Rather than saying pirating must be allowed, I think it should say the reverse -- copying MUST be allowed, and copyrighted content and playback systems must be set up in a way that the content can be copied for personal use in a manner which retains the full value of the content -- ie, not just BS analog copies on yesterday's mediums, but full-value copies which retain all the advantages of the original material. The only mitigating factor allowed would be the lack of availability of consumer copying equipment (eg, DVDs prior to the availability of DVD recoders).
In other words, copyright holders are forbidden from encumbering their material for sale with copyright protection technology which would otherwise hinder consumers from making their personal use copies.
It's not enough to just say "OK, you can make personal copies" -- the industry will just push DRM and other onerous systems which prevent you from making copies. At this point, they are violating the spirit of a law which grants them royalties without having to prove a loss.
BTW, thanks to the guy in NYC on park ave & 37th with an open access point. My gay room in the Sheraton doesn't have hi speed access.
That's kind of funny, but there was an article I read recently on the strongarm tactics that ASCAP and BMI apply to coffeehouses and the like that have CD players -- apparently its a public performance, therefore songwriters are due royalties.
Anyway, the article went on to describe the royalty payment process (ie, who gets royalties), and as it turns out the money almost always goes to big-name artists since the stats that ASCAP/BMI compile rely on radio airplay, which favors "popular" artists.
A couple of the small-time artists they interviewed who had been "with" BMI/ASCAP (ie, had songs written and registered with them) said they had never gotten a dime from them.
That's why I maintain a legal solution will never work, only a global technological effort to deny spammers the resources.
A legal solution WOULD work if we would focus on the fact that spam is almost always based on perpetrating fraud. Follow the money trail and arrest those committing (arguably) the REAL crime.
I do agree that the mail-sending aspect of spam will be notoriously hard to fight. Shit, just last night I got a "spam" phone call (in violation of state and federal do-not-calls) from a MLM claiming to be operating out of Cypress. I guess if VoIP enables spammers to break the geographic barrier, then VoIP will too.
Can we please abandon the phrase "Surf the web" to Sunday supplement columnists and others of a related ilk? I guess it was an apt term years ago when people actually mindlessly followed links, but it just sounds so John Q Public anymore.
If video apps weren't so lame and weren't written as if everybody in the world only had 384MB of RAM, they'd use more RAM and get the job done a lot faster. What sucks about video is all the HDD thrashing that gets done -- why not read a 512MB block of video, process it in RAM, and then write it out?
It just drives me nuts that we've got gigs of RAM and the apps still think they're running on a 1965 system with 128k of core.
In case you didn't get a chance to review the statement from Steve Ballmer last week, I will try to bring you all up to date on the new process for security alerts.
The net of this all is that Microsoft is moving to a monthly security bulletin release schedule. This change was in response to customer feedback.
After today, we will be releasing security bulletins on the second calendar Tuesday of every month. Today was the starting day, and was an exception.
There are a couple of benefits to this new process:
1) Switching to a monthly release cycle for security patches allows customers to install multiple patches with a single install and single reboot (using Qchain.exe, Update.exe and other similar tools). This will minimize downtime on mission-critical systems and will allow customers to consolidate the patch deployment to once per month.
2) Another benefit of the monthly cycle is that it offers customers more time between releases of security patches. This allows customers to evaluate, test and install patches in their computing environments in a timely manner. The release schedule is also more predictable and allows customer to plan in advance for deploying patches.
You may notice as well that the format of the bulletins has changed, so when you view the bulletin from the link inside of the security alert email, you will notice the sections of the bulletins have changed a bit.
The change in this process is in order to make it more predictable for our customers so that you can plan and implement patches as quickly as possible.
If you have any feedback on this new process, please feel free to let me know and I will pass it along to the security team directly.
Which I translated as:
We were so humiliated by the never-ending barrage of security vulnerabilities in our products that in order to enable our sales force to make any headway at all against Linux/IBM/Sun we decided to bundle all our security vulnerabilities into a once-per-month release. Our analysis of MSN News and Entertainment Tonight indicates that on our chosen date, the second Tuesday of the month, people are much more likely to be preoccupied with Ben 'n' Jen and the previous day's sporting events, and will easily overlook the most recent worm/virus/breech attributable to our bloated, unmanageable software base.
The other reasons for the new monthly cycle are that since we'll be dumping more patches into a single file, you'll need more time to debug, back out or ultimately rebuild systems corrupted by patches that will also include special new "features". We also think that our new monthly cycle will coincide with your or your spouses' monthly cycle, allowing you to be victimized by uncontrolled emotional outbursts in one tidy week, instead of having it spread out all over the month.
I'd love to see a MythTV distro that would give me some *nix and MythTV all conveniently pre-installed and requiring a minimum of BSing around.
I just don't have the time to waste with installation, X Windows (which I hate), and so on. An appliance-style distro would be great, and I'd even pay for it.
Someone once told me this was impossible due to the hardware, but how much harder is it to select a capture card in a setup screen than a SCSI card?
We're about to retire a Netserver LH4 -- Dual P3 500s, 1 GB of RAM, 160GB of disk, multi-channel RAID 5. Nothing to write home about in terms of any of those specs, but as a freebie from the office it'd make a nice FreeBSD fileserver or something.
Until you look at the power consumption -- sheeit! All those 9 and 18GB HDDs suck AC harder than a 5 dollar whore on a Saturday night. It'd be far more cost effective in the first year for me to go out and buy a 3Ware RAID card and a couple of 160s to upgrade the existing cheapie tower I use for the same purpose.
I don't know how some of the enthusiasts with real old machines deal with this, maybe they just turn 'em on when the relatives visit.
OK, it's not a documentary, but its a pretty good movie with Robert Mitchum as a bootlegger in the early 50s driving hopped up cars -- A lot of NASCAR guys got their start doing this, it's not a coincidence that they're all from the hill country in the south.
There was a great article in the local paper about how many ordinary businesses collecting email supposedly for customer service purposes are selling this info off, where it ultimately gets into the hands of spammers.
I'm not sure how the spammers re-close the loop with mainstream businesses, but I'm sure its happening.
We use nouns in English to define things. Sometimes we get cute and reassign a noun to define another thing, like Java, which instead of being "coffee", now means a somewhat portable programming language initially developed by Sun.
When Sun start using "Java" in the name of a product, how can anyone NOT assume it refers to the the definition we all know for Java? Why is anything BUT reasonable to assume its a product written in or dependent on Java?
The more we can do to combat the digital divide and welcome all people in this world onto the Internet and into the logic age, the better.
Why is this necessarily a true statement? Is there perhaps some rational reason that whatever obstacles there are to crossing the digital divide shouldn't actually be crossed until they're capable of being crossed?
I compare this to the statement "The more we welcome all people in this world into deomocracy, the better." It seems right and reasonable on its surface, but the outcome in Africa and other places has been messy at best and in some cases a complete disaster with the exact opposite outcome we wanted.
but for home use of computers to take off in India, they need to be able to write letters to Grandma who only speaks the local languages
This begs the question, can grandma even *read* in Hindi, Bengali or any other language for that matter? What is the literacy rate for the 55+ population in India, anyway?
Except that a reasonably competant house painter is a skilled one. An unskilled housepainter is not reasonably competant, ie they are incompetant and equivilent to a non-skilled housepainter, like me.
Having painted a room and then paid a painter to paint the rest of the rooms in my house, I can assure you that an amatuer paint job in any house is immediate and obvious to me. The ceiling/wall line is cut badly, the woodwork isn't smooth and even, the gap between woodwork and the walls isn't even, and even wall coverage and texture are uneven. Bad priming jobs can be seen as well (shine or uneven coverage can be caused by this).
Some people may be satisfied with this or they may just not notice the difference or not have the experience to know (ie, always lived in poorly painted houses).
It might just be market pressure. Banks desperately want to hang on to debit cards and have them be successful, as there are fewer fees associated with them for merchants, which means an opportunity for business expansion. Just this weekend I happened to be in a fast food restaurant that had left an industry trade rag around. It was amusing reading, and there was even a story mentioning the benefits of accepting debit cards vs. credit cards.
Regardless, I'd be much happier if all debit transactions *required* 72 hours to post ("I lost my card") and required a manditory transaction reversal reinstatement pending investigation ("Your loss before mine"). It's not enough that banks do it because they like to, it needs to be law.
It was a hassle and it took a week, but I lost nothing in the end.
This is the hidden problem with debit card fraud. Until the matter is resolved, you *are* out whatever the amount is. Banks like to promote how willing they are to resolve these in your favor, but they're not willing enough to give you the money back right away.
Credit card fraud at worst will cost you part of your maximum spending limit while the matter is resolved; it's money out of someone else's pocket at that point.
Yes I remember reading that you could put different roms in the SE/30 to add color support even though the video on board did not use it.
I'm probably wrong, but I could have sworn the SE/30 had 8-bit color support built into the ROMs, which is why you could put a color display card into it to begin with. Something about the built-in video driver rendering all colors except white as black or something.
Obnoxiously Apple's spec entry for the SE/30 doesn't list any "hidden" ROM features like color support, so I may go to my grave never knowing for sure..
The problem with the iMac is that while it may have helped Apple, that doesn't add anything (or take anything away) from the technology aspect of it. As it stands, the only thing remarkable from a computing perspective about the iMac was its all-in-one design, and even more so the decision to not include a floppy drive.
The all-in-one aspect has been done ad nauseum since the dawn of personal computing -- everything Mac until the II, the Kaypro, and many others I'm probably forgetting, and omitting the floppy seems less important now than it did at the time.
I think what would have been a really revolutionary computer would have been a Macintosh SE/30 with a color display. The SE/30 was one of my all-time faves; internal HDD, 68030 CPU (although slightly hobbled with a 16 bit data path), and highly portable. Until the Powerbook line, it was Apple's best portable computer.
I'd love to see an SE/30 modded with a hi-res LCD color display. I dunno if the ROMs supported color or not, but that would have been sweet in 1990.
It can be open sourced, but that doesn't mean anything about preventing lock-in.
Presumably a 'domain key' is some cryptographic element that authenticates that your domain is who it claims to be. To me this sounds an awful lot like SSL where a third party issues the keys, or acts as a clearinghouse for self-issued keys.
Either way, Yahoo could be the man in the middle acting as either issuer or clearinghouse. Think of it this way, OpenSSL is open sourced, but that doesn't keep the SSL issuers from having a lock on that market.
$ telnet mx1.mail.yahoo.com 25
Trying 64.157.4.78...
Connected to mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 YSmtp mta108.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ESMTP service ready
It looks like they run YSmtp, just like everyone else I know. In all seriousness, I'd imagine there isn't much of Yahoo's infrastructure that isn't highly optimized for Yahoo's own use. I think that Yahoo did a lot with FreeBSD at one time, but I'd presume whatever they have isn't just an out of the box app.
I've seen the 2L bottles used as sink bongs. Cut the bottom off a 2L bottle, ditch the cap. Fill sink with water. Put the bottle into the water to just below the cap. Put a loaded bowl of some kind into the opening (the slide from a Graphix works well). Light the bowl, and pull the bottle slowly out of the water until it's almost, but not quite, out of the water. Pull the bowl out of the bottle, put mouth over opening and *slam* the bottle back into the water.
If you do it right, it only takes about 2-3 of these to get completely staggered. And usually by the third, everyone's gotten kind of wet from splashing the water. It's an amusing way to spend about an hour. Or so I'm told.
Say what you will, but US domination (I'm not even sure "control" is the right word) has not been bad for the Internet. It has grown and prospered, nobody has been denied access for disagreeing with the US government, and censorship by the US government is nonexistant.
Furthermore, the US has an excellent track record of not imposing censorship on speech PERIOD. Even many European countries willingly impose censorship on everyday things like movies, as well as having their own individual pet bans on specific speeches and ideas (Nazism). Get outside of Europe and it gets even worse. Many other countries willingly censor all mediums including the internet, as well as punishing those people who try to break through such censorship.
Moving to control by the UN would be a disaster from a censorship perspective, and probably even worse from a bureaucracy perspective.
But wasn't Apple all but doomed prior to Jobs' takeover the deal with Microsoft? I remember that as being a particularly dark period for Apple that made it really look like the end was near.
Their products weren't competitive with PC hardware, cost way too much (they still do, but are highly competitive feature and performance wise), and their tenuous hold on a segment of business computing was coming to an end.
Jobs got the hardware back up to snuff and fixed the product line (or was this in the works all along?), they got a bunch of cash from Microsoft. Once the better hardware was available, they were able to get back on their feet and reinforce their claim on their key market segment.
Morality aside, he was kind of an idiot. It would have been far smarter to not tell anyone what you have done, and only sought small payouts on an irregular basis.
That way, you don't arouse suspicion. Sure, you don't make any "big" money, but if you used your cheatings as basic cash out of pocket spending (gas, meals, etc), and invested your legit income that you would have normally spent, you could easily retire early and probably never, ever get caught.
It's when you bring in co-conspirators and go for big money that you get nailed every time. That, and leaving his exploit on the office PC...
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Rather than saying pirating must be allowed, I think it should say the reverse -- copying MUST be allowed, and copyrighted content and playback systems must be set up in a way that the content can be copied for personal use in a manner which retains the full value of the content -- ie, not just BS analog copies on yesterday's mediums, but full-value copies which retain all the advantages of the original material. The only mitigating factor allowed would be the lack of availability of consumer copying equipment (eg, DVDs prior to the availability of DVD recoders).
In other words, copyright holders are forbidden from encumbering their material for sale with copyright protection technology which would otherwise hinder consumers from making their personal use copies.
It's not enough to just say "OK, you can make personal copies" -- the industry will just push DRM and other onerous systems which prevent you from making copies. At this point, they are violating the spirit of a law which grants them royalties without having to prove a loss.
BTW, thanks to the guy in NYC on park ave & 37th with an open access point. My gay room in the Sheraton doesn't have hi speed access.
That's kind of funny, but there was an article I read recently on the strongarm tactics that ASCAP and BMI apply to coffeehouses and the like that have CD players -- apparently its a public performance, therefore songwriters are due royalties.
Anyway, the article went on to describe the royalty payment process (ie, who gets royalties), and as it turns out the money almost always goes to big-name artists since the stats that ASCAP/BMI compile rely on radio airplay, which favors "popular" artists.
A couple of the small-time artists they interviewed who had been "with" BMI/ASCAP (ie, had songs written and registered with them) said they had never gotten a dime from them.
That's why I maintain a legal solution will never work, only a global technological effort to deny spammers the resources.
A legal solution WOULD work if we would focus on the fact that spam is almost always based on perpetrating fraud. Follow the money trail and arrest those committing (arguably) the REAL crime.
I do agree that the mail-sending aspect of spam will be notoriously hard to fight. Shit, just last night I got a "spam" phone call (in violation of state and federal do-not-calls) from a MLM claiming to be operating out of Cypress. I guess if VoIP enables spammers to break the geographic barrier, then VoIP will too.
Can we please abandon the phrase "Surf the web" to Sunday supplement columnists and others of a related ilk? I guess it was an apt term years ago when people actually mindlessly followed links, but it just sounds so John Q Public anymore.
If video apps weren't so lame and weren't written as if everybody in the world only had 384MB of RAM, they'd use more RAM and get the job done a lot faster. What sucks about video is all the HDD thrashing that gets done -- why not read a 512MB block of video, process it in RAM, and then write it out?
It just drives me nuts that we've got gigs of RAM and the apps still think they're running on a 1965 system with 128k of core.
I'd love to see a MythTV distro that would give me some *nix and MythTV all conveniently pre-installed and requiring a minimum of BSing around.
I just don't have the time to waste with installation, X Windows (which I hate), and so on. An appliance-style distro would be great, and I'd even pay for it.
Someone once told me this was impossible due to the hardware, but how much harder is it to select a capture card in a setup screen than a SCSI card?
We're about to retire a Netserver LH4 -- Dual P3 500s, 1 GB of RAM, 160GB of disk, multi-channel RAID 5. Nothing to write home about in terms of any of those specs, but as a freebie from the office it'd make a nice FreeBSD fileserver or something.
Until you look at the power consumption -- sheeit! All those 9 and 18GB HDDs suck AC harder than a 5 dollar whore on a Saturday night. It'd be far more cost effective in the first year for me to go out and buy a 3Ware RAID card and a couple of 160s to upgrade the existing cheapie tower I use for the same purpose.
I don't know how some of the enthusiasts with real old machines deal with this, maybe they just turn 'em on when the relatives visit.
I like the idea behind MythTV, but the setup looks like too much of a PITA (especially when I already have a Tivo and a Panasonic E80 DVDR).
Is there Knoppix-type distro that you can boot off a CDR? That would be great.
OK, it's not a documentary, but its a pretty good movie with Robert Mitchum as a bootlegger in the early 50s driving hopped up cars -- A lot of NASCAR guys got their start doing this, it's not a coincidence that they're all from the hill country in the south.
There was a great article in the local paper about how many ordinary businesses collecting email supposedly for customer service purposes are selling this info off, where it ultimately gets into the hands of spammers.
I'm not sure how the spammers re-close the loop with mainstream businesses, but I'm sure its happening.
We use nouns in English to define things. Sometimes we get cute and reassign a noun to define another thing, like Java, which instead of being "coffee", now means a somewhat portable programming language initially developed by Sun.
When Sun start using "Java" in the name of a product, how can anyone NOT assume it refers to the the definition we all know for Java? Why is anything BUT reasonable to assume its a product written in or dependent on Java?
The more we can do to combat the digital divide and welcome all people in this world onto the Internet and into the logic age, the better.
Why is this necessarily a true statement? Is there perhaps some rational reason that whatever obstacles there are to crossing the digital divide shouldn't actually be crossed until they're capable of being crossed?
I compare this to the statement "The more we welcome all people in this world into deomocracy, the better." It seems right and reasonable on its surface, but the outcome in Africa and other places has been messy at best and in some cases a complete disaster with the exact opposite outcome we wanted.
but for home use of computers to take off in India, they need to be able to write letters to Grandma who only speaks the local languages
This begs the question, can grandma even *read* in Hindi, Bengali or any other language for that matter? What is the literacy rate for the 55+ population in India, anyway?
Except that a reasonably competant house painter is a skilled one. An unskilled housepainter is not reasonably competant, ie they are incompetant and equivilent to a non-skilled housepainter, like me.
Having painted a room and then paid a painter to paint the rest of the rooms in my house, I can assure you that an amatuer paint job in any house is immediate and obvious to me. The ceiling/wall line is cut badly, the woodwork isn't smooth and even, the gap between woodwork and the walls isn't even, and even wall coverage and texture are uneven. Bad priming jobs can be seen as well (shine or uneven coverage can be caused by this).
Some people may be satisfied with this or they may just not notice the difference or not have the experience to know (ie, always lived in poorly painted houses).
It might just be market pressure. Banks desperately want to hang on to debit cards and have them be successful, as there are fewer fees associated with them for merchants, which means an opportunity for business expansion. Just this weekend I happened to be in a fast food restaurant that had left an industry trade rag around. It was amusing reading, and there was even a story mentioning the benefits of accepting debit cards vs. credit cards.
Regardless, I'd be much happier if all debit transactions *required* 72 hours to post ("I lost my card") and required a manditory transaction reversal reinstatement pending investigation ("Your loss before mine"). It's not enough that banks do it because they like to, it needs to be law.
It was a hassle and it took a week, but I lost nothing in the end.
This is the hidden problem with debit card fraud. Until the matter is resolved, you *are* out whatever the amount is. Banks like to promote how willing they are to resolve these in your favor, but they're not willing enough to give you the money back right away.
Credit card fraud at worst will cost you part of your maximum spending limit while the matter is resolved; it's money out of someone else's pocket at that point.
Yes I remember reading that you could put different roms in the SE/30 to add color support even though the video on board did not use it.
I'm probably wrong, but I could have sworn the SE/30 had 8-bit color support built into the ROMs, which is why you could put a color display card into it to begin with. Something about the built-in video driver rendering all colors except white as black or something.
Obnoxiously Apple's spec entry for the SE/30 doesn't list any "hidden" ROM features like color support, so I may go to my grave never knowing for sure..
The problem with the iMac is that while it may have helped Apple, that doesn't add anything (or take anything away) from the technology aspect of it. As it stands, the only thing remarkable from a computing perspective about the iMac was its all-in-one design, and even more so the decision to not include a floppy drive.
The all-in-one aspect has been done ad nauseum since the dawn of personal computing -- everything Mac until the II, the Kaypro, and many others I'm probably forgetting, and omitting the floppy seems less important now than it did at the time.
I think what would have been a really revolutionary computer would have been a Macintosh SE/30 with a color display. The SE/30 was one of my all-time faves; internal HDD, 68030 CPU (although slightly hobbled with a 16 bit data path), and highly portable. Until the Powerbook line, it was Apple's best portable computer.
I'd love to see an SE/30 modded with a hi-res LCD color display. I dunno if the ROMs supported color or not, but that would have been sweet in 1990.
It can be open sourced, but that doesn't mean anything about preventing lock-in.
Presumably a 'domain key' is some cryptographic element that authenticates that your domain is who it claims to be. To me this sounds an awful lot like SSL where a third party issues the keys, or acts as a clearinghouse for self-issued keys.
Either way, Yahoo could be the man in the middle acting as either issuer or clearinghouse. Think of it this way, OpenSSL is open sourced, but that doesn't keep the SSL issuers from having a lock on that market.
$ telnet mx1.mail.yahoo.com 25
Trying 64.157.4.78...
Connected to mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 YSmtp mta108.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ESMTP service ready
It looks like they run YSmtp, just like everyone else I know. In all seriousness, I'd imagine there isn't much of Yahoo's infrastructure that isn't highly optimized for Yahoo's own use. I think that Yahoo did a lot with FreeBSD at one time, but I'd presume whatever they have isn't just an out of the box app.
I've seen the 2L bottles used as sink bongs. Cut the bottom off a 2L bottle, ditch the cap. Fill sink with water. Put the bottle into the water to just below the cap. Put a loaded bowl of some kind into the opening (the slide from a Graphix works well). Light the bowl, and pull the bottle slowly out of the water until it's almost, but not quite, out of the water. Pull the bowl out of the bottle, put mouth over opening and *slam* the bottle back into the water.
If you do it right, it only takes about 2-3 of these to get completely staggered. And usually by the third, everyone's gotten kind of wet from splashing the water. It's an amusing way to spend about an hour. Or so I'm told.
Say what you will, but US domination (I'm not even sure "control" is the right word) has not been bad for the Internet. It has grown and prospered, nobody has been denied access for disagreeing with the US government, and censorship by the US government is nonexistant.
Furthermore, the US has an excellent track record of not imposing censorship on speech PERIOD. Even many European countries willingly impose censorship on everyday things like movies, as well as having their own individual pet bans on specific speeches and ideas (Nazism). Get outside of Europe and it gets even worse. Many other countries willingly censor all mediums including the internet, as well as punishing those people who try to break through such censorship.
Moving to control by the UN would be a disaster from a censorship perspective, and probably even worse from a bureaucracy perspective.
But wasn't Apple all but doomed prior to Jobs' takeover the deal with Microsoft? I remember that as being a particularly dark period for Apple that made it really look like the end was near.
Their products weren't competitive with PC hardware, cost way too much (they still do, but are highly competitive feature and performance wise), and their tenuous hold on a segment of business computing was coming to an end.
Jobs got the hardware back up to snuff and fixed the product line (or was this in the works all along?), they got a bunch of cash from Microsoft. Once the better hardware was available, they were able to get back on their feet and reinforce their claim on their key market segment.
Morality aside, he was kind of an idiot. It would have been far smarter to not tell anyone what you have done, and only sought small payouts on an irregular basis.
That way, you don't arouse suspicion. Sure, you don't make any "big" money, but if you used your cheatings as basic cash out of pocket spending (gas, meals, etc), and invested your legit income that you would have normally spent, you could easily retire early and probably never, ever get caught.
It's when you bring in co-conspirators and go for big money that you get nailed every time. That, and leaving his exploit on the office PC...