I find myself trying to multitask a lot of the time during my free time...and usually what I'm trying to do suffers for it. Roleplay online, read net news, read Slashdot, read email, read net comics, watch a DVD movie...I guess I'm easily distracted by things.
It would actually be nice if it did cause a big stink, because then the Justice Department would have an actual excuse to release him, on humanitarian grounds. In fact, I think that's just about the only thing that will get him freed at this point. But so far, I haven't seen anything in the news about the Russian ambassador raising any kind of fuss.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the Justice Department's hands are tied here. This is a criminal case, not a civil one. They're just as unable to do anything as if someone had turned his neighbor in to them for murder, complete with a bloody knife in his hand and his fingerprints all over the corpse, and then said, "Oh, I changed my mind, I don't think he did it after all."
Having been provided with evidence that a "crime" (whether you think it's wrong or not, the law is on the books) has taken place, they have to investigate and prosecute unless they can figure out some way out of it. That's their duty under the law. If they shirk from it, they could be in for investigation themselves. They're just as stuck with Skylarov as Skylarov is with them.
And don't think for one moment that Adobe wasn't fully cognizant of this from the very beginning. Now they get what they wanted all along--Skylarov in the can--and get to shrug off most of the negative P.R. by claiming they changed their minds. Why do you think they launched a criminal rather than a civil case against the guy in the first place? As a friend of mine put it, "If I'm the FBI, I'm really hating Adobe about now." Adobe has just handed them a hot potato and then run away sniggering.
It's the Users, Stupid--no, wait, reverse that...
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Death To Virus Writers
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· Score: 2
...it's the Stupid Users.
Who on earth would believe that in this day and age, after all the big viruses like Melissa and I Love You and Anna Kournikova and Naked Wife and I don't know what all, that got major media coverage . . .
. . . people would still be stupid enough to open files attached to an ungrammatical message from someone they didn't even know? I mean, what's up with that? Obviously, peole aren't getting the message. If they were getting the message, I would not have gotten at least two dozen random document files in my emailbox in the last few days, all of them asking for my advice. (I always reply, "My advice is to run a virus checker, and not to open any more strange attachments"--so far I haven't heard back from anyone; I wonder if the emails even get through?)
I mean . . . what can you say? I never got any I Love You emails. I get a new SirCam almost every time I check my email. If I were to draw a conclusion just from strength of numbers, I would have to guess that people are getting more stupid as time goes by!
Yes, it's easy to blame the virus writers; yes, it's easy to blame Microsoft for the security singularity that is Outlook. But none of these viruses would get very far at all if people would just use a little common sense about what files they opened! I mean, geez, I knew not to open strange files just from BBS days, before I even made it to the Internet. Why don't more people these days?
Sigh. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised by this. I see enough rampant stupidity in my part time job as a K-Mart cashier already to realize the truth of that old George Carlin line. But it seems like every time I turn around, someone else is reminding me . . .
"You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half the entire population is even dumber than that!"
Let's be honest here, Jon. If Ralph Nader made a decryption-cracking program available, he would be liable to prosecution. Is that a good thing? No, but it's the way the law currently stands. Is that a good law? No, but that doesn't mean he was arrested for his speech, either.
There is a relationship of correlation, not causation, between Skylarov's speech and his arrest.
Frankly, I thought J Park 3 was pretty good. Sure, it's formulaic--but what do you expect, War and Peace? If you go to a Jurassic Park movie, then presumably you want to see a Jurassic Park movie. I mean, hell, look at the Evil Dead trilogy. Evil Dead 2 was a lot more of a remake of the first Evil Dead than JP 3 was of JP 1, and it's still considered a cult classic.
The JP 3 director knew what he was doing. There were no slowdowns, few plot holes, no wasted time--it was nice and tight at 90 minutes. There were a hell of a lot fewer annoying characters in it than the first JP; the kid (played by one of the child actors from The Sixth Sense, by the way!) was actually a decent character and not someone you kept wishing would get eaten by a dinosaur, and there was no annoying lawyer or Jeff Goldblum either. Sam Neill, always a fantastic actor, did a great job of playing this grown up boy who never quite lost his sense of wonder, even when he tried to hide it under a callous exterior; William Atherton and Tea Leoni were also quite good and very believable as the divorced couple who are brought back together by the the island. There were some cute in-jokes and references back to the first film, too.
I never saw the Goldblum sequel because, hey, I didn't really like Goldblum's character. And from what I've heard, I didn't miss much. But this--this was a sequel worth seeing.
If this is true (given how sketchy the details are, and that a translation from a non-Germanic language is involved, it makes it a lot harder to judge or guess), it certainly does change some things. It makes it much more likely that Dmitri will be acquitted--probably on a technicality, due to an FBI conflict of interest--but a lot less likely that the case will serve any worthwhile purpose at all as a test case of the DMCA's constitutionality.
1) Not if you install the Linux version it doesn't.
2a) That's what a good firewall--like the free-as-in-beer Zone Alarm--is for. When it asks to connect to the Internet, you tell it "No way, Jose!" and "Remember this answer".
2b) You can uninstall the spyware afterward without affecting the performance of the Satellite at all.
That's it. Napster is now a non-entity. I bailed when they started making it harder to use, locking out Napigator (or trying!) and removing all the songs I wanted to grab. I've moved on to AudioGalaxy, and I'll move on to something else when that bites the dust.
I don't really think there need to be any more Napster stories now. Because the plain and simple facts are, Napster no longer offers what people originally wanted to use Napster for. And it looks like it will be offering less and less in the future. I think it's finished.
I'm not at all surprised that Anarchy Online is living up to the more negative aspects of its name. Frankly, things are looking better and better for its major competitor, Neocron, which is just starting to enter beta. Neocron looks like it's going to be a lot better than AO.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL (though I am somewhat anal:).
Illustrator may be a generic name/word/what-have-you--but Illustrator-the-vector-graphics-computer-program is most emphatically not generic. Adobe isn't trying to claim sole dominion over all uses of the word Illustrator--just the use of the word Illustrator for which it holds a trademark.
People, it's the same fallacy that the anime fansub traders fall into--the ones who think that because they're not out to make a profit, the copyright law doesn't apply to them. Apparently the people who name these programs--these Killustrators and FreeMWares (yes, I know FreeMWare changed the name back to the name of the project they borrowed code from to begin with, but they still did choose and use that name for a while) and so on--are under the impression that because they're not trying to make a profit, the trademark law does not apply to them. I've got news for them--they're wrong.
This sort of situation is precisely the reason why we have trademark laws in the first place--to prevent one party from trying to trade on the good name and reputation of another party by creating a similar product with a similar name.
You may not like it, but there it is. And while the rabid German lawyers may have been over the line in their actions, Adobe is certainly not over the line to ask that the name be changed. Let's just be thankful that's all they're asking.
By your argument the last Daniel Steel book would have been Shakespeare.
Not at all! But look at what you wrote for just a second. You may have misspelled her name, but you did know who Danielle Steele is. Why? Because her books were pro-published. You saw them on the bookshelf.
The last Danielle Steele book may not have been Shakespeare--but it was a Danielle Steele book. People who want to read Danielle Steele books know who she is, and that she writes books of the quality that they want to read. But, people who have never read a Danielle Steele book and have never heard of her can look at the blurb, think, "Hmm, that's the kind of story I like to read. If it's been professionally published, then it's been given a professional proofreading, and it must have been at least good enough for a publisher to want to publish. I think I'll give it a shot." That is to say, they can know from the fact that it has been pro-published, the cover of the book should be accurately representative of the writing/editing/proofing quality within.
Not all published stuff has to be good. Not all published stuff even is good. But there is at least someone to weed out the stuff that goes into the slushpile.
I mean, look at fanfic groups on the Internet sometime. See how long you have to look before you find something that is actually worth reading, even if you like that sort of thing.
Though IANAS (I Am Not a Scientist), as I understand it there is very little actual solid evidence about global warming one way or the other. It's just a theory, and as such has yet to be conclusively proven.
A competing theory, put forward fictionally in the book Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn (available free in its entirety through the Baen Free Library), is that the earth is actually entering a cooler period (a Maunder Minimum), and if it weren't for the "greenhouse gas" in the atmosphere, we'd be experiencing another ice age.
The book is fiction, but the scientific theory it cites is real. (And it has RMS in it.)
If Authors could publish themselves, they wouldn't need the Publishers. They still need a middle man, but this one would be a lot cheaper.
I'm afraid you're falling into a common fallacy here. Publishers are still needed, partly for doing publicity and such to promote the book for more sales, but mostly because most readers are accustomed to having publishers act as the gatekeepers, the arbiters of quality--if something has been pro-published, they know that it's more likely to be worth reading.
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Re:They already HAVE it at the local Kinko's!
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Books on Demand
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· Score: 2
Printing out pages one at a time is nowhere near as cost-efficient as printing out thousands of copies at a time.
But conversely, printing out a book where you are is much more cost-efficient than printing it out halfway across the country and paying to warehouse and ship it to you. (How much does it cost to send one book through the mail, even at book rate?) These things should balance out--it might be less expensive to buy that book than you think.
Lawsuit my butt; the publishing industry will be one of the major users of this machine. The vast majority of publishing costs are printing, storage, and shipping. These factors are why midlist authors are having such a hard time; the economies of scale are such that a book that is only a modest success cannot pay for its own publication costs. (One of Salonmag's articles from a couple years back aptly discusses this point.)
This machine, in one fell swoop, will let publishing houses stop having to warehouse and print so many titles. Costs will go way down, profit margins will go up, and perhaps more midlist authors will start being published again.
As for piracy . . . I think some people are only skimming the article. This is a big, complicated, mechanical, $30,000 machine--it's not likely to be the sort of machine that the "casual pirate" is going to be able to buy. If you're talking about the overseas printers that churn out physical pirate books--well, they're doing that now, with regular printing presses. The lack of a machine like this won't stop them either.
The big revolutionary use for this thing lies in keeping mass-published books in print. Say I wanted a book that was published back in '84, but is now out of print and the only way I can find it is by ordering it via one of Amazon's used book stores. Well, if this thing were set up, and enough old books were on file, I could just go down and have them print me out a copy. Which means the author would get a royalty from it, instead of the nothing he would get from me buying used.
Of course, the problem is that a lot of authors' contracts specify that the rights to shop their books to other publishers revert to them when the books go "out of print." If a POD-able book might be considered never to be out of print, we might be looking at another Tasini fight.
Actually, Dialpad is still completely free, at least for continental USA calls. They don't even make sure you're not using Junkbuster on their banner and pop-up ads.:)
I have abandoned my POTS line, in favor of a combination of Dialpad for long-distance and a $30 a month AT&T cellphone for local. And so far it's worked rather well. I have more cell time than I could ever use, and when I need to call someone LD, Dialpad is there for me. And I'm not paying much more than I was for landline local plus long distance.
I was talking about micropayments with a friend of mine, and he brought up the fact that there's an expression "nickel and dime you to death" for a reason. Lots of little payments are hard to keep track of, and they add up fast; if you view 1,000 bits of web-content that cost you a nickel each (like, say, browsing through archives of a comic strip), all of a sudden that's $50.00. He feels that people aren't going to want to subject themselves to a system where it's so easy to end up owing more than you realize.
Actually, according to PBS's Robert Cringely, such a thing does exist, and presumably people do indeed know about it:
But can you really program a computer to find patterns in stock prices? Yes, you can, according to Jim Hall, who did just that. Hall was an engineer at Deere & Co. in Moline, Illinois, who was asked to build a combine that didn't need a driver. Deere was worried about the rising cost of farm labor, and so asked Hall for a machine that didn't require skilled labor -- a machine that would automatically learn the field and harvest without supervision. Hall built the combine, which was never marketed, then converted the software to learn another field -- the stock market. Hall became the manager of Deere's pension portfolio, successfully harvesting capital gains instead of wheat.
As for what effects it's had, well, probably not many, or else people would have made more noise about it.:)
Gregory Benford had a couple of interesting thoughts on this in his "Scientist's Notebook" column in F&SF Magazine. He posits that older technologies, to which we are long-accustomed, seem more "natural" to us, and that newer technology seems somehow "unnatural". (Remember the people a century back who thought that going over 60 miles per hour would cause irreparable physiological harm, or who thought if man was meant to fly God would have provided him wings?) If someone dies in an auto accident, or because a steam turbine blows up, it seems almost like an act of God--a storm or an earthquake. We don't blame humanity for it, we blame nature, fate, or whatever.
But because nuclear power is so new, it has this feeling of unnaturalness about it, and that if people die from it, we have to blame ourselves. And there's also the fear of contamination, which is in most cases blown way out of proportion.
I'm doing a lousy job paraphrasing it, of course. Go to your library and find the article for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh! Bright shiny object, sorry gotta go!
IANAL, but it seems to me that the Justice Department's hands are tied here. This is a criminal case, not a civil one. They're just as unable to do anything as if someone had turned his neighbor in to them for murder, complete with a bloody knife in his hand and his fingerprints all over the corpse, and then said, "Oh, I changed my mind, I don't think he did it after all."
Having been provided with evidence that a "crime" (whether you think it's wrong or not, the law is on the books) has taken place, they have to investigate and prosecute unless they can figure out some way out of it. That's their duty under the law. If they shirk from it, they could be in for investigation themselves. They're just as stuck with Skylarov as Skylarov is with them.
And don't think for one moment that Adobe wasn't fully cognizant of this from the very beginning. Now they get what they wanted all along--Skylarov in the can--and get to shrug off most of the negative P.R. by claiming they changed their minds. Why do you think they launched a criminal rather than a civil case against the guy in the first place? As a friend of mine put it, "If I'm the FBI, I'm really hating Adobe about now." Adobe has just handed them a hot potato and then run away sniggering.
Who on earth would believe that in this day and age, after all the big viruses like Melissa and I Love You and Anna Kournikova and Naked Wife and I don't know what all, that got major media coverage . . .
. . . people would still be stupid enough to open files attached to an ungrammatical message from someone they didn't even know? I mean, what's up with that? Obviously, peole aren't getting the message. If they were getting the message, I would not have gotten at least two dozen random document files in my emailbox in the last few days, all of them asking for my advice. (I always reply, "My advice is to run a virus checker, and not to open any more strange attachments"--so far I haven't heard back from anyone; I wonder if the emails even get through?)
I mean . . . what can you say? I never got any I Love You emails. I get a new SirCam almost every time I check my email. If I were to draw a conclusion just from strength of numbers, I would have to guess that people are getting more stupid as time goes by!
Yes, it's easy to blame the virus writers; yes, it's easy to blame Microsoft for the security singularity that is Outlook. But none of these viruses would get very far at all if people would just use a little common sense about what files they opened! I mean, geez, I knew not to open strange files just from BBS days, before I even made it to the Internet. Why don't more people these days?
Sigh. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised by this. I see enough rampant stupidity in my part time job as a K-Mart cashier already to realize the truth of that old George Carlin line. But it seems like every time I turn around, someone else is reminding me . . .
"You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half the entire population is even dumber than that!"
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Let's be honest here, Jon. If Ralph Nader made a decryption-cracking program available, he would be liable to prosecution. Is that a good thing? No, but it's the way the law currently stands. Is that a good law? No, but that doesn't mean he was arrested for his speech, either.
There is a relationship of correlation, not causation, between Skylarov's speech and his arrest.
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Oops. Mia maxima culpa. My brain short-circuits from time to time. :P
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The JP 3 director knew what he was doing. There were no slowdowns, few plot holes, no wasted time--it was nice and tight at 90 minutes. There were a hell of a lot fewer annoying characters in it than the first JP; the kid (played by one of the child actors from The Sixth Sense, by the way!) was actually a decent character and not someone you kept wishing would get eaten by a dinosaur, and there was no annoying lawyer or Jeff Goldblum either. Sam Neill, always a fantastic actor, did a great job of playing this grown up boy who never quite lost his sense of wonder, even when he tried to hide it under a callous exterior; William Atherton and Tea Leoni were also quite good and very believable as the divorced couple who are brought back together by the the island. There were some cute in-jokes and references back to the first film, too.
I never saw the Goldblum sequel because, hey, I didn't really like Goldblum's character. And from what I've heard, I didn't miss much. But this--this was a sequel worth seeing.
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. . . if he's worth a shuttle, why's he going in a Soyuz? (-1, funny)
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IANAL, blah blah blah.
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Do take note of my new Slashsig--which I've added to my email/USENET sig, since I was 1 line under McQuary anyway . . .
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2a) That's what a good firewall--like the free-as-in-beer Zone Alarm--is for. When it asks to connect to the Internet, you tell it "No way, Jose!" and "Remember this answer".
2b) You can uninstall the spyware afterward without affecting the performance of the Satellite at all.
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That's it. Napster is now a non-entity. I bailed when they started making it harder to use, locking out Napigator (or trying!) and removing all the songs I wanted to grab. I've moved on to AudioGalaxy, and I'll move on to something else when that bites the dust.
I don't really think there need to be any more Napster stories now. Because the plain and simple facts are, Napster no longer offers what people originally wanted to use Napster for. And it looks like it will be offering less and less in the future. I think it's finished.
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Fortunately, the impact of this decision will be relatively minimal. The general public won't pay much attention to this, because very few people actually realize that New Mexico is part of the United States. So you see, we actually have very little to worry about.
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I'm not at all surprised that Anarchy Online is living up to the more negative aspects of its name. Frankly, things are looking better and better for its major competitor, Neocron, which is just starting to enter beta. Neocron looks like it's going to be a lot better than AO.
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Illustrator may be a generic name/word/what-have-you--but Illustrator-the-vector-graphics-computer-program is most emphatically not generic. Adobe isn't trying to claim sole dominion over all uses of the word Illustrator--just the use of the word Illustrator for which it holds a trademark.
People, it's the same fallacy that the anime fansub traders fall into--the ones who think that because they're not out to make a profit, the copyright law doesn't apply to them. Apparently the people who name these programs--these Killustrators and FreeMWares (yes, I know FreeMWare changed the name back to the name of the project they borrowed code from to begin with, but they still did choose and use that name for a while) and so on--are under the impression that because they're not trying to make a profit, the trademark law does not apply to them. I've got news for them--they're wrong.
This sort of situation is precisely the reason why we have trademark laws in the first place--to prevent one party from trying to trade on the good name and reputation of another party by creating a similar product with a similar name.
You may not like it, but there it is. And while the rabid German lawyers may have been over the line in their actions, Adobe is certainly not over the line to ask that the name be changed. Let's just be thankful that's all they're asking.
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The last Danielle Steele book may not have been Shakespeare--but it was a Danielle Steele book. People who want to read Danielle Steele books know who she is, and that she writes books of the quality that they want to read. But, people who have never read a Danielle Steele book and have never heard of her can look at the blurb, think, "Hmm, that's the kind of story I like to read. If it's been professionally published, then it's been given a professional proofreading, and it must have been at least good enough for a publisher to want to publish. I think I'll give it a shot." That is to say, they can know from the fact that it has been pro-published, the cover of the book should be accurately representative of the writing/editing/proofing quality within.
Not all published stuff has to be good. Not all published stuff even is good. But there is at least someone to weed out the stuff that goes into the slushpile.
I mean, look at fanfic groups on the Internet sometime. See how long you have to look before you find something that is actually worth reading, even if you like that sort of thing.
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A competing theory, put forward fictionally in the book Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn (available free in its entirety through the Baen Free Library), is that the earth is actually entering a cooler period (a Maunder Minimum), and if it weren't for the "greenhouse gas" in the atmosphere, we'd be experiencing another ice age.
The book is fiction, but the scientific theory it cites is real. (And it has RMS in it.)
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This machine, in one fell swoop, will let publishing houses stop having to warehouse and print so many titles. Costs will go way down, profit margins will go up, and perhaps more midlist authors will start being published again.
As for piracy . . . I think some people are only skimming the article. This is a big, complicated, mechanical, $30,000 machine--it's not likely to be the sort of machine that the "casual pirate" is going to be able to buy. If you're talking about the overseas printers that churn out physical pirate books--well, they're doing that now, with regular printing presses. The lack of a machine like this won't stop them either.
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Of course, the problem is that a lot of authors' contracts specify that the rights to shop their books to other publishers revert to them when the books go "out of print." If a POD-able book might be considered never to be out of print, we might be looking at another Tasini fight.
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I have abandoned my POTS line, in favor of a combination of Dialpad for long-distance and a $30 a month AT&T cellphone for local. And so far it's worked rather well. I have more cell time than I could ever use, and when I need to call someone LD, Dialpad is there for me. And I'm not paying much more than I was for landline local plus long distance.
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I was talking about micropayments with a friend of mine, and he brought up the fact that there's an expression "nickel and dime you to death" for a reason. Lots of little payments are hard to keep track of, and they add up fast; if you view 1,000 bits of web-content that cost you a nickel each (like, say, browsing through archives of a comic strip), all of a sudden that's $50.00. He feels that people aren't going to want to subject themselves to a system where it's so easy to end up owing more than you realize.
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But because nuclear power is so new, it has this feeling of unnaturalness about it, and that if people die from it, we have to blame ourselves. And there's also the fear of contamination, which is in most cases blown way out of proportion.
I'm doing a lousy job paraphrasing it, of course. Go to your library and find the article for yourself.
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I blame the Slashdot person for not catching my mistake when he posted the article. Yeah, that's the ticket! ;)
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