*Some* DVDs have somewhat lengthy FBI warnings, but the idea that you're forced to "watch 2+ minutes" of them is a gross overstatement.
Ummm, I have a couple of DVDs here with warnings in 4 languages, each 30 seconds long. I just wish I could remember which ones they were; I'd quote the titles...
One I do remember is the Buffy S1 DVDs, R4. 3 warnings (English, French, and somethingelse) at the beginning; Dutch (I think) at the end. This is the one that got me off my arse to install DVDsynth, so I can skip those damned warnings...
They also cannot retaliate against them for including a computer with 2 OSes (notably missing is the provision against retaliating due to not installing an MS OS)
I know of at least one organisation which, due to either a far-sighted negotiator or a licencing cock-up, still has a MS-DOS OEM agreement valid until 2006.
Of course, it's only good for MS-DOS 4.01, and I'd rather stab myself in the eyes with pickle forks than install/use that P.O.S., but still...
Note : I'm an Australian, so these thoughts may sound weird and out of place in the "land of the free"...
Make carrying guns, outside of an approved and registered shooting range, illegal. Full stop. A capital offence. Give police the right to arrest / shoot on sight anyone carrying a gun outside of these areas.
Problem solved. Easy, huh?
Oh, I forgot. There's that little bit of gun nut propaganda floating around that goes "... only criminals will have guns."
Yeah, well that's true. But now the correct, legally-empowered people will have the unfettered ability to stop them on sight, even kill them on the spot if necessary. Sounds good to me - you're a criminal, you pay for it...
I should say, at this point, that a good half of my family are gun owners. Some of them were even championship-winning shooters in their day. But still, I've never really understood why anyone would want to keep a gun at home. Maybe it's a dicksize thing - "Honey, I'm just going down to the shed to stroke my... uh, gun. Yeah, gun."
As I understand it (and I'm Australian, so forgive my lack of knowledge of the finer details), under the DMCA both the sale and posession of so-called "infringing" devices is illegal.
Now, consider the act of a sale over a shop counter, where one side is in Russia, and the other in the US. Say, somewhere up over the Bering Strait...
Is selling the product illegal in Russia? No. Is owning the product illegal in the US? Yes.
So why prosecute the maufacturer/seller? Why not prosecute the purchaser?
This is why the DMCA is fscked - it takes an action which *may* be illegal in the US, and tries to make it, by force of dick-waving, illegal in places where that law has no jurisdiction. As many people have already commented, imagine the outcry if some other country tried to do this in reverse...
The internet is merely the enabling device - the counter where you place your money and grab your goods, if you will - in the transaction. And it should be treated as such.
(Kinda like drug paraphenalia in this part of the world. It's illegal to own, on either side of the counter, but it's not illegal to sell;-)
So, perhaps it should become public domain 1-2 years after last sale (sale being the time that a publisher made the item avail to a store for resell).
The problem occurs that an item may be listed as available for sale, but in reality it isn't. There are literally thousands of books and CDs which are nominally "available" (according to the publishers current catalogues), but are unavailable in practice because they are no longer published/printed/pressed.
This happens now, under current copywrite/IP law. As good an idea as yours is, what's to stop it exploding under your scenario? I can imagine *everything* ever published still being listed as "available", securing the publishers right to future production-for-fun-and-profit and blocking its availability practically forever...
Also, I can see problems with periodicals - effectively, once the printing run is done and sold, it's no longer available.
Maybe it could be combined somehow with copywrite terms (or right of veto/approval?) lasting the authors lifetime?
BTW, how often do you lobby the US govt to privatise its socialist highway system? Afterall the fall of the Soviet Union shows that socialism doesn't work, which means US highways are bound to be more efficient if they were all privacised & there were tollbooths on every entry ramp.
Just a little point, which may have been missed by people who aren't students of human nature. Which we all should be, because the people who make it their job to take money from you are... :
You don't put toll booths on on-ramps, you put them on off-ramps
Ever wonder why that should be so? Think about it...
Umm, did you even *bother* to *read* the bug report he quoted? What it says is basically "if text is made bold, the underline should not be, because it looks silly".
Which is right. But it's no biggy. Certainly doesn't inhibit the value of my user experience...
I hate to break it to you, but the reason we have to keep developing our military technology at the rate that we do is because people want to kill us. That's the cold reality of the world we live in. Dropping all defenses would be a naive and fatal mistake.
I wonder how often the Russians, the Afghanis, the Pakistanis, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Koreans, the Turks, the Greeks, the Romans, etc, have told themselves this?
They've certainly had more reason to do so than the Americans. 3500 people is not a war, it's a failure of intelligence and foreign policy...
Because a big gun can sometimes save you from a fight, when negotiation fails. Five guys with baseball bats and a problem with a pissant are going to be reluctant to start a fight once that pissant produces a pistol.
Unless those five guys believe that they are invincible, and the puny firepower of a single pistol can't hurt them in any meaningful way. Does that sound anything like USA-ian foreign/military policy?
Or unless that one guy with a pistol believes that he is truly enacting the will of his Supreme Being, and that he will be rewarded for doing so. Does that sound anything like Taliban/A-Q/Palistinian/Israeli military policy?
To see if your analogy scales, swap "pistol" with "4 jet aircraft", and "baseball bats" with "gigantic nuclear-powered industrio/military complex".
You think Microsoft is bad. Call up Quest or Verizon. Or better yet, have them sell your information to anybody they want and get phone calls claiming to represent the phone company trying to sell you "$5,000 of free gasoline"!
But it's not the phone companies fault - it's the fault of the business/legal system, which has created a situation where your personal information/statistics are valuable assets for any business.
And the situation where they can consider that information to be theirs, not yours, without having to even give you any sort of consideration for the percentage you've donated to them.
And it's your fault too, for giving them the information in the first place. After all, at some point in space and time you decided that getting a shiny bauble was worth more than the money you were forking over - it was worth the cash plus your personal information.
So don't bitch if you've participated in this in any way. You deserve it. The only way to win is not to play...
And while... many people lost their jobs, a lot of goods got cheaper for the rest of us...
And it's this exact "Fuck you, I'm alright Jack" attitude which is the second fundamental problem with capitalism. Whether it be cheaper shiny beads to play with, or the desire for ever increasing returns to satisfy shareholders, some poor schmuck who has done nothing but try his best loses out.
Just remember this : in not too many years time, chances are you'll be that schmuck.
(Of course, the first fundamental problem with capitalism is that it has been twisted so that we serve it, instead of it serving us...)
Yes, it is illegal. But so long as companies like Microsoft abuse their position, lie to consumers, produce broken software, knowingly release bug-ladden insecure crap, and otherwise mistreat the public it is difficult to defend, on moral grounds, striking back at the evil empire.
This is funny. While I tend to agree with you in a certain way - they build crap, expect you to pay ridiculous amounts of money for it, then pay again for their next attempt at fixing the crappiness (or more likely some extra flashing lights and bells to cover up the crappiness), I can't help thinking that the whole argument is bullshit.
Because it boils down to this :
They build something which is an odious pile of steaming horseshit - and we still want it!
Ain't consumerism wonderful, even in this imperfect world...
The Preferences Toolbar allows you to do this, and more - allows/disallow custom fonts, custom colours, auto-load images, Javascript, Java, popups, onLoad popups, proxies, cookies, & XUL cache. I'm not at home to try it, but I'm pretty sure all these can be set on a window by window basis.
Would you rather Dr. Smith (the friendly and talented neurosurgeon), or Dr. Lecter (the friendly and talented cannibal) perform your brain surgery for free?
No, but I would rather have Dr. Lecter (the friendly and talented cannibal) than Dr. Smith (the cowardly and snivelling Jupiter II stowaway)...
'k, here's another comment on telecomms network design, this time from the brain of a network tech in the land of Oz...
Up until ~15 years ago, local exchanges here were built and connected in a sort of "distributed heirachy" plan - that is, each exchange had multiple connections to other exchanges around it, connections to several tandem exchanges, and connections to several geographically diverse "trunk" switches. The upshot of this was that you take one site out (even a major switch in the middle of the city), and the rest continue to function more or less normally - you only lose connectivity to the site that's dead. If one does down, there's usually a way to get around it, even if it means a few more "hops" - very IP-like.
About 15 yrs ago, the network started getting a major upgrade, and with that came a new design philosophy, based on a heirachy of local switches connected to a few major controlling nodes, and 2 or 3 "mega-nodes". Each local exchange has links to its parent node only, and those parent nodes switch through one or two of the "mega-nodes". End result : take out a node and you take out a good part of the city; take out one of the "mega-nodes" and you pretty much isolate big parts of the city from each other, and severely restrict the city itself from the rest of the country.
Hey kids, let's make it easy for attackers!
Interesting tidbit : A couple of months back, the node in the next city south of us had a minor fire (actually, it was a very minor fire in the shop next door, causing a little smoke damage only). That fire knocked out pretty much all communications - voice, data, mobile - in the city overnight. Partial restoration was done by next morning, but final cleanup was only recently completed.
It's all based on risk assesment. But now, the perceived risks have changed. I wonder if anybody is doing a re-assesment?
There was a lot of excitement around "The Cluetrain Manifesto" when it was first published.
Personally, I found it to be similar in many ways to "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People": a couple of useful observations and good ideas, wrapped up in many pages of useless blather, pseudo-religion, annoying condescension, and obviousity.
Too true. It's a good book, and I still have it lying by my bedside/chair to read bits from occasionally (usually when some mindless pap crops up in my mind or on television to remind me how corporations and advertisers get "the 'net" so wrong...). But it would be a much better book if it was about 1/3rd as long.
The same 2 or 3 good observations presented over and over again, from 20 different angles, becomes a bit mindless after a while. It's almost a parody of the dot-bomb times itself, when all you needed to do was present a stupid idea in enough different ways until you found the one which some clueless but greedy dick would throw money at...
But in any case what has happened with the internet is that the monkeys have escaped from their cages, so to speak. This is what the concept of micromarketing has tapped into, but it is more global than that.
But what micromarketing is really trying to do is stuff those monkeys back into the cage. Maybe smaller cages, maybe with pretty wallpaper, maybe with a nice selection of books/CDs/Napstered MP3s/porno mags/whatever - but still a cage.
I'm really disturbed by the thinking of marketing 'droids - thinking which started in the post-war 50's, and has been refined ever since. I don't want whatever gee-whiz labour-saving sugar-flavoured crap (which they've decided is good for me, based on the demographics they've collected) shoved in my face (or even worse, shoved directly into my subconscious). Anything beyond a level of advertising which just informs me that a product exists becomes an offensive waste of time.
If I need a product/service I'll research it, then buy it. The research stage is when to start flogging the advantages of your product. Coincidentally, it's also the stage where the internet comes in very handy. And a company that tells me honestly "yes, it does this and this - but also has these problems/restrictions which we're currently working on fixing" (*) is much more likely to get my business than one which says "don't worry about that, just look at all the flashing coloured lights!"
(*) This doesn't always work, mind you - I did make the mistake of buying a Guillemot MaxiStudio Isis based on their promises of Win2k support.:-(
Remember what happened in the real-life Balkans? Dozens of smaller countries happily getting along, enjoying their little arguements with each other - then Big brother comes along, decides they don't like what's going on, and bombs the crap out of them to make them see things "his way"...
Yeah, that's a good model for the software industry...
Slashdot Mirror
3 kids?
That means he's had sex at least 3 times!
Wow...
*Some* DVDs have somewhat lengthy FBI warnings, but the idea that you're forced to "watch 2+ minutes" of them is a gross overstatement.
Ummm, I have a couple of DVDs here with warnings in 4 languages, each 30 seconds long. I just wish I could remember which ones they were; I'd quote the titles...
One I do remember is the Buffy S1 DVDs, R4. 3 warnings (English, French, and somethingelse) at the beginning; Dutch (I think) at the end. This is the one that got me off my arse to install DVDsynth, so I can skip those damned warnings...
I know of at least one organisation which, due to either a far-sighted negotiator or a licencing cock-up, still has a MS-DOS OEM agreement valid until 2006.
Of course, it's only good for MS-DOS 4.01, and I'd rather stab myself in the eyes with pickle forks than install/use that P.O.S., but still...
I'd carry a plastic bottle that I could put snow into, then put the bottle into my clothes. After it melts, then you can drink it. That's much safer.
As long as you watch out where the huskies go...
Note : I'm an Australian, so these thoughts may sound weird and out of place in the "land of the free"...
... uh, gun. Yeah, gun."
Make carrying guns, outside of an approved and registered shooting range, illegal. Full stop. A capital offence. Give police the right to arrest / shoot on sight anyone carrying a gun outside of these areas.
Problem solved. Easy, huh?
Oh, I forgot. There's that little bit of gun nut propaganda floating around that goes "... only criminals will have guns."
Yeah, well that's true. But now the correct, legally-empowered people will have the unfettered ability to stop them on sight, even kill them on the spot if necessary. Sounds good to me - you're a criminal, you pay for it...
I should say, at this point, that a good half of my family are gun owners. Some of them were even championship-winning shooters in their day. But still, I've never really understood why anyone would want to keep a gun at home. Maybe it's a dicksize thing - "Honey, I'm just going down to the shed to stroke my
As I understand it (and I'm Australian, so forgive my lack of knowledge of the finer details), under the DMCA both the sale and posession of so-called "infringing" devices is illegal.
;-)
Now, consider the act of a sale over a shop counter, where one side is in Russia, and the other in the US. Say, somewhere up over the Bering Strait...
Is selling the product illegal in Russia? No.
Is owning the product illegal in the US? Yes.
So why prosecute the maufacturer/seller? Why not prosecute the purchaser?
This is why the DMCA is fscked - it takes an action which *may* be illegal in the US, and tries to make it, by force of dick-waving, illegal in places where that law has no jurisdiction. As many people have already commented, imagine the outcry if some other country tried to do this in reverse...
The internet is merely the enabling device - the counter where you place your money and grab your goods, if you will - in the transaction. And it should be treated as such.
(Kinda like drug paraphenalia in this part of the world. It's illegal to own, on either side of the counter, but it's not illegal to sell
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
Would you expect anything less from a person who was elected because people liked his crappy music.
Maybe he saw a need for people to enjoy his music after he died?
Pity he didn't see the tree...
So, perhaps it should become public domain 1-2 years after last sale (sale being the time that a publisher made the item avail to a store for resell).
The problem occurs that an item may be listed as available for sale, but in reality it isn't. There are literally thousands of books and CDs which are nominally "available" (according to the publishers current catalogues), but are unavailable in practice because they are no longer published/printed/pressed.
This happens now, under current copywrite/IP law. As good an idea as yours is, what's to stop it exploding under your scenario? I can imagine *everything* ever published still being listed as "available", securing the publishers right to future production-for-fun-and-profit and blocking its availability practically forever...
Also, I can see problems with periodicals - effectively, once the printing run is done and sold, it's no longer available.
Maybe it could be combined somehow with copywrite terms (or right of veto/approval?) lasting the authors lifetime?
BTW, how often do you lobby the US govt to privatise its socialist highway system? Afterall the fall of the Soviet Union shows that socialism doesn't work, which means US highways are bound to be more efficient if they were all privacised & there were tollbooths on every entry ramp.
Just a little point, which may have been missed by people who aren't students of human nature. Which we all should be, because the people who make it their job to take money from you are... :
You don't put toll booths on on-ramps, you put them on off-ramps
Ever wonder why that should be so? Think about it...
Works just fine for me. Mozilla 0.9.8.
Umm, did you even *bother* to *read* the bug report he quoted? What it says is basically "if text is made bold, the underline should not be, because it looks silly".
Which is right. But it's no biggy. Certainly doesn't inhibit the value of my user experience...
I hate to break it to you, but the reason we have to keep developing our military technology at the rate that we do is because people want to kill us. That's the cold reality of the world we live in. Dropping all defenses would be a naive and fatal mistake.
I wonder how often the Russians, the Afghanis, the Pakistanis, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Koreans, the Turks, the Greeks, the Romans, etc, have told themselves this?
They've certainly had more reason to do so than the Americans. 3500 people is not a war, it's a failure of intelligence and foreign policy...
Because a big gun can sometimes save you from a fight, when negotiation fails. Five guys with baseball bats and a problem with a pissant are going to be reluctant to start a fight once that pissant produces a pistol.
Unless those five guys believe that they are invincible, and the puny firepower of a single pistol can't hurt them in any meaningful way. Does that sound anything like USA-ian foreign/military policy?
Or unless that one guy with a pistol believes that he is truly enacting the will of his Supreme Being, and that he will be rewarded for doing so. Does that sound anything like Taliban/A-Q/Palistinian/Israeli military policy?
To see if your analogy scales, swap "pistol" with "4 jet aircraft", and "baseball bats" with "gigantic nuclear-powered industrio/military complex".
Didn't think it did...
You think Microsoft is bad. Call up Quest or Verizon. Or better yet, have them sell your information to anybody they want and get phone calls claiming to represent the phone company trying to sell you "$5,000 of free gasoline"!
But it's not the phone companies fault - it's the fault of the business/legal system, which has created a situation where your personal information/statistics are valuable assets for any business.
And the situation where they can consider that information to be theirs, not yours, without having to even give you any sort of consideration for the percentage you've donated to them.
And it's your fault too, for giving them the information in the first place. After all, at some point in space and time you decided that getting a shiny bauble was worth more than the money you were forking over - it was worth the cash plus your personal information.
So don't bitch if you've participated in this in any way. You deserve it. The only way to win is not to play...
SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'
Empty set (0.07 sec)
Step A : Get disillusioned with continuously hearing "It's only a temporary destabilisation of economic and social forces."
Step B : Kill the rich.
Step C : Now that you control your own destiny, get interested again.
Simple, really...
And while ... many people lost their jobs, a lot of goods got cheaper for the rest of us ...
And it's this exact "Fuck you, I'm alright Jack" attitude which is the second fundamental problem with capitalism. Whether it be cheaper shiny beads to play with, or the desire for ever increasing returns to satisfy shareholders, some poor schmuck who has done nothing but try his best loses out.
Just remember this : in not too many years time, chances are you'll be that schmuck.
(Of course, the first fundamental problem with capitalism is that it has been twisted so that we serve it, instead of it serving us...)
Yeah, so I'm a socialist. Shoot me.
Yes, it is illegal. But so long as companies like Microsoft abuse their position, lie to consumers, produce broken software, knowingly release bug-ladden insecure crap, and otherwise mistreat the public it is difficult to defend, on moral grounds, striking back at the evil empire.
This is funny. While I tend to agree with you in a certain way - they build crap, expect you to pay ridiculous amounts of money for it, then pay again for their next attempt at fixing the crappiness (or more likely some extra flashing lights and bells to cover up the crappiness), I can't help thinking that the whole argument is bullshit.
Because it boils down to this :
They build something which is an odious pile of steaming horseshit - and we still want it!
Ain't consumerism wonderful, even in this imperfect world...
The Preferences Toolbar allows you to do this, and more - allows/disallow custom fonts, custom colours, auto-load images, Javascript, Java, popups, onLoad popups, proxies, cookies, & XUL cache. I'm not at home to try it, but I'm pretty sure all these can be set on a window by window basis.
Would you rather Dr. Smith (the friendly and talented neurosurgeon), or Dr. Lecter (the friendly and talented cannibal) perform your brain surgery for free?
No, but I would rather have Dr. Lecter (the friendly and talented cannibal) than Dr. Smith (the cowardly and snivelling Jupiter II stowaway)...
"Oh, the pain! The pain!"
'k, here's another comment on telecomms network design, this time from the brain of a network tech in the land of Oz...
Up until ~15 years ago, local exchanges here were built and connected in a sort of "distributed heirachy" plan - that is, each exchange had multiple connections to other exchanges around it, connections to several tandem exchanges, and connections to several geographically diverse "trunk" switches. The upshot of this was that you take one site out (even a major switch in the middle of the city), and the rest continue to function more or less normally - you only lose connectivity to the site that's dead. If one does down, there's usually a way to get around it, even if it means a few more "hops" - very IP-like.
About 15 yrs ago, the network started getting a major upgrade, and with that came a new design philosophy, based on a heirachy of local switches connected to a few major controlling nodes, and 2 or 3 "mega-nodes". Each local exchange has links to its parent node only, and those parent nodes switch through one or two of the "mega-nodes". End result : take out a node and you take out a good part of the city; take out one of the "mega-nodes" and you pretty much isolate big parts of the city from each other, and severely restrict the city itself from the rest of the country.
Hey kids, let's make it easy for attackers!
Interesting tidbit : A couple of months back, the node in the next city south of us had a minor fire (actually, it was a very minor fire in the shop next door, causing a little smoke damage only). That fire knocked out pretty much all communications - voice, data, mobile - in the city overnight. Partial restoration was done by next morning, but final cleanup was only recently completed.
It's all based on risk assesment. But now, the perceived risks have changed. I wonder if anybody is doing a re-assesment?
There was a lot of excitement around "The Cluetrain Manifesto" when it was first published.
Personally, I found it to be similar in many ways to "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People": a couple of useful observations and good ideas, wrapped up in many pages of useless blather, pseudo-religion, annoying condescension, and obviousity.
Too true. It's a good book, and I still have it lying by my bedside/chair to read bits from occasionally (usually when some mindless pap crops up in my mind or on television to remind me how corporations and advertisers get "the 'net" so wrong...). But it would be a much better book if it was about 1/3rd as long.
The same 2 or 3 good observations presented over and over again, from 20 different angles, becomes a bit mindless after a while. It's almost a parody of the dot-bomb times itself, when all you needed to do was present a stupid idea in enough different ways until you found the one which some clueless but greedy dick would throw money at...
But in any case what has happened with the internet is that the monkeys have escaped from their cages, so to speak. This is what the concept of micromarketing has tapped into, but it is more global than that.
:-(
But what micromarketing is really trying to do is stuff those monkeys back into the cage. Maybe smaller cages, maybe with pretty wallpaper, maybe with a nice selection of books/CDs/Napstered MP3s/porno mags/whatever - but still a cage.
I'm really disturbed by the thinking of marketing 'droids - thinking which started in the post-war 50's, and has been refined ever since. I don't want whatever gee-whiz labour-saving sugar-flavoured crap (which they've decided is good for me, based on the demographics they've collected) shoved in my face (or even worse, shoved directly into my subconscious). Anything beyond a level of advertising which just informs me that a product exists becomes an offensive waste of time.
If I need a product/service I'll research it, then buy it. The research stage is when to start flogging the advantages of your product. Coincidentally, it's also the stage where the internet comes in very handy. And a company that tells me honestly "yes, it does this and this - but also has these problems/restrictions which we're currently working on fixing" (*) is much more likely to get my business than one which says "don't worry about that, just look at all the flashing coloured lights!"
(*) This doesn't always work, mind you - I did make the mistake of buying a Guillemot MaxiStudio Isis based on their promises of Win2k support.
That's the easy part.
The hard part is generating the 1.21 Gigawatts...
Australian Federal Minister for Communications, Information Technology & the Arts
I think you may have mis-spelled that last word...
Remember what happened in the real-life Balkans? Dozens of smaller countries happily getting along, enjoying their little arguements with each other - then Big brother comes along, decides they don't like what's going on, and bombs the crap out of them to make them see things "his way"...
Yeah, that's a good model for the software industry...