Hollywood just has too few ideas in its collective mind:
Every movie must be set in New York or Los Angeles. If, by oversight, the setting is actually someplace else, then that someplace will be depicted as a New York or Los Angeles resident would imagine it. (Which is pretty much like New York or Los Angeles, but papered over with some shallow stereotypes.)
Everyone in every movie aspires to be famous, rich, powerful, and glamorous-- much like someone who goes to Los Angeles or New York to be in the movie industry. No one aspires to a stable job, a good family, and fun with friends. That's just dumb. Who would do that?
There must be a love interest. Middle of the Peal Harbor bombing? Love interest. Legal thriller? Love interest. Man struggling alone across Greenland icecap? Uh, flashbacks to love interest. And she meets him at the end. And seems him off. And, um, parachutes in briefly to resupply him.
At all key moments, viewers must be provided with unambiguous guidance on how to feel in the form of an overdone musical score.
A character that survives torture, escapes through a crocodile-infest swamp, and then blows up the enemy fortress must endure an artful dirt smudge on the cheek and a modestly torn shirt to indicate his or her travails. (Fortunately, there was a discount laundry/dry cleaner, not depicted, just outside the crocodile-infested swamp.)
The entire world constantly hangs by a thread, but everything Turns Out Okay in the end.
There are good guys, and there are bad guys. Moral ambiguity is right out. ("Well, gee, that 'bad guy' really kinda has a legitimate point there, when you think about it"-- NO! BAD! CUT-CUT-CUT!)
[insert your own here]
I've taken to watching foreign films. Subtitles are a drag, and I often miss cultural references, but at least there is some variety. And a foreign film has to really prove itself to get into Blockbuster. In contrast, it seems that worse an American film is, the more the studios hype it in order to compensate.
I checked around and found this from Karl Auerbach:
Second, I do not believe that ICANN is paying enough attention
to economizing. I have noted that ICANN's previous President is jetting around the world on ICANN business. That strikes me as odd - and
expensive. Similarly, ICANN's senior staff does seem to show up, sometimes
by two's and threes, at a lot
of meetings around the world, even if only to give a short presentation.
And I have heard quiet, but persistent, rumbles that some of these the
presentations were not particularly well technically grounded. It seems
that ICANN would be better served by fewer trips by fewer people.
A majority of the Panel agrees with the holding in Cabela's and concludes that the Respondent's domain name is confusingly similar to the Complainant's marks.
This is bad, even though other issues let Parisi carry the day. If -sucks sites were decisively ruled not to be "confusing similar" to their prefix, then they'd all be in the clear forever. As it is, survival of a particular site depends on the makeup of the arbitration panel.
The rationale for saying that -sucks sites are "confusingly similar" is that the name similarity will confuse a search engine. You type in Bloomberg, and you get directed to Bloombergsucks. Clearly, there has been confusion. But there are overwhelming arguments that this is nonsense:
Search engines don't key on URLs. The panel states, "the Respondent makes it likely that Internet users entering "Bloomberg" into a search engine will find michaelbloombergsucks.com in addition to the Complainant's sites." But this is demonstrably false! Type "bloomberg" into Google or Altavista. For that matter, type "bloombergsucks". Neither takes you to michaelbloombergsucks.com! The panel pulled "makes it likely" out of thin air-- it's not likely or unlikely, it's either true or false that you're taken to the -sucks site. Specifically, it's false.
In any case, "confusingly similar" presumably refers to confused humans, not confused search engines. Arrrrgh!
An earlier ruling addressed the "confusing similarity" of sucks sites much better: "Both common sense and a reading of the plain language of the Policy support the view that a domain name combining a trademark with the word "sucks" or language clearly indicating that the domain name is not affiliated with the trademark owner cannot be considered confusingly similar to the trademark".
This evidence of mass extinctions caused by early humans is going to rattle some people that I'd very much like to see smacked down.
In particular, there is this line of thought in environmental history that primitive humans were the "first ecologists". Many people seem really wedded to this idea to an extent that runs far, far beyond the facts. For example, the book Conquest of Paradise by Kirkpatrick Sale argues that not only were native americans environmentally enlightened, but-- by god!-- they were pretty much late 1990's liberals.
Since we know so extremely little about, say, native americans before 1000 AD, they too often serve as a sort of inkblot test. You can project your own fantasies about how people "should be" upon their culture. Not surprising, then, that a slipshod researcher like Sale "discovers" that humans in their natural state were card-carrying democrats.
Awkward facts, such as the native practice of stampeding buffalo heards off cliffs or burning entire forests to flush game get talked around in a fashion that would do ICANN proud.
The problem is that these notions do a great disservice to aboriginal people. First we colonize their land, and then we colonize their history: we run roughshod over the delicate, real evidence of their cultural history, and instead impose a fantasy history that serves our current political agenda. It's disgusting, and I'm glad to see another nail in coffin for such thinking.
I once moderated a comment and then used the mouse wheel to scroll down to other comments. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way: rolling the mouse wheel after moderating scrolls through the list of moderation adjectives. I bet this leads to otherwise inexplicable mis-ratings all the time. An "insightful" becomes a "troll", etc.
I wonder if the recent propaganda assault by Microsoft is drawing the open source/free software community closer? There have been a spate of these "new cooperation" stories lately. Perhaps differences in philosophy and direction start to seem pretty minor when Microsoft conspicuously brings its ion cannons to bear...
It's the only shape that won't fall through the hole.
Surprisingly, given how commonplace the question is, this answer is wrong!
There are shapes other than the circle that can't fall through a slightly-smaller hole of the same shape. Here is how to construct one of them. Take three equidistant points. (Like the corners of an equilateral triangle.) Place the needle of a compass on one point and run the pencil from the second point to the the third. Repeat for the other two points. The result is an equilateral triangle with bowed-out sides.
Not only can this shape function as a delightful manhole cover, but also you can roll a platform on top of logs with this cross section without it bouncing up and down-- just as if the logs had a circular cross section.
(Martin Gardner wrote about this in one of his books.)
it seems to me that Slashdot is lately engaging too much in the latter rather than the former
You're new here, aren't you?:-)
This article seems a bit over the top, I agree. However, the number of fronts on which law enforcement and corporate entities are muscling into the computing world is astonishing and disturbing.
Perhaps it is because the internet is a relatively clean slate. In the wider world, we are used few large corporations controlling virtually every channel of information we have: radio, television, newspapers, magazines, movies, music... But on the internet, we aren't used to that. So we notice the invasion.
We see RIAA and MPAA attacking digital copying, ICANN handing the namespace to corporations and excusing itself from public accountability. We see FBI wanting to tap communications at every ISP and bar strong encryption. 2600 is ordered not to link, and program code is ruled unprotected under the first amendment. Microsoft tells us Open Source is a cancer while cheating at business itself. RAMBUS wants cash for every memory chip manufactured, RIAA wants cash for every CD-R sold, and CPRM would control what you write on your hard drive. Reality doesn't leave a lot of room for irrational paranoia these days!
These issues may not interest you, but they'll shape the future of the internet and, consequently, of society. Think no one should care? Tell that to RIAA, MPAA, FBI, Microsoft, RAMBUS, AOL-Time Warner... because for some reason, they all do care passionately and are on the ball asserting their interests every day.
The Powers That Be have managed to destroy some mechanisms for music trading (Napster, MP3.com), but have not succeeded with even a single positive step toward controlling music trading (such as SDMI, CPRM, CD burning control, etc.) This heartens me.
Am I overlooking something?
On other sites, a group of regular users rank the value of contributions, and the rankings then determines their place on the "bulletin board." How well that works, however, is an open question. When Mr. Sunstein tried to intervene in a discussion of his own book on a techie Web site called slashdot.org, his contribution was given a very low ranking. "I think maybe they didn't believe I was the author of the book," he said.
I looked up this posting. His post number was something like 171/178. Funny that the guy wrote a book about this kinda stuff, but doesn't have the first clue about getting modded up: POST EARLY!!!
If the government were working so effectively to control communication between citizens, we'd be talking tyranny and armed revolution. When corporations do the heavy lifting on their behalf, we bitch and moan on Slashdot.
Yet any system that allows distribution of copyrighted materials despite the wishes of powerful interests is invaluable for a parallel purpose: trading ideas and information that the government would like to suppress.
For example, Daniel Ellsberg might well have distributed the Pentagon Papers via P2P. Secure P2P could have been used to distribute suppressed writings in the former USSR in place of laboriously mimeographed samizdat. Not long ago, Linda Tripp held tapes that could destroy the president of the United States-- a terrifying position. Nowadays, she might post them on Freenet.
The existence of a mechanism for ordinary people to trade information by a means uncontrolled by elites shifts the power balance in an important, positive way. But here's a chilling thought: almost the same words were spoken in the early days of radio. People celebrated it as a new, uncontrolled medium for public expression of ideas that would enhance democracy in America. Now major stations are controled by media megacorps and low-power radio is flat-out illegal. Is this the future of P2P?
With certainty, there will be further occasions when the public needs to communicate through channels outside government control. The moment some politically explosive document is released on Freenet, the Supreme Court is going to take a very different view of P2P. I hope Freenet lasts long enough for this to happen.
Perhaps one need not reinvent the wheel in figuring out how to oppose RIAA and MPAA. Many organizations have a long history of fighting powerful interests and well-established techniques. It's remarkable that a fringey, but dedicated outfit like Earthfirst! manages to be more active than the 50 million Napster users combined. That need not continue.
What is it with fantasy film directors? They all INSIST on having an irritating comic relief character to lighten up (= destroy) the mood. Serious fantasy is tough enough to bring off in film without some obnoxious character flitting about going, "Eeee! Eeee! Meesa passed gas!" in a distracting quest for sight-gag laughs. It's as if the directors are saying, "Well, of course we're not taking this geeky stuff *seriously*. Hehehe." And we're all in the audience saying, "Then don't make the damn film."
Man, I hope these guys can bring it off! The universe needs at least one good fantasy film before its heat death in 10^18 years or whatever. (I give it about even odds at this rate.)
He added that the legal action in New York will seek a Napster-like injunction to bar Aimster users from trading in copyrighted materials.
Does this remedy make sense? Without a central sever, how could AIMster bar trading of copyrighted materials?
Incidentally, why is AIMster incorporated? Is it to provide the individuals with a legal umbrella? (It is hard to believe that they have get-rich plans. They seem pretty clued.)
And, hey, wasn't AIMster already suing for a declaratory judgement on its service?
I'm not a stocks-and-business person. But following Amazon as a sort of case study has taught me a lot. (Perhaps a real financial person can correct me where I err...)
Stock analysts generally suck. During the big tech-stock price run-up, analysts like Henry Blodget and Mary Meeker became famous for accurately predicting the rise. Of course, after the market began to collapse, they still predicted a rise. And after everyone else said, "Gee whiz-- I guess the bubble burst" and went home, they were still predicting a rise. Turns out they weren't analysts at all, just eternal optimists who, to a significant extent, created the bubble with their relentless, baseless cheerleading. (Sadly, while screwing investors who listened to their advice, they may have served their firms well-- in the short term-- by bringing in investment banking business.) Every now and then someone comes within a standard deviation of reasonable (Ravi Suria), and it really shakes up the house.
The financial media generally sucks. Blodget and Meeker didn't just "become famous", they were lionized by the breathless bimbos on CNNfn and in investing magazines who apparently wanted to make thoughtful investing into a sort of celebrity gala. To this day, these media buffoons love to quote the same analysts who completely failed to predict, observe, or even retroactively recognize the tech stock bubble burst. (WSJ rocks, though.)
Companies strive to deceive. Amazon, like many companies, reports a thing called "pro forma" financial results. These are sort of like real financial results, except that they throw out a half dozen or so things that make them look bad, such as interest payments on their massive debt. When Amazon says it will soon make a profit, they mean a pro-forma profit, which means a loss. It's intentional deception and should be outlawed by the SEC.
Analysts still suck? Amazon's stock has been up recently because their results in the last quarter were better than expected. To some extent, though, this seems driven by Christmas toy sales. Since there isn't a Christmas every quarter, things might not really be so rosy. I haven't seen discussion of this in the financial press, however.
Here's what churns my stomach: this is an argument that pits incredibly talented people who truly believe in something-- people like RMS-- against a banal Microsoft goon reading lines in random order off a propaganda script.
On the one hand, you see people who are earnestly thinking about how things "should" be and trying to make them more that way. On the other hand, we have a guy who is arguing with all the sincerity of an animatronic. He's just being a flunky, mindlessly spouting his flunky nonsense so he can collect his paycheck and maybe the occasional raise.
What sorry contrast. What a waste of good people's time.
I agree. I love how Bill Gates put an abrupt stop to those pathetic notions that what the 3rd world really needs is a lot of American high tect. He pointed out-- rightly-- that they don't even have a power source. And no solar won't work. No, the third world needs infrastructure, good internal governance, better health care.. not a bunch of PCs. I'm glad he's more informed about these issues than most of his critics.
Lots of people decided to get into the tech world for solid reasons-- like, tech is what they enjoy and do well. But for the last few years, the tech sector has been pulled through a violent boom/bust by Wall Street investors, buzzword babbling bimbos on CNNfn, and "visionary geniuses" revealed as blowhards. All their hot air made for a turbulence ride even down at ground level. For a while it was fun like a roller-coaster, but now it mostly makes you puke. I think a lot of us would have preferred to skip the whole up-and-down, "new economy" bullshit trip and just do good work.
When the HackSDMI materials were first posted, the "click-through" button on the contract was just an image hyperlinked to another page. A lot of us noticed this and never clicked through-- we just cut and pasted the link to get to the download page. So how does SDMI even know that Felten "signed" any agreement at all? But I suppose the fact that one ABSOLUTELY, EXPLICITLY DID NOT SIGN THE AGREEMENT would be dismissed as a technicality by a court... *sigh*
I am so sick of laws that have no purpose other than to enrich a few scumbags by creating artificial markets:
"We can't make a business out of that; it is already conveniently available for free."
"Ah, but we get the convenient, free service declared illegal and then we get rich!"
How can executives at these companies not look at themselves in the mirror each morning and think, "I am a disgusting parasitic leech of a human being"?
Sure, it gets us a few more months (or years, if there's a long appeals process), but overall I think this is a case of winning a battle that will probably mean losing the war.
Ahhh... but time is on our side.
The longer it takes RIAA to shut down Napster and other music trading services, the more users there are and the more convinced those users become that it is their GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO COPY DIGITAL MUSIC. And those users become ever more likely to scream ever more loudly to their representatives if that right is snatched away.
Every day that Napster stalls, the good ship Music Trading gathers momentum, and becomes harder for RIAA to bring back to port.
Am I the only one thats just a little tired of napster?
I agree that Napster isn't exactly a knight in shining armor for the causes of business integrity and IP reform. But we have to take what we're given: the battle for digital music is Napster vs. RIAA, like it or not. Yes, Napster is a greasy outfit, but RIAA is Stalinesque. Given that, I guess I'm pro-Napster, and I'd guess you are too. If Napster is demolished in the courts and legislature, I don't think we can expect, say, Bearshare to trundle up in 2004 and reverse all the precedents set in Napster vs. RIAA.
I'd like to be rootin' for someone else, but Napster and RIAA are the only players on center court.
Pick a large enough length, and you are virtually guaranteed that there is a 1024-byte block of zeroes in it somewhere.
Your reasoning contains an error. What were you thinking, arguing with an MIT guy, for heaven's sake!:-)
As the length of the file increases, the number of bits needed to *specify the position* of this run of zeroes also increases. And you're going to have to record that position somewhere in your decompressor or compressed file.
For example, to a first order, you need a file of length around 2^1000 bits to expect a run of 1000 consecutive zero-bits. Great, But specifying the position of this run requires-- you got it!-- a 1000-bit number. We're hosed!
Yes, this is theoretically possible. But the amount of memory required is really too much... there are 10^80 positions or something.
That said, I think it is not impossible to imagine that someone will figure out some custom compression tricks to store those 10^80 or so win-loss bits. I think chess could well be solved within a couple generations.
If had a program that could play perfectly, I'd set it to always make the WORST winning move. I think it would be hilarious to see it throwing away pieces, wasting moves, and still *just* squeaking out the win.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hollywood just has too few ideas in its collective mind:
I've taken to watching foreign films. Subtitles are a drag, and I often miss cultural references, but at least there is some variety. And a foreign film has to really prove itself to get into Blockbuster. In contrast, it seems that worse an American film is, the more the studios hype it in order to compensate.
I checked around and found this from Karl Auerbach:
Second, I do not believe that ICANN is paying enough attention to economizing. I have noted that ICANN's previous President is jetting around the world on ICANN business. That strikes me as odd - and expensive. Similarly, ICANN's senior staff does seem to show up, sometimes by two's and threes, at a lot of meetings around the world, even if only to give a short presentation. And I have heard quiet, but persistent, rumbles that some of these the presentations were not particularly well technically grounded. It seems that ICANN would be better served by fewer trips by fewer people.
I would guess ICANN gets a share of the profits
ICANN is a non-profit. (Amazingly, considering how much cash they rake in; where does it all go?)
Instead of a cop sitting in secret location watching the public through hidden video cameras, how about we put him or her ON THE STREET?
Then people can ask for directions, mention suspicious activity, approach if they feel threatened, etc.
And it's safe to say that there's no computer system in the world for recognizing human faces that is even remotely as good as the human brain.
The decision says:
A majority of the Panel agrees with the holding in Cabela's and concludes that the Respondent's domain name is confusingly similar to the Complainant's marks.
This is bad, even though other issues let Parisi carry the day. If -sucks sites were decisively ruled not to be "confusing similar" to their prefix, then they'd all be in the clear forever. As it is, survival of a particular site depends on the makeup of the arbitration panel.
The rationale for saying that -sucks sites are "confusingly similar" is that the name similarity will confuse a search engine. You type in Bloomberg, and you get directed to Bloombergsucks. Clearly, there has been confusion. But there are overwhelming arguments that this is nonsense:
An earlier ruling addressed the "confusing similarity" of sucks sites much better: "Both common sense and a reading of the plain language of the Policy support the view that a domain name combining a trademark with the word "sucks" or language clearly indicating that the domain name is not affiliated with the trademark owner cannot be considered confusingly similar to the trademark".
Common sense is so refreshing!
This evidence of mass extinctions caused by early humans is going to rattle some people that I'd very much like to see smacked down.
In particular, there is this line of thought in environmental history that primitive humans were the "first ecologists". Many people seem really wedded to this idea to an extent that runs far, far beyond the facts. For example, the book Conquest of Paradise by Kirkpatrick Sale argues that not only were native americans environmentally enlightened, but-- by god!-- they were pretty much late 1990's liberals.
Since we know so extremely little about, say, native americans before 1000 AD, they too often serve as a sort of inkblot test. You can project your own fantasies about how people "should be" upon their culture. Not surprising, then, that a slipshod researcher like Sale "discovers" that humans in their natural state were card-carrying democrats.
Awkward facts, such as the native practice of stampeding buffalo heards off cliffs or burning entire forests to flush game get talked around in a fashion that would do ICANN proud.
The problem is that these notions do a great disservice to aboriginal people. First we colonize their land, and then we colonize their history: we run roughshod over the delicate, real evidence of their cultural history, and instead impose a fantasy history that serves our current political agenda. It's disgusting, and I'm glad to see another nail in coffin for such thinking.
I once moderated a comment and then used the mouse wheel to scroll down to other comments. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way: rolling the mouse wheel after moderating scrolls through the list of moderation adjectives. I bet this leads to otherwise inexplicable mis-ratings all the time. An "insightful" becomes a "troll", etc.
I wonder if the recent propaganda assault by Microsoft is drawing the open source/free software community closer? There have been a spate of these "new cooperation" stories lately. Perhaps differences in philosophy and direction start to seem pretty minor when Microsoft conspicuously brings its ion cannons to bear...
9) Why are manhole covers round?
It's the only shape that won't fall through the hole.Surprisingly, given how commonplace the question is, this answer is wrong!
There are shapes other than the circle that can't fall through a slightly-smaller hole of the same shape. Here is how to construct one of them. Take three equidistant points. (Like the corners of an equilateral triangle.) Place the needle of a compass on one point and run the pencil from the second point to the the third. Repeat for the other two points. The result is an equilateral triangle with bowed-out sides.
Not only can this shape function as a delightful manhole cover, but also you can roll a platform on top of logs with this cross section without it bouncing up and down-- just as if the logs had a circular cross section.
(Martin Gardner wrote about this in one of his books.)
it seems to me that Slashdot is lately engaging too much in the latter rather than the former
You're new here, aren't you? :-)
This article seems a bit over the top, I agree. However, the number of fronts on which law enforcement and corporate entities are muscling into the computing world is astonishing and disturbing.
Perhaps it is because the internet is a relatively clean slate. In the wider world, we are used few large corporations controlling virtually every channel of information we have: radio, television, newspapers, magazines, movies, music... But on the internet, we aren't used to that. So we notice the invasion.
We see RIAA and MPAA attacking digital copying, ICANN handing the namespace to corporations and excusing itself from public accountability. We see FBI wanting to tap communications at every ISP and bar strong encryption. 2600 is ordered not to link, and program code is ruled unprotected under the first amendment. Microsoft tells us Open Source is a cancer while cheating at business itself. RAMBUS wants cash for every memory chip manufactured, RIAA wants cash for every CD-R sold, and CPRM would control what you write on your hard drive. Reality doesn't leave a lot of room for irrational paranoia these days!
These issues may not interest you, but they'll shape the future of the internet and, consequently, of society. Think no one should care? Tell that to RIAA, MPAA, FBI, Microsoft, RAMBUS, AOL-Time Warner... because for some reason, they all do care passionately and are on the ball asserting their interests every day.
The Powers That Be have managed to destroy some mechanisms for music trading (Napster, MP3.com), but have not succeeded with even a single positive step toward controlling music trading (such as SDMI, CPRM, CD burning control, etc.) This heartens me. Am I overlooking something?
From the New York Times article:
On other sites, a group of regular users rank the value of contributions, and the rankings then determines their place on the "bulletin board." How well that works, however, is an open question. When Mr. Sunstein tried to intervene in a discussion of his own book on a techie Web site called slashdot.org, his contribution was given a very low ranking. "I think maybe they didn't believe I was the author of the book," he said.
I looked up this posting. His post number was something like 171/178. Funny that the guy wrote a book about this kinda stuff, but doesn't have the first clue about getting modded up: POST EARLY!!!
If the government were working so effectively to control communication between citizens, we'd be talking tyranny and armed revolution. When corporations do the heavy lifting on their behalf, we bitch and moan on Slashdot.
Yet any system that allows distribution of copyrighted materials despite the wishes of powerful interests is invaluable for a parallel purpose: trading ideas and information that the government would like to suppress.
For example, Daniel Ellsberg might well have distributed the Pentagon Papers via P2P. Secure P2P could have been used to distribute suppressed writings in the former USSR in place of laboriously mimeographed samizdat. Not long ago, Linda Tripp held tapes that could destroy the president of the United States-- a terrifying position. Nowadays, she might post them on Freenet.
The existence of a mechanism for ordinary people to trade information by a means uncontrolled by elites shifts the power balance in an important, positive way. But here's a chilling thought: almost the same words were spoken in the early days of radio. People celebrated it as a new, uncontrolled medium for public expression of ideas that would enhance democracy in America. Now major stations are controled by media megacorps and low-power radio is flat-out illegal. Is this the future of P2P?
With certainty, there will be further occasions when the public needs to communicate through channels outside government control. The moment some politically explosive document is released on Freenet, the Supreme Court is going to take a very different view of P2P. I hope Freenet lasts long enough for this to happen.
Perhaps one need not reinvent the wheel in figuring out how to oppose RIAA and MPAA. Many organizations have a long history of fighting powerful interests and well-established techniques. It's remarkable that a fringey, but dedicated outfit like Earthfirst! manages to be more active than the 50 million Napster users combined. That need not continue.
Yeah, I love the dark aspect!
What is it with fantasy film directors? They all INSIST on having an irritating comic relief character to lighten up (= destroy) the mood. Serious fantasy is tough enough to bring off in film without some obnoxious character flitting about going, "Eeee! Eeee! Meesa passed gas!" in a distracting quest for sight-gag laughs. It's as if the directors are saying, "Well, of course we're not taking this geeky stuff *seriously*. Hehehe." And we're all in the audience saying, "Then don't make the damn film."
Man, I hope these guys can bring it off! The universe needs at least one good fantasy film before its heat death in 10^18 years or whatever. (I give it about even odds at this rate.)
He added that the legal action in New York will seek a Napster-like injunction to bar Aimster users from trading in copyrighted materials.
Does this remedy make sense? Without a central sever, how could AIMster bar trading of copyrighted materials?
Incidentally, why is AIMster incorporated? Is it to provide the individuals with a legal umbrella? (It is hard to believe that they have get-rich plans. They seem pretty clued.)
And, hey, wasn't AIMster already suing for a declaratory judgement on its service?
I'm not a stocks-and-business person. But following Amazon as a sort of case study has taught me a lot. (Perhaps a real financial person can correct me where I err...)
Here's what churns my stomach: this is an argument that pits incredibly talented people who truly believe in something-- people like RMS-- against a banal Microsoft goon reading lines in random order off a propaganda script.
On the one hand, you see people who are earnestly thinking about how things "should" be and trying to make them more that way. On the other hand, we have a guy who is arguing with all the sincerity of an animatronic. He's just being a flunky, mindlessly spouting his flunky nonsense so he can collect his paycheck and maybe the occasional raise.
What sorry contrast. What a waste of good people's time.
I agree. I love how Bill Gates put an abrupt stop to those pathetic notions that what the 3rd world really needs is a lot of American high tect. He pointed out-- rightly-- that they don't even have a power source. And no solar won't work. No, the third world needs infrastructure, good internal governance, better health care.. not a bunch of PCs. I'm glad he's more informed about these issues than most of his critics.
(Not that I'm a Microsoft fan in the least...)
Sounds pretty rough.
Lots of people decided to get into the tech world for solid reasons-- like, tech is what they enjoy and do well. But for the last few years, the tech sector has been pulled through a violent boom/bust by Wall Street investors, buzzword babbling bimbos on CNNfn, and "visionary geniuses" revealed as blowhards. All their hot air made for a turbulence ride even down at ground level. For a while it was fun like a roller-coaster, but now it mostly makes you puke. I think a lot of us would have preferred to skip the whole up-and-down, "new economy" bullshit trip and just do good work.
I hope things look up for you soon!
When the HackSDMI materials were first posted, the "click-through" button on the contract was just an image hyperlinked to another page. A lot of us noticed this and never clicked through-- we just cut and pasted the link to get to the download page. So how does SDMI even know that Felten "signed" any agreement at all? But I suppose the fact that one ABSOLUTELY, EXPLICITLY DID NOT SIGN THE AGREEMENT would be dismissed as a technicality by a court... *sigh*
I am so sick of laws that have no purpose other than to enrich a few scumbags by creating artificial markets:
How can executives at these companies not look at themselves in the mirror each morning and think, "I am a disgusting parasitic leech of a human being"?
I just don't know. Maybe they just need a reminder.
Sure, it gets us a few more months (or years, if there's a long appeals process), but overall I think this is a case of winning a battle that will probably mean losing the war.
Ahhh... but time is on our side.
The longer it takes RIAA to shut down Napster and other music trading services, the more users there are and the more convinced those users become that it is their GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO COPY DIGITAL MUSIC. And those users become ever more likely to scream ever more loudly to their representatives if that right is snatched away.
Every day that Napster stalls, the good ship Music Trading gathers momentum, and becomes harder for RIAA to bring back to port.
Am I the only one thats just a little tired of napster?
I agree that Napster isn't exactly a knight in shining armor for the causes of business integrity and IP reform. But we have to take what we're given: the battle for digital music is Napster vs. RIAA, like it or not. Yes, Napster is a greasy outfit, but RIAA is Stalinesque. Given that, I guess I'm pro-Napster, and I'd guess you are too. If Napster is demolished in the courts and legislature, I don't think we can expect, say, Bearshare to trundle up in 2004 and reverse all the precedents set in Napster vs. RIAA.
I'd like to be rootin' for someone else, but Napster and RIAA are the only players on center court.
Pick a large enough length, and you are virtually guaranteed that there is a 1024-byte block of zeroes in it somewhere.
Your reasoning contains an error. What were you thinking, arguing with an MIT guy, for heaven's sake! :-)
As the length of the file increases, the number of bits needed to *specify the position* of this run of zeroes also increases. And you're going to have to record that position somewhere in your decompressor or compressed file.
For example, to a first order, you need a file of length around 2^1000 bits to expect a run of 1000 consecutive zero-bits. Great, But specifying the position of this run requires-- you got it!-- a 1000-bit number. We're hosed!
Yes, this is theoretically possible. But the amount of memory required is really too much... there are 10^80 positions or something.
That said, I think it is not impossible to imagine that someone will figure out some custom compression tricks to store those 10^80 or so win-loss bits. I think chess could well be solved within a couple generations.
If had a program that could play perfectly, I'd set it to always make the WORST winning move. I think it would be hilarious to see it throwing away pieces, wasting moves, and still *just* squeaking out the win. :-)