* Replenishes the Justice Department's antiterrorism emergency reserve with up to $50 million; authorizes private gift-giving to the fund; allows service providers to use reserve fund to expedite assistance to victims of domestic terrorism
Emphasis added... Somehow I can see this glazed over point having a tremendous long term effect. What percentage of these "gifts" do we expect will come from Microsoft, the RIAA, and big tobacco? Will the "givers" be on public record?
Really, do we need more "private" money entering into the government's hands?
In Chicago, there is a relatively independent service provider, RCN, that provides local/long distance phone, cable TV, and cable modem service for $100 / month. The customer service is about as bad as anything else, but at least I never have to send a penny to either Ameritech or AT&T.
Whatever someone wants to make the social evil of the week will be recorded and used against their enemies.
The idea is that when everyone knows what everyone else is doing, the phrase "social evil" takes on a much different meaning.
Examples: sex and drugs. These are things that large percentages of people do on a frequent basis, but few will talk about because of the bizarre social negativity placed on these activities. By having an Open Source Society, you can now see your politicians engaged in dirty sex (ewww) so that if they ever accuse you of being "disturbed" (or a witch, communist, pirate, etc.) you can show the world undeniable proof of that person's hypocrisy.
Even though every person "knows" that Clinton and Bush both did various drugs, there still isn't proof. Proof makes a big difference.
Sensationalist journalism at best. Utter crap at worst.
We don't have a paperless world; work isn't easier, or even demonstrably more efficient
Isn't easier? Are you trying to say that typing an html document and posting it on the web isn't easier than printing it on paper and shipping across the country with a fleet of trucks? Do you have any evidence or are you just spewing forth?
...to bring
information to everybody and make lives easier. But is this the revolution? Does this really
change life for the better, or even change it much at all?
YES! Knowledge is the single most freeing "object" in existence. Freedom is good! Revolution - drastic changes in people's lives - cannot happen unless they wish for something better. Knowledge brings hope and desire for change. You don't need permission to be free. You just do it.
the bad guys have won one of the first great wars between
corporatism and free information advocates
... and when did Napster become the good guy? Napster is just another one of the privacy invading corporatist powers of which you speak, but somehow because they facilitate and promote copyright infringement they are the good guys? Please.
a new plan for "human-centric computing" that will serve,
not frustrate people, and work as well for the non-tech world as for the tech universe
One word: Google.
In case it's not obvious, I have a serious problem with this whole article. Freedom, revolution, power, knowledge - these are not things that are given to you by your politicians. They are not things that corporations can take from you. They are concepts that exist within the realm of the human mind, not government or corporate monoliths.
The only time you lose your Freedom is if you let yourself be controlled.
There are a great many people including myself who have been able to obtain great amounts of knowledge in a short period of time through the use of the Internet that would have taken hundreds of years to obtain without the Internet. Because of this knowledge, I live in a safer neighborhood, I eat healthier food, I enjoy more entertaining passtimes, and my overall quality of life is better.
Don't bitch about the failure of the Internet because an article on CNN and some guy in McDonalds told you that life sucks.
My personal recommendation would be to find something else you enjoy. If you like music, then major in music and get a minor in computer science. This way, you will be able to better apply your computer knowledge to real world situations.
The problem with majoring in computer science is that the field changes too quickly. CS classes often revolve around a language or two and then get into a lot of theory that is fairly inapplicable to the real world. Then when you have finished, the only thing you have learned is "computers". If on the other hand you major in something else you enjoy (music, foreign language, business, electrical engineering, etc. ) and use your CS knowledge to help you in that major, you will learn a great deal about how the normal business world uses computers for reason and purpose.
Rarely do good businesses do programming for programming's sake. There is always a reason and a purpose for doing it, and in the end it saves money as unbelievable as that may seem. If you want to do development without purpose, you may want to go into a research field or work at an e-commerce startup.
In the end, it comes down to what you want to do. Just remember that the computer is a tool used to accomplish a goal. Would you rather take a class on "construction" or a class on "hammers". If every last detail of the hammer interests you, go with CS, otherwise pick something else.
Even though linux does not currently support the hot swappable hardware, that does not mean you cannot have 100% uptime. You can just as easily mirror your entire server to another machine with a 0$ licensing cost and fairly inexpensive hardware. Throw in a load balancer and you now have a much more robust system.
If you need more scalability, add another machine for a very low cost. Compare this to the cost of a couple of "fully redundant" netras and you're easily several thousand dollars better off.
We need to get off of this mainframe concept where there is one really big machine that does everything. You can make it fully redundant if you have a hundred grand to spare, but why bother when you can spend a tenth of that amount and have a fully redundant expandable system with two machines instead of one.
Sorry, but there are no magical "IP" laws that protect your revenue stream unless you have
A patent
A copyright
A trademark
That's it. IANAL, but I believe there are some provisions against stealing intellectual property, where "stealing" means breaking into an office and physically taking/copying trade secret material. That is a crime because the "trade secret" was obtained through a criminal act.
However, in this country, there is no such law outlawing reverse engineering, not even the DMCA. The DMCA forbids the circumvention of copyright protection other than for interoperability, so whether that circumvention was obtained through reverse engineering or not is irrelevant (which makes me wonder if I could publish my weak protection scheme and still claim that the DMCA applies, but that's another story...).
In fact, if it were legal to reverse engineer, every single "invention" would be illegal. Let's see... birds can fly... I want to build a flying machine... ILLEGAL. Fire good, fire warm, me want fire, me bang rocks... ILLEGAL. I want to cure a disease... unfortunately I cannot analyze the disease because that would be... ILLEGAL.
So, unless you have it patented, consider it public domain once you release a product. Horrors, you may actually have to compete in a free market! Oh dear God, no!
In the perfect world, vague overgeneralized IP laws would apply to everyone except me, and then I would be your god.
Does this apply to everyone?
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
Would this also apply to Congressmen who decide to use a voice vote to enact the DMCA so that no public voting record exists?
I mean, if I'm not protected, why should they be protected?
I live in downtown Chicago. Around 9/99 I signed up for a DSL line through Mindspring for $50/month. Mindspring is just the ISP, and the line is actually serviced by Covad.
The line was installed in a couple weeks and worked great for a few months. Then one day, the line just stopped working. I called Mindspring/Covad and they began to check on the line and were very bad and getting back to me with information. I kept calling and it would always take them a day or two to perform any new tests. Eventually, they just said that they didn't know what the problem was and left me hanging.
Needless to say, I cancelled my line. I was refunded for the month that my service was out and did not have to pay any "cancellation fee" for breaking my contract.
Then I signed on with 21stcentury which was a small cable company (bought out by RCN) that actually offered competition to Ma Bell. For $40 a month, I get a more stable faster dhcp'd connection. The DSL line worked over pppoe and was hell for my LAN. With my current setup, every machine can have its own IP and everything just works without installing any additional software.
I've had the service for a few months now, and it works great. If you are in Chicago and can get service, I would recommend them for internet and cable access. They do also offer local phone service, but a friend of mine that has it has had to wait for a couple months before his line is switched from Ameritech.
It's amazing what happens when there is competition in an industry!
You let the speeds rise as they may. If the end users are downloading too much porn, the porn sites will get faster connections, or people will download porn from a different site.
Same goes for audio and video.
Setting some sort of "speed limit" on the end use would be a *very* dangerous precedent to set. Would it then be "illegal" to have a faster connection? Throw someone in prison or take away their "Internet rights" because they were surfing too fast?
There is no scarcity...
there is an unlimited supply, so the laws of supply and demand don't apply.
Almost, but not quite. There is definitely an "unlimited" supply of bits and bytes, but by no means is there an unlimited supply of talent.
Even if the actual music itself is free, most people will never want to go sifting through the millions of songs ever recorded to find ones they like.
This is where the scarcity lies: the critic. People will always pay other people to make some decisions for them. When you go to a store to buy a CD, there is always the rack of CDs that cost $1.99 right next to the rack of the $15 CDs. I know I generally skip by the $1.99 rack and go to the $15 rack. Why? Because the $1.99 rack is usually a bunch of crap. I don't want to listen to crap. Sure, I may listen to a hundred crappy CDs and end up finding one I like, but I would still rather pay someone to tell me what is good. I will always want the choice to listen to whatever I want, but that doesn't mean I want to listen to everything.
People with money will always pay for a higher level of service. Period.
Forget all the legal garbage for a couple minutes and then ask yourself why you don't go out into the woods to pick edible plants for dinner. Why don't you? Because:
You want stuff that won't kill you (doesn't quite apply to music, but stick with the analogy)
You want stuff that tastes good (quality music)
You want stuff that is of high quality (quality encoding)
You are lazy (duh)
In the end, artists will get paid to write and record songs, but will not be paid for distribution. Critics will get paid to go out and find the best music and tell others about it. Businesses will get paid by selling physical things, live experiences, and connecting consumers to critics and artists.
The entire basis of the U.S. Constitution is that the government does not have more power that the people. The government is made of the people.
Even if the FBI were going to use this in a responsible way, just the fact that they could use it in such a monstrously irresponsible way gives Carnivore and the FBI too much power.
The same basic argument comes up with gun control. Is it right to take away the people's right to own weapons when police officers can still carry them? In a perfect world, that would be great. Unfortunately, the police are not perfect, and certainly neither is the FBI.
There is no need to give them more power to abuse until they prove they can handle it.
Slashdot Mirror
cat turkey? I think I'll just stick with cranberry sauce!
Destroy it before it kills us all!
This is just part of the trend to distribute risk among the public while privatizing profit. Welcome to America.
Hopefully they will also sell advertising so that I may be better informed of the products and services available to me.
Let's just hope that the Russians and Europeans will help us out when our time comes.
After reading this, I was reminded of a Simpsons quote:
Amendment To Be: But, if we change the Constitution...
Boy: Then we can make all sorts of crazy laws!
* Replenishes the Justice Department's antiterrorism emergency reserve with up to $50 million; authorizes private gift-giving to the fund; allows service providers to use reserve fund to expedite assistance to victims of domestic terrorism
Emphasis added... Somehow I can see this glazed over point having a tremendous long term effect. What percentage of these "gifts" do we expect will come from Microsoft, the RIAA, and big tobacco? Will the "givers" be on public record?
Really, do we need more "private" money entering into the government's hands?
The only folks who ever visit MSN are the ones who never changed their IE default homepage.
If you are using Mozilla, why would you ever need to look at MSN?
In Chicago, there is a relatively independent service provider, RCN, that provides local/long distance phone, cable TV, and cable modem service for $100 / month. The customer service is about as bad as anything else, but at least I never have to send a penny to either Ameritech or AT&T.
Now I can get segmentation fault (core dumped), GPFs, and BSODs without having to port a single line of code!
I haven't seen anyone mention the other cool date this year: October 2, 2001.
In other words: 2001-10-02
Notice it is palindromic. The last palindromic date would have been 1380-08-31, quite some time ago.
Maybe on this date, computers will get confused as to which direction they were going and start running backwards.
Whatever someone wants to make the social evil of the week will be recorded and used against their enemies.
The idea is that when everyone knows what everyone else is doing, the phrase "social evil" takes on a much different meaning.
Examples: sex and drugs. These are things that large percentages of people do on a frequent basis, but few will talk about because of the bizarre social negativity placed on these activities. By having an Open Source Society, you can now see your politicians engaged in dirty sex (ewww) so that if they ever accuse you of being "disturbed" (or a witch, communist, pirate, etc.) you can show the world undeniable proof of that person's hypocrisy.
Even though every person "knows" that Clinton and Bush both did various drugs, there still isn't proof. Proof makes a big difference.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!
Sensationalist journalism at best. Utter crap at worst.
...to bring
information to everybody and make lives easier. But is this the revolution? Does this really
change life for the better, or even change it much at all?
... and when did Napster become the good guy? Napster is just another one of the privacy invading corporatist powers of which you speak, but somehow because they facilitate and promote copyright infringement they are the good guys? Please.
We don't have a paperless world; work isn't easier, or even demonstrably more efficient
Isn't easier? Are you trying to say that typing an html document and posting it on the web isn't easier than printing it on paper and shipping across the country with a fleet of trucks? Do you have any evidence or are you just spewing forth?
YES! Knowledge is the single most freeing "object" in existence. Freedom is good! Revolution - drastic changes in people's lives - cannot happen unless they wish for something better. Knowledge brings hope and desire for change. You don't need permission to be free. You just do it.
the bad guys have won one of the first great wars between corporatism and free information advocates
a new plan for "human-centric computing" that will serve, not frustrate people, and work as well for the non-tech world as for the tech universe
One word: Google.
In case it's not obvious, I have a serious problem with this whole article. Freedom, revolution, power, knowledge - these are not things that are given to you by your politicians. They are not things that corporations can take from you. They are concepts that exist within the realm of the human mind, not government or corporate monoliths. The only time you lose your Freedom is if you let yourself be controlled.
There are a great many people including myself who have been able to obtain great amounts of knowledge in a short period of time through the use of the Internet that would have taken hundreds of years to obtain without the Internet. Because of this knowledge, I live in a safer neighborhood, I eat healthier food, I enjoy more entertaining passtimes, and my overall quality of life is better.
Don't bitch about the failure of the Internet because an article on CNN and some guy in McDonalds told you that life sucks.
The problem with majoring in computer science is that the field changes too quickly. CS classes often revolve around a language or two and then get into a lot of theory that is fairly inapplicable to the real world. Then when you have finished, the only thing you have learned is "computers". If on the other hand you major in something else you enjoy (music, foreign language, business, electrical engineering, etc. ) and use your CS knowledge to help you in that major, you will learn a great deal about how the normal business world uses computers for reason and purpose.
Rarely do good businesses do programming for programming's sake. There is always a reason and a purpose for doing it, and in the end it saves money as unbelievable as that may seem. If you want to do development without purpose, you may want to go into a research field or work at an e-commerce startup.
In the end, it comes down to what you want to do. Just remember that the computer is a tool used to accomplish a goal. Would you rather take a class on "construction" or a class on "hammers". If every last detail of the hammer interests you, go with CS, otherwise pick something else.
If you need more scalability, add another machine for a very low cost. Compare this to the cost of a couple of "fully redundant" netras and you're easily several thousand dollars better off.
We need to get off of this mainframe concept where there is one really big machine that does everything. You can make it fully redundant if you have a hundred grand to spare, but why bother when you can spend a tenth of that amount and have a fully redundant expandable system with two machines instead of one.
<SHAMELESS-SELF-PROMOTION>
My favorite self-adaptive site is definitely Ubersite, but since I created it, I'm also biased ;)
</SHAMELESS-SELF-PROMOTION>
Boy, is Saddam going to be pissed when he finds out they're all Region 1 encoded!
- A patent
- A copyright
- A trademark
That's it. IANAL, but I believe there are some provisions against stealing intellectual property, where "stealing" means breaking into an office and physically taking/copying trade secret material. That is a crime because the "trade secret" was obtained through a criminal act.However, in this country, there is no such law outlawing reverse engineering, not even the DMCA. The DMCA forbids the circumvention of copyright protection other than for interoperability, so whether that circumvention was obtained through reverse engineering or not is irrelevant (which makes me wonder if I could publish my weak protection scheme and still claim that the DMCA applies, but that's another story...).
In fact, if it were legal to reverse engineer, every single "invention" would be illegal. Let's see... birds can fly... I want to build a flying machine... ILLEGAL. Fire good, fire warm, me want fire, me bang rocks... ILLEGAL. I want to cure a disease... unfortunately I cannot analyze the disease because that would be... ILLEGAL.
So, unless you have it patented, consider it public domain once you release a product. Horrors, you may actually have to compete in a free market! Oh dear God, no!
In the perfect world, vague overgeneralized IP laws would apply to everyone except me, and then I would be your god.
I mean, if I'm not protected, why should they be protected?
Since Al Gore invented the Internet, I guess we can all blame him.
The line was installed in a couple weeks and worked great for a few months. Then one day, the line just stopped working. I called Mindspring/Covad and they began to check on the line and were very bad and getting back to me with information. I kept calling and it would always take them a day or two to perform any new tests. Eventually, they just said that they didn't know what the problem was and left me hanging.
Needless to say, I cancelled my line. I was refunded for the month that my service was out and did not have to pay any "cancellation fee" for breaking my contract.
Then I signed on with 21stcentury which was a small cable company (bought out by RCN) that actually offered competition to Ma Bell. For $40 a month, I get a more stable faster dhcp'd connection. The DSL line worked over pppoe and was hell for my LAN. With my current setup, every machine can have its own IP and everything just works without installing any additional software.
I've had the service for a few months now, and it works great. If you are in Chicago and can get service, I would recommend them for internet and cable access. They do also offer local phone service, but a friend of mine that has it has had to wait for a couple months before his line is switched from Ameritech.
It's amazing what happens when there is competition in an industry!
Same goes for audio and video.
Setting some sort of "speed limit" on the end use would be a *very* dangerous precedent to set. Would it then be "illegal" to have a faster connection? Throw someone in prison or take away their "Internet rights" because they were surfing too fast?
Free markets, people! Evolution does work.
Almost, but not quite. There is definitely an "unlimited" supply of bits and bytes, but by no means is there an unlimited supply of talent. Even if the actual music itself is free, most people will never want to go sifting through the millions of songs ever recorded to find ones they like.
This is where the scarcity lies: the critic. People will always pay other people to make some decisions for them. When you go to a store to buy a CD, there is always the rack of CDs that cost $1.99 right next to the rack of the $15 CDs. I know I generally skip by the $1.99 rack and go to the $15 rack. Why? Because the $1.99 rack is usually a bunch of crap. I don't want to listen to crap. Sure, I may listen to a hundred crappy CDs and end up finding one I like, but I would still rather pay someone to tell me what is good. I will always want the choice to listen to whatever I want, but that doesn't mean I want to listen to everything.
People with money will always pay for a higher level of service. Period.
Forget all the legal garbage for a couple minutes and then ask yourself why you don't go out into the woods to pick edible plants for dinner. Why don't you? Because:
- You want stuff that won't kill you (doesn't quite apply to music, but stick with the analogy)
- You want stuff that tastes good (quality music)
- You want stuff that is of high quality (quality encoding)
- You are lazy (duh)
In the end, artists will get paid to write and record songs, but will not be paid for distribution. Critics will get paid to go out and find the best music and tell others about it. Businesses will get paid by selling physical things, live experiences, and connecting consumers to critics and artists.Even if the FBI were going to use this in a responsible way, just the fact that they could use it in such a monstrously irresponsible way gives Carnivore and the FBI too much power.
The same basic argument comes up with gun control. Is it right to take away the people's right to own weapons when police officers can still carry them? In a perfect world, that would be great. Unfortunately, the police are not perfect, and certainly neither is the FBI.
There is no need to give them more power to abuse until they prove they can handle it.