I'm not altogether certain what you are trying to say. The post i am responding to seems to be saying "Universal human rights aren't". However, i am guessing that i am somehow misinterpreting this, because in another thread you say "I personally believe that all humans should have the right to free speech". So, instead of trying to discuss whether free speech should be a universal ideal, i am going to step back from the idea of what is moral for a moment and just talk about what is a good idea.
I will venture to say that a culture in which individuals are discouraged from having individual thoughts and opinions and/or voicing them, and in which if you will not wholly accept the ideals and morals of the greature culture you must die or leave, is a really bad idea. I will say this becuase it encourages blind groupthink, and discourages the breaking of harmful misconceptions.
For an example of this, i will take one of your own examples: Feudal Japan. What happened to feudal japan? Well, stepping aside some envy-of-the-western-world issues that could quite easily be compared to parts of modern islamic culture:
Partially through coersion, partially through indoctrination, they developed a value and ideal system in which the state and the culture and the emperor were important and godlike above all, and it was considered utterly absurd to question the perfection of these things. Blind belief to these things was considered a virtue.
And then what happened was that the emperor, who controlled the state, who controlled the culture, and who happened personally to not be a terribly strong-willed man, came under the influence of a couple of power-hungry generals, who convinced him that japan must expand, for whatever reasons. And they began to play him like a puppet. And the people, because their culture's moral system demanded it of them and they had no access to dissenting voices to provide a counterpoint to their culture's moral system, did whatever they believed their emperor wanted.
And so Japan raised a fanatic army, attempted to conquer just about all of asia, did any number of insane, tyrannical, and/or just plain evil things, and millions of people died.
Treating human rights as negotiable is just plain dangerous. Removing the sanity checks that freedom of expression provides necessarily ends in a Godwins-Law-triggering disaster. This is because a society that cannot question itself has no way of stopping itself when it gets out of control.
Does this make sense to you?
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Like i said, i am not quite sure what you are trying to say here, or for that matter why whatever it is you're saying got modded up. Consider this: you spend most of your post making the point that you do not believe it moral for one culture to attempt to superimpose their value system on another.
Specifically, you are stating that slashdotters do not have the right to be making demands as to how that the Russian, Islamic and "feudal japanese" treat their citizens.
Your sole examples of things that the slashdotters et al are demanding the foreign powers stop, but you think the foreign powers should be allowed to continue, are things in which the foreign powers are imposing a value system on others.
So which is it? Is it permissible to force another to accept your value system, or not?
What is it that makes you think it is alright for an islamic nation to prevent a radical feminist lesbian from publishing a book that clashes with their moral ideals, but it is not alright for the united states to prevent said islamic nation from preventing said book? What is it that makes it okay for cultures to impose on individuals, but not okay for culures to impose on other cultures? This doesn't make sense.
I do not demand that the moral systems of others will be the same as mine before i will respect them. However, i do demand of others, before i will give them my respect, that their moral systems be consistent. You have failed to meet this criteria.
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Two more points.
It is not objectively wrong to prevent free speech when the person being "oppressed" can freely leave their oppressors with no consiquence (as exists in Japan, though not in most Islamic states).
I don't agree with this, but even if i did, the current subject of discussion is Russia. Russia is very large. It is not particularly easy to leave Russia. Ask the province of Chechnia, sometime, about the time they've had in attempting to leave Russia (That war is still going on , by the way)
Re: your comment on sept. 11: I would say that killing several thousand mostly innocent civilians unrelated to nearly anything because you consider certain actions of their culture immoral, just to hurt that culture's economy, is objectively wrong no matter whatthe context. Are you trying to disagree with this? Or am i just confused? Death is sometimes unavoidable for the greater good. This is not the case with september 11; if the terrorists had any goals other than causing hurt, there were many far more effective ways of solving those goals. There are lots and lots of ways to effect positive change in america. Crashing airplanes into public buildings is not one of them. "An eye for an eye" is not a universal ideal either, and it is a road that leads nowhere worthwhile.
There is no such thing as "balance" when it comes to freedom of expression.
Either you have it or you don't.
"Slippery slope" arguments are not always valid. However, in this case, the slope isn't just slippery; it's vertical.
Expression is one huge gray area; for any two given pieces of expression which you give me, i can give you a solid chain of "Well, but that's really identical to this, isn't it? Which is really identical to this, isn't it?" and even if no one would say that the endpoints are similar, each two links in that chain woul dbe philosophically identical.
The only things clearly defined enough to be valid exceptions to free speech are copyright protection, for specific phrasings and expressings of an idea, and slander, for presenting an idea as true when it is not. And note that both of these two things deal only with the dressings of the idea being expressed, and not with the desired expression itself. Laws which suppress "dangerous" speech, on the other hand, repress ideas at the core level, however they are expressed.
Beyond the two caveats above, you cannot balance, negotiate, make exceptions to, or in any way abrogate free speech rights and have them still be there. This isn't extremism. This is just saying, basic human rights are an all or nothing committment.
(While i'm on the subject, while this isn't quite relevant to net censorship in russia, i might as well note that most human rights act in exactly the same way-- that they are gray areas so huge that you have to look at them in terms of black and white while legislating. For example, Due process of law. Due process of law is merely a convention that the government, as the group of people with guns, agrees to follow. The people agree "okay, we will let you all have guns instead of taking the law into our own hands if you use this privilidge responsibly." If the government does not treat this convention as sacred, the people's rights evaporate. If you are in a situation where the government is not guaranteed to behave in a manner consistent with its constitutional basis, the freedoms that constitutional basis guarantees are meaningless.)
Apple has had good, working handwriting recognition technology ever since the Newton 130 or 2000 or so in 1996. (Yes, the first newtons had laughable handwriting recognition at first. But by the time that the newton was at the end of its life cycle, it was actually a good, worthwhile, usable product, one that technology is only just now catching up with. People don't remember that the year Windows 95 came out, NewtonOS v2.0 won the "Best New Operating System" award at comdex.. the problem was that Apple released the Newton prematurely, and then hyped it endlessly. Then a few years later, in *1996*, when the thing was actually FIXED, they did absolutely nothing to promote it. So the general public, unless they read "MacWorld" cover to cover, didn't know the Newton then worked-- they just remembered the beginning of the Newton's cycle, when Apple released it in a blitz of hype, and every journalist in the world picked it up, tried it out, and reported, hey, guess what, this thing doesn't WORK.)
Apple will be putting handwriting recognition back into the OS with mac os 10.2. But it is too late-- by the time that 10.2 is released, MS will have their handwriting-recognition-enabled WinXP Tablet Edition *preinstalled on tablet PCs being shipped in stores*. Before 10.2 is released, WinXP Tablet Beta will be in the hands of consumers. Although Apple has had a great handwriting recognition tech for years, MS will actually be releasing the tech first-- and when they do, it will be in a much cooler form, namely tablet laptops. Something apple currently has no analogue for at all. (iWalk? What's that? Is that like the segway?)
Just think what apple could have done: they didn't have the funds or resources to continue developing the Newton in 1997. However, they could have sold/licensed some of that technology to Wacom, and worked with them on getting some kind of simple, early version of this Cintiq thing (which, by the way, is absolutely the coolest tech toy i've seen in ages) created-- then put the newton handwriting recognition stuff into the Mac OS. They would have had an advantage for *quite* awhile in that you would have something absolutely unique for the Mac OS-- Wacom would surely release windows drivers for their tablet/monitor, but 1) it would take a really long time for MS to play catch-up and get some kind of workable handwriting recognition feature, not counting Graffiti (handwriting recognition not being a useful feature, but definitely an eye-catching one to consumers), and 2) this was back when the Mac OS had multiple monitor support, and Windows didn't to speak of. (Mac OS has had seamless multiple monitor support for a long time; Windows didn't in any functional form until Windows 98, and even for awhile after that, it was buggy).
Think about all that could have done for Apple-- even though the monitor might have been prohibhitively hyperexpensive outside of its designated "niche market", given the LCD tech of the day, Apple could have been publicly seen as doing something truly revolutionary and new at a time they were troubled. Instead, Apple just gave off the impression that year of falling apart at the seams. An image problem which of course didn't help sales. Instead, though, MS is going to be the one to first take advantage of this technology, and Apple will be playing catch-up in a field they pioneered.
Typical-- the entire computing world, including apple, is just now catching up with where Apple was six years ago. Once again, Apple is far ahead of Microsoft in terms of getting something working & usable, and far, far behind microsoft in terms of actually getting their technology into the hands of consumers. I'm tired of this being the way the computing world works.
Now i can't wait to see what happens when the Windows world discovers the "voice command" useless gimmick.
More editorial bullshit. What if this was about Chinese space technology? Would we see the same statement with a link to a negative Clinton story?
Probably not, because Slashdot is generally more about tech stuff than general political stuff. Also, the slashdot community seems to tend to think that anyone getting into space is cool. However, such a statement/link combo would definitely be VALID COMMENTARY if 1) it were attached to an article about something China was doing that they shouldn't be doing and 2) Either Bill Clinton or Al Gore were currently president or likely to be president anytime in the very immediate future. As the latter is not the case, a link to a negative clinton story probably would not make sense. Anyway, it probably would not OCCUR to a slashdot poster (though it may be more likely such a thing would happen on kuro5hin) to make such a connection on a China story, but it might, there's no reason why it wouldn't, and i do not think anyone would mind.
George W. Bush is not exactly anti-china, and seems to be doing the same lets-ignore-human-rights-abuses-and-trade-with-chi na thing as everyone else since richard nixon. Speaking of which, that's an interesting point: the opening of relations with Communist China was begun by Nixon and expanded by Raegan, which between the two of them are probably the most conservative presidents of the last 50 years. There are many things to fault Clinton for, but his soft stance on China is not particularly one of them, as he was not much worse about this than previous/current presidents. (Although i will say, if Gore participates in the 2004 elections, you may critisize him for his support of China all that you like.)
The Bush Administration is very very open about their pro-business, anti-antitrust-enforcement stance. As Bush has many personal contacts in the business world, it is-- while cynical-- not altogether unreasonable to suggest this philosophy stems less from knowledge of economics and theories of promoting public good than it does from how Bush and Bush's friends would benefit from the application of this philosophy. Moreover, you absolutely cannot deny this: while Clinton was in office, a full-blown effort to have Microsoft taken down as a monopoly was going on. During the 2000 political elections, Microsoft donated significantly more money and lobbying effort to Bush than Gore. (Also, one can make a significant case that Ashcroft is too biased to be allowed near the Microsoft case.) Once Bush was in office, this effort virtually ceased, and the people who were running the antitrust suit were removed and replaced with people whose goal at this point seems to let off Microsoft with the most minimal punishing possible. Before Bush entered office, the antitrust suit was characterized by the DOJ and the computing industry on one side fighting to have competition returned to the industry, and Microsoft on the other fighting to have things stay as they are; now it is characterized by the computing industry on one side fighting to have competition returned to the industry, and the DOJ and Microsoft on the other side fighting to have things stay as they are. Thus, i would say it is valid commentary that, whether the "bought" implications are valid, to say that GWB can be made to let antitrust violators off the hook.
The portion you quoted was not meant to advocate throwing out patent law. It was meant to advocate changing the unjust portion of patent law. I originally meant for the words "the patent law" to refer to the single law which was inspiring people to circumvent it technologically (for example, the law allowing patenting of genes). It was not meant to refer to all patent laws as a singular entity ("the law"). I see now, however, that that sentence was written in an unclear manner. Sorry. My bad.
There are lots of patent laws. Some of them are unjust. Some of them are beneficial. Some of them are both, and some of these could be rewritten to become just without removing their public benefit.
I don't see how you're making any kind of point here. Just because something has caused at least one good thing to happen as a side-effect doesn't mean it is overall a good thing, and it CERTAINLY doesn't mean that there is no room for improvement.
OK.. when science is having to develop new methods which have absolutely no practical value other than to dodge patent laws, you know the patent law is completely unjust. Patent as a concept is granted to promote science and facilitate its advancement. When science is instead treating the law as an obstacle and exerting effort on finding ways to go around it-- that is to say, when for task A which has been patented it is easier to find a way to circumvent the patent law than it is to design an alternate, non-patent-covered version of task A-- then that patent law is not serving its purpose, is being a detriment to science, and is probably unconstitutional.
One of the neatest features of patent law is that it encourages lots of experimentation; if you need to do something, and there is a patented way to do this thing, and you can't afford to license the patent or the patent owner refuses to license it, this isn't that much of a problem; you just find an alternate way to do the thing, enlightened by your knowledge of how the current patent holders do it, and then patent your version. Today's overly broad patents prevent this; rather than creating cycles where technologies in a given industry iteratively improve as each company innovates new things and patents them (and the other companies look at the public details of the patent filing and try to find better ways of doing the same innovation) today's patents create dead ends; places where technology may no longer advance except with the permission of a certain company.
Because the main problem with the unjust patents of today-- software patents, business model patents, gene patents-- is that they cover a goal, not a methodology. Indeed, these patents are not just overly broad, they miss the point entirely; they cover concepts, while patent law was only ever intended to cover implementations of concepts.
On the contrary, in my opinion, AudioGalaxy was the absolute best such service for the mac because AG didn't support it. AG was shit for windows becuase of the cruddy client, but for the mac it was great because you just used one of the non-supported third-party clients, all of which were excellent.
This brings up my question, though: third party clients. Is there any reason the extant 3rdparty clients out there could not just be set to, instead of talking to the now-crippled audiogalaxy server, talk to some independent audiogalaxy workalike? How difficult would it be to create an open-source implementation of an AudioGalaxy server, given we already have many open-source third-party implementations of clients? OpenNAP meets OpenAG? Cut loose, the way GiFT has cut loose from kazaa.
I am just curious.
In the meantime, may i assume it would maybe be possible to take the idea behind audiogalaxy (everyone publicly queues stuff they'd like to download someday, and transactions are negotiated automatically as bandwidth becomes available on all sides) and someday recreate it as a wholly-decentralized gnutella-style network? Or do you need that central authority doing the negotiations for you to keep everything from falling apart? I would have to think about the idea some more. You could maybe do it. If you tried, how would the web page frontend thing be handled? Would we just have to throw that idea out?
I always thought that was the most disappointing thing about AG-- their "featured artists" were pretty good compared to (say) napster's, but i always thought it would be really neat if AG fufilled its potential as a site with a message board for every song in existence. This would be a godsend for those of us who like to collect really obscure music, especially bootlegs and such-- it would be convenient if, upon running across a track labelled (say) "Nine Inch Nails - eraser (Utter Desolation Remix -- Unreleased)" i could type that into a website, and even if i couldn't download the mp3 from there i could see some discussion and find out "this is fake" or "this is from X bootlegs & rarities compilation" or "this is a b-side from the japanese single of Y, only they renamed it". Allmusic.com meets everything2.com, or something:) Could a community-run version of such a website somehow tie into a decentralized community-run version of the AudioGalaxy idea? How would the client and the website communicate? A browser plugin, maybe? It would have to be something sufficiently disconnected to stave off the Out of Court Settlement Smackdown.. perhaps each webpage on the website could have an ID number / checksum, and you'd just cut&paste that ID number into your OpenGalaxy Client? Perhaps the "download this song" thingy could be inserted via some kind of variation on thirdvoice, and the people who run the website could just insist, honestly officer, we can't help it if the mp3 pirate people choose to use our database as a base for checksumming and such. We just run a message board. We aren't connected to those people. These aren't the bots you're looking for.
Ah well, idle wondering. In the meanwhile, i guess now i gotta go hit AudioGalaxy's site to find out how to inform them i give them permission to redistribute the music i own the rights to.. (Not that anyone *wants* to listen to my music.. just that it's the principle of the thing:) )
Why do you think this will be a huge thing for x-box sales? Just because the xbox is a PC doesn't mean it's the only thing that could do that. It would be absolutely no harder to create a divx player for playstation, or dreamcast, or just about anything else. OK, so no one bothered. Someone could, and probably will if it turns out there's a demand for this kind of thing. Keep in mind, of course, that the nonexistence of a playstation etc version of this might mean that no one thought it was worth the bother, not that no one could or that Sony stopped them.
I mean-- OK. Let me start over. First off, this is a nifty hack, and second off i'm glad people are making steps toward unlocking the stupid "copy protection" controls that keep any really independent development from happening on the xbox.
But i just don't see this being something revolutionary. I know people for whom this would be useful, and i know people who would use it. But think: it can be assumed anyone with the ability to burn cds also has the ability to play divxes on their computer. So, lets look at their options:
Buy an inexpensive computer->tv tuner/converter cable thingy from Radio Shack that would allow you to use a tv as the monitor for your computer. Watch divxes on your tv using whatever program it is that runs divxes fullscreen now.
Buy a several-hundred-dollar Xbox, go through a complicated, possibly expensive transaction in which your xbox is modded and your warranty is broken. Hook that up to your tv. Then, every time you want to watch a divx, you have to burn it to a CD-- which costs money-- and transfer it to your xbox.
I don't think so. This will probably raise publicity and possibly interest by people in the xbox (though i can't imagine it would be much), and this will probably be something really neat for people who own xboxes already. But i can't realistically imagine this becoming something people would buy an xbox for.
That being said, i think this is the funniest line i've ever seen on zdnet:
The developer, who identified himself only by his hacker name, "d7o3g4q," said in an email..
Whatever. Wake me up when they get linux running on it.
P.S. : I hate divx. I wish MPEG4 didn't have these stupid licensing terms. Grr.
At the private high school i previously attended, they had something kind of like this. Every friday afternoon after school, the lab administrator would stay a few hours late and allow the "game club" to meet. "Game club" basically consisted of, they set up a special NT user named "games" that could only log in to the school network between 3 and 8 PM on a friday and that had special permissions to run nonstandard programs. The kids would bring in games and leave disk images of the CDROMs on the games account's network drives.
So, when game club started, all the kids that liked computer games would come in to the computer lab, install the game they decided to play that day off the network drive, have a little LAN party for a few hours on the school's really very fast computers, then delete the game off the hard drive and go home. It was fun. (They usually played Counterstrike.)
Why did they do this?
Because before the creation of games club, they had a real problem with kids coming in to rooms with school computers that had been left unattended, or the terminals in the corner of the library, and playing computer games. So the lab admin guy decided to implement a no-computer-games rule, and set up the game club as a safe-zone time the kids could just cut loose and play whatever they wanted.
The trick was, his condition was that he would only run game club if everyone agreed to follow the no-computer-games rule the rest of the time. Game club was the kids' reward/bribe for ensuring compliance.
This turned out to work beautifully. The lab admin guy couldn't be everywhere at once and police every computer, but now suddenly he had the game club-- which consisted of the school's most computer-saavy users-- doing the policing for him. If some new kid came in and started playing games, the other kids would notice and make him stop, because they were afraid of losing game club.
Unfortuantely, the year after i left, the lab administrator guy was moved to the local middle school and replaced with some new guy. The new guy didn't like the idea of game club, and ended it. I am told that in the time since then, it has become invariably true that if you go into the non-monitored computer lab during lunch, there WILL be kids playing networked computer games..:)
You know, I'm from Texas. And if i remember right, the REASON all of this oil just laying around Texas isn't being mined is because it isn't cost-effective to do so.
If i remember right, all those countries in the middle east can pump oil out of the ground so much cheaper than the Texans can, that huge as the Texas oil market is, by and large the *bulk* of the Texan oil supplies just aren't worth the bother of tapping unless for some reason the global price of oil rises so high that it makes pumping oil out of Texas profitable. If i remember right, this is why whenever oil prices rise, while the rest of the economy starts suffering from the suddenly increased cost of producing just about anything, the Texas economy starts doing really well. If i remember right, this is why Beaumont just hasn't been the same since the 70s arab oil embargo ended.
Maybe Iceland is doing this less for environmental reasons than that they don't want to send money to texas? Maybe they don't like trade deficits, and they want to take all that money that was being sent to import coal and oil and such and make it stay within their relatively small economy? Maybe they like the idea of having an economy that isn't tied to the (extremely fragile) political situation in the Middle East at a base level, because it is independent of the fuel supply the countries in the Middle East provide?
"We have to get off fossil fuels before there aren't anymore!", well, i don't know, but that's a bit alarmist and is maybe not reasonable. But despite this, "We have to get off fossil fuels before they become so scarce and expensive that the oil companies are having to tap their wells in places like Texas again" makes quite a bit more sense, at least to me.
Mm.. i partially agree and partially disagree. [NOTE: SMALL SPOILERS AHEAD]
The cloning facility.. while it did stylistically look a bit like the Matrix, this wasn't really that avoidable. The way the later books described "cloning cylenders" kind of would make it difficult to do anything that didn't kind of look matrix-ish. And you simply couldn't have come up with a realistic plot for episode 2 that didn't introduce clones being grown in a lab. But then again, the books implied that the clones were grown in the cylenders up until the point of being adults, and then some kind of memory transfer took place-- which would have meant that the image of exclusively fetuses in the clone-growing room was maybe taken from the Matrix. But perhaps this was a practice that didn't arise until the later years of the close wars; or perhaps i misread the books. I'm not sure.
As for "the gladiatorial style execution".. Well, to be honest, you know what that reminded me of? Think about it.. desert planet, jedi and friends are chained up and about to be executed by being eaten by a huge monster in a pit while hundreds of locals watch.. personally, this reminds me more of the beginning of The Return of the Jedi than anything. As such, maybe this was just one of the stylistic nods to the later Star Wars movies-- the tracking device on fett's ship, the image of obi-wan's ship clinging to the side of an asteroid while fett wanders off oblivious, Anakin's hand trapped under a plate of metal while pieces of a battle droid are slapped in place around him-- that pervaded the movie. But then again, all of the visual references that i noticed to specific events in later movies (I mean, as opposed to stormtrooper armor and such) referred to The Empire Strikes Back, and not either of the other two in the trilogy, so maybe this isn't good analisis.
As for the car chase scene.. yeah, i have to admit this was a little bit sketchy, if only for the moments where we get to see anakin plunge down the controls and swerve vertically through multiple lanes of traffic. That one moment, i'm pretty sure everyone in the theatre was thinking of The Fifth Element. And christopher lee, while he did a really great job, probably should not have been given that role in the interest of avoiding echoing LoTR. (You could have joined me, Obi-Wan.. but instead, you have chosen the way of.. PAIN!!!)
I don't know enough about martial arts to comment on the fight scenes:)
Hm. I think this is a no-contest just because of the lightsaber. I mean, come on-- the man has a four foot rod of plasma that can cut through nearly anything and he can use it to deflect stuff. Anything who gets within three feet of a jedi is dead unless they have a lightsaber as well, or they can bind the jedi's hands. You have to fight Jedi with ranged weapons if they have their lightsabers on them. Period. And spider-man doesn't have any ranged weapons. (OK, the webfluid, but that doesn't kill and can be removed.) In order for this to be an even remotely fair fight, you would have to take away the lightsaber. Do that, and you'd have something interesting.
(This brings up the question, though: Could a lightsaber deflect bullets? Like, i mean, bullets, from a normal earthling gun. Would the bullets be absorbed in the plasma field, or would they just shoot out the other side transformed into slightly smaller drops of boiling lead?
At the least, when you think about it, a human automatic machine gun would be probably the best weapon you could attack a jedi with.. lots of tiny, hard to deflect, harder to sense projectiles.)
And Enron has nothing to do with good triumphing over evil. Enron has to do with entropy. Or, at the least, with evil defeating itself and collapsing.
Exactly.. this is a pretty big deal. Between the whole "look, a server OS that a half-idiot can configure with reasonable licensing policies" thing and the tools that seem to provide remote administration done right (apple remote desktop and this crazy looking manager thing, apple seems to have suddenly gotten a bunch of stuff right that no one ever quite has before.
I can only just hope and pray with all my might that apple doesn't let this opportunity slipt hrough their fingers. I mean, this isn't the most impressive box i've ever seen, esp. compared to some high-end UNIX setups, and traditional Unices probably still are more reliable and powerful for some stuff, but the tradeoffs you have to go through with this XServe are certainly no more unreasonable than the ones that early or even sometimes current versions of Windows NT make you go through. If Apple keeps developing this, and they *market* it, and they actually push this in those markets where this is actually something killer (all the ease of Windows NT without the bullshit, the constant reboots, the downtime, the requirements to buy like four redundant servers to make anything work, or the need foran MSCE).. this could definitely turn into a real, credible threat to windows XP.
And if this gets developed, it would be a very good thing for linux and UNIX in general, because anywhere that picks up this thing is going to be naturally gravitated toward J2EE and UNIX-based SQL software.. and after awhile, they'll begin to realize linux is a drop-in replacement in some places for this. Any mindshare that this Xserve thing picks up translates to instant mindshare for everything UNIX.. becuase that's just one more shop that has expertise in Apache, Perl, etc, instead of expertise in IIS, ASP, etc...
Please, please, apple, don't fuck this one up. If they play your cards right, they could take over the world with this one. This could be the first step to making Macs seem usable or credible in a university/business environment.. if they can get a serious foothold with this.. i don't even know.
This makes me incredibly, incredibly happy. It's very exciting. It's just too bad apple will probably not market it correctly and we'll wind up with something that just slips through the cracks and never catches on, another product that was technically neat but no one used. Now i just want to know how long it will take LinuxPPC to put together a bootable package for the XServe..
Here's a much better idea. Go out and buy one of these CDs. Take it back into the music store. Try to return it. While it's still in the macintosh.
I mean, specifically, what i really, really want to do is this: go down to Wherehouse music tomorrow and buy the Celene Dion CD, come back home, put the CD in my quicksilver g4 and fubar it.. then go back to Wherehouse carrying the g4, and whine and panic that their cd broke my computer.. and then whomp the empty cd case and the fubared g4 on their customer service counter and demand that they accept the return. And that they get their merchandise out of my computer.
Wouldn't it be great to see the looks on their faces???:)
Then I could do it at Sam Goody the next day.
Of course, *i* know that it's easy to solve, and that all you have to do is start up the macintosh with the mouse button held down, and it will eject the cd and you can get on with their life. And i *could* just do that for them. But hey, they broke it. Let them fix it:)
There will be thousands of clueless newbies who will buy that cd and break their computers with it, and *THEY* will be totally unable to do anything about it (since Apple won't provide phone support AT ALL unless you pay them lots of money, and so the only way to find out about the magic mouse button eject thing is to read the document on Apple's website that explains what to do.. and *how do you read Apple's website if your Macintosh is broken*?).. so.
If Wherehouse music is going to be selling this CD to people whose computers will break as a result, and Wherehouse music isn't going to be there to help explain to them how to restore their imacs to working order.. why should i explain to Wherehouse music how to restore my mac to working order when it's sitting on their counter in front of an underpaid clerk while i hold up the line?? ^_^ I have this vision of this happening all over the country, hundreds of secretly-clued-in mac owners sabotaging their machines and then going back to make music stores actually deal with the fallout of what they've done, instead of making the consumer deal with the fallout.. but of course that won't happen. Of course i won't even get around to doing it myself, because i don't get around to finishing things often and i fucking hate Celene Dion. But it's fun to think about:)
Anyway, for the record, it isn't that your "firmware" gets messed up like the Slashdot blurb says.. I know, because i've had this exact problem happen to me. Not with a copy-protected CD-- i apparently managed to replicate the macintosh-fubaring effects of the Cactus technology totally independently, in my dorm room, by getting my copy of "Confield" (Autechre's newest album, buy it today! ^_^) all scratched up and then spilling stuff on it. I got the same effect the apple article describes, and basically what happens is this: there's a flaw in the current macintosh CD-ROM drives where if you put in a sufficiently damaged CD, the computer gets so confused that upon trying to read the CD, it crashes. Unfortunately, with the newer macintoshes there's no way to eject the CD except by software unless you disassemble the machine.. and this is a problem because in the Macintosh boot sequence, the first thing the Macintosh does is read some data off the CD-ROM drive to see if the CD-ROM is bootable... which, with one of the copy-protected CDs, of course causes the Mac to crash again. The cycle can be broken by doing what this post says.. in my case, the mouse-button-at-startup thing worked. But only after I walked to a school computer lab and hounded people on IRC until i found someone who knew how to make a macintosh g4 eject the CD on startup..:P
Something that has been brought up a couple times in other threads, and that i am kind of curious about:
The CARP is something the RIAA is imposing, correct? Does this or does this not mean that if an internet radio station were certain to only play music by non-RIAA artists, it could stay in business? It would not be terribly easy to find material for a net radio station that only played independent music, but it would be possible, i think, and at the least i'd listen to it. But am i just confused? Would that be feasible from a royalties standpoint? What exactly is the royalties relationship between independent record labels and internet radio, before or after CARP?
One more small question: the page on CARP on your site says that non-US broadcasters would not be subject to the CARP fees. How would this work out? Would this just mean that anyone in Canada would be able to netcast worldwide without having to pay any fees other than the ones imposed by their government? Or would stations outside the U.S. be barred from netcasting to U.S. citizens? If stations outside the U.S. are allowed to run free, what would the regulations say about a server in the U.S. that is just repeating what is being broadcast by an internet streaming radio station located outside the U.S.-- so that the lag created by the internet links that go across the atlantic ocean are minimized. Could a repeater of this sort be classified as just another router, or would the repeater be subject to the CARP payments?
Thanks for clarifying things.. just curious. Hopefully, the LoC will see through this blatant attempt by the RIAA to silence internet radio and none of the above questions will ever become an issue. I wish you luck..
It is a good general view of something that happens every day, all over. It is a good forensic analysis of what can happen from just *one instance* of submitting an e-mail address to a single sweepstakes site.
It may not have helped most of the people on slashdot right now to have read this, but i think this is a good, well-written article to give to someone who doesn't read slashdot, doesn't know any sysadmins, doesn't have to deal with spam, doesn't incessantly read web message board posts by sysadmins who have to deal with spam, and doesn't know the extent to which this stuff goes on.
More importantly, it is a good article to show businesses who are considering using spam to advertise.
If you read all the way through the nadine chronicles (a good part of the middle could probably stand to have a "you can just skip this part" disclaimer, really..), the end is actually targeted directly at businesses considering advertising with spam, telling them why they should not and why their money will most likely be wasted if they give it to a bulk-email-advertising firm.
Just because you and i know (or think we know) everything there is to know about spam doesn't mean that everyone in the entire world does. And this is one of these issues where the people who are most important to reach are the ones who are currently uninformed..
Oh God.. Wow. This just works way, way too well. I mean, like, you can keep going with it...
-----
VINCENT: You'll dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Open Source software is?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different.
JULES: Examples?
VINCENT: Well, in KDE, you can embed a web browser in your file manager. And I don't mean that you're using the web browser for your file manager like in Win98 either. They give you a plug-in browser, like you can install or remove any browser you like anytime you want, like in Opendoc. And in GNOME, you can embed like Mozilla or drawing apps or whatever into anything. Also, you know what they call their image editing program?
JULES: They don't call it Photoshop?
VINCENT: No, they use UNIX there, they wouldn't know who the fuck Adobe is.
JULES: What do they call it?
VINCENT: The "GIMP".
JULES:(repeating, grinning softly) The "GIMP". What do they call their word processor?
VINCENT: Well, the word processor is still Office, but they call it "OpenOffice".
JULES: What do they call their IDE?
VINCENT: I dunno, I didn't code anything. But you know what they use in Open Source software to configure their webservers instead of preferences dialogs?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: Text files.
JULES: Goddamn!
VINCENT: I seen 'em do it. And I don't mean a couple of extra options, they fuckin' do everything with that shit. Like, they drown you in it. Anything you wanna change about the way the webserver looks, you have to open up this big-ass file named "httpd.conf" and search through the file for the place where they explain what words to put where if you want it to act a certain way.
JULES: Uuccch!
(Cut to shot from inside the G4 tower case as Vincent and Jules open up from the side panel, reach in, and pull out two.45 automatics laying near the back, loading and cocking them.)
JULES: We should have shotguns for this kind of deal.
-----
OK.. obvious, not funny/relevant.. I'm sorry.. I'm sorry!!! I just couldn't resist..!! Please don't hurt me. ^_^
Except that the first time that they actually prosecuted someone for copying stuff, they'd have to reveal to the court the element of the copy-protection system that they used to trap the perpetrator.
How do you expect this to work?
RIAA: Your honor, through our secret fifth method of hiding a serial number in an mp3, we have positively identified this man as the person who illegally leaked copies of our copyrighted material to 10,000 people over the internet!
Judge: How do you know he was the original sorce of those 10,000 copies?
RIAA: We can't tell you that. It's a secret.
Judge: Oh, okay.::slams gavel:: $200 fine!
Defendant: Wait, don't i get to contest this or anything?
Judge: No.. i trust them.
America's legal system has gone a bit downhill, but still i somehow just can't see that happening.
And even if no one but the judge was allowed to see the evidence of how they caught the defendant, every judge who is presented with this evidence is just one more person who knows The Horrible Secret of the Fifth RIAA Serial Number Hiding Method. Eventually, someone is going to quietly leak any and all secret methods the RIAA has from the bench to the press.
There is absolutely no reason Hollywood couldn't attach a serial number to every digital movie or braodcast sold and downloaded on the web.
The last i checked, every attempt thus far at "digital watermarking" technology has been a miserable failure. Remember the whole bit with Prof. Felton awhile back?
Serial numbers of this sort are a nice idea for a first step, but it is a really bad idea to think of this as a placenta. Basically: you can't trust it to work. Do the serial number thing, and people will just learn before they share stuff on grokster they need to run it through their DRM-cleaner program. Or they'll just not pirate things bought online, and only pirate stuff they ripped from CDs. (and if you try to use watermarking to embed the tag information into the signal on the CD, then you have to come up with a form of watermarking which is A) non-degrading-of-quality and B) cannot be effortlessly removed by a perl script written by some anarchists in norway. chances are good that a watermarking system like this is not even possible.)
( people i know were downloading VCDs of "the Matrix" while it was still in theatres. how will serial numbers on digitally downloaded material stop people from sneaking camcorders into theatres? )
So while a minimally invasive serial-tagging technology would be easy to implement, it is not the solution. It's just a way to amke people think twice before uploading stuff they bought to strangers.
An ID system also brings up the issue of the possible effects on the first sale doctrine. What if i sell my digital rights to the new Kool Keith album to a friend, who sells it to another friend, who sells it to a used cd store, who sells it to some guy who uploads said album to napster with *MY* serial number (since i was the original purchaser of the album) watermarked all inside it. How would "innocent until proven guilty" be maintained there? Would saying "um, i sold the album to someone and deleted it, i don't know what happened after that" hold in Internet Traffic Court?
There are only two solutions to the above problem that i see. The first is to have some massive central "rights management" server which tracks each time that someone sells a digital copyrighted work to someone else so that when it shows up all over FastTrack they'll go after the most recent person to legally own that copy of the album (and not the original purchaser). The second is to create a special class of digital downloaded copyrighted work where you recieve limited rights to it (the whole software 'lease but not sell' model) and do not have the right to resell.
The first solution here is unacceptable because the single-server model is rediculously suceptable to hacking attacks, system failures and willfull mismanagement/malfunctions engineered by an RIAA that doesn't want you to resell things; it is also COMPLETELY unacceptable based on the damage to personal privacy and such it does (you must notify the RIAA every time you sell someone a used CD??).
The second solution here is unacceptable because, while it sounds like a nice idea in theory (though it may not be constitutional), if the record companies were given this new ability they WOULD abuse it-- that is, this would be meant to be just a "special case" for effortless-to-copy downloaded mp3s, but you can bet whatever you like that it would suddenly become IMPOSSIBLE to buy a major-label CD (hey, it's digital) under the old licensing system where you had your constitutional right of first sale/resale and all. Throwing out the first sale doctrine is one of the RIAA's wet dreams; given the tiniest loophole to do it with, they would.
I don't think the whole serial-number-tracking thing is viable.
This is why computers, or at least all of apple's computers that i've ever seen, have, in the area of the machine with all the ports, a bar- a bar designed to fit a padlock.. It's so you can chain computers to the desk if you need to.. that should be all the security you need.
Making the thing harder to move may make it harder to steal, yes, but it also makes it harder to move. MUCH harder to move. And the education market is probably the one place where it's most likely that machines will be moved around a lot in a *legitimate* fashion.. (as a college student who moves his G4 around *constantly*, i can vouch for this.) especially for an all-in-one design machine. The absense of a handle *will* cause minorly major problems for a lot of people. I don't know what apple was thinking.
It's possible they maybe thought, well, it's a 17-inch machine and it's big, it doesn't need a handle since you can't carry it with one hand.. but still, it makes a HUGE difference if while carrying it you can just kind of shift all the weight to one hand for a moment while you use the other to open a door. This thing is so big and curvy, i don't see how you could keep it in your arms except by cradling it to your chest constantly..
(For the record, this *is* the FIRST non-laptop machine apple has released since the original imac to come without a handle. Even the G4 Cube, which didn't really need one since it was a 10-inch cube, the little thingy at the bottom where you put in the wires had a place where you could wiggle your fingers in and grasp it quite handily..)
Actually, nobody's seen the bottom of the eMac yet-- it's quite unlikely, but maybe there's a handle there, or maybe the place where you install the monitor-swivel thing has handle-like features? Eh, probably not.
(I still like the old trick where someone took a Power Macintosh 7500, took out all the parts, and stuck them in a hollowed out apple//gs case.. just so that people would wander in his house, see him turn on the//gs, and go, hey, wait a minute.. unfortunately, i have lost the link. blah.)
ANyway, though: what i would be very interested to see is this: There was a product available for the very early macintoshes-- the classic nine-inch one-piece ones that the current discussion is about-- that looked WIERD but was really just about the ultimate case mod.
The advantage to this was, the product had been designed in such a way that between the chinmey and the way it affected the air circulation inside the case, once the chimney was installed you no longer needed a fan. At all. So you'd remove the fan and get a literally totally silently-running macintosh.
So, basically, since we are talking about putting a PC inside of a classic macintosh, my question is this:
Were you to somehow locate one of the classic macintoshes with the antique macchimney thing, would it be possible to use safely it with modern pc technology, or is that darn pentium IV just too darn blazing hot?
What about with the slightly cooler-running modern mac hardware? What about a laptop?
If not the macchimney, is such convection-current-cooling technology still possible?
Ummm... hm. Some random thoughts.
on
Web Services
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This whole thing has me just kind of lost.
The mess of SOAP and RDDI and GESCOM and all these vaguely XML-related, something-to-do-with-port-80 acronyms don't leave me all that impressed; near as i can gather, they're nothing but platforms for people to build platforms on top of, and they won't be of much use until someone takes the foundation of tangled acronyms and builds a common client app that lets you actually use all of these things. I don't take this all this seriously, because knowing the computer industry, i'm pretty sure that by the time "web services" becomes actual services you can use using programs you can download, these services will be using a specific, jury-rigged enough implementation of "web services technology" that you'll be unable to use a given service except with their specific client, and there will be a huge incompatibility rift between MS-based and non-MS-based web services, and basically all of the nice, compatibility-engineering abstractions that the W3C is trying to put together now will be thrown out the window just because the current "web services" standards are so rediculously complicated that no one will be able to come up with an implementation of those standards that really *uses* the full potential of the protocols.
The thing is, though, i really don't care to understand "web services". I understand the following, and i really think it's all i need to know:
I like XML-RPC, because it gives me a really neat, simple way to do simple message passing between programs over the internet, without any more overhead than is absolutely necessary, it's cross-platform and cross-language, it isn't awkward to use in any of the programming languages i've used it in.
XSLT looks really really awesome becuase it's useful and relatively simple, and i really hope we start seeing some tools that can automatically generate some of the XSLT for you, since like all XML tech it's just really verbose.
J2EE looks *interesting*, and all i wish was that it could be interfaced more easily with other languages. I love Jython, but i don't know if i can embrace Java completely until it's possible to let java communicate with arbitrary languages a bit more easily.
Twisted looks neat but i don't think i'll ever use it.
I think CORBA would rock my world if it were a bit simpler, or just if someone would find a way to integrate it with the compiler, or just cut out the complicated crap that surrounds using it. C# (whoo, someone's finally figured out that if you make a bunch of languages with the same features but different syntax and macro between them, people will think it's "language cross-compatibility"..) is not the correct way of doing this.
I think "web services" these days comes down mostly to taking the problems with CORBA (it makes stuff simple! but you have to read a 1500 page book before you can start using it!) and putting <html brackets> around them.
I think this article was very interesting, especially the claim that.NET is just microsoft trying to take existing standards and take credit for them. (Although i found it funny that the article gives MS full credit for SOAP. Wasn't the guy who made XML-RPC on the SOAP creation team?)
I would like to know when someone is going to find the balance between J2EE's "everything is nice and fits together and is simple and you just sit down and start doing object oriented programming, but you're chained to the java vm" and the.NET/'web services' "here's a bunch of complicated, bloated standards that take way more bandwidth than they need and that are so abstract you can use them from any language, but also make so many compromises you really don't want to use them unless you're using C# (or a special version of python written for.NET, or a version of C++ that looks exactly like c#..)
You know, it would be really nice if we had *real*, good, turing complete macro languages built into the popular programming languages. Maybe then we wouldn't have to take the C# route of rewriting the compiler just because you want to make it possible to declare a method a "web service" using a single keyword.
If i'm not mistaken, the entire thrust of the "debundle IE" argument at this point, more or less, is for the benefit of OEMs.
Everyone knows that the average computer buyer just wants a bare-bones platform on which they can roll their own browser, media player, photo editor, etc.
The point is to get a bare-bones platform for the average computer seller so that, say, Compaq, can sell a computer with the bare-bones microsoft OS, and on top of that a web browser, media player, IM client, etc, selected by Compaq.
There are a lot of people on slashdot who want to just get the win32 APIs and a file browser from microsoft, and then have the freedom to "roll their own", as you put it, as far as applications go. There are not a lot of people out in the unwashed masses who want this.
However, who's to say that if OEMs weren't suddenly allowed to offer wildly different initial software setups, some of them wouldn't come up with more usable systems than the uniform setup that microsoft forces everyone to ship now? If Compaq can save X amount of money on each PC sold by not having to pay MS for IE and instead bundling Mozilla, and that X amount of money goes back to developing better products, wouldn't this benefit Compaq's unwashed-masses end users?
Forcing a bare-bones windows system out on the market is not going to change everything overnight, and it is not the only thing that needs to be done. But it isn't exactly an idea to just laugh at , and the gaps in the bare-bones system won't equate to a lot of work for the end user-- they'll just equate to slightly larger variety in the setups of the computers they have a choice of buying.
Remember, this lawsuit didn't start off saying "debundle the browser from the operating system." It started off saying "allow computer companies to sell computers with a netscape shortcut on the desktop by default instead of an IE shortcut"..
I very unfortunately cannot remember the details, but:
There was a book i read once that was a biography of Walt Disney. It had a story in it describing how one of the early made-for-tv Disney productions had been sponsored by Ford, and Ford, upon seeing the production, demanded that Disney edit out the newly-built Chrysler Building from the shots of the New York skyline. Disney complied.
This was sometime in the 50s.
I have spent the last 20 minutes or so scouring the web trying to find documentation of this, or at least figure out which disney movie/tv show exactly that this took place in, but unfortunately i can't seem to find it. (I'm not 100% sure that it was Ford that asked them to remove the tower, actually, but it was one of Chrysler's at-the-time direct competitors.)
I don't know if this qualifies as a legal precedent of any sort, but it's at least interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
(note: if you are wondering what i am defining as 'universal human rights', well, i think it's something of an open-ended idea by necessity, but i think that everything of importance is covered in this little list here. )
I will venture to say that a culture in which individuals are discouraged from having individual thoughts and opinions and/or voicing them, and in which if you will not wholly accept the ideals and morals of the greature culture you must die or leave, is a really bad idea. I will say this becuase it encourages blind groupthink, and discourages the breaking of harmful misconceptions.
For an example of this, i will take one of your own examples: Feudal Japan. What happened to feudal japan?
Well, stepping aside some envy-of-the-western-world issues that could quite easily be compared to parts of modern islamic culture:
Partially through coersion, partially through indoctrination, they developed a value and ideal system in which the state and the culture and the emperor were important and godlike above all, and it was considered utterly absurd to question the perfection of these things. Blind belief to these things was considered a virtue.
And then what happened was that the emperor, who controlled the state, who controlled the culture, and who happened personally to not be a terribly strong-willed man, came under the influence of a couple of power-hungry generals, who convinced him that japan must expand, for whatever reasons. And they began to play him like a puppet. And the people, because their culture's moral system demanded it of them and they had no access to dissenting voices to provide a counterpoint to their culture's moral system, did whatever they believed their emperor wanted.
And so Japan raised a fanatic army, attempted to conquer just about all of asia, did any number of insane, tyrannical, and/or just plain evil things, and millions of people died.
Treating human rights as negotiable is just plain dangerous. Removing the sanity checks that freedom of expression provides necessarily ends in a Godwins-Law-triggering disaster. This is because a society that cannot question itself has no way of stopping itself when it gets out of control.
Does this make sense to you?
- - - - -
Like i said, i am not quite sure what you are trying to say here, or for that matter why whatever it is you're saying got modded up. Consider this: you spend most of your post making the point that you do not believe it moral for one culture to attempt to superimpose their value system on another.
Specifically, you are stating that slashdotters do not have the right to be making demands as to how that the Russian, Islamic and "feudal japanese" treat their citizens.
Your sole examples of things that the slashdotters et al are demanding the foreign powers stop, but you think the foreign powers should be allowed to continue, are things in which the foreign powers are imposing a value system on others.
So which is it? Is it permissible to force another to accept your value system, or not?
What is it that makes you think it is alright for an islamic nation to prevent a radical feminist lesbian from publishing a book that clashes with their moral ideals, but it is not alright for the united states to prevent said islamic nation from preventing said book? What is it that makes it okay for cultures to impose on individuals, but not okay for culures to impose on other cultures? This doesn't make sense.
I do not demand that the moral systems of others will be the same as mine before i will respect them.
However, i do demand of others, before i will give them my respect, that their moral systems be consistent.
You have failed to meet this criteria.
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Two more points.
I don't agree with this, but even if i did, the current subject of discussion is Russia. Russia is very large. It is not particularly easy to leave Russia. Ask the province of Chechnia, sometime, about the time they've had in attempting to leave Russia (That war is still going on , by the way)
There is no such thing as "balance" when it comes to freedom of expression.
Either you have it or you don't.
"Slippery slope" arguments are not always valid. However, in this case, the slope isn't just slippery; it's vertical.
Expression is one huge gray area; for any two given pieces of expression which you give me, i can give you a solid chain of "Well, but that's really identical to this, isn't it? Which is really identical to this, isn't it?" and even if no one would say that the endpoints are similar, each two links in that chain woul dbe philosophically identical.
The only things clearly defined enough to be valid exceptions to free speech are copyright protection, for specific phrasings and expressings of an idea, and slander, for presenting an idea as true when it is not. And note that both of these two things deal only with the dressings of the idea being expressed, and not with the desired expression itself. Laws which suppress "dangerous" speech, on the other hand, repress ideas at the core level, however they are expressed.
Beyond the two caveats above, you cannot balance, negotiate, make exceptions to, or in any way abrogate free speech rights and have them still be there. This isn't extremism. This is just saying, basic human rights are an all or nothing committment.
(While i'm on the subject, while this isn't quite relevant to net censorship in russia, i might as well note that most human rights act in exactly the same way-- that they are gray areas so huge that you have to look at them in terms of black and white while legislating. For example, Due process of law. Due process of law is merely a convention that the government, as the group of people with guns, agrees to follow. The people agree "okay, we will let you all have guns instead of taking the law into our own hands if you use this privilidge responsibly." If the government does not treat this convention as sacred, the people's rights evaporate. If you are in a situation where the government is not guaranteed to behave in a manner consistent with its constitutional basis, the freedoms that constitutional basis guarantees are meaningless.)
Apple has had good, working handwriting recognition technology ever since the Newton 130 or 2000 or so in 1996.
(Yes, the first newtons had laughable handwriting recognition at first. But by the time that the newton was at the end of its life cycle, it was actually a good, worthwhile, usable product, one that technology is only just now catching up with. People don't remember that the year Windows 95 came out, NewtonOS v2.0 won the "Best New Operating System" award at comdex.. the problem was that Apple released the Newton prematurely, and then hyped it endlessly. Then a few years later, in *1996*, when the thing was actually FIXED, they did absolutely nothing to promote it. So the general public, unless they read "MacWorld" cover to cover, didn't know the Newton then worked-- they just remembered the beginning of the Newton's cycle, when Apple released it in a blitz of hype, and every journalist in the world picked it up, tried it out, and reported, hey, guess what, this thing doesn't WORK.)
Apple will be putting handwriting recognition back into the OS with mac os 10.2. But it is too late-- by the time that 10.2 is released, MS will have their handwriting-recognition-enabled WinXP Tablet Edition *preinstalled on tablet PCs being shipped in stores*. Before 10.2 is released, WinXP Tablet Beta will be in the hands of consumers. Although Apple has had a great handwriting recognition tech for years, MS will actually be releasing the tech first-- and when they do, it will be in a much cooler form, namely tablet laptops. Something apple currently has no analogue for at all. (iWalk? What's that? Is that like the segway?)
Just think what apple could have done: they didn't have the funds or resources to continue developing the Newton in 1997. However, they could have sold/licensed some of that technology to Wacom, and worked with them on getting some kind of simple, early version of this Cintiq thing (which, by the way, is absolutely the coolest tech toy i've seen in ages) created-- then put the newton handwriting recognition stuff into the Mac OS. They would have had an advantage for *quite* awhile in that you would have something absolutely unique for the Mac OS-- Wacom would surely release windows drivers for their tablet/monitor, but 1) it would take a really long time for MS to play catch-up and get some kind of workable handwriting recognition feature, not counting Graffiti (handwriting recognition not being a useful feature, but definitely an eye-catching one to consumers), and 2) this was back when the Mac OS had multiple monitor support, and Windows didn't to speak of. (Mac OS has had seamless multiple monitor support for a long time; Windows didn't in any functional form until Windows 98, and even for awhile after that, it was buggy).
Think about all that could have done for Apple-- even though the monitor might have been prohibhitively hyperexpensive outside of its designated "niche market", given the LCD tech of the day, Apple could have been publicly seen as doing something truly revolutionary and new at a time they were troubled. Instead, Apple just gave off the impression that year of falling apart at the seams. An image problem which of course didn't help sales. Instead, though, MS is going to be the one to first take advantage of this technology, and Apple will be playing catch-up in a field they pioneered.
Typical-- the entire computing world, including apple, is just now catching up with where Apple was six years ago. Once again, Apple is far ahead of Microsoft in terms of getting something working & usable, and far, far behind microsoft in terms of actually getting their technology into the hands of consumers. I'm tired of this being the way the computing world works.
Now i can't wait to see what happens when the Windows world discovers the "voice command" useless gimmick.
Phew!! Just when we were about to have a big discussion and get everyone talking about machines taking over the world..
;)
Oh, it'll happen anyway. This is Slashdot, remember, no one ever reads the linked story..
- Probably not, because Slashdot is generally more about tech stuff than general political stuff. Also, the slashdot community seems to tend to think that anyone getting into space is cool. However, such a statement/link combo would definitely be VALID COMMENTARY if 1) it were attached to an article about something China was doing that they shouldn't be doing and 2) Either Bill Clinton or Al Gore were currently president or likely to be president anytime in the very immediate future. As the latter is not the case, a link to a negative clinton story probably would not make sense. Anyway, it probably would not OCCUR to a slashdot poster (though it may be more likely such a thing would happen on kuro5hin) to make such a connection on a China story, but it might, there's no reason why it wouldn't, and i do not think anyone would mind.
- George W. Bush is not exactly anti-china, and seems to be doing the same lets-ignore-human-rights-abuses-and-trade-with-ch
i na thing as everyone else since richard nixon. Speaking of which, that's an interesting point: the opening of relations with Communist China was begun by Nixon and expanded by Raegan, which between the two of them are probably the most conservative presidents of the last 50 years. There are many things to fault Clinton for, but his soft stance on China is not particularly one of them, as he was not much worse about this than previous/current presidents. (Although i will say, if Gore participates in the 2004 elections, you may critisize him for his support of China all that you like.)
- The Bush Administration is very very open about their pro-business, anti-antitrust-enforcement stance. As Bush has many personal contacts in the business world, it is-- while cynical-- not altogether unreasonable to suggest this philosophy stems less from knowledge of economics and theories of promoting public good than it does from how Bush and Bush's friends would benefit from the application of this philosophy. Moreover, you absolutely cannot deny this: while Clinton was in office, a full-blown effort to have Microsoft taken down as a monopoly was going on. During the 2000 political elections, Microsoft donated significantly more money and lobbying effort to Bush than Gore. (Also, one can make a significant case that Ashcroft is too biased to be allowed near the Microsoft case.) Once Bush was in office, this effort virtually ceased, and the people who were running the antitrust suit were removed and replaced with people whose goal at this point seems to let off Microsoft with the most minimal punishing possible. Before Bush entered office, the antitrust suit was characterized by the DOJ and the computing industry on one side fighting to have competition returned to the industry, and Microsoft on the other fighting to have things stay as they are; now it is characterized by the computing industry on one side fighting to have competition returned to the industry, and the DOJ and Microsoft on the other side fighting to have things stay as they are. Thus, i would say it is valid commentary that, whether the "bought" implications are valid, to say that GWB can be made to let antitrust violators off the hook.
Your post has nothing to do with anything.The portion you quoted was not meant to advocate throwing out patent law. It was meant to advocate changing the unjust portion of patent law. I originally meant for the words "the patent law" to refer to the single law which was inspiring people to circumvent it technologically (for example, the law allowing patenting of genes). It was not meant to refer to all patent laws as a singular entity ("the law"). I see now, however, that that sentence was written in an unclear manner. Sorry. My bad.
There are lots of patent laws. Some of them are unjust. Some of them are beneficial. Some of them are both, and some of these could be rewritten to become just without removing their public benefit.
I don't see how you're making any kind of point here. Just because something has caused at least one good thing to happen as a side-effect doesn't mean it is overall a good thing, and it CERTAINLY doesn't mean that there is no room for improvement.
OK.. when science is having to develop new methods which have absolutely no practical value other than to dodge patent laws, you know the patent law is completely unjust. Patent as a concept is granted to promote science and facilitate its advancement. When science is instead treating the law as an obstacle and exerting effort on finding ways to go around it-- that is to say, when for task A which has been patented it is easier to find a way to circumvent the patent law than it is to design an alternate, non-patent-covered version of task A-- then that patent law is not serving its purpose, is being a detriment to science, and is probably unconstitutional.
One of the neatest features of patent law is that it encourages lots of experimentation; if you need to do something, and there is a patented way to do this thing, and you can't afford to license the patent or the patent owner refuses to license it, this isn't that much of a problem; you just find an alternate way to do the thing, enlightened by your knowledge of how the current patent holders do it, and then patent your version. Today's overly broad patents prevent this; rather than creating cycles where technologies in a given industry iteratively improve as each company innovates new things and patents them (and the other companies look at the public details of the patent filing and try to find better ways of doing the same innovation) today's patents create dead ends; places where technology may no longer advance except with the permission of a certain company.
Because the main problem with the unjust patents of today-- software patents, business model patents, gene patents-- is that they cover a goal, not a methodology. Indeed, these patents are not just overly broad, they miss the point entirely; they cover concepts, while patent law was only ever intended to cover implementations of concepts.
Just a thought.
On the contrary, in my opinion, AudioGalaxy was the absolute best such service for the mac because AG didn't support it. AG was shit for windows becuase of the cruddy client, but for the mac it was great because you just used one of the non-supported third-party clients, all of which were excellent.
:) Could a community-run version of such a website somehow tie into a decentralized community-run version of the AudioGalaxy idea? How would the client and the website communicate? A browser plugin, maybe? It would have to be something sufficiently disconnected to stave off the Out of Court Settlement Smackdown.. perhaps each webpage on the website could have an ID number / checksum, and you'd just cut&paste that ID number into your OpenGalaxy Client? Perhaps the "download this song" thingy could be inserted via some kind of variation on thirdvoice, and the people who run the website could just insist, honestly officer, we can't help it if the mp3 pirate people choose to use our database as a base for checksumming and such. We just run a message board. We aren't connected to those people. These aren't the bots you're looking for.
:) )
This brings up my question, though: third party clients. Is there any reason the extant 3rdparty clients out there could not just be set to, instead of talking to the now-crippled audiogalaxy server, talk to some independent audiogalaxy workalike? How difficult would it be to create an open-source implementation of an AudioGalaxy server, given we already have many open-source third-party implementations of clients? OpenNAP meets OpenAG? Cut loose, the way GiFT has cut loose from kazaa.
I am just curious.
In the meantime, may i assume it would maybe be possible to take the idea behind audiogalaxy (everyone publicly queues stuff they'd like to download someday, and transactions are negotiated automatically as bandwidth becomes available on all sides) and someday recreate it as a wholly-decentralized gnutella-style network? Or do you need that central authority doing the negotiations for you to keep everything from falling apart? I would have to think about the idea some more. You could maybe do it. If you tried, how would the web page frontend thing be handled? Would we just have to throw that idea out?
I always thought that was the most disappointing thing about AG-- their "featured artists" were pretty good compared to (say) napster's, but i always thought it would be really neat if AG fufilled its potential as a site with a message board for every song in existence. This would be a godsend for those of us who like to collect really obscure music, especially bootlegs and such-- it would be convenient if, upon running across a track labelled (say) "Nine Inch Nails - eraser (Utter Desolation Remix -- Unreleased)" i could type that into a website, and even if i couldn't download the mp3 from there i could see some discussion and find out "this is fake" or "this is from X bootlegs & rarities compilation" or "this is a b-side from the japanese single of Y, only they renamed it". Allmusic.com meets everything2.com, or something
Ah well, idle wondering. In the meanwhile, i guess now i gotta go hit AudioGalaxy's site to find out how to inform them i give them permission to redistribute the music i own the rights to.. (Not that anyone *wants* to listen to my music.. just that it's the principle of the thing
I mean-- OK. Let me start over. First off, this is a nifty hack, and second off i'm glad people are making steps toward unlocking the stupid "copy protection" controls that keep any really independent development from happening on the xbox.
But i just don't see this being something revolutionary. I know people for whom this would be useful, and i know people who would use it. But think: it can be assumed anyone with the ability to burn cds also has the ability to play divxes on their computer. So, lets look at their options:
- Buy an inexpensive computer->tv tuner/converter cable thingy from Radio Shack that would allow you to use a tv as the monitor for your computer. Watch divxes on your tv using whatever program it is that runs divxes fullscreen now.
- Buy a several-hundred-dollar Xbox, go through a complicated, possibly expensive transaction in which your xbox is modded and your warranty is broken. Hook that up to your tv. Then, every time you want to watch a divx, you have to burn it to a CD-- which costs money-- and transfer it to your xbox.
I don't think so. This will probably raise publicity and possibly interest by people in the xbox (though i can't imagine it would be much), and this will probably be something really neat for people who own xboxes already. But i can't realistically imagine this becoming something people would buy an xbox for.That being said, i think this is the funniest line i've ever seen on zdnet:Whatever. Wake me up when they get linux running on it.
P.S. : I hate divx. I wish MPEG4 didn't have these stupid licensing terms. Grr.
Another use for programs such as this one:
:)
At the private high school i previously attended, they had something kind of like this. Every friday afternoon after school, the lab administrator would stay a few hours late and allow the "game club" to meet. "Game club" basically consisted of, they set up a special NT user named "games" that could only log in to the school network between 3 and 8 PM on a friday and that had special permissions to run nonstandard programs. The kids would bring in games and leave disk images of the CDROMs on the games account's network drives.
So, when game club started, all the kids that liked computer games would come in to the computer lab, install the game they decided to play that day off the network drive, have a little LAN party for a few hours on the school's really very fast computers, then delete the game off the hard drive and go home. It was fun. (They usually played Counterstrike.)
Why did they do this?
Because before the creation of games club, they had a real problem with kids coming in to rooms with school computers that had been left unattended, or the terminals in the corner of the library, and playing computer games. So the lab admin guy decided to implement a no-computer-games rule, and set up the game club as a safe-zone time the kids could just cut loose and play whatever they wanted.
The trick was, his condition was that he would only run game club if everyone agreed to follow the no-computer-games rule the rest of the time. Game club was the kids' reward/bribe for ensuring compliance.
This turned out to work beautifully. The lab admin guy couldn't be everywhere at once and police every computer, but now suddenly he had the game club-- which consisted of the school's most computer-saavy users-- doing the policing for him. If some new kid came in and started playing games, the other kids would notice and make him stop, because they were afraid of losing game club.
Unfortuantely, the year after i left, the lab administrator guy was moved to the local middle school and replaced with some new guy. The new guy didn't like the idea of game club, and ended it. I am told that in the time since then, it has become invariably true that if you go into the non-monitored computer lab during lunch, there WILL be kids playing networked computer games..
You know, I'm from Texas. And if i remember right, the REASON all of this oil just laying around Texas isn't being mined is because it isn't cost-effective to do so.
If i remember right, all those countries in the middle east can pump oil out of the ground so much cheaper than the Texans can, that huge as the Texas oil market is, by and large the *bulk* of the Texan oil supplies just aren't worth the bother of tapping unless for some reason the global price of oil rises so high that it makes pumping oil out of Texas profitable. If i remember right, this is why whenever oil prices rise, while the rest of the economy starts suffering from the suddenly increased cost of producing just about anything, the Texas economy starts doing really well. If i remember right, this is why Beaumont just hasn't been the same since the 70s arab oil embargo ended.
Maybe Iceland is doing this less for environmental reasons than that they don't want to send money to texas? Maybe they don't like trade deficits, and they want to take all that money that was being sent to import coal and oil and such and make it stay within their relatively small economy? Maybe they like the idea of having an economy that isn't tied to the (extremely fragile) political situation in the Middle East at a base level, because it is independent of the fuel supply the countries in the Middle East provide?
"We have to get off fossil fuels before there aren't anymore!", well, i don't know, but that's a bit alarmist and is maybe not reasonable. But despite this, "We have to get off fossil fuels before they become so scarce and expensive that the oil companies are having to tap their wells in places like Texas again" makes quite a bit more sense, at least to me.
Just a thought.
Mm.. i partially agree and partially disagree. [NOTE: SMALL SPOILERS AHEAD]
:)
The cloning facility.. while it did stylistically look a bit like the Matrix, this wasn't really that avoidable. The way the later books described "cloning cylenders" kind of would make it difficult to do anything that didn't kind of look matrix-ish. And you simply couldn't have come up with a realistic plot for episode 2 that didn't introduce clones being grown in a lab. But then again, the books implied that the clones were grown in the cylenders up until the point of being adults, and then some kind of memory transfer took place-- which would have meant that the image of exclusively fetuses in the clone-growing room was maybe taken from the Matrix. But perhaps this was a practice that didn't arise until the later years of the close wars; or perhaps i misread the books. I'm not sure.
As for "the gladiatorial style execution".. Well, to be honest, you know what that reminded me of? Think about it.. desert planet, jedi and friends are chained up and about to be executed by being eaten by a huge monster in a pit while hundreds of locals watch.. personally, this reminds me more of the beginning of The Return of the Jedi than anything. As such, maybe this was just one of the stylistic nods to the later Star Wars movies-- the tracking device on fett's ship, the image of obi-wan's ship clinging to the side of an asteroid while fett wanders off oblivious, Anakin's hand trapped under a plate of metal while pieces of a battle droid are slapped in place around him-- that pervaded the movie. But then again, all of the visual references that i noticed to specific events in later movies (I mean, as opposed to stormtrooper armor and such) referred to The Empire Strikes Back, and not either of the other two in the trilogy, so maybe this isn't good analisis.
As for the car chase scene.. yeah, i have to admit this was a little bit sketchy, if only for the moments where we get to see anakin plunge down the controls and swerve vertically through multiple lanes of traffic. That one moment, i'm pretty sure everyone in the theatre was thinking of The Fifth Element. And christopher lee, while he did a really great job, probably should not have been given that role in the interest of avoiding echoing LoTR. (You could have joined me, Obi-Wan.. but instead, you have chosen the way of.. PAIN!!!)
I don't know enough about martial arts to comment on the fight scenes
Hm. I think this is a no-contest just because of the lightsaber. I mean, come on-- the man has a four foot rod of plasma that can cut through nearly anything and he can use it to deflect stuff. Anything who gets within three feet of a jedi is dead unless they have a lightsaber as well, or they can bind the jedi's hands. You have to fight Jedi with ranged weapons if they have their lightsabers on them. Period. And spider-man doesn't have any ranged weapons. (OK, the webfluid, but that doesn't kill and can be removed.) In order for this to be an even remotely fair fight, you would have to take away the lightsaber. Do that, and you'd have something interesting.
(This brings up the question, though: Could a lightsaber deflect bullets? Like, i mean, bullets, from a normal earthling gun. Would the bullets be absorbed in the plasma field, or would they just shoot out the other side transformed into slightly smaller drops of boiling lead?
At the least, when you think about it, a human automatic machine gun would be probably the best weapon you could attack a jedi with.. lots of tiny, hard to deflect, harder to sense projectiles.)
And Enron has nothing to do with good triumphing over evil. Enron has to do with entropy. Or, at the least, with evil defeating itself and collapsing.
Exactly.. this is a pretty big deal. Between the whole "look, a server OS that a half-idiot can configure with reasonable licensing policies" thing and the tools that seem to provide remote administration done right (apple remote desktop and this crazy looking manager thing, apple seems to have suddenly gotten a bunch of stuff right that no one ever quite has before.
.. this could definitely turn into a real, credible threat to windows XP.
I can only just hope and pray with all my might that apple doesn't let this opportunity slipt hrough their fingers. I mean, this isn't the most impressive box i've ever seen, esp. compared to some high-end UNIX setups, and traditional Unices probably still are more reliable and powerful for some stuff, but the tradeoffs you have to go through with this XServe are certainly no more unreasonable than the ones that early or even sometimes current versions of Windows NT make you go through. If Apple keeps developing this, and they *market* it, and they actually push this in those markets where this is actually something killer (all the ease of Windows NT without the bullshit, the constant reboots, the downtime, the requirements to buy like four redundant servers to make anything work, or the need foran MSCE)
And if this gets developed, it would be a very good thing for linux and UNIX in general, because anywhere that picks up this thing is going to be naturally gravitated toward J2EE and UNIX-based SQL software.. and after awhile, they'll begin to realize linux is a drop-in replacement in some places for this. Any mindshare that this Xserve thing picks up translates to instant mindshare for everything UNIX.. becuase that's just one more shop that has expertise in Apache, Perl, etc, instead of expertise in IIS, ASP, etc...
Please, please, apple, don't fuck this one up. If they play your cards right, they could take over the world with this one. This could be the first step to making Macs seem usable or credible in a university/business environment.. if they can get a serious foothold with this.. i don't even know.
This makes me incredibly, incredibly happy. It's very exciting. It's just too bad apple will probably not market it correctly and we'll wind up with something that just slips through the cracks and never catches on, another product that was technically neat but no one used. Now i just want to know how long it will take LinuxPPC to put together a bootable package for the XServe..
I mean, specifically, what i really, really want to do is this: go down to Wherehouse music tomorrow and buy the Celene Dion CD, come back home, put the CD in my quicksilver g4 and fubar it.. then go back to Wherehouse carrying the g4, and whine and panic that their cd broke my computer.. and then whomp the empty cd case and the fubared g4 on their customer service counter and demand that they accept the return. And that they get their merchandise out of my computer.
Wouldn't it be great to see the looks on their faces???
Then I could do it at Sam Goody the next day.
Of course, *i* know that it's easy to solve, and that all you have to do is start up the macintosh with the mouse button held down, and it will eject the cd and you can get on with their life. And i *could* just do that for them. But hey, they broke it. Let them fix it
There will be thousands of clueless newbies who will buy that cd and break their computers with it, and *THEY* will be totally unable to do anything about it (since Apple won't provide phone support AT ALL unless you pay them lots of money, and so the only way to find out about the magic mouse button eject thing is to read the document on Apple's website that explains what to do.. and *how do you read Apple's website if your Macintosh is broken*?).. so.
If Wherehouse music is going to be selling this CD to people whose computers will break as a result, and Wherehouse music isn't going to be there to help explain to them how to restore their imacs to working order.. why should i explain to Wherehouse music how to restore my mac to working order when it's sitting on their counter in front of an underpaid clerk while i hold up the line?? ^_^ I have this vision of this happening all over the country, hundreds of secretly-clued-in mac owners sabotaging their machines and then going back to make music stores actually deal with the fallout of what they've done, instead of making the consumer deal with the fallout.. but of course that won't happen. Of course i won't even get around to doing it myself, because i don't get around to finishing things often and i fucking hate Celene Dion. But it's fun to think about
Something that has been brought up a couple times in other threads, and that i am kind of curious about:
The CARP is something the RIAA is imposing, correct?
Does this or does this not mean that if an internet radio station were certain to only play music by non-RIAA artists, it could stay in business?
It would not be terribly easy to find material for a net radio station that only played independent music, but it would be possible, i think, and at the least i'd listen to it.
But am i just confused? Would that be feasible from a royalties standpoint? What exactly is the royalties relationship between independent record labels and internet radio, before or after CARP?
One more small question: the page on CARP on your site says that non-US broadcasters would not be subject to the CARP fees. How would this work out? Would this just mean that anyone in Canada would be able to netcast worldwide without having to pay any fees other than the ones imposed by their government? Or would stations outside the U.S. be barred from netcasting to U.S. citizens? If stations outside the U.S. are allowed to run free, what would the regulations say about a server in the U.S. that is just repeating what is being broadcast by an internet streaming radio station located outside the U.S.-- so that the lag created by the internet links that go across the atlantic ocean are minimized. Could a repeater of this sort be classified as just another router, or would the repeater be subject to the CARP payments?
Thanks for clarifying things.. just curious. Hopefully, the LoC will see through this blatant attempt by the RIAA to silence internet radio and none of the above questions will ever become an issue. I wish you luck..
This is important *because* it is so common.
It is a good general view of something that happens every day, all over. It is a good forensic analysis of what can happen from just *one instance* of submitting an e-mail address to a single sweepstakes site.
It may not have helped most of the people on slashdot right now to have read this, but i think this is a good, well-written article to give to someone who doesn't read slashdot, doesn't know any sysadmins, doesn't have to deal with spam, doesn't incessantly read web message board posts by sysadmins who have to deal with spam, and doesn't know the extent to which this stuff goes on.
More importantly, it is a good article to show businesses who are considering using spam to advertise.
If you read all the way through the nadine chronicles (a good part of the middle could probably stand to have a "you can just skip this part" disclaimer, really..), the end is actually targeted directly at businesses considering advertising with spam, telling them why they should not and why their money will most likely be wasted if they give it to a bulk-email-advertising firm.
Just because you and i know (or think we know) everything there is to know about spam doesn't mean that everyone in the entire world does. And this is one of these issues where the people who are most important to reach are the ones who are currently uninformed..
Oh God.. Wow. This just works way, way too well. I mean, like, you can keep going with it...
.45 automatics laying near the back, loading and cocking them.)
-----
VINCENT: You'll dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Open Source software is?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different.
JULES: Examples?
VINCENT: Well, in KDE, you can embed a web browser in your file manager. And I don't mean that you're using the web browser for your file manager like in Win98 either. They give you a plug-in browser, like you can install or remove any browser you like anytime you want, like in Opendoc. And in GNOME, you can embed like Mozilla or drawing apps or whatever into anything. Also, you know what they call their image editing program?
JULES: They don't call it Photoshop?
VINCENT: No, they use UNIX there, they wouldn't know who the fuck Adobe is.
JULES: What do they call it?
VINCENT: The "GIMP".
JULES: (repeating, grinning softly) The "GIMP". What do they call their word processor?
VINCENT: Well, the word processor is still Office, but they call it "OpenOffice".
JULES: What do they call their IDE?
VINCENT: I dunno, I didn't code anything. But you know what they use in Open Source software to configure their webservers instead of preferences dialogs?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: Text files.
JULES: Goddamn!
VINCENT: I seen 'em do it. And I don't mean a couple of extra options, they fuckin' do everything with that shit. Like, they drown you in it. Anything you wanna change about the way the webserver looks, you have to open up this big-ass file named "httpd.conf" and search through the file for the place where they explain what words to put where if you want it to act a certain way.
JULES: Uuccch!
(Cut to shot from inside the G4 tower case as Vincent and Jules open up from the side panel, reach in, and pull out two
JULES: We should have shotguns for this kind of deal.
-----
OK.. obvious, not funny/relevant.. I'm sorry.. I'm sorry!!! I just couldn't resist..!! Please don't hurt me. ^_^
How do you expect this to work?America's legal system has gone a bit downhill, but still i somehow just can't see that happening.
And even if no one but the judge was allowed to see the evidence of how they caught the defendant, every judge who is presented with this evidence is just one more person who knows The Horrible Secret of the Fifth RIAA Serial Number Hiding Method. Eventually, someone is going to quietly leak any and all secret methods the RIAA has from the bench to the press.
The last i checked, every attempt thus far at "digital watermarking" technology has been a miserable failure. Remember the whole bit with Prof. Felton awhile back?
Serial numbers of this sort are a nice idea for a first step, but it is a really bad idea to think of this as a placenta. Basically: you can't trust it to work. Do the serial number thing, and people will just learn before they share stuff on grokster they need to run it through their DRM-cleaner program. Or they'll just not pirate things bought online, and only pirate stuff they ripped from CDs. (and if you try to use watermarking to embed the tag information into the signal on the CD, then you have to come up with a form of watermarking which is A) non-degrading-of-quality and B) cannot be effortlessly removed by a perl script written by some anarchists in norway. chances are good that a watermarking system like this is not even possible.)
( people i know were downloading VCDs of "the Matrix" while it was still in theatres. how will serial numbers on digitally downloaded material stop people from sneaking camcorders into theatres? )
So while a minimally invasive serial-tagging technology would be easy to implement, it is not the solution. It's just a way to amke people think twice before uploading stuff they bought to strangers.
An ID system also brings up the issue of the possible effects on the first sale doctrine. What if i sell my digital rights to the new Kool Keith album to a friend, who sells it to another friend, who sells it to a used cd store, who sells it to some guy who uploads said album to napster with *MY* serial number (since i was the original purchaser of the album) watermarked all inside it. How would "innocent until proven guilty" be maintained there? Would saying "um, i sold the album to someone and deleted it, i don't know what happened after that" hold in Internet Traffic Court?
There are only two solutions to the above problem that i see. The first is to have some massive central "rights management" server which tracks each time that someone sells a digital copyrighted work to someone else so that when it shows up all over FastTrack they'll go after the most recent person to legally own that copy of the album (and not the original purchaser). The second is to create a special class of digital downloaded copyrighted work where you recieve limited rights to it (the whole software 'lease but not sell' model) and do not have the right to resell.I don't think the whole serial-number-tracking thing is viable.
Verr are your papers?
This is why computers, or at least all of apple's computers that i've ever seen, have, in the area of the machine with all the ports, a bar- a bar designed to fit a padlock.. It's so you can chain computers to the desk if you need to.. that should be all the security you need.
Making the thing harder to move may make it harder to steal, yes, but it also makes it harder to move. MUCH harder to move. And the education market is probably the one place where it's most likely that machines will be moved around a lot in a *legitimate* fashion.. (as a college student who moves his G4 around *constantly*, i can vouch for this.) especially for an all-in-one design machine. The absense of a handle *will* cause minorly major problems for a lot of people. I don't know what apple was thinking.
It's possible they maybe thought, well, it's a 17-inch machine and it's big, it doesn't need a handle since you can't carry it with one hand.. but still, it makes a HUGE difference if while carrying it you can just kind of shift all the weight to one hand for a moment while you use the other to open a door. This thing is so big and curvy, i don't see how you could keep it in your arms except by cradling it to your chest constantly..
(For the record, this *is* the FIRST non-laptop machine apple has released since the original imac to come without a handle. Even the G4 Cube, which didn't really need one since it was a 10-inch cube, the little thingy at the bottom where you put in the wires had a place where you could wiggle your fingers in and grasp it quite handily..)
Actually, nobody's seen the bottom of the eMac yet-- it's quite unlikely, but maybe there's a handle there, or maybe the place where you install the monitor-swivel thing has handle-like features? Eh, probably not.
hi mblase
ANyway, though: what i would be very interested to see is this: There was a product available for the very early macintoshes-- the classic nine-inch one-piece ones that the current discussion is about-- that looked WIERD but was really just about the ultimate case mod.
Here is a link to a picture taken out of the Macintosh Bible edition i originally heard of this thing in.. just look at it. It was called the MacChimney, or something, and as the name suggests it was basically a chimney for your macintosh. You'd go in with some tools and install this thing, and your macintosh would suddenly be about twice as tall and have this cone-like thing sticking off the top with a big stovepipe at the top.
The advantage to this was, the product had been designed in such a way that between the chinmey and the way it affected the air circulation inside the case, once the chimney was installed you no longer needed a fan. At all. So you'd remove the fan and get a literally totally silently-running macintosh.
So, basically, since we are talking about putting a PC inside of a classic macintosh, my question is this:
The mess of SOAP and RDDI and GESCOM and all these vaguely XML-related, something-to-do-with-port-80 acronyms don't leave me all that impressed; near as i can gather, they're nothing but platforms for people to build platforms on top of, and they won't be of much use until someone takes the foundation of tangled acronyms and builds a common client app that lets you actually use all of these things. I don't take this all this seriously, because knowing the computer industry, i'm pretty sure that by the time "web services" becomes actual services you can use using programs you can download, these services will be using a specific, jury-rigged enough implementation of "web services technology" that you'll be unable to use a given service except with their specific client, and there will be a huge incompatibility rift between MS-based and non-MS-based web services, and basically all of the nice, compatibility-engineering abstractions that the W3C is trying to put together now will be thrown out the window just because the current "web services" standards are so rediculously complicated that no one will be able to come up with an implementation of those standards that really *uses* the full potential of the protocols.
The thing is, though, i really don't care to understand "web services". I understand the following, and i really think it's all i need to know:I think "web services" these days comes down mostly to taking the problems with CORBA (it makes stuff simple! but you have to read a 1500 page book before you can start using it!) and putting <html brackets> around them.
I think this article was very interesting, especially the claim that
I would like to know when someone is going to find the balance between J2EE's "everything is nice and fits together and is simple and you just sit down and start doing object oriented programming, but you're chained to the java vm" and the
You know, it would be really nice if we had *real*, good, turing complete macro languages built into the popular programming languages. Maybe then we wouldn't have to take the C# route of rewriting the compiler just because you want to make it possible to declare a method a "web service" using a single keyword.
If i'm not mistaken, the entire thrust of the "debundle IE" argument at this point, more or less, is for the benefit of OEMs.
Everyone knows that the average computer buyer just wants a bare-bones platform on which they can roll their own browser, media player, photo editor, etc.
The point is to get a bare-bones platform for the average computer seller so that, say, Compaq, can sell a computer with the bare-bones microsoft OS, and on top of that a web browser, media player, IM client, etc, selected by Compaq.
There are a lot of people on slashdot who want to just get the win32 APIs and a file browser from microsoft, and then have the freedom to "roll their own", as you put it, as far as applications go. There are not a lot of people out in the unwashed masses who want this.
However, who's to say that if OEMs weren't suddenly allowed to offer wildly different initial software setups, some of them wouldn't come up with more usable systems than the uniform setup that microsoft forces everyone to ship now? If Compaq can save X amount of money on each PC sold by not having to pay MS for IE and instead bundling Mozilla, and that X amount of money goes back to developing better products, wouldn't this benefit Compaq's unwashed-masses end users?
Forcing a bare-bones windows system out on the market is not going to change everything overnight, and it is not the only thing that needs to be done. But it isn't exactly an idea to just laugh at , and the gaps in the bare-bones system won't equate to a lot of work for the end user-- they'll just equate to slightly larger variety in the setups of the computers they have a choice of buying.
Remember, this lawsuit didn't start off saying "debundle the browser from the operating system." It started off saying "allow computer companies to sell computers with a netscape shortcut on the desktop by default instead of an IE shortcut"..
I very unfortunately cannot remember the details, but:
There was a book i read once that was a biography of Walt Disney. It had a story in it describing how one of the early made-for-tv Disney productions had been sponsored by Ford, and Ford, upon seeing the production, demanded that Disney edit out the newly-built Chrysler Building from the shots of the New York skyline. Disney complied.
This was sometime in the 50s.
I have spent the last 20 minutes or so scouring the web trying to find documentation of this, or at least figure out which disney movie/tv show exactly that this took place in, but unfortunately i can't seem to find it. (I'm not 100% sure that it was Ford that asked them to remove the tower, actually, but it was one of Chrysler's at-the-time direct competitors.)
I don't know if this qualifies as a legal precedent of any sort, but it's at least interesting.