If you want your personal information to remain private, the DON'T GIVE IT OUT. DUH!
I'm curious, how did you get a job without telling your emplyer your Social security number and your home address? How do you get medical care without providing billing information to the hospital? How did you get a drivers' license?
How did you get your credit cards? how do you get the things you order online (or offline) without a proper address? How do you pay your phone bill?
I'm fascinated by the idea that anyone who doesn't live in a mud hut is an idiot for "giving out" information that we could so obviously simply keep private. The point is that many people you HAVE to give information to in order to exist have no relucatance whatsoever of selling that information to other people you specifically don't want it to go to.
We're not getting pissed about people using information we gave them knowingly and willingly, but if I give my SS# to the insurance company I don't think they should have any legal right whatsoever to sell it to my gocery store, or Amazon.com, or anyone else.
If the FTC gets in the act they won't just be nice about it, it will become a federal crime
I should hope they wouldn't be "nice about it", otherwise you lose most of the deterrent effect. they aren't nice about it when I break laws, why should companies get a break? Of course, the truth is they generally ARE "nice about it". The FTC will send warnings, demand complaince, do everything but send a singing telegram with flowers before they penalize a company. If anything the FTC is too lenient, because 99% of the time the worst that happens for breaking the law is you get told to stop breaking it. I wish I got such harsh punishment!
It is much easier to deal with a corporation which has it self interest at heart than it is to deal with a government which is hell bent on "helping."
Why doesn't the government (or rather, regulators/politicians) have it's self-interest at heart? Why doesn't the corporation want to help? Ayn always says, check your premises...
The 'net simply moves/changes too fast for legislators and their regulators
I keep hearing this and similar comments over and over, but I don't understand it.
In what way has the Net changed so fundamentally that a privacy policy from 1990, or 1980 would be outdated today? The entire point of good lawmaking is to make a law general enough to be adaptable to new circumstantial details.
If, at the beginning of Compuserve in the 70s, Congress had a made a law saying:
"No one shall, without prior consent of the user, keep records of that user's activities on any electronic network, including personally identifiable information, except such that is necessary for technical or security reasons. This shall in no way limit the use of information provided by a user in any public forum such that a user would not reasonably expect such information to be considered private."
And there would be another paragraph explaining that people with existing/ongoing relationships can store and use such information as is necessary to maintain that relationship (commercial or not). And another one talking about how sharing information with third-parties is subject to other rules, and some final sections with definitions of terms used.
Making law is very much the same as making code -- if you do it high-level enough, you only have to change the details to make it work in entirely new situation.
More regulation from the FTC is not the answer, because clever people always find a loophole or a way around regulations.
So we shouldn't even try? People manage to get around the laws against murder on occassion, but we haven't seen fit to scrap them yet. At the beginning of the Civil Rights Era, the anti-discrimination laws were circumvented with dull regularity. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a companies who won't do anything to avoid getting in trouble under them.
The point is that yes, people will get around the law but we'll reach a balance point that's a lot closer to provacy than it is right now. We're certainly not going to get more provacy by doing nothing...
Sorry, bad luck. You've hit someone who's studied that period of history fairly extensively:)
Well, but you don't seem to be disagreeing with the conclusion so much as providing more details.
Yes, the logistical issues of invading Russia were difficult (made more so by the scorched earth policy of the russians that I talked about).
Yes, the climate played a huge part (just as it had for Napolean) but the Russians would have won even without that advantage.
It was, as you point out, the fact that the Russians are willing to do ANYTHING to win that has always made them so formidable in war. And that's what I'm talking about -- a populace with weapons (even broken glass bottles and suicide bombers or convicts) simply cannot be defeated by a more "professional" military force with superiour military technology.
Fear and terror areb effective weapons, as you point out. Laser-guided bombs and air superiority have the effect of making people realize things could blow up any time without warning, which is quite effective.
But V2s provided the same terror effect. And what we learned was that it doesn't demoralize the populace, it makes them willing to eat dog food and melt down their false teeth to make bullets. The probelm with employing terror and fear to control a populace is (again, as was pointed out years ago) that fear and hate are very close, and a population that hates you with all their being will kill you, even if it means grinding your tanks to a halt with their own bodies.
For most of history, the Chinese have been far superior technologically than other civilisations, winning every battle due to superior tactics, strategy and firepower.
That is, until they met the Mongols, the most low-tech fighting force on Earth. Although the Mongols made great use of horseback, the majority of their troops were on foot and used nothing more complicated than a club. Very much like the russians, these were people who simply would not stop fighting.
But an armed population on the current model isn't really much of a defence, Sun Tzu or not
WEll then that's what i don't understand -- it's not about technology. If you want to occupy land, you have to have physical human beings with guns or flamethrowers or something to hold it. Do you expect the native population to just mail you tax checks every month? Sooner or later it is the occupying soldiers living in the same city as those they occupy, which makes them very vulnerable, no matter how much technology they have.
We won the gulf war so clearly on because we did not have occupation as a goal. We simply drove in, flanked to the left of Kuwait and squeezed anything that moved to the north of the border. if we had tried to occupy Bagdhad then our soldiers would have had to walk the streets with rifles, just as they do in Kosovo.
Technology changes the process of war but not the fundamental issues of occupying land. Air power, mechanized infantry, gunpowder, the Phalanx, these are all great tools for fighting, but they don't do shit for profiting from what you've taken.
The lesson we HAVE to learn from Afghanistan, Vietnam, the American revolution, the French Revolution, WW2 France and germany, is that if the civilians do not support your military actions you simply will not succeed at occupation and control in the long term.
(Of course, we've also learned from many other places that if the civilians are ambivilent or cynical, pretty much anyone can take control and they won't lift a finger).
So to summarize: Don't ever start a land war in Asia, I don't care what technology you have, the civilian population will decide the winner. But feel free to take over any central or south American country, they don't much care who steals the taxes.:)
Well since Uzis have been illegal in the US for some time (and no automatic weapon is legal, period) there is nothing to stop this now save crossing your fingers.
Of course, if the guy standing BEHIND the guy with an Uzi had a gun, he might be able to shoot UZI guy before UZI man kills the rest of the patrons.
We seem to forget so quicly that many of the most famous gun-related crimes in the US have been *STOPPED* by a law-abiding citizen with a gun, minutes or hours before the police were able to deal with it...
But I also understand that armies are different now and that it has consequences.
It has consequences, but not many (from the standpoint of controlling a population).
Sun Tzu's texts on how to fight with pikemen a few tousand years ago are essentially identical to current military troop strategy. Flanks, thrusts, numerical ratios, projecting power, etc.
While you can take over territory with tanks faster than you could with horse cavalry, sooner or later human soldiers with guns have to control the population, otherwise you won't get the taxes or industrial output of the conquered territory.
Dropping an a-bomb is good to stop the production of enemy tanks but does little to provide you with taxes in the future.
Laser-guided bombs cannot control territory, they can only stop industrial output or destroy communications and logistics.
Chemical weapons are good against troops but have the nasty side-effect of killing the civilians and fauna, which isn't good for business.
The russians had technology grossly inferior to the germnans in WW2, and the French were much closer to the Germans. But france was occupied and Russia was not because the French fought tank to tank and lost, leaving plenty behind for the Germans to add to their inventory. The russians burned their own cities and factories to the ground and retreated before the Germans (the same as they had done to the French under napolean just as successfully). Though they also fought with tanks, the Germansd lost for the same reason Napolean did - there was nothing to conquer but bare land. No people to control, no industry to run. Just land, which isn't very useful.
And their soldiers died of cold and starvation because there were no farms to loot, no citizens to press into logistical support.
have a deep suspicion of the type of person who carrys a penknife
Must be terrifying to get out of bed in the morning!
What ever else you cannot deny that your average american gunowner has a tendancy towards trigger happiness.
Well, sure you can. The vast, vast vast majority of legal gun owners in the US never shoot another human being in their life.
It's the same misconception people have about police in the US -- it's generally thought that they must shoot criminals every few weeks or so. But the truth is the vast majority of police never even draw their gun in defense, and a statistally small portion of that number ever fire a single bullet at a criminal in their entire career. That's why (unfortunately) so many screw-ups occur with cops shooting -- it's so rare to pull a gun no matter how much you train for that moment. It just happens very rarely.
So no, the average american noncriminal gunowner (whether civilian or police) is certainly not trigger-happy in any way.
It's those criminals who do like to shoot a lot more frequently that tend to throw the statistics for the overall population...
Protecting yourself from a nuclear power with handguns (or semiautomatic assault rifles or whatever)? Any common sense ever applied to the thinking of gun fanatics? That may have been the case in the 1700's but not anymore. Few thousand gallons of mustard gas (or any other modern battle gas or virus developed for biological warfare) should do ok if your govenment really wanted to oppress you.
I dunno, rusty AK-47s seemed to do okay against Mustard Gas and nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
Maybe it's not very useful to annihilate the population you're trying to control?...
Ahh, so the irregular or territorial army ought to be able to overthrow the central government. Any particular decision mechanism as to when they should decide its time for a revolution?.
This seems an utter red herring in terms of gun control debate.
Red herring? How so? You know the US had a Civil War, right? That's about how it happens (although it was a lot more formal than most revolutions/overthrows, successful or not).
Would you at least think about world and US history before making illogical statements on the basis of US government and the constitutional framing process?
Does anyone really thing the framers were sitting around thinking, "Oh, we've got free speech, let's make sure everyone has the right to go hunting and then we'll get to speedy jury trial later on". It's the second amendent for goodness sake! The states would not have ratified the constitution if they believed they would have no means of armed resistance against the new federal government.
Even the Surpeme Court recognizes this is the motivation behind the second amendment, the only argument is whether the "well-regulated militia" with the ability to fight against the federal government is a standing state army (such as the National Guard) or is the adult citizenry at large (the context of "militia" at the time of writing)...
So the creators of the constitution has so little faith in their own document that they needed to provide a means within that very document to invalidate it? If that's the case then it must be a pretty poor basis for government.
The framers had recently gone through several changes of Government (we didn't jump from British colonists to USA, we had several state governments for EACH state and multiple federal governments before the USA & Constitution & Bill of Rights). Those were a rough few decades, having little to do with the quality of documents that established each government. The framers knew it was just as likely the USA & Constitution would be replaced again as succeed (although obviously they hoped it would work out, which is why so many comprimises went into the creation -- and it satisfied no one perfectly but everyone well enough that it DID succeed).
Lets not say the French Revolution was without purpose just because of the years of the Terror or the many asinine governments they went through to find their way...
But you did nothing to disarm his arguments, which were essentially verbatim descriptions of why we lost Vietnam and the British lost the US.
It doesn't matter how well-armed the occupying force (and by occupying force it might mean the standing army simply enforcing laws in its own country) is, it will ALWAYS lose to a civilian population with weapons.
It has nothing to do with "Amerika" or "Red Dawn", this is a simple principle understood since the ealiest military planners of 5000 BC in China and the middle east began writing about military science.
If soldiers (say, white and black americans) are really well armed but are trying to kill terrorists/revolutionaries that look exactly like civilians (because they are!) they will lose because they don't know if that's "Farmer Bob" or "Bob Who's Gonna Shoot Ya", and you can't be on alert 24 hours a day. Ask anyone stationed in Vietnam well behind the front lines how safe it was to be in a US military base in "well-controlled" territory (that is, when terrorists weren't suicide-bombing the place and prostitutes weren't shredding penises with razor blades in their vaginas and restaurants weren't deliberately poisoning food, etc). it's hard to control a country if people really don't want you there, and killing them all (believe it or not!) is rarely an acceptable victory condition to a military...
You guys all seem to not understand the nature of "control".
A government doesn't kill people to control them. that's called "being the lord of nothing". So yes, we could drop antrax and a-bombs and wipe out all the citizens, and you will be in complete control of a radioactive desert. Congratulations.
You don't win a war without controlling the land. You can't control the land without controlling the people who live on that land. If you move everyone out, you control a land with no production value. if you kill everyone you own a land without production value.
Why is this so hard to understand?
We grossly overpowered Vietnam, yet lost! We had a-bombs and chemical weapons and a lot bigger guns, but lost. No because our army wasn't bigger or better, but because it was IMPOSSIBLE to control a land where any person might be an innocent civilian or an armed enemy. Yes, if we had just killed everyone we would have "won", but left a wasteland.
If the British had gone from door to door and killed every person in America, the revolution would have ended, but there would have been no value left in the land because no one would be left to make products and generate taxes. That was not a "victory condition" for the British, but they were left with the same situation we had in Vietnam -- is it an armed rebel or a loyal revenue-generating farmer?...
It took you gun crazy Americans 10 million Jewish lives and 2 years before you gave a sh*t.
Lets not forget about the 6 million Gypsies and gays and communists and catholics. And a few million soldiers on all sides.
Don't try and make it look like you won the war. You simply finished it.
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that people did not want America to be the "policeman of the world"? Was there a vote to change this, because now whenever we get involved overseas we are criticized for throwing our weight around and being arrogant bullies. So which is it, should we use military force to defend our view of the world or not?
And there's a big difference between "ending it" and "winning it". The war was already on its way to an end before America was involved -- an end where China would have been part of Japan and the French would have bigger problems than going on strike every month...
While you're absolutely right that the high wholesale costs are what kills everyone involved, that's not addressed in any way by this FTC settlement. The wholesale cost is going to remain exactly the same.
So yes, if the cost of getting the CD to the distributor (whether by reduced profit, marketing, R&D, or royalties) were to go down then everyone could afford to sell CDs for $9.99...
I'm sure there are plenty of people more than interested in sharing information and advice, but unfortunately the article (and original email, possibly) make it pretty much impossible.
First off, it doesn't sound like they are claiming to have copyright on HTML code. Not only would that be tenuous under the best of circumstances, but the fact that Dreamweaver was used makes it even more unlikely.
And oh, by the way they did some back end code that we've re-done in CGI. So is THAT what they're suing you for? Did you take their code and remake it in a different environment? That hasn't anything to do with Dreamweaver or HTML.
And we certainly don't have enough information about the situation to make any meaningful judgement. Was the first company paid? Did they have a contract, it would say who owns what. No advertising company would contract out work without saying who owns what because the likelyhood of reuse is too great.
The major question is: WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SUING YOU FOR? Without the answer to that question, NO ONE here can do more than speculate inaccurately.
And please, if you don't know what the phrase "First North American Serial Rights" means, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP GIVING LEGAL ADVICE (More like wild speculation)....
Microsoft doesn't lose much by pissing off a bunch of avowed anti-Microsoft Linux-lovers.
Well, pissing off/. isn't a big loss for them (although I suspect more of us Win32 weenies are on here than anyone suspects -- we are nerds, too) but the front page article in Infoworld talking about how Microsoft is trying to supress the publication of an "open" standard sure wouldn't make too many IS admins or CIOs comfortable with the support for that standard (or it's potential logevity)...
I know that the instant reaction is "hooray", and ultimately this will result in lower proces at places like Best Buy (remember when they used to sell new releases for $9.99?).
But this isn't necessarily the case of record companies gouging consumers, so much as record companies "protecting" stores.
Every store buys their CDs for pretty much the same wholesale price (maybe $11), and the MSRP is $15-20. But Best Buy was a new kid on the block and was will ing to lose a dollar on every CD to get you in the store, hoping you'd pick up a CD player or a video game while you're there.
Now this sounds like a good deal until you realize that a Record Store can't sell their music for less than what they paid, and essentially have no chance of competing with a megastore that can treat music as a loss leader. So record stores have been closing, and our musical choices at Best Buy are (needless to say) more along the lines of Britney Spears than Indy Imports.
Granted, this is pretty much the same issue as brick-and-mortar places will face in regards to online retailers offering significant discounts, even willing to lose money to build business the same way best Buy did the first few years.
But economics doesn't go away just because CDs are cheaper for a few years. What happens when everyone but Best Buy (or CDNow or whoever) has gotten out of the CD business? When all the local record stores have closed, and Best Buy decides to start charging $15/CD again? You're screwed, because there's no more record stores. Best Buy can survive a war of attrition a lot longer, and once they win they have no requirement to keep the proces low.
Not that this will necessarily happen (in fact i consider it unlikely simply because online retailers will always be available for CDs at the lowest retail cost).
But it isn't an imaginary fear that the record stores have -- look at the stores that have closed in the wake of the Wal-Martization of america...
to answer the question you've asked a million times -- it has nothing to do with the preview pane. Outlook has a setting to automatically open attatchments (which is off by default) that would (and did for many people) run the VBS file automatically.
The foolishness is in people enabling that idiotic setting, in MS putting the setting there, and most of all in MS making "high security" (the setting email runs under in "internet options") still capable of running javascript, cookies, vbscript, etc. I don't consider that "high security" and if MS would change that one default half of these email viruses would die oevrnight because you would have to save and execute the file as a separate step -- no double-clicking to open a script file...
I guess Windows 386 (1987) was a figment of my imagination.
Nope, it was real. It just didn't do multitasking (task switching at best), and MS didn't have a multitasking OS until OS/2-WinNT in the 90's. Didn't have a multitasking consumer OS until win95 (arguably) or Win98.
I agree that the placement of refrigeration (and air conditioning) is incorrect -- it is possibly the single most important engineering accomplishment of the past several hundred years, right with the printing press.
Talk all you want about internal combustion, petrochemicals, etc, they are all very important and changed the world, but they did not unquestionably and uniformly improve every aspect of our lives and our existence as a species.
Without refrigeration, we would not have any other technologies on the scale necessary for modern life. You couldn't have the current phone or electrical grid, computers and most other modern technology would have been nearly impossible to invent. Space travel would be impossible, much air travel would be as well.
Without refrigeration, our life expectancy would still be about 30-50 years because vaccines and the blood supply would be impossible to make and maintain. Our food supplies would be just as questionable as those at the turn of the last century (when food poisoning was a perfectly common way to die).
And of course without such reliable ways to safely transport food and other perishables, our economy could never grow to the scale of current urbanization.
And don't forget that "air conditioning" as it literally means, allows us to control the air in an environment. We can not only make it warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, we can also control the humidity so that electronics can function properly and valuable materials are not destroyed or contaminated by water vapor.
To understand the danger of humidity, simply visit the tombs of Egypt, where humidity did not exist until the irrigation projects of the past hundred years. For thousands of years, delicate artifacts sat perfectly preserved, and in the past hundred they have literally begun to disintegrate as humidity attacks them.
Refrigeration is unquestionably one of the most significant advances in mankind's control over his environment, along with irrigation and fire.
And like many great advances, it was scorned early on by others. The New York Times (keeping in mind NY made a lot of money by shipping ice all over the country for cooling) published an editorial making fun of "some fool in Florida thinks he can make ice better than God Almighty!"...
The 386 was around for years before they even put in support for more than 1MB, and even then it was only because they were threatened with a very good competitor - DRDOS
And of course, DesqView386 offered true multi-tasking on the 386 processor, taking advantage of all the new capabilities of the processor while maintaining 100% compatibility with DOS applications. About 10 years vefore MS got around to it...
Isn't it? What is the difference between a PDF files -- a stream of 1s and 0s which, when interpreted by a certain computer program, causes a particular action (i.e., a display of text) -- and a source code file
Well, the manifestation of the bits isn't what we're talking about, but rather the words, the arrangements of letters and idea that the PDF contains, is what is protected without question, because those words (whether represented as bits, as ink, or as stone carvings) are a "creative expression".
So to answer your question, the copyright status of the content wouldn't be affected by how it is stored (whether it's a PDF or a batch file that prints it to the screen). The words that are represented are protected. Whether or not the program that generates those words has a separate protection under [copyright|patent] is where the gray area and debate is.
Does this hamper legitimate reverse-engineering of the product?
No more than IBM hampered Compaq from reverse-engineering the original IBM-PC BIOS back in '83.
IBM actively published the BIOS specifications for exactly the reason you state -- it made it improbably that anyone technically capable of reverse-engineering it had not been exposed to the "trade secret". They thought it would make bulletproof legal protection.
Compaq had to search wide and far to find a team of engineeres who could swear they had never seen or heard anything about the BIOS "trade secrets". They locked them in a room with a black box version of the IBM-PC, and a second team "outside the room" (since they had been exposed to the trade secrets) would tell them whether they were hot or cold. They reverse-engineered it in one of the most important feats of the computer age.
And they kept detailed logs & journals of every step along the way so that they could prove beyond a doubt that they had succeeded in reverse-engineering the BIOS without seeing the published "secrets".
This may be, alas, further proof of Microsoft's fall -- they truly are becoming like IBM was back then, using tricks and traps to protect themselves rather than building a better mousetrap.
What's sad is that MS, Compaq, et al -- who would not exist without that single feat of engineering -- are more than happy to support laws that would prevent it from happening again (DMCA, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
If you want your personal information to remain private, the DON'T GIVE IT OUT. DUH!
I'm curious, how did you get a job without telling your emplyer your Social security number and your home address? How do you get medical care without providing billing information to the hospital? How did you get a drivers' license?
How did you get your credit cards? how do you get the things you order online (or offline) without a proper address? How do you pay your phone bill?
I'm fascinated by the idea that anyone who doesn't live in a mud hut is an idiot for "giving out" information that we could so obviously simply keep private. The point is that many people you HAVE to give information to in order to exist have no relucatance whatsoever of selling that information to other people you specifically don't want it to go to.
We're not getting pissed about people using information we gave them knowingly and willingly, but if I give my SS# to the insurance company I don't think they should have any legal right whatsoever to sell it to my gocery store, or Amazon.com, or anyone else.
If the FTC gets in the act they won't just be nice about it, it will become a federal crime
I should hope they wouldn't be "nice about it", otherwise you lose most of the deterrent effect. they aren't nice about it when I break laws, why should companies get a break? Of course, the truth is they generally ARE "nice about it". The FTC will send warnings, demand complaince, do everything but send a singing telegram with flowers before they penalize a company. If anything the FTC is too lenient, because 99% of the time the worst that happens for breaking the law is you get told to stop breaking it. I wish I got such harsh punishment!
It is much easier to deal with a corporation which has it self interest at heart than it is to deal with a government which is hell bent on "helping."
Why doesn't the government (or rather, regulators/politicians) have it's self-interest at heart? Why doesn't the corporation want to help? Ayn always says, check your premises...
The 'net simply moves/changes too fast for legislators and their regulators
I keep hearing this and similar comments over and over, but I don't understand it.
In what way has the Net changed so fundamentally that a privacy policy from 1990, or 1980 would be outdated today? The entire point of good lawmaking is to make a law general enough to be adaptable to new circumstantial details.
If, at the beginning of Compuserve in the 70s, Congress had a made a law saying:
"No one shall, without prior consent of the user, keep records of that user's activities on any electronic network, including personally identifiable information, except such that is necessary for technical or security reasons. This shall in no way limit the use of information provided by a user in any public forum such that a user would not reasonably expect such information to be considered private."
And there would be another paragraph explaining that people with existing/ongoing relationships can store and use such information as is necessary to maintain that relationship (commercial or not). And another one talking about how sharing information with third-parties is subject to other rules, and some final sections with definitions of terms used.
Making law is very much the same as making code -- if you do it high-level enough, you only have to change the details to make it work in entirely new situation.
More regulation from the FTC is not the answer, because clever people always find a loophole or a way around regulations.
So we shouldn't even try? People manage to get around the laws against murder on occassion, but we haven't seen fit to scrap them yet. At the beginning of the Civil Rights Era, the anti-discrimination laws were circumvented with dull regularity. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a companies who won't do anything to avoid getting in trouble under them.
The point is that yes, people will get around the law but we'll reach a balance point that's a lot closer to provacy than it is right now. We're certainly not going to get more provacy by doing nothing...
It is not possible to claim that a particular document is both a trade secret and copyrighted.
The two are mutually exclusive.
Whatever law school you went to, you should get a refund. What would preclude a copyright on a text document that describes a trade secret?
Sorry, bad luck. You've hit someone who's studied that period of history fairly extensively :)
:)
Well, but you don't seem to be disagreeing with the conclusion so much as providing more details.
Yes, the logistical issues of invading Russia were difficult (made more so by the scorched earth policy of the russians that I talked about).
Yes, the climate played a huge part (just as it had for Napolean) but the Russians would have won even without that advantage.
It was, as you point out, the fact that the Russians are willing to do ANYTHING to win that has always made them so formidable in war. And that's what I'm talking about -- a populace with weapons (even broken glass bottles and suicide bombers or convicts) simply cannot be defeated by a more "professional" military force with superiour military technology.
Fear and terror areb effective weapons, as you point out. Laser-guided bombs and air superiority have the effect of making people realize things could blow up any time without warning, which is quite effective.
But V2s provided the same terror effect. And what we learned was that it doesn't demoralize the populace, it makes them willing to eat dog food and melt down their false teeth to make bullets. The probelm with employing terror and fear to control a populace is (again, as was pointed out years ago) that fear and hate are very close, and a population that hates you with all their being will kill you, even if it means grinding your tanks to a halt with their own bodies.
For most of history, the Chinese have been far superior technologically than other civilisations, winning every battle due to superior tactics, strategy and firepower.
That is, until they met the Mongols, the most low-tech fighting force on Earth. Although the Mongols made great use of horseback, the majority of their troops were on foot and used nothing more complicated than a club. Very much like the russians, these were people who simply would not stop fighting.
But an armed population on the current model isn't really much of a defence, Sun Tzu or not
WEll then that's what i don't understand -- it's not about technology. If you want to occupy land, you have to have physical human beings with guns or flamethrowers or something to hold it. Do you expect the native population to just mail you tax checks every month? Sooner or later it is the occupying soldiers living in the same city as those they occupy, which makes them very vulnerable, no matter how much technology they have.
We won the gulf war so clearly on because we did not have occupation as a goal. We simply drove in, flanked to the left of Kuwait and squeezed anything that moved to the north of the border. if we had tried to occupy Bagdhad then our soldiers would have had to walk the streets with rifles, just as they do in Kosovo.
Technology changes the process of war but not the fundamental issues of occupying land. Air power, mechanized infantry, gunpowder, the Phalanx, these are all great tools for fighting, but they don't do shit for profiting from what you've taken.
The lesson we HAVE to learn from Afghanistan, Vietnam, the American revolution, the French Revolution, WW2 France and germany, is that if the civilians do not support your military actions you simply will not succeed at occupation and control in the long term.
(Of course, we've also learned from many other places that if the civilians are ambivilent or cynical, pretty much anyone can take control and they won't lift a finger).
So to summarize: Don't ever start a land war in Asia, I don't care what technology you have, the civilian population will decide the winner. But feel free to take over any central or south American country, they don't much care who steals the taxes.
I'd rather be hit in the head with a skillet than a bullet
I'd rather be shot than stabbed. You're much more likely to survive a shooting...
Which is why places like Kosovo are so peaceful and safe for children, I suppose?
Well since Uzis have been illegal in the US for some time (and no automatic weapon is legal, period) there is nothing to stop this now save crossing your fingers.
Of course, if the guy standing BEHIND the guy with an Uzi had a gun, he might be able to shoot UZI guy before UZI man kills the rest of the patrons.
We seem to forget so quicly that many of the most famous gun-related crimes in the US have been *STOPPED* by a law-abiding citizen with a gun, minutes or hours before the police were able to deal with it...
But I also understand that armies are different now and that it has consequences.
It has consequences, but not many (from the standpoint of controlling a population).
Sun Tzu's texts on how to fight with pikemen a few tousand years ago are essentially identical to current military troop strategy. Flanks, thrusts, numerical ratios, projecting power, etc.
While you can take over territory with tanks faster than you could with horse cavalry, sooner or later human soldiers with guns have to control the population, otherwise you won't get the taxes or industrial output of the conquered territory.
Dropping an a-bomb is good to stop the production of enemy tanks but does little to provide you with taxes in the future.
Laser-guided bombs cannot control territory, they can only stop industrial output or destroy communications and logistics.
Chemical weapons are good against troops but have the nasty side-effect of killing the civilians and fauna, which isn't good for business.
The russians had technology grossly inferior to the germnans in WW2, and the French were much closer to the Germans. But france was occupied and Russia was not because the French fought tank to tank and lost, leaving plenty behind for the Germans to add to their inventory. The russians burned their own cities and factories to the ground and retreated before the Germans (the same as they had done to the French under napolean just as successfully). Though they also fought with tanks, the Germansd lost for the same reason Napolean did - there was nothing to conquer but bare land. No people to control, no industry to run. Just land, which isn't very useful.
And their soldiers died of cold and starvation because there were no farms to loot, no citizens to press into logistical support.
have a deep suspicion of the type of person who carrys a penknife
Must be terrifying to get out of bed in the morning!
What ever else you cannot deny that your average american gunowner has a tendancy towards trigger happiness.
Well, sure you can. The vast, vast vast majority of legal gun owners in the US never shoot another human being in their life.
It's the same misconception people have about police in the US -- it's generally thought that they must shoot criminals every few weeks or so. But the truth is the vast majority of police never even draw their gun in defense, and a statistally small portion of that number ever fire a single bullet at a criminal in their entire career. That's why (unfortunately) so many screw-ups occur with cops shooting -- it's so rare to pull a gun no matter how much you train for that moment. It just happens very rarely.
So no, the average american noncriminal gunowner (whether civilian or police) is certainly not trigger-happy in any way.
It's those criminals who do like to shoot a lot more frequently that tend to throw the statistics for the overall population...
Protecting yourself from a nuclear power with handguns (or semiautomatic assault rifles or
whatever)? Any common sense ever applied to the thinking of gun fanatics? That may have been the case in the
1700's but not anymore. Few thousand gallons of mustard gas (or any other modern battle gas or virus
developed for biological warfare) should do ok if your govenment really wanted to oppress you.
I dunno, rusty AK-47s seemed to do okay against Mustard Gas and nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
Maybe it's not very useful to annihilate the population you're trying to control?...
Ahh, so the irregular or territorial army ought to be able to overthrow the central government. Any particular decision mechanism as to when they should decide its time for a revolution?.
This seems an utter red herring in terms of gun control debate.
Red herring? How so? You know the US had a Civil War, right? That's about how it happens (although it was a lot more formal than most revolutions/overthrows, successful or not).
Would you at least think about world and US history before making illogical statements on the basis of US government and the constitutional framing process?
Does anyone really thing the framers were sitting around thinking, "Oh, we've got free speech, let's make sure everyone has the right to go hunting and then we'll get to speedy jury trial later on". It's the second amendent for goodness sake! The states would not have ratified the constitution if they believed they would have no means of armed resistance against the new federal government.
Even the Surpeme Court recognizes this is the motivation behind the second amendment, the only argument is whether the "well-regulated militia" with the ability to fight against the federal government is a standing state army (such as the National Guard) or is the adult citizenry at large (the context of "militia" at the time of writing)...
So the creators of the constitution has so little faith in their own document that they needed to provide a means within that very document to invalidate it? If that's the case then it must be a pretty poor basis for government.
The framers had recently gone through several changes of Government (we didn't jump from British colonists to USA, we had several state governments for EACH state and multiple federal governments before the USA & Constitution & Bill of Rights).
Those were a rough few decades, having little to do with the quality of documents that established each government. The framers knew it was just as likely the USA & Constitution would be replaced again as succeed (although obviously they hoped it would work out, which is why so many comprimises went into the creation -- and it satisfied no one perfectly but everyone well enough that it DID succeed).
Lets not say the French Revolution was without purpose just because of the years of the Terror or the many asinine governments they went through to find their way...
But you did nothing to disarm his arguments, which were essentially verbatim descriptions of why we lost Vietnam and the British lost the US.
It doesn't matter how well-armed the occupying force (and by occupying force it might mean the standing army simply enforcing laws in its own country) is, it will ALWAYS lose to a civilian population with weapons.
It has nothing to do with "Amerika" or "Red Dawn", this is a simple principle understood since the ealiest military planners of 5000 BC in China and the middle east began writing about military science.
If soldiers (say, white and black americans) are really well armed but are trying to kill terrorists/revolutionaries that look exactly like civilians (because they are!) they will lose because they don't know if that's "Farmer Bob" or "Bob Who's Gonna Shoot Ya", and you can't be on alert 24 hours a day. Ask anyone stationed in Vietnam well behind the front lines how safe it was to be in a US military base in "well-controlled" territory (that is, when terrorists weren't suicide-bombing the place and prostitutes weren't shredding penises with razor blades in their vaginas and restaurants weren't deliberately poisoning food, etc). it's hard to control a country if people really don't want you there, and killing them all (believe it or not!) is rarely an acceptable victory condition to a military...
You guys all seem to not understand the nature of "control".
A government doesn't kill people to control them. that's called "being the lord of nothing". So yes, we could drop antrax and a-bombs and wipe out all the citizens, and you will be in complete control of a radioactive desert. Congratulations.
You don't win a war without controlling the land. You can't control the land without controlling the people who live on that land. If you move everyone out, you control a land with no production value. if you kill everyone you own a land without production value.
Why is this so hard to understand?
We grossly overpowered Vietnam, yet lost! We had a-bombs and chemical weapons and a lot bigger guns, but lost. No because our army wasn't bigger or better, but because it was IMPOSSIBLE to control a land where any person might be an innocent civilian or an armed enemy. Yes, if we had just killed everyone we would have "won", but left a wasteland.
If the British had gone from door to door and killed every person in America, the revolution would have ended, but there would have been no value left in the land because no one would be left to make products and generate taxes. That was not a "victory condition" for the British, but they were left with the same situation we had in Vietnam -- is it an armed rebel or a loyal revenue-generating farmer?...
It took you gun crazy Americans 10 million Jewish lives and 2 years before you gave a sh*t.
Lets not forget about the 6 million Gypsies and gays and communists and catholics. And a few million soldiers on all sides.
Don't try and make it look like you won the war. You simply finished it.
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that people did not want America to be the "policeman of the world"? Was there a vote to change this, because now whenever we get involved overseas we are criticized for throwing our weight around and being arrogant bullies. So which is it, should we use military force to defend our view of the world or not?
And there's a big difference between "ending it" and "winning it". The war was already on its way to an end before America was involved -- an end where China would have been part of Japan and the French would have bigger problems than going on strike every month...
While you're absolutely right that the high wholesale costs are what kills everyone involved, that's not addressed in any way by this FTC settlement. The wholesale cost is going to remain exactly the same.
So yes, if the cost of getting the CD to the distributor (whether by reduced profit, marketing, R&D, or royalties) were to go down then everyone could afford to sell CDs for $9.99...
I'm sure there are plenty of people more than interested in sharing information and advice, but unfortunately the article (and original email, possibly) make it pretty much impossible.
First off, it doesn't sound like they are claiming to have copyright on HTML code. Not only would that be tenuous under the best of circumstances, but the fact that Dreamweaver was used makes it even more unlikely.
And oh, by the way they did some back end code that we've re-done in CGI. So is THAT what they're suing you for? Did you take their code and remake it in a different environment? That hasn't anything to do with Dreamweaver or HTML.
And we certainly don't have enough information about the situation to make any meaningful judgement. Was the first company paid? Did they have a contract, it would say who owns what. No advertising company would contract out work without saying who owns what because the likelyhood of reuse is too great.
The major question is: WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SUING YOU FOR? Without the answer to that question, NO ONE here can do more than speculate inaccurately.
And please, if you don't know what the phrase "First North American Serial Rights" means, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP GIVING LEGAL ADVICE (More like wild speculation)....
Microsoft doesn't lose much by pissing off a bunch of avowed anti-Microsoft Linux-lovers.
/. isn't a big loss for them (although I suspect more of us Win32 weenies are on here than anyone suspects -- we are nerds, too) but the front page article in Infoworld talking about how Microsoft is trying to supress the publication of an "open" standard sure wouldn't make too many IS admins or CIOs comfortable with the support for that standard (or it's potential logevity)...
Well, pissing off
I know that the instant reaction is "hooray", and ultimately this will result in lower proces at places like Best Buy (remember when they used to sell new releases for $9.99?).
But this isn't necessarily the case of record companies gouging consumers, so much as record companies "protecting" stores.
Every store buys their CDs for pretty much the same wholesale price (maybe $11), and the MSRP is $15-20. But Best Buy was a new kid on the block and was will ing to lose a dollar on every CD to get you in the store, hoping you'd pick up a CD player or a video game while you're there.
Now this sounds like a good deal until you realize that a Record Store can't sell their music for less than what they paid, and essentially have no chance of competing with a megastore that can treat music as a loss leader. So record stores have been closing, and our musical choices at Best Buy are (needless to say) more along the lines of Britney Spears than Indy Imports.
Granted, this is pretty much the same issue as brick-and-mortar places will face in regards to online retailers offering significant discounts, even willing to lose money to build business the same way best Buy did the first few years.
But economics doesn't go away just because CDs are cheaper for a few years. What happens when everyone but Best Buy (or CDNow or whoever) has gotten out of the CD business? When all the local record stores have closed, and Best Buy decides to start charging $15/CD again? You're screwed, because there's no more record stores. Best Buy can survive a war of attrition a lot longer, and once they win they have no requirement to keep the proces low.
Not that this will necessarily happen (in fact i consider it unlikely simply because online retailers will always be available for CDs at the lowest retail cost).
But it isn't an imaginary fear that the record stores have -- look at the stores that have closed in the wake of the Wal-Martization of america...
to answer the question you've asked a million times -- it has nothing to do with the preview pane. Outlook has a setting to automatically open attatchments (which is off by default) that would (and did for many people) run the VBS file automatically.
The foolishness is in people enabling that idiotic setting, in MS putting the setting there, and most of all in MS making "high security" (the setting email runs under in "internet options") still capable of running javascript, cookies, vbscript, etc. I don't consider that "high security" and if MS would change that one default half of these email viruses would die oevrnight because you would have to save and execute the file as a separate step -- no double-clicking to open a script file...
I guess Windows 386 (1987) was a figment of my imagination.
Nope, it was real. It just didn't do multitasking (task switching at best), and MS didn't have a multitasking OS until OS/2-WinNT in the 90's. Didn't have a multitasking consumer OS until win95 (arguably) or Win98.
I agree that the placement of refrigeration (and air conditioning) is incorrect -- it is possibly the single most important engineering accomplishment of the past several hundred years, right with the printing press.
Talk all you want about internal combustion, petrochemicals, etc, they are all very important and changed the world, but they did not unquestionably and uniformly improve every aspect of our lives and our existence as a species.
Without refrigeration, we would not have any other technologies on the scale necessary for modern life. You couldn't have the current phone or electrical grid, computers and most other modern technology would have been nearly impossible to invent. Space travel would be impossible, much air travel would be as well.
Without refrigeration, our life expectancy would still be about 30-50 years because vaccines and the blood supply would be impossible to make and maintain. Our food supplies would be just as questionable as those at the turn of the last century (when food poisoning was a perfectly common way to die).
And of course without such reliable ways to safely transport food and other perishables, our economy could never grow to the scale of current urbanization.
And don't forget that "air conditioning" as it literally means, allows us to control the air in an environment. We can not only make it warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, we can also control the humidity so that electronics can function properly and valuable materials are not destroyed or contaminated by water vapor.
To understand the danger of humidity, simply visit the tombs of Egypt, where humidity did not exist until the irrigation projects of the past hundred years. For thousands of years, delicate artifacts sat perfectly preserved, and in the past hundred they have literally begun to disintegrate as humidity attacks them.
Refrigeration is unquestionably one of the most significant advances in mankind's control over his environment, along with irrigation and fire.
And like many great advances, it was scorned early on by others. The New York Times (keeping in mind NY made a lot of money by shipping ice all over the country for cooling) published an editorial making fun of "some fool in Florida thinks he can make ice better than God Almighty!"...
The 386 was around for years before they even put in support for more than 1MB, and even then it was only because they were threatened with a very good competitor - DRDOS
And of course, DesqView386 offered true multi-tasking on the 386 processor, taking advantage of all the new capabilities of the processor while maintaining 100% compatibility with DOS applications. About 10 years vefore MS got around to it...
Isn't it? What is the difference between a PDF files -- a stream of 1s and 0s which, when interpreted by a certain computer program, causes a particular action (i.e., a display of text) -- and a source code file
Well, the manifestation of the bits isn't what we're talking about, but rather the words, the arrangements of letters and idea that the PDF contains, is what is protected without question, because those words (whether represented as bits, as ink, or as stone carvings) are a "creative expression".
So to answer your question, the copyright status of the content wouldn't be affected by how it is stored (whether it's a PDF or a batch file that prints it to the screen). The words that are represented are protected. Whether or not the program that generates those words has a separate protection under [copyright|patent] is where the gray area and debate is.
Does this hamper legitimate reverse-engineering of the product?
No more than IBM hampered Compaq from reverse-engineering the original IBM-PC BIOS back in '83.
IBM actively published the BIOS specifications for exactly the reason you state -- it made it improbably that anyone technically capable of reverse-engineering it had not been exposed to the "trade secret". They thought it would make bulletproof legal protection.
Compaq had to search wide and far to find a team of engineeres who could swear they had never seen or heard anything about the BIOS "trade secrets". They locked them in a room with a black box version of the IBM-PC, and a second team "outside the room" (since they had been exposed to the trade secrets) would tell them whether they were hot or cold. They reverse-engineered it in one of the most important feats of the computer age.
And they kept detailed logs & journals of every step along the way so that they could prove beyond a doubt that they had succeeded in reverse-engineering the BIOS without seeing the published "secrets".
This may be, alas, further proof of Microsoft's fall -- they truly are becoming like IBM was back then, using tricks and traps to protect themselves rather than building a better mousetrap.
What's sad is that MS, Compaq, et al -- who would not exist without that single feat of engineering -- are more than happy to support laws that would prevent it from happening again (DMCA, etc).