Again, I fail to see how anything in that article implied that they are against the DMCA, as enacted.
They are not against the DMCA "as enacted". They are beginning to ramp up opposition to the DMCA as enforced. Just as there is many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip, there is much room for creative "interpretation" of a law once passed. How it plays out in the courts is a vital thing... and maybe the telcos are beginning to realize they bought into a viper's nest by agreeing to the DMCA. What the Content Cartel wishes to do with the law is far beyond what the telcos thought would be done.
Remember, the DMCA "would never be used to silence research"... until Felton.
Until Verizon improves their quality, I'm going with the company that gives me a good service. After all, in the end, all either one cares about is their bottom line.
And, apparently, that's all you care about, too -- your own bottom line.
This is why the Bad Guys win: People willing to make decisions of fundamental and lasting import based essentially on "What cool toy comes in this box today?"
I'm not saying you have to go out and subscribe to Verizon just because they seem to be on the side of goodness and nice here. I'm just saying, it's odd to whine about how Verizon is focused only on what it can get, while establishing that that's your motive, too. If Verizon is on the side of consumers in this fight -- even if the alliance is more along the lines of US/USSR vs. the Nazis -- then, on this matter, let's support them. Don't let your local contretemps make your decisions for you.
That people ususally operate in their own interest seems to be a new concept for a lot of Slashdot readers.
What seems to be a new concept for a lot of other slashdot readers is this: Sometimes, your best interest != the most narrowly defined, selfish interest. Sometimes, doing something for the general good -- even if it has costs, short-term -- is in your own long-term interest. For example, consider the largest of the colonies that eventually became the US, such as Virgina or New York. By economics and by population, they could have bullied the surrounding states and fought hard for a political system that enshrined their features of dominance. But they compromised, because the leaders at that time recognized that a strong US -- even one that costs some of the sovereignty of the states -- was better (even for VA or NY) than a collection of weak states.
Likewise, businesses could adopt ethic that says, long-term investment in the community is better for everyone... including the business itself. It doesn't require a stockholder revolution or a change in the laws. It requires a larger horizon and a reduced focused on the next-moment profit.
The problem with capitalism is not that it is intrinsically inhumane. Capitalism is just an engine that, history indicates, is the most wildly successful method to attain the goods people value. The problem is, too many capitalists fail to set "the good of community" as a good they value. Capitalism tells you how to maximize efficiency to attain what you desire. It does not tell you what to desire -- it does not set a moral worth on anything. Too many modern business decide "Oh, the market tells me what I should want", which is insane. Human wants and needs are the inputs to the market, along with natural resources, labor, etc.
And governments shouldn't always give in to mere negative publicity.
Well, governments shouldn't do such bone-headed things, either, but oh, wel... A democratic government needs to listen to a negative reaction from the citizens from whom it derives its mandate to govern. It's fine line between being responsive to citizen concerns and being driven by polling. I just wish the government would at least attempt to walk it...
Profiling is a fact of life for law enforcement, and profiling is designed to be effective, not to be aligned with the editorial page of the New York Times
The fact that it is "designed" to be effective is absolutely no indicator that it is effective. The fact that it is not "designed" to be illegally discriminatory is absolutely no indicator that it is, in fact, not discriminatory. In a pluralist society, profiling quite rightly raises hackles and -- if it is to be used at all -- must be constructed very carefully and narrowly.
Personally, I find the idea repugnant and prone to abuse, so I vote for "not at all".
They know they're not ever going to be able to do this - but do you really think anybody who's livelihood depends on being paid to continually fight this war is going to come out and say, "You know.. we could really be spending this money somewhere else"?
I know it's just TV and hence proves nothing, but I like the words that Aaron Sorkin put in the mouth of the President on The West Wing:
"I inherited the war on drugs from a President who inherited it from a President who inherited it from a President before that. I'm not a hundred percent sure who we're fighting but I know we're not winning. Ten years ago we spent five billion dollars fighting drugs and we did such a good job that last year we spent 16 billion. Sixty percent of federal prisoners are in jail on drug charges as opposed to two and a half percent that are there for violent crime. We imprison a higher percentage of our citizens than Russia did under Communism and South Africa did under apartheid. Somewhere between 50 and 85% of the prison population has a drug or alcohol abuse problem. We've tried 'Just Say No', I don't think it's going to work.
According to the Constitution, Congress has the power to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water, yet White House Lawyers think otherwise
Thank God I'm not the only who's noticed that President Bush has attempted to usurp an explicit power reserved to Congress. I wonder if history is going to record the 9/11 attacks as the American version of the Reichstag fire...
I don't have to -- I'm not making the positive argument here. If consumer response were truly random (and I don't believe it is, either), then some campaigns would be successes and others failures. There wouldn't be any necessary connection among the successful campaigns. But if I restrict my sample to "every single effective advertising campaign ever launched in history" and thereby exclude the unsuccessful ones from consideration, then of course I'm going to see a correlation. But it's just a selection effect.
Here's a new hypothesis: Mailing your college application on a sunny day improves your chances of getting into Harvard. If I look at every successful application to Harvard that was mailed on a sunny day, I see that -- wow! -- they were all accepted. Of course, lots of people were accepted who didn't mail on a sunny day. And lots of people who mailed on a sunny day happened not to have been accepted. But if I consider just "every successful application mailed on a sunny day", look at the massive correlation between sunny days and acceptances!
The difference here, of course, is that this new hypothesis is well-framed to be tested. But the "success" of advertising is filtered through several layers of coarse tools requiring interpretation. Positive correlations are accentuated and negatives suppressed. And in my (silly) hypothesis, I don't get to invoke time-lag, or market penetration, or fractal demographics, or the million others things alleged to have an impact on evaluating the success of a campaign.
Can you propose any non- contrived mechanism that would produce results that would cause a correlation between advertising and sales? One that would work in every case?
No. Luckily, I don't have to, because it is not true that increased advertising increases sales "in every case". That's why there are ad campaigns that flop -- some of them are legendary. Edsel, anyone?
Its all about observed correlations. We do something, we see a change. If it happens over and over, we can assume that it'll make a change if we do it in the future.
Which is all well and good when you can isolate the agents. Is it enough to know that you feel better when you bang your head against the wall, to conclude that banging your head against the wall makes you feel better? What if, every time you happen to bang your head, someone also shoots you up with morphine?
And for advertising, it gets even better: It's not a one-to-one causation; it's a "x percentage of viewers" thing. And it's not strongly temporally linked -- we all "know" that even good ad campaigns have a lag time as the concept "seeps" into the "mass consciousness". And of course, there's nothing like isolated causation at all. Did Sears really sell more air conditioners because of that ad? Or because it's summer and people need air conditioners? Perhaps both... but how do you deconvolve the bit that's due to advertising?
My argument was, and remains, that the effectiveness of advertising is not measured becuase the tools are too coarse, the sample too diverse, and the data too sparse. While some advertising clearly leaves its mark, even after a century of trying, the ad execs haven't figured out why -- or whether this particular campaign will yield benefits.
Which leads back to my original position: Executives spend millions on advertising not necessarily because it will work as much as because they believe it will work.
Hell, how did you first ever find out about the Tivo itself?
Well, actually, I heard about it on slashdot.:) As for
And don't give me 'from a friend who heard from a friend' etc., most likely that chain, however long, started with an ad.
Ah, the beauty of positing an unmeasurable as proof. How do you know that the chain "most likely" started with an ad?
And to take it further: The chain "most likely" started with an ad. We know this because ads are ubiquitous. Ads are ubiquitous because they work. We know they work because any chain of association can "most likely" be traced back to an ad. We know this because ads are ubiquitous...
In the end, all I was saying is, a lot of money is spent on advertising without any way to directly measure its effectiveness. Am I influence by ads? Certainly, to the extent that I am aware there are products out there. (Great example: movie ads on TV. I won't in general trawl my local googleplex for new movies but I'm aware of when a new one comes out.)
But I think ads work most for products that are truly distinguishable, since such ads actually convey information. For products that are essentially fungible -- corn flakes, for example -- ads can't just provide the info that makes them superior, because there isn't any. Such ads perforce fall back on deceptive or meaningless content ("Eat GeneriFlakes -- they're cooool"). Those ads, precisely, are the ones that bug people.
Why should I start paying for the show when I get it for free now?
Firstly, it isn't really free -- you pay for it with your time.
Secondly, you might not have a choice. A lot of people would rather get the shows for even less than they do now -- they want to cut out the commercials. If enough people do this regularly, the model will fail... and it doesn't matter if you're the last one to get a TiVo. Below a certain threshhold other models become more compelling (even if the model is, "Save your money and don't operate a TV station."). You could easily find yourself swept into this bold new future even if you are completely satisfied with the current scheme.
People who think TV doesn't affect their buying habits make me laugh. Do you really think that commercials don't work? Why do you think companies pay millions of dollars for them if they don't work?
Blockquoth Lord Leverhulme:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half
Moral: Companies pay millions of dollars because they think they work. That does not in fact mean that they work. Entire industries have spent decades or more laboring under shared misconceptions. In the case of advertising, the measurement tools are so coarse and the data pool so vast, I think very little is demonstrable of cause-and-effect.
So today a friend tells me of this great new site "gumby". I go to the web and look for "gumby.com" (because it sounded somewhat commercial).
Why don't you ask your friend the actual name of the site? Instead of a potentially confusing shorthand? When I order books online and then tell someone about it, I say "I got it from bn.com", not "I got it from bn". Why? Because logically the.com is part of the nane. (And yes, I do the same with "amazon.com", which I don't refer to as "amazon", as that's either (a) a river in South America or (b) Wonder Woman's tribe.)
Of course, the other solution is, do a Google search and avoid the whole issue. Hopefully your friend told something about why "gumby" was a cool site. Go look for it. You know the risk in trying to use a telephone number as a search handle. Why should it be different for domain names?
How can I tell you to check out www.643sda453fgasdf.org or would you rather I told you to check out www.xyz.org? Especially if xyz was a reasonable form of the name.
Um, how about you tell me enough about the site that a Google search brings it up? And the more people who use that search pattern, the higher it appears on my page.
Maybe what we need is a good protocol for storing and sharing bookmarks.
So I'm part of the government yet I can't know everything about it?
Well, duh. Do you really think you have a right to know, say, the operational plans of the 101st Airborne division? I'm all for transparency in government but you have to be reasonable. Does that mean in this case there's a reason for opaqueness? I surely do not know. But in some cases, there certainly is.
Just because it's "your" government doesn't mean you own the thing, for Pete's sake.
So- to everyone whining about "ohohohoh they did something illegal- they should pay...." SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU ARE WRONG!
Um, if they were so altruistic -- patriotic, evem -- then why didn't they tell the Army, rather than blabbing it on a public forum? I mean, yay for accountability and the holding of incompetent feet to the fire. But now you gotta pay the cost of your civic virtue...
Word and Excel and IE *are* extra programs, and likely major causes of instability.
Well, according to Microsoft, IE is a part of the OS. Parts of the OS should not cause instability. And Word and Excel are Microsoft's flagship software... they also should not cause instability.
It's a lot like saying, "This engine is guaranteed to never ever break down... unless you're foolish enough to actually turn it on, in which case it's likely to blow up. But it will never break if you never use it."
For example, I could have bought and installed a Windows 2000 license for that machine for less than $500, but I wouldn't have been able to also run DNS and DHCP services on it without more software.
Plus you still have spent two+ hours on that, or another, installation issue.
lol, besides the hang on shut down thing having been patched several months (years?) ago,
My Win98 system is up to date on all patches and still has about a 30% chance of hanging during power-down. I have coworkers who have installed exactly no extra programs, who only use Word and Excel and IE, and who nonetheless still have the power-down problem. And before you ask -- yes, their machines are up-to-date too, as the IT people at the school do that periodicially.
... this shows that the rule of law is not dead in the United States, despite previous appearances. It's some of the best legal news since 9/11 -- not that the FBI overstepped its bounds (which could be expected) but that a court preemptively slapped them down for it.
Sometimes I feel that the federal judiciary is the only place that "gets it" about fundamental American rights and legal traditions. Then, of course, I think of Judge Kaplan and I get depressed again.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not against the DMCA "as enacted". They are beginning to ramp up opposition to the DMCA as enforced. Just as there is many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip, there is much room for creative "interpretation" of a law once passed. How it plays out in the courts is a vital thing... and maybe the telcos are beginning to realize they bought into a viper's nest by agreeing to the DMCA. What the Content Cartel wishes to do with the law is far beyond what the telcos thought would be done.
Remember, the DMCA "would never be used to silence research"... until Felton.
And, apparently, that's all you care about, too -- your own bottom line.
This is why the Bad Guys win: People willing to make decisions of fundamental and lasting import based essentially on "What cool toy comes in this box today?"
I'm not saying you have to go out and subscribe to Verizon just because they seem to be on the side of goodness and nice here. I'm just saying, it's odd to whine about how Verizon is focused only on what it can get, while establishing that that's your motive, too. If Verizon is on the side of consumers in this fight -- even if the alliance is more along the lines of US/USSR vs. the Nazis -- then, on this matter, let's support them. Don't let your local contretemps make your decisions for you.
What seems to be a new concept for a lot of other slashdot readers is this: Sometimes, your best interest != the most narrowly defined, selfish interest. Sometimes, doing something for the general good -- even if it has costs, short-term -- is in your own long-term interest. For example, consider the largest of the colonies that eventually became the US, such as Virgina or New York. By economics and by population, they could have bullied the surrounding states and fought hard for a political system that enshrined their features of dominance. But they compromised, because the leaders at that time recognized that a strong US -- even one that costs some of the sovereignty of the states -- was better (even for VA or NY) than a collection of weak states.
Likewise, businesses could adopt ethic that says, long-term investment in the community is better for everyone... including the business itself. It doesn't require a stockholder revolution or a change in the laws. It requires a larger horizon and a reduced focused on the next-moment profit.
The problem with capitalism is not that it is intrinsically inhumane. Capitalism is just an engine that, history indicates, is the most wildly successful method to attain the goods people value. The problem is, too many capitalists fail to set "the good of community" as a good they value. Capitalism tells you how to maximize efficiency to attain what you desire. It does not tell you what to desire -- it does not set a moral worth on anything. Too many modern business decide "Oh, the market tells me what I should want", which is insane. Human wants and needs are the inputs to the market, along with natural resources, labor, etc.
Well, governments shouldn't do such bone-headed things, either, but oh, wel... A democratic government needs to listen to a negative reaction from the citizens from whom it derives its mandate to govern. It's fine line between being responsive to citizen concerns and being driven by polling. I just wish the government would at least attempt to walk it...
The fact that it is "designed" to be effective is absolutely no indicator that it is effective. The fact that it is not "designed" to be illegally discriminatory is absolutely no indicator that it is, in fact, not discriminatory. In a pluralist society, profiling quite rightly raises hackles and -- if it is to be used at all -- must be constructed very carefully and narrowly.
Personally, I find the idea repugnant and prone to abuse, so I vote for "not at all".
I know it's just TV and hence proves nothing, but I like the words that Aaron Sorkin put in the mouth of the President on The West Wing:
Thank God I'm not the only who's noticed that President Bush has attempted to usurp an explicit power reserved to Congress. I wonder if history is going to record the 9/11 attacks as the American version of the Reichstag fire...
Here's a new hypothesis: Mailing your college application on a sunny day improves your chances of getting into Harvard. If I look at every successful application to Harvard that was mailed on a sunny day, I see that -- wow! -- they were all accepted. Of course, lots of people were accepted who didn't mail on a sunny day. And lots of people who mailed on a sunny day happened not to have been accepted. But if I consider just "every successful application mailed on a sunny day", look at the massive correlation between sunny days and acceptances!
The difference here, of course, is that this new hypothesis is well-framed to be tested. But the "success" of advertising is filtered through several layers of coarse tools requiring interpretation. Positive correlations are accentuated and negatives suppressed. And in my (silly) hypothesis, I don't get to invoke time-lag, or market penetration, or fractal demographics, or the million others things alleged to have an impact on evaluating the success of a campaign.
No. Luckily, I don't have to, because it is not true that increased advertising increases sales "in every case". That's why there are ad campaigns that flop -- some of them are legendary. Edsel, anyone?
Which is all well and good when you can isolate the agents . Is it enough to know that you feel better when you bang your head against the wall, to conclude that banging your head against the wall makes you feel better? What if, every time you happen to bang your head, someone also shoots you up with morphine?
And for advertising, it gets even better: It's not a one-to-one causation; it's a "x percentage of viewers" thing. And it's not strongly temporally linked -- we all "know" that even good ad campaigns have a lag time as the concept "seeps" into the "mass consciousness". And of course, there's nothing like isolated causation at all. Did Sears really sell more air conditioners because of that ad? Or because it's summer and people need air conditioners? Perhaps both... but how do you deconvolve the bit that's due to advertising?
My argument was, and remains, that the effectiveness of advertising is not measured becuase the tools are too coarse, the sample too diverse, and the data too sparse. While some advertising clearly leaves its mark, even after a century of trying, the ad execs haven't figured out why -- or whether this particular campaign will yield benefits.
Which leads back to my original position: Executives spend millions on advertising not necessarily because it will work as much as because they believe it will work.
Well, actually, I heard about it on slashdot.
Ah, the beauty of positing an unmeasurable as proof. How do you know that the chain "most likely" started with an ad?
And to take it further: The chain "most likely" started with an ad. We know this because ads are ubiquitous. Ads are ubiquitous because they work. We know they work because any chain of association can "most likely" be traced back to an ad. We know this because ads are ubiquitous...
In the end, all I was saying is, a lot of money is spent on advertising without any way to directly measure its effectiveness. Am I influence by ads? Certainly, to the extent that I am aware there are products out there. (Great example: movie ads on TV. I won't in general trawl my local googleplex for new movies but I'm aware of when a new one comes out.)
But I think ads work most for products that are truly distinguishable, since such ads actually convey information. For products that are essentially fungible -- corn flakes, for example -- ads can't just provide the info that makes them superior, because there isn't any. Such ads perforce fall back on deceptive or meaningless content ("Eat GeneriFlakes -- they're cooool"). Those ads, precisely, are the ones that bug people.
Firstly, it isn't really free -- you pay for it with your time.
Secondly, you might not have a choice. A lot of people would rather get the shows for even less than they do now -- they want to cut out the commercials. If enough people do this regularly, the model will fail
Blockquoth Lord Leverhulme:
Moral: Companies pay millions of dollars because they think they work. That does not in fact mean that they work. Entire industries have spent decades or more laboring under shared misconceptions. In the case of advertising, the measurement tools are so coarse and the data pool so vast, I think very little is demonstrable of cause-and-effect.
Why don't you ask your friend the actual name of the site? Instead of a potentially confusing shorthand? When I order books online and then tell someone about it, I say "I got it from bn.com", not "I got it from bn". Why? Because logically the
Of course, the other solution is, do a Google search and avoid the whole issue. Hopefully your friend told something about why "gumby" was a cool site. Go look for it. You know the risk in trying to use a telephone number as a search handle. Why should it be different for domain names?
Um, how about you tell me enough about the site that a Google search brings it up? And the more people who use that search pattern, the higher it appears on my page.
Maybe what we need is a good protocol for storing and sharing bookmarks.
I move we call for a slashback a few years ago...
Well, duh. Do you really think you have a right to know, say, the operational plans of the 101st Airborne division? I'm all for transparency in government but you have to be reasonable. Does that mean in this case there's a reason for opaqueness? I surely do not know. But in some cases, there certainly is.
Just because it's "your" government doesn't mean you own the thing, for Pete's sake.
Um, if they were so altruistic -- patriotic, evem -- then why didn't they tell the Army, rather than blabbing it on a public forum? I mean, yay for accountability and the holding of incompetent feet to the fire. But now you gotta pay the cost of your civic virtue...
ObShamelessPlug: my journal
... Princeton?
Well, according to Microsoft, IE is a part of the OS. Parts of the OS should not cause instability. And Word and Excel are Microsoft's flagship software... they also should not cause instability.
It's a lot like saying, "This engine is guaranteed to never ever break down... unless you're foolish enough to actually turn it on, in which case it's likely to blow up. But it will never break if you never use it."
Plus you still have spent two+ hours on that, or another, installation issue.
My Win98 system is up to date on all patches and still has about a 30% chance of hanging during power-down. I have coworkers who have installed exactly no extra programs, who only use Word and Excel and IE, and who nonetheless still have the power-down problem. And before you ask -- yes, their machines are up-to-date too, as the IT people at the school do that periodicially.
If you've been paying attention, yes.
FBI's Behavioral Analysis Program and Secret FISA Cour (2000 Dec 16)
More WTC News (2001 Sep 13) :)
And heck, that's just reading slashdot. Imagine if you followed an actual news site?
Sometimes I feel that the federal judiciary is the only place that "gets it" about fundamental American rights and legal traditions. Then, of course, I think of Judge Kaplan and I get depressed again.