I think you're misunderstanding why such tactics work. It isn't because "what the copyright owner says goes". It's because the big media companies have a lot of money to spend on lawyers.
Sigh. Every time legal issues come up on Slashdot, somebody declares that the law is obvious, and thinks that there's only an issue because nobody's thought to visit the courthouse.
The reality is this: law is complicated and expensive. It's not enough for you to declare that something's "obvious", you have to demonstrate it in court. That costs money. Lots of money.
I've always thought RMSs notion of "free" software was braindead. It's just not workable. We have the illusion that it does work because a lot of projects use the licenses to create an IP commons that benefits all of them. That's the Open Source model that Free Software purists sneer at. It works because there's an economic basis for it. There's no economic basis for a system that lets everybody hack their own cell phone, and never will be.
That summary of funding rates a 9.8 on the 10-point Weasel Scale. It makes it sound like President Clinton just wrote GM a check for $1.5 billion. The reality is that PNGV disbursed funding to various universities and research institutions in addition to all three major car companies. And far from being aimed at developing electric cars, it was mostly about creating more fuel-efficient gas engines.
You could argue that the whole PNGV program was just a big boondoggle, as Ralph Nader did. But that's beside the point. It wasn't PNGV's small contribution to the EV1's $500 million development cost that made the program fail. (Let's leave the money GM wasted on "sales and marketing" out of the equation.) What made it fail is that GM decided in advance that it would fail.
When GM started advertising the EV1, I looked at getting one. There was no option to buy the car. You could lease it for 2 years with no option to renew. Then you had to give it back -- all offers from lessors who wanted to keep their cars were refused. And as soon as it did get the cars back, GM junked them, every single one. There's no sign that they even considered selling them. Patently, GM was only interested in demonstrating that there was no market for the car.
And yes, GM was responding to pressure to produce a zero-emission car. But what do you think Tesla's responding to? The difference is that Tesla sees zero-emission cars as an opportunity, whereas GM just went through the motions so they could go back to making SUVs.
This "government is the problem" mantra is getting old. Sure, government is too big and too bureaucratic. Funny thing, so is the private sector.
Before you write such an extremely long rant, expend a little effort to get your facts straight. EV1 was a GM project, not a government one. Of course, it was designed to fail (in order to "prove" that there was no market for electric cars) but that's not on the government either.
I agree that there are disadvantages to being a big country. But there are also advantages, like not worrying about somebody bigger than you invading. I think that's been an issue for Finland once or twice.
In other words, it's not true that anybody can start a bank. You have to have enough experience in the industry so that investors will give you the startup costs. Or have a few million of your own lying around. I think that excludes the typical developer who just needs a bank that will provide him with electronic services on a small scale at a reasonable price.
Sigh. Can't anybody on Slashdot read in context? Of course I don't think that banks just magically appear. I wasn't asking if it's possible to start a bank. I was asking if it's possible for an ordinary person with no capital or business connections to start a bank.
When I followed the link you sent me, I ended up on an advertising page for some webinar or something. If there was a way past it, I couldn't find it.
So a googled "Start a bank". Got nothing but links for schemes to avoid taxes by starting an offshore bank or other business. I think most or all of them were scams.
Jeez, did you really think that I was asking for an example of anybody starting a bank? We're talking about banking options for a small development firm without a lot of capital. Which means that in this context, I was asking about somebody like that starting a bank, not some random capitalist.
I agree that corporations have way too much influence over government policy. But that's not the problem here.
You're oversimplifying things when you cast it as "the people" versus "corporations". In this particular case, the two are actually aligned. If Ares is canceled, it isn't just corporations in Utah and Alabama who will lose out there, it's all the people who work for these corporations, and everybody in the state who would be affected by the damage to the local economies. Which is just about everybody. Which is why "the people" are actually for Ares. But not all the people — just the ones that live in Utah and Alabama.
To most of us, Ares is pure pork. But not to its supporters. The problem is not "us" versus "them", it's the fact that everybody wants their own bit of pork, and everybody thinks that somebody else is being too greedy. That attitude is screwing us up on every level: health care, physical infrastructure, education, you name it.
A price point is an economic term. It refers to a theoretical optimum on a price curve. The word for the actual price of something is (drum roll please) "price."
Yeah, I know, this sort of semantic nitpicking is obnoxious. But I can't help myself, because people keep giving me money when I do it. Hence the name of my website.
I think simple comprehensibility was more of an issue. German regional dialects are notoriously hard to understand if you speak another dialect. Some Deutchophones find Arnold's German extremely hard to follow.
You know, when he tried out for the Terminator, it wasn't for the title role, it was for the hero. You have to wonder if he realizes just how weird his voice sounds. Which works great when he's playing an killer cyborg, of course. Whenever he's speaking in public, I keep expecting him to stop talking about the budget crisis or politics or whatever, and suddenly announce "Ahy ahm ah mahcheen!"
My job at Sun was to document their x86 servers, and it was my perception that Sun's were much better than Dell's. Obviously I was biased;) but I don't recall Dell (or anybody else) building systems that compared with our best 4U systems:
I've read one or two of those CYOA books. I seem to recall that they were much more coherent than any Sun web site.
Incidentally, Java Desktop is primarily run on top of Solaris, not Linux. And aside from the (extremely lame) rebranding, it is just GNOME. This was Sun's fifth attempt to provide a Solaris desktop that could compete with PCs and Macs.
If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites. I used to have a hell of a time finding the download I needed — and I was a Sun employee. That's one reason other server vendors (like Dell) have cleaning Sun's clock for a long time.
I wrote technical docs for Sun, some of which appeared on the web. One of the least favorite parts of my job was dealing with the company's web bureaucrats. They were in denial about the many problems with their tech, knew jack about clean web design, and had way too many processes that should have been automated but weren't. Worst of all, Sun's politics and organizational dysfunction meant that web content was generated by a half dozen different groups with overlapping and conflicting responsibilities.
Naturally, Oracle is trying to clean up this mess. And it's predictable that whoever is reworking Sun's web presence is going to screw up now and then — something that complicated is Murphy's Law waiting to happen. It's still a step in the right direction.
Poor fact-checking (and yeah, a lot of journalists are guilty of that) is completely different from this situation. It's one thing to get your facts wrong. It's quite another thing to issue a legal opinion without any training in the law, and without having read the legislation you're passing judgment on.
Classic case of what Darwin called the "confidence of the ignorant."
I'm going to say it one last time: the article is wrong. There is no blanket requirement for encryption. That's the interpretation of somebody who obviously hasn't read the law.
If you don't agree, tell me why, but don't keep quoting the same misinformation at me.
The law was written by people who believe...
You love to make bold statements in the absence of fact, don't you? You can't even get straight what the law does, and now you're lecturing me on why it was written.
I've read the law, and I don't see one word where it requires anything that isn't standard industry practice. And it has nothing to do with "throwing technology at the problem". Indeed, a lot of it is about establishing procedures for restricting access to the people who actually need it.
I am so bookmaking all your posts for this story. Then a year from now, I'll check up or the privacy law, and rub your nose in the lack of any challenge to it.
Despite your weird arguments, the law does not do say anything except "you shall surround all sensitive data with reasonable security measures." It does outlaw taking unencrypted financial records home on your laptop (and about time!). But there's nothing that says you have to encrypt all your data — the data just has to he protected somehow. Like behind a firewall on a system only authorized folks can access.
Come on already. You made one brainless off the cuff statement, and promptly got shot down. It happens to all of us. Suck it up and admit it, instead of wasting all this effort on arguments that only convince you.
Did you even read my post? My whole point is that TFA is wrong.
I'm glad you're not the judge who decides whether this law is "unconstitutionally vague." Hopefully, that person will actually read the law before coming to any conclusions. You might want to give it a try. It's actually pretty clear. Link in my previous post.
This is about replacing one weapons system with another
Which is precisely why Bush didn't like this weapon and Obama does. For Bush it's not worth the expense if he has to decommission nukes (not a big net gain in ability to blow things up). For Obama, having a way to decommission nukes is the whole point. By replacing nukes with a new system that's even more vorpal, he gets the nuclear reduction he wants without looking weak.
Of course, the tea-birther will jump on this as yet more "proof" that Obama's a wimp. But nothing will convince them otherwise, so that's hardly a factor.
I don't think many people host with their ISPs. Hosting or colo providers are more common. But that's a moot point, because a domain name isn't tied to the host, it's tied to the nameserver that resolves it. People tend to get their hosting, name server, and domain name all from one provider, but tat's just a convenience. And if 2LDs were expensive, there'd be a competitive market for cheap 3LDs.
But even if were tied to your provider, the typical vanity web site doesn't really need a persistent domain. If you have to move MyKittens.JoesHosting.com to MyKittens.BillsHosting.com, you just email the dozen or so people who access the site.
All this is really, really, moot. I don't think there's a chance in hell of $10 domain registration going away. I just keep wishing we didn't have a setup that facilitated squatting.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're misunderstanding why such tactics work. It isn't because "what the copyright owner says goes". It's because the big media companies have a lot of money to spend on lawyers.
Sigh. Every time legal issues come up on Slashdot, somebody declares that the law is obvious, and thinks that there's only an issue because nobody's thought to visit the courthouse.
The reality is this: law is complicated and expensive. It's not enough for you to declare that something's "obvious", you have to demonstrate it in court. That costs money. Lots of money.
I've always thought RMSs notion of "free" software was braindead. It's just not workable. We have the illusion that it does work because a lot of projects use the licenses to create an IP commons that benefits all of them. That's the Open Source model that Free Software purists sneer at. It works because there's an economic basis for it. There's no economic basis for a system that lets everybody hack their own cell phone, and never will be.
That summary of funding rates a 9.8 on the 10-point Weasel Scale. It makes it sound like President Clinton just wrote GM a check for $1.5 billion. The reality is that PNGV disbursed funding to various universities and research institutions in addition to all three major car companies. And far from being aimed at developing electric cars, it was mostly about creating more fuel-efficient gas engines.
You could argue that the whole PNGV program was just a big boondoggle, as Ralph Nader did. But that's beside the point. It wasn't PNGV's small contribution to the EV1's $500 million development cost that made the program fail. (Let's leave the money GM wasted on "sales and marketing" out of the equation.) What made it fail is that GM decided in advance that it would fail.
When GM started advertising the EV1, I looked at getting one. There was no option to buy the car. You could lease it for 2 years with no option to renew. Then you had to give it back -- all offers from lessors who wanted to keep their cars were refused. And as soon as it did get the cars back, GM junked them, every single one. There's no sign that they even considered selling them. Patently, GM was only interested in demonstrating that there was no market for the car.
And yes, GM was responding to pressure to produce a zero-emission car. But what do you think Tesla's responding to? The difference is that Tesla sees zero-emission cars as an opportunity, whereas GM just went through the motions so they could go back to making SUVs.
This "government is the problem" mantra is getting old. Sure, government is too big and too bureaucratic. Funny thing, so is the private sector.
Before you write such an extremely long rant, expend a little effort to get your facts straight. EV1 was a GM project, not a government one. Of course, it was designed to fail (in order to "prove" that there was no market for electric cars) but that's not on the government either.
I agree that there are disadvantages to being a big country. But there are also advantages, like not worrying about somebody bigger than you invading. I think that's been an issue for Finland once or twice.
In other words, it's not true that anybody can start a bank. You have to have enough experience in the industry so that investors will give you the startup costs. Or have a few million of your own lying around. I think that excludes the typical developer who just needs a bank that will provide him with electronic services on a small scale at a reasonable price.
I think it's pretty clear from the context that I was talking about somebody who wasn't already rich.
Sigh. Can't anybody on Slashdot read in context? Of course I don't think that banks just magically appear. I wasn't asking if it's possible to start a bank. I was asking if it's possible for an ordinary person with no capital or business connections to start a bank.
When I followed the link you sent me, I ended up on an advertising page for some webinar or something. If there was a way past it, I couldn't find it.
So a googled "Start a bank". Got nothing but links for schemes to avoid taxes by starting an offshore bank or other business. I think most or all of them were scams.
Jeez, did you really think that I was asking for an example of anybody starting a bank? We're talking about banking options for a small development firm without a lot of capital. Which means that in this context, I was asking about somebody like that starting a bank, not some random capitalist.
Tell you what... You think this is a brilliant way to make money? Open your own bank.
Really? Have you done it? Can you point me to somebody who's done it?
I agree that corporations have way too much influence over government policy. But that's not the problem here.
You're oversimplifying things when you cast it as "the people" versus "corporations". In this particular case, the two are actually aligned. If Ares is canceled, it isn't just corporations in Utah and Alabama who will lose out there, it's all the people who work for these corporations, and everybody in the state who would be affected by the damage to the local economies. Which is just about everybody. Which is why "the people" are actually for Ares. But not all the people — just the ones that live in Utah and Alabama.
To most of us, Ares is pure pork. But not to its supporters. The problem is not "us" versus "them", it's the fact that everybody wants their own bit of pork, and everybody thinks that somebody else is being too greedy. That attitude is screwing us up on every level: health care, physical infrastructure, education, you name it.
A price point is an economic term. It refers to a theoretical optimum on a price curve. The word for the actual price of something is (drum roll please) "price."
Yeah, I know, this sort of semantic nitpicking is obnoxious. But I can't help myself, because people keep giving me money when I do it. Hence the name of my website.
I think simple comprehensibility was more of an issue. German regional dialects are notoriously hard to understand if you speak another dialect. Some Deutchophones find Arnold's German extremely hard to follow.
You know, when he tried out for the Terminator, it wasn't for the title role, it was for the hero. You have to wonder if he realizes just how weird his voice sounds. Which works great when he's playing an killer cyborg, of course. Whenever he's speaking in public, I keep expecting him to stop talking about the budget crisis or politics or whatever, and suddenly announce "Ahy ahm ah mahcheen!"
Telekom Austria is a telecommunications company?
The shipping firmware was unmitigated shit though.
Sigh. I spent a lot of time writing up firmware bugs.
My job at Sun was to document their x86 servers, and it was my perception that Sun's were much better than Dell's. Obviously I was biased ;) but I don't recall Dell (or anybody else) building systems that compared with our best 4U systems:
http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/07/sun-x4600-x4500-servers-and-8000.html
I've read one or two of those CYOA books. I seem to recall that they were much more coherent than any Sun web site.
Incidentally, Java Desktop is primarily run on top of Solaris, not Linux. And aside from the (extremely lame) rebranding, it is just GNOME. This was Sun's fifth attempt to provide a Solaris desktop that could compete with PCs and Macs.
If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites. I used to have a hell of a time finding the download I needed — and I was a Sun employee. That's one reason other server vendors (like Dell) have cleaning Sun's clock for a long time.
I wrote technical docs for Sun, some of which appeared on the web. One of the least favorite parts of my job was dealing with the company's web bureaucrats. They were in denial about the many problems with their tech, knew jack about clean web design, and had way too many processes that should have been automated but weren't. Worst of all, Sun's politics and organizational dysfunction meant that web content was generated by a half dozen different groups with overlapping and conflicting responsibilities.
Naturally, Oracle is trying to clean up this mess. And it's predictable that whoever is reworking Sun's web presence is going to screw up now and then — something that complicated is Murphy's Law waiting to happen. It's still a step in the right direction.
Huh? Don't get the relevance of BSD to this discussion. We're talking firmware, not OSs.
Poor fact-checking (and yeah, a lot of journalists are guilty of that) is completely different from this situation. It's one thing to get your facts wrong. It's quite another thing to issue a legal opinion without any training in the law, and without having read the legislation you're passing judgment on.
Classic case of what Darwin called the "confidence of the ignorant."
The accompanying FAQ says
I'm going to say it one last time: the article is wrong. There is no blanket requirement for encryption. That's the interpretation of somebody who obviously hasn't read the law.
If you don't agree, tell me why, but don't keep quoting the same misinformation at me.
The law was written by people who believe...
You love to make bold statements in the absence of fact, don't you? You can't even get straight what the law does, and now you're lecturing me on why it was written.
I've read the law, and I don't see one word where it requires anything that isn't standard industry practice. And it has nothing to do with "throwing technology at the problem". Indeed, a lot of it is about establishing procedures for restricting access to the people who actually need it.
I am so bookmaking all your posts for this story. Then a year from now, I'll check up or the privacy law, and rub your nose in the lack of any challenge to it.
Despite your weird arguments, the law does not do say anything except "you shall surround all sensitive data with reasonable security measures." It does outlaw taking unencrypted financial records home on your laptop (and about time!). But there's nothing that says you have to encrypt all your data — the data just has to he protected somehow. Like behind a firewall on a system only authorized folks can access.
Come on already. You made one brainless off the cuff statement, and promptly got shot down. It happens to all of us. Suck it up and admit it, instead of wasting all this effort on arguments that only convince you.
Did you even read my post? My whole point is that TFA is wrong.
I'm glad you're not the judge who decides whether this law is "unconstitutionally vague." Hopefully, that person will actually read the law before coming to any conclusions. You might want to give it a try. It's actually pretty clear. Link in my previous post.
Which is precisely why Bush didn't like this weapon and Obama does. For Bush it's not worth the expense if he has to decommission nukes (not a big net gain in ability to blow things up). For Obama, having a way to decommission nukes is the whole point. By replacing nukes with a new system that's even more vorpal, he gets the nuclear reduction he wants without looking weak.
Of course, the tea-birther will jump on this as yet more "proof" that Obama's a wimp. But nothing will convince them otherwise, so that's hardly a factor.
I don't think many people host with their ISPs. Hosting or colo providers are more common. But that's a moot point, because a domain name isn't tied to the host, it's tied to the nameserver that resolves it. People tend to get their hosting, name server, and domain name all from one provider, but tat's just a convenience. And if 2LDs were expensive, there'd be a competitive market for cheap 3LDs.
But even if were tied to your provider, the typical vanity web site doesn't really need a persistent domain. If you have to move MyKittens.JoesHosting.com to MyKittens.BillsHosting.com, you just email the dozen or so people who access the site.
All this is really, really, moot. I don't think there's a chance in hell of $10 domain registration going away. I just keep wishing we didn't have a setup that facilitated squatting.