Wouldn't it be great to, say, build one house but get paid for building houses for the rest of your life, and beyond?
Somehow, this supposedly encourages creative people to work harder. I don't see it. Come to think of it, about half the people on that list (including some I liked) were just plain fucked-up and drove themselves to an early grave.
Just think, if there were better copyright laws, Elvis might still be with us.
The thing I like about my Toshiba tablet is that I have it with me a lot more often than when I had a bigger laptop. It runs Firefox, Remote Desktop and SSH just fine. Add the Verizon National Access card, and I can reboot a bank of servers from the middle of the desert. Or at least from the edge of the desert.
My boss actually bought it for a couple of years, too.
Yeah, but they got the V-Chip snuck through on some later legislation or something, as I recall. They're in all new TV's sold now, aren't they?
Counting on the people to rise up over the DMCA (parts of which I'm okay with) or Broadcast Flag isn't a winning strategy. For that matter, perhaps nothing is; it's just the nature of democratic government to give in to interest groups on such matters.
A better argument, to my way of thinking, is to demand equal protection for small artists. I mean, Broadcast Flag may be great for Time-Warner, but it does nothing for an independent filmmaker. DMCA may be great for Sony and iTunes, but it does nothing to help a garage band profit from their work, in fact, it makes it harder by entrenching the big distributors even more.
In a time when the Internet enables more and more people to have access to distribution, goverment MIGHT be persuaded to find ways to make copyright protection useful to more people, rather than simply inflating the profits of a small sector. No business in America concentrates profits on so few people as do the entertainment and software industries. Of all the artists in America, I'll bet fewer than 1% ever profit from copyright protection. If the Democrats could just stop sucking off Hollywood's artificially-enhanced tits, they'd have a good issue to run with. Problem is, the Republicans just might agree with them.
It's a good example of an infallible principle of politics: That a small number of people who derive a large benefit can get something passed, at the expense of the larger number, each of whom has less at stake.
Increase taxes by a penny on each American, and you have $30 million to give to somebody. And if a cause is the least bit sympathetic, that somebody will have incentive to march on Washington and tell their tale of woe. They'll usually make enough noise to drown out the silence of the other 300 million.
Similarly, outside of Slashdot and similar tech-savvy audiences, few voters even KNOW about the broadcast flag... much less understand the implications. And to be honest, the real-world implications to the average TV viewer are minimal.... most will be happy to record what they're allowed to record, as long as it's the same as their neighbors.
I'm not against copyrights or for piracy. But I think it's the entertainment industry's repsonsibility to find ways to protect their content from new technologies, just as the software industry has had to find ways to deal with it, and every other business has to pay for their own burglar alarms and security guards. As far as I'm concerned, they're free to promote and distribute CSS and the like (and you can be sure that HD-DVD's will include substantially improved security). To most consumers, they're benign. Sure, they make it "impossible" to copy disks and realize your fair-use rights, but they don't make it illegal to do so. The DMCA and broadcast flag, on the other hand, do seem to change what constitutes "fair use," and they tilt the field in favor of copyright holders. In the case of the broadcast flag, Congress is basically setting up a distribution channel for the industry's favored technologies. If it fails to work adequately, they'll pass more laws to "close the loopholes."
But, a small group with a lot at stake can often get changes made at the expense of the general public, few of whom have enough at stake to march on Washington to demand redress.
Shucks, I have a couple hundred thousand dollars in unfunded retirement needs, but I sure as hell don't expect Google to give it to me. Their search engine might help me earn it, though.
Well, the thing is "The Internet" isn't a single thing.
Anybody can run root servers today. The challenge is getting people to use them.
So why would the US give up control of root servers? Because the UN said it would be more fair? Republicans certainly wouldn't go for that, and if Democrats were in power, I doubt they would, either.
Likewise.... why would a foreign country set up their own root servers? Sure, they COULD, but would it really improve things for them? Would anybody but their own citizens use them? Sure, Bongo Congo could set up a ".com" registry in defiance of ICANN. But it would only be good as long as Bongo Congolians were forced to surf through the BC root servers.... and then they'd be isolated from the rest of the 'net. So it'll never happen, not in Bongo Congo and not in France.
The only way the Internet is going to "fracture" is if somebody tries to split off from the existing DNS services, and the downside to that far outweighs the upside, for every country.
That's just the way it is. Is it fair? Of course not. But it works, and that tends to win out.
Be careful about this stuff. I once supplied a credit card to pay for a needy friend's account. A few years later, she died, and I tried to stop the billing. They simply told me that I couldn't, because the account wasn't in my name. They also warned me that the credit card company wouldn't believe me if I tried to stop the charges.
BTW, even though the credit card had expired two or three times during the subscription, I guess they felt empowered to change the expiration date themsleves, as I never supplied updated expiration info in the ten years or so that I paid for the account. They just kept charging me.
I've done business with all kinds of sleazy people in my day, from pornographers to Florida plumbers. None of them were as sleazy as AOL.
The problem is, HDTV isn't a market. You don't build a programming service based on the medium, you build it based on content. Voom just didn't have enough of the popular Standard Def content that people want, not enough to attract customers away from Dish & DirecTV anyway. High-def documentaries and travel shows just get boring after a while.
For that matter, I don't know what Mark Cuban is thinking with his HDNet. Once there's no need for a High-Def demo channel, what will become of it? At least it's a smaller investment than Voom.
The thing is, for somebody who wants to distribute a file, BitTorrent offers only one advantage; that it saves bandwidth for the originator of the file.... people it's not 1995 anymore. Bandwidth is cheap; if you're selling movies, you can afford the bandwidth.
The disadvantages? Imagine you've sold somebody a pay-per-view movie, and after they've downloaded it, you expect them to keep their client open so they can share their bandwidth. Fat F*ing chance. But unless they do it, you save nothing. On top of it your customers get slower downloads than you could feed them through http.
Maybe garage bands will have some luck distributing MP3's this way, but I can't imagine anybody ever wanting to use BT for commercial delivery.
The thing is, the goverment will basically pay 28% of your interest for you. What that means is that your mortage rate is effectively discounted. if your mortgage rate after taxes is 4%, then if your home appreciates at 5% a year, you're making money by paying interest. Yes, you do need to buy carefully, but the goverment "discount" makes it much easier to come out ahead.
Obviously, lots of real estate scams and schemes have evolved around this principle. But if you avoid being greedy, and just buy a home to live in, and buy wisely (eg, don't buy a condo in Florida right now), you can start young and turn the next 20 years of rent into a much earlier retirement.
It's possible to lose a little money in the short run by buying a home. But over 10 years or more, you'll always come out ahead. However, it's important to buy wisely, and I should have emphasized that.
My rule of thumb is that you want to look for a place where the highest portion of the value comes from the land rather than the structure. The land is what goes up in price, the structure actually devalues over time. A $100K house on a $200K lot is a safer investment than a $200K house on a $100K lot. And both are safer investments than a $300K condo.
This is really just a variation on the old principle of, "Location, Location, Location."
Condos do sort of scare me, I heard recently that 60% of new Florida condos are being bought by investors. That's a sign of a speculative bubble. But single family homes aren't quite as susceptible to that stuff.
Mortgages are simply a great deal, effectively you can pay 3-4% interest, and homes will always beat that over the long term.
We had a real estate crash in 1991 and it sucked, even if you didn't own real estate.
Don't hold your breath waiting for housing prices to drop more than a couple percent, anyway. And even then, mortgage rates would be high, so it would be difficult to take advantage.
The key to success in real estate is simple: Buy Young.
Buy a house as soon as you can manage it, put down as little as you can, get as big a mortgage as your paycheck can handle, and buy in the nicest part of town that you can afford. It can be a financial load at first, but as the years go by, it gets easier and easier; your mortgage payments are fixed as your income increases (even if you just make inflationary raises, after 20 years those mortgage payments become relatively small). And the mortgage interest deduction is one of the great ripoffs of all time, you might as well take advantage of it.
I didn't buy young, to my eternal regret. I remember 20 years ago thinking, "$50,000? I could never pay that off." But if I had bought, I'd be living in a $400K house paying about $250/month for a mortgage.
I think what needs to happen is for a large corporate customer (one that has been victimized by adware/etc) to sue Verisign over their negligence, or fraudulent representation of their certificates. Might make a nifty class-action suit, too.
I mean, if they issue a certificate to a company named "CLECK YES TO CONTINUE", then they're not even making a token effort to provide the services they claim.
It never seems to dawn on P2P advocates that you can't have an upload ratio greater than 1:1 unless somebody has one below 1:1. But if you're below 1:1, you're called a leach or a freeloader. The only way to eliminate users an upload/download ratio below 1:1 is to have everybody exactly at 1:1.
For this reason, P2P can never work the way the evangelizers claim. Making it worse is the fact that many users are limited to 128Kbps or 256Kbps upload, meaning they can't download faster than that (without becoming "leeches" or "freeloaders"). In fact, on most asynchronous broadband connections, you won't even get that unless you back off your upload speed.
Seems to me that all these P2P solutions double the actual bandwidth requirements, and they do it at the worst possible place on the network.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
Wouldn't it be great to, say, build one house but get paid for building houses for the rest of your life, and beyond?
Somehow, this supposedly encourages creative people to work harder. I don't see it. Come to think of it, about half the people on that list (including some I liked) were just plain fucked-up and drove themselves to an early grave.
Just think, if there were better copyright laws, Elvis might still be with us.
>> it was being full that made you tired
No, it's your family.
The thing I like about my Toshiba tablet is that I have it with me a lot more often than when I had a bigger laptop. It runs Firefox, Remote Desktop and SSH just fine. Add the Verizon National Access card, and I can reboot a bank of servers from the middle of the desert. Or at least from the edge of the desert.
My boss actually bought it for a couple of years, too.
Yeah, but they got the V-Chip snuck through on some later legislation or something, as I recall. They're in all new TV's sold now, aren't they?
Counting on the people to rise up over the DMCA (parts of which I'm okay with) or Broadcast Flag isn't a winning strategy. For that matter, perhaps nothing is; it's just the nature of democratic government to give in to interest groups on such matters.
A better argument, to my way of thinking, is to demand equal protection for small artists. I mean, Broadcast Flag may be great for Time-Warner, but it does nothing for an independent filmmaker. DMCA may be great for Sony and iTunes, but it does nothing to help a garage band profit from their work, in fact, it makes it harder by entrenching the big distributors even more.
In a time when the Internet enables more and more people to have access to distribution, goverment MIGHT be persuaded to find ways to make copyright protection useful to more people, rather than simply inflating the profits of a small sector. No business in America concentrates profits on so few people as do the entertainment and software industries. Of all the artists in America, I'll bet fewer than 1% ever profit from copyright protection. If the Democrats could just stop sucking off Hollywood's artificially-enhanced tits, they'd have a good issue to run with. Problem is, the Republicans just might agree with them.
It's a good example of an infallible principle of politics: That a small number of people who derive a large benefit can get something passed, at the expense of the larger number, each of whom has less at stake.
Increase taxes by a penny on each American, and you have $30 million to give to somebody. And if a cause is the least bit sympathetic, that somebody will have incentive to march on Washington and tell their tale of woe. They'll usually make enough noise to drown out the silence of the other 300 million.
Similarly, outside of Slashdot and similar tech-savvy audiences, few voters even KNOW about the broadcast flag... much less understand the implications. And to be honest, the real-world implications to the average TV viewer are minimal.... most will be happy to record what they're allowed to record, as long as it's the same as their neighbors.
I'm not against copyrights or for piracy. But I think it's the entertainment industry's repsonsibility to find ways to protect their content from new technologies, just as the software industry has had to find ways to deal with it, and every other business has to pay for their own burglar alarms and security guards. As far as I'm concerned, they're free to promote and distribute CSS and the like (and you can be sure that HD-DVD's will include substantially improved security). To most consumers, they're benign. Sure, they make it "impossible" to copy disks and realize your fair-use rights, but they don't make it illegal to do so. The DMCA and broadcast flag, on the other hand, do seem to change what constitutes "fair use," and they tilt the field in favor of copyright holders. In the case of the broadcast flag, Congress is basically setting up a distribution channel for the industry's favored technologies. If it fails to work adequately, they'll pass more laws to "close the loopholes."
But, a small group with a lot at stake can often get changes made at the expense of the general public, few of whom have enough at stake to march on Washington to demand redress.
I predict that somewhere, someday, some idiot will market a charging pad that requires a power brick.
Politicians see money, politicians want money.
Shucks, I have a couple hundred thousand dollars in unfunded retirement needs, but I sure as hell don't expect Google to give it to me. Their search engine might help me earn it, though.
Well, the thing is "The Internet" isn't a single thing.
Anybody can run root servers today. The challenge is getting people to use them.
So why would the US give up control of root servers? Because the UN said it would be more fair? Republicans certainly wouldn't go for that, and if Democrats were in power, I doubt they would, either.
Likewise.... why would a foreign country set up their own root servers? Sure, they COULD, but would it really improve things for them? Would anybody but their own citizens use them? Sure, Bongo Congo could set up a ".com" registry in defiance of ICANN. But it would only be good as long as Bongo Congolians were forced to surf through the BC root servers.... and then they'd be isolated from the rest of the 'net. So it'll never happen, not in Bongo Congo and not in France.
The only way the Internet is going to "fracture" is if somebody tries to split off from the existing DNS services, and the downside to that far outweighs the upside, for every country.
That's just the way it is. Is it fair? Of course not. But it works, and that tends to win out.
Be careful about this stuff. I once supplied a credit card to pay for a needy friend's account. A few years later, she died, and I tried to stop the billing. They simply told me that I couldn't, because the account wasn't in my name. They also warned me that the credit card company wouldn't believe me if I tried to stop the charges.
BTW, even though the credit card had expired two or three times during the subscription, I guess they felt empowered to change the expiration date themsleves, as I never supplied updated expiration info in the ten years or so that I paid for the account. They just kept charging me.
I've done business with all kinds of sleazy people in my day, from pornographers to Florida plumbers. None of them were as sleazy as AOL.
There should be an addition to that rule about when somebody mentions Hitler on the Internet, the argument is over.
My corollary would stipulate that if somebody writes an "Open Letter," it constitutes proof that nobody wants to listen to them.
I'm appreciative of the fact that I'm no longer a sysadmin. Does that count?
What I'd prefer is that they passed a law making the hours between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm shorter.
It means that you'll need to have the Flash plugin installed in order to download Acrobat Reader.
"Macrobe"
The problem is, HDTV isn't a market. You don't build a programming service based on the medium, you build it based on content. Voom just didn't have enough of the popular Standard Def content that people want, not enough to attract customers away from Dish & DirecTV anyway. High-def documentaries and travel shows just get boring after a while.
For that matter, I don't know what Mark Cuban is thinking with his HDNet. Once there's no need for a High-Def demo channel, what will become of it? At least it's a smaller investment than Voom.
Imagine if Gogle were in merger talks wth SCO.
The thing is, for somebody who wants to distribute a file, BitTorrent offers only one advantage; that it saves bandwidth for the originator of the file.... people it's not 1995 anymore. Bandwidth is cheap; if you're selling movies, you can afford the bandwidth.
The disadvantages? Imagine you've sold somebody a pay-per-view movie, and after they've downloaded it, you expect them to keep their client open so they can share their bandwidth. Fat F*ing chance. But unless they do it, you save nothing. On top of it your customers get slower downloads than you could feed them through http.
Maybe garage bands will have some luck distributing MP3's this way, but I can't imagine anybody ever wanting to use BT for commercial delivery.
Here, wait while I change CPU's... okay, that's better.
With the AMD, this would have been mod'ed -1, but with the Intel, it's only -0.9999999998.
The thing is, the goverment will basically pay 28% of your interest for you. What that means is that your mortage rate is effectively discounted. if your mortgage rate after taxes is 4%, then if your home appreciates at 5% a year, you're making money by paying interest. Yes, you do need to buy carefully, but the goverment "discount" makes it much easier to come out ahead.
Obviously, lots of real estate scams and schemes have evolved around this principle. But if you avoid being greedy, and just buy a home to live in, and buy wisely (eg, don't buy a condo in Florida right now), you can start young and turn the next 20 years of rent into a much earlier retirement.
It's possible to lose a little money in the short run by buying a home. But over 10 years or more, you'll always come out ahead. However, it's important to buy wisely, and I should have emphasized that.
My rule of thumb is that you want to look for a place where the highest portion of the value comes from the land rather than the structure. The land is what goes up in price, the structure actually devalues over time. A $100K house on a $200K lot is a safer investment than a $200K house on a $100K lot. And both are safer investments than a $300K condo.
This is really just a variation on the old principle of, "Location, Location, Location."
Condos do sort of scare me, I heard recently that 60% of new Florida condos are being bought by investors. That's a sign of a speculative bubble. But single family homes aren't quite as susceptible to that stuff.
Mortgages are simply a great deal, effectively you can pay 3-4% interest, and homes will always beat that over the long term.
We had a real estate crash in 1991 and it sucked, even if you didn't own real estate.
Don't hold your breath waiting for housing prices to drop more than a couple percent, anyway. And even then, mortgage rates would be high, so it would be difficult to take advantage.
The key to success in real estate is simple: Buy Young.
Buy a house as soon as you can manage it, put down as little as you can, get as big a mortgage as your paycheck can handle, and buy in the nicest part of town that you can afford. It can be a financial load at first, but as the years go by, it gets easier and easier; your mortgage payments are fixed as your income increases (even if you just make inflationary raises, after 20 years those mortgage payments become relatively small). And the mortgage interest deduction is one of the great ripoffs of all time, you might as well take advantage of it.
I didn't buy young, to my eternal regret. I remember 20 years ago thinking, "$50,000? I could never pay that off." But if I had bought, I'd be living in a $400K house paying about $250/month for a mortgage.
I think what needs to happen is for a large corporate customer (one that has been victimized by adware/etc) to sue Verisign over their negligence, or fraudulent representation of their certificates. Might make a nifty class-action suit, too.
I mean, if they issue a certificate to a company named "CLECK YES TO CONTINUE", then they're not even making a token effort to provide the services they claim.
Damned Internet Explorer cache must be screwed up, it keeps displaying old Slashdot stories that I read a few days ago.
Wow.... we could have Windows applications that are as reliable and usable as nuclear weapons.
Better than the other way around, I suppose.
"sniffer"
It never seems to dawn on P2P advocates that you can't have an upload ratio greater than 1:1 unless somebody has one below 1:1. But if you're below 1:1, you're called a leach or a freeloader. The only way to eliminate users an upload/download ratio below 1:1 is to have everybody exactly at 1:1.
For this reason, P2P can never work the way the evangelizers claim. Making it worse is the fact that many users are limited to 128Kbps or 256Kbps upload, meaning they can't download faster than that (without becoming "leeches" or "freeloaders"). In fact, on most asynchronous broadband connections, you won't even get that unless you back off your upload speed.
Seems to me that all these P2P solutions double the actual bandwidth requirements, and they do it at the worst possible place on the network.