Spreading the "Linux destroys intellectual property" argument is now official Microsoft policy. First Mundie, now Ballmer, each reading from the same script.
If anyone had doubts that MS is taking Linux seriously, let him now reconsider.
Bill Gates is intensely aware of the media attention MS commands, and he uses it with great care. He knows that anything an MS spokesman talks about publicly will get a lot of attention very fast; accordingly, he doesn't dignify anything that doesn't threaten him with criticism. It's when he's worried about competition, or maneuvering to take possession of a market niche, that we see the response typified by Ballmer and Mundie's recent outings: careful, meticulous repetition of catchy buzz phrases developed by MS marketing and public relations personnel.
Even this/. story, and my response to it, serves Big Bill's purpose. He's got the community buzzing, and what the media (and end users, and management) hears is "Linux...cancer...destroys intellectual property...."
I suppose the Linux community should feel honored to be elevated to the exalted status of Oracle, Apple, Stak Electronics and all the other entities MS has found worrisome enough to target with custom FUD.
I'd like to inquire about an issue your web site doesn't seem to cover: the potentially devastating effects of the Immortality Device on our nation's system of jurisprudence.
Follow with me here. The Supreme Court has held that every inmate in an American prison has a Constitutional right to effective medical treatment. Your Immortality Device is, obviously, the most effective form of medical treatment, as it prevents death itself. Ergo, prisoners have the right to be treated with the Immortality Device.
Now, the theory of incarceration is based upon the assumption that we all have only a short time to live, and therefore we fear losing our freedom, and with it, a span of the precious years allotted to us.
When everyone is immortal, who will fear imprisonment? We are already plagued by criminals who don't fear a five- or even ten-year prison sentence; how will we control them when a decade behind bars seems like a short vacation?
How do you respond to the charge that, far from being humanity's savior, you are in fact ushering us into a dark age of horrifying submission to an army of immortal killers, rapists, arsonists and pot smokers?
My, you haven't been in the U.S. very long, have you?
The networks would simply claim restraint of trade and lawsuit-bomb anyone who offered such a service. The suits probably wouldn't stand up in court over the long haul, but the legal costs would bankrupt the defendant and force him to sell his company...probably to the very networks suing him. Oh, sure, they'd call it a "partnership," but what it would mean in the final analysis is that the commercial-zapping technology would be buried, and buried deep.
Additionally, any service for editing out commercials would be DOA to begin with, as such a device would be difficult to sell without television advertising, and there's no way the networks are going to sell ad time for a service that attacks their revenue stream.
He's joking about the U.S. national security apparatus' penchant for lobbying against useful tech on the flimsy grounds that it could somehow be used in terrorism.
Witness the uphill battle for strong encryption, uncrippled GPS receivers, etc.
Wow. All one has to do is mention the name of a canned meat product and Slashdot turns into a slavering pack of censors. All the high-minded rhetoric about "free speech" and "the marketplace of ideas" goes right out the window the moment someone invokes the dreaded "spammer," cousin to pedophiles, disciple of Hitler.
Someone should inform Pat Robertson or James Dobson about this phenomenon. They're not having as much luck as they'd like in pushing the use of censorware that covertly blocks sites with political content they don't approve. Imagine how happy they'll be when all they have to do to shut down the ACLU's web site, or the Democratic Party's, is set up a bogus spammer haven on the same subnet and then turn themselves in anonymously.
Hey,for that matter, why not skip the subterfuge and set up a MAPS-like service openly advocating censorship? All you'd have to do is control one decent-sized ISP by purchasing it or packing its board of directors, block its users' access to everything you don't like, and then threaten all the other ISPs with blackholing if they don't block your list of censored sites too.
Let's start with everyone's favorite hot button, kiddie porn. I'm sure with enough public relations noise we could convince AOL or some other large ISP to block every IP number in the same subnet as some site with questionable pictures of minors. From there, we could just let the blackmail flow.....
That said, if someone is going to speculate what Dr. Frankenstein would do now, one has to wonder what would happen to Dr. Frankenstein after the novel completes.
Lest we forget the import of the subtitle of Shelley's novel, we should consider that its central theme is consequence. Victor gets slapped down for playing in God's domain, but his final words are "I have been blasted in these hopes, but another may yet succeed." His death is the consequence of exploring the unknown (it's relevant that he dies on a ship exploring the polar wastes), but the genie of his work is out of the bottle. Captain Walton leaves the pole with Victor's notes in hand, pondering the implications of what he now knows to be possible.
Humanity's most precious possession is our most terrible curse: memory. We're adept at freeing genies from bottles, but inept at putting them back...or leaving them there even if we do manage to reimprison them.
It's easy to say we shouldn't pursue a technology that's not sustainable, not clean, not fair in the consequences it will bring into the world...but who are "we"? Certainly Jon Katz and I can agree not to dabble in things that will harm our neighbors or make the world less hospitable for our descendents, but will everyone else? When "we" say "The consequences of Technology X are not acceptable," how do we prevent "not-we" from having, and acting upon, a different opinion?
Lots of third world nations find it awfully suspicious that the major industrial powers are trying to limit CO2 emissions just when industrialization is starting to benefit the little guy. Sure, we know things now about the effects of CO2 on the environment that we didn't before, but how much comfort is that knowledge to the starving peasant who could have benefited from manufactured goods, but whose government has been bullied into signing an agreement not to use technologies damaging to the environment? How do "we" weigh a.001% greater chance of skin cancer for everyone in the world against the quality of life of a few million? How do we make amends for decisions of this nature that we've already made, and that we continue to make to this day?
No physical ballots = No meaningful recount
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 5
The problem with eliminating physical ballots is that it leaves us with no recourse when an error occurs.
Look at the mess in Florida, and imagine that the voting there had been done 100% by electronic means. How would you deal with people who claim to have voted for the wrong candidate because the ballot was confusing?
Even worse, how would you deal with a hacked voting station? Security only goes so far; eventually a precinct would be hacked. With e-voting, there'd be no way to recount the ballots, no way to sort "good" ballots from "bad" ones, no way to identify which votes were bogus -- because there wouldn't be votes, just data.
Now, look at the precincts in Florida who finished their recounts within a few hours. What did they use? Good old fill-it-out-with-a-#2-pencil OPSCAN forms, just like you use with the SATs. Sure, the ballots are counted by machine, but there are ballots to be counted.
I would like to see a big name come up with a whole line of designer, modular, entertainment devices. Paint 'em red white and blue or something to get us to like them! Hell I don't know.
Every time some company has done this, the audio/videophiles have panned it, and the public has stayed away.
Sony had a line of components with a proprietary modular connector a few years ago. The critics hated it, pointing out that it locked buyers into Sony, Sony and more Sony. Customers liked it initially, since it allowed the easy set-up you're talking about, but hated it as soon as they bought a new component from another company and had to connect it the old fashioned way with RCA cables, coax, and the like.
You're never going to get a single-vendor solution past the critics yelling "Proprietary!", and no component manufacturer is willing to adopt a standard pioneered (no pun intended) by a competitor. Even if a de facto standard does start to emerge, every manufacturer will try to create a functional, but incompatible, clone to lock the customer into their brand.
For all the mockery of him as being a pro wrestler, if you listen to him talk, it is rather apparent that he is very intelligent and thoughtful.
While I told my fair share of wrestler jokes when he was first elected, Ventura has really made me think about the political process.
Office seeking shoudn't be a profession. Some of the best representatives the people have ever had in U.S. government have been doctors, engineers, soldiers and yes, even geeks.
People laughed at Sonny Bono when he ran for Congress, but Slashdotters aren't laughing at the copyright bill that bears his name. We tend to forget that however risible or improbable a candidate may seem, once elected, he has the same powers as his new peers.
We've become so accustomed to every politico being an attorney or a prominent businessman that we've forgotten things can be any other way. I just hope Bono's and Ventura's legacy isn't a string of "business as usual" candidates who just happen to be celebrities.
Now, as for the federal law that prohibits the use of SSN as an identifier, this is patently false. What the law says is that you
cannot be required to give your security number to organizations other than the SSA.
Tell that to the IRS, VA, many state DMVs and all the other government agencies that routinely deny services to anyone who won't give an SSN.
Seems to me that refusing to process my tax return without my SSN creates a de facto requirement.
Man, Ralph's sounding more and more like a real politician every day.
1. Do you think the use of social security numbers by businesses and government agencies should be regulated?
Yes. The use and sale of social security numbers by private firms and most government agencies should be banned.
Note: "most government agencies." Which ones are the exeption? Surely Ralph knows that federal law prohibits the use of the SSN as an identifier for any purpose other than Social Security benefits? Surely he knows this law is completely disregarded? Surely he's not proposing more legislation instead of enforcing the laws we already have?
Ralph's got a lot of good ideas in this Q & A, but he's cutting them down to sound bites. One of the reasons I don't support him for President is that he's more effective as a consumer advocate when he can tell the whole truth. Running for office he has to say "I think..." and "I support..." a dozen times a day, but doesn't have the latitude to propose actual solutions.
Ever see the Dilbert strips in which he telecommutes? He ends up in his underwear, filthy and unshaven, holding a little Dilbert hand puppet up to his QuickCam to fool his boss into thinking he's still maintaining a professional demeanor.
Given that half my students barely manage to get dressed before coming to class (if they make it at all), I have dim hopes of anything productive getting done via video conferencing.
It *would* be funny in small group discussion courses to see who'd come up with the best conference 'bot. Some bright kid doubtless would edit together some Quicktime movies of himself nodding, jotting notes, etc., with the occasional meaningless comment: "I agree. Yes. That's a good point."
Heeeeeeey, now. That gives *me* an idea! Now, where's that copy of Premiere?
Do you, or do you not, support resolution 602P, which would impose a tax on every e-mail message sent on the Internet, the proceeds benefiting the U.S. Postal Service?
Please document the history of your commitment or opposition to this measure.
What's boning them now is Case's flip-flop on open access. Before negotiations for the merger began he was a vocal advocate for legislation forcing network owners to open their networks to competing ISP without their own lines.
Now he's going to be a high muckety-muck with billions in stock and stock options at one of the world's largest corporations, and *poof*! Suddenly, those pro-competitive open networks he used to champion are tantamount to communism. Regulators tend to notice things like this.
It's my understanding that the SDMI challenge required the participants to agree to certain NDA conditions in order to see the algorithms. They'd be in hot water if their hack mysteriously became public soon after the adoption of SDMI.
The idea of inviting the hackers for a Slashdot interview is excellent. I'd love to see it happen.
.... this will just allow the RIAA to lobby Congress for appliance taxes the way they did with DAT.
"You see?" they'll say. "Evil nasty hackers destroyed our benevolent effort to release music to the masses before we could even bring it to market. They've proved there's no way to distribute music in an open model."
The solutions they'll offer, of course, are:
a hardware tax on everything, including computers, that can play or create audio files; and
mandatory hardware-based encryption for CD players.
Don't laugh. No one thought they'd get the same requirements passed on DAT, which was heralded as all that and a plastic Jesus.
Slashdot Mirror
... that Alanis Morrisette made the list, but Was (Not Was)'s "I Blew Up the United States" didn't?
Dontcha think?
If anyone had doubts that MS is taking Linux seriously, let him now reconsider.
Bill Gates is intensely aware of the media attention MS commands, and he uses it with great care. He knows that anything an MS spokesman talks about publicly will get a lot of attention very fast; accordingly, he doesn't dignify anything that doesn't threaten him with criticism. It's when he's worried about competition, or maneuvering to take possession of a market niche, that we see the response typified by Ballmer and Mundie's recent outings: careful, meticulous repetition of catchy buzz phrases developed by MS marketing and public relations personnel.
Even this /. story, and my response to it, serves Big Bill's purpose. He's got the community buzzing, and what the media (and end users, and management) hears is "Linux...cancer...destroys intellectual property...."
I suppose the Linux community should feel honored to be elevated to the exalted status of Oracle, Apple, Stak Electronics and all the other entities MS has found worrisome enough to target with custom FUD.
I'd like to inquire about an issue your web site doesn't seem to cover: the potentially devastating effects of the Immortality Device on our nation's system of jurisprudence.
Follow with me here. The Supreme Court has held that every inmate in an American prison has a Constitutional right to effective medical treatment. Your Immortality Device is, obviously, the most effective form of medical treatment, as it prevents death itself. Ergo, prisoners have the right to be treated with the Immortality Device.
Now, the theory of incarceration is based upon the assumption that we all have only a short time to live, and therefore we fear losing our freedom, and with it, a span of the precious years allotted to us.
When everyone is immortal, who will fear imprisonment? We are already plagued by criminals who don't fear a five- or even ten-year prison sentence; how will we control them when a decade behind bars seems like a short vacation?
How do you respond to the charge that, far from being humanity's savior, you are in fact ushering us into a dark age of horrifying submission to an army of immortal killers, rapists, arsonists and pot smokers?
What is the one thing the FCC shouldn't be doing, but is?
The networks would simply claim restraint of trade and lawsuit-bomb anyone who offered such a service. The suits probably wouldn't stand up in court over the long haul, but the legal costs would bankrupt the defendant and force him to sell his company...probably to the very networks suing him. Oh, sure, they'd call it a "partnership," but what it would mean in the final analysis is that the commercial-zapping technology would be buried, and buried deep.
Additionally, any service for editing out commercials would be DOA to begin with, as such a device would be difficult to sell without television advertising, and there's no way the networks are going to sell ad time for a service that attacks their revenue stream.
He's joking about the U.S. national security apparatus' penchant for lobbying against useful tech on the flimsy grounds that it could somehow be used in terrorism.
Witness the uphill battle for strong encryption, uncrippled GPS receivers, etc.
Don't make me come up there.
Someone should inform Pat Robertson or James Dobson about this phenomenon. They're not having as much luck as they'd like in pushing the use of censorware that covertly blocks sites with political content they don't approve. Imagine how happy they'll be when all they have to do to shut down the ACLU's web site, or the Democratic Party's, is set up a bogus spammer haven on the same subnet and then turn themselves in anonymously.
Hey,for that matter, why not skip the subterfuge and set up a MAPS-like service openly advocating censorship? All you'd have to do is control one decent-sized ISP by purchasing it or packing its board of directors, block its users' access to everything you don't like, and then threaten all the other ISPs with blackholing if they don't block your list of censored sites too.
Let's start with everyone's favorite hot button, kiddie porn. I'm sure with enough public relations noise we could convince AOL or some other large ISP to block every IP number in the same subnet as some site with questionable pictures of minors. From there, we could just let the blackmail flow.....
He would decompose. He dies at the end. ;-)
Humanity's most precious possession is our most terrible curse: memory. We're adept at freeing genies from bottles, but inept at putting them back...or leaving them there even if we do manage to reimprison them.
It's easy to say we shouldn't pursue a technology that's not sustainable, not clean, not fair in the consequences it will bring into the world...but who are "we"? Certainly Jon Katz and I can agree not to dabble in things that will harm our neighbors or make the world less hospitable for our descendents, but will everyone else? When "we" say "The consequences of Technology X are not acceptable," how do we prevent "not-we" from having, and acting upon, a different opinion?
Lots of third world nations find it awfully suspicious that the major industrial powers are trying to limit CO2 emissions just when industrialization is starting to benefit the little guy. Sure, we know things now about the effects of CO2 on the environment that we didn't before, but how much comfort is that knowledge to the starving peasant who could have benefited from manufactured goods, but whose government has been bullied into signing an agreement not to use technologies damaging to the environment? How do "we" weigh a .001% greater chance of skin cancer for everyone in the world against the quality of life of a few million? How do we make amends for decisions of this nature that we've already made, and that we continue to make to this day?
Look at the mess in Florida, and imagine that the voting there had been done 100% by electronic means. How would you deal with people who claim to have voted for the wrong candidate because the ballot was confusing?
Even worse, how would you deal with a hacked voting station? Security only goes so far; eventually a precinct would be hacked. With e-voting, there'd be no way to recount the ballots, no way to sort "good" ballots from "bad" ones, no way to identify which votes were bogus -- because there wouldn't be votes, just data.
Now, look at the precincts in Florida who finished their recounts within a few hours. What did they use? Good old fill-it-out-with-a-#2-pencil OPSCAN forms, just like you use with the SATs. Sure, the ballots are counted by machine, but there are ballots to be counted.
Food for thought.
...about going to work for the competition.
Every time some company has done this, the audio/videophiles have panned it, and the public has stayed away.
Sony had a line of components with a proprietary modular connector a few years ago. The critics hated it, pointing out that it locked buyers into Sony, Sony and more Sony. Customers liked it initially, since it allowed the easy set-up you're talking about, but hated it as soon as they bought a new component from another company and had to connect it the old fashioned way with RCA cables, coax, and the like.
You're never going to get a single-vendor solution past the critics yelling "Proprietary!", and no component manufacturer is willing to adopt a standard pioneered (no pun intended) by a competitor. Even if a de facto standard does start to emerge, every manufacturer will try to create a functional, but incompatible, clone to lock the customer into their brand.
While I told my fair share of wrestler jokes when he was first elected, Ventura has really made me think about the political process.
Office seeking shoudn't be a profession. Some of the best representatives the people have ever had in U.S. government have been doctors, engineers, soldiers and yes, even geeks.
People laughed at Sonny Bono when he ran for Congress, but Slashdotters aren't laughing at the copyright bill that bears his name. We tend to forget that however risible or improbable a candidate may seem, once elected, he has the same powers as his new peers.
We've become so accustomed to every politico being an attorney or a prominent businessman that we've forgotten things can be any other way. I just hope Bono's and Ventura's legacy isn't a string of "business as usual" candidates who just happen to be celebrities.
Tell that to the IRS, VA, many state DMVs and all the other government agencies that routinely deny services to anyone who won't give an SSN.
Seems to me that refusing to process my tax return without my SSN creates a de facto requirement.
Bold into the blackness
you spread the light.
In shroud of yourself
sail the distance between the stars.
Oh, traveller Bold into the blackness you spread the light. In shroud of yourself sail the distance between the stars.
He's endorsing Nader.
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-!
I mean, Bill Gates endorsing Nader, it's just....
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-!
No, seriously, he's endorsing Buchanan. If Pat's willing to declare a national language, why not a national OS?
Man, Ralph's sounding more and more like a real politician every day.
Note: "most government agencies." Which ones are the exeption? Surely Ralph knows that federal law prohibits the use of the SSN as an identifier for any purpose other than Social Security benefits? Surely he knows this law is completely disregarded? Surely he's not proposing more legislation instead of enforcing the laws we already have?
Ralph's got a lot of good ideas in this Q & A, but he's cutting them down to sound bites. One of the reasons I don't support him for President is that he's more effective as a consumer advocate when he can tell the whole truth. Running for office he has to say "I think..." and "I support..." a dozen times a day, but doesn't have the latitude to propose actual solutions.
Ah, but all these things the University would have to pay for. They're going to put the bill for the laptops on the students.
Ever see the Dilbert strips in which he telecommutes? He ends up in his underwear, filthy and unshaven, holding a little Dilbert hand puppet up to his QuickCam to fool his boss into thinking he's still maintaining a professional demeanor.
Given that half my students barely manage to get dressed before coming to class (if they make it at all), I have dim hopes of anything productive getting done via video conferencing.
It *would* be funny in small group discussion courses to see who'd come up with the best conference 'bot. Some bright kid doubtless would edit together some Quicktime movies of himself nodding, jotting notes, etc., with the occasional meaningless comment: "I agree. Yes. That's a good point."
Heeeeeeey, now. That gives *me* an idea! Now, where's that copy of Premiere?
Would it be better if I asked "In light of the positions taken by the candidates in the NY Senate race, where do you stand on resolution 602P"?
Please document the history of your commitment or opposition to this measure.
What's boning them now is Case's flip-flop on open access. Before negotiations for the merger began he was a vocal advocate for legislation forcing network owners to open their networks to competing ISP without their own lines.
Now he's going to be a high muckety-muck with billions in stock and stock options at one of the world's largest corporations, and *poof*! Suddenly, those pro-competitive open networks he used to champion are tantamount to communism. Regulators tend to notice things like this.
Things that make you go "Hmmmmm."
The idea of inviting the hackers for a Slashdot interview is excellent. I'd love to see it happen.
"You see?" they'll say. "Evil nasty hackers destroyed our benevolent effort to release music to the masses before we could even bring it to market. They've proved there's no way to distribute music in an open model."
The solutions they'll offer, of course, are:
- a hardware tax on everything, including computers, that can play or create audio files; and
- mandatory hardware-based encryption for CD players.
Don't laugh. No one thought they'd get the same requirements passed on DAT, which was heralded as all that and a plastic Jesus.