Amazing. Just as I hit 'submit' I was listening to a 'man on the street' interview with some 20-year-old women. The host asked them who was running for President. When one of them replied with a tentative, "Bush?", he managed to talk her into believing that Bush wasn't one of the candidates this year. When asked whether America is a democracy or republic, she replied "democracy." Yeah, I really want that sort of person voting.
Part of the tragedy of the American system of government is that every idiot has the same amount of votes as you do. Unless of course you don't vote. In which case you shouldn't be surprised that the politicians don't follow your particular credo.
Luckily, the idiots tend not to vote, despite well-meaning (I'm being charitable) attempts to get them to. Stupidity does have its good side.
This isn't designed to 'put the fear of God' into anyone. It's an attempt by a defendant in a big-bucks suit to spread the exposure around, particularly to a deep-pockets party (AOL). I predict that they're at least considering adding Napster, Freenet, Gnute, ad nauseum. If they can get a court to buy their theory, the additional parties gives them some additional folks to extract dollars from to reduce their liability. The longer I live, the more I think I should convert my net worth to gold or something and hide it. It's getting reeeal dangerous out there...
Maybe its just because I have an active interest in politics, but I certainly don't have the same pessimistic outlook as you. I vote in every election, and technology in general and the net in particular has been a boon. I can now easily research the qualifications, positions, funding sources, and prior voting records for every candidate. I listen to a lot of politically-oriented talk radio and the hosts will post links to critical information that they use in their broadcasts. The local talk show that I listen to regularly runs a chat room in parallel, with the host using our comments to steer the discussion or bring up new topics. Plus it also uses email and website postings to whip up community interest to fight the bureaucrats and sundry other malefactors of government and business.
If anything, I see the net as making democracy less centralized and subject to manipulation by 'The Corporate Party'. Your expressed concerns appear to me to be more appropriate to the situation immediately before the dawn of the net. I think what you're seeing now is the inertia of that old world still stumbling along, a world that is about to realize that the rules have changed.
One portion of your argument resonates with me. I believe that it should be rather difficult to vote. When it is, only those who actually care about the outcome will bother, and those will tend to be more informed than others. I'm not going to lose any sleep that the ill-informed and lazy aren't turning out. The Motor Voter bill that was passed goes in exactly the wrong direction, IMO, plus its provisions that restrict the ability of the states to purge the rolls leads to increased fraud.
It may not necessarily be that a) the media are incompetent or b) in the thrall of Microsoft. When a journalist gets a story like this, s/he is going to call Microsoft for comment. Msft spends gazillions on PR personnel, so you can bet the journalist is going to be inundated with their side of the story, which a horde of in-house personnel will have carefully crafted. Linux/Red Hat doesn't have such a PR machine poised to suppress such fires.
wonder, if we can have digital cameras with processors that can run Doom, and lots of RAM to store images, why can't we have a PDA with the same power?
I don't have experience with the Kodak Digita camera, but if it's anything like my Kodak DC260, the batteries have a lifespan measured in minutes if you use the display screen. I don't think you'd enjoy having to lug around a car battery to power your PDA for a full day.
We all need a little fun, and these people have chosen this as theirs. Sure, they could be doing something 'constructive', but so could we all. I'm wasting my time posting here on SlashDot for example, when I could be trying to cure cancer. One nice thing about living in a free society is that we can make these choices (and we can also lament them, as is your perfect right as well).
So, they're going to blast space junk into even more pieces? Or do they seriously think that they can turn them into vapor? If so, the pulse duration of the beam is going to have to be extremely short and put a lot of energy into the debris, or else the thing will ablate where the beam strikes it and the outgassing will scoot it out of the way. I didn't know we were close to having space-born lasers that could do that on a repetitive basis.
Lucas has had a 'roadmap' of the entire 9-episode Star Wars series in his head since the first one. I recall an interview with him on the occasion of the third movie (sorry, not enough of a fan to recall the title), which was to be number 6 in the timeline of the series. He talked then about his plans to next do the first 3, then the final 3, saying he might use the original cast, "if they're old enough". So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that he's had the titles worked out all along. Now, perhaps other titles could be determined by looking at domain registrations that were done about the same time by the same person. (An exercise left to the reader).
TiVo has stated time and time again in their privacy policy that NO DATA EVER LEAVES YOUR DEVICE. [snip] Perhaps it's time for me to pull out the data analyzer and check out what it's sending to the "man."
You may have meant this in humor, but I think it would be a very good idea. The story talked about how Tivo and ReplayTV would know "to the second" what you were doing. What Letterman joke caused you to change to a different show, what shows you watched on a regular basis, etc. How can they possibly know this without some 'data leaving your device'? One of the benefits touted by Tivo and ReplayTV is that they'd be able to pinpoint the exact demographic of a particular show or even show segment, so that an advertiser would know precisely who was watching it. Without data collection, I don't see where they would get this.
I love the subhead: It will also spy on you, destroy prime time and shatter the power of the mass market. Is it just impossible for people to accept a new paradigm without thinking that all that preceded it will be destroyed? Movies didn't kill theatrical performances, TV didn't kill movies, the VCR didn't kill broadcast TV, yada yada yada. Or maybe this is just the same mentality that thinks the public is unbelievably stupid, so that after a story that taking an aspirin a day may be good for you, they must warn us that we shouldn't go out and take a hundred.
I love how the "oh, I've seen this a hundred times before and I'm soooooo bored with it" types come out of the woodwork periodically. Perhaps it got moderated up because not everyone has been hanging around here as long as you. Did you imagine that the entire population of/. signed up simultaneously and has been reading every post ever since? In any community, some humor is going to get repeated. Deal with it and drop this feigned ennui, which is as tiresome as you claim the original joke to be.
Your post didn't say whether you want a personalized domain or not. If you don't care what the actual email address is, Yahoo will give you a free email account that you can access using POP. I've done that myself, using Outlook Express to pick up my email. They also offer SMTP service, so you can use your emailer to send email that appears to originate from the Yahoo account.
I've been noticing quite a lot of, shall we say, 'unorthodox' activity on Gnutella the last month or so. Someone set up a server to respond to any search with an html page that auto-forwarded the unwary downloader to porn sites (some porn sites pay money for page-views that come from referrals, so probably this was someone doing it to make money). Someone else peridocially puts up a server that responds to searches with "SPAM GNUTELLA!" file references. I've also seen searches that came back with what amounted to spam messages ('make money fast') instead of what was asked for. The wild west lives.
Well, if they were driving impaired and gave the cops 'probable cause' by acting like it, then yes, they can search the car. What isn't permitted is to simply stop every car and rummage through it looking for contraband. And, yes, get a lawyer, and don't say anything until you have one. (Of course, if you're drunk or stoned are you going to remember this? Probably not.)
But it goes further than this. Recently in my area, a highway was blocked off and a "drug checkpoint" was set up. This resulted in hundreds of innocent people being stoped, their cars searched without cause. It lead to two possesion of marijuana arrests, and a few open container alcholol violations. I hope those arrested get good laywers, and the courts are willing to listen. Apperently the 4th amendment doesn't mean anything anymore in law enforcement.
Such stops are illegal, as the Supreme Court has ruled, so you may have your facts wrong. What may have happened is that the cops put up a roadblock, then some distance away put up a sign saying "Drug Roadblock Ahead". Then they waited in hiding near the sign for the idiots to dump their drugs and arrested them for 'littering' and, oops, it looks like they were littering drugs! No search required since the perp tossed the stuff out himself (the 'Drug Roadblock' doesn't really search cars - it's just a ruse.). This is a tactic that was just recently ruled illegal itself.
And it used to be that law enforcement needed cause and a court order before they could proceed with a wiretap. Now we're going to have carnivore hooked up to the ISPs so the FBI can will have the ability to watch anybody anytime (not legally, but that doesn't seem to have stopped them in past similar situations).
Officially, the cops do need a warrant to hook up Carnivore. I don't think an ISP is going to expose itself to big liabilities by letting them do it without one. Also, the FBI will not use Carnivore if the ISP can satisfy the warrant without using it, as many can. And considering the debacle with the Worldnet(?) system (the use of Carnivore brought down their email system because it required them to install older software in order to be Carnivore-compatible), most ISPs will probably install whatever it takes in order to avoid having to accomodate Carnivore.
In this mass of 'reportage' one fact is missing: what were these people protesting? Did they even know? What the hell was the 'consensus' the group came to? The only clue I saw in the whole piece was the phrase 'environmental slogans' but that isn't much help. Just what was the purpose of all this organization, dividing up into 'arrestables' and non-arrestables', sloganeering, and general hell-raising? Or was the purpose secondary to the effort itself - was this just some batch of malcontents giving voice to some inchoate rage against 'the establishment'?
I take second place to no one in my animosity to the record companies and their Gestapo, the RIAA, but I'm wondering if this is another example of the plague of "let's get the unpopular" lawsuits sweeping the nation. First tobacco, then guns, now... record companies? The federal and state governments have become such whores for revenue that they need little incentive anymore to go after any industry that looks like it might cough up some dough and that is sufficiently unpopular (or can be made so with the right degree of demonization). If that's the case here, and I'm not saying it is until I see more facts on what's alleged, then I say leave them alone, else no industry will be safe from the jackals. Of course, if they've really done something wrong, a slow roast on a spit will be just fine with me...
As noted elsewhere, this device was actually patented by the NSA. Now, the big question is why'd they bother after 67 years? Could the NSA use this patent to shut down other, non-governmental, forms of encryption? Is this part of a plot by the nefarious Clinton administration to obtain leverage over these companies so that they can get their treasured 'key escrow' scheme?
Re:Guinness didn't want to be remembered for Obi W
on
Sir Alec Guinness Dies
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· Score: 2
Anyone wonder why, if he thought so little of Star Wars, he took the role? It was good enough for him to accept the pay, I'll bet. If the movie or character is tripe, make your artistic statement by turning it down. Actors who take a part and then later diss it earn diminished respect in my eyes.
I'm of precisely the opposite opinion. The Tenessee Two-By-Four has shown his true stripes during his 8 years in office. He's provably crooked, corrupt, and untruthful. GWB is light-years better than him. The Democrats are in the same fix as the Republicans in 1996, wondering how they ever ended up with such a lox as their candidate.
Minor tweak: You're attached to the internet, the largest repository of human knowledge in the known universe, so it's pretty easy to answer this question for yourself with any search engine. However, since it gives me the chance to expound, I'll answer the question. Harry Brown is the Libertarian candidate for president. I like a lot of what the Libertarians stand for, but they're going to have to learn to play the game better. For example, they refuse to take any matching funds from the feds. While it's admirable to stand on your principals, I don't believe in the virtues of 'losing with dignity'. They're going to keep losing until they adapt to the realities of life.
I forgot to include a link to this story in the NY times (free registration required). It talks about how German publishers are trying to stop the sales of books at a discount. It's just one more example of how the net is tearing down the old ways of doing business. And I think it's a good thing to, once in a while, clean out the old, ossified structures and replace them with something fresh.
I think services like Napster, Gnutella, et al are the agents of change (I like the term 'creative destruction' that was coined to describe the phenomenon). The fact that the Napster shutdown threat has caused a huge run on Gnutella and other sharing services is evidence that it just isn't going to be possible to reverse course; people have gotten accustomed to getting what they want, when they want via the net. The only question remains is what will the corporations whose revenues are affected going to do to counter the trend, or at least adapt to it? My personal vote in the music realm would be for an all-you-can-eat service. I'd like to be able to listen to any song ever recorded in return for some monthly fee. I'd be willing to part with some reasonable sum in return for not having to deal with the flakiness of a Napster or Gnutella.
Whatever emerges, the world of intellectual property has changed irreversibly.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing. Just as I hit 'submit' I was listening to a 'man on the street' interview with some 20-year-old women. The host asked them who was running for President. When one of them replied with a tentative, "Bush?", he managed to talk her into believing that Bush wasn't one of the candidates this year. When asked whether America is a democracy or republic, she replied "democracy." Yeah, I really want that sort of person voting.
Well said.
Part of the tragedy of the American system of government is that every idiot has the same amount of votes as you do. Unless of course you don't vote. In which case you shouldn't be surprised that the politicians don't follow your particular credo.
Luckily, the idiots tend not to vote, despite well-meaning (I'm being charitable) attempts to get them to. Stupidity does have its good side.
This isn't designed to 'put the fear of God' into anyone. It's an attempt by a defendant in a big-bucks suit to spread the exposure around, particularly to a deep-pockets party (AOL). I predict that they're at least considering adding Napster, Freenet, Gnute, ad nauseum. If they can get a court to buy their theory, the additional parties gives them some additional folks to extract dollars from to reduce their liability. The longer I live, the more I think I should convert my net worth to gold or something and hide it. It's getting reeeal dangerous out there ...
Maybe its just because I have an active interest in politics, but I certainly don't have the same pessimistic outlook as you. I vote in every election, and technology in general and the net in particular has been a boon. I can now easily research the qualifications, positions, funding sources, and prior voting records for every candidate. I listen to a lot of politically-oriented talk radio and the hosts will post links to critical information that they use in their broadcasts. The local talk show that I listen to regularly runs a chat room in parallel, with the host using our comments to steer the discussion or bring up new topics. Plus it also uses email and website postings to whip up community interest to fight the bureaucrats and sundry other malefactors of government and business.
If anything, I see the net as making democracy less centralized and subject to manipulation by 'The Corporate Party'. Your expressed concerns appear to me to be more appropriate to the situation immediately before the dawn of the net. I think what you're seeing now is the inertia of that old world still stumbling along, a world that is about to realize that the rules have changed.
One portion of your argument resonates with me. I believe that it should be rather difficult to vote. When it is, only those who actually care about the outcome will bother, and those will tend to be more informed than others. I'm not going to lose any sleep that the ill-informed and lazy aren't turning out. The Motor Voter bill that was passed goes in exactly the wrong direction, IMO, plus its provisions that restrict the ability of the states to purge the rolls leads to increased fraud.
It may not necessarily be that a) the media are incompetent or b) in the thrall of Microsoft. When a journalist gets a story like this, s/he is going to call Microsoft for comment. Msft spends gazillions on PR personnel, so you can bet the journalist is going to be inundated with their side of the story, which a horde of in-house personnel will have carefully crafted. Linux/Red Hat doesn't have such a PR machine poised to suppress such fires.
wonder, if we can have digital cameras with processors that can run Doom, and lots of RAM to store images, why can't we have a PDA with the same power?
I don't have experience with the Kodak Digita camera, but if it's anything like my Kodak DC260, the batteries have a lifespan measured in minutes if you use the display screen. I don't think you'd enjoy having to lug around a car battery to power your PDA for a full day.
We all need a little fun, and these people have chosen this as theirs. Sure, they could be doing something 'constructive', but so could we all. I'm wasting my time posting here on SlashDot for example, when I could be trying to cure cancer. One nice thing about living in a free society is that we can make these choices (and we can also lament them, as is your perfect right as well).
So, they're going to blast space junk into even more pieces? Or do they seriously think that they can turn them into vapor? If so, the pulse duration of the beam is going to have to be extremely short and put a lot of energy into the debris, or else the thing will ablate where the beam strikes it and the outgassing will scoot it out of the way. I didn't know we were close to having space-born lasers that could do that on a repetitive basis.
Lucas has had a 'roadmap' of the entire 9-episode Star Wars series in his head since the first one. I recall an interview with him on the occasion of the third movie (sorry, not enough of a fan to recall the title), which was to be number 6 in the timeline of the series. He talked then about his plans to next do the first 3, then the final 3, saying he might use the original cast, "if they're old enough". So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that he's had the titles worked out all along. Now, perhaps other titles could be determined by looking at domain registrations that were done about the same time by the same person. (An exercise left to the reader).
TiVo has stated time and time again in their privacy policy that NO DATA EVER LEAVES YOUR DEVICE. [snip] Perhaps it's time for me to pull out the data analyzer and check out what it's sending to the "man."
You may have meant this in humor, but I think it would be a very good idea. The story talked about how Tivo and ReplayTV would know "to the second" what you were doing. What Letterman joke caused you to change to a different show, what shows you watched on a regular basis, etc. How can they possibly know this without some 'data leaving your device'? One of the benefits touted by Tivo and ReplayTV is that they'd be able to pinpoint the exact demographic of a particular show or even show segment, so that an advertiser would know precisely who was watching it. Without data collection, I don't see where they would get this.
I love the subhead: It will also spy on you, destroy prime time and shatter the power of the mass market. Is it just impossible for people to accept a new paradigm without thinking that all that preceded it will be destroyed? Movies didn't kill theatrical performances, TV didn't kill movies, the VCR didn't kill broadcast TV, yada yada yada. Or maybe this is just the same mentality that thinks the public is unbelievably stupid, so that after a story that taking an aspirin a day may be good for you, they must warn us that we shouldn't go out and take a hundred.
I love how the "oh, I've seen this a hundred times before and I'm soooooo bored with it" types come out of the woodwork periodically. Perhaps it got moderated up because not everyone has been hanging around here as long as you. Did you imagine that the entire population of /. signed up simultaneously and has been reading every post ever since? In any community, some humor is going to get repeated. Deal with it and drop this feigned ennui, which is as tiresome as you claim the original joke to be.
Your post didn't say whether you want a personalized domain or not. If you don't care what the actual email address is, Yahoo will give you a free email account that you can access using POP. I've done that myself, using Outlook Express to pick up my email. They also offer SMTP service, so you can use your emailer to send email that appears to originate from the Yahoo account.
I've been noticing quite a lot of, shall we say, 'unorthodox' activity on Gnutella the last month or so. Someone set up a server to respond to any search with an html page that auto-forwarded the unwary downloader to porn sites (some porn sites pay money for page-views that come from referrals, so probably this was someone doing it to make money). Someone else peridocially puts up a server that responds to searches with "SPAM GNUTELLA!" file references. I've also seen searches that came back with what amounted to spam messages ('make money fast') instead of what was asked for. The wild west lives.
Well, if they were driving impaired and gave the cops 'probable cause' by acting like it, then yes, they can search the car. What isn't permitted is to simply stop every car and rummage through it looking for contraband. And, yes, get a lawyer, and don't say anything until you have one. (Of course, if you're drunk or stoned are you going to remember this? Probably not.)
But it goes further than this. Recently in my area, a highway was blocked off and a "drug checkpoint" was set up. This resulted in hundreds of innocent people being stoped, their cars searched without cause. It lead to two possesion of marijuana arrests, and a few open container alcholol violations. I hope those arrested get good laywers, and the courts are willing to listen. Apperently the 4th amendment doesn't mean anything anymore in law enforcement.
Such stops are illegal, as the Supreme Court has ruled, so you may have your facts wrong. What may have happened is that the cops put up a roadblock, then some distance away put up a sign saying "Drug Roadblock Ahead". Then they waited in hiding near the sign for the idiots to dump their drugs and arrested them for 'littering' and, oops, it looks like they were littering drugs! No search required since the perp tossed the stuff out himself (the 'Drug Roadblock' doesn't really search cars - it's just a ruse.). This is a tactic that was just recently ruled illegal itself.
And it used to be that law enforcement needed cause and a court order before they could proceed with a wiretap. Now we're going to have carnivore hooked up to the ISPs so the FBI can will have the ability to watch anybody anytime (not legally, but that doesn't seem to have stopped them in past similar situations).
Officially, the cops do need a warrant to hook up Carnivore. I don't think an ISP is going to expose itself to big liabilities by letting them do it without one. Also, the FBI will not use Carnivore if the ISP can satisfy the warrant without using it, as many can. And considering the debacle with the Worldnet(?) system (the use of Carnivore brought down their email system because it required them to install older software in order to be Carnivore-compatible), most ISPs will probably install whatever it takes in order to avoid having to accomodate Carnivore.
In this mass of 'reportage' one fact is missing: what were these people protesting? Did they even know? What the hell was the 'consensus' the group came to? The only clue I saw in the whole piece was the phrase 'environmental slogans' but that isn't much help. Just what was the purpose of all this organization, dividing up into 'arrestables' and non-arrestables', sloganeering, and general hell-raising? Or was the purpose secondary to the effort itself - was this just some batch of malcontents giving voice to some inchoate rage against 'the establishment'?
I take second place to no one in my animosity to the record companies and their Gestapo, the RIAA, but I'm wondering if this is another example of the plague of "let's get the unpopular" lawsuits sweeping the nation. First tobacco, then guns, now ... record companies? The federal and state governments have become such whores for revenue that they need little incentive anymore to go after any industry that looks like it might cough up some dough and that is sufficiently unpopular (or can be made so with the right degree of demonization). If that's the case here, and I'm not saying it is until I see more facts on what's alleged, then I say leave them alone, else no industry will be safe from the jackals. Of course, if they've really done something wrong, a slow roast on a spit will be just fine with me ...
As noted elsewhere, this device was actually patented by the NSA. Now, the big question is why'd they bother after 67 years? Could the NSA use this patent to shut down other, non-governmental, forms of encryption? Is this part of a plot by the nefarious Clinton administration to obtain leverage over these companies so that they can get their treasured 'key escrow' scheme?
Anyone wonder why, if he thought so little of Star Wars, he took the role? It was good enough for him to accept the pay, I'll bet. If the movie or character is tripe, make your artistic statement by turning it down. Actors who take a part and then later diss it earn diminished respect in my eyes.
I'm of precisely the opposite opinion. The Tenessee Two-By-Four has shown his true stripes during his 8 years in office. He's provably crooked, corrupt, and untruthful. GWB is light-years better than him. The Democrats are in the same fix as the Republicans in 1996, wondering how they ever ended up with such a lox as their candidate.
Minor tweak: You're attached to the internet, the largest repository of human knowledge in the known universe, so it's pretty easy to answer this question for yourself with any search engine. However, since it gives me the chance to expound, I'll answer the question. Harry Brown is the Libertarian candidate for president. I like a lot of what the Libertarians stand for, but they're going to have to learn to play the game better. For example, they refuse to take any matching funds from the feds. While it's admirable to stand on your principals, I don't believe in the virtues of 'losing with dignity'. They're going to keep losing until they adapt to the realities of life.
I forgot to include a link to this story in the NY times (free registration required). It talks about how German publishers are trying to stop the sales of books at a discount. It's just one more example of how the net is tearing down the old ways of doing business. And I think it's a good thing to, once in a while, clean out the old, ossified structures and replace them with something fresh.
I think services like Napster, Gnutella, et al are the agents of change (I like the term 'creative destruction' that was coined to describe the phenomenon). The fact that the Napster shutdown threat has caused a huge run on Gnutella and other sharing services is evidence that it just isn't going to be possible to reverse course; people have gotten accustomed to getting what they want, when they want via the net. The only question remains is what will the corporations whose revenues are affected going to do to counter the trend, or at least adapt to it? My personal vote in the music realm would be for an all-you-can-eat service. I'd like to be able to listen to any song ever recorded in return for some monthly fee. I'd be willing to part with some reasonable sum in return for not having to deal with the flakiness of a Napster or Gnutella.
Whatever emerges, the world of intellectual property has changed irreversibly.