The problem with all of this, as at least one poster pointed out already, is that it was a different world back then. The government was more concerned with the welfare of a large entity called 'the Nation' and less with the interests of whichever corporation(s) had the most money for lobbyists.
The article that the slashdot piece points to reveals a glaring contrast between then and now. At the opening of the first world war, the government realized that the nation would require aircraft to fight a modern war and it stepped in to say that the perceived economic interests of the Wright family occupied a back seat to national security. By contrast, Microsoft has spent much of a decade demonstrating that the security standards of computer systems used by government and industry could be such that fifteen-year-olds could enter or break them and have this fact pass with little comment and few consequences.
Today, we live in a media gestalt in which political contributions for advertising mean election and reelection for politicians, irrespective of what or whom their acts as politicians represent. That simply wasn't true in the time of the Wright/Curtis conflict and its resolution.
In his novel 'Neuromancer,' William Gibson describes terrorists and pranksters who invade the computer system of a building with fatal consequences. In Neuromancer, the sensenet run leaves the reader with the question of what a government would do when computer access allows hackers to 'put things in the water' of a large office building, or to cause a panic by making everyone believe that it had been done. The novel leads one to wonder what a government like ours would do about that in terms of its laws.
Now we know.
Considering that the dates mentioned in the novel tell the reader that the action takes place sometime past mid-century, you could think of the current legislation as a matter of the Government's 'jumping the gun' in a big way.
One thing that the proposed new law shows is the a disturbing recurring pattern of short-sightedness, immunity for the proposers of the law from its effects, and an increased advantage to the forces to governing bodies and commercial interests with a reason to dislike privacy and individual rights.
Minus the superheated rhetoric on both sides of the debate here on Slashdot, some things make it through the mist intact and when they do, you find that the law is Redundant at best.
There are already multiple layers of law in place to prevent people from acting on impulses to destroy others by any demonstrable means and there is no real-world reason to bother targeting a specific technology: whether you walk into a hospital and turn off someone's vital life support machinery with your index finger, on site, or do it from a thousand miles away with a script, you're still guilty of either murder or manslaughter. If the crime involves interstate travel or flight, it automatically becomes a federal matter with attendant federal penalties. If the crime is committed across national boundaries, the law has no effect whatsoever unless the foreign government is willing to extradite you to the United States. A government unfriendly to U.S. interests might have no inclination whatsoever, and in this case, the law has no effect. In this light, you can see the proposed legislation as a special penalty structure that really applies only to citizens and residents of the United States.
The proposed law is also dangerous to what we traditionally think of as our right to privacy and it can be seen as an end-run around the protections that keep anyone with a badge from opening your mail or listening in on your phone with no more cause than the lawman's mood and his having time on his hands.
In this light, the problem is not that someone possessing the equipment and the authority cannot invade your privacy (the means are there), but that doing so carries with it, civil and criminal penalties which dissuade the overzealous. If misused, a law which negates those penalties creates a shield for potential malefactors. It does not require paranoia to imagine a scenario in which a policeman automatically escapes what would otherwise be career-destroying legal complications by simply saying that he or she was acting in good faith during an investigation when he or she bullied your ISP into showing him or her the content of all your emails for months and where they had been routed. It has great potential for ugliness. Anyone can be the target of a malicious or mistaken prosecution that damages his or her life, one implication of the proposed legislation's becoming law would be that it would weaken you ability to redress the issue in the courts by suing the ones responsible: how do you sue someone for carrying out the provisions of federal law?
Like many of the laws involving technology/intellectual property that touch on individual rights, the proposers of the legislation are themselves for all intents and purposes immune to the consequences of what they have written in that they are unable, or at least highly unlikely, to commit the crime in question no matter what their motivation and they have nothing whatsoever to lose by voting for it.
In much the same way that a wealthy, white computer illiterate has nothing to fear from stiffened penalties for the possession of crack cocaine, or the DMCA, the same individual has neither the inclination nor the intellectual wherewithal to maliciously interfere with computer systems.
Right about now, writing one's senator seems like a very good idea.
Make it clear to the people who put those damned things on web pages, that you will never buy anything from them, that is, anything at all--not even the latest, pea-sized hornicam(tm), unless it's cold water, delivered to you, in the desert, at a discount.
By putting those ads up, advertisers are opening windows in your GUI that require your attention to get rid of. It's computer intrusion using JavaScript and, patented or not, if you never buy anything you see advertised that way, they should eventually get the message and stop doing it.
Better still, even if they don't, you win the moral victory of knowing that arrogant clowns with too much money are spending a lot of it in a collossal waste of time.
If surreptitious videotaping in the home is illegal, then evidence obtained by it is inadmissable in court.
This leads to interesting potential solutions to problems in burglary: if you know the target's got a camera going, strip down to your thong and running shoes. At your trial, all that clear video of you filling bags with cash and heirlooms just goes away...
This would seem to be the case, but I'm not a lawyer, anyone with a legal background have an opinion on this?
On the second part of the bill: yeah, we're still seeing laws made by people who understand neither the technology, nor the global nature of the it.
They're doing exactly what they should be doing. They are defending their copyrights by going after the individual lawbreakers. It may be as futile as the drug war in the US, but at least they're trying.
I think that's two bad arguments rolled into one. They are going after individual lawbreakers, which is futile as long as there is a profit in it. They are using the government to rubber-stamp legislation to shackle technology and innovation without understanding it. And, in your own words, like the drug war, it's all for nothing.
You've got to admire the logic you are espousing,
I mean, imagine it: someone hears one day that you can cure a mild cold by shooting yourself in the foot. He figures, 'what the hell,' goes out and buys a gun, blows a couple of toes off and the bullet misses the neighbors head by inches.
The cold persists through it's normal course and eventually the bandages come off. Despite the lack of favorable results (and the hole in the neighbor's cieling), the next time he gets the sniffles, he reaches for his revolver...
The only reason Morpheus and the other sites exist in the form that they do is because they've learned from the Napster experience. It's evolution, they're faster, smarter, and nastier than Napster, and their way of doing business is the direct result of the entertainment industry's failure to see beyond extending their stranglehold onto the internet.
The recording industry has demonstrated conclusively that a pure, straightforward way of doing things like Napster's leads to schools of lawyers swimming your way to protect the entertainmnet industry's right to fix prices without interference by consumers exchanging files on the internet. By destroying Napster, they left an ecological niche for the bottom feeders to slide into.
Now, the Dinosaurs of industry won't be happy with the stuff they can't block and we won't be happy with having to either go underground or risk using spyware to exchange files we've already paid for.
Stupidity and greed have failed to yield happiness. Why is anyone surprised?
Apple would do well to consider this the next time they tell you to Rip, Mix, and Burn.
One thing that is wildly irksome about the whole music copyprotection debate is how seldom we go past the two-part question of whether or not the latest intervention by the music industry is a fair try at protecting their business from thieves, or if it is an attempt to cheat the consumer out of his right to duplicate for private use. By limiting the debate to these terms, we miss the key point: the media industry has everything that it wants.
As a business, the big media companies have created music as a commodity and they have driven the price of it as high as they can without losing substantial customers. All you have to do to prove this, is to walk into Tower Records and look at the casette tapes instead of at the CD's which have replaced them and vinyl as the main musical storage media: the casettes cost one third of what the CD's do.
The physical media are different, but the songs are the same. The only difference is what the market will bear, the price, and with the only source of the material being a very small number of media providers, the fix is in with regard to pricing.
Essentially, the media industry has used the invention of the compact disc to do what Microsoft's harshest critics say that it does, by creating a way of doing business where in order to enjoy the benefits of a technology, you have to pay a price that is set by a seller whose business model is not touched by the moderating influences of competition--monopolistic price-gouging.
People like the original poster either fail to see or hide the key fact that copyright law--a concept put in place to allow creators to enjoy a market value for their works--is not being used the way it was originally intended.
Copyright law is there in order to provide insentive to create and invent; insuring the creator that he or she will be able to derive some profit from his work. Instead of this, copyright law is being used as the basis for price fixing; putting a noose around the neck of every consumer and offering the choice of either paying a price that gives the industry the money to consider copyright-law, and copyright protection schemes as a commodity for sale by the government, or walking through life in silence.
This brings us to an the unpleasant impasse between the passive consumer and the too active producer. The media companies have the money, lawyers and lobbyists necessary to make ridiculous changes in the law of the land and they will continue to use those resources because to do otherwise would be to forego billions of dollars of profits that they have secured by the power of a frighteningly well-funded oligopoly.
With this in mind, the original poster's trumpeting the media industy's just cause with regard to Apple is a ridiculous argument. The truth of the matter is that the media industry is protecting and will continue to protect its "natural right" to define price-gouging as pricing itself even if it means writing laws that reach into every electronic device on earth to do it.
In a better world than the one that businessmen make, the solution would be a very simple reaction to the market itself: if the price of CD's were the cost of tapes, more people would be able to afford larger music collections and the time and trouble needed to rip and burn MP3's would be more of a burden by comparison.
The problem would solved: fewer people would bother to steal.
The above post is both insiteful and erudite, but the plan described is especially good against the tsetse fly because of its reproduction strategy.
Most insects shield the next generation from predation using a strategy of sheer numbers. Most of their offspring end up a meal for something else, but a few win the survival lottery and make it to sexual maturity to carry on the next generation.
The Tsetse fly is uses a different strategy: its females produce one progeny at a time, carrying the larva internally through three of its four stages of development, releasing it only to let it pupate and emerge as an adult.
According to this page: , the 'sterile male' technique had been tried before, with little success. The technique described here must be a refinement. In any event, the successful implimentation of the sterile male technique for reduction/eradication of the tsetse fly is especially strong in that it turns one of the fly's strengths (the female's investment in their young) into a weakness.
Extinction is an ugly word, but considering the suffering that the tsetse has brought about since time out of mind, I for one would welcome any reasonable chance to see it go have tea with the passenger pigeon and the dodo.
Actually, there are some pretty good reasons to do some pretty strong thinking before going to war in Afghanistan: it's called history.
As the British empire learned(they sent in 10,000 men and got one and only one of them back) and the Soviet Union (10 years of war with no victory) later found out, history makes afghanistan a defender's paradise.
Its high and arid terrain increases the effectiveness of small, lightly-equipped groups of men who know the terrain well and are used to the rigors of functioning in that environment.
Now it's a safe bet to say that the U.S. Military has *probably* learned *something* since Vietnam, but anyone drooling to see the Taliban suffer for harboring Bin Laden should temper his enthusiasm with history and common sense, because the Vietnam situation and this one bear similarities: now, as then, it is true that no army in the world can stand against ours in a set-piece battle. However, our enemies would have to be insane to try and fight one against us and they won't.
If we go to war with the Taliban, we're going to have to use our brains and not just our anger. Righteous anger will not be enough.
As far as the Nader argument is concerned, the thing is simple: Gore won the election due to the closeness of the race and various forms of wicked chicanery in Florida. Only the closeness of the ra ce made the chicanery possible or paletable as anything other than low farce.
The argument runs this way: Gore won, but the election result was made moot by the actions of various conservative. If Nader's sickening campaign under the circumstances hadn't been the deciding factor, it certainly didn't help.
The truth about encryption is what was mentioned by someone in an earlier post: if you ban encryption, criminals will still use it. To criminals, you can add spies and terrorists.
Despite US laws defining encryption technology as a munition, it is ridiculous to assume that none of the publicly available encryption schemes was illegally exported to foreign countries. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out putting encryption technology on a laptop and putting the laptop in a diplomatic bag, or for that matter, simply sending it as a large email attachment from inside the United States. Common sense tells you that a lot of governments have already done exactly that. Chances are, if it was made here, it's out there, and noise about limiting access to encryption is either the result of ignorance about CS in our lawmakers (who would have imagined it...), or it's planning for a rainy day for U.S. citizens. Either way, limiting public crypto on this basis is ridiculous.
The 'reasoning' behind calls for limiting public access to encryption is double-edged; it's impossible to extract bad acts from not knowing, especially when ignorance plays well for reelection campaigns.
Limiting access to encryption might not be intended as a prelude to massive invasions of privacy, but it works perfectly well as one regardless of the stated intentions of the powers that be.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
As a company, Apple is driven by the idea that Apple will sell Apple computers as a package: Apple hardware, the Apple operating system and the Apple GUI. The Apple philosophy is "If you build it, they will come_ignoring pricing, compatability and their own common sense along the way." Go Apple!
With Steve Jobs at the helm, it is only natural to see Apple calling everything it can 'intellectual property'__ up to and including shades of blue on a white background__because Apple's big mission has always been to prove that it has something better and prettier which is the unique product of Apple's cleverness, and simple demonstrations that this is not true are intolerable.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
As a demonstration of what they can do with their new technology, the wineglass is perfect. Not only does it demonstrate that they can make something very, very small, but that they can create complex curves in three dimensions that are themselves, very, very small.
It's all a matter of orientation: to a righteous man, it's a tiny, tiny chalice....
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
I agree with most of the thread's creator's points. There is a lot of high-and low technology in Dune, but all of it show coherent themes that make the story work: people are at the center of things and machines are relegated to the background.
This is either good or bad writing depending on how you look at it. Either this is a message of hope for humanity in an increasingly technological present because Herbert's far-future puts humanity at it's center, or it's nothing more than one in a long list of devices needed to hold the story together and make it work.
Herbert's intergalactic empire sees the return of Feudalism, clannish, secretive guilds, brutality and chattel slavery as institutions (those women bathing Feyd and the dead boy with the surgically emplanted poisoned needle found by the baron were NOT wage-earners and Lady Jessica herself was a '"bound concubine") and these are things that bring Dune closer to pulp genres than most of the people who really like the books tend to advertise.
The technological view in Dune is driven more by plot and awe (as in, 'ghee-whiz that's cool') than high-tech accuracy (as in, 'I think we could build that if that if we had stronger metals.'). Ornithopters with flapping wings are silly if you can negate the force of gravity as even tiny machines do in Dune.
Lots of the technological items in Dune are there to support plot- and scene-devices. The reason that people fought with knives in Dune is not because of complex sociological needs but because of a shield effect that wears a lot of hats when it comes to making things work in the story.
The Holtzmann-someone-or-other shield effect in Dune stopped masses travelling above a threshhold velocity, making ordinary projectile weapons useless and making knife-fighting with a slow final attack the only way of coming to grips with an enemy. The same device (pun intended) also caused energy weapons to be avoided because firing a laser at a shield caused an energy release equivalent to an atomic explosion, and, just to keep things dangerous in the desert, the same shield effect was said to attract sandworms and drive them into a killing frenzy.
Herbert uses a lot of technology in Dune, but all of it is subordinate to Herbert's need to tell the story.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
Personally, the jury is out on this. There hasn't been enough show yet for us to judge the overall result but the characters and scenes that we have seen so far have a lot going for them.
So far, many of the scenes have been strict transcriptions from the book, establishing characters who are easily recognized, but there is a strong diverging from the book in some places.
Princess Irulan and Paul Atreides don't meet until much, much later in the story (help me out, does she even appear in the first novel?) which would have closed the book on any TV-formulaic romantic tension between them.
This could turn out to be a bad thing for the purity of the book's version of the story, because the book sees Paul marrying her to legitimize his claim to the throne despite his having no interest in her. This is what drives her into the scholarly pursuits which explain the novel's historical notes by her.
On the other hand, other characterizations take us to fresh places compared to the Lynch movie: in the book, Baron Vladimmir Harkonnen is a sickening character, a vile and twisted individual who spends his time soaking his bulk in bathtubs, nearly drooling with excitement while contemplating little boys.
The scifi channel's production tones this down, emphasizing that he is evil and cunning, in a strong contrast to the Lynch movie's raving madman. The scifi channel's rendition allows you to imagine him actually doing the kind of planning that drives the plot of the story. Of course, physically, the actor is no match for the book's description of someone so fat that even his eyes are partly hooded by folds of flesh.
The actor who portrays Paul Atreides might seem old for the part, but then, Paul is fifteen when the book starts and you can pretty much chalk it up to reality that some things simply don't transcribe well from book to film.
The movie also fails to point out that the Sardaukar are history-making bad-news as soldiers, near super human__the military force that brought the current dynasty to power and the one that gave the Baron the military power he needed to defeat the military forces of house Atreides. It seems pretty weak to see that glossed over in a production that takes so many pains to get so much else right.
All in all, the CG is really good. Finally, someone is using technology to build the kind of sets that would swallow whole movie budgets if they were real. And personally, I can't complain about missing Herbert's ornithopters. The design used in the movie looks like something that might work given antigravity, and it's hard to imagine how an audience conditioned by nearly a hundred years of airplanes and helicopters would react to seeing flapping wings, or even 'ornithopters' as the helicopter/fixed wing hybrids that were around during the thirties.
All in all, Dune certainly has its problems, but so far, it looks like a lavish production of a very well-known work and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
I wrote a piece on the subject and posted it on a website on AOL (yes, I know, mea culpa). The gist of the piece is that Sprint is the best provider in the New York City area. It touches upon some of the concerns voiced by the original poster and offers some useful (?) advice and tricks.
The addy is: http://hometown.aol.com/tygerfish01/sprtrev.htm
Unfortunately, with this level of repsonse, it's highly doubtful the original poster will ever see it...
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
The simple truth is that the whole thing is nonsense written by some logless drone of a copywriter, spitting out Microsoft House style. MS house style precisely reflects the attitude that MS has towards its customer-base, to whit:
"You are a pack of booger chewin' morons, and our fees are a tax which you must pay as many times as possible."
Considering where the data came from, and considering the composition of the Supreme Court, three courses of action recommend themselves. One, hope that overconsumption of MacDonald's mystery-meat causes cancer and heart disease even faster than is generally believed*, two, run linux, and three, vomit.
*Guess what B.G. is reputed to have eaten exclusively during a stay in Beijing.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
You seem to be either a Troll or a fool. It doesn't matter, the real point to what was written was genuinely scary.
Books on technical subjects are often difficult to get through and it is easy to make a mistake when browsing one in a bookstore and people respond to bad books of all kinds by returning them for refund.
This provides a good traditional balance between the buyer and seller of technical books which helps to assure quality. It also provides the consumer with a mechanism for legal relief should his experience with the seller warrant it.
What the writer of the original note appears to say is that a company has chosen to use UCITA to extend the privileges that large computer-related companies have garnered for themselves by employing an unnecesary shrink-wrap disclaimer on a technical book. In essence, a publisher in the computer field is trying to use UCITA as a cheap device to force the reader of their materials to give up his/her right to a guaranty that books bought from them demonstrate adequate value for the money while proactively removing the underpinnings of potential legal action.
As far as trolldom is concerned, when you next cast your net, posing as a literary snob, please try for a better pretense: please try to remember that Shakespeare didn't write any novels.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
Irony is not the operative concept here, nastiness is. Except for making an example of some poor bastard who displeased Apple's management (read, Steve Jobs), there's zero reason behind this action.
While searching for irony consider that if crap like this had come out of Redmond instead of Cupertino, Macweenies would take to the streets to condemn it.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
Once again Apple chooses to forsake the rest of the PC using populace by stubbornly adhering to its begrudginly minimalist one-button design. Since my first days as a computer user neither I nor any 'normal' person has had any excessive problems with the traditional two button design,...
I guess Apple doesn't fancy its customers to be above buying based on looks and feel alone (function be damned, right?). Shame on the reviewer too, for he seems to be too absorbed in the attractive design judging by how he shills Apple's latest halfass job.
It's really impossible to argue that Apple was ever interested in the PC community, and the appearance of yet another one-button UFO is just keeping things simple and consistent for Apple's Legion of Mouthbreathers.
When criticizing the reviewer, you have to remember that he, too, is part of the LoM. In my experience, many Apple users don't buy Apple hardware; they support Apple as an institution using their time and money, and reviews of Apple hardware reflect this.
Look into a PC magazine, and you see articles discussing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of a number of systems from a number of manufacturers; clear winners and losers emerge.
By contrast, any Apple reviewer is ideologically constrained to say good things about any hardware out of Cupertino that does'nt offer danger to life and limb.
"The kind of design only Apple able to create nowadays"??!
You mean, after years and years of the evil puck umbilliculled to the toybox keyboard, we're all supposed to jump for joy now that Apple has come up with something that *does'nt* force new Apple owners to buy new mice while they're still in the store where they've just bought their systems.
Sheesh!
Re:Hardly surprising but for different reasons...
on
End Of Fox Animation
·
· Score: 1
The main problems of Titan A.E. that lead to the demise of one of the Fox Animation Group's offices have nothing to do with the animation. The failure of the movie and the department that went with it could have been accomplished through other means, including pure 2D, 3D or pure live action.
Titan A.E. was even less entertaining than one of those Sci-fi channel original productions that flop regularly, and this is by no means surprising.
The problems of Titan A.E. stem from the confusion that is built into the studio system's means of production. Studios are driven to make money from artistic work but art takes risks that terrify bean-counters. Instead of creating genuine art in entertainment, studios reduce their risk of failure by producing things that they think of as sure winners and they do that by trying to improve on things they've seen before.
Titan A.E. is just an eggregious example of what studios do that happened to be an animated feature and the greatest animation in the world wouldn't have helped it, because the movie's writing delved so deep into the sewers that it was nothing but a rehash of unoriginal ideas from sources that were easily recognized.
For whatever reason, it seems easy to find a greater willingness to accept and produce more originality in Japanese Manga/Anime than from its western counterparts. As animated works from Japan__from "Urotsudojidoki," to "Akira," to "crying freeman," "Tenchi Muyo," and many others__demonstrate, there is some component in the Japanese way of doing things that can face up to someone's having an orginal vision and letting that vision shine through different media.
What we are treated to in Titan A.E. by contrast is yet another can't-miss money-maker from a corporate boardroom that was so weak that it fell through the ice and ended up being too bad to attract even brain-dead novelty-seekers.
The truth is that intelligent animation is alive and well in places other than America's movie-making mainstream and Titan AE was a dog that only happened to involve animators.
The worst part of it is that the closure of the offices is a potent sign that the powers that be are already doing the expected and punishing the medium for the mistakes it can't stop itself from making.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with all of this, as at least one poster pointed out already, is that it was a different world back then. The government was more concerned with the welfare of a large entity called 'the Nation' and less with the interests of whichever corporation(s) had the most money for lobbyists.
The article that the slashdot piece points to reveals a glaring contrast between then and now. At the opening of the first world war, the government realized that the nation would require aircraft to fight a modern war and it stepped in to say that the perceived economic interests of the Wright family occupied a back seat to national security. By contrast, Microsoft has spent much of a decade demonstrating that the security standards of computer systems used by government and industry could be such that fifteen-year-olds could enter or break them and have this fact pass with little comment and few consequences.
Today, we live in a media gestalt in which political contributions for advertising mean election and reelection for politicians, irrespective of what or whom their acts as politicians represent. That simply wasn't true in the time of the Wright/Curtis conflict and its resolution.
Basically, don't look for hope here.
Dark room, dead server
One more try. Green joy, It boots.
Later, her soft long hands
I think the fun part about haiku is the first time you get the impression of space at the end, the little jolt of realization when you get it.
Wish I could do it better.
I think your choice of example pretty much defines your/our degree of being out of touch with current (junk) culture.
You mentioned, 'My Dinner With Andre,' and I realized I actually know what you're talking about and why it's good.
I have a better idea.
Make it clear to the people who put those damned things on web pages, that you will never buy anything from them, that is, anything at all--not even the latest, pea-sized hornicam(tm), unless it's cold water, delivered to you, in the desert, at a discount.
By putting those ads up, advertisers are opening windows in your GUI that require your attention to get rid of. It's computer intrusion using JavaScript and, patented or not, if you never buy anything you see advertised that way, they should eventually get the message and stop doing it.
Better still, even if they don't, you win the moral victory of knowing that arrogant clowns with too much money are spending a lot of it in a collossal waste of time.
Having heard things about Chinese military/fighter aircraft, I can only imagine a conversation between two future astronauts:
'No, please, you go first.'
I hope I'm one of the first to have found this.
If surreptitious videotaping in the home is illegal, then evidence obtained by it is inadmissable in court.
This leads to interesting potential solutions to problems in burglary: if you know the target's got a camera going, strip down to your thong and running shoes. At your trial, all that clear video of you filling bags with cash and heirlooms just goes away...
This would seem to be the case, but I'm not a lawyer, anyone with a legal background have an opinion on this?
On the second part of the bill: yeah, we're still seeing laws made by people who understand neither the technology, nor the global nature of the it.
I think that's two bad arguments rolled into one. They are going after individual lawbreakers, which is futile as long as there is a profit in it. They are using the government to rubber-stamp legislation to shackle technology and innovation without understanding it. And, in your own words, like the drug war, it's all for nothing.
You've got to admire the logic you are espousing,
I mean, imagine it: someone hears one day that you can cure a mild cold by shooting yourself in the foot. He figures, 'what the hell,' goes out and buys a gun, blows a couple of toes off and the bullet misses the neighbors head by inches.
The cold persists through it's normal course and eventually the bandages come off. Despite the lack of favorable results (and the hole in the neighbor's cieling), the next time he gets the sniffles, he reaches for his revolver...
Something about this is wrong.
The only reason Morpheus and the other sites exist in the form that they do is because they've learned from the Napster experience. It's evolution, they're faster, smarter, and nastier than Napster, and their way of doing business is the direct result of the entertainment industry's failure to see beyond extending their stranglehold onto the internet.
The recording industry has demonstrated conclusively that a pure, straightforward way of doing things like Napster's leads to schools of lawyers swimming your way to protect the entertainmnet industry's right to fix prices without interference by consumers exchanging files on the internet. By destroying Napster, they left an ecological niche for the bottom feeders to slide into.
Now, the Dinosaurs of industry won't be happy with the stuff they can't block and we won't be happy with having to either go underground or risk using spyware to exchange files we've already paid for.
Stupidity and greed have failed to yield happiness. Why is anyone surprised?
One thing that is wildly irksome about the whole music copyprotection debate is how seldom we go past the two-part question of whether or not the latest intervention by the music industry is a fair try at protecting their business from thieves, or if it is an attempt to cheat the consumer out of his right to duplicate for private use. By limiting the debate to these terms, we miss the key point: the media industry has everything that it wants.
As a business, the big media companies have created music as a commodity and they have driven the price of it as high as they can without losing substantial customers. All you have to do to prove this, is to walk into Tower Records and look at the casette tapes instead of at the CD's which have replaced them and vinyl as the main musical storage media: the casettes cost one third of what the CD's do.
The physical media are different, but the songs are the same. The only difference is what the market will bear, the price, and with the only source of the material being a very small number of media providers, the fix is in with regard to pricing.
Essentially, the media industry has used the invention of the compact disc to do what Microsoft's harshest critics say that it does, by creating a way of doing business where in order to enjoy the benefits of a technology, you have to pay a price that is set by a seller whose business model is not touched by the moderating influences of competition--monopolistic price-gouging.
People like the original poster either fail to see or hide the key fact that copyright law--a concept put in place to allow creators to enjoy a market value for their works--is not being used the way it was originally intended.
Copyright law is there in order to provide insentive to create and invent; insuring the creator that he or she will be able to derive some profit from his work. Instead of this, copyright law is being used as the basis for price fixing; putting a noose around the neck of every consumer and offering the choice of either paying a price that gives the industry the money to consider copyright-law, and copyright protection schemes as a commodity for sale by the government, or walking through life in silence.
This brings us to an the unpleasant impasse between the passive consumer and the too active producer. The media companies have the money, lawyers and lobbyists necessary to make ridiculous changes in the law of the land and they will continue to use those resources because to do otherwise would be to forego billions of dollars of profits that they have secured by the power of a frighteningly well-funded oligopoly.
With this in mind, the original poster's trumpeting the media industy's just cause with regard to Apple is a ridiculous argument. The truth of the matter is that the media industry is protecting and will continue to protect its "natural right" to define price-gouging as pricing itself even if it means writing laws that reach into every electronic device on earth to do it.
In a better world than the one that businessmen make, the solution would be a very simple reaction to the market itself: if the price of CD's were the cost of tapes, more people would be able to afford larger music collections and the time and trouble needed to rip and burn MP3's would be more of a burden by comparison.
The problem would solved: fewer people would bother to steal.
Most insects shield the next generation from predation using a strategy of sheer numbers. Most of their offspring end up a meal for something else, but a few win the survival lottery and make it to sexual maturity to carry on the next generation.
The Tsetse fly is uses a different strategy: its females produce one progeny at a time, carrying the larva internally through three of its four stages of development, releasing it only to let it pupate and emerge as an adult.
According to this page: , the 'sterile male' technique had been tried before, with little success. The technique described here must be a refinement. In any event, the successful implimentation of the sterile male technique for reduction/eradication of the tsetse fly is especially strong in that it turns one of the fly's strengths (the female's investment in their young) into a weakness.
Extinction is an ugly word, but considering the suffering that the tsetse has brought about since time out of mind, I for one would welcome any reasonable chance to see it go have tea with the passenger pigeon and the dodo.
Actually, there are some pretty good reasons to do some pretty strong thinking before going to war in Afghanistan: it's called history.
As the British empire learned(they sent in 10,000 men and got one and only one of them back) and the Soviet Union (10 years of war with no victory) later found out, history makes afghanistan a defender's paradise.
Its high and arid terrain increases the effectiveness of small, lightly-equipped groups of men who know the terrain well and are used to the rigors of functioning in that environment.
Now it's a safe bet to say that the U.S. Military has *probably* learned *something* since Vietnam, but anyone drooling to see the Taliban suffer for harboring Bin Laden should temper his enthusiasm with history and common sense, because the Vietnam situation and this one bear similarities: now, as then, it is true that no army in the world can stand against ours in a set-piece battle. However, our enemies would have to be insane to try and fight one against us and they won't.
If we go to war with the Taliban, we're going to have to use our brains and not just our anger. Righteous anger will not be enough.
As far as the Nader argument is concerned, the thing is simple: Gore won the election due to the closeness of the race and various forms of wicked chicanery in Florida. Only the closeness of the ra ce made the chicanery possible or paletable as anything other than low farce.
The argument runs this way: Gore won, but the election result was made moot by the actions of various conservative. If Nader's sickening campaign under the circumstances hadn't been the deciding factor, it certainly didn't help.
It's that simple.
Despite US laws defining encryption technology as a munition, it is ridiculous to assume that none of the publicly available encryption schemes was illegally exported to foreign countries. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out putting encryption technology on a laptop and putting the laptop in a diplomatic bag, or for that matter, simply sending it as a large email attachment from inside the United States. Common sense tells you that a lot of governments have already done exactly that. Chances are, if it was made here, it's out there, and noise about limiting access to encryption is either the result of ignorance about CS in our lawmakers (who would have imagined it...), or it's planning for a rainy day for U.S. citizens. Either way, limiting public crypto on this basis is ridiculous.
The 'reasoning' behind calls for limiting public access to encryption is double-edged; it's impossible to extract bad acts from not knowing, especially when ignorance plays well for reelection campaigns.
Limiting access to encryption might not be intended as a prelude to massive invasions of privacy, but it works perfectly well as one regardless of the stated intentions of the powers that be.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
As a company, Apple is driven by the idea that Apple will sell Apple computers as a package: Apple hardware, the Apple operating system and the Apple GUI. The Apple philosophy is "If you build it, they will come_ignoring pricing, compatability and their own common sense along the way." Go Apple!
With Steve Jobs at the helm, it is only natural to see Apple calling everything it can 'intellectual property'__ up to and including shades of blue on a white background__because Apple's big mission has always been to prove that it has something better and prettier which is the unique product of Apple's cleverness, and simple demonstrations that this is not true are intolerable.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
It's all a matter of orientation: to a righteous man, it's a tiny, tiny chalice....
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
This is either good or bad writing depending on how you look at it. Either this is a message of hope for humanity in an increasingly technological present because Herbert's far-future puts humanity at it's center, or it's nothing more than one in a long list of devices needed to hold the story together and make it work.
Herbert's intergalactic empire sees the return of Feudalism, clannish, secretive guilds, brutality and chattel slavery as institutions (those women bathing Feyd and the dead boy with the surgically emplanted poisoned needle found by the baron were NOT wage-earners and Lady Jessica herself was a '"bound concubine") and these are things that bring Dune closer to pulp genres than most of the people who really like the books tend to advertise.
The technological view in Dune is driven more by plot and awe (as in, 'ghee-whiz that's cool') than high-tech accuracy (as in, 'I think we could build that if that if we had stronger metals.'). Ornithopters with flapping wings are silly if you can negate the force of gravity as even tiny machines do in Dune.
Lots of the technological items in Dune are there to support plot- and scene-devices. The reason that people fought with knives in Dune is not because of complex sociological needs but because of a shield effect that wears a lot of hats when it comes to making things work in the story.
The Holtzmann-someone-or-other shield effect in Dune stopped masses travelling above a threshhold velocity, making ordinary projectile weapons useless and making knife-fighting with a slow final attack the only way of coming to grips with an enemy. The same device (pun intended) also caused energy weapons to be avoided because firing a laser at a shield caused an energy release equivalent to an atomic explosion, and, just to keep things dangerous in the desert, the same shield effect was said to attract sandworms and drive them into a killing frenzy.
Herbert uses a lot of technology in Dune, but all of it is subordinate to Herbert's need to tell the story.To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
Personally, the jury is out on this. There hasn't been enough show yet for us to judge the overall result but the characters and scenes that we have seen so far have a lot going for them.
So far, many of the scenes have been strict transcriptions from the book, establishing characters who are easily recognized, but there is a strong diverging from the book in some places.
Princess Irulan and Paul Atreides don't meet until much, much later in the story (help me out, does she even appear in the first novel?) which would have closed the book on any TV-formulaic romantic tension between them.
This could turn out to be a bad thing for the purity of the book's version of the story, because the book sees Paul marrying her to legitimize his claim to the throne despite his having no interest in her. This is what drives her into the scholarly pursuits which explain the novel's historical notes by her.
On the other hand, other characterizations take us to fresh places compared to the Lynch movie: in the book, Baron Vladimmir Harkonnen is a sickening character, a vile and twisted individual who spends his time soaking his bulk in bathtubs, nearly drooling with excitement while contemplating little boys.
The scifi channel's production tones this down, emphasizing that he is evil and cunning, in a strong contrast to the Lynch movie's raving madman. The scifi channel's rendition allows you to imagine him actually doing the kind of planning that drives the plot of the story. Of course, physically, the actor is no match for the book's description of someone so fat that even his eyes are partly hooded by folds of flesh.
The actor who portrays Paul Atreides might seem old for the part, but then, Paul is fifteen when the book starts and you can pretty much chalk it up to reality that some things simply don't transcribe well from book to film.
The movie also fails to point out that the Sardaukar are history-making bad-news as soldiers, near super human__the military force that brought the current dynasty to power and the one that gave the Baron the military power he needed to defeat the military forces of house Atreides. It seems pretty weak to see that glossed over in a production that takes so many pains to get so much else right.
All in all, the CG is really good. Finally, someone is using technology to build the kind of sets that would swallow whole movie budgets if they were real. And personally, I can't complain about missing Herbert's ornithopters. The design used in the movie looks like something that might work given antigravity, and it's hard to imagine how an audience conditioned by nearly a hundred years of airplanes and helicopters would react to seeing flapping wings, or even 'ornithopters' as the helicopter/fixed wing hybrids that were around during the thirties.
All in all, Dune certainly has its problems, but so far, it looks like a lavish production of a very well-known work and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
Isn't it true that Episode One was crap and that a transition to digital will mean more crap cheaper and faster?
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"You are a pack of booger chewin' morons, and our fees are a tax which you must pay as many times as possible."
Considering where the data came from, and considering the composition of the Supreme Court, three courses of action recommend themselves. One, hope that overconsumption of MacDonald's mystery-meat causes cancer and heart disease even faster than is generally believed*, two, run linux, and three, vomit.
*Guess what B.G. is reputed to have eaten exclusively during a stay in Beijing.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
While searching for irony consider that if crap like this had come out of Redmond instead of Cupertino, Macweenies would take to the streets to condemn it.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
I guess Apple doesn't fancy its customers to be above buying based on looks and feel alone (function be damned, right?). Shame on the reviewer too, for he seems to be too absorbed in the attractive design judging by how he shills Apple's latest halfass job.
It's really impossible to argue that Apple was ever interested in the PC community, and the appearance of yet another one-button UFO is just keeping things simple and consistent for Apple's Legion of Mouthbreathers.
When criticizing the reviewer, you have to remember that he, too, is part of the LoM. In my experience, many Apple users don't buy Apple hardware; they support Apple as an institution using their time and money, and reviews of Apple hardware reflect this.
Look into a PC magazine, and you see articles discussing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of a number of systems from a number of manufacturers; clear winners and losers emerge.
By contrast, any Apple reviewer is ideologically constrained to say good things about any hardware out of Cupertino that does'nt offer danger to life and limb.
You mean, after years and years of the evil puck umbilliculled to the toybox keyboard, we're all supposed to jump for joy now that Apple has come up with something that *does'nt* force new Apple owners to buy new mice while they're still in the store where they've just bought their systems.
Sheesh!
Titan A.E. was even less entertaining than one of those Sci-fi channel original productions that flop regularly, and this is by no means surprising.
The problems of Titan A.E. stem from the confusion that is built into the studio system's means of production. Studios are driven to make money from artistic work but art takes risks that terrify bean-counters. Instead of creating genuine art in entertainment, studios reduce their risk of failure by producing things that they think of as sure winners and they do that by trying to improve on things they've seen before.
Titan A.E. is just an eggregious example of what studios do that happened to be an animated feature and the greatest animation in the world wouldn't have helped it, because the movie's writing delved so deep into the sewers that it was nothing but a rehash of unoriginal ideas from sources that were easily recognized.
For whatever reason, it seems easy to find a greater willingness to accept and produce more originality in Japanese Manga/Anime than from its western counterparts. As animated works from Japan__from "Urotsudojidoki," to "Akira," to "crying freeman," "Tenchi Muyo," and many others__demonstrate, there is some component in the Japanese way of doing things that can face up to someone's having an orginal vision and letting that vision shine through different media.
What we are treated to in Titan A.E. by contrast is yet another can't-miss money-maker from a corporate boardroom that was so weak that it fell through the ice and ended up being too bad to attract even brain-dead novelty-seekers.
The truth is that intelligent animation is alive and well in places other than America's movie-making mainstream and Titan AE was a dog that only happened to involve animators.
The worst part of it is that the closure of the offices is a potent sign that the powers that be are already doing the expected and punishing the medium for the mistakes it can't stop itself from making.