Not that I'm against 2600 and in favor of the DMCA, but the fundamental core values of freedom of political speech are more important than the freedom to circumvent copy protection. We can (if we're lucky) get Washington to repeal the DMCA, the Sony Bono copyright extensions, etc., but only if we are able to speak out against them, which is what we are doing.
An equivalent comparison between the case of Jurgen Verstrepen and the case of 2600 would be if the United States made it illegal to even argue against DMCA in a podcast without a government license. This isn't the law in the United States (although we came close when the FEC almost declared blogging to be political campaign contributions). So yes, I am still willing to say that the US has better free speech rights than Belgium, no matter what happens to 2600 under the DMCA.
...that it's still our internet, not theirs. This is just another example of the kind of government interference the high-minded international community would do if the UN took over the administration of the internet. If they were in charge, the podcast would have been pulled off the internet by government order.
Now I'm not saying that the US is the best government in the world or anything, but I am saying that we have better free speech protections than nations such as Belgiumm, France and Germany, and those countries are better than most.
One of the secretaries in my office just had a child two months ago. She's having a lot of pain in her wrists that was somehow induced by the pregnancy. Ironically, I just found out about this yesterday afternoon, when she popped into the office to pick up her paycheck.
I'm curious as to what percentage of carpal tunnel sufferors are women.
We didn't take over the Taliban's country because we didn't like them. We took over the Taliban's country because Afghanistan was a haven for the terrorist organization that killed thousands of civilians minding their own business in the World Trade Center, and the Taliban refused to cooperate with us trying to get rid of these terrorists.
Your Iraq example is a defensible position, but the Taliban? They had it coming to them.
For now, I prefer the US being in charge of the internet, to the extent that anyone can be in charge of the internet, for the simple reason that we suck less than the UN does and our record of free speech is second to none. Sure, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. And the Supreme Court struck it down in a 7 to 2 decision. Ironically, the minority opinion, concurring in part and dissenting in part, was from Rehnquist, who is dead, and O'Connor, who is retiring.
I agree - I've got a copy of the book, too. It's a gimmick book, with a gimmick that would fit on a web page or an SNL skit. I'd rather see an Evil Overlord Book, with movie stills showing villains violating each and every rule.
There's no way that this is going to be made into a movie. I hope.
These things can be and are routinely calibrated using samples of known alcohol content, and defense attorneys routinely challenge the validity of the calibration's accuracy and the techniques used to conduct the calibration. There's no legal reason to treat these devices as anything other than black boxes. As a lawyer, I can tell you that this has much less to do with the open source movement than it has to do with the criminal defense bar doing their job (love it or hate it) of selling doubt to a jury.
"Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, are you willing to convict my innocent client on the basis of evidence gathered by a secret government owned apparatus?"
Mind you, breath tests are the least accurate means of testing blood alcohol content, but in most jurisdictions, a driver can opt for an actual blood test if he or she wants one.
What's next - examining the firmware's source code of a digital camera used to take photographic evidence? The fancy fingerprint matching computer program we see every week on CSI? Mind you, I don't think there's any actual harm in us seeing the source code, but it's not a civil rights issue from the perspective of prosecuting crimes.
You got it backwards. What happened was that Gabe sent Jack Thompson an email pointing out the large sums of money gamers have donated to Child's Play. Gabe's cell phone number was listed in his.sig, and Jack Thompson called him, and proved he was the jerk we all know him to be.
I think that an iPod should be able to rest within my pocket, with my keys and pocket change, and not get scratched. I don't care if they have to make it out of metal or wood or titanium or even depleted uranium.
The list doesn't make sense, because it includes fantasies such as Xena, and spy dramas such as The Avengers and The Man from UNCLE, neither of which can by any stretch of the imagination be categorized as science fiction. Even including the X-Files is pushing it. Buffy (great show) doesn't belong on the list either. Right now, I've got to go to work, so I don't have time to pick apart this list. But, since that would be a waste of time anyway, I'm better off.
Make your own list. It doesn't have to be good enough, for anyone else but you.
What makes civilians "innocent". What makes military personnel "guilty". The whole idea of protecting "civilians" from the "military" is nothing other than a thin veneer of civilization painted over what is nothing more than barbarism. In a total war, the civilian effort is equal to that of the military effort - it's all the same. Why should civilians building weapons be considered as civilians?
My point - Japanese civilians are as responsible for the Rape of Nanking as the Japanese Army. And American civilians are as responsible for Hiroshima as US military personnel.
All I can say is: "Wow". It's still a cool program. And, it appears to work just fine (for me anyhow) in a DOS box in XP, so (just to get back on topic), I'm not so sure that MS is deliberately breaking it's OS to drive out the competition. MS was, and is today, probably engaged in the usual sort of semi-competent behavior.
Forget Notes. Whatever happened to Lotus Agenda? I owned it once, the disks now being lost to time. Hell of a program - a sort of free form database that was pretty easy to use. I wish I had it now.
I absolutely agree with you - at work, in a law office where we use mostly P4's, we still use WordPerfect for Windows 6.1, because it's blindingly fast, highly reliable, and it does everything that we need it to do, very well.
One of the reasons Apple has limited the hardware Apple OS's work on is to limit the hardware that it has to support. I doubt that this strategy is going to change just because Apple transitions to x86 processors. Maybe someone will develop a kludge to allow OS X86 to work on any PC, but driver support is going to be either open-source, or non-existant.
Does this mean 30 years from now there will be a really crappy "Firefly: Serenity" prequel TV series with an opening song lip-sync'd by Jessica Simpson's less-talented sister?
I have to disagree with your comment regarding Scalia. There have been a number of Supreme Court opinions in which Scalia came down on the side of heightened fourth amendment protections against the interests of the police.
In Kyllo v. United States, (99-8508) 533 U.S. 27 (2001) 190 F.3d 1041, Scalia wrote the opinion of the court that held the use of thermal imaging equipment to scope out a home to look for marijuana "grow rooms" requires a search warrant, countering the Ninth Circuit's argument that a home owner has no reasonable expection of privacy regarding the heat being radiated from his or her home. Scalia was joined in this opinion by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer.
How on earth does Microsoft make it difficult to use another browser? I downloaded Firefox with no difficulty whatsoever by using IE. Firefox installed correctly and copied my IE bookmarks correctly. After installing Firefox, I ran IE again and it did not automatically restore itself as my default browser. What, exactly, did Microsoft do to make installing and using Firefox difficult for me?
Oh, I get it. XP doesn't ship with the Firefox install. Cry me a river.
And the MS switcher ads - so what if the photos are fakes? 99.8% of all of the ads you see on TV feature paid performers who would otherwise have no connection to the products they are hawking. And it's not as if Apple "supercomputer for the desktop" is a paragon of truth in advertising.
The ultimate weakness of your argument is that it's the equivalent of saying that the genocide in Rwanda wasn't evil because they didn't kill off as many people as the Nazis did in the Holocaust. You need to step away from a black and white worldview and admit that Apple does do some things that are remarkably wrong, and that Microsoft (gasp!) does do some things that are remarkably right. Perhaps in the balance Apple is a much better "corporate citizen" than Microsoft, but this doesn't mean that Apple should be immune from criticism.
I'm a lawyer. Most of the work I do on a computer is in word processing. Win XP is perfect for me, as long as I'm behind a decent firewall with good virus protection (we use Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition). I use Outlook for my email - and I'm not stupid enough to open attachments. I am experimenting with Firefox for browsing now - I like tabs, very much, and I am using Thunderbird at home. It's pretty decent, and I'll probably use it at the office too.
But (and perhaps this is a little off-topic as I'm talking about apps here) what I really use most of the time is good old WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows. It's simple to use, and because it's 10 years old, it runs like lightning on any modern computer. It's perfect. WP 7-9 were more or less too buggy to use. WP 10+ (it's up to v12 today) work well, but some of the older computers we use at my office (Celeron 600's) won't run anything that's bloated with any efficiency whatsoever. They run WP6.1 just fine. The only thing that WP6.1 doesn't support that would be nice to have is long filenames, but since it's the devil we know, nobody complains about it - and the speed at which WP6.1 runs makes the loss of long filenames an acceptable cost. Also, since we've been using the same word processor for 10 years now, every document we prepared over the last ten years opens looking exactly the same as it did when it was drafted.
As long as the OS doesn't crash, and for me XP doesn't crash, it's the apps that count. If you have a stable OS, and the old apps work, stick with them. You won't have to learn new tricks. Ever. True productivity means learning something that does the job, and never, ever, having to "upgrade" to a new app with new "features" that you won't use at the cost of you and your less computer-literate coworkers having to take time away from actual work to learn to use from scratch.
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Dude, you need to be playing Shadow Hearts. The judgment reel rocks.
Not that I'm against 2600 and in favor of the DMCA, but the fundamental core values of freedom of political speech are more important than the freedom to circumvent copy protection. We can (if we're lucky) get Washington to repeal the DMCA, the Sony Bono copyright extensions, etc., but only if we are able to speak out against them, which is what we are doing.
An equivalent comparison between the case of Jurgen Verstrepen and the case of 2600 would be if the United States made it illegal to even argue against DMCA in a podcast without a government license. This isn't the law in the United States (although we came close when the FEC almost declared blogging to be political campaign contributions). So yes, I am still willing to say that the US has better free speech rights than Belgium, no matter what happens to 2600 under the DMCA.
...that it's still our internet, not theirs. This is just another example of the kind of government interference the high-minded international community would do if the UN took over the administration of the internet. If they were in charge, the podcast would have been pulled off the internet by government order.
Now I'm not saying that the US is the best government in the world or anything, but I am saying that we have better free speech protections than nations such as Belgiumm, France and Germany, and those countries are better than most.
One of the secretaries in my office just had a child two months ago. She's having a lot of pain in her wrists that was somehow induced by the pregnancy. Ironically, I just found out about this yesterday afternoon, when she popped into the office to pick up her paycheck.
I'm curious as to what percentage of carpal tunnel sufferors are women.
I mean, c'mon, I'm waiting here.
We didn't take over the Taliban's country because we didn't like them. We took over the Taliban's country because Afghanistan was a haven for the terrorist organization that killed thousands of civilians minding their own business in the World Trade Center, and the Taliban refused to cooperate with us trying to get rid of these terrorists.
Your Iraq example is a defensible position, but the Taliban? They had it coming to them.
For now, I prefer the US being in charge of the internet, to the extent that anyone can be in charge of the internet, for the simple reason that we suck less than the UN does and our record of free speech is second to none. Sure, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. And the Supreme Court struck it down in a 7 to 2 decision. Ironically, the minority opinion, concurring in part and dissenting in part, was from Rehnquist, who is dead, and O'Connor, who is retiring.
I agree - I've got a copy of the book, too. It's a gimmick book, with a gimmick that would fit on a web page or an SNL skit. I'd rather see an Evil Overlord Book, with movie stills showing villains violating each and every rule.
There's no way that this is going to be made into a movie. I hope.
These things can be and are routinely calibrated using samples of known alcohol content, and defense attorneys routinely challenge the validity of the calibration's accuracy and the techniques used to conduct the calibration. There's no legal reason to treat these devices as anything other than black boxes. As a lawyer, I can tell you that this has much less to do with the open source movement than it has to do with the criminal defense bar doing their job (love it or hate it) of selling doubt to a jury.
"Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, are you willing to convict my innocent client on the basis of evidence gathered by a secret government owned apparatus?"
Mind you, breath tests are the least accurate means of testing blood alcohol content, but in most jurisdictions, a driver can opt for an actual blood test if he or she wants one.
What's next - examining the firmware's source code of a digital camera used to take photographic evidence? The fancy fingerprint matching computer program we see every week on CSI? Mind you, I don't think there's any actual harm in us seeing the source code, but it's not a civil rights issue from the perspective of prosecuting crimes.
And say hello to the fire from which you can't escape from because the "glass" is unbreakable.
I understand that DARPA is working on new technology that would allow one to open a window instead of having to crash through it.
You got it backwards. What happened was that Gabe sent Jack Thompson an email pointing out the large sums of money gamers have donated to Child's Play. Gabe's cell phone number was listed in his .sig, and Jack Thompson called him, and proved he was the jerk we all know him to be.
Rome wasn't BitTorrented in a day.
I think that an iPod should be able to rest within my pocket, with my keys and pocket change, and not get scratched. I don't care if they have to make it out of metal or wood or titanium or even depleted uranium.
\iPod now available in new Pitchblend color.
The list doesn't make sense, because it includes fantasies such as Xena, and spy dramas such as The Avengers and The Man from UNCLE, neither of which can by any stretch of the imagination be categorized as science fiction. Even including the X-Files is pushing it. Buffy (great show) doesn't belong on the list either. Right now, I've got to go to work, so I don't have time to pick apart this list. But, since that would be a waste of time anyway, I'm better off.
Make your own list. It doesn't have to be good enough, for anyone else but you.
Besides, B5 is better than Star Trek.
...then it's a planet. Planets have Sailor Senshi. Everyone knows this. Pluto? Sailor Pluto proves Pluto is a planet.
And don't go talking to me about Sailor Moon. The Moon isn't a planet, because Sailor Moon is really Princess Serenity.
Morans.
What makes civilians "innocent". What makes military personnel "guilty". The whole idea of protecting "civilians" from the "military" is nothing other than a thin veneer of civilization painted over what is nothing more than barbarism. In a total war, the civilian effort is equal to that of the military effort - it's all the same. Why should civilians building weapons be considered as civilians?
My point - Japanese civilians are as responsible for the Rape of Nanking as the Japanese Army. And American civilians are as responsible for Hiroshima as US military personnel.
Me (US): I would like one hundred six-packs please: 100 six-packs.
But to be honest, I'd settle for one or two.
To be so crass as to reply to myself, I did a google search and found a page where one can actually download Lotus Agenda:
http://www.bobnewell.net/agenda.html
(sorry for lack of html sk1lz)
All I can say is: "Wow". It's still a cool program. And, it appears to work just fine (for me anyhow) in a DOS box in XP, so (just to get back on topic), I'm not so sure that MS is deliberately breaking it's OS to drive out the competition. MS was, and is today, probably engaged in the usual sort of semi-competent behavior.
Forget Notes. Whatever happened to Lotus Agenda? I owned it once, the disks now being lost to time. Hell of a program - a sort of free form database that was pretty easy to use. I wish I had it now.
No, I'm not looking for Dave. I'm Dave.
I absolutely agree with you - at work, in a law office where we use mostly P4's, we still use WordPerfect for Windows 6.1, because it's blindingly fast, highly reliable, and it does everything that we need it to do, very well.
One of the reasons Apple has limited the hardware Apple OS's work on is to limit the hardware that it has to support. I doubt that this strategy is going to change just because Apple transitions to x86 processors. Maybe someone will develop a kludge to allow OS X86 to work on any PC, but driver support is going to be either open-source, or non-existant.
Does this mean 30 years from now there will be a really crappy "Firefly: Serenity" prequel TV series with an opening song lip-sync'd by Jessica Simpson's less-talented sister?
I'm all for it.
I have to disagree with your comment regarding Scalia. There have been a number of Supreme Court opinions in which Scalia came down on the side of heightened fourth amendment protections against the interests of the police.
In Kyllo v. United States, (99-8508) 533 U.S. 27 (2001) 190 F.3d 1041, Scalia wrote the opinion of the court that held the use of thermal imaging equipment to scope out a home to look for marijuana "grow rooms" requires a search warrant, countering the Ninth Circuit's argument that a home owner has no reasonable expection of privacy regarding the heat being radiated from his or her home. Scalia was joined in this opinion by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer.
How on earth does Microsoft make it difficult to use another browser? I downloaded Firefox with no difficulty whatsoever by using IE. Firefox installed correctly and copied my IE bookmarks correctly. After installing Firefox, I ran IE again and it did not automatically restore itself as my default browser. What, exactly, did Microsoft do to make installing and using Firefox difficult for me?
Oh, I get it. XP doesn't ship with the Firefox install. Cry me a river.
And the MS switcher ads - so what if the photos are fakes? 99.8% of all of the ads you see on TV feature paid performers who would otherwise have no connection to the products they are hawking. And it's not as if Apple "supercomputer for the desktop" is a paragon of truth in advertising.
The ultimate weakness of your argument is that it's the equivalent of saying that the genocide in Rwanda wasn't evil because they didn't kill off as many people as the Nazis did in the Holocaust. You need to step away from a black and white worldview and admit that Apple does do some things that are remarkably wrong, and that Microsoft (gasp!) does do some things that are remarkably right. Perhaps in the balance Apple is a much better "corporate citizen" than Microsoft, but this doesn't mean that Apple should be immune from criticism.
I'm a lawyer. Most of the work I do on a computer is in word processing. Win XP is perfect for me, as long as I'm behind a decent firewall with good virus protection (we use Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition). I use Outlook for my email - and I'm not stupid enough to open attachments. I am experimenting with Firefox for browsing now - I like tabs, very much, and I am using Thunderbird at home. It's pretty decent, and I'll probably use it at the office too.
But (and perhaps this is a little off-topic as I'm talking about apps here) what I really use most of the time is good old WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows. It's simple to use, and because it's 10 years old, it runs like lightning on any modern computer. It's perfect. WP 7-9 were more or less too buggy to use. WP 10+ (it's up to v12 today) work well, but some of the older computers we use at my office (Celeron 600's) won't run anything that's bloated with any efficiency whatsoever. They run WP6.1 just fine. The only thing that WP6.1 doesn't support that would be nice to have is long filenames, but since it's the devil we know, nobody complains about it - and the speed at which WP6.1 runs makes the loss of long filenames an acceptable cost. Also, since we've been using the same word processor for 10 years now, every document we prepared over the last ten years opens looking exactly the same as it did when it was drafted.
As long as the OS doesn't crash, and for me XP doesn't crash, it's the apps that count. If you have a stable OS, and the old apps work, stick with them. You won't have to learn new tricks. Ever. True productivity means learning something that does the job, and never, ever, having to "upgrade" to a new app with new "features" that you won't use at the cost of you and your less computer-literate coworkers having to take time away from actual work to learn to use from scratch.