I'm not sure what to say about this, except that I don't like it.
Napster is a music-sharing service. It could be used for good (distributing MP3s of artists who recognize the validity of that distribution service) or for ill (violating copyright). I will set aside any issues involving the highway robbery scheme that is referred to as CD pricing and the ethics of music piracy.
If these extensions to the DMCA are passed, it will be the moral equivalent of banning paper clips because they can be used to pick locks, or banning cars because you can run from the police in one. Legislation against Napster and similar software with dual use is not the correct solution.
The government (and, by extension, large corporations in general and the recording industry in particular) knows that music piracy is a large-scale phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands or millions of people involved in it every day. To pursue legal action against these violators on an individual basis would call for a massive restriction of what we recognize as civil rights today.
Therefore, under the guise of convenience, the government and the recording industry lobbyists seek to restrict the tool, not the criminal. These restrictions, as they become more common and far-reaching, will slowly be crafted into a set of fetters and blinders for every citizen of the United States, a way to keep the populace under control at all times in the name of "freedom" and "protection." If they have their way, then the entire human race will one day be in these shackles, not just the unfortunate 280 million who live in the United States.
Patronage and commissioned works are interesting beasts. In both cases, someone has the power to get out a message of their own, using a popular or talented artist as a mouthpiece.
In the case of patronage (which, in our modern day and age, could well involve fairly binding contracts), a powerful entity (an individual, a corporation, a government) might be able to further the spread of propaganda favorable to them, using the artist(s) to do the dirty work. The average joe would be none the wiser. People who know how to read between the lines are few, and often in no position to speak effectively against lies and blatant manipulation of the public.
Commissioned works summon the same specter, but on an individual, not necessarily extended-contract basis. This has already been done before; every major belligerent during the First and Second World Wars commissioned artists to create propaganda posters and films.
I think the best route would be for performers to give live performances and sell (on a direct-to-customer basis, with as few middlemen as possible) copies of their works. But this is my personal opinion, and I could easily be wrong.
price the music realistically and the "crime" will go away. just like booze in the early part of this century.
It won't happen. The recording industry is a powerful, entrenched entity that makes its living by charging steep prices for mediocre products. They can do this and get away with it because:
Many people's tastes in art are dictated by their societies. If all that most people know is crap, then people will buy crap, not knowing that there is anything else.
The recording industry employs thousands upon thousands of people. Those people need to eat and clothe themselves. Plus, those higher up on the food chain need to buy the year-after-next's sports car and $5 million houses to replace their paltry $3 million hovels.
Recording executives have a fair amount of power. In a way, they are able to influence the mood of millions, simply by deciding which artists and albums to push. Do they use this power responsibly, or for their own ends? They'd like to hang on to that power, and so they do what they can to keep it.
Metallica is really only the tip of the iceberg. There are other, deeper issues here to be explored.
It would be nice if they answered the questions posed to them, but think of it this way: Metallica would never have answered any meaningful, penetrating questions. To do so might have tipped the hand of their label (and, by extension, the recording industry). Any answer that they gave would have given us some insight into their motives, into what they're really trying to accomplish here.
Perhaps they didn't like the obvious rudeness of some of the messages. After all, nobody likes to have insults hurled at them and questions couched in inflammatory language thrust in their direction. I think they chose not to answer because they didn't want people to find out the extent of their dealings with the industry in suppressing speech and information exchange. In short, they didn't want people to see them as hapless stooges with no real understanding of the issues.
Metallica has a legitimate case: many people are illegally distributing their work. But the erosion of the right to free expression--a right that is fundamental to the nature of the Internet--is not the way to combat the problem.
Plus, what exactly would Microsoft have to gain? Certainly not enough to make up for the potential lawsuits...
Power. For some, the ability to spy undetected on a total stranger and view the minutiae of her life is an end of its own, above and beyond any advantage that might be gained from exploiting that information.
For others, simply knowing everything about someone else isn't enough. They must put that knowledge to use in some way. You might use it to blackmail someone (if that someone had something to hide). You might use it for something as crass as directed advertising (we know that some companies have tried or are already doing this), hoping to get a share of that person's paycheck. They might want it for some other purpose altogether--politicking is more effective if you know that a certain percentage of the populace is likely to support or object to a policy you plan to propose.
There are any number of reasons why Microsoft in particular (and, by extension, any other intelligence gathering organization) would want this information. Microsoft is a large corporation, with billions of dollars in assets and capital, a force to be reckoned with. Governments are traditionally suspicious of anything that might usurp their power over the governed. Microsoft does not have an army and has no easy access to one, whereas the government has a lot of guns and people willing to use them on command. Therefore, Microsoft cannot fight the government in an open war in such a way; its fight must be conducted behind-the-scenes, using its strengths (money and political connections) to work the system to its advantage.
Then again, withaout a boogie man behind every corner, you may be forced to realize that your just a common run of the mill paranoid and have to go become a useful member of soceity.
While I appreciate your concern (if such it is) for my health and well-being, I think your assertion that I am not "a useful member of soceity" is unfounded, to say the least. Still, I'm not here to quibble over minor issues.
I don't have to see a "boogie man" around every corner to know that there are forces in the world that will treat me as a mere resource to be exploited. Some of them want my money. Some of them want my votes. Some of them just want to be able to tell me what to do because they enjoy controlling people.
I'm not fond of that idea. Ignorance is more comforting than revelation, but ignorance bears a heavy price, one that I'm not prepared to pay. I would rather be denounced as a paranoid with nothing useful to say than live in ignorance and be manipulated by outside forces that haven't the courage or will to show themselves to me directly.
It looks like another victory for the forces of divisiveness. Instead of appreciating cultural differences, governments and corporations everywhere are falling all over themselves to "protect" those of different cultural backgrounds. This would not be a bad thing, except that the mechanisms of protection (affirmative action in the United States, "political correctness", et cetera) are divisive. They force people to classify themselves as being of one background or another and pose another barrier to effective, meaningful communication.
Why does no one realize that skin color and national origin really do not matter? Judge a person on merit and that person's individual traits--not on arbitrary organization into a subgroup.
Another victory for those who wish to oppress us. United we stand, divided we fall.
When Boeing was accused of installing low-quality wiring in their jets in 1974, there was a massive public outrage forcing them to stop using that type of wiring.
The obvious reply is that no one's life depends on whether your letter to grandma gets eaten by the Office Assistant.
Why isn't anyone returning Outlook for a refund, because it's a major security threat on a Network?
Because people in the United States (I do not mean to exclude the rest of the world, but the U.S. is where Microsoft does a lot of its business, legitimate or not) have been carefully trained by fifty years of easy living that whatever doesn't affect them directly is not a problem. System security is seen as a task for system administrators, not users. Nobody realizes that good security begins with the users, in much the same way that U.S. citizens don't or won't believe that good government begins with good citizens.
Nobody is returning Outlook in droves because nobody sees it as a direct threat to them--except those who were bitten by the bug.
I advise you to go consult a psychologist to have your paranoia treated.
I don't expect you or anyone else to believe what I have to say. I wouldn't have believed it myself a few years ago. Still, it is a bit disheartening to have one's opinions dismissed without even the courtesy of a good rebuttal.
To each his/her own, I suppose. Still, for your sake, I hope you realize that the world is not a pretty place with rosy tints. Behind the flashy, eye-catching facades lurks a dangerous, manipulative world of faceless entities engaged in complex struggles to no easily-discernible end. All we know is that they want power. Maybe this doesn't bother you. I know it bothers me.
In my day-to-day work, I see a lot of people who either use the Office Assistant seriously, or let it run and just ignore it. Very few of those people go to great lengths to make sure they never see it.
What Microsoft has done is truly interesting, and maybe a bit frightening: they have made a cute, vaguely helpful (but mostly interfering) figure a commonplace on the desktop. With Office 2000, you don't even have to be using an Office product to have the assistant sit on your desktop.
The Assistant uses up a lot of valuable system resources, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it doesn't just use them to render itself in stunning 3-d realtime graphics. We already know that Microsoft has a policy of blatantly, casually violating its users' privacy. What else is this Assistant doing? Perhaps it's logging keystrokes and sending them to Redmond. Perhaps it's analyzing user traffic and building a profile.
I suspect that MS is using the Assistant and other Office "features" to create extensive profiles on users around the world, for who knows what use in its own nefarious schemes. Perhaps that is why they seem openly contemptuous of the DoJ--they have the goods on Reno and her crowd and will use them when the time seems right.
I won't make any of the obvious statements about how the U.S. "cybercrime" (gag) policy is idiotic, short-sighted, power-grabbing, and generally just the sort of thing a syphilitic monarch in the throes of a mid-life crisis would do after smoking a few particularly large crack rocks.
What I will say is that my colleagues and I have seen this coming for a long time. The big questions here are:
Who's really responsible for this plan? Surely the government alone couldn't have come up with such an idiotic scheme. Anybody can be a little stupid--it takes millions, working in concert, to bring about such monumental boneheadedness.
Who benefits from this? The government gets to tarnish its reputation, of course, but it also gains a fair amount of power in other countries that it wouldn't have had before. Corporations (via their lobbyists) get to attack people who "infringe" on their soi-disant "rights" (as if a fictional entity could have rights).
Who do they think they're fooling? Certainly, Joe Q. Sixpack won't understand or realize the import of such proposals, but anyone who knows about this and has an IQ above room temperature can see that this is a Bad Thing.
What can we do to stop it? I'd prefer not to resort to violence. Surely there is some way to derail this asinine juggernaut before it manages to get somewhere and hurt someone.
If an AI could point me at stuff I'd like and don't know about (aside from the limited domain of music, books etc.) I'd be very happy. If it could flash a dozen or two words on the screen to indicate the *themes* it's extrapolating from my current interests, I'd be fascinated.
Very interesting and helpful indeed. Also incredibly dangerous. It could become the ultimate profiling software:"Look at that. He's searched for information on red poppies, Spartacus, and fencepost manufacturers. Send a SWAT team--we've got another would-be mass murderer in the making!"
I know, I know. You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. I'm sure someone somewhere would like to get their hands on such software and use it to build profiles of what crimes people might commit in the future.
It seems to me that Microsofts biggest problem in this issue is trying to keep the life-blood of the technical community from being knowledgeable about there products. How can they expect IT professionals to be able to fully support their system if they can't have access to all the protocols, ect. used by the system.
That's the point. If nobody but Microsoft knows how to fix it when it breaks, and it breaks all the time, then Microsoft can charge an arm and a leg for it and make tons of money.
It's sad how transparent that little plan is. What's sadder is that it's working.
Microsoft's arrogance with regards to the federal government, its customers (prospective and actual), and more or less the world in general is well-known and documented.
If we abide for a moment with the legal fiction that MS Corporation is an entity, then the only reasonable conclusion is that said entity is certifiably insane and not competent to enter into legally-binding contracts.
Really, how could this hogwash stand up in any court of law anywhere that wasn't being bribed senseless by Microsoft?
The entire point of the Internet is to relay information. Information must, by definition, be meaningful to its recipient.
I'm sure you all remember the study done a year or so ago reporting that even the best search engines hit only 16% or so of the sites that are actually on the web. Clearly, there is a need for a good AI agent to look for information relating to a query and present that information to its client. Ideally, the client would be able to ask a question like, "Who was the fourth Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty?" and receive a weighted list of answers (e.g. 85% of sites consulted say it was Seti I).
The data is there. What we need is the means to collect it and turn it into information.
I'm in desperate need of a clue. I'm a newbie. I don't know jack about hardware.
Try:
www.arstechnica.com. The articles are mostly slanted towards gamers who are hardware enthusiasts, but don't let that fool you--they have a lot of good info there behind the scenes.
What if you worte a play and performed it in the park for everyone to see. If you were covered on the TV news you would probably be happy. If someone saw your play (in public) and made a TV movie out of and gave all the profits to charity you probably would be unhappy.
If I relate my experience of mistreatment at the hands of my peers in high school, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, might be affected for the better by that tale, then why would I demand monetary compensation for it when someone decides to quote that tale and publish it to a wider audience? Was I initially motivated by altruism or the desire for personal gain?
It's true, folks. Not all corporations are out to force you into subservience. In fact, most of them aren't. Corporations are after your money. That's all. They couldn't care less if you are a Democrat/Republican/Tory/Labour/Social Democrat/whatever. They don't care if you are white, black, or purple with pink polka-dots. All they care about is your wallet and how to make it thinner. They'll get your money any way that they can, but most do not stoop to legal action in the form of "give us your money or we will put you in jail forever." No representative of a corporation, acting in that corporation's name, has ever (to my knowledge) put a gun to someone's head and said, "Buy our products or we will kill you."
I don't like corporations, but this is mostly because they employ manipulative tactics in the rush to get me to buy their stuff. I see ads telling me (subtly or not) that I'm not cool if I don't wear the latest Gap products. I see lots of corporate logos on people's clothes. I know people who buy products just because they're made by a certain company, and not because they need the product itself.
What I don't see is people being attacked by, say, the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Police for wearing Ralph Lauren clothes. I don't see Nestle kicking people's doors in and forcing people to eat their food at gunpoint.
Sure, ads can be manipulative. Peer pressure can, in some environments, be a powerful force. There's always a push for people to conform. But corporations, no matter how skilled their advertising is, cannot force people to buy their stuff. I don't have to click-through a EULA to use an operating system or office product--I can find an alternative or do without. Likewise, I don't have to buy clothes with a fancy logo--I can make my own or do without.
Jon, corporations aren't trying to kill individuality. All they want is your money. The death of individuality (if there could ever be such a thing) is a by-product of that, and it's probably not something we'll ever see as a result of somebody trying to get people to buy the latest and greatest product.
There will always be people who don't care if they drive a Porche or a Yugo. There will always be people who grow and eat their own food rather than buying McDonald's. There will always be people who listen to Tuvan throat-singing instead of the Backstreet Boys. Cultural diversity will not ever go away. It can't.
Are corporations killing individuality? No. Corporations don't care about anything beyond profits and making their stockholders happy. If they can do that by selling thirty million gizmos, they'll do it, and they'll do it with the best advertising that they can buy. What they won't do is embark on some sinister plot to crush individuality.
Really, Jon, do you think that there are a bunch of rich white men in a smoke-filled room somewhere on Madison Avenue working to make everyone a twenty-something white suburbanite?
It's the change of media that irritates some people.
Really, I don't see why. What are the differences between web-based text and print media? --Web-based is dynamic within certain limits, print much less so. --Web-based is available only with certain equipment (computers, web access, etc.). Print is accessible to anyone that can read the language it's printed in.
These are the basic differences. There may be some legal differences, but this is more an artifact of our legal system having failed to catch up to new technology.
Why is the change of media important?
And, perhaps what my real question is, why do these people care? People wrote in with their own stories of abuse at the hands of their peers; they wrote in with opinions, diatribes, and sometimes incoherent or off-topic rambling. They did this in a semi-public forum that is commonly frequented by others of their kind, an informal kind of clubhouse for the technically proficient. Preaching to the choir, you might say.
However, the instant that there is some possibility that a wider audience (perhaps less-technically inclined, perhaps less sympathetic) can see these remarks, then people come out of the woodwork crying about intellectual property and "my permission wasn't asked!"
The point I am trying (somewhat disjointedly) to make is this: The people who could benefit most from reading these remarks (i.e. anyone who cares to pick up the book) are being denied that insight by the people who have the information (i.e. the Slashdot posters--some of them, anyway). It is as if a repressed minority lashes out against a largely ignorant majority with "You don't understand us! You are oppressing us!" and then refuses to give that majority the insight that would prevent oppression from ignorance.
I provide about 80% of all tech support for a deparment of 50 people. The remaining 20% gets sent off to our centralized tech people. I have no idea how many of them there are, but I work for a reasonably-sized company (~140,000 employees).
The privately held company has already arranged for a launch aboard the "Strela" launch vehicle.
Strela is Russian for, I believe, "arrow." Their hand-held Stinger-oid missiles (SA 7, I think, though I don't recall) were called by the same name.
Either they've been up to something and slapped an old name on it, or somehow these people are planning to use very short range surface-to-air missiles to loft their payloads.
What else are they not telling us?
The first advertising opportunity in lunar orbit
Which no one will see, unless the ad is huge (on the order of several miles across).
Earthrise 2001: A defining video image for the New Millennium
As if the December 1968 shot by Apollo 8 wasn't good enough. How the heck does a "video image" (I guess these people have never heard of "pictures") define a whole millennium?
An atlas of the entire lunar surface for students & planetary scientists
These already exist. The only thing they can possibly add is more accuracy and smaller resolutions.
Low-altitude, high-speed video, for Hollywood science-fiction movies footage
Equivalent or better quality can be produced in any decent computer imaging lab. They're starting to reach (read, grope) for anything that could be useful here.
The first deep space email service, from lunar orbit
"Look honey, my message got routed via a satellite over Copernicus!" Yawn.
What are they hiding from us? This can't possibly succeed as-stated.
I do hope we come up with a better business model before we have a rather annoying cleanup job...
On the one hand, they're making a mess by despoiling the moon's surface with this trash (and who knows what else).
On the other, they're potentially creating jobs for future workers: lunar garbagemen to clean up all this trash.
On the other other, there's probably a deeper agenda here. Why launch a probe to make HDTV shots of the moon and dump business cards? What else are they going to be doing up there?
Wonderful way to mark the first commercial space venture...dumping a load of paper on earth's only natural satellite...
You have to wonder, though, who they think they're kidding. "Buy space on our moon shots to drop a personal message or your business card!" Yeah, right. There are plenty of people dumb enough to buy 1000 acre deeds to lunar soil and think that'll be enforceable, but this is just silly. Really, who wants to send a business card that no one else will see to the moon?
There's something deeper here. What else are they planning on sending? I bet it isn't just camers and business cards.
I've always had a problem with science being propelled by money (much like human genome mapping).
Some types of science (notably various branches of physics, a lot of bioengineering, and pretty much everything relating to space) can't be done cheaply. They require either government sponsorship (and you know what that means) or corporate sponsorship (and you know what that means). Governments and corporations, in theory, have some sort of accountability to the general public. In practice, this is not the case.
Perhaps it's time for private individuals to pool resources to start a private space program. Not-for-profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Napster is a music-sharing service. It could be used for good (distributing MP3s of artists who recognize the validity of that distribution service) or for ill (violating copyright). I will set aside any issues involving the highway robbery scheme that is referred to as CD pricing and the ethics of music piracy.
If these extensions to the DMCA are passed, it will be the moral equivalent of banning paper clips because they can be used to pick locks, or banning cars because you can run from the police in one. Legislation against Napster and similar software with dual use is not the correct solution.
The government (and, by extension, large corporations in general and the recording industry in particular) knows that music piracy is a large-scale phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands or millions of people involved in it every day. To pursue legal action against these violators on an individual basis would call for a massive restriction of what we recognize as civil rights today.
Therefore, under the guise of convenience, the government and the recording industry lobbyists seek to restrict the tool, not the criminal. These restrictions, as they become more common and far-reaching, will slowly be crafted into a set of fetters and blinders for every citizen of the United States, a way to keep the populace under control at all times in the name of "freedom" and "protection." If they have their way, then the entire human race will one day be in these shackles, not just the unfortunate 280 million who live in the United States.
In the case of patronage (which, in our modern day and age, could well involve fairly binding contracts), a powerful entity (an individual, a corporation, a government) might be able to further the spread of propaganda favorable to them, using the artist(s) to do the dirty work. The average joe would be none the wiser. People who know how to read between the lines are few, and often in no position to speak effectively against lies and blatant manipulation of the public.
Commissioned works summon the same specter, but on an individual, not necessarily extended-contract basis. This has already been done before; every major belligerent during the First and Second World Wars commissioned artists to create propaganda posters and films.
I think the best route would be for performers to give live performances and sell (on a direct-to-customer basis, with as few middlemen as possible) copies of their works. But this is my personal opinion, and I could easily be wrong.
It won't happen. The recording industry is a powerful, entrenched entity that makes its living by charging steep prices for mediocre products. They can do this and get away with it because:
Metallica is really only the tip of the iceberg. There are other, deeper issues here to be explored.
Perhaps they didn't like the obvious rudeness of some of the messages. After all, nobody likes to have insults hurled at them and questions couched in inflammatory language thrust in their direction. I think they chose not to answer because they didn't want people to find out the extent of their dealings with the industry in suppressing speech and information exchange. In short, they didn't want people to see them as hapless stooges with no real understanding of the issues.
Metallica has a legitimate case: many people are illegally distributing their work. But the erosion of the right to free expression--a right that is fundamental to the nature of the Internet--is not the way to combat the problem.
Power. For some, the ability to spy undetected on a total stranger and view the minutiae of her life is an end of its own, above and beyond any advantage that might be gained from exploiting that information.
For others, simply knowing everything about someone else isn't enough. They must put that knowledge to use in some way. You might use it to blackmail someone (if that someone had something to hide). You might use it for something as crass as directed advertising (we know that some companies have tried or are already doing this), hoping to get a share of that person's paycheck. They might want it for some other purpose altogether--politicking is more effective if you know that a certain percentage of the populace is likely to support or object to a policy you plan to propose.
There are any number of reasons why Microsoft in particular (and, by extension, any other intelligence gathering organization) would want this information. Microsoft is a large corporation, with billions of dollars in assets and capital, a force to be reckoned with. Governments are traditionally suspicious of anything that might usurp their power over the governed. Microsoft does not have an army and has no easy access to one, whereas the government has a lot of guns and people willing to use them on command. Therefore, Microsoft cannot fight the government in an open war in such a way; its fight must be conducted behind-the-scenes, using its strengths (money and political connections) to work the system to its advantage.
While I appreciate your concern (if such it is) for my health and well-being, I think your assertion that I am not "a useful member of soceity" is unfounded, to say the least. Still, I'm not here to quibble over minor issues.
I don't have to see a "boogie man" around every corner to know that there are forces in the world that will treat me as a mere resource to be exploited. Some of them want my money. Some of them want my votes. Some of them just want to be able to tell me what to do because they enjoy controlling people.
I'm not fond of that idea. Ignorance is more comforting than revelation, but ignorance bears a heavy price, one that I'm not prepared to pay. I would rather be denounced as a paranoid with nothing useful to say than live in ignorance and be manipulated by outside forces that haven't the courage or will to show themselves to me directly.
Why does no one realize that skin color and national origin really do not matter? Judge a person on merit and that person's individual traits--not on arbitrary organization into a subgroup.
Another victory for those who wish to oppress us. United we stand, divided we fall.
The obvious reply is that no one's life depends on whether your letter to grandma gets eaten by the Office Assistant.
Why isn't anyone returning Outlook for a refund, because it's a major security threat on a Network?
Because people in the United States (I do not mean to exclude the rest of the world, but the U.S. is where Microsoft does a lot of its business, legitimate or not) have been carefully trained by fifty years of easy living that whatever doesn't affect them directly is not a problem. System security is seen as a task for system administrators, not users. Nobody realizes that good security begins with the users, in much the same way that U.S. citizens don't or won't believe that good government begins with good citizens.
Nobody is returning Outlook in droves because nobody sees it as a direct threat to them--except those who were bitten by the bug.
I don't expect you or anyone else to believe what I have to say. I wouldn't have believed it myself a few years ago. Still, it is a bit disheartening to have one's opinions dismissed without even the courtesy of a good rebuttal.
To each his/her own, I suppose. Still, for your sake, I hope you realize that the world is not a pretty place with rosy tints. Behind the flashy, eye-catching facades lurks a dangerous, manipulative world of faceless entities engaged in complex struggles to no easily-discernible end. All we know is that they want power. Maybe this doesn't bother you. I know it bothers me.
What Microsoft has done is truly interesting, and maybe a bit frightening: they have made a cute, vaguely helpful (but mostly interfering) figure a commonplace on the desktop. With Office 2000, you don't even have to be using an Office product to have the assistant sit on your desktop.
The Assistant uses up a lot of valuable system resources, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it doesn't just use them to render itself in stunning 3-d realtime graphics. We already know that Microsoft has a policy of blatantly, casually violating its users' privacy. What else is this Assistant doing? Perhaps it's logging keystrokes and sending them to Redmond. Perhaps it's analyzing user traffic and building a profile.
I suspect that MS is using the Assistant and other Office "features" to create extensive profiles on users around the world, for who knows what use in its own nefarious schemes. Perhaps that is why they seem openly contemptuous of the DoJ--they have the goods on Reno and her crowd and will use them when the time seems right.
What I will say is that my colleagues and I have seen this coming for a long time. The big questions here are:
Give the Man the Finger.
Very interesting and helpful indeed. Also incredibly dangerous. It could become the ultimate profiling software:"Look at that. He's searched for information on red poppies, Spartacus, and fencepost manufacturers. Send a SWAT team--we've got another would-be mass murderer in the making!"
I know, I know. You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. I'm sure someone somewhere would like to get their hands on such software and use it to build profiles of what crimes people might commit in the future.
That's the point. If nobody but Microsoft knows how to fix it when it breaks, and it breaks all the time, then Microsoft can charge an arm and a leg for it and make tons of money.
It's sad how transparent that little plan is. What's sadder is that it's working.
If we abide for a moment with the legal fiction that MS Corporation is an entity, then the only reasonable conclusion is that said entity is certifiably insane and not competent to enter into legally-binding contracts.
Really, how could this hogwash stand up in any court of law anywhere that wasn't being bribed senseless by Microsoft?
The entire point of the Internet is to relay information. Information must, by definition, be meaningful to its recipient.
I'm sure you all remember the study done a year or so ago reporting that even the best search engines hit only 16% or so of the sites that are actually on the web. Clearly, there is a need for a good AI agent to look for information relating to a query and present that information to its client. Ideally, the client would be able to ask a question like, "Who was the fourth Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty?" and receive a weighted list of answers (e.g. 85% of sites consulted say it was Seti I).
The data is there. What we need is the means to collect it and turn it into information.
Try:
www.arstechnica.com. The articles are mostly slanted towards gamers who are hardware enthusiasts, but don't let that fool you--they have a lot of good info there behind the scenes.
If I relate my experience of mistreatment at the hands of my peers in high school, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, might be affected for the better by that tale, then why would I demand monetary compensation for it when someone decides to quote that tale and publish it to a wider audience? Was I initially motivated by altruism or the desire for personal gain?
I don't like corporations, but this is mostly because they employ manipulative tactics in the rush to get me to buy their stuff. I see ads telling me (subtly or not) that I'm not cool if I don't wear the latest Gap products. I see lots of corporate logos on people's clothes. I know people who buy products just because they're made by a certain company, and not because they need the product itself.
What I don't see is people being attacked by, say, the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Police for wearing Ralph Lauren clothes. I don't see Nestle kicking people's doors in and forcing people to eat their food at gunpoint.
Sure, ads can be manipulative. Peer pressure can, in some environments, be a powerful force. There's always a push for people to conform. But corporations, no matter how skilled their advertising is, cannot force people to buy their stuff. I don't have to click-through a EULA to use an operating system or office product--I can find an alternative or do without. Likewise, I don't have to buy clothes with a fancy logo--I can make my own or do without.
Jon, corporations aren't trying to kill individuality. All they want is your money. The death of individuality (if there could ever be such a thing) is a by-product of that, and it's probably not something we'll ever see as a result of somebody trying to get people to buy the latest and greatest product.
There will always be people who don't care if they drive a Porche or a Yugo. There will always be people who grow and eat their own food rather than buying McDonald's. There will always be people who listen to Tuvan throat-singing instead of the Backstreet Boys. Cultural diversity will not ever go away. It can't.
Are corporations killing individuality? No. Corporations don't care about anything beyond profits and making their stockholders happy. If they can do that by selling thirty million gizmos, they'll do it, and they'll do it with the best advertising that they can buy. What they won't do is embark on some sinister plot to crush individuality.
Really, Jon, do you think that there are a bunch of rich white men in a smoke-filled room somewhere on Madison Avenue working to make everyone a twenty-something white suburbanite?
Really, I don't see why. What are the differences between web-based text and print media?
--Web-based is dynamic within certain limits, print much less so.
--Web-based is available only with certain equipment (computers, web access, etc.). Print is accessible to anyone that can read the language it's printed in.
These are the basic differences. There may be some legal differences, but this is more an artifact of our legal system having failed to catch up to new technology.
Why is the change of media important?
And, perhaps what my real question is, why do these people care? People wrote in with their own stories of abuse at the hands of their peers; they wrote in with opinions, diatribes, and sometimes incoherent or off-topic rambling. They did this in a semi-public forum that is commonly frequented by others of their kind, an informal kind of clubhouse for the technically proficient. Preaching to the choir, you might say.
However, the instant that there is some possibility that a wider audience (perhaps less-technically inclined, perhaps less sympathetic) can see these remarks, then people come out of the woodwork crying about intellectual property and "my permission wasn't asked!"
The point I am trying (somewhat disjointedly) to make is this: The people who could benefit most from reading these remarks (i.e. anyone who cares to pick up the book) are being denied that insight by the people who have the information (i.e. the Slashdot posters--some of them, anyway). It is as if a repressed minority lashes out against a largely ignorant majority with "You don't understand us! You are oppressing us!" and then refuses to give that majority the insight that would prevent oppression from ignorance.
This is a step towards social suicide.
I provide about 80% of all tech support for a deparment of 50 people. The remaining 20% gets sent off to our centralized tech people. I have no idea how many of them there are, but I work for a reasonably-sized company (~140,000 employees).
And so is Earth. Hmmm.
Strela is Russian for, I believe, "arrow." Their hand-held Stinger-oid missiles (SA 7, I think, though I don't recall) were called by the same name.
Either they've been up to something and slapped an old name on it, or somehow these people are planning to use very short range surface-to-air missiles to loft their payloads.
What else are they not telling us?
The first advertising opportunity in lunar orbit
Which no one will see, unless the ad is huge (on the order of several miles across).
Earthrise 2001: A defining video image for the New Millennium
As if the December 1968 shot by Apollo 8 wasn't good enough. How the heck does a "video image" (I guess these people have never heard of "pictures") define a whole millennium?
An atlas of the entire lunar surface for students & planetary scientists
These already exist. The only thing they can possibly add is more accuracy and smaller resolutions.
Low-altitude, high-speed video, for Hollywood science-fiction movies footage
Equivalent or better quality can be produced in any decent computer imaging lab. They're starting to reach (read, grope) for anything that could be useful here.
The first deep space email service, from lunar orbit
"Look honey, my message got routed via a satellite over Copernicus!" Yawn.
What are they hiding from us? This can't possibly succeed as-stated.
On the one hand, they're making a mess by despoiling the moon's surface with this trash (and who knows what else).
On the other, they're potentially creating jobs for future workers: lunar garbagemen to clean up all this trash.
On the other other, there's probably a deeper agenda here. Why launch a probe to make HDTV shots of the moon and dump business cards? What else are they going to be doing up there?
You have to wonder, though, who they think they're kidding. "Buy space on our moon shots to drop a personal message or your business card!" Yeah, right. There are plenty of people dumb enough to buy 1000 acre deeds to lunar soil and think that'll be enforceable, but this is just silly. Really, who wants to send a business card that no one else will see to the moon?
There's something deeper here. What else are they planning on sending? I bet it isn't just camers and business cards.
Some types of science (notably various branches of physics, a lot of bioengineering, and pretty much everything relating to space) can't be done cheaply. They require either government sponsorship (and you know what that means) or corporate sponsorship (and you know what that means). Governments and corporations, in theory, have some sort of accountability to the general public. In practice, this is not the case.
Perhaps it's time for private individuals to pool resources to start a private space program. Not-for-profit.