Did anyone else get Flash installed with the update? I notice the update included Safari enhancements, so maybe they included it there.
It's not that big of a deal. It just took me a while to figure out that I had been infected with the monster. I generally try hard to avoid it, and I am trying to figure out where it came from.
Of course it is legal. And the customer might even have an informed choice on whether to take the rebate of not. It is just another thing that confuses consumers and is marginally deceitful.
The problem is the printer will be advertised at it's price after rebate. At the retail outlet the full terms may not be disclosed until after the sale is completed. It is possible the consumer may not understand the full terms until after he or she has used the printer.
Yes, it is the consumer's responsibility to ask questions and make an informed decision. OTOH, how complex do we want to make act of purchasing good and services. I mean in the US this is an activity we want people to engage in hundreds of times a day, if possible. By making it complex and deceitful we are increasing the opportunity costs of consuming product. I mean I already have grocery stores I don't shop at because they require you to carry a card to get the price other grocery stores will give you just for walking in.
Like most of the BBC stuff, the special effects are quite irrelevant. The writer know they have no special effects, so they have to develop characters and dialogue to entertain the masses.
I think our concern should be that the excessive amount of attention that US studios tend to pay to special effects, and their need for long fx sequences, will render the characters meaningless. I mean a CG Marvin would make him like Jar Jar
The reality is that the changing of the name was done to confuse consumers and choke the widespread adoption of Firewire. Remember Firewire is Apple, and USB is Intel, Phillips and MS. It is anti-competative behavior.
USB 1.1 is more than 30 times as slow as Firewire and has other technical disadvantages. Firewire is quite a bit more expensive. The takeup on USB 2.0 was slow, and consumers were getting restless. So, in common form, they change the rules without fully informing the consumer. USB 1.1 is now the previously advertised high speed USB 2.0, and there is no way to differentiate.
This of course allows salespeople to claim that USB is just as fast as firewire and there it is now of to buy that portable computer even if has no firewirre port. The rub is that if the port, or the hub, or the device runs at USB 1.1 speeds, you will have a long wait to download your music. And because there is no way to prove the salesperson technically lied, the consumer is stuck with it.
The reality is without the USB 2.0 deception, USB would not be of any competition for high speed devices.
Laws really must allow the purchasers of equipment to do with them as they wish. The manufacturer is already protected through limited liability warrantees and traditional copyright laws. If I modify my computer, the manufacturer does not have to honor any applicable warranty. If I make a copy of book or music and sit out on a street corner and sell, or even give away copies, it is likely that traditional copyrights laws will allow for recompense.
The DCMA, with it's idea that I can purchase a piece of equipment and then not do it as I wish, or that I cannot make copies of books or music for personal use, is just immoral. It is immoral because it allows contracts in which the end user has to agree to terms that are unknown until the end user either cannot return the product of inadvertently breaks the contract. It is immoral because it prevents the necessary innovation that encourages the free market. It is immoral because it circumvents due process.
And we cannot allow immoral acts to continue. The best defense is peaceful civil disobedience. For instance, don't buy music from RIAA labels. If they have no income, they have no money to fight legal battles. The same goes for the MPAA, game vendors, and anyone else that uses the DMCA. It won't be possible to totally shut them out, but we can at least make an effort.
I believe a lot of what goes on P2P networks is copyright infringement, but what choice do we have. The music and movies are sold in packages that violates our traditional fair use rights under the law. If i can't make a copy of the CD for my car, and the manufacturer won't give me another CD when the original get stolen or damaged, then why should I buy the CD. The manufacturer obviously has no respect for me as a customer, so I might as well return the disrespect the manufacturer and copy the music off the net.
The same goes for movies. If movies are increasingly downloaded from the net, it won't be because people don't want to buy movies. It will be because the movies we can buy are illegally packaged to prevent out fair use rights. Why should I buy a movie that is crippled when I can download a copy that honors my fair use rights. The manufacturer may hid behind a license, but it makes no difference. A contract that removes legal rights, especially when the rights are not itemized, should not be honored.
Well, I'm not and it has to do with the underlying fundamental economic values of each party.
First, each party has nothing but contempt for the average citizen. Average citizens are merely pawns to be used to insure that the powerful remain powerful and do not have to do significant work to remain so. The difference is the minimum for entrance into the extreme upper classes and size of the middle class.
The democrats think that a large middle class is safer, and that there are minimal risks to allowing generation after generation to remain middle class. Although this grant significant power to some pretty stupid people, it is easy enough for the extremely wealthy to control those people. The biggest problem is that supporting a middle class poses significant financial risks to the upper class. Money is needed for education, higher wages, and crowd control, money that otherwise could be left to collect interest. As I said, the Democrats think that on balance the risk is worthwhile.
On the other hand the Republicans want a majority lower class, that is porous in both directions to the middle class, but a middle class that is not easily permeable to the upper classes. This will firmly cement control in the hands of those intelligent and experienced enough to make good decisions. While the Republicans agree that is costs more money in crowd control, and while a person may need to be occasionally moved up to the upper class just to maintain the myth it can happen, it should not be a rule.
So what does this have to do with copyright. Well, first music and movies are primarily a method to control the masses. Second, the vast sums of money paid to superstars are not consistent with maintaining class structure. Third, a large middle class has to exist to support music as we know it. So, while democrats see music as a critical means to move cash back to upper class, and therefore are scared to death that people may actually not be paying for it but saving the money for their children, Republicans see music purely as a method of controlling the poor rabble and hate paying wages high enough to allow their employee to afford it.
Lawsuits are the same way. Democrats see them as way to control the rabble by randomly making a few of them rich. Most of the time the rabble is too stupid to save it, and many opportunities are provided for them to waste it. OTOH, Republican know that while it take intelligence to get money, there are enough class traitors that will help the rabble keep and grow the money once it is gotten. We can expand this to things such as smoking, as late life medical payments for the uninsured are a perfect means to make sure money does not get traferred to the next generation.
This could have really helped our image alot. Just like the plastic surgeons who spend 10 months out of the year curing small breast disease and then two weeks helping deformed infants in some place no American has ever heard of, the US programmer can spend their days creating the means of world domination for MS and then go home and write the 1,361st GUI for GNU/Linux!
The difference between IBM and MS is that IBM understands the purpose of advertising. So does Apple. Advertising convinces you that a product will fulfill an emotional need. Apple does this by presenting their products as the haute coutre and therefore fulfilling the customers need to be beautiful. IBM has been running commercials that continue their long standing tradition presenting their products as the cure to FUD.
As an aside, I think it so silly that SCO is trying to use the FUD tactic. SCO is just the like the snot nosed kid that you just want to pick up by the shirt colar and say 'I invented FUD, boy.'
Anyway, back to the ramble. MS commercials fulfill no emotional need. They try to be feel good by focusing on who much money they give to charity. They have frantic IT guys running around telling how much money MS is going to save. Bullshit detector goes off. You don't do stuff like that anymore without a bit of sarcasm. A scary man running around in a tights does not an image make.
Which brings up MS totally lack of understanding of media in general. What is the central image of MS. For Apple it is that their machines are Stars that you can own. For IBM it is that their processes are Stars that will make life better. The commercials are produced, on message, edgy without being fake. If you go to the MS home page today the message is that their machines are bug ridden, virus infested monsters that turn old men senile.
And yet they say they are pushing media center. Can't find anything interesting about in the searches. The second sponsored link in google is broken. There is a mention of it on the MS homepage, but you have to have perfect vision in order to see it.
I think they fact is that MS thinks they are Jaguar and people only need to be shown that they can afford it. In fact they are closer to, if I am very generous, to Lexus or Infiniti, the cars you buy if you can't afford a BMW or Mercedes, or just can't see yourself in Volvo. In all likelihood they would be better of pretending that they a Ford Focus, and advertise as such.
Everyone uses MS. No one is happy, but no one who matters is particularly unhappy. They need to accept that reality. People will use XP media center because they know nothing else. The best thing they could do is to give away LOTR DVD, or some free songs from best buy, or may a free rental a month from blockbuster. They don't because they do not understand.
Again, this is a case of just because you are paranoid doesn't mean some one is not chasing you.
MS like control. It's licensing terms with vendors don't allow them to package other OSes. It actively wrote code to make dual booting difficult. It actively wrote code to create conflicts with competing products. It actively discourages end users for using anything other than MS products, even to the point of using marginally legal slush funds. Even with the loss in court MS is not changing behavior.
This has nothing to do with/. bias. This is reality. Now it may be that you find the current reality to be acceptable, even beneficial, but that does not change the facts.
Logically it would be ludicrous for any sane person to suggest that a custom bios would not lock a user into MS technology. Now maybe it is not windows, per se. Maybe the CPU and bios will lock the user into MS DRM, which might be licensed to 'competing' OSes. Even in this case MS would still have the control and the effective majority market share.
Re:Is he reading too much into people?
on
Beyond Fear
·
· Score: 1
From what I have read of Schnier, which admittedly has only included the work of the past several years, including the first several chapters of AC, and does not include, as of now, Beyond Fear, I find his statement to be based on the behavior of individuals and not on a priori assumptions.
Your security system example provides a good case in point. Many people do buy them out of fear. A security system at best provides a limited time for the intruder to spend on a premises before risking apprehension. For this to be effective the security system has to be monitored, and the security system must be on. This means that the security service must not only monitor for alarms, but must also monitor for system status. For example, an alarm company should know that between the hours of 5PM and 7AM the system should be armed, and if it is not, then someone should be called to find out why not. Not all security services provide this level of monitoring, and those that don't are arguably providing emotional protection from fear, not physical security.
Another example Schnier has cited is guns for airline pilot, which is really a perfect example of fear based policies. The purpose of the pilot is to fly the plane. Simulations in cockpits using real pilots and trained terrorist experts has shown that it is likely that a terrorist will get the gun from the pilot and kill everyone in the cockpit before the either pilot can draw a weapon. OTOH, we realize the value of secure cockpit and are making it happen. The Israeli's have known this for years. If the cockpit is secure, then the pilots can do their job and we will be much less likely to have planes flying into buildings.
And there are other techniques pilots can use to defend the plane. The French in 1994 used such techniques to successfully thwart a plan to crash a hijacked plane into the Eiffel tower which would have killed everyone on board, not to mention many people in the tower and tower area. Instead, the pilots were able to use the physics of the plane to pin the terrorist long enough to land the plane in a French military base where qualified military personnel stormed the plane, killed all 4 hijackers with the loss of (only) three passenger lives. The US knew of that this hijacking could lead to danger for the US, that the anti-terrorist method could be used here, yet even today the best they can come up with is using commercial pilots as police, unworkable passenger screening, and training fighter pilots to shoot down commercial jets. At least it seems that our nations finest are reluctant to commit to such acts.
So I would say Schnier has plenty of reason to assume that people make these decisions based on fear rather than logic.
Might I also add that users who like p2p networks might migrate to the ISPs that do not monitor traffic. Even those who don't do anything significant with P2P might prefer to support an ISP who does not monitor.
That in itself might be enough incentive to fight such requests.
The EFF is doing exactly what it should. It is taking business propaganda at face value and then compare the actual product to the propaganda. If the two match, the yea. If not, then either the company is deceiving through it's propaganda or building a deficient product.
In this case trusted computers is being billed as a way to allows owners to control their content. The opportunity for deception is provided by the interpretation of the word 'owners.'
Actually I just noticed that the other day. I was looking to see if anyone had architved an old printer driver, and what I got as a result was pretty much pages and pages of ink jet catridge advertisments.
I had heard page rank was dead. Until the other day I didn't believe it.
Either google needs to something to become relevent, or meet the fate of alta-vista.
I think the solar cell issue relates to the concept of electricity as a necessity. We can't live without it. When a power grid goes down, and we are without electrify for a few hours, you would think civilization had ended. We pay money not for the generation of electricity, but for the maintenance of the grid and the guarantee that we will have electricity. The power suppliers try very hard to make sure that guarantee is never questioned because as soon as it is they will lose the market.
Solar cells do not provide that guarantee by itself. For that guarantee to be met one has to have good batteries or a fossil fuel generator or the traditional grid. All these cost money. The most likely scenario is that we would have solar cells and draw on the grid when out demands outpaces the capacity of the cells, such as at night or in extremely hot weather. But the capital equipment that forms the grid will still have to maintained to provide that 99.5% reliability. And while this will likely be cheaper because there will be less power flow, it will not be proportionally cheaper.
So, the question is, aside from the environmental benefits, which I would argue are sufficient, where is incentive? Is anyone going to make a lot of money off this? Are consumer going to pay more for a smaller amount of electricity, or are they going to install solar panels, get off the grid, and then complain to congress when they have no power for a week?
In order for this to work, solar panels would have to cost almost nothing(which the one's here might) and the power producers would have to be allowed to rework thier pricing to those who choose to use cells.
The technology of the internet has already surpassed the technology of the telephone. On the later all i ever received were messages from alleged attractive alleged females who wanted to meet me. I'm not going to trust some faker on the phone.
However, with the services provided by the likes of O'Conner I now receive email with pictures from real women who are naked so i can see they are real women down the their spread privates. And these women not only want to meet me, but also want to perform act of unspeakable manipulations on my innocent body. And maybe they will even bring a friend!
I thank god every day for the bountiful fruits technological.
Look, if somone[sic] walked into your place of work and said "you are running unlicensed software," they'd be right. I have never seen a business that was NOT running unlicensed software. Does that mean they did it on purpose to destroy the maker of that software?
According to the BSA, and, if we extend the example, to the RIAA, the answer is absolutely. The end user 'steals' software explicitly to destroy the innocent vendor. Therefore, they believe, the end user owes treble damages plus the retail cost of the software plus the cost of the audit. Of course, we all know that the RIAA believes that each song that is 'stolen' is worth 150K.
This is why businesses and educational institutions pay large sums of money to license software they may never use, and allow spyware to be placed on their computers.
Which is just the say the whole IP fiction has gotten way out of control, and companies like SCO needs to chill. Just because a standard contract was signed a long time ago that gave the first born child of everyone using Unix to the owners of Unix, doesn't mean that anyone will actually give you a first born child.
While I completely agree with you that liberals are not necessarily any more or less of pure motives than conservatives, the statement you ridiculing is, and has been, the basis for most conservative policy for at least the past twenty years.
Most media not specifically affiliated with a political cause, not to mention the OMB, indicates all current tax policy overwhelmingly reduces the taxes of the top 1%, and really benefits the top 1/2% of taxpayers.
While we can question whether this is the best policy, that is not the point of your reply. The administration verifiable interested in reducing the tax of the rich. They do a few things to make people believe that the tax cuts benefit the middle class, but the OMB says otherwise.
Likewise, the current action do not show an interest in saving money. The current administration wants the US to pay for all the Iraq reconstruction, possible to benefit campaign contributors, even though other countries would be happy to help foot the bill, if only they were allowed to bid on the project. Likewise, the OMB indicates that the growing deficit will continue to cost our grand children additional taxes. No one is surprised at this, and no one expects otherwise.
So, if you want to fight over whether a policy will lead to good or bad, that's fine. Fighting over statements that every honest conservative would have to admit is true is foolish. It would be like a liberal denying the fact that they want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for social programs. No honest liberal would deny it.
The basis of the SCO claim is that due to contracts that were signed by, apparently, most player way back in prehistory, SCO, who claim to own Unix, owns everything.
Given that they have moved from the Linux kernel, to the GNU tools, to god knows what, the fact that a tool has been ported to non *nix platform(which OS X certainly does not qualify, and Windows might) would not seem to be barrier for their claims.
I did a bit work looking at the process of an assembly line. The situation was the standard problem of things being too slow, quality being too low, and the requirement that throughput increase 10% month. When I interviewed the supervisors the response I got was all the processes were good, and that they had used the processes to produce product in the past.
The supervisors blamed the workers for being stupid and lazy. The supervisors of course hadn't done any real work in a couple of years. When I actually went to the line I saw processes that may have been good enough a few years ago, but were not now.
The problem was that the company needed more people to run the line, the line needed to run most of the time 24 hours a day seven days a week, and product needed to be shipped on a more exacting schedule. The two biggest problems were that certain steps which required some precision would have had to be made more fault tolerant so that people with less training could do them, and other steps had to be made more reliable because there wasn't time to go back and fix things after the line shut down.
Which is where I think MS is now. The update process is not suited to the current use patterns or the people using them. Take the current auto-update for home users. There are many home users that are on dial-up with a single phone line in their house. They log on for like 20 minutes a day to check email and load a web site or two. These people might not want to tie up the line for the hour it takes to do an update. They are precisely the people that would open an infected email, which would then have plenty of time to spam the victims address book.
Production updates are the same thing, especially at small companies with several computers, broadband, and a single paid low paid IT worker. Is this worker going to stay after work on the day of the update to fix all the computers. If the company is running a website locally, is the boss going to let that site go down for the hour it takes to update, or is the boss going to want to wait until the IT worker can come in late one weekend to do it? Is that worker going to be competant to deal with any other patching that might be needed after the upate?
Again, it is easy to complain the workers are lazy and stupid. It is much harder to take responsibility as a supervisor or manager and realize that it is your responsibility to create a structure in which certain things will happen. Most supervisors and managers are just as lazy as the workers, and so don't take this responsibility.
Of course, the issue is widespread. IIRC, the original article said the problem was MS was so dominant such attacks were possible. All I am saying is they need to get off their lazy asses, use some of the billions, and develop processes that allows the stupid and lazy production line programmer to create secure code. They obviously can do this, as they have created plenty of processes that allows the untrained programmer to create useful code.
It seems that who pays whom is the issue, and points to a possible fallacy in the original posters assumption.
Headhunters, in a sense, don't really care about employers or candidates because the commission they receive is not directly from either. In a way it from the candidate, because the employer is likely reducing the first year pay for the candidate to cover the cost, but since the employer has the cash, and the party with the cash has the power, the head hunter has to appear to care about the employer.
But, as i said neither is true. The candidate is a means to a commission. The headhunter will happily waste as much as of the candidates time as is possible through meaningless interviews and long wait times in the head hunter office due to over booking. If the candidate is willing to spend money, the headhunter will happily waste that as well.
The same is true with the employer. The headhunters need to get the employer to start a new hire at as high a pay as possible. The headhunter has little motivation to make sure the hire is actually a good fit, as most contracts will state that a new hire only need to stay several months in order for the hire to be deemed successful, and even if the company has to fire the new hire, the headhunter must be given a few tries to do better before refunding money. Of course, if the new hire quits, the he or she is responsible for the headhunters fee.
Therefore it is in the headhunters best interest to get a employer to hire a candidate no matter how bad a fit that candidate is. This is not in the best interest of the candidate or the employer.
I successfully used a headhunter once. I was later told by the hiring manager at the company that the headhunter really did no useful work, and I was the only person supplied that really worked out. Most of the other news hires were not as advertised. OTOH I felt it was worth it because the headhunter did get my resume to the top, which probably would not have otherwise have happened.
I have thought about hiring an agent to help me find a job. I have not found anyone with a contract that actually was targeted to finding me a job. Most of the contracts merely provide an expensive resume service. I don't know if an employer would have any better luck for jobs that pay less than a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
I don't think it matters. MS is looking at a situation where it's products are being rejected by large portions of the world. The only reason that MS can use close standards and be so firm on copyrights is because they own most of the OS on all of the computers that matter. If the world standardizes on another OS, then MS will have to open up it's software just so the west can do business with the east.
So this probably poses no net loss to them. If the source ploy works then they win because the government will use windows and therefore the citizens will be more comfortable using widows as well.
If the chinese government looks at the source and copies the protocols into their linux, MS still wins. MS will be able to keep the standards closed in the west, where they make most of the money, while still be able to advertise that the systems will communicate with those in the east.
If the chinese government releases the linux source with the borrowed MS protocols, the MS wins doubly. There is no way that those enhancements will be included in a western Linux, and it would be very difficult to independently engineer the enhancements in such a way that there would not be significant copyright issues.
In any case, MS can change the protocol at any time, as it did with it's IM service, or even purposefully create messages that will break the competing service, as it did to Navigator.
I don't want to start a funny rubber thread, but I have one from an friend of mine.
I think he was in college, we are in the U.S., and it must have soon after the war, late 40's ealy 50's. Anyway he is sitting in class one day taking a test and this british bloke sitting behind him leans foward and whispers in this ear
can you spare a rubber.
It took my friend several seconds to understand what he meant.
It is a copyright issue. MS has pending claims for the terms "pc" and ".com" and objects to the term 'free' being used in conjuction with either.
Of course famous literature is going to be the next target as MS will continue it's push for trademarking common words like "Windows" with the application for "Door", "Home", "Porch" and "Gable".
Not really. Capitalism is all about the creation of wealth, which is not the same as the accumulation of money, or even stuff.
I believe that statements such as
Why beat around the bush and just come out and suggest that everyone forks their paycheck over to the government so that they can give everyone an equal share
are based upon the faulty assumption that a persons wealth derives from money. It was that single silly assumption that fueled the dot com stupidity and continues to fuel the daily corporate malfeasance.
Point in fact. Bill Gates is rich and wealthy. He could lose 90% of his liquid assets and still be wealthy. If he lost Windows he would merely be rich. Gates, like many a wealthy man, gives money away at a rate most of us cannot conceive of. OTOH, he fights tooth and nail to make sure Windows remains a lucrative property. Which do you believe he values more.
Point in fact. Kenneth Lay is merely rich. He has money. His statements shows he knows he is no longer wealthy. His company is worthless. Instead of building real value, management decided that money on the books was much more important. No wealth.
So when we are taking about wealth we are speaking of nothing so ephemeral as money. We are taking about things that make a country great. Things like natural resources and people. We are talking about not, like the socialist country, picking a choosing the children that will be professionals and those that will be laborers, but instead providing an educational system in which everyone has a chance to what they wish, and thereby maximize the efficacy of our population. We are talking about a health care system that maximizes the number work days and potential output of every citizen.
Of course these things cost money. Perhaps the people should pay for them based on how much they have personally profited from it, as is done in a free market. Perhaps local cooperatives are more efficient at creating wealth and exploiting resources and workers and this why people who merely care about money dislike them. After all, corporations have proven very effecient at transfering money, but it is the small startups that seem to create wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else get Flash installed with the update? I notice the update included Safari enhancements, so maybe they included it there.
It's not that big of a deal. It just took me a while to figure out that I had been infected with the monster. I generally try hard to avoid it, and I am trying to figure out where it came from.
Does Apple do anything that requires Flash?
The problem is the printer will be advertised at it's price after rebate. At the retail outlet the full terms may not be disclosed until after the sale is completed. It is possible the consumer may not understand the full terms until after he or she has used the printer.
Yes, it is the consumer's responsibility to ask questions and make an informed decision. OTOH, how complex do we want to make act of purchasing good and services. I mean in the US this is an activity we want people to engage in hundreds of times a day, if possible. By making it complex and deceitful we are increasing the opportunity costs of consuming product. I mean I already have grocery stores I don't shop at because they require you to carry a card to get the price other grocery stores will give you just for walking in.
I think our concern should be that the excessive amount of attention that US studios tend to pay to special effects, and their need for long fx sequences, will render the characters meaningless. I mean a CG Marvin would make him like Jar Jar
USB 1.1 is more than 30 times as slow as Firewire and has other technical disadvantages. Firewire is quite a bit more expensive. The takeup on USB 2.0 was slow, and consumers were getting restless. So, in common form, they change the rules without fully informing the consumer. USB 1.1 is now the previously advertised high speed USB 2.0, and there is no way to differentiate.
This of course allows salespeople to claim that USB is just as fast as firewire and there it is now of to buy that portable computer even if has no firewirre port. The rub is that if the port, or the hub, or the device runs at USB 1.1 speeds, you will have a long wait to download your music. And because there is no way to prove the salesperson technically lied, the consumer is stuck with it.
The reality is without the USB 2.0 deception, USB would not be of any competition for high speed devices.
The DCMA, with it's idea that I can purchase a piece of equipment and then not do it as I wish, or that I cannot make copies of books or music for personal use, is just immoral. It is immoral because it allows contracts in which the end user has to agree to terms that are unknown until the end user either cannot return the product of inadvertently breaks the contract. It is immoral because it prevents the necessary innovation that encourages the free market. It is immoral because it circumvents due process.
And we cannot allow immoral acts to continue. The best defense is peaceful civil disobedience. For instance, don't buy music from RIAA labels. If they have no income, they have no money to fight legal battles. The same goes for the MPAA, game vendors, and anyone else that uses the DMCA. It won't be possible to totally shut them out, but we can at least make an effort.
I believe a lot of what goes on P2P networks is copyright infringement, but what choice do we have. The music and movies are sold in packages that violates our traditional fair use rights under the law. If i can't make a copy of the CD for my car, and the manufacturer won't give me another CD when the original get stolen or damaged, then why should I buy the CD. The manufacturer obviously has no respect for me as a customer, so I might as well return the disrespect the manufacturer and copy the music off the net.
The same goes for movies. If movies are increasingly downloaded from the net, it won't be because people don't want to buy movies. It will be because the movies we can buy are illegally packaged to prevent out fair use rights. Why should I buy a movie that is crippled when I can download a copy that honors my fair use rights. The manufacturer may hid behind a license, but it makes no difference. A contract that removes legal rights, especially when the rights are not itemized, should not be honored.
By the way, what is IRC? Some of us are over 30 ya' know.
Well, I'm not and it has to do with the underlying fundamental economic values of each party.
First, each party has nothing but contempt for the average citizen. Average citizens are merely pawns to be used to insure that the powerful remain powerful and do not have to do significant work to remain so. The difference is the minimum for entrance into the extreme upper classes and size of the middle class.
The democrats think that a large middle class is safer, and that there are minimal risks to allowing generation after generation to remain middle class. Although this grant significant power to some pretty stupid people, it is easy enough for the extremely wealthy to control those people. The biggest problem is that supporting a middle class poses significant financial risks to the upper class. Money is needed for education, higher wages, and crowd control, money that otherwise could be left to collect interest. As I said, the Democrats think that on balance the risk is worthwhile.
On the other hand the Republicans want a majority lower class, that is porous in both directions to the middle class, but a middle class that is not easily permeable to the upper classes. This will firmly cement control in the hands of those intelligent and experienced enough to make good decisions. While the Republicans agree that is costs more money in crowd control, and while a person may need to be occasionally moved up to the upper class just to maintain the myth it can happen, it should not be a rule.
So what does this have to do with copyright. Well, first music and movies are primarily a method to control the masses. Second, the vast sums of money paid to superstars are not consistent with maintaining class structure. Third, a large middle class has to exist to support music as we know it. So, while democrats see music as a critical means to move cash back to upper class, and therefore are scared to death that people may actually not be paying for it but saving the money for their children, Republicans see music purely as a method of controlling the poor rabble and hate paying wages high enough to allow their employee to afford it.
Lawsuits are the same way. Democrats see them as way to control the rabble by randomly making a few of them rich. Most of the time the rabble is too stupid to save it, and many opportunities are provided for them to waste it. OTOH, Republican know that while it take intelligence to get money, there are enough class traitors that will help the rabble keep and grow the money once it is gotten. We can expand this to things such as smoking, as late life medical payments for the uninsured are a perfect means to make sure money does not get traferred to the next generation.
This could have really helped our image alot. Just like the plastic surgeons who spend 10 months out of the year curing small breast disease and then two weeks helping deformed infants in some place no American has ever heard of, the US programmer can spend their days creating the means of world domination for MS and then go home and write the 1,361st GUI for GNU/Linux!
B
M
The difference between IBM and MS is that IBM understands the purpose of advertising. So does Apple. Advertising convinces you that a product will fulfill an emotional need. Apple does this by presenting their products as the haute coutre and therefore fulfilling the customers need to be beautiful. IBM has been running commercials that continue their long standing tradition presenting their products as the cure to FUD.
As an aside, I think it so silly that SCO is trying to use the FUD tactic. SCO is just the like the snot nosed kid that you just want to pick up by the shirt colar and say 'I invented FUD, boy.'
Anyway, back to the ramble. MS commercials fulfill no emotional need. They try to be feel good by focusing on who much money they give to charity. They have frantic IT guys running around telling how much money MS is going to save. Bullshit detector goes off. You don't do stuff like that anymore without a bit of sarcasm. A scary man running around in a tights does not an image make.
Which brings up MS totally lack of understanding of media in general. What is the central image of MS. For Apple it is that their machines are Stars that you can own. For IBM it is that their processes are Stars that will make life better. The commercials are produced, on message, edgy without being fake. If you go to the MS home page today the message is that their machines are bug ridden, virus infested monsters that turn old men senile.
And yet they say they are pushing media center. Can't find anything interesting about in the searches. The second sponsored link in google is broken. There is a mention of it on the MS homepage, but you have to have perfect vision in order to see it.
I think they fact is that MS thinks they are Jaguar and people only need to be shown that they can afford it. In fact they are closer to, if I am very generous, to Lexus or Infiniti, the cars you buy if you can't afford a BMW or Mercedes, or just can't see yourself in Volvo. In all likelihood they would be better of pretending that they a Ford Focus, and advertise as such.
Everyone uses MS. No one is happy, but no one who matters is particularly unhappy. They need to accept that reality. People will use XP media center because they know nothing else. The best thing they could do is to give away LOTR DVD, or some free songs from best buy, or may a free rental a month from blockbuster. They don't because they do not understand.
MS like control. It's licensing terms with vendors don't allow them to package other OSes. It actively wrote code to make dual booting difficult. It actively wrote code to create conflicts with competing products. It actively discourages end users for using anything other than MS products, even to the point of using marginally legal slush funds. Even with the loss in court MS is not changing behavior.
This has nothing to do with /. bias. This is reality. Now it may be that you find the current reality to be acceptable, even beneficial, but that does not change the facts.
Logically it would be ludicrous for any sane person to suggest that a custom bios would not lock a user into MS technology. Now maybe it is not windows, per se. Maybe the CPU and bios will lock the user into MS DRM, which might be licensed to 'competing' OSes. Even in this case MS would still have the control and the effective majority market share.
Your security system example provides a good case in point. Many people do buy them out of fear. A security system at best provides a limited time for the intruder to spend on a premises before risking apprehension. For this to be effective the security system has to be monitored, and the security system must be on. This means that the security service must not only monitor for alarms, but must also monitor for system status. For example, an alarm company should know that between the hours of 5PM and 7AM the system should be armed, and if it is not, then someone should be called to find out why not. Not all security services provide this level of monitoring, and those that don't are arguably providing emotional protection from fear, not physical security.
Another example Schnier has cited is guns for airline pilot, which is really a perfect example of fear based policies. The purpose of the pilot is to fly the plane. Simulations in cockpits using real pilots and trained terrorist experts has shown that it is likely that a terrorist will get the gun from the pilot and kill everyone in the cockpit before the either pilot can draw a weapon. OTOH, we realize the value of secure cockpit and are making it happen. The Israeli's have known this for years. If the cockpit is secure, then the pilots can do their job and we will be much less likely to have planes flying into buildings.
And there are other techniques pilots can use to defend the plane. The French in 1994 used such techniques to successfully thwart a plan to crash a hijacked plane into the Eiffel tower which would have killed everyone on board, not to mention many people in the tower and tower area. Instead, the pilots were able to use the physics of the plane to pin the terrorist long enough to land the plane in a French military base where qualified military personnel stormed the plane, killed all 4 hijackers with the loss of (only) three passenger lives. The US knew of that this hijacking could lead to danger for the US, that the anti-terrorist method could be used here, yet even today the best they can come up with is using commercial pilots as police, unworkable passenger screening, and training fighter pilots to shoot down commercial jets. At least it seems that our nations finest are reluctant to commit to such acts.
So I would say Schnier has plenty of reason to assume that people make these decisions based on fear rather than logic.
That in itself might be enough incentive to fight such requests.
In this case trusted computers is being billed as a way to allows owners to control their content. The opportunity for deception is provided by the interpretation of the word 'owners.'
I had heard page rank was dead. Until the other day I didn't believe it.
Either google needs to something to become relevent, or meet the fate of alta-vista.
Solar cells do not provide that guarantee by itself. For that guarantee to be met one has to have good batteries or a fossil fuel generator or the traditional grid. All these cost money. The most likely scenario is that we would have solar cells and draw on the grid when out demands outpaces the capacity of the cells, such as at night or in extremely hot weather. But the capital equipment that forms the grid will still have to maintained to provide that 99.5% reliability. And while this will likely be cheaper because there will be less power flow, it will not be proportionally cheaper.
So, the question is, aside from the environmental benefits, which I would argue are sufficient, where is incentive? Is anyone going to make a lot of money off this? Are consumer going to pay more for a smaller amount of electricity, or are they going to install solar panels, get off the grid, and then complain to congress when they have no power for a week?
In order for this to work, solar panels would have to cost almost nothing(which the one's here might) and the power producers would have to be allowed to rework thier pricing to those who choose to use cells.
However, with the services provided by the likes of O'Conner I now receive email with pictures from real women who are naked so i can see they are real women down the their spread privates. And these women not only want to meet me, but also want to perform act of unspeakable manipulations on my innocent body. And maybe they will even bring a friend!
I thank god every day for the bountiful fruits technological.
According to the BSA, and, if we extend the example, to the RIAA, the answer is absolutely. The end user 'steals' software explicitly to destroy the innocent vendor. Therefore, they believe, the end user owes treble damages plus the retail cost of the software plus the cost of the audit. Of course, we all know that the RIAA believes that each song that is 'stolen' is worth 150K.
This is why businesses and educational institutions pay large sums of money to license software they may never use, and allow spyware to be placed on their computers.
Which is just the say the whole IP fiction has gotten way out of control, and companies like SCO needs to chill. Just because a standard contract was signed a long time ago that gave the first born child of everyone using Unix to the owners of Unix, doesn't mean that anyone will actually give you a first born child.
Most media not specifically affiliated with a political cause, not to mention the OMB, indicates all current tax policy overwhelmingly reduces the taxes of the top 1%, and really benefits the top 1/2% of taxpayers.
While we can question whether this is the best policy, that is not the point of your reply. The administration verifiable interested in reducing the tax of the rich. They do a few things to make people believe that the tax cuts benefit the middle class, but the OMB says otherwise.
Likewise, the current action do not show an interest in saving money. The current administration wants the US to pay for all the Iraq reconstruction, possible to benefit campaign contributors, even though other countries would be happy to help foot the bill, if only they were allowed to bid on the project. Likewise, the OMB indicates that the growing deficit will continue to cost our grand children additional taxes. No one is surprised at this, and no one expects otherwise.
So, if you want to fight over whether a policy will lead to good or bad, that's fine. Fighting over statements that every honest conservative would have to admit is true is foolish. It would be like a liberal denying the fact that they want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for social programs. No honest liberal would deny it.
The basis of the SCO claim is that due to contracts that were signed by, apparently, most player way back in prehistory, SCO, who claim to own Unix, owns everything.
Given that they have moved from the Linux kernel, to the GNU tools, to god knows what, the fact that a tool has been ported to non *nix platform(which OS X certainly does not qualify, and Windows might) would not seem to be barrier for their claims.
The supervisors blamed the workers for being stupid and lazy. The supervisors of course hadn't done any real work in a couple of years. When I actually went to the line I saw processes that may have been good enough a few years ago, but were not now.
The problem was that the company needed more people to run the line, the line needed to run most of the time 24 hours a day seven days a week, and product needed to be shipped on a more exacting schedule. The two biggest problems were that certain steps which required some precision would have had to be made more fault tolerant so that people with less training could do them, and other steps had to be made more reliable because there wasn't time to go back and fix things after the line shut down.
Which is where I think MS is now. The update process is not suited to the current use patterns or the people using them. Take the current auto-update for home users. There are many home users that are on dial-up with a single phone line in their house. They log on for like 20 minutes a day to check email and load a web site or two. These people might not want to tie up the line for the hour it takes to do an update. They are precisely the people that would open an infected email, which would then have plenty of time to spam the victims address book.
Production updates are the same thing, especially at small companies with several computers, broadband, and a single paid low paid IT worker. Is this worker going to stay after work on the day of the update to fix all the computers. If the company is running a website locally, is the boss going to let that site go down for the hour it takes to update, or is the boss going to want to wait until the IT worker can come in late one weekend to do it? Is that worker going to be competant to deal with any other patching that might be needed after the upate?
Again, it is easy to complain the workers are lazy and stupid. It is much harder to take responsibility as a supervisor or manager and realize that it is your responsibility to create a structure in which certain things will happen. Most supervisors and managers are just as lazy as the workers, and so don't take this responsibility.
Of course, the issue is widespread. IIRC, the original article said the problem was MS was so dominant such attacks were possible. All I am saying is they need to get off their lazy asses, use some of the billions, and develop processes that allows the stupid and lazy production line programmer to create secure code. They obviously can do this, as they have created plenty of processes that allows the untrained programmer to create useful code.
Headhunters, in a sense, don't really care about employers or candidates because the commission they receive is not directly from either. In a way it from the candidate, because the employer is likely reducing the first year pay for the candidate to cover the cost, but since the employer has the cash, and the party with the cash has the power, the head hunter has to appear to care about the employer.
But, as i said neither is true. The candidate is a means to a commission. The headhunter will happily waste as much as of the candidates time as is possible through meaningless interviews and long wait times in the head hunter office due to over booking. If the candidate is willing to spend money, the headhunter will happily waste that as well.
The same is true with the employer. The headhunters need to get the employer to start a new hire at as high a pay as possible. The headhunter has little motivation to make sure the hire is actually a good fit, as most contracts will state that a new hire only need to stay several months in order for the hire to be deemed successful, and even if the company has to fire the new hire, the headhunter must be given a few tries to do better before refunding money. Of course, if the new hire quits, the he or she is responsible for the headhunters fee.
Therefore it is in the headhunters best interest to get a employer to hire a candidate no matter how bad a fit that candidate is. This is not in the best interest of the candidate or the employer.
I successfully used a headhunter once. I was later told by the hiring manager at the company that the headhunter really did no useful work, and I was the only person supplied that really worked out. Most of the other news hires were not as advertised. OTOH I felt it was worth it because the headhunter did get my resume to the top, which probably would not have otherwise have happened.
I have thought about hiring an agent to help me find a job. I have not found anyone with a contract that actually was targeted to finding me a job. Most of the contracts merely provide an expensive resume service. I don't know if an employer would have any better luck for jobs that pay less than a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
So this probably poses no net loss to them. If the source ploy works then they win because the government will use windows and therefore the citizens will be more comfortable using widows as well.
If the chinese government looks at the source and copies the protocols into their linux, MS still wins. MS will be able to keep the standards closed in the west, where they make most of the money, while still be able to advertise that the systems will communicate with those in the east.
If the chinese government releases the linux source with the borrowed MS protocols, the MS wins doubly. There is no way that those enhancements will be included in a western Linux, and it would be very difficult to independently engineer the enhancements in such a way that there would not be significant copyright issues.
In any case, MS can change the protocol at any time, as it did with it's IM service, or even purposefully create messages that will break the competing service, as it did to Navigator.
I think he was in college, we are in the U.S., and it must have soon after the war, late 40's ealy 50's. Anyway he is sitting in class one day taking a test and this british bloke sitting behind him leans foward and whispers in this ear
can you spare a rubber.
It took my friend several seconds to understand what he meant.
Of course famous literature is going to be the next target as MS will continue it's push for trademarking common words like "Windows" with the application for "Door", "Home", "Porch" and "Gable".
I believe that statements such as
Why beat around the bush and just come out and suggest that everyone forks their paycheck over to the government so that they can give everyone an equal share
are based upon the faulty assumption that a persons wealth derives from money. It was that single silly assumption that fueled the dot com stupidity and continues to fuel the daily corporate malfeasance.
Point in fact. Bill Gates is rich and wealthy. He could lose 90% of his liquid assets and still be wealthy. If he lost Windows he would merely be rich. Gates, like many a wealthy man, gives money away at a rate most of us cannot conceive of. OTOH, he fights tooth and nail to make sure Windows remains a lucrative property. Which do you believe he values more.
Point in fact. Kenneth Lay is merely rich. He has money. His statements shows he knows he is no longer wealthy. His company is worthless. Instead of building real value, management decided that money on the books was much more important. No wealth.
So when we are taking about wealth we are speaking of nothing so ephemeral as money. We are taking about things that make a country great. Things like natural resources and people. We are talking about not, like the socialist country, picking a choosing the children that will be professionals and those that will be laborers, but instead providing an educational system in which everyone has a chance to what they wish, and thereby maximize the efficacy of our population. We are talking about a health care system that maximizes the number work days and potential output of every citizen.
Of course these things cost money. Perhaps the people should pay for them based on how much they have personally profited from it, as is done in a free market. Perhaps local cooperatives are more efficient at creating wealth and exploiting resources and workers and this why people who merely care about money dislike them. After all, corporations have proven very effecient at transfering money, but it is the small startups that seem to create wealth.