This is main current gripe with Nielsen. In the past his stance against Flash has made most of his other oversights tolerable. The fact is that Flash is almost always primarily used for 1)useless intros and 2) advertising. While I think his foray into flash usability is commendable, I think his association with Flash is a deal with the force of web unsuitability, and ultimately threatens his credibility.
I do not run flash on my main browser. I do not like to upgrade browser software because it will generally include flash. I have seen good uses of flash. I have more often seen gratuitous uses that stifle the visitor.
Pretty much DRM and encryption are pipe dreams for protected documents. DRM will only work if every machine is DRM compliant and the business is willing to sacrifice time to allow the DRM technology(for instance, most businesses are not willing to sacrifice efficiency for secure passwords). Encryption only works for short times and certain cases.
Just imagine how good a "your documents can't be leaked, can't be stolen, changes can be tracked and you have total control over which employees see what" must sound.
There is value in having control over who sees a document. If nothing else, you know that one of these people leaked the document. However, as has been stated many times before, the DRM will only work if the all machines respect the DRM. Right now one can track changes in a word document, but converting to text makes that tracking irrelevant. DRM is not going to protect against leaks to F Company, much less major news outlets.
OTOH Anyone with half an ounce of technology smarts would know that simply encrypting sensitive digital documents would be DRM-enough. Who cares if you can copy a 512bit-encrypted PDF if you don't have the key to open it up?
I feel it necessary to cite Schneier's Fallacy of the Very Tall Pole. If you want to protect your property, build a fence, not a taller pole. WRT to your statement, the problem is a)it must be unencrypted to be read and b)you do care who has the encrypted document. First, the document must be unencrypted to be read. The encryption may help you identify the leak, but it won't stop the leak. DRM can help stop the leak by marking certain documents as not-to-be-printed or not-to-email-to-insecure-people, if all equipment respects these tags. Second, a lot of encryption can eventually be broken. If the information will expire in a few months, for instance a love letter, then that is not such a big deal. If the document desribes how you murdered your once true love, you certainly want to keep even the encrypted version under wraps.
Every business failure has been blamed on 9/11. It is convenient sacrificial lamb and covers up bad management. While 9/11 increased the speed of the airlines demise, the industry was set for recession before that event.
The cause of the recession was the internet and business traveler protest. The internet allowed casual travelers to get rock bottom prices. Business travelers, who have traditionally paid the costs of the airlines, were becoming increasing angry at the high prices they had to pay, which were often several times that of the casual traveler. If one looks at the pre-9/11 stories, one sees an industry responding to these crisis by dropping prices, dropping commissions, dropping services, and dropping profits.
Add to this other salient facts. Airbus is getting more contracts now, at the expense of Boeing(New Zealand in July). Many travelers who might have the money to fly on these jets are increasingly flying on private jets. Security is a prime justification to purchase private jets. The airline companies that are doing well, like Southwest, are focused of price and a very defined level of service. They do not randomly spend money on new toys.
I agree with the poster to a point. The service is not perfect. I mainly use email, and about once a week or so my computer, which is set on automatic email retrieval, cannot log in the.Mac servers. This condition lasts for several minutes to a couple hours. I do not often use webmail, but when I do, it is reliable. The web hosting is adequate. The way I use.mac, it is reliable enough. My main complaint is that the virus update is poorly implemented.
My real suspicion about this article is that there are no links. Often when one has a long email conversation with customer support, that conversation is posted for others to peruse. One wonder why there is no such link. Also, if this topic is burning up the forums, why not a link to those archives. Certainly is this story was a comment on/., the lack of supportive documentation would certainly make it moderated as a troll.
It occurs to me that this anonymous reader might be trying to use,Mac to run a business. This would be a mistake. Like any consumer level ISP or hosting package,.Mac has no uptime guarantees or customer service standards. It is developed for the casual user who needs as very simple email, web hosting, and backup solution. I would encourage anyone who needs to run a business to spend the $15 to register a domain and then rent an appropriate level of web hosting..Mac is actually a good deal for what it is, but is it certainly not suitable for anything but the most casual business use.
On the other hand, the poster may be just some pissed off teenage Windows user. In that case, grow up and get a real OS.
We have long have an alternative to the palm. It is called the newton. I recently acquired a used on, to replace one I broke a few years ago. I look forward to upgrading to Jaguar and running nSync to synch the address book.
As it is now, the the NCU works fine through my network(network connected syncing, that is what I miss most) on Mac OX 10.1.5. I use Newton works for writing and exchange via RTF.
Of course this is more FUD. One wonders why, if the outlets were actually selling counterfeit CDs, they would just not send the authorities to arrest the suspects.
Rather they seem to be using this as an opportunity to intimidate alternative outlets and spread their unique interpretation fo the truth. I always find it amusing that they continue to blame various forms of piracy for the decline of sales, even in light of continuing revelations to the contrary. Of course, the sad thing is that the report just regurgitate the alleged facts.
The RIAA is probably most concerned about lack of control. They went through a lot of trouble insuring that they had control over the record stores. They have lost some of that control though discounters, but managed to minimize the loss through marketing deals. This is just another symptom of their compulsive control behavior. It is impossible to control all these little outlets, and therefor their price fixing policies will not be as effective.
Clearly, the media is not going to fix this. The congress is not going to fix this. I encourage everyone to go out into their communities and find independent music. Buy tickets to local concerts at local venues. Buy the CDs. Do not copy the music. We will only create a new market if we are willing to support the new market.
you obviously have no idea of historical fact or current advertising norms.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
1. The fight over bill boards has a long history. Ladybird Johnson officially started the fight with her work on highway beautification. Many large cities now have a moratorium on billboards. The content of billboard, like all advertising, is heavily restricted.
2. Magazine advertising is also restricted and people lose sleep over how to circumvent those restriction. However, because magazine ad campaigns cost real money, and the advertiser and magazine are liable for those campaigns, people generally behave.
3. Again, the fight over TV commercials are at a very mature state, but they are still skirmishes. A few years ago it was over underwear in commercials. Now the liquor companies want to end the voluntary ban of hard liquor advertising on TV. Of course we cannot directly promote tobacco on tv.
Which is to say it is extremely naive and ill informed to claim that advertising is not illegal in America. It would be very easy to put together a campaign that is illegal, and even professional mess up every once in a while. What makes non-internet advertising manageable is that the rules are known and it is assumed that the advertiser will always be held accountable. Contrast this to email where the advertiser assumes that the laws of the land do not apply because they can cowardly hide behind fraudulent headers.
Re:How many times does it have to be said?
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AOL Wins Anti-Spam Case
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Free speech for advertising does not include lies. I can no longer advertise a car for sale when I never had the car for sale. I can no longer advertise clothes at 50% off without noting that no sales occurred at the 'retail price. There are all sorts of restriction put on free speech in general, and advertising in particular, to protect the populous from lies. I do not have the right to outright lie about a competitor.
The worst spam, the spam that should be prosecuted, and the spam that should be destroyed, lies to the reader. The spam likely has forged headers. A lie. The spam likely has a misleading subject line. A line. The spam most likely has claims that goes beyond the traditional advertising hyperbole. A lie. The spam may fraudulently indicate that I signed up on a list. A lie. The spam may indicate a fraudult removal claim. A lie.
There is no way that fraudulent advertising speech is covered my the first amendment. Hyperbolic speech, probably, but not outright lies.
Speakeasy basic DSL gives you two static IPs, and doesn't have any language forbidding routers. Most other services only give you dynamic IP and PPP DSL. In addition, they want you to install a lot of extra spy crap. Earthlink, for instance, gives you a single dynamic IP and then charges you 10 dollars extra if you want a home network. This is highway robbbery,
Or they get screwed by the upstreanm provider in the case of service outages. In my experience, the smaller ISPs never could negotiate appropriate uptime agreements.
Exactly what the more rational and less rabid of us have said all along. Linux has its place, which for most people is not the desktop.
It depends on what desktop you mean. For many users, who need email, web browser, and simple office activity, Linux is very close to being an adequate desktop. It's installation is not simple, but if there were widely available Linux machines, that would not be a problem. The real issue is not the desktop, but MS licensing, Word and IE specific web sites.
If the monopoly remedies are successful at forcing MS to stop the anticompetive behaviors, and I have little confidence they will now that shrub has nuetered the procedure, I give it another year or so before linux is acceptable on business desktop machines.
What interests me about the end of vinyl and tape is the apparent end of components that supported the playback. It wasn't that long ago that if you wanted good audio and video you would need a good turn table, a good amplifier, a good VCR, and very good speakers. Of course, for maximum flexibility the amplifier tended to be very expensive with radio receiver and a/v i/o and switching. The quality of the tape and vinyl was such that you did not want to introduce further distortions in the other equipment.
Now most people just go out and buy a bookshelf system for a couple hundred dollars, or a few hundred if it has a DVD player, and let it go at that. The speakers suck so the reproduction is probably far below cassette tape. We might buy a decent set of speakers, but that doubles the price of the system. People get used to that low quality sound, so just download the songs from the net and listen to music on the computer, thus bypassing all music related sales.
Perhaps not as bad as I say, but I get a better sound out of my computer and my amplified speaker system than any bookshelf system I have seen.
And I can also rip anything out of my car and sell it on the open market. There is nothing that says I cannot remove the rear bumper and sell it. There is nothing that says if I upgrade my tires, I cannot sell the old tires.
OTOH, the software is unique. I agree that reasonable efforts should be made to protect the software from piracy. What I do not agree with is that reasonable protection includes forcing every computer to ship with the piece of software, or to bind that software permanently to a particular piece of hardware.
The MS rational is that everyone with an x86 owes them a tax, and anyone that does not pay the tax is a pirate. MS also believes that the licenses are largely non-transferable. One or the other needs to change.
My thing with motorcycles has been responsible riding. Although some complain that other vehicles are the problem, the insurance institute reports that about half the deaths involve a single vehicle, and about half of those involved an alcohol level above 0.10 percent. The report also informs us that in states where helmets are not required, only about 50% of the rides wear helmets, and those riders that do not wear them are about a third more at risk,
On the other hand, it seems we need to do something. The report indicates that a motorcycle is 18 times more dangerous than a car. Even if we get rid of drunk riders, that still is a very dangerous machine to ride. On the other hand, air bags will only protect the rides in limited circumstances, like a head on collision or running into another vehicle, which is only like 20%, while running off the road, falling down, or having a car smack into the bike is the rest. While air bags will protect the center of the body from trauma, will the effectiveness be high enough to make a difference?
One thing I found interesting on the above link is that deaths were falling until 1998. It looks like deaths have increased like 30% since then. I wonder if this might be due to the increased sales of larger vehicles, and the maniacs that drive them. I wonder if we required a different kind of drivers license for anything bigger than a Ford Escape we might save lives. After all, the car companies convinced congress to give trucks a catalytic converter exemption because they were largely commercial vehicles. Therefore, perhaps we should require commercial licenses for these large vehicles.(we were at 35% trucks in the mid 90's, and about 45-50% now)
I would say this would be more comparable to the Alien series, especially with relation to the amount of time it took to develop the script and the amount of money that was necessary to convince the star to sign on.
Alien and Aliens both are in the top 100 of the the IMDB rankings. On the other hand, Alien cubed is barely average, and Alien Resurrection is not even worth mentioning. Likewise, Sigourney Weaver was paid 30K and 1 Million for the first two, but 11 million for Resurrection.
You do have a point with Star Wars though. The first two films are in the top 20, and the third film is in the top 250. Episode I, II, and probably III, are not much better than average. Finally, it is a mistake to make quality judgements based on box office receipts. I think we can all find horrible movies in the list. Titanic anyone? Or Cast Away?
I must slightly disagree with your statement. For science to be healthy, all research, in all journals, at all times, should be taken with a grain of salt. There is nothing ground breaking about fraud in science. It happens, and will continue to happen. Science is very complex, and any single paper, like any single data point, is nothing more than a guess. In this case, we have an anomaly, a hypothesis, and some research. Time will tell if this hypothesis is correct, or if the anomaly is real.
In fact the validity of a paper is only determined after years of careful work to reproduce, understand, define the range, and provide a complete theoretical basis for the work. This was very pleasantly explained in Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica. The importance for patience was shown recently with the AT&T Jan Hendrik Schön fraud scandal among others. Most of the damage in these cases are caused by the treatment of science as a religion that provides instant truths, rather than a process that occasionally provides useful answers.
It amazes me the number of people of people who equate 'published in a peer reviewed journal' with 'stamp of truth'. This mistake is often made in the 'health sciences' sector in which firms routinely create products based on single peer review studies and then abuse the findings of those studies to market the products.
I would like to state here that I consider the creators of Chimera to be the most noble of persons and cannot thank them enough for their generosity. To me, Chimera is the killer App for OS X. It is one of the few applications that makes me happy I am running OS X.
rant on
As previously stated, the usefulness of an application that one uses every day cannot be stated in a simple features matrix. It can only be a title earned with use. IE, for everyday use, is not even an option. Netscape is barely an option. Mozilla is good, but still to complex.
Lets take a look at the cons. Chimera did crash at 0.5, but now it is stable. Even when it did crash, it was still more useful than IE. Chimera has never crashed on me since it reached 0.6.
Chimera has minimal preferences. For the most part setting preferences is not a daily task. It is not the thing that, over time, is going to rack up the hundreds of hours that say, directed to a vendors search service by default, might waste. Can anyone catagorize the amount of time wasted when IE would set the homepage and search engine back to MSN after upgrade? Most things can be done in Chimera. The most obvious missing feature is accept/reject image preference. I think the biggest mistake a developer can make is to over engineer the preference GUI at the expense of more oft used features.
As far as flash is concerned, that is more an issue to the advertisers and content distributors that to me, as a user. Flash has wasted so much time in my web browsing experience, through useless splash screens, advertisements, etc, that I have it turned off in everything except IE. If I can get into a site without using flash, I just usually skip that site.
BTW, the only reason IE is on my computer to access some (unfortunately) important sites in which the developer has implemented so IE only bug. I guess they were too illiterate to learn real HTML.
ran off
Joe sixpack doesn't care about the DCMA because, apparently, the only people who do care about the DCMA are condescending pompous assholes. The general population of the U.S. lives in fear of losing their job, losing their partner, being murdered by people who look different, and not being able to afford medical care for their children.
Within this context, stores like Walmart, along with mass entertainment and cheap energy, are the drugs that allows the population to survive in this fear. Things that are important are things that directly increase the price of the drugs. As long as the drugs are accessible, there is no problem. And since the factors that might increase the costs of these products have been externalized to the U.S. taxpayer, it is difficult to make the argument that such laws are directly harmful.
I would agree with you if the ads were merely somewhat misleading, emotionally contrived hyperbolic, immoral, or annoying. These elements are in almost every successful advertisement campaign, and few even notice. It is perfectly accepted that cigarettes create a sexy male, feeding fast food to your kids means you love them, and drinking the right soft drink will bring world peace, or, alternatively, get you lucky with a bit of former jail bait. All these things are perfectly legal.
The issue here is deceptive advertisement, which is taken quite seriously. Look at the evolution of the car lease promotion. In the beginning, it gave a deceptive impression of the cost of the lease. Now the ads are required to disclose all costs. Likewise the print ads for department stores, which now carry notices that the list price does not mean a price at which anything was actually offered or sold. Of course, the closest example may be the deceptive verisign domain registration which cajoled people to switch their registrar through fraudulent means.
I found this quote at bussiness 2.0: LESSIG: Well, OK, let's remember an important moment in the explosion of the PC revolution. Everybody said IBM made such a terrible mistake in giving Microsoft the operating system and just licensing a version back. But IBM also had in its plan control of the ROM BIOS -- this was the startup chip that would make it so that it was a quote "IBM PC." It was Compaq that went and reverse-engineered that ROM BIOS to, then, establish the PC industry where there could be lots of competition among a lot of different producers all buying Intel chips but, still, lots of competition in the boxes that they produced that gave birth to the PC industry. Now, that reverse-engineering, under some views of intellectual property, is a crime, it was theft. It was theft to the IP that IBM had built into the original ROM BIOS. Now, it was because that view of theft wasn't permitted to capture the birth of the PC industry that we got the birth of the PC industry. And my concern is this idea of theft will take over the lawmakers right now so that we won't get the equivalent of the reverse-engineering of the ROM BIOS that gave birth to the PC industry.
This is the generally accepted but largely forgotten version of history. While MS did the relatively simple task of copying an OS from IBM, Compaq et al did the much more complicated job of reverse engineering, against IBM wishes, the BIOS. Legal battles were fought to give Compaq the right to do so. Compaq won, and thus the PC market was opened. MS did little to facilitate this process. Once the BIOS was cracked, anyone could write the OS, and many did.
The ironic thing is that MS is working the IP cartel to rewrite laws so that such reverse engineering of hardware,and software cannot happen. History indicates the high prices we might have to pay if IBM was allowed to protect their BIOS. I think we can look at things such as the DCMA, the XBox, and DRM, and wonder if we are going down the same exploitive price road.
IANAP-hysiologist, so I do not the technicalities of this disonic resonance, but your comment sounds like simple defensiveness create by a lack of a safe environment. To wit, you say you "teased him." I do not believe such a technique is useful in diagnosing mental conditions.
What I do know is that everyone makes concessions. There are things that I would do if I owned a fast Windows machine or a fast Linux machine that I do not do on my fast Mac. I do not own such machines because I do not think my money is well spent MS stuff, nor do I think Linux is good enough to justify a second fast box. I tell this to people, admit that there are things I can't easily do, and then get hounded for my clear and rational statements. For some reason, thier world view will not accept the fact that I have a differing opinion. I generally do not go around and hound Window users for their viral licenses. I do not hound Linux users for their pompous culture. So why should they hound for my decisions?
No hires quicktime?
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Equilibrium
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Ob complaint. Why does Real Player and Windows Media Player get high quality feeds, but Quicktime only has a low quality feed. Is another DRM punishment for Apple? This is itself might make me not want to see the movie.
MS will screw it up
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More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Keep in mind that if this wasn't MS, having one program to do it all would be a good thing. No, I am not MS bashing, just taking a realistic look at history and UI.
Think about what this would mean. We would not have to find and open a new application for each task. We would not have to figure out what is the best format to use when we copy 'foreign' content into our word processing document. This operating system would just let us do work without the distraction of a myriad of applications and formats. This hasn't been done because it requires a level of computing power that is yet not cheap enough and programming abstraction that is not yet common. I don't know how this would be done, but the The Humane Interface describes one possibility.
So, why does history tell us MS will screw us over with this new interface. First, the top level interface must be open and expandable. One would expect the UI to contain a set of user definable hooks that will allow the user to add or substitute filters for each type of content, and define new hooks for new types of content(think about the web browser). MS is notorious for keeping hooks secret, and secret hooks means that you are stuck with MS approved filters, which further the monopoly.
Second, the file format must be open and expandable. For people to write new filters, and create new types of content, programmer must know the storage formats and protocols. Again, MS does not create open formats, and makes arbitrary changes to formats to break compatibility with any foolish enough to reverse engineer the formats.
Third, the UI must be secure. At the base level this means that the UI must sandbox each process to insure that user processes are secure. MS is not good at the sandbox. On the configuration level, the user should have some confidence that filters will not mysteriously change. If filters can be remotely changed, then a trojan can easily be placed in a filter. MS will probably break security here because it likes the ability to configure a user's machine to MS standards. Finally, the UI must not allow all processes full functionality. For instance, foreign content should not be allowed to automatically compile as run as root. However, we see in outlook that, by default, images are loaded and scripts are executed. This gives us little hope that MS could create a secure UI.
A quick search on the net shows that one can get an elliptical pipe around 180"X116". For a livable underground pipe, one would need to run electricity, data, plumbing, ventilation, etc. In addition, we would expect some condensation and leakage, so everything would probably run through conduits on the top and sides. We would need pumps at the bottom to keep the living space dry
So, if the long axis was horizontal, one might have a space of 13 feet wide by 7.5 feet high. If they make this pipe in 8 feet lengths, that will give an area of about 100 square feet, which is a mid size storage closet. Of course pipes can be put together. It appears that the pipe would be around $5k, or $50 a square foot, which would make this an espensive house.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not run flash on my main browser. I do not like to upgrade browser software because it will generally include flash. I have seen good uses of flash. I have more often seen gratuitous uses that stifle the visitor.
Just imagine how good a "your documents can't be leaked, can't be stolen, changes can be tracked and you have total control over which employees see what" must sound.
There is value in having control over who sees a document. If nothing else, you know that one of these people leaked the document. However, as has been stated many times before, the DRM will only work if the all machines respect the DRM. Right now one can track changes in a word document, but converting to text makes that tracking irrelevant. DRM is not going to protect against leaks to F Company, much less major news outlets.
OTOH
Anyone with half an ounce of technology smarts would know that simply encrypting sensitive digital documents would be DRM-enough. Who cares if you can copy a 512bit-encrypted PDF if you don't have the key to open it up?
I feel it necessary to cite Schneier's Fallacy of the Very Tall Pole. If you want to protect your property, build a fence, not a taller pole. WRT to your statement, the problem is a)it must be unencrypted to be read and b)you do care who has the encrypted document. First, the document must be unencrypted to be read. The encryption may help you identify the leak, but it won't stop the leak. DRM can help stop the leak by marking certain documents as not-to-be-printed or not-to-email-to-insecure-people, if all equipment respects these tags. Second, a lot of encryption can eventually be broken. If the information will expire in a few months, for instance a love letter, then that is not such a big deal. If the document desribes how you murdered your once true love, you certainly want to keep even the encrypted version under wraps.
The cause of the recession was the internet and business traveler protest. The internet allowed casual travelers to get rock bottom prices. Business travelers, who have traditionally paid the costs of the airlines, were becoming increasing angry at the high prices they had to pay, which were often several times that of the casual traveler. If one looks at the pre-9/11 stories, one sees an industry responding to these crisis by dropping prices, dropping commissions, dropping services, and dropping profits.
Add to this other salient facts. Airbus is getting more contracts now, at the expense of Boeing(New Zealand in July). Many travelers who might have the money to fly on these jets are increasingly flying on private jets. Security is a prime justification to purchase private jets. The airline companies that are doing well, like Southwest, are focused of price and a very defined level of service. They do not randomly spend money on new toys.
My real suspicion about this article is that there are no links. Often when one has a long email conversation with customer support, that conversation is posted for others to peruse. One wonder why there is no such link. Also, if this topic is burning up the forums, why not a link to those archives. Certainly is this story was a comment on /., the lack of supportive documentation would certainly make it moderated as a troll.
It occurs to me that this anonymous reader might be trying to use ,Mac to run a business. This would be a mistake. Like any consumer level ISP or hosting package, .Mac has no uptime guarantees or customer service standards. It is developed for the casual user who needs as very simple email, web hosting, and backup solution. I would encourage anyone who needs to run a business to spend the $15 to register a domain and then rent an appropriate level of web hosting. .Mac is actually a good deal for what it is, but is it certainly not suitable for anything but the most casual business use.
On the other hand, the poster may be just some pissed off teenage Windows user. In that case, grow up and get a real OS.
As it is now, the the NCU works fine through my network(network connected syncing, that is what I miss most) on Mac OX 10.1.5. I use Newton works for writing and exchange via RTF.
Rather they seem to be using this as an opportunity to intimidate alternative outlets and spread their unique interpretation fo the truth. I always find it amusing that they continue to blame various forms of piracy for the decline of sales, even in light of continuing revelations to the contrary. Of course, the sad thing is that the report just regurgitate the alleged facts.
The RIAA is probably most concerned about lack of control. They went through a lot of trouble insuring that they had control over the record stores. They have lost some of that control though discounters, but managed to minimize the loss through marketing deals. This is just another symptom of their compulsive control behavior. It is impossible to control all these little outlets, and therefor their price fixing policies will not be as effective.
Clearly, the media is not going to fix this. The congress is not going to fix this. I encourage everyone to go out into their communities and find independent music. Buy tickets to local concerts at local venues. Buy the CDs. Do not copy the music. We will only create a new market if we are willing to support the new market.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
1. The fight over bill boards has a long history. Ladybird Johnson officially started the fight with her work on highway beautification. Many large cities now have a moratorium on billboards. The content of billboard, like all advertising, is heavily restricted.
2. Magazine advertising is also restricted and people lose sleep over how to circumvent those restriction. However, because magazine ad campaigns cost real money, and the advertiser and magazine are liable for those campaigns, people generally behave.
3. Again, the fight over TV commercials are at a very mature state, but they are still skirmishes. A few years ago it was over underwear in commercials. Now the liquor companies want to end the voluntary ban of hard liquor advertising on TV. Of course we cannot directly promote tobacco on tv.
Which is to say it is extremely naive and ill informed to claim that advertising is not illegal in America. It would be very easy to put together a campaign that is illegal, and even professional mess up every once in a while. What makes non-internet advertising manageable is that the rules are known and it is assumed that the advertiser will always be held accountable. Contrast this to email where the advertiser assumes that the laws of the land do not apply because they can cowardly hide behind fraudulent headers.
The worst spam, the spam that should be prosecuted, and the spam that should be destroyed, lies to the reader. The spam likely has forged headers. A lie. The spam likely has a misleading subject line. A line. The spam most likely has claims that goes beyond the traditional advertising hyperbole. A lie. The spam may fraudulently indicate that I signed up on a list. A lie. The spam may indicate a fraudult removal claim. A lie.
There is no way that fraudulent advertising speech is covered my the first amendment. Hyperbolic speech, probably, but not outright lies.
Speakeasy basic DSL gives you two static IPs, and doesn't have any language forbidding routers. Most other services only give you dynamic IP and PPP DSL. In addition, they want you to install a lot of extra spy crap. Earthlink, for instance, gives you a single dynamic IP and then charges you 10 dollars extra if you want a home network. This is highway robbbery,
Or they get screwed by the upstreanm provider in the case of service outages. In my experience, the smaller ISPs never could negotiate appropriate uptime agreements.
Exactly what the more rational and less rabid of us have said all along. Linux has its place, which for most people is not the desktop.
It depends on what desktop you mean. For many users, who need email, web browser, and simple office activity, Linux is very close to being an adequate desktop. It's installation is not simple, but if there were widely available Linux machines, that would not be a problem. The real issue is not the desktop, but MS licensing, Word and IE specific web sites.
If the monopoly remedies are successful at forcing MS to stop the anticompetive behaviors, and I have little confidence they will now that shrub has nuetered the procedure, I give it another year or so before linux is acceptable on business desktop machines.
Now most people just go out and buy a bookshelf system for a couple hundred dollars, or a few hundred if it has a DVD player, and let it go at that. The speakers suck so the reproduction is probably far below cassette tape. We might buy a decent set of speakers, but that doubles the price of the system. People get used to that low quality sound, so just download the songs from the net and listen to music on the computer, thus bypassing all music related sales.
Perhaps not as bad as I say, but I get a better sound out of my computer and my amplified speaker system than any bookshelf system I have seen.
OTOH, the software is unique. I agree that reasonable efforts should be made to protect the software from piracy. What I do not agree with is that reasonable protection includes forcing every computer to ship with the piece of software, or to bind that software permanently to a particular piece of hardware.
The MS rational is that everyone with an x86 owes them a tax, and anyone that does not pay the tax is a pirate. MS also believes that the licenses are largely non-transferable. One or the other needs to change.
On the other hand, it seems we need to do something. The report indicates that a motorcycle is 18 times more dangerous than a car. Even if we get rid of drunk riders, that still is a very dangerous machine to ride. On the other hand, air bags will only protect the rides in limited circumstances, like a head on collision or running into another vehicle, which is only like 20%, while running off the road, falling down, or having a car smack into the bike is the rest. While air bags will protect the center of the body from trauma, will the effectiveness be high enough to make a difference?
One thing I found interesting on the above link is that deaths were falling until 1998. It looks like deaths have increased like 30% since then. I wonder if this might be due to the increased sales of larger vehicles, and the maniacs that drive them. I wonder if we required a different kind of drivers license for anything bigger than a Ford Escape we might save lives. After all, the car companies convinced congress to give trucks a catalytic converter exemption because they were largely commercial vehicles. Therefore, perhaps we should require commercial licenses for these large vehicles.(we were at 35% trucks in the mid 90's, and about 45-50% now)
Alien and Aliens both are in the top 100 of the the IMDB rankings. On the other hand, Alien cubed is barely average, and Alien Resurrection is not even worth mentioning. Likewise, Sigourney Weaver was paid 30K and 1 Million for the first two, but 11 million for Resurrection.
You do have a point with Star Wars though. The first two films are in the top 20, and the third film is in the top 250. Episode I, II, and probably III, are not much better than average. Finally, it is a mistake to make quality judgements based on box office receipts. I think we can all find horrible movies in the list. Titanic anyone? Or Cast Away?
In fact the validity of a paper is only determined after years of careful work to reproduce, understand, define the range, and provide a complete theoretical basis for the work. This was very pleasantly explained in Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica. The importance for patience was shown recently with the AT&T Jan Hendrik Schön fraud scandal among others. Most of the damage in these cases are caused by the treatment of science as a religion that provides instant truths, rather than a process that occasionally provides useful answers.
It amazes me the number of people of people who equate 'published in a peer reviewed journal' with 'stamp of truth'. This mistake is often made in the 'health sciences' sector in which firms routinely create products based on single peer review studies and then abuse the findings of those studies to market the products.
rant on
As previously stated, the usefulness of an application that one uses every day cannot be stated in a simple features matrix. It can only be a title earned with use. IE, for everyday use, is not even an option. Netscape is barely an option. Mozilla is good, but still to complex.
Lets take a look at the cons. Chimera did crash at 0.5, but now it is stable. Even when it did crash, it was still more useful than IE. Chimera has never crashed on me since it reached 0.6.
Chimera has minimal preferences. For the most part setting preferences is not a daily task. It is not the thing that, over time, is going to rack up the hundreds of hours that say, directed to a vendors search service by default, might waste. Can anyone catagorize the amount of time wasted when IE would set the homepage and search engine back to MSN after upgrade? Most things can be done in Chimera. The most obvious missing feature is accept/reject image preference. I think the biggest mistake a developer can make is to over engineer the preference GUI at the expense of more oft used features.
As far as flash is concerned, that is more an issue to the advertisers and content distributors that to me, as a user. Flash has wasted so much time in my web browsing experience, through useless splash screens, advertisements, etc, that I have it turned off in everything except IE. If I can get into a site without using flash, I just usually skip that site.
BTW, the only reason IE is on my computer to access some (unfortunately) important sites in which the developer has implemented so IE only bug. I guess they were too illiterate to learn real HTML.
ran off
Within this context, stores like Walmart, along with mass entertainment and cheap energy, are the drugs that allows the population to survive in this fear. Things that are important are things that directly increase the price of the drugs. As long as the drugs are accessible, there is no problem. And since the factors that might increase the costs of these products have been externalized to the U.S. taxpayer, it is difficult to make the argument that such laws are directly harmful.
The issue here is deceptive advertisement, which is taken quite seriously. Look at the evolution of the car lease promotion. In the beginning, it gave a deceptive impression of the cost of the lease. Now the ads are required to disclose all costs. Likewise the print ads for department stores, which now carry notices that the list price does not mean a price at which anything was actually offered or sold. Of course, the closest example may be the deceptive verisign domain registration which cajoled people to switch their registrar through fraudulent means.
LESSIG: Well, OK, let's remember an important moment in the explosion of the PC revolution. Everybody said IBM made such a terrible mistake in giving Microsoft the operating system and just licensing a version back. But IBM also had in its plan control of the ROM BIOS -- this was the startup chip that would make it so that it was a quote "IBM PC." It was Compaq that went and reverse-engineered that ROM BIOS to, then, establish the PC industry where there could be lots of competition among a lot of different producers all buying Intel chips but, still, lots of competition in the boxes that they produced that gave birth to the PC industry. Now, that reverse-engineering, under some views of intellectual property, is a crime, it was theft. It was theft to the IP that IBM had built into the original ROM BIOS. Now, it was because that view of theft wasn't permitted to capture the birth of the PC industry that we got the birth of the PC industry. And my concern is this idea of theft will take over the lawmakers right now so that we won't get the equivalent of the reverse-engineering of the ROM BIOS that gave birth to the PC industry.
This is the generally accepted but largely forgotten version of history. While MS did the relatively simple task of copying an OS from IBM, Compaq et al did the much more complicated job of reverse engineering, against IBM wishes, the BIOS. Legal battles were fought to give Compaq the right to do so. Compaq won, and thus the PC market was opened. MS did little to facilitate this process. Once the BIOS was cracked, anyone could write the OS, and many did.
The ironic thing is that MS is working the IP cartel to rewrite laws so that such reverse engineering of hardware,and software cannot happen. History indicates the high prices we might have to pay if IBM was allowed to protect their BIOS. I think we can look at things such as the DCMA, the XBox, and DRM, and wonder if we are going down the same exploitive price road.
What I do know is that everyone makes concessions. There are things that I would do if I owned a fast Windows machine or a fast Linux machine that I do not do on my fast Mac. I do not own such machines because I do not think my money is well spent MS stuff, nor do I think Linux is good enough to justify a second fast box. I tell this to people, admit that there are things I can't easily do, and then get hounded for my clear and rational statements. For some reason, thier world view will not accept the fact that I have a differing opinion. I generally do not go around and hound Window users for their viral licenses. I do not hound Linux users for their pompous culture. So why should they hound for my decisions?
Ob complaint. Why does Real Player and Windows Media Player get high quality feeds, but Quicktime only has a low quality feed. Is another DRM punishment for Apple? This is itself might make me not want to see the movie.
Think about what this would mean. We would not have to find and open a new application for each task. We would not have to figure out what is the best format to use when we copy 'foreign' content into our word processing document. This operating system would just let us do work without the distraction of a myriad of applications and formats. This hasn't been done because it requires a level of computing power that is yet not cheap enough and programming abstraction that is not yet common. I don't know how this would be done, but the The Humane Interface describes one possibility.
So, why does history tell us MS will screw us over with this new interface. First, the top level interface must be open and expandable. One would expect the UI to contain a set of user definable hooks that will allow the user to add or substitute filters for each type of content, and define new hooks for new types of content(think about the web browser). MS is notorious for keeping hooks secret, and secret hooks means that you are stuck with MS approved filters, which further the monopoly.
Second, the file format must be open and expandable. For people to write new filters, and create new types of content, programmer must know the storage formats and protocols. Again, MS does not create open formats, and makes arbitrary changes to formats to break compatibility with any foolish enough to reverse engineer the formats.
Third, the UI must be secure. At the base level this means that the UI must sandbox each process to insure that user processes are secure. MS is not good at the sandbox. On the configuration level, the user should have some confidence that filters will not mysteriously change. If filters can be remotely changed, then a trojan can easily be placed in a filter. MS will probably break security here because it likes the ability to configure a user's machine to MS standards. Finally, the UI must not allow all processes full functionality. For instance, foreign content should not be allowed to automatically compile as run as root. However, we see in outlook that, by default, images are loaded and scripts are executed. This gives us little hope that MS could create a secure UI.
A quick search on the net shows that one can get an elliptical pipe around 180"X116". For a livable underground pipe, one would need to run electricity, data, plumbing, ventilation, etc. In addition, we would expect some condensation and leakage, so everything would probably run through conduits on the top and sides. We would need pumps at the bottom to keep the living space dry
So, if the long axis was horizontal, one might have a space of 13 feet wide by 7.5 feet high. If they make this pipe in 8 feet lengths, that will give an area of about 100 square feet, which is a mid size storage closet. Of course pipes can be put together. It appears that the pipe would be around $5k, or $50 a square foot, which would make this an espensive house.
Oh, and the song is pretty funny.