1) give fake info (this will work until passport becomes ubiquitous, and you'll have to give out real info, but for now it's fun)
2) use GNU tools, not m$ tools (yes, even at work. try it.)
3) reverse engineer the Passport Beast (if you've got the skillz) and put it out on Freenet and Gnutella
4) quit your clueless-employer job (as richard stallman did) if you don't agree with them. stop contributing to the madne$$, either get a linux-related job, or get a non-computer-related job (like i am doing) and work on GPL software in your spare time!
now is not the time for complaining. now is the time for civil disobedience.
amazing. technology puts power in the hands of the consumer; this simply means that you must make a profit by becoming an enabler, not an obstacle.
an obstacle is extortion. you MUST do it my way, i lock you out of any other. you are now my slave. pay me.
an enabler is positive. i can help you with a better way. here it is. pay me.
yes, the enabling way relies on consumer good will, because the old militant force ways of obtaining payment no longer work.
whatever. competition ultimately will weed out the extortionists and enrich the enablers.
but.. has anyone given serious thought as to how to pay the Good Guys, the enablers? if i want to donate money to a band, without the music industry getting a penny of it, HOW do i do this? this is a significant problem. whoever solves it will make a big step in enriching enablers and impoverishing extortionists.
love is clearly not acting in his own best interests. the gpl is the only license that prevents microshaft from executing their deadly "embrace and extend" incompatibilities.
sure, the gpl also prevents caldera from doing the same. but, what is the bigger threat to caldera's survival? not being able to lock its customers in, or microsoft locking caldera's customers out?
indeed, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. caldera's enemy is microshaft. microshaft's enemy is gpl.
well it's clear that the reason m$ hates gpl especially is that it precludes embrace/extend. can't add your proprietary twinges to it, they're fsck'ed
and, the reason they glumped gpl and open source together was to generate the predictable vein-popping tirade from RMS that'll make him look foolish, and to sow discontent among the free/open software collective.
this is commonly done in politics, and m$ is quite political.
these men are not stupid.
but then, neither are we. i was a fan of the bsd licence and wary of gpl. after this latest ejaculation from m$, i'm now a die-hard GPL advocate.
i agree that venture capitalists are horrible places for open source initiatives to get funding.
as a friend of mine put it, vc's are just loansharks with slightly better tastes in suits.
and doing a deal with the devil is hardly ever a good idea.
have the indrema guys done the math on taking advance orders from linux gamers?
macintosh developers used to do this, years ago, to self-fund their developments from the user community itself (mac users being as dedicated a tribe as linux'ers or bsd'ers)
if 10% of the people who read the gaming posts on/. would plunk down $100 deposit on an advance indrema, how much $$ would that generate? enough to get the units in production?
also, any creative ideas on open-sourcing the hardware design? so that, instead of hiring and having to pay hardware engineers, free-thinking gamers might could volunteer their time?
this whole thing could be avoided if someone simply grabs a single-board pc platform with a ntsc output, puts "gnu/linux" (or just plain "linux", for those of us less ideologically pure), writes some nifty tv-screen-compatible menu system a la tivo, and loads crystal and a bunch of other linux games on there! viola! a "free" console, which can be run in menu-dumb-user mode or, by attaching a keyboard and a vga monitor, turn into a regular development system for editing and customizing?
now that we have the source code to the human body, we need to : 1) figure out how to read it! (what use is source to someone who doesn't know c?) 2) reform our obsolete intellectual property laws, before (as someone posted here a while ago) we owe royalties to dupont and lilly for our children. i don't want to have to save up to pay for genetic-royalties BEFORE conceiving. or afterward. saving for college (or paying college loans) is bad enough, imagine the price they'll put on custom human genetic material??? here, if anything, is something that should be gpl'ed!
if you have any interest in using any of it, feel free. i lifted a paragraph from another post here. this was addressed to tom lantos, the congressman for most of san mateo county (where i live).
------------------
Your Honor,
I urge you to vote against any more restrictions on Internet communications, and specifically against any requirements for any centralized cataloging or identification of Internet use and users.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act itself is flawed, and I am quite concerned that the proposals by the Progressive Policy Institute would make it outright dangerous.
First of all, the current DMCA has a major flaw. It allows injunctive relief WITHOUT DUE PROCESS OF LAW! As an example, if I want to silence some particular form of speech or element of information, I may (if I am sufficiently powerful and well-connected, enough so to retain a powerful law firm) simply send a letter to a service provider, who is, by the provisions of DMCA, required to remove the content, without any evidence of injury to the plaintiff, without any review by the courts or even any law-enforcement agencies, without due process! I think it would be more sensible if the plaintiff was first required to PROVE some injury, copyright violation, or other just cause-- enough so to obtain a formal injunction-- before any content or information is removed. This would be more prudent, and, rather than expanded as the PPI proposes, DMCA should actually be cut back to at least place the burden of proof on the plaintiff.
Secondly, the PPI wishes to extend DMCA even further, to include the "Napster" software and service. Napster, Inc. has its headquarters in your district (San Mateo) so I am sure you are quite familiar with its business and the issues surrounding its operation. But, ultimately, Napster is just a bit of peer-to-peer, loosely-authenticated file-sharing software. It just happens to be used today for sharing music files, --hence the controversy-- but that's only one possible application for the technology. Incidentially, when subjected to a description simplified enough to be comprehensible to the non-technical, almost all software on the Internet is the same kind of software, and even your own web site runs using peer-to-peer, loosely-authenticated file-sharing software of a very similar type as Napster! Part of the danger of the PPI proposals is that they will either narrowly target a specific company for restriction, or, in order to extend their agenda more widely, inadvertently place unrealistic as well as unconstitutional restrictions on the Internet as a whole, which would be unacceptable. The line is very fine indeed, and we must tread carefully. I urge you to extend every effort to educate your congressional peers on this distinction, since, coming from less technically-advanced districts, they may not be as up-to-speed on the technology as you are.
Thirdly, the much-maligned (and, in recent days, much-threatened!) "Right to Privacy" is the natural modern-day extension of the right to be secure in person and property. Any requirements to authenticate, track, and audit internet certainly puts us in danger of violating that right! This area is a bit more problematic, but our friends in the judiciary have established it fairly well... all the way up to the Supreme Court. I'm sure that you are familiar with _Talley_v._California_(1960)_, which addresses the distribution of anonymous publications. The court found then, and reiterated as recently as 5 years ago, in McIntyre_v._Ohio_(1995), that anonymity is often an essential ingredient for the propagation of democratic ideas that are unpopular to the powers that be. The right to free speech on the Internet is the natural modern extension of the rights to free speech in general, and to a free press. Restricting Internet communication is clearly not consistent with those rights, and the PPI proposals need to be carefully reviewed so as not to endanger them.
Finally, stripping away all the copyright complaints (which I maintain are a red herring), Napster, MP3, and the Internet are simply free-market forces doing their best work. The recording industry is an inefficient industry feeling the pain of competition for the first time, and I don't believe that the American people should be asked to subsidize it-- not with tax dollars, and certainly not with their Constitutional rights, which is what is being asked by the PPI. The RIAA's claims of concern for the well-being of their Artists is the most distasteful form of deception and misdirection, the given the mistreatment that Artists have suffered for generations at the hands of this same recording industry that claims to be acting on their behalf. The artists are not injured by Napster, even though the RIAA has recruited a few spokespeople from among their artist rosters. The Middlemen is where the bloat is: the recording industry and its comparatively out-of-date distribution, promotion, and accounting mechanisms. I would argue that the RIAA members' profits come at the expense of the consumer, not of the artists. The Internet and Napster is a competitive market force, which exposes the inefficiency-- if not the dishonesty!-- of the record industry oligopoly and its lobbying group, the RIAA. I would love to see a reform-minded RIAA embrace the new technology, but, instead, they have chosen to condemn it and litigate against it, to assert their power in a way that is not only ugly and self-centered, but dangerous to the rights of all Americans.
Interestingly enough, these 21st century issues have a close parallel in the 18th-century issues of the John Peter Zenger case-- the case which established a free press in this country and helped set the stage for the American Revolution. In that instance, it was libel, not copyright infringement, which the powerful interests of the day used as the smoke-screen to attempt to silence the free speech of the not-so-powerful. Nobody thinks copyright infringement is a good thing, just as nobody thinks that libel is a good thing. They're both injurious to someone. However, the question to ask is: "How many of our rights as Americans (or, as it was in the John Peter Zenger case, as Englishmen) are we willing to forfeit in order to be protected from some real or imagined injury?". Consider that, in the Napster case as in the John Peter Zenger case, the injury would primarily be to the rich and powerful captains of a very profitable industry (in the case of Napster, the entertainment distribution business, an industry which is arguably inefficient and provides questionable value for the money they collect) whereas the rights to be forfeited would be those of every American. It's an important choice.
This particular American chooses NOT to forfeit those rights so that the RIAA and the recording industry might continue their profiteering. I assume you would choose the same. Perhaps I might give up my rights for better reason, but not for that one. And I trust that you will do more vote that way, and also use your influence in the House to educate, inspire, and motivate your fellow Representatives.
folks, think about this for a second. linux was hip, it was hot, it was making money, it was taking on... microsoft! and they were notably and legitimately scared. now... linux stocks are the "laughing stocks". hmmm... who walks away laughing really? think first before buying into the hype, good OR bad. especially bad. fact one: stocks fluctuate fact two: stocks of volatile startup/ipo companies fluctuate a lot. what will happen next?
Slashdot Mirror
1) give fake info (this will work until passport becomes ubiquitous, and you'll have to give out real info, but for now it's fun) 2) use GNU tools, not m$ tools (yes, even at work. try it.) 3) reverse engineer the Passport Beast (if you've got the skillz) and put it out on Freenet and Gnutella 4) quit your clueless-employer job (as richard stallman did) if you don't agree with them. stop contributing to the madne$$, either get a linux-related job, or get a non-computer-related job (like i am doing) and work on GPL software in your spare time! now is not the time for complaining. now is the time for civil disobedience.
amazing. technology puts power in the hands of the consumer; this simply means that you must make a profit by becoming an enabler, not an obstacle. an obstacle is extortion. you MUST do it my way, i lock you out of any other. you are now my slave. pay me. an enabler is positive. i can help you with a better way. here it is. pay me. yes, the enabling way relies on consumer good will, because the old militant force ways of obtaining payment no longer work. whatever. competition ultimately will weed out the extortionists and enrich the enablers. but.. has anyone given serious thought as to how to pay the Good Guys, the enablers? if i want to donate money to a band, without the music industry getting a penny of it, HOW do i do this? this is a significant problem. whoever solves it will make a big step in enriching enablers and impoverishing extortionists.
love is clearly not acting in his own best interests. the gpl is the only license that prevents microshaft from executing their deadly "embrace and extend" incompatibilities. sure, the gpl also prevents caldera from doing the same. but, what is the bigger threat to caldera's survival? not being able to lock its customers in, or microsoft locking caldera's customers out? indeed, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. caldera's enemy is microshaft. microshaft's enemy is gpl.
well it's clear that the reason m$ hates gpl especially is that it precludes embrace/extend. can't add your proprietary twinges to it, they're fsck'ed and, the reason they glumped gpl and open source together was to generate the predictable vein-popping tirade from RMS that'll make him look foolish, and to sow discontent among the free/open software collective. this is commonly done in politics, and m$ is quite political. these men are not stupid. but then, neither are we. i was a fan of the bsd licence and wary of gpl. after this latest ejaculation from m$, i'm now a die-hard GPL advocate.
i agree that venture capitalists are horrible places for open source initiatives to get funding. as a friend of mine put it, vc's are just loansharks with slightly better tastes in suits. and doing a deal with the devil is hardly ever a good idea. have the indrema guys done the math on taking advance orders from linux gamers? macintosh developers used to do this, years ago, to self-fund their developments from the user community itself (mac users being as dedicated a tribe as linux'ers or bsd'ers) if 10% of the people who read the gaming posts on /. would plunk down $100 deposit on an advance indrema, how much $$ would that generate? enough to get the units in production?
also, any creative ideas on open-sourcing the hardware design? so that, instead of hiring and having to pay hardware engineers, free-thinking gamers might could volunteer their time?
this whole thing could be avoided if someone simply grabs a single-board pc platform with a ntsc output, puts "gnu/linux" (or just plain "linux", for those of us less ideologically pure), writes some nifty tv-screen-compatible menu system a la tivo, and loads crystal and a bunch of other linux games on there! viola! a "free" console, which can be run in menu-dumb-user mode or, by attaching a keyboard and a vga monitor, turn into a regular development system for editing and customizing?
now that we have the source code to the human body, we need to : 1) figure out how to read it! (what use is source to someone who doesn't know c?) 2) reform our obsolete intellectual property laws, before (as someone posted here a while ago) we owe royalties to dupont and lilly for our children. i don't want to have to save up to pay for genetic-royalties BEFORE conceiving. or afterward. saving for college (or paying college loans) is bad enough, imagine the price they'll put on custom human genetic material??? here, if anything, is something that should be gpl'ed!
if you have any interest in using any of it, feel free. i lifted a paragraph from another post here. this was addressed to tom lantos, the congressman for most of san mateo county (where i live).
------------------
Your Honor,
I urge you to vote against any more restrictions on Internet communications, and specifically against any requirements for any centralized cataloging or identification of Internet use and users.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act itself is flawed, and I am quite concerned that the proposals by the Progressive Policy Institute would make it outright dangerous.
First of all, the current DMCA has a major flaw. It allows injunctive relief WITHOUT DUE PROCESS OF LAW! As an example, if I want to silence some particular form of speech or element of information, I may (if I am sufficiently powerful and well-connected, enough so to retain a powerful law firm) simply send a letter to a service provider, who is, by the provisions of DMCA, required to remove the content, without any evidence of injury to the plaintiff, without any review by the courts or even any law-enforcement agencies, without due process! I think it would be more sensible if the plaintiff was first required to PROVE some injury, copyright violation, or other just cause-- enough so to obtain a formal injunction-- before any content or information is removed. This would be more prudent, and, rather than expanded as the PPI proposes, DMCA should actually be cut back to at least place the burden of proof on the plaintiff.
Secondly, the PPI wishes to extend DMCA even further, to include the "Napster" software and service. Napster, Inc. has its headquarters in your district (San Mateo) so I am sure you are quite familiar with its business and the issues surrounding its operation. But, ultimately, Napster is just a bit of peer-to-peer, loosely-authenticated file-sharing software. It just happens to be used today for sharing music files, --hence the controversy-- but that's only one possible application for the technology. Incidentially, when subjected to a description simplified enough to be comprehensible to the non-technical, almost all software on the Internet is the same kind of software, and even your own web site runs using peer-to-peer, loosely-authenticated file-sharing software of a very similar type as Napster! Part of the danger of the PPI proposals is that they will either narrowly target a specific company for restriction, or, in order to extend their agenda more widely, inadvertently place unrealistic as well as unconstitutional restrictions on the Internet as a whole, which would be unacceptable. The line is very fine indeed, and we must tread carefully. I urge you to extend every effort to educate your congressional peers on this distinction, since, coming from less technically-advanced districts, they may not be as up-to-speed on the technology as you are.
Thirdly, the much-maligned (and, in recent days, much-threatened!) "Right to Privacy" is the natural modern-day extension of the right to be secure in person and property. Any requirements to authenticate, track, and audit internet certainly puts us in danger of violating that right! This area is a bit more problematic, but our friends in the judiciary have established it fairly well... all the way up to the Supreme Court. I'm sure that you are familiar with _Talley_v._California_(1960)_, which addresses the distribution of anonymous publications. The court found then, and reiterated as recently as 5 years ago, in McIntyre_v._Ohio_(1995), that anonymity is often an essential ingredient for the propagation of democratic ideas that are unpopular to the powers that be. The right to free speech on the Internet is the natural modern extension of the rights to free speech in general, and to a free press. Restricting Internet communication is clearly not consistent with those rights, and the PPI proposals need to be carefully reviewed so as not to endanger them.
Finally, stripping away all the copyright complaints (which I maintain are a red herring), Napster, MP3, and the Internet are simply free-market forces doing their best work. The recording industry is an inefficient industry feeling the pain of competition for the first time, and I don't believe that the American people should be asked to subsidize it-- not with tax dollars, and certainly not with their Constitutional rights, which is what is being asked by the PPI. The RIAA's claims of concern for the well-being of their Artists is the most distasteful form of deception and misdirection, the given the mistreatment that Artists have suffered for generations at the hands of this same recording industry that claims to be acting on their behalf. The artists are not injured by Napster, even though the RIAA has recruited a few spokespeople from among their artist rosters. The Middlemen is where the bloat is: the recording industry and its comparatively out-of-date distribution, promotion, and accounting mechanisms. I would argue that the RIAA members' profits come at the expense of the consumer, not of the artists. The Internet and Napster is a competitive market force, which exposes the inefficiency-- if not the dishonesty!-- of the record industry oligopoly and its lobbying group, the RIAA. I would love to see a reform-minded RIAA embrace the new technology, but, instead, they have chosen to condemn it and litigate against it, to assert their power in a way that is not only ugly and self-centered, but dangerous to the rights of all Americans.
Interestingly enough, these 21st century issues have a close parallel in the 18th-century issues of the John Peter Zenger case-- the case which established a free press in this country and helped set the stage for the American Revolution. In that instance, it was libel, not copyright infringement, which the powerful interests of the day used as the smoke-screen to attempt to silence the free speech of the not-so-powerful. Nobody thinks copyright infringement is a good thing, just as nobody thinks that libel is a good thing. They're both injurious to someone. However, the question to ask is: "How many of our rights as Americans (or, as it was in the John Peter Zenger case, as Englishmen) are we willing to forfeit in order to be protected from some real or imagined injury?". Consider that, in the Napster case as in the John Peter Zenger case, the injury would primarily be to the rich and powerful captains of a very profitable industry (in the case of Napster, the entertainment distribution business, an industry which is arguably inefficient and provides questionable value for the money they collect) whereas the rights to be forfeited would be those of every American. It's an important choice.
This particular American chooses NOT to forfeit those rights so that the RIAA and the recording industry might continue their profiteering. I assume you would choose the same. Perhaps I might give up my rights for better reason, but not for that one. And I trust that you will do more vote that way, and also use your influence in the House to educate, inspire, and motivate your fellow Representatives.
Thanks for your kind attention!
Sincerely,
folks, think about this for a second. linux was hip, it was hot, it was making money, it was taking on... microsoft! and they were notably and legitimately scared. now... linux stocks are the "laughing stocks". hmmm... who walks away laughing really? think first before buying into the hype, good OR bad. especially bad. fact one: stocks fluctuate fact two: stocks of volatile startup/ipo companies fluctuate a lot. what will happen next?