if tivo thought they still owned the hardware, the hard drive hacks wouldn't be out there.
One could argue that the hard drive hacks actually help TiVo. For example, when TiVo was trying to clear out their older 15 hour units (which're only 7 hours or less at the more decent quality settings) to make room for new models, a lot of people bought 'em for cheap ($200 or less, after rebate, for the TiVo and lifetime service), threw an additional harddrive in there, and were very, very happy. I know I wound up with a TiVo that had 33% more capacity than the largest one that was on the market at the time.
Now, since TiVo makes their money on the service (they actually lose money if you buy the hardware and then don't get the service), each of these TiVos represents yet another customer to them. Furthermore, you're paying the same amount of money if you're subscribing a 15 hour TiVo or a 500 hour TiVo.
But consider if you could simply highlight arbitrary text on a page, and ask for more information about it. Now consider that maybe this feature is written into your favorite open source browser, and instead of the MS site, it hits a user-chosen search site instead.
Yes! For example, it's not unusual for me to highlight a word on a page and then copy-and-paste it into Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. You've already mentioned Google (another one that I use a lot). I could also see everything2.com being a popular destination -- no longer would we have to rely on Slashdot editors placing those E2 "[?]" links on stories.
Also nice would be the ability to turn on an auto-URL parser for those cases where people fail to provide anchors on their URLs (for example, certain Slashdot posters are guilty of this, and FAQs that were published on the web as straight.txt files generally have the same problem).
If, however, I decided to catch a plane to the US, I could (and probably would) be arrested as soon as I stepped off the plane, because the murder I ordered was illegal in the US, even if it wasn't in the jurisdiction where I committed the act. The parallel is exact;
Is it exact? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if I were to smoke marijuana in the Netherlands (where it's legal) and then return to the US (where it's illegal), I wouldn't be arrested.
That being said, libel seems to fall somewhere in-between murder and recreational drug use as far as how severe a crime it is. Also, I suspect there'd have to be some compelling reason for the arresting country to get involved -- if I were to murder someone with absolutely no ties to the Australia and then visited the country, I'm not sure they'd have much of a reason to arrest me.
So while I don't disagree that there may be some reasoning behind the argument, trying to draw a parallel to murder is utter bullshit.
What police state wanna be city do you live in? If someone wanted to see my drivers licence before they would even show me the place, I'd be looking else where. I've never even heard of such a thing before and housing is tight here (Calgary AB; the vacancy rate is down around 1.5%)
It was a gated community in Miami, Florida. Given that you don't generally anonymously rent apartments, anyway, I wasn't particularly upset at them wanting to know who I was. It was certainly less annoying, to me at least, than Radio Shack asking for my phone number because I've bought some batteries.
As for the implications of this being a police state, we're talking about a private organization stipulating lack-of-anonymity as one of the pre-qualifying conditions for an economic transaction. Such actions would be considered acceptable even in a purely libertarian society -- if you dislike them, you take your money elsewhere.
It's not as if the same thing isn't happening on the internet. MP3.com Payola is at least honest about it.
This raises an interesting question -- at what point does it cease to be "payola" and instead become legitimate advertising? To take a slightly silly example, I could theoretically purchase a Slashdot banner ad along the lines of "READ MY POSTS." with a link to my user page, as a means of using payola to do an end-run around Slashdot's moderation system. So here're some of my thoughts on where the difference comes into play:
Radio is a very limited resource. As mentioned in the article, radio is limited enough that it's considered a "public resource". (In the US) We've got the FTC regulating who gets to do what. In the realm of radio, I can't necessarily create my own (non-pirate) radio station. On the Internet, virtually anyone can publish -- although Internet radio would be trickier when you factor in bandwidth considerations, but it's still got to be cheaper by a couple orders of magnitude. I suppose someone could argue that 'mp3.com' does have possession of a very limited resource in the form of their domain name (as an asset, I'd guess that domain might be valued in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars), but that doesn't create nearly an exclusive club as the limited resource of radio broadcast frequencies.
Obvious ads. In the case of other mediums, it's usually (although admittedly not always) clear what is and isn't an ad. No one would argue that a 5 minute long "commercial" (played during a regular commercial break) of a music group's new video is payola. Provided the band didn't suck, it might even be a welcome change from the typical commercial jingles and such. Similarly, with my aforementioned idea of a "read my posts" banner ad, I can't imagine a Slashdot reader not recognizing it as anything other than a banner ad. In radio, however, I can't recall ever hearing the DJs admit, "We're being paid to promote this song." Furthermore, the article specificially mentions cases where the stations didn't make such a connection clear (and wound up getting fined an amount that was only a small percentage of their profit on the deal). So I'd argue something that's obviously payola isn't as likely to be considered payola. But even when clear disclaimers, we must still consider the notion brought up in the previous paragraph that radio's a limited resource.
User-directed experience. In the realm of radio, you've got much less control over what goes on. Your choices are generally limited to "listen to this station", "switch to another station" (who may also be pimping songs and may not even play the genres of music that you like), or "turn the radio off". With the Internet, it's generally a fully user-directed experience. If I start listening to a band being pimped by mp3.com and they suck, I can easily decide to go the next band on the list. Or the middle of the list. Or even the end of the list. My options are much more flexible than either jumping to another website or turning off the PC. And, even if we were to pretend that I couldn't control what I saw on any given website, the number of websites out there is multiple orders of magnitudes greater than the number of radio stations out there.
So in conclusion, while the mp3.com payola thing has some similarities to radio station payola, there are some key differences that make it not nearly as slimy (including the point made by the previous poster that they're honest about what they're doing).
However, they sit in the back corner, planning their next hits, and other illegal deeds. Do you, as the establishment owner, have any moral obligation to turn them in? Or do you, as the establishment owner, have any moral obligation to ban them from said establishment?
I can't help but extend your already great analogy to cover the incident (9 months ago or so?) where a list of users who were sharing Metallica mp3s was presented to Napster.
Let's say that a collection of local business owners complain to the restaurant owner about a specific list of hoodlums who've been using the restaurant to discuss extortion plans. The restaurant owner then proceeds to ban everyone one that list from the restaurant. However, the restaurant owner then allows back in the restaurant anyone who signs a statement ("I promise I'm not discussing extortion in the back of your restaurant.") or anyone who makes even the most superficial pretenses at pretending to be someone else ("I'm not Bob. I'm his evil twin, Ted. See? I've got this realistic looking mustache.").
Personally, I think it'd help to have some sort of standardized identification system on the Internet, as a means of allowing service providers a way of placing legal responsibility back on the party in question. I'm not talking about a constant, Big Brotherian identification scheme, but rather something where a service provider can request your identity and you can conclusively provide it. For example, when I went apartment hunting, a number of places wanted to view my driver's license, so they knew who they were showing apartments to. If I later went nuts and started urinating on the floor or something, they knew who I was. If I was concerned about my privacy, I had the option of not giving them my driver's license. However, they would've then invoked their option of not showing me the apartment. In online realms, on the other hand, identity confirmation tends to rest on email address confirmation -- a scheme which fails when you realize that anyone capable of typing "hotmail.com" into a web browser can make as many throw-away email addresses as they want. It's not anonymous enough for doing something that would get you major attention (like threatening the president), but when you're one of thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) engaging in lesser offenses, the cost of tracking the user becomes prohibitive.
On the other hand, to deflate my own scheme before it's even started, given how pervasive all the various Windows-based email worms are, would it really take that long before someone created an identity-theft worm?
I wonder if something like Slashdot would be considered mainstream in Korea?:)
I can see it now:
Millions of young Koreans use their wireless handhelds and Internet-ready cellphones to read and contribute to the online news site Slashdot. The site has become such a pervasive part of their culture that students have actually begun to use some of the site's jargon in every day life. For example, when a students provides a particularly insightful comment in class, his or her peers can usually be heard to shout, "MOD THIS UP!!!" Even teachers have begun to refer to the site, with one actually writing "You spell worse than CmdrTaco." on the top of an English essay.
Unfortunately, there's also a darker side to this rampant fandom. Students have been known to get violent when moderated down. When Chiang Tao Mzu's attempt at humor wound up moderated down to (-1, Troll), he used his connections to discover which of his classmates moderated him down. Then he and some friends proceeded to kill the responsible parties using home-made shivs.
This isn't a controlled study, and the results are useless.
He also missed out on comparing it to banner ads (the defacto web advertising medium) and identifying how many of the impressions were unique (which is particularly important in the case of the weblog, where you'll have the same people visiting the site over and over).
Just to clarify this point, I'd like to point out that giving up some privacy is not a prerequisite of using your TiVo. While it's true that they collect anonymized viewing statistics, you can opt out by calling them. For those willing to set up a shell on your TiVo, it's even possible to confirm your privacy settings and even change them yourself. Personally, given that I would've loved to have had a Nielsen box on my TV when I was growing up, the TiVo/privacy issue doesn't bother me. Others have pointed out that the data helps TiVo make money, which given how many geeks seem to like the company, isn't a bad thing to some.
Also, there was a big uproar when TiVo changed their privacy policy to allow sharing with business partners. However, this was so that TiVo could offer a single sign-up for a joint service (such as with the DirecTiVo, which is a combined DirecTV receiver and TiVo -- you're essentially going to be a customer of both companies, anyway).
Overall all, though, I understand that you aren't criticizing TiVo, but instead using this to illustrate the privacy/convenience trade-off. However, I felt it was worth pointing out that TiVo's privacy issue is completely voluntary (albeit on an opt-out basis), rather than pseudo-voluntary (i.e. if you want privacy, don't use the TiVo).
Since only the kernel has to be Open Source (not necessarily Free in the RMS view) Mac OS X would be allowed to run this, it would seem.
Devil's Advocate time:
So what about running OpenMotif under Windows under VMware under Linux? Is the Windows "kernel" still considered a kernel, even when it's running in userland? Also, I suppose one could distribute a Windows version of OpenMotif by arguing that it's for use under Wine on open source systems.
Also, what if a Linux user has non-open source modules loaded into the kernel? Wasn't there a sound driver that was non-open source at one point?
Will Transmeta sue AOL since it's essentially their software (if the GPL don't matter).
Would Transmeta really sue AOL? In the original article, here is a comment from one of the developers discussing how AOL's changes were rolled back into Midori and how they enjoyed working with AOL.
If that is the justification for a RBL block against Macromedia then MAPS truly has gotten out of hand.
Here is a personal account of my getting spammed by Macromedia themself; not a third party. It was part of their 'the Edge' mailing list (as stated in the article text of Jamie's original story). I never signed up for the list, they refused to stop trying to mail it to an invalid address, and it took maybe 15-20 minutes of my time to stop the mail.
ya know...I didn't even think of that and I've even set up majordomo before (ahh, the woderful experience...acckkgghh). [...] Was there any contact, reccomendation given before the blackholin'?
Well, ideally, people shouldn't have to worry about this things. Unfortunately, with the rampant popularity of the 'net, you've got to be paranoid as hell these days. If we ever wind up doing a mailing list at work, in addition to the standard opt-in confirmation paranoia, we'll also have a "personal reminder phrase". That phrase'll get included on all the mail as a reminder of the fact that they actually signed up for the list and that's it's not spam. Hopefully, that should cut down on the number of spam complaints. (We'll also keep copies of all the confirmation emails, as extra protection.)
As for the pre-blackhole contact, it's my understanding that before being RBL'd, hosts are first given an opportunity to fix the problem. It's only when they refuse to fix it (or when mail to postmaster bounces) that they wind up blackholed.
Maybe you should read the article before posting next time, Sparky. It's not about soft porn in games, but about real live soft porn at gaming trade shows.
Maybe you should think a bit before shooting off your mouth. The article also talked about how the soft porn in question related to the notion of alienating the non-geek portion of their audience. Their audience, for the most part, does not go to a trade show. I'd consider someone not in the industry who goes to a video game trade show pretty geeky.
Re:AOL is totally cool (some corrections)
on
AOL And The GPL
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· Score: 2
a link to another company's web site where the code can be obtained is not sufficient
And the Midori site couldn't be considered either an agent working to publish on AOL's behalf (or, more specificially, an agent working to publish on behalf of all contributors) or as an accepted means of software distribution? In the latter case, just pretend that AOL is publishing through the Midori website, in much the same way that J. Random OSS hacker publishes through SourceForge. Even if AOL were to directly mail you a disk, it'd still have to be done through a postal service.
It's silly to worry about exactly which site the source is being provided through. It's also worth pointing out that AOL doesn't have to fork over a copy of the source until they receive a formal request. And providing them with a formal request, when they'll publically indicated that the source is available from Midori, is more or less just a means of being a pest.
If there's one thing I'd worry about relating to the GPL, it'd be the loss of the build specific quirks. If I decided to create my own, identical copy of the binary they're shipping, how easily could I do it? What if we have the following hypothetical scenario:
Midori release 1. Midori release 2: Contains patches A, B, C, and AOL-A. Midori release 3: Contains patches D and AOL-B.
Where the AOL-prefixed patches indicate AOL's changes and the rest are Transmeta's or outside patches. Now imagine that AOL winds up building something that's equivilant to Midori release 2 PLUS AOL-B (in short, not bothering to incorporate patch D because they want to minimize non-critical software changes, as they've already done lots of formal testing, etc, etc). Under this scenario, even though AOL has published all their changes (certainly A Good Thing), it'd be difficult-to-impossible to recreate AOL's exact Midori Linux.
Of course short of digging through the Midori site, there'd be no easy way to figure out whether or not the exact AOL version is documented somehow. But overall, it's things like this that I'd worry about, rather than whether it says "transmeta.com" or "aol.com" at the top of my browser window when I'm downloading the source.
This technology is about 75% redundant with the systems we had at my high school -- plain, old-fashioned, non-web-based systems. If I was absent that day, they'd call home to confirm and I had to have a note when I got back to school. Report cards had to be signed to confirm that my parents had seen them. Detention slips also had to be signed, and I had to tell my parents anyway, so I could get a ride home. Also, if I skipped a single class during the day, it resulted in a detention, still resulting in parental notification.
The only three major differences with this system are that it circumvents the "forging your parents' signatures" problem, it adds food, and it lets parents check all kinds of intermediate grades. The first is only an issue if you were cheating the system, anway. The second one I'm a little mixed on. However, it's generally accepted that parents should have an active role in making sure their children eat a healthy diet. As for the last one, I know that I, as a student, wouldn't have minded having access to that. I was always too disorganized to keep track of what grades I got and such. Graded papers went into my backpack and didn't come out again until I dumped everything out. Besides, the parents are getting to see the final grades, anyway. You might as well let them see the rationale behind that grade. It'd certainly help in circumstances where you've got one or two early bad grades that brought your average down, followed by a number of good grades indicating improvement.
And what list was this? I receive THE EDGE newsletter...I elected to.
That's the newsletter. It was opt-in but unconfirmed. That means anyone, anywhere could have "elected" to sign you up for the newsletter. At work, our domain name is the same as a not uncommon surname. As a result, we get hit with emails whenever some dipshit converts their given name into an email address by sticking an '@' in the middle and a.com on the end.
The proper way to do things is to send a confirmation message to the address after a user signs up. This would be something like:
A user connecting to our website from IP address xx.xx.xx.xx signed up this address (foo@bar.invalid) to our "TheEDGE; not to be confused with Pizza Hut's The Edge" mailing list. Please reply to this message with the following confirmation code or click the following link to activate your email subscription: Confirmation code -- 48c54000610c7b6d0efc26175726ba5b http://www.macromedia.com/confirm.cgi?code=48c5400 0610c7b6d0efc26175726ba5b
If you did not sign up for this mailing list, discard this email and you will not be subscribed to our list. Thank you.
Not true. They simply run a mail list in a way Vixie and Dave Rand have decided to define as unacceptable.
They aren't the only ones who find it unacceptable. My personal experience with the macromedia mailing list:
After months of failed mailing attempts from TheEDGE@macromedia.com to 'perina@<<theplacewhereiwork>>.com', an address that is not and was never valid, I decided to stop it. Email-wise, we're a small enough site that I actually keep an eye on all the mail errors and such personally and I'd gotten sick of the fact that Macromedia couldn't take the hint.
So I set up an email alias and wait. Sooner or later, I get a piece of HTML crap in my mailbox from them. No text comments, just pure HTML. Given that I use a normal mail reader instead of some web-enabled POS, this already started to annoy me.
So I dig out the unsubscribe link from the email, http://dynamic.macromedia.com/bin/MM/hub/unsub.jsp . Going there in my web browser of choice, lynx, I discover that, joy of joys, they use Java-fucking-script for their submit button. So now I have to switch over in Netscape just to stop their spam. But that isn't enough -- I still have to first click on their "I forgot my password link", wait for the thing to mail the password, read the mail (which thankfully was plain text, this time), and then go back to the website (which was running horribly slow), and plug in the login and password.
By the time I had finished all of this, I was so pissed at them that I just changed the email address on the account to some random thing @macromedia.com.
All because these bastards couldn't provide address confirmation, bounce checking, or a non-GUI web browser method of unsubscribing from their spam. Macromedia deserves what they got.
Besides, confirming address just makes sense. Our company name is the same as a not uncommon surname, so we get a lot of people doing the equivilant of <john@smith.com>. Also, failing to confirm addresses makes it too easy for people to maliciously engage in signups (as opposed to the numerous ones who just do it out of stupidity).
BEN: And these blast points, too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.
Well, he's at least right on the "precise" part. Precision doesn't necessarily imply accuracy. The fact that the stormtroopers consistenly miss implies there's a degree of precision going on. However, since precision generally requires skill, it's obvious that stormtroopers are, in fact, expert marksmen, but that the suffer from all having their gun sights misaligned.
Tools don't have to have a legitimate purpose, they just have to be. Any other attitude stifles innovation, and otherwise Just Plain Sucks.
Yes, but I'm not attempting to stifle them. Rather, I'm simply refusing to personally fund them. My money, my choice where it goes.
As someone else in the thread pointed out, nVidia also makes a GeForce 3 and they're sponsoring the E3 coverage on another website I frequent. Barring some amazing technical or price advantage of the Asus product, I just don't see any reason for them to get my business.
No one is likely to boycot the product because of this but come on, it clearly took some programmer some time and concerted effort to develop this 'feature'.
Actually, I'm currently in the market for a 3D card (my current one's a Canopus Pure3D -- it's so old that the company apparently let the pure3d.com domain registration lapse) and will not by an Asus one exactly because of this situation.
I know exactly two things about Asus -- that I've heard of the GeForce 3 (but don't recall whether it was good or bad) and that they released this driver. The former would've been enough for me to at least look into them. The latter is enough that I will not bother.
Re:Lets look at another angle here shall we
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2600 v. Ford Motors
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· Score: 3
Buut linking is the _foundation_ of the Internet:)
And that somehow makes it immune to regulation? Words and pictures are the foundation of printed communication, but that doesn't mean I can string together "General Motors sucks. Sincerely, Ford Motors.", print up a bunch of flyers, and start handing them out.
Similarly, if I were to take a random phone number from the phone book (for the sake of argument, let's say "Jenny 867-5309") and start publishing this already publically available information ("Hey, everyone, I saw this in the phone book -- Jenny 867-5309"), it's still a form of harassment.
Doing an fgrep on the webserver logs (going back to July 2000) at work (not an especially high traffic site by Internet standards, nothing geek related) turns up: 841920 HTTP/1.0 requests 1076070 HTTP/1.1 requests
For just the past few months, the numbers are 254055 (1.0) versus 369703 (1.1).
I would like to see a show on network television where gay characters are depicted in the same manner as straight characters; i.e., without any reference to their sexuality. Most of the time, in real life, it isn't relevant, so why should it be important in a sitcom?
I think you're making a mistake by trying to compare sitcoms to real life. (Quick show of hands: How many of you out there have a wacky neighbor who shows up once every day or so to utter a wise-crack or two and then be on his way?) In a sitcom, sex generally is relevant. We're watching every bit of these peoples' lives. Anything that's funny is more or less fair game, and there are certainly lots of potentially funny things that take place when you throw dating, sex, and relationships into the mix.
Besides, in virtually all forms of story telling (television, books, movies, etc.), you're generally expected to identify and understand the characters to one degree or another. Empathy helps draw the observer into the story and keep them hooked. While sexually orientation is (rightfully so) a relatively private part of what makes up a person, it's still an important part. Of course, I'm not saying that there's a "gay outlook on life", but rather that your sexual orientation, your race, your nationality, your religion, your upbringing, and where you went to school are all things that affect how you see the world -- knowing some or all of these factors are a key part to understanding a character.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure most contest organizers were more than happy to pass on the photo opportunity in exchange for television coverage.
One could argue that the hard drive hacks actually help TiVo. For example, when TiVo was trying to clear out their older 15 hour units (which're only 7 hours or less at the more decent quality settings) to make room for new models, a lot of people bought 'em for cheap ($200 or less, after rebate, for the TiVo and lifetime service), threw an additional harddrive in there, and were very, very happy. I know I wound up with a TiVo that had 33% more capacity than the largest one that was on the market at the time.
Now, since TiVo makes their money on the service (they actually lose money if you buy the hardware and then don't get the service), each of these TiVos represents yet another customer to them. Furthermore, you're paying the same amount of money if you're subscribing a 15 hour TiVo or a 500 hour TiVo.
Yes! For example, it's not unusual for me to highlight a word on a page and then copy-and-paste it into Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. You've already mentioned Google (another one that I use a lot). I could also see everything2.com being a popular destination -- no longer would we have to rely on Slashdot editors placing those E2 "[?]" links on stories.
Also nice would be the ability to turn on an auto-URL parser for those cases where people fail to provide anchors on their URLs (for example, certain Slashdot posters are guilty of this, and FAQs that were published on the web as straight .txt files generally have the same problem).
Is it exact? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if I were to smoke marijuana in the Netherlands (where it's legal) and then return to the US (where it's illegal), I wouldn't be arrested.
That being said, libel seems to fall somewhere in-between murder and recreational drug use as far as how severe a crime it is. Also, I suspect there'd have to be some compelling reason for the arresting country to get involved -- if I were to murder someone with absolutely no ties to the Australia and then visited the country, I'm not sure they'd have much of a reason to arrest me.
So while I don't disagree that there may be some reasoning behind the argument, trying to draw a parallel to murder is utter bullshit.
It was a gated community in Miami, Florida. Given that you don't generally anonymously rent apartments, anyway, I wasn't particularly upset at them wanting to know who I was. It was certainly less annoying, to me at least, than Radio Shack asking for my phone number because I've bought some batteries.
As for the implications of this being a police state, we're talking about a private organization stipulating lack-of-anonymity as one of the pre-qualifying conditions for an economic transaction. Such actions would be considered acceptable even in a purely libertarian society -- if you dislike them, you take your money elsewhere.
This raises an interesting question -- at what point does it cease to be "payola" and instead become legitimate advertising? To take a slightly silly example, I could theoretically purchase a Slashdot banner ad along the lines of "READ MY POSTS." with a link to my user page, as a means of using payola to do an end-run around Slashdot's moderation system. So here're some of my thoughts on where the difference comes into play:
Radio is a very limited resource. As mentioned in the article, radio is limited enough that it's considered a "public resource". (In the US) We've got the FTC regulating who gets to do what. In the realm of radio, I can't necessarily create my own (non-pirate) radio station. On the Internet, virtually anyone can publish -- although Internet radio would be trickier when you factor in bandwidth considerations, but it's still got to be cheaper by a couple orders of magnitude. I suppose someone could argue that 'mp3.com' does have possession of a very limited resource in the form of their domain name (as an asset, I'd guess that domain might be valued in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars), but that doesn't create nearly an exclusive club as the limited resource of radio broadcast frequencies.
Obvious ads. In the case of other mediums, it's usually (although admittedly not always) clear what is and isn't an ad. No one would argue that a 5 minute long "commercial" (played during a regular commercial break) of a music group's new video is payola. Provided the band didn't suck, it might even be a welcome change from the typical commercial jingles and such. Similarly, with my aforementioned idea of a "read my posts" banner ad, I can't imagine a Slashdot reader not recognizing it as anything other than a banner ad. In radio, however, I can't recall ever hearing the DJs admit, "We're being paid to promote this song." Furthermore, the article specificially mentions cases where the stations didn't make such a connection clear (and wound up getting fined an amount that was only a small percentage of their profit on the deal). So I'd argue something that's obviously payola isn't as likely to be considered payola. But even when clear disclaimers, we must still consider the notion brought up in the previous paragraph that radio's a limited resource.
User-directed experience. In the realm of radio, you've got much less control over what goes on. Your choices are generally limited to "listen to this station", "switch to another station" (who may also be pimping songs and may not even play the genres of music that you like), or "turn the radio off". With the Internet, it's generally a fully user-directed experience. If I start listening to a band being pimped by mp3.com and they suck, I can easily decide to go the next band on the list. Or the middle of the list. Or even the end of the list. My options are much more flexible than either jumping to another website or turning off the PC. And, even if we were to pretend that I couldn't control what I saw on any given website, the number of websites out there is multiple orders of magnitudes greater than the number of radio stations out there.
So in conclusion, while the mp3.com payola thing has some similarities to radio station payola, there are some key differences that make it not nearly as slimy (including the point made by the previous poster that they're honest about what they're doing).
I can't help but extend your already great analogy to cover the incident (9 months ago or so?) where a list of users who were sharing Metallica mp3s was presented to Napster.
Let's say that a collection of local business owners complain to the restaurant owner about a specific list of hoodlums who've been using the restaurant to discuss extortion plans. The restaurant owner then proceeds to ban everyone one that list from the restaurant. However, the restaurant owner then allows back in the restaurant anyone who signs a statement ("I promise I'm not discussing extortion in the back of your restaurant.") or anyone who makes even the most superficial pretenses at pretending to be someone else ("I'm not Bob. I'm his evil twin, Ted. See? I've got this realistic looking mustache.").
Personally, I think it'd help to have some sort of standardized identification system on the Internet, as a means of allowing service providers a way of placing legal responsibility back on the party in question. I'm not talking about a constant, Big Brotherian identification scheme, but rather something where a service provider can request your identity and you can conclusively provide it. For example, when I went apartment hunting, a number of places wanted to view my driver's license, so they knew who they were showing apartments to. If I later went nuts and started urinating on the floor or something, they knew who I was. If I was concerned about my privacy, I had the option of not giving them my driver's license. However, they would've then invoked their option of not showing me the apartment. In online realms, on the other hand, identity confirmation tends to rest on email address confirmation -- a scheme which fails when you realize that anyone capable of typing "hotmail.com" into a web browser can make as many throw-away email addresses as they want. It's not anonymous enough for doing something that would get you major attention (like threatening the president), but when you're one of thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) engaging in lesser offenses, the cost of tracking the user becomes prohibitive.
On the other hand, to deflate my own scheme before it's even started, given how pervasive all the various Windows-based email worms are, would it really take that long before someone created an identity-theft worm?
I can see it now:
Millions of young Koreans use their wireless handhelds and Internet-ready cellphones to read and contribute to the online news site Slashdot. The site has become such a pervasive part of their culture that students have actually begun to use some of the site's jargon in every day life. For example, when a students provides a particularly insightful comment in class, his or her peers can usually be heard to shout, "MOD THIS UP!!!" Even teachers have begun to refer to the site, with one actually writing "You spell worse than CmdrTaco." on the top of an English essay.
Unfortunately, there's also a darker side to this rampant fandom. Students have been known to get violent when moderated down. When Chiang Tao Mzu's attempt at humor wound up moderated down to (-1, Troll), he used his connections to discover which of his classmates moderated him down. Then he and some friends proceeded to kill the responsible parties using home-made shivs.
He also missed out on comparing it to banner ads (the defacto web advertising medium) and identifying how many of the impressions were unique (which is particularly important in the case of the weblog, where you'll have the same people visiting the site over and over).
Just to clarify this point, I'd like to point out that giving up some privacy is not a prerequisite of using your TiVo. While it's true that they collect anonymized viewing statistics, you can opt out by calling them. For those willing to set up a shell on your TiVo, it's even possible to confirm your privacy settings and even change them yourself. Personally, given that I would've loved to have had a Nielsen box on my TV when I was growing up, the TiVo/privacy issue doesn't bother me. Others have pointed out that the data helps TiVo make money, which given how many geeks seem to like the company, isn't a bad thing to some.
Also, there was a big uproar when TiVo changed their privacy policy to allow sharing with business partners. However, this was so that TiVo could offer a single sign-up for a joint service (such as with the DirecTiVo, which is a combined DirecTV receiver and TiVo -- you're essentially going to be a customer of both companies, anyway).
Overall all, though, I understand that you aren't criticizing TiVo, but instead using this to illustrate the privacy/convenience trade-off. However, I felt it was worth pointing out that TiVo's privacy issue is completely voluntary (albeit on an opt-out basis), rather than pseudo-voluntary (i.e. if you want privacy, don't use the TiVo).
Devil's Advocate time:
So what about running OpenMotif under Windows under VMware under Linux? Is the Windows "kernel" still considered a kernel, even when it's running in userland? Also, I suppose one could distribute a Windows version of OpenMotif by arguing that it's for use under Wine on open source systems.
Also, what if a Linux user has non-open source modules loaded into the kernel? Wasn't there a sound driver that was non-open source at one point?
Would Transmeta really sue AOL? In the original article, here is a comment from one of the developers discussing how AOL's changes were rolled back into Midori and how they enjoyed working with AOL.
Here is a personal account of my getting spammed by Macromedia themself; not a third party. It was part of their 'the Edge' mailing list (as stated in the article text of Jamie's original story). I never signed up for the list, they refused to stop trying to mail it to an invalid address, and it took maybe 15-20 minutes of my time to stop the mail.
Well, ideally, people shouldn't have to worry about this things. Unfortunately, with the rampant popularity of the 'net, you've got to be paranoid as hell these days. If we ever wind up doing a mailing list at work, in addition to the standard opt-in confirmation paranoia, we'll also have a "personal reminder phrase". That phrase'll get included on all the mail as a reminder of the fact that they actually signed up for the list and that's it's not spam. Hopefully, that should cut down on the number of spam complaints. (We'll also keep copies of all the confirmation emails, as extra protection.)
As for the pre-blackhole contact, it's my understanding that before being RBL'd, hosts are first given an opportunity to fix the problem. It's only when they refuse to fix it (or when mail to postmaster bounces) that they wind up blackholed.
Maybe you should think a bit before shooting off your mouth. The article also talked about how the soft porn in question related to the notion of alienating the non-geek portion of their audience. Their audience, for the most part, does not go to a trade show. I'd consider someone not in the industry who goes to a video game trade show pretty geeky.
And the Midori site couldn't be considered either an agent working to publish on AOL's behalf (or, more specificially, an agent working to publish on behalf of all contributors) or as an accepted means of software distribution? In the latter case, just pretend that AOL is publishing through the Midori website, in much the same way that J. Random OSS hacker publishes through SourceForge. Even if AOL were to directly mail you a disk, it'd still have to be done through a postal service.
It's silly to worry about exactly which site the source is being provided through. It's also worth pointing out that AOL doesn't have to fork over a copy of the source until they receive a formal request. And providing them with a formal request, when they'll publically indicated that the source is available from Midori, is more or less just a means of being a pest.
If there's one thing I'd worry about relating to the GPL, it'd be the loss of the build specific quirks. If I decided to create my own, identical copy of the binary they're shipping, how easily could I do it? What if we have the following hypothetical scenario:
Midori release 1.
Midori release 2: Contains patches A, B, C, and AOL-A.
Midori release 3: Contains patches D and AOL-B.
Where the AOL-prefixed patches indicate AOL's changes and the rest are Transmeta's or outside patches. Now imagine that AOL winds up building something that's equivilant to Midori release 2 PLUS AOL-B (in short, not bothering to incorporate patch D because they want to minimize non-critical software changes, as they've already done lots of formal testing, etc, etc). Under this scenario, even though AOL has published all their changes (certainly A Good Thing), it'd be difficult-to-impossible to recreate AOL's exact Midori Linux.
Of course short of digging through the Midori site, there'd be no easy way to figure out whether or not the exact AOL version is documented somehow. But overall, it's things like this that I'd worry about, rather than whether it says "transmeta.com" or "aol.com" at the top of my browser window when I'm downloading the source.
The only three major differences with this system are that it circumvents the "forging your parents' signatures" problem, it adds food, and it lets parents check all kinds of intermediate grades. The first is only an issue if you were cheating the system, anway. The second one I'm a little mixed on. However, it's generally accepted that parents should have an active role in making sure their children eat a healthy diet. As for the last one, I know that I, as a student, wouldn't have minded having access to that. I was always too disorganized to keep track of what grades I got and such. Graded papers went into my backpack and didn't come out again until I dumped everything out. Besides, the parents are getting to see the final grades, anyway. You might as well let them see the rationale behind that grade. It'd certainly help in circumstances where you've got one or two early bad grades that brought your average down, followed by a number of good grades indicating improvement.
That's the newsletter. It was opt-in but unconfirmed. That means anyone, anywhere could have "elected" to sign you up for the newsletter. At work, our domain name is the same as a not uncommon surname. As a result, we get hit with emails whenever some dipshit converts their given name into an email address by sticking an '@' in the middle and a .com on the end.
The proper way to do things is to send a confirmation message to the address after a user signs up. This would be something like:
A user connecting to our website from IP address xx.xx.xx.xx signed up this address (foo@bar.invalid) to our "TheEDGE; not to be confused with Pizza Hut's The Edge" mailing list. Please reply to this message with the following confirmation code or click the following link to activate your email subscription:0 0610c7b6d0efc26175726ba5b
Confirmation code -- 48c54000610c7b6d0efc26175726ba5b
http://www.macromedia.com/confirm.cgi?code=48c540
If you did not sign up for this mailing list, discard this email and you will not be subscribed to our list. Thank you.
They aren't the only ones who find it unacceptable. My personal experience with the macromedia mailing list:
After months of failed mailing attempts from TheEDGE@macromedia.com to 'perina@<<theplacewhereiwork>>.com', an address that is not and was never valid, I decided to stop it. Email-wise, we're a small enough site that I actually keep an eye on all the mail errors and such personally and I'd gotten sick of the fact that Macromedia couldn't take the hint.
So I set up an email alias and wait. Sooner or later, I get a piece of HTML crap in my mailbox from them. No text comments, just pure HTML. Given that I use a normal mail reader instead of some web-enabled POS, this already started to annoy me.
So I dig out the unsubscribe link from the email, http://dynamic.macromedia.com/bin/MM/hub/unsub.jsp . Going there in my web browser of choice, lynx, I discover that, joy of joys, they use Java-fucking-script for their submit button. So now I have to switch over in Netscape just to stop their spam. But that isn't enough -- I still have to first click on their "I forgot my password link", wait for the thing to mail the password, read the mail (which thankfully was plain text, this time), and then go back to the website (which was running horribly slow), and plug in the login and password.
By the time I had finished all of this, I was so pissed at them that I just changed the email address on the account to some random thing @macromedia.com.
All because these bastards couldn't provide address confirmation, bounce checking, or a non-GUI web browser method of unsubscribing from their spam. Macromedia deserves what they got.
Besides, confirming address just makes sense. Our company name is the same as a not uncommon surname, so we get a lot of people doing the equivilant of <john@smith.com>. Also, failing to confirm addresses makes it too easy for people to maliciously engage in signups (as opposed to the numerous ones who just do it out of stupidity).
Well, he's at least right on the "precise" part. Precision doesn't necessarily imply accuracy. The fact that the stormtroopers consistenly miss implies there's a degree of precision going on. However, since precision generally requires skill, it's obvious that stormtroopers are, in fact, expert marksmen, but that the suffer from all having their gun sights misaligned.
Yes, but I'm not attempting to stifle them. Rather, I'm simply refusing to personally fund them. My money, my choice where it goes.
As someone else in the thread pointed out, nVidia also makes a GeForce 3 and they're sponsoring the E3 coverage on another website I frequent. Barring some amazing technical or price advantage of the Asus product, I just don't see any reason for them to get my business.
Actually, I'm currently in the market for a 3D card (my current one's a Canopus Pure3D -- it's so old that the company apparently let the pure3d.com domain registration lapse) and will not by an Asus one exactly because of this situation.
I know exactly two things about Asus -- that I've heard of the GeForce 3 (but don't recall whether it was good or bad) and that they released this driver. The former would've been enough for me to at least look into them. The latter is enough that I will not bother.
And that somehow makes it immune to regulation? Words and pictures are the foundation of printed communication, but that doesn't mean I can string together "General Motors sucks. Sincerely, Ford Motors.", print up a bunch of flyers, and start handing them out.
Similarly, if I were to take a random phone number from the phone book (for the sake of argument, let's say "Jenny 867-5309") and start publishing this already publically available information ("Hey, everyone, I saw this in the phone book -- Jenny 867-5309"), it's still a form of harassment.
Doing an fgrep on the webserver logs (going back to July 2000) at work (not an especially high traffic site by Internet standards, nothing geek related) turns up:
841920 HTTP/1.0 requests
1076070 HTTP/1.1 requests
For just the past few months, the numbers are 254055 (1.0) versus 369703 (1.1).
I think you're making a mistake by trying to compare sitcoms to real life. (Quick show of hands: How many of you out there have a wacky neighbor who shows up once every day or so to utter a wise-crack or two and then be on his way?) In a sitcom, sex generally is relevant. We're watching every bit of these peoples' lives. Anything that's funny is more or less fair game, and there are certainly lots of potentially funny things that take place when you throw dating, sex, and relationships into the mix.
Besides, in virtually all forms of story telling (television, books, movies, etc.), you're generally expected to identify and understand the characters to one degree or another. Empathy helps draw the observer into the story and keep them hooked. While sexually orientation is (rightfully so) a relatively private part of what makes up a person, it's still an important part. Of course, I'm not saying that there's a "gay outlook on life", but rather that your sexual orientation, your race, your nationality, your religion, your upbringing, and where you went to school are all things that affect how you see the world -- knowing some or all of these factors are a key part to understanding a character.