The single biggest problem at Microsoft as a corporation is this: nobody has yelled at Bill Gates in 20 years.
When you get in a position of power and success you lose contact with reality; the main part of what you are doing is working so well that you begin to believe that you have uncovered the 'secret to life' ( (C) Microsoft Inc. 1980 - 2000), and that therefore, everything you are doing is right. What is so dangerous for Gates is that he literally has billions of reasons to think he has everything figured out.
This is a common problem for successful people. Ego's spring from misunderstanding; if you are successful at something and you don't understand the reasons that you are successful, you are primed for developing an inflated ego. Your brain starts trying to understand why you are successful, and the only thing it can come up with is "Well, I must be hot shit!" Once the brain arrives at that conclusion it begins to act to protect that theory, and Ego problems ensue.
The only person I have ever heard of who had a good solution for success induced fat headedness was General Curtis LeMay - the creator of the Strategic Air Command in the United States. LeMay was a judo player, and he had strict orders for his training partner, an air force sergeant, to pound the General on the judo mat anytime LeMay started to get full of himself. This kept LeMay in touch with reality - and kept his from getting too crazy.
If Microsoft is to improve as a company, someone needs to hold Bill Gates nose to a CRT screen and show him reality; that Microsoft often produces really crappy products, and that their business practices seem to have sprung from a contract signed in blood with someone named B. Elzebub.
Isn't it interesting to note that everyone automatically assumes that Microsoft gets an 'automatic' appeal just because they are so big and powerful?
The court could have simply decided not to hear the case at all, in effect upholding the first level court's decision.
Most appeals are denied before they are heard. Unless you have an exceptional basis for your appeal, it will never be taken; only if you are a huge rich company are you assured of an appeal in a civil case.
The only way a person ever gets an automatic appeal in a legal case is if they are convicted of a capital crime.
This is another example of how the law is designed to look fair upon cursory examination, but on closer study is revealed to be a sham. The idea is to get people who could question what is going on in the entire legal system to only glance at the law and say to themselves "Oh I see how this works. There are a lot of technical things in the law that I'm not interested in, so there is no need to look any farther."
Meanwhile there is a core of truly evil people in the law saying: "That's right, nothing to see here, move along. This is the only justice we are going to let you get."
Think for a second about the symbol of justice that they give to us. Now ask yourself this question: "If I were going to swing the sword of justice based upon the results of a weighing, would I wear a blindfold?"
That symbol is a little joke that the evil people couldn't resist: it means: "We have justice hoodwinked", and it is a source of wry humor for the evil people who get the joke.
God, computer people are so helplessly innocent.
--
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works
Surely you have heard of 'flying fish'. You can stretch a point, and call the structures that they use to fly 'wings'. Almost all fish, even the real bottom feeders, have similar structures.
There is such a thing as an honest lawyer, and you could stretch a point and call the way he treats people 'ethical'. Almost all lawyers, even the real bottom feeders, are bound by the same rules which bind an honest lawyer.
So, in the same stinking, slippery, slimy, fashion that fish have wings, lawyers have ethics; the analogy is really quite exact.
Contracts which people have no choice but to sign are not valid. The athletes don't get to negotiate any of the clauses - they are dictated by the IOC.
The only choice they get is "do things our way or don't do them". There is a word for that: it is 'coercion'.
I realize that there are people in the world who's sense of justice is so poor that they think that a two year old child against Mike Tyson - or a grown man barehanded against a bull elephant is a fair fight; but the rest of us can see that they are not. Are you one of those blind to justice people? If you are, I suggest that you try opening your eyes; just because you can get a person's signature on a piece of paper doesn't mean what you are doing is right.
Contracts and other legalisms are just words written on pieces of paper - there is no possibility that those words are more important than the people who create them; anyone who thinks that they are is either very evil, or seriously mentally ill. People are alive and matter - legalisms are dead ink on paper. Writings matter only when what they say reaches the level of the profound.
A contract designed to screw somebody hardly qualifies as profundity.
Technical people are mainly about reality, and getting things to work, 'People people' are mainly about appearances; making things look good as opposed to making things be good.
A good manager from the perspective of the members of his technical team makes sure that the team members have the resources to do what they need to do - while protecting them from outside interference.
A good manager from the perspective of upper management is something very different. Upper management types - are generally clueless about anything technical, and regard technical people about the same way you would think of a draft horse; something that can do a lot of hard work they can't do - but which is interchangeable with any other draft horse. To upper management, the job of lower management is to whip those lazy draft horses into shape.
To the 'people people' types who populate management ranks you are making the transition from being a drudge into being a 'person'. What upper management wants is good looking reports - solid progress predictions - somebody who dresses 'professionally' and has the air about them of being a real 'mover'; someone on the way up.
A little thought tells you that most people can see that the higher ups sign the pay checks - so most managers concentrate on looking good to their bosses - rather than on getting the job done. This is why there are so many PHB's in the world; while they look like idiots to the people they manage, they look great to the people above them.
You have to decide what kind of manager you want to be; somebody who really gets the job done, and is therefore regarded by upper management as an 'asset' rather than a 'person' or do you want to be someone who becomes a 'player' to upper management? If you are an 'asset' you will be left where you are - in lower management where you have proved yourself valuable. Your actual contributions to the company will be denigrated by your corporate competitors; the 'people people' at your level will hate you for actually getting things done - and will do everything they can to make you look bad to upper management. 'People people' almost always hate technical people; they know that technical people can actually do what 'people people' look like they can do.
While it is possible to do both jobs - you have to become 'two-faced' to do it; you have to look one way to your team members - and another to upper management. If you decide to do that you now have a problem: which face do you want to look at in your mirror?
Where do you want to go - up the corporate ladder or stay pretty much where you are? Before you make your choice consider this: 'people - people' are all the ones who wouldn't talk to you in high school - they married the cheerleaders and other girls who didn't even know you existed; what makes you think those kind of people are going to accept you as one of their own now?
There is one, and only one reason, that anyone ever wants you to sign something; to use it against you in a court of law.
Anytime someone wants your signature be aware of that fact. People may tell you "Oh this is just a formality" but don't be fooled. All you are doing by signing any document is giving someone legal ammunition to use against you. If you want someone to sign something, it is to bind them legally to do what you want isn't it?
This becomes very important as UCITA becomes the law of the land - as pushing a button on a computer screen - or even tearing open a shrink wrap becomes the legal equivalent of signing a document.
The libertarian myth is that contracts are freely arrived at deals between parties in equal bargaining positions. Anyone who thinks that they are in an equal bargaining position with Microsoft and their cadre of Wolfram and Hart style lawyers has got serious delusions of grandeur. If you were in an equal bargaining position with companies - you would write half of all contracts with the companies; you don't, and you aren't.
It may be argued that you don't have to sign anything, and that is true; of course you also don't have to eat, drink water, or continue breathing - you are also under no legal obligation to do those things either.
When the choice is "Sign the employment contract or don't work" most people choose to sign the employment contract - for all the same reasons that they would sign over their house if 'Big Tony' had a nine millimeter pointed at their head. When every company you try to work for has similar employment contracts - you have no choice; you either sign, or you die of starvation.
From the FCC's perspective the merger is a good thing; fewer companies in a field mean less work for the FCC - fewer files to maintain etc.
In addition they realize that the whole Time - Warner - AOL deal will eventually wind up in anti-trust proceedings. That will put the ball in the DOJ's court. The end result? Several years where the FCC has less work.
I recently wrote a letter to the FCC complaining about a local TV station lying on the air about the cause of ozone pollution in my home town. The lie was significant because ozone levels had reached the level (more than 200 parts per billion) where it is hazardous to the lungs of normal people; not just people with impaired breathing.
The ozone was caused by chemical discharges from industry - but the TV station said it was car exhausts. Car exhausts were responsible for about 1% of the ozone level reading.
The FCC's response was that while the TV station was lying, and the lies were helping air pollution regulators in the area avoid treating the actual cause of the ozone pollution ( while allowing them to hammer car drivers with stiffer tail-pipe emissions tests, lower speed limits, and alternate driving days etc.) and that people were being harmed by those lies (all of which is necessary for a broadcast to be a criminal 'hoax' under FCC regulations) that there was no proof that the TV station was lying intentionally. This was despite the fact (which I pointed out to the FCC) that I had emailed the station pointing out their false material - which caused them to slightly modify their broadcast from "car exhausts were causing the ozone" to "car exhausts and industry were causing the ozone" on their next broadcast.
The FCC really doesn't care about trivial things like truth and the well being of the populace, and never has. In the 1930's and 1940's it was the FCC who kept Philo T. Farnsworth's TV (which he invented in 1927) off the air at the request of RCA, which was afraid of losing its radio broadcast monopoly position. It also kept Major Armstrong's FM off the air (also at RCA's request).
Big companies mean fewer people to see and an easier job for the FCC; so of course they will favor it. So much for being able to count on government regulatory agencies to protect us. In practice regulatory agencies protect only those whom they regulate - not the 'people' as a whole.
The analogy to a telephone captures only partly the reality. Remember it is called e-mail for a reason.
A better analogy which captures more of what the FBI is doing would be: "Suppose some terrorist group was using the US postal service to plot its plans." Unencrypted e-mail is like a post card, encrypted e-mail is like a letter inside of an envelope.
While e-mail is faster than snail mail, it lacks the immediate feedback of a phone conversation; in addition it leaves an audit trail that any terrorist organization would be fools to leave.
I would think that something like ICQ would be a better choice for clandestine plotting than e-mail.
Another way of handling communication would be through https and some secure forms to a.com site; your 'order' could be "Bomb the UN building at 3:OO PM".
In any case the whole "We've got to read your mail" paranoia on the part of the FBI is mostly unnecessary; traffic analysis alone will give them the vast majority of the information they need to have on any terrorist organization.
Besides, sending an e-mail message like "You da bomb" gets you looked at by Echelon anyway.
The FBI just wants Carnivore because it is full of petty snoopy people who like to read other peoples mail. Since 99.9999% of all email is of the innocent variety, they have to read an awful lot of innocuous stuff to find the sort of criminal communications that they claim are "flooding the Internet".
Anyone who is seriously worried that their daughter is going to be kidnapped and raped by political terrorists also needs to be worried about being electrocuted by a lightning strike in a dust storm; since the two events are roughly equal in probability.
The broadcast media and newspapers have a hidden agenda; both of these groups are terrified of the potential competition that the Internet can be for them - so they want the Internet as crippled as they can make it. That is the real motivating reason for all of the stories of "slavering pedophile boogie men who are going to turn your rosy cheeked 8 year old into a porn - ho".
If you want to see how ridiculous all of these stories are remember that the Internet is just a medium of communication like the air or the US Mail is. Substitute "Air" or "Postal Service" for Internet and the absurdity of the stories is apparent:
"A Pedophile was arrested today. Authorities said that he 'talked' to a little girl on her way to school. The FBI renewed its demand before congress to get parabolic microphones and laser snooping devices on every street corner so that they could listen in to all conversations to prevent that sort of crime from happening."
"You can never tell who is plotting crimes by using the air to talk to each other, so we need to have the ability to snoop on all conversations. Besides, if you aren't doing anything wrong how could you object? Warrants, we don't need no steenking warrants; this is an emergency, all civil rights need to be suspended for the duration."
All that has to happen for soldering irons - or anything else to be illegal under the DMCA is for Jack Valenti to take out an ad in Variety that says "Do you want to break the copy protection on your XXX device? Just use this!" He then sends a registered letter to the manufacturers of the soldering irons so that they have 'knowledge of his actions'. Notice that the DMCA says 'knowledge' it doesn't say knowledge and control.
This of course sets up another extortion racket for the MPAA: "Pay a licensing fee or your product is illegal" Oh, and expect free software operating systems to be among the first things the MPAA 'advertises'.
Folks - it is not about money - evil is never about money - money is to clean for evil to be interested in it; evil has always been about the creation of human misery - money is only a means to that end.
The only way to stop the DMCA is to show to the public that the people behind it are evil. But I can't even convince the geeks who are being hammered by that law of that truth. If the victims can't believe that evil is involved, there is no chance whatsoever of showing the population as a whole what is going on.
There is another post that points out that the 'first register - then confiscate' trick is exactly what happened in Great Britain. There is precedent sir; it has happened before.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. By the way, the Chinese dissidents were astonished that the "People's Army" fired on them, after all, they were the people. Ask the survivors of Kent State if the National Guard's rifles were loaded.
I don't think there are very many people who believe the "We are the government" argument any longer; it might have flown in 1800, but 200 years later most people see through it.
Do I think we are in for another Holocaust? No, not unless there is some sort of technological disaster of huge proportion - which was large enough to personally affect millions of people.
I do think that we are in for some legal beatings - we make a lot of money and people hate us. The DCMA is just the first of many punches we are going to get thrown at us. I just want everyone to understand what is going to happen to us in the near future and why; that way it won't come as quite so much of a shock.
Ex post facto applies only to acts - not to objects. The government clearly can and has ruled existing objects illegal; it is just as illegal to own a Thompson machine gun manufactured before the prohibition of automatic weapons as it would be to own one manufactured today.
As has been pointed out previously it would be possible to make a bit for bit copy af music containing the watermark on our existing CDROM burners. That means that our existing CDROM burners are devices capable of circumventing the copy protection scheme on the new music format - since they are able to copy everything including the watermark - that is clearly as illegal under the DMCA as any device could be.
There are many legitimate reasons for having lock picks - but it is nevertheless illegal to possess them because of the implication that they are for illegal use. Please remember that to the justice system the free software movement is full of people who are just thieves; to them the only reason we have things like CDROM burners is to steal copyrighted material.
My original post was moderated up because it pointed out a truth which had not been stated in any of the other posts on the topic.
The real question is "Is there such a thing as a hidden agenda?" The answer to that question depends upon your degree of awareness of evil. People who are virtually blind to evil except when it reaches the level of violent crime or officially sanctioned genocide, are likely to answer 'No." to that question. People who are more sensitive to evil are more likely to answer "Yes".
Sensitivity has its problems - it is easy to mistake noise for signal when you are sensitive. To someone who is blind to the actions of evil people - the warnings of those who are aware of the actions of evil - sound insane and paranoid. The belief is: "If I can't see it - it must not be there." It never seems to occur to such people that they just might not be able to see very well.
From your reactions to my original post I would make the guess that you are able to see only the actions of those who are not very sophisticated in their evil - and are thus obvious to almost anyone. Did it ever occur to you that there might be a class of evil people who are sophisticated enough to conceal their actions so that they become invisible to anyone who looks no deeper than the surface of events?
Most people are virtualy blind to the actions of sophisticated evil. I refuse to be labled as 'crazy' because I can see sophisticated evil. I am not crazy sir, I am just not as blind and insensitive as you are.
Once the copy protection scheme is in place it would be illegal to make even a fair use copy of music in another format which does not use the copy protection scheme - the only MP3's you could play would be of unprotected music. The view of the DMCA is that anything which CAN be used to copy protected music is illegal. (That is the crux of the DeCSS ruling; DeCSS CAN be used for illegal purposes, and therefore it is illegal)
The argument which I expect to be used in court is that any device which can be used to circumvent a digital copy protection scheme is the equivalent of a lock pick - and thus mere possession of them is a crime.
Once a law is on the books it is very difficult to get it repealed. There are millions of laws in this country - you pretty much know about all of the ones that have ever been repealed. The reason you have heard about laws being held as unconstitutional is that it is so rare an event that when it happens it is NEWS.
Prohibition was repealed because most people drank - drug prohibition has not been repealed because most people don't do drugs. Into which of those categories of bad law would the DMCA be more likely to fall? Just because most people WE know are involved with computers and understand the issues does not mean that most people in society as a whole are like that.
Paranoia is thinking people are out to get you - when nobody is. IT IS NOT PARANOIA TO THINK PEOPLE ARE OUT TO GET YOU WHEN THEY REALLY ARE.
The question is "Does the music industry want to collect information on anyone who might be interested in attempting to crack their copy protection scheme?" The answer to that question is an unqualified "YES". Do they have the means to compile a database on everyone who tries? Yes, they do.
I did not say that all identity checks are designed to allow someone to get you. I listed a single example - gun registration - which DOES have a hidden agenda. It is exactly for that reason that the People of the US have ALWAYS resisted gun registration.
Nice try at attempting to discredit my writing by implied character assassination - but it won't play.
Under the DMCA any player which does NOT use the watermark is a device which is 'bypassing digital copy protection means' and is thus ILLEGAL.
Not only will all new players be forced, by law, to use the copy protection scheme; but you can be imprisoned for 5 years by using your old CDROM or sound card once the new copy protection scheme is on the market. Like DeCSS any device which can be used to copy protected music IS ILLEGAL under the DMCA.
For example a PC which has a current CDROM burner would be illegal. We can assume that Microsoft will put the music copy protection scheme into a future version of Windows - thus making illegal all current operating systems which do not have that code in them.
The DMCA is not about copy protection; it is about controlling what YOU can do with digital technology.
The best reason not to attempt to crack the protection scheme is that it tells these people WHO YOU ARE.
That is the real reason for the 'hacking contest'. Much in the way that the real reason for registration of firearms is to make the later collection of those weapons from the law abiding easier - so is the real purpose of this contest to allow the music industry to collect information on who is interested in trying to crack their copy protection scheme. Anything you do in this 'contest' may be used against you in a court of law at a later time and date.
As a consequence of the DMCA free operating systems could be required to comply with 'Industry standard' copy protection schemes. For example the DMCA could require an API which furnishes media serial numbers to any program requesting them.
It would be a 'circumvention of digital copy protection methods' to disable or circumvent such an API.
Under the DMCA an act as innocent as formatting a floppy - which results in a change in its serial number could be a serious felony. One of the side effects of this is that older copies of all operating systems which fail to have a copy protection API - or which allow the reformatting of floppies could become illegal. Of course - we all know that Microsoft would simply hate the idea that everyone had to scrap any operating system older than Windows 2001.
Let us see if Hanlon's Razor is applicable to the DMCA. For those who
don't know, Hanlon's razor is : "Never ascribe to malice that which may
be adequately explained by stupidity."
To see if the DMCA is simply an act of stupidity we need to think
about the people who created the DMCA in the first place. If these are
generally stupid people we are safe in assuming that the act was the
result of stupidity and we may safely discount it as not being
malicious. If however, the people who created the act are not generally
stupid we need to show how otherwise intelligent people were confused
into creating something out of momentary stupidity in orger to judge the
DMCA as non malicious.
By far the majority of people in the House of Representatives and
the Senate in the US are lawyers. The vast majority of lawyers follow
the
conventional path of graduating from college with superior scholastic
records, then going into a post graduate law program which awards them
with a 'Doctor of Laws' (Juris Doctor) degree; which is the equivalent
of a Ph.D. in a technical subject. After obtaining this degree the
average lawmaker then passed a difficult bar exam to become an attorney.
After successfully becoming a lawyer these people engaged in significant
networking to build up their political prospects.
Most people who enter the political profession emerge as
significantly wealthier when they leave the profession than when they
enter into it.
The argument that the DMCA was created by people who are generally
stupid appears to lack plausibility. Now let us examine the idea that
the act was created by normally intelligent people who were acting in an
aberrant stupid fashion.
Reading the DMCA fails to give evidence of misspelling, poor
grammatical structure, ill thought out sentence constructs, or other
evidence of stupidity which might be brought on by the heavy use of
intoxicating drugs or spirits or wide spread occurrences of stroke or
other neurological damage. When tested against the standards of writing
in other laws passed by these same legislators there does not appear to
be any obvious fall off in the quality of expression in the DMCA.
In short, the evidence that the DMCA is the result of temporary
stupidity on the part of otherwise intelligent people is very poor.
Perhaps the claim could be made that the authors of the DMCA did not
understand the consequences of their actions in writing this law and
were thus being stupid. However, that argument fails upon further
thought. The consequences of the DMCA appear to be carefully designed -
the law appears to accomplish exactly what the authors meant it to
achieve.
Here is an example of a stupidly constructed law for comparison.
"Anyone who picks his nose in public shall be guilty of an offense.
Persons who violate this law will be punished by being forced to have
sex with an attractive person of the offenders' choosing."
The conclusion is that the DMCA is not the result of stupidity, and
that Hanlon's razor is not applicable to it. We therefore MAY
conclude that the DMCA is the result of malice; it is deliberate, it is
intentional, and it is no accident that it is written the way that it
is.
One thing this would normally do is spring up a market for disks without serial numbers - made by a manufacturer outside of the consortium. Market forces would cause these disks to sell more, since they would be more versatile and less expensive to manufacture.
In the past there would have been no way to keep a manufacturer from making such disks. HOWEVER: The copy protection part of the DMCA does make it possible to stop the manufacturing of such disks.
All anyone has to do is come up with some sort of utterly lame copy protection scheme involving the serial number on the disk and the DMCA springs into effect with its draconian penalties against a non serial number manufacturer - since they would be circumventing a digital protection means.
This means that one manufacturer of any type of digital media who puts a serial number on their media could force EVERYONE to put serial numbers on their media of the same type. This includes floppies - and it would be a felony to erase a floppy serial number!
Please everyone, as slashdotters have firmly stated by rejecting my arguments as flamebait and trolling, Jack Valenti and the MPAA are not evil. Jack Valenti and the MPAA are not malicious. They are simply well intended people who disagree with your interpretation of the world.
They are simply poor people - just like you - who are trying to protect their 'breadbasket'. They are just being stupid when they seek to silence your voice. Because it can be adequately explained by stupidity - it CAN't be malice!
Please remember - Mr. Valenti and the MPAA are not going to be holding loaded guns to your head and seizing your computer equipment from you if you violate the court order they have obtained against linking to DeCSS; that will be the police doing that.
Please remember - it was not malice that drove Jack Valenti and the MPAA to have the Norwegian teen who first posted the DeCSS taken in for questioning by the Norwegian authorities - it was stupidity that drove them to do it. If only Jack Valenti understood that we just wanted a free (as in speech) DVD player for linux and that we weren't trying to pirate DVD's this whole case would go away. Isn't it amazing that Jack Valenti and the MPAA are ALL so stupid? Even though we have told them what we were trying to do with DeCSS in terms that anyone with more intellectual ability than Koko the chimp (and yes, I know Koko is a gorilla) couldn't fail to understand - they are unable to understand what we are saying.
Perhaps the good people of slashdot - after convincing me that my argument that many people in positions of authority and power are evil and do things out of malice - not stupidity - is wrong could suggest some ways that we could penetrate the unmalicious stupidity of Mr. Valenti and the MPAA.
If I needed any other proof that Mr. Valenti and the MPAA members are just stupid it would be how many times Mr. Valenti was unable to remember things while testifying under oath. See, that wouldn't be malice at work - that is just plain old stupidity.
You know, come to think of it, if only the Jews in Germany in the 1930's could have broken through the stupidity of the people in the National Socialist Party to show them that the Jews weren't really to blame for Europe's economic state the whole stupid, unmalicious, error of the concentration camps of the 1940's could have been avoided.
Note to moderators - although I have made many specious arguments with which I don't agree in this post, and although it I would like to have this post spring up discussion of what I have to say - THIS POST IS NOT A TROLL. I am being SARCASTIC. Perhaps I should surround the whole post with SARCASM.../SARCASM tags so you would understand this.
While the original trigger of a neuron is electrochemical - the actual transmission of the signal in a neuron is purely an electrical effect. The reason that the transmission speed of the signal is so slow compared to wires is capacitance. The cell walls of a neuron are so thin that the capacitance of the conducting ion channel inside the neuron relative to the fluid surrounding the channel is very high. Conductor - extremely thin insulator - conductor; that is a capacitor. The Ion fluid inside the neuron is not a very good conductor; so we have a capacitor being charged through a resistor. This RC time constant is what makes the signal propagation speed so low.
The proof of this model comes from long axons - which have myelinated sheaths. These insulating sheaths make the cell wall much thicker - decreasing the capacitance and speeding up the nerve impulse. This also has the effect of allowing longer distances between depolarizing sites - which serve the function of a repeater; boosting signal strength.
If we made tiny wires the size of neurons which had insulation as thin as a neural cell wall, and immersed them in a conductive fluid - we couldn't get signal speeds much higher than neurons get. The tiny wires would have considerable resistance, and the thin insulators would mean they would have great distributed capacitance relative to the surrounding conductive fluid. The scale of things has a profound effect on how they work.
Slashdot Mirror
When you get in a position of power and success you lose contact with reality; the main part of what you are doing is working so well that you begin to believe that you have uncovered the 'secret to life' ( (C) Microsoft Inc. 1980 - 2000), and that therefore, everything you are doing is right. What is so dangerous for Gates is that he literally has billions of reasons to think he has everything figured out.
This is a common problem for successful people. Ego's spring from misunderstanding; if you are successful at something and you don't understand the reasons that you are successful, you are primed for developing an inflated ego. Your brain starts trying to understand why you are successful, and the only thing it can come up with is "Well, I must be hot shit!" Once the brain arrives at that conclusion it begins to act to protect that theory, and Ego problems ensue.
The only person I have ever heard of who had a good solution for success induced fat headedness was General Curtis LeMay - the creator of the Strategic Air Command in the United States. LeMay was a judo player, and he had strict orders for his training partner, an air force sergeant, to pound the General on the judo mat anytime LeMay started to get full of himself. This kept LeMay in touch with reality - and kept his from getting too crazy.
If Microsoft is to improve as a company, someone needs to hold Bill Gates nose to a CRT screen and show him reality; that Microsoft often produces really crappy products, and that their business practices seem to have sprung from a contract signed in blood with someone named B. Elzebub.
The court could have simply decided not to hear the case at all, in effect upholding the first level court's decision.
Most appeals are denied before they are heard. Unless you have an exceptional basis for your appeal, it will never be taken; only if you are a huge rich company are you assured of an appeal in a civil case.
The only way a person ever gets an automatic appeal in a legal case is if they are convicted of a capital crime.
This is another example of how the law is designed to look fair upon cursory examination, but on closer study is revealed to be a sham. The idea is to get people who could question what is going on in the entire legal system to only glance at the law and say to themselves "Oh I see how this works. There are a lot of technical things in the law that I'm not interested in, so there is no need to look any farther."
Meanwhile there is a core of truly evil people in the law saying: "That's right, nothing to see here, move along. This is the only justice we are going to let you get."
Think for a second about the symbol of justice that they give to us. Now ask yourself this question: "If I were going to swing the sword of justice based upon the results of a weighing, would I wear a blindfold?"
That symbol is a little joke that the evil people couldn't resist: it means: "We have justice hoodwinked", and it is a source of wry humor for the evil people who get the joke.
God, computer people are so helplessly innocent.
--
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works
Surely you have heard of 'flying fish'. You can stretch a point, and call the structures that they use to fly 'wings'. Almost all fish, even the real bottom feeders, have similar structures.
There is such a thing as an honest lawyer, and you could stretch a point and call the way he treats people 'ethical'. Almost all lawyers, even the real bottom feeders, are bound by the same rules which bind an honest lawyer.
So, in the same stinking, slippery, slimy, fashion that fish have wings, lawyers have ethics; the analogy is really quite exact.
I realize that there are people in the world who's sense of justice is so poor that they think that a two year old child against Mike Tyson - or a grown man barehanded against a bull elephant is a fair fight; but the rest of us can see that they are not. Are you one of those blind to justice people? If you are, I suggest that you try opening your eyes; just because you can get a person's signature on a piece of paper doesn't mean what you are doing is right.
Contracts and other legalisms are just words written on pieces of paper - there is no possibility that those words are more important than the people who create them; anyone who thinks that they are is either very evil, or seriously mentally ill. People are alive and matter - legalisms are dead ink on paper. Writings matter only when what they say reaches the level of the profound.
A contract designed to screw somebody hardly qualifies as profundity.
Technical people are mainly about reality, and getting things to work, 'People people' are mainly about appearances; making things look good as opposed to making things be good.
A good manager from the perspective of the members of his technical team makes sure that the team members have the resources to do what they need to do - while protecting them from outside interference.
A good manager from the perspective of upper management is something very different. Upper management types - are generally clueless about anything technical, and regard technical people about the same way you would think of a draft horse; something that can do a lot of hard work they can't do - but which is interchangeable with any other draft horse. To upper management, the job of lower management is to whip those lazy draft horses into shape.
To the 'people people' types who populate management ranks you are making the transition from being a drudge into being a 'person'. What upper management wants is good looking reports - solid progress predictions - somebody who dresses 'professionally' and has the air about them of being a real 'mover'; someone on the way up.
A little thought tells you that most people can see that the higher ups sign the pay checks - so most managers concentrate on looking good to their bosses - rather than on getting the job done. This is why there are so many PHB's in the world; while they look like idiots to the people they manage, they look great to the people above them.
You have to decide what kind of manager you want to be; somebody who really gets the job done, and is therefore regarded by upper management as an 'asset' rather than a 'person' or do you want to be someone who becomes a 'player' to upper management? If you are an 'asset' you will be left where you are - in lower management where you have proved yourself valuable. Your actual contributions to the company will be denigrated by your corporate competitors; the 'people people' at your level will hate you for actually getting things done - and will do everything they can to make you look bad to upper management. 'People people' almost always hate technical people; they know that technical people can actually do what 'people people' look like they can do.
While it is possible to do both jobs - you have to become 'two-faced' to do it; you have to look one way to your team members - and another to upper management. If you decide to do that you now have a problem: which face do you want to look at in your mirror?
Where do you want to go - up the corporate ladder or stay pretty much where you are? Before you make your choice consider this: 'people - people' are all the ones who wouldn't talk to you in high school - they married the cheerleaders and other girls who didn't even know you existed; what makes you think those kind of people are going to accept you as one of their own now?
Anytime someone wants your signature be aware of that fact. People may tell you "Oh this is just a formality" but don't be fooled. All you are doing by signing any document is giving someone legal ammunition to use against you. If you want someone to sign something, it is to bind them legally to do what you want isn't it?
This becomes very important as UCITA becomes the law of the land - as pushing a button on a computer screen - or even tearing open a shrink wrap becomes the legal equivalent of signing a document.
The libertarian myth is that contracts are freely arrived at deals between parties in equal bargaining positions. Anyone who thinks that they are in an equal bargaining position with Microsoft and their cadre of Wolfram and Hart style lawyers has got serious delusions of grandeur. If you were in an equal bargaining position with companies - you would write half of all contracts with the companies; you don't, and you aren't.
It may be argued that you don't have to sign anything, and that is true; of course you also don't have to eat, drink water, or continue breathing - you are also under no legal obligation to do those things either.
When the choice is "Sign the employment contract or don't work" most people choose to sign the employment contract - for all the same reasons that they would sign over their house if 'Big Tony' had a nine millimeter pointed at their head. When every company you try to work for has similar employment contracts - you have no choice; you either sign, or you die of starvation.
In addition they realize that the whole Time - Warner - AOL deal will eventually wind up in anti-trust proceedings. That will put the ball in the DOJ's court. The end result? Several years where the FCC has less work.
I recently wrote a letter to the FCC complaining about a local TV station lying on the air about the cause of ozone pollution in my home town. The lie was significant because ozone levels had reached the level (more than 200 parts per billion) where it is hazardous to the lungs of normal people; not just people with impaired breathing.
The ozone was caused by chemical discharges from industry - but the TV station said it was car exhausts. Car exhausts were responsible for about 1% of the ozone level reading.
The FCC's response was that while the TV station was lying, and the lies were helping air pollution regulators in the area avoid treating the actual cause of the ozone pollution ( while allowing them to hammer car drivers with stiffer tail-pipe emissions tests, lower speed limits, and alternate driving days etc.) and that people were being harmed by those lies (all of which is necessary for a broadcast to be a criminal 'hoax' under FCC regulations) that there was no proof that the TV station was lying intentionally. This was despite the fact (which I pointed out to the FCC) that I had emailed the station pointing out their false material - which caused them to slightly modify their broadcast from "car exhausts were causing the ozone" to "car exhausts and industry were causing the ozone" on their next broadcast.
The FCC really doesn't care about trivial things like truth and the well being of the populace, and never has. In the 1930's and 1940's it was the FCC who kept Philo T. Farnsworth's TV (which he invented in 1927) off the air at the request of RCA, which was afraid of losing its radio broadcast monopoly position. It also kept Major Armstrong's FM off the air (also at RCA's request).
Big companies mean fewer people to see and an easier job for the FCC; so of course they will favor it. So much for being able to count on government regulatory agencies to protect us. In practice regulatory agencies protect only those whom they regulate - not the 'people' as a whole.
A better analogy which captures more of what the FBI is doing would be: "Suppose some terrorist group was using the US postal service to plot its plans." Unencrypted e-mail is like a post card, encrypted e-mail is like a letter inside of an envelope.
While e-mail is faster than snail mail, it lacks the immediate feedback of a phone conversation; in addition it leaves an audit trail that any terrorist organization would be fools to leave.
I would think that something like ICQ would be a better choice for clandestine plotting than e-mail.
Another way of handling communication would be through https and some secure forms to a .com site; your 'order' could be "Bomb the UN building at 3:OO PM".
In any case the whole "We've got to read your mail" paranoia on the part of the FBI is mostly unnecessary; traffic analysis alone will give them the vast majority of the information they need to have on any terrorist organization.
Besides, sending an e-mail message like "You da bomb" gets you looked at by Echelon anyway.
The FBI just wants Carnivore because it is full of petty snoopy people who like to read other peoples mail. Since 99.9999% of all email is of the innocent variety, they have to read an awful lot of innocuous stuff to find the sort of criminal communications that they claim are "flooding the Internet".
Anyone who is seriously worried that their daughter is going to be kidnapped and raped by political terrorists also needs to be worried about being electrocuted by a lightning strike in a dust storm; since the two events are roughly equal in probability.
The broadcast media and newspapers have a hidden agenda; both of these groups are terrified of the potential competition that the Internet can be for them - so they want the Internet as crippled as they can make it. That is the real motivating reason for all of the stories of "slavering pedophile boogie men who are going to turn your rosy cheeked 8 year old into a porn - ho".
If you want to see how ridiculous all of these stories are remember that the Internet is just a medium of communication like the air or the US Mail is. Substitute "Air" or "Postal Service" for Internet and the absurdity of the stories is apparent:
"A Pedophile was arrested today. Authorities said that he 'talked' to a little girl on her way to school. The FBI renewed its demand before congress to get parabolic microphones and laser snooping devices on every street corner so that they could listen in to all conversations to prevent that sort of crime from happening."
"You can never tell who is plotting crimes by using the air to talk to each other, so we need to have the ability to snoop on all conversations. Besides, if you aren't doing anything wrong how could you object? Warrants, we don't need no steenking warrants; this is an emergency, all civil rights need to be suspended for the duration."
This of course sets up another extortion racket for the MPAA: "Pay a licensing fee or your product is illegal" Oh, and expect free software operating systems to be among the first things the MPAA 'advertises'.
Folks - it is not about money - evil is never about money - money is to clean for evil to be interested in it; evil has always been about the creation of human misery - money is only a means to that end.
The only way to stop the DMCA is to show to the public that the people behind it are evil. But I can't even convince the geeks who are being hammered by that law of that truth. If the victims can't believe that evil is involved, there is no chance whatsoever of showing the population as a whole what is going on.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. By the way, the Chinese dissidents were astonished that the "People's Army" fired on them, after all, they were the people. Ask the survivors of Kent State if the National Guard's rifles were loaded.
I don't think there are very many people who believe the "We are the government" argument any longer; it might have flown in 1800, but 200 years later most people see through it.
I do think that we are in for some legal beatings - we make a lot of money and people hate us. The DCMA is just the first of many punches we are going to get thrown at us. I just want everyone to understand what is going to happen to us in the near future and why; that way it won't come as quite so much of a shock.
Face it, you would hate people who had wings and could fly if all you could do is crawl in the mud.
There was a wonderful line in the Mini-Series "Holocaust" where one Jew said to another: "What are they going to do? Kill us all?"
Ex post facto applies only to acts - not to objects. The government clearly can and has ruled existing objects illegal; it is just as illegal to own a Thompson machine gun manufactured before the prohibition of automatic weapons as it would be to own one manufactured today.
There are many legitimate reasons for having lock picks - but it is nevertheless illegal to possess them because of the implication that they are for illegal use. Please remember that to the justice system the free software movement is full of people who are just thieves; to them the only reason we have things like CDROM burners is to steal copyrighted material.
The real question is "Is there such a thing as a hidden agenda?" The answer to that question depends upon your degree of awareness of evil. People who are virtually blind to evil except when it reaches the level of violent crime or officially sanctioned genocide, are likely to answer 'No." to that question. People who are more sensitive to evil are more likely to answer "Yes".
Sensitivity has its problems - it is easy to mistake noise for signal when you are sensitive. To someone who is blind to the actions of evil people - the warnings of those who are aware of the actions of evil - sound insane and paranoid. The belief is: "If I can't see it - it must not be there." It never seems to occur to such people that they just might not be able to see very well.
From your reactions to my original post I would make the guess that you are able to see only the actions of those who are not very sophisticated in their evil - and are thus obvious to almost anyone. Did it ever occur to you that there might be a class of evil people who are sophisticated enough to conceal their actions so that they become invisible to anyone who looks no deeper than the surface of events?
Most people are virtualy blind to the actions of sophisticated evil. I refuse to be labled as 'crazy' because I can see sophisticated evil. I am not crazy sir, I am just not as blind and insensitive as you are.
The argument which I expect to be used in court is that any device which can be used to circumvent a digital copy protection scheme is the equivalent of a lock pick - and thus mere possession of them is a crime.
Once a law is on the books it is very difficult to get it repealed. There are millions of laws in this country - you pretty much know about all of the ones that have ever been repealed. The reason you have heard about laws being held as unconstitutional is that it is so rare an event that when it happens it is NEWS.
Prohibition was repealed because most people drank - drug prohibition has not been repealed because most people don't do drugs. Into which of those categories of bad law would the DMCA be more likely to fall? Just because most people WE know are involved with computers and understand the issues does not mean that most people in society as a whole are like that.
The question is "Does the music industry want to collect information on anyone who might be interested in attempting to crack their copy protection scheme?" The answer to that question is an unqualified "YES". Do they have the means to compile a database on everyone who tries? Yes, they do.
I did not say that all identity checks are designed to allow someone to get you. I listed a single example - gun registration - which DOES have a hidden agenda. It is exactly for that reason that the People of the US have ALWAYS resisted gun registration.
Nice try at attempting to discredit my writing by implied character assassination - but it won't play.
Under the DMCA any player which does NOT use the watermark is a device which is 'bypassing digital copy protection means' and is thus ILLEGAL.
Not only will all new players be forced, by law, to use the copy protection scheme; but you can be imprisoned for 5 years by using your old CDROM or sound card once the new copy protection scheme is on the market. Like DeCSS any device which can be used to copy protected music IS ILLEGAL under the DMCA.
For example a PC which has a current CDROM burner would be illegal. We can assume that Microsoft will put the music copy protection scheme into a future version of Windows - thus making illegal all current operating systems which do not have that code in them.
The DMCA is not about copy protection; it is about controlling what YOU can do with digital technology.
That is the real reason for the 'hacking contest'. Much in the way that the real reason for registration of firearms is to make the later collection of those weapons from the law abiding easier - so is the real purpose of this contest to allow the music industry to collect information on who is interested in trying to crack their copy protection scheme. Anything you do in this 'contest' may be used against you in a court of law at a later time and date.
It would be a 'circumvention of digital copy protection methods' to disable or circumvent such an API.
Under the DMCA an act as innocent as formatting a floppy - which results in a change in its serial number could be a serious felony. One of the side effects of this is that older copies of all operating systems which fail to have a copy protection API - or which allow the reformatting of floppies could become illegal. Of course - we all know that Microsoft would simply hate the idea that everyone had to scrap any operating system older than Windows 2001.
To see if the DMCA is simply an act of stupidity we need to think about the people who created the DMCA in the first place. If these are generally stupid people we are safe in assuming that the act was the result of stupidity and we may safely discount it as not being malicious. If however, the people who created the act are not generally stupid we need to show how otherwise intelligent people were confused into creating something out of momentary stupidity in orger to judge the DMCA as non malicious.
By far the majority of people in the House of Representatives and the Senate in the US are lawyers. The vast majority of lawyers follow the conventional path of graduating from college with superior scholastic records, then going into a post graduate law program which awards them with a 'Doctor of Laws' (Juris Doctor) degree; which is the equivalent of a Ph.D. in a technical subject. After obtaining this degree the average lawmaker then passed a difficult bar exam to become an attorney. After successfully becoming a lawyer these people engaged in significant networking to build up their political prospects.
Most people who enter the political profession emerge as significantly wealthier when they leave the profession than when they enter into it.
The argument that the DMCA was created by people who are generally stupid appears to lack plausibility. Now let us examine the idea that the act was created by normally intelligent people who were acting in an aberrant stupid fashion.
Reading the DMCA fails to give evidence of misspelling, poor grammatical structure, ill thought out sentence constructs, or other evidence of stupidity which might be brought on by the heavy use of intoxicating drugs or spirits or wide spread occurrences of stroke or other neurological damage. When tested against the standards of writing in other laws passed by these same legislators there does not appear to be any obvious fall off in the quality of expression in the DMCA.
In short, the evidence that the DMCA is the result of temporary stupidity on the part of otherwise intelligent people is very poor. Perhaps the claim could be made that the authors of the DMCA did not understand the consequences of their actions in writing this law and were thus being stupid. However, that argument fails upon further thought. The consequences of the DMCA appear to be carefully designed - the law appears to accomplish exactly what the authors meant it to achieve.
Here is an example of a stupidly constructed law for comparison. "Anyone who picks his nose in public shall be guilty of an offense. Persons who violate this law will be punished by being forced to have sex with an attractive person of the offenders' choosing."
The conclusion is that the DMCA is not the result of stupidity, and that Hanlon's razor is not applicable to it. We therefore MAY conclude that the DMCA is the result of malice; it is deliberate, it is intentional, and it is no accident that it is written the way that it is.
In the past there would have been no way to keep a manufacturer from making such disks. HOWEVER: The copy protection part of the DMCA does make it possible to stop the manufacturing of such disks.
All anyone has to do is come up with some sort of utterly lame copy protection scheme involving the serial number on the disk and the DMCA springs into effect with its draconian penalties against a non serial number manufacturer - since they would be circumventing a digital protection means.
This means that one manufacturer of any type of digital media who puts a serial number on their media could force EVERYONE to put serial numbers on their media of the same type. This includes floppies - and it would be a felony to erase a floppy serial number!
Isn't the DMCA just swell?
They are simply poor people - just like you - who are trying to protect their 'breadbasket'. They are just being stupid when they seek to silence your voice. Because it can be adequately explained by stupidity - it CAN't be malice!
Please remember - Mr. Valenti and the MPAA are not going to be holding loaded guns to your head and seizing your computer equipment from you if you violate the court order they have obtained against linking to DeCSS; that will be the police doing that.
Please remember - it was not malice that drove Jack Valenti and the MPAA to have the Norwegian teen who first posted the DeCSS taken in for questioning by the Norwegian authorities - it was stupidity that drove them to do it. If only Jack Valenti understood that we just wanted a free (as in speech) DVD player for linux and that we weren't trying to pirate DVD's this whole case would go away. Isn't it amazing that Jack Valenti and the MPAA are ALL so stupid? Even though we have told them what we were trying to do with DeCSS in terms that anyone with more intellectual ability than Koko the chimp (and yes, I know Koko is a gorilla) couldn't fail to understand - they are unable to understand what we are saying.
Perhaps the good people of slashdot - after convincing me that my argument that many people in positions of authority and power are evil and do things out of malice - not stupidity - is wrong could suggest some ways that we could penetrate the unmalicious stupidity of Mr. Valenti and the MPAA.
If I needed any other proof that Mr. Valenti and the MPAA members are just stupid it would be how many times Mr. Valenti was unable to remember things while testifying under oath. See, that wouldn't be malice at work - that is just plain old stupidity.
You know, come to think of it, if only the Jews in Germany in the 1930's could have broken through the stupidity of the people in the National Socialist Party to show them that the Jews weren't really to blame for Europe's economic state the whole stupid, unmalicious, error of the concentration camps of the 1940's could have been avoided.
Note to moderators - although I have made many specious arguments with which I don't agree in this post, and although it I would like to have this post spring up discussion of what I have to say - THIS POST IS NOT A TROLL. I am being SARCASTIC. Perhaps I should surround the whole post with SARCASM ... /SARCASM tags so you would understand this.
The proof of this model comes from long axons - which have myelinated sheaths. These insulating sheaths make the cell wall much thicker - decreasing the capacitance and speeding up the nerve impulse. This also has the effect of allowing longer distances between depolarizing sites - which serve the function of a repeater; boosting signal strength.
If we made tiny wires the size of neurons which had insulation as thin as a neural cell wall, and immersed them in a conductive fluid - we couldn't get signal speeds much higher than neurons get. The tiny wires would have considerable resistance, and the thin insulators would mean they would have great distributed capacitance relative to the surrounding conductive fluid. The scale of things has a profound effect on how they work.