I'm in Oregon, too. The western part of the Portland metro area sometimes referred to as 'The Silicon Forest'.
Many of the roads here have the median paint worn to the point where it's impossible to see the broken white line that is supposed to indicate the center of the road.
Plus, unlike most areas of the country, we commonly have large hundred-foot shade trees that cover most of the road. In the autumn, the sides of the roads are covered with leaves and bark, obscurring the line markings.
I should also mention that, being Oregon, we seem to have an inordinate number of DASMOs in space shuttles (Dumb-as-Shit Mommies in giant SUVs, pronounced 'dazz-mo' -as in mo' disco jazz-) who don't even realize that they are driving in the middle of the lane of the wrong side of the street when they pass a bicyclist who is riding completely in the shoulder lane. Having all paint worn off from the divider line doesn't help this situation.
Nevertheless, I'm not trying to dispute your comment that government money is wasted by washing the center dividers.
Consider that at least in Oregon the people who are being paid to wash the street are actually out there washing the street. In Tony Soprano land, you would be paying even more for street washing, while the street washers would be earning their pay chillin' at the Bada-Bing.
The registration is there because the NYTimes wants it there. The copyright is theirs. The GPL depends on copyright. Don't infringe on copyright. Fair use is not the reposting of the entire article, especially when the registration makes it plain the NYTimes does not want it reposted
With all respect, this is bullshit!
The New York Times is the newspaper of record for the American empire. Words appear there in order to be read, by the citizens of the empire and its subjects.
They published it... We're reading it.
The New York Times has never explained WHY they require a registration for reading from the net the articles that are available on every newstand and every library in the country. They just demand it.
Every demand from a corporate entity for personal information deserves an explanation of why this information is being collected and for what purposes it will be used. The fact that they are not charging for their web access only accentuates their need to be straightforward in regards to their demand for personal information from their readers.
(and yes, I do consider my name to be personal information, thank you)
With all respect to your arguments, if you really were someone who makes a living through music, then I would have expected to see a link to your website (where we could download MP3 samples of your work) in the signature of your message.
A link in your signature on SlashDot is a free piece of advertising to your musical product that is seen by many thousands of people daily.
(that's possibly thousands of more people than have ever heard the music by which you claim to make your living???)
I would like to get a bumper sticker for my car that says:
"Kazaa is more important than televison!"
== or one the says:
"Kazaa will destroy Clear Channel!"
To the people over 40 it would just seem like incomprehensible weirdness. But to younger adults it's an interesting possibility. Just one more example of irrelevance of the baby boomers...And as for yourself...Do you think Kazaa is now more important than television?
This is terrible. Having computers in clothes will just set off primitive alarms in huge department and food stores.
This will give sleezy creepy $8/hour 'security guards' an excuse to take female customers into back rooms and strip search them in lieu of threats, detainment, or arrest.
Sure, if you're rich, you can sue, threaten, or avoid stores with oppressive and primitive alarm systems (like Fred Meyer).
But if you're not rich, it's just one more mean stupid thing that the technological community has inflicted on the general population in order to find reason to continue to exist.
The phrase above refers to the great Blutto in "Animal House" extolling the other members of Delta house to avenge the injustices rendered upon them by the evil Dean Wormer. It has nothing to do with shithead shoe salesmen.
Let's get some copies of the CDs that have people reading the holy Koran that are sold on Islamic web sites.
We'll convert them to MP3s and add them (correctly labeled) to the lists of files available for downloading on thousands of P2P file sites.
Then, when the RIAA orders these sites to shut down, we'll send e-mails to the Saudi Arabian embassy complaining that the RIAA is trying to destroy the sharing of the word of the prophet.
The Saudis will put out the word to their old buddy Osama that the RIAA is now an enemy of Islam and issue a fatwa authorizing its destruction, like the mad Ahyatolla in Iran did to Salmon Rushdie. A modest reward of a few million bucks will help encourage the faithfull to answer the call. After all, what's a few million to the Saudis when the recordings of readings from the holy Koran is at stake?
The RIAA will be so busy trying to hide from a billion fanatical Moslems that they will lose interest in destroying the lives of the ordinary people who are more interested in just listening to music than killing them.
'When you have multiple enemies with great strength trying to destroy you, the best way to fight back is to get your enemies to turn against each other and ignore you. ' - Machievelli (more or less)
Let's Just Do It! We have to start doing something creative to protect ourselves from these assholes!
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages are so radically different from each other that I would believe that the developers would use English as the common language for the project and the source. English is the common second language of all three countries.
Plus there is still a lot of bad blood between the countries on certain levels due the great war and occupations of the 1940's and the civil wars in Korea and China during the 1950's. Any one of the three countries would rather opt out of the project entirely rather than lose face by having their national language not used for the source and comments.
There is also the possibility that a composite language of three nations would be developed, but this is unlikely because most of the developers probably are already able to work in English.
If the North Asian OS does come through then one of the first applications would likely be a language translator between the three nation's languages.
I doubt that the OS would be shared with non-Asian countries after it is finished. Non-profit sharing just doesn't seem to be the Asian way of doing things.
Please post a million examples and/or links if you think that I'm wrong.
It's pretty lame, in my opinion. Like making drivers pass a test using stick-shift before letting them drive on the interstate highways, regardless of whether their car is manual or automatic transmission. It's a silly hold-over from the olden days. The world is no longer so disconnected that one would really ever NEED to send a carrier-wave message.
I agree. The Morse code requirement should have been dropped thirty years ago.
Morse is interesting as an absolute minimal communications protocol...bicycle generators powered radio transmitters sending out pleas to the world from the distant third-world village located near the epicenter of the big earthquake that just hit...and POWs tapping out messages to each other on the water pipes with their West Point rings...that kind of thing.
Even carrier wave radio has a place for Morse. But in these days of 10 MIPs per dollar microcontrollers that can convert Morse and any other code to ASCII characters (and then translate its language), it's hard to justify requiring Morse proficency in order to get a radio licence. Seems like just a means of radio geeks keeping the riff-raff away from their little hobby.
Maybe some bright boy in the RIAA (diariaa?) figured out that if you take the life savings from all your customers and throw them in prison for using your product, they won't have a lot of money to buy your product.
I noticed this after sending the message and then remembered the 'moi-meme'.
The message should have read:
"J. cinq M.....
Well, J.M. sank. And he took his company with him."
The much harder, and more common, problem is with ex-employees or unfaithful employees sending documents and secrets to competitors.
Implicit in this argument is the assumption that the ex-employee believes that competitor is smarter that the corporation being raided. As so many people have been and are being downsized out of one corporation and into another, they develop the realization that there isn't any difference between them. There's no point in stealing secrets from one corporation and feeding them to another if the receiving corporation is just as stupid and clueless as the previous one.
There is a possiblility that people are overestimating the ablility of large corporations to actually respond to changes in their working environment. Monopolies don't really end so much as people develop ways to work around them.
In the case of Microsoft and Office2003 DRM, what will likely happen is that all the current corporate customers will continue to buy Office updates as they always have, and individual workers will create ad-hoc alternatives. The corporation will be the last to know that Office2003 is not filling the need for which it is being purchased. (Actually that's not quite right, it will be Microsoft who will be the last to know that Office is not being used even though it is still being purchased.)
The discrepency between having Office200x be the official company tool for preparing business documents and the reality of Office200x not working will lead to many people being disciplined in the corporation and the blame being passed between various departments as long as it can be hidden from top management and the alternatives to Office can be made to work by people who won't get fired for getting the alternative software working.
Microsoft is now a permanant institution and will be kept around forever by all those who now have too much to lose if it passes. Everyone else will just have to learn to work around Microsoft's products just as 10-15 years ago they had to learn to work with Microsoft's products.
So here's the question: what effect do these predictions have on the ways in which companies in control of these industries approach their market?
The answer is: highly-paid fools are pulling numbers out the air and handing them to other highly-paid fools who are passing them off to you as 'sober business forecasts based on intensive market research'.
These are the same morons who were telling you three years ago that Jean-Marie Messier was turning an obscure French water supply utility into the 'world's leading synergistic media global conglomerate set to control and deliver multi-media content to the world for the future!'
Uh..yeah..
What we got was a huge mess of unsupportable debt, thousands of destroyed and interrupted careers, billions of dollars of life-savings evaporated, creative productions indefinitely suspended, formerly productive media companies being sold to blockheads for peanuts, and one (slightly) less arrogant Jean-Marie Messier, currently resting and planning new opportunities to impress the world with his brilliance.
"**Jay cinq M*** Jean Marie Messier - Maitre du Monde!" -unquote- from these same fools who are telling you now that CDs and DVDs are going to disappear. Just imagine what he could have done with AOL!
What's going to disappear are the music divisions of the five global media corporations. CDs and DVDs will still be here. Everyone will have hundreds of them: all filled with copies of the world's greatest recordings and films: all sitting in their closets in storage with their titles cross-referenced on websites and all available for trading and downloading to other discreet lovers of culture throughout the world.
I would suggest that it is no longer possible to prevent bad laws from being passed and enforced within the legal system. The system is far too corrupt and institutionally inflexable now.
It would be more effective to work at designing technological work-arounds to nullify bad laws rather than to attempt to modify these bad laws within the legal system.
The results would be the same in the long run.
Using technological means to correct oppressive legal situations is simpily more efficient for us, given that as the designers, engineers, and technicians of the technology, we control the technology and have the final say over the proper use of the technology.
It would also send a clear and strong message to the most dense of politicians that they must now consult with us before attempting to implement changes in the technological infrastructure through legal means.
Shutting down web sites to protest idiotic American or European Community laws is not a good action.
In this transistion to the information age, a major battle is going on between the forces of old, who use politics as a means for controlling individuals and the forces of new, who use information technology as a means of liberating individuals. We should avoid using the tactics of the political forces because it means that we will always lose, because they are controlling the legal mechanisms of engagement.
In other words, by shutting down our web sites we are doing exactly what they are trying to get us to do, which is shut down our websites. The fact that the web site is down because of its operator's protest as opposed to an arbitrary decision of the political forces (i.e. a software patent) is irrelevant. The point is that the web site is down.
Which, in the information age, means that the politicians have won this engagement.
It would be to our advantage to prove our strength to our website users and followers by ensuring that our websites are ALWAYS up, running, and available to provide service. To show that we can keep our websites running, regardless of whether the politicians have decided that they must be shut down for one arbitrary pseudo-legal reason or another, would show the world the strength of the global technical community in the information age.
Shutting down our websites to protest a political decision is counterproductive, because it shows that we exist only at the whim and mercy of the political forces and are limited in our response to political oppression by useless symbolic protest. Keeping our websites on-line, through means of third-world mirror sites or advanced internet routing techniques, shows the world that, in the technical fields that world has come to depend on, we are stronger than politicians.
It also shows the world that if the politicians have a disagreement with the way that we choose to provide our services to the world, then they should engage us in civilized dialog in an open international forum instead of assuming that they can simply crush us through violence or its threat.
I would recommend the book 'The Sovereign Individual' by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg for a detailed, advanced, and thrilling discussion of the transfer of power from political forces (using violence) to civilized forces (using technology) that is beginning to occur now.
The tax would be payable on the actual cost of operating and maintaining the system, which DOR defines as including the following: . .. Taxes, licensing, and franchising costs...
If you install your LAN using Linux, then there are no taxes, licensing, and franchising costs.
Therefore this would seem to encourage new LANs to get installed under Linux.
This idea of paying taxes on taxes previous paid is the result of having too many Europeans hanging around. Their VATs have driven them bats.
In the long run, the information age will transform the nature of determining and collecting taxes. For an interesting discussion, check out the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Moog.
Hello,
Could you reference your comments with URLs to websites to back up these statements.
For example, just exactly why is Mitsubishi 'the most evil company on the planet'? I'm not defending them, I simply want to know what could compell you make such a statement.
Also list websites that provide more info on the research to led you to state that Taiyo Yuden's high contrast blue CD-R media are ideal for archival use.
Again, I'm not challenging your assertions as much as looking for both conformation and information on the best way to approach getting around the problem of CD-R degeneration and data loss.
Your comment reminds me of the story of the "Kill Mommy!" doll.
It was about ten ? years ago. A doll that was advertised on the box as saying " I want Mommy" would actually say "Kill Mommy!" in a deep growling voice.
It turned out that the doll was made (in China) with two versions for the North American market. One with an english voice and one in spanish. The shipment of spanish-speaking dolls got misplaced in a Hong Kong warehouse for over a year and their batteries wore down. Then the dolls were placed in English language packaging and sent to the USA. The spanish phrase for 'I want mommy' is "quiero mommy" and with the weak batteries the voice came out really low and slow "Kee aill o Mommy!".
It's almost as funny as when General Motors executives couldn't understand why the Chevy Nova was not selling in South America. Then some bright boy realized that 'No Va' is spanish for 'it doesn't go - it doesn't work'.
Back in the days when Poland was ruled by the Communists (Soviet Russians) and the money was not freely convertable, we used to say that 'the Polish currency was called 'zlotys' because it was a lot easier to get them then to get rid of them'.
If you slur the english expression 'was..a..lot..easier' then it comes out sounding like 'zloty'. Cute I guess, and kind of funny if you're drunk enough.
Ah, maybe I should just go shoot myself.
This forensic technique was shown in the book and movie "Gorky Park" by Martin Cruz Smith from the mid-1980's.
I usually assume that any technique shown in a movie is real and in current professional use. However I'm beginning to wonder if filmmakers simply fantasize about a technology and then portray it as real on the screen.
Two other examples of this type of technological 'projection' that is possibly fantasy are:
1> Near the end of "Being There" (1980) with Peter Sellars, there is a scene where a wealthy man adjusts his will using a real-time speech-to-text convertor. Such a device may not have existed at the time that the movie was made.
2> "Three Days of the Condor" 1975 -- Near the beginning of a CIA spy movie with Robert Redford and Faye Duniway there is a scene where a red laser is doing Optical Character Recognition on Chinese characters at about 20 - 40 characters per second. The laser is reading the characters off a piece of paper like a bar-code scanner.
Does anyone else have examples of technology that is shown in movies that is being portrayed as current but is actually about ten to twenty years from being developed?
Since software publishers can make potentially far more money from people who are using a program 'illegally' then they can from sales of a program, it is in their best interest to have as many (rich) people (corporations) using their program 'illegally' as possible. Then they can use spyware to shake down their 'clients' by getting tens of thousands of dollars in profit from fines and penalities as opposed to simply hundreds of dollars in profit from straight per-unit sales.
They just put some bizarre clause into the End Use Agreement (surely you read that part in the French language section of your agreement that said):
'En cliquetant sur cet accord, l'utilisateur ecrit une obligation legale de nous payer quelque quantite laquelle nous avons choisi de facturer quelque raison au lequel nous pouvons penser.'
*** 'By clicking on this agreement, the user enters a legal obligation to pay us whatever amount that we chose to charge for whatever reason that we can think of.' ***
That line wasn't in the English section of the EUL? Tough Titty! You clicked - You agreed - You entered a legal agreement -- You now owe!
Basically software companies will do anything that they can get away with to take your money.
The situation that you have described where the software company invaded the private section of your PC and is using information taken from there to extort from your company is a major ethical breach on their part.
I believe that you would be justified to tell the slashdot community just who it is who has done this so that we can avoid commerce with them in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in Oregon, too. The western part of the Portland metro area sometimes referred to as 'The Silicon Forest'.
Many of the roads here have the median paint worn to the point where it's impossible to see the broken white line that is supposed to indicate the center of the road.
Plus, unlike most areas of the country, we commonly have large hundred-foot shade trees that cover most of the road. In the autumn, the sides of the roads are covered with leaves and bark, obscurring the line markings.
I should also mention that, being Oregon, we seem to have an inordinate number of DASMOs in space shuttles (Dumb-as-Shit Mommies in giant SUVs, pronounced 'dazz-mo' -as in mo' disco jazz-) who don't even realize that they are driving in the middle of the lane of the wrong side of the street when they pass a bicyclist who is riding completely in the shoulder lane. Having all paint worn off from the divider line doesn't help this situation.
Nevertheless, I'm not trying to dispute your comment that government money is wasted by washing the center dividers.
Consider that at least in Oregon the people who are being paid to wash the street are actually out there washing the street. In Tony Soprano land, you would be paying even more for street washing, while the street washers would be earning their pay chillin' at the Bada-Bing.
The registration is there because the NYTimes wants it there. The copyright is theirs.
The GPL depends on copyright.
Don't infringe on copyright. Fair use is not the reposting of the entire article, especially when the registration makes it plain the NYTimes does not want it reposted
With all respect, this is bullshit!
The New York Times is the newspaper of record for the American empire. Words appear there in order to be read, by the citizens of the empire and its subjects.
They published it
The New York Times has never explained WHY they require a registration for reading from the net the articles that are available on every newstand and every library in the country. They just demand it.
Every demand from a corporate entity for personal information deserves an explanation of why this information is being collected and for what purposes it will be used. The fact that they are not charging for their web access only accentuates their need to be straightforward in regards to their demand for personal information from their readers.
(and yes, I do consider my name to be personal information, thank you)
With all respect to your arguments, if you really were someone who makes a living through music, then I would have expected to see a link to your website (where we could download MP3 samples of your work) in the signature of your message.
A link in your signature on SlashDot is a free piece of advertising to your musical product that is seen by many thousands of people daily.
(that's possibly thousands of more people than have ever heard the music by which you claim to make your living???)
"Kazaa will get you through times of no Clear Channel better than Clear Channel will get you through times of no Kazaa!"
(That's a reference to the 'Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers' series of underground comic books from the 1966 to 1972 era)
I would like to get a bumper sticker for my car that says:
..And as for yourself...Do you think Kazaa is now more important than television?
"Kazaa is more important than televison!"
== or one the says:
"Kazaa will destroy Clear Channel!"
To the people over 40 it would just seem like incomprehensible weirdness. But to younger adults it's an interesting possibility. Just one more example of irrelevance of the baby boomers.
One by one the monsters of the 20th century are leaving us for their own little special place in hell.
This guy was directly and primarily responsible for creating hydrogen bomb.
The world is a better place now that he's dead.
Thank you,
Simonetta
This is terrible. Having computers in clothes will just set off primitive alarms in huge department and food stores.
This will give sleezy creepy $8/hour 'security guards' an excuse to take female customers into back rooms and strip search them in lieu of threats, detainment, or arrest.
Sure, if you're rich, you can sue, threaten, or avoid stores with oppressive and primitive alarm systems (like Fred Meyer).
But if you're not rich, it's just one more mean stupid thing that the technological community has inflicted on the general population in order to find reason to continue to exist.
Thank you,
The phrase above refers to the great Blutto in "Animal House" extolling the other members of Delta house to avenge the injustices rendered upon them by the evil Dean Wormer. It has nothing to do with shithead shoe salesmen.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Let's get some copies of the CDs that have people reading the holy Koran that are sold on Islamic web sites.
We'll convert them to MP3s and add them (correctly labeled) to the lists of files available for downloading on thousands of P2P file sites.
Then, when the RIAA orders these sites to shut down, we'll send e-mails to the Saudi Arabian embassy complaining that the RIAA is trying to destroy the sharing of the word of the prophet.
The Saudis will put out the word to their old buddy Osama that the RIAA is now an enemy of Islam and issue a fatwa authorizing its destruction, like the mad Ahyatolla in Iran did to Salmon Rushdie. A modest reward of a few million bucks will help encourage the faithfull to answer the call. After all, what's a few million to the Saudis when the recordings of readings from the holy Koran is at stake?
The RIAA will be so busy trying to hide from a billion fanatical Moslems that they will lose interest in destroying the lives of the ordinary people who are more interested in just listening to music than killing them.
'When you have multiple enemies with great strength trying to destroy you, the best way to fight back is to get your enemies to turn against each other and ignore you. ' - Machievelli (more or less)
Let's Just Do It! We have to start doing something creative to protect ourselves from these assholes!
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages are so radically different from each other that I would believe that the developers would use English as the common language for the project and the source. English is the common second language of all three countries.
Plus there is still a lot of bad blood between the countries on certain levels due the great war and occupations of the 1940's and the civil wars in Korea and China during the 1950's. Any one of the three countries would rather opt out of the project entirely rather than lose face by having their national language not used for the source and comments.
There is also the possibility that a composite language of three nations would be developed, but this is unlikely because most of the developers probably are already able to work in English.
If the North Asian OS does come through then one of the first applications would likely be a language translator between the three nation's languages.
I doubt that the OS would be shared with non-Asian countries after it is finished. Non-profit sharing just doesn't seem to be the Asian way of doing things.
Please post a million examples and/or links if you think that I'm wrong.
Thank you,
Simonetta
It's pretty lame, in my opinion. Like making drivers pass a test using stick-shift before letting them drive on the interstate highways, regardless of whether their car is manual or automatic transmission. It's a silly hold-over from the olden days. The world is no longer so disconnected that one would really ever NEED to send a carrier-wave message.
I agree. The Morse code requirement should have been dropped thirty years ago.
Morse is interesting as an absolute minimal communications protocol...bicycle generators powered radio transmitters sending out pleas to the world from the distant third-world village located near the epicenter of the big earthquake that just hit...and POWs tapping out messages to each other on the water pipes with their West Point rings...that kind of thing.
Even carrier wave radio has a place for Morse. But in these days of 10 MIPs per dollar microcontrollers that can convert Morse and any other code to ASCII characters (and then translate its language), it's hard to justify requiring Morse proficency in order to get a radio licence. Seems like just a means of radio geeks keeping the riff-raff away from their little hobby.
Maybe some bright boy in the RIAA (diariaa?) figured out that if you take the life savings from all your customers and throw them in prison for using your product, they won't have a lot of money to buy your product.
I noticed this after sending the message and then remembered the 'moi-meme'.
The message should have read:
"J. cinq M.....
Well, J.M. sank. And he took his company with him."
The much harder, and more common, problem is with ex-employees or unfaithful employees sending documents and secrets to competitors.
Implicit in this argument is the assumption that the ex-employee believes that competitor is smarter that the corporation being raided. As so many people have been and are being downsized out of one corporation and into another, they develop the realization that there isn't any difference between them. There's no point in stealing secrets from one corporation and feeding them to another if the receiving corporation is just as stupid and clueless as the previous one.
why bother?
There is a possiblility that people are overestimating the ablility of large corporations to actually respond to changes in their working environment. Monopolies don't really end so much as people develop ways to work around them.
In the case of Microsoft and Office2003 DRM, what will likely happen is that all the current corporate customers will continue to buy Office updates as they always have, and individual workers will create ad-hoc alternatives. The corporation will be the last to know that Office2003 is not filling the need for which it is being purchased. (Actually that's not quite right, it will be Microsoft who will be the last to know that Office is not being used even though it is still being purchased.)
The discrepency between having Office200x be the official company tool for preparing business documents and the reality of Office200x not working will lead to many people being disciplined in the corporation and the blame being passed between various departments as long as it can be hidden from top management and the alternatives to Office can be made to work by people who won't get fired for getting the alternative software working.
Microsoft is now a permanant institution and will be kept around forever by all those who now have too much to lose if it passes. Everyone else will just have to learn to work around Microsoft's products just as 10-15 years ago they had to learn to work with Microsoft's products.
Thank you for your kind attention,
Simonetta
So here's the question: what effect do these predictions have on the ways in which companies in control of these industries approach their market?
The answer is: highly-paid fools are pulling numbers out the air and handing them to other highly-paid fools who are passing them off to you as 'sober business forecasts based on intensive market research'.
These are the same morons who were telling you three years ago that Jean-Marie Messier was turning an obscure French water supply utility into the 'world's leading synergistic media global conglomerate set to control and deliver multi-media content to the world for the future!'
Uh..yeah..
What we got was a huge mess of unsupportable debt, thousands of destroyed and interrupted careers, billions of dollars of life-savings evaporated, creative productions indefinitely suspended, formerly productive media companies being sold to blockheads for peanuts, and one (slightly) less arrogant Jean-Marie Messier, currently resting and planning new opportunities to impress the world with his brilliance.
"**Jay cinq M*** Jean Marie Messier - Maitre du Monde!" -unquote- from these same fools who are telling you now that CDs and DVDs are going to disappear. Just imagine what he could have done with AOL!
What's going to disappear are the music divisions of the five global media corporations. CDs and DVDs will still be here. Everyone will have hundreds of them: all filled with copies of the world's greatest recordings and films: all sitting in their closets in storage with their titles cross-referenced on websites and all available for trading and downloading to other discreet lovers of culture throughout the world.
This is one reason why the DMCA has to go.
I would suggest that it is no longer possible to prevent bad laws from being passed and enforced within the legal system. The system is far too corrupt and institutionally inflexable now.
It would be more effective to work at designing technological work-arounds to nullify bad laws rather than to attempt to modify these bad laws within the legal system.
The results would be the same in the long run.
Using technological means to correct oppressive legal situations is simpily more efficient for us, given that as the designers, engineers, and technicians of the technology, we control the technology and have the final say over the proper use of the technology.
It would also send a clear and strong message to the most dense of politicians that they must now consult with us before attempting to implement changes in the technological infrastructure through legal means.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Shutting down web sites to protest idiotic American or European Community laws is not a good action.
In this transistion to the information age, a major battle is going on between the forces of old, who use politics as a means for controlling individuals and the forces of new, who use information technology as a means of liberating individuals. We should avoid using the tactics of the political forces because it means that we will always lose, because they are controlling the legal mechanisms of engagement.
In other words, by shutting down our web sites we are doing exactly what they are trying to get us to do, which is shut down our websites. The fact that the web site is down because of its operator's protest as opposed to an arbitrary decision of the political forces (i.e. a software patent) is irrelevant. The point is that the web site is down.
Which, in the information age, means that the politicians have won this engagement.
It would be to our advantage to prove our strength to our website users and followers by ensuring that our websites are ALWAYS up, running, and available to provide service. To show that we can keep our websites running, regardless of whether the politicians have decided that they must be shut down for one arbitrary pseudo-legal reason or another, would show the world the strength of the global technical community in the information age.
Shutting down our websites to protest a political decision is counterproductive, because it shows that we exist only at the whim and mercy of the political forces and are limited in our response to political oppression by useless symbolic protest. Keeping our websites on-line, through means of third-world mirror sites or advanced internet routing techniques, shows the world that, in the technical fields that world has come to depend on, we are stronger than politicians.
It also shows the world that if the politicians have a disagreement with the way that we choose to provide our services to the world, then they should engage us in civilized dialog in an open international forum instead of assuming that they can simply crush us through violence or its threat.
I would recommend the book 'The Sovereign Individual' by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg for a detailed, advanced, and thrilling discussion of the transfer of power from political forces (using violence) to civilized forces (using technology) that is beginning to occur now.
Thank you,
Simonetta
The tax would be payable on the actual cost of operating and maintaining the system, which DOR defines as including the following: .
. .
Taxes, licensing, and franchising costs...
If you install your LAN using Linux, then there are no taxes, licensing, and franchising costs.
Therefore this would seem to encourage new LANs to get installed under Linux.
This idea of paying taxes on taxes previous paid is the result of having too many Europeans hanging around. Their VATs have driven them bats.
In the long run, the information age will transform the nature of determining and collecting taxes. For an interesting discussion, check out the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Moog.
Hello,
Could you reference your comments with URLs to websites to back up these statements.
For example, just exactly why is Mitsubishi 'the most evil company on the planet'? I'm not defending them, I simply want to know what could compell you make such a statement.
Also list websites that provide more info on the research to led you to state that Taiyo Yuden's high contrast blue CD-R media are ideal for archival use.
Again, I'm not challenging your assertions as much as looking for both conformation and information on the best way to approach getting around the problem of CD-R degeneration and data loss.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Your comment reminds me of the story of the "Kill Mommy!" doll.
It was about ten ? years ago. A doll that was advertised on the box as saying " I want Mommy" would actually say "Kill Mommy!" in a deep growling voice.
It turned out that the doll was made (in China) with two versions for the North American market. One with an english voice and one in spanish. The shipment of spanish-speaking dolls got misplaced in a Hong Kong warehouse for over a year and their batteries wore down. Then the dolls were placed in English language packaging and sent to the USA.
The spanish phrase for 'I want mommy' is "quiero mommy" and with the weak batteries the voice came out really low and slow "Kee aill o Mommy!".
It's almost as funny as when General Motors executives couldn't understand why the Chevy Nova was not selling in South America. Then some bright boy realized that 'No Va' is spanish for 'it doesn't go - it doesn't work'.
Back in the days when Poland was ruled by the Communists (Soviet Russians) and the money was not freely convertable, we used to say that 'the Polish currency was called 'zlotys' because it was a lot easier to get them then to get rid of them'.
If you slur the english expression 'was..a..lot..easier' then it comes out sounding like 'zloty'. Cute I guess, and kind of funny if you're drunk enough.
Ah, maybe I should just go shoot myself.
This forensic technique was shown in the book and movie "Gorky Park" by Martin Cruz Smith from the mid-1980's.
I usually assume that any technique shown in a movie is real and in current professional use. However I'm beginning to wonder if filmmakers simply fantasize about a technology and then portray it as real on the screen.
Two other examples of this type of technological 'projection' that is possibly fantasy are:
1> Near the end of "Being There" (1980) with Peter Sellars, there is a scene where a wealthy man adjusts his will using a real-time speech-to-text convertor. Such a device may not have existed at the time that the movie was made.
2> "Three Days of the Condor" 1975 -- Near the beginning of a CIA spy movie with Robert Redford and Faye Duniway there is a scene where a red laser is doing Optical Character Recognition on Chinese characters at about 20 - 40 characters per second. The laser is reading the characters off a piece of paper like a bar-code scanner.
Does anyone else have examples of technology that is shown in movies that is being portrayed as current but is actually about ten to twenty years from being developed?
Thank you,
Simonetta
Since software publishers can make potentially far more money from people who are using a program 'illegally' then they can from sales of a program, it is in their best interest to have as many (rich) people (corporations) using their program 'illegally' as possible. Then they can use spyware to shake down their 'clients' by getting tens of thousands of dollars in profit from fines and penalities as opposed to simply hundreds of dollars in profit from straight per-unit sales.
They just put some bizarre clause into the End Use Agreement (surely you read that part in the French language section of your agreement that said):
'En cliquetant sur cet accord, l'utilisateur ecrit une obligation legale de nous payer quelque quantite laquelle nous avons choisi de facturer quelque raison au lequel nous pouvons penser.'
*** 'By clicking on this agreement, the user enters a legal obligation to pay us whatever amount that we chose to charge for whatever reason that we can think of.' ***
That line wasn't in the English section of the EUL? Tough Titty! You clicked - You agreed - You entered a legal agreement -- You now owe!
Basically software companies will do anything that they can get away with to take your money.
The situation that you have described where the software company invaded the private section of your PC and is using information taken from there to extort from your company is a major ethical breach on their part.
I believe that you would be justified to tell the slashdot community just who it is who has done this so that we can avoid commerce with them in the future.
Thank you,
Simonetta
If the question is a job vs. a degree go for the job. They pay you instead you pay them. Always helps unless you're independently wealthy.