You know, I almost want to like this, but probably not for the reasons you think.
Were it not for the fact that legal corporate DOS attacks would kill EVERYONE'S bandwidth and violate every known acceptable network use policy for every upstream provider known to God, (and a few that probably aren't.) I'd almost say that it's a good thing.
Why?
Because they'd have to let all you, as copyright holders, play along.
Pity the day that a large media company steals your domain name and you DOS them out of several million in sales and service -- LEGALLY!
And stop, think and drool for a moment at the possibilities of two companies, instead of going to court over copyright issues, just DOS each other out of existance.
And lets not forget the wonderful economic stimulus that adding several million script kiddies to the payroll with bring. And it's cost effective! You can get literally THOUSANDS of underpaid, almost-unpaid, basicially unskilled Hindu hackers for the price of a good legal team.
But then, see, my solution to everything is to give everyone a gun. Sure, you have a period where all the idiots kill each other, but then, things quiet down, and noone uses them unless they really have to.
But, ya know, it's not like the copyright and intellectual property realms couldn't use that kind of shakeup. It does. Bigtime.
Not to mention that it brings the wonderful cyberpunk world just *that* much closer to reality.
Welp, I'll leave you to ponder that while I buy a stack of good books, and pack up my tent and 60 years worth of freeze-dried food onto the back of my ATV and head off for the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Cheers!
I don't care what the court says. My Pledge of Allegiance will always contain the phrase "under God." I'll say it that way. I'll teach it my kids this way.
We, as a community of software users, consumers, and citizens need to let companies know that WE know that we have certain rights, we KNOW what they are, and that if they admit that they realize that, we're going to boycott them. Completely.
I'm sure it'd be a minor thing to the Lucas Empire if we stopped buying old copies of Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island, but if we told him, "Fuck you, George, Episodes 3, 7, 8 and 9 can kiss my rosy red ass" Hopefully they'd think twice about hounding someone who created a perfectly legitimate piece of software.
I realize there's problems with this. First, we need a platform, a voice, a document. (It doesn't have to be a *legal* document, a piece of legislation. Just a statement that says that we know we have a right to media-shift our software, reverse-engineer our software to provide interoperability, know where the bugs are, (and fix them if the company won't, doesn't, or can't,) and so on and so on and so on. ) Then, we need companies to take it seriously. And, of course, we need people with some principles to actually *not* support the companies that don't admit, adopt, or accept those rights. (In plain English, that means *DOING WITHOUT* WarCraft 3, or the next what's-sure-to-be-godawful Star Wars flick. Not buying it, not stealing it, nothing.) Admittedly, I'm not very hopeful there. Slashdot illustrates on a daily basis that principled people are few and far between. We need people to do the homework and tell us, "Okay, Company A is being dickish, here... Company B is the parent company, companies C, D, and E are the subsidiaries..." We need a lot.
Or maybe it's more than just software... call it the Digital Media Bill of Rights... Whatever you call it, though, the intent is the same: Get enough people together to make a *principled* stand for the rights that we have, and totally boycott those companies that don't go along with it.
That principled stand may be the hardest part of it all. *You* have to be willing to possibly do without your blessed mainstream entertainment and software for a while to make it work. Can you do that?
Okay, it's been a while since my last high school physics class, but, um, isn't this exactly what we would expect?
After all, there's an equation there for getting some body of mass a to orbit some body of mass b, at a distance of c apart, needing to do so at a speed of d.
So, yeah, we're probably going to see everything lining up and orbiting at speeds just about where the physics says they're going to be.
Environmental activism is supposed to be all about preserving "Earth's delicate balance," of which extinction is a natural, and vital process.
But, of course, they'll overlook that if it means injecting a cutesy-woosty puddy-tat back into a wild that no longer finds the critter-witter necessary, because we got one over on the evil-weevil human beings.
I think that the real cause for alarm in all this is that there are people out there that *NEED* a frequently-asked questions list for a tanning spray.
Pray that they speak english and know how to spell.
I've seen FAR too many projects shipped overseas and come back a HUGE, mangled pile of absolute crap that had to basically be rewritten because you couldn't understand what the app was trying to tell you.
Last time I checked, you didn't have to download your CD off the internet to make a cassette copy for your car. You put the CD (that you own) into the CD player (that you own), put a tape (that you own) into the cassette player (that you own), and press the play button (that you own) with your right index finger (that you, presumably, own) and wait roughly the 40 minutes to an hour to get your perfectly legal media-shifted fair use copy.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the folks that load up their favorite file-sharing app, and search a collection of ripped music (that they don't own) for songs from their favorite artist (that they don't own) download them to their computer, CDs, MP3 players and the like.
But, fine, I'll bite. "Fair Use" rights blah blah. File sharing apps are just tools blah blah blah. You know darn well I wasn't talking about that, but the countless people who trade/distrubute/steal music, software, etc.. that they do *not* own, and when fair use does *not* apply, and claim that it's not wrong, when they know full well that it is.
But take a situation where it's theft, it's wrong, *and* there's a chance of getting caught, getting shut off, prosecuted, or screwing your peers out of their precious bandwidth, (although I guess you could argue that file-sharing, too, does screw your peers out of bandwidth.) it's suddenly a Bad Idea and you just shouldn't do it.
It seems like the overwhelming majority of folks here think that uncapping your cable modem is a Bad Idea, either because you're stealing the service, breaking the law, taking bandwidth away from people who are paying for it, or will lose your high speed access if you do.
But how many of you used Napster, and now use Gnutella, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy and the like, and think it's your god-given right to do so?
The shoe seems to be on the other foot when *you* run the risk of losing something. Consider, though, that other than the much closer-to-home personal risk involved in this one, that *both* acts are basically theft.
(As an aside, I wonder, though, how long until the "studies" show that uncapping your cable modem leads to the purchase of higher-bandwidth levels of service.)
This whole point would be moot...
on
Spyware Fights Back
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
You know, this whole point would be moot if people would JUST GO AND FUCKING *BUY* SOFTWARE!
If they place only charged, hell, $5 a head, at 750,000 downloads, that a good chunk of change for the company, and you wouldn't have to put up with/bitch about ad-supported software and spyware.
But, hey, they're about as apt to give up the spyware stuff as you are to actually *pay* for software, so I guess it's a standoff.
Table 4: Cisco ATA 186 Ringing Characteristics Category Specification Tip/ring interfaces for each RJ-11 FXS port (SLIC) Ring voltage 40 VRMS (typical, balanced ringing only)
Ring frequency 25 Hz
Ring waveform Trapezoidal with 1.2 to 1.6 crest factor
Ring load 1400 ohm + 40F
******* Ringer equivalence number (REN) Up to 5 REN per RJ-11 FXS port ******
Loop impedance Up to 200 ohm (plus 430 ohm maximum telephone DC resistance)
On-hook/off-hook characteristics On-hook voltage (tip/ring) -50 V
Off-hook current 27 mA (nominal)
RJ-11 FXS port terminating impedance option 600 ohm resistive or 270 ohm + 750 ohm// 150 nF complex impedance
If Google were smart, here's what Google would do:
*Voluntarily* send a letter to the Church of Scientology explaining that in the interest of good faith and to avoid the risk of violating the DMCA with regard to the CoS's materials, copyrights and trademarks, effective immediatelly, keywords comprising of CoS trademarks will no longer be indexed by Google, and references will no longer be made to linking pages based on those keywords. In addition, the CoS official web sites will no longer be spidered or indexed by Google, and that any attempt to "hack" Googles indexing methods to attempt to get the sites back in the index will be considered itself to be a violation of the DCMA perpetrated against Google by the CoS.
Meaning, basically, that CoS will pretty much be dead as far as Google is concerned.
See, this is what gets me. We'll call a practice like this "sleazy," but never mind that everyone's using the softwear in the first place to steal and pirate music, movies and software.
Combine this technology with last summer's craze, hotornot.com, and I think you got something. (15 seconds to know if the chick you wanna pick up in a bar is really hot? Priceless.)
The answer's pretty simple: I want to be able to summarize documents as they come into my life and inevitably stay there. I'm a pack rat. I keep everything. I just want to be able to organize it. I want to be able to search it. I want to be able to search through the summaries (to provide for a way to be able to search generalizations, rather than finding keywords in irrelevant parts of irrelevant documents.) and I want to be able to display the summary when I mouse over the document... stuff like that... so I don't have to dig through the whole document to find out if it's really what I need. And I wanted to play a little bit with the technology. I tinker. I do that.:)
I do thank everyone for their responses. Anything else you can think of, please let me know. Thanks much!
I filled out the fax form, but I made a few changes to the default letter. You're all invited to use - - and in the further interest of fair use, to modify and add your own thoughts - - my version of the message, listed below:
---
You and your colleagues have recieved letters or faxes from me in the past regarding issues of Consumer Technology. While the are no doubt recieving a number of faxes that look very similar to this one, I urge to you read this one completely. While most of this letter was written by members of DigitalConsumer.org -- they've already stated things better than I could -- I have added a few of my own thoughts.
As a constituent, an ardent consumer of digital media, an artist, musician, author, and software developer, I write again today to urge you to support a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights, and to express my concerns about the recent trend toward allowing one-sided copyright laws to eliminate my Fair Use rights.
Historically, our country has enjoyed a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of citizens who legally acquire copyrighted works. Generally speaking, rights holders have the exclusive right to distribute and profit from artistic works. Consumers like me who legally acquire these works are free to use them in most noncommercial ways. Unfortunately, this balance has shifted dramatically in recent years, much to the detriment of consumers.
To prevent further erosion of my rights, I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights". It is simply an attempt to assert positively the public's personal use rights. These rights are not new; they are historic rights granted in previous legislation and court rulings that have over the last four years been whittled away.
Under the guise of "preventing illegal copying" I believe media companies are vilifying their customers - people like me - and using the legislative process to stifle outside innovation and create new lines of business at my expense. Legitimate, legal devices and methods for Fair Use copying, time- or media-shifting -- privileges that I am granted under both Constitutional and Federal Law -- are being outlawed because of the possibility that they may be used for widespread copyright infringement. Content licenses are becoming more and more restrictive, too. I can recall a recent case where the license of a particular electronic book forbid the content of the book to be spoken aloud! And another case where consumers were cease-and-desisted because they figured out how to use a hardware -- hardware! -- bar code scanner that the company had given them to read bar codes other than the ones that the company had intended them to read. Can you imagine the state of the country if Goodyear tires could only be used on roads that Goodyear approved of, or if people were forced not to use timesaving or lifesaving products or information because to do so was not the use the manufacturer had intended for their product?
The goal of the media companies seems to be to create a legal system that takes away my long-cherished personal use rights and my right to innovate, and then to charge me additional fees to regain those rights! These companies should be encouraged to examine and reform their products and business models, not to infringe upon my rights.
Copy protection, especially to prevent overseas piracy for illicit sale, is an important issue. But before Congress considers yet another change in the law at the behest of the copyright holders, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to protect my Fair Use rights. I don't pirate software. I don't pirate music. Yet, what the media companies have done and are doing with laws like the DMCA and proposals like the SSSCA will have great negative impact on my rights, and what I choose to do, within the real of fair use, with content I license or own.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
Didn't Monorail (or something like that) do this first, about 4-5 years ago, anyhoo?
Not that their machine was any good, and wasn't very successful commercially, but it *was* an LCD-screen PC with all the guttiwuts behind the LCD.
The sad thing is..
on
Hack in Space
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
...in this day and age, I wouldn't be surprised if they get a cease-and-desist order in the mail in the next few days because they're infringing on someone's patent or violating someone's intellectual property.
But hey, that's the screwy stated of intellectual property and patent law these days.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I almost want to like this, but probably not for the reasons you think.
Were it not for the fact that legal corporate DOS attacks would kill EVERYONE'S bandwidth and violate every known acceptable network use policy for every upstream provider known to God, (and a few that probably aren't.) I'd almost say that it's a good thing.
Why?
Because they'd have to let all you, as copyright holders, play along.
Pity the day that a large media company steals your domain name and you DOS them out of several million in sales and service -- LEGALLY!
And stop, think and drool for a moment at the possibilities of two companies, instead of going to court over copyright issues, just DOS each other out of existance.
And lets not forget the wonderful economic stimulus that adding several million script kiddies to the payroll with bring. And it's cost effective! You can get literally THOUSANDS of underpaid, almost-unpaid, basicially unskilled Hindu hackers for the price of a good legal team.
But then, see, my solution to everything is to give everyone a gun. Sure, you have a period where all the idiots kill each other, but then, things quiet down, and noone uses them unless they really have to.
But, ya know, it's not like the copyright and intellectual property realms couldn't use that kind of shakeup. It does. Bigtime.
Not to mention that it brings the wonderful cyberpunk world just *that* much closer to reality.
Welp, I'll leave you to ponder that while I buy a stack of good books, and pack up my tent and 60 years worth of freeze-dried food onto the back of my ATV and head off for the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Cheers!
I don't care what the court says. My Pledge of Allegiance will always contain the phrase "under God." I'll say it that way. I'll teach it my kids this way.
Stupid atheiest fucks.
It really is time for a Software Bill of Rights.
We, as a community of software users, consumers, and citizens need to let companies know that WE know that we have certain rights, we KNOW what they are, and that if they admit that they realize that, we're going to boycott them. Completely.
I'm sure it'd be a minor thing to the Lucas Empire if we stopped buying old copies of Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island, but if we told him, "Fuck you, George, Episodes 3, 7, 8 and 9 can kiss my rosy red ass" Hopefully they'd think twice about hounding someone who created a perfectly legitimate piece of software.
I realize there's problems with this. First, we need a platform, a voice, a document. (It doesn't have to be a *legal* document, a piece of legislation. Just a statement that says that we know we have a right to media-shift our software, reverse-engineer our software to provide interoperability, know where the bugs are, (and fix them if the company won't, doesn't, or can't,) and so on and so on and so on. ) Then, we need companies to take it seriously. And, of course, we need people with some principles to actually *not* support the companies that don't admit, adopt, or accept those rights. (In plain English, that means *DOING WITHOUT* WarCraft 3, or the next what's-sure-to-be-godawful Star Wars flick. Not buying it, not stealing it, nothing.)
Admittedly, I'm not very hopeful there. Slashdot illustrates on a daily basis that principled people are few and far between. We need people to do the homework and tell us, "Okay, Company A is being dickish, here... Company B is the parent company, companies C, D, and E are the subsidiaries..." We need a lot.
Or maybe it's more than just software... call it the Digital Media Bill of Rights... Whatever you call it, though, the intent is the same: Get enough people together to make a *principled* stand for the rights that we have, and totally boycott those companies that don't go along with it.
That principled stand may be the hardest part of it all. *You* have to be willing to possibly do without your blessed mainstream entertainment and software for a while to make it work. Can you do that?
Okay, it's been a while since my last high school physics class, but, um, isn't this exactly what we would expect?
After all, there's an equation there for getting some body of mass a to orbit some body of mass b, at a distance of c apart, needing to do so at a speed of d.
So, yeah, we're probably going to see everything lining up and orbiting at speeds just about where the physics says they're going to be.
This is astonishing, why, exactly?
It costs that much?!?!
Damn. I think I'll boycott it based on that fact alone. Sheesh.
No, I like your idea about donating the money to the EFF and mailing Blizzard and telling them why. I may just do that.
...and we all know how long *that* lasted, don't we?
...but they won't be.
Environmental activism is supposed to be all about preserving "Earth's delicate balance," of which extinction is a natural, and vital process.
But, of course, they'll overlook that if it means injecting a cutesy-woosty puddy-tat back into a wild that no longer finds the critter-witter necessary, because we got one over on the evil-weevil human beings.
*shrug*
I think that the real cause for alarm in all this is that there are people out there that *NEED* a frequently-asked questions list for a tanning spray.
Pray that they speak english and know how to spell.
I've seen FAR too many projects shipped overseas and come back a HUGE, mangled pile of absolute crap that had to basically be rewritten because you couldn't understand what the app was trying to tell you.
(Never mind that the person distributing that MP3 does not have the rights to do so in the first place.)
Last time I checked, you didn't have to download your CD off the internet to make a cassette copy for your car. You put the CD (that you own) into the CD player (that you own), put a tape (that you own) into the cassette player (that you own), and press the play button (that you own) with your right index finger (that you, presumably, own) and wait roughly the 40 minutes to an hour to get your perfectly legal media-shifted fair use copy.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the folks that load up their favorite file-sharing app, and search a collection of ripped music (that they don't own) for songs from their favorite artist (that they don't own) download them to their computer, CDs, MP3 players and the like.
But, fine, I'll bite. "Fair Use" rights blah blah. File sharing apps are just tools blah blah blah. You know darn well I wasn't talking about that, but the countless people who trade/distrubute/steal music, software, etc.. that they do *not* own, and when fair use does *not* apply, and claim that it's not wrong, when they know full well that it is.
But take a situation where it's theft, it's wrong, *and* there's a chance of getting caught, getting shut off, prosecuted, or screwing your peers out of their precious bandwidth, (although I guess you could argue that file-sharing, too, does screw your peers out of bandwidth.) it's suddenly a Bad Idea and you just shouldn't do it.
I just think that's interesting.
It seems like the overwhelming majority of folks here think that uncapping your cable modem is a Bad Idea, either because you're stealing the service, breaking the law, taking bandwidth away from people who are paying for it, or will lose your high speed access if you do.
But how many of you used Napster, and now use Gnutella, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy and the like, and think it's your god-given right to do so?
The shoe seems to be on the other foot when *you* run the risk of losing something. Consider, though, that other than the much closer-to-home personal risk involved in this one, that *both* acts are basically theft.
(As an aside, I wonder, though, how long until the "studies" show that uncapping your cable modem leads to the purchase of higher-bandwidth levels of service.)
You know, this whole point would be moot if people would JUST GO AND FUCKING *BUY* SOFTWARE!
If they place only charged, hell, $5 a head, at 750,000 downloads, that a good chunk of change for the company, and you wouldn't have to put up with/bitch about ad-supported software and spyware.
But, hey, they're about as apt to give up the spyware stuff as you are to actually *pay* for software, so I guess it's a standoff.
*sigh*
From: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/as/180/186/ prodlit/at186_ds.htm
// 150 nF complex impedance
Table 4: Cisco ATA 186 Ringing Characteristics Category Specification
Tip/ring interfaces for each RJ-11 FXS port (SLIC)
Ring voltage 40 VRMS (typical, balanced ringing only)
Ring frequency 25 Hz
Ring waveform Trapezoidal with 1.2 to 1.6 crest factor
Ring load 1400 ohm + 40F
*******
Ringer equivalence number (REN) Up to 5 REN per RJ-11 FXS port
******
Loop impedance Up to 200 ohm (plus 430 ohm maximum telephone DC resistance)
On-hook/off-hook characteristics
On-hook voltage (tip/ring) -50 V
Off-hook current 27 mA (nominal)
RJ-11 FXS port terminating impedance option 600 ohm resistive or 270 ohm + 750 ohm
Only problem there being that next to bloody NOONE does and meaningful IP QoS yet.
That's it.
I'm going to patent adding 2 plus 2 as a method of getting an answer of four.
I think I've got a good shot at it.
This is *really* getting ridiculous.
If Google were smart, here's what Google would do:
:)
*Voluntarily* send a letter to the Church of Scientology explaining that in the interest of good faith and to avoid the risk of violating the DMCA with regard to the CoS's materials, copyrights and trademarks, effective immediatelly, keywords comprising of CoS trademarks will no longer be indexed by Google, and references will no longer be made to linking pages based on those keywords. In addition, the CoS official web sites will no longer be spidered or indexed by Google, and that any attempt to "hack" Googles indexing methods to attempt to get the sites back in the index will be considered itself to be a violation of the DCMA perpetrated against Google by the CoS.
Meaning, basically, that CoS will pretty much be dead as far as Google is concerned.
Which I think would be pretty cool.
...of being tarriffed as Magnetic (Storage) Media.
See, this is what gets me. We'll call a practice like this "sleazy," but never mind that everyone's using the softwear in the first place to steal and pirate music, movies and software.
That's freakin' rich.
Only problem is, no source code. :(
Oh well. The search continues.....
Combine this technology with last summer's craze, hotornot.com, and I think you got something. (15 seconds to know if the chick you wanna pick up in a bar is really hot? Priceless.)
No offense taken.
:)
The answer's pretty simple: I want to be able to summarize documents as they come into my life and inevitably stay there. I'm a pack rat. I keep everything. I just want to be able to organize it. I want to be able to search it. I want to be able to search through the summaries (to provide for a way to be able to search generalizations, rather than finding keywords in irrelevant parts of irrelevant documents.) and I want to be able to display the summary when I mouse over the document... stuff like that... so I don't have to dig through the whole document to find out if it's really what I need. And I wanted to play a little bit with the technology. I tinker. I do that.
I do thank everyone for their responses. Anything else you can think of, please let me know. Thanks much!
I filled out the fax form, but I made a few changes to the default letter. You're all invited to use - - and in the further interest of fair use, to modify and add your own thoughts - - my version of the message, listed below:
---
You and your colleagues have recieved letters or faxes from me in the past regarding issues of Consumer Technology. While the are no doubt recieving a number of faxes that look very similar to this one, I urge to you read this one completely. While most of this letter was written by members of DigitalConsumer.org -- they've already stated things better than I could -- I have added a few of my own thoughts.
As a constituent, an ardent consumer of digital media, an artist, musician, author, and software developer, I write again today to urge you to support a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights, and to express my concerns about the recent trend toward allowing one-sided copyright laws to eliminate my Fair Use rights.
Historically, our country has enjoyed a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of citizens who legally acquire copyrighted works. Generally speaking, rights holders have the exclusive right to distribute and profit from artistic works. Consumers like me who legally acquire these works are free to use them in most noncommercial ways. Unfortunately, this balance has shifted dramatically in recent years, much to the detriment of consumers.
To prevent further erosion of my rights, I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights". It is simply an attempt to assert positively the public's personal use rights. These rights are not new; they are historic rights granted in previous legislation and court rulings that have over the last four years been whittled away.
Under the guise of "preventing illegal copying" I believe media companies are vilifying their customers - people like me - and using the legislative process to stifle outside innovation and create new lines of business at my expense. Legitimate, legal devices and methods for Fair Use copying, time- or media-shifting -- privileges that I am granted under both Constitutional and Federal Law -- are being outlawed because of the possibility that they may be used for widespread copyright infringement. Content licenses are becoming more and more restrictive, too. I can recall a recent case where the license of a particular electronic book forbid the content of the book to be spoken aloud! And another case where consumers were cease-and-desisted because they figured out how to use a hardware -- hardware! -- bar code scanner that the company had given them to read bar codes other than the ones that the company had intended them to read. Can you imagine the state of the country if Goodyear tires could only be used on roads that Goodyear approved of, or if people were forced not to use timesaving or lifesaving products or information because to do so was not the use the manufacturer had intended for their product?
The goal of the media companies seems to be to create a legal system that takes away my long-cherished personal use rights and my right to innovate, and then to charge me additional fees to regain those rights! These companies should be encouraged to examine and reform their products and business models, not to infringe upon my rights.
Copy protection, especially to prevent overseas piracy for illicit sale, is an important issue. But before Congress considers yet another change in the law at the behest of the copyright holders, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to protect my Fair Use rights. I don't pirate software. I don't pirate music. Yet, what the media companies have done and are doing with laws like the DMCA and proposals like the SSSCA will have great negative impact on my rights, and what I choose to do, within the real of fair use, with content I license or own.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
Didn't Monorail (or something like that) do this first, about 4-5 years ago, anyhoo?
Not that their machine was any good, and wasn't very successful commercially, but it *was* an LCD-screen PC with all the guttiwuts behind the LCD.
...in this day and age, I wouldn't be surprised if they get a cease-and-desist order in the mail in the next few days because they're infringing on someone's patent or violating someone's intellectual property.
But hey, that's the screwy stated of intellectual property and patent law these days.