"Anyone see any searchable database on the Web with the potential to topple what Google has become / could become?"
I don't why it didn't occur to me before, but something about your statement set off alarm bells in my little head. Maybe there's more to Google than meets the eye. Maybe, they should have named it, SkyNet.
What Disney ought to do is, either, give the boxes away (but make people sign for them and pay to replace if lost/damaged...not a big deal, insurance covers this kind of stuff), and just charge for the viewing, OR, charge a flat rate of like $20 per month, all the movies you want. Either way would be a much better deal for consumers, and would get them more customers (which == "more money").
They'd basically be combining the best parts of TiVo and HBO.
No one *allowed* Amazon to "dominate the book sales industry" (somehow I doubt Amazon sells more books than either Barnes&Noble or Borders, though they probably have better margins than the other two). Consumers decided they preferred the convenience of shopping for books online, and Amazon was pretty much first out the gate. Personnally, the only reason I sometimes shop in small bookshops is when I feel my ego getting too big and I need some abuse to make it go down (though that isn't nearly as effective as going to a used CD store, or a game store).
Now, Comcast: it doesn't matter if people want them or not, they have a government sanctioned monopoly. Government intrusion into the market gave us the cable companies, do you think *more* government intrusion into the market would help? (Hint: the answer has two letters and rhymes with "know".)
As for Microsoft, they've used various OEM contracts and dominance in one area to establish dominance in others. A true, bona fide, illegal monopoly. Which the courts have already acted on/are acting on, though nowhere near the level they should be. But even with MS, their products have been improving drastically in the last two or three years. Why? Possibly because of all the other alternatives out there now, a la Mac, Linux, OpenOffice.org, etc. etc. etc. So even a monopoly can't ignore (or control) the market forever.
You're absolutely correct. It's also correct to say that the Feds are *completely* out of their collective mind, going after journalists for something like this (the ironic part: he hacked a newspaper, some think *the* newspaper, now the Feds are using him to try to break down journalistic freedom...who's side will the Times be on, here?). I was only commenting on whether Lamo had broken any laws (assuming he's guilty, of course, he hasn't been proven to be, yet).
Probably not even then. You do realize that most cable companies have a customer support department that provides basic tech support for the cable boxes, right? Anything they can't fix over the phone, they send out a tech.
Actually, they can, sometimes. If you own a mall, and someone wants to pass out political flyers, you have to let them. You can set reasonable limits (like requiring people to get 24 hours advance notice, or stay in one central location instead of wandering all over the place). But because malls are, today, the equivilant of town squares 200 years ago, courts have ruled they are "forums for public discourse."
I learned this back when I used to volunteer to register voters. The orginization had a whole series of classes so you would know your rights, and had little flash cards to carry with you to enforce them. The best memory is when some store manager at a Safeway threatened to call the police to have me removed, even though I wasn't harassing anyone. I told him go ahead, and I'd have him sued for violating my civil rights, and then move into his house. He got pissed and stomped off, never to be heard from again.:)
"To be fair i side with the government in this case since I think the group is upto no good."
That may be, but why would they cut off access to all of Yahoo! groups for something like 1 billion people because 24 were saying nasty things? Wouldn't it have been easier, and far more effective, to let them rant there and read what they were ranting? Now they'll just go hide somewhere else, but you and the rest of your countrymen are stuck not getting access to the groups you need.
Um, what about Fox News and their "Axis of Weasel" (Germany, France, and Brussels)?
And the only reason "no national newspaper in the US" (not counting tabloids and weekly newsmags, we only have one, US Today, and nobody reads it except foreigners) wouldn't call the leader of an allied nation a "worm" on the frontpage is because that kind of thing isn't front page news in the US, it goes into the Opinion section. And you can find lots OpEd pieces calling Chirac much worse than a worm (you can also find some calling Bush and Blair names, too, just using the same example you did).
"They need to offer him a job and put him in the Defense Department - use his skill 'for' us, instead of putting him in jail."
Um, no they don't. The guy breaks into other people networks, without their permission, then "graciously" offers to fix their problems for them, for free. While that last bit sounds nice, the first part (the breaking in part) isn't so nice. Especially not when he uses his access to run thousands of dollars in bills using that network to, basically, ego surf (he accessed the Times' Lexis account to lookup references to himself).
That is definitely not the kind of troublemaker we should have anywhere near the military. This guy needs to go to some nice little minimum security Federal prison for a few years, and grow up.
"Similarly, you can pay extra for a little bit of privacy on road tolls, New York's EZPass system is cheaper (and quicker) than the cash toll, but less private. (Unless you count those little cameras staring at your license plate of course)."
Seems the EZPass system has been a guest star on "Law & Order" more times than the woman who plays the original psychiatrist. From those appearances (only because I can't think of any real life instances, and Law & Order seems, in some ways, one of the more realistic cop drama shows on TV), I wouldn't worry too much about any tracking systems. The cops still need a judge to sign a warrant to get any of it, which means you have to be under suspicion for some crime, with some (at least token) amount of evidence already against you before they can start going through the logs to see where you've been. They need much less than the to go through your garbage, since once it's on the street, it's fair game.
I'm much more concerned about laws passed by Congress, or Parliament, or the State House, or the UN General Assembly, or our new insect overlords, banning thoughts and political affliations, than I am the ability of some group to track what you're doing and where you've been. The truth of it is, noone really cares.
Besides all that, let's say they do build a system to track every Londoner's use of the tube. There's, what?, 20 million people in London? Let's say 5 million use the tube everyday. Now let's say each record in the db uses 256B of space. Even at that extremely tight level of data storage you're still talking about a database that grows at the rate of over 2 GB of data per day, assuming each person who uses the tube uses it twice per day. Do you know how long it would take to go back in time and track one person's movements over a five year period? Do you *really* think that's going to be useful to anyone?
Ask anyone with experience with datawarehousing: this kind of system is *great* for working with aggregates, but absolutely sucks for drilling down to an individual.
"Or perhaps keep them on their own node with anti-virus scanners between it and the main network?"
Now *that* is a genius idea. It may be common in some areas, but in all honesty, it's never occurred to me. I'll have to institute this on the networks I'm responsible for.
"This is bound to be one hell of an interesting debate. I hope they at least do an archive webcast of it. It doesn't look like they're doing a live one."
I don't know, there might be copyright concerns with a Webcast. What if a copy ended up on KaZaa?
In any event, there were no Native Americans who had a ceremony that resembled anything like Holy Communion. The Mayans had several blood sacrifice ceremonies, and the Aztecs were pretty brutal in their human sacrifice, but none of them believed they were consuming the body and blood of God, thus joining with him in Spirit. And they sure as hell didn't believe their God became human and died for their sins.
Last I checked, Christ didn't look like a giant feathered serpent, so I'm not sure where you get the "Quetzecoatl resembles Christ" remark. They didn't even have similar philosophies. One was a god of war, the other was a Man of peace.
As for tribes of Indian speaking Hebrew, there weren't any (there may be today, nothing says an Apache can't become a Jew if he isn't, er, attached to his foreskin). There is a tribe in Alabama who uses some Celtic words and phrases, most likely thanks to St. Patrick, and there are artifacts from Mexican which bear Chinese and Phoenician characteristics. But nothing remotely resembling ancient Jews.
Of course, you left out the little niggling details about "Indians" and the Book of Mormon. Like how that book teaches all Indians are children of the Devil and should be killed. And that blacks should be kept as slaves, since it's their natural state. And don't forget the idea of keeping women as chattel. Oh, wait, I forgot, Mormons dropped that one so their territory could become a state. Christians have done some horrible things through history, but they never claimed revelations from God countradicting core beliefs just so they could gain the benefits of US statehood.
two great tastes that go great together
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 4, Funny
"...and the profound effect on European history of stockbrokers and syphilis."
Ah, yes, stockbrokers and syphilis. You just can't have one without the other.
As long as we live in a world where ads for UNIX programmer jobs list "FTP" as a "required skill", people will prefer P2P networks over anything else. It's not that it's hard, it's that it's *perceived* to be hard.
Slashdot Mirror
"Anyone see any searchable database on the Web with the potential to topple what Google has become / could become?"
I don't why it didn't occur to me before, but something about your statement set off alarm bells in my little head. Maybe there's more to Google than meets the eye. Maybe, they should have named it, SkyNet.
What Disney ought to do is, either, give the boxes away (but make people sign for them and pay to replace if lost/damaged...not a big deal, insurance covers this kind of stuff), and just charge for the viewing, OR, charge a flat rate of like $20 per month, all the movies you want. Either way would be a much better deal for consumers, and would get them more customers (which == "more money").
They'd basically be combining the best parts of TiVo and HBO.
I second this. While Kenda was never able to get me a position, their recruiters were all very professional and honest.
Wow, talk about apples and oranges.
No one *allowed* Amazon to "dominate the book sales industry" (somehow I doubt Amazon sells more books than either Barnes&Noble or Borders, though they probably have better margins than the other two). Consumers decided they preferred the convenience of shopping for books online, and Amazon was pretty much first out the gate. Personnally, the only reason I sometimes shop in small bookshops is when I feel my ego getting too big and I need some abuse to make it go down (though that isn't nearly as effective as going to a used CD store, or a game store).
Now, Comcast: it doesn't matter if people want them or not, they have a government sanctioned monopoly. Government intrusion into the market gave us the cable companies, do you think *more* government intrusion into the market would help? (Hint: the answer has two letters and rhymes with "know".)
As for Microsoft, they've used various OEM contracts and dominance in one area to establish dominance in others. A true, bona fide, illegal monopoly. Which the courts have already acted on/are acting on, though nowhere near the level they should be. But even with MS, their products have been improving drastically in the last two or three years. Why? Possibly because of all the other alternatives out there now, a la Mac, Linux, OpenOffice.org, etc. etc. etc. So even a monopoly can't ignore (or control) the market forever.
You're absolutely correct. It's also correct to say that the Feds are *completely* out of their collective mind, going after journalists for something like this (the ironic part: he hacked a newspaper, some think *the* newspaper, now the Feds are using him to try to break down journalistic freedom...who's side will the Times be on, here?). I was only commenting on whether Lamo had broken any laws (assuming he's guilty, of course, he hasn't been proven to be, yet).
Probably not even then. You do realize that most cable companies have a customer support department that provides basic tech support for the cable boxes, right? Anything they can't fix over the phone, they send out a tech.
Actually, they can, sometimes. If you own a mall, and someone wants to pass out political flyers, you have to let them. You can set reasonable limits (like requiring people to get 24 hours advance notice, or stay in one central location instead of wandering all over the place). But because malls are, today, the equivilant of town squares 200 years ago, courts have ruled they are "forums for public discourse."
:)
I learned this back when I used to volunteer to register voters. The orginization had a whole series of classes so you would know your rights, and had little flash cards to carry with you to enforce them. The best memory is when some store manager at a Safeway threatened to call the police to have me removed, even though I wasn't harassing anyone. I told him go ahead, and I'd have him sued for violating my civil rights, and then move into his house. He got pissed and stomped off, never to be heard from again.
That's interesting, I didn't know that. Too bad I already replied to this thread, I would've given you some mod points.
"To be fair i side with the government in this case since I think the group is upto no good."
That may be, but why would they cut off access to all of Yahoo! groups for something like 1 billion people because 24 were saying nasty things? Wouldn't it have been easier, and far more effective, to let them rant there and read what they were ranting? Now they'll just go hide somewhere else, but you and the rest of your countrymen are stuck not getting access to the groups you need.
"...they can be forgiven for the Second Amendment...."
Except that without that one, the others wouldn't have lasted as long as they have.
Um, what about Fox News and their "Axis of Weasel" (Germany, France, and Brussels)?
And the only reason "no national newspaper in the US" (not counting tabloids and weekly newsmags, we only have one, US Today, and nobody reads it except foreigners) wouldn't call the leader of an allied nation a "worm" on the frontpage is because that kind of thing isn't front page news in the US, it goes into the Opinion section. And you can find lots OpEd pieces calling Chirac much worse than a worm (you can also find some calling Bush and Blair names, too, just using the same example you did).
"This is all notwithstanding the fact that Gilligan's report was third rate, sensational and, it seems, contained several inaccuracies."
(Screw it, I've got karma to burn.)
What would you expect? Without the Skipper or Professor around to keep him out of trouble, Gilligan can't get anything right.
"They need to offer him a job and put him in the Defense Department - use his skill 'for' us, instead of putting him in jail."
Um, no they don't. The guy breaks into other people networks, without their permission, then "graciously" offers to fix their problems for them, for free. While that last bit sounds nice, the first part (the breaking in part) isn't so nice. Especially not when he uses his access to run thousands of dollars in bills using that network to, basically, ego surf (he accessed the Times' Lexis account to lookup references to himself).
That is definitely not the kind of troublemaker we should have anywhere near the military. This guy needs to go to some nice little minimum security Federal prison for a few years, and grow up.
"Hmmm... come to think of it, how do you get modded down?
I know, make really, really, REALLY lame jokes like me!"
Hey, look! it worked!
"Similarly, you can pay extra for a little bit of privacy on road tolls, New York's
EZPass system is cheaper (and quicker) than the cash toll, but less private. (Unless
you count those little cameras staring at your license plate of course)."
Seems the EZPass system has been a guest star on "Law & Order" more times than the woman who plays the original psychiatrist. From those appearances (only because I can't think of any real life instances, and Law & Order seems, in some ways, one of the more realistic cop drama shows on TV), I wouldn't worry too much about any tracking systems. The cops still need a judge to sign a warrant to get any of it, which means you have to be under suspicion for some crime, with some (at least token) amount of evidence already against you before they can start going through the logs to see where you've been. They need much less than the to go through your garbage, since once it's on the street, it's fair game.
I'm much more concerned about laws passed by Congress, or Parliament, or the State House, or the UN General Assembly, or our new insect overlords, banning thoughts and political affliations, than I am the ability of some group to track what you're doing and where you've been. The truth of it is, noone really cares.
Besides all that, let's say they do build a system to track every Londoner's use of the tube. There's, what?, 20 million people in London? Let's say 5 million use the tube everyday. Now let's say each record in the db uses 256B of space. Even at that extremely tight level of data storage you're still talking about a database that grows at the rate of over 2 GB of data per day, assuming each person who uses the tube uses it twice per day. Do you know how long it would take to go back in time and track one person's movements over a five year period? Do you *really* think that's going to be useful to anyone?
Ask anyone with experience with datawarehousing: this kind of system is *great* for working with aggregates, but absolutely sucks for drilling down to an individual.
Oh, I see, you're not anti-religion, just anti-freedom of speech. Gotcha.
Personnally, I don't like peope who spout their non-sense opinions on Slashdot. Can I burn your house down, now?
"Or perhaps keep them on their own node with anti-virus scanners between it and the main network?"
Now *that* is a genius idea. It may be common in some areas, but in all honesty, it's never occurred to me. I'll have to institute this on the networks I'm responsible for.
Your link doesn't work.
"This is bound to be one hell of an interesting debate. I hope they at least do an archive webcast of it. It doesn't look like they're doing a live one."
I don't know, there might be copyright concerns with a Webcast. What if a copy ended up on KaZaa?
"You can open the side of the case and take a whiz in it, and the machine will keep chugging."
Just how do you test something like that?
Why is this so hard to do? I mean, really, if you're gonna provide a link, at least make it a link!
Who moderated this as "Interesting"??
In any event, there were no Native Americans who had a ceremony that resembled anything like Holy Communion. The Mayans had several blood sacrifice ceremonies, and the Aztecs were pretty brutal in their human sacrifice, but none of them believed they were consuming the body and blood of God, thus joining with him in Spirit. And they sure as hell didn't believe their God became human and died for their sins.
Last I checked, Christ didn't look like a giant feathered serpent, so I'm not sure where you get the "Quetzecoatl resembles Christ" remark. They didn't even have similar philosophies. One was a god of war, the other was a Man of peace.
As for tribes of Indian speaking Hebrew, there weren't any (there may be today, nothing says an Apache can't become a Jew if he isn't, er, attached to his foreskin). There is a tribe in Alabama who uses some Celtic words and phrases, most likely thanks to St. Patrick, and there are artifacts from Mexican which bear Chinese and Phoenician characteristics. But nothing remotely resembling ancient Jews.
Of course, you left out the little niggling details about "Indians" and the Book of Mormon. Like how that book teaches all Indians are children of the Devil and should be killed. And that blacks should be kept as slaves, since it's their natural state. And don't forget the idea of keeping women as chattel. Oh, wait, I forgot, Mormons dropped that one so their territory could become a state. Christians have done some horrible things through history, but they never claimed revelations from God countradicting core beliefs just so they could gain the benefits of US statehood.
"...and the profound effect on European history of stockbrokers and syphilis."
Ah, yes, stockbrokers and syphilis. You just can't have one without the other.
Man, you have got to be smokin' crack if you think that!
As long as we live in a world where ads for UNIX programmer jobs list "FTP" as a "required skill", people will prefer P2P networks over anything else. It's not that it's hard, it's that it's *perceived* to be hard.