The thing that annoys me the most is that I can't find decent sheet music for songs. Example: the song 'You Must Love Me' from the movie-remake of Evita. It's a piano accompaniment, but the only music I can find (including on SongFile) is the crappy "Easy Piano" version they put out for almost everything. What I can't find is the original score. I once found a MIDI version of it somewhere, and I might still have it laying around.
Maybe I could license the song, but none of the license categories seem to apply (no, I don't want to make 500 recordings of it minimum) Another annoying thing is movie soundtracks. Anyone ever try finding the score for the theme to Enemy of the State or Twister? Sheesh! I'm starting to think Harry Fox should be shot (but nah.. that wouldn't do anything - there's always another lawyer-money-grubber in line.)
I wouldn't think so. WINE is supposed to be a reverse-engineered program that emulates the library calls for Win95/98/whatever, right? So MS should be able to say nothing about WINE as long as reverse engineering remains legal .
> pay for content - using the money that we have saved by not having to pay 20 to 40 percent more for producs
Yeah, but how much of that 20-40 percent do you expect would actually come back to you in the price? I bet about 10, maybe 15 percent. The rest would pump up cash reserves, or stock dividends ("look Ma, I'm getting 59 cents per share instead of 58! Woo-hoo!")
Jim
Hypothetical situation: possession/intent?
on
Brian West Update
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· Score: 2, Informative
I read a post further down that stated that possession of a protected (or supposedly protected) password file implies intent (to commit a crime with said list).
Here's a hypothetical situation: What if some malicious company made a webpage that when I connected to it, it downloaded the password file to a cookie on my hard drive. I don't know it's there. Then they come after me, claiming that I hacked into their system. True, I could say that I didn't know how it got there, and if I could get a person to show that their code downloaded the file (which would probably require a subpoena to look at their HTML code), that could make a good defense that I had no intent.
But what if I can't get that kind of help? What if I get a bone-head judge? Could someone be sent to jail for doing nothing more than browsing a web-page? It does seem that this guy was an damn-big idiot at least, and a malicious cracker at most, but it seems like cops are getting overzealous in prosecuting tech "crimes" without understanding what's really going on.
I agree with the poster of a comment further down about revenge records. If the companies would drop prices to a level that's reasonable, piracy proabby would drop off. the problem is that not everyone agrees what a resonable price is.
A lot of people here (me included) think $18 for a CD (or even $11 on sale) is too much too pay for on average less than 50 minutes of music. I also will remember a song with absolute clarity after hearing it 10 times, so I feel like the price is a double insult (now, if I could just figure out how to download out of my brain - then the RIAA would really have a problem: fair-use? piracy? what's the difference?)
As we learn in Micro Econ 101, every product has a demand curve: at any price, a certain number of consumers will buy it, a certain number will not. A company sets a price such that enough people will buy it to satisfy their want/need for revenue. Now, if you drop the price further, enough more people may buy that it will offset the price drop; this is elasticity greater than 1 (I think).
But/.'ers aside, a lot of people do seem to think that getting 30 minutes of Britney Spears-crap is worth $11-$18, or are willing to pay it through the nose and grumble. This is why I don't think boycotts really work. Unless you have a huge number of people boycotting (think tens or hundreds of thousands in the cd market), it won't do anything.
What I wonder is why people think that $14 is a reasonable price for a CD? Is it that they don't know that the media/pressing-cost-in-volume is around $2 per disc? Personally, I would have paid it and grumbled in the past (would have, mind you, I didn't buy them even then much), until I started to learn about how the recording industry shafted it's artists, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on questionably-needed promotion, and the other things that fly around/.
Jim
> We won't get it for at least six months in the UK, so I'll just have to moan and bitch about how
Six months!! God, why is the EU suing Hollywood over DVD prices? (Not that I don't think that's a good thing(TM)) Why not sue over such scheduling nonsense as this?
PS. I'm live in the US, but I'm getting pissed off with corporate America (mainly Hollywood and the big-media industries) and am ready for the US to be knocked off its collective pedestal for a change. At least for the corporate class to be knocked off its pedestal..
I read the story in the British Independent, and I'm struck by three passages:
> In this campaign, hi-tech weapons and long-term delivery systems will not be as important as human skills and human judgements
Here the writer makes a comment, which I think is true, on the usefulness of high-tech intelligence vs. human intelligence - i.e. that human-int is better (actually, what he means by "high-tech weapons" is anyone's guess, but I suppose he means things like high-tech intelligence)
> The US has identity cards and it didn't protect them. The terrorist who can forge a pilot's licence isn't going to have difficulty with identity cards.
Here he makes another very true point about the fact that ID cards aren't really going to protect anyone. If underage teens can get fake IDs to get beer, so can the terrorists. And making them more secure, using embedded microchips or holograms is probably just a waste of time, resources, and money which could be put to better use elsewhere.
> Should we end personal use of unbreakable codes in the net? Very likely. We must beware of giving carte blanche to those who would eat away at our freedoms
Here he goes off the deep end. First he says we should ban strong encryption. But he must know that terrorists aren't going to respect that. Then he has the audacity to say that we shouldn't allow this to eat away at our freedoms. What??!!
Ever since I became addicted to Slashdot a couple of years ago, I've come to realize a very important goal of politics: Information filtering. In this country, there are somewhere around 290 million people, give or take a few million. On any particular issue, you can therefore have about 100 million different points of view, and that's probably a consrevative estimate. True, many of these will be the same (for/against abortion, for/against missile defence/etc). But there will be that many different arguments for different posisition.
I would argue that a major goal of politics is of information filtering, of winnowing out the 300 or so truely good ideas from all the chaff. We witness this every day on Slashdot: within minutes of a story about YRO or Politics beging posted, there can be litterly hundreds of comments posted.
And I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the moderation system used by Slashdot is not perfect. (Go ahead, mod me down. Nobody'll see this anyway, and I don't particularly care about my karma) The parenthetical expression I just made is an example of this. As more and more comments accumulate, the ones at the "bottom" of the list, those posted later, tend to have lower or more average moderation score. That's sad too, because I've noticed that many of the insightful comments are made later, after the rest of us have gotten our one or two lines off our chest (I don't oresume to be included in either group here).
My moderation filters are basically set for +4 with a bonus for long comments, on the assumption that someone who writes a lot will have something insightful to say (others would disagree). But still, I always wonder if there is some gem buried 4 levels nested down that doesn't make my filter, simply because no one bothered to read it.
For the past few months, I've been wondering if a moderation system based on the concept of "circles of trust" (familiar to anyone who uses PGP) might work. Comments would be moderated for a person based on what they were moderated by people that the first person "trusts", who in turn would trust others. Individuals could add a "trust contribution" to a particular comment based on the number score, or by modifiers (funny, insightful, etc), length, number of sentences, etc. One problem with this of course is the sheer amount of data involved, and the number of computations required for each comment to be processed for each individual. Another is how to set comment scores for archiving. Another is people examining the source code and figuing out how to "karma whole" it. Oh well..
Anyway, I see politics as a way to filter information. The current American system is not perfect, some (myself included) would argue, far from perfect. The decisions made by government that can most affect peoples' lives (criminal sentencing bills, the Drug War(TM), DMCA, MATA, etc) are not the ones that people vote on. Some of us do, but most of us (out in "9 to 5 Pleasentville") could care less about the fact that we live in a country where a foriegn citizen canbe thrown in jail for 5 years for doing something perfectly legal, and ethical, in his own contry, or that legislation is being proposed that would thrown a love-sick teenager away for 25-to-life for defacing a web page. Heck, the idea of MATA didn't even exist prior to September 11, such less at election time. Most people vote based on the "bot-button" issues: Medicare, Social Security, and the (promise) of lower taxes.
For the other issues, there is the "third house" of journalistic opinion, writing to Congress and other People with Power, and "big-time" lobbying. Of the three, the third is probably the most effective, followed by the first and second, unless you happen to get the ear of a Congressperson. There's a lot of cynicism about politics floating around, and I think a lot of it is that in the face of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of soft money being thrown around, and the fact that George W. ammased 100-odd million dollars before he was even elected, "little guys" don't stand a chace. Or at least we don't think we do. I recall that in a recent Supreme Court opinion regarding campaign contributions, of of the justices said that "the appearance of a fair election process must be maintained" (paraphrased from a bad memory).
As many people here and elsewhere have stated in recent days, lots of the legislative proposals made in responce to Geroge W.'s declaration of a "War on Terrorism" are kinee-jerk reactions, grounded in little if any fact (the futility of encryption restrictions), and without regard for existing laws (much of MATA). Yet they are proposed by our legislators. Do these people truely "ignore the facts"? In some cases, probably. In some cases (Judd Gregg's proposal) it might be to push a pet agenda. In a lot of cases (Judd Gregg again), it's probably so they can say to their constituents that "I did something!"
The question shouldn't necessarily be how to get better people into power, but how to get better ideas. How to make the people in power face facts, that encryption restrictions won't work, that getting tougher on computer crime isn't necessarily going to catch terrorists (they would be breaking laws anyway) and is just going to potentially ruin a lot of lives in the process, and take away the feeling of security for a lor more of us that we won't be thrown in the slammer some day.
Do I think the idea of a Slashdot lobbying effort is a good idea? You bet! We need a way to get some sanity on tech issues, and an antidote to knee-jerk reactions to anything "high tech" that is vaguely threatening, into Washington and elsewhere, and make people listen.
Remember the Native Americans. That list includes us, or would if it were to be applied for past sins (or whatever you want to call them).
I assume you're talking about the Taliban here. After skimming the Dept. of State reports that were listed other places in this long thread (Afganistan, Feb 2001 and Feb 2000) I find myself swinging back toward supporting military action. But I think that it should necessarily be a military-minded campaign. I think a militarily-back, international humanitarian mission would be more appropriate (or maybe I've just watched too much Star Trek). I hope that Bush (or other world leaders who can get his ear) have sense enough to see this too. We can't just go in there and bomb the hell out of the place (the suggestion that we neutron-bomb the place would work, but that would be kind of pointless from a humanitarian POV, and it would really piss off the terrorits and probably start WWIII)
But we can't just bomb the hell out of them, because we don't know exactly who "they" are, and even if we got bin Laden, there's still Hezbolla (sp?) and whatever other terror networks are out there. It might "show them we mean business" and scare them, but I wouldn't count on it. And it would accomplish nothing from a humanitarian POV for the Afgani people. On the other hand, if we took out the Taliban, if that's even possible, it's not clear that the Northern alliance would be able to form a stable government.
The only real conclusion I can come to is that I'm rally glad I'm not in Bush's shoes right now.. But I do think that a humanitarian "solution" of some kind has to be part of this. After we go in, after the war-frenzy fades a bit, what will be left is a world community that will be more aware than before of the sufferening and oppression of the Afgan people.
I've been coming to the opinion for awhile that it might be effective to might fire with fire. In other words, get corporations who would stand to be against this to fund the opposition (gee, sounds like a proxy war..) Tivo is one example for the SSSCA, but they don't really have any money (I'm not sure what their cash reserves are like, but their stock is in the toilet, which is bad since I bought it at 40)
Apple with their Digital Hub strategy might be against this. So too might be UltimateTV or other Tivo-workalikes. Might indie bands and record lables be likely to agree to fight this?
I agree with you about info on older systems. I'm sort of part of the dwindling community of Newton users (sort of because I used to use it quite a bit, but haven't touched it in the past few months), and low-level/never-released info on it could potentially REALLY be useful.
Sean Luke has succesfuly ported the Waba JVM to the Newton, and low-level info on how to access the QuickDraw routines in the Newton ROM would really speed up the graphics. It's been done (Fractor, by Jason Rukman - you don't happen to know him?), but I can't find him.. Diddo for how to access the inker directly. And for info on how to make an OSX app to connect to the internal Dock application, or having the source to the NewtonScript byte-code compiler to make a replacement for NTK. Heck, the whole darn source code for the OS would be nice to look at, as I'd think that there's nothing of particularly "strategic value" in there (except for legacy SE QuickDraw routines, which are just that - legacy) On a more ambitious note, info on the hardware specs would be useful, especially with regards to replacing the display, or perhaps putting in a larger one.
I ran across a post somewhere talking about the mounds and mounds of neat techology that Apple is just sitting on - QuickDraw GX, PowerTalk, KeyChain (off the table now, as it's in the OS), QuickDraw 3D (mostly supplanted by Quesa, but they still have some neat 3D-user-interface ideas for a mythical "Quickdraw 3D 2.0") and saying that Apple should release these gems as open-source. Put a moderatly restrictive licensing agreement on it saying that it can't be used in commercial software without written authorization from Apple (but that would invole $$$ on Apple's part to process requests, and you'd have to hire an army of lawyers to go after M$ if they tried to steal it.)
Hmm, any posibility of forming a "Coalition to Free Apple Technology" ("Apple Toys want to be free..."), and the prayer of getting an ear on the board of directors?
I thought of this idea the other day. My idea would be to have a panic button that would use GPS to take a plane to near an airport, and them alert the airport and allow them to bring the plane in by remote control. If there's no ground control in range, maybe have some way to do a controlled crash landing in some open area. That would be harder to do from a tech standpoint, as you'd need some kind of algorithm to scan for an open area and to bring the plane down relatively safely.
Video cameras in the cockpit would also be a good idea - at the very least have a VC that could be turned on by a panic button so that ground control or another plane in the area could get a video feed of the cockpit if terrorists did get in there.
When will Slashcode go XML? I don't know much about XML, but it seems like it would be able to cut out a trememdous amount of the redundent elements on the dynamic pages and a lot of the HTML-formatting code. This might have a measurable impact on the performance of the severs, and I'd think it would certainly help for those of us using dial-up connections.. (Yes, we do exist - I use one when I'm not on campus, though I'm hoping that will soon change..)
God. I just read Levy's Crypto about a month ago, and I thought this was *over*. I can understand why Congress and other people would want to do this, especialy now, and I can even sympathize with them - a little.
But I also know that whereever there's a backdoor, there's the possibility that it could be mis-used. The U.S.'s history of intervention/harrasement of other parts of the world and our own citizens at times (McCarthey, WWII internment, etc) tells us that possibility.
I myself can't really see *now* how the government being able to snoop into people's email would be a problem - unless they started cracking down on DMCA protesters (and law-breakers), post-Napster users, anti-WTO folks, etc. I would hope that our government learned from the McCarthey era - forever, but then, maybe I'm just not paranoid enough..
But the biggest reason is that it's utterly pointless. Strong crypto is already out of the bottle, here and abroad. Other countries have developed strong crypto, so even if O. bin Laden couldn't get it here, he could get it somewhere else (Russia perhaps - wouldn't that be ironic). I don't know much about the mathematics of crypto, but even if PGP isn't secure now, couldn't you just re-compile it using some unGodly bug key size like 4096 bits.
What I'd *really* like to know - and probably what a lot of other people here like to know - is what encryption O. bin Laden used, and could we crack his codes.
Ever since I read that the EU was looking into anti-trust/price-fixing violations by the record and movie companies, and now are looking at M$, I think that maybe the EU will save the US from itself..
Well, yes that is a possibility. But say if I wanted to develop under BSD, that means that I could not use any code that is GPL. This means I might have to reinvent the wheel, and we all hate having to do that.. And from a cursory look at source code out there (very cursory, I'm not 'involved' in the open-source community at all), there appears to be a LOT more GPL code out there than BSD.
On the corporate side, these points about the GPL DO matter. For example, there was a big discussion on the IBM ViaVoice for Linux list recently (past six months) about whether ViaVoice could be GPLd. The upshot was that IBM didn't want to because they'd loose their IP protection (which one must admit, does matter. After all, their programmers do have to eat, and if the people at M$ or MacSpeech could get their code "free" they could make their products better possibly and then ViaVoice could lose out in the marketplace, except for things like market-penetration, etc, which is WAY of the scope of this rant) One person of the VV list pointed out that some open-source developers will not use code that is not GPLd, as a moral issue. This rules out using ViaVoice.
If we want more people to use/develop/release open-source software, a system needs to be worked out where the traditional software-business can continue, to a point. IMO, what we need is some intermediate case between GPL-totally-open and traditional-softwre-market-totally-closed-forever models needs to be developed. If you choose to use GPL code (see above), and you want to get paid, you basically are relying on the generosity of strangers, although I suppose you could sell a precompiled binary, and then just have the source files available on-line (as per the clause in the GPL that you must either provide the source OR provide a place to get it). This on the assumption that most joe's aren't going to take the trouble to download your source, perhaps reconfigure their compiler (if they have one), and make it themselves (do you have to include makefiles/project files, or just the code?)
An interesting question that just occurred to me is that if you use GPL code in a project, are you allowed to dual-release you code under GPL and BSD? Could someone then licenses your BSD code or app (for a fee perhaps, but with the source closed)?
Of course, most software under GPL would be sold as shareware anyway (if not for the GPL virality). And where with GPL you have the (potential) risk that someone will download you're code and compile it without paying you for a precompiled binary (if you chose that route), with shareware they just might not pay you at all.
I remember reading in an old thread about Napster (gee, how many of those we got here:) about an online CD label/retailer that sold CDs for a bit less than others - the quote about it was something like $x for on-label stuff, $y for off-label stuff. Does anyone have a reference?
The same thread also had a comment about Ace-MP3.com, which sold mp3 cds that where you could get 12 or so complete albums for $25. They purported to have paid all the apropriate licensing fees and be legit. The URL no longer works. Has the RIAA crushed this?
> kick the major label habit and pick up some
> indie stuff. There's a world of goodness..
What if I want to listen to Charlotte Church (BMG)? James Galway (RCA)? The soundtrack to 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon', or any number of movies soundtracks, which are mostly (or at least partly) instrumental music by "real" composers (various major lables).
It's easy to say 'fuck the majors, go with indie' if you're referring to the 'music' put out by Britney or nsync. But what about the above mentioned artists? I think they are a little more deserving of musical attention that Britney-type crap, but if you want to listen to it (legally, though Home Recording Act may limit illegality), you have to feed the majors.
It's like my history AI said last semester, "You may not *like* globalization, but if you live in the modern world, it's very hard to get away from.."
> The Director may want all sort of additional
> shots in there, but the studio is more likely
> to insist that he cut it to a more reasonable
I know. Sometimes, when I *know* that this is happening, it bugs me a lot. I was watching a PBS special on "The West Wing" season finale (Charlie Rose, IAC [if anyone cares]), and Sorking I think it was refered to a particular scene that "he hoped would make it in the final cut". I thought, "what, they shoot things and then DON'T PUT THEM IN THE EPISODES?!" Dammit, I *like* the West Wing. I want to see everything Sorkin has come up with (espeically if it's one of CJ's speeches calling a Pentagon person an ass over the particulars of C4 defense unpreparedness..)
Are ther plans to move Slashdot to using XML in the near-mid future? This could potentially dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements for viewing stories, as the banner and page-formatting codes could potentially be transmitted only once per session, as well as reduce processing for the/. server.
It's also perhaps a problem with the way the patent office is set up (duh!): if a panel of "experts," or at least a "jury" of people knowledgeable in the field, had to "rate" a patent proposal, perhaps some of the fluff that gets patented these days wouldn't. (Then again, such a rating system could just turn into another/.)
IMO, a lot of companies are *afraid* to litigate a stupid patent, like Apple and Amazon's One-Click (TM) (At least Apple advirtised promenently on their website "One Click Shopping" At least that way it looks more like a trademark license, which IMO is perfectly okay, at least for a reasonable length of time [2 years..]) The way it is now, once a patent is filled, it's almost enforced de facto because litigation costs are so high. So the courts never get into the act, which almost seems like a delegation of power from Congress (sort of). Of course, you could never prove it in court, because you'd have to quantify such things as being 'discouraged from litigation by the cost of such litigation' Methink this would not fly with judges (or lawyers). Economists, maybe, but not lawyers.
Jim
But how do we *know* exactly how much the tax is? It's not as if (at least I would guess not) there's a little bit of fine print at the bottom of the CD-Burner box that says "$0.05% of the purchase price of this machine has been used to pay the Bertlesmann tax" I would also guess that Bertlesmann (sp) would not be particularly eager to give out such information. This is what worries me. As well as the idea that I'm "paying" for a transgression that I may never commit.
The other thing that bothers me about this is the question of how Bertlesmann is going to use the money this "tax" generates? It's not going to combat piracy (as in stop it). It's just going to be an alternate revenue stream for Bertlesmann Inc.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I could license the song, but none of the license categories seem to apply (no, I don't want to make 500 recordings of it minimum) Another annoying thing is movie soundtracks. Anyone ever try finding the score for the theme to Enemy of the State or Twister? Sheesh! I'm starting to think Harry Fox should be shot (but nah.. that wouldn't do anything - there's always another lawyer-money-grubber in line.)
I wouldn't think so. WINE is supposed to be a reverse-engineered program that emulates the library calls for Win95/98/whatever, right? So MS should be able to say nothing about WINE as long as reverse engineering remains legal .
> pay for content - using the money that we have saved by not having to pay 20 to 40 percent more for producs
Yeah, but how much of that 20-40 percent do you expect would actually come back to you in the price? I bet about 10, maybe 15 percent. The rest would pump up cash reserves, or stock dividends ("look Ma, I'm getting 59 cents per share instead of 58! Woo-hoo!")
Jim
Here's a hypothetical situation: What if some malicious company made a webpage that when I connected to it, it downloaded the password file to a cookie on my hard drive. I don't know it's there. Then they come after me, claiming that I hacked into their system. True, I could say that I didn't know how it got there, and if I could get a person to show that their code downloaded the file (which would probably require a subpoena to look at their HTML code), that could make a good defense that I had no intent.
But what if I can't get that kind of help? What if I get a bone-head judge? Could someone be sent to jail for doing nothing more than browsing a web-page? It does seem that this guy was an damn-big idiot at least, and a malicious cracker at most, but it seems like cops are getting overzealous in prosecuting tech "crimes" without understanding what's really going on.
A lot of people here (me included) think $18 for a CD (or even $11 on sale) is too much too pay for on average less than 50 minutes of music. I also will remember a song with absolute clarity after hearing it 10 times, so I feel like the price is a double insult (now, if I could just figure out how to download out of my brain - then the RIAA would really have a problem: fair-use? piracy? what's the difference?)
As we learn in Micro Econ 101, every product has a demand curve: at any price, a certain number of consumers will buy it, a certain number will not. A company sets a price such that enough people will buy it to satisfy their want/need for revenue. Now, if you drop the price further, enough more people may buy that it will offset the price drop; this is elasticity greater than 1 (I think).
But /.'ers aside, a lot of people do seem to think that getting 30 minutes of Britney Spears-crap is worth $11-$18, or are willing to pay it through the nose and grumble. This is why I don't think boycotts really work. Unless you have a huge number of people boycotting (think tens or hundreds of thousands in the cd market), it won't do anything.
What I wonder is why people think that $14 is a reasonable price for a CD? Is it that they don't know that the media/pressing-cost-in-volume is around $2 per disc? Personally, I would have paid it and grumbled in the past (would have, mind you, I didn't buy them even then much), until I started to learn about how the recording industry shafted it's artists, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on questionably-needed promotion, and the other things that fly around /.
Jim
Six months!! God, why is the EU suing Hollywood over DVD prices? (Not that I don't think that's a good thing(TM)) Why not sue over such scheduling nonsense as this?
PS. I'm live in the US, but I'm getting pissed off with corporate America (mainly Hollywood and the big-media industries) and am ready for the US to be knocked off its collective pedestal for a change. At least for the corporate class to be knocked off its pedestal..
Jim Witte
I read the story in the British Independent, and I'm struck by three passages:
> In this campaign, hi-tech weapons and long-term delivery systems will not be as important as human skills and human judgements
Here the writer makes a comment, which I think is true, on the usefulness of high-tech intelligence vs. human intelligence - i.e. that human-int is better (actually, what he means by "high-tech weapons" is anyone's guess, but I suppose he means things like high-tech intelligence)
> The US has identity cards and it didn't protect them. The terrorist who can forge a pilot's licence isn't going to have difficulty with identity cards.
Here he makes another very true point about the fact that ID cards aren't really going to protect anyone. If underage teens can get fake IDs to get beer, so can the terrorists. And making them more secure, using embedded microchips or holograms is probably just a waste of time, resources, and money which could be put to better use elsewhere.
> Should we end personal use of unbreakable codes in the net? Very likely. We must beware of giving carte blanche to those who would eat away at our freedoms
Here he goes off the deep end. First he says we should ban strong encryption. But he must know that terrorists aren't going to respect that. Then he has the audacity to say that we shouldn't allow this to eat away at our freedoms. What??!!
Jim
I would argue that a major goal of politics is of information filtering, of winnowing out the 300 or so truely good ideas from all the chaff. We witness this every day on Slashdot: within minutes of a story about YRO or Politics beging posted, there can be litterly hundreds of comments posted.
And I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the moderation system used by Slashdot is not perfect. (Go ahead, mod me down. Nobody'll see this anyway, and I don't particularly care about my karma) The parenthetical expression I just made is an example of this. As more and more comments accumulate, the ones at the "bottom" of the list, those posted later, tend to have lower or more average moderation score. That's sad too, because I've noticed that many of the insightful comments are made later, after the rest of us have gotten our one or two lines off our chest (I don't oresume to be included in either group here).
My moderation filters are basically set for +4 with a bonus for long comments, on the assumption that someone who writes a lot will have something insightful to say (others would disagree). But still, I always wonder if there is some gem buried 4 levels nested down that doesn't make my filter, simply because no one bothered to read it.
For the past few months, I've been wondering if a moderation system based on the concept of "circles of trust" (familiar to anyone who uses PGP) might work. Comments would be moderated for a person based on what they were moderated by people that the first person "trusts", who in turn would trust others. Individuals could add a "trust contribution" to a particular comment based on the number score, or by modifiers (funny, insightful, etc), length, number of sentences, etc. One problem with this of course is the sheer amount of data involved, and the number of computations required for each comment to be processed for each individual. Another is how to set comment scores for archiving. Another is people examining the source code and figuing out how to "karma whole" it. Oh well..
Anyway, I see politics as a way to filter information. The current American system is not perfect, some (myself included) would argue, far from perfect. The decisions made by government that can most affect peoples' lives (criminal sentencing bills, the Drug War(TM), DMCA, MATA, etc) are not the ones that people vote on. Some of us do, but most of us (out in "9 to 5 Pleasentville") could care less about the fact that we live in a country where a foriegn citizen canbe thrown in jail for 5 years for doing something perfectly legal, and ethical, in his own contry, or that legislation is being proposed that would thrown a love-sick teenager away for 25-to-life for defacing a web page. Heck, the idea of MATA didn't even exist prior to September 11, such less at election time. Most people vote based on the "bot-button" issues: Medicare, Social Security, and the (promise) of lower taxes.
For the other issues, there is the "third house" of journalistic opinion, writing to Congress and other People with Power, and "big-time" lobbying. Of the three, the third is probably the most effective, followed by the first and second, unless you happen to get the ear of a Congressperson. There's a lot of cynicism about politics floating around, and I think a lot of it is that in the face of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of soft money being thrown around, and the fact that George W. ammased 100-odd million dollars before he was even elected, "little guys" don't stand a chace. Or at least we don't think we do. I recall that in a recent Supreme Court opinion regarding campaign contributions, of of the justices said that "the appearance of a fair election process must be maintained" (paraphrased from a bad memory).
As many people here and elsewhere have stated in recent days, lots of the legislative proposals made in responce to Geroge W.'s declaration of a "War on Terrorism" are kinee-jerk reactions, grounded in little if any fact (the futility of encryption restrictions), and without regard for existing laws (much of MATA). Yet they are proposed by our legislators. Do these people truely "ignore the facts"? In some cases, probably. In some cases (Judd Gregg's proposal) it might be to push a pet agenda. In a lot of cases (Judd Gregg again), it's probably so they can say to their constituents that "I did something!"
The question shouldn't necessarily be how to get better people into power, but how to get better ideas. How to make the people in power face facts, that encryption restrictions won't work, that getting tougher on computer crime isn't necessarily going to catch terrorists (they would be breaking laws anyway) and is just going to potentially ruin a lot of lives in the process, and take away the feeling of security for a lor more of us that we won't be thrown in the slammer some day.
Do I think the idea of a Slashdot lobbying effort is a good idea? You bet! We need a way to get some sanity on tech issues, and an antidote to knee-jerk reactions to anything "high tech" that is vaguely threatening, into Washington and elsewhere, and make people listen.
Jim
I assume you're talking about the Taliban here. After skimming the Dept. of State reports that were listed other places in this long thread (Afganistan, Feb 2001 and Feb 2000) I find myself swinging back toward supporting military action. But I think that it should necessarily be a military-minded campaign. I think a militarily-back, international humanitarian mission would be more appropriate (or maybe I've just watched too much Star Trek). I hope that Bush (or other world leaders who can get his ear) have sense enough to see this too. We can't just go in there and bomb the hell out of the place (the suggestion that we neutron-bomb the place would work, but that would be kind of pointless from a humanitarian POV, and it would really piss off the terrorits and probably start WWIII)
But we can't just bomb the hell out of them, because we don't know exactly who "they" are, and even if we got bin Laden, there's still Hezbolla (sp?) and whatever other terror networks are out there. It might "show them we mean business" and scare them, but I wouldn't count on it. And it would accomplish nothing from a humanitarian POV for the Afgani people. On the other hand, if we took out the Taliban, if that's even possible, it's not clear that the Northern alliance would be able to form a stable government.
The only real conclusion I can come to is that I'm rally glad I'm not in Bush's shoes right now.. But I do think that a humanitarian "solution" of some kind has to be part of this. After we go in, after the war-frenzy fades a bit, what will be left is a world community that will be more aware than before of the sufferening and oppression of the Afgan people.
But arn't those devices illegal (thanks to that 4-letter word we all so know and love..)?
Jim
I've been coming to the opinion for awhile that it might be effective to might fire with fire. In other words, get corporations who would stand to be against this to fund the opposition (gee, sounds like a proxy war..) Tivo is one example for the SSSCA, but they don't really have any money (I'm not sure what their cash reserves are like, but their stock is in the toilet, which is bad since I bought it at 40)
Apple with their Digital Hub strategy might be against this. So too might be UltimateTV or other Tivo-workalikes. Might indie bands and record lables be likely to agree to fight this?
Jim
I agree with you about info on older systems. I'm sort of part of the dwindling community of Newton users (sort of because I used to use it quite a bit, but haven't touched it in the past few months), and low-level/never-released info on it could potentially REALLY be useful.
Sean Luke has succesfuly ported the Waba JVM to the Newton, and low-level info on how to access the QuickDraw routines in the Newton ROM would really speed up the graphics. It's been done (Fractor, by Jason Rukman - you don't happen to know him?), but I can't find him.. Diddo for how to access the inker directly. And for info on how to make an OSX app to connect to the internal Dock application, or having the source to the NewtonScript byte-code compiler to make a replacement for NTK. Heck, the whole darn source code for the OS would be nice to look at, as I'd think that there's nothing of particularly "strategic value" in there (except for legacy SE QuickDraw routines, which are just that - legacy) On a more ambitious note, info on the hardware specs would be useful, especially with regards to replacing the display, or perhaps putting in a larger one.
I ran across a post somewhere talking about the mounds and mounds of neat techology that Apple is just sitting on - QuickDraw GX, PowerTalk, KeyChain (off the table now, as it's in the OS), QuickDraw 3D (mostly supplanted by Quesa, but they still have some neat 3D-user-interface ideas for a mythical "Quickdraw 3D 2.0") and saying that Apple should release these gems as open-source. Put a moderatly restrictive licensing agreement on it saying that it can't be used in commercial software without written authorization from Apple (but that would invole $$$ on Apple's part to process requests, and you'd have to hire an army of lawyers to go after M$ if they tried to steal it.)
Hmm, any posibility of forming a "Coalition to Free Apple Technology" ("Apple Toys want to be free..."), and the prayer of getting an ear on the board of directors?
Miffed,
Jim Witte
jswitte@bloomington.in.us
This warms my heart, it really does. (and no, I've never "read" pr0n)
I thought of this idea the other day. My idea would be to have a panic button that would use GPS to take a plane to near an airport, and them alert the airport and allow them to bring the plane in by remote control. If there's no ground control in range, maybe have some way to do a controlled crash landing in some open area. That would be harder to do from a tech standpoint, as you'd need some kind of algorithm to scan for an open area and to bring the plane down relatively safely.
Video cameras in the cockpit would also be a good idea - at the very least have a VC that could be turned on by a panic button so that ground control or another plane in the area could get a video feed of the cockpit if terrorists did get in there.
When will Slashcode go XML? I don't know much about XML, but it seems like it would be able to cut out a trememdous amount of the redundent elements on the dynamic pages and a lot of the HTML-formatting code. This might have a measurable impact on the performance of the severs, and I'd think it would certainly help for those of us using dial-up connections.. (Yes, we do exist - I use one when I'm not on campus, though I'm hoping that will soon change..)
Jim Witte
Well, what if the got it written into a WTO treaty ? That's really scarry (from a liberties POV)..
Jim
God. I just read Levy's Crypto about a month ago, and I thought this was *over*. I can understand why Congress and other people would want to do this, especialy now, and I can even sympathize with them - a little.
But I also know that whereever there's a backdoor, there's the possibility that it could be mis-used. The U.S.'s history of intervention/harrasement of other parts of the world and our own citizens at times (McCarthey, WWII internment, etc) tells us that possibility.
I myself can't really see *now* how the government being able to snoop into people's email would be a problem - unless they started cracking down on DMCA protesters (and law-breakers), post-Napster users, anti-WTO folks, etc. I would hope that our government learned from the McCarthey era - forever, but then, maybe I'm just not paranoid enough..
But the biggest reason is that it's utterly pointless. Strong crypto is already out of the bottle, here and abroad. Other countries have developed strong crypto, so even if O. bin Laden couldn't get it here, he could get it somewhere else (Russia perhaps - wouldn't that be ironic). I don't know much about the mathematics of crypto, but even if PGP isn't secure now, couldn't you just re-compile it using some unGodly bug key size like 4096 bits.
What I'd *really* like to know - and probably what a lot of other people here like to know - is what encryption O. bin Laden used, and could we crack his codes.
Jim
Ever since I read that the EU was looking into anti-trust/price-fixing violations by the record and movie companies, and now are looking at M$, I think that maybe the EU will save the US from itself..
Jim
Well, yes that is a possibility. But say if I wanted to develop under BSD, that means that I could not use any code that is GPL. This means I might have to reinvent the wheel, and we all hate having to do that.. And from a cursory look at source code out there (very cursory, I'm not 'involved' in the open-source community at all), there appears to be a LOT more GPL code out there than BSD.
On the corporate side, these points about the GPL DO matter. For example, there was a big discussion on the IBM ViaVoice for Linux list recently (past six months) about whether ViaVoice could be GPLd. The upshot was that IBM didn't want to because they'd loose their IP protection (which one must admit, does matter. After all, their programmers do have to eat, and if the people at M$ or MacSpeech could get their code "free" they could make their products better possibly and then ViaVoice could lose out in the marketplace, except for things like market-penetration, etc, which is WAY of the scope of this rant) One person of the VV list pointed out that some open-source developers will not use code that is not GPLd, as a moral issue. This rules out using ViaVoice.
If we want more people to use/develop/release open-source software, a system needs to be worked out where the traditional software-business can continue, to a point. IMO, what we need is some intermediate case between GPL-totally-open and traditional-softwre-market-totally-closed-forever models needs to be developed. If you choose to use GPL code (see above), and you want to get paid, you basically are relying on the generosity of strangers, although I suppose you could sell a precompiled binary, and then just have the source files available on-line (as per the clause in the GPL that you must either provide the source OR provide a place to get it). This on the assumption that most joe's aren't going to take the trouble to download your source, perhaps reconfigure their compiler (if they have one), and make it themselves (do you have to include makefiles/project files, or just the code?)
An interesting question that just occurred to me is that if you use GPL code in a project, are you allowed to dual-release you code under GPL and BSD? Could someone then licenses your BSD code or app (for a fee perhaps, but with the source closed)?
Of course, most software under GPL would be sold as shareware anyway (if not for the GPL virality). And where with GPL you have the (potential) risk that someone will download you're code and compile it without paying you for a precompiled binary (if you chose that route), with shareware they just might not pay you at all.
> (on CD prices being all about the same)
I remember reading in an old thread about Napster (gee, how many of those we got here:) about an online CD label/retailer that sold CDs for a bit less than others - the quote about it was something like $x for on-label stuff, $y for off-label stuff. Does anyone have a reference?
The same thread also had a comment about Ace-MP3.com, which sold mp3 cds that where you could get 12 or so complete albums for $25. They purported to have paid all the apropriate licensing fees and be legit. The URL no longer works. Has the RIAA crushed this?
Jim Witte
> kick the major label habit and pick up some > indie stuff. There's a world of goodness.. What if I want to listen to Charlotte Church (BMG)? James Galway (RCA)? The soundtrack to 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon', or any number of movies soundtracks, which are mostly (or at least partly) instrumental music by "real" composers (various major lables). It's easy to say 'fuck the majors, go with indie' if you're referring to the 'music' put out by Britney or nsync. But what about the above mentioned artists? I think they are a little more deserving of musical attention that Britney-type crap, but if you want to listen to it (legally, though Home Recording Act may limit illegality), you have to feed the majors. It's like my history AI said last semester, "You may not *like* globalization, but if you live in the modern world, it's very hard to get away from.."
> The Director may want all sort of additional
> shots in there, but the studio is more likely
> to insist that he cut it to a more reasonable
I know. Sometimes, when I *know* that this is happening, it bugs me a lot. I was watching a PBS special on "The West Wing" season finale (Charlie Rose, IAC [if anyone cares]), and Sorking I think it was refered to a particular scene that "he hoped would make it in the final cut". I thought, "what, they shoot things and then DON'T PUT THEM IN THE EPISODES?!" Dammit, I *like* the West Wing. I want to see everything Sorkin has come up with (espeically if it's one of CJ's speeches calling a Pentagon person an ass over the particulars of C4 defense unpreparedness..)
Are ther plans to move Slashdot to using XML in the near-mid future? This could potentially dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements for viewing stories, as the banner and page-formatting codes could potentially be transmitted only once per session, as well as reduce processing for the /. server.
It's also perhaps a problem with the way the patent office is set up (duh!): if a panel of "experts," or at least a "jury" of people knowledgeable in the field, had to "rate" a patent proposal, perhaps some of the fluff that gets patented these days wouldn't. (Then again, such a rating system could just turn into another /.)
IMO, a lot of companies are *afraid* to litigate a stupid patent, like Apple and Amazon's One-Click (TM) (At least Apple advirtised promenently on their website "One Click Shopping" At least that way it looks more like a trademark license, which IMO is perfectly okay, at least for a reasonable length of time [2 years..]) The way it is now, once a patent is filled, it's almost enforced de facto because litigation costs are so high. So the courts never get into the act, which almost seems like a delegation of power from Congress (sort of). Of course, you could never prove it in court, because you'd have to quantify such things as being 'discouraged from litigation by the cost of such litigation' Methink this would not fly with judges (or lawyers). Economists, maybe, but not lawyers.
Jim
But how do we *know* exactly how much the tax is? It's not as if (at least I would guess not) there's a little bit of fine print at the bottom of the CD-Burner box that says "$0.05% of the purchase price of this machine has been used to pay the Bertlesmann tax" I would also guess that Bertlesmann (sp) would not be particularly eager to give out such information. This is what worries me. As well as the idea that I'm "paying" for a transgression that I may never commit.
The other thing that bothers me about this is the question of how Bertlesmann is going to use the money this "tax" generates? It's not going to combat piracy (as in stop it). It's just going to be an alternate revenue stream for Bertlesmann Inc.