Why on earth is this new for nerds? This is not stuff that matters.
Whether one likes the Austin Powers movies or not, there are far more important issues that matter that don't appear to be getting/. editor's attention. I don't believe they're not being submitted by the masses. Yes, they've been discussed here before, but each day seems to bring new developments that are *even* being reported on cnn:
It's saying something about the state of affairs at/. when rubbish about Austin Powers makes the news and issues covered by the non-tech main-stream media that have *serious* implications for nerds, are not.
It's not even like it's a slow news day!
Has it ever been suggested for/. to open the submissions directory for public scrutiny?
Umm...Maybe you haven't read it lately, but the GPL *is* as restrictive license.
A restriction is still a restriction, no matter if it's ultimate goal is openness or profit.
It's not a question of more or less. It's different! That's all. Microsoft's EULA is not any more open than the GPL no matter what their marketing spin might have people believe. This article insinuates that you're somehow strapped to lead weights and sunk in a deep ocean with the GPL. While the GPL may be restrictive, it's simply a different kind of restriction than that engendered by other, non GPL licenses.
My point was that the monkey at the keyboard writing that article suggested, in bold type no less, that a portion of Ximian mono was going to be ... a less restrictive license than the GPL. That is as rubbish as saying that the GPL is non restrictive. Saying either leads the ignorant down a garden path. That's what marketing is for, not journalism!
How can a professional journalist be so irresponsible as to write things like:
Ximian, a company working to improve the Linux operating system for ordinary computer users, has made a philosophical shift in a key new open-source software project that now will be governed by a less restrictive license [emphasis added].
and:
Mono would allow Linux and Unix systems to host Web services and to tap into Web services on other servers.
I'm sorry, but this has nothing to do with Windows' security or lack thereof. Anytime you run a binary you did not compile yourself (including a compiler), there's a chance that it will do heinous things to your computer. Like adding lines to ~/.bash_profile that run spyware.
True 'nuff. But what are the odds that you're going to get a *nix binary that includes binaries that haven't been compiled by the distributor?
Those who prefer to see to their own Trojan removal need only search for a hidden directory under their \Windows directory called \Explorer. Simply delete the \Windows\Explorer directory, along with the companion file Dlder.exe in the \Windows directory.
This is not an issue, afaik, if you're running any of these apps for linux.
This was discussed on The Register a couple of days ago.
From the article:
"We sometimes bundle advertiser applications with our installer in order to help pay for our costs here at Grokster. We are normally given an installer from the advertiser which we run during the installation of Grokster. We have no access to the source code of these third-party installers and so we rely on what our advertisers say these programs do. To the best of our knowledge, this particular advertiser simply placed a link to a free online lottery on the desktop. We were never informed that it installed or was a Trojan."
The damages could be even more severe if the products selected are "free software" because the Defendant is more morally culpable as well as financially liable (i.e., there will be a presumption by the court that non-free software performs better and the burden will be upon the Defendant to prove otherwise at a very awkward moment
Fortunatly, courts and court-decisions are not about presumptions but about fact-finding and establishing (in the case of law suits) whether the accusation of neglegance or malicious intent were/are substantive
The moral of the story is to do proper Technology Assessment before deploying anything at your customer's site, carry insurance and try to get it in writing that you aren't responsible if anything goes wrong.
erm, no again. The moral of the story is that if your reading of the moral of the story is correct, then innovation will not only be crushed by lack of competition, but because lawyers will become project managers.
2. The growing belief that copyright law and the First Amendment are on a collision course. When some people's copyright protections mean that other people can't say what they want to say, there is going to be a constitutional issue. The issue has been neglected for decades. It isn't being neglected anymore.
The full brunt of this issue will come as a sharp slap to the face of everyone involved in this industry if Microsoft, Adobe and others are allowed to continue to get away with gag orders restricting or preventing the announcement of security holes.
It will make an interesting test case when one company sues another for, say, loss of data and it turns out that the defendant was prevented from making it known to the plantif that its IP was at risk because of a third company's restriction on the defendant's ability to act on a security flaw they knew about which would have saved the plantif's data.
Let's say that the defendant is hosting a credit-card brokerage's database. Let's say that the database is compromised and data is stolen at great cost to the brokerage. They'd be insured, sure, but might take action if they learned that the defendant was aware of security holes in the database. What happens when the defendant says that they were aware of the hole but were unable to patch because a patch hadn't be released and were unable to notify their client because of a gag order imposed by the lawyers of the company that produced the database?
Re:How come old technology keeps making headlines?
on
P2P in 2001
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So now distributed computing has this neat new "p2p" hax0r acronym, and the fact that you can write distributed applications if you've got networked computers is news.
Well said!
Watch now as the corporate giants wake up and start to co-opt the methodology and recast it as their innovation and file patent suits against any and all they perceive as transgressing their IP.
I honestly and truly hope that the US government brings them to their knees about this. That's wishful thinking, I know. However, two statements in particular in the Yahoo! article surprised me:
1.Microsoft declined to tell U.S. officials Friday how many consumers downloaded and installed its fix during the first 24 hours it was available. 2.Microsoft also indicated it would not send e-mail reminders to Windows XP customers to remind them of the importance of installing the patch.
The reasons for point 1 are quite clear though. Acting on point 1 would indicate what a fiction the sales figures for XP really are.
Point 2 is more difficult to fathom... perhaps they're hoping people won't notice? Why on earth, other than their disdain for non-corporate users, wouldn't they send out the reminder? Or even a reminder stressing the improtance of installing the auto-updater?
No. it's at version 0.97. Wait for 1.0. That will be ready. Will it be free of bugs? Probably not. Will those bugs be resolved more quickly than those on closed-source browsers? yes.
If you're talking ideology, why on earth are you running windows at all?
Or, run Linux and use one of the many players that's able to use various open-source codecs and find that your one player is an integrated multi-media device.
I've just returned from a protest held in front of the US Embassy in London.
While ours was a small group (I believe there were 33 of us who made it to the embassy), we encountered a lot of Londoners and tourists on the way from Hyde Park corner. Some were perplexed by a parade of geeks attempting to chant things like "Free Speech! Free Dmitry!". There was no hostility; however, it was clear that some American tourists were rather upset by the banner we were carrying that read "Visit America, Go to jail". But despite being a small protest, the organiser was interviewed by Newsnight (the UK equivelant of Larry King Live) and we're going to get the second spot tonight.
I don't know if these protests will actually help Dmitry, but I do think they're raising the awareness of the absurdity of the DCMA. With Europe and Canada about to vote on DMCA-type laws, the protests come at the right time.
Does anyone else but me think it's a Bad Thing that we will eventually have 10 or so differnet ways to get broadband access to our homes? Or am I missing the point?
I think you're missing the point.
As long as the varied broadband connections do not breed incompatibility, it's definitely a Good Thing (tm)
The more choice the consumer has, the better. The great the variety, the stiffer the competition. The stiffer the competition, the better the service. Finally, we get down to price. Doubtless, with more consumer choice come more competitive pricing schemes.
Re:It won't be windows only for long
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 4
Progress is good, regardless of who it benefits.
Surely you don't mean that.
There's a point to ethical business practices and consumer protection agencies. While I agree that business cannot and should not be over-regulated precisely because of the danger of stifling innovation, an attitude that defends progress inspite of who benefits from it is almost equally dangerous.
GM foods are one good example where innovation has been allowed to go unchecked with little thought of knock-on effect. Broader environmental issues are another good example. If it were not for a consideration of net benefit, we'd still have unrestricted nuclear testing.
This is a long way from MP3s, I'll give you that; however, part of the 'battle' being fought by the Open Source community is precisely to establish ethics in the computing industry. Why should we pay (with our time) to re-engineer an open standard to something which should have been made open in the first place? Why should we cow-tow to an organisation which is using its market dominance to entrench a set of standards that haven't been through the testing and innovation and imagination offered by the Open Source community?
As long as attitudes like the one you have flipped-off in your comments pervade the computing sector, we'll all be forced to 'make do' with shoddy / poorly designed and implemented products.
No I think this will work out well for everyone, and I hope that minority browsers like Mozilla and Opera follow suit. No longer will we need to be constrained by the linking laziness of web authors:)
You've dropped in a smiley but there's nothing to smile about in your comments.
There are boring people and there are interesting people out there. Just because someone is dull does not give me, you or anyone else the right to insert "more interesting" or "more relevant" speech into their mouths.
The internet is a free (or was anyway) forum where readers / users / clients could choose the information they did or did not want to receive. People could vote with their feet. Popular and interesting sites would be visited frequently. Dull, rarely updated sites would not.
It's downright arrogant that microsoft or anyone else should feel it their duty to 'improve' upon what someone else has made. The Mozilla/Netscape sidebar is already doing that with the important caveat that users are able to switch it off at will. Embedded tags though... c'mon, there is *nothing* inherently good about them. We can hope for the benevolence of the company in charge of their "smartness" but if history is anything to go by, that hope's not likely to be realised.
I can still read paper written on 2000 years ago. Try and do that with *any* digital technology...
Um, how? IBM invested a lot of intellectual effort in textual mark-up tags for their internal documents which, as I understand, formed the basis for SGML. That was done in the 60s. AFAIK, those docs are still readable.
As for 2000 years, what say you and I get together in about 1950 of them and check on your prediction.
Do not mistake the bone-headedness of closed-source word-processor documents with text marked-up with a schema designed for preservation!
This is quite an interesting and well written article. Indeed, given yesterday's/. posting, there's little doubt that there will be some dramatic changes in the very near future.
However, why is taking the printed word off dead-trees necessarly equivelant to the end of the 'printed' book?
The process of 'printing' has changed dramatically over the years. Once, scribes copied from a master by hand. Then, Gutenberg brought the press. Then, we got automated typesetting. Then the dot-matrix printer. Then, bubble, laser and thermal. Now we're talking about 'setting' pixels on flexible digital LCD-like displays. But how is this step any different from those we've seen thus far? This is not a paradigm shift, it's the reflection of the impact of technology and innovation on a process. Just as books today aren't hand-written on parchment, books a few years down the road will not be printed on pulp.
Also, the leading paragraph sets up a straw-man. So what that Star Trek has embedded images of paper books as rare collectors items in the public's mind? The public's mind is generally vacuous and what's been impressed upon it is no more permanent than what's been drawn on an etchasketch (sp?).
Absolutely not! If you start with the money argument, you'll be out the door and you'll watch a gleaming, fall-toothed, wig-wearing, armani-suit-wearing drone take the contract.
What must be stressed is reliability, stability, security and above all, PORTABILITY. Most OSS solutions, especially those for web-based projects are not as platform dependent as are those of our closed-source colleagues.
If we're talking Fortune 500 companies, saving a few hundred thousand is not a big deal. What they want to know is that they're getting *the best*. Sit down with some of their managers and play the "what's that site running" game on netcraft and watch them raise their eyebrows as they see some of the most popular and most visited sites on the net turn up running various versions of *nix-based servers. That's what's going to convince them, not the cost equation.
If you're talking to someone on a very restricted budget (an NP or an arts organisation or some such) then yes, the "cost" factor is a good lead-in. But never with F500 breed. Never.
The point here is not what one does as an individual. That's easy. The point of reading articles such as this one and discussing them is that many of us are IT professionals who need to make solid and reasoned arguments for *why* we're advising our clients / businesses / employers to use something other than Windows and Microsoft products.
If you're in a position where you have to argue at board-level for or against certain products, fine, "just switch". If you have to convince a committee, you'd better have a better argument to offer than that!
While the whole "smart tags" issue may be rubbish, it does bear thinking about. Will your users know what "smart tags" really do? How do you make them aware of it? I've learned a thing or two from some reader comments here and those observations will help me to provice my clients with an informed opinion.
While the quotes that Lampe has chosen to illustrate the outrageousness of some of Wheat's readings are funny, it is always rather risky to take quotes from books like these out of context.
Yes, the bathroom-tile man-machine argument sounds pretty 'out there'; however, there is a long tradition of books attempting to connect-up seemingly dispirate myths, legends, stories and poems. Taken in abstract, Robert Graves's claim that the stories of Jesus and Hercules are different versions of the same myth, sounds mad. Perhaps it is, but Graves's justification takes a few hundred pages and is pretty convincing. By the time he goes into how theories of accretion can pollute oral narratives and the effect of the written-word in making particular versions of stories more canonical than others, he's made a point.
Fact is, Wheat wasn't the first nor will he be the last. Sir James Frazer's 'The Golden Bough', Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero With a Thousand Faces', etc, etc, etc, are all equally mad. But each of them is attempting to do something very human and touching: they are attempting to detect some order, sanity, ration and reason in an otherwise pretty random and chaotic world -- just as Kubrick was doing, just as Homer was doing...
What's he looking for? A company that tells potential purchasers what they intend to do in the event of being purchased themselves?
Actually, that's not such an unreasonable demand. One should be able to consult a document that does inform you, the consumer, about what happens to the information that you give about yourself in the event of a merger.
Take, for example, what might happen in the even of a medical practise being privatised and purchased by an insurance company. Would you like your medical records to become a part of that company's records?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps we were smoking the same batch? I've just searched through the archives also and can't come up with it either.
Why on earth is this new for nerds? This is not stuff that matters.
Whether one likes the Austin Powers movies or not, there are far more important issues that matter that don't appear to be getting /. editor's attention. I don't believe they're not being submitted by the masses. Yes, they've been discussed here before, but each day seems to bring new developments that are *even* being reported on cnn:
People sound off against Microsoft / DOJ settlement
and cnet:
Anti-trust debate heats up
It's saying something about the state of affairs at /. when rubbish about Austin Powers makes the news and issues covered by the non-tech main-stream media that have *serious* implications for nerds, are not.
It's not even like it's a slow news day!
Has it ever been suggested for /. to open the submissions directory for public scrutiny?
Umm...Maybe you haven't read it lately, but the GPL *is* as restrictive license. A restriction is still a restriction, no matter if it's ultimate goal is openness or profit.
It's not a question of more or less. It's different! That's all. Microsoft's EULA is not any more open than the GPL no matter what their marketing spin might have people believe. This article insinuates that you're somehow strapped to lead weights and sunk in a deep ocean with the GPL. While the GPL may be restrictive, it's simply a different kind of restriction than that engendered by other, non GPL licenses.
My point was that the monkey at the keyboard writing that article suggested, in bold type no less, that a portion of Ximian mono was going to be ... a less restrictive license than the GPL. That is as rubbish as saying that the GPL is non restrictive. Saying either leads the ignorant down a garden path. That's what marketing is for, not journalism!
... or perhaps flamebait?
How can a professional journalist be so irresponsible as to write things like:
Ximian, a company working to improve the Linux operating system for ordinary computer users, has made a philosophical shift in a key new open-source software project that now will be governed by a less restrictive license [emphasis added].
and:
Mono would allow Linux and Unix systems to host Web services and to tap into Web services on other servers.
I'm sorry, but this has nothing to do with Windows' security or lack thereof. Anytime you run a binary you did not compile yourself (including a compiler), there's a chance that it will do heinous things to your computer. Like adding lines to ~/.bash_profile that run spyware.
True 'nuff. But what are the odds that you're going to get a *nix binary that includes binaries that haven't been compiled by the distributor?
You can also do as The Register's oft-quoted article suggests:
Those who prefer to see to their own Trojan removal need only search for a hidden directory under their \Windows directory called \Explorer. Simply delete the \Windows\Explorer directory, along with the companion file Dlder.exe in the \Windows directory.
This is not an issue, afaik, if you're running any of these apps for linux.
This was discussed on The Register a couple of days ago.
From the article:
"We sometimes bundle advertiser applications with our installer in order to help pay for our costs here at Grokster. We are normally given an installer from the advertiser which we run during the installation of Grokster. We have no access to the source code of these third-party installers and so we rely on what our advertisers say these programs do. To the best of our knowledge, this particular advertiser simply placed a link to a free online lottery on the desktop. We were never informed that it installed or was a Trojan."
If you run a leaky os, what do you expect?
erm, you're probably trolling but...
The damages could be even more severe if the products selected are "free software" because the Defendant is more morally culpable as well as financially liable (i.e., there will be a presumption by the court that non-free software performs better and the burden will be upon the Defendant to prove otherwise at a very awkward moment
Fortunatly, courts and court-decisions are not about presumptions but about fact-finding and establishing (in the case of law suits) whether the accusation of neglegance or malicious intent were/are substantive
The moral of the story is to do proper Technology Assessment before deploying anything at your customer's site, carry insurance and try to get it in writing that you aren't responsible if anything goes wrong.
erm, no again. The moral of the story is that if your reading of the moral of the story is correct, then innovation will not only be crushed by lack of competition, but because lawyers will become project managers.
Cass Sunstein
University of Chicago Law School
2. The growing belief that copyright law and the First Amendment are on a collision course. When some people's copyright protections mean that other people can't say what they want to say, there is going to be a constitutional issue. The issue has been neglected for decades. It isn't being neglected anymore.
The full brunt of this issue will come as a sharp slap to the face of everyone involved in this industry if Microsoft, Adobe and others are allowed to continue to get away with gag orders restricting or preventing the announcement of security holes.
It will make an interesting test case when one company sues another for, say, loss of data and it turns out that the defendant was prevented from making it known to the plantif that its IP was at risk because of a third company's restriction on the defendant's ability to act on a security flaw they knew about which would have saved the plantif's data.
Let's say that the defendant is hosting a credit-card brokerage's database. Let's say that the database is compromised and data is stolen at great cost to the brokerage. They'd be insured, sure, but might take action if they learned that the defendant was aware of security holes in the database. What happens when the defendant says that they were aware of the hole but were unable to patch because a patch hadn't be released and were unable to notify their client because of a gag order imposed by the lawyers of the company that produced the database?
So now distributed computing has this neat new "p2p" hax0r acronym, and the fact that you can write distributed applications if you've got networked computers is news.
Well said!
Watch now as the corporate giants wake up and start to co-opt the methodology and recast it as their innovation and file patent suits against any and all they perceive as transgressing their IP.
Watch the partnerships a la Groove Networks foment:0 1/10-10GroovePR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/oct
and then watch as any work-alike initiatives are crushed in the courtrooms of America.
I honestly and truly hope that the US government brings them to their knees about this. That's wishful thinking, I know. However, two statements in particular in the Yahoo! article surprised me:
1. Microsoft declined to tell U.S. officials Friday how many consumers downloaded and installed its fix during the first 24 hours it was available.
2. Microsoft also indicated it would not send e-mail reminders to Windows XP customers to remind them of the importance of installing the patch.
The reasons for point 1 are quite clear though. Acting on point 1 would indicate what a fiction the sales figures for XP really are.
Point 2 is more difficult to fathom... perhaps they're hoping people won't notice? Why on earth, other than their disdain for non-corporate users, wouldn't they send out the reminder? Or even a reminder stressing the improtance of installing the auto-updater?
No. it's at version 0.97. Wait for 1.0. That will be ready. Will it be free of bugs? Probably not. Will those bugs be resolved more quickly than those on closed-source browsers? yes.
If you're talking ideology, why on earth are you running windows at all?
Or, run Linux and use one of the many players that's able to use various open-source codecs and find that your one player is an integrated multi-media device.
could you post a link, please?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22959.ht ml
While ours was a small group (I believe there were 33 of us who made it to the embassy), we encountered a lot of Londoners and tourists on the way from Hyde Park corner. Some were perplexed by a parade of geeks attempting to chant things like "Free Speech! Free Dmitry!". There was no hostility; however, it was clear that some American tourists were rather upset by the banner we were carrying that read "Visit America, Go to jail". But despite being a small protest, the organiser was interviewed by Newsnight (the UK equivelant of Larry King Live) and we're going to get the second spot tonight.
I don't know if these protests will actually help Dmitry, but I do think they're raising the awareness of the absurdity of the DCMA. With Europe and Canada about to vote on DMCA-type laws, the protests come at the right time.
I think you're missing the point.
As long as the varied broadband connections do not breed incompatibility, it's definitely a Good Thing (tm)
The more choice the consumer has, the better. The great the variety, the stiffer the competition. The stiffer the competition, the better the service. Finally, we get down to price. Doubtless, with more consumer choice come more competitive pricing schemes.
Surely you don't mean that.
There's a point to ethical business practices and consumer protection agencies. While I agree that business cannot and should not be over-regulated precisely because of the danger of stifling innovation, an attitude that defends progress inspite of who benefits from it is almost equally dangerous.
GM foods are one good example where innovation has been allowed to go unchecked with little thought of knock-on effect. Broader environmental issues are another good example. If it were not for a consideration of net benefit, we'd still have unrestricted nuclear testing.
This is a long way from MP3s, I'll give you that; however, part of the 'battle' being fought by the Open Source community is precisely to establish ethics in the computing industry. Why should we pay (with our time) to re-engineer an open standard to something which should have been made open in the first place? Why should we cow-tow to an organisation which is using its market dominance to entrench a set of standards that haven't been through the testing and innovation and imagination offered by the Open Source community?
As long as attitudes like the one you have flipped-off in your comments pervade the computing sector, we'll all be forced to 'make do' with shoddy / poorly designed and implemented products.
You've dropped in a smiley but there's nothing to smile about in your comments.
There are boring people and there are interesting people out there. Just because someone is dull does not give me, you or anyone else the right to insert "more interesting" or "more relevant" speech into their mouths.
The internet is a free (or was anyway) forum where readers / users / clients could choose the information they did or did not want to receive. People could vote with their feet. Popular and interesting sites would be visited frequently. Dull, rarely updated sites would not.
It's downright arrogant that microsoft or anyone else should feel it their duty to 'improve' upon what someone else has made. The Mozilla/Netscape sidebar is already doing that with the important caveat that users are able to switch it off at will. Embedded tags though... c'mon, there is *nothing* inherently good about them. We can hope for the benevolence of the company in charge of their "smartness" but if history is anything to go by, that hope's not likely to be realised.
I agree! It's still a leap though and not a paradigm shift.
Mind you, if microsoft has its way with smart-tags, that leap might just be from off the edge of a Dover-like cliff. :\
Um, how? IBM invested a lot of intellectual effort in textual mark-up tags for their internal documents which, as I understand, formed the basis for SGML. That was done in the 60s. AFAIK, those docs are still readable.
As for 2000 years, what say you and I get together in about 1950 of them and check on your prediction.
Do not mistake the bone-headedness of closed-source word-processor documents with text marked-up with a schema designed for preservation!
However, why is taking the printed word off dead-trees necessarly equivelant to the end of the 'printed' book?
The process of 'printing' has changed dramatically over the years. Once, scribes copied from a master by hand. Then, Gutenberg brought the press. Then, we got automated typesetting. Then the dot-matrix printer. Then, bubble, laser and thermal. Now we're talking about 'setting' pixels on flexible digital LCD-like displays. But how is this step any different from those we've seen thus far? This is not a paradigm shift, it's the reflection of the impact of technology and innovation on a process. Just as books today aren't hand-written on parchment, books a few years down the road will not be printed on pulp.
Also, the leading paragraph sets up a straw-man. So what that Star Trek has embedded images of paper books as rare collectors items in the public's mind? The public's mind is generally vacuous and what's been impressed upon it is no more permanent than what's been drawn on an etchasketch (sp?).What must be stressed is reliability, stability, security and above all, PORTABILITY. Most OSS solutions, especially those for web-based projects are not as platform dependent as are those of our closed-source colleagues.
If we're talking Fortune 500 companies, saving a few hundred thousand is not a big deal. What they want to know is that they're getting *the best*. Sit down with some of their managers and play the "what's that site running" game on netcraft and watch them raise their eyebrows as they see some of the most popular and most visited sites on the net turn up running various versions of *nix-based servers. That's what's going to convince them, not the cost equation.
If you're talking to someone on a very restricted budget (an NP or an arts organisation or some such) then yes, the "cost" factor is a good lead-in. But never with F500 breed. Never.
If you're in a position where you have to argue at board-level for or against certain products, fine, "just switch". If you have to convince a committee, you'd better have a better argument to offer than that!
While the whole "smart tags" issue may be rubbish, it does bear thinking about. Will your users know what "smart tags" really do? How do you make them aware of it? I've learned a thing or two from some reader comments here and those observations will help me to provice my clients with an informed opinion.
Yes, the bathroom-tile man-machine argument sounds pretty 'out there'; however, there is a long tradition of books attempting to connect-up seemingly dispirate myths, legends, stories and poems. Taken in abstract, Robert Graves's claim that the stories of Jesus and Hercules are different versions of the same myth, sounds mad. Perhaps it is, but Graves's justification takes a few hundred pages and is pretty convincing. By the time he goes into how theories of accretion can pollute oral narratives and the effect of the written-word in making particular versions of stories more canonical than others, he's made a point.
Fact is, Wheat wasn't the first nor will he be the last. Sir James Frazer's 'The Golden Bough', Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero With a Thousand Faces', etc, etc, etc, are all equally mad. But each of them is attempting to do something very human and touching: they are attempting to detect some order, sanity, ration and reason in an otherwise pretty random and chaotic world -- just as Kubrick was doing, just as Homer was doing...
Actually, that's not such an unreasonable demand. One should be able to consult a document that does inform you, the consumer, about what happens to the information that you give about yourself in the event of a merger.
Take, for example, what might happen in the even of a medical practise being privatised and purchased by an insurance company. Would you like your medical records to become a part of that company's records?