How does this solve the problem of multinational corporations aggressively moving to quash fair use in all of its guises? Oh, I see. You just want to rip CDs.
How does what solve the problem of multinational corporations ruling politics? If you figure that out, don't waste your time on/. -- incorporate! There's money to be made!
The disobedient citizenry can be useful, too. In another/. article today, Felten vs. RIAA, the premise that DeCSS is on thousands of computers worldwide is being used against the argument that CSS encryption is a trade-secret. I.e. if it's such a great secret, how come everyone knows?
Money rules our world. If you invented a country where money didn't rule, all the money would move out and everyone who was left would be pretty pissed (and broke). Your governor would probably be deposed (happens to me all the time) in favor of one that was more friendly to money. So it goes.
On the other hand, as long as what the entertainment companies want is utter control, an impossible goal, if you can listen to their music despite their best efforts, despite how many politicos they've purchased and how much money they've spent, how is that any sweat off your back? Maybe that's naive, maybe it's pragmatic. In twenty years I imagine more artists than ever will be making their money off of concerts and releasing recordings of their music for free, and the RIAA will probably not have the money to pull as much water or haul as many teenagers to jail as they used to. Christ, in twenty years Reps will remember getting their music off Napster in college. "I didn't inhale" will be replaced by "I deleted within 24 hours and bought the CDs I liked." The RIAA is the big lumbering dinosaur whose brain is so far away from the rest of their body that they don't know they're already dead.
In all likelihood, it will eventually become unprofitable for the RIAA to continue coming up with crack-pot copy-protection schemes. As the man's sig said, "If [only] CDs were as hard to copy as DVDs" - Jay Samit, EMI Senior VP of new media . The point is, right now they don't realize that any CP scheme they dream up is going to be cracked, unless they make it unusable, in which case it won't be purchased. In either case, it's unprofitable for them to continue paying scienticians to dream them up, and they'll stop. Laws be damned, it just won't be cost-effective.
"It will burn up entering our atmosphere, and anything that's left will be no larger than a chihuaua's head."
What would be a neat trick is turning Freenet into a Walled City.. in addition to an anonymous, distributed, redundant file-system, add mutually anonymous chatting, emailing, web-surfing, "direct" file-sends, payment systems... all double-blind and encrypted from the host nodes, sort of like ZeroKnowledge's Freedom system.
"Concept provided. A full proof is left as an exercise to the reader."
THE CROWDS CODE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
If you would like a copy of the code, please send mail to crowds@research.att.com
with a copy of the following license and indicate that you agree to the license.
Request may take a little while to process.
The Crowds software is available for free, non-commercial use in the United States. To obtain the software, please provide the following information...
So it goes. Anyone have a copy of the code? It's a proxy, written in perl. Intriguing enough to want to take a look at.
What an intelligent post. But I must refrain from modding it up in order to reply to it. =)
The question is not "why did they fail" but "why anybody thought they would succeed".
You mention moon rocket vacations, but we've seen insane market speculation before, in the late twenties. It was a time very similar to the late nineties in terms of the delusions of profitibility-for-everyone, and it ended in a very similar way. I found an interesting primary source reflecting on Black Friday (1929), saying that nobody called it that at the time (of course), because it wasn't understood then that that day was the onset of the Depression, only the end of wild speculation.
We had a day like that not long ago ourselves, and our pundits have been proclaiming that it's not the beginning of another contraction/recession/Depression, only a downturn/contraction/recession. The same message prevalent for years after Black Friday. Stocks fall, but slight rebounds at the end of the day, investors encouraging optimism, etc.
The problem was that then, as now, it was a pyramid scheme. The VC was there, even as every start-up was losing money, because the bills were paid with the money of new investors. Send a five dollar bill to everyone whose name is above yours on the list,etc... works great until your name is the last one on the list, and no one is left to send you money.
What's hilarious is that this wasn't enough for a few enterprising folks, who actually set up more recognizable (illegal) pyramid schemes in the middle of the larger one the world economy was caught up in. I remember an article in Wired about Russian gangsters starting some magical online casino where everyone makes money* (* for awhile).
The lesson I take away is not the one learned by looking at failed dot.coms, but by a failed market model. Will those good times ever return? Count on it. It's just waiting for a new generation of suckers to be born. Let's see, at a rate of one a minute...
Yes, yes he can be very clueless about how other people think. He doesn't understand why people are upset with his company. He doesn't understand why people might not like his product. Some people have suggested that he seems a little autistic.
Who does that remind you of?;)
"Smithers, are they booing me?"
"No...uh, they're saying, 'Boo-urns! Boo-urns!'"
Being able to pick up a toy at any time of day or night was considered preferable in some ways to other people and pets that were less flexible and asked for more than a change of batteries.
Don't forget "more socially acceptable." You don't see a lot of executives in high-stress jobs whip out a 12-inch rubber cock during an all-nighter, even though all it asks in return is a change of batteries. =)
It's also cheaper than depending on call girls and such.
That's like not buying orange juice that's not from concentrate. There are some things that you just have to set aside money for, and make your budget from what's left.
I don't think that machines need to be given intellect in order to experience this. A lot of people assign their cars personality as it is. I think of mine more as a steed than a mere vehicle. Think of a captain and his ship, or a pilot and her plane.
Would you ever value artificial intellect at least as much as "real" intellect? The recent ST:TNG marathon on TNN got me thinking about Data's value as a human being. They treat his death on the show as irreversible, yet any software-based life is fundamentally capable of being recreated in a much easier fashion than its biological counterpart. Wouldn't that loss of appreciation for the value of life detract some from the relationship? As much as I value my car, if I wreck it, insurance buys me another one. I don't grieve.
I'm sensing a little bit of built up stress and aggression here. My diagnosis? Unsatisfied with your job.
What has working your ass off for the Man gotten you? If you don't mind a little constructive criticism, you seem a little tense, your interpersonal skills leave a little something to be desired, and with a name like fartmaster, I'm gonna go ahead and assume you've got self-esteem problems, especially if you're making such a good salary. Come back from a hard day at the office and need to blow off a little stress by flamebaiting on slashdot?? That's a little sad, man.
Considering how little regard it's popularly believed that employers have for their employees these days, I think it's cute that you're willing to take a stand for upper management everywhere.
Every message I read has been "suck it up!" or "that's life!" or "welcome to something!" which sounds like the ruminescences of lots of bitter, bitter, bitter people. Except for the ones like "volunteer for everything!" and "ask nicely!", which sound like those from suckers. You want a tip? Here's what you do...
You're a coop. Now, I'm not sure how well this works for high-schoolers compared to college students, but I just finished up a great 8 month coop, and this is why. The place I worked had a lot of coops, but they only had one or two from my university. In other words, they needed to appease me to stay in good relations with my school, because a single, hardworking, creative, young, enthusiastic person like yourself, when pissed off, is a threat. Don't forget it. With that in mind, I took the jobs I wanted, avoided the jobs I didn't, came to work late somedays, left early others, and in general got away with all kinds of shit that a regular employee never could. I took pains to never cross the line so that any action on the company's part would be justified, but within those limits I got to write my own terms.
Forget what the rest of these suckers tell you. Life's not like that. Work's not like that. Either enjoy what you're doing, or quit and find something better. Have you seen OfficeSpace yet? "We don't have a lot of time on this world." Get busy livin, or get busy dyin.
Giving vendors a little jump on the crackers makes some sense. When a bug is announced, it's nice to have patches ready, too, and a whole mess of people ship BIND.
Good form on bugtraq dictates making vendors aware of the problem with plenty of time (typically two to four weeks) to put out a patch, before the bug is disclosed publically. Disclosing to everyone at the same time is definitely a party foul. The people that break this rule are either frustrated about the perceived lack of action on their report to the vendor (which, in BIND's case, would definitely not have been the case), or they're the k1Dd13s that are going to have just as much fun playing with zero-day sploits as they did finding the bug. Note that the closed BIND security group would not prevent hostiles from finding their own bugs, so neither of these exceptions are applicable.
You can be sure that if and when the group is created, nothing will change. The bugs will still be found and fixed on bugtraq. Just now they might be preceded by about 10 minutes on another list.
We all will forge the "Brave New World" to come. Including you unless you die or become a self sufficient hermit. If you really want to be productive do more than just bellow negatives.
I think I can field this one.
It's time to realize that people who can point out the problems in The Plan are being productive. See Disasters, Titanic and Challenger. Additionally, if someone had pointed out to the Good Doctor Guillotin that his invention would allow hundreds of his countrymen to be executed in a day's work, he probably wouldn't have invented it. Maybe his friend that typically voices such practical and wise concerns was silenced by another friend, accusing him of being a Negative Nellie and not being productive enough.
Sharpen that blade, you! I want to hear less thinking and more sharpening!
- the way I understand it, the animal trials do NOT indicate that there are no problems with this. 2% success rate isn't very convincing.
It's worse than that. DNA maintains it's own counter of the number of times it allows itself to be copied. When this counter is decremented down to zero, the cell in question will no longer copy itself, and fresh cells must be copied from ones formed much earlier in the lifetime of the organism, heretofore unused.
When those Scottish lads took the cell from the adult ewe from which they made Dolly, they used a cell that was representative of an 8-year-old sheep or so, which therefore has a much shorter lifespan than a cell from a newly formed lamb. This gives Dolly a much shorter lifespan than a natural-born ewe.
Wondering if clones aren't going to fall apart after 10 years or 100,000 miles isn't as unrealistic as some would think. Just more evidence that there's a lot going on that we don't know, much like a new coder cutting and pasting code from a powerful program and wondering where the extraneous output is coming from.
Jesus! I assume you are the industry. No one else can justifiably have as one-sided an opinion except those who are putting bread on their table by advocating the advancement of cloning.
human lives will be created with little knowledge of what health, or legal (or spiritual) consequences there will be.
This is nothing new, as far as health reasons go, spurious for spiritual ones, and somewhat silly as far as legal reasons go, unless you believe that we should not create or use new technology until the government has carefully studied what uses it thinks we should be allowed to use and worked out every little detail of how we're going to handle it, an idea I find fairly repugnant.
This is not logic. I don't know what the 'health' concerns of a human clone will be. There are noted differences between Dolly and her progenitor, which is interesting. I will infer that there will be differences between a human clone and its progenitor, and will not hop on the band wagon until someone has demonstrated some convincing evidence, as opposed to just dismissing the idea out of hand.
And speaking of dismissing ideas out of hand, are you concluding that the spiritual issues surrounding the cloning of humans are trivial and spurious? I don't understand what led you to that conclusion. In fact I don't even think you honestly believe that. If most of the Christian Churches of the world find the issue spiritually troubling, I think it would be fair to acknowledge that others might find the issue a little less trivial than you do.
And you find the government studying the science before clearing it repugnant? Hmm... I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you here, too. For starters, government's going to be the one with the authority to yea or nay human cloning, and I would prefer they do it with the benefit of large amounts of research, as opposed to without it. Secondly, since most people don't seem to be as blindly enthusiastic about the idea as you seem to be, I should think that this is indeed a government issue, to try to come to grips with a new reality and make a decision that sits well with as much of the country as possible. Not just those whose bread is buttered by the industry. In fact, all of my complaints with government regulation are with its track record so far, which is to say its history of kowtowing to corporate and industrial interests at the expense of the governed. I guess our reps know where their bread is buttered, too.
I'm not going to be awake long enough tonight to refute all your other points, but I don't think others are going to be fooled by your quick dismissals.
I suppose there is the problem of the clone of the famous person growing up under the pressure of inflated expectations. Probably that clone of Einstein will decide to become a performance artist just to defy everybody's assumptions.
This struck me as interesting. What if you went your whole life, just bumping along normally, when you got to college and realized that you looked a whole lot like Albert Einstein, at the same age. Far too much like him to be coincidental. You confront your "parents", who inform you that, in fact, you are as much Einstein as he was.
There are some other issues that would need some clearing up, as well.
I lost my wife before we had a chance to have children. It would be wonderful to have a daughter like her.
You're crossing very deeply programmed relational bonds when you do this. Every culture of humans on this planet has incest taboos. You would be putting your "daughter" in a role/relationship you formally reserved for your lover. Would you inform your "daughter" of this? How do you think she would feel about her place in the family? What do you think she would feel she had to do to live up to your expectations? Would you re-marry? How would your new wife feel about your first wife living in the house in the form of your "daughter". Would you not re-marry, because you feel that you can satisfy the same emotional urges with your "daughter"? There are other issues. Imagine the social pressures felt by children of same-sex coupled households. Do you think there would not be similar pressures placed on your "daughter" by her peers when they find out that she's your daughter and your wife? Kids can be mean. We all poke fun of Maine and Kentucky for this, and now the intelligentsia are considering it? You think your "daughter's" friends won't hear their parents talking?
I think you threw out the idea because of the emotional swell you felt while remembering your wife, but I really don't think this is the sort of situation you really want.
Why roll the genetic dice again when you already had a winning throw?
This is also a very dangerous sentiment. Dice games are what genetics is all about. I don't need to get into the whole argument here, but just remember that your wife might never have existed if her parents had opted for a clone instead of a little more genomic diversity.
I'm going to hazard another guess and say that you adopted cloning without contemplating any of these issues. It scares me that this is how the decision will be made, just like so many other technology-related decisions before it. Without serious forethought given to negative consequences. Scientists and technologists aren't generally known for their contributions to philosophy, theology, ethics and morality, or any of the other ways in which society gauges the value of ideas and behaviors. They're just the peons that invent the shit that the rest of us have to deal with for ever after, usually motivated by ego and greed (arguably the same as anyone else, but still not qualified to make decisions for anyone else. Hell, I don't even remember voting for scientists. Certainly I didn't write any of them a note that said to go ahead and clone some guys.)
My point, in summary, is that we've gotten ourselves into quite a few predicaments due to running around finding genies to let out of bottles, without taking enough time before hand to wonder why we should do this, instead of making others argue why we shouldn't.
Allow me to sit at your feet...
on
Hacking The City
·
· Score: 1
No my friend, the people who will change the world are the same people who got us in the god-awfull mess we are all in at the moment:
Well, we know for sure that it won't be you, friend. You, who in your long lifespan have seen all that there is to see in this wicked world, have achieved sage wisdom in just 29 years. Surely there is nothing left under the sun that would surprise you.
How downright dreary! To realize that you have already discovered everything,and have so many years left to look forward to nothing but stewing in your own bile, or perhaps finding a few to share your misery with, all the while observing those ignorant and naive peons who lead useless lives working for change and better lives for the few people around them that they can affect, knowing that they are just drops in the bucket, and that, while a few people might be better off for these lost souls' compassion, since it hasn't affected you yet, it must be wasted effort.
I apologize for the criticism, but if this is really how you see things, it might help you if someone kicked you in the ass now and then. My favorite line in the article was:
The country stands at the cusp of an enormous sociology experiment: what happens when you give smart, creative people the means to pursue their ideas?
Even if you think JWZ is just yanking his bean on this club, you have to think that this might be a good point, in general. It might even appeal to whatever's left of the uncorrupted child-like desire to be part of the solution rather than the embittered, cynical, establishment preference to be part of the problem.
I know that if I sit around and wait for the ruling parties to have an attack of conscience before I switch to the winning team, I'm going to die pissed and lonely. Be proud to be the underdog! Be suspicious of any establishment, especially anti-establishment establishments, and do your own thing. Hopefully that's working for the world you want to live in, not resignation to failure.
What I've read so far on this comment page seems mostly to be cynical bitching from some very bitter/.ers. Being cynical about the process will forever condemn it in your eyes. You will never see the good that has been done, and if you can't see the good that could be done, you'll join the ranks of those that blow their wad on expensive carz and fast women. My favorite point in the article was:
"The country stands at the cusp of an enormous sociology experiment: what happens when you give smart, creative people the means to pursue their ideas?"
It's a fantastic question, and if you don't think much of JWZ's specific case, you should at least think about this question, and discover if it's worth anything to you, specifically.
I came from a small town in Ohio with an educational system that seemed intent on collapsing in on itself. (It certainly had "support" in this goal from the state legislature, which has always done a good job at appearing to want to entirely dismantle the public education system in Ohio.)
In high school, I clashed constantly with the principal, administrators, and insane policies (we were one of the schools you might have read about 4 years ago, that suspended a 13 year old girl for giving out Certs, because they looked like drugs.) But I found unlikely allies in several of the teachers in the school, who couldn't do anything but lend support invisibly and count the years until they, too, could get the hell out and retire. This is not the way it's supposed to work, I'm sure. Now if the few of us who were so focused on getting out before we got any more embittered towards any authoritarian institution, be it educational, governmental, or workplace, came back with our ideals and our energy after having set out into the world, we could spare generations of kids to come from having their creativity stifled, their independence repressed. We can go bug fixing the system on equal footing, because we all know how futile it is to try to change people's minds when they see you as nothing but a student under their control. At one point in the disciplinary process, the principal of the high school sent me to the then Superintendent of schools, and he surprised me by asking me if I would be interested in returning after college and taking his job. There are some that recognize that we are the type of people that excel at fixing things, be they systems of code or systems of people, and can make a positive difference in "our corner of the world." We choose whether or not we're already too bitter to accept that responsibility.
This list you guys keep referring to does exist. Check out the Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op homepage. A group of us getting together to make purchases from whatever company still exists, hopefully at the best price possible. There's more info on the webpage, including a listserv. The more people we get involved, the cheaper the price of units.
On behalf of the Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op, I would like to inquire about purchasing a quantity of your soon to be defunct and inanimate WebPlayer units. Unfortunately, neither I nor Virgin MegaStore can locate anyone employed by your company. My deepest sympathies regarding your recent failed venture, but perhaps some of the loss can be mitigated by selling returned units to the appliance hacking communitity. Please contact me at schlachAThotmailDOTcom if you can provide any information regarding your company's present contact information. Thanks, and best luck in future endeavors.
moderator: if you could mod this up so that a crusing IAN employee might actually see it, it would be most appreciated.
Given the number of posters expressing interest in getting a WebPlayer for hacking up, a few of us have started the
Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op to collect our bargaining power for bulk rates. If you're interested, please read the page for info and signup. I'm hoping we can get the price down between $25 to $50 per unit. And spread the word! Shouldn't be that difficult with enough people interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's just kind of funny that the White House is looking for the same kind of security experts as Microsoft. =)
McMahon & Tate Advertising:
Sleazy Ad Exec: "You know those radio ads, with the two people with annoying voices talking to each other? I invented that."
Homer punches him in the face
Ad Exec, laughing. Happens all the time.
How does this solve the problem of multinational corporations aggressively moving to quash fair use in all of its guises? Oh, I see. You just want to rip CDs.
/. -- incorporate! There's money to be made!
/. article today, Felten vs. RIAA, the premise that DeCSS is on thousands of computers worldwide is being used against the argument that CSS encryption is a trade-secret. I.e. if it's such a great secret, how come everyone knows?
How does what solve the problem of multinational corporations ruling politics? If you figure that out, don't waste your time on
The disobedient citizenry can be useful, too. In another
Money rules our world. If you invented a country where money didn't rule, all the money would move out and everyone who was left would be pretty pissed (and broke). Your governor would probably be deposed (happens to me all the time) in favor of one that was more friendly to money. So it goes.
On the other hand, as long as what the entertainment companies want is utter control, an impossible goal, if you can listen to their music despite their best efforts, despite how many politicos they've purchased and how much money they've spent, how is that any sweat off your back? Maybe that's naive, maybe it's pragmatic. In twenty years I imagine more artists than ever will be making their money off of concerts and releasing recordings of their music for free, and the RIAA will probably not have the money to pull as much water or haul as many teenagers to jail as they used to. Christ, in twenty years Reps will remember getting their music off Napster in college. "I didn't inhale" will be replaced by "I deleted within 24 hours and bought the CDs I liked." The RIAA is the big lumbering dinosaur whose brain is so far away from the rest of their body that they don't know they're already dead.
In all likelihood, it will eventually become unprofitable for the RIAA to continue coming up with crack-pot copy-protection schemes. As the man's sig said, "If [only] CDs were as hard to copy as DVDs" - Jay Samit, EMI Senior VP of new media . The point is, right now they don't realize that any CP scheme they dream up is going to be cracked, unless they make it unusable, in which case it won't be purchased. In either case, it's unprofitable for them to continue paying scienticians to dream them up, and they'll stop. Laws be damned, it just won't be cost-effective.
"It will burn up entering our atmosphere, and anything that's left will be no larger than a chihuaua's head."
Jesus I wrote a lot. I must be drunk. Cheers,
--schlach
What would be a neat trick is turning Freenet into a Walled City.. in addition to an anonymous, distributed, redundant file-system, add mutually anonymous chatting, emailing, web-surfing, "direct" file-sends, payment systems... all double-blind and encrypted from the host nodes, sort of like ZeroKnowledge's Freedom system.
"Concept provided. A full proof is left as an exercise to the reader."
haha...
from http://www.research.att.com/projects/crowds...
THE CROWDS CODE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
If you would like a copy of the code, please send mail to crowds@research.att.com
with a copy of the following license and indicate that you agree to the license.
Request may take a little while to process.
The Crowds software is available for free, non-commercial use in the United States. To obtain the software, please provide the following information...
So it goes. Anyone have a copy of the code? It's a proxy, written in perl. Intriguing enough to want to take a look at.
What an intelligent post. But I must refrain from modding it up in order to reply to it. =)
The question is not "why did they fail" but "why anybody thought they would succeed".
You mention moon rocket vacations, but we've seen insane market speculation before, in the late twenties. It was a time very similar to the late nineties in terms of the delusions of profitibility-for-everyone, and it ended in a very similar way. I found an interesting primary source reflecting on Black Friday (1929), saying that nobody called it that at the time (of course), because it wasn't understood then that that day was the onset of the Depression, only the end of wild speculation.
We had a day like that not long ago ourselves, and our pundits have been proclaiming that it's not the beginning of another contraction/recession/Depression, only a downturn/contraction/recession. The same message prevalent for years after Black Friday. Stocks fall, but slight rebounds at the end of the day, investors encouraging optimism, etc.
The problem was that then, as now, it was a pyramid scheme. The VC was there, even as every start-up was losing money, because the bills were paid with the money of new investors. Send a five dollar bill to everyone whose name is above yours on the list,etc... works great until your name is the last one on the list, and no one is left to send you money.
What's hilarious is that this wasn't enough for a few enterprising folks, who actually set up more recognizable (illegal) pyramid schemes in the middle of the larger one the world economy was caught up in. I remember an article in Wired about Russian gangsters starting some magical online casino where everyone makes money* (* for awhile).
The lesson I take away is not the one learned by looking at failed dot.coms, but by a failed market model. Will those good times ever return? Count on it. It's just waiting for a new generation of suckers to be born. Let's see, at a rate of one a minute...
Yes, yes he can be very clueless about how other people think. He doesn't understand why people are upset with his company. He doesn't understand why people might not like his product. Some people have suggested that he seems a little autistic.
;)
Who does that remind you of?
"Smithers, are they booing me?"
"No...uh, they're saying, 'Boo-urns! Boo-urns!'"
"...and I don't think we've done enough education of policy-makers to understand the threat."
I wonder how much education will be enough?
$100,000? $200,000? =)
-And how would you like that, Senator Schmidt?
-Oh, tens and twenties.
Mayor Quimby: "Did I, uh, hear a briefcase opening?
Being able to pick up a toy at any time of day or night was considered preferable in some ways to other people and pets that were less flexible and asked for more than a change of batteries.
Don't forget "more socially acceptable." You don't see a lot of executives in high-stress jobs whip out a 12-inch rubber cock during an all-nighter, even though all it asks in return is a change of batteries. =)
It's also cheaper than depending on call girls and such.
That's like not buying orange juice that's not from concentrate. There are some things that you just have to set aside money for, and make your budget from what's left.
I don't think that machines need to be given intellect in order to experience this. A lot of people assign their cars personality as it is. I think of mine more as a steed than a mere vehicle. Think of a captain and his ship, or a pilot and her plane.
Would you ever value artificial intellect at least as much as "real" intellect? The recent ST:TNG marathon on TNN got me thinking about Data's value as a human being. They treat his death on the show as irreversible, yet any software-based life is fundamentally capable of being recreated in a much easier fashion than its biological counterpart. Wouldn't that loss of appreciation for the value of life detract some from the relationship? As much as I value my car, if I wreck it, insurance buys me another one. I don't grieve.
at least my name's not fartmaster =)
I'm sensing a little bit of built up stress and aggression here. My diagnosis? Unsatisfied with your job.
What has working your ass off for the Man gotten you? If you don't mind a little constructive criticism, you seem a little tense, your interpersonal skills leave a little something to be desired, and with a name like fartmaster, I'm gonna go ahead and assume you've got self-esteem problems, especially if you're making such a good salary. Come back from a hard day at the office and need to blow off a little stress by flamebaiting on slashdot?? That's a little sad, man.
Considering how little regard it's popularly believed that employers have for their employees these days, I think it's cute that you're willing to take a stand for upper management everywhere.
Thanks for posting.
Every message I read has been "suck it up!" or "that's life!" or "welcome to something!" which sounds like the ruminescences of lots of bitter, bitter, bitter people. Except for the ones like "volunteer for everything!" and "ask nicely!", which sound like those from suckers. You want a tip? Here's what you do...
You're a coop. Now, I'm not sure how well this works for high-schoolers compared to college students, but I just finished up a great 8 month coop, and this is why. The place I worked had a lot of coops, but they only had one or two from my university. In other words, they needed to appease me to stay in good relations with my school, because a single, hardworking, creative, young, enthusiastic person like yourself, when pissed off, is a threat. Don't forget it. With that in mind, I took the jobs I wanted, avoided the jobs I didn't, came to work late somedays, left early others, and in general got away with all kinds of shit that a regular employee never could. I took pains to never cross the line so that any action on the company's part would be justified, but within those limits I got to write my own terms.
Forget what the rest of these suckers tell you. Life's not like that. Work's not like that. Either enjoy what you're doing, or quit and find something better. Have you seen OfficeSpace yet? "We don't have a lot of time on this world." Get busy livin, or get busy dyin.
Giving vendors a little jump on the crackers makes some sense. When a bug is announced, it's nice to have patches ready, too, and a whole mess of people ship BIND.
Good form on bugtraq dictates making vendors aware of the problem with plenty of time (typically two to four weeks) to put out a patch, before the bug is disclosed publically. Disclosing to everyone at the same time is definitely a party foul. The people that break this rule are either frustrated about the perceived lack of action on their report to the vendor (which, in BIND's case, would definitely not have been the case), or they're the k1Dd13s that are going to have just as much fun playing with zero-day sploits as they did finding the bug. Note that the closed BIND security group would not prevent hostiles from finding their own bugs, so neither of these exceptions are applicable.
You can be sure that if and when the group is created, nothing will change. The bugs will still be found and fixed on bugtraq. Just now they might be preceded by about 10 minutes on another list.
We all will forge the "Brave New World" to come. Including you unless you die or become a self sufficient hermit. If you really want to be productive do more than just bellow negatives.
I think I can field this one.
It's time to realize that people who can point out the problems in The Plan are being productive. See Disasters, Titanic and Challenger. Additionally, if someone had pointed out to the Good Doctor Guillotin that his invention would allow hundreds of his countrymen to be executed in a day's work, he probably wouldn't have invented it. Maybe his friend that typically voices such practical and wise concerns was silenced by another friend, accusing him of being a Negative Nellie and not being productive enough.
Sharpen that blade, you! I want to hear less thinking and more sharpening!
4. On the past success of animal trials.
- the way I understand it, the animal trials do NOT indicate that there are no problems with this. 2% success rate isn't very convincing.
It's worse than that. DNA maintains it's own counter of the number of times it allows itself to be copied. When this counter is decremented down to zero, the cell in question will no longer copy itself, and fresh cells must be copied from ones formed much earlier in the lifetime of the organism, heretofore unused.
When those Scottish lads took the cell from the adult ewe from which they made Dolly, they used a cell that was representative of an 8-year-old sheep or so, which therefore has a much shorter lifespan than a cell from a newly formed lamb. This gives Dolly a much shorter lifespan than a natural-born ewe.
Wondering if clones aren't going to fall apart after 10 years or 100,000 miles isn't as unrealistic as some would think. Just more evidence that there's a lot going on that we don't know, much like a new coder cutting and pasting code from a powerful program and wondering where the extraneous output is coming from.
So...were you for cloning or against it?
Jesus! I assume you are the industry. No one else can justifiably have as one-sided an opinion except those who are putting bread on their table by advocating the advancement of cloning.
human lives will be created with little knowledge of what health, or legal (or spiritual) consequences there will be.
This is nothing new, as far as health reasons go, spurious for spiritual ones, and somewhat silly as far as legal reasons go, unless you believe that we should not create or use new technology until the government has carefully studied what uses it thinks we should be allowed to use and worked out every little detail of how we're going to handle it, an idea I find fairly repugnant.
This is not logic. I don't know what the 'health' concerns of a human clone will be. There are noted differences between Dolly and her progenitor, which is interesting. I will infer that there will be differences between a human clone and its progenitor, and will not hop on the band wagon until someone has demonstrated some convincing evidence, as opposed to just dismissing the idea out of hand.
And speaking of dismissing ideas out of hand, are you concluding that the spiritual issues surrounding the cloning of humans are trivial and spurious? I don't understand what led you to that conclusion. In fact I don't even think you honestly believe that. If most of the Christian Churches of the world find the issue spiritually troubling, I think it would be fair to acknowledge that others might find the issue a little less trivial than you do.
And you find the government studying the science before clearing it repugnant? Hmm... I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you here, too. For starters, government's going to be the one with the authority to yea or nay human cloning, and I would prefer they do it with the benefit of large amounts of research, as opposed to without it. Secondly, since most people don't seem to be as blindly enthusiastic about the idea as you seem to be, I should think that this is indeed a government issue, to try to come to grips with a new reality and make a decision that sits well with as much of the country as possible. Not just those whose bread is buttered by the industry. In fact, all of my complaints with government regulation are with its track record so far, which is to say its history of kowtowing to corporate and industrial interests at the expense of the governed. I guess our reps know where their bread is buttered, too.
I'm not going to be awake long enough tonight to refute all your other points, but I don't think others are going to be fooled by your quick dismissals.
I suppose there is the problem of the clone of the famous person growing up under the pressure of inflated expectations. Probably that clone of Einstein will decide to become a performance artist just to defy everybody's assumptions.
This struck me as interesting. What if you went your whole life, just bumping along normally, when you got to college and realized that you looked a whole lot like Albert Einstein, at the same age. Far too much like him to be coincidental. You confront your "parents", who inform you that, in fact, you are as much Einstein as he was.
There are some other issues that would need some clearing up, as well.
I lost my wife before we had a chance to have children. It would be wonderful to have a daughter like her.
You're crossing very deeply programmed relational bonds when you do this. Every culture of humans on this planet has incest taboos. You would be putting your "daughter" in a role/relationship you formally reserved for your lover. Would you inform your "daughter" of this? How do you think she would feel about her place in the family? What do you think she would feel she had to do to live up to your expectations? Would you re-marry? How would your new wife feel about your first wife living in the house in the form of your "daughter". Would you not re-marry, because you feel that you can satisfy the same emotional urges with your "daughter"? There are other issues. Imagine the social pressures felt by children of same-sex coupled households. Do you think there would not be similar pressures placed on your "daughter" by her peers when they find out that she's your daughter and your wife? Kids can be mean. We all poke fun of Maine and Kentucky for this, and now the intelligentsia are considering it? You think your "daughter's" friends won't hear their parents talking?
I think you threw out the idea because of the emotional swell you felt while remembering your wife, but I really don't think this is the sort of situation you really want.
Why roll the genetic dice again when you already had a winning throw?
This is also a very dangerous sentiment. Dice games are what genetics is all about. I don't need to get into the whole argument here, but just remember that your wife might never have existed if her parents had opted for a clone instead of a little more genomic diversity.
I'm going to hazard another guess and say that you adopted cloning without contemplating any of these issues. It scares me that this is how the decision will be made, just like so many other technology-related decisions before it. Without serious forethought given to negative consequences. Scientists and technologists aren't generally known for their contributions to philosophy, theology, ethics and morality, or any of the other ways in which society gauges the value of ideas and behaviors. They're just the peons that invent the shit that the rest of us have to deal with for ever after, usually motivated by ego and greed (arguably the same as anyone else, but still not qualified to make decisions for anyone else. Hell, I don't even remember voting for scientists. Certainly I didn't write any of them a note that said to go ahead and clone some guys.)
My point, in summary, is that we've gotten ourselves into quite a few predicaments due to running around finding genies to let out of bottles, without taking enough time before hand to wonder why we should do this, instead of making others argue why we shouldn't.
No my friend, the people who will change the world are the same people who got us in the god-awfull mess we are all in at the moment:
Well, we know for sure that it won't be you, friend. You, who in your long lifespan have seen all that there is to see in this wicked world, have achieved sage wisdom in just 29 years. Surely there is nothing left under the sun that would surprise you.
How downright dreary! To realize that you have already discovered everything,and have so many years left to look forward to nothing but stewing in your own bile, or perhaps finding a few to share your misery with, all the while observing those ignorant and naive peons who lead useless lives working for change and better lives for the few people around them that they can affect, knowing that they are just drops in the bucket, and that, while a few people might be better off for these lost souls' compassion, since it hasn't affected you yet, it must be wasted effort.
I apologize for the criticism, but if this is really how you see things, it might help you if someone kicked you in the ass now and then. My favorite line in the article was:
The country stands at the cusp of an enormous sociology experiment: what happens when you give smart, creative people the means to pursue their ideas?
Even if you think JWZ is just yanking his bean on this club, you have to think that this might be a good point, in general. It might even appeal to whatever's left of the uncorrupted child-like desire to be part of the solution rather than the embittered, cynical, establishment preference to be part of the problem.
I know that if I sit around and wait for the ruling parties to have an attack of conscience before I switch to the winning team, I'm going to die pissed and lonely. Be proud to be the underdog! Be suspicious of any establishment, especially anti-establishment establishments, and do your own thing. Hopefully that's working for the world you want to live in, not resignation to failure.
Think globally, act locally. Proud to be a naive peon.
Amen.
/.ers. Being cynical about the process will forever condemn it in your eyes. You will never see the good that has been done, and if you can't see the good that could be done, you'll join the ranks of those that blow their wad on expensive carz and fast women. My favorite point in the article was:
What I've read so far on this comment page seems mostly to be cynical bitching from some very bitter
"The country stands at the cusp of an enormous sociology experiment: what happens when you give smart, creative people the means to pursue their ideas?"
It's a fantastic question, and if you don't think much of JWZ's specific case, you should at least think about this question, and discover if it's worth anything to you, specifically.
I came from a small town in Ohio with an educational system that seemed intent on collapsing in on itself. (It certainly had "support" in this goal from the state legislature, which has always done a good job at appearing to want to entirely dismantle the public education system in Ohio.)
In high school, I clashed constantly with the principal, administrators, and insane policies (we were one of the schools you might have read about 4 years ago, that suspended a 13 year old girl for giving out Certs, because they looked like drugs.) But I found unlikely allies in several of the teachers in the school, who couldn't do anything but lend support invisibly and count the years until they, too, could get the hell out and retire. This is not the way it's supposed to work, I'm sure. Now if the few of us who were so focused on getting out before we got any more embittered towards any authoritarian institution, be it educational, governmental, or workplace, came back with our ideals and our energy after having set out into the world, we could spare generations of kids to come from having their creativity stifled, their independence repressed. We can go bug fixing the system on equal footing, because we all know how futile it is to try to change people's minds when they see you as nothing but a student under their control. At one point in the disciplinary process, the principal of the high school sent me to the then Superintendent of schools, and he surprised me by asking me if I would be interested in returning after college and taking his job. There are some that recognize that we are the type of people that excel at fixing things, be they systems of code or systems of people, and can make a positive difference in "our corner of the world." We choose whether or not we're already too bitter to accept that responsibility.
"Have you found anything yet?"
"We aaaaain't found shit!"
Whoops! Spaceballs! What was I thinking?
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"I knew it! I'm surrounded by Assholes!"
This list you guys keep referring to does exist. Check out the Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op homepage. A group of us getting together to make purchases from whatever company still exists, hopefully at the best price possible. There's more info on the webpage, including a listserv. The more people we get involved, the cheaper the price of units.
Less than $50, though.
Lies! All lies! =)
We are really doing this. Check out the Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op Homepage. And it is impossible to contact anyone at IAN.
Now, I'm not saying I wouldn't step over my own mother for karma, I'm just saying that's not why I asked for moderation in this case. =)
Dear Internet Appliance Network employee,
On behalf of the Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op, I would like to inquire about purchasing a quantity of your soon to be defunct and inanimate WebPlayer units. Unfortunately, neither I nor Virgin MegaStore can locate anyone employed by your company. My deepest sympathies regarding your recent failed venture, but perhaps some of the loss can be mitigated by selling returned units to the appliance hacking communitity. Please contact me at schlachAThotmailDOTcom if you can provide any information regarding your company's present contact information. Thanks, and best luck in future endeavors.
moderator: if you could mod this up so that a crusing IAN employee might actually see it, it would be most appreciated.
Given the number of posters expressing interest in getting a WebPlayer for hacking up, a few of us have started the Virgin WebPlayer Co-Op to collect our bargaining power for bulk rates. If you're interested, please read the page for info and signup. I'm hoping we can get the price down between $25 to $50 per unit. And spread the word! Shouldn't be that difficult with enough people interested.
Would you mind posting the email and the Use Agreement you signed onto when you purchased the player?
Whups! Seemed to have moved since then, with no forwarding address..
A nice stunt, but they've still got your credit card #, and I bet they're confident that Visa can track you down.