So I'm experimenting with documenting the paths I take on the web over my morning cup(s) of coffee. I think I found a lot of stuff that/. readers of Tim's openp2p piece would also be interested in. Hope you enjoy my morning...
After Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. he goes on to Lesson 2:
For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.
Tim O'Reilly is a great example of a guy who doesn't go on the record until he's got it right. Maybe he's always right, or maybe he doesn't open his mouth if he's wrong. I respect that a lot.
A few weeks ago, I wrote Microsoft Mac FUD, Phooey, complaining about Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit head Kevin Browne's comments on the eve of Macworld.
At this point, it became obvious that I was going to have to dig up to get anywhere. So, I read that one. It's about a comment attributed to Kevin Browne, along the lines of "Apple - Work harder to accelerate Mac OS X sales or Microsoft will exit the Mac market forever." Tim's take:
This is such a despicable tactic. Microsoft embraced Apple and gave them funding at the height of the antitrust investigation, as a way of sustaining the idea that there was still competition in the market. Now that Apple's back on their feet, and OS X is giving them a run for the money, they pull out of the market. This decision may end up as badly for Microsoft's Office division as Lotus' decision to skip Windows.
So when Tim was in Seattle, he was invited to sit down with Tim McDonough, the Director of Marketing for the MBU. He was able to clarify Kevin's comments a bit. Tim: "And he was intrigued by my report that my customers (Unix power users, Java developers, perl hackers, wireless community activists, and other "alpha geeks" of all stripes) are adopting OS X in droves."
I've heard rumors about OS X on x86, and if I find it, I'll definitely give it a whirl. Hearing about it a lot on slashdot, and having a real purty layer on top of BSD could be slightly more useful than cygwin, a slightly-useful Linux layer on top of XP. So let's see what Tim says about these alpha geeks.
Hackers and "alpha geeks" push the envelope, start to use the new technology, and get more out of their systems long before ordinary users even know what's possible.
Well, duh. But the rest of it is slightly more informative.
A good example that's still a bit far out, but that I'm confident is significant. I held a summit of peer-to-peer networking developers, and when we were sitting around having a beer afterwards, a young FreeNet developer said to Kevin Lenzo (who was there because of his early work on IRC infobots): "You sound familiar."
Kevin mentioned that he was the developer of festvox, an open source speech synthesis package, and that he was the source of one of the voices distributed with the package. "Oh, that's why. I listen to you all the time. I pipe IRC to festival so I can listen to it in the background when I'm coding."
Now I'll guarantee that lots of people will routinely be converting text to speech in a few years, and I know it because the hackers are already doing it. It's been possible for a long time, but now it's ripening toward the mainstream.
Ok that's too cool to pass up. Definitely rigging this up on my system, and finally I'll be able to have my technical documentation read to me in a Sean Connery accent.
So, finally, on to Switcher Stories Follow Up.
"... I know several who have started using Darwin on Intel hardware as there[sic] Unix underpinnings of choice... "
Aha! More evidence of this Mac-on-x86 conspiracy.
Todd Hoff writes:
I'm a Windows-only user and I plan to switch to the Mac on my next purchase because of XP's DRM approach. Using XP would be like voluntarily entering a jail cell and closing the door.
From an interface perspective, I don't find the Mac superior.
Amen to your DRM concerns. Apple has been relatively more enlightened on the subject of DRM, recognizing that most users are fundamentally honest, and unwilling to support the extreme position of fear-mongering media executives.
That link is "What Hollywood can learn from Microsoft", by Paul Boutin
When industry gets handed lemons on this scale, it has no choice but to turn them into marketing. A common reckoning is that one-third of software is used illegally, but not every theft represents a lost sale. If economic theory has any claim on the real world, Microsoft's pricing should naturally gravitate toward producing an optimum amount of theft. That is, thieves who wouldn't use the product if they had to pay for it, but who might become future customers or who become part of a network of users that makes the software more valuable to legitimate buyers.
...
A sore subject at its antitrust trial, for instance, was Microsoft's practice of awarding large discounts to computer makers who bought a Windows license for every machine they shipped, whether or not Windows was actually loaded. This was supposed to be proof of monopolistic intent, but the only real competitor for Windows is a Windows bootleg. Microsoft's pricing strategy was designed to induce customers not to steal.
...
The entertainment industry is still getting used to the idea that anybody who wants to take the trouble can get its products for free. But as Microsoft has been showing for years, that's no excuse for not making bundles of money.
I assure you, the rest of the piece is just as insightful.
No. This means that any mechanism that must be circumvented to allow home brew software must also circumvent the copy protection. The fact that they're doing it for a legitimate purpose does not neccesarily make the act itself legal.
I disagree with your assertion of "presumption of guilt". I'd read it as, "The fact that they're doing it for an illegitimate purpose does not necessarily make the act itself illegal."
There have been some setbacks, like DeCSS, but Napster won it's argument, that the system's primary purpose was the distribution of music, not the distribution of copyrighted content, even though an unholy percentage of the traded content was "illegal". I remain confident that the DeCSS rulings will eventually be overturned, once the case gets high enough.
Actually, perl to the rescue again. I recently needed to do some work with libraries exporting a COM interface, and all the docs and currenly-existing scripts/libs were written in vbscript. Long story short, I was super-impressed with perl's COM support on windows (ditch ActiveState, the win32 build of the main branch works correctly - I had problems with AS's version, like using variables in VT_ARRAYs), and the vbscript to perl conversion is practically scriptable itself.
Bottom line, no reason anyone should be stuck with stupid scripting languages, even on windows.
As I see it, the.NET Framework spirit makes a lot of sense to me, it's a step in the right direction.
I totally agree. What has been a huge source of frustration for me is when I want to improve / utilize someone else's application in a way they didn't think of.
On Linux: chances are, I've got the source, and can do pretty much whatever the hell I want. But if I don't, or if I don't want to take the time-hit to read the whole damn thing (anyone read the netcat source? *shudder*), there's a good chance I can just have perl grab the output and pipe it into whatever form I need it to be in.
On Windows: no such luck. It's exceedingly unlikely that I have the source for the app, and there's a very good chance that the only way to interact with the data is the GUI, so unless I build something that will hook the window and grab the frame to read its text (I've heard that this is one way to go, but never tried), I'm SOL. I'll be manually save-as'ing or text-select cut-n-pasting.
If.NET adoption provides everyone a default way of allowing others to hook their logic, that will be fine with me.
Haha. Piqua was always the "Shelbyville" to Troy's "Springfield".
FUNFACT: when Troy was picked as the county seat, back in the day, the rivalry was already so bad that Troy built the courthouse so that the statue on top had its ass pointed at Piqua.
This thread is the funniest article I ever read on slashdot, just because it's so fun to watch Piqua get creamed so bad by people who have never even had to set foot in it to trash-talk...
Hey, don't get me wrong, Troy's no prize-pig itself, resembles the real 'Springfield' in far too many ways, but you can't grow up there without picking up the old rivalries from your entire community... teachers, parents, neighbors, ministers, mayor... They're going to be laughing at the library gaffe for a long time.
I bet the story about being blacklisted would be blacklisted.
That's usually the way filtering software works... they block sites like peacefire that publish banned-lists, so that you don't accidentally find out what you're not allowed to know.
(telemarketers know better in our area to call cellphones ($500 charge min))
What is this $500-charge per minute you speak of? I have recently been telemarketed by my bank, and would be interested in knowledge of "behavioral correction strategies." What area are you speaking of, and are there many areas with similar laws?
Ok, in general I didn't really find your comment stimulating enough to respond to, but I will respond to your "give the rich man a break" sentiment. Oh, and you raise the taxes too much and your taxbase will leave.
We already are one of the highest taxed states in the nation.
Now that's interesting, if not contradictory. If we're the second "highest-taxed" (there's about a billion ambiguities in that statement) state in the land, and the taxbase is still here, it seems to me they're not going to leave, unless it's to go to the #1 highest-taxed state. We could make the tax code much more intelligent, so that we're not so "highly taxed", but people pay an amount proportionate to their income instead of their purchases and vehicles, and that should make everyone happy. High-tax whiners won't have to complain about how high-taxed we are, and the poor won't have to see a higher percentage of their income gobbled up in sales and vehicle taxes than they would with an income tax.
Unless you don't really think we're so highly taxed now...
You think cause some people are rich they owe you something? Fuck that. They don't own you squat, even if they do drive a BMW.
Too many people like you who want to soak the rich and so they won't pay attention to the fact that the government is wasting money like crazy on crackpot stupid programs.
I don't like to ignore government inefficiency. I also don't consider homeless shelters "crackpot stupid" programs. And I don't consider it "soaking" the rich. I consider it shouldering one's responsibility to society. A lot of rich people think they got there without anyone's help, and they get upset when someone suggests they share some of their good fortune with others. I think that's bunk. It hurts to think of a 37-39% chunk coming out of your paycheck, err, excuse me, annual report, but I bet few rich people really pay the amount of the bracket they're in, anyway.
When I make it to the top, I hope I'm a bit more magnimonious with my money than those I see around me. May my words come back to condemn me should a flat-taxer I come to be.
The reason you should be bitter is its MORE TAXES.
"Taxes" do not bother me, per se. What bothers me is how those taxes are collected. Sales taxes, like flat taxes, fall disproportionately on the poor. I have never seen a higher concentration of BMWs anywhere in America than the Seattle area (actually, it gets higher the closer you get to Redmond;) There's plenty of people with enough money to spring for roads, or education, or any of the other worthy government projects, but we're ignoring that money in favor of a 9% sales tax, and huge vehicle taxes.
The frigging state ran huge surpluses in the 90s, and what did they do with that money? SPENT IT ALL. Now that the economy is soft, they want to raise taxes.
I dunno, I only got here in time for the bomb =)
Lets get Tim Eyman in the governorship so we can start voting on EVERYTHING.
Ok, so i haven't been here that long, but long enough to figure out this guy's a crackpot. FYI: Tim Eyman is some perennial anti-tax crusader that frequently gets anti-tax referendums on ballots, and often they get passed. Then an alliance of legislators and the courts get together to figure out how to invalidate it (like, in the space marked "Do not write here", he wrote, "OK").
It's not hard to pitch anti-tax referendums to people, but I'm not convinced that less taxes will make paying for the programs we want any easier. Rather, I think it will just make it more likely that education, health and human services and other populist programs get scrapped for new road construction.
Commute time by monorail will be 100% quicker than bus, good reason for people to change from bus and car.
I doubt it will be 100% quicker.
And are you quite sure people will not be taking a bus to get to the monorail station? The time comparisons I've seen do favor monorail, but they seem to start the race at the point someone steps on the bus or monorail, without worrying about how long it took to get there.
The Cost is high, but if we wait another 15 years (or is it 20 now, that light rail has been voted on) it will be 5 billion.
That's not a reason. If we wait forever, the cost will be 0.
I'm glad they didn't do that, because that would mean that I(a Georgia resident) would be paying for it. I think they are setting a Nice Precedent by Not asking for funds.
No fair. I'm a Washington resident, and I'm paying for your construction projects.
(a) The company is estimating $100 million per mile (light rail would be ~ $14 million / mile)
(b) it's connecting Ballard and West Seattle (like needing a Western Passage so building one from Lake Erie to Superior, ie it goes nowhere)
(c) the company building it is estimating that 80% of the ridership will be taken off of buses,rather than roads.
(d) WA doesn't have an income tax, so the brunt of payment is falling on non-new car owning citizens (new cars aren't taxed), and disproportionately on the poor.
(e) even if everything was perfect, it would still only connect ballard and west seattle. so what? we're gonna build a light rail system *too* in order to actually get to the frickin' airport?
(f) Why the hell didn't they try to get federal funding? We have the dubious distinction of being the first huge construction project in history without feds backing us, and we didn't even ask for money from them. WTF? I don't think that's a record I want my city to hold...
Hey, monorails are great, technology, ra, but we got lanley'd so bad. It passed by 800 votes. That's a slim majority for 45% of eligible voters for $2 billion in costs, without a federal dime or a state income tax.
No, he's got a real good point. Of course, by the time I read the article, two intelligent posts had managed to float their way up to the surface. The problem isn't with idiots on slashdot. They've always been there. The problem is moderation.
I think a lot of people have noticed a stark decline in slashdot quality the last three or four weeks. This is about the time the editors changed the code to post notice about your mod points on the top of the front page when you log in. According to CmdrTaco, the number of mod points in use jumped from 4 per 10 comments to ~8 per 10 comments. To me this means two things:
there is twice as much uselessly moderated crap at +4 and +5.
half the moderators running loose on slashdot are people who until recently never bothered to read the discussions, as they would have figured out they had mod-points at that point, under the old system.
This is dangerous. We're talking about a Byzantine failure model with half of our population being bent on our destruction. We can tolerate 20-25%, but once half the moderators are aligned against intelligent conversation, the system breaks down.
Might want to read Taco's journal. He talks about the moderation system, and they're trying to figure out what to do about the sudden inflation of mod-points. They're not working very fast, granted, but they're working.
It's also time for everyone to start thinking about what's broken, specifically, as opposed to the general "slashdot is totally populated by trolls" theory. The population of slashdot has not changed significantly in the last month! But the way we listen to them has. And so we're hearing more useless chatter. Slashdot isn't dead, it's just broken. I've come up with some ideas that I'll post to my journal - or a story about the slashdot malaise that may or may not get posted on the front page - to solicit public comments on what should be changed/fixed. Wish I had already, but been busy.
Don't worry though. I'm sure that if slashdot does die, whatever succeeds it will first be posted about on slashdot. =)
So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.
You:
Maybe a little bit more research was warranted other than going to the UltimateTV.com website before countering...
Read my post. From ZDNet, the man writing the article specifically stated that when he called Microsoft, they said they weren't discontinuing the product. How does that jibe with the original poster claiming they did announce it?
Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV
I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.
The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.
But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.
And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."
So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.
Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.
If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.
The desire to hand the responsiblity over to someone else is clear.
Bah. If that were true, he'd be looking at all the available filtering options that are already out there.
The super-parent is just saying that he believes no child, regardless of age, should have any censorship imposed. An idea that, while perhaps noble, is hardly one shared by the vast majority of American parents. I favor the approach of a parent taking the time to surf with their child, rather than setting up NetNanny to do the parenting and answer the tough questions with a flat, unarguable, "No".
I don't let my kids on the internet unless I'm sitting in the same room.
and look at what your response is
if you want to hand over responsibility for deciding what's appropriate for your kids to some fscking government contractor - please put your kids up for adoption now.
Obviously the poster is being *very* responsible as a parent, by making sure he knows what kind of crazy shit his kid is getting in to. Contrary to handing over the responsibility to NeuStar, he's in the same room as his kid, making the judgements himself.
I suppose if I had a seven or eight-year-old, I would surf with them. They'd have to crack my account to surf by themselves, which seems fair. So I'd put some filters up after that, and wait for my kid to crack those, too. It's only irresponsible when they think you don't care what they see.
So I'd say the parent is handling the responsibility of being a "parent" quite well. (yuck yuck)
Ok, the most important thing to remember is that everything Microsoft does has to be evaluated in the context of making money. They can illegally abuse a monopoly and still make money, because they could outfight and outplan the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration doesn't want a fight.
But it's very unlikely that they can somehow reveal their plans to take over the world by targeting every Intenet user with buffer-overflow exploits. First of all, if they did want to control your machine...well, you're using win98. They wrote your operating system. So they could have included a backdoor, and you don't have to worry about where you surf. Second of all, this plan to "take over the world" would produce a consumer backlash, and more people would switch to Mac and Linux, which would cost Microsoft money. If Microsoft loses money, it can't pay its employees (well, after a couple years..), so they leave, and Microsoft doesn't exist anymore.
Third of all, non-IE browsers don't load ActiveX, so the overflow couldn't be in ActiveX. Fourth of all, attempting to 0wN machines that just surf to its websites would be illegal, like criminally illegal, not just antitrust-illegal. You'd have to click some EULA first, like the one that comes with new versions of Media Player...
Mono and glibc are open source projects. It's not unlikely that they might support DRM, but any DRM server that allowed authentication by open-source products deserves what its got coming to it. If you wanted to take the DRM out, you could, and recompile. Fairly trivial, at least until we're all running trusted hardware platforms. And we all pray that day never comes.
It is very unlikely that people that write open-source Free Software under the GPL will "protect their DRM" by using some Microsoft DRM initiative. Very unlikely. So I would argue that Linux is, in fact, immune.
You give Microsoft way too much credit. Look at how many marketing and PR gaffes they make. The Media Player and SP1 EULAs are a good example. Now they've got hospitals' legal departments wondering whether they can use an unpatched OS, or agree to MS's EULA in violation of whatever that hospital-records security bill is. HIPPA? I have no idea who let that EULA out, but they probably received holy hell for it. Oh, and EULAs probably aren't enforceable. Especially if you don't read them. So if MS was really doing something criminal you could sue them / arrest the board despite your acceptance of the EULA.
I'm a slash fanatic. I encourage thoughtful discussion instead of reactionary nonsense. I keep telling people the system works. And when I read a troll article, which that one definitely was (sloppy editors), I expect that most of the comments that are highly moderated are from a reasonable point of view, ie they know that the article is a troll. Hate to use your post as a counter-example, but it really didn't fit into the +4 category.
Good points. And keep in mind that a lot of security fixes that break non-MS apps are due to lousy implementations by the third-party vendor. Microsoft makes the rules for how to code something (for example, an app that hooks the TCP/IP stack). They say, if you follow these rules, your app will not break in the future. Third-party vendors then go and hook the TCP/IP stack in some totally unpredictable way, which should be a bug/broken implementation, except it happens to work at the time. And then it becomes popular. And Microsoft gets in this position where if they want to make changes, they have to convince the vendor to recode their stupid app, or risk having a bunch of people going around saying "I installed XX patch and then my broken-app stopped working!"
If someone found a way to solve this problem (and stay profitable), I'm sure they'd listen...
Slashdot Mirror
this is obviously a joke, folks...
a funny joke, too =)
Started, predictably enough, at slashdot. Found the article Tim O'Reilly Says Piracy is Progressive Taxation. Well, I had to check that out.
After Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. he goes on to Lesson 2: Tim O'Reilly is a great example of a guy who doesn't go on the record until he's got it right. Maybe he's always right, or maybe he doesn't open his mouth if he's wrong. I respect that a lot.
So I tried to find more of his pieces online. First, went to his oreillynet author page. The next piece I hadn't read was the Switcher Stories Follow-Up, but as I had not yet read the original, I thought I'd do that first. At this point, it became obvious that I was going to have to dig up to get anywhere. So, I read that one. It's about a comment attributed to Kevin Browne, along the lines of "Apple - Work harder to accelerate Mac OS X sales or Microsoft will exit the Mac market forever." Tim's take: So when Tim was in Seattle, he was invited to sit down with Tim McDonough, the Director of Marketing for the MBU. He was able to clarify Kevin's comments a bit. Tim: "And he was intrigued by my report that my customers (Unix power users, Java developers, perl hackers, wireless community activists, and other "alpha geeks" of all stripes) are adopting OS X in droves."
I've heard rumors about OS X on x86, and if I find it, I'll definitely give it a whirl. Hearing about it a lot on slashdot, and having a real purty layer on top of BSD could be slightly more useful than cygwin, a slightly-useful Linux layer on top of XP. So let's see what Tim says about these alpha geeks. Well, duh. But the rest of it is slightly more informative. Ok that's too cool to pass up. Definitely rigging this up on my system, and finally I'll be able to have my technical documentation read to me in a Sean Connery accent. So, finally, on to Switcher Stories Follow Up. Aha! More evidence of this Mac-on-x86 conspiracy. That link is "What Hollywood can learn from Microsoft", by Paul Boutin I assure you, the rest of the piece is just as insightful.
Congratulations, you crazy kids! Best wishes!
And why would we tell you that anywhere but here? =)
No. This means that any mechanism that must be circumvented to allow home brew software must also circumvent the copy protection. The fact that they're doing it for a legitimate purpose does not neccesarily make the act itself legal.
I disagree with your assertion of "presumption of guilt". I'd read it as, "The fact that they're doing it for an illegitimate purpose does not necessarily make the act itself illegal."
There have been some setbacks, like DeCSS, but Napster won it's argument, that the system's primary purpose was the distribution of music, not the distribution of copyrighted content, even though an unholy percentage of the traded content was "illegal". I remain confident that the DeCSS rulings will eventually be overturned, once the case gets high enough.
Actually, perl to the rescue again. I recently needed to do some work with libraries exporting a COM interface, and all the docs and currenly-existing scripts/libs were written in vbscript. Long story short, I was super-impressed with perl's COM support on windows (ditch ActiveState, the win32 build of the main branch works correctly - I had problems with AS's version, like using variables in VT_ARRAYs), and the vbscript to perl conversion is practically scriptable itself.
Bottom line, no reason anyone should be stuck with stupid scripting languages, even on windows.
As I see it, the .NET Framework spirit makes a lot of sense to me, it's a step in the right direction.
.NET adoption provides everyone a default way of allowing others to hook their logic, that will be fine with me.
I totally agree. What has been a huge source of frustration for me is when I want to improve / utilize someone else's application in a way they didn't think of.
On Linux: chances are, I've got the source, and can do pretty much whatever the hell I want. But if I don't, or if I don't want to take the time-hit to read the whole damn thing (anyone read the netcat source? *shudder*), there's a good chance I can just have perl grab the output and pipe it into whatever form I need it to be in.
On Windows: no such luck. It's exceedingly unlikely that I have the source for the app, and there's a very good chance that the only way to interact with the data is the GUI, so unless I build something that will hook the window and grab the frame to read its text (I've heard that this is one way to go, but never tried), I'm SOL. I'll be manually save-as'ing or text-select cut-n-pasting.
If
IF people were paying their fair share, they'd all pay the same PERCENTAGE of their income to taxes-- and thus the richer you are, the more you'd pay.
This isn't really fair either, actually, because EVERYONE gets the same benefit from the government and has the same cost to the government.
Truely fair would be for everyone to pay the same DOLLAR AMOUNT in taxes to the government.
But you'd never stand for that, screaming about how "unfair" it is based on bullshit assumptions (like the rich get more from government-- often made, never backed up. Fucking idiot statement, that.)
But no, you want to tax a higher percentage from the more wealthy-- which is pure bigotry.
You might as well be advocating that gay people and black people pay more taxes than straight or white people-- cause its just as bigoted an idea.
EOD
Haha. Piqua was always the "Shelbyville" to Troy's "Springfield".
FUNFACT: when Troy was picked as the county seat, back in the day, the rivalry was already so bad that Troy built the courthouse so that the statue on top had its ass pointed at Piqua.
This thread is the funniest article I ever read on slashdot, just because it's so fun to watch Piqua get creamed so bad by people who have never even had to set foot in it to trash-talk...
Hey, don't get me wrong, Troy's no prize-pig itself, resembles the real 'Springfield' in far too many ways, but you can't grow up there without picking up the old rivalries from your entire community... teachers, parents, neighbors, ministers, mayor... They're going to be laughing at the library gaffe for a long time.
Haha so am I... =)
I bet the story about being blacklisted would be blacklisted.
That's usually the way filtering software works... they block sites like peacefire that publish banned-lists, so that you don't accidentally find out what you're not allowed to know.
(telemarketers know better in our area to call cellphones ($500 charge min))
What is this $500-charge per minute you speak of? I have recently been telemarketed by my bank, and would be interested in knowledge of "behavioral correction strategies." What area are you speaking of, and are there many areas with similar laws?
Ok, in general I didn't really find your comment stimulating enough to respond to, but I will respond to your "give the rich man a break" sentiment.
Oh, and you raise the taxes too much and your taxbase will leave.
We already are one of the highest taxed states in the nation.
Now that's interesting, if not contradictory. If we're the second "highest-taxed" (there's about a billion ambiguities in that statement) state in the land, and the taxbase is still here, it seems to me they're not going to leave, unless it's to go to the #1 highest-taxed state. We could make the tax code much more intelligent, so that we're not so "highly taxed", but people pay an amount proportionate to their income instead of their purchases and vehicles, and that should make everyone happy. High-tax whiners won't have to complain about how high-taxed we are, and the poor won't have to see a higher percentage of their income gobbled up in sales and vehicle taxes than they would with an income tax.
Unless you don't really think we're so highly taxed now...
You think cause some people are rich they owe you something? Fuck that. They don't own you squat, even if they do drive a BMW.
Too many people like you who want to soak the rich and so they won't pay attention to the fact that the government is wasting money like crazy on crackpot stupid programs.
I don't like to ignore government inefficiency. I also don't consider homeless shelters "crackpot stupid" programs. And I don't consider it "soaking" the rich. I consider it shouldering one's responsibility to society. A lot of rich people think they got there without anyone's help, and they get upset when someone suggests they share some of their good fortune with others. I think that's bunk. It hurts to think of a 37-39% chunk coming out of your paycheck, err, excuse me, annual report, but I bet few rich people really pay the amount of the bracket they're in, anyway.
When I make it to the top, I hope I'm a bit more magnimonious with my money than those I see around me. May my words come back to condemn me should a flat-taxer I come to be.
MS might sick [sic] their lawyers...
yuck yuck yuck
=)
The reason you should be bitter is its MORE TAXES.
;) There's plenty of people with enough money to spring for roads, or education, or any of the other worthy government projects, but we're ignoring that money in favor of a 9% sales tax, and huge vehicle taxes.
"Taxes" do not bother me, per se. What bothers me is how those taxes are collected. Sales taxes, like flat taxes, fall disproportionately on the poor. I have never seen a higher concentration of BMWs anywhere in America than the Seattle area (actually, it gets higher the closer you get to Redmond
The frigging state ran huge surpluses in the 90s, and what did they do with that money? SPENT IT ALL. Now that the economy is soft, they want to raise taxes.
I dunno, I only got here in time for the bomb =)
Lets get Tim Eyman in the governorship so we can start voting on EVERYTHING.
Ok, so i haven't been here that long, but long enough to figure out this guy's a crackpot. FYI: Tim Eyman is some perennial anti-tax crusader that frequently gets anti-tax referendums on ballots, and often they get passed. Then an alliance of legislators and the courts get together to figure out how to invalidate it (like, in the space marked "Do not write here", he wrote, "OK").
It's not hard to pitch anti-tax referendums to people, but I'm not convinced that less taxes will make paying for the programs we want any easier. Rather, I think it will just make it more likely that education, health and human services and other populist programs get scrapped for new road construction.
Commute time by monorail will be 100% quicker than bus, good reason for people to change from bus and car.
I doubt it will be 100% quicker.
And are you quite sure people will not be taking a bus to get to the monorail station? The time comparisons I've seen do favor monorail, but they seem to start the race at the point someone steps on the bus or monorail, without worrying about how long it took to get there.
The Cost is high, but if we wait another 15 years (or is it 20 now, that light rail has been voted on) it will be 5 billion.
That's not a reason. If we wait forever, the cost will be 0.
New cars aren't taxed in Washington? GOD DAMMIT! I want my $5500 back!
Haha, it's *Washington*! I'm sure they're taxed, they're just not Monorail-taxed.
I'm glad they didn't do that, because that would mean that I(a Georgia resident) would be paying for it. I think they are setting a Nice Precedent by Not asking for funds.
No fair. I'm a Washington resident, and I'm paying for your construction projects.
but I live in Seattle, and I voted against it.
(a) The company is estimating $100 million per mile (light rail would be ~ $14 million / mile)
(b) it's connecting Ballard and West Seattle (like needing a Western Passage so building one from Lake Erie to Superior, ie it goes nowhere)
(c) the company building it is estimating that 80%
of the ridership will be taken off of buses,rather than roads.
(d) WA doesn't have an income tax, so the brunt of payment is falling on non-new car owning citizens (new cars aren't taxed), and disproportionately on the poor.
(e) even if everything was perfect, it would still only connect ballard and west seattle. so what? we're gonna build a light rail system *too* in order to actually get to the frickin' airport?
(f) Why the hell didn't they try to get federal funding? We have the dubious distinction of being the first huge construction project in history without feds backing us, and we didn't even ask for money from them. WTF? I don't think that's a record I want my city to hold...
Hey, monorails are great, technology, ra, but we got lanley'd so bad. It passed by 800 votes. That's a slim majority for 45% of eligible voters for $2 billion in costs, without a federal dime or a state income tax.
I think a lot of people have noticed a stark decline in slashdot quality the last three or four weeks. This is about the time the editors changed the code to post notice about your mod points on the top of the front page when you log in. According to CmdrTaco, the number of mod points in use jumped from 4 per 10 comments to ~8 per 10 comments. To me this means two things:
This is dangerous. We're talking about a Byzantine failure model with half of our population being bent on our destruction. We can tolerate 20-25%, but once half the moderators are aligned against intelligent conversation, the system breaks down.
Might want to read Taco's journal. He talks about the moderation system, and they're trying to figure out what to do about the sudden inflation of mod-points. They're not working very fast, granted, but they're working.
It's also time for everyone to start thinking about what's broken, specifically, as opposed to the general "slashdot is totally populated by trolls" theory. The population of slashdot has not changed significantly in the last month! But the way we listen to them has. And so we're hearing more useless chatter. Slashdot isn't dead, it's just broken. I've come up with some ideas that I'll post to my journal - or a story about the slashdot malaise that may or may not get posted on the front page - to solicit public comments on what should be changed/fixed. Wish I had already, but been busy.
Don't worry though. I'm sure that if slashdot does die, whatever succeeds it will first be posted about on slashdot. =)
I stand by my original statement.
So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.
You:
Maybe a little bit more research was warranted other than going to the UltimateTV.com website before countering...
Read my post. From ZDNet, the man writing the article specifically stated that when he called Microsoft, they said they weren't discontinuing the product. How does that jibe with the original poster claiming they did announce it?
Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV
I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.
The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.
This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:
But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.
So I found that article.
And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."
So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.
Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.
If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.
the next badge readers will be based on a combination of Gilette razors in your pocket? =)
The desire to hand the responsiblity over to someone else is clear.
Bah. If that were true, he'd be looking at all the available filtering options that are already out there.
The super-parent is just saying that he believes no child, regardless of age, should have any censorship imposed. An idea that, while perhaps noble, is hardly one shared by the vast majority of American parents. I favor the approach of a parent taking the time to surf with their child, rather than setting up NetNanny to do the parenting and answer the tough questions with a flat, unarguable, "No".
Ouch. Umm, look at what you're quoting.
I don't let my kids on the internet unless I'm sitting in the same room.
and look at what your response is
if you want to hand over responsibility for deciding what's appropriate for your kids to some fscking government contractor - please put your kids up for adoption now.
Obviously the poster is being *very* responsible as a parent, by making sure he knows what kind of crazy shit his kid is getting in to. Contrary to handing over the responsibility to NeuStar, he's in the same room as his kid, making the judgements himself.
I suppose if I had a seven or eight-year-old, I would surf with them. They'd have to crack my account to surf by themselves, which seems fair. So I'd put some filters up after that, and wait for my kid to crack those, too. It's only irresponsible when they think you don't care what they see.
So I'd say the parent is handling the responsibility of being a "parent" quite well. (yuck yuck)
Thank you for writing a real response.
Ok, the most important thing to remember is that everything Microsoft does has to be evaluated in the context of making money. They can illegally abuse a monopoly and still make money, because they could outfight and outplan the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration doesn't want a fight.
But it's very unlikely that they can somehow reveal their plans to take over the world by targeting every Intenet user with buffer-overflow exploits. First of all, if they did want to control your machine...well, you're using win98. They wrote your operating system. So they could have included a backdoor, and you don't have to worry about where you surf. Second of all, this plan to "take over the world" would produce a consumer backlash, and more people would switch to Mac and Linux, which would cost Microsoft money. If Microsoft loses money, it can't pay its employees (well, after a couple years..), so they leave, and Microsoft doesn't exist anymore.
Third of all, non-IE browsers don't load ActiveX, so the overflow couldn't be in ActiveX. Fourth of all, attempting to 0wN machines that just surf to its websites would be illegal, like criminally illegal, not just antitrust-illegal. You'd have to click some EULA first, like the one that comes with new versions of Media Player...
Mono and glibc are open source projects. It's not unlikely that they might support DRM, but any DRM server that allowed authentication by open-source products deserves what its got coming to it. If you wanted to take the DRM out, you could, and recompile. Fairly trivial, at least until we're all running trusted hardware platforms. And we all pray that day never comes.
It is very unlikely that people that write open-source Free Software under the GPL will "protect their DRM" by using some Microsoft DRM initiative. Very unlikely. So I would argue that Linux is, in fact, immune.
You give Microsoft way too much credit. Look at how many marketing and PR gaffes they make. The Media Player and SP1 EULAs are a good example. Now they've got hospitals' legal departments wondering whether they can use an unpatched OS, or agree to MS's EULA in violation of whatever that hospital-records security bill is. HIPPA? I have no idea who let that EULA out, but they probably received holy hell for it. Oh, and EULAs probably aren't enforceable. Especially if you don't read them. So if MS was really doing something criminal you could sue them / arrest the board despite your acceptance of the EULA.
I'm a slash fanatic. I encourage thoughtful discussion instead of reactionary nonsense. I keep telling people the system works. And when I read a troll article, which that one definitely was (sloppy editors), I expect that most of the comments that are highly moderated are from a reasonable point of view, ie they know that the article is a troll. Hate to use your post as a counter-example, but it really didn't fit into the +4 category.
Good points. And keep in mind that a lot of security fixes that break non-MS apps are due to lousy implementations by the third-party vendor. Microsoft makes the rules for how to code something (for example, an app that hooks the TCP/IP stack). They say, if you follow these rules, your app will not break in the future. Third-party vendors then go and hook the TCP/IP stack in some totally unpredictable way, which should be a bug/broken implementation, except it happens to work at the time. And then it becomes popular. And Microsoft gets in this position where if they want to make changes, they have to convince the vendor to recode their stupid app, or risk having a bunch of people going around saying "I installed XX patch and then my broken-app stopped working!"
If someone found a way to solve this problem (and stay profitable), I'm sure they'd listen...