I've been saying thos for a while now, but the the net user community needs to have a more active (read: effective) lobby in washington. We rely on the EFF, but they are primarily a civil liberties organiation, with slightly more creadibility than the ACLU but far less money.
There are two issues here. First, civil liberties organiations often fall into the trap of using the slippery slope argument to defend their positions, which forced them to take on fases that fall far outside the main stream in order to defend their basic argument. This tends to erode their creadibility within mainstream society.
Second, they are a cibil liberties organization and not all issues of interest to the technically savvy portion of the population are civil liberties issues, so a more wide ranging and inclusive lobbying organiation needs to be established.
This new organization needs to model itself after the NRA. Say what you will about the NRA, but you must recognize that they are expert in the area of fund raising and political power brokering. These are the two areas that define an effective lobbying organization. You many not agree with them but you must recognize expertise when you see it, so when you learn, always learn from the best.
SourceForge is a good place to start if you wanted to get involved in OSS development, but I would question whether such experience is truly valiable in the job market. While it looks good on a grad school application (maybe) it really doesn't demonstrate an ability to work in a close knit team, to meet deadlines, to solve problems, enguage in project management activities (in the more treditional sense).
It's true that working on an OSS project may give you experience in the actual work of software development in that you will be producing code, vary few of the software development skills msot companies look for are really developed or evaluated in the OSS world, unless you think a hiring manager at any company would actually be influenced by your code-fu rating as listed on SourceForge or Avogado. While in the strictest sense it may allow one to sharpen one's coding skills, I seriourly doubt whether it would significantly effect a hiring decision at any large company. On the other hand, if you want to start building up a consulting business it could never hurt to say you were a lead developer on OSS projects A, B, and C.
Usually I have some point of contention with the article referenced or the opinion given but Randy Bush makes good and absoluitly valid points. He's completely correct. Unfortunately some of his solutions are more wishful thinking than potential implementations.
While it's true that ICANN could run on one or two million dollars, what organiation strives to command a smaller empire. It is the nature of those in authority to seek out greater power and methods of expanding their empire. We need to identify a strategy which ill provide incentive to the ICANN leadership toward downsiing and cost effective operations. While these incentives exist in forproffit businesses at risk of bankrupcy if they fail to operate efficiently, ICAN doesn't have this threat handing over their collective head.
Perhaps a strategy could be devised to create such a threat. This seems like the only way to persuage the jugernaught that is ICANN to amend it's ways.
"ReplayTV 4000 requires a broadband Internet connection and a home network.
A PC connected to a home network is required to store and view digital
photos with ReplayTV. 320 hours of storage is only available on the ReplayTV
4320 model. If your ISP limits outbound data transfer speeds, it may take a
day or more to completely send an hour of recorded material over the
Internet. When in use, the Commercial Advance(TM) feature may not skip all
commercials. SONICblue reserves the right to automatically add, modify, or
disable any features in the operating software when your ReplayTV 4000
connects to our server."
Does this mean that ads for which the advertiser pays SonicBlue an addition al fee, get encoded so replayTV won't skip them?
As much as I like OSX and would enjoy using it on Intel base comodity hardware, I can see why Apple hasn't ported it and should not do so.
Apple is making a proffit on it's hardware and as such there is no value to the company to alter it's business model in such a drastic way until such time as they start losing money in their hardware business.
I say this because offering a port of their OS to comodity hardware would completely descimate their hardware business to to offer such a port would nessecerily include removing hardware from their business model completely. Companies line NeXT and Be, had in the past both abandoned their hardware businesses in favor of software as a last corporate gasp - a struggle to remain viable, so if Apple were to take this path, it would be viewed in the context of the past, as if the company were struggling, which for the moment they really are not.
In an ecological sense as well as when you ecamine small town economies in a simplistic sense, Wal-Mart is a great ofender, however the range of damage to the economies of the world doesn't begin to approach the carnage that appears in the wake of Microsoft as it stomps it's way across Tokyo, London, and Washington.
The Open-Source movement doesn't need to select a new enemy so much as recruit allies more effectively. The OSS movement doesn't often address the political issues (to the extent needed) surrounding modification of market models that is at it's core - because the Free Software Foundation isn't getting the job done. This is promarily because the OSS movement is made up primarily of technically savvy indeviduals rather than politically savvy indeviduals. The OSS movement needs to take a page from the NRA with regard to fund raising and political power brokering. OSS proponants often make the mistake of believing that the Electronic Fronteirs Foundation is representing the cause of OSS in the political arena, when in fact the EFF is a civil liberties organization - which serves a great purpose and addresses a great need but does not by charter serve the interests of the OSS community, except where (as is often the case) the civil liberties issues they do address are of interest to the OSS community.
Selecting a new enemy at this time would be admitting defeat. The OSS community doesn't need to select a new enemy so much as confront the selected enemy in the arenas in which it does battle. The Open Source Software Community needs an effective lobying organization acting soecifically in it's interest.
But I refuse to share my results or make them available in any way for peer review, because I have chosen money over credibility within the scientific community.
Seriously, there are good reasons the established scientific publishing system esists. Results are published and processes are defined for peer review in order to confirm findings. This is a perfectly reasonable and effective process that has worked for decades. The argument that the only ay you can make money with a scientific result is a falacy. Intellectual property laws have never been stronger. Patent law has never been stronger and many prescidents have been set with regard to patenting of gene sequences. There really is no excuse for failing to disclose findings in this day and age.
I use linux, I like Linux and I've deployed it in many production enviroments but my enthusiasm for it is tempered by the realization that it's not quite ready to be considered suitable for beginning computer users, and thus probably not appropriate for deployment en masse to the less fortunate in Belgium or elsewhere.
I am making an asumption here, that most of 'the less fortunate' mentioned in the article will be first-time computer users. Given this asumption, you could argue that these uers have history using other OS's, they should be able to adopt the Linux paradigm more easily than those unfortunates who were brought up using MS Windows. On the other hand, if these users are not familiar with computers it would be most beneficial to provide them with the simplest enviroment possible (and by that I don't mean WebTV). With this reasoning, the government should deploy iMAC's to everyone. You'd think Apple would jump if given the opportunity to penetrate this new market.
One of my points was this is a slippery slope. While this forum is for corporate (civil vs. Criminal) law at the moment, it opens the door for such things as criminal trials - not limited to bench trials. in the future.
Lawyers can make appearances by video conference... hmmm, this seems a little inefectual with regard to comonly accepted forms of legal argumentation. Granted, at the moment this forum is only available for certain pretrial motions and delivery of briefs but this opens a door which will lead to full trials being conducted in this sort of forum. A great deal of the usefulness of a lawyer is his/her ability to be persuasive on an indevidual level almost more than on a legal level. Body language and other behaviors have a significant impact on this effectiveness and videoconferencing -while better than audio conferencing- precludes use of numerous argumentitive tools normaly available to jurists.
Certainly this will be of lesser impact in bench trials but what will come of this medium when someone decides to hold a jury trial in this medium? We can only hope the technology takes significant strides before some judge decides to conduct a jury trial this way.
Certainly the law is far too broad, but this is merely a side effect of the drafters not having any idea how it might be applied. I wouldn't go so far as to say the drafters had no technical knowlege (because I have no idea if they did) but certainly they had only a vague idea of what specific crimes that cover within the legislation.
That said, Randall should have been more careful and Intel should Intel should have acted more wisely. Certainly a contractor messing with a client's password file without security consulting requiring 'complete network access and authority to alter' should have such things explicitly spelled out in his contract. It is truly disappointing though, to see that the appeals court will have the final say in this matter.
I live in a 16 year old appt. complex near Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The place is a dump, but at least I can get DSL. This isn't such a big deal except that I've hjad DSL there for over a year and recently found out that the management was concerned that they were losing potential leases because they couldn't offer high speed access.
Aparently even though I got DSL through Verizon a year ago (I talked directly to their network engineering staff), the Verizon call center that handles DSL service subscription hasn't been informed of the hardware installation in the remote servicing my area.
This seems not only to be a failing of Verizon, but also of my appartment management. Their failure to adequately research service offerings in the region has let to undoubtedly thousands of dollars in lost revenue. It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
The moral of the story is, don't trust appartment managers who say, 'sorry, no high speed access' or telephone call centers that say the same thing. Find out directly from the network engineers responsible, whenever possible. As for a Cat-5 infastructure... well, it isn't really nessecery now that wireless networking is of reasonably high quality.
Back 5 (or so) years ago Amazon.com brought the world of (english language) books to the internet, and many have claimed the events of Septerm ber 11th brought the world of internet based news put pf the shadpws into the mainstream. Non-English language literature however, has not seen it's internet coming-of-age.
Perhaps, however, this is a good thing, not that non-english language literature isn't as widely availble on the net, but the fact that it isn't suggests a continued focus on treditional puslishing for such literature.
Whatever your view on electronic puslishing (eBooks, etc...) you must agree that electronic pusblishing is transient. when 'sponsorship' for a publisged work dries up, that work simply would simply disappear. Gone will be the days of 200 year old books being discovered in the musty corner of some atic, many years in the future. If the qualkity of a published work isn't recognized within the lifetime of the author, the work may disappear without a trace, without a single printed and bound copy to be found. While it's true that media (which un-like a website, doesn't require sponsorship to exist) containing the work may exist for a few years after the death of the author, even that is transient. Organizations such as the Long Now Foundation are working to preserve the vast expanse of knowlege published on the internet, but without such organizations, works not published in a physical sense may be lost to time.
For this reason, it's somewhat heartening to see that not all publishing is moving to the internet, even though it may reduce the exposure of the works in question. Granted it's more desirable to gain the widest exposure in the shortest period of time such that the publisher can turn a proffit on works of literature but that proffit margin shouldn't be at the expense of future generations' access to the work.
I guess in a time where anything with the name Linux attached has gone down in flames, it's a good move, but you have to wonder at what point will the company change it's name back? (because they probably will when the Linux desktop marketshare picks up reaches some level that makes it more commercially viable). PR is like that. Jump on any mane that works for as long as it works then run like hell when the name itself doesn't drive customers any longer. This is why old companies had it right: 'General Electric' for example made appliances, but now they also do Insurance and Investment Products. DO you see them changing their name? Of course, by that reasoning VA Software would still be VA Systems (which it was before VA Linux).
First McAffee and now Symantec are willing to ignore the presence of this virus. This article describes Symantec's position on the issue:
Eric Chien, chief researcher at Symantec's antivirus research lab, said that provided a hypothetical keystroke logging tool was used only by the FBI, then Symantec would avoid updating its antivirus tools to detect such a Trojan.
Symantec is yet to hear back from the FBI on its enquiries about Magic Lantern.
"If it was under the control of the FBI, with appropriate technical safeguards in place to prevent possible misuse, and nobody else used it - we wouldn't detect it," said Chien. "However we would detect modified versions that might be used by hackers."
The bigger problem here, though is that these antivirus vendors are violating the public trust and esentially providing faulty products (nothing new in the software industry) intentionally (which is a new prescident).
Furthermore, if antivirus vendors can be currupted this ay in the name of national security, does this mean that OS vendors will do the same, to accomodate the delivery methods chosen by the FBI? Will there be un-closed security holes intentionally left open as delivery vectors (like buffer overflow problems etc.) for 'Magic Lantern'? And regardless of the position of Stmantec that they will try to detect variants of Magic Lantern, what happens when a virus writer succeeds in writing a piece of code with a signature sufficiently similar to the FBI code as to be indestinguishable? the risk introduced here is too great to justify through the promise of improved crime fighting capabilities.
Point Taken. I saw that too. I'm not sure where Jay finds these sad wastes of skin but I remember reading somewhere that they only interview something like 14 people to get the 5-8 clips they usually broadcast. Truly scary.
True. Viewers aren't strictly the direct customers because the viewers don't supply funds directly to the producers, but the viewers do directly effect the valuation of the product, so to say that the viewers aren't the customers (read: End Users) is just as much a misnomer.
It's scary that so many lawmakers in so many countries can make mistakes like this. It just goes to show the power of ill-informed people in large numbers. Blind agreement to treaties like this serve to establish a dangerous trend in international relations.
No longer is the United States leading in introducing new freedoms to people throughout the world, who are subject to governments offering less freedoms that are available in the United States. Instead, the rights (to due process, etc) available in the United States are gradually eaten away to become 'consistant' with the processes of other countries. No longer is America leading the way with regard to international policy. America's leadership durring the Cold War facilitated application of a degree of incluence which is so longer evident. Perhaps the 'war on terrorism' will manifest as the new cold war, and propel the United States into a leadership position once again.
Then again, it can be legitimately argued that that the United States played a leadership role in stripping it's citizens of their civil liverties on an international stage.
It's sad that producers have such a low opinion of viewers these days, that they choose to dumb down otherwise intentionally texdured and compled material. Gene Rodenbury would be rolling over in his grave if his ashes weren't floating in space.
The scary thing is the producers might be right. The steps probably will improve ratings for the show, which is a pathetic comentary on television audiances.
Also, I periodically watched 'Earth: Final Conflict' but this season the producers decided to trash the plot arc and introduce an episodic action driven cookie-cutter plot strategy. There really isn't any good Sci-Fi out there, except perhaps Stargate-SG1 and The Outer Limits.
On the other hand, since none of us are actively producing television series, we don't really have much of a right to complain. Some may say that producers should listen to us because we, the audience, are the 'customers' and are always right, but certainly the changes being made to these shows are based of viewer feedback and focus groups, with the intent to improve ovarall ratings and thus proffit.
Perhaps the programming via subscription model that as tried several times a few years back, needs to be applied to Sci-Fi series. I havn't heard much about this model ($19.95 per season per viewer) recently which leads me to believe the original attempts ere spectacular failures, but perhaps with the more dedicated audiences of Sci-Fi, it would work better.
Theoretically, of you publish your cell phone number and a telemarketer calls it (since it costs you money to recieve calls) you can invoice them $500 - $1500 per call under the Telecommunications Act of 1991
There's always the Max Max strategy for organic gas extraction. Or alternatively, we could just shove a hose up his A**. I doubt it would impact the quality of his writing (or at least the perception of his writing).
The claim with regard to closing the SMB protocol was that the new password-exchange
system (implemented in XP I think) was covered by a method patent. This raises two questions. First, will Microsoft be required to either relinquish this patent or agree not to pursue claims based on this patent (since it's not strictly a patent on a protocol)? Second, What does this mean for Microsoft's other Intellectual Property?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been saying thos for a while now, but the the net user community needs to have a more active (read: effective) lobby in washington. We rely on the EFF, but they are primarily a civil liberties organiation, with slightly more creadibility than the ACLU but far less money.
There are two issues here. First, civil liberties organiations often fall into the trap of using the slippery slope argument to defend their positions, which forced them to take on fases that fall far outside the main stream in order to defend their basic argument. This tends to erode their creadibility within mainstream society.
Second, they are a cibil liberties organization and not all issues of interest to the technically savvy portion of the population are civil liberties issues, so a more wide ranging and inclusive lobbying organiation needs to be established.
This new organization needs to model itself after the NRA. Say what you will about the NRA, but you must recognize that they are expert in the area of fund raising and political power brokering. These are the two areas that define an effective lobbying organization. You many not agree with them but you must recognize expertise when you see it, so when you learn, always learn from the best.
--CTH
SourceForge is a good place to start if you wanted to get involved in OSS development, but I would question whether such experience is truly valiable in the job market. While it looks good on a grad school application (maybe) it really doesn't demonstrate an ability to work in a close knit team, to meet deadlines, to solve problems, enguage in project management activities (in the more treditional sense).
It's true that working on an OSS project may give you experience in the actual work of software development in that you will be producing code, vary few of the software development skills msot companies look for are really developed or evaluated in the OSS world, unless you think a hiring manager at any company would actually be influenced by your code-fu rating as listed on SourceForge or Avogado. While in the strictest sense it may allow one to sharpen one's coding skills, I seriourly doubt whether it would significantly effect a hiring decision at any large company. On the other hand, if you want to start building up a consulting business it could never hurt to say you were a lead developer on OSS projects A, B, and C.
--CTH
Usually I have some point of contention with the article referenced or the opinion given but Randy Bush makes good and absoluitly valid points. He's completely correct. Unfortunately some of his solutions are more wishful thinking than potential implementations.
While it's true that ICANN could run on one or two million dollars, what organiation strives to command a smaller empire. It is the nature of those in authority to seek out greater power and methods of expanding their empire. We need to identify a strategy which ill provide incentive to the ICANN leadership toward downsiing and cost effective operations. While these incentives exist in forproffit businesses at risk of bankrupcy if they fail to operate efficiently, ICAN doesn't have this threat handing over their collective head.
Perhaps a strategy could be devised to create such a threat. This seems like the only way to persuage the jugernaught that is ICANN to amend it's ways.
--CTH
-CTH
As much as I like OSX and would enjoy using it on Intel base comodity hardware, I can see why Apple hasn't ported it and should not do so.
Apple is making a proffit on it's hardware and as such there is no value to the company to alter it's business model in such a drastic way until such time as they start losing money in their hardware business.
I say this because offering a port of their OS to comodity hardware would completely descimate their hardware business to to offer such a port would nessecerily include removing hardware from their business model completely. Companies line NeXT and Be, had in the past both abandoned their hardware businesses in favor of software as a last corporate gasp - a struggle to remain viable, so if Apple were to take this path, it would be viewed in the context of the past, as if the company were struggling, which for the moment they really are not.
--CTH
In an ecological sense as well as when you ecamine small town economies in a simplistic sense, Wal-Mart is a great ofender, however the range of damage to the economies of the world doesn't begin to approach the carnage that appears in the wake of Microsoft as it stomps it's way across Tokyo, London, and Washington.
The Open-Source movement doesn't need to select a new enemy so much as recruit allies more effectively. The OSS movement doesn't often address the political issues (to the extent needed) surrounding modification of market models that is at it's core - because the Free Software Foundation isn't getting the job done. This is promarily because the OSS movement is made up primarily of technically savvy indeviduals rather than politically savvy indeviduals. The OSS movement needs to take a page from the NRA with regard to fund raising and political power brokering. OSS proponants often make the mistake of believing that the Electronic Fronteirs Foundation is representing the cause of OSS in the political arena, when in fact the EFF is a civil liberties organization - which serves a great purpose and addresses a great need but does not by charter serve the interests of the OSS community, except where (as is often the case) the civil liberties issues they do address are of interest to the OSS community.
Selecting a new enemy at this time would be admitting defeat. The OSS community doesn't need to select a new enemy so much as confront the selected enemy in the arenas in which it does battle. The Open Source Software Community needs an effective lobying organization acting soecifically in it's interest.
--CTH
But I refuse to share my results or make them available in any way for peer review, because I have chosen money over credibility within the scientific community.
Seriously, there are good reasons the established scientific publishing system esists. Results are published and processes are defined for peer review in order to confirm findings. This is a perfectly reasonable and effective process that has worked for decades. The argument that the only ay you can make money with a scientific result is a falacy. Intellectual property laws have never been stronger. Patent law has never been stronger and many prescidents have been set with regard to patenting of gene sequences. There really is no excuse for failing to disclose findings in this day and age.
--CTH
I was typing quickly and didn't really think about it. It probably should have been 'iMac'
I use linux, I like Linux and I've deployed it in many production enviroments but my enthusiasm for it is tempered by the realization that it's not quite ready to be considered suitable for beginning computer users, and thus probably not appropriate for deployment en masse to the less fortunate in Belgium or elsewhere.
I am making an asumption here, that most of 'the less fortunate' mentioned in the article will be first-time computer users. Given this asumption, you could argue that these uers have history using other OS's, they should be able to adopt the Linux paradigm more easily than those unfortunates who were brought up using MS Windows. On the other hand, if these users are not familiar with computers it would be most beneficial to provide them with the simplest enviroment possible (and by that I don't mean WebTV). With this reasoning, the government should deploy iMAC's to everyone. You'd think Apple would jump if given the opportunity to penetrate this new market.
--CTH
One of my points was this is a slippery slope. While this forum is for corporate (civil vs. Criminal) law at the moment, it opens the door for such things as criminal trials - not limited to bench trials. in the future.
--CTH
Lawyers can make appearances by video conference... hmmm, this seems a little inefectual with regard to comonly accepted forms of legal argumentation. Granted, at the moment this forum is only available for certain pretrial motions and delivery of briefs but this opens a door which will lead to full trials being conducted in this sort of forum. A great deal of the usefulness of a lawyer is his/her ability to be persuasive on an indevidual level almost more than on a legal level. Body language and other behaviors have a significant impact on this effectiveness and videoconferencing -while better than audio conferencing- precludes use of numerous argumentitive tools normaly available to jurists.
Certainly this will be of lesser impact in bench trials but what will come of this medium when someone decides to hold a jury trial in this medium? We can only hope the technology takes significant strides before some judge decides to conduct a jury trial this way.
--CTH
Certainly the law is far too broad, but this is merely a side effect of the drafters not having any idea how it might be applied. I wouldn't go so far as to say the drafters had no technical knowlege (because I have no idea if they did) but certainly they had only a vague idea of what specific crimes that cover within the legislation.
That said, Randall should have been more careful and Intel should Intel should have acted more wisely. Certainly a contractor messing with a client's password file without security consulting requiring 'complete network access and authority to alter' should have such things explicitly spelled out in his contract. It is truly disappointing though, to see that the appeals court will have the final say in this matter.
--CTH
I live in a 16 year old appt. complex near Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The place is a dump, but at least I can get DSL. This isn't such a big deal except that I've hjad DSL there for over a year and recently found out that the management was concerned that they were losing potential leases because they couldn't offer high speed access.
Aparently even though I got DSL through Verizon a year ago (I talked directly to their network engineering staff), the Verizon call center that handles DSL service subscription hasn't been informed of the hardware installation in the remote servicing my area.
This seems not only to be a failing of Verizon, but also of my appartment management. Their failure to adequately research service offerings in the region has let to undoubtedly thousands of dollars in lost revenue. It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
The moral of the story is, don't trust appartment managers who say, 'sorry, no high speed access' or telephone call centers that say the same thing. Find out directly from the network engineers responsible, whenever possible. As for a Cat-5 infastructure... well, it isn't really nessecery now that wireless networking is of reasonably high quality.
--CTH
Back 5 (or so) years ago Amazon.com brought the world of (english language) books to the internet, and many have claimed the events of Septerm ber 11th brought the world of internet based news put pf the shadpws into the mainstream. Non-English language literature however, has not seen it's internet coming-of-age.
Perhaps, however, this is a good thing, not that non-english language literature isn't as widely availble on the net, but the fact that it isn't suggests a continued focus on treditional puslishing for such literature.
Whatever your view on electronic puslishing (eBooks, etc...) you must agree that electronic pusblishing is transient. when 'sponsorship' for a publisged work dries up, that work simply would simply disappear. Gone will be the days of 200 year old books being discovered in the musty corner of some atic, many years in the future. If the qualkity of a published work isn't recognized within the lifetime of the author, the work may disappear without a trace, without a single printed and bound copy to be found. While it's true that media (which un-like a website, doesn't require sponsorship to exist) containing the work may exist for a few years after the death of the author, even that is transient. Organizations such as the Long Now Foundation are working to preserve the vast expanse of knowlege published on the internet, but without such organizations, works not published in a physical sense may be lost to time.
For this reason, it's somewhat heartening to see that not all publishing is moving to the internet, even though it may reduce the exposure of the works in question. Granted it's more desirable to gain the widest exposure in the shortest period of time such that the publisher can turn a proffit on works of literature but that proffit margin shouldn't be at the expense of future generations' access to the work.
--CTH
I guess in a time where anything with the name Linux attached has gone down in flames, it's a good move, but you have to wonder at what point will the company change it's name back? (because they probably will when the Linux desktop marketshare picks up reaches some level that makes it more commercially viable). PR is like that. Jump on any mane that works for as long as it works then run like hell when the name itself doesn't drive customers any longer. This is why old companies had it right: 'General Electric' for example made appliances, but now they also do Insurance and Investment Products. DO you see them changing their name? Of course, by that reasoning VA Software would still be VA Systems (which it was before VA Linux).
--CTH
Furthermore, if antivirus vendors can be currupted this ay in the name of national security, does this mean that OS vendors will do the same, to accomodate the delivery methods chosen by the FBI? Will there be un-closed security holes intentionally left open as delivery vectors (like buffer overflow problems etc.) for 'Magic Lantern'? And regardless of the position of Stmantec that they will try to detect variants of Magic Lantern, what happens when a virus writer succeeds in writing a piece of code with a signature sufficiently similar to the FBI code as to be indestinguishable? the risk introduced here is too great to justify through the promise of improved crime fighting capabilities.
--CTH
Point Taken. I saw that too. I'm not sure where Jay finds these sad wastes of skin but I remember reading somewhere that they only interview something like 14 people to get the 5-8 clips they usually broadcast. Truly scary.
--CTH
True. Viewers aren't strictly the direct customers because the viewers don't supply funds directly to the producers, but the viewers do directly effect the valuation of the product, so to say that the viewers aren't the customers (read: End Users) is just as much a misnomer.
--CTH
'nuf said.
It's scary that so many lawmakers in so many countries can make mistakes like this. It just goes to show the power of ill-informed people in large numbers. Blind agreement to treaties like this serve to establish a dangerous trend in international relations.
No longer is the United States leading in introducing new freedoms to people throughout the world, who are subject to governments offering less freedoms that are available in the United States. Instead, the rights (to due process, etc) available in the United States are gradually eaten away to become 'consistant' with the processes of other countries. No longer is America leading the way with regard to international policy. America's leadership durring the Cold War facilitated application of a degree of incluence which is so longer evident. Perhaps the 'war on terrorism' will manifest as the new cold war, and propel the United States into a leadership position once again.
Then again, it can be legitimately argued that that the United States played a leadership role in stripping it's citizens of their civil liverties on an international stage.
--CTH
It's sad that producers have such a low opinion of viewers these days, that they choose to dumb down otherwise intentionally texdured and compled material. Gene Rodenbury would be rolling over in his grave if his ashes weren't floating in space.
The scary thing is the producers might be right. The steps probably will improve ratings for the show, which is a pathetic comentary on television audiances.
Also, I periodically watched 'Earth: Final Conflict' but this season the producers decided to trash the plot arc and introduce an episodic action driven cookie-cutter plot strategy. There really isn't any good Sci-Fi out there, except perhaps Stargate-SG1 and The Outer Limits.
On the other hand, since none of us are actively producing television series, we don't really have much of a right to complain. Some may say that producers should listen to us because we, the audience, are the 'customers' and are always right, but certainly the changes being made to these shows are based of viewer feedback and focus groups, with the intent to improve ovarall ratings and thus proffit.
Perhaps the programming via subscription model that as tried several times a few years back, needs to be applied to Sci-Fi series. I havn't heard much about this model ($19.95 per season per viewer) recently which leads me to believe the original attempts ere spectacular failures, but perhaps with the more dedicated audiences of Sci-Fi, it would work better.
--CTH
Why bother telling them off when you could do any one of the following:
:-)
Top 49 Ways To Have Fun With Telemarketers
--CTH
PS: this link to a site that I run (although completely topical) is offered in the spirit of shameless self promotion
Theoretically, of you publish your cell phone number and a telemarketer calls it (since it costs you money to recieve calls) you can invoice them $500 - $1500 per call under the Telecommunications Act of 1991
--CTH
There's always the Max Max strategy for organic gas extraction. Or alternatively, we could just shove a hose up his A**. I doubt it would impact the quality of his writing (or at least the perception of his writing).
The claim with regard to closing the SMB protocol was that the new password-exchange system (implemented in XP I think) was covered by a method patent. This raises two questions. First, will Microsoft be required to either relinquish this patent or agree not to pursue claims based on this patent (since it's not strictly a patent on a protocol)? Second, What does this mean for Microsoft's other Intellectual Property?
--CTH