DC spokesperson: "And coming up next week, DC intends to sue Radio Shack for distributing their IP without permission."
DC flackey whispering to spokesperson: "Uh, actually, we partnered with Radio Shack. They're supposed to be giving it away."
DC spokesperson: "Retraction (damn PR people can't get anything right!) Instead, we will sue a World Wide Web page known as Slash/DOT or something like that for talking about our IP."
DC flackey, whispering: "Uh, I don't think we can do that."
DC spokesperson whispering back: "So what? This is fantastic publicity! Let's sue everyone! What's your mother's name? We'll sue her!" ________________
How refreshing! Someone breaks into a site and the FBI is not called in, pols are not running around screaming about the world coming to an end, and USA Today is not running a story about how evil hackers are about to steal every cent you have in your online bank account.
Instead, we have an open acknowledgment from the victims, a full story about what happened and what steps are being taken now, simple instructions for the users, and the proper amount of credit to the guys who cracked the site.
A little extra work for the/. crew, a good reminder for them to take security more seriously, but otherwise no big deal.
If only mainstream media could be this mature and accurate. ________________
""Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of sXXXch, or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances."
Filthy-minded founding fathers. Someone oughta ban that piece of filth literature with the above quote... ________________
I realize that if you fail to perform your job, you can have a huge impact on a companies ability to generate revenue, but I reiterate, you don't generate revenue. Sales and Marketing are driving corporate revenue and thats something that you are never going to do.
You are not the first person to point this out, but, to be honest, I've never understood this logic. Isn't everyone in the organization needed? If any one group suddenly quit, wouldn't the whole organization go down?
For instance, if the sales folks stopped selling, we go out of business. But by the same token, if the IT folks stop developing, the sales folks have nothing to sell, and we go out of business. Same result.
Since every worker is needed to do his or her part, what difference does it make if one group is playing the part of the revenue-makers, and another group is playing the part of the cost center? If either group quits, the results are the same.
It's that "cost center" mentality that drove me nuts, for it directly led to the odd concept that sales folks were more important than the IT staff. They weren't. We were all equally needed. ________________
"...employers frequently seem unwilling to consider hiring older, experienced IT workers. The attention that employers give to recruiting college graduates disproportionately focuses on just a handful of jobs. Moreover, many employers treat IT employees poorly and undervalue their contributions to companies. For instance, programmers typically find themselves working in isolation on fragmented tasks that do not allow them to see the larger purpose of a project or to interact with other people."
That certainly has been true in my experience. It was rare to find a good manager, one who made going to work a pleasure. Usually I had to merely take pleasure in doing a good job despite management's efforts or the corporate politics.
When a developer finds a good fit with a clued-in manager, they tend to stay. For all the rest of us, the PHBs eventually get us disgusted enough to move on.
As for undervaluing the contribution of IT, that was always the case. Sales & Marketing were the stars, always, and IT was an afterthought. That was true both in corporte culture as well as management opportunities. The sales guys, no matter how idiotic they were, got to move up the ladder far faster than the best of the IT staff. I always attributed that to the VPs not knowing what we did but actually did understand what the sales guys did.
These idiots are beginning to get what they deserve if IT staff are leaving in droves.
________________
"You have to remeber that most people on the street do not have access to 'news' information that doesn't originate from one of the main corporate 'news' outlets. "
Perhaps they don't have easy access, but a library would provide Net access. Or a bookstore would provide other points of view. Or training in how to detect specious arguments could help them tell when mainstream news is misleading them.
It may not be as easy, but it is certainly possible. The alternative is to have their thinking led by others, not a healthy situation. ________________
Re:Good review, but one English nitpick
on
Spirit Of The Web
·
· Score: 2
Despite your sophomoric response, I double-checked with Strunk & White. I can find no reference to -wise anywhere in the book. Feel free to point out an actual reference. ________________
"Yet most Americans believe violence among the young is skyrocketing, and more than 80% told the Gallup poll last year that they believe the Internet is at least partly responsible. that's how good a propaganda job the neo-Luddites and their media have done."
Mainstream media hypes problems, such as isolated acts of school violence, to such an extent that people who point out crime is going down are given funny looks. 'Conventional' wisdom tells us we are living in horrible times with our children under fire at school, and under attack by Hollywood and the Net.
Conventional wisdom is dead wrong. For this, I blame the mainstream media. Now that we have access to news on the Net, from a wide variety of sources, I'm constantly amazed at the emptiness of the nightly newscasts. So many interesting stories are happening around the world, and they report instead on Al Gore sneezing in Michigan or something.
Just when the corporations got full control over the mainstream media and managed to eviscerate it, the Net came along and gave us access to more information. Now they are going after the Net. If they succeed, we will all be dumbed-down.
________________
Re:Jeez, the web is the new frontier
on
Spirit Of The Web
·
· Score: 2
"...how barbed wire is destroying the spirit of the West..."
A very apt analogy. In fact, there are commentaries comparing the current attempts to rope off the Net to the range wars of the 1800s which resulted from the invention of barbed wire. See, for instance, this article which describes the history of that time and how it applies to patents and such in our day.
As with the range wars, there were extremists on both sides (some who wanted to rope off every bit of land for themselves at the expense of the public good, and those who wanted to take even private grazing land for themselves). It is an interesting analogy. ________________
Good review, but one English nitpick
on
Spirit Of The Web
·
· Score: 2
A good review, and the book sounds interesting and worth reading. However, it bothers me to see this sentence:
"For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times, information-wise. "
Please don't write 'xxxxxxxx-wise'. I would suggest the sentence be re-written such as this:
"For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times in the area of information," or "...in the use of information." ________________
"The Redmond, Wash.-based software company said the address notification feature was only created as a helpful tool for consumers."
Silly me, I thought it was a helpful tool for Microsoft to lock in users and spam others! How could I be so clueless as to not realize it was solely a helpful tool for consumers?
I'm so grateful to Microsoft PR, for without them, I wouldn't know what to think! ________________
"On Tuesday, the Justice Department placed the 51-page PDF file online, with project information such as names, phone numbers, and government security clearances erased with thick black bars.
But it turns out that the information wasn't removed after all. Anyone with Adobe-supplied software -- or a text editor and a little bit of time -- can view the unaltered document.
It's uncertain whether the irony of public disclosure of personal information, by the very people who are in the midst of claiming they can be trusted to protect it, was lost on Justice Department officials, because they declined to comment on Wednesday. "
No further comment needed. A sarcastic remark is left as an exercise for the reader... ________________
The process of non-standard kernel patches is just fine with Torvalds. "On the whole we've actually tried to come up with compromises that most people can live with," he said. "It's fairly clear that at least early on you will see kernel patches for specific uses -- that's actually been going on forever, and it's just a sign of the fact that it takes a while to get to a solution that works for all the different cases." He continued:
"That's how things work in Open Source. If my taste ended up being the limiting factor for somebody, the whole point of Open Source would be gone."
It sounds inevitable that a Big Iron fork will occur, and as Linus says above, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes when you have competing factions trying to do the same thing and causing confusion (as in the UNIX wars of the past). But when you have different solutions for different problems, yet everyone is moving forward together overall, it should be manageable. Indeed, it should be helpful, for it maximizes the solution for each platform.
________________
Attempting to justify that these email are not spam, the letter from MS says:
"The e-mail you received was an invitation from MSN Explorer, sent on behalf of an existing user who changed their e-mail address and wants you to try MSN Explorer," said Microsoft customer support in a letter that appeared to be an official statement.
Let's see if their definition of non-spam holds up...
"The e-mail you received was an invitation from GetRichQuick, Inc., sent on behalf of an existing spammer who wants you to try his product."
Hmmm...nope, certainly not spam. Nosiree, nothing even remotely hamlike about it.
PR 101: When caught doing something wrong, immediately claim that you weren't actually doing anything wrong. Then define what you were doing so that it matches what is wrong in every sense of the definition...
________________
"What are people's thoughts? What are the benefits of this bill? Do high-tech suits just want this bill to pass because they are unwilling to hire americans at a competetive rate? Or is there a real shortage of people to hire in the country?"
Having worked with H1B visa holders in a previous job, I think the answer to your questions are that both are true. In this job, these workers were consultants and made a good rate (certainly the going rate for the area). Was the company saving money by hiring these H1B consultants? No, but they needed workers and they fit the bill.
On the other hand, I have read about companies who exploit these workers by not paying them market rates, making them work hard hours with no compensation, and so on. This tactic works as the H1B workers cannot easily change jobs, and therefore are stuck with the bad managers.
My opinion is that there is a little of both going on. There is a shortage of certain skilled positions, and if a foreign worker has those skills they will be snapped up. There is also the very human tendency to take advantage of workers who have far less power to do anything about it. No doubt both situations are in the marketplace, and the pressure for more H1B workers comes from both camps. ________________
That is as may be, but I've read about digital paper from a number of sources, not just Negroponte. It's clear they are actively working (and beginning to succeed) at create electronic paper that will look and feel like regular paper. ________________
"The regulations were relaxed after pressure from industry but Madison believes that this may have driven the NSA to find ways to carry out surveillance. "They're not going to give in over exporting strong cryptography without getting something in return," he says."
Although nothing concrete is stated in this article, it's good to remember the tendency government agencies have to never turn back from their goals. Any time you think you have won a victory for free-speech, or privacy rights, or whatever, and that that big, bad evil government has been beaten, realize that they probably just made it look as if they were beaten. Meanwhile, they made a quid-pro-quo agreement to backdoor their way around the defeat. We then don't hear about this alternative method until years down the road. At which point they are actively working on yet another method of achieving their goals.
Never assume the government is as powerless or as clueless as they may appear. ________________
"There's something to be said for being able to hold a book in your hand. The flexible pages, the weight, the simple fact that you know it is something tangible.
All of the current "digital books" that I've seen are a kind of tablet and you click buttons to make the pages scroll by"
The key words in your thought are "that I've seen." Future digital books will look just like regular books, if that is what you want. Note this discussion, including the comments by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte.
So in the near future, a digital book will have all the advantages of a regular book plus all the extra advantages of digital. Once that happens, regular books will be marginalized except among the folks who reject any new concept.
Then the next generation will come along and will say, "Hey, I don't care about some old book-style paper smell and feel! I want some rad new paradigm for my books", and the book form may change entirely.
At a minimum, however, regular dead-tree books are doomed. Digital holds too much promise.
________________
There is certainly a need for textbooks that exist primarily to educate, not primarly to generate profits. Note this quote from the article:
"In this climate of vanishingly thin margins, the most successful textbook is little more than a loss leader, and one with more modest sales is a disaster. Every book has to be a home run. K-12 biology books often don't mention evolution for fear of losing sales in socially conservative school districts. History books avoid controversy by propagating the myth that John Brown was insane, or by failing to mention that the Vietnam war began as a war of independence in a French colony."
So as to avoid losing sales from those who would be offended, truth is sacrificed. This is a dangerous slope upon which to stand. Since there are a myriad of opinions and sacred cows in the world, to be so focused on the money at the expense of teaching reality is to eventually reach the point where you teach nothing controversial. Only feel-good, rah-rah, aren't we wonderful material will get printed.
It's somewhat different in the general book market where a variety of opinions is still considered a good thing. But in the textbook market, I think the open source concept is needed, if only to provide an alternative to the money-above-all crowd. ________________
"Not to question your integrity, but this I cannot believe. The use of shopping records by lawenforcement before a crime was commited? I could see how they would be able to subpoena them afterwards for use in the trial, but only if they had a suspect and wanted circumstantial evidence or prehaps to prove premeditation. Your example smells of -- oh I forget the term -- something infringing on privacy, presumed innocence. "
Actually, you are quite right, and I mis-remembered the incident. I cannot provide a link, as I don't recall where I read it, though it was in the past couple of weeks. However, your comment jogged my memory that it was, in fact, after they had a suspect that they took the shopping records and found some suspicious purchases which they then presented to the jury.
My apologies for the fuzzy memory, but I was speaking off the top of my head to illustrate a point. In today's society, it can be hard to remember what has already happened, and what is merely possible if rights are abused.
"Of the nine high court members, only Justice Stephen Breyer dissented from the full court's action. He said the case ''significantly affects an important sector of the economy.''"
One the one hand, it would have been nice to resolve this case soon. On the other hand, since nothing truly substantial will probably result from this eventually, taking longer for it to be resolved is probably a good thing. It forces Microsoft to 'behave' more than they would otherwise do, and the longer they remain in check the longer competitors can roll out good products.
To my mind, the best thing that came of this court case against Microsoft was slowing them down in their voracious ways. ________________
"Such use of and reliance on computer data leads to the central paranoia of this world - a fear of what the records might contain and what might be used to your detriment by someone who has better access to data."
We do indeed see this beginning to happen today. Our personal data is rapidly being gathered into various databases and the ability to cross-check these repositories of information can yield amazing results. We've read of criminals who were caught when the police checked the shopping records of people using their discount card at the supermarket. When a person was found to have bought an unusually large number of items that would facilitate a crime, the police descended and caught the guy.
Think the insurance companies aren't interested in who is checking out cancer survivor discussion groups, or information about AIDS? Think the corporations aren't interested in knowing about which employees engage in 'dangerous' hobbies or habits?
Aspects of Shockwave Rider will absolutely come true, and are already beginning to happen. ________________
"Although we appreciate your apparent curiosity and interest in determining how Digital Convergence's proprietary:CueCat and:Cue technology operates, you must appreciate that Digital Convergence will enforce its rights against those unlawfully using its proprietary technology."
Since they gave:CueCat away, what makes them think we can't take it apart? I got a:CueCat in the mail, unsolicited. I did not install the software as I have no use for the thing, and therefore I saw no license or agreement of any kind. I got something in the mail without asking for it, and if I want to take it apart I can.
Two analogies come to mind:
1. Receiving 'something for nothing' in the mail in order to encourage you to buy a product or perform a service (such as getting a dollar bill attached to a survey they would like you to take). The law says that I am under no obligation to perform the service, and I am welcome to the dollar.
2. When you own a physical object, such as an alarm clock, you are welcome to throw it against the wall, or smash it with a hammer, or take it apart into little pieces, or disconnect the alarm, or whatever you feel like. It's your clock.
With:CueCat, they sent it to me in the mail, unsolicited. Therefore it is now legally mine, and item 1 has legal precedence. Then, as item 2 follows, if I own this thing, I can take it apart if I want.
So when DC says we are "unlawfully using its proprietary technology," I'm curious to know which laws they are pretending apply in this case? ________________
"An Internet company that's given away one million cat-shaped barcode scanners to magazine subscribers and Radio Shack shoppers is claiming victory in a skirmish with hackers over how the feline freebies can be used."
PR 101: Manage expectations. When you have completely lost, declare unconditional victory.
"We had to make a bold statement up front that we didn't authorize you to do this, we encrypted our cat data, and you're not allowed to take over that output," says David Mathews, vice president of new technology at Dallas-based Digital Convergence.
Bold statement (n.) - Impotent claim that is ignored by everyone. See political speech, press release.
"Digital Convergence was aghast. "If people take over our cat and start using their own databases, the world becomes cloudy," says Mathews. "Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online."
Oh the horrors! The world will become cloudy if we don't stop using our own databases! Why, we might even get access to our own information and then where would we be? I mean, think it through people! Is a free world the kind of world you want for your children?
"By way of example, Mathews points to one hack, created by network engineer Michael Rothwell, that allows users to scan the ISBN number on the back of a book with the CueCat. "You could swipe a code, and it would serve up a page on Amazon.com. But what if [the publisher] doesn't want it to go to Amazon.com, they want it to go to web site under their control..."
Think of the implications! We might wind up at a web site that is not under their control!
"By the Linux community taking over and redirecting where these swipes go to, they were circumventing our software."
Slashdot Mirror
DC flackey whispering to spokesperson: "Uh, actually, we partnered with Radio Shack. They're supposed to be giving it away."
DC spokesperson: "Retraction (damn PR people can't get anything right!) Instead, we will sue a World Wide Web page known as Slash/DOT or something like that for talking about our IP."
DC flackey, whispering: "Uh, I don't think we can do that."
DC spokesperson whispering back: "So what? This is fantastic publicity! Let's sue everyone! What's your mother's name? We'll sue her!"
________________
It was the LATER story I was referring to.
________________
Instead, we have an open acknowledgment from the victims, a full story about what happened and what steps are being taken now, simple instructions for the users, and the proper amount of credit to the guys who cracked the site.
A little extra work for the /. crew, a good reminder for them to take security more seriously, but otherwise no big deal.
If only mainstream media could be this mature and accurate.
________________
""Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of sXXXch, or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances."
Filthy-minded founding fathers. Someone oughta ban that piece of filth literature with the above quote...
________________
You are not the first person to point this out, but, to be honest, I've never understood this logic. Isn't everyone in the organization needed? If any one group suddenly quit, wouldn't the whole organization go down?
For instance, if the sales folks stopped selling, we go out of business. But by the same token, if the IT folks stop developing, the sales folks have nothing to sell, and we go out of business. Same result.
Since every worker is needed to do his or her part, what difference does it make if one group is playing the part of the revenue-makers, and another group is playing the part of the cost center? If either group quits, the results are the same.
It's that "cost center" mentality that drove me nuts, for it directly led to the odd concept that sales folks were more important than the IT staff. They weren't. We were all equally needed.
________________
That certainly has been true in my experience. It was rare to find a good manager, one who made going to work a pleasure. Usually I had to merely take pleasure in doing a good job despite management's efforts or the corporate politics.
When a developer finds a good fit with a clued-in manager, they tend to stay. For all the rest of us, the PHBs eventually get us disgusted enough to move on.
As for undervaluing the contribution of IT, that was always the case. Sales & Marketing were the stars, always, and IT was an afterthought. That was true both in corporte culture as well as management opportunities. The sales guys, no matter how idiotic they were, got to move up the ladder far faster than the best of the IT staff. I always attributed that to the VPs not knowing what we did but actually did understand what the sales guys did.
These idiots are beginning to get what they deserve if IT staff are leaving in droves.
________________
Perhaps they don't have easy access, but a library would provide Net access. Or a bookstore would provide other points of view. Or training in how to detect specious arguments could help them tell when mainstream news is misleading them.
It may not be as easy, but it is certainly possible. The alternative is to have their thinking led by others, not a healthy situation.
________________
Despite your sophomoric response, I double-checked with Strunk & White. I can find no reference to -wise anywhere in the book. Feel free to point out an actual reference.
________________
Mainstream media hypes problems, such as isolated acts of school violence, to such an extent that people who point out crime is going down are given funny looks. 'Conventional' wisdom tells us we are living in horrible times with our children under fire at school, and under attack by Hollywood and the Net.
Conventional wisdom is dead wrong. For this, I blame the mainstream media. Now that we have access to news on the Net, from a wide variety of sources, I'm constantly amazed at the emptiness of the nightly newscasts. So many interesting stories are happening around the world, and they report instead on Al Gore sneezing in Michigan or something.
Just when the corporations got full control over the mainstream media and managed to eviscerate it, the Net came along and gave us access to more information. Now they are going after the Net. If they succeed, we will all be dumbed-down.
________________
A very apt analogy. In fact, there are commentaries comparing the current attempts to rope off the Net to the range wars of the 1800s which resulted from the invention of barbed wire. See, for instance, this article which describes the history of that time and how it applies to patents and such in our day.
As with the range wars, there were extremists on both sides (some who wanted to rope off every bit of land for themselves at the expense of the public good, and those who wanted to take even private grazing land for themselves). It is an interesting analogy.
________________
"For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times, information-wise. "
Please don't write 'xxxxxxxx-wise'. I would suggest the sentence be re-written such as this:
"For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times in the area of information," or "...in the use of information."
________________
"The Redmond, Wash.-based software company said the address notification feature was only created as a helpful tool for consumers."
Silly me, I thought it was a helpful tool for Microsoft to lock in users and spam others! How could I be so clueless as to not realize it was solely a helpful tool for consumers?
I'm so grateful to Microsoft PR, for without them, I wouldn't know what to think!
________________
"On Tuesday, the Justice Department placed the 51-page PDF file online, with project information such as names, phone numbers, and government security clearances erased with thick black bars.
But it turns out that the information wasn't removed after all. Anyone with Adobe-supplied software -- or a text editor and a little bit of time -- can view the unaltered document.
It's uncertain whether the irony of public disclosure of personal information, by the very people who are in the midst of claiming they can be trusted to protect it, was lost on Justice Department officials, because they declined to comment on Wednesday. "
No further comment needed. A sarcastic remark is left as an exercise for the reader...
________________
The process of non-standard kernel patches is just fine with Torvalds. "On the whole we've actually tried to come up with compromises that most people can live with," he said. "It's fairly clear that at least early on you will see kernel patches for specific uses -- that's actually been going on forever, and it's just a sign of the fact that it takes a while to get to a solution that works for all the different cases." He continued:
"That's how things work in Open Source. If my taste ended up being the limiting factor for somebody, the whole point of Open Source would be gone."
It sounds inevitable that a Big Iron fork will occur, and as Linus says above, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes when you have competing factions trying to do the same thing and causing confusion (as in the UNIX wars of the past). But when you have different solutions for different problems, yet everyone is moving forward together overall, it should be manageable. Indeed, it should be helpful, for it maximizes the solution for each platform.
________________
"The e-mail you received was an invitation from MSN Explorer, sent on behalf of an existing user who changed their e-mail address and wants you to try MSN Explorer," said Microsoft customer support in a letter that appeared to be an official statement.
Let's see if their definition of non-spam holds up...
"The e-mail you received was an invitation from GetRichQuick, Inc., sent on behalf of an existing spammer who wants you to try his product."
Hmmm...nope, certainly not spam. Nosiree, nothing even remotely hamlike about it.
PR 101: When caught doing something wrong, immediately claim that you weren't actually doing anything wrong. Then define what you were doing so that it matches what is wrong in every sense of the definition...
________________
Having worked with H1B visa holders in a previous job, I think the answer to your questions are that both are true. In this job, these workers were consultants and made a good rate (certainly the going rate for the area). Was the company saving money by hiring these H1B consultants? No, but they needed workers and they fit the bill.
On the other hand, I have read about companies who exploit these workers by not paying them market rates, making them work hard hours with no compensation, and so on. This tactic works as the H1B workers cannot easily change jobs, and therefore are stuck with the bad managers.
My opinion is that there is a little of both going on. There is a shortage of certain skilled positions, and if a foreign worker has those skills they will be snapped up. There is also the very human tendency to take advantage of workers who have far less power to do anything about it. No doubt both situations are in the marketplace, and the pressure for more H1B workers comes from both camps.
________________
That is as may be, but I've read about digital paper from a number of sources, not just Negroponte. It's clear they are actively working (and beginning to succeed) at create electronic paper that will look and feel like regular paper.
________________
"The regulations were relaxed after pressure from industry but Madison believes that this may have driven the NSA to find ways to carry out surveillance. "They're not going to give in over exporting strong cryptography without getting something in return," he says."
Although nothing concrete is stated in this article, it's good to remember the tendency government agencies have to never turn back from their goals. Any time you think you have won a victory for free-speech, or privacy rights, or whatever, and that that big, bad evil government has been beaten, realize that they probably just made it look as if they were beaten. Meanwhile, they made a quid-pro-quo agreement to backdoor their way around the defeat. We then don't hear about this alternative method until years down the road. At which point they are actively working on yet another method of achieving their goals.
Never assume the government is as powerless or as clueless as they may appear.
________________
The key words in your thought are "that I've seen." Future digital books will look just like regular books, if that is what you want. Note this discussion, including the comments by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte.
So in the near future, a digital book will have all the advantages of a regular book plus all the extra advantages of digital. Once that happens, regular books will be marginalized except among the folks who reject any new concept.
Then the next generation will come along and will say, "Hey, I don't care about some old book-style paper smell and feel! I want some rad new paradigm for my books", and the book form may change entirely.
At a minimum, however, regular dead-tree books are doomed. Digital holds too much promise.
________________
"In this climate of vanishingly thin margins, the most successful textbook is little more than a loss leader, and one with more modest sales is a disaster. Every book has to be a home run. K-12 biology books often don't mention evolution for fear of losing sales in socially conservative school districts. History books avoid controversy by propagating the myth that John Brown was insane, or by failing to mention that the Vietnam war began as a war of independence in a French colony."
So as to avoid losing sales from those who would be offended, truth is sacrificed. This is a dangerous slope upon which to stand. Since there are a myriad of opinions and sacred cows in the world, to be so focused on the money at the expense of teaching reality is to eventually reach the point where you teach nothing controversial. Only feel-good, rah-rah, aren't we wonderful material will get printed.
It's somewhat different in the general book market where a variety of opinions is still considered a good thing. But in the textbook market, I think the open source concept is needed, if only to provide an alternative to the money-above-all crowd.
________________
Actually, you are quite right, and I mis-remembered the incident. I cannot provide a link, as I don't recall where I read it, though it was in the past couple of weeks. However, your comment jogged my memory that it was, in fact, after they had a suspect that they took the shopping records and found some suspicious purchases which they then presented to the jury.
My apologies for the fuzzy memory, but I was speaking off the top of my head to illustrate a point. In today's society, it can be hard to remember what has already happened, and what is merely possible if rights are abused.
Thanks for the correction.
________________
"Of the nine high court members, only Justice Stephen Breyer dissented from the full court's action. He said the case ''significantly affects an important sector of the economy.''"
One the one hand, it would have been nice to resolve this case soon. On the other hand, since nothing truly substantial will probably result from this eventually, taking longer for it to be resolved is probably a good thing. It forces Microsoft to 'behave' more than they would otherwise do, and the longer they remain in check the longer competitors can roll out good products.
To my mind, the best thing that came of this court case against Microsoft was slowing them down in their voracious ways.
________________
We do indeed see this beginning to happen today. Our personal data is rapidly being gathered into various databases and the ability to cross-check these repositories of information can yield amazing results. We've read of criminals who were caught when the police checked the shopping records of people using their discount card at the supermarket. When a person was found to have bought an unusually large number of items that would facilitate a crime, the police descended and caught the guy.
Think the insurance companies aren't interested in who is checking out cancer survivor discussion groups, or information about AIDS? Think the corporations aren't interested in knowing about which employees engage in 'dangerous' hobbies or habits?
Aspects of Shockwave Rider will absolutely come true, and are already beginning to happen.
________________
"Although we appreciate your apparent curiosity and interest in determining how Digital Convergence's proprietary :CueCat and :Cue technology operates, you must appreciate that Digital Convergence will enforce its rights against those unlawfully using its proprietary technology."
Since they gave :CueCat away, what makes them think we can't take it apart? I got a :CueCat in the mail, unsolicited. I did not install the software as I have no use for the thing, and therefore I saw no license or agreement of any kind. I got something in the mail without asking for it, and if I want to take it apart I can.
Two analogies come to mind:
1. Receiving 'something for nothing' in the mail in order to encourage you to buy a product or perform a service (such as getting a dollar bill attached to a survey they would like you to take). The law says that I am under no obligation to perform the service, and I am welcome to the dollar.
2. When you own a physical object, such as an alarm clock, you are welcome to throw it against the wall, or smash it with a hammer, or take it apart into little pieces, or disconnect the alarm, or whatever you feel like. It's your clock.
With :CueCat, they sent it to me in the mail, unsolicited. Therefore it is now legally mine, and item 1 has legal precedence. Then, as item 2 follows, if I own this thing, I can take it apart if I want.
So when DC says we are "unlawfully using its proprietary technology," I'm curious to know which laws they are pretending apply in this case?
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"An Internet company that's given away one million cat-shaped barcode scanners to magazine subscribers and Radio Shack shoppers is claiming victory in a skirmish with hackers over how the feline freebies can be used."
PR 101: Manage expectations. When you have completely lost, declare unconditional victory.
"We had to make a bold statement up front that we didn't authorize you to do this, we encrypted our cat data, and you're not allowed to take over that output," says David Mathews, vice president of new technology at Dallas-based Digital Convergence.
Bold statement (n.) - Impotent claim that is ignored by everyone. See political speech, press release.
"Digital Convergence was aghast. "If people take over our cat and start using their own databases, the world becomes cloudy," says Mathews. "Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online."
Oh the horrors! The world will become cloudy if we don't stop using our own databases! Why, we might even get access to our own information and then where would we be? I mean, think it through people! Is a free world the kind of world you want for your children?
"By way of example, Mathews points to one hack, created by network engineer Michael Rothwell, that allows users to scan the ISBN number on the back of a book with the CueCat. "You could swipe a code, and it would serve up a page on Amazon.com. But what if [the publisher] doesn't want it to go to Amazon.com, they want it to go to web site under their control..."
Think of the implications! We might wind up at a web site that is not under their control!
"By the Linux community taking over and redirecting where these swipes go to, they were circumventing our software."
Oh the shame of it all...
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