You were on a roll there, at least, for a while. But then you lost me with the "confiscate AIM from AOL" idea. How would you like it if the government came in, took your shirt, and told you it was for the good of the state? Not too good. So stop bitching about AOL - they're just in it for money.
The real concern is, why does AOL have a stranglehold on the IM market? Because no one has written a reasonable open-source client - and GAIM, et. al. do not count - that's just piggybacking off of AOL's protocol. How about writing a good, open-source IM client without a centralized server? Another/. reader and myself have been looking into the possibility of such a thing. Only open-source can make IP a thing of the past, so go out and claim as much for the open-source world as you can!
One: over the next few years, all those CFC's that we used until the 90's are going to start chugging ozone like it was beer, and we're all going to get a nice tan. Is it possible that this idea, proposed first for T minus 1,000,000,000 years, might have practical use in the near future. After all, no one wants Atlantic City to become Atlantis City, right?
Two: What sort of implications does a "slight shift" in the earth's orbit have in light of Chaos and Complexity Theory. I mean, if a butterfly flapping it's wings can have such a drastic effect on the earth, what could we do to the galaxy? Probably not much, but who knows what sort of cosmic tangle we could stumble into...
First of all, we will never rid ourselves of the idea of encryption - that is how we protect data from others. In addition, breaking RSA is not as trivial as the media makes it out to be. The chances of a random teen in Ireland finding an efficient way to factor large composites is remarkably slim. Just because no one has shown that a problem is "hard" does not imply that it is not. In fact, I attended the P=NP lecture at Harvard (the minesweeper thing), and heard an interesting theory that the problem might be a Goedel problem: one whose solution is not determined by any existing mathematical axioms. Furthermore, if it is a Goedel problem, it is entirely possible that that fact cannot be proven!
Furthermore, "Plan B", as you call it, has been under development for some time. Theoretically, a quantum computer would be able to test many possible factors simultaneously, thus reducing the problem of factoring large numbers to a constant-time (O(1), for you math geeks) problem. However, algorithms for quantum cryptography using phase-shifting of the wavepacket are being perfected by several groups.
Which is all well and good, except that the best quantum computer to date is one bit. That's actually okay, since the current maximum bitsize for a quantum compiler is also one bit. Pretty soon, a quantum computer will be able to show that 4 = 2 * 2.
When I get unsolicited phone calls, I will sometimes ask them to hold and put the phone down in front of the radio, playing the worst crap I can find. Then I pick up, ask who they were looking for, and put them on hold again. After doing that a few times, I tell them that the office is closing, and they should call back tomorrow.
Other times, I argue about the price or quality of their product for five or ten minutes before they realize just how much money they're losing on me. The beleaguered voice of a telemarketer saying "But... but... there's no monthly fee!" can make me laugh like nothing else.
Deregulation happened for the public providers, but not for the bulk B2B providers. They refuse to lower prices to the little guys, and the little guys are complaining a lot.
In 1994, I made my first call in to a SLIP service. I saw newsgroups and pr0n galore, and bought a book called "The Internet Yellow Pages". Mostly it was a listing of FTP and Gopher sites, with a few W3's in there. But I didn't get a web browser until 1995 because the web was useless. Then I got NCSA Mosaic, and things were good.
But you know, I never got all the web pages to display right, even when the important ones could all be listed and reviewed in a 200-page book. The web was never browser-neutral, because the html spec. wasn't designed for what it does today, and the W3C is not going to push forward too fast, so we're stuck.
At my job, we need to write ASP's (sorry) that take that into account, and use IE's <object> tag and Netscape's <embed> tag in order to accomodate those customers. Lynx? Forget it, we embed RealPlayer! Maybe you could get Konqueror to work if you can stomach the fact that KDE looks slightly like Windoze, but I doubt it.
The web was never browser-neutral, and might never be so. But as the web advances, more tags will be taken into the HTML standard, and what was browser-specific today will not be tomorrow. I mean, remember the original table tags? They were horrible!
Just relax, everything will work itself out in the world of computers. This is just the beginning.
Okay, kiddies, here's the lesson today: Economics is defined as "The study of systems for distributing a limited number of goods among an unlimited desire for those goods."
You hear that? Limited goods, unlimited wants. If I want a hoversuit, and a company wants to sell me a hoversuit, the deal still doesn't go through because there aren't any. More relevant, if I want a Phish ticket, and Ticketmaster wants to sell me a ticket, I still don't get one because those damn Phish-heads always beat me to the punch with their mail-in orders.
The point is that CA is having power supply problems, and power wholesalers refuse to cut rates. This is what happens when a monopoly is in control: higher price, lower quantity, more profit.
Well, for a comment system like Slashdot, corruptibility is not a terrible concern. But for any enterprise-level solutions, missing data is very bad. I think that transactions are simply essential for anything that is legally responsible information.
PG is damn good, and pretty quick besides. Good FK implementation with ON DELETE functionality built in. It has support for procedural language, but not quite as intuitive as Oracle's PL. My main gripe with it is the lack of a good context search. That's where Oracle really blows PG away, although there's no question that PG's physical DB structure is not as stable as Oracle's (if you can get it to run).
-Scott Miller
Re:Is MySQL ready for that?
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
There was a recent/. article on this: MySQL is implementing record-level locks on the next release, slated for spring '01. Still, I have to agree with the other people here - MySQL sucks ass, and the only reason to do this is the/. coolness factor.
Seriously, I understand their "FK's would make us slow" bit, but come on - subqueries are pretty nice to have.
You are absolutely right about FK's, and that's why I switched to PostgreSQL. However, it is those same foreign keys that make inserts/updates very slow, because the check occurs each time. That's why MySQL is faster, yet more corruptible. Of course, I run a good Linux kernel, so MY server will NEVER crash. Yeah, right.
Why ask me a question if you know the answer? Yes, I used MySQL for six months in web development for e-commerce and message boards, and found it severely lacking in all capacities, except that it had fast read/write times, like mSQL. I would like you to enumerate the differences for me. Besides functions; I already mentioned those.
mSQL is not really an RDBMS. It is more like a file cabinet. It has no functions, no transactions. Does it even have keys? (I think it does)
The reason to use mSQL is to store a small amount of non-essential data for extremely rapid retrieval. It is easy to use, and, for the record, does have PHP driver support. Not that there is that much to support anyway:)
Seriously, though, if you're going to criticize mSQL, you have to be willing to acknowledge that the only leg-up MySQL has (before the row-level lock gets finished) on mSQL is the ability to write functions. And it doesn't even have a procedural language, just C-functions! So don't stand all high-and-mighty looking down on mSQL from your MySQL pedastal - it's not that high off the ground.
Thanks! I'm at a new job now, though, and we weren't really looking for EJB stuff, just the basics. But when I get back into the development space, I'll defnitely take a look. Tomcat is a pretty damn good implementation except for that rather annoying little bug.
First of all, database access WAS a problem with PHP. Java has a good implementation of connection pooling, which we needed to access PostgreSQL fast enough for the universal logon.
Second, we actually ran into threading issues with PHP... you see, we stored logged-in users in a set variable. But PHP doesn't really do a good threading job, and we ran into all sorts of errors... phantom users, etc. Java's Collections Interface has a built-in set object as well as syncrhonization.
Also, PHP doesn't have the different variable contexts that JSP does. Registering a variable with the page and passing that context to another page allowed for a real servlet-centric application instead of a few unrelated script pages. PHP is just a scripting language - you really do need something more powerful for real apps.
I appreciate your open-mindedness, though, as opposed to some other unnamed slash trolls who are against anything that might be used for an (oh!) capitalist pursuit.
I forgot to mention how the Beans were busted in the Tomcat implementation...
What I found was that Bean object had trouble loading via the <jsp:useBean> tag. That tag would load a default Bean with no problems. The book recommended that multiple beans of the same type could be loaded as follows:
<jsp:useBean id="myBean" class="MyBeanClass"/>
<% MyBeanClass myBeanArray[];
for (int i=0; i < myBeanArray.size(); i++) {
myBean = myBeanArray[i]; %>
Theoretically, the for loop sets each object in the array to myBean, then displays "myProperty". In Tomcat, myBean in the jsp:useBean context and myBean in the scriptlet context were two very different objects. In fact, that code gave me an error for not declaring myBean as a MyBeanClass instance. I found other people with similar problems, but no official bug report or solution/workaround. Any idea, my geek brothers?:)
Before the dot-com slide started to knock out all the loser no-content sites, I worked for one such company. We were using PHP and MySQL to do some CD database stuff, and it was going well until we wanted to implement e-commerce and a universal login system (we had several domains, and wanted one login for all of them). Suddenly, we realized that PHP and MySQL would not be enough for the task at hand. So we bought the JSP book.
I had never used JSP before - I had never even written Java code! But the book was written well for someone with a background in scripting languages, and I found myself working with JSP projects easily in no time at all. I even learned Java from that book, and did so well enough to get a new job and excel at it.
As far as the book is concerned, there are two parts which especially interested me. The first was their overview of Javabeans, which was done clearly and concisely. However, you should know that when I set up the Apache Tomcat JSP server, Javabeans were busted pretty bad (just a warning).
The FAQ example (I believe it is chapter 9) was also excellent, because it introduced some very good methods for web application design. The first is the FAQRepository, which encapsulates DB calls into a single class. This enhances portability and allows changes to be implemented quickly in the case of a DB software or design change. The second is the so-called "octopus" design, whereby an intelligent central servlet does the bulk of the processing, and then passes control off to a JSP "tentacle" for minor alterations and display. This keeps code clean and organized, and allows for great scalability.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn JSP as well as develop a strong technique. I know it did wonders for me.
I find it interesting that you can post a comment to/. that no one is interested in dynamic content. I'm sure that static pages are all the craze in your neck of the woods, but if you want a web server to store any reasonable amount of information, you'll a shell page with text inserted from database calls. That, my friend, is dynamic content, and/. uses it with perl. The only difference is that some/. pages precompile to.shtml for faster loading.
JSP pages compile as well, and well-implemented JSP/Servlet server (IE, Allaire's JRun) will do just fine for speed on a reasonable server. Beyond that, JDBC database access is quick and easy, and their connection pooling capability makes even Oracle run fast enough for web purposes.
Moreover, all e-commerce requires dynamic content, unless you are using static pages and emailing your credit card info to an operator. So don't be so down on the concept. Try to open your mind a little bit, instead of just lashing out at things you don't understand.
That's true, but it's the moving parts that can provide mechanical failure. The write process for a camera is remarkably simple, even in the most advanced cameras: open and shut. Digital recording onto DVD-RAM might require very precise movements; jarring it even a little could ruin your memories. Jarring a camera won't.
As was already stated, juries are used in criminal cases. That is clearly the case.
Moreover, the "Jury of Peers" situation is a difficult one in business law, because a corporation is endowed with the legal powers of a human being. Beyond who is M$'s peer, what constitutes a "peer corporation"?
Last, a jury of 12 randomly selected citizens would be difficult in the case of M$. This is because the legal proceedings involve the interpretation of antitrust law, which is a huge and very complicated body of law. While I believe that M$ is an abusive monopolistic power, the nuances of antitrust escape me, as they probably escape everyone else on/.
That is why a qualified federal judge decided this case, and did so correctly. I still am unclear as to why he felt it necessary to go and give interviews - that definitely seems to compromise his impartiality, and hurt the case immensely. The only argument I would make is that he did so to leave an opening for appeal, and allow the trial to continue indefinitely. Perhaps he wanted to keep the trial going so that time would level the playing field without the need for direct federal intervention, and possibly scare M$ into submission.
I don't think we'll agree because we're stuck on the object vs. RDBMS debate. I love relational DB's, in fact I used them extensively in my previous job (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL even though it's not really an RDBMS). But I found them better for storing data long-term than for programming, because the write/delete time is horrendous, especially if you use a good indexing system, which you must to get reasonable read times.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep protesting the vote."
-Benjamin Franklin
I would like to hear your response to my refutation of your "Person and Tax" inefficiency problem. I mean, we're talking about a terribly complex problem with several parts to it. Plus, the tax code changes frequently. Having an object to encapsulate the problem allows you to set the necessary parameters, and then just run T.CalcTax(P). That seems much better than your method.
Second, using an RDBMS for variable management is probably not such a good idea. Access is ridiculously slow, even for the best of them.
I'm not sure how you don't see that the Object, Attribute, Method framework is logical. It seems so natural to think of a person as a Person() rather than a more haphazard collection of defining variables.
As for portability, well, Java serialization allows you to pass objects between platforms. How's that for portable? It just seems like your attempts at abstraction would result in parameter overload: every object would be a list of parameters in your model, and trying to keep track of or pass them around would be sick.
But hey, write a platform with your model... if it catches on, you will be heralded as the slayer of the OOP efficiency myth. If not, at least you put your money where your mouth was.
I'm really unsure of your "fad" statement. The move from DBMS to RDBMS was no fad. The move from single-process to multitasking was no fad. I don't think OOP is a fad either.
In any case, they were trying to piss you off when they modded your comment down. It was a good comeback, for some of it at least, but you just can't convince the Slash crew of what they don't want to hear. You should have seen me try to convince them that copyright wasn't always a bad thing:)
I'm sick of companies suing because of links to their sites, or who views them. They make their information publicly available, and when they do so, they cannot go back and say "wait, we don't want so-and-so viewing it." If you don't want bots to be able to view things, require a login. Otherwise, f**k off and stop clogging the legal system with petty copyright infringement cases. The Supreme Court is going to hear a medical marijuana case, that's news. This is bullsh*t. When material is public, the only copyright infringement possible is claiming or implying personal authorship of someone else's work.
Remember your history? The FTC was formed to enforce and prosecute antitrust charges when the Sherman Antitrust Act was first passed. This is back when the word "Monopoly" was being coined, and Standard Oil was the only oil company around. Since then, it has had an inconsistent record on litigation.
They went after the first big boys on the block - the Carnegies, Rockefellers, etc., but they never went after Hearst even though he owned a newspaper in every city. He also owned all the production means, start to finish, to build a newspaper, and consistently used his papers to influence public opinion and put pressure on political figures. Hearst almost kept us out of WWII by defending and supporting the Nazis in his papers.
The FTC went after AT&T, but hasn't done anything as the Baby Bells have come back together to form (ugh!) Verizon. They haven't blinked when banks take over cities, and airlines consolidate. And they haven't offered more than trifling criticism on mass media deals. Why not?
If the merger were to be blocked, how do you think the FTC and FCC would look on CNN? Most people aren't smart enough to see the connection, and slowly but surely, the media would drop them down a notch. Who knows, CNN might be able to generate enough support to overturn Sherman Antitrust completely! And then where would we be? I mean, the media killed the Independent Counsel Act after the Clinton impeachment. I've seen five CNN correspondents tag-team a gov't PR official until he almost cracked ("Are there any questions from a non-CNN reporter?" was his exact quote). The power of the media in this country has reached the point of ridicule.
I think we should ask ourselves a question. If the founding fathers had known the speed and widespread audience that media could generate given the technology, would they have so vigorously defended the rights of the media? Or would there have been a responsiblity issue? I think that with technological advancement comes a responsibility not to abuse it, and the mass media has overstepped its bounds. I'm the last person in the world who wants to revisit the First Amendment (I think it's the most important part of our body of law), but there must be some mechanism to stop the glaring abuses going on. Any ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
The real concern is, why does AOL have a stranglehold on the IM market? Because no one has written a reasonable open-source client - and GAIM, et. al. do not count - that's just piggybacking off of AOL's protocol. How about writing a good, open-source IM client without a centralized server? Another /. reader and myself have been looking into the possibility of such a thing. Only open-source can make IP a thing of the past, so go out and claim as much for the open-source world as you can!
Two: What sort of implications does a "slight shift" in the earth's orbit have in light of Chaos and Complexity Theory. I mean, if a butterfly flapping it's wings can have such a drastic effect on the earth, what could we do to the galaxy? Probably not much, but who knows what sort of cosmic tangle we could stumble into...
Furthermore, "Plan B", as you call it, has been under development for some time. Theoretically, a quantum computer would be able to test many possible factors simultaneously, thus reducing the problem of factoring large numbers to a constant-time (O(1), for you math geeks) problem. However, algorithms for quantum cryptography using phase-shifting of the wavepacket are being perfected by several groups.
Which is all well and good, except that the best quantum computer to date is one bit. That's actually okay, since the current maximum bitsize for a quantum compiler is also one bit. Pretty soon, a quantum computer will be able to show that 4 = 2 * 2.
Other times, I argue about the price or quality of their product for five or ten minutes before they realize just how much money they're losing on me. The beleaguered voice of a telemarketer saying "But... but... there's no monthly fee!" can make me laugh like nothing else.
At heart, though, this is a supply problem, true.
But you know, I never got all the web pages to display right, even when the important ones could all be listed and reviewed in a 200-page book. The web was never browser-neutral, because the html spec. wasn't designed for what it does today, and the W3C is not going to push forward too fast, so we're stuck.
At my job, we need to write ASP's (sorry) that take that into account, and use IE's <object> tag and Netscape's <embed> tag in order to accomodate those customers. Lynx? Forget it, we embed RealPlayer! Maybe you could get Konqueror to work if you can stomach the fact that KDE looks slightly like Windoze, but I doubt it.
The web was never browser-neutral, and might never be so. But as the web advances, more tags will be taken into the HTML standard, and what was browser-specific today will not be tomorrow. I mean, remember the original table tags? They were horrible!
Just relax, everything will work itself out in the world of computers. This is just the beginning.
You hear that? Limited goods, unlimited wants. If I want a hoversuit, and a company wants to sell me a hoversuit, the deal still doesn't go through because there aren't any. More relevant, if I want a Phish ticket, and Ticketmaster wants to sell me a ticket, I still don't get one because those damn Phish-heads always beat me to the punch with their mail-in orders.
The point is that CA is having power supply problems, and power wholesalers refuse to cut rates. This is what happens when a monopoly is in control: higher price, lower quantity, more profit.
PG is damn good, and pretty quick besides. Good FK implementation with ON DELETE functionality built in. It has support for procedural language, but not quite as intuitive as Oracle's PL. My main gripe with it is the lack of a good context search. That's where Oracle really blows PG away, although there's no question that PG's physical DB structure is not as stable as Oracle's (if you can get it to run).
-Scott Miller
Seriously, I understand their "FK's would make us slow" bit, but come on - subqueries are pretty nice to have.
You are absolutely right about FK's, and that's why I switched to PostgreSQL. However, it is those same foreign keys that make inserts/updates very slow, because the check occurs each time. That's why MySQL is faster, yet more corruptible. Of course, I run a good Linux kernel, so MY server will NEVER crash. Yeah, right.
Why ask me a question if you know the answer? Yes, I used MySQL for six months in web development for e-commerce and message boards, and found it severely lacking in all capacities, except that it had fast read/write times, like mSQL. I would like you to enumerate the differences for me. Besides functions; I already mentioned those.
The reason to use mSQL is to store a small amount of non-essential data for extremely rapid retrieval. It is easy to use, and, for the record, does have PHP driver support. Not that there is that much to support anyway :)
Seriously, though, if you're going to criticize mSQL, you have to be willing to acknowledge that the only leg-up MySQL has (before the row-level lock gets finished) on mSQL is the ability to write functions. And it doesn't even have a procedural language, just C-functions! So don't stand all high-and-mighty looking down on mSQL from your MySQL pedastal - it's not that high off the ground.
Thanks! I'm at a new job now, though, and we weren't really looking for EJB stuff, just the basics. But when I get back into the development space, I'll defnitely take a look. Tomcat is a pretty damn good implementation except for that rather annoying little bug.
Second, we actually ran into threading issues with PHP... you see, we stored logged-in users in a set variable. But PHP doesn't really do a good threading job, and we ran into all sorts of errors... phantom users, etc. Java's Collections Interface has a built-in set object as well as syncrhonization.
Also, PHP doesn't have the different variable contexts that JSP does. Registering a variable with the page and passing that context to another page allowed for a real servlet-centric application instead of a few unrelated script pages. PHP is just a scripting language - you really do need something more powerful for real apps.
I appreciate your open-mindedness, though, as opposed to some other unnamed slash trolls who are against anything that might be used for an (oh!) capitalist pursuit.
It was the latest release of Tomcat as of 11/00, with Java 2, as far as I remember. It was a while ago.
I forgot to mention how the Beans were busted in the Tomcat implementation...
:)
What I found was that Bean object had trouble loading via the <jsp:useBean> tag. That tag would load a default Bean with no problems. The book recommended that multiple beans of the same type could be loaded as follows:
<jsp:useBean id="myBean" class="MyBeanClass"/>
<% MyBeanClass myBeanArray[];
for (int i=0; i < myBeanArray.size(); i++) {
myBean = myBeanArray[i]; %>
<jsp:getProperty name="myBean" property="myProperty"/>
<% } %>
Theoretically, the for loop sets each object in the array to myBean, then displays "myProperty". In Tomcat, myBean in the jsp:useBean context and myBean in the scriptlet context were two very different objects. In fact, that code gave me an error for not declaring myBean as a MyBeanClass instance. I found other people with similar problems, but no official bug report or solution/workaround. Any idea, my geek brothers?
I had never used JSP before - I had never even written Java code! But the book was written well for someone with a background in scripting languages, and I found myself working with JSP projects easily in no time at all. I even learned Java from that book, and did so well enough to get a new job and excel at it.
As far as the book is concerned, there are two parts which especially interested me. The first was their overview of Javabeans, which was done clearly and concisely. However, you should know that when I set up the Apache Tomcat JSP server, Javabeans were busted pretty bad (just a warning).
The FAQ example (I believe it is chapter 9) was also excellent, because it introduced some very good methods for web application design. The first is the FAQRepository, which encapsulates DB calls into a single class. This enhances portability and allows changes to be implemented quickly in the case of a DB software or design change. The second is the so-called "octopus" design, whereby an intelligent central servlet does the bulk of the processing, and then passes control off to a JSP "tentacle" for minor alterations and display. This keeps code clean and organized, and allows for great scalability.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn JSP as well as develop a strong technique. I know it did wonders for me.
Sorry about all the buzzwords ;)
JSP pages compile as well, and well-implemented JSP/Servlet server (IE, Allaire's JRun) will do just fine for speed on a reasonable server. Beyond that, JDBC database access is quick and easy, and their connection pooling capability makes even Oracle run fast enough for web purposes.
Moreover, all e-commerce requires dynamic content, unless you are using static pages and emailing your credit card info to an operator. So don't be so down on the concept. Try to open your mind a little bit, instead of just lashing out at things you don't understand.
It's not the size of the processors,
it's the motion of the registers.
That's true, but it's the moving parts that can provide mechanical failure. The write process for a camera is remarkably simple, even in the most advanced cameras: open and shut. Digital recording onto DVD-RAM might require very precise movements; jarring it even a little could ruin your memories. Jarring a camera won't.
Moreover, the "Jury of Peers" situation is a difficult one in business law, because a corporation is endowed with the legal powers of a human being. Beyond who is M$'s peer, what constitutes a "peer corporation"?
Last, a jury of 12 randomly selected citizens would be difficult in the case of M$. This is because the legal proceedings involve the interpretation of antitrust law, which is a huge and very complicated body of law. While I believe that M$ is an abusive monopolistic power, the nuances of antitrust escape me, as they probably escape everyone else on /.
That is why a qualified federal judge decided this case, and did so correctly. I still am unclear as to why he felt it necessary to go and give interviews - that definitely seems to compromise his impartiality, and hurt the case immensely. The only argument I would make is that he did so to leave an opening for appeal, and allow the trial to continue indefinitely. Perhaps he wanted to keep the trial going so that time would level the playing field without the need for direct federal intervention, and possibly scare M$ into submission.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep protesting the vote."
-Benjamin Franklin
Second, using an RDBMS for variable management is probably not such a good idea. Access is ridiculously slow, even for the best of them.
I'm not sure how you don't see that the Object, Attribute, Method framework is logical. It seems so natural to think of a person as a Person() rather than a more haphazard collection of defining variables.
As for portability, well, Java serialization allows you to pass objects between platforms. How's that for portable? It just seems like your attempts at abstraction would result in parameter overload: every object would be a list of parameters in your model, and trying to keep track of or pass them around would be sick.
But hey, write a platform with your model... if it catches on, you will be heralded as the slayer of the OOP efficiency myth. If not, at least you put your money where your mouth was.
I'm really unsure of your "fad" statement. The move from DBMS to RDBMS was no fad. The move from single-process to multitasking was no fad. I don't think OOP is a fad either.
In any case, they were trying to piss you off when they modded your comment down. It was a good comeback, for some of it at least, but you just can't convince the Slash crew of what they don't want to hear. You should have seen me try to convince them that copyright wasn't always a bad thing :)
I'm sick of companies suing because of links to their sites, or who views them. They make their information publicly available, and when they do so, they cannot go back and say "wait, we don't want so-and-so viewing it." If you don't want bots to be able to view things, require a login. Otherwise, f**k off and stop clogging the legal system with petty copyright infringement cases. The Supreme Court is going to hear a medical marijuana case, that's news. This is bullsh*t. When material is public, the only copyright infringement possible is claiming or implying personal authorship of someone else's work.
They went after the first big boys on the block - the Carnegies, Rockefellers, etc., but they never went after Hearst even though he owned a newspaper in every city. He also owned all the production means, start to finish, to build a newspaper, and consistently used his papers to influence public opinion and put pressure on political figures. Hearst almost kept us out of WWII by defending and supporting the Nazis in his papers.
The FTC went after AT&T, but hasn't done anything as the Baby Bells have come back together to form (ugh!) Verizon. They haven't blinked when banks take over cities, and airlines consolidate. And they haven't offered more than trifling criticism on mass media deals. Why not?
If the merger were to be blocked, how do you think the FTC and FCC would look on CNN? Most people aren't smart enough to see the connection, and slowly but surely, the media would drop them down a notch. Who knows, CNN might be able to generate enough support to overturn Sherman Antitrust completely! And then where would we be? I mean, the media killed the Independent Counsel Act after the Clinton impeachment. I've seen five CNN correspondents tag-team a gov't PR official until he almost cracked ("Are there any questions from a non-CNN reporter?" was his exact quote). The power of the media in this country has reached the point of ridicule.
I think we should ask ourselves a question. If the founding fathers had known the speed and widespread audience that media could generate given the technology, would they have so vigorously defended the rights of the media? Or would there have been a responsiblity issue? I think that with technological advancement comes a responsibility not to abuse it, and the mass media has overstepped its bounds. I'm the last person in the world who wants to revisit the First Amendment (I think it's the most important part of our body of law), but there must be some mechanism to stop the glaring abuses going on. Any ideas?