Well, you have to show it's most probable his punk minor child that did the damage.
The music industry is going through a process where they determine that a particular computer is advertising that it's distributing, without authorization, various files that are copyrighted by parties represented by the industry. The music industry retrieves the IP address of that computer, and passes it on to the ISP responsible for that IP address, obtaining the details of who owns the account that was assigned that IP address at that particular point. The music industry then says "Well, it's almost certain that the person performing the copyright violation is either the owner of that account, or someone known to the owner. If it's not the owner, the owner should find it easy to prove it wasn't him or her, so we can legitimately at this point file a lawsuit against that named person."
Is it foolproof? Well, obviously not. It might be that someone hacked the account, though that's improbable - even the "OMG! You shouldn't leave your WAP open, someone might run Kazaa and you'll get the blame!" argument doesn't generally fly because it's rarely the case that the WAP provides you with a IP address that can be directly connected to from outside. And, of course, it might be the ISP made a mistake, though again that's unlikely.
The music industry is doing what it's supposed to be doing - showing it's probable it was the owner of the account identified by the ISP that was violating copyright. The person controlled the account (and, in many senses, is responsible for it), and if it was someone they let use the account, why are they refusing to identify the real guilty party? If they were hacked, why is there no evidence? Showing damages isn't as complex as you might think, as even the act of copying music to your hard drive and then (in good faith) advertising that it's available to anyone who wants to make a copy clearly undermines a copyright holder's ability to sell their music, and as such congress has enacted copyright laws that have statutory damages.
Even if this were a criminal case, the burden of proof would be lower than you might think. "The dog ate the evidence" is not going to fly in many courts.
Which means ultimately if you want to fight a music industry lawsuit, you do, actually, have to show a few things. If you're on the receiving end of the lawsuit, and you're genuinely bewildered, you can:
1. Obtain information from your ISP giving more information on how your account was tied to the copyright violation. Maybe they made a mistake, or perhaps the telephone line (heh) used was not tied to you in any way.
2. Perhaps you left your WAP open, in which case it should be possible to determine whether it's possible to actually use a guest computer to run a file distributor program. It probably isn't, but if it is, you at least have something to go on.
3. See if your computer has been hacked. It probably hasn't been, as there's no earthly reason to plant file distributor clients on innocent people's computers.
4. Have an extremely frank chat with the other people who you know have used your account.
My money is that if you really didn't do it, option 4 is almost certainly going to be the method by which you find out what really happened, and it will give you real options for defending yourself, rather than certain idiotic defenses like "Innocent by reason of single motherhood".
Well, I don't know Sprint's exact reasons, but at a guess I'd assume that you can't always perfectly overlay one technology on another. For example, GSM has always been easy to roll out because all you need to do is juggle the frequencies a little whenever you want to split a cell and create more coverage in a particular area. CDMA based systems (I'm talking about the multiplexing technology, not the standard - UMTS is included) generally require a different footprint because power management/cell breathing issues become more important; it's less easy to just arbitrarily split a cell as it would be with GSM. As a result, operators rolling out UMTS over their existing GSM systems, are frequently putting up new towers, and avoiding many existing ones; and I'd assume the same issues apply to a roll-out of TDD OFDMA systems like WiMAX - again, a system whose ideal tower footprint is not going to be the same as it would be with Sprint's PCS or iDEN networks.
I'd also assume they have customer usage requirements to consider. WiMAX seems likely to me to be mostly used in built-up areas. Cellphones require more consistent capacity, with major roads requiring strong coverage and high capacity.
I stand corrected, the figures for mine (a V635) are the same. Anyone else thinking of looking this up might want to use this handy dBm to Watts chart.
How do you mean "more than a cellular network"? How far do you think cell towers are generally spaced apart? While both GSM and IS-95/CDMA2000 can use cells larger than 25km in radius, there's a limit to how far your typical half-watt cellphone can usefully transmit, especially in real world conditions with no unblocked line of sight between you and the tower.
It's a shame politics is so cynical at the current time that the choice is between either voting for the lesser of two evils, or to vote for someone out of a machiavellian wish to disrupt the government as much as possible. Voting for a person because you believe they'll make a good president, even now, when there are a few candidates who actually fit the bill, seems to be something everyone refuses to consider.
The SCO deal isn't really that relevant. Sun paid SCO for one of the few items of technology SCO actually owned the rights to - the ix86 device drivers in SCO Unix. The idea was to make Solaris more viable on ix86 hardware - previously it was very fussy about what it could run on.
Sun would have licensed those drivers if they hadn't planned to free Solaris, and they would have freed Solaris even if they hadn't licensed the drivers. In the latter scenario, Solaris would have continued to be a second-rate OS when run on non-Sun Intel-architecture hardware.
Not that this has much to do with anything. It's certainly true IBM would have problems with freeing OS/2 given the amount of third party ownership going on, and with the difficulty in identifying what needs to be rewritten. I suspect a similar problem exists with AmigaOS, BeOS, VMS, and a whole range of other operating systems that come up as candidates to be freed from time to time.
IBM has an additional issue nobody's brought up here. IBM has contracted out support to the eComStation people, which almost certainly involved promises of exclusivity for a period of time. So even if IBM had the time and inclination to comb through their code and see what can be released, I think they're contractually unable to do so.
Such is the legacy of the obsession with proprietary code in the 1980s: a mountain of dead operating systems, unsupportable because of an unwillingness to recognize the need for self-support in the future.
Well, the ruling's more like being told that you can't enter a shop that happens to have a door unlocked at the front after you've repeatedly entered it and been told explicitly to go away because the shop's not open yet.
What's absolutely hilarious about this are the number of replies to this article complaining about "clueless" Judges who "don't understand the issues" and aren't prepared to "read the evidence" right in front of them. Uh-hum. Because all you guys did, right?
Taco is very careful to clearly delineate what's been written by him and what is written by others. Slashdot also has several layers of editing - a front page article whose text is blatantly racist would, I suspect, be disavowed very quickly and probably result in editors being fired.
If Rob Malda left it to others to edit the site, only published editor approved content, and put the site under his name (ie "Rob Malda's Newsletter") with no signs whatsoever that anyone other than Rob or people associated with Rob are involved, then yeah, the situation would be comparable.
It's all academic anyway. Reason has uncovered pretty damning evidence that Ron Paul actually did write many of the things that concern is being expressed about that he's now disclaiming.
You're not really countering my point. IT departments have major issues with dealing with ordinary user issues that come up because of ordinary growth. This is because they're not structured correctly, do not contain the correct mix of people, are reactive rather than pro-active, and have lack the procedures that would allow them to effectively help the people they serve.
You're saying you have problems in all those areas, and yet my pointing it out is somehow dubious. I'm not blaming you for having those problems, I'm not blaming people in IT in general for having them either; I'm saying the approach we take means you're unable to act effectively.
Look at it this way: You're a fully-trained marine. You've been armed with bows and arrows. Your job is to keep order in downtown Detroit - you know, prevent people from being mugged, deal with illegal parking, oh and your job is to deliver the mail too. How are you going to act in that situation?
Are you going to come to me complaining that "You don't know what it's like being in the Marines Downtown Detroit Unit, the other day this guy double parked while I was trying to deal with some old lady being mugged, who then spat at me", or are you going to ask what idiot politician thought this particular solution to Detroit's problems was a good idea in the first place?
This is why IT departments need some improvement. Most are made up of hardware people who have a few programmers as friends and by and large are reactive rather than proactive in the way they deal with growth. The worst are the massively corporate entities who assume that the way to deal with any issue is to micromanage everything. I'm not blaming the people in IT for this so much as the people who create and staff IT departments.
How do you deal with the growth of an application such that it no longer is able to serve the audience that it now has effectively? Well, if this were hardware, you'd replace it. And the same approach needs to be taken with software. But that takes people to understand the application, and others to do the time consuming work of migrating people and data over to the new application.
There's nothing wrong with using a spreadsheet to manage an address book to start with. As more people start to use the same source, however, IT departments need to be willing to (and CTO's willing to allow them to) recommend changes, including providing the resources to move the data to a more efficient, more effective, platform. As of right now though, most IT departments don't even have the appropriate people to do that.
FWIW, the minimum number now stands at seven for the period Dec 1999 to Oct 2002, as one newsletter cited turns out to be December 1990 (see "describes" link.)
Given that we're talking about a grand total of twenty five issues for the period above, at minimum seven of them being notably racist is hard for a regular reader to believably miss.
I agree, I guess they know that in the short term a lot of people will pass up an A3 if it doesn't have benefits over a cheap $50 DVD player other than the HD DVD feature.
The "Major initiatives" thing is a long time coming. I've seen barely any advertising of HD DVD aside from cheesy trailers on DVDs themselves. HD DVD has captured a third of the market despite Toshiba and the DVD Forum, not because of them. And what exactly are they going to advertise? It'll be amusing to see them go negative on Blu-ray: "Blu-ray says it's a new advanced way to watch movies. But Blu-ray plans to force you to upgrade your player every few months. And Blu-ray still has an unsustainable plan for social security. I'm HD DVD and I approve this message", but they can't go positive when they're not exactly pushing out the kinds of equipment that HD DVD is theoretically capable of. I've spent the last few weeks rattling on about the benefits of mandatory managed copy, but where the hell is Toshiba or Microsoft's centralized media server that you can just load all your HD DVDs onto and have them streamed around the house?
You begin to wonder if Mehdi Ali is involved in some way...
We appear to be able to rule out "idiot" (well, except in the sense that if you promote racism and want to be taken seriously, then you're none-to-bright. What I mean is that of the three options, the "Someone else edited it and I never bothered reading my own newsletter" explanation is ruled out.)
...but they do make good upconverting DVD players, and at that price can be bought as "An upconverting player that also happens to have a fairly good selection of real HD content for it."
I think more than that's needed for HD DVD to "not fail", but it still results in good value hardware hitting the market that's worth the money regardless of whether it supports a standard that may not end up going anywhere.
Given you listed five dates, and I pointed out these didn't include February 1990 and March 1994, both of which are included either explicitly (the latter) or indirectly ("two months later" after December 1989), I fail to see why you're still plugging the "five" number. This is the second time I've had to correct your use of "five", and come after the constant assertions there were just "two", something I find hard to believe anyone would have come away from the article even after a brief skim-read thinking.
You and I will have to differ as to whether it's possible to miss at least six issues over the space of three years of a magazine that you're supposedly actively reading - or should be, if you're not a complete idiot. And you might find it easier to understand why if you address why, rather than just assume that people cannot sincerely have problems with the fact that Ron Paul appears to have consented to having racism and homophobia published under his name.
Yes, we heard you say five the first time, even though TNR explicitly quotes more than five as was just pointed out. Just as it was more than two, back when you were claiming it was just two.
To me, no, it simply isn't believable to me that he missed at least six, and almost certainly more, random issues between December 1989 and October 1992, unless he was actively ignoring what was written under his name.
We appear to have considerably more than five issues quoted, though for some we're unsure of the exact issue. February 1990 and March 1994 are explicitly mentioned. At least two 1990 newsletters attacked King, and at least one praised Duke, and the article is written in such a way that implies these are probably not the two explicitly cited 1990 newsletters.
Do we know that Ron Paul read the seven-to-ten issues that were published from December 1989 to October 1992? Well, if he managed to miss about a fifth (being generous and assuming the three 1990 mentions are all in the February and November issues, and concentrating on race only, and assuming that TNR published every single questionable comment made) of the published content of his own newsletter during that period, it seems hard to believe he was reading any of it.
Whether Paul himself has praised King is not necessarily relevant. The guy consented to have attacks on King to be published under his name. At no time does he appear to have made a serious effort to prevent the "editors" from continuing to publish this kind of content. There is no plausible deniability here, he's either an utter and complete idiot who ignored for many years what was being published under his name after putting in charge people who clearly had extremist views, or he was comfortable with those views being expressed - for whatever reason, be it pandering or actual racism.
I'm not really hearing a fourth explanation here, just a denial that enough racist content was published for him to notice. Well, sorry, but how the hell could he have missed that much?
The new republic article only quoted a couple of the newsletters
Really? Because I see considerably more than two newsletters quoted. This is just the part of the article that quotes Ron Paul's newsletters on race issues:
Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."
This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."
Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending "South African Holocaust."
Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, newsletters attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One news
You think that accountability means "taking the blame for the words of others even though those words have nothing to do with one's view"? Crack open a dictionary, pronto.
No, he thinks that accountability means taking responsibility for what's been published under your name. This scandal involves what was published in papers published under Ron Paul's name for the best part of a decade, and not just one or two occasional lapses (with editors being reprimanded, etc), but over, and over, and over, again. To believe Ron Paul's own explanation, he didn't read his own newsletter for ten years.
There are very few legitimate explanations for what could have happened. Ron Paul may be a racist. He may be a man who's willing to pander to racists. Or he may be utterly and completely incompetent, willing to lend his name to a publication edited directly by people whose views he supposedly finds repugnant, and not even bothered enough to check on its progress for that time period.
What's the fourth explanation? 'cos I'm not seeing it.
The newsletter was published for the best part of a decade and the issues raised in, for example, the TNR article span many, many, issues over that period. What we're expected to believe from Ron Paul's denial is that he allowed people to edit a newsletter under his name whose opinions he didn't vet; that he never read his newsletter over that time; and that he wasn't even aware there was a serious issue with it until it became a campaign issue in the last decade.
It's simply not believable. I don't know if Ron Paul's a racist or if he's an opportunist, but either way it's close to impossible to believe that there's the degree of disconnect between Ron Paul and what was published under his name that he claims. I cannot believe he didn't know, and that he wasn't in a position to stop it from going on. And as such, I cannot believe he isn't an exploiter of racism.
Sony's won quite a few format wars. The CD was a Sony/Philips co-production, and of course, there's the 3.5" floppy.
I wouldn't put Blu-ray in the winners camp yet. HD DVD may be about to die (and who really knows for sure? Just three months ago, 50% of the studios were in the HD DVD camp and HD DVD players had dropped to below $200. This thing is still playing out), but its death does not mean Blu-ray's victory. I'm about 90% convinced that consumers are not going to switch to Blu-ray from DVD en-mass. Most affordable TVs aren't high enough quality to present that great a noticable improvement in quality, and the need for constant updates means Blu-ray will always be a consumer-unfriendly technology.
I don't think the industry has ever made such an almighty cock-up as they have with Hi-def physical media. The standard with the most promise is the one that the studios are deserting. The one with the highest capacity per layer is the one crippled by paranoia and incompetent control over standards. Lower-cost upgrades that could have been integrated into existing hardware have been rejected. And even the incumbent has suffered slower sales because of consumer confusion and the belief that regular DVDs may go obsolete at any moment. Great job Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft, Warner Brothers, Disney, etc.
I never saw that war, but I saw a bunch of confused geeks who didn't understand Bluetooth thinking there was one. BT is a PAN standard, Wifi is a wireless LAN standard. I never saw any effort to make Bluetooth do the same kinds of things Wifi is good at, nor any attempts to make cheap, low range, Wifi chips with simpler ad-hoc point-to-point protocols for handling basic PAN services. Wifi is to Bluetooth as Ethernet is to USB.
The only war between the two, really, is that they don't always co-exist nicely because they use the same frequencies, but then you might as well talk about a war between cordless phones and Wifi...
I'm guessing that the various attempts to create a wireless USB standard might end up with something that replaces Bluetooth, as there's a more direct overlap of application. It'll be interesting to see how that PANs out... har har har, I kill myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you have to show it's most probable his punk minor child that did the damage.
The music industry is going through a process where they determine that a particular computer is advertising that it's distributing, without authorization, various files that are copyrighted by parties represented by the industry. The music industry retrieves the IP address of that computer, and passes it on to the ISP responsible for that IP address, obtaining the details of who owns the account that was assigned that IP address at that particular point. The music industry then says "Well, it's almost certain that the person performing the copyright violation is either the owner of that account, or someone known to the owner. If it's not the owner, the owner should find it easy to prove it wasn't him or her, so we can legitimately at this point file a lawsuit against that named person."
Is it foolproof? Well, obviously not. It might be that someone hacked the account, though that's improbable - even the "OMG! You shouldn't leave your WAP open, someone might run Kazaa and you'll get the blame!" argument doesn't generally fly because it's rarely the case that the WAP provides you with a IP address that can be directly connected to from outside. And, of course, it might be the ISP made a mistake, though again that's unlikely.
The music industry is doing what it's supposed to be doing - showing it's probable it was the owner of the account identified by the ISP that was violating copyright. The person controlled the account (and, in many senses, is responsible for it), and if it was someone they let use the account, why are they refusing to identify the real guilty party? If they were hacked, why is there no evidence? Showing damages isn't as complex as you might think, as even the act of copying music to your hard drive and then (in good faith) advertising that it's available to anyone who wants to make a copy clearly undermines a copyright holder's ability to sell their music, and as such congress has enacted copyright laws that have statutory damages.
Even if this were a criminal case, the burden of proof would be lower than you might think. "The dog ate the evidence" is not going to fly in many courts.
Which means ultimately if you want to fight a music industry lawsuit, you do, actually, have to show a few things. If you're on the receiving end of the lawsuit, and you're genuinely bewildered, you can:
1. Obtain information from your ISP giving more information on how your account was tied to the copyright violation. Maybe they made a mistake, or perhaps the telephone line (heh) used was not tied to you in any way.
2. Perhaps you left your WAP open, in which case it should be possible to determine whether it's possible to actually use a guest computer to run a file distributor program. It probably isn't, but if it is, you at least have something to go on.
3. See if your computer has been hacked. It probably hasn't been, as there's no earthly reason to plant file distributor clients on innocent people's computers.
4. Have an extremely frank chat with the other people who you know have used your account.
My money is that if you really didn't do it, option 4 is almost certainly going to be the method by which you find out what really happened, and it will give you real options for defending yourself, rather than certain idiotic defenses like "Innocent by reason of single motherhood".
Well, I don't know Sprint's exact reasons, but at a guess I'd assume that you can't always perfectly overlay one technology on another. For example, GSM has always been easy to roll out because all you need to do is juggle the frequencies a little whenever you want to split a cell and create more coverage in a particular area. CDMA based systems (I'm talking about the multiplexing technology, not the standard - UMTS is included) generally require a different footprint because power management/cell breathing issues become more important; it's less easy to just arbitrarily split a cell as it would be with GSM. As a result, operators rolling out UMTS over their existing GSM systems, are frequently putting up new towers, and avoiding many existing ones; and I'd assume the same issues apply to a roll-out of TDD OFDMA systems like WiMAX - again, a system whose ideal tower footprint is not going to be the same as it would be with Sprint's PCS or iDEN networks.
I'd also assume they have customer usage requirements to consider. WiMAX seems likely to me to be mostly used in built-up areas. Cellphones require more consistent capacity, with major roads requiring strong coverage and high capacity.
I stand corrected, the figures for mine (a V635) are the same. Anyone else thinking of looking this up might want to use this handy dBm to Watts chart.
How do you mean "more than a cellular network"? How far do you think cell towers are generally spaced apart? While both GSM and IS-95/CDMA2000 can use cells larger than 25km in radius, there's a limit to how far your typical half-watt cellphone can usefully transmit, especially in real world conditions with no unblocked line of sight between you and the tower.
It's a shame politics is so cynical at the current time that the choice is between either voting for the lesser of two evils, or to vote for someone out of a machiavellian wish to disrupt the government as much as possible. Voting for a person because you believe they'll make a good president, even now, when there are a few candidates who actually fit the bill, seems to be something everyone refuses to consider.
The SCO deal isn't really that relevant. Sun paid SCO for one of the few items of technology SCO actually owned the rights to - the ix86 device drivers in SCO Unix. The idea was to make Solaris more viable on ix86 hardware - previously it was very fussy about what it could run on.
Sun would have licensed those drivers if they hadn't planned to free Solaris, and they would have freed Solaris even if they hadn't licensed the drivers. In the latter scenario, Solaris would have continued to be a second-rate OS when run on non-Sun Intel-architecture hardware.
Not that this has much to do with anything. It's certainly true IBM would have problems with freeing OS/2 given the amount of third party ownership going on, and with the difficulty in identifying what needs to be rewritten. I suspect a similar problem exists with AmigaOS, BeOS, VMS, and a whole range of other operating systems that come up as candidates to be freed from time to time.
IBM has an additional issue nobody's brought up here. IBM has contracted out support to the eComStation people, which almost certainly involved promises of exclusivity for a period of time. So even if IBM had the time and inclination to comb through their code and see what can be released, I think they're contractually unable to do so.
Such is the legacy of the obsession with proprietary code in the 1980s: a mountain of dead operating systems, unsupportable because of an unwillingness to recognize the need for self-support in the future.
He means he wants one of these, 'cos he's elderly and kind of stuck in his ways.
Well, the ruling's more like being told that you can't enter a shop that happens to have a door unlocked at the front after you've repeatedly entered it and been told explicitly to go away because the shop's not open yet.
What's absolutely hilarious about this are the number of replies to this article complaining about "clueless" Judges who "don't understand the issues" and aren't prepared to "read the evidence" right in front of them. Uh-hum. Because all you guys did, right?
Taco is very careful to clearly delineate what's been written by him and what is written by others. Slashdot also has several layers of editing - a front page article whose text is blatantly racist would, I suspect, be disavowed very quickly and probably result in editors being fired.
If Rob Malda left it to others to edit the site, only published editor approved content, and put the site under his name (ie "Rob Malda's Newsletter") with no signs whatsoever that anyone other than Rob or people associated with Rob are involved, then yeah, the situation would be comparable.
It's all academic anyway. Reason has uncovered pretty damning evidence that Ron Paul actually did write many of the things that concern is being expressed about that he's now disclaiming.
You're not really countering my point. IT departments have major issues with dealing with ordinary user issues that come up because of ordinary growth. This is because they're not structured correctly, do not contain the correct mix of people, are reactive rather than pro-active, and have lack the procedures that would allow them to effectively help the people they serve.
You're saying you have problems in all those areas, and yet my pointing it out is somehow dubious. I'm not blaming you for having those problems, I'm not blaming people in IT in general for having them either; I'm saying the approach we take means you're unable to act effectively.
Look at it this way: You're a fully-trained marine. You've been armed with bows and arrows. Your job is to keep order in downtown Detroit - you know, prevent people from being mugged, deal with illegal parking, oh and your job is to deliver the mail too. How are you going to act in that situation?
Are you going to come to me complaining that "You don't know what it's like being in the Marines Downtown Detroit Unit, the other day this guy double parked while I was trying to deal with some old lady being mugged, who then spat at me", or are you going to ask what idiot politician thought this particular solution to Detroit's problems was a good idea in the first place?
This is why IT departments need some improvement. Most are made up of hardware people who have a few programmers as friends and by and large are reactive rather than proactive in the way they deal with growth. The worst are the massively corporate entities who assume that the way to deal with any issue is to micromanage everything. I'm not blaming the people in IT for this so much as the people who create and staff IT departments.
How do you deal with the growth of an application such that it no longer is able to serve the audience that it now has effectively? Well, if this were hardware, you'd replace it. And the same approach needs to be taken with software. But that takes people to understand the application, and others to do the time consuming work of migrating people and data over to the new application.
There's nothing wrong with using a spreadsheet to manage an address book to start with. As more people start to use the same source, however, IT departments need to be willing to (and CTO's willing to allow them to) recommend changes, including providing the resources to move the data to a more efficient, more effective, platform. As of right now though, most IT departments don't even have the appropriate people to do that.
FWIW, the minimum number now stands at seven for the period Dec 1999 to Oct 2002, as one newsletter cited turns out to be December 1990 (see "describes" link.)
Given that we're talking about a grand total of twenty five issues for the period above, at minimum seven of them being notably racist is hard for a regular reader to believably miss.
I agree, I guess they know that in the short term a lot of people will pass up an A3 if it doesn't have benefits over a cheap $50 DVD player other than the HD DVD feature.
The "Major initiatives" thing is a long time coming. I've seen barely any advertising of HD DVD aside from cheesy trailers on DVDs themselves. HD DVD has captured a third of the market despite Toshiba and the DVD Forum, not because of them. And what exactly are they going to advertise? It'll be amusing to see them go negative on Blu-ray: "Blu-ray says it's a new advanced way to watch movies. But Blu-ray plans to force you to upgrade your player every few months. And Blu-ray still has an unsustainable plan for social security. I'm HD DVD and I approve this message", but they can't go positive when they're not exactly pushing out the kinds of equipment that HD DVD is theoretically capable of. I've spent the last few weeks rattling on about the benefits of mandatory managed copy, but where the hell is Toshiba or Microsoft's centralized media server that you can just load all your HD DVDs onto and have them streamed around the house?
You begin to wonder if Mehdi Ali is involved in some way...
But, dude, it fits in an envelope! An envelope!
We appear to be able to rule out "idiot" (well, except in the sense that if you promote racism and want to be taken seriously, then you're none-to-bright. What I mean is that of the three options, the "Someone else edited it and I never bothered reading my own newsletter" explanation is ruled out.)
Ron Paul has, in the past, said his words were being taken out of context. So either he was lying then, or he's lying now.
I think more than that's needed for HD DVD to "not fail", but it still results in good value hardware hitting the market that's worth the money regardless of whether it supports a standard that may not end up going anywhere.
Given you listed five dates, and I pointed out these didn't include February 1990 and March 1994, both of which are included either explicitly (the latter) or indirectly ("two months later" after December 1989), I fail to see why you're still plugging the "five" number. This is the second time I've had to correct your use of "five", and come after the constant assertions there were just "two", something I find hard to believe anyone would have come away from the article even after a brief skim-read thinking.
You and I will have to differ as to whether it's possible to miss at least six issues over the space of three years of a magazine that you're supposedly actively reading - or should be, if you're not a complete idiot. And you might find it easier to understand why if you address why, rather than just assume that people cannot sincerely have problems with the fact that Ron Paul appears to have consented to having racism and homophobia published under his name.
Yes, we heard you say five the first time, even though TNR explicitly quotes more than five as was just pointed out. Just as it was more than two, back when you were claiming it was just two.
To me, no, it simply isn't believable to me that he missed at least six, and almost certainly more, random issues between December 1989 and October 1992, unless he was actively ignoring what was written under his name.
We appear to have considerably more than five issues quoted, though for some we're unsure of the exact issue. February 1990 and March 1994 are explicitly mentioned. At least two 1990 newsletters attacked King, and at least one praised Duke, and the article is written in such a way that implies these are probably not the two explicitly cited 1990 newsletters.
Do we know that Ron Paul read the seven-to-ten issues that were published from December 1989 to October 1992? Well, if he managed to miss about a fifth (being generous and assuming the three 1990 mentions are all in the February and November issues, and concentrating on race only, and assuming that TNR published every single questionable comment made) of the published content of his own newsletter during that period, it seems hard to believe he was reading any of it.
Whether Paul himself has praised King is not necessarily relevant. The guy consented to have attacks on King to be published under his name. At no time does he appear to have made a serious effort to prevent the "editors" from continuing to publish this kind of content. There is no plausible deniability here, he's either an utter and complete idiot who ignored for many years what was being published under his name after putting in charge people who clearly had extremist views, or he was comfortable with those views being expressed - for whatever reason, be it pandering or actual racism.
I'm not really hearing a fourth explanation here, just a denial that enough racist content was published for him to notice. Well, sorry, but how the hell could he have missed that much?
Really? Because I see considerably more than two newsletters quoted. This is just the part of the article that quotes Ron Paul's newsletters on race issues:
No, he thinks that accountability means taking responsibility for what's been published under your name. This scandal involves what was published in papers published under Ron Paul's name for the best part of a decade, and not just one or two occasional lapses (with editors being reprimanded, etc), but over, and over, and over, again. To believe Ron Paul's own explanation, he didn't read his own newsletter for ten years.
There are very few legitimate explanations for what could have happened. Ron Paul may be a racist. He may be a man who's willing to pander to racists. Or he may be utterly and completely incompetent, willing to lend his name to a publication edited directly by people whose views he supposedly finds repugnant, and not even bothered enough to check on its progress for that time period.
What's the fourth explanation? 'cos I'm not seeing it.
The newsletter was published for the best part of a decade and the issues raised in, for example, the TNR article span many, many, issues over that period. What we're expected to believe from Ron Paul's denial is that he allowed people to edit a newsletter under his name whose opinions he didn't vet; that he never read his newsletter over that time; and that he wasn't even aware there was a serious issue with it until it became a campaign issue in the last decade.
It's simply not believable. I don't know if Ron Paul's a racist or if he's an opportunist, but either way it's close to impossible to believe that there's the degree of disconnect between Ron Paul and what was published under his name that he claims. I cannot believe he didn't know, and that he wasn't in a position to stop it from going on. And as such, I cannot believe he isn't an exploiter of racism.
Sony's won quite a few format wars. The CD was a Sony/Philips co-production, and of course, there's the 3.5" floppy.
I wouldn't put Blu-ray in the winners camp yet. HD DVD may be about to die (and who really knows for sure? Just three months ago, 50% of the studios were in the HD DVD camp and HD DVD players had dropped to below $200. This thing is still playing out), but its death does not mean Blu-ray's victory. I'm about 90% convinced that consumers are not going to switch to Blu-ray from DVD en-mass. Most affordable TVs aren't high enough quality to present that great a noticable improvement in quality, and the need for constant updates means Blu-ray will always be a consumer-unfriendly technology.
I don't think the industry has ever made such an almighty cock-up as they have with Hi-def physical media. The standard with the most promise is the one that the studios are deserting. The one with the highest capacity per layer is the one crippled by paranoia and incompetent control over standards. Lower-cost upgrades that could have been integrated into existing hardware have been rejected. And even the incumbent has suffered slower sales because of consumer confusion and the belief that regular DVDs may go obsolete at any moment. Great job Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft, Warner Brothers, Disney, etc.
I never saw that war, but I saw a bunch of confused geeks who didn't understand Bluetooth thinking there was one. BT is a PAN standard, Wifi is a wireless LAN standard. I never saw any effort to make Bluetooth do the same kinds of things Wifi is good at, nor any attempts to make cheap, low range, Wifi chips with simpler ad-hoc point-to-point protocols for handling basic PAN services. Wifi is to Bluetooth as Ethernet is to USB.
The only war between the two, really, is that they don't always co-exist nicely because they use the same frequencies, but then you might as well talk about a war between cordless phones and Wifi...
I'm guessing that the various attempts to create a wireless USB standard might end up with something that replaces Bluetooth, as there's a more direct overlap of application. It'll be interesting to see how that PANs out... har har har, I kill myself.