I try not to be alarmist about stories like this, but no government - including bad-boy gov'ts like Iraq, North Korea, Libya and industrialized gov'ts like the US, UK, and Russia - is going to be able to keep themselves from experimenting with this. It would be unrealistic to think otherwise.
I think the answer (for the species, anyway) is pretty clear: extraterran colonization. Of course, nobody outside of/. and K5 seems to think that a serious space program is worth funding any more, so the species is probably screwed.
No, the thing I was thinking of had the input devices fully integrated into the furniture. The price may have been bundled with some other goodies, like a wall display. It was sometime back, so I don't remember.
Thanks for the reply - interesting stuff. Someone should mod it up as informative.
About 5(?) years ago, I saw a review of a similar product will fully adjustable armrests, two-part keyboard and thumb-operated trackball mouse integrated into the armrests, wireless interface to the box, etc. Black leather. It cost about $8-10K at the time, IIRC.
Anyway, this sounds neat, too, even if my wife would shoot me for getting one.;)
Hmm... It seems plausible (though far from certain) that M$ has had this trick in the box for some time, and that they've deliberately been turning a blind eye to OS piracy specifically to increase market share to where they felt they could get away with this trick.
Or, another possibility: They've had this in mind for a while, with an eye toward implementing it once the world economy was sufficiently dependent on their products, but are implementing early because of declining market share and a perceived future opportunity loss.
But I think part of the point is that "wrong" was not defined in terms of what the user might want, but what eBay would want, without thought of the user. It seems unlikely (to me anyway, but I don't think I'm unreasonable in this belief) that if the error had been the other way (people who didn't want email accidentally getting the "send me mail" bit set) that eBay would have sent an email, taken any action, or even acknowledged the problem. I bet they'd even lie about the existence of the problem, if some observant user(s) turned it up.
The problem isn't that they're out to make money - that's a fine goal. The problem is that they are willing to ignore consumer benefit and do things like send spam and invade privacy to do it, and they don't spend time in prison for it.
For the record: I agree that this is a shitty thing for eBay to do, and that this is not the first shitty thing they've done.
That said, what is all this whining about? Did you really think that setting a bit in someone's database - especially a known privacy sink like eBay - was going to protect your privacy, or that a company like eBay would even make an attempt to honor your wishes if they thought they could tighten their bottom line?
I really hope all this shocked outrage I'm seeing here and on K5 is just curmudgeonly posing, because if it's actually genuine surprise, it represents a depth of naivete that boggles the mind.
It's business, and it is without a concept of honor or morality. Unless you make a law that holds representatives of the business personally accountable - as in jail time - they're going to do this again and again as long as it benefits them. Self-regulation doesn't work.
They are using their collective power to screw consumers out of their freedoms (instead of their money, in this case)
Well, I think the former translates pretty directly into the latter, or the companies in question wouldn't bother. But that's splitting hairs.;)
Under only one circumstance do I see real "stealing"... [much good stuff elided]
I agree with you - I'm not speaking of students, trial users, or warez bratz here, I'm talking about wholesale-level, shrink-wrap, counterfeit-the-authentication-holograms piracy like the kind the Chinese gov't turns a blind eye to. That kind of piracy does bite into legitimate sales and represents a real loss. It also seems to fit your (wisely narrow) definition of "stealing".
...but flawed, most notably in his assumptions (stated early in the article) that (a) government and corporate power are separate entities (they are not, at least in the U.S.) and (2) that the (American) method of jettisoning dead wood in elected government is effective enough to ensure that the gov't works in the interest of its constituents.
Sadly, I don't have any better solution than Carr's to offer, besides suggesting that people educate themselves, distrust authority generally, and leave the raising of other people's children to their parents.
I think perhaps that the point was that when the geographic targetting was a cost/liability, they claimed not to know how, but now that they stand to make a buck, a solution magically presents itself.
I'll agree with you, though, that this isn't necessarily earth-shattering news.
The hard-drive copy protection scheme seems to me to be yet another attempt (in the vein of DVD/CSS, DPMI, etc.) to maintain a legal structure (that of multinational corporations with scarcity-based proprietary information models) with a technical fix. On/., it may be taken as an article of faith that such efforts are doomed - smart people solve legal problems with lawyers, and technical problems with technology, and know the difference.
My question, though, stems from the fact that (like it or not) software companies are within their rights to get paid for software they write, and to set up their own price structure, and to prosecute those who steal their software.
So the question is: If this misguided idea of hardware-based copy protection gets successfully scuttled (and I hope it does), what better solution might there be for proprietary-model software companies that has the benefit of providing them superior protection from pirates without screwing the rest of the world out of the benefits of the currently open hardware model, such as "fair use" under copyright law?
My US$.02: Coming up with such a "third way" solution could go a long way toward killing media-based copy protection - give them an out, and they might take it.
It's most common decay mode is gamma radiation, so I don't know how useful it would be for fission, but the only other Am242 nuclides are the one with the aforementioned 16-hour half-life and one with a half-life of 14 ms, so I figure this must be it.
Consult the nuclear physicist in your family for more details.
The thing that all the industry suits seem to be forgetting is that no matter what copy protection/tracing/encryption/whatever scheme they come up with, it has no hope of working, since at some point the plaintext must be shown to the consumer. Try as they might, they can't get around the fact (though they would if they could) that nobody's going to pay for something unless they can view it, and if they can view it, they can copy it.
Hopefully, the entertainment industry will someday get that clue (preferably after a brutal fragmenting of the current megalithic multinationals) and leave their legal problems with lawyers, and solve their technical with technology.
"They are brilliant. They told me that within five minutes they can hack (sic) the (Indian) defense ministry Web site...," he (J. Random Suit) said.
I think the operative words here are "they told me".
I mean, the idea of co-opting the opposition talent sounds great on paper, but come on. (a) If you're going around cracking military websites, you're not going to go out of your way to attract attention to anything but your IRC pseudonym, and (2), a military website is still a website, and therefore vulnerable to script kiddies. It's not like these brats are grabbing the launch codes or anything.
Does anyone know where this Perl-based Flash project stands relative to some of the PHP-based Flash generators? I've been messing with Flash 4 for some time, and have long wanted the power of a real programming language in Flash (serious conditional branching, etc.), and am curious to hear what/.ers think of these tools, and which is better for what task.
I'm not very recognition-driven. If I were to choose my ideal method of reward, I'd have to go with a cut of every unit sold.
While this maybe doesn't translate so well to a Linux device driver that people download for free, the company could arrange a kickback^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H small payment for every unit shipped pre-installed on a Linux box.
Egads... Next I'll be suggesting that Intel transform itself into a sort of tech developers' co-op and relocate to Cambridge or something...
The harsh tone will probably get me modded down, but I have no urge to be civil right now...
<rant mood="blind rage">
Exactly what is it with all the attempts to control content lately? There's this, there's the article on link charges, RIAA-vs-Napster, MPAA-vs-DeCSS, the CDA... The world seems to be full of lawyers, greedheads, and/or moralists who think that they should be able to control what media I consume and that I should pay to be controlled in that manner.
Though I have broad tastes in literature and consume thousands of dollars worth of books every year, in this case I can see only one reasonable response to the authors' gripe: Fuck them. But hard. If they can't write a book worth keeping, they shouldn't be rewarded with higher sales.
(Side note: Now that I think of it, the used-books-over-the-net trade would probably has the potential to improve the quality of new books, by introducing the market requirement that new releases be keepers, lest they be destined for perpetual net-facilitated swapping.)
Secondly, what right do they have to interfere in private transactions, no matter how they are facilitated? Used book stores have been around for some time - it seems to me that their objection really isn't the trade itself, but the efficiency of it. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like an attempt at anti-competetive trade restraint, pure and simple.
More generally, I'm interested in hearing what/.ers think about how we as citizens & private individuals can curtail these idiot attempts to control and charge for our media consumption. I don't think we can count on useful legislative relief - the legislature is too much a slave to the greedheads and moralists. What market forces can we bring to bear to make trade restraint groups like the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Author's Guild realize that they can't and shouldn't maintain their current parasitic mode of existence in the (pardon the phrase) Internet Age?
It seems that the larger the net gets, the lower the average IQ of a net business gets.
Well, I think a larger N just widens the bell curve, and somebody has to tether the low end, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be these chuckleheads.
More seriously, this model won't last. First, it's too hard to enforce - even if you could automate combing the weblogs and finding out who the rogue linkers are, they couldn't possibly claim that their dumbass content-control terms had jurisdiction in Estonia. A serious monkey wrencher might exacerbate this by setting up an anonymous re-linker in Finland - the idea being to link to anywhere, from anywhere, with the host's log showing the re-linker's address.
Second, while a real content provider might have revenue streams other than bogus link charges, any company that uses this as the underpinning of a business model is bound to wind up on Fucked Company. People writing web pages will just say, "Gee, that's fucking stupid", and find other content to link to. The era of companies specializing in this form of parasitism will be short indeed.
Governor Bush recognizes that our new economy is driven by the hard work and creativity of men and women in the private sector
Which is why he's a member of the party that favors repealing overtime pay and labor laws in general, so that large corporations can get that hard work and creativity on the cheap.
-- and not by Government bureaucrats.
PLATITUDE ALERT!
he also seems to support MORE H1-B visas
Which is yet another way that large corporations can get hard work and creativity on the cheap.
As for his ideas on how to improve education, most of them consist of (through one channel or another) subsidizing private schools - yet another naked wealth transfer from the rest of us to the wealthy.
And to call Baby Bush technology-oriented is flat-out goofy. Content filters don't work, because they don't filter content, but text. You can screen out the word "fuck", but not the meme for fucking. OTOH, Gore's proposal (though still wrong-headed) is somewhat more feasible - ISP's do keep logs, and it would put the burden on parents to monitor and filter the memes their children consume.
Mind you, I'm not saying Gore's all that hot. He's not - in fact, I consider him merely a tool of different interests. This is strictly and anti-Bush rant, not a pro-Gore rant.
How do otherwise smart people get sucked in by a creature like W? I don't understand it.
PHPWebhosting offers "unlimited" disk & bandwidth for $9.95 a month, and you can do pretty much what you want with your domain name. But they do have a proviso that "unlimited" implies "within reason" - so you'll want to contact them for specifics before you take my word on this. I use them for my own site, and have been very happy with service so far.
Serve/Datarealm might also be able to help - they have a few plans, one of which might suit you. I forget their pricing structure, but the name just popped into my head as a possibility... I have no experience with them personally.
Slashdot Mirror
I try not to be alarmist about stories like this, but no government - including bad-boy gov'ts like Iraq, North Korea, Libya and industrialized gov'ts like the US, UK, and Russia - is going to be able to keep themselves from experimenting with this. It would be unrealistic to think otherwise.
I think the answer (for the species, anyway) is pretty clear: extraterran colonization. Of course, nobody outside of /. and K5 seems to think that a serious space program is worth funding any more, so the species is probably screwed.
I will go now, and drink myself stupid.
OK,
- B
--
Just my US$2e-2.
OK,
- B
--
Thanks for the reply - interesting stuff. Someone should mod it up as informative.
OK,
- B
--
Anyway, this sounds neat, too, even if my wife would shoot me for getting one. ;)
OK,
- B
--
Yeah, but you'd have to really watch your posture. Slouching could lead to the accelerating toddler effect...
OK,
- B
--
Or, another possibility: They've had this in mind for a while, with an eye toward implementing it once the world economy was sufficiently dependent on their products, but are implementing early because of declining market share and a perceived future opportunity loss.
OK,
- B
--
But I think part of the point is that "wrong" was not defined in terms of what the user might want, but what eBay would want, without thought of the user. It seems unlikely (to me anyway, but I don't think I'm unreasonable in this belief) that if the error had been the other way (people who didn't want email accidentally getting the "send me mail" bit set) that eBay would have sent an email, taken any action, or even acknowledged the problem. I bet they'd even lie about the existence of the problem, if some observant user(s) turned it up.
The problem isn't that they're out to make money - that's a fine goal. The problem is that they are willing to ignore consumer benefit and do things like send spam and invade privacy to do it, and they don't spend time in prison for it.
OK,
- B
--
That said, what is all this whining about? Did you really think that setting a bit in someone's database - especially a known privacy sink like eBay - was going to protect your privacy, or that a company like eBay would even make an attempt to honor your wishes if they thought they could tighten their bottom line?
I really hope all this shocked outrage I'm seeing here and on K5 is just curmudgeonly posing, because if it's actually genuine surprise, it represents a depth of naivete that boggles the mind.
It's business, and it is without a concept of honor or morality. Unless you make a law that holds representatives of the business personally accountable - as in jail time - they're going to do this again and again as long as it benefits them. Self-regulation doesn't work.
OK,
- B
--
Well, I think the former translates pretty directly into the latter, or the companies in question wouldn't bother. But that's splitting hairs. ;)
Under only one circumstance do I see real "stealing"... [much good stuff elided]
I agree with you - I'm not speaking of students, trial users, or warez bratz here, I'm talking about wholesale-level, shrink-wrap, counterfeit-the-authentication-holograms piracy like the kind the Chinese gov't turns a blind eye to. That kind of piracy does bite into legitimate sales and represents a real loss. It also seems to fit your (wisely narrow) definition of "stealing".
OK,
- B
--
Sadly, I don't have any better solution than Carr's to offer, besides suggesting that people educate themselves, distrust authority generally, and leave the raising of other people's children to their parents.
OK,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--
I'll agree with you, though, that this isn't necessarily earth-shattering news.
OK,
- B
--
My question, though, stems from the fact that (like it or not) software companies are within their rights to get paid for software they write, and to set up their own price structure, and to prosecute those who steal their software.
So the question is: If this misguided idea of hardware-based copy protection gets successfully scuttled (and I hope it does), what better solution might there be for proprietary-model software companies that has the benefit of providing them superior protection from pirates without screwing the rest of the world out of the benefits of the currently open hardware model, such as "fair use" under copyright law?
My US$.02: Coming up with such a "third way" solution could go a long way toward killing media-based copy protection - give them an out, and they might take it.
OK,
- B
--
I will now go and chuckle heartily.
OK,
- B
--
Nice one, HM.
OK,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--
It's most common decay mode is gamma radiation, so I don't know how useful it would be for fission, but the only other Am242 nuclides are the one with the aforementioned 16-hour half-life and one with a half-life of 14 ms, so I figure this must be it.
Consult the nuclear physicist in your family for more details.
OK,
- B
--
Hopefully, the entertainment industry will someday get that clue (preferably after a brutal fragmenting of the current megalithic multinationals) and leave their legal problems with lawyers, and solve their technical with technology.
OK,
- B
--
I think the operative words here are "they told me".
I mean, the idea of co-opting the opposition talent sounds great on paper, but come on. (a) If you're going around cracking military websites, you're not going to go out of your way to attract attention to anything but your IRC pseudonym, and (2), a military website is still a website, and therefore vulnerable to script kiddies. It's not like these brats are grabbing the launch codes or anything.
YAWN.
OK,
- B
--
Thanks,
- B
--
While this maybe doesn't translate so well to a Linux device driver that people download for free, the company could arrange a kickback^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H small payment for every unit shipped pre-installed on a Linux box.
Egads... Next I'll be suggesting that Intel transform itself into a sort of tech developers' co-op and relocate to Cambridge or something...
OK,
- B
--
<rant mood="blind rage">
Exactly what is it with all the attempts to control content lately? There's this, there's the article on link charges, RIAA-vs-Napster, MPAA-vs-DeCSS, the CDA... The world seems to be full of lawyers, greedheads, and/or moralists who think that they should be able to control what media I consume and that I should pay to be controlled in that manner.
Though I have broad tastes in literature and consume thousands of dollars worth of books every year, in this case I can see only one reasonable response to the authors' gripe: Fuck them. But hard. If they can't write a book worth keeping, they shouldn't be rewarded with higher sales.
(Side note: Now that I think of it, the used-books-over-the-net trade would probably has the potential to improve the quality of new books, by introducing the market requirement that new releases be keepers, lest they be destined for perpetual net-facilitated swapping.)
Secondly, what right do they have to interfere in private transactions, no matter how they are facilitated? Used book stores have been around for some time - it seems to me that their objection really isn't the trade itself, but the efficiency of it. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like an attempt at anti-competetive trade restraint, pure and simple.
More generally, I'm interested in hearing what /.ers think about how we as citizens & private individuals can curtail these idiot attempts to control and charge for our media consumption. I don't think we can count on useful legislative relief - the legislature is too much a slave to the greedheads and moralists. What market forces can we bring to bear to make trade restraint groups like the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Author's Guild realize that they can't and shouldn't maintain their current parasitic mode of existence in the (pardon the phrase) Internet Age?
</rant>
OK,
- B
--
Well, I think a larger N just widens the bell curve, and somebody has to tether the low end, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be these chuckleheads.
More seriously, this model won't last. First, it's too hard to enforce - even if you could automate combing the weblogs and finding out who the rogue linkers are, they couldn't possibly claim that their dumbass content-control terms had jurisdiction in Estonia. A serious monkey wrencher might exacerbate this by setting up an anonymous re-linker in Finland - the idea being to link to anywhere, from anywhere, with the host's log showing the re-linker's address.
Second, while a real content provider might have revenue streams other than bogus link charges, any company that uses this as the underpinning of a business model is bound to wind up on Fucked Company. People writing web pages will just say, "Gee, that's fucking stupid", and find other content to link to. The era of companies specializing in this form of parasitism will be short indeed.
OK,
- B
--
Which is why he's a member of the party that favors repealing overtime pay and labor laws in general, so that large corporations can get that hard work and creativity on the cheap.
PLATITUDE ALERT!
Which is yet another way that large corporations can get hard work and creativity on the cheap.
As for his ideas on how to improve education, most of them consist of (through one channel or another) subsidizing private schools - yet another naked wealth transfer from the rest of us to the wealthy.
And to call Baby Bush technology-oriented is flat-out goofy. Content filters don't work, because they don't filter content, but text. You can screen out the word "fuck", but not the meme for fucking. OTOH, Gore's proposal (though still wrong-headed) is somewhat more feasible - ISP's do keep logs, and it would put the burden on parents to monitor and filter the memes their children consume.
Mind you, I'm not saying Gore's all that hot. He's not - in fact, I consider him merely a tool of different interests. This is strictly and anti-Bush rant, not a pro-Gore rant.
How do otherwise smart people get sucked in by a creature like W? I don't understand it.
Flame away, y'all.
OK,
- B
Serve/Datarealm might also be able to help - they have a few plans, one of which might suit you. I forget their pricing structure, but the name just popped into my head as a possibility... I have no experience with them personally.
Best of luck.
OK,
- B