Actually, when I went to grade school, parents were responsible for basic school supplies, but not books (which were paid for out of district funds, though in 1974 when I started high school French the books we had dated to 1962, the year we all were born). Something I've been puzzled by for some years now is the "school supplies drive" we conduct at the Big-Ass Federal Agency where I work, where we go buy pencils, pens, paper, notebooks, etc. for kids who are attending schools in a state where school taxes are among the highest in the nation. I have no idea where the funds are going, except possibly to defend districts against lawsuits brought by whiner parents who think that "equal opportunity" means "equal outcomes" and sue when their brat farks off in class and fails out.
With everything going toward computer-based education, I predict within ten years pencils will be considered contraband, lest the graphite get sucked into the vents on Windows machines and short everything out.
Yeah, I can't quite figure out where the hell all the money is going in K-12 education now. I have no idea why kids are paying "lab fees" for more-or-less-required science classes and "participation fees" for things like cheerleading and sports. Next thing you know it'll be like college, where you're expected to show up to school -- school you're required by law to attend until 16 -- with your own books.
Back in 1977, my dad was the owner of one of the first microcomputers anybody had ever seen within a hundred miles of us, a TRS-80 Model 1 with Level 1 BASIC and a whopping 4K of RAM. I was specifically FORBIDDEN by my teachers to use it for anything useful at school. At the time, it was only barely acceptable that I typed book reports and other detritus on a used Smith-Corona Super Sterling manual typewriter... using a computer -- even for "word processing," a term that barely existed then anyway -- was considered cheating and I'd have gotten a fail for doing it. We couldn't even use crappy Novus 650 Mathbox calculators in class.
Now they're telling parents they ought to buy that POC from Redmond? My parents didn't even like buying me pencils (my dad had bought the Trash to manage his small portfolio of stocks, and had written -- in Level 1 BASIC -- the software to do that).
...and we're getting close to it already, is to simply arrest everyone at birth. Increasingly, the only people "running for office" in this country are people who've never done anything. Not just "good things" or "bad things," but ANYTHING. A race of innocuous milquetoasts are slowly taking over the political operation of America simply by convincing "voters" that anyone who's ever done anything distinctive or at all out of the perceived mainstream is unfit to lead.
Lest we forget... Harry Truman went bankrupt. JFK fooled around on his wife. Richard Nixon had a serious affinity for alcohol. Ronald Reagan was (horrors!) a Democrat. Comedian Tim Allen was arrested for drugz. Martha Stewart was convicted of securities fraud. G. Gordon Libby was in prison after Watergate. Rush Limbaugh admitted illegal use of prescription drugz. W. was... well, farkit, go look it up.
When everyone has a black mark against "their permanent record," as my sixth-grade teacher called it, then we're all equals again and we can forget this pseudo-puritanical horse dung.
When mere accusations are enough to blight your life, we're already in 1984. Oh, wait... what?
They can subpoena anybody they want. Bush & Co. have already decided they answer to no one. Lookit what's going on this week with Cheney's refusal to comply with a long-standing executive order regarding submission of materials to NARA... I think somewhere in the White House someone went down to the mall and got one of those rubber stamps made at Things Remembered, marked "GO POUND SALT." They've worn out several inkpads already, using it.
Sensitive point for me, as I own one of the oldest Segways in America and have two of them. There are some parts of suburboland that really OUGHT to be reconfigured for bikes, Segways and other non-fossil-burners. But of course they won't.
Over the last 14 years it's generally been the job of the client to adhere to both published standards and common convention, and really, if I can get to my site and use it with a POC Windows Mobile phone, a Blackberry, every common Windows, Mac and Linux browser, and Lynx (yeah, I still test with Lynx) then if a client can't handle the site, that's the problem of the client. Not me. I never bothered worrying about people using the AOL Browser nor the benighted people stuck on WebTV, and my standard response was, "get a normal browser."
Back in 1992, I had a short job with a company that made window blinds. They had been around for long enough that the first computer they used was an Apple II. The guy they had doing their software tended to write everything himself, which was in a lot of cases necessary because what they were asking him to do just couldn't be done with any off-the-shelf packages. So, he wrote The Blinds Program. Originally written on some sort of UCSD p-code (remember that?) implementation of Pascal, The Blinds Program eventually got moved through a couple of other Apples, some sort of SmallTalk environment, and a couple of other things until it ended up on a trio of Macintosh II servers and a bunch of Macintosh workstations strung together with their AppleTalk connectors.
However, nothing was off-the-shelf. Literally, nothing. I'm pretty sure the guy wrote most of his own networking protocols, wrote his own database engine, and then wrote the guts of The Blinds Program within it. The data -- ALL data, from details about blinds orders to supplies purchasing to payroll records to scheduling to who knows what -- was in this mysterious custom database that consisted of pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers-of-data. You literally couldn't find anything unless you already knew where it was likely to be. The problem is, the thing was so dependent on its rat's-nest of pointers that if one was corrupted, the system would happily go writing new data to entirely unexpected places, including places that older data might already live.
Whenever anybody needed a new tool, it got written into The Blinds Program. Simple calculator? Put it in The Blinds Program. EDI interface to talk to your customers' systems? Put it in The Blinds Program. Need to dial up a BBS? Let's not use Red Ryder, let's write it into The Blinds Program (with hard-coded phone numbers, of course).
Well, eventually the guy decided he wanted to do something else with his life, and he left, and they handed the thing over to me. After about four weeks of exploring this monster, I realized that (a) the only person in the entire world who could grok it had already left and (b) I didn't wanna be around when (not if) it exploded and took the entire company with it. I went into the general manager's office and laid it out for him: go hire a consultant, have them design you a new system from supportable, off-the-shelf components, pay them to test and maintain it, or this thing is gonna eat your company. And then I resigned. No sense having a digital Hiroshima on my conscience. The GM hemmed and hawed and I think eventually hired the original guy back as a consultant and never did replace The Blinds Program.
The company went out of business in 1999 or so. I was amazed they lasted that long. My old boss got a good deal on a pool table at their bankruptcy sale.
But what I'm saying is, what difference does it make what signal the carrier puts out over their already-franchised lines? Is it within the purview of localities to tell a carrier what type of signal or data they carry, to whom, and how? I haven't lived anywhere that had that specific a franchise agreement because frankly, most places I've lived, local officials were nowhere near as sharp as the franchisees' lawyers and technicians!
I see no functional difference between telephones carrying voices, fax data, computer dial-up signals, or any other type of IP traffic. Therefore, I see no reason why any carrier should need to obtain a redundant franchise agreement. In a situation where anytime they chose to use existing technology in a new way, they had to go back to some dorkwad local county commission or city franchising board, telecommunications technology could never advance faster than the local yokels' ability to flap their jaws about it. This is why the FCC has oversight over carriers, and not, primarily, local entities.
AT&T already has rights to put the phone lines and DSL out there... the fact that that IP traffic might now carry old episodes of "Murder She Wrote" instead of your gramma's emails is irrelevant.
AT&T and other phone providers don't seem to NEED a new "franchise agreement" from any local government because they pretty much already HAVE one and have had it ever since copper wires were laid in. It seems pointless, and fairly stupid actually, to demand that a change in the physical media from copper to fiber would demand some new operating agreement, oversight and (ahem) ***FRANCHISE FEES** with the local government. What we're talking about here is a change in content, not a change in the nature of the communications infrastructure. The local telcos have already had the rights to go bury copper cable all over suburbia, the fact that the new physical medium MIGHT be used to carry some new content is pretty much irrelevant, any more than the fact that phone lines could carry voice *but also* carry fax required any interaction with localities.
The issue is more likely that Comcast doesn't want the competition, never mind that they already HAVE it from systems that don't involve physical right-of-way, i.e., DirecTV.
Unrelated question, and obvious attempt to stir up conspiracy hounds: does anyone know if Comcast is subtly or overtly behind efforts to ban or restrict satellite dishes? Seems like there was a move in Boston to ban visible satellite dishes, largely in violation of FCC regs that don't generally permit localities to do so.
Is that their latest pre-emptive penalty, sticking people they don't like on the no-fly list? While not legally in the same category as house arrest, by infringing on his right to travel, have they or have they not already imposed a civil penalty?
I didn't actually see a citation of where he'd been placed on the no-fly list, can anyone find one and post it? Probably not, since the list doesn't even technically "exist" except as an abstract concept... sorta.
I have to strongly disagree with the dude above who insists that what CS did was "wrong." He neither invented the method of subverting a broken access control system (it had been possible to alter boarding passes with a $50 scanner and a cheap inkjet printer for who-knows-how-long) nor did he encourage anyone to break the law. Worse, TSA's head-in-anus response only even more strongly points up the problem with DHS overall: we can't fix our problems, but we CAN harrass people who point the problems out to the world in the hope we might actually do something.
They're too busy making old ladies take off their shoes.
I've got an Archos 6GB playback-only jukebox, and the thing is pretty much unbeatable for what I need to do. What's more, if 6Gb isn't enough for you, you can grab pretty much any other decent 9.5mm drive and replace the Toshiba 6Gb with your favorite, and the system is none the wiser. A 1394 port is useful and relevant only to those people who have a 1394 port. Except for Apple, and a few specific models from Dell and Gateway and maybe a Sony VAIO, most machines are still not shipping with 1394, but every one of them ships with USB, and usually USB 2.0.
Archos has been remarkably good about firmware updates and there's a pretty active community involved in hacking and modding the Archos devices. Different controls, different behaviors, bigger drives, etc. I've heard of one guy who's planning on jacking a 60Gb into his. That's enough MP3s to make Hillary Rosen soil herself.
They're not the smallest/lightest/most-elegant, but the batteries last longer than I do, they hold a pile of stuff, play it back decently, and act as a nice portable drive for those times you don't feel like carting around a mountain of Zip disks.
I really don't understand the dazzle effect that the Nomads have on people. I looked at them, priced them, and said "eh."
And while I look on the OggVorbis development effort with interest, there's no compelling reason right now to move away from MP3.
Banish any thought from your head about open-source, about GNU, and even about Linux. AOL doesn't know about it (much), doesn't care about it (much) and has become large, rich and influential without it.
AOL wants it for two reasons:
1. So Microsoft can't buy it
2. So they can become larger, richer, and more powerful, which would be partly stymied by #1 above.
Let me explain. AOL/Time-Warner knows its business quite well, and its business has nothing to do with software and everything to do with charging people for access to content they desire.
They can't do that if Microsoft, through MSN, is charging people for access to THEIR content instead. Therefore, they must counter or thwart every attempt by Microsoft to eliminate other options by which consumers might get to ATW (not MS) content. Since Microsoft pretty much owns the desktop, and with the sellout of the Justice Department effort against them has pretty much a clear shot to extend that domination into online content.
And not just web content. We're talking interactive messaging, video-on-demand, online commerce and a bunch of other potentially-moneyed pursuits that AOL wants to have or keep for itself.
I think AOL realistically looked at it and realized that (as a piece I read on CNet the other day pointed out) most consumers online in Murka are not the techs and geeks of the old days, they're just McCitizens who (a) don't know about and (b) don't care about "the desktop," "the operating system," or even the hardware. They just wanna send pictures to their Aunt Edith, buy some stuff off Eddie Bauer, check out some choice pron, or watch "Sudden Impact" for eleventeenth time.
How they do it, they don't care. In the 1930s, nobody knew what tubes were in their Philco radios, they only wanted to hear Jack Benny. Or how about now -- can you name the theatre chain in which you saw "The Matrix?" Do you really care? What color was the wallpaper?
This means AOL has "network appliance" in their heads. They've watched the stuff being done with embedded Linux (like the DVRs that aren't all that popular yet but they work). They looked to see who was the big cheese, the Biggest Name In Linux, and it was RedHat. They buy RH, they can have them develop an AOL Network Appliance, basically a box you turn on and it delivers... AOL and Time-Warner content. No Microsoft anywhere to be seen, which means no chance for Microsoft to hijack future revenue streams.
I personally think AOL is torqued off about the whole go-round with Instant Messaging and vowed never to get dicked by MS like that again.
This is not the end of Open Source. Anyone who thinks so radically overestimates the influence of RH on the Linux world. Yes, it's a big influence, and a lot of the way things are can be traced to them, but if RH vanished tomorrow, someone else would step up. I wouldn't be surprised, as a matter of fact, if AOL didn't slurp up the company, then spin it right back out after working out some very favorable licensing deals and pulling in key development staff.
Their track record is strange: they pretty well fouled up Netscape by forgetting there are non-AOL users of the tool, but they left Nullsoft alone and they're as fine as ever. But the strength of open-source is... we don't "need" any one distribution. If we did, we'd have been hosed long ago.
When the whole shitstorm over Napster was playing out in court and the mainstream media over the last 12 months or so, I thought a lot about why people want music over the net, what they want, and why they don't want to pay for it.
Quit laughing, the answer to "why they don't want to pay" isn't as obvious as you think.
I don't want to pay because the money's not going to the right place.
For better or worse, the Napster/P2P phenomenon is an American contrivance, and a lot of it is built, though not necessarily by Americans or in America, with American sensibilities. The Great American Idea is, "I want what I want, where I want it, and when I want it." And the complement of that is, "I don't like to be conscious of being told what I want."
The major labels are trying to play this like they have, or soon will have, total control, same as the old pre-cassette LP days of the 1960s. If you want to hear this music, you go to a store we designate, and you pay some money for a physical flat, black circular object and take it home to play it.
A lot of the labels (just like a lot of the book publishers until a few years ago) still think that they're in the business of selling physical containers for media, when really, most listeners don't give a shit how the content is packaged, they want what's IN it.
But it's that "control" thing that will nuke the labels in the end, because it runs counter to the Promise Of World Interconnection: anything you want, you can find, right now. Anything. The ethic of the labels is, "you can only have what we choose to sell you, when we choose to sell it, nyah."
This offends people. It sure offends ME. I could not possibly give a rat's ass about Britney or Garth or Blink or N'Sync. But the things I am interested in finding are uneconomic for the labels to choose to sell to me on physical media. If I'm interested in finding a particular track by a particular obscure 1950s Detroit blues band, and they recorded only one album that was released locally and there's maybe only ten copies left in the entire world, in a solid-media world, I am completely forked. That is, unless some major label chose to buy the rights to the album, then chose release it on CD, then chose to distribute it AND the stores around me chose to carry it AND they're not out of stock that day AND the counter staff has some idea of what bin it was chucked into.
All I wanted was to hear "Winin' Boy Blues," and I've gotta go through all that? Scruit.
Look at it now from a net perspective: all it takes is for one of those ten people to sample their rare LP, convert it and stick up a Gnutella host. I can then find it, and hear the music right now, and by extension, pass it along to other people who might hit my Gnutella node. No flat, black, rare expensive scratchy things involved.
I want what *I* want, not the shit the label wants me to buy this month. Nothing about any of these online distribution schemes is built to account for that paradigm. And nothing about their paradigm interests me. So yes, I will continue "stealing" the older, less-mainstream music I want, because I don't want any of the stuff they're trying to sell, or if I do, I don't want it on their terms, because their terms don't suit my intended use and strip me of fair-use rights under law.
The one big flaw in my approach is that the creators of the music don't get paid, and I want them to be paid. However, there's nothing in the major label structure that assures that they will be if I hand over my money to them, either!
One way out: rather than try to take on the labels at their game, invent a new one. Bypass the existing rights-management mechanisms and set up a net-based rights cooperative to handle micropayments directly to the artists, a la Amazon's Honor System. Not just for new or unsigned artists, but all artists, including the estates of dead ones. If I want to use an early Fugs track in a film I'm doing, or want to burn some Wes Montgomery to CDR for a friend, I go to the clearinghouse, find the track, find the item, list my use and contact info, and arrange for payment in real time. For artists and material not yet tracked, put it in interest-bearing escrow until such time as they can be.
They get paid, I get my stuff, and the control of labels over what I hear is reduced. The trick is going to be, get the rights to material to revert to the artists rather than continuing to let labels hoard masters they'll never, ever rerelease. Copyright was never intended to be a way for people to bury intellectual property.
I did an earlier essay on this that probably puts it better: The Death Of Napster
I'm somewhat impressed, but what I'm waiting for is for them to get the threshold down to 30 degrees C, so that I can run my laptops off the heat energy in my flatulence. Right now it's just wasted in the couch cushions.
Either that, or can anyone suggest a diet that would increase the heat of farts up to 250C?
I'm on a smaller non-ATT @Home affiliate in Maryland, and we're fine here. I grilled the cable losers last week as to their contingency plans, and while they indicated they had one, I was pretty sure they really didn't. Something they pointed out is that they as a cable provider deal with an entity called @Home Solutions, as opposed to subbing off Excite@Home.
Our original provider here was Kiva Networks, but they apparently chose to pull out of the area after helping the local company get the system up and running, but they were far superior to @Home, particularly in tech support. Among their last useful acts was to ensure that I got static IP (yay) when they did the conversion to the @Home address space.
Somebody mentioned the "go fill out a web support request form" when your service is down... nothing said "loser" about @Home's support more clearly than the fact that unless you are actually at a workstation in @Home's address space, you can't even visit excite.home.com, where supposedly all the subscriber-specific information is. Thus, if the cable is forked up, I can't go to work and look up reasons why. Dildos.
1. projects that can be done by 1 person 2. project that
require a team 1. people that work best alone (prima donna) 2. people that work best in a group
There are far fewer projects that actually REQUIRE a team than most people think, and the worst possible situation is to demand that a one-human job be done by a team simply because the manager making that call has a team standing around with nothing to do.
The issue of "generic words within tradenames" was never really settled... it got pretty stupid a few years ago when Sports Authority started going after pretty much any business that had the word "authority" in it. I almost expected them to demand royalties from the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, and anyone who prints up those "Question Authority" bumper stickers.
More than 30 years ago, after hiking through the woods for several hours in Algonquin Provincial Park, we came out on a small lake where... there was a concrete rowboat tied up. Unlike the UAH canoe, this one was nowhere near any sort of resonance and probably weighed 600 or 700 pounds, but... there it was, floating.
The insidious thing about the DMCA is that it shifts, rather inelegantly, the balance toward encouraging, and in many cases forcing, individuals to sign away their Constitutional rights to access material they pay for and obtain legally.
They did it by basically handing control from the state (which cannot force you to "volunteer" to give up your rights) to private companies, to whom the Constitution does not apply. In effect the state is saying, "well, they can do anything to you they want, including forcing you to relinquish your rights, and we're no longer going to get involved."
Look at this crap with Windows XP, for example. How dare M$ demand that I call their frickin' nasal phone operators just because I end up having to reinstall their POS a dozen times to deal with flaws they created themselves?
(Yeah, yeah, I know, but for a lot of droids in this country the inability to use MS "software" equates to an inability to use a computer, much as an inability to drive, in most places, equates to an inability to go anywhere at any time).
Worth pointing out again is that the US Constitution is solely an agreement between the state and individuals (or corporations, who have been given far too many opportunities to be treated the same as a natural person). It is not and has never been an agreement between citizens.
This is not well understood.
Turtle ---------------------------------------
Some of you guys are making light of this, but this raises some seriously all-forked-up issues.
If you think about this, this goes straight to the heart of "what is a public record?" If the actions of publicly elected officials can be copyrighted by private individuals or private groups, you start raising some truly hairy questions.
Do legislators "own" the legislation they write, and could they then demand compensation for its publication and use?
Are elected legislators "employees," and so, is their work in office "work for hire?" and thus the property of their employer
If so, who is the "employer?"
If legislation is essentially ghost-written by outsiders (who cannot legally introduce legislation nor vote on it in Congress), but entered through a legislator, who "owns" the legislation text?
Are all public records works for hire?
Do citizens who fill out public forms (say, a copyright application, hm?) retain copyright in the content?
Do witnesses who testify in court retain a performance copyright?
Some of these are rather out there, but man, if private individuals or groups can essentially "own" public law...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, when I went to grade school, parents were responsible for basic school supplies, but not books (which were paid for out of district funds, though in 1974 when I started high school French the books we had dated to 1962, the year we all were born). Something I've been puzzled by for some years now is the "school supplies drive" we conduct at the Big-Ass Federal Agency where I work, where we go buy pencils, pens, paper, notebooks, etc. for kids who are attending schools in a state where school taxes are among the highest in the nation. I have no idea where the funds are going, except possibly to defend districts against lawsuits brought by whiner parents who think that "equal opportunity" means "equal outcomes" and sue when their brat farks off in class and fails out.
With everything going toward computer-based education, I predict within ten years pencils will be considered contraband, lest the graphite get sucked into the vents on Windows machines and short everything out.
Yeah, I can't quite figure out where the hell all the money is going in K-12 education now. I have no idea why kids are paying "lab fees" for more-or-less-required science classes and "participation fees" for things like cheerleading and sports. Next thing you know it'll be like college, where you're expected to show up to school -- school you're required by law to attend until 16 -- with your own books.
Free and open education?
Horace Mann is doin' about 4500rpm right now.
Back in 1977, my dad was the owner of one of the first microcomputers anybody had ever seen within a hundred miles of us, a TRS-80 Model 1 with Level 1 BASIC and a whopping 4K of RAM. I was specifically FORBIDDEN by my teachers to use it for anything useful at school. At the time, it was only barely acceptable that I typed book reports and other detritus on a used Smith-Corona Super Sterling manual typewriter... using a computer -- even for "word processing," a term that barely existed then anyway -- was considered cheating and I'd have gotten a fail for doing it. We couldn't even use crappy Novus 650 Mathbox calculators in class.
Now they're telling parents they ought to buy that POC from Redmond? My parents didn't even like buying me pencils (my dad had bought the Trash to manage his small portfolio of stocks, and had written -- in Level 1 BASIC -- the software to do that).
ODF, anyone? Anyone?
...and we're getting close to it already, is to simply arrest everyone at birth. Increasingly, the only people "running for office" in this country are people who've never done anything. Not just "good things" or "bad things," but ANYTHING. A race of innocuous milquetoasts are slowly taking over the political operation of America simply by convincing "voters" that anyone who's ever done anything distinctive or at all out of the perceived mainstream is unfit to lead.
Lest we forget... Harry Truman went bankrupt. JFK fooled around on his wife. Richard Nixon had a serious affinity for alcohol. Ronald Reagan was (horrors!) a Democrat. Comedian Tim Allen was arrested for drugz. Martha Stewart was convicted of securities fraud. G. Gordon Libby was in prison after Watergate. Rush Limbaugh admitted illegal use of prescription drugz. W. was... well, farkit, go look it up.
When everyone has a black mark against "their permanent record," as my sixth-grade teacher called it, then we're all equals again and we can forget this pseudo-puritanical horse dung.
When mere accusations are enough to blight your life, we're already in 1984. Oh, wait... what?
And actually, Monica wasn't all that bad. I've dated worse.
They can subpoena anybody they want. Bush & Co. have already decided they answer to no one. Lookit what's going on this week with Cheney's refusal to comply with a long-standing executive order regarding submission of materials to NARA... I think somewhere in the White House someone went down to the mall and got one of those rubber stamps made at Things Remembered, marked "GO POUND SALT." They've worn out several inkpads already, using it.
Sensitive point for me, as I own one of the oldest Segways in America and have two of them. There are some parts of suburboland that really OUGHT to be reconfigured for bikes, Segways and other non-fossil-burners. But of course they won't.
Over the last 14 years it's generally been the job of the client to adhere to both published standards and common convention, and really, if I can get to my site and use it with a POC Windows Mobile phone, a Blackberry, every common Windows, Mac and Linux browser, and Lynx (yeah, I still test with Lynx) then if a client can't handle the site, that's the problem of the client. Not me. I never bothered worrying about people using the AOL Browser nor the benighted people stuck on WebTV, and my standard response was, "get a normal browser."
Back in 1992, I had a short job with a company that made window blinds. They had been around for long enough that the first computer they used was an Apple II. The guy they had doing their software tended to write everything himself, which was in a lot of cases necessary because what they were asking him to do just couldn't be done with any off-the-shelf packages. So, he wrote The Blinds Program. Originally written on some sort of UCSD p-code (remember that?) implementation of Pascal, The Blinds Program eventually got moved through a couple of other Apples, some sort of SmallTalk environment, and a couple of other things until it ended up on a trio of Macintosh II servers and a bunch of Macintosh workstations strung together with their AppleTalk connectors.
However, nothing was off-the-shelf. Literally, nothing. I'm pretty sure the guy wrote most of his own networking protocols, wrote his own database engine, and then wrote the guts of The Blinds Program within it. The data -- ALL data, from details about blinds orders to supplies purchasing to payroll records to scheduling to who knows what -- was in this mysterious custom database that consisted of pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers-of-data. You literally couldn't find anything unless you already knew where it was likely to be. The problem is, the thing was so dependent on its rat's-nest of pointers that if one was corrupted, the system would happily go writing new data to entirely unexpected places, including places that older data might already live.
Whenever anybody needed a new tool, it got written into The Blinds Program. Simple calculator? Put it in The Blinds Program. EDI interface to talk to your customers' systems? Put it in The Blinds Program. Need to dial up a BBS? Let's not use Red Ryder, let's write it into The Blinds Program (with hard-coded phone numbers, of course).
Well, eventually the guy decided he wanted to do something else with his life, and he left, and they handed the thing over to me. After about four weeks of exploring this monster, I realized that (a) the only person in the entire world who could grok it had already left and (b) I didn't wanna be around when (not if) it exploded and took the entire company with it. I went into the general manager's office and laid it out for him: go hire a consultant, have them design you a new system from supportable, off-the-shelf components, pay them to test and maintain it, or this thing is gonna eat your company. And then I resigned. No sense having a digital Hiroshima on my conscience. The GM hemmed and hawed and I think eventually hired the original guy back as a consultant and never did replace The Blinds Program.
The company went out of business in 1999 or so. I was amazed they lasted that long. My old boss got a good deal on a pool table at their bankruptcy sale.
But what I'm saying is, what difference does it make what signal the carrier puts out over their already-franchised lines? Is it within the purview of localities to tell a carrier what type of signal or data they carry, to whom, and how? I haven't lived anywhere that had that specific a franchise agreement because frankly, most places I've lived, local officials were nowhere near as sharp as the franchisees' lawyers and technicians!
I see no functional difference between telephones carrying voices, fax data, computer dial-up signals, or any other type of IP traffic. Therefore, I see no reason why any carrier should need to obtain a redundant franchise agreement. In a situation where anytime they chose to use existing technology in a new way, they had to go back to some dorkwad local county commission or city franchising board, telecommunications technology could never advance faster than the local yokels' ability to flap their jaws about it. This is why the FCC has oversight over carriers, and not, primarily, local entities.
AT&T already has rights to put the phone lines and DSL out there... the fact that that IP traffic might now carry old episodes of "Murder She Wrote" instead of your gramma's emails is irrelevant.
AT&T and other phone providers don't seem to NEED a new "franchise agreement" from any local government because they pretty much already HAVE one and have had it ever since copper wires were laid in. It seems pointless, and fairly stupid actually, to demand that a change in the physical media from copper to fiber would demand some new operating agreement, oversight and (ahem) ***FRANCHISE FEES** with the local government. What we're talking about here is a change in content, not a change in the nature of the communications infrastructure. The local telcos have already had the rights to go bury copper cable all over suburbia, the fact that the new physical medium MIGHT be used to carry some new content is pretty much irrelevant, any more than the fact that phone lines could carry voice *but also* carry fax required any interaction with localities.
The issue is more likely that Comcast doesn't want the competition, never mind that they already HAVE it from systems that don't involve physical right-of-way, i.e., DirecTV.
Unrelated question, and obvious attempt to stir up conspiracy hounds: does anyone know if Comcast is subtly or overtly behind efforts to ban or restrict satellite dishes? Seems like there was a move in Boston to ban visible satellite dishes, largely in violation of FCC regs that don't generally permit localities to do so.
Is that their latest pre-emptive penalty, sticking people they don't like on the no-fly list? While not legally in the same category as house arrest, by infringing on his right to travel, have they or have they not already imposed a civil penalty?
I didn't actually see a citation of where he'd been placed on the no-fly list, can anyone find one and post it? Probably not, since the list doesn't even technically "exist" except as an abstract concept... sorta.
I have to strongly disagree with the dude above who insists that what CS did was "wrong." He neither invented the method of subverting a broken access control system (it had been possible to alter boarding passes with a $50 scanner and a cheap inkjet printer for who-knows-how-long) nor did he encourage anyone to break the law. Worse, TSA's head-in-anus response only even more strongly points up the problem with DHS overall: we can't fix our problems, but we CAN harrass people who point the problems out to the world in the hope we might actually do something.
They're too busy making old ladies take off their shoes.
I've got an Archos 6GB playback-only jukebox, and the thing is pretty much unbeatable for what I need to do. What's more, if 6Gb isn't enough for you, you can grab pretty much any other decent 9.5mm drive and replace the Toshiba 6Gb with your favorite, and the system is none the wiser. A 1394 port is useful and relevant only to those people who have a 1394 port. Except for Apple, and a few specific models from Dell and Gateway and maybe a Sony VAIO, most machines are still not shipping with 1394, but every one of them ships with USB, and usually USB 2.0.
Archos has been remarkably good about firmware updates and there's a pretty active community involved in hacking and modding the Archos devices. Different controls, different behaviors, bigger drives, etc. I've heard of one guy who's planning on jacking a 60Gb into his. That's enough MP3s to make Hillary Rosen soil herself.
They're not the smallest/lightest/most-elegant, but the batteries last longer than I do, they hold a pile of stuff, play it back decently, and act as a nice portable drive for those times you don't feel like carting around a mountain of Zip disks.
I really don't understand the dazzle effect that the Nomads have on people. I looked at them, priced them, and said "eh."
And while I look on the OggVorbis development effort with interest, there's no compelling reason right now to move away from MP3.
Turtle
Banish any thought from your head about open-source, about GNU, and even about Linux. AOL doesn't know about it (much), doesn't care about it (much) and has become large, rich and influential without it.
AOL wants it for two reasons:
1. So Microsoft can't buy it
2. So they can become larger, richer, and more powerful, which would be partly stymied by #1 above.
Let me explain. AOL/Time-Warner knows its business quite well, and its business has nothing to do with software and everything to do with charging people for access to content they desire.
They can't do that if Microsoft, through MSN, is charging people for access to THEIR content instead. Therefore, they must counter or thwart every attempt by Microsoft to eliminate other options by which consumers might get to ATW (not MS) content. Since Microsoft pretty much owns the desktop, and with the sellout of the Justice Department effort against them has pretty much a clear shot to extend that domination into online content.
And not just web content. We're talking interactive messaging, video-on-demand, online commerce and a bunch of other potentially-moneyed pursuits that AOL wants to have or keep for itself.
I think AOL realistically looked at it and realized that (as a piece I read on CNet the other day pointed out) most consumers online in Murka are not the techs and geeks of the old days, they're just McCitizens who (a) don't know about and (b) don't care about "the desktop," "the operating system," or even the hardware. They just wanna send pictures to their Aunt Edith, buy some stuff off Eddie Bauer, check out some choice pron, or watch "Sudden Impact" for eleventeenth time.
How they do it, they don't care. In the 1930s, nobody knew what tubes were in their Philco radios, they only wanted to hear Jack Benny. Or how about now -- can you name the theatre chain in which you saw "The Matrix?" Do you really care? What color was the wallpaper?
This means AOL has "network appliance" in their heads. They've watched the stuff being done with embedded Linux (like the DVRs that aren't all that popular yet but they work). They looked to see who was the big cheese, the Biggest Name In Linux, and it was RedHat. They buy RH, they can have them develop an AOL Network Appliance, basically a box you turn on and it delivers... AOL and Time-Warner content. No Microsoft anywhere to be seen, which means no chance for Microsoft to hijack future revenue streams.
I personally think AOL is torqued off about the whole go-round with Instant Messaging and vowed never to get dicked by MS like that again.
This is not the end of Open Source. Anyone who thinks so radically overestimates the influence of RH on the Linux world. Yes, it's a big influence, and a lot of the way things are can be traced to them, but if RH vanished tomorrow, someone else would step up. I wouldn't be surprised, as a matter of fact, if AOL didn't slurp up the company, then spin it right back out after working out some very favorable licensing deals and pulling in key development staff.
Their track record is strange: they pretty well fouled up Netscape by forgetting there are non-AOL users of the tool, but they left Nullsoft alone and they're as fine as ever. But the strength of open-source is... we don't "need" any one distribution. If we did, we'd have been hosed long ago.
Turtle
When the whole shitstorm over Napster was playing out in court and the mainstream media over the last 12 months or so, I thought a lot about why people want music over the net, what they want, and why they don't want to pay for it.
Quit laughing, the answer to "why they don't want to pay" isn't as obvious as you think.
I don't want to pay because the money's not going to the right place.
For better or worse, the Napster/P2P phenomenon is an American contrivance, and a lot of it is built, though not necessarily by Americans or in America, with American sensibilities. The Great American Idea is, "I want what I want, where I want it, and when I want it." And the complement of that is, "I don't like to be conscious of being told what I want."
The major labels are trying to play this like they have, or soon will have, total control, same as the old pre-cassette LP days of the 1960s. If you want to hear this music, you go to a store we designate, and you pay some money for a physical flat, black circular object and take it home to play it.
A lot of the labels (just like a lot of the book publishers until a few years ago) still think that they're in the business of selling physical containers for media, when really, most listeners don't give a shit how the content is packaged, they want what's IN it.
But it's that "control" thing that will nuke the labels in the end, because it runs counter to the Promise Of World Interconnection: anything you want, you can find, right now. Anything. The ethic of the labels is, "you can only have what we choose to sell you, when we choose to sell it, nyah."
This offends people. It sure offends ME. I could not possibly give a rat's ass about Britney or Garth or Blink or N'Sync. But the things I am interested in finding are uneconomic for the labels to choose to sell to me on physical media. If I'm interested in finding a particular track by a particular obscure 1950s Detroit blues band, and they recorded only one album that was released locally and there's maybe only ten copies left in the entire world, in a solid-media world, I am completely forked. That is, unless some major label chose to buy the rights to the album, then chose release it on CD, then chose to distribute it AND the stores around me chose to carry it AND they're not out of stock that day AND the counter staff has some idea of what bin it was chucked into.
All I wanted was to hear "Winin' Boy Blues," and I've gotta go through all that? Scruit.
Look at it now from a net perspective: all it takes is for one of those ten people to sample their rare LP, convert it and stick up a Gnutella host. I can then find it, and hear the music right now, and by extension, pass it along to other people who might hit my Gnutella node. No flat, black, rare expensive scratchy things involved.
I want what *I* want, not the shit the label wants me to buy this month. Nothing about any of these online distribution schemes is built to account for that paradigm. And nothing about their paradigm interests me. So yes, I will continue "stealing" the older, less-mainstream music I want, because I don't want any of the stuff they're trying to sell, or if I do, I don't want it on their terms, because their terms don't suit my intended use and strip me of fair-use rights under law.
The one big flaw in my approach is that the creators of the music don't get paid, and I want them to be paid. However, there's nothing in the major label structure that assures that they will be if I hand over my money to them, either!
One way out: rather than try to take on the labels at their game, invent a new one. Bypass the existing rights-management mechanisms and set up a net-based rights cooperative to handle micropayments directly to the artists, a la Amazon's Honor System. Not just for new or unsigned artists, but all artists, including the estates of dead ones. If I want to use an early Fugs track in a film I'm doing, or want to burn some Wes Montgomery to CDR for a friend, I go to the clearinghouse, find the track, find the item, list my use and contact info, and arrange for payment in real time. For artists and material not yet tracked, put it in interest-bearing escrow until such time as they can be.
They get paid, I get my stuff, and the control of labels over what I hear is reduced. The trick is going to be, get the rights to material to revert to the artists rather than continuing to let labels hoard masters they'll never, ever rerelease. Copyright was never intended to be a way for people to bury intellectual property.
I did an earlier essay on this that probably puts it better: The Death Of Napster
Turtle
I'm somewhat impressed, but what I'm waiting for is for them to get the threshold down to 30 degrees C, so that I can run my laptops off the heat energy in my flatulence. Right now it's just wasted in the couch cushions.
Either that, or can anyone suggest a diet that would increase the heat of farts up to 250C?
Turtle
I'm on a smaller non-ATT @Home affiliate in Maryland, and we're fine here. I grilled the cable losers last week as to their contingency plans, and while they indicated they had one, I was pretty sure they really didn't. Something they pointed out is that they as a cable provider deal with an entity called @Home Solutions, as opposed to subbing off Excite@Home.
Our original provider here was Kiva Networks, but they apparently chose to pull out of the area after helping the local company get the system up and running, but they were far superior to @Home, particularly in tech support. Among their last useful acts was to ensure that I got static IP (yay) when they did the conversion to the @Home address space.
Somebody mentioned the "go fill out a web support request form" when your service is down... nothing said "loser" about @Home's support more clearly than the fact that unless you are actually at a workstation in @Home's address space, you can't even visit excite.home.com, where supposedly all the subscriber-specific information is. Thus, if the cable is forked up, I can't go to work and look up reasons why. Dildos.
Turtle
And you use this for WHAT in the server room besides scaring the crap out of the guy wiring up the phone line for the new fax machine...?
...and in what number base?
Argh, the teasing!
That's OK, it'll blow up all by itself.
Turtle
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There are far fewer projects that actually REQUIRE a team than most people think, and the worst possible situation is to demand that a one-human job be done by a team simply because the manager making that call has a team standing around with nothing to do.
Turtle
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Turtle
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Turtle
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The insidious thing about the DMCA is that it shifts, rather inelegantly, the balance toward encouraging, and in many cases forcing, individuals to sign away their Constitutional rights to access material they pay for and obtain legally. They did it by basically handing control from the state (which cannot force you to "volunteer" to give up your rights) to private companies, to whom the Constitution does not apply. In effect the state is saying, "well, they can do anything to you they want, including forcing you to relinquish your rights, and we're no longer going to get involved." Look at this crap with Windows XP, for example. How dare M$ demand that I call their frickin' nasal phone operators just because I end up having to reinstall their POS a dozen times to deal with flaws they created themselves? (Yeah, yeah, I know, but for a lot of droids in this country the inability to use MS "software" equates to an inability to use a computer, much as an inability to drive, in most places, equates to an inability to go anywhere at any time). Worth pointing out again is that the US Constitution is solely an agreement between the state and individuals (or corporations, who have been given far too many opportunities to be treated the same as a natural person). It is not and has never been an agreement between citizens. This is not well understood. Turtle
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If you think about this, this goes straight to the heart of "what is a public record?" If the actions of publicly elected officials can be copyrighted by private individuals or private groups, you start raising some truly hairy questions.
Some of these are rather out there, but man, if private individuals or groups can essentially "own" public law...
Turtle
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