Piracy and fraud would abound if the artists were paid directly for their work on the Net.
Imagine that you were an artist with a song that you published on the Net. Someone takes your song, runs it through a distortion engine and adds bleating goats and calls it their song. It sells a million copies. How do you get your rights?
Your record company and the RIAA could get you your contractually agreed royalty from the goat pirate, but you can't afford to do so on your own.
Like your computer, you need downtime (sleep, walking the dog, eating, etc).
If you are an avid computer user, you may only get your downtime when your computer is rebooting. This is especially true in workplaces where people are "chained" to their computers trying to finish a project, etc.
Those ergonomics posters on the wall do very little to get an average 'puter user to take care of themselves.. reboots served some of this purpose.
(Maybe that is why windows crashes so much - it's Bill Gates' gift to the employee!)
In any case, perhaps all offices should institute a staggered mandatory 15 minute inactivity period every couple of hours for each active computer.
I would think that this is a way to get people to see movies repeatedly in the theater at the inflated price... your average geek can see LOTR on some pirated version by now, so all the replay value has to be added via these teasers n'previews.
You are drooling because of a very short piece of film, and you are allowing yourself to be marketed to. The fansites could be very useful centers of discussion and analysis, if they weren't so breathlessly following announcements of a teaser of a trailer.
You got a great machine to be built w/taxpayer dollars on the cheap and quick.
It is way easier for you to move up a few orders of magnitude of encryption than for them to build a machine that can crack it.
However, this will mean a bigger supercomputer for all kinds of numbering tasks - basic research and math, physics, and astronomy will eventually benefit.
I really like your comment, and if I had five moderation points I would give them all to you.
I believe that journalism is never objective, and that much of the best groundbreaking journalism is honestly partisan.
Consider that many of the reporters in a given area who attempt to cover both sides are stuck in a capital city listening to spokespeople. A war correspondent who covers the force of one side will have much more insight into that limited aspect of the conflict.
I see each news as a piece - when I write an article it's a "piece.." I put the pieces together, attempting to triangulate for various kinds of bias, when I read the news.
I am not sure whether the author here is trying to start an office-suite software choice argument or is trying to get people to code for this project.
Exposing the core business weakness of this software development is not going to help it get more work done. It's like putting out a flea-ridden sad puppy and saying, "look how sick he is, don't you want to adopt him?"
I see a good and a bad to the computer music developments.
I was just listening to some old Smithsonian recordings at work. They are old blues, country and mountain music from the Depression-era recorders who went around with huge trunk sized machines to rcord the music of people without radios who made music on their porches.
Now, we can make music together on a virtual porch. We can sample and produce music easily, and our tastes are, perhaps, less likely to be influenced by the hit machine. Unfortunately, though, most music as of yet from the Net has been derivative..
Perhaps there is still a solitary nature to music made remotely, designed for Napster-style release only, not for performance. Musicmaking, for me, takes a real audience into account. I couldn't make music without a real crowd in mind when I make it.
do bot discount the utility of knowing where you are at. the modern stock market came up because bizzes were able to trade and do shit like predict the weather and their upcoming returns.
Investment in the future used to be a non-rational thing. Due to the cultural and religious shit that was impressed upon your kids, you could count on their supporting you in their old age.
When the advanced navigational techniques of the 16th and 17th centuries were developed, people could predict their futures. They would say,:when my ship comes in."
When my ship comes in sounds antique and slow, because a ship could take 2-3 years between leaving, laden with cargo, and returning, bursting with trade.
But, compared to the generation-long gambles on farms and marriages (the prominent speculations of their time), a ship coming in was as rapid a return on investment as a new technology can be today.
It's great to know where we are - exactly where we are, in physical time in space. I am in awe of it, myself. Place yourself in the proper context of history, and you will know the context of your own experience.
I was an insurance underwriter. I took the job rather than going on with schooling at the University of Chicago to become an anthropologist. I did fairly well in insurance, was a supervising underwriter for individual, group, and association group, health, life, long term disability, and unusual risk policies.
I smiled when I saw this. I couldn't help but think that this is where D&D, and so many of its descendants on boards and on chips, got their obsession with tracking numbers for so many unquantifiable characteristics.
Risk assessors have to put a number on health, wit, and daring; they classify you by background, skills, and lifestyle, in dollars and cents.
Only recently have more plot-driven games broadened out of this focus - like the Final Fantasy series, which puts interesting, structured plots ahead of arduous level-building.
This is the sort of thing that will make open source software broad and popular. You get a dedicated audience who (literally) depends on the product, and the social brownie points racked up by catering to the disabled improves the image of GNOME in broader tech and policy circles.
are, unfortunately, untenable in a home with children and cats in it. at least my trusty glass screen will not leak goo all over the place when slashed by the claws of an angry monitor-sitting feline.
Furthermore, where is there room for the cat on a flatscreen anyway? They have to sit in front of the screen, getting static-cling created furballs between you and what you're looking at, or behind the screen, which removes the motivation for the whole computer-cat experience in the first place, pissing off the computer user.
I remember the story as one of the most haunting memories in my life. All of the science fiction I read after it with similar themes - the apocalyptic science fiction that is so popular today - depends on this story.
It may be escapism, avoidance of personal life problems, or one of any number of distractions. however, most technical innovations in film and many other mechanical disciplines come about this way.
Stop motion film and animation, for instance, are very laborious ways of accomplishing tasks of communication that can be easily accomplished in other ways. However, the drive of fanatical individuals has resulted in some great art in those cases.
Anything that increases safety and stability while filming a tornado would also increase these characteristics in other chaotic situations, such as a war zone or the scene of a terrorist attack.
It's nice to see China and the US working together against terrorism in this game. It's a more realistic scenario than the ones that pit US and Chinese forces (including the wargames on this scenario conducted by the US armed forces).
Actually, China is claiming to be fighting the war against terror in its repression of the Uighur ethnic Turk Muslim people in its Xinjiang province, on the basis that a few dozen people from there may have trained in Afghan Al Qaeda terrorist camps.
2.Cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and any flavor of Unix we could) 3. Useable across all devices a user possessed - desktops, laptops, and, we hoped, eventually handhelds, no extra purchase required for each device.
I was thinking the other day - what happens if electronic books become so prevalent and useable that entire libraries become available via e-book formats, and public facilities use electronic books as a large part of their libraries?
Libraries are required to provide reasonable access and facilities for all sorts of people, such as the deaf and blind. In that case, any restrictions on OS or devices used for the books would raise discrimination issues.
I am aware that a bookseller may restrict the rights to books in any way that they choose. However, there is a subgroup of printed matter - publically available government and court documents, for instance - that may be presented in e-book format. A broad DRM scheme is ideal for this sort of material - you still are able to keep track of who has the material, and to regulate available copyright issues (government documents wouldnt have these issues, but some "public interest" type material might) without overburdening people or forcing them to use a particular OS or device to read the material.
I suggest that, with all the new.$$$ domains being developed that we make one that is really public and keep it so through aggressive legislative activity.
The.org was supposed to be public but it is not./. for example is commercial and private. we need to establish stringent standards for such a public domain and keep it as clearly registered and demarcated public groups.
your personal webpage should not be in this public domain, sites that actually advance the public interest should be.
I don't think that ICANN can responsibly deliniate which sites fall into this category. Who can? I do not know. Groups like eff.org should be involved in this decisionmaking process and corporate groups should not. The debate on what is in the public interest and what is not continues.. I don;t think that game information or whatever should be there, though.
I think things that in themselves maintain freedoms on the Internet itself should be, and that the government should be involved. On a global scale, public interest sites on the Internet should organize and lobby global orgs such as the WTO, etc. to delineate this public space on the Internet. There should be a dot-whatever URL-style that people can go to to look up environmental, technical, social, and political information from verifiably independent sources.
I worry that things like freenet are going to make it so that people will have to engage in continual warfare with people like John Ashcroft.
Ashcroft is the guy who pulled lots of federal enviro data on pipeline locations and stuff from the Net. He will have to attack Google caches and stuff to completely hide this information.
Total lack of anonymity is next. How can Freenet survive if the service is branded as terrorist and the individual humans are pulled away from their terminals while servers are confiscated? No robustness of code can prevent this.
I love Freenet, but to protect anonymity we must acknowledge that not all solutions to civil liberties restrictions are code-based. We must back them up with aggressive defence of civil liberties in political and protest arenas.
The Internet is not a Dewey Decimal System library. The indexing and categorization of information, as it's manifested in the meaning in URLs, is a natural process. It happened due to geeks being funny, people trying to make money, and so on. We have the wonderful histories of sites like www.whitehouse.com, which brings up the question - is it true that people who want information on the web about the White House would not want to see a porno site? I don't think so. Protection from surprise on the Internet should not be the realm of the government, but the realm of the individual.
I think that it will be hard to get devices without this universal locatability soon.
while this is good for people who want to get their sports scores at 3 am while careening down the highway, it's not good for people who wish to place a private call without some agency knowing what house they are placing it from.
Your extramarital affair, your whistle-blowing telephone call, your obfuscation of whereaboutsa from your parents, etc. could all be negatively impacted by the predominance of radio-implanted devices. That's fine, just allow the option of devices that still allow privacy.
You are going to get pretty much unitary legal structures on intellectual property and music copying. That's what's been planned by groups like the World Economic Forum and the World Trade Organization for years.
What's more, there won't be too much debate on perspectives other than those put forward by U.S. law and the major music corporations. That's because these firms and the U.S. government are able to dominate the meetings of business decisionmakers.
The protesters outside global gatherings are, in part, fighting for freedoms in music copying and things like this. What they are doing is trying to get more than a few voices into the meetings where these decisions are made. You should consider lobbying these global groups like the WTO - it doesnt make you a "bomb throwing anarchist," and it may be more effective than lobbying your congressperson, 'cause that's where the decisions are getting made.
From the perspective of someone who uses a spreadsheet of information: This stuff is data, as essential to a corporation with thousands of names to manage as lights and heat.
Software regulators might as well license the software the power company uses, because it provides light to a casino using its software.
If you are gonna give businesses this break, though, you should give the government an equivalent public good in exchange for ceding this control and revenue from software licensing. Governments should be able to easily break in and unwittingly subpoena the records of corporations like Enron, so they can't shred 'em.
Technologies, in society, operate on a gradient. The old ones are usually retained until they fall apart, and the new ones are acquired when it's forced upon a business or an individual (usually because everybody else has acquired a new tech, and it's incompatible with the old).
There are vested interests in old technologies, too. That's why an airport, who's been subcontracting to an old-skewl tech company for years, may have a new iteration of punchcard tech.
In Africa, for example, the old Datsuns and 286's we throw away are put to good use, and repaired until they fall apart. Most people, there and here, see technology as a necessary evil, not a blessing. They would hate to spend money on, and waste time learning, something new just for its own sake!
Only a truly myopic perspective - that which worships the new for the newness, and hence also worships the old for its oldness, would consider the use of Punchcards something slash-worthy. I wish there were more perspective on these issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep up the good work.
Imagine that you were an artist with a song that you published on the Net. Someone takes your song, runs it through a distortion engine and adds bleating goats and calls it their song. It sells a million copies. How do you get your rights?
Your record company and the RIAA could get you your contractually agreed royalty from the goat pirate, but you can't afford to do so on your own.
Like your computer, you need downtime (sleep, walking the dog, eating, etc).
If you are an avid computer user, you may only get your downtime when your computer is rebooting. This is especially true in workplaces where people are "chained" to their computers trying to finish a project, etc.
Those ergonomics posters on the wall do very little to get an average 'puter user to take care of themselves.. reboots served some of this purpose.
(Maybe that is why windows crashes so much - it's Bill Gates' gift to the employee!)
In any case, perhaps all offices should institute a staggered mandatory 15 minute inactivity period every couple of hours for each active computer.
baaaa.. everyone is sheep of the movie industry.
I would think that this is a way to get people to see movies repeatedly in the theater at the inflated price... your average geek can see LOTR on some pirated version by now, so all the replay value has to be added via these teasers n'previews.
You are drooling because of a very short piece of film, and you are allowing yourself to be marketed to. The fansites could be very useful centers of discussion and analysis, if they weren't so breathlessly following announcements of a teaser of a trailer.
You got a great machine to be built w/taxpayer dollars on the cheap and quick.
It is way easier for you to move up a few orders of magnitude of encryption than for them to build a machine that can crack it.
However, this will mean a bigger supercomputer for all kinds of numbering tasks - basic research and math, physics, and astronomy will eventually benefit.
I really like your comment, and if I had five moderation points I would give them all to you.
I believe that journalism is never objective, and that much of the best groundbreaking journalism is honestly partisan.
Consider that many of the reporters in a given area who attempt to cover both sides are stuck in a capital city listening to spokespeople. A war correspondent who covers the force of one side will have much more insight into that limited aspect of the conflict.
I see each news as a piece - when I write an article it's a "piece.." I put the pieces together, attempting to triangulate for various kinds of bias, when I read the news.
I am not sure whether the author here is trying to start an office-suite software choice argument or is trying to get people to code for this project.
Exposing the core business weakness of this software development is not going to help it get more work done. It's like putting out a flea-ridden sad puppy and saying, "look how sick he is, don't you want to adopt him?"
I see a good and a bad to the computer music developments.
I was just listening to some old Smithsonian recordings at work. They are old blues, country and mountain music from the Depression-era recorders who went around with huge trunk sized machines to rcord the music of people without radios who made music on their porches.
Now, we can make music together on a virtual porch. We can sample and produce music easily, and our tastes are, perhaps, less likely to be influenced by the hit machine. Unfortunately, though, most music as of yet from the Net has been derivative..
Perhaps there is still a solitary nature to music made remotely, designed for Napster-style release only, not for performance. Musicmaking, for me, takes a real audience into account. I couldn't make music without a real crowd in mind when I make it.
do bot discount the utility of knowing where you are at. the modern stock market came up because bizzes were able to trade and do shit like predict the weather and their upcoming returns.
:when my ship comes in."
Investment in the future used to be a non-rational thing. Due to the cultural and religious shit that was impressed upon your kids, you could count on their supporting you in their old age.
When the advanced navigational techniques of the 16th and 17th centuries were developed, people could predict their futures. They would say,
When my ship comes in sounds antique and slow, because a ship could take 2-3 years between leaving, laden with cargo, and returning, bursting with trade.
But, compared to the generation-long gambles on farms and marriages (the prominent speculations of their time), a ship coming in was as rapid a return on investment as a new technology can be today.
It's great to know where we are - exactly where we are, in physical time in space. I am in awe of it, myself. Place yourself in the proper context of history, and you will know the context of your own experience.
I smiled when I saw this. I couldn't help but think that this is where D&D, and so many of its descendants on boards and on chips, got their obsession with tracking numbers for so many unquantifiable characteristics.
Risk assessors have to put a number on health, wit, and daring; they classify you by background, skills, and lifestyle, in dollars and cents.
Only recently have more plot-driven games broadened out of this focus - like the Final Fantasy series, which puts interesting, structured plots ahead of arduous level-building.
This is the sort of thing that will make open source software broad and popular. You get a dedicated audience who (literally) depends on the product, and the social brownie points racked up by catering to the disabled improves the image of GNOME in broader tech and policy circles.
are, unfortunately, untenable in a home with children and cats in it. at least my trusty glass screen will not leak goo all over the place when slashed by the claws of an angry monitor-sitting feline.
Furthermore, where is there room for the cat on a flatscreen anyway? They have to sit in front of the screen, getting static-cling created furballs between you and what you're looking at, or behind the screen, which removes the motivation for the whole computer-cat experience in the first place, pissing off the computer user.
I remember the story as one of the most haunting memories in my life. All of the science fiction I read after it with similar themes - the apocalyptic science fiction that is so popular today - depends on this story.
would be a much better replacement for Nightline than Dave Letterman.
1) he doesn't age
2) entirely removed from the depressing world of news and politics that Letterman insists on finding funny
3) Is actually funny
It may be escapism, avoidance of personal life problems, or one of any number of distractions. however, most technical innovations in film and many other mechanical disciplines come about this way.
Stop motion film and animation, for instance, are very laborious ways of accomplishing tasks of communication that can be easily accomplished in other ways. However, the drive of fanatical individuals has resulted in some great art in those cases.
Anything that increases safety and stability while filming a tornado would also increase these characteristics in other chaotic situations, such as a war zone or the scene of a terrorist attack.
It's nice to see China and the US working together against terrorism in this game. It's a more realistic scenario than the ones that pit US and Chinese forces (including the wargames on this scenario conducted by the US armed forces).
Actually, China is claiming to be fighting the war against terror in its repression of the Uighur ethnic Turk Muslim people in its Xinjiang province, on the basis that a few dozen people from there may have trained in Afghan Al Qaeda terrorist camps.
hoped, eventually handhelds, no extra purchase required for each device.
I was thinking the other day - what happens if electronic books become so prevalent and useable that entire libraries become available via e-book formats, and public facilities use electronic books as a large part of their libraries?
Libraries are required to provide reasonable access and facilities for all sorts of people, such as the deaf and blind. In that case, any restrictions on OS or devices used for the books would raise discrimination issues.
I am aware that a bookseller may restrict the rights to books in any way that they choose. However, there is a subgroup of printed matter - publically available government and court documents, for instance - that may be presented in e-book format. A broad DRM scheme is ideal for this sort of material - you still are able to keep track of who has the material, and to regulate available copyright issues (government documents wouldnt have these issues, but some "public interest" type material might) without overburdening people or forcing them to use a particular OS or device to read the material.
How to keep the public domain our right?
.$$$ domains being developed that we make one that is really public and keep it so through aggressive legislative activity.
.org was supposed to be public but it is not. /. for example is commercial and private. we need to establish stringent standards for such a public domain and keep it as clearly registered and demarcated public groups.
I suggest that, with all the new
The
your personal webpage should not be in this public domain, sites that actually advance the public interest should be.
I don't think that ICANN can responsibly deliniate which sites fall into this category. Who can? I do not know. Groups like eff.org should be involved in this decisionmaking process and corporate groups should not. The debate on what is in the public interest and what is not continues.. I don;t think that game information or whatever should be there, though.
I think things that in themselves maintain freedoms on the Internet itself should be, and that the government should be involved. On a global scale, public interest sites on the Internet should organize and lobby global orgs such as the WTO, etc. to delineate this public space on the Internet. There should be a dot-whatever URL-style that people can go to to look up environmental, technical, social, and political information from verifiably independent sources.
I worry that things like freenet are going to make it so that people will have to engage in continual warfare with people like John Ashcroft.
Ashcroft is the guy who pulled lots of federal enviro data on pipeline locations and stuff from the Net. He will have to attack Google caches and stuff to completely hide this information.
Total lack of anonymity is next. How can Freenet survive if the service is branded as terrorist and the individual humans are pulled away from their terminals while servers are confiscated? No robustness of code can prevent this.
I love Freenet, but to protect anonymity we must acknowledge that not all solutions to civil liberties restrictions are code-based. We must back them up with aggressive defence of civil liberties in political and protest arenas.
I am with Robertson on this one.
The Internet is not a Dewey Decimal System library. The indexing and categorization of information, as it's manifested in the meaning in URLs, is a natural process. It happened due to geeks being funny, people trying to make money, and so on. We have the wonderful histories of sites like www.whitehouse.com, which brings up the question - is it true that people who want information on the web about the White House would not want to see a porno site? I don't think so.
Protection from surprise on the Internet should not be the realm of the government, but the realm of the individual.
I think that it will be hard to get devices without this universal locatability soon.
while this is good for people who want to get their sports scores at 3 am while careening down the highway, it's not good for people who wish to place a private call without some agency knowing what house they are placing it from.
Your extramarital affair, your whistle-blowing telephone call, your obfuscation of whereaboutsa from your parents, etc. could all be negatively impacted by the predominance of radio-implanted devices. That's fine, just allow the option of devices that still allow privacy.
You are going to get pretty much unitary legal structures on intellectual property and music copying. That's what's been planned by groups like the World Economic Forum and the World Trade Organization for years.
What's more, there won't be too much debate on perspectives other than those put forward by U.S. law and the major music corporations. That's because these firms and the U.S. government are able to dominate the meetings of business decisionmakers.
The protesters outside global gatherings are, in part, fighting for freedoms in music copying and things like this. What they are doing is trying to get more than a few voices into the meetings where these decisions are made. You should consider lobbying these global groups like the WTO - it doesnt make you a "bomb throwing anarchist," and it may be more effective than lobbying your congressperson, 'cause that's where the decisions are getting made.
From the perspective of someone who uses a spreadsheet of information: This stuff is data, as essential to a corporation with thousands of names to manage as lights and heat.
Software regulators might as well license the software the power company uses, because it provides light to a casino using its software.
If you are gonna give businesses this break, though, you should give the government an equivalent public good in exchange for ceding this control and revenue from software licensing.
Governments should be able to easily break in and unwittingly subpoena the records of corporations like Enron, so they can't shred 'em.
Technologies, in society, operate on a gradient. The old ones are usually retained until they fall apart, and the new ones are acquired when it's forced upon a business or an individual (usually because everybody else has acquired a new tech, and it's incompatible with the old).
There are vested interests in old technologies, too. That's why an airport, who's been subcontracting to an old-skewl tech company for years, may have a new iteration of punchcard tech.
In Africa, for example, the old Datsuns and 286's we throw away are put to good use, and repaired until they fall apart. Most people, there and here, see technology as a necessary evil, not a blessing. They would hate to spend money on, and waste time learning, something new just for its own sake!
Only a truly myopic perspective - that which worships the new for the newness, and hence also worships the old for its oldness, would consider the use of Punchcards something slash-worthy. I wish there were more perspective on these issues.
do we need to watch tv all the time? when we are working with hot things, etc?
I don't like TVs in cars, either. There are times when we shouldn't watch tv.
Yes, there is free enterprise. You have a right to buy this. However, the more people buy it, the more "ubiquitous" having every room wired becomes.
Think about it from your grandkids' perspective: They might have to have a computer in every room of the house for their 18 hour workdays.