The 3-judge panel was making up the law by misapplying something in the Constitution for something in this case that didn't exist. It had no basis in the Constitution for the situation they were talking about.
The 3-judge panel was simply following the reasoning and precedent of Bush v. Gore.
If so, why did the Clinton administration not seize the opportunity to have Sudan hand over Bin Laden when they had the chance on numerous occasions?
I regret that this is buried so far down in the thread, but have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, the story about Clinton declining this deal might be spurious?
Al Franken's latest book (I realize he's just as partisan as anyone else, but he's got a bit more regard for the truth than the likes of Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter) has the following to say:
[The] entire case comes from a guy named Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American who claims to have transmitted the offer as a middleman between the U.S. and Sudan. I got the story on Ijaz from former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and from Daniel Benjamin, past director of counterterrrism on the National Security Council and now senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Berger only had to meet once with Ijaz to determine that he was an unreliable freelancer, pursuing his own financial interests. Ijaz was an investment banker with a huge stake in Sudanese oil.
Ijaz had urged Berger to lift sanctions against Sudan. Why the sanctions? Because Sudan was and remains a notorious sponsor of terrorism, harboring Hamas, Hezbolla, and al Qaeda. Also, the Sudanese regime is the leading state sponsor of slavery and is considered by many to be genocidal. And totally untrustworthy. Ijaz, however, was arguing their case. As Benjamin said of Ijaz, Either he allowed himself to be manipulated, or he's in bed with a bunch of genocidal terrorists.
Ijaz said that Sudan was ready to hand over bin Laden. The U.S. does not conduct diplomacy through self-appointed private individuals. When the U.S. talked to Sudan, there was no such offer. The U.S. pursued every lead and tried to negotiate. Nothing.
The story does have a happy ending. Ijaz now has a job as foreign affairs analyst for the Fox News Channel.
I plan to make several anonymous calls to SCO, asking them exactly which of Mr. McBride's orfices he would like his money in. I plan to pay in small bills, all folded until they're nothing but sharp little corners. Who's with me?!
Nah...I say you should go the old Upright Citizens Brigade ass pennies route. I don't know if it's possible to shove 69,900 pennies up his ass, but I'd be willing to find out.
The thing is, you can't be certain that the intentions of sourcecode will be executed faithfully, without returning to first principles (basically the laws of physics), unless you start trusting some of the layers. And once you start trusting layers - say, the hardware layer, the compiler - why not extend that trust further up the stack? So, why is sourcecode access so crucial to trust?
Going that far down into the stack crosses the line from sensible caution to paranoia; risk can be mitigated by using commonly available, preferably open-source, general purpose products to build the system. How can you trust that the compiler is doing what it's supposed to? Because thousands of other programmers are using it and receiving correct results from their programs. If you're worried that your compiler has been tampered with, you can take the MD5 hash of it and compare it with those of other copies.
Source code needs to be transparent because that's the part of the system that's most specific to voting and most susceptible to problems, either through improper handling of possible attack scenarios or through deliberate tampering.
What's important is that there be some external, verifiable proof that the machine results reflect the intentions of the voters. That means a system where the machine prints off a physical ballot paper, the voter checks it accurately reflects their vote, and deposits it in a secure ballot box. That way an audit trail exists that means that you can physically count the votes and ensure that the results are what the computer said they were. Source access isn't necessary to ensure this, just as access to electron microscopy of the chip surface isn't required.
Having the ability to audit for discrepancies after the fact is a poor substitute for getting it right the first time. Suppose, hypothetically speaking, a nefarious voting program was written to give a slightly higher margin of victory to one party in areas that already lean heavily toward that party--e.g. in an area that typically votes 70/30 Republican, it boosts the Republican candidate's votes to 72%. Who would question that? And if no one questioned it, who would count the paper ballots to make sure the count was accurate?
Be realistic, though, you don't double smartcard voice recognized palm scanned passphrase authentication and uncrackable in a trillion years triple supercrypto to do the equivalent of program your vcr from the office.
But I don't want some hacker breaking into it and recording stuff to make TiVo think I'm gay!
Actually, very little of what you've said contradicts what I wrote, and in fact, much of it supports it. I explicitly recognized the benefits, both purely scientific and practical, that the space program in general has given us, and my criticism was not of NASA in general but of the current state of the manned space program as it currently exists.
One key statement from you: "In short, the Shuttle allows the politicians to avoid making harder funding decisions and enabling NASA to produce new vehicles." All the more reason to scrap the shuttle, then!
I would love to see space research, development, and technology take up a much greater percentage of the budget than it does. But that simply ain't gonna happen any time soon, because, again, unlike the Apollo years, there is no clear goal or vision driving the program.
As for hindering other programs...NASA's budget is about $15 billion, and 40% of it--$6 billion--goes to manned spaceflight operations and support, per year. Consider that NASA management imposed a $150 million total budget limit when seeking proposals for the on-hold Pluto-Kuiper Express mission to the last unvisited planet in the solar system, and then put the project on hold, and...well, you tell me...does that look like hindering to you?
Hate to say it, but I have to agree with Rep. Barton. Manned space flight, as it is currently practiced, is a joke, and has been since the seventies. The Space Age has apparently come and gone....there are children today whose parents were not even alive at the time of the last moon landing. Having once stepped on another world, we now seem to be content to simply play in our cosmic back yard.
All our manned space activity has been devoted to a bloated hulking monstrosity of a vehicle that can manage far fewer missions at far higher cost than originally intended; for twenty years, until the ISS was finally built, it failed to serve the function it was designed for--ferrying equipment, construction materials, etc. into space. (And the value of the ISS is as dubious sa that of the shuttle itself.) We send it up two hundred miles, it circles around the earth a few dozen times, and it comes back down. If it doesn't blow up on the way up or burn up on reentry. The shuttle program has obstructed cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful ways of getting people into space. It has so hindered us that it would take us another ten years to rebuild the infrastructure needed to send us back to the moon.
And for what? For PR? So schoolkids could have a real live astronaut growing their bean sprouts for them? So John Glenn could have one last moment of glory? The only worthwhile missions in my opinion have been those to service the Hubble telescope. Consider the adverse impact it has had on other, more valuable, unmanned programs, either because of the shuttle's drain on NASA's budget, or its inability to function due to delays and disasters--the delay of the Cassini program, the bare-bones funding available for Mars missions, the shame of being the only spacefaring nation unable to send a probe to Halley's Comet on its last visit, the failure to send a probe to Pluto when it would be most scientifically useful...
The shuttle program is a parasite on the nation's science program, and it is a killer. Don't look at it as a 2% failure rate--two disasters out of 107 flights. It's a 40% failure rate: two of five vehicles catastrophically exploding, well within the limits of their expected usable life.
I am by no means saying that we should end the space program. The Voyager program, the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, and other unmanned scientific missions have provided us with vast knowledge about the universe around us. The commercial space program has enriched our lives here on earth, through global communications networks, better weather forecasting, etc. But compared to these, our manned space program is lagging far behind. We can send people no farther than low earth orbit, and we have no worthwhile vision for what they should do once they get there.
We'll come up with our own standard of mass, and we'll call it the Freedom Sphere. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jacques Chirac! With your burned lips!
And then Lifetime would probably make a movie about it.
A cruel man, determined to cut his wife off from the outside world. A long-suffering woman, pushed to the edge. A caring friend who decides that enough is enough. Robert Hays, Markie Post and Victoria Principal star in Justice Glows. Only on Lifetime.
Earlier today, Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-Disney) announced legislation to allow copyright holders to use otherwise illegal hacking techniques to disrupt toasters, light switches, and other devices used by individuals believed to be pirating copyrighted works.
RIAA chair Hilary Rosen hailed the effort as a milestone in attempts at combatting Internet piracy. "The development of Internet-enabled toasters offers us vast new opportunities to hit the pirates where they live. 'Smoking out the bastards' will no longer be a figure of speech. It will be a reality.'"
Keep in mind that Sony, the company that builds MP3 players, computers with CD-RW drives, CD players, DVD players, etc., is also the company that owns Columbia Records, which tries to prevent their music from working with those MP3 players, computers with CD-RW drives, CD players, and DVD players.
Are you going to go out and spend $1500 on a piece of equipment from a schizophrenic company that's trying to sabotage their own products?
Some of the problem is adults whacking off in libraries looking at porn. We can protect the kids from that by banning porn altogether.
No, you can protect the kids from that by calling the cops. There are laws against public lewd behavior, you know.
Another problem is state funds. I for one never want to see my tax dollars being use *even once* for viewing crap like porn. So ban it. If our excuse is that in blocking porn we may also block some other "protected" speech, then we are obviously just making excuses.
There are millions of things the government spends its money on that I don't want my tax dollars being used for. Everyone else has their own list of pet peeves as well. Why should yours be any more important than anyone else's? And who are you to say that it's OK to cut people off from whole realms of information that is not indecent to support your "Won't somebody please think of the children?" crusade?
I know legislators love writing laws, see writing laws as their reason for existence, and think there isn't a problem in the world that can't be solved with a new law. But in this case, it's exactly the wrong thing to do.
We already have traditional copyright law which prohibits illegal distribution of copyrighted materials.
We already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows the content industry to devise any copy protection methods it wants and makes it a crime to circumvent them.
The industry already has all the legal tools it needs to fight genuine piracy. The only thing stopping it from doing so is the realization that going after end users would be a public relations disaster. Is Congress really that eager to bring the PR nightmare upon themselves with a new law that interferes with the actions and technical abilities of law-abiding citizens?
Any industry that treats all of its customers like criminals and treats its products as something to be protected from the customers is doomed to fail. The longer Congress and the industry avoid this realization, the more painful it will be for everyone.
"He added that in two days the three students downloaded nearly 6,000 songs.
"'Now multiply that by millions of students and other computer users, and the problem comes into sharp focus,' he said."
Let's see, three students downloading 6,000 songs in two days...that's a thousand songs per student per day, or 365,000 songs per student per year...times millions of students (say fifty million, which was the last figure I recall hearing for the number of Napster users back before the RIAA killed it)...that's 18 and a quarter trillion songs per year!
CD prices are approaching $20 for a disc that typically contains ten songs or so. So the music industry must be missing out on $36.5 trillion dollars in sales every year. Since their actual revenues are closer to $10 billion—a mere one three-thousandth of their potential—it's no wonder they're so upset about file sharing.
The Tivo and PVR's have shitty marketing IMHO. Primary candidates are geeks, who generally have computers (read plural); and these folks can do the TiVo thing anyway; why buy the unit?
I think most geeks would rather watch TV on a good 27"+ TV screen than a 17"/19"/21" monitor, if only because they're more likely to have a comfortable couch in front of the former.
But you're right, marketing is the problem. Here are some ideas I wish I'd see in ads:
A standup comic is doing his act. A punch line gets drowned out by laughter, background noise, whatever. Cut to a couple sitting watching the comic on TV. One asks, "what did he say?" The other hits the instant replay button.
An exciting movie on TV is approaching its climax when a kid runs in front of the image saying "mommy I hurt myself!" Mom hits the pause button and takes care of the kid.
A man comes in the door and his wife says "you're home late, honey..." He realizes he's missing his favorite show, a special episode on a special night. But when he checks the TiVo, it's recording it for him because he's got a season pass and it detected the schedule change.
A guy and his girlfriend are checking the TiVo suggestions screen and he sees a movie on tonight that he's always wanted to see...the TiVo figured he'd like it. He gets really excited and tells the TiVo to record it. Uh oh, there's a conflict--his girlfriend has already got something set to record then, and she says "Don't you dare cancel that." Damn. Wait, let's see if it's on any at any other time. Yup, they're showing it at 3 a.m. Excellent.
I'm no Madison Avenue hotshot, but it seems to me that ads like this would have them flying out of the stores faster than they could stock them. But maybe they've already made such ads--I wouldn't know, I skip over them all.:)
Bundle WebTV with TiVo and i think you might have a winner for john q. public.
Not gonna happen in that form, since WebTV is owned by Microsoft--who also own UltimateTV and the XBox. Besides, TiVo is Linux-based, which would send Bill Gates into a seething rage. I do wish TiVo had an optional keyboard, though, if only to simplify program selection.
Is this terribly different from what happens when slashdot has a post announcing some poll about linux? I'm sure we've rigged our share in the past. Not that I think Microsoft is right. I'm just trying to give a little perspective and play devil's advocate for a moment. Feel free to mod me down because you dissagree.
Is stuffing the ballot box with forged ballots terribly different than rallying your supporters to get out the vote?
Give Senator Judd a break! Just because he changed his mind on an issue is not a bad thing. He probably just came to his senses after hearing the facts about the issue. You should be happy. I am.
I'm extremely happy he changed his mind. I don't think anyone's complaining about that at all. But in coming forward so stridently at first, he swayed the opinion of those who assumed that he knew what he was talking about. Remember, Slashdot readers are not representative of the US population at large--witness the large numbers of people answering in the affirmative when asked if they'd be willing to give up some of their freedoms if doing so would help the war on terrorism. People hear rhetoric about secret unbreakable messages being sent by terrorists, whether true or not, and naturally they want to make it possible for the government to intercept those messages. So when a senator calls for back doors in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in history, they're all for it. They're unlikely to be swayed back. Sen. Gregg's initial call made front-page headlines. His retraction will be buried. He should have been put more thought into his initial position before announcing it.
If bridges were programmed...
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 5, Informative
Project managers would see the balsa mockup and tell the construction crews to just put the mockup in place because it's good enough to use as is.
Somebody would stop the project halfway through construction to insist that it be changed from a simple truss to a suspension bridge.
Somebody else would stop the project to insist that it be changed from a suspension bridge to a tunnel, and furthermore, to demand delivery of a tunnel for simple truss prices.
Massive traffic jams would occur as users stop at each end and call for help because they can't figure out how to drive across.
Architects would be sent out to tow cars and fill potholes.
The primary goal of Linux for the past few years seems to have been "imitate and emulate Microsoft."
Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? Should we be developing substitutes or alternatives for ActiveX instead of trying to recreate it?
We spend more time trying to get Microsoft-supported games to run on Linux than we do writing games for Linux.
Get your priorities straight: Linux ought to be an alternative, not a poor imitation.
I'm primarily a Windows user. I'm interested in Linux, have it installed at home, and use it for personal reasons. I've decided not to follow MS down the XP/.NET path. But at the same time, I can't commit fully to Linux yet because there are so many things I can't do with it.
There are thousands of good philosophical reasons to choose an open computing platform over a proprietary one, but the people who actually stop to think about those reasons are a tiny minority of society. Average computer users want to be able to run the same programs as all their friends and coworkers. They want their Word documents to open properly, their web browser to render pages properly. And by properly, they don't mean "the way things ought to work" but rather "the way they work for everyone else." Open source? Free software? They don't give a damn whether the source code for their mail reader is available, because they wouldn't know what to do with it.
Simply being better than Windows isn't enough. Windows runs on more than 90% of the desktop computers out there. Business is run with Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and MS Project timelines. You can develop the best word processor or spreadsheet program imaginable, but if it doesn't work with 95% of the rest of the market, what good is it? If Linux is ever to make serious inroads into the Windows desktop environment, then it has to provide enough interoperability to make switching painless (or at least less painful than staying with Windows).
Reading the KDE news release, I see that Konqueror supports Java applets, Netscape plugins, KParts components, any X window...in short, provides a wide range of extensibility options. That's great. And now ActiveX controls are one of those options. How is that a bad thing exactly? Were Linux users making a positive moral sacrifice by depriving themselves of web content that uses ActiveX controls? Does support for a Microsoft technology somehow quot;taint" Konqueror? And if so, how come I've never heard the same complaint about, say, Samba, the killer app that's taken a huge chunk out of Microsoft's server market?
You're absolutely right that Linux should provide an alternative to Windows rather than just an imitation of it. But supporting Windows-based protocols, file formats, etc. in addition to non-Microsoft technologies does that, and in the short term is Linux's best hope for greater success. Linux will win by letting people do what they want, not by frustrating their wishes and giving them lectures about how what they want is bad.
I find it amusing to see McNealy conflate life-and-death situations with the mundane experiences of day-to-day life, as if it were just as important to have an Italian restaurant inform you of its existence as to have paramedics know you've got diabetes. But one point he fails to mention, probably because it undermines his views, is that technology can protect privacy at the same time it offers these wonderful personalized services.
Take his example of the embedded GPS transmitter in his car. "I have agreed to let my car company...track my every move.... I find it comforting to know that, should my airbag deploy, they know where I am and can send help." But why does anyone need to make that kind of bargain with their car company? It's just as easy to design a system that transmits your location only when the airbag deploys, or manually at the push of a button, as one that transmits continuously. With such a system, your car company may not be able to tell you where the nearest restaurant or gas station owned by one of their marketing affiliates is located...but they also can't inform your insurance company of your habit of driving 85 mph on the interstate.
And the latest Amazon privacy debacle illustrates that contrary to his claims, the industry has not done a pretty good job of regulating itself, when a company can decide to change their privacy policy with minimal notice, removing customers' ability to opt out, and retroactively abrogating all previous opt-out requests.
McNealy asserts that companies that don't protect privacy will go out of business, but that's just one of many factors that determine whether people will use a company. I would bet that 90% of Internet users do not bother reading privacy policies, assuming often incorrectly that they are reasonable. I would bet that 90% of those who do read a company's privacy policy statements do so only once, assuming that it won't change on future visits. In that climate, companies can pay lip service to privacy while trampling the concept into the ground with impunity.
The current standard is unacceptably low. An opt-in policy is the only appropriate standard. Information provided by the user is to be used only for the specified purpose, distribution to other parties is prohibited without the user's explicit consent, and if the company goes under, the data may be sold off only with the same restrictions on its use. Then make that standard legally binding with the same kind of statutory damages as unsolicited commercial faxes.
Back in like '94 or so, Bob Denny, the author, ported the NCSA HTTPD server to Windows 3.1. When it came time to move from 16- to 32-bit, he turned it into a commercial product. So really WebSite and Apache are pretty close cousins. I haven't used WebSite myself since version 1.0, so I don't know what's been added in more recent versions, but making it open-source probably wouldn't be that useful since Apache already occupies the same project space.
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The 3-judge panel was simply following the reasoning and precedent of Bush v. Gore.
I regret that this is buried so far down in the thread, but have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, the story about Clinton declining this deal might be spurious?
Al Franken's latest book (I realize he's just as partisan as anyone else, but he's got a bit more regard for the truth than the likes of Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter) has the following to say:
Nah...I say you should go the old Upright Citizens Brigade ass pennies route. I don't know if it's possible to shove 69,900 pennies up his ass, but I'd be willing to find out.
Going that far down into the stack crosses the line from sensible caution to paranoia; risk can be mitigated by using commonly available, preferably open-source, general purpose products to build the system. How can you trust that the compiler is doing what it's supposed to? Because thousands of other programmers are using it and receiving correct results from their programs. If you're worried that your compiler has been tampered with, you can take the MD5 hash of it and compare it with those of other copies.
Source code needs to be transparent because that's the part of the system that's most specific to voting and most susceptible to problems, either through improper handling of possible attack scenarios or through deliberate tampering.
Having the ability to audit for discrepancies after the fact is a poor substitute for getting it right the first time. Suppose, hypothetically speaking, a nefarious voting program was written to give a slightly higher margin of victory to one party in areas that already lean heavily toward that party--e.g. in an area that typically votes 70/30 Republican, it boosts the Republican candidate's votes to 72%. Who would question that? And if no one questioned it, who would count the paper ballots to make sure the count was accurate?
Actually, very little of what you've said contradicts what I wrote, and in fact, much of it supports it. I explicitly recognized the benefits, both purely scientific and practical, that the space program in general has given us, and my criticism was not of NASA in general but of the current state of the manned space program as it currently exists. One key statement from you: "In short, the Shuttle allows the politicians to avoid making harder funding decisions and enabling NASA to produce new vehicles." All the more reason to scrap the shuttle, then! I would love to see space research, development, and technology take up a much greater percentage of the budget than it does. But that simply ain't gonna happen any time soon, because, again, unlike the Apollo years, there is no clear goal or vision driving the program. As for hindering other programs...NASA's budget is about $15 billion, and 40% of it--$6 billion--goes to manned spaceflight operations and support, per year. Consider that NASA management imposed a $150 million total budget limit when seeking proposals for the on-hold Pluto-Kuiper Express mission to the last unvisited planet in the solar system, and then put the project on hold, and...well, you tell me...does that look like hindering to you?
Hate to say it, but I have to agree with Rep. Barton. Manned space flight, as it is currently practiced, is a joke, and has been since the seventies. The Space Age has apparently come and gone....there are children today whose parents were not even alive at the time of the last moon landing. Having once stepped on another world, we now seem to be content to simply play in our cosmic back yard.
All our manned space activity has been devoted to a bloated hulking monstrosity of a vehicle that can manage far fewer missions at far higher cost than originally intended; for twenty years, until the ISS was finally built, it failed to serve the function it was designed for--ferrying equipment, construction materials, etc. into space. (And the value of the ISS is as dubious sa that of the shuttle itself.) We send it up two hundred miles, it circles around the earth a few dozen times, and it comes back down. If it doesn't blow up on the way up or burn up on reentry. The shuttle program has obstructed cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful ways of getting people into space. It has so hindered us that it would take us another ten years to rebuild the infrastructure needed to send us back to the moon.
And for what? For PR? So schoolkids could have a real live astronaut growing their bean sprouts for them? So John Glenn could have one last moment of glory? The only worthwhile missions in my opinion have been those to service the Hubble telescope. Consider the adverse impact it has had on other, more valuable, unmanned programs, either because of the shuttle's drain on NASA's budget, or its inability to function due to delays and disasters--the delay of the Cassini program, the bare-bones funding available for Mars missions, the shame of being the only spacefaring nation unable to send a probe to Halley's Comet on its last visit, the failure to send a probe to Pluto when it would be most scientifically useful...
The shuttle program is a parasite on the nation's science program, and it is a killer. Don't look at it as a 2% failure rate--two disasters out of 107 flights. It's a 40% failure rate: two of five vehicles catastrophically exploding, well within the limits of their expected usable life.
I am by no means saying that we should end the space program. The Voyager program, the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, and other unmanned scientific missions have provided us with vast knowledge about the universe around us. The commercial space program has enriched our lives here on earth, through global communications networks, better weather forecasting, etc. But compared to these, our manned space program is lagging far behind. We can send people no farther than low earth orbit, and we have no worthwhile vision for what they should do once they get there.
I don't see Gillette creating blades that dull themselves if you don't use them soon enough.
We'll come up with our own standard of mass, and we'll call it the Freedom Sphere. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jacques Chirac! With your burned lips!
A cruel man, determined to cut his wife off from the outside world. A long-suffering woman, pushed to the edge. A caring friend who decides that enough is enough. Robert Hays, Markie Post and Victoria Principal star in Justice Glows. Only on Lifetime.
Earlier today, Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-Disney) announced legislation to allow copyright holders to use otherwise illegal hacking techniques to disrupt toasters, light switches, and other devices used by individuals believed to be pirating copyrighted works.
RIAA chair Hilary Rosen hailed the effort as a milestone in attempts at combatting Internet piracy. "The development of Internet-enabled toasters offers us vast new opportunities to hit the pirates where they live. 'Smoking out the bastards' will no longer be a figure of speech. It will be a reality.'"
Keep in mind that Sony, the company that builds MP3 players, computers with CD-RW drives, CD players, DVD players, etc., is also the company that owns Columbia Records, which tries to prevent their music from working with those MP3 players, computers with CD-RW drives, CD players, and DVD players.
Are you going to go out and spend $1500 on a piece of equipment from a schizophrenic company that's trying to sabotage their own products?
Maybe it's squant.
No, you can protect the kids from that by calling the cops. There are laws against public lewd behavior, you know.
There are millions of things the government spends its money on that I don't want my tax dollars being used for. Everyone else has their own list of pet peeves as well. Why should yours be any more important than anyone else's? And who are you to say that it's OK to cut people off from whole realms of information that is not indecent to support your "Won't somebody please think of the children?" crusade?
We already have traditional copyright law which prohibits illegal distribution of copyrighted materials.
We already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows the content industry to devise any copy protection methods it wants and makes it a crime to circumvent them.
The industry already has all the legal tools it needs to fight genuine piracy. The only thing stopping it from doing so is the realization that going after end users would be a public relations disaster. Is Congress really that eager to bring the PR nightmare upon themselves with a new law that interferes with the actions and technical abilities of law-abiding citizens?
Any industry that treats all of its customers like criminals and treats its products as something to be protected from the customers is doomed to fail. The longer Congress and the industry avoid this realization, the more painful it will be for everyone.
Let's see, three students downloading 6,000 songs in two days...that's a thousand songs per student per day, or 365,000 songs per student per year...times millions of students (say fifty million, which was the last figure I recall hearing for the number of Napster users back before the RIAA killed it)...that's 18 and a quarter trillion songs per year!
CD prices are approaching $20 for a disc that typically contains ten songs or so. So the music industry must be missing out on $36.5 trillion dollars in sales every year. Since their actual revenues are closer to $10 billion—a mere one three-thousandth of their potential—it's no wonder they're so upset about file sharing.
I think most geeks would rather watch TV on a good 27"+ TV screen than a 17"/19"/21" monitor, if only because they're more likely to have a comfortable couch in front of the former.
But you're right, marketing is the problem. Here are some ideas I wish I'd see in ads:
- A standup comic is doing his act. A punch line gets drowned out by laughter, background noise, whatever. Cut to a couple sitting watching the comic on TV. One asks, "what did he say?" The other hits the instant replay button.
- An exciting movie on TV is approaching its climax when a kid runs in front of the image saying "mommy I hurt myself!" Mom hits the pause button and takes care of the kid.
- A man comes in the door and his wife says "you're home late, honey..." He realizes he's missing his favorite show, a special episode on a special night. But when he checks the TiVo, it's recording it for him because he's got a season pass and it detected the schedule change.
- A guy and his girlfriend are checking the TiVo suggestions screen and he sees a movie on tonight that he's always wanted to see...the TiVo figured he'd like it. He gets really excited and tells the TiVo to record it. Uh oh, there's a conflict--his girlfriend has already got something set to record then, and she says "Don't you dare cancel that." Damn. Wait, let's see if it's on any at any other time. Yup, they're showing it at 3 a.m. Excellent.
I'm no Madison Avenue hotshot, but it seems to me that ads like this would have them flying out of the stores faster than they could stock them. But maybe they've already made such ads--I wouldn't know, I skip over them all.Is stuffing the ballot box with forged ballots terribly different than rallying your supporters to get out the vote?
There are thousands of good philosophical reasons to choose an open computing platform over a proprietary one, but the people who actually stop to think about those reasons are a tiny minority of society. Average computer users want to be able to run the same programs as all their friends and coworkers. They want their Word documents to open properly, their web browser to render pages properly. And by properly, they don't mean "the way things ought to work" but rather "the way they work for everyone else." Open source? Free software? They don't give a damn whether the source code for their mail reader is available, because they wouldn't know what to do with it.
Simply being better than Windows isn't enough. Windows runs on more than 90% of the desktop computers out there. Business is run with Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and MS Project timelines. You can develop the best word processor or spreadsheet program imaginable, but if it doesn't work with 95% of the rest of the market, what good is it? If Linux is ever to make serious inroads into the Windows desktop environment, then it has to provide enough interoperability to make switching painless (or at least less painful than staying with Windows).
Reading the KDE news release, I see that Konqueror supports Java applets, Netscape plugins, KParts components, any X window...in short, provides a wide range of extensibility options. That's great. And now ActiveX controls are one of those options. How is that a bad thing exactly? Were Linux users making a positive moral sacrifice by depriving themselves of web content that uses ActiveX controls? Does support for a Microsoft technology somehow quot;taint" Konqueror? And if so, how come I've never heard the same complaint about, say, Samba, the killer app that's taken a huge chunk out of Microsoft's server market?
You're absolutely right that Linux should provide an alternative to Windows rather than just an imitation of it. But supporting Windows-based protocols, file formats, etc. in addition to non-Microsoft technologies does that, and in the short term is Linux's best hope for greater success. Linux will win by letting people do what they want, not by frustrating their wishes and giving them lectures about how what they want is bad.
"I'm not dead yet!"
Take his example of the embedded GPS transmitter in his car. "I have agreed to let my car company...track my every move.... I find it comforting to know that, should my airbag deploy, they know where I am and can send help." But why does anyone need to make that kind of bargain with their car company? It's just as easy to design a system that transmits your location only when the airbag deploys, or manually at the push of a button, as one that transmits continuously. With such a system, your car company may not be able to tell you where the nearest restaurant or gas station owned by one of their marketing affiliates is located...but they also can't inform your insurance company of your habit of driving 85 mph on the interstate.
And the latest Amazon privacy debacle illustrates that contrary to his claims, the industry has not done a pretty good job of regulating itself, when a company can decide to change their privacy policy with minimal notice, removing customers' ability to opt out, and retroactively abrogating all previous opt-out requests.
McNealy asserts that companies that don't protect privacy will go out of business, but that's just one of many factors that determine whether people will use a company. I would bet that 90% of Internet users do not bother reading privacy policies, assuming often incorrectly that they are reasonable. I would bet that 90% of those who do read a company's privacy policy statements do so only once, assuming that it won't change on future visits. In that climate, companies can pay lip service to privacy while trampling the concept into the ground with impunity.
The current standard is unacceptably low. An opt-in policy is the only appropriate standard. Information provided by the user is to be used only for the specified purpose, distribution to other parties is prohibited without the user's explicit consent, and if the company goes under, the data may be sold off only with the same restrictions on its use. Then make that standard legally binding with the same kind of statutory damages as unsolicited commercial faxes.
Back in like '94 or so, Bob Denny, the author, ported the NCSA HTTPD server to Windows 3.1. When it came time to move from 16- to 32-bit, he turned it into a commercial product. So really WebSite and Apache are pretty close cousins. I haven't used WebSite myself since version 1.0, so I don't know what's been added in more recent versions, but making it open-source probably wouldn't be that useful since Apache already occupies the same project space.