showing color-coded levels of congestion on major highways. This handy thing has been in place for several years and I check it EVERY time I leave work.
This one quote by the PERL developer says more than all the comments on Slashdot about how the real world works:
Today, they treatened me with a law-suit for writing this module. I would like to have the WWW::EuroTV module removed as soon as possible from CPAN and any of its mirrors.
I wish nobody had invented the terminology, "x number of times less." I'm pretty sure "20 times less light" means the same as "5 percent as much light," but couldn't they just say that? If it was 40 instead of 20, would we say half as much light or twice as much less light? Jeez.
This could be a good thing in the long run. On one hand, it adds yet another layer to our already complicated network of taxation. On the other, it might be a step toward simplifying taxation overall. I would like to see us eventually replace ALL taxes with a single National Retail Sales Tax, distributed to all states and the federal government.
One scheme that was proposed several years ago (but died in committee) combined a sales tax of 20% and an annual refund of 20% of whatever the government declared was poverty level income. Every head of household would receive the same dollar amount refund, adjusted for dependents. All income tax, including corporate tax, would be abolished. People with more money would pay more tax because they spend more money. For poor people, who spend all or nearly all their income, the refund would amount to ALL the sales tax they paid, because the refund would be set at 20% of a poverty income. For wealthier people the refund would amount to only a fraction of the tax they paid.
This would accomplish the same thing as a continuously graduated income tax rate, but without the 4000 pages of IRS rules and 105,000 IRS employees we now use to collect the same amount of money. The vast army of accountants, clerks, lawyers and consultants whose careers are dedicated to paying and avoiding taxes would have to find something productive to do with their lives.
To manipulate a sales-tax-only system, Congress would have just 2 numbers to work with: the percentage rate and the refund ammount, and any changes they made would be completely out in the open. No corporate taxes would be built into the cost of everything we buy. No custom-designed loopholes would be created to pay back campaign contributions. People would pay tax according to how rich they are and how much stuff they consume, the opportunities for cheating would be far fewer than now, and everybody who would know exactly how much tax they were paying.
If we did switch to an all-sales-tax system it would be essential to enforce it on all sales, which means it would have to be collected on e-commerce. So on that basis, I think instituting the practice and getting people used to it could be a good step.
"There's no way of telling what happened," Berman said. "I'm convinced that we made a very good movie, and I'm also convinced that the movie was promoted properly."
We've got ourselves quite a mystery here. A very good movie, properly promoted, yet the public didn't want to see it. Hmmmm... Can't be that it wasn't a very good movie. Rick's convinced it was a very good movie. No problems with promotion either. People just didn't like it. Hmmm, yeah, he's right, there's just no way to figure it. This one's got me stumped.
Re:It's not the technology, it's the lies
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, it's not as if local stations would try to fool their own viewers, say by taping news stories on location during the day, editing the footage back at the studio, and then sending the reporters back out at showtime to do "live reports" from the scene, consisting of introducing the tapes, which they could do just as well from a chair in the studio. Hah! Like the local viewing audience would let them get away with that one! Anyway, getting back to Carson Daly, the difference between him recording his top 10 show all at once and in little bits and pieces is, uhhhh...?
From the article: "...members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements." Groups like the RIAA apparently are not alone in wanting to make sure new technology doesn't disturb existing revenue streams, and wanting to thwart it if it does. This kind of thing reminds me that geeks seem to live in a completely different continuum from the rest of the world.
What would things be like today if, for example, computer programmers and electronics engineers had reacted in the same way to things like code-generating tools, CAD and microcircuitry, clinging instead to the practices of hand-entering 1's and 0's and wiring everything with a soldering iron, because more streamlined methods might threaten our jobs? I envision something like the computers in the movie Brazil, coexisting with pheumatic message tubes.
Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge and development of those technologies so dangerous that we judge it better that they never be available.
As we now know, the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 on an extensive scale... until its collapse in 1991.
If the "we" in the first passage were "we, the world" then we could decide which technologies are too dangerous to pursue. Unfortunately the real world is made up of a collection of we's and they's, acting independently and at their own levels of wisdom. Any we that decides not to pursue a technology has no guarantee that they will do likewise. The fate of the world will rest, as usual, on the wisdom of whoever ends up dominating it.
I'm sitting here drinking a Starbucks double mocha latte, made with 100% real Darigold whipping cream, thinking how great it would be if there were no commercials. I could enjoy quality entertainment on Fox Network, MTV or the WB on my Sony 54" plasma screen without committing theft of programming with Tivo, or even reaching for the MUTE button. On the other hand, people who work at places like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) consume large amounts of complimentary Coca-Cola Classic, A&W Root Beer and Earl Grey tea. They might need the commercial time to commit theft of programming and go to the bathroom. It's a dilemma worthy of a MacGiver or a Matlock.
Microsoft has helped the situation by creating an automatic update service...
And to give their customers the confidence needed to USE this wonderful service, they hid a waiver in the Media Player EULA that grants Microsoft root permission. A Trojan horse is a Trojan horse, no matter how it's packaged.
For me this situation kind of hammers home the point that today there is no right and wrong, and there are no principles. Their are only winners and losers. Our current version of having faith in the system amounts to hoping that your favorite side has smarter and sleazier lawyers than the other side. I would like to think that Congress and the courts might actually try to figure out what kind of world the public wants to live in and make it so, kind of like government of the people, by the people and for the people. I don't want to jump up and cheer because OJ's lawyers are on my team. But oh well, we have what we have. Our democracy and our legal system are both about as real and meaningful as pro wrestling.
It's nice that retailers are joining the mutiny against record companies, even if only the way rats jump ship. The whole record business is heading for a niche -- old music -- music recorded in the days when record companies were able to force musicians to hand over their rights, when the companies could become the owners of the music, could make it "their" music. You see that phrase in the article... get permission from record companies' to download "their" music. Record companies still think of musicians as contract labor making a product for them. It's happening slowly, but as more musicians find ways to get their music heard without locking into record deals, the ownership of music by record companies will dwindle to an oldies collection.
It may be a little early to crack open the champagne, but I'm ready to celebrate evolution in action. Record companies served a purpose when the technology to make copies of records was expensive. This service is no longer necessary, or even beneficial, to musicians or the public. The promotional services that record companies still legitimately provice could be replaced by a promotion industry. Hopefully one that's based on sane business agreements, rather than the take-it-or-leave-it usury model which the record industry chose to follow, and which is finally biting it in its big ugly ass.
What I really hope happens is not just the extinction of record companies, but that other businesses will take this as proof that the path to long-term survival lies in serving a purpose, not in forcing the public to support your business model.
We might be able to get the entertainment industry off our backs if we just go ahead and give them some money every time anything happens that could possibly involve proprietary material. In Finland they want to collect royalties from daycare centers because workers sing songs to the kids. No problem. Just institute a daycare tax payable to the recording industry. Churchgoers singing hymn-ized pop songs during services? Fine, just fork over some of that collection plate to the RIAA. Cab drivers playing CDs with passengers present? Gas tax! People going to the bathroom during commercials? Water tax! [You do flush, don't you?] In fact, the simplest thing would be to collect an ongoing daily entertainment tax from everybody to cover any copyright infringement we might commit during ordinary activities. Then maybe the entertainment industry would finally ** SHUT THE FUCK UP ** and leave us alone.
Norway isn't a huge country, but surely there must be more than one person in it who has messed with DVD security. Poor Jon seems like a scapegoat for misplaced bureaucratic zeal. It would be interesting if the underground press in Norway could find others who hack DVDs, and sample their state of mind right now. I wonder if there are hundreds (or at least dozens) of Jons biting their fingernails over this.
"Regulators said they were wary of undermining traditional producers and distributors..."
Says it all. Our duly elected public servants are always wary of undermining commercial interests, but completely okay with undermining the public domain, as we've seen recently in the Lower 48.
Repeat after me: "Democracy is not like pro wrestling. Democracy is not like pro wrestling."
This may seem like a waste of the court's time, but the point is taxation, not the actual nature of the X-Men. Years ago I read that a state Supreme Court in the U.S. ruled that deveined shrimp are tastier than the non-deveined kind. Then and now, it was all about money. Well alrighty then.
I highly recommend all the books in the Bazil Broketail series by Christopher Rowley. Set in a meticulously detailed medieval world, where dragons are used in battle like tanks and witches strive to suppress technology, these vividly written books follow the career of one dragon and his attendant "dragonboy" for about 10 years. Readers who don't enjoy a cross-country trek as well as a big battle may find them somewhat tedious.
Bazil Broketail A Sword for a Dragon Dragons of War BattleDragon Dragon at World's End The Dragons of Argonath Dragon Ultimate
You could be right, but I doubt it. My wife has a relative who used to tie up ships at San Francisco Bay. His salary was higher than mine (I'm a programmer), and his job consisted primarily of being on call. When his beeper went off he would go down to the dock, loop a rope over a capstan and return home. I'll grant that he was pretty much on call 24-hours a day, but he only worked one or two of those hours.
It doesn't surprise me that the shipping industry would like to eliminate these jobs. But I doubt that a union that has held on to them for so long will give them up without a fight, or without getting something equally lucrative in return.
"Information in the article that appears in the current issue of the online hacker magazine Phrack potentially puts at risk GPS devices used for commercial navigation and military operations."
WRONG !!!
The fact that the GPS devices are jammable for 50 bucks is what puts them at risk, not the fact that the general public is now aware of it.
Look, you and I are the public. When we buy copies of books, movie tickets, etc, we are collectively making payments to authors and publishers, with the expectation that we, the public (not a bunch of strangers), will eventually own that material. Just like you make house payments for years and years expecting to own the house. When authors and publishers create and sell new works, they are fully aware that eventually the public will own those works.
That's always been the deal, until now. With the Bono Act, Congress has essentially torn up that contract, and now the Supreme Court has thrown away the scotch tape.
Slashdot Mirror
showing color-coded levels of congestion on major highways. This handy thing has been in place for several years and I check it EVERY time I leave work.
This one quote by the PERL developer says more than all the comments on Slashdot about how the real world works:
Today, they treatened me with a law-suit for writing this module. I would like to have the WWW::EuroTV module removed as soon as possible from CPAN and any of its mirrors.
I wish nobody had invented the terminology, "x number of times less." I'm pretty sure "20 times less light" means the same as "5 percent as much light," but couldn't they just say that? If it was 40 instead of 20, would we say half as much light or twice as much less light? Jeez.
This could be a good thing in the long run. On one hand, it adds yet another layer to our already complicated network of taxation. On the other, it might be a step toward simplifying taxation overall. I would like to see us eventually replace ALL taxes with a single National Retail Sales Tax, distributed to all states and the federal government.
One scheme that was proposed several years ago (but died in committee) combined a sales tax of 20% and an annual refund of 20% of whatever the government declared was poverty level income. Every head of household would receive the same dollar amount refund, adjusted for dependents. All income tax, including corporate tax, would be abolished. People with more money would pay more tax because they spend more money. For poor people, who spend all or nearly all their income, the refund would amount to ALL the sales tax they paid, because the refund would be set at 20% of a poverty income. For wealthier people the refund would amount to only a fraction of the tax they paid.
This would accomplish the same thing as a continuously graduated income tax rate, but without the 4000 pages of IRS rules and 105,000 IRS employees we now use to collect the same amount of money. The vast army of accountants, clerks, lawyers and consultants whose careers are dedicated to paying and avoiding taxes would have to find something productive to do with their lives.
To manipulate a sales-tax-only system, Congress would have just 2 numbers to work with: the percentage rate and the refund ammount, and any changes they made would be completely out in the open. No corporate taxes would be built into the cost of everything we buy. No custom-designed loopholes would be created to pay back campaign contributions. People would pay tax according to how rich they are and how much stuff they consume, the opportunities for cheating would be far fewer than now, and everybody who would know exactly how much tax they were paying.
If we did switch to an all-sales-tax system it would be essential to enforce it on all sales, which means it would have to be collected on e-commerce. So on that basis, I think instituting the practice and getting people used to it could be a good step.
"There's no way of telling what happened," Berman said. "I'm convinced that we made a very good movie, and I'm also convinced that the movie was promoted properly."
We've got ourselves quite a mystery here. A very good movie, properly promoted, yet the public didn't want to see it. Hmmmm... Can't be that it wasn't a very good movie. Rick's convinced it was a very good movie. No problems with promotion either. People just didn't like it. Hmmm, yeah, he's right, there's just no way to figure it. This one's got me stumped.
Yeah, it's not as if local stations would try to fool their own viewers, say by taping news stories on location during the day, editing the footage back at the studio, and then sending the reporters back out at showtime to do "live reports" from the scene, consisting of introducing the tapes, which they could do just as well from a chair in the studio. Hah! Like the local viewing audience would let them get away with that one! Anyway, getting back to Carson Daly, the difference between him recording his top 10 show all at once and in little bits and pieces is, uhhhh...?
From the article: "...members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements." Groups like the RIAA apparently are not alone in wanting to make sure new technology doesn't disturb existing revenue streams, and wanting to thwart it if it does. This kind of thing reminds me that geeks seem to live in a completely different continuum from the rest of the world.
What would things be like today if, for example, computer programmers and electronics engineers had reacted in the same way to things like code-generating tools, CAD and microcircuitry, clinging instead to the practices of hand-entering 1's and 0's and wiring everything with a soldering iron, because more streamlined methods might threaten our jobs? I envision something like the computers in the movie Brazil, coexisting with pheumatic message tubes.
Quoting 2 passages from the article:
Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge and development of those technologies so dangerous that we judge it better that they never be available.
As we now know, the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 on an extensive scale... until its collapse in 1991.
If the "we" in the first passage were "we, the world" then we could decide which technologies are too dangerous to pursue. Unfortunately the real world is made up of a collection of we's and they's, acting independently and at their own levels of wisdom. Any we that decides not to pursue a technology has no guarantee that they will do likewise. The fate of the world will rest, as usual, on the wisdom of whoever ends up dominating it.
I'm sitting here drinking a Starbucks double mocha latte, made with 100% real Darigold whipping cream, thinking how great it would be if there were no commercials. I could enjoy quality entertainment on Fox Network, MTV or the WB on my Sony 54" plasma screen without committing theft of programming with Tivo, or even reaching for the MUTE button. On the other hand, people who work at places like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) consume large amounts of complimentary Coca-Cola Classic, A&W Root Beer and Earl Grey tea. They might need the commercial time to commit theft of programming and go to the bathroom. It's a dilemma worthy of a MacGiver or a Matlock.
Microsoft has helped the situation by creating an automatic update service...
And to give their customers the confidence needed to USE this wonderful service, they hid a waiver in the Media Player EULA that grants Microsoft root permission. A Trojan horse is a Trojan horse, no matter how it's packaged.
For me this situation kind of hammers home the point that today there is no right and wrong, and there are no principles. Their are only winners and losers. Our current version of having faith in the system amounts to hoping that your favorite side has smarter and sleazier lawyers than the other side. I would like to think that Congress and the courts might actually try to figure out what kind of world the public wants to live in and make it so, kind of like government of the people, by the people and for the people. I don't want to jump up and cheer because OJ's lawyers are on my team. But oh well, we have what we have. Our democracy and our legal system are both about as real and meaningful as pro wrestling.
Echo, as in "we've heard it before".
It's nice that retailers are joining the mutiny against record companies, even if only the way rats jump ship. The whole record business is heading for a niche -- old music -- music recorded in the days when record companies were able to force musicians to hand over their rights, when the companies could become the owners of the music, could make it "their" music. You see that phrase in the article... get permission from record companies' to download "their" music. Record companies still think of musicians as contract labor making a product for them. It's happening slowly, but as more musicians find ways to get their music heard without locking into record deals, the ownership of music by record companies will dwindle to an oldies collection.
There's already a technology very similar to what Overpeer is doing, and it's been in active use for many years:
a) Put some dog shit in a paper bag on somebody's porch, b) light the bag on fire, c) ring the doorbell and run away.
IANAL.
YYYESSSSSSSS!!!!
It may be a little early to crack open the champagne, but I'm ready to celebrate evolution in action. Record companies served a purpose when the technology to make copies of records was expensive. This service is no longer necessary, or even beneficial, to musicians or the public. The promotional services that record companies still legitimately provice could be replaced by a promotion industry. Hopefully one that's based on sane business agreements, rather than the take-it-or-leave-it usury model which the record industry chose to follow, and which is finally biting it in its big ugly ass.
What I really hope happens is not just the extinction of record companies, but that other businesses will take this as proof that the path to long-term survival lies in serving a purpose, not in forcing the public to support your business model.
We might be able to get the entertainment industry off our backs if we just go ahead and give them some money every time anything happens that could possibly involve proprietary material. In Finland they want to collect royalties from daycare centers because workers sing songs to the kids. No problem. Just institute a daycare tax payable to the recording industry. Churchgoers singing hymn-ized pop songs during services? Fine, just fork over some of that collection plate to the RIAA. Cab drivers playing CDs with passengers present? Gas tax! People going to the bathroom during commercials? Water tax! [You do flush, don't you?] In fact, the simplest thing would be to collect an ongoing daily entertainment tax from everybody to cover any copyright infringement we might commit during ordinary activities. Then maybe the entertainment industry would finally ** SHUT THE FUCK UP ** and leave us alone.
I agree with your lawyer that you have no problem, and everything is ok.
That'll be $85 (my rates are higher).
Norway isn't a huge country, but surely there must be more than one person in it who has messed with DVD security. Poor Jon seems like a scapegoat for misplaced bureaucratic zeal. It would be interesting if the underground press in Norway could find others who hack DVDs, and sample their state of mind right now. I wonder if there are hundreds (or at least dozens) of Jons biting their fingernails over this.
"Regulators said they were wary of undermining traditional producers and distributors..."
Says it all. Our duly elected public servants are always wary of undermining commercial interests, but completely okay with undermining the public domain, as we've seen recently in the Lower 48.
Repeat after me: "Democracy is not like pro wrestling. Democracy is not like pro wrestling."
This may seem like a waste of the court's time, but the point is taxation, not the actual nature of the X-Men. Years ago I read that a state Supreme Court in the U.S. ruled that deveined shrimp are tastier than the non-deveined kind. Then and now, it was all about money. Well alrighty then.
I highly recommend all the books in the Bazil Broketail series by Christopher Rowley. Set in a meticulously detailed medieval world, where dragons are used in battle like tanks and witches strive to suppress technology, these vividly written books follow the career of one dragon and his attendant "dragonboy" for about 10 years. Readers who don't enjoy a cross-country trek as well as a big battle may find them somewhat tedious.
Bazil Broketail
A Sword for a Dragon
Dragons of War
BattleDragon
Dragon at World's End
The Dragons of Argonath
Dragon Ultimate
And while they're at it, they better slap a ban on public jogging, because a jogger can travel even faster than a Segway.
2.4 miles per hour. It's not just a good idea. It's the LAW.
Copy-making Industry: "Mine! That's MINE! [stomp] Gimme more money!"
Public: "Shut the fuck up."
Congressman Lapdog duJour: "Let's step into my office..."
Slashdot: "Senate/House Extends Copyrights 5000 Years, Creates RIAA Tax, Mandatory Death Penalty for DMCA Violations"
Public: "Dammit. Whoa -- Look at Britney's tits!"
"I expect the ILWU won't give a good god-damn..."
You could be right, but I doubt it. My wife has a relative who used to tie up ships at San Francisco Bay. His salary was higher than mine (I'm a programmer), and his job consisted primarily of being on call. When his beeper went off he would go down to the dock, loop a rope over a capstan and return home. I'll grant that he was pretty much on call 24-hours a day, but he only worked one or two of those hours.
It doesn't surprise me that the shipping industry would like to eliminate these jobs. But I doubt that a union that has held on to them for so long will give them up without a fight, or without getting something equally lucrative in return.
"Information in the article that appears in the current issue of the online hacker magazine Phrack potentially puts at risk GPS devices used for commercial navigation and military operations."
WRONG !!!
The fact that the GPS devices are jammable for 50 bucks is what puts them at risk, not the fact that the general public is now aware of it.
Look, you and I are the public. When we buy copies of books, movie tickets, etc, we are collectively making payments to authors and publishers, with the expectation that we, the public (not a bunch of strangers), will eventually own that material. Just like you make house payments for years and years expecting to own the house. When authors and publishers create and sell new works, they are fully aware that eventually the public will own those works.
That's always been the deal, until now. With the Bono Act, Congress has essentially torn up that contract, and now the Supreme Court has thrown away the scotch tape.