Last year I worked at a startup that was writing an instant messaging app consisting of a bunch of web pages and.jsp's. They created their own automated testing application in C++. I didn't examine the code closely, but it was essentially a screen scraper that navigated through the pages using a WebBrowser control and manipulating the DOM programatically -- entering text into input boxes, clicking checkboxes and buttons, checking results against expected results and writing out a log file. The test sequences were stored in a database, which they had a full-time person updating as the app changed.
From the look of this setup, I have a strange feeling this guy did a tour of duty on that Russian refueling station in Armageddon. Wonder if he quit smoking.
Come on, this legal bickering is for weasels. The problem isn't whether or not the DMCA's subpoena rules apply to P2P users, or any other legal technicality. The problem is that the copyright ownership industry is so lucrative, and it's that way because Congress has made it so, by obligingly making copyrights last longer and longer at the whim of the entertainment industry.
The recording industry wouldn't have anywhere near the power they have if their rights only lasted a few years, which was the original intent of copyright. It was meant to encourage creativity and inventiveness, not as a tool to keep anything valuable from ever dropping into public domain. But by extending copyrights again and again, people like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) have given the copyright-ownership industry a golden goose, which they naturally want to keep alive forever.
If you want to help fix the problem, find out who your congressional reps are and write to them, on clean paper in an actual envelope, asking them to rollback copyright law to a sane level. I'd really like to see people actually exercise their freedom of speech in this matter, instead of lawyers merely using it as body armor.
All I can say is, D&D survived without Gygax, and it will keep going without Jeff Grubb and company. WOTC and Hasbro can both go out of business for that matter, and it won't stop anybody from playing.
Some interesting information in the article... like the main reasons for cancelling the project are a lack of significant improvements in safety, reliability, or cost savings over the shuttle program's remaining lifetime. I'm no fan of keeping obsolete systems hobbling along beyond their years, but this reasoning doesn't seem outrageous to me. The outrageous thing is that it took 400 contractors to develop something that won't outperform a 30-year-old system that runs in 64k.
My first reaction to this was, "What the hell is the point of THIS?" But then I remembered how cool it used to be to watch Dave Letterman throw stuff off that tall building. The watermelons were my personal favorite! Let's face it, almost anything that's going to go Boom or Squish is in some way entertaining, and putting a countdown on it makes it more so. Perhaps the most pointless exercise of all is trying to define "art" nowadays. If somebody can sell containers of his own shit for thousands of dollars as art objects, then art is completely without reason and there's no point ranting about it. Like religion. Either you're one of the ones who are gonna try to be connected when the press goes crunch, or you're not, and it doesn't matter either way.
1) Allow contributions only from individuals who are eligible to vote for the candidate or on the issue.
2) Limit the size of those individual contributions.
3) Prohibit donations of "services" (including advertising). All money and personal volunteering must be supplied by eligible individuals.
In other words, all Senate campaigns would be financed entirely by adult citizens living in the candidate's own district. PACs could only give money collected from citizens within that district. Phone-callers, leaflet hander-outers and other campaign workers would have to live in the district, etc. Outside entities could not sponsor "public service" advertising related to the campaign.
The media restrictions necessary to implement these rules would be attacked as limits on freedom of speech, but they would really be limits on buying air time. Defining freedom of speech as the freedom to buy the most air time is the key hack that has allowed PACs and others to beat the system, turning democracy into a system of legalized bribery. Gigantic sums of money and sophisticated psychological advertising are not what the framers of the Constitution meant by freedom of speech. Scoping campaign finance would allow democracy to function as originally designed, rather than in its present hacked form.
The photos on their website seem to show these guys indeed converting a Delorean to electricity, and they put up enough money to lease an actual racetrack. You gotta admit that puts them at least a notch above anybody claiming, for example, to have played old vinyl records through a flatbed scanner.
I think the crux of this whole discussion is the definition of "making it" in the music business. In terms of getting major recording contracts and becoming national sensations, almost nobody every makes it. The vast majority of bands that do get recording contracts don't get rich and yet lose almost all control over their material. In light of many recent comments from outspoken musicians like Janis Ian and Cheryl Crow, the common pattern of bands that have "made it" sounds a lot like the stories of lottery winners ending up bankrupt, divorced and friendless after a few years.
What would successful bands look like if Edison had somehow invented the Internet instead of the phonograph? There would probably be no recording industry as we know it today. The market would be driven more by fan acceptance and less by hype. There would probably be even fewer mega-superstars than now, and a lot more bands making better livings than a typical band makes now. The definition of success for musicians would be a lot different.
When the current difficult period is over, I believe the music industry will be on a firm course toward being irrelevant. Musicians will be much more able to succeed in terms of a normal definition of success rather than a fairy-tale one. My advice is to adjust your sights and aim for that now.
Hey, has anybody tried disabling the light tube on a flatbet scanner and using some alternative light source mounted at an angle? I don't mean necessarily to scan a vinyl record, just in general on interesting surfaces. Skin, cloth, paper, bark, I don't know. If I can find a working scanner to rip apart I will give it a try and report back.
Oh, uh, I mean, I DID do that, yeah I did it already. Last week. It was easy because I'm a genius. But uhhh, I'm not releasing any pictures because they're lame and nobody would be interested in swapping them on Kazaa.
I'm with you. If anybody believes this I'll be happy to send you a recording of the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. I just ran an Antarctic ice core sample over my flatbed scanner and converted the compression-induced diffraction patterns into sound waves, using high school algebra and a TRS-80.
Now with some big money in play, maybe the anti-copyright forces have a chance after all. I just love American government -- of the people, by the people, for the people.
Some people see cluelessness as a problem, others see it as a valuable asset. I'm not crying conspiracy, but there is no incentive for the media to fix the public's general lack of technical know-how outside of the realm of buying and using consumer electronics. Without the addition of eerie connotations, this story about a piece of software misinterpreting noise as data would be sort of amusing to those of us who understand it, but completely uninteresting to everybody else.
That's why we have government
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
This is exactly why we have a constitution, a legislature and a court system, rather than simply putting every major issue up for a majority vote. Our elected officials and appointed judges are supposed to act wisely and apply a knowledge of history and a sense of continuity. Whether they actually do that is another story.
I love the analogy Mr. Plotkin makes near the end, that letting software vendors lock the state into proprietary systems is similar to letting construction firms install their own toll bridges on freeways. Hits the nail right on the head.
As for his closing question, "Will our legislators do their [job]?" Unfortunately the answer is another question: are they doing it now?
Winston Chan, the MS digital media mgr, says a couple things that need translating.
The purpose of DRM is, "to keep honest users honest." Translation: to keep everybody paying, and paying, and paying...
Censorship through license revocation will not be a problem because, "You [would] need all the content to be able to be revoked, and to do that you need all the content to come from the same service, which is unlikely. This is not something that is possible." Translation: we haven't figured out how to pull that one off.
The thing that interests me most about this whole war is that it throws harsh daylight on our make-believe democracy. Given that my opinion and the opinion of everybody reading this doesn't mean shit to the representatives we elected, it's kind of satisfying to see the people actually do run the government bashing away at each other like battlebots.
What say we just drop the charade entirely, put Hilary and Sarah in thongs, pour some honey on them and let them settle this issue with a televised pillow fight? We would probably end up with the same legislation we're going to get anyway, and it would be a hell of a lot more entertaining than C-SPAN.
As has been asked here already, how is this different from the phone company keeping recordings of private phone calls? I'll tell you, it's an order of magnitude worse. Web browsing isn't even a conversation. It's like recording which magazine articles one reads and which ads one looks at. The because-we-can philosophy is no excuse to treat web browsing any differently from any other form of reading. The practice of recording surfing habits at the ISP level may very well provide crime-fighting information, but the inhibiting effects of this level of surveillance could harm society far more than any bomb could.
Western governments may turn out to be Osama bin Laden's most effective weapon.
It's good to see someone at my old alma mater Lewis & Clark College making some headlines. Just to prolong the slashdotting, here are some cool microscopic photos and a QT movie of gecko foot hairs and microsensors.
Is Thomson Multimedia suddenly wanting to build up a defense fund for an RIAA lawsuit? Or have they been sued already for trafficking in copyright infringement technology?
It strikes me that this kind of hanging-in-the-balance thinking is rooted in our big-media cultural mindset, like saying that the future of music hangs on the results of the next Grammy awards. It doesn't, considering how few musicians are actually involved in the Grammys. The vast majority continue to play the same gigs for the same audiences as before.
The only thing that concerns me is how it might affect your and my ability to post and surf each others websites. As long as those stay online, I don't care whether AOL or MSN has more members. The corporate interests all want to control whatever they think might threaten their profit streams, and in that sense I don't think really matters which of them wins these wars. There aren no good guys among them. What affects us is how much they are allowed to restrict on our access, and the only way we peasants will win that war is if Congress decides to bite the hand that feeds it and do a Bell breakup on these guys, prohibiting any of them from owning a controlling interest in a significant facet of the Internet.
Or, alternately, monkeys could fly out of my butt.
Slashdot Mirror
Last year I worked at a startup that was writing an instant messaging app consisting of a bunch of web pages and .jsp's. They created their own automated testing application in C++. I didn't examine the code closely, but it was essentially a screen scraper that navigated through the pages using a WebBrowser control and manipulating the DOM programatically -- entering text into input boxes, clicking checkboxes and buttons, checking results against expected results and writing out a log file. The test sequences were stored in a database, which they had a full-time person updating as the app changed.
From the look of this setup, I have a strange feeling this guy did a tour of duty on that Russian refueling station in Armageddon. Wonder if he quit smoking.
Come on, this legal bickering is for weasels. The problem isn't whether or not the DMCA's subpoena rules apply to P2P users, or any other legal technicality. The problem is that the copyright ownership industry is so lucrative, and it's that way because Congress has made it so, by obligingly making copyrights last longer and longer at the whim of the entertainment industry.
The recording industry wouldn't have anywhere near the power they have if their rights only lasted a few years, which was the original intent of copyright. It was meant to encourage creativity and inventiveness, not as a tool to keep anything valuable from ever dropping into public domain. But by extending copyrights again and again, people like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) have given the copyright-ownership industry a golden goose, which they naturally want to keep alive forever.
If you want to help fix the problem, find out who your congressional reps are and write to them, on clean paper in an actual envelope, asking them to rollback copyright law to a sane level. I'd really like to see people actually exercise their freedom of speech in this matter, instead of lawyers merely using it as body armor.
All I can say is, D&D survived without Gygax, and it will keep going without Jeff Grubb and company. WOTC and Hasbro can both go out of business for that matter, and it won't stop anybody from playing.
Some interesting information in the article... like the main reasons for cancelling the project are a lack of significant improvements in safety, reliability, or cost savings over the shuttle program's remaining lifetime. I'm no fan of keeping obsolete systems hobbling along beyond their years, but this reasoning doesn't seem outrageous to me. The outrageous thing is that it took 400 contractors to develop something that won't outperform a 30-year-old system that runs in 64k.
My first reaction to this was, "What the hell is the point of THIS?" But then I remembered how cool it used to be to watch Dave Letterman throw stuff off that tall building. The watermelons were my personal favorite! Let's face it, almost anything that's going to go Boom or Squish is in some way entertaining, and putting a countdown on it makes it more so. Perhaps the most pointless exercise of all is trying to define "art" nowadays. If somebody can sell containers of his own shit for thousands of dollars as art objects, then art is completely without reason and there's no point ranting about it. Like religion. Either you're one of the ones who are gonna try to be connected when the press goes crunch, or you're not, and it doesn't matter either way.
1) Allow contributions only from individuals who are eligible to vote for the candidate or on the issue.
2) Limit the size of those individual contributions.
3) Prohibit donations of "services" (including advertising). All money and personal volunteering must be supplied by eligible individuals.
In other words, all Senate campaigns would be financed entirely by adult citizens living in the candidate's own district. PACs could only give money collected from citizens within that district. Phone-callers, leaflet hander-outers and other campaign workers would have to live in the district, etc. Outside entities could not sponsor "public service" advertising related to the campaign.
The media restrictions necessary to implement these rules would be attacked as limits on freedom of speech, but they would really be limits on buying air time. Defining freedom of speech as the freedom to buy the most air time is the key hack that has allowed PACs and others to beat the system, turning democracy into a system of legalized bribery. Gigantic sums of money and sophisticated psychological advertising are not what the framers of the Constitution meant by freedom of speech. Scoping campaign finance would allow democracy to function as originally designed, rather than in its present hacked form.
The photos on their website seem to show these guys indeed converting a Delorean to electricity, and they put up enough money to lease an actual racetrack. You gotta admit that puts them at least a notch above anybody claiming, for example, to have played old vinyl records through a flatbed scanner.
I think the crux of this whole discussion is the definition of "making it" in the music business. In terms of getting major recording contracts and becoming national sensations, almost nobody every makes it. The vast majority of bands that do get recording contracts don't get rich and yet lose almost all control over their material. In light of many recent comments from outspoken musicians like Janis Ian and Cheryl Crow, the common pattern of bands that have "made it" sounds a lot like the stories of lottery winners ending up bankrupt, divorced and friendless after a few years.
What would successful bands look like if Edison had somehow invented the Internet instead of the phonograph? There would probably be no recording industry as we know it today. The market would be driven more by fan acceptance and less by hype. There would probably be even fewer mega-superstars than now, and a lot more bands making better livings than a typical band makes now. The definition of success for musicians would be a lot different.
When the current difficult period is over, I believe the music industry will be on a firm course toward being irrelevant. Musicians will be much more able to succeed in terms of a normal definition of success rather than a fairy-tale one. My advice is to adjust your sights and aim for that now.
Hey, has anybody tried disabling the light tube on a flatbet scanner and using some alternative light source mounted at an angle? I don't mean necessarily to scan a vinyl record, just in general on interesting surfaces. Skin, cloth, paper, bark, I don't know. If I can find a working scanner to rip apart I will give it a try and report back.
Oh, uh, I mean, I DID do that, yeah I did it already. Last week. It was easy because I'm a genius. But uhhh, I'm not releasing any pictures because they're lame and nobody would be interested in swapping them on Kazaa.
Seriously, has it been done?
I'm with you. If anybody believes this I'll be happy to send you a recording of the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. I just ran an Antarctic ice core sample over my flatbed scanner and converted the compression-induced diffraction patterns into sound waves, using high school algebra and a TRS-80.
DUH !!
It was sarcasm.
Now with some big money in play, maybe the anti-copyright forces have a chance after all. I just love American government -- of the people, by the people, for the people.
Don't need a new word, we already have "gag".
... is that some people are actually going to buy these things.
Wow, if only those stupid Russians had come to you, with your vast experience and insight, instead of wasting all those rubles doing actual research.
You're a fool.
Some people see cluelessness as a problem, others see it as a valuable asset. I'm not crying conspiracy, but there is no incentive for the media to fix the public's general lack of technical know-how outside of the realm of buying and using consumer electronics. Without the addition of eerie connotations, this story about a piece of software misinterpreting noise as data would be sort of amusing to those of us who understand it, but completely uninteresting to everybody else.
This is exactly why we have a constitution, a legislature and a court system, rather than simply putting every major issue up for a majority vote. Our elected officials and appointed judges are supposed to act wisely and apply a knowledge of history and a sense of continuity. Whether they actually do that is another story.
I love the analogy Mr. Plotkin makes near the end, that letting software vendors lock the state into proprietary systems is similar to letting construction firms install their own toll bridges on freeways. Hits the nail right on the head.
As for his closing question, "Will our legislators do their [job]?" Unfortunately the answer is another question: are they doing it now?
Winston Chan, the MS digital media mgr, says a couple things that need translating.
The purpose of DRM is, "to keep honest users honest." Translation: to keep everybody paying, and paying, and paying...
Censorship through license revocation will not be a problem because, "You [would] need all the content to be able to be revoked, and to do that you need all the content to come from the same service, which is unlikely. This is not something that is possible." Translation: we haven't figured out how to pull that one off.
The thing that interests me most about this whole war is that it throws harsh daylight on our make-believe democracy. Given that my opinion and the opinion of everybody reading this doesn't mean shit to the representatives we elected, it's kind of satisfying to see the people actually do run the government bashing away at each other like battlebots.
What say we just drop the charade entirely, put Hilary and Sarah in thongs, pour some honey on them and let them settle this issue with a televised pillow fight? We would probably end up with the same legislation we're going to get anyway, and it would be a hell of a lot more entertaining than C-SPAN.
As has been asked here already, how is this different from the phone company keeping recordings of private phone calls? I'll tell you, it's an order of magnitude worse. Web browsing isn't even a conversation. It's like recording which magazine articles one reads and which ads one looks at. The because-we-can philosophy is no excuse to treat web browsing any differently from any other form of reading. The practice of recording surfing habits at the ISP level may very well provide crime-fighting information, but the inhibiting effects of this level of surveillance could harm society far more than any bomb could.
Western governments may turn out to be Osama bin Laden's most effective weapon.
It's good to see someone at my old alma mater Lewis & Clark College making some headlines. Just to prolong the slashdotting, here are some cool microscopic photos and a QT movie of gecko foot hairs and microsensors.
Is Thomson Multimedia suddenly wanting to build up a defense fund for an RIAA lawsuit? Or have they been sued already for trafficking in copyright infringement technology?
It strikes me that this kind of hanging-in-the-balance thinking is rooted in our big-media cultural mindset, like saying that the future of music hangs on the results of the next Grammy awards. It doesn't, considering how few musicians are actually involved in the Grammys. The vast majority continue to play the same gigs for the same audiences as before.
The only thing that concerns me is how it might affect your and my ability to post and surf each others websites. As long as those stay online, I don't care whether AOL or MSN has more members. The corporate interests all want to control whatever they think might threaten their profit streams, and in that sense I don't think really matters which of them wins these wars. There aren no good guys among them. What affects us is how much they are allowed to restrict on our access, and the only way we peasants will win that war is if Congress decides to bite the hand that feeds it and do a Bell breakup on these guys, prohibiting any of them from owning a controlling interest in a significant facet of the Internet.
Or, alternately, monkeys could fly out of my butt.