I feel that software is "spyware" if it meets the following tests:
1. Does the software install itself without the user's knowledge or consent? 2. Does it monitor user behaviour of any kind? 3. Does it do this monitoring without the user's consent?
I would simplify:
A) Is it hardware or software?
B) Does it send information about you or your behavior to a second or third party without permission every time it transmits?
you have to admit that yours are, and only then can you make an attempt to get better ones. that defies the system. The whole idea is to say "I'm not a weasel and my opponent is."
Why are you surprised that a politician is a weasel? The president is *always* the head weasel. Let's see - just the last few: Nixon (defined weasel), Gerald Ford (incompetant weasel)Jimmy Carter (not weasel, not good president) Teflon Man Reagan (irancontra weasel), GW Bush (Mr. free trade/new world order), Clinton (classic shouthern US political weasel), GW Bush (weasel, Texas style). Your point is?
You don't have to claim either of them are upstanding people just because they're in the same political party. Personal experience: they are all weasels because they are politicians. This is not news.
France does have real freedom of speech and the press. Please quote facts in favor of your arguments.
LOL
* Illegal to insult the prime minister. * Illegal to engage in speech/publication except against specific groups (nazis) * Certain political movements are outlawed (nazis) * Certain racial speech is illegal.
I don't like Nazis very much. That said, it looks like they are being oppressed. They may deserve it, but a nation that claims to be free and open can't do that.
Your example of scientology is not a good comparson. Preventing access to a copyrighted document is within the right of the copyright holder. This is different than making a word or created words disappear from the language which is what the Frenchies are doing.
If a woman can "take ownership" of the life created in her womb and have the legal right to terminate said creation, then a computer scientist can have the right to terminte his/her electronic creation, as a matter of precident.
I think this is an interesting analogy. With fetucide becoming a felony (hurt/kill mom, kill fetus), I wonder how long it will be before the supreme court changes their position on abortion. I guess if the Democrats don't come up with a real candidate, it will happen in the next five years. Regardless, I think it will take a long long time for an AI to be recognized as anything other than intellectual property or a license agreement of IP.
I think that it will take a long time before humanity is willing to endow anything other than a human or human like being "personhood". It was just under 150 years ago that the practice of slavery was ended. Women voting is relatively new. And that says nothing to the concept of equality to which people of color and women are still not on the recieving end of all the time.
The other issue is one of creation - we award ownership of a human created product (that isn't human itself).
But we're not war-like here in the USA, not at all. LOL. The US is possibly the most war-like nation in the history of the world. When the anthropologists study American society in 6,000 years, they will discover an incredible number of war monuments and military artifacts and will conclude that Americans were a fierce, violent warlike people. They'll probably think our athletic arenas were for killing the conquered off.
There's two factors motivating currect cable and TV channels from selling their content to the consumer for "cheap".... First of all, it wasn't free on the air, because they spend 7 minutes or so throwing commercials at you. Secondly, because of that, tapes or DVDs of these shows have to be priced well away from a reasonable price range, they figure, becuase they need advertisers to feel comfortable that the vast majority of people who watch will go straight to the channel hosting the show instead of buying commercial-free versions.
Why not sell for cheap with commercials embeded in the recording? I'm not expecting a movie experience when I watch futurama, SG1 or southpark.
It's the best of both worlds and would have incredibe ROI for an advertiser. Highly recorded, but not viewed shows (MOST OF THEM) would get a far better share of commercial revenue this way.
Banner ads do work - just not the way that other media works. Using the web to hawk Coke, Pepsi or tampons is probably not the right media. I've had tremendous results using banner ads on very targeted sites. They yeild leads - and buy me editorial influence/immunity.
Advertising is much like playing blackjack in las vegas. Dotcom style ads do little but stroke egos. Ads targeted at investors are impossible to measure. The more local or targeted an ad is, the more effective. Radio works well generating leads. Local market TV can increase traffic in a retail store substantially. Embeds for fast food, movies and so on should be very effective in recorded media. Much like coveted product placements.
Americans are the most clue-resistant people on the face of the Earth. They can be relied on to do whatever is most convenient/profitable/etc at any given moment in time, without regard to future consequences.
This also means we will be quick to abandon ideas when they become unprofitable. IP is one such idea that will soon become very unprofitable for nearly everyone.
This is what happens when one man shapes the vision of a large corporation. When his vision is no longer fashionable in society, the company starts to fail. McNealy needs to find some people who have great vision and retain them rather than scaring them out of the company to become superstars elsewhere.
Sun's hardware strategy is increasingly problematic: the cost of incredible computing power is lower than ever. Linux has also taken away a lot of the reliability advantage over Wintel and offers Sun-like functionality.
Sun failed to realize the opportunity that Linux presented:
Cut cost of OS development substantially
Lower cost contribution of OS to hardware systems allowing for more competitive pricing
Focus on generating real value: new innovation, better marketing (even Nike doesn't make it's own shoes - the design and market them)
Improve their channel and market access to product. Who in my city recommends and sells Sun hardware?
Ultimately, I fear that Sun may have an SGI like future - they were right for the time five years ago because the Internet was built on Unix as was Sun. Now, wintel boxes and lintel boxes can do internet almost as well if not as well as a Sun. The only remaining reason to purchase a Sun system is proprietary application software. And unfortunately software can easily be ported to other *nix or even Windoze.
RIAA, MPAA, now the broadcast TV industry really just don't get it: the purpose of all this digital technology is to lower the marginal cost of copying and editing information. Every copy protection scheme is doomed to fail, even in a "trusted" computing environment. At the end of the day, it's all binary data and it costs NOTHING to reproduce it. If anything, the media should be embedding advertising and so on so they can sell commercial time on the traded files. It's an opportunity.
Incidentally, there would be substantially less file swapping going on of TV shows if the networks made them available on DVD or electronically. I'd love to be able to go FOX and buy the episode of the Futurama I missed the other night for a reasonable - considering it was free on the air price.
I hope congress and the FCC see Viacom's threat to halt HDTV broadcast for what it is: an attempt to ursurp the governement's power. In fact, I hope we all wise up to the increasing granularity of intellectual property and reverse that trend. At the end of the day, the people will wise up to it and the people absolutely will limit intellectual property rights.
Care to address your implicit threat that the government would be overthrown if it didn't acknowledge that it was subordinate to god? That was the most interesting thing to me in your post but you completely ignored it in your reply.
My statement wasn't intended to be a threat. It was intended to point out that taking those words from the pledge will piss off the our nations resident kooks - the same ilk of kooks (radical religous fundamentalists) that are causing global issues at the moment. Right now our resident kooks are relatively pacified compared to their wahabist counterparts:)
That said, I do believe that removing references to god from the pledge creates a threat to our domestic tranquility. Those words serve well to pacify the radical fundamentalists - the american equivelent to wahabists. These are the people who blow up abortion clinics, tend to be radical racists (not just white) and are very oppresive to women. I'd rather not give them a reson to become even more intollerant and even more opposed to our government.
Which of those weren't a crime under Roman law? And since when was "freedom of choice" Christian-based morality - I seem to remember a lot of people, including the entire population of Palestine, were executed for believing in the wrong thing in the Bible.
Coercing one into signing a contract was quite legal. One could also argue that fraud was quite legal with respect to binding agreements as there was not always consideration aside - sign or die.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Take any doctrine and somone will be willing to oppress all dissent. Regardless, when it comes to faith, man is a lousy arbiter of divine will.
And just as common for good people not be darkened by the door of a church.
Why insult religous people after such a lucid post? Why tell me that you think religon is dark? How does that improve your argument beyond exposing you as yet another anti-religion zealot?
My point was that despite the religious rights attempt to re-cast the American founders as their brand of religious:
I agree with you that our founding fathers represented a wide variety of faiths, but that most were Christian is indisputable. At the time our nation was created Christians in Europe were killing each other over which brand of Chrisitanity was acceptable (or not in the case of Robspiere)! That our nation chose religous freedom and slowly and grudgingly opened up to applying these freedoms to other faiths or lack of is what is miraculous about America.
you equate the government NOT acknowledging God as somehow being equivalent to oppressive.
It is very much so. If you don't believe in god's existence, then the statement "one nation under god" means "one nation under nothing" which is frankly a statement of fact. If you are a person of faith "God" is a great word: it can refer to any supreme being or pantheon you happen to believe in. Failure to acknowledge that the state's athority is under that of God's is problematice - look at those shining beacons of freedom that have existed in the last 50 years: China, Soviet Russia, Eastern Europe.
A secular government is MUCH less oppressive than a religious one This has no basis in fact. The Stalinist goverment of soviet russia was athiestic and oppressive. It is exactly what people of faith fear: a government that is without morals. There are indeed examples of religous governments that are equally brutal and repressive. The fact is that religion is one of many many factors that can be present (or not) in tyranny.
The country becomes LESS oppressed as Christain-based morality laws are removed from the book I'm sure it will be a better place when murder, theft, fraud, coercion, the contract, freedom of choice and so on become obsolete. Please. You don't know what you are really talking about.
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I feel that software is "spyware" if it meets the following tests:
1. Does the software install itself without the user's knowledge or consent?
2. Does it monitor user behaviour of any kind?
3. Does it do this monitoring without the user's consent?
I would simplify:
A) Is it hardware or software?
B) Does it send information about you or your behavior to a second or third party without permission every time it transmits?
Frankly, I don't want a "buy" button on my stereo. Too easy to push when drunk.
you have to admit that yours are, and only then can you make an attempt to get better ones. that defies the system. The whole idea is to say "I'm not a weasel and my opponent is."
Why can't people accept that Dubya *is* a weasel?
Why are you surprised that a politician is a weasel? The president is *always* the head weasel. Let's see - just the last few: Nixon (defined weasel), Gerald Ford (incompetant weasel)Jimmy Carter (not weasel, not good president) Teflon Man Reagan (irancontra weasel), GW Bush (Mr. free trade/new world order), Clinton (classic shouthern US political weasel), GW Bush (weasel, Texas style). Your point is?
You don't have to claim either of them are upstanding people just because they're in the same political party.
Personal experience: they are all weasels because they are politicians. This is not news.
how can they label Bush as a known weasel, thus indicating his "war on terrorism" is at least in great part a sham, and still bash the french?
Could it be that they both are weasels?
The French benefit from a history of weaselness.
they knew the war was a fake and they stuck to their stance while UK/USA continue to evade and dodge the truth
The war was not a fake. I watched it on CNN.
I think what you ment was: the premise for going to war was questionable.
France does have real freedom of speech and the press. Please quote facts in favor of your arguments.
LOL
* Illegal to insult the prime minister.
* Illegal to engage in speech/publication except against specific groups (nazis)
* Certain political movements are outlawed (nazis)
* Certain racial speech is illegal.
I don't like Nazis very much. That said, it looks like they are being oppressed. They may deserve it, but a nation that claims to be free and open can't do that.
Your example of scientology is not a good comparson. Preventing access to a copyrighted document is within the right of the copyright holder. This is different than making a word or created words disappear from the language which is what the Frenchies are doing.
If a woman can "take ownership" of the life created in her womb and have the legal right to terminate said creation, then a computer scientist can have the right to terminte his/her electronic creation, as a matter of precident.
I think this is an interesting analogy. With fetucide becoming a felony (hurt/kill mom, kill fetus), I wonder how long it will be before the supreme court changes their position on abortion. I guess if the Democrats don't come up with a real candidate, it will happen in the next five years. Regardless, I think it will take a long long time for an AI to be recognized as anything other than intellectual property or a license agreement of IP.
I am not surprised by this action. The French do not have real freedom of speech/press and have been falling down the slippery slope for sometime.
I think that it will take a long time before humanity is willing to endow anything other than a human or human like being "personhood". It was just under 150 years ago that the practice of slavery was ended. Women voting is relatively new. And that says nothing to the concept of equality to which people of color and women are still not on the recieving end of all the time.
The other issue is one of creation - we award ownership of a human created product (that isn't human itself).
commercialize air, commercialize water, commercialize every spoken and written word, commercialize music, commercialize feelings,
This has been done already. We need new ideas.
But we're not war-like here in the USA, not at all.
LOL. The US is possibly the most war-like nation in the history of the world. When the anthropologists study American society in 6,000 years, they will discover an incredible number of war monuments and military artifacts and will conclude that Americans were a fierce, violent warlike people. They'll probably think our athletic arenas were for killing the conquered off.
Once you prepare for war, you've already started the war.
When you don't prepare for war, you have prepared your nation for easy conquest.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I've already got one and it's very nice!
There's two factors motivating currect cable and TV channels from selling their content to the consumer for "cheap".... First of all, it wasn't free on the air, because they spend 7 minutes or so throwing commercials at you. Secondly, because of that, tapes or DVDs of these shows have to be priced well away from a reasonable price range, they figure, becuase they need advertisers to feel comfortable that the vast majority of people who watch will go straight to the channel hosting the show instead of buying commercial-free versions.
Why not sell for cheap with commercials embeded in the recording? I'm not expecting a movie experience when I watch futurama, SG1 or southpark.
It's the best of both worlds and would have incredibe ROI for an advertiser. Highly recorded, but not viewed shows (MOST OF THEM) would get a far better share of commercial revenue this way.
Embedded adverts will not generate sales.
Banner ads do work - just not the way that other media works. Using the web to hawk Coke, Pepsi or tampons is probably not the right media. I've had tremendous results using banner ads on very targeted sites. They yeild leads - and buy me editorial influence/immunity.
Advertising is much like playing blackjack in las vegas. Dotcom style ads do little but stroke egos. Ads targeted at investors are impossible to measure. The more local or targeted an ad is, the more effective. Radio works well generating leads. Local market TV can increase traffic in a retail store substantially. Embeds for fast food, movies and so on should be very effective in recorded media. Much like coveted product placements.
Americans are the most clue-resistant people on the face of the Earth. They can be relied on to do whatever is most convenient/profitable/etc at any given moment in time, without regard to future consequences.
This also means we will be quick to abandon ideas when they become unprofitable. IP is one such idea that will soon become very unprofitable for nearly everyone.
Sun's hardware strategy is increasingly problematic: the cost of incredible computing power is lower than ever. Linux has also taken away a lot of the reliability advantage over Wintel and offers Sun-like functionality.
Sun failed to realize the opportunity that Linux presented:
Ultimately, I fear that Sun may have an SGI like future - they were right for the time five years ago because the Internet was built on Unix as was Sun. Now, wintel boxes and lintel boxes can do internet almost as well if not as well as a Sun. The only remaining reason to purchase a Sun system is proprietary application software. And unfortunately software can easily be ported to other *nix or even Windoze.
RIAA, MPAA, now the broadcast TV industry really just don't get it: the purpose of all this digital technology is to lower the marginal cost of copying and editing information. Every copy protection scheme is doomed to fail, even in a "trusted" computing environment. At the end of the day, it's all binary data and it costs NOTHING to reproduce it. If anything, the media should be embedding advertising and so on so they can sell commercial time on the traded files. It's an opportunity.
Incidentally, there would be substantially less file swapping going on of TV shows if the networks made them available on DVD or electronically. I'd love to be able to go FOX and buy the episode of the Futurama I missed the other night for a reasonable - considering it was free on the air price.
I hope congress and the FCC see Viacom's threat to halt HDTV broadcast for what it is: an attempt to ursurp the governement's power. In fact, I hope we all wise up to the increasing granularity of intellectual property and reverse that trend. At the end of the day, the people will wise up to it and the people absolutely will limit intellectual property rights.
No matter how many people want it there, it can't be there unless we amend the Constitution and make this a monotheist country.
I suppose the next thing you will want to do is revise that creator line in the Declaration of Independence.
Care to address your implicit threat that the government would be overthrown if it didn't acknowledge that it was subordinate to god? That was the most interesting thing to me in your post but you completely ignored it in your reply.
:)
My statement wasn't intended to be a threat. It was intended to point out that taking those words from the pledge will piss off the our nations resident kooks - the same ilk of kooks (radical religous fundamentalists) that are causing global issues at the moment. Right now our resident kooks are relatively pacified compared to their wahabist counterparts
That said, I do believe that removing references to god from the pledge creates a threat to our domestic tranquility. Those words serve well to pacify the radical fundamentalists - the american equivelent to wahabists. These are the people who blow up abortion clinics, tend to be radical racists (not just white) and are very oppresive to women. I'd rather not give them a reson to become even more intollerant and even more opposed to our government.
The phrasing "under God" doesn't acknowledge that religion exists though, it acknowledges that God exists, which is entirely unwelcome to many people.
Taking it out is equally unwelcoome to people of faith. Your point is?
Which of those weren't a crime under Roman law? And since when was "freedom of choice" Christian-based morality - I seem to remember a lot of people, including the entire population of Palestine, were executed for believing in the wrong thing in the Bible.
Coercing one into signing a contract was quite legal. One could also argue that fraud was quite legal with respect to binding agreements as there was not always consideration aside - sign or die.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Take any doctrine and somone will be willing to oppress all dissent. Regardless, when it comes to faith, man is a lousy arbiter of divine will.
But it doesn't - it means the Judeo-Christian god.
LOL. Get a dictionary.
And just as common for good people not be darkened by the door of a church.
Why insult religous people after such a lucid post? Why tell me that you think religon is dark? How does that improve your argument beyond exposing you as yet another anti-religion zealot?
My point was that despite the religious rights attempt to re-cast the American founders as their brand of religious:
I agree with you that our founding fathers represented a wide variety of faiths, but that most were Christian is indisputable. At the time our nation was created Christians in Europe were killing each other over which brand of Chrisitanity was acceptable (or not in the case of Robspiere)! That our nation chose religous freedom and slowly and grudgingly opened up to applying these freedoms to other faiths or lack of is what is miraculous about America.
you equate the government NOT acknowledging God as somehow being equivalent to oppressive.
It is very much so. If you don't believe in god's existence, then the statement "one nation under god" means "one nation under nothing" which is frankly a statement of fact. If you are a person of faith "God" is a great word: it can refer to any supreme being or pantheon you happen to believe in. Failure to acknowledge that the state's athority is under that of God's is problematice - look at those shining beacons of freedom that have existed in the last 50 years: China, Soviet Russia, Eastern Europe.
A secular government is MUCH less oppressive than a religious one
This has no basis in fact. The Stalinist goverment of soviet russia was athiestic and oppressive. It is exactly what people of faith fear: a government that is without morals. There are indeed examples of religous governments that are equally brutal and repressive. The fact is that religion is one of many many factors that can be present (or not) in tyranny.
The country becomes LESS oppressed as Christain-based morality laws are removed from the book I'm sure it will be a better place when murder, theft, fraud, coercion, the contract, freedom of choice and so on become obsolete. Please. You don't know what you are really talking about.