Well, right, it's the remote factor, not that it's cheapest way to back up. But I have to admit, I did the math on my own puny storage needs and I was like, "70 bucks a year? Shit, man, I'm not paying that for backup." I wonder what I would have thought in 1990 if someone had told me that in less than two decades I would be able to purchase the storage to maintain a library of something like 50,000 ebooks for well under a hundred dollars a year.
Yeah, I always thought the most implausible thing about Asimov's premise was the idea we'd think that way at all. "Wow, that could be really dangerous, we'd better start right from the beginning thinking about how to control it" doesn't really describe our relationship with technology. More like "wow, that'd be the biggest goddam bomb ever! We gotta build us one them like yesterday!" Put a couple of big gas-operated automatic rifles on one of those "robotic pack mules," set it for full auto and maximum erratic hop and just start parachuting them them in. Finally we can retire human infantry completely.
Unfortunately it's a bipartisan technique. Neither liberals or conservatives should feel any sense of superiority about these kinds of tactics, and the relevant organizations should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging this kind of thing. Ends justify means seems to be one principle political activists have in common.
So if someone tries to blackmail me for $100 and I talk them down to $50, I didn't give in either?
Well, granted, but if you had a thousand bucks in your pocket, you might still feel like you got off pretty light (RIM's market value is over 12 billion).
Well, you've delivered a very sane, rational analysis for the true-believin' rapture preachin' hardcore eschatological hysterics. That should settle 'em. Why didn't anyone ever think to just explain it to them?
I don't see what the big deal is. At this point my feelings about AOL subscribers are about the same as my feelings about people who voted for George W. Bush twice. I respect their intrinsic value as human beings, but I can no longer take them seriously as members of society. So who gives a rats ass about what they do or do not receive? Get a better inbox, get a better ISP while you're at it. In other words - in my book AOL subscribers already exist in a lower tier of the already divided internet, and AOL asking for money to access that tier is just another layer of absurdity, putting a final spit polish on that turd.
And on the flip side of this, why should AOL give a rats ass what mass mailers and electronic freedom hippies say about them? If the customers raise hell about not getting five thousand action alerts from some nonprofit they signed onto once five years ago, or about spammers buying unrestricted access to their inboxes for a quarter cent, they might listen. Otherwise? Money talks.
Did you read the damn article at all? The two critical points is first how hidden this reclassification process is (particularly from scrutiny of whether it is consistent with the relevant law on the matter) and second the reaction of multiple historians that there seems to be a trend of "cleaning up" embarassing loose ends of historical issues rather than there being a relevant intelligence or security interest. I'm not exactly locking myself in the bunker, no, but I'm fed up with people acting like we shouldn't be disturbed and protesting these trends to secrecy and operating with a dubious unilateral autonomy in intelligence matters. If anyone is allowed to have honest textbooks in the future you humps will be remembered as the ones that drove the last nail into Americas coffin. Though the way things are going you'll probably be remembered as the brave upstanding televisionated zombies who liberated us from the burden of truth.
Judging from current events, all you have to do is import the internet to China and it becomes spineless... or at least everyone involved in doing business on it does...
While I have neither particular ire nor adulations for Netflix (I'm a subscriber and while the service is imperfect, I find it worth the subscription), their position - and response - is fairly typical. Ironically it will doubtless persist in the world of on-demand download, the business that will certainly replace them (or at least their current business model).
It is a problem particular to a kind of business where your most dedicated customers increase your operating expenses but not your revenue. You see the same thing in some subscription model music services: the new, elastic definition of "unlimited." It's a bad position to be in, frankly. Any pay-to-download service that tries to work a subscription-based, all-you-can-eat model is going to wrestle with the same problem if they get successful enough.
If the economics of your business cannot manage a person who truly works your distribution system within the boundaries of your agreement, you have to just bite the bullet and stop marketing the concept of "unlimited" access.
And expect to see plenty of this kind of business sensibility: If their best customers are costing them money there's no point in keeping them. They probably thrive on people like me - casual but steady renters who go for a relatively high percentage of what are probably low-mileage titles; off the beaten track stuff that is probably usually in stock. I judge my subscription saves me maybe five or ten bucks a month over what I used to spend for a comparable number of disks in the B&M video store, but I have rented dozens of items that would never show up in my local rental chain. It takes three to five days for turnaround (day one it goes out in the mail, day three a new movie arives) - usually closer to three and never yet more than five. I almost always get what's at the top of my cue, to the extent I've never noticed a variance though I'm sure they occur. I've gotten one busted disk in the mail, never had a shipment vanish in either direction. Maybe I've found the sweet spot.
I'm curious why those involved with budgeting never questioned why they suddenly had an extra $8 million to play with. Someone more in touch with government and their community should have wondered what was going on.
Maybe it's the same blind acceptance of numbers spit out by computers that will find a slack-jawed, gum-popping cashier blithely telling you you owe $58.60 for your soda, twinkie and magazine.
DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright. DRM systems may allow copyright holders to retain control over their material longer than they are legally entitled to. Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent.
Of course, it seems unlikely that there is anything out there - or likely to be - that couldn't be cracked. But here's a question: something only exists as a DRM protected file. Its copyright expires. The DMCA is still as it is today. Is it still illegal to crack the DRM on this file?
Oh, and in reference to "what election," it's Tuesday, November 7, 2006... and you'll generally find that voting NO to Republicans will coincide with voting NO to the further erosion of civil liberties. Though do make sure to do your research, there are always a few nutty GOPpers who actually believe that "rule of law" shuck and feel strangely compelled to, you know, uphold the constitution and stuff. And god knows there are plenty of Democrats Podpeople who have totally drunk the ""National Security" kool-aid. But inasmuch as the Administration is leading the charge to throw the judiciary out of the whole "law and order" equation, and the Republican led congress overwhelmingly supports him in this, yeah, they are the bums what need throwing out at this particular time.
There is also the issue that they are consistently, persistently a pack of incompetent, ass-covering fuckups. The best way to get promoted in the FBI is to commit some egregious, inexcusable blunder in front of an incurably ethical underling. After they report you, they'll get demoted or fired and you'll get kicked upstairs.
Eh, I would go even further than that. It is flatly illegal to reproduce and distribute information you don't own the copyright on, and in my opinion it should be, but I don't believe for a minute that the industry is prepared to even go so far as to allow unrestricted downloads of non-drm files for any price, certainly not for such a low one. Some anonymous rep can toss off any crazy idea to some U egghead in the course of a conversation, but when in reality they're holding Apple's feet to the fire to get the right to charge more than a dollar a pop for the flavor of the month with iTunes (including DRM and user restrictions, however trivial they may be to defeat)? This is clearly blue sky nonsense.
A good seven years ago I had a conversation with the president of a well known think tank I had worked with shortly after college about global warming, in which he delivered the opinion without the slightest hint of doubt that we were just about done with the "oh, we can't be sure that it's really happening" phase of the public conversation (of course there will always be a few wingnuts espousing any idiotic view you could imagine) and would shortly be entering the "oh well, there's nothing we can do about it at this point" phase.
Hmm, what a brilliant man, I think to myself now, even if he was not at all fun to work for. Sorry, I'm just going to jump offline for a moment and try to weep as quietly as possible over my sleeping infant's crib.
Yeah... my immediate thought was, their real motivation is that not having to account for those piffling millions makes it easier to balance the checkbook.
Yeah, of all the sad elements of this story, this guy's pathetic behavior is the nadir. I also like the way he begs to be allowed to sleep in his own bed at the end. The best part is, he's got an odd name, so a google search on him will probably turn this up for years to come. What a fuck.
More like weed prohibition in the 1930's...
on
RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with this argument is, the government doesn't do shit because it "makes sense" or because their punitive solutions "aren't working" any more. If they did things like the prohibition of marijuana would have been history 60 years ago. Instead its still goin' strong after 7 decades. DVD on Linux? Why do you want to kill our children?
every time they run this thing, it takes me back to this crap job I had years ago entering data from documentation in huge class action court cases into searchable databases for teams of attorneys. Lab results from animal fertility experiments crossed my desk and I must have looked at the phrase a dozen times before it occured to me what it meant to extract semen from dogs via "digital manipulation."
Presuming eBay plans to be as free with information about my telephone habits as they are with information from my auction account, I think I'll stick with my phone bill, thanks.
On a more general note, though I'm sure this is subject to change, right now my phone bill is the least of my worries, frankly. The land line is a bargain considering what it does for me every day, and it just plain works... I've lost my power, my internet, my cable for periods of time, but I've been living in my town for over a decade and not once has my phone gone out for even a minute in all that time. Figure out a way to deliver heat through the internet - that's the bill I'm worried about this winter.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, right, it's the remote factor, not that it's cheapest way to back up. But I have to admit, I did the math on my own puny storage needs and I was like, "70 bucks a year? Shit, man, I'm not paying that for backup." I wonder what I would have thought in 1990 if someone had told me that in less than two decades I would be able to purchase the storage to maintain a library of something like 50,000 ebooks for well under a hundred dollars a year.
And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?
Yeah, I always thought the most implausible thing about Asimov's premise was the idea we'd think that way at all. "Wow, that could be really dangerous, we'd better start right from the beginning thinking about how to control it" doesn't really describe our relationship with technology. More like "wow, that'd be the biggest goddam bomb ever! We gotta build us one them like yesterday!" Put a couple of big gas-operated automatic rifles on one of those "robotic pack mules," set it for full auto and maximum erratic hop and just start parachuting them them in. Finally we can retire human infantry completely.
Unfortunately it's a bipartisan technique. Neither liberals or conservatives should feel any sense of superiority about these kinds of tactics, and the relevant organizations should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging this kind of thing. Ends justify means seems to be one principle political activists have in common.
So if someone tries to blackmail me for $100 and I talk them down to $50, I didn't give in either?
Well, granted, but if you had a thousand bucks in your pocket, you might still feel like you got off pretty light (RIM's market value is over 12 billion).
Well, you've delivered a very sane, rational analysis for the true-believin' rapture preachin' hardcore eschatological hysterics. That should settle 'em. Why didn't anyone ever think to just explain it to them?
I don't see what the big deal is. At this point my feelings about AOL subscribers are about the same as my feelings about people who voted for George W. Bush twice. I respect their intrinsic value as human beings, but I can no longer take them seriously as members of society. So who gives a rats ass about what they do or do not receive? Get a better inbox, get a better ISP while you're at it. In other words - in my book AOL subscribers already exist in a lower tier of the already divided internet, and AOL asking for money to access that tier is just another layer of absurdity, putting a final spit polish on that turd.
And on the flip side of this, why should AOL give a rats ass what mass mailers and electronic freedom hippies say about them? If the customers raise hell about not getting five thousand action alerts from some nonprofit they signed onto once five years ago, or about spammers buying unrestricted access to their inboxes for a quarter cent, they might listen. Otherwise? Money talks.
Yes, this creation of worthless content for money is disgusting. People should be more like me - I blog, and create worthless content for free.
In fairness, Ed Rooney does tell that one girl "your ass is mine."
Did you read the damn article at all? The two critical points is first how hidden this reclassification process is (particularly from scrutiny of whether it is consistent with the relevant law on the matter) and second the reaction of multiple historians that there seems to be a trend of "cleaning up" embarassing loose ends of historical issues rather than there being a relevant intelligence or security interest. I'm not exactly locking myself in the bunker, no, but I'm fed up with people acting like we shouldn't be disturbed and protesting these trends to secrecy and operating with a dubious unilateral autonomy in intelligence matters. If anyone is allowed to have honest textbooks in the future you humps will be remembered as the ones that drove the last nail into Americas coffin. Though the way things are going you'll probably be remembered as the brave upstanding televisionated zombies who liberated us from the burden of truth.
First they came for the men who surfed pornography at the library...
And I didn't speak up, because I surfed pornography at home.
Judging from current events, all you have to do is import the internet to China and it becomes spineless... or at least everyone involved in doing business on it does...
While I have neither particular ire nor adulations for Netflix (I'm a subscriber and while the service is imperfect, I find it worth the subscription), their position - and response - is fairly typical. Ironically it will doubtless persist in the world of on-demand download, the business that will certainly replace them (or at least their current business model).
It is a problem particular to a kind of business where your most dedicated customers increase your operating expenses but not your revenue. You see the same thing in some subscription model music services: the new, elastic definition of "unlimited." It's a bad position to be in, frankly. Any pay-to-download service that tries to work a subscription-based, all-you-can-eat model is going to wrestle with the same problem if they get successful enough.
If the economics of your business cannot manage a person who truly works your distribution system within the boundaries of your agreement, you have to just bite the bullet and stop marketing the concept of "unlimited" access.
And expect to see plenty of this kind of business sensibility: If their best customers are costing them money there's no point in keeping them. They probably thrive on people like me - casual but steady renters who go for a relatively high percentage of what are probably low-mileage titles; off the beaten track stuff that is probably usually in stock. I judge my subscription saves me maybe five or ten bucks a month over what I used to spend for a comparable number of disks in the B&M video store, but I have rented dozens of items that would never show up in my local rental chain. It takes three to five days for turnaround (day one it goes out in the mail, day three a new movie arives) - usually closer to three and never yet more than five. I almost always get what's at the top of my cue, to the extent I've never noticed a variance though I'm sure they occur. I've gotten one busted disk in the mail, never had a shipment vanish in either direction. Maybe I've found the sweet spot.
I'm curious why those involved with budgeting never questioned why they suddenly had an extra $8 million to play with. Someone more in touch with government and their community should have wondered what was going on.
Maybe it's the same blind acceptance of numbers spit out by computers that will find a slack-jawed, gum-popping cashier blithely telling you you owe $58.60 for your soda, twinkie and magazine.
DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright. DRM systems may allow copyright holders to retain control over their material longer than they are legally entitled to. Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever -- exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent.
Of course, it seems unlikely that there is anything out there - or likely to be - that couldn't be cracked. But here's a question: something only exists as a DRM protected file. Its copyright expires. The DMCA is still as it is today. Is it still illegal to crack the DRM on this file?
Oh, and in reference to "what election," it's Tuesday, November 7, 2006... and you'll generally find that voting NO to Republicans will coincide with voting NO to the further erosion of civil liberties. Though do make sure to do your research, there are always a few nutty GOPpers who actually believe that "rule of law" shuck and feel strangely compelled to, you know, uphold the constitution and stuff. And god knows there are plenty of Democrats Podpeople who have totally drunk the ""National Security" kool-aid. But inasmuch as the Administration is leading the charge to throw the judiciary out of the whole "law and order" equation, and the Republican led congress overwhelmingly supports him in this, yeah, they are the bums what need throwing out at this particular time.
There is also the issue that they are consistently, persistently a pack of incompetent, ass-covering fuckups. The best way to get promoted in the FBI is to commit some egregious, inexcusable blunder in front of an incurably ethical underling. After they report you, they'll get demoted or fired and you'll get kicked upstairs.
Eh, I would go even further than that. It is flatly illegal to reproduce and distribute information you don't own the copyright on, and in my opinion it should be, but I don't believe for a minute that the industry is prepared to even go so far as to allow unrestricted downloads of non-drm files for any price, certainly not for such a low one. Some anonymous rep can toss off any crazy idea to some U egghead in the course of a conversation, but when in reality they're holding Apple's feet to the fire to get the right to charge more than a dollar a pop for the flavor of the month with iTunes (including DRM and user restrictions, however trivial they may be to defeat)? This is clearly blue sky nonsense.
"The lab I was visiting recently reported catching lies with 90 percent accuracy."
Yes, that would probably beat the US Criminal justice system for its general accuracy rate in determining guilt.
A good seven years ago I had a conversation with the president of a well known think tank I had worked with shortly after college about global warming, in which he delivered the opinion without the slightest hint of doubt that we were just about done with the "oh, we can't be sure that it's really happening" phase of the public conversation (of course there will always be a few wingnuts espousing any idiotic view you could imagine) and would shortly be entering the "oh well, there's nothing we can do about it at this point" phase.
Hmm, what a brilliant man, I think to myself now, even if he was not at all fun to work for. Sorry, I'm just going to jump offline for a moment and try to weep as quietly as possible over my sleeping infant's crib.
Yeah... my immediate thought was, their real motivation is that not having to account for those piffling millions makes it easier to balance the checkbook.
Yeah, of all the sad elements of this story, this guy's pathetic behavior is the nadir. I also like the way he begs to be allowed to sleep in his own bed at the end. The best part is, he's got an odd name, so a google search on him will probably turn this up for years to come. What a fuck.
The problem with this argument is, the government doesn't do shit because it "makes sense" or because their punitive solutions "aren't working" any more. If they did things like the prohibition of marijuana would have been history 60 years ago. Instead its still goin' strong after 7 decades. DVD on Linux? Why do you want to kill our children?
every time they run this thing, it takes me back to this crap job I had years ago entering data from documentation in huge class action court cases into searchable databases for teams of attorneys. Lab results from animal fertility experiments crossed my desk and I must have looked at the phrase a dozen times before it occured to me what it meant to extract semen from dogs via "digital manipulation."
Presuming eBay plans to be as free with information about my telephone habits as they are with information from my auction account, I think I'll stick with my phone bill, thanks.
On a more general note, though I'm sure this is subject to change, right now my phone bill is the least of my worries, frankly. The land line is a bargain considering what it does for me every day, and it just plain works... I've lost my power, my internet, my cable for periods of time, but I've been living in my town for over a decade and not once has my phone gone out for even a minute in all that time. Figure out a way to deliver heat through the internet - that's the bill I'm worried about this winter.
well, jonathan is my name, though not that jon - but yes, another element of odd chance.