Dude, the Soviet Union BROKE UP like, years ago and stuff. All the satellites have solo careers now, the comeback hype has come to nothing. Watch some news, man.
Benefits to Advertisers and Content Providers
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 2
One thing this ignores is the benefits devices of this nature provide to both advertisers and content providers. Consider, for example, the case many people have made that commercials have always been "opt-in." There is no way you can legally be forced to watch/pay attention to commercials: If you're not bip-booping over them with Tivo you're muting, snacking, channel-surfing or (god forbid) actually communicating with the potato next to you on the couch. Now, with Tivo, because it's so easy to scroll through the commercial, you're more likely to actually view it -albeit in a truncuated form. And you have to pay attention, so you know when the program starts again. So all advertisers need to do is create ads that give essentially the same meaningful content both at regular replay and at accelerated Tivotime speed. It's notable that most Volkswagon ads already fullfil this criteria.
With this in mind, lets face it: Tivo and its like are creating a service to content providers by enabling viewers to access their programs at different times then they're played. It gives them a broader audience.
Sponsors are always worried about people skipping commercials - hell, I don't need no fancy devices, I just let my mind wander - and the remedy is same as always: make funny, clever commercials that people want to watch, and make commercials that communicate your message at any speed, with or without sound. Advertisers aren't complaining about Tivo, so why is Forbes?
This is a nice article with lots of news for the genome newbie, but no new news for anyone who follows the subject more closely. Even before revelations about the lower-than-expected number of genes, many seasoned genetecists were warning of the "hype" factor involved with the genome. It is instructive that the first disease-related gene ever established - sickle cell anemia - has yet to yield a cure or any hope of therapy. As yet we lavk a reliable way to mask or alter any particular segment of the genome even in the one-shot arena of the germ cell (sperm or egg), and the kind of all-over gene therapy that would be required to counteract something like cystic fibrosis in an adolescent is far, far away.
This being said, the human genome project is still HUGELY valuable. Is the situation much more complicated than previously thought? Well, so be it: genome mapping is doubly necessary to start to understand that huge complexity. Even if understanding the genetic underpinnings of a disease does not lead immediately to a cure, it holds the potential for greater understanding of the disease's mechanism as well as the potential for earlier detection - and that makes an actual cure or treatment that much closer.
Theft is simply what it is defined as by law and by this definition this is theft. A statement like flamingcow's does not make it not theft any more than me quoting Marx makes all individual property theft. If I go on to steal flamingcow's car I can still justifiably get busted for grand theft auto.
It kind of depends on how you define the owner's "ability to use their property," an issue flamingcow ignores. In the case of intellectual property, I think the creator or owner expects, I think rightly, that part of the ability to use that property is the ability to control it's duplication and transfer so as to generate an income from their work/ownership. I see and sympathize with the fact that it's easier to care less about this when the owner is not the creator but rather some nasty giant corporation. But that does not make it right to render intellectual property valueless by taking the power of duplication and distribution away from the copyright owner.
Noone is trying to enforce the laws "of physical theft" on intellectual property. They are sucessfully enforcing copyright laws which are designed for ephemeral property like bitstreams (and the more traditional letterstream, for that matter). "Destined to fail"? Tell that to Napster.
One could argue, with just as much validity, that the copy machine would destroy the publishing industry. The reason it didn't is that it is easier to conduct legitimate business than illegitimate business. The FM band isn't packed with pirate signals because it is simply impossible to broadcast a strong signal from a stable location at a regular time without getting busted. Intellectual property laws will withstand the challenge of computers and the internet for the same reason. To get big enough to make a real impact, ordinary people will have to be able to find what they want easily from a central location. And if they can find it so can the authorities.
And though I'm not too crazy about some of the legal and technological trends happening in service of enforcing copyright in the digital age, I generally think this is a good thing, because just like the printing press and the mimeograph and the copy machine and the printer and the computer and the CD burner, the internet is putting a little more of the power of mass production into the hands of the individual creator. If that creator has the power to protect their right to self-distribute, well... you just might have something REALLY meaningful.
just replace that "We do not agree on everything" with:
we do not agree on ANYTHING
and that's a GOOD thing.
I also just want to affirm the basic content of this message. Anyone who illegally trades copyrighted materials has committed a crime and must expect the potential consequences. And let the punishment fit the crime. Loss of broadband seems a valid (not excessive)punishment for abuse of its power. Call it passive resistance or protest if you want but getting caught and punished is part of the game. Hey, they could be cutting people's hands off.
To my mind the biggest danger of all this copyright bruhaha is how it endangers the legitimate use of these kinds of tools by people who actually want to harness the potential cornucopia of digital duplication and interchange for use with intellectual property they actually own. The tail of bootlegging/pirating is wagging the dog of unleashing the scarcity-destroying power of digitalized intellectual property. Certainly the publishing/duplication industry is the ultimate villain but people who pirate/bootleg copyrighted materials are their unwitting stooges for creating a world where information is kept in chains.
I think the point is, this person signed up with a company and told them (on THE COMPANY'S little sign up doohickey) to NOT send her spam. So what do they do?
They send her spam that says "we thought you might actually be wanting some spam, so here's how to sign up for spam."
You ask me, they deserved what they got. And let's face it: most of these failing dot-coms deserve everything they get, becuase they started stupid companies with dicey money and then swiftly ran them straight into the ground. Stop a moment and ponder on the fact that if providing some sort of valuable, valid SERVICE had been a bigger goal than gettin' rich real quick, the whole Dot-Com bubble might have actually created some sort of value in society, rather than just turning a whole lotta dollars into a whole lotta nothin'.
I've pondered this as a potential money-making strategy for the internet before: What about setting up an e-mail company dedicated to creating a class-action lawsuit against all the major spammers? One arm would be involved in creating software and protocols to intercept spam and reply to the offending organizations with legally worded "don't spam me again" messages, the second arm would be engaged in research to insure that it located the true perpetrator of the spam and to track any specious legal transformations they migh engage in to avoid hassle/litigation, and the final arm would be engaged in preparing a massive lawsuit to sieze their assets and make spam a thing of the past. I'm ready to sign on! I would be satisfied to make 5 bucks if it meant doing irrepperable harm to the dogs that run the major spam lists.
Nearly Spam-Proof personal e-mail ought to be the easist thing in the world for most of us. Nearly 100% of the e-mail I want to receive comes from known sources. I want an e-mail program where I register who I want mail from. After a month or two to make sure I have a pretty complete "friend" list, I turn the filter on. Only known addresses automatically go to my in-box. The rest get an automated reply linking them to a web-based dialog box which explains that they are not on my list, and gives a form where they can enter their name and a brief line of text that may help me recognize or approve them. I then get sent a nice small brief e-mail transmitting only that information and a link. If I want to investigate further, I click that link and get the original e-mail message. If it turns out to be someone I want to correspond with, I add them to the list. If they don't want to go to the trouble, to hell with them. Every couple of weeks, anything that didn't respond to the reply gets dumped.
Why can't I find this simple functionality? It's not perfect, but I bet it would eliminate 99% of the spam I receive overnight. So let's hear it, hackers - how hard can this be? I'd pay money for it!
Public Service Announcement, people: As this sad tale relates, when you're getting hassled by cops it is NEVER in your favor nor in the favor of liberty to GIVE THEM PERMISSION TO DO ANYTHING. If a cop asks to search your home, your car or your person it means exactly one thing: They are not sure they have the legal right to do so. If they were sure of probable cause they would not ask, they would simply search. Statements implying that cooperation will translate into getting a better deal legally, or that non-cooperation constitutes a legal grounds for suspicion, are false. There is only one basic reality: Once you give permission to search, you've given up any legal protection from that search.
It should go without saying, but it is wise to be polite and cooperative (to an extent) with police. There is no benefit in being disrespectful or profane, and certainly physical evasion or resistance is asking for trouble. But people going about their legal business in particular have an obligation to politely but firmly refuse police searches, even though it may mean a little more time and hassle. MOre than anything else our rights have been eroded by the fact that too few LAW-ABIDING citizens have any real respect for them. Our pioneer ancestors, as the late William S. Burroughs Sr. put it, would be "pissing in their graves" if they could see us now.
The idea that the feds are careful not to run afoul of constitutional protections isn't backed up by the facts - and why should they, when they've had such a fine record of getting the Supreme Court to roll back our constitutional rights whenever the menace of drugs is invoked. (no-knock warrants, piss tests, anonymous informants, the use of helicopters for visual and infrared espionage on citizens, substantial weakening of what constitutes illegal search and seizure - just to name a few).
Do you honestly believe you could determine "passengers' names and itineraries and... see whether they paid in cash or credit" merely by standing around watching people check in? There's no probable cause or reasonable suspicion here - this is just one agency giving another agency private information on the movements of private citizens, for pay. By virtue of riding the train you get your personal information shaken down. (Here's a concept, people - read the article then post your "opinions" on it). The DEA is using this illegally obtained information to create probable cause - not the other way around.
I agree that there is a lot of illegal racial profiling in current law enforcement practices. That doesn't mean that something which violates everyone's rights is an improvement. Our rights have been steadily eroded by the war on drugs - a war, I might point out, that has only made the drug situation worse (there is a higher per-capita incidence of drug addiction now than when cocaine, marijuana extracts and opium were commonly available as legal patent medicines). Stop making excuses for the government. If you don't like racial profiling then you don't like the war on drugs, which is America's single most concentrated assault on African Americans since slavery. Figure out what you're fighting and get on the right side.
No doubt Pentagon officials feel totally on home turf with a project characterized by the aerospace industry delivering compromised solutions at several times the original projected cost.
On the serious side: the United States is on the verge of crossing some real lines in the issue of space-based weaponry, and this is part and parcel of that questionable policy. Half a century ago we did this with nuclear weapons: without treaty, international dialog or significant civilian control we rushed pel-mel to build the nuclear arsenal. And while one can argue the value of this arsenal as a deterrent, I think reasonable and intelligent representatives of hawks and doves alike can recognize that what we ended up with is not an asset. There are too many weapons which are too difficult to dispose of, there are too many insufficiently controlled or uncontrolled weapons, there is too much potential for the uncontrolled loss, theft, or sale of fissionable materials and technology. Are we going to do the same thing with the arms race in space?
The argument some will make against controlling and managing offensive space technology is that the US has too much vital technology in space, and is too dependent on this technology for civil as well as military applications, to NOT move forward in building a space-ready armament. THis is a valid argument and there is probably little chance to stop the further encroachment of military technologies into space, but at the same time, even putting aside the arguments of preventing another arms race and fostering international peace, there are completely pragmatic military reasons for proceeding with caution. Just do a Google search on Space Debris for one very real consequence of a shooting war in space.
Nuclear arms may very well have a deterrent capacity but they still represent a terrible danger to human civilisation and life on earth, and in the final analysis it is not bombs but sane international policy, the promotion of peaceful international relations, and diplomacy that have prevented a nuclear war so far. Please think carefully about the space-based arms race when you vote and when you communicate with your elected representatives.
I don't think there's been more obvious and open challenge to the Open Source community. MP3 should disappear; it's proprietary. But if Microsoft is allowed to control the standard format for digital audio playback then that's it: the world of commercial music is going to end up looking like the world of commercial software and that's an ugly, ugly picture.
Two words: Fair Use. Do you know what this means? Of course, but for those who just fell off the truck, you have a legal, constitutionally guarenteed, Supreme-Court approved right to make copies of copyrighted materials YOU ALREADY OWN for personal use. If I own the CD I have the right to tape it, burn it to a new CD, to rip it to my hard drive, to make MP3s from that, all for my personal convenience. I have the right to stream it on the intertnet so I can listen to it at work. I can't legally trade, distribute or sell it. But I can use that copyrighted information any way I want to, once I buy an original. The publishing community doesn't have the political juice to overturn fair use so they're joining forced with M$ to simply make it technologically impossible.
The big lie is that we need any more laws due to the digital revolution. Napster proves that: the average consumer will always need some sort of easy, accessible method to get their product. As soon as any illegal distribution network becomes big enough to make a dent in the publishing/recording industry's massive coffers, they'll get shut down. Piracy and bootlegs will always exist: fighting those who illegally (and despicably, from my point of view as a writer and songwriter) make personal profit from piracy is part of maintaining intellectual property laws.
What is really the issue is the desire of the publishing/recording industry to change the paradigm from a pay for rights (you buy copyrighted material and receive all attendant fair use rights - essentially unlimited personal playback rights) to a pay to play model where you end up paying EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU LISTEN/READ/VIEW. It's a shaft job on the consumer. A total greed power play. And this is the beginning.
I've said it once, twice, I'll say it a thousand times if I have to: There is only one way out and that is by artists cooperating with the open source community to forge a new model of distribution. We don't NEED the publishing/recording industry any more: If you have what it takes you will get 10X as rich selling yourself even if you take no steps to avoid piracy.
Yeah, Yeah, I'm crazy (and long winded too). Interested? Get in on the ground floor - write at the e-mail above or to PO 3171 Minneapolis MN 55403 and find out what the REAL score is.
Last time I watched a Nova special on supersonic jetfighter pilots, I distinctly recall a long segment on overcoming the tendency of the high g-forces of supersonic travel making people, well, pass out. Is this really a viable technology for commercial travel? I assume that the G's are a factor of how fast you accelerate, not how fast you actually end up going (my physics is a little rusty so don't laugh if I have this all wrong) but how realistic to think that you're going to be able to get up to these never-before-experienced speeds on a nice, slow even burn? Anyone got expertise?
Did you read the article, you simpleton? It states very clearly that the current technology is based on the ramjet principle but theoretically permits much faster speeds.
By the by, what is it with these conservative blowhards that have to invoke Clinton's name in connection with every subject on earth?! Fuck it man, I didn't like him either, but come off it - aerospace technology policy is not another nefarious part of the liberal agenda. And while we're on the subject of reinventing the wheel, let's talk about "missle defense," the Republican darling. Yeah, back in the day it was called Star Wars, and it they couldn't get it to work back then either, dumbass!
Hey dumbass, I love responding to this one.
1) Bush voters elected Bush
2) The Electoral College put Bush in the White House.
3) Democracy means never having to apologize for the actions of a candidate you didn't vote for.
I love the way Democrats try to blame their failed attempt to put a corrupt block of wood into office on people who by and large aren't even members of their party. The idea that I was somehow obligated to vote for a man I didn't want to see in the White House is patently ludicrous. I even saw one liberal moron claim in print that Nader voters should "burn their voters registration cards" to avoid doing further damage - and if you can't figure out why that makes no sense then you probably don't understand this response either.
One final note - in an imperfect world I vote tactically. I live in a state where I was dead certain Gore would get our electoral votes (hint - we voted for Mondale AND Dukakis). I voted for Nader in a bid for major party status for the Greens in my state - just my little bid to spread the power around. Not sure how I would have voted if I lived in Florida, but I didn't face that situation. In my state we succeeded - the Greens now have major party status. Making me one of a very small number of liberal voters who actually accomplished something with my vote.
This post seems to assume that there is some kind of unified front dicating opinion at Slashdot. Get real, Geek - When I show up with Moderator privileges I pick a few stories at random and expend my points moderating as I see fit. Yes-Men? Saying yes to who, exactly? There are at least as many people who take every possible opportunity to slag Cmdr Taco, Hemos, Katz and other Slashdot heavies.
Like so much open forum on the net, the main problem of Slashdot is that there's too much commentary, and too much of it says nothin' about nothin', for everything worthwhile to rise reliably to the top. But that's real community, Geek. You can't just not deal with people because you don't like how they act and react. Slashdot is far far far from perfect. But when I look at a given story, the comments consistently represent a pretty broad range of viewpoints. It'd be nice if less of them said "all yer yessmen are belong to us" or existed merely to link to goat porn, and that's why moderation exists. You'll notice your own comment didn't live up to your assumptions about moderation.
When I first started browsing slashdot I wondered all the slagging on John Katz was about - I'm starting to get it now. Lot's of insightful comments here: anyone with a little knowledge about international politics can see that there are serious diplomatic concerns with the U.S. making the kind of unconditional apology China wants. It involves admission of espionage, accepting full blame in a situation where operational errors occured on both sides, and acknowledging a disputed national airspace. China, on the other hand, is not merely posturing or demonstrating and old-school attitude to international dispute. They have the card of physically controlling the spyplane crew, and if they allow the dispute to drop their claim on the disputed airspace is damaged. China is on the verge of entering into the big leagues of the global economic community and if they back down on this issue the message is that they will bow to the wishes of the US in exchange for the WTO stamp of approval - a bad precedent for them. China has the potential to become a massive economic power but they're hampered by environmental issues and increasing dependence on the US for food supplies.
Bringing us to the point: What does all this have to do with the nature of virtual community and the effect of the extended communications capabilities on international politics and nationalism? Fuck all. Katz takes a complicated situation, spins it in a simplistic manner, and draws a dubious conclusion from the resulting mess. Nations exist because the human race controls vast and frightening powers of production, destruction, and health, and anyone not represented by a big gun is going to find themselves bowing to the barrel of someone else's. International disputes occur over issues of resources and power, and ideology is merely a distraction that dupes like Katz fall for because they're too lazy to do a little research. If ideas and a dozen lives were the only thing at stake in this little dispute it would already be resolved: nations are quick to abandon ideology when pragmatic concerns are at stake.
I voted for Ralph Nader last year. Draw your conclusions on my personal inclinations from that.
This being said, there are two big stupidities being promulgated by the comments on this story. The first is that this action represents an attack on free speech. For those who bothered to actually read what Mr. Aldridge had done, even allowing for a certain hyperbole in the recounting it represents a litany on every form of nasty and reprehensible on-line behavior imaginable. This guy spammed, trolled, talked twenty varieties of trash, faked user accounts to contravene site rules, and least forgivably released personal information on other users as a method of attacking their viewpoints. I don't need this kind of cowardly weasel representing an alternative viewpoint to the right wing. But more to the point, he broke all the rules on a private site and they took an appropriate action to stop him. Note this opinion does not necessarily preclude the reality that those responsible for the FR are a bunch of ultra-conservative assholes.
Point the second: the idea that this can somehow be correlated to some statement about the "left wing" in general is ridiculous. Mr. Aldridge is one (obviously troubled) person, and anyone with a brain will acknowledge that there are crazies on both sides of the right-wing/left-wing spectrum, and that there are also those not-quite-so-crazies who will nonetheless defend the irrational actions of their fellows on the irrational basis that a wrong comitted against a wrong is somehow right. Nevertheless, those who seek a real understanding of the ways of this world have a grasp on the fact that knocking down a straw man does not an strong argument make.
This is the problem with self-identifying with a worldview where there are only two possible identities: you end up getting lumped in with a lot of crazies, kooks, and bums. In a system where only half the people bother to participate in self-governance, and that half is allowing itself to be split neatly in two by intractable points of ideology, smart people on both sides of the imaginary (and largely handed to us by monied interests) line need to start seeking common ground and arguing issues basd on their merits, not anecdotal bullshit like this.
If he builds an experience worth having it could work. Of course, like the public library (only illegal and fomenting a lot of angsty societal discussion and justifying a lot of questionable laws) the urge of the masses to broadcast digital intellectual property will mean that only a core of fans will pay for the full experience. But with a solid contingency who have decided, with whatever motivation, that intellectual property is actually wrong or immoral or unnatural, this kind of thing is bound to escape because the net is just not set up to protect intellectual property.
The trick (look I'm giving away my intellectual property for free) is to charge a one-time access fee giving rights to view the whole shebang, then embed user information into the encoding format in a way that isn't obvious/easy to detect so that people who release the content they've acquired can have their access revoked. That way you could only give away plain text, and there would be a disincentive for giving away the content - losing access to the rest of the story. Of course it would eventually fall to circumvention but in a case like this the critical thing is to hold the inevitable off for as long as possible.
Prediction: it will break even and be completed but prove not sufficiently profitable to encourage much action; publishers will continue to seek an on-line experience people will pay for.
This respondent nails it. $15-25 for an ephemeral experience is just a rip job. The problem with digital distribution is that the greedheads that run publishing are desperate to take what should be a cheaper distribution technology and turn it into a cash machine. Now, some will object by saying that a movie is no less ephemeral, and has a comparable cost. Well, at a movie you're paying to rent a pretty unbeatable playback mode, giant screen and professional sound system. Whereas with digital publishing, the user gets stuck with the cost of the playback technology. A bunch of things are going to have to happen to make this kind of thing fly:
1. It's going to have to give an experience significantly superior to simply reading (reading online is a drag anyway except to kill time while it looks like you're working).
2. It's going to have to be reasonably priced and in a format where it's worth the effort to drag out your credit card (so when there's only one project like this out there, it's gonna be a much harder sell. There are a million things I could read, this one requires special effort ergo...)
3. It's going to have to leave some useful/desirable artifacts behind (since I don't get a book, I need stuff like fun icons or noises for my cptr, puzzles or games, posters or cards to print, SOMETHING beyond just the content of the experience). With a book I get, well, a book. I'm not going to shell out cash just to read something once. I question whether I would bother even for one of my favorite authors, let alone someone I had no special feelings for like Williams.
It's pointless to post so late but decency demands it - Blow is a terrible movie, inexplicably reviewed up by certain simpletons. I'm still mad about the loss of 15 dollars and two hours in my and my wife's lives.
This is an entirely superficial, shaloow presentation of a boring and completely unsympathetic character. We're presented with no perceptable motivation for his actions except a childhood aversion to poverty and a rootless aversion to work. We're given no reason to believe that his dominance in the cocaine market was a result of anything besides good timing. He tells his father he's "really good" at what he does, but from what we're shown on the screen, all he does is act as a middle man and collect.
The character fails to develop at all during the movie. We're told he is transformed by the birth of his daughter and subsequent drug-induced collapse, but his actions don't bear this out. He blames everyone but himself when he has face the natural consequences of his actions.
Moreover, Depps performance is flat and uninspiring. Everyone is dressed real nice and immaculately coiffed, but only Penelope Cruz seems to really stretch to the point of actually giving a performance. There is no insight into the cocaine market, the criminal culture of smugglers (they do a lot of coke and there's so much money it's just SITTING AROUND - fascinating!) or what impact the coke explosion really had on society and culture. And the final hour of the movie drags and slows to an eventual snail's pace as Jung's life grinds to a predictably ignominous conclusion, leaving no moral or message other than that it's fun to make a ton of money without really working, but it sucks to get beat up and thrown in jail.
Style triumphs over substance once again.
"I cannot comment on the scientific validity..." I can, as I spent a year doing research on bio-based alternatives to petroleum (you can check out the Carbohydrate Economy program at ilsr.org - several years ago). Bio-diesel is not a new idea, and there are, as the article states, a number of vehicles running on vegetable-oil derived fuels. Typically these vehicles are not running on unmodified vegetable oil; they burn a fuel created through a chemical process called transesterification, where the oil is reacted with a catalyst in the presence of ethanol or methanol (grain and wood alcohols, respectively, to you): This seperates the glycerine component from the oils which promotes a better burn. Although the technology is well established it is unlikely to catch on in the near term due to the stated problems: vegetable oils still cost mere than gas, and there are performance limitations. This is Mad Max stuff - we'll be using it once we enter the technological dark ages thanks to all you dumb-ass conservatives and SUV drivers.
And of course this is just a can of worms, but regarding the statement "this is how MS will die..." Only if the lawsuits succeed.
Anyone have more info on the track record of who's representing the class-action suit? What's the basis of the complaint? It says buyers were charged too much. Too much compared to what?
I don't have much of an opinion. Just curious to hear from those who do.
Have an opinion. On this subject. An INFORMED opinion. An informed opinion on this subject...
Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted.
Dude, the Soviet Union BROKE UP like, years ago and stuff. All the satellites have solo careers now, the comeback hype has come to nothing. Watch some news, man.
With this in mind, lets face it: Tivo and its like are creating a service to content providers by enabling viewers to access their programs at different times then they're played. It gives them a broader audience.
Sponsors are always worried about people skipping commercials - hell, I don't need no fancy devices, I just let my mind wander - and the remedy is same as always: make funny, clever commercials that people want to watch, and make commercials that communicate your message at any speed, with or without sound. Advertisers aren't complaining about Tivo, so why is Forbes?
This being said, the human genome project is still HUGELY valuable. Is the situation much more complicated than previously thought? Well, so be it: genome mapping is doubly necessary to start to understand that huge complexity. Even if understanding the genetic underpinnings of a disease does not lead immediately to a cure, it holds the potential for greater understanding of the disease's mechanism as well as the potential for earlier detection - and that makes an actual cure or treatment that much closer.
It kind of depends on how you define the owner's "ability to use their property," an issue flamingcow ignores. In the case of intellectual property, I think the creator or owner expects, I think rightly, that part of the ability to use that property is the ability to control it's duplication and transfer so as to generate an income from their work/ownership. I see and sympathize with the fact that it's easier to care less about this when the owner is not the creator but rather some nasty giant corporation. But that does not make it right to render intellectual property valueless by taking the power of duplication and distribution away from the copyright owner.
Noone is trying to enforce the laws "of physical theft" on intellectual property. They are sucessfully enforcing copyright laws which are designed for ephemeral property like bitstreams (and the more traditional letterstream, for that matter). "Destined to fail"? Tell that to Napster.
One could argue, with just as much validity, that the copy machine would destroy the publishing industry. The reason it didn't is that it is easier to conduct legitimate business than illegitimate business. The FM band isn't packed with pirate signals because it is simply impossible to broadcast a strong signal from a stable location at a regular time without getting busted. Intellectual property laws will withstand the challenge of computers and the internet for the same reason. To get big enough to make a real impact, ordinary people will have to be able to find what they want easily from a central location. And if they can find it so can the authorities.
And though I'm not too crazy about some of the legal and technological trends happening in service of enforcing copyright in the digital age, I generally think this is a good thing, because just like the printing press and the mimeograph and the copy machine and the printer and the computer and the CD burner, the internet is putting a little more of the power of mass production into the hands of the individual creator. If that creator has the power to protect their right to self-distribute, well... you just might have something REALLY meaningful.
just replace that "We do not agree on everything" with:
we do not agree on ANYTHING
and that's a GOOD thing.
I also just want to affirm the basic content of this message. Anyone who illegally trades copyrighted materials has committed a crime and must expect the potential consequences. And let the punishment fit the crime. Loss of broadband seems a valid (not excessive)punishment for abuse of its power. Call it passive resistance or protest if you want but getting caught and punished is part of the game. Hey, they could be cutting people's hands off.
To my mind the biggest danger of all this copyright bruhaha is how it endangers the legitimate use of these kinds of tools by people who actually want to harness the potential cornucopia of digital duplication and interchange for use with intellectual property they actually own. The tail of bootlegging/pirating is wagging the dog of unleashing the scarcity-destroying power of digitalized intellectual property. Certainly the publishing/duplication industry is the ultimate villain but people who pirate/bootleg copyrighted materials are their unwitting stooges for creating a world where information is kept in chains.
They send her spam that says "we thought you might actually be wanting some spam, so here's how to sign up for spam."
You ask me, they deserved what they got. And let's face it: most of these failing dot-coms deserve everything they get, becuase they started stupid companies with dicey money and then swiftly ran them straight into the ground. Stop a moment and ponder on the fact that if providing some sort of valuable, valid SERVICE had been a bigger goal than gettin' rich real quick, the whole Dot-Com bubble might have actually created some sort of value in society, rather than just turning a whole lotta dollars into a whole lotta nothin'.
I've pondered this as a potential money-making strategy for the internet before: What about setting up an e-mail company dedicated to creating a class-action lawsuit against all the major spammers? One arm would be involved in creating software and protocols to intercept spam and reply to the offending organizations with legally worded "don't spam me again" messages, the second arm would be engaged in research to insure that it located the true perpetrator of the spam and to track any specious legal transformations they migh engage in to avoid hassle/litigation, and the final arm would be engaged in preparing a massive lawsuit to sieze their assets and make spam a thing of the past. I'm ready to sign on! I would be satisfied to make 5 bucks if it meant doing irrepperable harm to the dogs that run the major spam lists.
Why can't I find this simple functionality? It's not perfect, but I bet it would eliminate 99% of the spam I receive overnight. So let's hear it, hackers - how hard can this be? I'd pay money for it!
It should go without saying, but it is wise to be polite and cooperative (to an extent) with police. There is no benefit in being disrespectful or profane, and certainly physical evasion or resistance is asking for trouble. But people going about their legal business in particular have an obligation to politely but firmly refuse police searches, even though it may mean a little more time and hassle. MOre than anything else our rights have been eroded by the fact that too few LAW-ABIDING citizens have any real respect for them. Our pioneer ancestors, as the late William S. Burroughs Sr. put it, would be "pissing in their graves" if they could see us now.
Do you honestly believe you could determine "passengers' names and itineraries and... see whether they paid in cash or credit" merely by standing around watching people check in? There's no probable cause or reasonable suspicion here - this is just one agency giving another agency private information on the movements of private citizens, for pay. By virtue of riding the train you get your personal information shaken down. (Here's a concept, people - read the article then post your "opinions" on it). The DEA is using this illegally obtained information to create probable cause - not the other way around.
I agree that there is a lot of illegal racial profiling in current law enforcement practices. That doesn't mean that something which violates everyone's rights is an improvement. Our rights have been steadily eroded by the war on drugs - a war, I might point out, that has only made the drug situation worse (there is a higher per-capita incidence of drug addiction now than when cocaine, marijuana extracts and opium were commonly available as legal patent medicines). Stop making excuses for the government. If you don't like racial profiling then you don't like the war on drugs, which is America's single most concentrated assault on African Americans since slavery. Figure out what you're fighting and get on the right side.
On the serious side: the United States is on the verge of crossing some real lines in the issue of space-based weaponry, and this is part and parcel of that questionable policy. Half a century ago we did this with nuclear weapons: without treaty, international dialog or significant civilian control we rushed pel-mel to build the nuclear arsenal. And while one can argue the value of this arsenal as a deterrent, I think reasonable and intelligent representatives of hawks and doves alike can recognize that what we ended up with is not an asset. There are too many weapons which are too difficult to dispose of, there are too many insufficiently controlled or uncontrolled weapons, there is too much potential for the uncontrolled loss, theft, or sale of fissionable materials and technology. Are we going to do the same thing with the arms race in space?
The argument some will make against controlling and managing offensive space technology is that the US has too much vital technology in space, and is too dependent on this technology for civil as well as military applications, to NOT move forward in building a space-ready armament. THis is a valid argument and there is probably little chance to stop the further encroachment of military technologies into space, but at the same time, even putting aside the arguments of preventing another arms race and fostering international peace, there are completely pragmatic military reasons for proceeding with caution. Just do a Google search on Space Debris for one very real consequence of a shooting war in space.
Nuclear arms may very well have a deterrent capacity but they still represent a terrible danger to human civilisation and life on earth, and in the final analysis it is not bombs but sane international policy, the promotion of peaceful international relations, and diplomacy that have prevented a nuclear war so far. Please think carefully about the space-based arms race when you vote and when you communicate with your elected representatives.
I don't think there's been more obvious and open challenge to the Open Source community. MP3 should disappear; it's proprietary. But if Microsoft is allowed to control the standard format for digital audio playback then that's it: the world of commercial music is going to end up looking like the world of commercial software and that's an ugly, ugly picture. Two words: Fair Use. Do you know what this means? Of course, but for those who just fell off the truck, you have a legal, constitutionally guarenteed, Supreme-Court approved right to make copies of copyrighted materials YOU ALREADY OWN for personal use. If I own the CD I have the right to tape it, burn it to a new CD, to rip it to my hard drive, to make MP3s from that, all for my personal convenience. I have the right to stream it on the intertnet so I can listen to it at work. I can't legally trade, distribute or sell it. But I can use that copyrighted information any way I want to, once I buy an original. The publishing community doesn't have the political juice to overturn fair use so they're joining forced with M$ to simply make it technologically impossible. The big lie is that we need any more laws due to the digital revolution. Napster proves that: the average consumer will always need some sort of easy, accessible method to get their product. As soon as any illegal distribution network becomes big enough to make a dent in the publishing/recording industry's massive coffers, they'll get shut down. Piracy and bootlegs will always exist: fighting those who illegally (and despicably, from my point of view as a writer and songwriter) make personal profit from piracy is part of maintaining intellectual property laws. What is really the issue is the desire of the publishing/recording industry to change the paradigm from a pay for rights (you buy copyrighted material and receive all attendant fair use rights - essentially unlimited personal playback rights) to a pay to play model where you end up paying EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU LISTEN/READ/VIEW. It's a shaft job on the consumer. A total greed power play. And this is the beginning. I've said it once, twice, I'll say it a thousand times if I have to: There is only one way out and that is by artists cooperating with the open source community to forge a new model of distribution. We don't NEED the publishing/recording industry any more: If you have what it takes you will get 10X as rich selling yourself even if you take no steps to avoid piracy. Yeah, Yeah, I'm crazy (and long winded too). Interested? Get in on the ground floor - write at the e-mail above or to PO 3171 Minneapolis MN 55403 and find out what the REAL score is.
Last time I watched a Nova special on supersonic jetfighter pilots, I distinctly recall a long segment on overcoming the tendency of the high g-forces of supersonic travel making people, well, pass out. Is this really a viable technology for commercial travel? I assume that the G's are a factor of how fast you accelerate, not how fast you actually end up going (my physics is a little rusty so don't laugh if I have this all wrong) but how realistic to think that you're going to be able to get up to these never-before-experienced speeds on a nice, slow even burn? Anyone got expertise?
By the by, what is it with these conservative blowhards that have to invoke Clinton's name in connection with every subject on earth?! Fuck it man, I didn't like him either, but come off it - aerospace technology policy is not another nefarious part of the liberal agenda. And while we're on the subject of reinventing the wheel, let's talk about "missle defense," the Republican darling. Yeah, back in the day it was called Star Wars, and it they couldn't get it to work back then either, dumbass!
2) The Electoral College put Bush in the White House.
3) Democracy means never having to apologize for the actions of a candidate you didn't vote for.
I love the way Democrats try to blame their failed attempt to put a corrupt block of wood into office on people who by and large aren't even members of their party. The idea that I was somehow obligated to vote for a man I didn't want to see in the White House is patently ludicrous. I even saw one liberal moron claim in print that Nader voters should "burn their voters registration cards" to avoid doing further damage - and if you can't figure out why that makes no sense then you probably don't understand this response either.
One final note - in an imperfect world I vote tactically. I live in a state where I was dead certain Gore would get our electoral votes (hint - we voted for Mondale AND Dukakis). I voted for Nader in a bid for major party status for the Greens in my state - just my little bid to spread the power around. Not sure how I would have voted if I lived in Florida, but I didn't face that situation. In my state we succeeded - the Greens now have major party status. Making me one of a very small number of liberal voters who actually accomplished something with my vote.
Like so much open forum on the net, the main problem of Slashdot is that there's too much commentary, and too much of it says nothin' about nothin', for everything worthwhile to rise reliably to the top. But that's real community, Geek. You can't just not deal with people because you don't like how they act and react. Slashdot is far far far from perfect. But when I look at a given story, the comments consistently represent a pretty broad range of viewpoints. It'd be nice if less of them said "all yer yessmen are belong to us" or existed merely to link to goat porn, and that's why moderation exists. You'll notice your own comment didn't live up to your assumptions about moderation.
Bringing us to the point: What does all this have to do with the nature of virtual community and the effect of the extended communications capabilities on international politics and nationalism? Fuck all. Katz takes a complicated situation, spins it in a simplistic manner, and draws a dubious conclusion from the resulting mess. Nations exist because the human race controls vast and frightening powers of production, destruction, and health, and anyone not represented by a big gun is going to find themselves bowing to the barrel of someone else's. International disputes occur over issues of resources and power, and ideology is merely a distraction that dupes like Katz fall for because they're too lazy to do a little research. If ideas and a dozen lives were the only thing at stake in this little dispute it would already be resolved: nations are quick to abandon ideology when pragmatic concerns are at stake.
I voted for Ralph Nader last year. Draw your conclusions on my personal inclinations from that. This being said, there are two big stupidities being promulgated by the comments on this story. The first is that this action represents an attack on free speech. For those who bothered to actually read what Mr. Aldridge had done, even allowing for a certain hyperbole in the recounting it represents a litany on every form of nasty and reprehensible on-line behavior imaginable. This guy spammed, trolled, talked twenty varieties of trash, faked user accounts to contravene site rules, and least forgivably released personal information on other users as a method of attacking their viewpoints. I don't need this kind of cowardly weasel representing an alternative viewpoint to the right wing. But more to the point, he broke all the rules on a private site and they took an appropriate action to stop him. Note this opinion does not necessarily preclude the reality that those responsible for the FR are a bunch of ultra-conservative assholes. Point the second: the idea that this can somehow be correlated to some statement about the "left wing" in general is ridiculous. Mr. Aldridge is one (obviously troubled) person, and anyone with a brain will acknowledge that there are crazies on both sides of the right-wing/left-wing spectrum, and that there are also those not-quite-so-crazies who will nonetheless defend the irrational actions of their fellows on the irrational basis that a wrong comitted against a wrong is somehow right. Nevertheless, those who seek a real understanding of the ways of this world have a grasp on the fact that knocking down a straw man does not an strong argument make. This is the problem with self-identifying with a worldview where there are only two possible identities: you end up getting lumped in with a lot of crazies, kooks, and bums. In a system where only half the people bother to participate in self-governance, and that half is allowing itself to be split neatly in two by intractable points of ideology, smart people on both sides of the imaginary (and largely handed to us by monied interests) line need to start seeking common ground and arguing issues basd on their merits, not anecdotal bullshit like this.
If he builds an experience worth having it could work. Of course, like the public library (only illegal and fomenting a lot of angsty societal discussion and justifying a lot of questionable laws) the urge of the masses to broadcast digital intellectual property will mean that only a core of fans will pay for the full experience. But with a solid contingency who have decided, with whatever motivation, that intellectual property is actually wrong or immoral or unnatural, this kind of thing is bound to escape because the net is just not set up to protect intellectual property. The trick (look I'm giving away my intellectual property for free) is to charge a one-time access fee giving rights to view the whole shebang, then embed user information into the encoding format in a way that isn't obvious/easy to detect so that people who release the content they've acquired can have their access revoked. That way you could only give away plain text, and there would be a disincentive for giving away the content - losing access to the rest of the story. Of course it would eventually fall to circumvention but in a case like this the critical thing is to hold the inevitable off for as long as possible. Prediction: it will break even and be completed but prove not sufficiently profitable to encourage much action; publishers will continue to seek an on-line experience people will pay for.
This respondent nails it. $15-25 for an ephemeral experience is just a rip job. The problem with digital distribution is that the greedheads that run publishing are desperate to take what should be a cheaper distribution technology and turn it into a cash machine. Now, some will object by saying that a movie is no less ephemeral, and has a comparable cost. Well, at a movie you're paying to rent a pretty unbeatable playback mode, giant screen and professional sound system. Whereas with digital publishing, the user gets stuck with the cost of the playback technology. A bunch of things are going to have to happen to make this kind of thing fly: 1. It's going to have to give an experience significantly superior to simply reading (reading online is a drag anyway except to kill time while it looks like you're working). 2. It's going to have to be reasonably priced and in a format where it's worth the effort to drag out your credit card (so when there's only one project like this out there, it's gonna be a much harder sell. There are a million things I could read, this one requires special effort ergo...) 3. It's going to have to leave some useful/desirable artifacts behind (since I don't get a book, I need stuff like fun icons or noises for my cptr, puzzles or games, posters or cards to print, SOMETHING beyond just the content of the experience). With a book I get, well, a book. I'm not going to shell out cash just to read something once. I question whether I would bother even for one of my favorite authors, let alone someone I had no special feelings for like Williams.
It's pointless to post so late but decency demands it - Blow is a terrible movie, inexplicably reviewed up by certain simpletons. I'm still mad about the loss of 15 dollars and two hours in my and my wife's lives. This is an entirely superficial, shaloow presentation of a boring and completely unsympathetic character. We're presented with no perceptable motivation for his actions except a childhood aversion to poverty and a rootless aversion to work. We're given no reason to believe that his dominance in the cocaine market was a result of anything besides good timing. He tells his father he's "really good" at what he does, but from what we're shown on the screen, all he does is act as a middle man and collect. The character fails to develop at all during the movie. We're told he is transformed by the birth of his daughter and subsequent drug-induced collapse, but his actions don't bear this out. He blames everyone but himself when he has face the natural consequences of his actions. Moreover, Depps performance is flat and uninspiring. Everyone is dressed real nice and immaculately coiffed, but only Penelope Cruz seems to really stretch to the point of actually giving a performance. There is no insight into the cocaine market, the criminal culture of smugglers (they do a lot of coke and there's so much money it's just SITTING AROUND - fascinating!) or what impact the coke explosion really had on society and culture. And the final hour of the movie drags and slows to an eventual snail's pace as Jung's life grinds to a predictably ignominous conclusion, leaving no moral or message other than that it's fun to make a ton of money without really working, but it sucks to get beat up and thrown in jail. Style triumphs over substance once again.
"I cannot comment on the scientific validity..." I can, as I spent a year doing research on bio-based alternatives to petroleum (you can check out the Carbohydrate Economy program at ilsr.org - several years ago). Bio-diesel is not a new idea, and there are, as the article states, a number of vehicles running on vegetable-oil derived fuels. Typically these vehicles are not running on unmodified vegetable oil; they burn a fuel created through a chemical process called transesterification, where the oil is reacted with a catalyst in the presence of ethanol or methanol (grain and wood alcohols, respectively, to you): This seperates the glycerine component from the oils which promotes a better burn. Although the technology is well established it is unlikely to catch on in the near term due to the stated problems: vegetable oils still cost mere than gas, and there are performance limitations. This is Mad Max stuff - we'll be using it once we enter the technological dark ages thanks to all you dumb-ass conservatives and SUV drivers.
The only thing more pathetic than a "second post fool on slashdot" is an anonymous coward who responds to them... Which makes me... Oh dear.
And of course this is just a can of worms, but regarding the statement "this is how MS will die..." Only if the lawsuits succeed. Anyone have more info on the track record of who's representing the class-action suit? What's the basis of the complaint? It says buyers were charged too much. Too much compared to what? I don't have much of an opinion. Just curious to hear from those who do. Have an opinion. On this subject. An INFORMED opinion. An informed opinion on this subject... Oh well.