Still, it's only 2 of the five record companies that have settled, and this doesn't get to the root of the whole mp3 fiasco. Basically, this story is good news to mp3.com (although not even great for them, still 3 more groups to worry about), but not for anyone else. And again, they're just settling, so apparently mp3.com decided that $100 million was a better deal than having those 2 extra labels.
Here here - this is one of the least lucid Katz articles I've seen in a while, although I often enjoy them. What bothered me most is that he's still trying to tie everything into the Hellmouth series:
The heretic today is marginalized without any bloodshed. He doesn't even take the risks the Shadowrunner takes. His teacher and peers make him a joke in the classroom, and ignore or isolate him. His career is either destroyed outright, as it [sic] being fired or demoted.
Are all Katz's articles still all about sad geeks in high school? Hell, I was one myself just a few years ago, but that's not the main point here.
It's a very valid worry that corporations are soon to be or already are above the law, and something massive needs to be done to take back the rights from the conglomorates to the customers. What is it? I wish I knew, but I have a bad feeling that things will have to get much worse before the majority stops swallowing PR and thinking for themselves.
The "post-Microsoft era" that everyone's crowing about is basically the exact same thing that we've had for years. As always, the underbelly of the internet is non-Microsoft, but what the vast majority of people see and use is still Windows. Even with a forced breakup for MS, it will take years for a major change to come about - most desktop software will exist exclusively for Windows, and most users will stick to what they're familiar with. As long as software houses are guaranteed to have their software compatible with most users' systems, they will write exclusively for that platform.
So what happens to MS? If they're broken up, the Windows division will still be vomiting out the OS most people use, and other divisions will still be spitting out software for it. Although they might then have more of an incentive to port the talking paper clip to other OSes, most users will stick with what they know. Of course, it's great to see more software available for Linux, but a post-Microsoft era it ain't - it's another small step, just with extra hype.
Heh heh heh... Michael Swindell... heh.. Swindle... think about it. If I can't say something intellignet about the topic, at least I can make fun of anyone who has had their name attached to it... whee!
Re:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
on
Brainball!
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· Score: 1
Ford played drinking games to lose. Although that probably ends up with the same effect as Brainball.
I'm surprised by the general lack of sense on the posts I've seen so far here, although quite a few of the AC ones are funny...
Anything like this, which could easily push the whole Echelon project into public knowledge, is a good thing. The fact is that 95 out of 100 people have no idea that it exists, or that it even could. Granted, the French may have a less than distinguished history of industrial espionage, but I somehow doubt that the US or UK are any less rosy. Instead of abusing France, we should be glad that things like this get into the limelight - if the vast majority has no idea that this exists, there will be no opposal to it.
I'd love this to be true right off the bat, but we all know this is just someone with the server to make an actual server behave like an actual server... not that that's not a real servver, but we should see something that better that that wank-ass crap. Great idea, but nothing so groundbreaking as deserving of a story here. Maybe if she were sitll running "Firefly"... I wish it hadn't been taken down...
AI si good, but this is just a simple re-hash of tech that's been around for over 4 years.
Let me be yet another whiner and say "we should have a new category for AI", but I want to think it's worthwhile now. We can all make us proud!
...it's invasion of privacy. A lot of people seem to think this is OK, because it's just a little bit of data, or it's all for their own good, or (here's the best one) it's id, so it's fine. As others have said here, once you let one little thing slip, we're opening up the floodgates to all sorts of undocumented reporting features.
The problem here is that the program took user information and sent it back to id without the users' knowledge or consent. Voluntary registration is one thing, involuntary and unwitting registration is another.
Although it's beside the point whether or not id used this for anything other than future hardware support, even data not linked to names or email is worth a lot of money. Market research people can extract a lot of info from the demographics of people who buy first-person shooters and their video card, and will pay a good price for a large quantity of that data. Coming on the heels of all the recent privacy fiascos, there is no reason to say that this is any better than the rest.
There are two book collections of stuff he's done on NPR over the years - Fishwhistle and Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights (I may have the cities backwards... apologies in advance). Both are hilarious, even more so if you can imagine them being read in his voice. They're collections of his radio spots, about the length of a short essay each. Highly recommended.
Yes, most of the things claimed against Iran in this thread are true, but they are not something to be viewed in a vacuum. The CIA supported Iran for most of the 1980's (remember Irangate?), basically giving them weapons which were used to fight Iraq. After a while, Iran became a bit too bizarre even for the CIA, so we "sold" arms to the Iraqis instead. In the end, it was a 10-year war between two countries that the US both supported at one time or another, depending on which one was ruled by less of a fanatic.
Either way, any middle eastern conflict has been pushed on by the US. In order to keep the military-industrial complex going after the end of the cold war, the big defense conractors had to go with exports to keep up their profits.
Yes, the Iraqi government has carried out a genocidal campaign against Kurds, for which the US fires cruise missles at them every few weeks. However, there is also a large Kurdish population in Turkey. The Turkish government is currently the number one customer of US arms companies, and has been involved in a campaign to eradicate the Kurds from their country just as long as Iraq, only more brutally and completely ignored.
What I'm trying to say is that everyone involved is to blame, and basically every developed nation is involved. The US supplies arms as the media there and everywhere else ignores it as we watch NATO, a "defensive" alliance, invade a nation. Certainly, I cannot support genocide or violence in any form, but to try and blame whichever underdeveloped country that has spent the past 10 years buying guns under US government subsidies is ridiculous - the American economy depends on lucrative weapons contracts, and the government there knows it, which is why they provide subsidies and continue to allow guns to be exported all over the world.
Great counterpoint to the media frenzy over Littleton, huh? Guns are great, as long as no one in the states has one.
LED, not laser, AFAIK. Lasers, especially in the 80s, would be too expensive and big. So you can continue staring into the little red light as long as you want. Although, maybe tricking M$ users into blindness wouldn't be a bad idea...
I agree, the person directly at fault is the kid who pulled the trigger. But most 14 year olds don't go around gunning people down, right? Why? Because of how they've been brought up. The parents are probably guilty of extreme negligence, or at least extreme stupidity. Like everyone else has said, the things they're suing about are already rated for violence etc., and if his parents haven't been able to (more likely haven't tried) to instill a sense of values, and reality vs. fantasy, they're just as much at fault. A 14 year old is a minor, supposedly his parents are responsible for his actions. This is not to say the people behind this lawsuit are anything less than greedy idiots. As the article said, they've already tried to sue 24 people from the school - teachers and students. Are they responsible for encouraging him to kill people? Or just responsible for not noticing he had problems? This seems to me to be just another case of people looking for as many others to blame as possible, in an attempt to cash in on tragedy. Certainly nothing can bring back what these families lost, but by dragging in civil suits left and right, they're just prolonging their pain and the pain of a lot of other people. They say they want to "hurt Hollywood," etc? $130 million isn't going to do that. The only message it sends, even if the case had any chance of being won, is that you are responsible for any damage caused by something you create, no matter how indirectly it caused the damage. As Steve Dallas said, "America! Land of the Lawsuit!! God bless her!!"
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Still, it's only 2 of the five record companies that have settled, and this doesn't get to the root of the whole mp3 fiasco. Basically, this story is good news to mp3.com (although not even great for them, still 3 more groups to worry about), but not for anyone else. And again, they're just settling, so apparently mp3.com decided that $100 million was a better deal than having those 2 extra labels.
The heretic today is marginalized without any bloodshed. He doesn't even take the risks the Shadowrunner takes. His teacher and peers make him a joke in the classroom, and ignore or isolate him. His career is either destroyed outright, as it [sic] being fired or demoted.
Are all Katz's articles still all about sad geeks in high school? Hell, I was one myself just a few years ago, but that's not the main point here.
It's a very valid worry that corporations are soon to be or already are above the law, and something massive needs to be done to take back the rights from the conglomorates to the customers. What is it? I wish I knew, but I have a bad feeling that things will have to get much worse before the majority stops swallowing PR and thinking for themselves.
So what happens to MS? If they're broken up, the Windows division will still be vomiting out the OS most people use, and other divisions will still be spitting out software for it. Although they might then have more of an incentive to port the talking paper clip to other OSes, most users will stick with what they know. Of course, it's great to see more software available for Linux, but a post-Microsoft era it ain't - it's another small step, just with extra hype.
If you're in the Davis Square area, try a Newbury Comics - I've seen it there recently.
Heh heh heh... Michael Swindell... heh.. Swindle... think about it. If I can't say something intellignet about the topic, at least I can make fun of anyone who has had their name attached to it... whee!
Ford played drinking games to lose. Although that probably ends up with the same effect as Brainball.
Anything like this, which could easily push the whole Echelon project into public knowledge, is a good thing. The fact is that 95 out of 100 people have no idea that it exists, or that it even could. Granted, the French may have a less than distinguished history of industrial espionage, but I somehow doubt that the US or UK are any less rosy. Instead of abusing France, we should be glad that things like this get into the limelight - if the vast majority has no idea that this exists, there will be no opposal to it.
I'd love this to be true right off the bat, but we all know this is just someone with the server to make an actual server behave like an actual server... not that that's not a real servver, but we should see something that better that that wank-ass crap. Great idea, but nothing so groundbreaking as deserving of a story here. Maybe if she were sitll running "Firefly"... I wish it hadn't been taken down...
AI si good, but this is just a simple re-hash of tech that's been around for over 4 years.
Let me be yet another whiner and say "we should have a new category for AI", but I want to think it's worthwhile now. We can all make us proud!
The problem here is that the program took user information and sent it back to id without the users' knowledge or consent. Voluntary registration is one thing, involuntary and unwitting registration is another.
Although it's beside the point whether or not id used this for anything other than future hardware support, even data not linked to names or email is worth a lot of money. Market research people can extract a lot of info from the demographics of people who buy first-person shooters and their video card, and will pay a good price for a large quantity of that data. Coming on the heels of all the recent privacy fiascos, there is no reason to say that this is any better than the rest.
Either way, any middle eastern conflict has been pushed on by the US. In order to keep the military-industrial complex going after the end of the cold war, the big defense conractors had to go with exports to keep up their profits.
Yes, the Iraqi government has carried out a genocidal campaign against Kurds, for which the US fires cruise missles at them every few weeks. However, there is also a large Kurdish population in Turkey. The Turkish government is currently the number one customer of US arms companies, and has been involved in a campaign to eradicate the Kurds from their country just as long as Iraq, only more brutally and completely ignored.
What I'm trying to say is that everyone involved is to blame, and basically every developed nation is involved. The US supplies arms as the media there and everywhere else ignores it as we watch NATO, a "defensive" alliance, invade a nation. Certainly, I cannot support genocide or violence in any form, but to try and blame whichever underdeveloped country that has spent the past 10 years buying guns under US government subsidies is ridiculous - the American economy depends on lucrative weapons contracts, and the government there knows it, which is why they provide subsidies and continue to allow guns to be exported all over the world.
Great counterpoint to the media frenzy over Littleton, huh? Guns are great, as long as no one in the states has one.
LED, not laser, AFAIK. Lasers, especially in the 80s, would be too expensive and big. So you can continue staring into the little red light as long as you want. Although, maybe tricking M$ users into blindness wouldn't be a bad idea...
I agree, the person directly at fault is the kid who pulled the trigger. But most 14 year olds don't go around gunning people down, right? Why? Because of how they've been brought up. The parents are probably guilty of extreme negligence, or at least extreme stupidity. Like everyone else has said, the things they're suing about are already rated for violence etc., and if his parents haven't been able to (more likely haven't tried) to instill a sense of values, and reality vs. fantasy, they're just as much at fault. A 14 year old is a minor, supposedly his parents are responsible for his actions.
This is not to say the people behind this lawsuit are anything less than greedy idiots. As the article said, they've already tried to sue 24 people from the school - teachers and students. Are they responsible for encouraging him to kill people? Or just responsible for not noticing he had problems? This seems to me to be just another case of people looking for as many others to blame as possible, in an attempt to cash in on tragedy. Certainly nothing can bring back what these families lost, but by dragging in civil suits left and right, they're just prolonging their pain and the pain of a lot of other people.
They say they want to "hurt Hollywood," etc? $130 million isn't going to do that. The only message it sends, even if the case had any chance of being won, is that you are responsible for any damage caused by something you create, no matter how indirectly it caused the damage. As Steve Dallas said, "America! Land of the Lawsuit!! God bless her!!"