spamming is functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing
That doesn't help anyone, since telemarketing is legal.
they're both trying to sell something by going through a list of people and contacting each person on that list
Except telemarketing is specifically defined as involving a phone number for addressing and receipt via a telephone device. Spam involves neither. You would first have to argue that an email address is the same as a phone number, and then argue that your email mailbox is a phone.
If you take text messaging and compare it, with either a dull or a fine comb, to alphanumeric paging, I think you will find that they are just different packaging of the same technology and service. --
I would encourage all geeks and freaks to call that number and turn in every jock they know.
I mean, why not take advantage of the inquisition? There's no clear distinction made in Wave America's campaign of segregation as to what social group of kids qualify as violent or good (if we ignore the Gap Kids models on the front page).
And when the burly, demanding fathers of these sternly-raised jocks start shaking their fists at the PTA meeting over why their son was targeted by this witchhunt, it will die a miserable death. --
one could argue that skins slow an application down and make it harder to see UI widgets
One could also argue the inverse: that skins can make it easier to see UI widgets. It may even speed up program performance by lowering the necessary color depth that the display manager needs to display the interface (avoid dithering, etc.)
Winamp's default skin is actually pretty poor on a low-depth video system, and is very much on the dark side. A skin with high contrast could actually make it easier to use, especially for those with low-light vision problems.
Which would make interaction with the program more efficient for that user.:)
But this is drifting away from the argument of the story, which is that skins and other UI customizations (which is not limited to Winampesque skins that don't actually change UI functionality) make it harder for users to use software since the appearance and/or operation becomes inconsistent with the introduction of skinning. Which is what I was addressing.
Nor was I suggesting that "personal liking" and "maximum efficiency" are necessarily equivalent. It is the difference between form and function.
Thanks to the informative link that sqlrob provided:
(iii) to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
I certainly get charged for a text message I receive. Someone noted that this section also covers pager numbers. I say this:
I get charged for the message; The message is sent via my phone number; A text message is functionally indistinguishable from a page (which is, I imagine, elsewhere defined broad enough to allow this interpretation); and I receive the message via a telephone device. Therefore, the action is in violation.
It will take up where First Contact left off and continue until the time period of the original '60s series.
Isn't this roughly a 200-year time span?
To add suspense, it will feature a 29th century villain who is trying to prevent the Federation from being born.
Aha! It can't just be a simple Volume 0 of ST; they have to base the whole series on a YATI that will distract from what the title suggests this will be about.
Apparently getting their suspense just from a simple future history is too much work for UPN's writers; they have to add a gaudy door of uncertainty through which to throw off-the-wall plot devices. The sorts of things that shows like Cleopatra 2525 thrive on.
I hate UPN. When are they going to schedule this episode? 1:30 AM after "Jack of All Trades"?
# 1: In many of these cases, such as Winamp and anything hacked with Renovator, the functional and positional UI doesn't change. One of my complaints about the Winamp skinning implementation is that it doesn't go far enough: all you get to do is change pictures, and you don't get to change location, type, or triggering of functional elements. a0 gave users that aspect of UI redesign but without the benefits of skinning.
# 2: All user-customizable programs -- like Winamp and Emacs -- ship with a standard, default UI. If the user doesn't change it, this is consistent. It is up to the individual user to tweak the UI settings to their own likings, and those changes are (should be) limited strictly to either the user who developed them, and/or others who think they will benefit from them.
# 3: Skinning and UI redesign is meant for power user customization. Anyone who used X extensively before the (evil, IMO) days of Gnome and all the *DE's should know the joys of UI customization. So should power users of Emacs.
The ability to alter the UI to one's personal liking and maximum efficiency is a benefit that computers brings to us. Limiting all users to the same UI is cathartic and autocratic. The ability of a power user to define the terms of his/her own human-computer interaction is one of the greatest ways that computers help us perform tasks better, easier, and faster.
People who use my computer get confused because my desktop icons are "wrong" and my taskbar is in the "wrong" place. That may true for them, but not at all for me, and I configure my computer for my better use, not for theirs.
And perhaps if they knew more about customizing their user interface, their computer(s) would work better for them, too.
As machine code is not intended to be read by a human, one could make an argument for it not being protected free speech.
Hold on. If you ask Tim Berners-Lee, HTML wasn't meant to be read by humans either. Wouldn't you then jeopardize the protection of HTML with this argument?
The observation that "machine code is not intended to be read by a human" is mainly just an observation based on current conditions. Could a person learn to read source code? Sure they can. I'm not saying its easy, but it's doable.
In early computing, they didn't have compilers to generate machine code for you -- the programmers had to write their programs by hand, in machine code, and enter it instruction by instruction.
So, since they lacked the modern luxury of higher-level computing languages, and modern compilers, does the code they wrote somehow lack the same FA protection that your random Java applet has now?
If I write a book, and then translate it into Sanskrit, or Braille, or some cypher, does it lose its FA protection because it's not readable anymore? Or let's say I write it in disappearing ink. Does its FA protection last only as long as the ink remains black?
Secondly, there is the little matter of... da-dum... DMCA. I'm pretty sure it makes DeCSS illegal, and unless/until it is shown to be unconstitutional and thrown out,
But doesn't this now cause a conflict between DMCA (or certain applications thereof) and the first amendment? Even if DMCA is not directly challenged on these grounds, AFAIK in most situations where a case involves a conflict between the FA and another law (especially a very young one), judges defer to the FA.
Now, if they find speech/expression to be _directly_ harmful, such as hate speech, or child porn, or incitement to riot, it usually loses its FA protection. But this isn't the same thing as potential harm, which is what you have with a piece of code that _might_ be harmful (and not physically or mentally), IF compiled, and even then only IF used in such a way, ec'cetry ec'cetry.
IAN blah blah, but you knew that.
IANAL and any corrections/clarifications would be appreciated.
Laypeople, for lack of a better word, aren't able to read Slashdot, ZDNet, or any other intelligent or discerning medium for tech news. Many can't even be bothered to watch the CNet show, for what that's worth.
Where are they getting their tech news? MSNBC, Reuters, AP -- most of which are more inclined to rebroadcast Bill Gates' speech than any random geek's criticism of Microsoft.
Who are the tech pundits? People like ESR or Rob Malda or even Spencer F. Katt? No, the tech pundits are people like Ira Magaziner, Steve Case, and the CEO of (insert other large tech company here).
Perhaps WWN doesn't have the direct pull that MSNBC has, but don't pretend that the titillation and FUD that this story makes won't spread by word of mouth.
Let me ask you: How many copies of the Good Times warning do you have in your old mail?
Don't think older media is that much better at coverage of this field. Did anyone see the Boston Herald story on the GPF last weekend? It began with the sentence:
About ten years after most of them took their sisters to the prom,
Need I say more? Neither us nor our field get covered well at all. It's not so funny; in cases like these its downright damaging.
When no one will let you use their computer for fear you will add the "cpu bomb bug" to their computer, give me a call.
(A little Geek Pride now and then doesn't seem so bad to me.)
``This sequence may be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the human genome,'' Thomas Kornberg of the University of California San Francisco and Mark Krasnow of Stanford University wrote, referring to a slab of stone, inscribed with the same story in three different languages, which allowed archeologists to finally decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I think it's sad when the news media has to explain what the Rosetta Stone is.
(Presumably the dumbass cub reporter sent to cover this one didn't know what it was, either.)
I'm really starting to agree with E.D. Hirsch as I slowly get older. And to think I wrote an opposing critique of him my freshman year.
It's bad enough intro-to-computers classes have to teach people how to use a mouse. They shouldn't have to have the most fundamental topics of human history explained to them on top of it.
This sounds like something the labels made artists say, in the neverending anti-MP3 PR.
Artists say they can't make money from t-shirts and touring, and if sales of their CD drop on the auto-indexer, the label says goodbye.
Nonsense! You can't tell me artists are making more money from the $1 they get per $15 CD than they do from their $25 T-shirts and $20-$50/ticket concerts. If anything, touring and T-shirts are where they're liable to make better money.
Who makes money from the CD's? That's right. The labels. Sure, the label makes some proceeds from the touring, but they make a bigger percentage off the albums.
Okay, maybe some studio-processed bands (boy bands, production acts, one-hit pop wonders, etc.) make the labels more money from touring and paraphernalia. It would certainly explain why we keep getting bombarded with those crappy bands (and then never hear from them again).
But a band that's not getting pushed by its label wants to tour all it can, because it isn't going to get much money from the CD's that the label isn't selling for them.
Besides, these bands might be better off without the big labels anyway. If they suck the ____ of the labels in order to make their money, they end up just like every other entity that's lived off the milk of a big company -- eventually they find themselves dead in the water. I don't care if you're a rock star on the Top 40 chart or an auto factory town in Michigan.
If they like the label putting together hackneyed artwork for them, and giving them nice limos on say five days out of the year; if that's what they really want is glamour and riches, they shoulda gone to B-school, not music school, and not speak any nonsense of their "artistic" goals.
MP3 might not be the saviour of bands, but neither is being a whore for Capitalist Records.
IP laws don't stifle popular culture. They reinforce it.
Note, I don't think it's a good thing.
IP laws give a) publishers and b) purchasers of entertainment material the ability not only to control the expression of the works they own, but more importantly, the interpretation as well.
On top of that, purchasers of this material also have the power to prevent or limit the release of material, for whatever reason. Maybe they are embarrased by the work because it is poor quality. Maybe they are afraid of it because it is (has become) controversial. Maybe cutting back on production is a convenient way to 'prove' financial damages in court. Or maybe they bought the material in the first place to prevent it's release.
This has the effect of reinforcing popular culture by stifling unpopular culture, and keeping the LCD of pop culture fans pretty common and low.
We don't rally, we don`t boycott, we don't protest (execpt with pissant little emails), and we dont unionize (though we dont have to, currently).
Oh sure, we talk about the EFF a lot, but for the most part the EFF are seen as wacky radicals. Even 2600's innocuous banners shouting 'Free Kevin' have embarrassed geeks. And the even the un-politically motivated Geek Pride Festival in two weeks will probably not be well attended.
Geeks don't think they need a political voice, because they've always been under the impression that money is all the power they need. Changing one's own life is all most of us want. Most geeks are getting real decadent.
(Change the world you say? What about Linux? they say.)
Besides, most geeks don't worry a drop about the laws that are supposed to affect the things they do. Warez, mp3, and all manner of trading are the staple of the geek's life. Geeks (in this case hackers, mostly) are all about circumventing those silly sorts of limitations. Why lobby for when you can just get away with?
I can remember, months ago, when Nullsoft was bought by AOL, that it was widely touted as A Good Thing. Frankel's gonna make money. Great. He'll be able to make a living doing something he really loves. That's great too (and many of us at least like our jobs even if its not our dream job). And Winamp became freeware, great -- but even my cheapskate ass paid the $10 before it did, and I think I've registered a total of three apps over the past six years.
Perhaps when Nullsoft was bought out, AOL wasn't as much a Big Company as it is today, post-merger(s). So AOL picking up a small company with a successful product didn't seem like a bad thing, even though almost everyone here agrees AOL is evil, bad, and wrong. We joke about AOL users, decry their behaviour on Usenet, and grumble about our bosses not allowing us to keep that ALL: aol.com: DENY in our hosts.allow.
But now AOL is not just an annoyingly dumb and large ISP; they now control a major cable/TV/movie operation, and soon major music production operations as well. They're becoming a multinational media company which will soon control some of the largest communications operations in the world. And in an era where threats of legal action have not only become cool, but remarkably effective even without action, AOL's protection of its own interests aren't only going to hurt other companies, and consumers, but certainly those small companies they suckered into being bought by them. Like Nullsoft.
A lot of us predicted the Nullsoft purchase would start going down this road; and regardless of whether we were primarily worried about Justin's creative freedom or our own MP3 collection, it's going that way. Many chose to ignore it, and focused on Justin's financial success over his prolificness, liberty, and quality as a software developer. But how often is it that we admire financial success over technical success? Do we admire Bill Gates, tycoon of obfuscation, or ESR, champion of OS? Do we prefer Ira Magaziner to Jon Postel? Khaled to jwz?
It's bothersome when some people refuse to see the darker side of the coin until they actually have to try and redeem it.
Justin and the Nullsoft crew will either have to suck it up and go do something else in AOL land, or else quit. (Mark my words, Shoutcast will come under AOL's fire by the end of the year.) Maybe Justin will get a kick out of designing and implementing some "AOL Music Download Format" or developing some "AOL Instant Secure Musicplayer". He'll have to put Winamp in his past as a fun project of some misspent youth. The handful of us who resist the AOL-sponsored replacement for MP3 will still be running an 'old, sluggish' abandoned Winamp 2.6 on our Windows 2001 machines.
All I can say is that jwz didn't put up with that shit, and that's why I admire him more.
Perhaps you should leave this school, and go to a normal high school, with the old standby courses of Physics, Calculus, and Social Studies; instead of trendy-seeming courses called Software Development or Advanced GUI Mangling.
I don't expect a high school OR its students to be able to handle wacky classes like that.
Embittered, R.NR
PS: High school students are smarter than their teachers. Don't you know that? (Don't they make you kids read Sideways Stories from Wayside School anymore? Sheesh.)
Without having original copy in one's hands (and even with, perhaps), it quite looks impossible to accurately transcribe this cipher.
With so many characters inverted, and with the usage of both small cap and lowercase, any attempt to solve this cipher will be confounded by the inability to retain the real lettering.
For example: Capital H is used among the small-cap alphabet. The H used here, as most Hs are, is rotationally symmetrical. How then can you tell whether this is small cap H, or inverted small cap H? Same for small cap O, I, and possibly S, X and Z (lowercase for those too).
Further, how do you know what looks like a lower case S is not actually a small cap S?
Can you assume that there are no such ambiguities used in this cipher? Can you risk that assumption, if you also assume that inversion and case have functional significance?
And my last one, is how do you know that that lower case P is not an inverted lower case D?
An Indirect Election Discourages and Disenfranchises Voters - The two-tier membership structure currently proposed - where a public electorate votes for members of an At-Large Council which in turn elects the At-Large Directors of ICANN's Board.... Critics bitterly complain that such a system disenfranchises members, and provides little incentive to vote and little on which to campaign.
Tell that to the Federal Election Committee.
The US Presidency has been elected the same way for all of its history. And according to Britannica:
Although the Constitution still allows electors to use their discretion, electors now are usually pledged to support a party's candidate.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
Unfortunately, that argument doesn't always apply.
Originally, I was a journalism major. And I took classes like Press History, Press Law, and Press Ethics (hold the laughs, please).
So, it falls on me to note that, as an example, colleges are NOT allowed to censor, limit, or otherwise infringe on the expression of student-run publications, even if school and/or student funds were used to make the publication.
I'm not going to go into the arguments for or against that. Were that I had more time I could look up a reference to the original SC case that brought it about.
The point is that in that case, it would have been an easy cop-out to say "We're not stopping them from using their own money to print their magazine." It didn't fly.
Perhaps a better argument for the conservatives, and libertarians with internal conflicts, would be that, since the students are paying for the school services, and the students want content X to be available on the network, or protocol Y, or servers of type Z, then the college should offer the services (and modes of expression, etc.) which the students are paying for.
Colleges have also since quite far back in history been places of open expression, including offbeat creativity, crudeness, vulgarity, and shady practices, whether we're talking about naked wintertime runs through the neighborhood, or binge drinking, or making and selling blue boxes (mr. wozniak?), or running Napster.
My campus had lots of computing environments. Unix, VAX, in-room ethernet, campus labs, dialup, etc.
They banned IRC from dialup and then from shell in 1996. We weren't happy. Then they banned MUD from the shells too.
They banned student-run web servers on the shell, but luckily at the same time they decided they would run one for us.
They blocked off-site telnet from the resnet, but accidentally forgot to turn that off for the first three months it was active.
They blocked almost any network game they could find the port or protocol for. They've also blocked all UDP to off-site on the resnet and in all labs for ever.
They don't ban any INCOMING connections on the resnet, just outgoing ones. Just in case you thought it was to protect US. It's just to protect THEM.
They probably do ban napster now, which would be a kick in the pants, seeing as the kid who wrote napster GOES there.
Slashdot Mirror
spamming is functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing
That doesn't help anyone, since telemarketing is legal.
they're both trying to sell something by going through a list of people and contacting each person on that list
Except telemarketing is specifically defined as involving a phone number for addressing and receipt via a telephone device. Spam involves neither. You would first have to argue that an email address is the same as a phone number, and then argue that your email mailbox is a phone.
If you take text messaging and compare it, with either a dull or a fine comb, to alphanumeric paging, I think you will find that they are just different packaging of the same technology and service.
--
I would encourage all geeks and freaks to call that number and turn in every jock they know.
I mean, why not take advantage of the inquisition? There's no clear distinction made in Wave America's campaign of segregation as to what social group of kids qualify as violent or good (if we ignore the Gap Kids models on the front page).
And when the burly, demanding fathers of these sternly-raised jocks start shaking their fists at the PTA meeting over why their son was targeted by this witchhunt, it will die a miserable death.
--
one could argue that skins slow an application down and make it harder to see UI widgets
:)
One could also argue the inverse: that skins can make it easier to see UI widgets. It may even speed up program performance by lowering the necessary color depth that the display manager needs to display the interface (avoid dithering, etc.)
Winamp's default skin is actually pretty poor on a low-depth video system, and is very much on the dark side. A skin with high contrast could actually make it easier to use, especially for those with low-light vision problems.
Which would make interaction with the program more efficient for that user.
But this is drifting away from the argument of the story, which is that skins and other UI customizations (which is not limited to Winampesque skins that don't actually change UI functionality) make it harder for users to use software since the appearance and/or operation becomes inconsistent with the introduction of skinning. Which is what I was addressing.
Nor was I suggesting that "personal liking" and "maximum efficiency" are necessarily equivalent. It is the difference between form and function.
Thanks to the informative link that sqlrob provided:
(iii) to any telephone number assigned to a paging service,
cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service,
or other radio common carrier service, or any service for
which the called party is charged for the call;
I certainly get charged for a text message I receive. Someone noted that this section also covers pager numbers. I say this:
I get charged for the message;
The message is sent via my phone number;
A text message is functionally indistinguishable from a page (which is, I imagine, elsewhere defined broad enough to allow this interpretation);
and I receive the message via a telephone device.
Therefore, the action is in violation.
If my lawyer can't argue that, he's fired.
--
It will take up where First Contact left off and continue until the time period of the original '60s series.
Isn't this roughly a 200-year time span?
To add suspense, it will feature a 29th century villain who is trying to prevent the Federation from being born.
Aha! It can't just be a simple Volume 0 of ST; they have to base the whole series on a YATI that will distract from what the title suggests this will be about.
Apparently getting their suspense just from a simple future history is too much work for UPN's writers; they have to add a gaudy door of uncertainty through which to throw off-the-wall plot devices. The sorts of things that shows like Cleopatra 2525 thrive on.
I hate UPN. When are they going to schedule this episode? 1:30 AM after "Jack of All Trades"?
Rebuttal points:
# 1: In many of these cases, such as Winamp and anything hacked with Renovator, the functional and positional UI doesn't change. One of my complaints about the Winamp skinning implementation is that it doesn't go far enough: all you get to do is change pictures, and you don't get to change location, type, or triggering of functional elements. a0 gave users that aspect of UI redesign but without the benefits of skinning.
# 2: All user-customizable programs -- like Winamp and Emacs -- ship with a standard, default UI. If the user doesn't change it, this is consistent. It is up to the individual user to tweak the UI settings to their own likings, and those changes are (should be) limited strictly to either the user who developed them, and/or others who think they will benefit from them.
# 3: Skinning and UI redesign is meant for power user customization. Anyone who used X extensively before the (evil, IMO) days of Gnome and all the *DE's should know the joys of UI customization. So should power users of Emacs.
The ability to alter the UI to one's personal liking and maximum efficiency is a benefit that computers brings to us. Limiting all users to the same UI is cathartic and autocratic. The ability of a power user to define the terms of his/her own human-computer interaction is one of the greatest ways that computers help us perform tasks better, easier, and faster.
People who use my computer get confused because my desktop icons are "wrong" and my taskbar is in the "wrong" place. That may true for them, but not at all for me, and I configure my computer for my better use, not for theirs.
And perhaps if they knew more about customizing their user interface, their computer(s) would work better for them, too.
So you mean to tell me that all their servers will be unavailable when I try to connect? They will tell me that "No more connections are allowed?"
Is anyone going to notice?
As machine code is not intended to be read by a human, one could make an argument for it not being protected free speech.
Hold on. If you ask Tim Berners-Lee, HTML wasn't meant to be read by humans either. Wouldn't you then jeopardize the protection of HTML with this argument?
The observation that "machine code is not intended to be read by a human" is mainly just an observation based on current conditions. Could a person learn to read source code? Sure they can. I'm not saying its easy, but it's doable.
In early computing, they didn't have compilers to generate machine code for you -- the programmers had to write their programs by hand, in machine code, and enter it instruction by instruction.
So, since they lacked the modern luxury of higher-level computing languages, and modern compilers, does the code they wrote somehow lack the same FA protection that your random Java applet has now?
If I write a book, and then translate it into Sanskrit, or Braille, or some cypher, does it lose its FA protection because it's not readable anymore? Or let's say I write it in disappearing ink. Does its FA protection last only as long as the ink remains black?
Secondly, there is the little matter of... da-dum... DMCA. I'm pretty sure it makes DeCSS illegal, and unless/until it is shown to be unconstitutional and thrown out,
But doesn't this now cause a conflict between DMCA (or certain applications thereof) and the first amendment? Even if DMCA is not directly challenged on these grounds, AFAIK in most situations where a case involves a conflict between the FA and another law (especially a very young one), judges defer to the FA.
Now, if they find speech/expression to be _directly_ harmful, such as hate speech, or child porn, or incitement to riot, it usually loses its FA protection. But this isn't the same thing as potential harm, which is what you have with a piece of code that _might_ be harmful (and not physically or mentally), IF compiled, and even then only IF used in such a way, ec'cetry ec'cetry.
IAN blah blah, but you knew that.
IANAL and any corrections/clarifications would be appreciated.
YM "first", "amendment". HTH.
This isn't funny. People are reading this.
Laypeople, for lack of a better word, aren't able to read Slashdot, ZDNet, or any other intelligent or discerning medium for tech news. Many can't even be bothered to watch the CNet show, for what that's worth.
Where are they getting their tech news? MSNBC, Reuters, AP -- most of which are more inclined to rebroadcast Bill Gates' speech than any random geek's criticism of Microsoft.
Who are the tech pundits? People like ESR or Rob Malda or even Spencer F. Katt? No, the tech pundits are people like Ira Magaziner, Steve Case, and the CEO of (insert other large tech company here).
Perhaps WWN doesn't have the direct pull that MSNBC has, but don't pretend that the titillation and FUD that this story makes won't spread by word of mouth.
Let me ask you: How many copies of the Good Times warning do you have in your old mail?
Don't think older media is that much better at coverage of this field. Did anyone see the Boston Herald story on the GPF last weekend? It began with the sentence:
About ten years after most of them took their sisters to the prom,
Need I say more? Neither us nor our field get covered well at all. It's not so funny; in cases like these its downright damaging.
When no one will let you use their computer for fear you will add the "cpu bomb bug" to their computer, give me a call.
(A little Geek Pride now and then doesn't seem so bad to me.)
[T]his is the city that is known
for the expression "You can't get there from here"
Sorry, that is a Mainer saying, used in the 60's comedy routine Bert & I by Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan. Close, but not quite.
Though I agree driving around Boston can be painful -- especially if you are looking for a place to park under $8/hr.
That's when my road rage sets in, I can tell you. ("Resident Parking Only" monsters - I will smite you all.)
I couldn't configure sendmail to save my life.
Well then, this whole thread doesn't apply to you, now does it?
What are you here for anyway -- the comprehensive Kevin Smith news?
Talk about self-proclaimed superiority nonsense!
No. The governor's [sic] office demanded that a police detail be on duty during the event. They didn't say why.
Maybe they plan to arrest people with DeCSS T-shirts on.
ID-cide...
...Meaning they kill my identity?
``This sequence may be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the human genome,'' Thomas Kornberg of the University of California San Francisco and Mark Krasnow of Stanford University wrote, referring to a slab of stone, inscribed with the same story in three different languages, which allowed archeologists to finally decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I think it's sad when the news media has to explain what the Rosetta Stone is.
(Presumably the dumbass cub reporter sent to cover this one didn't know what it was, either.)
I'm really starting to agree with E.D. Hirsch as I slowly get older. And to think I wrote an opposing critique of him my freshman year.
It's bad enough intro-to-computers classes have to teach people how to use a mouse. They shouldn't have to have the most fundamental topics of human history explained to them on top of it.
This sounds like something the labels made artists say, in the neverending anti-MP3 PR.
Artists say they can't make money from t-shirts and touring, and if sales of their CD drop on the auto-indexer, the label says goodbye.
Nonsense! You can't tell me artists are making more money from the $1 they get per $15 CD than they do from their $25 T-shirts and $20-$50/ticket concerts. If anything, touring and T-shirts are where they're liable to make better money.
Who makes money from the CD's? That's right. The labels. Sure, the label makes some proceeds from the touring, but they make a bigger percentage off the albums.
Okay, maybe some studio-processed bands (boy bands, production acts, one-hit pop wonders, etc.) make the labels more money from touring and paraphernalia. It would certainly explain why we keep getting bombarded with those crappy bands (and then never hear from them again).
But a band that's not getting pushed by its label wants to tour all it can, because it isn't going to get much money from the CD's that the label isn't selling for them.
Besides, these bands might be better off without the big labels anyway. If they suck the ____ of the labels in order to make their money, they end up just like every other entity that's lived off the milk of a big company -- eventually they find themselves dead in the water. I don't care if you're a rock star on the Top 40 chart or an auto factory town in Michigan.
If they like the label putting together hackneyed artwork for them, and giving them nice limos on say five days out of the year; if that's what they really want is glamour and riches, they shoulda gone to B-school, not music school, and not speak any nonsense of their "artistic" goals.
MP3 might not be the saviour of bands, but neither is being a whore for Capitalist Records.
IP laws don't stifle popular culture. They reinforce it.
Note, I don't think it's a good thing.
IP laws give a) publishers and b) purchasers of entertainment material the ability not only to control the expression of the works they own, but more importantly, the interpretation as well.
On top of that, purchasers of this material also have the power to prevent or limit the release of material, for whatever reason. Maybe they are embarrased by the work because it is poor quality. Maybe they are afraid of it because it is (has become) controversial. Maybe cutting back on production is a convenient way to 'prove' financial damages in court. Or maybe they bought the material in the first place to prevent it's release.
This has the effect of reinforcing popular culture by stifling unpopular culture, and keeping the LCD of pop culture fans pretty common and low.
geeks don't organize.
We don't rally, we don`t boycott, we don't protest (execpt with pissant little emails), and we dont unionize (though we dont have to, currently).
Oh sure, we talk about the EFF a lot, but for the most part the EFF are seen as wacky radicals. Even 2600's innocuous banners shouting 'Free Kevin' have embarrassed geeks. And the even the un-politically motivated Geek Pride Festival in two weeks will probably not be well attended.
Geeks don't think they need a political voice, because they've always been under the impression that money is all the power they need. Changing one's own life is all most of us want. Most geeks are getting real decadent.
(Change the world you say? What about Linux? they say.)
Besides, most geeks don't worry a drop about the laws that are supposed to affect the things they do. Warez, mp3, and all manner of trading are the staple of the geek's life. Geeks (in this case hackers, mostly) are all about circumventing those silly sorts of limitations. Why lobby for when you can just get away with?
I said, in my last post, "I told you so."
I can remember, months ago, when Nullsoft was bought by AOL, that it was widely touted as A Good Thing. Frankel's gonna make money. Great. He'll be able to make a living doing something he really loves. That's great too (and many of us at least like our jobs even if its not our dream job). And Winamp became freeware, great -- but even my cheapskate ass paid the $10 before it did, and I think I've registered a total of three apps over the past six years.
Perhaps when Nullsoft was bought out, AOL wasn't as much a Big Company as it is today, post-merger(s). So AOL picking up a small company with a successful product didn't seem like a bad thing, even though almost everyone here agrees AOL is evil, bad, and wrong. We joke about AOL users, decry their behaviour on Usenet, and grumble about our bosses not allowing us to keep that ALL: aol.com: DENY in our hosts.allow.
But now AOL is not just an annoyingly dumb and large ISP; they now control a major cable/TV/movie operation, and soon major music production operations as well. They're becoming a multinational media company which will soon control some of the largest communications operations in the world. And in an era where threats of legal action have not only become cool, but remarkably effective even without action, AOL's protection of its own interests aren't only going to hurt other companies, and consumers, but certainly those small companies they suckered into being bought by them. Like Nullsoft.
A lot of us predicted the Nullsoft purchase would start going down this road; and regardless of whether we were primarily worried about Justin's creative freedom or our own MP3 collection, it's going that way. Many chose to ignore it, and focused on Justin's financial success over his prolificness, liberty, and quality as a software developer. But how often is it that we admire financial success over technical success? Do we admire Bill Gates, tycoon of obfuscation, or ESR, champion of OS? Do we prefer Ira Magaziner to Jon Postel? Khaled to jwz?
It's bothersome when some people refuse to see the darker side of the coin until they actually have to try and redeem it.
Justin and the Nullsoft crew will either have to suck it up and go do something else in AOL land, or else quit. (Mark my words, Shoutcast will come under AOL's fire by the end of the year.) Maybe Justin will get a kick out of designing and implementing some "AOL Music Download Format" or developing some "AOL Instant Secure Musicplayer". He'll have to put Winamp in his past as a fun project of some misspent youth. The handful of us who resist the AOL-sponsored replacement for MP3 will still be running an 'old, sluggish' abandoned Winamp 2.6 on our Windows 2001 machines.
All I can say is that jwz didn't put up with that shit, and that's why I admire him more.
If AOL sees Gnutella in the same light [a threat to music media interests], the Nullsoft employees may not be able to continue development.
We told you so.
What happens if MP3 itself becomes the threat to traditional music media? What happens if AOL decides VQF is the right way?
As AOL gets bigger, the noose tightens. Not just on the consumers, but on the kids who thought it would be kewl to be bought by them.
"We Own Everyone" - Conglomo slogan, from Rocco's Modern Life
"We're a multi-billion dollar company" - AOL ad, under the heading 'Reasons to use AOL'
Perhaps you should leave this school, and go to a normal high school, with the old standby courses of Physics, Calculus, and Social Studies; instead of trendy-seeming courses called Software Development or Advanced GUI Mangling.
I don't expect a high school OR its students to be able to handle wacky classes like that.
Embittered,
R.NR
PS: High school students are smarter than their teachers. Don't you know that? (Don't they make you kids read Sideways Stories from Wayside School anymore? Sheesh.)
Without having original copy in one's hands (and even with, perhaps), it quite looks impossible to accurately transcribe this cipher.
With so many characters inverted, and with the usage of both small cap and lowercase, any attempt to solve this cipher will be confounded by the inability to retain the real lettering.
For example: Capital H is used among the small-cap alphabet. The H used here, as most Hs are, is rotationally symmetrical. How then can you tell whether this is small cap H, or inverted small cap H? Same for small cap O, I, and possibly S, X and Z (lowercase for those too).
Further, how do you know what looks like a lower case S is not actually a small cap S?
Can you assume that there are no such ambiguities used in this cipher? Can you risk that assumption, if you also assume that inversion and case have functional significance?
And my last one, is how do you know that that lower case P is not an inverted lower case D?
An Indirect Election Discourages and Disenfranchises Voters - The two-tier membership structure currently proposed - where a public electorate votes for members of an At-Large Council which in turn elects the At-Large Directors of ICANN's Board.... Critics bitterly complain that such a system disenfranchises members, and provides little incentive to vote and little on which to campaign.
Tell that to the Federal Election Committee.
The US Presidency has been elected the same way for all of its history. And according to Britannica:
Although the Constitution still allows electors to use their discretion, electors now are usually pledged to support a party's candidate.
I haven't heard people complaining about that.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
Unfortunately, that argument doesn't always apply.
Originally, I was a journalism major. And I took classes like Press History, Press Law, and Press Ethics (hold the laughs, please).
So, it falls on me to note that, as an example, colleges are NOT allowed to censor, limit, or otherwise infringe on the expression of student-run publications, even if school and/or student funds were used to make the publication.
I'm not going to go into the arguments for or against that. Were that I had more time I could look up a reference to the original SC case that brought it about.
The point is that in that case, it would have been an easy cop-out to say "We're not stopping them from using their own money to print their magazine." It didn't fly.
Perhaps a better argument for the conservatives, and libertarians with internal conflicts, would be that, since the students are paying for the school services, and the students want content X to be available on the network, or protocol Y, or servers of type Z, then the college should offer the services (and modes of expression, etc.) which the students are paying for.
Colleges have also since quite far back in history been places of open expression, including offbeat creativity, crudeness, vulgarity, and shady practices, whether we're talking about naked wintertime runs through the neighborhood, or binge drinking, or making and selling blue boxes (mr. wozniak?), or running Napster.
Define "banned on campus".
My campus had lots of computing environments. Unix, VAX, in-room ethernet, campus labs, dialup, etc.
They banned IRC from dialup and then from shell in 1996. We weren't happy. Then they banned MUD from the shells too.
They banned student-run web servers on the shell, but luckily at the same time they decided they would run one for us.
They blocked off-site telnet from the resnet, but accidentally forgot to turn that off for the first three months it was active.
They blocked almost any network game they could find the port or protocol for. They've also blocked all UDP to off-site on the resnet and in all labs for ever.
They don't ban any INCOMING connections on the resnet, just outgoing ones. Just in case you thought it was to protect US. It's just to protect THEM.
They probably do ban napster now, which would be a kick in the pants, seeing as the kid who wrote napster GOES there.
This neu.edu, btw.