Nice character assassination, without any evidence. How about actually doing some research, since that's what you are alleging to be doing, and tell us:
1) What evidence is there that TrustE being on a board of directors wouldn't be anything but good? Past history, please?
2) Since you know she is an advertising executive, and you choose to take this as damning of her character, how about giving us a full resume? Tell us exactly when and how she has been damaging to privacy (as you define damage, of course).
Any writer has to assume a few things about his audience. If every story included a total recap of everything that had happened to date, I wouldn't have to assume any knowledge, but the stories would quickly reach Katz-length. In this case, I am assuming that you know something about TrustE - how it was created as a PR device to ward off government regulation, how it has repeatedly refused to investigate or condemn any of its members, no matter how egregious their actions. It's been asked to investigate Microsoft, Real, Doubleclick, Dejanews, Hotmail, Geocities... and couldn't find anything wrong with any of them. That's right - Real wasn't violating its privacy statement by tracking what music you listen to, Geocities wasn't violating its user agreement that said it wouldn't sell information to outside parties when it (according to the FTC) sold information to outside parties.... TrustE is a very forgiving overseer, you see.
After all, companies pay it for the privilege of being overseen - if TrustE started cracking down, the companies would stop paying! There have been dozens of stories about TrustE, several of them in slashdot. For an example, see TrustE Decides Its Own Fate Today.
Perhaps I am assuming too much. I've been following TrustE for several years, and seen it evolve from an organization supposed to protect privacy to an organization solely geared toward PR work in protecting its member corporations. These facts might not be obvious to someone who hasn't been paying attention.
P3P is a mechanism designed to get you to enter all your personal data into your web browser and have your browser give it out, behind the scenes, to any website that asks for it.
Today, a website can't just demand that, as a condition of entry, you provide it with your SSN and mother's maiden name. People have an initial bad reaction to that, and coupled with the hassle of filling out a form to enter that info, they'll turn away from the site. P3P allows web sites to do that without the hassle - instead of being presented with a form, you'll see a dialog box:
"Website X is requesting full access to your personal information. Yes/No?"
If you say no, website X won't let you enter. If you say yes, it gets access to every bit of information in the profile you filled out. Eventually, of course, you'll get tired of seeing those pop-up boxes and will turn them off and forget about it. You'll even have a hard time putting in fictitious information because ecommerce sites will use it for purchasing information - you'll have to enter the right information if you ever want to actually purchase anything.
Consider: Doubleclick has a whole elaborate Doubleclick cookie with information you enter at a site when you make a purchase. Now Doubleclick could simply access your profile. The protocol is designed to move information from the user to the remote site behind the scenes, in such a way that the user doesn't see it go. If it actually caught on, the default for the web would switch from being more-or-less anonymous until you choose to identify yourself, to being identified, personally, at every site you visit.
There's actually not a bit of paranoia in the above; every bit of what I said is factual and accurate. I barely even make a prediction about Doubleclick's future practices, although their path seems quite obvious to me.
In fact, the only knees that are jerking are the net-libertarian types who hate government and automatically reject any suggestion that a corporation might be doing something bad. Like you. Of course people can disagree on the privacy issues. I'm pointing out that Doubleclick is trying to mislead you, and that information should be useful regardless of where you stand on privacy issues.
Copyright protects against copying. It does not grant the copyright holder any power to control how you use a work you've purchased. Once you buy a book, you're free to resell it, tear it up, read it as many times as you want, lend it to people - anything except copy it. In fact, the law says that any attempt by the copyright holder to stop you from doing those things is not permitted.
The DMCA allows copyright holders to prevent you from doing any of those things - reselling, tearing up, reading it more than once (or even once), lending it out - and be backed by the force of law.
That's why I put use in bold. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Since that situation you describe doesn't have a thing to do with civil liberties (the ACLU is not a personal injury law firm), I'm having a little trouble believing you. How about a case citation?
It convinces me, but I'm a soft mark for free speech arguments.
It's not on the front page because I think the majority of slashdot readers do not have any particular interest in reading a 50 page legal brief. The ones who really care will see it in this section, and the rest wouldn't read it anyway.
-- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Re:hasnt this been posted?
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
·
· Score: 2
It was actually a funkiness with the date. Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that the story originally appeared with no date at all, because it had managed to be entered into the system with a date of April 31, 2000. This caused some weirdness, the story date was reset to be May 1, 2000. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?
And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer.:)
There's no doubt that the poster "owns" the comments, as in, "possesses the copyright for their comments". So much for "ownership". But holding the copyright is not the be-all and end-all. Other people can copy and use your works if:
a) you license them to do so
b) their use falls under the fair use exemptions in copyright law
There is no question, for example, that by posting a comment on slashdot, you grant them a long-term non-exclusive license to publish your work on the website - though you still own the copyright. You could post the same words on another website and license them to publish your words too.
Fair use allows a book reviewer, for example, to quote passages from the book without obtaining any sort of license from the book publisher or author. That's why people are upset about UCITA - it would abolish this right with regard to software.
But in any case, people need to distinguish between ownership and use.
This has got to be the dumbest comment I've ever read.
You must not read at -1 very often.
No, the stock market is not just paper. It is part ownership in a company. It's part ownership in the entity that pays your bills. If that piece of paper is worth nothing, that means the company is worth nothing, which means that you won't be getting a paycheck.
Not true. A company can be perfectly healthy, have perfectly good cash-flow, pay all of its employees and have good prospects for the future, yet have a) no stock at all or b) stock that is worth nothing. People often equate stock price with some sort of generalized measure of the health of a company - if it goes to zero we're dead! - but that's not how it works.
However, people that actually OWN stock and are able to cash out at any given moment are more than just paper rich. They ARE rich.
I disagree. Can you hand a share of stock to a kid at McDonald's and get a hamburger? If not, how are you going to keep from starving to death? Stock is fundamentally non-liquid. For instance, people tally Gates' wealth by multiplying the shares he owns by the share price. But if he tried to sell even one one-hundredth of his shares, the share price would drop, drop, drop - he could never get the full "value" of them. He couldn't get a quarter of the full value. And of course, if no one is willing to buy them from him, they're worth nothing at all. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
*shrug* It's an interesting story, but if there's one thing that the internet isn't going to change it's that governments are going to try to protect their secrets by any means possible. Not necessarily a bad thing in principle, though it has funny or stupid results from time to time.
We're making an effort to run more stuff in the individual sections where appropriate. We hope that the sections will be as visible to people interested in those topics as the main page is. Not everything can go on the main page, and obviously some people will rank some things higher than others. You're probably right that the U.S. government trying to suppress a CIA document would be destined for the main page; that's a function of the fact that most of the people involved with slashdot and surely most of the audience are from the U.S. If you complain to a UK newspaper that they're burying some U.S. news to the last page, are they going to change?
Feel free to email Rob and complain - I know he just loves complaints (snicker). -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
It's paper, nothing more. If I declare a piece of paper to be "worth" a zillion dollars on Tuesday, and nothing on Wednesday, then, wow, I just lost a zillion dollars. It was never there.
What sort of political correctness? If you neither praised nor bashed the story, how could I... oh, never mind. People will whine regardless.
FYI, that story was posted at about 6AM EDT this morning, when I got up and read the submissions bin. Yes, the slashdot engine has the ability to post-date stuff so it can be scheduled for some time in the future. No, slashdot doesn't post everything for Now() because then you'd have ten stories on the front page at 9AM when the Commander and Hemos read the previous night's submissions, and nothing for the rest of the day.
In other words, your submission was way late and was presumably deleted because it was a duplicate of a story already set to run in the early afternoon.
But hey, I'm probably making this up. It was probably political correctness ("Too neutral! Let's spike it!") that did your submission in. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
See www.powermarks.com. This is, AFAIK, the closest match to a bookmark organizer. I found it deficient because it doesn't allow folder organization - you have to search, period, which is often a very crappy way of finding a bookmark. They say "Innovative search interface provides fast and easy access to your bookmarks - no hierarchies to sort, order and arrange". What this means is "A thousand bookmarks which you used to have in two dozen folders now in one folder, sorted alphabetically, where you can't find anything at all and you can no longer export them except into one really, really big folder." Bleh.
Whenever someone comes out with a bookmark organizer that allows and preserves folders, yet also allows quick and easy searching, or better yet *self-organizes* bookmarks into folders all by its lonesome, by looking at the content of the pages or whatever, it'll sell a million copies. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Eliminate Microsoft's copyright on operating systems they've brought to market. All of them, from DOS to Win 3.1 to Win 98 to NT to Win2K. Require them to publish the source code on an FTP server for a minimum of one year. Future operating systems would retain a MS copyright as usual.
With the code available, no doubt one or more companies would take the opportunity to run with it and develop new OS's compatible with legacy Windows products. Microsoft remains free to "innovate", whatever that means, and everyone else remains free to do so also. Maybe someone starts a GPL fork of the code. Maybe someone else starts a BSD-type fork of the code. Maybe someone wants to make a closed-source version.
The only thing they lose is their government-granted monopoly on the Windows source code which is what they abused in the first place. If you abuse it, you lose it. Simple and direct. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
First of all, even if they do sell your name, they are not allowed to divulge any information on the procedures you've undergone. That's part of your medical record, which they aren't allowed to give out or sell.
This is wrong. People typically believe that certain "common sense" privacy measures actually exist - but they don't. There's no law that says your doctor, employer or HMO can't sell every bit of information they know about you, from your cancer status to your counselling for depression to the abortion you had when you were 14. There's no law. Not in the U.S. Show me otherwise if you think I'm wrong. You can't.
Most people believe that there are some sort of minimum privacy standards protecting medical records and the like. But there aren't. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Are you certain about this? I've never worked with mySQL, but generally, the conventional wisdom is to leave sorting to the database. That's what databases do... I'd be quite surprised if it was actually faster to dump a set of records and have perl sort them rather than have the database do it. If true, that says nothing good about the database software. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Cyber Patrol calls their list of banned sites "CyberNOT" (they also have a list of "approved" sites called "CyberYES"). They license it to various firewall manufacturers to include as an optional accessory in those products.
That said, there are *good* clauses, like specifically allowing reverse engineering for compatibility. BRAVO!.
If a law takes away nine freedoms, and specifically permits you to retain the tenth, "BRAVO!" is hardly the reaction I'd have. Perhaps "This is awful" or "BULLSHIT!", but certainly not "BRAVO!".
In other news, I've announced that my new law will eliminate your ability to speak, read or communicate, but I'm still allowing you to think subversive thoughts. You also retain the ability to stand on your head and stick your tongue out (in your own home only, of course). Reaction from slashdot posters: BRAVO!
I personally judge stuff by what's interesting to me, with a strong emphasis on civil liberties and freedom of speech issues, since I do things in the YRO section. I hope it will be interesting to the slashdot community as well, but judging by number of comments is no way to judge interest.
I frankly discount almost all "this doesn't belong on slashdot" postings. If you look at the posting history of some of those posters, you find they've posted similar comments dozens or hundreds of times on all sorts of stories. So... they're perpetual whiners. Nothing is likely to satisfy them.
The assorted slashdot authors have different priorities. I would never have posted anything about Scream, period, end of sentence. I thought the first movie was physically painful to watch, the hype was excessive, stupid, and excessively stupid, and it was a crime to bring out a sequel and capital offense to bring out a third movie. Such a thing should never be dignified by having a story on slashdot.
They are just ways to pull in links or article headlines from other sites. They shouldn't be construed as an endorsement of any sort, they're solely for the convenience of slashdot readers.
Personally, I don't think there's a lot of bias in pointing out that, on the one hand, Ms. Rosen, is claiming the record industry loses billions of dollars per year to "piracy", and, on the other hand, that they have posted record profits and sales for the last several years running. That's not bias - it's called opening your eyes. Most news sources will not present those two facts side by side, because they don't see them side by side - one journalist writes a story about music piracy, a story where 90% of the wording came from the RIAA's press department, and then a week later another journalist from the same organization gets a press release from the RIAA about their record profits, and that gets published nearly verbatim, and no connection is ever made. That sort of "journalism" is a kind of doublethink, holding two contradictory ideas in one's head simultaneously. I'm trying to pierce that. If you don't like it, by all means enjoy your diet of press releases. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
However, could we prevail upon the volunteers for just a bit longer? Can we get a copy of the presentation up on the Web somewhere permanently?... A known resource for fighting future battles would be a godsend. The folks at Holland paved the way and we need to learn everything they did right and wrong, and have all the materials they created at hand.... It would be great if we knew where to go to just grab leaflets and educational presentations, print them out, and respond *the same day*.
We will definitely do this, and store them on censorware.org for future reference. It's a great idea, one that we thought about in the past but never got up the gumption to actually do. -- Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Mr. Greenberg's points are usually civil, but often wrong. The reason that UCITA has sailed through its hurdles to date is not that slashdot or any other group has been overreacting; the reason it has sailed through is that the vast, vast majority of the populace has no idea it exists. Rational, reasoned calls for amendments to the draft were met with utter stonewalling; almost none of them were ever accepted, despite many years of effort from the academic and legal communities, with zero hysteria, demagoguery or anything else which Mr. Greenberg wouldn't like. A great many people have worn themselves out arguing for "simple, rational and well-articulated amendments directed to the worst points", and not one of those worst points has changed in the least.
In other words, Mr. Greenberg's suggested method has been a complete failure.
The thing lacking in the above process was substantial involvement from the population. The pro-UCITA forces didn't care to advertise the issue, and the anti-UCITA groups generally felt the issue was too complex to take to the populace and harbored hopes of tempering the draft through their own actions. The DMCA was similarly passed with zero fanfare.
Well, they chose wrongly.
Mr. Greenberg is correct in one thing: the huge amount of money being poured in by the pro-UCITA corporations. Rational, reasoned arguments do not counter large campaign contributions. What does counter them is the threat that a Yea vote will sufficiently piss off a large sector of the population that Politician X will not be re-elected. Politicians ARE afraid of this; thus the voice votes on the DMCA and this vote in the Virginia House which make it difficult to assign blame.
A call-in campaign to stop UCITA is the only thing that has a chance of stopping UCITA right now. If the general population had gotten involved earlier in the process, it might have been corrected at that time. But what the Virginia and other politicians need to hear now is that voting yes on UCITA will cost them votes.
Mr. Greenberg is of course welcome to grovel, write some scholarly papers, or perform some other useless actions as he wishes.
Slashdot Mirror
Any writer has to assume a few things about his audience. If every story included a total recap of everything that had happened to date, I wouldn't have to assume any knowledge, but the stories would quickly reach Katz-length. In this case, I am assuming that you know something about TrustE - how it was created as a PR device to ward off government regulation, how it has repeatedly refused to investigate or condemn any of its members, no matter how egregious their actions. It's been asked to investigate Microsoft, Real, Doubleclick, Dejanews, Hotmail, Geocities... and couldn't find anything wrong with any of them. That's right - Real wasn't violating its privacy statement by tracking what music you listen to, Geocities wasn't violating its user agreement that said it wouldn't sell information to outside parties when it (according to the FTC) sold information to outside parties.... TrustE is a very forgiving overseer, you see.
After all, companies pay it for the privilege of being overseen - if TrustE started cracking down, the companies would stop paying! There have been dozens of stories about TrustE, several of them in slashdot. For an example, see TrustE Decides Its Own Fate Today.
Perhaps I am assuming too much. I've been following TrustE for several years, and seen it evolve from an organization supposed to protect privacy to an organization solely geared toward PR work in protecting its member corporations. These facts might not be obvious to someone who hasn't been paying attention.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
P3P is a mechanism designed to get you to enter all your personal data into your web browser and have your browser give it out, behind the scenes, to any website that asks for it.
Today, a website can't just demand that, as a condition of entry, you provide it with your SSN and mother's maiden name. People have an initial bad reaction to that, and coupled with the hassle of filling out a form to enter that info, they'll turn away from the site. P3P allows web sites to do that without the hassle - instead of being presented with a form, you'll see a dialog box:
"Website X is requesting full access to your personal information. Yes/No?"
If you say no, website X won't let you enter. If you say yes, it gets access to every bit of information in the profile you filled out. Eventually, of course, you'll get tired of seeing those pop-up boxes and will turn them off and forget about it. You'll even have a hard time putting in fictitious information because ecommerce sites will use it for purchasing information - you'll have to enter the right information if you ever want to actually purchase anything.
Consider: Doubleclick has a whole elaborate Doubleclick cookie with information you enter at a site when you make a purchase. Now Doubleclick could simply access your profile. The protocol is designed to move information from the user to the remote site behind the scenes, in such a way that the user doesn't see it go. If it actually caught on, the default for the web would switch from being more-or-less anonymous until you choose to identify yourself, to being identified, personally, at every site you visit.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
There's actually not a bit of paranoia in the above; every bit of what I said is factual and accurate. I barely even make a prediction about Doubleclick's future practices, although their path seems quite obvious to me.
In fact, the only knees that are jerking are the net-libertarian types who hate government and automatically reject any suggestion that a corporation might be doing something bad. Like you. Of course people can disagree on the privacy issues. I'm pointing out that Doubleclick is trying to mislead you, and that information should be useful regardless of where you stand on privacy issues.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Copyright protects against copying. It does not grant the copyright holder any power to control how you use a work you've purchased. Once you buy a book, you're free to resell it, tear it up, read it as many times as you want, lend it to people - anything except copy it. In fact, the law says that any attempt by the copyright holder to stop you from doing those things is not permitted.
The DMCA allows copyright holders to prevent you from doing any of those things - reselling, tearing up, reading it more than once (or even once), lending it out - and be backed by the force of law.
That's why I put use in bold.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Since that situation you describe doesn't have a thing to do with civil liberties (the ACLU is not a personal injury law firm), I'm having a little trouble believing you. How about a case citation?
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
It convinces me, but I'm a soft mark for free speech arguments.
It's not on the front page because I think the majority of slashdot readers do not have any particular interest in reading a 50 page legal brief. The ones who really care will see it in this section, and the rest wouldn't read it anyway.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
It was actually a funkiness with the date. Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that the story originally appeared with no date at all, because it had managed to be entered into the system with a date of April 31, 2000. This caused some weirdness, the story date was reset to be May 1, 2000.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?
:)
And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
There's no doubt that the poster "owns" the comments, as in, "possesses the copyright for their comments". So much for "ownership". But holding the copyright is not the be-all and end-all. Other people can copy and use your works if:
a) you license them to do so
b) their use falls under the fair use exemptions in copyright law
There is no question, for example, that by posting a comment on slashdot, you grant them a long-term non-exclusive license to publish your work on the website - though you still own the copyright. You could post the same words on another website and license them to publish your words too.
Fair use allows a book reviewer, for example, to quote passages from the book without obtaining any sort of license from the book publisher or author. That's why people are upset about UCITA - it would abolish this right with regard to software.
But in any case, people need to distinguish between ownership and use.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
This has got to be the dumbest comment I've ever read.
You must not read at -1 very often.
No, the stock market is not just paper. It is part ownership in a company. It's part ownership in the entity that pays your bills. If that piece of paper is worth nothing, that means the company is worth nothing, which means that you won't be getting a paycheck.
Not true. A company can be perfectly healthy, have perfectly good cash-flow, pay all of its employees and have good prospects for the future, yet have a) no stock at all or b) stock that is worth nothing. People often equate stock price with some sort of generalized measure of the health of a company - if it goes to zero we're dead! - but that's not how it works.
However, people that actually OWN stock and are able to cash out at any given moment are more than just paper rich. They ARE rich.
I disagree. Can you hand a share of stock to a kid at McDonald's and get a hamburger? If not, how are you going to keep from starving to death? Stock is fundamentally non-liquid. For instance, people tally Gates' wealth by multiplying the shares he owns by the share price. But if he tried to sell even one one-hundredth of his shares, the share price would drop, drop, drop - he could never get the full "value" of them. He couldn't get a quarter of the full value. And of course, if no one is willing to buy them from him, they're worth nothing at all.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
*shrug* It's an interesting story, but if there's one thing that the internet isn't going to change it's that governments are going to try to protect their secrets by any means possible. Not necessarily a bad thing in principle, though it has funny or stupid results from time to time.
We're making an effort to run more stuff in the individual sections where appropriate. We hope that the sections will be as visible to people interested in those topics as the main page is. Not everything can go on the main page, and obviously some people will rank some things higher than others. You're probably right that the U.S. government trying to suppress a CIA document would be destined for the main page; that's a function of the fact that most of the people involved with slashdot and surely most of the audience are from the U.S. If you complain to a UK newspaper that they're burying some U.S. news to the last page, are they going to change?
Feel free to email Rob and complain - I know he just loves complaints (snicker).
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
It's paper, nothing more. If I declare a piece of paper to be "worth" a zillion dollars on Tuesday, and nothing on Wednesday, then, wow, I just lost a zillion dollars. It was never there.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
What sort of political correctness? If you neither praised nor bashed the story, how could I ... oh, never mind. People will whine regardless.
FYI, that story was posted at about 6AM EDT this morning, when I got up and read the submissions bin. Yes, the slashdot engine has the ability to post-date stuff so it can be scheduled for some time in the future. No, slashdot doesn't post everything for Now() because then you'd have ten stories on the front page at 9AM when the Commander and Hemos read the previous night's submissions, and nothing for the rest of the day.
In other words, your submission was way late and was presumably deleted because it was a duplicate of a story already set to run in the early afternoon.
But hey, I'm probably making this up. It was probably political correctness ("Too neutral! Let's spike it!") that did your submission in.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
See www.powermarks.com. This is, AFAIK, the closest match to a bookmark organizer. I found it deficient because it doesn't allow folder organization - you have to search, period, which is often a very crappy way of finding a bookmark. They say "Innovative search interface provides fast and easy access to your bookmarks - no hierarchies to sort, order and arrange". What this means is "A thousand bookmarks which you used to have in two dozen folders now in one folder, sorted alphabetically, where you can't find anything at all and you can no longer export them except into one really, really big folder." Bleh.
Whenever someone comes out with a bookmark organizer that allows and preserves folders, yet also allows quick and easy searching, or better yet *self-organizes* bookmarks into folders all by its lonesome, by looking at the content of the pages or whatever, it'll sell a million copies.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Eliminate Microsoft's copyright on operating systems they've brought to market. All of them, from DOS to Win 3.1 to Win 98 to NT to Win2K. Require them to publish the source code on an FTP server for a minimum of one year. Future operating systems would retain a MS copyright as usual.
With the code available, no doubt one or more companies would take the opportunity to run with it and develop new OS's compatible with legacy Windows products. Microsoft remains free to "innovate", whatever that means, and everyone else remains free to do so also. Maybe someone starts a GPL fork of the code. Maybe someone else starts a BSD-type fork of the code. Maybe someone wants to make a closed-source version.
The only thing they lose is their government-granted monopoly on the Windows source code which is what they abused in the first place. If you abuse it, you lose it. Simple and direct.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
First of all, even if they do sell your name, they are not allowed to divulge any information on the procedures you've undergone. That's part of your medical record, which they aren't allowed to give out or sell.
This is wrong. People typically believe that certain "common sense" privacy measures actually exist - but they don't. There's no law that says your doctor, employer or HMO can't sell every bit of information they know about you, from your cancer status to your counselling for depression to the abortion you had when you were 14. There's no law. Not in the U.S. Show me otherwise if you think I'm wrong. You can't.
Most people believe that there are some sort of minimum privacy standards protecting medical records and the like. But there aren't.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Are you certain about this? I've never worked with mySQL, but generally, the conventional wisdom is to leave sorting to the database. That's what databases do... I'd be quite surprised if it was actually faster to dump a set of records and have perl sort them rather than have the database do it. If true, that says nothing good about the database software.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Cyber Patrol calls their list of banned sites "CyberNOT" (they also have a list of "approved" sites called "CyberYES"). They license it to various firewall manufacturers to include as an optional accessory in those products.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
That said, there are *good* clauses, like specifically allowing reverse engineering for compatibility. BRAVO!.
If a law takes away nine freedoms, and specifically permits you to retain the tenth, "BRAVO!" is hardly the reaction I'd have. Perhaps "This is awful" or "BULLSHIT!", but certainly not "BRAVO!".
In other news, I've announced that my new law will eliminate your ability to speak, read or communicate, but I'm still allowing you to think subversive thoughts. You also retain the ability to stand on your head and stick your tongue out (in your own home only, of course). Reaction from slashdot posters: BRAVO!
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I personally judge stuff by what's interesting to me, with a strong emphasis on civil liberties and freedom of speech issues, since I do things in the YRO section. I hope it will be interesting to the slashdot community as well, but judging by number of comments is no way to judge interest.
I frankly discount almost all "this doesn't belong on slashdot" postings. If you look at the posting history of some of those posters, you find they've posted similar comments dozens or hundreds of times on all sorts of stories. So... they're perpetual whiners. Nothing is likely to satisfy them.
The assorted slashdot authors have different priorities. I would never have posted anything about Scream, period, end of sentence. I thought the first movie was physically painful to watch, the hype was excessive, stupid, and excessively stupid, and it was a crime to bring out a sequel and capital offense to bring out a third movie. Such a thing should never be dignified by having a story on slashdot.
But that's just me. Others may feel differently.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
They are just ways to pull in links or article headlines from other sites. They shouldn't be construed as an endorsement of any sort, they're solely for the convenience of slashdot readers.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Personally, I don't think there's a lot of bias in pointing out that, on the one hand, Ms. Rosen, is claiming the record industry loses billions of dollars per year to "piracy", and, on the other hand, that they have posted record profits and sales for the last several years running. That's not bias - it's called opening your eyes. Most news sources will not present those two facts side by side, because they don't see them side by side - one journalist writes a story about music piracy, a story where 90% of the wording came from the RIAA's press department, and then a week later another journalist from the same organization gets a press release from the RIAA about their record profits, and that gets published nearly verbatim, and no connection is ever made. That sort of "journalism" is a kind of doublethink, holding two contradictory ideas in one's head simultaneously. I'm trying to pierce that. If you don't like it, by all means enjoy your diet of press releases.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
presentation up on the Web somewhere permanently?
We will definitely do this, and store them on censorware.org for future reference. It's a great idea, one that we thought about in the past but never got up the gumption to actually do.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
That's news to me.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Mr. Greenberg's points are usually civil, but often wrong. The reason that UCITA has sailed through its hurdles to date is not that slashdot or any other group has been overreacting; the reason it has sailed through is that the vast, vast majority of the populace has no idea it exists. Rational, reasoned calls for amendments to the draft were met with utter stonewalling; almost none of them were ever accepted, despite many years of effort from the academic and legal communities, with zero hysteria, demagoguery or anything else which Mr. Greenberg wouldn't like. A great many people have worn themselves out arguing for "simple, rational and well-articulated amendments directed to the worst points", and not one of those worst points has changed in the least.
In other words, Mr. Greenberg's suggested method has been a complete failure.
The thing lacking in the above process was substantial involvement from the population. The pro-UCITA forces didn't care to advertise the issue, and the anti-UCITA groups generally felt the issue was too complex to take to the populace and harbored hopes of tempering the draft through their own actions. The DMCA was similarly passed with zero fanfare.
Well, they chose wrongly.
Mr. Greenberg is correct in one thing: the huge amount of money being poured in by the pro-UCITA corporations. Rational, reasoned arguments do not counter large campaign contributions. What does counter them is the threat that a Yea vote will sufficiently piss off a large sector of the population that Politician X will not be re-elected. Politicians ARE afraid of this; thus the voice votes on the DMCA and this vote in the Virginia House which make it difficult to assign blame.
A call-in campaign to stop UCITA is the only thing that has a chance of stopping UCITA right now. If the general population had gotten involved earlier in the process, it might have been corrected at that time. But what the Virginia and other politicians need to hear now is that voting yes on UCITA will cost them votes.
Mr. Greenberg is of course welcome to grovel, write some scholarly papers, or perform some other useless actions as he wishes.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org