The UK has a constitution. It's just not written and means essentially what Parliament says it means (no power of judicial review), which in turn equates into what the majority party says it means, which in turn equates to what Tony Blair says it means
Which in turns equates to what the press report that Alastair Campbell (Tony's PR whore) says Tony is about to say. Really, when was the last time you heard a premier actually announce anything, as opposed to just confirming an earlier press report? Long term Government direction is now decided on a day to day basis by PR whores based on acute PR imperatives.
Get enough of the worlds data on networks inside your haven
The great Rogerborgy will use his powers of prescience to predict that by 2005 we'll be getting most of our entertainment data from China, where intellectual property is counter doctrinal. Forget spy planes, the next Cold War will be Corporate vs Communist.
Interesting marketing strategy: promote new version by making fun of previous feature
They have a long history of it. Every time a new version of Windoze comes out, Bill gets up on stage and says "Yesterday we told you WinV1 was great. Well, it turns out we were lying, it's utter garbage, and you really need WinV2, today, or your business is screwed. And you can trust us this time, really."
So all they've really done is change the default ('bout time).
That and create a genuinely funny apology. Yes, they're the Borg, utter evil, blah blah blah, but you don't have to have everything that reeks of Redmond, just as it's OK to say that even Linus makes mistakes. Really, it is.
That's right, it is an add campain over a changed default, and we are it's first suckers
So? They screwed up, they admit they screwed up, and they've made a genuinely funny site by way of apologising for it. It's not a law that we have to hate everything that comes out of Redmond.
Well, first they'd have to prove the Apache Group had anything, whatsoever, to do with the development of mod_mp3
Sure, but if the corps launch a frivolous suit and are lucky enough to get a circuit judge who's dumb enough to allow the case (plenty of precedent), it'll cost Apache a pile in legal fees to "prove their innocence", compared to chump change for the corps. Dumb fucked up legal system. The corps don't have to win cases, they just have to bleed their target dry defending it.
To go after the Apache Group for mod_mp3 is very much the same idea as going after Microsoft because Napster uses the Win32 API.
Or to go after an ISP because it's users have been serving/pulling down kiddie porn or warez. Ludicrous! It'd never get to court! No... wait a minute...
Heck, we were running.au jukeboxen on the St Andrews University campus LAN back in 1991. College admins might say the right words about respecting copyright, but they're pragmatic beasts. Better to have it streaming privately inside the LAN than tying up the outside links and exposing your user's piracy.
Makes sense for ISP's too, come to think of it. It might even be cheaper for them to license music and provide jukeboxen than for them to buy the external bandwidth to suck in multiple dodgy Napsterised copies of it (while their common carrier status is steadily eroded by doofus circuit judgements).
Different heads of the Beast, but the same words come out of all of them. "Vital to the economy... small amounts of fair use hide massive abuse... only protecting our poor widdle content creators..."
publishers won't touch anything that's been online
Bad form to followup your own post and all, but I've just noticed this telling slip up. "been online" is a misnomer. Once a piece of IP is online, it's online for keeps. Not just warez and mp3, but stuff like copyrighted $cientology material and ebooks as well. And wait until China starts havening IP in a big way. Can't use the force of law against a country which doesn't legally recognise IP.
you've pretty much blown your chance of getting a conventional publisher to pick it up.
So you say
So my agent says. IIRC, "No, no, please no!" was her response to my suggestion that I post bits of a novel online. She's moderately clued, and her view is publishers won't touch anything that's been online, either because they're too dumb to understand that there's not much overlap today, or because they're smart enough to understand that there might be a lot of overlap in five years, which is an issue for a paper novel that gets picked up today. Novels aren't just publish-and-forget, a good (i.e. lucrative) one has years of editing, translation and multi-region sales and non-print media exploitation in it. Paper publishers want to know where all the rights for a work lie, and they won't like an answer of "Technically, I own them all, but there might be a couple of thousand copies getting passed round the most likely fan base."
But then I'm just Joe Slushpile, and I do agree that it'll take an author with a fervent fanboy following to break into the online market without being outcast from the paper publishing world. I'll be keeping an eye on this one, but I still can't (quite) see a mechanism to make it work.
I keep all my servers in the basement of my parent's house, and use my mother as the control mechanism
Heh, mine's under the stairs, and my girlfriend is my on-site admin. We're still at the "it's the little black picture with the green squiggle" stage. I like the sound files idea.
And I've just had a great idea for using an X10. I could get a linux box to listen for keepalives from my (sorry) Win98 box on the LAN, and cycle the power on it whenever it hangs. Neato!;)
why do these online "experiments" produce episodic stories at all? Why not release the whole story in one shot
Too risky. If you publish 100,000 words electronically, clever conclusion and all, then you've pretty much blown your chance of getting a conventional publisher to pick it up.
And if two fans pay for it then, ahem, share it with their friends, and they share it on, and on, then BANG, it's gone, and you've blown a year's work and a year's reward. The downside to electronic format is that the perceived copyright gets diluted rapidly once you're not getting it from the original distribution source, so it starts as copyrighted, then it's seen as fair-use-ware, then just another share down the line you're into the Napster zone where the content is pretty much viewed as public domain freeware.
On the other hand, episodic is a bad move considering micropayments are still on the To Do list. Did you notice that The Plant would have cost you $20 to read (of which 1/3 went straight to the credit card companies), plus the cost to print it out if you wanted a hard copy? The saps - bad pun intended - who purchased the early episodes must have had rather poor arithmetic skills. However, there's no indication that Tad has a better idea. At the moment, it sounds like he's just blueskying.
I can't believe I just blew my mod points before reading this off topic drivel. This venture has nothing to do with open source, it's a closed IP commercial project.
Good luck with the degree, I think you'll need it.
Anybody can come up with a story where freedoms are curtailed depending on which country you're talking about
Granted, but what cracks us pinko foreign filth up is the dichotemy between all the drum banging about constitutional freedoms and first amendment in the USA, and the sad fact that you so often have to pay to assert and defend those rights in court, whenever gubmint or corps feel like tromping all over them.
How strange that in countries without any such legal protection, we also have fewer regulations, and fewer gagging attempts, which (in the UK at least) courts tend to overturn anyway, putting the onus of proof of harm with the complainer.
Perhaps it's just that if you draw a line in the sand and say "This you may not cross," people will step right up to it and lean as far over as they can.
Sure, and all we need to make that workable is a global court, a global age of consent, and a global definition of what constitutes pornography. What shall we do after lunch?
Wait I think I got a patent idea... Expedited troll conversations via prediction of troller/trollee responses.
And automate it. AutoTroll leaps in to any/. discussion and posts a single message composed of trolls and responses to save us wasting our time doing it. It would only need to extract a very little context from the topic, as most trolls are along the lines of:
"Regarding this exciting news about Star Wars Episode II, it clearly demonstrates that Microsoft sux, that there's a specific reference to Napster in the 1st Amendment, and anyone who challenges the inviolable opinions I got from selectively reading bits of an ancient document written by dead patriarchal slavers (Consitution or Bible, you choose), you're clearly a commie liberal dope head paedophile fascist, doomed to burn in heck, for ever and ever, oh man."
I can confirm most of these points. Wind River can't support the system it's currently selling; how on earth do they expect to be able to support a whole new OS when they're sacking half the BSDi staff?
As an aside, the system architect who settled on VxWorks up and left when he realised we were screwed, and we're now looking at moving to Linux for future versions, on the basis that we'll get way more support for zero cost. Go figure.
the next month or so while this would still be a big deal
That may be wishful thinking. Most corporate IT departments are already in the "all your soul are belong to Microsoft" category, and this is just another in a long, long list of screwups that they've already shown that they'll tolerate. My own employer doesn't bother putting out advisories or upgrading desktops any more. And how many personal users will even find out about this, much less care? If it doesn't hit the mainstream media, it's purely a geek issue.
slashdot.com? Holy SH... so it is. Seriously, it never even occurred to me. So, which one is going to get taken away? As an aside, if you're going to bend the spirit of the rules and get.com and.org, then why not get.net as well?
Care to mention a company with a.com address that would be happy letting someone else get the.firm? Or a company that would settle for the.firm knowing that a good portion of their traffic would end up going to the.com?.flop, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK has a constitution. It's just not written and means essentially what Parliament says it means (no power of judicial review), which in turn equates into what the majority party says it means, which in turn equates to what Tony Blair says it means
Which in turns equates to what the press report that Alastair Campbell (Tony's PR whore) says Tony is about to say. Really, when was the last time you heard a premier actually announce anything, as opposed to just confirming an earlier press report? Long term Government direction is now decided on a day to day basis by PR whores based on acute PR imperatives.
Get enough of the worlds data on networks inside your haven
The great Rogerborgy will use his powers of prescience to predict that by 2005 we'll be getting most of our entertainment data from China, where intellectual property is counter doctrinal. Forget spy planes, the next Cold War will be Corporate vs Communist.
Interesting marketing strategy: promote new version by making fun of previous feature
They have a long history of it. Every time a new version of Windoze comes out, Bill gets up on stage and says "Yesterday we told you WinV1 was great. Well, it turns out we were lying, it's utter garbage, and you really need WinV2, today, or your business is screwed. And you can trust us this time, really."
The scary part is that I'm not joking.
So all they've really done is change the default ('bout time).
That and create a genuinely funny apology. Yes, they're the Borg, utter evil, blah blah blah, but you don't have to have everything that reeks of Redmond, just as it's OK to say that even Linus makes mistakes. Really, it is.
That's right, it is an add campain over a changed default, and we are it's first suckers
So? They screwed up, they admit they screwed up, and they've made a genuinely funny site by way of apologising for it. It's not a law that we have to hate everything that comes out of Redmond.
No! It's a Microsoft site, but it's actually funny. Want to hate it... but laughed... pain... joy... does... not... compute... <bzzzzzzzzzt BANG>
Well, first they'd have to prove the Apache Group had anything, whatsoever, to do with the development of mod_mp3
Sure, but if the corps launch a frivolous suit and are lucky enough to get a circuit judge who's dumb enough to allow the case (plenty of precedent), it'll cost Apache a pile in legal fees to "prove their innocence", compared to chump change for the corps. Dumb fucked up legal system. The corps don't have to win cases, they just have to bleed their target dry defending it.
To go after the Apache Group for mod_mp3 is very much the same idea as going after Microsoft because Napster uses the Win32 API.
Or to go after an ISP because it's users have been serving/pulling down kiddie porn or warez. Ludicrous! It'd never get to court! No... wait a minute...
Heck, we were running .au jukeboxen on the St Andrews University campus LAN back in 1991. College admins might say the right words about respecting copyright, but they're pragmatic beasts. Better to have it streaming privately inside the LAN than tying up the outside links and exposing your user's piracy.
Makes sense for ISP's too, come to think of it. It might even be cheaper for them to license music and provide jukeboxen than for them to buy the external bandwidth to suck in multiple dodgy Napsterised copies of it (while their common carrier status is steadily eroded by doofus circuit judgements).
Different heads of the Beast, but the same words come out of all of them. "Vital to the economy... small amounts of fair use hide massive abuse... only protecting our poor widdle content creators..."
publishers won't touch anything that's been online
Bad form to followup your own post and all, but I've just noticed this telling slip up. "been online" is a misnomer. Once a piece of IP is online, it's online for keeps. Not just warez and mp3, but stuff like copyrighted $cientology material and ebooks as well. And wait until China starts havening IP in a big way. Can't use the force of law against a country which doesn't legally recognise IP.
- you've pretty much blown your chance of getting a conventional publisher to pick it up.
So you saySo my agent says. IIRC, "No, no, please no!" was her response to my suggestion that I post bits of a novel online. She's moderately clued, and her view is publishers won't touch anything that's been online, either because they're too dumb to understand that there's not much overlap today, or because they're smart enough to understand that there might be a lot of overlap in five years, which is an issue for a paper novel that gets picked up today. Novels aren't just publish-and-forget, a good (i.e. lucrative) one has years of editing, translation and multi-region sales and non-print media exploitation in it. Paper publishers want to know where all the rights for a work lie, and they won't like an answer of "Technically, I own them all, but there might be a couple of thousand copies getting passed round the most likely fan base."
But then I'm just Joe Slushpile, and I do agree that it'll take an author with a fervent fanboy following to break into the online market without being outcast from the paper publishing world. I'll be keeping an eye on this one, but I still can't (quite) see a mechanism to make it work.
I keep all my servers in the basement of my parent's house, and use my mother as the control mechanism
Heh, mine's under the stairs, and my girlfriend is my on-site admin. We're still at the "it's the little black picture with the green squiggle" stage. I like the sound files idea.
And I've just had a great idea for using an X10. I could get a linux box to listen for keepalives from my (sorry) Win98 box on the LAN, and cycle the power on it whenever it hangs. Neato! ;)
why do these online "experiments" produce episodic stories at all? Why not release the whole story in one shot
Too risky. If you publish 100,000 words electronically, clever conclusion and all, then you've pretty much blown your chance of getting a conventional publisher to pick it up.
And if two fans pay for it then, ahem, share it with their friends, and they share it on, and on, then BANG, it's gone, and you've blown a year's work and a year's reward. The downside to electronic format is that the perceived copyright gets diluted rapidly once you're not getting it from the original distribution source, so it starts as copyrighted, then it's seen as fair-use-ware, then just another share down the line you're into the Napster zone where the content is pretty much viewed as public domain freeware.
On the other hand, episodic is a bad move considering micropayments are still on the To Do list. Did you notice that The Plant would have cost you $20 to read (of which 1/3 went straight to the credit card companies), plus the cost to print it out if you wanted a hard copy? The saps - bad pun intended - who purchased the early episodes must have had rather poor arithmetic skills. However, there's no indication that Tad has a better idea. At the moment, it sounds like he's just blueskying.
I can't believe I just blew my mod points before reading this off topic drivel. This venture has nothing to do with open source, it's a closed IP commercial project.
Good luck with the degree, I think you'll need it.
Now we know what OS They use to run the avionics of the Black Helicoptors. ;)
Anybody can come up with a story where freedoms are curtailed depending on which country you're talking about
Granted, but what cracks us pinko foreign filth up is the dichotemy between all the drum banging about constitutional freedoms and first amendment in the USA, and the sad fact that you so often have to pay to assert and defend those rights in court, whenever gubmint or corps feel like tromping all over them.
How strange that in countries without any such legal protection, we also have fewer regulations, and fewer gagging attempts, which (in the UK at least) courts tend to overturn anyway, putting the onus of proof of harm with the complainer.
Perhaps it's just that if you draw a line in the sand and say "This you may not cross," people will step right up to it and lean as far over as they can.
You can probably guess what kind of email address I hand out to on-line merchants
From: bob@trusted-partner.comTo: root@fbi.gov
Dear Mr Privacy Complaints,
YOU CAN MAKE $$$ FAST!...
Something like that? ;)
Production of child pornography => Death sentence
Sure, and all we need to make that workable is a global court, a global age of consent, and a global definition of what constitutes pornography. What shall we do after lunch?
Planet Express
Planet Badly, Fix It In Implementation
LB 426 Is A Rock
This IS Ceti Alpha Five!
This Planet Intentionally Left Blank
Source Of The Bug Scourge
God Like Being Retirement Planet (Thank You For Not Talking About Alternative Universes)
What Do You Mean We're Detecting An Energy Surge On The Planet's Surfa...
We Made It! (Pending Legal Action With Larry Niven)
Wait I think I got a patent idea... Expedited troll conversations via prediction of troller/trollee responses.
And automate it. AutoTroll leaps in to any /. discussion and posts a single message composed of trolls and responses to save us wasting our time doing it. It would only need to extract a very little context from the topic, as most trolls are along the lines of:
"Regarding this exciting news about Star Wars Episode II, it clearly demonstrates that Microsoft sux, that there's a specific reference to Napster in the 1st Amendment, and anyone who challenges the inviolable opinions I got from selectively reading bits of an ancient document written by dead patriarchal slavers (Consitution or Bible, you choose), you're clearly a commie liberal dope head paedophile fascist, doomed to burn in heck, for ever and ever, oh man."
I can confirm most of these points. Wind River can't support the system it's currently selling; how on earth do they expect to be able to support a whole new OS when they're sacking half the BSDi staff?
As an aside, the system architect who settled on VxWorks up and left when he realised we were screwed, and we're now looking at moving to Linux for future versions, on the basis that we'll get way more support for zero cost. Go figure.
Is this another lame St Andrews Uni AI project being tested on /. ? Add a humour subnet, guys. :P
the next month or so while this would still be a big deal
That may be wishful thinking. Most corporate IT departments are already in the "all your soul are belong to Microsoft" category, and this is just another in a long, long list of screwups that they've already shown that they'll tolerate. My own employer doesn't bother putting out advisories or upgrading desktops any more. And how many personal users will even find out about this, much less care? If it doesn't hit the mainstream media, it's purely a geek issue.
slashdot.com? Holy SH... so it is. Seriously, it never even occurred to me. So, which one is going to get taken away? As an aside, if you're going to bend the spirit of the rules and get .com and .org, then why not get .net as well?
like .firm, etc
Care to mention a company with a .com address that would be happy letting someone else get the .firm? Or a company that would settle for the .firm knowing that a good portion of their traffic would end up going to the .com? .flop, I think.