The record labels do not choose their prosecutors, the state does. Keep in mind, attorneys tend to be type A personalities that seek challenges and glory in inordinate amounts.
I am sure there was some jockeying for the person who will handle this case, someone won, and he is doing it because he knew how to handle the politics moreso than because of his technology background.
It was mentioned yesterday that the prosecutor claimed to be a computer crimes expert, but that he could not get a powerpoint presentation to operate on his laptop.
Arguably, I make copyright infingement available by providing my daughter with a computer that can access the Internet.
If the argument is that putting a site up that points at known torrents is a crime, doesn't every media outlet in the world carrying this story run the risk of some culpability by promoting it?
I download various Linux distros from TPB all the time, it's faster than hitting the source sites. If the site exists exclusively for pirating, how is this pirating?
The media hypes up the financial aspects of this greatly. Something tells me the money made off ad revenue barely covers the costs of servers, legal defenses and other aspects of their operations. I guess we will find out for real as the trial proceeds.
I am not endorsing theft, but this is not theft, this is copyright infringement. That is not a technical difference, that is a different class of legal dispute altogether. In most cases, I don't think it is even a criminal offense, but a civil one. Do we really want the police acting as the copyright enforcers for giant corporations?
Jeez, so many stories I could share. I guess the best one is the cheeseburger in the CD ROM.
Back before I started my own company, I worked as a contractor for various federal agencies. I would always run into lifers, people who had worked at these places for years and let their standards drop for grooming and personal responsibility because there was no way they could ever be fired. Anyways, a lifer was working on some cables beneath the raised floors, and was reaching down after something near the bottom. He was simultaneously eating a cheesebuger, and you could see all kinds of sauces dripping from the thing. Realizing the size of his belly prohibited easy retrieval of whatever it was he was after under the floor, this lifer stopped to put down his cheeseburger so he could lay out and get some extra reach.
Lo and behold, the place he chose to put his cheeseburger was the outstretched tray of a cd rom, and the tray closed while he was spread out on the floor. Bits and pieces of the cheeseburger made their way into the server, which in turn caught fire, which in turn set off various fire supression systems and lead to the evacuation of the facility.
Silicon smells awful when it burns and can quickly overwhelm you in an enclosed space. The lifer got himself out of the building promptly and was allowed to keep his job despite shutting down the facility and royally f***ing up the project I was working on. I was laid off after a couple days, when everyone realized they were going to need to procure new servers to replace the ones that had been damaged in the fire and that the procurement process would take months.
I try to remember this story when things go wrong at my company, and be understanding to people affected by the ding-dangitiness of others.
Sounds a lot like my patent, "System and Method for Allowing People to Talk." Perhaps we should get all our lawyers together for a barbeque or something.
Mortality is a fact of life. I never understand why people are so ready to assign extradorinary motives to events in the absence of any facts to support their conclusions. I mean, think about it: if this was your neighbor and he died the same way, how ready would you be to say he offed himself or was knocked off by his enemies?
You probably would not. What people don't realize, when they are engaging in this kind of speculation, is they are participating in a public disinformation campaign, sometimes coming from the ground up but often coordinated by PR and media strategy firms in support of various political agendas. I work in online politics and deal with such firms on a regular basis. By spreading the word around, you are tacitly participating in that agenda as well as being exploited for your lack of information on the subject.
When Vince Foster died, there was a lot of speculation on conservative talk radio that the Clintons 'ordered a hit'. Those were the words being used, and I heard them make their way up to major media outlets again and again. I was working at Department of Commerce when it happened, and no one who knew him thought this was some nefarious deed or felt anything but sorrow for him and his family. The amount of speculation and criticism of what happened, as well as the never ending barrage of accusations that still are whispered at various events, makes me sick. Seeing people's misfortune kicked around like a soccer ball by people who have no clue what really happened but are ready to believe whatever their favorite blog / newspaper / 24 hour cable news channel / crazy uncle says is the only thing sadder.
The point of these ad-hominem, post-mortem attacks is not to discover the truth nor do they seek to establish a more well-informed public. They are designed to criminalize the other side in the minds of the people and create an atmosphere of distrust that obscures facts and distracts from real issues that people could be doing something about. A high-profile death is like a snow day in high school, it's a break from the regular news cycle and an opportunity to reinvent the national dialogue.
If you have any interest in good government, vote, get involved in civic organizations, volunteer for a worthwhile cause, find something constructive to do besides picking some poor guy's bones clean for the sake of someone else's political agenda. I mean, maybe Mike Connell did rig an election. Maybe he was Rove's homonoculous and wasted no time worrying about the law when he was ripping apart his political opponents. There are people who know the real story there, and the truth does have a funny way of coming out. But dead is dead, and Connell was a human being and a Catholic who probably deserves more than to be reduced to a talking point. Saying he was murdered or committed suicide in the absence of any facts is irresponsible speculation at best, and you probably would not be thinking this way of him were it not for his political connections.
Give the dead the same respect you would want, you'll be there too someday.
Dude, I got emails about it over the weekend. I don't know what the disposition of his corpse is, but there are a lot of people who were talking about this long before it hit Slashdot.
Dunno why this made it on the front page of Slashdot.
First off, it's old news. Mike Connell died a few days ago, at least someone could have reported it in a timely manner.
Secondly, there's really only two reasons people take much of an interest in Mike Connell. The first is that he developed technology for use in politics. Second is the whole 2004 mess, where he has been accused of voter fraud in Ohio (and allegedly in Florida).
Too much importance is given to Mike Connell and his 'role' in various things. He was a web designer, he ran a technology company, just like me and a lot of people who read Slashdot. The fact that he worked in politics is just another detail about his life (his relationship with teh turdblossom aside). He was also a board member of the American Association of Political Consultants. While listening to him speak could be entertaining, his ideas about ways to use the Internet never really struck me as anything new that hadn't already been done better by someone else.
It just makes me sad that people want to remember him for all these 'scandals' and that his notability is based on innunendo and rumor instead of the actual accomplishments in his life. I mean, I am a Dem and have no love for the man, but it is just rotten to think this is how people choose to remember him. Reducing him to a rumor of some wrongdoing and despising him over his dealings is just another way of dehumanizing the man, and people should be above that.
Sure, there are plenty of cooperative, non-violent video games out there. Reader Rabbit, the entire Barney series, Mavis Beacon teaches typing, Dora the Explorer, the Barbie dress up series, there are just a few of the popular games that have sold greater than 5million titles.
None of them made any money and none are really geared for adults (with the exception of Mavis Beacon, which is for adults who don't know how to use a keyboard). Just take the brand for any popular children's show on PBS or Nickelodeon and you will find a beavy of non-violent, non-competitive titles released for it.
Real gaming is always competitive, in the sense that chess is competitive. There are always challenges to be worked out, which can be done through slick moves executed as combos, puzzle solving, outstrategizing the computer, building a fortress, developing an economy, and the like. There is no reason why games have to depend on violence to acheive this basic goal.
The reason there are few non-violent titles out there is simple. Games have to appeal to the widest possible audience to be appealing, and consumers have grown up with a set of expectations for their entertainment corresponding to Hollywood archetypes. Blowing things up, fantastic settings, oversexualized female characters, strong good guy / bad guy roles, etc. are all part of what modern audiences have been spoon fed, and this is an important step in the evolution in games. People are still not used to the idea that being able to interact with others online, solving puzzles, etc. can be rewarding in itself.
The tastes of audiences changes over time, and something tells me that 100 years from now violent games will be as alien to adult gaming audiences as Barney's Puzzle Time Theater is to them now. But right now people are still infants in the world of online gaming, and non-violent, cooperative play is something that will enjoy widespread popularity in the future moreso than today.
I don't really care for the continential view of the term offered by this article, and don't see liberty in terms of being some mean between two extremes. Really, this idea of a lack of government intervention being an ideal relationship between man and the state is really a way of distancing people from the mechaniations of the state itself. It looks to me more like a form of divide and conquer, and a way for the state to operate unmolested by oversight on behalf of it's citizens.
Liberty can be expressed solely in terms of the relationship between man and the state, and this is a perfectly valid way of defining the term. The way I look at it, liberty is a broader concept, and one which is not limited to the form of government under which we live. Man has liberated himself from the ebb and flow and flow of nature through the pursuit of science, the unrestrained pursuit of our interests through codes of ethics, and the cultivation of our uniquely human nature through the arts. Saying that there is something special about the state, that our liberty comes from gradually eliminating it from our lives, is conceptually incompatible with these other uses of the word.
Perhaps the best expression of the word is the pursuit of a perfect union, and idea we are fond of in US politics. This is by no means meant to refer strictly to states in the union, but between its people, too. Participating in a democracy may be the highest expression of liberty, because by your very actions you are exercizing your rights as a citizen. I don't really know the answer, I just know it's hard to look at libertarian ideas and really say that the word fits.
'Basically agrees'? He's saying Obama is going to create a socialist society in the US, and I am saying he already lives in one. I guess that's not really true, it's socialism directed towards corporations and the top 1%, which is really nationalism, but the point remains the same.
Dunno what the point about liberty means. We could argue about definitions, but any time you live in a society you give up certain rights in exchange for the benefits. Where you draw the line about who is growing liberty versus taking it away is a matter of perspective. Personally, I believe true liberty is realized when people are free from the ravages of nature.
No joke. Plus the suspension of basic civil rights, undercutting the posse comitatus act, widespread government surveilance of civilians, launching wars that benefit noone. GOP socialism is the worst kind of socialism anyone could ever think of.
Go slouch towards Gommorah somewhere else. Just because you think you are right doesn't mean other people are not. I mean, jeez, it's going to take 20 years to clean up after W before anyone could even talk about really changing society in any meaningful way.
Calling Obama a socialist after 8 years of Bush growing the government, giving titanic bailout packages to Wall Street, keeping companies alive on corporate welfare, propping up economic figures by ignoring the excesses of an industry, giving companies incentives to send jobs overseas, fighting wars that benefit no one, and all the other garbage that has been kicked up since 2000 is plain nuts. We are emerging from a form of socialism directed solely at the top 1% of Americans and it is time to move on.
An Obama presidency means we are going to be seeing Linux everywhere. Cars with onboard navigation systems, embedded in devices ranging from ATM machines to cell phones, operating behaind the scenes at supermarket checkout counters, claw machines at the mall, ticket booths for parking garages, desktop machines being sold at Best Buy, on PDAs for squirrels, traffic light cameras, the list is endless.
I mean, come on, Microsoft must have bought off everyone in the GOP to still be around after Vista.
Get a Linux / Mac version of the browser going and see what happens. I know there aren't nearly as many Linux / Mac users out there, but these are vocal communities who will extol virtues of anything that takes up less processor capacity or makes their day have one less click in it. There's an opportunity to make all these windows guys feel like they are missing out unless they use Chrome.
Heard this last week and thought it was a joke. You mean I can refer clients to Microsoft for support on an open source javascript library?
One big thing about jQuery is how well it works cross-browser. While some of the plug ins can be browser specific, I have rarely had issues deploying it across all browsers. But I just can't see MS supporting a cludgy issue with anything but IE.
In Alaska, oil companies send every man, woman and child a check every year to keep them quiet about what they do to the environment. I seriously doubt they have a Sunshine law.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a prosecutor.
The record labels do not choose their prosecutors, the state does. Keep in mind, attorneys tend to be type A personalities that seek challenges and glory in inordinate amounts.
I am sure there was some jockeying for the person who will handle this case, someone won, and he is doing it because he knew how to handle the politics moreso than because of his technology background.
It was mentioned yesterday that the prosecutor claimed to be a computer crimes expert, but that he could not get a powerpoint presentation to operate on his laptop.
M
Arguably, I make copyright infingement available by providing my daughter with a computer that can access the Internet.
If the argument is that putting a site up that points at known torrents is a crime, doesn't every media outlet in the world carrying this story run the risk of some culpability by promoting it?
M
I download various Linux distros from TPB all the time, it's faster than hitting the source sites. If the site exists exclusively for pirating, how is this pirating?
The media hypes up the financial aspects of this greatly. Something tells me the money made off ad revenue barely covers the costs of servers, legal defenses and other aspects of their operations. I guess we will find out for real as the trial proceeds.
I am not endorsing theft, but this is not theft, this is copyright infringement. That is not a technical difference, that is a different class of legal dispute altogether. In most cases, I don't think it is even a criminal offense, but a civil one. Do we really want the police acting as the copyright enforcers for giant corporations?
M
Yeah, what he said.
Free Mickey!
M
Finally, a company just comes out and says what we all know: the entire Internet is dangerous and must be stopped.
Been on a 5/80 work schedule for years.
Turning 35 into the new 80.
M
Jeez, so many stories I could share. I guess the best one is the cheeseburger in the CD ROM.
Back before I started my own company, I worked as a contractor for various federal agencies. I would always run into lifers, people who had worked at these places for years and let their standards drop for grooming and personal responsibility because there was no way they could ever be fired. Anyways, a lifer was working on some cables beneath the raised floors, and was reaching down after something near the bottom. He was simultaneously eating a cheesebuger, and you could see all kinds of sauces dripping from the thing. Realizing the size of his belly prohibited easy retrieval of whatever it was he was after under the floor, this lifer stopped to put down his cheeseburger so he could lay out and get some extra reach.
Lo and behold, the place he chose to put his cheeseburger was the outstretched tray of a cd rom, and the tray closed while he was spread out on the floor. Bits and pieces of the cheeseburger made their way into the server, which in turn caught fire, which in turn set off various fire supression systems and lead to the evacuation of the facility.
Silicon smells awful when it burns and can quickly overwhelm you in an enclosed space. The lifer got himself out of the building promptly and was allowed to keep his job despite shutting down the facility and royally f***ing up the project I was working on. I was laid off after a couple days, when everyone realized they were going to need to procure new servers to replace the ones that had been damaged in the fire and that the procurement process would take months.
I try to remember this story when things go wrong at my company, and be understanding to people affected by the ding-dangitiness of others.
M
Sounds a lot like my patent, "System and Method for Allowing People to Talk." Perhaps we should get all our lawyers together for a barbeque or something.
M
See my point above in response.
Guilt by association is not the point. Talking about 'the smell' of things and spreading rumors as if they were facts is.
M
Mortality is a fact of life. I never understand why people are so ready to assign extradorinary motives to events in the absence of any facts to support their conclusions. I mean, think about it: if this was your neighbor and he died the same way, how ready would you be to say he offed himself or was knocked off by his enemies?
You probably would not. What people don't realize, when they are engaging in this kind of speculation, is they are participating in a public disinformation campaign, sometimes coming from the ground up but often coordinated by PR and media strategy firms in support of various political agendas. I work in online politics and deal with such firms on a regular basis. By spreading the word around, you are tacitly participating in that agenda as well as being exploited for your lack of information on the subject.
When Vince Foster died, there was a lot of speculation on conservative talk radio that the Clintons 'ordered a hit'. Those were the words being used, and I heard them make their way up to major media outlets again and again. I was working at Department of Commerce when it happened, and no one who knew him thought this was some nefarious deed or felt anything but sorrow for him and his family. The amount of speculation and criticism of what happened, as well as the never ending barrage of accusations that still are whispered at various events, makes me sick. Seeing people's misfortune kicked around like a soccer ball by people who have no clue what really happened but are ready to believe whatever their favorite blog / newspaper / 24 hour cable news channel / crazy uncle says is the only thing sadder.
The point of these ad-hominem, post-mortem attacks is not to discover the truth nor do they seek to establish a more well-informed public. They are designed to criminalize the other side in the minds of the people and create an atmosphere of distrust that obscures facts and distracts from real issues that people could be doing something about. A high-profile death is like a snow day in high school, it's a break from the regular news cycle and an opportunity to reinvent the national dialogue.
If you have any interest in good government, vote, get involved in civic organizations, volunteer for a worthwhile cause, find something constructive to do besides picking some poor guy's bones clean for the sake of someone else's political agenda. I mean, maybe Mike Connell did rig an election. Maybe he was Rove's homonoculous and wasted no time worrying about the law when he was ripping apart his political opponents. There are people who know the real story there, and the truth does have a funny way of coming out. But dead is dead, and Connell was a human being and a Catholic who probably deserves more than to be reduced to a talking point. Saying he was murdered or committed suicide in the absence of any facts is irresponsible speculation at best, and you probably would not be thinking this way of him were it not for his political connections.
Give the dead the same respect you would want, you'll be there too someday.
M
Dude, I got emails about it over the weekend. I don't know what the disposition of his corpse is, but there are a lot of people who were talking about this long before it hit Slashdot.
M
Dunno why this made it on the front page of Slashdot.
First off, it's old news. Mike Connell died a few days ago, at least someone could have reported it in a timely manner.
Secondly, there's really only two reasons people take much of an interest in Mike Connell. The first is that he developed technology for use in politics. Second is the whole 2004 mess, where he has been accused of voter fraud in Ohio (and allegedly in Florida).
Too much importance is given to Mike Connell and his 'role' in various things. He was a web designer, he ran a technology company, just like me and a lot of people who read Slashdot. The fact that he worked in politics is just another detail about his life (his relationship with teh turdblossom aside). He was also a board member of the American Association of Political Consultants. While listening to him speak could be entertaining, his ideas about ways to use the Internet never really struck me as anything new that hadn't already been done better by someone else.
It just makes me sad that people want to remember him for all these 'scandals' and that his notability is based on innunendo and rumor instead of the actual accomplishments in his life. I mean, I am a Dem and have no love for the man, but it is just rotten to think this is how people choose to remember him. Reducing him to a rumor of some wrongdoing and despising him over his dealings is just another way of dehumanizing the man, and people should be above that.
M
Sure, there are plenty of cooperative, non-violent video games out there. Reader Rabbit, the entire Barney series, Mavis Beacon teaches typing, Dora the Explorer, the Barbie dress up series, there are just a few of the popular games that have sold greater than 5million titles.
None of them made any money and none are really geared for adults (with the exception of Mavis Beacon, which is for adults who don't know how to use a keyboard). Just take the brand for any popular children's show on PBS or Nickelodeon and you will find a beavy of non-violent, non-competitive titles released for it.
Real gaming is always competitive, in the sense that chess is competitive. There are always challenges to be worked out, which can be done through slick moves executed as combos, puzzle solving, outstrategizing the computer, building a fortress, developing an economy, and the like. There is no reason why games have to depend on violence to acheive this basic goal.
The reason there are few non-violent titles out there is simple. Games have to appeal to the widest possible audience to be appealing, and consumers have grown up with a set of expectations for their entertainment corresponding to Hollywood archetypes. Blowing things up, fantastic settings, oversexualized female characters, strong good guy / bad guy roles, etc. are all part of what modern audiences have been spoon fed, and this is an important step in the evolution in games. People are still not used to the idea that being able to interact with others online, solving puzzles, etc. can be rewarding in itself.
The tastes of audiences changes over time, and something tells me that 100 years from now violent games will be as alien to adult gaming audiences as Barney's Puzzle Time Theater is to them now. But right now people are still infants in the world of online gaming, and non-violent, cooperative play is something that will enjoy widespread popularity in the future moreso than today.
M
I don't really care for the continential view of the term offered by this article, and don't see liberty in terms of being some mean between two extremes. Really, this idea of a lack of government intervention being an ideal relationship between man and the state is really a way of distancing people from the mechaniations of the state itself. It looks to me more like a form of divide and conquer, and a way for the state to operate unmolested by oversight on behalf of it's citizens.
Liberty can be expressed solely in terms of the relationship between man and the state, and this is a perfectly valid way of defining the term. The way I look at it, liberty is a broader concept, and one which is not limited to the form of government under which we live. Man has liberated himself from the ebb and flow and flow of nature through the pursuit of science, the unrestrained pursuit of our interests through codes of ethics, and the cultivation of our uniquely human nature through the arts. Saying that there is something special about the state, that our liberty comes from gradually eliminating it from our lives, is conceptually incompatible with these other uses of the word.
Perhaps the best expression of the word is the pursuit of a perfect union, and idea we are fond of in US politics. This is by no means meant to refer strictly to states in the union, but between its people, too. Participating in a democracy may be the highest expression of liberty, because by your very actions you are exercizing your rights as a citizen. I don't really know the answer, I just know it's hard to look at libertarian ideas and really say that the word fits.
M
Happy to find out what it will be like. NOTHING could be as bad as the current administration.
M
'Basically agrees'? He's saying Obama is going to create a socialist society in the US, and I am saying he already lives in one. I guess that's not really true, it's socialism directed towards corporations and the top 1%, which is really nationalism, but the point remains the same.
Dunno what the point about liberty means. We could argue about definitions, but any time you live in a society you give up certain rights in exchange for the benefits. Where you draw the line about who is growing liberty versus taking it away is a matter of perspective. Personally, I believe true liberty is realized when people are free from the ravages of nature.
M
He doesn't have to. Microsoft is just going to have a lot more trouble 'gaining influence' with Democrats, and it's all downhill from there.
M
No joke. Plus the suspension of basic civil rights, undercutting the posse comitatus act, widespread government surveilance of civilians, launching wars that benefit noone. GOP socialism is the worst kind of socialism anyone could ever think of.
M
Go slouch towards Gommorah somewhere else. Just because you think you are right doesn't mean other people are not. I mean, jeez, it's going to take 20 years to clean up after W before anyone could even talk about really changing society in any meaningful way.
Calling Obama a socialist after 8 years of Bush growing the government, giving titanic bailout packages to Wall Street, keeping companies alive on corporate welfare, propping up economic figures by ignoring the excesses of an industry, giving companies incentives to send jobs overseas, fighting wars that benefit no one, and all the other garbage that has been kicked up since 2000 is plain nuts. We are emerging from a form of socialism directed solely at the top 1% of Americans and it is time to move on.
M
An Obama presidency means we are going to be seeing Linux everywhere. Cars with onboard navigation systems, embedded in devices ranging from ATM machines to cell phones, operating behaind the scenes at supermarket checkout counters, claw machines at the mall, ticket booths for parking garages, desktop machines being sold at Best Buy, on PDAs for squirrels, traffic light cameras, the list is endless.
I mean, come on, Microsoft must have bought off everyone in the GOP to still be around after Vista.
M
Get a Linux / Mac version of the browser going and see what happens. I know there aren't nearly as many Linux / Mac users out there, but these are vocal communities who will extol virtues of anything that takes up less processor capacity or makes their day have one less click in it. There's an opportunity to make all these windows guys feel like they are missing out unless they use Chrome.
M
Heard this last week and thought it was a joke. You mean I can refer clients to Microsoft for support on an open source javascript library?
One big thing about jQuery is how well it works cross-browser. While some of the plug ins can be browser specific, I have rarely had issues deploying it across all browsers. But I just can't see MS supporting a cludgy issue with anything but IE.
M
Try going to the main page: http://www.eonline.com/on/shows/chelsea/ ... select the Leave Palin Alone video. It's tops.
M
It works for me. The video makes my point, actually...
M
In Alaska, oil companies send every man, woman and child a check every year to keep them quiet about what they do to the environment. I seriously doubt they have a Sunshine law.
M