The concern about "big" versus "small" government is not a political concern. It's a political talking point primarily, a shorthand for "I'm with you," or "they're against you."
When looking at the reality of behavior and decisions made by proponents of either meaninglessly vague philosophy, it becomes clear that few have any moral compunctions about inflating the size and influence of programs that benefit their constituents or ensure a constant flow of political capital.
There are things that governments, accountable to many people, do well or, must do because they are programs or tasks that cannot be carried out by groups that are accountable to the very few, or who cannot take long-term losses. Likewise, there are many things government is not suited for, such as short-term profit, specialized R&D, or rapid deployment.
It's sad that "government" becomes synonymous with "waste," but the fault for that interpretation lies at least partially with those who think that government and the private sector are interchangeable. Extreme libertarians and extreme authoritarians are deluded in much the same way, mirror images of each other.
Personally, the comments of the person from the private sector seem most valuable for someone trying to choose between the two. The other article seems mostly a cautionary tale of what goes wrong when orgs with not enough oversight are given too much responsibility.
More than any other single computer manufacturer, Apple's hardware and software is associated with content creation and production. In addition to Apple simply protecting license agreements it may have on Superdrive and DVD burning software, I see it also as a bone thrown to the big gorillas to let them know that Apple's on their side.
Remember "Rip, Mix, Burn"? Apple needs to make doubly sure that at some point in the future, the Macintosh itself isn't ruled by some court to be a circumvention device. It needs both the PR and legal record to show that it has acted in good faith WRT copyrighted material.[1] Apple may be behaving evilly here, but it's within a much larger context of what individual entities must do to survive in a legal framework that is horribly bent.
For what it's worth, I personally think that OWC is completely within its (moral) rights to distribute whatever patch it wants, DMCA or no. Instructions are instructions are instructions, compiled, in C++, in Applescript, or in english. If you bought a computer, it's yours to run whatever you want on it. If you wrote a program that does something on a computer, and someone else wants to use that same program, you can give it to them. It's very simple. The DMCA is a travesty.
--------
Everybody creates copyrighted material, but it seems to be the understated goal of the RIAA and others that only copyrighted material that is bankrolled by multinational conglomerates make it into the hands of the general public.
Liza Richardson, featured in one of the ads, is a real, honest-to-goodness DJ at KCRW, an influential public radio station in Santa Monica. You can listen to her show The Drop on Saturday evenings from 7PM to 9PM (Pacific) in Real, MP3, and Windows Media. 89.9FM for those of you in Los Angeles.
She was also music supervisor for the recent movie Y tu mam tambien by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarn.
I don't know the other people in the ads, but I work with people who know Richardson personally, and I listen to her show from time to time.
If figure I'm just giving air time to a troll, however.
Re:Donations from individual listeners are HUGE
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 1
My local network affiliate, with a listenership of 450,000 claims in its FAQ that most of its funding comes from its listeners.
Re:Non-thinkers call the thoughtful center "biased
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 2
Fox packages the news in a neat, easily digestible package. It is clearly labeled in a manner in which anyone, regardless of effort or intellectual capacity, can decide whether they are "for" or "against" this or that issue. It may be reporting, but it wants of analysis, and only barely fits the description of journalism. Of course the same could be said of most major media outlets, but in my opinion, Fox is the worst. Whether it's "conservative" or "liberal" is irrelevant; it's just *bad*.
NPR by contrast suffers from no obligation to advertisers and therefore doesn't have to worry about drawing the most listeners. Their market is a set of people who are capable of thinking for themselves and realize that the news isn't a story with beginning-middle-end, protagonists and bad guys. The difference shows. Smart conservatives and liberals alike listen to NPR because they know they're being valued as an intelligent listener, rather than as a "consumer" whose sole function is to buy the products hawked on the station.
Re:Govt. should NOT be paying for this
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Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 1
PBS absolutely kills commercial T.V. when it comes to coverage of science, art and general news. Commercial television is all about entertainment, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but many interesting and intelligent programs get left on the shelf when that comes to the fore.
NPR vs. commercial radio? Don't make me laugh. From music to talk to local news to international news, public radio works commercial radio up, sideways, backwards, left, right, inside, outside, and upside down. Commercial stations do sports well, but otherwise you're presented with the same five exact formats from coast-to-coast, only with slightly different call letters. Commercial radio, for the most part, is cultural blight and a waste of bandwidth.
As long as the government allows international media conglomerates to swoop into town and swallow as many television and radio stations as they please, I'm going to continue to endorse the damn fine programming on PBS, NPR, and other public stations.
Sure, IE has 93% penetration, but it got there not only because it was bundled, but because developers wrote code for it.
I was not interested at all in scripting web pages during the time of two separate object models (Netscape and IE). Too much headache and pain, not enough return. Now, looking at Mozilla's support of the W3C DOM, I'm really interested in writing browser-based applications. Part of it is that MS sits on the W3C and at least nominally is committed to supporting those standards.
Another part is that I know, regardless of platform, I can deploy a thin application with one code base. Even my boneheaded MCSE-heavy IS&T department recognizes this value, and if I said "we can do this on *any* platform now and it'll be really easy," there would be little resistance to installing a free browser.
Developers have a lot of leverage, and Mozilla is an attractive platform in its own right:
OS independent, available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, among others
Open source, ensuring longevity and availability
support of open standards... even Opera or OmniWeb can Do the Right Thing and support W3C recommendations. The same can't be said of IE conventions.
Microsoft's standards support is just enough that we can start coding in the direction of the recommendations without disrupting IE users (too much) while making the case for broader standards support.
Ultimately, it's up to developers to be vocal and support the platforms that enable them to do the most good.
Could very well be that this is another case of them crying wolf.
It is worth noting, as long as we're speaking of allegory, that the Boy Who Cries Wolf eventually had his flock consumed by a real canine.
As others have noted, there are almost no technological or physical limitations to making copies. The MPAA and RIAA might actually be facing a real crisis this time.
Even if the car is unlocked, taking what is not yours is still theft.
It's not entrapment unless an LEO (or agent) is influencing the crime in some way... suggestion, approval, etc. You know, like posing as a john, or a buyer, or (name your vice)...
It's really quite logical... the Mac platform has always used the click+modifiers thing... the assumption being that your other hand is probably on the keyboard anyway.
Not that I don't appreciate mice with scroll wheels and right clicks, but really, it's entirely consistent with the Mac experience to have clicks modified by keys on the keyboard. Shift-click and option-click (among others) have been significant and pervasive since January 24, 1984.
Come to think of it, I'd prefer a "scroll region" on the trackpad to a second mouse button as, I've been told, implemented on some PC laptops.
Printout on both Windows and Macintosh versions of Mozilla have problems with certain types of tables spanning multiple pages. Netscape 6 seems to handle this okay, so it's something specific to Mozilla itself.
Can you say "Afghanistan"?
Can you say "daisy cutter"?
Setting up shop in a country with lax laws would seem to be profitable only in the short term. If the RIAA decides that file sharing constitutes terrorism of sorts, then you can guarantee that (figurative) bombs will drop in Antigua, Barbados, and other "fringe" domains.
"Faster better cheaper" was Goldin's doctrine during his tenure at NASA. Perhaps history will be kinder to him, in light of defense and research budgets tightening all throughout the '90s, but many people, including those who worked for NASA and various government labs thought the policy disastrous.
My father works for a lab that contracts with NASA quite a bit (I won't name names, but its initials are J.P.L.), and they've really suffered politically and monetarily, with a number of unmanned missions in the past few years failing directly or indirectly due to "faster better cheaper." As any rational engineer knows, you can only have two.
Part of the strategy was to cut down on "battlestar galactica" projects that occupied resources on the scale of decades -- the Voyager project is one example -- in favor of less expensive, more easily mobilized efforts. Part of the huge cost of missions like Voyager was the amount of in-house quality checking that went on. Hundreds of pairs of eyes with knowledge of the entire project constantly monitored progress. It's an expensive way to go, but the success of many of NASA's flagship missions were due to this.
When FBC became policy, labs were forced to cut staff and contract out more. The results are more frequent missions (Mars is a big focus now), but diminished quality. Most of the major disasters in recent unmanned projects are directly attributable to communication breakdowns between labs, agencies, and contractors that simply would not have happened in the old monolithic model.
It could be argued that FBC saved NASA from some hard times that could have been harder. However, it also resulted in many glitches in a system that had prided itself on quality and accuracy. How do you balance the two? Ultimately, it was all under Goldin's watch; the buck stops there.
On the contrary, it keeps Apple standards-compliant and removes what may or may not be a stumbling block at some point, akin to the the "Mac has SCSI, PC has IDE" arguments of yore. By embracing both (and continuing to make Firewire kick ass), they simply make their hardware open to a lot of options.
The price of inclusion in this case is trivial, and the potential benefit is significant. This can't be anything but good for Apple.
Except that a careless parent who left his strong crypto software out doesn't have to worry nearly as much about his emotionially troubled teen taking the stuff to school and hurting his classmates with it.
Not that I'm not also concerned about erosion of the rights you're talking about, but the analogy is a poor one.
Even for one-time or very occasional players, the very act of getting up on the pad and moving your body to the music strikes a very primal chord with most people.
Of all gaming phenomena, this is the one that strikes me as most bizarre. Pay $5-$10 bucks in any number of locations on any given night in a reasonably large city and you can have the real thing. If DDR is the future of arcades and a harbinger of social interaction, what does that mean for the tried and true dance halls and clubs that are far more real than any arcade game ever could be?
It's always a chicken and egg thing of course, but developers must always rely on early adopters to flesh out their programs. Linux has plenty of coders, but few non-geek users.
As it is, Linux UI progress has been slow because much of its development has existed within a large but singularly focused community. You need the pioneering end-user (a rare, but critical beast) to provide feedback to developers. You'd have more pioneers if the OS was preloaded. Period. That's just one less hurdle to overcome.
Before we get upset and assume that there is some sort of corporate conspiracy keeping multi-OS systems off the shelfs, it seems a more reasonable explination that most people simply would'nt want to deal with Two OSws.
This seems to me a very plausible and obvious reason why Apple has given short shrift to the idea of shipping a full MacOS X-on-x86. For that to be successful, you have to get people to use it. As stated in the article, most people will use what's shipped with their machine, and if clone makers are beholden to do what Microsoft says or else, no other OS stands a chance on the consumer x86 desktop.
I guarantee you would see more commercially viable apps (and UIs) for Linux if a major vendor (Dell, Compaq, Gateway) shipped it and made it as easy to get to as Windows.
This is all the article is saying... people have figured out how to use the web in a way that they find beneficial, and they're tuning out the dreck.
Something else to consider: more people use the web directly in their business. It's less of a hobbyist's toy (which is how it remains for many geeks), and more of a practical tool for any number of purposes. When you have a job to do, you don't futz around -- you go straight to the sources you know work for you.
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The concern about "big" versus "small" government is not a political concern. It's a political talking point primarily, a shorthand for "I'm with you," or "they're against you."
When looking at the reality of behavior and decisions made by proponents of either meaninglessly vague philosophy, it becomes clear that few have any moral compunctions about inflating the size and influence of programs that benefit their constituents or ensure a constant flow of political capital.
There are things that governments, accountable to many people, do well or, must do because they are programs or tasks that cannot be carried out by groups that are accountable to the very few, or who cannot take long-term losses. Likewise, there are many things government is not suited for, such as short-term profit, specialized R&D, or rapid deployment.
It's sad that "government" becomes synonymous with "waste," but the fault for that interpretation lies at least partially with those who think that government and the private sector are interchangeable. Extreme libertarians and extreme authoritarians are deluded in much the same way, mirror images of each other.
Personally, the comments of the person from the private sector seem most valuable for someone trying to choose between the two. The other article seems mostly a cautionary tale of what goes wrong when orgs with not enough oversight are given too much responsibility.
More than any other single computer manufacturer, Apple's hardware and software is associated with content creation and production. In addition to Apple simply protecting license agreements it may have on Superdrive and DVD burning software, I see it also as a bone thrown to the big gorillas to let them know that Apple's on their side.
Remember "Rip, Mix, Burn"? Apple needs to make doubly sure that at some point in the future, the Macintosh itself isn't ruled by some court to be a circumvention device. It needs both the PR and legal record to show that it has acted in good faith WRT copyrighted material.[1] Apple may be behaving evilly here, but it's within a much larger context of what individual entities must do to survive in a legal framework that is horribly bent.
For what it's worth, I personally think that OWC is completely within its (moral) rights to distribute whatever patch it wants, DMCA or no. Instructions are instructions are instructions, compiled, in C++, in Applescript, or in english. If you bought a computer, it's yours to run whatever you want on it. If you wrote a program that does something on a computer, and someone else wants to use that same program, you can give it to them. It's very simple. The DMCA is a travesty.
--------
Liza Richardson, featured in one of the ads, is a real, honest-to-goodness DJ at KCRW, an influential public radio station in Santa Monica. You can listen to her show The Drop on Saturday evenings from 7PM to 9PM (Pacific) in Real, MP3, and Windows Media. 89.9FM for those of you in Los Angeles.
She was also music supervisor for the recent movie Y tu mam tambien by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarn.
I don't know the other people in the ads, but I work with people who know Richardson personally, and I listen to her show from time to time.
If figure I'm just giving air time to a troll, however.
My local network affiliate, with a listenership of 450,000 claims in its FAQ that most of its funding comes from its listeners.
Fox packages the news in a neat, easily digestible package. It is clearly labeled in a manner in which anyone, regardless of effort or intellectual capacity, can decide whether they are "for" or "against" this or that issue. It may be reporting, but it wants of analysis, and only barely fits the description of journalism. Of course the same could be said of most major media outlets, but in my opinion, Fox is the worst. Whether it's "conservative" or "liberal" is irrelevant; it's just *bad*.
NPR by contrast suffers from no obligation to advertisers and therefore doesn't have to worry about drawing the most listeners. Their market is a set of people who are capable of thinking for themselves and realize that the news isn't a story with beginning-middle-end, protagonists and bad guys. The difference shows. Smart conservatives and liberals alike listen to NPR because they know they're being valued as an intelligent listener, rather than as a "consumer" whose sole function is to buy the products hawked on the station.
PBS absolutely kills commercial T.V. when it comes to coverage of science, art and general news. Commercial television is all about entertainment, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but many interesting and intelligent programs get left on the shelf when that comes to the fore.
NPR vs. commercial radio? Don't make me laugh. From music to talk to local news to international news, public radio works commercial radio up, sideways, backwards, left, right, inside, outside, and upside down. Commercial stations do sports well, but otherwise you're presented with the same five exact formats from coast-to-coast, only with slightly different call letters. Commercial radio, for the most part, is cultural blight and a waste of bandwidth.
As long as the government allows international media conglomerates to swoop into town and swallow as many television and radio stations as they please, I'm going to continue to endorse the damn fine programming on PBS, NPR, and other public stations.
Sure, IE has 93% penetration, but it got there not only because it was bundled, but because developers wrote code for it.
I was not interested at all in scripting web pages during the time of two separate object models (Netscape and IE). Too much headache and pain, not enough return. Now, looking at Mozilla's support of the W3C DOM, I'm really interested in writing browser-based applications. Part of it is that MS sits on the W3C and at least nominally is committed to supporting those standards.
Another part is that I know, regardless of platform, I can deploy a thin application with one code base. Even my boneheaded MCSE-heavy IS&T department recognizes this value, and if I said "we can do this on *any* platform now and it'll be really easy," there would be little resistance to installing a free browser.
Developers have a lot of leverage, and Mozilla is an attractive platform in its own right:
Microsoft's standards support is just enough that we can start coding in the direction of the recommendations without disrupting IE users (too much) while making the case for broader standards support.
Ultimately, it's up to developers to be vocal and support the platforms that enable them to do the most good.
Could very well be that this is another case of them crying wolf.
It is worth noting, as long as we're speaking of allegory, that the Boy Who Cries Wolf eventually had his flock consumed by a real canine.
As others have noted, there are almost no technological or physical limitations to making copies. The MPAA and RIAA might actually be facing a real crisis this time.
Personally, I'd be happy to see them devoured.
Even if the car is unlocked, taking what is not yours is still theft.
It's not entrapment unless an LEO (or agent) is influencing the crime in some way... suggestion, approval, etc. You know, like posing as a john, or a buyer, or (name your vice)...
It's really quite logical... the Mac platform has always used the click+modifiers thing... the assumption being that your other hand is probably on the keyboard anyway.
Not that I don't appreciate mice with scroll wheels and right clicks, but really, it's entirely consistent with the Mac experience to have clicks modified by keys on the keyboard. Shift-click and option-click (among others) have been significant and pervasive since January 24, 1984.
Come to think of it, I'd prefer a "scroll region" on the trackpad to a second mouse button as, I've been told, implemented on some PC laptops.
Printout on both Windows and Macintosh versions of Mozilla have problems with certain types of tables spanning multiple pages. Netscape 6 seems to handle this okay, so it's something specific to Mozilla itself.
Can you say "Afghanistan"?
Can you say "daisy cutter"?
Setting up shop in a country with lax laws would seem to be profitable only in the short term. If the RIAA decides that file sharing constitutes terrorism of sorts, then you can guarantee that (figurative) bombs will drop in Antigua, Barbados, and other "fringe" domains.
"Faster better cheaper" was Goldin's doctrine during his tenure at NASA. Perhaps history will be kinder to him, in light of defense and research budgets tightening all throughout the '90s, but many people, including those who worked for NASA and various government labs thought the policy disastrous.
My father works for a lab that contracts with NASA quite a bit (I won't name names, but its initials are J.P.L.), and they've really suffered politically and monetarily, with a number of unmanned missions in the past few years failing directly or indirectly due to "faster better cheaper." As any rational engineer knows, you can only have two.
Part of the strategy was to cut down on "battlestar galactica" projects that occupied resources on the scale of decades -- the Voyager project is one example -- in favor of less expensive, more easily mobilized efforts. Part of the huge cost of missions like Voyager was the amount of in-house quality checking that went on. Hundreds of pairs of eyes with knowledge of the entire project constantly monitored progress. It's an expensive way to go, but the success of many of NASA's flagship missions were due to this.
When FBC became policy, labs were forced to cut staff and contract out more. The results are more frequent missions (Mars is a big focus now), but diminished quality. Most of the major disasters in recent unmanned projects are directly attributable to communication breakdowns between labs, agencies, and contractors that simply would not have happened in the old monolithic model.
It could be argued that FBC saved NASA from some hard times that could have been harder. However, it also resulted in many glitches in a system that had prided itself on quality and accuracy. How do you balance the two? Ultimately, it was all under Goldin's watch; the buck stops there.
They're probably considering the *two* Firewire busses and summing the bandwidth.
1.6Gbps + 1.6Gbps = 3.2Gbps
On the contrary, it keeps Apple standards-compliant and removes what may or may not be a stumbling block at some point, akin to the the "Mac has SCSI, PC has IDE" arguments of yore. By embracing both (and continuing to make Firewire kick ass), they simply make their hardware open to a lot of options.
The price of inclusion in this case is trivial, and the potential benefit is significant. This can't be anything but good for Apple.
Except that a careless parent who left his strong crypto software out doesn't have to worry nearly as much about his emotionially troubled teen taking the stuff to school and hurting his classmates with it.
Not that I'm not also concerned about erosion of the rights you're talking about, but the analogy is a poor one.
She's a brick ---- OS
Mightay mightay just lettin' it all hang out...
Hey! A theme song, and another potential infringement! What more could you ask for?
Even for one-time or very occasional players, the very act of getting up on the pad and moving your body to the music strikes a very primal chord with most people.
Of all gaming phenomena, this is the one that strikes me as most bizarre. Pay $5-$10 bucks in any number of locations on any given night in a reasonably large city and you can have the real thing. If DDR is the future of arcades and a harbinger of social interaction, what does that mean for the tried and true dance halls and clubs that are far more real than any arcade game ever could be?
On the other hand, a caffeine overdose may be one of the more painful and sickening experiences of your life.
;-)
Like any drug... do it in extreme moderation.
It's always a chicken and egg thing of course, but developers must always rely on early adopters to flesh out their programs. Linux has plenty of coders, but few non-geek users.
As it is, Linux UI progress has been slow because much of its development has existed within a large but singularly focused community. You need the pioneering end-user (a rare, but critical beast) to provide feedback to developers. You'd have more pioneers if the OS was preloaded. Period. That's just one less hurdle to overcome.
Before we get upset and assume that there is some sort of corporate conspiracy keeping multi-OS systems off the shelfs, it seems a more reasonable explination that most people simply would'nt want to deal with Two OSws.
Who needs a conspiracy when you've got Microsoft?
This seems to me a very plausible and obvious reason why Apple has given short shrift to the idea of shipping a full MacOS X-on-x86. For that to be successful, you have to get people to use it. As stated in the article, most people will use what's shipped with their machine, and if clone makers are beholden to do what Microsoft says or else, no other OS stands a chance on the consumer x86 desktop.
I guarantee you would see more commercially viable apps (and UIs) for Linux if a major vendor (Dell, Compaq, Gateway) shipped it and made it as easy to get to as Windows.
This is all the article is saying... people have figured out how to use the web in a way that they find beneficial, and they're tuning out the dreck.
Something else to consider: more people use the web directly in their business. It's less of a hobbyist's toy (which is how it remains for many geeks), and more of a practical tool for any number of purposes. When you have a job to do, you don't futz around -- you go straight to the sources you know work for you.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will certainly give them L.
Except that Microsoft isn't a person.
If the company gets broken up, nobody dies. Some people may lose their jobs, but for most (possibly all) of them, that will be a temporary condition.
Yes, American legal tradition has given corporations the same rights as individuals. Is that really a *good* thing?