Note that the question is not 'Would you support backdoors in cryptography', but 'would backdoors be helpful?'
Two ENTIRELY different questions. The results of this survey have no relation to whether or not Americans actually SUPPORT said backdoors.
I think any one of us would be hard pressed to say that crypto backdoors wouldn't help the investigation. Simply admitting that doesn't mean you think it's right.
Seriously, Mr. Katz, don't you think these people have enough to do without you poking around?
Stay out. Leave them alone. Let them do their jobs. They don't need to worry about your sorry ass while they try to do the hardest thing most of them have ever had to
I have a Palm m505, personally. I love it, but I'd like easier connectivity. 802.11 support would be perfect. I'd love to use web clipping applications through my existing Internet connection(s) wirelessly.
Yes they can. However this doesn't justifie it as right. This means that some people using Linux or any other OS that they don't support will not be able to use their service.
And again, so what? There's nothing inherently wrong with that ideal.
If Napster, or Microsoft, or Bob's House of Software doesn't release versions of software for Linux, then so be it. That's their call, not yours. If they also decide that you can only access their service using their client, then there is also nothing wrong with that. They have a complete right to do that.
There are good points and bad points to any OS. One of the negatives for Linux is no Napster. That's Napster's call, and it's completely right.
The general thought in the past, and still held by many mental health professionals, is that the viewing of sexually explicit material before the child is ready can lead to various mental and sexual problems. This is borne out by several case studies of young children who are scarred by viewing their parents having sex. Said children do not yet have the mental capacity to deal with this, and often think of the act itself as a violent assault. In addition, it's often felt that pornography portrays an unhealthy sexual relationship, and should not be shown to people too young to understand the fantasy element of it.
I do agree with this ideal. Children shouldn't be allowed to see porn, just as children should not be allowed to see violence. Most can't deal with it - they don't have the knowledge or experience to deal with it as it actually is.
Having said that, the responsibility is on the parents to ensure that their children are not viewing this stuff. Don't make it harder for adults to get to it - educate parents on the problems involved. Make them responsible, not everyone else.
The question is, do you want parts, or whole systems? If you're looking for whole systems, boot each one until you find one that works. Swap parts from ones that don't boot into the ones that do until you find which parts are damaged on the unbootables.
If you're going for parts, take all 40 apart. Build one out of good parts, maybe, for testing purposes. Test them en masse - hard drive after hard drive after hard drive, for instance.
Either way, this could be a nice windfall. Don't forget to save all the little things that come in handy, like like expansion card covers, screws, power supplies, etc.
The worst thing you can do in an academic setting is imply that you are using the network connection for anything other than direct academic uses. SSH/telnet ports should be easy to keep open. Explain that you're using them for remote access to email or whatever. Many students put up personal webpages for their job search - resumes, downloadable snipepts of code, etc. Point out that that will be gone. Pick your battles, though. You may not win on http, but shoot for ftp, or vice versa. Don't throw down over Napster or the like, becase from an academic standpoint, there is not much use.
If anyone says "I'm going to kill people here", should we just ignore it? Laugh it off? Pretend it never happened? Hell no! I agree, to a certain extent, that adolescents AND adults say things they don't mean. Investigations do need to take this into account. To presume, however, that the solution to this problem lies with students(or anyone else) ignoring everything they hear is patently absurd! What if, for instance, I was to say "I will kill the CEO of my company this Thursday at four." Would it be absurd for one of my coworkers to report me? Of course not! This is a legitimate threat. Now, lets' say the CEO does something I don't like, and I say, off the cuff, "Geez, I'd like to take that bastard out". Probably harmless. But still, it should be investigated, or at LEAST given a cursory examination!
Threatening others, while certainly easy to do, and a way to let off steam, is not acceptable, under any circumstances. This is not the sort of thing that can be argued is harmless to others. If this student had been serious, the safety of the whole school was at stake.
The student who blew the whistle, in this case, did precisely what she was supposed to do. She heard a threat with no context and reported it. Did the school overreact? Perhaps. Should the school have been sued? Maybe. Should she? Hell no. For one, it prevents her right to free speech as well. For two, she was providing credible, correct information about a possibly dangerous situation to someone in a position to do something about it.
In the end, what is crucial here is to remember that anything you say can be overheard and misinterpreted. If you don't mean it, don't say it. It is easier said than done, but is the best way to prevent problems like this one.
(My apologies for the odd formatting. Posting through lynx will do that to you.)
Security officers are good resources, in most cases. Problem is, they generally don't directly understand computing.
So find yourself an Information Security expert. Get him to set some policy. Make him a display admin, at least - the ability to see anything out there.
Be sure to find someone who knows how everything fits together, not just someone who is an auditing expert or an administration expert.
If they can't convince us their service is worth paying for, then they'll just have to arrest us and throw us all in jail; because I really don't care about the interests of every large company and its consumers who defend it like mindless drones.
So if they can't convince you their service is worth paying for, it's OK for you to just take it? If I want to charge you 50 bucks a night for a hotel room, and you don't think it's worth it, are you then allowed to just take the room?
And don't even try to compare my use of the word 'kids' to racism. That's ludicrous on face value alone.
This is the perfect solution to a nagging problem. Direct TV sells a service. They make money from the sale of this service, and they provide the infrastructure, the broadcast, the hardware, etc.
Then, a bunch of kids decide that they want what DirectTV has, but not at their terms. So they steal the service. Yes, they stole it. Hell, they admit it in the article.
So what does DirectTV do? They beat the hackers at their own game. They outplay, outsmart, and outfox them.
Bravo. They protected themselves and their market share in the best way possible. In the end, we can all appreciate the beauty of this particular hack.
At this time(2030 EST), the race is still too close to call.
In the next few hours, a President will be elected. It'll be George W Bush or Al Gore.
No matter who it is, let's not make the same mistakes we made last time.
Let the new guy do his job. Let's not pick through his sexual past. Let's not drool over blue dresses, and piccadilloes that no one really cares about.
Congress, stop playing like a bunch of whiny crybabies. Work positively, not negatively. Don't investigate the President. Leave him be. You blew too much money on absolutely nothing. Let it go.
If your party gets defeated, take it. Deal with it. Work to make the country better. Five year olds hold grudges - not the men we put in office.
This time, let's come behind our President. He really is OUR President. He may belong to one party or the other, but he is ours. Support him as much as you can. You can disagree, but he is our symbol.
I was fifteenth in line at my precinct this morning. I wanted to get there early so I could watch the returns tonight. It was remarkably painless. I was in and out in twenty minutes, which seems to be pretty good. The only peeve were the two people behind me who chattered on about all sorts of nothingness for twenty minutes.
Motor Trend's September issue....
on
Geocaching
·
· Score: 2
...has a contest just like this. During this years' Death Valley Torture Test, they hid four MT license plates in Death Valley. They give you the coordinates in the issue, and the first people to find the plates get a prize of some sort.
It's a neat idea - I just wish I lived closer to Death Valley.
So let's see, the kid distributed someone else's property without their permission. He broke the law, and campus rules, and got slammed for it.
I can guarantee that if someone distributed Linux without proper permissions, violating the GPL or something, you'd all jump on his back.
I support the distribution of music over the Net wholheartedly. But, the music and movies do belong to someone, and taking it from them is stealing.
Defending people who are obviously guilty just because it deals with "the Internet" serves no more then to dilute the cause and make you look like fools.
NOTE: My apologies if there is another post here with the same subject - a minor misclick on my part.
DVD is a great example of this, as is Sorenson,AOL, msword and ActiveX plugins. Each serve to restrict your choice and funnel you into buying and consuming only certain product.
Bull.
Who are you to say that Microsoft can't market Word because it doesn't work with everything? If you don't like it, don't use it. That's freedom. Same with AOL and DVDs. You don't like how they work? Fine. But you have zero right to tell me that I can't use them, or tell Sony that they can't produce them.
A free market is one where you can put out anything, no matter how open or proprietary. You can also buy anything, no matter how open or proprietary.
No one prevents you, personally, from using a competing product to any of those. That's a free market.
It is crucial to remember in these discussions that free software is not equal to freedom.
Freedom entails doing what you feel like with what you feel like. Of course, there are limits - your freedom can not encroach on another's, for instance, or cause harm to others.
If I create a software package, and I decide to keep it closed source, patent it, and sell it for 100 dollars a pop, that's MY decision to make.
Freedom does not necessarily equal doing what is "best" for everyone. Even if we could decide what is the best for everyone, it's still within my purview to decide not to do it.
A wise man once said "I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." (paraphrased)
My decision to open or close my software is my decision alone. You have absolutely no say in it whatsoever. That, right there, is freedom.
So, you went down there, specifically, to protest something.
You placed yourself in a group specifically designed to get arrested.
You decided to be both belligerent and evasive to the officer involved.
You declined to provide identification when asked for it.
You implied, on camera, that the officers involved might steal your money.
I say, what DID you expect to happen?
For God's sake, if a cop asks to see your ID, show it to him. You look damned suspicious otherwise. If you weren't carrying any contraband, why bother hiding it. You can crow about "the principle" of it, but the fact is, you're a reporter looking to get a story. So far, your story boils down to "cops picked on me after I gave them reason to".
The cops didn't cuff you. Sounds to me like they held on to you while they checked your record. Standard operating procedure. You were belligerent, uncooperative, acting like you had something to hide. THey didn't cuff you. When you implied they were robbers, they responded by calling you "sir" and assuring that your stuff would still be there. They checked on you to make sure you were comfortable, temperaturewise. WHen they saw you had no record, they released you.
But, because they were cops, they MUST have been wrong, right? God forbid they would ever arrest you, because you MUST be an upstanding citizen. Here's a clue for you - if you intentionally try to make life hard for anyone, they will probably reciprocate.
I see a lot of uncorroborated stuff here. Hunkapiller is just like Bill Gates? Hunkapiller is managing the future of the human race? Please.
Of course, this is another article which is meant to raise our hackles and get us ticked off about another subject. Give the Human Genome Project time to really do some work before we decide that "Hunkapiller Syndrome" is totally evil and on it's way.
You really want to get ticked off, read the history of nuclear power and radiation. You'll see the stupidity and viciousness that came through that.
BTW - hey, Jon, if I want to seem tons smarter then everyone else, I too, can come up with a name no one has heard of and try to make people feel dumb. It's a bad tactic - don't use it.
More importantly, I believe in the inherent security involved with OPen Source.
However, I don't believe that we need to be kissing Eric S Raymond's ass. C'mon, this article said nothing new about security, or open source, or anything.
Maybe if he'd brought up some new points, or had given new examples of how the Open Source movement had helped.
Rather, we get vague notions of how it would maybe do something.
I like ESR as much as the next guy, but I don't think his OPen Source work should give him a/. soapbox.
ChickClicks is the name of a website (or more aptly, group of sites) run by a woman he mentions in the story. Read the whole article before jumping to conclusions next time.
I did read the whole article. Jon brings up the name ChickClickers a full two paragraphs before he mentions ChickClick.com, and uses the moniker throughout the article, often without relation to Chickclick.com or anything related. In short, maybe you should've read the article, instead of jumping to conclusions about mine.
C'mon, Jon. Can't you ever get a point across without stereotyping? It's not enough to refer to every single person on Slashdot as a 'geek', as if we were all cut from the same cloth and were the exact same person, but now you're branching out. Now, you've taken women who use the Internet and lump them together as "Chickclickers". Not only is the name vaguely insulting, but you're once again assuming that you can simply lump a group of people together under a name and it'll all be good.
People aren't all the same, Jon. Drop the stereotyping, and maybe your points will be better heard.
Heard this story a little while ago, and I believe it was in reference to the CurseFree product. Seems that they had programmed the thing to flag on keywords. Not too uncommon. Problem was, it was pretty undiscriminating.
The most egregious error? The "Dick Van Dyke" show was titled the "Penis Van Lesbian" show.
Possibly an urban legend, but it sounds plausible to me.
According to NPR's "Morning Edition", last night's ceremony was the longest in Oscar history
Really? I try to catch the Oscars regularly, and I thought this year's was pretty short. Of course, I didn't time it specifically. Maybe it jsut seemed that way. It seemed to flow pretty well.
How does my viewing of someone adjusting a tie backstage, or someone adjusting themselves, or someone practicing a speech add to my enjoyment of the event?
Do I need to see the sets and props for "The Fugitive" or "Apollo 13" painted and selected before I can watch the movie?
And even if I do, how is that "interactive"? There's no interaction there. My seeing Kevin Spacey backstage lends nothing to my relationship with Kevin Spacey. I didn't "interact" with him or anything else - they just stuck an extra camera guy back there.
Finally, I don't think the screenplay/music display was anything special. It was a set dressing decision. They could've easily shown cast pictures, or stills from the movie. The screenplays weren't up there long enough for anyone to read or parse.
In short, I don't see anything these Oscars did that previous years didn't do. Other then being relatively short(for the Oscars) and pretty funny, thanks to Billy Crystal.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that the question is not 'Would you support backdoors in cryptography', but 'would backdoors be helpful?'
Two ENTIRELY different questions. The results of this survey have no relation to whether or not Americans actually SUPPORT said backdoors.
I think any one of us would be hard pressed to say that crypto backdoors wouldn't help the investigation. Simply admitting that doesn't mean you think it's right.
Seriously, Mr. Katz, don't you think these people have enough to do without you poking around?
Stay out. Leave them alone. Let them do their jobs. They don't need to worry about your sorry ass while they try to do the hardest thing most of them have ever had to
I have a Palm m505, personally. I love it, but I'd like easier connectivity. 802.11 support would be perfect. I'd love to use web clipping applications through my existing Internet connection(s) wirelessly.
Yes they can. However this doesn't justifie it as right. This means
that some people using Linux or any other OS that they don't support
will not be able to use their service.
And again, so what? There's nothing inherently wrong with that ideal.
If Napster, or Microsoft, or Bob's House of Software doesn't release versions of software for Linux, then so be it. That's their call, not yours.
If they also decide that you can only access their service using their client, then there is also nothing wrong with that.
They have a complete right to do that.
There are good points and bad points to any OS. One of the negatives for Linux is no Napster. That's Napster's call, and it's completely right.
The general thought in the past, and still held by many mental health professionals,
is that the viewing of sexually explicit material before the child is ready can lead to various mental and sexual problems.
This is borne out by several case studies of young children who are scarred by
viewing their parents having sex. Said children do not
yet have the mental capacity to deal with this, and often think of
the act itself as a violent assault. In addition, it's often
felt that pornography portrays an unhealthy sexual relationship,
and should not be shown to people too young to understand the
fantasy element of it.
I do agree with this ideal. Children shouldn't be allowed to see porn, just as
children should not be allowed to see violence. Most can't deal with it -
they don't have the knowledge or experience to deal with it
as it actually is.
Having said that, the responsibility is on the parents to ensure
that their children are not viewing this stuff. Don't make it
harder for adults to get to it - educate parents on the problems
involved. Make them responsible, not everyone else.
The question is, do you want parts, or whole systems?
If you're looking for whole systems, boot each one
until you find one that works. Swap parts from ones that
don't boot into the ones that do until you find
which parts are damaged on the unbootables.
If you're going for parts, take all 40 apart. Build
one out of good parts, maybe, for testing purposes.
Test them en masse - hard drive after hard drive
after hard drive, for instance.
Either way, this could be a nice windfall. Don't forget
to save all the little things that come in handy, like
like expansion card covers, screws, power supplies, etc.
The worst thing you can do in an academic setting
is imply that you are using the network connection for anything other than direct academic uses.
SSH/telnet ports should be easy to keep open. Explain that you're using them for remote access to email or whatever.
Many students put up personal webpages for their job search - resumes, downloadable snipepts of code, etc. Point out that that will be gone.
Pick your battles, though. You may not win on http, but shoot for ftp, or vice versa. Don't throw down over Napster or the like,
becase from an academic standpoint, there is not much use.
Good luck!
If anyone says "I'm going to kill people here",
should we just ignore it? Laugh it off? Pretend
it never happened? Hell no!
I agree, to a certain extent, that adolescents AND
adults say things they don't mean. Investigations
do need to take this into account.
To presume, however, that the solution to this
problem lies with students(or anyone else) ignoring
everything they hear is patently absurd! What if,
for instance, I was to say "I will kill the CEO of my
company this Thursday at four." Would it be absurd
for one of my coworkers to report me? Of course
not! This is a legitimate threat. Now, lets' say the
CEO does something I don't like, and I say, off the
cuff, "Geez, I'd like to take that bastard out".
Probably harmless. But still, it should be
investigated, or at LEAST given a cursory examination!
Threatening others, while certainly easy to do, and a
way to let off steam, is not acceptable, under any
circumstances. This is not the sort of thing that
can be argued is harmless to others. If this student
had been serious, the safety of the whole school
was at stake.
The student who blew the whistle, in this case,
did precisely what she was supposed to do. She
heard a threat with no context and reported it.
Did the school overreact? Perhaps. Should the
school have been sued? Maybe. Should she? Hell no.
For one, it prevents her right to free speech as
well. For two, she was providing credible, correct
information about a possibly dangerous situation
to someone in a position to do something about it.
In the end, what is crucial here is to remember
that anything you say can be overheard and
misinterpreted. If you don't mean it, don't say it.
It is easier said than done, but is the best way
to prevent problems like this one.
(My apologies for the odd formatting. Posting through
lynx will do that to you.)
....or some equivalent.
Security officers are good resources, in most cases. Problem is, they generally don't directly understand computing.
So find yourself an Information Security expert. Get him to set some policy. Make him a display admin, at least - the ability to see anything out there.
Be sure to find someone who knows how everything fits together, not just someone who is an auditing expert or an administration expert.
If they can't convince us their service is worth paying for, then
they'll just have to arrest us and throw us all in jail; because I
really don't care about the interests of every large company and its
consumers who defend it like mindless drones.
So if they can't convince you their service is
worth paying for, it's OK for you to just take it?
If I want to charge you 50 bucks a night for
a hotel room, and you don't think it's worth it,
are you then allowed to just take the room?
And don't even try to compare my use of the word
'kids' to racism. That's ludicrous on face value
alone.
This is the perfect solution to a nagging problem.
Direct TV sells a service. They make money from
the sale of this service, and they provide the
infrastructure, the broadcast, the hardware, etc.
Then, a bunch of kids decide that they want what
DirectTV has, but not at their terms. So they steal
the service. Yes, they stole it. Hell, they
admit it in the article.
So what does DirectTV do? They beat the hackers at their
own game. They outplay, outsmart, and outfox them.
Bravo. They protected themselves and their market
share in the best way possible. In the end, we
can all appreciate the beauty of this particular hack.
At this time(2030 EST), the race is still too close to call.
In the next few hours, a President will be elected. It'll be George W Bush or Al Gore.
No matter who it is, let's not make the same mistakes we made last time.
Let the new guy do his job. Let's not pick through his sexual past. Let's not drool over blue dresses, and piccadilloes that no one really cares about.
Congress, stop playing like a bunch of whiny crybabies. Work positively, not negatively. Don't investigate the President. Leave him be. You blew too much money on absolutely nothing. Let it go.
If your party gets defeated, take it. Deal with it. Work to make the country better. Five year olds hold grudges - not the men we put in office.
This time, let's come behind our President. He really is OUR President. He may belong to one party or the other, but he is ours. Support him as much as you can. You can disagree, but he is our symbol.
Good luck to all.
I was fifteenth in line at my precinct this morning. I wanted to get there early so I could watch the returns tonight. It was remarkably painless. I was in and out in twenty minutes, which seems to be pretty good. The only peeve were the two people behind me who chattered on about all sorts of nothingness for twenty minutes.
...has a contest just like this. During this years' Death Valley Torture Test, they hid four MT license plates in Death Valley. They give you the coordinates in the issue, and the first people to find the plates get a prize of some sort.
It's a neat idea - I just wish I lived closer to Death Valley.
So let's see, the kid distributed someone else's property without their permission. He broke the law, and campus rules, and got slammed for it.
I can guarantee that if someone distributed Linux without proper permissions, violating the GPL or something, you'd all jump on his back.
I support the distribution of music over the Net wholheartedly. But, the music and movies do belong to someone, and taking it from them is stealing.
Defending people who are obviously guilty just because it deals with "the Internet" serves no more then to dilute the cause and make you look like fools.
NOTE: My apologies if there is another post here with the same subject - a minor misclick on my part.
DVD is a great example of this, as is Sorenson,AOL, msword and ActiveX plugins. Each serve to restrict your choice and funnel you into buying and consuming only certain product.
Bull.
Who are you to say that Microsoft can't market Word because it doesn't work with everything? If you don't like it, don't use it. That's freedom. Same with AOL and DVDs. You don't like how they work? Fine. But you have zero right to tell me that I can't use them, or tell Sony that they can't produce them.
A free market is one where you can put out anything, no matter how open or proprietary. You can also buy anything, no matter how open or proprietary.
No one prevents you, personally, from using a competing product to any of those. That's a free market.
It is crucial to remember in these discussions that free software is not equal to freedom.
Freedom entails doing what you feel like with what you feel like. Of course, there are limits - your freedom can not encroach on another's, for instance, or cause harm to others.
If I create a software package, and I decide to keep it closed source, patent it, and sell it for 100 dollars a pop, that's MY decision to make.
Freedom does not necessarily equal doing what is "best" for everyone. Even if we could decide what is the best for everyone, it's still within my purview to decide not to do it.
A wise man once said "I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." (paraphrased)
My decision to open or close my software is my decision alone. You have absolutely no say in it whatsoever. That, right there, is freedom.
So, you went down there, specifically, to protest something.
You placed yourself in a group specifically designed to get arrested.
You decided to be both belligerent and evasive to the officer involved.
You declined to provide identification when asked for it.
You implied, on camera, that the officers involved might steal your money.
I say, what DID you expect to happen?
For God's sake, if a cop asks to see your ID, show it to him. You look damned suspicious otherwise. If you weren't carrying any contraband, why bother hiding it. You can crow about "the principle" of it, but the fact is, you're a reporter looking to get a story. So far, your story boils down to "cops picked on me after I gave them reason to".
The cops didn't cuff you. Sounds to me like they held on to you while they checked your record. Standard operating procedure. You were belligerent, uncooperative, acting like you had something to hide. THey didn't cuff you. When you implied they were robbers, they responded by calling you "sir" and assuring that your stuff would still be there. They checked on you to make sure you were comfortable, temperaturewise. WHen they saw you had no record, they released you.
But, because they were cops, they MUST have been wrong, right? God forbid they would ever arrest you, because you MUST be an upstanding citizen. Here's a clue for you - if you intentionally try to make life hard for anyone, they will probably reciprocate.
Sheesh.
I see a lot of uncorroborated stuff here. Hunkapiller is just like Bill Gates? Hunkapiller is managing the future of the human race? Please.
Of course, this is another article which is meant to raise our hackles and get us ticked off about another subject. Give the Human Genome Project time to really do some work before we decide that "Hunkapiller Syndrome" is totally evil and on it's way.
You really want to get ticked off, read the history of nuclear power and radiation. You'll see the stupidity and viciousness that came through that.
BTW - hey, Jon, if I want to seem tons smarter then everyone else, I too, can come up with a name no one has heard of and try to make people feel dumb. It's a bad tactic - don't use it.
I beleive in Open Source.
More importantly, I believe in the inherent security involved with OPen Source.
However, I don't believe that we need to be kissing Eric S Raymond's ass. C'mon, this article said nothing new about security, or open source, or anything.
Maybe if he'd brought up some new points, or had given new examples of how the Open Source movement had helped.
Rather, we get vague notions of how it would maybe do something.
I like ESR as much as the next guy, but I don't think his OPen Source work should give him a
My two cents.
ChickClicks is the name of a website (or more aptly, group of sites) run by a woman he mentions in the story. Read the whole article before jumping to conclusions next time.
I did read the whole article. Jon brings up the name ChickClickers a full two paragraphs before he mentions ChickClick.com, and uses the moniker throughout the article, often without relation to Chickclick.com or anything related. In short, maybe you should've read the article, instead of jumping to conclusions about mine.
C'mon, Jon. Can't you ever get a point across without stereotyping?
It's not enough to refer to every single person on Slashdot as a 'geek', as if we were all cut from the same cloth and were the exact same person, but now you're branching out. Now, you've taken women who use the Internet and lump them together as "Chickclickers". Not only is the name vaguely insulting, but you're once again assuming that you can simply lump a group of people together under a name and it'll all be good.
People aren't all the same, Jon. Drop the stereotyping, and maybe your points will be better heard.
Heard this story a little while ago, and I believe it was in reference to the CurseFree product. Seems that they had programmed the thing to flag on keywords. Not too uncommon. Problem was, it was pretty undiscriminating.
The most egregious error? The "Dick Van Dyke" show was titled the "Penis Van Lesbian" show.
Possibly an urban legend, but it sounds plausible to me.
According to NPR's "Morning Edition", last night's ceremony was the longest in Oscar history
Really? I try to catch the Oscars regularly, and I thought this year's was pretty short. Of course, I didn't time it specifically. Maybe it jsut seemed that way. It seemed to flow pretty well.
Is this honestly interactivity?
How does my viewing of someone adjusting a tie backstage, or someone adjusting themselves, or someone practicing a speech add to my enjoyment of the event?
Do I need to see the sets and props for "The Fugitive" or "Apollo 13" painted and selected before I can watch the movie?
And even if I do, how is that "interactive"? There's no interaction there. My seeing Kevin Spacey backstage lends nothing to my relationship with Kevin Spacey. I didn't "interact" with him or anything else - they just stuck an extra camera guy back there.
Finally, I don't think the screenplay/music display was anything special. It was a set dressing decision. They could've easily shown cast pictures, or stills from the movie. The screenplays weren't up there long enough for anyone to read or parse.
In short, I don't see anything these Oscars did that previous years didn't do. Other then being relatively short(for the Oscars) and pretty funny, thanks to Billy Crystal.