Well, the FCC already has a regulation allowing you to install TV antennae, but a better solutio would be to move. The proliferation of restrictive covenants is killing freedom in this country, and the only way to effectively combat this is to refuse to buy any such property in the first place. Someone with as low an ID as yours is very likely to have more than emough intelligence to figure this out. Nobody forced you to buy into a restricted community, so you can't really complain about the exit costs.
I've gotten to the point where I don't know what we can do.
Well, the obvious answer is, get more involved in politics (whether that means simply posting on the Internet, being involved in a partisan effort, or actually running for office is up to you--all input is important), and vote for a candidate who actually supports your views. Certain issues like abortion, and the Second Amendment are always going to be polarizing issues, and it's up to each of us to assign relative weights to each issue.
Unfortunately for people such as libertarians, who generally hold very strong positions that conflict with the major parties alternately (say, pro-choice *and* pro-gun), it can leave one in a terrible quandary. I do think, though, that substantial evidence exists that we are beginning a strong libertarian shift in the United States.
More importantly, the only way that you can conclude that doing away with the Electoral College is to assume that the federal principles which are the basis for our government are ill-suited to the American people. This is usually the point of view espoused by those who take the view that a strong centralized government is desirable. Fortunately, many other people are of the opposite persuasion--that government should only be as large as it needs to be to protect its citizens from tyranny of all kinds.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, and ultimately all of us, the Republican Party over the last couple of decades has somehow managed to delude themselves into believing that they were well on the way to creating a more or less permanent Republican/conservative/neo-conservative majority in the United States. More and more evidence is appearing that we are at the beginning stages of a powerful swing to a somewhat left-leaning version libertarianism in this country. Now if only we could completely replace the Supreme Court with a slate of Justices who truly understand their responsibilities...
The next time an American starts talking about "democracy", remind them that they need to look elsewhere, far outside of their own country, to find a more true example of the democracy.
And the next time a Slashdotter who understands very little about the structure of the United States government and the meaning of the Constitution of the United States mentions the word democracy, remind him that the United States is not, and was never intended to be, a democracy. It is a federal republic with a structure that was specifically intended to limit the power of the majority to tyrannize minority interests by promoting the natural rights, privileges, and immunities of all people.
You can't even begin to imagine how hilarious I find it that a comment which characterizes Google as being something other than "mass media" has been moderated "+5, Insightful"...
This smacks to me of Google trying to figure out a way to appear journalistic without actually having to engage in journalism.
If they feel it so necessary to invite commentary from those actually involved in a story, then why do they not simply hire journalists to interact with such people? If their goal is simply to invite public commentary on news items, why do they not simply build a Slashcode server, or some other group discussion system that can achieve the same end?
Heck, why not use an NNTP server? NNTP is one of the most underused systems out there, and this sort of application is exactly the purpose for which it was designed. Google already has the Deja archives, so they cannot be unfamiliar with the concept, and if Google were to expose the public more to NNTP with an HTML gateway, it might actually revive interest in not only news servers in general, but in updating the NNTP protocol to incorporate some more modern mechanisms.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that they're starting to look at this idea. It's long overdue for news outlets to invite timely commentary on their articles, especially given the sorry state of journalism these days.
The point of Section 2 is that should some harm to the detainee occur as a result of the detention (I'm not talking physical harm here, but things like financial harm from missing an appointment/plane/etc, or some such), then the detainor cannot be held liable.
The very fact that the OpenBSD project makes itself such a huge target for would-be hackers is what makes it almost certain that any vulnerabilities will be found and patched. No handwringing is necessary here, though quite a lot of recoding may be involved. We can all look forward to an even more secure OpenBSD very soon. Keep up the good work, everyone!
This is the worst sort of denial of the responsibility to consider the consequences of our collective actions that I've seen in a long time from someone who has made their entire reputation on speculation about the future. All of this sort of hand-wringing is based quite clearly on the myopic assumption that simply because we, as a species, have managed to advance the state of our technology over the past few millenia and have witnessed a corellated exponential increase in population, we will continue to do so at an ever-accelerating rate. The number one question we face right now is the question of whether or not our available resources, in terms of both raw materials and energy, are sufficient to sustain our way of life, and the more we discover about science and technology, the more we realize that it is practically certain that we do not, in fact, have resources of unlimited abundance.
Sure, they had the "discretion" to not do anything, but why is that in their lap?
Because it is reasonable to expect that, as the theatre is acting (as you put it in a subsequent post) as an agent for the copyright owner, that a certain amount of enforcement power be granted them. Whether or not her recording, excerpt or no, falls within the bounds of the fair use doctrine is not germane to the case. It is reasonable to ban *all* recording because while the theatre, as agent, should be delegated the authority to remove a recorder and its operator from the theatre premises and destroy any resulting recording, it is *not* reasonable to delegate to that agent the power to make determinations as to what falls under fair use. The harm to the individual and to the public at large in this case is insignificant.
This is an egregious abuse of our legal system and public safety officials. The proper way to handle the situation would have been to temporarily confiscate the offending equipment pending destruction of the copied material, and remove the offending party from the theatre. Problem solved.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about copyright in general, ignorance of the law is no excuse; however, the fact that a law exists is no excuse to abuse a violator, alleged or convicted, with prejudice and with cruel and usual punishment.
The first thing that we need is to consider how we can design a network that is immune from centralized authority. Security, anonymity, and privacy should be primary concerns and considered as a basic right of all humanity. Once we bear this in mind, it becomes quite obvious what we need to do to redesign the Internet. We need to control by not controlling. The mistake that is commonly made by people in our industrialized societies of today is that fear leads them to believe that, to paraphrase a historical great citizen of these United States, we must exchange liberty for security, when in fact it is that very liberty that results in our security.
Tyrannical private corporations and governments the world over are doing everything in their power to ensure that your basic human rights are denigrated in favor of their power-seeking and profit-driven motivations. It is within our power to stop this peacefully and relatively quickly, though it may mean at least temporarily abandoning some of the seeming benefits of living in such a technologically advanced system. Ultimately, though, we face much more serious long-term problems, such as energy scarcity and global climate change, that may obviate the ability of any organization to maintain the levels of centralized control and authority that they evidently crave.
Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom all want to be free, and so do People. Let us promote the cause.
The funny thing is, if there's enough of Mac OS X in there, it should be theoretically possible to port Inkwell to the iPhone. I'm sure Apple is thinking about this.
And Palm? It seems to me that about the only chance Palm has for continued existence is to go back to their roots and release Graffiti (v1, not v2, now that the lawsuit is settled) for the iPhone. You *do* know that Palm's original product was Graffiti, right? And that one of the platforms it ran on was the Newton MessagePad?
Honestly, I hope Palm does well with the Foleo, because it embodies in many ways ideas that I've had about the future of mobile computing for a long time. It's just that given Palm's recent history, I doubt that it's going to thrive.
You sign one large support contract, makes it very easy to have 'one neck to choke' when there's an issue.
Unfortunately, the "one neck" often turns out to be yours, rather than the vendor's...
The reason Cisco's gear is dominant in the networking marketplace has nothing to do with superior hardware, software, or service. It does, however, have quite a lot to do with the fact that Cisco was one of the first players in the IP router market, with products that frequently failed to interoperate with other brands of equipment. The large WAN providers, having a large installed base of Cisco gear, therefore practically forced all their clients into using Cisco routers, since that was the only thing they could guarantee would work with their network. Those of us who knew better chose other brands, and supported it ourselves, at least until it became difficult to so because of mergers and marketplace attrition.
So, yes, Cisco *is* the Microsoft of networking. It's sad, really.
I disagree with the premise that there wasn't acceptable justification for rewriting things from the ground up. Remember that the key players at Be were Jean-Louis Gasse (sorry for the lack of grave or accent or whatever the French thing is...) and Steve Sakoman. Their primary prior experience was at Apple. The biggest mistake that they made was in trying to create a better Mac OS than Mac OS. What they ended up doing was creating something that looked more like a better UNIX than UNIX, except that it lacked all the things that made UNIX great in the first place. To start with, the biggest thing they left out of BeOS was multi-user capability. That, IMO, more than anything else was what led to the downfall of Be.
I lost a bit of change on Be stock. It still pisses me off, because Be had the nucleus of a great idea, but failed to follow through.
If you believe that the RIAA and MPAA don't understand this, then you don't understand so many things about basic economics and human behavior that it's almost a complete waste of time to mention the fact.
People don't use movie products in the same way that they use music products. Of course CD's cost the consumer more! Haven't you noticed the fact that in recent years, most popular movies and television shows have practically become advertisements for recordings that the studios want to push? What do you think they make more money from?
Even those of us who are die hard video collectors rarely watch any individual program or feature more than a handful of times (never mind the fact that my two year old is now obsessed with "Kiki's Delivery Service" and is doing her best to wear out the tape with repeated viewings), yet will continue to play songs from even decades ago time and again.
Actually, my experience has been entirely the opposite. In my travels through Europe, I found that Europeans, by and large, are quite rude when interacting in an impersonal manner. It's only when you get involved in one-on-one interactions that they become more friendly. Americans on the whole I find to be much more polite to strangers. I suppose it depends on the class of people you interact with more than anything else.
And for what it's worth, down at the Jersey Shore, they have quite a few choice things to say about the Canadian tourists...
Screw Exchange. Exchange support is the last thing in the world that the Sunbird team should be working on. The whole point of this project should be to get people to *stop* using Exchange. This is IMHO, the single most important issue facing the open source and free software movements. Exchange and Outlook are so often held up as the reason why corporations are tied to Microsoft platforms, and we need to break the hegemony.
This should be the number one priority for the Sunbird team, if it's not already working (anyone have info on this?). Apple will have iCal 2 out with Mac OS X v10.5 in October, and the iCal Server with Mac OS X Server v10.5. Darwin Calendar Server is available for testing on Mac OS X v10.4, and should also run on any UNIX-like system.
There are several things about all this that are seriously bothering me.
First of all, the $175 cancellation fee. AFAIK, cancellation fees have been mainly justified by the fact that phones are subsidized by the carrier. This is not the case with the iPhone, so how can they justify a cancellation fee at all, let alone a $175 fee?
Second of all, there is the question of tethering. The only information I've seen on this subject (which is not official) indicates that tethering will NOT be allowed. This is practically a deal-breaker for me.
Third of all, I'd also like to know what the deal is with credit check v. deposit. I'm sick to death of every company in the world thinking they have a right to intrude into my credit history/privacy/what have you. There's no information from Apple or AT&T about this subject. Also, what's the deal with the "pre-approved credit" number?
Other than these three big issues, every other drawback I've seen is something that isn't important to me, or is something that I believe that Apple will fix in the future. It's times like these that I hate Apple's closed mouth about their product details. I know I won't be standing in line this weekend. I'll wait until the real details surface.
Imagine a few years down the road and I do not Motorola's offerings? I have a shit load of stuff that is now completely useless to me. Substitute the word Motorola for MS or Apple and the same applies.
You may want to re-read what you wrote here...a few years down the road the vast majority of the electronic devices currently in circulation will be landfill, because they will be completely useless to the vast majority of the populace. What was your argument again?
I'm betting that the sixth-gen iPod is going to essentially be an iPhone minus the cellular radio. Unfortunately, the earliest we will see such a creature is probably Macworld San Francisco 2008, because Apple will want to keep this holiday season for the iPhone.
I think you've completely missed the point of TFA. While you're at it, why don't you just yell, "Damn you kids, get off my lawn!"
OTOH, TFA isn't the most insightful piece I've ever read. It would have been more helpful to say that librarians need to think more like game theory researchers or HCI experts than to say they need to think more like video game producers. Perhaps Mr. Gee isn't familiar with the processes involved in media production?
When TFA says "lowered conseqences of failure", this doesn't mean failure in life, in general, but in keeping with the assumed goal of information access, failure to find information relevant to the topic being researched. "Playing while inept" refers to the concept of progressive disclosure, a familiar phrase to anyone familiar with "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines". It should not be necessary to study the usage of the access tools when the tools can be designed in such manner as to make their use intuitive and only as apparently complex as the user and specific task demand.
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Well, the FCC already has a regulation allowing you to install TV antennae, but a better solutio would be to move. The proliferation of restrictive covenants is killing freedom in this country, and the only way to effectively combat this is to refuse to buy any such property in the first place. Someone with as low an ID as yours is very likely to have more than emough intelligence to figure this out. Nobody forced you to buy into a restricted community, so you can't really complain about the exit costs.
I've gotten to the point where I don't know what we can do.
Well, the obvious answer is, get more involved in politics (whether that means simply posting on the Internet, being involved in a partisan effort, or actually running for office is up to you--all input is important), and vote for a candidate who actually supports your views. Certain issues like abortion, and the Second Amendment are always going to be polarizing issues, and it's up to each of us to assign relative weights to each issue.
Unfortunately for people such as libertarians, who generally hold very strong positions that conflict with the major parties alternately (say, pro-choice *and* pro-gun), it can leave one in a terrible quandary. I do think, though, that substantial evidence exists that we are beginning a strong libertarian shift in the United States.
More importantly, the only way that you can conclude that doing away with the Electoral College is to assume that the federal principles which are the basis for our government are ill-suited to the American people. This is usually the point of view espoused by those who take the view that a strong centralized government is desirable. Fortunately, many other people are of the opposite persuasion--that government should only be as large as it needs to be to protect its citizens from tyranny of all kinds.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, and ultimately all of us, the Republican Party over the last couple of decades has somehow managed to delude themselves into believing that they were well on the way to creating a more or less permanent Republican/conservative/neo-conservative majority in the United States. More and more evidence is appearing that we are at the beginning stages of a powerful swing to a somewhat left-leaning version libertarianism in this country. Now if only we could completely replace the Supreme Court with a slate of Justices who truly understand their responsibilities...
And the next time a Slashdotter who understands very little about the structure of the United States government and the meaning of the Constitution of the United States mentions the word democracy, remind him that the United States is not, and was never intended to be, a democracy. It is a federal republic with a structure that was specifically intended to limit the power of the majority to tyrannize minority interests by promoting the natural rights, privileges, and immunities of all people.
You can't even begin to imagine how hilarious I find it that a comment which characterizes Google as being something other than "mass media" has been moderated "+5, Insightful"...
This smacks to me of Google trying to figure out a way to appear journalistic without actually having to engage in journalism.
If they feel it so necessary to invite commentary from those actually involved in a story, then why do they not simply hire journalists to interact with such people? If their goal is simply to invite public commentary on news items, why do they not simply build a Slashcode server, or some other group discussion system that can achieve the same end?
Heck, why not use an NNTP server? NNTP is one of the most underused systems out there, and this sort of application is exactly the purpose for which it was designed. Google already has the Deja archives, so they cannot be unfamiliar with the concept, and if Google were to expose the public more to NNTP with an HTML gateway, it might actually revive interest in not only news servers in general, but in updating the NNTP protocol to incorporate some more modern mechanisms.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that they're starting to look at this idea. It's long overdue for news outlets to invite timely commentary on their articles, especially given the sorry state of journalism these days.
The point of Section 2 is that should some harm to the detainee occur as a result of the detention (I'm not talking physical harm here, but things like financial harm from missing an appointment/plane/etc, or some such), then the detainor cannot be held liable.
The very fact that the OpenBSD project makes itself such a huge target for would-be hackers is what makes it almost certain that any vulnerabilities will be found and patched. No handwringing is necessary here, though quite a lot of recoding may be involved. We can all look forward to an even more secure OpenBSD very soon. Keep up the good work, everyone!
This is the worst sort of denial of the responsibility to consider the consequences of our collective actions that I've seen in a long time from someone who has made their entire reputation on speculation about the future. All of this sort of hand-wringing is based quite clearly on the myopic assumption that simply because we, as a species, have managed to advance the state of our technology over the past few millenia and have witnessed a corellated exponential increase in population, we will continue to do so at an ever-accelerating rate. The number one question we face right now is the question of whether or not our available resources, in terms of both raw materials and energy, are sufficient to sustain our way of life, and the more we discover about science and technology, the more we realize that it is practically certain that we do not, in fact, have resources of unlimited abundance.
Sure, they had the "discretion" to not do anything, but why is that in their lap?
Because it is reasonable to expect that, as the theatre is acting (as you put it in a subsequent post) as an agent for the copyright owner, that a certain amount of enforcement power be granted them. Whether or not her recording, excerpt or no, falls within the bounds of the fair use doctrine is not germane to the case. It is reasonable to ban *all* recording because while the theatre, as agent, should be delegated the authority to remove a recorder and its operator from the theatre premises and destroy any resulting recording, it is *not* reasonable to delegate to that agent the power to make determinations as to what falls under fair use. The harm to the individual and to the public at large in this case is insignificant.
This is an egregious abuse of our legal system and public safety officials. The proper way to handle the situation would have been to temporarily confiscate the offending equipment pending destruction of the copied material, and remove the offending party from the theatre. Problem solved.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about copyright in general, ignorance of the law is no excuse; however, the fact that a law exists is no excuse to abuse a violator, alleged or convicted, with prejudice and with cruel and usual punishment.
I hope the poor girl countersues the plaintiff.
The first thing that we need is to consider how we can design a network that is immune from centralized authority. Security, anonymity, and privacy should be primary concerns and considered as a basic right of all humanity. Once we bear this in mind, it becomes quite obvious what we need to do to redesign the Internet. We need to control by not controlling. The mistake that is commonly made by people in our industrialized societies of today is that fear leads them to believe that, to paraphrase a historical great citizen of these United States, we must exchange liberty for security, when in fact it is that very liberty that results in our security.
Tyrannical private corporations and governments the world over are doing everything in their power to ensure that your basic human rights are denigrated in favor of their power-seeking and profit-driven motivations. It is within our power to stop this peacefully and relatively quickly, though it may mean at least temporarily abandoning some of the seeming benefits of living in such a technologically advanced system. Ultimately, though, we face much more serious long-term problems, such as energy scarcity and global climate change, that may obviate the ability of any organization to maintain the levels of centralized control and authority that they evidently crave.
Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom all want to be free, and so do People. Let us promote the cause.
The funny thing is, if there's enough of Mac OS X in there, it should be theoretically possible to port Inkwell to the iPhone. I'm sure Apple is thinking about this.
And Palm? It seems to me that about the only chance Palm has for continued existence is to go back to their roots and release Graffiti (v1, not v2, now that the lawsuit is settled) for the iPhone. You *do* know that Palm's original product was Graffiti, right? And that one of the platforms it ran on was the Newton MessagePad?
Honestly, I hope Palm does well with the Foleo, because it embodies in many ways ideas that I've had about the future of mobile computing for a long time. It's just that given Palm's recent history, I doubt that it's going to thrive.
You sign one large support contract, makes it very easy to have 'one neck to choke' when there's an issue.
Unfortunately, the "one neck" often turns out to be yours, rather than the vendor's...
The reason Cisco's gear is dominant in the networking marketplace has nothing to do with superior hardware, software, or service. It does, however, have quite a lot to do with the fact that Cisco was one of the first players in the IP router market, with products that frequently failed to interoperate with other brands of equipment. The large WAN providers, having a large installed base of Cisco gear, therefore practically forced all their clients into using Cisco routers, since that was the only thing they could guarantee would work with their network. Those of us who knew better chose other brands, and supported it ourselves, at least until it became difficult to so because of mergers and marketplace attrition.
So, yes, Cisco *is* the Microsoft of networking. It's sad, really.
I disagree with the premise that there wasn't acceptable justification for rewriting things from the ground up. Remember that the key players at Be were Jean-Louis Gasse (sorry for the lack of grave or accent or whatever the French thing is...) and Steve Sakoman. Their primary prior experience was at Apple. The biggest mistake that they made was in trying to create a better Mac OS than Mac OS. What they ended up doing was creating something that looked more like a better UNIX than UNIX, except that it lacked all the things that made UNIX great in the first place. To start with, the biggest thing they left out of BeOS was multi-user capability. That, IMO, more than anything else was what led to the downfall of Be.
I lost a bit of change on Be stock. It still pisses me off, because Be had the nucleus of a great idea, but failed to follow through.
If you believe that the RIAA and MPAA don't understand this, then you don't understand so many things about basic economics and human behavior that it's almost a complete waste of time to mention the fact.
People don't use movie products in the same way that they use music products. Of course CD's cost the consumer more! Haven't you noticed the fact that in recent years, most popular movies and television shows have practically become advertisements for recordings that the studios want to push? What do you think they make more money from?
Even those of us who are die hard video collectors rarely watch any individual program or feature more than a handful of times (never mind the fact that my two year old is now obsessed with "Kiki's Delivery Service" and is doing her best to wear out the tape with repeated viewings), yet will continue to play songs from even decades ago time and again.
Actually, my experience has been entirely the opposite. In my travels through Europe, I found that Europeans, by and large, are quite rude when interacting in an impersonal manner. It's only when you get involved in one-on-one interactions that they become more friendly. Americans on the whole I find to be much more polite to strangers. I suppose it depends on the class of people you interact with more than anything else.
And for what it's worth, down at the Jersey Shore, they have quite a few choice things to say about the Canadian tourists...
Screw Exchange. Exchange support is the last thing in the world that the Sunbird team should be working on. The whole point of this project should be to get people to *stop* using Exchange. This is IMHO, the single most important issue facing the open source and free software movements. Exchange and Outlook are so often held up as the reason why corporations are tied to Microsoft platforms, and we need to break the hegemony.
This should be the number one priority for the Sunbird team, if it's not already working (anyone have info on this?). Apple will have iCal 2 out with Mac OS X v10.5 in October, and the iCal Server with Mac OS X Server v10.5. Darwin Calendar Server is available for testing on Mac OS X v10.4, and should also run on any UNIX-like system.
There are several things about all this that are seriously bothering me.
First of all, the $175 cancellation fee. AFAIK, cancellation fees have been mainly justified by the fact that phones are subsidized by the carrier. This is not the case with the iPhone, so how can they justify a cancellation fee at all, let alone a $175 fee?
Second of all, there is the question of tethering. The only information I've seen on this subject (which is not official) indicates that tethering will NOT be allowed. This is practically a deal-breaker for me.
Third of all, I'd also like to know what the deal is with credit check v. deposit. I'm sick to death of every company in the world thinking they have a right to intrude into my credit history/privacy/what have you. There's no information from Apple or AT&T about this subject. Also, what's the deal with the "pre-approved credit" number?
Other than these three big issues, every other drawback I've seen is something that isn't important to me, or is something that I believe that Apple will fix in the future. It's times like these that I hate Apple's closed mouth about their product details. I know I won't be standing in line this weekend. I'll wait until the real details surface.
Imagine a few years down the road and I do not Motorola's offerings? I have a shit load of stuff that is now completely useless to me. Substitute the word Motorola for MS or Apple and the same applies.
You may want to re-read what you wrote here...a few years down the road the vast majority of the electronic devices currently in circulation will be landfill, because they will be completely useless to the vast majority of the populace. What was your argument again?
I'm betting that the sixth-gen iPod is going to essentially be an iPhone minus the cellular radio. Unfortunately, the earliest we will see such a creature is probably Macworld San Francisco 2008, because Apple will want to keep this holiday season for the iPhone.
I think you've completely missed the point of TFA. While you're at it, why don't you just yell, "Damn you kids, get off my lawn!"
OTOH, TFA isn't the most insightful piece I've ever read. It would have been more helpful to say that librarians need to think more like game theory researchers or HCI experts than to say they need to think more like video game producers. Perhaps Mr. Gee isn't familiar with the processes involved in media production?
When TFA says "lowered conseqences of failure", this doesn't mean failure in life, in general, but in keeping with the assumed goal of information access, failure to find information relevant to the topic being researched. "Playing while inept" refers to the concept of progressive disclosure, a familiar phrase to anyone familiar with "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines". It should not be necessary to study the usage of the access tools when the tools can be designed in such manner as to make their use intuitive and only as apparently complex as the user and specific task demand.
I don't know why everyone seems so surprised about this, considering that this is exactly what Steve Jobs said in his D5 symposium with Bill Gates.