excuse the newbie but umm, until i can either stick in a floppy or cdrom and boot up to install linux (any version) with a "simple" easy step by step approach (like windows)
You mean and then require hours of fiddling to get it into a usable state.
you aren`t going to get the average user to try it.
The average USER never installs any OS. Indeed they would typically be looking for another job.
this is the BIGGEST complaint i hear and has yet to be resolved.......
Expecting the end user of a machine to maintain it too is something which just dosn't work. Outside of Windows software this kind of paradigm just isn't applied to software. In fields of technology other than computers it would be laughed at. Presumably in Windows "poweruser" fantasy land people also build their own houses from scratch, collect their own drinking water, generate their own electricity and run their self installed (not preloaded) Windows on a machine they built from scratch... Indeed in many environments Windows "poweruser" design is an utter menance, from end user vandalism (both accidental and deliberate) to the way in which it is also virus friendly. What the average user actually needs is computer which is a good tool to the job or jobs they need to do. Expecting the average user to be installing software is like expecting an airline pilot to move the seats around in the cabin and replace the engines. It's an utterly daft and unsustainable idea which Microsoft's marketing machine has managed to sell as being actually desirable.
The folks in Hawaii had no reason to believe it applied to them--in fact, they assumed they were safe by virtue of geography. We do know that the War Department figured the Philippines were the certain target (correct, but incomplete), that MacAruthur got the same warning Hawaii did, and that he ignored it.
So the US authorities at the time seriously didn't think that the Japanese knew where the US Pacific fleet was?
Personally, I think that (unless the artist choses otherwise) copyright should last until the death of the artist.
This is effectivly the scheme we have at present, except that it's X years after the death of the artist. Which not only makes it very complicated to work out when a work will enter the public domain, especially where there is more than one artist involved. But also raises the possibility of artists being killed off for their copyrights. More fundermentally why should these people be entitled to special treatment in the first place?
That consumer manuals don't mention to cycle the ABS after flushing the brake fluid is understandable - my TV manual doesn't say anything about changing R26 from 220K to 470K if I change the Sony driver IC for a Philips one
Hopefully the service manual does... Isn't what this is about anyway, the ability of independents to get hold of service manuals?
Books, especially, might not become popular until about 20 years after they're written,
What publisher is going to publish an unpopular book for 20 years against the possibility it might suddenly become popular. Indeed how many books originally published in 1982 have suddenly become popular after 20 years of obscurity?
I don't see what the average life span in 1790 has anything to do with the intention of the law. Copyright law is not in any way in consideration for the artist. It's a way of funding his work. Are you saying that now that people live longer the prospect of not controlling their art for the rest of their life is going to discourage them? That doesn't really make any sense.
You can just as easily say that people living longer means that copyrights should be shorter, because there are more potential customers...
You use the word "freeloading" and I will not contest that accusation. This is the purpose of copyright. To eventually enrich the public domain so there is free art available for everyone.
There are very few completly new works. A great many works are derived from something pre-existing. e.g. movies based on stories in the public domain, "cover versions" of popular music.
Until now, however, if you went into any bookstore, there was hardly any difference between a copyrighted and a public domain book. Maybe a copyrighted book costed a little more, but for the most part, no one was hurt by having copyright extended. There was no such thing as getting a book "for free" or a movie "for free". There were printing costs.
Also costs of distributing books and costs of operating the shop.
But, now we have this extraordinary ability: we have the ability to copy and distribute any form of art for virtually no cost.
Also with this small cost often being paid by the user, rather than the publisher/distributer having to spend money up front then attempt to recoup it.
The reason why libraries have traditionally only "lent" stuff was because it costed money, a significant amount of money, to make a copy of anything, so since there were a limited number of copies, they had to be shared among the community, and therefore people could only "borrow" it.
Which is in itself a compromise, since recording the borrowing and ensuring that the books wind up back where they should be is itself a costly activity.
Well what if I told you that any given piece of art only makes 10% of it's revenue after 12 years. That means if some book was going to bring in 500,000 dollars revenue in 150 years, on average, it would bring in 450,000 in 12 years. So basically we are locking up all forms of art for 138 more years, just to squeeze out an extra 10% revenue. That doesn't really make any sense, and it goes against the spirit of the first copyright act, and against the spirit of a truly open society.
These figures may be generous. Especially for creative works other than books. (There are books which were never even in print for 12 years though.) With the likes of music and movies if they don't make money, within a very short time which can be measured in weeks or months, they will be considered a "failure".
Internet surveillance, using carnivore or back doors in encryption, will not stop terrorists communicating by other means e.g. face to face, personal courier or steganography.
Thing is that things such as face to face meetings, personal courier, steganography (most likely not computer based though), codes (not cyphers) are quite likely amongst the terrorists' prefered methods anyway. Also unlike a large company or even a regular army terrorists can rapidly change how they communicate things.
Perhaps using mobile when absolutely essential, saying - Go with plan A (human bomb to target A), or plan B (target B) or abort.
They probably won't use languages like that though. Something more like if they are going to meet at place A, place B or not bother. How is anyone overhearing this phone call going to know that it's about terrorism? You'd find out that the people involved are terrorists by regular detective work, not through mass surveillance.
Agents, police and assorted administrative folk are constantly abusing their access to "private" data in order to (1) enrich themselves and friends or (2) get revenge on somebody.
Another possible reason is so as to appear to be doing somehing to justify the money they cost. Especially if you have something like number of arrests being a performance metric for police.
Because throughout history almost every government has proven itself utterly uncapable of figuring out what information is relevant or not to identifying you as a threat.
Sometimes they can be so busy chasing bogus threats that they miss the real ones. Or they collect information without any way to do anything with it. The GDR had the most extensive surveillance systems in modern history, but it ceased to exist.
And then there are the times when they can't figure out that something is a joke. Like the FBI investigating bonsaikitten.com. I wonder if Tom Clancy is under constant surveillance...
Maybe they though the Boeing 767 improvised cruise missile was a joke.
The legaslative is 2-party, and moreover, owned by the same parties.
In the case of the US Federal government those same 2 parties dominate the executive and judiciary, rather subverting the idea of these being independent of each other. Further the same 2 parties dominate every level of government in the US.
The system of greed breeds corporatism. This is what we've developed.
What is it specifically about the USA which has developed this system? There are other representative democracies, even those organised as federal republics, which have considerably more political diversity.
If the government say "these are the laws you will follow" and they say "no, we're too useful we can do as we please" then the government has to sack them and hire new people.
Most likely they will say "yes ok", then procede to completly ignore them with everyone involved fully understanding that the whole thing was a publicity stunt.
Echelon, and other spying programs will remain secret because spying can not be done in the open.
However those it is supposedly intended to target either know or have reason to suspect it exists. Especially after most of the worlds press covered the "shoebomber" case and mentioned recordings to the suspect's telephone calls. Any terrorist with half a brain will assume that their telephone calls, faxes, emails etc will be intercepted. Thus they will make them appear either innocent or misleading. One thing they probably wouldn't do is encrypt them. For the simple reason that encryption is not commonly used, so encrypted messages stand out.
The watchers of those watching the watchers can be watched by the watchers themselves, thus guaranteeing that all the watchers, even the watchers OF the watchers, are watched. Then, just in case, we can have some watchers of the watchers of the watchers of the watchers, making sure everything goes smoothly.
Or alterativly you go for the David Brin solution. Where everyone can be a "watcher" and anyone can be watched.
If you've ever worked in retail you probably have come across the common switch-aroo scam. With colored currency this will almost be impossible to pull off, or at the very least make potential criminals a little hesitant on trying to claim they gave you purple bill when they really gave you a yellow one.
Even more so if the money is different sizes too.
This isn't really about tourists. Its about catching up with the world in currency technology. Europe was inserting the little metallic strips into their currency way before the US.
That's probably half the problem, the US is a strongly NIH country.
It appears that some countries [ hint: "colour", "defence" ] have bills of different sizes...
It's more like most of the planet. Where, outside of the US, do they issue paper money printed on the same size notes using the same colour scheme? Even in the US they have coins of different shapes, sizes and colour.
You make a good point, although an asteroid impact is certainly not a guaranteed holocaust event. A good example is the 1908 Tunguska hit which is mentioned in the original article.
Only because it exploded above Siberia. A few hours later and it could have killed millions.
This is believed to be about the same size as the one that missed us June 14th. It caused no known deaths and relatively little damage.
"little damage" it demolished a forrest. Typically buildings, even of today wouldn't survive such a blast.
Just remember that it's not legal for you to download and use any content that isn't part of the original VHS tape you bought, like deleted scenes, director commentary, or anything else added only to the digital format; those are all covered by separate copyright.
But try getting hold of just this material. If you already had a VHS copy you've paid twice for the movie. Also quite a lot of this material is very cheap for the publisher to add.
The important detail is that the popularity of vinyl is easily explained in the context of dance music. This suggests that until a superior technology comes along to replace what vinyl provides (and neither cassette tapes or CDs fit this) vinyl records will continue to be sold.
Rather it's the case that when it comes to DJing vinyl is the "superior technology". Dispite attempts to make CD players which attempt to emulate turntables.
VHS tapes as well have this sort of niche that DVDs can't replace: recording shows off the air.
Or recording from security cameras.
Tivo is in many ways a superior alternative (though not in all ways, as it doesn't allow friends to share tapes), so it will probably continue to take market share away from VCRs.
You could make such a device with removable media, it's just that such machines are in their infancy and the likes of the MPAA are trying to kill them off.
Cost is also an issue with Tivos, something which is not the case with movies on VHS.
20 years ago VHS tapes cost about 10 times what they do now. If hard disks were as commonplace as VHS they would be a lot cheaper too. It's a matter of economy of scale.
There is no technical reason that DVD movies have to be more expensive that VHS movies.
The reason is that they are priced around what people will pay, since DVD (like CD) is being pushed as a "better" product it has a higher price. Thus even more profits, since they are cheaper to produce and distribute than VHS they would still make more profit if they were priced a bit less...
Because of the service component of Tivo, it's unlikely that Tivo could become less expensive than VCRs. Those digital TV recorders that do not depend on a central service have a better chance of eliminating VCRs, though the marketing reality may mean that they take a while to succesfully compete with Tivo.
In terms of hardware having less moving parts could easily make a Tivo type device cheaper than a VCR, at least in volume. The problem with the service is that it's a standalone service. With the Tivo people having to provide all the dialup infrastructure, which means that it costs more than if they were simply selling access to the data over the Internet.
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excuse the newbie but umm, until i can either stick in a floppy or cdrom and boot up to install linux (any version) with a "simple" easy step by step approach (like windows)
You mean and then require hours of fiddling to get it into a usable state.
you aren`t going to get the average user to try it.
The average USER never installs any OS. Indeed they would typically be looking for another job.
this is the BIGGEST complaint i hear and has yet to be resolved.......
Expecting the end user of a machine to maintain it too is something which just dosn't work. Outside of Windows software this kind of paradigm just isn't applied to software. In fields of technology other than computers it would be laughed at.
Presumably in Windows "poweruser" fantasy land people also build their own houses from scratch, collect their own drinking water, generate their own electricity and run their self installed (not preloaded) Windows on a machine they built from scratch...
Indeed in many environments Windows "poweruser" design is an utter menance, from end user vandalism (both accidental and deliberate) to the way in which it is also virus friendly.
What the average user actually needs is computer which is a good tool to the job or jobs they need to do.
Expecting the average user to be installing software is like expecting an airline pilot to move the seats around in the cabin and replace the engines. It's an utterly daft and unsustainable idea which Microsoft's marketing machine has managed to sell as being actually desirable.
Those 1 percent are basically the best of the best and as such they deserve what they have. ..
Remember Bill Gates did not inherit these billions
Mr Gates has never been a poor man, he comes from a rich family. Also he got his foot in the door with IBM through direct family connections.
One thing to keep in mind here is that stock value sometimes has little semblance to the *actual* value of a company.
Quite likely more than sometimes.
Worldcom is still in business and still bringing in heaps of positive revenue on a daily basis.
Has this guy actually taken $3.6 billion out of the busines. Or is this figure related to stock market valuations.
The folks in Hawaii had no reason to believe it applied to them--in fact, they assumed they were safe by virtue of geography. We do know that the War Department figured the Philippines were the certain target (correct, but incomplete), that MacAruthur got the same warning Hawaii did, and that he ignored it.
So the US authorities at the time seriously didn't think that the Japanese knew where the US Pacific fleet was?
Personally, I think that (unless the artist choses otherwise) copyright should last until the death of the artist.
This is effectivly the scheme we have at present, except that it's X years after the death of the artist. Which not only makes it very complicated to work out when a work will enter the public domain, especially where there is more than one artist involved. But also raises the possibility of artists being killed off for their copyrights. More fundermentally why should these people be entitled to special treatment in the first place?
That consumer manuals don't mention to cycle the ABS after flushing the brake fluid is understandable - my TV manual doesn't say anything about changing R26 from 220K to 470K if I change the Sony driver IC for a Philips one
Hopefully the service manual does...
Isn't what this is about anyway, the ability of independents to get hold of service manuals?
Books, especially, might not become popular until about 20 years after they're written,
What publisher is going to publish an unpopular book for 20 years against the possibility it might suddenly become popular. Indeed how many books originally published in 1982 have suddenly become popular after 20 years of obscurity?
I don't see what the average life span in 1790 has anything to do with the intention of the law. Copyright law is not in any way in consideration for the artist. It's a way of funding his work. Are you saying that now that people live longer the prospect of not controlling their art for the rest of their life is going to discourage them? That doesn't really make any sense.
You can just as easily say that people living longer means that copyrights should be shorter, because there are more potential customers...
You use the word "freeloading" and I will not contest that accusation. This is the purpose of copyright. To eventually enrich the public domain so there is free art available for everyone.
There are very few completly new works. A great many works are derived from something pre-existing. e.g. movies based on stories in the public domain, "cover versions" of popular music.
Until now, however, if you went into any bookstore, there was hardly any difference between a copyrighted and a public domain book. Maybe a copyrighted book costed a little more, but for the most part, no one was hurt by having copyright extended. There was no such thing as getting a book "for free" or a movie "for free". There were printing costs.
Also costs of distributing books and costs of operating the shop.
But, now we have this extraordinary ability: we have the ability to copy and distribute any form of art for virtually no cost.
Also with this small cost often being paid by the user, rather than the publisher/distributer having to spend money up front then attempt to recoup it.
The reason why libraries have traditionally only "lent" stuff was because it costed money, a significant amount of money, to make a copy of anything, so since there were a limited number of copies, they had to be shared among the community, and therefore people could only "borrow" it.
Which is in itself a compromise, since recording the borrowing and ensuring that the books wind up back where they should be is itself a costly activity.
Well what if I told you that any given piece of art only makes 10% of it's revenue after 12 years. That means if some book was going to bring in 500,000 dollars revenue in 150 years, on average, it would bring in 450,000 in 12 years. So basically we are locking up all forms of art for 138 more years, just to squeeze out an extra 10% revenue. That doesn't really make any sense, and it goes against the spirit of the first copyright act, and against the spirit of a truly open society.
These figures may be generous. Especially for creative works other than books. (There are books which were never even in print for 12 years though.) With the likes of music and movies if they don't make money, within a very short time which can be measured in weeks or months, they will be considered a "failure".
Internet surveillance, using carnivore or back doors in encryption, will not stop terrorists communicating by other means e.g. face to face, personal courier or steganography.
Thing is that things such as face to face meetings, personal courier, steganography (most likely not computer based though), codes (not cyphers) are quite likely amongst the terrorists' prefered methods anyway. Also unlike a large company or even a regular army terrorists can rapidly change how they communicate things.
Perhaps using mobile when absolutely essential, saying - Go with plan A (human bomb to target A), or plan B (target B) or abort.
They probably won't use languages like that though. Something more like if they are going to meet at place A, place B or not bother. How is anyone overhearing this phone call going to know that it's about terrorism? You'd find out that the people involved are terrorists by regular detective work, not through mass surveillance.
Terrorists know about Echelon and will use other methods e.g. personal courier - either that or get caught.
Or, if they do use email, they will make it appear very innocent. Which isn't too difficult if they plan on attacking a tourist attraction.
Agents, police and assorted administrative folk are constantly abusing their access to "private" data in order to (1) enrich themselves and friends or (2) get revenge on somebody.
Another possible reason is so as to appear to be doing somehing to justify the money they cost.
Especially if you have something like number of arrests being a performance metric for police.
Because throughout history almost every government has proven itself utterly uncapable of figuring out what information is relevant or not to identifying you as a threat.
Sometimes they can be so busy chasing bogus threats that they miss the real ones. Or they collect information without any way to do anything with it. The GDR had the most extensive surveillance systems in modern history, but it ceased to exist.
And then there are the times when they can't figure out that something is a joke. Like the FBI investigating bonsaikitten.com. I wonder if Tom Clancy is under constant surveillance...
Maybe they though the Boeing 767 improvised cruise missile was a joke.
The legaslative is 2-party, and moreover, owned by the same parties.
In the case of the US Federal government those same 2 parties dominate the executive and judiciary, rather subverting the idea of these being independent of each other. Further the same 2 parties dominate every level of government in the US.
The system of greed breeds corporatism. This is what we've developed.
What is it specifically about the USA which has developed this system? There are other representative democracies, even those organised as federal republics, which have considerably more political diversity.
If the government say "these are the laws you will follow" and they say "no, we're too useful we can do as we please" then the government has to sack them and hire new people.
Most likely they will say "yes ok", then procede to completly ignore them with everyone involved fully understanding that the whole thing was a publicity stunt.
Echelon, and other spying programs will remain secret because spying can not be done in the open.
However those it is supposedly intended to target either know or have reason to suspect it exists. Especially after most of the worlds press covered the "shoebomber" case and mentioned recordings to the suspect's telephone calls.
Any terrorist with half a brain will assume that their telephone calls, faxes, emails etc will be intercepted. Thus they will make them appear either innocent or misleading. One thing they probably wouldn't do is encrypt them. For the simple reason that encryption is not commonly used, so encrypted messages stand out.
The watchers of those watching the watchers can be watched by the watchers themselves, thus guaranteeing that all the watchers, even the watchers OF the watchers, are watched. Then, just in case, we can have some watchers of the watchers of the watchers of the watchers, making sure everything goes smoothly.
Or alterativly you go for the David Brin solution. Where everyone can be a "watcher" and anyone can be watched.
Since these terrorists are adept at manipulating systems and people, it is unlikely that the next group will be in anyones database.
They'd probably be in the database, filed under "harmless passenger of good character, don't bother unduely".
If you've ever worked in retail you probably have come across the common switch-aroo scam. With colored currency this will almost be impossible to pull off, or at the very least make potential criminals a little hesitant on trying to claim they gave you purple bill when they really gave you a yellow one.
Even more so if the money is different sizes too.
This isn't really about tourists. Its about catching up with the world in currency technology. Europe was inserting the little metallic strips into their currency way before the US.
That's probably half the problem, the US is a strongly NIH country.
It appears that some countries [ hint: "colour", "defence" ] have bills of different sizes...
It's more like most of the planet. Where, outside of the US, do they issue paper money printed on the same size notes using the same colour scheme? Even in the US they have coins of different shapes, sizes and colour.
But the moon is much smaller than earth, so the amount of force required to fsck it up is less.
It's smaller than the Earth, but still a very hefty sized body. Also it is still there with huge impact craters visible.
You make a good point, although an asteroid impact is certainly not a guaranteed holocaust event. A good example is the 1908 Tunguska hit which is mentioned in the original article.
Only because it exploded above Siberia. A few hours later and it could have killed millions.
This is believed to be about the same size as the one that missed us June 14th. It caused no known deaths and relatively little damage.
"little damage" it demolished a forrest. Typically buildings, even of today wouldn't survive such a blast.
Even IF one makes it to earth, it somehow has to somehow land on the 30% of land mass.
It would do a nice job of creating a tsunami...
Of that land mass a very small percentage is densely populated.
A high proportion of the populated land mass is close to sea level.
Just remember that it's not legal for you to download and use any content that isn't part of the original VHS tape you bought, like deleted scenes, director commentary, or anything else added only to the digital format; those are all covered by separate copyright.
But try getting hold of just this material. If you already had a VHS copy you've paid twice for the movie. Also quite a lot of this material is very cheap for the publisher to add.
The important detail is that the popularity of vinyl is easily explained in the context of dance music. This suggests that until a superior technology comes along to replace what vinyl provides (and neither cassette tapes or CDs fit this) vinyl records will continue to be sold.
Rather it's the case that when it comes to DJing vinyl is the "superior technology". Dispite attempts to make CD players which attempt to emulate turntables.
VHS tapes as well have this sort of niche that DVDs can't replace: recording shows off the air.
Or recording from security cameras.
Tivo is in many ways a superior alternative (though not in all ways, as it doesn't allow friends to share tapes), so it will probably continue to take market share away from VCRs.
You could make such a device with removable media, it's just that such machines are in their infancy and the likes of the MPAA are trying to kill them off.
Cost is also an issue with Tivos, something which is not the case with movies on VHS.
20 years ago VHS tapes cost about 10 times what they do now. If hard disks were as commonplace as VHS they would be a lot cheaper too. It's a matter of economy of scale.
There is no technical reason that DVD movies have to be more expensive that VHS movies.
The reason is that they are priced around what people will pay, since DVD (like CD) is being pushed as a "better" product it has a higher price. Thus even more profits, since they are cheaper to produce and distribute than VHS they would still make more profit if they were priced a bit less...
Because of the service component of Tivo, it's unlikely that Tivo could become less expensive than VCRs. Those digital TV recorders that do not depend on a central service have a better chance of eliminating VCRs, though the marketing reality may mean that they take a while to succesfully compete with Tivo.
In terms of hardware having less moving parts could easily make a Tivo type device cheaper than a VCR, at least in volume. The problem with the service is that it's a standalone service. With the Tivo people having to provide all the dialup infrastructure, which means that it costs more than if they were simply selling access to the data over the Internet.