I've never gotten this Japan train thing. Don't get me wrong. Happy to see how the Japanese recovered from WWII and became the powerhouse that they are in many ways. A nice stable government, an economy similar to ours, great scientific advances.
(America haters will reply something like "how is being like America a good thing? Bush sucks" -- or something. Disregard those morons).
Anyway, as much respect as I have for Japan, trains are our thing. Why is America not the one always building the fastest train in the world? Why isn't the rest of the world chasing us? And why don't we care about having the world's tallest building anymore? Especially now that we have some rebuilding to do in NY, I can't think of a single decent reason to not make it the tallest building in the world.
And while I'm on a Superman theme, I might as well complete it. We should also have the fastest speeding bullet. Come on ammo manufacturers. Get your act together:)
OK, maybe it's a neat idea... but it was never really a barrier. The only thing that has ever stood in the way was time and effort. It's easier now that it would have been with, say, 640K pixels, and it's still not all that easy. Dozens and dozens of pictures strategically taken and spliced together, but this is not some sort of technical breakthrough.
I've been using instant messaging for many years, but I didn't start using it as a regular part of my work until late 1999 or early 2000 while working at IBM. We had Lotus Sametime, which eventually also became an AIM client, so we could use Sametime to talk with other IBM'ers and AIM for people outside, all in the same chat client.
This came in handy when I left IBM, as I was able to continue communicating with many people at IBM through AIM without their needing to change anything. Since then, some of them have left IBM as well, and we continue to use AIM to communicate. Now that I work at home, these people are my co-workers, although they all have other employers -- and some work at home, some have had periods of not working at all. But we still have this community and it keeps me sane.
I'm a one-man web department at my job and my employer is on the opposite coast. I speak and e-mail with my boss and have a good relationship with him, but he's busy with other things besides me and he's not into IM. Not only do I need the social connection that IM provides, but it's a great technical resource for me as well. There are 2 or 3 of us who bounce questions and ideas off each other. They help me and I help them.
Of course, there's a lot of the social stuff also. We send funny URLs to each other and joke around a lot. It's a duplication of the environment we would have (and indeed used to have) as coworkers in the same office. Many of them are from the same job, but some are from other jobs, so it's like a "greatest hits" album of friends and coworkers from several jobs, some of whom don't know each other at all. It's fascinating and terribly useful.
Oh, and vim. PostgreSQL for data storage. Should take you a week to slam out a custom content management system. Absent the current skills, add O'Reilly to the list. Llama, then Camel. Wish your folks a happy holiday from me.
As a pretty good iTMS customer myself (1.32 GB bought so far), I'll tell you what good it does.
Yes, you can burn audio CDs and then rip those CDs to MP3s (Apple's opinion on the legality of the resulting MP3s is beyond the scope of this post, but I would be interested in knowing).
The problem is that you can only get 15-18 songs on an audio CD (or something like that). On the other hand, you can get like 400 songs on an MP3 CD. So there's a serious advantage in terms of both labor and CD blank media to get your music on CD, both for portablity purposes and for backup purposes.
Now that I'm reached the point of no return as a customer, meaning I'm no longer experimenting with their service, because I have spent quite a chunk of change, I've recently started contemplating issues like backup, potential change of ownership of my music (say I want to sell an album like I could sell a used CD).
Anyway, in my opinion, this is the main issue. Directly converting the songs to MP3 (or some other non-DRM compressed format) without first having to go through the audio CD process.
1) If the cost-profit ratio is still economically feasible, legal mailers will continue to mail in vast quantities, and they might also increase their mailings, having been "blessed" by the government in the form of a tax payment.
2) This puts the mass e-mailers in the government's pocket, increasing their lobbying power and their power among society. It adds government to the list of benefactors of the mass e-mail problem, significantly reducing the likelihood that they will ever take any other action. This solution could be described as "It's a problem until we get a piece of the action", much like gambling (which is now blessed and depended upon as the lottery), and cigarettes (which are now blessed and depended upon in the form of high taxes and settlements to state governments from tobacco companies).
3) The technical implementation of this is amazingly difficult. If all e-mail went through ISPs who were already charging their customers for metered units, such as minutes online, it would be less of a nightmare, but still very difficult. In that case, their software would have to be modified to integrate their mail server into some sort of tracking and billing system that would keep track of how many e-mails a user sends out in a period. Additionally, their overhead would increase to report and pay the taxes on the consumer's behalf (much like a sales tax), not to mention the cost of upgrading the software to track something that has never before been tracked. This additional overhead will lead to higher prices to consumers.
4) Aside from problems within ISPs, you don't even need to send mail through an ISP mail server. If you know enough about how the protocol works (you don't need to know much), you can send mail directly to the recipient's mail server, and there's no way their ISP is going to bill you, since they don't even know who you are. The point is that the entire electronic mail infrastructure will have to be replaced and old pieces of that infrastructure (such as old versions of sendmail) will have to be outlawed. Try enforcing that.
5) Don't forget workarounds. Want to see an even bigger boom in instant messaging? Tax e-mail. If they decide to tax instant messaging, watch something else show up that works around it. The only solution will be an extremely broad definition of "electronic mail", that would have to encompass any way that a message from one user can get to another user, which will never get passed. Even if all US e-mail was centralized, say, with the Postal Service (not a chance of that), that would just make it even more clear what forms of communication to avoid and which new technologies to embrace.
The solution to the problem of spam is not government intervention. It's a self-regulation issue that will require users to grow up technically if they want to get rid of their unwanted e-mail. I sign every one of my e-mails with a PGP signature. Hardly ANYBODY else does that. If everybody started doing that, which is easy and free, it would be A START in the right direction. Eventually, you could be able to only accept e-mail from anybody who has a verifiable signature. If they're e-mailing you for the first time, there could be a challenge-response system in place to force them to provide a public key, even one that has been certified by a certifying authority. Most of this exists today. But the users don't want to have to get smarter. And they certainly don't have to work harder. They want the government to just make the problem go away, but they don't realize that the internet they have today is as good as it is precisely because the government hasn't regulated every step along the way.
I clicked through hoping to see an "intimate portrait of Larry Ellison". Come on, guys... when you advertise pr0n you should deliver, especially when it's somebody as sexy as Britney Spears or Larry Ellison:)
select count(*) as count, candidate.lastname || ', ' || candidate.firstname as candidate from candidate, vote group by candidate order by count desc
They should have added "where candidate.id = vote.candidate_id". I make this mistake often, but I generally practice my queries before doing them for the press.
You know, it's stuff like this that constantly reminds me of how much more politically tuned I need to be. I'm a news junkie, but that usually means watching a lot of mainstream media and not keeping up with bills going through congress nearly as much as I should.
For some silly reason, I'm not even sure I've ever heard of CIPA (the Children's Internet Protection Act), even though it's been overturned and taken to the Supreme Court and upheld. It's obviously not very newsworthy, or I just wasn't paying attention.
Something unusual about this law is that you can read it in a single sitting. It's simple and short. I'll share with you what I learned in about a half hour, just in case you didn't know about it either. You're aware of the Universal Service Fee on your phone bill, of course. Well that goes into an FCC fund that enables discounts on phone lines and internet access to eligible schools and libraries. Well, this law threatened to take that assistance away (and, in my interpretation, threatened to force schools and libraries to pay back all money they had ever received from the Universal Service Program) if they don't install some sort of software to filter material deemed harmful to minors.
That's essentially it, although the law goes on to say that the federal government won't establish guidelines about what to filter and won't approve or dissapprove any local guidelines. That's certainly a good thing. But I was impressed by how incredibly short and sweet the law is. But I still found myself disagreeing with it, for the same reason that the law was challenged in court, on the grounds that filtering is an imperfect science and that these measures would block genuinely useful information, which is, of course, protected by the First Ammendment, from reaching users in schools and libraries.
Now then, it didn't take long in my Google searching to find ads from all sort of companies, touting "CIPA Compliance" in their software. Ha! Well that's not very hard, considering the government specified only one requirement with which to comply... the software must be capable of filtering. Even a simple web proxy that allows the administrator to enter URLs one at a time of websites that are "deemed to be harmful to children" is complaint with CIPA. And, of course, this was a great opportunity for the software sales snakes of America to capitalize on a new law requiring their software. So you think this software is cheap? Ha! Guess again. When the government makes a law requiring something to be bought, that something goes up in price.
Sheesh.
Oh, and the original topic.... about filtering NRA stuff and not anti-gun stuff. Yeah, I completely agree. The NRA, as largely a political organization, should absolutely not be filtered. There's nothing there at all harmful to children. The NRA and its members are the very most responsible advocates of gun ownership you will ever run across.
I also live in Greater Atlanta and intentionally avoided the Apple Stores. I kind of wanted to go out to CompUSA last night, but they didn't stay open late, so since they close at 9:00 and Panther was released at 8:00, I didn't want to risk any crowds that they might have.
It so happened that I had to buy a birthday present for somebody and also buy some new headphones today, so I had three good reasons to go to CompUSA, and I was a tad surprised that there didn't seem to be anybody in the whole store that knew what Panther was. There was one iMac (or was it an eMac? Still confused about that) that had it installed for demo purposes, and demo I did. I'll squeeze in a mini-review of what I saw so far.
Overall, I was a little surprised at how similar to Jaguar it felt... this is a good thing. We want improvements, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Speaking of bathwater, the Finder has been replaced and I'm sure the new one is awesome. It was noticeably different but I didn't see a whole lot of Gee Whiz stuff in my quick (about 30 minutes) runthrough. I probably spent about 10 of those minutes playing with the much-heralded Expos, which honestly is DAMN COOL. I only hope it runs that quickly on my 550 PowerBook... probably not, though. I also tested the quick user switching thing. I had to figure out the CompUSA password, but it only took me about three guesses. That's another great feature.
The nicest surprise is that alt-tab (yeah, yeah, command-tab on Mac) application switching has really matured. It's much, MUCH more like Windows now... with a transparent bar that appears center-screen and true stack-based app switching (to make it just as easy to go two applications back as it is to go one application back). As a former Windows keystroke nut, I absolutely had to have my alt-tab support, and I about lost my mind when I first switched to OS X and had to deal with the various incarnations of that, including some shareware that did what I wanted and was subsequently irreparably broken by Jaguar, at which point I got used to Jaguar's better-but-not-quite-there implementation. That was when they almost lost me as a customer, but I just love OS X too damn much.
I'm glad to see they've burst forth with this great upgrade. I obviously wish it wasn't so expensive, but hey, it could be worse... it could be like $400:) Highlly recommended, even though I didn't buy it quite yet. Soon, very soon. Especially now that I've touched it... I realize that I really like it but it's not so earth-shattering that I simply must have it. I'm sure many applications will soon be Panther-only (that's what happened with Jaguar), so I'll have to upgrade within the next few months. I hope to be able to do so with a good fiscal conscience within a couple of weeks.
Sorry it's so long... hope it was sort of interesting.
Then I suppose you have no trouble endorsing your paycheck over to your favorite charity, since financial concerns pale in comparison to the humanitarian good that can be done. Or are you missing the point also?
This person's not missing the point at all. He just doesn't want to donate something he might not be able to afford.
It's a good point that this story has little to do with online rights, but it's also a testament of how involved readers of slashdot have become in subjects that many of us would have never thought would interest us that much.
I was just discussing this with somebody the other day, about how being a geek these days (and especially a reader of slashdot) exposes me to an unbelievable assortment of information. I read way more legal documents than I ever thought I would, for example, thanks to patent silliness that has been going on for years, to say nothing of the recent SCO idiocy. There are legal issues that come up around technology all the time.
Religion, various sciences, many of which aren't very technical, politics, law, medicine... this site and our various discussions have led us to be a much more interest-diverse crowd than many of us started out to be.
Again, you're right that this isn't related to technology. But it is related, as the original story says, to one of the most active slashdot stories ever. Although the original story wasn't a tech story either, as the poster said at the time, there were many, many readers who submitted that story, which is probably why it was posted. Obviously there was extreme interest in the case, regardless of the tech quotient.
The same is true of many other important stories, dare I mention September 11th, which wasn't a very technical story either. But this is where many of us end up spending a lot of our days and are used to discussing all kinds of topics with others. This site is devoted to our interests, no matter how diverse those interests might be.
If Wal-Mart suddenly started charging 5 times what everything was worth to the average consumer, but most consumers had no real stores to shop at that weren't Wal-Marts, and in addition if the quality of most products unpredictably shot below even Wal-Mart standards...
Well, that would be an antitrust issue, wouldn't it, especially considering the kind of stuff that Wal-Mart sells (everything). If that was the only place you could buy anything and they're prices were obviously inflated that would be some sort of price gouging or something and would be dealt with.
I thought for a moment you had pulled out my favorite argument that people like to use for downloading music... that the prices are too high. Why, that's exactly why I tried to take off with the case of Coke... because I thought 3.50 was too much money for it.
But alas, you're not saying that at all. And here I've already started a reply and now I don't have much more to say on the subject. So I might as well just wrap it up.
I didn't miss the point. I explicitly avoided the point and noted that in my reply. My reply wasn't about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. It was about the silly use of the word "customers" to describe those that they're going after. They might have been customers in the past, and they might be customers in the future, but that's not the capacity in which they're being sued.
Why do people have such a problem understanding the difference between copyright infringement and theft?
And others have a problem understanding the similarities. Remember, I didn't express an opinion about the RIAA or their policies, just the term "customers" that's used by people external to the RIAA to refer to the people that they feel are hurting their business. Again, this has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with the RIAA.
With copyright infringement, you deprive the owner of nothing, since you simply make your own copy.
That's a popular misconception. Go write some good songs and spend some serious rehearsal and studio time getting those songs recorded and mixed. Oh, I forgot the touring that you'll have to do and the dues you'll have to pay (figuratively) to get a recording contract. Anyway, once your CD is in stores, let's say one (1) guy shows up and buys one. He goes home, rips it, and 20,000 people now own a recording of your music. You receive the royalties for one (1) unit sold. Now let somebody tell you that this isn't stealing.
Here's the other thing: Most people that download songs, also buy CDs.
I don't know that. Do you? I know if I can get it for free or get it for not free, I'll often take the free route. I know that have personally downloaded music via Napster and Gnutella, and only a couple of times did my download lead to a sale, and that was just because of guilt. I honestly loved the albums and felt that the artists deserved my money. But I still have many songs that I never paid for. I'm not afraid to admit it. I certainly wasn't downloading anywhere near the quantity of the people the RIAA has their sights on. And even though I did it, I still felt bad about it.
Often the more they download, the more they buy.
Again, we just don't know this.
I've known more than one person who loved to play with P2P software and owned literally over a thousand CDs.
Fine. I've bought thousands of dollars of stuff from Wal-mart over the years, I'm sure, but that doesn't give me the right to steal from them.
That would not only make them a customer, that would make them a big customer. You do not want to piss these people off.
Good point. Wal-mart should let me do literally whatever I want to in their store, because they don't want to piss me off because I might not buy from them in the future. But when they see me high-tailing it to the front door with a pack of doublemint in my fist that I don't intend to pay for, the money they might make from me in the future just doesn't matter. They're out to stop the loss and punish the crime. Admittedly, shoplifting and downloading songs on P2P networks are apples and oranges. I don't say that my Wal-mart example isn't extreme. But it is valid.
Also there are plenty of people that were customers but are now no longer buying CDs because of the tactics, though not targeted at them.
Not buying the merchandise is every consumer's right. But that right is to give up the merchandise entirely, not to only give up paying for it.
So this is not at all like going after a theif. this is going after people who sample your msuic, at no cost to you, and then buy it.
If that's the case, then none of these people have anything to fear. If they can demonstrate that they bought all of the music that they downloaded, I'm sure the RIAA will drop the suit. The fact is that, despite the usage of P2P as an evaluation vehicle (I myself have used it in this way also), there is an extremely large number of people who have every intention of keeping every song they download and paying for none of them.
What's more, it is leading to the strengthening of indie labels.
Yes, and this is a good thing. I'm no fan of the RIAA and never have been.
When MILLIONS of customers do something like P2P, you find a way to exploit it, not try to stand in
"...decent quality sound," he says, as if to suggest that 128 bps isn't decent. It's very, very decent. Not as high as it could be, but calling it short of even decent is a stretch, I think.
I'm not the audiophile I used to be and I don't pretend to be any more of one than I am, but I've got an ear, dadgummit, and 128 bps makes for very good sound reproduction, certainly worthy of at least the "decent" rank.
By the way, I don't disagree with your post in spirit. I like the idea that you sketched out there and from time to time I feel like I'm not really getting that great a deal buying songs and albums from iTunes (I've bought 1.25 GB worth so far), given that the quality is admittedly below what a CD would be, with no liner notes, no media, limited portability, a DRM format, etc. But as somebody else already replied, that's not very likely, especially doing as well as they're doing so far.
Regardless of agreement or disagreement with the RIAA in general or this particular lawsuit strategy, "suing your customers" is a silly way to put it. If I walked into Wal-Mart and stole a case of Coke, they would not worry about whether or not it was a good idea to "put one of our customers in jail". They would be stopping their loss and taking legal action against an offender. If I happened to be a past or future customer, that's a separate issue.
While reading this article, which is really good, by the way, I clicked on the "resume" link and glanced at it. I figured he was a dot-com generation guy who had gotten out of school and started working for six-figured salaries until his various employers started showing up on f**kedcompany.com. You know, the same old story of the IT workers who didn't how much they had until they lost it. But Holy Astronauts, Batman! This guy worked on the friggin' APOLLO program. He worked at NASA from 1967-1971 (the year I was born).
What's ingenious about it? Have you read about it? The gyroscopes that keep it balanced on two wheels and senses your leaning direction and travels the direction and speed you want to go. It is truly revolutionary. And this is exactly the problem. People see is as an overpriced and underpowered moped, but it's actually the first version of a revolutionary transport. I honestly believe this invention is way bigger than most people are giving it credit for.
Overhyped? Absolutely. Overpriced? Probably, and definitely if they want to have the kind of earth-shattering acceptance that they were expecting. Practical at this moment in most situations? No. But an ingenious INVENTION? Yes -- absolutely.
He eventually did call. I'm embarassed to admit that I posted a suggestion to read the entire story before I had read the entire story. I realized that after the fact and was ashamed:)
I encourage you to read the entire story, which is four pages long. Mr. Rocha appears to have acted in an exemplary manner. He worked with Columbia from the time it was being built and felt very close to that particular shuttle. He witnessed and has reported the "launch fever" on the part of managers, and as soon as he heard about the foam strike, he spent the weekend (does that sound familiar to anyone here?) reviewing the video. He took an actual INTEREST in his work, get it?
Then he wrote the e-mail to the manager at 11:24 pm on Sunday. Sound familiar? Spend all weekend checking it out and when you're SURE, take action. He requested that the astronauts conduct a visual inspection of the impact area. He didn't hear back from his manager (sound familiar?). But he didn't stop there. He and the debris assessment team continued to review it until Tuesday, when he sent another e-mail asking if they could get some satellite images of the damage area. Sounds like a great idea.
It never happened, because management didn't want to play the role of "Chicken Little". Unbelievable. Seven dead astronauts because management couldn't be bothered. But Mr Rocha is a hero, and I hope to shake his hand one day and thank him for his efforts. I also looked for his e-mail address and couldn't find it. I'm amazed he hasn't been fired by now for being a whistleblower. Give it time. If anybody has a work or personal address for him, please share it with me.
You'd think that for $5000, they could have put an RJ45 port on the sucker and included a DHCP client and a little web server admin interface for upgrades, like any other network device. Your IP address can show up on the display (surely there's some sort of display, or they could have included one just for that purpose for practically no money).
The justification for this is easy... when there's a problem that can be fixed with software, you just offer an upgrade instead of suffering the PR of a recall, even a voluntary one. The Segway, an ingenius invention that is under too much pressure to be too perfect too soon, is having a hard enough time with the public (too big, too ugly, too stupid, whatever) without this. This is definitely not what they need.
This decision came from the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma. Their site is here, which has links to two PDFs... one is the judgement and the other is the order:
Slashdot Mirror
I've never gotten this Japan train thing. Don't get me wrong. Happy to see how the Japanese recovered from WWII and became the powerhouse that they are in many ways. A nice stable government, an economy similar to ours, great scientific advances.
:)
(America haters will reply something like "how is being like America a good thing? Bush sucks" -- or something. Disregard those morons).
Anyway, as much respect as I have for Japan, trains are our thing. Why is America not the one always building the fastest train in the world? Why isn't the rest of the world chasing us? And why don't we care about having the world's tallest building anymore? Especially now that we have some rebuilding to do in NY, I can't think of a single decent reason to not make it the tallest building in the world.
And while I'm on a Superman theme, I might as well complete it. We should also have the fastest speeding bullet. Come on ammo manufacturers. Get your act together
RP
...since I got my Mac.
OK, maybe it's a neat idea... but it was never really a barrier. The only thing that has ever stood in the way was time and effort. It's easier now that it would have been with, say, 640K pixels, and it's still not all that easy. Dozens and dozens of pictures strategically taken and spliced together, but this is not some sort of technical breakthrough.
RP
I've been using instant messaging for many years, but I didn't start using it as a regular part of my work until late 1999 or early 2000 while working at IBM. We had Lotus Sametime, which eventually also became an AIM client, so we could use Sametime to talk with other IBM'ers and AIM for people outside, all in the same chat client.
This came in handy when I left IBM, as I was able to continue communicating with many people at IBM through AIM without their needing to change anything. Since then, some of them have left IBM as well, and we continue to use AIM to communicate. Now that I work at home, these people are my co-workers, although they all have other employers -- and some work at home, some have had periods of not working at all. But we still have this community and it keeps me sane.
I'm a one-man web department at my job and my employer is on the opposite coast. I speak and e-mail with my boss and have a good relationship with him, but he's busy with other things besides me and he's not into IM. Not only do I need the social connection that IM provides, but it's a great technical resource for me as well. There are 2 or 3 of us who bounce questions and ideas off each other. They help me and I help them.
Of course, there's a lot of the social stuff also. We send funny URLs to each other and joke around a lot. It's a duplication of the environment we would have (and indeed used to have) as coworkers in the same office. Many of them are from the same job, but some are from other jobs, so it's like a "greatest hits" album of friends and coworkers from several jobs, some of whom don't know each other at all. It's fascinating and terribly useful.
RP
Oh, and vim. PostgreSQL for data storage. Should take you a week to slam out a custom content management system. Absent the current skills, add O'Reilly to the list. Llama, then Camel. Wish your folks a happy holiday from me.
As a pretty good iTMS customer myself (1.32 GB bought so far), I'll tell you what good it does.
Yes, you can burn audio CDs and then rip those CDs to MP3s (Apple's opinion on the legality of the resulting MP3s is beyond the scope of this post, but I would be interested in knowing).
The problem is that you can only get 15-18 songs on an audio CD (or something like that). On the other hand, you can get like 400 songs on an MP3 CD. So there's a serious advantage in terms of both labor and CD blank media to get your music on CD, both for portablity purposes and for backup purposes.
Now that I'm reached the point of no return as a customer, meaning I'm no longer experimenting with their service, because I have spent quite a chunk of change, I've recently started contemplating issues like backup, potential change of ownership of my music (say I want to sell an album like I could sell a used CD).
Anyway, in my opinion, this is the main issue. Directly converting the songs to MP3 (or some other non-DRM compressed format) without first having to go through the audio CD process.
RP
Sometimes the jokes write themselves.
1) If the cost-profit ratio is still economically feasible, legal mailers will continue to mail in vast quantities, and they might also increase their mailings, having been "blessed" by the government in the form of a tax payment.
2) This puts the mass e-mailers in the government's pocket, increasing their lobbying power and their power among society. It adds government to the list of benefactors of the mass e-mail problem, significantly reducing the likelihood that they will ever take any other action. This solution could be described as "It's a problem until we get a piece of the action", much like gambling (which is now blessed and depended upon as the lottery), and cigarettes (which are now blessed and depended upon in the form of high taxes and settlements to state governments from tobacco companies).
3) The technical implementation of this is amazingly difficult. If all e-mail went through ISPs who were already charging their customers for metered units, such as minutes online, it would be less of a nightmare, but still very difficult. In that case, their software would have to be modified to integrate their mail server into some sort of tracking and billing system that would keep track of how many e-mails a user sends out in a period. Additionally, their overhead would increase to report and pay the taxes on the consumer's behalf (much like a sales tax), not to mention the cost of upgrading the software to track something that has never before been tracked. This additional overhead will lead to higher prices to consumers.
4) Aside from problems within ISPs, you don't even need to send mail through an ISP mail server. If you know enough about how the protocol works (you don't need to know much), you can send mail directly to the recipient's mail server, and there's no way their ISP is going to bill you, since they don't even know who you are. The point is that the entire electronic mail infrastructure will have to be replaced and old pieces of that infrastructure (such as old versions of sendmail) will have to be outlawed. Try enforcing that.
5) Don't forget workarounds. Want to see an even bigger boom in instant messaging? Tax e-mail. If they decide to tax instant messaging, watch something else show up that works around it. The only solution will be an extremely broad definition of "electronic mail", that would have to encompass any way that a message from one user can get to another user, which will never get passed. Even if all US e-mail was centralized, say, with the Postal Service (not a chance of that), that would just make it even more clear what forms of communication to avoid and which new technologies to embrace.
The solution to the problem of spam is not government intervention. It's a self-regulation issue that will require users to grow up technically if they want to get rid of their unwanted e-mail. I sign every one of my e-mails with a PGP signature. Hardly ANYBODY else does that. If everybody started doing that, which is easy and free, it would be A START in the right direction. Eventually, you could be able to only accept e-mail from anybody who has a verifiable signature. If they're e-mailing you for the first time, there could be a challenge-response system in place to force them to provide a public key, even one that has been certified by a certifying authority. Most of this exists today. But the users don't want to have to get smarter. And they certainly don't have to work harder. They want the government to just make the problem go away, but they don't realize that the internet they have today is as good as it is precisely because the government hasn't regulated every step along the way.
RP
I clicked through hoping to see an "intimate portrait of Larry Ellison". Come on, guys... when you advertise pr0n you should deliver, especially when it's somebody as sexy as Britney Spears or Larry Ellison :)
RP
RP
You know, it's stuff like this that constantly reminds me of how much more politically tuned I need to be. I'm a news junkie, but that usually means watching a lot of mainstream media and not keeping up with bills going through congress nearly as much as I should.
For some silly reason, I'm not even sure I've ever heard of CIPA (the Children's Internet Protection Act), even though it's been overturned and taken to the Supreme Court and upheld. It's obviously not very newsworthy, or I just wasn't paying attention.
Something unusual about this law is that you can read it in a single sitting. It's simple and short. I'll share with you what I learned in about a half hour, just in case you didn't know about it either. You're aware of the Universal Service Fee on your phone bill, of course. Well that goes into an FCC fund that enables discounts on phone lines and internet access to eligible schools and libraries. Well, this law threatened to take that assistance away (and, in my interpretation, threatened to force schools and libraries to pay back all money they had ever received from the Universal Service Program) if they don't install some sort of software to filter material deemed harmful to minors.
That's essentially it, although the law goes on to say that the federal government won't establish guidelines about what to filter and won't approve or dissapprove any local guidelines. That's certainly a good thing. But I was impressed by how incredibly short and sweet the law is. But I still found myself disagreeing with it, for the same reason that the law was challenged in court, on the grounds that filtering is an imperfect science and that these measures would block genuinely useful information, which is, of course, protected by the First Ammendment, from reaching users in schools and libraries.
Now then, it didn't take long in my Google searching to find ads from all sort of companies, touting "CIPA Compliance" in their software. Ha! Well that's not very hard, considering the government specified only one requirement with which to comply... the software must be capable of filtering. Even a simple web proxy that allows the administrator to enter URLs one at a time of websites that are "deemed to be harmful to children" is complaint with CIPA. And, of course, this was a great opportunity for the software sales snakes of America to capitalize on a new law requiring their software. So you think this software is cheap? Ha! Guess again. When the government makes a law requiring something to be bought, that something goes up in price.
Sheesh.
Oh, and the original topic.... about filtering NRA stuff and not anti-gun stuff. Yeah, I completely agree. The NRA, as largely a political organization, should absolutely not be filtered. There's nothing there at all harmful to children. The NRA and its members are the very most responsible advocates of gun ownership you will ever run across.
RP
I also live in Greater Atlanta and intentionally avoided the Apple Stores. I kind of wanted to go out to CompUSA last night, but they didn't stay open late, so since they close at 9:00 and Panther was released at 8:00, I didn't want to risk any crowds that they might have.
:) Highlly recommended, even though I didn't buy it quite yet. Soon, very soon. Especially now that I've touched it... I realize that I really like it but it's not so earth-shattering that I simply must have it. I'm sure many applications will soon be Panther-only (that's what happened with Jaguar), so I'll have to upgrade within the next few months. I hope to be able to do so with a good fiscal conscience within a couple of weeks.
It so happened that I had to buy a birthday present for somebody and also buy some new headphones today, so I had three good reasons to go to CompUSA, and I was a tad surprised that there didn't seem to be anybody in the whole store that knew what Panther was. There was one iMac (or was it an eMac? Still confused about that) that had it installed for demo purposes, and demo I did. I'll squeeze in a mini-review of what I saw so far.
Overall, I was a little surprised at how similar to Jaguar it felt... this is a good thing. We want improvements, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Speaking of bathwater, the Finder has been replaced and I'm sure the new one is awesome. It was noticeably different but I didn't see a whole lot of Gee Whiz stuff in my quick (about 30 minutes) runthrough. I probably spent about 10 of those minutes playing with the much-heralded Expos, which honestly is DAMN COOL. I only hope it runs that quickly on my 550 PowerBook... probably not, though. I also tested the quick user switching thing. I had to figure out the CompUSA password, but it only took me about three guesses. That's another great feature.
The nicest surprise is that alt-tab (yeah, yeah, command-tab on Mac) application switching has really matured. It's much, MUCH more like Windows now... with a transparent bar that appears center-screen and true stack-based app switching (to make it just as easy to go two applications back as it is to go one application back). As a former Windows keystroke nut, I absolutely had to have my alt-tab support, and I about lost my mind when I first switched to OS X and had to deal with the various incarnations of that, including some shareware that did what I wanted and was subsequently irreparably broken by Jaguar, at which point I got used to Jaguar's better-but-not-quite-there implementation. That was when they almost lost me as a customer, but I just love OS X too damn much.
I'm glad to see they've burst forth with this great upgrade. I obviously wish it wasn't so expensive, but hey, it could be worse... it could be like $400
Sorry it's so long... hope it was sort of interesting.
RP
Then I suppose you have no trouble endorsing your paycheck over to your favorite charity, since financial concerns pale in comparison to the humanitarian good that can be done. Or are you missing the point also?
This person's not missing the point at all. He just doesn't want to donate something he might not be able to afford.
RP
It's a good point that this story has little to do with online rights, but it's also a testament of how involved readers of slashdot have become in subjects that many of us would have never thought would interest us that much.
I was just discussing this with somebody the other day, about how being a geek these days (and especially a reader of slashdot) exposes me to an unbelievable assortment of information. I read way more legal documents than I ever thought I would, for example, thanks to patent silliness that has been going on for years, to say nothing of the recent SCO idiocy. There are legal issues that come up around technology all the time.
Religion, various sciences, many of which aren't very technical, politics, law, medicine... this site and our various discussions have led us to be a much more interest-diverse crowd than many of us started out to be.
Again, you're right that this isn't related to technology. But it is related, as the original story says, to one of the most active slashdot stories ever. Although the original story wasn't a tech story either, as the poster said at the time, there were many, many readers who submitted that story, which is probably why it was posted. Obviously there was extreme interest in the case, regardless of the tech quotient.
The same is true of many other important stories, dare I mention September 11th, which wasn't a very technical story either. But this is where many of us end up spending a lot of our days and are used to discussing all kinds of topics with others. This site is devoted to our interests, no matter how diverse those interests might be.
RP
If Wal-Mart suddenly started charging 5 times what everything was worth to the average consumer, but most consumers had no real stores to shop at that weren't Wal-Marts, and in addition if the quality of most products unpredictably shot below even Wal-Mart standards...
Well, that would be an antitrust issue, wouldn't it, especially considering the kind of stuff that Wal-Mart sells (everything). If that was the only place you could buy anything and they're prices were obviously inflated that would be some sort of price gouging or something and would be dealt with.
I thought for a moment you had pulled out my favorite argument that people like to use for downloading music... that the prices are too high. Why, that's exactly why I tried to take off with the case of Coke... because I thought 3.50 was too much money for it.
But alas, you're not saying that at all. And here I've already started a reply and now I don't have much more to say on the subject. So I might as well just wrap it up.
RP
I didn't miss the point. I explicitly avoided the point and noted that in my reply. My reply wasn't about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. It was about the silly use of the word "customers" to describe those that they're going after. They might have been customers in the past, and they might be customers in the future, but that's not the capacity in which they're being sued.
RP
Why do people have such a problem understanding the difference between copyright infringement and theft?
And others have a problem understanding the similarities. Remember, I didn't express an opinion about the RIAA or their policies, just the term "customers" that's used by people external to the RIAA to refer to the people that they feel are hurting their business. Again, this has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with the RIAA.
With copyright infringement, you deprive the owner of nothing, since you simply make your own copy.
That's a popular misconception. Go write some good songs and spend some serious rehearsal and studio time getting those songs recorded and mixed. Oh, I forgot the touring that you'll have to do and the dues you'll have to pay (figuratively) to get a recording contract. Anyway, once your CD is in stores, let's say one (1) guy shows up and buys one. He goes home, rips it, and 20,000 people now own a recording of your music. You receive the royalties for one (1) unit sold. Now let somebody tell you that this isn't stealing.
Here's the other thing: Most people that download songs, also buy CDs.
I don't know that. Do you? I know if I can get it for free or get it for not free, I'll often take the free route. I know that have personally downloaded music via Napster and Gnutella, and only a couple of times did my download lead to a sale, and that was just because of guilt. I honestly loved the albums and felt that the artists deserved my money. But I still have many songs that I never paid for. I'm not afraid to admit it. I certainly wasn't downloading anywhere near the quantity of the people the RIAA has their sights on. And even though I did it, I still felt bad about it.
Often the more they download, the more they buy.
Again, we just don't know this.
I've known more than one person who loved to play with P2P software and owned literally over a thousand CDs.
Fine. I've bought thousands of dollars of stuff from Wal-mart over the years, I'm sure, but that doesn't give me the right to steal from them.
That would not only make them a customer, that would make them a big customer. You do not want to piss these people off.
Good point. Wal-mart should let me do literally whatever I want to in their store, because they don't want to piss me off because I might not buy from them in the future. But when they see me high-tailing it to the front door with a pack of doublemint in my fist that I don't intend to pay for, the money they might make from me in the future just doesn't matter. They're out to stop the loss and punish the crime. Admittedly, shoplifting and downloading songs on P2P networks are apples and oranges. I don't say that my Wal-mart example isn't extreme. But it is valid.
Also there are plenty of people that were customers but are now no longer buying CDs because of the tactics, though not targeted at them.
Not buying the merchandise is every consumer's right. But that right is to give up the merchandise entirely, not to only give up paying for it.
So this is not at all like going after a theif. this is going after people who sample your msuic, at no cost to you, and then buy it.
If that's the case, then none of these people have anything to fear. If they can demonstrate that they bought all of the music that they downloaded, I'm sure the RIAA will drop the suit. The fact is that, despite the usage of P2P as an evaluation vehicle (I myself have used it in this way also), there is an extremely large number of people who have every intention of keeping every song they download and paying for none of them.
What's more, it is leading to the strengthening of indie labels.
Yes, and this is a good thing. I'm no fan of the RIAA and never have been.
When MILLIONS of customers do something like P2P, you find a way to exploit it, not try to stand in
"...decent quality sound," he says, as if to suggest that 128 bps isn't decent. It's very, very decent. Not as high as it could be, but calling it short of even decent is a stretch, I think.
I'm not the audiophile I used to be and I don't pretend to be any more of one than I am, but I've got an ear, dadgummit, and 128 bps makes for very good sound reproduction, certainly worthy of at least the "decent" rank.
By the way, I don't disagree with your post in spirit. I like the idea that you sketched out there and from time to time I feel like I'm not really getting that great a deal buying songs and albums from iTunes (I've bought 1.25 GB worth so far), given that the quality is admittedly below what a CD would be, with no liner notes, no media, limited portability, a DRM format, etc. But as somebody else already replied, that's not very likely, especially doing as well as they're doing so far.
RP
Regardless of agreement or disagreement with the RIAA in general or this particular lawsuit strategy, "suing your customers" is a silly way to put it. If I walked into Wal-Mart and stole a case of Coke, they would not worry about whether or not it was a good idea to "put one of our customers in jail". They would be stopping their loss and taking legal action against an offender. If I happened to be a past or future customer, that's a separate issue.
RP
While reading this article, which is really good, by the way, I clicked on the "resume" link and glanced at it. I figured he was a dot-com generation guy who had gotten out of school and started working for six-figured salaries until his various employers started showing up on f**kedcompany.com. You know, the same old story of the IT workers who didn't how much they had until they lost it. But Holy Astronauts, Batman! This guy worked on the friggin' APOLLO program. He worked at NASA from 1967-1971 (the year I was born).
Please let me know what makes it ingenious!
What's ingenious about it? Have you read about it? The gyroscopes that keep it balanced on two wheels and senses your leaning direction and travels the direction and speed you want to go. It is truly revolutionary. And this is exactly the problem. People see is as an overpriced and underpowered moped, but it's actually the first version of a revolutionary transport. I honestly believe this invention is way bigger than most people are giving it credit for.
Overhyped? Absolutely. Overpriced? Probably, and definitely if they want to have the kind of earth-shattering acceptance that they were expecting. Practical at this moment in most situations? No. But an ingenious INVENTION? Yes -- absolutely.
He eventually did call. I'm embarassed to admit that I posted a suggestion to read the entire story before I had read the entire story. I realized that after the fact and was ashamed :)
RP
I encourage you to read the entire story, which is four pages long. Mr. Rocha appears to have acted in an exemplary manner. He worked with Columbia from the time it was being built and felt very close to that particular shuttle. He witnessed and has reported the "launch fever" on the part of managers, and as soon as he heard about the foam strike, he spent the weekend (does that sound familiar to anyone here?) reviewing the video. He took an actual INTEREST in his work, get it?
Then he wrote the e-mail to the manager at 11:24 pm on Sunday. Sound familiar? Spend all weekend checking it out and when you're SURE, take action. He requested that the astronauts conduct a visual inspection of the impact area. He didn't hear back from his manager (sound familiar?). But he didn't stop there. He and the debris assessment team continued to review it until Tuesday, when he sent another e-mail asking if they could get some satellite images of the damage area. Sounds like a great idea.
It never happened, because management didn't want to play the role of "Chicken Little". Unbelievable. Seven dead astronauts because management couldn't be bothered. But Mr Rocha is a hero, and I hope to shake his hand one day and thank him for his efforts. I also looked for his e-mail address and couldn't find it. I'm amazed he hasn't been fired by now for being a whistleblower. Give it time. If anybody has a work or personal address for him, please share it with me.
Thanks,
RP
You'd think that for $5000, they could have put an RJ45 port on the sucker and included a DHCP client and a little web server admin interface for upgrades, like any other network device. Your IP address can show up on the display (surely there's some sort of display, or they could have included one just for that purpose for practically no money).
The justification for this is easy... when there's a problem that can be fixed with software, you just offer an upgrade instead of suffering the PR of a recall, even a voluntary one. The Segway, an ingenius invention that is under too much pressure to be too perfect too soon, is having a hard enough time with the public (too big, too ugly, too stupid, whatever) without this. This is definitely not what they need.
RP