Sure, but putty does ssh and fits on a floppy... Complaining about blocked ports is different than "they're oppressing me because they won't install this software for me on their computer"... The poster said "can't get a connection", not "can't get the software".
He said "used bins", not "cut-outs". Never mind that most cutouts are returns to labels being sold out the side door, extra copies from promotional runs, overproduction, etc, and as such, the artist really isn't seeing those bucks. But anyway, he was talking about used CDs, which are totally different.
In fact, the distinction is a really important one. There is a doctrine of copyright law called "first sale", which means that once you sell a copy of a copyrighted work (unless you are a software company and turn logic and the law inside out by calling it a "license"), you have no control over what happens to that copy. The reason that there is such a doctrine is that producers of copyrighted works would love to make selling your CDs to a record store or at a garage sale a crime; after all, it's "their" work, and by selling it to someone else, you are STEALING their property! Of course, once upon a time the courts were not 100% focused on maximizing shareholder value, so they explained the semi-clear legal principles regarding copyright with this doctrine and thus limited the degree to which copyright holders could use the law to create protections that nature does not provide.
So, really, each CD bought from a used bin is like getting it from Napster; the work is further distributed without the artist seeing a dime. Remember next time you buy used music that you are taking food out of the mouths of a boy band somewhere.
Your argument is interesting, but it assumes that the patent system works even according to its own principles (grant a patent for anyone who files the paperwork correctly and isn't an obvious troll). It doesn't. The fact is, corporations will file patents overlapping their own patents filed in slightly different ways, and the only time anyone will notice is when someone hauls out a 15 year old patent on something that apparently conflicts with a newer patent. You still need $1,000,000.00 ante just to play this game (not a good idea, as proponents of the system allege).
Judges will be timid and rule on the narrowest technical details possible, so the legal system will never confront the fact that the entire system is horribly broken and resembles, at this point, the medieval guild system more than an engine for economic progress. Nor should the legal system confront this, frankly, it's the job of legislators and the executive branch.
I'm still surprised at how few catcalls of "socialist" have been posted so far in reply to anyone who questions the wisdom of software patents. I suppose those trolls are all out of jobs now and not feeling so cocky that Captain Capitalist will win every battle. Nevertheless, it's still clear that the current patent system is as bad as any socialist excess/oligarchic corruption/medieval guild system as we've seen in quite some time ("we" obviously leaving out the unfortunate folks who live in places that never left such systems). Meanwhile, real capitalism is on a choke chain.
The worst part is that holding back a crucial piece of technology for 20 years can really kill the rate of technological progress exponentially. Sure, I can wait 20 years for your super-magneto-quantum-coffee storage system to hit the market at prices I can afford, but in the meantime, there have been 2 to 10 generations of technology that can't be built upon it for economic reasons; you hold the patent, so all technology based on it grinds to a halt.
While it's sorta alarmist, it *could* be true. But Cringely provides his own Occam's razor right in the same article; Microsoft allows poor security because improving it would not increase their market share. No one chooses a Microsoft product on security criteria, and the few people who choose against it are the folks who have
The resistance to even installing support at the ISP level for a Microsoft networking protocol would be much larger than he accounts for. For one thing, I've seen ISPs belly flop on flash upgrades before. Now figure that such a protocol would have to be in place at every hop along the way. Even if it were encapsulated in TCP/IP, this would bring performance down and require at least the other end to use the protocol, and that's a pretty thin wedge.
Their chances of succeeding in such a takeover would be exceedingly poor, at least without legislative action, and Microsoft would come out a real loser in that kind of political battle in DC. The number of "all business is all right, all the time" nitwits in Washington can be easily calculated by counting bow ties, while Microsoft's enemies are many and not so easy to identify.
Cringely's actually a pretty smart guy, but he's wrong on this one.
You gotta be kidding. First of all, Rush is a dishonest ideologue suitable only for people who like to be fooled; I'd rather listen to conservative with honest, personal, non-fake opinions any day, e.g. Liddy, Hatch, Goldwater; Rush is just a fat fuck who thinks that elephant shit smells like money.
Second, you gotta get the hell outta Texas and visit America once in a while.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I'm not an alien race, but I can tell you that both the motive and the cure in this case are not at all hypothetical.
On the other hand, I think a more accurate explanation for this phenomenon is called "information overload". I get a mild depression after I begin investigating a broad new topic, just from trying to absorb vast amounts of information. I get a mild depression a few hours after entering a large city (after being away from large cities for a while).
The original study was irresponsibly presented and reported, but no one reads retractions. And thus it's a given that at this very moment, somehwere in a big city, a kid is listening to loud rock music, using the internet to teach himself about programming for the first time, trying to ignore his mom outside the bedroom door screeching, "Turn off that internet! You'll get depressed!"
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yup. All bandwith, everywhere, is shared. And that's why any internet connection you pay for connects your bandwidth to the price you pay.
That doesn't meant that the fuckwits in the middle of the connection should be restricting connections in any way. Frankly, if I find out that Time Warner is fucking with the data rates on my home connection based on the originating content company, I will sue their asses back into the stone age for selling "internet" connections that aren't.
What's next, are you going to start defending AT&T's refusal to carry my phone calls to companies that don't give them a kickback? No, you probably wouldn't, but many of the other monarchists pretending to be capitalists do.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I dunno about USING telnetd, but there have been times when I wanted it active... particularly around times I'm updating SSH on a remote machine. There are times when SSH just doesn't come back up the way you expect it to.
Of course, even then I restrict access with hosts.allow and/or firewalling at the machine iteself and remove it from inetd.conf once I'm done. And even though I don't use telnetd normally, I updated just in case. It's hard to argue that an encrypted telnet is always a bad thing to have around.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It doesn't keep you from cracking systems. That's already illegal. If you don't know that, you're really to stupid to be reasoned with.
It does prevent you from using encryption-cracking technology to access a copyrighted database floating around on a CD somewhere, but I can't imagine why that would ever be the case. I challenge you to come up with any circumstance where the DMCA would stop you from doing anything harmful that would be legal without the DMCA.
Anyone who even pretends to value freedom is under the burden of demonstrating, for any given law, that it can actually prevent or punish something that causes palpable harm to others, that it does not unduly limit the freedom of those not causing such harm through such actions, and that the law does not restrict an overly broad class of activity. The DMCA fails miserably on every count.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right. Adler is clearly a fuckwit. It's worth pointing out that to obtain personal information about me by breaking encryption, you'd also have to hack into computers, thereby breaking many laws already on the books, which just makes the DMCA look irrelevant, as well being an unconsititutional, consumer-screwing, freedom-killing POS.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right about now (Tue Jul 24 14:56:51 UTC 2001), CNN is pumping the story as "Lights in the Sky"... as if it were a mystery or something. Obviously, a cheap ploy to get people to watch the story hoping for UFO sightings.
Now we know why the geezer who ran CNN just left; he wanted to be gone before they had the chance to chase Fox further down the gutter.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You might be right, but don't assume that's all there is to it. If the power consumption isn't equivalent, then your view only represents a very small portion of users.
I know very few people who have any desire to use their palms/visors as anything but a Filofax that can be easily shared and backed up. Those people are uninterested in sacrificing battery life for wacky features that don't work and that they don't need.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Which would be nice if all MUAs were compliant with RCF2822, or if it didn't confuse the average user to reply to an address that isn't in the "From" line they see...
But if what you're saying is correct, then Verizon's new policy could be stated as "Run your own mail server, or use our email addresses", which sucks for many customers, to be sure. Especially if their static DSL IPs are on the DUL, which would be surprising and stupid. But otherwise, it is a fair and freer approach to Earthlink's "block port 25" solution. For one thing, it won't leave you wondering if the word "Scientology" gets a copy of your email forwarded to a windowless building somewhere.
But if what you're saying is incorrect, then I will NEVER buy DSL from Verizon, and I wouldn't use it if it were free.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I sent mail from a *nix machine over dialup using their servers and putting whatever the fuck I pleased in the From: line.
I host a POP server for some folks who send e-mail over dialup link with a "From" address of their domain for which I MX.
I could give a flying fuck what their customer support says, and I've never called them for anything, ever. Earthlink is handling this stuff in a reasonable way that limits the work they have to do to squash SPAM while keeping options mostly acceptable for their customers. Check you facts against reality before you go insulting people, asswipe.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
As a sysadmin, I agree... because users installing software on personal computers inevitably fucks something up.
But as a programmer, I have to say your assumption is wrong. I had a job where I needed to install stuff all the time for my own programming purposes, and wasn't permitted to. I had to scream my way up to VPs to get permission to install stuff. I HAD to, it was my job. And the lame-ass IT staff wouldn't do it, because it was "unsupported software". The funny thing was, I never, ever once called them for anything unless it was something they screwed up. So it cuts both ways.
Programmers should fix their own machines. Period. For one thing, it gives them sympathy with users when it "doesn't work". For another, if they can't, they probably can't program well, either.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right. This arrest was to keep anyone from knowing if they get what they paid for by using Adobe's format.
In a related Fuck You!, I would rather have my kid looking at beastiality all day than pay money for a web filtering product when I, the customer, am not entitled to know what it filters. The fact that the DCMA has been used to protect corporations against customers in this way is viciously anti-individual, and proves that the DCMA is virulently un-American.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
True, but in most of the Western AND non-Western world, their educational system is patterned after UK schooling or else Prussian schooling, both of which are known for their emphasis on discipline and submission, as well as a callous disregard for the social world they are creating among their students---and it's a direct line from there to Columbine (probably a brief stop through Lord of the Flies, If (gee, why don't we blame Malcom McDowell for Columbine, he seems pretty evil) and The Wall). Try asking yourself where those uniforms came from next time you're surfing for Japanese schoolgirl porn.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
That doens't mean they aren't, in some sense, con artists. If you were enticed into getting an account at Bank MacroShaft by their offer of a free coffee machine, only to find out that the coffee machine requires special non-standard filters only available from some folks that they happen to do business with, you'd be pretty cheesed off, and you might have a good case for getting money back etc etc.
Fetchmail is essential, but its existence doesn't mean the deal isn't a con, unless they are PAYING to support fetchmail's development and offering it as a solution for accessing their mail server.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Then again, with the preponderance of shitty sites that require javascript for all kinds of stupid reasons, plus needless use of frames, you might be out of luck anyway... I have a special silver sledgehammer waiting for me in heaven to pound those programmers responsible back into limbo every time they crawl out.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
And again, just because they can doesn't mean they should. Did you think if you repeated your point it would be any less boring?
Don't forget, I still have the right to tell napster to go fuck themselves.
And, I don't think they are making a "completely right" call by refusing to do a linux client. Just because you release an app only on Windoze doesn't mean it's any safer from hacking, manipulation, or shenanigans.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Proves nothing except that Jackson is a bigmouth, but we knew that already. Microsoft is still guilty of monopoly.
I see no proof of innovation in any sense. You know, getting the king to grant you the exclusive right to conduct your form of business and murdering the competition are also good old-fashioned business tactics. Are you recommending those tactics, or are you just expressing a hatred for capitalism?
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right on. I love science and progress as much of the next guy, but you've outlined the precise reasons why GM should be kept in the lab for another 50 years at least. We are likely to screw it up, we can't fix it if we do, and the folks who are likely to screw it up have only their profit margins in mind. Bad scenario.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but putty does ssh and fits on a floppy... Complaining about blocked ports is different than "they're oppressing me because they won't install this software for me on their computer"... The poster said "can't get a connection", not "can't get the software".
In fact, the distinction is a really important one. There is a doctrine of copyright law called "first sale", which means that once you sell a copy of a copyrighted work (unless you are a software company and turn logic and the law inside out by calling it a "license"), you have no control over what happens to that copy. The reason that there is such a doctrine is that producers of copyrighted works would love to make selling your CDs to a record store or at a garage sale a crime; after all, it's "their" work, and by selling it to someone else, you are STEALING their property! Of course, once upon a time the courts were not 100% focused on maximizing shareholder value, so they explained the semi-clear legal principles regarding copyright with this doctrine and thus limited the degree to which copyright holders could use the law to create protections that nature does not provide.
So, really, each CD bought from a used bin is like getting it from Napster; the work is further distributed without the artist seeing a dime. Remember next time you buy used music that you are taking food out of the mouths of a boy band somewhere.
Judges will be timid and rule on the narrowest technical details possible, so the legal system will never confront the fact that the entire system is horribly broken and resembles, at this point, the medieval guild system more than an engine for economic progress. Nor should the legal system confront this, frankly, it's the job of legislators and the executive branch.
I'm still surprised at how few catcalls of "socialist" have been posted so far in reply to anyone who questions the wisdom of software patents. I suppose those trolls are all out of jobs now and not feeling so cocky that Captain Capitalist will win every battle. Nevertheless, it's still clear that the current patent system is as bad as any socialist excess/oligarchic corruption/medieval guild system as we've seen in quite some time ("we" obviously leaving out the unfortunate folks who live in places that never left such systems). Meanwhile, real capitalism is on a choke chain.
The worst part is that holding back a crucial piece of technology for 20 years can really kill the rate of technological progress exponentially. Sure, I can wait 20 years for your super-magneto-quantum-coffee storage system to hit the market at prices I can afford, but in the meantime, there have been 2 to 10 generations of technology that can't be built upon it for economic reasons; you hold the patent, so all technology based on it grinds to a halt.
Why not? It could work in a country where burglars sue homeowners in slip-and-falls...
The resistance to even installing support at the ISP level for a Microsoft networking protocol would be much larger than he accounts for. For one thing, I've seen ISPs belly flop on flash upgrades before. Now figure that such a protocol would have to be in place at every hop along the way. Even if it were encapsulated in TCP/IP, this would bring performance down and require at least the other end to use the protocol, and that's a pretty thin wedge.
Their chances of succeeding in such a takeover would be exceedingly poor, at least without legislative action, and Microsoft would come out a real loser in that kind of political battle in DC. The number of "all business is all right, all the time" nitwits in Washington can be easily calculated by counting bow ties, while Microsoft's enemies are many and not so easy to identify.
Cringely's actually a pretty smart guy, but he's wrong on this one.
Yes, but it seems he would use windows for that. Apparently, peeping floats his boat.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Second, you gotta get the hell outta Texas and visit America once in a while.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
On the other hand, I think a more accurate explanation for this phenomenon is called "information overload". I get a mild depression after I begin investigating a broad new topic, just from trying to absorb vast amounts of information. I get a mild depression a few hours after entering a large city (after being away from large cities for a while).
The original study was irresponsibly presented and reported, but no one reads retractions. And thus it's a given that at this very moment, somehwere in a big city, a kid is listening to loud rock music, using the internet to teach himself about programming for the first time, trying to ignore his mom outside the bedroom door screeching, "Turn off that internet! You'll get depressed!"
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
That doesn't meant that the fuckwits in the middle of the connection should be restricting connections in any way. Frankly, if I find out that Time Warner is fucking with the data rates on my home connection based on the originating content company, I will sue their asses back into the stone age for selling "internet" connections that aren't.
What's next, are you going to start defending AT&T's refusal to carry my phone calls to companies that don't give them a kickback? No, you probably wouldn't, but many of the other monarchists pretending to be capitalists do.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Of course, even then I restrict access with hosts.allow and/or firewalling at the machine iteself and remove it from inetd.conf once I'm done. And even though I don't use telnetd normally, I updated just in case. It's hard to argue that an encrypted telnet is always a bad thing to have around.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It does prevent you from using encryption-cracking technology to access a copyrighted database floating around on a CD somewhere, but I can't imagine why that would ever be the case. I challenge you to come up with any circumstance where the DMCA would stop you from doing anything harmful that would be legal without the DMCA.
Anyone who even pretends to value freedom is under the burden of demonstrating, for any given law, that it can actually prevent or punish something that causes palpable harm to others, that it does not unduly limit the freedom of those not causing such harm through such actions, and that the law does not restrict an overly broad class of activity. The DMCA fails miserably on every count.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right. Adler is clearly a fuckwit. It's worth pointing out that to obtain personal information about me by breaking encryption, you'd also have to hack into computers, thereby breaking many laws already on the books, which just makes the DMCA look irrelevant, as well being an unconsititutional, consumer-screwing, freedom-killing POS.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Now we know why the geezer who ran CNN just left; he wanted to be gone before they had the chance to chase Fox further down the gutter.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Vs lbh ner ernqvat guvf, lbh ner n pevzvany haqre gur QZPN. Shpx lbh irel zhpu.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I know very few people who have any desire to use their palms/visors as anything but a Filofax that can be easily shared and backed up. Those people are uninterested in sacrificing battery life for wacky features that don't work and that they don't need.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But if what you're saying is correct, then Verizon's new policy could be stated as "Run your own mail server, or use our email addresses", which sucks for many customers, to be sure. Especially if their static DSL IPs are on the DUL, which would be surprising and stupid. But otherwise, it is a fair and freer approach to Earthlink's "block port 25" solution. For one thing, it won't leave you wondering if the word "Scientology" gets a copy of your email forwarded to a windowless building somewhere.
But if what you're saying is incorrect, then I will NEVER buy DSL from Verizon, and I wouldn't use it if it were free.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I host a POP server for some folks who send e-mail over dialup link with a "From" address of their domain for which I MX.
I could give a flying fuck what their customer support says, and I've never called them for anything, ever. Earthlink is handling this stuff in a reasonable way that limits the work they have to do to squash SPAM while keeping options mostly acceptable for their customers. Check you facts against reality before you go insulting people, asswipe.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But as a programmer, I have to say your assumption is wrong. I had a job where I needed to install stuff all the time for my own programming purposes, and wasn't permitted to. I had to scream my way up to VPs to get permission to install stuff. I HAD to, it was my job. And the lame-ass IT staff wouldn't do it, because it was "unsupported software". The funny thing was, I never, ever once called them for anything unless it was something they screwed up. So it cuts both ways.
Programmers should fix their own machines. Period. For one thing, it gives them sympathy with users when it "doesn't work". For another, if they can't, they probably can't program well, either.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
In a related Fuck You!, I would rather have my kid looking at beastiality all day than pay money for a web filtering product when I, the customer, am not entitled to know what it filters. The fact that the DCMA has been used to protect corporations against customers in this way is viciously anti-individual, and proves that the DCMA is virulently un-American.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
True, but in most of the Western AND non-Western world, their educational system is patterned after UK schooling or else Prussian schooling, both of which are known for their emphasis on discipline and submission, as well as a callous disregard for the social world they are creating among their students---and it's a direct line from there to Columbine (probably a brief stop through Lord of the Flies, If (gee, why don't we blame Malcom McDowell for Columbine, he seems pretty evil) and The Wall). Try asking yourself where those uniforms came from next time you're surfing for Japanese schoolgirl porn.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Fetchmail is essential, but its existence doesn't mean the deal isn't a con, unless they are PAYING to support fetchmail's development and offering it as a solution for accessing their mail server.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
And assuming that no java applets are involved?
Then again, with the preponderance of shitty sites that require javascript for all kinds of stupid reasons, plus needless use of frames, you might be out of luck anyway... I have a special silver sledgehammer waiting for me in heaven to pound those programmers responsible back into limbo every time they crawl out.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Don't forget, I still have the right to tell napster to go fuck themselves.
And, I don't think they are making a "completely right" call by refusing to do a linux client. Just because you release an app only on Windoze doesn't mean it's any safer from hacking, manipulation, or shenanigans.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I see no proof of innovation in any sense. You know, getting the king to grant you the exclusive right to conduct your form of business and murdering the competition are also good old-fashioned business tactics. Are you recommending those tactics, or are you just expressing a hatred for capitalism?
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right on. I love science and progress as much of the next guy, but you've outlined the precise reasons why GM should be kept in the lab for another 50 years at least. We are likely to screw it up, we can't fix it if we do, and the folks who are likely to screw it up have only their profit margins in mind. Bad scenario.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.