Coffee stains and dog-ears are cute, but I don't think that they are enough of a benefit to keep real books more popular. But there is something worth preserving: you can loan it to a friend.
All digital media distribution is predicated on "rights protection" and loaning your "right to read" to someone else ain't gonna happen under that system. So consumers won't care for it, and so we have Napster suits and possibly a decades-long stalemate between industry barons and consumer serfs.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It's also filled with a lot of other third-rate almost-weres and others who sold themselves into major label slavery, or sold their souls, or whatever, all of whom can be yanked around like so many puppets on strings.
Hey! I can't find my coke spoon! Get me another!
Yes sir, Mister Geffen! (mass exodus ensues)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The government often does something like this, in order to compensate the "losers" during a time of drastic change in the economy. The hard part is making sure that the level of compensation is appropriate, and that small-scale victims (independent
book publishers, for example) are treated fairly alongside the mega-corporations who are able to pay a lobbyist to keep within
arm's length of legislators at all times.
There are two major problems with this:
Small-time artists don't get compensated. Proving who should get what would be nearly impossible, so instead, this becomes a royal entitlement paid to corporations instead of dukes.
The fee never goes away once it has been established. Nearly every American can think of a toll bridge or highway, where the toll revenues were meant to pay for the cost of construction; and we all know that this tax never, never, ever goes away when its alleged justification disappears.
So say what you like, but any so-called tax that goes to the pockets of a corporation is no different than the random entitlements given to powerful friends of the monarchy; only now, the nobility is called a "Corporation." When you look behind the smokescreen of fake market cheerleading, you will see that some of it is actual capitalism, but much is no more than a sign that we still haven't crawled out of the dark ages. So it's the RIAA instead of the Duke of Stickypants; go on bleat "Capitalism" like a dying goat: you're still just a peasant as long as these kind of so-called taxes exist.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Apart from invoking Godwin's law, I have to say you have a point that shouldn't be buried so easily. I've worked in large corporations, and while a lot of the symptoms of their evil are in fact just symptoms of business as usual (ever read Arendt's "The Banality of Evil"?) seen from a different perspective, the facts are that the decisions that many hear regard as evil aren't being made by accident. Many in power are very consciously aware of what they are doing, and they should bear responsibility for that, even up to the word "evil."
Don't expect Jack Valenti to look and talk like Snidely Whiplash just because he sold his soul to Satan.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Hmm... using technological developments to evade laws controlling access to content... So the plaintiffs are guilty of the same crime as the defendants!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Was it in reality a big deal, or actually bias his views? No.
Do lawyers and judges routinely remove themselves from cases to avoid even the mere appearance of impropriety? Yes. Should this judge have? Yes.
Does he give the appearance in general of being biased against the defendants for ideological reasons? Yes. Does he give the appearance of being personally biased against the defense team? Yes.
Kaplan's behavior will be a liability to the plaintiffs in appeal for plenty of good reasons, even if his former law firm's role in advising Time Warner on issues germane to the case isn't itself the best reason.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
In looking over what big media companies are spending to have Real Networks stream their audio, and in looking at what iCast is doing by supporting this, it's a great example of where self-interest can create a public good, especially if it's a smarter self-interest than what others are excercising.
Streaming is nowhere near economical as is. The existing commercial formats take way too big a bite of a would-be streaming company's budget. To make way for small broadcasters, you need Ogg or something like it.
Running a company like iCast, you see your margins get shaved to hairs by the likes of Rob Glaser and Bill Gates. But it's not feasible to engineer a new format from scratch and force its adoption on the market. So what do you do?
Find a smart, dedicated believer in an alternative format, and fund his dream project. In the end, you give away the product, but you also liberate yourself from crushing per-stream licensing and expensive, unstable, coercive OS choices. You give away the milk, and in return, you get the cow. If the standard takes off, they will be able to compete against Real, and iCast's investors will be slapping each other's backs over the best investment they ever made. Just keep the smart guys who made it possible, treat them well, and if the format takes over, you can get all the business for outsourced streaming (and very few companies want to do it themselves) since you are, after all, the source of the streaming server software that powers it.
That's why you should pay very close attention to the article and parent comment's mentions of hardware players and industry support. These guys have made a very smart play, one I wish I was in a position to make because I saw it coming.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Reading the post, it seems like he didn't bother to copy down his configuration info, then bollixed the mandrake configuration, and sent it back with some complaint about hardware expecting them to fix it for him; IOW, he sounds like just another loser, from this info. Perhaps it was a hardware problem that came up AFTER Mandrake was running fine and dandy, but you'd never know from reading this post.
People who can't articulate their problems basically put themselves last in line for tech support, that's just reality; so either way you read it, it's hard to have any sympathy for this momo.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
After using WindowMaker for a while (and for my laptop I prefer it to the 50 processes and squanderous memory of Gnome/KDE), I saw clearly the NeXt heritage coming through in MacOS X, especially all the little icons collecting on the bottom of the screen.
Now with a cube, it's pretty clear that the return of Jobs is partially because he wants to vindicate his unfulfilled NeXt dreams of the past...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
A law may only be about one primary topic, and all attached clauses must be relevant to that topic, and also more relevant to that law than to any other pre-existing law.
This one is seemingly easy, and it's hard for any honest person, and even for some members of Congress, to disagree with its sentiment, but due to the backscratching nature of politics it's hard to make a watertight case for its benefits, and next to impossible to get it seriously considered. It's a great idea in so many ways, but I'm not aware of anything like it in reality; the closest thing would be the line-item veto, which gets spanked down periodically.
Every law must be interpreted consistently (i.e., in the same way) by over 50% of the high school juniors.
That's kind of like saying every piece of software should be usable by 5 out of 10 grannies, and never have a bug. It looks easy to people outside the profession responsible for implementing it, but it doesn't take a lawyer (whether I am one or not is none of your business; judge me by reason, not credentials) to point out that the seemingly impenetrable nature of legalese stems directly from the need to prevent possible arguments and variance in interpretation. Put another way, there's a lot of formula like "the Slashdot web site including, but not limited to, all content, articles, postings, stories, editorials, but expressly exlcuding all advertisements and third party headlines, snippets, and shorts, whether delivered by RSS, XML, hyperlinks, or other means (hereafter known as 'the Web Site')". It has a kind of equivalence to a statement like "#define SLASHDOT 'the Web Site'", and yet neither really communicate much of anything to a 12 year old, yet no one in the profession of making such statements questions their utility.
Hey, want an example of a place where all the laws were understood by pre-teens? Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Mostly because the law was made by 14 year olds with guns. They killed everyone with education they could find and now there are problems bringing the old killers to justice because there aren't many judges.
There may be no more than 10,000 laws. If you want to add one more, you need to remove one.
I like this idea even more, but, well, let's just say it's not going to happen. For one thing, it would deprive us of the fun of laws against marrying a mule in Kalamazoo and such.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I for one plan on registering an address. I will never give it out to anyone, and I will not use it for anything except e-mail sent to my USPS address. It will be usps@mydomain.com. It will bounce the mail back and auto-send a complaint to the Attorney General. Get 100,000 people doing this, and watch it all hit the fan.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
A ?real? content management system, and I?m not sure Zope really cuts the mustard (but I don?t know), is something Linux in general has been lacking.
I successfully used zope to do content management with some html dummies who were allegedly webmasters for their area. Basically, you just give them permission only to alter certain objects which are inlcluded in the pages. You can write stuff on top of that to do other functions. The ickiest thing is getting a dump of the site for use behind regular apache serving... Only because the zope code is rather intimidating for non-developers it was hard to write such a thing, and you will see the use of tools like wget recommended instead.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Best Buy (for example) has kicked people out of the store for writing down prices on, say, VCRs. The people who do this are usually under-cover employees from Circuit City,...
Right, because _real_ customers would never want to compare prices, right;-) But it is true, my girlfriend and I used to photograph store displays and layouts for a design and marketing firm, and we got kicked out quite legally all the time. They fight a losing battle, but it's their perogative.
Once I had a Blockbuster employee try to stop me from photographing from the street and I told him to get lost or call the cops; from the public sidewalk, you can photograph anything you want. One could make an analogy that anything involving entry of search terms might be illegal (with proper notice), while static pages are "publically visible" and therefore, tough nuts, don't put it up, or drop their packets. I'm not saying that's correct, but it's a down-the-middle solution I haven't seen anyone discuss...
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I saw a "sciography" last night on Sci-Fi Channel - it was a documentary on Battlestar Galactica. They mentioned how Lucas tried to sue them for copyright infringement, citing 83 points of similarity, including many inane things (older rogue/younger idealist, dogfight patterns) that Lucas himself freely admits he took from mythology and old war movies. It made Lucas sound like a jerk.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Corporatism as used by political scientists in the current era involves the kind of government-buisness-union coordnation that occurs most prominently in the Low Countries, Scandanavia, and the Alpine states. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are similar examples, minus the powerful trade unions.
In fact, in the sense used by today's political scientists, the U.S. has the smallest degree of corporatism in the developed world...
This is certainly true. However, your additional claim that Democrats perpetrate this in the US more than Republicans is 25% hogwash, and 75% irrelevant. The reason we don't have it in the US is that it's not "co-ordination." It's outright legalized corruption and bribery via Political Action Committees. And both parties are equally guilty (read: completely corrupt) in that.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
IE empowers web developers to create interactive, useful web sites. I've give up coding sites for Netscape because the whole thing is junk.
Good thing you are anonymous. No one should ever hire a developer who gives the finger to 20% of your customers.
As long as browser makers -- all of them -- fail to support existing standards while adding on frou frou crap for lame-o coders and dreamweaver drones -- they don't have a basis of quality or comptetency on which to innovate.
If we stuck to the W3C standards, we'd be living with a shitty web.
If browser makers stuck to these standards, the jobs of web developers would be MUCH easier; CSS alone would help tremendously. But I don't care! Because when shitty coders like you make broken sites, I can rake in the $$$ fixing your insults to their users. While I might make less, the web would be far less shitty if there weren't so many sites broken by browser makers' lack of standards.
No browser maker or microsoft sycophont has any right to complain about W3C slowness when they can't even catch up to the standard. No extensions to the standard are useful while they require coding for two or more browsers to use them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I find it odd that a writer would have this kind of issue with boundaries between work and play. I was a lousy student because I hated not having those boundaries, and I don't seem to be able to write because I can't stand not knowing when I'm working and when I'm not.
Now, I'm working for myself, and I probably work much more, and the boundaries are more or less non-existant, but I feel less stressed because I actually enjoy what I'm doing. And even when it is very stressful, sometimes it feels like playing all day, and sometimes it feels like crashing for a final exam, but I wouldn't even think of going back. I finally got the laptop, the PDA, the cell phone, and as long as I know when to turn it off - always to spend time with friends and family - I wouldn't consider going back.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Because, I feel that I have no place paying for mp3's. You're forgetting that consumers like cd's a lot better, because of the feel, the portability and tangibility, and the liner notes that come with it
There's another reason that for-pay mp3s are doomed (especially the "protected" or encrypted variety); they are too easy to lose. While I can lose my (encrypted) mp3s with an errant mouse click or software re-install, I am unlikely to accidentally throw my CDs in the trash. "Protected" mp3s in particular are doomed to be novelties for this reason...
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It's a pretty good guess that they are mapping the Internet for some large-scale profiling; this would involve either a media-metrix type sampling of areas of the net in order to make correlations between where you are on the net and what you are likely to be interested in. The other possibility is that they are going to compile a geographic-IP correlation map like DoubleClick has...
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Gee, now that you mention it, that's so true! Governments turning on their own citizens isn't really a big deal at all!
Frankly, there's a bunch of FBI who should have been thrown into the ocean for that kind of dictatorial, un-American betrayal of everything a free country and democracy should stand for. And hold your tongue about "since then" because you don't know what's going on now.
Besides, how does this make the argument that the US government needs more power to spy on it's own citizens? You are fucking weak.
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The government isn't going to get into your personal life if you aren't doing something illegal on a massive scale. They don't have the manpower to.
Congratulations, you just got a D in American History. Ever heard of Cointelpro? The FBI infiltrated non-violent political groups and incited them to commit crimes. The gutting of the Fourth Amendment in the name of the War on Drugs? Sure, they only get the bad guys until they decide you are one, plant drugs on you, and take your car away. And there are a number of dead New Yorkers who did NOTHING wrong, except be at home when the cops busted into the wrong apartment and shot'em dead. They don't need to have infinite manpower. They just have to get the wrong person or hire "informants."
Boss of nothin. Big deal. Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
All digital media distribution is predicated on "rights protection" and loaning your "right to read" to someone else ain't gonna happen under that system. So consumers won't care for it, and so we have Napster suits and possibly a decades-long stalemate between industry barons and consumer serfs.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Hey! I can't find my coke spoon! Get me another!
Yes sir, Mister Geffen! (mass exodus ensues)
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
- Small-time artists don't get compensated. Proving who should get what would be nearly impossible, so instead, this becomes a royal entitlement paid to corporations instead of dukes.
- The fee never goes away once it has been established. Nearly every American can think of a toll bridge or highway, where the toll revenues were meant to pay for the cost of construction; and we all know that this tax never, never, ever goes away when its alleged justification disappears.
So say what you like, but any so-called tax that goes to the pockets of a corporation is no different than the random entitlements given to powerful friends of the monarchy; only now, the nobility is called a "Corporation." When you look behind the smokescreen of fake market cheerleading, you will see that some of it is actual capitalism, but much is no more than a sign that we still haven't crawled out of the dark ages. So it's the RIAA instead of the Duke of Stickypants; go on bleat "Capitalism" like a dying goat: you're still just a peasant as long as these kind of so-called taxes exist.Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Don't expect Jack Valenti to look and talk like Snidely Whiplash just because he sold his soul to Satan.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Hmm... using technological developments to evade laws controlling access to content... So the plaintiffs are guilty of the same crime as the defendants!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Do lawyers and judges routinely remove themselves from cases to avoid even the mere appearance of impropriety? Yes. Should this judge have? Yes.
Does he give the appearance in general of being biased against the defendants for ideological reasons? Yes. Does he give the appearance of being personally biased against the defense team? Yes.
Kaplan's behavior will be a liability to the plaintiffs in appeal for plenty of good reasons, even if his former law firm's role in advising Time Warner on issues germane to the case isn't itself the best reason.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
And so does DeCSS, you bootlicking toady.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Rather to math majors. Lamba-calculus had some interesting back-door analogs to Goedel's theorem, unless I dreamed that one...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
careful of recent remote exploits in dhcp clients. Don't want @home breaking into your linux box hehe. keep up to date...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Streaming is nowhere near economical as is. The existing commercial formats take way too big a bite of a would-be streaming company's budget. To make way for small broadcasters, you need Ogg or something like it.
Running a company like iCast, you see your margins get shaved to hairs by the likes of Rob Glaser and Bill Gates. But it's not feasible to engineer a new format from scratch and force its adoption on the market. So what do you do?
Find a smart, dedicated believer in an alternative format, and fund his dream project. In the end, you give away the product, but you also liberate yourself from crushing per-stream licensing and expensive, unstable, coercive OS choices. You give away the milk, and in return, you get the cow. If the standard takes off, they will be able to compete against Real, and iCast's investors will be slapping each other's backs over the best investment they ever made. Just keep the smart guys who made it possible, treat them well, and if the format takes over, you can get all the business for outsourced streaming (and very few companies want to do it themselves) since you are, after all, the source of the streaming server software that powers it.
That's why you should pay very close attention to the article and parent comment's mentions of hardware players and industry support. These guys have made a very smart play, one I wish I was in a position to make because I saw it coming.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
People who can't articulate their problems basically put themselves last in line for tech support, that's just reality; so either way you read it, it's hard to have any sympathy for this momo.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Now with a cube, it's pretty clear that the return of Jobs is partially because he wants to vindicate his unfulfilled NeXt dreams of the past...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Hey, want an example of a place where all the laws were understood by pre-teens? Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Mostly because the law was made by 14 year olds with guns. They killed everyone with education they could find and now there are problems bringing the old killers to justice because there aren't many judges.
I like this idea even more, but, well, let's just say it's not going to happen. For one thing, it would deprive us of the fun of laws against marrying a mule in Kalamazoo and such.Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I for one plan on registering an address. I will never give it out to anyone, and I will not use it for anything except e-mail sent to my USPS address. It will be usps@mydomain.com. It will bounce the mail back and auto-send a complaint to the Attorney General. Get 100,000 people doing this, and watch it all hit the fan.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Once I had a Blockbuster employee try to stop me from photographing from the street and I told him to get lost or call the cops; from the public sidewalk, you can photograph anything you want. One could make an analogy that anything involving entry of search terms might be illegal (with proper notice), while static pages are "publically visible" and therefore, tough nuts, don't put it up, or drop their packets. I'm not saying that's correct, but it's a down-the-middle solution I haven't seen anyone discuss...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I saw a "sciography" last night on Sci-Fi Channel - it was a documentary on Battlestar Galactica. They mentioned how Lucas tried to sue them for copyright infringement, citing 83 points of similarity, including many inane things (older rogue/younger idealist, dogfight patterns) that Lucas himself freely admits he took from mythology and old war movies. It made Lucas sound like a jerk.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
As long as browser makers -- all of them -- fail to support existing standards while adding on frou frou crap for lame-o coders and dreamweaver drones -- they don't have a basis of quality or comptetency on which to innovate.
If browser makers stuck to these standards, the jobs of web developers would be MUCH easier; CSS alone would help tremendously. But I don't care! Because when shitty coders like you make broken sites, I can rake in the $$$ fixing your insults to their users. While I might make less, the web would be far less shitty if there weren't so many sites broken by browser makers' lack of standards.No browser maker or microsoft sycophont has any right to complain about W3C slowness when they can't even catch up to the standard. No extensions to the standard are useful while they require coding for two or more browsers to use them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Please don't trivialize racism this way.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Now, I'm working for myself, and I probably work much more, and the boundaries are more or less non-existant, but I feel less stressed because I actually enjoy what I'm doing. And even when it is very stressful, sometimes it feels like playing all day, and sometimes it feels like crashing for a final exam, but I wouldn't even think of going back. I finally got the laptop, the PDA, the cell phone, and as long as I know when to turn it off - always to spend time with friends and family - I wouldn't consider going back.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
It's a pretty good guess that they are mapping the Internet for some large-scale profiling; this would involve either a media-metrix type sampling of areas of the net in order to make correlations between where you are on the net and what you are likely to be interested in. The other possibility is that they are going to compile a geographic-IP correlation map like DoubleClick has...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Frankly, there's a bunch of FBI who should have been thrown into the ocean for that kind of dictatorial, un-American betrayal of everything a free country and democracy should stand for. And hold your tongue about "since then" because you don't know what's going on now.
Besides, how does this make the argument that the US government needs more power to spy on it's own citizens? You are fucking weak.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.