By "christian 'scientists'", I think he was referring to the creationist/intelligent design types, rather than to members of the Church of Christ, Scientist, or to scientists (minus the scare quotes) who profess the Christian religion.
Now, I gather that the official position of the Church of Christ, Scientist is opposed to the evolutionary explanation of the fossil evidence, and for the literal Bible creation explanation, but you'd know a lot more about that than I do.
the fact is that natural processes have killed off more animals than humans have.
This is very true, but you're looking at the wrong time scales. Most of those species that died had no effect on humans, because we're a relatively recent phenomenon.
If you're suggestion that we simply shouldn't care whether species live or die, I'll treat it in a self-centered fashion: we don't want to wipe out species if they could do something for us, or if their deaths would be a barometer for our own.
In the former case, there are many species on the planet who could be of utility to us. If not for medicine or food, at least as part of the total evolutionary record that we use to understand ourselves.
In the latter case, it may not matter if we wipe out the xebu by turning up the temperature, but if that temperature change presages worse changes that wipe out us, too, we care.
So extinction doesn't just suck for them. Potentially it sucks for us, too. I'm not going to tell you that every beetle is sacred, and I'm not one of those green-at-all-costs eco types. But extinctions do matter, and we should moderate our behavior to not actively cause them at least until we have a better idea of what the total long-term effect might be.
Sure, there are plenty of other ways for creatures to go extince, and we should keep an eye out for asteroids and such, but that doesn't mean that extinction isn't also a problem on scales less than 100 million years, too.
Slashdotters are used to computers, where information is like water in bucket: leave even a tiny hole and it will all leak out. A piece of software is either 100% secure or it's 0% secure.
Lawyers and merchants see things differently. They know that they're going to lose a certain amount of sales to theft/copyright infringement/shrinkage. All they want is to keep it to a manageable level.
So perhaps "copy prevention" is an inaccurate name, and this debate is full of loaded terms, like "piracy" and "copyright infringment" (the first dramatically overstating the case, the other using six syllables to make the fact that you're getting something you didn't pay for seem like an inconsequential legal technicality).
I'll call it "copy inhibition". It slows down copying a little bit. Maybe: once somebody puts it on P2P everybody who wants it can have it nearly instantly. It only takes one person to do the work. After that, it really is like water in a sieve.
They keep trying to introduce DRM without invalidating the huge installed base of CD players. At what point are they going to say, "We like DRM, and we think you like our music so much that you're going to buy a new music system to get it?"
Will some music company eventually say, "We're making the next Famous Music Artist album available only on iTunes?" Or introduce some new DRM'ed format designed to force you to upgrade your system, equivalent to CSS in DVDs?
As long as they're trying to hack DRM on top of CD formats, they're destined to lose. Perhaps DRM is destined to lose no matter what. People broke CSS and Fairplay, and I suspect that's the reason they haven't tried to force DRM yet. But it seems to me that as long as their market strategy is based around "we're selling you the rights to listen, but not the rights to copy", they're eventually going to have to abandon the CD format. Sooner would be better than later for them, wouldn't it?
I don't know if their marketing tells them they'd lose. Perhaps that would be the tipping point where people said, "Nah, forget it; we don't want a new format no matter what artists make it and no matter what features it has." I dunno, but I'm sure they do (or think they do).
I think that Microsoft may carry more weight than Spamhaus does with the ISPs. If Hotmail starts declining mail, users get pissed. If Hotmail cuts all connections, so that users from an entire ISP can't get on, users get rabid.
I don't know what Microsoft has in mind, if anything, but a gentle threat may just be their first salvo.
Spotting spam zombies should be easy: if a computer on your ISP is hitting port 25 all day, then it's probably a spam zombie.
You don't need feedback from Microsoft to tell you that you have zombies on your network. The question is, what are you going to do about them?
Perhaps this is Microsoft's way of saying, "We think you're spewing spam, and now you know we know it. Fix it or we'll stop accepting mail from you entirely."
Yeah, it would sure be better if Microsoft fixed its OS instead, and they're working on that, too. But it can't do anything about compromised Windows 95/98/ME boxes if they're not patching, so it's up to the ISPs to notify users that they're in violation of the terms-of-service and had better shape up.
True dat. I think of my NAT box as a firewall that cuts off a lot of crap.
I installed a new cable modem the other day and to configure it I had to connect it directly to the computer. ZoneAlarm (thank God I had it) immediately went ballistic about the number of incoming attacks. I'm not running any servers, and I hope I'm reasonably current on the patches, but God only knows what program that I'm running has a backdoor port open. I was actually queasy.
As soon as the thing was configured I re-rigged it through the NAT box, and immediately felt better. When IPv6 comes and I have my own address I may have to buy an IPv6 NAT box just for safety's sake. Yeah, zonealarm and other software firewalls exist, but the blue box makes me feel more comfortable. It does only one thing and it's a lot harder to trick into being hacked.
If you have a monopoly on a limited resource thats in high demand (thats constantly increasing) would you give it up?
Give it up? No. But since ISPs compete with each other, some ISP may eventually realize that it will be outcompeted by the others in the v4 space and say, "Try us, we're different, we have v6". Maybe Comcast or AOL will decide to jump first. Especially if it saves them money on configuration, or if they can make a good case for a static IP or other feature.
Or if they've run out of addressing space and it's cheaper to get it via IPv6 than by buying space from somebody else.
We're not there yet; I've never heard of an ISP saying, "Sorry, can't log you on, we have no IP address for you." Yet. Let's hope the ISPs are smart enough to fix the problem before they're hosed.
The question is, how important are those benefits?
* simplified headers
Lovely, but since the IPv4 header code is already written, is it that big a deal?
* quality of service
* multicasting
These are enabling technologies. They're boring by themselves, but could enable something cool. But what they enable is better use of resources. You wouldn't need QoS or multicasting if bandwidth were unlimited. It will remain limited, of course, but when we start getting fiber to the curb, I wonder if the features will appear to use it.
Multicasting in particular is most important for simultaneous events, like broadcasting, which is counter to the "what you want when you want it" notion that drives Internet acceptance. But maybe a new thing will arise I haven't seen yet.
* autoconfiguration
* improved routing
These seem like things that would save ISPs money. But the question is, how much money? There's a huge IPv4 base installed and switching is expensive. Are these, along with the users demanding new features, enough to cause ISP acceptance? Or are the Japanese and Chinese and Koreans buying a pig in a poke?
* security (that's certainly buzzword compliant, why is it never brought up?)
* authentication
These two do seem like a big deal, but thus far we've implemented security and authentication (as well as sessions) at the next level up. Sure, it would be better at the IP level, but if the problem is solved (at least provisionally), it seems a major investment for little benefit. Unless there are IPv6 level security improvements that I'm not aware of; I'm not an expert and I'd appreciate any extra info.
I'm all in favor of IPv6 acceptance, and I'd like to start seeing it deployed in parallel with IPv4, and waiting for the advances to happen. But I'd like to understand why the ISPs haven't done it yet on purely capitalist grounds. Maybe it's because it's just too little to justify the expense.
While there are certainly cases where NAT isn't nearly good enough, for the vast majority of users it IS good enough.
That's what makes IPv6 acceptance so slow: your ISP isn't going to rebuild its infrastructure so that you can run a SMTP server. Certainly not for the measly (from their POV) $50 a month you and your friends are paying for that line. If you want a static IP, or a few, you can have it, but you'll start paying $150 a month or more for the service.
Some day, those necessary static IPs will be too rare, and you'll have to switch ISPs to get it. At that point your ISP will need to switch to IPv6 to keep your business. I have no idea when that day is. It may well be soon; I can't say. But as a major investment for your ISP they're going to put it off as long as possible.
So the answer to your question, "Why shouldn't people be able to have full IP connectivity?" is, "Because not enough people want it to make it worth their while, but if you really want it you can pay for it."
In a sense that matches up with the "fair use" notion in the US. Swapping a few songs with your friends hardly seems criminal, or at least trivial.
Pulling tens of thousands of files from other file-trading networks and then making them available for free to people anywhere in the world, that hardly sounds like "fair use". It's too bad the the technologies that enable the fair use case also enable the more clearly criminal case.
I know you're just making a joke, but I'm curious: in what way was Revenge of the Sith ripping people off? They made a movie, and they were hoping to sell tickets to it, and eventually sell DVDs. Are you saying that the price for a ticket is too high?
George Lucas sure will make a profit off that, but is all profit-making a ripoff?
Re:Spoken Like a Good Twitch Gamer
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 1
It sounds like you need to clean the wheels on that mouse.
It's amazing that people can live with such annoyances. But I guess it's like your car: it gradually gets more and more busted, and you compensate for the failures without noticing. Until somebody else tries to drive it...
Not necessarily. It could be automated, and once somebody wrote the software it could just rip the book out of Google for free. Writing software is hard, but people seem to like writing software and giving it away. So it would be neither hard nor expensive for you to get a book that way.
The key is the "small snippets" and how they're given out. TFA didn't say, but I suspect that the questions that they sent to Google concern how Google is going to keep people from coercing Google into giving them the whole book a piece at a time.
It's been done before; some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were first released because somebody reverse-engineered a concordance. One could imagine somebody writing software to pull up part of a book, then search on the last sentenece of each snippet to get it to reveal some more (as context). Repeat and get the whole book.
It might not be all that simple or all that effective, but publishers do have a right to worry about the possibility. It takes a lot of work to publish a book, and it would be nice if Google were able to give them some assurance that it wouldn't become common for people to get the books for free.
Even without that, even publishing small snippets of reference books can be problematic. Sometimes you only want a short snippet of the book at a time, and the rest of the book goes unused. The publisher spends money assembling the whole book, so they want you to pay for all of it (amortizing the cost), or at least use the library's copy (which can be very expensive if they expect to sell only to libraries).
Personally, I'd like to see Google honor a publisher's request not to index a book, the same way google honors the robots.txt file. If they're losing sales that they might otherwise get via Google's free advertising, that's their own lookout.
The purpose of the CAN-SPAM act wasn't to stop spam, it was to legitimize spam sent by the DMA and its members....but make it easier to filter out.
I don't know whether the DMA mebers are complying or not. Most spam is still sent from outside the DMA's members. So we sure can't turn off our bayesian spam filters.
The theory was that the US would crack down on those people, who according to TFA are right here in the US, leaving us with just the easily-filterable DMA-approved ads.
That hasn't happened yet, perhaps because the FBI has more important things on its mind (i.e. terrorism). I can't imagine that the DMA is happy, because their actual sales pitches are getting lost among the scams, phishes, and frauds.
I'll worry about how evil the DMA is once I stop getting 92 spams a day for C$ALIS.
I use My Yahoo as my home page. It gives me the news, weather, and other miscellaneous stuff. I check it a few dozen times a day, whenever I want to connect with what's going on.
I use Google to search.
At this point, a "Personalized Google" home page wouldn't be a reaplcement for Google, and in fact they shouldn't take up half the front page with a search bar. It would be a replacement for My Yahoo. When I want to search, I'll search. When I want to know what's going on, I'll hit my personal page.
What I see of Perssonalized Google Home Page isn't taking me away from My Yahoo yet, especially since I use neither Yahoo mail nor GMail. (Not that I have anything against gmail; I just own my own domain and use that instead.) I like My Yahoo's collection of news better, which is funny because Google News has all the ones I could possibly want.
But if they keep at it, combine the maturity of My Yahoo with Google's fancy Javascript and good instincts for non-evil features, and it may not be long before I abandon My Yahoo entirely.
The point is that if there's an emergency, you need to get help FAST, without thinking about it. There's only one thing you need to know: 911. From there they can just ask you where you are. But if you have to look up the number for fire, or police, or the hospital, you could be dead before you find a phone book.
It's only recently that E911 gave the emergency responders the ability to determine your address automatically. Asking people to know their present location isn't much. Asking them to memorize emergency numbers that they don't use often is.
I'm sure you can strip the OS down, but could you also strip Office down? It's a bit of a memory hog. All those bloated features also make it a bit of a disk hog, but if there's a way to fault them in only when needed, disk is cheap. But we're talking about Win95 machines with 64 megs of RAM and people who explicitly don't wish to upgrade.
Not that OOo is any better. Office-ware tends to be bloat-ware.
While I concur that this is a stupid plan, could you elaborate on the "treated like a thief" theme that I see so often on slashdot?
You treat most people like theives. More accurately, you treat them like they could be thieves. You lock your car and your house, because you don't trust people you haven't met. When you rent a car or a movie they go to great lengths to assure you'll give it back. You assume people are thieves because it's easier than getting your stuff back later.
When you say "treat them like thieves", the image is of throwing somebody in jail. That's not the case here.
I gotta admit, in this case the cliche looks perilously close to accurate. Taking fingerprints IS treating somebody more like a thief than a potential thief. That's a bit of a coincidence (just because it's one way to take an ID used in both processes, but they're not fingerprinting you like a thief gets fingerprinted.) But it's still incredibly, and overly, invasive.
My gist is that I don't think of DRM as "treating somebody like a thief" any more than I think of locking your house as treating people like thieves. This plan is stupid, and I'm sure not buying it, and it would never happen because the technology would be wildly inconvenient and insufficiently accurate.
But I've happily bought DRMed songs from Apple and I'd buy DRMed movies. When you buy a DRMed song you're giving them a "fingerprint", just one that's tied to your computer rather than a permanent part of you (which is the real stupid part of this plan.) I'd prefer non-DRMed ones, just in case I wanted to make a backup or use it in a different medium, but I sure understand why they don't want to see their material given away for free over the Internet, and go to some lengths to ensure it. Fingerprints are stupid, but I'm not opposed to a less invasive plan.
Because IE has deep ties to the operating system (or rather, the window manager, for *nix users who like to distinguish between the two.)
Even if they bought out Opera they'd spend forever getting it to replace some of the thing Explorer does, such as file management. Explorer and IE are deeply intertwined.
In addition, IE's core components are used in other places, like MS Help, and they're even made available to third-party applications. Making sure that the new Opera-derived browser supported those would be... fun. And IE provides a lot of features to those components not provided in a standard web browser, which would have to be replicated.
Finally, it would be hard to make it bug-compatible. The one advantage to IE is that it's compatible with all those IE-only web sites. Replace IE with Opera and you're going to break a whole lot of web sites.
I'm not saying IE is better than Opera. IE sucks, and part of the reason it sucks so bad is that MS was afraid that Netscape (remember Netscape) would take over the world. So they tried to offer a free be-all-end-all browser that everybody could depend on having pre-installed, which would allow other apps to build on it. That made it a monstrosity. It also makes it nearly impossible to replace it.
Me, I never forgave Turan for his review of Titanic, but he was really ahead of the curve. He dissed Titanic before it became fashionable, so points for insight.
He is definitely one of the more skilled reviewers out there. He knows how a movie works. I'm just bummed. I liked Titanic, dammit.
Most importantly, Ebert would tell you to ignore the star rating. He says he puts that there only because it's expected by the readers and required by the newspaper. It's totally lacking in context, for one thing: many people would rather see a two-star chopsocky than a four-star tearjerker. He tries to rate them relative to the expectations of the audience, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.
Beyond that, even if you disagree with him on taste, you can learn a lot from his reviews. His skill is to be able to say why he liked a movie, or disliked it, and you can often use that to judge your opinion by his.
He's a good writer. Or at least I think so. His reviews are fun to read. I find that's different from most reviewers, where the review looks like: * 1 paragraph snarky comments * N paragraphs of plot summary * One sentence each for the leads, the director, and a few other details
It helps to be familiar with the reviewer's baises. Ebert is a huge fan of anime, so he adores some films that bore me silly. One advantage Ebert has over some other reviewers is that he's been at it forever, so there's a large body of reviews to calibrate your taste against.
Ebert will tell you he's a critic, not a reviewer. His goal is to understand why movies succeed and fail. As an actor and director myself I find reviewers infuriating since they rarely understand the craft and usually misapportion blame and credit.
Hey, if you've found a reviewer out there whose tastes match yours completely, bonus. If you're into genre pics, like horror or scifi, it may be easier to find somebody whose taste better matches yours; Ebert's taste runs in favor of dramas and literary types.
For many people, Ebert fits that bill. If not, enjoy the movies anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
By "christian 'scientists'", I think he was referring to the creationist/intelligent design types, rather than to members of the Church of Christ, Scientist, or to scientists (minus the scare quotes) who profess the Christian religion.
Now, I gather that the official position of the Church of Christ, Scientist is opposed to the evolutionary explanation of the fossil evidence, and for the literal Bible creation explanation, but you'd know a lot more about that than I do.
the fact is that natural processes have killed off more animals than humans have.
This is very true, but you're looking at the wrong time scales. Most of those species that died had no effect on humans, because we're a relatively recent phenomenon.
If you're suggestion that we simply shouldn't care whether species live or die, I'll treat it in a self-centered fashion: we don't want to wipe out species if they could do something for us, or if their deaths would be a barometer for our own.
In the former case, there are many species on the planet who could be of utility to us. If not for medicine or food, at least as part of the total evolutionary record that we use to understand ourselves.
In the latter case, it may not matter if we wipe out the xebu by turning up the temperature, but if that temperature change presages worse changes that wipe out us, too, we care.
So extinction doesn't just suck for them. Potentially it sucks for us, too. I'm not going to tell you that every beetle is sacred, and I'm not one of those green-at-all-costs eco types. But extinctions do matter, and we should moderate our behavior to not actively cause them at least until we have a better idea of what the total long-term effect might be.
Sure, there are plenty of other ways for creatures to go extince, and we should keep an eye out for asteroids and such, but that doesn't mean that extinction isn't also a problem on scales less than 100 million years, too.
Ah. So you have permission to download Mandy Moore's latest album off P2P. Good to know.
Slashdotters are used to computers, where information is like water in bucket: leave even a tiny hole and it will all leak out. A piece of software is either 100% secure or it's 0% secure.
Lawyers and merchants see things differently. They know that they're going to lose a certain amount of sales to theft/copyright infringement/shrinkage. All they want is to keep it to a manageable level.
So perhaps "copy prevention" is an inaccurate name, and this debate is full of loaded terms, like "piracy" and "copyright infringment" (the first dramatically overstating the case, the other using six syllables to make the fact that you're getting something you didn't pay for seem like an inconsequential legal technicality).
I'll call it "copy inhibition". It slows down copying a little bit. Maybe: once somebody puts it on P2P everybody who wants it can have it nearly instantly. It only takes one person to do the work. After that, it really is like water in a sieve.
They keep trying to introduce DRM without invalidating the huge installed base of CD players. At what point are they going to say, "We like DRM, and we think you like our music so much that you're going to buy a new music system to get it?"
Will some music company eventually say, "We're making the next Famous Music Artist album available only on iTunes?" Or introduce some new DRM'ed format designed to force you to upgrade your system, equivalent to CSS in DVDs?
As long as they're trying to hack DRM on top of CD formats, they're destined to lose. Perhaps DRM is destined to lose no matter what. People broke CSS and Fairplay, and I suspect that's the reason they haven't tried to force DRM yet. But it seems to me that as long as their market strategy is based around "we're selling you the rights to listen, but not the rights to copy", they're eventually going to have to abandon the CD format. Sooner would be better than later for them, wouldn't it?
I don't know if their marketing tells them they'd lose. Perhaps that would be the tipping point where people said, "Nah, forget it; we don't want a new format no matter what artists make it and no matter what features it has." I dunno, but I'm sure they do (or think they do).
I think that Microsoft may carry more weight than Spamhaus does with the ISPs. If Hotmail starts declining mail, users get pissed. If Hotmail cuts all connections, so that users from an entire ISP can't get on, users get rabid.
I don't know what Microsoft has in mind, if anything, but a gentle threat may just be their first salvo.
Spotting spam zombies should be easy: if a computer on your ISP is hitting port 25 all day, then it's probably a spam zombie.
You don't need feedback from Microsoft to tell you that you have zombies on your network. The question is, what are you going to do about them?
Perhaps this is Microsoft's way of saying, "We think you're spewing spam, and now you know we know it. Fix it or we'll stop accepting mail from you entirely."
Yeah, it would sure be better if Microsoft fixed its OS instead, and they're working on that, too. But it can't do anything about compromised Windows 95/98/ME boxes if they're not patching, so it's up to the ISPs to notify users that they're in violation of the terms-of-service and had better shape up.
True dat. I think of my NAT box as a firewall that cuts off a lot of crap.
I installed a new cable modem the other day and to configure it I had to connect it directly to the computer. ZoneAlarm (thank God I had it) immediately went ballistic about the number of incoming attacks. I'm not running any servers, and I hope I'm reasonably current on the patches, but God only knows what program that I'm running has a backdoor port open. I was actually queasy.
As soon as the thing was configured I re-rigged it through the NAT box, and immediately felt better. When IPv6 comes and I have my own address I may have to buy an IPv6 NAT box just for safety's sake. Yeah, zonealarm and other software firewalls exist, but the blue box makes me feel more comfortable. It does only one thing and it's a lot harder to trick into being hacked.
If you have a monopoly on a limited resource thats in high demand (thats constantly increasing) would you give it up?
Give it up? No. But since ISPs compete with each other, some ISP may eventually realize that it will be outcompeted by the others in the v4 space and say, "Try us, we're different, we have v6". Maybe Comcast or AOL will decide to jump first. Especially if it saves them money on configuration, or if they can make a good case for a static IP or other feature.
Or if they've run out of addressing space and it's cheaper to get it via IPv6 than by buying space from somebody else.
We're not there yet; I've never heard of an ISP saying, "Sorry, can't log you on, we have no IP address for you." Yet. Let's hope the ISPs are smart enough to fix the problem before they're hosed.
The question is, how important are those benefits?
* simplified headers
Lovely, but since the IPv4 header code is already written, is it that big a deal?
* quality of service
* multicasting
These are enabling technologies. They're boring by themselves, but could enable something cool. But what they enable is better use of resources. You wouldn't need QoS or multicasting if bandwidth were unlimited. It will remain limited, of course, but when we start getting fiber to the curb, I wonder if the features will appear to use it.
Multicasting in particular is most important for simultaneous events, like broadcasting, which is counter to the "what you want when you want it" notion that drives Internet acceptance. But maybe a new thing will arise I haven't seen yet.
* autoconfiguration
* improved routing
These seem like things that would save ISPs money. But the question is, how much money? There's a huge IPv4 base installed and switching is expensive. Are these, along with the users demanding new features, enough to cause ISP acceptance? Or are the Japanese and Chinese and Koreans buying a pig in a poke?
* security (that's certainly buzzword compliant, why is it never brought up?)
* authentication
These two do seem like a big deal, but thus far we've implemented security and authentication (as well as sessions) at the next level up. Sure, it would be better at the IP level, but if the problem is solved (at least provisionally), it seems a major investment for little benefit. Unless there are IPv6 level security improvements that I'm not aware of; I'm not an expert and I'd appreciate any extra info.
I'm all in favor of IPv6 acceptance, and I'd like to start seeing it deployed in parallel with IPv4, and waiting for the advances to happen. But I'd like to understand why the ISPs haven't done it yet on purely capitalist grounds. Maybe it's because it's just too little to justify the expense.
While there are certainly cases where NAT isn't nearly good enough, for the vast majority of users it IS good enough.
That's what makes IPv6 acceptance so slow: your ISP isn't going to rebuild its infrastructure so that you can run a SMTP server. Certainly not for the measly (from their POV) $50 a month you and your friends are paying for that line. If you want a static IP, or a few, you can have it, but you'll start paying $150 a month or more for the service.
Some day, those necessary static IPs will be too rare, and you'll have to switch ISPs to get it. At that point your ISP will need to switch to IPv6 to keep your business. I have no idea when that day is. It may well be soon; I can't say. But as a major investment for your ISP they're going to put it off as long as possible.
So the answer to your question, "Why shouldn't people be able to have full IP connectivity?" is, "Because not enough people want it to make it worth their while, but if you really want it you can pay for it."
In a sense that matches up with the "fair use" notion in the US. Swapping a few songs with your friends hardly seems criminal, or at least trivial.
Pulling tens of thousands of files from other file-trading networks and then making them available for free to people anywhere in the world, that hardly sounds like "fair use". It's too bad the the technologies that enable the fair use case also enable the more clearly criminal case.
I know you're just making a joke, but I'm curious: in what way was Revenge of the Sith ripping people off? They made a movie, and they were hoping to sell tickets to it, and eventually sell DVDs. Are you saying that the price for a ticket is too high?
George Lucas sure will make a profit off that, but is all profit-making a ripoff?
It sounds like you need to clean the wheels on that mouse.
It's amazing that people can live with such annoyances. But I guess it's like your car: it gradually gets more and more busted, and you compensate for the failures without noticing. Until somebody else tries to drive it...
Not necessarily. It could be automated, and once somebody wrote the software it could just rip the book out of Google for free. Writing software is hard, but people seem to like writing software and giving it away. So it would be neither hard nor expensive for you to get a book that way.
The key is the "small snippets" and how they're given out. TFA didn't say, but I suspect that the questions that they sent to Google concern how Google is going to keep people from coercing Google into giving them the whole book a piece at a time.
It's been done before; some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were first released because somebody reverse-engineered a concordance. One could imagine somebody writing software to pull up part of a book, then search on the last sentenece of each snippet to get it to reveal some more (as context). Repeat and get the whole book.
It might not be all that simple or all that effective, but publishers do have a right to worry about the possibility. It takes a lot of work to publish a book, and it would be nice if Google were able to give them some assurance that it wouldn't become common for people to get the books for free.
Even without that, even publishing small snippets of reference books can be problematic. Sometimes you only want a short snippet of the book at a time, and the rest of the book goes unused. The publisher spends money assembling the whole book, so they want you to pay for all of it (amortizing the cost), or at least use the library's copy (which can be very expensive if they expect to sell only to libraries).
Personally, I'd like to see Google honor a publisher's request not to index a book, the same way google honors the robots.txt file. If they're losing sales that they might otherwise get via Google's free advertising, that's their own lookout.
The purpose of the CAN-SPAM act wasn't to stop spam, it was to legitimize spam sent by the DMA and its members. ...but make it easier to filter out.
I don't know whether the DMA mebers are complying or not. Most spam is still sent from outside the DMA's members. So we sure can't turn off our bayesian spam filters.
The theory was that the US would crack down on those people, who according to TFA are right here in the US, leaving us with just the easily-filterable DMA-approved ads.
That hasn't happened yet, perhaps because the FBI has more important things on its mind (i.e. terrorism). I can't imagine that the DMA is happy, because their actual sales pitches are getting lost among the scams, phishes, and frauds.
I'll worry about how evil the DMA is once I stop getting 92 spams a day for C$ALIS.
I use My Yahoo as my home page. It gives me the news, weather, and other miscellaneous stuff. I check it a few dozen times a day, whenever I want to connect with what's going on.
I use Google to search.
At this point, a "Personalized Google" home page wouldn't be a reaplcement for Google, and in fact they shouldn't take up half the front page with a search bar. It would be a replacement for My Yahoo. When I want to search, I'll search. When I want to know what's going on, I'll hit my personal page.
What I see of Perssonalized Google Home Page isn't taking me away from My Yahoo yet, especially since I use neither Yahoo mail nor GMail. (Not that I have anything against gmail; I just own my own domain and use that instead.) I like My Yahoo's collection of news better, which is funny because Google News has all the ones I could possibly want.
But if they keep at it, combine the maturity of My Yahoo with Google's fancy Javascript and good instincts for non-evil features, and it may not be long before I abandon My Yahoo entirely.
The point is that if there's an emergency, you need to get help FAST, without thinking about it. There's only one thing you need to know: 911. From there they can just ask you where you are. But if you have to look up the number for fire, or police, or the hospital, you could be dead before you find a phone book.
It's only recently that E911 gave the emergency responders the ability to determine your address automatically. Asking people to know their present location isn't much. Asking them to memorize emergency numbers that they don't use often is.
I'm sure you can strip the OS down, but could you also strip Office down? It's a bit of a memory hog. All those bloated features also make it a bit of a disk hog, but if there's a way to fault them in only when needed, disk is cheap. But we're talking about Win95 machines with 64 megs of RAM and people who explicitly don't wish to upgrade.
Not that OOo is any better. Office-ware tends to be bloat-ware.
While I concur that this is a stupid plan, could you elaborate on the "treated like a thief" theme that I see so often on slashdot?
You treat most people like theives. More accurately, you treat them like they could be thieves. You lock your car and your house, because you don't trust people you haven't met. When you rent a car or a movie they go to great lengths to assure you'll give it back. You assume people are thieves because it's easier than getting your stuff back later.
When you say "treat them like thieves", the image is of throwing somebody in jail. That's not the case here.
I gotta admit, in this case the cliche looks perilously close to accurate. Taking fingerprints IS treating somebody more like a thief than a potential thief. That's a bit of a coincidence (just because it's one way to take an ID used in both processes, but they're not fingerprinting you like a thief gets fingerprinted.) But it's still incredibly, and overly, invasive.
My gist is that I don't think of DRM as "treating somebody like a thief" any more than I think of locking your house as treating people like thieves. This plan is stupid, and I'm sure not buying it, and it would never happen because the technology would be wildly inconvenient and insufficiently accurate.
But I've happily bought DRMed songs from Apple and I'd buy DRMed movies. When you buy a DRMed song you're giving them a "fingerprint", just one that's tied to your computer rather than a permanent part of you (which is the real stupid part of this plan.) I'd prefer non-DRMed ones, just in case I wanted to make a backup or use it in a different medium, but I sure understand why they don't want to see their material given away for free over the Internet, and go to some lengths to ensure it. Fingerprints are stupid, but I'm not opposed to a less invasive plan.
Because IE has deep ties to the operating system (or rather, the window manager, for *nix users who like to distinguish between the two.)
... fun. And IE provides a lot of features to those components not provided in a standard web browser, which would have to be replicated.
Even if they bought out Opera they'd spend forever getting it to replace some of the thing Explorer does, such as file management. Explorer and IE are deeply intertwined.
In addition, IE's core components are used in other places, like MS Help, and they're even made available to third-party applications. Making sure that the new Opera-derived browser supported those would be
Finally, it would be hard to make it bug-compatible. The one advantage to IE is that it's compatible with all those IE-only web sites. Replace IE with Opera and you're going to break a whole lot of web sites.
I'm not saying IE is better than Opera. IE sucks, and part of the reason it sucks so bad is that MS was afraid that Netscape (remember Netscape) would take over the world. So they tried to offer a free be-all-end-all browser that everybody could depend on having pre-installed, which would allow other apps to build on it. That made it a monstrosity. It also makes it nearly impossible to replace it.
Me, I never forgave Turan for his review of Titanic, but he was really ahead of the curve. He dissed Titanic before it became fashionable, so points for insight.
He is definitely one of the more skilled reviewers out there. He knows how a movie works. I'm just bummed. I liked Titanic, dammit.
Most importantly, Ebert would tell you to ignore the star rating. He says he puts that there only because it's expected by the readers and required by the newspaper. It's totally lacking in context, for one thing: many people would rather see a two-star chopsocky than a four-star tearjerker. He tries to rate them relative to the expectations of the audience, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.
Beyond that, even if you disagree with him on taste, you can learn a lot from his reviews. His skill is to be able to say why he liked a movie, or disliked it, and you can often use that to judge your opinion by his.
He's a good writer. Or at least I think so. His reviews are fun to read. I find that's different from most reviewers, where the review looks like:
* 1 paragraph snarky comments
* N paragraphs of plot summary
* One sentence each for the leads, the director, and a few other details
It helps to be familiar with the reviewer's baises. Ebert is a huge fan of anime, so he adores some films that bore me silly. One advantage Ebert has over some other reviewers is that he's been at it forever, so there's a large body of reviews to calibrate your taste against.
Ebert will tell you he's a critic, not a reviewer. His goal is to understand why movies succeed and fail. As an actor and director myself I find reviewers infuriating since they rarely understand the craft and usually misapportion blame and credit.
Hey, if you've found a reviewer out there whose tastes match yours completely, bonus. If you're into genre pics, like horror or scifi, it may be easier to find somebody whose taste better matches yours; Ebert's taste runs in favor of dramas and literary types.
For many people, Ebert fits that bill. If not, enjoy the movies anyway.
Effectively you're auto-whitelisting people who pay you.