"Unauthorized reproduction or distribution, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing."
That's the copyright statement (or near enough -- I'm not in the presence of my CD collection at the moment) on every Ani disc I own. She's awesome. Particularly recommend the album she did with Utah Phillips, especially for anyone who's woken up to the fact that corporate media are constantly rewriting history, even of things that happened within living memory.
Screw the cafepress model. Picking the design of the artwork on the clothing is a problem that has already been solved, and it's not the interesting problem anyway.
As someone who NEVER fits into off-the-rack clothes (I'm 5'4", >160lbs, with a 30in waist) what I want is a direct link between the online-order process and a computer-driven seamshop. I want to be able to buy 30waist/29inseam pants with a crotch that doesn't scrape the insides of my knees. I want to order shirts that fit across my shoulders without leaving enough extra material at my waist to outfit a small craft with a spare spinnaker. I want to find dress pants that fit over my thighs and butt without having to go up four waist sizes. I want to specify pocket size, shape, and design; I want to pick fabric and cut. I'm sure the same would hold true for many folks who don't easily fit into mass-produced clothing, regardless of how and why their physiques differ from the garment industry's mythical "average-size person".
Yes, these things are all possible now with a human tailor, but they are prohibitively expensive (think $5-10k for a bespoke suit using good fabric from a good but less-than-famous tailor, versus minor fractions of that for a mostly mass-produced off-the-rack suit of the same fabric from a known designer.) Cut the end-user cost even in half compared to the cost of tailoring, and you'd have a viable business proposition. Cut it to 10 percent (still more than retail cost for many off-the-rack suits) and I guarantee you'd have all the business you could handle.
Ole
(Or, as Captain Picard said to the robo-tailor's programmer... "Make it sew.")
There's a HUGE practical problem with the idea of completely privatized health care as espoused by Libertarian ideology. Long before Microsoft demonstrated the "network effect" with regard to software sales, public health researchers knew about it in regards to contagion: the more people around you that have access to health care, the less likely you are to get sick.
Public health (in this country, as in most other industrialized nations) was originally conceived of as the most efficient and effective method of maintaining a healthy workforce with the least total cost to the owning and managing classes.
Ole
(extra credit: what roles would be played by libertarians and/or free-market ideologues in this illustrative classic tale?)
[...]
I refuse to let any non-government agency swipe the mag-stripe on my driver's license If they won't serve me without doing so, I don't do business with them.[...]
There's a simpler way -- introduce the magstrip on your license to Mr. Bulk Magtape Eraser. Then they can swipe away, and when their reader doesn't work, you say "Yeah, that happens to my credit cards, too, sometimes -- I occasionally work around high magnetic fields." Then they have to look at the front of the license anyway. If they don't accept it, it's not like you're out anything -- you weren't going to frequent their establishment anyway, right?
A properly configured border firewall, for example, will protect systems behind it.
Not from each other, which is a real bummer when one of those machines
is a laptop that sometimes visits other networks, or
has a user who likes to click on hotchick.jpg.pif in the inbox, or
runs a browser unpatched against malicious ActiveX/javascript combinations, or...
Personal firewall software is A Good Thing(tm).
Ole
(Well, except when I have to spend time explaining that the reason GreySlush Defender logged packets going from my [DNS_server:53] to your [$TOYbox:31211] is because, well, you asked for them when you wanted to browse a site on my network.) "Nasty packetses, hitting our precious they are." Sheesh.)
Hey you cannot possibly admin 600 machines with 4 guys, Microsoft said so!
Sdh, don't tell my boss*, 'cause they're going to be down to 3 in a month. (I'm moving to Colorado -- know anyone who needs a linux guru in the Boulder/Denver area?)
Luckily, they're not all guys, so no worries! (Senior software specialist is a woman who worked on the original OSF/1 and has forgotten more about UNIX than I'll ever know...)
Ole
*: meaning: don't tell my boss that he can't admin 600 boxes with 3/4 folks. He already knows I'm leaving; he's gratifyingly unhappy about it.:-)
Don't know if this is quite what you were looking for, but it's the first thing that popped into my mind...
There are four of us who do *nix admin for over 600 *nix machines, more than half of which are linux boxes (both workstations and servers.) SSH with X displayback on a 100Mbit switched network is such a godsend I can't even begin to imagine life without it. I probably generate more SSH sessions in a normal workday than I do HTTP sessions. (Yes, that does include/. reloads, why do you ask?:-)
I also think it's well worth your while to understand SSH's more esoteric tunneling capabilities... Recently I had to support a research group who was doing a demo at JPL and they were behind a very restrictive firewall but needed to do control and image transfer from a robot framework here in Massachusetts, and the researchers who'd coded the software hadn't implemented any kind of authentication layer. We were able to do everything using SSH tunneling over one of the three ports allowed through JPL's firewall (and they could IMAP their mail from our servers as a side bonus) without exposing our servers or JPL to unencrypted protocols of any kind.
[...]
They do code review, bug fixes and testing in a continuous cycle to get all the software bugs out. [...]
In fact, an excerpt of a typical DoD debugging session (and its aftermath) dating from sometime in 1997 can be found disguised as an RHF posting here, among other places.
Ole
(telnet!? Is ssh really that recent? Hm. Maybe it is, at that... I guess we didn't start really pushing it here until 1998 or 9.)
I work for a large university's CS department, as a network/server admin and resident linux guru. I've been a minor contributor to many RH bugzilla discussions, and may have helped to solve a few esoteric bugs here and there. RedHat's recent move leaves me in the cold; we can't move to RHEL because the cost would kill our IT budget, and I doubt very much that the Fedora model will work for us. Reading upthread, I see several posts whose authors tell much the same tale. For all of us, the Fedora description and proposed release schedule aren't something to which we'll feel able to trust our servers (and our professional reputations).
In those Bugzilla discussions I mentioned, I've seen a lot of highly-informed, to-the-point correspondence from people just like me -- we have no problems patching driver code, recompiling kernels, parsing debugger output &etc., and I'd hazard a guess that the issues we raise and the bugs we help troubleshoot in the field (the ones that make it past your inhouse QA folks) are part of the reason that RedHat has been so rock-solid. This translates directly to the stability of the server-class packages you sell to our cousins in the corporate trenches. The targetting of Fedora at bleeding-edge enthusiasts and hobbyist installations means that these bugs (remember, these are the ones that made it past the in-house RH team -- have a look at the tg3 driver issues in bug 69920 for one example) likely won't be caught before they bite your paying server customers. Do you foresee a decrease in stability for RHEL as a result? If not, where do you envision getting your field/beta testing done for the server components of your OS? Isn't it possible that, while taken by itself the "free" version of RH was an operating loss, when viewed in context of overall product line it was actually part of the reason you started operating "in the black"?
[...] Generally speaking, you get about as much download as you provide in upload, but that can vary if there's plent of excess upload capacity, or if too many people are behind NAT, or if the original seed is slow, or a few other things. [...]
Hm. Since I opened up 6881 on the firewall, I've been getting a dl:ul ratio somewhere between 2 and 3 to 1. Right now I'm getting 1151kB/s down, 410kB/s up. Guess I got lucky.:-)
Ole
PS. In the time it took me to type this comment, my download finished -- I love this BT thing! -- and my upload speed immediately jumped from the low 400's to the high 700's. (yes, I'm leaving the client running.)
[...] Technically I am circumventing copyright protection [...]
I could be wrong, but if I remember my reading properly, you are not in violation of any law doing what you are doing. [...]
In fact, technically that is breaking the law, and it's the reason we get all worked up about it. The DMCA makes it a crime to "[...] circumvent a technical protection measure that [...] protects a copyrighted work". Nowhere does the DMCA say that the crime occurs only when the subsequent use of the work would constitute copyright infringement. (It does make a limited exception for enumerated classes of works; such enumeration is the province of the Librarian of Congress, and so far that office has not granted many exceptions. DVDs are definitely not within the exception to date.)
"But what about Fair Use?"
Fair use is a defense only to an accusation of copyright infringement. Since infringement doesn't have to be alleged in a DMCA case, you never get to raise the issue of fair use.
IANAL either, but I have spent an enormous amount of time discussing this on the DVD-discuss list.
...And entitled "Harnessing Microbially Generated Power on the Seafloor" can be found in PDF format at http://zdna.micro.umass.edu/publications/12091916. pdf.
The basic idea is to use geobacter organisms (which occur naturally in various places, such as the mud on the bottom of Boston harbor) to generate electricity, by giving them a graphite anode to colonize.
Blockpoth the quoster (with broken tags re-HTMLed):
...aerodynamically stable at Mach 1.2
Dude, your car goes 206 MPH? That's one hell of a speeding ticket...
Um... Within your group of friends, are you always the "last to know" person?
Because it would appear sound travels awfully slowly in your vicinity... For the rest of us, the speed of sound (Mach 1) is a little under 770 MPH, and Mach 1.2 would be 900+ MPH.[1]
The citing officer would have to have a hell of a squad car... I guess that'll be the end of the Ford Crown Vic franchise -- they'll be underbid by Lockheed Martin.
Ole
[1]: Speed of sound through air at sealevel, assuming "average" ambient temperature, pressure, and humidity, is roughly 761 MPH. See FREX the aerospace web faq.
Interesting. On a tangential note, every time I see that veep's name I tend to parse it as "Brian Gormenghast." Coincidence?
(The fact that it rhymes with bombast tickles me, too; particularly appropriate in the current context IMO.)
I loved the euphemism at the end of the article:
Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment.
It's not like Microsoft has a large PR department or anything... probably the translation from Corporate Journalese to standard english is "Microsoft was unable to respond with anything printable."
Much as I hate to say it, if ICANN is pissing off Verisign then ICANN can't be all bad... Notwork Solutions/Verisign absofuckinglutely sucks, as anyone who's ever dealt with them will tell you in a heartbeat. Every network admin I've ever known will spew invective or expectorate (or both) at the mere mention of their name.
Of course, the UMass sysadmin is going to be wonder why 50,000 geeks are clicking to your home directory now.
"Naah, I removed those pictures months ago."
Besides, I'm used to getting email from UMass sysadmins -- although now I suppose we're going to have to quibble about who gets to claim the title of "The UMass sysadmin". (It's a largish school, there are a lot of us -- usually multiple BOFHen per department, particularly in the sciences.:)
Ole
(Who's been accused of many things, but never schizophrenia.)
These benefits in SF are nice and all for those of us who live somewhere out there or can afford airfare, but it'd be awful nice if the EFF would put together some high profile get-togethers in Boston or New York, somewhere us rightcoasters can get to without having to surrender umpteen forms of ID along the way.
Here's an idea: make sure there's a benefit scheduled to coincide with LISA in Philly. I'll go!
Ole
PS. EFF, if you're listening -- get your damn secure site fixed -- the last time I tried to donate, the site barfed; I had to print out a page with my CC info filled in and fax it -- and I still never actually got billed.
[T]he music industry had exactly the same response to the
advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs,
minidiscs, VHS, BETA, music videos ("Why buy the record when you
can tape it?"), MTV, and a host of other technological advances
designed to make the consumer's life easier and better. I know
because I was there.
The only reason they didn't react that way publicly to the
advent of CDs was because they believed CD's were uncopyable. I
was told this personally by a former head of Sony marketing, when
they asked me to license Between the Lines in CD format at a
reduced royalty rate. ("Because it's a brand new technology.")
[...]
You can't hear new music on radio these days; I live in
Nashville, "Music City USA", and we have exactly one station
willing to play a non-top-40 format. On a clear day, I can even
tune it in. The situation's not much better in Los Angeles or New
York. College stations are sometimes bolder, but their wattage is
so low that most of us can't get them.
[...]
If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have
addressed this problem 15 years ago, when people with websites
were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online.
Instead, the industry-wide attitude was It'll go away. That's the
same attitude CBS Records had about rock 'n' roll when Mitch
Miller was head of A&R. (And you wondered why they passed on The
Beatles and The Rolling Stones.)
[...]
The industry has been complaining for years about the
stranglehold the middle-man has on their dollars, yet they wish to
do nothing to offend those middle-men. (BMG has a strict policy
for artists buying their own CDs to sell at concerts - $11 per CD.
They know very well that most of us lose money if we have to pay
that much; the point is to keep the big record stores happy by
ensuring sales go to them. What actually happens is no sales to us
or the stores.) NARAS and RIAA are moaning about the little mom &
pop stores being shoved out of business; no one worked harder to
shove them out than our own industry, which greeted every new
Tower or mega-music store with glee, and offered steep discounts
to Target and WalMart et al for stocking CDs. The Internet has
zero to do with stores closing and lowered sales.
And for those of us with major label contracts who want
some of our music available for free downloading? well, the record
companies own our masters, our outtakes, even our demos, and they
won't allow it. Furthermore, they own our voices for the duration
of the contract, so we can't even post a live track for
downloading!
"You go, girl!"
It's interesting to note that this is not someone who could be dismissed by an RIAA flack as a no-name musician whining because the Internet might get her recognition that she's not gotten from "The Industry" -- she's had nine Grammy nominations, and her music has been recorded by just about everybody at one time or another.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the copyright statement (or near enough -- I'm not in the presence of my CD collection at the moment) on every Ani disc I own. She's awesome. Particularly recommend the album she did with Utah Phillips, especially for anyone who's woken up to the fact that corporate media are constantly rewriting history, even of things that happened within living memory.
(She's also one hell of a guitarist.)
Screw the cafepress model. Picking the design of the artwork on the clothing is a problem that has already been solved, and it's not the interesting problem anyway.
As someone who NEVER fits into off-the-rack clothes (I'm 5'4", >160lbs, with a 30in waist) what I want is a direct link between the online-order process and a computer-driven seamshop. I want to be able to buy 30waist/29inseam pants with a crotch that doesn't scrape the insides of my knees. I want to order shirts that fit across my shoulders without leaving enough extra material at my waist to outfit a small craft with a spare spinnaker. I want to find dress pants that fit over my thighs and butt without having to go up four waist sizes. I want to specify pocket size, shape, and design; I want to pick fabric and cut. I'm sure the same would hold true for many folks who don't easily fit into mass-produced clothing, regardless of how and why their physiques differ from the garment industry's mythical "average-size person".
Yes, these things are all possible now with a human tailor, but they are prohibitively expensive (think $5-10k for a bespoke suit using good fabric from a good but less-than-famous tailor, versus minor fractions of that for a mostly mass-produced off-the-rack suit of the same fabric from a known designer.) Cut the end-user cost even in half compared to the cost of tailoring, and you'd have a viable business proposition. Cut it to 10 percent (still more than retail cost for many off-the-rack suits) and I guarantee you'd have all the business you could handle.
(Or, as Captain Picard said to the robo-tailor's programmer... "Make it sew.")There's a HUGE practical problem with the idea of completely privatized health care as espoused by Libertarian ideology. Long before Microsoft demonstrated the "network effect" with regard to software sales, public health researchers knew about it in regards to contagion: the more people around you that have access to health care, the less likely you are to get sick.
Public health (in this country, as in most other industrialized nations) was originally conceived of as the most efficient and effective method of maintaining a healthy workforce with the least total cost to the owning and managing classes.
(extra credit: what roles would be played by libertarians and/or free-market ideologues in this illustrative classic tale?)
Blockpoth the quoster:
There's a simpler way -- introduce the magstrip on your license to Mr. Bulk Magtape Eraser. Then they can swipe away, and when their reader doesn't work, you say "Yeah, that happens to my credit cards, too, sometimes -- I occasionally work around high magnetic fields." Then they have to look at the front of the license anyway. If they don't accept it, it's not like you're out anything -- you weren't going to frequent their establishment anyway, right?Blockpoth the quoster:
Not from each other, which is a real bummer when one of those machines
- is a laptop that sometimes visits other networks, or
- has a user who likes to click on hotchick.jpg.pif in the inbox, or
- runs a browser unpatched against malicious ActiveX/javascript combinations, or...
Personal firewall software is A Good Thing(tm).(Well, except when I have to spend time explaining that the reason GreySlush Defender logged packets going from my [DNS_server:53] to your [$TOYbox:31211] is because, well, you asked for them when you wanted to browse a site on my network.) "Nasty packetses, hitting our precious they are." Sheesh.)
Blockpoth the quoster:
Sdh, don't tell my boss*, 'cause they're going to be down to 3 in a month. (I'm moving to Colorado -- know anyone who needs a linux guru in the Boulder/Denver area?)
Luckily, they're not all guys, so no worries! (Senior software specialist is a woman who worked on the original OSF/1 and has forgotten more about UNIX than I'll ever know...)
*: meaning: don't tell my boss that he can't admin 600 boxes with 3/4 folks. He already knows I'm leaving; he's gratifyingly unhappy about it. :-)
There are four of us who do *nix admin for over 600 *nix machines, more than half of which are linux boxes (both workstations and servers.) SSH with X displayback on a 100Mbit switched network is such a godsend I can't even begin to imagine life without it. I probably generate more SSH sessions in a normal workday than I do HTTP sessions. (Yes, that does include
I also think it's well worth your while to understand SSH's more esoteric tunneling capabilities... Recently I had to support a research group who was doing a demo at JPL and they were behind a very restrictive firewall but needed to do control and image transfer from a robot framework here in Massachusetts, and the researchers who'd coded the software hadn't implemented any kind of authentication layer. We were able to do everything using SSH tunneling over one of the three ports allowed through JPL's firewall (and they could IMAP their mail from our servers as a side bonus) without exposing our servers or JPL to unencrypted protocols of any kind.
Blockpoth the quoster:
In fact, an excerpt of a typical DoD debugging session (and its aftermath) dating from sometime in 1997 can be found disguised as an RHF posting here, among other places.
(telnet!? Is ssh really that recent? Hm. Maybe it is, at that... I guess we didn't start really pushing it here until 1998 or 9.)In those Bugzilla discussions I mentioned, I've seen a lot of highly-informed, to-the-point correspondence from people just like me -- we have no problems patching driver code, recompiling kernels, parsing debugger output &etc., and I'd hazard a guess that the issues we raise and the bugs we help troubleshoot in the field (the ones that make it past your inhouse QA folks) are part of the reason that RedHat has been so rock-solid. This translates directly to the stability of the server-class packages you sell to our cousins in the corporate trenches. The targetting of Fedora at bleeding-edge enthusiasts and hobbyist installations means that these bugs (remember, these are the ones that made it past the in-house RH team -- have a look at the tg3 driver issues in bug 69920 for one example) likely won't be caught before they bite your paying server customers. Do you foresee a decrease in stability for RHEL as a result? If not, where do you envision getting your field/beta testing done for the server components of your OS? Isn't it possible that, while taken by itself the "free" version of RH was an operating loss, when viewed in context of overall product line it was actually part of the reason you started operating "in the black"?
Hm. Since I opened up 6881 on the firewall, I've been getting a dl:ul ratio somewhere between 2 and 3 to 1. Right now I'm getting 1151kB/s down, 410kB/s up. Guess I got lucky. :-)
PS. In the time it took me to type this comment, my download finished -- I love this BT thing! -- and my upload speed immediately jumped from the low 400's to the high 700's. (yes, I'm leaving the client running.)In fact, technically that is breaking the law, and it's the reason we get all worked up about it. The DMCA makes it a crime to "[...] circumvent a technical protection measure that [...] protects a copyrighted work". Nowhere does the DMCA say that the crime occurs only when the subsequent use of the work would constitute copyright infringement. (It does make a limited exception for enumerated classes of works; such enumeration is the province of the Librarian of Congress, and so far that office has not granted many exceptions. DVDs are definitely not within the exception to date.)
Fair use is a defense only to an accusation of copyright infringement. Since infringement doesn't have to be alleged in a DMCA case, you never get to raise the issue of fair use.
IANAL either, but I have spent an enormous amount of time discussing this on the DVD-discuss list.
If you'd ever spent any, er, "quality" time with fsck(8) , you'd know that it's not a sugar-coating...
(Whaddaya know, my sig is actually relevant.)
Because it would appear sound travels awfully slowly in your vicinity... For the rest of us, the speed of sound (Mach 1) is a little under 770 MPH, and Mach 1.2 would be 900+ MPH.[1]
The citing officer would have to have a hell of a squad car... I guess that'll be the end of the Ford Crown Vic franchise -- they'll be underbid by Lockheed Martin.
[1]: Speed of sound through air at sealevel, assuming "average" ambient temperature, pressure, and humidity, is roughly 761 MPH. See FREX the aerospace web faq.
A crime against humanity, maybe...
</cheapshot>
(The fact that it rhymes with bombast tickles me, too; particularly appropriate in the current context IMO.)
I loved the euphemism at the end of the article:
It's not like Microsoft has a large PR department or anything... probably the translation from Corporate Journalese to standard english is "Microsoft was unable to respond with anything printable."
"Naah, I removed those pictures months ago."
Besides, I'm used to getting email from UMass sysadmins -- although now I suppose we're going to have to quibble about who gets to claim the title of "The UMass sysadmin". (It's a largish school, there are a lot of us -- usually multiple BOFHen per department, particularly in the sciences.:)
(Who's been accused of many things, but never schizophrenia.)Here's an idea: make sure there's a benefit scheduled to coincide with LISA in Philly. I'll go!
PS. EFF, if you're listening -- get your damn secure site fixed -- the last time I tried to donate, the site barfed; I had to print out a page with my CC info filled in and fax it -- and I still never actually got billed.
It's interesting to note that this is not someone who could be dismissed by an RIAA flack as a no-name musician whining because the Internet might get her recognition that she's not gotten from "The Industry" -- she's had nine Grammy nominations, and her music has been recorded by just about everybody at one time or another.
I'd be real surprised if the Verizon DSL available in my area shared a gateway with the Charter Pipeline cablemodem service.
I think you misspelt "You cannot fix a social problem with a technical solution"
HTH, HAND.
(Not that you aren't 100% right, of course. I was just being persnickety.)