I think you're wrong, but that reminds me to note... I'm actually an owner of several blocks of Sony shares. I bought them at a time when I regarded Sony as a technology-based company that also knew how to market. I also thought of them as a very ethical company.
Making money in hardware is hard work, but honest. The content business (pronounced "publishing") is an aspect of software with much higher profit potential, especially if you are willing to prostitute yourself and lie as needed (pronounced "marketing") to drive up the value of your "product". Sony has become involved in an internal civil war between the poor-but-honest hardware people and the greedy **AA scumbags. We now know who lost:
The customers and the creative artists. (And the hardware folks, but they're the relatively minor casualties.)
Bad time to sell my shares, but maybe I should do it anyway. It would help to make sure that Sony gets the message.
Actually, this might be a debacle with positive consequences. Not that it was a big secret or anything, but this fiasco is making it very clear how the paying customers feel about having their rights stripped away by secret technical countermeasures. However, all of this is linked together, and all of it goes back to the root of the evil. In this specific case, the evil of having copyright law controlled by publishers whose only interest in profit maximization. Remember that the REAL justification for copyright monopolies was to benefit society by encouraging creativity. The mechanism was supposed to work for the benefit of the creators. No mention of publishers in the American Constitution, though they've been dictating the terms of copyright laws for decades.
Perhaps it is too much to hope for, but it is certainly clear that the current system is completely out of whack. Perhaps it will collapse now and America can start considering why this was supposed to be a good idea in the first place. It's way past time to whack Mickey Mouse.
On the other hand, perhaps it doesn't matter. If you believe that the free exchange of creative ideas is a thing that benefits society, and that this encourages growth and development of a healthy society, then you must conclude it confers competitive advantage. Therefore, the societies that do better at encouraging creativity will eventually overwhelm the others--and nothing the **AA can do will stop that inevitable transition.
As long as you keep it to a few words, I'll see most of it at a glance. Speed reading. What I don't see is a red dot. So as an alternative, why don't you just get a new user name? I suggest "dildo-hurler".
That is the purpose of the red dot, you fucking cretinous moron. If you think a "foe" designation on/. has any greater significance than that, I have to lower my opinion of you even more--if that were only possible.
Re:What if there's nothing to see here?
on
Requiem for Usenet
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Usenet died years ago. The signal to noise ratio used to be pretty good, but that was a long time ago. It wasn't just that the noise increased, but that "negative signal" of false information started to increase. The designers of the newsgroups were thinking about spreading useful information, but it has become the favorite tool of cheap propagandists and the playground of the "vile spewers of mindless blather". Nice idea, but broken beyond repair. "It's dead, Jim."
Move along. Nothing to see there.
Consider this a rant and spleen venting. I really think the newsgroups were a lovely idea. I hope Wikipedia doesn't succumb to the same problems.
The real problem is that any power gets abused. Having your email is a power, and even if Google is not abusing it (by studying your email to improve their advertising revenue), someone else will (hackers in this case).
The solution is obvious. Get rid of the power. Find an alternative solution. And I happen to have one right here in my pocket:
Your email should live on *YOUR* hard drive. Google's software can do all the indexing and searching of your email right on your machine. It might well be within the current capabilities of the Google Desktop, but if not, only trivial changes required there.
But what about the children? Advertisers' children in this case. How will Google make money? Simple. Send the advertising keywords to YOUR machine, and then your computer will request the appropriate ads from the list. (Actually, not quite so simple because there are lots of ads, but think of it as though your computer is doing a background search against their database of current ads to find the most relevant ones.)
They can still offer the Web-based interface as an option, but it should not be the default because it creates an unneeded power that will (sooner or later (or already)) be abused--and even then it isn't needed. Google could hold the last few weeks' email on line, but then store it only on your machine.
Next wrinkle? Backup services where (for a small fee?) Google encrypts your email (on your machine) and stores the encrypted data for you on a Google server in case your machine croaks. Next? Migration services. Google will (for another small fee?) let you restore your backup files to a new machine and combine and reconcile all of your personal data. Etc.
Where is the red dot? All I read was that you don't hate me. Fine. In that case you should be more willing to be "helpful". I still think you're a pompous and ignorant dickhead, only more so.
Yeah, it's a little more bother now, but I consider it a long-term investment.
I've also abandoned flying, though I can't even estimate the number of times I'd flown before that.
As far as security goes, even if the system really works, I can already see lots of problems. For example, false positives from people who have OTHER things to hide that have nothing to do with airplanes. Or even more seriously, false negatives from people who are using drugs or some trick to reduce their voice stress under the detection threshold. Even more serious than that, we have true negatives that are really false negatives, because the passenger is an innocent patsy that doesn't know about the bomb that was stuffed into the luggage.
True positives? Gosh, if only the terrorists were so conveniently stupid.
Right now I regard it as yet another example of BushCo projection--accusing others of your own flaws. Taking the most extreme example available, Dubya is a sincere moron, so he expects the terrorists to be the same way. Another flavor of stuff like accusing other people of trying to rewrite history while you try to rewrite history.
Next, let's start considering the problems if the system doesn't really work. That's probably more likely, actually.
Look, I have complete and total contempt for you. I think you're a total waste of a human life, assuming you aren't some sort of robotic idiot. Simple ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of. It can be cured with a bit of sincere effort. You, on the other hand, are a proudly ignorant jackass. You are a shameful excuse for a human being.
Perhaps that is a false impression created by another one of your typical fuckups. Too bad. You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and you blew it out your ass.
What more do you want from a foe? Now where's the red dot?
Congrats. I didn't read what you wrote beyond the first few words. All I want from you is that red dot. I don't want to waste *ANY* time on proudly ignorant morons. I'd do it myself, but there are constructive uses for "friend" designations, and unfortunately there is a limit on the total number of "friend" and "foe" settings.
I don't want to give away the first word, but the rest of it is "Each Spyware Programmer and the Horse He (or sHe) Rode in On".
Anyway, it's a totally worthless approach. The anti-spyware programmers could handle it in at least three ways.
By doing business from a country with reasonable laws. (Putting this first because I think it is already true for some of them, so it really means they don't have to do anything.)
Creating some tool that allows users to validate spyware and send them the signatures without having to be directly involved.
Get slightly unethical about it and "forget" where the sigs came from. (Putting this one last because fighting fire with fire is basically bad.)
Thank you for identifying yourself as some sort of Bushevik moron. Blaming the Democrats for legislation passed by the Republicans? I have no use for your profound ignorance or intellectual dishonesty or whatever.
I have only one request for such fools as yourself. Designate me as your foe for the convenience of ignoring you in the future. It's probably within your intellectual capacity to click on the little gray button and select the "foe" option, isn't it?
You're confusing censorship and prosecution with copyright. However, it obviously was risky to publish a book that would offend the religious authorities of those days.
I agree that it's a difficult problem. I tend to lean toward the notion of tracking usage and compensating for actual value received. Essentially a kickback on value derived. In the case of that kind of non-fiction it's actually easier, where the doctor would owe some compensation to the authors of the books he consulted based on a fraction of his own charges to patients.
Thank you for making my point so effectively: There was very little creative accomplishment. In those days the vast majority of the people were peasant farmers and had effectively zero access to any form of art. There were a few extremely rich patrons, and a small number of artists. It's very nice that a few masterpieces were created.
I had found the location you referred to and disabled the annoying setting. The impression I had received was that it was working dynamically based on the words I had already used.
The notion of overloading the key in that way is terrible. It might be tolerable assigned to the key, if that's an option, though I'm still unattracted and plan no experiments.
Not sure why, but I had already started working with styles, so apparently that part was intuitive enough for me.
Finally, in a case of small world syndrome, one of my grandparents was from that country.
Just note that I agree that copyright law is badly broken, and that the causes are almost entirely the sustained lobbying efforts of the publishing industry.
However, I think you are completely misrepresenting the costs of publishing when the original legislation was produced. You are talking about the marginal cost of the additional copies, and it is true that the low marginal costs made it possible to mass produce books in the first place. However the costs of setting up to do so were extremely substantial. Printing presses themselves were large and expensive, but you also needed paper and lots of ink, and a warehouse to store the paper before and after printing. Add in collating and binding, too. Altogether a more-than-minor enterprise, and the capital costs only declined gradually until about 40 years ago...
...when the bottom started completely dropping out of the market. Initially it was just photocopying technologoy, but nowadays technologies like BitTorrent can make thousands (or millions) of digital copies almost immediately. Yes, the marginal costs are still low, but the capital investments are also negligible. (Minor assumption that people buy computers primarily for other purposes, but even if they didn't, the total cost of a computer and a network connection is trivial compared to the cost of setting up a printshop.)
While the problem is usually the other way around with broken legislative solutions to technical problems, you are actually trying to stand it the situation on the head, and it still doesn't work. The technology available and the world itself were quite different when copyright was originally conceived and implemented, and it was quite a good thing. In fact, in those days there would have been very little creative accomplishment at all without the kinds of financial incentives that copyright created, and the ownership of a printing press was a major obstacle to the distribution of creative works.
Perhaps you are trying to make a different argument that *TODAY* we don't need so much creativity, but society would survive well enough on the literary creativity of part-time authors who really want to write or compose music, etc., and who are willing to donate their creations to society. Perhaps so, especially if you consider that we've already created enough entertaining literature and pretty music to fill up entire lives with reading and listening. (And I would even agree that some of the worst writing is done by hacks who are just doing it for the bucks.)
If so, you are really presenting your case poorly, and I had to stretch to imagine you have that much coherence. I hope you program better than you write, because (putting on my editorial hat) if you were one of my authors, I'd weep.
Thank you for confirming my opinion of your profound and willful ignorance. You could address that with some actual effort, though of course your remarkable stupidity is not curable. Actually, your comment was so amusing that I'm tempted to save it for posterity. Every single comment you made about me was totally wrong, which is extremely amusing insofar as you had just claimed to have visited my Web site. Not just ignorant, but boasting about your inability to read. Typical Bushevik moron.
Okay, let's make nicey-nice. Please mark me as your foe. My settings will then make you almost invisible and we can eagerly ignore each other forever.
You're getting off topic. However, I don't think you should regard this action as purely a distraction, but rather a "bid" for more campaign donations. In that sense it is relevant in that BushCo's version of "conservativism" simply means "compassion" for the people who have lots of money, and doing everything they can to help them keep as much as possible (so that they can conveniently and without stress afford to donate more to Dubya's campaigns). Of course the BIG problem there is that time waits for no man. Change is coming, and your actual choices are lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. Propping up dying copyright laws is just another form of getting in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
c/your "product"/"your product" (pronounced "the creative artists' work")/
Making money in hardware is hard work, but honest. The content business (pronounced "publishing") is an aspect of software with much higher profit potential, especially if you are willing to prostitute yourself and lie as needed (pronounced "marketing") to drive up the value of your "product". Sony has become involved in an internal civil war between the poor-but-honest hardware people and the greedy **AA scumbags. We now know who lost:
The customers and the creative artists. (And the hardware folks, but they're the relatively minor casualties.)
Bad time to sell my shares, but maybe I should do it anyway. It would help to make sure that Sony gets the message.
Perhaps it is too much to hope for, but it is certainly clear that the current system is completely out of whack. Perhaps it will collapse now and America can start considering why this was supposed to be a good idea in the first place. It's way past time to whack Mickey Mouse.
On the other hand, perhaps it doesn't matter. If you believe that the free exchange of creative ideas is a thing that benefits society, and that this encourages growth and development of a healthy society, then you must conclude it confers competitive advantage. Therefore, the societies that do better at encouraging creativity will eventually overwhelm the others--and nothing the **AA can do will stop that inevitable transition.
As long as you keep it to a few words, I'll see most of it at a glance. Speed reading. What I don't see is a red dot. So as an alternative, why don't you just get a new user name? I suggest "dildo-hurler".
That is the purpose of the red dot, you fucking cretinous moron. If you think a "foe" designation on /. has any greater significance than that, I have to lower my opinion of you even more--if that were only possible.
Move along. Nothing to see there.
Consider this a rant and spleen venting. I really think the newsgroups were a lovely idea. I hope Wikipedia doesn't succumb to the same problems.
The solution is obvious. Get rid of the power. Find an alternative solution. And I happen to have one right here in my pocket:
Your email should live on *YOUR* hard drive. Google's software can do all the indexing and searching of your email right on your machine. It might well be within the current capabilities of the Google Desktop, but if not, only trivial changes required there.
But what about the children? Advertisers' children in this case. How will Google make money? Simple. Send the advertising keywords to YOUR machine, and then your computer will request the appropriate ads from the list. (Actually, not quite so simple because there are lots of ads, but think of it as though your computer is doing a background search against their database of current ads to find the most relevant ones.)
They can still offer the Web-based interface as an option, but it should not be the default because it creates an unneeded power that will (sooner or later (or already)) be abused--and even then it isn't needed. Google could hold the last few weeks' email on line, but then store it only on your machine.
Next wrinkle? Backup services where (for a small fee?) Google encrypts your email (on your machine) and stores the encrypted data for you on a Google server in case your machine croaks. Next? Migration services. Google will (for another small fee?) let you restore your backup files to a new machine and combine and reconcile all of your personal data. Etc.
I should send a copy to Google, eh?
Yeah, it's a little more bother now, but I consider it a long-term investment.
As far as security goes, even if the system really works, I can already see lots of problems. For example, false positives from people who have OTHER things to hide that have nothing to do with airplanes. Or even more seriously, false negatives from people who are using drugs or some trick to reduce their voice stress under the detection threshold. Even more serious than that, we have true negatives that are really false negatives, because the passenger is an innocent patsy that doesn't know about the bomb that was stuffed into the luggage.
True positives? Gosh, if only the terrorists were so conveniently stupid.
Right now I regard it as yet another example of BushCo projection--accusing others of your own flaws. Taking the most extreme example available, Dubya is a sincere moron, so he expects the terrorists to be the same way. Another flavor of stuff like accusing other people of trying to rewrite history while you try to rewrite history.
Next, let's start considering the problems if the system doesn't really work. That's probably more likely, actually.
Perhaps that is a false impression created by another one of your typical fuckups. Too bad. You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and you blew it out your ass.
What more do you want from a foe? Now where's the red dot?
Where's the red dot? Can't figure it out?
Congrats. I didn't read what you wrote beyond the first few words. All I want from you is that red dot. I don't want to waste *ANY* time on proudly ignorant morons. I'd do it myself, but there are constructive uses for "friend" designations, and unfortunately there is a limit on the total number of "friend" and "foe" settings.
Anyway, it's a totally worthless approach. The anti-spyware programmers could handle it in at least three ways.
I have only one request for such fools as yourself. Designate me as your foe for the convenience of ignoring you in the future. It's probably within your intellectual capacity to click on the little gray button and select the "foe" option, isn't it?
You're confusing censorship and prosecution with copyright. However, it obviously was risky to publish a book that would offend the religious authorities of those days.
I agree that it's a difficult problem. I tend to lean toward the notion of tracking usage and compensating for actual value received. Essentially a kickback on value derived. In the case of that kind of non-fiction it's actually easier, where the doctor would owe some compensation to the authors of the books he consulted based on a fraction of his own charges to patients.
It was supposed to say "CapsLock" key, but I forgot that angle brackets will be interpreted as a tag, and the unknown tag was ignored and disappeared.
Thank you for making my point so effectively: There was very little creative accomplishment. In those days the vast majority of the people were peasant farmers and had effectively zero access to any form of art. There were a few extremely rich patrons, and a small number of artists. It's very nice that a few masterpieces were created.
The notion of overloading the key in that way is terrible. It might be tolerable assigned to the key, if that's an option, though I'm still unattracted and plan no experiments.
Not sure why, but I had already started working with styles, so apparently that part was intuitive enough for me.
Finally, in a case of small world syndrome, one of my grandparents was from that country.
You are correct. I should have worded that as something like "an abuse of the underlying motivation of copyright for social benefit".
However, I think you are completely misrepresenting the costs of publishing when the original legislation was produced. You are talking about the marginal cost of the additional copies, and it is true that the low marginal costs made it possible to mass produce books in the first place. However the costs of setting up to do so were extremely substantial. Printing presses themselves were large and expensive, but you also needed paper and lots of ink, and a warehouse to store the paper before and after printing. Add in collating and binding, too. Altogether a more-than-minor enterprise, and the capital costs only declined gradually until about 40 years ago...
Perhaps you are trying to make a different argument that *TODAY* we don't need so much creativity, but society would survive well enough on the literary creativity of part-time authors who really want to write or compose music, etc., and who are willing to donate their creations to society. Perhaps so, especially if you consider that we've already created enough entertaining literature and pretty music to fill up entire lives with reading and listening. (And I would even agree that some of the worst writing is done by hacks who are just doing it for the bucks.)
If so, you are really presenting your case poorly, and I had to stretch to imagine you have that much coherence. I hope you program better than you write, because (putting on my editorial hat) if you were one of my authors, I'd weep.
Okay, let's make nicey-nice. Please mark me as your foe. My settings will then make you almost invisible and we can eagerly ignore each other forever.
You're getting off topic. However, I don't think you should regard this action as purely a distraction, but rather a "bid" for more campaign donations. In that sense it is relevant in that BushCo's version of "conservativism" simply means "compassion" for the people who have lots of money, and doing everything they can to help them keep as much as possible (so that they can conveniently and without stress afford to donate more to Dubya's campaigns). Of course the BIG problem there is that time waits for no man. Change is coming, and your actual choices are lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. Propping up dying copyright laws is just another form of getting in the way.
Do me a favor. Put me on your foe list so I won't see your crap in the future.