To what extent do the political appointees in the DOJ (Ashcroft et al) affect the enforcement of anti-piracy laws? Is IP enforcement any different under the current Administration that it was under the previous?
I'm asking this because I assume that most rank and file DOJ attorneys are career and not political appointees.
They're planning a similary program here in the Twin Cities, and they are discussing some kind of electronic system, such as EZ Pass systems on toll roads that will verify that you belong in the HOV lane.
I work with Data Aquisition and Control Systems in the aerospace industry. In my experience most systems - especially complicated systems - have flaws despite the best efforts of the people developing them. I imagine that most technical Slashdot readers understand this too.
This makes me think about the reliability of recorded data as evidence in court cases. Granted, all evidence is questionable. Some is very questionable, such as eyewitness accounts. Some evidence has an explicit and reasonably well defined probability attached to it, such as DNA evidence. Even if we can assure ourselves that these onboard data aquisition records are valid, there is still the posibility that they're erroneous.
With all that in mind, I think that evidence such as this should be considered in court alongside its reliability.
And to add to the failing frenzy, AOL has two failing stars to host the AOL 8.0 Release Party:
"...AOL 8.0's launch -- it will be unveiled at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, at a "star-studded" bash hosted by Dana Carvey and featuring Alanis Morissette..."
Maybe they could use Glitter as the official movie of AOL 8.0.
The article proposes that "one cooperative project that I think really would be a good idea would be to accumulate a giant corpus of spam."
This brings to mind a huge, quivering, pink mass of luncheon meat sitting on the Midwestern prairie just down the road from the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
Thanks for pointing this out. All the posters who are blaming the FCC are missing the point. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals is to blame for this.
In 1999, This court vacated the FCC's previous opt-in only policy in this ruling. This means that the FCC used to have an opt-in only policy but the court forced the FCC to change it in favor of commercial interests.
I confess that my first reaction was to get pissed at the FCC, but it ain't that simple.
A couple of interesting facts about the 10th circuit appeals case:
Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard Professor of Bush v. Gore 2000 election fame, was the lead attorney for the Telecoms against the FCC.
The Supreme Court failed to grant this case cert., meaning that they refused to consider the appeal to this ruling. It'll be interesting to see what happens if this new FCC ruling gets challenged in court and then whether the Supreme Court will take on the CPNI privacy issue then. That's when the final interpretation will be determined.
In the meantime, I too encourage everyone who wants the opt-in policy back to contact your Senators and Representatives.
That's pretty funny. It's also pretty funny that most of us paying homage to Office Space are doing so from a cubicle somewhere in corporate IT land.
It reminds me of a theory put forward by Tom Tomorrow about Dilbert.
In this op-ed piece, he suggests
"that fellow cartoonist Scott Adams might actually be "providing a valuable service for all those idiotic bosses" he parodies in his syndicated strip, Dilbert -- "by giving their employees a safety valve that's just edgy enough to ring true, without inspiring anyone to actually question the fundamental assumptions of corporate America."
It's a compelling idea that could apply to Office Space just as well.
I'm afraid you are missing the point of the post you replied to.
Like you, the parent-poster was saying that the cable ISP's do not operate in a free market. ("Most homes can only get cable/cable-modem service from one provider, or local telephone service from one provider")
I think the poster's point was that, because these ISP's are effectively monopolies, it is disingenuous to invoke free-market arguments and tell their customers to get smart and find an ISP they like.
The resolution, as I'm sure you'd agree, is to admit that you can't have it both ways. If it's going to be a free market, then bust up monopolies and give the consumer true choice. If it's going to be a monopoly, then regulate the market, and, yes, as you say, "Pass a law that says they have to be nice". That's what regulation is.
Anyway, please read a little more carefully. You're both sort of saying the same thing.
In that case, there's only one solution. We'll have to do away with users.
Or maybe, just maybe, this could be a case for genetic engineering. Scientists can identify the dumb password gene, DPW12, and replace it with something from a banana that will somehow make future users pick good passwords.
John Katz's experience reminds me of being in Las Vegas. The casinos are easy as pie to get into but once inside the exits are hard to find. Some of the casino's have nice speedy moving walkways that whisk you right in with ones leading out that always "happen" to be broken.
His experience also calls to mind a recent trip to Best Buy to buy a PS2. The sales folks were downright agressive. First, the floor sales guy tried to convince me that I the Sony DVD remote was required to play DVDs on the PS2, which I understand to be a downright lie. He also agressively tried to sell expensive games. Then, when I was at the register, checking out, the cashier pushily tried to get me to buy one of those "extended service contracts". He wouldn't give up, asking me multiple times and telling me horror stories about friends spending 100's of dollars getting their PS2s fixed. Then, he too demanded a reason why I wouldn't purchase the contract. I told him "because I think it's a bad deal", but we really shouldn't have to justify ourselves in this manner.
Obviously these companies are training their employees to be so agressive.
The annoying thing about the Best Buy experience is that, in contrast to quiting a ISP, I was in the process of spending money. I was already a paying customer. Best Buy (via their trained "sales associates") was simply trying to squeeze a little more moolah out of me.
What these companies need to understand is that the kind of hyper-agressive salesmanship may get them marginal short-term increases in profits due to increased sales but is going to cost them when people like me get annoyed and stop shopping there.
Spintronics could mean the end of booting your computer. From the article:
More sophisticated storage technologies based on spintronics are already at an advanced stage: in the next few years, MRAM (magnetic random-access memory), a new type of computer memory, will go on the market. MRAMs would retain their state even when the power was turned off, but unlike present forms of nonvolatile memory, they would have switching rates and rewritability challenging those of conventional RAM.
Think about what this means! You will be able to turn off your MRAM computer and when you turn it back on, you won't have to boot it. The computer (its memory) would be in the state in which you left it. Think of how nice that'll be!
Of course, when Windows crashed everyday, you'd still have to boot it.
In the US "Microsoft Schools Agreement 3.0," for example, "100 per cent of all Pentiums, Power Macs, iMacs or better" are specified, whereas the FAQ document for the UK Microsoft School Agreement says "You need to count 100% of all Pentiums, Power Macs and iMacs."
This from the referenced NASA writeup on the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter:
"The 'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of... software" said Arthur Stephenson, chairman of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board.
That's not the root cause! The real root cause is that we in the US insist on using the obsolete, difficult to use, and non-standard English system. The failure to convert units was a manifestation of this true "root cause".
At first when I read this story, I (predictably) got all worked up and went to their site to mouth off on their forums. Then it struck me. If Radlight had never put an AdAware killing "feature" in their crappy app, nobody would have ever heard of it.
Now, everybody on/. has heard of it and I'd guess that a lot of them have visited radlight.net, like I did. Within the space of a couple of hours, tens of thousands of computer users heard of the RadLight who never would have otherwise.
Instant, free, (albeit bad) publicity. And, as the PR folks say, no PR is bad PR. In any case, lots of bad PR must be better than absolutely no name-recognition.
On the other hand, having read some of these guys comments on their forums, I think that maybe they're not clever enough to have thought of this...
Linux has failed to make significant inroads in the home-user market for all the reasons listed in the article and one more: Windows is still affordably priced (especially if you skip every other upgrade). True, Linux is free, but Microsoft is still cheap.
Wait until M$ switches to some kind of expensive, burdensome subscription pricing scheme, and then we will see Linux take off.
Without significant price pressure however, there is no reason for joe schmoe home user to switch from M$.
Wow, nothing captures the grandeur and rich detail of a 1000+ page epic like 128 colors, 160x200 resolution rendered by a graphics chip running at 1.19 MHz. The screenshots transport me back to 1986 when I first read the book.
Re:The Lexus and the Olive Tree
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
I actually checked out that book from the library and started to read it but didn't get past the first sentence, which is (I shit you not), "What was it that Forrest Gump's mama liked to say? Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get inside." I'm sorry, but I refuse to finish the rest of a book, no matter how good, that begins with a quote from "Forrest Gump's mama".
Anyway, that's beside the point. Friedman has also written many columns on this subject in the NY Times, and in one, he made the point that globalization is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It will be good or bad depending on how we manage or steer it.
I think that is a good point, which leads to a couple of questions: How have we managed globalisation so far? And in what direction will we steer it in the future? And of course, who is "we" in the previous two questions? The UN? A handful of multinationals?
I'm not going to answer those questions, except to say that it is obvious that globalisation could be managed much better than it has been and is being managed. And, I hope that "we" can steer it in towards a better course in the future.
"... in order to assure its long-term growth, it is moving into new markets,
mainly digital entertainment, enterprise software and web services."
Oct 20th 2031 | SAN FRANCISCO
... in order to assure its long-term growth, Microsoft is moving into new markets,
mainly organic goat cheese production, adult entertainment and dry cleaning franchises.
I usually don't support Micro$oft but I'd rather there was some competition to AOL's increasingly massive control of how, where and when most people access the 'net and what they see
You seem to be advocating a lesser or two evils solution by saying that it would be better for one corporation to dominate the net instead of one other slightly more offensive corporation.
I would propose instead that what we should all be advocating is that no single entity dominate the internet in any way (whether in the U.S. or worldwide.)
A speaker driver is mounted in a flat, rigid board bonded to a large bladder. When the bladder is inflated, it expands to form a box shape resembling a speaker cabinet.
I'd like to see the first time someone tries to dramatically smash their guitar against the speakers at the end of a set.
Slashdot Mirror
To what extent do the political appointees in the DOJ (Ashcroft et al) affect the enforcement of anti-piracy laws? Is IP enforcement any different under the current Administration that it was under the previous?
I'm asking this because I assume that most rank and file DOJ attorneys are career and not political appointees.
They're planning a similary program here in the Twin Cities, and they are discussing some kind of electronic system, such as EZ Pass systems on toll roads that will verify that you belong in the HOV lane.
I work with Data Aquisition and Control Systems in the aerospace industry. In my experience most systems - especially complicated systems - have flaws despite the best efforts of the people developing them. I imagine that most technical Slashdot readers understand this too.
This makes me think about the reliability of recorded data as evidence in court cases. Granted, all evidence is questionable. Some is very questionable, such as eyewitness accounts. Some evidence has an explicit and reasonably well defined probability attached to it, such as DNA evidence. Even if we can assure ourselves that these onboard data aquisition records are valid, there is still the posibility that they're erroneous.
With all that in mind, I think that evidence such as this should be considered in court alongside its reliability.
And to add to the failing frenzy, AOL has two failing stars to host the AOL 8.0 Release Party:
"...AOL 8.0's launch -- it will be unveiled at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, at a "star-studded" bash hosted by Dana Carvey and featuring Alanis Morissette..."
Maybe they could use Glitter as the official movie of AOL 8.0.
Excuse me, but don't you mean enough pierile humor?
The article proposes that "one cooperative project that I think really would be a good idea would be to accumulate a giant corpus of spam."
This brings to mind a huge, quivering, pink mass of luncheon meat sitting on the Midwestern prairie just down the road from the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
In 1999, This court vacated the FCC's previous opt-in only policy in this ruling. This means that the FCC used to have an opt-in only policy but the court forced the FCC to change it in favor of commercial interests.
I confess that my first reaction was to get pissed at the FCC, but it ain't that simple.
A couple of interesting facts about the 10th circuit appeals case:
Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard Professor of Bush v. Gore 2000 election fame, was the lead attorney for the Telecoms against the FCC.
The Supreme Court failed to grant this case cert., meaning that they refused to consider the appeal to this ruling. It'll be interesting to see what happens if this new FCC ruling gets challenged in court and then whether the Supreme Court will take on the CPNI privacy issue then. That's when the final interpretation will be determined.
In the meantime, I too encourage everyone who wants the opt-in policy back to contact your Senators and Representatives.
Tom Tomorrow does over rely on conspiracy theories and hyperbole, which is why overblown caricatures are his style.
That's pretty funny. It's also pretty funny that most of us paying homage to Office Space are doing so from a cubicle somewhere in corporate IT land.
It reminds me of a theory put forward by Tom Tomorrow about Dilbert.
In this op-ed piece, he suggests "that fellow cartoonist Scott Adams might actually be "providing a valuable service for all those idiotic bosses" he parodies in his syndicated strip, Dilbert -- "by giving their employees a safety valve that's just edgy enough to ring true, without inspiring anyone to actually question the fundamental assumptions of corporate America."
It's a compelling idea that could apply to Office Space just as well.
LawMeme also has a Letterman-style "Top Ten New Copyright Crimes".
One of those things that's half funny, half scary because of its ring of truth.
I'm afraid you are missing the point of the post you replied to.
Like you, the parent-poster was saying that the cable ISP's do not operate in a free market. ("Most homes can only get cable/cable-modem service from one provider, or local telephone service from one provider")
I think the poster's point was that, because these ISP's are effectively monopolies, it is disingenuous to invoke free-market arguments and tell their customers to get smart and find an ISP they like.
The resolution, as I'm sure you'd agree, is to admit that you can't have it both ways. If it's going to be a free market, then bust up monopolies and give the consumer true choice. If it's going to be a monopoly, then regulate the market, and, yes, as you say, "Pass a law that says they have to be nice". That's what regulation is.
Anyway, please read a little more carefully. You're both sort of saying the same thing.
In that case, there's only one solution. We'll have to do away with users.
Or maybe, just maybe, this could be a case for genetic engineering. Scientists can identify the dumb password gene, DPW12, and replace it with something from a banana that will somehow make future users pick good passwords.
begin off-topic dead horse beating
You are correct.
However, "it's" really should mean either it is or the thing that it owns.
"It's" as a contraction for "it is" is obviously correct.
But so is "it's" as an "apostrophe-s" possesive. Compare:
Cmdr Taco has a Ferrari. Cdmr Taco's car sure is fast!
That computer has a 750 Gig hard drive. It's hard drive sure is big!
In fact, this possesive form was correct until the 19th century. Check out this link for an interesting history of the usage.
end off-topic dead horse beating>
John Katz's experience reminds me of being in Las Vegas. The casinos are easy as pie to get into but once inside the exits are hard to find. Some of the casino's have nice speedy moving walkways that whisk you right in with ones leading out that always "happen" to be broken.
His experience also calls to mind a recent trip to Best Buy to buy a PS2. The sales folks were downright agressive. First, the floor sales guy tried to convince me that I the Sony DVD remote was required to play DVDs on the PS2, which I understand to be a downright lie. He also agressively tried to sell expensive games. Then, when I was at the register, checking out, the cashier pushily tried to get me to buy one of those "extended service contracts". He wouldn't give up, asking me multiple times and telling me horror stories about friends spending 100's of dollars getting their PS2s fixed. Then, he too demanded a reason why I wouldn't purchase the contract. I told him "because I think it's a bad deal", but we really shouldn't have to justify ourselves in this manner.
Obviously these companies are training their employees to be so agressive.
The annoying thing about the Best Buy experience is that, in contrast to quiting a ISP, I was in the process of spending money. I was already a paying customer. Best Buy (via their trained "sales associates") was simply trying to squeeze a little more moolah out of me.
What these companies need to understand is that the kind of hyper-agressive salesmanship may get them marginal short-term increases in profits due to increased sales but is going to cost them when people like me get annoyed and stop shopping there.
Spintronics could mean the end of booting your computer. From the article:
More sophisticated storage technologies based on spintronics are already at an advanced stage: in the next few years, MRAM (magnetic random-access memory), a new type of computer memory, will go on the market. MRAMs would retain their state even when the power was turned off, but unlike present forms of nonvolatile memory, they would have switching rates and rewritability challenging those of conventional RAM.
Think about what this means! You will be able to turn off your MRAM computer and when you turn it back on, you won't have to boot it. The computer (its memory) would be in the state in which you left it. Think of how nice that'll be!
Of course, when Windows crashed everyday, you'd still have to boot it.
In the US "Microsoft Schools Agreement 3.0," for example, "100 per cent of all Pentiums, Power Macs, iMacs or better" are specified, whereas the FAQ document for the UK Microsoft School Agreement says "You need to count 100% of all Pentiums, Power Macs and iMacs."
So AMD's are OK? Phew!
This from the referenced NASA writeup on the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter:
"The 'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ... software" said Arthur Stephenson, chairman of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board.
That's not the root cause! The real root cause is that we in the US insist on using the obsolete, difficult to use, and non-standard English system. The failure to convert units was a manifestation of this true "root cause".
At first when I read this story, I (predictably) got all worked up and went to their site to mouth off on their forums. Then it struck me. If Radlight had never put an AdAware killing "feature" in their crappy app, nobody would have ever heard of it.
Now, everybody on
Instant, free, (albeit bad) publicity. And, as the PR folks say, no PR is bad PR. In any case, lots of bad PR must be better than absolutely no name-recognition.
On the other hand, having read some of these guys comments on their forums, I think that maybe they're not clever enough to have thought of this...
Linux has failed to make significant inroads in the home-user market for all the reasons listed in the article and one more: Windows is still affordably priced (especially if you skip every other upgrade). True, Linux is free, but Microsoft is still cheap.
Wait until M$ switches to some kind of expensive, burdensome subscription pricing scheme, and then we will see Linux take off.
Without significant price pressure however, there is no reason for joe schmoe home user to switch from M$.
Wow, nothing captures the grandeur and rich detail of a 1000+ page epic like 128 colors, 160x200 resolution rendered by a graphics chip running at 1.19 MHz. The screenshots transport me back to 1986 when I first read the book.
I actually checked out that book from the library and started to read it but didn't get past the first sentence, which is (I shit you not), "What was it that Forrest Gump's mama liked to say? Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get inside." I'm sorry, but I refuse to finish the rest of a book, no matter how good, that begins with a quote from "Forrest Gump's mama".
Anyway, that's beside the point. Friedman has also written many columns on this subject in the NY Times, and in one, he made the point that globalization is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It will be good or bad depending on how we manage or steer it.
I think that is a good point, which leads to a couple of questions: How have we managed globalisation so far? And in what direction will we steer it in the future? And of course, who is "we" in the previous two questions? The UN? A handful of multinationals?
I'm not going to answer those questions, except to say that it is obvious that globalisation could be managed much better than it has been and is being managed. And, I hope that "we" can steer it in towards a better course in the future.
"... in order to assure its long-term growth, it is moving into new markets, mainly digital entertainment, enterprise software and web services."
Oct 20th 2031 | SAN FRANCISCO
I usually don't support Micro$oft but I'd rather there was some competition to AOL's increasingly massive control of how, where and when most people access the 'net and what they see
You seem to be advocating a lesser or two evils solution by saying that it would be better for one corporation to dominate the net instead of one other slightly more offensive corporation.
I would propose instead that what we should all be advocating is that no single entity dominate the internet in any way (whether in the U.S. or worldwide.)
This also from that page:
"Fortunately for consumers, CD-Rs are easy to spot. They are typically gold on one side with a greenish tint on the non-graphic or "read-only" side."
They are also easy to spot because you paid $1.50 for the disc and you bought it at a street market in Shanghai.
A speaker driver is mounted in a flat, rigid board bonded to a large bladder. When the bladder is inflated, it expands to form a box shape resembling a speaker cabinet.
I'd like to see the first time someone tries to dramatically smash their guitar against the speakers at the end of a set.