I use an older version of the word "Conservative" (when I was a pup, Conservatives knew what was good for us, and anything else was a Commie plot) so I (on one level) disagree with FyreGryffon, but he makes some very interesting connections, and his article is making me think. Which causes a certain degree of pain, but I have ibuprophin in my desk drawer, and if that doesn't solve it, there is good Russian vodka in my freezer.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
OK, the various Baby Bill employees chat, and technology gets transferred under the table. Hard to control.
But money is another story.
Under this split, the IE company would have to find it's own money, not get financed by raising the price of the OS - which is possible due to the monopoly.
The point of the whole IE situation, if you think back, was to shut down Netscape, which was threatening to make Windows less relevant by providing an alternate platform for applications.
So MS developed IE, but the software didn't gain enough market share. So they gave it away. Still not good enough. So they changed the OS (which, you may recall, you pretty much had to pay for unless you bought a Mac or built your own computer) so that you had to have IE. At which point, %50 percent market share was guaranteed even if nobody ever used the software. And most people prefer not to have two different software packages that do exactly the same thing.
This enabled Microsoft to raise the price of Windows.
So yes, I like this idea. It directly addresses the problem.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Universal Access, yes. But not this way.
on
Universal Access
·
· Score: 1
Universal access is a good thing, and the cost is not only low, but possibly negative when you consider the network effects.
But doing it through employers is just not a good thing. Look at health insurance: all these uninsured people, and since the money is two steps removed from the consumer (employer pays insurance which pays for services) the economics are completely warped. If the consumer were paying the bills, there would be price competition. But now the prices have been driven up (by exactly those warped economics) to a point where that is not a valid policy option. Worse yet - what happens when the employment relationship goes bad? I had a daughter born with a heart defect, and then my job went bad. She was, in a very real sense, held hostage. Fortunately, my employer was a more than decent person and he allowed me to switch professions without leaving the company.
That employer also set up an employee computer purchase plan, under which I bought a fairly nice (at the time) machine.
The employment relationship is already too tight, too intertwined. Adding the computer to it risks further entanglement that isn't healthy. Particularly since a computer is such a vital job-search tool. If the company owns the computer and your job falls apart, you may lose it just when you need it most.
But as long as the ownership issues are clear (in my own case, the computer I bought using a loan from my employer is clearly and definitely mine and not company property) a computer as an employee perk is a neat thing. Just take a good look at your contract before you write the Great American Novel on it.
Not Internet access, though. Having everybody link up through the company ISP is just asking for trouble. The free speech issues that occur as a natural consequence of the differences in interests between an employer and an employee and a customer and an ISP are bad enough without the employer being the ISP.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Yeah, all that stuff moderated to -2
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 1
when the lowest I can read at is -1.
Oh, wait - it doesn't work that way.
Moderation is reviewing - some people say "this is crap" - and then I, as a reader, can choose to pay attention to their opinion or not.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
The Sweat Sock Forum has concluded that the next world war will be over access to laundry-deficient athletic facilities.
And yet, every day, people all over the world thoughtlessly toss this vital resource into the nearest washing machine or (in developing countries) scrub it on rocks in streams.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
1) The ILOVEYOU was, in fact, malicious. It doesn't just spread, it also overwrites files, intentionaly. And then there is the bit that emails passwords back to the mother ship. Yeah, it could have been worse. But if I just break your legs, when I could have killed you, that doesn't make me a nice guy.
2) There are two seperate propagation exploits, although I haven't heard that the mIRC one was all that effective. But it was there.
I agree that the law enforcement approach is unlikely to end the problem, but it didn't cause the problem, either. And legalizing extortion is an interesting idea to consider, but only in order to realize just how much worse things could be without laws. Think about it more.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
to include a little sponsorship note in the "core dumped" message.
A little thank you to the good folks at MS, whose FrontPage98 installation routines introduced me to Linux by destroying my formerly adequate Windows98 system.
Maybe "core dumped. If this were Windows, you'd be seeing blue now. %0x %0x blablabla"
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
The customers don't care whether the system works or not.
What the customer gets is insurance. When there is a problem and the school system gets sued, the question "what did you do to prevent/solve the problem" has a concrete, quantifyable answer: "we gave Pinkerton $X." What Pinkerton did with the money doesn't matter. The school system has addressed the problem, and the problem no longer belongs to them.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
You'll notice that there are no medications to treat workaholism and "Overachievement Disorder," even if they compromise the ability to form and maintain healthy relationships.
A few years ago, the University of Chicago had a program to teach little kids how to be little kids after having been over-programmed.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
If the Star Wars universe is locked away by its owners, write stories and build movies in your own universe, or in one shared with other individuals.
In the long run, some artists will realize (as the Grateful Dead did) the value that derivative works add to the original, and those artists will thrive.
Hearing Disney describe one of their, admittedly rather nice, works as "beyond your imagination" opened my eyes to exactly how arrogant the corporate pop culture industry is. What do they know of my imagination? I think I can imagine beyond a sequel to Alladin.
Go to a movie now and then. But when you walk out that theater door, fly your imagination so far beyond what was on the screen that what you create isn't recognizable.
You can do better. And when you do, you will make the bastards irrelevant.
...let's forget you, better still" - The Who Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
It's been a while since I had time to play much, but the people I played with tended to simplify most of the rules as time went by, and concentrate on the more creative aspects. We even ended up moving away from interesting dice, using various numbers of D6 for just about everything random.
When the game is consists of someone building a world and several people role-playing in it with a relatively simple (OK, RISK combat without the 2/3 die limit. With enough dice, you can get any probability range you want.) dice system to handle combat and anything that needs to be random, how much is there to "open"? Our rules were dead simple, our worlds insanely elaborate (they often had economic systems involving the inflationary effects of all that gold being dumped into the market, and multiple pantheons including deities that may or may not exist) and our role-playing guided by the creativity of the players more than by rules and die rolls.
In short, virtualy all the value was provided by the players (including the game coordinator) and there just wasn't much marketable IP involved, unless a game coordinator wanted to try selling a world.
Situation wasn't great for me financialy, since I was trying to sell games, but is was fun.
If I were to try making a game for sale, I'd be real leery of taking WotC up on the "open" rules. That would put me in their arena, and they don't have a history of playing nice.
Open source software provides lots of benefit (tons of valuable code) and a culture and license that seems secure to me. D20 provides a set of rules that isn't particularly valuable to me, and means I have to trust a single company.
What happens if I invest a lot of time and money into a project and they decide they don't want to be open anymore? Since I declared my project to be D20, even if I retro-fit my own rule system and remove all reference to D20, they can still claim my project is a derivative work.
I think I'm better off staying out of their park altogether.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Fan sites and pirated music aren't the important part of the story. Those just leech off the corporate tofu-beast.
But when artists create their own culture, seriously good things can happen. And technology is helping.
Lately, I've seen more and more CDs produced by local artists. More and more performances without corporate sponsors. More house-concerts, more collaborative art projects.
That's where the action is. Not in fan sites. Not in DeCSS. In creation and self-expression.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
OK, the spinning is artistic license. Woody isn't spinning because a prolonged spin while doing a dramatic death scene just doesn't work in a movie.
But the way it took fuel use to keep moving isn't as wrong as it looks. This isn't space motion, this is orbital motion relative to other orbiting objects. As such, you aren't using fuel to move, you are using fuel to move from one orbit to another.
The complaint is, more or less, that Woody's wife should have been able to coast and catch up with him. That would work in space, but not in orbit. Woody was in an orbit a bit different from the rest of the group. And they didn't have enough fuel to match his orbit. You can't coast from one orbit to another - coasting is what an orbit is.
What was wrong was the psychology: all these "can-do" characters gave up way too soon. These guys are in the middle of doing all this "out of the box" thinking stuff, and the guy doesn't even attempt to throw some random piece of gear as a reaction mass or puncture his suit or anything.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
The DCMA seems to me to be restricting the use of corporate cultural stuff.
How does it restrict, say, my making mp3s of my own (as in "I wrote and performed it") music?
Let them keep their crap.
I haven't been to a movie in months, and it isn't because I'm boycoting them, it is because, on many, many evenings, I've had something I'd rather do.
I hardly watch television anymore - too busy doing my webs and sculpting and hanging out with people.
The DCMA, as far as I can tell, is the corporate type's way of regaining control of their own content. Which, by and large, is lame corporate content. Let them have it. Let's make our own, and control it as we see fit. I'm not proposing starting anything, I'm pointing out what's already happening. The open source movement is one place where we are already doing it. Open source isn't about making a version of Word that we don't have to pay Microsoft for, it is about new, better, more personal content, with heart. The homebrewers are doing it with beer, also because we can do it better, more personal, with heart, and cheap. There are lots of others. I'm doing it here - I'm providing your content instead of, oh, I don't know, the New York Times.
There is a split between the personal and the corporate. The split is getting wider every day. The DMCA widens that split, and that is OK with me.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Spoiler alert: The ending on the Human Genome project, philosophicaly, is going to be: genes set up lots of interesting potentials, some of them in fiendishly complicated interactions, that are, in every individual case, mostly going to be lost due to environment. We can do lots of stuff (and will be able to do more) that may or may not be a good idea.
What else is there? Oh, yeah - the 'net. We have the best system for communication in the history of the world. And maybe someday we will have something to say on it. Woohooo - we can put the Sears catalog (well, not the Sears catalog as such, they stopped doing that) on the Web. My email to some guy in France last night thanking him for a bit of software he threw into the public domain was more important than that, in the grand scheme. Cooperation between far-flung strangers is one of the highlights of our culture.
Space exploration is plodding along sort of OK. But I don't see anything big being done in the next decade or two.
The big dreams of our culture are to have fewer kids getting stoned and possibly lower rates of some diseases for a while until the organisms get resistant. Some people dream of politicians who aren't quite as corrupt as the ones we have now. Others dream that we might be able to be a little less mean to each other.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
How about regularly running the complete text of political speeches and debates?
Not what some analyst thinks it meant, not the sound bites, but the actual, entire text start to finish. I know some papers do that from time to time, but as a regular thing, that would be great.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Well, I'm guessing that a substantial number of people pick up Linux as a way of dealing with the frustration that comes from having to cope with Windows.
Windows is an extremely irritating bit of code, and in my case, anyway, I still have to deal with it at work. Hardly a day goes by without my having to deal with some unbeleivably stupid or downright malicious code surprise from our friends in Redmond.
So I do have a certain amount of frustration that could give rise to some stupid flammage. But I'm an adult, which means a certain degree of self-control. So I don't do it. And I don't excuse it. But I do understand it.
People who don't have a problem with Windows are less likely to use Linux - they just stick with what was on the machine when they got it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any points at the moment.
I use an older version of the word "Conservative" (when I was a pup, Conservatives knew what was good for us, and anything else was a Commie plot) so I (on one level) disagree with FyreGryffon, but he makes some very interesting connections, and his article is making me think. Which causes a certain degree of pain, but I have ibuprophin in my desk drawer, and if that doesn't solve it, there is good Russian vodka in my freezer.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
OK, the various Baby Bill employees chat, and technology gets transferred under the table. Hard to control.
But money is another story.
Under this split, the IE company would have to find it's own money, not get financed by raising the price of the OS - which is possible due to the monopoly.
The point of the whole IE situation, if you think back, was to shut down Netscape, which was threatening to make Windows less relevant by providing an alternate platform for applications.
So MS developed IE, but the software didn't gain enough market share. So they gave it away. Still not good enough. So they changed the OS (which, you may recall, you pretty much had to pay for unless you bought a Mac or built your own computer) so that you had to have IE. At which point, %50 percent market share was guaranteed even if nobody ever used the software. And most people prefer not to have two different software packages that do exactly the same thing.
This enabled Microsoft to raise the price of Windows.
So yes, I like this idea. It directly addresses the problem.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Universal access is a good thing, and the cost is not only low, but possibly negative when you consider the network effects.
But doing it through employers is just not a good thing. Look at health insurance: all these uninsured people, and since the money is two steps removed from the consumer (employer pays insurance which pays for services) the economics are completely warped. If the consumer were paying the bills, there would be price competition. But now the prices have been driven up (by exactly those warped economics) to a point where that is not a valid policy option. Worse yet - what happens when the employment relationship goes bad? I had a daughter born with a heart defect, and then my job went bad. She was, in a very real sense, held hostage. Fortunately, my employer was a more than decent person and he allowed me to switch professions without leaving the company.
That employer also set up an employee computer purchase plan, under which I bought a fairly nice (at the time) machine.
The employment relationship is already too tight, too intertwined. Adding the computer to it risks further entanglement that isn't healthy. Particularly since a computer is such a vital job-search tool. If the company owns the computer and your job falls apart, you may lose it just when you need it most.
But as long as the ownership issues are clear (in my own case, the computer I bought using a loan from my employer is clearly and definitely mine and not company property) a computer as an employee perk is a neat thing. Just take a good look at your contract before you write the Great American Novel on it.
Not Internet access, though. Having everybody link up through the company ISP is just asking for trouble. The free speech issues that occur as a natural consequence of the differences in interests between an employer and an employee and a customer and an ISP are bad enough without the employer being the ISP.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
when the lowest I can read at is -1.
Oh, wait - it doesn't work that way.
Moderation is reviewing - some people say "this is crap" - and then I, as a reader, can choose to pay attention to their opinion or not.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The behavior is configurable.
Tools->Options on the menu, then click the Security tab.
Sheesh.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The Sweat Sock Forum has concluded that the next world war will be over access to laundry-deficient athletic facilities.
And yet, every day, people all over the world thoughtlessly toss this vital resource into the nearest washing machine or (in developing countries) scrub it on rocks in streams.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
1) The ILOVEYOU was, in fact, malicious. It doesn't just spread, it also overwrites files, intentionaly. And then there is the bit that emails passwords back to the mother ship. Yeah, it could have been worse. But if I just break your legs, when I could have killed you, that doesn't make me a nice guy.
2) There are two seperate propagation exploits, although I haven't heard that the mIRC one was all that effective. But it was there.
I agree that the law enforcement approach is unlikely to end the problem, but it didn't cause the problem, either. And legalizing extortion is an interesting idea to consider, but only in order to realize just how much worse things could be without laws. Think about it more.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
to include a little sponsorship note in the "core dumped" message.
A little thank you to the good folks at MS, whose FrontPage98 installation routines introduced me to Linux by destroying my formerly adequate Windows98 system.
Maybe "core dumped. If this were Windows, you'd be seeing blue now. %0x %0x blablabla"
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I used to like Beer Run and Roach Motel.
Beer Run was a levels game, there the goal was to collect beers.
Roach Motel had this little hotel on the screen. Bugs would run out, and you would try to squish them with a big foot.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The customers don't care whether the system works or not.
What the customer gets is insurance. When there is a problem and the school system gets sued, the question "what did you do to prevent/solve the problem" has a concrete, quantifyable answer: "we gave Pinkerton $X." What Pinkerton did with the money doesn't matter. The school system has addressed the problem, and the problem no longer belongs to them.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
A few years ago, the University of Chicago had a program to teach little kids how to be little kids after having been over-programmed.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I had this great idea for a sequel that would explore the literature of Milton and Dante:
Where in Hell is Carmen Sandiego?
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
If the Star Wars universe is locked away by its owners, write stories and build movies in your own universe, or in one shared with other individuals.
In the long run, some artists will realize (as the Grateful Dead did) the value that derivative works add to the original, and those artists will thrive.
Hearing Disney describe one of their, admittedly rather nice, works as "beyond your imagination" opened my eyes to exactly how arrogant the corporate pop culture industry is. What do they know of my imagination? I think I can imagine beyond a sequel to Alladin.
Go to a movie now and then. But when you walk out that theater door, fly your imagination so far beyond what was on the screen that what you create isn't recognizable.
You can do better. And when you do, you will make the bastards irrelevant.
...let's forget you, better still" - The Who
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
It's been a while since I had time to play much, but the people I played with tended to simplify most of the rules as time went by, and concentrate on the more creative aspects. We even ended up moving away from interesting dice, using various numbers of D6 for just about everything random.
When the game is consists of someone building a world and several people role-playing in it with a relatively simple (OK, RISK combat without the 2/3 die limit. With enough dice, you can get any probability range you want.) dice system to handle combat and anything that needs to be random, how much is there to "open"? Our rules were dead simple, our worlds insanely elaborate (they often had economic systems involving the inflationary effects of all that gold being dumped into the market, and multiple pantheons including deities that may or may not exist) and our role-playing guided by the creativity of the players more than by rules and die rolls.
In short, virtualy all the value was provided by the players (including the game coordinator) and there just wasn't much marketable IP involved, unless a game coordinator wanted to try selling a world.
Situation wasn't great for me financialy, since I was trying to sell games, but is was fun.
If I were to try making a game for sale, I'd be real leery of taking WotC up on the "open" rules. That would put me in their arena, and they don't have a history of playing nice.
Open source software provides lots of benefit (tons of valuable code) and a culture and license that seems secure to me. D20 provides a set of rules that isn't particularly valuable to me, and means I have to trust a single company.
What happens if I invest a lot of time and money into a project and they decide they don't want to be open anymore? Since I declared my project to be D20, even if I retro-fit my own rule system and remove all reference to D20, they can still claim my project is a derivative work.
I think I'm better off staying out of their park altogether.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The lawyers get paid anyway.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Fan sites and pirated music aren't the important part of the story. Those just leech off the corporate tofu-beast.
But when artists create their own culture, seriously good things can happen. And technology is helping.
Lately, I've seen more and more CDs produced by local artists. More and more performances without corporate sponsors. More house-concerts, more collaborative art projects.
That's where the action is. Not in fan sites. Not in DeCSS. In creation and self-expression.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
OK, the spinning is artistic license. Woody isn't spinning because a prolonged spin while doing a dramatic death scene just doesn't work in a movie.
But the way it took fuel use to keep moving isn't as wrong as it looks. This isn't space motion, this is orbital motion relative to other orbiting objects. As such, you aren't using fuel to move, you are using fuel to move from one orbit to another.
The complaint is, more or less, that Woody's wife should have been able to coast and catch up with him. That would work in space, but not in orbit. Woody was in an orbit a bit different from the rest of the group. And they didn't have enough fuel to match his orbit. You can't coast from one orbit to another - coasting is what an orbit is.
What was wrong was the psychology: all these "can-do" characters gave up way too soon. These guys are in the middle of doing all this "out of the box" thinking stuff, and the guy doesn't even attempt to throw some random piece of gear as a reaction mass or puncture his suit or anything.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The DCMA seems to me to be restricting the use of corporate cultural stuff.
How does it restrict, say, my making mp3s of my own (as in "I wrote and performed it") music?
Let them keep their crap.
I haven't been to a movie in months, and it isn't because I'm boycoting them, it is because, on many, many evenings, I've had something I'd rather do.
I hardly watch television anymore - too busy doing my webs and sculpting and hanging out with people.
The DCMA, as far as I can tell, is the corporate type's way of regaining control of their own content. Which, by and large, is lame corporate content. Let them have it. Let's make our own, and control it as we see fit. I'm not proposing starting anything, I'm pointing out what's already happening. The open source movement is one place where we are already doing it. Open source isn't about making a version of Word that we don't have to pay Microsoft for, it is about new, better, more personal content, with heart. The homebrewers are doing it with beer, also because we can do it better, more personal, with heart, and cheap. There are lots of others. I'm doing it here - I'm providing your content instead of, oh, I don't know, the New York Times.
There is a split between the personal and the corporate. The split is getting wider every day. The DMCA widens that split, and that is OK with me.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
What are we doing interesting?
Spoiler alert:
The ending on the Human Genome project, philosophicaly, is going to be: genes set up lots of interesting potentials, some of them in fiendishly complicated interactions, that are, in every individual case, mostly going to be lost due to environment. We can do lots of stuff (and will be able to do more) that may or may not be a good idea.
What else is there?
Oh, yeah - the 'net. We have the best system for communication in the history of the world. And maybe someday we will have something to say on it. Woohooo - we can put the Sears catalog (well, not the Sears catalog as such, they stopped doing that) on the Web. My email to some guy in France last night thanking him for a bit of software he threw into the public domain was more important than that, in the grand scheme. Cooperation between far-flung strangers is one of the highlights of our culture.
Space exploration is plodding along sort of OK. But I don't see anything big being done in the next decade or two.
The big dreams of our culture are to have fewer kids getting stoned and possibly lower rates of some diseases for a while until the organisms get resistant. Some people dream of politicians who aren't quite as corrupt as the ones we have now. Others dream that we might be able to be a little less mean to each other.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Must I refer you pups to Holy Scripture?
Consult the Book of Kernighan and Richie, verse 2.5, wherein it is written:
if (year % 4 ==0 && year % 100 != 0 || year % 400 == 0)
it's a leap year
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
that pirates steal,
and should be feared and hated.
I say we're victims of bad press,
it's all exaggerated...
Dr. Frank N. Furter as Long John Silver in the Muppet Treasure Island.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Indeed!
I'd prefer a completely robotic robot, like the Lost in Space one.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
How about regularly running the complete text of political speeches and debates?
Not what some analyst thinks it meant, not the sound bites, but the actual, entire text start to finish. I know some papers do that from time to time, but as a regular thing, that would be great.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Not if the movie ends up anything like the comic strip.
How the comic strip based on a cartoon based on the inspired "Life in Hell" strip can suck so bad is beyond me.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Well, I'm guessing that a substantial number of people pick up Linux as a way of dealing with the frustration that comes from having to cope with Windows.
Windows is an extremely irritating bit of code, and in my case, anyway, I still have to deal with it at work. Hardly a day goes by without my having to deal with some unbeleivably stupid or downright malicious code surprise from our friends in Redmond.
So I do have a certain amount of frustration that could give rise to some stupid flammage. But I'm an adult, which means a certain degree of self-control. So I don't do it. And I don't excuse it. But I do understand it.
People who don't have a problem with Windows are less likely to use Linux - they just stick with what was on the machine when they got it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad