Code is speech, right? Don't I have a first ammendment right to distribute it to whomever I want? I don't think it's wise for the government to make (more) laws on what kinds of software can and can not be exported.
On the other hand, I'd like to see some Congressmen condemning Microsoft's executives as treasonous scum, and a call on real Americans to use Open Source alternatives.
Wow you're just like Jack Horkheimer from PBS' show Stargazer. In case no one has ever turned on PBS at midnight before, here is his show for this week:
Horkheimer: Greetings greetings, fellow star gazers. And if you want to begin December a very special way then mark December 1st as the day you absolutely must go outside before sunrise to see an exquisite cosmic triangle performed courtesy of the three closest celestial bodies. Let me show you. O.K., if we could go out into space and take a closer look at our three closest cosmic neighbors, do you know what they'd be? Well I'm sure all of you have guessed the first one. Our closest neighbor is the Moon. Which on average is about 250,000 miles away. And although it's the smallest of our closest neighbors, only 2,000 miles wide, it looks bigger because it's the closest. Our next closest neighbor Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky and on December 1st it will be 35 million miles away. And with a diameter of 8,000 miles it is 4 times as wide as the Moon and is almost the same size as our planet Earth which has earned it the title "twin sister" planet, although there the similarity ends. The farthest and least bright of our 3 closest neighbors is twice the size of our Moon but only 1/2 as wide as Venus, 4,000 mile wide Mars which on December 1st will be 212 million miles away. And although rather dim at the present it will become one of the brightest objects in the sky next August when it will be as close to us as Venus is now. And just coincidentally these three will form an exquisite visual triangle which the Old Farmer's Almanac describes as "awesome", this Sunday morning just before sunrise. Let's get a preview!
O.K., we've got our skies set up for this Friday just before dawn facing east where you will see an exquisite 24 day old crescent Moon hovering above Mars and Venus and the brightest star of Virgo, Spica. But if you go out Saturday at exactly the same time, that same Moon will be 25 days old and even skinnier and even closer visually to our other two cosmic neighbors. But the big event is, ta da!, Sunday December 1st when just before dawn you will see a 26 day old absolutely exquisite crescent Moon complete with earthshine which will look like a dark full Moon nestled inside the Moon's bright crescent, parked right alongside Venus and Mars in a near perfect triangle only 2 degrees on each side.
Now in order to give you some idea of the relative distances of these objects on December 1st remember that light travels 186,000 miles per second, which means that when you look at the Moon which will be 225,000 miles away on December 1st you will see it not as it exists right now but as it existed 1 1/4 seconds ago. When you look at Venus, which will be 35 1/2 million miles away on December 1st you will be seeing it not as it exists now but as it existed 3 minutes, and Mars which this Sunday will be 212 million miles away you will see as it exists not right now but as it existed 19 minutes ago. Wow! Think of it, an exquisite cosmic triangle of our 3 closest cosmic neighbors, all apparently in a tight triangle, but all at such incredible distances both from us and each other that we see each one as it existed some time ago in the recent past. Wow! I can hardly wait. Happy December 1st and Keep Looking Up!
Um, when a media company loses readers or consumers of that media, that company will lose money, not to mention relevance, and power.
Relevance and power, yes. Money? When those readers aren't paying anything? Look at Salon.com. They've lost millions and are still losing money. Internet advertising doesn't make a great deal of money. So, like I said, it is small amounts of money either way. There won't be many new AOL subscriptions. And they aren't making much money out things as it is.
It doesn't matter whether or not they lose readers. It matters whether or not they make more money. Will the cash earned by drawing more customers to AOL outweigh the cash lost through advertising?
The sad thing is that they aren't talking about a lot of money either way.
I told them that the merger was a stupid idea for Time-Warner. Anyone who actually thought it through knew the same. Time-Warner traded a profitable business for monopoly money.
It's good to hear that the RIAA is harassing our armed forces right before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq. The RIAA should throw the book at these young men and women who will soon be putting their lives at risk for the sake of their country.
Just because you are putting your life on the line for the sake of our freedoms, doesn't mean you have the right to listen to illict tunes!
Keep this up RIAA! I hope you make sure to get lots of media coverage with this campaign.
You misread the thrust of that statement. You simply restated the author's argument but quibbled with the nouns he used. I hardly think that was helpful to the discussion.
When the author said that Congress passed the Bono act because Congress viewed the issue as a property rights issue, he meant that Congress was ignoring the benefit to the public. Congress was in effect stating that the benefit to the public was what was incidental and that the mechanism of copyright existed to protect the property rights of authors.
The Weekly Standard has also had a number of editorials on copyright--a writer has even come out in favor of mp3 sharing! This issue is finally coming up on the radar. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across the NR article this morning. I think some political thinkers are slowly starting to realize that this is a very important issue to a number of young adult professionals, and deserves a lot more attention than it is currently getting.
You seem to have ignored your original statement about file trading in your response. Unsolicited (or solicited) commerical speech has fewer protections than normal speech. That's a matter of law and common sense.
Just because there are few cases where it is hard to distinguish betwee unsolicited commercial advertisement and between communication between two consenting adults, does not mean that there is no difference at all. That's simply dumb. I wasn't joking when I wrote that stuff about your ego. Courts have found it rather easy to distinguish what is and what is not commercial speech for years. Your argument is akin to saying 'sometimes it's hard to whether someone is sane or insane, so there is no difference at all between insane people and sane people.'
And the whole commons side-issue you bring up is as silly as it is a desperate attempt to change the subject. If the state can only regulate 'the commons' why can they make laws against junk faxes? Again, it's because the laws regulating commercial speech are different than the laws regulating normal (1st ammendment protected) speech.
I am dissapointed that you ignored the personal attacks. I included them in order to make you less of a snobbish idiot. Not that I had much hope.
Good god, one of those sarcastic bastards who loves mentally masturbating about his superiority over the rest of the human race. You're a hundred years too early, punk.
Let me put this very simply. I know it won't get past your ego, but I'll try anyway: Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
Communication between adults therefore has certain safeguards of privacy and freedom--things fundamentally incompatible with a scheme that blocks file trading. Unsolicited advertisement does not have the same legal protections, nor has anyone (except you) ever claimed that it should. Moreover, unsolicited advertisement in the form of spam or telemarketing calls or junk faxes is generally not a thing that has been consented to by the recieving party.
Ever been in Japan? Ever heard the vans with loud-speakers that go around town campaigning for a certain candidate? Notice how a politician in the U.S. would go to jail if he tried it. Hint: It's not censorship...
The main problem raised with filters isn't that they filter too little. It's that they filter too much. Internet whitelisting does not improve that at all. It only amplifies the problem.
kids.us is a humungous, unwieldy, unworkable, whitelist. (But at least it's.us, gotta keep them foreigners from corrupting our youth.)
This information is only as good as the time period we've been collecting it for. Meteor frequency is quite variable, therefore one decade's (or less) observation may not be of much value.
I got Windows XP running fine on my 200Mhz Pentium Pro. Actually the Pentium Pro is better than the Pentium II for XP, I recall seeing an analysis of it on the internet some place. You can google.
The New York Times article is kind of silly. If we ever need to move a large chunk of rock out of the way is a (relatively) short time, there is only one way to do it with current or near-future technology: Project Orion style nuclear explosions.
You park your space ship against the rock, and set off small nuclear explosions against a plate mounted on the other side. The explosions are as small as you want, so the acceleration is as small as you want (to keep the rock from breaking up), but you can hold enough fuel (nuclear bombs) to make it last for quite some time.
The methods suggested in the article might work if far longer time frames are available (millenia). But this is the best bet if you have to move it out of the way a little quicker than that.
First rule of benchmarking-->In order to benchmark two different systems, you must run exactly the same software.
Without this ability, comparison is impossible. Most of the things that human brains do so well, we can't make computers do at any speed. That suggests that the hardware differential is currently unknown. First, we need software that can imitate the human brain, and then we can make the analysis.
The liquor store clerk is doing what an elected legislature requires him to do by law. Microsoft is not a body that we have elected to make our laws. And as you say, that is exactly how they are acting...
Ha ha ha. I'm sorry, but that is funny. After taking something they didn't legally own (your GPL'd software), they gave away something that they didn't own in settlement.
If it turns out that they didn't have copyright to all the code that they promissed to GPL, that settlement is invalid. You have a great case for taking them back to court.
And if other authors do own copyright on some of that code, you don't have the right to distribute it. Simple as that.
Several--there was that nut a few years back who massacred all those Palestinians praying.
But the reason Isreal doesn't have suicide bombers is because they have a GNP 10000 times larger than the Palestinians. They've got bombs. Recall that operation recently where they blew up an apartment complex to get one guy? That isn't because the majority of Isrealis support things like that, but because in any conflict there will be crazies. You could be sure that if the situations were reversed (hell, if you put any two groups of people in the world in that situation) suicide bombings would be used by the weaker side. Hell, just look at all those nutty settlers. They are camping out in Hebron now (with Sharon's voiced approval).
The fact is that the Palestinians have a reason for grief, after being driven out (or leaving voluntarily, depending on the historian) during the war of Isreali independance. And after that, having their land occupied (after a war Isreal had with someone else) since the '67 war.
Anytime you have something like that, you can depend on people not simply giving up. You can depend on them using whatever means are at their disposal to fight. And on the Israeli side, Isreal was founded by Jews running from European persecution--and later the holocaust--and now it is populated mostly by people who have been living there their entire lives, and have no other home.
You could have predicted all this from the first kibbutz built in British Palestine. Or maybe since the first Jew burned by the Inquisiton. There is overwhelming blame to go around, but it will never be enough. The responsibility of leaders on all sides is to build a peace however they can.
Actually, it was quite a good article. It was funny, and it also hit on some of the main problems with the Harry Potter books.
Like the Shakespearean critic (amoung other things) Harold Bloom says, Harry Potter is a set of Disney movies in book form (and now movies again). I read them, and was consistantly dissapointed by the triumph of carictature over character. Harry's normal family is "bad," so they are fat and mean and ugly. Harry Potter is "good" so he is strong and handsome and famous. There is never any progress beyond the superficial. There is never more than a hint of actual moral struggle. The magical world that Rowling sets up is less interesting, less complicated, and more chintzy, than the real world. Sure, Harry Potter can fly on a broomstick, but can he hold an involving conversation with one of the other cardboard cut-out characters?
Am I being unfair to a set of "children's books?" Not at all. In fact, I think great children's literature is at once harder to write and more valuable than any other type of literature. But Harry Potter does not fall into the category of great children's literature. Harry Potter can be entertaining at times, but it doesn't leave you with the feeling that you have read something that might affect you, that might make you into a different person.
I think the superficiality of the slashdot crowd is apparent with the Harry Potter phenomenon. There a million slashdot readers that are all slobering to be the first to prove their Alpha Geekness by insulting N'Sync or Brittany Spears when the chance comes up. But when it comes time to prove that they have some taste that goes beyond the shit the Hollywood media culture is feeding them, they lap it all up like everyone else.
I've re-read my post. It has all the elements of a troll. But I agree with every word, so it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
Code is speech, right? Don't I have a first ammendment right to distribute it to whomever I want? I don't think it's wise for the government to make (more) laws on what kinds of software can and can not be exported.
On the other hand, I'd like to see some Congressmen condemning Microsoft's executives as treasonous scum, and a call on real Americans to use Open Source alternatives.
Wow you're just like Jack Horkheimer from PBS' show Stargazer. In case no one has ever turned on PBS at midnight before, here is his show for this week:
Horkheimer: Greetings greetings, fellow star gazers. And if you want to begin December a very special way then mark December 1st as the day you absolutely must go outside before sunrise to see an exquisite cosmic triangle performed courtesy of the three closest celestial bodies. Let me show you. O.K., if we could go out into space and take a closer look at our three closest cosmic neighbors, do you know what they'd be? Well I'm sure all of you have guessed the first one. Our closest neighbor is the Moon. Which on average is about 250,000 miles away. And although it's the smallest of our closest neighbors, only 2,000 miles wide, it looks bigger because it's the closest. Our next closest neighbor Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky and on December 1st it will be 35 million miles away. And with a diameter of 8,000 miles it is 4 times as wide as the Moon and is almost the same size as our planet Earth which has earned it the title "twin sister" planet, although there the similarity ends. The farthest and least bright of our 3 closest neighbors is twice the size of our Moon but only 1/2 as wide as Venus, 4,000 mile wide Mars which on December 1st will be 212 million miles away. And although rather dim at the present it will become one of the brightest objects in the sky next August when it will be as close to us as Venus is now. And just coincidentally these three will form an exquisite visual triangle which the Old Farmer's Almanac describes as "awesome", this Sunday morning just before sunrise. Let's get a preview!
O.K., we've got our skies set up for this Friday just before dawn facing east where you will see an exquisite 24 day old crescent Moon hovering above Mars and Venus and the brightest star of Virgo, Spica. But if you go out Saturday at exactly the same time, that same Moon will be 25 days old and even skinnier and even closer visually to our other two cosmic neighbors. But the big event is, ta da!, Sunday December 1st when just before dawn you will see a 26 day old absolutely exquisite crescent Moon complete with earthshine which will look like a dark full Moon nestled inside the Moon's bright crescent, parked right alongside Venus and Mars in a near perfect triangle only 2 degrees on each side.
Now in order to give you some idea of the relative distances of these objects on December 1st remember that light travels 186,000 miles per second, which means that when you look at the Moon which will be 225,000 miles away on December 1st you will see it not as it exists right now but as it existed 1 1/4 seconds ago. When you look at Venus, which will be 35 1/2 million miles away on December 1st you will be seeing it not as it exists now but as it existed 3 minutes, and Mars which this Sunday will be 212 million miles away you will see as it exists not right now but as it existed 19 minutes ago. Wow! Think of it, an exquisite cosmic triangle of our 3 closest cosmic neighbors, all apparently in a tight triangle, but all at such incredible distances both from us and each other that we see each one as it existed some time ago in the recent past. Wow! I can hardly wait. Happy December 1st and Keep Looking Up!
Um, when a media company loses readers or consumers of that media, that company will lose money, not to mention relevance, and power.
Relevance and power, yes. Money? When those readers aren't paying anything? Look at Salon.com. They've lost millions and are still losing money. Internet advertising doesn't make a great deal of money. So, like I said, it is small amounts of money either way. There won't be many new AOL subscriptions. And they aren't making much money out things as it is.
It doesn't matter whether or not they lose readers. It matters whether or not they make more money. Will the cash earned by drawing more customers to AOL outweigh the cash lost through advertising?
The sad thing is that they aren't talking about a lot of money either way. I told them that the merger was a stupid idea for Time-Warner. Anyone who actually thought it through knew the same. Time-Warner traded a profitable business for monopoly money.
Anybody know how to turn the volume down on a bullshit dectector? My eardrums are bleeding, I swear.
It's good to hear that the RIAA is harassing our armed forces right before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq. The RIAA should throw the book at these young men and women who will soon be putting their lives at risk for the sake of their country.
Just because you are putting your life on the line for the sake of our freedoms, doesn't mean you have the right to listen to illict tunes!
Keep this up RIAA! I hope you make sure to get lots of media coverage with this campaign.
Oh my. We're going to have to improve pop-up stoppers to defeat this technology.
Well, I'd better free up 45-50 minutes for coding sometime in the next week.
Interesting. The author gets to decide whether certain sections are "Invariant," can't be modified, or not.
If a translation is done of an Invariant section, the translator either needs the author's permission, or needs to include the original along with it.
Very good analysis. Misunderstanding of those very issues leads to things like the DMCA.
You misread the thrust of that statement. You simply restated the author's argument but quibbled with the nouns he used. I hardly think that was helpful to the discussion.
When the author said that Congress passed the Bono act because Congress viewed the issue as a property rights issue, he meant that Congress was ignoring the benefit to the public. Congress was in effect stating that the benefit to the public was what was incidental and that the mechanism of copyright existed to protect the property rights of authors.
The Weekly Standard has also had a number of editorials on copyright--a writer has even come out in favor of mp3 sharing! This issue is finally coming up on the radar. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across the NR article this morning. I think some political thinkers are slowly starting to realize that this is a very important issue to a number of young adult professionals, and deserves a lot more attention than it is currently getting.
You seem to have ignored your original statement about file trading in your response. Unsolicited (or solicited) commerical speech has fewer protections than normal speech. That's a matter of law and common sense.
Just because there are few cases where it is hard to distinguish betwee unsolicited commercial advertisement and between communication between two consenting adults, does not mean that there is no difference at all. That's simply dumb. I wasn't joking when I wrote that stuff about your ego. Courts have found it rather easy to distinguish what is and what is not commercial speech for years. Your argument is akin to saying 'sometimes it's hard to whether someone is sane or insane, so there is no difference at all between insane people and sane people.'
And the whole commons side-issue you bring up is as silly as it is a desperate attempt to change the subject. If the state can only regulate 'the commons' why can they make laws against junk faxes? Again, it's because the laws regulating commercial speech are different than the laws regulating normal (1st ammendment protected) speech.
I am dissapointed that you ignored the personal attacks. I included them in order to make you less of a snobbish idiot. Not that I had much hope.
Good god, one of those sarcastic bastards who loves mentally masturbating about his superiority over the rest of the human race. You're a hundred years too early, punk.
Let me put this very simply. I know it won't get past your ego, but I'll try anyway: Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
Communication between adults therefore has certain safeguards of privacy and freedom--things fundamentally incompatible with a scheme that blocks file trading. Unsolicited advertisement does not have the same legal protections, nor has anyone (except you) ever claimed that it should. Moreover, unsolicited advertisement in the form of spam or telemarketing calls or junk faxes is generally not a thing that has been consented to by the recieving party.
Ever been in Japan? Ever heard the vans with loud-speakers that go around town campaigning for a certain candidate? Notice how a politician in the U.S. would go to jail if he tried it. Hint: It's not censorship...
They did it already with Polio.
The main problem raised with filters isn't that they filter too little. It's that they filter too much. Internet whitelisting does not improve that at all. It only amplifies the problem.
.us, gotta keep them foreigners from corrupting our youth.)
kids.us is a humungous, unwieldy, unworkable, whitelist. (But at least it's
This information is only as good as the time period we've been collecting it for. Meteor frequency is quite variable, therefore one decade's (or less) observation may not be of much value.
I got Windows XP running fine on my 200Mhz Pentium Pro. Actually the Pentium Pro is better than the Pentium II for XP, I recall seeing an analysis of it on the internet some place. You can google.
The New York Times article is kind of silly. If we ever need to move a large chunk of rock out of the way is a (relatively) short time, there is only one way to do it with current or near-future technology: Project Orion style nuclear explosions.
You park your space ship against the rock, and set off small nuclear explosions against a plate mounted on the other side. The explosions are as small as you want, so the acceleration is as small as you want (to keep the rock from breaking up), but you can hold enough fuel (nuclear bombs) to make it last for quite some time.
The methods suggested in the article might work if far longer time frames are available (millenia). But this is the best bet if you have to move it out of the way a little quicker than that.
First rule of benchmarking-->In order to benchmark two different systems, you must run exactly the same software.
Without this ability, comparison is impossible. Most of the things that human brains do so well, we can't make computers do at any speed. That suggests that the hardware differential is currently unknown. First, we need software that can imitate the human brain, and then we can make the analysis.
The liquor store clerk is doing what an elected legislature requires him to do by law. Microsoft is not a body that we have elected to make our laws. And as you say, that is exactly how they are acting...
Ha ha ha. I'm sorry, but that is funny. After taking something they didn't legally own (your GPL'd software), they gave away something that they didn't own in settlement.
If it turns out that they didn't have copyright to all the code that they promissed to GPL, that settlement is invalid. You have a great case for taking them back to court.
And if other authors do own copyright on some of that code, you don't have the right to distribute it. Simple as that.
Several--there was that nut a few years back who massacred all those Palestinians praying.
But the reason Isreal doesn't have suicide bombers is because they have a GNP 10000 times larger than the Palestinians. They've got bombs. Recall that operation recently where they blew up an apartment complex to get one guy? That isn't because the majority of Isrealis support things like that, but because in any conflict there will be crazies. You could be sure that if the situations were reversed (hell, if you put any two groups of people in the world in that situation) suicide bombings would be used by the weaker side. Hell, just look at all those nutty settlers. They are camping out in Hebron now (with Sharon's voiced approval).
The fact is that the Palestinians have a reason for grief, after being driven out (or leaving voluntarily, depending on the historian) during the war of Isreali independance. And after that, having their land occupied (after a war Isreal had with someone else) since the '67 war.
Anytime you have something like that, you can depend on people not simply giving up. You can depend on them using whatever means are at their disposal to fight. And on the Israeli side, Isreal was founded by Jews running from European persecution--and later the holocaust--and now it is populated mostly by people who have been living there their entire lives, and have no other home.
You could have predicted all this from the first kibbutz built in British Palestine. Or maybe since the first Jew burned by the Inquisiton. There is overwhelming blame to go around, but it will never be enough. The responsibility of leaders on all sides is to build a peace however they can.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Shareza just making their own protocol and stealing Gnutella's name for it?
World's best honeypot!
Actually, it was quite a good article. It was funny, and it also hit on some of the main problems with the Harry Potter books.
Like the Shakespearean critic (amoung other things) Harold Bloom says, Harry Potter is a set of Disney movies in book form (and now movies again). I read them, and was consistantly dissapointed by the triumph of carictature over character. Harry's normal family is "bad," so they are fat and mean and ugly. Harry Potter is "good" so he is strong and handsome and famous. There is never any progress beyond the superficial. There is never more than a hint of actual moral struggle. The magical world that Rowling sets up is less interesting, less complicated, and more chintzy, than the real world. Sure, Harry Potter can fly on a broomstick, but can he hold an involving conversation with one of the other cardboard cut-out characters?
Am I being unfair to a set of "children's books?" Not at all. In fact, I think great children's literature is at once harder to write and more valuable than any other type of literature. But Harry Potter does not fall into the category of great children's literature. Harry Potter can be entertaining at times, but it doesn't leave you with the feeling that you have read something that might affect you, that might make you into a different person.
I think the superficiality of the slashdot crowd is apparent with the Harry Potter phenomenon. There a million slashdot readers that are all slobering to be the first to prove their Alpha Geekness by insulting N'Sync or Brittany Spears when the chance comes up. But when it comes time to prove that they have some taste that goes beyond the shit the Hollywood media culture is feeding them, they lap it all up like everyone else.
I've re-read my post. It has all the elements of a troll. But I agree with every word, so it's not.