I was *trying* to refer specifically to the probably smallish group of people obsessed with exposing the CoS, as differentiated from random people using the name "anonymous". OBVIOUSLY it wasn't those particular people. Failing to clearly define exactly to whom I was referring is my bad; assuming that putting "Anonymous" in quotes would accurately imply this definition was apparently not specific enough for the Asbergers afflicted among us.
I think we can all agree that this incident is utterly and completely reprehensible. It's one thing for griefers to screw around with overly serious gamers or troll/flame discussion boards - no real harm done at the end of the day. To deliberately attempt to induce a seizure may be a criminal act.
Considering recent events it does not seem likely that "Anonymous" would do it - their campaign is meant to expose CoS's alleged misdeeds; an altruistic motive. Blaming "Anonymous" doesn't make sense in this context.
In these days of never ending spin and propaganda, the *first* thing to do when analyzing an event like this is to look carefully at who's ends are served by the fallout. The most likely culprits are either 1)some random asshole or 2)CoS. Of the two, who's ends are best served by this event?
The contract started at nearly half a billion and could balloon to four times that amount? What did they do, start by reinventing enigma-era bombes and develop from there? This is a classic scam-the-government operation all the way. Retailers commonly use rugged hand held devices for inventory control and I'd bet with a bit of software tweaking you could use one of those for census data collection. The whole thing makes me wonder why I bother paying my taxes instead of just standing on the street handing out Benjamins to random strangers.
An idiot can easily understand the distinction between free speech and free beer, however the title is clearly "profits", which implies money and not control. Pehaps I should have used smaller words?
You have an interesting attitude toward money. I wonder how radically your attitude will change once you start working for a living.
Free and open? "Open" I can understand, but "free"? Where did you get that idea? Even when I was in school I paid for access via tuition. Government supported access isn't "free" either, you just don't pay directly. Nothing is free.
Although I'm no fan of corporate greed somebody, somewhere has to pay for the service.
The defining characteristic of fascism is subordination of the individual to the state. Unfortunately the term gets diluted when it gets thrown around so often. Government abuse of police powers without oversight certainly seems to fit this definition. There is going to be lots of disagreement over exactly where the line between the individual and the state should be drawn, but certainly it's easy to see when a given policy or practice so clearly favors state control.
In any country you are going to find people who favor government control to an extreme degree. Regardless of how you choose to label them, they're still fascists to varying degrees. Given the history and values upon which the United States was founded, it's ironic in the extreme that the word "freedom" gets bandied about so often by the very people enabling the erosion of individual liberties.
Complicit in our current electoral shams are the media corporations, who have a vested interest in the current system and control what we read in newspapers, hear on the radio and see on tv. The internet is a good way to propagate information, but credibility is a serious problem. Journalistic integrity is as important as ever.
I don't think you can ever stop the influence of big money on politics but anything that will force it out into the open is a step in the right direction.
Heh. It's hard to believe someone thought this was a good idea. After the recent warrentless wiretap fiasco, it's brutally obvious that this would be abused by some government agency somewhere. Fascists exist in every society.
Sorry, I wasn't as clear as I should have been. By production and distribution costs I meant the costs of downloading and electronic copy only - there is virtually zero cost involved in producing a COPY. The costs you cite would be covered by revenue generated by traditional hard copy sales - and there is still a big market for that.
I'm suggesting that there is a big difference in value to the consumer in owning a stripped down electronic copy and a hard copy. Look at the differences: for books you get something nice you can hold in your hand and put in your library. A DVD has subtitles, alternate scenes, commentary tracks, etc.. CD's have high quality media and encoding - you can rip mp3's at any bitrate you choose. I hate reading books on screen and would much rather hold a book. With CD's I prefer owning a disk from which to rip and re-rip my own music files. For DVD's I like the subtitles and actor/director commentary. An electronic copy can also be easily lost due to hard drive failure, deletion or data corruption from any of a large variety of sources.
The difference in value means there will always be a market for more traditional media, unless of course the product is pedantic, academic and boring in which case you probably won't have any sales at all.
What does MS have to sell that is unique? Service and support. Thats the difference between pirated and purchased software. Even open source software lacks this advantage. MS (or any other compamy) can certify support techs and provide company-backed support services.
The whole CFL thing is a bunch of shit. They're very expensive and don't last that much longer - not enough to justify the cost. They are more complex to produce, buzz when they are lit, spill heavy metal whenever they break and let's face it, virtually all of them will be broken outside hazmat collection points. As you point out, breaking CFL's is nothing compared to traditional 4' tubes but it's still worse than a traditional bulb.
Hopefully the LED's will hit the market soon and abort the CFL monstrosity.
I did read it and looked at your website, too. You give away chapters, not the entire book. What I'm criticizing is your logic. Just because the source is a library and not a download doesn't change anything; you still don't get a sale by your logic.
The traditional distribution paradigm for things like movies, music and books is in transition and people will not continue to pay top dollar for something that costs virtually nothing to produce. So what? If there is value in owning a hard copy they'll buy it. If they share it you get another chance at a sale. Why shouldn't the internet be a world wide library? That would make it the most valuable invention in the history of humanity.
Personally, the humor of the ancient Greeks and Romans is interesting and if I like what I read, will I buy the book? Not at $32.95 USD for a paperback. Maybe for $9.99 if there's a reason to own a copy.
I just read an article about some author (I wish I could remember his name) who made his latest work available in its entirety for free from his website at the time of publication. Basically, the book sold better than expected because more people got to see it.
You are making exactly the same arguments as the RIAA regarding "lost sales". By your argument borrowing a book from a library is theft. Copyright law as it is currently being interpreted by the RIAA and MPAA fails to recognize the intrinsic value of the propagation of culture. Besides, the "law of supply and demand" works regardless of legality. If YOU make your work available for free from your own website you could generate advertising revenue from traffic AND completely negate any need for piracy in the first place. If I liked your work I would probably purchase hard copies and have done exactly that in the past for books, films, music AND games. Personally I feel the purchased versions to be a better value.
Equating piracy with theft on a one for one basis is bad business; all you do is piss people off and those people are your customers.
No, I didn't. You even quote me stating that "I would take it one step further...", i.e., *beyond* the points made in TFA.
Anyone who listens to the mp3's are potential customers. Share it and another potential customer hears the song. Repeat several thousand times and you have bona fide "buzz". Someone will buy the disk, go to the show, whatever. Money is made.
How about this: If I distribute mp3's over the internet, the record companies should pay ME for helping to advertise and distribute their content. How's that?
It's technically illegal but laws can be changed to reflect reality. The industries fantasy is that they should get paid for every time someone plays a song. The reality is that with unlimited supply with virtually zero production costs the value of an mp3 is basically zero. The fact is, you get more VALUE from a CD, but cd's have been massively overpriced for years. Additionally, the music industry existed for promotion and distribution. Now that distribution is basically free, their only function is promotions. This puts the artists in the curious postition of being popular not due to their hype but their talent. Artists were never the ones getting paid from album sales anyway; the labels made the bulk of the money. Cut out the middleman by having bands sell mps'3 directly from a website and the money goes where it should-to the artists.
Artist may have to resort to actually PERFORMING in order to make money. Damn shame.
The industry ought to adjust to the reality on the ground: mp3's are advertising & thats all.
Basically the message is that pirates were never customers and can therefore be ignored. I would take it one step further and say that piracy is a form of free advertising. More than once I've bought cd's based on mp3's I heard. The music and movie industry suits are a bunch of whining dinosaurs; all they need to do is make the disks worth buying by offering additional content liek posters, stickers, etc..
It really isn't clear at all exactly who purchased the drives and under what authority. Early in TFA they refer to "privately owned drives" which clearly indicates personal property, but in the same breath refer to state owned drives - and the difficulties in distinguishing between the two. The agency may well have a policy allowing them to confiscate personal items containing confidential information. Props to the agency for recognizing the problem.
The whole point of the exercise appears to be about safeguarding the data. The/. submission focusses on the confiscated drives being destroyed, which in TFA is a minor note at the end of the article. It appears that the state has to choose between paying someone to wipe all those drives or "destroying" them by some as yet undefined but presumably secure method and of the two, destruction would presumably be the most reliable.
A better title would have been "Washington's Division of Child Support takes important steps needed to safeguard confidental data" or "State agency moves to plug USB flash drive security gap". Oops, never mind, the second one was already used by *TFA*.
it's just a matter of time before someone starts claiming that the US *deserves* be nuked for all our our "crimes". This will mark the beginning of the new dark ages.
Don't forget, Iran is a DEMOCRACY; they just had an election yesterday! And SURPRISE! The religious radicals who have been running the country for the last 28 years won again! Hooray for democracy! The Iranian people have spoken!
After reading the posts in this thread I can conclude that the world really is full of idiots.
Sorry , I just cant agree. This argument assumes all regiemes are equal. Equating the US to Iran or North Korea is ludicrous in the extreme, and you know it.
Exactly. Re: hardware - So you are saying I have to buy linux compatible hardware, just like with vista!
Re: drivers - With xp I can track down and delete the driver and registry entries manually - both via GUI - and attempt reinstallation. Face it, the driver installer in xp is pretty good and doesn't fail unless there is some serious problem.
Re: end users - the "technically clueless end user" is not what I'm talking about. In linux, you have an either/or situation where you are either a clueless newb at the mercy of someone comfortable with CLI or you must become comfortable with CLI yourself.
In xp, I've found it easy to avoid trojans and virii simply by not clicking on everything shiny. If my computer starts misbehaving it has generally been due to failing hardware. In Ubuntu it's "sudo" everything just to get access, with no option to turn that "feature" off.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the cost and proprietary nature of xp and the unfair tactics MS uses to make windows the de-facto standard OS. Unfortunately what you saying here is "buy compatible hardware and either learn CLI or forever be at the mercy of the uber users". Ok, I'm playing a bit at being devil's advocate, but why isn't there another option?
Slashdot Mirror
REAL paranoics mine, smelt and roll out their OWN tinfoil.
I was *trying* to refer specifically to the probably smallish group of people obsessed with exposing the CoS, as differentiated from random people using the name "anonymous". OBVIOUSLY it wasn't those particular people. Failing to clearly define exactly to whom I was referring is my bad; assuming that putting "Anonymous" in quotes would accurately imply this definition was apparently not specific enough for the Asbergers afflicted among us.
I think we can all agree that this incident is utterly and completely reprehensible. It's one thing for griefers to screw around with overly serious gamers or troll/flame discussion boards - no real harm done at the end of the day. To deliberately attempt to induce a seizure may be a criminal act.
Considering recent events it does not seem likely that "Anonymous" would do it - their campaign is meant to expose CoS's alleged misdeeds; an altruistic motive. Blaming "Anonymous" doesn't make sense in this context.
In these days of never ending spin and propaganda, the *first* thing to do when analyzing an event like this is to look carefully at who's ends are served by the fallout. The most likely culprits are either 1)some random asshole or 2)CoS. Of the two, who's ends are best served by this event?
The contract started at nearly half a billion and could balloon to four times that amount? What did they do, start by reinventing enigma-era bombes and develop from there? This is a classic scam-the-government operation all the way. Retailers commonly use rugged hand held devices for inventory control and I'd bet with a bit of software tweaking you could use one of those for census data collection. The whole thing makes me wonder why I bother paying my taxes instead of just standing on the street handing out Benjamins to random strangers.
Corruption is too mild a word by far.
Oooook. Next.
An idiot can easily understand the distinction between free speech and free beer, however the title is clearly "profits", which implies money and not control. Pehaps I should have used smaller words?
You have an interesting attitude toward money. I wonder how radically your attitude will change once you start working for a living.
Free and open? "Open" I can understand, but "free"? Where did you get that idea? Even when I was in school I paid for access via tuition. Government supported access isn't "free" either, you just don't pay directly. Nothing is free.
Although I'm no fan of corporate greed somebody, somewhere has to pay for the service.
The defining characteristic of fascism is subordination of the individual to the state. Unfortunately the term gets diluted when it gets thrown around so often. Government abuse of police powers without oversight certainly seems to fit this definition. There is going to be lots of disagreement over exactly where the line between the individual and the state should be drawn, but certainly it's easy to see when a given policy or practice so clearly favors state control.
In any country you are going to find people who favor government control to an extreme degree. Regardless of how you choose to label them, they're still fascists to varying degrees. Given the history and values upon which the United States was founded, it's ironic in the extreme that the word "freedom" gets bandied about so often by the very people enabling the erosion of individual liberties.
Complicit in our current electoral shams are the media corporations, who have a vested interest in the current system and control what we read in newspapers, hear on the radio and see on tv. The internet is a good way to propagate information, but credibility is a serious problem. Journalistic integrity is as important as ever.
I don't think you can ever stop the influence of big money on politics but anything that will force it out into the open is a step in the right direction.
Heh. It's hard to believe someone thought this was a good idea. After the recent warrentless wiretap fiasco, it's brutally obvious that this would be abused by some government agency somewhere. Fascists exist in every society.
"Now the article doesn't really address the fact that SOME pirates BECOME customers..."
THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT.
Sorry, I wasn't as clear as I should have been. By production and distribution costs I meant the costs of downloading and electronic copy only - there is virtually zero cost involved in producing a COPY. The costs you cite would be covered by revenue generated by traditional hard copy sales - and there is still a big market for that.
I'm suggesting that there is a big difference in value to the consumer in owning a stripped down electronic copy and a hard copy. Look at the differences: for books you get something nice you can hold in your hand and put in your library. A DVD has subtitles, alternate scenes, commentary tracks, etc.. CD's have high quality media and encoding - you can rip mp3's at any bitrate you choose. I hate reading books on screen and would much rather hold a book. With CD's I prefer owning a disk from which to rip and re-rip my own music files. For DVD's I like the subtitles and actor/director commentary. An electronic copy can also be easily lost due to hard drive failure, deletion or data corruption from any of a large variety of sources.
The difference in value means there will always be a market for more traditional media, unless of course the product is pedantic, academic and boring in which case you probably won't have any sales at all.
What does MS have to sell that is unique? Service and support. Thats the difference between pirated and purchased software. Even open source software lacks this advantage. MS (or any other compamy) can certify support techs and provide company-backed support services.
The whole CFL thing is a bunch of shit. They're very expensive and don't last that much longer - not enough to justify the cost. They are more complex to produce, buzz when they are lit, spill heavy metal whenever they break and let's face it, virtually all of them will be broken outside hazmat collection points. As you point out, breaking CFL's is nothing compared to traditional 4' tubes but it's still worse than a traditional bulb.
Hopefully the LED's will hit the market soon and abort the CFL monstrosity.
I did read it and looked at your website, too. You give away chapters, not the entire book. What I'm criticizing is your logic. Just because the source is a library and not a download doesn't change anything; you still don't get a sale by your logic.
The traditional distribution paradigm for things like movies, music and books is in transition and people will not continue to pay top dollar for something that costs virtually nothing to produce. So what? If there is value in owning a hard copy they'll buy it. If they share it you get another chance at a sale. Why shouldn't the internet be a world wide library? That would make it the most valuable invention in the history of humanity.
Personally, the humor of the ancient Greeks and Romans is interesting and if I like what I read, will I buy the book? Not at $32.95 USD for a paperback. Maybe for $9.99 if there's a reason to own a copy.
Supply and demand. Value.
I just read an article about some author (I wish I could remember his name) who made his latest work available in its entirety for free from his website at the time of publication. Basically, the book sold better than expected because more people got to see it.
You are making exactly the same arguments as the RIAA regarding "lost sales". By your argument borrowing a book from a library is theft. Copyright law as it is currently being interpreted by the RIAA and MPAA fails to recognize the intrinsic value of the propagation of culture. Besides, the "law of supply and demand" works regardless of legality. If YOU make your work available for free from your own website you could generate advertising revenue from traffic AND completely negate any need for piracy in the first place. If I liked your work I would probably purchase hard copies and have done exactly that in the past for books, films, music AND games. Personally I feel the purchased versions to be a better value.
Equating piracy with theft on a one for one basis is bad business; all you do is piss people off and those people are your customers.
No, I didn't. You even quote me stating that "I would take it one step further...", i.e., *beyond* the points made in TFA.
Anyone who listens to the mp3's are potential customers. Share it and another potential customer hears the song. Repeat several thousand times and you have bona fide "buzz". Someone will buy the disk, go to the show, whatever. Money is made.
How about this: If I distribute mp3's over the internet, the record companies should pay ME for helping to advertise and distribute their content. How's that?
It's technically illegal but laws can be changed to reflect reality. The industries fantasy is that they should get paid for every time someone plays a song. The reality is that with unlimited supply with virtually zero production costs the value of an mp3 is basically zero. The fact is, you get more VALUE from a CD, but cd's have been massively overpriced for years.
Additionally, the music industry existed for promotion and distribution. Now that distribution is basically free, their only function is promotions. This puts the artists in the curious postition of being popular not due to their hype but their talent. Artists were never the ones getting paid from album sales anyway; the labels made the bulk of the money. Cut out the middleman by having bands sell mps'3 directly from a website and the money goes where it should-to the artists.
Artist may have to resort to actually PERFORMING in order to make money. Damn shame.
The industry ought to adjust to the reality on the ground: mp3's are advertising & thats all.
An interesting article on Ars Technica regarding copyrighted games:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-developer-has-radical-message-ignore-the-pirates.html
Basically the message is that pirates were never customers and can therefore be ignored. I would take it one step further and say that piracy is a form of free advertising. More than once I've bought cd's based on mp3's I heard. The music and movie industry suits are a bunch of whining dinosaurs; all they need to do is make the disks worth buying by offering additional content liek posters, stickers, etc..
It really isn't clear at all exactly who purchased the drives and under what authority. Early in TFA they refer to "privately owned drives" which clearly indicates personal property, but in the same breath refer to state owned drives - and the difficulties in distinguishing between the two. The agency may well have a policy allowing them to confiscate personal items containing confidential information. Props to the agency for recognizing the problem.
/. submission focusses on the confiscated drives being destroyed, which in TFA is a minor note at the end of the article. It appears that the state has to choose between paying someone to wipe all those drives or "destroying" them by some as yet undefined but presumably secure method and of the two, destruction would presumably be the most reliable.
The whole point of the exercise appears to be about safeguarding the data. The
A better title would have been "Washington's Division of Child Support takes important steps needed to safeguard confidental data" or "State agency moves to plug USB flash drive security gap". Oops, never mind, the second one was already used by *TFA*.
O, so you ARE saying we deserve to be nuked? Go smoke your ganja somewhere else.
it's just a matter of time before someone starts claiming that the US *deserves* be nuked for all our our "crimes". This will mark the beginning of the new dark ages.
Don't forget, Iran is a DEMOCRACY; they just had an election yesterday! And SURPRISE! The religious radicals who have been running the country for the last 28 years won again! Hooray for democracy! The Iranian people have spoken!
After reading the posts in this thread I can conclude that the world really is full of idiots.
Sorry , I just cant agree. This argument assumes all regiemes are equal. Equating the US to Iran or North Korea is ludicrous in the extreme, and you know it.
Exactly. Re: hardware - So you are saying I have to buy linux compatible hardware, just like with vista!
Re: drivers - With xp I can track down and delete the driver and registry entries manually - both via GUI - and attempt reinstallation. Face it, the driver installer in xp is pretty good and doesn't fail unless there is some serious problem.
Re: end users - the "technically clueless end user" is not what I'm talking about. In linux, you have an either/or situation where you are either a clueless newb at the mercy of someone comfortable with CLI or you must become comfortable with CLI yourself.
In xp, I've found it easy to avoid trojans and virii simply by not clicking on everything shiny. If my computer starts misbehaving it has generally been due to failing hardware. In Ubuntu it's "sudo" everything just to get access, with no option to turn that "feature" off.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the cost and proprietary nature of xp and the unfair tactics MS uses to make windows the de-facto standard OS. Unfortunately what you saying here is "buy compatible hardware and either learn CLI or forever be at the mercy of the uber users". Ok, I'm playing a bit at being devil's advocate, but why isn't there another option?