No flash and dash like Enterprise, but I watch firefly because I KNOW they're gonna do something that exceeds my expectations of what sci-fi on TV normally delivers.
For example, despite the horrible sounding teaser for last weeks episode, where they're stranded in space with failing life support (a textbook sci-fi cliche if there was ever one), I watched it, knowing they'd deliver some unexpected take on the idea. So far, I'm pretty pleased with the show - but it is a much slower paced delivery than the rest of the stuff on TV these days.
Regarding Daniel Jackson, I hope the rumors of his death are overstated, since I'm still one season behind (watching it on the local network, as a syndicated show.) It wouldn't be the same without him, and putting John deLancie in as that spook Colonel is just weird... AND, if they ever do a feature, there'd better be Daniel as part of the team, or else I ain't gonna spend money to see it, no matter if they toss Apothis, the replicators, and whatever the hell else at SG-1 and Earth!
Anyone know if there will be a tie-in (and if so, what kind) for that new animated show, SG-Infinity?
Given that there's a USB port and a phone port (powered by some sort of software modem), you have two choices to network your equipment. The real problem with clustering will be power -you'll have to hack each case with an adapter to supply 4.5vdc. A more elegant way of handling this would be if they allowed you to supply power to the simputer via the USB port (say, could you get enough current to charge your batteries?)
It's funny that they talk about client-server processes for the simputer, since it lacks wireless access (when I think of portable devices talking to other devices, I think wireless.) However, if you can implement a common interface for connecting to a network and charging via a common port (could USB work?), you could install ports all over the place.
With this kind of distributed computing in place, India could soon be home of some serious computational power...
If you're a geek (probably, if you get one of these), you'll probably also find a way to get your hands on some rechargable nicad batteries, and a charger (solar or conventional) to charge em with.
For those who get one of these gizmos, who aren't geeks, they'll just find a local geek to hook them up with the requisite technology. I expect the local village tech to build a side business supply them with a set of rechargable batteries, which he'll recharge at his shop for a fee, if there doesn't already exist a service like this now...
While I won't argue about the Pentium IV being designed around the need to advertise a higher clock speed (irregardless of what that means in terms of actual computing power), the Pentium III is a more mature design, and benefits from lots of improvements to its power consumption. In a blade server, power consumption is one of the main issues, thus using a PIII doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't use a Pentium IV if they could get away with it - they just can't afford the power/heat issues.
Now consider that fact with laptops using the P4 - that's one area where they can get away with it, at the cost of battery life...
Anyone remember Metricom, and their Ricochet network? You knew they were gonna go under when they stopped selling service direct, and started selling through expensive retailers like Worldcom...
Not to mention other brain-dead tactics like disabling peer-to-peer connectivity between modems, forcing subscribers to migrate to more expensive 128kbps service, and selling modems at a loss in order to induce people to sign up.
That's one company that so obviously was run into the ground by management bozos. Superior product with manageable growth, replaced by unmanageable spending and excessive debt. Serves the bastards right when they passed up the inital bankruptcy bid of 20mil, and ended up getting bought out for only 8mil!
The sad thing is every corporate exec that worked for them is probably employed at some hapless company right now. There should be a blacklist of suits circulated around the geek community, so you know to bail when one of these idiots signs on to your company...
Regulation is inevitable? Dude, you've been smoking way too much Brady/HCI propoganda. Once you believe that, any form of "compromise" starts to sound good.
It's like saying that DRM is inevitable, and that we should start cooperating now with Hollywood/Microsoft/the RIAA to make our slavery more bearable...
Given the fast pace of development on hard drives, the HD manufacturers are making a choice not to support any drives older than 1 year. This is an important point - as having to support these drives means having to have a stock of refurb drives in the same size range, or larger, to replace bad drives that come in years 2 and 3 of the old warranty period.
Consider if someone with a 10gb drive from 3 years ago had that drive crap out today, and got a replacement from Maxtor for the price of shipping it to them. I know I did - my sister's iMac died, and since the internal drive was from maxtor, I took advantage of the 3 yr warranty to get the drive replaced for $8. The time I spent with the phone operator, the time the warehouse had to use to find, package, and ship the replacement, and the space the replacement took up while it sat on the shelf... that's all overhead folks.
What are the chances that your $140 120gb drive will be worth anything close to half what you paid for it in 3 years?
With that said, I wish Maxtor would take a cue from WD and allow consumers to purchase "insurance" on their drives, to extend the warranty up to 3 years. I'd like to use those 5400 rpm fluid bearing drives for production use (quiet, and should run cooler, and thus last longer), but I don't know if I can trust those drives if nobody is willing to stand behind them for more than a year... Yes, I'd buy the more expensive drives - if they made one running at 5400 rpm or slower!!!
The local EB is blowing 'em out at $150 a box (though you probably have to buy some games as part of the bundle for you to offer that price.) Another EB bundle I saw was $195, including DVD playback...
No need to extend copyright for items that can be covered by trademark law. Mickey Mouse and Superman are trademarked characters, and can be protected, without having to lock up earlier works created using their characters. 35 years is a bit short - I'd argue we should go back to having periodic renewals for an additional 15 years, up to a period of 65 years.
Either too lazy, or too stupid. There are plenty of "designers" who use the latest, off the shelf GUI HTML editor to put pizzaz into their website (ie flash, javascript scripts, and java applets), without giving a single thought to what exactly is getting uploaded.
The really stupid thing is that the same steps to make site access better for the blind would also make the site easier to access for cell phone/pda users, and users on browser-appliances like WebTV, not to mention the uber-geeks using tools like Opera and Konqueror without all the bells and whistles installed. It's not like complying with the ADA is only gonna deliver you the blind customers - it's gonna deliver you many other segments besides.
It's just laziness. Plus stupidity. A perfect example of management bozoism combined with MCSE "graduates"...
After all, how many handicapped parking places does the mall need?
Given the number of people abusing handicapped parking places, either by getting a handicapped placard (without actually having a handicap), stealing a placard, or just parking there and not giving a shit, the actual number of spaces needed is going to get inflated, just so that a REAL handicapped driver has a chance of getting a spot when they need it.
Anyone recall the UCLA scandal where university football players were using placards to get prime parking spots? Yes, some of those placards were gotten under false pretenses.
Tax implications? Like being able to write the entire fine off as a legitimate business expense?
I don't know how the IRS is going to treat this expense, but the WSJ had an article in the past month or so on how businesses essentially can ignore fines for bad behavior, because it can be treated as a cost of doing business, and as such, it can be FULLY DEDUCTED on their tax returns.
Talk about corporate welfare! We fine em, then forgive em!
At UCLA VShield is a free download to campus users (staff, students, faculty) and is recommended. I assume they paid for a site license, and since it's free, it makes sense to install it.
I only switched to SETI yesterday, after wondering for several days about what to do with the two machines that MUST stay on all the time (or else bearings in the fans and drives sieze... - all the other machines that were used for RC5 that don't have to stay on are now off.) Why not switch earlier? Easy - the money! If they decide to put RC5-72 on the plate for distributed.net, you can bet I'd run my machines on that.
Re:Sponsored by your local electric company...
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 2
I'm assuming your figure of 300 Watts is the average computer load? That seems a bit high to me... even including your drives, graphics card, etc. Unless you're running some sort of unconventional monster, or a REALLY old machine, I would peg 150 Watts as the average load.
That works to about $15,000, the cost of buying about a dozen workstations. If you give the user generating the keys 5 cents per kilowatt hour, that runs about $22,500 total over 4 years, or $5625 a year. That's a decent price to rent what amounts to a supercomputer (albeit, a supercomputer with ugly latency between nodes.)
I dispute the notion that this is wasted energy, as 1) many workstations would have been sitting idle anyways, 2) the point of this exercise was to prove that short key lengths (ie 56 bits, 64 bits) are bad for any organization or individual who needs to keep data encrypted for long periods of time (say, until after 20, 30 years, or until the end of someone's lifetime.)
Of course, there are the geeks who dug machines out of the trash or bought new processors/boxes under the rationalization that they'd find the key and win the prize, who then ran their boxes, and their relatives' boxes, and other peoples' boxes (if they were lab admins), 24 x 7, requiring air conditioning, efficiency losses incurred in powering the air-conditioning, shipping expenses related to the shipping of new processors because they accidently toasted the ones they were overclocking, etc. I suppose they could have spent that time pedaling on bikes equipped with generators to help with the energy shortage... but then you'd incur the expenses associated with the extra food they'd be eating!
Oh, it's even worse than that. Lessig proposes the 10k fine only for spammers who fail to label their spam with an [ADV:] tag. He essentialy means to leave spammers alone as long as they do that, in order to make client-side filtering 100% effective. Good intentions aside, his idea stinks - I'd rather get rid of them all, than to deal with incoming crap that I'd be trashing ANYWAYS.
It's a great mail client - and the Applescript support is an excellent! But you have to admit, version 1.5.1 (the one from 1995, pre-dating Qualcomm, and Eudora Pro/Light, and thus, pre-dating HTML mail support) is a bit old...
Read the article. The 10k bounty for not labeling spam as spam isn't what you should be paying attention to. It's his attack on volunteer efforts to block spam relays, whom he calls "spam vigilantes", in the worst sense of the word. Essentially, he says that efforts to blackhole servers (presumably, because the admin of that server also needs to be whacked repeatedly with a cluestick) do more harm than good, and that we should just use filtering.
The 10k bounty is supposed to convince spammers to label their spam so we can effectively filter it.
Finished laughing? Let's dissect his thinking, shall we? He says we can handle spam just by making sure the spammers label it. This is the thinking behind a lot of bad legislation - it legitimizes it, instead of eradicating it. Second of all, he implies that vigilantism can work with government (finding spammers who don't comply with the ADV: rule) to fix what vigilantism by itself (blacklists) cannot do. Well, blacklists are meant to eliminate spammer havens - and we have plenty of anti-spam people hunting spammers as it is, FOR FREE. What the hell does he think 10k is going to do, if all the bounty-hunter does is turn the spammer's info over to the government? I mean, the FTC doesn't do much to the existing fax-spammers who are in violation of federal law. (The fax.com lawsuit was filed by a private individual, the FTC just levies paltry fines.) Or worse, what is the US government gonna do to foreign spammers who don't comply with our "label law"?
Essentially, Lessig says we should discard our current system of blocklists and anti-spam tech, in favor of simple client-side filters and a federal mandate to label spam, with a bounty to catch anyone who fails to label their spam. The threat is so feeble, and the undeserved side-effects so beneficial, I'm sure that spammers will love this idea.
Do you know how many times I've opened an e-mail that has a subject as just "hi" or "a quick question" and having some really disgusting porn pop up [goatse.cx] on my computer.
I run Eudora 1.5.1 to avoid HTML and nasty javascript payloads like that. That maybe taking things a little far, but I like having a mail client that doesn't spread worms, and is able to hold an inbox of 8000 messages without crashing. On another note, I really need to take some vacation time and get through that backlog of e-mail...
Oh, and if you have shell access to your mail account, and procmail capability, consider installing Spamassassin. It catches 95% of the spam that comes my way, with maybe a.5% false positive (both of which are easily adjusted by adding and subtracting names and domains from the user-configurable whitelist/blacklists.)
For creative people, reputation can be worth a lot, in terms of work you can get, and an audience willing to spend money for your work. Sometimes, reputation is all you have.
Don't forget, for all the abuses that have been perpetrated by the corporations against the common citizen, copyright and patent law are rooted in the constitution, as a method of promoting the creation and dissemination of creative works.
There is no new legislation at stake here. No underhanded attempts to extend copyright protection for non-individuals (ie corprations), no dark-of-the night clause inserted by the RIAA to claim permanent ownership of an artist's master recordings, no DMCA to lock up anyone who opens up their Discman to see what makes it tick.
What is at stake here is whether a commercial enterprise has the right to modify creative content, even at the behest of its clients, without the permission of the rights holder/creators - a case that clearly falls under current, existing (hell, even pre-DMCA) law.
As someone who one day hopes to make a living, selling those rights (right of first publication, right of syndication in North America, etc.), can you blame me for siding with the artists on this one? After all, if you have no rights to your work, you have nothing! You might as well go to trade school and make $60/hr as a plumber...
The real problem with this lawsuit is over gizmos allowing the user to implement blocking, as you come dangerously close to censoring just pure information (they sell a kind of "safe movie" software that tells your DVD player to censor your DVD at appropriate places.)
Arrgh, overuse of the word censor. What I meant was the instructions to tell the gizmo to blank out the movie at spots is just a bunch of times and signal commands. You don't want to start regulating whether it's legal to send a text file with a list of times - therein lies the path to madness.
BTW, it's not censorship if the unedited version is as easily or more easily available. If it's censorship you want to stop, there are lots of movies that aren't available for purchase/viewing at all or are only available in edited format. They're from the early 20th century or during WWII and contain what are now considered improper political and racial stereotypes. What? It's not censorship if you happen to agree with it?
I do disagree with it. I belive that any racism or stereotyping should stand, AS IT IS, as a window into a cruder era. Maybe there should be a warning (like the MA warning for language, sex, etc. - now for offensive characterizations). Consider all the classic cartoons that will NEVER see the light of day, because they had nasty portrayals of Japanese (as in Bugs Bunny Nip the Nips, or scenes where characters were in blackface. Offensive? Yes. And people should be aware that there was offensive content at one point in our history, and be able to see for themselves how Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, etc. were treated in America, and STILL ARE in some places.
That actually is sanitization without the permission of the viewer, unlike this -- why aren't you up in arms about that?
I did touch upon that briefly (and decried it for what it's doing to classic cartoons), but that's really between the directors and the studios (damn network censors - really, it's the unevenness of the censorship that's annoying, but that's another issue entirely...)
The main thrust of the DGA suit parallels my argument that distributing an edited work without the creators' consent effectively misrepresents the work (despite whatever disclaimers may have been inserted) because it was never authorized by the creator.
Suppose you're John Woo. Assume your trademark fight scenes were cut because of the violence. A viewer checks out your movie and decides you suck (not knowing that the best parts were cut.) Yes they knew it was edited. But did they know WHAT was edited? I think as a content creator, you have the right not to have inferior work distributed with your name on it.
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No flash and dash like Enterprise, but I watch firefly because I KNOW they're gonna do something that exceeds my expectations of what sci-fi on TV normally delivers.
For example, despite the horrible sounding teaser for last weeks episode, where they're stranded in space with failing life support (a textbook sci-fi cliche if there was ever one), I watched it, knowing they'd deliver some unexpected take on the idea. So far, I'm pretty pleased with the show - but it is a much slower paced delivery than the rest of the stuff on TV these days.
Regarding Daniel Jackson, I hope the rumors of his death are overstated, since I'm still one season behind (watching it on the local network, as a syndicated show.) It wouldn't be the same without him, and putting John deLancie in as that spook Colonel is just weird... AND, if they ever do a feature, there'd better be Daniel as part of the team, or else I ain't gonna spend money to see it, no matter if they toss Apothis, the replicators, and whatever the hell else at SG-1 and Earth!
Anyone know if there will be a tie-in (and if so, what kind) for that new animated show, SG-Infinity?
Given that there's a USB port and a phone port (powered by some sort of software modem), you have two choices to network your equipment. The real problem with clustering will be power -you'll have to hack each case with an adapter to supply 4.5vdc. A more elegant way of handling this would be if they allowed you to supply power to the simputer via the USB port (say, could you get enough current to charge your batteries?)
It's funny that they talk about client-server processes for the simputer, since it lacks wireless access (when I think of portable devices talking to other devices, I think wireless.) However, if you can implement a common interface for connecting to a network and charging via a common port (could USB work?), you could install ports all over the place.
With this kind of distributed computing in place, India could soon be home of some serious computational power...
If you're a geek (probably, if you get one of these), you'll probably also find a way to get your hands on some rechargable nicad batteries, and a charger (solar or conventional) to charge em with.
For those who get one of these gizmos, who aren't geeks, they'll just find a local geek to hook them up with the requisite technology. I expect the local village tech to build a side business supply them with a set of rechargable batteries, which he'll recharge at his shop for a fee, if there doesn't already exist a service like this now...
While I won't argue about the Pentium IV being designed around the need to advertise a higher clock speed (irregardless of what that means in terms of actual computing power), the Pentium III is a more mature design, and benefits from lots of improvements to its power consumption. In a blade server, power consumption is one of the main issues, thus using a PIII doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't use a Pentium IV if they could get away with it - they just can't afford the power/heat issues.
Now consider that fact with laptops using the P4 - that's one area where they can get away with it, at the cost of battery life...
Anyone remember Metricom, and their Ricochet network? You knew they were gonna go under when they stopped selling service direct, and started selling through expensive retailers like Worldcom...
Not to mention other brain-dead tactics like disabling peer-to-peer connectivity between modems, forcing subscribers to migrate to more expensive 128kbps service, and selling modems at a loss in order to induce people to sign up.
That's one company that so obviously was run into the ground by management bozos. Superior product with manageable growth, replaced by unmanageable spending and excessive debt. Serves the bastards right when they passed up the inital bankruptcy bid of 20mil, and ended up getting bought out for only 8mil!
The sad thing is every corporate exec that worked for them is probably employed at some hapless company right now. There should be a blacklist of suits circulated around the geek community, so you know to bail when one of these idiots signs on to your company...
Regulation is inevitable? Dude, you've been smoking way too much Brady/HCI propoganda. Once you believe that, any form of "compromise" starts to sound good.
It's like saying that DRM is inevitable, and that we should start cooperating now with Hollywood/Microsoft/the RIAA to make our slavery more bearable...
Given the fast pace of development on hard drives, the HD manufacturers are making a choice not to support any drives older than 1 year. This is an important point - as having to support these drives means having to have a stock of refurb drives in the same size range, or larger, to replace bad drives that come in years 2 and 3 of the old warranty period.
Consider if someone with a 10gb drive from 3 years ago had that drive crap out today, and got a replacement from Maxtor for the price of shipping it to them. I know I did - my sister's iMac died, and since the internal drive was from maxtor, I took advantage of the 3 yr warranty to get the drive replaced for $8. The time I spent with the phone operator, the time the warehouse had to use to find, package, and ship the replacement, and the space the replacement took up while it sat on the shelf... that's all overhead folks.
What are the chances that your $140 120gb drive will be worth anything close to half what you paid for it in 3 years?
With that said, I wish Maxtor would take a cue from WD and allow consumers to purchase "insurance" on their drives, to extend the warranty up to 3 years. I'd like to use those 5400 rpm fluid bearing drives for production use (quiet, and should run cooler, and thus last longer), but I don't know if I can trust those drives if nobody is willing to stand behind them for more than a year... Yes, I'd buy the more expensive drives - if they made one running at 5400 rpm or slower!!!
The local EB is blowing 'em out at $150 a box (though you probably have to buy some games as part of the bundle for you to offer that price.) Another EB bundle I saw was $195, including DVD playback...
No need to extend copyright for items that can be covered by trademark law. Mickey Mouse and Superman are trademarked characters, and can be protected, without having to lock up earlier works created using their characters. 35 years is a bit short - I'd argue we should go back to having periodic renewals for an additional 15 years, up to a period of 65 years.
Either too lazy, or too stupid. There are plenty of "designers" who use the latest, off the shelf GUI HTML editor to put pizzaz into their website (ie flash, javascript scripts, and java applets), without giving a single thought to what exactly is getting uploaded.
The really stupid thing is that the same steps to make site access better for the blind would also make the site easier to access for cell phone/pda users, and users on browser-appliances like WebTV, not to mention the uber-geeks using tools like Opera and Konqueror without all the bells and whistles installed. It's not like complying with the ADA is only gonna deliver you the blind customers - it's gonna deliver you many other segments besides.
It's just laziness. Plus stupidity. A perfect example of management bozoism combined with MCSE "graduates"...
After all, how many handicapped parking places does the mall need?
Given the number of people abusing handicapped parking places, either by getting a handicapped placard (without actually having a handicap), stealing a placard, or just parking there and not giving a shit, the actual number of spaces needed is going to get inflated, just so that a REAL handicapped driver has a chance of getting a spot when they need it.
Anyone recall the UCLA scandal where university football players were using placards to get prime parking spots? Yes, some of those placards were gotten under false pretenses.
Nah, this is a preview of James Bond's next ride...
Tax implications? Like being able to write the entire fine off as a legitimate business expense?
I don't know how the IRS is going to treat this expense, but the WSJ had an article in the past month or so on how businesses essentially can ignore fines for bad behavior, because it can be treated as a cost of doing business, and as such, it can be FULLY DEDUCTED on their tax returns.
Talk about corporate welfare! We fine em, then forgive em!
At UCLA VShield is a free download to campus users (staff, students, faculty) and is recommended. I assume they paid for a site license, and since it's free, it makes sense to install it.
I only switched to SETI yesterday, after wondering for several days about what to do with the two machines that MUST stay on all the time (or else bearings in the fans and drives sieze... - all the other machines that were used for RC5 that don't have to stay on are now off.) Why not switch earlier? Easy - the money! If they decide to put RC5-72 on the plate for distributed.net, you can bet I'd run my machines on that.
I'm assuming your figure of 300 Watts is the average computer load? That seems a bit high to me... even including your drives, graphics card, etc. Unless you're running some sort of unconventional monster, or a REALLY old machine, I would peg 150 Watts as the average load.
That works to about $15,000, the cost of buying about a dozen workstations. If you give the user generating the keys 5 cents per kilowatt hour, that runs about $22,500 total over 4 years, or $5625 a year. That's a decent price to rent what amounts to a supercomputer (albeit, a supercomputer with ugly latency between nodes.)
I dispute the notion that this is wasted energy, as 1) many workstations would have been sitting idle anyways, 2) the point of this exercise was to prove that short key lengths (ie 56 bits, 64 bits) are bad for any organization or individual who needs to keep data encrypted for long periods of time (say, until after 20, 30 years, or until the end of someone's lifetime.)
Of course, there are the geeks who dug machines out of the trash or bought new processors/boxes under the rationalization that they'd find the key and win the prize, who then ran their boxes, and their relatives' boxes, and other peoples' boxes (if they were lab admins), 24 x 7, requiring air conditioning, efficiency losses incurred in powering the air-conditioning, shipping expenses related to the shipping of new processors because they accidently toasted the ones they were overclocking, etc. I suppose they could have spent that time pedaling on bikes equipped with generators to help with the energy shortage... but then you'd incur the expenses associated with the extra food they'd be eating!
Oh, it's even worse than that. Lessig proposes the 10k fine only for spammers who fail to label their spam with an [ADV:] tag. He essentialy means to leave spammers alone as long as they do that, in order to make client-side filtering 100% effective. Good intentions aside, his idea stinks - I'd rather get rid of them all, than to deal with incoming crap that I'd be trashing ANYWAYS.
It's a great mail client - and the Applescript support is an excellent! But you have to admit, version 1.5.1 (the one from 1995, pre-dating Qualcomm, and Eudora Pro/Light, and thus, pre-dating HTML mail support) is a bit old...
I couldn't read HTML mail even if I wanted to!
Read the article. The 10k bounty for not labeling spam as spam isn't what you should be paying attention to. It's his attack on volunteer efforts to block spam relays, whom he calls "spam vigilantes", in the worst sense of the word. Essentially, he says that efforts to blackhole servers (presumably, because the admin of that server also needs to be whacked repeatedly with a cluestick) do more harm than good, and that we should just use filtering.
The 10k bounty is supposed to convince spammers to label their spam so we can effectively filter it.
Finished laughing? Let's dissect his thinking, shall we? He says we can handle spam just by making sure the spammers label it. This is the thinking behind a lot of bad legislation - it legitimizes it, instead of eradicating it. Second of all, he implies that vigilantism can work with government (finding spammers who don't comply with the ADV: rule) to fix what vigilantism by itself (blacklists) cannot do. Well, blacklists are meant to eliminate spammer havens - and we have plenty of anti-spam people hunting spammers as it is, FOR FREE. What the hell does he think 10k is going to do, if all the bounty-hunter does is turn the spammer's info over to the government? I mean, the FTC doesn't do much to the existing fax-spammers who are in violation of federal law. (The fax.com lawsuit was filed by a private individual, the FTC just levies paltry fines.) Or worse, what is the US government gonna do to foreign spammers who don't comply with our "label law"?
Essentially, Lessig says we should discard our current system of blocklists and anti-spam tech, in favor of simple client-side filters and a federal mandate to label spam, with a bounty to catch anyone who fails to label their spam. The threat is so feeble, and the undeserved side-effects so beneficial, I'm sure that spammers will love this idea.
Do you know how many times I've opened an e-mail that has a subject as just "hi" or "a quick question" and having some really disgusting porn pop up [goatse.cx] on my computer.
.5% false positive (both of which are easily adjusted by adding and subtracting names and domains from the user-configurable whitelist/blacklists.)
I run Eudora 1.5.1 to avoid HTML and nasty javascript payloads like that. That maybe taking things a little far, but I like having a mail client that doesn't spread worms, and is able to hold an inbox of 8000 messages without crashing. On another note, I really need to take some vacation time and get through that backlog of e-mail...
Oh, and if you have shell access to your mail account, and procmail capability, consider installing Spamassassin. It catches 95% of the spam that comes my way, with maybe a
I thought he worked for the Church of the Sub-Genius?
For creative people, reputation can be worth a lot, in terms of work you can get, and an audience willing to spend money for your work. Sometimes, reputation is all you have.
Don't forget, for all the abuses that have been perpetrated by the corporations against the common citizen, copyright and patent law are rooted in the constitution, as a method of promoting the creation and dissemination of creative works.
There is no new legislation at stake here. No underhanded attempts to extend copyright protection for non-individuals (ie corprations), no dark-of-the night clause inserted by the RIAA to claim permanent ownership of an artist's master recordings, no DMCA to lock up anyone who opens up their Discman to see what makes it tick.
What is at stake here is whether a commercial enterprise has the right to modify creative content, even at the behest of its clients, without the permission of the rights holder/creators - a case that clearly falls under current, existing (hell, even pre-DMCA) law.
As someone who one day hopes to make a living, selling those rights (right of first publication, right of syndication in North America, etc.), can you blame me for siding with the artists on this one? After all, if you have no rights to your work, you have nothing! You might as well go to trade school and make $60/hr as a plumber...
The real problem with this lawsuit is over gizmos allowing the user to implement blocking, as you come dangerously close to censoring just pure information (they sell a kind of "safe movie" software that tells your DVD player to censor your DVD at appropriate places.)
Arrgh, overuse of the word censor. What I meant was the instructions to tell the gizmo to blank out the movie at spots is just a bunch of times and signal commands. You don't want to start regulating whether it's legal to send a text file with a list of times - therein lies the path to madness.
BTW, it's not censorship if the unedited version is as easily or more easily available. If it's censorship you want to stop, there are lots of movies that aren't available for purchase/viewing at all or are only available in edited format. They're from the early 20th century or during WWII and contain what are now considered improper political and racial stereotypes. What? It's not censorship if you happen to agree with it?
I do disagree with it. I belive that any racism or stereotyping should stand, AS IT IS, as a window into a cruder era. Maybe there should be a warning (like the MA warning for language, sex, etc. - now for offensive characterizations). Consider all the classic cartoons that will NEVER see the light of day, because they had nasty portrayals of Japanese (as in Bugs Bunny Nip the Nips, or scenes where characters were in blackface. Offensive? Yes. And people should be aware that there was offensive content at one point in our history, and be able to see for themselves how Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, etc. were treated in America, and STILL ARE in some places.
That actually is sanitization without the permission of the viewer, unlike this -- why aren't you up in arms about that?
I did touch upon that briefly (and decried it for what it's doing to classic cartoons), but that's really between the directors and the studios (damn network censors - really, it's the unevenness of the censorship that's annoying, but that's another issue entirely...)
The main thrust of the DGA suit parallels my argument that distributing an edited work without the creators' consent effectively misrepresents the work (despite whatever disclaimers may have been inserted) because it was never authorized by the creator.
Suppose you're John Woo. Assume your trademark fight scenes were cut because of the violence. A viewer checks out your movie and decides you suck (not knowing that the best parts were cut.) Yes they knew it was edited. But did they know WHAT was edited? I think as a content creator, you have the right not to have inferior work distributed with your name on it.