> > incase you're wondering when alt.2600 took the nosie dive into pure shit,
> > I say summer of 1995. Basically USENET's commuliative quallity halved that summer.
> > Windows 95. Dial-up networking. Bundled TCP/IP stack. Everybody and
> their dog could get on the internet with a few clicks.
> [snip comment saying "GCs and citizenship over temporary labor"]
Also agreed. GCs and citizenship over H-1B anyday.
I think if you look at the bill itself, you'll see a lot of steps in this direction: Summary of S.2045
Of note - increased portability of H-1B status and I-140 backlog reduction:
Portability of H-1B status: in some areas, yes, you can transfer an H-1B in a few weeks, so it's not a big deal for employee or employer. In Sillycon Valley, which is "serviced" by the INS California Service Center, it's a multiple-month wait. (CSC is the slowest of the four INS centers.) Being able to transfer one's H-1B at the time of petition submission is a major win.
Portability of I-140s and LCs:If I read this correctly - and IANAL - but it sure looks as though it means "no more indentured servitude." If I read that section correctly, it sounds like "If INS has stalled on your I-140 for > 6 months, and you can get the same job at another employer, you don't have to start your Green Card process from square one". (Again, IANAL, and if I'm wrong on my interpretation of that section, someone needs to point that out, because I don't want anyone misled).
Backlog: Both the language in S.2586 which would tell INS to get its ass moving on cases pending more than six months, and Congressional funding for adjudications (as opposed to enforcement-only, which has been policy up to now) might give INS the capacity to reduce the backlog. This is INS we're talking about - so whether they have the will to do what they're required to do under this law remains to be seen. But if they don't, the bits about increased portability of H-1B visas as well as labor certifications and I-140s seem to be good protection to workers caught in the trap of having their paperwork sitting on an INS shelf for 2-3 years.
> [the/. crowd used to say] "How stupid these guys are," [but now says that the SDMI guys] are the enemy,"
> [... ]
> somehow I get the feeling that making your customers think of you as the enemy
> is probably not the best business strategy.
Elementary game theory - "tit for tat". Treat us like the enemy for 20 years, sooner or later we're gonna wise up.
When it comes to copy-protection, it goes all the way back to the days of cassette tape (royalties on blank tape), the VCR (the Sony case), and DAT (killed the format by forcing hardware manufacturers to implement SCMS).
We've always been their enemy.
It's only been in the past six months that we've collectively woken up from 20-odd years of abuse and realized that they are our enemy.
Segue to the Katz article on virtual communities. The realization that RIAA/MPAA are not just invisible trade organizations, but are actively attacking us - indeed, that there is an "us" for them to attack - is all the evidence I need to know that there are communities. We are bound together by common ideas and goals, not accidents of geography, but it doesn't make us any less a community than our enemies, namely RIAA and the MPAA.
Filk: 2600 miles and runnin'
(Parody: NWA/Dr. Dre's "100 Miles and Runnin'")
[... ]
And we got ten thousand hackaz strong,
Got everybody singin' the De-CSS song,
And while you treatin' Goldstein like dirt,
Yo' whole fuckin' family wears De-CSS shirts.
> you really shouldn't hot-swap anything on your PS/2 ports (mouse/keyboard). Shut down first."
Yes, I know the PS/2 ports have +5V and GND, so hot-swapping isn't necessarily safe, but it sounds you're saying it's more of a problem on the PS/2 port than, say, the old-style keyboard port.
What makes a PS/2 hotswap more risky than swapping an AT keyboard? (Obviously in the case of a serial mouse, there's no +5V supply on the serial port, but there is on a PS/2 mouse/port. But an AT keyboard seems to be the same kind of risk as a PS/2 keyboard, as both connectors have +5V and GND. What's the deal here? I don't hot-swap PS/2 mice, but have I just been damn lucky with my keyboards over the past few years?:-)
Obviously, a search for "hot-swap" and "ps/2" yields nothing but descriptions of boxen with PS/2 ports and hot-swap power supplies. Sigh. So any info on the failure mechanism you could provide would be appreciated. AdvTHANXance
Cheaper Then a Playstation 2 ($300 or less): A real-live Klein Bottle, from Cliff Stoll. Yes, that Cliff Stoll. One classic-style to look at, and one beer-mug style for, well, you figure it out.
Cheaper Then a Playstation 2's rumored eBay sale value ($301-$1500) : The usual big-ass flatscreen monitor.
Unlimited (Mommy, can I have a stealth bomber for Christmas?) : A viable space program.
Tempted by the stealth bomber and a full load of nukes? Sure, who wouldn't be? But as cool as a stealth would be, it wouldn't be as useful as, say, a few gazillion on a faster, better space program.
You asked me what I want for Christmas? A Congress that'll let NASA skip the cheaper part in order to get back to "faster and better", and a private space industry able to give NASA a run for their money.
$10B to the first company - or NASA - able to put a team of six people on Mars for two years and return them safely to the earth. $2B for the first organization able to launch a Europa Orbiter. Another $2B for a Europa Lander, with a bonus $1B if you can find the ocean and take samples of what it's made of. $500M for the first 100-meter resolution pictures of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon.
Or $10B to the first group who can cut down the cost of lifting stuff to orbit to $1000/lb, and another $10B to every group for every 50% improvement thereafter. That'd be ~$50B to get the cost down to $100/lb. Over 50 years, it means spaceflight becomes affordable to the general populace, and at $2B/y, that works out to goddamn cheap. With lift costs at $1000/lb (let alone $100/lb!), you get the space probes and offworld colonies for free.
> part of me desperately wants to suggest the humour in imagining what >
kinds of possible religions might be created by sentient machines capable of 'experience,' but the >
rest knows that this is beyond any forseeable event horizon.
From Red Dwarf:
"No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! If there were no Silicon Heaven, where would all the calculators go?"
> if you think that any amount of modelling, branch prediction, and >
hypotheses can ever actually 'know' something, especially something as individual as
experience, then perhaps you've forgot about the cat.
If you're talking about Schroedinger's Cat, I'd say that's a bad example - quantum mechanics is probably the best-tested model we have going. Just because it conflicts with "common sense" doesn't mean it conflicts with observed behavior. The experiments are pretty conclusive proof that, yes, particles do exist in superpositions of states, the state vector collapsing upon observation.
Manipulating the superpositions of states and building quantum computers is a difficult - and possibly insurmountable - problem, but the reason people are interested in quantum computers is precisely because we have the mathematical understanding to talk about what sorts of things we could do with such a system if one existed.
Even if we never develop the technology to build a quantum computer, the theory's fascinating. (If I were 20 years younger, I'd forget all about learning about transistors and figuring out truth tables and just start trying to wrap my head around how to do useful computation with qubits.)
I'll segue out to an earlier "does [spoken] language affect the design of computer languages" Slashdot thread... I don't find that particular issue terribly interesting, but the I do think that design of computer languages is strongly affected by the type of machine you're programming.
Functional programing is a big jump from strictly procedural languages. You have to change the way you think, not the way you code. If someone develops a "usable" quantum computer, I can guarantee you that most of us are out of a job. Our generation has too much Von Neumann on the brain.
And I'll bet the hard AI folks will have a field day with it. "The brain's not a VN machine, it's a quantum computer! That's why the first attempts at hard AI failed!".;-)
Back to subjective experience and consciousness again. My personal belief is that while Godel may well stop us from understanding (at the level of "run this code to get this result") conscious experience, it's no barrier to creating machines which have it.
I'll even go so far as to live down to Jaron's bit about how cybernetic totalists like to annoy people on the other side of the debate by saying. "Proof: Humans have been creating machines that have experience consciousness without understanding the mechanism by which consciousness arises by mating with each other for about a million years. Other species have been creating similar machines by similar means for possibly much longer periods of times".
> Apparently, DC doesn't like the fact that you can use a CueCat to drive the database query. It's not the database proper, it's the CueCat decode programming.
> [because the things we build out of silicon today break down sometimes, and thus don't aren't the idealized Turing machines we claim they are] We kid ourselves when we think
we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.
Nope, we don't understand conservation of momentum because we can't build frictionless surfaces. The pucks on the air-hockey table aren't good enough.
Nope, we don't understand Newtonian gravity because we can describe it by an inverse square law.
Nope, we don't understand special relativity because we can describe how clocks slow down when put into accelerating frames of reference.
Nope, we don't understand consciousness when we can model it and build a machine that passes the Turing test.
The first two statements ring hollow because we developed the technology to test our models. The third statement is untested because we have neither the models nor the technology.
I said untested, not untestable.
To make a long story short, a cybernetic totalist believes that at some point, we will develop models of consciousness that allow us to describe machines that posess it, and that we will also develop technology that will allow us to build said machines.
I'm one of 'em. At present, I take that last paragraph on faith - I'm on the Minsky side of things; a brain is a computer made of meat. It should be possible to build one.
Where I take issue with Jaron Lanier (aside from his IMHO preposterous assertion that not being able to build "ideal" computers equates to our not understanding computer science!) is that he believes that CTs see the eschaton as immanent. I don't. I see it as a possibility, but we have so many serious technological hurdles to jump over between "here" and "there" that I don't worry about it. Building nanopaste is highly nontrivial.
(I do agree with him that the blind acceptance of criticality is a problem - I'm also one of those people who "looks forward to it" - but even I acknowledge that criticality might not be as good a thing as I think it will be.)
So finally on to subjective experience.
I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience doesn't exist. I believe it exists. I experience it 24/7.
But likewise - I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience requires anything other than a sufficiently complex network of inputs, outputs, and some sort of feedback going on in the middle.
I can't explain how that works. Lanier would call it "soul". I call it "mind", and view it as an epiphenomenon of "brain". The fact that it is an epiphenomenon of "brain" doesn't make it any less real.
When Jaron says "But don't you experience your life? Isn't experience something apart from what you could measure in a computer?", I'd counter with:
"Yes I do, but as for the second question, I don't know, because I lack the tools to measure experience. It may be, as suggested in Godel, Escher, Bach, that my brain lacks the capability to understand said measurements, owing to some Godelian "loopiness" in that it's hard to emulate a brainputer on a brianputer. But at present, that hypothesis is untested, and I have to proceed as though it were measured.
As for ad hominem arguments, the notion that Turing developed the notion of machine sentience in order to deal with his own personal anguish is almost beneath contempt (I say "almost" because on Edge, "where ideas come from" is a legitimate topic for discussion), and I won't dignify it with a reply. Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea is IMHO valid, and Lanier does himself a disservice when attempting to criticize it on the grounds of its origins, not its merits.
Feh. A long rambling rant from Tackhead.
LionKimbro, regardless of our agreement or disagreement about Lanier's paper (I, too, found it a wonderful read; while I've taken a few slices out of him here, it's an excellent articulation of the non-CT point of view, contains much that is of merit that I've ignored in this post, and provides lots of food for thought), we're in solid agreement on one thing:
Those of you taking pride in not understanding the paper should seriously reconsider your position. Ignorance is not something to take pride in.
To those saying that Edge is "just a load of intellectual crap", would you also agree with some skript kiddie saying "That RMS guy at gnu.org, hes stupid, all he duz is write lots of stupid essays talking big intellectual crap about free beer versus free speech! Wut da fuk he talking about? N-E-1 with cl00 know that free software means #warez, d00d!!!"
> [because the things we build out of silicon today break down sometimes, and thus don't aren't the idealized Turing machines we claim they are] We kid ourselves when we think
we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.
Nope, we don't understand conservation of momentum because we can't build frictionless surfaces. The pucks on the air-hockey table aren't good enough.
Nope, we don't understand Newtonian gravity because we can describe it by an inverse square law.
Nope, we don't understand special relativity because we can describe how clocks slow down when put into accelerating frames of reference.
Nope, we don't understand consciousness when we can model it and build a machine that passes the Turing test.
The first two statements ring hollow because we developed the technology to test our models. The third statement is untested because we have neither the models nor the technology.
I said untested, not untestable.
To make a long story short, a cybernetic totalist believes that at some point, we will develop models of consciousness that allow us to describe machines that posess it, and that we will also develop technology that will allow us to build said machines.
I'm one of 'em. At present, I take that last paragraph on faith - I'm on the Minsky side of things; a brain is a computer made of meat. It should be possible to build one.
Where I take issue with Jaron Lanier (aside from his IMHO preposterous assertion that not being able to build "ideal" computers equates to our not understanding computer science!) is that he believes that CTs see the eschaton as immanent. I don't. I see it as a possibility, but we have so many serious technological hurdles to jump over between "here" and "there" that I don't worry about it. Building nanopaste is highly nontrivial.
(I do agree with him that the blind acceptance of criticality is a problem - I'm also one of those people who "looks forward to it" - but even I acknowledge that criticality might not be as good a thing as I think it will be.)
So finally on to subjective experience.
I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience doesn't exist. I believe it exists. I experience it 24/7.
But likewise - I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience requires anything other than a sufficiently complex network of inputs, outputs, and some sort of feedback going on in the middle.
I can't explain how that works. Lanier would call it "soul". I call it "mind", and view it as an epiphenomenon of "brain". The fact that it is an epiphenomenon of "brain" doesn't make it any less real.
When Jaron says "But don't you experience your life? Isn't experience something apart from what you could measure in a computer?", I'd counter with:
"Yes I do, but as for the second question, I don't know, because I lack the tools to measure experience. It may be, as suggested in Godel, Escher, Bach, that my brain lacks the capability to understand said measurements, owing to some Godelian "loopiness" in that it's hard to emulate a brainputer on a brianputer. But at present, that hypothesis is untested, and I have to proceed as though it were measured.
As for ad hominem arguments, the notion that Turing developed the notion of machine sentience in order to deal with his own personal anguish is almost beneath contempt (I say "almost" because on Edge, "where ideas come from" is a legitimate topic for discussion), and I won't dignify it with a reply. Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea is IMHO valid, and Lanier does himself a disservice when attempting to criticize it on the grounds of its origins, not its merits.
Feh. A long rambling rant from Tackhead.
LionKimbro, regardless of our agreement or disagreement about Lanier's paper (I, too, found it a wonderful read; while I've taken a few slices out of him here, it's an excellent articulation of the non-CT point of view, contains much that is of merit that I've ignored in this post, and provides lots of food for thought), we're in solid agreement on one thing:
Those of you taking pride in not understanding the paper should seriously reconsider your position. Ignorance is not something to take pride in.
To those saying that Edge is "just a load of intellectual crap", would you also agree with some skript kiddie saying "That RMS guy at gnu.org, hes stupid, all he duz is write lots of stupid essays talking big intellectual crap about free beer versus free speech! Wut da fuk he talking about? N-E-1 with cl00 know that free software means #warez, d00d!!!"
> I cannot believe that these idiots are trying to claim that it isn't spam. It's auto-generated; it's ad-copy; and it's offensive to one's intelligence.
"This is not spam!" is the first cry of the spammer.
0) Spam is theft.
1) Spammers lie.
2) If you think a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3) Spammers are st00pid.
(Footnote: Actually, "OooOOOOOHhonnnngggh! is the cry of the spammer. After I pound its balls flat with a mallet. The bit about "It wasn't spam, it was invitation to buy my product" only comes after they've regained the ability to speak. This is poor practice: when you whack a spammer, do it like you mean it. If properly whacked, the bits of goo around the server room will never recongeal into anything that has the ability to speak.)
if you can't memorize the email addresses of the hundred or so people and mailing lists with whom you regularly correspond, you shouldn't be using a computer.
Actually, while I think you meant it in jest, I think it's true.
My name isn't unique. There are a million John Does in the world. At work, I'm john_doe@johndoescompany.com, and at home, I'm jd@johndoesisp.net. Those are two unique identities.
Nothing bugs me more than carrying on a conversation with foo@bar.com, and having him "reply" to the wrong address because "John Doe"'s work address is above his home address in foo@bar.com's "address book". Not only do I not necessarily want personal correspondance at work, but now I have to forward that mail *back to my home address* if I want to keep a record of it in one place.
Email addresses uniquely identify users. Names don't. We expect total drooling fuckwits to be capable of associating phone numbers (7 to 10 arbitrary digits) with individuals, so it's actually pretty goddamn reasonable to expect them to be able to associate an email address (a pronounceable string of characters often bearing a striking resemblance to the person's name) with an individual too.
And as for those who are saying that "mailing everyone in your address book when you change addresses isn't spam", read the article.
If it mailed everyone in your address book with "Hi. This is John Doe. I'm now on MSN and my address is john_doe@m_s_n_dot_com", it would be a misfeature, but forgivable.
It doesn't.
It says "I recently began using a new product from Microsoft called MSN Explorer. With MSN Explorer, you can send and receive e-mail, exchange instant messages with me and the millions of other people who use MSN Explorer, browse the Web and much more. MSN Explorer even offers an exciting new look for using the web and makes it easy to find and play music online. Want to try it out? It's FREE! Just click on the link below and follow the download instructions", and presumably follows it with a link to a Trojan. (Yeah, I consider MSN a trojan. Deal with it.) 100,000 quatloos says the spam's in fuckin' HTML, too.
If it walks like spam, smells like spam, and is made from potted meat product like spam, it bloody well is spam.
I've just added the strings in the above-quoted spam to my procmail filter. The response will be "550 MSN auto-generated spam rejected. Use a real ISP that doesn't turn you into a spammer."
As for Bill Gates and the marketer who came up with this shit, anyone whose sole view of the world is their own lower digestive tract should not be permitted to come within 20 feet of a computer, much less one attached to the 'net.
But sure as fsck not 128kilobytes. Christ, my Apple//e had 128K, and it was state of the art!
ObMicrso~1Bash:
BTW, is it just me, or is that site the most garbled heap of nested tables and crap HTML I've seen in ages? I mean, even for a M$ FrontPage site, it's pretty fucking sick to see 70-80 kilobytes of HTML - 30K of banner-ad tables and 40K of other shite - for about 3K of actual text.
Multiply it out, that's about 200K of HTML I had to download to read something that could have fit in a single, albeit long,/. comment. What is it with m0r0n webmasters who think that a web site should be like a book - and require the manual clicking of a mouse to "turn a page" every time you read two or three paragraphs?
> [ in the event of an unjustified declaration of martial law ]
> As a former soldier myself, I suspect many of those same soldiers would turn
> to their political leaders and say "You're on your own pal. If you want civilians > oppressed, call the LAPD."
Which is why the oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and emphatically not any particular leader.
Although I don't believe American soldiers have quite the same protections as the (West) Germans put in place following WW2, it's still true that no soldier is obliged to follow an unlawful order.
That's not to say that the decision not to follow an unlawful order is free of consequences; in fact, it's arguably the most important decision a soldier can make, and when made, you're staking your career (and possibly your life) on being right.
I believe the most generally-accepted response is to lay down one's arms and remove one's epaulets, with a comment to the effect of "This will be settled at the court-martial - whether it be mine or yours, sir, has yet to be determined."
Meanwhile, thanks for the reassuring note that they're still teaching this stuff. Props to yourself and all your fellow servicemen. (Yeah, and even the officers;-)
Katz: > if anybody reading this believes there's much difference between these two exhausted ideologies
If it were a contest between two ideologies - however exhausted they may be - I'd be interested.
But it's not. There is only one ideology, and it's common to both of the major parties: power.
Power: How to get it. How to keep it.
The debates over Social Security? Nobody debating this issue cares about SS per se - they care about nailing down the Grey Power vote. Education/health? The soccer mom vote. Violence in the media? The religious right then says the things you can't say.
DMCA and UCITA are straight out of Machiavelli. Both the feudal lord and the Prince of the Rennaissance city-state can (and should) abuse the peasants all they want - the abuse prevents them from rising above subsistence levels, and the Church placates them. But don't ever piss off the nobles. They're where your real support comes from.
The 'net as a playground for terrorists, pedophiles, and pirates? Scare the ignorant into voting for you, and simultaneously lay the groundwork for a surveillance state - a necessary piece of infrastructure for long-term consolidation of power.
Don't ever delude yourself into thinking that anyone who wants your vote is interested in anything other than power.
"Gentlemen? (And I use that word loosely). I will testify for you. I'm a gun for hire, I'm a saint, I'm a liar. Because there are
no facts, there is no truth--just data to be manipulated.
I can
get you any result you like: What's it worth to you?
Because
there is no wrong, there is no right, and I sleep very well at
night. No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution."
- Don Henley, _Garden_of_Allah_
Anyone who thinks "It Can't Happen Here" hasn't been paying attention:
"Quoting unnamed Russian computer security experts, the report said U.S. officials had advised Moscow on implementation of such network surveillance systems. "
If you think the Chinese and Russian net.surveillance systems are things that can only happen in totalitarian states, think again. Since the end of the Cold War, we've gone from defending the free world against totalitarianism to helping totalitarian states set up their surveillance programs.
Yes, "politics is almost over". Not because of some fluffy Katzesque triumph of free Netizens, but because there'll no longer be a need for the charade.
The former USSR held elections for the 74 years following the Revolution. Present-day China does the same thing.
"remove portions... which assist or induce others to [hack the cat]"
Actually, not quite:
"remove immediately those portions of the Web site that contain unauthorized or illegal [and still undefined] misappropriations of [DC's] intellectual and proprietary rights, or which assist or induce others to do so"
What the blistering three-nippled fuck are they talking about?
What are intellectual rights? What are proprietary rights? Or do they mean "intellectual-and-proprietary rights" as a long way of saying "IP rights". Can any lawyers comment on that wording? Seems a weird way to say it, but IANAL.
And what does "to do so" mean? The only fsckin' verb in that sentence is "to contain unauthorized or illegal misappropriations of DC's [whatever]". Do you see any portions of that web site which assist or induce others to contain information? I sure don't.
Sigh. At least it's an improvement in that they've hired a real lawyer to do the blustering, as opposed to someone with Robert McElwaine's command of the English language.
But it's still a crock. Unless and until DCNV informs Kenyon & Kenyon as to which material - specifically - it believes is infringing, and K&K informs the owner of Flyingbuttmonkeys.com, it's still a load of freshly spat-up cat vomit.
Speaking of unauthorized use of these things and the phrase "IANAL", I just realized that two of 'em, glued together (flat end to flat end), and with any sharp flashing edges on the plastic properly-smoothed, would serve as a pretty useful dildo. Or better yet, a buttplug.
You could bend over on all fours, insert the modified cats, have a good friend give a really good yank on the cord, and plastic barcode-reading cats would fly out of your butt.
> The content industry doesn't seem to have learned by example what happens when you blanket all members of a group
I like ConceptJunkie's reponse: "Evil. Stupid".
But in answer to your question about when they started seeing the consumer as the enemy - 'twas always thus. Taxes on the sale of blank "music" CD-R media extended to blank "data" CD-R media are nothing more than extensions of the taxes on blank cassette tapes. Ditto the hamstrings on DAT that prevented it from being a commercial medium.
They've always regarded the customer as little more than a sheep to be sheared, a fool to be parted with our money. Ditto the bands who actually produce the content they resell.
Make no mistake - the consumer has always been a dupe in their eyes. Only recently, now that we have the power to force a change their business model, have we gone from "harmless dupe" to "enemy".
But they've never had anything more than contempt for us. The only thing that's changed recently is that the veil's been ripped away, and we can see them for what they really are.
No, not the video compression scheme, the goofy pay-per-view DVD mode.
We don't want your DRM-hobbled music in the presence of unprotected alternatives.
We won't buy your DRM-hobbled crap in the presence of unprotected alternatives.
OK, says RIAA, we'll take away all the unprotected alternatives, releasing music only in watermarked, protected formats, and we'll badger the hardware companies to self-destruct any device that doesn't comply. (What, you mean you didn't want to throw out your entire CD collection and buy it all over again?)
Fuck 'em.
When consumers are presented with the choice between SDMI and rolling around in a pool of freshly spat-up cat vomit, the choice is remarkably easy. Not only is the pool of half-digested Friskies and mouse-heads less offensive, it is also delightfully warm.
I'm not the author, just someone who keeps this around every time some blithering twit sends me a heaping shitpile of LottaSnots or Outhouse 2000 dreck.
Original post is Message-ID {x67lk4bzvw.fsf@kharendaen.krall.org} from 30 Oct 1999 - and may still be on Dejanews.
Back in the day, we had something like that, only we called it
fortune(7). Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.
And the reality of cubemail is far from interesting. Basically, there
was this thing called email. It lets you send text to people, and with
some slight cleverness, arbitrary files. And anyone who has any kind
of email MUA can read and send mail to any other such person. Email is
a Good Thing (though implementations, being software, suck). Email is
_not_ a result of someone looking at a vaguely useful idea and then
asking "what can I add?" until all the resources on a state-of-the-art
machine are used up.
Cubemail is kind of like email, except the idea is that you never send
plain boring ol' text, because text is only useful if you happen to
have something interesting to say, which cubemail users
don't. Instead, you send huge blocks of drek encoded in some idiotic
proprietary way, so you can only write to people who happen to have
exactly the same flavor of cubemail you do. As an added bonus, it is
much less reliable and more consumptive of shared resources than
email. But, by Glub, you can use exciting k-rad fonts and colors,
which is the whole point of sending something to someone, nyet?
Bloatus Notes is probably the canonical example of cubemail. (The name
"cubemail" derives from the fact the the lusers who perpetrate it
inhabit cubes.)
The other added bonus is that cubemail tends to be part of some big
monolithic integrated package that does one thing halfway decently (if
you're lucky), everything else in the universe badly, and forces you
to take the lot as an all-or-nothing package. And of course, you have
to do everything interactively; there's no concept of scripting or
composing primitives.
This is why cubemail sucks. This is also why cubemail is a favorite
amongst corporate smegheads who long ago had the blood supply to their
brain cut off by wearing ties.
ObOb: We have one customer who uses email, but insists on sending
everything as an attached "AmiPro" word processor file. So, they have
essentially created cubemail by hand. And O what fun we all had
scrambling around trying to figure out what AmiPro even fscking *is*
and where to get a copy and where did I put that copy of Mess-DOS 6.2
so I can run it?
And if the PHB doesn't get it after that, I follow Paul Tomblin's advice (also found in alt.sysadmin.recovery):
"The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a
hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his
computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism."
Re:Well ppbbbpbbtt!!!
on
Disconnected
·
· Score: 2
Amen, brother.
This guy would probably peg me as an "Isolate", but I'm probably more connected than he'll ever be. No, I couldn't give a damn 'bout my cow orkers except inasmuch they're good people to work with and we can produce a quality product at a good price and support it well. (They are, we do, and we do, respectively. It's a great place to be.)
But my community is more than just my cow orkers, it's also/., a few geek mailing lists I hang out on, and so on.
Schmoozing at the picnic, playin' softball and droolin' over the company newsletter got nothin' to do with it. My IP connectvity gives me a "network" of friends that beats these artificial "but you have to play 'dance-on-the-fulcrum-to-show-teamwork' with Johnny from Marketing!" social games hands-down.
> But there's no outcry over phone tapping
because a) it's already here, and b) it's not affecting the Internet.
You forgot (c) it's bloody difficult for FBI to tap everyone's phone 24/7 and to turn all the conversations into easily-searchable transcripts.
Swap out the 120M removable media from the Carnivore box and replace it with a 100G hard drive next year, and you've got a reasonable shot at being able to record all email at that ISP and dump it into a big-ass database.
Anyone who thinks that the FBI will scan every packet going through routers in the US is
living in a paranoid fantasy world.
Anyone who thinks that FBI does not want to dump every packet going through routers in the US is living in a Polyanna fantasy world.
Everyone seems to be going on about how it's a black box.
OK, suppose they do it. Now it's a black box that the FBI guy says is running the open-source version of Carnivore. Great.
Old version: "Trust us, the closed-source version only captures SMTP headers and throws out ones with the wrong From: line"
Open-sourced version: "Trust us, the CARNIVOR.EXE on this box was compiled from the open source version that you geek types wrote."
Hands up, anyone who's sleeping better at night.
Open source has nothing to do with this debate. It all comes down to trust. Do we trust the FBI or not? Regrettably, FBI's track record over the past 50 years has been pretty consistent in demonstrating that they're not worthy of our trust.
In 5 years, I'll no longer dare to make statements like this. Somehow, my political views will evolve to a more mature position, whereby I recognize that FBI has a legal and moral duty to defend me against terrorists, pedophiles, computer programmers, and drug dealers.
I wonder if FBI will have a brain-scanning version of Carnivore in 20 years that'll determine whether my political views really changed over that time, or if I was just duckspeaking in order to stay out of Room 101?
Slashdot Mirror
> > I say summer of 1995. Basically USENET's commuliative quallity halved that summer.
>
> Windows 95. Dial-up networking. Bundled TCP/IP stack. Everybody and
> their dog could get on the internet with a few clicks.
Or as we old-farts like to call it: The September That Never Ended.
It's just that it took a couple of years for September to catch up with alt.2600.
Also agreed. GCs and citizenship over H-1B anyday.
I think if you look at the bill itself, you'll see a lot of steps in this direction: Summary of S.2045
Of note - increased portability of H-1B status and I-140 backlog reduction:
Portability of H-1B status: in some areas, yes, you can transfer an H-1B in a few weeks, so it's not a big deal for employee or employer. In Sillycon Valley, which is "serviced" by the INS California Service Center, it's a multiple-month wait. (CSC is the slowest of the four INS centers.) Being able to transfer one's H-1B at the time of petition submission is a major win.
Portability of I-140s and LCs:If I read this correctly - and IANAL - but it sure looks as though it means "no more indentured servitude." If I read that section correctly, it sounds like "If INS has stalled on your I-140 for > 6 months, and you can get the same job at another employer, you don't have to start your Green Card process from square one". (Again, IANAL, and if I'm wrong on my interpretation of that section, someone needs to point that out, because I don't want anyone misled).
Backlog: Both the language in S.2586 which would tell INS to get its ass moving on cases pending more than six months, and Congressional funding for adjudications (as opposed to enforcement-only, which has been policy up to now) might give INS the capacity to reduce the backlog. This is INS we're talking about - so whether they have the will to do what they're required to do under this law remains to be seen. But if they don't, the bits about increased portability of H-1B visas as well as labor certifications and I-140s seem to be good protection to workers caught in the trap of having their paperwork sitting on an INS shelf for 2-3 years.
> [
> somehow I get the feeling that making your customers think of you as the enemy
> is probably not the best business strategy.
Elementary game theory - "tit for tat". Treat us like the enemy for 20 years, sooner or later we're gonna wise up.
When it comes to copy-protection, it goes all the way back to the days of cassette tape (royalties on blank tape), the VCR (the Sony case), and DAT (killed the format by forcing hardware manufacturers to implement SCMS).
We've always been their enemy.
It's only been in the past six months that we've collectively woken up from 20-odd years of abuse and realized that they are our enemy.
Segue to the Katz article on virtual communities. The realization that RIAA/MPAA are not just invisible trade organizations, but are actively attacking us - indeed, that there is an "us" for them to attack - is all the evidence I need to know that there are communities. We are bound together by common ideas and goals, not accidents of geography, but it doesn't make us any less a community than our enemies, namely RIAA and the MPAA.
Filk: 2600 miles and runnin'
(Parody: NWA/Dr. Dre's "100 Miles and Runnin'")
[ ... ]
And we got ten thousand hackaz strong,
Got everybody singin' the De-CSS song,
And while you treatin' Goldstein like dirt,
Yo' whole fuckin' family wears De-CSS shirts.
Yes, I know the PS/2 ports have +5V and GND, so hot-swapping isn't necessarily safe, but it sounds you're saying it's more of a problem on the PS/2 port than, say, the old-style keyboard port.
What makes a PS/2 hotswap more risky than swapping an AT keyboard? (Obviously in the case of a serial mouse, there's no +5V supply on the serial port, but there is on a PS/2 mouse/port. But an AT keyboard seems to be the same kind of risk as a PS/2 keyboard, as both connectors have +5V and GND. What's the deal here? I don't hot-swap PS/2 mice, but have I just been damn lucky with my keyboards over the past few years? :-)
Obviously, a search for "hot-swap" and "ps/2" yields nothing but descriptions of boxen with PS/2 ports and hot-swap power supplies. Sigh. So any info on the failure mechanism you could provide would be appreciated. AdvTHANXance
Hey, I think we all thought this when we first saw the CC. e.g. My comment on flyingbuttcats& lt;/A>.
As for marital aids plugging in to keyboard sockets, fufme's web site appears to be no more. A pity, that.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a stick.
Cheaper Then a Playstation 2's rumored eBay sale value ($301-$1500) : The usual big-ass flatscreen monitor.
Unlimited (Mommy, can I have a stealth bomber for Christmas?) : A viable space program.
Tempted by the stealth bomber and a full load of nukes? Sure, who wouldn't be? But as cool as a stealth would be, it wouldn't be as useful as, say, a few gazillion on a faster, better space program.
You asked me what I want for Christmas? A Congress that'll let NASA skip the cheaper part in order to get back to "faster and better", and a private space industry able to give NASA a run for their money.
$10B to the first company - or NASA - able to put a team of six people on Mars for two years and return them safely to the earth. $2B for the first organization able to launch a Europa Orbiter. Another $2B for a Europa Lander, with a bonus $1B if you can find the ocean and take samples of what it's made of. $500M for the first 100-meter resolution pictures of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon.
Or $10B to the first group who can cut down the cost of lifting stuff to orbit to $1000/lb, and another $10B to every group for every 50% improvement thereafter. That'd be ~$50B to get the cost down to $100/lb. Over 50 years, it means spaceflight becomes affordable to the general populace, and at $2B/y, that works out to goddamn cheap. With lift costs at $1000/lb (let alone $100/lb!), you get the space probes and offworld colonies for free.
Yeah, but did they get first post?
> kinds of possible religions might be created by sentient machines capable of 'experience,' but the
> rest knows that this is beyond any forseeable event horizon.
From Red Dwarf:
"No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! If there were no Silicon Heaven, where would all the calculators go?"
> if you think that any amount of modelling, branch prediction, and
> hypotheses can ever actually 'know' something, especially something as individual as experience, then perhaps you've forgot about the cat.
If you're talking about Schroedinger's Cat, I'd say that's a bad example - quantum mechanics is probably the best-tested model we have going. Just because it conflicts with "common sense" doesn't mean it conflicts with observed behavior. The experiments are pretty conclusive proof that, yes, particles do exist in superpositions of states, the state vector collapsing upon observation.
Manipulating the superpositions of states and building quantum computers is a difficult - and possibly insurmountable - problem, but the reason people are interested in quantum computers is precisely because we have the mathematical understanding to talk about what sorts of things we could do with such a system if one existed.
Even if we never develop the technology to build a quantum computer, the theory's fascinating. (If I were 20 years younger, I'd forget all about learning about transistors and figuring out truth tables and just start trying to wrap my head around how to do useful computation with qubits.)
I'll segue out to an earlier "does [spoken] language affect the design of computer languages" Slashdot thread... I don't find that particular issue terribly interesting, but the I do think that design of computer languages is strongly affected by the type of machine you're programming.
Functional programing is a big jump from strictly procedural languages. You have to change the way you think, not the way you code. If someone develops a "usable" quantum computer, I can guarantee you that most of us are out of a job. Our generation has too much Von Neumann on the brain.
And I'll bet the hard AI folks will have a field day with it. "The brain's not a VN machine, it's a quantum computer! That's why the first attempts at hard AI failed!". ;-)
Back to subjective experience and consciousness again. My personal belief is that while Godel may well stop us from understanding (at the level of "run this code to get this result") conscious experience, it's no barrier to creating machines which have it.
I'll even go so far as to live down to Jaron's bit about how cybernetic totalists like to annoy people on the other side of the debate by saying. "Proof: Humans have been creating machines that have experience consciousness without understanding the mechanism by which consciousness arises by mating with each other for about a million years. Other species have been creating similar machines by similar means for possibly much longer periods of times".
So they sue the database?
This is :Clueless, even for :CueCat.
Nope, we don't understand conservation of momentum because we can't build frictionless surfaces. The pucks on the air-hockey table aren't good enough.
Nope, we don't understand Newtonian gravity because we can describe it by an inverse square law.
Nope, we don't understand special relativity because we can describe how clocks slow down when put into accelerating frames of reference.
Nope, we don't understand consciousness when we can model it and build a machine that passes the Turing test.
The first two statements ring hollow because we developed the technology to test our models. The third statement is untested because we have neither the models nor the technology.
I said untested, not untestable.
To make a long story short, a cybernetic totalist believes that at some point, we will develop models of consciousness that allow us to describe machines that posess it, and that we will also develop technology that will allow us to build said machines.
I'm one of 'em. At present, I take that last paragraph on faith - I'm on the Minsky side of things; a brain is a computer made of meat. It should be possible to build one.
Where I take issue with Jaron Lanier (aside from his IMHO preposterous assertion that not being able to build "ideal" computers equates to our not understanding computer science!) is that he believes that CTs see the eschaton as immanent. I don't. I see it as a possibility, but we have so many serious technological hurdles to jump over between "here" and "there" that I don't worry about it. Building nanopaste is highly nontrivial.
(I do agree with him that the blind acceptance of criticality is a problem - I'm also one of those people who "looks forward to it" - but even I acknowledge that criticality might not be as good a thing as I think it will be.)
So finally on to subjective experience.
I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience doesn't exist. I believe it exists. I experience it 24/7.
But likewise - I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience requires anything other than a sufficiently complex network of inputs, outputs, and some sort of feedback going on in the middle.
I can't explain how that works. Lanier would call it "soul". I call it "mind", and view it as an epiphenomenon of "brain". The fact that it is an epiphenomenon of "brain" doesn't make it any less real.
When Jaron says "But don't you experience your life? Isn't experience something apart from what you could measure in a computer?", I'd counter with:
"Yes I do, but as for the second question, I don't know, because I lack the tools to measure experience. It may be, as suggested in Godel, Escher, Bach, that my brain lacks the capability to understand said measurements, owing to some Godelian "loopiness" in that it's hard to emulate a brainputer on a brianputer. But at present, that hypothesis is untested, and I have to proceed as though it were measured.
As for ad hominem arguments, the notion that Turing developed the notion of machine sentience in order to deal with his own personal anguish is almost beneath contempt (I say "almost" because on Edge, "where ideas come from" is a legitimate topic for discussion), and I won't dignify it with a reply. Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea is IMHO valid, and Lanier does himself a disservice when attempting to criticize it on the grounds of its origins, not its merits.
Feh. A long rambling rant from Tackhead.
LionKimbro, regardless of our agreement or disagreement about Lanier's paper (I, too, found it a wonderful read; while I've taken a few slices out of him here, it's an excellent articulation of the non-CT point of view, contains much that is of merit that I've ignored in this post, and provides lots of food for thought), we're in solid agreement on one thing:
Those of you taking pride in not understanding the paper should seriously reconsider your position. Ignorance is not something to take pride in.
To those saying that Edge is "just a load of intellectual crap", would you also agree with some skript kiddie saying "That RMS guy at gnu.org, hes stupid, all he duz is write lots of stupid essays talking big intellectual crap about free beer versus free speech! Wut da fuk he talking about? N-E-1 with cl00 know that free software means #warez, d00d!!!"
Nope, we don't understand conservation of momentum because we can't build frictionless surfaces. The pucks on the air-hockey table aren't good enough.
Nope, we don't understand Newtonian gravity because we can describe it by an inverse square law.
Nope, we don't understand special relativity because we can describe how clocks slow down when put into accelerating frames of reference.
Nope, we don't understand consciousness when we can model it and build a machine that passes the Turing test.
The first two statements ring hollow because we developed the technology to test our models. The third statement is untested because we have neither the models nor the technology.
I said untested, not untestable.
To make a long story short, a cybernetic totalist believes that at some point, we will develop models of consciousness that allow us to describe machines that posess it, and that we will also develop technology that will allow us to build said machines.
I'm one of 'em. At present, I take that last paragraph on faith - I'm on the Minsky side of things; a brain is a computer made of meat. It should be possible to build one.
Where I take issue with Jaron Lanier (aside from his IMHO preposterous assertion that not being able to build "ideal" computers equates to our not understanding computer science!) is that he believes that CTs see the eschaton as immanent. I don't. I see it as a possibility, but we have so many serious technological hurdles to jump over between "here" and "there" that I don't worry about it. Building nanopaste is highly nontrivial.
(I do agree with him that the blind acceptance of criticality is a problem - I'm also one of those people who "looks forward to it" - but even I acknowledge that criticality might not be as good a thing as I think it will be.)
So finally on to subjective experience.
I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience doesn't exist. I believe it exists. I experience it 24/7.
But likewise - I have never seen a credible argument that subjective experience requires anything other than a sufficiently complex network of inputs, outputs, and some sort of feedback going on in the middle.
I can't explain how that works. Lanier would call it "soul". I call it "mind", and view it as an epiphenomenon of "brain". The fact that it is an epiphenomenon of "brain" doesn't make it any less real.
When Jaron says "But don't you experience your life? Isn't experience something apart from what you could measure in a computer?", I'd counter with:
"Yes I do, but as for the second question, I don't know, because I lack the tools to measure experience. It may be, as suggested in Godel, Escher, Bach, that my brain lacks the capability to understand said measurements, owing to some Godelian "loopiness" in that it's hard to emulate a brainputer on a brianputer. But at present, that hypothesis is untested, and I have to proceed as though it were measured.
As for ad hominem arguments, the notion that Turing developed the notion of machine sentience in order to deal with his own personal anguish is almost beneath contempt (I say "almost" because on Edge, "where ideas come from" is a legitimate topic for discussion), and I won't dignify it with a reply. Whatever the origin of the idea, the idea is IMHO valid, and Lanier does himself a disservice when attempting to criticize it on the grounds of its origins, not its merits.
Feh. A long rambling rant from Tackhead.
LionKimbro, regardless of our agreement or disagreement about Lanier's paper (I, too, found it a wonderful read; while I've taken a few slices out of him here, it's an excellent articulation of the non-CT point of view, contains much that is of merit that I've ignored in this post, and provides lots of food for thought), we're in solid agreement on one thing:
Those of you taking pride in not understanding the paper should seriously reconsider your position. Ignorance is not something to take pride in.
To those saying that Edge is "just a load of intellectual crap", would you also agree with some skript kiddie saying "That RMS guy at gnu.org, hes stupid, all he duz is write lots of stupid essays talking big intellectual crap about free beer versus free speech! Wut da fuk he talking about? N-E-1 with cl00 know that free software means #warez, d00d!!!"
"This is not spam!" is the first cry of the spammer.
0) Spam is theft.
1) Spammers lie.
2) If you think a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3) Spammers are st00pid.
(Footnote: Actually, "OooOOOOOHhonnnngggh! is the cry of the spammer. After I pound its balls flat with a mallet. The bit about "It wasn't spam, it was invitation to buy my product" only comes after they've regained the ability to speak. This is poor practice: when you whack a spammer, do it like you mean it. If properly whacked, the bits of goo around the server room will never recongeal into anything that has the ability to speak.)
Actually, while I think you meant it in jest, I think it's true.
My name isn't unique. There are a million John Does in the world. At work, I'm john_doe@johndoescompany.com, and at home, I'm jd@johndoesisp.net. Those are two unique identities.
Nothing bugs me more than carrying on a conversation with foo@bar.com, and having him "reply" to the wrong address because "John Doe"'s work address is above his home address in foo@bar.com's "address book". Not only do I not necessarily want personal correspondance at work, but now I have to forward that mail *back to my home address* if I want to keep a record of it in one place.
Email addresses uniquely identify users. Names don't. We expect total drooling fuckwits to be capable of associating phone numbers (7 to 10 arbitrary digits) with individuals, so it's actually pretty goddamn reasonable to expect them to be able to associate an email address (a pronounceable string of characters often bearing a striking resemblance to the person's name) with an individual too.
And as for those who are saying that "mailing everyone in your address book when you change addresses isn't spam", read the article.
If it mailed everyone in your address book with "Hi. This is John Doe. I'm now on MSN and my address is john_doe@m_s_n_dot_com", it would be a misfeature, but forgivable.
It doesn't.
It says "I recently began using a new product from Microsoft called MSN Explorer. With MSN Explorer, you can send and receive e-mail, exchange instant messages with me and the millions of other people who use MSN Explorer, browse the Web and much more. MSN Explorer even offers an exciting new look for using the web and makes it easy to find and play music online. Want to try it out? It's FREE! Just click on the link below and follow the download instructions", and presumably follows it with a link to a Trojan. (Yeah, I consider MSN a trojan. Deal with it.) 100,000 quatloos says the spam's in fuckin' HTML, too.
If it walks like spam, smells like spam, and is made from potted meat product like spam, it bloody well is spam.
I've just added the strings in the above-quoted spam to my procmail filter. The response will be "550 MSN auto-generated spam rejected. Use a real ISP that doesn't turn you into a spammer."
As for Bill Gates and the marketer who came up with this shit, anyone whose sole view of the world is their own lower digestive tract should not be permitted to come within 20 feet of a computer, much less one attached to the 'net.
But sure as fsck not 128kilobytes. Christ, my Apple //e had 128K, and it was state of the art!
ObMicrso~1Bash:
BTW, is it just me, or is that site the most garbled heap of nested tables and crap HTML I've seen in ages? I mean, even for a M$ FrontPage site, it's pretty fucking sick to see 70-80 kilobytes of HTML - 30K of banner-ad tables and 40K of other shite - for about 3K of actual text.
Multiply it out, that's about 200K of HTML I had to download to read something that could have fit in a single, albeit long, /. comment. What is it with m0r0n webmasters who think that a web site should be like a book - and require the manual clicking of a mouse to "turn a page" every time you read two or three paragraphs?
> As a former soldier myself, I suspect many of those same soldiers would turn
> to their political leaders and say "You're on your own pal. If you want civilians
> oppressed, call the LAPD."
Which is why the oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and emphatically not any particular leader.
Although I don't believe American soldiers have quite the same protections as the (West) Germans put in place following WW2, it's still true that no soldier is obliged to follow an unlawful order.
That's not to say that the decision not to follow an unlawful order is free of consequences; in fact, it's arguably the most important decision a soldier can make, and when made, you're staking your career (and possibly your life) on being right.
I believe the most generally-accepted response is to lay down one's arms and remove one's epaulets, with a comment to the effect of "This will be settled at the court-martial - whether it be mine or yours, sir, has yet to be determined."
Meanwhile, thanks for the reassuring note that they're still teaching this stuff. Props to yourself and all your fellow servicemen. (Yeah, and even the officers ;-)
If it were a contest between two ideologies - however exhausted they may be - I'd be interested.
But it's not. There is only one ideology, and it's common to both of the major parties: power.
Power: How to get it. How to keep it.
The debates over Social Security? Nobody debating this issue cares about SS per se - they care about nailing down the Grey Power vote. Education/health? The soccer mom vote. Violence in the media? The religious right then says the things you can't say.
DMCA and UCITA are straight out of Machiavelli. Both the feudal lord and the Prince of the Rennaissance city-state can (and should) abuse the peasants all they want - the abuse prevents them from rising above subsistence levels, and the Church placates them. But don't ever piss off the nobles. They're where your real support comes from.
The 'net as a playground for terrorists, pedophiles, and pirates? Scare the ignorant into voting for you, and simultaneously lay the groundwork for a surveillance state - a necessary piece of infrastructure for long-term consolidation of power.
Don't ever delude yourself into thinking that anyone who wants your vote is interested in anything other than power.
Anyone who thinks "It Can't Happen Here" hasn't been paying attention:
From a CNN article:
If you think the Chinese and Russian net.surveillance systems are things that can only happen in totalitarian states, think again. Since the end of the Cold War, we've gone from defending the free world against totalitarianism to helping totalitarian states set up their surveillance programs.
Yes, "politics is almost over". Not because of some fluffy Katzesque triumph of free Netizens, but because there'll no longer be a need for the charade.
The former USSR held elections for the 74 years following the Revolution. Present-day China does the same thing.
Power wins.
Actually, not quite: "remove immediately those portions of the Web site that contain unauthorized or illegal [and still undefined] misappropriations of [DC's] intellectual and proprietary rights, or which assist or induce others to do so"
What the blistering three-nippled fuck are they talking about?
What are intellectual rights? What are proprietary rights? Or do they mean "intellectual-and-proprietary rights" as a long way of saying "IP rights". Can any lawyers comment on that wording? Seems a weird way to say it, but IANAL.
And what does "to do so" mean? The only fsckin' verb in that sentence is "to contain unauthorized or illegal misappropriations of DC's [whatever]". Do you see any portions of that web site which assist or induce others to contain information? I sure don't.
Sigh. At least it's an improvement in that they've hired a real lawyer to do the blustering, as opposed to someone with Robert McElwaine's command of the English language.
But it's still a crock. Unless and until DCNV informs Kenyon & Kenyon as to which material - specifically - it believes is infringing, and K&K informs the owner of Flyingbuttmonkeys.com, it's still a load of freshly spat-up cat vomit.
Speaking of unauthorized use of these things and the phrase "IANAL", I just realized that two of 'em, glued together (flat end to flat end), and with any sharp flashing edges on the plastic properly-smoothed, would serve as a pretty useful dildo. Or better yet, a buttplug.
You could bend over on all fours, insert the modified cats, have a good friend give a really good yank on the cord, and plastic barcode-reading cats would fly out of your butt.
Worse. The Direct Marketing Association will require that a privacy-invasive :CueCat will be required to scan it ;-)
I like ConceptJunkie's reponse: "Evil. Stupid".
But in answer to your question about when they started seeing the consumer as the enemy - 'twas always thus. Taxes on the sale of blank "music" CD-R media extended to blank "data" CD-R media are nothing more than extensions of the taxes on blank cassette tapes. Ditto the hamstrings on DAT that prevented it from being a commercial medium.
They've always regarded the customer as little more than a sheep to be sheared, a fool to be parted with our money. Ditto the bands who actually produce the content they resell.
Make no mistake - the consumer has always been a dupe in their eyes. Only recently, now that we have the power to force a change their business model, have we gone from "harmless dupe" to "enemy".
But they've never had anything more than contempt for us. The only thing that's changed recently is that the veil's been ripped away, and we can see them for what they really are.
We don't want your DRM-hobbled music in the presence of unprotected alternatives.
We won't buy your DRM-hobbled crap in the presence of unprotected alternatives.
OK, says RIAA, we'll take away all the unprotected alternatives, releasing music only in watermarked, protected formats, and we'll badger the hardware companies to self-destruct any device that doesn't comply. (What, you mean you didn't want to throw out your entire CD collection and buy it all over again?)
Fuck 'em.
When consumers are presented with the choice between SDMI and rolling around in a pool of freshly spat-up cat vomit, the choice is remarkably easy. Not only is the pool of half-digested Friskies and mouse-heads less offensive, it is also delightfully warm.
Original post is Message-ID {x67lk4bzvw.fsf@kharendaen.krall.org} from 30 Oct 1999 - and may still be on Dejanews.
And if the PHB doesn't get it after that, I follow Paul Tomblin's advice (also found in alt.sysadmin.recovery):This guy would probably peg me as an "Isolate", but I'm probably more connected than he'll ever be. No, I couldn't give a damn 'bout my cow orkers except inasmuch they're good people to work with and we can produce a quality product at a good price and support it well. (They are, we do, and we do, respectively. It's a great place to be.)
But my community is more than just my cow orkers, it's also /., a few geek mailing lists I hang out on, and so on.
Schmoozing at the picnic, playin' softball and droolin' over the company newsletter got nothin' to do with it. My IP connectvity gives me a "network" of friends that beats these artificial "but you have to play 'dance-on-the-fulcrum-to-show-teamwork' with Johnny from Marketing!" social games hands-down.
You forgot (c) it's bloody difficult for FBI to tap everyone's phone 24/7 and to turn all the conversations into easily-searchable transcripts.
Swap out the 120M removable media from the Carnivore box and replace it with a 100G hard drive next year, and you've got a reasonable shot at being able to record all email at that ISP and dump it into a big-ass database.
Anyone who thinks that the FBI will scan every packet going through routers in the US is living in a paranoid fantasy world.
Anyone who thinks that FBI does not want to dump every packet going through routers in the US is living in a Polyanna fantasy world.
OK, suppose they do it. Now it's a black box that the FBI guy says is running the open-source version of Carnivore. Great.
Old version: "Trust us, the closed-source version only captures SMTP headers and throws out ones with the wrong From: line"
Open-sourced version: "Trust us, the CARNIVOR.EXE on this box was compiled from the open source version that you geek types wrote."
Hands up, anyone who's sleeping better at night.
Open source has nothing to do with this debate. It all comes down to trust. Do we trust the FBI or not? Regrettably, FBI's track record over the past 50 years has been pretty consistent in demonstrating that they're not worthy of our trust.
In 5 years, I'll no longer dare to make statements like this. Somehow, my political views will evolve to a more mature position, whereby I recognize that FBI has a legal and moral duty to defend me against terrorists, pedophiles, computer programmers, and drug dealers.
I wonder if FBI will have a brain-scanning version of Carnivore in 20 years that'll determine whether my political views really changed over that time, or if I was just duckspeaking in order to stay out of Room 101?