How's that interesting or surprising? "Welcome to Justice4Pat.com - this is the site for the Justice for Pat Richard Campaign and will aim to present his side in the current legal problems."
Well, it could make Google's founders rich without forcing them to give up control of the company. Who knows how much Google will be worth in a few years? Why not sell a small portion of it just in case? And why not expand with $2 billion? What if they can turn it into $20 billion?
Do you know what a hostile takeover is? It's when one company buys greater than 50% of a another company against the board of director's will. Google here is only selling about 10% of itself. So, control of it will still be in private hands. So, they actually ARE NOT taking the risk of a hostile takeover.
We can't do civil disobedience when we go to the polls. The only type of civil disobedience we can have there is not voting. And when the Diebold board of directors gave $200,000 to the Republicans over the last election cycle and Wired reports that they made an unauthorized patch with Georgia's software before the Republican upsets in 2002, that makes it seem rather fishy...
First off, they can log information with or without these "web bugs." I know this because I run my own websites and I track visits because I like knowing how much traffic I'm getting, with what terms, etc.
Given that, this article is useless.
But even more so, if you go to the site it says at the bottom:
This site is operated by Consumer.net and is not operated or controlled by the US Government or the telemarketing industry
Consumer.net testified at Federal Trade Commission Workshops for Internet Privacy in 1997 and the "Do-Not-Call" Forum in 2000. Consumer.net authored a paper for an Online Profiling workshop at the Department of Commerce in 1998.
The Consumer.net Privacy Policy is found at PrivacyPolicy.com
This privacy policy states:
Web Site Log Files: We site log files are generated that collect the IP Address of the visitor, date, time, and pages visited. Aggregate reports for web site visitors are generated that do not contain personally identifiable information.
Advertising reports are generated that show the IP addresses of visitors who clicked on ads. This information may be sent to the advertiser to confirm the number of "click-throughs." The advertiser normally already has this information as a result of the user clicking on the adverstisement. No additional information about the visitor is supplied to the advertiser. The log files are eventually deleted.
There. Case solved. Stop being paranoid about such silly things. If you want to be paranoid, be paranoid that the MPAA might accidentally associate your IP with file sharing even if you don't file share, or be paranoid that John Ashcroft is using the PATRIOT Act or Patriot Act II (to be introduced in Congress soon) to spy on you for reasons unrelated to terrorism (as he has done). Better yet, donate some money to the ACLU to protect your civil liberties or to the EFF to protect your electronic freedoms.
Re:I'm not an American...
on
TIA Project to End
·
· Score: 2, Informative
the US didn't plant the bugs, a leader in competition with China's leader planted the bugs. This was admitted to by the Chinease.
I wasn't aware of any US bugs, but Google turned up this article by a left leaning UK paper that claims bugs, and since the parent post made a weak claim that claimed a "rumor," I'd certainly consider this to be at the very least to be a "rumor," whether or not it is confirmed. And before you dismiss this as a leftist press, I'd note that they correctly dismissed the Iraqi "tractor trailers" as Hydrogen producing vehicles, a month or two before the mainstream New York Times reported on it (some accuse them of being leftist, but they are usually pretty conservative in making sure they have evidence to back up claims, except of course in Judith Miller's conservatively biased articles that only cited Chalabi (who Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld wanted to install as leader of Iraq), and Jayson Blair's articles).
Also, I couldn't find anything to back up your claim that China bugged UN offices, though I seem to have a vague recollection about something that Russia bugged. Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?
Ironically, one can imagine that the virtual turnout for the dearly departed will nearly always outstrip the real life version by an order of magnitude. Figure that out and you might have something interesting to get worked up about.
Easy. The cost of getting there is small. You simply go to your computer. In real life, you have to get out of bed, schedule a flight, cancel work, go to the airport, go to another city, find a place to stay, get up again the next day and go to the funeral.
that Google has this information from phone books as well (just google for a phone number or address), and there are many reverse phone books online. I think they should focus on solving identity theft in ways that if someone's info is already available (as it is everywhere) it can't be utilized well.
You should read The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig. One of the things he talks about in the book is economic reasons of why entities (such as companies or countries) might "give away" their intellectual property under an open license. One argument would be if they forked an open project and kept a secret version, they would have to spend a lot more resources if they wanted to use updates to the project. IIRC, another reason is that it enhances value of assets they have in other ways. Maybe if they give away their source code it enhances the value of their computers significantly enough so that they don't need to keep it proprietary.
How the fuck is splitting an atom going to help anyone?
Well, nuclear fission, which involves splitting uranium atoms, generates massive amounts of cheap electricity in nuclear power plants. Downsides of this are that nuclear energy are not sustainable, waste disposal can be a pain, and badly run plants can lead to accidents. But, I think that nuclear power plants have surely helped economies of several industrialized nations in the past.
Many spammers use systems with holes in them. So if we have the slammer and sobig worms going around, maybe these are infecting spammer machines and preventing spam from occurring somehow. Then again, I've read that "experts have speculated that Sobig.F, which affects only machines running Microsoft Windows, is setting up computers to become spam generators."
Call me paranoid....but this might be a trick by SCO to probe the defences of the Open Source community, by having us do their historical code research for them, gratis.
Wait, so you're saying they discovered that our defense is Google?
I've been reading Lessig's The Future of Ideas as well, but I'd note that the commons he discusses has simply been endangered through bad copyright law and bad handling of the spectrum used for radio (which could be used for alternate purposes such as broadband), whereas the commons from Linux cannot be endangered by coroporations except through bad patent law. If you choose to make something free, corporations can't endanger that, as long as what you have is legal. Through Lessig's Creative Commons licenses in fact you can insure that it remains free.
Sorry, but your definition is technically incorrect. A public good has two qualities:
Jointly supplied. If you supply it to one person, supplying it to the second person has zero marginal cost. In other words, it costs the same to supply it to 5 people as to supply it to 10,000.
Non-excludable. If it's supplied to one person, then you can't prevent anyone who doesn't pay from using it.
The non-excludable characteristic is the chief problem of public goods--if you need to buy a nuclear missile defense system for a large city, and only 100,000 of 20 million people pay, there's no way to allow the 19 million people who don't pay to get nuked while saving the other 1 million.
So, if this system costs $100 million, and is worth $100 to each person, if everyone acts in his own self interest then no one will contribute to buy it (because they won't effect a difference on whether it is bought or not, so they won't pay). So, they'll each gain $0 in utility, but if they each paid $10 they would have gained $90 and paid for the system.
Thus, the collective goods problem is justification for taxation and government.
In all honesty, anyone who thinks that you can't losslessly capture a streaming music or video file without total hardware control (or some legal control) is a crock or a liar or an RIAA or MPAA executive who is both a crock and a liar.
There are programs that do this now--the GPL'ed ASFRecorder, Streambox VCR (although this is legally questionable), and many others.
Ok, so how about they find some way to argue these programs are illegal? Aside from the fact that they won't be able to eliminate the already disseminated programs (i.e. look at DeCSS), someone could simply use a program to capture audio off the sound card or video off the video card or some other similar scheme.
Without a Palladium type system that prevents the users from controlling the hardware, and without Draconian legislation or legislation that violates fair use, there is no way that streaming files can prevent their copying.
Just a half hour? Proficient in it? I never thought I was interested enough to spend several hours on Blender when I still don't know many other technologies (I recently taught myself Perl and I've learned C++ and Java in high school and college so far...), but 30 minutes?
That I'll do, if you weren't exaggerating. Which book should I read?
Ahead of you in Japan...
on
Clammy Modding
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Yup, they've already thought of this in Japan, where the toilets will clean your derrière. No, I'm not joking...to quote from a random article about this:
An American diplomat was at a dinner party in a Japanese home when he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He did his business, stood up and realized he didn't have a clue about how to flush the toilet.
The diplomat speaks Japanese, but he was still baffled by the colorful array of buttons on the complicated keypad on the toilet. So he just started pushing.
He hit the noisemaker button that makes a flushing sound to mask any noise you might be making in the john. He hit the button that starts the blow-dryer for your bottom. Then he hit the bidet button and watched helplessly as a little plastic arm, sort of a squirt gun shaped like a toothbrush, appeared from the back of the bowl and began shooting a stream of warm water across the room and onto the mirror.
Yeah, somewhat. But I'm sure he wouldn't completely side with them, and he seems free from corrupting influences, so I would somewhat trust his decision (although still thinking he was wrong, and maybe I'd trust him somewhat less). I'm not a one issue person though so I'd probably still support him (I'm socially liberal, and fiscally conservative (regarding balancing the budgets) like him, and he seems less corrupt than others (I liked McCain and Nader in these fashions), and I share several other views with him). I supported the war earlier because I thought at the time that Bush was telling the truth and that Iraq had WMDs, and I've changed my mind on this in time, but I still supported Dean when I was pro-war (he's hardly a pacifist, he just thought the war wouldn't accomplish anything and would cost lives, tons of money, world opinions of us, and tie up our army for years, all for nothing) This is all purely speculation of course.
Yes they are in the same party, but Dean isn't cozy with Hollywood. In the last quarter he raised more than any Democratic candidate, $7.6 million, from over 80,000 different people, with an average dollar amount in the 80s. This average amount is smaller than that of anyone else, and because he gets his money from the people due to his large grassroots support, he won't be beholden to special interests.
In fact, he has been guest blogging this week on Lawrence Lessig's blog, and Lessig is generally critical of current copyright law, so I consider him very promising (he hasn't yet explicity stated his opinions of the DMCA and copyright/technology law but he seems to have favorable positions; he's very pragmatic and chooses his policies based on the evidence).
Slashdot Mirror
How's that interesting or surprising? "Welcome to Justice4Pat.com - this is the site for the Justice for Pat Richard Campaign and will aim to present his side in the current legal problems."
How does giving links to the ANSWERS help people solve it? Doesn't that seem like cheating to you? Why not figure it out yourself?
Well, it could make Google's founders rich without forcing them to give up control of the company. Who knows how much Google will be worth in a few years? Why not sell a small portion of it just in case? And why not expand with $2 billion? What if they can turn it into $20 billion?
Do you know what a hostile takeover is? It's when one company buys greater than 50% of a another company against the board of director's will. Google here is only selling about 10% of itself. So, control of it will still be in private hands. So, they actually ARE NOT taking the risk of a hostile takeover.
We can't do civil disobedience when we go to the polls. The only type of civil disobedience we can have there is not voting. And when the Diebold board of directors gave $200,000 to the Republicans over the last election cycle and Wired reports that they made an unauthorized patch with Georgia's software before the Republican upsets in 2002, that makes it seem rather fishy...
Given that, this article is useless.
But even more so, if you go to the site it says at the bottom: This privacy policy states:There. Case solved. Stop being paranoid about such silly things. If you want to be paranoid, be paranoid that the MPAA might accidentally associate your IP with file sharing even if you don't file share, or be paranoid that John Ashcroft is using the PATRIOT Act or Patriot Act II (to be introduced in Congress soon) to spy on you for reasons unrelated to terrorism (as he has done). Better yet, donate some money to the ACLU to protect your civil liberties or to the EFF to protect your electronic freedoms.
Also, I couldn't find anything to back up your claim that China bugged UN offices, though I seem to have a vague recollection about something that Russia bugged. Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?
that Google has this information from phone books as well (just google for a phone number or address), and there are many reverse phone books online. I think they should focus on solving identity theft in ways that if someone's info is already available (as it is everywhere) it can't be utilized well.
Yeah, like they can't find the 100 most common typo riddled versions of their domains and afford to pay $500-1000 per year to redirect those.
Maybe because that's a bad business strategy and companies want to hire the best people for the job at a market salary?
Post a link to it from Slashdot.
Or tell hackers that it is the most secure computer ever.
Except that this is at the bottom of the page in the fine print and no one will notice it, especially if you list 100 results...
You should read The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig. One of the things he talks about in the book is economic reasons of why entities (such as companies or countries) might "give away" their intellectual property under an open license. One argument would be if they forked an open project and kept a secret version, they would have to spend a lot more resources if they wanted to use updates to the project. IIRC, another reason is that it enhances value of assets they have in other ways. Maybe if they give away their source code it enhances the value of their computers significantly enough so that they don't need to keep it proprietary.
Many spammers use systems with holes in them. So if we have the slammer and sobig worms going around, maybe these are infecting spammer machines and preventing spam from occurring somehow. Then again, I've read that "experts have speculated that Sobig.F, which affects only machines running
Microsoft Windows, is setting up computers to become spam generators."
I've been reading Lessig's The Future of Ideas as well, but I'd note that the commons he discusses has simply been endangered through bad copyright law and bad handling of the spectrum used for radio (which could be used for alternate purposes such as broadband), whereas the commons from Linux cannot be endangered by coroporations except through bad patent law. If you choose to make something free, corporations can't endanger that, as long as what you have is legal. Through Lessig's Creative Commons licenses in fact you can insure that it remains free.
- Jointly supplied. If you supply it to one person, supplying it to the second person has zero marginal cost. In other words, it costs the same to supply it to 5 people as to supply it to 10,000.
- Non-excludable. If it's supplied to one person, then you can't prevent anyone who doesn't pay from using it.
The non-excludable characteristic is the chief problem of public goods--if you need to buy a nuclear missile defense system for a large city, and only 100,000 of 20 million people pay, there's no way to allow the 19 million people who don't pay to get nuked while saving the other 1 million.So, if this system costs $100 million, and is worth $100 to each person, if everyone acts in his own self interest then no one will contribute to buy it (because they won't effect a difference on whether it is bought or not, so they won't pay). So, they'll each gain $0 in utility, but if they each paid $10 they would have gained $90 and paid for the system.
Thus, the collective goods problem is justification for taxation and government.
In all honesty, anyone who thinks that you can't losslessly capture a streaming music or video file without total hardware control (or some legal control) is a crock or a liar or an RIAA or MPAA executive who is both a crock and a liar.
There are programs that do this now--the GPL'ed ASFRecorder, Streambox VCR (although this is legally questionable), and many others.
Ok, so how about they find some way to argue these programs are illegal? Aside from the fact that they won't be able to eliminate the already disseminated programs (i.e. look at DeCSS), someone could simply use a program to capture audio off the sound card or video off the video card or some other similar scheme.
Without a Palladium type system that prevents the users from controlling the hardware, and without Draconian legislation or legislation that violates fair use, there is no way that streaming files can prevent their copying.
Just a half hour? Proficient in it? I never thought I was interested enough to spend several hours on Blender when I still don't know many other technologies (I recently taught myself Perl and I've learned C++ and Java in high school and college so far...), but 30 minutes?
That I'll do, if you weren't exaggerating. Which book should I read?
and so on..
Yeah, somewhat. But I'm sure he wouldn't completely side with them, and he seems free from corrupting influences, so I would somewhat trust his decision (although still thinking he was wrong, and maybe I'd trust him somewhat less). I'm not a one issue person though so I'd probably still support him (I'm socially liberal, and fiscally conservative (regarding balancing the budgets) like him, and he seems less corrupt than others (I liked McCain and Nader in these fashions), and I share several other views with him). I supported the war earlier because I thought at the time that Bush was telling the truth and that Iraq had WMDs, and I've changed my mind on this in time, but I still supported Dean when I was pro-war (he's hardly a pacifist, he just thought the war wouldn't accomplish anything and would cost lives, tons of money, world opinions of us, and tie up our army for years, all for nothing) This is all purely speculation of course.
Yes they are in the same party, but Dean isn't cozy with Hollywood. In the last quarter he raised more than any Democratic candidate, $7.6 million, from over 80,000 different people, with an average dollar amount in the 80s. This average amount is smaller than that of anyone else, and because he gets his money from the people due to his large grassroots support, he won't be beholden to special interests.
In fact, he has been guest blogging this week on Lawrence Lessig's blog, and Lessig is generally critical of current copyright law, so I consider him very promising (he hasn't yet explicity stated his opinions of the DMCA and copyright/technology law but he seems to have favorable positions; he's very pragmatic and chooses his policies based on the evidence).