When judges make their rulings, they have two things to go by. First, they look at the letter of the law. If the law is clear on a specific point, the Judge will usually rule along those lines.
Oftentimes, the law isn't sufficiently clear about something. So judges generally look for past rulings made on related issues. They then make their ruling based on the precedents that other judges have laid down in the past. Today's ruling on pop-ups is a terribly bad thing, because other judges are likely to use it to decide future pop-up cases.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, there are tools that users can employ to block all pop-ups. The Mozilla browser can solve this problem once and for all.
I guess the question is, how long most users remain clueless about pop-ups and spam, and ignorant about how to block these intrusions. Right now, it's mainly the tech-savvy population that knows how to do this. But I bet in five years' time, all dominant web and email clients will automatically block pop-ups and spam. With any luck, that will render stupid precedents like today's meaningless, and will send wretched companies like WhenU where they belong.
A search for 'linux' on msn.com give amazon and ebay as the top two results, and a microsoft site promoting migration from Linux to Windows as the fourth listing. A search on MSN India is even more amusing -- the top result is a dead link, and the second one is Linuxsucks.com."
Everybody knows that the 1.0 release of every Microsoft product sucks. But for the markets they want to take over, they are often able to squash the competition by v. 3.0 or 4.0.
Google's obviously done a fantastic job so far in the search world. But then, Netscape did a fantastic job with Navigator until it turned into Communicator bloatware. Then Microsoft came out with a 4.0 release that ate Netscape's lunch.
Google clearly has the brains to fight, but do they have the resources to remain the #1 engine, now that The Dark Lord has decided he wants that particular crown?
In any case, MS often has the last laugh over people who ridicule their 1.0 releases.
No surprise that Lessig got to the heart of the Post article in his comments. Unfortunately, It appears that Lessig accidentally turned a paraphrase attributed to Bolland into a direct quote. Paraphrasing Boland, the Post wrote:
open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.
In his weblog, Lessig mistakenly turned this paraphrase into a direct quotation from Boland. He then continued, this time with an actual quotation from Boland taken from the same article:
To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO.
I'm not at all saying that the Post mischaracterized what Boland was saying, but it's important that words aren't put in her mouth, which is what Lessig inadvertently did.
Now, on to Lessig's analysis:
If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign. The level of ignorance built into that statement is astonishing, and the idea that a government official of her level would be so ignorant is an embarrassment. First, and most obviously, open-source software is based in intellectual-property rights. It can't exist (and free software can't have its effect) without it.
Lessig makes a good point about property rights, and how free software does not subvert them.
But free software is nevertheless deeply subversive. What it subverts is not property rights, but the ability of corporations to corner the market in a variety of software applications. Whether Microsoft builds it, or OpenOffice.org builds it, something of value is being created whenever people sit down to code software. The only question is whether this labor enriches society as a whole, or whether a significant part of that labor extracts wealth from society for the benefit of Microsoft's shareholders.
It seems to me that Boland's view of WIPO is that it exists to serve the interests of companies who create proprietary software. One of the drawbacks to free software is that it is, well, free. And unless a company (like IBM) gets a vested interest in selling hardware and services to accompany this free software, there's not going to be money to counter the lobbyists who steer WIPO's agenda in a pro-Microsoft direction.
This idea is so incredibly backwards and wrong I don't know where to begin. Predictably, the article provides absolutely no level of detail about how such a service would work. But it sounds as if this will amount to giving students limited access to some half-broken and incomplete service whereby DRM-crippled files would be downloaded.
It also sounds as though colleges will pay a set fee per student, so they can use the service, thus supposedly freeing up the college of legal liability.
But wait, what happens if the college-affiliated jukebox doesn't carry, say, Rush's CD catalog? As a broke college student who already indirectly paid my $30 extra in tuition to subsidize this program, what am I likely to do? That's right, go onto a Kazaa and pirate those Rush CD's. And then we're right back where we started. And at that point, you can be sure that both my college and I are back on the hook, as far as the record companies are concerned.
More to the point, I think the most pressing concern is how much money from these college jukeboxes would be passed to the artist. The article makes no mention of this. And I'm inclined to think that when I download my DRM-crippled music, at this cut-rate University special fee, the artist is going to get shafted even more than if I had purchased a CD. And to me, the whole point of buying music is to support the artist. If a big chunk of my dollar doesn't support the artist, then piracy seems a moral option. I can always go to the artist's concert later, paying for tickets and t-shirts.
So to sum up, there's plenty of reason to be distrustful of this. It looks like a way for record companies to take $30 or whatever for each college student, and then to continue going after these same students, when they resort to piracy after realizing the college jukebox sucks.
If the job is to locate illegal file sharing, then I guess the RIAA is going about it in a fairly predictable manner. They're basically using a bunch of leading mainstream artists from different genres. I suppose the good thing here is that if somebody needs to get mauled in court, it might as well be the people who feel a need to listen to Whitney Houston, Destiny's Child, and J. Lo (all of whom are well represented on the spreadsheet.)
It's hardly surprising that the RIAA would seek out listeners of crap artists, given that's most of what the recording industry pushes. The take home message is that if you are downloading cool, interesting stuff, you're may be safe for the foreseeable future; since that's not constituting the bulk of what's getting shared.
As an aside, but also touching on piracy issues, it was nice to see my OpenOffice.org pop open that friggin' Excel spreadsheet.
I'm finishing up a book manuscript that was written almost entirely on a $250 Thinkpad that I scored on eBay. I've been incredibly productive on this machine for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that I've deliberately never set it up to go online. So I have no ability to check email or surf the web when I should be working. Also, I've installed no games onto the machine. This Thinkpad is my work computer, and I've personally set it up so that when I'm at the keyboard there's nothing fun competing for my attention.
Computers are the most wonderful tool for distracting yourself ever created. So get yourself a cheap used notebook, and only load the software on it that you need to get work done. And for God's sake, don't hook it up to the Internet!
I Bet Steel is Still the Better Choice
on
Bamboo Bike A Reality
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· Score: 4, Interesting
From the summary:
This is a strong step towards making bicycling more sustainable, expecially in contrast to aluminum, one of the most resource demanding materials that exist.
It's a cool looking bike, but there's a few things worth mentioning. First of all, compared to driving cars, any form of bicycle is the most sustainable mechanized transport imaginable. I think if we have to worry about the fifteen pounds of metal used for each bicycle, then we might as well give up all hope that humans can survive on the planet. Because if things are that bad, the millions of people buying SUV's are going to put us over the edge in no time, no matter what material we fashion bicycles out of.
Secondly, the summary says that aluminum is "one of the most resource demanding materials that exist."
That statement strikes me as terribly disingenuous, if it's not also mentioned that recycled aluminum does away with about 95% of the energies needed to extract aluminum from ore. And besides, how many bicycles are actually made from aluminum or fancy alloys/composites? No bicycle I've ever ridden, I know that much. And certainly not the bikes that are going to be produced for developing countries.
The real question here is how much extra work goes into fabricating a bamboo bike, vs. mass producing a steel-framed bike that's totally useful to anyone who's not a racing enthusiast. Because I would bet that making bamboo bikes in quantity would take fivefold or even tenfold the labor of stamping out cheap steel-framed bikes. And if that's the case, bamboo bikes could never be within reach of the poor.
Given how eco-friendly a steel-framed bike is, it's probably counterproductive to devote attention to an alternative that would probably be fundamentally unsuited to mass production.
I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work. Must I leave my country to do so?
Yep. And you must also accept a salary of around $5,900 a year, assuming you're relocating to India. You said you would be willing to work cheaper, but I doubt you'll want a job at that salary.
I think it's needlessly confrontational to use phrases like "code hoarder."
I'm sure the author would like nothing better than to give away X-Plane for free. The trouble is that there are some applications that require the bulk of one person's time, for years on end, if they are to be amazing. And, like anybody else, the creator of this work needs to eat.
I think we're certain to see a greater variety of open source freeware apps in the years ahead. But there just aren't enough people out there with serious expertise in both aeronautics and coding, who can pitch in and build an open source X-Plane in their free time.
You want 1001 small apps, from hard drive erasers to science calculators, the open source movement has you covered. You're also covered with the handful of huge apps, that everybody needs, since there are sufficient coders out there to recognize the supreme significance of these apps and donate bits of their time (take Mozilla and OpenOffice.org as two examples.)
But if you want something as niche as a world class flight simulator, sorry, you're probably not gonna get it open source. It's gonna take a huge effort from a tiny group of people, and they need to do it to the exclusion of other things. Like anyone else, they've gotta eat. And to call their code "useless" because it's not open source, that's unfair, mean spirited, and ignorant.
In a widely publicized interview from earlier this month, RIAA Senior Vice President Matt Oppenheim said:
Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services.
Translation: "Oh Lord, I hope Freenet is inherently unable to have robust search functions, because if it ever develops these, we're hosed. But in the meantime, we can dismiss this software as being a big POS."
Now, less than two weeks after the interview, it seems the one aspect of Freenet that Oppenheim wanted to write off at is on the brink of being fixed.
Saying "...not an inexpensive..." is a double negative, and double negatives used without a clear purpose tend to be needlessly confusing. The author could have written, "...not a cheap..." and it would carry an identical meaning, but be far more readable.
Read the same sentence again, substituting "cheap" for "inexpensive" and see how much more readable it is.
The author's point was fine. He just said it in a needlessly clumsy way, using a double negative without reason.
</style lesson>
Supposedly, these are professional writers having their text marked up by professional editors. Something that amateurish in a story's lead is a tip-off that the article's content may suffer from the same ineptitude as its style. And it did.
I stopped reading after the Wi-Fi analysis because this was superficial, poorly written crud. Italicized stuff is from the article.
Selling doodads on the Web is not an inexpensive way to make billions, and the malls are still jammed with shoppers.
You know when you've got a double negative way up in the article's lead paragraph, that what you're about to read is gonna be slop.
When Starbucks announced in January 2001 that most of its outlets would offer wireless broadband Internet access to their frappuccino-addicted customers, skeptics questioned its plan. Turns out Starbucks was ahead of its time: the chain now has thousands of wireless cafés across the US, and space on the Wi-Fi bandwagon has become scarce.
How exactly has space on the Wi-Fi bandwagon become scarce? And even though Starbucks has thousands of wireless cafes up and running, what kind of profits, or losses, are being made? We don't get any kind of analysis here, because the article just breathlessly jumps ahead and asks this question:
How much are people willing to pay? Can the many service providers work out access-sharing agreements with competitors so consumers don't have to shell out for multiple accounts?
Sorry, but that's the wrong question to ask. The question isn't how much people are willing to pay. The question is if they're willing to pay at all. I suspect that Wi-Fi will be the ultimate loss-leader for businesses who profit when their customers linger. Lose money on the Wi-Fi; gain it back by selling an extra $2.00 coffee. But again, the article doesn't even bring up this idea. Instead, we get:
These details should be sorted out in the next year or two, and consolidation is pretty much guaranteed. Once that happens, Wi-Fi will be even more widespread than a certain chain of cafés.
Sure, but will Wi-Fi still even be available at that certain chain of cafes? Will a large enough portion of paying customers keep Starbuck's network financially viable? See, for instance, the rather sobering third item published a couple months ago on this page.
I use a wireless network all the time. It's truly a useful and earth-shaking technology. Which makes it galling to see such a superficial analysis of its vast possibilities. There's no doubt that Wi-Fi will produce amazing changes in how we live and how we work, but the author of this article did a terrible job of backing up his suppositions.
Has anybody looked into the potential to use open source philosophy to create things other than software? It seems like one of the most worthy projects in the Linux world could well be forming a group of people who make life miserable for SCO in a variety of legal ways.
It seems that if you really want to advance the state of Linux, doing things to bring about the downfall of SCO and to convince others never to follow in their footsteps should receive as much attention at the moment as, say, improving the user interface. In other words, I think getting a few of the sharpest people in the Linux world leading the effort to mess with SCO might take away Linux's greatest threat.
I'm neither a programmer nor a Linux user, and I'll readily acknowledge I don't know what the hell I'm talking about here. But I'd be really interested to hear ideas about how the Linux community could organize an open-source style project, not to create software, but to help wipe SCO off the map. To start with, what would such a group look like, and what would its immediate short-term projects be?
the early years of telephone answering machines, and, I think, 300 baud modems as well. (Now donning craggy old man's voice:)
Supposedly, you were supposed to notify the phone company that you were installing one of these devices. In fact, I think I even bought a Commodore 64 modem once that came labeled that I needed to notify the phone company. But I never did, and neither did anyone else.
Yeah, the government may well impose a fee of $400 for your 802.11B hookup. But the real question is, is this law being enforced, and are they even bothering to look for offenders? They'd have to look pretty hard too, considering the 802.11B connection I just installed at a friend's house barely reaches upstairs.
All in all, this strikes me as a law that is about as likely to be enforced as jaywalking; although I almost got a jaywalking ticket once but that's a whole other story.
Is this specific 500-CD deal a big thing? Of course not. But a few people in New Zealand have been measurably inconvenienced by the FUD spread by SCO.
I think little by little, SCO's efforts to create FUD may inconvenience substantial numbers of people. It wouldn't be a bad idea for a website to be started, for keeping track of the myriad ways that SCO's threats of copyright infringement liability have caused tangible expense and inconvenience.
It would be a good knowledge base to have, and might come in handy for purposes of a potential class-action suit against SCO, if the company's claims of infringement are found by the courts to be without merit. In any case, this would be one way to give SCO's backers some FUD of their own.
Anyway, does anyone know of a good Linux program that allows one to prepare and re-organize writing in an Outline form?
Leo does a great job with what you're asking for. It's really intended to be more of a programming tool than a writer's outliner, but it still does the job of outlining beautifully, and has some nice perks thrown in. Plus, it's free.
I've used it for organizing book chapters, and it does that job beautifully. I even have a friend who uses it for outlining, writing, and then automatically outputting finished text in LaTeX. That goes way beyond my needs of simple outlining. Unfortunately, Leo doesn't let you print your outline directly to paper. You have to follow an exporting command, and in the process you'll lose your outline's hierarchical format.
From the article it appears they both work equally well so the deciding factor will have to be...features.
No, the deciding factor will have to be...video quality.
Here's what Pogue's article says about the Microsoft product:
If both conversation partners have high-speed Internet connections or are on the same office network, Messenger's video looks very good. You have only three size choices for the video - small, smaller or microscopic - but it's bona fide video. [Also, Pogue goes onto say that the MS product gets bogged down if you're connecting through a router]
And here's what Pogue's article says about Apple's product:
Apple, on the other hand, would sooner die than release anything that could be described as "stuttering" or "microscopic." In iChat AV, video is as crisp, clear, bright and smooth as television (640 by 480 pixels), in a window as small as a Triscuit or as big as your screen.
As you can see, video quality for the Apple product is incomparably better. The whole point of this video chat stuff is great quality video, and it appears that Apple is the only one offering high quality video at the moment. Unless you're content to look at triscuits;)
Heh, the download is 171K. If memory serves, that's the exact size of a 1541 floppy disk. Looks like they crammed the disk with every last level they could fit on there.
Looking at the screen shot, I don't know how I missed out on Wizard, since I played every C64 game back in the mid-1980s (it sure beat doing my high school homework.)
This Wizard game looks a lot like Jumpman...now that game was a blast! I agree with you that C64 programmers pushed the hardware to the limit. I remember what a sad day it was when I sold my C64 setup for $500 back in 1986 so that I could buy an Imagewriter II for my Mac Plus. I knew that for I'd never get a Mac Plus game that was half as good as what ran on my C64...not even Dark Castle came close.
Anybody who cares about the system of intellectual property which has made the American entertainment and information technology industries so dynamic, and enjoys their fine products, from Windows XP to the "Lord of the Rings" movies to your new cell phone with built-in games and internet access, should understand the necessity of crushing Kazaa once and for all.
What should be crushed once and for all is Microsoft and the RIAA.
On the off chance that you're serious, do you really want to lump Microsoft, the recording industry, and the film industry together? No doubt the MPAA has done some heinous things, but at least those folks can reliably deliver good products at reasonable prices. The brand new extended cut multi DVD package of LOTR is like $28; whereas any crap band you can name goes for $18 for a CD.
There's just something about the recording industry that has them pushing inferior products at ultra-high markups. God bless Kazaa, especially if it hastens the recording industry's ruin. I'm never going to give the RIAA another nickel, if I can help it. I support the bands I like by catching them live, and if I really want a new CD I'll buy it at their show or order it from their online store (so they walk away keeping at least half the price of the CD.) And yeah, I listen to a bit of commercial garbage, and the stuff I like I buy used, listen for a while, and then trade it in. That way, the record companies don't get a penny.
And as for Windows XP and Microsoft, don't get me started.
Once again, however, I'm not defending the MPAA people so much as saying that at least they are capable of delivering a great product at a reasonable price. I think the world would be a better, richer place with a far more flourishing software and music scene if Microsoft and the big music labels were systematically denied their income. I'm voting with my wallet to make that happen, and you should too.
I'm looking forward to receiving my $13. I bought a hundred or so CDs between 1988 and last year, so I figure this check covers about 1% of the total I've been overcharged. In any case, the recording industry will never get another nickel from me. The RIAA disgusts me so much that I've stopped buying new CD's entirely. Now I just buy used, listen to it a while, and sell it. The money I save goes to seeing the musicians I like perform locally, and sometimes to buying higher margin stuff at their shows, like T-shirts and so forth.
We've got the recording industry in a vulnerable spot. It's time to withhold cash from them and go in for the kill.
Toshiba Research Europe have just demonstrated quantum crypto over 100km fibre links. Sounds like there's still a fair bit of work to be done before it leaves the lab...
How could it not have left the lab? Is Toshiba's lab 100KM long? That's a pretty huge lab!
However, since its not to early to think about the Fall semester for incoming freshman, I was wondering what electronic devices people found most useful for college now.
No, it is to early to think about buying stuff for the fall semester. Wait three months and do your shopping then, and you'll get a better selection and 20% more for your money.
I was given an iPod about six months or so, and it's the best toy I've ever owned. There's nothing like flying coast to coast, and having 5000 songs to choose from. And it made my recent cross-country road trip a joy...the only thing that could have made it more perfect for road trips is if the unit included a laser jammer to keep me from getting nailed at that speed trap in Cleveland.
It blows my mind that Apple has been able to improve on the iPod. As if the original's form factor was too thick (not quite as thick as a deck of cards), they still somehow cut it almost in half.
I played around with the new music service this week. Super impressively done. Having said that, I don't think I'll order any music from it. The record companies have shown themselves to be complete bastards for decades now, in how they screw over the public and the artists. I hate to think that Apple's now riding to this industry's rescue, perhaps only a year or two before the entire industry would go down the crapper. If there was only some way I could use this service with the bulk of the money going straight to the artist, I'd be incredibly enthusiastic about this whole thing.
I'm always thrilled to see Apple succeed at something, since I think they tend to make beautifully designed products. I just hope that this success isn't the event that keeps the parasitic recording industry form withering away.
whitelists mean the spammers have won.
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Spam Meeting Wrap-up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Eventually, if everybody started doing this, spammers would see zero revenue, and the tide of spam would disappear.
The trouble is that comparatively few people are savvy enough to switch to whitelist email systems. And it only takes a small percentage of internet users who don't block spam, and who order occasionally from spam, to keep the spam problem a growing nightmare for the rest of us. I think it's unrealistic to suggest that whitelists can solve the spam problem, since there's no way to argue they'll be adopted widely enough to keep huge amounts of spam from reaching people.
And another thing. I want random people to be able to contact me, for whatever reason. What I don't want is to be contacted by automated email systems for purposes of marketing. In my mind, whitelists prevent the latter, but they also prevent or seriously inconvenience the former. And to me, that's unacceptable. I presonally rely on Mozilla filters, which rid me of about 97% of my spam, while allowing the email of random people who need to contact me to (usually) get through.
In many ways, the same advice here applies to people trying to get word about out bands/books/games etc etc.
Sort of interesting to see a bunch of comments moderated 5 already, just fifteen minutes after the article was posted. I started reading this article, since I had a small press publish my first (nonfiction) book, and I intend to publish my own stuff next year. After getting about halfway through, I decided the material wasn't worth my time. There are no doubt some good points here, but despite the claim from the submitter, this stuff is really mostly applicable to smalltime comicbook authors. And it's an incredibly lengthy piece considering the small amount of advice presented. It clocks in at nearly 10,000 words (for reference, books start at about 50,000 words), and I suspect the main advice in this piece could be extracted to make a new article barely 1000 words long.
Slashdot Mirror
When judges make their rulings, they have two things to go by. First, they look at the letter of the law. If the law is clear on a specific point, the Judge will usually rule along those lines.
Oftentimes, the law isn't sufficiently clear about something. So judges generally look for past rulings made on related issues. They then make their ruling based on the precedents that other judges have laid down in the past. Today's ruling on pop-ups is a terribly bad thing, because other judges are likely to use it to decide future pop-up cases.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, there are tools that users can employ to block all pop-ups. The Mozilla browser can solve this problem once and for all.
I guess the question is, how long most users remain clueless about pop-ups and spam, and ignorant about how to block these intrusions. Right now, it's mainly the tech-savvy population that knows how to do this. But I bet in five years' time, all dominant web and email clients will automatically block pop-ups and spam. With any luck, that will render stupid precedents like today's meaningless, and will send wretched companies like WhenU where they belong.
Everybody knows that the 1.0 release of every Microsoft product sucks. But for the markets they want to take over, they are often able to squash the competition by v. 3.0 or 4.0.
Google's obviously done a fantastic job so far in the search world. But then, Netscape did a fantastic job with Navigator until it turned into Communicator bloatware. Then Microsoft came out with a 4.0 release that ate Netscape's lunch.
Google clearly has the brains to fight, but do they have the resources to remain the #1 engine, now that The Dark Lord has decided he wants that particular crown?
In any case, MS often has the last laugh over people who ridicule their 1.0 releases.
open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.
In his weblog, Lessig mistakenly turned this paraphrase into a direct quotation from Boland. He then continued, this time with an actual quotation from Boland taken from the same article:
To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO.
I'm not at all saying that the Post mischaracterized what Boland was saying, but it's important that words aren't put in her mouth, which is what Lessig inadvertently did.
Now, on to Lessig's analysis:
If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign. The level of ignorance built into that statement is astonishing, and the idea that a government official of her level would be so ignorant is an embarrassment. First, and most obviously, open-source software is based in intellectual-property rights. It can't exist (and free software can't have its effect) without it.
Lessig makes a good point about property rights, and how free software does not subvert them.
But free software is nevertheless deeply subversive. What it subverts is not property rights, but the ability of corporations to corner the market in a variety of software applications. Whether Microsoft builds it, or OpenOffice.org builds it, something of value is being created whenever people sit down to code software. The only question is whether this labor enriches society as a whole, or whether a significant part of that labor extracts wealth from society for the benefit of Microsoft's shareholders.
It seems to me that Boland's view of WIPO is that it exists to serve the interests of companies who create proprietary software. One of the drawbacks to free software is that it is, well, free. And unless a company (like IBM) gets a vested interest in selling hardware and services to accompany this free software, there's not going to be money to counter the lobbyists who steer WIPO's agenda in a pro-Microsoft direction.
It also sounds as though colleges will pay a set fee per student, so they can use the service, thus supposedly freeing up the college of legal liability.
But wait, what happens if the college-affiliated jukebox doesn't carry, say, Rush's CD catalog? As a broke college student who already indirectly paid my $30 extra in tuition to subsidize this program, what am I likely to do? That's right, go onto a Kazaa and pirate those Rush CD's. And then we're right back where we started. And at that point, you can be sure that both my college and I are back on the hook, as far as the record companies are concerned.
More to the point, I think the most pressing concern is how much money from these college jukeboxes would be passed to the artist. The article makes no mention of this. And I'm inclined to think that when I download my DRM-crippled music, at this cut-rate University special fee, the artist is going to get shafted even more than if I had purchased a CD. And to me, the whole point of buying music is to support the artist. If a big chunk of my dollar doesn't support the artist, then piracy seems a moral option. I can always go to the artist's concert later, paying for tickets and t-shirts.
So to sum up, there's plenty of reason to be distrustful of this. It looks like a way for record companies to take $30 or whatever for each college student, and then to continue going after these same students, when they resort to piracy after realizing the college jukebox sucks.
If the job is to locate illegal file sharing, then I guess the RIAA is going about it in a fairly predictable manner. They're basically using a bunch of leading mainstream artists from different genres. I suppose the good thing here is that if somebody needs to get mauled in court, it might as well be the people who feel a need to listen to Whitney Houston, Destiny's Child, and J. Lo (all of whom are well represented on the spreadsheet.) It's hardly surprising that the RIAA would seek out listeners of crap artists, given that's most of what the recording industry pushes. The take home message is that if you are downloading cool, interesting stuff, you're may be safe for the foreseeable future; since that's not constituting the bulk of what's getting shared. As an aside, but also touching on piracy issues, it was nice to see my OpenOffice.org pop open that friggin' Excel spreadsheet.
Computers are the most wonderful tool for distracting yourself ever created. So get yourself a cheap used notebook, and only load the software on it that you need to get work done. And for God's sake, don't hook it up to the Internet!
This is a strong step towards making bicycling more sustainable, expecially in contrast to aluminum, one of the most resource demanding materials that exist.
It's a cool looking bike, but there's a few things worth mentioning. First of all, compared to driving cars, any form of bicycle is the most sustainable mechanized transport imaginable. I think if we have to worry about the fifteen pounds of metal used for each bicycle, then we might as well give up all hope that humans can survive on the planet. Because if things are that bad, the millions of people buying SUV's are going to put us over the edge in no time, no matter what material we fashion bicycles out of.
Secondly, the summary says that aluminum is "one of the most resource demanding materials that exist."
That statement strikes me as terribly disingenuous, if it's not also mentioned that recycled aluminum does away with about 95% of the energies needed to extract aluminum from ore. And besides, how many bicycles are actually made from aluminum or fancy alloys/composites? No bicycle I've ever ridden, I know that much. And certainly not the bikes that are going to be produced for developing countries.
The real question here is how much extra work goes into fabricating a bamboo bike, vs. mass producing a steel-framed bike that's totally useful to anyone who's not a racing enthusiast. Because I would bet that making bamboo bikes in quantity would take fivefold or even tenfold the labor of stamping out cheap steel-framed bikes. And if that's the case, bamboo bikes could never be within reach of the poor.
Given how eco-friendly a steel-framed bike is, it's probably counterproductive to devote attention to an alternative that would probably be fundamentally unsuited to mass production.
I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work. Must I leave my country to do so?
Yep. And you must also accept a salary of around $5,900 a year, assuming you're relocating to India. You said you would be willing to work cheaper, but I doubt you'll want a job at that salary.
I'm sure the author would like nothing better than to give away X-Plane for free. The trouble is that there are some applications that require the bulk of one person's time, for years on end, if they are to be amazing. And, like anybody else, the creator of this work needs to eat.
I think we're certain to see a greater variety of open source freeware apps in the years ahead. But there just aren't enough people out there with serious expertise in both aeronautics and coding, who can pitch in and build an open source X-Plane in their free time.
You want 1001 small apps, from hard drive erasers to science calculators, the open source movement has you covered. You're also covered with the handful of huge apps, that everybody needs, since there are sufficient coders out there to recognize the supreme significance of these apps and donate bits of their time (take Mozilla and OpenOffice.org as two examples.)
But if you want something as niche as a world class flight simulator, sorry, you're probably not gonna get it open source. It's gonna take a huge effort from a tiny group of people, and they need to do it to the exclusion of other things. Like anyone else, they've gotta eat. And to call their code "useless" because it's not open source, that's unfair, mean spirited, and ignorant.
Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services.
Translation: "Oh Lord, I hope Freenet is inherently unable to have robust search functions, because if it ever develops these, we're hosed. But in the meantime, we can dismiss this software as being a big POS."
Now, less than two weeks after the interview, it seems the one aspect of Freenet that Oppenheim wanted to write off at is on the brink of being fixed.
Saying "...not an inexpensive..." is a double negative, and double negatives used without a clear purpose tend to be needlessly confusing. The author could have written, "...not a cheap..." and it would carry an identical meaning, but be far more readable.
Read the same sentence again, substituting "cheap" for "inexpensive" and see how much more readable it is.
The author's point was fine. He just said it in a needlessly clumsy way, using a double negative without reason.
</style lesson>
Supposedly, these are professional writers having their text marked up by professional editors. Something that amateurish in a story's lead is a tip-off that the article's content may suffer from the same ineptitude as its style. And it did.
Selling doodads on the Web is not an inexpensive way to make billions, and the malls are still jammed with shoppers.
You know when you've got a double negative way up in the article's lead paragraph, that what you're about to read is gonna be slop.
When Starbucks announced in January 2001 that most of its outlets would offer wireless broadband Internet access to their frappuccino-addicted customers, skeptics questioned its plan. Turns out Starbucks was ahead of its time: the chain now has thousands of wireless cafés across the US, and space on the Wi-Fi bandwagon has become scarce.
How exactly has space on the Wi-Fi bandwagon become scarce? And even though Starbucks has thousands of wireless cafes up and running, what kind of profits, or losses, are being made? We don't get any kind of analysis here, because the article just breathlessly jumps ahead and asks this question:
How much are people willing to pay? Can the many service providers work out access-sharing agreements with competitors so consumers don't have to shell out for multiple accounts?
Sorry, but that's the wrong question to ask. The question isn't how much people are willing to pay. The question is if they're willing to pay at all. I suspect that Wi-Fi will be the ultimate loss-leader for businesses who profit when their customers linger. Lose money on the Wi-Fi; gain it back by selling an extra $2.00 coffee. But again, the article doesn't even bring up this idea. Instead, we get:
These details should be sorted out in the next year or two, and consolidation is pretty much guaranteed. Once that happens, Wi-Fi will be even more widespread than a certain chain of cafés.
Sure, but will Wi-Fi still even be available at that certain chain of cafes? Will a large enough portion of paying customers keep Starbuck's network financially viable? See, for instance, the rather sobering third item published a couple months ago on this page.
I use a wireless network all the time. It's truly a useful and earth-shaking technology. Which makes it galling to see such a superficial analysis of its vast possibilities. There's no doubt that Wi-Fi will produce amazing changes in how we live and how we work, but the author of this article did a terrible job of backing up his suppositions.
It seems that if you really want to advance the state of Linux, doing things to bring about the downfall of SCO and to convince others never to follow in their footsteps should receive as much attention at the moment as, say, improving the user interface. In other words, I think getting a few of the sharpest people in the Linux world leading the effort to mess with SCO might take away Linux's greatest threat.
I'm neither a programmer nor a Linux user, and I'll readily acknowledge I don't know what the hell I'm talking about here. But I'd be really interested to hear ideas about how the Linux community could organize an open-source style project, not to create software, but to help wipe SCO off the map. To start with, what would such a group look like, and what would its immediate short-term projects be?
Supposedly, you were supposed to notify the phone company that you were installing one of these devices. In fact, I think I even bought a Commodore 64 modem once that came labeled that I needed to notify the phone company. But I never did, and neither did anyone else.
Yeah, the government may well impose a fee of $400 for your 802.11B hookup. But the real question is, is this law being enforced, and are they even bothering to look for offenders? They'd have to look pretty hard too, considering the 802.11B connection I just installed at a friend's house barely reaches upstairs.
All in all, this strikes me as a law that is about as likely to be enforced as jaywalking; although I almost got a jaywalking ticket once but that's a whole other story.
I think little by little, SCO's efforts to create FUD may inconvenience substantial numbers of people. It wouldn't be a bad idea for a website to be started, for keeping track of the myriad ways that SCO's threats of copyright infringement liability have caused tangible expense and inconvenience.
It would be a good knowledge base to have, and might come in handy for purposes of a potential class-action suit against SCO, if the company's claims of infringement are found by the courts to be without merit. In any case, this would be one way to give SCO's backers some FUD of their own.
Leo does a great job with what you're asking for. It's really intended to be more of a programming tool than a writer's outliner, but it still does the job of outlining beautifully, and has some nice perks thrown in. Plus, it's free.
I've used it for organizing book chapters, and it does that job beautifully. I even have a friend who uses it for outlining, writing, and then automatically outputting finished text in LaTeX. That goes way beyond my needs of simple outlining. Unfortunately, Leo doesn't let you print your outline directly to paper. You have to follow an exporting command, and in the process you'll lose your outline's hierarchical format.
From the article it appears they both work equally well so the deciding factor will have to be...features.
No, the deciding factor will have to be...video quality.
Here's what Pogue's article says about the Microsoft product:
If both conversation partners have high-speed Internet connections or are on the same office network, Messenger's video looks very good. You have only three size choices for the video - small, smaller or microscopic - but it's bona fide video. [Also, Pogue goes onto say that the MS product gets bogged down if you're connecting through a router]
And here's what Pogue's article says about Apple's product:
Apple, on the other hand, would sooner die than release anything that could be described as "stuttering" or "microscopic." In iChat AV, video is as crisp, clear, bright and smooth as television (640 by 480 pixels), in a window as small as a Triscuit or as big as your screen.
As you can see, video quality for the Apple product is incomparably better. The whole point of this video chat stuff is great quality video, and it appears that Apple is the only one offering high quality video at the moment. Unless you're content to look at triscuitsLooking at the screen shot, I don't know how I missed out on Wizard, since I played every C64 game back in the mid-1980s (it sure beat doing my high school homework.)
This Wizard game looks a lot like Jumpman...now that game was a blast! I agree with you that C64 programmers pushed the hardware to the limit. I remember what a sad day it was when I sold my C64 setup for $500 back in 1986 so that I could buy an Imagewriter II for my Mac Plus. I knew that for I'd never get a Mac Plus game that was half as good as what ran on my C64...not even Dark Castle came close.
Anybody who cares about the system of intellectual property which has made the American entertainment and information technology industries so dynamic, and enjoys their fine products, from Windows XP to the "Lord of the Rings" movies to your new cell phone with built-in games and internet access, should understand the necessity of crushing Kazaa once and for all.
What should be crushed once and for all is Microsoft and the RIAA.
On the off chance that you're serious, do you really want to lump Microsoft, the recording industry, and the film industry together? No doubt the MPAA has done some heinous things, but at least those folks can reliably deliver good products at reasonable prices. The brand new extended cut multi DVD package of LOTR is like $28; whereas any crap band you can name goes for $18 for a CD.
There's just something about the recording industry that has them pushing inferior products at ultra-high markups. God bless Kazaa, especially if it hastens the recording industry's ruin. I'm never going to give the RIAA another nickel, if I can help it. I support the bands I like by catching them live, and if I really want a new CD I'll buy it at their show or order it from their online store (so they walk away keeping at least half the price of the CD.) And yeah, I listen to a bit of commercial garbage, and the stuff I like I buy used, listen for a while, and then trade it in. That way, the record companies don't get a penny.
And as for Windows XP and Microsoft, don't get me started.
Once again, however, I'm not defending the MPAA people so much as saying that at least they are capable of delivering a great product at a reasonable price. I think the world would be a better, richer place with a far more flourishing software and music scene if Microsoft and the big music labels were systematically denied their income. I'm voting with my wallet to make that happen, and you should too.
We've got the recording industry in a vulnerable spot. It's time to withhold cash from them and go in for the kill.
Toshiba Research Europe have just demonstrated quantum crypto over 100km fibre links. Sounds like there's still a fair bit of work to be done before it leaves the lab...
How could it not have left the lab? Is Toshiba's lab 100KM long? That's a pretty huge lab!
However, since its not to early to think about the Fall semester for incoming freshman, I was wondering what electronic devices people found most useful for college now.
No, it is to early to think about buying stuff for the fall semester. Wait three months and do your shopping then, and you'll get a better selection and 20% more for your money.
It blows my mind that Apple has been able to improve on the iPod. As if the original's form factor was too thick (not quite as thick as a deck of cards), they still somehow cut it almost in half.
I played around with the new music service this week. Super impressively done. Having said that, I don't think I'll order any music from it. The record companies have shown themselves to be complete bastards for decades now, in how they screw over the public and the artists. I hate to think that Apple's now riding to this industry's rescue, perhaps only a year or two before the entire industry would go down the crapper. If there was only some way I could use this service with the bulk of the money going straight to the artist, I'd be incredibly enthusiastic about this whole thing.
I'm always thrilled to see Apple succeed at something, since I think they tend to make beautifully designed products. I just hope that this success isn't the event that keeps the parasitic recording industry form withering away.
The trouble is that comparatively few people are savvy enough to switch to whitelist email systems. And it only takes a small percentage of internet users who don't block spam, and who order occasionally from spam, to keep the spam problem a growing nightmare for the rest of us. I think it's unrealistic to suggest that whitelists can solve the spam problem, since there's no way to argue they'll be adopted widely enough to keep huge amounts of spam from reaching people.
And another thing. I want random people to be able to contact me, for whatever reason. What I don't want is to be contacted by automated email systems for purposes of marketing. In my mind, whitelists prevent the latter, but they also prevent or seriously inconvenience the former. And to me, that's unacceptable. I presonally rely on Mozilla filters, which rid me of about 97% of my spam, while allowing the email of random people who need to contact me to (usually) get through.
Sort of interesting to see a bunch of comments moderated 5 already, just fifteen minutes after the article was posted. I started reading this article, since I had a small press publish my first (nonfiction) book, and I intend to publish my own stuff next year. After getting about halfway through, I decided the material wasn't worth my time. There are no doubt some good points here, but despite the claim from the submitter, this stuff is really mostly applicable to smalltime comicbook authors. And it's an incredibly lengthy piece considering the small amount of advice presented. It clocks in at nearly 10,000 words (for reference, books start at about 50,000 words), and I suspect the main advice in this piece could be extracted to make a new article barely 1000 words long.