You mean 'copyrighted', AC. The content of the web site is copyrighted as per the Berne Convention. So are audiovisual works.
There's a difference between end users and middlemen here. As an end user, you can go get any sort of work and cross out words, underline them, do any sort of editorial or advertising stuff you want and it means nothing- you're just doing it for yourself.
However, the middlemen have to come to terms with the content creator if they intend to change things. See the muddled caselaw on 'framing' sites- and that is not even altering the content directly, but containing it in a possibly deceptive environment! You can buy a book and write "Eat At Joe's" on every page, but the publisher, the bookseller etc. don't have that privilege, and your opinion of it as the end buyer is not really relevant- the people transferring the content must enter into agreements with the content provider in order to do any such alteration or even to be allowed to transfer the content at all.
Common carriers needn't reach such an agreement, but common carriers don't alter or even keep aware of exactly what they're transferring. Publishers _do_ need to reach such an agreement. You go and try to arrange with the publisher to pencil in tiny 'links' under words in their version of the latest Stephen King novel- see if you don't get your ass handed to you in court. Go and bring in an end user to cry 'How dare you tell me what to do with MY BOOK!' and see how flat that falls.
Microsoft could _get_ the right to change the content of your page. This is through a simple process known as a 'contract', towards a goal known as 'advertising'. All that is well established and is exactly what they're trying to do. The only difference is, they're trying to steal it, and that's ridiculous. They must come to terms with content providers if they want to advertise in this manner. They are more than capable of doing that and can afford it- they're just being criminal because they're a bit out of touch with reality, and because they _want_ free advertising links to their properties in every site on the Web, no matter who gets hosed by it. The fact that they want this doesn't make it legitimate. It's plainly, obviously, not.
"The next thing you'll be saying is telemarketers should pay you money for using YOUR PERSONAL PHONE, for the money it cost you on your phone bill because you were talking with them for a few seconds, some money for rent to have a place to keep the phone, money for food for you to have the energy to pick up the phone and talk, etc., etc."
Sure. Why not?
In the olden days, we lived in villages or towns. There's only so many people who can _try_ to contact you in a village- and in fact there's case law where if someone in the village decided to bang on your door and shout in your windows 24/7, they'd be harassing you and the law would tell them to stop or be stopped.
The difference between now and then is technology and the expansion of possible contacts, and nothing illustrates this better than the Internet.
When every stupid peddler in the world can 'contact' MILLIONS OF PEOPLE with relative ease, the rules have changed. Any given peddler may or may not have a 'right' to 'contact' me, but the CLASS of stupid peddlers obviously do not have the right to perform a denial of service attack on my email account, or for that matter to consume many hours out of my day while I grovel through the thousands of emails to try and look for actual communications from people I need to talk to. Filters don't completely solve this, either. They don't scale that much better than hitting 'delete'.
I don't know exactly what needs to be done to give stupid peddlers the capacity to market to people (maybe *gasp* BUYING ADVERTISING?) but in a situation of hyperconnectivity, 'cold calling' is no good. They just hook up a big machine and cold-call EVERYBODY, just like the telemarketer machines that dial more numbers than the operators can handle. Technology brings the connectivity to a point where the old rules don't make sense any more. We need new rules better suited to the situation.
In addition, Recipient agrees (i) to promptly upgrade to and obtain a license for the commercially released version of the Software when it becomes generally available to the public; (ii) to install all updates as 'mandatory updates' by Microsoft within 2 business days of receipt of such updates"
Ye gods!
I'd seen (i) before but I hadn't spotted (ii). Legally compelled to install unspecified software within 2 business days, no matter what? What are the penalties on failure to comply with this? (yes, I know UCITA would change the penalties to potential jail time, but what are the penalties NOW?)
Oh, that's cute. Note how there is no suggestion of what price this is to be- or even whether it'll be the same price for everyone, or decided on a case-by-case basis?!?
This is a recipe for "You've been a baaaad company, Soko. As you agreed, you are contractually obliged to obtain a license for the commercially released version of the software. Just for you, the price is $50,000 or your immortal soul;) just kidding! $50,000 or controlling interest..."
If I wrote a gaming site, what possible reason would I have to expect to get free links on competing gaming sites against their will? Have you never heard of the phrase, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"? Advertising costs money. I am not sure where you get this idea that I as a content producer get to place advertising on other sites without paying them...
Personally, I think I would be appeased if they paid me. 1/100th a cent per impression would be reasonable. They have no intention of letting me put content across to a web reader without putting in advertising links, which includes marking up works of fiction etc. so I think they need to pay for it, like any normal advertiser. If third parties want to do this, they can pay too. Otherwise it's "Yeah, we put an ad for Office in the middle of your poem, but it's okay because we let the kid down the street put a link to goatse.cx in the middle of your poem too!" What?? Where the hell is the logic in that?
You can also paste in banners to anything you wish. This doesn't mean that the people who added banner advertising to the actual site didn't need to pay for the privilege.
Nobody is suggesting that you can't whip out Notepad and do whatever you want. The point is, Microsoft are not doing this. They're gearing up to do a centralised text-based web advertising system. The mode of delivery is not relevant: if they expect to make use of words from other people's web sites as advertising links, they are obligated to pay the content providers like any advertiser. You don't enter into it at all. It's not you doing it. Your freedom to do stuff has nothing to do with this...
I think what the original poster meant was that, like any web advertising, Microsoft should come to terms with a site and pay them a royalty for the use of their words as advertising links. Whether they make this default in the browser or not is sort of their business, just like with banner graphics (on by default). It makes no sense to deploy smart tags without paying sites a royalty- if anything, it is more intrusive than banner advertising because it is IN the text being read. As such, it ought to equate to a considerable per-word royalty.
It is _advertising_, you fool. What business is it of yours whether Microsoft gets to deploy text-based advertising across all of creation without paying for it? Who asked you?
If they expect to have links IN the content area of anyone's page, they need to expect to pay for it. It's completely absurd to get all socialist on us NOW and give Microsoft such a vast amount of advertising links for nothing. TANSTAAFL, my friend. Ever heard of that one? No free lunch.
Why are you trying to give Microsoft an advertising handout? They can afford to pay for what they use. Do you think their need for charity is so great that others' wishes must be put aside? You're sounding alarmingly Socialist. Which I think is a good thing- but you're doing it wrong;)
Well, as an American, I know _I_ look to the Europeans on this. I do about as much as an individual can do, but it's not enough. We've lost control of our country- if we start laying plans for a Windows2000YearCyberReich, I do hope the rest of the world has it together enough to lay the smackdown on US. I know which side I'm on, too- it's the side of Judge Jackson, of James Madison the author of Federalist #10, the side of our justice and legal systems in their finest forms- but that does _not_ mean it will always be the side of _America_.
We'll see. There may be surprises. In particular, the arrogance of Microsoft in trying to seize control of all communications everywhere reminds me strongly of things like the dotcom bubble. News flash: just because _they_ are certain they will triumph and never give an inch and march on a road of bones etc etc chanting "Microsoft, kill 'em!" does NOT mean they are right. That's their fantasy. They can be as 100% convinced of it as anyone ever has, and act as if it's already reality, but there are still many toes that get stepped on by _that_ fantasy.
One of them is governmental autonomy, in many senses- including the autonomy of the _American_ government. The administration can be stupid, but if the actual power in the world begins to shift (as the money has shifted away from countries and towards multinational corporations) it _will_ be noticed. I would bet you anything that the NSA has many detailed plans in store for use in the event of Microsoft gaining unprecedented power in the cybersphere. The question is whether Mossad or the intelligence services of Iraq or China etc. _also_ have detailed plans for what to do in that event.
Anyone as arrogant and sloppy as Microsoft is a walking target. We should not so much fear them on a basis of their gaining that much power- we should fear them because, if they do gain that much power, they'll be useless, out of their depth, and easy prey for _many_ different problems not of their own making- indeed, not even acknowledged by them.
If Microsoft lives to unite all information and communications in one MS-controlled centralised format, that's one thing (and inherently bad, but let's overlook that for now). The trouble is, it equates to a digital monoculture- and there ARE people out there who live to invent digital Monoculture Blight, or to invent systems to surreptitiously enter the databases of such a digital monoculture and do whatever they want.
Whether Microsoft wants to do bad things to its 'customers' is moot. If I was an enemy intelligence apparat what I would want to do is this: five minutes before the invasion, thousands of key United States individuals and companies are penniless, their funds transferred overseas to a certain hostile nation. Digital hotlines between those people and their financial advisors have had their wirescrambled- DNS lookups no longer relate to anything sensible. All recorded telephone and postal addresses for defense industries have had one number changed. A fair amount of the actual military computer systems are hardened and impossible to compromise... but instructions for use and maintenance were produced in Word, and some small changes in meaning were introduced throughout thousands of hundred-page documents and maintenance manuals, to be proliferated as new materials are printed...
Good morning, America. Funny how a little dirtbag country would be daring actual physical attack on such a *ahem* powerful, computerised nation...
(and I'm no chest-thumping militarist but I hope to hell the NSA _are_ reading this, or projecting scenarios like it. Who says Microsoft themselves have to be hostile, or that they have to replace all military systems for there to be a massive risk involved with their course of action? I have to wonder, just how many foreign intelligence agents are working _at_ Microsoft _right_ _now_, and who, exactly, would notice? Given that MS wants to bring so much 'in-house', why would such an operative even need to put 'back doors' into anything? The data is steadily coming right into Microsoft's lap, as if MS was somehow mysteriously endowed with the credentials to be wholly, utterly trustworthy, just because they 'mean well'. What a set-up...)
*holds up cards* 9.9
A truly wonderful troll with a fine, fruity flavor right down to the piquant user-ID: the only flaw is at the very end, where 'Lord Hugh' cannot supply a link. Remember, you don't need to justify any sort of assertion if you're trolling- leaving the last sentence out entirely would have been still better! Ideally the impression you want to convey is, 'but of course everybody knows this'. However, this lapse does not negate the otherwise excellent qualities of the troll, not least the fine efficiency and lack of effort expended in producing it. Kudos and many happy +1 Funny's;)
You've got a funny definition of 'winning', if 'winning' means 'getting lots of publicity for the GPL, and leading large numbers of other respected industry people to point out the obvious nonsense in your statements';)
I say, go Bill! Bring it on, Bill. You're a damned fool if you think you can wildly publicise the GPL and still be able to define it in public opinion. Hell, Apple uses it, IBM can work with it. You think you has so much credibility that people ignore what IBM is doing, Bill? Don't you have the common sense to NOT PUBLICISE YOUR COMPETITOR'S PRODUCT? Yeesh! I don't remember you doing that with WordPerfect, or Netscape: in those instances, I remember you just making a product and acting as if it was the only thing anyone would ever want to use or know about. Now you feel you have to teach people NOT to use the GPL? Sounds like it's proving a worse threat, but you're damned stupid to change your tactics.
Now, that's what I'd say to ol' Bill. And at the same time I think maybe he's desperately trying to still get people to look at Linux, at the GPL, at all of that stuff at a time when Windows STILL DOMINATES. He wants people to look at the GPL while it still does NOT have a big place underlying lots of stuff in the mass market. He wants people to look at Linux while Windows still completely dominates userspace. That's why he's pushing the publicity so hard- because this is the best position of power he's likely to have for a while, unless he can stop the new threats and shift everybody onto even more Microsoft-based IT- and that's a very hard sell, and is not sure to succeed- and it's certainly going to have a harder time succeeding if this Open Source thing continues being used by Apple, IBM, et al.
It's interesting to watch- even clever- but I think it's an end-game, all the same. There are limits to how much power people will _consistently_ give to Microsoft. If they give too much they're capable of freaking out and pulling back, taking some losses and turning to something that seems safer: and to a large extent, GPL seems safer from an end user or semi-developer perspective, because it's the opposite of the pay-per-use thing Microsoft needs to go to: with GPL you own the programs. They're so hard to monetize that building in boobytraps and 'self-help' timebombs is completely pointless, and as a result they're ideal for the sort of person who wants to buy or assemble a thing and then be frugal and keep using the same thing for years without 'upgrades'.
This is why Microsoft is losing. Nothing lasts forever... the real question is, how much damage can they do in the meantime? And that, they're trying their best to do.
The real trouble is, in an environment with no restrictions and no rules, 'one bad egg' tends to be the player that WINS. Crime _does_ pay, cheaters _do_ prosper: this is why justice and the legal system are even necessary. When you have a situation where one of the players _can_ without penalty abuse power, there is no option for the others but to follow suit or be destroyed by their own inefficiency. The 'free market' has no interest in society per se: it is a system of belief under which the winner, by any means, _must_ be the most desirable player simply by virtue of having one. Much like an industrious mugger could be considered the finest citizen of a city because he has the highest income and is most effective at what he does...
So attention has to be paid to the extremist fringes of the situation- to the corporations that _are_ abusing society. Not because all corporations are painted with the same brush by default- but because, if no other force prevails, the market will cause ALL the corporations to either become equally abusive- or die.
Let me put it this way: I reserve the right to be wholly skeptical of, say, 'government research' that shows that dismantling all of Social Welfare and eliminating taxes for the rich and for corporations will make society be wonderful through 'trickle down theory'. This is because I already know the government has an agenda- it _is_ made of the wealthy and it _is_ paid off by corporations and I don't trust it to have an unbiased opinion on the matter.
However, the government does not have anywhere near as much of an obvious bias (yet!) regarding, say, drugs to cure cancer or 'fix' depression or make people lose weight. And corporate-funded research DOES have that agenda, to the extent that you're just about guaranteed to not hear a wrong thing about the damned product: if the antidepressant caused half the subjects to freaking drop dead and the other half to turn into giggling drooling imbeciles, all you're going to hear is "All subjects are no longer suffering from depression", that's where the money is. *G*
Why shouldn't I like _some_ of my research to be government funded? Then I can look for private research on _government_ issues, and keep 'shopping' for a viewpoint that's not too heavily bribed and paid off. But leaving all research strictly to the specific corporate entities most interested in getting specific results is asinine, and that's increasingly what we've got.
I, too, would be happy to see the world being basically same as it ever was, flaws and all.
The problem is, this is a trend with no obvious way to stop it, and the end point is NOT the same as things have always been. The end point is that releasing false results becomes _customary_, and that there are no significant research facilities left anywhere else to counterbalance that because they've been out-spent, out-publicitied, basically 'competed' into the ground.
At that point, you no longer have access to anything but false results, and people are so used to doctoring their results to please their owners/employers that it becomes traditional and expected. As Mildred Cho found, 98% of the studies say, HEY, what a great new product! That's a transition period- the direction it's heading is that 100% of the studies back the pharmaceutical industry, that more and more and finally _all_ of the studies _are_ funded by said industry, and that there's nowhere else you can go where people have the often expensive facilities to conduct such research at all. That's the end of the road. We're NOT at the end of the road, we are in progress toward that end.
How will you feel when 'false results' often happens? When it usually happens? When it always happens?
Do you think they have a right to suppress truths that could incriminate them or damage their profitability?
There's two issues here and only one is private ownership of scientific IP. The other is outright suppression of true but 'damaging' scientific IP, and that is IMHO the _really_ frightening aspect of all this.
In the future (_this_ future), there will be no cure for cancer, or any sort of immunizing agents for terrible new diseases, or even a cure for RSI- but there will be an unending stream of patent medicines to treat such ailments, none of which actually work.
This is no good. Profit maximizing IS NOT a recipe for societal health. The belief that it does equate to the ideal society is a religious belief based on blind faith.
Some people mysteriously have this idea that corporate-funded science is not real science at all, more along the lines of a division of marketing and spin control. They are raising the possibility that business may in some way be NOT AS TRUSTWORTHY as pure science, shocking as that suggestion may be.
"Betty Dong at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered data that led her to question the effectiveness of a medication being used daily by millions of people. But when she went to report it, she was blocked for seven years by the company that paid for the study.
"
"David Kahn, another researcher at the same school, was sued last November for $10 million by the company that sponsored his study, after he published a report that the AIDS drug he was testing was ineffective."
"Mildred Cho, a senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, took a different tack. Her 1996 study found that 98 percent of university studies of new drug therapies funded by the pharmaceutical industry reported that those new therapies were more effective than standard drugs. By comparison, just 79 percent of studies without industry financing found the new drugs to be more effective."
Can we say "duh"?
The question is, given the unarguable fact that business _is_ trying to muzzle and restrict science, what the hell are we going to do about it? I mean, other than give up entirely on the idea of having higher education and a scientific community that is worth listening to at all? It is one thing if _ownership_ of scientific discoveries gets concentrated in the hands of business. That is arguably bad, certainly slows progress and ties things up making them unusable to society at large. That's one thing. But surely suppressing scientific research and widely falsifying it and replacing it outright with spin and marketing is far worse? What are we going to do for _truth_ if the only permissible truth is that which is approved by its owners' marketing department? The role of spin and suppression in corporate science is a _lot_ more dangerous and alarming than the simple tendency of all corporate science to become private, withheld property.
In science, it is one thing to lock up your findings and play it cagey. It's uncooperative, but that's a judgement call. But to intentionally lie...
In order to have a social network that's worth a damn, you have to not be overly selfish.
Period.
Which explains a lot about the new breed of essentially Randite dotcommers... and what happened to them when Darwin turned out to be real, and not everybody could win.
Which is not to say all those merrily heartless libertarian extremists turned out to be hypocrites- I am sure there are a lot of them sleeping in their cars because by God they're not taking charity! Better to die alone than to bow to others!
It's just that... well, they can be sincere about that as much as they want, but I still can't help but think that SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE GOOD. They are how civilization has got along for centuries, for thousands of years. Scorning that seems like a singularly stupid and unhealthy attitude.
So, if the dotcommer Randites are determined to die in the back seat of their cars from starvation rather than concede the inadequacy of selfishness as a social mechanism- maybe that's a good thing. You could almost call it Darwinian...
Update- I tried another way to shuffle the data, in this case taking career _averages_ of the artists. The result was mostly garbage, and I ended up throwing out all artists that did not have at least two platinum albums that were not greatest hits collections- this caused the resulting list to look a _little_ saner, though I really wanted to see what it did to the many acts with dozens of platinum albums.
The commentary (about 'formula' versus breaking formula and how breaking the formula can also mean breaking 'local maximums' in sales) is at the bottom of the page now, and links to the much smaller, noisier list I wound up with. Here is the top 20 artist _averaged_ careers:
Considering that they often lie, it could almost be a little gentle reminder. "We think 0% of the time would be 'well'" sort of thing. Whose definition of 'well' are we looking at here? *G*
Actually, this review seemed like nothing but a marketing release written by the company. I can just see the ZDnet guys placing emergency phone calls to nVidia:
"Look, when we do X the framerate drops to one every five minutes. Uh, can we say that 'sucks'? Um, I see, well then, how about can we say it is 'not good'? No? Well, but, what do you expect us to say? Well, people are going to be asking about this, we can't really NOT say anything.. what's that? 'Stately'? Are you kidding or something? Wait, wait, no, no, I'm not being disrespectful! No, sir! We'll use that to describe it, sir! All right... thank you... thank you..."
Get used to this sort of thing. These guys are going to be _the_ 'everybody' in the statement you may be hearing a lot of... "No, you can't put out a negative review of our product. No, not even a little tiny bit. Everybody else is perfectly happy to accept our terms on this, take it or leave it..."
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between end users and middlemen here. As an end user, you can go get any sort of work and cross out words, underline them, do any sort of editorial or advertising stuff you want and it means nothing- you're just doing it for yourself.
However, the middlemen have to come to terms with the content creator if they intend to change things. See the muddled caselaw on 'framing' sites- and that is not even altering the content directly, but containing it in a possibly deceptive environment! You can buy a book and write "Eat At Joe's" on every page, but the publisher, the bookseller etc. don't have that privilege, and your opinion of it as the end buyer is not really relevant- the people transferring the content must enter into agreements with the content provider in order to do any such alteration or even to be allowed to transfer the content at all.
Common carriers needn't reach such an agreement, but common carriers don't alter or even keep aware of exactly what they're transferring. Publishers _do_ need to reach such an agreement. You go and try to arrange with the publisher to pencil in tiny 'links' under words in their version of the latest Stephen King novel- see if you don't get your ass handed to you in court. Go and bring in an end user to cry 'How dare you tell me what to do with MY BOOK!' and see how flat that falls.
Microsoft could _get_ the right to change the content of your page. This is through a simple process known as a 'contract', towards a goal known as 'advertising'. All that is well established and is exactly what they're trying to do. The only difference is, they're trying to steal it, and that's ridiculous. They must come to terms with content providers if they want to advertise in this manner. They are more than capable of doing that and can afford it- they're just being criminal because they're a bit out of touch with reality, and because they _want_ free advertising links to their properties in every site on the Web, no matter who gets hosed by it. The fact that they want this doesn't make it legitimate. It's plainly, obviously, not.
Sure. Why not?
In the olden days, we lived in villages or towns. There's only so many people who can _try_ to contact you in a village- and in fact there's case law where if someone in the village decided to bang on your door and shout in your windows 24/7, they'd be harassing you and the law would tell them to stop or be stopped.
The difference between now and then is technology and the expansion of possible contacts, and nothing illustrates this better than the Internet.
When every stupid peddler in the world can 'contact' MILLIONS OF PEOPLE with relative ease, the rules have changed. Any given peddler may or may not have a 'right' to 'contact' me, but the CLASS of stupid peddlers obviously do not have the right to perform a denial of service attack on my email account, or for that matter to consume many hours out of my day while I grovel through the thousands of emails to try and look for actual communications from people I need to talk to. Filters don't completely solve this, either. They don't scale that much better than hitting 'delete'.
I don't know exactly what needs to be done to give stupid peddlers the capacity to market to people (maybe *gasp* BUYING ADVERTISING?) but in a situation of hyperconnectivity, 'cold calling' is no good. They just hook up a big machine and cold-call EVERYBODY, just like the telemarketer machines that dial more numbers than the operators can handle. Technology brings the connectivity to a point where the old rules don't make sense any more. We need new rules better suited to the situation.
Ye gods!
I'd seen (i) before but I hadn't spotted (ii). Legally compelled to install unspecified software within 2 business days, no matter what? What are the penalties on failure to comply with this? (yes, I know UCITA would change the penalties to potential jail time, but what are the penalties NOW?)
This is a recipe for "You've been a baaaad company, Soko. As you agreed, you are contractually obliged to obtain a license for the commercially released version of the software. Just for you, the price is $50,000 or your immortal soul ;) just kidding! $50,000 or controlling interest..."
If I wrote a gaming site, what possible reason would I have to expect to get free links on competing gaming sites against their will? Have you never heard of the phrase, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"? Advertising costs money. I am not sure where you get this idea that I as a content producer get to place advertising on other sites without paying them...
Personally, I think I would be appeased if they paid me. 1/100th a cent per impression would be reasonable. They have no intention of letting me put content across to a web reader without putting in advertising links, which includes marking up works of fiction etc. so I think they need to pay for it, like any normal advertiser. If third parties want to do this, they can pay too. Otherwise it's "Yeah, we put an ad for Office in the middle of your poem, but it's okay because we let the kid down the street put a link to goatse.cx in the middle of your poem too!" What?? Where the hell is the logic in that?
Nobody is suggesting that you can't whip out Notepad and do whatever you want. The point is, Microsoft are not doing this. They're gearing up to do a centralised text-based web advertising system. The mode of delivery is not relevant: if they expect to make use of words from other people's web sites as advertising links, they are obligated to pay the content providers like any advertiser. You don't enter into it at all. It's not you doing it. Your freedom to do stuff has nothing to do with this...
I think what the original poster meant was that, like any web advertising, Microsoft should come to terms with a site and pay them a royalty for the use of their words as advertising links. Whether they make this default in the browser or not is sort of their business, just like with banner graphics (on by default). It makes no sense to deploy smart tags without paying sites a royalty- if anything, it is more intrusive than banner advertising because it is IN the text being read. As such, it ought to equate to a considerable per-word royalty.
If they expect to have links IN the content area of anyone's page, they need to expect to pay for it. It's completely absurd to get all socialist on us NOW and give Microsoft such a vast amount of advertising links for nothing. TANSTAAFL, my friend. Ever heard of that one? No free lunch.
Why are you trying to give Microsoft an advertising handout? They can afford to pay for what they use. Do you think their need for charity is so great that others' wishes must be put aside? You're sounding alarmingly Socialist. Which I think is a good thing- but you're doing it wrong ;)
We'll see. There may be surprises. In particular, the arrogance of Microsoft in trying to seize control of all communications everywhere reminds me strongly of things like the dotcom bubble. News flash: just because _they_ are certain they will triumph and never give an inch and march on a road of bones etc etc chanting "Microsoft, kill 'em!" does NOT mean they are right. That's their fantasy. They can be as 100% convinced of it as anyone ever has, and act as if it's already reality, but there are still many toes that get stepped on by _that_ fantasy.
One of them is governmental autonomy, in many senses- including the autonomy of the _American_ government. The administration can be stupid, but if the actual power in the world begins to shift (as the money has shifted away from countries and towards multinational corporations) it _will_ be noticed. I would bet you anything that the NSA has many detailed plans in store for use in the event of Microsoft gaining unprecedented power in the cybersphere. The question is whether Mossad or the intelligence services of Iraq or China etc. _also_ have detailed plans for what to do in that event.
Anyone as arrogant and sloppy as Microsoft is a walking target. We should not so much fear them on a basis of their gaining that much power- we should fear them because, if they do gain that much power, they'll be useless, out of their depth, and easy prey for _many_ different problems not of their own making- indeed, not even acknowledged by them.
If Microsoft lives to unite all information and communications in one MS-controlled centralised format, that's one thing (and inherently bad, but let's overlook that for now). The trouble is, it equates to a digital monoculture- and there ARE people out there who live to invent digital Monoculture Blight, or to invent systems to surreptitiously enter the databases of such a digital monoculture and do whatever they want.
Whether Microsoft wants to do bad things to its 'customers' is moot. If I was an enemy intelligence apparat what I would want to do is this: five minutes before the invasion, thousands of key United States individuals and companies are penniless, their funds transferred overseas to a certain hostile nation. Digital hotlines between those people and their financial advisors have had their wirescrambled- DNS lookups no longer relate to anything sensible. All recorded telephone and postal addresses for defense industries have had one number changed. A fair amount of the actual military computer systems are hardened and impossible to compromise... but instructions for use and maintenance were produced in Word, and some small changes in meaning were introduced throughout thousands of hundred-page documents and maintenance manuals, to be proliferated as new materials are printed...
Good morning, America. Funny how a little dirtbag country would be daring actual physical attack on such a *ahem* powerful, computerised nation...
(and I'm no chest-thumping militarist but I hope to hell the NSA _are_ reading this, or projecting scenarios like it. Who says Microsoft themselves have to be hostile, or that they have to replace all military systems for there to be a massive risk involved with their course of action? I have to wonder, just how many foreign intelligence agents are working _at_ Microsoft _right_ _now_, and who, exactly, would notice? Given that MS wants to bring so much 'in-house', why would such an operative even need to put 'back doors' into anything? The data is steadily coming right into Microsoft's lap, as if MS was somehow mysteriously endowed with the credentials to be wholly, utterly trustworthy, just because they 'mean well'. What a set-up...)
Microsoft's WMA page pisses off the RIAA?
*holds up cards* 9.9 A truly wonderful troll with a fine, fruity flavor right down to the piquant user-ID: the only flaw is at the very end, where 'Lord Hugh' cannot supply a link. Remember, you don't need to justify any sort of assertion if you're trolling- leaving the last sentence out entirely would have been still better! Ideally the impression you want to convey is, 'but of course everybody knows this'. However, this lapse does not negate the otherwise excellent qualities of the troll, not least the fine efficiency and lack of effort expended in producing it. Kudos and many happy +1 Funny's ;)
I say, go Bill! Bring it on, Bill. You're a damned fool if you think you can wildly publicise the GPL and still be able to define it in public opinion. Hell, Apple uses it, IBM can work with it. You think you has so much credibility that people ignore what IBM is doing, Bill? Don't you have the common sense to NOT PUBLICISE YOUR COMPETITOR'S PRODUCT? Yeesh! I don't remember you doing that with WordPerfect, or Netscape: in those instances, I remember you just making a product and acting as if it was the only thing anyone would ever want to use or know about. Now you feel you have to teach people NOT to use the GPL? Sounds like it's proving a worse threat, but you're damned stupid to change your tactics.
Now, that's what I'd say to ol' Bill. And at the same time I think maybe he's desperately trying to still get people to look at Linux, at the GPL, at all of that stuff at a time when Windows STILL DOMINATES. He wants people to look at the GPL while it still does NOT have a big place underlying lots of stuff in the mass market. He wants people to look at Linux while Windows still completely dominates userspace. That's why he's pushing the publicity so hard- because this is the best position of power he's likely to have for a while, unless he can stop the new threats and shift everybody onto even more Microsoft-based IT- and that's a very hard sell, and is not sure to succeed- and it's certainly going to have a harder time succeeding if this Open Source thing continues being used by Apple, IBM, et al.
It's interesting to watch- even clever- but I think it's an end-game, all the same. There are limits to how much power people will _consistently_ give to Microsoft. If they give too much they're capable of freaking out and pulling back, taking some losses and turning to something that seems safer: and to a large extent, GPL seems safer from an end user or semi-developer perspective, because it's the opposite of the pay-per-use thing Microsoft needs to go to: with GPL you own the programs. They're so hard to monetize that building in boobytraps and 'self-help' timebombs is completely pointless, and as a result they're ideal for the sort of person who wants to buy or assemble a thing and then be frugal and keep using the same thing for years without 'upgrades'.
This is why Microsoft is losing. Nothing lasts forever... the real question is, how much damage can they do in the meantime? And that, they're trying their best to do.
So attention has to be paid to the extremist fringes of the situation- to the corporations that _are_ abusing society. Not because all corporations are painted with the same brush by default- but because, if no other force prevails, the market will cause ALL the corporations to either become equally abusive- or die.
However, the government does not have anywhere near as much of an obvious bias (yet!) regarding, say, drugs to cure cancer or 'fix' depression or make people lose weight. And corporate-funded research DOES have that agenda, to the extent that you're just about guaranteed to not hear a wrong thing about the damned product: if the antidepressant caused half the subjects to freaking drop dead and the other half to turn into giggling drooling imbeciles, all you're going to hear is "All subjects are no longer suffering from depression", that's where the money is. *G*
Why shouldn't I like _some_ of my research to be government funded? Then I can look for private research on _government_ issues, and keep 'shopping' for a viewpoint that's not too heavily bribed and paid off. But leaving all research strictly to the specific corporate entities most interested in getting specific results is asinine, and that's increasingly what we've got.
The problem is, this is a trend with no obvious way to stop it, and the end point is NOT the same as things have always been. The end point is that releasing false results becomes _customary_, and that there are no significant research facilities left anywhere else to counterbalance that because they've been out-spent, out-publicitied, basically 'competed' into the ground.
At that point, you no longer have access to anything but false results, and people are so used to doctoring their results to please their owners/employers that it becomes traditional and expected. As Mildred Cho found, 98% of the studies say, HEY, what a great new product! That's a transition period- the direction it's heading is that 100% of the studies back the pharmaceutical industry, that more and more and finally _all_ of the studies _are_ funded by said industry, and that there's nowhere else you can go where people have the often expensive facilities to conduct such research at all. That's the end of the road. We're NOT at the end of the road, we are in progress toward that end.
How will you feel when 'false results' often happens? When it usually happens? When it always happens?
There's two issues here and only one is private ownership of scientific IP. The other is outright suppression of true but 'damaging' scientific IP, and that is IMHO the _really_ frightening aspect of all this.
In the future (_this_ future), there will be no cure for cancer, or any sort of immunizing agents for terrible new diseases, or even a cure for RSI- but there will be an unending stream of patent medicines to treat such ailments, none of which actually work.
This is no good. Profit maximizing IS NOT a recipe for societal health. The belief that it does equate to the ideal society is a religious belief based on blind faith.
"Betty Dong at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered data that led her to question the effectiveness of a medication being used daily by millions of people. But when she went to report it, she was blocked for seven years by the company that paid for the study. "
"David Kahn, another researcher at the same school, was sued last November for $10 million by the company that sponsored his study, after he published a report that the AIDS drug he was testing was ineffective."
"Mildred Cho, a senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, took a different tack. Her 1996 study found that 98 percent of university studies of new drug therapies funded by the pharmaceutical industry reported that those new therapies were more effective than standard drugs. By comparison, just 79 percent of studies without industry financing found the new drugs to be more effective."
Can we say "duh"?
The question is, given the unarguable fact that business _is_ trying to muzzle and restrict science, what the hell are we going to do about it? I mean, other than give up entirely on the idea of having higher education and a scientific community that is worth listening to at all? It is one thing if _ownership_ of scientific discoveries gets concentrated in the hands of business. That is arguably bad, certainly slows progress and ties things up making them unusable to society at large. That's one thing. But surely suppressing scientific research and widely falsifying it and replacing it outright with spin and marketing is far worse? What are we going to do for _truth_ if the only permissible truth is that which is approved by its owners' marketing department? The role of spin and suppression in corporate science is a _lot_ more dangerous and alarming than the simple tendency of all corporate science to become private, withheld property.
In science, it is one thing to lock up your findings and play it cagey. It's uncooperative, but that's a judgement call. But to intentionally lie...
Period.
Which explains a lot about the new breed of essentially Randite dotcommers... and what happened to them when Darwin turned out to be real, and not everybody could win.
Which is not to say all those merrily heartless libertarian extremists turned out to be hypocrites- I am sure there are a lot of them sleeping in their cars because by God they're not taking charity! Better to die alone than to bow to others!
It's just that... well, they can be sincere about that as much as they want, but I still can't help but think that SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE GOOD. They are how civilization has got along for centuries, for thousands of years. Scorning that seems like a singularly stupid and unhealthy attitude.
So, if the dotcommer Randites are determined to die in the back seat of their cars from starvation rather than concede the inadequacy of selfishness as a social mechanism- maybe that's a good thing. You could almost call it Darwinian...
_What_ tight labor market? O_O
Why not just to get in the habit? Developing good practices and habits is _part_ of education...
The commentary (about 'formula' versus breaking formula and how breaking the formula can also mean breaking 'local maximums' in sales) is at the bottom of the page now, and links to the much smaller, noisier list I wound up with. Here is the top 20 artist _averaged_ careers:
-chris johnson
Considering that they often lie, it could almost be a little gentle reminder. "We think 0% of the time would be 'well'" sort of thing. Whose definition of 'well' are we looking at here? *G*
Get used to this sort of thing. These guys are going to be _the_ 'everybody' in the statement you may be hearing a lot of... "No, you can't put out a negative review of our product. No, not even a little tiny bit. Everybody else is perfectly happy to accept our terms on this, take it or leave it..."
Oh joy :P
Money can be used to buy goods and services.
"Woohoo!"