You're crazy if you think WalMart could ever capture 90% of the market of retail sales. Here in south central Indiana, there are a myriad of choices of where to shop. There always will be. WalMart is a dismal place to purchase a lot of items, with limited choice, which naturally leaves an opening for other retailers to do well in a market.
There's no mechanism by which WalMart could capture said 90% of the market, except by some sort of command-economy edict, and that kind of stuff, frankly, comes from the 'big bizzness is bad' 'the gubbermint can help fight those big bizznesses' types, who you seem to align yourself with.
And I would much rather have the publishers have the guts to not be carried at Wallmart, rather than censor their product.
I doubt of the 'loyalty' of the other 85% of the publisher's customer base hinges on wether they include 'push-the-envelope' soft-porn splash covers on the magazine.
The IBM PC's BIOS was not copy protected. In fact, the commented Assembly Language source code to the IBM PC's BIOS is openly published in IBM's Technical Reference Manual.
The 'reverse engineering' effort was complicated by the fact that anybody interested could read said source code and be 'contaminated' and not be safe for a company to use as a programmer for a 'clone' BIOS.
When a contribution to NPR is no longer a tax deduction, they will cease to be taxpayer funded.
Much the same is true of any other tax-deductable organization, of course.
But why do we need a Broadcasting organization, in the day of diverse and broad Cable Television programming, that is government subsidized in the form of being a non-profit?
Unless NPR pays income tax as a profit-making business, they are significantly tax-funded. Unless contributions to NPR are not a tax writeoff, they are heavily tax-funded (indirectly), as is the case with any non-profit.
If a business or individual gives money to NPR that they otherwise would have had taxed away, it's taxpayer funding. Cut and dry.
Re:Well, part of the reason...
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
I would hardly call NPR's content free, no matter how readily they give it away.
I paid for a slice of it with my taxes. So did you.
Hell, our tax dollars help pay for the electricity to broadcast those long wordy 'sponsored by' sound bites they now interleave with every program on Public Radio and Television.
(brother is an architect, so that saves me some money right there...),
Oh, I dunno. Being overly involved with an architect can actually drive your costs up. Architects are highly involved with the aesthetics of the project, and practicality is often a secondary consideration for them.
My family lived in an architect-designed/built house for most of my adolescence. There were things like:
the big flat patio roof over the garage, made out of poured concrete, that cracked..
the huge natural stone fireplace in the living room with double faces ('pass through') that we never, ever had a fire in, because it was non-standard dimensions so the fireplace screen would have had to be custom and would have cost many thousands....
the way the moisture condensed out of the deep-well skylights in the second floor bathroom (a rainstorm after every shower!).
the hole in the parquet(sp.?) floor where a dumb waiter from downstairs was supposed to be installed.
Hire an architect to do some sketches and early layout. Then get involved with somebody practical, so you don't spend many thousands in the decades after the house is built dealing with the problems an 'aesthetic' person doesn't consider.
You are making the mistaken notion that it's necessarily a good thing to introduce more 'Microsoft drones' into the Linux fold.
Linux is not like OS/2 or BeOS, where unless commercial vendors support it in ways consumers will grasp, it will die. Sure, there are people banking on it succeeding that way. There are refugees from various other OSes (i.e. OS/2, Amiga, Macintosh) hoping to use Linux as a club to beat on Microsoft with... but then there are those of us who admire the core strength of Unix, who want Linux and the other Freenixes to thrive as strong, sharp tools for those with the knack to know how to use the classic Unix approach get powerful tasks done.
His point, and it is a valid one, is that going in and hand editing the config files in/etc doesn't get you started in a wrestling match with a lot of scripts run out of a baroque array of GUI config tools.
Back when I ran Red Hat for a short while, after having run Slack for a long time (this was back in the Red Hat 5.0 era) I used to say 'I run Red Hat linux for about the first ten minutes until I fix things.' I hated the awkward way the Modular kernal was slugged around by Red Hat at the time, so the first thing I'd do was go in and hard code all the stuff I needed into a monolythic kernal.
I remember how mad it made me that Red Hat hard-coded in the 'tweaked' name of their special kernel in lilo.conf, so that I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why my rebuilt kernal wouldn't work before discovering what was going on. I remember their tweaking of the Xconfig script of their 'version' of the kernal source so that certain options couldn't be selected.
I wonder if the difficulty coming up with a working model had to do with the 'wife' problem.
I mean, I read the article:
Dude is experimenting in Cuba with electric shocks to treat illness.
Wife becomes paralyzed.
Wife for some reason sells off machines for $6 to a second hand shop.
Probably she'd had enough with his electric shocks, etc. Perhaps he couldn't keep a prototype in the home because anytime he went out for a beer it mysteriously disappeared.
As for the anonymity of surfing in an internet cafe as opposed to home, there isn't any, since the government could just required all net cafe to keep a log of their patrons. China have universal ID cards so that won't be hard.
You're right. That won't be hard. The first step in implementing such a plan is to close down the unlicensed cafes and get the sanctioned cafes up and running and the logs processed, etc. etc.
The best way is simply having people with eclectic tastes recommend random shit to you -- either IRL, IM, on message boards, etc. Another way, which I like, is using Amazon's recommendation system.
Neither of those is at all inherently related to P2P sharing. Amazon's recommendation system would exist if there was no P2P system at all, and the same with IRL, IM, and message boards.
Yes, but the 'garbage generators' from the Music industry won't just exist on the server side, they'll also have rogue clients out there labelling legitimate download sites as 'bad.' Client-side labeling to identify 'black holes' won't be validated, to do so does away with anonymnity, requiring a central validating body subject to attack. Sony hires 150 people to mislabel the legit sharers. Those 150 people each adopt 24 different identities to make their trouble, etc. etc.
P2P relies on a consensus model, just like much of the Internet as a whole. Consensus models don't scale very well to huge communities.
Your post makes me wonder: would you still be so worried if you didn't know about the vulnerability?
In part, it has to do with his reliance on 'Security through Obscurity' although you won't hear him call it that. Until ISS broadcast the bug out all over the place, it was an obscure bug known only to a limited number of folks. Now it's hanging all out and every medium-level script kiddie on the net is digging away trying to make it useful.
Yes, that's right. The people saying ISS shouldn't have spoken up are advocates of Security through Obscurity. There's no other way of looking at it.
Unfortunately, to a great extent, this is a Linux fanboy site. It's sad, because some of us want it to be more than that, to talk about actual tech. We'd like to shut out the zealots from all the losting platforms (OS/2, Amiga, Mac) who've crowded into 'Linux' because it's a fairly sharp way to be anti-Microsoft. We'd like to talk about geek like embedded controllers, new tech breakthroughs, etc. etc. Sort of a 'Circuit Cellar Plus' so to speak.
Speaking as a latecomer to P2P music 'trading' I can state categorically that I only ever used Audio Galaxy to download music that I explicitly know was copyrighted and they almost certainly had no permission to be spreading around for free. Mostly tracks from Psychic TV. Genesis P-Orrige, one of the PTV leaders, is notorious for defending his 'IP' rights.
Being as I am a Usenet enthusiast, I hope binary attachments aren't used as an excuse to take down NNTP.
In actuality, they are, though, because the sheer volume of people trading warez and pirated content on Usenet is flooding out people using it for actual news and discussion.
Sounds like an interesting tactic for AOL to take.
The question is: what would be the business reason for spending all the money to do so?
It's painful enough at AOL to try to get the userbase to move up to the latest release. I know people (family members on the in-law side) who say things like '5.0 is the best!'
It seems like a big expensive proposition, and what for? To spite Microsoft?
Re:Be Careful--Warranty-Voiding Stuff
on
Inside the eMac
·
· Score: 1
Hell, I remember the press conference back in 1984 where Steve Jobs boasted that the new Macintosh was 'hacker proof' like it was something wonderful.
The fact that these CDs 'crash' some platforms is more a statement about the reliability (or lack theof) of said platforms. A copy protected Cd should generate an error message that can be handled by the machine. If it doesn't, it sounds like a bug in the software of the machine, not a fault of the CD manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
You're crazy if you think WalMart could ever capture 90% of the market of retail sales. Here in south central Indiana, there are a myriad of choices of where to shop. There always will be. WalMart is a dismal place to purchase a lot of items, with limited choice, which naturally leaves an opening for other retailers to do well in a market.
There's no mechanism by which WalMart could capture said 90% of the market, except by some sort of command-economy edict, and that kind of stuff, frankly, comes from the 'big bizzness is bad' 'the gubbermint can help fight those big bizznesses' types, who you seem to align yourself with.
And I would much rather have the publishers have the guts to not be carried at Wallmart, rather than censor their product.
I doubt of the 'loyalty' of the other 85% of the publisher's customer base hinges on wether they include 'push-the-envelope' soft-porn splash covers on the magazine.
Make sure nobody can get super big.
Wow. You're willing to lay it all out in the open.
Who are the controlling bodies, er.. censors, who decide when 'big' has crossed over the line and become 'super big?'
Oh, and the advertised goal is 'Freedom' not 'Free market capitalism.' The capitalism is just one possible result of said freedom.
The IBM PC's BIOS was not copy protected. In fact, the commented Assembly Language source code to the IBM PC's BIOS is openly published in IBM's Technical Reference Manual.
The 'reverse engineering' effort was complicated by the fact that anybody interested could read said source code and be 'contaminated' and not be safe for a company to use as a programmer for a 'clone' BIOS.
When a contribution to NPR is no longer a tax deduction, they will cease to be taxpayer funded.
Much the same is true of any other tax-deductable organization, of course.
But why do we need a Broadcasting organization, in the day of diverse and broad Cable Television programming, that is government subsidized in the form of being a non-profit?
Any organization that gets even part of it's money from tax-deductable contributions is taxpayer funded.
If I give money to NPR and it was money that I would have had to pay in taxes, I've just diverted tax money from the general fund and to NPR.
Unless NPR pays income tax as a profit-making business, they are significantly tax-funded. Unless contributions to NPR are not a tax writeoff, they are heavily tax-funded (indirectly), as is the case with any non-profit.
If a business or individual gives money to NPR that they otherwise would have had taxed away, it's taxpayer funding. Cut and dry.
I would hardly call NPR's content free, no matter how readily they give it away.
I paid for a slice of it with my taxes. So did you.
Hell, our tax dollars help pay for the electricity to broadcast those long wordy 'sponsored by' sound bites they now interleave with every program on Public Radio and Television.
Oh, I dunno. Being overly involved with an architect can actually drive your costs up. Architects are highly involved with the aesthetics of the project, and practicality is often a secondary consideration for them.
My family lived in an architect-designed/built house for most of my adolescence. There were things like:
the big flat patio roof over the garage, made out of poured concrete, that cracked..
the huge natural stone fireplace in the living room with double faces ('pass through') that we never, ever had a fire in, because it was non-standard dimensions so the fireplace screen would have had to be custom and would have cost many thousands....
the way the moisture condensed out of the deep-well skylights in the second floor bathroom (a rainstorm after every shower!).
the hole in the parquet(sp.?) floor where a dumb waiter from downstairs was supposed to be installed.
Hire an architect to do some sketches and early layout. Then get involved with somebody practical, so you don't spend many thousands in the decades after the house is built dealing with the problems an 'aesthetic' person doesn't consider.
You are making the mistaken notion that it's necessarily a good thing to introduce more 'Microsoft drones' into the Linux fold.
Linux is not like OS/2 or BeOS, where unless commercial vendors support it in ways consumers will grasp, it will die. Sure, there are people banking on it succeeding that way. There are refugees from various other OSes (i.e. OS/2, Amiga, Macintosh) hoping to use Linux as a club to beat on Microsoft with... but then there are those of us who admire the core strength of Unix, who want Linux and the other Freenixes to thrive as strong, sharp tools for those with the knack to know how to use the classic Unix approach get powerful tasks done.
Possibly this sounds elitist. So be it.
His point, and it is a valid one, is that going in and hand editing the config files in /etc doesn't get you started in a wrestling match with a lot of scripts run out of a baroque array of GUI config tools.
Back when I ran Red Hat for a short while, after having run Slack for a long time (this was back in the Red Hat 5.0 era) I used to say 'I run Red Hat linux for about the first ten minutes until I fix things.' I hated the awkward way the Modular kernal was slugged around by Red Hat at the time, so the first thing I'd do was go in and hard code all the stuff I needed into a monolythic kernal.
I remember how mad it made me that Red Hat hard-coded in the 'tweaked' name of their special kernel in lilo.conf, so that I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why my rebuilt kernal wouldn't work before discovering what was going on. I remember their tweaking of the Xconfig script of their 'version' of the kernal source so that certain options couldn't be selected.
It wasn't long before I went back to Slack.
That's a hypothetical situation. We can't base legal precedent on hypothetical situations.
Sort of like a huge discussion 'what if Linus Torvalds were hired by Microsoft?'
It gives pundits all sorts of hand waving opportunities to make their point and rant their rants, but it's not productive for a real discussion.
If I'm not mistaken, the fastest Pentium II chip ever made was the 450 MHz.
(I might be mistaken, life is too short.... )
I mean, I read the article:
Dude is experimenting in Cuba with electric shocks to treat illness.
Wife becomes paralyzed.
Wife for some reason sells off machines for $6 to a second hand shop.
Probably she'd had enough with his electric shocks, etc. Perhaps he couldn't keep a prototype in the home because anytime he went out for a beer it mysteriously disappeared.
As for the anonymity of surfing in an internet cafe as opposed to home, there isn't any, since the government could just required all net cafe to keep a log of their patrons. China have universal ID cards so that won't be hard.
You're right. That won't be hard. The first step in implementing such a plan is to close down the unlicensed cafes and get the sanctioned cafes up and running and the logs processed, etc. etc.
The best way is simply having people with eclectic tastes recommend random shit to you -- either IRL, IM, on message boards, etc. Another way, which I like, is using Amazon's recommendation system.
Neither of those is at all inherently related to P2P sharing. Amazon's recommendation system would exist if there was no P2P system at all, and the same with IRL, IM, and message boards.
Yes, but the 'garbage generators' from the Music industry won't just exist on the server side, they'll also have rogue clients out there labelling legitimate download sites as 'bad.' Client-side labeling to identify 'black holes' won't be validated, to do so does away with anonymnity, requiring a central validating body subject to attack. Sony hires 150 people to mislabel the legit sharers. Those 150 people each adopt 24 different identities to make their trouble, etc. etc.
P2P relies on a consensus model, just like much of the Internet as a whole. Consensus models don't scale very well to huge communities.
Your post makes me wonder: would you still be so worried if you didn't know about the vulnerability?
In part, it has to do with his reliance on 'Security through Obscurity' although you won't hear him call it that. Until ISS broadcast the bug out all over the place, it was an obscure bug known only to a limited number of folks. Now it's hanging all out and every medium-level script kiddie on the net is digging away trying to make it useful.
Yes, that's right. The people saying ISS shouldn't have spoken up are advocates of Security through Obscurity. There's no other way of looking at it.
Unfortunately, to a great extent, this is a Linux fanboy site. It's sad, because some of us want it to be more than that, to talk about actual tech. We'd like to shut out the zealots from all the losting platforms (OS/2, Amiga, Mac) who've crowded into 'Linux' because it's a fairly sharp way to be anti-Microsoft. We'd like to talk about geek like embedded controllers, new tech breakthroughs, etc. etc. Sort of a 'Circuit Cellar Plus' so to speak.
Speaking as a latecomer to P2P music 'trading' I can state categorically that I only ever used Audio Galaxy to download music that I explicitly know was copyrighted and they almost certainly had no permission to be spreading around for free. Mostly tracks from Psychic TV. Genesis P-Orrige, one of the PTV leaders, is notorious for defending his 'IP' rights.
Being as I am a Usenet enthusiast, I hope binary attachments aren't used as an excuse to take down NNTP.
In actuality, they are, though, because the sheer volume of people trading warez and pirated content on Usenet is flooding out people using it for actual news and discussion.
Perhaps no-binary servers are the answer.
'The enemy of your enemy is your friend.'
Oh, look! Your new friend just wiped out all the storefronts downtown!
Sounds like an interesting tactic for AOL to take.
The question is: what would be the business reason for spending all the money to do so?
It's painful enough at AOL to try to get the userbase to move up to the latest release. I know people (family members on the in-law side) who say things like '5.0 is the best!'
It seems like a big expensive proposition, and what for? To spite Microsoft?
Hell, I remember the press conference back in 1984 where Steve Jobs boasted that the new Macintosh was 'hacker proof' like it was something wonderful.
Apple made an enemy or two on that day.
The fact that these CDs 'crash' some platforms is more a statement about the reliability (or lack theof) of said platforms. A copy protected Cd should generate an error message that can be handled by the machine. If it doesn't, it sounds like a bug in the software of the machine, not a fault of the CD manufacturer.
I mean, let's get real here.