Re:Does this book stand alone?
on
War of Honor
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· Score: 2
I can't speak for the latest book (It's on the shelf here, on deck to be read) but the Honor books have always impressed me by their stand-alone-ness. The author has done a pretty good job in the past of bringing new readers up to speed. (If some SF TV Writers were as adept at that, perhaps shows like Farscape might have actually grown their audiences and lasted longer...)
I'm guessing the latest book maintains the series' stand-alone style. Can anyone here who has read it confirm?
Who is Honor? What's It About? How Do I Work This?
on
War of Honor
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· Score: 5, Informative
Because I am a fan of the series, and because I think what author Weber and publisher Baen have done with the CD-ROM thingie is both courageous and spiffy, lemme try and save y'all some Googlin'...
As has been noted, The Honor Harrington Series is Space Opera, Military Science Fiction. What David Drake did for future tank crewman with his Hammer's Slammers books, Weber does for their space-navy counterparts. There is no "Earth" and no "Aliens," just some far-flung planetary empires, each with different politics (monarchy, socialism, feudalism, whatever) all on planetary scales.
Honor Harrington is an Ayn Rand Romantic Heroine from the Old School. She fights classism, fleet politics, bigotry, duels, and Big Honkin' Enemy Fleets with equal tirelessness and aplomb. She loses friends, limbs, eyes, commands, and keeps coming back for more, plasma cannons a-blazing.
The series has traced her career, from just-out-of-academy first command to whatever she is now, Lord Admiral of the Friggin' Universal Royal Fleet, or somesuch. (Personally, I liked her better when she was "coming up through the ranks," but hey...)
From a geek perspective, the series is notable for its rather detailed thinking-out of space navy mechanics. As someone here has said, Weber is Master of the Space Battle, not necessarily because they are any more exciting than your average Tie-fighter sequence, but because the detail in the physics and the navy crewmen operations seem exceptionally plausible.
If your idea of a good read is the latest Chicano-Lesbian-Prison-Drama from some Lower East Side playwright, move along, there's nothing to see here. If your idea of SF is a barrier-breaking, genre-bending, quantum-cyber-dystopic Enduring-Parable-For-Our-Time, ditto.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy a good read, with interesting, likable characters for whom you can really cheer, and an approach to space-battles that will have you running for your calculator and some graph paper, the Honor Harrington books are da bomb.
The smartest thing Chernin did was to get geek faves like Lucas and Jackson to speak on his cause's behalf. The second smartest thing was to play up the fact that the entertainment industry is more than just the "misguided artists" and the "evil fat cat suits," but includes all the blue collar workers found in any "normal" industry.
So many times I read about the evil **AA's, as if people don't realize these trade industry groups exist to do the bidding, and often the dirty work, of the creative entities like Lucas. Valenti and Rosen are paid to be targets for the heat-seekers so that the creative brands aren't tarnished by politics.
Chernin wisely realized -- and I've no doubt others in the entertainment industry who will be speaking publicly on this topic will realize also -- that Joe Sixpack doesn't give a rat's ass about some distribution exec in an expensive suit, but let the creator of Boba Fett get up there in a black turtleneck, and the crowd melt likes butter.
Now that the gloves are really off in the fight for public opinion, this gets interesting...
I won't support the easement of the RIAA regime into our century. The dinosaurs had their day and now it's over
Fair enough, but who do you propose creates the pay-for-download of music? The musicians themselves? Surely they are better suited to, umm, making music? Should the musicians band together to create yet another artists' association to handle the download transactions? Seems kind of fat, don't you think?
Would you rather not see a pay-for-download system established? It seems that the distribution of music via physical media is even more of a dinosaur concept.
By what manner would you propose musicians distribute their music to you? How do you propose they be compensated? I'm genuinely curious, because all I've ever heard about the **AA's being dinosaurs had to do with their inflexibility regarding finding a means to deliver content online. Now that they are working on this, I'm surprised to see so much grousing. I mean, you didn't really think the RIAA was going to suddenly vanish one Wednesday morning, did you?
Sure it ain't perfect, and as geeks we tend to focus on trees, like file formats, while ignoring forests, like major distributors of music and film are genuinely hard at work to develop direct Internet distribution of content, thereby doing away with the thousands of brick-and-mortar retailers with whom they have built relationships for decades! Technically, we have our quibbles, but from the political and economic camps... WOW!
Has it all been just a "calling of a bluff?" You would like to compensate that musician somehow for the song you are enjoying, wouldn't you?
Or am I missing the point entirely, cuz "Information And Music Must Be Free?"
"Back in the Day" I ran on-air ops for a major cable premium network, from whence this anecdote, and perhaps some inkling into H-Wood's current mindset, arises:
In the big hubbub prior to "The Day The Skies Went Black," i.e., the time when HBO and Showtime began encrypting their signals (early 80's), denying them from the long-standing C-Band pirates, various congressfolk went ballistic. Their gripe (inexplicable and amazing to us in the industry at the time) was that the cable networks could not all-of-a-sudden deny the pirates their entertainment; we had to at least offer a for-pay alternative to what they had gotten previously for free. This neccessitated a tremendous cost in building out certain shared encryption operations centers that would pool subscriber data, etc etc. (Happy upside that nobody predicted was that the revenues garnered from catering to the former pirates was HUGE, in some networks' instances well in advance of Cable susbcriber revenue.)
Of course, this didn't stop the real dyed-in-the-wool, off-shore-operating, parrot-on-the-shoulder, chip-modding, math-prodigy, Trans-Am-On-The-Cinder-Blocks, Complete-and-Total-Social-Outcast Pirates, who set about cracking the (ridiculously loose, in hind sight) encryption we used at the time. But... because we had gone to the pain and expense of creating this "inclusion" distribution for all the dis-affected Big-Ugly-Dish geeks nationwide, we as an industry had tremendous goodwill with the Gov't. This led to numerous FBI sting operations against the pirates, whereas before the industry couldn't really get the authorities' attention on the matter. In fact, my boss at the time was one of the industry guys who travelled around with the FBI agents cuffing the pirates. Big, Big, Fed-Entertainment Industry co-op, once the Ent Industry showed good faith in creating a system that ensured "no one was left out."
You see where I'm going with this. "Back In the Day," the pirates said, basically, "If you don't want me to view your network, keep it out of my living room." Tough to argue with, so the Ent industry encrypted and provided Joe Dish-Geek a means to buy his entertainment. Flash forward 20 years (ye gods... has it been that long? Christ, I'm old...), and Joe Internet-Geek is saying, "Look, I'm getting this entertainment on the Net, I'm accustomed to getting it on the Net, you can't deny it to me." By providing a net-based, for-pay service, H-Wood is "fulfilling its tech evolutional obligations" yet again. And they are doing so faster than their peers in the Music and Book Publishing industries.
Only Windows? Only US? Who cares? Certainly not H-Wood, or US Law Makers and Enforcers. It ain't about wide-spread adoption (although if they can make some money on this, they won't turn it down) it's about having some credibility and teeth in the subsequent piracy pogroms.
I know for a fact that there are a lot of digital copies of copyrighted works such as Frank Herbert's Dune series and The Lord of the Rings floating around the Net and I think the newsgroups as well.
Of course, there are. And why shouldn't there be? Information (and Entertainment) Must Be Free!
True SlashDot geeks are watching the Discovery network channels, National Geographic, and the History channel any chance they can get.
Thanks for reminding us, Dexter. Sometimes I forget what I am supposed to watch or do so that my membership in the True SlashDot Geek Club won't lapse or be revoked. I'd hate to have to turn in my decoder ring.
All my free-thinking and living-my-own-life crap sometimes plays havok with the whole/.-Hive-Mind, but I'm working on it, really I am. Still, It's real swell to know you're here and have the time to set me and all the other strays back on the path of True Geek Righteousness.
And if they wanted to put some in the next town, they went to their corner Kinko's?
There was no anonymity, no over-educated under-worked "Anonymous Cowards" when your Constitutional rights were framed. You had a gripe, you got up on your soapbox in the Town Square and you made it, loud and clear. The Founding Fathers wanted to make sure you couldn't be legally shot or carried off later that night, so they protected your right to speak freely. The Constitution does not, was not meant to, protect your anonymity as you take snivelling globally distributed pot shots at the government or corporations or the media or soccer Moms or Britney Spears all from the safety of a firewalled computer terminal on your employer's time.
Want to really make a difference, be heard, get your point across? Find a large group of like-minded people and have a rally. The Founding Fathers knew that took guts, too (it was the age of Napolean's "whiffs of grapeshot," after all), and so they protected your Right to Assemble. In public, where people live, not in a virtual "chatroom," or (saints and martyrs preserve us!) a "Blog."
Got something to say? That's great, let's hear it. But be prepared to take personal responsibility for it. I may not agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your freedom to say it. But just have the balls to own up to your words, and don't expect to hide behind the Internet or your Mom.
In short, the Founding Fathers did not work to protect your right to be an Anonymous Coward... maybe because they knew that cowards already die a thousand deaths and there was not much anybody could do to improve their lot.
All this is not to say that I don't respect your privacy, or respect others who respect their privacy. It's just not a God-given or Constitutional right, then or now.
This guy's right. Michael has zero credibility with any Microsoft story. My first reaction when I saw all the links about the case was, "I should probably go to Yahoo or Google and look for a summary." Then I saw the editor's "I'll post a summary," and I thought, "Great! Now that's a service! Well managed!" And then I saw it was michael, and said, "I should probably go to Yahoo or Google and look for a summary."
This is not said with emotion or rancor, not even disappointment (at this stage). It just is what it is. [shrug] I don't know whose job it is to dole out the postings, but if it's done in any manner other than the most current stuff going to the editor on duty, the person in charge should have had the good sense NOT to give such an important MS story to Michael.
Yeah, yeah, I know the drill: Mod down -1 FlameBait -2 OffTopic -2 you-think-you-know-better-than-us! -4 Troll -1 Your-Alliance-to-Open-Source-Is-Suspect -3 He's-Probably-An-MS-Schill! -2 He-Hasn't-Posted-Anything-Really-Funny-In-Days-Who -Needs-Him?
Are there really people out there who read this same pseudo-intellectual tripe 9 times and then demanded an additional book?
A more meaningful question might be, "Are there really people out there who get bent out of shape by what books other people read or what music they listen to?"
Somebody wants to read the back story to Paul Atreides' Grocery List, or the novelization of the latest George-Lucas-Made-For-Burger-King-Promotion movie, or "Gor #48: Trans-Op Sex Slaves of Gor," or "Remo Williams #97: The Story Begins," or "BattleTech #63: Operation: Audacious Legacy," or the fourth volume in R.A. Salvatore's Dark-Elf Trilogy, "Gygax, the Wife-Beater," or Proust, or Wilde, or Stephen King, or Ayn Rand, or William Shatner Writing as Kirk About When Picard went Back in Time to Rescue Janeway while Trapped in Archer's Body, or the online version of the New York friggin' Times, WHAT Do You Care? What friggin' *DIFFERENCE* does it make in your Life on a Friday afternoon?
So long as people are READING something, I am happy. If they are reading, they are not killing or brooding. If they are reading they are using their imagination. If they are reading *They* are happy. Does that upset you?
Of course, were these people to all of sudden See The Light and begin to read what you are reading, you would no doubt stop reading that because it had become so trendy...
A merger does not mean that every channel on each existing service automatically gets pulled on to the new service
Let's take SlashDotters' favorite content niche, Porn, as an example. (L33T HAxx0Rs and other fourteen-year-olds, please note the correct spelling).
Let's say the New Merged Company (NewCo) decides they want to charge a higher premium for Porn. Not pay the content provider (e.g., Playboy) any more, just charge a higher premium. Some subscribers pay it happily, others grudgingly, others drop the channel(s). There is little either the content owner (Playboy) or the consumer can do. With only one distributor -- one trucking company driving the food from the farm into the local grocery store -- the distributor makes the rules and sets the margins.
Let's say you are a struggling Porn network and you want to get distribution. If NewCo decides it has enough Porn channels at the moment (with Playboy's 4 or 5 or whatever it is), you're done. At the moment, with two sources of satellite distribution, the newer smaller nets are more likely to get a niche, as each distributor uses it as leverage against their compeitor ("Get a Subscribution to Dish, we have the CowboyNeal Porn Channel, the other guys don't!")
If the Porn Channel is entenched with NewCo, and its CEO plays golf with NewCo's EVP Programming every Sunday, it's pretty much on a path to squeezing out more copycat Porn channels to the consumers while figuring out exactly how frequently it can raise rates. Why not? No competition will be introduced. In fact, the distributor can quite handily use its position as the single distributor to dictate exactly what type of new channels should be introduced, and, more disturbingly, how the content on existing channels should be modified.
Worst of all, yet not unimaginable (especially given our niche example) NewCo might (albeit foolishly) even decide they did not want to carry Porn.
As an aside, I am fascinated to see so much support for this merger here on SlashDot. It is getting tougher and tougher to figure this place out. Not that that is a bad thing, of course. Makes for some interesting discussions.
What seems to be happening more and more, amidst the corporate axe-swingings, is that managers are inheriting "other people's' employees. And yes, during the feel-good-foosball-mania of the past decade, an awful lot of non-professionals started collecting paychecks just as if they were genuine professionals.
I don't think the lack of trust should be there, but a re-examination of goals, past mere punching of time-clocks, is prolly in order in most shops.
Try this one: "The sound of one hand clapping."...which is exactly what you'll hear here if the editors continue to pander to the juvenile knee-jerk dead-horse-pummeling which is its unthinking MS-bashing. Christ, the way it's done half the time, it's got to be a turn-off for even some of the real Linux-o-philes
Try this:
"OKAY, I *Get* it, you're EVIL!" -- Buffy Summers.
Maven? He's a kid at a university! (But then again, when I was 22 years old, I seem to recall that I was the smartest guy in the world. I also must have believed I was immortal, but let's not go there...)
What I don't understand is why there is any kind of discussion at all on this particular thread. OF COURSE companies are going to come down on employees using their resources for file-sharing. Companies are cracking down on their employees for all manner of time-and-resource wasting endeavors, why should music file-sharing, which has the additional stigma of its dubious legality, be condoned, when the foosball table has already been sent to auction?
Legality aside for a minute, an employee's file-sharing on company time is a waste of resources, and just plain un-productive. You want to share files, update your Blog (blogs... ye gods!), tinker with the wallpaper on your iPAQ, whatever, Do It On Your Own Time, on your own computer, across your own wires. Period, Full Stop, End of Story.
An employee who would never dream of sitting at his desk reading a newspaper doesn't think twice about reading an (easily and quickly minimizable) online version of that same newspaper. Someone who would never in a million years think about spreading his record collection out on his desk at work and organizing it by artist and genre has no problem taking the same amount of time out to do so with his MP3s. Why? Because it LOOKS LIKE HE'S WORKING, and the bosses are fooled.
Those damn bosses...
Hey, Corporate Manager, want to increase employee productivity by at least 35% across the board? Ensure that everyone's computer monitor is viewable from the hallway outside his/her office or cube. Sure, you'll get a few, most likely just out of University, who'll exit loudly, babbling something about "employee rights," "corporate Nazis," and "going home to Mommy," but I'll wager that, from a productivity perspective, you won't miss 'em.
Later, on an individual basis, you can start allowing employees to move their monitors back to their customary positions of concealment, once trust has been re-earned.
The average person does not know what ISP stands for. The average person thinks that "AOL" equals "Internet." This is not meant as a slight on the the "average person," most of whom have much more important things to focus upon in their varied, non-tech-obsessed lives.
MS, fast on the heels of just about every major reviewer decalring MSN 8 superior to AOL 8, has just sent the average person a a message that there is another Internet besides AOL. I've never used either AOL or MSN, and have no love for either parent organization, but I see this as a brilliant publicity stunt by MS, no question.
The "average person on SlashDot," who has got his toaster oven connected to a Cisco router and is using it to hack into the SETI distribution, is neither the intended customer for the service nor the intended audience for the stunt.
Oh, stop! That ridiculous-looking penguin is *NOT* cool, by any stretch of the imagination. What it represents may be cool, but it is the dorkiest symbol in the IT industry.
It was a dorky symbol when it was used by a satellite porn channel in the late-eighties, and you've gotta be pretty weak to symbolize *THAT* and still come across nebish-y.
The charm, such as Tux may have any, lay in its obvious anti-corporate, anti-status symbolism, inasmuch as any company with more than five hundred dollars in its coffers could hire someone to devise a better logo. Tux sort of has that snarky frat-boy, movie-posters-on-the-wall, lamps-made-from-beer-kegs charm.
What, that's not what the Linux movement was going for...?
Sirius and XM both spent hundreds of millions of dollars establishing their infrastructure. They control the horizontal and the vertical because it is theirs to control! They have every right not to stream college-radio playlists if they feel it won't help them turn a profit. You want to listen your favorite band, put the CD in your box and push 'play.' There's an entire generation of Wilco-listening music fans whose mantra is "Music Must Be Free!"...and you want these satellite guys to cater to that demographic? That's insane. The "edgey" listeners have already ripped entire servers worth of their "special jams" into their iPods, and are never going to be happy with, let alone pay for, what any programmer, "independent" or not, is streaming.
Don't let your politics ("pigopolists?" Sure, you're taken seriously...) get mixed in with Marketing 101.
Don't you find the liberal bias on NPR makes it un-listenable? This is not a troll, but a serious post. I'm not crazy about the conservative news presentations either, but it seems that, in those instances, the presenters are a little more up-front about the slant. They want you to know you're getting a conservative perspective. NPR has always seemed disturbingly... sneaky in this regard.
It's not that I can fault them for their bias; government funding for public media is a lot higher on the Liberal agenda then it is on the Conservative, but there has always been a disingenuity about their news that I found undermined their credibility.
1. Had you written "black" or "Jewish" instead of "40+" in your post, you would have been mod'd down somewhere approximate to Dante's 8th Ring. Of course, since you're obviously young and hip, you probably don't think of yourself as prejudiced as some tobacco-chawin' no-neck Cracker. Here's a Newsflash, Moby -- You are.
2. Even without his celebrity, his published poetry, and his status as a Famous Rock Star, Henry Rollins would still be getting way more girls than you, 'cause he's good-looking and erudite. It's a TV Show, Milton, not a University intranet feed. Viewers like good-looking and erudite. The producers can hire the Long brothers or Stephen Hawking to write the damn thing if they're afraid of losing the SlashDot crowd.
3. And finally.... [eek!] Hey, errm, Seth, I just clicked on your webpage. Forget I said anything, kid. You've obviously got a lot on your mind, saving the world and all. Never mind! (Just don't set me on fire, 'kay? Please?)
[walks out of forum, slowly, backwards, hands where all can see them, smiling sweetly...]
Not to feed the trolls -- or, in this case, the Balrogs -- but...
There are far fewer than six degrees of separation between Tolkien's Magnum Opus and the Third Reich's own modern mythology. Himmler and the good Professor both drew from the same sources. Himmler, of course, took a very wrong turn Eastward through Hindu Mythology, but had both men sat at the same table at a dinner party, they would have had a lot to talk about...
Three years of Latin in High School. Wished I had taken more in college, plus some Greek. Consider it of such a benefit that I've begun home-schooling my four-year old daughter in it.
I was MIS. I was the dude. MIS is not the dude. We're talking Legal, we're talking HR, or some over-arching "Corporate," but not MIS.
I would expect my employer to monitor my activities. I would not expect that monitoring to be done by a rogue MIS "dude," except when given specific instructions or clear patterns and guidelines by someone else.
Besides, most smaller companies (atleast here in north carolina, don't have a written policy re: email.) If you are the dude, what you says goes That's the problem. It needs to be written down, with all department heads in agreement, and it needs to be in step with federal guidelines. This was all an amorphous "new frontier" a half-decade ago. The processes and protocols are pretty well-established these days.
I apologize if you felt I was ranting, and I do not wish for you to be without work. Unfortunately, I have encountered too many sysAdmins who believed that because "they had the power" (i.e., root access), they had either a right or God-given duty to be judge, jury, and executioner in matters of e-mail policy. It doesn't -- it shouldn't -- work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak for the latest book (It's on the shelf here, on deck to be read) but the Honor books have always impressed me by their stand-alone-ness. The author has done a pretty good job in the past of bringing new readers up to speed. (If some SF TV Writers were as adept at that, perhaps shows like Farscape might have actually grown their audiences and lasted longer...)
I'm guessing the latest book maintains the series' stand-alone style. Can anyone here who has read it confirm?
Because I am a fan of the series, and because I think what author Weber and publisher Baen have done with the CD-ROM thingie is both courageous and spiffy, lemme try and save y'all some Googlin'...
As has been noted, The Honor Harrington Series is Space Opera, Military Science Fiction. What David Drake did for future tank crewman with his Hammer's Slammers books, Weber does for their space-navy counterparts. There is no "Earth" and no "Aliens," just some far-flung planetary empires, each with different politics (monarchy, socialism, feudalism, whatever) all on planetary scales.
Honor Harrington is an Ayn Rand Romantic Heroine from the Old School. She fights classism, fleet politics, bigotry, duels, and Big Honkin' Enemy Fleets with equal tirelessness and aplomb. She loses friends, limbs, eyes, commands, and keeps coming back for more, plasma cannons a-blazing.
The series has traced her career, from just-out-of-academy first command to whatever she is now, Lord Admiral of the Friggin' Universal Royal Fleet, or somesuch. (Personally, I liked her better when she was "coming up through the ranks," but hey...)
From a geek perspective, the series is notable for its rather detailed thinking-out of space navy mechanics. As someone here has said, Weber is Master of the Space Battle, not necessarily because they are any more exciting than your average Tie-fighter sequence, but because the detail in the physics and the navy crewmen operations seem exceptionally plausible.
If your idea of a good read is the latest Chicano-Lesbian-Prison-Drama from some Lower East Side playwright, move along, there's nothing to see here. If your idea of SF is a barrier-breaking, genre-bending, quantum-cyber-dystopic Enduring-Parable-For-Our-Time, ditto.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy a good read, with interesting, likable characters for whom you can really cheer, and an approach to space-battles that will have you running for your calculator and some graph paper, the Honor Harrington books are da bomb.
The smartest thing Chernin did was to get geek faves like Lucas and Jackson to speak on his cause's behalf. The second smartest thing was to play up the fact that the entertainment industry is more than just the "misguided artists" and the "evil fat cat suits," but includes all the blue collar workers found in any "normal" industry.
So many times I read about the evil **AA's, as if people don't realize these trade industry groups exist to do the bidding, and often the dirty work, of the creative entities like Lucas. Valenti and Rosen are paid to be targets for the heat-seekers so that the creative brands aren't tarnished by politics.
Chernin wisely realized -- and I've no doubt others in the entertainment industry who will be speaking publicly on this topic will realize also -- that Joe Sixpack doesn't give a rat's ass about some distribution exec in an expensive suit, but let the creator of Boba Fett get up there in a black turtleneck, and the crowd melt likes butter.
Now that the gloves are really off in the fight for public opinion, this gets interesting...
I won't support the easement of the RIAA regime into our century. The dinosaurs had their day and now it's over
Fair enough, but who do you propose creates the pay-for-download of music? The musicians themselves? Surely they are better suited to, umm, making music? Should the musicians band together to create yet another artists' association to handle the download transactions? Seems kind of fat, don't you think?
Would you rather not see a pay-for-download system established? It seems that the distribution of music via physical media is even more of a dinosaur concept.
By what manner would you propose musicians distribute their music to you? How do you propose they be compensated? I'm genuinely curious, because all I've ever heard about the **AA's being dinosaurs had to do with their inflexibility regarding finding a means to deliver content online. Now that they are working on this, I'm surprised to see so much grousing. I mean, you didn't really think the RIAA was going to suddenly vanish one Wednesday morning, did you?
Sure it ain't perfect, and as geeks we tend to focus on trees, like file formats, while ignoring forests, like major distributors of music and film are genuinely hard at work to develop direct Internet distribution of content, thereby doing away with the thousands of brick-and-mortar retailers with whom they have built relationships for decades! Technically, we have our quibbles, but from the political and economic camps... WOW!
Has it all been just a "calling of a bluff?" You would like to compensate that musician somehow for the song you are enjoying, wouldn't you?
Or am I missing the point entirely, cuz "Information And Music Must Be Free?"
"Back in the Day" I ran on-air ops for a major cable premium network, from whence this anecdote, and perhaps some inkling into H-Wood's current mindset, arises:
In the big hubbub prior to "The Day The Skies Went Black," i.e., the time when HBO and Showtime began encrypting their signals (early 80's), denying them from the long-standing C-Band pirates, various congressfolk went ballistic. Their gripe (inexplicable and amazing to us in the industry at the time) was that the cable networks could not all-of-a-sudden deny the pirates their entertainment; we had to at least offer a for-pay alternative to what they had gotten previously for free. This neccessitated a tremendous cost in building out certain shared encryption operations centers that would pool subscriber data, etc etc. (Happy upside that nobody predicted was that the revenues garnered from catering to the former pirates was HUGE, in some networks' instances well in advance of Cable susbcriber revenue.)
Of course, this didn't stop the real dyed-in-the-wool, off-shore-operating, parrot-on-the-shoulder, chip-modding, math-prodigy, Trans-Am-On-The-Cinder-Blocks, Complete-and-Total-Social-Outcast Pirates, who set about cracking the (ridiculously loose, in hind sight) encryption we used at the time. But... because we had gone to the pain and expense of creating this "inclusion" distribution for all the dis-affected Big-Ugly-Dish geeks nationwide, we as an industry had tremendous goodwill with the Gov't. This led to numerous FBI sting operations against the pirates, whereas before the industry couldn't really get the authorities' attention on the matter. In fact, my boss at the time was one of the industry guys who travelled around with the FBI agents cuffing the pirates. Big, Big, Fed-Entertainment Industry co-op, once the Ent Industry showed good faith in creating a system that ensured "no one was left out."
You see where I'm going with this. "Back In the Day," the pirates said, basically, "If you don't want me to view your network, keep it out of my living room." Tough to argue with, so the Ent industry encrypted and provided Joe Dish-Geek a means to buy his entertainment. Flash forward 20 years (ye gods... has it been that long? Christ, I'm old...), and Joe Internet-Geek is saying, "Look, I'm getting this entertainment on the Net, I'm accustomed to getting it on the Net, you can't deny it to me." By providing a net-based, for-pay service, H-Wood is "fulfilling its tech evolutional obligations" yet again. And they are doing so faster than their peers in the Music and Book Publishing industries.
Only Windows? Only US? Who cares? Certainly not H-Wood, or US Law Makers and Enforcers. It ain't about wide-spread adoption (although if they can make some money on this, they won't turn it down) it's about having some credibility and teeth in the subsequent piracy pogroms.
I know for a fact that there are a lot of digital copies of copyrighted works such as Frank Herbert's Dune series and The Lord of the Rings floating around the Net and I think the newsgroups as well.
Of course, there are. And why shouldn't there be? Information (and Entertainment) Must Be Free!
Just ask Harlan
True SlashDot geeks are watching the Discovery network channels, National Geographic, and the History channel any chance they can get.
/.-Hive-Mind, but I'm working on it, really I am. Still, It's real swell to know you're here and have the time to set me and all the other strays back on the path of True Geek Righteousness.
Thanks for reminding us, Dexter. Sometimes I forget what I am supposed to watch or do so that my membership in the True SlashDot Geek Club won't lapse or be revoked. I'd hate to have to turn in my decoder ring.
All my free-thinking and living-my-own-life crap sometimes plays havok with the whole
Thanks again, bro!
A Bunch of Fliers? All Over Town?! Oh, Boy!!
The Rascals! The... The Anarchists!!
And if they wanted to put some in the next town, they went to their corner Kinko's?
There was no anonymity, no over-educated under-worked "Anonymous Cowards" when your Constitutional rights were framed. You had a gripe, you got up on your soapbox in the Town Square and you made it, loud and clear. The Founding Fathers wanted to make sure you couldn't be legally shot or carried off later that night, so they protected your right to speak freely. The Constitution does not, was not meant to, protect your anonymity as you take snivelling globally distributed pot shots at the government or corporations or the media or soccer Moms or Britney Spears all from the safety of a firewalled computer terminal on your employer's time.
Want to really make a difference, be heard, get your point across? Find a large group of like-minded people and have a rally. The Founding Fathers knew that took guts, too (it was the age of Napolean's "whiffs of grapeshot," after all), and so they protected your Right to Assemble. In public, where people live, not in a virtual "chatroom," or (saints and martyrs preserve us!) a "Blog."
Got something to say? That's great, let's hear it. But be prepared to take personal responsibility for it. I may not agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your freedom to say it. But just have the balls to own up to your words, and don't expect to hide behind the Internet or your Mom.
In short, the Founding Fathers did not work to protect your right to be an Anonymous Coward... maybe because they knew that cowards already die a thousand deaths and there was not much anybody could do to improve their lot.
All this is not to say that I don't respect your privacy, or respect others who respect their privacy. It's just not a God-given or Constitutional right, then or now.
For what my two cents are worth...
o -Needs-Him?
This guy's right. Michael has zero credibility with any Microsoft story. My first reaction when I saw all the links about the case was, "I should probably go to Yahoo or Google and look for a summary." Then I saw the editor's "I'll post a summary," and I thought, "Great! Now that's a service! Well managed!" And then I saw it was michael, and said, "I should probably go to Yahoo or Google and look for a summary."
This is not said with emotion or rancor, not even disappointment (at this stage). It just is what it is. [shrug] I don't know whose job it is to dole out the postings, but if it's done in any manner other than the most current stuff going to the editor on duty, the person in charge should have had the good sense NOT to give such an important MS story to Michael.
Yeah, yeah, I know the drill: Mod down
-1 FlameBait
-2 OffTopic
-2 you-think-you-know-better-than-us!
-4 Troll
-1 Your-Alliance-to-Open-Source-Is-Suspect
-3 He's-Probably-An-MS-Schill!
-2 He-Hasn't-Posted-Anything-Really-Funny-In-Days-Wh
Are there really people out there who read this same pseudo-intellectual tripe 9 times and then demanded an additional book?
A more meaningful question might be, "Are there really people out there who get bent out of shape by what books other people read or what music they listen to?"
Somebody wants to read the back story to Paul Atreides' Grocery List, or the novelization of the latest George-Lucas-Made-For-Burger-King-Promotion movie, or "Gor #48: Trans-Op Sex Slaves of Gor," or "Remo Williams #97: The Story Begins," or "BattleTech #63: Operation: Audacious Legacy," or the fourth volume in R.A. Salvatore's Dark-Elf Trilogy, "Gygax, the Wife-Beater," or Proust, or Wilde, or Stephen King, or Ayn Rand, or William Shatner Writing as Kirk About When Picard went Back in Time to Rescue Janeway while Trapped in Archer's Body, or the online version of the New York friggin' Times, WHAT Do You Care? What friggin' *DIFFERENCE* does it make in your Life on a Friday afternoon?
So long as people are READING something, I am happy. If they are reading, they are not killing or brooding. If they are reading they are using their imagination. If they are reading *They* are happy. Does that upset you?
Of course, were these people to all of sudden See The Light and begin to read what you are reading, you would no doubt stop reading that because it had become so trendy...
Like in anything else, some folks like their vendor retaining total control, and others do not.
The issue here is ensuring that choice remains an option.
Surely a merger is good for consumers?
Exactly the opposite, actually.
A merger does not mean that every channel on each existing service automatically gets pulled on to the new service
Let's take SlashDotters' favorite content niche, Porn, as an example. (L33T HAxx0Rs and other fourteen-year-olds, please note the correct spelling).
Let's say the New Merged Company (NewCo) decides they want to charge a higher premium for Porn. Not pay the content provider (e.g., Playboy) any more, just charge a higher premium. Some subscribers pay it happily, others grudgingly, others drop the channel(s). There is little either the content owner (Playboy) or the consumer can do. With only one distributor -- one trucking company driving the food from the farm into the local grocery store -- the distributor makes the rules and sets the margins.
Let's say you are a struggling Porn network and you want to get distribution. If NewCo decides it has enough Porn channels at the moment (with Playboy's 4 or 5 or whatever it is), you're done. At the moment, with two sources of satellite distribution, the newer smaller nets are more likely to get a niche, as each distributor uses it as leverage against their compeitor ("Get a Subscribution to Dish, we have the CowboyNeal Porn Channel, the other guys don't!")
If the Porn Channel is entenched with NewCo, and its CEO plays golf with NewCo's EVP Programming every Sunday, it's pretty much on a path to squeezing out more copycat Porn channels to the consumers while figuring out exactly how frequently it can raise rates. Why not? No competition will be introduced. In fact, the distributor can quite handily use its position as the single distributor to dictate exactly what type of new channels should be introduced, and, more disturbingly, how the content on existing channels should be modified.
Worst of all, yet not unimaginable (especially given our niche example) NewCo might (albeit foolishly) even decide they did not want to carry Porn.
As an aside, I am fascinated to see so much support for this merger here on SlashDot. It is getting tougher and tougher to figure this place out. Not that that is a bad thing, of course. Makes for some interesting discussions.
You forgot about the photoshopped porn of Sarah Michelle Gellar doing 69 with Seven of Nine and T'pal
Actually, that would be more like a 127, but I'm not complaining, put me down for two copies...
I agree with you.
What seems to be happening more and more, amidst the corporate axe-swingings, is that managers are inheriting "other people's' employees. And yes, during the feel-good-foosball-mania of the past decade, an awful lot of non-professionals started collecting paychecks just as if they were genuine professionals.
I don't think the lack of trust should be there, but a re-examination of goals, past mere punching of time-clocks, is prolly in order in most shops.
Try this one: "The sound of one hand clapping." ...which is exactly what you'll hear here if the editors continue to pander to the juvenile knee-jerk dead-horse-pummeling which is its unthinking MS-bashing. Christ, the way it's done half the time, it's got to be a turn-off for even some of the real Linux-o-philes
Try this:
"OKAY, I *Get* it, you're EVIL!" -- Buffy Summers.
Maven? He's a kid at a university! (But then again, when I was 22 years old, I seem to recall that I was the smartest guy in the world. I also must have believed I was immortal, but let's not go there...)
What I don't understand is why there is any kind of discussion at all on this particular thread. OF COURSE companies are going to come down on employees using their resources for file-sharing. Companies are cracking down on their employees for all manner of time-and-resource wasting endeavors, why should music file-sharing, which has the additional stigma of its dubious legality, be condoned, when the foosball table has already been sent to auction?
Legality aside for a minute, an employee's file-sharing on company time is a waste of resources, and just plain un-productive. You want to share files, update your Blog (blogs... ye gods!), tinker with the wallpaper on your iPAQ, whatever, Do It On Your Own Time, on your own computer, across your own wires. Period, Full Stop, End of Story.
An employee who would never dream of sitting at his desk reading a newspaper doesn't think twice about reading an (easily and quickly minimizable) online version of that same newspaper. Someone who would never in a million years think about spreading his record collection out on his desk at work and organizing it by artist and genre has no problem taking the same amount of time out to do so with his MP3s. Why? Because it LOOKS LIKE HE'S WORKING, and the bosses are fooled.
Those damn bosses...
Hey, Corporate Manager, want to increase employee productivity by at least 35% across the board? Ensure that everyone's computer monitor is viewable from the hallway outside his/her office or cube. Sure, you'll get a few, most likely just out of University, who'll exit loudly, babbling something about "employee rights," "corporate Nazis," and "going home to Mommy," but I'll wager that, from a productivity perspective, you won't miss 'em.
Later, on an individual basis, you can start allowing employees to move their monitors back to their customary positions of concealment, once trust has been re-earned.
It's the New York Friggin' Times, Bunky. Quit whining, register, and get on with your life.
jeezus...
The average person does not know what ISP stands for. The average person thinks that "AOL" equals "Internet." This is not meant as a slight on the the "average person," most of whom have much more important things to focus upon in their varied, non-tech-obsessed lives.
MS, fast on the heels of just about every major reviewer decalring MSN 8 superior to AOL 8, has just sent the average person a a message that there is another Internet besides AOL. I've never used either AOL or MSN, and have no love for either parent organization, but I see this as a brilliant publicity stunt by MS, no question.
The "average person on SlashDot," who has got his toaster oven connected to a Cisco router and is using it to hack into the SETI distribution, is neither the intended customer for the service nor the intended audience for the stunt.
Oh, stop! That ridiculous-looking penguin is *NOT* cool, by any stretch of the imagination. What it represents may be cool, but it is the dorkiest symbol in the IT industry.
It was a dorky symbol when it was used by a satellite porn channel in the late-eighties, and you've gotta be pretty weak to symbolize *THAT* and still come across nebish-y.
The charm, such as Tux may have any, lay in its obvious anti-corporate, anti-status symbolism, inasmuch as any company with more than five hundred dollars in its coffers could hire someone to devise a better logo. Tux sort of has that snarky frat-boy, movie-posters-on-the-wall, lamps-made-from-beer-kegs charm.
What, that's not what the Linux movement was going for...?
Sirius and XM both spent hundreds of millions of dollars establishing their infrastructure. They control the horizontal and the vertical because it is theirs to control! They have every right not to stream college-radio playlists if they feel it won't help them turn a profit. You want to listen your favorite band, put the CD in your box and push 'play.' There's an entire generation of Wilco-listening music fans whose mantra is "Music Must Be Free!" ...and you want these satellite guys to cater to that demographic? That's insane. The "edgey" listeners have already ripped entire servers worth of their "special jams" into their iPods, and are never going to be happy with, let alone pay for, what any programmer, "independent" or not, is streaming.
Don't let your politics ("pigopolists?" Sure, you're taken seriously...) get mixed in with Marketing 101.
Don't you find the liberal bias on NPR makes it un-listenable? This is not a troll, but a serious post. I'm not crazy about the conservative news presentations either, but it seems that, in those instances, the presenters are a little more up-front about the slant. They want you to know you're getting a conservative perspective. NPR has always seemed disturbingly... sneaky in this regard.
It's not that I can fault them for their bias; government funding for public media is a lot higher on the Liberal agenda then it is on the Conservative, but there has always been a disingenuity about their news that I found undermined their credibility.
Coupla concepts here to chew on, junior:
1. Had you written "black" or "Jewish" instead of "40+" in your post, you would have been mod'd down somewhere approximate to Dante's 8th Ring. Of course, since you're obviously young and hip, you probably don't think of yourself as prejudiced as some tobacco-chawin' no-neck Cracker. Here's a Newsflash, Moby -- You are.
2. Even without his celebrity, his published poetry, and his status as a Famous Rock Star, Henry Rollins would still be getting way more girls than you, 'cause he's good-looking and erudite. It's a TV Show, Milton, not a University intranet feed. Viewers like good-looking and erudite. The producers can hire the Long brothers or Stephen Hawking to write the damn thing if they're afraid of losing the SlashDot crowd.
3. And finally.... [eek!] Hey, errm, Seth, I just clicked on your webpage. Forget I said anything, kid. You've obviously got a lot on your mind, saving the world and all. Never mind! (Just don't set me on fire, 'kay? Please?)
[walks out of forum, slowly, backwards, hands where all can see them, smiling sweetly...]
Not to feed the trolls -- or, in this case, the Balrogs -- but...
There are far fewer than six degrees of separation between Tolkien's Magnum Opus and the Third Reich's own modern mythology. Himmler and the good Professor both drew from the same sources. Himmler, of course, took a very wrong turn Eastward through Hindu Mythology, but had both men sat at the same table at a dinner party, they would have had a lot to talk about...
Three years of Latin in High School. Wished I had taken more in college, plus some Greek. Consider it of such a benefit that I've begun home-schooling my four-year old daughter in it.
I was MIS. I was the dude.
MIS is not the dude. We're talking Legal, we're talking HR, or some over-arching "Corporate," but not MIS.
I would expect my employer to monitor my activities. I would not expect that monitoring to be done by a rogue MIS "dude," except when given specific instructions or clear patterns and guidelines by someone else.
Besides, most smaller companies (atleast here in north carolina, don't have a written policy re: email.) If you are the dude, what you says goes
That's the problem. It needs to be written down, with all department heads in agreement, and it needs to be in step with federal guidelines. This was all an amorphous "new frontier" a half-decade ago. The processes and protocols are pretty well-established these days.
I apologize if you felt I was ranting, and I do not wish for you to be without work. Unfortunately, I have encountered too many sysAdmins who believed that because "they had the power" (i.e., root access), they had either a right or God-given duty to be judge, jury, and executioner in matters of e-mail policy. It doesn't -- it shouldn't -- work that way.