The IT guy publishing media on that windows server is a user too.
It goes both ways.
No, it's not "1984" yet. But the technology is now in place... for the first time in our history, there's no practical reason why it can't be tomorrow.
This is push-button book-burning technology, plain and simple, and it's being rammed down our throats.
You know, I really don't see a problem with a sovereign nation deciding to implement a national identity verification scheme internally.
Now, sending troops to a foreign nation to kill everyone with enough spine to stand up for themselves and forcibly implement such a scheme on the remaining citizens, that's a different matter.
America isn't going crazy with fear because they got attacked. They're not going crazy with fear because they're afraid other people are going to try to kill them.
They're going crazy with fear because they hear the ticking of the tell-tale heart. Because their culture is based around killing and exploiting others.
They've always known they deserve to have people try to kill them, and that's a scary thing.
Of course it is. Didn't you see the picture that went with it? They were fingerprinting "bad guys". How do we know that they're bad guys? Why, because US troops were fingerprinting them, obviously.
Wait a minute... I'm confused... the US troops were fingerprinting each other?
Doesn't their government do that to them before they send them over?
If it means my girlfriend can spend less time removing spam links from her forum to protect her sites page rank and more time in bed with me, I'm all for it.
I got 6 fancy energy saving light bulbs. They cost $10. The packaging assured me that they would save me a fortune in energy costs and be easier on my eyes.
But they're very fragile, and one of them broke when I tried to arrange my light fixture on it.
And the power here in this building isn't very good, so in relatively short order, two more blew out.
3 of them were in the garbage inside of a month. Wonder how much energy they cost to make?
I got 6 old school bulbs to replace them. They cost a $1. And they last longer.
That's why I personally haven't switched.
Next time I pay $10 for six light bulbs, I want a warranty.
The first culpable parties in this are Microsoft, the media groups, and the hardware manufacturers who agreed to be party to it. They're the direct actors, and should be dealt with via direct action.
The next group of culpable parties are those who participate in the scheme. The people who pay for supporting hardware and install Vista on it are enabling this to continue. In their absence, it would not happen. They are indirectly responsible. Or perhaps irresponsible.
The appropriate thing for those of us who do not wish to allow this to happen to do is to shun those who participate. This creates a tangable disincentive for continuing down this course, and also disempowers those who choose to do so, reducing their capacity to act as effective supporters.
The common wisdom says that in the land of the internet, you must do everything you can to entice the users to come to your site, and if you don't, you're shooting yourself in the foot and no one will care.
I would suggest that is a short sighted view in this case.
There is a vast amount of content out there that is generating negligable income if any for those who host it, who do not depend on being as popular as they can be to survive.
If you are in such a position, please, break your site for users of Vista. Break it utterly, tell them that it's intentional, tell them how to find alternatives, and let them know their patronage is not welcome until and unless they do.
It's time to play hardball.
We can't make people not build it. We can't make them not buy it. We can't make people not put premium content out there that only supports Vista with DRM, and we can't make people not pay for that premium content.
But right now, the choice is non-DRM-supporting systems offering limited choice compared to the DRM-supporting systems that offer greater choice.
That is something we can do something about.
We can make it so that choosing DRM means limiting your choices. One server at a time.
And if we do it soon enough, and quick enough, we can do it from the comfortable confines of a system where the price is only a small percentage of the market.
Webmasters everywhere chose not to bother supporting anything but IE5/6 with Windows. For years and years.
Because they could get away with it.
Because that describes 90% of the market.
And their sites did just fine.
That same fact can be used against Vista. Right now.
They are still debating the laws on DRM, it takes a long time. However, in the meantime, they are utilizing existing laws that outlaw the consequences of the DRM rather than utilizing not-yet-created laws that outlaw the DRM itself.
For a bunch of posturing hypocrites, they sure do seem to be playing very effective hardball with the market leader...
See, they have this nation over there called Norway, bunch of Democratic Socialists, and the people that live there, they have all sorts of gadgets and music distribution networks and formats and whatnot, and they think that it sucks when all these different companies decide to screw the end user and try to make them pay over and over to listen to the same bunch of songs by the same bunch of retired or dead musicians, or force them to buy their hardware upgrade from the same company so they don't lose their music library.
So they made it illegal to do that to people.
You can talk all you want about the value of these business relationships and the investments and monopolies till you're blue in the face, but it's really kind of irrelevant. The Norwegians decided that these sorts of arrangements amount to unfair business practices, so unless Apple wants to play by their rules, it appears Apple is free to go peddle their shit somewhere else.
Perhaps an inititive to have these things publicly funded would be good.
Make it part of the mandate that the entire catalogue would have to be packaged for use in offline format and distributed in that fashion to the various libraries of the land, and that those copies must be no more than X period of time old if funding is to continue.
This way, even if the project later fails or funding is dropped, the value is retained and the venture was worthwhile.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. Don't take the job, don't quit your current job, post the name of the company with your submission to slashdot so other people know not to work for them unless they want to get screwed and call it a day.
I was with you clear up until you called the dishonesty of the CEO a "personality strength". This must be some strange meaning of the word strength of whick I have not previously been aware.
I was referring to the fact that they have the ability to see into the minds of their fellow and know what motivates them.
Being able to rally others to your cause is a strength.
Knowing how to present something that is true and reasonable in a way that focuses on what aspects relate to the listener rather than presenting a set of facts and presupposing that the target will have a "eureka" moment is where the difference lies, I would say.
You believe it is impossible that the administering of pain would form part of a process to socialize a person, and you do not believe that those among us whose worldview is anti-social are restraining themselves from anti-social acts because punishment exists.
You also believe that passive responses such as shunning and prison are an acceptable way to deal with the unfortunate reality that anti-social elements exist among us, particularly because these methods do not make aggressors of the rest of us.
Your worldview has validity, but it disregards the history of our species, which demonstrates again and again that the altered states of consciousness that can be engendered by such things as pain, shock, esctacy, drugs and rituals are useful tools to break a persons attachment to their worldview and open them up to either discover a new one or have a new one forced upon them.
Most religions, for example, incorporate such techniques, and so does modern psychiatric care.
Modern rehabilitation attempts to instill a new way of living into people so they can be returned to society. When we cannot break through the attachment the individual has to their dangerous perspective, we lock them up.
Locking people in a cage, cut off from human interaction and stimulation, that is torture. And it doesn't help with the problem, except as much as they eventually grow old and weak. And it's a burden on society.
I don't believe in torture and I don't believe in vengence.
But I believe that there are some people out there right now locked in cages for the rest of their lives because they didn't get a good puck in the mouth to get their attention when it mattered, followed by some guidance when they were receptive.
The dominance of your view does nothing to serve those people. Something more refined is necessary.
The whole point is that criminals either don't think far enough ahead to see the enlightened self interest in behaving in a civilized fashion.
10000 years ago, the constant threat of being kicked out to die attempting to fend for oneself alone would have kept them grudgingly in line, and if people were behaving in a fashion that threatened the welfare of the group, they'd do just that, that or just kill them.
Politicans are there to fill a role we as society asked them to fill by creating it, wielding power we gave them by our continued participation.
Part of the answer involves making them obsolete as a role.
The general idea I have is to:
a) allow people to vote on every issue if they wish, and give them the necessary transparency of process to allow them to do so to the best of their abilities.
b) allow people to delegate their vote to anyone they trust, not just those who signed up on the ballot.
c) allow those who have votes delegated to them (ie they were voted for) to cast their vote on issues the same way before, but add the weight of their personal electorate to their votes.
d) allow people to revoke their vote for a person any time they feel their values are being betrayed by those they elected, allowing them to either cast it themselves or re-assigning it to someone else.
This deals with the two major issues facing modern democratic process:
1) Sometimes there's no one to vote for that you trust but they get to speak for you anyways regardless of if you vote or not.
2) Sometimes the person you voted for betrays you and you have no way to remove from them the power of your support for several years without overthrowing the system.
The job of a CIO is to paint an honest and true picture grounded firmly in reality, and protect it from those who would engage in wishful thinking. The person who becomes a CIO is the person who has made it their lifes work to operate in this mode, and achieved the trust and respect of their peers by their effectiveness in doing so.
The job of a CEO is to paint a glowing and radiant picture firmly grounded in the hopes and dreams of investors, and protect it from those who would engage in critical thinking. The person who becomes a CEO is the person who has made it their lifes work to understand what others want and convince them it is just around the next bend, thus eliciting their ongoing co-operation.
Someone who has forged themselves into CIO material is most likely not going to be very good or happy at the CEO job for that reason. They require different personality strengths.
I often contemplate how we as a society can structure things so the guy who is telling the truth is a more effective organizational representative than the guy who likes to spin lies and half-truths. No answers yet..
Slashdot Mirror
DRM already is in the users hands as is.
The IT guy publishing media on that windows server is a user too.
It goes both ways.
No, it's not "1984" yet. But the technology is now in place... for the first time in our history, there's no practical reason why it can't be tomorrow.
This is push-button book-burning technology, plain and simple, and it's being rammed down our throats.
Those who developed it should be executed.
You know, I really don't see a problem with a sovereign nation deciding to implement a national identity verification scheme internally.
Now, sending troops to a foreign nation to kill everyone with enough spine to stand up for themselves and forcibly implement such a scheme on the remaining citizens, that's a different matter.
America isn't going crazy with fear because they got attacked. They're not going crazy with fear because they're afraid other people are going to try to kill them.
They're going crazy with fear because they hear the ticking of the tell-tale heart. Because their culture is based around killing and exploiting others.
They've always known they deserve to have people try to kill them, and that's a scary thing.
Of course it is. Didn't you see the picture that went with it? They were fingerprinting "bad guys". How do we know that they're bad guys? Why, because US troops were fingerprinting them, obviously.
Wait a minute... I'm confused... the US troops were fingerprinting each other?
Doesn't their government do that to them before they send them over?
Obviously, the rest of us are going to have to unite and invade you first.
That's what I want to see stopped. The US have already demonstrated that they can't be trusted with weapons.
They should really be broken up just as the USSR was broken up.
Personally, I don't care what any individual US citizen does or thinks... I still want to see weapons inspectors in the USA.
Relationship advice from an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot.
Words fail me.
If it means my girlfriend can spend less time removing spam links from her forum to protect her sites page rank and more time in bed with me, I'm all for it.
The researchers concluded that the generally ambiguous ads, which appeal almost entirely to emotion rather than fact, tend to confuse viewers.
This is what all ads do. And yes, ads are damaging. All of them.
I got 6 fancy energy saving light bulbs. They cost $10. The packaging assured me that they would save me a fortune in energy costs and be easier on my eyes.
But they're very fragile, and one of them broke when I tried to arrange my light fixture on it.
And the power here in this building isn't very good, so in relatively short order, two more blew out.
3 of them were in the garbage inside of a month. Wonder how much energy they cost to make?
I got 6 old school bulbs to replace them. They cost a $1. And they last longer.
That's why I personally haven't switched.
Next time I pay $10 for six light bulbs, I want a warranty.
The first culpable parties in this are Microsoft, the media groups, and the hardware manufacturers who agreed to be party to it. They're the direct actors, and should be dealt with via direct action.
The next group of culpable parties are those who participate in the scheme. The people who pay for supporting hardware and install Vista on it are enabling this to continue. In their absence, it would not happen. They are indirectly responsible. Or perhaps irresponsible.
The appropriate thing for those of us who do not wish to allow this to happen to do is to shun those who participate. This creates a tangable disincentive for continuing down this course, and also disempowers those who choose to do so, reducing their capacity to act as effective supporters.
The common wisdom says that in the land of the internet, you must do everything you can to entice the users to come to your site, and if you don't, you're shooting yourself in the foot and no one will care.
I would suggest that is a short sighted view in this case.
There is a vast amount of content out there that is generating negligable income if any for those who host it, who do not depend on being as popular as they can be to survive.
If you are in such a position, please, break your site for users of Vista. Break it utterly, tell them that it's intentional, tell them how to find alternatives, and let them know their patronage is not welcome until and unless they do.
It's time to play hardball.
We can't make people not build it. We can't make them not buy it. We can't make people not put premium content out there that only supports Vista with DRM, and we can't make people not pay for that premium content.
But right now, the choice is non-DRM-supporting systems offering limited choice compared to the DRM-supporting systems that offer greater choice.
That is something we can do something about.
We can make it so that choosing DRM means limiting your choices. One server at a time.
And if we do it soon enough, and quick enough, we can do it from the comfortable confines of a system where the price is only a small percentage of the market.
Webmasters everywhere chose not to bother supporting anything but IE5/6 with Windows. For years and years.
Because they could get away with it.
Because that describes 90% of the market.
And their sites did just fine.
That same fact can be used against Vista. Right now.
Think about it.
That's clever... I was going to go with "Kill Bush", but yours is punnier.
They are still debating the laws on DRM, it takes a long time. However, in the meantime, they are utilizing existing laws that outlaw the consequences of the DRM rather than utilizing not-yet-created laws that outlaw the DRM itself.
For a bunch of posturing hypocrites, they sure do seem to be playing very effective hardball with the market leader...
It's really simple to explain.
See, they have this nation over there called Norway, bunch of Democratic Socialists, and the people that live there, they have all sorts of gadgets and music distribution networks and formats and whatnot, and they think that it sucks when all these different companies decide to screw the end user and try to make them pay over and over to listen to the same bunch of songs by the same bunch of retired or dead musicians, or force them to buy their hardware upgrade from the same company so they don't lose their music library.
So they made it illegal to do that to people.
You can talk all you want about the value of these business relationships and the investments and monopolies till you're blue in the face, but it's really kind of irrelevant. The Norwegians decided that these sorts of arrangements amount to unfair business practices, so unless Apple wants to play by their rules, it appears Apple is free to go peddle their shit somewhere else.
Perhaps an inititive to have these things publicly funded would be good.
Make it part of the mandate that the entire catalogue would have to be packaged for use in offline format and distributed in that fashion to the various libraries of the land, and that those copies must be no more than X period of time old if funding is to continue.
This way, even if the project later fails or funding is dropped, the value is retained and the venture was worthwhile.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. Don't take the job, don't quit your current job, post the name of the company with your submission to slashdot so other people know not to work for them unless they want to get screwed and call it a day.
Interesting that two Canadian cities made the cut, while every other nation only had one.
I was with you clear up until you called the dishonesty of the CEO a "personality strength". This must be some strange meaning of the word strength of whick I have not previously been aware.
I was referring to the fact that they have the ability to see into the minds of their fellow and know what motivates them.
Being able to rally others to your cause is a strength.
Knowing how to present something that is true and reasonable in a way that focuses on what aspects relate to the listener rather than presenting a set of facts and presupposing that the target will have a "eureka" moment is where the difference lies, I would say.
You believe it is impossible that the administering of pain would form part of a process to socialize a person, and you do not believe that those among us whose worldview is anti-social are restraining themselves from anti-social acts because punishment exists.
You also believe that passive responses such as shunning and prison are an acceptable way to deal with the unfortunate reality that anti-social elements exist among us, particularly because these methods do not make aggressors of the rest of us.
Your worldview has validity, but it disregards the history of our species, which demonstrates again and again that the altered states of consciousness that can be engendered by such things as pain, shock, esctacy, drugs and rituals are useful tools to break a persons attachment to their worldview and open them up to either discover a new one or have a new one forced upon them.
Most religions, for example, incorporate such techniques, and so does modern psychiatric care.
Modern rehabilitation attempts to instill a new way of living into people so they can be returned to society. When we cannot break through the attachment the individual has to their dangerous perspective, we lock them up.
Locking people in a cage, cut off from human interaction and stimulation, that is torture. And it doesn't help with the problem, except as much as they eventually grow old and weak. And it's a burden on society.
I don't believe in torture and I don't believe in vengence.
But I believe that there are some people out there right now locked in cages for the rest of their lives because they didn't get a good puck in the mouth to get their attention when it mattered, followed by some guidance when they were receptive.
The dominance of your view does nothing to serve those people. Something more refined is necessary.
Maybe you should take a visit to South Korea.
The whole point is that criminals either don't think far enough ahead to see the enlightened self interest in behaving in a civilized fashion.
10000 years ago, the constant threat of being kicked out to die attempting to fend for oneself alone would have kept them grudgingly in line, and if people were behaving in a fashion that threatened the welfare of the group, they'd do just that, that or just kill them.
Any human being who wants to.
Last time I had my IQ tested, it was over 160... I think I'm ok...
Politicans are there to fill a role we as society asked them to fill by creating it, wielding power we gave them by our continued participation.
Part of the answer involves making them obsolete as a role.
The general idea I have is to:
a) allow people to vote on every issue if they wish, and give them the necessary transparency of process to allow them to do so to the best of their abilities.
b) allow people to delegate their vote to anyone they trust, not just those who signed up on the ballot.
c) allow those who have votes delegated to them (ie they were voted for) to cast their vote on issues the same way before, but add the weight of their personal electorate to their votes.
d) allow people to revoke their vote for a person any time they feel their values are being betrayed by those they elected, allowing them to either cast it themselves or re-assigning it to someone else.
This deals with the two major issues facing modern democratic process:
1) Sometimes there's no one to vote for that you trust but they get to speak for you anyways regardless of if you vote or not.
2) Sometimes the person you voted for betrays you and you have no way to remove from them the power of your support for several years without overthrowing the system.
Like I said... I'm still working on it...
No, I was more thinking the way it's done in Asia. Publicly, with sticks.
The job of a CIO is to paint an honest and true picture grounded firmly in reality, and protect it from those who would engage in wishful thinking. The person who becomes a CIO is the person who has made it their lifes work to operate in this mode, and achieved the trust and respect of their peers by their effectiveness in doing so.
The job of a CEO is to paint a glowing and radiant picture firmly grounded in the hopes and dreams of investors, and protect it from those who would engage in critical thinking. The person who becomes a CEO is the person who has made it their lifes work to understand what others want and convince them it is just around the next bend, thus eliciting their ongoing co-operation.
Someone who has forged themselves into CIO material is most likely not going to be very good or happy at the CEO job for that reason. They require different personality strengths.
I often contemplate how we as a society can structure things so the guy who is telling the truth is a more effective organizational representative than the guy who likes to spin lies and half-truths. No answers yet..