What we're talking about here are whistleblowers. What makes IT people unique in the history whistleblowerdom is that they often have, as part of their ordinary routines, access to vast quantities of corporate data. It's difficult to keep anything from them because the very people that would have the knowledge to do so are... more IT people.
Well, in the United States at least, which group is most likely to instill fear of repercussion (legal if not otherwise), the atheists or the creationists? How much of this has to do with some of the people running those corporations agreeing with the creationists?
No argument from me. After losing the Diamond Multimedia case, I haven't heard much about the RIAA going after portable players either. And I'm sure any such activity would have been front-page news here on Slashdot.
On the other hand, a lot of the commentary I hear from RIAA and music studio execs (always to be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure) revolves around the fact that portable storage is now comparatively huge. You can walk around with a black (or maybe Apple beige) box in your pocket with fifteen or twenty thousand tracks in it. Nobody with that much music on their player has actually spent fifteen or twenty thousand dollars though, so I have to agree with what one executive said, "Everyone knows those things are full of pirated music" (or words to that effect.) Oh sure, that's maybe not the legal definition of "piracy" but the point is well taken.
In 1999, a 60 Gb portable player was something we all knew would happen sooner or later, even if the RIAA didn't. It happened sooner, and with the synergistic rise of peer-to-peer it really did alter the landscape for music consumption. I have to wonder if that's what they are really afraid of: everyone wandering around with enormous readily accessible personal collections of music (legitimately-purchased or otherwise.) 10,000 songs at 3.5 minutes per track is almost 600 hours of continuous music, and for someone with decent broadband and a Gnutella client, collecting ten K songs isn't that hard. And people share hard drives. That's truly a paradigm shift, and one that I'm sure scares the Bejesus out of the content industry.
So, what this all comes down to is that the RIAA and the media outfits failed to account for the possibility of more advanced (i.e. non-AHRA-compliant) recording methods in their original thinking, and maybe got a little too specific. Now that they've finally grasped that technology has passed them by, they want to rewrite the deal.
I guess I'm not too surprised. Emperor Palpatine summed it up nicely: "You will pay the price for your lack of vision."
In any event, unless they can conclusively demonstrate that the "unauthorized code" was not capable of transmitting other information then that statement is meaningless. Any halfway competent cracker would take steps to cover his tracks: for all we know, this address-harvesting business was just cover for something worse.
As I sit here having just finished restoring NTLDR to my RAID 0 drive after the thing failed to boot. I compared the original file and the replacement, and they were off by ONE BIT.
Don't forget the fortunately unsuccessful attempt by the MPAA to have the Video Cassette Recorder ruled a contraband technology, and the legal battles both they and the RIAA have fought all down the line as new technologies are brought to market. They have the gall to talk about theft, when they've stolen far, far more from us and are trying to take more. There needs to be a certain balance, a balance that the Founders struck so well that it stood up for two hundred years. These people have to know what they're doing, the damage they're causing: the fact that the persist anyway indicates that they are the ones who are unbalanced.
Of course, realistically it's too much to expect attack lawyers funded by non-U.S. corporations to have any respect for the U.S. legal system or its citizens. Personally, the behavior of the RIAA member companies in this regard should have resulted in an international incident. I mean, if an American corporation went overseas somewhere, and funded a bunch of lawyers to begin suing the pants of the locals, you can bet there'd be an uproar.
Yes indeed, but I said software generals, as in "expert computing systems placed in charge of strategy and logistics", specifically referring to the eventual replacement of human military leaders with software. Of course, whether a computer will ever be able to replace a great leader is another issue entirely, but in terms of integrating vast amounts of real-time information from thousands of sources and formulating a sound battle plan... well, that's something an expert system (or whatever we're calling AI in twenty or thirty years) will be able to do.
We can also always count on the random A.C. who doesn't have even a smidgen of understanding to carry on about STEALING. There's this thing called "the Big Picture" which you are apparently failing to see. You had best understand that both sides in this conflict have rights under the law, but only one side is interested in removing the other side's rights... permanently.
"... will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends", or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."
Like, say... a battlefield or even a major military campaign. Eventually war is going to be a matter of software "generals" maneuvering resources and personnel around in order to achieve maximum effect. Something tells me the military may already be far ahead of what the massively-multiplayer folks are doing. Or maybe not: when you think about it, a closed universe interacting with millions of actual human beings is a great place to experiment with this sort of thing, and hey, you even get the players to pay for it.
One would have thought RIAA could afford better lawyers.
Maybe, up 'til now... they haven't need any. Better lawyers cost more money, and why hire one of those if a mere paper-pusher will serve your purposes.
The voting machine then is just a more convenient way of filling out the ballot by hand (which is also still an option for people who don't trust machines at all).
Which brings us right back to the debate about why we need the damn machines in the first place. I'm still waiting for a solid justification for that. Discussing the technical merits of one electromechanical system versus another is premature, unless we truly have a good reason for using them in the first place.
In any event, at a minimum I would expect any proposed design for a voting machine to be:
A. Completely open (both hardware and software),
B. Have a method of guaranteeing that the published code is actually being used in every machine, and
C. In no way involve Diebold, Congress, or any other known criminal organization or class.
We use some commercial libraries in our main application that require activation. Well, they don't for the end user, just for the developer, so every time I blow up my XP box, or the company upgrades my equipment, I have to call and beg them to reactivate me. They have a dongle version available, but a. dongles suck and b. it costs almost as much as the original software! I'm sure that sounded reasonable to a bunch of executive types sitting around a conference room, but for the customer it's pretty raw.
Well, in my case I'm sure because a. I purchased the individual components from a number of sources and assembled them myself and b. I didn't buy the operating system from a hardware vendor. But otherwise, yeah... the Wintel combine has screwed things down pretty tight so far as the masses are concerned. That's really unfortunate, given the promise held by the personal computing revolution circa 1978-79. I'm frequently criticized for pointing out Microsoft's destructive influence in the decades since: back then the field was wiiiiide open... anything was possible, in terms of both software and hardware. Technically it still is, but to make it happen on anything resembling a significant scale means contending with the big boys. It doesn't matter how good your product, either: the more technical merit you have, the more the Beast of Redmond will try to crush you.
Spread by the Chinese. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this is just the Chinese government trying to make Microsoft look bad as a bargaining tactic.
Perhaps... but then again, to be completely fair, you really don't have to work that hard to make Microsoft look bad.
It's funny that physical borders are off and we can travel wherever we want, but now we have to fight legal borders
Some of us are more worried about illegal boarders but that's another story.
I dunno about Fox being faster than torrents... more consistent maybe for older shows, but I've never been impressed by Fox's servers. On the other hand, I usually pull anywhere from 2 to 10 mbit/sec out of any reasonably active torrent.
Putting it in a drive does not mean the setup program was executed and does not mean he was presented with any license screen. If he nLite'd it and then booted the remastered version, odds are he never saw a license page. Microsoft won't like that much, but the fact remains he didn't "click through" squat.
Slashdot Mirror
What we're talking about here are whistleblowers. What makes IT people unique in the history whistleblowerdom is that they often have, as part of their ordinary routines, access to vast quantities of corporate data. It's difficult to keep anything from them because the very people that would have the knowledge to do so are ... more IT people.
Creationism itself is a subset of religion.
To some it's a religion, to others it is a tool for political gain. To some it is both.
Because trying to get through it is a rite of passage for any competent explorer.
Well, in the United States at least, which group is most likely to instill fear of repercussion (legal if not otherwise), the atheists or the creationists? How much of this has to do with some of the people running those corporations agreeing with the creationists?
If my code is written well, it will do exactly what it was designed to do, every time. It will not lie to me, it will not decide to do something else.
What kind of a computer do you work on?
No argument from me. After losing the Diamond Multimedia case, I haven't heard much about the RIAA going after portable players either. And I'm sure any such activity would have been front-page news here on Slashdot.
On the other hand, a lot of the commentary I hear from RIAA and music studio execs (always to be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure) revolves around the fact that portable storage is now comparatively huge. You can walk around with a black (or maybe Apple beige) box in your pocket with fifteen or twenty thousand tracks in it. Nobody with that much music on their player has actually spent fifteen or twenty thousand dollars though, so I have to agree with what one executive said, "Everyone knows those things are full of pirated music" (or words to that effect.) Oh sure, that's maybe not the legal definition of "piracy" but the point is well taken.
In 1999, a 60 Gb portable player was something we all knew would happen sooner or later, even if the RIAA didn't. It happened sooner, and with the synergistic rise of peer-to-peer it really did alter the landscape for music consumption. I have to wonder if that's what they are really afraid of: everyone wandering around with enormous readily accessible personal collections of music (legitimately-purchased or otherwise.) 10,000 songs at 3.5 minutes per track is almost 600 hours of continuous music, and for someone with decent broadband and a Gnutella client, collecting ten K songs isn't that hard. And people share hard drives. That's truly a paradigm shift, and one that I'm sure scares the Bejesus out of the content industry.
Not that I feel sorry for them, exactly.
So, what this all comes down to is that the RIAA and the media outfits failed to account for the possibility of more advanced (i.e. non-AHRA-compliant) recording methods in their original thinking, and maybe got a little too specific. Now that they've finally grasped that technology has passed them by, they want to rewrite the deal.
I guess I'm not too surprised. Emperor Palpatine summed it up nicely: "You will pay the price for your lack of vision."
Apparently this idiot has a bad network card. It's obviously corrupting outgoing packets.
There's got to be a good strap-on joke in here somewhere but I'm too many beers down to come up with it.
In any event, unless they can conclusively demonstrate that the "unauthorized code" was not capable of transmitting other information then that statement is meaningless. Any halfway competent cracker would take steps to cover his tracks: for all we know, this address-harvesting business was just cover for something worse.
As I sit here having just finished restoring NTLDR to my RAID 0 drive after the thing failed to boot. I compared the original file and the replacement, and they were off by ONE BIT.
Don't forget the fortunately unsuccessful attempt by the MPAA to have the Video Cassette Recorder ruled a contraband technology, and the legal battles both they and the RIAA have fought all down the line as new technologies are brought to market. They have the gall to talk about theft, when they've stolen far, far more from us and are trying to take more. There needs to be a certain balance, a balance that the Founders struck so well that it stood up for two hundred years. These people have to know what they're doing, the damage they're causing: the fact that the persist anyway indicates that they are the ones who are unbalanced.
Of course, realistically it's too much to expect attack lawyers funded by non-U.S. corporations to have any respect for the U.S. legal system or its citizens. Personally, the behavior of the RIAA member companies in this regard should have resulted in an international incident. I mean, if an American corporation went overseas somewhere, and funded a bunch of lawyers to begin suing the pants of the locals, you can bet there'd be an uproar.
Yes indeed, but I said software generals, as in "expert computing systems placed in charge of strategy and logistics", specifically referring to the eventual replacement of human military leaders with software. Of course, whether a computer will ever be able to replace a great leader is another issue entirely, but in terms of integrating vast amounts of real-time information from thousands of sources and formulating a sound battle plan ... well, that's something an expert system (or whatever we're calling AI in twenty or thirty years) will be able to do.
We can also always count on the random A.C. who doesn't have even a smidgen of understanding to carry on about STEALING. There's this thing called "the Big Picture" which you are apparently failing to see. You had best understand that both sides in this conflict have rights under the law, but only one side is interested in removing the other side's rights ... permanently.
"... will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends", or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."
... a battlefield or even a major military campaign. Eventually war is going to be a matter of software "generals" maneuvering resources and personnel around in order to achieve maximum effect. Something tells me the military may already be far ahead of what the massively-multiplayer folks are doing. Or maybe not: when you think about it, a closed universe interacting with millions of actual human beings is a great place to experiment with this sort of thing, and hey, you even get the players to pay for it.
Like, say
One would have thought RIAA could afford better lawyers.
... they haven't need any. Better lawyers cost more money, and why hire one of those if a mere paper-pusher will serve your purposes.
Maybe, up 'til now
The voting machine then is just a more convenient way of filling out the ballot by hand (which is also still an option for people who don't trust machines at all).
Which brings us right back to the debate about why we need the damn machines in the first place. I'm still waiting for a solid justification for that. Discussing the technical merits of one electromechanical system versus another is premature, unless we truly have a good reason for using them in the first place.
In any event, at a minimum I would expect any proposed design for a voting machine to be:
A. Completely open (both hardware and software),
B. Have a method of guaranteeing that the published code is actually being used in every machine, and
C. In no way involve Diebold, Congress, or any other known criminal organization or class.
Otherwise, I'd never trust it.
We use some commercial libraries in our main application that require activation. Well, they don't for the end user, just for the developer, so every time I blow up my XP box, or the company upgrades my equipment, I have to call and beg them to reactivate me. They have a dongle version available, but a. dongles suck and b. it costs almost as much as the original software! I'm sure that sounded reasonable to a bunch of executive types sitting around a conference room, but for the customer it's pretty raw.
Not only does it exist, but it even has lots of competition!
Well, in my case I'm sure because a. I purchased the individual components from a number of sources and assembled them myself and b. I didn't buy the operating system from a hardware vendor. But otherwise, yeah ... the Wintel combine has screwed things down pretty tight so far as the masses are concerned. That's really unfortunate, given the promise held by the personal computing revolution circa 1978-79. I'm frequently criticized for pointing out Microsoft's destructive influence in the decades since: back then the field was wiiiiide open ... anything was possible, in terms of both software and hardware. Technically it still is, but to make it happen on anything resembling a significant scale means contending with the big boys. It doesn't matter how good your product, either: the more technical merit you have, the more the Beast of Redmond will try to crush you.
Spread by the Chinese. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this is just the Chinese government trying to make Microsoft look bad as a bargaining tactic.
... but then again, to be completely fair, you really don't have to work that hard to make Microsoft look bad.
Perhaps
Now, if they'd invest as much money in making decent beer, they might be on to something!
True, although to be entirely fair, a lot of quality and taste is lost due to poor handling.
It's funny that physical borders are off and we can travel wherever we want, but now we have to fight legal borders
... more consistent maybe for older shows, but I've never been impressed by Fox's servers. On the other hand, I usually pull anywhere from 2 to 10 mbit/sec out of any reasonably active torrent.
Some of us are more worried about illegal boarders but that's another story.
I dunno about Fox being faster than torrents
Putting it in a drive does not mean the setup program was executed and does not mean he was presented with any license screen. If he nLite'd it and then booted the remastered version, odds are he never saw a license page. Microsoft won't like that much, but the fact remains he didn't "click through" squat.
Are you sure you did not give oncent?
It's none of your business whether or not I bought my copy.