Are politicians getting worse or do we just hear about it more often today?
I think we just hear about it more often. Remember, we now have a series of tubes that can be used to instantly transmit any negative information around the planet.
A sensible reply to my first comment would have been, "didn't you mean ethanol?" Instead you chose to be an ass and read a whole lot more into my remark than was there. Next time bother to read the whole thread and pick up on the gist of what people are talking rather than jumping on a single error.
I wonder why you do that? In any event, don't bother replying, I'm not interested in a flamefest. Goodbye.
{sigh} you really must be new here. There's no need to be snide over a typo, and other than your pointless grammar-Nazism, you offered nothing of substance in your reply.
Your inappropriateness aside, are you actually claiming that the Federal Government does not subsidize the conversion of corn into motor fuel? Huh. That's a remarkable degree of ignorance, given the nearly forty billion dollars that Congress has given in such subsidies in the past decade. Your taxpayer dollars at work. In any event, just so you won't think that I'm making this up, there are some who would disagree with you on this subject.
Patents weren't supposed to be about ideas. They were supposed to be about implementations, specific ways of making ideas work in the real world. The Founders were pretty clear about that. The problems came in (as so many do) when we stopped listening to them.
Ha... believe me, I wasn't offended. But you're right of course, and all this kind of behavior will do is force the smart criminals to become even smarter. Think of it as evolution in action.
I guarantee this is about selective enforcement, and it could just as easily be that they want to determine who has the most money available to pay them off, as much as concerns over someone's lawyer daddy. Obviously, a college kid with no money isn't worth the effort (other than the PR), but if you find some likely candidates and discover their assets you'll be better able to allocate legal resources. In any event, this seems to have become a money-making venture in its own right, and they'll probably want to prequalify their targets to maximize the take. Of course, it could be for some other reason entirely, and you'd have to be an RIAA lawyer to know what that would be.
Copyright itself does that. States have never had the power to regulate copyright, and that's not necessarily bad. Some things are better if they are uniformly enforced by a central entity.
They were known for quality keyboards for a long time. I have three older Microsoft keyboards (a couple of years or so) and they are pretty awesome. Double-shot keys (i.e., the plastic lettering is molded all the way through the keycaps so it can't fade), fairly hefty, keys have a nice feel. Never had a problem with them.
I keep automatic updates turned off ever since an update for Win2k corrupted my installation and forced a full re-install.
Me since Windows NT 4. I had a friend of mine who worked for large company call me and say, "don't install the latest fixes! One of them will trash your drive!" Apparently, their IT people were checking the latest hotfixes on their test system, prior to deployment, and discovered the problem. Of course, he tells me this right as I was trying to reboot after having installed them on my goddamn server and was wondering why I was getting a BSOD.
Yeah, I was pissed, and when automatic updates came around, it just seemed like a good idea to let everyone else test them first.
Good thing you threw that last line on there, you were starting to look awfully guilty;D
Well, if you mean "guilty" of wanting to protect my personal information I'll have to cop to that one. I haven't gone so far as to bury a server in my back yard (that's a bit extreme) but I do take some steps. Like I said before, if somebody (anybody, I don't care if it's a burglar stealing my computers or the Feds wanting a look) wants my stuff they should have to work for it.
These days, you have to be a good nerd to be a good criminal.
Or you at least have to know one you can trust. Both law enforcement and organized crime (the distinction is somewhat subtle nowadays I admit) have some pretty sharp people working for them, I'm sure.
True, but at least if they have to spend time arguing with me, my lawyer has time to do whatever he can. My point is that simply making things easy for law enforcement is the wrong approach. They'll probably get what they want eventually, but not before I get something in return. That's why you need a good attorney: the law can be manipulated by both sides. The guy you referred to probably didn't get proper representation.
The FBI has never been an organization that has felt bound by the law, and this is not the first time they've gotten too big for their britches. In case you don't remember, it got pretty bad under J. Edgar Hoover as well. Congress placed a lot of restrictions on their behavior because of their abuses of the citizenry (and of Congress as it happens, that bastard had dirt on everyone.) Unfortunately, after 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the Bush Administration we're pretty much back to square one.
There are two ways to respond to such "requests". Roll over, or fight back. Yes, that videographer was jailed for a few months before he gave in... but that's more "fighting back" than most of us would do. I'll give the man a lot of credit, it takes some balls to stand up to the Feds that way, particularly when you're not even protecting yourself. If the Feds knew that everyone they tried to run roughshod over would take that attitude they might think twice. As it is, they know most of us would rather die than go to jail, so they can do whatever the hell they want. That simple fact grants them a lot of power they otherwise would not have, because we're a nation of wimps.
Sooer or later (and at the rate things are spiraling downhill I vote for sooner) even the most complacent individuals in this country are going to understand the prescience of the Founding Fathers and the value of the Second Amendment.
On the other hand, you have to look at the reason the media companies use DRM of one sort or another. And that's because it works. Yes, they'll always be cracked sooner or later. However, that means nothing in terms of raw sales because the vast majority of your customers will never be aware of that fact, or too afraid to try it, or too technically inept to find the tools and use them. So far as those people are concerned, your DRM scheme is perfect because they'll never, ever manage to get around it, even if they wanted to.
CSS was cracked years ago, and now tools to copy DVDs are readily available: just Google "DVD Shrink" for one example. That being the case, why do virtually all commercial DVDs have CSS still on them? Because it raises the bar high enough so that only a relative few will be able to manipulate that data in a manner not of the studio's choosing. That's just as true today as it was before DVD Jon came along and shook the applecart.
DRM is like most things: it doesn't have to be perfect, it only needs to be good enough. The RIAA learned that lesson after decades of focusing on the control of "digitally perfect copies". They were shocked at the popularity of Napster and early MP3 rips, because those rips were anything but perfect. They were, however, good enough for a heck of a lot of people. That fact cuts both ways.
Re:You'd expect the poster to have read the articl
on
Facebook In Court
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If I were you I'd do two things: a. retain the services of a competent attorney and b. listen to him when he tells you to stop posting about the case on a public forum. You have no idea what effect what you just wrote could have if the opposition were to bring it up in court. Shut up about it until it's over and done. At that point, every software developer on Slashdot will want to hear all about it, me included, but in the meantime don't risk compromising yourself.
You would think that, after all this time, the PHBs usually put in charge of software purchasing would have realized that nothing from Microsoft is open. Good, bad... that's the way it is.
Well, I'd say it depends on what really happened. The problem is that everything was apparently verbal, and I'm not sure how this is going to be resolved. My guess is that Facebook will end up settling out of court for some millions to get off the hook. Probably that's all the people suing Facebook want anyways: I can't believe they truly expect to have the company just turned over to them.
Not that I've seen. I suppose in that mythical environment where programmers are always given time to do the job right, where requirements are always fully documented up front, and customers aren't allowed to change the spec at will... sure, I imagine there's plenty of pretty code there. Now, I've never worked in such an environment, and I've taken over several large projects along the way and it was usually an ugly, thorny mess. Sometimes it's because the coders just didn't care, or just weren't very good, other times it's because they were barely given enough time to do the job, much less care about niceties.
The other problem is that code does evolve, does have to change to meet new requirements, and often there just isn't an elegant way to fit those changes into the existing architecture. Other times it's just "make the fix and get it out the door." Anyway you look at it, from an organizational and neatness perspective, code suffers entropy: it goes downhill from bad to worse. Maybe that's different in development environments that aren't subject to market pressures, but I wouldn't know. Research, or maybe government projects? I've been in the industrial sector most of my life and those kinds of projects work to schedules. Meet it or beat it.
Occasionally, codebase entropy can be reversed, but only temporarily and at great expense. Usually this is done when the disharmony has reached such proportions that the program can no longer be maintained.
I'm still waiting for an implantable extension to my brain. I mean, the real complaint here is that our gadgeteering society isn't using our brains to store and retrieve information, instead we're using our fingers and eyes to interface to computers of various types (of course, we had other nonvolatile storage media in the past: the were called "books" or "scrolls", I think.) Well, when I can get a few hundred gigabytes of electronic memory implanted in my skull, directly addressable using symbolic thought patterns... well. Worrying about phone number lists and birthdays will see pretty trivial. And if the thing can store information it can run programs too... let the implant remind me of my anniversary. Let it do all the grunt work that my merely human brain has to struggle with today. Need to do integral calculus in your head? No problem, anyone can do it. Easy as pie. Just think it.
Lots of cool things would be possible. True telepathy would be only an implant and an Internet connection away, and why stop with merely talking to people. Talking to computers and remote data stores would be equally useful. Want to Google the name of the actress you just saw on TV? Just think it and let the implant find the data for you. Hell, if it were done right there would be no perceptible difference between recalling something from your own cortex, or having the machine put information into your brain as if you'd remembered it yourself. Well, probably the implant would be faster, but you wouldn't even have to know that you didn't already know it. Need more processing power? Just talk to a remote system somewhere and have it handle the request. If it's a big job and it takes a while, it'll be just like when you're trying hard to remember something and you can't, and then you stop trying. Eventually, your brain's search algorithm completes and the answer pops into your head. This would work like that, and at that point, the difference between man and machine would be moot.
I hope I live to see it. I've been typing at a computer for a living for too many years: I want a better way.
Well, regulating markets is financial suicide in the long run, so you can't keep them(the regulations) forever.
That's just not true. One, you're equating regulated markets with protectionism (the latter being merely an extreme level of the former), and two, you certainly can keep those regulations in place forever. For that matter, you can refuse to trade with certain nations entirely, if such trade is detrimental to you. You've made the basic assumption that the global economy is good for everyone, and that everyone should be required to compete in it. You're also forgetting that corporations compete with each other within the confines of their home country (whatever that means anymore), and don't necessarily become "dangerously uncompetitive".
America was a downright isolationist place at one time, and a lot of us liked it that way. It was how the Founders wanted us to be... free and independent. Then we started heavy trade with the rest of the world... and look where we are now. From Japan decimating our electronics manufacturing sector using a variety of illegal tactics to China finishing the job with, well, pretty much everything else, I must say I'm at a complete loss to explain how the current state of affairs can be considered "good" from the perspective of the U.S. worker. Those of us who are still working, anyway.
I'd rather work for a crappy, inefficient protected industry than not work at all, which is the direction we're heading with this "global economy". I mean, if you're a First-World nation that is just itching to achieve Third-World status, why, Free Trade is a marvelous idea. That's because the result of all this openness is a massive transfer of wealth to other countries (notably China) and concomitant destruction of domestic industries. That's just great, if you happen to be on the receiving end of all that American wealth. Not so good if you're among those who used to create it, once upon a time.
Just for grins, let's take a look at how China and Japan operate, from an openness perspective: Japan doesn't want to buy anything but raw materials from anyone else, period (so much for free trade), whereas China is perfectly happy to have you come and set up shop there, so long as you partner with a Chinese company and make them a gift of all your hard-won technology and manufacturing technique. Really, if you were looking to use your economy as weapon I can't think of a better way to do it, short of an actual war.
Personally, I'd say a little "protectionism" is long overdue, although it is likely far too late.
Slashdot Mirror
It just means that you'll have to emulate your virtualized emulated environment.
Or something.
Ben's office was raided by the FBI in an entirely separate incident over a year ago, and he hasn't been charged with a crime.
It could also be that they're building a case against the man and that was just one piece of the puzzle.
Are politicians getting worse or do we just hear about it more often today?
I think we just hear about it more often. Remember, we now have a series of tubes that can be used to instantly transmit any negative information around the planet.
There's an easier way to tell. They're lying whenever their lips move.
Take a look at an American city
...
You can see that it's very pretty,
Just two things of which you must beware
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!
Sounds like Indiana has the water thing covered. Unfortunate, for those of us who live in nearby States.
I wonder why you do that.
A sensible reply to my first comment would have been, "didn't you mean ethanol?" Instead you chose to be an ass and read a whole lot more into my remark than was there. Next time bother to read the whole thread and pick up on the gist of what people are talking rather than jumping on a single error.
I wonder why you do that? In any event, don't bother replying, I'm not interested in a flamefest. Goodbye.
{sigh} you really must be new here. There's no need to be snide over a typo, and other than your pointless grammar-Nazism, you offered nothing of substance in your reply.
Your inappropriateness aside, are you actually claiming that the Federal Government does not subsidize the conversion of corn into motor fuel? Huh. That's a remarkable degree of ignorance, given the nearly forty billion dollars that Congress has given in such subsidies in the past decade. Your taxpayer dollars at work. In any event, just so you won't think that I'm making this up, there are some who would disagree with you on this subject.
Patents weren't supposed to be about ideas. They were supposed to be about implementations, specific ways of making ideas work in the real world. The Founders were pretty clear about that. The problems came in (as so many do) when we stopped listening to them.
It's even worse than that, since methanol production is heavily subsidized by the Federal Government.
Ha ... believe me, I wasn't offended. But you're right of course, and all this kind of behavior will do is force the smart criminals to become even smarter. Think of it as evolution in action.
I guarantee this is about selective enforcement, and it could just as easily be that they want to determine who has the most money available to pay them off, as much as concerns over someone's lawyer daddy. Obviously, a college kid with no money isn't worth the effort (other than the PR), but if you find some likely candidates and discover their assets you'll be better able to allocate legal resources. In any event, this seems to have become a money-making venture in its own right, and they'll probably want to prequalify their targets to maximize the take. Of course, it could be for some other reason entirely, and you'd have to be an RIAA lawyer to know what that would be.
Copyright itself does that. States have never had the power to regulate copyright, and that's not necessarily bad. Some things are better if they are uniformly enforced by a central entity.
They were known for quality keyboards for a long time. I have three older Microsoft keyboards (a couple of years or so) and they are pretty awesome. Double-shot keys (i.e., the plastic lettering is molded all the way through the keycaps so it can't fade), fairly hefty, keys have a nice feel. Never had a problem with them.
Sounds like Microsoft got cheap. Too bad.
I keep automatic updates turned off ever since an update for Win2k corrupted my installation and forced a full re-install.
Me since Windows NT 4. I had a friend of mine who worked for large company call me and say, "don't install the latest fixes! One of them will trash your drive!" Apparently, their IT people were checking the latest hotfixes on their test system, prior to deployment, and discovered the problem. Of course, he tells me this right as I was trying to reboot after having installed them on my goddamn server and was wondering why I was getting a BSOD.
Yeah, I was pissed, and when automatic updates came around, it just seemed like a good idea to let everyone else test them first.
Good thing you threw that last line on there, you were starting to look awfully guilty ;D
Well, if you mean "guilty" of wanting to protect my personal information I'll have to cop to that one. I haven't gone so far as to bury a server in my back yard (that's a bit extreme) but I do take some steps. Like I said before, if somebody (anybody, I don't care if it's a burglar stealing my computers or the Feds wanting a look) wants my stuff they should have to work for it.
These days, you have to be a good nerd to be a good criminal.
Or you at least have to know one you can trust. Both law enforcement and organized crime (the distinction is somewhat subtle nowadays I admit) have some pretty sharp people working for them, I'm sure.
True, but at least if they have to spend time arguing with me, my lawyer has time to do whatever he can. My point is that simply making things easy for law enforcement is the wrong approach. They'll probably get what they want eventually, but not before I get something in return. That's why you need a good attorney: the law can be manipulated by both sides. The guy you referred to probably didn't get proper representation.
... but that's more "fighting back" than most of us would do. I'll give the man a lot of credit, it takes some balls to stand up to the Feds that way, particularly when you're not even protecting yourself. If the Feds knew that everyone they tried to run roughshod over would take that attitude they might think twice. As it is, they know most of us would rather die than go to jail, so they can do whatever the hell they want. That simple fact grants them a lot of power they otherwise would not have, because we're a nation of wimps.
The FBI has never been an organization that has felt bound by the law, and this is not the first time they've gotten too big for their britches. In case you don't remember, it got pretty bad under J. Edgar Hoover as well. Congress placed a lot of restrictions on their behavior because of their abuses of the citizenry (and of Congress as it happens, that bastard had dirt on everyone.) Unfortunately, after 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the Bush Administration we're pretty much back to square one.
There are two ways to respond to such "requests". Roll over, or fight back. Yes, that videographer was jailed for a few months before he gave in
Sooer or later (and at the rate things are spiraling downhill I vote for sooner) even the most complacent individuals in this country are going to understand the prescience of the Founding Fathers and the value of the Second Amendment.
On the other hand, you have to look at the reason the media companies use DRM of one sort or another. And that's because it works. Yes, they'll always be cracked sooner or later. However, that means nothing in terms of raw sales because the vast majority of your customers will never be aware of that fact, or too afraid to try it, or too technically inept to find the tools and use them. So far as those people are concerned, your DRM scheme is perfect because they'll never, ever manage to get around it, even if they wanted to.
CSS was cracked years ago, and now tools to copy DVDs are readily available: just Google "DVD Shrink" for one example. That being the case, why do virtually all commercial DVDs have CSS still on them? Because it raises the bar high enough so that only a relative few will be able to manipulate that data in a manner not of the studio's choosing. That's just as true today as it was before DVD Jon came along and shook the applecart.
DRM is like most things: it doesn't have to be perfect, it only needs to be good enough. The RIAA learned that lesson after decades of focusing on the control of "digitally perfect copies". They were shocked at the popularity of Napster and early MP3 rips, because those rips were anything but perfect. They were, however, good enough for a heck of a lot of people. That fact cuts both ways.
If I were you I'd do two things: a. retain the services of a competent attorney and b. listen to him when he tells you to stop posting about the case on a public forum. You have no idea what effect what you just wrote could have if the opposition were to bring it up in court. Shut up about it until it's over and done. At that point, every software developer on Slashdot will want to hear all about it, me included, but in the meantime don't risk compromising yourself.
I think they're calling it "Ack!uafina" now.
You would think that, after all this time, the PHBs usually put in charge of software purchasing would have realized that nothing from Microsoft is open. Good, bad ... that's the way it is.
At least they're still required to put this stuff on the label. It'll be worse once they manage to get the FDA to change the labeling laws.
Well, I'd say it depends on what really happened. The problem is that everything was apparently verbal, and I'm not sure how this is going to be resolved. My guess is that Facebook will end up settling out of court for some millions to get off the hook. Probably that's all the people suing Facebook want anyways: I can't believe they truly expect to have the company just turned over to them.
Not that I've seen. I suppose in that mythical environment where programmers are always given time to do the job right, where requirements are always fully documented up front, and customers aren't allowed to change the spec at will ... sure, I imagine there's plenty of pretty code there. Now, I've never worked in such an environment, and I've taken over several large projects along the way and it was usually an ugly, thorny mess. Sometimes it's because the coders just didn't care, or just weren't very good, other times it's because they were barely given enough time to do the job, much less care about niceties.
The other problem is that code does evolve, does have to change to meet new requirements, and often there just isn't an elegant way to fit those changes into the existing architecture. Other times it's just "make the fix and get it out the door." Anyway you look at it, from an organizational and neatness perspective, code suffers entropy: it goes downhill from bad to worse. Maybe that's different in development environments that aren't subject to market pressures, but I wouldn't know. Research, or maybe government projects? I've been in the industrial sector most of my life and those kinds of projects work to schedules. Meet it or beat it.
Occasionally, codebase entropy can be reversed, but only temporarily and at great expense. Usually this is done when the disharmony has reached such proportions that the program can no longer be maintained.
Gadgets Have Taken Over For Our Brains
... well. Worrying about phone number lists and birthdays will see pretty trivial. And if the thing can store information it can run programs too ... let the implant remind me of my anniversary. Let it do all the grunt work that my merely human brain has to struggle with today. Need to do integral calculus in your head? No problem, anyone can do it. Easy as pie. Just think it.
I'm still waiting for an implantable extension to my brain. I mean, the real complaint here is that our gadgeteering society isn't using our brains to store and retrieve information, instead we're using our fingers and eyes to interface to computers of various types (of course, we had other nonvolatile storage media in the past: the were called "books" or "scrolls", I think.) Well, when I can get a few hundred gigabytes of electronic memory implanted in my skull, directly addressable using symbolic thought patterns
Lots of cool things would be possible. True telepathy would be only an implant and an Internet connection away, and why stop with merely talking to people. Talking to computers and remote data stores would be equally useful. Want to Google the name of the actress you just saw on TV? Just think it and let the implant find the data for you. Hell, if it were done right there would be no perceptible difference between recalling something from your own cortex, or having the machine put information into your brain as if you'd remembered it yourself. Well, probably the implant would be faster, but you wouldn't even have to know that you didn't already know it. Need more processing power? Just talk to a remote system somewhere and have it handle the request. If it's a big job and it takes a while, it'll be just like when you're trying hard to remember something and you can't, and then you stop trying. Eventually, your brain's search algorithm completes and the answer pops into your head. This would work like that, and at that point, the difference between man and machine would be moot.
I hope I live to see it. I've been typing at a computer for a living for too many years: I want a better way.
Well, regulating markets is financial suicide in the long run, so you can't keep them(the regulations) forever.
... free and independent. Then we started heavy trade with the rest of the world ... and look where we are now. From Japan decimating our electronics manufacturing sector using a variety of illegal tactics to China finishing the job with, well, pretty much everything else, I must say I'm at a complete loss to explain how the current state of affairs can be considered "good" from the perspective of the U.S. worker. Those of us who are still working, anyway.
That's just not true. One, you're equating regulated markets with protectionism (the latter being merely an extreme level of the former), and two, you certainly can keep those regulations in place forever. For that matter, you can refuse to trade with certain nations entirely, if such trade is detrimental to you. You've made the basic assumption that the global economy is good for everyone, and that everyone should be required to compete in it. You're also forgetting that corporations compete with each other within the confines of their home country (whatever that means anymore), and don't necessarily become "dangerously uncompetitive".
America was a downright isolationist place at one time, and a lot of us liked it that way. It was how the Founders wanted us to be
I'd rather work for a crappy, inefficient protected industry than not work at all, which is the direction we're heading with this "global economy". I mean, if you're a First-World nation that is just itching to achieve Third-World status, why, Free Trade is a marvelous idea. That's because the result of all this openness is a massive transfer of wealth to other countries (notably China) and concomitant destruction of domestic industries. That's just great, if you happen to be on the receiving end of all that American wealth. Not so good if you're among those who used to create it, once upon a time.
Just for grins, let's take a look at how China and Japan operate, from an openness perspective: Japan doesn't want to buy anything but raw materials from anyone else, period (so much for free trade), whereas China is perfectly happy to have you come and set up shop there, so long as you partner with a Chinese company and make them a gift of all your hard-won technology and manufacturing technique. Really, if you were looking to use your economy as weapon I can't think of a better way to do it, short of an actual war.
Personally, I'd say a little "protectionism" is long overdue, although it is likely far too late.