so they argue for open DRM and call Jobs insincere.
And he may very well be insincere. Both Jobs and record execs in general are about as self-serving as they come. But I know they are lying through their teeth, so I'll give Jobs the benefit of the doubt.
Yes. The movie people played it a lot smarter in that regard, with the original DVD CSS. They've maintained iron-fisted control over hardware vendors all along, whereas the music companies seem to have screwed up completely.
If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.
Sure, and if I opened up my bank account, everybody would love me too, for a while at least. I see Digital Restrictions Management as a net negative, in pretty much any form, but this kind of sour grapes attitude just doesn't sit well with me either. "If they would just give us back our candy store, we'd be, like, really happy and all." Apple has the market and the momentum, and it sounds like you have a bunch of people accustomed to being in charge suddenly finding that somebody else is steering their boat and won't leave the bridge. They don't like it, and they want that person to simply go away, and they just can't figure out why they won't. Pot calling the kettle black, and all that.
I'd like Apple's DRM to go away too... I'd like all of it to go away. On the other hand, I don't believe that record industry executives, unless some effective treatment is found for the mass psychosis that infects most of them, are the ones to be calling for it's demise. All they want to do is get Apple out of the way so they can a. return to selling us shiny plastic discs and forget this "downloading" business, or b. take control of content distribution again and institute their own forms of DRM.
The record industry is all about what is good for themselves: if Apple were to "open up" it's content management system, I presume Apple will ask "what's in it for us?" Answer: not much. For my own part, I don't particularly like Apple, and I don't care for Steve Jobs, but it just seems hypocritical for an industry that has done so very much to cripple or eliminate every technological advance in media and data storage for the past thirty years to complain about FairPlay.
They're just mad that they didn't think of it first.
**AA: legal until they step on the wrong toes. Sooner or later they're going to threaten an IP lawyer or trial attorney with an axe to grind and some time on his or her hands.
Well, if it's not legal, there's been no high-level criminal investigation of their tactics, no Federal Marshals raiding their offices looking for "evidence", no RIAA executives up on charges. So all I can think is that, in the U.S. at least, our government considers their actions legal.
It's all relative. Microsoft's quality has always sucked, relative to Apple's, which means that Windows isn't purchased because of quality. It's purchased because "that's what we've always used" or "I would've rather had a Mac, but we use Windows at work" or "Apple's are too expensive" or whatever. Remember, Windows 95 = Mac '86, although even that is really a slap in Apple's face.
They should have been notifying everyone they've sued, or threatened to sue, that legal action was pending. The fact that they are only now being (ahem) "reasonable" doesn't excuse their past behavior one whit.
If you get a patent, then you're protecting the **idea**, not a physical board.
Nope. That absolutely is not how the Founders intended the patent system work. You're confusing concept and implementation. Put it this way, there was a damned good reason why the Patent Office used to require a working prototype of any device that for which a patent application had been made.
In the past, you could have an idea, but you could only patent a particular realization of that idea. Others could take the exact same idea, implement it in a sufficiently different or novel way, and receive an equally-valid patent. That worked very well (for a bloody long time) and it encouraged inventors to look beyond the obvious and find other (often better!) ways of realizing the same fundamental ideas.
The key to that, however, is specificity, narrowness. It was never, ever intended that anyone or any company could control every possible realization of a single idea. That, unfortunately, is exactly what the U.S. patence office allows, if it is true that other countries are modelling their IP laws after our present system, well, that's good. They'll be just as screwed up as we are.
Yes, and most countries that care about such things would call that "treason" and simply line the bastards up in front of a firing squad and get rid the problem. Personally, I think the heads of such traitors should left on pikes on the Whitehouse lawn as a warning to others.
Anyway, it sounds like you're referring to the incident with a Toshiba Corporation subsidiary, Toshiba Machine: the U.S. government licensed specialized milling technology to that company, who promptly turned around and sold it to the Russians. In typical Japanese fashion, the executives deemed "responsible" immediately committed corporate seppuku and everything was just hunky-dory, according to Toshiba and our government. Of course, the Soviets still had the equipment.
Not that China hasn't been doing it's own share of high-tech looting and espionage for the past few decades. The silent-screw scandal is one of thousands of similar events, I think, only most of them never get reported, or are buried on the last page of a newspaper somewhere. There have been several examples of similar illegal acquisitions by China over the past couple of decades: machine tools that were "only for making toys, believe us, boss!" that were later found to have been used for military purposes. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We're giving away the candy store, and when we find ourselves in even deeper shit because of it, we'll have no-one but ourselves to blame.
We're just lucky that this ex-Sandia employee was a. skilled enough to detect the intrusion and back-track it and b. ethical enough to blow the whistle on his employers. Hopefully, an award of that magnitude may help others in his position decide to spill the beans: certainly their bosses aren't interested in any accountability. If nothing else, I'd say this makes a good precedent: behave, or your employees may make big bucks while you go to jail.
By way of example, I understand that the Vatican is evaluating the X-Serve group's latest content filtering product, the X-Communicator, as well as the ODBC (Open Deity-Base Converter) standard, used in a supernaturally-high-availability cloistering add-on. Also, to help fulfill the proselytizing requirements of most modern organized religions, a new bulk-email package code-named "Ad-Minister" is currently under development.
... the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word 'evolution' in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy.
Now that's bad. If you are unwilling to accept controversy as a consequence of good science, odds are that you no longer have good science.
Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.
Good.
Assuming your plaintive cries of "not enough tech workers" are actually true, my response is: just bloody deal with it. The domestic workforce will come up to speed if you stop selling them out and stop trying to take shortcuts. There are plenty of sharp Americans who will fill those positions if you'd just stop trying to squeeze them out.
BBC story give a far more sensible view that the summary does.
It's not even remotely fair to compare a BBC new story with a Slashdot summary, I know that and I'm American. Now if you were comparing Slashdot to, say, Fox News... that might be more reasonable.
I disagree that massive spending and concomitant high taxation is or was a necessary, intrinsic aspect to the United States Federal Government. The single, most important reason as to why our government got so expensive was because politicians got ready access to massive funds because of various war efforts and they liked it. The personal income tax was first instituted for that reason, but people still had to figure their own taxes and pay them: it wasn't simply taken. However, the kicker was in 1943 when the Withholding Tax was instituted.
Withholding was of those things that was justified as being necessary to fight the war (and it probably was) and that would be eliminated once the war was over (and, naturally, was not.) We trusted them, again, and they let us down. No surprise there, I suppose. But it wasn't that way in this country for a couple of hundred years, and I refuse to accept that other nations' failures in this regard in any way justifies our own. We were better than that, once.
I don't actually understand why you would call our current government either accessible or accountable. In truth, it is now less accessible and less accountable than it has ever been in the history of this great nation. We may have wanted more accessibility and more accountability, but instead we got more taxation and less of either. Those are the facts, jack. What you are really saying is that, in the decades following "the Great Society" people got accustomed to more and more and even more government freebies and handouts. And they got them... but at the cost of more taxation.
Realistically, the Democratic strategy for government has been one of continuous expansion and more welfare in direct exchange for votes. Unfortunately, the other party has finally figured out just how well that works: consequently, I think we're in bigger trouble than we realize.
Face it, once we made the mistake of allowing our leaders to take our money before we even saw it, the battle for small government was lost. A good capsule history of taxation in the United States is here
Well, in the case of my employer they not only report how much I make but they send the goddamn IRS whatever it decides I owe them that month. Way beyond mere "snitching", withholding comes perilously close to "stealing", given that they hold your money for a year and then give you back some chunk of it if you can prove they owe it to you (???). If this were put into simple business terms, it would be called "playing the float", which is unethical as hell and tends to piss people off.
Grow up, please. You completely eliminated, on one fell swoop, everything that happened prior to the dropping of Fatman and Littleboy. There are limits to my patience with ignorance.
The reality (completely obfuscated in modern histories, given what I read here on Slashdot) is that the fire raids which preceeded the atomic bombings did far more damage to Japanese cities and infrastructure than both nuclear weapons combined. And after that, Japan's miltary still refused to surrender! Yes, I know there are those who said we should have given them a "demonstration" first, but there was no guarantee that a surrender would have been forthcoming and we only had the two. They were extremely expensive weapons and using one for a demo wasn't considered a wise idea. Given that the Japanese, at the time, weren't behaving in an exactly rational manner I can understand why.
And if you're goal is to make the United States into the monster that, for no reason whatsoever, just decided one day to drop nukes on Japan you're a bigger idiot than I originally took you for. Ask some of the Chinese that suffered Japan's military forays into the Chinese mainland over the years just what exactly it was that we were fighting. That is, if you can find any that survived. World War II Japan, like their erstwhile allies the Nazis, were a force to be reckoned with, a brutal force that did not subscribe to any Western ideas about warfare. Even the Nazis were aghast at some of actions taken by Japan's military, and that's going some.
And after those attacks, how many have we dropped since? One? Two? A dozen? How about NONE. And I might add that we've certainly had provocation but we restricted ourselves to conventional warfare, if you can call what we did since "restricted". You might want to ask a few Viet Cong or North Koreans how they felt about our ability to wage conventional warfare... hard to say which is worse given that a couple of million VC died compared to about 60,000 Americans. Hell, if we'd just said "fuck it" and peppered a few small nukes around Viet Nam there probably wouldn't have been many more of them killed, but none of us would have had to die in the jungle.
Part of why we restricted ourselves is that we graduated from the minor kiloton leagues (like Hiroshima and Nagasaki) into the majors, megaton equivalents. If we or the Russians had ever cut loose with real nukes we'd not be having this discussion. You might also ask yourself whether the Soviet Empire would have shown similar restraint to ours, had it not been for the existence of the American nuclear arsenal, and our historical willingness to use the things.
No, usually they get slapped down hard once or twice by somebody more knowledgeable, and the ones who are actually smart and capable of learning wise up and don't let it happen again. It's part of the lengthy process of going from "newbie" to "professional". Painful, to be sure.
Besides, once you've already decided how life originated, you are pretty much limited in how things play out in your own particular "theory". And if this guy were correct, there's a massive multinational conspiracy to cover up the "truth", a wall of silence perpetuated for centuries and only finally penetrated by Mr. Cremo's dedication and intellect.
If there were ever a reason to repair the education system in this country, this is it. Unless ignorance really is bliss, and we've all been missing something all these years.
That's not the issue, so much as the fact that it's those schoolgirls that can ultimately contract cervical cancer from their HPV infections and die. So it's more important that they get it first.
Perhaps, but historically the United States Federal Government didn't require anywhere near the cut they currently demand. It wasn't really until World War II that the Feds got used to the massive cash flow from the personal income tax. The Federal Government, for a couple of hundred years, really, got along on tariffs and other such sources.
Either way, it doesn't make withholding any less sleazy, or morally bankrupt. It's MY money, and I earned it. The fact that they don't trust us to pay them the exorbitant amounts they currently demand is irrelevant, and in fact that should tell you something right there. Americans (like the Brits before them) used to pay their taxes in full and with pride. Not anymore, because we know that most of it is either wasted or used for purposes with which we don't agree. Yes yes, looking at the global scene America is a comparatively "low tax" nation, but on the other hand, unlike many of those higher-tax countries I don't get a lot for what I do pay. Certainly not anything useful like health care, although that also comes right off the top.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but since I just bought a Sanyo cell phone, I figure I just got a lot more bang for my buck.
so they argue for open DRM and call Jobs insincere.
And he may very well be insincere. Both Jobs and record execs in general are about as self-serving as they come. But I know they are lying through their teeth, so I'll give Jobs the benefit of the doubt.
Yes. The movie people played it a lot smarter in that regard, with the original DVD CSS. They've maintained iron-fisted control over hardware vendors all along, whereas the music companies seem to have screwed up completely.
If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.
... I'd like all of it to go away. On the other hand, I don't believe that record industry executives, unless some effective treatment is found for the mass psychosis that infects most of them, are the ones to be calling for it's demise. All they want to do is get Apple out of the way so they can a. return to selling us shiny plastic discs and forget this "downloading" business, or b. take control of content distribution again and institute their own forms of DRM.
Sure, and if I opened up my bank account, everybody would love me too, for a while at least. I see Digital Restrictions Management as a net negative, in pretty much any form, but this kind of sour grapes attitude just doesn't sit well with me either. "If they would just give us back our candy store, we'd be, like, really happy and all." Apple has the market and the momentum, and it sounds like you have a bunch of people accustomed to being in charge suddenly finding that somebody else is steering their boat and won't leave the bridge. They don't like it, and they want that person to simply go away, and they just can't figure out why they won't. Pot calling the kettle black, and all that.
I'd like Apple's DRM to go away too
The record industry is all about what is good for themselves: if Apple were to "open up" it's content management system, I presume Apple will ask "what's in it for us?" Answer: not much. For my own part, I don't particularly like Apple, and I don't care for Steve Jobs, but it just seems hypocritical for an industry that has done so very much to cripple or eliminate every technological advance in media and data storage for the past thirty years to complain about FairPlay.
They're just mad that they didn't think of it first.
But if ppl just resort to comparing APIs, it like saying "mine is bigger than yours" :)
... but what happens if mine really is bigger than yours?
Indeed
**AA: legal until they step on the wrong toes. Sooner or later they're going to threaten an IP lawyer or trial attorney with an axe to grind and some time on his or her hands.
that's extortion and it's illegal.
Well, if it's not legal, there's been no high-level criminal investigation of their tactics, no Federal Marshals raiding their offices looking for "evidence", no RIAA executives up on charges. So all I can think is that, in the U.S. at least, our government considers their actions legal.
It's all relative. Microsoft's quality has always sucked, relative to Apple's, which means that Windows isn't purchased because of quality. It's purchased because "that's what we've always used" or "I would've rather had a Mac, but we use Windows at work" or "Apple's are too expensive" or whatever. Remember, Windows 95 = Mac '86, although even that is really a slap in Apple's face.
They should have been notifying everyone they've sued, or threatened to sue, that legal action was pending. The fact that they are only now being (ahem) "reasonable" doesn't excuse their past behavior one whit.
If you get a patent, then you're protecting the **idea**, not a physical board.
Nope. That absolutely is not how the Founders intended the patent system work. You're confusing concept and implementation. Put it this way, there was a damned good reason why the Patent Office used to require a working prototype of any device that for which a patent application had been made.
In the past, you could have an idea, but you could only patent a particular realization of that idea. Others could take the exact same idea, implement it in a sufficiently different or novel way, and receive an equally-valid patent. That worked very well (for a bloody long time) and it encouraged inventors to look beyond the obvious and find other (often better!) ways of realizing the same fundamental ideas.
The key to that, however, is specificity, narrowness. It was never, ever intended that anyone or any company could control every possible realization of a single idea. That, unfortunately, is exactly what the U.S. patence office allows, if it is true that other countries are modelling their IP laws after our present system, well, that's good. They'll be just as screwed up as we are.
Two words: bird flu.
Of course the bird flu. That's what birds do! A whole flock of them flu over my house this morning.
Yes, and most countries that care about such things would call that "treason" and simply line the bastards up in front of a firing squad and get rid the problem. Personally, I think the heads of such traitors should left on pikes on the Whitehouse lawn as a warning to others.
Anyway, it sounds like you're referring to the incident with a Toshiba Corporation subsidiary, Toshiba Machine: the U.S. government licensed specialized milling technology to that company, who promptly turned around and sold it to the Russians. In typical Japanese fashion, the executives deemed "responsible" immediately committed corporate seppuku and everything was just hunky-dory, according to Toshiba and our government. Of course, the Soviets still had the equipment.
Not that China hasn't been doing it's own share of high-tech looting and espionage for the past few decades. The silent-screw scandal is one of thousands of similar events, I think, only most of them never get reported, or are buried on the last page of a newspaper somewhere. There have been several examples of similar illegal acquisitions by China over the past couple of decades: machine tools that were "only for making toys, believe us, boss!" that were later found to have been used for military purposes. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We're giving away the candy store, and when we find ourselves in even deeper shit because of it, we'll have no-one but ourselves to blame.
We're just lucky that this ex-Sandia employee was a. skilled enough to detect the intrusion and back-track it and b. ethical enough to blow the whistle on his employers. Hopefully, an award of that magnitude may help others in his position decide to spill the beans: certainly their bosses aren't interested in any accountability. If nothing else, I'd say this makes a good precedent: behave, or your employees may make big bucks while you go to jail.
By way of example, I understand that the Vatican is evaluating the X-Serve group's latest content filtering product, the X-Communicator, as well as the ODBC (Open Deity-Base Converter) standard, used in a supernaturally-high-availability cloistering add-on. Also, to help fulfill the proselytizing requirements of most modern organized religions, a new bulk-email package code-named "Ad-Minister" is currently under development.
... the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word 'evolution' in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy.
Now that's bad. If you are unwilling to accept controversy as a consequence of good science, odds are that you no longer have good science.
.. they say that sometimes you feel a "buzz" ...
That, or they knocked back a few cold ones before getting in the shower. Either way, it sounds dangerous.
Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.
Good.
Assuming your plaintive cries of "not enough tech workers" are actually true, my response is: just bloody deal with it. The domestic workforce will come up to speed if you stop selling them out and stop trying to take shortcuts. There are plenty of sharp Americans who will fill those positions if you'd just stop trying to squeeze them out.
BBC story give a far more sensible view that the summary does.
... that might be more reasonable.
It's not even remotely fair to compare a BBC new story with a Slashdot summary, I know that and I'm American. Now if you were comparing Slashdot to, say, Fox News
I disagree that massive spending and concomitant high taxation is or was a necessary, intrinsic aspect to the United States Federal Government. The single, most important reason as to why our government got so expensive was because politicians got ready access to massive funds because of various war efforts and they liked it. The personal income tax was first instituted for that reason, but people still had to figure their own taxes and pay them: it wasn't simply taken. However, the kicker was in 1943 when the Withholding Tax was instituted.
... but at the cost of more taxation.
Withholding was of those things that was justified as being necessary to fight the war (and it probably was) and that would be eliminated once the war was over (and, naturally, was not.) We trusted them, again, and they let us down. No surprise there, I suppose. But it wasn't that way in this country for a couple of hundred years, and I refuse to accept that other nations' failures in this regard in any way justifies our own. We were better than that, once.
I don't actually understand why you would call our current government either accessible or accountable. In truth, it is now less accessible and less accountable than it has ever been in the history of this great nation. We may have wanted more accessibility and more accountability, but instead we got more taxation and less of either. Those are the facts, jack. What you are really saying is that, in the decades following "the Great Society" people got accustomed to more and more and even more government freebies and handouts. And they got them
Realistically, the Democratic strategy for government has been one of continuous expansion and more welfare in direct exchange for votes. Unfortunately, the other party has finally figured out just how well that works: consequently, I think we're in bigger trouble than we realize.
Face it, once we made the mistake of allowing our leaders to take our money before we even saw it, the battle for small government was lost. A good capsule history of taxation in the United States is here
Well, in the case of my employer they not only report how much I make but they send the goddamn IRS whatever it decides I owe them that month. Way beyond mere "snitching", withholding comes perilously close to "stealing", given that they hold your money for a year and then give you back some chunk of it if you can prove they owe it to you (???). If this were put into simple business terms, it would be called "playing the float", which is unethical as hell and tends to piss people off.
Grow up, please. You completely eliminated, on one fell swoop, everything that happened prior to the dropping of Fatman and Littleboy. There are limits to my patience with ignorance.
... hard to say which is worse given that a couple of million VC died compared to about 60,000 Americans. Hell, if we'd just said "fuck it" and peppered a few small nukes around Viet Nam there probably wouldn't have been many more of them killed, but none of us would have had to die in the jungle.
The reality (completely obfuscated in modern histories, given what I read here on Slashdot) is that the fire raids which preceeded the atomic bombings did far more damage to Japanese cities and infrastructure than both nuclear weapons combined. And after that, Japan's miltary still refused to surrender! Yes, I know there are those who said we should have given them a "demonstration" first, but there was no guarantee that a surrender would have been forthcoming and we only had the two. They were extremely expensive weapons and using one for a demo wasn't considered a wise idea. Given that the Japanese, at the time, weren't behaving in an exactly rational manner I can understand why.
And if you're goal is to make the United States into the monster that, for no reason whatsoever, just decided one day to drop nukes on Japan you're a bigger idiot than I originally took you for. Ask some of the Chinese that suffered Japan's military forays into the Chinese mainland over the years just what exactly it was that we were fighting. That is, if you can find any that survived. World War II Japan, like their erstwhile allies the Nazis, were a force to be reckoned with, a brutal force that did not subscribe to any Western ideas about warfare. Even the Nazis were aghast at some of actions taken by Japan's military, and that's going some.
And after those attacks, how many have we dropped since? One? Two? A dozen? How about NONE. And I might add that we've certainly had provocation but we restricted ourselves to conventional warfare, if you can call what we did since "restricted". You might want to ask a few Viet Cong or North Koreans how they felt about our ability to wage conventional warfare
Part of why we restricted ourselves is that we graduated from the minor kiloton leagues (like Hiroshima and Nagasaki) into the majors, megaton equivalents. If we or the Russians had ever cut loose with real nukes we'd not be having this discussion. You might also ask yourself whether the Soviet Empire would have shown similar restraint to ours, had it not been for the existence of the American nuclear arsenal, and our historical willingness to use the things.
No, usually they get slapped down hard once or twice by somebody more knowledgeable, and the ones who are actually smart and capable of learning wise up and don't let it happen again. It's part of the lengthy process of going from "newbie" to "professional". Painful, to be sure.
No difference ... he's just saying that you can have his Virus ... Free.
Besides, once you've already decided how life originated, you are pretty much limited in how things play out in your own particular "theory". And if this guy were correct, there's a massive multinational conspiracy to cover up the "truth", a wall of silence perpetuated for centuries and only finally penetrated by Mr. Cremo's dedication and intellect.
If there were ever a reason to repair the education system in this country, this is it. Unless ignorance really is bliss, and we've all been missing something all these years.
That's not the issue, so much as the fact that it's those schoolgirls that can ultimately contract cervical cancer from their HPV infections and die. So it's more important that they get it first.
Perhaps, but historically the United States Federal Government didn't require anywhere near the cut they currently demand. It wasn't really until World War II that the Feds got used to the massive cash flow from the personal income tax. The Federal Government, for a couple of hundred years, really, got along on tariffs and other such sources.
Either way, it doesn't make withholding any less sleazy, or morally bankrupt. It's MY money, and I earned it. The fact that they don't trust us to pay them the exorbitant amounts they currently demand is irrelevant, and in fact that should tell you something right there. Americans (like the Brits before them) used to pay their taxes in full and with pride. Not anymore, because we know that most of it is either wasted or used for purposes with which we don't agree. Yes yes, looking at the global scene America is a comparatively "low tax" nation, but on the other hand, unlike many of those higher-tax countries I don't get a lot for what I do pay. Certainly not anything useful like health care, although that also comes right off the top.