The internet has reached the point where is constructed of the one thing that scares governments: money. No capitalist government will break the net to the point where the consumers cant or wont consume. It's all about the benjamins, and it will hold til the point where the cost of hardware (including self-sustaining communications, think wifi and the future of wifi) will make international communications possible without ISPs. And while it holds, anything that lets the consumers consume will be enough for the geeks to build slicker penguin based software, swap media files and bemoan the state of net on slashdot or the future slashdot.
I think it's a bit one sided to say the US Military invented the net. The US have done well in technical innovations over the last century, and they were home to quite a few important milestones on the road to the net. But the net is more than al gore, and more the the USA.
The UN may be somewhat corrupt and inneffient but they are safer like that.
In some ways I would prefer ultra powerful organisations to be corrupt and innefficent. While they are busy being corrupt and inefficient they are not regieme-changing or collateral-ing or buzzwording large numbers of people like me. And paying off UN envoys or Euro MPs is only millions from the public purse - another carrier group to take the navy into the 21st century and someone else into the 15th costs billions and hurts more.
I thank God I was born in a country that owns submarines and big stock exchange. Saves having to suck up to the bully, at least in principle.
I got the update notice on my Windows box, hit download, thought about slashdot, confirmed the non existence of the story, updated, and posted the story from 1.02. That kind of pain free update is a credit to Mozilla, and an example for the rest of the software world.
When they got the patch out, there was just 1 English language story on Google news about it.
Anyhow, it is insightful, dolphins do sell laptops, but more to the point with this, is will joe consumer or the PHB see enough here to spring the extra? I don't think so, not yet. Stuff like this needs to demonstrate real usefulness, fad appeal or low price difference before it hits the mainstrean. It's too far out in the 'noosphere' for now.
Unfortunately, people are fallable, and no set of beliefs will cure that.
I've yet to come across any single person who 'truly understands and practises the teachings of Jesus Christ' - since Jesus Christ set a perfect example and never sinned, you will never see a mere mortal coming close to that.
More than that, all religions are let down by a vocal crowd who merely use the religion as a vehicle to further their own end. The true believers, and those who truely 'love thy neighbour as thyself' are easily shouted down by those who whose outrageous accusations, violance and intolarance make great news stories. Christianity (and to some extent any religion) is never the cause of intolarance, it is only used as a poor excuse by those who would be intolerant.
An approach like that is the way music should be done. And I like your music. Keep up the good work - I'd come and see you play maybe if I was 800 miles close!
Hypothetical 'just-surf' user does exist. What's more, if you put them in front of a KDE install, they will actually be quite happy, as long as they start with the idea that is superior to windows.
I built a Fedora Core 2 box for my g/f and she's delighted with it despite years of using windows. She was already used to Firefox after using it from 0.7 on my machine, she enjoys the kdegames collection and is happy using OO.o for the odd thing.
The people who suffer when switching are the middle ground, the people who are competant enough on windows to start fiddling with it.
Gizmodo have now added a link to a blog that details the result further:
http://moskalyuk.com/blog/allofmp3com-escapes-cr im inal-lawsuit-for-now/475
This implies that currently the only recourse of the RIAA/BPI/Big Four is to initiate a civil lawsuit against allomp3.com for failing to acquire a suitable license. It also says that this may be difficult, since they are probably covered by their license from ROMS.
I don't understand how it is possible for them to be 'theoretically illegal' AND 'the law can't be applied against them'. Surely if the law is not applicable, then they are legal (both theoretically and in practice)?
I will be interested to follow this case since I do not see any reason so far not to use this service from the UK. IANAL, but this does look legal so far, despite the apparent low cost. Is it possible that the RIAA and BPI (as representatives of The Big Four) have no power over this company?
Apple Records have not given permission for ANY download site to have Beatles songs. Yet AllofMP3 are selling them. Therefore we know for a fact that they are operating against the law.
They are operating against the opinion of Apple Records. Who are not the law. Who are not representing or enforcing the law. Who better not even be influencing the law, since that would be illegal. In the case of AllofMP3.com, the Russian authorities are the law. In my case, I am under God's law followed by UK law. The opinions of a corperation mean nothing to me. If they wish to make a complaint (as apparently they do, through the Recording Industry Ass.) then they may make one to Russian authorites, who can then make a judgement. Is this not elementary stuff?
Civil disobedience is a last resort to counter oppression. Gross inequality in our society, and corruption in our government, is reprehensible, but it does not warrent lawlessness, IMO.
"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established." Romans 13 v 1 (vv1-7 gives a complete summary).
'Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -- Andrew Young'
Thank you slashdot, that's a gorgoeus quote to put at the bottom of the page.
The law in this area is broken - copyright was created to provide an incentive to create, but the law has been twisted by the rich to rob the poor.
Until the law is fixed to protect the comman man, those of us who attempt to adhere to the law can protest the corruption by using this legal download service which does not support the rich and corrupt. Without it, there is no way to protest except to boycott or break the law.
As well as those who download more than once or install more than once, remember to factor those who get their firefox elsewhere, such as on a fedora core 3 dvd, an OpenCD or a cover disk.
Part of the mandate for schools is to prepare children for their future lives. This can be done well or badly.
Schools will (can?) only prepare students for their vision of the future. By doing this, they influence the future in subtle ways. Any actions which are common across the school system will affect the future of the country they are in.
On one hand you could argue that by missing key areas of our education, policy makers are restricting our options. Some neglected education is so crucial that private sector industries have been created (sometimes artificially, by legislation) to replace it - an example being driving. Some missing education merely hampers people in their daily lives, like typing or money management.
Some influence is more subtle. I would argue that the increased time that we spend as dependants in education has made increased state control more policatally acceptable.
This doesn't come close to covering the ways in which our education enriches or limits our lives.
As an example, an argument I commonly have with teacher friends is the presence of specific commercial products on the curriculam - for example, students are taught how to use MS Windows and Word, but NOT operating systems or word processing. When they leave school, they have an ingrained belief that a computer requires ms windows, and even ms office. Because we are in the strange state of softaware development, this is seen as acceptable, despite been seen as ridiculous in more advanced technology - imagine being eductated in such a way you were unable to use more than one brand of pen, paper, book, map, ruler, screwdriver, oven or other tool?
I disagree. Just because is a reason. Another reason is that stupid gimmicks are great for pulling attention to an underrated product.
Make everything optional, and then those who want to use those cycles for something useful can, and those who want eye candy can have it too. Just don't go the MS route of 'one size fits no-one'.
Not only can you download it, but dozens of other people already have, and some publish it on a variety of other sites. Since the GFDL prevents anyone restricting access to it, it can never die the way CDDB did.
We are fortunate to have much less dangerous wildlife in England. I think we do have skunks (don't quote me!) but probably not as many.
We are lucky enough for rabies to be vanishingly rare in England - thanks to our draconian animal immigration laws. Only recently did they introduce electronic tagging schemes for pets - until then any animal entering the UK was subject to a minimum 6 months quarantine.
Unfortunately worms does seem to be common - I don't know too much on the subject though.
The biggest threat to roaming pets in the UK is proabably traffic, because of the high road density, caused by the high population density here.
I think it's a fair guess that 300k US citizens have had enough information stolen to make them liable to financial problems.
Now, that data is going to worth a lot of money to someone. There are going to be individuals on that list who could have more $100k stolen each, ergo, the data is worth a multiple of that.
But what if someone leaked it? Disgruntled employees or clients, other blackhats, cleaners, anyone? How wide would a 100MB csv spread on Kazaa? Given the precedent set by spammers, nearly all of those victims could be exploited.
Anyone want to guess the political, economic and cultural impact of 1 in every 10 US citizens becoming bankrupt or even destitute in a matter of months? If it doesn't happen this time, its a ticking time-bomb for the future.
A radical redesign of the modern approach to financial security is overdue.
Also in the UK, I know of several cats that have lived to 18+ with freedom to roam. OTOH, I know a couple who lost both their cats at once, because one was struck by a car and the other laid next to it until it died of exposure. It took them three days to find the bodies at the bottom of a roadside ditch. Seems like a good enough reason to keep your kitties inside.
Google groups 2 is just badly implemented, it's not a bad idea as such. If they want to make it good, they need to take a long hard look at gmane.org, and also yahoogroups, phpbb, expertsexchange and even slashdot, work out what makes a good, accessable, reliable and comprehensive resource, and implement it with google style and speed, they could be turning a fortune from googleads.
While I'm at it, if they want to make Google Desktop Search better, it needs to search your Gmail too, as well as your Firefox history, GAIM conversations, media tags and all the ASCII files on your disk, allow custom community created filters for other files and allow you to link indexes on multiple computers.
And as for gmail... it's already miles ahead of the competition, but it's tough to capitalize on. There are good new things to add; sychronisation with desktop software and mobile devices (or at least an API to achieve that), whitelisting, IMAP support, anti-virus. Then there are more uses for all that online storage, like calandering and scheduling, better support for contact information including sychronizing. there are people who do handle bits and pieces of this, like plaxo.com?, but they are patchy at best, and have business models that people will not trust. They key to Googles model is abstracting the cost from the end user. There are no charges to the user for anything - except maybe google answers, and that doesn't go to google directly, and they publish the answers there too.
If they get a lot of that done right, they will have the right public support to move to where I suspect they have been thinking for some time - application service providing. applications like gmail and maps.google show they can produce good quality web based applications that respond in real time. It's not difficult to create a document editor (see fckeditor), spreadsheet, or similar in html/javascript, and with that under your belt, you could put out all sorts.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheer up.
The internet has reached the point where is constructed of the one thing that scares governments: money. No capitalist government will break the net to the point where the consumers cant or wont consume. It's all about the benjamins, and it will hold til the point where the cost of hardware (including self-sustaining communications, think wifi and the future of wifi) will make international communications possible without ISPs. And while it holds, anything that lets the consumers consume will be enough for the geeks to build slicker penguin based software, swap media files and bemoan the state of net on slashdot or the future slashdot.
I think it's a bit one sided to say the US Military invented the net. The US have done well in technical innovations over the last century, and they were home to quite a few important milestones on the road to the net. But the net is more than al gore, and more the the USA.
The UN may be somewhat corrupt and inneffient but they are safer like that.
In some ways I would prefer ultra powerful organisations to be corrupt and innefficent. While they are busy being corrupt and inefficient they are not regieme-changing or collateral-ing or buzzwording large numbers of people like me. And paying off UN envoys or Euro MPs is only millions from the public purse - another carrier group to take the navy into the 21st century and someone else into the 15th costs billions and hurts more.
I thank God I was born in a country that owns submarines and big stock exchange. Saves having to suck up to the bully, at least in principle.
I got the update notice on my Windows box, hit download, thought about slashdot, confirmed the non existence of the story, updated, and posted the story from 1.02. That kind of pain free update is a credit to Mozilla, and an example for the rest of the software world.
When they got the patch out, there was just 1 English language story on Google news about it.
Insightful? That's an intelligent moderation.
Anyhow, it is insightful, dolphins do sell laptops, but more to the point with this, is will joe consumer or the PHB see enough here to spring the extra? I don't think so, not yet. Stuff like this needs to demonstrate real usefulness, fad appeal or low price difference before it hits the mainstrean. It's too far out in the 'noosphere' for now.
Unfortunately, people are fallable, and no set of beliefs will cure that.
I've yet to come across any single person who 'truly understands and practises the teachings of Jesus Christ' - since Jesus Christ set a perfect example and never sinned, you will never see a mere mortal coming close to that.
More than that, all religions are let down by a vocal crowd who merely use the religion as a vehicle to further their own end. The true believers, and those who truely 'love thy neighbour as thyself' are easily shouted down by those who whose outrageous accusations, violance and intolarance make great news stories. Christianity (and to some extent any religion) is never the cause of intolarance, it is only used as a poor excuse by those who would be intolerant.
Combining existing dumb ideas with worse catchphrases and patenting the results has replaced innvotation, as shown by the 'plogging' story.
Besides Ebooks on a PSP would be EPSPBookCasting or something. Patent that quick.
Who wants to bet the next four stories will also feature this process? Here's my prediction:
Gridlogging
Nano-toasting
WiFiSatMaxG Mobile
FlashReceipeCasting
I propose a name for this phenomenon:
dotCatchphrasePatentAbuse
The trick is not so much rebooting as ensuring that they boot from CD. Not everyone can pick that idea up easily.
But almost any windows user can take a cd, insert into drive, and wait.
An approach like that is the way music should be done. And I like your music. Keep up the good work - I'd come and see you play maybe if I was 800 miles close!
Hypothetical 'just-surf' user does exist. What's more, if you put them in front of a KDE install, they will actually be quite happy, as long as they start with the idea that is superior to windows.
I built a Fedora Core 2 box for my g/f and she's delighted with it despite years of using windows. She was already used to Firefox after using it from 0.7 on my machine, she enjoys the kdegames collection and is happy using OO.o for the odd thing.
The people who suffer when switching are the middle ground, the people who are competant enough on windows to start fiddling with it.
Gizmodo have now added a link to a blog that details the result further:
r im inal-lawsuit-for-now/475
http://moskalyuk.com/blog/allofmp3com-escapes-c
This implies that currently the only recourse of the RIAA/BPI/Big Four is to initiate a civil lawsuit against allomp3.com for failing to acquire a suitable license. It also says that this may be difficult, since they are probably covered by their license from ROMS.
I don't understand how it is possible for them to be 'theoretically illegal' AND 'the law can't be applied against them'. Surely if the law is not applicable, then they are legal (both theoretically and in practice)?
I will be interested to follow this case since I do not see any reason so far not to use this service from the UK. IANAL, but this does look legal so far, despite the apparent low cost. Is it possible that the RIAA and BPI (as representatives of The Big Four) have no power over this company?
Buying Oracle is closer to buying a 40 ton truck. Not something you do if you can fit your stuff into the back of a car (or mysql).
When will we expect the first Trojan masquerading as an update from the "IT Safe" service?
They've thought of that. When you sign up, you enter a 'safe word' which will they will put in the subject line of every email they send you.
So a convincing spoof would require access to their database.
Russia does have copyright laws - but they are not the same as the USA. They do not require permisson from Apple Records.
Apple Records have not given permission for ANY download site to have Beatles songs. Yet AllofMP3 are selling them. Therefore we know for a fact that they are operating against the law.
They are operating against the opinion of Apple Records. Who are not the law. Who are not representing or enforcing the law. Who better not even be influencing the law, since that would be illegal. In the case of AllofMP3.com, the Russian authorities are the law. In my case, I am under God's law followed by UK law. The opinions of a corperation mean nothing to me. If they wish to make a complaint (as apparently they do, through the Recording Industry Ass.) then they may make one to Russian authorites, who can then make a judgement. Is this not elementary stuff?
I don't know why you stop there
Civil disobedience is a last resort to counter oppression. Gross inequality in our society, and corruption in our government, is reprehensible, but it does not warrent lawlessness, IMO.
"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established." Romans 13 v 1 (vv1-7 gives a complete summary).
'Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -- Andrew Young'
Thank you slashdot, that's a gorgoeus quote to put at the bottom of the page.
The law in this area is broken - copyright was created to provide an incentive to create, but the law has been twisted by the rich to rob the poor.
Until the law is fixed to protect the comman man, those of us who attempt to adhere to the law can protest the corruption by using this legal download service which does not support the rich and corrupt. Without it, there is no way to protest except to boycott or break the law.
As well as those who download more than once or install more than once, remember to factor those who get their firefox elsewhere, such as on a fedora core 3 dvd, an OpenCD or a cover disk.
Part of the mandate for schools is to prepare children for their future lives. This can be done well or badly.
Schools will (can?) only prepare students for their vision of the future. By doing this, they influence the future in subtle ways. Any actions which are common across the school system will affect the future of the country they are in.
On one hand you could argue that by missing key areas of our education, policy makers are restricting our options. Some neglected education is so crucial that private sector industries have been created (sometimes artificially, by legislation) to replace it - an example being driving. Some missing education merely hampers people in their daily lives, like typing or money management.
Some influence is more subtle. I would argue that the increased time that we spend as dependants in education has made increased state control more policatally acceptable.
This doesn't come close to covering the ways in which our education enriches or limits our lives.
As an example, an argument I commonly have with teacher friends is the presence of specific commercial products on the curriculam - for example, students are taught how to use MS Windows and Word, but NOT operating systems or word processing. When they leave school, they have an ingrained belief that a computer requires ms windows, and even ms office. Because we are in the strange state of softaware development, this is seen as acceptable, despite been seen as ridiculous in more advanced technology - imagine being eductated in such a way you were unable to use more than one brand of pen, paper, book, map, ruler, screwdriver, oven or other tool?
I disagree. Just because is a reason. Another reason is that stupid gimmicks are great for pulling attention to an underrated product.
Make everything optional, and then those who want to use those cycles for something useful can, and those who want eye candy can have it too. Just don't go the MS route of 'one size fits no-one'.
Not only can you download it, but dozens of other people already have, and some publish it on a variety of other sites. Since the GFDL prevents anyone restricting access to it, it can never die the way CDDB did.
See: Wikipedia Mirrors and Forks
We are fortunate to have much less dangerous wildlife in England. I think we do have skunks (don't quote me!) but probably not as many.
We are lucky enough for rabies to be vanishingly rare in England - thanks to our draconian animal immigration laws. Only recently did they introduce electronic tagging schemes for pets - until then any animal entering the UK was subject to a minimum 6 months quarantine.
Unfortunately worms does seem to be common - I don't know too much on the subject though.
The biggest threat to roaming pets in the UK is proabably traffic, because of the high road density, caused by the high population density here.
I think it's a fair guess that 300k US citizens have had enough information stolen to make them liable to financial problems.
Now, that data is going to worth a lot of money to someone. There are going to be individuals on that list who could have more $100k stolen each, ergo, the data is worth a multiple of that.
But what if someone leaked it? Disgruntled employees or clients, other blackhats, cleaners, anyone? How wide would a 100MB csv spread on Kazaa? Given the precedent set by spammers, nearly all of those victims could be exploited.
Anyone want to guess the political, economic and cultural impact of 1 in every 10 US citizens becoming bankrupt or even destitute in a matter of months? If it doesn't happen this time, its a ticking time-bomb for the future.
A radical redesign of the modern approach to financial security is overdue.
Also in the UK, I know of several cats that have lived to 18+ with freedom to roam. OTOH, I know a couple who lost both their cats at once, because one was struck by a car and the other laid next to it until it died of exposure. It took them three days to find the bodies at the bottom of a roadside ditch. Seems like a good enough reason to keep your kitties inside.
Google groups 2 is just badly implemented, it's not a bad idea as such. If they want to make it good, they need to take a long hard look at gmane.org, and also yahoogroups, phpbb, expertsexchange and even slashdot, work out what makes a good, accessable, reliable and comprehensive resource, and implement it with google style and speed, they could be turning a fortune from googleads.
While I'm at it, if they want to make Google Desktop Search better, it needs to search your Gmail too, as well as your Firefox history, GAIM conversations, media tags and all the ASCII files on your disk, allow custom community created filters for other files and allow you to link indexes on multiple computers.
And as for gmail... it's already miles ahead of the competition, but it's tough to capitalize on. There are good new things to add; sychronisation with desktop software and mobile devices (or at least an API to achieve that), whitelisting, IMAP support, anti-virus. Then there are more uses for all that online storage, like calandering and scheduling, better support for contact information including sychronizing. there are people who do handle bits and pieces of this, like plaxo.com?, but they are patchy at best, and have business models that people will not trust. They key to Googles model is abstracting the cost from the end user. There are no charges to the user for anything - except maybe google answers, and that doesn't go to google directly, and they publish the answers there too.
If they get a lot of that done right, they will have the right public support to move to where I suspect they have been thinking for some time - application service providing. applications like gmail and maps.google show they can produce good quality web based applications that respond in real time. It's not difficult to create a document editor (see fckeditor), spreadsheet, or similar in html/javascript, and with that under your belt, you could put out all sorts.