I would offer you a chance to assault the groin of racist joke tellers beyond the realm of real life encounters, but since the bubble burst I haven't been able to convince anyone to invest in my Internet Crotch Boot. Which is just as well -- it was vapor anyway. Besides it required your intended victim to choose to install an internet-operated kicking device in front of their groin which is a sticking point despite the study I never did which would have said how everyone would love to do this.
I'd bet you whatever you want. If Microsoft hadn't given IE away for free, we'd all be using Netscape and the OS you use would be irrelevent on the web. Preventing this from happening and thus reducing the value of windows is exactly what the anti-trust trial was about. The price of Windows has remained consistent because of the lack of competition. Shake up the monopoly and the price drops to prevent defection, as the deals Microsoft doles out to stop people from switching to Linux demonstrates.
That's a good point as long as we are considering the hidden cost of things...
Except that to the extent that IBM's or AOL's prices are affected by their contributions to Mozilla, that only makes them less competitive vs other offerings which don't have this embedded cost. And you are perfectly free to go buy something from any of the innumerable companies that aren't donating to mozilla.
Whereas you must purchase Windows in order to legally run IE. There is no way to escape the payment to the authors of IE.
IE is not free because the cost of developing IE is included in the cost of Windows. Just because you can download IE for Windows without paying anything extra is irrelevent, because you have already payed for it.
Whereas you never have to pay any cost to anyone which includes the development costs of firefox.
Your hardware purchase does not include the price of Firefox. Your hardware purchase does not include the price of IE, unless you are buying a machine with Windows pre-installed on it (which is most of them).
and his passion for playing chess until the wee hours of the morning then sleeping until midday
With the knowledge that electronic games weren't available back then (though of course Ben had a hand in the long history leading up to them!) I'll say that this is probably the only way in which I'm substantially similar to Ben Franklin.
Oh, and his love of beer. We have that in common too.
It's worse because parents don't understand it. Parents mostly "get" books and plays. They're basically benign, but you may want to stop your kids from reading certain books. They aren't scary "simulations", whatever that is.
The thing is, there's a whole generation of people who grew up with video games and are now having kids of their own. A lot of that generation may still be uptight about this new way of doing the old thing (imagining you are someone else), but this will pass with time. My guess is that as we age more parents will know that games aren't inherently any different than books or plays or movies -- if you have a problem with certain content, you must be responsible for what your kids do.
Or the same uptight people will realize what a free ride we've been giving to books and plays, and everything will be censored equally.
They should use a system that lists the 'level' of sex, violence, dirty language or whatever and let parents choose appropriately for their own fears.
They've been doing this for movies (at least on television) for some time, right? They'll have the rating (e.g. "R") and then a list of reasons why it got that rating (e.g. "adult situations" aka "sex", "violence", "language" aka "the f-bomb", "brief nudity").
The age-based system can stay, but by making it better informed with specific content ratings parents could make better choices. Of course the whole problem is parents not taking the time to try to make a choice at all and then going apeshit when they realize what their child is playing.
The vast majority of those subsidies you mention go to humongous good ole boy corporate farms, or international agro biz run through daisy chained paper corporations.
Of course! What, you thought I bought into the "save our poor small-time family farms" propaganda? I can smell a corporate giveaway disguised as aiding the "common man". It's not hard, just wait until they open their mouths. No, the whole thing is designed to force the small-time farmers to fail so the big corporations can buy them out on the cheap. And it will only get worse thanks in part to...
And the Africans don't want ag aid because it's GM, they don't want their farmers to get tied in with GM patented seeds,which would put them into serfdom, and I don't blame them one bit, I think it sucks too.
That's the kind of "aid" where we give them GM crops to make their own farms more productive, and yeah they don't want it because it's a Faustian deal. They also don't want the "aid" of cheap produce made in the U.S. because it undercuts the value of the productive farms they have over there. Like a gangbang porno, they're getting screwed from multiple angles.:)
I agree allowing Africa to get over the problem themselves may be best. The sad part is GM technology would actualy be beneficial if it enabled them to be self-sufficient. Instead we want them to hand control over to a multinational based in the opposite hemisphere.
Cool, so all these US-corn eating Russian, Chinese, whatever are about to starve ?
No, they're about to have their own farms become economically viable again.
They have their own farms. The problem is that our farms are heavily subsidized, so imports from the U.S. are cheaper than locally grown crops ever could be. Which means the local farmers can't make a living, and end up unable to buy the cheap food that put them out of business, and they starve. This is a summary of one of the complaints African countries have with our "aid".
Actually, when simplified like that, it sounds kinda like our relationship with China, doesn't it? Communist country with little environmental/labor protection produces products well below the cost of any U.S. manufacturer, putting local manufacturers out of business. Fortunately the retailers have an interest in making sure the locals can at least afford the imported goods, if not much else.
I know it's just a game, but it is a rather poignant quote from Alpha Centauri (from memory): "Beware of those who would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master."
Anyway, the main hope that I have for China is that capitalism is alive and well there. People are free to earn and spend money, with all that entails.
Right, because Capitalism unfettered by a Representative Democracy would be awesome.
Take every abuse you've ever heard of in a capitalist system. Then take every abuse you've ever heard of in a totalitarian system. Then combine them, and multiply the capitalist abuses by the lack of accountability the totalitarian system provides.
Western companies have invaded - including McDonalds and WalMart, in this case defining a new standard and experience for consumers and stimulating local competiton. China is open for business.
Yes, a new experience as consumers but what about as workers? I already hate Wal Mart for their labor practices in the U.S. -- they are essentially creating a class of working poor by trying to work around minimum wage laws. They employ a plurality of people in the States, and these people are only going to have enough money to shop at Wal Mart.
What do you think WalMart is going to do in a country like China? You think they are going to raise the standard of employment practices, or are they going to scream with orgasmic joy at being free of those few restraints the U.S. had imposed on them?
This is my fundamental problem with the way our businesses are whoring themselves to China. We are selling them our fundamental production capacity, but requiring nothing in return except more money for the executives of these companies. Every dollar we send them without a demand for democratic reform is a dollar that just entrenches the current system in place. And the whore executives don't care at all. They just see the delta between U.S. labor and Chinese labor as dollars flowing into their pocket.
Here's my prediction: If China becomes the enemy that some fear it might, you will be able to look back and see the hand of the business elites of the capitalist democracies propping them up the entire way. If China does not become that enemy, it will be because we stop allowing this to happen.
People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge.
While I generally agree with you, the point is that this "challenge" is rather immense because we are talking about switching over a world-wide economic system. In particular the economics of it is such that it is currently advantageous to delay the shift until such time as our current solution is grossly expensive. However the same factor means that the longer we wait, the more desperately we will need to change and the more expensive and difficult that change will be.
In other words, Peak Oil doesn't have to be a disaster, but it will be unless we take it seriously today. Personally, I do like the "status quo", and the biggest danger to it is believing that the status quo will somehow maintain itself indefinitely.
All these technologies you mention are great, but if we wait until we're tapping out the deep ocean oil deposits to switch then we'll still be dependent on extremely expensive oil to bring the change about and to do all the things we do now. This not only makes the change more expensive, it also has a dramatic effect on everything else. I don't think Phoenix will appreciate the "opportunity and a challenge" during those years that fresh produce is a luxury item.
Again, I agree with you... But like so many other things (radon gas, the Y2K bug) it is only not a big deal if you do something about it before it becomes a big deal. You may appreciate this, but in general I see an alarming lack of concern and even outright dismissal of this looming problem, which is a sure way to cause it to become the big problem all the pessimists say it is.
Re:DRM support good. DRM on consumer product bad.
on
DRM Advocate Violates DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable.
Why would you want to do that? If you don't trust the person on the receiving end not to copy the document... well, you're screwed, because if it's that important and they can see it, they can copy it.
Every other form of information hiding is different from DRM because you are worried about an unintended third party viewing your message. Even then it is extremely difficult to do right, and impossible to guarantee. With DRM, it is the intended recipient who you are worried about. You're trying to simultaneously give them access to the message, yet not allow them to share it with anyone else. This goes way beyond mere encryption in terms of impossibility.
Goes to show that evil is not a party line problem; its a congressional whore problem, spanning both parties.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes YES!
Our government is rotten, and we need to scrape the corrupted parts out to save the whole. Ignore the party; it's meaningless lip service! Pay attention to the actions! That's how we'll distinguish the healthy from the festering so we can burn away what's hurting us!
Sorry, but I just get a bit excited when I hear someone else say that.
So, you're saying Apple put the DRM in to make the record companies happy, but made it weak enough to keep their customers happy as well. I wonder if this was a deliberate tradeoff, or did they just decide that they had to let people burn CDs and defeating their DRM is the natural result.
That's what Michael Gartenberg doesn't get. Strong DRM will inevitably screw you over.
Yeah. It's pretty sad that he ran face-first into this, yet thinks it's just a problem with the implementation. No, it's a problem with the concept -- when you need to get permission to use something you own, you become unable to use something you own if the permission giver is not available for any reason. That is simply ridiculous, and even he thinks so when actually put in that position.
Everybody wants to use their property however they want, and if some outside entity says "no, you can't do that" they'll respond "Screw you, I paid for it and it's mine". Notice that this was exactly what Michael did. Hopefully he will realize what that means.
That's why Apple's DRM works. Because it doesn't. If it did, it wouldn't.
Remember that phrase, you're going to hear it a lot.
The crime that was committed was unauthorized distribution by the store selling the books. Copyright owners do not have any authority over you reading a book, only copying it. But they want that authority. And "no right to read" is the phrase they will use to get it.
I think I liked the old universe better. You know, the one where Richard Stallman seemed like a nut with crazy predictions of the future?
I loved it as a kid, and when I re-watched it as an adult, I mostly still liked it. The first twenty minutes are still some of the greatest film moments involving robots ever. It's only a couple minutes in when the first autobot is killed outright (which was truly stunning when I was a kid and nobody ever really "died" in cartoons), and the stakes only go up from there to climactic Optimus Prime vs Megatron battle.
Unfortunately, after that point it gets cheesier. The writers were afraid to kill any of the new characters who had toys based on them, and some of those characters really deserved to be killed (including the hero). But that warm fuzzy glow of awesome from the first twenty minutes helps carry the rest of the film, and it's okay.
Not exactly the greatest movie ever, but worth a re-watch every ten years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
I would offer you a chance to assault the groin of racist joke tellers beyond the realm of real life encounters, but since the bubble burst I haven't been able to convince anyone to invest in my Internet Crotch Boot. Which is just as well -- it was vapor anyway. Besides it required your intended victim to choose to install an internet-operated kicking device in front of their groin which is a sticking point despite the study I never did which would have said how everyone would love to do this.
Time to start practicing writing it in the snow.
And the Patriot Act is how we address the problem.
I'd bet you whatever you want. If Microsoft hadn't given IE away for free, we'd all be using Netscape and the OS you use would be irrelevent on the web. Preventing this from happening and thus reducing the value of windows is exactly what the anti-trust trial was about. The price of Windows has remained consistent because of the lack of competition. Shake up the monopoly and the price drops to prevent defection, as the deals Microsoft doles out to stop people from switching to Linux demonstrates.
That's a good point as long as we are considering the hidden cost of things...
Except that to the extent that IBM's or AOL's prices are affected by their contributions to Mozilla, that only makes them less competitive vs other offerings which don't have this embedded cost. And you are perfectly free to go buy something from any of the innumerable companies that aren't donating to mozilla.
Whereas you must purchase Windows in order to legally run IE. There is no way to escape the payment to the authors of IE.
That makes it quite different in my mind.
No, you are missing the point entirely.
IE is not free because the cost of developing IE is included in the cost of Windows. Just because you can download IE for Windows without paying anything extra is irrelevent, because you have already payed for it.
Whereas you never have to pay any cost to anyone which includes the development costs of firefox.
Your hardware purchase does not include the price of Firefox. Your hardware purchase does not include the price of IE, unless you are buying a machine with Windows pre-installed on it (which is most of them).
So your statement is completely invalid.
Firefox is free. IE is not.
and his passion for playing chess until the wee hours of the morning then sleeping until midday
With the knowledge that electronic games weren't available back then (though of course Ben had a hand in the long history leading up to them!) I'll say that this is probably the only way in which I'm substantially similar to Ben Franklin.
Oh, and his love of beer. We have that in common too.
How is GTA any worse?
It's worse because parents don't understand it. Parents mostly "get" books and plays. They're basically benign, but you may want to stop your kids from reading certain books. They aren't scary "simulations", whatever that is.
The thing is, there's a whole generation of people who grew up with video games and are now having kids of their own. A lot of that generation may still be uptight about this new way of doing the old thing (imagining you are someone else), but this will pass with time. My guess is that as we age more parents will know that games aren't inherently any different than books or plays or movies -- if you have a problem with certain content, you must be responsible for what your kids do.
Or the same uptight people will realize what a free ride we've been giving to books and plays, and everything will be censored equally.
They should use a system that lists the 'level' of sex, violence, dirty language or whatever and let parents choose appropriately for their own fears.
They've been doing this for movies (at least on television) for some time, right? They'll have the rating (e.g. "R") and then a list of reasons why it got that rating (e.g. "adult situations" aka "sex", "violence", "language" aka "the f-bomb", "brief nudity").
The age-based system can stay, but by making it better informed with specific content ratings parents could make better choices. Of course the whole problem is parents not taking the time to try to make a choice at all and then going apeshit when they realize what their child is playing.
The vast majority of those subsidies you mention go to humongous good ole boy corporate farms, or international agro biz run through daisy chained paper corporations.
:)
Of course! What, you thought I bought into the "save our poor small-time family farms" propaganda? I can smell a corporate giveaway disguised as aiding the "common man". It's not hard, just wait until they open their mouths. No, the whole thing is designed to force the small-time farmers to fail so the big corporations can buy them out on the cheap. And it will only get worse thanks in part to...
And the Africans don't want ag aid because it's GM, they don't want their farmers to get tied in with GM patented seeds,which would put them into serfdom, and I don't blame them one bit, I think it sucks too.
That's the kind of "aid" where we give them GM crops to make their own farms more productive, and yeah they don't want it because it's a Faustian deal. They also don't want the "aid" of cheap produce made in the U.S. because it undercuts the value of the productive farms they have over there. Like a gangbang porno, they're getting screwed from multiple angles.
I agree allowing Africa to get over the problem themselves may be best. The sad part is GM technology would actualy be beneficial if it enabled them to be self-sufficient. Instead we want them to hand control over to a multinational based in the opposite hemisphere.
Cool, so all these US-corn eating Russian, Chinese, whatever are about to starve ?
No, they're about to have their own farms become economically viable again.
They have their own farms. The problem is that our farms are heavily subsidized, so imports from the U.S. are cheaper than locally grown crops ever could be. Which means the local farmers can't make a living, and end up unable to buy the cheap food that put them out of business, and they starve. This is a summary of one of the complaints African countries have with our "aid".
Actually, when simplified like that, it sounds kinda like our relationship with China, doesn't it? Communist country with little environmental/labor protection produces products well below the cost of any U.S. manufacturer, putting local manufacturers out of business. Fortunately the retailers have an interest in making sure the locals can at least afford the imported goods, if not much else.
Anyway, got off on a tangent there.
Had you gone through with it
Um... Oops.
It would then be your job to kill the goat.
That's what I was supposed to do with the goat? Oops again.
I know it's just a game, but it is a rather poignant quote from Alpha Centauri (from memory): "Beware of those who would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master."
Anyway, the main hope that I have for China is that capitalism is alive and well there. People are free to earn and spend money, with all that entails.
Right, because Capitalism unfettered by a Representative Democracy would be awesome.
Take every abuse you've ever heard of in a capitalist system. Then take every abuse you've ever heard of in a totalitarian system. Then combine them, and multiply the capitalist abuses by the lack of accountability the totalitarian system provides.
Western companies have invaded - including McDonalds and WalMart, in this case defining a new standard and experience for consumers and stimulating local competiton. China is open for business.
Yes, a new experience as consumers but what about as workers? I already hate Wal Mart for their labor practices in the U.S. -- they are essentially creating a class of working poor by trying to work around minimum wage laws. They employ a plurality of people in the States, and these people are only going to have enough money to shop at Wal Mart.
What do you think WalMart is going to do in a country like China? You think they are going to raise the standard of employment practices, or are they going to scream with orgasmic joy at being free of those few restraints the U.S. had imposed on them?
This is my fundamental problem with the way our businesses are whoring themselves to China. We are selling them our fundamental production capacity, but requiring nothing in return except more money for the executives of these companies. Every dollar we send them without a demand for democratic reform is a dollar that just entrenches the current system in place. And the whore executives don't care at all. They just see the delta between U.S. labor and Chinese labor as dollars flowing into their pocket.
Here's my prediction: If China becomes the enemy that some fear it might, you will be able to look back and see the hand of the business elites of the capitalist democracies propping them up the entire way. If China does not become that enemy, it will be because we stop allowing this to happen.
Then who was it who told me to kill my family?
Damnit...
People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge.
While I generally agree with you, the point is that this "challenge" is rather immense because we are talking about switching over a world-wide economic system. In particular the economics of it is such that it is currently advantageous to delay the shift until such time as our current solution is grossly expensive. However the same factor means that the longer we wait, the more desperately we will need to change and the more expensive and difficult that change will be.
In other words, Peak Oil doesn't have to be a disaster, but it will be unless we take it seriously today. Personally, I do like the "status quo", and the biggest danger to it is believing that the status quo will somehow maintain itself indefinitely.
All these technologies you mention are great, but if we wait until we're tapping out the deep ocean oil deposits to switch then we'll still be dependent on extremely expensive oil to bring the change about and to do all the things we do now. This not only makes the change more expensive, it also has a dramatic effect on everything else. I don't think Phoenix will appreciate the "opportunity and a challenge" during those years that fresh produce is a luxury item.
Again, I agree with you... But like so many other things (radon gas, the Y2K bug) it is only not a big deal if you do something about it before it becomes a big deal. You may appreciate this, but in general I see an alarming lack of concern and even outright dismissal of this looming problem, which is a sure way to cause it to become the big problem all the pessimists say it is.
I have more karma than God.
That's because God posts anonymously.
This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable.
Why would you want to do that? If you don't trust the person on the receiving end not to copy the document... well, you're screwed, because if it's that important and they can see it, they can copy it.
Every other form of information hiding is different from DRM because you are worried about an unintended third party viewing your message. Even then it is extremely difficult to do right, and impossible to guarantee. With DRM, it is the intended recipient who you are worried about. You're trying to simultaneously give them access to the message, yet not allow them to share it with anyone else. This goes way beyond mere encryption in terms of impossibility.
Goes to show that evil is not a party line problem; its a congressional whore problem, spanning both parties.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes YES!
Our government is rotten, and we need to scrape the corrupted parts out to save the whole. Ignore the party; it's meaningless lip service! Pay attention to the actions! That's how we'll distinguish the healthy from the festering so we can burn away what's hurting us!
Sorry, but I just get a bit excited when I hear someone else say that.
So, you're saying Apple put the DRM in to make the record companies happy, but made it weak enough to keep their customers happy as well. I wonder if this was a deliberate tradeoff, or did they just decide that they had to let people burn CDs and defeating their DRM is the natural result.
That's what Michael Gartenberg doesn't get. Strong DRM will inevitably screw you over.
Yeah. It's pretty sad that he ran face-first into this, yet thinks it's just a problem with the implementation. No, it's a problem with the concept -- when you need to get permission to use something you own, you become unable to use something you own if the permission giver is not available for any reason. That is simply ridiculous, and even he thinks so when actually put in that position.
Everybody wants to use their property however they want, and if some outside entity says "no, you can't do that" they'll respond "Screw you, I paid for it and it's mine". Notice that this was exactly what Michael did. Hopefully he will realize what that means.
That's why Apple's DRM works. Because it doesn't. If it did, it wouldn't.
Great way of putting it.
Yes, that's true according to TFA.
The injunction had nothing to do with not allowing people to read the book.
Not according to TFA.
Followed by The Balzoan Overpass, The Lemarian Switchbacks, The Madeupnameian Clover Leaf Interchange, and The Ipswitch Roundabout.
By the way, please never use the words "Wesley" and "sexy results" together in a sentence again.
Remember that phrase, you're going to hear it a lot.
The crime that was committed was unauthorized distribution by the store selling the books. Copyright owners do not have any authority over you reading a book, only copying it. But they want that authority. And "no right to read" is the phrase they will use to get it.
I think I liked the old universe better. You know, the one where Richard Stallman seemed like a nut with crazy predictions of the future?
I loved it as a kid, and when I re-watched it as an adult, I mostly still liked it. The first twenty minutes are still some of the greatest film moments involving robots ever. It's only a couple minutes in when the first autobot is killed outright (which was truly stunning when I was a kid and nobody ever really "died" in cartoons), and the stakes only go up from there to climactic Optimus Prime vs Megatron battle.
Unfortunately, after that point it gets cheesier. The writers were afraid to kill any of the new characters who had toys based on them, and some of those characters really deserved to be killed (including the hero). But that warm fuzzy glow of awesome from the first twenty minutes helps carry the rest of the film, and it's okay.
Not exactly the greatest movie ever, but worth a re-watch every ten years or so.