At least AT&T is warming up to VoIP, that is a lot more than other "dinosaurs" like the record labels and movie studios have done to get aclimated to new technologies. It may be proprietary, but at least their solution isn't to legislate it out of existance.
Do you think that it is in the longterm interest of your party to align itself with the Libertarian Party to help force a revitalized political system? Or do you believe that it would be better to focus on putting pressure on the Democrats to enact some of your politics by costing them elections? Basically, do you see a better future in working with other minor parties to create an essentially totally new political system or to act as a "powerful spoiler" capable of putting pressure on left-of-center democrats to listen to your supporters?
They seem to have no conception of a need to foster public good will, which is just bizarre for a corporate entity. Whenever I think about things like steamboat willy, I just can't help but wonder why Disney didn't release those really old cartoons just to keep old fans happy. Yes, they would lose out on a small amount of revenue, but a company that "gives back" gets a good reputation that can make its future offerings more attractive since it adds a more human face to an otherwise faceless entity.
If you are sharing content illegally, ie breaking federal copyright laws, then why the hell would be inclined to make it even easier? This is functionally identical to gun registration. How many criminals actually register their guns? If they can't get one off the street, they just get them by stealing from law abiding citizens.
I can appreciate trying to cut back on massive copyright infringement, but this.... this is just bullshit. Whoever at the MPAA/RIAA paid for this should be fired for wasting their employers' money. No one who is breaking the law and "causing them to lose money" is going to follow this law. Well maybe some, the kind that would have probably been caught anyway.
If it be true that California leads the way for our country, then Arnold has ushered in a new wave of stupidity into American politics. Doesn't he have better things to do, that not coincidentally would help these lobby groups' retainers more, like cut down the overall size of the CA state government, streamline its laws, eliminate red tape, cut taxes, cut expenditures and find innovative ways to save money?
Here's a novel idea for the RIAA/MPAA/BSA: instead of wasting your money on bullshit like this, lobby for tax and spending cuts. Get rid of the income tax, when the people aren't taxed at 20-50%, they have discressionary income out their asses and that's when people buy your products.
In other words, stop subsidizing the Republicrats and send the check to Reason and the Libertarian Party.
If they know a lot, and want to learn, then why no
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Would You Hire A Hacker?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If they want to learn more about their "trade" and the company that hires them properly handles all of the information it could then extract out of them, then whatever damage the kid could do would be mitigated by how much the security guys could learn. I for one say go for it, if the company that is going to hire this person knows what it's doing on collecting data about any and all work the cracker will be doing for them.
Sometimes the best way to learn about your enemy really is to contain them and see how they think. Who knows, maybe the security guys could find out enough to actually get an insight into how to properly go about proactively handling security threats posed by worms?
What's all the hubub over this? The GMES or whatever it's called is doing it's job. It's a **GLOBAL** management system. Who are we to tell the Nigerians and Chinese that they cannot cast a vote in our elections? Are we not a free country? As the self-appointed leader of the free world, don't we owe it to these poor, miserable third world serfs to taste pure democratic freedom? What is more democratic than a 5 line VBScript that lets them feel the awesome touch of freedom that comes with choosing leaders?
Sure it may be changing **YOUR** vote, but stop being selfish. Will somebody please think of the (Nigerian spammers' and Chicom's) children?
I'm all for strict drunk driving laws. In Virginia, where I live, you don't want to get caught on a DUI, especially if you're an incorrigible offender. There was a guy from NC who got slapped on the wrist 8 times in NC for DUIs, when the VA state police caught him in Southern VA, and found out about his previous **8** offenses he was arrested, his car was seized, his license revoked for a long time and last I heard he was sent to rot for 5 years on a felony sentence in a state prison. DUIs can and often do result in very dangerous, at a minimum criminally negligent acts, so I see no problem with severely punishing people after the first offense if they managed to not harm anyone but themselves.
But with white collar crime, like copyright infringement and this area, we have to be very careful. People often do recover quite easily from white collar crime, but violent crime when successful usually does lasting damage. Someone gets maimed or killed. That's why I think that with white collar crime the better approach is make things like fraud weak charges in and of themselves, but make the penalties increase rapidly for people caught committing them en masse or repeat offenders.
Do I think a spammer who operates one fradulent site should get sent to the pokey for 5 years? Absolutely not unless they did a lot of really bad stuff from it. However, someone operating a whole chain of them I'd lock away very quickly.
The best longterm solution for all of this, though, is to keep the laws simple, easy for the public to understand and as enforceable and compatible with the more decent side of human nature as possible. But then again, that would kill most trial and defense lawyers' careers quickly. The public, at least IMO, won't benefit from this law. What the public needs is for the Congress to rewrite the fraud laws from scratch in a way that makes perfectly good sense for our circumstances today, and that the average person can follow. We need to move toward a system where the laws are well-written by design, I mean why do we have all of these "loopholes" that keep getting closed?
Maybe another part of the solution is that the Congress should meet for one month a year to discuss the budget, hear public complaints about the laws, and then either take another month to pass reform measures or go home. In VA, our assembly cannot be busy bodies like the Congress, the General Assembly meets only about 1 month or so a year:)
I will confess that much my knowledge of federal penalties is second hand, having lived with two former federal agents most of my life, but what good does this do, really? The federal penalties for most crimes seem to already be aimed at simply "crushing the perp and ruining him/her forever" rather than anything resembling pursuit of justice.
Yet another good reason to vote for Michael Badnarik in November. He wants to move us toward a system based on restitution, not simply locking the perp away and throwing away the key.
The solution is to move money over from welfare
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Order in the e-Court!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Cut the welfare budget by 50% at a minimum and transfer the money over in each state to building more courts, hiring more prosecutors, judges and public defenders (good ones) and pass laws requiring the police to prioritize all property crimes above anything specious like drug crimes. Why? It'll kill two birds with one stone: slow trial dockets and much of the poverty in America.
What I am talking about isn't the shrill left wing bullshit of "OMG they want to lock up all the poor people" but rather a strict libertarianization of Giuliani's "Broken Windows" enforcement program. The idea is that you prosecute all minor property offenses and you treat even something as simple as an inner city teen stealing an inner city child's bike as a "gateway crime." It does two things: tries to nip the problem of repeat offenders in the bud by showing them the law always applies, and it shows the poor that the law can work for them just like the rich.
Without strong property protections, the poor don't have an incentive to believe that hard work really pays off. For every cop that genuinely believes that they have a moral imperative to protect that inner city single mother and her kids' property, there are probably 5 that feel that it's "not worth it the trouble to the tax payers." To which I, as a voting Libertarian, have to ask, "then WTF am I doing paying your salary and letting you hide behind a badge?" Seriously, sometimes with this kind of attitude I think we'd be better off in most areas in America with firing 90% of the cops and letting the average law abiding citizen own military-grade infantry weapons and waste any mofo that tries to steal from them. As Heinlein said, an armed society, is a polite society.
Seriously, just cut the welfare programs, gun control laws, let people use force to defend their property and make the cops accountable for when they don't do a damn thing to take down petty property rights offenders. Within a few years, the poverty in much of the urban areas in America will sharply decline, along with the crime rates, especially the violent crime.
One day I'd love to get a chance to go to Burning Man, especially seeing blurbs on Reason Online about how one of the editors went and loved it. Anyway, what I don't get is why people would see something like VoIP as an issue. VoIP/Wifi are of course made by corporations, but they aren't **run** by corporations necessarily.
There seems to be too much of a false dichotomy that is present. Either you're an artsy, expressive person or you're one of those technology nerds that is cold to creativity. Maybe the worst nightmare to the artsy extremists is the idea that they don't have a monopoly on aesthetics anymore than the nerds on functionality. Would not the greatest triumph be a blending of beauty and functionality? Of course, harmonization of the two would naturally result in the nerds and artsy types having to meet half-way and *gasp* learn to communicate and appreciate each other.
But then what do I know? I'm one of the only geeks in my CS department that can actually excel at human languages while suffering in my math skills. I picked up basic scheme programming in one or two classes and finished the projects quickly, and beat most of the math people because my brain is more used to switching between fairly starkly different logic paradigms. Going between English and Spanish requires more mental flexibility than from C->Java.
At this point I just don't understand why people who pride themselves on how well-developed their intellects are would limit themselves instead of building on that so they could stay on top. I am just reminded of some of the math nerds, whose coding skills aren't as good as mine, said that a math minor should be a prereq. When I retorted, "fine then let's add a foreign language minor since that would be just as useful for helping programmers think flexibly" they just... shut up.
Nerds, go to a coffee shop when local bands are jamming and maybe take an artsy chick out to a musical or something. Artsy types, try math, programming, anything to gain an appreciation for the value of logic. It'd do so many of you good.
I just actually bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for MacOS X. Granted it was an academic copy, but even at 21 I just lost my ability to sit there for hours waiting for something to download that I could easily buy.
After a while you also tend to gain an appreciation for paying people for producing software. Granted I probably won't ever buy another copy of Office unless it's the academic version, but what the hell?
Quite frankly any bureaucrat that settles on closed data formats and protocols should be fired for betraying the interests of the government. The government should not be beholden to a particular manufacturer for its information systems.
Ok MacGuyver, you've already proven that you can make a death ray out of chewing gum, a ford pinto radio antenna and a double A battery, so please stop bragging, it's getting old. We all bow before your higher geek prowess....
There are very few cases where it is sampling
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The File Sharing Report
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Most of the time you can find 30 second clips on Amazon or CDUniverse, even for small bands. I can see downloading copies of songs from bands that you cannot find any legit means to sample, but stop using this bullshit excuse of "oh they're just sampling" to justify most peoples' use. They don't delete the music and they keep listening to it in most cases. One of those little inconvenient logical twists is that you can also argue that many people wouldn't have bought the album anyway, because with Kazaa, et al. they don't have to.
The reaction of the people I lived with at my dorm when they saw that my music collection was not only legit, but that I had almost as many MP3s from my used CDs as they had taken off of AudioGalaxy was just... shock. I'm not rich, by any stretch of the imagination.
And you know what the irony of it is? Many of these "kids who couldn't buy them anyway" were driving much nicer cars than my 11 year old Honda Accord. It's nothing more than a bunch of rich brats who don't want to spend $10-$15 on a CD so that they can upgrade their beamer, at least around here. I just got Draconian Times by Paradise Lost in the mail today from Amazon's used products market. It cost me $5 before shipping and handling for a total of ~$7.50.
I have even more contempt for the RIAA than most of my geek peers because unlike them, I actually own all of my music that the RIAA wants to control. I didn't get it off of a file sharing network, I bought it either from a store or from the iTMS. That is also why when I bitch about those bastards that older people will actually listen to me. File sharers are free loaders, people like me have paid our dues to the RIAA and are getting shafted anyway.
Sun: we build and get you to contribute to open source products to use as the foundation for our for-profit products and then let the "Evil Empire" get said open source project firmly in its sights. Sometimes we are going super hardcore for open source, othertimes we are terrified of it and attack it with wild-eyed zeal.
HP: When we're not whoring to Microsoft, we'll be more than happy to sell Linux to our cutomsters, but then we'll go right back to our buddies in Redmond.
Dell: We are such corporatist tools that if it is remotely risky we won't touch it with less than a 10 foot pole. We'll sell a few Linux boxes, but claim the way most families claim a gay cousin.
Microsoft: I really hope no one has to explain this one to you.
IBM: Linux lets us standardize and save money. We build on Linux a little, we save tons of money, thrash our competition and make tons of money. Invest over $1B today, and we make many times more than that. Not only that, but Linux is a great stick to beat Microsoft with.
I wonder why IBM looks like such a good ally. Maybe it has to do with them seeing the growth of a robust Linux platform and community as the fastest way to them not only getting revenge, but being the preeminent IT company in the world.
No company will actually side with OSS for altruistic reasons, but it isn't hard to guage motives. IBM's motives are the most sympathetic of all of the big IT companies to Linux. IBM sees guiding Linux into the big time as the best way to become a massive force unto itself. Most other companies like to ride the fence and only occassionally flirt with Linux which is the enemy of their ally, Microsoft.
The problem with most OEMs IMO is that Microsoft is more than just a supplier to them. They don't have the business sense to see that dependence on Microsoft Windows means that they cannot act in their own interests if Microsoft makes the XBox2 essentially a real computer for John Q. Citizen. It makes them like a cheap fuck buddy, and when Microsoft is through with Dell, HP, etc they will be discarded as quickly.
The only thing I personally wish that an OEM had the foresight to do, was for Apple to give a few million dollars to the OSI with a tacit purpose of working on the OSX port of open office and general open office improvement beyond that.
Imagine if the parrot or mono guys wrote really slick bindings for this and made them availible on all supported platforms. Personally, I would rather have a game that is just "pretty" fast but isn't bound to a particular operating system to one that is really fast, but that I cannot take to any platform I want.
If PERL 6 and Parrot are able to get really mature in the next 6 months to a year, they owe it to their users to try to provide solid support for a library like this as part of the parrot distribution. A language like PERL 6 which is supposed to be really slick thanks to ruby's influence on its design would be great for opening up game development to the masses.
The way I see it, unless a game written in C/C++ is going to completely max out your CPU and GPU then it's probably worth being written in C# or PERL 6 eventually. Something like this would be Microsoft's worst nightmare for home users who play games a lot.
Sounds like the moral of the story is....
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Mambo Users Threatened
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Open source developers need to err on the side of rejecting submissions rather than risk accepting corrupted ones. From the sounds of it, Sakic took some of the work he was paid to do exclusively for Connelley and gave it away to the Mambo guys. If that be the case, and we wouldn't know until the shit really hits the fan, then it would be very cut and dry: Sakic was wrong and the Mambo guys should have known better.
Granted the laws should be changed, because as they stand right now they only benefit lawyers. If company A believes company B has a legal right to sell a product to company A then it should be immune to litigation, and company B should be the one that gets hit. Company A should have the legal right to rewrite the code until it is no longer the infringing code. The time frame, and whether the old code would have to be stripped immediately would of course be set by law.
Maybe the safest bet until that happens, if it ever happens, is for OSS projects to bite the bullet and do even more work "in house" than accept submissions rather than risk getting SCO'd.
It's one thing for them to block service packs and require a serial number, but it's quite another thing for them to do the whole product activation and mandatory serial checking approach. People by nature feel that they own their software or should. The biggest problem that copyright holders face is that the more they pull, the more they are going against human nature. Eventually, the result will be either people losing interest or aggressively "stealing software" and/or supporting political action that is antagonistic to corporate software interests.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd keep working the OEM channels, cut the cost of a new copy of Windows XP Home to $100 with none of the product activation junk and charge $50 per retail upgrade. If Microsoft is so worried about people pirating its products, they should extend steep discounts to their customers who buy off the shelf copies. Microsoft could make good money charging only $50 for Home and $100 for Pro upgrades for Windows.
When in doubt, cut your profit margin down and try to sell more copies of your product. Since digital goods are so cheap to fabricate physical copies of, there is no reason why Microsoft couldn't experiment with much cheaper retail prices for a version of Windows. Hell, they might find that if they stop heckling their legitimate users and cut prices that the desktop Linux threat all but goes away.
Let's face it, what incentive right now would there be for people to choose desktop linux for small business and home use if Windows had a no hassle licensing system and was sold that cheap?
God promised you that he would never flood your ass out to sea and drown you. He never promised that he wouldn't send a category 4 hurricane after those who steal others' bandwidth. Be warned cyber sinners the end is fucking nigh!!!
Support the record labels that aren't a part of the RIAA. Last I checked, Century Media is one of them. So is Projekt. Century Media also had a number of its bands present at Ozzfest this year, the best one IMO, being Lacuna Coil. I normally get tired of a band after a year or two of heavy listening, but I find myself still coming back to Lacuna Coil if that gives you any perspective on Century Media's taste.
The best part about CM, IMO, is that they have officially declared in an interview with IIRC Revolver, that the fastest way to not get your band signed to them is to be "the next Lacuna Coil, Shadows Fall or Arch Enemy." They don't like formulas because they want bands that know how to be creative. Those are the bands that if they continue to grow after after their first one or two releases will be good investments. I can't wait until Lacuna Coil releases the successor to Comalies next year.
But as far as garage bands go, there is something about indy bands that many people can't deal with. It's that the record labels sign anything with a modicum of talent. Hell, they might even sign me if I got into a band and I have almost no guitar or bass experience. If your band hasn't been "discovered" chances are it very well may have been and not even the most tasteless label(s) would sign your band. 90% of indy bands are that way because they would be obvious money holes, it's that rare 5-10% that are victims of the market passing them over for the wrong reasons.
What good are laws that are simultaneously unenforceable and make the people more contemptuous of the thought of paying for your products? If the labels had said publically, "we believe the No Electronic Theft Act more than adequately addresses online piracy, and the DMCA is bad for consumers" then they would have been the good guys. The people who pay attention to what they were doing at the time would have bought more CDs, and the RIAA would have been right, the NET Act was more than enough.
As I have pointed out on my blog before the solution to illegal file sharing is not in lawsuits, but in repealing the DMCA and replacing it with a "right of private action for prosecutions in IP." That's right, let copyright holders hire a lawyer and prosecute you. Think about it for a second. It makes them pay to prosecute you, which means your tax dollars don't get drained by endless hours of DOJ/US Attorney expansion and action. It also gives the copyright holders a real means to go after people that'd work in the USA. Lawsuits aren't too scary, private initivative on prosecution is to college students and other young file sharers. When 5,000 sit in prison, not getting hit up for a few grand, people will stand up and take notice.
Yes, it would cost the RIAA considerably more in the short term, but it'd put a deep chill on illegal file sharing use. I have lost my patience with people who steal from the labels and musicians and hide behind things like "oh I am just sampling." If I sample something off a newsgroup or something, I either delete it right away and buy the album or I delete it because it's pure shit not worth keeping on my hard drive or buying. A few of my friends work the same way, but most of my peers do not.
The only reason I still have some support for the "other side" is that if the RIAA and MPAA were left unchecked they'd make my computer into a VCR that can run Microsoft Office and licensed video games. But seriously, the copyright holders are not entirely wrong. There is a moral problem with those who say that no one gets hurt. We have already been forced to deal with the fact, thanks to people like Courtney Love, that the artists don't get a fair deal in most contracts. Are you going to compound that by making it even harder to get out of debt? I seriously doubt most of the whiners even buy merch or go see them live.
"Normal people" aren't nuanced, at least in America. They will end up just seeing a bunch of free loaders and will be too lazy to challenge the MPAA/RIAA's latest IT industry killing plan du jour. If you make moral arguments for your freedom to be left alone from the copyright holders, you have to be virtuous so that the people can see that you are a libertarian, not a libertine.
in my CS department. The amount of crow that is getting passed around is amazing these days as many are being forced to switch to Linux or MacOS X for class in the 400 levels and they realize "uhhh those UNIX guys were right about Windows." The irony of it is that we Mac users are usually very good at helping them get started with OSX.
Still, we can't blame Microsoft for a lot of the instability since there are so many users out there using terrible and/or outdated drivers. Microsoft cannot be blamed for the quality of the drivers that most Windows users have because they didn't write them.
Of course I will say this about Windows. It is nice for the first few months, but then it just begins to become as sensually appealing as a rotten piece of bait fish left on your back porch for a few days in the sun. My Macs frequently have several times the uptimes of the Windows PCs I hear about and the Windows users are shocked, "why are 8 weeks of uptime, your PowerBook is still fast and usable."
Actually Bush stands to lose the "Christian Right"
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Bush vs. Kerry on Science
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· Score: 4, Insightful
By supporting Arlen Spectre over his challenger, Bush basically guaranteed that any of his allegedly anti-abortion judicial candidates would be "Borked" again. It was Spectre, a republican, that went off like a rabid attack dog on Bork when IIRC Bush senior was trying to get him approved. And do you know what the irony of it is? Bork is the kind of conservative that would have ripped Microsoft a new asshole on its anti-trust case if it had gone to the SCotUS.
Between his support for spectre, illegal alien amnesty, spending like a stripper with a stolen credit card, new entitlements and his equivocation on supporting Israel he stands to lose the Christian Right from the comments I've been reading on right-of-center sites. Most of them are not commentary sites either, but forums like FreeRepublic.
Unfortunately most of these guys will be deusch bags in 2004 and would stay home rather than vote for Petruka the Constitution Party candidate. Why? If it ain't the big guy, and it ain't their big guy, no point in voting. Most of them are probably working class or barely in the middle class because they cannot connect two simple facts: if they came out and voted LP or CP instead of voting for Bush, the minor parties would get so many votes that the RP would be howling in pain in 2004 and would be whoring itself out to the right to get its base back. But they won't do that, so why should the Republicans give a flying fuck about the Christian Right anymore?
As I have often quipped, we libertarians are the principled on the right, the "christian right" aren't principled, their voting habits show it. Rather they are merely the spoiled brats of the right.
People like myself, who are more classical liberals than libertarians, apply Lord Acton's famous expression "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" to economics. The more wealth that is centralized in faceless organizations, the more power they have. Yet, the wealth is not to be measured in just how much cash they have, but by the position they enjoy which can be worth more than their bank accounts.
Anti-trust laws are nothing more than a way to provide a check on corporate power. They exist to keep companies, especially big corporations, from becoming in Locke's words "a law unto themselves."
Anyone who calls themself a libertarian, opposes antitrust laws and has a sympathetic view of the south in the civil war would do well to read some of the founders of the CSA's opinions on monied corporations. The short summary is that they considered them to be a plague on basic liberties and the free market and were fighting more against the corporations who saught the tariff which taxed the southern economy terribly and used the money to line the pockets of corporations, than it was for "states' rights." The major state's right was to "be free from being sucked dry by monied corporations."
I will say this about monopolies. The government creates many of these headaches that it has to later solve by having expansive IP laws which allow patent holders to rape and pillage innovators. Would someone please tell me why we can patent online shopping carts and file formats? How about business processes in general? What about things we have never even fully or at all implemented ourselves?
If the government were to be reconstituted on classical liberal values, most of these monopolies would die like vampires in the morning sunlight.
Slashdot Mirror
At least AT&T is warming up to VoIP, that is a lot more than other "dinosaurs" like the record labels and movie studios have done to get aclimated to new technologies. It may be proprietary, but at least their solution isn't to legislate it out of existance.
Do you think that it is in the longterm interest of your party to align itself with the Libertarian Party to help force a revitalized political system? Or do you believe that it would be better to focus on putting pressure on the Democrats to enact some of your politics by costing them elections? Basically, do you see a better future in working with other minor parties to create an essentially totally new political system or to act as a "powerful spoiler" capable of putting pressure on left-of-center democrats to listen to your supporters?
They seem to have no conception of a need to foster public good will, which is just bizarre for a corporate entity. Whenever I think about things like steamboat willy, I just can't help but wonder why Disney didn't release those really old cartoons just to keep old fans happy. Yes, they would lose out on a small amount of revenue, but a company that "gives back" gets a good reputation that can make its future offerings more attractive since it adds a more human face to an otherwise faceless entity.
If you are sharing content illegally, ie breaking federal copyright laws, then why the hell would be inclined to make it even easier? This is functionally identical to gun registration. How many criminals actually register their guns? If they can't get one off the street, they just get them by stealing from law abiding citizens.
I can appreciate trying to cut back on massive copyright infringement, but this.... this is just bullshit. Whoever at the MPAA/RIAA paid for this should be fired for wasting their employers' money. No one who is breaking the law and "causing them to lose money" is going to follow this law. Well maybe some, the kind that would have probably been caught anyway.
If it be true that California leads the way for our country, then Arnold has ushered in a new wave of stupidity into American politics. Doesn't he have better things to do, that not coincidentally would help these lobby groups' retainers more, like cut down the overall size of the CA state government, streamline its laws, eliminate red tape, cut taxes, cut expenditures and find innovative ways to save money?
Here's a novel idea for the RIAA/MPAA/BSA: instead of wasting your money on bullshit like this, lobby for tax and spending cuts. Get rid of the income tax, when the people aren't taxed at 20-50%, they have discressionary income out their asses and that's when people buy your products.
In other words, stop subsidizing the Republicrats and send the check to Reason and the Libertarian Party.
If they want to learn more about their "trade" and the company that hires them properly handles all of the information it could then extract out of them, then whatever damage the kid could do would be mitigated by how much the security guys could learn. I for one say go for it, if the company that is going to hire this person knows what it's doing on collecting data about any and all work the cracker will be doing for them.
Sometimes the best way to learn about your enemy really is to contain them and see how they think. Who knows, maybe the security guys could find out enough to actually get an insight into how to properly go about proactively handling security threats posed by worms?
What's all the hubub over this? The GMES or whatever it's called is doing it's job. It's a **GLOBAL** management system. Who are we to tell the Nigerians and Chinese that they cannot cast a vote in our elections? Are we not a free country? As the self-appointed leader of the free world, don't we owe it to these poor, miserable third world serfs to taste pure democratic freedom? What is more democratic than a 5 line VBScript that lets them feel the awesome touch of freedom that comes with choosing leaders?
Sure it may be changing **YOUR** vote, but stop being selfish. Will somebody please think of the (Nigerian spammers' and Chicom's) children?
I'm all for strict drunk driving laws. In Virginia, where I live, you don't want to get caught on a DUI, especially if you're an incorrigible offender. There was a guy from NC who got slapped on the wrist 8 times in NC for DUIs, when the VA state police caught him in Southern VA, and found out about his previous **8** offenses he was arrested, his car was seized, his license revoked for a long time and last I heard he was sent to rot for 5 years on a felony sentence in a state prison. DUIs can and often do result in very dangerous, at a minimum criminally negligent acts, so I see no problem with severely punishing people after the first offense if they managed to not harm anyone but themselves.
:)
But with white collar crime, like copyright infringement and this area, we have to be very careful. People often do recover quite easily from white collar crime, but violent crime when successful usually does lasting damage. Someone gets maimed or killed. That's why I think that with white collar crime the better approach is make things like fraud weak charges in and of themselves, but make the penalties increase rapidly for people caught committing them en masse or repeat offenders.
Do I think a spammer who operates one fradulent site should get sent to the pokey for 5 years? Absolutely not unless they did a lot of really bad stuff from it. However, someone operating a whole chain of them I'd lock away very quickly.
The best longterm solution for all of this, though, is to keep the laws simple, easy for the public to understand and as enforceable and compatible with the more decent side of human nature as possible. But then again, that would kill most trial and defense lawyers' careers quickly. The public, at least IMO, won't benefit from this law. What the public needs is for the Congress to rewrite the fraud laws from scratch in a way that makes perfectly good sense for our circumstances today, and that the average person can follow. We need to move toward a system where the laws are well-written by design, I mean why do we have all of these "loopholes" that keep getting closed?
Maybe another part of the solution is that the Congress should meet for one month a year to discuss the budget, hear public complaints about the laws, and then either take another month to pass reform measures or go home. In VA, our assembly cannot be busy bodies like the Congress, the General Assembly meets only about 1 month or so a year
I will confess that much my knowledge of federal penalties is second hand, having lived with two former federal agents most of my life, but what good does this do, really? The federal penalties for most crimes seem to already be aimed at simply "crushing the perp and ruining him/her forever" rather than anything resembling pursuit of justice.
Yet another good reason to vote for Michael Badnarik in November. He wants to move us toward a system based on restitution, not simply locking the perp away and throwing away the key.
Cut the welfare budget by 50% at a minimum and transfer the money over in each state to building more courts, hiring more prosecutors, judges and public defenders (good ones) and pass laws requiring the police to prioritize all property crimes above anything specious like drug crimes. Why? It'll kill two birds with one stone: slow trial dockets and much of the poverty in America.
What I am talking about isn't the shrill left wing bullshit of "OMG they want to lock up all the poor people" but rather a strict libertarianization of Giuliani's "Broken Windows" enforcement program. The idea is that you prosecute all minor property offenses and you treat even something as simple as an inner city teen stealing an inner city child's bike as a "gateway crime." It does two things: tries to nip the problem of repeat offenders in the bud by showing them the law always applies, and it shows the poor that the law can work for them just like the rich.
Without strong property protections, the poor don't have an incentive to believe that hard work really pays off. For every cop that genuinely believes that they have a moral imperative to protect that inner city single mother and her kids' property, there are probably 5 that feel that it's "not worth it the trouble to the tax payers." To which I, as a voting Libertarian, have to ask, "then WTF am I doing paying your salary and letting you hide behind a badge?" Seriously, sometimes with this kind of attitude I think we'd be better off in most areas in America with firing 90% of the cops and letting the average law abiding citizen own military-grade infantry weapons and waste any mofo that tries to steal from them. As Heinlein said, an armed society, is a polite society.
Seriously, just cut the welfare programs, gun control laws, let people use force to defend their property and make the cops accountable for when they don't do a damn thing to take down petty property rights offenders. Within a few years, the poverty in much of the urban areas in America will sharply decline, along with the crime rates, especially the violent crime.
One day I'd love to get a chance to go to Burning Man, especially seeing blurbs on Reason Online about how one of the editors went and loved it. Anyway, what I don't get is why people would see something like VoIP as an issue. VoIP/Wifi are of course made by corporations, but they aren't **run** by corporations necessarily.
There seems to be too much of a false dichotomy that is present. Either you're an artsy, expressive person or you're one of those technology nerds that is cold to creativity. Maybe the worst nightmare to the artsy extremists is the idea that they don't have a monopoly on aesthetics anymore than the nerds on functionality. Would not the greatest triumph be a blending of beauty and functionality? Of course, harmonization of the two would naturally result in the nerds and artsy types having to meet half-way and *gasp* learn to communicate and appreciate each other.
But then what do I know? I'm one of the only geeks in my CS department that can actually excel at human languages while suffering in my math skills. I picked up basic scheme programming in one or two classes and finished the projects quickly, and beat most of the math people because my brain is more used to switching between fairly starkly different logic paradigms. Going between English and Spanish requires more mental flexibility than from C->Java.
At this point I just don't understand why people who pride themselves on how well-developed their intellects are would limit themselves instead of building on that so they could stay on top. I am just reminded of some of the math nerds, whose coding skills aren't as good as mine, said that a math minor should be a prereq. When I retorted, "fine then let's add a foreign language minor since that would be just as useful for helping programmers think flexibly" they just... shut up.
Nerds, go to a coffee shop when local bands are jamming and maybe take an artsy chick out to a musical or something. Artsy types, try math, programming, anything to gain an appreciation for the value of logic. It'd do so many of you good.
I just actually bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for MacOS X. Granted it was an academic copy, but even at 21 I just lost my ability to sit there for hours waiting for something to download that I could easily buy.
After a while you also tend to gain an appreciation for paying people for producing software. Granted I probably won't ever buy another copy of Office unless it's the academic version, but what the hell?
Quite frankly any bureaucrat that settles on closed data formats and protocols should be fired for betraying the interests of the government. The government should not be beholden to a particular manufacturer for its information systems.
Generally speaking, saying "a company will never said with Linux for altruistic reasons" implies that you are saying that altruism is not a factor....
Ok MacGuyver, you've already proven that you can make a death ray out of chewing gum, a ford pinto radio antenna and a double A battery, so please stop bragging, it's getting old. We all bow before your higher geek prowess....
Most of the time you can find 30 second clips on Amazon or CDUniverse, even for small bands. I can see downloading copies of songs from bands that you cannot find any legit means to sample, but stop using this bullshit excuse of "oh they're just sampling" to justify most peoples' use. They don't delete the music and they keep listening to it in most cases. One of those little inconvenient logical twists is that you can also argue that many people wouldn't have bought the album anyway, because with Kazaa, et al. they don't have to.
The reaction of the people I lived with at my dorm when they saw that my music collection was not only legit, but that I had almost as many MP3s from my used CDs as they had taken off of AudioGalaxy was just... shock. I'm not rich, by any stretch of the imagination.
And you know what the irony of it is? Many of these "kids who couldn't buy them anyway" were driving much nicer cars than my 11 year old Honda Accord. It's nothing more than a bunch of rich brats who don't want to spend $10-$15 on a CD so that they can upgrade their beamer, at least around here. I just got Draconian Times by Paradise Lost in the mail today from Amazon's used products market. It cost me $5 before shipping and handling for a total of ~$7.50.
I have even more contempt for the RIAA than most of my geek peers because unlike them, I actually own all of my music that the RIAA wants to control. I didn't get it off of a file sharing network, I bought it either from a store or from the iTMS. That is also why when I bitch about those bastards that older people will actually listen to me. File sharers are free loaders, people like me have paid our dues to the RIAA and are getting shafted anyway.
Sun: we build and get you to contribute to open source products to use as the foundation for our for-profit products and then let the "Evil Empire" get said open source project firmly in its sights. Sometimes we are going super hardcore for open source, othertimes we are terrified of it and attack it with wild-eyed zeal.
HP: When we're not whoring to Microsoft, we'll be more than happy to sell Linux to our cutomsters, but then we'll go right back to our buddies in Redmond.
Dell: We are such corporatist tools that if it is remotely risky we won't touch it with less than a 10 foot pole. We'll sell a few Linux boxes, but claim the way most families claim a gay cousin.
Microsoft: I really hope no one has to explain this one to you.
IBM: Linux lets us standardize and save money. We build on Linux a little, we save tons of money, thrash our competition and make tons of money. Invest over $1B today, and we make many times more than that. Not only that, but Linux is a great stick to beat Microsoft with.
I wonder why IBM looks like such a good ally. Maybe it has to do with them seeing the growth of a robust Linux platform and community as the fastest way to them not only getting revenge, but being the preeminent IT company in the world.
No company will actually side with OSS for altruistic reasons, but it isn't hard to guage motives. IBM's motives are the most sympathetic of all of the big IT companies to Linux. IBM sees guiding Linux into the big time as the best way to become a massive force unto itself. Most other companies like to ride the fence and only occassionally flirt with Linux which is the enemy of their ally, Microsoft.
The problem with most OEMs IMO is that Microsoft is more than just a supplier to them. They don't have the business sense to see that dependence on Microsoft Windows means that they cannot act in their own interests if Microsoft makes the XBox2 essentially a real computer for John Q. Citizen. It makes them like a cheap fuck buddy, and when Microsoft is through with Dell, HP, etc they will be discarded as quickly.
The only thing I personally wish that an OEM had the foresight to do, was for Apple to give a few million dollars to the OSI with a tacit purpose of working on the OSX port of open office and general open office improvement beyond that.
Imagine if the parrot or mono guys wrote really slick bindings for this and made them availible on all supported platforms. Personally, I would rather have a game that is just "pretty" fast but isn't bound to a particular operating system to one that is really fast, but that I cannot take to any platform I want.
If PERL 6 and Parrot are able to get really mature in the next 6 months to a year, they owe it to their users to try to provide solid support for a library like this as part of the parrot distribution. A language like PERL 6 which is supposed to be really slick thanks to ruby's influence on its design would be great for opening up game development to the masses.
The way I see it, unless a game written in C/C++ is going to completely max out your CPU and GPU then it's probably worth being written in C# or PERL 6 eventually. Something like this would be Microsoft's worst nightmare for home users who play games a lot.
Open source developers need to err on the side of rejecting submissions rather than risk accepting corrupted ones. From the sounds of it, Sakic took some of the work he was paid to do exclusively for Connelley and gave it away to the Mambo guys. If that be the case, and we wouldn't know until the shit really hits the fan, then it would be very cut and dry: Sakic was wrong and the Mambo guys should have known better.
Granted the laws should be changed, because as they stand right now they only benefit lawyers. If company A believes company B has a legal right to sell a product to company A then it should be immune to litigation, and company B should be the one that gets hit. Company A should have the legal right to rewrite the code until it is no longer the infringing code. The time frame, and whether the old code would have to be stripped immediately would of course be set by law.
Maybe the safest bet until that happens, if it ever happens, is for OSS projects to bite the bullet and do even more work "in house" than accept submissions rather than risk getting SCO'd.
It's one thing for them to block service packs and require a serial number, but it's quite another thing for them to do the whole product activation and mandatory serial checking approach. People by nature feel that they own their software or should. The biggest problem that copyright holders face is that the more they pull, the more they are going against human nature. Eventually, the result will be either people losing interest or aggressively "stealing software" and/or supporting political action that is antagonistic to corporate software interests.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd keep working the OEM channels, cut the cost of a new copy of Windows XP Home to $100 with none of the product activation junk and charge $50 per retail upgrade. If Microsoft is so worried about people pirating its products, they should extend steep discounts to their customers who buy off the shelf copies. Microsoft could make good money charging only $50 for Home and $100 for Pro upgrades for Windows.
When in doubt, cut your profit margin down and try to sell more copies of your product. Since digital goods are so cheap to fabricate physical copies of, there is no reason why Microsoft couldn't experiment with much cheaper retail prices for a version of Windows. Hell, they might find that if they stop heckling their legitimate users and cut prices that the desktop Linux threat all but goes away.
Let's face it, what incentive right now would there be for people to choose desktop linux for small business and home use if Windows had a no hassle licensing system and was sold that cheap?
God promised you that he would never flood your ass out to sea and drown you. He never promised that he wouldn't send a category 4 hurricane after those who steal others' bandwidth. Be warned cyber sinners the end is fucking nigh!!!
Support the record labels that aren't a part of the RIAA. Last I checked, Century Media is one of them. So is Projekt. Century Media also had a number of its bands present at Ozzfest this year, the best one IMO, being Lacuna Coil. I normally get tired of a band after a year or two of heavy listening, but I find myself still coming back to Lacuna Coil if that gives you any perspective on Century Media's taste.
The best part about CM, IMO, is that they have officially declared in an interview with IIRC Revolver, that the fastest way to not get your band signed to them is to be "the next Lacuna Coil, Shadows Fall or Arch Enemy." They don't like formulas because they want bands that know how to be creative. Those are the bands that if they continue to grow after after their first one or two releases will be good investments. I can't wait until Lacuna Coil releases the successor to Comalies next year.
But as far as garage bands go, there is something about indy bands that many people can't deal with. It's that the record labels sign anything with a modicum of talent. Hell, they might even sign me if I got into a band and I have almost no guitar or bass experience. If your band hasn't been "discovered" chances are it very well may have been and not even the most tasteless label(s) would sign your band. 90% of indy bands are that way because they would be obvious money holes, it's that rare 5-10% that are victims of the market passing them over for the wrong reasons.
What good are laws that are simultaneously unenforceable and make the people more contemptuous of the thought of paying for your products? If the labels had said publically, "we believe the No Electronic Theft Act more than adequately addresses online piracy, and the DMCA is bad for consumers" then they would have been the good guys. The people who pay attention to what they were doing at the time would have bought more CDs, and the RIAA would have been right, the NET Act was more than enough.
As I have pointed out on my blog before the solution to illegal file sharing is not in lawsuits, but in repealing the DMCA and replacing it with a "right of private action for prosecutions in IP." That's right, let copyright holders hire a lawyer and prosecute you. Think about it for a second. It makes them pay to prosecute you, which means your tax dollars don't get drained by endless hours of DOJ/US Attorney expansion and action. It also gives the copyright holders a real means to go after people that'd work in the USA. Lawsuits aren't too scary, private initivative on prosecution is to college students and other young file sharers. When 5,000 sit in prison, not getting hit up for a few grand, people will stand up and take notice.
Yes, it would cost the RIAA considerably more in the short term, but it'd put a deep chill on illegal file sharing use. I have lost my patience with people who steal from the labels and musicians and hide behind things like "oh I am just sampling." If I sample something off a newsgroup or something, I either delete it right away and buy the album or I delete it because it's pure shit not worth keeping on my hard drive or buying. A few of my friends work the same way, but most of my peers do not.
The only reason I still have some support for the "other side" is that if the RIAA and MPAA were left unchecked they'd make my computer into a VCR that can run Microsoft Office and licensed video games. But seriously, the copyright holders are not entirely wrong. There is a moral problem with those who say that no one gets hurt. We have already been forced to deal with the fact, thanks to people like Courtney Love, that the artists don't get a fair deal in most contracts. Are you going to compound that by making it even harder to get out of debt? I seriously doubt most of the whiners even buy merch or go see them live.
"Normal people" aren't nuanced, at least in America. They will end up just seeing a bunch of free loaders and will be too lazy to challenge the MPAA/RIAA's latest IT industry killing plan du jour. If you make moral arguments for your freedom to be left alone from the copyright holders, you have to be virtuous so that the people can see that you are a libertarian, not a libertine.
in my CS department. The amount of crow that is getting passed around is amazing these days as many are being forced to switch to Linux or MacOS X for class in the 400 levels and they realize "uhhh those UNIX guys were right about Windows." The irony of it is that we Mac users are usually very good at helping them get started with OSX.
Still, we can't blame Microsoft for a lot of the instability since there are so many users out there using terrible and/or outdated drivers. Microsoft cannot be blamed for the quality of the drivers that most Windows users have because they didn't write them.
Of course I will say this about Windows. It is nice for the first few months, but then it just begins to become as sensually appealing as a rotten piece of bait fish left on your back porch for a few days in the sun. My Macs frequently have several times the uptimes of the Windows PCs I hear about and the Windows users are shocked, "why are 8 weeks of uptime, your PowerBook is still fast and usable."
By supporting Arlen Spectre over his challenger, Bush basically guaranteed that any of his allegedly anti-abortion judicial candidates would be "Borked" again. It was Spectre, a republican, that went off like a rabid attack dog on Bork when IIRC Bush senior was trying to get him approved. And do you know what the irony of it is? Bork is the kind of conservative that would have ripped Microsoft a new asshole on its anti-trust case if it had gone to the SCotUS.
Between his support for spectre, illegal alien amnesty, spending like a stripper with a stolen credit card, new entitlements and his equivocation on supporting Israel he stands to lose the Christian Right from the comments I've been reading on right-of-center sites. Most of them are not commentary sites either, but forums like FreeRepublic.
Unfortunately most of these guys will be deusch bags in 2004 and would stay home rather than vote for Petruka the Constitution Party candidate. Why? If it ain't the big guy, and it ain't their big guy, no point in voting. Most of them are probably working class or barely in the middle class because they cannot connect two simple facts: if they came out and voted LP or CP instead of voting for Bush, the minor parties would get so many votes that the RP would be howling in pain in 2004 and would be whoring itself out to the right to get its base back. But they won't do that, so why should the Republicans give a flying fuck about the Christian Right anymore?
As I have often quipped, we libertarians are the principled on the right, the "christian right" aren't principled, their voting habits show it. Rather they are merely the spoiled brats of the right.
People like myself, who are more classical liberals than libertarians, apply Lord Acton's famous expression "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" to economics. The more wealth that is centralized in faceless organizations, the more power they have. Yet, the wealth is not to be measured in just how much cash they have, but by the position they enjoy which can be worth more than their bank accounts.
Anti-trust laws are nothing more than a way to provide a check on corporate power. They exist to keep companies, especially big corporations, from becoming in Locke's words "a law unto themselves."
Anyone who calls themself a libertarian, opposes antitrust laws and has a sympathetic view of the south in the civil war would do well to read some of the founders of the CSA's opinions on monied corporations. The short summary is that they considered them to be a plague on basic liberties and the free market and were fighting more against the corporations who saught the tariff which taxed the southern economy terribly and used the money to line the pockets of corporations, than it was for "states' rights." The major state's right was to "be free from being sucked dry by monied corporations."
I will say this about monopolies. The government creates many of these headaches that it has to later solve by having expansive IP laws which allow patent holders to rape and pillage innovators. Would someone please tell me why we can patent online shopping carts and file formats? How about business processes in general? What about things we have never even fully or at all implemented ourselves?
If the government were to be reconstituted on classical liberal values, most of these monopolies would die like vampires in the morning sunlight.