I think a system like this would cause too much hassle for email recipients in a variety of situations. Here's a quick example:
You sign up on a website that sends you an activation code for your account there. The site you signed up on is a small business that can't afford to pay to get this email through to you. So either you have to remember to add their email address to your free whitelist, or you don't receive the email (and many users wouldn't have any clue why). The small business thus gets so much less business that they go under.
The same goes for subscribing to an eZine or mail lists (can you imagine how many bounces bugtraq would have to deal with?), receiving any other email from a site where you sign up, etc. And every time a friend changed their email address or you met someone new, you'd have to update your whitelist.
This kind of system would be useless for an email address where you accepted bug reports for products, etc. (any address that you would HAVE to keep open for free).
I guess if there are people who would want to use such a system, then I'm all for someone creating it. But I won't be using it, and I can't see myself paying to get my emails through.
For those of us using MacOS 9, we'll have to stick with version 1.2.1--they've dropped MacOS 9 support this time around. Augh!
So if you want to help a poor Mac (and Linux, for my servers) user who can't afford to upgrade to Jaguar, go to this website and make a donation! (or buy something).
Shameless, I know. Shame is too expensive for my budget.
Apparently AOL users can set up their accounts to reject ALL email originating outside AOL (as if the rest of the internet were worse SPAMmers than AOL folks). Amazingly, this setting is turned on on some accounts (many, I suspect) without them even knowing it. I run a webserver for a few businesses, and we get LOTS of mail bounced back from AOL account for this reason. It's a real pain when, for example, an AOL customer is trying to sign up on our site, and their account activation key gets bounced back to us because of this stupid setting. I bet they're counting all these messages in their total.
In practice, most of what is delivered over the internet is Loads Of Crap. The size of a single Load just happens to be the same amount of data as you'll find in the Library of Congress.
"Microsoft had us do an audit last year that took two weeks out of my schedule," Rugg said. "That's two week's work of taxpayers' money to satisfy Microsoft."
With no MS software, who knows, maybe MS would audit anyway. But all you'd have to do is say, "take a look--no MS software", and the audit would be over.
As an LHS alumni, it's exciting to see that my alma matter has made Slashdot, especially since they did something GOOD to earn the honor.
There's plenty of talk about passing laws against SPAM, replacing SMTP, and all sorts of other things that other people can do to reduce the amount of SPAM we recieve. My question is what can we the users do to reduce SPAM? More specifically, what that most people don't do now would make the most difference if we all started doing it? Even better, what that most people are capable of doing (email users with little or no technical expertise), would make the most difference? Perhaps the best strategy is not to evangelize the most effective methods, but the reasonably effective methods most likely to be widely implemented.
I made a script like this a few years back that I called "Telweb". It was mainly an experiment to see if I could make it work (and for use briefly on a server where I didn't have a shell account). I only ever told one person about it, and hesitated even to do that, because the results if it every got into the wild were "too terrible to imagine."
* Work on removing unnecessary debconf prompts from packages, and making the ones that are necessary easy to understand.
Bravo! Aside from wading through 5 million packages to decide which to install, this has been the worst part of installing Debian for me (which I've done on a number of computers because I LOVE how easy it is to keep my system up to date using dselect). In fact, all the prompts may be even worse.
Here are a few ideas for reducing prompts without causing problems:
1) Make a log of all the prompts that WOULD have been shown so that those who want to can go back and see what else they might have customized.
2) Another reason to make a log of the prompts is in case you accidentally okay one of them and then realize you wish you'd read it more carefully. And it would save you the trouble of writing down anything that it suggests you might want to do later.
3) Give people the option of seeing more or less prompts. Some people may want to see them all. Others may want to only see prompts for things that could make their computer stop working if configured wrong. Others may want more than that, but not every grizzly little detail about configuration files they've never looked at and never will look at.
4) If you really want to get zealous, you could add the ability to make a list of packages that you want to see all prompts for (you'd build it over time) so that you can run on minimal prompts for most things, but for packages that seem to get messed up every time you upgrade them because the default isn't right for you, you get all the prompts.
I remember once hearing a statistic about how many tons of coal were burned a day to run SETI@Home. I'm sure there are lots of people who were in fact using "spare cycles" on a computer that would have been left on anyway and had no power management capabilities, but I would be that a high percentage of the computers running their program would either be turned off or be in a lower power mode if they weren't running it.
For a short period of time, I had SETI@Home running on 3 or 4 computers where I used to work (more to pump the company's stats than because I thought we'd find anything). All of those computers would have been turned off during the majority of the day when I was not at work if SETI@Home weren't running on them. So I don't buy the line that running it on another computer doesn't cost anything. Nor, frankly, do I think it's worth the extra cost that is incurred by running it.
Other distributed projects that have been mentioned in various messages here, on the other hand, I think are worthy causes. As long as the people (or companies) running their programs are willing to pay the cost of running the program, I think they're great things to be contributing to.
This is like them walking into someone else's store, setting up a cash register, and taking money for someone else's product. In the case of an Amazon associate, the "product" is not the product the consumer purchased, it's the referral that Amazon purchased from the associate. This they are stealing.
Anyone who is an Amazon associate (or an associate for any other company they're doing this with) should complain to Amazon.com (maybe make a petition) and have these people's associates account cancelled. I'm sure going to!
Exactly, you have to consider what a Microsoft security man knows about computers:
Every computer on earth runs Microsoft software
All (read "Microsoft") software can be compromised in the blink of an eye
Crackers are advancing their evil techniques in leaps and bounds, while nice programmers will never improve their security practices--they simply don't have that ability
Microsoft's control is extending into all areas of life
Therefore, all areas of life will soon be wide open to blink-of-an-eye disruption by crackers
Microsoft has already demonstrated in court the ability to reach back in time and change the past, so Microsoft software must be able to propogate viruses et al backward through time
So what would YOU do after you'd hacked into a pacemaker?
The obvious but boring response: DOS
Getting more interesting--site defacement: make it send morse code messages promoting your world view. As long as it didn't crash ("kill") the host, it would spread subliminal messages throughout society
I can just imagine the EULA on pacemaker software: "Microsoft reserves the right to remotely disable this software if we determine that it is being used without a license."
This is a very good starting point for thinking about a solution to a serious problem, but I'd have to agree with a number of others here that it is not the right solution.
It seems to me that there are a few needs here:
1) Having an upgrade system that's easy enough that sysadmins won't dread it and put it off till it's too late. (I run dselect on my machines on a regular basis, and... at least once you've slogged through the package list and gotten just what you want on your machine... I think it's a great sytem)
2) Getting sysadmins in the habit of using the system regularly.
Perhaps a good solution for number 2 would be to have a standardized system (which is installed and set running by default) for alerting the sysadmin if they've gone too long without checking for an upgraded version of a piece of software. Once a day, a cron job checks to see if it's been more than a week or whatever since the packaging system was run to check for updates, and if it has been that long, the admin gets an email every day reminding tehm to get on the stick.
Better yet, a cron job could run once a day to check whether any upgrades were available, and if so, send an email to the sysadmin to tell them to upgrade. (I wouldn't advocate automatic upgrades, because you never know when something requiring a little human intelligence is going to happen--rare but not unheard of).
The remaining issue would be custom-compiled software that you can't just grab using the packaging system. For example, I've got a custom Apache installation with PHP, mod_ssl, etc. built into it with all the options set the way I want them. I've built my own compile and install script to automate rebuilds whenever I notice that one of the components has an upgrade available. If the OS could provide some standardized service for each of the components to check for updates and email me when one is available, the process would be almost 100% painless.
From that perspective, even Judge Jackson's breakup proposal would not have been an effective remedy, merely giving one company 90% of the OS market and the other company 90% of the Office productivty suite software market.
The point of Judge Jackson's breakup proposal was to make it impossible for Microsoft to leverage its Office monopoly to maintain its OS monopoly, and vice versa. Having the monopoly was not the problem, it was the way it weilded its monopoly that was the problem.
If you think back to how much MS had to push to get themselves pre-installed onto machines back in the 1980s where they were still fighting tooth and nail against competitive offerings.
Now that Windows is effectively regarded as as much of necessary part of the computer as the motherboard, the shoe's on the other foot regarding their relationship with OEMs.
This isn't exactly a reversal of positions (assuming that was the point of the original comment, which I recognize it may not have been). In the 80's, Microsoft was not fighting against anyone's monopoly power to try to get its software installed--it was fighting to get a number of competitive computer manufacturers to decide that they needed Microsoft's product versus someone else's product.
More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard.
Certainly the preceeding sentence was a bit of a no-brainer (the real mystery is who the 20% are who DON'T understand better how to operate a TV). But looking a little deeper, there may be something we could take from the ol' tube.
TVs have gotten more complex without getting more difficult to operate at a basic level. Newer TVs have a lot more than 5 options. It's just that you can get by fine without ever touching most of them. (adjusting the tone, balance, antenna type, programming which channels to skip, turning the internal speakers on or off, selecting which type of closed captioning to use, etc.)
But the basic operation of TVs used to be more complex--the fine tuning dial, switching manually from VHF to UHF, horizontal hold (getting that baby set right was sure a pain on my fam's old TV), manual color adjustment, having to pick your butt up off the couch or exploit the labor of your chilluns to change the channel, etc. (though I suppose you could argue that the remote control makes it more of a mental exercise).
Perhaps computers ought to have the equivalent of automatic fine tuning ("plug-and-play" i/o "plug-and-pray"), horizontal hold without having to fiddle with the dial (no crashes without having to remember not to click the mouse or yawn too loud during a file download or whatever),...can't think of a TV anology for this one, but I have to mention it (apt-get i/o downloading a service pack and hoping it installs and leaves your computer bootable) etc.
From the article: "their tone and content identified them as statements of opinion and not fact." (not the fact that it was on a message board) and "...generally, a lot of that talk is along the lines of, 'this stock sucks,' or 'this management sucks.' The Riverside Court said to determine if something is fact or opinion, you must examine the context."
So slander is still slander, even if it's done on the internet. To say that the court is saying the "message boards are opinions, not facts", is... "hyperbole", to use a term from the article. All they said was that message boards posts are more likely to be opinion than statements made in many other forums. Just like statements made anywhere else, opinion is protected, but attempts to mislead may not be.
A few days ago I sent a letter to my congressional representatives about this. I posted it under another topic here on Slashdot, but since it took more than 5 minutes to write, it was probably up too late for many of you to see it, so here it is again. If 72% of American's don't understand this stuff, the other 28% had better speak up.
Dear [representative's name]:
Like many Americans, I am very concerned that our country respond appropriately to the terrorist attacks of last week. I have been greatly encouraged by the tone and content of statements both by President Bush, and by our representatives from Utah, as well as many others. I agree strongly that we must act decisively, leaving no question that the United States of America is a very unwise choice of targets for terrorism. I agree that we must target our response carefully to ensure that we root out the source of the problem and destroy the ability of those who have committed terrorist acts to continue such activities, while at the same time ensuring that we do not participate in the terrorists' game of injuring and killing innocent people. I am in favor of greatly increased security at airports, even at the cost of convenience. I am even in favor of some controversial uses of technology which may assist us in fighting terrorism and crime, like using face recognition in public places to look for known criminals and terrorists.
However, I am also very concerned that we do not overreact. I am concerned that our united America go united in the right direction. I am concerned that in our determination to protect ourselves from future terrorism we do not give a free hand to those who would take advantage of an opportunity to expand the power of our government to intrude in the privacy of our citizens. The terrorist attacks of last week have been characterized as an attack on the freedom of Americans and free people everywhere. If our reaction to terrorism is to give away our freedoms in hope of greater security, then I fear the terrorists will have succeeded. I urge you not to be afraid of being called un-American by those who would erode our freedoms for opposing unwise or inappropriate measures at this time when our nation is so focused on unity and protection from physical danger. Please stand up for America by protecting not only our lives, but the chance to live our lives as free people.
I wish in particular to voice my strenuous opposition to two particular proposals which I have heard are being considered. First, a law requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software. Second, a law allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant.
The first, requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software, simply sounds like a bad idea. Why, while tightening security at airports in an attempt to protect ourselves, would we loosen the security of our communications by requiring an easy way to eavesdrop on them? We used to be confident that we could prevent hijackings in this country. Is there any reason to believe that we are not equally overconfident of our ability to protect back doors in encryption software? How can we be confident that no one will be able to compromise the back doors, gaining access to the strong encryption upon which we depend to protect our online credit card, banking, stock market and other transactions? If these systems were compromised, I fear the consequences to our nation may even be greater than what we have seen in the last week. The stock market was closed for a few days and is down sharply today, but our economy certainly has not been destroyed. Aside from the direct damage that might result from a serious breach of security in our online financial systems, it would almost certainly keep us off line for more than the few days that the markets were closed. The cost of recovering from such a breach would be enormous. For that matter, the cost of implementing the required back doors would probably be enormous.
Another argument against this proposal is that such a law seems certain to be obeyed only by those who the government has no need to listen in on anyway. Certainly not all criminals will be sophisticated enough to use cryptographic tools without back doors, but those who will are probably unsophisticated enough that they could be found by less drastic methods. This measure seems to carry too great a risk and too great a cost to justify the advantages in would provide.
The second proposal, allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant, appears to me to be a gross violation of our Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. I admit I do not know much of the details of this proposal, but I cannot fathom how any such law could be Constitutional. And especially if coupled with the first proposal, I fear what might happen if our government crosses that line. The fact that our nation has stood strong so long is a testament to the sound foundation upon which it is built, not a small part of which is the limits which our Constitution places on the power of the government. It is said that power tends to corrupt. I believe that we have succeeded in limiting corruption in our government by limiting its power, and urge you to stand for the values upon which the Constitution is built in resisting the temptation to over-extend the power of government in a time when we are all looking for someone with the power to protect us.
In closing, I thank you for your service on behalf of the State of Utah and of our nation. It is encouraging to know that there are men and women of good will who are willing to carry the burden of public office, which I am sure is, especially at times like these, very great.
Here's a copy of the letter I emailed to my congressman and senators:
Dear [representative's name],
Like many Americans, I am very concerned that our country respond appropriately to the terrorist attacks of last week. I have been greatly encouraged by the tone and content of statements both by President Bush, and by our representatives from Utah, as well as many others. I agree strongly that we must act decisively, leaving no question that the United States of America is a very unwise choice of targets for terrorism. I agree that we must target our response carefully to ensure that we root out the source of the problem and destroy the ability of those who have committed terrorist acts to continue such activities, while at the same time ensuring that we do not participate in the terrorists' game of injuring and killing innocent people. I am in favor of greatly increased security at airports, even at the cost of convenience. I am even in favor of some controversial uses of technology which may assist us in fighting terrorism and crime, like using face recognition in public places to look for known criminals and terrorists.
However, I am also very concerned that we do not overreact. I am concerned that our united America go united in the right direction. I am concerned that in our determination to protect ourselves from future terrorism we do not give a free hand to those who would take advantage of an opportunity to expand the power of our government to intrude in the privacy of our citizens. The terrorist attacks of last week have been characterized as an attack on the freedom of Americans and free people everywhere. If our reaction to terrorism is to give away our freedoms in hope of greater security, then I fear the terrorists will have succeeded. I urge you not to be afraid of being called un-American by those who would erode our freedoms for opposing unwise or inappropriate measures at this time when our nation is so focused on unity and protection from physical danger. Please stand up for America by protecting not only our lives, but the chance to live our lives as free people.
I wish in particular to voice my strenuous opposition to two particular proposals which I have heard are being considered. First, a law requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software. Second, a law allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant.
The first, requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software, simply sounds like a bad idea. Why, while tightening security at airports in an attempt to protect ourselves, would we loosen the security of our communications by requiring an easy way to eavesdrop on them? We used to be confident that we could prevent hijackings in this country. Is there any reason to believe that we are not equally overconfident of our ability to protect back doors in encryption software? How can we be confident that no one will be able to compromise the back doors, gaining access to the strong encryption upon which we depend to protect our online credit card, banking, stock market and other transactions? If these systems were compromised, I fear the consequences to our nation may even be greater than what we have seen in the last week. The stock market was closed for a few days and is down sharply today, but our economy certainly has not been destroyed. Aside from the direct damage that might result from a serious breach of security in our online financial systems, it would almost certainly keep us off line for more than the few days that the markets were closed. The cost of recovering from such a breach would be enormous. For that matter, the cost of implementing the required back doors would probably be enormous.
Another argument against this proposal is that such a law seems certain to be obeyed only by those who the government has no need to listen in on anyway. Certainly not all criminals will be sophisticated enough to use cryptographic tools without back doors, but those who will are probably unsophisticated enough that they could be found by less drastic methods. This measure seems to carry too great a risk and too great a cost to justify the advantages in would provide.
The second proposal, allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant, appears to me to be a gross violation of our Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. I admit I do not know much of the details of this proposal, but I cannot fathom how any such law could be Constitutional. And especially if coupled with the first proposal, I fear what might happen if our government crosses that line. The fact that our nation has stood strong so long is a testament to the sound foundation upon which it is built, not a small part of which is the limits which our Constitution places on the power of the government. It is said that power tends to corrupt. I believe that we have succeeded in limiting corruption in our government by limiting its power, and urge you to stand for the values upon which the Constitution is built in resisting the temptation to over-extend the power of government in a time when we are all looking for someone with the power to protect us.
In closing, I thank you for your service on behalf of the State of Utah and of our nation. It is encouraging to know that there are men and women of good will who are willing to carry the burden of public office, which I am sure is, especially at times like these, very great.
can't help but think that it would be extremely unlinkely that the Government would enforce "emminant domain" over music.
A lot of people seem to be getting hung up on this point. Sure, a song isn't as important as a mass transit system, but neither is the effect on an artist whose music is required to be made available (or a record company whose music...) as serious as the effect on someone who is required to move their home/farm/whatever to make way for a mass transit system.
Note that the Constitution's purpose for authorizing congress to create IP laws was to further the arts for the benefit of society. Just as eminent domain over real property is exercized for the benefit of society, limitations on the monopoly granted on IP through copyright, such as compulory licensing, are implemented for the benefit of society, which is entirely in line with the goals for which IP rights were created in the first place.
However, i'm also unsure as to whether music would be as quick to be proclaimed emminant domain, since i'm not sure if musics is as an essential "protected speech" as the press.
I'm sure you're right that music wouldn't be considered as important to keep available to the public, but as stated in the article, compulsory license already exists for music. I quote:
The Court offered the example of a law that allows noncommercial public broadcasters the right to use music or photos, either by voluntary negotiation or -- importantly -- by compulsory license.
"My Occam's Razor was dull, so I tossed it and got a Mach III."
This is not Big Brother. Big Brother is when the camera is installed in your home or some other place where you have a right to privacy.
This is not the first step down the slipery slope that will lead inevitably to Big Brother.
This is technology being used to reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of doing what has been done before--protect society against people who abuse it.
I for one would rather have a few tax dollars spent on a camera system to patrol a large area than have a lot of tax dollars spent hiring a lot of police officers to do the job less effectively.
What are we going to demand next, that all police officers either be blind or were blindfolds? When your rights are voliated, then complain. When your tax dollars are wasted on ineffective ways of doing the government's job, then complain. But when the government actually makes progress--when it discovers that it can be more efficient using the technology you know and love--supress the Pavlovian reaction to foam and the mouth, and be glad that progress is being made.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
But now all of a sudden some idiots in Taiwan start to say that they are not Chinese. Their grand parents were Chinese. But for some reason, they feel they are not Chinese. ... I don't care what political party is controlling China right now. All I know is we are all Chinese.
There's a big difference between ethnicity and citizenship. Some people do care what government is controlling China. It's easy for a person living in the U.S. to not care what government controls the lives of the people of Taiwan, but I'm sure it's a little different if you live there.
One day you heard on the news saying that New Yorkers are asking for independence. The New Yorkers now say they are not Americans.
The government in Taiwan used to be the government of China. The communist government took over the mainland, but not Taiwan. Perhaps the communists are the legitimate government of the mainland--assuming that the people of the mainland supported the revolution (I don't know the historical details, so I won't comment further on that), but apparently the peole of Taiwan wanted to keep their former government.
A better analogy than yours would be if most of the U.S. decided to toss out the Constitution and start over, but New York decided to keep it. The rest of the country would not have the right to deny New York the right to keep the Constitution.
If the communist party is controlling China, they represent China.
Might makes right? If the people of a region disagree with the policies of a government, then that government does not represent those people.
I feel that China has every right to take Taiwan back. It's nobody else's business. If you defend Taiwan and fight against the Liberation Army, you are automatically a traitor.
It's certainly Taiwan's business. By your reasoning, the Liberation army is an army of traitors, because they fought against the government during their revolution. By your reasoning, the goverment of Taiwan is the legitimate government of China.
Taiwan has been part of China for centuries.
Does that mean they have to go along with all the policatal changes that people in another part of China choose?
Why did Lincoln decide to reconquer the south?
Your best comment yet. I question this one myself sometimes. I will point out one difference though: In the Chinese revolution, the Liberation Army was fighting against the existing government. In the U.S. civil war, the north was fighting for the existing government. Whether that was legitimate, I'm not sure.
You guys always talk about human rights. But why can't you guys mention about "government rights"? Chinese government has the right to do whatever it must do to protect China. That includes... the liberation of Tibet.
What about the "government rights" of the people in Taiwan and Tibet? Why don't they get to protect Taiwan and Tibet?
In the old Tibet, you can have slaves,
So the old Tibet had problems. If that justifies takeover by China, then I guess it would be justified for someone to take over China to solve it's problems. If there were still slavery in Tibet, I'm sure there would be as much noise being made about that today as their is about human rights issues in China.
you can marry 4 wives
You could marry 4 wives in the Old Testament, and there are still other places in the world where you can do that. Personally, I don't see any particular problem with that--as long as none of the wives are being forced to marry into that situation. Not that I would want multiple wives myself.
Liberated Tibet and kick out that stupid Dalai Lama
Who's more credible, Mr. Magnet who doesn't understand the concept of scientific proof, or a Novel Peace Prize winner?
You guys don't know how much Tibet has changed. Most families in Tibet now has electricity. TV, VCR, stereo,micro-wave, you name it. Everything's made in China! They have shopping malls and supermarkets there. There's stock market brokers there. In fact, Tibet is one of the most popular European tourist attraction of asia.
Guess what, the rest of the world has made a lot of the same changes during that same period of time. "Everything's made in China"? So what. If it hadn't been made in China, it would ahve been made somewhere else--perhaps in Tibet. I can't imagine the European tourists are going to Tibet to see the shopping malls and stock brokers. More likely they're interested in see the remains of Tibetan culture before they're completely destroyed. Or the geography. In any case, I greatly doubt that it has much to do with the changes China has made there. Judging from the economies of various countries around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if Tibet would have been better off without communism's "help".
Everywhere would stink like hell because nobody teaches you the importance of taking a bath.
Did you know that westerners stink to people from other parts of the world? Stink is totally based on what you're accustomed to. To me, farm animals stink, but some people love the smell of them.
If you say Tibetans are not Chinese because they have their own language and culture, let me ask you this: Is Hawaii part of USA? Is Okinawa part of Japan? Okinawa people have different language and culture than the Japanese. So should Okinawa gain independence from Japan?
Again, ethnicity and culture are not the same as politics. Almost every country has culturally and ethnically diverse people. I for one don't argue that tibet should be independant because of cultural differences. I think they should be independant because they once were free to live their own way, but that freedom was taken from them by a revolutionary goverment which they did not support.
As for Hawaii and Okinawa, maybe they should be independant. Maybe they don't want to be indepndant. (I'm sure there are those who do and those who don't in both places). I don't know the answers to these questions myself, but it seems clear that the people of Tibet and Taiwan do want to be independant, and have good arguments for why they should be.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
One might argue that this doesn't modify the web page, but I think it clearly does:
A web page is not just the text and other content that appears on it, it is the whole presentation of that content. When I create a page that is purposely not littered with hyperlinks or any other element that distracts from the text, I've done more that just write the text, I've made a design decision for how my work will look. This feature changes that.
Imagine that someday M$ adds another feature that draws squiggly lines around regonizable areas of graphics. That hideous looking eye shadow on the picture of the Mona Lisa you're looking at now links to a page on M$'s website that says: "eye n. an organ used for sight which is owned by Microsoft. (eg. all you eye are belong to us.)" Modifying the visual presentation of text is not so much different.
Now, one could argue that webpage designers never had control of the presentation of their pages anyway. Well, even if browsers have alwyas done a poor job of rendering the tags that web designers put in, to my knowledge, they have never inserted tags of their own into our pages. (Yes, I know it doesn't literally insert tags into the HTML...well, I assume it doesn't...but the effect is exactly the same as if it did). There's a big difference between a program that sucks and a program that intentionally makes significant changes to the appearance and purpose of a copyrighted work.
This isn't a copyright question, but isn't this a little like a company going into their competitors' stores (or non-competitors, depending on what website you're at) and pasting their own posters all over the walls? Or, especially in the case of a page that was purposely designed to appear a certain way, like spray painting M$ propoganda all over the walls and merchandise?
And how about M$'s benevolent grant of an opt-out scheme? If this feature DOES modify copyrighted works, I don't think this would make it legal. Copyright is not an "opt-out" law. Since when is a copyright owner required to make a pilgrimage to Redmond and beg the good graces of Emperor Willy to prevent M$ from modifying their copyrighted material?
If this feature makes it into a public release, I intend to add a graphic to my pages that looks like one of their links that opens a window explaining my view of what M$ is doing. I'm sure glad I use templates for most of my web pages, so I could "opt-out" for all my pages by updating only one or two files.
Hmm...maybe M$'s strategy is to force their compatitors to spend so much time adding opt-out tags to all their web pages that they go broke.
The fact that this feature even got written, in my opinion, shows how arrogant and unconcerned about legal issues M$ has become. They may not be evil, but their actions are identical to the actions of someone who is.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
I wonder how long until this sort of thing just degenerates into a bunch of teenagers just taking everything from the cache.
Well, as long as no more stories about it are posted on Slashdot, there shouldn't be a problem, but if there are, the caches will probably all be destroyed with flame throwers. Let's hope those ammo cans can stand up to the punishment!
Mononoke (my nickname on www.geocaching.com)
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
Just curious why you would like that. Personally, I very much appreciate being able to resize my mail reader window and have the paragraphs reflow to the width I set. I don't see the point of taking this flexibility away from the user.
Slashdot Mirror
You sign up on a website that sends you an activation code for your account there. The site you signed up on is a small business that can't afford to pay to get this email through to you. So either you have to remember to add their email address to your free whitelist, or you don't receive the email (and many users wouldn't have any clue why). The small business thus gets so much less business that they go under.
The same goes for subscribing to an eZine or mail lists (can you imagine how many bounces bugtraq would have to deal with?), receiving any other email from a site where you sign up, etc. And every time a friend changed their email address or you met someone new, you'd have to update your whitelist.
This kind of system would be useless for an email address where you accepted bug reports for products, etc. (any address that you would HAVE to keep open for free).
I guess if there are people who would want to use such a system, then I'm all for someone creating it. But I won't be using it, and I can't see myself paying to get my emails through.
So if you want to help a poor Mac (and Linux, for my servers) user who can't afford to upgrade to Jaguar, go to this website and make a donation! (or buy something).
Shameless, I know. Shame is too expensive for my budget.
Slashdot may give you news 20 minutes in advance, but The Next Week Times, the psychic journal, gives it to you a week in advance!
</shameless self promotion>
Apparently AOL users can set up their accounts to reject ALL email originating outside AOL (as if the rest of the internet were worse SPAMmers than AOL folks). Amazingly, this setting is turned on on some accounts (many, I suspect) without them even knowing it. I run a webserver for a few businesses, and we get LOTS of mail bounced back from AOL account for this reason. It's a real pain when, for example, an AOL customer is trying to sign up on our site, and their account activation key gets bounced back to us because of this stupid setting. I bet they're counting all these messages in their total.
In practice, most of what is delivered over the internet is Loads Of Crap. The size of a single Load just happens to be the same amount of data as you'll find in the Library of Congress.
With no MS software, who knows, maybe MS would audit anyway. But all you'd have to do is say, "take a look--no MS software", and the audit would be over.
As an LHS alumni, it's exciting to see that my alma matter has made Slashdot, especially since they did something GOOD to earn the honor.
There's plenty of talk about passing laws against SPAM, replacing SMTP, and all sorts of other things that other people can do to reduce the amount of SPAM we recieve. My question is what can we the users do to reduce SPAM? More specifically, what that most people don't do now would make the most difference if we all started doing it? Even better, what that most people are capable of doing (email users with little or no technical expertise), would make the most difference? Perhaps the best strategy is not to evangelize the most effective methods, but the reasonably effective methods most likely to be widely implemented.
I made a script like this a few years back that I called "Telweb". It was mainly an experiment to see if I could make it work (and for use briefly on a server where I didn't have a shell account). I only ever told one person about it, and hesitated even to do that, because the results if it every got into the wild were "too terrible to imagine."
Bravo! Aside from wading through 5 million packages to decide which to install, this has been the worst part of installing Debian for me (which I've done on a number of computers because I LOVE how easy it is to keep my system up to date using dselect). In fact, all the prompts may be even worse.
Here are a few ideas for reducing prompts without causing problems:
1) Make a log of all the prompts that WOULD have been shown so that those who want to can go back and see what else they might have customized.
2) Another reason to make a log of the prompts is in case you accidentally okay one of them and then realize you wish you'd read it more carefully. And it would save you the trouble of writing down anything that it suggests you might want to do later.
3) Give people the option of seeing more or less prompts. Some people may want to see them all. Others may want to only see prompts for things that could make their computer stop working if configured wrong. Others may want more than that, but not every grizzly little detail about configuration files they've never looked at and never will look at.
4) If you really want to get zealous, you could add the ability to make a list of packages that you want to see all prompts for (you'd build it over time) so that you can run on minimal prompts for most things, but for packages that seem to get messed up every time you upgrade them because the default isn't right for you, you get all the prompts.
I remember once hearing a statistic about how many tons of coal were burned a day to run SETI@Home. I'm sure there are lots of people who were in fact using "spare cycles" on a computer that would have been left on anyway and had no power management capabilities, but I would be that a high percentage of the computers running their program would either be turned off or be in a lower power mode if they weren't running it.
For a short period of time, I had SETI@Home running on 3 or 4 computers where I used to work (more to pump the company's stats than because I thought we'd find anything). All of those computers would have been turned off during the majority of the day when I was not at work if SETI@Home weren't running on them. So I don't buy the line that running it on another computer doesn't cost anything. Nor, frankly, do I think it's worth the extra cost that is incurred by running it.
Other distributed projects that have been mentioned in various messages here, on the other hand, I think are worthy causes. As long as the people (or companies) running their programs are willing to pay the cost of running the program, I think they're great things to be contributing to.
This is like them walking into someone else's store, setting up a cash register, and taking money for someone else's product. In the case of an Amazon associate, the "product" is not the product the consumer purchased, it's the referral that Amazon purchased from the associate. This they are stealing.
Anyone who is an Amazon associate (or an associate for any other company they're doing this with) should complain to Amazon.com (maybe make a petition) and have these people's associates account cancelled. I'm sure going to!
- Every computer on earth runs Microsoft software
- All (read "Microsoft") software can be compromised in the blink of an eye
- Crackers are advancing their evil techniques in leaps and bounds, while nice programmers will never improve their security practices--they simply don't have that ability
- Microsoft's control is extending into all areas of life
- Therefore, all areas of life will soon be wide open to blink-of-an-eye disruption by crackers
- Microsoft has already demonstrated in court the ability to reach back in time and change the past, so Microsoft software must be able to propogate viruses et al backward through time
So what would YOU do after you'd hacked into a pacemaker?- The obvious but boring response: DOS
- Getting more interesting--site defacement: make it send morse code messages promoting your world view. As long as it didn't crash ("kill") the host, it would spread subliminal messages throughout society
I can just imagine the EULA on pacemaker software: "Microsoft reserves the right to remotely disable this software if we determine that it is being used without a license."I'd vote for 2 TLDs: ".sex" for porn, and ".erotica" for "erotic art". More details for how I'd go about working this can be found here.
It seems to me that there are a few needs here:
1) Having an upgrade system that's easy enough that sysadmins won't dread it and put it off till it's too late. (I run dselect on my machines on a regular basis, and ... at least once you've slogged through the package list and gotten just what you want on your machine ... I think it's a great sytem)
2) Getting sysadmins in the habit of using the system regularly.
Perhaps a good solution for number 2 would be to have a standardized system (which is installed and set running by default) for alerting the sysadmin if they've gone too long without checking for an upgraded version of a piece of software. Once a day, a cron job checks to see if it's been more than a week or whatever since the packaging system was run to check for updates, and if it has been that long, the admin gets an email every day reminding tehm to get on the stick.
Better yet, a cron job could run once a day to check whether any upgrades were available, and if so, send an email to the sysadmin to tell them to upgrade. (I wouldn't advocate automatic upgrades, because you never know when something requiring a little human intelligence is going to happen--rare but not unheard of).
The remaining issue would be custom-compiled software that you can't just grab using the packaging system. For example, I've got a custom Apache installation with PHP, mod_ssl, etc. built into it with all the options set the way I want them. I've built my own compile and install script to automate rebuilds whenever I notice that one of the components has an upgrade available. If the OS could provide some standardized service for each of the components to check for updates and email me when one is available, the process would be almost 100% painless.
The point of Judge Jackson's breakup proposal was to make it impossible for Microsoft to leverage its Office monopoly to maintain its OS monopoly, and vice versa. Having the monopoly was not the problem, it was the way it weilded its monopoly that was the problem.
If you think back to how much MS had to push to get themselves pre-installed onto machines back in the 1980s where they were still fighting tooth and nail against competitive offerings.
Now that Windows is effectively regarded as as much of necessary part of the computer as the motherboard, the shoe's on the other foot regarding their relationship with OEMs.
This isn't exactly a reversal of positions (assuming that was the point of the original comment, which I recognize it may not have been). In the 80's, Microsoft was not fighting against anyone's monopoly power to try to get its software installed--it was fighting to get a number of competitive computer manufacturers to decide that they needed Microsoft's product versus someone else's product.
Certainly the preceeding sentence was a bit of a no-brainer (the real mystery is who the 20% are who DON'T understand better how to operate a TV). But looking a little deeper, there may be something we could take from the ol' tube.
TVs have gotten more complex without getting more difficult to operate at a basic level. Newer TVs have a lot more than 5 options. It's just that you can get by fine without ever touching most of them. (adjusting the tone, balance, antenna type, programming which channels to skip, turning the internal speakers on or off, selecting which type of closed captioning to use, etc.)
But the basic operation of TVs used to be more complex--the fine tuning dial, switching manually from VHF to UHF, horizontal hold (getting that baby set right was sure a pain on my fam's old TV), manual color adjustment, having to pick your butt up off the couch or exploit the labor of your chilluns to change the channel, etc. (though I suppose you could argue that the remote control makes it more of a mental exercise).
Perhaps computers ought to have the equivalent of automatic fine tuning ("plug-and-play" i/o "plug-and-pray"), horizontal hold without having to fiddle with the dial (no crashes without having to remember not to click the mouse or yawn too loud during a file download or whatever), ...can't think of a TV anology for this one, but I have to mention it (apt-get i/o downloading a service pack and hoping it installs and leaves your computer bootable) etc.
So slander is still slander, even if it's done on the internet. To say that the court is saying the "message boards are opinions, not facts", is ... "hyperbole", to use a term from the article. All they said was that message boards posts are more likely to be opinion than statements made in many other forums. Just like statements made anywhere else, opinion is protected, but attempts to mislead may not be.
A few days ago I sent a letter to my congressional representatives about this. I posted it under another topic here on Slashdot, but since it took more than 5 minutes to write, it was probably up too late for many of you to see it, so here it is again. If 72% of American's don't understand this stuff, the other 28% had better speak up.
Dear [representative's name]:
Like many Americans, I am very concerned that our country respond appropriately to the terrorist attacks of last week. I have been greatly encouraged by the tone and content of statements both by President Bush, and by our representatives from Utah, as well as many others. I agree strongly that we must act decisively, leaving no question that the United States of America is a very unwise choice of targets for terrorism. I agree that we must target our response carefully to ensure that we root out the source of the problem and destroy the ability of those who have committed terrorist acts to continue such activities, while at the same time ensuring that we do not participate in the terrorists' game of injuring and killing innocent people. I am in favor of greatly increased security at airports, even at the cost of convenience. I am even in favor of some controversial uses of technology which may assist us in fighting terrorism and crime, like using face recognition in public places to look for known criminals and terrorists.
However, I am also very concerned that we do not overreact. I am concerned that our united America go united in the right direction. I am concerned that in our determination to protect ourselves from future terrorism we do not give a free hand to those who would take advantage of an opportunity to expand the power of our government to intrude in the privacy of our citizens. The terrorist attacks of last week have been characterized as an attack on the freedom of Americans and free people everywhere. If our reaction to terrorism is to give away our freedoms in hope of greater security, then I fear the terrorists will have succeeded. I urge you not to be afraid of being called un-American by those who would erode our freedoms for opposing unwise or inappropriate measures at this time when our nation is so focused on unity and protection from physical danger. Please stand up for America by protecting not only our lives, but the chance to live our lives as free people.
I wish in particular to voice my strenuous opposition to two particular proposals which I have heard are being considered. First, a law requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software. Second, a law allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant.
The first, requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software, simply sounds like a bad idea. Why, while tightening security at airports in an attempt to protect ourselves, would we loosen the security of our communications by requiring an easy way to eavesdrop on them? We used to be confident that we could prevent hijackings in this country. Is there any reason to believe that we are not equally overconfident of our ability to protect back doors in encryption software? How can we be confident that no one will be able to compromise the back doors, gaining access to the strong encryption upon which we depend to protect our online credit card, banking, stock market and other transactions? If these systems were compromised, I fear the consequences to our nation may even be greater than what we have seen in the last week. The stock market was closed for a few days and is down sharply today, but our economy certainly has not been destroyed. Aside from the direct damage that might result from a serious breach of security in our online financial systems, it would almost certainly keep us off line for more than the few days that the markets were closed. The cost of recovering from such a breach would be enormous. For that matter, the cost of implementing the required back doors would probably be enormous.
Another argument against this proposal is that such a law seems certain to be obeyed only by those who the government has no need to listen in on anyway. Certainly not all criminals will be sophisticated enough to use cryptographic tools without back doors, but those who will are probably unsophisticated enough that they could be found by less drastic methods. This measure seems to carry too great a risk and too great a cost to justify the advantages in would provide.
The second proposal, allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant, appears to me to be a gross violation of our Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. I admit I do not know much of the details of this proposal, but I cannot fathom how any such law could be Constitutional. And especially if coupled with the first proposal, I fear what might happen if our government crosses that line. The fact that our nation has stood strong so long is a testament to the sound foundation upon which it is built, not a small part of which is the limits which our Constitution places on the power of the government. It is said that power tends to corrupt. I believe that we have succeeded in limiting corruption in our government by limiting its power, and urge you to stand for the values upon which the Constitution is built in resisting the temptation to over-extend the power of government in a time when we are all looking for someone with the power to protect us.
In closing, I thank you for your service on behalf of the State of Utah and of our nation. It is encouraging to know that there are men and women of good will who are willing to carry the burden of public office, which I am sure is, especially at times like these, very great.
Sincerely,
[my name]
[my city], UT
Here's a copy of the letter I emailed to my congressman and senators:
Dear [representative's name],
Like many Americans, I am very concerned that our country respond appropriately to the terrorist attacks of last week. I have been greatly encouraged by the tone and content of statements both by President Bush, and by our representatives from Utah, as well as many others. I agree strongly that we must act decisively, leaving no question that the United States of America is a very unwise choice of targets for terrorism. I agree that we must target our response carefully to ensure that we root out the source of the problem and destroy the ability of those who have committed terrorist acts to continue such activities, while at the same time ensuring that we do not participate in the terrorists' game of injuring and killing innocent people. I am in favor of greatly increased security at airports, even at the cost of convenience. I am even in favor of some controversial uses of technology which may assist us in fighting terrorism and crime, like using face recognition in public places to look for known criminals and terrorists.
However, I am also very concerned that we do not overreact. I am concerned that our united America go united in the right direction. I am concerned that in our determination to protect ourselves from future terrorism we do not give a free hand to those who would take advantage of an opportunity to expand the power of our government to intrude in the privacy of our citizens. The terrorist attacks of last week have been characterized as an attack on the freedom of Americans and free people everywhere. If our reaction to terrorism is to give away our freedoms in hope of greater security, then I fear the terrorists will have succeeded. I urge you not to be afraid of being called un-American by those who would erode our freedoms for opposing unwise or inappropriate measures at this time when our nation is so focused on unity and protection from physical danger. Please stand up for America by protecting not only our lives, but the chance to live our lives as free people.
I wish in particular to voice my strenuous opposition to two particular proposals which I have heard are being considered. First, a law requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software. Second, a law allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant.
The first, requiring "back doors" in cryptographic software, simply sounds like a bad idea. Why, while tightening security at airports in an attempt to protect ourselves, would we loosen the security of our communications by requiring an easy way to eavesdrop on them? We used to be confident that we could prevent hijackings in this country. Is there any reason to believe that we are not equally overconfident of our ability to protect back doors in encryption software? How can we be confident that no one will be able to compromise the back doors, gaining access to the strong encryption upon which we depend to protect our online credit card, banking, stock market and other transactions? If these systems were compromised, I fear the consequences to our nation may even be greater than what we have seen in the last week. The stock market was closed for a few days and is down sharply today, but our economy certainly has not been destroyed. Aside from the direct damage that might result from a serious breach of security in our online financial systems, it would almost certainly keep us off line for more than the few days that the markets were closed. The cost of recovering from such a breach would be enormous. For that matter, the cost of implementing the required back doors would probably be enormous.
Another argument against this proposal is that such a law seems certain to be obeyed only by those who the government has no need to listen in on anyway. Certainly not all criminals will be sophisticated enough to use cryptographic tools without back doors, but those who will are probably unsophisticated enough that they could be found by less drastic methods. This measure seems to carry too great a risk and too great a cost to justify the advantages in would provide.
The second proposal, allowing internet wiretaps without a warrant, appears to me to be a gross violation of our Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. I admit I do not know much of the details of this proposal, but I cannot fathom how any such law could be Constitutional. And especially if coupled with the first proposal, I fear what might happen if our government crosses that line. The fact that our nation has stood strong so long is a testament to the sound foundation upon which it is built, not a small part of which is the limits which our Constitution places on the power of the government. It is said that power tends to corrupt. I believe that we have succeeded in limiting corruption in our government by limiting its power, and urge you to stand for the values upon which the Constitution is built in resisting the temptation to over-extend the power of government in a time when we are all looking for someone with the power to protect us.
In closing, I thank you for your service on behalf of the State of Utah and of our nation. It is encouraging to know that there are men and women of good will who are willing to carry the burden of public office, which I am sure is, especially at times like these, very great.
Sincerely,
[my name]
[city name], UT
A lot of people seem to be getting hung up on this point. Sure, a song isn't as important as a mass transit system, but neither is the effect on an artist whose music is required to be made available (or a record company whose music...) as serious as the effect on someone who is required to move their home/farm/whatever to make way for a mass transit system.
Note that the Constitution's purpose for authorizing congress to create IP laws was to further the arts for the benefit of society. Just as eminent domain over real property is exercized for the benefit of society, limitations on the monopoly granted on IP through copyright, such as compulory licensing, are implemented for the benefit of society, which is entirely in line with the goals for which IP rights were created in the first place.
However, i'm also unsure as to whether music would be as quick to be proclaimed emminant domain, since i'm not sure if musics is as an essential "protected speech" as the press.
I'm sure you're right that music wouldn't be considered as important to keep available to the public, but as stated in the article, compulsory license already exists for music. I quote:
The Court offered the example of a law that allows noncommercial public broadcasters the right to use music or photos, either by voluntary negotiation or -- importantly -- by compulsory license.
"My Occam's Razor was dull, so I tossed it and got a Mach III."
This is not the first step down the slipery slope that will lead inevitably to Big Brother.
This is technology being used to reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of doing what has been done before--protect society against people who abuse it.
I for one would rather have a few tax dollars spent on a camera system to patrol a large area than have a lot of tax dollars spent hiring a lot of police officers to do the job less effectively.
What are we going to demand next, that all police officers either be blind or were blindfolds? When your rights are voliated, then complain. When your tax dollars are wasted on ineffective ways of doing the government's job, then complain. But when the government actually makes progress--when it discovers that it can be more efficient using the technology you know and love--supress the Pavlovian reaction to foam and the mouth, and be glad that progress is being made.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
...
I don't care what political party is controlling China right now. All I know is we are all Chinese.
There's a big difference between ethnicity and citizenship. Some people do care what government is controlling China. It's easy for a person living in the U.S. to not care what government controls the lives of the people of Taiwan, but I'm sure it's a little different if you live there.
One day you heard on the news saying that New Yorkers are asking for independence. The New Yorkers now say they are not Americans.
The government in Taiwan used to be the government of China. The communist government took over the mainland, but not Taiwan. Perhaps the communists are the legitimate government of the mainland--assuming that the people of the mainland supported the revolution (I don't know the historical details, so I won't comment further on that), but apparently the peole of Taiwan wanted to keep their former government.
A better analogy than yours would be if most of the U.S. decided to toss out the Constitution and start over, but New York decided to keep it. The rest of the country would not have the right to deny New York the right to keep the Constitution.
If the communist party is controlling China, they represent China.
Might makes right? If the people of a region disagree with the policies of a government, then that government does not represent those people.
I feel that China has every right to take Taiwan back. It's nobody else's business. If you defend Taiwan and fight against the Liberation Army, you are automatically a traitor.
It's certainly Taiwan's business. By your reasoning, the Liberation army is an army of traitors, because they fought against the government during their revolution. By your reasoning, the goverment of Taiwan is the legitimate government of China.
Taiwan has been part of China for centuries.
Does that mean they have to go along with all the policatal changes that people in another part of China choose?
Why did Lincoln decide to reconquer the south?
Your best comment yet. I question this one myself sometimes. I will point out one difference though: In the Chinese revolution, the Liberation Army was fighting against the existing government. In the U.S. civil war, the north was fighting for the existing government. Whether that was legitimate, I'm not sure.
You guys always talk about human rights. But why can't you guys mention about "government rights"? Chinese government has the right to do whatever it must do to protect China. That includes ... the liberation of Tibet.
What about the "government rights" of the people in Taiwan and Tibet? Why don't they get to protect Taiwan and Tibet?
In the old Tibet, you can have slaves,
So the old Tibet had problems. If that justifies takeover by China, then I guess it would be justified for someone to take over China to solve it's problems. If there were still slavery in Tibet, I'm sure there would be as much noise being made about that today as their is about human rights issues in China.
you can marry 4 wives
You could marry 4 wives in the Old Testament, and there are still other places in the world where you can do that. Personally, I don't see any particular problem with that--as long as none of the wives are being forced to marry into that situation. Not that I would want multiple wives myself.
Liberated Tibet and kick out that stupid Dalai Lama
Who's more credible, Mr. Magnet who doesn't understand the concept of scientific proof, or a Novel Peace Prize winner?
You guys don't know how much Tibet has changed. Most families in Tibet now has electricity. TV, VCR, stereo,micro-wave, you name it. Everything's made in China! They have shopping malls and supermarkets there. There's stock market brokers there. In fact, Tibet is one of the most popular European tourist attraction of asia.
Guess what, the rest of the world has made a lot of the same changes during that same period of time. "Everything's made in China"? So what. If it hadn't been made in China, it would ahve been made somewhere else--perhaps in Tibet. I can't imagine the European tourists are going to Tibet to see the shopping malls and stock brokers. More likely they're interested in see the remains of Tibetan culture before they're completely destroyed. Or the geography. In any case, I greatly doubt that it has much to do with the changes China has made there. Judging from the economies of various countries around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if Tibet would have been better off without communism's "help".
Everywhere would stink like hell because nobody teaches you the importance of taking a bath.
Did you know that westerners stink to people from other parts of the world? Stink is totally based on what you're accustomed to. To me, farm animals stink, but some people love the smell of them.
If you say Tibetans are not Chinese because they have their own language and culture, let me ask you this: Is Hawaii part of USA? Is Okinawa part of Japan? Okinawa people have different language and culture than the Japanese. So should Okinawa gain independence from Japan?
Again, ethnicity and culture are not the same as politics. Almost every country has culturally and ethnically diverse people. I for one don't argue that tibet should be independant because of cultural differences. I think they should be independant because they once were free to live their own way, but that freedom was taken from them by a revolutionary goverment which they did not support.
As for Hawaii and Okinawa, maybe they should be independant. Maybe they don't want to be indepndant. (I'm sure there are those who do and those who don't in both places). I don't know the answers to these questions myself, but it seems clear that the people of Tibet and Taiwan do want to be independant, and have good arguments for why they should be.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
One might argue that this doesn't modify the web page, but I think it clearly does:
A web page is not just the text and other content that appears on it, it is the whole presentation of that content. When I create a page that is purposely not littered with hyperlinks or any other element that distracts from the text, I've done more that just write the text, I've made a design decision for how my work will look. This feature changes that.
Imagine that someday M$ adds another feature that draws squiggly lines around regonizable areas of graphics. That hideous looking eye shadow on the picture of the Mona Lisa you're looking at now links to a page on M$'s website that says: "eye n. an organ used for sight which is owned by Microsoft. (eg. all you eye are belong to us.)" Modifying the visual presentation of text is not so much different.
Now, one could argue that webpage designers never had control of the presentation of their pages anyway. Well, even if browsers have alwyas done a poor job of rendering the tags that web designers put in, to my knowledge, they have never inserted tags of their own into our pages. (Yes, I know it doesn't literally insert tags into the HTML...well, I assume it doesn't...but the effect is exactly the same as if it did). There's a big difference between a program that sucks and a program that intentionally makes significant changes to the appearance and purpose of a copyrighted work.
This isn't a copyright question, but isn't this a little like a company going into their competitors' stores (or non-competitors, depending on what website you're at) and pasting their own posters all over the walls? Or, especially in the case of a page that was purposely designed to appear a certain way, like spray painting M$ propoganda all over the walls and merchandise?
And how about M$'s benevolent grant of an opt-out scheme? If this feature DOES modify copyrighted works, I don't think this would make it legal. Copyright is not an "opt-out" law. Since when is a copyright owner required to make a pilgrimage to Redmond and beg the good graces of Emperor Willy to prevent M$ from modifying their copyrighted material?
If this feature makes it into a public release, I intend to add a graphic to my pages that looks like one of their links that opens a window explaining my view of what M$ is doing. I'm sure glad I use templates for most of my web pages, so I could "opt-out" for all my pages by updating only one or two files.
Hmm...maybe M$'s strategy is to force their compatitors to spend so much time adding opt-out tags to all their web pages that they go broke.
The fact that this feature even got written, in my opinion, shows how arrogant and unconcerned about legal issues M$ has become. They may not be evil, but their actions are identical to the actions of someone who is.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
Well, as long as no more stories about it are posted on Slashdot, there shouldn't be a problem, but if there are, the caches will probably all be destroyed with flame throwers. Let's hope those ammo cans can stand up to the punishment!
Mononoke (my nickname on www.geocaching.com)
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
Just curious why you would like that. Personally, I very much appreciate being able to resize my mail reader window and have the paragraphs reflow to the width I set. I don't see the point of taking this flexibility away from the user.