There is a Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. Presumably, a large block of TBS's shares are held by Time/Warner.
I would be very suprised if Ted Turner himself had zero influence over political donations made by TBS.
I was hoping I could find some information on shareholding and whatnot on turner.com's site, but it's pretty content-free. I suppose I should consider the source.
You guys ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the reason that CNN and other American news sources don't report that Bush was behind it because their owners support Bush completely?
I was going to call you on this (after all, this is Ted Turner, former hubby of Jane Fonda f'chrissakes), but I went to OpenSecrets (a wonderful source of data on campaign contributions) and found that Turner Broadcasting Corp. donated 83,406 to the RNC, and another $1,878 to the LNC/Non-Federal (Libertarian National Committe?).
Really? And I always had the President figured for a hands-on type. You know, the late-night policy debates, the intense interest in all the intracacies of policy, simultaneously keeping tabs on the news on three TV screens while reading the New York Times.
SARCASM
I set up one of the first streaming internet radio feeds outside of North America (www.icrt.com.tw, in 1995 if it matters). I am VERY aware that places outside of the US have running water, electricity, and even small internet feeds.
/SARCASM
The issue is not with me personally being bored (I almost never am), the issue is that commercial stations here are wondering why their online content isn't catching fire.
Similar things happended when the BBC cut off their World Service shortwave stream to North America and Australia a couple of months ago, their reasoning was that with high Internet proliferation people could tune into the net instead, or listen via XM radio etc.
Interesting that you say that. Fairly recently, the BBC's World Service was put on as the late-night broadcast for one of the local public radio stations. I believe Public Radio International is handling the syndication. I wonder if there's a causal connection between one and the other.
The other 30 stations on the dial are utterly, completely interchangable. There's a station which plays all the hits from 1968-1972. Over and over. Just like every other big city in the US. Imagine that! There's three "alternative" music stations which alternate between K0RN, the Beastie Boys, and Shania Twain (there must be something alternative about her, but God knows what). Even NPR, which I wake up to every morning, does not sound a bit different if I listen in NYC, Atlanta, or San Francisco. They have All Things Considered, they have Car Talk on Saturdays, they have a mid-day call in program to talk about local politics. Who woulda thunk it?
So, if I want to listen to K0RN, or Stairway to Heaven (for the 6.02x10^23rd time!), or even listen to Fresh Air, I have this highly sophisticated device to do that. I call it a "radio". There is no imaginable reason why I would waste bandwidth and hassle to get a streaming media connection to do that.
For Internet Radio to be a success, you must first put out product which is different enough to provide value added. In this way, content is just like every other business.
Pay attention to section 1, Article 5, Section 3 et. al. The NSA also is charged with creating standards for the security of information held in DoD computers (specifically), other govt. computers (generally), and promulgating those standards for use in other systems. Here is a nice link to the NSA's computer security guidelines if you haven't seen them.
Yes, the NSA spies on people. No this isn't nice. Yes, the government of the USA does some awfully screwy things, like the DMCA. Tarring the whole government with the same brush is simple-minded.
Besides, the code is available for your perusal. If you think the uberspooks have put in a back door, get to work and find it!
Linux is not as ubiquitous as Windows (which I doubt can be considered "trusted" in the security sense due to how it handles memory protection and device access).
Sounds like a fun rumor, but 196x computers which did high-level abstract stuff like run programs compiled in Fortran took up entire rooms.
My guess is any electronics on the sat itself were hand-wired circuit boards.
If you mean the navigation program on the ground had an error, I'd say... maybe.
True or false, thanks for sharing a fun story!
j.
Let me see if I understand correctly...
on
Make Your Own DSL
·
· Score: 2
As a city dweller, this sounds like it would have hack value, but little more for wiring up my house.
However, some of my family lives out in rural Washington State. The nearest telco exchange (and the only ISP) is 10 miles away, and the terrain is so hilly that 802.11 is absolutely impossible.
The way I read this, one would be able to set up a broadband connection to Stixtown with four segments of copper and a few DSL modems set up as bridges.
8 Cisco 675s @ $80/each off Ebay = $640 in upfront
costs.
If a sharing arrangment (via 802.11b?) could be set up with the nine or so houses which are line-of-sight from Stixville Farms, it might even make financial sense.
Did I miss anything, or can a DSL maven see a problem with my plans?
Spoiled and rich?!?!?! This is in the country were[sic] 95% of the $ is in 5% of the population. I'm sure the same shit is in the other countries as well.
First, as bad as inequality is in the United States, please find a citation for that number. If you find a citation, think long and hard about what it means.
Bill Gates (to name one of our favorite odious examples) does not have 40 billion dollars locked up in a box somewhere. The money is moving around doing things. Maybe he "owns" it (whatever that means) but other people get to do things with it in the mean time.
Case in point: The bank and I own a quarter-million dollar house in Seattle. My name is on the title, renters get half of the floor space to use as they see fit, and my bank gets a nice fat check every month. Who "owns" the asset matters at some level.
The bank doesn't get to sleep over or hold barbeques here. I do.
Further, while the protesters may understand a little about the problems (inequality in the industrialized world, while probably not 95/5, is still clearly too high), I have seen scant few realistic solutions from the anti-globalization camp. The solutions for the developed world are all right, so long as no actual base of political support is required to make them a reality. The tosh I read about what spoiled rich kids think the developing world is like or should be (I spent seven years working and travelling all over Asia) is so throughly detached from reality as to defy belief.
Anyhow, this is all fine and well, but the topic was/is the DMCA.
The DMCA was written because the last major reworking of copyright law in the late 1970s was designed for the age when (to crib from Negroponte) intellectual property existed primarily as atoms, not bits. It could not keep up, and could not be bandaged to work for the age of distributed networks, encryption algorithms, and the like.
It is obvious that the DMCA, or at least the interpretation excercised by the Federal court system of the US, has some serious flaws.
The two (or three) questions people should be asking are this:
#include "ianal.h"
1) Can existing (i.e. pre-DMCA) copyright law realistically be extended solely through case law to work in the digital age and to protect legitimate copyrights? (I would say categorically not)
2) Is the DMCA so fundamentally flawed that it needs to be rewritten, or does it simply need better case law to clarify the bits we don't like?
(Maybe).
3) (A syllogism of 1 and 2 actually, rather than a unique question). Can another country (say Canada), write a law which embraces the intended principles of the DMCA, without the industry-driven abuse which has happened in the US? (I hope so).
With all due respect to Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., blaming the fed for the dot com crash is like swatting butterflies in Hong Kong because your trailer was flattened by a hurricane last week.
A lot of otherwise pretty smart people (including myself. Yeah, I bought tech stocks too.) figured that telecom and network infrastructure could keep ramping up indefinitely. A lot of VCs and brokers were either hypnotized with tunnel vision over "new paradigms" or figured that as long as the stocks they were holding could be pumped up longer than their SEC-mandated lockout period, the long-term profitability of the companies they were hyping didn't matter that much ($200/share for an Internet retail company that could MAYBE in your wildest, wettest dreams double the 1-2% profit margins which are standard in brick and mortar retail? Get real!).
And a lot of suckers saw their friends making money on e-Meringue stocks, and figured they had to get themselves some of that.
Can you blame the Fed's loose money policy? Well, a little. Cheap money makes it easier to speculate, as Rockwell says. However, rather than spouting laisez-faire puffery off the top of his head, I'd like him to come up with an example of tight money policy deflating a speculative bubble.
I can see the mental gears of a daytrader grinding now:
"Let's see. If I borrow $20,000 at 10% to purchase shares, and keep that 10% line of credit maxed out for the next 10 years I'll be looking at paying about $12,000 worth of interest over that time period. But if monetary policy tightens and I have to pay 12% interest, I'll be paying $14,500 in interest for the same time period. Meanwhile some analyst on CNBC is saying that amazon.com will double in price over the next 18 months. Gosh, I don't know. That extra 2500 bucks in interest really tips the scales on whether or not this is a good idea."
Maybe Rockwell is having visions of interest rates jumping up to the same level they were at in the early 80s without benefit of inflation. If so, could somebody please put me in touch with his dealer?
I work at an ISP and I know firsthand, here in Kansas, USA anyway, that we can not by any means give out information. The victim *must* get a subpoena to us. The police and courts must get involved.
I work as a systems administrator at a company in Seattle, and I have on more than one occasion gotten the dialup number from tech support at a national ISP of users who have attempted (not suceeded, but attempted) to break into our systems through the network.
The policy is as you say, but it's amazing what a recipe of one part sugar-and-spice and two parts firm-and-authoratative will do to work around that policy.
Thanks for writing. I'd mod you up, but I'm writing in this thread so...
As for whether software is or is not a hammer, I think the answer is "it depends".
I normally like to write in certainties, but my thoughts are a little muddled on this point, so I'll ramble, and the reader gets to Deal With It.
I have modified Open Source software before. On a number of occasions in my career, it has been necessary to make changes to software to make it do interesting things.
I've never promulgated these changes to a master source tree. Nature of the game. The changes were often too specialized (such as letting Sendmail know how to identify the ESMTP response string from a brain-damaged piece of NT email-to-fax software we had to integrate, and send mail addresses to said software in a form the software could cope with, in contradiction of RFC 822).
The benefits of open source software in a case like this is clear.
Zero-copy cost is something I look on with extreme skepticism. This is meaningful if you're hacking in your garage (not to kick on people who hack in their garages. Lots of cool stuff happens this way). In professional situations, where people are billing real money for their services, integration costs generally dwarf licensing costs. This I've found to even be true for insanely expensive software like Oracle.
Reusability (in your words, allowing the end user to share with those who have similar requirements) has a place. My gut feeling is the further up the feeding chain you are (i.e. in the libraries and/or OS code), the more benefit you'll get from reusability. I haven't seen a lot of this when hacking end-user, or even "middleware" applications. Sometimes you have to hack the code, but frequently the problem really is unique to your circumstance.
And this brings me back to the original point of the message. When choosing which software to use for the job, the question a professional systems integrator should be asking is "what is the most effective way to deliver a solution for my customer?" If commerical product X is going to require tons of ugly external glue code to fit the job requirements, it's a bad tool. If Open Source app Y is going to require lots of custom hacking to fit the reqs, and commercial product Z requires less, ask what's worth more: your money or your time. And, of course, think long-term. Is this a one-off? Will the customer come back needing 10 more licenses in the next two years? And of course, is the customer willing to pay the up-front money to let you explore now in exchange for lower total costs down the road?
A very concrete example of this. A friend of mine needed to get a bunch of machines in an office hooked to an ADSL line. I told him there were two obvious ways to solve this: An off-the-shelf Cable/DSL router, or a Linux (or NetBSD) box with two ethernet cards, IP forwarding, etc. etc.
I told him that if it was his own network at home, and he had time on his hands, get some used hardware and consider the Open Source solution. You'll get much more flexibility, and you'll learn a lot about how networks go together and how technologies like NAT and firewalls really work under the hood.
Conversely, I told him that if a customer was paying money to have this solution put in, don't ever dream of doing this. SOHO routers are cheap, your time is expensive, and if you're trying to do something a SOHO router can't do, you probably shouldn't be doing it on an ADSL line in the first place (at least not in a professional capacity).
In design, and philosophy, I think people have the luxury of choosing many paths to get to the same goal. In design, the asthetics of the viewer (a soft and mushy thing if ever there was one) play a part. In philosophy, one draws up broad (and frequently subjective) goals, and creates premises to get where one wants to go.
I don't feel entirely comfortable with it. I believe in free software a lot more than I believe in Linux specifically.
I am not sure what to think about this...
There is a lot to be said for free software, obviously. However, insisting that your entire work platform be free (as in speech) hits me as being driven more by ideology than utitlity.
Let's take your example of databases. It is interesting to me from the viewpoint of intellectual curiosity to understand how the internals of a DBMS work. Although I haven't done so yet, I may find it useful one day to modify database code to have it do something Interesting.
However, when it's time to start creating product, I treat a database as being like a hammer. I don't care much how it was made, I don't care how it works. I don't even care (much) how it costs. I want it to drive nails into wood. If it does that, it's a good hammer. If it doesn't, nothing about the design process will make it into a good hammer. While a Free hammer could be re-engineered to work for my needs, I'm not in the toolmaking business. I just want my tools to work so I can do things which I'm good at and enjoy doing.
Conversely, there is no universal tool which handles all jobs. Oracle is a wonderful DBMS. If you're juggling hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes of data, there is simply no acceptable substitute. Oracle is also complex to install, fiendish to tune, a major resource hog even when it's been slimmed down, and the per-seat costs are stunning. I would never choose Oracle as the back-end for a message board or my at-home CD cataloging app, even if it was free (or Free).
It was LSD and UNIX initially. The BSD part was sort of implied.
This was originally said 15 years ago or so, when Linus was a high-school student, and odds were good that the UNIX implementation you would see at a university was BSD or a derivative thereof.
I've received enough grief from UNIX people in general who thought I was a VMS partisan or something. (I'm not). I don't want to be misconstrued by BSD lovers as having an axe to grind with BSD as well (I don't).
... But you are free to make any quote you want. My lawyers won't call...
Us over here in the UK cannot understand how the US system can be so broken.
I should point out that much of the perceived bizarreness in the US was related to:
1) A somewhat loopy state which did not have good hand-count procedures in place.
2) The teams of two utterly ruthless, completely unscrupulous human beings (OK. I'm not sure if Gore REALLY passes the human test, but I have to give him the benefit of the doubt) fanning the flames of this system.
Here in Washington State, we had an extremely close Senate race which forced a full recount (by law, not by lawsuit). Washington has all the issues Florida has: poor districts with lousy voting equipment, military personell sending in absentee ballots, etc. (admittedly, we don't go out much for vote-buying, and there aren't enough blacks outside Seattle to make it worthwhile to intimidate people in to not voting).
There was also a well-established procedure in place to handle all of these cases.
It took two weeks for all the absentee ballots to be considered "in", and a few days to handle a full recount of votes.
It was as boring as watching paint dry. The process merited less than two column-inches in the newspaper every day and a total of 40 seconds of coverage of the entire process on NPR.
(I wish to apologize in advance for feeding the trolls)
Slashdot? Balanced? You have got to be kidding! This is not "serious journalism" as taught at Columbia University. It's a discussion board! The headlines are always full of smart-assed remarks. Sorry if the smart-assed remarks sometimes get political when defense-related stories are involved.
I love it all to pieces when club-toting troglodytes from the Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party yell out "liberal bias" every five minutes. (here's the trick kids: set the 'middle' about where John McCain is sitting. At that point, almost everything is biased). In the interest of fairness, I also just love it when lefties like FAIR are trying to find conservatives hiding under every bed.
If there is a "liberal slant" (NPR, The Nation, Slashdot. They all just kind of go together, yah?), it would indicate little more to me than, contrary to popular belief, some nerds developed their views on relationships with fellow humans after they finished second-grade.
Unencumbered by the authoritarian gaze of a spell checker, Anonymous Coward writes:
People buy SUV's to feel safe. In my part of the country they are bought for ground clearence and 4X4 to get around in the snow
I sympathise with this. Living in Seattle, I feel a need to be safe from my fellow drivers while crossing SR-520 at 20 mph. God knows what could happen if there was a fender-bender in a smaller car.
Ground clearance. With ya there too. The potholes in my 'hood would swallow a Honda whole.
Snow? We get about three days a year. Better safe than sorry though.
OK. I've gotten the cheap digs in. I'll be serious for a moment.
There is a place in the world for SUVs. If you're living in a rural envrionment, are going off-road a lot, etc. you do not want to be driving a rice rocket.
However, in the two places where I've spent much of my time over the last few years (Silicon Valley and Puget Sound), I'm not seeing a lot of SUV owners in that category. It's obvious by looking at the vehicles that they never leave the pavement. We're not seeing a demand born of necessity, but rather a lack of imagination.
If you have an extra $20,000 kicking around and really have no better idea how to use it, please drop me a line. I have plenty of useful (and a few profitable) projects that I'll be happy to share with you.
One trick I was taught many years ago is to (if you can) put your passwords in a language other than English. This not only makes the password cracking programs work harder, but it tends to confuse shoulder surfers as well.
Thus, an example password I might use would be
yUEh@lIAng
(Mandarin speakers may notice the full moon in the middle of the password)
Another trick which was used in a shop where we had to issue passwords to users (thus we had to make passwords the users could remember, not just the admins) was to use close-by keyboard patterns. An example might be frdU*8 .
apologies in advance for the topic drift. This has little to do with trees or extinction.
To borrow a well-worn chestnut:
Ethanol is the fuel of the future. Always has been, always will be.
The largest problem with using ethanol is not technical but economic. Although a quick search of Google didn't turn up the sort of hard numbers I like, memory serves that ethanol manufacturing costs are somewhere in the vicinity of $3/gallon.
Brazil backed off of their ethanol program due to the cost of farm and fuel subsidies to keep ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline.
Here's a study which says we can make and sell ethanol in CA for $1.75/gallon, but environmental researchers are cheap and factories are expensive.
I'd like to see more ethanol in use. The only thing that's missing is cheap eth (or expensive gasoline).
If someone can find a pointer to a working plant which is producing ethanol for $1.50 a gallon or less, send a reference my way (and pour a little bit of it over these ice cubes while you're at it please...)
It sounds like you had a bad experience with porn. It also sounds like you did the responsible thing by shutting off your access to porn.
It's like anything else. Lots of people drink socially. Some people touch any quantity of alcohol and wind up binging. Lots of people spend a few bucks gambling for fun. Some people won't leave the slots until their all their credit cards are redlined and their car is in hock.
We tried Prohibition here. The result was Alfonse Capone. We tried outlawing gambling. The result was the numbers' rackets. Everyone has their own weakness, and they need to learn to wrestle with it.
I'm genuinely happy that you're doing the right thing. Just don't assume that your weakness is everybody else's weakness. As individuals, we all have different things that get under our skin.
j.
(If I don't get my chocolate soon, so help me God I'm gonna strangle someone!!!!!)
Actually, I was very suprised to find a few months back that Terry Gross interviews very few people face to face. While it sounds like they're across the table from each other, usually her interview subject is in a radio studio somehwere else in the world, while Ms. Gross is (presumably) at WHYY studios.
Here's the interview where she talks about that (and other things):
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in how exactly that works...
There is a Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. Presumably, a large block of TBS's shares are held by Time/Warner.
I would be very suprised if Ted Turner himself had zero influence over political donations made by TBS.
I was hoping I could find some information on shareholding and whatnot on turner.com's site, but it's pretty content-free. I suppose I should consider the source.
j.
You guys ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the reason that CNN and other American news sources don't report that Bush was behind it because their owners support Bush completely?
I was going to call you on this (after all, this is Ted Turner, former hubby of Jane Fonda f'chrissakes), but I went to OpenSecrets (a wonderful source of data on campaign contributions) and found that Turner Broadcasting Corp. donated 83,406 to the RNC, and another $1,878 to the LNC/Non-Federal (Libertarian National Committe?).
Ya learn something new every day.
j.
Really? And I always had the President figured for a hands-on type. You know, the late-night policy debates, the intense interest in all the intracacies of policy, simultaneously keeping tabs on the news on three TV screens while reading the New York Times.
Wait? Who's president now?
Jeez. I need to get out more.
j.
Thanks for the ObStupidAmerican bash.
SARCASM
I set up one of the first streaming internet radio feeds outside of North America (www.icrt.com.tw, in 1995 if it matters). I am VERY aware that places outside of the US have running water, electricity, and even small internet feeds.
/SARCASM
The issue is not with me personally being bored (I almost never am), the issue is that commercial stations here are wondering why their online content isn't catching fire.
Similar things happended when the BBC cut off their World Service shortwave stream to North America and Australia a couple of months ago, their reasoning was that with high Internet proliferation people could tune into the net instead, or listen via XM radio etc.
Interesting that you say that. Fairly recently, the BBC's World Service was put on as the late-night broadcast for one of the local public radio stations. I believe Public Radio International is handling the syndication. I wonder if there's a causal connection between one and the other.
I'll weep about the DMCA and those additional royalties in a second.
Commercial (and even non-commercial) radio in the United States has an extremely serious problem: It all sounds the same.
Where I live (Seattle) has a few stations which are worth listening to. The classical music station, The underground/rock music station, The folk music station, and of course The extremely annoying dance music station. (I'm not a big dance music fan, but if you want to feel like you're in a disco, even when you're not, it's a good thing).
The other 30 stations on the dial are utterly, completely interchangable. There's a station which plays all the hits from 1968-1972. Over and over. Just like every other big city in the US. Imagine that! There's three "alternative" music stations which alternate between K0RN, the Beastie Boys, and Shania Twain (there must be something alternative about her, but God knows what). Even NPR, which I wake up to every morning, does not sound a bit different if I listen in NYC, Atlanta, or San Francisco. They have All Things Considered, they have Car Talk on Saturdays, they have a mid-day call in program to talk about local politics. Who woulda thunk it?
So, if I want to listen to K0RN, or Stairway to Heaven (for the 6.02x10^23rd time!), or even listen to Fresh Air, I have this highly sophisticated device to do that. I call it a "radio". There is no imaginable reason why I would waste bandwidth and hassle to get a streaming media connection to do that.
For Internet Radio to be a success, you must first put out product which is different enough to provide value added. In this way, content is just like every other business.
j.
The sole purpose of the NSA is to spy on you, now why are they trying to make your system more secure?
Incorrect. Read the NSA's charter.
Pay attention to section 1, Article 5, Section 3 et. al. The NSA also is charged with creating standards for the security of information held in DoD computers (specifically), other govt. computers (generally), and promulgating those standards for use in other systems. Here is a nice link to the NSA's computer security guidelines if you haven't seen them.
Yes, the NSA spies on people. No this isn't nice. Yes, the government of the USA does some awfully screwy things, like the DMCA. Tarring the whole government with the same brush is simple-minded.
Besides, the code is available for your perusal. If you think the uberspooks have put in a back door, get to work and find it!
Well...
Linux is not as ubiquitous as Windows (which I doubt can be considered "trusted" in the security sense due to how it handles memory protection and device access).
However, if you look at the other operating systems which are considered B2 or B1 secure Linux is mainstream compared to those.
j.
Sounds like a fun rumor, but 196x computers which did high-level abstract stuff like run programs compiled in Fortran took up entire rooms.
My guess is any electronics on the sat itself were hand-wired circuit boards.
If you mean the navigation program on the ground had an error, I'd say... maybe.
True or false, thanks for sharing a fun story!
j.
As a city dweller, this sounds like it would have hack value, but little more for wiring up my house.
However, some of my family lives out in rural Washington State. The nearest telco exchange (and the only ISP) is 10 miles away, and the terrain is so hilly that 802.11 is absolutely impossible.
The way I read this, one would be able to set up a broadband connection to Stixtown with four segments of copper and a few DSL modems set up as bridges.
8 Cisco 675s @ $80/each off Ebay = $640 in upfront
costs.
4 Segments of wire @ (hypothetically) $30/month = $120/month + bandwidth charges.
If a sharing arrangment (via 802.11b?) could be set up with the nine or so houses which are line-of-sight from Stixville Farms, it might even make financial sense.
Did I miss anything, or can a DSL maven see a problem with my plans?
j.
Spoiled and rich?!?!?! This is in the country were[sic] 95% of the $ is in 5% of the population. I'm sure the same shit is in the other countries as well.
First, as bad as inequality is in the United States, please find a citation for that number. If you find a citation, think long and hard about what it means.
Bill Gates (to name one of our favorite odious examples) does not have 40 billion dollars locked up in a box somewhere. The money is moving around doing things. Maybe he "owns" it (whatever that means) but other people get to do things with it in the mean time.
Case in point: The bank and I own a quarter-million dollar house in Seattle. My name is on the title, renters get half of the floor space to use as they see fit, and my bank gets a nice fat check every month. Who "owns" the asset matters at some level.
The bank doesn't get to sleep over or hold barbeques here. I do.
Further, while the protesters may understand a little about the problems (inequality in the industrialized world, while probably not 95/5, is still clearly too high), I have seen scant few realistic solutions from the anti-globalization camp. The solutions for the developed world are all right, so long as no actual base of political support is required to make them a reality. The tosh I read about what spoiled rich kids think the developing world is like or should be (I spent seven years working and travelling all over Asia) is so throughly detached from reality as to defy belief.
Anyhow, this is all fine and well, but the topic was/is the DMCA.
The DMCA was written because the last major reworking of copyright law in the late 1970s was designed for the age when (to crib from Negroponte) intellectual property existed primarily as atoms, not bits. It could not keep up, and could not be bandaged to work for the age of distributed networks, encryption algorithms, and the like.
It is obvious that the DMCA, or at least the interpretation excercised by the Federal court system of the US, has some serious flaws.
The two (or three) questions people should be asking are this:
#include "ianal.h"
1) Can existing (i.e. pre-DMCA) copyright law realistically be extended solely through case law to work in the digital age and to protect legitimate copyrights? (I would say categorically not)
2) Is the DMCA so fundamentally flawed that it needs to be rewritten, or does it simply need better case law to clarify the bits we don't like?
(Maybe).
3) (A syllogism of 1 and 2 actually, rather than a unique question). Can another country (say Canada), write a law which embraces the intended principles of the DMCA, without the industry-driven abuse which has happened in the US? (I hope so).
My 2 cents for the evening.
With all due respect to Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., blaming the fed for the dot com crash is like swatting butterflies in Hong Kong because your trailer was flattened by a hurricane last week.
A lot of otherwise pretty smart people (including myself. Yeah, I bought tech stocks too.) figured that telecom and network infrastructure could keep ramping up indefinitely. A lot of VCs and brokers were either hypnotized with tunnel vision over "new paradigms" or figured that as long as the stocks they were holding could be pumped up longer than their SEC-mandated lockout period, the long-term profitability of the companies they were hyping didn't matter that much ($200/share for an Internet retail company that could MAYBE in your wildest, wettest dreams double the 1-2% profit margins which are standard in brick and mortar retail? Get real!).
And a lot of suckers saw their friends making money on e-Meringue stocks, and figured they had to get themselves some of that.
Can you blame the Fed's loose money policy? Well, a little. Cheap money makes it easier to speculate, as Rockwell says. However, rather than spouting laisez-faire puffery off the top of his head, I'd like him to come up with an example of tight money policy deflating a speculative bubble.
I can see the mental gears of a daytrader grinding now:
"Let's see. If I borrow $20,000 at 10% to purchase shares, and keep that 10% line of credit maxed out for the next 10 years I'll be looking at paying about $12,000 worth of interest over that time period. But if monetary policy tightens and I have to pay 12% interest, I'll be paying $14,500 in interest for the same time period. Meanwhile some analyst on CNBC is saying that amazon.com will double in price over the next 18 months. Gosh, I don't know. That extra 2500 bucks in interest really tips the scales on whether or not this is a good idea."
Maybe Rockwell is having visions of interest rates jumping up to the same level they were at in the early 80s without benefit of inflation. If so, could somebody please put me in touch with his dealer?
j.
I work at an ISP and I know firsthand, here in Kansas, USA anyway, that we can not by any means give out information. The victim *must* get a subpoena to us. The police and courts must get involved.
I work as a systems administrator at a company in Seattle, and I have on more than one occasion gotten the dialup number from tech support at a national ISP of users who have attempted (not suceeded, but attempted) to break into our systems through the network.
The policy is as you say, but it's amazing what a recipe of one part sugar-and-spice and two parts firm-and-authoratative will do to work around that policy.
Does that mean property values in North Seattle will finally take a dip into normalcy? Yippee!
j.
Thanks for writing. I'd mod you up, but I'm writing in this thread so...
As for whether software is or is not a hammer, I think the answer is "it depends".
I normally like to write in certainties, but my thoughts are a little muddled on this point, so I'll ramble, and the reader gets to Deal With It.
I have modified Open Source software before. On a number of occasions in my career, it has been necessary to make changes to software to make it do interesting things.
I've never promulgated these changes to a master source tree. Nature of the game. The changes were often too specialized (such as letting Sendmail know how to identify the ESMTP response string from a brain-damaged piece of NT email-to-fax software we had to integrate, and send mail addresses to said software in a form the software could cope with, in contradiction of RFC 822).
The benefits of open source software in a case like this is clear.
Zero-copy cost is something I look on with extreme skepticism. This is meaningful if you're hacking in your garage (not to kick on people who hack in their garages. Lots of cool stuff happens this way). In professional situations, where people are billing real money for their services, integration costs generally dwarf licensing costs. This I've found to even be true for insanely expensive software like Oracle.
Reusability (in your words, allowing the end user to share with those who have similar requirements) has a place. My gut feeling is the further up the feeding chain you are (i.e. in the libraries and/or OS code), the more benefit you'll get from reusability. I haven't seen a lot of this when hacking end-user, or even "middleware" applications. Sometimes you have to hack the code, but frequently the problem really is unique to your circumstance.
And this brings me back to the original point of the message. When choosing which software to use for the job, the question a professional systems integrator should be asking is "what is the most effective way to deliver a solution for my customer?" If commerical product X is going to require tons of ugly external glue code to fit the job requirements, it's a bad tool. If Open Source app Y is going to require lots of custom hacking to fit the reqs, and commercial product Z requires less, ask what's worth more: your money or your time. And, of course, think long-term. Is this a one-off? Will the customer come back needing 10 more licenses in the next two years? And of course, is the customer willing to pay the up-front money to let you explore now in exchange for lower total costs down the road?
A very concrete example of this. A friend of mine needed to get a bunch of machines in an office hooked to an ADSL line. I told him there were two obvious ways to solve this: An off-the-shelf Cable/DSL router, or a Linux (or NetBSD) box with two ethernet cards, IP forwarding, etc. etc.
I told him that if it was his own network at home, and he had time on his hands, get some used hardware and consider the Open Source solution. You'll get much more flexibility, and you'll learn a lot about how networks go together and how technologies like NAT and firewalls really work under the hood.
Conversely, I told him that if a customer was paying money to have this solution put in, don't ever dream of doing this. SOHO routers are cheap, your time is expensive, and if you're trying to do something a SOHO router can't do, you probably shouldn't be doing it on an ADSL line in the first place (at least not in a professional capacity).
In design, and philosophy, I think people have the luxury of choosing many paths to get to the same goal. In design, the asthetics of the viewer (a soft and mushy thing if ever there was one) play a part. In philosophy, one draws up broad (and frequently subjective) goals, and creates premises to get where one wants to go.
I don't feel entirely comfortable with it. I believe in free software a lot more than I believe in Linux specifically.
I am not sure what to think about this...
There is a lot to be said for free software, obviously. However, insisting that your entire work platform be free (as in speech) hits me as being driven more by ideology than utitlity.
Let's take your example of databases. It is interesting to me from the viewpoint of intellectual curiosity to understand how the internals of a DBMS work. Although I haven't done so yet, I may find it useful one day to modify database code to have it do something Interesting.
However, when it's time to start creating product, I treat a database as being like a hammer. I don't care much how it was made, I don't care how it works. I don't even care (much) how it costs. I want it to drive nails into wood. If it does that, it's a good hammer. If it doesn't, nothing about the design process will make it into a good hammer. While a Free hammer could be re-engineered to work for my needs, I'm not in the toolmaking business. I just want my tools to work so I can do things which I'm good at and enjoy doing.
Conversely, there is no universal tool which handles all jobs. Oracle is a wonderful DBMS. If you're juggling hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes of data, there is simply no acceptable substitute. Oracle is also complex to install, fiendish to tune, a major resource hog even when it's been slimmed down, and the per-seat costs are stunning. I would never choose Oracle as the back-end for a message board or my at-home CD cataloging app, even if it was free (or Free).
j.
It was LSD and UNIX initially. The BSD part was sort of implied.
This was originally said 15 years ago or so, when Linus was a high-school student, and odds were good that the UNIX implementation you would see at a university was BSD or a derivative thereof.
I've received enough grief from UNIX people in general who thought I was a VMS partisan or something. (I'm not). I don't want to be misconstrued by BSD lovers as having an axe to grind with BSD as well (I don't).
... But you are free to make any quote you want. My lawyers won't call...
j.
Us over here in the UK cannot understand how the US system can be so broken.
I should point out that much of the perceived bizarreness in the US was related to:
1) A somewhat loopy state which did not have good hand-count procedures in place.
2) The teams of two utterly ruthless, completely unscrupulous human beings (OK. I'm not sure if Gore REALLY passes the human test, but I have to give him the benefit of the doubt) fanning the flames of this system.
Here in Washington State, we had an extremely close Senate race which forced a full recount (by law, not by lawsuit). Washington has all the issues Florida has: poor districts with lousy voting equipment, military personell sending in absentee ballots, etc. (admittedly, we don't go out much for vote-buying, and there aren't enough blacks outside Seattle to make it worthwhile to intimidate people in to not voting).
There was also a well-established procedure in place to handle all of these cases.
It took two weeks for all the absentee ballots to be considered "in", and a few days to handle a full recount of votes.
It was as boring as watching paint dry. The process merited less than two column-inches in the newspaper every day and a total of 40 seconds of coverage of the entire process on NPR.
j.
(I wish to apologize in advance for feeding the trolls)
Slashdot? Balanced? You have got to be kidding! This is not "serious journalism" as taught at Columbia University. It's a discussion board! The headlines are always full of smart-assed remarks. Sorry if the smart-assed remarks sometimes get political when defense-related stories are involved.
I love it all to pieces when club-toting troglodytes from the Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party yell out "liberal bias" every five minutes. (here's the trick kids: set the 'middle' about where John McCain is sitting. At that point, almost everything is biased). In the interest of fairness, I also just love it when lefties like FAIR are trying to find conservatives hiding under every bed.
If there is a "liberal slant" (NPR, The Nation, Slashdot. They all just kind of go together, yah?), it would indicate little more to me than, contrary to popular belief, some nerds developed their views on relationships with fellow humans after they finished second-grade.
Unencumbered by the authoritarian gaze of a spell checker, Anonymous Coward writes:
People buy SUV's to feel safe. In my part of the country they are bought for ground clearence and 4X4 to get around in the snow
I sympathise with this. Living in Seattle, I feel a need to be safe from my fellow drivers while crossing SR-520 at 20 mph. God knows what could happen if there was a fender-bender in a smaller car.
Ground clearance. With ya there too. The potholes in my 'hood would swallow a Honda whole.
Snow? We get about three days a year. Better safe than sorry though.
OK. I've gotten the cheap digs in. I'll be serious for a moment.
There is a place in the world for SUVs. If you're living in a rural envrionment, are going off-road a lot, etc. you do not want to be driving a rice rocket.
However, in the two places where I've spent much of my time over the last few years (Silicon Valley and Puget Sound), I'm not seeing a lot of SUV owners in that category. It's obvious by looking at the vehicles that they never leave the pavement. We're not seeing a demand born of necessity, but rather a lack of imagination.
If you have an extra $20,000 kicking around and really have no better idea how to use it, please drop me a line. I have plenty of useful (and a few profitable) projects that I'll be happy to share with you.
Yes there are.
Are there also categories for systems administrators?
www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~werdna/sysadmins.html
I like your names better, but the descriptions of sysadmins in the article above are precious.
One trick I was taught many years ago is to (if you can) put your passwords in a language other than English. This not only makes the password cracking programs work harder, but it tends to confuse shoulder surfers as well.
Thus, an example password I might use would be
yUEh@lIAng
(Mandarin speakers may notice the full moon in the middle of the password)
Another trick which was used in a shop where we had to issue passwords to users (thus we had to make passwords the users could remember, not just the admins) was to use close-by keyboard patterns. An example might be frdU*8 .
To borrow a well-worn chestnut:
Ethanol is the fuel of the future. Always has been, always will be.
The largest problem with using ethanol is not technical but economic. Although a quick search of Google didn't turn up the sort of hard numbers I like, memory serves that ethanol manufacturing costs are somewhere in the vicinity of $3/gallon.
Brazil backed off of their ethanol program due to the cost of farm and fuel subsidies to keep ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline.
Here's a study which says we can make and sell ethanol in CA for $1.75/gallon, but environmental researchers are cheap and factories are expensive.
I'd like to see more ethanol in use. The only thing that's missing is cheap eth (or expensive gasoline).
If someone can find a pointer to a working plant which is producing ethanol for $1.50 a gallon or less, send a reference my way (and pour a little bit of it over these ice cubes while you're at it please...)
j.
Thanks for sharing.
It sounds like you had a bad experience with porn. It also sounds like you did the responsible thing by shutting off your access to porn.
It's like anything else. Lots of people drink socially. Some people touch any quantity of alcohol and wind up binging. Lots of people spend a few bucks gambling for fun. Some people won't leave the slots until their all their credit cards are redlined and their car is in hock.
We tried Prohibition here. The result was Alfonse Capone. We tried outlawing gambling. The result was the numbers' rackets. Everyone has their own weakness, and they need to learn to wrestle with it.
I'm genuinely happy that you're doing the right thing. Just don't assume that your weakness is everybody else's weakness. As individuals, we all have different things that get under our skin.
j.
(If I don't get my chocolate soon, so help me God I'm gonna strangle someone!!!!!)
Here's the interview where she talks about that (and other things):
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/me/20000901.me.06.ram