Y'know maybe it would suck as a TV show, but I seem to recall two characters from a time travel episode of the original Star Trek that featured a secret agent with extraordinary powers whose black cat turns into a sexy woman near the end of the episode (for perhaps two moments, just long enough for the viewer to catch it). I remember the episode had something to do with a rocket launching or something.
Those two characters might make an interesting spin off.
I know practically nothing about Trek fandom, so I don't know if these characters are fan favored or fan hated...
The RIAA and other industries can sue away - in fact, I think we are regularly informed that they are doing so. Sure, they face obstacles - copyright infringment must be proven and some people may actually want to protect their privacy and may even have other substantive arguments to make. Nothing guarantees the RIAA or any other industry a clear win in a civil case - they might even lose some cases. That's the way it works - that's how it was designed to work.
Meanwhile, the fact that our and many other governments are using up taxpaper money to fight for the interests of the RIAA and a few other industries is seen by me as a waste of resources.
If you had this "infringement" problem, the FBI would just laugh and laugh at you - you'd have to investigate it yourself and sue for infringment - just like any other penniless schmuck. Lucky for them, the likes of the RIAA can just buy these subsidies via the legislature. For very little money the RIAA gets access to extravagant pork - the money you worked hard to pay in taxes.
Someone wondered why the topic is categorized under "Your Rights Online." It's categorized that way because it's your money, dingbats, that supports this nonsense. It's your money that subsidizes the law enforcement overkill over concerns peculiar to but a very few industries.
You know, murders do actually go unsolved while the cops dick around with bullshit like making the RIAA happy. I'd rather have more real law and order and leave the RIAA to its own legal remedies.
Gosling says: "We're not a bunch of moronic secret subversive Microsoft lapdogs."
Uh huh...
So why do you sound like MS when discussing the GPL? Why do you attack the political premise of the GPL? I think the "viral infection" must be between your ears, Mr. Gosling.
RMS and the GPL will be precisely what you need when you needed it. The moment has not yet arrived for you if you do not yet fully understand that assertion or why it's true.
RMS' argument is basically one of not doing any kind of free development for what ends up being something with a non-free dependency. Smart guy. His almost autistic predictability in communicating the rigors of his philosophy is truly awesome (an overused word, I know). Someday he will be looked back on by history as one of the geniuses of our era - hell, it's already like honoring the corpse in the room. Why? Because he could die today and his message will not have changed.
Moderation seems very strange today - the parent post is not just "Score: 4, interesting" it should be "Score: 5, Insightful."
This person, like a few others, has explained in detail what happened as regards Iomega support in the past. In a way, it doesn't matter how good the new product is - based on their past support record, which is shit, no one should even consider buying the new product. You don't want to be the one with the problem and find this out the hard way.
We are trying to save you money and hassle. But go ahead - mod us whatever the fuck pleases you...
I'd say the war in Iraq is proof that some corporations do not need their own private militaries, not when they already have the use of the U.S. military through campaign contributions and hidden deals.
Cringley wants to end on a good note by suggesting that somewhere along the line something will happen and Microsoft will be too large to compete with some probably tiny but very agile rival.
That won't happen for the very reasons he spends most of the article enumerating. MS is hugely powerful at this point. MS is vastly wealthy. As Cringely probably correctly notes: MS can compete for a period of *YEARS* with others while making absolutely zero profit. Just let that one sink in a moment.
When thinking about these issues people make some common mistakes.
One of them is to mistakenly identify a corporation with having the exact same sorts of rights as do natural persons - and they don't! Corporations are fictitious persons that are legally created entities with specific benefits and obligations - those benefits and obligations are whatever we as a body politic write into the laws governing the creation of corporations. If any single corporation gets to a point where its practices are so anticompetitive and monopolistic that nothing but control after control must be implemented to stop it - then so be it. The corporation is not a natural person, we can do that.
The other mistake is to think that a corporate entity like Microsoft can be challenged by a few weirdo geniuses in a garage somewhere building some kind of "MS-killing" product. That won't happen either. Why not? Look at the history of Apple computers - that seemingly small and nimble rival has failed to take away from MS any significant market share. I'm not knocking Apple - to the contrary, I'm saying they make an objectively better product. But that doesn't matter. Read it again, because that's the big problem right there: it doesn't matter that a competitor has already produced a machine that is better! [N.B. This is a possibly subjective argument because lots of people will now argue issues like Apple's price point, whether it really is better, etc.] Microsoft's monopoly status has largely prevented Apple from gaining market share (and thereby also dropping its prices because of what is recovered by volume sales, putting huge profits into further innovation, etc).
A third problem is that people always make the error of thinking that large monopolistic corporations are necessary for technological advancment. Obviously, one could write a book about this subject, but in the main I'd suggest that the claim is simply false. Many things move forward incrementally because of research in numerous fields. Who might have suspected that Xerox might be investigating revolutionary ideas in computer technologies (as related to photocopy machines??!!!) but that those ideas could best be exploited by a then relatively small company called Apple Computers. Don't forget that *ONE* scientist had a dream about the structure of DNA. Sometimes all you need is one Einstein to keep moving things forward for a really long time - an no team of really bright physicists equals one Einstein.
Someone else has already made a comparison to Walmart, but it's worth repeating. These huge monopolies have more political pull and economic gravity than do most governments (amongst which I would personally include that tiny one we call the United States). To ignore that fact is supreme folly. We'll all end up working for corporations as our literal masters if we are not careful.
We have to take these HUGE corporate players out of the game, not just bench them or pretend they even give a shit about some weeny penalty they may have to pay. The way the business game works now is that the penalties are worked into the price of doing business any way they damn well please. Once you understand that, you will get the problem.
Y'know what - your whole model does nothing more than point up the fact that our whole monetary system is based on faith: faith in paper money backed by nothing of value. Most of the things that are raising in perceived value are somehow more tangible: real property, an education, a doctor's time. Those in a position to name their price are simply doing so, and recognizing that money is increasingly worth less and less as the fed prints it and keeps interest rates down.
Sounds like a con to me - a con straight from the top levels of society to the bottom. Sounds like legalized theft.
You haven't really shown that outsourcing isn't class warfare - you've merely shifted the precise reason it is class warfare.
No, really - the average worker is actually able to tell when his stomach is full and when it isn't. He will have your head on a pike soon enough, Mr. Economics ("You're not hungry, the food has been converted to offshored inflation").
You conveniently ignore the complete immorality of labor conditions as they exist and have been documented abroad. If they had social justice more equivalent to our own - the labor there would not be significantly cheaper. Instead, the very wealthy here are able to take unfair advantage of labor conditions over there - that's all it is. Stop trying to justify your sick position - it's exploitation, pure and simple.
Long term economic stability is based on an enormous middle-class - not on the decimation of the middle-class.
We all get what is happening: every job, no matter what level of education is needed to initially acquire the job, can be offshored as long as it doesn't require the physical presence of the person doing the job. That's everything except stuff like janitorial, medical, plumbing, construction, and flipping burgers. All of these jobs are about to get radically reduced in terms of pay potential as they fill up with people that understood the message being sent. Don't be surprised if national healthcare reduces the pay of the average doctor considerably. If they can do it to a programmer with a doctorate degree, they can do it to any kind of doctor.
There are no jobs beyond that "physical presence" threshold that cannot be offshored. There will be no jobs to gainfully employ well-educated out of work people at anything like a middle-class level.
The only way this become truly cool (considering the hassle and expense) is for it to multipurpose as a home appliance that will also play MP3s (and possibly even movies) off your server.
I don't mind a nicely organized tube of wires running down the wall (a really clever person would run the wires in the wall and place the frame over the various outlets), but I don't know enough about input peripherals to see an easy way to attach a keyboard and mouse. I suppose one could go with an IR wireless deal, the mouse would be the main thing.
Do they make a mouse that functions without any kind of base, something that works almost like a pointer?
What killed Britannica was crap coding. I have the CD-Rom version for the year 1999 and the freaking javascript breaks. I could actually fix it once installed to a machine, but what the fuck - why couldn't they just get it right? The second piece of shit thing they did was tie the product to MS IE - I like other browsers. The third hassle also goes for Encarta - I want it on the CD-Rom, not online. If I have to be online, what exactly is the installed product doing for me? Being online is no longer a problem thanks to broadband, but the experience with their poorly made product in 1999 left a bad taste in my mouth for what should have a been a slam-dunk - information easily viewed via ANY browser.
I actually wrote them a nice but specific email listing these issues, beyond an automated reply I got nothing.
If they had fixed the javascript, offered me a free and improved version, done anything to make me a happy customer - I might feel a little sad about their imminent demise.
But they fucking blew it, so now my best friends are Websters full install, Bookshelf 2000, and Wiki. I'm still eyeballing The Oxford English unabridged.
> The greatest decision anyone ever (even if accidentally) made was to make the Fed reserve a non-political entity.
Um, why do we have even have the Federal Reserve when the U.S. government is specifically charged with minting coin under Art I Sect 10 of the Constitution?
>Yes I actually support outsourcing.
Because you either have wealth in stocks or simply don't care about the future of workers in the U.S.
The world is too big a place, there will never be a stabilized labor force because there is finite work to be done and there are many more than the needed number of people to do it. If India gets expensive, move on to cheaper places. This kind of "turn and burn" of the labor force can probably go on forever in cycles.
Scarcity in the labor market must mean something less than billions of people. Lots of them are well educated too.
Free trade doesn't exist - your view on the veracity of that statement depends heavily on whether current trade policies help or hinder your wealth creation potential.
I'm not going to see Jackson's King Kong because it is a classic film that needs no remaking. The fact that Jackson wants to do it means nothing.
I'd like to have sculpted Michaelangelo's David - too bad it's already be done though, huh?
And no one has to have any kind of reputation of any kind to offer an opinion. I don't have to be a movie director or sculptor to have opinions about movies or works of art. WTF?
When the idea is crap, you can smell it from a distance. Sadly, I think Jackson's King Kong remake has already begun to stink of "egopoo."
I find it interesting and sad that the wrongness of the Matrix program even has to be argued over.
The average American is as dumb as a bag of hammers. Even if an American were to wake up to the problems surrounding him, he wouldn't have the savvy to know what to do about it. Of course, it's all right there in every liberty document upon which our country was founded -- but god forbid anyone should actually read those fucking documents! God forbid we should defend our liberties with the same passion with which we are apparently willing to fight for the oil already claimed by private corporations.
And like the other person already said, yeah just vote for Presidential candidate "du jour" because of the ones that could possibly be elected by the moronic American public, none will be worth voting for anyway.
Patents are nice when they are handled properly. Then again, maybe that's impossible and the era of such rights is now past.
http://www.thecorporation.tv/
What the corporation wants is more, fucker. And it doesn't care about you.
This is what happens when you let a fiction of law have the rights of a person. Why keep extending those rights? Because corporations may never die -- they're not MORTAL.
Get it? Now it ALL starts to make sense, doesn't it?
When corporations have the rights of persons, natural persons are less important.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine - the kid gloves are off then. Republican heads on pikes, people! Riot now!
That's all I have to say.
Y'know maybe it would suck as a TV show, but I seem to recall two characters from a time travel episode of the original Star Trek that featured a secret agent with extraordinary powers whose black cat turns into a sexy woman near the end of the episode (for perhaps two moments, just long enough for the viewer to catch it). I remember the episode had something to do with a rocket launching or something.
Those two characters might make an interesting spin off.
I know practically nothing about Trek fandom, so I don't know if these characters are fan favored or fan hated...
The RIAA and other industries can sue away - in fact, I think we are regularly informed that they are doing so. Sure, they face obstacles - copyright infringment must be proven and some people may actually want to protect their privacy and may even have other substantive arguments to make. Nothing guarantees the RIAA or any other industry a clear win in a civil case - they might even lose some cases. That's the way it works - that's how it was designed to work.
Meanwhile, the fact that our and many other governments are using up taxpaper money to fight for the interests of the RIAA and a few other industries is seen by me as a waste of resources.
If you had this "infringement" problem, the FBI would just laugh and laugh at you - you'd have to investigate it yourself and sue for infringment - just like any other penniless schmuck. Lucky for them, the likes of the RIAA can just buy these subsidies via the legislature. For very little money the RIAA gets access to extravagant pork - the money you worked hard to pay in taxes.
Someone wondered why the topic is categorized under "Your Rights Online." It's categorized that way because it's your money, dingbats, that supports this nonsense. It's your money that subsidizes the law enforcement overkill over concerns peculiar to but a very few industries.
You know, murders do actually go unsolved while the cops dick around with bullshit like making the RIAA happy. I'd rather have more real law and order and leave the RIAA to its own legal remedies.
Gosling says: "We're not a bunch of moronic secret subversive Microsoft lapdogs."
Uh huh...
So why do you sound like MS when discussing the GPL? Why do you attack the political premise of the GPL? I think the "viral infection" must be between your ears, Mr. Gosling.
RMS and the GPL will be precisely what you need when you needed it. The moment has not yet arrived for you if you do not yet fully understand that assertion or why it's true.
RMS' argument is basically one of not doing any kind of free development for what ends up being something with a non-free dependency. Smart guy. His almost autistic predictability in communicating the rigors of his philosophy is truly awesome (an overused word, I know). Someday he will be looked back on by history as one of the geniuses of our era - hell, it's already like honoring the corpse in the room. Why? Because he could die today and his message will not have changed.
I fucking love that about RMS! And so should you.
Moderation seems very strange today - the parent post is not just "Score: 4, interesting" it should be "Score: 5, Insightful."
This person, like a few others, has explained in detail what happened as regards Iomega support in the past. In a way, it doesn't matter how good the new product is - based on their past support record, which is shit, no one should even consider buying the new product. You don't want to be the one with the problem and find this out the hard way.
We are trying to save you money and hassle. But go ahead - mod us whatever the fuck pleases you...
It wasn't just how bad the product turned out to be - it was Iomega's failure to support the product. Double Plus Ungood.
I'd say the war in Iraq is proof that some corporations do not need their own private militaries, not when they already have the use of the U.S. military through campaign contributions and hidden deals.
Unbid contract, anyone?
Cringley wants to end on a good note by suggesting that somewhere along the line something will happen and Microsoft will be too large to compete with some probably tiny but very agile rival.
That won't happen for the very reasons he spends most of the article enumerating. MS is hugely powerful at this point. MS is vastly wealthy. As Cringely probably correctly notes: MS can compete for a period of *YEARS* with others while making absolutely zero profit. Just let that one sink in a moment.
When thinking about these issues people make some common mistakes.
One of them is to mistakenly identify a corporation with having the exact same sorts of rights as do natural persons - and they don't! Corporations are fictitious persons that are legally created entities with specific benefits and obligations - those benefits and obligations are whatever we as a body politic write into the laws governing the creation of corporations. If any single corporation gets to a point where its practices are so anticompetitive and monopolistic that nothing but control after control must be implemented to stop it - then so be it. The corporation is not a natural person, we can do that.
The other mistake is to think that a corporate entity like Microsoft can be challenged by a few weirdo geniuses in a garage somewhere building some kind of "MS-killing" product. That won't happen either. Why not? Look at the history of Apple computers - that seemingly small and nimble rival has failed to take away from MS any significant market share. I'm not knocking Apple - to the contrary, I'm saying they make an objectively better product. But that doesn't matter. Read it again, because that's the big problem right there: it doesn't matter that a competitor has already produced a machine that is better! [N.B. This is a possibly subjective argument because lots of people will now argue issues like Apple's price point, whether it really is better, etc.] Microsoft's monopoly status has largely prevented Apple from gaining market share (and thereby also dropping its prices because of what is recovered by volume sales, putting huge profits into further innovation, etc).
A third problem is that people always make the error of thinking that large monopolistic corporations are necessary for technological advancment. Obviously, one could write a book about this subject, but in the main I'd suggest that the claim is simply false. Many things move forward incrementally because of research in numerous fields. Who might have suspected that Xerox might be investigating revolutionary ideas in computer technologies (as related to photocopy machines??!!!) but that those ideas could best be exploited by a then relatively small company called Apple Computers. Don't forget that *ONE* scientist had a dream about the structure of DNA. Sometimes all you need is one Einstein to keep moving things forward for a really long time - an no team of really bright physicists equals one Einstein.
Someone else has already made a comparison to Walmart, but it's worth repeating. These huge monopolies have more political pull and economic gravity than do most governments (amongst which I would personally include that tiny one we call the United States). To ignore that fact is supreme folly. We'll all end up working for corporations as our literal masters if we are not careful.
We have to take these HUGE corporate players out of the game, not just bench them or pretend they even give a shit about some weeny penalty they may have to pay. The way the business game works now is that the penalties are worked into the price of doing business any way they damn well please. Once you understand that, you will get the problem.
Why should any of us care about a solution to the problem? We just calls 'em as we sees 'em.
"Timberlake helped boost the business in the second half of 2003."
Is that a fucking joke? That's the problem right there!
A diminished ability to collect means fewer dollars for an imperialistic war, a secret government, and the Patriot Acts.
Now if we could just get a cure for AIDS we'd see people dancing and fucking in the streets!
...I think some of these managers might be surplus to requirements and just haven't figured it out yet. That's a big savings right there!
Y'know what - your whole model does nothing more than point up the fact that our whole monetary system is based on faith: faith in paper money backed by nothing of value. Most of the things that are raising in perceived value are somehow more tangible: real property, an education, a doctor's time. Those in a position to name their price are simply doing so, and recognizing that money is increasingly worth less and less as the fed prints it and keeps interest rates down.
Sounds like a con to me - a con straight from the top levels of society to the bottom. Sounds like legalized theft.
You haven't really shown that outsourcing isn't class warfare - you've merely shifted the precise reason it is class warfare.
No, really - the average worker is actually able to tell when his stomach is full and when it isn't. He will have your head on a pike soon enough, Mr. Economics ("You're not hungry, the food has been converted to offshored inflation").
You conveniently ignore the complete immorality of labor conditions as they exist and have been documented abroad. If they had social justice more equivalent to our own - the labor there would not be significantly cheaper. Instead, the very wealthy here are able to take unfair advantage of labor conditions over there - that's all it is. Stop trying to justify your sick position - it's exploitation, pure and simple.
Long term economic stability is based on an enormous middle-class - not on the decimation of the middle-class.
We all get what is happening: every job, no matter what level of education is needed to initially acquire the job, can be offshored as long as it doesn't require the physical presence of the person doing the job. That's everything except stuff like janitorial, medical, plumbing, construction, and flipping burgers. All of these jobs are about to get radically reduced in terms of pay potential as they fill up with people that understood the message being sent. Don't be surprised if national healthcare reduces the pay of the average doctor considerably. If they can do it to a programmer with a doctorate degree, they can do it to any kind of doctor.
There are no jobs beyond that "physical presence" threshold that cannot be offshored. There will be no jobs to gainfully employ well-educated out of work people at anything like a middle-class level.
It's that simple.
Yeah, you all laugh and tell your jokes - but in another context this stuff becomes the basis of your favorite episode of Star Trek.
Submit these words to a free resource, not the OED - the OED is *SO* not free. WTF?
The only way this become truly cool (considering the hassle and expense) is for it to multipurpose as a home appliance that will also play MP3s (and possibly even movies) off your server.
I don't mind a nicely organized tube of wires running down the wall (a really clever person would run the wires in the wall and place the frame over the various outlets), but I don't know enough about input peripherals to see an easy way to attach a keyboard and mouse. I suppose one could go with an IR wireless deal, the mouse would be the main thing.
Do they make a mouse that functions without any kind of base, something that works almost like a pointer?
Yeah, whatever...
What killed Britannica was crap coding. I have the CD-Rom version for the year 1999 and the freaking javascript breaks. I could actually fix it once installed to a machine, but what the fuck - why couldn't they just get it right? The second piece of shit thing they did was tie the product to MS IE - I like other browsers. The third hassle also goes for Encarta - I want it on the CD-Rom, not online. If I have to be online, what exactly is the installed product doing for me? Being online is no longer a problem thanks to broadband, but the experience with their poorly made product in 1999 left a bad taste in my mouth for what should have a been a slam-dunk - information easily viewed via ANY browser.
I actually wrote them a nice but specific email listing these issues, beyond an automated reply I got nothing.
If they had fixed the javascript, offered me a free and improved version, done anything to make me a happy customer - I might feel a little sad about their imminent demise.
But they fucking blew it, so now my best friends are Websters full install, Bookshelf 2000, and Wiki. I'm still eyeballing The Oxford English unabridged.
Kevin:
That "wooshing" sound overhead is the sound of you missing my point entirely and not understanding the primary rule book - the U.S. Constitution.
I'll try again this way: why even bother having interest rates and a fluctuating currency? If you don't get it, try reading the rule book.
The corruption of our whole system starts right at the front - with our means of exchange.
> The greatest decision anyone ever (even if accidentally) made was to make the Fed reserve a non-political entity.
Um, why do we have even have the Federal Reserve when the U.S. government is specifically charged with minting coin under Art I Sect 10 of the Constitution?
>Yes I actually support outsourcing.
Because you either have wealth in stocks or simply don't care about the future of workers in the U.S.
The world is too big a place, there will never be a stabilized labor force because there is finite work to be done and there are many more than the needed number of people to do it. If India gets expensive, move on to cheaper places. This kind of "turn and burn" of the labor force can probably go on forever in cycles.
Scarcity in the labor market must mean something less than billions of people. Lots of them are well educated too.
Free trade doesn't exist - your view on the veracity of that statement depends heavily on whether current trade policies help or hinder your wealth creation potential.
Um, who gives a shit if he cares?
I'm not going to see Jackson's King Kong because it is a classic film that needs no remaking. The fact that Jackson wants to do it means nothing.
I'd like to have sculpted Michaelangelo's David - too bad it's already be done though, huh?
And no one has to have any kind of reputation of any kind to offer an opinion. I don't have to be a movie director or sculptor to have opinions about movies or works of art. WTF?
When the idea is crap, you can smell it from a distance. Sadly, I think Jackson's King Kong remake has already begun to stink of "egopoo."
...or just get rabbit ears. The only things really worth watching are the occasional DVDs.
The reception with rabbit ears varies with location, but even if the new season of "Friends" comes in all snowy - is that really a problem?
A lot of worthwhile PBS is available via the net now. Or just read the transcripts.
I find it interesting and sad that the wrongness of the Matrix program even has to be argued over.
The average American is as dumb as a bag of hammers. Even if an American were to wake up to the problems surrounding him, he wouldn't have the savvy to know what to do about it. Of course, it's all right there in every liberty document upon which our country was founded -- but god forbid anyone should actually read those fucking documents! God forbid we should defend our liberties with the same passion with which we are apparently willing to fight for the oil already claimed by private corporations.
And like the other person already said, yeah just vote for Presidential candidate "du jour" because of the ones that could possibly be elected by the moronic American public, none will be worth voting for anyway.
Just go back to your porn, x-box, cool mod, etc.
$13 an hour? That level pay in that part of California qualifies this job for submission to Fuck That Job!.
Patents are nice when they are handled properly. Then again, maybe that's impossible and the era of such rights is now past.
http://www.thecorporation.tv/
What the corporation wants is more, fucker. And it doesn't care about you.
This is what happens when you let a fiction of law have the rights of a person. Why keep extending those rights? Because corporations may never die -- they're not MORTAL.
Get it? Now it ALL starts to make sense, doesn't it?
When corporations have the rights of persons, natural persons are less important.