1) I don't have confirmation for Alibek's stuff - I assume he was a source for multiple things I read, so I don't know how accurate he is.
2) The Soviets figured that most of their missiles would be shot down - I think they figured a quarter would actually hit their targets. Thus, if you want to kill or threaten others, you have a problem. One solution (as was done) is to just make more of them. Bioweapons are another solution - while they won't prevent retaliation, they don't require as many hits to kill your enemy. The enemies that aren't killed by your nukes get sick and die, even if you only land a few of them. None of these weapons (citybuster nukes or bioweapons) will prevent retaliation - they are simply there to kill and make your opponents scared. The only missiles that might be able to disable opponents' missiles are the MXs - I don't think the Soviets had an analogous missile to go after ours.
A bonus is that bioweapons can be delivered more flexibly and quietly - if you have truck with terrorists (as the Soviets and perhaps the US did) you can get them to deliver your weapons with deniability. Detection of nukes is easier than bioweapons, and there are more methods to transport and deliver them. (We don't know if they work, but that's another story,)
3) Ebola is a natural pathogen - it has to balance its infectivity against its kill rate. Killing all of your victims quickly prevents Ebola from spreading, and makes it less widespread. Bioweapon viruses and bacteria are engineered to kill, not to survive. Passing on their genes was not relevant to their selective breeding, and so is unlikely to be manifested in their behavior. Bioweapons, unlike natural bacteria and viruses, are like kamikazes - they are selected to kill, not to pass on their genes.
1) India has less income that the Europe and US per capita, but lots more people. If India has a choice, it makes sense for them to go with OS (which requires more labor but less money) than with proprietary solutions such as MS (which require more money but (perhaps?) less labor).
2) Using nonproprietary solutions allows countries to develop indigenous software industries; for now, and for awhile, this will probably foster OS in lots of ways. In the pharmaceutical industry, India has started out making lots of generics, but are now looking at developing and selling their own blockbuster drugs. If a similar path is followed by India in software, at some point they will have their own MS; at that point, the continued use and nurturing of OS is not assured - as the relative cost of labor increases, commercial solutions might become more attractive.
While it might be best for India to follow an open source pathway, this is not because it is always right to do so, but because it best fits their current circumstances.
1) See Biohazard (1998 - Ken Alibek, I think now at Batelle Labs in OH) The Soviets had generated a variety of variants, including plague and smallpox strains that were immune to most antibiotics. The strains of smallpox used would circumvent vaccines made with previous strains - thus new vaccines would have to be produced very rapidly to stop them. In addition to smallpox, plague, and anthrax, they had a variety of other goodies, most of which have no treatments. They might not kill everything, but 90% is probably "good enough".
2) To toast lots of people with nukes, you have to hit lots of targets at once. Bioweapons don't require that - one shot in a high-population area is enough. Your targets spread the devastation for you, which lowers your requirements - instead of hundreds of warheads, you only need a few to have the same effect. Even if they warheads miss their targets, most of the payload agents are weaponized and will survive for long periods of time outside, so wherever they hit is going to be uninhabitable Bioweapons have the potential of widespread (worldwide, perhaps) damage because of their ability to be amplified, while nukes (with no such ability) will cause mainly localized damage.
3) Bioweapons are there to generate fear, just like city-buster nukes. They are intimidation weapons, rather than weapons to disable enemy soldiers. Most of the species on those warheads can't be stopped by anyone, so they don't make good weapons for anything but fear and mass murder.
I like your sig - I have another Radio Shack phrase:
"Yesterday's technology at tomorrow's prices." (from when they sold Tandy computers (which to the untrained mind were more expensive and less capable than other hardware).
it's that he thinks everyone else should have to, as well.
Religious beliefs are a part of what makes someone who they are. The problem with Ashcroft is that he has decided that people sould believe what he wants, and that others should be shown the errors of their ways. While cloaking the statue of Justice at the DOJ (an eerily symbolic act), he has been extraordinarily resistant to furnishing information to the public (a precondition for democracy) while being selective with his targets in the "war on terror": porn is a good target, while people who send anthrax are not, a position seemingly inconsistent with a stance taken for "public security". His "phantoms of lost liberty" comment was priceless, too - while Ashcroft claims to preserve freedom, he attempts to censure its exercise as being un-American.
Ashcroft acts as a man who believes his power does not come from people, but in spite of them; such people are dangerous, regardless of their religious beliefs. The country exists to respect the rights of its people, one of the most fundamental of which is religious freedom. His actions are in opposition to the freedoms that allow people such as he to believe what they do and to exist as believing people.
In addition, Ashcroft acts inconsistently with what he claims to believe. If God had wanted to force people to believe in Him, He could have - after all He makes the rules. God wanted people to choose freely to follow Him - a message repeated over and over in the Bible. Forcing people to believe and behave how Ashcroft believes they should contradicts this - it ultimately reinstates the falsity of the Pharisees who Jesus criticized so long ago, and might not even work anyway (because forcing actions disconnects souls from acts, and thus means that people won't know where they stand with God anyway).
So, his religious beliefs are not a problem in themselves - his insistence and his willingness to suborn democracy to make his beliefs real are.
if so, I guess that means that a foreign terrorist leader and an insane dictator care more about the future of the US than our President does; considering the last four years, that sounds about right.
P.S. I'm sure a lot of people would like to know how you talked to these two. One is in hiding/dead for three years, while the other is in a country even more closed than Asscroft's mind. How did you get on their mailing lists?
I don't play that many games to start with, but I wanted compatibility with the PS1 games I did play. The compatibility is what helps people to justify the money they spend on the console, which helps justify game development budgets, which stimulates console purchase.... With console prices increasing faster than income, making your console even more inconvenient, single-use (money for DVD play), and expensive (with the need to buy all new, expensive games) doesn't seem like the way to go.
I have a book that is a compendium of rock reviews, and while I like the writing, after awhile it gets corrosive. The writing of the review seems to be about what the authors like, about how cool or "alternative" it is, about how the music is too liberal or not liberal enough (the bias seemed mostly left in phase), or about how much of an experience the music is. Music they don't like gets lots of analogies to other things that suck without explaining why the analogies work.
I like reading essays and reviews, but music reviews often seem uninformative and illogical, written by people who think I like reading about music to hear how expansive and cool their musical knowledge is while not imparting any of it. Even political writing, with the overwhelming tendency to use bad analogies, implications, and innuendo, doesn't seem as meaningless as bad music writing. Good music writing rarely gives me useful information about the music it (nominally) describes - perhaps an understanding about the people who make it, or some wit, but that's it.
while the RIAA's methods are draconian and amplified by their own evil, suing those who took something from them is appropriate. SCO is not only asserting ownership of something they don't own, but attepting to compel payment from people from whom it is not due (infringement doesn't transmit to legitimate purchasers of products containing SCO "IP", but only to those who sold the products and used the "IP" illegally). SCO's claims are (likely) baseless, and they have chosen evil methods to pursue those claims.
The same people who put out patches that break the OS/other applications, the same people who allowed email viruses to run by default...are telling me they can keep my computer safe from the security holes they couldn't avoid in the first place. They are selling a product whose existence depends in part on their incompetence.
Why don't people here trust MS's intentions? MS enters markets not because it has a product, but because it has locked-in users. They've done it before (does IE ring a bell?) and there is no reason to expect that they won't try again. If they wanted to avoid antitrust screaming, they could have FIXED THEIR &$%*(*NG PRODUCT. Making something more complicated is not going to make it safer; simplifying it does (or at least decreases users' chances of hurting themselves). If people want bells and whistles, you isolate them from critical applications or minimize the connections between the B+W and the OS and then secure the few connections that you do have. Instead MS focuses on integrating B+W into their products and making them as inextricable as possible, in the process making the system more complex and less secure. You don't do this to make users happy, because making users happy could be done better and more easily in other ways. You do it so that users have to use MS products to avoid breaking other products. Good design minimzes the consequences of user errors. Bad design amplifies those consequences.
MS software seems to amplify the consequences of user error/incompetence for its own aggrandizement, and now wants to profit further from those consequences. Is this the mindset of someone from whom you should buy security products, and whom you should trust not to abuse the authority that those products require?
The MPAA has control over most of the movies shown in the USA, while the RIAA has substantial control over sales outlets and exclusivity (almost) in radio. SCO has no such leverage in any of its markets. SCO has competitors in its markets, so that customers have relatively easy options to go elsewhere. While there are lots of non-RIAA artists, most people probably won't hear them; for the music they do hear, the RIAA is the only source.
The RIAA has a much bigger hammer than SCO (in controlling its market) and more money to buy legislation amenable to them (e.g., DMCA, the "PIRATE Act", etc.) - they just need to scare people away from copying their product so that they can go back to their original model of screwing their customers by colluding on price and controlling distribution so that they can control their artists. I don't know, but are movies shown which are represented by organizations other than the MPAA? For these businesses, suing their customers is a necessary evil so that they can return to more subtle ways of hosing their customers. For the RIAA to alter its business practices towards openness and away from customer antagonism is contrary to a century of business practice, and won't happen. In addition, unlike SCO, the movie and music industries are still making money (just not as much as they would like), so they can afford to annoy their customers (for the moment). SCO has not much chance at surviving if (once) their suits fail - they are cutting their own lifeline while hanging over a cliff.
The only lessons that other businesses will take from SCO's fate is to make sure their customers are suitably constrained before they screw them.
Convergence is about negating the customer?
on
Big Bang of Convergence
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Businesses seem to be trying to bind their customers by coercion rather than to trust customers to choose their products willingly. Music, movie, and software businesses seem to rely more on dictating customer desires than on fulfilling them.
Convergence could be a buzzword for businesses coordinating with each other on products; the coordination allows them to get what they want from their customers (money, information) while at the same time using the power that their cooperation gives them to ignore what their customers want (as often as possible). Convergence is a way for vendors to ignore price and flexibility and instead go for a comprehensive and interrelated set of products. It might negate the need for businesses to compete on price because they don't have competition anymore (the web of interconnections between products would make price choices difficult, and flexibility irrelevant) and because by linking items together, choices between competing products become more difficult because the constraints (their effects on other purchases) become overwhelming.
For the most part, convergence may not be about products much more convenient; it seems to be less about improving the lives of customers and more about making them irrelevant. By making choices difficult (if not impossible), convergence might allow businesses to even more blatantly ignore their customers while guaranteeing themselves their business. In this scenario, customers' wills would be an obstacle to businesses getting money from them. Ideally, your possessions would spend your money as their manufacturers see fit, and would not have to worry about that pesky free will...
While I don't make any explicit agreements with musicians whose music is played on the radio or their labels, I am under the rule of the government, and the gov't is the guarantor of copyright. Since gov't is explicitly given the right to govern copyright, and they chose to give those rights to authors of works of their designated agents, attempting to assert the right to redistribute a work not only infringes on the right of authors and their agents (with whom I made no explicit agreement) but the government which is specifically given those rights (and with whom I do have explicit legal obligations). Violation of copyright by distributing a work without permission violates not only the rights of authors to whom were lent those rights, but the agency (the government, or the people) in whom those rights are vested. Ultimately, it replaces a corporate good (the availabilty of works to all) for an individual good (the availability of a work to me).
Copyrights have many flaws as currently written and enforced, but the concept of copyright exists so that all can profit from ideas, rather than just a few. If upon transmission, the restriction of copyright on the use of works is negated, then few things will be transmitted, hurting everyone in the process. If copyright law is bastardized to the point of unrecognizability, it will either cease to be obeyed (thus undermining the govt's authority and negating their ability to do other things they wish) or will be rewritten, or people will accept it and we will fade into oblivion.
I disagree with your underlying premise - I believe that copyright as a concept is sound, even if copyright law as currently composed (and alloyed with the DMCA) is not.
SCO against IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc. is like bringing a spork to a firefight. If they're lucky, the (figurative) weapons fire will break SCO into small enough pieces that an open casket funeral (with Darl holding the spork in his cold, dead hand) will be impossible.
The difference between your examples is that in one case, the labels (the people who are given permission to control the distribution and public performance of the music) choose to pay someone to play. If I distribute mp3 of someone else's song to a wide audience (e.g., Kazaa, etc.), I am making a choice that rightfully belongs to the person/entity who has the copyright.
There are a lot of things wrong with the system of music (control of airplay and concerts by labels/Clear Channel, indefinitely extended copyrights for large corporations, suits tried by legal muscle rather than law, etc.) but the principle at stake here is whether the copyright holder has the right to control the public performance/distribution of their music. Since that right is the domain of copyright law, what is at stake is the existence of copyright. I believe that while copyright is misused, its absence will also be misused, to greater detriment of individual artists, replacing very limited protection for people with novel works with no protection at all. If copyrights exist, the copyright holder has sole control of public distribution and play of their work (until the copyright period is up - theoretically "a limited time", in effect, limited to only three generations...). They have that right, I don't.
big companies have the money to pay representatives to enact laws on their behalf, and the muscle to underprice competitors or make the barrier to entry high enough to keep others out. (Collusion is also a possibility, as in vitamins and carbon black). Antitrust law is supposed to address this, but if it isn't enforced, then it really isn't there.
The relation between money in high concentration and law is one problem. The ability to drive your competitors out of business without consequence is another. Both put a wrinkle in the ability of competition to better serve customers.
the problem was that their service was utterly useless. When my phone (StarTac) dropped 90% of outgoing calls (and most incoming), their only response was "you're in a medium signal area" (OSU campus), That was when I could get a hold of them by lying and saying that I was buying new service (their customer service line puts you on an endless loop, while their website throws multiple cookies a second at you so that you can't get anywhere without leaving cookies on). I solved the problem by buying a Samsung phone, which hardly ever dropped a call in the same area. I dropped Sprint's service because of dissatisfaction with the service and because I didn't use the minutes I was paying for. I don't expect "gold" service, but being able to get someone on the phone (or in person) who could help me is desirable. (I have Verizon now - they're OK).
I live in the US, with public transit being a variable commodity. In Boston, where I went to school, public transit or bikes or walking was sufficient and cheap enough to get you almost anyplace that you wanted to be in the city. Most of the time, I didn't care (and I couldn't drive anyway). When I had job interviews, however, particularly in the suburbs, PT came to suck hard. The local trains go about 30 kph, guaranteeing that your transit time is measured in hours; in addition, the trips usually involve at least one transfer; thus trips that might take 30 min. to an 1 hour driving take two hours by train, time that doesn't get spent anywhere else.
Now I live in Columbus OH, where all we have is buses. If you live near OSU, or on High Street, life is good - you can get a bus in reasonable time, and get downtown. If you live anywhere else or need to go further out into the suburbs, however, you are hosed. Transfers galore, and time waiting for the bus at each one. This is not the only place where this is true - I lived in Trenton, NJ (a fairly dense area) and experienced similar problems. I took the public transit for a year to school. I couldn't get to school on time ever, I had to leave my (mandatory) running practices early to get home (or walk three miles home or get my dad to pick me up). The driver on the first route was nice, but most others were variable - often the buses came late, sometimes not at all. A route that took 30 min. direct takes 90 min by bus (one way).
While public transit is useful, it depends on a densely populated area to work well (to have enough service to be convenient as a car replacement). Even then it uses time that can't be used in other ways. Some may use the time well, so that it doesn't hurt much. For lots of people, riding the bus or train displaces time with family or time doing tasks (homework, running) that can't be done on the bus or train. Time is not fungible - we only have so much of it, and we can't get any more if we use it all.
Why shouldn't it cost more? Well, in the US, we probably don't pay all of the costs our cars impose, but in Europe I had always figured the opposite - I thought that most places paid at least twice as much for gas ($4/gal or $1/L) and that most of it went to taxes. Most of the $2/gal in the US goes to taxes, much of which goes to direct car costs (roads and pollution). If the money for your gas (and licences, and fines, which most people also pay) is twice as much, I imagine that a chunk of that money is going to things other than auto- (or transit-)related costs, which means that cars are subsidizing activities for others. If the costs of driving (mainly pollution, whose costs are difficult to accurately assess anyway) to drivers don't equal the costs imposed on others, then the costs to drivers need to increase. Otherwise, the cars are paying their own way. Property damage is already assessed - through insurance, fines, and lawsuits. Crowding is a variant of pollution - a cost which is difficult to discern, but possible with work. You could get around with taxis here, too, but that requires wealth - depending on how far you go, a decent cab ride will run $10-$20 each way, and that's not exactly financial sensible for anyone not already wealthy.
Cars aren't perfect solutions here - their availability (and the cheapness of land) means people build out, and PT becomes even less of an option. Worst case is California, where commutes grow long (unless you're wealthy) and there is no alternative - buses take even longer. There are subways (SF/Oakland, and some of LA) but they only cover a limited area. There are places where cars aren't needed, but they require money, and lots of people don't have that, either. In a place where land is cheap, cars allow more land to be used. Unfortunately, in either case (plentiful PT in a dense environment or endless roads and cars to fill them), poor people are out of luck - people with money will hold the places amenable to easy access. Cars here make for long commutes, bu
Rule 3 - "Make the truth seem unpatriotic, partisan, or political so that it will not be used against you in an argument."
Sounds about right - I mean the rich are getting the bulk of W's tax cuts while everybody (poor and rich) gets to pay for the debt the tax cuts create. Ironic when W said that the bulk of the tax relief his tax plan gives would go to the middle class and poor. I guess that "class war" is an inappropriate term for stealing from the poor to give to the rich...or maybe not.
I should be glad, though...at least I still have a job, and benefits, unlike lots of people. Isn't the Bush economic rally great?
the "stepometer" gives the same figure - about 2.6 ft/step. My girlfriend walked about 1/2-3/4 mile (about 1000-1500 steps) and it only read 800. Walking through the parking lot, which should have been more like 90 ft, only read 10 steps.
So, the step count the stepometer gives is inaccurate (I wasn't expecting a distance) it was giving 1/3 the number of steps she walked rather than 1/3 the feet (which would make sense).
...when the vomiting from the diet of bad pop and Big Macs ruptures your esophagus, causing either death or a long-term parenteral diet. In either case, the BAAM effect should yield weight loss in McDonald's target audience, both individually and as a whole.
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1) I don't have confirmation for Alibek's stuff - I assume he was a source for multiple things I read, so I don't know how accurate he is.
2) The Soviets figured that most of their missiles would be shot down - I think they figured a quarter would actually hit their targets. Thus, if you want to kill or threaten others, you have a problem. One solution (as was done) is to just make more of them. Bioweapons are another solution - while they won't prevent retaliation, they don't require as many hits to kill your enemy. The enemies that aren't killed by your nukes get sick and die, even if you only land a few of them. None of these weapons (citybuster nukes or bioweapons) will prevent retaliation - they are simply there to kill and make your opponents scared. The only missiles that might be able to disable opponents' missiles are the MXs - I don't think the Soviets had an analogous missile to go after ours.
A bonus is that bioweapons can be delivered more flexibly and quietly - if you have truck with terrorists (as the Soviets and perhaps the US did) you can get them to deliver your weapons with deniability. Detection of nukes is easier than bioweapons, and there are more methods to transport and deliver them. (We don't know if they work, but that's another story,)
3) Ebola is a natural pathogen - it has to balance its infectivity against its kill rate. Killing all of your victims quickly prevents Ebola from spreading, and makes it less widespread. Bioweapon viruses and bacteria are engineered to kill, not to survive. Passing on their genes was not relevant to their selective breeding, and so is unlikely to be manifested in their behavior. Bioweapons, unlike natural bacteria and viruses, are like kamikazes - they are selected to kill, not to pass on their genes.
1) India has less income that the Europe and US per capita, but lots more people. If India has a choice, it makes sense for them to go with OS (which requires more labor but less money) than with proprietary solutions such as MS (which require more money but (perhaps?) less labor).
2) Using nonproprietary solutions allows countries to develop indigenous software industries; for now, and for awhile, this will probably foster OS in lots of ways. In the pharmaceutical industry, India has started out making lots of generics, but are now looking at developing and selling their own blockbuster drugs. If a similar path is followed by India in software, at some point they will have their own MS; at that point, the continued use and nurturing of OS is not assured - as the relative cost of labor increases, commercial solutions might become more attractive.
While it might be best for India to follow an open source pathway, this is not because it is always right to do so, but because it best fits their current circumstances.
1) See Biohazard (1998 - Ken Alibek, I think now at Batelle Labs in OH) The Soviets had generated a variety of variants, including plague and smallpox strains that were immune to most antibiotics. The strains of smallpox used would circumvent vaccines made with previous strains - thus new vaccines would have to be produced very rapidly to stop them. In addition to smallpox, plague, and anthrax, they had a variety of other goodies, most of which have no treatments. They might not kill everything, but 90% is probably "good enough".
2) To toast lots of people with nukes, you have to hit lots of targets at once. Bioweapons don't require that - one shot in a high-population area is enough. Your targets spread the devastation for you, which lowers your requirements - instead of hundreds of warheads, you only need a few to have the same effect. Even if they warheads miss their targets, most of the payload agents are weaponized and will survive for long periods of time outside, so wherever they hit is going to be uninhabitable Bioweapons have the potential of widespread (worldwide, perhaps) damage because of their ability to be amplified, while nukes (with no such ability) will cause mainly localized damage.
3) Bioweapons are there to generate fear, just like city-buster nukes. They are intimidation weapons, rather than weapons to disable enemy soldiers. Most of the species on those warheads can't be stopped by anyone, so they don't make good weapons for anything but fear and mass murder.
I like your sig - I have another Radio Shack phrase:
"Yesterday's technology at tomorrow's prices." (from when they sold Tandy computers (which to the untrained mind were more expensive and less capable than other hardware).
it's that he thinks everyone else should have to, as well.
Religious beliefs are a part of what makes someone who they are. The problem with Ashcroft is that he has decided that people sould believe what he wants, and that others should be shown the errors of their ways. While cloaking the statue of Justice at the DOJ (an eerily symbolic act), he has been extraordinarily resistant to furnishing information to the public (a precondition for democracy) while being selective with his targets in the "war on terror": porn is a good target, while people who send anthrax are not, a position seemingly inconsistent with a stance taken for "public security". His "phantoms of lost liberty" comment was priceless, too - while Ashcroft claims to preserve freedom, he attempts to censure its exercise as being un-American.
Ashcroft acts as a man who believes his power does not come from people, but in spite of them; such people are dangerous, regardless of their religious beliefs. The country exists to respect the rights of its people, one of the most fundamental of which is religious freedom. His actions are in opposition to the freedoms that allow people such as he to believe what they do and to exist as believing people.
In addition, Ashcroft acts inconsistently with what he claims to believe. If God had wanted to force people to believe in Him, He could have - after all He makes the rules. God wanted people to choose freely to follow Him - a message repeated over and over in the Bible. Forcing people to believe and behave how Ashcroft believes they should contradicts this - it ultimately reinstates the falsity of the Pharisees who Jesus criticized so long ago, and might not even work anyway (because forcing actions disconnects souls from acts, and thus means that people won't know where they stand with God anyway).
So, his religious beliefs are not a problem in themselves - his insistence and his willingness to suborn democracy to make his beliefs real are.
if so, I guess that means that a foreign terrorist leader and an insane dictator care more about the future of the US than our President does; considering the last four years, that sounds about right.
P.S. I'm sure a lot of people would like to know how you talked to these two. One is in hiding/dead for three years, while the other is in a country even more closed than Asscroft's mind. How did you get on their mailing lists?
it was the same guy who signed the DMCA into law...and it wasn't GWB.
I don't play that many games to start with, but I wanted compatibility with the PS1 games I did play. The compatibility is what helps people to justify the money they spend on the console, which helps justify game development budgets, which stimulates console purchase.... With console prices increasing faster than income, making your console even more inconvenient, single-use (money for DVD play), and expensive (with the need to buy all new, expensive games) doesn't seem like the way to go.
The doctor would never tell him "there are no bugs in your code", because there is always one more bug.
I have a book that is a compendium of rock reviews, and while I like the writing, after awhile it gets corrosive. The writing of the review seems to be about what the authors like, about how cool or "alternative" it is, about how the music is too liberal or not liberal enough (the bias seemed mostly left in phase), or about how much of an experience the music is. Music they don't like gets lots of analogies to other things that suck without explaining why the analogies work.
I like reading essays and reviews, but music reviews often seem uninformative and illogical, written by people who think I like reading about music to hear how expansive and cool their musical knowledge is while not imparting any of it. Even political writing, with the overwhelming tendency to use bad analogies, implications, and innuendo, doesn't seem as meaningless as bad music writing. Good music writing rarely gives me useful information about the music it (nominally) describes - perhaps an understanding about the people who make it, or some wit, but that's it.
while the RIAA's methods are draconian and amplified by their own evil, suing those who took something from them is appropriate. SCO is not only asserting ownership of something they don't own, but attepting to compel payment from people from whom it is not due (infringement doesn't transmit to legitimate purchasers of products containing SCO "IP", but only to those who sold the products and used the "IP" illegally). SCO's claims are (likely) baseless, and they have chosen evil methods to pursue those claims.
The same people who put out patches that break the OS/other applications, the same people who allowed email viruses to run by default...are telling me they can keep my computer safe from the security holes they couldn't avoid in the first place. They are selling a product whose existence depends in part on their incompetence.
Why don't people here trust MS's intentions? MS enters markets not because it has a product, but because it has locked-in users. They've done it before (does IE ring a bell?) and there is no reason to expect that they won't try again. If they wanted to avoid antitrust screaming, they could have FIXED THEIR &$%*(*NG PRODUCT. Making something more complicated is not going to make it safer; simplifying it does (or at least decreases users' chances of hurting themselves). If people want bells and whistles, you isolate them from critical applications or minimize the connections between the B+W and the OS and then secure the few connections that you do have. Instead MS focuses on integrating B+W into their products and making them as inextricable as possible, in the process making the system more complex and less secure. You don't do this to make users happy, because making users happy could be done better and more easily in other ways. You do it so that users have to use MS products to avoid breaking other products. Good design minimzes the consequences of user errors. Bad design amplifies those consequences.
MS software seems to amplify the consequences of user error/incompetence for its own aggrandizement, and now wants to profit further from those consequences. Is this the mindset of someone from whom you should buy security products, and whom you should trust not to abuse the authority that those products require?
The MPAA has control over most of the movies shown in the USA, while the RIAA has substantial control over sales outlets and exclusivity (almost) in radio. SCO has no such leverage in any of its markets. SCO has competitors in its markets, so that customers have relatively easy options to go elsewhere. While there are lots of non-RIAA artists, most people probably won't hear them; for the music they do hear, the RIAA is the only source.
The RIAA has a much bigger hammer than SCO (in controlling its market) and more money to buy legislation amenable to them (e.g., DMCA, the "PIRATE Act", etc.) - they just need to scare people away from copying their product so that they can go back to their original model of screwing their customers by colluding on price and controlling distribution so that they can control their artists. I don't know, but are movies shown which are represented by organizations other than the MPAA? For these businesses, suing their customers is a necessary evil so that they can return to more subtle ways of hosing their customers. For the RIAA to alter its business practices towards openness and away from customer antagonism is contrary to a century of business practice, and won't happen. In addition, unlike SCO, the movie and music industries are still making money (just not as much as they would like), so they can afford to annoy their customers (for the moment). SCO has not much chance at surviving if (once) their suits fail - they are cutting their own lifeline while hanging over a cliff.
The only lessons that other businesses will take from SCO's fate is to make sure their customers are suitably constrained before they screw them.
Businesses seem to be trying to bind their customers by coercion rather than to trust customers to choose their products willingly. Music, movie, and software businesses seem to rely more on dictating customer desires than on fulfilling them.
Convergence could be a buzzword for businesses coordinating with each other on products; the coordination allows them to get what they want from their customers (money, information) while at the same time using the power that their cooperation gives them to ignore what their customers want (as often as possible). Convergence is a way for vendors to ignore price and flexibility and instead go for a comprehensive and interrelated set of products. It might negate the need for businesses to compete on price because they don't have competition anymore (the web of interconnections between products would make price choices difficult, and flexibility irrelevant) and because by linking items together, choices between competing products become more difficult because the constraints (their effects on other purchases) become overwhelming.
For the most part, convergence may not be about products much more convenient; it seems to be less about improving the lives of customers and more about making them irrelevant. By making choices difficult (if not impossible), convergence might allow businesses to even more blatantly ignore their customers while guaranteeing themselves their business. In this scenario, customers' wills would be an obstacle to businesses getting money from them. Ideally, your possessions would spend your money as their manufacturers see fit, and would not have to worry about that pesky free will...
While I don't make any explicit agreements with musicians whose music is played on the radio or their labels, I am under the rule of the government, and the gov't is the guarantor of copyright. Since gov't is explicitly given the right to govern copyright, and they chose to give those rights to authors of works of their designated agents, attempting to assert the right to redistribute a work not only infringes on the right of authors and their agents (with whom I made no explicit agreement) but the government which is specifically given those rights (and with whom I do have explicit legal obligations). Violation of copyright by distributing a work without permission violates not only the rights of authors to whom were lent those rights, but the agency (the government, or the people) in whom those rights are vested. Ultimately, it replaces a corporate good (the availabilty of works to all) for an individual good (the availability of a work to me).
Copyrights have many flaws as currently written and enforced, but the concept of copyright exists so that all can profit from ideas, rather than just a few. If upon transmission, the restriction of copyright on the use of works is negated, then few things will be transmitted, hurting everyone in the process. If copyright law is bastardized to the point of unrecognizability, it will either cease to be obeyed (thus undermining the govt's authority and negating their ability to do other things they wish) or will be rewritten, or people will accept it and we will fade into oblivion.
I disagree with your underlying premise - I believe that copyright as a concept is sound, even if copyright law as currently composed (and alloyed with the DMCA) is not.
SCO against IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc. is like bringing a spork to a firefight. If they're lucky, the (figurative) weapons fire will break SCO into small enough pieces that an open casket funeral (with Darl holding the spork in his cold, dead hand) will be impossible.
the labels have two legs to stand on here...
The difference between your examples is that in one case, the labels (the people who are given permission to control the distribution and public performance of the music) choose to pay someone to play. If I distribute mp3 of someone else's song to a wide audience (e.g., Kazaa, etc.), I am making a choice that rightfully belongs to the person/entity who has the copyright.
There are a lot of things wrong with the system of music (control of airplay and concerts by labels/Clear Channel, indefinitely extended copyrights for large corporations, suits tried by legal muscle rather than law, etc.) but the principle at stake here is whether the copyright holder has the right to control the public performance/distribution of their music. Since that right is the domain of copyright law, what is at stake is the existence of copyright. I believe that while copyright is misused, its absence will also be misused, to greater detriment of individual artists, replacing very limited protection for people with novel works with no protection at all. If copyrights exist, the copyright holder has sole control of public distribution and play of their work (until the copyright period is up - theoretically "a limited time", in effect, limited to only three generations...). They have that right, I don't.
big companies have the money to pay representatives to enact laws on their behalf, and the muscle to underprice competitors or make the barrier to entry high enough to keep others out. (Collusion is also a possibility, as in vitamins and carbon black). Antitrust law is supposed to address this, but if it isn't enforced, then it really isn't there.
The relation between money in high concentration and law is one problem. The ability to drive your competitors out of business without consequence is another. Both put a wrinkle in the ability of competition to better serve customers.
the problem was that their service was utterly useless. When my phone (StarTac) dropped 90% of outgoing calls (and most incoming), their only response was "you're in a medium signal area" (OSU campus), That was when I could get a hold of them by lying and saying that I was buying new service (their customer service line puts you on an endless loop, while their website throws multiple cookies a second at you so that you can't get anywhere without leaving cookies on). I solved the problem by buying a Samsung phone, which hardly ever dropped a call in the same area. I dropped Sprint's service because of dissatisfaction with the service and because I didn't use the minutes I was paying for. I don't expect "gold" service, but being able to get someone on the phone (or in person) who could help me is desirable. (I have Verizon now - they're OK).
"if you can't be a good example, then you can be a terrible warning."
/. yesterday, but it seems more relevant here.
someone quoted this on
I live in the US, with public transit being a variable commodity. In Boston, where I went to school, public transit or bikes or walking was sufficient and cheap enough to get you almost anyplace that you wanted to be in the city. Most of the time, I didn't care (and I couldn't drive anyway). When I had job interviews, however, particularly in the suburbs, PT came to suck hard. The local trains go about 30 kph, guaranteeing that your transit time is measured in hours; in addition, the trips usually involve at least one transfer; thus trips that might take 30 min. to an 1 hour driving take two hours by train, time that doesn't get spent anywhere else.
Now I live in Columbus OH, where all we have is buses. If you live near OSU, or on High Street, life is good - you can get a bus in reasonable time, and get downtown. If you live anywhere else or need to go further out into the suburbs, however, you are hosed. Transfers galore, and time waiting for the bus at each one. This is not the only place where this is true - I lived in Trenton, NJ (a fairly dense area) and experienced similar problems. I took the public transit for a year to school. I couldn't get to school on time ever, I had to leave my (mandatory) running practices early to get home (or walk three miles home or get my dad to pick me up). The driver on the first route was nice, but most others were variable - often the buses came late, sometimes not at all. A route that took 30 min. direct takes 90 min by bus (one way).
While public transit is useful, it depends on a densely populated area to work well (to have enough service to be convenient as a car replacement). Even then it uses time that can't be used in other ways. Some may use the time well, so that it doesn't hurt much. For lots of people, riding the bus or train displaces time with family or time doing tasks (homework, running) that can't be done on the bus or train. Time is not fungible - we only have so much of it, and we can't get any more if we use it all.
Why shouldn't it cost more? Well, in the US, we probably don't pay all of the costs our cars impose, but in Europe I had always figured the opposite - I thought that most places paid at least twice as much for gas ($4/gal or $1/L) and that most of it went to taxes. Most of the $2/gal in the US goes to taxes, much of which goes to direct car costs (roads and pollution). If the money for your gas (and licences, and fines, which most people also pay) is twice as much, I imagine that a chunk of that money is going to things other than auto- (or transit-)related costs, which means that cars are subsidizing activities for others. If the costs of driving (mainly pollution, whose costs are difficult to accurately assess anyway) to drivers don't equal the costs imposed on others, then the costs to drivers need to increase. Otherwise, the cars are paying their own way. Property damage is already assessed - through insurance, fines, and lawsuits. Crowding is a variant of pollution - a cost which is difficult to discern, but possible with work. You could get around with taxis here, too, but that requires wealth - depending on how far you go, a decent cab ride will run $10-$20 each way, and that's not exactly financial sensible for anyone not already wealthy.
Cars aren't perfect solutions here - their availability (and the cheapness of land) means people build out, and PT becomes even less of an option. Worst case is California, where commutes grow long (unless you're wealthy) and there is no alternative - buses take even longer. There are subways (SF/Oakland, and some of LA) but they only cover a limited area. There are places where cars aren't needed, but they require money, and lots of people don't have that, either. In a place where land is cheap, cars allow more land to be used. Unfortunately, in either case (plentiful PT in a dense environment or endless roads and cars to fill them), poor people are out of luck - people with money will hold the places amenable to easy access. Cars here make for long commutes, bu
Rule 3 - "Make the truth seem unpatriotic, partisan, or political so that it will not be used against you in an argument."
Sounds about right - I mean the rich are getting the bulk of W's tax cuts while everybody (poor and rich) gets to pay for the debt the tax cuts create. Ironic when W said that the bulk of the tax relief his tax plan gives would go to the middle class and poor. I guess that "class war" is an inappropriate term for stealing from the poor to give to the rich...or maybe not.
I should be glad, though...at least I still have a job, and benefits, unlike lots of people. Isn't the Bush economic rally great?
the "stepometer" gives the same figure - about 2.6 ft/step. My girlfriend walked about 1/2-3/4 mile (about 1000-1500 steps) and it only read 800. Walking through the parking lot, which should have been more like 90 ft, only read 10 steps.
So, the step count the stepometer gives is inaccurate (I wasn't expecting a distance) it was giving 1/3 the number of steps she walked rather than 1/3 the feet (which would make sense).
I didn't take it as bashing - I just wanted to explain what I was complaining about.
...when the vomiting from the diet of bad pop and Big Macs ruptures your esophagus, causing either death or a long-term parenteral diet. In either case, the BAAM effect should yield weight loss in McDonald's target audience, both individually and as a whole.