Lots of good stuff without the marketing dollars behind Disney. I'm not a Disney fan, I assure you, and my child watches PBS and Nick Jr., not the Disney Channel. But we have quite a few of the old Disney movies - can't deprive her of Dumbo and Winne the Pooh:).
I would love to see PBS with the budget that Disney has.:)
The measure of a monopoly is not whether you are forced to buy their products. No one has to watch movies - does that mean it wouldn't be a monopoly if there were only one company? No one has to have a telephone; does that mean that there can't be abuses of the Sherman Antitrust Act by a phone company?
If you think that Microsoft, Disney, or most other large corporations have not violated the sherman
Antitrust Act of 1890, you should probably read it. The word 'monopoly' has been bandied around specifically to confuse the issue. Section 2:
Section 2. Monopolizing trade a felony; penalty Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
"Attempt to monopolize" etc. Section 1 discusses restraint of trade - which this could most certainly be percieved as a step towards, dependin g on how Microsoft and Disney deal with the DRM issues - and with their track record, it's not looking good.
Creating a barrier to entry is what the industry is trying to accomplish with mandatory DRM. If you have to pay a $50 license for DRM, and it's illegal to distribute something (software, os, hardware, or all three) without it, then the Free Software world - and, perhaps, open source - is essentially relegated to irrelevance here in the US. And in any country that would hope to do business with US and the IMF/Wold Bank. Bleah.
I agree that the quality of Disney productions is declining, but Disney will continue to be the pre-eminate supplier of Children's content until some one steps up to fill the gap.
Also, let's not forget Touchstone, either. Or their licensing business, which is still doing a stunning trade, judging by the number of Winnie-the-pooh and Tigger products I see.
Well, we can't take it back, since we never really had it. The internet is a powerful political force, but right now it's not our political force. When I say "our", I'm referring to those of us in the 90%+ of the population that controls
The only way that we can be truly enfranchised in this environment where campaign dollars are king and contributions control legislation is for 'us' to become a motivational financial force capable of supplying a candidate with the cash to get elected, election after election. In this race, that looks to be about $30,000,000, I'm guessing. Bush has the whole farm, but I don't think he really needs it - he can either steal this election too, or win it, or lose it, on much less.
Until we can swing a big enough monetary stick around in a guided fashion, the corporate interests will continue to control US policies.
Just because this is about entertainment and art and not politics doesn't make it less real. There's a lot of money in movies.
And movies are about marketing and opinion engineering - just like politics. Our illustrious leader showed us - with one spot, standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in flyboy gear - that politics is ALL about marketing.
"OK"? No, of course not. What I'm saying is that laws against content are 1) Unconstitutional, and 2) unproductive. What I'm saying is that if you arrest the man doing the molesting, or the one taking the pictures, and use those pictures as evidence, you'll soon stop seeing them for various reasons. Legislation against the images is specious and takes a big step out onto the 'slippery slope' to censorship. As I said, it's a short step from giving another entity a mandate to censor what *I* find offensive to that entity censoring what *it* finds offensive.
Way back in the day, (like, '96 or something) people started really getting up in arms about porn on the web. I remember a fifteen minute diatribe by a woman that lived two doors down about the fact that she'd found her fourteen year old son looking at pictures of breasts... The pictures were actually medical pictures from a university's plastic surgery department, before and after pictures.
You have some good points, with which I agree; As soon as the FS based PDAs reach a level of functionality approaching my Tungsten E, I won't look back, I promise.:)
On the other hand, the map software issue is either incompetent or intentionally poor software design; I have many low res applications that I bought for my M505 and they all work flawlessly on my Tungsten E. Maybe the Tungsten T has problems? Ah, well. I use my PDA for PIM and Ebooks, mostly, and the Zaurus is overkill for those applications.
I've owned a Zaurus SL5500 and innumerable (ok, well, 5, actuallly) palm based PDAs. Recently, I purchased a Palm Tungsten E.
The Zaurus was an amazing critter; but most of its value was in pure Geek Factor. In Windows or in Linux, the Zaurus was interesting but plagued by ongoing random minor issues with synchronization, what version of QPE I was using, what the date was, and how I held my mouth. In Windows or in Linux, the Palm is nearly effortless.
The Zaurus had many neat things. I could log in to it over the network (wireless); I could run a webserver on it; I could do all kinds of system things. But in the end, the actual D of the PDA is much more usable in the Palm. I'd love to have the time and the money to develop replacements for the Palm software to run on the Zaurus, but I simply don't; I need something that works, and works well, right now.
Not to mention the fact that, comparitively, the Zaurus is enormous. It's easily half again as heavy, and an inch longer, and a little thicker, than the tungsten E.
If you go with the commercial QPE (that synchronizes well) functionality is low; if you go with the free embedded GUIs, functionality is high, but interoperability (in the form of synchronization with outlook and evolution) is low. Even with all the objections fielded in this discussion, the Palm is like a Sound Blaster - it just works.
And it's sad, too. I love Linux, I love free software, I love the entire Opensource movement, and I wanted to be much more pleased with the Zaurus. I would say, all in all, PDA linux is where desktop linux was at RedHat 5.2. It will get there, eventually.
I understand your point, and I agree with the accuracy of the use of the word 'criminal' in this context; but by supporting this argument, you're simply asking for the Internet to become a fractious, useless extension of the political landscape that now exists across the planet, and removing most of the value many of us find in it now. Because when they close down www.kiddieporn.com, they'll shut down otherstuff , too.
"D you not realize how idiotic your reply is? You are actually begging them to regulate it, if you think out-loud that it should be a haven for criminal content. You do accept that child abuse is criminal, don't you?"
"Idiotic" is a bit strong. The Constitution of the United States says that there is no 'criminal content'. Images of child abuse would be evidence of criminal behavior. Let's not confuse the issue by muddying the waters with emotion. I believe child molesters should be shot; send 'em back, they're defective. But let's examine another 'crime', any crime... like, say, defacement of public property. Does the fact that it's illegal to deface public property mean we should remove all pictures of graffiti from the internet as 'criminal content'?
I have no objection to an investigation into the handles used on graffiti websites; but banning the content is the wrong way to go about it. That's why our constitution opposes censorship.
And I don't care what Baudrillard says; the Internet was the first taste of true expression available to everyone who can get into a public Library.
In the end, that last sentence is what will doom the Internet. Big Business and the Government cannot condone a situation where some geek with a webserver is equal in venue to say, Ford, or Wal-Mart, or CNN... They cannot tolerate a truly free forum, and will do their best to convince you that you cannot, either. In your case, it appears that they have been successful.
Of course it's ridiculous to 'give' control of the internet to 'corporations' or to 'governments'. How many times have we seen poor decisions based on a lack of information in normal life? What happens if Communist countries decide that.com is an epithet - or a violation of their economic philosophy - and pass a law banning it? Or how many governments will require a governmental firewall at the 'ingress' of the network into their country?
And if we give it to 'a' country - like the US government, who already seems to think they own it - we'll all be more subject to their insanities.
In addition, the whole concept of 'excluding content' is simply the wrong way to go about it. Censorship never accomplishes its goals, nor does it elevate content. Any step in that direction is a 'foot in the door', and excluding things because we find them objectionable is poor practice; I can probably find someone (or even a 'category' of someones) who dislikes what any given post on/. says.
The way to deal with child pornography is not "banning" it; it's prosecuting people who create and purchase it. It's working to fix the economic problems that create situations where parents will submit their children to such indignities; it's finding the sick bastards that molest and photograph children in the more affluent parts of the world. It's not giving some entity a mandate to protect us from viewing something we find offensive - because it's only a short step to protecting us from viewing something they find offensive. Like, say, open source software that doesn't honor DRM legislation.
The 'GUIFication' of the Linux kernel is interesting, but not mandatory. Make menuconfig still works, so you don't have to have X. Also, most of the bells and whistles related specifically to application space can be de-selected, so runaway featuritis is at least controlled.
The 2.6 kernel is noticeably faster on my dual Athlon 2100+mp, at the user interface; X is faster than I've ever seen it before; the realtime scheduling is awesome.
In short, as soon as you can reasonably do so, I recommend you migrate to the 2.6.x kernel.
The title is a little bit of a stretch; what I mean to say is that most of the people I exchange IMs with are abominable at spelling and worse at grammar. Fortunately for my peace of mind, it doesn't bother me very much as long as I can actually apprehend what they're trying to convey.
People that speak clearly will put punctuation in random places. One of my friends explained to me that he knew punctuation belonged in there, but he didn't know where it went, so he made it up as he went along.
In the end, however, language is a popularity contest, right? The words used the most frequently prosper and surge into the forefront of our vocabularies, and those less often used fade away. Spelling and grammar are also in flux constantly, but at a very slow rate that drops below most peoples' radars.
As time goes on and these electronic tools become more and more common, I would expect to see a levelling occur; Even though I can spell fairly well, I'd advocate phonetic spelling and reduction or elimination of homonyms. Call me a philistine, I don't care...
change for the machines. It's a stoned-the-crows-at-home Schroedinger's world.
that's why stupid assholes like yourself should recycle.
Of course, I reserve comment on the 'stupid asshole' part, but I do recycle. I'm not saying that littering is irrelevant, just far less important than the chemical pollution that the earth faces now and in the future. The 'energy expending pollution' you discuss is part of the problem I'm pointing out, no?
There are a couple of real problems; one is the recursive relationship between campaign funding and legislative favors to corporations. The second is the fact that most schools simply can't stay current in their computer programs. I know quite a few CE and CS grads who are basically clueless as to IT in the real world, with the exception of a very few schools.
Linux/BSD/etc are rapidly addressing this, but not fast enough.
I agree with much of the factual explanation here, but I disagree, to a large extent, with the conclusions. The copyright laws were never intended as a means of establishing a media empire on one idea. The copyright laws were intended to allow someone to profit from their idea, but not to own your memories (think Disney).
The spirit of that decision, I think, can only be observed in one of two ways; short duration, strong copyright laws, or long duration, weak copyright laws. The problem with the egregious Disney extensions is that they apply to other copyrights.
The ridiculous result is that Disney now owns a large percentage of what's in my head. They have relentlessly pursued copyright violations that were completely tangential to their trademarks and intellectual properties in order to establish the "don't fuck with the mouse" mindset, thus setting an example for everyone.
In short, I would quite agree with you if our copyright laws were still as originally written; I cannot agree based on current law.
I'm quite distressed at the number of posts from seemingly intelligent individuals decrying the impact of humanity on the environment and the earth in general.
Peeps, I understand that there is a lot of hysteria and piss-poor science out there about the impact we have. For instance, the crying about beer bottles and 'littering' of that sort. Guess what? A bottle is just a funny-shaped rock, to nature.
OTOH, there are impacts we have on the environment that have real dangers attached to them - specifically chemical ones. Everyone yells about the rainforest and connects it to free oxygen - but that's not the truth, is it? 97% of the earth's free oxygen is released by phytoplankton in the top 12 inches of the ocean. This area is also the very base of the food chain.
All it would take is for one coastal factory to dump some complex chemical enzym or catalyst into the ocean and it could be all over but the shouting and bleeding. We could wipe out all life on land and the earth would recover; kill the ocean, and we're done for.
(The complaint I lodged through their site's feedback mechanism)
Dear BBC;
I wanted to say that normally I am a big supporter of the BBC worldview, but this article is simply irresponsible. Stephen Evans is either a shill for the vested interests (Microsoft or SCO) or is simply a sensationalist without any significant journalistic integrity - or completely uninformed about this situation.
Even though the evidence points to the probability that this 'virus' (it's actually a trojan that takes advantage of a poor security decision in Outlook/Windows) was, and is, a tool of spammers, with the SCO/Microsoft connection being nothing more than window dressing and misdirection.
Even the Windows supporters on slashdot.org don't believe the 'Linux Community' created this malware. Why should the BBC be more gullible? Even if this malware were created by an outraged Linux zealot, it would not mean that the "Linux Community" was behind it.
This procedure could be armored against sniffing in another manner; if both endpoints synchronize to the same timeserver, an md5 hash of the epoch time and a keyphrase could be used; do it like SecureID and accept the previous and next hashes as well as the current one, and use that hash to generate the knock sequence.
Thanks to all for the info; as a PC user since early 80's, I've never had a virus or trojan on a machine that I didn't put there (experimenting)- until about four weeks ago; I scan my laptop with McAfees, AVG, and (can't remember the name offhand, but it's opensource - I'm on my LINUX workstation) Adaware 6; Adaware removes a bunch of stuff; AVG and McAffeee remove (I think it's Second.Thought or some similar); both pronounce the machine clean.
Then, at some point later, without any new software being introduced, the machine is mysteriously re-infected. I'm baffled.
You misunderstand me. I was commenting on the fact that this is a trend, not a fait accompli. I'm presuming that the trend will follow that of manufacturing. And if this article is accurate, and $11k is 5 times the average, by the time most of the development jobs have moved from here to there, it will be a powerful economic driver. In any city - even Bangalore - thousands of jobs at 5x the average income can't help but be a major capital injection.There are far more jobs that are not development or tech related here than are, but the loss of technical jobs, because of the higher-than-average pay (although certainly not 5x the average pay) creates a significant impact to the local economy.
Again, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people from India, or the Indian government; they're doing what's best for them. My issue with the H1B is the basis under which that was modified - i.e., selling the relaxed visa requirements to Congress (and the rest of the population) based on a 'lack of technical expertise', which is blatant horsehockey. The purpose of the H1b is to allow corporations to pay substandard wages and avoid taxes. The H1b employees I work with on a daily basis are no better or worse than their American counterparts; they're simply cheaper.
Also, don't forget that the 'windfall' of jobs making 5x the average pay in these cities will drive inflation there as it did in Japan, Mexico, and other places during the Great Manufacturing migration.
In short, my problem is not with you, my friend, or with India, or with people from India; you are momentarily the benficiary of an economic imbalance; but sooner or later the money coming in will not be so valuable. The influx of cash drives inflation until the average wage increases and prices come up to meet your salary; Then some other country becomes the temporary beneficiary of the economic imbalance. The people making these decisions don't care about you any more than they care about me, or the families of my friends who have lost their jobs through outsourcing.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to see PBS with the budget that Disney has. :)
If you think that Microsoft, Disney, or most other large corporations have not violated the sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, you should probably read it. The word 'monopoly' has been bandied around specifically to confuse the issue. Section 2:
"Attempt to monopolize" etc. Section 1 discusses restraint of trade - which this could most certainly be percieved as a step towards, dependin g on how Microsoft and Disney deal with the DRM issues - and with their track record, it's not looking good.
Creating a barrier to entry is what the industry is trying to accomplish with mandatory DRM. If you have to pay a $50 license for DRM, and it's illegal to distribute something (software, os, hardware, or all three) without it, then the Free Software world - and, perhaps, open source - is essentially relegated to irrelevance here in the US. And in any country that would hope to do business with US and the IMF/Wold Bank. Bleah.
Also, let's not forget Touchstone, either. Or their licensing business, which is still doing a stunning trade, judging by the number of Winnie-the-pooh and Tigger products I see.
Until we can swing a big enough monetary stick around in a guided fashion, the corporate interests will continue to control US policies.
And movies are about marketing and opinion engineering - just like politics. Our illustrious leader showed us - with one spot, standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in flyboy gear - that politics is ALL about marketing.
More to the point, you think we'll actually elect the next president?
Way back in the day, (like, '96 or something) people started really getting up in arms about porn on the web. I remember a fifteen minute diatribe by a woman that lived two doors down about the fact that she'd found her fourteen year old son looking at pictures of breasts... The pictures were actually medical pictures from a university's plastic surgery department, before and after pictures.
On the other hand, the map software issue is either incompetent or intentionally poor software design; I have many low res applications that I bought for my M505 and they all work flawlessly on my Tungsten E. Maybe the Tungsten T has problems? Ah, well. I use my PDA for PIM and Ebooks, mostly, and the Zaurus is overkill for those applications.
The Zaurus was an amazing critter; but most of its value was in pure Geek Factor. In Windows or in Linux, the Zaurus was interesting but plagued by ongoing random minor issues with synchronization, what version of QPE I was using, what the date was, and how I held my mouth. In Windows or in Linux, the Palm is nearly effortless.
The Zaurus had many neat things. I could log in to it over the network (wireless); I could run a webserver on it; I could do all kinds of system things. But in the end, the actual D of the PDA is much more usable in the Palm. I'd love to have the time and the money to develop replacements for the Palm software to run on the Zaurus, but I simply don't; I need something that works, and works well, right now.
Not to mention the fact that, comparitively, the Zaurus is enormous. It's easily half again as heavy, and an inch longer, and a little thicker, than the tungsten E.
If you go with the commercial QPE (that synchronizes well) functionality is low; if you go with the free embedded GUIs, functionality is high, but interoperability (in the form of synchronization with outlook and evolution) is low. Even with all the objections fielded in this discussion, the Palm is like a Sound Blaster - it just works.
And it's sad, too. I love Linux, I love free software, I love the entire Opensource movement, and I wanted to be much more pleased with the Zaurus. I would say, all in all, PDA linux is where desktop linux was at RedHat 5.2. It will get there, eventually.
Is it worth it?
"Idiotic" is a bit strong. The Constitution of the United States says that there is no 'criminal content'. Images of child abuse would be evidence of criminal behavior. Let's not confuse the issue by muddying the waters with emotion. I believe child molesters should be shot; send 'em back, they're defective. But let's examine another 'crime', any crime... like, say, defacement of public property. Does the fact that it's illegal to deface public property mean we should remove all pictures of graffiti from the internet as 'criminal content'?
I have no objection to an investigation into the handles used on graffiti websites; but banning the content is the wrong way to go about it. That's why our constitution opposes censorship.
And I don't care what Baudrillard says; the Internet was the first taste of true expression available to everyone who can get into a public Library.
In the end, that last sentence is what will doom the Internet. Big Business and the Government cannot condone a situation where some geek with a webserver is equal in venue to say, Ford, or Wal-Mart, or CNN... They cannot tolerate a truly free forum, and will do their best to convince you that you cannot, either. In your case, it appears that they have been successful.
And if we give it to 'a' country - like the US government, who already seems to think they own it - we'll all be more subject to their insanities.
In addition, the whole concept of 'excluding content' is simply the wrong way to go about it. Censorship never accomplishes its goals, nor does it elevate content. Any step in that direction is a 'foot in the door', and excluding things because we find them objectionable is poor practice; I can probably find someone (or even a 'category' of someones) who dislikes what any given post on /. says.
The way to deal with child pornography is not "banning" it; it's prosecuting people who create and purchase it. It's working to fix the economic problems that create situations where parents will submit their children to such indignities; it's finding the sick bastards that molest and photograph children in the more affluent parts of the world. It's not giving some entity a mandate to protect us from viewing something we find offensive - because it's only a short step to protecting us from viewing something they find offensive. Like, say, open source software that doesn't honor DRM legislation.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
The 2.6 kernel is noticeably faster on my dual Athlon 2100+mp, at the user interface; X is faster than I've ever seen it before; the realtime scheduling is awesome.
In short, as soon as you can reasonably do so, I recommend you migrate to the 2.6.x kernel.
People that speak clearly will put punctuation in random places. One of my friends explained to me that he knew punctuation belonged in there, but he didn't know where it went, so he made it up as he went along.
In the end, however, language is a popularity contest, right? The words used the most frequently prosper and surge into the forefront of our vocabularies, and those less often used fade away. Spelling and grammar are also in flux constantly, but at a very slow rate that drops below most peoples' radars.
As time goes on and these electronic tools become more and more common, I would expect to see a levelling occur; Even though I can spell fairly well, I'd advocate phonetic spelling and reduction or elimination of homonyms. Call me a philistine, I don't care...
change for the machines. It's a stoned-the-crows-at-home Schroedinger's world.
Of course, I reserve comment on the 'stupid asshole' part, but I do recycle. I'm not saying that littering is irrelevant, just far less important than the chemical pollution that the earth faces now and in the future. The 'energy expending pollution' you discuss is part of the problem I'm pointing out, no?
Linux/BSD/etc are rapidly addressing this, but not fast enough.
The spirit of that decision, I think, can only be observed in one of two ways; short duration, strong copyright laws, or long duration, weak copyright laws. The problem with the egregious Disney extensions is that they apply to other copyrights.
The ridiculous result is that Disney now owns a large percentage of what's in my head. They have relentlessly pursued copyright violations that were completely tangential to their trademarks and intellectual properties in order to establish the "don't fuck with the mouse" mindset, thus setting an example for everyone.
In short, I would quite agree with you if our copyright laws were still as originally written; I cannot agree based on current law.
Peeps, I understand that there is a lot of hysteria and piss-poor science out there about the impact we have. For instance, the crying about beer bottles and 'littering' of that sort. Guess what? A bottle is just a funny-shaped rock, to nature.
OTOH, there are impacts we have on the environment that have real dangers attached to them - specifically chemical ones. Everyone yells about the rainforest and connects it to free oxygen - but that's not the truth, is it? 97% of the earth's free oxygen is released by phytoplankton in the top 12 inches of the ocean. This area is also the very base of the food chain.
All it would take is for one coastal factory to dump some complex chemical enzym or catalyst into the ocean and it could be all over but the shouting and bleeding. We could wipe out all life on land and the earth would recover; kill the ocean, and we're done for.
He was talking about having to modify a linux kernel in order to generate the traffic to crash the BSD kernel...
I wanted to say that normally I am a big supporter of the BBC worldview, but this article is simply irresponsible. Stephen Evans is either a shill for the vested interests (Microsoft or SCO) or is simply a sensationalist without any significant journalistic integrity - or completely uninformed about this situation.
Even though the evidence points to the probability that this 'virus' (it's actually a trojan that takes advantage of a poor security decision in Outlook/Windows) was, and is, a tool of spammers, with the SCO/Microsoft connection being nothing more than window dressing and misdirection.
Even the Windows supporters on slashdot.org don't believe the 'Linux Community' created this malware. Why should the BBC be more gullible? Even if this malware were created by an outraged Linux zealot, it would not mean that the "Linux Community" was behind it.
Sadly yours,
Steve
"But every time I go to a Leafs game, some guy gets me pissed and tries to blow me!"
Ok, what's the tech market like in Canada for hard-core engineer level *Nix geeks? :) How do Canadians feel about American Immigrants? LOL
Then, at some point later, without any new software being introduced, the machine is mysteriously re-infected. I'm baffled.
Again, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people from India, or the Indian government; they're doing what's best for them. My issue with the H1B is the basis under which that was modified - i.e., selling the relaxed visa requirements to Congress (and the rest of the population) based on a 'lack of technical expertise', which is blatant horsehockey. The purpose of the H1b is to allow corporations to pay substandard wages and avoid taxes. The H1b employees I work with on a daily basis are no better or worse than their American counterparts; they're simply cheaper.
Also, don't forget that the 'windfall' of jobs making 5x the average pay in these cities will drive inflation there as it did in Japan, Mexico, and other places during the Great Manufacturing migration.
In short, my problem is not with you, my friend, or with India, or with people from India; you are momentarily the benficiary of an economic imbalance; but sooner or later the money coming in will not be so valuable. The influx of cash drives inflation until the average wage increases and prices come up to meet your salary; Then some other country becomes the temporary beneficiary of the economic imbalance. The people making these decisions don't care about you any more than they care about me, or the families of my friends who have lost their jobs through outsourcing.