>But it's naive to believe that is why she is pushing for it.
Hold on a minute. She supports P2P and is against the DMCA and this is good for SV how? DMCA gives software companies some interesting powers regarding fighting reverse engineering by putting in token secuity measures. Think Adobe. P2P is the main conduit for software copyright infringment. I don't see how SV benefits from any of this.
Its not like the computer industry is fighting against DRM and other nasties. If the content industry is destined to get something then SV will find a way to make money off of it. "Buy our DRM tech its foolproof!" NO! Buy ours!!"
I love how WWII is suddenly an excuse to fight and a way to criticize diplomecy. A simple act of cracking open of a history book will show you that the UN was formed because of people with your "stike first" attitude. Isolationism and unilateral action has lead to two world wars. World leaders realized this and got together to keep war down to a minumum.
As someone pointed out already, how would events have turned out if Europeans got more involved with what was going on before or right after the invasion of Poland. Or better yet, how would things have turned out if there was a UN back then.
Regardless, if you have to bring up Nazi Germany and the holocaust as your only/best defense then you've already invoked Godwin and showed me that your rationalizition depends on extremes and not on more common, realistic events.
Norwegian Appeals Court to Hear "DVD Jon" Case Related: EFF media advisory, Johansen case archive, Free Jon mailing list
I don't really want to nitpick, but as a member of the EFF I expect to hear about something as seemingly as important as BALANCE from them ASAP. Where is the free fax page? I think Rep Lofgren can use all the support she can get.
I'm also uncomfortable using the "write your rep" system. A real phonecall or a physical fax is much harder to ignore than a bunch of emails. Not to mention email is routinely abused by special interest groups with fake addresses voicing fake concerns.
Time to bust out the fax modem I guess. Anyone know of free fax over IP that will fax to Washington?
A lot of schools sign Microsoft Campus-wide agreements for deep-discounts. You can pretty much run into any CS professor and hear a groan when you mention unix because they don't like the MS agreements much either.
> Yes, but while they're free, they don't necessarily do the job.
Actually they get the job done, at least for me last quarter. As a small social experiment I decided to use only open source and non-MS apps for school. I study CS at an all-Microsoft campus so it's a bit more of challenge than it probably sounds.
Open Office took care of my "office" needs just fine. The doc format didn't crap out on me often and the app itself isn't bad. It could really use some nice 16-bit cutesy icons though.
Mozilla and other gecko-based browsers took care of all my web stuff. My school is heavily into making use of the web (for better or worse) and I didn't have any problems using Moz even though the sites had huge disclaimers about using non-IE web browsers. Other than pointing out the fact that they weren't sending proper MIME types I got along just fine.
The stuff works, it may not be as pretty or arguably "user-friendly" (whatever that means when you consider MS's own learning curve), but it will do the job.
You're right, open source is not the swiss army knife of software, but it is a workable and viable alternative. The biggest problem I see is that there's so little effort evangelizing open source Windows apps compared to Linux.
I'd be a lot more comfortable if I heard something like "Oh, Open Office runs on Linux too?" more often. Or ever.
>Moreover, It takes courage to advocate and perform an unpleasent but neccessary action.
Oh man, what can't you justify with your post? It doesn't take much courage to move parts of the world's largest military into a sitting duck country for political and economic reasons. Really now, we're not trying to end a world war or anything, if anything we're helping to start one.
Not to mention you aren't even above name calling, so I'm probably wasting my time.
>and those people we would call weak-willed moral relativists.
Why are mod chips even illegal? They give equipment owners the ability to play whatever the hell they want on their machines. Go after the "pirates" not the guys who sell you the means to control your device. The game industry, along with the content industry, expect you to buy the equipment and the games/music but consider backing up the software or music to be a crime and thanks to the DMCA it is.
Sure, the mod chips can be used to play games that aren't officially released yet (overseas releases) just like multi-region DVD players and they let you play a copied game if you choose. They have legitimate uses and hell this is my equipment I'll do as I please with it. It blows my mind that this 22 year old will be in debt for the rest of his days to pay off his legal fees on his deal AND the fine he's going to get AND serve time in prison (probably) because hardware manufacturers don't want you touching the inside of their magic black boxes.
On top of it all, they're seizing domain names (who game then that right?) to point to their absurd pro-industry propaganda. Lets sum up their message.
1. Piracy is copying/selling stuff you dont own.
2. Mod chips let you do anything you want with your machine.
These things have nothing in common but an easy to arrest 22 year old.
Why not try electroluminscent wire? I bought a bunch a couple years ago for a quick and dirty Tron halloween outfit. Not only was it a smashing sucess which got me more free drinks than I could handle thus creating a drunken smashed Tron, but I'm sure my night visibility was amazing. I didn't get run over once!
Even the cheapest elwire can be bought with an sequencer so you could build a simple circuit and make your clothes tell drivers if you intend to turn right or left, like giant body sized blinkers.
Nonsense. Google is not only a real word (think back to wacky math facts from 4th grade) they're complaining about being in a dictionary. Google could make a principled stand like, "This is a dictionary, not a competing company."
But they won't. Google has become the 800lbs gorilla we love to complain about. Arguably, any company that grows fast enough eventually becomes Microsoft.
Techies used to love Bill Gates, he was the lone nerd vs. the IBM suits. He won out, yet we all lost. Now he's the most hated man in the IT industry.
Apple plays the IP game all the time. From ridiculous "look and feel" lawsuits to their lawsuit against the Church of Satan for using their Apple logo on their page. Of course I've seen that logo on every Mac lover's page, but it looks like someone in power at Apple has no love for religious tolerance or some fundie writing campaign really paid off.
Google in any practical sense of the word "owns" USENET. Its the number one search engine and possibly the one useful one around. It keeps, arguably, illegal caches of webpages. It just bought blogger.
This isn't some lame conspiracy theory. Google is expanding aggressively and there's lots of money to be made. Obviously this lawsuit shows that the lawyers are very much in charge and Google wants to protect its business come hell, highwater, or harmless little online dictionaries. You can keep making excuses or you can call them on their over-litigious attitude.
Welcome to the real world. Companies aren't nice, they're money making machines. The best we can hope for is that they don't constatly piss on the rest of us while trying to make a buck.
Time to replace "I'm Okay, You're Okay" with "Backup often and we'll all be Okay."
Not to mention The Nation and Harpers
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
>Utne Reader (uck) and Mother Jones (yeah).
Or on The Nation or Harpers. They come in dead tree format so no more wireless laptops in the bathroom. There's a decent essay out there of how Salon spends its money (giant office spaces, high living, etc) that makes me not want to help them, especially when some very decent papers like MaJones or The Nation do what salon does a lot better.
What bothers me most is the assumption that there is no room for liberal media and people using salon as proof. Salon is just a badly run company ready to join its dot com brethrens at fuckedcompany. They simply failed to compete against more established and better left-leaning news outlets.
Just last night I was commenting to a friend that a the second band out of a three band lineup (ending with Damo Suzuki) literally took more time to setup than time they were given to play.
I immedialtly thought of how a digital infrastructure owned by the venue would make things so much easier for everyone involved, help create cheap digital instruments, and make expensive tube amps a thing of the past. Of course, few guitarist are going to give up their tube equipment for some wacky digital revolution, but there are some real pros here and a lot of cons related simply to the intertia of not changing.
Imagine setting up simply by putting your USB flash card on your keychain into a PC and seeing your presets regarding amp, tone, effects, etc. We're not just talking guitars here, but anything that could be digitally modeled and something that could be built like a thin client.
Its probably not practical in commercial settings, but in places where money is tight and centralization is a bit easier to manage it could bring "thin clients" to music. I'm sure this could have applications in schools with tight music budgets. As long as the physical interface isn't too weird e.g. the digital guitar still has 6 strings or string like objects, the trumpet still has to blown into, the drums still need to be hit properly, etc then these skills should be easy to carry over to "real" traditional instruments.
Kottke.org something something.. COOL!!!!!!! theonion.com something something FUNNY!!!!!! Which Garbage Pail Jr Kid are U?! TRY IT!! I'M SMELLY MCGEE!!!! I'm gonna move out at 18!!! MOM SUCKS!!!! New Homestar Runner this week. SO COOL!!!! Dog bites man;-P HAHA IRONY!!! IE update out!! AWESOME PRIVACY CONTROL DUDEZ My mom totally hates my hair!!! SUCH A BITCH!!! Wow you can block pop-unders!! KEWL ITS FREE!! Flash RULEZ!! This movie is wack ya'all!!! Buffy something something!!! !!!!!! Man bits dog back!! SUPER IRONY!!
> Harsh, but preferable to some jerk putting DRM in my hardware.
What makes you think these two are mutually exclusive? The university, ideally, should be fighting to control their computers, in service of its students, as they wish without outside influences
Do you really think devulging personal information, sniffing packets, and reporting this to an outside authority without a warrant is good? Do you really think DRM will be put on hold because some student gets busted as an, "example?"
I seriously doubt it. This is one of the many hard-armed tactics the record companies use. Its not a solution and certainly does not make DRM less appealing to the PC and content industry.
>catch is if you want to buy from them you're going to need to order in bulk just like Dell do.
Naww, just buy it used. If the submitter is so hot to make a political statement then buy it used. The MS tax has already been paid. MS is not going to make more money from ebay. The end result is the same. MS makes zero more dollars this way.
Much like the one million monkeys theory, eventually with enough computing and a whole hell lot of good luck the recipient will get your message. Unbreakable? Sure.
Practical? Umm, well you just have to weed out the "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times" results a few trillion times.
When I use a computer at the school lab I always run Trend Micro's Housecall in the background. That is if they haven't disabled ActiveX. I'm assuming it would catch the popular keyloggers and trojans. Of course, its nearly impossible to stop someone who is really motivated from keylogging, stealing, murdering, etc, but it sure beats nothing and if I do find something I'm making sure someone who makes policy will hear my complaint.
How about an app which listens for keyloggers? There has to be a way to detect keylogging regardless of how its done. Why can't this be built into the heuristic part of anti-virus scanners?
How about a virtual keyboard? Web-based services (hotmail, hushmail, etc) could spring up a Java box with randomly ordered letters and numbers and you simply use your mouse to click on the proper letter. Just make it small enough so no one can shoulder-surf without making themselves noticable.
This isn't really a problem. All the card needs is a small digital display installed. If too expensive a couple flat LEDs with 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, etc should give an approximate value without making the card too much more expensive.
Fox told Paul Krassner and Castellaneta that they couldn't release a Homer simpson introduction to Krassner's audio book/album. You can still get it on web in real format here:
> The reason: the food is so shitty that the taste disappears when it is processed. It has to be added 'back'...
From what I gathered it had a lot more to do with enhancing and creating a "McDonalds" taste more than anything else. That's why fast food doesn't taste like the exact same IBP ground beef you buy at the grocery store.
What I don't like is the neo-luddite response to this. When was the last time you had an "authentic" culinary experience? How "real" is antibiotic-filled meat processed eight-ways til Sunday? More importantly, how many people can afford good food?
I don't see this as anything but a more advanced form of putting salt on your salad.
You may be more right than you think. According to wired Clark left on a very anti-Microsoft sounding note only to be replaced by an ex-MS crony. Afterall, this is the Bush administration, they're doing a wonderful job proving how unbelievably complacent Americans are.
Clarke, in an e-mail sent overnight Thursday to colleagues, cited damage from the weekend's infection that struck hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, slowing e-mail and Web surfing and even shutting down some banking systems. He called the attacking software "a dumb worm that was easily and cheaply made."
Slashdot Mirror
>But it's naive to believe that is why she is pushing for it.
Hold on a minute. She supports P2P and is against the DMCA and this is good for SV how? DMCA gives software companies some interesting powers regarding fighting reverse engineering by putting in token secuity measures. Think Adobe. P2P is the main conduit for software copyright infringment. I don't see how SV benefits from any of this.
Its not like the computer industry is fighting against DRM and other nasties. If the content industry is destined to get something then SV will find a way to make money off of it. "Buy our DRM tech its foolproof!" NO! Buy ours!!"
I love how WWII is suddenly an excuse to fight and a way to criticize diplomecy. A simple act of cracking open of a history book will show you that the UN was formed because of people with your "stike first" attitude. Isolationism and unilateral action has lead to two world wars. World leaders realized this and got together to keep war down to a minumum.
As someone pointed out already, how would events have turned out if Europeans got more involved with what was going on before or right after the invasion of Poland. Or better yet, how would things have turned out if there was a UN back then.
Regardless, if you have to bring up Nazi Germany and the holocaust as your only/best defense then you've already invoked Godwin and showed me that your rationalizition depends on extremes and not on more common, realistic events.
So where's the EFF mass-email on this?
As of 7pm CST, their front page newest items are:
March 7-11
Cory Doctorow at SWSX
Norwegian Appeals Court to Hear "DVD Jon" Case
Related: EFF media advisory, Johansen case archive, Free Jon mailing list
I don't really want to nitpick, but as a member of the EFF I expect to hear about something as seemingly as important as BALANCE from them ASAP. Where is the free fax page? I think Rep Lofgren can use all the support she can get.
I'm also uncomfortable using the "write your rep" system. A real phonecall or a physical fax is much harder to ignore than a bunch of emails. Not to mention email is routinely abused by special interest groups with fake addresses voicing fake concerns.
Time to bust out the fax modem I guess. Anyone know of free fax over IP that will fax to Washington?
>What is it that people see in anime?
I think its just a reliable source for tons of science fiction. Wherever science fiction goes geeks are sure to follow.
I don't think its a big coincedence that the most popular titles are pretty much sci-fi or use a sci-fi setting.
>What are these schools??
A lot of schools sign Microsoft Campus-wide agreements for deep-discounts. You can pretty much run into any CS professor and hear a groan when you mention unix because they don't like the MS agreements much either.
> Yes, but while they're free, they don't necessarily do the job.
Actually they get the job done, at least for me last quarter. As a small social experiment I decided to use only open source and non-MS apps for school. I study CS at an all-Microsoft campus so it's a bit more of challenge than it probably sounds.
Open Office took care of my "office" needs just fine. The doc format didn't crap out on me often and the app itself isn't bad. It could really use some nice 16-bit cutesy icons though.
Mozilla and other gecko-based browsers took care of all my web stuff. My school is heavily into making use of the web (for better or worse) and I didn't have any problems using Moz even though the sites had huge disclaimers about using non-IE web browsers. Other than pointing out the fact that they weren't sending proper MIME types I got along just fine.
The stuff works, it may not be as pretty or arguably "user-friendly" (whatever that means when you consider MS's own learning curve), but it will do the job.
You're right, open source is not the swiss army knife of software, but it is a workable and viable alternative. The biggest problem I see is that there's so little effort evangelizing open source Windows apps compared to Linux.
I'd be a lot more comfortable if I heard something like "Oh, Open Office runs on Linux too?" more often. Or ever.
>Moreover, It takes courage to advocate and perform an unpleasent but neccessary action.
Oh man, what can't you justify with your post? It doesn't take much courage to move parts of the world's largest military into a sitting duck country for political and economic reasons. Really now, we're not trying to end a world war or anything, if anything we're helping to start one.
Not to mention you aren't even above name calling, so I'm probably wasting my time.
>and those people we would call weak-willed moral relativists.
Why are mod chips even illegal? They give equipment owners the ability to play whatever the hell they want on their machines. Go after the "pirates" not the guys who sell you the means to control your device. The game industry, along with the content industry, expect you to buy the equipment and the games/music but consider backing up the software or music to be a crime and thanks to the DMCA it is.
Sure, the mod chips can be used to play games that aren't officially released yet (overseas releases) just like multi-region DVD players and they let you play a copied game if you choose. They have legitimate uses and hell this is my equipment I'll do as I please with it. It blows my mind that this 22 year old will be in debt for the rest of his days to pay off his legal fees on his deal AND the fine he's going to get AND serve time in prison (probably) because hardware manufacturers don't want you touching the inside of their magic black boxes.
On top of it all, they're seizing domain names (who game then that right?) to point to their absurd pro-industry propaganda. Lets sum up their message.
1. Piracy is copying/selling stuff you dont own.
2. Mod chips let you do anything you want with your machine.
These things have nothing in common but an easy to arrest 22 year old.
Why not try electroluminscent wire? I bought a bunch a couple years ago for a quick and dirty Tron halloween outfit. Not only was it a smashing sucess which got me more free drinks than I could handle thus creating a drunken smashed Tron, but I'm sure my night visibility was amazing. I didn't get run over once!
Even the cheapest elwire can be bought with an sequencer so you could build a simple circuit and make your clothes tell drivers if you intend to turn right or left, like giant body sized blinkers.
>Otherwise, they lose the trademark.
Nonsense. Google is not only a real word (think back to wacky math facts from 4th grade) they're complaining about being in a dictionary. Google could make a principled stand like, "This is a dictionary, not a competing company."
But they won't. Google has become the 800lbs gorilla we love to complain about. Arguably, any company that grows fast enough eventually becomes Microsoft.
Techies used to love Bill Gates, he was the lone nerd vs. the IBM suits. He won out, yet we all lost. Now he's the most hated man in the IT industry.
Apple plays the IP game all the time. From ridiculous "look and feel" lawsuits to their lawsuit against the Church of Satan for using their Apple logo on their page. Of course I've seen that logo on every Mac lover's page, but it looks like someone in power at Apple has no love for religious tolerance or some fundie writing campaign really paid off.
Google in any practical sense of the word "owns" USENET. Its the number one search engine and possibly the one useful one around. It keeps, arguably, illegal caches of webpages. It just bought blogger.
This isn't some lame conspiracy theory. Google is expanding aggressively and there's lots of money to be made. Obviously this lawsuit shows that the lawyers are very much in charge and Google wants to protect its business come hell, highwater, or harmless little online dictionaries. You can keep making excuses or you can call them on their over-litigious attitude.
Welcome to the real world. Companies aren't nice, they're money making machines. The best we can hope for is that they don't constatly piss on the rest of us while trying to make a buck.
Time to replace "I'm Okay, You're Okay" with "Backup often and we'll all be Okay."
>Utne Reader (uck) and Mother Jones (yeah).
Or on The Nation or Harpers. They come in dead tree format so no more wireless laptops in the bathroom. There's a decent essay out there of how Salon spends its money (giant office spaces, high living, etc) that makes me not want to help them, especially when some very decent papers like MaJones or The Nation do what salon does a lot better.
What bothers me most is the assumption that there is no room for liberal media and people using salon as proof. Salon is just a badly run company ready to join its dot com brethrens at fuckedcompany. They simply failed to compete against more established and better left-leaning news outlets.
Just last night I was commenting to a friend that a the second band out of a three band lineup (ending with Damo Suzuki) literally took more time to setup than time they were given to play.
I immedialtly thought of how a digital infrastructure owned by the venue would make things so much easier for everyone involved, help create cheap digital instruments, and make expensive tube amps a thing of the past. Of course, few guitarist are going to give up their tube equipment for some wacky digital revolution, but there are some real pros here and a lot of cons related simply to the intertia of not changing.
Imagine setting up simply by putting your USB flash card on your keychain into a PC and seeing your presets regarding amp, tone, effects, etc. We're not just talking guitars here, but anything that could be digitally modeled and something that could be built like a thin client.
Its probably not practical in commercial settings, but in places where money is tight and centralization is a bit easier to manage it could bring "thin clients" to music. I'm sure this could have applications in schools with tight music budgets. As long as the physical interface isn't too weird e.g. the digital guitar still has 6 strings or string like objects, the trumpet still has to blown into, the drums still need to be hit properly, etc then these skills should be easy to carry over to "real" traditional instruments.
Kottke.org something something.. COOL!!!!!!! ;-P HAHA IRONY!!!
theonion.com something something FUNNY!!!!!!
Which Garbage Pail Jr Kid are U?! TRY IT!! I'M SMELLY MCGEE!!!!
I'm gonna move out at 18!!! MOM SUCKS!!!!
New Homestar Runner this week. SO COOL!!!!
Dog bites man
IE update out!! AWESOME PRIVACY CONTROL DUDEZ
My mom totally hates my hair!!! SUCH A BITCH!!!
Wow you can block pop-unders!! KEWL ITS FREE!!
Flash RULEZ!! This movie is wack ya'all!!!
Buffy something something!!! !!!!!!
Man bits dog back!! SUPER IRONY!!
etc
> Harsh, but preferable to some jerk putting DRM in my hardware.
What makes you think these two are mutually exclusive? The university, ideally, should be fighting to control their computers, in service of its students, as they wish without outside influences
Do you really think devulging personal information, sniffing packets, and reporting this to an outside authority without a warrant is good? Do you really think DRM will be put on hold because some student gets busted as an, "example?"
I seriously doubt it. This is one of the many hard-armed tactics the record companies use. Its not a solution and certainly does not make DRM less appealing to the PC and content industry.
>catch is if you want to buy from them you're going to need to order in bulk just like Dell do.
Naww, just buy it used. If the submitter is so hot to make a political statement then buy it used. The MS tax has already been paid. MS is not going to make more money from ebay. The end result is the same. MS makes zero more dollars this way.
Much like the one million monkeys theory, eventually with enough computing and a whole hell lot of good luck the recipient will get your message. Unbreakable? Sure.
Practical? Umm, well you just have to weed out the "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times" results a few trillion times.
When I use a computer at the school lab I always run Trend Micro's Housecall in the background. That is if they haven't disabled ActiveX. I'm assuming it would catch the popular keyloggers and trojans. Of course, its nearly impossible to stop someone who is really motivated from keylogging, stealing, murdering, etc, but it sure beats nothing and if I do find something I'm making sure someone who makes policy will hear my complaint.
How about an app which listens for keyloggers? There has to be a way to detect keylogging regardless of how its done. Why can't this be built into the heuristic part of anti-virus scanners?
How about a virtual keyboard? Web-based services (hotmail, hushmail, etc) could spring up a Java box with randomly ordered letters and numbers and you simply use your mouse to click on the proper letter. Just make it small enough so no one can shoulder-surf without making themselves noticable.
This isn't really a problem. All the card needs is a small digital display installed. If too expensive a couple flat LEDs with 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, etc should give an approximate value without making the card too much more expensive.
Fox told Paul Krassner and Castellaneta that they couldn't release a Homer simpson introduction to Krassner's audio book/album. You can still get it on web in real format here:
click
Anime and Magna collection: $2,400
Sewing supplies: $59
2 reams of polyester: $22
A gallon of kerosene: $8
The look on your buddy's face when all that cheap highly flammable polyester melts to your burning skin: priceless.
Most banks don't, but Bank of America does. Washington Mutual also. Do a google search. Bank smart.
> The reason: the food is so shitty that the taste disappears when it is processed. It has to be added 'back'...
From what I gathered it had a lot more to do with enhancing and creating a "McDonalds" taste more than anything else. That's why fast food doesn't taste like the exact same IBP ground beef you buy at the grocery store.
What I don't like is the neo-luddite response to this. When was the last time you had an "authentic" culinary experience? How "real" is antibiotic-filled meat processed eight-ways til Sunday? More importantly, how many people can afford good food?
I don't see this as anything but a more advanced form of putting salt on your salad.
>The truth is, Windows needs to be pretty much re-written from the ground up with a focus on security.
It was. Its called NT. Didn't work too well did it?