Brought to you by the two-wrongs-make-a-right department.
That would be a meaningful response if the West was currently a good global citizen engaging in fair trade and not still engaging in military campaigns with the thinly veiled purpose of usurping economic resources. But as it stands, the west is still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for control of petroleum, De Beers is still financing wars in Africa to ensure the continuance of its diamond monopoly, South East Asian nations are still used as a source of cheap de facto slave labour, the IMF is still used as the G8's stick to ensure sovereignty of the third world governments is a purchasable commodity and companies like Bechtel are still pulling this sort of rubbish.
Even if that's the case and this is nothing but a thinly veiled plot to steal product knowledge, I have no problem with China using their power to extort western companies. After all, China's population (and indeed the rest of the third world) has been extorted by Western companies for the better part of two centuries now, so if you ask me, it's about time profligate western nations got a taste of what it's like at the other end of the stick.
They're just giving back what they got, now that they're big enough.
Given that this judge's decision flies in the face of established legal doctrine, industry practice and plain old common sense, I don't see how this can be anything other than either a) the judge being incredibly stupid or b) bribed.
As a practical matter, if a federal judge was that greedy, why would he or she be a federal judge?
Greed for money and greed for status are the same disease. Judges start out their legal career, not deciding to become a judge for the bribe money, but they get there and realize there's extra to be had. Not everyone who accepts a bribe does so because they cannot earn more legitimately.
My further entrenching a monopoly they compete with and making it far harder for new entrants of even existing market players to enter their space?
Oh, and why do you find it so hard to believe that Google would deliberately weaken its competitor? What if it was Microsoft brokering a similar deal with, say, Red Hat?
Seriously, enough with the "we love Google" rubbish. They're a profit seeking company, just like any other, and they don't play fair, they just have a better handle on how to direct your attention to the bones they throw at the FOSS community while they go about their business.
"it seems like the judge has decided that, whatever the law says, this matter is a waste of their time"
Never attribute to laziness (or anything else for that matter) what can adequately be explained by a bribe, particularly when an organization like the RIAA is involved.
There's only a large surplus of it due to mammoth subsidies paid to corn farmers.
Recipe for counter argument for biofuel:
a) Pay huge subsidies for corn. b) Use resulting excess corn as fuel crops c) Complain that corn is inefficient as a fuel crop and point to the low yield per acre. d) Point to the starving third world and claim that biofuel production takes food out of their mouth (yea, as if food produced in the US would get shipped to the third world anway) e) Use above as smear campaign against biofuels
Done. Big Oil's engineered anti-biofuel campaign laid bare.
In a related story, recent analysis of Slashdot posts has revealed an alarming increase in the number of people who say what they want to say by framing it as the subject of an unrelated story, when the point they are making is, in fact related to the issue at hand.
Cut it out with the finger pointing at China and Russia. The vast majority of spam comes from the US, initiated by US citizens. It's not "the Russians" at fault. Anyway, what is this? The 80s? The Mozlems are the new enemy, or didn't you get the memo?
Personally I think the form would be fine if you just took off the vigilante box. Spam can be solved by a few guys with a list of names, free air travel for a month and a box of bullets.
Those guys represent the largest companies from the entire cross section of the IT world, acting as a single unit, with the objective of filtering the Internet.
If you think that they all play by the rules, adhering to the principles of competitive fair play and not acting like a pack of wolves coordinating to engage in a pack-like feeding frenzy on the consumer's flesh, then you're quite the deluded idealist.
"I like having my music files from all the computers I touch. I want my email everywhere too."
Thsse are standard server-side services. Cloud computing's end game is the moving of all data processing and creation off the client computer. My understanding of it is that the browser will become the OS and PCs will become overpriced thin clients. This is the model that is most profitable for the business sector, and I guarantee you that this is the model they have their eyes fixed on. The link above to the lobby group formed to filter the Internet is part of this same goal; to ensure that all computing is done in a model that can be leveraged to ensure regular payments.
"But you should at least be able to admit that for some people, and for some uses, cloud stuff is preferred."
I can admit that. however, like Windows, big business is pushing something that many who don't know any better will use out of ignorance of a) alternatives and b) big business' real nefarious agenda.
"Sure, managing *a* local office suite shouldn't be too difficult (though there are plenty of people who can't manage even this!), but what about thousands across an enterprise?"
Managing thousands of machines is only hard due to Windows' inherent flaws. An org that properly displaced Windows for Macs or properly configured Linux boxes would not have the headaches involved in administering thousands of machines running a rickety unstable OS.
"If you're really upset about people saying that cloud computing is the *only* or *always* best (which isn't what your post actually says) then I'd agree with you. But you are being just as silly as that hypothetical hysteric."
No, actually. I'm trying to convince you that if "cloud computing" catches on because the ignorant masses start using it, we're all screwed, as big business will see to it that personal computing as a paradigm atrophies, giving them a monopoly on the very use of the PC which can now be charged at a monthly fee. It may seem unlikely at this point in time, but big business will wait the decade or two that it will take while people slowly get frogboiled into this new paradigm. They have the incentive, they have the resources and we all know they have the willingness to keep at it.
For these reasons I would like it if informed people did not recommend "cloud computing" to the masses. It is not in anybody's long term interests except big business. You're only OK with it for now, because you, like the proverbial frog, think that the water just seems nice and warm.
Maintaining a PC is not as hard as you imply it, and with the onslaught of real OSes (Mac, Linux, even desktop BSD taking bites out of Windows' market share), the days of regular crashing, reboots and virus infection are numbered as are the days of Windows.
Windows' hegemony will only last a short while longer unless it becomes at least as reliable and secure as a Mac, because it's previous advantage, ease of use, has eroded away to almost nothing.
So no, I don't accept that people want to use Google Apps because it is more reliable and less work to maintain than a local office suite. I don't accept that Google Maps is inherently better than a local mapping package. I don't want to have to get online every time I want to use my PC. It's hard enough already finding power for your laptop, making people also have to find an Internet jack before they can do anything meaningful with their PC is *not* a step forward.
RMS is right. Cloud computing is big business' push to turn what was a previously unacceptably democratic computing paradigm into one that can be controlled by only those players with enough funding to set up "clouds".
The migration away from mainframes in the 80s was supposed to avoid just the problem with massively centralized computing: I.e., the problem that centralized computing forces everyone to be doing the same thing or at very least, conforming to the same design parameters.
Personally, I like my PC. I don't want to be constrained to only doing things that can be done in "cloud space". Having an OS that I can do whatever I want on, in absolute privacy and not having to rely on corporate policy to be at least partially friendly to me is something that I value. I don't want Google, Yahoo or Facebook letting the government look over my shoulder, or their big corporate buddies using their data to shove ads down my throat. It also means that I can't just buy a computer and use it as much as I want for no extra cost. Now I have to pay Internet bills, plus whatever software service charges will be applicable in this new forthcoming cloud.
On another note, cloud computing makes it *impossible* for the masses to implement proper privacy policies or cryptography. You think it's hard at the moment to get people to use secure email? Try implementing privacy when everyone's using Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.
So called SaaS/cloud computing is just a way to ensure that the big end of town gets to watch and control what everyone else is doing, and bill them by the month.
It's a term invented by idiot managers who saw all those diagrams where the wider internet is represented by a picture of a cloud and were too stupid to grasp the concept of a representative diagram, so they took the picture of the cloud to be literal, and now there is an entire generation of managers who have an image of electrons flying around the sky. They confusion they suffer is only exacerbated when there's a thunderstorm and they hear the word "torrent" to describe the rain, thinking that the storm is the result of those damned P2P users.
There are ways to safe GET requests. Unnecessarily avoiding the use of GET results in web sites that are not bookmarkable and where users can't provide links to their friends. So "hey check this out" and pasting a link becomes "hey check this out go to the main page, click here, then there, then on the other thing, then scroll down a bit to find the item in the list and then its halfway down that page".
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, you alarmists always come up with the most outlandish doomsday scenarios.
That would be a meaningful response if the West was currently a good global citizen engaging in fair trade and not still engaging in military campaigns with the thinly veiled purpose of usurping economic resources. But as it stands, the west is still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for control of petroleum, De Beers is still financing wars in Africa to ensure the continuance of its diamond monopoly, South East Asian nations are still used as a source of cheap de facto slave labour, the IMF is still used as the G8's stick to ensure sovereignty of the third world governments is a purchasable commodity and companies like Bechtel are still pulling this sort of rubbish.
So, sorry, your moral high horse has no legs.
Even if that's the case and this is nothing but a thinly veiled plot to steal product knowledge, I have no problem with China using their power to extort western companies. After all, China's population (and indeed the rest of the third world) has been extorted by Western companies for the better part of two centuries now, so if you ask me, it's about time profligate western nations got a taste of what it's like at the other end of the stick.
They're just giving back what they got, now that they're big enough.
Can I send you my CV? I've been trying to get a job with the RIAA as a shill for ages.
Given that this judge's decision flies in the face of established legal doctrine, industry practice and plain old common sense, I don't see how this can be anything other than either a) the judge being incredibly stupid or b) bribed.
Greed for money and greed for status are the same disease. Judges start out their legal career, not deciding to become a judge for the bribe money, but they get there and realize there's extra to be had. Not everyone who accepts a bribe does so because they cannot earn more legitimately.
"how can a non-exclusive deal weaken yahoo"
My further entrenching a monopoly they compete with and making it far harder for new entrants of even existing market players to enter their space?
Oh, and why do you find it so hard to believe that Google would deliberately weaken its competitor? What if it was Microsoft brokering a similar deal with, say, Red Hat?
Seriously, enough with the "we love Google" rubbish. They're a profit seeking company, just like any other, and they don't play fair, they just have a better handle on how to direct your attention to the bones they throw at the FOSS community while they go about their business.
"it seems like the judge has decided that, whatever the law says, this matter is a waste of their time"
Never attribute to laziness (or anything else for that matter) what can adequately be explained by a bribe, particularly when an organization like the RIAA is involved.
There's only a large surplus of it due to mammoth subsidies paid to corn farmers.
Recipe for counter argument for biofuel:
a) Pay huge subsidies for corn.
b) Use resulting excess corn as fuel crops
c) Complain that corn is inefficient as a fuel crop and point to the low yield per acre.
d) Point to the starving third world and claim that biofuel production takes food out of their mouth (yea, as if food produced in the US would get shipped to the third world anway)
e) Use above as smear campaign against biofuels
Done. Big Oil's engineered anti-biofuel campaign laid bare.
Monster cables are great if you're too rich to care that you're buying the technological equivalent of magic beans.
Not for Elvis or Tupac.
Who the hell modded this interesting?!
In a related story, recent analysis of Slashdot posts has revealed an alarming increase in the number of people who say what they want to say by framing it as the subject of an unrelated story, when the point they are making is, in fact related to the issue at hand.
A nice can of Woof-O should do the trick. You can get the girl out of the way with a handful of gauze and a bottle of chloroform.
This piece of dating advice brought to you by Slashdot!
Hire good enough PIs, we'll find the guy. And collect all his money too.
Get geeky cops to explain it to the rest of them.
No, they'd be dead, so their business would be left in tact for their next of kin who would now be less inclined to spam.
Just get George Bush to declare a War on Spam.
A *global* War on Spam.
Eh? How is a dead spammer not a solution to the problem?
Hire the members of the Russian mafia who *don't* spam to help on that one.
+1 awesome childhood reference!
Cut it out with the finger pointing at China and Russia. The vast majority of spam comes from the US, initiated by US citizens. It's not "the Russians" at fault. Anyway, what is this? The 80s? The Mozlems are the new enemy, or didn't you get the memo?
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso
Personally I think the form would be fine if you just took off the vigilante box. Spam can be solved by a few guys with a list of names, free air travel for a month and a box of bullets.
"Big business, as you put it, doesn't function as a single unit."
Oh really?
Those guys represent the largest companies from the entire cross section of the IT world, acting as a single unit, with the objective of filtering the Internet.
If you think that they all play by the rules, adhering to the principles of competitive fair play and not acting like a pack of wolves coordinating to engage in a pack-like feeding frenzy on the consumer's flesh, then you're quite the deluded idealist.
"I like having my music files from all the computers I touch. I want my email everywhere too."
Thsse are standard server-side services. Cloud computing's end game is the moving of all data processing and creation off the client computer. My understanding of it is that the browser will become the OS and PCs will become overpriced thin clients. This is the model that is most profitable for the business sector, and I guarantee you that this is the model they have their eyes fixed on. The link above to the lobby group formed to filter the Internet is part of this same goal; to ensure that all computing is done in a model that can be leveraged to ensure regular payments.
"But you should at least be able to admit that for some people, and for some uses, cloud stuff is preferred."
I can admit that. however, like Windows, big business is pushing something that many who don't know any better will use out of ignorance of a) alternatives and b) big business' real nefarious agenda.
"Sure, managing *a* local office suite shouldn't be too difficult (though there are plenty of people who can't manage even this!), but what about thousands across an enterprise?"
Managing thousands of machines is only hard due to Windows' inherent flaws. An org that properly displaced Windows for Macs or properly configured Linux boxes would not have the headaches involved in administering thousands of machines running a rickety unstable OS.
"If you're really upset about people saying that cloud computing is the *only* or *always* best (which isn't what your post actually says) then I'd agree with you. But you are being just as silly as that hypothetical hysteric."
No, actually. I'm trying to convince you that if "cloud computing" catches on because the ignorant masses start using it, we're all screwed, as big business will see to it that personal computing as a paradigm atrophies, giving them a monopoly on the very use of the PC which can now be charged at a monthly fee. It may seem unlikely at this point in time, but big business will wait the decade or two that it will take while people slowly get frogboiled into this new paradigm. They have the incentive, they have the resources and we all know they have the willingness to keep at it.
For these reasons I would like it if informed people did not recommend "cloud computing" to the masses. It is not in anybody's long term interests except big business. You're only OK with it for now, because you, like the proverbial frog, think that the water just seems nice and warm.
Maintaining a PC is not as hard as you imply it, and with the onslaught of real OSes (Mac, Linux, even desktop BSD taking bites out of Windows' market share), the days of regular crashing, reboots and virus infection are numbered as are the days of Windows.
Windows' hegemony will only last a short while longer unless it becomes at least as reliable and secure as a Mac, because it's previous advantage, ease of use, has eroded away to almost nothing.
So no, I don't accept that people want to use Google Apps because it is more reliable and less work to maintain than a local office suite. I don't accept that Google Maps is inherently better than a local mapping package. I don't want to have to get online every time I want to use my PC. It's hard enough already finding power for your laptop, making people also have to find an Internet jack before they can do anything meaningful with their PC is *not* a step forward.
RMS is right. Cloud computing is big business' push to turn what was a previously unacceptably democratic computing paradigm into one that can be controlled by only those players with enough funding to set up "clouds".
The migration away from mainframes in the 80s was supposed to avoid just the problem with massively centralized computing: I.e., the problem that centralized computing forces everyone to be doing the same thing or at very least, conforming to the same design parameters.
Personally, I like my PC. I don't want to be constrained to only doing things that can be done in "cloud space". Having an OS that I can do whatever I want on, in absolute privacy and not having to rely on corporate policy to be at least partially friendly to me is something that I value. I don't want Google, Yahoo or Facebook letting the government look over my shoulder, or their big corporate buddies using their data to shove ads down my throat. It also means that I can't just buy a computer and use it as much as I want for no extra cost. Now I have to pay Internet bills, plus whatever software service charges will be applicable in this new forthcoming cloud.
On another note, cloud computing makes it *impossible* for the masses to implement proper privacy policies or cryptography. You think it's hard at the moment to get people to use secure email? Try implementing privacy when everyone's using Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.
So called SaaS/cloud computing is just a way to ensure that the big end of town gets to watch and control what everyone else is doing, and bill them by the month.
Thanks, but no thanks.
It's a term invented by idiot managers who saw all those diagrams where the wider internet is represented by a picture of a cloud and were too stupid to grasp the concept of a representative diagram, so they took the picture of the cloud to be literal, and now there is an entire generation of managers who have an image of electrons flying around the sky. They confusion they suffer is only exacerbated when there's a thunderstorm and they hear the word "torrent" to describe the rain, thinking that the storm is the result of those damned P2P users.
The Internet would survive Google's demise. It was designed to survive a nuclear attack and it survived Excite's demise. It'd survive without Google.
Just a reminder, as many people seem to have forgotten:
Google != The Internet
There are ways to safe GET requests. Unnecessarily avoiding the use of GET results in web sites that are not bookmarkable and where users can't provide links to their friends. So "hey check this out" and pasting a link becomes "hey check this out go to the main page, click here, then there, then on the other thing, then scroll down a bit to find the item in the list and then its halfway down that page".
If I suspected feminism lacked a sense of humor, I now know that to be the case. Oh, and Summer Glau, is that you?