That's a stupid solution. Making Kazaa slow ALL the time punishes those who were only going to use it once in a while. What makes more sense is to track how many bytes of transfer a machine uses on each port per day (or week, or month, or whatever works best), and throttle only those machines that are using a lot of Kazaa. Don't punish the guy who's only downloading a 20 meg file once a week by making him wait 21 minutes for it, when the actual target you're after is the guy downloading several CD images a day.
In other words, don't punish the occasional bursters. Occasional bursting is more efficient than a sustained connection.
[...] have the option of allowing users to turn it off.
Unless *large number* of users do this, it won't help. Because what will happen is that more and more you will find media that refuses to run unless you have it turned on, and so your choice will be to leave it turned on, or never display any media again. And no amount of explaining the situation to the public will ever work. You'll say, "This sucks because it means I have to run only approved Windows software and I don't even want to run Windows" - and people will hear "Hi, I'm into piracy." And in the battle of public opinion, you can't beat the 500 pound elephant willing to lie.
Actually, it's been my experience that FreeBSD and Linux users aren't at each other's throats much. Their systems are quite compatable and complimentary and both camps realize their differences can coexist in the same world. They don't have to try to crush each other to exist, and so they're happy to just accept that they have differing preferences and let it be. That might not be YOUR experience, but that's probably because (if this post is any indication) you start the stupid bullshit first and people are just replying to you in kind.
Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
True. But, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't think you will be able to eradicate spam WITH governmental help either, becasue that attitude leads to extra rules that only hurt the honest guy. Spam is here to stay. Deal with it. Can you define a legal line between unsolicited e-mail that you want versus unsolicited e-mail you don't? Until you can, Spam will live on. And it's NOT just that the mail was unsolicited. That's not what makes spam spam. If it was, then ALL e-mail conversations would be the result of spam, because someone had to the be one to send first, and that first sending was not solicited. And it's NOT just that the person sending you the message is a stranger to you. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to contact strangers via e-mail - such as asking a question about a piece of software to the person who wrote it, or following up in private e-mail to an interesting thread you saw in usenet.
Since there cannot be a good legal definition that separates SPAM from non-SPAM, the legislative approach is doomed to fail. Incidnetally, this is why the technological approach is also doomed to fail. SPAM filters are (and will always be) as unreliable as web porn filters - It either lets undesirable content through, or it gets overly eager and filters out legitimate content.
That is why I do NOT want anti-spam laws in place. No way, no how. If you want to accept the inaccuracy of spam filters, that is your decision, but given that filtering is inaccurate and unfair, it is a decision the recipient should make. It's up to him whether he can put up with that or not. It is NOT a decision to be made for you by legislation.
The problem is, the rate at which it happens has accellerated, to the point where you can no longer look at something written 10 years ago and assume you know what it means (if it's using technical terms that have been mangled by layman usage.) It used to take centuries for langauge to become incomprehensable.
And this isn't a case of a meaning slowly changing over time because the speakers of the language decided to use it differently. It's a case of the meaning changing becasue a large group hijacked the meaning from the group that coined the term, and believed falsely that they were using the term the same way.
I can handle naturally evolving language. This isn't it. This is language evolution through deception of the masses who didn't know what the word used to mean.
Welcome to the wonderful world of linguistics. Languages evolve.
Or, as in this case, devolve. When there used to be two terms for two different things, and now they both refer to the same thing as each other, that is NOT evolution.
Many of the atomic scientists working in the US on this during World War two came from Eurpoe, by way of the UK, and they were in the US because the US and the UK chose to combine efforts on researching the atom bomb after the US joined the war. It was mutually agreed that it made more sense to carry out the research in the US (and move the scientists out of Britian to join with the US effort) because the US could hide them away from public eyes easier - there was more empty open land to run the experiments in. And being farther away from the "front" made spying less likely, and an air raid would be out of the question.
Steam powered railroads were invented in England, originally as an outgrowth of coal mine carts.
While the Wright Brothers made the first plane that worked, their relentless intellectual property arguments in the years that followed stagnated progress by treating aviation as an industry (where information is not shared) not a science. As a result, the next decade of advancement of aviation was in Europe, out of reach of their relentless patenting.
I know that's part of what the X-Prize is designed to remedy, but realisticly it will take "big business" to drive down the cost.
Realisticly, if you wait for big business to make leaps in technology you'll be waiting a LONG time. Typically it's the little companies that make the giant leaps in technology, and then the big companies eventually get interested only after it's a proven concept. Yes, it takes big business to take a novel idea and make it cheap. But it takes a little business to risk trying that novel idea the first time. Big business is too concerned with protecting what they already have to try anything risky.
The request is reasonable. If it was a case of lindows merely offering information about how people can make their claims it would be legitimate. But their site makes the claim that you can file your claim agaisnt MS through the lindows site, and according to the terms of the settlement that is clearly not true (for one thing, the form has to be physically signed to be legitimate.) So the Lindows site is making false claims about their capacity to file on your behaf. Asking them to change that is perfectly reasonable.
(And you will note if you actually read the statement instead of trusting the slashdot summary that it is NOT are request to take the site down. It is a request to take it down OR fix the faulty claims it makes about what it can do for you.)
Lindows could just change the site so it doesn't do the filing on your behaf, but still does everything else, and it would be legitimate. If it resulted in a form you can download, print out, and sign and stuff in an envelope, then it would be removing the point of contention with the lawyer firm that sent this notice.
This isn't an example of MS trying to censor valuable information from the public. It's an example of them trying to get a site to stop making fradulent legal claims. The site can continue to exist as an informational site telling people what steps they need to take to get a refund, but right now it's giving incorrect information about what those steps are, and making the claim that it can file your claim on your behaf, which it can't.
Companies producing things in states benefit from the infrastructure in that state just as much as an individual owning property does. Hence the sales tax. If I own 1 acre of property and you own 1 acre of property but I use mine to live on and you use it to run a factory, then we aren't making use of the state's infrastructure to the same degree.
Libertarians are the only political group with a consistent message -- freedom from the tyranny of government.
If that's where their message ended I'd have no problem supporting them. But they *also* include the message that it is totally impossible for a corporation to ever do anything wrong so get off their backs. The ability for SCO, Microsoft, and Enron's executives to make money based on criminal bullshit proves that to be a naive and dangerous illusion to uphold.
No. In politics it means someone who wants to things to continue similarly to how they were done in the past. What this actually works out to mean will vary based on the history where they live. A conservative in the USA is different from one in Italy or China or Africa.
Increasing the cost of the bread/book via sales tax increases it for everyone, but that's not equal taxation. A difference of $1 extra in taxes is a larger percentage of the disposable income of a person making 10k per year than it is for someone making 500k a year.
I might be going out on a limb here, but I suspect that people making more money might actually make costlier purchases. The sales tax on buying a Learjet is going to be huge if it's the same percentage as the tax on buying a bicycle. (Oh, and groceries are typically exempt from sales tax unless it's "luxury" extra food items like candy, so your bread example is bullshit.) What you are actually complaining about is the kind of sales tax that applies to only RETIAL purchases and not the kind that applies to all sales equally. A true equal flat sales tax would be more fair because it would tax everyone according to their income just like a flat income tax would. The problem is that the current sales tax systems tend to only tax retail purchases and not the large-scale purchases that rich people make. As such they aren't true sales taxes.
Best situations, tax-wise, in order from best to worst: 1 - low taxes across the board. 2 - high taxes across the board. 3 - low taxes on some things, high on others.
While high taxes does suppress the economy, if it does so UNIVERSALLY, it doesn't end up propping up one type of thing artificially over another. Taxes that make one type of business venture "win" over another for artificial reasons are even MORE damaging to the economy than high taxes all around. With high taxes all around, at least the normal checks and balances of the market still are the primary determinant of which businesses do better than which other ones. But right now, the brick-and-mortar retailers have a huge disadvantage over internet retailers specificly because of the disparity in how they are taxed. Right now the government has inadvertently created an incentive to close down all brick-and-mortar shops and do everything on the internet instead, which causes brick-and-mortar businesses to dry up for reasons OTHER than their economic suitability.
Right now, with internet sales, we're at #3 - the WORST one of the bunch. I'd rather see us move to #1, but that's not likely, and moving to #2 is *still* an improvement. Why should the sales taxes be different for orders placed by telephone versus ones placed by HTTP? What f-ing difference does it make?
FIRST get rid of that disparity. SECOND work on lowering the taxes overall for all sales.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's good to let the user pick his own viewing color options that aren't embedded in the document (remember how HTML browsers were supposed to work?) The only stupid thing about it is that it seems like it only has ONE color scheme option - the color Jerry wanted. And that's pretty stupid.
That's BS and you know it. You are incapable of reading my mind, liar.
If you live in the shadow of an active volcano, then you *should* buy volcano insurance because the risk is significant, How about if that "insurance" comes in the form of offering live virgin sacrifices to the volcano god? Granted, you have no proof that such an appeasement will work, but hey, it's better to be safe and try it, right? This is just like the argument people are using with environmentalism works. Yes, global warming is a fact. No, you don't have any clue what the cause is, and enacting your regulations DOES come with a huge cost. You don't fix a real problem by using shitty science. Should global warming be the top priority of study today? Yes. Should we start enacting alarmist rules before any real science shows they will help? Hell no.
The fact that vi works on just the typewriter keys (plus escape and control) IS why it's such a fast editor. No, really. Your hands don't leave the "typing zone" to go hit the arrow keys or any other such distractions. So your right hand never "loses" the home row. If you use a mouse or cursor keys, you have to look at your hands to reposition between the "typing context" and the "arrowing context". Such that in terms of how distracting it is, that sort of pseudo context-switch is actually more distracting than the real context switch of insert vs command mode in vi. Also, using the typewriter keys for the commands is much faster than the special keys, because you *already* know where the 'x' key is, and years of touch-typing keeps retraining you on where 'x' is, but the 'del' key is on different places on different keyboards. While removing a line with "dd" may seem more confusing than triple-click and hit 'del', "dd" is faster to type. Vi is very slow to learn, but VERY FAST to use once you learn it. Thats why people who got over the learning hurdle swear by it, while people who haven't swear AT it.
If you read the article, you see that the author is NOT complaining because the tech is new. It's because it isn't appropriate to the task at hand and there is no reason to switch OTHER than it's newness. It's not like an artist refusing to acknowlege that 3d rendering is an art form. It's like an artist refusing to acknowlege that it makes sense to use 3d rendering to paint a person's portrait. It's inappropriate to the task at hand and the artist shouldn't be forced to use it just because it's new.
For sumbitting manuscripts to a publisher, anything more than a text editor is totally inappropriate (you do realize that it's the PUBLISHER that picks the fonts, headings, paragraph formattings, and so on, NOT the author, right? The stream of words is *all* the author decides.)
[...] publishers more and more demand manuscripts in the form of M$ Word files, which frankly sucks.
Which REALLY sucks when you consider what they (publishers) do with your work after you submit it. They reformat it, choosing completely new fonts, completley new headings, completely new paragraph styles, and so on. So at that point why did they want anything from you other than the plain old text? A system of post-processing (like tex or nroff) is a PERFECT fit for what they do, but they don't do it anymore. And the really frustrating thing is *why* they do it. It's not because it makes their lives easier (publishers now have to have people frustratingly fiddle with Word to undo the formatting in submitted texts)
They do everything in Word because that's what they think the authors themselves want. They figure if they didn't use a standard of Word, authors would go publish with someone else who will. And they're probably right in that.
So if you want someone to blame, don't blame the publisher - blame fellow authors' technical ignorance at the tools of their chosen profession. It's in vogue to say that knowing the computer tools isn't their problem, but I say bullshit. Imagine if someone claimed in the 1960's that an author shouldn't be expected to know how to use a typewriter. They'd be laughed at. Of COURSE authors should understand the tools of the trade, and that should include understanding the difference between a word processor and a document formatter, and when one is more appropriate than the other.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a stupid solution. Making Kazaa slow ALL the time punishes those who were only going to use it once in a while. What makes more sense is to track how many bytes of transfer a machine uses on each port per day (or week, or month, or whatever works best), and throttle only those machines that are using a lot of Kazaa. Don't punish the guy who's only downloading a 20 meg file once a week by making him wait 21 minutes for it, when the actual target you're after is the guy downloading several CD images a day.
In other words, don't punish the occasional bursters. Occasional bursting is more efficient than a sustained connection.
If you are found to be sharing files that are against copyright
But the onus should be on THEM to prove it, not on you to prove you aren't, which is how the system currently works.
[...]
have the option of allowing users to turn it off.
Unless *large number* of users do this, it won't help. Because what will happen is that more and more you will find media that refuses to run unless you have it turned on, and so your choice will be to leave it turned on, or never display any media again. And no amount of explaining the situation to the public will ever work. You'll say, "This sucks because it means I have to run only approved Windows software and I don't even want to run Windows" - and people will hear "Hi, I'm into piracy." And in the battle of public opinion, you can't beat the 500 pound elephant willing to lie.
Actually, it's been my experience that FreeBSD and Linux users aren't at each other's throats much. Their systems are quite compatable and complimentary and both camps realize their differences can coexist in the same world. They don't have to try to crush each other to exist, and so they're happy to just accept that they have differing preferences and let it be. That might not be YOUR experience, but that's probably because (if this post is any indication) you start the stupid bullshit first and people are just replying to you in kind.
Bouncing emails back is not impossible.
Assuming the sender had the courtesy to be truthful in stating where the mail came from, unlike EVERY SPAMMER out there.
Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
True.
But, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't think you will be able to eradicate spam WITH governmental help either, becasue that attitude leads to extra rules that only hurt the honest guy. Spam is here to stay. Deal with it. Can you define a legal line between unsolicited e-mail that you want versus unsolicited e-mail you don't? Until you can, Spam will live on. And it's NOT just that the mail was unsolicited. That's not what makes spam spam. If it was, then ALL e-mail conversations would be the result of spam, because someone had to the be one to send first, and that first sending was not solicited. And it's NOT just that the person sending you the message is a stranger to you. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to contact strangers via e-mail - such as asking a question about a piece of software to the person who wrote it, or following up in private e-mail to an interesting thread you saw in usenet.
Since there cannot be a good legal definition that separates SPAM from non-SPAM, the legislative approach is doomed to fail. Incidnetally, this is why the technological approach is also doomed to fail. SPAM filters are (and will always be) as unreliable as web porn filters - It either lets undesirable content through, or it gets overly eager and filters out legitimate content.
That is why I do NOT want anti-spam laws in place. No way, no how. If you want to accept the inaccuracy of spam filters, that is your decision, but given that filtering is inaccurate and unfair, it is a decision the recipient should make. It's up to him whether he can put up with that or not. It is NOT a decision to be made for you by legislation.
The problem is, the rate at which it happens has accellerated, to the point where you can no longer look at something written 10 years ago and assume you know what it means (if it's using technical terms that have been mangled by layman usage.) It used to take centuries for langauge to become incomprehensable.
And this isn't a case of a meaning slowly changing over time because the speakers of the language decided to use it differently. It's a case of the meaning changing becasue a large group hijacked the meaning from the group that coined the term, and believed falsely that they were using the term the same way.
I can handle naturally evolving language. This isn't it. This is language evolution through deception of the masses who didn't know what the word used to mean.
Welcome to the wonderful world of linguistics. Languages evolve.
Or, as in this case, devolve. When there used to be two terms for two different things, and now they both refer to the same thing as each other, that is NOT evolution.
Atomic Energy (both bombs and other wise)
Many of the atomic scientists working in the US on this during World War two came from Eurpoe, by way of the UK, and they were in the US because the US and the UK chose to combine efforts on researching the atom bomb after the US joined the war. It was mutually agreed that it made more sense to carry out the research in the US (and move the scientists out of Britian to join with the US effort) because the US could hide them away from public eyes easier - there was more empty open land to run the experiments in. And being farther away from the "front" made spying less likely, and an air raid would be out of the question.
Steam powered railroads were invented in England, originally as an outgrowth of coal mine carts.
While the Wright Brothers made the first plane that worked, their relentless intellectual property arguments in the years that followed stagnated progress by treating aviation as an industry (where information is not shared) not a science. As a result, the next decade of advancement of aviation was in Europe, out of reach of their relentless patenting.
Pizza is a prime example. Some (fortunately not that many) Americans think it's an American thing.
If it's got meat and cheese on it, it is.
The original Pizza ("Tomato Pie") is tomato paste and bread.
I know that's part of what the X-Prize is designed to remedy, but realisticly it will take "big business" to drive down the cost.
Realisticly, if you wait for big business to make leaps in technology you'll be waiting a LONG time. Typically it's the little companies that make the giant leaps in technology, and then the big companies eventually get interested only after it's a proven concept. Yes, it takes big business to take a novel idea and make it cheap. But it takes a little business to risk trying that novel idea the first time. Big business is too concerned with protecting what they already have to try anything risky.
The request is reasonable. If it was a case of lindows merely offering information about how people can make their claims it would be legitimate. But their site makes the claim that you can file your claim agaisnt MS through the lindows site, and according to the terms of the settlement that is clearly not true (for one thing, the form has to be physically signed to be legitimate.) So the Lindows site is making false claims about their capacity to file on your behaf. Asking them to change that is perfectly reasonable.
(And you will note if you actually read the statement instead of trusting the slashdot summary that it is NOT are request to take the site down. It is a request to take it down OR fix the faulty claims it makes about what it can do for you.)
Lindows could just change the site so it doesn't do the filing on your behaf, but still does everything else, and it would be legitimate. If it resulted in a form you can download, print out, and sign and stuff in an envelope, then it would be removing the point of contention with the lawyer firm that sent this notice.
This isn't an example of MS trying to censor valuable information from the public. It's an example of them trying to get a site to stop making fradulent legal claims. The site can continue to exist as an informational site telling people what steps they need to take to get a refund, but right now it's giving incorrect information about what those steps are, and making the claim that it can file your claim on your behaf, which it can't.
[...] more costly to do business on the internet (since everyone would then start using the phone to place the actual order)
Why? The proposed change is to make it so that it costs the SAME for phone orders (currently taxed) and internet orders (currently not taxed).
Companies producing things in states benefit from the infrastructure in that state just as much as an individual owning property does. Hence the sales tax. If I own 1 acre of property and you own 1 acre of property but I use mine to live on and you use it to run a factory, then we aren't making use of the state's infrastructure to the same degree.
Libertarians are the only political group with a consistent message -- freedom from the tyranny of government.
If that's where their message ended I'd have no problem supporting them. But they *also* include the message that it is totally impossible for a corporation to ever do anything wrong so get off their backs. The ability for SCO, Microsoft, and Enron's executives to make money based on criminal bullshit proves that to be a naive and dangerous illusion to uphold.
A conservative believes in smaller government.
No. In politics it means someone who wants to things to continue similarly to how they were done in the past. What this actually works out to mean will vary based on the history where they live. A conservative in the USA is different from one in Italy or China or Africa.
Increasing the cost of the bread/book via sales tax increases it for everyone, but that's not equal taxation. A difference of $1 extra in taxes is a larger percentage of the disposable income of a person making 10k per year than it is for someone making 500k a year.
I might be going out on a limb here, but I suspect that people making more money might actually make costlier purchases. The sales tax on buying a Learjet is going to be huge if it's the same percentage as the tax on buying a bicycle. (Oh, and groceries are typically exempt from sales tax unless it's "luxury" extra food items like candy, so your bread example is bullshit.) What you are actually complaining about is the kind of sales tax that applies to only RETIAL purchases and not the kind that applies to all sales equally. A true equal flat sales tax would be more fair because it would tax everyone according to their income just like a flat income tax would. The problem is that the current sales tax systems tend to only tax retail purchases and not the large-scale purchases that rich people make. As such they aren't true sales taxes.
Something cannot be lost if it never existed in the first place!
Ever heard of sales tax? Why does an order placed over the telephone get taxed and one placed over HTTP does not?
Best situations, tax-wise, in order from best to worst:
1 - low taxes across the board.
2 - high taxes across the board.
3 - low taxes on some things, high on others.
While high taxes does suppress the economy, if it does so UNIVERSALLY, it doesn't end up propping up one type of thing artificially over another. Taxes that make one type of business venture "win" over another for artificial reasons are even MORE damaging to the economy than high taxes all around. With high taxes all around, at least the normal checks and balances of the market still are the primary determinant of which businesses do better than which other ones. But right now, the brick-and-mortar retailers have a huge disadvantage over internet retailers specificly because of the disparity in how they are taxed. Right now the government has inadvertently created an incentive to close down all brick-and-mortar shops and do everything on the internet instead, which causes brick-and-mortar businesses to dry up for reasons OTHER than their economic suitability.
Right now, with internet sales, we're at #3 - the WORST one of the bunch. I'd rather see us move to #1, but that's not likely, and moving to #2 is *still* an improvement. Why should the sales taxes be different for orders placed by telephone versus ones placed by HTTP? What f-ing difference does it make?
FIRST get rid of that disparity. SECOND work on lowering the taxes overall for all sales.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's good to let the user pick his own viewing color options that aren't embedded in the document (remember how HTML browsers were supposed to work?) The only stupid thing about it is that it seems like it only has ONE color scheme option - the color Jerry wanted. And that's pretty stupid.
That's BS and you know it.
You are incapable of reading my mind, liar.
If you live in the shadow of an
active volcano, then you *should* buy volcano insurance because the
risk is significant,
How about if that "insurance" comes in the form of offering live virgin sacrifices to the volcano god? Granted, you have no proof that such an appeasement will work, but hey, it's better to be safe and try it, right? This is just like the argument people are using with environmentalism works. Yes, global warming is a fact. No, you don't have any clue what the cause is, and enacting your regulations DOES come with a huge cost. You don't fix a real problem by using shitty science. Should global warming be the top priority of study today? Yes. Should we start enacting alarmist rules before any real science shows they will help? Hell no.
The risk of enacting a useless rule is not Nil.
The fact that vi works on just the typewriter keys (plus escape and control) IS why it's such a fast editor. No, really. Your hands don't leave the "typing zone" to go hit the arrow keys or any other such distractions. So your right hand never "loses" the home row. If you use a mouse or cursor keys, you have to look at your hands to reposition between the "typing context" and the "arrowing context". Such that in terms of how distracting it is, that sort of pseudo context-switch is actually more distracting than the real context switch of insert vs command mode in vi. Also, using the typewriter keys for the commands is much faster than the special keys, because you *already* know where the 'x' key is, and years of touch-typing keeps retraining you on where 'x' is, but the 'del' key is on different places on different keyboards. While removing a line with "dd" may seem more confusing than triple-click and hit 'del', "dd" is faster to type. Vi is very slow to learn, but VERY FAST to use once you learn it. Thats why people who got over the learning hurdle swear by it, while people who haven't swear AT it.
If you read the article, you see that the author is NOT complaining because the tech is new. It's because it isn't appropriate to the task at hand and there is no reason to switch OTHER than it's newness. It's not like an artist refusing to acknowlege that 3d rendering is an art form. It's like an artist refusing to acknowlege that it makes sense to use 3d rendering to paint a person's portrait. It's inappropriate to the task at hand and the artist shouldn't be forced to use it just because it's new.
For sumbitting manuscripts to a publisher, anything more than a text editor is totally inappropriate (you do realize that it's the PUBLISHER that picks the fonts, headings, paragraph formattings, and so on, NOT the author, right? The stream of words is *all* the author decides.)
Is that something different from just picking a background color which is blue, and a text color which is white?
[...] publishers more and more demand manuscripts in the form of M$ Word files, which frankly sucks.
Which REALLY sucks when you consider what they (publishers) do with your work after you submit it. They reformat it, choosing completely new fonts, completley new headings, completely new paragraph styles, and so on. So at that point why did they want anything from you other than the plain old text? A system of post-processing (like tex or nroff) is a PERFECT fit for what they do, but they don't do it anymore. And the really frustrating thing is *why* they do it. It's not because it makes their lives easier (publishers now have to have people frustratingly fiddle with Word to undo the formatting in submitted texts)
They do everything in Word because that's what they think the authors themselves want. They figure if they didn't use a standard of Word, authors would go publish with someone else who will. And they're probably right in that.
So if you want someone to blame, don't blame the publisher - blame fellow authors' technical ignorance at the tools of their chosen profession. It's in vogue to say that knowing the computer tools isn't their problem, but I say bullshit. Imagine if someone claimed in the 1960's that an author shouldn't be expected to know how to use a typewriter. They'd be laughed at. Of COURSE authors should understand the tools of the trade, and that should include understanding the difference between a word processor and a document formatter, and when one is more appropriate than the other.