You are right. We should try contacting General Antilles, who's in charge of the small rebellion planning an attack run on the battle station. I heard he just received some secret plans to it.
He means that Bush's argument goes something like this:
1. The warrantless wiretapping program is essential for our national security. 2. We must not let it expire and we must enhance its regulation or else the country will be unsafe. 3. Oh and by the way, we could use retro-active immunity for the telcos in order to ensure their cooperation.
His focus when speaking to the American people has been on #1 and #2, in essence playing the "fear card".
By threatening to veto a bill that provides #1 and prevents #2 (his primary argument), just because it does not contain #3 (an auxiliary argument), he is conveying the message that retro-active immunity is more important than national security itself.
Now, you can argue -- as you you seem to do in your comment -- that it is Bush's opinion that retro-active immunity is essential for national security, and that may very well be the case. However, whether it is more important than having the program in the first place is debatable, and understood by many to be an indefensible position; and at the very least gives the appearance of a strawman to the first two arguments I mentioned.
>> Spam does sell. There must be some twit in the thousands of Mortgage spam out there for it to be effective. Flash ads like the dancing people/aliens. If they didn't work, we wouldn't see it.
This is a common misconception. Although I am sure that there must be some twit out there that actually buys something out of a badly spelled message in his Inbox, this is not the real drive for spam -- at least not the spam which is relevant to the flooded e-mail traffic people usually refer to. You know, the "buY c!alis che4p!" kind. The "respectable" spam (unsolicited but genuine messages from a brand-name company hawking their wares) is pretty low in comparison.
The main drive for spam is the selling of address lists. Much like a pyramid scheme, spammers sell the promise that you can make money out of the suckers in his list, or by building a larger list and reselling it. The large traffic generated by these scammers is usually intended to test the validity of the addresses in their lists. If the e-mails do not bounce, they get added to the "valid" list and sold for more money; if an unsuspecting idiot clicks back on a tracked link on a message, then those get added to the "confirmed" list and sold for even more.
Thus, most spammers make money out of selling their lists rather than selling a product. And as long as there is a market to buy lists with the promise of targetted sells, they will continue sending their spam, testing their lists, and making money. And as long as they continue making money, they will continue attracting new spammers into the pyramid.
So even if there were no twits replying to spam messages and no product sales generated as a result of spam, their traffic would continue. Although this is not sustainable, like many other pyramid scams, it is distributed and de-centralized enough that it will take a long time for it to collapse. And the fact that the Internet is so large (and the barriers of cost so low) helps to prolong it.
>> I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk.
No, it did not take a genius; it took quite a few thousand idiots, and a sh*tload of money to realize it.
>> But I also talk in public (like on Slashdot) in simple terms, like "I could share my CDs, why can't I share my MP3s?", which anyone can understand. If they get the answer wrong, by making it more complicated, I explain why there was no legitimate power to stop sharing CDs, which hasn't changed. Over the past few years, as others have also done so, I've seen consciousness gradually change. That's my way of helping.
I see. Then I concede that it was my mistake in judging your simplistic comment as your overall understanding of the issue, instead of an attempt at painlessly introducting the topic. I apologize for this.
And once again I would like to reiterate that I absolutely agree with your views on Copyright, as expressed in your responses.
And I'll agree with you 'till I'm blue in the face, dammit!:)
>> And since it's obvious that DRM is helping kill the publishing business when it should be thriving, there really is no sane argument in its favor.
I think you may have misunderstood the point of my argument. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly, and specially with the quote above, so I hardly see the reason to react in such a defensive manner.
My point was that saying statements such as "I was able to copy my CDs before, ergo I should be able to copy my MP3s now" is the wrong attitude when fighting the pervasion of Copyrights and DRM. Not necessarily because they are wrong, but because they depend on causality as the justification for eliminating such restrictions. And the classic retort to such argument has been "well, usage was always meant to be restricted, we just couldn't do it before." This is obviously a strawman argument, but it is my opinion that it is fundamentally flawed on both sides. The latter because, as we agree, is not really reasonable based on historical fact; the former, well, because it fuels the latter and by arguing against its false logic legitimizes it.
My original comment implied that those in favor of DRM, are striving to convince the populous and government that this distorted view and intent of Copyrights is the way it was always meant to be. That the means of providing a temporary monolopy of the work to the author towards the end of promoting the public good, is the end in itself. To you or me this may seem absurd and incomprehensible, especially in light of what is said in the Constitution, yet the pervasiveness of DRM, and the acceptance that most have towards these mechanisms as "necessary evils" (and the recent extensions to the Copyright statutes) suggests that at least *some* are falling for it.
So the proper arguments should be *against* the distortion of the intent of Copyrights and a focus on educating about the real reasons why it has been in the best interest of our society to limit -- temporarily -- such rights, but with the ultimate goal of enriching the public domain of works, and thus promote "science and the useful arts". And once that is accepted and upheld, all arguments in favor of extending "intellectual property rights" past the lifetime of an author, or of restricting access or fair use, become invalid and indefensible.
In the meantime, sure, fight DRM! oppose it! boycott it! But when stating your case against it, I hope you don't just say "because DRM prevents me from doing what I did before, and that's wrong", but rather "because DRM prevents me from doing what has been my Constitutional, cultural, and moral right since the birth of this Nation." And that's wrong.
You're missing one rather large and important piece of reasoning which rationalizes the intent of DRM and explains why you can't loan your MP3 as you do with your CDs:
The technology for limiting rights and usage was not mature, practical, or else available when older media were introduced. What this means is that, contrary to your assumption, current MP3s do not *add* restrictions to your usage, but that instead (for technical reasons) CDs did *not* add them.
This may seem like a purely semantical argument but it carries some very important implications: that restricting usage was *always* the intent, but could not be done before; and that now that the technology is available, rights restrictions are finally being rightfully implemented. It means that publishers had always wanted to control your access to the content, but couldn't do so until now. It means the fact that you could sell a tangible, used book to someone else was merely a technological fluke. And it further means that you have absolutely no claim over the content, and perhaps not even to the medium on which such content is applied.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely and consummately abhor this perverted view. But this is the case brought forth by the so-called "intellectual property" concept and the distortion of Copyrights' purpose of enriching humanity's cultural universe. More importantly, identifying the real reasons why these technologies are applied is the first step in any effort to defeat them: it must be understood that these technological mechanisms are merely a means to an end, and that the the reason they seem to have become so prevalent in our society is because those who propose them feel themselves justified by history.
Its worse than that! According to the article, they were aware of this "leak" bogging down the system, which came up during testing; and programmed in a timer to restart the application after 40 minutes -- without truly understanding the nature of the issue, or its safety implications.
Then, during the actual course run, the system became unresponsive in about 28 minutes instead of the 40 that it took during testing, so the timer did not helped.
No code profiler can fix incompetence like that. I am glad they did not win the challenge. If by chance their timer were set at, say, 20 minutes and it just happened to maintain the system usable during the desert run, it still remains a crap implementation, and winning would have defeated part of the purpose of the competition.
>> However, even though PHP allows you to build bad designs, it doesn't require you. It allows you to do everything by the book.
But the problem is that the book is not that good. Its full of redundant library functions, with inconsistent calling and naming conventions, and a glossy invitation to do things cheaply and thoughtlessly.
Perl may allow you to do incredibly terse code, yes, but even when so obfuscated, it still entices you to follow a grammatically coherent structure, as it were. Howerver, most of the time, you end up writing code as you write an essay. Whereas PHP is starting to look like the Win32 API: a highly crufty battleground, where new ideas are thrown in just to fight it out with the old ones left by the previous participants.
I completely agree that the physics are not simulated correctly. But I believe that this is a matter of bad direction and lack of talent, than a technological limitation. Traditional frame animation is an artform that requires a certain degree of talent from the animator in order to make a believable and smooth representation of real life, that is, when doing something more ambitious than a Saturday morning cartoon. And even when the animators are highly talented, a good director is very important in order to ensure that the "performance" of the animation corroborates with the story and seems fluid and believable.
The same holds true with computer animation. Even modern CGI "simulations", which may be just designed, modeled, and then left to their own algorithmic devices to "perform"; they have numerous variables that are tweaked constantly in order to stray from the straight simulation and add a level of dynamism and realism. The problem is when a very talented software engineer or graphics modeler is not properly skilled in the nuances that traditional animators have for ages taken as second nature: the little details that are taken for granted on casual observation, but that subconsciously register in our brains. This CGI animator then may not know to tweak that final factor that will add extra weight to the performance. The director, by fearing or misunderstanding the technology, or perhaps just out of dumb inexperience, will not go back and say "Hey, something's missing. I don't know, it just doesn't look right. Go back and fix that!"; and the shot is then committed to production.
I've seen beautifully crafted computer-generated animation that seems fluid and lifelike, so I know it is certainly possible. Those are the ones that have the actors in a "Behind the scenes" featurette talking about how they spent months watching and analyzing the movements of elephants, fish, humans, or whatever, performing mundane acts of everyday life, just to be able to get things "right". Those are also the ones where the director may have even said "there's something wrong with that shot, the dinosaur's neck does not seem to go with the head. Go back and fix that!"
Probably because we're talking about a natural compound that most people consume regularly, not a potential toxic chemical that was manufactured in the lab, which may possibly have serious side effects.
If you want to study the effects of, say, honey as an expectorant and possible cure for the common cold, would you find it necessary to start feeding honey to rats and rabbits? Or would you assume that it is safe enough to start trying humans and document their reactions?
The other professors in the math department all use the blackboard, and I haven't noticed any real difference in effectiveness.
If there is no noticeable difference in effectiveness, then would you admit that switching to the high-tech solution is not warranted, if only because its an unnecessary significant expense?
Since when? IBM is short for International Business Machines which, I believe, is still the actual company name.
An acronym is a new word composed of the first letters of other words, i.e. when an abbreviation creates a new word. Take for example the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which is commonly pronounced "nay'-toh". Since the abbreviation results in a new word, it is an acronym. International Business Machines (IBM), on the other hand, does not result in a new word, unless you pronounce it as it is spelled: "eye-bum" or something like that. IBM, thus, is an initialism, or an abbreviation composed of the first letters of words.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! I did not know you could have such low-level access with Visual Basic. These kids nowadays...
-dZ.
"Canadian University Puts Tech Whiz Kids in 'Dorkubator'"
There, fixed it for you.
-dZ.
You are right. We should try contacting General Antilles, who's in charge of the small rebellion planning an attack run on the battle station. I heard he just received some secret plans to it.
-dZ.
From the summary:
The tag about GoogleIsEvil is in relation to that comment suggesting that Google is honest. Therefore is very much relevant to the context.
-dZ.
>> The prime rule of pranking is don't do anything you wouldn't be able to fix or pay for yourself.
I thought the prime rule of pranking was to only execute them on days who's number of the month can only be divided by itself and one.
-dZ.
>> I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.
He means that Bush's argument goes something like this:
1. The warrantless wiretapping program is essential for our national security.
2. We must not let it expire and we must enhance its regulation or else the country will be unsafe.
3. Oh and by the way, we could use retro-active immunity for the telcos in order to ensure their cooperation.
His focus when speaking to the American people has been on #1 and #2, in essence playing the "fear card".
By threatening to veto a bill that provides #1 and prevents #2 (his primary argument), just because it does not contain #3 (an auxiliary argument), he is conveying the message that retro-active immunity is more important than national security itself.
Now, you can argue -- as you you seem to do in your comment -- that it is Bush's opinion that retro-active immunity is essential for national security, and that may very well be the case. However, whether it is more important than having the program in the first place is debatable, and understood by many to be an indefensible position; and at the very least gives the appearance of a strawman to the first two arguments I mentioned.
-dZ.
>> Spam does sell. There must be some twit in the thousands of Mortgage spam out there for it to be effective. Flash ads like the dancing people/aliens. If they didn't work, we wouldn't see it.
This is a common misconception. Although I am sure that there must be some twit out there that actually buys something out of a badly spelled message in his Inbox, this is not the real drive for spam -- at least not the spam which is relevant to the flooded e-mail traffic people usually refer to. You know, the "buY c!alis che4p!" kind. The "respectable" spam (unsolicited but genuine messages from a brand-name company hawking their wares) is pretty low in comparison.
The main drive for spam is the selling of address lists. Much like a pyramid scheme, spammers sell the promise that you can make money out of the suckers in his list, or by building a larger list and reselling it. The large traffic generated by these scammers is usually intended to test the validity of the addresses in their lists. If the e-mails do not bounce, they get added to the "valid" list and sold for more money; if an unsuspecting idiot clicks back on a tracked link on a message, then those get added to the "confirmed" list and sold for even more.
Thus, most spammers make money out of selling their lists rather than selling a product. And as long as there is a market to buy lists with the promise of targetted sells, they will continue sending their spam, testing their lists, and making money. And as long as they continue making money, they will continue attracting new spammers into the pyramid.
So even if there were no twits replying to spam messages and no product sales generated as a result of spam, their traffic would continue. Although this is not sustainable, like many other pyramid scams, it is distributed and de-centralized enough that it will take a long time for it to collapse. And the fact that the Internet is so large (and the barriers of cost so low) helps to prolong it.
-dZ.
"Ah, I see that you have started the My Jet Pack action. Do you want me to engage the My Auto Pilot option?"
-dZ.
I'm pretty sure there's prior art on that. People call him Spider-Guy, or something.
-dZ.
>> I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk.
No, it did not take a genius; it took quite a few thousand idiots, and a sh*tload of money to realize it.
-dZ.
Dude, it was a joke. I'm guessing the reference to deity-imprinted items on e-bay swooshed right by, uh?
-dZ.
That's not a fake picture! I know: I saw it on auction on e-bay. It's a picture of Jesus on Mars.
-dZ.
>> But I also talk in public (like on Slashdot) in simple terms, like "I could share my CDs, why can't I share my MP3s?", which anyone can understand. If they get the answer wrong, by making it more complicated, I explain why there was no legitimate power to stop sharing CDs, which hasn't changed. Over the past few years, as others have also done so, I've seen consciousness gradually change. That's my way of helping.
:)
I see. Then I concede that it was my mistake in judging your simplistic comment as your overall understanding of the issue, instead of an attempt at painlessly introducting the topic. I apologize for this.
And once again I would like to reiterate that I absolutely agree with your views on Copyright, as expressed in your responses.
And I'll agree with you 'till I'm blue in the face, dammit!
-dZ.
>> And since it's obvious that DRM is helping kill the publishing business when it should be thriving, there really is no sane argument in its favor.
I think you may have misunderstood the point of my argument. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly, and specially with the quote above, so I hardly see the reason to react in such a defensive manner.
My point was that saying statements such as "I was able to copy my CDs before, ergo I should be able to copy my MP3s now" is the wrong attitude when fighting the pervasion of Copyrights and DRM. Not necessarily because they are wrong, but because they depend on causality as the justification for eliminating such restrictions. And the classic retort to such argument has been "well, usage was always meant to be restricted, we just couldn't do it before." This is obviously a strawman argument, but it is my opinion that it is fundamentally flawed on both sides. The latter because, as we agree, is not really reasonable based on historical fact; the former, well, because it fuels the latter and by arguing against its false logic legitimizes it.
My original comment implied that those in favor of DRM, are striving to convince the populous and government that this distorted view and intent of Copyrights is the way it was always meant to be. That the means of providing a temporary monolopy of the work to the author towards the end of promoting the public good, is the end in itself. To you or me this may seem absurd and incomprehensible, especially in light of what is said in the Constitution, yet the pervasiveness of DRM, and the acceptance that most have towards these mechanisms as "necessary evils" (and the recent extensions to the Copyright statutes) suggests that at least *some* are falling for it.
So the proper arguments should be *against* the distortion of the intent of Copyrights and a focus on educating about the real reasons why it has been in the best interest of our society to limit -- temporarily -- such rights, but with the ultimate goal of enriching the public domain of works, and thus promote "science and the useful arts". And once that is accepted and upheld, all arguments in favor of extending "intellectual property rights" past the lifetime of an author, or of restricting access or fair use, become invalid and indefensible.
In the meantime, sure, fight DRM! oppose it! boycott it! But when stating your case against it, I hope you don't just say "because DRM prevents me from doing what I did before, and that's wrong", but rather "because DRM prevents me from doing what has been my Constitutional, cultural, and moral right since the birth of this Nation." And that's wrong.
-dZ.
You're missing one rather large and important piece of reasoning which rationalizes the intent of DRM and explains why you can't loan your MP3 as you do with your CDs:
The technology for limiting rights and usage was not mature, practical, or else available when older media were introduced. What this means is that, contrary to your assumption, current MP3s do not *add* restrictions to your usage, but that instead (for technical reasons) CDs did *not* add them.
This may seem like a purely semantical argument but it carries some very important implications: that restricting usage was *always* the intent, but could not be done before; and that now that the technology is available, rights restrictions are finally being rightfully implemented. It means that publishers had always wanted to control your access to the content, but couldn't do so until now. It means the fact that you could sell a tangible, used book to someone else was merely a technological fluke. And it further means that you have absolutely no claim over the content, and perhaps not even to the medium on which such content is applied.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely and consummately abhor this perverted view. But this is the case brought forth by the so-called "intellectual property" concept and the distortion of Copyrights' purpose of enriching humanity's cultural universe. More importantly, identifying the real reasons why these technologies are applied is the first step in any effort to defeat them: it must be understood that these technological mechanisms are merely a means to an end, and that the the reason they seem to have become so prevalent in our society is because those who propose them feel themselves justified by history.
-dZ.
Its worse than that! According to the article, they were aware of this "leak" bogging down the system, which came up during testing; and programmed in a timer to restart the application after 40 minutes -- without truly understanding the nature of the issue, or its safety implications.
Then, during the actual course run, the system became unresponsive in about 28 minutes instead of the 40 that it took during testing, so the timer did not helped.
No code profiler can fix incompetence like that. I am glad they did not win the challenge. If by chance their timer were set at, say, 20 minutes and it just happened to maintain the system usable during the desert run, it still remains a crap implementation, and winning would have defeated part of the purpose of the competition.
-dZ.
>> Their methodology may not be perfectly sound, but they never claimed to be any final source of information.
And thus you have just proven his point.
-dZ.
>> However, even though PHP allows you to build bad designs, it doesn't require you. It allows you to do everything by the book.
But the problem is that the book is not that good. Its full of redundant library functions, with inconsistent calling and naming conventions, and a glossy invitation to do things cheaply and thoughtlessly.
Perl may allow you to do incredibly terse code, yes, but even when so obfuscated, it still entices you to follow a grammatically coherent structure, as it were. Howerver, most of the time, you end up writing code as you write an essay. Whereas PHP is starting to look like the Win32 API: a highly crufty battleground, where new ideas are thrown in just to fight it out with the old ones left by the previous participants.
-dZ.
I completely agree that the physics are not simulated correctly. But I believe that this is a matter of bad direction and lack of talent, than a technological limitation. Traditional frame animation is an artform that requires a certain degree of talent from the animator in order to make a believable and smooth representation of real life, that is, when doing something more ambitious than a Saturday morning cartoon. And even when the animators are highly talented, a good director is very important in order to ensure that the "performance" of the animation corroborates with the story and seems fluid and believable.
The same holds true with computer animation. Even modern CGI "simulations", which may be just designed, modeled, and then left to their own algorithmic devices to "perform"; they have numerous variables that are tweaked constantly in order to stray from the straight simulation and add a level of dynamism and realism. The problem is when a very talented software engineer or graphics modeler is not properly skilled in the nuances that traditional animators have for ages taken as second nature: the little details that are taken for granted on casual observation, but that subconsciously register in our brains. This CGI animator then may not know to tweak that final factor that will add extra weight to the performance. The director, by fearing or misunderstanding the technology, or perhaps just out of dumb inexperience, will not go back and say "Hey, something's missing. I don't know, it just doesn't look right. Go back and fix that!"; and the shot is then committed to production.
I've seen beautifully crafted computer-generated animation that seems fluid and lifelike, so I know it is certainly possible. Those are the ones that have the actors in a "Behind the scenes" featurette talking about how they spent months watching and analyzing the movements of elephants, fish, humans, or whatever, performing mundane acts of everyday life, just to be able to get things "right". Those are also the ones where the director may have even said "there's something wrong with that shot, the dinosaur's neck does not seem to go with the head. Go back and fix that!"
-dZ.
Probably because we're talking about a natural compound that most people consume regularly, not a potential toxic chemical that was manufactured in the lab, which may possibly have serious side effects.
If you want to study the effects of, say, honey as an expectorant and possible cure for the common cold, would you find it necessary to start feeding honey to rats and rabbits? Or would you assume that it is safe enough to start trying humans and document their reactions?
-dZ.
And don't forget: A pony for everyone!
-dZ.
>> I can print a screenshot, but I won't have a real longsword.
You mean a real virtual longsword? Or a real long virtualsword? Or something.
-dZ.
If there is no noticeable difference in effectiveness, then would you admit that switching to the high-tech solution is not warranted, if only because its an unnecessary significant expense?
I have to admit that that is my most hated word!
-dZ.
Since when? IBM is short for International Business Machines which, I believe, is still the actual company name.
An acronym is a new word composed of the first letters of other words, i.e. when an abbreviation creates a new word. Take for example the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which is commonly pronounced "nay'-toh". Since the abbreviation results in a new word, it is an acronym. International Business Machines (IBM), on the other hand, does not result in a new word, unless you pronounce it as it is spelled: "eye-bum" or something like that. IBM, thus, is an initialism, or an abbreviation composed of the first letters of words.
-dZ.