Personally I buy quite a lot of music (about 5-6 albums a week at times).
Good for you. Now can you point me to the place where I can buy one song at a time on CD and not have to buy and ablum with the song I want plus a bunch of other crap for inflated prices?
Oh, wait theres nowhere to do that is there? I agree with your dislike of DRM, but buying CDs and ripping them is only serving the RIAAs greed just as much as buying a DRMed song from iTunes.
It is absolutely crystal clear to anyone who takes a serious look at the music industry that what the customers really want is non DRMed music sold digitally by the song. Of coure this is the last thing the music industry wants to do. The RIAA is so #$%$%# stupid they don't even deserve to exist.
If there were a fair market in digital music without the restrictions of DRM, the music industry would be so busy counting the money they would be making that they wouldn't care about 'piracy' anymore. By they're too greedy and evil to realize this.
It makes me sick to see how much this overreaching, overreacting federal regulation is being used by IT departments to run companies as if its the IT department thats actually in charge of things. The IT department serves the business, not the other way around. IT departments that have to use SOX to enforce their wishes, aren't serving the business, they're playing games with it. The business should (I know there are companies out there that actually are hopeless, but not most) be telling IT what they want to do about SOX, not the other way around.
What really needs to be asked in this situation is "How can I improve security to an acceptable level while impacting the ability of the firm to do business the least?" If every recommendation requires that the workers at the firm jump through hurdles and face extra hardship in using systems, then of course they're not going to be receptive. Make things easy. Go ahead and buy security cables for their laptops and show them how to use them. Help them put boot password on their laptops, or make the next round of laptops you buy have biometrics. But remember the most important lesson you can teach them is never ever leave their laptop out of their sight. Remember, no physical security is no security at all. Tell them that, and then let them do their jobs. If you tell them to watch their laptop like a hawk and if someone steals it they will remember what you told them. If they still try to say its your fault, you should do what a lot of people have suggested here and leave, because they don't have any sense of responsbility to either security or really to their business.
So right! Why is it that everyone and their dog is trying to revive a franchise that everyone wants to die (or at least go away for a while), but the franchise truly loved by its fans seems to have no chance of ever coming back to the big (or small) screen.
It's all about the competition, puppy, and nobody needs a good hard competitive slap more than Apple's Music-Related business.
Nope, I can't agree. I see it like this.
Things needing a good competitive slap: 1. Microsoft's OS Monopoly 2. Microsoft's Office Suite Monopoly . . . 10. Apples iPod / iTunes monopoly
It is absolutely mindboggling to me that so many people are so beside themselves about the fact that Apple holds a majority in the music player business, but either don't care or defend Microsoft's monopolies in the OS and Office software market.
Its like they're saying "Apple needs to go down" and then saying "Microsoft isn't a monopoly" at the same time.
And what would Microsoft do if this music player managed to take a majority of the market from Apple. Thats right, they'd us it to extend their #$%^% monopoly more like they do with everything.
For an iPod "killer" I'd much prefer something from anyone but Microsoft. Althought I know with absolute certainty that I wouldn't be getting a Zune, because its almost an absoulte certainty it would never ever work on my iMac.
It really make me wonder sometimes why so many stories like this are out there. iTunes is a phenomonal success and has a brilliant buisness model. And the record industry wants an iPod killer to come becasue they want to start charging MORE for music and iTunes is currently in the way of that. Of course that will fail miserably. Microsoft's "convert your library" will also fail. For any but the smallest libraries, it would take hours to download your music to get the same thing thats already on your iPod. Rembember sony's portable player that had to convert all the music you wanted to put on it? It didn't do so hot either.
The way I see it the only way I will embrace an iPod/iTunes killer is when:
1) Someone starts selling MP3s without DRM for less than 99 cents. (By the way the first legitimate store (read not Russian based) to do this would take almost half of iTunes business overnight. Of course the meglomaniacally stupid bastards in the RIAA would never ever decide to make billions of dollars selling money that way, no sir!
and
2) Someone starts selling another MP3 player with an amazing user interface, fantastic integration with your music library, and good looks.
Until then I know _I_ won't see any iPod killers out there.
Speaking of Apple and browsers. What I find truly amazing is that on my iMac I have _five_ different browsers installed (none of which is IE). Now mind you some of them share quite a bit of code (camino, firefox) but still the amount of activity and innovation going on with browsers is amazing. Amazing everywhere that is except at Microsoft. IE exists and has always existed for the sole purpose of locking people into Microsoft products. It was Microsoft's best reaponse to regain control after the world wide web broke out.
You always have to remember that when the web became big, it wasn't where MS wanted the fuure to be. In fact the delays on the way to IE7 are all about MS not wanting the web to be the future either. Microsoft fears open standards and systems like the plague. Embrace, extend, extinguish exist soley for the purpose of trying to defeat open standards.
Its good to see MS losing ground on this battle in the browser space and hopefully ODF will help them lose it in the document space.
You always have to remember that if in the 90's Microsoft could have in any way caused the web to not exist they would have done anything to make it so. But the best they could do was try to monopolize the market with _their_ browser.
Bootleg unauthorized edited DVDs are bootleg unauthorized edited DVDs, they aren't lions. Get over yourself.
Thats true, but the original poster does have a point. Your recorded show with the commercials removed (or skipped) is very much considered a bootleg by the TV establishment.
This ruling does not help in that respect. How long before ABC or some other network takes TIVO to court for unlawfully editing their Television shows, using this ruiling as their excuse?
It makes me wonder if people that sing along with songs on the radio are worse drivers (cause its somewhat similar to talking on a handsfree phone).
They better not make it illegal to sing along with the radio or.... there'll be a lot of people I know unhappy with that. Right, yeah, people I know wouldn't like that.
RIAA: Everytime you listen to it. MPAA: Everytime you wacth it. Telcos: Every time every bit crosses our wires.
Which reminds me. I the old days, you could get internet access based on your timed usage amount. The market quickly figured out that set rates for bandwidth were better, much better.
This idea of tiered service is so bogus its just confounding that they are wanting to try it. The only thing a "large pipe" carrier will need to do to win in the marketplace in _not_ charge extra to carry the data. God help (or rather not help, let them go to hell) the telcos if Google starts using its dark fiber to get into the market as an internet backbone carrier.
Plus the page has quotes from Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-lee.
If those guys are saying a tiered internet is bad, then it is bad. I mean these are two of the biggest people behind what has become the modern internet. Their vision was correct. I would say then that their vision of the bad that can come of tiered internet services might well be correct too.
Also sorry, I just can't argue for "Net Neutrality", I much prefer to argue AGAINST a tiered internet. I think Net Neutrality is hard to understand, but everyone can understand different pricing tiers for different internet service and wonder why theri intenet content would need to be paid for twice, because everyone has already paid thier ISP.
Taxis and Limousines both drive on public roads; their owners can charge whatever they wish, whoever they wish, as long as the person who is charged agrees to pay.
Bad analogy, because taxi and limo fares are for the use of the car and driver, not for the use of the road. The better analogy would be if a private company wanted to put up toll booths on public roads and start charging tolls.
I agree, except that I would say its an awful analogy, since my car, your car, a taxi, and a limo all have to obey the same SPEED LIMITS, and that what a tiered internet is all about. Charging more for changing speed limits.
Also, its really amazing to watch how the tiered iternet has gone from the ramblings of a Telco CEO, to being voted on as a law. Its also staggerlingly disturbing that it even happens, much more so that it happens all of the time. It appears that a government of, for and by the people has actually already perished.
Customers don't want to pay out the ass again for you to add a simple feature because you didn't take the time to do it properly the first time around.
I say that customers want exactly that. This is the model of software development that Microsoft has adopted from the start and customers can't seem to get enough of it. If customers had really wanted solutions that just worked and didn't have problems, then Unix would have been a much more dominant operating system in the late 80's and early 90's. Instead customers just wanted the next thing from Microsoft that fixed the problems from the previous version. Of course, MS's cheaper price didn't hurt, but true ROI anaysis would have show a "full" solution would have been better, even if more expensive.
Don't get me wrong. While I'm being critical of this tactic by MS, it definately works and has worked extremely well for them. We are always waiting for the next Microsoft os that will "have everything". As Vista has shown, that will never happen, but its really because MS doesn't ever want it to happen.
Because, in reality, thats what customers really want. Delivering now and making them upgrade (or fix) later is really what they expect. It shouldn't be, but it is.
All audioplayer have a small buffer in them, is that illegal too then
Of course it will be. They'll just add another law forbidding electronics companies to make any playback device that uses a buffer. So what if your^H^H^H^Htheir content skips when you play it. That's they way they ment for your to hear it everytime you pay them so you can play it.
I'm meening all these above comments to be facetious, but I terrified that they might become real issues. The RIAA and MPAA are so $#%#@$% greedy that the only end state they seem to have in mind for their products is to make them totally unusable thus guaranteeing their market. Yes I know that sounds insanely stupid, but the ??AA's are insanely stupid.
They're not "bolting it on", Windows NT *was* designed with security "in mind" from day one. Far better security than traditional unix, as well.
True, except that in order to do anything meaninful in NT when it first came out you had to have administrator access, which kind of nullified the extra secrity stuff.
And the real laugh is microsoft's late, humorous, bolted on implementation of fairly simple access controls. Attempting to get users to not run as superuser at this late stage is going to be an absolute laugh riot - personally, I can't wait for vista:-)
You hit the nail on the head. Its not that Microsoft is finally taking an interest in user security, its the fact that they're bolting it on to a system that wasn't designed with it in mind in the first place.
The more I hear about Vista, the more I believe that Microsoft's next operating system will be built from the ground up using a pre-existing OS like BSD or Linux as its foundation. The legacy of Windows is just too much weight for their new operating systems to bear.
No, in that case the secret of the state was a particular weapons technology. That we had such a device was already public knowledge. The people in fact had a right to know that we had the bomb once it was used. The implementation details of how to make such a weapon however did not need to be as it was not a significant threat to the liberty of the people to be deprived of such knowledge. No political party or movement could be persecuted or intimidated and democracy is not threatened by nuclear weapon implementation details.
You can't have it both ways. All the phone records are implementation details, and on the call logging one, no ties are being made with the data back to the owers of the numbers before the data is analyzed. Basically what I'm getting at is that this is technical details as well, so you're splitting hairs there. The technical details of the bomb were very important in the Rosenbergs time and my question of what if they published the plans still stands.
That's an essential difference between these two example. However, a program that spies on the activity of Americans that was kept secret from the people is another thing because it is ripe for abuse. In this case, the state secret is that it is acting in a manner that is arguably counter to the interests of the people. That sort of secret should never be kept.
I actually agree with this statement. Hopefully, if charges are filed, the defense will take exactly this stance. A jury of their peers will be able to discern if they traded secrets, or exposed a coverup. There is a big difference between the two, but a fine like between doing one or the other. Our system does allow them to defend themselves from any allegations, and use their rights in their defense as well as allow other citizens to determine their guilt or innocence. All is not lost here.
The flip side of this is that the government could (and you claim should) lose. This means that their monitoring would have to end. This means that leads on terrorist activities will be harder to find. For every citizen to be free in this case, citizens will have to accept that to have more freedom they may need to be more alert themselves because the government will lose one of its tools to analyze data and find out information itself.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" Is a fine slogan, but you've got to mean it. You can't say after an attack, "but you were supposed to protect me" to a government that had its hands tied in investigating terrorists. Its not all or nothing, you have to weigh your risks. But, I believe if you want Liberty, you should be able to have it and defend it. If you are one of those people, though, you have to make it your perogative to be free, _and_ your perogitive to be secure. You can't have the nanny state and Liberty at the same time.
While I agree with the spirit of your post. I cannot fully agree. We are talking here about classified information. Things that are supposed to be classified are considered "secrets" of the government. There is an has always been punishment for those that reveal the coutries secrets, since the founding of this country (and even before).
Free speech is about being free to speak your mind and give your opinion. It is not about telling your countries secrets and undermining its security. While I believe the actions going after the "whistleblowers" in this case may be quite overzealous. They did release classified information, and that has always been wrong. Whether or not that information should be classified is debatable, and whether or not the government should be collecting it is also debatable. But anyone charged can have that debate during their trial.
Now before anyone goes ballistic over my stance, or gets all worked up about my stance with respect to our First Amentment freedoms, please ask youself this:
If the Rosenbergs had given the details on the bomb to a newspaper to be printed, instead of handing it over to the Soviets, do you think they should have been protected just because a newspaper has a right to publish under the first amendment? Do you think the newspaper should be protected? This was notably one of the biggest "leaks" ever in US history. But what if it had gone just like this one with a publisher involved with a unnamed source. Should they be protected in this? It is actually a debatable question and a hard one at that. It not as easy as "all speach must be free" all of the time.
From an IT perspective, its not the cost to purchase that is the problem, its the cost to configure. We can configure a thin client in 15 minutes, but a Windows PC with all the latest patches takes at least an hour. Factor this by all the PCs at our site and thin clients save buckets full of money in setup, confiuration and time to manage.
If your a small business, then thin clients won't save you much money, but overall they aren't as expensive as you think (in total cost) either.
Maybe so, in the long run, though I'm not as optimistic as you are. In the short-run, the people who make lots of money controlling distribution of content like DRM, and will do everything they can to get it adopted in order to continue to profit from that control, and lots of people will go along because it will be the easiest way to get access to the most popular media content.
And as they try and invent this future they miss out on the massive amount of money they could make by just giving up on DRM and creating a fair market for digital music. Their insistance to DRM will ensure that illegal copies survive. They have to make illegal downloading not worth it in comparison and the wasy to do that is to make legal downloading easier, not harder (read DRM enbumbered up the wazoo).
Todays cars already have a speed limit in their controllers. I didn't hear anyone scream.
Well I've never run into any limit on any of my cars. By the way, I was talking about cars not letting you exceed the POSTED limit, not having some kind of limiter to keep you from going 110, I'm talking about one that would kick in at 55. And yes people would get very pissed about that.
No I wouldn't, becuase I won't by any of that content.
To use your car anaolgy, it would be like car manufactures being forced to make cars that couldn't speed. And yes that would cause one hell of an uproar. So I, like everyone else will bitch about HDCP crap.
DRM has a NEGATIVE value to the consumer, the only way to get consumers to buy it is to force them. It really pisses me off. We could be in the middle of a true revolution in digital content, but the "Content Providers" are such greedy bastards they need to "protect their revenue", all while failing to realize that if they just went along with what everyone wanted, they could actually, eventually make MORE money (see the VCR for an historical example they themselves experienced, but are unable, do to their stupidity to apply to this situation).
And true there really is a digital content revolution going on right now, but its wayyy behind where it could (or should) be.
You do realize that influenza has the potential to kill more people within a few weeks than AIDS has killed in the last 25 years. (And that flu infections occur about 100X more frequently than AIDS infections.)
Yeah, I know. I toyed with the idea of using ebola for the windows side, but windows really does have a lowered immune system for viruses and trojans so I thought AIDS more appropriate. As for the flu for the mac, I was kind of operating on the idea of the basic run of the mill "flu", not so much influenza. I just thought common cold wouldn't have been quite enough for the comparison.
Although I rather like the other posters cliffdiving and breaking your ankle bit. That seems to fit;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I buy quite a lot of music (about 5-6 albums a week at times).
Good for you. Now can you point me to the place where I can buy one song at a time on CD and not have to buy and ablum with the song I want plus a bunch of other crap for inflated prices?
Oh, wait theres nowhere to do that is there? I agree with your dislike of DRM, but buying CDs and ripping them is only serving the RIAAs greed just as much as buying a DRMed song from iTunes.
It is absolutely crystal clear to anyone who takes a serious look at the music industry that what the customers really want is non DRMed music sold digitally by the song. Of coure this is the last thing the music industry wants to do. The RIAA is so #$%$%# stupid they don't even deserve to exist.
If there were a fair market in digital music without the restrictions of DRM, the music industry would be so busy counting the money they would be making that they wouldn't care about 'piracy' anymore. By they're too greedy and evil to realize this.
No, not "Please", but "Sarbanes-Oxley"
It makes me sick to see how much this overreaching, overreacting federal regulation is being used by IT departments to run companies as if its the IT department thats actually in charge of things. The IT department serves the business, not the other way around. IT departments that have to use SOX to enforce their wishes, aren't serving the business, they're playing games with it. The business should (I know there are companies out there that actually are hopeless, but not most) be telling IT what they want to do about SOX, not the other way around.
What really needs to be asked in this situation is "How can I improve security to an acceptable level while impacting the ability of the firm to do business the least?" If every recommendation requires that the workers at the firm jump through hurdles and face extra hardship in using systems, then of course they're not going to be receptive. Make things easy. Go ahead and buy security cables for their laptops and show them how to use them. Help them put boot password on their laptops, or make the next round of laptops you buy have biometrics. But remember the most important lesson you can teach them is never ever leave their laptop out of their sight. Remember, no physical security is no security at all. Tell them that, and then let them do their jobs. If you tell them to watch their laptop like a hawk and if someone steals it they will remember what you told them. If they still try to say its your fault, you should do what a lot of people have suggested here and leave, because they don't have any sense of responsbility to either security or really to their business.
Sorry, I think that was a test to see if you were "easily offended".
You didn't pass. You might want to avoid the link. However, since the link totally broken, its a moot point now.
Trekkers are Old Hat. Browncoats Unite!
So right! Why is it that everyone and their dog is trying to revive a franchise that everyone wants to die (or at least go away for a while), but the franchise truly loved by its fans seems to have no chance of ever coming back to the big (or small) screen.
It's all about the competition, puppy, and nobody needs a good hard competitive slap more than Apple's Music-Related business.
Nope, I can't agree. I see it like this.
Things needing a good competitive slap:
1. Microsoft's OS Monopoly
2. Microsoft's Office Suite Monopoly
.
.
.
10. Apples iPod / iTunes monopoly
It is absolutely mindboggling to me that so many people are so beside themselves about the fact that Apple holds a majority in the music player business, but either don't care or defend Microsoft's monopolies in the OS and Office software market.
Its like they're saying "Apple needs to go down" and then saying "Microsoft isn't a monopoly" at the same time.
And what would Microsoft do if this music player managed to take a majority of the market from Apple. Thats right, they'd us it to extend their #$%^% monopoly more like they do with everything.
For an iPod "killer" I'd much prefer something from anyone but Microsoft. Althought I know with absolute certainty that I wouldn't be getting a Zune, because its almost an absoulte certainty it would never ever work on my iMac.
It really make me wonder sometimes why so many stories like this are out there. iTunes is a phenomonal success and has a brilliant buisness model. And the record industry wants an iPod killer to come becasue they want to start charging MORE for music and iTunes is currently in the way of that. Of course that will fail miserably. Microsoft's "convert your library" will also fail. For any but the smallest libraries, it would take hours to download your music to get the same thing thats already on your iPod. Rembember sony's portable player that had to convert all the music you wanted to put on it? It didn't do so hot either.
The way I see it the only way I will embrace an iPod/iTunes killer is when:
1) Someone starts selling MP3s without DRM for less than 99 cents. (By the way the first legitimate store (read not Russian based) to do this would take almost half of iTunes business overnight. Of course the meglomaniacally stupid bastards in the RIAA would never ever decide to make billions of dollars selling money that way, no sir!
and
2) Someone starts selling another MP3 player with an amazing user interface, fantastic integration with your music library, and good looks.
Until then I know _I_ won't see any iPod killers out there.
I believe it's the first or second one that's actually related to this partiuclar instance of Jeremy DeGroot.
Wow, I've heard of refering to yourself in the third person, but referencing yourself as an object, now thats cool. I'm impressed.
Speaking of Apple and browsers. What I find truly amazing is that on my iMac I have _five_ different browsers installed (none of which is IE). Now mind you some of them share quite a bit of code (camino, firefox) but still the amount of activity and innovation going on with browsers is amazing. Amazing everywhere that is except at Microsoft. IE exists and has always existed for the sole purpose of locking people into Microsoft products. It was Microsoft's best reaponse to regain control after the world wide web broke out.
You always have to remember that when the web became big, it wasn't where MS wanted the fuure to be. In fact the delays on the way to IE7 are all about MS not wanting the web to be the future either. Microsoft fears open standards and systems like the plague. Embrace, extend, extinguish exist soley for the purpose of trying to defeat open standards.
Its good to see MS losing ground on this battle in the browser space and hopefully ODF will help them lose it in the document space.
You always have to remember that if in the 90's Microsoft could have in any way caused the web to not exist they would have done anything to make it so. But the best they could do was try to monopolize the market with _their_ browser.
Go Firefox!
Bootleg unauthorized edited DVDs are bootleg unauthorized edited DVDs, they aren't lions. Get over yourself.
Thats true, but the original poster does have a point. Your recorded show with the commercials removed (or skipped) is very much considered a bootleg by the TV establishment.
This ruling does not help in that respect. How long before ABC or some other network takes TIVO to court for unlawfully editing their Television shows, using this ruiling as their excuse?
It makes me wonder if people that sing along with songs on the radio are worse drivers (cause its somewhat similar to talking on a handsfree phone).
.... there'll be a lot of people I know unhappy with that. Right, yeah, people I know wouldn't like that.
They better not make it illegal to sing along with the radio or
How many times does it have to be paid?
Answers from various sources:
RIAA: Everytime you listen to it.
MPAA: Everytime you wacth it.
Telcos: Every time every bit crosses our wires.
Which reminds me. I the old days, you could get internet access based on your timed usage amount. The market quickly figured out that set rates for bandwidth were better, much better.
This idea of tiered service is so bogus its just confounding that they are wanting to try it. The only thing a "large pipe" carrier will need to do to win in the marketplace in _not_ charge extra to carry the data. God help (or rather not help, let them go to hell) the telcos if Google starts using its dark fiber to get into the market as an internet backbone carrier.
Great mod to my analogy! You are certainly correct. Many thanks.
Plus the page has quotes from Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-lee.
If those guys are saying a tiered internet is bad, then it is bad. I mean these are two of the biggest people behind what has become the modern internet. Their vision was correct. I would say then that their vision of the bad that can come of tiered internet services might well be correct too.
Also sorry, I just can't argue for "Net Neutrality", I much prefer to argue AGAINST a tiered internet. I think Net Neutrality is hard to understand, but everyone can understand different pricing tiers for different internet service and wonder why theri intenet content would need to be paid for twice, because everyone has already paid thier ISP.
Taxis and Limousines both drive on public roads; their owners can charge whatever they wish, whoever they wish, as long as the person who is charged agrees to pay.
Bad analogy, because taxi and limo fares are for the use of the car and driver, not for the use of the road. The better analogy would be if a private company wanted to put up toll booths on public roads and start charging tolls.
I agree, except that I would say its an awful analogy, since my car, your car, a taxi, and a limo all have to obey the same SPEED LIMITS, and that what a tiered internet is all about. Charging more for changing speed limits.
Also, its really amazing to watch how the tiered iternet has gone from the ramblings of a Telco CEO, to being voted on as a law. Its also staggerlingly disturbing that it even happens, much more so that it happens all of the time. It appears that a government of, for and by the people has actually already perished.
Sorry, I just can't pass this one up.
Customers don't want to pay out the ass again for you to add a simple feature because you didn't take the time to do it properly the first time around.
I say that customers want exactly that. This is the model of software development that Microsoft has adopted from the start and customers can't seem to get enough of it. If customers had really wanted solutions that just worked and didn't have problems, then Unix would have been a much more dominant operating system in the late 80's and early 90's. Instead customers just wanted the next thing from Microsoft that fixed the problems from the previous version. Of course, MS's cheaper price didn't hurt, but true ROI anaysis would have show a "full" solution would have been better, even if more expensive.
Don't get me wrong. While I'm being critical of this tactic by MS, it definately works and has worked extremely well for them. We are always waiting for the next Microsoft os that will "have everything". As Vista has shown, that will never happen, but its really because MS doesn't ever want it to happen.
Because, in reality, thats what customers really want. Delivering now and making them upgrade (or fix) later is really what they expect. It shouldn't be, but it is.
All audioplayer have a small buffer in them, is that illegal too then
Of course it will be. They'll just add another law forbidding electronics companies to make any playback device that uses a buffer. So what if your^H^H^H^Htheir content skips when you play it. That's they way they ment for your to hear it everytime you pay them so you can play it.
I'm meening all these above comments to be facetious, but I terrified that they might become real issues. The RIAA and MPAA are so $#%#@$% greedy that the only end state they seem to have in mind for their products is to make them totally unusable thus guaranteeing their market. Yes I know that sounds insanely stupid, but the ??AA's are insanely stupid.
They're not "bolting it on", Windows NT *was* designed with security "in mind" from day one. Far better security than traditional unix, as well.
True, except that in order to do anything meaninful in NT when it first came out you had to have administrator access, which kind of nullified the extra secrity stuff.
And the real laugh is microsoft's late, humorous, bolted on implementation of fairly simple access controls. Attempting to get users to not run as superuser at this late stage is going to be an absolute laugh riot - personally, I can't wait for vista :-)
You hit the nail on the head. Its not that Microsoft is finally taking an interest in user security, its the fact that they're bolting it on to a system that wasn't designed with it in mind in the first place.
The more I hear about Vista, the more I believe that Microsoft's next operating system will be built from the ground up using a pre-existing OS like BSD or Linux as its foundation. The legacy of Windows is just too much weight for their new operating systems to bear.
Great post, BTW.
No, in that case the secret of the state was a particular weapons technology. That we had such a device was already public knowledge. The people in fact had a right to know that we had the bomb once it was used. The implementation details of how to make such a weapon however did not need to be as it was not a significant threat to the liberty of the people to be deprived of such knowledge. No political party or movement could be persecuted or intimidated and democracy is not threatened by nuclear weapon implementation details.
You can't have it both ways. All the phone records are implementation details, and on the call logging one, no ties are being made with the data back to the owers of the numbers before the data is analyzed. Basically what I'm getting at is that this is technical details as well, so you're splitting hairs there. The technical details of the bomb were very important in the Rosenbergs time and my question of what if they published the plans still stands.
That's an essential difference between these two example. However, a program that spies on the activity of Americans that was kept secret from the people is another thing because it is ripe for abuse. In this case, the state secret is that it is acting in a manner that is arguably counter to the interests of the people. That sort of secret should never be kept.
I actually agree with this statement. Hopefully, if charges are filed, the defense will take exactly this stance. A jury of their peers will be able to discern if they traded secrets, or exposed a coverup. There is a big difference between the two, but a fine like between doing one or the other. Our system does allow them to defend themselves from any allegations, and use their rights in their defense as well as allow other citizens to determine their guilt or innocence. All is not lost here.
The flip side of this is that the government could (and you claim should) lose. This means that their monitoring would have to end. This means that leads on terrorist activities will be harder to find. For every citizen to be free in this case, citizens will have to accept that to have more freedom they may need to be more alert themselves because the government will lose one of its tools to analyze data and find out information itself.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" Is a fine slogan, but you've got to mean it. You can't say after an attack, "but you were supposed to protect me" to a government that had its hands tied in investigating terrorists. Its not all or nothing, you have to weigh your risks. But, I believe if you want Liberty, you should be able to have it and defend it. If you are one of those people, though, you have to make it your perogative to be free, _and_ your perogitive to be secure. You can't have the nanny state and Liberty at the same time.
While I agree with the spirit of your post. I cannot fully agree. We are talking here about classified information. Things that are supposed to be classified are considered "secrets" of the government. There is an has always been punishment for those that reveal the coutries secrets, since the founding of this country (and even before).
Free speech is about being free to speak your mind and give your opinion. It is not about telling your countries secrets and undermining its security. While I believe the actions going after the "whistleblowers" in this case may be quite overzealous. They did release classified information, and that has always been wrong. Whether or not that information should be classified is debatable, and whether or not the government should be collecting it is also debatable. But anyone charged can have that debate during their trial.
Now before anyone goes ballistic over my stance, or gets all worked up about my stance with respect to our First Amentment freedoms, please ask youself this:
If the Rosenbergs had given the details on the bomb to a newspaper to be printed, instead of handing it over to the Soviets, do you think they should have been protected just because a newspaper has a right to publish under the first amendment? Do you think the newspaper should be protected? This was notably one of the biggest "leaks" ever in US history. But what if it had gone just like this one with a publisher involved with a unnamed source. Should they be protected in this? It is actually a debatable question and a hard one at that. It not as easy as "all speach must be free" all of the time.
From an IT perspective, its not the cost to purchase that is the problem, its the cost to configure. We can configure a thin client in 15 minutes, but a Windows PC with all the latest patches takes at least an hour. Factor this by all the PCs at our site and thin clients save buckets full of money in setup, confiuration and time to manage.
If your a small business, then thin clients won't save you much money, but overall they aren't as expensive as you think (in total cost) either.
Maybe so, in the long run, though I'm not as optimistic as you are. In the short-run, the people who make lots of money controlling distribution of content like DRM, and will do everything they can to get it adopted in order to continue to profit from that control, and lots of people will go along because it will be the easiest way to get access to the most popular media content.
And as they try and invent this future they miss out on the massive amount of money they could make by just giving up on DRM and creating a fair market for digital music. Their insistance to DRM will ensure that illegal copies survive. They have to make illegal downloading not worth it in comparison and the wasy to do that is to make legal downloading easier, not harder (read DRM enbumbered up the wazoo).
Todays cars already have a speed limit in their controllers. I didn't hear anyone scream.
Well I've never run into any limit on any of my cars. By the way, I was talking about cars not letting you exceed the POSTED limit, not having some kind of limiter to keep you from going 110, I'm talking about one that would kick in at 55. And yes people would get very pissed about that.
No I wouldn't, becuase I won't by any of that content.
To use your car anaolgy, it would be like car manufactures being forced to make cars that couldn't speed. And yes that would cause one hell of an uproar. So I, like everyone else will bitch about HDCP crap.
DRM has a NEGATIVE value to the consumer, the only way to get consumers to buy it is to force them. It really pisses me off. We could be in the middle of a true revolution in digital content, but the "Content Providers" are such greedy bastards they need to "protect their revenue", all while failing to realize that if they just went along with what everyone wanted, they could actually, eventually make MORE money (see the VCR for an historical example they themselves experienced, but are unable, do to their stupidity to apply to this situation).
And true there really is a digital content revolution going on right now, but its wayyy behind where it could (or should) be.
Amen, brother.
You do realize that influenza has the potential to kill more people within a few weeks than AIDS has killed in the last 25 years. (And that flu infections occur about 100X more frequently than AIDS infections.)
;-)
Yeah, I know. I toyed with the idea of using ebola for the windows side, but windows really does have a lowered immune system for viruses and trojans so I thought AIDS more appropriate. As for the flu for the mac, I was kind of operating on the idea of the basic run of the mill "flu", not so much influenza. I just thought common cold wouldn't have been quite enough for the comparison.
Although I rather like the other posters cliffdiving and breaking your ankle bit. That seems to fit