I grow tired of the "Slashdot hates intellectual property rights" argument. I get the sense reading the posts here that very few are against rewarding people that create worthwhile material whether it is music, books, programs or graphical art.
Of course it's not "slashdot" that "hates IP," it's a very noisy, seldom-challenged group of loons that post comments along those lines. The "you shouldn't get to make money later, off of work you did yesterday" crowd is shrill, carping, ridiculous... but also rarely called on what's wrong with their take on things because they also tend to give comfort to people who are too cheap to pay for their entertainment in general.
Personally, if I could Paypal bands/artists/creators directly for their works I enjoy, I would.
And, as is so often pointed out here, you can. Unless the artist has chosen to do business a different way. Most successful/promising ones would rather concentrate on their art, and hire someone to do all of the paperwork, the promotion, the publishing, the legal crap, and so on. Those publishers are sometimes members of a trade association or two, and those trade associations are the pet demons, around here. But people here keep forgetting that many an artists chooses to personally form a studio or a record label so that they can, themselves, help cultivate and promote new talent, and they quickly realize there's a lot to be said for letting a single entity help with their industry representation and other not-about-the-art-itself activities.
So, if you don't like the business decisions that an artist has made (including the media and related DRM-ish stuff that comes with those deals), don't do business with that artist. Couldn't be simpler!
You posted that on Slashdot, where every third post is a complaint about the tyranny of copyright and payment for the use of intellectual property?
How naive.
Excellent observation. But I think instead of "naive" you might be looking for "contextually hypocritical." No one that hangs out here for long would be foggy on the way this audience treats the concept of making more money, down the road, for something you did yesterday (to say nothing of 30 years ago). Especially when what you did was produce some information (which wants to be free, blah blah blah). What the folks looking to send this guy money really want is to reward him, with cash, for his slightly loopy world view.
Because the UK media have been telling people "careful about what you click on when go online, there are bad people out there".
But you say that like it's a bad thing! It's actually true, even if it's a lot more nuanced than as presented - just like everything you get from aimed-at-a-large-audience news/communication. Economics, legal matters, cosmology, genetics, giant multi-million-node internetworked systems... I think it's better they say "careful!" than say "there are free things out there that can work well for you, start looking."
Look, we brought peace to Japan, after we nuked it.
No doubt you'd have preferred a sustained, horrific firebombing (a la Tokyo) and a massive, tooth-and-nail invasion that would have killed many times more people and destroyed much of the country's remaining infrastructure. Or, perhaps you would have preferred to let that regime just go on its merry way ransacking the Pacific rim and expanding their territory the old fashioned way (through the murder and enslavement of millions)? Or is it that you just don't like "nukes," despite the fact that using them got more done to stop the war, and save lives, than any other available option?
The Dean connections, the Q&A about a method of journalism that turns into a multi-paragraph administration-bash, and so on. It's interesting to see discussions of truthiness and fact checking bump up so hard against the idealogical tone being used as examples in the discussion. There's no question that non-traditional channnels of communication are vital to shedding light on media manipulation/limitations (see Dan Rather's clumsiness as initially exposed by bloggers... just not this guy's flavor of bloggers) - but he seems to be framing the entire discussion around how he sees it bearing on a particular, and transient, political climate. He's clearly no dummy, and graces us with some astute academic observations... but so much of his thought process seems anchored in a particular spot on the idealogical spectrum, rather than celebrating how filter-less the aggregate result of this sort of thing might actually be.
But the notion that we need to be free of gatekeepers seems to ignore the fact that merit is and should be a (perhaps the) gatekeeper... and that's the one area where he can't be in any way specific (on the mechanics of it). It's nice to hear that he's uncomfortable with the word "community" as a news source, but he seems equally uncomfortable grappling with the fact that real skill in editing (and weighing the merit of) submitted material is a serious full-time effort that, for most people, must therefore also be how they pay their bills. I don't think we can have an full-on paradigm shift made credible entirely by professionally trained, retired journalists. Especially when many people jumping on this bandwagon seem to be doing so expressly to make the profession of journalism obsolete (and thus, ultimately, killing off the very demographic he'd rely on to play a role making this sustainably credible in the first place).
Yeah, me neither. Someone who hates MS so much that they'd rather cede liberty in software design to judges and juries isn't really going to have anything constructive to say, anyway.
The problem is that you're using the phrase "the exit polls" without providing any context. When a few precincts are found to have not voted quite the way that exit polls (which are only as meaningful as the demographic that takes/has the time to honestly respond to them, instead of heading to work or home, etc) run by media companies have extrapolated, you're dealing with exactly what you'd expect: some noise in the system. When you have clear evidence of systemic corruption, that's another matter. There is ZERO of that in the US, or at the very least just as much good old fashioned dead-people-voting and same-guy-with-no-photo-id voting in every precinct in his county as there is any indication, whatsoever, of actual malice in the operation of the polls.
On the other hand, in the Ukraine, you've got actual beating up of poll workers and voters, and cash-for-thuggery across large blocks of voting territory. Were you outraged when a local democrat's campaign workers were caught slashing tires on the vans that had been rented to drive some (mostly republican) voters to their polling places? No? Right - because it was local, and not wide-spread. Apples and (heh) oranges, I'm afraid.
try to aim at a moving deer in a scope... now add fore/background brush to 'blur it'... you get the picture
Better yet, launch three or four of them in a flock. If you've ever tried to hit a particular bird in an explosively rising covey of quail, you'll know what I mean. Thrumming gray/brown wings, semi-random-seeming movement, motion catching your eye in three places... natural selection has finely honed such critters and their defenses from accurate, fast predators (like hawks). Insurgent squads are going to have to start including a guy with a goose gun who's had some time on blue-gray clay pigeon boomerangs.
At the point where the marketplace, in part due to illegal activity by Microsoft, ceased to provide the necessary checks and balances.
Don't you feel a little silly refering to "checks and balances" when talking about software features? Especially when talking about a company that's historically been screamed at in this venue for not making their product secure enough... acting to do exactly that? How do "checks and balances" come into play when we're talking about a new version of an operating system being shipped safer than the last version? Are you saying that the government's role, here, is to insist that Microsoft ship their product in a less safe condition so that other companies that are not competing with them by making their own operating systems can make money off of that unsafe condition? You can say:
Win95 etc are all out of support but MS *still* has copyright on the code. Why?
Because the have a vested interest in maintaining the notion that their code is their code. Why open up ancient code, just so that all of the leering MS-bashers can light up their blogs saying "Look how stupid MS was in the 1990's! LOLZ! Chair throwning!" etc. It's just not worth the noise and the pointless distraction, and it IS worth not setting an expectation for dishing out their source X years after they've retired a product - since their better, newer stuff may remain central to future offerings for years to come.
they will destroy the source code well before the copyright expires
Really? Like, it's all in one briefcase which they'll send to the bottom of the ocean or burn? What do you have to actually back up that prediction? Further, why do you care? If you have such contempt for them, why do you give a rat's ass what happens to the source for the product you despise? Just wondering.
This is what you get when a company acquires monopoly power
Um... so, if the very same company happened to have produced an O/S (let's go back to, say, Win98 or something, doesn't matter), that WAS airtight, and wouldn't be materially helped by third-party A/V products... wouldn't you still be saying the same thing? At what point did the publisher lose the right to make their own product better?
At what point did the government, or third parties via the courts, become the best people to decide what features you think should appear in your new software product? Are you really comfortable with that, as a matter of philosophy? If Vista sucks in new and interesting ways, it will either have problems, or a third party will find a new (if temporary) way to make a truckload of cash. If it doesn't suck, all you've got is less trouble on the desktop, and fewer dart-throwing targets for people that don't like MS (um, including the ones who say they don't like MS because their products are secure... the irony is delicious).
So, let's all hope Microsoft's antivirus component is pretty good, because whether it is or not, in a few years it's all we're going to have.
So what? It's also the only thing that's meaningfully doing all sorts of things in its role as your O/S. If you don't like the collection of computer-operating tools that's called Vista... use something else. It's not MS's obligation to provide a platform for other companies to market particular pieces of the desktop and under-the-hood environment. No more than it's Symantec's obligation to open up their products so that MacAffee can make money off of "improving" Symantec's tools with another item you can buy.
I suppose Microsoft will claim that this is another integral part of an OS. While my first reaction is to scoff...
Your use of the word "claim" implies that someone other than them should decide what is, and is not, part of their own product. They wouldn't be "claiming" such a thing, but simply stating it. "Yesterday, our product looked like X, and today, it looks like Y." Other companies that glom onto a freight train like MS and get rich doing so can hardly complain (with a straight face) when that other company's products change shape or purpose. Symantec and MacAfee aren't MS's customers, the end users are. If we ever get to the point of killing off most of the spam conduits in the world, we'll probably hear about how the spam-filtering appliance makers are being "unfairly" deprived of a living.
This all derives from the pervasive sense of entitlement that's drenching our culture. MacAfee and Symantec know the score, but they're playing this card because they know it will resonate in a courtroom full of modern day jurors, should it come to that. Sleazy, but probably clever in real terms.
The polls in question are not partisan, "attitude" of either party is not statisticly significant.
The point is that the polls aren't statistically very helpful in the FIRST place, but that the attitudes in question are driving the shrieking fits that some people are having about actual voting patterns that don't precisely match very imprecise exit polls. If the attitudes weren't so cranked up, and the outcome wasn't at odds with the desires of the people doing most of the shrieking, then we wouldn't be having the conversation. That's not irrelevent, it's the whole point of the conversation, here.
Confidence going into the election, on the part of the Dems, that they would win, and a much-larger-than-usual (and rather shrill) emotion-laden investment on the part of many of Bush's opponents in seeing Kerry win. That positioning completely colored the tone of those reporting on the issue (the majority of whom were Kerry voters themselves), and absolutely impacts the way man-on-the-street coverage plays out. It was also a very close election. We've had very few of those historically, and now that the science of campaign-running is working with that reality, you'll see more and more just-barely-tuned precinct level attention to campaigns that wlil produce non-"traditional" feeling results... from the ads you see run right down to the off-by-a-few-percent stats gathered by people running exit polls with old methodolgies.
The question isn't "what changed?" but rather "how on earth would you expect anything other than a shift in how these tools report such a dramatically altered campaign and media environment?"
Terror incidents have been a constant backdrop throughout the cold war. Yet somehow the West managed to win this war without losing its soul. According to you this should have been impossible.
You're confusing the period of the Cold War with other things that happened during that period. The Libyan downing of PanAm 103 wasn't some proxy attack by the Soviets. The Achille Loro wasn't some Soviet attack on US citizens designed to terrorize them into accepting the Communist Way. The deaths of the Marines in Lebanon wasn't part of the Soviet attempt to hang onto Eastern Europe.
Communist terrorists (Shining Path, that sort of thing) committed "hot" acts, but it wasn't the Soviets (our opponents in the Cold War) doing such overt things.
You're honestly trying to tell me that the stakes are higher against a loose network of terrorists on a shoestring budget than they were against an entire nation that had the ability to rain down thousands of nuclear weapons on our cities?
One's a strategic thing, and one's a tactical thing. Not counting the possibly-hysterical concerns about stuff like malicious smallpox releases by terrorists, of course the stakes, per se, were higher (during the Cold War) if you really thought all-out nuclear war was really going to happen. But if the Soviets were regularly putting together small teams of people that were actually tasked with finding ways to randomly kill trainloads of people in Madrid or London, or crash plains into tall buildings, and doing it, that would have been a hot war, not a cold one.
The issue with the Soviets wasn't whether we'd actually win/lose/fight a nuclear war, it was whether we'd see more or less of the world gobbled up like the bloc states. That's a lot different figuring out to stop well-financed, but small-time operators from something like the Beslan school attack. I imagine if you asked a selection of parents if they really would be truly "scared" (as you put it) at the prospect of their kids in their school going through that (especially if you also told them that we were going to stop worrying about looking for people communicating about the plans for such an event), you'd probably hear a yes.
Because the hundreds of espionage trials that have taken place in our judicial system throughout our nation's history didn't work?
No, because espionage trials usually involve US citizens acting traitorously (but in a way that the criminal system clearly knows what to do with), and because many foreign nationals involved are in the country under reciprocal diplomatic protections.
We do not have a long history of foreigners attacking our people overseas (not counting traditional military opponents - we have military prisoner and tribual practices long established for that), or being involved in complex, wide-spread (but loosely knit) networks that gather, finance, and prep overseas, and which we set out to stop (and capture). It's one thing when you have people clearly working at the behest of a identifiable foreign government. Groups like Al Queda are a different beast altogether.
Since you're a history buff, please generally characterize the "hundreds" of pattern/precedent-establishing circumstances, in the past, that we've encountered in some way substantially like what we're dealing with, right now? You know, privately financed, geographically adrift, bent-on-mass-murder cells of individuals that have actually scored a good few hits, and have no uniform/national affiliation. OK, so run down how we handled, say, just 50 of those. Remember: they have to be foreign nationals, caught attacking or gearing up to attack us here and/or abroad. No?
Citing past counter-intel operations and busts is nonsense in this situation. Someone looking to get nuclear sub program info, or communications systems plans, or troop deployment schedules as the CCCP jockied for a better type of losing position not doing so in advance of then setting a near-term date to fly a passenger jet into your office building. Can you not see the difference?
The whole point of the legislation is to provide a formal framework where none previously existed. In the meantime, actual events were unfolding, and actual people (like the one you mentioned) actually did have actual contact with actual bad guys. Pursuing a prosecution in the absence of tangible legislative guidance was just about a perfect recipe for the guy walking away on appeals. A guy who demonstrated his interest in helping to gather materials and plan the use of a radiologial bomb in a US city. So: you'd let him out on his own, or allow lawyers to come and go while you're still hashing out how to best deal with the rest of the implications of his connections?
It's not obvious how to deal with situations like that - especially when there are international, defense-related entanglements that would require the disclosure of intel methods in a standard criminal trial. This legislation is trying to make such situations clearer, and provide the couter-terror people some much needed boundaries/expectations.
Body count Bush: 120,000+ and counting, with infinite military power to spare, ready to oppress a nation.
Body count Bin Laden: 5,000 and struggling to survive, on the run with with no nation to call home.
Ah, I see. It's Bush that's arming the insurgents and getting one sect of Muslims to blow up another sect of Muslims. Right, I keep forgetting that.
5,000? Is that really, really what you think Al Queda has limited itself to? If that's your take on it, then the "perspective" from which you're operating is incredibly twisted. First: cite your 120,000 reference, being sure to include an indication that it's US troops that have killed the people you're referring to.
Even a group that's solidly against the use of western forces to support the new Iraqi government puts the total number of deaths at roughly 30,000. Your 120K is just total BS. And more to the point: just because most of those deaths took place while the US(+) forces were in the country doesn't mean it's those forces killing thousands of civilians. The insurgency is an indiscriminate violence machine doing its best to convince people that the US presence is the cause of the sectarian violence, rather than a propoganda excuse for the terror that's being deployed, by jihaddi activists and states like Iran, to erode trust in a new democracy that isn't completely beholden to Wahabbists and their ilk. They're willing to slaughter other Muslims to paint a picture that they hope will obscure causality, and you're just singing their tune perfectly. Hope that feels nice for you, what with your perspective, and all.
It's hyperbolic and fallacious and it sets off my bullshit sophistry alarms from three miles away. That rhetorical tactic is fundamentally identical to overstating terrorist threat.
That, and the fact that there actually is a hole where the WTC used to be, and guys sitting in jail that were trying really hard to take down a bunch of UK->US planes a month ago, and thousands of people in the middle east being killed by people expressly in the name of denying them democracy... that stuff is real, as unpleasant as it is. And the more shrill some idealogues are (along the lines you've identified), the more it seems they don't consider those things to be important at all (never mind over stated here, understated there, etc... no, their tone actually seems to suggest that such doesn't matter at all).
Thank you for illustrating exactly why some of the counter-terrorism backers seem to feel the urge to speak in such dramatic language sometimes... their detractors truly seem more interested in a high-school-debate foot-stomping contest than in actually rationally discussing anything. "Bush is teh evil" doesn't really grant the person who says it any sort of intellectual credibility - and so the person they're screaming at tends to just boil it down to, "Fine. So I don't care if you get killed or suffer economically in something akin to 9/11... but it can't impact you without impacting the rest of us, so STFU."
The criminals who bombed the WTC in 1993 -- 6 months after Clinton took office -- are currently sitting in jail. They were captured, tried, and imprisoned.
Er, not exactly. For example, there's Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who came and went between the US and Iraq, helped make the bombs involved, and is thought to still be in Iraq. He is not in prison, and despite ties to international terrorist organizations was not prevented from attempting to destroy those buildings.
Or, there's the Al Queda money-man, good old KSM. He's exactly the sort of person about which we're currently trying to decide how to detain and question. He was hip deep in the original, and second WTC attacks, and many other terror plots. He's detained, all right, but not because (as you imply) the Clinton administration performed some criminal arrest and prosecution. Nor was he prevented from conducting his attacks.
You seem to be confusing the obviously good thing of locking up terrorists when you happen to lay hands on them - using criminal proceedings if that's a good fit - with preventing mass slaughter (which is their stated objective). Normal punish-the-crime type activity isn't very helpful when you've got people doing their best to (as in the UK example) blow up trains or a bunch of planes. Sure, the victims' families would be happy to have the prosecution go forth, but they'd probably much rather have their family members still alive. For that, you've got to conduct actual counter-terrorism activities - and that's just not the same as dealing with the neighborhood drug dealer.
The solution of the left is to get the fuck out of Iraq.
And, of course, the portions of the recently leaked NIE document that the left is braying about, taken out of context, might make that feel warm and fuzzy to you. But the part of that document that's the most important is the part that mentions the important impact against future terror recruitment and activities that a steadfast support of the Iraqi government will have. If the insurgents in that country fail to widen the conflict that their employers in Iran and elsewhere want, it will take the romance and propoganda power out of that scene - essentially, Muslims killing other Muslims in the name of preventing democracy will start to lose its appeal if it doesn't work.
By the way: your embarassing reference to people "pushing memes" even as you play the "Fox" card to explain a world-view less goopy than yours is... really, really funny. "You people and your memes are bogus! And I've got a mythical meme that says so, which I will continue to repeat until everyone thinks it's true!" Heh. But that's not as funny as your need to spew names, junior high school style, at people in an attempt to show how lucid and thoughtful you are. What a hoot! +% Funny, no doubt.
However: the only think cooler than woosh-click would be total silence. That's unnervingly cool.
Is that a whiff of ... creeping apostrophitis?
on
A Plant That Can Smell
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Turns out, it sniffs out it's prey
Yes, but can it sniff out the difference between "it's" (it is) and "its" (the thing that belongs to it)? Come on, now, it's just one stinking paragraph to edit!
That being said, I've often observed, in the jungle-like Maryland suburbs, the seemingly impossible reach and accuracy of certain smothering, viney plants. The twisty, strangling, inescapable spread of warm, fuzzy-looking faux-friendliness - it's amazing. And that's just the PTA members! You should see the Kudzu!
Slashdot Mirror
I grow tired of the "Slashdot hates intellectual property rights" argument. I get the sense reading the posts here that very few are against rewarding people that create worthwhile material whether it is music, books, programs or graphical art.
Of course it's not "slashdot" that "hates IP," it's a very noisy, seldom-challenged group of loons that post comments along those lines. The "you shouldn't get to make money later, off of work you did yesterday" crowd is shrill, carping, ridiculous... but also rarely called on what's wrong with their take on things because they also tend to give comfort to people who are too cheap to pay for their entertainment in general.
Personally, if I could Paypal bands/artists/creators directly for their works I enjoy, I would.
And, as is so often pointed out here, you can. Unless the artist has chosen to do business a different way. Most successful/promising ones would rather concentrate on their art, and hire someone to do all of the paperwork, the promotion, the publishing, the legal crap, and so on. Those publishers are sometimes members of a trade association or two, and those trade associations are the pet demons, around here. But people here keep forgetting that many an artists chooses to personally form a studio or a record label so that they can, themselves, help cultivate and promote new talent, and they quickly realize there's a lot to be said for letting a single entity help with their industry representation and other not-about-the-art-itself activities.
So, if you don't like the business decisions that an artist has made (including the media and related DRM-ish stuff that comes with those deals), don't do business with that artist. Couldn't be simpler!
You posted that on Slashdot, where every third post is a complaint about the tyranny of copyright and payment for the use of intellectual property?
How naive.
Excellent observation. But I think instead of "naive" you might be looking for "contextually hypocritical." No one that hangs out here for long would be foggy on the way this audience treats the concept of making more money, down the road, for something you did yesterday (to say nothing of 30 years ago). Especially when what you did was produce some information (which wants to be free, blah blah blah). What the folks looking to send this guy money really want is to reward him, with cash, for his slightly loopy world view.
but at 2000g, that would probably equate to throwing hamburger
More like spraying a red cow-plasma cloud out of the launch tube.
Because the UK media have been telling people "careful about what you click on when go online, there are bad people out there".
But you say that like it's a bad thing! It's actually true, even if it's a lot more nuanced than as presented - just like everything you get from aimed-at-a-large-audience news/communication. Economics, legal matters, cosmology, genetics, giant multi-million-node internetworked systems... I think it's better they say "careful!" than say "there are free things out there that can work well for you, start looking."
nope. though I don't disagree with the decision, some have argued cogently that it may have been unecessary. Bad joke, that's why it's AC.
Oh, OK. Never mind!
Look, we brought peace to Japan, after we nuked it.
No doubt you'd have preferred a sustained, horrific firebombing (a la Tokyo) and a massive, tooth-and-nail invasion that would have killed many times more people and destroyed much of the country's remaining infrastructure. Or, perhaps you would have preferred to let that regime just go on its merry way ransacking the Pacific rim and expanding their territory the old fashioned way (through the murder and enslavement of millions)? Or is it that you just don't like "nukes," despite the fact that using them got more done to stop the war, and save lives, than any other available option?
I mean, what with all the grinding, and all.
... but so much of his thought process seems anchored in a particular spot on the idealogical spectrum, rather than celebrating how filter-less the aggregate result of this sort of thing might actually be.
... and that's the one area where he can't be in any way specific (on the mechanics of it). It's nice to hear that he's uncomfortable with the word "community" as a news source, but he seems equally uncomfortable grappling with the fact that real skill in editing (and weighing the merit of) submitted material is a serious full-time effort that, for most people, must therefore also be how they pay their bills. I don't think we can have an full-on paradigm shift made credible entirely by professionally trained, retired journalists. Especially when many people jumping on this bandwagon seem to be doing so expressly to make the profession of journalism obsolete (and thus, ultimately, killing off the very demographic he'd rely on to play a role making this sustainably credible in the first place).
The Dean connections, the Q&A about a method of journalism that turns into a multi-paragraph administration-bash, and so on. It's interesting to see discussions of truthiness and fact checking bump up so hard against the idealogical tone being used as examples in the discussion. There's no question that non-traditional channnels of communication are vital to shedding light on media manipulation/limitations (see Dan Rather's clumsiness as initially exposed by bloggers... just not this guy's flavor of bloggers) - but he seems to be framing the entire discussion around how he sees it bearing on a particular, and transient, political climate. He's clearly no dummy, and graces us with some astute academic observations
But the notion that we need to be free of gatekeepers seems to ignore the fact that merit is and should be a (perhaps the) gatekeeper
Not interested in arguing with ranting loon
Yeah, me neither. Someone who hates MS so much that they'd rather cede liberty in software design to judges and juries isn't really going to have anything constructive to say, anyway.
The problem is that you're using the phrase "the exit polls" without providing any context. When a few precincts are found to have not voted quite the way that exit polls (which are only as meaningful as the demographic that takes/has the time to honestly respond to them, instead of heading to work or home, etc) run by media companies have extrapolated, you're dealing with exactly what you'd expect: some noise in the system. When you have clear evidence of systemic corruption, that's another matter. There is ZERO of that in the US, or at the very least just as much good old fashioned dead-people-voting and same-guy-with-no-photo-id voting in every precinct in his county as there is any indication, whatsoever, of actual malice in the operation of the polls.
On the other hand, in the Ukraine, you've got actual beating up of poll workers and voters, and cash-for-thuggery across large blocks of voting territory. Were you outraged when a local democrat's campaign workers were caught slashing tires on the vans that had been rented to drive some (mostly republican) voters to their polling places? No? Right - because it was local, and not wide-spread. Apples and (heh) oranges, I'm afraid.
try to aim at a moving deer in a scope... now add fore/background brush to 'blur it'... you get the picture
Better yet, launch three or four of them in a flock. If you've ever tried to hit a particular bird in an explosively rising covey of quail, you'll know what I mean. Thrumming gray/brown wings, semi-random-seeming movement, motion catching your eye in three places... natural selection has finely honed such critters and their defenses from accurate, fast predators (like hawks). Insurgent squads are going to have to start including a guy with a goose gun who's had some time on blue-gray clay pigeon boomerangs.
At the point where the marketplace, in part due to illegal activity by Microsoft, ceased to provide the necessary checks and balances.
Don't you feel a little silly refering to "checks and balances" when talking about software features? Especially when talking about a company that's historically been screamed at in this venue for not making their product secure enough... acting to do exactly that? How do "checks and balances" come into play when we're talking about a new version of an operating system being shipped safer than the last version? Are you saying that the government's role, here, is to insist that Microsoft ship their product in a less safe condition so that other companies that are not competing with them by making their own operating systems can make money off of that unsafe condition? You can say:
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
Because it really is that simple.
Win95 etc are all out of support but MS *still* has copyright on the code. Why?
Because the have a vested interest in maintaining the notion that their code is their code. Why open up ancient code, just so that all of the leering MS-bashers can light up their blogs saying "Look how stupid MS was in the 1990's! LOLZ! Chair throwning!" etc. It's just not worth the noise and the pointless distraction, and it IS worth not setting an expectation for dishing out their source X years after they've retired a product - since their better, newer stuff may remain central to future offerings for years to come.
they will destroy the source code well before the copyright expires
Really? Like, it's all in one briefcase which they'll send to the bottom of the ocean or burn? What do you have to actually back up that prediction? Further, why do you care? If you have such contempt for them, why do you give a rat's ass what happens to the source for the product you despise? Just wondering.
This is what you get when a company acquires monopoly power
Um... so, if the very same company happened to have produced an O/S (let's go back to, say, Win98 or something, doesn't matter), that WAS airtight, and wouldn't be materially helped by third-party A/V products... wouldn't you still be saying the same thing? At what point did the publisher lose the right to make their own product better?
At what point did the government, or third parties via the courts, become the best people to decide what features you think should appear in your new software product? Are you really comfortable with that, as a matter of philosophy? If Vista sucks in new and interesting ways, it will either have problems, or a third party will find a new (if temporary) way to make a truckload of cash. If it doesn't suck, all you've got is less trouble on the desktop, and fewer dart-throwing targets for people that don't like MS (um, including the ones who say they don't like MS because their products are secure... the irony is delicious).
So, let's all hope Microsoft's antivirus component is pretty good, because whether it is or not, in a few years it's all we're going to have.
So what? It's also the only thing that's meaningfully doing all sorts of things in its role as your O/S. If you don't like the collection of computer-operating tools that's called Vista... use something else. It's not MS's obligation to provide a platform for other companies to market particular pieces of the desktop and under-the-hood environment. No more than it's Symantec's obligation to open up their products so that MacAffee can make money off of "improving" Symantec's tools with another item you can buy.
I suppose Microsoft will claim that this is another integral part of an OS. While my first reaction is to scoff...
Your use of the word "claim" implies that someone other than them should decide what is, and is not, part of their own product. They wouldn't be "claiming" such a thing, but simply stating it. "Yesterday, our product looked like X, and today, it looks like Y." Other companies that glom onto a freight train like MS and get rich doing so can hardly complain (with a straight face) when that other company's products change shape or purpose. Symantec and MacAfee aren't MS's customers, the end users are. If we ever get to the point of killing off most of the spam conduits in the world, we'll probably hear about how the spam-filtering appliance makers are being "unfairly" deprived of a living.
This all derives from the pervasive sense of entitlement that's drenching our culture. MacAfee and Symantec know the score, but they're playing this card because they know it will resonate in a courtroom full of modern day jurors, should it come to that. Sleazy, but probably clever in real terms.
The polls in question are not partisan, "attitude" of either party is not statisticly significant.
The point is that the polls aren't statistically very helpful in the FIRST place, but that the attitudes in question are driving the shrieking fits that some people are having about actual voting patterns that don't precisely match very imprecise exit polls. If the attitudes weren't so cranked up, and the outcome wasn't at odds with the desires of the people doing most of the shrieking, then we wouldn't be having the conversation. That's not irrelevent, it's the whole point of the conversation, here.
What changed?
Confidence going into the election, on the part of the Dems, that they would win, and a much-larger-than-usual (and rather shrill) emotion-laden investment on the part of many of Bush's opponents in seeing Kerry win. That positioning completely colored the tone of those reporting on the issue (the majority of whom were Kerry voters themselves), and absolutely impacts the way man-on-the-street coverage plays out. It was also a very close election. We've had very few of those historically, and now that the science of campaign-running is working with that reality, you'll see more and more just-barely-tuned precinct level attention to campaigns that wlil produce non-"traditional" feeling results... from the ads you see run right down to the off-by-a-few-percent stats gathered by people running exit polls with old methodolgies.
The question isn't "what changed?" but rather "how on earth would you expect anything other than a shift in how these tools report such a dramatically altered campaign and media environment?"
Terror incidents have been a constant backdrop throughout the cold war. Yet somehow the West managed to win this war without losing its soul. According to you this should have been impossible.
You're confusing the period of the Cold War with other things that happened during that period. The Libyan downing of PanAm 103 wasn't some proxy attack by the Soviets. The Achille Loro wasn't some Soviet attack on US citizens designed to terrorize them into accepting the Communist Way. The deaths of the Marines in Lebanon wasn't part of the Soviet attempt to hang onto Eastern Europe.
Communist terrorists (Shining Path, that sort of thing) committed "hot" acts, but it wasn't the Soviets (our opponents in the Cold War) doing such overt things.
You're honestly trying to tell me that the stakes are higher against a loose network of terrorists on a shoestring budget than they were against an entire nation that had the ability to rain down thousands of nuclear weapons on our cities?
One's a strategic thing, and one's a tactical thing. Not counting the possibly-hysterical concerns about stuff like malicious smallpox releases by terrorists, of course the stakes, per se, were higher (during the Cold War) if you really thought all-out nuclear war was really going to happen. But if the Soviets were regularly putting together small teams of people that were actually tasked with finding ways to randomly kill trainloads of people in Madrid or London, or crash plains into tall buildings, and doing it, that would have been a hot war, not a cold one.
The issue with the Soviets wasn't whether we'd actually win/lose/fight a nuclear war, it was whether we'd see more or less of the world gobbled up like the bloc states. That's a lot different figuring out to stop well-financed, but small-time operators from something like the Beslan school attack. I imagine if you asked a selection of parents if they really would be truly "scared" (as you put it) at the prospect of their kids in their school going through that (especially if you also told them that we were going to stop worrying about looking for people communicating about the plans for such an event), you'd probably hear a yes.
Because the hundreds of espionage trials that have taken place in our judicial system throughout our nation's history didn't work?
No, because espionage trials usually involve US citizens acting traitorously (but in a way that the criminal system clearly knows what to do with), and because many foreign nationals involved are in the country under reciprocal diplomatic protections.
We do not have a long history of foreigners attacking our people overseas (not counting traditional military opponents - we have military prisoner and tribual practices long established for that), or being involved in complex, wide-spread (but loosely knit) networks that gather, finance, and prep overseas, and which we set out to stop (and capture). It's one thing when you have people clearly working at the behest of a identifiable foreign government. Groups like Al Queda are a different beast altogether.
Since you're a history buff, please generally characterize the "hundreds" of pattern/precedent-establishing circumstances, in the past, that we've encountered in some way substantially like what we're dealing with, right now? You know, privately financed, geographically adrift, bent-on-mass-murder cells of individuals that have actually scored a good few hits, and have no uniform/national affiliation. OK, so run down how we handled, say, just 50 of those. Remember: they have to be foreign nationals, caught attacking or gearing up to attack us here and/or abroad. No?
Citing past counter-intel operations and busts is nonsense in this situation. Someone looking to get nuclear sub program info, or communications systems plans, or troop deployment schedules as the CCCP jockied for a better type of losing position not doing so in advance of then setting a near-term date to fly a passenger jet into your office building. Can you not see the difference?
The whole point of the legislation is to provide a formal framework where none previously existed. In the meantime, actual events were unfolding, and actual people (like the one you mentioned) actually did have actual contact with actual bad guys. Pursuing a prosecution in the absence of tangible legislative guidance was just about a perfect recipe for the guy walking away on appeals. A guy who demonstrated his interest in helping to gather materials and plan the use of a radiologial bomb in a US city. So: you'd let him out on his own, or allow lawyers to come and go while you're still hashing out how to best deal with the rest of the implications of his connections?
It's not obvious how to deal with situations like that - especially when there are international, defense-related entanglements that would require the disclosure of intel methods in a standard criminal trial. This legislation is trying to make such situations clearer, and provide the couter-terror people some much needed boundaries/expectations.
Body count Bush: 120,000+ and counting, with infinite military power to spare, ready to oppress a nation.
Body count Bin Laden: 5,000 and struggling to survive, on the run with with no nation to call home.
Ah, I see. It's Bush that's arming the insurgents and getting one sect of Muslims to blow up another sect of Muslims. Right, I keep forgetting that.
5,000? Is that really, really what you think Al Queda has limited itself to? If that's your take on it, then the "perspective" from which you're operating is incredibly twisted. First: cite your 120,000 reference, being sure to include an indication that it's US troops that have killed the people you're referring to.
Even a group that's solidly against the use of western forces to support the new Iraqi government puts the total number of deaths at roughly 30,000. Your 120K is just total BS. And more to the point: just because most of those deaths took place while the US(+) forces were in the country doesn't mean it's those forces killing thousands of civilians. The insurgency is an indiscriminate violence machine doing its best to convince people that the US presence is the cause of the sectarian violence, rather than a propoganda excuse for the terror that's being deployed, by jihaddi activists and states like Iran, to erode trust in a new democracy that isn't completely beholden to Wahabbists and their ilk. They're willing to slaughter other Muslims to paint a picture that they hope will obscure causality, and you're just singing their tune perfectly. Hope that feels nice for you, what with your perspective, and all.
It's hyperbolic and fallacious and it sets off my bullshit sophistry alarms from three miles away. That rhetorical tactic is fundamentally identical to overstating terrorist threat.
That, and the fact that there actually is a hole where the WTC used to be, and guys sitting in jail that were trying really hard to take down a bunch of UK->US planes a month ago, and thousands of people in the middle east being killed by people expressly in the name of denying them democracy... that stuff is real, as unpleasant as it is. And the more shrill some idealogues are (along the lines you've identified), the more it seems they don't consider those things to be important at all (never mind over stated here, understated there, etc... no, their tone actually seems to suggest that such doesn't matter at all).
Thank you for illustrating exactly why some of the counter-terrorism backers seem to feel the urge to speak in such dramatic language sometimes... their detractors truly seem more interested in a high-school-debate foot-stomping contest than in actually rationally discussing anything. "Bush is teh evil" doesn't really grant the person who says it any sort of intellectual credibility - and so the person they're screaming at tends to just boil it down to, "Fine. So I don't care if you get killed or suffer economically in something akin to 9/11... but it can't impact you without impacting the rest of us, so STFU."
The criminals who bombed the WTC in 1993 -- 6 months after Clinton took office -- are currently sitting in jail. They were captured, tried, and imprisoned.
Er, not exactly. For example, there's Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who came and went between the US and Iraq, helped make the bombs involved, and is thought to still be in Iraq. He is not in prison, and despite ties to international terrorist organizations was not prevented from attempting to destroy those buildings.
Or, there's the Al Queda money-man, good old KSM. He's exactly the sort of person about which we're currently trying to decide how to detain and question. He was hip deep in the original, and second WTC attacks, and many other terror plots. He's detained, all right, but not because (as you imply) the Clinton administration performed some criminal arrest and prosecution. Nor was he prevented from conducting his attacks.
You seem to be confusing the obviously good thing of locking up terrorists when you happen to lay hands on them - using criminal proceedings if that's a good fit - with preventing mass slaughter (which is their stated objective). Normal punish-the-crime type activity isn't very helpful when you've got people doing their best to (as in the UK example) blow up trains or a bunch of planes. Sure, the victims' families would be happy to have the prosecution go forth, but they'd probably much rather have their family members still alive. For that, you've got to conduct actual counter-terrorism activities - and that's just not the same as dealing with the neighborhood drug dealer.
The solution of the left is to get the fuck out of Iraq.
And, of course, the portions of the recently leaked NIE document that the left is braying about, taken out of context, might make that feel warm and fuzzy to you. But the part of that document that's the most important is the part that mentions the important impact against future terror recruitment and activities that a steadfast support of the Iraqi government will have. If the insurgents in that country fail to widen the conflict that their employers in Iran and elsewhere want, it will take the romance and propoganda power out of that scene - essentially, Muslims killing other Muslims in the name of preventing democracy will start to lose its appeal if it doesn't work.
By the way: your embarassing reference to people "pushing memes" even as you play the "Fox" card to explain a world-view less goopy than yours is... really, really funny. "You people and your memes are bogus! And I've got a mythical meme that says so, which I will continue to repeat until everyone thinks it's true!" Heh. But that's not as funny as your need to spew names, junior high school style, at people in an attempt to show how lucid and thoughtful you are. What a hoot! +% Funny, no doubt.
I won't continue, lest I embarrass myself.
Too late!
However: the only think cooler than woosh-click would be total silence. That's unnervingly cool.
Turns out, it sniffs out it's prey
Yes, but can it sniff out the difference between "it's" (it is) and "its" (the thing that belongs to it)? Come on, now, it's just one stinking paragraph to edit!
That being said, I've often observed, in the jungle-like Maryland suburbs, the seemingly impossible reach and accuracy of certain smothering, viney plants. The twisty, strangling, inescapable spread of warm, fuzzy-looking faux-friendliness - it's amazing. And that's just the PTA members! You should see the Kudzu!