You laugh, but this actually happened. Frank Zappa's completely instrumental album Jazz From Hell was marked with one of the first "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" warnings.
I repeat: the album has no lyrics. But it had an explicit lyrics warning from the RIAA.
The likely reason? His vocal opposition to the Tipper Gore-led Parent's Music Resource Center, whose bludgeoning pressured the RIAA to start putting those warnings on albums in the first place.
See http://ericnuzum.com/banned/incidents/80s.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_From_Hell
Thanks to blogger Joe Gratz. I would be worried about overwhelming his server, but I don't think many Slashdotters are actually willing to do that much work.
The thing is though, his grandkids won't own his writing. In fact, Dvorak doesn't even own it, which he would know if he scrolled to the bottom of his own article:
timothy, meet Zonk. He works at Slashdot too. Like you, he's interested in France's fusion reactor. In fact, he posted a story about it seven hours before you did.
After reading about this in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter on Monday, I emerged acroread 7, and it works like a charm. It's a definite improvement over version 5.
This all seems a little alarmist. Our IT infrastructure is far more secure than our physical infrastructure, because our IT infrastructure has grown up under constant threats from script kiddies, trojans, and worms. 9/11 was possible because we have (or had) a basically open, trusting society. That's not true online.
Servers across the internet are under constant attack from all kinds of viruses, worms, and malicious hackers. Even the most successful viruses amount to little more than annoyances, and can be easily protected against by any systems administrator worth his salt. Like the human immune system, continuous exposure to cyber-pathogens results in our information infrastructure growing increasingly good at resisting and fending off attacks.
There's no reason to think that Islamic terrorists would be any more competent virus writers than those that currently plague us. In fact, given the backwardness of the arab countries where most islamic terrorists come from, I think there's good reason to think they would be less competent as computer programmers than people from other parts of the world. The only significant difference between cyber terrorists and today's virus writers is motivation. Most virus writers are interested in the technological challenge, and want to show off their prowess. They don't really want to do any damage. Others are more sinister, and try to install keystroke loggers or bots in order to steal your credit card numbers or extort money from people threatened with having their servers brought down by an attack from an army of compromised computers. Cyber-terrorists, on the other hand, would want to cause some spectacular failure that would grab all the headlines. Unfortunately for them, the systems that the terrorists would like to bring down are administered by professionals, people who are a lot more sophisticated than a grandma who forgets to update her anti-virus definitions.
Finally, two more features of our information infrastructure make it resistant to catastrophic failure. First, it is resilient. Our information infrastructure is largely owned by private industry, and is supported by an army of trained to quickly get systems back up and running should they ever be brought down. Second, and more importantly, the systems that comprise the infrastructure are diverse. No program can run natively on a Cisco router, an Apache webserver, and a Microsoft SQL server. It's therefore extremely unlikely that a single program could bring the nation's cyber infrastructure to its knees.
A CD ripper AND a video player?! What will they do for an encore? Shouldn't they leave something to include in later versions?
In all seriousness, one of the main complaints I hear about KDE is that it includes all these bells and whistles, thus causing bloat. If Gnome continues on the same trend, there will be even less differentiatingthe two.
The broadcast flag is only for hdtv. This plextor thing is not an hdtv card, just plain old tv. The hauppage cards aren't hdtv cards either.
The only hdtv card that will work with linux (and, therefore, with mythtv) is the pcHDTV HD-3000. There are just two problems with it, a little one and a big one. The little one is that they won't be able to sell it after this summer, once the broadcast flag rule takes effect. The big problem is that it can't decrypt cable or satellite signals, so all it's good for is free, over-the-air broadcasts.
Personally, I'm thinking of sticking with plain old tv (as opposed to hdtv) when I build my myth box in the next year or two. Supposedly the FCC is going to tell broadcasters to switch to hdtv-only broadcasts in about five years so that some broadcast spectrum can be freed up, but I don't really believe it will happen that soon. Can you imagine how pissed people would be to wake up one day and find out that they no longer get tv reception?
I agree that the ACLU almost certainly won't like the bill, but I doubt that it's as clear a First Amendment violation as you think it is.
Remember that this bill requires ISPs only to provide an "opt-in" filter. Customers that don't want to have their internet access filtered won't have to, so a court would probably throw their case out fairly quickly.
The real challenges to this bill would come not from ISP customers who feel they've been unjustly blocked from content that they want to see, but from two other groups.
First, the ISPs will complain about the fact that this bill forces them to implement a feature that the market doesn't really want, and therefore will increase prices unnecessarily. I'm sure that this was one of their central issues while lobbying (unsuccessfully) against the bill. While I think they have a valid beef from an economic standpoint, it's probably a losing argument from a legal standpoint. We already have all kinds of regulations that introduce economic inefficiencies in the name of promoting moral values. The v-chip in eveyone's TV is probably the closest analogy, and I haven't heard of it being struck down as unconstitutional.
Second, website operators who feel that their sites have been unfairly blacklisted may be able to bring a First Amendment claim. For example, imagine that some Mom gets freaked out when she sees that her son has been visiting an online support forum for closeted gay teenagers. It's not hard to imagine her reporting the site as one that has content "harmful" to minors, and it's conceivable that the Attorney General would then add it to the database. I think the operators of that site would have a pretty strong claim that their First Amendment rights had been violated. Even if that exact case went to court, it's not a sure bet that the law would be struck down. The court might just interpret the phrase "harmful to minors" to not include sites like a support forum that are meant to help minors. Thus the law would still be constitutional, but its scope would be narrowed a bit.
You're right that the Supreme Court could decide not to hear the case, but it would take a long time to get there. The case would probably start in state district court, and would not be appealable to the Supreme Court until it had wended its way through the Utah state court system. Alternatively, the plaintiffs could file in federal district court. If they lost there, they could appeal to the 10th Circuit court in Denver, which would have to hear their case. If they lost at the Circuit court level, then they could appeal to the Supreme Court, though, as you say, it's unlikely that the Supreme Court would grant certioriari.
It's already passed. It's just waiting for the governor's signature. And if you think that the Mormon governor of mostly Mormon Utah is going to go against the mostly Mormon legislature on an anti-porn measure, you're crazy.
If you actually read the bill (especially lines 117-118), you'll see that, amongst its other requirements, it requires the Utah Attorney General to do two things:
1 - Create and maintain a database of sites with content harmful to minors that do not restrict minors from viewing the content.
2 - Make that database publicly available.
So now you don't have to spend hours surfing for free porn anymore, because the Utah AG will do it for you. Heck, somebody could even hook up an RSS feed to the thing and you could have all the new free porn sites conveniently listed for you whenever you open up your browser. This bill could have the perverse (no pun intended) effect of actually making it easier people (minors included) to get their porn.
And what about the guy in the AG's office who has to decide whether sites deserve to be on the list? I assume that they can't just blindly add every site that gets reported to them, so somebody is going to have the full time job of looking at porn sites to make sure that they really belong on the list.
As the owner of a VIA motherboard with integrated prosavage video, let me assure you that Linux 3d acceleration on that hardware is not as seamless as you claim it to be. In fact, it's a bit of a bitch.
You have to compile a cvs version of X yourself to get the driver. It's so experimental there's not even a Gentoo ebuild for it yet (though it seems to have been in that state for about a year).
To me, it looked mostly like low-level processor and bus related stuff. Could this be a backdoor way of promoting their PowerPC line, by getting it better supported by open source software?
It sounds like your friend is handling it correctly. I'm not against employees playing the game. In fact, I think they should play it, so they can be more in tune with their customers' needs. The problem only comes when people blur the line between employee and player, put their guilds' interests ahead of customers', and ruin everyone else's fun.
Slashdot Mirror
You laugh, but this actually happened. Frank Zappa's completely instrumental album Jazz From Hell was marked with one of the first "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" warnings. I repeat: the album has no lyrics. But it had an explicit lyrics warning from the RIAA. The likely reason? His vocal opposition to the Tipper Gore-led Parent's Music Resource Center, whose bludgeoning pressured the RIAA to start putting those warnings on albums in the first place. See http://ericnuzum.com/banned/incidents/80s.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_From_Hell
Those who like to RTFA might also like to RTFD (read the !%$#ing decision). You can find the judge's actual decision here:
7 /CleanFlicksDistCtOpinion.pdf
http://www.joegratz.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/0
Thanks to blogger Joe Gratz. I would be worried about overwhelming his server, but I don't think many Slashdotters are actually willing to do that much work.
timothy, meet Zonk. He works at Slashdot too. Like you, he's interested in France's fusion reactor. In fact, he posted a story about it seven hours before you did.
Darknet sounds at times like it could have been written by a team of Slashdotters.
That's a pretty mean thing to say.
After reading about this in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter on Monday, I emerged acroread 7, and it works like a charm. It's a definite improvement over version 5.
should have been this.
You can do all that in Linux. That's the whole point of Novell's ZENWorks product.
...but here's a link.
you can find it here. I can't take credit for finding it there though. It was mentioned in one of the above posts.
This all seems a little alarmist. Our IT infrastructure is far more secure than our physical infrastructure, because our IT infrastructure has grown up under constant threats from script kiddies, trojans, and worms. 9/11 was possible because we have (or had) a basically open, trusting society. That's not true online.
Servers across the internet are under constant attack from all kinds of viruses, worms, and malicious hackers. Even the most successful viruses amount to little more than annoyances, and can be easily protected against by any systems administrator worth his salt. Like the human immune system, continuous exposure to cyber-pathogens results in our information infrastructure growing increasingly good at resisting and fending off attacks.
There's no reason to think that Islamic terrorists would be any more competent virus writers than those that currently plague us. In fact, given the backwardness of the arab countries where most islamic terrorists come from, I think there's good reason to think they would be less competent as computer programmers than people from other parts of the world. The only significant difference between cyber terrorists and today's virus writers is motivation. Most virus writers are interested in the technological challenge, and want to show off their prowess. They don't really want to do any damage. Others are more sinister, and try to install keystroke loggers or bots in order to steal your credit card numbers or extort money from people threatened with having their servers brought down by an attack from an army of compromised computers. Cyber-terrorists, on the other hand, would want to cause some spectacular failure that would grab all the headlines. Unfortunately for them, the systems that the terrorists would like to bring down are administered by professionals, people who are a lot more sophisticated than a grandma who forgets to update her anti-virus definitions.
Finally, two more features of our information infrastructure make it resistant to catastrophic failure. First, it is resilient. Our information infrastructure is largely owned by private industry, and is supported by an army of trained to quickly get systems back up and running should they ever be brought down. Second, and more importantly, the systems that comprise the infrastructure are diverse. No program can run natively on a Cisco router, an Apache webserver, and a Microsoft SQL server. It's therefore extremely unlikely that a single program could bring the nation's cyber infrastructure to its knees.
A CD ripper AND a video player?! What will they do for an encore? Shouldn't they leave something to include in later versions? In all seriousness, one of the main complaints I hear about KDE is that it includes all these bells and whistles, thus causing bloat. If Gnome continues on the same trend, there will be even less differentiatingthe two.
The broadcast flag is only for hdtv. This plextor thing is not an hdtv card, just plain old tv. The hauppage cards aren't hdtv cards either.
The only hdtv card that will work with linux (and, therefore, with mythtv) is the pcHDTV HD-3000. There are just two problems with it, a little one and a big one. The little one is that they won't be able to sell it after this summer, once the broadcast flag rule takes effect. The big problem is that it can't decrypt cable or satellite signals, so all it's good for is free, over-the-air broadcasts.
Personally, I'm thinking of sticking with plain old tv (as opposed to hdtv) when I build my myth box in the next year or two. Supposedly the FCC is going to tell broadcasters to switch to hdtv-only broadcasts in about five years so that some broadcast spectrum can be freed up, but I don't really believe it will happen that soon. Can you imagine how pissed people would be to wake up one day and find out that they no longer get tv reception?
Typical Utahn. Since when does RTFA mean "Read The Fricking Article"?
I hope you realize I'm joking though. I lived my whole life in Utah until moving last year.
I agree that the ACLU almost certainly won't like the bill, but I doubt that it's as clear a First Amendment violation as you think it is.
Remember that this bill requires ISPs only to provide an "opt-in" filter. Customers that don't want to have their internet access filtered won't have to, so a court would probably throw their case out fairly quickly.
The real challenges to this bill would come not from ISP customers who feel they've been unjustly blocked from content that they want to see, but from two other groups.
First, the ISPs will complain about the fact that this bill forces them to implement a feature that the market doesn't really want, and therefore will increase prices unnecessarily. I'm sure that this was one of their central issues while lobbying (unsuccessfully) against the bill. While I think they have a valid beef from an economic standpoint, it's probably a losing argument from a legal standpoint. We already have all kinds of regulations that introduce economic inefficiencies in the name of promoting moral values. The v-chip in eveyone's TV is probably the closest analogy, and I haven't heard of it being struck down as unconstitutional.
Second, website operators who feel that their sites have been unfairly blacklisted may be able to bring a First Amendment claim. For example, imagine that some Mom gets freaked out when she sees that her son has been visiting an online support forum for closeted gay teenagers. It's not hard to imagine her reporting the site as one that has content "harmful" to minors, and it's conceivable that the Attorney General would then add it to the database. I think the operators of that site would have a pretty strong claim that their First Amendment rights had been violated. Even if that exact case went to court, it's not a sure bet that the law would be struck down. The court might just interpret the phrase "harmful to minors" to not include sites like a support forum that are meant to help minors. Thus the law would still be constitutional, but its scope would be narrowed a bit.
You're right that the Supreme Court could decide not to hear the case, but it would take a long time to get there. The case would probably start in state district court, and would not be appealable to the Supreme Court until it had wended its way through the Utah state court system. Alternatively, the plaintiffs could file in federal district court. If they lost there, they could appeal to the 10th Circuit court in Denver, which would have to hear their case. If they lost at the Circuit court level, then they could appeal to the Supreme Court, though, as you say, it's unlikely that the Supreme Court would grant certioriari.
It's true.
look at lines 117-118 of the bill. The database will be publicly available.
It's already passed. It's just waiting for the governor's signature. And if you think that the Mormon governor of mostly Mormon Utah is going to go against the mostly Mormon legislature on an anti-porn measure, you're crazy.
If you RTFB you'll see that it allocates $100,000 to the Utah Attorney General to do exactly that.
1 - Create and maintain a database of sites with content harmful to minors that do not restrict minors from viewing the content.
So now you don't have to spend hours surfing for free porn anymore, because the Utah AG will do it for you. Heck, somebody could even hook up an RSS feed to the thing and you could have all the new free porn sites conveniently listed for you whenever you open up your browser. This bill could have the perverse (no pun intended) effect of actually making it easier people (minors included) to get their porn. And what about the guy in the AG's office who has to decide whether sites deserve to be on the list? I assume that they can't just blindly add every site that gets reported to them, so somebody is going to have the full time job of looking at porn sites to make sure that they really belong on the list.2 - Make that database publicly available.
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1 005971,00.html
You have to compile a cvs version of X yourself to get the driver. It's so experimental there's not even a Gentoo ebuild for it yet (though it seems to have been in that state for about a year).
Check these links for the experiences of some people trying to get it to work: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=283208&hi ghlight=savage
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=147440&po stdays=0&postorder=asc&start=100
To me, it looked mostly like low-level processor and bus related stuff. Could this be a backdoor way of promoting their PowerPC line, by getting it better supported by open source software?
It sounds like your friend is handling it correctly. I'm not against employees playing the game. In fact, I think they should play it, so they can be more in tune with their customers' needs. The problem only comes when people blur the line between employee and player, put their guilds' interests ahead of customers', and ruin everyone else's fun.
Despite the success, not all is well in the WoW. Some of those 600,000 users are pretty pissed about some employees inappropriately using their influence in-game.