From a business perspective piracy is theft. You're denying the legitimate copyright or patent holder the revenue they would have gotten from selling legitimate copies.
Now is a good time to be a a citizen and a netizen. I'll explain:
More and more people are discovering things like Thomas, and more and more states are implementing things like lobby tracking, bill tracking, open meeting and notes tracking among other things.
The key is that delivery of this information is becoming much more flexible. For example, the items I mentioned above can be obtained via RSS feed or email. More interestingly is that open meetings can actually RSS an ical file so you can easily bring it into your application of choice.
But my favorites in Rhode Island are the Lobby Tracker which shows all lobbying activity right down to what bill is being lobbied for/against, but who's doing the lobbying, who's paying for it, etc.
They used WAPs to triangluate position. How interesting.
What would happen if you and your neighbors decided you didn't want your radio signals being piggybacked by these folks? You could do fun things like install directional antennas and rotate on a regular basis, or line the walls of your house with grounded copper grid.
Or you could change the ID of your WAP. Or not broadcast it at all. Why particiapte in their little moneymaking scheme.
Corporations are also a pain the arse. But we deal with them out of necessity in most cases.
At home I use two hardware firewalls (One is my VoIP router, the other is a Netgear firewall/router I picked up) and then use either the software firewall provided with XP, or any of the available freeware.
I can honestly say I've never been hit by a virus or attack at the host level. Sure, the logs on the Linksys are a veritable horror story, but everything else appears (note I used 'appears') to be under control.
What worries me more is knowing that for every lock created, someone has figured out how to beat it. Remember the debacle with the Krypton locks that could be defeated with the cap from a Bic pen?
For the most part there isn't any need to switch to Win XP on most of the machines in my office. Matter of fact, only XP machines we've got are new machines and all in the IT staff.
Other divisions got new hardware with 2000 installed so it wouldn't break some of our applications.
And I'm loathe to continue the trend with MS anyhow. This constant upgrade cycle has gotten a little tiring.
College tends to force the status quo on undergrads. As someone who did the career first and got the degree later I can pretty much concur with Jobs assesment that dropping in is much more effective.
But we need to have some sort of filter and college fits that need.
But I will admit that the most brilliant people I've met have eschewed college and done spectacularly well for themselves.
Why on earth would I want to put a stable operating system on a friend or acquaintance's machine?
The $50 minimum to clean up spyware, viruses etc. adds up to $500 a month for me. Why would I walk away from that?
Of course when I'm asked to build a system for someone it is built with all patches applied, AVG, users choice of firewall both hardware and software, Firefox and Thunderbird. That tends to cut down on the repair side but happy people are more valuable.
It doesn't necessarily need to be Linux and KDE. A well maintained Windows system works too.
But this all agrees with the basic premise of the article. Most home users shouldn't have administrative rights on their own computers. That's the biggest problem I run into.
Haven't had any since I was in my early 30's. Now tatoos but had earings at one point. It didn't impede me in my IT career.
The office I work in now is business casual, to jeans, to suits depending on what happens to be going on that day.
We're judged on our capabilities, not our appearances. The highest compliment that can be paid to us is telling one of us how geeky we can be. Nirvana!
Oh sing it. Recently had to upgrade from Quark 5 to Quark 6 on Mac OS-X Tiger.
Great greasy gonads of god, it was a pain in the butt. First you have to get the serial number of your old product, then call Quark and give them the old serial and the id number from the disc you have in your hand. Then they read back this ridiculously long string.
I've used InDesign and much prefer it to Quark. Quark is a dinosaur that failed to keep up with the times.
I worked for Brown University. In hindsight I wish I hadn't left the job.
You'll find academia somewhat less frantic than the real world.
You'll also find pay levels less than the real world. The system most universities use to determine pay scales is out of touch with reality in most cases.
But the general freedom involved with working for a university can't be beat.
Its shocking that nobody has brought up Revenge of the Nerds where one of the nerds gets it on with the hot cheerleader who doesn't know it's him because he's got a Darth Vader costume on.
When they're done having sex and he takes off the mask the girl is surprised that nerds are such good lovers. She asks him why and he replies it's because all jocks have on their mind is sports, while all nerds have on their mind is sex.
Friend of mine manages a cluster that models the worlds oceans. One thing they forgot about when planning it was the cooling needs. That added a nice chunk to the budget.
I doubt they even looked at the power requirements.
But it is cool to have access to a super computing cluster.
Around here they won't pull you for 35 in a 25 unless your skin color happens to be a shade darker than the majority.
I'm serious - I'm white, have sped like a demon yet never been pulled over. Friend is black, speeds like a demon, gets pulled over regularly. Same basic cars, same locations so what gives.
It's nice to see that Japan is taking it seriously. I was a bit worried when I first started reading the article when I saw that the government was 'urging' people instead of offering incentives.
Then a bit later I saw that they'd give tax breaks on hybrid cars. Whew...
This is precisely why the U.S. wouldn't sign the Kyoto agreements - there is no incentive because all we've been doing is cutting taxes for everyone, well, everyone except those of us in the middle.
I've caught flak for proposing that the U.S. implement a simple rule. If you wish to use an interestate highway or major secondary road, you must have more than one person in the vehicle, otherwise a hefty fine ensues.
But we have to do something. I don't hear any other ideas being put forth.
It really makes me hopping mad when crap like this happens. Look, I run dual hardware firewalls, keep my anti-virus and patches all up to date etc. Why can't everyone else do that?
That being said, even if somehow I managed to get one of those viruses they could damage my machine, but they wouldn't be getting back out.
At my maximum I could probablyu key 30WPM in morse code. Today that's probably 20WPM but still fast enough.
I hate the cell phone keypad for SMS. T9 makes it mildly more acceptable but it'd be cool if I could morse a message using a single key on the cell phone.
They're all going to be up against the wall when the revolution comes.
The revolution will come, and it will not be televised - attributed to Gil Scott Heron.
Next thing you know, someone will patent H20 or DMSO. It's going to take a really ridiculous one to really make people stand up and notice. Or how about recipes - those are instructions on how to make something. Why shouldn't they be protected to? Well, some are protected by copyright but I think you get the gist.
I think this is why the EU struggles mightily with IP laws. They've seen what a stinking cesspool the U.S. Patent and Trade Office has become all at the behest of greedy corporations and their slimey attorneys.
Slashdot Mirror
So if a city or town decides their tax base isn't big enough, they can pay below market, buldoze entire sections and tough luck to the property owner.
Yeah - we've definitely come full circle when it comes to corporate dominance.
From a business perspective piracy is theft. You're denying the legitimate copyright or patent holder the revenue they would have gotten from selling legitimate copies.
Rule for on-line advertisements that should be implement immediately:
1 No blink tags, ever.
2 No purple/green backgrounds, fonts or images unless they occur in nature.
3 No bouncy ads, ads that pop in the middle of what you're reading or try to pop up windows.
4 No ads embedded in the web page so I can't block the really annoying ones.
5 Keep the ads at the top, bottom, right or left gutters. Ads in the middle of text shall be considered an offense punishable by death.
If advertisers would just follow these simple rules the market for ad-blockers would evaporate overnight.
Now is a good time to be a a citizen and a netizen. I'll explain:
r 2.0/public/
More and more people are discovering things like Thomas, and more and more states are implementing things like lobby tracking, bill tracking, open meeting and notes tracking among other things.
The key is that delivery of this information is becoming much more flexible. For example, the items I mentioned above can be obtained via RSS feed or email. More interestingly is that open meetings can actually RSS an ical file so you can easily bring it into your application of choice.
But my favorites in Rhode Island are the Lobby Tracker which shows all lobbying activity right down to what bill is being lobbied for/against, but who's doing the lobbying, who's paying for it, etc.
Of course perusing that you see the usual players like the Catholic Church, the insurance companies, etc. http://www2.sec.state.ri.us/lt_filing/lobbyTracke
They used WAPs to triangluate position. How interesting.
What would happen if you and your neighbors decided you didn't want your radio signals being piggybacked by these folks? You could do fun things like install directional antennas and rotate on a regular basis, or line the walls of your house with grounded copper grid.
Or you could change the ID of your WAP. Or not broadcast it at all. Why particiapte in their little moneymaking scheme.
Corporations are also a pain the arse. But we deal with them out of necessity in most cases.
At home I use two hardware firewalls (One is my VoIP router, the other is a Netgear firewall/router I picked up) and then use either the software firewall provided with XP, or any of the available freeware.
I can honestly say I've never been hit by a virus or attack at the host level. Sure, the logs on the Linksys are a veritable horror story, but everything else appears (note I used 'appears') to be under control.
What worries me more is knowing that for every lock created, someone has figured out how to beat it. Remember the debacle with the Krypton locks that could be defeated with the cap from a Bic pen?
All SIQ gives you is the ability of a person to take a test, not their intelligence level.
I'd be more interested in correlating things like actual brain size vs. income, etc.
Government agencies in the United States are Microsoft Lapdogs.
And yes, they use Outlook. Until Mozilla Lightning comes out there won't really be any viable options.
But what really has to happen is for a drop-in replacement for MS Exchange with it's calendaring, groups, etc.
From what I recall, the Mozilla folks are working on that but it's a project thats 5 years down the pike.
It always helps to use a secure proxy on the other side of the globe, somewhere that doesn't have jurisdiction if you know what I mean.
But the reach of the law now exceeds geographic boundaries. It's getting to be ridiculous.
They extended on NT4, they'll extend on 2000.
Lets face it, NT4 was around for how long?
For the most part there isn't any need to switch to Win XP on most of the machines in my office. Matter of fact, only XP machines we've got are new machines and all in the IT staff.
Other divisions got new hardware with 2000 installed so it wouldn't break some of our applications.
And I'm loathe to continue the trend with MS anyhow. This constant upgrade cycle has gotten a little tiring.
College tends to force the status quo on undergrads. As someone who did the career first and got the degree later I can pretty much concur with Jobs assesment that dropping in is much more effective.
But we need to have some sort of filter and college fits that need.
But I will admit that the most brilliant people I've met have eschewed college and done spectacularly well for themselves.
Why on earth would I want to put a stable operating system on a friend or acquaintance's machine?
The $50 minimum to clean up spyware, viruses etc. adds up to $500 a month for me. Why would I walk away from that?
Of course when I'm asked to build a system for someone it is built with all patches applied, AVG, users choice of firewall both hardware and software, Firefox and Thunderbird. That tends to cut down on the repair side but happy people are more valuable.
It doesn't necessarily need to be Linux and KDE. A well maintained Windows system works too.
But this all agrees with the basic premise of the article. Most home users shouldn't have administrative rights on their own computers. That's the biggest problem I run into.
Haven't had any since I was in my early 30's. Now tatoos but had earings at one point. It didn't impede me in my IT career.
The office I work in now is business casual, to jeans, to suits depending on what happens to be going on that day.
We're judged on our capabilities, not our appearances. The highest compliment that can be paid to us is telling one of us how geeky we can be. Nirvana!
Oh sing it. Recently had to upgrade from Quark 5 to Quark 6 on Mac OS-X Tiger.
Great greasy gonads of god, it was a pain in the butt. First you have to get the serial number of your old product, then call Quark and give them the old serial and the id number from the disc you have in your hand. Then they read back this ridiculously long string.
I've used InDesign and much prefer it to Quark. Quark is a dinosaur that failed to keep up with the times.
I worked for Brown University. In hindsight I wish I hadn't left the job.
You'll find academia somewhat less frantic than the real world.
You'll also find pay levels less than the real world. The system most universities use to determine pay scales is out of touch with reality in most cases.
But the general freedom involved with working for a university can't be beat.
Its shocking that nobody has brought up Revenge of the Nerds where one of the nerds gets it on with the hot cheerleader who doesn't know it's him because he's got a Darth Vader costume on.
When they're done having sex and he takes off the mask the girl is surprised that nerds are such good lovers. She asks him why and he replies it's because all jocks have on their mind is sports, while all nerds have on their mind is sex.
Apparently they've been offering a throw away digital camera for momths now. But this one takes the cake.
Of course it'll be hackable, unless they used some sort of encryption in which case reverse engineering the roms on the thing will solve that problem.
For $30 I'll pick one up and see what I can do with it.
Friend of mine manages a cluster that models the worlds oceans. One thing they forgot about when planning it was the cooling needs. That added a nice chunk to the budget.
I doubt they even looked at the power requirements.
But it is cool to have access to a super computing cluster.
Around here they won't pull you for 35 in a 25 unless your skin color happens to be a shade darker than the majority.
I'm serious - I'm white, have sped like a demon yet never been pulled over. Friend is black, speeds like a demon, gets pulled over regularly. Same basic cars, same locations so what gives.
Just be sure the sucker has a big, red power off switch in the event it decides to take over the world.
It's nice to see that Japan is taking it seriously. I was a bit worried when I first started reading the article when I saw that the government was 'urging' people instead of offering incentives. Then a bit later I saw that they'd give tax breaks on hybrid cars. Whew... This is precisely why the U.S. wouldn't sign the Kyoto agreements - there is no incentive because all we've been doing is cutting taxes for everyone, well, everyone except those of us in the middle. I've caught flak for proposing that the U.S. implement a simple rule. If you wish to use an interestate highway or major secondary road, you must have more than one person in the vehicle, otherwise a hefty fine ensues. But we have to do something. I don't hear any other ideas being put forth.
It really makes me hopping mad when crap like this happens. Look, I run dual hardware firewalls, keep my anti-virus and patches all up to date etc. Why can't everyone else do that?
That being said, even if somehow I managed to get one of those viruses they could damage my machine, but they wouldn't be getting back out.
At my maximum I could probablyu key 30WPM in morse code. Today that's probably 20WPM but still fast enough.
I hate the cell phone keypad for SMS. T9 makes it mildly more acceptable but it'd be cool if I could morse a message using a single key on the cell phone.
Hmmmm...
This could be interesting and scary at the same time.
But wait, we've already grafted human brain cells in to mice (Pinky & the Brain anyone?) and I have to wonder what new horrors this will bring up.
Sure, we've sequenced the genes but we don't know what a vast majority of them actually do. That actual process will take years.
But on the flip side - we've been hybridizing for hundreds of years. Just look what new and exciting fruits we've obtained through cross polenation.
Now imagine what new and exciting human fruits we'll creat.
They're all going to be up against the wall when the revolution comes.
The revolution will come, and it will not be televised - attributed to Gil Scott Heron.
Next thing you know, someone will patent H20 or DMSO. It's going to take a really ridiculous one to really make people stand up and notice. Or how about recipes - those are instructions on how to make something. Why shouldn't they be protected to? Well, some are protected by copyright but I think you get the gist.
I think this is why the EU struggles mightily with IP laws. They've seen what a stinking cesspool the U.S. Patent and Trade Office has become all at the behest of greedy corporations and their slimey attorneys.