Ok, than I stand corrected on exactly when HTML got such things as the img element....
Still, it doesn't really change my core arguement. (AKA. If HTML didn't grow out of simply presenting text content, why really use it instead of "Veronica", "Gopher" and other such tools?) IMO, the "web" really took off only because it started allowing multimedia content.... not just text. We had perfectly good computer bulletin board systems, IRC chat, email, Usenet news, and many other ways to convey information otherwise.....
I don't understand why so many people are tossing out their old cellphones in the first place?
Every old cellphone I've ever owned, I was able to resell for at least $15 on eBay. (Often times, for much more than that!)
People who don't want to be locked into 1 or 2 year long contracts often buy your "useless" old cellphones, so they can keep them in their vehicles as spares for emergencies.
Perhaps you didn't read the story on these speed cameras then? At least as they're being used in the United States, they're not trustworthy at all. The big problem is, they're installed and maintained by 3rd. parties.... *not* by the police themselves. In fact, these commercial companies taking care of the photo radar cameras are getting kickbacks from each fine levied against a speeder. Therefore, it's in the best interest of the company to generate as many tickets as possible with their systems. (EG. Not really sure you can read all the letters on the license plate in that photo? Oh well, let's just assume that fuzzy letter is an E, and issue a citation against the owner of that plate.)
How do we know the things are even calibrated correctly? Oh, we're supposed to *trust* the companies contracted with the police depts. to ensure their systems are accurate! Of course, how silly of me.
Bleah.... Surveillance is fine by me, but automated systems trying to take the place of human judgement never work out very well.
A security camera in a store does not (at least in the current form) actually determine your guilt or innocence, and places its own call to authorities. It merely records what it sees on tape, for humans to review later. That's a bit different from an automated photo radar system that selectively snaps pictures of those it determines "guilty" because they operated a vehicle outside its parameters. Such systems require much closer scrutiny.
No, the whole issue of the ADA requiring ramps and handicapped accessible restrooms was a bit different. That directly affected the ability for handicapped people to go to work each day.
Not being able to purchase airplane tickets online is a much different situation. The web is *not* the only way tickets can be purchased. As long as Southwest offers alternatives (like calling up on the phone to order your tickets), this isn't preventing the blind from boarding their airplanes!
My point is, from the beginning, the web was not really supposed to be a "blind friendly" environment. It's designed around the whole concept of adding photos and colors, plus asthetically pleasing text formatting to content. None of this has any relevance to a blind person.
Now, I agree, it's great that there are ways to design a site so voice synthesizers can read the content for blind users - but IMHO, that ability should be viewed as a nice "bonus", and certainly not a legal requirement.
Once again, there's simply no basic human right to use the Internet. Internet access itself isn't even considered a basic necessity. There are few things it offers that aren't really more than "convenience features". (AKA. Online bill-pay is almost *always* just one more of several possible ways to get a bill paid. In fact, my local electric company *used* to let you pay your bill online each month on their web site, but discontinued it due to "lack of interest"!)
It's a classic case of "20-20 hindsight", coupled with a desire to sound like a prophet on the future of computing.
In reality, the "boom and bust" of the mainframe computer was much more of an obvious evolution. It simply started becoming technologically feasible to pack computing power into smaller and cheaper cases. Today, people are doing quite a bit of the computing model traditionally reserved for "mainframes" using software packages like Citrix on Windows servers (or even Tarantella on Unix boxes), coupled with PC workstations as the "dumb terminals" to them.
There would have been no "mainframe bust" if the manufacturers of the "big iron" were aggressive at switching to building high-powered microcomputer servers, and tried selling their customer base on them. Instead, others stepped up to that plate and "ate their lunch".
The predicted "rise in network computing" seems, once again, like more of an evolution than a "cycle". As Internet broadband becomes cheaper and more prevalent, naturally, more people will try serving their applications remotely over it. (Why not?) To say it'll be a "revolution" in software design is a bit much, IMHO. Many people want to ensure that their important data doesn't leak outside their business. Why pay for someone else to store it all for you, when you have much less control over what they might do with it? (EG. Perhaps their employees will sell your sales info to competitors for cash on the side, and you'll have a really tough time stopping it. You can't just fire the responsible party if they're not one of your own employees to start with.)
I'm constantly amazed at how often businesses don't seem to consider "purchasing" as a viable job title when it comes to their I.T. departments.
The fact is, when you don't assign purchasing and researching tasks to a specific member of your I.T. staff, you end up with a scattered mess of software licensing, fiascos such as the one you described with the bundled system w/19" monitor and RAM upgrade, and many other disasters.
With my previous employer, we had that issue, starting out. It was just generally understood that practically anyone in a salaried position could put in a purchase request, and then their direct manager had to "approve" the order before it was finalized. Seemed simple enough, except people in engineering would always dream up all sorts of hardware and software they "could get lots of use and productivity" out of. Of course, their boss would agree that it "sounded like a good plan" and sign for it. Then, I.T. would get stuck with all the support hassles if the thing wasn't playing nice on our network, didn't work as advertised, or what-not.
Even when we started trying to enforce a more strict policy of "only I.T. purchasing I.T. related goods" - things were still a mess. One person would prefer a certain vendor they used in the past, while another I.T. worker was trying to buy through someone else to keep up a minimum yearly purchase agreement (to lock in a discount).
Web sites are primarily designed for a particular, limited audience, in most cases. If someone *chooses* to make their site easily accessible to everyone who comes across it, that's their option -- but it certainly doesn't need to be legislated as mandatory.
That's as ludicrous as saying every author writing a book needs to have it translated and published into every foreign language in common use, so those not speaking English are ensured "equal access" to it!
The fact is, many sites right now are quite browser-dependent, even if they opt not to touch any additional "plug-in" technologies such as Shockwave or RealAudio. If we didn't have Javascript, web sites would be much less useful. (As just one example, I recently found a site that calculated your speedometer error based upon changing your car's tires out with different sizes. If this had to be presented as pure HTML, I suppose we'd be reduced to looking through a huge list or table of every combination, to find relevant data for our particular car and situation. How is that a *better* way to build the site?)
Sure, some of the ".bomb'ers" are out there drawing up poor quality sites, and don't deserve a job designing web pages. That's not what this discussion is really about, however. This is a question of whether we want to let government dictate requirements for every site we build. If this becomes law, many people will take down sites completely rather than pay to do major revamping to meet ADA requirements, and then *nobody* benefits.
Do the banks really keep their UI consistent though?
I know for a fact that in St. Louis, Missouri - my bank (Firstar) has changed around the prompts on their machines numerous times in just the last 6 months or so.
EG. One set of drive-up ATMs has a prompt at the beginning that asks if you'd like English or Spanish. I've never seen this on their ATMs anyplace else in town (and I know this was just recently added to these particular machines). Other times, they seem to play around with enabling and disabling prompts that ask "Would you like a receipt for this transaction?" after your card is inserted, but before you select any other options. They've also made changes to some of their ATMs so they ask if you'd like a deposit envelope, after you tell it you wish to make a deposit. (It used to be, they all just spit out an envelope without asking.)
All of these small changes seem like they'd cause major havock for blind people who had the sequence of prompts memorized.
There's nothing wrong with "voting with your dollar" (aka. only buying non copy-protected software), except we have no good mechanism in place to inform the buyer in advance whether or not copy protection exists on the software!
I can't remember a single game I ever purchased that said on the box "Warning: This CD is copy protected using XYZ protection." Once you open the box and discover such a thing, the product is deemed "non-returnable" since it was opened - and you're stuck. You just voted with your dollar for something you didn't even want!
The software situation is much more complex than the "Robin Hood" analogies people keep trying to use. For starters, Robin Hood was physically threatening people and taking their money away from them. Software piracy involves no direct assault or confrontation with another individual, nor does it even involve physically stripping someone of their possession of the original code and/or media it's placed on for sale.
Just as importantly though, Robin Hood was a pretty "cut and dried" case of attempting to make everyone more "financially equal". (A very questionable goal, at best.)
The software industry, by contrast, does a number of ethically questionable things, including making the buyer agree to shrinkwrap license agreements. (Oh wow, I'm not allowed to use product Y with this product X I just purchased? I had no idea of that until I read page 6 of this fine print *inside the box*!) Sometimes, they attempt to artifically inflate their sales via legal strong-arming people. (EG. Microsoft's lawyers threatening people who try to resell unopened/unused "OEM editions" of their operating systems on eBay.) Sometimes they even partake in "false advertising" when their product promises to perform functions that don't work properly (or sometimes, at all!). Often, the buyer is left with only a suggestion that "we'll address that in an update later this year".
In this rather hostile software purchasing environment, why is it so surprising that some folks are motivated to strip away the copy protection schemes and help distribute the resulting code? If that makes those doing it into "Robin Hoods", I daresay they should have far less of a guilty conscience than the original Robin Hood.
I don't deny the USA has a serious problem with trying to meddle in the affairs of other countries and governments.
On the other hand, this case hardly seems like one of them. Otherwise, what are you trying to say? It's only a belief that stealing other people's credit card numbers and emptying their bank accounts is a "crime" in the USA?
The Russian hackers would have never been touched at all by the USA if they weren't stealing the funds of US citizens!
It's one thing to request that the US refrains from interfering with something that's initially none of their business, but I see it as "self-defense" to make every attempt to stop someone who is directly attacking or commiting crimes against our own people.
Obviously, we didn't just fly into Russia, grab these guys, and haul them back here. We simply fooled them into coming to us. If they were more cautious or did a little more research, they probably wouldn't have fallen for the fake company and "job interview" and then we'd still be unable to touch them.
The fact is, the ability to make "perfect copies" is sort of a "red herring".
People have been able to make "acceptable copies" using cassette tape (or even reel-to-reel tape!) for years.
"Joe Consumer" typically doesn't really care if his music is a perfect duplicate of the original. He simply wants it to "sound good" in his car, on his Walkman, or played back on a $179.95 home stereo system in his bedroom or dorm.
The fact that so many folks treat MP3's encoded at 128bits as "excellent quality sound" illustrates my point further. (These sure aren't perfect duplicates of the original, with all that compression.)
The recording industry tried to shut down production of the VCR and failed. They probably would have done the same with the first cassette recorders, except perhaps it took them by surprise. Every time a new form of media comes along, they look for a reason to halt copying of their material onto it. The argument that computers and CDRs allow "perfect copies" is irrelevant, really. They just need to drag that out into the open as an excuse to try their same old tricks, one more time.
I really believe that "Joe Consumer" *has* to win this in the end. Ultimately, he's the only one buying any of these products in the first place. Either you cater to his needs and wants, or you choose not to, and your business model fails.
Another alternative I don't see used much, but which I've been relatively happy with myself, is c2it. (www.c2it.com)
They charge absolutely no transaction fees (well, at least so far -- but I'm sure that'd change if they got popular enough).
Honestly, I think much of PayPal's bad reputation would have been mirrored by any of these alternative online payment services, had they grown as large and as quickly as PayPal did.
It's easy to claim your cust. service is "much more responsive" when you only have 1/20th. the number of users.
But actually, I'm not even so sure groups like DoD should be considered as commiting "larger crimes" simply because larger amounts of software pass through their hands.
Consider this: Relatively few individuals have the technical know-how to remove copy protection mechanisms from software packages. If this wasn't so, the motivation wouldn't have existed to form "cracking groups" in the first place.
Is this so much a "criminal" action, or "providing a service to the public"? How often has copy protection gotten in your way? I can remember one, specific case, where a piece of video game software (Tony Hawk Pro Skater) wasn't even Windows 2000/XP compatible as purchased in the store. If you wanted it to run fine on 2000 or XP though, you could use the cracked version. The copy protection itself was apparently the only incompatible thing in the program!
I know many others who run pirate copies of software they bought legally, because it's more convenient to use the cracked version. (Look how often a program requires that you leave the original CD in the drive to run it. Many times, all the data is already loaded on your hard drive from the first installation. They simply want to check the CD to make sure you're the real owner. How annoying....)
I do find myself in total agreement with you (both on preferences in reading material and movies, and on the comment about it not being the "fault of the genre").
Honestly, as much as anything, I'm partially just trying to be difficult in this discussion, since I was nitpicked over my usage of "you" rather than "I".
If I've managed to find fault in the entire Fantasy genre, that's not quite what I intended to do.
This whole thing originated from the argument over whether or not LoTR was supposed to have taken place on our planet. Some folks seem to be saying "No way. Middle Earth isn't *our* Earth." Others say yes, Tolkien stated before that it was, indeed, supposed to be here on our planet.
Perhaps we're supposed to assume that the human race does/did live on more planets than just Earth? That's a possibility I hadn't really considered until now. All I know is in the movie, the wizard does mutter something about humans and hobbits rarely interacting with each other (and that he thinks it's probably just as well).
Initially, it was exactly that part which bothered me. (Why go to all the effort to write a consistent, epic story about an entire fantasy world, and then nail it down to supposedly happening here? It's just an unnecessary "tie-in" that needlessly strains credibility.)
Any good "cost/benefit analysis" of this sort would include the potential "costs" to others, as well as benefits and costs to oneself directly.
Anything else would be foolhardy, as humans are truly "interdependent" creatures, NOT indepdendent.
In this particular scenario, I do feel that moral justifications can be made for copying the "copyrighted works". In my opinion (which I'm quite certain is shared by many others too), the current laws are unreasonable in their punishment of copyright infringements.
You're bringing up quite different situations when you start talking about the morality of killing an abortion doctor, or gasing Jews.
Software piracy, in most rational people's view, is much more akin to choosing to drive 75MPH in a 55MPH zone, or choosing not to report your earnings on a garage sale to skirt the taxes.
I say the proverbial "you" rather than "I" because I happen to know I speak for more people than just myself.
Just because you, in particular, don't care whether an author puts in the extra effort to add a measure of believability to his/her story doesn't mean I'm automatically in a small minority of those who do.
In fact, I had a number of fantasy novels up for sale on eBay last year (all in brand new condition), as well as a collection of science ficiton novels. (My girlfriend ordered a whole bunch of random things from a sci-fi book club one time, and I wanted to get the stuff out of here.) The sci-fi sold without any problems, yet several of the "fantasy" novels never sold at all, and the others sold for only the minimum bid price of about $1.00.
That's just one more shred of evidence that helps back up my claim that there aren't an awful lot of people out there into the fantasy genre. I daresay it's largely because people feel it's a "waste of time" to read hundreds of pages about a mythical fantasy world that not only doesn't exist/never existed, but doesn't even try to leave the reader with any new wisdom/insight or ability to relate to the characters presented.
Note: I'm not claiming *all* fantasy is void of "value" to the reader. That's absurd. As I said in my first post, LOTR teaches several good lessons. Still, I think those same lessons can be better communicated in another fiction genre that roots itself a little deeper in science and/or reality.
If you just want mindless entertainment, you can get plenty of it from TV sitcoms.... No need to read fantasy novels too.
Seriously, there are so many certifications out there now, I'm starting to wonder if it'd be profitable for me to create my own cert. and get one of the testing centers to offer it?
The cheapest I.T. industry cert. I've seen is still the A+, and that is a 2 part exam that sets you back around $180 by the time you take both pieces. Either the testing centers make an absolute killing on these things, or else a certain percentage of the profit goes back to the test's creator.
I'm thinking if you even get a 4% or 5% cut of the profits on each attempted exam, you stand to make more money than you would by actually working in the industry in a job you got, partially by becoming "certified".
Even most fairy tales and myths make sure not to give enough detail as to the "where" and "when" so you feel as though you're struggling with a contradiction with reality.
That, or they dealt with the "unprovable"... concepts similar to ghosts or ancient gods/deities. There's not really any way to disprove their existance, so why not write stories about them?
All I'm saying is I don't care for fantasy novels that make claims that "lock them into a particular place and time in history". LOTR would have been improved, IMHO, if it was made clear that it took place on another world. Tying it in to the human race starts the reader/viewer asking lots of questions that the author would have been better off not getting involved with.
What are you trying to say? The "trick" to success for a p2p file sharing service lay in distribution of alternatives to the music most people were currently listening to?
If so, no - I think you're sadly mistaken. Napster and all other file sharing packages of this sort allow users to put anything out there that they like. What ends up downloaded, mostly, is what's already popular. Nothing stops obscure or "non mainstream" artists from trying to get their music out to the masses via networks like Napster. They simply copy their stuff to MP3 and go online. In fact, many resorted to trickery, putting names of popular bands that "sound kind of like us" in the filenames, so you'd download their stuff by accident and hopefully get hooked on it.
Nonetheless, it didn't really catch on. I don't see how Napster could have done much better if they promoted their service as only distributing that type of material. People would just have largely ignored it....
I don't know if there's anything to say here that will help you understand my complaint? Obviously, you feel that fiction of any type is perfectly fine, whether it has any grain of "believability" in it or not.
I, on the other hand, have a view that's shared by many other people I know. I think that one of the biggest creative challenges of good fiction is coming up with credible explanations for the technologies, events and places depicted in the story.
EG. We all know there is no such thing as a "warp drive", a la "Star Trek", and we know we can't currently teleport people from point A to B. We also know we don't have phaser guns that can "stun" or kill, depending on their setting, and certainly not the level of medical know-how illustrated on the series. Nonetheless, Star Trek stood out, above many other sci-fi shows, precisely because the effort was made to explain it all. If the "science" wasn't there to give something legitimacy, it didn't go into the TV show or movie.
The "Fantasy genre", on the other hand, seems to discount any of this as relevant at all - and wants its readers to disregard reality completely. Some people are bothered less by this than others. (Perhaps parallels could be drawn between those who blindly accept religious beliefs "on faith" and those who choose not to believe in a "god" without better evidence?)
In any case, I see no reason why a fantasy novel couldn't be written that still preserves some "credibility". It might take a little more forethought and knowledge of science and history, but what's wrong with asking for that?
No, I wasn't suggesting that all students should have the cost of DSL or a cable modem rolled into their tuition. I was suggesting that the colleges offer students the *option* of ordering this type of service, and having the monthly payments rolled in to their tuition.
(People paying with student loans find this quite attractive, many times, because they don't want to deal with another monthly bill of $40 or more while not working, or working only part-time.)
In fact, I'd think a large university could work some type of deal with the service provider to get students a slightly discounted rate.
As someone already pointed out, right now, students are often paying a big chunk for net access through the school's T1/T3, yet they're getting censored and limited access. Seems to me a cable or DSL circuit would be a better alternative for their dollar spent.
Well, there's a line in the movie (near the beginning, where the wizard is riding into town on the wagon), where he makes a comment about "the humans not often interacting with the hobbits, which is probably just as well".
That would certainly lead me to believe that this is supposed to be taking place somewhere on our planet, at the same time humans are alive.
Well, frankly, I didn't go see the first one in the theater either. (Hey, money's been very tight lately. There's not much I will pay to see right now.)
I did, however, watch it now that it's out on DVD. Honestly, it just didn't do much for me. Before I get slammed by people for saying that, let me qualify:
It was a very well put-together production. Perfectly good acting, special effects, and the whole nine yards. Like the book, there are great lessons taught in the film. (Certainly, the whole theme of "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" runs throughout.)
I just generally dislike the "fantasy" genre, because we're forced to suspend all rational belief through the whole thing. Unlike sci-fi, where it's easy to say "Well, all of this simply happened on another planet we haven't discovered yet." - they have us believe that this world existed on *our own planet*, yet humans never realized it was there.
Somehow, this ruins some of the enjoyment for me, whether it's in book form or a movie. (It's sort of like the stereotypical "action movie" where the hero does so many unbelievable stunts that after 30 minutes, it makes the whole movie "cheesy" - no matter what else is good about it.)
I don't think you should ever ask the reader, or audience, to "swallow" excessive amounts of impossibility. Instead of insulting our intelligence, create a background for the tale that gives our minds a way to justify its existance.
Dragons and gargoyles are cool-looking creatures, and make good children's stories, but beyond that - you just need a little more "substance" to keep us believing in them.
Originally, colleges and universities had fast Internet connections because they were really the only users other than government and research labs. As the net got commercialized, everyone seemed to get used to the idea that those fast connections should stay there for *all* manner of usage by students, including arbitrarily hosting file servers.
It seems to me that with cable modems and DSL typically only costing $40-50 per month - it's not that big of a deal to give each interested student their own such connection, and roll the cost into their tuition.
Leave the University T1 or T3 for internal use only (faculty and actual classrooms), and of course, leave some sort of ftp type file service active - so students can submit legal files to it if they need to distribute something (like an open-source program they wrote themselves?).
Any student who would whine and complain about this arangement is probably just hoping to run a high-speed server without ponying up the cash for the bandwidth - and that's not what college is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, than I stand corrected on exactly when HTML got such things as the img element....
Still, it doesn't really change my core arguement. (AKA. If HTML didn't grow out of simply presenting text content, why really use it instead of "Veronica", "Gopher" and other such tools?) IMO, the "web" really took off only because it started allowing multimedia content.... not just text. We had perfectly good computer bulletin board systems, IRC chat, email, Usenet news, and many other ways to convey information otherwise.....
I don't understand why so many people are tossing out their old cellphones in the first place?
Every old cellphone I've ever owned, I was able to resell for at least $15 on eBay. (Often times, for much more than that!)
People who don't want to be locked into 1 or 2 year long contracts often buy your "useless" old cellphones, so they can keep them in their vehicles as spares for emergencies.
Perhaps you didn't read the story on these speed cameras then? At least as they're being used in the United States, they're not trustworthy at all. The big problem is, they're installed and maintained by 3rd. parties.... *not* by the police themselves. In fact, these commercial companies taking care of the photo radar cameras are getting kickbacks from each fine levied against a speeder. Therefore, it's in the best interest of the company to generate as many tickets as possible with their systems. (EG. Not really sure you can read all the letters on the license plate in that photo? Oh well, let's just assume that fuzzy letter is an E, and issue a citation against the owner of that plate.)
How do we know the things are even calibrated correctly? Oh, we're supposed to *trust* the companies contracted with the police depts. to ensure their systems are accurate! Of course, how silly of me.
Bleah.... Surveillance is fine by me, but automated systems trying to take the place of human judgement never work out very well.
A security camera in a store does not (at least in the current form) actually determine your guilt or innocence, and places its own call to authorities. It merely records what it sees on tape, for humans to review later. That's a bit different from an automated photo radar system that selectively snaps pictures of those it determines "guilty" because they operated a vehicle outside its parameters. Such systems require much closer scrutiny.
No, the whole issue of the ADA requiring ramps and handicapped accessible restrooms was a bit different. That directly affected the ability for handicapped people to go to work each day.
Not being able to purchase airplane tickets online is a much different situation. The web is *not* the only way tickets can be purchased. As long as Southwest offers alternatives (like calling up on the phone to order your tickets), this isn't preventing the blind from boarding their airplanes!
My point is, from the beginning, the web was not really supposed to be a "blind friendly" environment. It's designed around the whole concept of adding photos and colors, plus asthetically pleasing text formatting to content. None of this has any relevance to a blind person.
Now, I agree, it's great that there are ways to design a site so voice synthesizers can read the content for blind users - but IMHO, that ability should be viewed as a nice "bonus", and certainly not a legal requirement.
Once again, there's simply no basic human right to use the Internet. Internet access itself isn't even considered a basic necessity. There are few things it offers that aren't really more than "convenience features". (AKA. Online bill-pay is almost *always* just one more of several possible ways to get a bill paid. In fact, my local electric company *used* to let you pay your bill online each month on their web site, but discontinued it due to "lack of interest"!)
It's a classic case of "20-20 hindsight", coupled with a desire to sound like a prophet on the future of computing.
In reality, the "boom and bust" of the mainframe computer was much more of an obvious evolution. It simply started becoming technologically feasible to pack computing power into smaller and cheaper cases. Today, people are doing quite a bit of the computing model traditionally reserved for "mainframes" using software packages like Citrix on Windows servers (or even Tarantella on Unix boxes), coupled with PC workstations as the "dumb terminals" to them.
There would have been no "mainframe bust" if the manufacturers of the "big iron" were aggressive at switching to building high-powered microcomputer servers, and tried selling their customer base on them. Instead, others stepped up to that plate and "ate their lunch".
The predicted "rise in network computing" seems, once again, like more of an evolution than a "cycle". As Internet broadband becomes cheaper and more prevalent, naturally, more people will try serving their applications remotely over it. (Why not?) To say it'll be a "revolution" in software design is a bit much, IMHO. Many people want to ensure that their important data doesn't leak outside their business. Why pay for someone else to store it all for you, when you have much less control over what they might do with it? (EG. Perhaps their employees will sell your sales info to competitors for cash on the side, and you'll have a really tough time stopping it. You can't just fire the responsible party if they're not one of your own employees to start with.)
I'm constantly amazed at how often businesses don't seem to consider "purchasing" as a viable job title when it comes to their I.T. departments.
The fact is, when you don't assign purchasing and researching tasks to a specific member of your I.T. staff, you end up with a scattered mess of software licensing, fiascos such as the one you described with the bundled system w/19" monitor and RAM upgrade, and many other disasters.
With my previous employer, we had that issue, starting out. It was just generally understood that practically anyone in a salaried position could put in a purchase request, and then their direct manager had to "approve" the order before it was finalized. Seemed simple enough, except people in engineering would always dream up all sorts of hardware and software they "could get lots of use and productivity" out of. Of course, their boss would agree that it "sounded like a good plan" and sign for it. Then, I.T. would get stuck with all the support hassles if the thing wasn't playing nice on our network, didn't work as advertised, or what-not.
Even when we started trying to enforce a more strict policy of "only I.T. purchasing I.T. related goods" - things were still a mess. One person would prefer a certain vendor they used in the past, while another I.T. worker was trying to buy through someone else to keep up a minimum yearly purchase agreement (to lock in a discount).
Web sites are primarily designed for a particular, limited audience, in most cases. If someone *chooses* to make their site easily accessible to everyone who comes across it, that's their option -- but it certainly doesn't need to be legislated as mandatory.
That's as ludicrous as saying every author writing a book needs to have it translated and published into every foreign language in common use, so those not speaking English are ensured "equal access" to it!
The fact is, many sites right now are quite browser-dependent, even if they opt not to touch any additional "plug-in" technologies such as Shockwave or RealAudio. If we didn't have Javascript, web sites would be much less useful. (As just one example, I recently found a site that calculated your speedometer error based upon changing your car's tires out with different sizes. If this had to be presented as pure HTML, I suppose we'd be reduced to looking through a huge list or table of every combination, to find relevant data for our particular car and situation. How is that a *better* way to build the site?)
Sure, some of the ".bomb'ers" are out there drawing up poor quality sites, and don't deserve a job designing web pages. That's not what this discussion is really about, however. This is a question of whether we want to let government dictate requirements for every site we build. If this becomes law, many people will take down sites completely rather than pay to do major revamping to meet ADA requirements, and then *nobody* benefits.
Do the banks really keep their UI consistent though?
I know for a fact that in St. Louis, Missouri - my bank (Firstar) has changed around the prompts on their machines numerous times in just the last 6 months or so.
EG. One set of drive-up ATMs has a prompt at the beginning that asks if you'd like English or Spanish. I've never seen this on their ATMs anyplace else in town (and I know this was just recently added to these particular machines). Other times, they seem to play around with enabling and disabling prompts that ask "Would you like a receipt for this transaction?" after your card is inserted, but before you select any other options. They've also made changes to some of their ATMs so they ask if you'd like a deposit envelope, after you tell it you wish to make a deposit. (It used to be, they all just spit out an envelope without asking.)
All of these small changes seem like they'd cause major havock for blind people who had the sequence of prompts memorized.
There's nothing wrong with "voting with your dollar" (aka. only buying non copy-protected software), except we have no good mechanism in place to inform the buyer in advance whether or not copy protection exists on the software!
I can't remember a single game I ever purchased that said on the box "Warning: This CD is copy protected using XYZ protection." Once you open the box and discover such a thing, the product is deemed "non-returnable" since it was opened - and you're stuck. You just voted with your dollar for something you didn't even want!
The software situation is much more complex than the "Robin Hood" analogies people keep trying to use. For starters, Robin Hood was physically threatening people and taking their money away from them. Software piracy involves no direct assault or confrontation with another individual, nor does it even involve physically stripping someone of their possession of the original code and/or media it's placed on for sale.
Just as importantly though, Robin Hood was a pretty "cut and dried" case of attempting to make everyone more "financially equal". (A very questionable goal, at best.)
The software industry, by contrast, does a number of ethically questionable things, including making the buyer agree to shrinkwrap license agreements. (Oh wow, I'm not allowed to use product Y with this product X I just purchased? I had no idea of that until I read page 6 of this fine print *inside the box*!) Sometimes, they attempt to artifically inflate their sales via legal strong-arming people. (EG. Microsoft's lawyers threatening people who try to resell unopened/unused "OEM editions" of their operating systems on eBay.) Sometimes they even partake in "false advertising" when their product promises to perform functions that don't work properly (or sometimes, at all!). Often, the buyer is left with only a suggestion that "we'll address that in an update later this year".
In this rather hostile software purchasing environment, why is it so surprising that some folks are motivated to strip away the copy protection schemes and help distribute the resulting code? If that makes those doing it into "Robin Hoods", I daresay they should have far less of a guilty conscience than the original Robin Hood.
I don't deny the USA has a serious problem with trying to meddle in the affairs of other countries and governments.
On the other hand, this case hardly seems like one of them. Otherwise, what are you trying to say? It's only a belief that stealing other people's credit card numbers and emptying their bank accounts is a "crime" in the USA?
The Russian hackers would have never been touched at all by the USA if they weren't stealing the funds of US citizens!
It's one thing to request that the US refrains from interfering with something that's initially none of their business, but I see it as "self-defense" to make every attempt to stop someone who is directly attacking or commiting crimes against our own people.
Obviously, we didn't just fly into Russia, grab these guys, and haul them back here. We simply fooled them into coming to us. If they were more cautious or did a little more research, they probably wouldn't have fallen for the fake company and "job interview" and then we'd still be unable to touch them.
The fact is, the ability to make "perfect copies" is sort of a "red herring".
People have been able to make "acceptable copies" using cassette tape (or even reel-to-reel tape!) for years.
"Joe Consumer" typically doesn't really care if his music is a perfect duplicate of the original. He simply wants it to "sound good" in his car, on his Walkman, or played back on a $179.95 home stereo system in his bedroom or dorm.
The fact that so many folks treat MP3's encoded at 128bits as "excellent quality sound" illustrates my point further. (These sure aren't perfect duplicates of the original, with all that compression.)
The recording industry tried to shut down production of the VCR and failed. They probably would have done the same with the first cassette recorders, except perhaps it took them by surprise. Every time a new form of media comes along, they look for a reason to halt copying of their material onto it. The argument that computers and CDRs allow "perfect copies" is irrelevant, really. They just need to drag that out into the open as an excuse to try their same old tricks, one more time.
I really believe that "Joe Consumer" *has* to win this in the end. Ultimately, he's the only one buying any of these products in the first place. Either you cater to his needs and wants, or you choose not to, and your business model fails.
Another alternative I don't see used much, but which I've been relatively happy with myself, is c2it. (www.c2it.com)
They charge absolutely no transaction fees (well, at least so far -- but I'm sure that'd change if they got popular enough).
Honestly, I think much of PayPal's bad reputation would have been mirrored by any of these alternative online payment services, had they grown as large and as quickly as PayPal did.
It's easy to claim your cust. service is "much more responsive" when you only have 1/20th. the number of users.
I'm smiling at your 747 analogy...
But actually, I'm not even so sure groups like DoD should be considered as commiting "larger crimes" simply because larger amounts of software pass through their hands.
Consider this:
Relatively few individuals have the technical know-how to remove copy protection mechanisms from software packages. If this wasn't so, the motivation wouldn't have existed to form "cracking groups" in the first place.
Is this so much a "criminal" action, or "providing a service to the public"? How often has copy protection gotten in your way? I can remember one, specific case, where a piece of video game software (Tony Hawk Pro Skater) wasn't even Windows 2000/XP compatible as purchased in the store. If you wanted it to run fine on 2000 or XP though, you could use the cracked version. The copy protection itself was apparently the only incompatible thing in the program!
I know many others who run pirate copies of software they bought legally, because it's more convenient to use the cracked version. (Look how often a program requires that you leave the original CD in the drive to run it. Many times, all the data is already loaded on your hard drive from the first installation. They simply want to check the CD to make sure you're the real owner. How annoying....)
Ah-hah! Thanks for an excellent reply.
I do find myself in total agreement with you (both on preferences in reading material and movies, and on the comment about it not being the "fault of the genre").
Honestly, as much as anything, I'm partially just trying to be difficult in this discussion, since I was nitpicked over my usage of "you" rather than "I".
If I've managed to find fault in the entire Fantasy genre, that's not quite what I intended to do.
This whole thing originated from the argument over whether or not LoTR was supposed to have taken place on our planet. Some folks seem to be saying "No way. Middle Earth isn't *our* Earth." Others say yes, Tolkien stated before that it was, indeed, supposed to be here on our planet.
Perhaps we're supposed to assume that the human race does/did live on more planets than just Earth? That's a possibility I hadn't really considered until now. All I know is in the movie, the wizard does mutter something about humans and hobbits rarely interacting with each other (and that he thinks it's probably just as well).
Initially, it was exactly that part which bothered me. (Why go to all the effort to write a consistent, epic story about an entire fantasy world, and then nail it down to supposedly happening here? It's just an unnecessary "tie-in" that needlessly strains credibility.)
No,
Any good "cost/benefit analysis" of this sort would include the potential "costs" to others, as well as benefits and costs to oneself directly.
Anything else would be foolhardy, as humans are truly "interdependent" creatures, NOT indepdendent.
In this particular scenario, I do feel that moral justifications can be made for copying the "copyrighted works". In my opinion (which I'm quite certain is shared by many others too), the current laws are unreasonable in their punishment of copyright infringements.
You're bringing up quite different situations when you start talking about the morality of killing an abortion doctor, or gasing Jews.
Software piracy, in most rational people's view, is much more akin to choosing to drive 75MPH in a 55MPH zone, or choosing not to report your earnings on a garage sale to skirt the taxes.
I say the proverbial "you" rather than "I" because I happen to know I speak for more people than just myself.
Just because you, in particular, don't care whether an author puts in the extra effort to add a measure of believability to his/her story doesn't mean I'm automatically in a small minority of those who do.
In fact, I had a number of fantasy novels up for sale on eBay last year (all in brand new condition), as well as a collection of science ficiton novels. (My girlfriend ordered a whole bunch of random things from a sci-fi book club one time, and I wanted to get the stuff out of here.) The sci-fi sold without any problems, yet several of the "fantasy" novels never sold at all, and the others sold for only the minimum bid price of about $1.00.
That's just one more shred of evidence that helps back up my claim that there aren't an awful lot of people out there into the fantasy genre. I daresay it's largely because people feel it's a "waste of time" to read hundreds of pages about a mythical fantasy world that not only doesn't exist/never existed, but doesn't even try to leave the reader with any new wisdom/insight or ability to relate to the characters presented.
Note: I'm not claiming *all* fantasy is void of "value" to the reader. That's absurd. As I said in my first post, LOTR teaches several good lessons. Still, I think those same lessons can be better communicated in another fiction genre that roots itself a little deeper in science and/or reality.
If you just want mindless entertainment, you can get plenty of it from TV sitcoms.... No need to read fantasy novels too.
Seriously, there are so many certifications out there now, I'm starting to wonder if it'd be profitable for me to create my own cert. and get one of the testing centers to offer it?
The cheapest I.T. industry cert. I've seen is still the A+, and that is a 2 part exam that sets you back around $180 by the time you take both pieces. Either the testing centers make an absolute killing on these things, or else a certain percentage of the profit goes back to the test's creator.
I'm thinking if you even get a 4% or 5% cut of the profits on each attempted exam, you stand to make more money than you would by actually working in the industry in a job you got, partially by becoming "certified".
Even most fairy tales and myths make sure not to give enough detail as to the "where" and "when" so you feel as though you're struggling with a contradiction with reality.
That, or they dealt with the "unprovable"... concepts similar to ghosts or ancient gods/deities. There's not really any way to disprove their existance, so why not write stories about them?
All I'm saying is I don't care for fantasy novels that make claims that "lock them into a particular place and time in history". LOTR would have been improved, IMHO, if it was made clear that it took place on another world. Tying it in to the human race starts the reader/viewer asking lots of questions that the author would have been better off not getting involved with.
What are you trying to say? The "trick" to success for a p2p file sharing service lay in distribution of alternatives to the music most people were currently listening to?
If so, no - I think you're sadly mistaken. Napster and all other file sharing packages of this sort allow users to put anything out there that they like. What ends up downloaded, mostly, is what's already popular. Nothing stops obscure or "non mainstream" artists from trying to get their music out to the masses via networks like Napster. They simply copy their stuff to MP3 and go online. In fact, many resorted to trickery, putting names of popular bands that "sound kind of like us" in the filenames, so you'd download their stuff by accident and hopefully get hooked on it.
Nonetheless, it didn't really catch on. I don't see how Napster could have done much better if they promoted their service as only distributing that type of material. People would just have largely ignored it....
I don't know if there's anything to say here that will help you understand my complaint? Obviously, you feel that fiction of any type is perfectly fine, whether it has any grain of "believability" in it or not.
I, on the other hand, have a view that's shared by many other people I know. I think that one of the biggest creative challenges of good fiction is coming up with credible explanations for the technologies, events and places depicted in the story.
EG. We all know there is no such thing as a "warp drive", a la "Star Trek", and we know we can't currently teleport people from point A to B. We also know we don't have phaser guns that can "stun" or kill, depending on their setting, and certainly not the level of medical know-how illustrated on the series. Nonetheless, Star Trek stood out, above many other sci-fi shows, precisely because the effort was made to explain it all. If the "science" wasn't there to give something legitimacy, it didn't go into the TV show or movie.
The "Fantasy genre", on the other hand, seems to discount any of this as relevant at all - and wants its readers to disregard reality completely. Some people are bothered less by this than others. (Perhaps parallels could be drawn between those who blindly accept religious beliefs "on faith" and those who choose not to believe in a "god" without better evidence?)
In any case, I see no reason why a fantasy novel couldn't be written that still preserves some "credibility". It might take a little more forethought and knowledge of science and history, but what's wrong with asking for that?
No, I wasn't suggesting that all students should have the cost of DSL or a cable modem rolled into their tuition. I was suggesting that the colleges offer students the *option* of ordering this type of service, and having the monthly payments rolled in to their tuition.
(People paying with student loans find this quite attractive, many times, because they don't want to deal with another monthly bill of $40 or more while not working, or working only part-time.)
In fact, I'd think a large university could work some type of deal with the service provider to get students a slightly discounted rate.
As someone already pointed out, right now, students are often paying a big chunk for net access through the school's T1/T3, yet they're getting censored and limited access. Seems to me a cable or DSL circuit would be a better alternative for their dollar spent.
Sorry, next time, I'll be sure only to speak for myself when making such statements as "dragons and gargoyles don't really exist".
Well, there's a line in the movie (near the beginning, where the wizard is riding into town on the wagon), where he makes a comment about "the humans not often interacting with the hobbits, which is probably just as well".
That would certainly lead me to believe that this is supposed to be taking place somewhere on our planet, at the same time humans are alive.
Well, frankly, I didn't go see the first one in the theater either. (Hey, money's been very tight lately. There's not much I will pay to see right now.)
I did, however, watch it now that it's out on DVD. Honestly, it just didn't do much for me. Before I get slammed by people for saying that, let me qualify:
It was a very well put-together production. Perfectly good acting, special effects, and the whole nine yards. Like the book, there are great lessons taught in the film. (Certainly, the whole theme of "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" runs throughout.)
I just generally dislike the "fantasy" genre, because we're forced to suspend all rational belief through the whole thing. Unlike sci-fi, where it's easy to say "Well, all of this simply happened on another planet we haven't discovered yet." - they have us believe that this world existed on *our own planet*, yet humans never realized it was there.
Somehow, this ruins some of the enjoyment for me, whether it's in book form or a movie. (It's sort of like the stereotypical "action movie" where the hero does so many unbelievable stunts that after 30 minutes, it makes the whole movie "cheesy" - no matter what else is good about it.)
I don't think you should ever ask the reader, or audience, to "swallow" excessive amounts of impossibility. Instead of insulting our intelligence, create a background for the tale that gives our minds a way to justify its existance.
Dragons and gargoyles are cool-looking creatures, and make good children's stories, but beyond that - you just need a little more "substance" to keep us believing in them.
Originally, colleges and universities had fast Internet connections because they were really the only users other than government and research labs. As the net got commercialized, everyone seemed to get used to the idea that those fast connections should stay there for *all* manner of usage by students, including arbitrarily hosting file servers.
It seems to me that with cable modems and DSL typically only costing $40-50 per month - it's not that big of a deal to give each interested student their own such connection, and roll the cost into their tuition.
Leave the University T1 or T3 for internal use only (faculty and actual classrooms), and of course, leave some sort of ftp type file service active - so students can submit legal files to it if they need to distribute something (like an open-source program they wrote themselves?).
Any student who would whine and complain about this arangement is probably just hoping to run a high-speed server without ponying up the cash for the bandwidth - and that's not what college is all about.