From the same country that brought you the monopolizing telcos and DMCA? [not to mention crippling patent system]
HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
To be fair, the US government and internet oversight bodies have done a remarkable job of keeping bad laws off the internet. A few slip through here and there, but most laws that impact the internet do so as an incident of their aim, not as the direct intention of it (e.g., the DMCA). America has very few laws that are DIRECTLY intended to regular the internet, and most of those that HAVE been passed have no teeth.
In any case, the only legitimate question to ask is whether TLD is better off in the hands of the UN or the US. A few years ago I'd have said the UN, but lately I really think we're better off leaving it as it is. It ain't broken. Let's not fix it.
The reason we so warmly embrace Wikipedia is because we know it's instant geek cred. Wanna back up your opinion? Link to Wikipedia, no geek will argue with that shit.
Wikipedia is ultimately just like Slashdot - a collection of potentially relevent links to material you might be interested in accompanied by editorial material of highly dubious merit. And behind the scenes are a half million desperate nerds trying to be right about something, all while defending this exercise in social onanism as a "community" effort to provide a free educational resource to people.
Go ahead, mod me a troll. It makes you feel really good for just a few minutes, doesn't it? Fuck that guy! Stupid trolls! We're trying to have an open, honest debate and a free exchange of ideas and he's in here disagreeing with us!
A telephone wire is necessary for a DSL connection, but it's not sufficient. Try this exercise:
If you say, "They live in Wyoming," that is sufficient to also claim that they live in the United States. However, it is not necessary to live in Wyoming in order to live in the United States.
Do you know how DSL works? Having a wire to your home is not sufficient to provide DSL service. It's necessary, but not sufficient. There are other things that are necessary. If it was a simple as throwing a switch and collecting $50, don't you think the telecoms would be all over that shit?
In fact, since 2001, the U.S. has slipped from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband use per capita.
Isn't the world always on our collective asses for hogging a disproportionate share of the world's resources? So American is using a smaller percentage of the world's bandwidth supply. Shouldn't we be happy about this? Because if our usage was going UP even while ever-increasing populations of the world were getting Internet access, Salon.com would have some kind of expose about how the greedy Americans are using up all the bandwidth and starting wars for copper so they can give contracts to their rich friends at...er.. SBC. Wow the wheels totally came off this metaphor as it trundled downhill.
After seeing what many other countries have accomplished with their broadband markets,
namely Japan, Korea, and (gasp) even Canada, the current state of affairs in the U.S. is looking pretty dismal.
Let's play Comparison!
The USA has a population density of 17.
Japan is like 325 and Korea is #3 in the world for population density at well over 400.
So, seriously. This is an intelletual exercise? Comparing the telecom infrastructure of Asian nations like Japan and Korea, among the most heavily
populated people in the world per land area, to the United States? Canada would indeed make for a better comparison, with its insanely low population density of less than four, except something like 90% of Canadian citizens
are condensed to areas that are within 200km of the American border, so the overwhelming majority of their land mass is almost entirely unpopulated and probably does not have
cheap Canadian fat pipe broadband access.
American broadband blows because it's hard to wire the 450,000 people in Wyoming using the same deployment strategy that wires the millions that live in Chicago.
ranting about games and sex causing social decline
Oh wait. No, I don't buy that line. Uberconservative Republican hacks like Senator Hillary Clinton might want our tax dollars to investigate violence and sex in games, but I'm one conservative who does NOT. LESS governmenting spending on this bullshit.
"Yeah! I mean, do you know what's happened to rates of violent youth crime and teen pregancny in the last ten years?" They always answer that they're at unprecedented levels
Hmmm. Maybe I'm NOT conservative, because I don't believe that either. It's the George Bush cronies and conservative right-wing nuts like Senator Clinton, Howard Dean, and John Kerry who have recently been found playing up false numbers for activities that we generally frown upon as being measures of moral decay in our society. No, Republicans, screw you, I'm not buying into that line.
and then are thrown off when I tell them that they've actually been falling quite steadily.
Amen brother. And what's been happening for the last 10-15 years? Unprecedented prosperity, even when you consider the recession a few years ago. Crime rates almost always drop when people are making more money.
Teen pregancy is even at its lowest rate since we began taking statistics in the '40s, down from the all-time high in 1991.
Go go gadget condoms!
What would be really amusing to me is if they discovered, in 20 years, that untold psychological damage to children was done by The Sims. People spending all day running households like gods, torturing and killing families and developing these horribly twisted personalities. I mean, take a horribly violent, depraved movie -- for example, Saw, and ask what game the creators would probably enjoy playing?
uhhh.. The Sims 2 is actually on the list of morally reprehensible games that Jack is crusading against. Seriously.
If you have to switch computers in order to view a website, it is not convenient.
I agree. Hence, I just use Windows for most of my casual browsing. I love it when people who want to argue with me make my point for me. Saves me time!
2) It assumes that it's the MS programs holding people back, when many desktops are tied because of third party software. For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation. Yes, you can find replacement photo editors, but not really replacement video editors that are on par with After Effects, or replacements for Flash that have 95%+ installation base.
Exactly. Ever try to hire a graphics artist and tell him, "by the way, you'll be using GIMP on our Fedora Core 3 installation"? It's harder than it sounds. Yes, you can all rain down here with THOUSANDS of examples of YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and people YOU KNOW who not only can use GIMP but PREFER it to expensive alternatives. If the sample of Slashdot and its immediate social clique were the norm, we'd live in a pseudosocialist utopia in which all of us are gainfully employed and paid a hundred thousand dollars to work 30 hour weeks developing beautiful open source software that we give away and nobody buys, and all music and entertainment is produced through the honest labor of talented people upon whom we benevolently bestow voluntary payments for their work, and whose labors of love are distributed for free through the software channels that we were paid lots of money to develop. Oh, and Bush isn't president. And global warming stopped. And we all ride bikes to our jobs. And there's no McDonald's or suburbs. And soda is free. So is beer. I could go on, but I moved into the TrollZone about 5 minutes ago.
I'd say "no" to Microsoft but Windows is easy to use, fairly intuitive on the surface (fine-tuning it is a big hassle, I admit), and with XP it's finally stable enough for me to use day-in and day-out. I despise it as a development platform, I'm guess I'm a stubborn old UNIX kind of guy. Give me ANSI C and a dumb terminal, and I'll vi up some code for you. But for day-to-day productivity, gaming, websurfing, etc, I'll take it. I'm aware of its myriad shortcomings and MS's sketchville business practices, but the reality is that I need a Windows machine around. Too many things I do require one. There are a handful of web sites that just will not work properly in Firefox, nor even on my Powerbook. These tend to be sites that I find very convenient to use and have available. It may because the site authors have stupidly mated themselves to the Win IE platform. It might be worth it to your principles to boycott such a site, but my convenience > your principles. There is only one non-renewable resource in my life, and that's time. I just won't boycott a web site that saves me time and adds convenience to my life because I am teh hatez when it comes to MS. Sorry, guys.
Especially considering that the "mainstream press" is relying more and more on the bloggers for their news. As I see it, this is nothing more than freelance journalism, which is now and always has been a respected and vital part of the mainstream news agencies.
President Clinton said of Rush Limbaugh at one point during his presidency that Limbaugh is dangerous because people take what he says to be truth, but there's no "truth detection" apparatus that holds him accountable. He's not a "journalist." It's not like he's writing stories for the Boston Globe, where his statements receive some oversight.
Clinton had a good point, and was eerily precient. Now we have Limbaugh and some of the traditional media using blogs as sources for their stories, news, and opinions. This is fine in theory, but dangerous in that anybody can say anything on a blog.
The problem isn't the bloggings. It's like people who hate standardized testing. The tool is the problem, it's the way it is being used. I posted about this not too long ago, but we have a lamentable tendancy in this country to blame tools for the actions of people. It's the gun's fault you shot somebody with it, it's the cigarette's fault that smoked it, it's the marijuana's fault that you got high, it's the TV's fault that you watched it, it's the credit card's fault that you charged too much shit on it. And when tools are blamed, corporations are sued, and individuals are held unaccountable for their actions. This is great in the short term because the "little guy" gets to screw big business for a huge chunk of cash, and nobody except a handful of blue bloods really genuinely likes big business. The problem is that our government sanctions corporations and shields their ownership (stockholders) from liability when those corporations misbehave.
We're tiptoeing towards a sociey in which whenever people abuse or misuse something, the tool is blamed, the company that created it gets sued for it, and no individual citizen actually gets blamed. Wealth is redistributed, the stock takes a temporary hit, prices go up, and life marches on. In the end, with the exception of Martha Stewart and a few Enron guys, nobody actually is punished for breaking the law, and the people we're trying so hard to help get hurt the most, especially those who didn't ask for and don't want our help. Ask anybody who smokes.
What else you ask? Uhhh, I just thought of an important one. What about "how to make money?"
On this point, I think the example of Zope is illustrative. Investor Hadar Pedhazur was willing to pony up venture capital to fund Zope Corporation, on the condition that they open-source Zope. I'm not really a Zope fan, but the idea of an investor requiring a company to open-source their principal asset struck me as a hard-dollar vote for the value of OSS.
Illustrative of what? Just because somebody says, "You must open source the project to get my money!" doesn't mean they have any business plan to generate revenue.
I can walk up to you and said, "I will not give you $100,000 unless you fart the Star Spangled Banner for me!" That doesn't mean there's some kind of implicit monetary value or sound business planning behind patriotic flatulence.
If I were arrested in Fairbanks, AK, for carrying an ice-cream cone in my pocket, I would hope for some public outrage. Yes, there's a law against it; but that law infringes on my basic right to carry an ice-cream cone in whatever manner I desire.
I completely agree with you, but be careful about how you fling about the term "right." Rights are things that all men possess as an incident of being human beings. They cannot be taken away or awarded, you always have them. Governments may only choose to recognize them or ignore them. This is the fundamental principle of American individual liberty, and our civil rights. We play fast and loose with what constitutes a "right" on Slashdot. Does this guy have the "right" to "[carry] out two tests to check the security of the site" and does a law preventing such a thing violate that right? I honestly don't know, and I suspect neither do most of the outraged posters on Slashdot. It's a comforting assumption that we have such a right, but do we really? That's really the question that an article like this should beg, and it might start an intellectual conversation, which is almost always a more edifying experience than the predictable Slashdot outrage whenever one of "our own" is brutalized by The Man for breaking laws that we find unpalatable.
The RIAA thinks they have a right here because they are making a case that web radio and satalite radio use buffers and there for copy the music, which real radio dosnt. Just wait folks, soon you will be walking down the street whistling a new song you heard on the radio, and an RIAA lawyer will pop up demanding royalties because you memerized it and are reproducing it at a lesser but still recognizable quality. There need to be a line drawn, I'm half joking, but I wouldn't be suprised if the RIAA made it a reality.
In the case of a device that records a potentially permanent copy for the specific purpose of later playback, I believe the law is on the RIAA's side. What they really want here is a bite out of satellite radio's ass because it's becoming very popular and the members of the RIAA want in on the revenue stream while the elevator is near to the ground floor still. Rather than innovate, they're going to take advantage of the legal system and try to establish themselves as part of the revenue-generating process somewhere. Again, I believe the law may be on their side for the radio TiVo thing, and if so, I wouldn't blame them for pursuing it. This particular group, however, is somewhat reknown for using lawyers and belligerance to make up profit lost from both illegal activity and their own lack of aggressive market research and foresight. If we had iTunes before we had Napster, I believe the landscape of these disputes would be much less contentious. But they wanted no part of any such venture, and now they're pissing away money on trying to elbow their way into these new revenue streams that they've missed out on.
Amen, brother. P2P software does not violate the law. Photocopies do not violate the law. Camera phones do not violate the law. Laws exist to mitigate between the conflicting desires of people. I want your lawnmower. You want to keep your lawnmower. Who wins? The law says you do. I want to own a gun. You're afraid of guns and think I shouldn't have one. Who wins? Well this one's not so straightforward, but having no criminal record or particular proclivity towards violence, I'd most likely get to have my gun.
Things do not break laws. Corporations do not even break laws. Only people can. We have some errors in our legal system right now that hold things responsible for lawbreaking that cannot break laws. Corporations aren't things. They are federally-sanctioned legal entities that exist as legal fact on paper and in practical fact by a massive collective agreement that it is what we say it is. Corporations can't break laws any more than knitting circles can. But we allow people who break laws to hide behind them. Bad juju.
And it's the same with file sharing. A computer network cannot violate a law. Nor can a network card, a hard disk, a mouse button, or anything else beyond the two people complicit in copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is like global warming. People are so goddamed polarized on the subject that having an honest intellectual debate is impossible. You've got the P2P advocates who all claim in unison they primarily use P2P for legitimate purposes when the majority of people who really that software are violating copyright. This is because the majority of users are not Slashdotters innocently swapping Linux distributions, they're high school and college kids with little disposable income and an insatiatble thirst for new music, missed TV shows, and movies they can't afford to go see.
Then you've got the content cartels confusing us (on purpose) with flat out lies and mischaracterizations. Copyright infringement is not theft. There's another term that covers theft, and it's called... well... theft. Copyright infringement is a violation of somebody else's exclusive right to manage a particular piece of intellectual property in the manner they prefer, with some common sense exceptions called "Fair Use" that are defined on a case-by-case basis. And downloading songs isn't even a criminal offense unless you do a lot of it. No more than shoplifting a candy bar is.
We need to stop blaming tools for the actions of people. It's not the drug's fault that you're stoned. It's that you decided to consume it. It's not the gun's fault that you murdered somebody. You decided to shoot it. This hellbent determination to excuse the actions of individuals by blaming their bad decision making on tools or circumstances has got to end at some point, or our tangled web of indulging and empathetic laws will result in a soup of legal abstractness that makes it impossible for anybody to ever do anything wrong. It will always go back to being the fault of some company that manufactured some product or tool that enabled a person to commit a crime, and since the corporation as a peopleless legal entity will be held responsible, we end up with a legal system in which individual people are never responsible for anything. That's going to suck.
...will make the combined application more attractive to corporate users, although they're not specifically targeting Microsoft Outlook.
...will include fixes for the most important bugs, such as those that cause the loss of data.
Wait... now come on, who ELSE are they targetting? Gotta be MS Outlook users. Nobody uses Oracle Corporate Time. If they want to win over MS users they ought to leave bugs in the software that cause catastrophic data loss. It's what MS users are used to.
If only they can work in Kevin Smith somehow, we'll be treated to hilarious single-cut 15 minute scenes of conversations between frustrated and impotent twentysomethings waxing intellectual about every topics. And then Jay will make a joke about drugs! Ha ha!
Re:Challenges in Artificial Intelligence
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 1
You can win and have an awful score, is the guy's point. I don't really care about the score that much, personally, but it's kind of annoying to play Emperor and survive against ridiculous odds, come out victorious, but have a shoddy rating because you weren't the biggest, baddest bully. The game simultaneously encourages noble, responsible leadership and being a total shitcock.
Challenges in Artificial Intelligence
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One of the few elements of the Civ games that I always disliked was the manner in which the game is made more difficult on higher difficulty settings. It seems like the game is made harder at first with smarter AI, but after a certain point, the game mechanics change and the AI just cheats. AI Civs are permitted to acquire techs they haven't researched or traded for, AI Civs cut ludicrous deals with other while gouging the player, they produce units units faster than is possible, field armies of economically ruinous size, overcome preposterous odds in battle, all while researching at a breakneck pace and beating the player to wonders with no civil unrest. Finally, when the player comes out on top despite all this, the AI civs simply all gang up on him and arbitrarily start wars when the player is close to victory regardless of how benevolent, honorable, and generous of a diplomat he has been. The difficulties in developing a good AI justify some such measures, but rivals such as Galactic Civilizations appear to have successfully created "smarter" AIs rather than just stacking the deck against the player. What kind of unique challenges do Civ and its cousins in developing "smart" AIs that can challenge the best of players? Is it clear when you've hit an AI wall and the only way to toughen up the difficulty is with rule-bending? Does the pressure to publish and realize revenue result in shortcuts in AI development? I've always been curious about how much development efforts goes into AI, it strikes me as one of those areas where it'd be easy to cut corners and still produce a game looks, sounds, and plays great.
I'm going to totally pirate their anti-piracy software so that I can illegally use their intellectual property to expunge my system of illegal intellectual property. The software ought to remove itself at that point!
I don't have one. I take pride in not understanding or caring about 80% of what is posted on Slashdot. So does my girlfriend. You'll learn all about in a few years, probably, when you hit your mid-30's.
Slashdot Mirror
HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
To be fair, the US government and internet oversight bodies have done a remarkable job of keeping bad laws off the internet. A few slip through here and there, but most laws that impact the internet do so as an incident of their aim, not as the direct intention of it (e.g., the DMCA). America has very few laws that are DIRECTLY intended to regular the internet, and most of those that HAVE been passed have no teeth.
In any case, the only legitimate question to ask is whether TLD is better off in the hands of the UN or the US. A few years ago I'd have said the UN, but lately I really think we're better off leaving it as it is. It ain't broken. Let's not fix it.
My employer has that site blacklisted. :)
Wikipedia is ultimately just like Slashdot - a collection of potentially relevent links to material you might be interested in accompanied by editorial material of highly dubious merit. And behind the scenes are a half million desperate nerds trying to be right about something, all while defending this exercise in social onanism as a "community" effort to provide a free educational resource to people.
Go ahead, mod me a troll. It makes you feel really good for just a few minutes, doesn't it? Fuck that guy! Stupid trolls! We're trying to have an open, honest debate and a free exchange of ideas and he's in here disagreeing with us!
If you say, "They live in Wyoming," that is sufficient to also claim that they live in the United States. However, it is not necessary to live in Wyoming in order to live in the United States.
Do you know how DSL works? Having a wire to your home is not sufficient to provide DSL service. It's necessary, but not sufficient. There are other things that are necessary. If it was a simple as throwing a switch and collecting $50, don't you think the telecoms would be all over that shit?
Isn't the world always on our collective asses for hogging a disproportionate share of the world's resources? So American is using a smaller percentage of the world's bandwidth supply. Shouldn't we be happy about this? Because if our usage was going UP even while ever-increasing populations of the world were getting Internet access, Salon.com would have some kind of expose about how the greedy Americans are using up all the bandwidth and starting wars for copper so they can give contracts to their rich friends at ...er.. SBC. Wow the wheels totally came off this metaphor as it trundled downhill.
Let's play Comparison!
The USA has a population density of 17.
Japan is like 325 and Korea is #3 in the world for population density at well over 400.
So, seriously. This is an intelletual exercise? Comparing the telecom infrastructure of Asian nations like Japan and Korea, among the most heavily populated people in the world per land area, to the United States? Canada would indeed make for a better comparison, with its insanely low population density of less than four, except something like 90% of Canadian citizens are condensed to areas that are within 200km of the American border, so the overwhelming majority of their land mass is almost entirely unpopulated and probably does not have cheap Canadian fat pipe broadband access.
American broadband blows because it's hard to wire the 450,000 people in Wyoming using the same deployment strategy that wires the millions that live in Chicago.
Ooo! Ooo! I'm one. I'll try to answer.
ranting about games and sex causing social decline
Oh wait. No, I don't buy that line. Uberconservative Republican hacks like Senator Hillary Clinton might want our tax dollars to investigate violence and sex in games, but I'm one conservative who does NOT. LESS governmenting spending on this bullshit.
"Yeah! I mean, do you know what's happened to rates of violent youth crime and teen pregancny in the last ten years?" They always answer that they're at unprecedented levels
Hmmm. Maybe I'm NOT conservative, because I don't believe that either. It's the George Bush cronies and conservative right-wing nuts like Senator Clinton, Howard Dean, and John Kerry who have recently been found playing up false numbers for activities that we generally frown upon as being measures of moral decay in our society. No, Republicans, screw you, I'm not buying into that line.
and then are thrown off when I tell them that they've actually been falling quite steadily.
Amen brother. And what's been happening for the last 10-15 years? Unprecedented prosperity, even when you consider the recession a few years ago. Crime rates almost always drop when people are making more money.
Teen pregancy is even at its lowest rate since we began taking statistics in the '40s, down from the all-time high in 1991.
Go go gadget condoms!
What would be really amusing to me is if they discovered, in 20 years, that untold psychological damage to children was done by The Sims. People spending all day running households like gods, torturing and killing families and developing these horribly twisted personalities. I mean, take a horribly violent, depraved movie -- for example, Saw, and ask what game the creators would probably enjoy playing?
uhhh.. The Sims 2 is actually on the list of morally reprehensible games that Jack is crusading against. Seriously.
I agree. Hence, I just use Windows for most of my casual browsing. I love it when people who want to argue with me make my point for me. Saves me time!
Exactly. Ever try to hire a graphics artist and tell him, "by the way, you'll be using GIMP on our Fedora Core 3 installation"? It's harder than it sounds. Yes, you can all rain down here with THOUSANDS of examples of YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and people YOU KNOW who not only can use GIMP but PREFER it to expensive alternatives. If the sample of Slashdot and its immediate social clique were the norm, we'd live in a pseudosocialist utopia in which all of us are gainfully employed and paid a hundred thousand dollars to work 30 hour weeks developing beautiful open source software that we give away and nobody buys, and all music and entertainment is produced through the honest labor of talented people upon whom we benevolently bestow voluntary payments for their work, and whose labors of love are distributed for free through the software channels that we were paid lots of money to develop. Oh, and Bush isn't president. And global warming stopped. And we all ride bikes to our jobs. And there's no McDonald's or suburbs. And soda is free. So is beer. I could go on, but I moved into the TrollZone about 5 minutes ago.
I'd say "no" to Microsoft but Windows is easy to use, fairly intuitive on the surface (fine-tuning it is a big hassle, I admit), and with XP it's finally stable enough for me to use day-in and day-out. I despise it as a development platform, I'm guess I'm a stubborn old UNIX kind of guy. Give me ANSI C and a dumb terminal, and I'll vi up some code for you. But for day-to-day productivity, gaming, websurfing, etc, I'll take it. I'm aware of its myriad shortcomings and MS's sketchville business practices, but the reality is that I need a Windows machine around. Too many things I do require one. There are a handful of web sites that just will not work properly in Firefox, nor even on my Powerbook. These tend to be sites that I find very convenient to use and have available. It may because the site authors have stupidly mated themselves to the Win IE platform. It might be worth it to your principles to boycott such a site, but my convenience > your principles. There is only one non-renewable resource in my life, and that's time. I just won't boycott a web site that saves me time and adds convenience to my life because I am teh hatez when it comes to MS. Sorry, guys.
President Clinton said of Rush Limbaugh at one point during his presidency that Limbaugh is dangerous because people take what he says to be truth, but there's no "truth detection" apparatus that holds him accountable. He's not a "journalist." It's not like he's writing stories for the Boston Globe, where his statements receive some oversight.
Clinton had a good point, and was eerily precient. Now we have Limbaugh and some of the traditional media using blogs as sources for their stories, news, and opinions. This is fine in theory, but dangerous in that anybody can say anything on a blog.
The problem isn't the bloggings. It's like people who hate standardized testing. The tool is the problem, it's the way it is being used. I posted about this not too long ago, but we have a lamentable tendancy in this country to blame tools for the actions of people. It's the gun's fault you shot somebody with it, it's the cigarette's fault that smoked it, it's the marijuana's fault that you got high, it's the TV's fault that you watched it, it's the credit card's fault that you charged too much shit on it. And when tools are blamed, corporations are sued, and individuals are held unaccountable for their actions. This is great in the short term because the "little guy" gets to screw big business for a huge chunk of cash, and nobody except a handful of blue bloods really genuinely likes big business. The problem is that our government sanctions corporations and shields their ownership (stockholders) from liability when those corporations misbehave.
We're tiptoeing towards a sociey in which whenever people abuse or misuse something, the tool is blamed, the company that created it gets sued for it, and no individual citizen actually gets blamed. Wealth is redistributed, the stock takes a temporary hit, prices go up, and life marches on. In the end, with the exception of Martha Stewart and a few Enron guys, nobody actually is punished for breaking the law, and the people we're trying so hard to help get hurt the most, especially those who didn't ask for and don't want our help. Ask anybody who smokes.
It is theft. It's not a criminal offense.
On this point, I think the example of Zope is illustrative. Investor Hadar Pedhazur was willing to pony up venture capital to fund Zope Corporation, on the condition that they open-source Zope. I'm not really a Zope fan, but the idea of an investor requiring a company to open-source their principal asset struck me as a hard-dollar vote for the value of OSS.
Illustrative of what? Just because somebody says, "You must open source the project to get my money!" doesn't mean they have any business plan to generate revenue.
I can walk up to you and said, "I will not give you $100,000 unless you fart the Star Spangled Banner for me!" That doesn't mean there's some kind of implicit monetary value or sound business planning behind patriotic flatulence.
More nanny statism. Good riddance.
I completely agree with you, but be careful about how you fling about the term "right." Rights are things that all men possess as an incident of being human beings. They cannot be taken away or awarded, you always have them. Governments may only choose to recognize them or ignore them. This is the fundamental principle of American individual liberty, and our civil rights. We play fast and loose with what constitutes a "right" on Slashdot. Does this guy have the "right" to "[carry] out two tests to check the security of the site" and does a law preventing such a thing violate that right? I honestly don't know, and I suspect neither do most of the outraged posters on Slashdot. It's a comforting assumption that we have such a right, but do we really? That's really the question that an article like this should beg, and it might start an intellectual conversation, which is almost always a more edifying experience than the predictable Slashdot outrage whenever one of "our own" is brutalized by The Man for breaking laws that we find unpalatable.
Which of Cuthbert's rights were violated when he broke the law and was convicted of doing so, again? I missed that part.
In the case of a device that records a potentially permanent copy for the specific purpose of later playback, I believe the law is on the RIAA's side. What they really want here is a bite out of satellite radio's ass because it's becoming very popular and the members of the RIAA want in on the revenue stream while the elevator is near to the ground floor still. Rather than innovate, they're going to take advantage of the legal system and try to establish themselves as part of the revenue-generating process somewhere. Again, I believe the law may be on their side for the radio TiVo thing, and if so, I wouldn't blame them for pursuing it. This particular group, however, is somewhat reknown for using lawyers and belligerance to make up profit lost from both illegal activity and their own lack of aggressive market research and foresight. If we had iTunes before we had Napster, I believe the landscape of these disputes would be much less contentious. But they wanted no part of any such venture, and now they're pissing away money on trying to elbow their way into these new revenue streams that they've missed out on.
Things do not break laws. Corporations do not even break laws. Only people can. We have some errors in our legal system right now that hold things responsible for lawbreaking that cannot break laws. Corporations aren't things. They are federally-sanctioned legal entities that exist as legal fact on paper and in practical fact by a massive collective agreement that it is what we say it is. Corporations can't break laws any more than knitting circles can. But we allow people who break laws to hide behind them. Bad juju.
And it's the same with file sharing. A computer network cannot violate a law. Nor can a network card, a hard disk, a mouse button, or anything else beyond the two people complicit in copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is like global warming. People are so goddamed polarized on the subject that having an honest intellectual debate is impossible. You've got the P2P advocates who all claim in unison they primarily use P2P for legitimate purposes when the majority of people who really that software are violating copyright. This is because the majority of users are not Slashdotters innocently swapping Linux distributions, they're high school and college kids with little disposable income and an insatiatble thirst for new music, missed TV shows, and movies they can't afford to go see.
Then you've got the content cartels confusing us (on purpose) with flat out lies and mischaracterizations. Copyright infringement is not theft. There's another term that covers theft, and it's called... well... theft. Copyright infringement is a violation of somebody else's exclusive right to manage a particular piece of intellectual property in the manner they prefer, with some common sense exceptions called "Fair Use" that are defined on a case-by-case basis. And downloading songs isn't even a criminal offense unless you do a lot of it. No more than shoplifting a candy bar is.
We need to stop blaming tools for the actions of people. It's not the drug's fault that you're stoned. It's that you decided to consume it. It's not the gun's fault that you murdered somebody. You decided to shoot it. This hellbent determination to excuse the actions of individuals by blaming their bad decision making on tools or circumstances has got to end at some point, or our tangled web of indulging and empathetic laws will result in a soup of legal abstractness that makes it impossible for anybody to ever do anything wrong. It will always go back to being the fault of some company that manufactured some product or tool that enabled a person to commit a crime, and since the corporation as a peopleless legal entity will be held responsible, we end up with a legal system in which individual people are never responsible for anything. That's going to suck.
Capitalism is not the enemy of justice here. Capitalism has been bypassed here.
Wait... now come on, who ELSE are they targetting? Gotta be MS Outlook users. Nobody uses Oracle Corporate Time. If they want to win over MS users they ought to leave bugs in the software that cause catastrophic data loss. It's what MS users are used to.
If only they can work in Kevin Smith somehow, we'll be treated to hilarious single-cut 15 minute scenes of conversations between frustrated and impotent twentysomethings waxing intellectual about every topics. And then Jay will make a joke about drugs! Ha ha!
You can win and have an awful score, is the guy's point. I don't really care about the score that much, personally, but it's kind of annoying to play Emperor and survive against ridiculous odds, come out victorious, but have a shoddy rating because you weren't the biggest, baddest bully. The game simultaneously encourages noble, responsible leadership and being a total shitcock.
One of the few elements of the Civ games that I always disliked was the manner in which the game is made more difficult on higher difficulty settings. It seems like the game is made harder at first with smarter AI, but after a certain point, the game mechanics change and the AI just cheats. AI Civs are permitted to acquire techs they haven't researched or traded for, AI Civs cut ludicrous deals with other while gouging the player, they produce units units faster than is possible, field armies of economically ruinous size, overcome preposterous odds in battle, all while researching at a breakneck pace and beating the player to wonders with no civil unrest. Finally, when the player comes out on top despite all this, the AI civs simply all gang up on him and arbitrarily start wars when the player is close to victory regardless of how benevolent, honorable, and generous of a diplomat he has been. The difficulties in developing a good AI justify some such measures, but rivals such as Galactic Civilizations appear to have successfully created "smarter" AIs rather than just stacking the deck against the player. What kind of unique challenges do Civ and its cousins in developing "smart" AIs that can challenge the best of players? Is it clear when you've hit an AI wall and the only way to toughen up the difficulty is with rule-bending? Does the pressure to publish and realize revenue result in shortcuts in AI development? I've always been curious about how much development efforts goes into AI, it strikes me as one of those areas where it'd be easy to cut corners and still produce a game looks, sounds, and plays great.
I'm going to totally pirate their anti-piracy software so that I can illegally use their intellectual property to expunge my system of illegal intellectual property. The software ought to remove itself at that point!
I don't have one. I take pride in not understanding or caring about 80% of what is posted on Slashdot. So does my girlfriend. You'll learn all about in a few years, probably, when you hit your mid-30's.