Exactly. To unfairly manipulate a manual counted paper election, you have to bribe, cajole and keep quiet election workers at dozens or hundreds of different locations. While some election fraud on a small or local scale surely happens in every election, if you do it on a big scale, you will probably get caught.
Who exactly is going to catch the surreptitious lines of code inserted into release A21.3 of Diebold's VoteCounter software? We have no way of auditing. Of course the election and vote counting process will appear to "go smoothly", because there's no way to audit or challenge results! I think electronic voting has potential to eliminate the small-scale fraud previously mentioned, but until a more apolitical company implements the system, and it's open to public scrutiny and *each release* of the software and hardware system is approved by independent expert panels at a national level (not state - I wouldn't trust most states to be able to put together a panel with this kind of review process - let the state or local election boards select a vendor's solution that is approved by a nationwide board or organization).
Well, if those too stupid were unable to figure out the ballot and voted in a statistically random fashion that didn't modify the outcome, then I suppose you might have a point. However, what seems to end up happening isn't quite like that. It depends on how the voting process is set up and, for example, whether the people or machines counting the ballots have any biases built in.
Firefox is vulnerable to two (admittedly fairly modest) spoofing attacks here too. However, you are right in that Firefox is likely to patched far faster than IE, if past experience is any indicator of future performance.
Disabling Javascript would be a huge overreaction to a moderate theoretical browser exploit. The only time disabling a major browser function for security was really justified was ActiveX, a while back when there seemed to be dozens of known and unknown attacks actually in the wild on thousands of websites, mostly used to install spyware on your system.
That's the first vulnerability. What about the second one, the form field focus vulnerability? To me that seems more serious than the first, since it doesn't pop up some weird hokey spyware-looking popup window. No legitimate website prompts for login information in a popup window. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to imagine typing your user name/password without necessarily noticing that the text isn't appearing on the page until you've already typed it. And this seems like a more subtle bug in Mozilla's focus management (anybody else remember back in the M milestones when focus used to go willy nilly wherever the hell it wanted?).
I don't think is funny, this is a troll - see the guy's sig? Hmm, do I want to advertise to all those liberal weenie hippies who are the thought leaders of the world, or to all the Post readers who ride the subway every day to their construction jobs.
Conservative populism mixed with tabloid journalism - the basest of human instincts all in one place, and the Post is a fine example of it. Seriously - I respect somebody who reads the National Review, but the Post? Even worse than watching Fox News.
I don't think a typical DR print ad is appropriate for this context - they are running a one-off publicity stunt here, not a regular DR advertising campaign where metrics matter. Half the point of this is the publicity they will get by saying they are doing this in advance. Having a full page in the NYTimes isn't about effectiveness per dollar, it's about the mindshare of the paper and the audience you are reaching. If you aren't running this as a launch announcement, but as a follow up to a campaign test in local papers, it rather loses its cool factor, surprise factor, etc.
But in general, if you were running a traditional advertising campaign, you DR metrics are a good list of points to keep in mind.
As the other reply hints, this has nothing to do with New York. The New York Times is the traditional place where large scale annoucement-advertisements are made by American companies because of the size of its readership (large), the composition of its readership (mostly well-educated, upper middle-class, etc.), and the location of its readership (everywhere in the US and around the world). Furthermore, because of its general position of respect in the world of journalism, the New York Times is considered a thought-leading paper in many respects.
And other serious journalists? They often read the New York Times too.
As for the question of how to design and present this ad, and whether Firefox is ready for this ad, I am less certain. I love Firefox, but it still misrenders my favorite Internet time-suck, Slashdot. This is a pretty major and obvious rendering bug, and the stubborn-ass Mozilla people seem to think that this or it's dependencies shouldn't be listed as an Aviary-1.0 blocker. Utterly inconceivable - and yes, that word does mean what I think it means. How can I recommend a browser to my friends, family, and now the entire Western world that I still find annoying to use on a daily basis and whose drivers refuse to acknowledge a critical 1.0 bug?
Furthermore, what is this shit about putting everybody's name in the NY Times? Nobody wants to see an ad with a thousand names across the bottom. If you want to put names on it, put some names and quotes that will at least sound like they have credibility to the generally-intelligent-but-non-technical-elite audience. This sounds like an ego exercise instead of a real advertising campaign. I don't want MY name on a tiny corner of a full page ad, I'd rather just have an acknowledgement somewhere on the Mozilla.org webpage thanking me for supporting their launch. Furthermore, if I am helping finance this launch, I want to see what I'm buying. Show me the money... err.. the ad copy, and I'll consider helping to fund it. I sure hope if you are going to put this much money into it, you did actually get somebody who understands how to design impactful print ads for this audience to design it, right? Right?
An update: at my site. The XMDirect "protocol" is just a trivial header of 3 XM 5AA5 serial opcodes. Like I predicted, it was a trivial thing to dump with a serial monitor and figure this out (I just didn't realize quite how trivial it would be).
I agree with Jon Stewart and have been saying the same for years, as a moderate liberal who is annoyed by the radicalization of American politics and the unwillingness to engage in reasoned debate. But I do think Tucker Carlson has a point in a way - it's one thing to skewer Crossfire, it's another to explain how exactly to make things more reasoned and rational, embrace compromise and still provide enough entertainment to get ratings when you are up against people with essentially no journalistic ethics, like Fox News (no offense intended, it's just not journalism, it's pure populist-conservative entertainment most of the time).
If Jon is so serious about this, I'd like to see him get involved in doing exactly this. I don't think it's fair to hide behind his identity as a comic and the fact that the Daily Show is part entertainment and comedy, part political commentary. In other words, Jon Stewart makes a funny show, and sometimes prioritizes entertainment value over boring, reasoned debate, but doesn't purport for it to be anything more than comedy, and thus it's okay. And Jon Stewart gets the ratings as a result. But then he seems perturbed that "real news" programs are gunning for ratings too. This is a reality of market driven media and entertainment.
I wish Jon would at least propose some real solutions to the underlying problem. More public funded media? Republicans seem to hate that, even though it's hard to deny that a well-informed populace is absolutely in the common interest. I guess they prefer to deal with media that plays to the lowest common denominator, like Fox, since the lowest common denominator is populist conservatism.
Liberals are like Plato to the conservative's Gorgias - oratory and rhetoric is an effective tool of persuasion for the human psyche, though it can be used for good or bad. Reasoned debate, while undoubtedly better for reaching useful conclusions, lacks the style or panache of oratory. Plato described this problem 2000 years ago, and we've been unable to solve it in our political system since then. If Jon Stewart has a real solution, I'd love to hear it.
So what you're saying is that human beings can function without a de jure government in a hunter gatherer culture, which is what existed for most of the two million years prior to the last 10,000 years, give or take. Okay, but so what? You think we can go back to living as hunter gatherers?
And you seem to be suggesting that because tribal groups were small enough that there was no need for a formal state meant that there were no "laws" or rules of social order. I would like to know your evidence for this. The rules were unwritten and informal, but they existed. You don't think that people were punished who didn't conform to the social expectations of their tribal groups?
Some of your other comments make no sense. You seem to talk about voluntary association and voluntary groups, but then you say corporations should be banned or severely curtailed. Aren't those voluntary associations of people working together for economic gain, admittedly of the shareholders and not the workers? Isn't capital a necessary consequence of property rights, and the corporation just an outgrowth of the concept of capital investment for economic gain? You don't really need a formalized corporation, you can do it all with simple contractual relationships and so on, which are entirely voluntary... how do you propose to prevent these without curtailing individual rights?
True, but MEPIS has pretty much been built from the beginning as a dual purpose distro (bootable CD / rescue disk, and full-featured distro), and has a wide community of day-to-day users now (check out MEPISLovers.com. There's probably nothing you can do with MEPIS that you can't do with Knoppix, and vice versa, but I still think Knoppix is first and foremost a rescue disk and "Linux intro" CD for newbies. MEPIS is the new Mandrake, and has basically been able to take mindshare by working with the (IMHO) superior apt-get system, and providing the best, most working hardware support out there.
In theory, URPMI is fabulous, but in practice, I've had far, far better luck keeping a clean, consistent system without weird, incompatible RPMs and other stuff mucking up my install when using MEPIS, and find I almost never have to go outside of the pre-configured repositories. And Mandrake's lack of working out of the box Nvidia support (at least as of the last version I used, probably a year and a half ago) killed it for me. MEPIS is the first distro I've been able to use extensively without encountering some hitch that required a kernel recompile.
Don't get me wrong, I have been doing Linux kernel compiles since around '96 (when I was a freshman in college, and I thought compiling the kernel was pretty 3733+), but I just don't want to screw around with that stuff for a day-to-day use desktop system. Custom compiled kernels for special purpose server boxes is fine, but it just doesn't fly for a desktop distro for me - I want to get work done, not screw around with kernel settings.
Awesome "quote" from John Stewart's book. I discovered Rand when I was 13. At the time, I thought she was the coolest author ever, and a great thinker. Such is the naivete of being 13 and not having much exposure to the real world.
I still think Rand had some interesting points, but I've come to see her self-proclaimed philosophy as fundamentally amoral. It purports to be embrace rational thought, but I see it as the ultimate cop out. Morality is hard, and subjective, therefore we're going to reject consdering moral issues entirely and assume that whatever is good for me is basically good.
I definitely don't know the answer, but I know that Objectivism is at most a question, and you have to dig much further to get real answers.
Yes, I'm distro whoring here. Personally, I'd recommend MEPIS over Knoppix. Knoppix is fine as a boot disk, but MEPIS is by far the easiest-to-use distro and most overall enjoyable to work with that I know of. MEPIS started as a bootable CD, but it's grown into a full-fledged Debian-based distribution now, and I'd say a good 80%-90% of MEPIS users now use it as their primary distribution, not just a rescue disk or "Linux test" distro.
No, I'm not a weenie who needs things spoon fed to them, I've been using Linux since long before it was cool or chic, starting with Slack back in '96, then RedHat, then Mandrake. After Win2k came out I moved back to using Windows for most of my day-to-day desktop needs (now mostly Win XP), but recently I've installed MEPIS on my laptop and I find it quite enjoyable to use. The things that stand out to me are 1) fabulous hardware compatibility, including out of the box support for almost every component of my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop, with NVidia GeForce4 Go graphics and so on (I did have to make a quick manual edit to XF86Config-4 to get widescreen support, and my Microsoft MN-720 802.11b card took about half an hour of screwing around to get running, but ndiswrapper was already there, I just had to find the right driver version and run it.
Okay, that's all the ranting I can do for now. Did I mention that MEPIS makes a great recovery CD? That's how I first discovered it. Give it a try, funny name aside.
Yes, that's what I said, these cables are "serial protocol translators". The XMDirect uses a different protocol to speak with headunits - I presume because XM first designed them they didn't want to give out documentation to authorized adapter cable makers like Blitzsafe with the internal serial protocol used by the tuner tincan, so they threw in an Atmel to translate serial instructions.
the government is your enemy - no exceptions.... If we all start to realize that good government is always less government, the better the world will be.
If the government is your enemy, with no exceptions, and the less government the better, I take this as an endorsement of the sentiment that no government would be best. Maybe it's not, but that's the way it sounded. I agree that true anarchy is impossible, in that parts of the "social order" are biologically dictated phenomena in humans, as with all mammals and most animals in general, but temporary lawlessness and lack of effective government can certainly occur in places, and it's almost always an unpleasant scene when they do.
I think that small government is a useful ideal, but the larger, more complex and more heterogeneous a society becomes, the more pressures there are from special interest groups, companies, states, localities, and so on to make new laws. I'd be curious to see a breakdown of types of legislation passed and the root interest group behind the legislation over the last century. My guess is that you'd find a lot more legislation, both in quantity and proportion, being passed these days that is sponsored or backed primarily by large corporations and industry groups.
If your statements were true, then we'd all just go pick up and live in anarchy somewhere. Face it, government serves a useful purpose and that's why we have it. Do the people in governments tend to try to overextend the reach of government into our private lives with cries of protecting the children, indecency, the common good, etc.? Yes, way too often. But we need a police force to enforce basic social rules, since the alternative is lynch mobs and chaos. We want a hospital and health care system that allows access to the benefits of modern science (whether you think we want the government to ensure that everyone gets access to healthcare or not is up for debate - if you are a coldhearted Randian bastard, maybe you think it's okay for people to die on the streets of curable illnesses because they couldn't afford treatment). We want paved roads that allow us to get around from place to place and do the stuff we enjoy or need to do. We don't want arbitrary groups of people (corporations) to freely dump polluting chemicals on the commons.
All of these sorts of functions have been necessary as long as humans have been social creatures, and they have been filled, by kings, tribal chieftains, religious leaders, or elected governments.
An ideal government is one that balances minority rights (i.e. the basic human rights and principles of equality that we believe in) and the interest of the many, and one that maximizes personal freedom. But this is a very complicated equation, not something easily solved in some optimizing equation. Yes, generally less intrusion into our personal lives is a good thing, but sometimes I want peoples personal lives intruded into (if they are beating their children severely, for example). Anytime my rights and somebody else's rights come into conflict, I still need some sort of intermediary to resolve the conflict, or else we just all end up shooting each other to resolve our conflicts.
With goods in competitive markets -- lawn-chairs, for example -- any store could do the same. Find the lawn-chairs that are the cheapest and stock them. If the cheapest is too expensive, make do without lawn-chairs in your store. Each lawn-chair manufacturer will want to be the one that you stock, so each will engage in price wars with the others. Adding a huge chain like Walmart to the mix does add something of a jump to the otherwise continuous demand curve, but in general the same principles apply. The lower profit limit that the market is willing to bear shouldn't change regardless of Walmart's presence.
So it seems to me that whatever moral or pragmatic effect you see pursuant to Walmart's heftiness would come from a competitive market as well.
So all the people who report these effects in their dealings with Walmart are making it up? All the articles documenting Walmart's business practices are fiction? The businesses that have been driven into the ground after their management bit off more they can chew to please Walmart didn't go under? The businesses that shut down factories after letting Walmart audit their books didn't really fire those employees?
I don't see how you can deny that this has happened, and present a first-principles argument for it based on a nominal understanding of 100-level economics (no offense intended, since my own understanding is no better), a science which is itself generally more descriptive than prescriptive. Your argument seems to go:
1. Walmart is not a monopoly (I agree with this statement in the strict sense, of course)
2. Walmart has forced manufacturer profit margins down.
3. Price wars result which happen in competitive markets too.
The problem is that 3 wasn't happening in many industries, at least not at a level or intensity that forced the hands of management to take the drastic step of shutting down factories in the US and moving them overseas. Sure, there is always competition to lower prices, but when Bob's discount center purchasing department calls up a bicycle manufacturer and says "we won't pay you that much per unit, we need a lower price, let us see your balance sheets as we think your profits are too high", the manufacturer tells them to get stuffed. The value of their business isn't enough to support the radically intrusive nature of such an inquiry, or to follow their instructions with respect to where and how manufacturing is done. Sure, Bob's can carry some cheap Chinese bike, but people won't buy the 40 dollar no-name bike at Bob's if all the well-known American brand bikes can be had for 70 dollars down the street. And for a long time, this was how it worked - carry the cheap Chinese bikes, or the more expensive American bikes (and the way it worked with many other products).
But Walmart shifted the balance of power by virtue of their retail mass. They said to the American bike company, we want to carry your brand bike, but we want it at Chinese prices. If you don't give this to us, we'll get your competitor to give it to us at Chinese prices, or we'll just tell you to screw off and use our own in house brand because we're that big, and since 30% of the market buys bikes at Walmart, that's 30% of your revenues down the tubes.
Now you can argue that the psychological forces or moral forces or inertia or whatever the hell that prevented the American companies from whole hog shutting down American manufacturing operations and 'outsourcing' were not rational in a pure economic world. They should have done this without Walmart because the market is competitive. But in many cases, they didn't, and the catalyst in quite a few markets to do this (factually) was Walmart, first principles arguments be damned. Maybe it would have happened eventually in most or all of these markets even without Walmart, I cannot claim to know.
There was no reverse engineering of the service itself by these guys, or of the XM Tuner unit. The tuner module found in every XM unit speaks the same serial protocol as the PCR, and the PCR protocol was deciphered ages ago by dobbz, nsayer, and others from the XMFan board (and later apparently nsayer was assisted in filling in the gaps by XM themselves when they actually supported the 3rd party XMPCR development community).
This is just a serial protocol translator, one of at least 3 or 4 separate implementations that have popped up in the last 3 or 4 weeks - a modest reverse engineering of the XMDirect's headunit protocol, translating (probably 1:1) serial commands to the internal tuner (tincan) serial format.
First of all, that offer apparently just became available within the last day or so, it wasn't there the last time I checked their webpage (2-3 days ago). So I have no idea what that cable actually is, if it's shipping, or not. Furthermore, the whole reason many of us went to Open Source alternatives is we don't want to give TimeTrax, with their legal troubles, our personal credit card information, Radio ID, etc, since XM was looking to shut them down and get their purchaser list.
Personally, I got involved in the XMPCR community because of all the cool third party apps and the ability to roll your own software for the device. I already told you, the TimeTrax software itself A) isn't so fabulous, I've used it B) doesn't allow you to do anything you can't do with other, better software out there that's free (and Open Source).
I'm all for the cheapest cable solution that has a well-documented protocol (and thus I can write my own software or modify other software for) or supports the standard "A5 5A" protocol. If it doesn't meet those criteria, then it's an inferior product to the DirectPCR.
First of all, this isn't a hack of XM Radio per se, it's just a simple reverse engineering of the undocumented cable spec for the XMDirect unit. The XMDirect has an 8 pin mini-DIN pinout and an internal 32 bit Atmel which translates serial instructions between XM's undocumented "car headunit" serial format and the standard, internal "A5 5A" serial format used directly by the XMPCR units, for which there is already quite a bit of Open Source software (incidentally, PCRCommander does pretty much everything that TimeTrax does).
This "solution" is pretty much just a cable, and this groups software which does the translation. If you want something that works with all the existing software out there now, what you really want is the DirectPCR brought to you by Ryan and the XMFan people. The DirectPCR is more expensive, because it's actually got a microprocessor that reverse translates the standard "A5 5A" serial commands into XM Direct format (which is then dutifully translated back by the XM Direct).
The DirectPCR is the best solution if you really want something with the power and cool factor of the now-defunct XMPCR (no I don't have any business relationship, I'm just an XMFan regular and have been following developments). As for "hack factor" at least three separate people or groups have separately done the XMDirect protocol translation. If you have the right equipment, it's probably about an afternoon's work - just hook up two serial monitors side by side and dump away. So there isn't that much hack cred to speak of in this. Furthermore, if you're comfortable with a soldering iron, you can trivially build an XMPCR-compatible unit out of a SkyFi with a DB9 header, a MAX232, and an optical adapter board.
Admittedly, the first sentence on this page is imprecise, but the second time he uses the word 'use' is pretty accurate:
Do everyone a favor and don't break the law -- if you use busybox, comply with the busybox license by releasing the source code with your product.
This is basically correct. "Releasing the source code with your product" is perhaps less precise than what the GPL says, but it's a decent common English interpretation of it. If you release (i.e. distribute) a product, you need to include the source code to the GPLed components, and any software that links to it, under the GPL or compatible license.
As far as I can tell, none of the examples in the Hall of Shame are examples of internal "use" applications that don't involve distribution, which is perfectly legal under the GPL. All of these look at first glance like they involve distribution without written offers, or source code, and most of these cases have been documented by refusals to provide source code to GPLed components to customers in posession of the hardware in question. If that's not GPL violation, I don't know what is.
It's amazing to me that they are letting all these people run all over them. With a project that's apparently this high profile and subject to abuse, they ought to just assign copyright to the FSF and work with them to enforce their licensing terms, or find lawyers willing to help pursue at least court injunctions on sales of these products. These guys would release their source code in no time flat as soon as the phrase "injunctive relief" was uttered in a courtroom.
You are saying that goods with low marginal cost and zero marginal cost are identical (and your assessment of the marginal cost of an apple pie is absurd - what about the cost of the land for an apple orchard, and the labor of cooking and preparing the apple pies). I am saying that zero marginal cost goods are never stolen in the usual sense at all, because you aren't TAKING the good from the original owner at all, you are just making your own copy since there is no cost associated with doing so. You could also take an apple pie and replicate the recipe and ingredients, and similarly deprive the original owner of his market for the goods, but we don't consider this wrong, because a) the copy is not identical to the original, and b) the original pie maker still has his twenty pies that he can sell, and there's no real fear that you're going to give away apple pies based on his recipe to everybody else on the block, because it costs you money and lots of time to make them.
A better analogy would be, I have 20 apple pies, and somebody has a Star Trek food synthesizer (forgive the dorkiness of this analogy), which they can use to replicate my apple pies, for which I developed the secret recipe and put the labor into preparing, for no charge. Now if somebody replicates my apple pie and eats the replicated pie instead of buying the pie from me, I have a right to be upset, as they have done a rather nasty thing to me, taking advantage of my hard work and labor without compensating me fairly. If they start replicating the pie that I created and selling it, then they are REALLY doing something wrong in that they are competing against me in the market with the product that I put all the effort into creating.
But I still have my 20 pies, and thus it is not the *same thing* as stealing a physical pie. It's still bad, and it's still illegal, but it's not the same.
You don't have to agree with my distinction if you don't want - I guess not everybody thinks this difference is very significant, but it seems fairly significant to me.
Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips
Strange, I thought the point of the big numbers was to sell more chips, not to make them faster. Wasn't part of the reason that Intel made the P4 pipeline as long as it is so that they could keep cranking the MHz up for a long, long time so they'd have lots of generations of P4 processors to sell? Because I don't think you really need that long a pipeline for purely performance reasons.
I wonder if AMDs inroads into the 64 bit market have Intel getting a bit scared about the future?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. To unfairly manipulate a manual counted paper election, you have to bribe, cajole and keep quiet election workers at dozens or hundreds of different locations. While some election fraud on a small or local scale surely happens in every election, if you do it on a big scale, you will probably get caught.
Who exactly is going to catch the surreptitious lines of code inserted into release A21.3 of Diebold's VoteCounter software? We have no way of auditing. Of course the election and vote counting process will appear to "go smoothly", because there's no way to audit or challenge results! I think electronic voting has potential to eliminate the small-scale fraud previously mentioned, but until a more apolitical company implements the system, and it's open to public scrutiny and *each release* of the software and hardware system is approved by independent expert panels at a national level (not state - I wouldn't trust most states to be able to put together a panel with this kind of review process - let the state or local election boards select a vendor's solution that is approved by a nationwide board or organization).
Well, if those too stupid were unable to figure out the ballot and voted in a statistically random fashion that didn't modify the outcome, then I suppose you might have a point. However, what seems to end up happening isn't quite like that. It depends on how the voting process is set up and, for example, whether the people or machines counting the ballots have any biases built in.
Firefox is vulnerable to two (admittedly fairly modest) spoofing attacks here too. However, you are right in that Firefox is likely to patched far faster than IE, if past experience is any indicator of future performance.
Disabling Javascript would be a huge overreaction to a moderate theoretical browser exploit. The only time disabling a major browser function for security was really justified was ActiveX, a while back when there seemed to be dozens of known and unknown attacks actually in the wild on thousands of websites, mostly used to install spyware on your system.
That's the first vulnerability. What about the second one, the form field focus vulnerability? To me that seems more serious than the first, since it doesn't pop up some weird hokey spyware-looking popup window. No legitimate website prompts for login information in a popup window. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to imagine typing your user name/password without necessarily noticing that the text isn't appearing on the page until you've already typed it. And this seems like a more subtle bug in Mozilla's focus management (anybody else remember back in the M milestones when focus used to go willy nilly wherever the hell it wanted?).
Conservative populism mixed with tabloid journalism - the basest of human instincts all in one place, and the Post is a fine example of it. Seriously - I respect somebody who reads the National Review, but the Post? Even worse than watching Fox News.
But in general, if you were running a traditional advertising campaign, you DR metrics are a good list of points to keep in mind.
And other serious journalists? They often read the New York Times too.
As for the question of how to design and present this ad, and whether Firefox is ready for this ad, I am less certain. I love Firefox, but it still misrenders my favorite Internet time-suck, Slashdot. This is a pretty major and obvious rendering bug, and the stubborn-ass Mozilla people seem to think that this or it's dependencies shouldn't be listed as an Aviary-1.0 blocker. Utterly inconceivable - and yes, that word does mean what I think it means. How can I recommend a browser to my friends, family, and now the entire Western world that I still find annoying to use on a daily basis and whose drivers refuse to acknowledge a critical 1.0 bug?
Furthermore, what is this shit about putting everybody's name in the NY Times? Nobody wants to see an ad with a thousand names across the bottom. If you want to put names on it, put some names and quotes that will at least sound like they have credibility to the generally-intelligent-but-non-technical-elite audience. This sounds like an ego exercise instead of a real advertising campaign. I don't want MY name on a tiny corner of a full page ad, I'd rather just have an acknowledgement somewhere on the Mozilla.org webpage thanking me for supporting their launch. Furthermore, if I am helping finance this launch, I want to see what I'm buying. Show me the money... err.. the ad copy, and I'll consider helping to fund it. I sure hope if you are going to put this much money into it, you did actually get somebody who understands how to design impactful print ads for this audience to design it, right? Right?
An update: at my site. The XMDirect "protocol" is just a trivial header of 3 XM 5AA5 serial opcodes. Like I predicted, it was a trivial thing to dump with a serial monitor and figure this out (I just didn't realize quite how trivial it would be).
If Jon is so serious about this, I'd like to see him get involved in doing exactly this. I don't think it's fair to hide behind his identity as a comic and the fact that the Daily Show is part entertainment and comedy, part political commentary. In other words, Jon Stewart makes a funny show, and sometimes prioritizes entertainment value over boring, reasoned debate, but doesn't purport for it to be anything more than comedy, and thus it's okay. And Jon Stewart gets the ratings as a result. But then he seems perturbed that "real news" programs are gunning for ratings too. This is a reality of market driven media and entertainment.
I wish Jon would at least propose some real solutions to the underlying problem. More public funded media? Republicans seem to hate that, even though it's hard to deny that a well-informed populace is absolutely in the common interest. I guess they prefer to deal with media that plays to the lowest common denominator, like Fox, since the lowest common denominator is populist conservatism.
Liberals are like Plato to the conservative's Gorgias - oratory and rhetoric is an effective tool of persuasion for the human psyche, though it can be used for good or bad. Reasoned debate, while undoubtedly better for reaching useful conclusions, lacks the style or panache of oratory. Plato described this problem 2000 years ago, and we've been unable to solve it in our political system since then. If Jon Stewart has a real solution, I'd love to hear it.
And you seem to be suggesting that because tribal groups were small enough that there was no need for a formal state meant that there were no "laws" or rules of social order. I would like to know your evidence for this. The rules were unwritten and informal, but they existed. You don't think that people were punished who didn't conform to the social expectations of their tribal groups?
Some of your other comments make no sense. You seem to talk about voluntary association and voluntary groups, but then you say corporations should be banned or severely curtailed. Aren't those voluntary associations of people working together for economic gain, admittedly of the shareholders and not the workers? Isn't capital a necessary consequence of property rights, and the corporation just an outgrowth of the concept of capital investment for economic gain? You don't really need a formalized corporation, you can do it all with simple contractual relationships and so on, which are entirely voluntary... how do you propose to prevent these without curtailing individual rights?
In theory, URPMI is fabulous, but in practice, I've had far, far better luck keeping a clean, consistent system without weird, incompatible RPMs and other stuff mucking up my install when using MEPIS, and find I almost never have to go outside of the pre-configured repositories. And Mandrake's lack of working out of the box Nvidia support (at least as of the last version I used, probably a year and a half ago) killed it for me. MEPIS is the first distro I've been able to use extensively without encountering some hitch that required a kernel recompile.
Don't get me wrong, I have been doing Linux kernel compiles since around '96 (when I was a freshman in college, and I thought compiling the kernel was pretty 3733+), but I just don't want to screw around with that stuff for a day-to-day use desktop system. Custom compiled kernels for special purpose server boxes is fine, but it just doesn't fly for a desktop distro for me - I want to get work done, not screw around with kernel settings.
I still think Rand had some interesting points, but I've come to see her self-proclaimed philosophy as fundamentally amoral. It purports to be embrace rational thought, but I see it as the ultimate cop out. Morality is hard, and subjective, therefore we're going to reject consdering moral issues entirely and assume that whatever is good for me is basically good.
I definitely don't know the answer, but I know that Objectivism is at most a question, and you have to dig much further to get real answers.
No, I'm not a weenie who needs things spoon fed to them, I've been using Linux since long before it was cool or chic, starting with Slack back in '96, then RedHat, then Mandrake. After Win2k came out I moved back to using Windows for most of my day-to-day desktop needs (now mostly Win XP), but recently I've installed MEPIS on my laptop and I find it quite enjoyable to use. The things that stand out to me are 1) fabulous hardware compatibility, including out of the box support for almost every component of my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop, with NVidia GeForce4 Go graphics and so on (I did have to make a quick manual edit to XF86Config-4 to get widescreen support, and my Microsoft MN-720 802.11b card took about half an hour of screwing around to get running, but ndiswrapper was already there, I just had to find the right driver version and run it.
Okay, that's all the ranting I can do for now. Did I mention that MEPIS makes a great recovery CD? That's how I first discovered it. Give it a try, funny name aside.
Yes, that's what I said, these cables are "serial protocol translators". The XMDirect uses a different protocol to speak with headunits - I presume because XM first designed them they didn't want to give out documentation to authorized adapter cable makers like Blitzsafe with the internal serial protocol used by the tuner tincan, so they threw in an Atmel to translate serial instructions.
His post said:
the government is your enemy - no exceptions.... If we all start to realize that good government is always less government, the better the world will be.
If the government is your enemy, with no exceptions, and the less government the better, I take this as an endorsement of the sentiment that no government would be best. Maybe it's not, but that's the way it sounded. I agree that true anarchy is impossible, in that parts of the "social order" are biologically dictated phenomena in humans, as with all mammals and most animals in general, but temporary lawlessness and lack of effective government can certainly occur in places, and it's almost always an unpleasant scene when they do.
I think that small government is a useful ideal, but the larger, more complex and more heterogeneous a society becomes, the more pressures there are from special interest groups, companies, states, localities, and so on to make new laws. I'd be curious to see a breakdown of types of legislation passed and the root interest group behind the legislation over the last century. My guess is that you'd find a lot more legislation, both in quantity and proportion, being passed these days that is sponsored or backed primarily by large corporations and industry groups.
All of these sorts of functions have been necessary as long as humans have been social creatures, and they have been filled, by kings, tribal chieftains, religious leaders, or elected governments.
An ideal government is one that balances minority rights (i.e. the basic human rights and principles of equality that we believe in) and the interest of the many, and one that maximizes personal freedom. But this is a very complicated equation, not something easily solved in some optimizing equation. Yes, generally less intrusion into our personal lives is a good thing, but sometimes I want peoples personal lives intruded into (if they are beating their children severely, for example). Anytime my rights and somebody else's rights come into conflict, I still need some sort of intermediary to resolve the conflict, or else we just all end up shooting each other to resolve our conflicts.
So it seems to me that whatever moral or pragmatic effect you see pursuant to Walmart's heftiness would come from a competitive market as well.
So all the people who report these effects in their dealings with Walmart are making it up? All the articles documenting Walmart's business practices are fiction? The businesses that have been driven into the ground after their management bit off more they can chew to please Walmart didn't go under? The businesses that shut down factories after letting Walmart audit their books didn't really fire those employees?
I don't see how you can deny that this has happened, and present a first-principles argument for it based on a nominal understanding of 100-level economics (no offense intended, since my own understanding is no better), a science which is itself generally more descriptive than prescriptive. Your argument seems to go:
1. Walmart is not a monopoly (I agree with this statement in the strict sense, of course)
2. Walmart has forced manufacturer profit margins down.
3. Price wars result which happen in competitive markets too.
The problem is that 3 wasn't happening in many industries, at least not at a level or intensity that forced the hands of management to take the drastic step of shutting down factories in the US and moving them overseas. Sure, there is always competition to lower prices, but when Bob's discount center purchasing department calls up a bicycle manufacturer and says "we won't pay you that much per unit, we need a lower price, let us see your balance sheets as we think your profits are too high", the manufacturer tells them to get stuffed. The value of their business isn't enough to support the radically intrusive nature of such an inquiry, or to follow their instructions with respect to where and how manufacturing is done. Sure, Bob's can carry some cheap Chinese bike, but people won't buy the 40 dollar no-name bike at Bob's if all the well-known American brand bikes can be had for 70 dollars down the street. And for a long time, this was how it worked - carry the cheap Chinese bikes, or the more expensive American bikes (and the way it worked with many other products).
But Walmart shifted the balance of power by virtue of their retail mass. They said to the American bike company, we want to carry your brand bike, but we want it at Chinese prices. If you don't give this to us, we'll get your competitor to give it to us at Chinese prices, or we'll just tell you to screw off and use our own in house brand because we're that big, and since 30% of the market buys bikes at Walmart, that's 30% of your revenues down the tubes.
Now you can argue that the psychological forces or moral forces or inertia or whatever the hell that prevented the American companies from whole hog shutting down American manufacturing operations and 'outsourcing' were not rational in a pure economic world. They should have done this without Walmart because the market is competitive. But in many cases, they didn't, and the catalyst in quite a few markets to do this (factually) was Walmart, first principles arguments be damned. Maybe it would have happened eventually in most or all of these markets even without Walmart, I cannot claim to know.
There was no reverse engineering of the service itself by these guys, or of the XM Tuner unit. The tuner module found in every XM unit speaks the same serial protocol as the PCR, and the PCR protocol was deciphered ages ago by dobbz, nsayer, and others from the XMFan board (and later apparently nsayer was assisted in filling in the gaps by XM themselves when they actually supported the 3rd party XMPCR development community).
This is just a serial protocol translator, one of at least 3 or 4 separate implementations that have popped up in the last 3 or 4 weeks - a modest reverse engineering of the XMDirect's headunit protocol, translating (probably 1:1) serial commands to the internal tuner (tincan) serial format.
First of all, that offer apparently just became available within the last day or so, it wasn't there the last time I checked their webpage (2-3 days ago). So I have no idea what that cable actually is, if it's shipping, or not. Furthermore, the whole reason many of us went to Open Source alternatives is we don't want to give TimeTrax, with their legal troubles, our personal credit card information, Radio ID, etc, since XM was looking to shut them down and get their purchaser list.
Personally, I got involved in the XMPCR community because of all the cool third party apps and the ability to roll your own software for the device. I already told you, the TimeTrax software itself A) isn't so fabulous, I've used it B) doesn't allow you to do anything you can't do with other, better software out there that's free (and Open Source).
I'm all for the cheapest cable solution that has a well-documented protocol (and thus I can write my own software or modify other software for) or supports the standard "A5 5A" protocol. If it doesn't meet those criteria, then it's an inferior product to the DirectPCR.
No, it's playing poker for imaginary petfood.
Yeah, why can't people just get addicted to something normal, like sex or gambling?
This "solution" is pretty much just a cable, and this groups software which does the translation. If you want something that works with all the existing software out there now, what you really want is the DirectPCR brought to you by Ryan and the XMFan people. The DirectPCR is more expensive, because it's actually got a microprocessor that reverse translates the standard "A5 5A" serial commands into XM Direct format (which is then dutifully translated back by the XM Direct).
The DirectPCR is the best solution if you really want something with the power and cool factor of the now-defunct XMPCR (no I don't have any business relationship, I'm just an XMFan regular and have been following developments). As for "hack factor" at least three separate people or groups have separately done the XMDirect protocol translation. If you have the right equipment, it's probably about an afternoon's work - just hook up two serial monitors side by side and dump away. So there isn't that much hack cred to speak of in this. Furthermore, if you're comfortable with a soldering iron, you can trivially build an XMPCR-compatible unit out of a SkyFi with a DB9 header, a MAX232, and an optical adapter board.
Do everyone a favor and don't break the law -- if you use busybox, comply with the busybox license by releasing the source code with your product.
This is basically correct. "Releasing the source code with your product" is perhaps less precise than what the GPL says, but it's a decent common English interpretation of it. If you release (i.e. distribute) a product, you need to include the source code to the GPLed components, and any software that links to it, under the GPL or compatible license.
As far as I can tell, none of the examples in the Hall of Shame are examples of internal "use" applications that don't involve distribution, which is perfectly legal under the GPL. All of these look at first glance like they involve distribution without written offers, or source code, and most of these cases have been documented by refusals to provide source code to GPLed components to customers in posession of the hardware in question. If that's not GPL violation, I don't know what is.
It's amazing to me that they are letting all these people run all over them. With a project that's apparently this high profile and subject to abuse, they ought to just assign copyright to the FSF and work with them to enforce their licensing terms, or find lawyers willing to help pursue at least court injunctions on sales of these products. These guys would release their source code in no time flat as soon as the phrase "injunctive relief" was uttered in a courtroom.
A better analogy would be, I have 20 apple pies, and somebody has a Star Trek food synthesizer (forgive the dorkiness of this analogy), which they can use to replicate my apple pies, for which I developed the secret recipe and put the labor into preparing, for no charge. Now if somebody replicates my apple pie and eats the replicated pie instead of buying the pie from me, I have a right to be upset, as they have done a rather nasty thing to me, taking advantage of my hard work and labor without compensating me fairly. If they start replicating the pie that I created and selling it, then they are REALLY doing something wrong in that they are competing against me in the market with the product that I put all the effort into creating.
But I still have my 20 pies, and thus it is not the *same thing* as stealing a physical pie. It's still bad, and it's still illegal, but it's not the same.
You don't have to agree with my distinction if you don't want - I guess not everybody thinks this difference is very significant, but it seems fairly significant to me.
Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips
Strange, I thought the point of the big numbers was to sell more chips, not to make them faster. Wasn't part of the reason that Intel made the P4 pipeline as long as it is so that they could keep cranking the MHz up for a long, long time so they'd have lots of generations of P4 processors to sell? Because I don't think you really need that long a pipeline for purely performance reasons.
I wonder if AMDs inroads into the 64 bit market have Intel getting a bit scared about the future?