An online casino has none of these. You can operate out of a basement somewhere. No rules, no oversight, no regulation.
You suffer from the misperception that entities opereating outside United States law operate outside all law. This is not the case. Many online casinos are based in England, which regulates them heavily to ensure fair play. The same is true of Antiguan casinos. If the government does not regulate (and therefore certify) the fairness of the casino, there will be significantly diminished revenue as many, many people go elsewhere. This is especially true of internet casinos, which provide absolutely nothing other than gambling; at least in a hypothetical crooked B&M casino, you could eat the buffet or watch the shows or something.
The reason these governments do all this, of course, is that they get to tax the casinos. So your argument that the government doesn't get tax revenue also suffers from the "U.S. government == all government" fallacy.
Even a quasi-legitimate operation that returns 99.99% of all money bet would have incredible payoff to the operator.
You just described how slot machines and almost all table games work in completely legal (i.e., not "quasi-legal") casinos, except that they get to keep more than.1%. Most of these games are complete chance -- which, ironically, provides the most reliable profit since player skill cannot skew the probabilities.
The exception to this is games where people compete with each other to capture part or all of a pot which they build by wagering; in that case, the casino takes a commision (e.g., a "rake" or a "vig") and lets the players fight it out among themselves. The casino doesn't care if these games can be influenced by skill; they make no money on who wins the game. The textbook examples of this is poker and prop (e.g., sports) betting.
Assuming you are a voter somewhere, I urge you to educate yourselves on how gambling works before making any votes that might influence or be influenced by it.
All the links of the form "/uri/prefix/text" are captions for photos that are on the pages denoted by "/uri/prefix". All of this information is indexed by Google on the "/uri/prefix" page. This comprises 90% of the links in the above page. The others are the/cgi-bin directory and the search page.
The tinfoil hat is messing up your hair.
Oh, I finally get it -- and it's actually cool!
on
Mobile Wifi Backpack
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My first thought -- "pointless art-for-art's-sake" crap.
I read the website for a while. My second thought -- "oh, go hijack people at Starbuck's onto your Internet. Cute, immature crap."
I download the docs and read them, and buried deep within, it starts talking about geographically-based ad-hoc networks. Finally, a point. And quite a good one, actually.
The Internet's great and all, and it's not like you can't talk to a guy that's 20 feet away from you with it -- provided you know his (absolute) IP or hostname or something.
What this guy's talking about is being able to address people/things based on a relative measure -- geographical proximity to each other and this backpack. There are community tools on it to facilitate the coalescence of "instant communities" that can exchange very ephemeral information (broadcast a message saying you have beer to everyone in your section of the office) or use local resources ("print on the nearest printer").
It's not nearly as cool and avant-garde as this guy wants to think it is. It's not even new. (Jini, anyone?) He's applied more of a people angle on it, creating "communities" instead of just ad-hoc networks, and focusing on ways to make people interact with each other on the network -- or at least with the hoodlum who set it up.:)
It is a cool idea, though, IMO. Sometimes you want to talk to Jane or everyone in #slashdot, wherever she is or they are. And sometimes you want to talk to whoever (or whatever -- see the printer example) is nearby and (maybe) meets some other criteria.
It won't be remotely practical until the whole darn thing sits in the iPaq frontend, however.
"Yes of course, all the money from my bank account. Lord knows I keep my bank number, routing number, and pin number, in a text file on my computer marked Bank Information for hacker to use.txt
Get real."
Do you bank online? If you're infected with ap216, someone can remotely install keystroke loggers and other nasties on your computer. Believe it or not, they're not doing this just for fun.
'Course, you seem to take reasonable precautions, so you (probably) wouldn't get infected with ap216. Unless you visited one of the hacked websites mentioned in the lurhq.com article I linked to using an unpatched copy of IE 6. (They weren't just 'HOT BRITNEY PORN!!1' -- one of the infected sites was a small business selling uniforms and supplies to school and organizational sports teams, for instance. It took credit card orders -- no word on whether the hacked version stored the numbers in a file involved named "Bank Information for hacker to use.txt".)
That said, they were probably mostly after machines to send spam from/through, and (with the exception of updating your browser) your precautions list is pretty complete for a user. (It's also a bit of a hassle -- we can only hope MS will figure out that some of their software is easy to use, but hard to use responsibly.)
I was analyzing something very similar around October of last year when I worked here. They probably aren't installing a virus, per se -- more like an autoproxy which they will use to send spam or install more malware (e.g., to steal passwords or credit card numbers).
All the vulnerabilities mentioned in the article have been known for quite some time. Liu Die Yu's Unpatched IE vulnerabilities page documents several of these in detail, with exploit examples. (Note that some of the links on Liu Die Yu's site may result in popups, ironically.)
When I took a look at it, the proxy flavor of the month was most commonly referred to as ap216.exe the filename is irrelevant, obviously). A good description of it is here, in the context of its use in a phishing scam.
Note that everything done in this attack will blithely go through most firewalls -- almost all connections are initiated from within the network. Firewalls are an increasingly inadequate means of protecting users from organized and motivated attackers. IMO, any network admin who doesn't run deep-packet inspection firewalls, intrusion prevention, or security-minded filtering application proxies is asking for it.
Sure, someone could write something to quietly delete all the files on your hard drive. I'm sure he'd rather have all the spam your machine can send, or all the money from your bank account.
"Bottom line... when your boss and the company higher ups are not on the same page, the company higher ups will be seeking direct reports from the lower-level IT staff."
If this is meant to imply to the original poster that the upper brass are meeting with the plebians because they they're suspicious of the people in the middle, you may be right. You may also be wrong.
Reasons to meet with the great unwashed:
The aforementioned short-circuit because upper doesn't trust middle.
The exact opposite of the aforementioned short-circuit -- upper management supports the middle management but knows the workers don't, so they meet with everyone to make sure they know this. (Note that airing your problems at this point probably won't win you friends, unlike the previous example.)
Upper management wants to be seen as accessible. The meal is internal PR.
Lots of other stuff I can't think of.
The bottom line is, every situation is different. Too different for any of the advice presented on a forum full of strangers to be relevant, except by accident. (Except this advice, of course.:)
My advice to you in this important meeting: enjoy the meal. Oh, and listen. I won't presume to know anything else.
Um, when invalidating someone's arguments due to inconsistency, try to be consistent yourself.
(BTW, I'll go with "hundreds of thousands." Saddam was/is a bastard.)
2. All that went on with the blessing of the US, UK and the most of rest of the world
Hardly. It went on, but most certainly neither the U.S. or the U.K. put their blessing on such an event. By the standard you seem to hold, the fact that hit happened meant it went on with the "blessing" of ALL of the world.
So, what constitues a blessing? I take it you support the near-unilateral US action in Iraq. (Tony Blair: "And I helped!") Would abstaining from such action have been excusable? We are talking here about a war that was waged because of something a person might be capable of doing. Killing Kurds, by contrast, was something Saddam demonstrated he could do, and do remorselessly. In fact, the explicit message he was sending the Kurds was that he would do it again. Yet the West (led, as always, by the US) stood idle.
If we were not morally obligated to intervene when the Kurds were massacred -- and everyone agrees that the Kurds were killed by Saddam -- then why were we morally obligated to intervene when Saddam might have had WMD's -- an assertion that was vigorously disputed at the time, and an assertion which looks doubtful today?
In that light, either silence implies consent (in which case, yes, the US "blessed" the death of the Kurds by the lack of reprisals) or it doesn't (in which case there should have been no rush to commit troops to an unprovoked war).
You can support Gulf War II and accept that the US condoned the massacre of Kurds. You can condemn the US role in the Kurdish massacre and also condemn GWII, which was international interference on a much thinner pretext. You can't condone Western non-interference in the Kurdish massacre and still support GWII without hypocrisy, unless you can throw some more variables into the equation.
In spite of your assertions, the United States only provided Saddam with around 1% of his armaments during the period from 1973-1992.
From which we are, presumably, meant to infer that the US role in supporting Iraq, especially in its most critical period of the Iran-Iraq war, was minor. To rebut:
Even the United States...did not shy away from supporting the Iraqi war effort. In February 1982, Baghdad was removed fromthe US Government's list of states 'supporting international terrorism', thus paving the way for a significant boost in US-Iraqi trade relations. Three months later, as the mullahs in Tehran were deliberating the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Alexander Haig strongly warned Iran against expanding the war.
In December 1984, merely a month after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, the newly opened US Embassy in Bashdad began supplying the Iraqi armed forces with much-needed military intelligence. At the same time, Washington nearly doubled its credits for food products and agricultural equipment from $345 million in 1984 to $675 million in 1985; in late 1987 Iraq was promised $1 billion credit for the fiscal year 1988, the largest such credit given to any single country in the world. [Karsh, Ephraim. The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988. Osprey Publishing, 2002. pp 43-44]
So in 1987, Ronald Reagan gave Iraq a larger credit line (of that type, at least) than Israel. More importantly, Iraq was no longer branded a "nation that supports international terrorism". (So Saddam had contritely renounced international terrorism? How nice.) This permitted considerable investment by companies that also did business in the United States, which, in turn, permitted Iraq to maintain a thriving economy in the early years of the war.
He was not placed in power by the U.S. and the U.K. and he helped turn back the Ayatollah and, ultimately, the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East.
Well, Salon's oversimplifying (surprise!). He's sorta right, in that radio force-carriers don't interfere with each other's movements through space (or whatever's analogous for freaky massless stuff). That isn't how we define "interference" as we understand it, though, as your "green object in a green room" analogy makes clear.
Interference as we know it is the inability to derive meaning from information about the local radio environment. That's what happens when two people broadcast on the same frequency -- your receiver can't figure out which information to care about, because all it knows is "stuff on this frequency is important information" and we keep more than one person from broadcasting on more than one frequency by convention.
Where he seems to be going is treating the endpoints of radio communication more like endpoints in a network. Something analogous to modulation of a carrier frequency (in terms of complexity) is voltage modulation of wires in CAT5 cable. But network interfaces lay the notion of connections between two endpoints over something a good deal more abstract than that. They abstract the modulations into a binary stream, decode the binary into discrete data structures, interrogate the data structures to get meta-information about the data, demux the data (or defrag the packet, or reassemble the stream) based on the meta-information, and so on.
What he seems to be proposing is that radio receivers and transmitters do the same thing that network interfaces and protocol stacks do -- make the actual dance of bits considerably more complicated (to allow for things like error-correction when traditional "interference" is a problem, and to add more meta-information), then apply layered abstractions on top of it to get at the actual data.
Spread-spectrum communication does this already -- two SS messages can be sent to two SS receivers in the same range of frequency, because the two transmitters won't usually be broadcasting on the same frequency, and redundancy can be built into the transmission protocol so that when collisions occur, information isn't lost.
The article overpromises -- if I understand, this mode of communication is no better or worse than what we enjoy by using the OSI model to structure network communications. Even if the information space is "theoretically infinite" (which I doubt), we have to get increasingly more creative in how we utilize the space. In the networking world, however, we can talk at gigabit speeds over the same physical media that only supported 10mbps 10 years ago. We accept that wireless networking can find ways to squeeze increased "bandwidth" out of what is, in reality, a fixed width of spectrum allocated by the FCC.
What Reed seems to be agitating for is that the FCC and others get out of the way entirely, architecting a basic framework for the exchange of information and letting the transmitters/receivers figure out the rest of the details -- essentially the same thing he advocated for the Internet. I don't think it's a crackpot idea at all, though the style of the article masks that pretty well.
Google for the star schema. It's used in data warehouses (and elsewhere) for consistent representations of facts (events, things, etc.) to their dimensions (parameters that make them unique).
Something your plan seems to assume, which is considerably harder, is expression of the semantics of the relations. Creating a relation is easy, conveying the meaning of a relationship is considerably trickier.
"As for impatience, I personally think that two years is too long to wait for a stable release, especially in the open source world where software is such a moving target. And yes, I know testing is more frequently updated and mostly stable, but try telling that to an IT manager. IT managers want "stable", not "testing". It's a political thing and it's stupid, but it's reality. Which is why I come across more and more Red Hat shops every day."
Then the fix is easy -- just rename "Unstable" to "Pro".:)
I've had a lot fewer problems running Debian unstable in the last two years than I ever had running what Red Hat claimed was stable. (Remember when they put a beta version of gcc in their "stable" distribution?)
phil
You miss the point. (Well, IMO anyway, I can't speak for the original poster.) Making algebra skills required in other classes has a fundamental practical advantage -- it makes it harder to get any good (or even passing) grades if you don't know a fundamental skill.
Reading is already this way; students that can't read or have trouble are virtually doomed to low grades, as reading skills are relied upon at increasing sophistication almost as soon as they are taught. It is a very obvious red flag that students are missing something very important.
It is very difficult to impart a genuine appreciation for something before someone understands it at some level.While I agree that this approach needs to be much, much more heavily promoted, I also think you need the negative, "look, just learn it" repercussions of an interdependent curriculum, so society can be guaranteed that children emerging from our schools have a known baseline of educational skills.
"Certainly a fully open and free version of Java would have been preferrable and all. Even still, is this really that much different then having the Netscape 4.x browser included? For years this has gone along with both Linux and FreeBSD to provide what the community couldn't, a functioning browser."
Unfortunately, yes, it is a bigger deal than Netscape, because Java, unlike Netscape, is used to build other applications. Should the licensing change or Java should go away, a host of other apps go with it.
As a Java developer, I'm very impressed with the language, and have so far been pretty happy with Sun's performance as a steward. But I would like it if the language and libraries had a cleanroom-free implementation. Hopefully, though, you'll be right and Kaffe and GNU Classpath (or something) will eventually bring a stable, up-to-date, Free Java.
When the big companies whose whining prompted these raids actually finds out who these people are, they should pay them. Piracy has been the friend of big software for years.
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1: Adobe releases Photoshop. No one ever makes an illegal copy of it. So kids who want to goof around with pix they got on the Internet don't use it; they use a shareware Paint Shop-type app instead. If the bug bites him, he'll probably spend a lot of time on that piece of software, getting better and better with it. A small percentage of these kids might get their parents to spring for a copy of the real thing for Christmas or something, but don't count on it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Graphic Design Company CEO needs a tool to use in his design shop. Does he go with Photoshop? Maybe -- it has a lot of options. Big problem, though -- he'll have to train people to use it. Of course, there are some real hotshots out there with Paint Shop experience. Hmmm...maybe I only use Paint Shop, and outsource to a specialty company when I need Photoshop work. In fact, maybe I don't _need_ Photoshop; these guys are getting a lot of the same effects using the more primitive shareware tools.
Scenario 2: Adobe releases Photoshop. Individuals, mostly people who can't afford personal copies (students, kids at home, pros or amateurs at home) pirate it. They develop proficiency in it. Companies (who can be easily audited) more or less always buy licensed copies -- and they do buy it, because their employee base is all fluent in Photoshop!
for (i = 0; i array_size; i++)
free(array[i]);
free(array);
and now let's look at:
// get rid of the array
for (i = 0; i array_size; i++)
free(array[i]);
free(array);
Has your life *really* been so harmed?"
---
What's wrong with:
freeArray(array, array_size);
and an appropriate function definition? (Sorry, don't know enough C to get the typing straight on the function or overloaded functions.)
If the for loop cited above is so idiomatic in C that it shouldn't need a function with a clear name around it, it also shouldn't need a comment. But virtually every piece of atomic logic that's complicated enough to be non-obvious probably deserves its own function with a good name. Not only does it make the code more readable, it follows the "once and only once" rule (no matter how many times you use it, define it once) and enables potential reuse of that code in the future (without compromising maintainability now).
I generally take comments as a sign that the code they comment needs simplification, and then refactor it until the comments are redundant. The exception is comments that detail external forces acting on the function, like "This array can't have more than 255 characters, because that's the datatype in the database." That's a good candidate for inclusion in the unit test, though, if you code test-first.
Of course, encapsulating a bit of logic in a well-named function is documentation, of a different sort. I find it provides more use than the slightly "deader" comment block.
If you have to satisfy more than the programmer, you may have to rattle off a bit more than that; comments in the code are an excellent place to put that extra documentation, if you're using something like javadoc or doxygen.
XP is actually notable for its lack of "mumbo-jumbo CS-degree bullshit" -- it was developed and refined by development teams in the field (of industry and cosumer-related IT, not building space shuttles or cruise missiles, like so many other methodologies).
XP is one of a series of methodologies called "lightweight," or, more recently, "agile." A good starting point for reading about it would be the book Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck. (Sorry, no ISBN, look it up somewhere.) You will find it much smaller, simpler, and more informative than most books on the subject. You can also check out their website)
There are actually a lot of other methodologies besides XP that are taking this approach -- you can find a lot of links and a statement of shared values at the Agile Alliance website.
No, no, no. Don't overgeneralize. This was clearly only HALF the programmer's fault -- the evil half. The good half was entirely unaware of the misappropriation, and worked to make good when he saw what was wrong.
Damn slashdotters, always blaming individuals when, clearly, fractions of individuals are responsible.
The first thing I did when I saw that 'audiogalaxy' was one of the rising searches was go search for them and see what I got. I've already seen posts requesting actual links from the zeitgeist entries (presumably to the searches they spawn, and not pre-chosen links).
It will be interesting to see how these reports drive -- and therefore change -- searching trends if they become popular.
phil
No, they really are that bad
on
Launchcast Sued
·
· Score: 3
(Yes, it's a little tangential. But isn't that what the ends of threads are for?)
I'm sorry, but the freemarket argument does not apply. At least, it didn't apply a few years ago (when I was working in radio, and paid a little attention to it), and I don't see a lot that's changed now.
There was a small crisis in the recording industry a few years back, because they had this problem: they couldn't find an artist that people would buy more than one album from. A good example was Hootie and the Blowfish; the first album was a super-platinum success, but sales for the second album were a pale shadow.
The phenomenon is well-known in marketing; ever since Markie Mapo charmed kids into demanding that their parents pick up a box of Mapo cereal -- and then decided that they hated it, killing the cereal through lack of repeat business.
There's a big difference between music and other consumer products, though. For one thing, the first buys of cereal are analogous to purchases of artists' first albums; labels make gobs of money on any successful album they put out, even if they don't get any "repeat business" on the artist. In this way, they're more like a company whose business plan is to put out fifty cereals a year, heavily hyping them and inspiring first sales, but manufacturing with the expectation that that's all they'll get.
Further, most people need to spend some time listening to an album before they really decide they like an artist -- how many songs you initially liked make you sick now, and how many songs you didn't like have you eventually cozied up to? Until people decide what they really like, they generally propogate the hype, buying the album that gets the most airplay and raving from radio/record stores and feeling pretty much how they're supposed to feel until they can listen to it a few times and form their own opinion. That means first albums have more sales momentum than most consumer products.
Hootie is a prime example, but there are others. Lisa Loeb, for instance, became the first unsigned artist to top the charts with "Stay" (there's no marketing mystery, however -- the song was heavily hyped as part of the (RCA-released) _Reality Bites_ soundtrack, and her album was released on Geffen). She had exactly one other album after being a number-one artist. Her follow-up was disappointing, and she faded.
(Are there exceptions? Sure. The labels won't drop an artist who is successful. But for the labels, an artist who can be marketed into an initial platinum record is successful enough to turn a profit, and a much more regular source of income than cultivating an artist who may have a downturn in popularity. You don't find many major-label artists who get more than one album's chance to turn a slump around before getting cut. And there's also the related phenomenon of an indy artist that signs to a major label, gets pushed into a huge album, doesn't click with the market, and goes back to being an indy. Paula Cole, the 1998 Best New Artist winner -- despite having released her first album four years earler -- is a good example. Economically, it's the same as a real new artist for the labels.)
The point? In your post, you say:
Rail all you want about how The Public (which you, of course, are not a member of, being too "special" for that) are a bunch of sheep who will eat any manufactured tripe thrown at them, but that's simply not true, and it's easy to demonstrate.
But the music industry has made a business model out of assuming precisely that, that the public really are "a bunch of sheep who will eat any manufactured tripe thrown at them," at least long enough for the industry to make their money on it. And when the public figures out what they really think about the artist, there's always another Next Big Thing waiting in the wings. The one-hit wonders you hold up as a refutation of this argument are, in fact, a very lucrative and predictable source of income for labels. And if you look through the Nineties, I think you'll find considerably more of them than you will multi-album artists who got their start in the last 10-12 years. (Remember Merril Bainbridge?) I won't blame the labels for other people's poor taste, but I will accuse them of marketing artists into popularity and record sales as a more reliable method of profit-making than actually backing and signing what they believe to be talented and long-term viable artists.
A good sentiment, and a good first step. However, this is somewhat naive, IMO.
Charly Pride is not, as far as I can tell, one of the most widely traded artists on, say, Napster. I suspect the RIAA picked him precisely _because_ his album would not suffer ill effects from a boycott of techno-geeks. They probably want to convince people in their own industry that this is a viable solution. Given that they seem to be living in denial already, it makes sense that they'd try to start this initiative with a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes them (and, perhaps, their stockholders) feel better.
The fact is that they're not only doing nothing new, they're doing something that was abandoned decades ago by the software industry as pointless and too expensive. Remember when software houses would take advantage of errors in the firmware of the Commodore 1541 drive to copy-protect their software? Remember the "disk nibblers" that came out and foiled it?
The new wrinkle here is obviously the DMCA -- the RIAA thinks they can use law to trump technology. They may be right, but only if:
They don't find themselves at odds with any larger industries (evil and ubiquitous as the music industry is, their revenues don't hold a candle to the leading players in most other industries)
The politicians who let the RIAA have this legislation with the apparent gentlemen's agreement that they wouldn't abuse it -- Orrin Hatch, I'm looking at you -- don't feel that this promise is broken by using a decades-old copy-protection technique and claiming attempts to circumvent it for fair use are legal violations.
We don't speak up to our legislators and let them know that, even if it is only Charly Pride now, we don't like this one little bit, and will vote accordingly if necessary.
phil
Fair enough, but apply an even standard
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 3
There are some good points in the article. The Drug War under Clinton has failed, just as it did under Reagan. (FWIW, though, Clinton locked up more people than Reagan did, so simply making the laws tougher doesn't seem to work.)
I also believe in holding people accountable for their actions, and becoming intoxicated on anything is a choice. But I do think we need to apply an even standard, and I don't think O'Reilly presents one.
His plan would penalize anyone who "uses illegal drugs or overindulges alcohol" (paraphrasing). So it's okay for people to use alcohol as long as they don't "overindulge", but it isn't okay to use illegal drugs at all (or, presumably, use legal drugs in a non-prescribed way). With regard to current law enforcement policy, this is status quo.
It would make more sense to regulate the currently illegal drugs the same way we treat legal ones, and deal with intoxication in more general terms. It's okay for people to be intoxicated on alcohol, but certain activities (driving) are more dangerous than others (watching TV, talking with friends), and people caught doing those things are treated harshly if they are intoxicated. People below a certain age are not allowed to become intoxicated because they generally do not have the life experience necessary to make that kind of decision.
The exact details of what is dangerous may vary depending on the type of drug and its effects. But I think these guidelines are more rational than giving alcohol (and nicotine) the undeserved status of being safer than other drugs, because we can allow people to indulge in it, but not in illegal drugs. Its intoxicating effects are, in many ways, more dangerous than several illegals
To continue your metaphor, you don't take the jacket off in the Arctic -- unless the jacket is doing you more harm than good. This may sound odd, but it's more exact -- the War on Drugs isn't helping to stop drug abuse in our country more than a little, but it's doing enormous harm to large parts of the population:
The poor communities that are decimated by crack (a drug that exists because it's more profitable to distribute than powder cocaine, and therefore more worth the risk of trafficking).
The black and hispanic communities torn apart because their citizens are disproportionately imprisoned in the Drug war.
The children who are lied to in class by DARE representatives, only to find from their friends (and personal experience) that they really were lies, and proceed to ignore the rest of the message (some of which is worthwhile).
The American citizens who know casual drug users who are not ruining their lives, recognize the propoganda for what it is, and become jaded with the system.
If you're in the North Woods, and your down jacket gets wet, you take it off because it's cooling you faster than exposed skin. This is a much more accurate metaphor for the Drug War.
But in the interests of lighting a candle, here is a sane alternative. We could make drugs legal, and regulate their use, production and advertisement, like we do now with tobacco and alcohol. The details of the regulation could be refined over time until we got the best compromise between social health and integrity of freedom. But that can't happen until we declare a truce, at the very least, in the Drug War.
phil
Feeling like "Unordered-List Man" today
Re:Why is the war still raging?
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 4
"What is the motive? Whom does it benefit?"
Campaign contributors, of course. And law enforcement, as I've pointed out in a previous post. They're in a unique bind. Most organizations can look forward to growth and increased prestige if they do their jobs right; law enforcement done right leads to lower budgets and decreasing power, since there's less crime to fight. So law enforcement is incented to always have an enemy to fight, and preferrably a morally reprehensible one, so we can't use the ineffectiveness of our opposition as an exuse to resign. With an enemy like that, you can go on growing forever....
Apart from law enforcement, here's a few other powerful lobbies that benefit:
Gun and Law Enforcement Equipment Manufacturers. For obvious reasons. Since many of them also supply the military, you can see how they might have the money to make a fuss.
Drug Testing companies. Until the '80's, there was no drug testing industry. Now, it's worth millions. Most of that comes from the drug most likely to be legalized if the War is ever de-escalated: marijuana. So they have a vested interest in increased support for the War on Drugs.
For-profit rehab facilities. It is necessary to have help for people with addiction problems who can't help themselves. But like the drug-testing companies, for-profit rehabs have been able to blossom under the Drug War. They charge healthcare industry prices, but don't have many healthcare industry expenses (like diagnostic or surgical equipment, and many fewer pharmaceuticals), so their margins are relatively high.
Alcohol and tobacco. Only the War on Drugs could make these industries look like the Safe Alternative.
People who have bought the propoganda. Recreational drugs provide an excellent scapegoat -- they're shadowy, genuinely dangerous (though so is driving a car, or owning a gun), and generally not part of most people's everyday lives. Given the thorough whitewash they've been given by the mainstream media and the government, there are many people who think they know the facts and vehemently oppose the Evil Drugs. Until those who oppose the Drug War get their message out to these people in a way that makes them really look at the issue, they will continue to support it.
Before the deluge of "what does this have to do with News for Nerds?" posts starts to swell, I'd like to point out that the federal government has, in the last few decades, used two primary examples of "public safety" to get their eavesdropping agenda through:
Terrorism
The Drug War
Of those two, terrorism is mostly only used when there's a major incident (the two that come to mind are the Trade Center bombing and the Murrah Federal Building bombing). Drugs are used whenever there isn't a good explosion somewhere.
You want to know why they think they can put Carnivore through? So they can "finally begin to stem the tide of drugs into our country." (That's not a quote, just a characterization.) Why do you think there's a serious threat of them using Tempest gear in the real world, or cavalierly subpoenaing reams of logging info from your ISP? So they can fight the War on Drugs -- and incidentally have the apparatus in place in case someone declares some other entirely consensual behavior as criminal. Reverse engineering by individuals, perhaps, or encrypted communication with other countries.
And why do such surprising entities as the Motion Picture and Recording Industries think they can take away our rights to our own property so carelessly? Why are people so apathetic that their property, once legally purchased, can be monitored so closely by the manufacturers? Because the government has been softening us up for years with slow encroachments on our freedom, justified by the above drug war.
So if you're fed up with the way our rights as individuals are being trampled on -- first by the government, then by companies with an excellent template to follow -- you're fed up with the drug war. And movies like Traffic really do have a direct impact on you. For that matter, so do "crackpot" (uh, poor choice of words) organizations like NORML, who have pointed out the increasing absurdities of this rationalization for years.
Another thing this Drug War enforces is continual international hostility to the US -- we're constantly tampering in the affairs of other countries, especially those in this hemisphere, and justifying it in the name of "stopping the supply of drugs." If you would rather not have China or Columbia dictate policy to us, and you believe in the Golden Rule ("Do unto others," not the one we generally use), then you, too, are against the Drug War. That's probably not news for nerds, though, so I'll let that drop....
We need to just get off our high horse because these people are just trying to do their (thankless) job[...]
Amen to that.
...and obviously we're not THAT smart or we wouldn't be calling them for tech support.
Actually, every time I've ever called tech support for my broadband service they had a problem, not me. The hideous "customer disservice" experience was a major incentive to make absolutely sure I couldn't fix it myself.
Having done IT for a call center, I'm shocked at how little the person on the other end of the line matters. Call centers exist, mostly, to meet the needs of companies to market -- either by direct outbound telemarketing, or by providing the illusion of "customer service". The person on the other end of the line is simply a means to an end, or (in the case of customer service) an antagonist to pacify or neutralize.
Yes, there are exceptions. And sometimes call centers are a great thing (911 dispatch, for example). But mostly, call centers are another example of corporate America beating the consumer up for lunch money.
"But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it , without my consent. "
I disagree. If you think students are making a "nearly direct transcription" of your words, you need to read some class notes.
People are allowed to profit from written works that are as derivative as class notes all the time. A review of a play or a movie is no less a written work derived, in part, from a performed work. Copyright clearly belongs to the review writer (or his publisher), not the copyright holder of the work that inspired him. A reviewer frequently recounts events in the play/movie to his readers; is this a violation of the movie's copyright?
In fact, your lecture is (probably) a distillation of courses you have taken, books and papers you have read, etc. Shouldn't the authors of those works, by your logic, have to consent to your "derivative" use of them to create your lectures? Your argument would indicate that, except in cases of recounting only your own research, your own lectures are an example of commercially profiting through the distribution of a derivative work. (You are getting paid to lecture, I assume.)
And for that matter, what research worth doing these days isn't "derivative" of someone else's research? Was your research inspired by a paper you read, or by what someone else's findings were? Shouldn't that person consent before you release your research -- or lecture about them?
Enough reductio ad absurdum. Certainly, a word-for-word transcript of your lecture, or a tape recording, would more clearly represent a potential violation of your rights -- in that case, every effort is made to preserve your presentation of the information, which is uniquely yours. As a student, I never had the time to write down every word the instructor said, and I didn't want to. I wanted to put down the information in a way I would remember.
If you want to prohibit distribution of direct transcripts or recordings of your lectures, fine. But if you think an attempt to preserve the information in your lecture is a violation, you are saying that the information is your personal intellectual property, or the property of your school. For 99% of the information contained in the lectures I heard in school, that is laughably false -- imagine claiming that Newton's laws of motion or the Turner Thesis or Poe's ideas on fiction are your personal intellectual property!
The remaining one percent were dirty jokes, which the professors can have.:)
Slashdot Mirror
An online casino has none of these. You can operate out of a basement somewhere. No rules, no oversight, no regulation.
You suffer from the misperception that entities opereating outside United States law operate outside all law. This is not the case. Many online casinos are based in England, which regulates them heavily to ensure fair play. The same is true of Antiguan casinos. If the government does not regulate (and therefore certify) the fairness of the casino, there will be significantly diminished revenue as many, many people go elsewhere. This is especially true of internet casinos, which provide absolutely nothing other than gambling; at least in a hypothetical crooked B&M casino, you could eat the buffet or watch the shows or something.
The reason these governments do all this, of course, is that they get to tax the casinos. So your argument that the government doesn't get tax revenue also suffers from the "U.S. government == all government" fallacy.
Even a quasi-legitimate operation that returns 99.99% of all money bet would have incredible payoff to the operator.
You just described how slot machines and almost all table games work in completely legal (i.e., not "quasi-legal") casinos, except that they get to keep more than .1%. Most of these games are complete chance -- which, ironically, provides the most reliable profit since player skill cannot skew the probabilities.
The exception to this is games where people compete with each other to capture part or all of a pot which they build by wagering; in that case, the casino takes a commision (e.g., a "rake" or a "vig") and lets the players fight it out among themselves. The casino doesn't care if these games can be influenced by skill; they make no money on who wins the game. The textbook examples of this is poker and prop (e.g., sports) betting.
Assuming you are a voter somewhere, I urge you to educate yourselves on how gambling works before making any votes that might influence or be influenced by it.
All the links of the form "/uri/prefix/text" are captions for photos that are on the pages denoted by "/uri/prefix". All of this information is indexed by Google on the "/uri/prefix" page. This comprises 90% of the links in the above page. The others are the /cgi-bin directory and the search page.
The tinfoil hat is messing up your hair.
My first thought -- "pointless art-for-art's-sake" crap.
:)
I read the website for a while. My second thought -- "oh, go hijack people at Starbuck's onto your Internet. Cute, immature crap."
I download the docs and read them, and buried deep within, it starts talking about geographically-based ad-hoc networks. Finally, a point. And quite a good one, actually.
The Internet's great and all, and it's not like you can't talk to a guy that's 20 feet away from you with it -- provided you know his (absolute) IP or hostname or something.
What this guy's talking about is being able to address people/things based on a relative measure -- geographical proximity to each other and this backpack. There are community tools on it to facilitate the coalescence of "instant communities" that can exchange very ephemeral information (broadcast a message saying you have beer to everyone in your section of the office) or use local resources ("print on the nearest printer").
It's not nearly as cool and avant-garde as this guy wants to think it is. It's not even new. (Jini, anyone?) He's applied more of a people angle on it, creating "communities" instead of just ad-hoc networks, and focusing on ways to make people interact with each other on the network -- or at least with the hoodlum who set it up.
It is a cool idea, though, IMO. Sometimes you want to talk to Jane or everyone in #slashdot, wherever she is or they are. And sometimes you want to talk to whoever (or whatever -- see the printer example) is nearby and (maybe) meets some other criteria.
It won't be remotely practical until the whole darn thing sits in the iPaq frontend, however.
"Yes of course, all the money from my bank account. Lord knows I keep my bank number, routing number, and pin number, in a text file on my computer marked Bank Information for hacker to use.txt Get real."
Do you bank online? If you're infected with ap216, someone can remotely install keystroke loggers and other nasties on your computer. Believe it or not, they're not doing this just for fun.
'Course, you seem to take reasonable precautions, so you (probably) wouldn't get infected with ap216. Unless you visited one of the hacked websites mentioned in the lurhq.com article I linked to using an unpatched copy of IE 6. (They weren't just 'HOT BRITNEY PORN!!1' -- one of the infected sites was a small business selling uniforms and supplies to school and organizational sports teams, for instance. It took credit card orders -- no word on whether the hacked version stored the numbers in a file involved named "Bank Information for hacker to use.txt".)
That said, they were probably mostly after machines to send spam from/through, and (with the exception of updating your browser) your precautions list is pretty complete for a user. (It's also a bit of a hassle -- we can only hope MS will figure out that some of their software is easy to use, but hard to use responsibly.)
philI was analyzing something very similar around October of last year when I worked here. They probably aren't installing a virus, per se -- more like an autoproxy which they will use to send spam or install more malware (e.g., to steal passwords or credit card numbers).
All the vulnerabilities mentioned in the article have been known for quite some time. Liu Die Yu's Unpatched IE vulnerabilities page documents several of these in detail, with exploit examples. (Note that some of the links on Liu Die Yu's site may result in popups, ironically.)
When I took a look at it, the proxy flavor of the month was most commonly referred to as ap216.exe the filename is irrelevant, obviously). A good description of it is here, in the context of its use in a phishing scam.
Note that everything done in this attack will blithely go through most firewalls -- almost all connections are initiated from within the network. Firewalls are an increasingly inadequate means of protecting users from organized and motivated attackers. IMO, any network admin who doesn't run deep-packet inspection firewalls, intrusion prevention, or security-minded filtering application proxies is asking for it.
Sure, someone could write something to quietly delete all the files on your hard drive. I'm sure he'd rather have all the spam your machine can send, or all the money from your bank account.
phil
If this is meant to imply to the original poster that the upper brass are meeting with the plebians because they they're suspicious of the people in the middle, you may be right. You may also be wrong.
Reasons to meet with the great unwashed:
The bottom line is, every situation is different. Too different for any of the advice presented on a forum full of strangers to be relevant, except by accident. (Except this advice, of course. :)
My advice to you in this important meeting: enjoy the meal. Oh, and listen. I won't presume to know anything else.
phil(BTW, I'll go with "hundreds of thousands." Saddam was/is a bastard.)
2. All that went on with the blessing of the US, UK and the most of rest of the world
Hardly. It went on, but most certainly neither the U.S. or the U.K. put their blessing on such an event. By the standard you seem to hold, the fact that hit happened meant it went on with the "blessing" of ALL of the world.
So, what constitues a blessing? I take it you support the near-unilateral US action in Iraq. (Tony Blair: "And I helped!") Would abstaining from such action have been excusable? We are talking here about a war that was waged because of something a person might be capable of doing. Killing Kurds, by contrast, was something Saddam demonstrated he could do, and do remorselessly. In fact, the explicit message he was sending the Kurds was that he would do it again. Yet the West (led, as always, by the US) stood idle.
If we were not morally obligated to intervene when the Kurds were massacred -- and everyone agrees that the Kurds were killed by Saddam -- then why were we morally obligated to intervene when Saddam might have had WMD's -- an assertion that was vigorously disputed at the time, and an assertion which looks doubtful today?
In that light, either silence implies consent (in which case, yes, the US "blessed" the death of the Kurds by the lack of reprisals) or it doesn't (in which case there should have been no rush to commit troops to an unprovoked war).
You can support Gulf War II and accept that the US condoned the massacre of Kurds. You can condemn the US role in the Kurdish massacre and also condemn GWII, which was international interference on a much thinner pretext. You can't condone Western non-interference in the Kurdish massacre and still support GWII without hypocrisy, unless you can throw some more variables into the equation.
In spite of your assertions, the United States only provided Saddam with around 1% of his armaments during the period from 1973-1992.
From which we are, presumably, meant to infer that the US role in supporting Iraq, especially in its most critical period of the Iran-Iraq war, was minor. To rebut:
So in 1987, Ronald Reagan gave Iraq a larger credit line (of that type, at least) than Israel. More importantly, Iraq was no longer branded a "nation that supports international terrorism". (So Saddam had contritely renounced international terrorism? How nice.) This permitted considerable investment by companies that also did business in the United States, which, in turn, permitted Iraq to maintain a thriving economy in the early years of the war.
He was not placed in power by the U.S. and the U.K. and he helped turn back the Ayatollah and, ultimately, the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East.
Saddam Huss
Well, Salon's oversimplifying (surprise!). He's sorta right, in that radio force-carriers don't interfere with each other's movements through space (or whatever's analogous for freaky massless stuff). That isn't how we define "interference" as we understand it, though, as your "green object in a green room" analogy makes clear.
Interference as we know it is the inability to derive meaning from information about the local radio environment. That's what happens when two people broadcast on the same frequency -- your receiver can't figure out which information to care about, because all it knows is "stuff on this frequency is important information" and we keep more than one person from broadcasting on more than one frequency by convention.
Where he seems to be going is treating the endpoints of radio communication more like endpoints in a network. Something analogous to modulation of a carrier frequency (in terms of complexity) is voltage modulation of wires in CAT5 cable. But network interfaces lay the notion of connections between two endpoints over something a good deal more abstract than that. They abstract the modulations into a binary stream, decode the binary into discrete data structures, interrogate the data structures to get meta-information about the data, demux the data (or defrag the packet, or reassemble the stream) based on the meta-information, and so on.
What he seems to be proposing is that radio receivers and transmitters do the same thing that network interfaces and protocol stacks do -- make the actual dance of bits considerably more complicated (to allow for things like error-correction when traditional "interference" is a problem, and to add more meta-information), then apply layered abstractions on top of it to get at the actual data.
Spread-spectrum communication does this already -- two SS messages can be sent to two SS receivers in the same range of frequency, because the two transmitters won't usually be broadcasting on the same frequency, and redundancy can be built into the transmission protocol so that when collisions occur, information isn't lost.
The article overpromises -- if I understand, this mode of communication is no better or worse than what we enjoy by using the OSI model to structure network communications. Even if the information space is "theoretically infinite" (which I doubt), we have to get increasingly more creative in how we utilize the space. In the networking world, however, we can talk at gigabit speeds over the same physical media that only supported 10mbps 10 years ago. We accept that wireless networking can find ways to squeeze increased "bandwidth" out of what is, in reality, a fixed width of spectrum allocated by the FCC.
What Reed seems to be agitating for is that the FCC and others get out of the way entirely, architecting a basic framework for the exchange of information and letting the transmitters/receivers figure out the rest of the details -- essentially the same thing he advocated for the Internet. I don't think it's a crackpot idea at all, though the style of the article masks that pretty well.
Google for the star schema. It's used in data warehouses (and elsewhere) for consistent representations of facts (events, things, etc.) to their dimensions (parameters that make them unique).
Something your plan seems to assume, which is considerably harder, is expression of the semantics of the relations. Creating a relation is easy, conveying the meaning of a relationship is considerably trickier.
phil
"As for impatience, I personally think that two years is too long to wait for a stable release, especially in the open source world where software is such a moving target. And yes, I know testing is more frequently updated and mostly stable, but try telling that to an IT manager. IT managers want "stable", not "testing". It's a political thing and it's stupid, but it's reality. Which is why I come across more and more Red Hat shops every day." Then the fix is easy -- just rename "Unstable" to "Pro". :)
I've had a lot fewer problems running Debian unstable in the last two years than I ever had running what Red Hat claimed was stable. (Remember when they put a beta version of gcc in their "stable" distribution?)
phil
You miss the point. (Well, IMO anyway, I can't speak for the original poster.) Making algebra skills required in other classes has a fundamental practical advantage -- it makes it harder to get any good (or even passing) grades if you don't know a fundamental skill.
Reading is already this way; students that can't read or have trouble are virtually doomed to low grades, as reading skills are relied upon at increasing sophistication almost as soon as they are taught. It is a very obvious red flag that students are missing something very important.It is very difficult to impart a genuine appreciation for something before someone understands it at some level.While I agree that this approach needs to be much, much more heavily promoted, I also think you need the negative, "look, just learn it" repercussions of an interdependent curriculum, so society can be guaranteed that children emerging from our schools have a known baseline of educational skills.
phil
"Certainly a fully open and free version of Java would have been preferrable and all. Even still, is this really that much different then having the Netscape 4.x browser included? For years this has gone along with both Linux and FreeBSD to provide what the community couldn't, a functioning browser."
Unfortunately, yes, it is a bigger deal than Netscape, because Java, unlike Netscape, is used to build other applications. Should the licensing change or Java should go away, a host of other apps go with it.
As a Java developer, I'm very impressed with the language, and have so far been pretty happy with Sun's performance as a steward. But I would like it if the language and libraries had a cleanroom-free implementation. Hopefully, though, you'll be right and Kaffe and GNU Classpath (or something) will eventually bring a stable, up-to-date, Free Java.
phil
When the big companies whose whining prompted these raids actually finds out who these people are, they should pay them. Piracy has been the friend of big software for years.
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1: Adobe releases Photoshop. No one ever makes an illegal copy of it. So kids who want to goof around with pix they got on the Internet don't use it; they use a shareware Paint Shop-type app instead. If the bug bites him, he'll probably spend a lot of time on that piece of software, getting better and better with it. A small percentage of these kids might get their parents to spring for a copy of the real thing for Christmas or something, but don't count on it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Graphic Design Company CEO needs a tool to use in his design shop. Does he go with Photoshop? Maybe -- it has a lot of options. Big problem, though -- he'll have to train people to use it. Of course, there are some real hotshots out there with Paint Shop experience. Hmmm...maybe I only use Paint Shop, and outsource to a specialty company when I need Photoshop work. In fact, maybe I don't _need_ Photoshop; these guys are getting a lot of the same effects using the more primitive shareware tools.
Scenario 2: Adobe releases Photoshop. Individuals, mostly people who can't afford personal copies (students, kids at home, pros or amateurs at home) pirate it. They develop proficiency in it. Companies (who can be easily audited) more or less always buy licensed copies -- and they do buy it, because their employee base is all fluent in Photoshop!
Thanks, software piracy!
phil
"Let's compare:
// get rid of the array
for (i = 0; i array_size; i++)
free(array[i]);
free(array);
and now let's look at:
for (i = 0; i array_size; i++)
free(array[i]);
free(array);
Has your life *really* been so harmed?"
---
What's wrong with:
freeArray(array, array_size);
and an appropriate function definition? (Sorry, don't know enough C to get the typing straight on the function or overloaded functions.)
If the for loop cited above is so idiomatic in C that it shouldn't need a function with a clear name around it, it also shouldn't need a comment. But virtually every piece of atomic logic that's complicated enough to be non-obvious probably deserves its own function with a good name. Not only does it make the code more readable, it follows the "once and only once" rule (no matter how many times you use it, define it once) and enables potential reuse of that code in the future (without compromising maintainability now).
I generally take comments as a sign that the code they comment needs simplification, and then refactor it until the comments are redundant. The exception is comments that detail external forces acting on the function, like "This array can't have more than 255 characters, because that's the datatype in the database." That's a good candidate for inclusion in the unit test, though, if you code test-first.
Of course, encapsulating a bit of logic in a well-named function is documentation, of a different sort. I find it provides more use than the slightly "deader" comment block.
If you have to satisfy more than the programmer, you may have to rattle off a bit more than that; comments in the code are an excellent place to put that extra documentation, if you're using something like javadoc or doxygen.
phil
XP is actually notable for its lack of "mumbo-jumbo CS-degree bullshit" -- it was developed and refined by development teams in the field (of industry and cosumer-related IT, not building space shuttles or cruise missiles, like so many other methodologies).
XP is one of a series of methodologies called "lightweight," or, more recently, "agile." A good starting point for reading about it would be the book Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck. (Sorry, no ISBN, look it up somewhere.) You will find it much smaller, simpler, and more informative than most books on the subject. You can also check out their website)
There are actually a lot of other methodologies besides XP that are taking this approach -- you can find a lot of links and a statement of shared values at the Agile Alliance website.
phil
No, no, no. Don't overgeneralize. This was clearly only HALF the programmer's fault -- the evil half. The good half was entirely unaware of the misappropriation, and worked to make good when he saw what was wrong.
Damn slashdotters, always blaming individuals when, clearly, fractions of individuals are responsible.
phil
The first thing I did when I saw that 'audiogalaxy' was one of the rising searches was go search for them and see what I got. I've already seen posts requesting actual links from the zeitgeist entries (presumably to the searches they spawn, and not pre-chosen links).
It will be interesting to see how these reports drive -- and therefore change -- searching trends if they become popular.
phil(Yes, it's a little tangential. But isn't that what the ends of threads are for?)
I'm sorry, but the freemarket argument does not apply. At least, it didn't apply a few years ago (when I was working in radio, and paid a little attention to it), and I don't see a lot that's changed now.
There was a small crisis in the recording industry a few years back, because they had this problem: they couldn't find an artist that people would buy more than one album from. A good example was Hootie and the Blowfish; the first album was a super-platinum success, but sales for the second album were a pale shadow.
The phenomenon is well-known in marketing; ever since Markie Mapo charmed kids into demanding that their parents pick up a box of Mapo cereal -- and then decided that they hated it, killing the cereal through lack of repeat business.
There's a big difference between music and other consumer products, though. For one thing, the first buys of cereal are analogous to purchases of artists' first albums; labels make gobs of money on any successful album they put out, even if they don't get any "repeat business" on the artist. In this way, they're more like a company whose business plan is to put out fifty cereals a year, heavily hyping them and inspiring first sales, but manufacturing with the expectation that that's all they'll get.
Further, most people need to spend some time listening to an album before they really decide they like an artist -- how many songs you initially liked make you sick now, and how many songs you didn't like have you eventually cozied up to? Until people decide what they really like, they generally propogate the hype, buying the album that gets the most airplay and raving from radio/record stores and feeling pretty much how they're supposed to feel until they can listen to it a few times and form their own opinion. That means first albums have more sales momentum than most consumer products.
Hootie is a prime example, but there are others. Lisa Loeb, for instance, became the first unsigned artist to top the charts with "Stay" (there's no marketing mystery, however -- the song was heavily hyped as part of the (RCA-released) _Reality Bites_ soundtrack, and her album was released on Geffen). She had exactly one other album after being a number-one artist. Her follow-up was disappointing, and she faded.
(Are there exceptions? Sure. The labels won't drop an artist who is successful. But for the labels, an artist who can be marketed into an initial platinum record is successful enough to turn a profit, and a much more regular source of income than cultivating an artist who may have a downturn in popularity. You don't find many major-label artists who get more than one album's chance to turn a slump around before getting cut. And there's also the related phenomenon of an indy artist that signs to a major label, gets pushed into a huge album, doesn't click with the market, and goes back to being an indy. Paula Cole, the 1998 Best New Artist winner -- despite having released her first album four years earler -- is a good example. Economically, it's the same as a real new artist for the labels.)
The point? In your post, you say:
But the music industry has made a business model out of assuming precisely that, that the public really are "a bunch of sheep who will eat any manufactured tripe thrown at them," at least long enough for the industry to make their money on it. And when the public figures out what they really think about the artist, there's always another Next Big Thing waiting in the wings. The one-hit wonders you hold up as a refutation of this argument are, in fact, a very lucrative and predictable source of income for labels. And if you look through the Nineties, I think you'll find considerably more of them than you will multi-album artists who got their start in the last 10-12 years. (Remember Merril Bainbridge?) I won't blame the labels for other people's poor taste, but I will accuse them of marketing artists into popularity and record sales as a more reliable method of profit-making than actually backing and signing what they believe to be talented and long-term viable artists.A good sentiment, and a good first step. However, this is somewhat naive, IMO.
Charly Pride is not, as far as I can tell, one of the most widely traded artists on, say, Napster. I suspect the RIAA picked him precisely _because_ his album would not suffer ill effects from a boycott of techno-geeks. They probably want to convince people in their own industry that this is a viable solution. Given that they seem to be living in denial already, it makes sense that they'd try to start this initiative with a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes them (and, perhaps, their stockholders) feel better.
The fact is that they're not only doing nothing new, they're doing something that was abandoned decades ago by the software industry as pointless and too expensive. Remember when software houses would take advantage of errors in the firmware of the Commodore 1541 drive to copy-protect their software? Remember the "disk nibblers" that came out and foiled it?
The new wrinkle here is obviously the DMCA -- the RIAA thinks they can use law to trump technology. They may be right, but only if:
phil
There are some good points in the article. The Drug War under Clinton has failed, just as it did under Reagan. (FWIW, though, Clinton locked up more people than Reagan did, so simply making the laws tougher doesn't seem to work.)
I also believe in holding people accountable for their actions, and becoming intoxicated on anything is a choice. But I do think we need to apply an even standard, and I don't think O'Reilly presents one.
His plan would penalize anyone who "uses illegal drugs or overindulges alcohol" (paraphrasing). So it's okay for people to use alcohol as long as they don't "overindulge", but it isn't okay to use illegal drugs at all (or, presumably, use legal drugs in a non-prescribed way). With regard to current law enforcement policy, this is status quo.
It would make more sense to regulate the currently illegal drugs the same way we treat legal ones, and deal with intoxication in more general terms. It's okay for people to be intoxicated on alcohol, but certain activities (driving) are more dangerous than others (watching TV, talking with friends), and people caught doing those things are treated harshly if they are intoxicated. People below a certain age are not allowed to become intoxicated because they generally do not have the life experience necessary to make that kind of decision.
The exact details of what is dangerous may vary depending on the type of drug and its effects. But I think these guidelines are more rational than giving alcohol (and nicotine) the undeserved status of being safer than other drugs, because we can allow people to indulge in it, but not in illegal drugs. Its intoxicating effects are, in many ways, more dangerous than several illegals
phil
To continue your metaphor, you don't take the jacket off in the Arctic -- unless the jacket is doing you more harm than good. This may sound odd, but it's more exact -- the War on Drugs isn't helping to stop drug abuse in our country more than a little, but it's doing enormous harm to large parts of the population:
If you're in the North Woods, and your down jacket gets wet, you take it off because it's cooling you faster than exposed skin. This is a much more accurate metaphor for the Drug War.
But in the interests of lighting a candle, here is a sane alternative. We could make drugs legal, and regulate their use, production and advertisement, like we do now with tobacco and alcohol. The details of the regulation could be refined over time until we got the best compromise between social health and integrity of freedom. But that can't happen until we declare a truce, at the very least, in the Drug War.
phil
Feeling like "Unordered-List Man" today
"What is the motive? Whom does it benefit?"
Campaign contributors, of course. And law enforcement, as I've pointed out in a previous post. They're in a unique bind. Most organizations can look forward to growth and increased prestige if they do their jobs right; law enforcement done right leads to lower budgets and decreasing power, since there's less crime to fight. So law enforcement is incented to always have an enemy to fight, and preferrably a morally reprehensible one, so we can't use the ineffectiveness of our opposition as an exuse to resign. With an enemy like that, you can go on growing forever....
Apart from law enforcement, here's a few other powerful lobbies that benefit:
phil
Before the deluge of "what does this have to do with News for Nerds?" posts starts to swell, I'd like to point out that the federal government has, in the last few decades, used two primary examples of "public safety" to get their eavesdropping agenda through:
Of those two, terrorism is mostly only used when there's a major incident (the two that come to mind are the Trade Center bombing and the Murrah Federal Building bombing). Drugs are used whenever there isn't a good explosion somewhere.
You want to know why they think they can put Carnivore through? So they can "finally begin to stem the tide of drugs into our country." (That's not a quote, just a characterization.) Why do you think there's a serious threat of them using Tempest gear in the real world, or cavalierly subpoenaing reams of logging info from your ISP? So they can fight the War on Drugs -- and incidentally have the apparatus in place in case someone declares some other entirely consensual behavior as criminal. Reverse engineering by individuals, perhaps, or encrypted communication with other countries.
And why do such surprising entities as the Motion Picture and Recording Industries think they can take away our rights to our own property so carelessly? Why are people so apathetic that their property, once legally purchased, can be monitored so closely by the manufacturers? Because the government has been softening us up for years with slow encroachments on our freedom, justified by the above drug war.
So if you're fed up with the way our rights as individuals are being trampled on -- first by the government, then by companies with an excellent template to follow -- you're fed up with the drug war. And movies like Traffic really do have a direct impact on you. For that matter, so do "crackpot" (uh, poor choice of words) organizations like NORML, who have pointed out the increasing absurdities of this rationalization for years.
Another thing this Drug War enforces is continual international hostility to the US -- we're constantly tampering in the affairs of other countries, especially those in this hemisphere, and justifying it in the name of "stopping the supply of drugs." If you would rather not have China or Columbia dictate policy to us, and you believe in the Golden Rule ("Do unto others," not the one we generally use), then you, too, are against the Drug War. That's probably not news for nerds, though, so I'll let that drop....
phil
We need to just get off our high horse because these people are just trying to do their (thankless) job[...]
Amen to that.
Actually, every time I've ever called tech support for my broadband service they had a problem, not me. The hideous "customer disservice" experience was a major incentive to make absolutely sure I couldn't fix it myself.
Having done IT for a call center, I'm shocked at how little the person on the other end of the line matters. Call centers exist, mostly, to meet the needs of companies to market -- either by direct outbound telemarketing, or by providing the illusion of "customer service". The person on the other end of the line is simply a means to an end, or (in the case of customer service) an antagonist to pacify or neutralize.
Yes, there are exceptions. And sometimes call centers are a great thing (911 dispatch, for example). But mostly, call centers are another example of corporate America beating the consumer up for lunch money.
phil
"But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it , without my consent. "
I disagree. If you think students are making a "nearly direct transcription" of your words, you need to read some class notes.
People are allowed to profit from written works that are as derivative as class notes all the time. A review of a play or a movie is no less a written work derived, in part, from a performed work. Copyright clearly belongs to the review writer (or his publisher), not the copyright holder of the work that inspired him. A reviewer frequently recounts events in the play/movie to his readers; is this a violation of the movie's copyright?
In fact, your lecture is (probably) a distillation of courses you have taken, books and papers you have read, etc. Shouldn't the authors of those works, by your logic, have to consent to your "derivative" use of them to create your lectures? Your argument would indicate that, except in cases of recounting only your own research, your own lectures are an example of commercially profiting through the distribution of a derivative work. (You are getting paid to lecture, I assume.)
And for that matter, what research worth doing these days isn't "derivative" of someone else's research? Was your research inspired by a paper you read, or by what someone else's findings were? Shouldn't that person consent before you release your research -- or lecture about them?
Enough reductio ad absurdum. Certainly, a word-for-word transcript of your lecture, or a tape recording, would more clearly represent a potential violation of your rights -- in that case, every effort is made to preserve your presentation of the information, which is uniquely yours. As a student, I never had the time to write down every word the instructor said, and I didn't want to. I wanted to put down the information in a way I would remember.
If you want to prohibit distribution of direct transcripts or recordings of your lectures, fine. But if you think an attempt to preserve the information in your lecture is a violation, you are saying that the information is your personal intellectual property, or the property of your school. For 99% of the information contained in the lectures I heard in school, that is laughably false -- imagine claiming that Newton's laws of motion or the Turner Thesis or Poe's ideas on fiction are your personal intellectual property!
The remaining one percent were dirty jokes, which the professors can have. :)
phil