Theoretically, the energy to get to the Moon is a one-time energy expense, assuming it is possible to set up a self-sustaining colony there. That would mean that the extra energy cost to mine metals there would be the energy required to escape from the Moon's gravity well, which is a lot smaller than that of escaping from the Earth. In addition, since the Moon lacks atmosphere, you don't have to be in a big hurry to generate all that energy all at once. It might be sufficient to use energy collected from the Sun over a relatively long period of time.
I do not mean to say that you aren't right that this will not be a reality for quite a while, if ever. It would require a self-sustaining Moon colony with advanced manufacturing capabilities.
> Thus illegal distribution of pre-release content is not significantly any more > costly to the MAFIAA than illegal distribution of post-release content.
It seems to me that it would be more costly if it generates a lot of bad third-party reviews before the movie hits the theaters. Maybe the **AA are worried that the content is getting to people over whom they have no control? And no, I don't believe they actually control the professional movie reviewers; however, they have much more of a chance of swaying their opinions via lobbying and other tools, if only because they know who they are.
OK, personally I believe your post deserves a reply (as opposed to the negative mod you got).
1) Any application which you have to learn to use has a degree of lock-in, which is the cost of learning to use a different application to gain the same functionality. This point holds in varying degrees for 3 out of the 4 applications which you list: wmplayer, iexplore, and winword. Mostly for winword, but as you correctly point out, it doesn't come bundled free with Windows. So I will stop worrying about winword...
2) Any application which manipulates or displays documents in proprietary formats has a degree of lock-in; either in your information getting stuck in those formats, or in your not being able to access information sent to you in those formats. Again, this point holds in varying degrees for 2 out of the 3 free applications which you list: wmplayer and iexplore.
wmplayer : its monopoly in being able to display various DRM formats controlled by MS, and proprietary MS specific codecs is a form of lock-in.
iexplorer : its well-known lack of standard compliance means that people need to use it to display web pages which only display properly in it (one could think of this as a proprietary mutation of the HTML format), a form of lock-in.
3) As you astutely point out, many companies, not just MS, generate income indirectly from free products. It doesn't bother me that MS does this, my reply was more to set things straight than to complain. The poster I replied to implied that MS was dying, out of the goodness of their hearts, to supply these "free utilities" and the evil DOJ was preventing them from being so altruistically helpful. My post was attempting to put that in a more realistic light.
...Microsoft would love nothing more than to bundle as many free utilities which lock you into using Windows as they could...
There, fixed that for you.
Oh, and they have also been known to try to generate income from those "free utilities" via indirect mechanisms (like IE directing you to MSN search in various situations, etc.), based on their control of your user experience.
So that's why Jesus's great-great-...-grandfather Judah intended to do it?
Anyone who reads the Bible with an open mind understands that societal norms at the time were (or are depicted as) very different from those of the religious right today.
> If Linus is not released within 48 hours on the other hand, > I will be forced to free Reiser in a crazed attempt
Considering that Linus's wife is a six-time Finnish Karate champion, it would probably be a better movie if she and Reiser have to cooperate in this desperate (but ultimately successful, of course) attempt to free Linus. Reiser would have to wave his "I AM McGyver" card around a lot in order to equalize the power of the main characters, and get killed off dramatically (but redeemingly) at the end after he tries to pull a partial double cross in order to force Linus to add support to the 2.7 kernel tree for the new Reiser5 filesystem (note to scriptwriters: find a nice simple analogy for this for the non-geek viewers).
You have hit the nail on the head that envelopes are not secure, yet they do succeed in making it much harder for the government to scan all of the mail sent in envelopes for keywords.
This actually means that it's relatively easy to gain security for your email which is analogous to that of putting mail in an envelope, and in a one-sided fashion (the recipient does not need to do anything special). Merely send the important data in an encrypted attachment, with the key "encoded" in the plaintext of the email (obscure the key in a way similar to how Slashdot sometimes obscures email addresses, but not in an automatic fashion).
Example:
The 9-letter key for the attachment is the name of country you live in but with the second letter capitalized instead of the first letter.
... Self-extracting attachment encrypted with key "aRgentina"....
This is of course totally insecure against a person trying to read your email, but would defend your mail from automatic scanning. Exactly what a postal envelope does!
Yeah, another Slashdot user already corrected me, but thanks. I've been here too long, this time I skipped reading the article, and got caught.
It turns out that even if he wins, he can't get more than $100K of damages from the State of Massachusetts and perhaps his pension and health benefits (which you probably know since you did read the article).
Funny that I got an "Informative" mod on that, I had thought that the part about the need for a law requiring forensic snapshots in cases of employee dismissal was the Interesting or Insightful part.
There's no such thing as a legal "slam dunk". The only person who will certainly make money from suing them is the lawyer himself (unless he takes the case on a percentage-of-settlement basis, of course).
This whole case would seem to hinge on one forensic expert's testimony, so if I were a lawyer, I'd be a bit leery about considering this an open-and-shut case.
Still, I wish the guy a lot of luck in setting a precedent that you can't be held accountable in all situations for what your computer does.
I'm not sure if the guy wasn't lucky that the employer went immediately to start criminal proceedings --- that's the only reason he has a valid forensic analysis of the computer to show. In an ordinary instance of firing, the computer would almost certainly have been reimaged before he could sue to have it analyzed.
It seems there's room for a law that in cases like this, the employer has to get a forensic snapshot of the computer involved before reimaging it (or be responsible for destroying evidence in any subsequent discovery proceedings).
In Economics, monopoly (also "Pure oligopoly") exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. Monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods.
1) Until ReactOS gets up to speed, Microsoft obviously has a complete monopoly in Win32 ABI compatible OS's. 2) Do to network effects, Microsoft's overwhelming marketshare gives it the kind of control mentioned in Wikipedia which would in turn characterize it as a monopoly.
My advice is to go the route Ares suggests, by contacting Yahoo about the problem, but in addition, I would emphasize in my communications with them that as a customer, they aren't getting full value for the money they pay their geolocation service. This may be more effective for actually motivating Yahoo to contact its geolocation service about it, rather than just complaining about bad ads.
> It probably has already identified a large portion of the 10 million or so bots.
Somehow I doubt that it has positive identification via IP addresses for most of those bots since most of them have dynamic IP addresses; what it surely does have are weighted statistics for spam arriving from given IP addresses/blocks.
> I've long thought that was the original goal, "How many kids can we get to use Linux"
Frankly, I don't understand how you think having MS under the hood of the OLPC would help it be a better educational computer. If you had used one for even 2 minutes you would understand that the end user has no direct interaction with the underlying operating system at all, he is supposed to use the Sugar interface and the applications installed in it by default.
There are plenty of reasons why Linux was a better choice than an MS operating system, but I don't see how "educational indoctrination in Linux use" could be one, since using Sugar has little relation to using Linux with a more common desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. (Note well: I am not claiming that there are absolutely no reasons why using an underlying MS operating system might be better than using Linux. I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could come up with a few of those, also.)
> I could send an RIAA lawyer a cd with "Receiving this cd means that I now own your soul.
"RIAA lawyer's soul", eh? I guess you're looking for something to put on the shelf next to the "square circle", "military intelligence", and "Microsoft Works", right?
Why on earth would that deserve a Troll mod? Does "thruth" have some kind of recently acquired meaning which has managed to escape me in my overaged noncoolness?
Besides having to watch 5 seconds of a music video not to my taste on YouTube, my searching on Google didn't cause me any particular suffering nor enlightenment...
Didn't they already do this when they politely acquiesced to the broadcaster's non-copy bit in their Media Center (or whatever braindead application it was)? That cant-record-"American Gladiator" stuff I saw referenced here?
Just curious --- were your estimates for the expenses ($6M x 2 yrs + $15M x 3 yrs) also including payments to MediaDefender and other payments over and above the cost of lawyers (and court fees)?
Of course the Constitution isn't supposed to "encode enough information to enable everyone to unequivocally understand what the authors of that document believed should be done in all possible situations." That's why the Constitution and the bill of rights are about *enabling* the government to perform certain tasks, and the rest of it should be left up to Congress -- to pass laws -- and the states, to whom the default of power is given. 1) The Bill of Rights I'm familiar with mainly deals with enabling the public (and inhibiting the government) --- what is the connection between the First Amendment and enabling the government, for example?
2) Your argument appears to totally miss my point, which was not connected with whether the "meaning" has an enabling or inhibiting sense. In both cases you're still going to need judges to define the behavior of the legal system in borderline cases. (My apologies if your post was not meant as a rebuttal to mine --- in that case, just ignore #2)
> what would Washington say to see Obama in the Presidency...
I think that's kind of a strawman. It might be what he would say if he were shown that scenario with no context, but what is actually important is what he would say if he were also to be exposed (at a slow enough rate to absorb) to all of the societal changes which have taken place in the meantime, before being shown Obama.
> I do not want some judge changing the original meaning
I don't get it. You actually believe that the words of the Constitution encode enough information to enable everyone to unequivocally understand what the authors of that document believed should be done in all possible situations (even assuming they had one unanimous opinion)?
Face it. That's impossible, and that's why we have judges. And why they're constantly overturning old decisions and laws.
Of course, I do agree with you that judges shouldn't be making their decisions based on partisan loyalty. But one has to cope with the fact that they are human also.
Slashdot Mirror
Theoretically, the energy to get to the Moon is a one-time energy expense, assuming it is possible to set up a self-sustaining colony there. That would mean that the extra energy cost to mine metals there would be the energy required to escape from the Moon's gravity well, which is a lot smaller than that of escaping from the Earth. In addition, since the Moon lacks atmosphere, you don't have to be in a big hurry to generate all that energy all at once. It might be sufficient to use energy collected from the Sun over a relatively long period of time.
I do not mean to say that you aren't right that this will not be a reality for quite a while, if ever. It would require a self-sustaining Moon colony with advanced manufacturing capabilities.
> Thus illegal distribution of pre-release content is not significantly any more
> costly to the MAFIAA than illegal distribution of post-release content.
It seems to me that it would be more costly if it generates a lot of bad third-party reviews before the movie hits the theaters. Maybe the **AA are worried that the content is getting to people over whom they have no control? And no, I don't believe they actually control the professional movie reviewers; however, they have much more of a chance of swaying their opinions via lobbying and other tools, if only because they know who they are.
OK, personally I believe your post deserves a reply (as opposed to the negative mod you got).
1) Any application which you have to learn to use has a degree of lock-in, which is the cost of learning to use a different application to gain the same functionality. This point holds in varying degrees for 3 out of the 4 applications which you list: wmplayer, iexplore, and winword. Mostly for winword, but as you correctly point out, it doesn't come bundled free with Windows. So I will stop worrying about winword...
2) Any application which manipulates or displays documents in proprietary formats has a degree of lock-in; either in your information getting stuck in those formats, or in your not being able to access information sent to you in those formats. Again, this point holds in varying degrees for 2 out of the 3 free applications which you list: wmplayer and iexplore.
3) As you astutely point out, many companies, not just MS, generate income indirectly from free products. It doesn't bother me that MS does this, my reply was more to set things straight than to complain. The poster I replied to implied that MS was dying, out of the goodness of their hearts, to supply these "free utilities" and the evil DOJ was preventing them from being so altruistically helpful. My post was attempting to put that in a more realistic light.
Oh, and they have also been known to try to generate income from those "free utilities" via indirect mechanisms (like IE directing you to MSN search in various situations, etc.), based on their control of your user experience.
> you can't have sex with a whore
So that's why Jesus's great-great-...-grandfather Judah intended to do it?
Anyone who reads the Bible with an open mind understands that societal norms at the time were (or are depicted as) very different from those of the religious right today.
> If Linus is not released within 48 hours on the other hand,
> I will be forced to free Reiser in a crazed attempt
Considering that Linus's wife is a six-time Finnish Karate champion, it would probably be a better movie if she and Reiser have to cooperate in this desperate (but ultimately successful, of course) attempt to free Linus. Reiser would have to wave his "I AM McGyver" card around a lot in order to equalize the power of the main characters, and get killed off dramatically (but redeemingly) at the end after he tries to pull a partial double cross in order to force Linus to add support to the 2.7 kernel tree for the new Reiser5 filesystem (note to scriptwriters: find a nice simple analogy for this for the non-geek viewers).
When the scientists came for the tuna,
I remained silent;
I was not a tuna.
When they locked up the dolphins in SeaWorld,
I remained silent;
I was not a dolphin.
When they came for the trade currents,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade current.
When they came for me,
the oceans were silent,
there was no one left to speak out.
You have hit the nail on the head that envelopes are not secure, yet they do succeed in making it much harder for the government to scan all of the mail sent in envelopes for keywords.
This actually means that it's relatively easy to gain security for your email which is analogous to that of putting mail in an envelope, and in a one-sided fashion (the recipient does not need to do anything special). Merely send the important data in an encrypted attachment, with the key "encoded" in the plaintext of the email (obscure the key in a way similar to how Slashdot sometimes obscures email addresses, but not in an automatic fashion).
Example:
This is of course totally insecure against a person trying to read your email, but would defend your mail from automatic scanning. Exactly what a postal envelope does!Yeah, another Slashdot user already corrected me, but thanks. I've been here too long, this time I skipped reading the article, and got caught.
It turns out that even if he wins, he can't get more than $100K of damages from the State of Massachusetts and perhaps his pension and health benefits (which you probably know since you did read the article).
Funny that I got an "Informative" mod on that, I had thought that the part about the need for a law requiring forensic snapshots in cases of employee dismissal was the Interesting or Insightful part.
And I must be getting too old, here. Ouch.
Thanks for the info. I guess I've really earned my Slashdot veteran's button today, now I can wear it in shame...
Well, at least I can be glad the guy got cleared of blame relatively effectively. Unfortunately, his life is still in shambles.
There's no such thing as a legal "slam dunk". The only person who will certainly make money from suing them is the lawyer himself (unless he takes the case on a percentage-of-settlement basis, of course).
This whole case would seem to hinge on one forensic expert's testimony, so if I were a lawyer, I'd be a bit leery about considering this an open-and-shut case.
Still, I wish the guy a lot of luck in setting a precedent that you can't be held accountable in all situations for what your computer does.
I'm not sure if the guy wasn't lucky that the employer went immediately to start criminal proceedings --- that's the only reason he has a valid forensic analysis of the computer to show. In an ordinary instance of firing, the computer would almost certainly have been reimaged before he could sue to have it analyzed.
It seems there's room for a law that in cases like this, the employer has to get a forensic snapshot of the computer involved before reimaging it (or be responsible for destroying evidence in any subsequent discovery proceedings).
2) Do to network effects, Microsoft's overwhelming marketshare gives it the kind of control mentioned in Wikipedia which would in turn characterize it as a monopoly.
My advice is to go the route Ares suggests, by contacting Yahoo about the problem, but in addition, I would emphasize in my communications with them that as a customer, they aren't getting full value for the money they pay their geolocation service. This may be more effective for actually motivating Yahoo to contact its geolocation service about it, rather than just complaining about bad ads.
> which apply to Microsoft, and nobody else
You do know what the meaning of "mono" in monopoly is, right?
What a laughable troll.
I wait for the day that the EU go after "Linux" for abusing a monopoly position. LOL
> It probably has already identified a large portion of the 10 million or so bots.
Somehow I doubt that it has positive identification via IP addresses for most of those bots since most of them have dynamic IP addresses; what it surely does have are weighted statistics for spam arriving from given IP addresses/blocks.
> gmail's spam filtering beats Thunderbird's handily
And in this, we see an faint echo of the enormous power in the information that Google collects:
1) They have a lot more training data
2) They can make a comparative analysis to catch large batches of largely identical messages which arrive at their servers within short time periods
> I've long thought that was the original goal, "How many kids can we get to use Linux"
Frankly, I don't understand how you think having MS under the hood of the OLPC would help it be a better educational computer. If you had used one for even 2 minutes you would understand that the end user has no direct interaction with the underlying operating system at all, he is supposed to use the Sugar interface and the applications installed in it by default.
There are plenty of reasons why Linux was a better choice than an MS operating system, but I don't see how "educational indoctrination in Linux use" could be one, since using Sugar has little relation to using Linux with a more common desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. (Note well: I am not claiming that there are absolutely no reasons why using an underlying MS operating system might be better than using Linux. I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could come up with a few of those, also.)
> I could send an RIAA lawyer a cd with "Receiving this cd means that I now own your soul.
"RIAA lawyer's soul", eh? I guess you're looking for something to put on the shelf next to the "square circle", "military intelligence", and "Microsoft Works", right?
Why on earth would that deserve a Troll mod? Does "thruth" have some kind of recently acquired meaning which has managed to escape me in my overaged noncoolness?
Besides having to watch 5 seconds of a music video not to my taste on YouTube, my searching on Google didn't cause me any particular suffering nor enlightenment...
Didn't they already do this when they politely acquiesced to the broadcaster's non-copy bit in their Media Center (or whatever braindead application it was)? That cant-record-"American Gladiator" stuff I saw referenced here?
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...
Just curious --- were your estimates for the expenses ($6M x 2 yrs + $15M x 3 yrs) also including payments to MediaDefender and other payments over and above the cost of lawyers (and court fees)?
2) Your argument appears to totally miss my point, which was not connected with whether the "meaning" has an enabling or inhibiting sense. In both cases you're still going to need judges to define the behavior of the legal system in borderline cases. (My apologies if your post was not meant as a rebuttal to mine --- in that case, just ignore #2)
> what would Washington say to see Obama in the Presidency ...
I think that's kind of a strawman. It might be what he would say if he were shown that scenario with no context, but what is actually important is what he would say if he were also to be exposed (at a slow enough rate to absorb) to all of the societal changes which have taken place in the meantime, before being shown Obama.
<pedantic>
BTW, the Oval Office was built in 1909 and I doubt that Washington would recognize a modern necktie, either. And "nigger" wasn't necessarily derogatory, in Washington's time.
</pedantic>
> I do not want some judge changing the original meaning
I don't get it. You actually believe that the words of the Constitution encode enough information to enable everyone to unequivocally understand what the authors of that document believed should be done in all possible situations (even assuming they had one unanimous opinion)?
Face it. That's impossible, and that's why we have judges. And why they're constantly overturning old decisions and laws.
Of course, I do agree with you that judges shouldn't be making their decisions based on partisan loyalty. But one has to cope with the fact that they are human also.
You know I just used up my last mod point 5 minutes ago! LOL
OTOH, I wouldn't have been able to decide between Funny and Insightful, anyway...