Oblig comment about likely all unlimited users' information will make it into the hands of the MPAA/RIAA, who will conclude that the only way a user could use that much bandwidth is if they were pirating copyrighted content.
Oblig comment that all those downloads could have been completely uncopyrighted content (like downloading seven different distrobutions of Linux) or legally purchased downloadable content (like iTunes, Amazon eBooks, XBox 360 games, streaming NetFlix, Windows Service Packs, etc, etc, etc).
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The keyword is "peaceably", but TFS seems to imply that they are trying to prohibit people from assembling, which is unconstitutional.
The correct response, I believe, is to arrange a "peaceful assembly" on the front door of the "Virginia Fusion Center" and generate enough publicity from the press so these clowns in Virginia can be made to understand that internet sites like Slashdot.org don't make any attempt to rally any violent political movements.
A series of types of food and ask which one would go best with Natalie Portman.
Cultural differences make this impossible. Maybe for you hot grits go best with Ms. Portman, but I'm sure for people in other regions of the world they've prefer bakalava or maybe even tuna maki.
You make e-mail sound like getting a P.O. Box number... which is an interesting thought.
I think the trouble arises when you begin deciding how to limit the distribution of e-mail accounts. How many can a single person have? Which organizations are responsible for distributing them in the first place? What will you do to individuals who spam with their registered accounts? How do you decide how to filter e-mail from unregistered accounts? What will you do with system administrators who run their own e-mail servers? How do you deal with spammer hackers who gain access to other people's legitimate accounts? How do you deal with spammers who "spoof" other people's legitimate accounts? Where do you draw the line between e-mail abuse and fraud and what are the legal punishments for each? Do we want to try to ban spammers from using computers? Do we think that'll be effective? Do we want to throw them in jail? How will we deal with the public outcry of spending taxpayer dollars and legal fees for people who sent spam when the "Filtering solution" is actually doing a pretty good job and people with Google/Postini don't see most spam anyway.
The trouble, I think, is that you'd need buy-in from far too many organizations to enforce it properly.
The 2003 blackout had nothing to do with any computer virus. I studied this in a Software Reliability course a few years ago and recall that it was caused by cascading failures that originated from a software bug and a tree following onto a wire somewhere in Ohio.
What about BugTracker websites or discussion forums that expose software warts to the general public? Doesn't posting to these count as criticizing? Sure, the mass media doesn't track these issues because they are generally not very exciting, but I'd think the unexciting bug reports are more a symptom that these software projects are either not extensively used (which I know is false for FireFox, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and Apache) or that they're stable "done" products. Responding to the accusaction that "things can never get better", I'd agree. The products I just named are damned good. Let them stagnate. I like the way current versions work.
And if you'd like criticism... I'll give you some. Linux has piss-poor support for high-definition video editing software. The last time I investigated this was 6 months ago and no suitable tools were available that could run on my 3 year old laptop. Now, I know this might be symptomatic of my lack of processing power... but the same computer loaded with Windows was able to run a video editing product from Ulead to do high definition video editing in 2006, so I'd hope that sometime soon this capability becomes available for Linux.
JFK used to give out replicas of the sword George Washington used during the Revolutionary War to visiting dignitaries. There is a version of it on display in his museum in Boston. It's pretty, and who doesn't love a good sword?
stop these "free" publicity stunts or else... run for local elections
He tried running in the Primary elections. He gave up when he realized that he couldn't afford it. Also, I believe if he had gone through with it he would have had to give up his Comedy Central Show on account of it providing him an unbalanced method to spread his message and get votes.
Wouldn't you be pissed if all an author had to do was write 20 good pages and then sold you a shitty e-book copy of the rest of their book for $5? You'd slam their ratings and leave negative feedback so the next person doesn't fall for the same trap... but the damage would have been done.
Similarly, a really good author can be pushed into obscurity if he gets slammed by a couple of reviews and ratings from people who have personal vendettas (for whatever reason) against him.
Maybe these are extreme examples, but the point is that when their are 500 thousand other things to read, it's hard for talented, yet obscure authors to get noticed. I'm not gonna try to argue that traditional publishers are there to support these individuals because I think there are a LOT of disadvantages for authors to deal with publishers, but as a reader I'd rather reserve my limited funds for author's who have a lot of buzz around them... and this is typically easier to get from the major publishing houses then from guys "throwing shit against the wall".
Publishes are like newspaper. They're a dying breed, but that doesn't mean they don't perform a valuable service. Currently, when a publisher decides to green-light a book it typically comes with an assurance to readers that a large upfront cost will be expended to produce a professional product. That is to say, publishing houses are one measure that helps ensure quality.
Qualitatively, if Google can manage to figure out a way to assure quality without traditional publishers then they'll do well and force the traditional publishing houses to adopt or die. If Google, as it typically has done, merely rides on the coattails of industry or gives users a free-for-all to publish whatever they want (throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks), then I'd think Google isn't going to enjoy much success.
Caveat emptor - I say this as a (currently commercially unsuccessful) author who has a product uploaded to GoogleBooks and is planning on print-on-demand through Amazon in the upcoming months.
Okay, so it's taking some getting used to but the Vimperator plug-in is pretty awesome. They implement Search-Replace better than Firefox, though it'll take some getting used to before I get C-i C-o instead of searching for the mouse and clicking on the Back and Forward buttons.
I love what they do with bookmarks, though. Instead of mousing over the bookmark buttons that I usually have taking up real estate on my taskbar I just type ":bmarks! xkcd" and it automatically opens my favorite web comic. Plus, I can easily envision renaming my webcomic bookmarks as "comic " so that I can open them with one sweeping ":bmarks! comic" and then just C-n with "d" through them until I've consumed them all.
Good stuff. Mod parent up. Vimperator is an excellent tool.
I have other complaints that I'd like to see addressed if they want me to use this:
1. If it's at the top of the screen, I won't use it. Command line interfaces place user input at the bottom of the window. Simply replacing the address bar at the top of the screen (which I also generally ignore) won't change the way I interact with it.
2. If the commands are "search-amazon" I'm rather just enter "site:amazon.com" into the Google toolbar browser extension. If specialized queries aren't special enough to warrant their own short abbreviations (as in: ls, top, cd, grep, find) nobody is going to use them.
3. If they implement this like Ctrl-F or "/" so it pops up and disappears when I want it to, then I'll be real happy. I suggest Ctrl-Q or "?" to activate the feature. And then let's call it "Firefox Query" instead of whatever "Taskfox" which sounds like stupid marketing lingo that a bunch of suits thought up during a business lunch while sipping margaritas at the beach last summer.
We aren't talking about preserving news regurgitation from the Associate Press. We're talking about being able to find out when the Community Fare will be in town, when high school sports games are scheduled for, and the opinions of the individuals who are running for town council elections. Last time I checked, that type of stuff isn't covered by any of the internet news leeches who don't add any value to the stories they report. That's the type of thing you need a local news source for.
If it wasn't for the local newspaper I wouldn't have a clue on what the city council does or what the school board is doing. The local news channels don't recognize small towns and all they report on is local crime and traffic reports.
In the post immediately before yours, I had said:
For example, one thing local reporters cover is town council meetings and police reports.
I think putting the information you get from local newspapers online is a lot easier than most newspaper operators realize.
The two primary costs of operating a newspaper are (a) paying the reporters, and (b) printing papers. We all know subscriptions are down and that the medium is evolving so that only the largest national papers can afford to print copies. Also, readership in local areas doesn't really demand printed copies as much as they want access to the information. For example, one thing local reporters cover is town council meetings and police reports. Thanks largely to digital search mechanisms, it's way easier to grab this information from the pages of a reputable townie news service website than to sift through a printed paper.
So, I see the costs of printing a newspaper disappearing over the years and that leaves only the cost of paying reporters. My question is... what's to stop the small newspapers from firing the majority of their staff and operating like Internet newspapers with self-moderated volunteer staffs? All it'd take is to deploy Slashcode, buy-in from town administrators and business owners, and a critical mass of town residents to begin operating a near-free town news service.
Meanwhile, I see "tradition newspapers" as an occupation disappearing, regardless of tax exempt status or not.
And look at it this way... the newspaper profit model has been largely based on ad-revenue for so long that a simple "local" implementation of Craigslist could easily facilitate job postings, garage sales, and local advertising so that tiny, tiny charges for these would pay the small staff that's needed to maintain the hardware and post the most interesting stories on the mainpage.
Maybe the American Idol guys should be making our ATM machines instead.
If you want us to take $20 from your account, text your account at 54932-1, if you want us to deduct $60, text 54932-2, and if you want your account to be completely liquidated, text 54932-3.
I don't believe Discovery Channel's reason for filing the patent is important. As long as they hold a valid patent, they have the right to sue anybody who violates it for (a) damages, and (b) to shutdown their business.
It could be that they are just seeking to supplement their revenue with a licensing agreement, or it could be that they're holding this patent in hopes of preventing DRM'd ebooks from hitting the market. In either case, they're entitled to their right to sue.
Take, for example, if my business were making bike frames (and I had the bike frame patent) and you had a patent on the wheel. In order to sell bicycles without a fear of a lawsuit from you, I'd need to license your wheel patent. In theory, you are free to hoard your wheel patent until it expires if you think it would be bad for you to license your technology to me. Get it?
Vapid and brainless, sure. But when they let the Mythbusters load a ton of dynamite into a cement-mixer truck to test whether it will clean out the hardened cement caked on the walls you have to show some respect.
A patents grants the holder the right to stop another business for operations based on the contents of the patent. In theory, the Discovery Channel could refuse to negotiate with Amazon and Amazon would be violating the patent terms... in which case it would be possible to launch a huge lawsuit against Amazon. The Writer's Guild has nothing to do with this.
I would guess that the Discovery Channel will sign some kind of licensing deal to permit Amazon to conduct their business with DRM, though. They've got a lot to gain and seemingly nothing to lose from such a deal.
I'm glad they blocked it. Making things free and easy leads to abuse from users. Remember how e-mail is an essentially free service, and people are surprised that a huge percent of traffic is junk, spam, or garbage? I would hate to see that happen to SMS... so I think Google is right to do this until at least the point where they can restrict it to legitimate users only.
Fact is... I don't completely believe my argument either. The Kindle is somewhere in between the "expensive mp3 player" and "cheap video game console" market. I don't think they'd make any money leasing it, though. Leases work better for really expensive general purpose equipment that needs to be replaced every few years. Cars are great for leases. The cell phone business model is essentially very close to a "lease".
In fairness... it's too expensive for me and I'm not going to buy one. You are free to avoid buying one, as well. We can avoid supporting Amazon together! Though, with all the book readers who will get good use out of the Kindle, I'm still glad it's out there b/c using technology to avoid the dead tree method for the majority of publishing is (IMHO) a generally good thing.
But our personal right to do what we will with our property trumps Amazon's business model.
When Amazon starts selling Kindles for huge profits like Apple sells iPods, I'd agree. When Amazon sells the Kindle like Sony sells Playstations, I'd disagree.
I mean, feel free to do whatever you'd like with your Kindle... but Amazon didn't create this thing so they could put their bookselling business on hold.
Look at it this way: You can have cheap new technology that's locked into a single vendor (the console video game model) or expensive technology that's open to content from multiple streams (the mp3 player model). You CAN'T pick and choose what you like from both categories.
It's the same way with cell phones. Want the phone for free? Lock-in your access plan for two years. Want your choice of phone and network provider? Be prepared to pay market price for your phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Oblig comment about likely all unlimited users' information will make it into the hands of the MPAA/RIAA, who will conclude that the only way a user could use that much bandwidth is if they were pirating copyrighted content.
Oblig comment that all those downloads could have been completely uncopyrighted content (like downloading seven different distrobutions of Linux) or legally purchased downloadable content (like iTunes, Amazon eBooks, XBox 360 games, streaming NetFlix, Windows Service Packs, etc, etc, etc).
From the U.S. Constitution, Ammendment 1:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble , and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The keyword is "peaceably", but TFS seems to imply that they are trying to prohibit people from assembling, which is unconstitutional.
The correct response, I believe, is to arrange a "peaceful assembly" on the front door of the "Virginia Fusion Center" and generate enough publicity from the press so these clowns in Virginia can be made to understand that internet sites like Slashdot.org don't make any attempt to rally any violent political movements.
A series of types of food and ask which one would go best with Natalie Portman.
Cultural differences make this impossible. Maybe for you hot grits go best with Ms. Portman, but I'm sure for people in other regions of the world they've prefer bakalava or maybe even tuna maki.
You make e-mail sound like getting a P.O. Box number... which is an interesting thought.
I think the trouble arises when you begin deciding how to limit the distribution of e-mail accounts. How many can a single person have? Which organizations are responsible for distributing them in the first place? What will you do to individuals who spam with their registered accounts? How do you decide how to filter e-mail from unregistered accounts? What will you do with system administrators who run their own e-mail servers? How do you deal with spammer hackers who gain access to other people's legitimate accounts? How do you deal with spammers who "spoof" other people's legitimate accounts? Where do you draw the line between e-mail abuse and fraud and what are the legal punishments for each? Do we want to try to ban spammers from using computers? Do we think that'll be effective? Do we want to throw them in jail? How will we deal with the public outcry of spending taxpayer dollars and legal fees for people who sent spam when the "Filtering solution" is actually doing a pretty good job and people with Google/Postini don't see most spam anyway.
The trouble, I think, is that you'd need buy-in from far too many organizations to enforce it properly.
The 2003 blackout had nothing to do with any computer virus. I studied this in a Software Reliability course a few years ago and recall that it was caused by cascading failures that originated from a software bug and a tree following onto a wire somewhere in Ohio.
What about BugTracker websites or discussion forums that expose software warts to the general public? Doesn't posting to these count as criticizing? Sure, the mass media doesn't track these issues because they are generally not very exciting, but I'd think the unexciting bug reports are more a symptom that these software projects are either not extensively used (which I know is false for FireFox, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and Apache) or that they're stable "done" products. Responding to the accusaction that "things can never get better", I'd agree. The products I just named are damned good. Let them stagnate. I like the way current versions work.
And if you'd like criticism... I'll give you some. Linux has piss-poor support for high-definition video editing software. The last time I investigated this was 6 months ago and no suitable tools were available that could run on my 3 year old laptop. Now, I know this might be symptomatic of my lack of processing power... but the same computer loaded with Windows was able to run a video editing product from Ulead to do high definition video editing in 2006, so I'd hope that sometime soon this capability becomes available for Linux.
Thank you.
JFK used to give out replicas of the sword George Washington used during the Revolutionary War to visiting dignitaries. There is a version of it on display in his museum in Boston. It's pretty, and who doesn't love a good sword?
Mod parent Insightful. His link explains how to Master Lolcat.
stop these "free" publicity stunts or else... run for local elections
He tried running in the Primary elections. He gave up when he realized that he couldn't afford it. Also, I believe if he had gone through with it he would have had to give up his Comedy Central Show on account of it providing him an unbalanced method to spread his message and get votes.
jessica_alba,
Wouldn't you be pissed if all an author had to do was write 20 good pages and then sold you a shitty e-book copy of the rest of their book for $5? You'd slam their ratings and leave negative feedback so the next person doesn't fall for the same trap... but the damage would have been done.
Similarly, a really good author can be pushed into obscurity if he gets slammed by a couple of reviews and ratings from people who have personal vendettas (for whatever reason) against him.
Maybe these are extreme examples, but the point is that when their are 500 thousand other things to read, it's hard for talented, yet obscure authors to get noticed. I'm not gonna try to argue that traditional publishers are there to support these individuals because I think there are a LOT of disadvantages for authors to deal with publishers, but as a reader I'd rather reserve my limited funds for author's who have a lot of buzz around them... and this is typically easier to get from the major publishing houses then from guys "throwing shit against the wall".
Publishes are like newspaper. They're a dying breed, but that doesn't mean they don't perform a valuable service. Currently, when a publisher decides to green-light a book it typically comes with an assurance to readers that a large upfront cost will be expended to produce a professional product. That is to say, publishing houses are one measure that helps ensure quality.
Qualitatively, if Google can manage to figure out a way to assure quality without traditional publishers then they'll do well and force the traditional publishing houses to adopt or die. If Google, as it typically has done, merely rides on the coattails of industry or gives users a free-for-all to publish whatever they want (throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks), then I'd think Google isn't going to enjoy much success.
Caveat emptor - I say this as a (currently commercially unsuccessful) author who has a product uploaded to GoogleBooks and is planning on print-on-demand through Amazon in the upcoming months.
Okay, so it's taking some getting used to but the Vimperator plug-in is pretty awesome. They implement Search-Replace better than Firefox, though it'll take some getting used to before I get C-i C-o instead of searching for the mouse and clicking on the Back and Forward buttons.
I love what they do with bookmarks, though. Instead of mousing over the bookmark buttons that I usually have taking up real estate on my taskbar I just type ":bmarks! xkcd" and it automatically opens my favorite web comic. Plus, I can easily envision renaming my webcomic bookmarks as "comic " so that I can open them with one sweeping ":bmarks! comic" and then just C-n with "d" through them until I've consumed them all.
Good stuff. Mod parent up. Vimperator is an excellent tool.
I have other complaints that I'd like to see addressed if they want me to use this:
1. If it's at the top of the screen, I won't use it. Command line interfaces place user input at the bottom of the window. Simply replacing the address bar at the top of the screen (which I also generally ignore) won't change the way I interact with it.
2. If the commands are "search-amazon" I'm rather just enter "site:amazon.com" into the Google toolbar browser extension. If specialized queries aren't special enough to warrant their own short abbreviations (as in: ls, top, cd, grep, find) nobody is going to use them.
3. If they implement this like Ctrl-F or "/" so it pops up and disappears when I want it to, then I'll be real happy. I suggest Ctrl-Q or "?" to activate the feature. And then let's call it "Firefox Query" instead of whatever "Taskfox" which sounds like stupid marketing lingo that a bunch of suits thought up during a business lunch while sipping margaritas at the beach last summer.
We aren't talking about preserving news regurgitation from the Associate Press. We're talking about being able to find out when the Community Fare will be in town, when high school sports games are scheduled for, and the opinions of the individuals who are running for town council elections. Last time I checked, that type of stuff isn't covered by any of the internet news leeches who don't add any value to the stories they report. That's the type of thing you need a local news source for.
If it wasn't for the local newspaper I wouldn't have a clue on what the city council does or what the school board is doing. The local news channels don't recognize small towns and all they report on is local crime and traffic reports.
In the post immediately before yours, I had said:
For example, one thing local reporters cover is town council meetings and police reports.
I think putting the information you get from local newspapers online is a lot easier than most newspaper operators realize.
The two primary costs of operating a newspaper are (a) paying the reporters, and (b) printing papers. We all know subscriptions are down and that the medium is evolving so that only the largest national papers can afford to print copies. Also, readership in local areas doesn't really demand printed copies as much as they want access to the information. For example, one thing local reporters cover is town council meetings and police reports. Thanks largely to digital search mechanisms, it's way easier to grab this information from the pages of a reputable townie news service website than to sift through a printed paper.
So, I see the costs of printing a newspaper disappearing over the years and that leaves only the cost of paying reporters. My question is... what's to stop the small newspapers from firing the majority of their staff and operating like Internet newspapers with self-moderated volunteer staffs? All it'd take is to deploy Slashcode, buy-in from town administrators and business owners, and a critical mass of town residents to begin operating a near-free town news service.
Meanwhile, I see "tradition newspapers" as an occupation disappearing, regardless of tax exempt status or not.
And look at it this way... the newspaper profit model has been largely based on ad-revenue for so long that a simple "local" implementation of Craigslist could easily facilitate job postings, garage sales, and local advertising so that tiny, tiny charges for these would pay the small staff that's needed to maintain the hardware and post the most interesting stories on the mainpage.
I used to check all my girlfriends' voicemails
AC and claiming to have multiple girlfriends while posting on Slashdot? I smell a rat.
This is the first thing I thought. I haven't used IE since version 5.0, but I'm looking forward to trying this new "porn mode" feature.
Maybe the American Idol guys should be making our ATM machines instead.
If you want us to take $20 from your account, text your account at 54932-1, if you want us to deduct $60, text 54932-2, and if you want your account to be completely liquidated, text 54932-3.
Somehow, I don't see this working...
I don't believe Discovery Channel's reason for filing the patent is important. As long as they hold a valid patent, they have the right to sue anybody who violates it for (a) damages, and (b) to shutdown their business.
It could be that they are just seeking to supplement their revenue with a licensing agreement, or it could be that they're holding this patent in hopes of preventing DRM'd ebooks from hitting the market. In either case, they're entitled to their right to sue.
Take, for example, if my business were making bike frames (and I had the bike frame patent) and you had a patent on the wheel. In order to sell bicycles without a fear of a lawsuit from you, I'd need to license your wheel patent. In theory, you are free to hoard your wheel patent until it expires if you think it would be bad for you to license your technology to me. Get it?
Vapid and brainless, sure. But when they let the Mythbusters load a ton of dynamite into a cement-mixer truck to test whether it will clean out the hardened cement caked on the walls you have to show some respect.
A patents grants the holder the right to stop another business for operations based on the contents of the patent. In theory, the Discovery Channel could refuse to negotiate with Amazon and Amazon would be violating the patent terms... in which case it would be possible to launch a huge lawsuit against Amazon. The Writer's Guild has nothing to do with this.
I would guess that the Discovery Channel will sign some kind of licensing deal to permit Amazon to conduct their business with DRM, though. They've got a lot to gain and seemingly nothing to lose from such a deal.
I'm glad they blocked it. Making things free and easy leads to abuse from users. Remember how e-mail is an essentially free service, and people are surprised that a huge percent of traffic is junk, spam, or garbage? I would hate to see that happen to SMS... so I think Google is right to do this until at least the point where they can restrict it to legitimate users only.
Fact is... I don't completely believe my argument either. The Kindle is somewhere in between the "expensive mp3 player" and "cheap video game console" market. I don't think they'd make any money leasing it, though. Leases work better for really expensive general purpose equipment that needs to be replaced every few years. Cars are great for leases. The cell phone business model is essentially very close to a "lease".
In fairness... it's too expensive for me and I'm not going to buy one. You are free to avoid buying one, as well. We can avoid supporting Amazon together! Though, with all the book readers who will get good use out of the Kindle, I'm still glad it's out there b/c using technology to avoid the dead tree method for the majority of publishing is (IMHO) a generally good thing.
But our personal right to do what we will with our property trumps Amazon's business model.
When Amazon starts selling Kindles for huge profits like Apple sells iPods, I'd agree. When Amazon sells the Kindle like Sony sells Playstations, I'd disagree.
I mean, feel free to do whatever you'd like with your Kindle... but Amazon didn't create this thing so they could put their bookselling business on hold.
Look at it this way: You can have cheap new technology that's locked into a single vendor (the console video game model) or expensive technology that's open to content from multiple streams (the mp3 player model). You CAN'T pick and choose what you like from both categories.
It's the same way with cell phones. Want the phone for free? Lock-in your access plan for two years. Want your choice of phone and network provider? Be prepared to pay market price for your phone.