What is funny is that the telecoms didn't get real horny for this issue until the DSL price war broke out.
What I always love is that Big Business in America supports a free and open market for about an hour, and then gets all huffy because competition and efficiency force them to work harder.
Suddenly, free enterpise becomes bullshit, and they start pining for a mercantile economy.
If the value proposition for putting up new lines isn't there, maybe Verizon can just ditch its FIOS roll-out and leave us with really old, worn-out copper wiring that runs dial-up at a blazing 7 kbps.
Why is it the government's job to fix their value proposition?
Do these people even think before they do anything?
The idea of Dali's works being defended on those grounds is priceless in light of the fact that several artists, including Picasso, were pissed at Dali for the same thing.
Then again, when was the last time you saw a group of artists and real appreciation for anything in the same room together?
Could you imagine the killing an even slightly harder working group of people other than Infinium could achieve with this type of ballsy venture capitalism?
Because MS Bob is the only parallel to this I can summon.
Sure, this is full 3-D, but Bob would have been full 3-D too . . . Come to think of it, isn't the engine in Vista really a way of weening the public toward this sort of interface?
The 2-D interface has inherent, long-term value.
To be blunt, the next revolution in interface isn't going to be visual. We like flat, simple layouts.
Some things are just too high concept, and the pervasive interest in 3-D desktop interfaces is one of those things.
When people sort out their papers, they don't put them on stands all around the room so they can interpret them in a radical 3-D interface. They lay them out on a table.
Thompson was always at his best in politics. Better Than Sex is a great read on the 1992 election, which was probably Thompson's highest point after he didn't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.
Other than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Where the Buffalo Roam, his fiction stuff was marginal at best.
Actually, his sports stuff was pretty good, too. On a good day, Thompson could mix sports, politics and Bible quotes into the damnedest thing you ever read.
Disappointingly, ESPN keeps his entire archive under subscriber lock and key on their website.
Thompson was probably the last white man to understand the NBA on its level.
HST was a great loss, but who would have bet he would have lived that long in the first place?
I am just wrapping up a local community website, and we're starting to debate these things heavily before it goes live.
1. Is community self-policing the best approach? If so, what's the best system for ratings? Is there an algorithm that works, because I've seen several good forums break up over complaints about the rating system.
2. Is editing at all a good idea? I say this especially in the face of the emerging view that the DMCA seems to mean that editing equals taking responsibility for all the content.
3. What's the safest yet most open format? How do you work a good and enforcable user agreement around something that is essentially a compromise between conflicting interests?
We're all generally users more often than we are editors. My natural sympathy has been toward the users. But, as I get closer to having to live with the responsibility for a horde's actions, my sympathies are waning.
Is Digg doing the right thing?
If not, what would you tell someone with a similar dilemma to do?
Think about it; the Bushies live in bizarro world:
Clear Skies Initiative: let factories pollute more.
No Child Left Behind: helped schools hide minority test scores.
Operation Iraqi Freedom: DUCK MOTHERFUCKER! has become Iraq's national motto.
The Bush administration has been living in Opposite Day for years.
So... A Civil Liberties officer is going to become the head of America's newest brownshirt organization and be highly effective.
Otherwise, why would they cite his hands-on experience dealing with totalitarian methods as if it were a selling point.
If they really wanted to convince us he was serious about civil liberties, he would appoint Larry Flynt or better yet have Hunter S. Thompson brought back from the dead.
The new civil liberties director would be a hard-living, foul-mouth, drug-addicted, woman-grabbing, ass-slapping, hyperactive pervert driving the biggest, meanest gas-guzzling straight-line Cadillac he could find from the car lot nearest to his last traffic accident.
The truth is, even if your patent is approved, the teeth of patent is backed by your ability to take it into court.
While it is nice to hold it as a property with the possibility of transfering it in the future (to someone who CAN defend it in court), it is not a hands-down defense of your idea.
Your idea had better be able to make it to market with quality backing by you. If that isn't there, who cares about a patent?
For the price, if you're sold on the idea, skip the BS and just patent it already.
But you have to fight Satan and accept that some practices are for the better.
For me, root was more bad habit from tinkering with Linux before delving into servers as a real world business.
Especially when you're learning on your own, anything but root feels like being in a full body cast.
But, once you learn and grow up with it as a business, you recognize that it's just poor practice to have root access sitting there begging you (and others) to cause havok.
Look at it this way: how beautiful would the world be if we could restrict Windows users as easily?
One of the main things that pushes young people into the computer business is a desire to tinker around with and even screw up their computers for fun or profit.
Anymore, for the young tinkerer, it's Linux or nothing.
What happened to the days when kids had stacks of floppies labelled DOS 3.3, DOS 6.22, PC-DOS, etc., virtually none of which were legal copies? And did it prevent Microsoft from achieving accendancy? Hardly.
What is Microsoft's plan for when they've poisoned the waters so badly with young developers that no one will be seen near a MS building?
With Apple preparing to stake a claim to part of the Windows market, hardware virtualization and compatibilities layers such as WINE all coming on, Microsoft couldn't make a dumber and more unnecessarily aggressive move.
America has had a special trade relationship with China since the beginning of the Republic.
We are almost single-handedly responsible for China's place in the world today, as China's constant angel. We've bailed China out of European colonialism, Japanese imperialism, Soviet domination and inevitable communist stagnation.
Why? Because America, since the late 1700s, has hung its hat on being the #1 partner to the world's largest market.
Want some good reading on the subject? Dig up a book from the 80s called the Soong Dynasty. It is about the various decendants of Charlie Soong, a Chinese-American businessman, whose family had a finger in every pie in China during the Nationalist period (Soong's daughter, Mayling, married Chiang Kaishek, and his son was Chiang's finance minister).
When you're done, you'll understand the length to which America will go to guarantee a permanent relationship with China.
In all my internet use going back to the 90s, I have never had any malware put me in a bad spot. The occassional.jar file with some dumb thing in it, and that's about all.
Mind you, during that time I've had a teenage male using the computer, too.
And, I owe it all to a severe aversion to major antvirus vendors, an absolute belief in using port blocking and religious application of least-priveleged users.
That's all. Nothing fancy.
I've run everything from Windows 3.1 to XP, various Linux distros, Apple OS 7.6 and up, web servers, mail servers, testbed servers, databases . . . and nothing in that time has tripped me up.
I'm a firm believer in common sense, even if it has to be applied by force.
So, if I have a real firewall setup and I don't open every attachment I'm sent, I'm still safe, right?
At the end of the day, you still have to run the exploit for it to work. So, how is that any worse than the rootkits running around at the moment?
The vast majority of viruses still specifically depend on users who haven't hardened their systems.
As people try harder and harder to control your information, those who seek to avoid that control are going to push that information into vaults and underground.
My main fear is that the better part of the internet is going to be pushed underground because the gov't wants to read your email and the corps want to charge Google for letting you search for anything.
If these people get their way, there will be no incentive for intelligent people to use an above-ground internet.
One of the first jobs I got out of college, thanks entirely to the presence of Adobe Illustrator on my resume, was night desk at a local newspaper.
No one in a newsroom aims to write alternate usage or text. Ever. Period.
News people are lazy as hell. Even if you built them a robust admin system that made the entire process of entire the alternate text and usages a breeze, they still wouldn't use it.
Journalism went to hell in a handbasket after the search engine became a common feature in everyday life. The main reason is that journalists are lazy.
Don't believe me? Watch the idiots swoon around Scott McClellan at the White House press gaggle every day.
These people reprint AP wire copy, press releases and eve junk faxes verbatim because they're too lazy to do what they're being financially compensated to do.
Slashdot Mirror
What I always love is that Big Business in America supports a free and open market for about an hour, and then gets all huffy because competition and efficiency force them to work harder.
Suddenly, free enterpise becomes bullshit, and they start pining for a mercantile economy.
If the value proposition for putting up new lines isn't there, maybe Verizon can just ditch its FIOS roll-out and leave us with really old, worn-out copper wiring that runs dial-up at a blazing 7 kbps.
Why is it the government's job to fix their value proposition?
The GOP is dedicated to grabbing every non-member of the 1% by the ankles and seeing what falls out of their pockets.
The upside? At least this isn't as bad as the shit they did on behalf of Jack Abramoff.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_200 5_08_07.php#006266/
Wait a second! Yes it is!
The recording industry is largely run by the mafia anyhow. So... It's just the same as the Indian gaming scandal.
I'm no big fan of either political party, but the Republicans are bad news.
Corruption-wise, this is the ugliest America has been since the end of the 19th Century.
The idea of Dali's works being defended on those grounds is priceless in light of the fact that several artists, including Picasso, were pissed at Dali for the same thing.
Then again, when was the last time you saw a group of artists and real appreciation for anything in the same room together?
There are always going to be imperfections. Wise people plan for imperfection, rather than trying to hammer the world into one method.
Also, isn't there something to be said for software diversity?
Perhaps we'd like to recall the fun of Sasser and cousins thanks to the fact that everyone runs Windows.
Yup. Getting everyone on one system sure helped there, right?
Could you imagine the killing an even slightly harder working group of people other than Infinium could achieve with this type of ballsy venture capitalism?
Sure, this is full 3-D, but Bob would have been full 3-D too . . . Come to think of it, isn't the engine in Vista really a way of weening the public toward this sort of interface?
The 2-D interface has inherent, long-term value.
To be blunt, the next revolution in interface isn't going to be visual. We like flat, simple layouts.
Some things are just too high concept, and the pervasive interest in 3-D desktop interfaces is one of those things.
When people sort out their papers, they don't put them on stands all around the room so they can interpret them in a radical 3-D interface. They lay them out on a table.
Other than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Where the Buffalo Roam, his fiction stuff was marginal at best.
Actually, his sports stuff was pretty good, too. On a good day, Thompson could mix sports, politics and Bible quotes into the damnedest thing you ever read.
Disappointingly, ESPN keeps his entire archive under subscriber lock and key on their website.
Thompson was probably the last white man to understand the NBA on its level.
HST was a great loss, but who would have bet he would have lived that long in the first place?
1. Is community self-policing the best approach? If so, what's the best system for ratings? Is there an algorithm that works, because I've seen several good forums break up over complaints about the rating system.
2. Is editing at all a good idea? I say this especially in the face of the emerging view that the DMCA seems to mean that editing equals taking responsibility for all the content.
3. What's the safest yet most open format? How do you work a good and enforcable user agreement around something that is essentially a compromise between conflicting interests?
We're all generally users more often than we are editors. My natural sympathy has been toward the users. But, as I get closer to having to live with the responsibility for a horde's actions, my sympathies are waning.
Is Digg doing the right thing?
If not, what would you tell someone with a similar dilemma to do?
Our idea of a celebrity gubernatorial candidate is Lynn Swann.
Who the hell in the GOP picks these guys?
Clear Skies Initiative: let factories pollute more.
No Child Left Behind: helped schools hide minority test scores.
Operation Iraqi Freedom: DUCK MOTHERFUCKER! has become Iraq's national motto.
The Bush administration has been living in Opposite Day for years.
So... A Civil Liberties officer is going to become the head of America's newest brownshirt organization and be highly effective.
Otherwise, why would they cite his hands-on experience dealing with totalitarian methods as if it were a selling point.
If they really wanted to convince us he was serious about civil liberties, he would appoint Larry Flynt or better yet have Hunter S. Thompson brought back from the dead.
The new civil liberties director would be a hard-living, foul-mouth, drug-addicted, woman-grabbing, ass-slapping, hyperactive pervert driving the biggest, meanest gas-guzzling straight-line Cadillac he could find from the car lot nearest to his last traffic accident.
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward.
Every possible action in the world has an economy surrounding it.
Don't like it? Change the economy of whatever vexes you.
The truth is, even if your patent is approved, the teeth of patent is backed by your ability to take it into court.
While it is nice to hold it as a property with the possibility of transfering it in the future (to someone who CAN defend it in court), it is not a hands-down defense of your idea.
Your idea had better be able to make it to market with quality backing by you. If that isn't there, who cares about a patent?
For the price, if you're sold on the idea, skip the BS and just patent it already.
But you have to fight Satan and accept that some practices are for the better. For me, root was more bad habit from tinkering with Linux before delving into servers as a real world business. Especially when you're learning on your own, anything but root feels like being in a full body cast. But, once you learn and grow up with it as a business, you recognize that it's just poor practice to have root access sitting there begging you (and others) to cause havok. Look at it this way: how beautiful would the world be if we could restrict Windows users as easily?
One of the main things that pushes young people into the computer business is a desire to tinker around with and even screw up their computers for fun or profit.
Anymore, for the young tinkerer, it's Linux or nothing.
What happened to the days when kids had stacks of floppies labelled DOS 3.3, DOS 6.22, PC-DOS, etc., virtually none of which were legal copies? And did it prevent Microsoft from achieving accendancy? Hardly.
What is Microsoft's plan for when they've poisoned the waters so badly with young developers that no one will be seen near a MS building?
With Apple preparing to stake a claim to part of the Windows market, hardware virtualization and compatibilities layers such as WINE all coming on, Microsoft couldn't make a dumber and more unnecessarily aggressive move.
Because on any given day, how many unsigned nVidia drivers are running on systems?
Well, I tried.
America has had a special trade relationship with China since the beginning of the Republic.
We are almost single-handedly responsible for China's place in the world today, as China's constant angel. We've bailed China out of European colonialism, Japanese imperialism, Soviet domination and inevitable communist stagnation.
Why? Because America, since the late 1700s, has hung its hat on being the #1 partner to the world's largest market.
Want some good reading on the subject? Dig up a book from the 80s called the Soong Dynasty. It is about the various decendants of Charlie Soong, a Chinese-American businessman, whose family had a finger in every pie in China during the Nationalist period (Soong's daughter, Mayling, married Chiang Kaishek, and his son was Chiang's finance minister).
When you're done, you'll understand the length to which America will go to guarantee a permanent relationship with China.
Mind you, during that time I've had a teenage male using the computer, too.
And, I owe it all to a severe aversion to major antvirus vendors, an absolute belief in using port blocking and religious application of least-priveleged users.
That's all. Nothing fancy.
I've run everything from Windows 3.1 to XP, various Linux distros, Apple OS 7.6 and up, web servers, mail servers, testbed servers, databases . . . and nothing in that time has tripped me up.
I'm a firm believer in common sense, even if it has to be applied by force.
Indeed.
So, if I have a real firewall setup and I don't open every attachment I'm sent, I'm still safe, right? At the end of the day, you still have to run the exploit for it to work. So, how is that any worse than the rootkits running around at the moment? The vast majority of viruses still specifically depend on users who haven't hardened their systems.
My main fear is that the better part of the internet is going to be pushed underground because the gov't wants to read your email and the corps want to charge Google for letting you search for anything.
If these people get their way, there will be no incentive for intelligent people to use an above-ground internet.
I'm not so sure. Most lazy people are like old yellow dogs, and wouldn't move if they were on fire.
No one in a newsroom aims to write alternate usage or text. Ever. Period.
News people are lazy as hell. Even if you built them a robust admin system that made the entire process of entire the alternate text and usages a breeze, they still wouldn't use it.
Journalism went to hell in a handbasket after the search engine became a common feature in everyday life. The main reason is that journalists are lazy.
Don't believe me? Watch the idiots swoon around Scott McClellan at the White House press gaggle every day.
These people reprint AP wire copy, press releases and eve junk faxes verbatim because they're too lazy to do what they're being financially compensated to do.
Until it hits people HARD at the bottom line, it means nothing. Me? I live in the North. It's hard not to support global warming.