These sorts of broad characterizations about the youngin's have been going on forever.
If you really want some insight into how generations interact in America, and how this interaction influences history, check out Strauss & Howe's Generations, a book published in 1991 that still offers many insights.
I only pay a monthly fee for broadband, which allows me unfettered access to ANY song I could ever hope to have... I have yet to see any DRM on it either!
Can you take your broadband with you on the bus, in your car, taking a walk, on a plane, to a friend's house, or to the office?
Re:Government "may" release the names of the winne
on
FCC Ends 700 MHz Auction
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"may" do so? Did the New York Times misspell "must"? Or is it that there is a lack of clarity in the FCC's administrative law as to how long it can go before it makes public the detailed results of the auction?
That's the problem with mainstream media. They are so used to summarizing stories for us little people that they seldom give links to the material they use in their stories. It would be nice to be able to independently corroborate Wired's assessment of the paper, wouldn't it? A paper written by industry people is summarized for us by industry people. Forgive me for being a bit skeptical.
I'd put TV-style advertising way down on the "evil" scale. Producing content doesn't just magically happen for free, and nobody is going to make the next Blade Runner without a profit motive. Certainly a patent on this sort of ad tech is (to name just one example) far below helping certain governments filter access to Web content.
We would be able to get back on our own feet, then consider trade.
I agree wholeheartedly. We should stop international trade for a while. That will help us recover from the horrible state we're in. After all, it's not like much of the American economy depends on international trade. We can all work on WPA projects like building dams and bringing electricity to rural areas. Once that's all squared away, we can ponder whether we should send steam ships across the oceans to re-establish our trade connections with the rest of the world.
State attempts to regulate the Internet have been tried in many states, for many years, in many guises. Take a look at Utah's Trademark Protection Act. The state government eventually realized that (drumroll) states can't control the Internet. As others here have noted, it's simply not feasible. In the case of the proposed Kentucky legislation, this dooms it before analysis even gets to Constitutional protections on speech, not to mention the Federal government's objections on Dormant Commerce Clause grounds.
How is that not acceptable? If they labeled systems misleadingly then they should be paying to help clean up the mess they caused.
You're operating under the assumption that the case against Microsoft is valid. Since the case has not yet been decided, the court cannot operate under that assumption. During discovery the court has to weigh the cost to Microsoft against the probability that information germane to the case at hand will be revealed. Civil litigation frequently involves analysis of this kind.
If the court allowed every single discovery motion, cases would never be resolved and the cost of litigation would be higher than it already is. I'm not saying that this motion shouldn't be allowed, but the courts don't have the luxury of deciding the case first, then making discovery rulings on that basis.
Do you really think the average user feels comfortable storing, say, bank information online?
Given that our banks all have that information online anyway, I'd say people are generally comfortable with it. It's one of those deals where since we're all in the same boat, we all go along with it.
Brin wants a level playing field, but Schneider's arguing that we should slope the field heavily away from the government. If they have all the guns, we should at least have a monopoly on the data to preserve the balance of power.
Brin also comes down fairly hard on crypto-privacy advocates because he claims in essence the right to obfuscate and hide personal data winds up helping only those with the technical abilities and interest in hiding their data. The average Joe Sixpack will never have such capabilities or interest, so according to Brin, giving anyone the right to hide their data is in practice only giving a small tech elite the opportunity to hide what they are doing.
This is not new terrain. The evidence can be examined under restrictions so the "proprietary and confidential" information doesn't make its way out of the confines of the case. Frankly, this is just standard legal maneuvering for a case like this. The test is whether the discovery methods will be considered germaine to the validity of the RIAA's case. If so, the court will likely allow discovery of these techniques.
It's a cliche now to talk about how the geeks have taken over the world, but back in the early days of tabletop RPG, Arneson and Gygax created a seed that gave bright, imaginative young people an outlet and a way to explore and collaborate and have fun. American society often punishes smart kids. D&D rewarded intelligence and imagination, and paved the way for a huge cultural shift. The geeks of today owe a huge debt to Gygax and Arneson.
i find that after a person is a victim of identity theft, they are far more likely to take privacy seriously.
A good friend of mine used to never wear his helmet when we'd go mountain bike riding. I tried in earnest twice to convince him that he was really pushing his luck. He continued to ride sans helmet. Then one day as we were riding home, he hit some railroad tracks at an angle and went down hard. On his head.
It took a while for the ambulance to arrive. The pool of blood around his head was fairly expansive. He got a serious concussion. Not good.
He now rides with his helmet.
As others have suggested, sometimes people won't figure things out until they feel the pain. But just as important is the net effect of seeing other people getting hurt. The bike helmet trend didn't take off until people realized that a lot of people were getting injured or killed on bikes, and that many of those incidents could be mitigated through the use of helmets.
There was a painful outcome, an easy solution to reduce the probability of the painful outcome. Right now online privacy is not seen as a threat because hardly anyone actually knows someone else who has been bitten by lax online privacy. But that's starting to change, slowly. Now what we need is an easy (for those people in the world who are not inherently fascinated by computers and privacy) mechanism for managing online privacy. I don't expect the latter to come into being any time soon, given the political climate in the United States, where there's simply too much money telling the government to look the other way as companies gobble up more and more personal data.
The Fact or Fiction site was put together by Microsoft Australia for "technology professionals" and aims to help Windows tech experts sell Vista to their customers. This is not oriented toward the general public, and frankly it doesn't look "desperate" to me.
Sure Vista has been a disappointment, but not everything Microsoft does is evidence of this.
So the NYT is just confirming what those of us who have played games from the '80 and early '90s have known for years.
Yep. Maybe with some luck, the lords of the game studios will read the article. As many have already noted, the folks at Nintendo figured this out a long time ago. But hard-core gamers are the folks making most of the games. It reminds me a bit of designers and websites. A few years ago many designers simply made sites for other designers. Now most of the designers have realized that they're not designing for themselves and their friends, but for a larger audience. Web design has evolved. There are still designer-oriented sites, but for the most part mass market professional sites do a much better job of serving the broader audience than they did even five years ago.
There will still be room for ultrageek games that require the latest hardware and suck up dozens of hours a week. But the race for that juicy mass market is on, and Nintendo has an early lead.
I see you've never taken any kind of higher level math class. Last I checked, all mathematical constructs are represented in words. Get a clue.
I stand corrected. I should have said, "use words rather than numbers." I think you understand my point, however. Logic is not limited to numbers. If you want to bash lawyers, that's fine. But don't pretend that legal arguments are devoid of logic.
Well, I'm not going to enumerate European Microsoft competitors for you. You may have heard of these little things called Linux, KDE, etc.
Linux and KDE are part of the same bundle, and they're not serious competitors to Microsoft on the desktop.
What I do like to ask you is to stop projecting your own nationalistic feelings onto others. This is not action against the US, this is action against abusive monopolists. How do you feel that taking very little action is working out for the US in the telecom sector?
I agree that our telecom sector sucks because our government has been so lax in going after collusion in that market. But you're naive if you think the EU is only going after Microsoft because it is a monopolist. There are plenty of state-sponsored monopolies in the European market (Airbus springs to mind) that receive all kinds of support financially and legislatively in the EU.
In the EU we have a Commissioner for Competition [wikipedia.org]. She takes action against abusive behaviour by large companies. This affects companies like telcos and banks in the EU, but also companies like Microsoft. I think that the actions taken by this organization are generally effective and taken in the eye of consumer interest. I find it hard to believe that there would be much nationalism working against the US.
Again, I think you're being naive. The Americans have been dominating the consumer computing environment for decades, and the EU knows this is an area that the EU should be much more competitive in. But so far it can't figure out a way to create an EU champion in the desktop computing market.
What you should also take into account is that the EU is not a nation, and nationalistic feelings about it are pretty rare. Typically people in the EU feel more strongly about competition with their neighbouring member states than about US companies.
You're conflating European citizens with the EU bureaucracy. As the recent failed but undead attempt at a new EU constitution has shown, the bureaucrats who run the EU aren't terribly concerned with what EU citizens think.
The point of the previous paragraph is to point out that if you think that Microsoft is holding the world of computing together, you are fucking hallucinating, because in reality if anything gets accomplished in computing it is in spite of Microsoft, not because of it.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. But my question is this: What is the EU doing other than continuing to sue Microsoft, to develop a truly competitive market in the EU?
Maybe no one should be allowed to be a lawyer except if he or she wrote a complicated program and debugged it.
Lawyers are trained in logic, but they use words rather than mathematical constructs. Judges are not trained to rely purely on logic, and they bring in their experiences and personal preferences. It is impossible, and likely not desirable, to have a legal system that is run by humans attempting to engage in robot logic exercises. The worst excesses of the law are as likely to be from logic divorced from reality as from excess emotion.
The ability to debug a program is not always an indicator of capability in pure logic. You likely know some programmers who are marginal at best, and some who have finely honed logic skills. Then there are mathematicians who embrace logic in a more pure form than most programmers you'll ever meet. Logic of that sort is, like all human abilities, relative.
Laws are indeed made by elected representatives who were chosen for a wide variety of reasons by a conflicted mass of people who can barely agree on anything. But can you seriously imagine what a group of mathematicians and programmers would do if elected? Have you ever worked in a university? Have you seen the ego wars and backbiting and general b.s. that happens? The ability to perform mental calculations in the cold, abstract world of computers and math doesn't necessarily translate at all to the fuzzy-edged world of human beings. It would be nice if the world of human interaction could be reduced to formulas, but that just isn't the way things are. And that's why, sad as it is, we have a complicated legal structure and bozos in public office.
Another part of the problem is that lawyers make far more money if the law is confusing and illogical.
Here's a first year law school problem for you. Try to write a rape statute. Write down what you think the definition of rape should be and the punishments for it. Then show it to three female friends and three male friends and ask them to poke holes in the statute.
Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though.
It means the lawyer is of average or better intelligence. The Eastern District of Texas has swiftly built a reputation for being friendly to patent holders. It also has a rep for getting a large number of patent decisions overturned on appeal. But if you're a patent holder and you want the best chance of winning, you angle for E.D. Texas.
If you held a patent, would you *not* try to file in a district that is generally favorable to patent holders? It has nothing to do with troll/non-troll status. Nobody files a patent suit to waste money. If you file, you want to win or get the claimed infringer to settle.
Has Microsoft abused its monopoly position? Absolutely, categorically, yes.
Is the EU upset because an American company so thoroughly dominates the European market? Yes.
Is there anything remotely like real competition for Microsoft in the desktop coming from any European companies? No.
Regulating Microsoft is fine, but at what point does it simply become regulation for the sake of regulation? If the goal is to develop a competitive landscape, what else is the EU doing, other than punishing Microsoft, to create that competitive landscape? Seems the EU knows how to use the stick to punish American software companies, but hasn't figured out how to use the carrot to get European companies to go up against Microsoft.
And yes, I know about SAP. I know about SuSE. I'm talking about serious competition for the desktop market.
Slashdot Mirror
How does it stack up against Star Trek: Generations?
Less shooting, less baldness, less special effects, a lot more text.
These sorts of broad characterizations about the youngin's have been going on forever.
If you really want some insight into how generations interact in America, and how this interaction influences history, check out Strauss & Howe's Generations, a book published in 1991 that still offers many insights.
Darwin is not very open-source
The Darwin source code is made available under the APSL, which is OSI-approved.
I only pay a monthly fee for broadband, which allows me unfettered access to ANY song I could ever hope to have... I have yet to see any DRM on it either!
Can you take your broadband with you on the bus, in your car, taking a walk, on a plane, to a friend's house, or to the office?
"may" do so? Did the New York Times misspell "must"? Or is it that there is a lack of clarity in the FCC's administrative law as to how long it can go before it makes public the detailed results of the auction?
When the D Block gets resolved, the FCC will be allowed to reveal who won the other blocks.
That's the problem with mainstream media. They are so used to summarizing stories for us little people that they seldom give links to the material they use in their stories. It would be nice to be able to independently corroborate Wired's assessment of the paper, wouldn't it? A paper written by industry people is summarized for us by industry people. Forgive me for being a bit skeptical.
They do promise to do no evil, right?
I'd put TV-style advertising way down on the "evil" scale. Producing content doesn't just magically happen for free, and nobody is going to make the next Blade Runner without a profit motive. Certainly a patent on this sort of ad tech is (to name just one example) far below helping certain governments filter access to Web content.
We would be able to get back on our own feet, then consider trade.
I agree wholeheartedly. We should stop international trade for a while. That will help us recover from the horrible state we're in. After all, it's not like much of the American economy depends on international trade. We can all work on WPA projects like building dams and bringing electricity to rural areas. Once that's all squared away, we can ponder whether we should send steam ships across the oceans to re-establish our trade connections with the rest of the world.
State attempts to regulate the Internet have been tried in many states, for many years, in many guises. Take a look at Utah's Trademark Protection Act. The state government eventually realized that (drumroll) states can't control the Internet. As others here have noted, it's simply not feasible. In the case of the proposed Kentucky legislation, this dooms it before analysis even gets to Constitutional protections on speech, not to mention the Federal government's objections on Dormant Commerce Clause grounds.
How is that not acceptable? If they labeled systems misleadingly then they should be paying to help clean up the mess they caused.
You're operating under the assumption that the case against Microsoft is valid. Since the case has not yet been decided, the court cannot operate under that assumption. During discovery the court has to weigh the cost to Microsoft against the probability that information germane to the case at hand will be revealed. Civil litigation frequently involves analysis of this kind.
If the court allowed every single discovery motion, cases would never be resolved and the cost of litigation would be higher than it already is. I'm not saying that this motion shouldn't be allowed, but the courts don't have the luxury of deciding the case first, then making discovery rulings on that basis.
Now excuse me while I hop in my Moller. I'm late for a meeting at the Zeiss-Ikon factory.
Do you really think the average user feels comfortable storing, say, bank information online?
Given that our banks all have that information online anyway, I'd say people are generally comfortable with it. It's one of those deals where since we're all in the same boat, we all go along with it.
Brin wants a level playing field, but Schneider's arguing that we should slope the field heavily away from the government. If they have all the guns, we should at least have a monopoly on the data to preserve the balance of power.
Brin also comes down fairly hard on crypto-privacy advocates because he claims in essence the right to obfuscate and hide personal data winds up helping only those with the technical abilities and interest in hiding their data. The average Joe Sixpack will never have such capabilities or interest, so according to Brin, giving anyone the right to hide their data is in practice only giving a small tech elite the opportunity to hide what they are doing.
This is not new terrain. The evidence can be examined under restrictions so the "proprietary and confidential" information doesn't make its way out of the confines of the case. Frankly, this is just standard legal maneuvering for a case like this. The test is whether the discovery methods will be considered germaine to the validity of the RIAA's case. If so, the court will likely allow discovery of these techniques.
It's a cliche now to talk about how the geeks have taken over the world, but back in the early days of tabletop RPG, Arneson and Gygax created a seed that gave bright, imaginative young people an outlet and a way to explore and collaborate and have fun. American society often punishes smart kids. D&D rewarded intelligence and imagination, and paved the way for a huge cultural shift. The geeks of today owe a huge debt to Gygax and Arneson.
i find that after a person is a victim of identity theft, they are far more likely to take privacy seriously.
A good friend of mine used to never wear his helmet when we'd go mountain bike riding. I tried in earnest twice to convince him that he was really pushing his luck. He continued to ride sans helmet. Then one day as we were riding home, he hit some railroad tracks at an angle and went down hard. On his head.
It took a while for the ambulance to arrive. The pool of blood around his head was fairly expansive. He got a serious concussion. Not good.
He now rides with his helmet.
As others have suggested, sometimes people won't figure things out until they feel the pain. But just as important is the net effect of seeing other people getting hurt. The bike helmet trend didn't take off until people realized that a lot of people were getting injured or killed on bikes, and that many of those incidents could be mitigated through the use of helmets.
There was a painful outcome, an easy solution to reduce the probability of the painful outcome. Right now online privacy is not seen as a threat because hardly anyone actually knows someone else who has been bitten by lax online privacy. But that's starting to change, slowly. Now what we need is an easy (for those people in the world who are not inherently fascinated by computers and privacy) mechanism for managing online privacy. I don't expect the latter to come into being any time soon, given the political climate in the United States, where there's simply too much money telling the government to look the other way as companies gobble up more and more personal data.
The Fact or Fiction site was put together by Microsoft Australia for "technology professionals" and aims to help Windows tech experts sell Vista to their customers. This is not oriented toward the general public, and frankly it doesn't look "desperate" to me.
Sure Vista has been a disappointment, but not everything Microsoft does is evidence of this.
So the NYT is just confirming what those of us who have played games from the '80 and early '90s have known for years.
Yep. Maybe with some luck, the lords of the game studios will read the article. As many have already noted, the folks at Nintendo figured this out a long time ago. But hard-core gamers are the folks making most of the games. It reminds me a bit of designers and websites. A few years ago many designers simply made sites for other designers. Now most of the designers have realized that they're not designing for themselves and their friends, but for a larger audience. Web design has evolved. There are still designer-oriented sites, but for the most part mass market professional sites do a much better job of serving the broader audience than they did even five years ago.
There will still be room for ultrageek games that require the latest hardware and suck up dozens of hours a week. But the race for that juicy mass market is on, and Nintendo has an early lead.
Someone will find a way to claim it.
I see you've never taken any kind of higher level math class. Last I checked, all mathematical constructs are represented in words. Get a clue.
I stand corrected. I should have said, "use words rather than numbers." I think you understand my point, however. Logic is not limited to numbers. If you want to bash lawyers, that's fine. But don't pretend that legal arguments are devoid of logic.
Well, I'm not going to enumerate European Microsoft competitors for you. You may have heard of these little things called Linux, KDE, etc.
Linux and KDE are part of the same bundle, and they're not serious competitors to Microsoft on the desktop.
What I do like to ask you is to stop projecting your own nationalistic feelings onto others. This is not action against the US, this is action against abusive monopolists. How do you feel that taking very little action is working out for the US in the telecom sector?
I agree that our telecom sector sucks because our government has been so lax in going after collusion in that market. But you're naive if you think the EU is only going after Microsoft because it is a monopolist. There are plenty of state-sponsored monopolies in the European market (Airbus springs to mind) that receive all kinds of support financially and legislatively in the EU.
In the EU we have a Commissioner for Competition [wikipedia.org]. She takes action against abusive behaviour by large companies. This affects companies like telcos and banks in the EU, but also companies like Microsoft. I think that the actions taken by this organization are generally effective and taken in the eye of consumer interest. I find it hard to believe that there would be much nationalism working against the US.
Again, I think you're being naive. The Americans have been dominating the consumer computing environment for decades, and the EU knows this is an area that the EU should be much more competitive in. But so far it can't figure out a way to create an EU champion in the desktop computing market.
What you should also take into account is that the EU is not a nation, and nationalistic feelings about it are pretty rare. Typically people in the EU feel more strongly about competition with their neighbouring member states than about US companies.
You're conflating European citizens with the EU bureaucracy. As the recent failed but undead attempt at a new EU constitution has shown, the bureaucrats who run the EU aren't terribly concerned with what EU citizens think.
The point of the previous paragraph is to point out that if you think that Microsoft is holding the world of computing together, you are fucking hallucinating, because in reality if anything gets accomplished in computing it is in spite of Microsoft, not because of it.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. But my question is this: What is the EU doing other than continuing to sue Microsoft, to develop a truly competitive market in the EU?
Maybe no one should be allowed to be a lawyer except if he or she wrote a complicated program and debugged it.
Lawyers are trained in logic, but they use words rather than mathematical constructs. Judges are not trained to rely purely on logic, and they bring in their experiences and personal preferences. It is impossible, and likely not desirable, to have a legal system that is run by humans attempting to engage in robot logic exercises. The worst excesses of the law are as likely to be from logic divorced from reality as from excess emotion.
The ability to debug a program is not always an indicator of capability in pure logic. You likely know some programmers who are marginal at best, and some who have finely honed logic skills. Then there are mathematicians who embrace logic in a more pure form than most programmers you'll ever meet. Logic of that sort is, like all human abilities, relative.
Laws are indeed made by elected representatives who were chosen for a wide variety of reasons by a conflicted mass of people who can barely agree on anything. But can you seriously imagine what a group of mathematicians and programmers would do if elected? Have you ever worked in a university? Have you seen the ego wars and backbiting and general b.s. that happens? The ability to perform mental calculations in the cold, abstract world of computers and math doesn't necessarily translate at all to the fuzzy-edged world of human beings. It would be nice if the world of human interaction could be reduced to formulas, but that just isn't the way things are. And that's why, sad as it is, we have a complicated legal structure and bozos in public office.
Another part of the problem is that lawyers make far more money if the law is confusing and illogical.
Here's a first year law school problem for you. Try to write a rape statute. Write down what you think the definition of rape should be and the punishments for it. Then show it to three female friends and three male friends and ask them to poke holes in the statute.
Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though.
It means the lawyer is of average or better intelligence. The Eastern District of Texas has swiftly built a reputation for being friendly to patent holders. It also has a rep for getting a large number of patent decisions overturned on appeal. But if you're a patent holder and you want the best chance of winning, you angle for E.D. Texas.
If you held a patent, would you *not* try to file in a district that is generally favorable to patent holders? It has nothing to do with troll/non-troll status. Nobody files a patent suit to waste money. If you file, you want to win or get the claimed infringer to settle.
Has Microsoft abused its monopoly position? Absolutely, categorically, yes.
Is the EU upset because an American company so thoroughly dominates the European market? Yes.
Is there anything remotely like real competition for Microsoft in the desktop coming from any European companies? No.
Regulating Microsoft is fine, but at what point does it simply become regulation for the sake of regulation? If the goal is to develop a competitive landscape, what else is the EU doing, other than punishing Microsoft, to create that competitive landscape? Seems the EU knows how to use the stick to punish American software companies, but hasn't figured out how to use the carrot to get European companies to go up against Microsoft.
And yes, I know about SAP. I know about SuSE. I'm talking about serious competition for the desktop market.