I thoroughly agree with you. Once a sex offender is released from prison, they've served their time, and paid their debt to society. If the sentence included mandatory observation, fine -- it isn't hard to wiretap a single person's Internet connection as part of that. If sex offenders are considered to be too dangerous to live like regular people...then they should live like prison inmates, in a prison.
One thing that really strikes me about this law is that it sounds like a sort of combination of double jeopardy and ex post facto legislation: you were punished for a crime, released, but now they are going to punish you again for that crime, by passing a law after you are released from jail. Of course, who is going to stand up for a convicted sex offender in this day and age, and say that they are being treated unfairly? It would be like standing up to a lynch mob.
I should clarify the comment about IT infrastructure: I was referring to serving video. I know that Antigua has a large online gambling business, but that requires a lot less bandwidth than trying to send out a feature-length movie.
Please, the WTO can't punish the US by letting a pipsqueak country like Antigua live without our copyright laws. I doubt that there is enough IT infrastructure in Antigua as a whole for anyone to serve more than 100000-500000 users at a time, which is barely a thorn in the industry's side (remember, Kazaa, at its height, had 60000000 users and the RIAA reported a record profit). If the WTO really wanted to hurt the US, they would have to grant the same freedom to a country that carries more weight, like China or Russia (countries that already have problems with black-market IP violations; just imagine an open market for US software, music and movies).
What this really represents is a message to the US: the WTO is not afraid to use IP laws to penalize us if we try and bully other countries. The member states of the WTO are not happy that the US can basically run free, so they just wanted to remind us that there is a system in place that can overrule America's policies. I personally view that as a good thing, since the US keeps using its position as the single most powerful nation in the world to push various agendas on other nations.
You have to realize that this bug occurs in a system that is stripped down for "home use," and therefore has reduced functionality which may actually be contributing to the problem. Granted, I've never worked with Windows servers in any real-world environment, so I can't say whether or not their fully functional products suffer from problems like this, but I would like to think that the NT server line (which includes Windows Server 2003) doesn't suffer from problems like these. Or so I would like to think...
It's worse at my school. Of the people who think it is wrong to download music, movies, or software illegally (we are a larger school, so I can't tell how many), I have yet to meet one who actually refrains from doing it or builds their music collection from legal sources. There is also an attitude that as long as you don't get caught, it is OK (coupled with that is a delusion that there is no way to be caught unless you share the files on the public Internet, despite my warnings that the university computer center is already aware of a campus filesharing network).
It's not that people of this generation are immoral -- nobody I know of thinks that taking a physical disc from a store is acceptable behavior -- it is that copyright infringement doesn't mean what it used to mean. I have a professor who worked for IBM when they caught a company infringing on some copyrights related to mainframe software; they were deliberately profiting from IBM's work without compensating IBM. Clearly, that is wrong, and that is what copyrights are designed to protect against, and I don't know anyone who thinks that is OK. It is different with file sharing networks, as there is neither business competition nor profit involved, and most of the people downloading music wouldn't buy so much anyway (I doubt that most could even afford that many albums). People don't view it as wrong, not because they don't have a moral compass, but because they don't view it as depriving artists or record companies of profit.
The point is that regulating video games is not addressing any problems, nor is regulating porn, nor is a drinking age. Teenagers can get porno with or without the law, if they want it, and with or without the law, it is still the parents' job to raise their kids, and teach them about such things. Teenagers can get alcohol with or without the law, and it is still the parents' job to raise their kids to drink responsibly. Teenagers can get video games, of all sorts, and it is their parents' job to teach them to be responsible citizens, to stay in school, and to separate the video game from reality.
I really don't think that it is too much to ask parents to raise their children. I do think that it is too much for the government to regulate what material a teenager is allowed to view on television, in a movie theater, or on their video game system. As I said in another post, who decides what a 15 year old is allowed to play? If it were books, you would be appalled by the idea of government regulation, but there are plenty of violent books out there that any 12 year old can buy, many that provide very, very detailed descriptions of violence. If we can't apply the "protect our children" logic to books, then why can we apply it to video games?
This is just another reason why I am going to vote third party -- for all the things Democrats have going for them, they pull something like this.
Fining a video game store for selling certain games to minors? Who decides what games are appropriate for minors? When I was 12, a friend of mine and I played Doom II on his Sega Saturn, and neither of us was harmed by it, even when we decided to have fun and run around with the chainsaw, spewing blood all over the place. When I was 14, I got a hold of a copy of GTA 3, and my friends and I thought it was great fun to run around shooting cops with a rocket launcher, and again, nobody was harmed by it.
What counts as a harmful game? "Hidden sexual content?" I wasn't aware that 12 year olds were harmed by sex as depicted in the GTA games. It is a stretch to claim that after playing a game like San Andreas, teenagers were running around, joining gangs, picking up hoes, and killing cops. If a teenager has emotional problems to begin with, or has trouble distinguishing the fantasy presented in a video game from reality, then they need professional psychological help.
Just how far do we take the "harmful" label, anyway? Is it more harmful to be in a game where your character is a gang member shooting cops, or a game where your character is a pilot dropping bombs over Vietnam and Iraq? Are both games harmful? What about a game where you are a wizard, who throws bolts of lighting at your enemies and electrocutes them? What if the Ender's Game novels were made into a video game; would that be harmful to youth? For that matter, why hasn't Ender's Game been taken off the shelves, or subjected to an age requirement: Ender murders a few of his classmates, with his bare hands, and then leads an army to commit genocide. Why isn't Mrs. Clinton calling for a crack down on violent novels as well, which describe violence in quite a bit of detail, far more than a video game can (video games can only provide a visual and audio reference; a written work can describe all the senses in a single passage)?
Of course, video games are an easy target, just like music was an easy target in the 80s and 90s, or hippies were an easy target in the 60s and 70s, or Jazz singers in the 20s. A candidate who wants to say they are protecting our youth only needs to find an easy target, and they are good to go: Lieberman chose Marilyn Manson, Al Gore chose Twisted Sister, and Hillary Clinton chose San Andreas. I doubt that any of them actually care about our kids, except to try and get our votes.
While I know that MacOS X ships with an X server, I have met only one Apple user so far who has set it up, and beyond that, none of the rest are even aware of X11. X11 is not enabled by default. The Apple users I've encountered have very little knowledge of X11, ssh, forwarding, non-Apple Unixes, or how a program can run on one computer and be displayed on another. Apple designed a GUI-centric OS, and its users are often loathe to open a shell and start typing in commands (considered to be too "unintuitive"), at least in my experience.
Most Linux or BSD users, who happen to be using a GUI, will already have X11 running, and will therefore have a much easier time running Matlab off our Unix servers. There is certainly no problem running an X server in MacOS, nor is there a problem running it in Windows -- but these systems are not being marketed to people who have the technical skill to set that up. Not to start a flame war, but Apple just isn't trying to attract users who are aware of X11, Unix terminals, programming, etc. If anything, Apple has tried as hard as possible to remove the "nerdiness" from computing, and present there systems as intuitive, simple, straightforward computers that any idiot with no computing skills whatsoever can figure out how to use. That's fine, but when it comes to doing something that doesn't fit into the desktop computer model -- running a program on a server, and having its GUI rendered on your PC does not fit into the desktop model, at least not as Apple has implemented it -- they are not marketing to people who are comfortable, knowledgeable, or appreciative of such things. You don't have to be their target market to use Apple systems, but you have to be aware of what their target market is, and that the overwhelming majority of Apple users have no interest in anything beyond the desktop metaphor that Apple has created.
It is necessary for me to stress that I am not criticizing Apple or its users; I am criticizing my university and the Mathworks company, for creating an environment where only people who are involved in computing can access Matlab outside of our computer labs. My point is that, because of the terms of Mathworks' site license, the software must be on a specific number of university owned systems, and that while there is nothing stopping Apple or Microsoft users from accessing that software, the majority are not knowledgeable enough to do that. The university doesn't do much to educate or encourage students to set up X servers and run Matlab/Mathematica/Maple on our servers (can't say I blame them; the increased network and server load would probably bring everything to a grinding halt), and most students who use this software aren't even aware that they can access it in that manner anyway.
Features? Maybe I can't beat you there. Reliability? Absolutely (GNU code is at least on par with BSD and other Unixes, and far more reliable than other systems, in my experience). GNU won't waste your time with a license check; when my school's Matlab license server went down, me and my peers were left out in the cold, with final projects looming over our heads.
My school will not give students a copy of Matlab for any purpose, because of license restrictions. We can either use a school terminal (ever wonder what a crowded computer lab looks like?), or run it off a Solaris server (X11 forwarding, leaving Windows and most Apple users out of the loop) which has strict resource limits imposed (forget processing anything big). Of course, with this setup, it is completely impossible to hook up any specialized hardware to the system running Matlab, so to process data from the real world, we must first collect it on one computer, then copy it over to a computer with Matlab installed (which is rarely in the same room as the equipment in use), and no, you cannot process anything as it happens, and yes, our disk space on the Solaris server is limited to 100MB, so your data can't be too large (not that you get enough CPU cycles to process anything large).
Octave? Right on my system. On any system I want, actually. I miss a few features, and bit of Matlab compatibility (not nearly as bad as it sounds, I have yet to have it be an actual problem), and a GUI (which I am not at all concerned about -- I'll take a functional CLI over a dysfunctional GUI any day), but in the end, I get what I needed: Something that allows me to work with other people's Matlab code, without having to wait in line for a computer or worrying about a resource limit on a Unix server. If Mathworks stopped screwing around with license restrictions, that are even worse than Wolfram (the maker of Mathematica, which is also mangled in license restrictions), I would never have even looked into Octave.
Matlab syntax is weird, but sometimes you are forced to work with other people who may be using Matlab. Python is not universal, 95% of the world's computers (that is to say, the ones running the most popular desktop OS) still do not ship with a Python interpreter, and many engineers are using Windows systems with Matlab and neither Python nor PERL environments.
Like Windows, Matlab has become too popular for everyone to just drop and move on to some other platform. Python may be great, maybe even for scientific computing, but Matlab is just what people are used to. It is good that Octave exists as a free software clone of Matlab -- a great way to show people (my fellow engineers included) that it is entirely possible to live without proprietary software, and a great way to bring non-programmers into the free software movement.
Mostly because, in this day and age, a recording company requires little talent beyond marketing -- if someone is so bad that it takes an expert marketing team to get people to buy their albums, then I would hesitate to call that person an "artist."
Should a restaurant owner, who is only the legal owner of the restaurant, be making more money than the people who run the restaurant? I don't know; did he contribute any talent, any effort, to the construction or running of the restaurant? Does the record company contribute more to the CD than the artist does? Should a singer or guitar play with an appreciable level of talent (that is, enough that people want to buy his music without an expert marketing team convincing them to) make less money per album than the company that manufactures CD's?
What does a record company contribute to an album? Unless the record company employs puts more talent and effort into producing the album than the artist does, why should they receive 10 times more of the profit from the album than the artist? It is hard to make that argument for most of today's popular music, since the majority of the talent in the album is in marketing and convincing people that it is actually worth paying to listen to, but that is just a natural result of large media companies.
I know, it sounds crazy in this country, with our progressive, modern society, that people who have talent in anything other than business making more money than people with business skills.
We should compensate artists, but there is a problem with that: when the artist starts getting big, somebody has to step in and help, and they have to get paid. The existence of a record company is understandable; what is not understandable is a record company making more money than the artist they are publishing. Of course, that can all change with the existence of the Internet, CD burners, and digital music players, since distribution does not have to cost millions of dollars anymore. Unfortunately, as with so many cases, trying to sweep away a large, established industry that makes their money from out-of-date technology ("technology" in the economic sense), is almost impossible.
With all our modern technology, though, musicians could make money with only one or two guys helping them with distribution, even worldwide distribution, and take home a much larger percentage of the profit. As long as a quiet place to record the music can be located, even someone with almost no financial backing could potentially sell a lot of music. If only there weren't people fighting such ideas...
...I've just about given up on politicians in this state. Albany has not been able to pass an on time budget for...actually, I don't think I was even born the last time they passed an on time budget. Governor Pataki was a union-busting asshole, and Governor Spitzer has failed to fulfill his promise of restoring integrity to Albany. Hillary Clinton votes for one idiotic bill after another, and Chuck Schumer voted in favor of Mukasey (need I say more?).
Microsoft designs a system by which you can install binary software packages on Microsoft servers (or third party servers) using some program that ships with the OS. Then, that program could periodically update the OS.
Personally, I think the latter option is more appealing, but only because we've been doing with with Linux for more than a decade.
Well, these are serious questions that we need to ask, and because they are so important, you can't expect everyone to immediately agree. It is better that we are debating the question, rather than simply following what one man has to say (regardless of the fact that I agree with what he has to say, it is still good to debate it).
Worse, these "rich content" websites are almost always buggy or problematic in some way. Our library search software, "Metalink," will fall apart if you try to open multiple windows or tabs. There is no reason why that web page needs any Javascript whatsoever, but their use of it only makes it less functional. More complex software is more prone to failure, and there is no escaping that.
The worst part is that, if this bill passes, I have no doubt that there will be people who are acquitted but whose computers were already auctioned off, and who will be unable to retrieve them. There is a reason that we have due process, courts, and trials in this country, but nobody can see past it. Almost everyone I know thinks that the police should have more power to invade people's homes on suspicions; I suppose they just see too many cop shows where the police officers magically know who is guilty but have to work to prove it (heaven forbid!).
"If the people lose..." should have been "When the people lose..."
There are no major party candidates who will appropriately serve the people. Those that are against torture are voting for crap like this, and those that are against crap like this are voting against health care, and those that are for health care and against this crap are all in third parties. The problem is that the people aren't aware of these issues, because their lives are flooded with jingoism and irrelevancies. Of course, as Thomas Jefferson put it: When the people stop caring about public affairs, the government becomes wolves and the people become sheep.
But this is true of almost every electronics, computer, or software company. How can you convince people to pay money for something that already does everything they need it to do, and that has already scaled up without too many perceivable problems? The only companies that aren't competing against themselves are the companies that continue to make money on a particular product, like Sun or Red Hat, because to them, the upgrades aren't the source of revenue (actually, Red Hat provides free upgrades for life, AFAIK).
What really interests me about Microsoft is that, because they need to get people to continue to upgrade year by year, what could motivate them to fix all their bugs? Perhaps the reason their products keep getting bigger and bigger but not doing proportionally more is that they are keeping the bug rates up -- fix old bugs, but introduce new bugs, so there is a constant incentive for people to upgrade. It doesn't seem so implausible, since they already have a monopoly position and therefore have little room to make a business of acquiring more customers...
Copyright law, as it was prior to the DMCA, wasn't really so bad. A lot of people seem to forget that the GPL and BSD license are base entirely on copyright. And I agree, small media companies and organizations are definitely protected by copyright law. But the problem with this bill, when coupled with the DMCA, is that almost anything could be construed as a violation, and so almost anyone using their computer in a normal way -- sharing a song with some friends in a college dorm, for example -- could be subject to prosecution.
Small media companies aren't hunting down college students; big media companies are. Small media companies aren't threatening free software DVD players; big media companies are. Big media companies pushed for the DMCA because it helps them. They didn't even consider the effect it might have on small companies, and why should they have? That was congress' job (judge for yourself whether or not Congress succeeded).
At least once a year, these results come out in yet another study. Perhaps we should declare a new holiday: False Sense of Security Day (and of course, False Sense of Security Eve, when a hacker in a Santa suit constructs an enormous botnet and takes down a few small mailservers with spam).
I wouldn't say that ALL politicians are in it for the power; just all the major party candidates. Ralph Nader, for all the complaints about him, was one of the few honest politicians who actually wanted to help the general public (and did, for decades, before becoming a politician). Major parties can't afford to have people like Nader running, because as you say, their money comes from industries and Nader has never been a friend of big businesses.
Unfortunately, of the major party candidates, I can only say who will worsen the privacy situation: Hillary Clinton. If you doubt it, just look at some of the crap she's proposed or voted for in the senate. As president, I could see her pushing mandatory DRM, mandatory TPM chips, immunity for anyone collaborating with the NSA wiretap program, and a strong push further down the "I have nothing to hide so I don't need privacy" road.
Aggregating messages and calendars is nothing new, it was available in desktop email programs long before GMail was even on the map. I use Kontact, for example, which allows me to do things that google's web interface is not capable of (to the best of my knowledge):
Drag-n-drop emails into calendar or todo items, and visa-versa
Integrated e-mail encryption (almost all universities read students' emails)
Automatic reminders on my desktop of upcoming events or todo items (Google desktop may or may not support this, I haven't checked)
Logging of completed todo items (surprisingly useful)
Offline availability (wifi and cell coverage are not universal)
And that is just what I personally use. Outlook, Evolution, and others have similar features. GMail's web interface is interesting, but you can only go so far with a web interface, and I really don't see the attraction of a web interface over a mature, integrated email program. My university made a big deal out of an upgrade to a new web interface for our email, and I just yawn seeing "new" features that I've been using since high school.
Except that the Apple mantra is that everything "just works," that it is "easy to do everything you need," etc. A software package that "just works" but is rendered inoperable by a routine patch process is news, at least on Digg and Slashdot (and similar sites), especially with all the Mac OS fanboyism that's been going around lately.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that really strikes me about this law is that it sounds like a sort of combination of double jeopardy and ex post facto legislation: you were punished for a crime, released, but now they are going to punish you again for that crime, by passing a law after you are released from jail. Of course, who is going to stand up for a convicted sex offender in this day and age, and say that they are being treated unfairly? It would be like standing up to a lynch mob.
I should clarify the comment about IT infrastructure: I was referring to serving video. I know that Antigua has a large online gambling business, but that requires a lot less bandwidth than trying to send out a feature-length movie.
What this really represents is a message to the US: the WTO is not afraid to use IP laws to penalize us if we try and bully other countries. The member states of the WTO are not happy that the US can basically run free, so they just wanted to remind us that there is a system in place that can overrule America's policies. I personally view that as a good thing, since the US keeps using its position as the single most powerful nation in the world to push various agendas on other nations.
You have to realize that this bug occurs in a system that is stripped down for "home use," and therefore has reduced functionality which may actually be contributing to the problem. Granted, I've never worked with Windows servers in any real-world environment, so I can't say whether or not their fully functional products suffer from problems like this, but I would like to think that the NT server line (which includes Windows Server 2003) doesn't suffer from problems like these. Or so I would like to think...
It's not that people of this generation are immoral -- nobody I know of thinks that taking a physical disc from a store is acceptable behavior -- it is that copyright infringement doesn't mean what it used to mean. I have a professor who worked for IBM when they caught a company infringing on some copyrights related to mainframe software; they were deliberately profiting from IBM's work without compensating IBM. Clearly, that is wrong, and that is what copyrights are designed to protect against, and I don't know anyone who thinks that is OK. It is different with file sharing networks, as there is neither business competition nor profit involved, and most of the people downloading music wouldn't buy so much anyway (I doubt that most could even afford that many albums). People don't view it as wrong, not because they don't have a moral compass, but because they don't view it as depriving artists or record companies of profit.
I really don't think that it is too much to ask parents to raise their children. I do think that it is too much for the government to regulate what material a teenager is allowed to view on television, in a movie theater, or on their video game system. As I said in another post, who decides what a 15 year old is allowed to play? If it were books, you would be appalled by the idea of government regulation, but there are plenty of violent books out there that any 12 year old can buy, many that provide very, very detailed descriptions of violence. If we can't apply the "protect our children" logic to books, then why can we apply it to video games?
Well, I was not aware of this, but thank you for the info, I'll keep that in mind. I suppose that mitigates the issue for Mac users.
Fining a video game store for selling certain games to minors? Who decides what games are appropriate for minors? When I was 12, a friend of mine and I played Doom II on his Sega Saturn, and neither of us was harmed by it, even when we decided to have fun and run around with the chainsaw, spewing blood all over the place. When I was 14, I got a hold of a copy of GTA 3, and my friends and I thought it was great fun to run around shooting cops with a rocket launcher, and again, nobody was harmed by it.
What counts as a harmful game? "Hidden sexual content?" I wasn't aware that 12 year olds were harmed by sex as depicted in the GTA games. It is a stretch to claim that after playing a game like San Andreas, teenagers were running around, joining gangs, picking up hoes, and killing cops. If a teenager has emotional problems to begin with, or has trouble distinguishing the fantasy presented in a video game from reality, then they need professional psychological help.
Just how far do we take the "harmful" label, anyway? Is it more harmful to be in a game where your character is a gang member shooting cops, or a game where your character is a pilot dropping bombs over Vietnam and Iraq? Are both games harmful? What about a game where you are a wizard, who throws bolts of lighting at your enemies and electrocutes them? What if the Ender's Game novels were made into a video game; would that be harmful to youth? For that matter, why hasn't Ender's Game been taken off the shelves, or subjected to an age requirement: Ender murders a few of his classmates, with his bare hands, and then leads an army to commit genocide. Why isn't Mrs. Clinton calling for a crack down on violent novels as well, which describe violence in quite a bit of detail, far more than a video game can (video games can only provide a visual and audio reference; a written work can describe all the senses in a single passage)?
Of course, video games are an easy target, just like music was an easy target in the 80s and 90s, or hippies were an easy target in the 60s and 70s, or Jazz singers in the 20s. A candidate who wants to say they are protecting our youth only needs to find an easy target, and they are good to go: Lieberman chose Marilyn Manson, Al Gore chose Twisted Sister, and Hillary Clinton chose San Andreas. I doubt that any of them actually care about our kids, except to try and get our votes.
Most Linux or BSD users, who happen to be using a GUI, will already have X11 running, and will therefore have a much easier time running Matlab off our Unix servers. There is certainly no problem running an X server in MacOS, nor is there a problem running it in Windows -- but these systems are not being marketed to people who have the technical skill to set that up. Not to start a flame war, but Apple just isn't trying to attract users who are aware of X11, Unix terminals, programming, etc. If anything, Apple has tried as hard as possible to remove the "nerdiness" from computing, and present there systems as intuitive, simple, straightforward computers that any idiot with no computing skills whatsoever can figure out how to use. That's fine, but when it comes to doing something that doesn't fit into the desktop computer model -- running a program on a server, and having its GUI rendered on your PC does not fit into the desktop model, at least not as Apple has implemented it -- they are not marketing to people who are comfortable, knowledgeable, or appreciative of such things. You don't have to be their target market to use Apple systems, but you have to be aware of what their target market is, and that the overwhelming majority of Apple users have no interest in anything beyond the desktop metaphor that Apple has created.
It is necessary for me to stress that I am not criticizing Apple or its users; I am criticizing my university and the Mathworks company, for creating an environment where only people who are involved in computing can access Matlab outside of our computer labs. My point is that, because of the terms of Mathworks' site license, the software must be on a specific number of university owned systems, and that while there is nothing stopping Apple or Microsoft users from accessing that software, the majority are not knowledgeable enough to do that. The university doesn't do much to educate or encourage students to set up X servers and run Matlab/Mathematica/Maple on our servers (can't say I blame them; the increased network and server load would probably bring everything to a grinding halt), and most students who use this software aren't even aware that they can access it in that manner anyway.
My school will not give students a copy of Matlab for any purpose, because of license restrictions. We can either use a school terminal (ever wonder what a crowded computer lab looks like?), or run it off a Solaris server (X11 forwarding, leaving Windows and most Apple users out of the loop) which has strict resource limits imposed (forget processing anything big). Of course, with this setup, it is completely impossible to hook up any specialized hardware to the system running Matlab, so to process data from the real world, we must first collect it on one computer, then copy it over to a computer with Matlab installed (which is rarely in the same room as the equipment in use), and no, you cannot process anything as it happens, and yes, our disk space on the Solaris server is limited to 100MB, so your data can't be too large (not that you get enough CPU cycles to process anything large).
Octave? Right on my system. On any system I want, actually. I miss a few features, and bit of Matlab compatibility (not nearly as bad as it sounds, I have yet to have it be an actual problem), and a GUI (which I am not at all concerned about -- I'll take a functional CLI over a dysfunctional GUI any day), but in the end, I get what I needed: Something that allows me to work with other people's Matlab code, without having to wait in line for a computer or worrying about a resource limit on a Unix server. If Mathworks stopped screwing around with license restrictions, that are even worse than Wolfram (the maker of Mathematica, which is also mangled in license restrictions), I would never have even looked into Octave.
Like Windows, Matlab has become too popular for everyone to just drop and move on to some other platform. Python may be great, maybe even for scientific computing, but Matlab is just what people are used to. It is good that Octave exists as a free software clone of Matlab -- a great way to show people (my fellow engineers included) that it is entirely possible to live without proprietary software, and a great way to bring non-programmers into the free software movement.
Should a restaurant owner, who is only the legal owner of the restaurant, be making more money than the people who run the restaurant? I don't know; did he contribute any talent, any effort, to the construction or running of the restaurant? Does the record company contribute more to the CD than the artist does? Should a singer or guitar play with an appreciable level of talent (that is, enough that people want to buy his music without an expert marketing team convincing them to) make less money per album than the company that manufactures CD's?
What does a record company contribute to an album? Unless the record company employs puts more talent and effort into producing the album than the artist does, why should they receive 10 times more of the profit from the album than the artist? It is hard to make that argument for most of today's popular music, since the majority of the talent in the album is in marketing and convincing people that it is actually worth paying to listen to, but that is just a natural result of large media companies.
I know, it sounds crazy in this country, with our progressive, modern society, that people who have talent in anything other than business making more money than people with business skills.
With all our modern technology, though, musicians could make money with only one or two guys helping them with distribution, even worldwide distribution, and take home a much larger percentage of the profit. As long as a quiet place to record the music can be located, even someone with almost no financial backing could potentially sell a lot of music. If only there weren't people fighting such ideas...
...I've just about given up on politicians in this state. Albany has not been able to pass an on time budget for...actually, I don't think I was even born the last time they passed an on time budget. Governor Pataki was a union-busting asshole, and Governor Spitzer has failed to fulfill his promise of restoring integrity to Albany. Hillary Clinton votes for one idiotic bill after another, and Chuck Schumer voted in favor of Mukasey (need I say more?).
Personally, I think the latter option is more appealing, but only because we've been doing with with Linux for more than a decade.
Well, these are serious questions that we need to ask, and because they are so important, you can't expect everyone to immediately agree. It is better that we are debating the question, rather than simply following what one man has to say (regardless of the fact that I agree with what he has to say, it is still good to debate it).
Worse, these "rich content" websites are almost always buggy or problematic in some way. Our library search software, "Metalink," will fall apart if you try to open multiple windows or tabs. There is no reason why that web page needs any Javascript whatsoever, but their use of it only makes it less functional. More complex software is more prone to failure, and there is no escaping that.
The worst part is that, if this bill passes, I have no doubt that there will be people who are acquitted but whose computers were already auctioned off, and who will be unable to retrieve them. There is a reason that we have due process, courts, and trials in this country, but nobody can see past it. Almost everyone I know thinks that the police should have more power to invade people's homes on suspicions; I suppose they just see too many cop shows where the police officers magically know who is guilty but have to work to prove it (heaven forbid!).
There are no major party candidates who will appropriately serve the people. Those that are against torture are voting for crap like this, and those that are against crap like this are voting against health care, and those that are for health care and against this crap are all in third parties. The problem is that the people aren't aware of these issues, because their lives are flooded with jingoism and irrelevancies. Of course, as Thomas Jefferson put it: When the people stop caring about public affairs, the government becomes wolves and the people become sheep.
What really interests me about Microsoft is that, because they need to get people to continue to upgrade year by year, what could motivate them to fix all their bugs? Perhaps the reason their products keep getting bigger and bigger but not doing proportionally more is that they are keeping the bug rates up -- fix old bugs, but introduce new bugs, so there is a constant incentive for people to upgrade. It doesn't seem so implausible, since they already have a monopoly position and therefore have little room to make a business of acquiring more customers...
Small media companies aren't hunting down college students; big media companies are. Small media companies aren't threatening free software DVD players; big media companies are. Big media companies pushed for the DMCA because it helps them. They didn't even consider the effect it might have on small companies, and why should they have? That was congress' job (judge for yourself whether or not Congress succeeded).
At least once a year, these results come out in yet another study. Perhaps we should declare a new holiday: False Sense of Security Day (and of course, False Sense of Security Eve, when a hacker in a Santa suit constructs an enormous botnet and takes down a few small mailservers with spam).
Unfortunately, of the major party candidates, I can only say who will worsen the privacy situation: Hillary Clinton. If you doubt it, just look at some of the crap she's proposed or voted for in the senate. As president, I could see her pushing mandatory DRM, mandatory TPM chips, immunity for anyone collaborating with the NSA wiretap program, and a strong push further down the "I have nothing to hide so I don't need privacy" road.
And that is just what I personally use. Outlook, Evolution, and others have similar features. GMail's web interface is interesting, but you can only go so far with a web interface, and I really don't see the attraction of a web interface over a mature, integrated email program. My university made a big deal out of an upgrade to a new web interface for our email, and I just yawn seeing "new" features that I've been using since high school.
Except that the Apple mantra is that everything "just works," that it is "easy to do everything you need," etc. A software package that "just works" but is rendered inoperable by a routine patch process is news, at least on Digg and Slashdot (and similar sites), especially with all the Mac OS fanboyism that's been going around lately.