ask the one whose data you want to use. It's clear, it's simple, and it's fair
It's fair, but it's far from simple. Current state of the art can barely pose the question (This is what APPEL addresses) and it certainly can't offer P3P-enabled products to people building sites today.
If I browse to a site that claims to request data for one purpose (that I accept) and then does something unacceptable with it, then I have little redress under the current DPA. The DPA simply doesn't account for the situation where I might make a per-visit choice about how much information I want to offer, and the purposes for which I understood it would be used. The DPA just sees "data" and doesn't distinguish much between purposes. Claiming that I'd only offered my data on the basis of a particular offer (we'll use it for X, but not sell it on for Y) gets into per-issue contract law and outside the DPA remit.
I'd hope that the European users, having a clear choice between privacy in Europe and blatant abuse in the US, would avoid American sites,
I'm a UK-based eCommerce developer. How should I develop my site ("Orinoco.com") when my main US-based competitor can do sophisticated CRM to up-sell related products and offer recommendations, but I can't ?
I don't think there's any hope of a boycott. We don't (most of us) boycott Outlook, despite Melissa, and we don't boycott Amazon over patent issues. Very few users will support a boycott when the most obvious effect is to reduce their apparent functionality
I'm in favour of privacy, but I also like good CRM systems that recommend useful books to me. The UK DPA (Data Protection Act) is far too blunt to distinguish between "helpful" CRM and intrusive "snooping" (mainly because those subjective terms are just that, subjective). We don't just need another legal framework for controlling personalised data and its security, we need some mechanism that allows the identified person to specify, at time of collection, how much data may be collected and what may be done with it in the future. This is an issue as complex as inherited rights management....
Have you seen the complexity of P3P and APPEL ? Now those are privacy issue implementations by smart geeks, not by lawyers. If we ever produce a workable legal framework that can distinguish between "good" and "bad" data, then it will be hugely complex.
Can I take the European Union to court for failing to protect my right to privacy
IANAL
No. We (in the UK) have no right to privacy, as we have no defined "rights" to anything, in the way that these are clearly defined in the USA. What we have instead is a set of laws on data privacy (and they're not a bad set). If a company breaks them, then we may have a case against that company. -- Although if they're a US company, then we may not have a case anyway, as they can dodge on the basis of the EU jurisdiction not being applicable to them. What we don't have is a case against our governing bodies. This is in the same way that if we were mugged, we'd have a case against the mugger, but not the government for preventing it.
Does this include all useful crypto (according to the RIP bill) ? I can already buy reliable non-pr0n hosting on the UK mainland, but I'd still like somewhere that didn't have the RIP problem. If you aren't going to help with that, then why don't I just host in Switzerland or Andorra ?
Self Defence is OK, but if we extend the analogy with IRL law, then it has defined limits. Only "Reasonable Force" may be used, and anyone who uses "self defence" also lays themselves open to a charge of assault.
If you're being hammered on offensively by a router that's actually causing a flood, then it's reasonable to retaliate in ways that might reduce the incoming flood. OTOH, it's not reasonable to try to take down their web server, just because they're taking yours down (assuming they're separate machines). A measure that is defensive is reasonable, even if "offence is the best form of defence".
Equally, mail-bombing is not acceptable as a response to an immediate threat. It's a delayed measure that won't stop an ongoing attack and is only there as a means of revenge. If you're under a chronic Spam attack though, email may be a reasonable defence, as it's now a comparable timescale.
There's also the problem of injuring innocents. Defending yourself in the immediate is reasonable, even if it's a compromised 3rd party machine, because you're trying to fight a clear and present danger. Owning it and rm * -r, just because it's an open mail relay that's Spamming you is excessive and should lay you open to as much of a claim for damages as if you'd cracked it of your own evil intent.
If you attack an unrelated box, because a spoofed header made you think that it was the source, then you're liable for the damage you cause. If you shoot back when attacked, then you're expected to be competent enough to shoot straight at the real targets.
Swan produced the first vaguely reliable lightbulb, received the first patent, mass-produced the first usable bulbs (in Newcastle, before the Swan Edison company), and is even reported to have independently invented the carburised filament. Starr described (sic) the idea of using a carburised filament, but didn't specify a useful material to use, didn't have a means of sealing the envelope after production and didn't even have an adequate vacuum pump to produce an unsealed demonstrator. Starr's claim is also widely disputed as post-facto filing of someone else's idea. Not to imply that the American Patent Office makes a habit of encouraging such practices, then or now....
Edison supporters still claim that Edison received the first patent in 1879, ignoring Swan's UK patent in 1878 (they can't spell Humphrey Dav(e)y either).
As for the trustworthiness of Edison's patent, then the US PTO themselves ruled it invalid in 1883, in favour of William Sawyer's claims.
If you want more details on Joseph Swan, look in the archives of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne. This is a private library, and still going (although my own membership has lapsed since I left Newcastle). Apart from demonstrations of Swan's work, it's also where Humphrey Davey first demonstrated the miner's safety lamp.
I'd mention Edison's treatment of Tesla, but I wouldn't want you to think I'm one of those monomaniac loons that hangs around on the Net, slating Edison 8-)
The Ed Krol book is still an interesting read. It was authored in the early '90s ('92 ?), so the 'Net was already well established but clearly in a state of flux. Most usage was mail, usenet and ftp.
The Web (sic) gets a a very brief mention in it, but in the form of WAIS and Gopher, not WWW and HTML
I'm just wondering why they're not suing people for burning music CDs (cd-to-cd copy),
CD copying is very similar to home taping. They don't like it, but they know that it's a small scale thing. I might copy a CD for one friend, but I'm very unlikely to stand on a street corner handing them out to strangers. Similarly ripping MP3s for a Diamond Rio, or whatever is still only losing one (potential) sale, for some non-trivial time investment on my part -- it's self-limiting.
Napster changes all that. It's not only a good means of doing the previous level of minor copying, but it's also a better mass publication medium than commercial servers can offer ! Napster one track and that's several thousand lost sales, as a low estimate.
I still don't know if Napster is the best thing for music since recording, or the worst thing. All I do know is that it's simply incompatible with the current model of the music industry; poor quality bands sold by high quality hype.
maybe we'll finally see some companies experiment with allowing coders to telecommute.
I don't think so -- it's worse now than two years ago. This whole over-hyped bubble economy means that making good product no longer counts for anything, nor does the fact that it's now _easier_ to telecommute than to travel.
In eCommerce especially, it's all face-to-face bravado and Wall Street egomania. Have you seen the business card scene in American Psycho ?.... If you're not at this week's trendy location, you're clearly not a serious player, no matter whether the product works or not.
boo.com were the worst culprits here -- "We're hip and trendy, so we'll need a Carnaby Street office" is fair enough, but why did they need to put the call centre there too ? That's just piling the money up and lighting it.
Personally I'll switch to making furniture and living on no money, before I'd move to London.
Will you take a rain check until I have some up-moderation points ? Good comments.
I've tried to feed WAP / WML to Palms. Total disaster, the WAP protocol is so squeezed dow to fit phones that it's unworkable for anything bigger than a Tamagotchi.
You can use XSL/whatever-transformations-you-desire to spit it out as HTML (or XHTML) from the server side today
I know this. For the last twelve months, I've worked on little else. Trust me, that's not a good choice for building any Slashcode version in the "near future".
Similarly, neither is client side XML. You can get away with that on msdn.microsoft.com/xml/, where you know anyone connecting is going to understand the issue, even if they are using a non-IE browser. You'd have to be pretty brave though to try it in the Linux-loving mosh-pit of Slashdot !
programmers are usually the last to understand or get right either usability or design.
Programmers are the second to last. The worst of all are graphic designers; meaning those who spend all day thinking about how the item looks, not how it's used.
#insert boo_flame.h
You'll have heard this rant from me already - there are too many old-media people out there today, trading as new-media people. They think everything is a magazine advert. Appearance is everything, there's no interaction, and there's no need to scale it onto "other sorts of paper". These people make for bad usability, and they're certainly not "programmers" doing it because it's easy to implement that way.
A sub-species of these are the young designers, who think everything is a Mac G4 with a Flash plug-in and huge bandwidth. These people are even worse. Yes, it does look wonderful. No, I don't care !
you guys spend all days thing about wonderful things like efficiency and reusability. Chocolate, mainly
I spend all day thinking about colors and interfaces. It's a different mindset.
That's a great mindset. Unfortunately too many designers think about colours and shapes, but not interfaces.
Nielson [...] speaks for Programmer-like mindset.
Nielsen speaks for usability. Sometimes that clashes with graphic design, sometimes it clashes with coding.
I'd support XHTML (but go easy on the CSS), but not XML. XML doesn't allow much extra that can't be achieved anyway by screen scraping, and that's pretty easy in XHTML (Palm portallers, read the last para before screaming at me).
The only real benefit from going with XML would be for people who wanted to leech Slashdot content and rebadge it on other sites in a fairly greedy manner. This isn't something that many will want, nor should it be encouraged. If there's a demand for headline and link-swapping between sites, then use RSS - it's what it's there for.
The downside of XML, is that it's compatible with nothing out there browser-wise and so you'd inevitably fall back to a two-formats legacy position, probably involving HTML 3.2 for the lesser stream.
XHTML Transitional doesn't break any existing browsers, and it still lets you use enough format control to make it viewable on old Netscapes. A good push for WAI standards on Slash content would fit in with an XHTML move and would probably benefit people doing portals for wireless and small-screen devices. I certainly don't think that wireless portalling needs XML (with a SlashSchema) instead of XHTML.
Low current PSU design is dead easy these days. I'm not certain that they'll reach a few hundred V, but there are very many DC-DC converters out there which are based on single-chip chipsets. Most are capacitor based, where the inductors are only used for filtering purposes, not even as transformers.
Any decent electronic component vendor (rswww.com) will list these and you can just grab the application note. I've built these things for the 5V->50V region starting from scratch in an evening and it's no big deal. Some even do developer kits with a ready-etched PCB.
There's certainly no need to use 555s any more - the chipsets are as easy, and more sophisticated. Many also have a simple "output disable" input that would solve your other problem.
I used to work with lasers, where long-throw piezos were commonplace as mirror adjusters etc.
Some use levers, but that's awkward to make and less accurate in use. Maybe they'd work for this, where it's a fairly simple "up or down" output.
The usual method was to stack piezos, so that they were mechanically in series, but electrically in parallel. This gave you long throws (a few mm), but with voltages in the hundreds of V, not the thousands.
Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio
I used to like Visual Studio too. I work in the suit-based Microsoft world, so it's the best editor I have any reasonable hope of getting on-site.
The downside of "smart" environments is when they get out of date. If the "intelligence" it knows about HTML turns out to no longer be true, then it becomes counter-productive. As an example, I no longer write HTML, but always XHTML. The InterDev HTML editor fights you all the way with that ! It doesn't understand closing the tag on an empty element, and it doesn't know about quoting attributes. If you insert an without the size, then when you next look at the source InterDev will have gone in there and mangled it, "helpfully" putting width and height attributes onto it. Unfortunately: <img src="foo.jpg" / WIDTH=120 HEIGHT=240> isn't even valid HTML (the / that ought to stay at the end), let alone XHTML.
Are you really so gullible as to believe any statements from rock stars to be literally true ?
Maybe she does "support" Napster in a rather agnostic manner (it's Geffen's money its stealing, not hers, so she doesn't care) by not taking Metallica's "sue-everyone" line, but that's hardly doing anything to support it in a pro-active manner. Love has a big mouth, and you shouldn't believe everything that comes out of it.
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students
Falling local sales doesn't implicate Napster. There could be other reasons, and both of these alternative channels are also likely to be more common amongst students than the general population.
Mail order. I can save 30% on a CD by web-purchase rather than shopping locally. I haven't bought over the counter from a big shop in over a year.
Home CD copying. I know more people with CD burners than Napster users.
Napster (and MP3 generally) isn't popular in the UK because our phone charges are too high. The fact that we're also seeing a big drop in high-street CD sales suggests to me that it's mail order taking the biggest bite out, not MP3.
College students spend a finite disposable income (basically their CC limits and bank overdraughts) on music and beer. As part of a Global Brewing Conspiracy, the brewers produced Napster. Make either one of these essential student needs free, and the students will spend exactly as much as before, but they'll spend it exclusively on the other instead.
Slashdot Mirror
ask the one whose data you want to use. It's clear, it's simple, and it's fair
It's fair, but it's far from simple. Current state of the art can barely pose the question (This is what APPEL addresses) and it certainly can't offer P3P-enabled products to people building sites today.
If I browse to a site that claims to request data for one purpose (that I accept) and then does something unacceptable with it, then I have little redress under the current DPA. The DPA simply doesn't account for the situation where I might make a per-visit choice about how much information I want to offer, and the purposes for which I understood it would be used. The DPA just sees "data" and doesn't distinguish much between purposes. Claiming that I'd only offered my data on the basis of a particular offer (we'll use it for X, but not sell it on for Y) gets into per-issue contract law and outside the DPA remit.
I'd hope that the European users, having a clear choice between privacy in Europe and blatant abuse in the US, would avoid American sites,
I'm a UK-based eCommerce developer. How should I develop my site ("Orinoco.com") when my main US-based competitor can do sophisticated CRM to up-sell related products and offer recommendations, but I can't ?
I don't think there's any hope of a boycott. We don't (most of us) boycott Outlook, despite Melissa, and we don't boycott Amazon over patent issues. Very few users will support a boycott when the most obvious effect is to reduce their apparent functionality
I'm in favour of privacy, but I also like good CRM systems that recommend useful books to me. The UK DPA (Data Protection Act) is far too blunt to distinguish between "helpful" CRM and intrusive "snooping" (mainly because those subjective terms are just that, subjective). We don't just need another legal framework for controlling personalised data and its security, we need some mechanism that allows the identified person to specify, at time of collection, how much data may be collected and what may be done with it in the future. This is an issue as complex as inherited rights management....
Have you seen the complexity of P3P and APPEL ? Now those are privacy issue implementations by smart geeks, not by lawyers. If we ever produce a workable legal framework that can distinguish between "good" and "bad" data, then it will be hugely complex.
Can I take the European Union to court for failing to protect my right to privacy
IANAL
No. We (in the UK) have no right to privacy, as we have no defined "rights" to anything, in the way that these are clearly defined in the USA. What we have instead is a set of laws on data privacy (and they're not a bad set). If a company breaks them, then we may have a case against that company. -- Although if they're a US company, then we may not have a case anyway, as they can dodge on the basis of the EU jurisdiction not being applicable to them. What we don't have is a case against our governing bodies. This is in the same way that if we were mugged, we'd have a case against the mugger, but not the government for preventing it.
In the UK, all UK-illegal content will be banned.
Does this include all useful crypto (according to the RIP bill) ? I can already buy reliable non-pr0n hosting on the UK mainland, but I'd still like somewhere that didn't have the RIP problem. If you aren't going to help with that, then why don't I just host in Switzerland or Andorra ?
Self Defence is OK, but if we extend the analogy with IRL law, then it has defined limits. Only "Reasonable Force" may be used, and anyone who uses "self defence" also lays themselves open to a charge of assault.
If you're being hammered on offensively by a router that's actually causing a flood, then it's reasonable to retaliate in ways that might reduce the incoming flood. OTOH, it's not reasonable to try to take down their web server, just because they're taking yours down (assuming they're separate machines). A measure that is defensive is reasonable, even if "offence is the best form of defence".
Equally, mail-bombing is not acceptable as a response to an immediate threat. It's a delayed measure that won't stop an ongoing attack and is only there as a means of revenge. If you're under a chronic Spam attack though, email may be a reasonable defence, as it's now a comparable timescale.
There's also the problem of injuring innocents. Defending yourself in the immediate is reasonable, even if it's a compromised 3rd party machine, because you're trying to fight a clear and present danger. Owning it and rm * -r, just because it's an open mail relay that's Spamming you is excessive and should lay you open to as much of a claim for damages as if you'd cracked it of your own evil intent.
If you attack an unrelated box, because a spoofed header made you think that it was the source, then you're liable for the damage you cause. If you shoot back when attacked, then you're expected to be competent enough to shoot straight at the real targets.
Websters as a reliable authority ?
Swan produced the first vaguely reliable lightbulb, received the first patent, mass-produced the first usable bulbs (in Newcastle, before the Swan Edison company), and is even reported to have independently invented the carburised filament. Starr described (sic) the idea of using a carburised filament, but didn't specify a useful material to use, didn't have a means of sealing the envelope after production and didn't even have an adequate vacuum pump to produce an unsealed demonstrator. Starr's claim is also widely disputed as post-facto filing of someone else's idea. Not to imply that the American Patent Office makes a habit of encouraging such practices, then or now....
Edison supporters still claim that Edison received the first patent in 1879, ignoring Swan's UK patent in 1878 (they can't spell Humphrey Dav(e)y either).
As for the trustworthiness of Edison's patent, then the US PTO themselves ruled it invalid in 1883, in favour of William Sawyer's claims.
If you want more details on Joseph Swan, look in the archives of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne. This is a private library, and still going (although my own membership has lapsed since I left Newcastle). Apart from demonstrations of Swan's work, it's also where Humphrey Davey first demonstrated the miner's safety lamp.
I'd mention Edison's treatment of Tesla, but I wouldn't want you to think I'm one of those monomaniac loons that hangs around on the Net, slating Edison 8-)
The Ed Krol book is still an interesting read. It was authored in the early '90s ('92 ?), so the 'Net was already well established but clearly in a state of flux. Most usage was mail, usenet and ftp.
The Web (sic) gets a a very brief mention in it, but in the form of WAIS and Gopher, not WWW and HTML
invent a light bulb [...]
95% of the people who read this will know exactly who
Easy - Swan (another Brit) invented the incandescent lightbulb. (No, it wasn't Edison)
I expect to see a flurry of postings about how both Davies and PSS were American.
After all, America is happy enough to steal our U-boat stories.
MP3 was born at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, in the town of Erlangen
Does this mean we should measure MP3 traffic in "Erlangens" 8-) We need a unit of volume anyway.
OK, so it's not the greatest pun in the world, but if no-one gets it, then Slashdot really has lost its geek primacy.
I'm just wondering why they're not suing people for burning music CDs (cd-to-cd copy),
CD copying is very similar to home taping. They don't like it, but they know that it's a small scale thing. I might copy a CD for one friend, but I'm very unlikely to stand on a street corner handing them out to strangers. Similarly ripping MP3s for a Diamond Rio, or whatever is still only losing one (potential) sale, for some non-trivial time investment on my part -- it's self-limiting.
Napster changes all that. It's not only a good means of doing the previous level of minor copying, but it's also a better mass publication medium than commercial servers can offer ! Napster one track and that's several thousand lost sales, as a low estimate.
I still don't know if Napster is the best thing for music since recording, or the worst thing. All I do know is that it's simply incompatible with the current model of the music industry; poor quality bands sold by high quality hype.
maybe we'll finally see some companies experiment with allowing coders to telecommute.
I don't think so -- it's worse now than two years ago. This whole over-hyped bubble economy means that making good product no longer counts for anything, nor does the fact that it's now _easier_ to telecommute than to travel.
In eCommerce especially, it's all face-to-face bravado and Wall Street egomania. Have you seen the business card scene in American Psycho ?.... If you're not at this week's trendy location, you're clearly not a serious player, no matter whether the product works or not.
boo.com were the worst culprits here -- "We're hip and trendy, so we'll need a Carnaby Street office" is fair enough, but why did they need to put the call centre there too ? That's just piling the money up and lighting it.
Personally I'll switch to making furniture and living on no money, before I'd move to London.
Will you take a rain check until I have some up-moderation points ? Good comments.
I've tried to feed WAP / WML to Palms. Total disaster, the WAP protocol is so squeezed dow to fit phones that it's unworkable for anything bigger than a Tamagotchi.
You can use XSL/whatever-transformations-you-desire to spit it out as HTML (or XHTML) from the server side today
I know this. For the last twelve months, I've worked on little else. Trust me, that's not a good choice for building any Slashcode version in the "near future".
Similarly, neither is client side XML. You can get away with that on msdn.microsoft.com/xml/, where you know anyone connecting is going to understand the issue, even if they are using a non-IE browser. You'd have to be pretty brave though to try it in the Linux-loving mosh-pit of Slashdot !
programmers are usually the last to understand or get right either usability or design.
Programmers are the second to last. The worst of all are graphic designers; meaning those who spend all day thinking about how the item looks , not how it's used .
#insert boo_flame.h
You'll have heard this rant from me already - there are too many old-media people out there today, trading as new-media people. They think everything is a magazine advert. Appearance is everything, there's no interaction, and there's no need to scale it onto "other sorts of paper".
These people make for bad usability, and they're certainly not "programmers" doing it because it's easy to implement that way.
A sub-species of these are the young designers, who think everything is a Mac G4 with a Flash plug-in and huge bandwidth. These people are even worse.
Yes, it does look wonderful. No, I don't care !
you guys spend all days thing about wonderful things like efficiency and reusability.
Chocolate, mainly
I spend all day thinking about colors and interfaces. It's a different mindset.
That's a great mindset. Unfortunately too many designers think about colours and shapes, but not interfaces.
Nielson [...] speaks for Programmer-like mindset.
Nielsen speaks for usability. Sometimes that clashes with graphic design, sometimes it clashes with coding.
I'd support XHTML (but go easy on the CSS), but not XML. XML doesn't allow much extra that can't be achieved anyway by screen scraping, and that's pretty easy in XHTML (Palm portallers, read the last para before screaming at me).
The only real benefit from going with XML would be for people who wanted to leech Slashdot content and rebadge it on other sites in a fairly greedy manner. This isn't something that many will want, nor should it be encouraged. If there's a demand for headline and link-swapping between sites, then use RSS - it's what it's there for.
The downside of XML, is that it's compatible with nothing out there browser-wise and so you'd inevitably fall back to a two-formats legacy position, probably involving HTML 3.2 for the lesser stream.
XHTML Transitional doesn't break any existing browsers, and it still lets you use enough format control to make it viewable on old Netscapes. A good push for WAI standards on Slash content would fit in with an XHTML move and would probably benefit people doing portals for wireless and small-screen devices. I certainly don't think that wireless portalling needs XML (with a SlashSchema) instead of XHTML.
Low current PSU design is dead easy these days. I'm not certain that they'll reach a few hundred V, but there are very many DC-DC converters out there which are based on single-chip chipsets. Most are capacitor based, where the inductors are only used for filtering purposes, not even as transformers.
Any decent electronic component vendor (rswww.com) will list these and you can just grab the application note. I've built these things for the 5V->50V region starting from scratch in an evening and it's no big deal. Some even do developer kits with a ready-etched PCB.
There's certainly no need to use 555s any more - the chipsets are as easy, and more sophisticated. Many also have a simple "output disable" input that would solve your other problem.
I used to work with lasers, where long-throw piezos were commonplace as mirror adjusters etc.
Some use levers, but that's awkward to make and less accurate in use. Maybe they'd work for this, where it's a fairly simple "up or down" output.
The usual method was to stack piezos, so that they were mechanically in series, but electrically in parallel. This gave you long throws (a few mm), but with voltages in the hundreds of V, not the thousands.
Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio
I used to like Visual Studio too. I work in the suit-based Microsoft world, so it's the best editor I have any reasonable hope of getting on-site.
The downside of "smart" environments is when they get out of date. If the "intelligence" it knows about HTML turns out to no longer be true, then it becomes counter-productive. As an example, I no longer write HTML, but always XHTML. The InterDev HTML editor fights you all the way with that ! It doesn't understand closing the tag on an empty element, and it doesn't know about quoting attributes. If you insert an without the size, then when you next look at the source InterDev will have gone in there and mangled it, "helpfully" putting width and height attributes onto it. Unfortunately:
<img src="foo.jpg" / WIDTH=120 HEIGHT=240>
isn't even valid HTML (the / that ought to stay at the end), let alone XHTML.
Are you really so gullible as to believe any statements from rock stars to be literally true ?
Maybe she does "support" Napster in a rather agnostic manner (it's Geffen's money its stealing, not hers, so she doesn't care) by not taking Metallica's "sue-everyone" line, but that's hardly doing anything to support it in a pro-active manner. Love has a big mouth, and you shouldn't believe everything that comes out of it.
PS. Sorry to hear about the size issue.
Napster hurts album sales especially among poor college students
Falling local sales doesn't implicate Napster. There could be other reasons, and both of these alternative channels are also likely to be more common amongst students than the general population.
Napster (and MP3 generally) isn't popular in the UK because our phone charges are too high. The fact that we're also seeing a big drop in high-street CD sales suggests to me that it's mail order taking the biggest bite out, not MP3.
Courtney Love doesn't support Napster, she's just grinding her own axe in an entirely separate argument.
At most, this is a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend"
College students spend a finite disposable income (basically their CC limits and bank overdraughts) on music and beer. As part of a Global Brewing Conspiracy, the brewers produced Napster. Make either one of these essential student needs free, and the students will spend exactly as much as before, but they'll spend it exclusively on the other instead.
That's free as in music, not free as in beer.
B2B - Business to Business.
I can type it faster, and it makes people more likely to give me money.
So what if it's a silly game ? It's their cash, and they're queueing up to throw it at me.
Tech thing.
Unusual output device.
The Slashdoterati.
It only ever leads to one thing; jokes about, "General Protection Fault, Fried customer in booth 2"
Does "Ham" radio have problems with Spam ?