Next thing you know, someone will apply for a Nobel Prize because of the momentous discovery that his "dead" flashlight "works" for a few seconds after being turned off for a few minutes.
Well, I don't think that meets the qualifications for a Nobel Prize, but they could probably get a patent on the process.
yeah, but i can get a cable provider other than time-warner, i can use an isp other than aol, and i can watch news on a channel that isn't cnn.
Yeah, but you can't reverse engineer even the simplest of content encryption. You can't release software unless you're sure it cannot, in any way, be used to hurt AOL/TW or the rest of the content mafia. You cannot use napster to trade mp3s of independant bands who would like you to hear their music for free. And you may not be able to buy a hard drive that doesn't include DRM (that's digital rights management to content providers, digital rectal massage to the rest of us).
Microsoft might not play fair, but at lease UCITA is only half as bad as DMCA or SSSCA. You can always decline a EULA. AOL is worse. It enlists the government's help in becomming more powerful. The justice department can't sue for anti-competitive practices when those practices were enacted into law by the congress.
Re:blogging and the death of the commons
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 2
sorry...but if you're going to begin a post with "learn to code" followed by your own code, you may want to include the library correctly:
Mr. Chomsky needs to stop trying to have his cake and eat it too. There was a massive civil war going on, with four tribes attempting to eradicate each other. Regardless of the reason for US intervention, it's not the US's fault that the culture of blood-warfare existed in the place, or that the civil war occurred.
So the fact that citizens of a third world country are being persecuted by people in their own country gives the US the right to come in and do the same?
What Chomsky is pointing is a legitimate comment on US foreign policy. If we are so quick to engage in military action on behalf of our corporate interests (in this case, big oil) without being careful of who we kill (as in not shooting civilians or blowing up hospitals), we lose our right to ask, "why do they hate us?" when they decide to blow up some of our buildings.
Not that I condone the actions taken by the terrorists on 9/11 (I oppose terrorism in all its forms), but a lot of the anger that Americans are feeling toward Osama Bin Laden should be directed at our own leaders who pissed these people off in the first place. Terrorists are only trying to destroy our way of life because they feel that we destroyed (and continue to destroy) theirs.
Americans have a choice...deal with terrorists trying to disrupt our way of life, or pay higher prices for things. You wanted to talk about having your cake and eating it too, well Americans cannot continue to exploit the third world and expect them to just take it.
The Technology Working Group has a better record of achievement, however. Formed in 1996 to come up with standards for protecting DVDs from piracy, the group has consistently agreed on standards such as the Content Scrambling System, which is built into DVDs and DVD players.
I suppose they just succeded in making me buy a new monitor (...must...learn...not...to...read...online...stor ies...whilst...drinking...coffee...)
I'm so sick of everyone bashing.com workers. The media is so quick to label everything.com a failure. The reality that many of us.com'ers know is that the.com bubble burst because of terrible business plans and greedy venture capitalists. It was *rarely* because engineers weren't able to get the job done.
People have the mistaken idea that just because workers were given more freedom, that the quality of their work suffered. The idea that people working for.com's don't document their work is just wrong. Every.com I worked for (and there were 5) highly valued detailed functional and technical specs. We had coding standards which included fully commenting code. The difference was, we didn't have two years to complete the product. It was always ASAP. As a result, we did view our work less as striving toward a finished product and more toward meeting a deadline and then revisiting it again to add in the features that product planning decided were necessary.
It is truly a shame that so many great ideas are being discarded by labeling them part of the.com phenomenon. Ideas like respecting your workers and trying to create an environment where they can achieve as much as possible. From someone who saw them first hand, these ideas worked. Some amazing things were accomplished by tech workers at.coms...they just didn't have any business application.
So, if you have to slam the.coms, talk about the marketing people who spent millions on advertisements before the company saw revenues, let alone profits. Don't blame it on the engineering teams...we did our job.
Ummm...from all the futuristic sci-fi novels/movies I've seen, there won't be any.
Either global warming will have raised sea levels so that 99% of all land is underwater or mankind will have expanded its civilization into space. In either case, the landlords are unimportant.
It's the waterlords and spacelords that we have to worry about!
(my personal favorite is that mankind will delve deep undergroud to create a society protected from the harmful UV rays which kill with impunity now that there is no protective o3 layer...I suppose then well have magmalords)
Advertising is by nature deceptive. They try to leave out things that would make you not want to buy the product. Here's my take on what they didn't say, but might have meant.
- "The real thing" [Coca-Cola] - if you conclude that thing is meant to be a reference to Coca-Cola, then "The real thing" is a reference to the version of Coca-Cola that they sell, as opposed to the imaginary version that the product development team is currently working on.
- "You'll love the way we fly" [Delta] - you will, at some point in the future, love the way we fly. That point in time, however, is unlikely to be now or anywhere near your flight date.
- "Quality is job 1" [Ford] - Everything else is job 0...every computer person should know that one is hardly a logical starting place.
- "We try harder" [Avis] -...than we could. This is actually a veiled threat.
- "Just slightly ahead of our time" [Panasonic] - All of our offices are located just west of the beginning of the timezones. So, while it's technically 10:00am, are time appears closer to 10:02. We didn't say we were way ahead of our time, just slightly.
Could something like this be used to detect violations of gpl'd software? It would be especially useful for detecting usage of gpl'd software in proprietary products where the source is never released.
Well...Wall street has been saying for sometime that broadband will be the next big thing. Napster, for all its flaws, could have been an agent for bringing middle america into the broadband age. Many companies bet a lot of money on the majority of people having high speed access to the internet. These companies lost a lot of customers when Napster was shut down.
This has a cascading effect. If everyone had broadband, we'd be seeing a lot more high quality multi-media applications. These applications don't run too well on those old PII's. Napster in and of itself probably wouldn't have caused people to upgrade their computers. But Napster was just the leading edge of the sword. Following in Napster's footsteps would have been movies on demand, interactive television and a whole lot of other innovations (combined with a whole lot more spectacular failures). Napster + ICraveTV + the promise of future online entertainment might have made a lot of people upgrade.
I don't think it is too far out there to say that a massive broadband expansion might have kept the economic ball rolling. It might have made the fall that much harder once it came, but we'd probably be doing better today than we are now.
</my_$0.01>(it's a recession...I can't afford the full $0.02)
It's tough to say for sure. If understanding why people spend money were a simple matter, there'd be a lot of out of work economists. But there is some strong, albeit empircal, evidence that Napster did help music sales.
During Napster's heyday, someone figured out that "The Offspring" were the most pirated band on the net. The band embraced the title, even selling Napster t-shirts on their website (until, not without some irony, napster sent them a cease and desist letter). The band's album sold far more copies than expected (the percentage increase in sales was much more than the average band, indicating that there was an effect beyond the strong economy), their concerts sold out and they got far more air/mtv play.
This only indicates that p2p distribution might help record sales during a strong economy (it says nothing about how it might affect music sales during a down economy tho). However, it does indicate that p2p distribution might have some positive affect on music sales.
Heck...just say the words "free beer" a lot and you'll win by a landslide.
I'd have to agree with the parent tho...stressing techie issues is a bad way to try to get elected. Regardless of whether it is a legitimate problem or not, the tech-saavy population is one of the least motivated electorates around. How many/.'ers have written lengthy posts to/. about the issues they feel strongest about but have never written their congressperson?
Relying on the tech saavy vote to get elected probably won't work. However, that said, when re-election time rolls around, the "I saved the city $xxxxxx.xx using open source software" might work really well.
I would be fine with a Katz review of Tron in recognition of the re-release on DVD, but a link to Amazon (with a referrer id...this guy will $1.50 per sale that amazon makes) plus the words "all for $29.99" is over the top. Just tell us that there is a new DVD release of the movie and point us to the movie studio's page about it. I'm sure everyone on slashdot who has fond memories of the movie is fully capable of finding an online retailer who's happy to sell it to them.
All I'm saying is that this is blatant advertising and they should have done something more understated like this.
Random note:
Anytime I post with a subject that ends in "!!!" someone always mods it "Troll" When my posts end in "..." they're usually modded "Interesting"
yes...we see the connection. But the "all for $29.99" with the link to buy it is pretty wrong.
I could understand if announced the features and had a link to the studio's page about it, but this is pretty much a blatant advertisement. I wouldn't be surprised if Muddie worked for Amazon or the studio that is releasing it.
Why pay for a banner ad when you can get way more attention by posting it as a news story?
However, the article intro that people see above doesn't exactly make it sound like it is a problem with SIMPLE. I think we've been a victim of article marketing. If the/. intro read, "We came up with a cool new protocol, cept now we realized its kinda broken for file transfers" would you click through to read it? But if it says, "Internet could grind to a halt because of AOL users insatiable need to chat and their inability to be happy with plain text IM'ing" more people will read it.
Well...I highly doubt that the aliens would be *enjoying* the content that is being sent to them. If ever there was a demographic that could gripe about being negatively portrayed in the media, it would be aliens.
Would you enjoy movies in which some alien race that is wrongly persecuted/attacked by a group of humans (who are far more advanced than the alien race). Would you get that "warm and fuzzy" feeling when the small band of out-numbered aliens took on the hoard of humans and amazingly triumphed?
Or perhaps you would enjoy the light hearted romantic romp where, at the end of the movie, the two aliens embrace and share a passionate kiss (except, due to differences in anatomy, their passionate kiss is much closer to our hard-core pornography).
I think the true concern of the Content Mafia^H^H^H^H^HCreators is that the aliens, upon viewing the content sent out into space, will send new content back to the people of earth (how difficult can it be to create completely derivitive sequels?) and then we'd get all our content for free.
This is the same phillips, I believe, that just a few short days ago was championed for saying that copy-proofing CD's was against the logo rules.. I love how fast this community can change its mind about someone, based soley on them attempting to protect their interests.
When your kid makes the honor role, you support them. When they plow the family station wagon into a telephone pole, you get mad. Same kid, but it's the actions that we react to. If you want to point out a double standard, point out that we never give MS credit on the rare occasions when they do something good.
If you want to see a place where other peoples intellectual products belong to the community, move to a communist country. (Not that there are/were ever any truly successful communist countries, in the true sense of the word communist..). I still prefer capitalism.
Hmmm...I'll take Democracy over Capitalism. Remember, Communism was a fusion of a type of government and an economic system. In America, we have a type of government which (theoretically) keeps checks on our economic system, but is a seperate entity. DRM is the perfect example of where the checking should occur (by affirming fair use, etc). The idea that We have rights is pretty fundamental to the principles of our democracy, but seems laughable to your average corporation/content syndicate.
Slashdot Mirror
It might have put Enron out of business.
Next thing you know, someone will apply for a Nobel Prize because of the momentous discovery that his "dead" flashlight "works" for a few seconds after being turned off for a few minutes.
Well, I don't think that meets the qualifications for a Nobel Prize, but they could probably get a patent on the process.
Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book program.
That's strange...I keep trying to hit his website, but keep getting mine instead...
yeah, but i can get a cable provider other than time-warner, i can use an isp other than aol, and i can watch news on a channel that isn't cnn.
Yeah, but you can't reverse engineer even the simplest of content encryption. You can't release software unless you're sure it cannot, in any way, be used to hurt AOL/TW or the rest of the content mafia. You cannot use napster to trade mp3s of independant bands who would like you to hear their music for free. And you may not be able to buy a hard drive that doesn't include DRM (that's digital rights management to content providers, digital rectal massage to the rest of us).
Microsoft might not play fair, but at lease UCITA is only half as bad as DMCA or SSSCA. You can always decline a EULA. AOL is worse. It enlists the government's help in becomming more powerful. The justice department can't sue for anti-competitive practices when those practices were enacted into law by the congress.
sorry...but if you're going to begin a post with "learn to code" followed by your own code, you may want to include the library correctly:
#include <iostream.h>
...
...the grass gets trampled.
(or something like that)
Mr. Chomsky needs to stop trying to have his cake and eat it too. There was a massive civil war going on, with four tribes attempting to eradicate each other. Regardless of the reason for US intervention, it's not the US's fault that the culture of blood-warfare existed in the place, or that the civil war occurred.
/. specific concept.
So the fact that citizens of a third world country are being persecuted by people in their own country gives the US the right to come in and do the same?
What Chomsky is pointing is a legitimate comment on US foreign policy. If we are so quick to engage in military action on behalf of our corporate interests (in this case, big oil) without being careful of who we kill (as in not shooting civilians or blowing up hospitals), we lose our right to ask, "why do they hate us?" when they decide to blow up some of our buildings.
Not that I condone the actions taken by the terrorists on 9/11 (I oppose terrorism in all its forms), but a lot of the anger that Americans are feeling toward Osama Bin Laden should be directed at our own leaders who pissed these people off in the first place. Terrorists are only trying to destroy our way of life because they feel that we destroyed (and continue to destroy) theirs.
Americans have a choice...deal with terrorists trying to disrupt our way of life, or pay higher prices for things. You wanted to talk about having your cake and eating it too, well Americans cannot continue to exploit the third world and expect them to just take it.
Karma isn't a
maybe...(A)OL (O)wned (L)inux?
Unfortunately, even computers will stop reading before they reach the end of the article, so you'd probably have some data loss.
The Technology Working Group has a better record of achievement, however. Formed in 1996 to come up with standards for protecting DVDs from piracy, the group has consistently agreed on standards such as the Content Scrambling System, which is built into DVDs and DVD players.
r ies...whilst...drinking...coffee...)
I suppose they just succeded in making me buy a new monitor (...must...learn...not...to...read...online...sto
I'm so sick of everyone bashing .com workers. The media is so quick to label everything .com a failure. The reality that many of us .com'ers know is that the .com bubble burst because of terrible business plans and greedy venture capitalists. It was *rarely* because engineers weren't able to get the job done.
.com's don't document their work is just wrong. Every .com I worked for (and there were 5) highly valued detailed functional and technical specs. We had coding standards which included fully commenting code. The difference was, we didn't have two years to complete the product. It was always ASAP. As a result, we did view our work less as striving toward a finished product and more toward meeting a deadline and then revisiting it again to add in the features that product planning decided were necessary.
.com phenomenon. Ideas like respecting your workers and trying to create an environment where they can achieve as much as possible. From someone who saw them first hand, these ideas worked. Some amazing things were accomplished by tech workers at .coms...they just didn't have any business application.
.coms, talk about the marketing people who spent millions on advertisements before the company saw revenues, let alone profits. Don't blame it on the engineering teams...we did our job.
People have the mistaken idea that just because workers were given more freedom, that the quality of their work suffered. The idea that people working for
It is truly a shame that so many great ideas are being discarded by labeling them part of the
So, if you have to slam the
(and what will we do with the landlords? :)
Ummm...from all the futuristic sci-fi novels/movies I've seen, there won't be any.
Either global warming will have raised sea levels so that 99% of all land is underwater or mankind will have expanded its civilization into space. In either case, the landlords are unimportant.
It's the waterlords and spacelords that we have to worry about!
(my personal favorite is that mankind will delve deep undergroud to create a society protected from the harmful UV rays which kill with impunity now that there is no protective o3 layer...I suppose then well have magmalords)
the lack of bugs or security holes certainly seems to suggest that, doesn't it?
Advertising is by nature deceptive. They try to leave out things that would make you not want to buy the product. Here's my take on what they didn't say, but might have meant.
...than we could. This is actually a veiled threat.
- "The real thing" [Coca-Cola] - if you conclude that thing is meant to be a reference to Coca-Cola, then "The real thing" is a reference to the version of Coca-Cola that they sell, as opposed to the imaginary version that the product development team is currently working on.
- "You'll love the way we fly" [Delta] - you will, at some point in the future, love the way we fly. That point in time, however, is unlikely to be now or anywhere near your flight date.
- "Quality is job 1" [Ford] - Everything else is job 0...every computer person should know that one is hardly a logical starting place.
- "We try harder" [Avis] -
- "Just slightly ahead of our time" [Panasonic] - All of our offices are located just west of the beginning of the timezones. So, while it's technically 10:00am, are time appears closer to 10:02. We didn't say we were way ahead of our time, just slightly.
Could something like this be used to detect violations of gpl'd software? It would be especially useful for detecting usage of gpl'd software in proprietary products where the source is never released.
Well...Wall street has been saying for sometime that broadband will be the next big thing. Napster, for all its flaws, could have been an agent for bringing middle america into the broadband age. Many companies bet a lot of money on the majority of people having high speed access to the internet. These companies lost a lot of customers when Napster was shut down.
This has a cascading effect. If everyone had broadband, we'd be seeing a lot more high quality multi-media applications. These applications don't run too well on those old PII's. Napster in and of itself probably wouldn't have caused people to upgrade their computers. But Napster was just the leading edge of the sword. Following in Napster's footsteps would have been movies on demand, interactive television and a whole lot of other innovations (combined with a whole lot more spectacular failures). Napster + ICraveTV + the promise of future online entertainment might have made a lot of people upgrade.
I don't think it is too far out there to say that a massive broadband expansion might have kept the economic ball rolling. It might have made the fall that much harder once it came, but we'd probably be doing better today than we are now.
</my_$0.01>(it's a recession...I can't afford the full $0.02)
It's tough to say for sure. If understanding why people spend money were a simple matter, there'd be a lot of out of work economists. But there is some strong, albeit empircal, evidence that Napster did help music sales.
During Napster's heyday, someone figured out that "The Offspring" were the most pirated band on the net. The band embraced the title, even selling Napster t-shirts on their website (until, not without some irony, napster sent them a cease and desist letter). The band's album sold far more copies than expected (the percentage increase in sales was much more than the average band, indicating that there was an effect beyond the strong economy), their concerts sold out and they got far more air/mtv play.
This only indicates that p2p distribution might help record sales during a strong economy (it says nothing about how it might affect music sales during a down economy tho). However, it does indicate that p2p distribution might have some positive affect on music sales.
Heck...just say the words "free beer" a lot and you'll win by a landslide.
/.'ers have written lengthy posts to /. about the issues they feel strongest about but have never written their congressperson?
I'd have to agree with the parent tho...stressing techie issues is a bad way to try to get elected. Regardless of whether it is a legitimate problem or not, the tech-saavy population is one of the least motivated electorates around. How many
Relying on the tech saavy vote to get elected probably won't work. However, that said, when re-election time rolls around, the "I saved the city $xxxxxx.xx using open source software" might work really well.
I would be fine with a Katz review of Tron in recognition of the re-release on DVD, but a link to Amazon (with a referrer id...this guy will $1.50 per sale that amazon makes) plus the words "all for $29.99" is over the top. Just tell us that there is a new DVD release of the movie and point us to the movie studio's page about it. I'm sure everyone on slashdot who has fond memories of the movie is fully capable of finding an online retailer who's happy to sell it to them.
All I'm saying is that this is blatant advertising and they should have done something more understated like this.
Random note:
Anytime I post with a subject that ends in "!!!" someone always mods it "Troll" When my posts end in "..." they're usually modded "Interesting"
yes...we see the connection. But the "all for $29.99" with the link to buy it is pretty wrong.
I could understand if announced the features and had a link to the studio's page about it, but this is pretty much a blatant advertisement. I wouldn't be surprised if Muddie worked for Amazon or the studio that is releasing it.
Why pay for a banner ad when you can get way more attention by posting it as a news story?
I know how one goes about placing a banner add on /., but how does one go about placing a "story add?"
/. that posted with indignation about yahoo mixing news and advertising?
Isn't this the same
However, the article intro that people see above doesn't exactly make it sound like it is a problem with SIMPLE. I think we've been a victim of article marketing. If the /. intro read, "We came up with a cool new protocol, cept now we realized its kinda broken for file transfers" would you click through to read it? But if it says, "Internet could grind to a halt because of AOL users insatiable need to chat and their inability to be happy with plain text IM'ing" more people will read it.
Well...I highly doubt that the aliens would be *enjoying* the content that is being sent to them. If ever there was a demographic that could gripe about being negatively portrayed in the media, it would be aliens.
Would you enjoy movies in which some alien race that is wrongly persecuted/attacked by a group of humans (who are far more advanced than the alien race). Would you get that "warm and fuzzy" feeling when the small band of out-numbered aliens took on the hoard of humans and amazingly triumphed?
Or perhaps you would enjoy the light hearted romantic romp where, at the end of the movie, the two aliens embrace and share a passionate kiss (except, due to differences in anatomy, their passionate kiss is much closer to our hard-core pornography).
I think the true concern of the Content Mafia^H^H^H^H^HCreators is that the aliens, upon viewing the content sent out into space, will send new content back to the people of earth (how difficult can it be to create completely derivitive sequels?) and then we'd get all our content for free.
This is the same phillips, I believe, that just a few short days ago was championed for saying that copy-proofing CD's was against the logo rules.. I love how fast this community can change its mind about someone, based soley on them attempting to protect their interests.
When your kid makes the honor role, you support them. When they plow the family station wagon into a telephone pole, you get mad. Same kid, but it's the actions that we react to. If you want to point out a double standard, point out that we never give MS credit on the rare occasions when they do something good.
If you want to see a place where other peoples intellectual products belong to the community, move to a communist country. (Not that there are/were ever any truly successful communist countries, in the true sense of the word communist..). I still prefer capitalism.
Hmmm...I'll take Democracy over Capitalism. Remember, Communism was a fusion of a type of government and an economic system. In America, we have a type of government which (theoretically) keeps checks on our economic system, but is a seperate entity. DRM is the perfect example of where the checking should occur (by affirming fair use, etc). The idea that We have rights is pretty fundamental to the principles of our democracy, but seems laughable to your average corporation/content syndicate.