Theo's response was a very short incisive critique that exposes the guts of the hardware argument. On one side, manufacturers and their shills all want disposable hardware. Is it OK if every child has a laptop but the parts from their old one are leaching lead into their water supply and they are too dumb to use them? Driver maintenance helps keep hardware out of landfills. If the service life of a piece of hardware is extended, the cost of recycling its toxic parts becomes affordable. Software (long term driver maintenance) that squeezes the extra value out of the hardware is the key. The problem is that vendors want a horizontal market where they can cash in on volume, volume, volume!
This turns out to be one of those "long tail" issues. Disposable computers will poison the children.
A possible compromise would be an expiration clause to the NDA that allowed full documentation release in one or two years (or three if you want to push it).
If I'm getting off track, lets get back to the subject?
How is corporate search different from internet search? How does that set of differences make rigid ontology a necessary component of corporate search in order to approximate the value internet search provides without such ontology?
Hasn't this been tried before in business? What happened to KnowledgeBases? (I think KnowledgeBases are to Knowledge what DataBases are to Data)...
I don't see it happening. The reality that an ontology attempts to explain is changing, and those who reflect on it change, and thus the experience cannot be canned like a taxonomy. Tell me how good an ontology can get, for example, at helping someone find music they will like? Pandora.com is trying as hard as they can, but it takes more effort to tweak a Pandora "station" than our Hoi Polloi will tolerate. The thing is: everything on the web has some of the same qualities as the music problem for Pandora.
When you say "it's not going to get good enough until it's informed by much better ontologies/taxonomies," do you mean that we need some kind of prior rigid ontological structure or taxonomy to provide buckets for our metadata, or do you mean we need search that is aware of the ontology of a particular "world" of documents and leverage that to improve search performance?
The real problem here is that the old market used to be a costly distribution network, requiring lots of physical reproduction of master copies, and trucking these copies around. It used to be so expensive that there was a natural barrier of entry getting into the distribution business. The Internet has completely overwhelmed the old distribution chain for media. Remember how the RIAA whined about dual-cassette decks before the advent of the CD? "Home taping is killing record industry profits?" Later, CDRs gave them the same issue, but the lawyers just directly cited the same arguments against the RIAA under the dual-cassette issue caselaw.
The distributors used to be the tollbooth operators from which artists and the other 95% of the music business got all of their money. Now nobody's driving because we all have our own personal helecopters or something. Which is lamer? The argument that helecopter pilots should all drive their helicopters through the old toll booth, or the attractions at the destinations (artists) should find another way to get money independant of the tollbooth operators?
If they get a warrant, then they can have a judge legally compel me to give them access. This is just like granting them access to certain buildings.
I know you will hate me for this, but the objection to the proposed system isn't confined to the stated means and justifications of the proposal. The system as it stands has a very high level of accountability and control. If you create facilities that bypass the courts, then the controls and accountability for how these facilities are (mis)used disappears.
Businessmen and officials and regular people commit crimes all of the time because (and this is usually a whiner DA/cop reason) under legal presumption of innocence, if the process of producing a prima facie case in court is significanlty less than the effort it takes to investigate then the law will have no deterrent effect against criminals. Therefore, even though this seems to improve investigation, prosecution, and therefore deterrence, it actually makes it easier for many more shady people to victimize many more regular people without a trail of evidence or fear of legal retribution.
Make that a quadruple not-a-chance, because you can add the "all of the music you bought on iTunes included" to the vapor list.
To pull this off MS would either have an unsecure solution and have the RIAA on their backs for allowing cheaters to falsely claim they paid for songs on iTunes, OR MS would have to violate/crack the Apple DMCA protected copy protection scheme to be able to cryptographically validate the purchases.
Of course this quadruple not-a-chance could be a publicity stunt to try and make MS look like the underdog fighting against big bad Apple. There's probably a few suckers born every minute at today's population growth rate.
My grandma's mac isn't infected, and she clicks on everything! I'm calling bullshit. Please produce the infected Mac. One synthetic test does not make a real world case. I run the system updater on my grandma's mac about 3-4 times a year. That's probably 1/10th (liberal estimate) of the exposed vulnerability that a Weendoerws box has. I paid my dues supporting Weendoerws and they will never work hard enough to earn my respect after making me eat so much shite back in the day.
If it could be done, it would be done in a public way. If it were within Microsoft's power to do so, they would have done it. Either
all the money in the world can't buy a Mac OSX virus because they're trying and it can't be done (so far) OR
It could have been done, but Microsoft can't do it because of some special property of Microsoft (they suck)OR
It is pretty damned hard/expensive and only Microsoft could do it, but they don't care because they know people will still buy their products even if everyone knows it is inferior because they know that the dumb (ddoeoeoertt!) consumer market dwarfs the discriminating (Hmmmm...) consumer market. Crappy OS software is good because it breeds 3rd party Integrated Software Vendors (ISVs) to solve those problems who must sink or swim on the OS maker's success. What if 90% of the business people were holding Dell/HP/IBM/ISV equity? (Niccolo Machiavelli)
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations: your philanthropy kills the future producers in your own family first because you reserve the most of your excess as inheritance assets to your offspring making sure they never develop any of the productive tendencies and indeed develop the most powerful sense of entitlement and conspicuous consumption that the following generation will have nothing to pass to their offspring, and they must compete at a disadvantage with other families that are 60 degrees out of phase.
If other people are communists and their economic ideas are so freaking inferior, then you don't need to SAY anything derogatory about collectivism or tax funded public works. Your magic invisible hand will do them in by evolutionary superiority. Ayn Rand was a WHINER.
(Isn't the devil's advocate a kind of troll? Socrates?)
Having two monopolies (one heavy native and one light web based) isn't much better than having one.
Isn't that an oxymoron? Having two competing giants is certainly fundamentally much better than having one monopoly. If they were colluding, then it might be an oligopoly, which isn't much better than a monopoly, but that isn't the case is it?
Video games are targeted because their proponents are mainly young people who are politically ignorant, non-voting wage-slaves who pay taxes and can only cry like babies when the law singles them out. In WoW, you may be a god, but IRL you are a COPPER-TOP like that slur in The Matrix...
This is a joke. They think it is a way to beat up on a straw man, and look tough. It is also a red herring for the war, which IS SPONSORING MANY CAMPAIGNS.
You should all go join the ACM and support a credible movement for digital freedoms. Also, you [Americans] should all go join a local DFA group so you can pick one of the as**oles closest to you and chip in to get him un-elected. If you sit back and whine, you will force the video game companies to start paying for legislators' political campaigns (to get congress off their backs for starters), and then they will jack up the price of video games to pay for it, and they will ask the congressmen for more draconian DMCA crap so they can squeeze you for those dollars. You are the one, Neo. What are you going to do about it?
Well, you can do your own speed test. I use tcpdump and netstat and download several things (using wget) from several geographically diverse servers.
Guess what? When I do this at a friend's house, I get the same results on the Speakeasy Flash downloader as I do on the netstat and wget test.
Don't just scoff: do some science and propose a test that would provide actual factual proof one way or the other. If you think about your implication that Speakeasy's speed test would bias results against their competitor, you forget that *anyone* can make a speed test that is better than that, and it would take prospective customers farther away from the "order DSL from Speakeasy" button to allow the possibility of a significantly better speed test.
I triple-dog-dare you! Oh, and you don't live in ISP land. You live in form-your-own-co-op-land. If you need the connection, you either have to move, or sell the idea to all of your neighbors.
The writeoff is one reason. If they can make the BSA look enough like an impartial third party, maybe they can get IRS lawyers to take it... However I doubt it. The burden of proof would be on the BSA member claiming the loss, and the IRS can afford to be sticklers (highly qualified lawyers on the case) about the details because of the money involved.
The other reason the BSA wants to trump up big losses is to get the attention of politicians who are willing to take BSA lobbying dollars to turn our legislation that solves the "economic problem". They have to put on a show to make it look like the legislation is in the country's general interests so they don't get sent to prison for buying legislation.
How did the creator's wishes get to be so important? My argument isn't really an argument, but rather a question. I'm not the type of person you suggest would send hate mail to a GPL violator. I would only ask: what if you had actually released the source for your modifications? If they say "then our product could not compete" I would more likely shame the GPL authors for not doing what a BSD licensed software author would do: release a free competitive version. If they are not free because the GPL was violated by inserting patented technology, then what would happen if someone released free software that violated that patent (a software library to make sure it gets maximum exposure)? Tit for tat?
All of those dollars the BSA is claiming as economic losses are actually being spent elsewhere. It's not a situation of money that should be out working loafing safely in a shoebox. Would we all reap more economic benefit from shifting money away from the other things into the software industry? I reckon not. Microsoft is probably one of the biggest claimants of the BSA loss statistic, and it is difficult to suggest that we would all be better off if they had more money or more freedom to make/improve software.
This is more of that smoke and mirrors trickle-down voodoo-economics gobbledygook. The BSA overwhelmingly represents the entrenched interests of large enterprises (you think big government is wasteful? How about big business..) against entrepreneurial business (where we see the most real economic growth).
As I remember, the FreeBSD code in question was only compiled when explicitly configured, and the option and code was clearly marked EXPERIMENTAL. The way I see it is that Linus is really uncomfortable with people pushing Linux in that direction because their code is messier and more difficult to refactor (and change directions) in general. In FreeBSD people who implement this code are required to keep the dangerous stuff in a sandbox that can be applied optionally to encourage lots of high quality real-world testing. You can talk about the theoretical cost to caching performance, but the proof is in the pudding. If Linus is right, the best argument is a working example. If he is wrong, the best argument is a working example. Who is he to make disparaging remarks about other peoples' toys anyway?
I think the real story is the scrap heap of companies that thought they could make it selling a software solution to Microsoft's customers. Microsoft lets other companies take all of the risks and then eats them and their whole market.
Find a gap/niche in Microsoft's market
Spend money to develop and market a solution
Make some serious cash showing real WallStreet potential
Microsoft announces vaporware to replace your solution
Wall Street backs away, and your IPO potential withers
You sell out to Microsoft for peanuts and promises
Microsoft bends you over like Spyglass and rubs it in
Glassy eyed morons that remind you of yourself line up back at step one for a shot at the leftovers
Let's call a spade a spade: in fact, the iPod and iTunes do support music from any sources besides the iTMS. However, iTunes and iPods do not support any DRM outside of iTMS. Therefore, it isn't breaking Apple's iTMS lock on the iPod. It's an attempt to force Apple to adopt other DRM schemes/contracts.
The new Chicago touchscreen voting machines in 2006 log your votes to a paper tape that rolls through a glass/plastic window that you can see and verify your votes before you submit them. When you approve your selections, the paper winds your votes up on a spool to hide your selections from the next voter. You can choose to "spoil" your ballot and start over if it doesn't look right.
Hello everyone, Michele here again, Stephen Heller's wife. Some of you have asked us if we've tried to get pro bono counsel, and the answer is yes, of course we have. But we've had no luck. The ACLU was approached, and their board of directors considered it, but they turned us down, claiming a lack of resources.
Several national whistleblower foundations have also been approached. Some have indicated they will donate to a defense fund, and some referred us to attorneys, but they don't provide pro bono counsel. A few other organizations have also been approached, but none of those efforts or referrals resulted in pro bono counsel.
All of the attorneys that have been approached have declined to represent Stephen pro bono. We have learned that criminal defense attorneys rarely take a case pro bono unless 3 conditions are met: 1) the defendant is indigent; 2) the defendant is already in jail or in prison; and 3) the attorney believes the defendant to be factually innocent. We respect that; a person who is indigent and in prison is in much greater need than we are.
Stephen does have a lawyer, a very skilled and experienced criminal defense firm. Stephen's brother David, an attorney from Seattle (he can't handle the case, he is not a member of the Cal. bar and he has his own law firm and family to attend to, he can't live in L.A. for the many months, or even years, that this case may drag on) said Stephen's attorneys are "pretty much top of the heap in criminal defense in L.A." So we are confident about Stephen's representation. It's just paying their very high fees that worries us.
Thank you for your concerns and suggestions. We truly appreciate all your help and good wishes.
Slashdot Mirror
Theo's response was a very short incisive critique that exposes the guts of the hardware argument. On one side, manufacturers and their shills all want disposable hardware. Is it OK if every child has a laptop but the parts from their old one are leaching lead into their water supply and they are too dumb to use them? Driver maintenance helps keep hardware out of landfills. If the service life of a piece of hardware is extended, the cost of recycling its toxic parts becomes affordable. Software (long term driver maintenance) that squeezes the extra value out of the hardware is the key. The problem is that vendors want a horizontal market where they can cash in on volume, volume, volume!
This turns out to be one of those "long tail" issues. Disposable computers will poison the children.
A possible compromise would be an expiration clause to the NDA that allowed full documentation release in one or two years (or three if you want to push it).
I know! Let's have a CONTEST!
You know... infinite monkeys... That's how we can outdo Apple!
If I'm getting off track, lets get back to the subject?
How is corporate search different from internet search? How does that set of differences make rigid ontology a necessary component of corporate search in order to approximate the value internet search provides without such ontology?
Hasn't this been tried before in business? What happened to KnowledgeBases? (I think KnowledgeBases are to Knowledge what DataBases are to Data)...
If an ontology isn't a recommendation tool, then what place does it have in a search engine?
What is a search other than a recommendation tool? A user loosely indicates preference with some hints, and the system replies with recommendations?
I don't see it happening. The reality that an ontology attempts to explain is changing, and those who reflect on it change, and thus the experience cannot be canned like a taxonomy. Tell me how good an ontology can get, for example, at helping someone find music they will like? Pandora.com is trying as hard as they can, but it takes more effort to tweak a Pandora "station" than our Hoi Polloi will tolerate. The thing is: everything on the web has some of the same qualities as the music problem for Pandora.
Ontologies must be disposable and cheap, IMHO.
When you say "it's not going to get good enough until it's informed by much better ontologies/taxonomies," do you mean that we need some kind of prior rigid ontological structure or taxonomy to provide buckets for our metadata, or do you mean we need search that is aware of the ontology of a particular "world" of documents and leverage that to improve search performance?
The real problem here is that the old market used to be a costly distribution network, requiring lots of physical reproduction of master copies, and trucking these copies around. It used to be so expensive that there was a natural barrier of entry getting into the distribution business. The Internet has completely overwhelmed the old distribution chain for media. Remember how the RIAA whined about dual-cassette decks before the advent of the CD? "Home taping is killing record industry profits?" Later, CDRs gave them the same issue, but the lawyers just directly cited the same arguments against the RIAA under the dual-cassette issue caselaw.
The distributors used to be the tollbooth operators from which artists and the other 95% of the music business got all of their money. Now nobody's driving because we all have our own personal helecopters or something. Which is lamer? The argument that helecopter pilots should all drive their helicopters through the old toll booth, or the attractions at the destinations (artists) should find another way to get money independant of the tollbooth operators?
If they get a warrant, then they can have a judge legally compel me to give them access. This is just like granting them access to certain buildings.
I know you will hate me for this, but the objection to the proposed system isn't confined to the stated means and justifications of the proposal. The system as it stands has a very high level of accountability and control. If you create facilities that bypass the courts, then the controls and accountability for how these facilities are (mis)used disappears.
Businessmen and officials and regular people commit crimes all of the time because (and this is usually a whiner DA/cop reason) under legal presumption of innocence, if the process of producing a prima facie case in court is significanlty less than the effort it takes to investigate then the law will have no deterrent effect against criminals. Therefore, even though this seems to improve investigation, prosecution, and therefore deterrence, it actually makes it easier for many more shady people to victimize many more regular people without a trail of evidence or fear of legal retribution.
Make that a quadruple not-a-chance, because you can add the "all of the music you bought on iTunes included" to the vapor list.
To pull this off MS would either have an unsecure solution and have the RIAA on their backs for allowing cheaters to falsely claim they paid for songs on iTunes, OR MS would have to violate/crack the Apple DMCA protected copy protection scheme to be able to cryptographically validate the purchases.
Of course this quadruple not-a-chance could be a publicity stunt to try and make MS look like the underdog fighting against big bad Apple. There's probably a few suckers born every minute at today's population growth rate.
My grandma's mac isn't infected, and she clicks on everything! I'm calling bullshit. Please produce the infected Mac. One synthetic test does not make a real world case. I run the system updater on my grandma's mac about 3-4 times a year. That's probably 1/10th (liberal estimate) of the exposed vulnerability that a Weendoerws box has. I paid my dues supporting Weendoerws and they will never work hard enough to earn my respect after making me eat so much shite back in the day.
If it could be done, it would be done in a public way. If it were within Microsoft's power to do so, they would have done it. Either
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations: your philanthropy kills the future producers in your own family first because you reserve the most of your excess as inheritance assets to your offspring making sure they never develop any of the productive tendencies and indeed develop the most powerful sense of entitlement and conspicuous consumption that the following generation will have nothing to pass to their offspring, and they must compete at a disadvantage with other families that are 60 degrees out of phase.
If other people are communists and their economic ideas are so freaking inferior, then you don't need to SAY anything derogatory about collectivism or tax funded public works. Your magic invisible hand will do them in by evolutionary superiority. Ayn Rand was a WHINER.
(Isn't the devil's advocate a kind of troll? Socrates?)
Isn't that an oxymoron? Having two competing giants is certainly fundamentally much better than having one monopoly. If they were colluding, then it might be an oligopoly, which isn't much better than a monopoly, but that isn't the case is it?
Plone is a CMS Use ZODB backend
The reason video games are targeted is not because Congress is ignorant. It is also not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing.
Video games are targeted because their proponents are mainly young people who are politically ignorant, non-voting wage-slaves who pay taxes and can only cry like babies when the law singles them out. In WoW, you may be a god, but IRL you are a COPPER-TOP like that slur in The Matrix...
This is a joke. They think it is a way to beat up on a straw man, and look tough. It is also a red herring for the war, which IS SPONSORING MANY CAMPAIGNS.
You should all go join the ACM and support a credible movement for digital freedoms. Also, you [Americans] should all go join a local DFA group so you can pick one of the as**oles closest to you and chip in to get him un-elected. If you sit back and whine, you will force the video game companies to start paying for legislators' political campaigns (to get congress off their backs for starters), and then they will jack up the price of video games to pay for it, and they will ask the congressmen for more draconian DMCA crap so they can squeeze you for those dollars. You are the one, Neo. What are you going to do about it?
Checklist:Well, you can do your own speed test. I use tcpdump and netstat and download several things (using wget) from several geographically diverse servers. Guess what? When I do this at a friend's house, I get the same results on the Speakeasy Flash downloader as I do on the netstat and wget test.
Don't just scoff: do some science and propose a test that would provide actual factual proof one way or the other. If you think about your implication that Speakeasy's speed test would bias results against their competitor, you forget that *anyone* can make a speed test that is better than that, and it would take prospective customers farther away from the "order DSL from Speakeasy" button to allow the possibility of a significantly better speed test.
I triple-dog-dare you! Oh, and you don't live in ISP land. You live in form-your-own-co-op-land. If you need the connection, you either have to move, or sell the idea to all of your neighbors.
The writeoff is one reason. If they can make the BSA look enough like an impartial third party, maybe they can get IRS lawyers to take it... However I doubt it. The burden of proof would be on the BSA member claiming the loss, and the IRS can afford to be sticklers (highly qualified lawyers on the case) about the details because of the money involved.
The other reason the BSA wants to trump up big losses is to get the attention of politicians who are willing to take BSA lobbying dollars to turn our legislation that solves the "economic problem". They have to put on a show to make it look like the legislation is in the country's general interests so they don't get sent to prison for buying legislation.
How did the creator's wishes get to be so important? My argument isn't really an argument, but rather a question. I'm not the type of person you suggest would send hate mail to a GPL violator. I would only ask: what if you had actually released the source for your modifications? If they say "then our product could not compete" I would more likely shame the GPL authors for not doing what a BSD licensed software author would do: release a free competitive version. If they are not free because the GPL was violated by inserting patented technology, then what would happen if someone released free software that violated that patent (a software library to make sure it gets maximum exposure)? Tit for tat?
All of those dollars the BSA is claiming as economic losses are actually being spent elsewhere. It's not a situation of money that should be out working loafing safely in a shoebox. Would we all reap more economic benefit from shifting money away from the other things into the software industry? I reckon not. Microsoft is probably one of the biggest claimants of the BSA loss statistic, and it is difficult to suggest that we would all be better off if they had more money or more freedom to make/improve software.
This is more of that smoke and mirrors trickle-down voodoo-economics gobbledygook. The BSA overwhelmingly represents the entrenched interests of large enterprises (you think big government is wasteful? How about big business..) against entrepreneurial business (where we see the most real economic growth).
Nuff Said!
As I remember, the FreeBSD code in question was only compiled when explicitly configured, and the option and code was clearly marked EXPERIMENTAL. The way I see it is that Linus is really uncomfortable with people pushing Linux in that direction because their code is messier and more difficult to refactor (and change directions) in general. In FreeBSD people who implement this code are required to keep the dangerous stuff in a sandbox that can be applied optionally to encourage lots of high quality real-world testing. You can talk about the theoretical cost to caching performance, but the proof is in the pudding. If Linus is right, the best argument is a working example. If he is wrong, the best argument is a working example. Who is he to make disparaging remarks about other peoples' toys anyway?
I think the real story is the scrap heap of companies that thought they could make it selling a software solution to Microsoft's customers. Microsoft lets other companies take all of the risks and then eats them and their whole market.
Let's call a spade a spade: in fact, the iPod and iTunes do support music from any sources besides the iTMS. However, iTunes and iPods do not support any DRM outside of iTMS. Therefore, it isn't breaking Apple's iTMS lock on the iPod. It's an attempt to force Apple to adopt other DRM schemes/contracts.
The new Chicago touchscreen voting machines in 2006 log your votes to a paper tape that rolls through a glass/plastic window that you can see and verify your votes before you submit them. When you approve your selections, the paper winds your votes up on a spool to hide your selections from the next voter. You can choose to "spoil" your ballot and start over if it doesn't look right.
Donate to the Steven Heller Defence Fund.
Donate to the Steven Heller Defense Fund.
From Michelle Heller (Steven's wife):