That being said, I must point out that copy protection, to some extent, is a necessary evil.
I disagree, and I believe one merely needs to look at the many examples of profit without copy protection. Take music, for example: artists (or, at least, their publishers and distributors) thrive despite massive, blatant, and sometimes even officially encouraged piracy of their works. Or take books: absolutely no technical protection, yet the book publishing industry remains a profitable business. (I hesitate to include free software like Linux, since profit is made off of alternate venues like support which might not be as available or well developed for games.)
how many scientists would want to go and work on a tropical island in the south pacific?
I can think of quite a lot of people who say they would not mind moving to such an island, if only they could. Then again, few of them dream of working once there...
And so we see another once-proud institution fall victim to the delusion that paying more attention to the business end, while paying less attention to the customers' enjoyment of and utility from the product/content, will always give bigger returns in the long run, just because it might (or might not) in the short run.
Recant in as many shorter forms as you like. "Screw-balling the fans" seems apt.
Who can blame them? The power of the press goes to those who own presses...or so it used to be. If everybody owns one, which can be the case now, then only those who produce good content (which requires treating the content as more important than the business, something that execs of big companies are inherently not good at) will have effective power, because they'll own the presses that people pay attention to.
Nicely worded - except that it's more like "TTL decrement for certain cell types, or cancerous cells, gets deactivated" rather than "gets set to -1". Now if only we had a way to reset the TTLs for all the cells in an existing body - perhaps engineer a virus that specifically looks for the end of a DNA strand, and attaches base pairs at random (or pehaps biased towards A/T pairs)?
Treating users as a commodity, to be tricked and
herded into creating profit for the portal with
little to no expectation of genuine value for the
user, is malice against the users.
Cynical and unrelated dismissal of nostalgia in general.
Re:A worrying turn of phrase...
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
Getting in a bit late, but...
True, but she could always not produce an abusable product.
Ain't no such thing. Anything can be used as a weapon, for example. Any non-biodegradable product can be smashed and turned into so much litter that lasts until it's cleaned up - and biodegradable products are necessarily disposable products. Et cetera.
It's easier to hack systems you already know something about. (Security arguments aside, this is the main reason why there have been so many more viruses for Windows than Linux - and why so many more people get scared about Windows viruses.)
It's even easier to hack something you helped write. (I've actually been paid to hack a system under those circumstances: the system's owners lost the root password. Good thing it was only meant to be secure against remote access, and not physical.)
Or, from another perspective, this makes the Feds' jobs easier because US businesses will trust the NSA more than foreign businesses will, so if they can get those businesses to use something far more secure than current popular alternatives, say by hitching security to Linux to take advantage of current migrations towards Linux...
Well...the barrel would have to be a mite long if the projectile were going to orbit. But what if you wanted to shoot the barrel itself into orbit, using recoil from (expendible) projectiles?
And I don't deserve my brand new Ferrari to be stolen from a parkinglot after leaving it in Downtown Los Angeles for a couple of weeks unlocked and with the keys in the ignition?
"Deserve" from what perspective? Moral "everyone should be kind and peaceful towards their neighbors", no. Practical "take responsibility for the real consequences of your actions", yes. (But then, this is the point you were making, no?)
And that's why they do it: so you can't just firewall out their insecure "advanced" features. They have no reason to care about your security, except insofar as it makes you more likely to purchase their stuff (not an issue if their management sincerely believes there is little significant competition), but they do have incentive to make sure their software running on your hardware runs all the connectivity features they say their software does.
>cast top
You see a mail daemon here
You see a http daemon here
You see a ftp daemon here
>yell Help, demons!
You yell, "Help, demons!"
>attack http daemon
You easily slay the http daemon
|<00|_/-\|)/\/\1|/| yells, "Some lamer just crashed our Web server, d00dz!"
While I obviously don't know details, I'd be willing to bet that, more often than not, costing the school district $62,000 because you overstepped your authority would be considered a Career Limiting Move.
Not if the people with hire/fire authority over you believe that the control you set a precedent for is worth any cost. Or, not if the people with hire/fire authority over you never bother to follow up on "make sure this line item expense does not happen again".
This probably needs to be mentioned until it's been mentioned to death, because it is the one detail that tends to kill micropayments in reality, yet no micropayment supporter ever (so far as I have yet seen) acknowledges it:
What about the mental transaction cost to the customer? Each click becomes a "do I buy or don't I buy" decision, with accompanying anxiety and time spent to make it.
Unless and until this issue is successfully addressed by micropayments, it does not look like micropayments will be accepted in reality, no matter how much hype people put behind it. (Remember Divx - the discs, not the MPEG format. Remember "push". Would it be too early to say "remember WAP"?) The alternatives - subscription, aggregation, and so forth - all deal with this problem by bundling everything into one transaction. (Granted, this transaction is potentially slightly wasteful of money, if the customer does not use the whole package. But money is not the only thing of value to the customer.)
The school district is out $62K, which might otherwise have gone to fund various educational projects. Meanwhile, the people who made the decision to censor are getting away with relatively light (if any) punishment.
Well...ok, maybe I should have revised that: SC isn't that bribeable with money alone, which is what the RIAA would have tried. Money is not the only thing people value.
RIAA is so confident that They Are In The Right that they take the upcoming Supreme Court decision for granted. (But I thought we were the only moralists here.)
RIAA has paid enough to enough SC justices that they take the decision for granted. (Not likely: SC isn't that bribeable.)
RIAA is trying to cause Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, just like whippersnapper Nephew Microsoft. (Which explains why Microsoft never bothered to patent that particular business practice.)
Proof: my own is sitting at 23 as of this typing. I just posted a comment in another thread, and did not get +1. This post should likewise start out at 1. (In the unlikely event that this post gets moderated, either up or down, check the mod points on this post to see whether it started out at 1 or 2.)
They keep spending resources on unworkable copy protection. Meanwhile, the public is becoming more and more used to free software (which, for a number of these applications, is the only one deployed - the corporate version's release having been delayed when the oh-so-important copy protection could not be verified as working). This means less acceptance of the protected model over time.
It's the old "first to market" strategy, only in our favor.
Slashdot Mirror
No. They'll just revive the old punishment of chopping it off. After all, they say you are a thief.
That being said, I must point out that copy protection, to some extent, is a necessary evil.
I disagree, and I believe one merely needs to look at the many examples of profit without copy protection. Take music, for example: artists (or, at least, their publishers and distributors) thrive despite massive, blatant, and sometimes even officially encouraged piracy of their works. Or take books: absolutely no technical protection, yet the book publishing industry remains a profitable business. (I hesitate to include free software like Linux, since profit is made off of alternate venues like support which might not be as available or well developed for games.)
how many scientists would want to go and work on a tropical island in the south pacific?
I can think of quite a lot of people who say they would not mind moving to such an island, if only they could. Then again, few of them dream of working once there...
And so we see another once-proud institution fall victim to the delusion that paying more attention to the business end, while paying less attention to the customers' enjoyment of and utility from the product/content, will always give bigger returns in the long run, just because it might (or might not) in the short run.
Recant in as many shorter forms as you like. "Screw-balling the fans" seems apt.
Who can blame them? The power of the press goes to those who own presses...or so it used to be. If everybody owns one, which can be the case now, then only those who produce good content (which requires treating the content as more important than the business, something that execs of big companies are inherently not good at) will have effective power, because they'll own the presses that people pay attention to.
Nicely worded - except that it's more like "TTL decrement for certain cell types, or cancerous cells, gets deactivated" rather than "gets set to -1". Now if only we had a way to reset the TTLs for all the cells in an existing body - perhaps engineer a virus that specifically looks for the end of a DNA strand, and attaches base pairs at random (or pehaps biased towards A/T pairs)?
What, does no one get the joke?
Treating users as a commodity, to be tricked and herded into creating profit for the portal with little to no expectation of genuine value for the user, is malice against the users.
Cynical and unrelated dismissal of nostalgia in general.
Getting in a bit late, but...
True, but she could always not produce an abusable product.
Ain't no such thing. Anything can be used as a weapon, for example. Any non-biodegradable product can be smashed and turned into so much litter that lasts until it's cleaned up - and biodegradable products are necessarily disposable products. Et cetera.
Think of the children. Think of the millions slaughtered by bombs whose trajectories were calculated using - yes - Pi.
;)
All these lives could be saved. Lets abolish Pi today.
Abolish pie? How un-american!
<ducks the 3,141 flames about pi not belonging to just America>
Well...the barrel would have to be a mite long if the projectile were going to orbit. But what if you wanted to shoot the barrel itself into orbit, using recoil from (expendible) projectiles?
And I don't deserve my brand new Ferrari to be stolen from a parkinglot after leaving it in Downtown Los Angeles for a couple of weeks unlocked and with the keys in the ignition?
"Deserve" from what perspective? Moral "everyone should be kind and peaceful towards their neighbors", no. Practical "take responsibility for the real consequences of your actions", yes. (But then, this is the point you were making, no?)
Cop1: "We found the thieves! They're at ## West by ## North!"
Cop2: "Good job! We're loading the coordinates into our GPS-guided missiles now. Let's see them try to jam this!"
And that's why they do it: so you can't just firewall out their insecure "advanced" features. They have no reason to care about your security, except insofar as it makes you more likely to purchase their stuff (not an issue if their management sincerely believes there is little significant competition), but they do have incentive to make sure their software running on your hardware runs all the connectivity features they say their software does.
>cast top
You see a mail daemon here
You see a http daemon here
You see a ftp daemon here
>yell Help, demons!
You yell, "Help, demons!"
>attack http daemon
You easily slay the http daemon
|<00|_/-\|)/\/\1|/| yells, "Some lamer just crashed our Web server, d00dz!"
While I obviously don't know details, I'd be willing to bet that, more often than not, costing the school district $62,000 because you overstepped your authority would be considered a Career Limiting Move.
Not if the people with hire/fire authority over you believe that the control you set a precedent for is worth any cost. Or, not if the people with hire/fire authority over you never bother to follow up on "make sure this line item expense does not happen again".
This probably needs to be mentioned until it's been mentioned to death, because it is the one detail that tends to kill micropayments in reality, yet no micropayment supporter ever (so far as I have yet seen) acknowledges it:
What about the mental transaction cost to the customer? Each click becomes a "do I buy or don't I buy" decision, with accompanying anxiety and time spent to make it.
Unless and until this issue is successfully addressed by micropayments, it does not look like micropayments will be accepted in reality, no matter how much hype people put behind it. (Remember Divx - the discs, not the MPEG format. Remember "push". Would it be too early to say "remember WAP"?) The alternatives - subscription, aggregation, and so forth - all deal with this problem by bundling everything into one transaction. (Granted, this transaction is potentially slightly wasteful of money, if the customer does not use the whole package. But money is not the only thing of value to the customer.)
The school district is out $62K, which might otherwise have gone to fund various educational projects. Meanwhile, the people who made the decision to censor are getting away with relatively light (if any) punishment.
Well...ok, maybe I should have revised that: SC isn't that bribeable with money alone, which is what the RIAA would have tried. Money is not the only thing people value.
Proof: my own is sitting at 23 as of this typing. I just posted a comment in another thread, and did not get +1. This post should likewise start out at 1. (In the unlikely event that this post gets moderated, either up or down, check the mod points on this post to see whether it started out at 1 or 2.)
They keep spending resources on unworkable copy protection. Meanwhile, the public is becoming more and more used to free software (which, for a number of these applications, is the only one deployed - the corporate version's release having been delayed when the oh-so-important copy protection could not be verified as working). This means less acceptance of the protected model over time.
It's the old "first to market" strategy, only in our favor.
You can't buy market dominance like that.
Oh, wait...