Only problem is that the bit you quoted doesn't mean what you say it means. They say that "no Palladium Application can censor, monitor, or disable", yatta yatta. Note the application bit in there. The OS is not the Palladium application. That quote says nothing about what the OS will or will not allow when a Palladium application is in memory.
And this is why you've got the high costs. American Cable and DSL companies all assumed what the original poster did - that people using their service would have the same usage patterns as dialup. But an always-on high-speed service changes your usage patterns a lot - it makes hosting much more attractive, for example. Or downloading/uploading large files.
None of these companies seem to have considered that, and so their peering arrangements and business models don't reflect it. Now that users are changing their habits and taking advantage of the connections they've been given, these companies are bumping their rates and crippling their serivces, all the while screaming about costs and bandwidth hogs.
Interestingly enough, many are owned by the telcos and movie companies that broadband could make irrelevant.
Sure, they don't force all documents to be locked documents...
...That is, until Word and Frontpage start saving locked documents by default. And IIS starts serving locked documents by default. And Internet Explorer won't run on a computer without Palladium, by default.
It doesn't matter if you can turn these defaults off. If they're the default, most people will use them because they don't want to risk breaking something. And its only a short step from "this computer must be using Palladium to open Locked Documents" to "this document must be locked to open it on a computer using Palladium". And from there, its only a short step to removing the "unused" option to turn Palladium off.
Think this won't happen? Think about what happens when all programs must be Palladium-safe to run. All of Microsoft's competitors just disappear. Apple disappears. (they can't interoperate, after all) And if the SSSCA/CBDTPA passes, it'll be illegal to compete with Microsoft.
I think our only hope is the USA legislating itself into irrelevance and other nations picking up the slack and giving them the finger.
I felt the same way when I saw it on DVD. Seeing it on the big screen, I thought it was very good... But then I read the books, then watched a friend's copy of the DVD... And saw that there was so much they'd dropped out. It had basically been turned into a bunch of "best of" scenes that were, at best, loosely connected together.
Okay, I'm seeing a lot of advertising costs in the breakdown there and no production costs. So the statements about production and distribution costs being near-nil are correct. What's holding back indie labels is the massive fees they have to pay for advertising.
And you seem to have missed my point about "this months top names". I mean that whenever I walk into a record store or see/hear an ad, its always for the same bands. The really popular ones. Its rare, if ever, that I see advertisments for anything other than the latest/biggest latino/pop/rap group from the big labels. (In case you didn't catch it, I'm referring to people like N'Sync, Britney, and Eminem) Its even rarer that I hear music other than played on a radio station, and I'm in Canada, so this is outside of the Clear Channel monopoly.
If I were you, I'd start asking people where those millions of dollars spent advertising a 10,000-sales CD go. Because I never see any results from it.
Also note that RIAA labels are now pushing to own the music of the artists they promote. So the artist doesn't retain the label, but the label retains the artist.
It is a good queston, and I'm also curious about the answer... Unit production costs are now almost nil. Editing costs are almost nil. Signing costs might as well be, unless you're already an established band. Reproduction (burned CDs are now at about $1.00 per CD. Stamped CDs sit FAR below that) and distribution are negligible. And the only musicians I ever see getting promoted are this month's "big names".
So tell me, where exactly is all this cost? I know that indie labels need to pay a lot of tax to the RIAA for their "studio-quality" recording and mastering equipment and media. But other than that, where's the cost?
I find that this is especially bad with KDE. Some actions have well-chosen shortcuts, and I use those a lot. Others are totally lacking in keyboard shortcuts, have hard-to-rembmer shortcuts, or have shortcuts that are totally unadvertised.
The most obvious example of this, IMHO, is kicker. The K menu has, at least in 2.2.x, no keyboard accelerators at all. Bring it up with alt-F1 and scroll around with the arrow keys, fine. But why can't I hit "g" and jump to games, like Windows has allowed me to do in the start menu since 1995?
There are even bug reports on bugs.kde.org under the kicker package dealing with this. I seem to remember seeing one where the submitter was flamed mercilessly by the operator of the KDE bug tracking system, though that bug seems to have since disappeared. More recent bugs point out that KDE 2.x removed the capability to even define your own menu shortcuts.
On the other hand, licq is an example of a program that does this well. Most operations have convenient and well-indicated keyboard shortcuts.
Note to the authors of KDE and GNOME: Just because its a graphical environment doesn't mean you're not allowed to use the keyboard for anything!
Not only that, but I believe ADV releases their DVDs without any kind of encryption or macrovision protection. In all, they seem to make good products and release good shows. (In addition to a whole load of anime, they also released the Reboot season three DVDs.)
It is an interesting question... Why is it that anything that portrays space as a useful place to be that is anything other than hideously uneconomical to get to gets axed almost immediately? As is, for that matter, anything that shows the least bit of imagination or originality...
Are people just not interested in anything beyond the "lands we know" anymore?
The question I'd ask is whether the entire concept of copyright makes sense at all. Though right now, its the only way to compensate artists (and, more importantly, middlemen, laywers, and producers) so I don't see it going away anytime soon. But if someone could come up with a way of ensuring the same ends (artist compensation for giving their work to the public) and sneak it into legislative existance...
Oh, and transmission costs aren't always low. Why? Look at who you're transmitting through - local cable company? Owned by media giant. Local telco? Has business arrangements with media giant.
Gee, I wonder if it might be in their interest to keep bandwidth costs for the average citizen artificially inflated? (And otherwise restricted - after all, you don't want Joe Average running his own web page. That's already resulted in embarassaments like small news sites beating the big names on a breaking story.)
Not just confiscate everything, confiscate everything and auction it off before the trial. This is a War, remember, and they've established with the War on Drugs that they're allowed to do that.
A good subtitling job can usually provide 95% of the meaning, tone, and nuance of the original. There are plenty of ways to translate things which give you a very good idea of what's going on, and to say that watching raw is necessary is just rediculous.
For an extreme example of this, pick up the ADV Excel Saga DVD and flip on the Menchi notes. They point out most of the hard-to-spot (and occasionally very high-speed) visual gags and explain a bunch of the jokes. Even when it takes several paragraphs to do so. (You just have to either pause or read really, really fast.;) ) A lot of fansubbers will do the same thing, although its rare for a commercial sub to point them out unless (like Excel Saga) they're the entire point of the show.
Oh, and what Tenchi episode were you talking about again? Aeyka doesn't even appear in Ep1 - I think the bit you refer to is in Ep2 or 3. And that's easy to pick up with even a bit of understanding of Japanese culture. (And it is indeed amusing)
Exchange "GIF" for "MP3" and "UNISYS" for "Thomson". Then step back six or seven years. Hmm... Looks familiar, doesn't it?
I wouldn't trust these guys at all. Especially since the line that was removed is what garunteed what this spokesman seems to be claiming is still garunteed.
Err... I don't see what all the fuss is about. Screenshots 1-16 are GNOME and 17-20 are KDE. Its not like they've mushed the two together, and its not like there's no differences between them. They don't even have the same window decorations! Sure, the panels look a bit similar, and GNOME's been made up to look a bit like KDE. Big deal - they're both themable desktops. You can change how they look.
Oh, and the RedHat package tool in #7 looks a bit familiar to users of Windows. From the screenshots, this is not a bad thing - the UI looks much better than previous versions of said tool.
So could someone please explain to me what the issue is here? (The gnomedesktop article seems to be down, so I can't seen the original source.)
Okay, so not only can I get thrown in jail for it, but the Federal government is the one doing the persecution. Not only that, but they're required by law to do so.
Wait a minute. Share with friends and family members? So if I sit down and watch a $40 movie once a week with my family for 25 weeks, I get a year of jail time? Or is that share copies as in commit copyright infringement? (Which is already covered under existing laws!) What is the definition of 'share'?
And by his logic, ISPs shouldn't ban problem users. IE, those who attack other machines and disrupt service for their own ends. (Spammers and script kiddies, for example.)
Yes, that's a good point. I believe whats special is that 196 is the start of this chain, and only numbers this is true for are the ones in this chain. The question is: do they have a special property, or is it just some kind of base 10 fluke?
Exactly. Debian, I believe, follows mostly the same definition of free as RMS and the GNU and FSF types. So it has to be possible to distribute every package in the main body of their distro freely, even if you're charging for it.
OTOH, I don't see what stops them throwing the fonts into nonfree...
Hey, I think its great that they made these available. Good-looking fonts for free, and promoting standards at the same time! It would've been even better if they'd put it under the BSD license, but then they wouldn't have been able to throw that "non-commercial" bit in there.
Also, note that no-one was actually violating the spirit. None of the Linux distros actually distributed them, and Debian merely included a package to download them for you. (Which was probably what they were objecting to)
Finally, there are several archives linked to in the discussion. Even with my filter at 4+, I managed to catch them.
Yes, it can. Debian removed the package that downloaded them from Microsoft's site. (thus exploiting a loophole in the license) It probably will not be distributing them because of that "not be distributed for profit" clause. However, numerous non-profit groups can, according to that license, still distribute them at will.
This is, of course, assuming that Microsoft doesn't have a right to unilaterally change the terms of that license at any time. I'm assuming they don't, but one can never be sure in the modern American legal system.
Of course, this sidesteps the main issue. There needs to be good, nice-looking, Free fonts usable by any and everyone who wants to.
More like Godzilla meet Mecha-Godzilla. Both are giant firebreathing monsters, and no matter who wins, the public (and the infrastructure) gets squished and charbroiled in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Only problem is that the bit you quoted doesn't mean what you say it means. They say that "no Palladium Application can censor, monitor, or disable", yatta yatta. Note the application bit in there. The OS is not the Palladium application. That quote says nothing about what the OS will or will not allow when a Palladium application is in memory.
And this is why you've got the high costs. American Cable and DSL companies all assumed what the original poster did - that people using their service would have the same usage patterns as dialup. But an always-on high-speed service changes your usage patterns a lot - it makes hosting much more attractive, for example. Or downloading/uploading large files.
None of these companies seem to have considered that, and so their peering arrangements and business models don't reflect it. Now that users are changing their habits and taking advantage of the connections they've been given, these companies are bumping their rates and crippling their serivces, all the while screaming about costs and bandwidth hogs.
Interestingly enough, many are owned by the telcos and movie companies that broadband could make irrelevant.
Sure, they don't force all documents to be locked documents...
...That is, until Word and Frontpage start saving locked documents by default. And IIS starts serving locked documents by default. And Internet Explorer won't run on a computer without Palladium, by default.
It doesn't matter if you can turn these defaults off. If they're the default, most people will use them because they don't want to risk breaking something. And its only a short step from "this computer must be using Palladium to open Locked Documents" to "this document must be locked to open it on a computer using Palladium". And from there, its only a short step to removing the "unused" option to turn Palladium off.
Think this won't happen? Think about what happens when all programs must be Palladium-safe to run. All of Microsoft's competitors just disappear. Apple disappears. (they can't interoperate, after all) And if the SSSCA/CBDTPA passes, it'll be illegal to compete with Microsoft.
I think our only hope is the USA legislating itself into irrelevance and other nations picking up the slack and giving them the finger.
I felt the same way when I saw it on DVD. Seeing it on the big screen, I thought it was very good... But then I read the books, then watched a friend's copy of the DVD... And saw that there was so much they'd dropped out. It had basically been turned into a bunch of "best of" scenes that were, at best, loosely connected together.
And then LotR and Spider-man blew it all away.
Here's hoping the second one does a better job!
Okay, I'm seeing a lot of advertising costs in the breakdown there and no production costs. So the statements about production and distribution costs being near-nil are correct. What's holding back indie labels is the massive fees they have to pay for advertising.
And you seem to have missed my point about "this months top names". I mean that whenever I walk into a record store or see/hear an ad, its always for the same bands. The really popular ones. Its rare, if ever, that I see advertisments for anything other than the latest/biggest latino/pop/rap group from the big labels. (In case you didn't catch it, I'm referring to people like N'Sync, Britney, and Eminem) Its even rarer that I hear music other than played on a radio station, and I'm in Canada, so this is outside of the Clear Channel monopoly.
If I were you, I'd start asking people where those millions of dollars spent advertising a 10,000-sales CD go. Because I never see any results from it.
Also note that RIAA labels are now pushing to own the music of the artists they promote. So the artist doesn't retain the label, but the label retains the artist.
It is a good queston, and I'm also curious about the answer... Unit production costs are now almost nil. Editing costs are almost nil. Signing costs might as well be, unless you're already an established band. Reproduction (burned CDs are now at about $1.00 per CD. Stamped CDs sit FAR below that) and distribution are negligible. And the only musicians I ever see getting promoted are this month's "big names".
So tell me, where exactly is all this cost? I know that indie labels need to pay a lot of tax to the RIAA for their "studio-quality" recording and mastering equipment and media. But other than that, where's the cost?
I was thinking the Bismark, but to each his own.
Oh, excellent. Can't wait for KDE 3.1, then!
Thanks for the tip, BTW... Do you happen to know if KDE 3.0 lets you do this too, or is it a new 3.1 feature?
I find that this is especially bad with KDE. Some actions have well-chosen shortcuts, and I use those a lot. Others are totally lacking in keyboard shortcuts, have hard-to-rembmer shortcuts, or have shortcuts that are totally unadvertised.
The most obvious example of this, IMHO, is kicker. The K menu has, at least in 2.2.x, no keyboard accelerators at all. Bring it up with alt-F1 and scroll around with the arrow keys, fine. But why can't I hit "g" and jump to games, like Windows has allowed me to do in the start menu since 1995?
There are even bug reports on bugs.kde.org under the kicker package dealing with this. I seem to remember seeing one where the submitter was flamed mercilessly by the operator of the KDE bug tracking system, though that bug seems to have since disappeared. More recent bugs point out that KDE 2.x removed the capability to even define your own menu shortcuts.
On the other hand, licq is an example of a program that does this well. Most operations have convenient and well-indicated keyboard shortcuts.
Note to the authors of KDE and GNOME: Just because its a graphical environment doesn't mean you're not allowed to use the keyboard for anything!
Not only that, but I believe ADV releases their DVDs without any kind of encryption or macrovision protection. In all, they seem to make good products and release good shows. (In addition to a whole load of anime, they also released the Reboot season three DVDs.)
It is an interesting question... Why is it that anything that portrays space as a useful place to be that is anything other than hideously uneconomical to get to gets axed almost immediately? As is, for that matter, anything that shows the least bit of imagination or originality...
Are people just not interested in anything beyond the "lands we know" anymore?
The question I'd ask is whether the entire concept of copyright makes sense at all. Though right now, its the only way to compensate artists (and, more importantly, middlemen, laywers, and producers) so I don't see it going away anytime soon. But if someone could come up with a way of ensuring the same ends (artist compensation for giving their work to the public) and sneak it into legislative existance...
Oh, and transmission costs aren't always low. Why? Look at who you're transmitting through - local cable company? Owned by media giant. Local telco? Has business arrangements with media giant.
Gee, I wonder if it might be in their interest to keep bandwidth costs for the average citizen artificially inflated? (And otherwise restricted - after all, you don't want Joe Average running his own web page. That's already resulted in embarassaments like small news sites beating the big names on a breaking story.)
Not just confiscate everything, confiscate everything and auction it off before the trial. This is a War, remember, and they've established with the War on Drugs that they're allowed to do that.
A good subtitling job can usually provide 95% of the meaning, tone, and nuance of the original. There are plenty of ways to translate things which give you a very good idea of what's going on, and to say that watching raw is necessary is just rediculous.
For an extreme example of this, pick up the ADV Excel Saga DVD and flip on the Menchi notes. They point out most of the hard-to-spot (and occasionally very high-speed) visual gags and explain a bunch of the jokes. Even when it takes several paragraphs to do so. (You just have to either pause or read really, really fast. ;) ) A lot of fansubbers will do the same thing, although its rare for a commercial sub to point them out unless (like Excel Saga) they're the entire point of the show.
Oh, and what Tenchi episode were you talking about again? Aeyka doesn't even appear in Ep1 - I think the bit you refer to is in Ep2 or 3. And that's easy to pick up with even a bit of understanding of Japanese culture. (And it is indeed amusing)
Exchange "GIF" for "MP3" and "UNISYS" for "Thomson". Then step back six or seven years. Hmm... Looks familiar, doesn't it?
I wouldn't trust these guys at all. Especially since the line that was removed is what garunteed what this spokesman seems to be claiming is still garunteed.
They did. The original post is just another case of a user trolling for Karma by claiming the Slashdot editors are making a big deal out of nothing.
Err... I don't see what all the fuss is about. Screenshots 1-16 are GNOME and 17-20 are KDE. Its not like they've mushed the two together, and its not like there's no differences between them. They don't even have the same window decorations! Sure, the panels look a bit similar, and GNOME's been made up to look a bit like KDE. Big deal - they're both themable desktops. You can change how they look.
Oh, and the RedHat package tool in #7 looks a bit familiar to users of Windows. From the screenshots, this is not a bad thing - the UI looks much better than previous versions of said tool.
So could someone please explain to me what the issue is here? (The gnomedesktop article seems to be down, so I can't seen the original source.)
Okay, so not only can I get thrown in jail for it, but the Federal government is the one doing the persecution. Not only that, but they're required by law to do so.
Wait a minute. Share with friends and family members? So if I sit down and watch a $40 movie once a week with my family for 25 weeks, I get a year of jail time? Or is that share copies as in commit copyright infringement? (Which is already covered under existing laws!) What is the definition of 'share'?
Something smells fishy about this law...
And by his logic, ISPs shouldn't ban problem users. IE, those who attack other machines and disrupt service for their own ends. (Spammers and script kiddies, for example.)
Yes, that's a good point. I believe whats special is that 196 is the start of this chain, and only numbers this is true for are the ones in this chain. The question is: do they have a special property, or is it just some kind of base 10 fluke?
Exactly. Debian, I believe, follows mostly the same definition of free as RMS and the GNU and FSF types. So it has to be possible to distribute every package in the main body of their distro freely, even if you're charging for it.
OTOH, I don't see what stops them throwing the fonts into nonfree...
Hey, I think its great that they made these available. Good-looking fonts for free, and promoting standards at the same time! It would've been even better if they'd put it under the BSD license, but then they wouldn't have been able to throw that "non-commercial" bit in there.
Also, note that no-one was actually violating the spirit. None of the Linux distros actually distributed them, and Debian merely included a package to download them for you. (Which was probably what they were objecting to)
Finally, there are several archives linked to in the discussion. Even with my filter at 4+, I managed to catch them.
Yes, it can. Debian removed the package that downloaded them from Microsoft's site. (thus exploiting a loophole in the license) It probably will not be distributing them because of that "not be distributed for profit" clause. However, numerous non-profit groups can, according to that license, still distribute them at will.
This is, of course, assuming that Microsoft doesn't have a right to unilaterally change the terms of that license at any time. I'm assuming they don't, but one can never be sure in the modern American legal system.
Of course, this sidesteps the main issue. There needs to be good, nice-looking, Free fonts usable by any and everyone who wants to.
More like Godzilla meet Mecha-Godzilla. Both are giant firebreathing monsters, and no matter who wins, the public (and the infrastructure) gets squished and charbroiled in the process.