The Microsoft one. While Microsoft does have different versions of NT, it is important to note that Microsoft's sales of NT managed to beat the combined sales of all of the Linux distributions.
In the same spirit, here's one I wrote just now: "Keep in mind, there are too many Windows-using lamers posting these days, and they ALL suck"
I don't use windows. I thought maybe I would remind you that while Linux has the second spot in terms of total sales, that is divided up among many unique distributions of Linux, with different properties and functions. Windows NT, on the other hand, represents a single distribution which still has more sales than all the Linux distributions put together. I figured I would save bandwidth and time by merely posting the one line, but I guess I was a little bit too subtle for some of the less intelligent Slashdot crowd.
Anyone have a good argument as to why someone should NOT profit from a legitimate domain name investment?
It depends largely on why the domain name is being sold. If I bought oven.com to use for some personal project, and Maytag comes along wanting to use it to advertise their latest oven, they are asking me to remove it from my project to give to them. I have every right to ask for a price that's fair to me for giving up my domain name. I am not justified in asking for zillions of dollars just because I know it's worth that much to Maytag.
On the other hand, if my oven related project fell through, and I'm no longer using the domain, I'm not really justified in asking for more than the original cost of the domain name, plus a little for the time and trouble of transferring it.
I see no real difference between "domain name investing" and "cybersquatting". In either case, people are demanding massive amounts of cash for something that cost them virtually nothing and that they have no use for. It's just plain wrong. The price of a domain name should be determined by the loss (not necessarily just financial) of the person selling it. Anything more is just plain wrong.
But people are inherently greedy. If I owned a highly desirable domain name, I'd probably demand a large wad of cash to part with it too.
Even if this thing is for real, do we really want it?
The key to the Palm design that (from what I've read) made it sell so well and certainly what made me choose it was its simplicity. It doesn't do a heck of a lot, but it does it very, very well. I can pull it out and with only 1 button open a notepad, calculator, to-do list, or address book. There's no boot time and it is virtually crash-free. It has a very smooth and consistent GUI. I have trouble seeing any advantage to using Linux over a custom-written OS. Just take a look at the disaster that is WinCE. I know that there are some desirable things that could be done with Linux but not with the Palm OS, and of course there is the pure appeal to Linux evangelists and to companies wanting to cash in on Linux IPO mania, but it seems to me that consumers would be better off with an OS written from the ground up specifically for the handheld platform it's running on. A handheld is different from a PC in that it is only useful if it can be depended upon implicitly to anytime, in all situations. A handheld that crashes or fails in any way cannot effectively be used as an extension to the user's body, and therefore loses much of its usefulness.
In response to my saying that people will tend not to buy what they already have for free:
Unfortunately, the reality of the situation proves you to be dead wrong. Given a choice, most people still buy the music, rather than just keep the MP3's. I've bought CD's after downloading tracks from them before myself.
I think it would be fortunate if reality proved me wrong. When the difference is $10-$20 for a commercial CD vs. $.50 for a CD-R, or free if you just store the MP3s on your hard disk, there are a lot of people who will choose to just keep what they can get for free. Unless you're suggesting that they only give out some of the songs for free to get people to buy the rest, which really doesn't change the situation we're in now. People will still pirate MP3s with FTP and Napster and Hotline, and the RIAA will still be just as pissed off about it.
The model of a radio or television station probably wouldn't work. If it works just like a traditional radio station, what will be the advantage for the listener? It will be the same old business model. The only truly innovative concept would be to make the entire catalog of music available to any listener at any time. On-demand music. But that runs into the problem of getting the advertising in, and also keeping people from just downloading the music once, then redistributing it without the advertising. Same old problem.
You'd be surprised at how little artists actually see of the revenue generated by their albums;
I have a close relative who is a professional musician. His income is directly affected every time someone pirates one of his songs. It's true that a lot of the money is eaten by the evil greedy record companies before it gets to him, but that isn't going to change. The ones who will suffer the most will be the artists, and hence the public, because if you can't make a living as a musician, you can't devote your full time to producing quality work.
1) Someone IS stopping me, Blank DVD's have the encryption key track "zeroed out"
There's nothing legally preventing you from buying DVDs with the encryption key track unwritten, or preventing anyone from making/selling them (as far as I know). And there's nothing to stop you from buying a $10,000 commercial DVD burner. If no one is selling blank DVDs or you can't afford a DVD press, that's not really the fault of the encryption.
2) I'm NOT converting it into a "more easily pirated" form, I'm converting it into its NATIVE form. When was the last time you read a book with a Captain Crunch Decoder Ring? (Anyway, encrypted data is just as tranferable/"pirateable" as native).
An encrypted DVD movie is multiple gigabytes, which makes it difficult to transfer over the internet currently. A shortsighted solution, certainly (as bandwidth will only increase in the future to the point where it is no big deal) but at present speeds a 500MB MPEG is much easier to transfer than a 5.2GB encoded DVD, and the loss of quality and size is bearable.
3) In fact, the media is USELESS without purchasing an ADDITIONAL PRODUCT (CSS licensed player)!
Even if you remove the encryption, you're still going to have to buy a DVD player. I can just see you buying a DVD of The Matrix, then sitting it on the coffee table and wondering why it isn't playing.
Your comparison of decoding CSS to reading books is just stupid. The 16 year old is not being tried for reading; he is being sued for breaking corporate security and distributing his results on the internet, potentially costing the film industry untold amounts of money.
If you ever produce or create something, I'm sure you'll want your rights to it protected.
If RIAA had harnessed the power of MP3 and streaming when these technologies had first come out, they would have owned the scene by now.
Yeah, but what scene? If they were giving away free music over the internet, they probably would own the scene, but how would that benefit them? They would be giving away intellectual property and getting nothing in return but maybe some advertising revenue. Not a bad deal if it isn't your intellectual property to begin with, (like MP3.com or Napster) but not such a good idea for the RIAA.
The RIAA's paranoia over their music being stolent is real. When faced with a choice between paying and just taking, a lot of people will just take. And as time goes on, it's looking less and less like there is anything the RIAA can do to stop people from just taking. The question now is, how can creators make a living from their intellectual property in a world where their work can be accessed by anyone, anytime, without paying them?
So he invented a couple of cool words: "Neuromacer" in particular.
He's invented a lot of cool words, (for instance "jacking in") and concepts which have become the standard if not the basis for much of modern science fiction.
Still, he's not the only author out there, and a lot of his books leave something to be desired. I'm seldom find myself satisfied with the way his stories end, personally, but the way things work along the way makes it worthwhile.
Whether you like it or not, a lot of pirating goes on between little insignificant low-end consumers. And that amount is only going to grow larger. You can't stop professional bootleggers who are willing to spend zillions of dollars on equipment because if the media can be read in the first place, it can be copied. The trick is in making it difficult and expensive enough to copy that Joe Average can't post it on the internet to share witha ll his friends.
I've worked for and with people from various countries other than America, and have found them to be (in most cases) at least as intelligent, motivated, and experienced as myself. If I lose a job to someone from another country, it just means I'll have to work harder to get the next one. I was lucky enough to be born in America, but that doesn't give me the right to say that someone born in Europe or Asia or Africa or South America shouldn't get a fair shot at working in the computer industry or any other. So don't preach your ethnocentric elitist ideals at me.
The people the article is talking about aren't a bunch of unskilled slovenly idiots who know little about English or personal hygiene. These are intelligent, educated people who have come to America to work in silicon valley and are being hired because they are the most qualified for the job at hand. The only people who suffer are people less qualified who would be filling the same jobs if it weren't for those darned immigrants. Don't blame all your problems on foreigners.
how many "warez" sites have you seen with captured VHS tapes on them, I havent seen any
I know a guy who gets copies of all the latest new releases. He downloads ripped MPEGs of them and dumps them onto VHS. If you haven't seen them, I guess it's because you haven't looked.
DVD's would be even MORE difficult to capture and distribute just because of the sheer SIZE That's like someone in the days of ENIAC saying that computers will never be in the home due to the sheer SIZE. Size is only a problem until bandwidth, compression, and physical media catch up. Just look at the popularity of MP3: Ten years ago, no one would have even thought of digitizing a record and sending it over the phone lines. The speed, compression, and disk space wasn't even close.
I have a legal right to make an archival backup of ANY media I purchase. Copy protection is wrong, it always hurts the consumer.
Nobody is stopping you from making an exact copy of the media you purchase. What they are stopping you from doing is converting that media into another form which is more easily pirated. Copy protection is a misleading name, so perhaps you are confused. In most cases it doesn't prevent you from copying the media (anything that can be read can be copied), it just attempts to prevent you from making unlawful copies of the media (for instance copies for friends). What harms the consumer is the difficulty in making it impossible to make unlawful copies without impairing the customer's ability to use the software and make lawful copies. But it is, after all, easier to criticize an existing system than think one up yourself, so go right ahead.
You do NOT have the right to watch it any way you like. When you buy a DVD, you are buying two things. The physical medium, and a license to use that physical medium. But the owners of the content on the physical medium can put whatever crazy clauses they want in that license.
This has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with control - control of how I watch a DVD, and what products I watch it on.
I still don't see how you can blame them for trying to supress CSS. Whether they are trying to keep people from copying their intellectual property or controlling how people view their intellectual property, it is still their right to do so. You don't have a right to view their intellectual propery.
Can you blame them for what they're doing? They came up with CSS encryption to prevent people from ripping movies and pirating them, and someone broke their code. Of course they're going to use every means at their disposal to try to put the cat back in the bag and prevent their intellectual property from being devalued and stolen.
The point has been made that as they didn't patent CSS, they have no legal claim to keep it under wraps. Not being a lawyer myself, I don't know whether this is true or not. But that's the point; I don't know and neither do most of you. Let the courts and the lawyers sort it out, and if the court says not to distribute deCSS until it's made up its mind, don't distribute deCSS.
Another thing: The MPAA and accessories have recieved a lot of criticism over their attempt to prevent piracy using proprietary encryption. I'm curious to know, what other options are available? Patenting doesn't seem like it would work, as then the complete record of how it works would be on file for all to see. So what should they have done and what should they do the next time they release a new standard and want to prevent piracy?
It is a sad reflection on slashdot that the top moderated article in this thread (as I write this) contains the phrase "firm young buttocks" no less than twice and a graphic description of a young girl being bludgeoned with a giant sausage. News for nerds indeed!
I guess I must be missing something, but Linux compatibility to me seems like a stupid thing to waste computer industry time by petitioning for. I mean, Linux is fine as an opensource pioneer and a free alternative to Solaris or similar Unix derivative, but one must question the wisdom in porting everything in sight to run under it. The reason that things like Quicktime don't already exist under Unix is, after all, that it's primarily a network operating system and not a home system. So when people start using it as a home system, it just creates another competing standard and slows down the whole industry.
they've set up a service where by Americans can set up their automated robotic agents to cross the border into Canada - come to the Vat o' Goodness, scoop up some of the waste and return to America with it.
Yeah, except that they supply the robotic agents. Look, I send a signal to my provider, who relays it to someone else, to someone else, to someone else etc. until it reaches iCraveTV. Then they send back a TV feed through the chain of servers eventually reaching me.
You can't criticize America for spilling over radio signals and then defend iCraveTV. After all, to retrieve those radio signals, you have to turn on your "robotic agent" (your TV) to fetch out of the air for you things which to your 5 built-in senses are completely invisible.
iCraveTV is supplying to Americans something which is illegal to supply in the United States.
I don't think iCraveTV is rebroadcasting over the internet to show the world the attrocities being committed against Canada, and I don't think that's why people are watching iCraveTV either.
And a signal jamming network won't help, because all it could do is pump radio garbage out over the current broadcasts. It would replace the current signal spillover with a garbage signal to drown out all others. Canada still wouldn't be able to use those frequencies.
I think you missed the point of the analogy, which is that though the company is located in a country where what they are doing is legal, they are victimizing companies in a country in which it is not legal.
Listening for something that might actually be there? I'd donate my computer's cycles to that!
But really, I can't see any way that the existing d.net clients could be used to process signals, which means they'd have to write a new client and then redistribute it. That would probably take a lot of time. Plus, since the individual clients would be running on computers all over the world, isn't there the potential for error due to screwed up computers or deliberate tampering with the client? The d.net model is fine for something unimportant like RC5, but a sensitive multimillion dollar project might want a more well thought out system.
Slashdot Mirror
Which one is the one?
The Microsoft one. While Microsoft does have different versions of NT, it is important to note that Microsoft's sales of NT managed to beat the combined sales of all of the Linux distributions.
In the same spirit, here's one I wrote just now: "Keep in mind, there are too many Windows-using lamers posting these days, and they ALL suck"
I don't use windows. I thought maybe I would remind you that while Linux has the second spot in terms of total sales, that is divided up among many unique distributions of Linux, with different properties and functions. Windows NT, on the other hand, represents a single distribution which still has more sales than all the Linux distributions put together. I figured I would save bandwidth and time by merely posting the one line, but I guess I was a little bit too subtle for some of the less intelligent Slashdot crowd.
There are many distributions of Linux. There is only one NT.
Anyone have a good argument as to why someone should NOT profit from a legitimate domain name investment?
It depends largely on why the domain name is being sold. If I bought oven.com to use for some personal project, and Maytag comes along wanting to use it to advertise their latest oven, they are asking me to remove it from my project to give to them. I have every right to ask for a price that's fair to me for giving up my domain name. I am not justified in asking for zillions of dollars just because I know it's worth that much to Maytag.
On the other hand, if my oven related project fell through, and I'm no longer using the domain, I'm not really justified in asking for more than the original cost of the domain name, plus a little for the time and trouble of transferring it.
I see no real difference between "domain name investing" and "cybersquatting". In either case, people are demanding massive amounts of cash for something that cost them virtually nothing and that they have no use for. It's just plain wrong. The price of a domain name should be determined by the loss (not necessarily just financial) of the person selling it. Anything more is just plain wrong.
But people are inherently greedy. If I owned a highly desirable domain name, I'd probably demand a large wad of cash to part with it too.
Could this be related to that trinoo program that was unearthed a few weeks ago? Or is this completely unrelated?
Even if this thing is for real, do we really want it?
The key to the Palm design that (from what I've read) made it sell so well and certainly what made me choose it was its simplicity. It doesn't do a heck of a lot, but it does it very, very well. I can pull it out and with only 1 button open a notepad, calculator, to-do list, or address book. There's no boot time and it is virtually crash-free. It has a very smooth and consistent GUI. I have trouble seeing any advantage to using Linux over a custom-written OS. Just take a look at the disaster that is WinCE. I know that there are some desirable things that could be done with Linux but not with the Palm OS, and of course there is the pure appeal to Linux evangelists and to companies wanting to cash in on Linux IPO mania, but it seems to me that consumers would be better off with an OS written from the ground up specifically for the handheld platform it's running on. A handheld is different from a PC in that it is only useful if it can be depended upon implicitly to anytime, in all situations. A handheld that crashes or fails in any way cannot effectively be used as an extension to the user's body, and therefore loses much of its usefulness.
Or did I just totally miss the point?
In response to my saying that people will tend not to buy what they already have for free:
Unfortunately, the reality of the situation proves you to be dead wrong. Given a choice, most people still buy the music, rather than just keep the MP3's. I've bought CD's after downloading tracks from them before myself.
I think it would be fortunate if reality proved me wrong. When the difference is $10-$20 for a commercial CD vs. $.50 for a CD-R, or free if you just store the MP3s on your hard disk, there are a lot of people who will choose to just keep what they can get for free. Unless you're suggesting that they only give out some of the songs for free to get people to buy the rest, which really doesn't change the situation we're in now. People will still pirate MP3s with FTP and Napster and Hotline, and the RIAA will still be just as pissed off about it.
The model of a radio or television station probably wouldn't work. If it works just like a traditional radio station, what will be the advantage for the listener? It will be the same old business model. The only truly innovative concept would be to make the entire catalog of music available to any listener at any time. On-demand music. But that runs into the problem of getting the advertising in, and also keeping people from just downloading the music once, then redistributing it without the advertising. Same old problem.
You'd be surprised at how little artists actually see of the revenue generated by their albums;
I have a close relative who is a professional musician. His income is directly affected every time someone pirates one of his songs. It's true that a lot of the money is eaten by the evil greedy record companies before it gets to him, but that isn't going to change. The ones who will suffer the most will be the artists, and hence the public, because if you can't make a living as a musician, you can't devote your full time to producing quality work.
1) Someone IS stopping me, Blank DVD's have the encryption key track "zeroed out"
There's nothing legally preventing you from buying DVDs with the encryption key track unwritten, or preventing anyone from making/selling them (as far as I know). And there's nothing to stop you from buying a $10,000 commercial DVD burner. If no one is selling blank DVDs or you can't afford a DVD press, that's not really the fault of the encryption.
2) I'm NOT converting it into a "more easily pirated" form, I'm converting it into its NATIVE form. When was the last time you read a book with a Captain Crunch Decoder Ring? (Anyway, encrypted data is just as tranferable/"pirateable" as native).
An encrypted DVD movie is multiple gigabytes, which makes it difficult to transfer over the internet currently. A shortsighted solution, certainly (as bandwidth will only increase in the future to the point where it is no big deal) but at present speeds a 500MB MPEG is much easier to transfer than a 5.2GB encoded DVD, and the loss of quality and size is bearable.
3) In fact, the media is USELESS without purchasing an ADDITIONAL PRODUCT (CSS licensed player)!
Even if you remove the encryption, you're still going to have to buy a DVD player. I can just see you buying a DVD of The Matrix, then sitting it on the coffee table and wondering why it isn't playing.
Your comparison of decoding CSS to reading books is just stupid. The 16 year old is not being tried for reading; he is being sued for breaking corporate security and distributing his results on the internet, potentially costing the film industry untold amounts of money.
If you ever produce or create something, I'm sure you'll want your rights to it protected.
If RIAA had harnessed the power of MP3 and streaming when these technologies had first come out, they would have owned the scene by now.
Yeah, but what scene? If they were giving away free music over the internet, they probably would own the scene, but how would that benefit them? They would be giving away intellectual property and getting nothing in return but maybe some advertising revenue. Not a bad deal if it isn't your intellectual property to begin with, (like MP3.com or Napster) but not such a good idea for the RIAA.
The RIAA's paranoia over their music being stolent is real. When faced with a choice between paying and just taking, a lot of people will just take. And as time goes on, it's looking less and less like there is anything the RIAA can do to stop people from just taking. The question now is, how can creators make a living from their intellectual property in a world where their work can be accessed by anyone, anytime, without paying them?
So he invented a couple of cool words: "Neuromacer" in particular.
He's invented a lot of cool words, (for instance "jacking in") and concepts which have become the standard if not the basis for much of modern science fiction.
Still, he's not the only author out there, and a lot of his books leave something to be desired. I'm seldom find myself satisfied with the way his stories end, personally, but the way things work along the way makes it worthwhile.
Whether you like it or not, a lot of pirating goes on between little insignificant low-end consumers. And that amount is only going to grow larger. You can't stop professional bootleggers who are willing to spend zillions of dollars on equipment because if the media can be read in the first place, it can be copied. The trick is in making it difficult and expensive enough to copy that Joe Average can't post it on the internet to share witha ll his friends.
I've worked for and with people from various countries other than America, and have found them to be (in most cases) at least as intelligent, motivated, and experienced as myself. If I lose a job to someone from another country, it just means I'll have to work harder to get the next one. I was lucky enough to be born in America, but that doesn't give me the right to say that someone born in Europe or Asia or Africa or South America shouldn't get a fair shot at working in the computer industry or any other. So don't preach your ethnocentric elitist ideals at me.
The people the article is talking about aren't a bunch of unskilled slovenly idiots who know little about English or personal hygiene. These are intelligent, educated people who have come to America to work in silicon valley and are being hired because they are the most qualified for the job at hand. The only people who suffer are people less qualified who would be filling the same jobs if it weren't for those darned immigrants. Don't blame all your problems on foreigners.
how many "warez" sites have you seen with captured VHS tapes on them, I havent seen any
I know a guy who gets copies of all the latest new releases. He downloads ripped MPEGs of them and dumps them onto VHS. If you haven't seen them, I guess it's because you haven't looked.
DVD's would be even MORE difficult to capture and distribute just because of the sheer SIZE That's like someone in the days of ENIAC saying that computers will never be in the home due to the sheer SIZE. Size is only a problem until bandwidth, compression, and physical media catch up. Just look at the popularity of MP3: Ten years ago, no one would have even thought of digitizing a record and sending it over the phone lines. The speed, compression, and disk space wasn't even close.
I have a legal right to make an archival backup of ANY media I purchase. Copy protection is wrong, it always hurts the consumer.
Nobody is stopping you from making an exact copy of the media you purchase. What they are stopping you from doing is converting that media into another form which is more easily pirated. Copy protection is a misleading name, so perhaps you are confused. In most cases it doesn't prevent you from copying the media (anything that can be read can be copied), it just attempts to prevent you from making unlawful copies of the media (for instance copies for friends). What harms the consumer is the difficulty in making it impossible to make unlawful copies without impairing the customer's ability to use the software and make lawful copies. But it is, after all, easier to criticize an existing system than think one up yourself, so go right ahead.
This is what you miss.
Unless I was excersizing subtle humor mixed with serious irony.
You do NOT have the right to watch it any way you like. When you buy a DVD, you are buying two things. The physical medium, and a license to use that physical medium. But the owners of the content on the physical medium can put whatever crazy clauses they want in that license.
This has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with control - control of how I watch a DVD, and what products I watch it on.
I still don't see how you can blame them for trying to supress CSS. Whether they are trying to keep people from copying their intellectual property or controlling how people view their intellectual property, it is still their right to do so. You don't have a right to view their intellectual propery.
Can you blame them for what they're doing? They came up with CSS encryption to prevent people from ripping movies and pirating them, and someone broke their code. Of course they're going to use every means at their disposal to try to put the cat back in the bag and prevent their intellectual property from being devalued and stolen.
The point has been made that as they didn't patent CSS, they have no legal claim to keep it under wraps. Not being a lawyer myself, I don't know whether this is true or not. But that's the point; I don't know and neither do most of you. Let the courts and the lawyers sort it out, and if the court says not to distribute deCSS until it's made up its mind, don't distribute deCSS.
Another thing: The MPAA and accessories have recieved a lot of criticism over their attempt to prevent piracy using proprietary encryption. I'm curious to know, what other options are available? Patenting doesn't seem like it would work, as then the complete record of how it works would be on file for all to see. So what should they have done and what should they do the next time they release a new standard and want to prevent piracy?
It is a sad reflection on slashdot that the top moderated article in this thread (as I write this) contains the phrase "firm young buttocks" no less than twice and a graphic description of a young girl being bludgeoned with a giant sausage. News for nerds indeed!
I guess I must be missing something, but Linux compatibility to me seems like a stupid thing to waste computer industry time by petitioning for. I mean, Linux is fine as an opensource pioneer and a free alternative to Solaris or similar Unix derivative, but one must question the wisdom in porting everything in sight to run under it. The reason that things like Quicktime don't already exist under Unix is, after all, that it's primarily a network operating system and not a home system. So when people start using it as a home system, it just creates another competing standard and slows down the whole industry.
they've set up a service where by Americans can set up their automated robotic agents to cross the border into Canada - come to the Vat o' Goodness, scoop up some of the waste and return to America with it.
Yeah, except that they supply the robotic agents. Look, I send a signal to my provider, who relays it to someone else, to someone else, to someone else etc. until it reaches iCraveTV. Then they send back a TV feed through the chain of servers eventually reaching me.
You can't criticize America for spilling over radio signals and then defend iCraveTV. After all, to retrieve those radio signals, you have to turn on your "robotic agent" (your TV) to fetch out of the air for you things which to your 5 built-in senses are completely invisible.
iCraveTV is supplying to Americans something which is illegal to supply in the United States.
That's fine because the cardboard signs or stickers aren't a part of the broadcast, obviously.
I don't think iCraveTV is rebroadcasting over the internet to show the world the attrocities being committed against Canada, and I don't think that's why people are watching iCraveTV either.
And a signal jamming network won't help, because all it could do is pump radio garbage out over the current broadcasts. It would replace the current signal spillover with a garbage signal to drown out all others. Canada still wouldn't be able to use those frequencies.
I think you missed the point of the analogy, which is that though the company is located in a country where what they are doing is legal, they are victimizing companies in a country in which it is not legal.
Listening for something that might actually be there? I'd donate my computer's cycles to that!
But really, I can't see any way that the existing d.net clients could be used to process signals, which means they'd have to write a new client and then redistribute it. That would probably take a lot of time. Plus, since the individual clients would be running on computers all over the world, isn't there the potential for error due to screwed up computers or deliberate tampering with the client? The d.net model is fine for something unimportant like RC5, but a sensitive multimillion dollar project might want a more well thought out system.