So probably the BBC has to show respect for such contracts by somehow using 'best efforts' to control systematic redistribution (or at least being able to claim that they are trying). Sure TPB is a gaping hole, but just because expert poachers sometimes outwit the gamekeeper doesn't mean he can tell his boss he's invited the whole village to shoot free.
So your argument is that the BBC's current broadcasting system doesn't stop people from freely watching the content, and that's okay, but that their new iplayer system must attempt to do more to stop them because otherwise people might do exactly the same things that they are already doing, and that would somehow... no, I can't even keep going, this is just too absurd.
There is no appreciable difference between the new system and the current system, except that the current system is larger, carries even more content, has better quality, and is being systematically redistributed right now. Why is it that only the new system "must have DRM"? Why should the new system use MS crippleware when the bigger, better, more important system is open to all?
Assuming they need to control the content - 'cos otherwise DVD sales etc are dead, hence lost revenue, hence more expensive TV licensing in the UK
The BBC already broadcasts their programming, in MPEG-2 at more or less DVD quality, unencrypted, over the public airwaves, all over the UK - in the form of digital terrestrial television. This is their primary reason for existence. There is no sight or sign of DRM anywhere near it. It is utterly trivial to record this with a computer and DVB capture card, hardware which is cheaply and widely available. Most popular BBC programmes are already recorded in this fashion and posted on thepiratebay.org within 12 hours.
This is the same content that they are now releasing onto the internet. It is quite obvious that if they didn't need DRM to broadcast it over radio in the first place, they don't need DRM to broadcast exactly the same stuff again over IP. It is further obvious that the simplest thing for them to do would be to use exactly the same codec that they are already using. There is no apparent reason why they should suddenly propose a far more limited and ineffective system just because the carrier system is IP rather than radio.
It is pretty obvious that Microsoft is involved in this one somewhere, and that's almost certainly illegal.
No amount of DRM on the IP version is going to have any effect at all on the material available on TPB, because all the content is already on the net and will continue to be posted there from the digital terrestrial broadcasts (no proposals are currently being made to post any of the BBC's considerable archive of material on the net, only some of the things which are currently being broadcast). The quality is better in the terrestrial broadcasts than in the iplayer system anyway, so iplayer is never going to be used as a source for TPB when the far better DVB version is readily available. The entire proposal is retarded: they are seriously suggesting a service which is lower quality, less convenient, and already less popular than TPB, with DRM crippling thrown in just to make it entirely unwanted. It's a complete waste of time and money, because everybody with an interest will just keep using TPB instead.
How about this: maybe Rockstar should try making a game that isn't so horrifyingly gory, brutal, and cruel that it can't be justified for sale into a market heavily populated by 15-year-olds? I mean, really, there are a lot of games that get the M rating that have gibs and spurting blood all over the place. You have go out of your way to make something exceptionally vicious and sadistic in order to get an AO.
The reality is that this isn't true, and AO ratings are only given out for two reasons: sex and politics. Everything else gets an M rating, regardless how "horrifyingly gory, brutal, and cruel" it is. Violence and cruelty are the American way, sex is the enemy.
Manhunt 2 got rated AO because of Jack Thompson's crusade against Rockstar, so this one falls under "politics".
I spoke to a guy who does DRM for an online game publisher. Once, they rewrote their algorithm which instantly rendered all existing cracks for the games useless. Sales jumped by 40% that month. Why? surely none of those who cracked the stuff would have bought it anyway?
That one only works if you don't look at it closely enough.
Let's assume that everything you said here is true and representative of the entire world. We now know that there exists some number of people who download cracks for stuff that they would otherwise have bought. I don't think anybody seriously disputes that at least one such person exists (your anecdote does not involve a claim for the existence of large numbers of such people).
How many of the people who cracked the stuff didn't buy it that month? Half the number who bought it? A hundred times the number who bought it? It's evidence for either side, depending on the information that hasn't been provided (and which you probably don't know either). This means the anecdote tells us nothing interesting about the point in question.
People will make all kinds of rationalisation to justify taking other peoples work for free.
This is very true. Publishers in particular are notable for being very good at it - they talk about "free market" and "competitive" and "the way the game is played", and what they mean is "you do all of the work and we take most of the money". You can't really make an ethical argument on this basis when the corporations that are being "injured" are already doing exactly the same thing.
But the distinct lack of really great songs as well as tons of "As made famous by..." really put me off.
The developers have commented on this before - apparently, they initially tried using the original versions of the songs (it's actually cheaper - licensing doesn't cost any more, and you don't have to pay a band), but they ran into a major problem:
It just wasn't fun
It turns out that most songs are not centred around the guitarist. While they may have some good riffs and solos in them, a lot of the song becomes quite boring to play, as the guitars take a back seat to the vocals. Also, the timing is often quite uneven, which makes it excruciatingly difficult for somebody to match on the controller - real bands kind of wing it, but GH doesn't work that way, you have to play the right notes at the time they appear in the score. So, in order to make the game fun to play, they recorded specialised versions of all the songs on the primary set lists, suitably rearranged with the guitars in the lead, and rehearsed to be note-perfect.
I totally agree that the BBC's back-catalogue should be made available to license payers to watch, but without some sort of mechanism to ensure that viewers actually have a license fee, when such a measure is possible, then that breaks their charter.
The BBC's main product is the BBC terrestrial broadcast. DRM measures are possible on this, such as the encryption and decoder mechanisms used by the cable companies. The BBC does not use them. Anybody can buy (or build, it's not that hard!) their own TV receiver and watch TV broadcasts in their own home. There is no authentication that the person watching TV has paid a license fee. The BBC's charter does not require DRM and DRM is not currently used.
License fees are enforced through legal means, as a deterrent - most people have TV licenses, and they know which houses don't have licenses, so they just check up on those houses from time to time to make sure that they don't have a TV, and take them to court if necessary.
There is no reason why exactly the same lightweight method would not work for the downloaded content - access could easily be limited to the UK only, and the rest can be handled by catching the handful of violators (there are not many undersea cables coming into the country, and arranging IP-address-based filters on all of them would be quite simple for an organisation with the BBC's connections).
According to Goodmail, seven U.S. ISPs now use CertifedEmail, accounting for 60 percent of the U.S. population.
This is probably true as stated, but almost meaningless. Each of those ISPs will be counting the number of users that have email accounts with them, and then they just added up those numbers. The problem with this is that many users have more than one email account and don't use the one provided by their ISP - a large chunk of that 60% probably uses yahoo, hotmail, or gmail. Many people will also have another account provided by their employer.
It is not particularly useful to count email accounts as a fraction of the US population.
Contracts for residential Internet service and mobile phone service are signed, yet they're still contracts of adhesion.
Yours are signed? Mine aren't, I just give them a credit card number and they give me an account. Regardless, it can happen, it's just unusual (largely because contracts of adhesion don't really need a signature so much - with a classical contract, the signature is to show that this particular document is the version accepted by the parties, but by definition there is only one version of a contract of adhesion).
And more importantly, the makers/administrators of giant multiplayer games (or worlds) kind of NEED to be able to terminate accounts at will. What if a player/group of players find a bug in the game and are able to use it to cheat? Or worse, use it to gain access to the personal computers of OTHER players without their permission? If they had to go through a whole "termination process", players could wreak havoc at will in those kinds of situations. And what could the admins of the servers do? They can't terminate the accounts. They can't just shut off the servers (because that would be the equivalent of terminating *everybody's* account). The only recourse it to quickly try and patch the software before the problem gets entirely out of hand. They do that anyway, really, but it's a lot harder when the entire server is going to hell because of the exploit.
They need, and have, the ability to terminate accounts for just cause, such as exploiting the game to steal, commit fraud, or cause damage. They do not need, and do not have, the right to terminate accounts without just cause and in a manner that causes actual damage to the user whose account is terminated, regardless of the form which that damage might take. Anybody who is running a profit-making business within a game will suffer actual damage if their account is terminated, so it is illegal for the operator to do this without a good reason. Such a user does have the right to have a court examine whether there was a good reason.
It's okay for Blizzard to clearly make a rule that farming gold and then selling it for real-world money is prohibited, and then terminate the accounts of people who break that rule. It's not okay for them to terminate an account because they don't like the user. Etcetera.
Their right to control what happens on their servers ends at the point where other people's right to not be unfairly injured begins. This is true for anything, not just games, and not just software. The courts do not care about the medium, only the injury.
He ruled that the terms were so one-sided that it was "unconscionable" (horribly one-sided), and therefore invalid. If the same terms were in a shrinkwrap license, or even a signed contract, the same terms would have had the same problem.
Obligatory proviso: while this is basically true, a signed contract may be valid anyway - if it can be shown that the party who loses out to the contract was fully aware of this at the time when they signed it, that the terms of the contract were negotiated by both parties, and they were not under any form of duress, then any contract is valid no matter how unconscionable. Licenses or contracts are only rejected in this manner when one party failed to understand the implications of the contract (and "would not have signed it if they had known") or when the terms were dictated by one party alone ("contract of adhesion", which is normal for clickwrap and shrinkwrap, but unusual for a signed contract).
There are some rules which apply to all contracts, but this isn't one of them. Be careful what you sign. For an important example, you can't often play this card for your job contract.
why doesn't MS just tell Square - Enix, hey give us the exclusive and we will pre-pay you for 10 million copies. That should help the XBOX sell a few units at the tough (for outsiders) Japanese market and help bury the PS3... A very good investment IMHO. And Square whether traditional or not, is still a business, so I can't see offers like that rejected "by principle".
Japanese are not like Americans. They need to make a profit. They do not feel compelled to maximise their profit at the expense of all else - in fact, they often loathe that attitude. Many things are more important to most Japanese businessmen and executives than profit, particularly if they are traditionalists. Not everybody there is like this, but Square-Enix is run by some fairly traditional people. If Americans are slaves to the bottom line, then Japanese are slaves to tradition and pride.
A Japanese company would rather stick with somebody they know well and have prior connections with, than "shop around" for somebody who will give them a 10% lower price. They will not normally abandon a current partner unless they are mistreated or they are at risk of losing money (ie, making a loss, not just reduced profit).
If you want to make a traditionalist Japanese executive incredibly angry, offer him a bribe to switch to your company. It's a direct insult. If Microsoft even proposed something like you suggest, it would inspire hatred of a religious fervour, and it would be likely that no Square-Enix title would ever run on any platform made by Microsoft, ever. They may be able to win FF by persuasion; they will not be able to do it by throwing money around.
It would be nice if he managed to once and for all break the legality of EULAs. Most likely won't happen but one can indulge in fantasy.
The whole concept of a contract no one ever bothers to read is silly. Not to mention that often allot of the clauses break the law.
Judges can and do void EULAs all the time, if and only if the user has not broken any real laws (ie, if you're making duplicates for your own use, the judge is not going to let you off the hook - that's illegal copyright infringement regardless of the EULA). They're quite aware that these things are silly. Judges cannot proclaim that the practice of slapping EULA labels on all commercial software is somehow illegal - that's up to your legislature - but they can simply ignore them whenever a corporation tries to grab something that wasn't theirs. It's not a valid contract if you don't get anything out of it, and most EULAs grant you nothing that you wanted (you do not need a license just to use a piece of software that you've already bought, any more than you needed to agree to a license before you played a CD or drove a car that you bought).
One notable requirement is that the judge isn't allowed to consider any arguments that haven't been made by a party to the lawsuit, so you do have to assert the invalidity of EULAs and at least vaguely point at the appropriate reasons - some cases go bad because the user or user's lawyer didn't know about this, and then the corporation pushes publicity of the case in order to strengthen the illusion of EULAs. Another issue is that you probably won't get legal costs (unless you're in a "loser pays" jurisdiction), as the presence of the EULA is normally considered sufficient reason for the corporation to sue you - so you still have to pay for the legal battle. A lot of cases get settled badly because of this.
Free Software licenses are distribution licenses, not EULAs, and so there is no need to agree to them, or even read them, before using the software.
There is no such thing as a license which you "need" to agree to before using some software. There is no copyright on usage, only on duplication, distribution of modified forms, and possession or distribution of illegal integers. Anything that you are holding is perfectly legal to use in any way you see fit, unless you've explicitly agreed not to or would be violating some other law in the process.
The "I agree" EULA game is an attempt to con you into accepting a license which you don't need. Nothing more.
Consider: when was the last time you agreed to a license before playing a CD that you bought? Never? That's because you don't need one to use something you own, and only the software companies bother to pretend that you do, in the hope that nobody will call them out on it.
I have no idea why people think that one actually has to sign anything to form a contract. Most US states have no such requirement. The closest thing to any such requirement is in the statute of frauds, but the statute of frauds is applied very narrowly (the US doesn't typically like formalities).
Contracts are formed all the time without signing anything. More often than not, the only questions for a court in a contract between businesses and consumers are: 1) was there proper notice of the terms and 2) are the terms unconscionable?
While this is true as far as it goes, a contract will under normal circumstances only form in a two-way exchange - in legal parlance, there must be "consideration" for both parties. Since these EULAs usually don't grant anything to the consumer that they did not already have, they cannot be presumed to automatically form at the time of exchange, which is the normal basis for these things in the absence of a signature. Some form of explicit hoop-jumping, such as a signature, is required to get these one-way things to activate. Corporations like to play games with forced "I agree" buttons; their legitimacy is actually quite weak, and judges will often (although not always) void them if the user hasn't done anything "wrong" and is sufficiently aware to make this argument. You can't force somebody into a contract, and any agreement made under duress is invalid (and the "but they could have returned it to the store, so they had a choice" line does not amuse very many judges, particularly since the store is not legally required to take the computer back if there's nothing wrong with it)
You're missing an important point... the software is protected by copyright law. Without a license agreement, nothing else gives you the right to use that software. That's why the GPL works for example... without agreeing to the GPL's terms, you have no right to use the software.
So if the EULA is invalid in your country, but the copyright laws are... then you are forbidden to use that software;)
The GPL explicitly activates this behaviour by saying that either the entire license applies, or none of it does. Microsoft's EULAs explicitly deactivate this behaviour by saying that if any clause or term in the license is found to be unlawful, the rest of it still applies. Hence, this is true only for the GPL, and not for this license. Microsoft wanted it this way (since their EULAs grab things that weren't previously theirs).
The clause in question is probably unlawful in the UK and EU and so can be ignored.
Furthermore, sale of a product (or gift of a product that is normally sold) is presumptively considered by the courts to grant a license for the use of that product in any reasonably expected fashion - you don't actually need the EULA to permit you to play the CD or run the software that you just bought. Microsoft and similar companies have to jump through legal hoops, forcing you to click on "I Agree" buttons and break seals that say "By breaking this seal you agree to..." in order to force you to submit to the license. You do not actually need that license.
The same thing does apply to GPLed products - but the GPL permits free use without restriction in the first place, so it doesn't matter. Sale of a product does not grant rights to duplicate or modify-then-redistribute the product (although it does give you the right to redistribute the original copy of the product, or to modify it for your own private use), and that's what you need to accept the GPL for. The Microsoft EULAs don't permit this, so they aren't giving you permission to do anything that you did not already have. (Yes, they are taking things from you and giving you nothing in return; this is one of the main reasons why they are considered legally dubious, and courts tend to ignore them when no otherwise illegal activities have occurred)
CVS and Subversion are open source projects, Linus should fix them.
Many people have tried to fix subversion. They have always been rebuffed with claims like "that's not what we're trying to do". You have to realise that subversion is, fundamentally, a commercial product designed to maximise revenue. Just because the source is public doesn't mean that it is developed in the same manner as Linux; contributions are welcome only if they are beneficial to CollabNet's goals.
You can theorise for yourself what kind of goals a support-oriented company might have for a project they support (but I'd bet that "needing our support" is going to be on that list somewhere).
Also, waste is not "just so dangerous." By the very definition of half-life, the most intense radioactive waste is the stuff that breaks down the fastest. That's why we keep it in cooling ponds for a few years before doing something else with it. After the high-radioactive components have decayed, what's left has a very long half-life, which means that it has a low level of radioactivity.
But most importantly, that stuff that's left over that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years? We didn't create it. That's the stuff that we dug out of the ground in the first place. Nuclear power plants actually decrease the total amount of it in the world. It has always been horribly dangerous (if you mess around in a uranium mine, you'll die), it was just buried under a million tons of rock. We are not creating a new problem here, we're just looking at a problem that wasn't previously so noticeable. By digging it up and burning some of it in reactors, we're almost certainly improving matters (so long as we handle it properly when we're done with it, and don't do stupid things in the name of cost-cutting).
(1.5*10^13 TW / [0.4 *342 W/m]) / 148939100000000 m = ~ 0.07%. Let's double it for extra capacity (and because half the planet is in night), and we're still under 0.15% of the land surface area. Your 8% estimate is large by a factor of 50 or so.
You also need to account for cloudy weather, and the fact that solar cells produce power dependant on the angle of the sun - the quoted efficiency is for noon only, it drops off sharply the rest of the time (cosine function, IIRC), growing worse as you get further from the equator. Also, the fact that a significant of the Earth's land area has long nights and short days for half the year screws things up more (you can't really store the energy from summer for use in winter, and the northern and southern land masses don't balance, you're going to lose out on one of them). Without spending time to look up the real figures, my back-of-the-envelope scribblings comes to about 1/5 of that amount of power. 8% is still too large, but not by that much. The right figure is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 1%.
Lastly, you need to account for the energy cost of producing solar cells, and that one is a real killer. I could easily believe that 8% is the right figure for 10%-efficient solar cells, once that has been factored in. New technologies like the one in the article can only help with this, but we need to keep improving them a lot before solar power is viable as a primary power source (rather than a backup to reduce the load on dirty coal and oil burners).
Of course, putting the whole thing in space might make more sense. If you really want pie-in-the-sky thinking, covering the moon with 10% efficient solar cells would provide about 86 times the power the world uses now. Getting it all back to Earth would be the tricky part.
More practical would be pushing the energy consumers out there - how much is manufacturing and computer hardware that could run quite happily on the moon, and just ship back the products? Dropping manufactured items down to Earth is much easier (although it's still highly effective as a weapon, c.f. Heinlein's "The moon is a harsh mistress"), and the latency of internet access would only be a few seconds.
Efficiency needs to be better than the stuff currently on the mass market (15-20% ish) if solar cells are going to be worthwhile on a large scale. The problem lies in the fact that solar cells cost energy to produce and install, and don't last forever. Since they have a limited lifespan, there is a limit to the total energy that they can produce in that lifespan. Once you have accounted for night, clouds, and the fact that the angle of the sun yields lower power when it's not noon, most of the cells currently out there look pretty poor compared to their energy cost. Some don't even manage to break even.
If we could get high-efficiency cells like this on the market, at the prices current cells are going for, it would mean a radical improvement - doubling the gross energy production would increase the net energy gain by something in the region of a factor of ten. It would also mean that the tree-hugger's wet dream of a landscape plated black with solar cells, as a replacement for conventional power plants, might actually stray into the realms of practicality (with the current cells, you would literally have to plate the US from coast to coast if you wanted to supply all the energy that the US consumes).
Except when you stumble upon something that doesn't work so easily, and casual users are told to change some text in some config files and type things that they don't know what the meaning is in the console.
On Windows, they get told to change some text in the registry and type things they don't understand into cmd.exe. Where's the difference?
I'm guessing that you're a programmer. So I'm further guessing that the UIs you design suck.
No, I'm a sysadmin. I'm the guy that gets called in when a user can't figure out whether to click on 'Yes' or 'No' in the newly-purchased application. This puts me in a very good position to judge what the problem is, and the problem is usually users who are clearly unqualified to do the jobs they have been given.
For example, if a user is trying to interact with a mouse-driven program by kicking the computer, then you might say the problem is that the UI should have been designed to accept kicking as input, but I know for a fact that you're just trying to avoid taking the blame for hiring somebody who does not know how to use a mouse.
Insert CD. Phone relative because the CD does nothing. Find Install and click it. Cancel the dialog and click the other install. Phone relative again and ask them why its going to take 3 hours. Make coffee. Return to computer and switch it off (thinking they were switching it on because the screen was blank) Ring relative and ask why its not worked.
Ah, you've used Windows, I see. Installing things is much easier on pretty much every other platform (including macosx, most of the linux-based platforms, and most of the BSDs).
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any reason to bother, because you can get exactly the same effect in software with a simple Diffie-Helman key exchange (and that's probably more secure anyway, because it doesn't rely on the precision of hardware resistors). The essential security properties appear to be identical: a secure channel is established between two endpoints, but the identify of those endpoints is not authenticated in any way, so all you know is that you're securely talking to somebody.
In both cases, you can authenticate the endpoints by prior exchange of key material. I can't see why you would want to do this in complicated, strange hardware when you can do it perfectly easily in existing software. This is the method by which ssh operates, if you have validated the host key correctly, or SSL/TLS, if you have provided the appropriate certificates.
The point of quantum encryption was that we might someday be able to prove it cannot be broken, if we can show that quantum physics works how we think it does (we are uncertain whether Diffie-Helman can be broken, like all other modern cryptographic algorithms, and have no idea whether we'll ever be able to prove it secure). No such proof appears possible with this method.
Copyright law does not allow you to copyright an idea. So, if I have an idea and say it in a copyrighted article, there is nothing stopping you from expressing the same idea, so long as you don't use my exact words.
In the US, this is no longer true. Post-DMCA copyright law can stop you from expressing certain ideas.
Now, this is not to say that copyright law can't be abused in such a way that it can curtail free speech - and the 2600 and DECSS case appears to be a good example of this abuse. However, abuse of a law is not the same as the letter and spirit of a law, and for any discussion about copyright we must take all factors into account - not neglect the two biggest (the letter and spirit of the law) whenever it suits our argument to do so.
The letter and spirit of the law is that anything potentially dangerous to the copyright model of the RIAA and MPAA cannot be expressed. The decss case was entirely consistent with this, and not an abuse of the law at all - it is precisely what the law was enacted to do. It's not the court's fault that you let them pass that law.
The barn has burned down, the horse is long since gone. Copyright in the US is not what it used to be.
Exactly. Here's a hint to computer programmers: If the user's not getting what they need from your application, then you fucked up. It's your job to make your software usable. Stop blaming others for problems caused by your shitty UI design skills. Good Christ, I'm sick of the condescension I see coming every day from my fellow developers.
But equally and in the opposite direction: if your staff can't use the system to get their work done, there is a good chance that you fucked up in hiring them. Stop blaming the system for problems caused by you hiring people with no computer literacy at all, and not bothering to test whether they had any skills before giving them the job.
There are certainly many badly designed applications in the world, but most real-world problems with computer usage in the workplace are the result of idiotic hiring practices. You do not save money by offering lower salaries.
Slashdot Mirror
So your argument is that the BBC's current broadcasting system doesn't stop people from freely watching the content, and that's okay, but that their new iplayer system must attempt to do more to stop them because otherwise people might do exactly the same things that they are already doing, and that would somehow... no, I can't even keep going, this is just too absurd.
There is no appreciable difference between the new system and the current system, except that the current system is larger, carries even more content, has better quality, and is being systematically redistributed right now. Why is it that only the new system "must have DRM"? Why should the new system use MS crippleware when the bigger, better, more important system is open to all?
The BBC already broadcasts their programming, in MPEG-2 at more or less DVD quality, unencrypted, over the public airwaves, all over the UK - in the form of digital terrestrial television. This is their primary reason for existence. There is no sight or sign of DRM anywhere near it. It is utterly trivial to record this with a computer and DVB capture card, hardware which is cheaply and widely available. Most popular BBC programmes are already recorded in this fashion and posted on thepiratebay.org within 12 hours.
This is the same content that they are now releasing onto the internet. It is quite obvious that if they didn't need DRM to broadcast it over radio in the first place, they don't need DRM to broadcast exactly the same stuff again over IP. It is further obvious that the simplest thing for them to do would be to use exactly the same codec that they are already using. There is no apparent reason why they should suddenly propose a far more limited and ineffective system just because the carrier system is IP rather than radio.
It is pretty obvious that Microsoft is involved in this one somewhere, and that's almost certainly illegal.
No amount of DRM on the IP version is going to have any effect at all on the material available on TPB, because all the content is already on the net and will continue to be posted there from the digital terrestrial broadcasts (no proposals are currently being made to post any of the BBC's considerable archive of material on the net, only some of the things which are currently being broadcast). The quality is better in the terrestrial broadcasts than in the iplayer system anyway, so iplayer is never going to be used as a source for TPB when the far better DVB version is readily available. The entire proposal is retarded: they are seriously suggesting a service which is lower quality, less convenient, and already less popular than TPB, with DRM crippling thrown in just to make it entirely unwanted. It's a complete waste of time and money, because everybody with an interest will just keep using TPB instead.
The reality is that this isn't true, and AO ratings are only given out for two reasons: sex and politics. Everything else gets an M rating, regardless how "horrifyingly gory, brutal, and cruel" it is. Violence and cruelty are the American way, sex is the enemy.
Manhunt 2 got rated AO because of Jack Thompson's crusade against Rockstar, so this one falls under "politics".
That one only works if you don't look at it closely enough.
Let's assume that everything you said here is true and representative of the entire world. We now know that there exists some number of people who download cracks for stuff that they would otherwise have bought. I don't think anybody seriously disputes that at least one such person exists (your anecdote does not involve a claim for the existence of large numbers of such people).
How many of the people who cracked the stuff didn't buy it that month? Half the number who bought it? A hundred times the number who bought it? It's evidence for either side, depending on the information that hasn't been provided (and which you probably don't know either). This means the anecdote tells us nothing interesting about the point in question.
This is very true. Publishers in particular are notable for being very good at it - they talk about "free market" and "competitive" and "the way the game is played", and what they mean is "you do all of the work and we take most of the money". You can't really make an ethical argument on this basis when the corporations that are being "injured" are already doing exactly the same thing.
The developers have commented on this before - apparently, they initially tried using the original versions of the songs (it's actually cheaper - licensing doesn't cost any more, and you don't have to pay a band), but they ran into a major problem:
It just wasn't fun
It turns out that most songs are not centred around the guitarist. While they may have some good riffs and solos in them, a lot of the song becomes quite boring to play, as the guitars take a back seat to the vocals. Also, the timing is often quite uneven, which makes it excruciatingly difficult for somebody to match on the controller - real bands kind of wing it, but GH doesn't work that way, you have to play the right notes at the time they appear in the score. So, in order to make the game fun to play, they recorded specialised versions of all the songs on the primary set lists, suitably rearranged with the guitars in the lead, and rehearsed to be note-perfect.
The BBC's main product is the BBC terrestrial broadcast. DRM measures are possible on this, such as the encryption and decoder mechanisms used by the cable companies. The BBC does not use them. Anybody can buy (or build, it's not that hard!) their own TV receiver and watch TV broadcasts in their own home. There is no authentication that the person watching TV has paid a license fee. The BBC's charter does not require DRM and DRM is not currently used.
License fees are enforced through legal means, as a deterrent - most people have TV licenses, and they know which houses don't have licenses, so they just check up on those houses from time to time to make sure that they don't have a TV, and take them to court if necessary.
There is no reason why exactly the same lightweight method would not work for the downloaded content - access could easily be limited to the UK only, and the rest can be handled by catching the handful of violators (there are not many undersea cables coming into the country, and arranging IP-address-based filters on all of them would be quite simple for an organisation with the BBC's connections).
This is probably true as stated, but almost meaningless. Each of those ISPs will be counting the number of users that have email accounts with them, and then they just added up those numbers. The problem with this is that many users have more than one email account and don't use the one provided by their ISP - a large chunk of that 60% probably uses yahoo, hotmail, or gmail. Many people will also have another account provided by their employer.
It is not particularly useful to count email accounts as a fraction of the US population.
Yours are signed? Mine aren't, I just give them a credit card number and they give me an account. Regardless, it can happen, it's just unusual (largely because contracts of adhesion don't really need a signature so much - with a classical contract, the signature is to show that this particular document is the version accepted by the parties, but by definition there is only one version of a contract of adhesion).
They need, and have, the ability to terminate accounts for just cause, such as exploiting the game to steal, commit fraud, or cause damage. They do not need, and do not have, the right to terminate accounts without just cause and in a manner that causes actual damage to the user whose account is terminated, regardless of the form which that damage might take. Anybody who is running a profit-making business within a game will suffer actual damage if their account is terminated, so it is illegal for the operator to do this without a good reason. Such a user does have the right to have a court examine whether there was a good reason.
It's okay for Blizzard to clearly make a rule that farming gold and then selling it for real-world money is prohibited, and then terminate the accounts of people who break that rule. It's not okay for them to terminate an account because they don't like the user. Etcetera.
Their right to control what happens on their servers ends at the point where other people's right to not be unfairly injured begins. This is true for anything, not just games, and not just software. The courts do not care about the medium, only the injury.
Obligatory proviso: while this is basically true, a signed contract may be valid anyway - if it can be shown that the party who loses out to the contract was fully aware of this at the time when they signed it, that the terms of the contract were negotiated by both parties, and they were not under any form of duress, then any contract is valid no matter how unconscionable. Licenses or contracts are only rejected in this manner when one party failed to understand the implications of the contract (and "would not have signed it if they had known") or when the terms were dictated by one party alone ("contract of adhesion", which is normal for clickwrap and shrinkwrap, but unusual for a signed contract).
There are some rules which apply to all contracts, but this isn't one of them. Be careful what you sign. For an important example, you can't often play this card for your job contract.
Japanese are not like Americans. They need to make a profit. They do not feel compelled to maximise their profit at the expense of all else - in fact, they often loathe that attitude. Many things are more important to most Japanese businessmen and executives than profit, particularly if they are traditionalists. Not everybody there is like this, but Square-Enix is run by some fairly traditional people. If Americans are slaves to the bottom line, then Japanese are slaves to tradition and pride.
A Japanese company would rather stick with somebody they know well and have prior connections with, than "shop around" for somebody who will give them a 10% lower price. They will not normally abandon a current partner unless they are mistreated or they are at risk of losing money (ie, making a loss, not just reduced profit).
If you want to make a traditionalist Japanese executive incredibly angry, offer him a bribe to switch to your company. It's a direct insult. If Microsoft even proposed something like you suggest, it would inspire hatred of a religious fervour, and it would be likely that no Square-Enix title would ever run on any platform made by Microsoft, ever. They may be able to win FF by persuasion; they will not be able to do it by throwing money around.
Judges can and do void EULAs all the time, if and only if the user has not broken any real laws (ie, if you're making duplicates for your own use, the judge is not going to let you off the hook - that's illegal copyright infringement regardless of the EULA). They're quite aware that these things are silly. Judges cannot proclaim that the practice of slapping EULA labels on all commercial software is somehow illegal - that's up to your legislature - but they can simply ignore them whenever a corporation tries to grab something that wasn't theirs. It's not a valid contract if you don't get anything out of it, and most EULAs grant you nothing that you wanted (you do not need a license just to use a piece of software that you've already bought, any more than you needed to agree to a license before you played a CD or drove a car that you bought).
One notable requirement is that the judge isn't allowed to consider any arguments that haven't been made by a party to the lawsuit, so you do have to assert the invalidity of EULAs and at least vaguely point at the appropriate reasons - some cases go bad because the user or user's lawyer didn't know about this, and then the corporation pushes publicity of the case in order to strengthen the illusion of EULAs. Another issue is that you probably won't get legal costs (unless you're in a "loser pays" jurisdiction), as the presence of the EULA is normally considered sufficient reason for the corporation to sue you - so you still have to pay for the legal battle. A lot of cases get settled badly because of this.
There is no such thing as a license which you "need" to agree to before using some software. There is no copyright on usage, only on duplication, distribution of modified forms, and possession or distribution of illegal integers. Anything that you are holding is perfectly legal to use in any way you see fit, unless you've explicitly agreed not to or would be violating some other law in the process.
The "I agree" EULA game is an attempt to con you into accepting a license which you don't need. Nothing more.
Consider: when was the last time you agreed to a license before playing a CD that you bought? Never? That's because you don't need one to use something you own, and only the software companies bother to pretend that you do, in the hope that nobody will call them out on it.
While this is true as far as it goes, a contract will under normal circumstances only form in a two-way exchange - in legal parlance, there must be "consideration" for both parties. Since these EULAs usually don't grant anything to the consumer that they did not already have, they cannot be presumed to automatically form at the time of exchange, which is the normal basis for these things in the absence of a signature. Some form of explicit hoop-jumping, such as a signature, is required to get these one-way things to activate. Corporations like to play games with forced "I agree" buttons; their legitimacy is actually quite weak, and judges will often (although not always) void them if the user hasn't done anything "wrong" and is sufficiently aware to make this argument. You can't force somebody into a contract, and any agreement made under duress is invalid (and the "but they could have returned it to the store, so they had a choice" line does not amuse very many judges, particularly since the store is not legally required to take the computer back if there's nothing wrong with it)
The GPL explicitly activates this behaviour by saying that either the entire license applies, or none of it does. Microsoft's EULAs explicitly deactivate this behaviour by saying that if any clause or term in the license is found to be unlawful, the rest of it still applies. Hence, this is true only for the GPL, and not for this license. Microsoft wanted it this way (since their EULAs grab things that weren't previously theirs).
The clause in question is probably unlawful in the UK and EU and so can be ignored.
Furthermore, sale of a product (or gift of a product that is normally sold) is presumptively considered by the courts to grant a license for the use of that product in any reasonably expected fashion - you don't actually need the EULA to permit you to play the CD or run the software that you just bought. Microsoft and similar companies have to jump through legal hoops, forcing you to click on "I Agree" buttons and break seals that say "By breaking this seal you agree to..." in order to force you to submit to the license. You do not actually need that license.
The same thing does apply to GPLed products - but the GPL permits free use without restriction in the first place, so it doesn't matter. Sale of a product does not grant rights to duplicate or modify-then-redistribute the product (although it does give you the right to redistribute the original copy of the product, or to modify it for your own private use), and that's what you need to accept the GPL for. The Microsoft EULAs don't permit this, so they aren't giving you permission to do anything that you did not already have. (Yes, they are taking things from you and giving you nothing in return; this is one of the main reasons why they are considered legally dubious, and courts tend to ignore them when no otherwise illegal activities have occurred)
Many people have tried to fix subversion. They have always been rebuffed with claims like "that's not what we're trying to do". You have to realise that subversion is, fundamentally, a commercial product designed to maximise revenue. Just because the source is public doesn't mean that it is developed in the same manner as Linux; contributions are welcome only if they are beneficial to CollabNet's goals.
You can theorise for yourself what kind of goals a support-oriented company might have for a project they support (but I'd bet that "needing our support" is going to be on that list somewhere).
But most importantly, that stuff that's left over that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years? We didn't create it. That's the stuff that we dug out of the ground in the first place. Nuclear power plants actually decrease the total amount of it in the world. It has always been horribly dangerous (if you mess around in a uranium mine, you'll die), it was just buried under a million tons of rock. We are not creating a new problem here, we're just looking at a problem that wasn't previously so noticeable. By digging it up and burning some of it in reactors, we're almost certainly improving matters (so long as we handle it properly when we're done with it, and don't do stupid things in the name of cost-cutting).
You also need to account for cloudy weather, and the fact that solar cells produce power dependant on the angle of the sun - the quoted efficiency is for noon only, it drops off sharply the rest of the time (cosine function, IIRC), growing worse as you get further from the equator. Also, the fact that a significant of the Earth's land area has long nights and short days for half the year screws things up more (you can't really store the energy from summer for use in winter, and the northern and southern land masses don't balance, you're going to lose out on one of them). Without spending time to look up the real figures, my back-of-the-envelope scribblings comes to about 1/5 of that amount of power. 8% is still too large, but not by that much. The right figure is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 1%.
Lastly, you need to account for the energy cost of producing solar cells, and that one is a real killer. I could easily believe that 8% is the right figure for 10%-efficient solar cells, once that has been factored in. New technologies like the one in the article can only help with this, but we need to keep improving them a lot before solar power is viable as a primary power source (rather than a backup to reduce the load on dirty coal and oil burners).
More practical would be pushing the energy consumers out there - how much is manufacturing and computer hardware that could run quite happily on the moon, and just ship back the products? Dropping manufactured items down to Earth is much easier (although it's still highly effective as a weapon, c.f. Heinlein's "The moon is a harsh mistress"), and the latency of internet access would only be a few seconds.
Efficiency needs to be better than the stuff currently on the mass market (15-20% ish) if solar cells are going to be worthwhile on a large scale. The problem lies in the fact that solar cells cost energy to produce and install, and don't last forever. Since they have a limited lifespan, there is a limit to the total energy that they can produce in that lifespan. Once you have accounted for night, clouds, and the fact that the angle of the sun yields lower power when it's not noon, most of the cells currently out there look pretty poor compared to their energy cost. Some don't even manage to break even.
If we could get high-efficiency cells like this on the market, at the prices current cells are going for, it would mean a radical improvement - doubling the gross energy production would increase the net energy gain by something in the region of a factor of ten. It would also mean that the tree-hugger's wet dream of a landscape plated black with solar cells, as a replacement for conventional power plants, might actually stray into the realms of practicality (with the current cells, you would literally have to plate the US from coast to coast if you wanted to supply all the energy that the US consumes).
On Windows, they get told to change some text in the registry and type things they don't understand into cmd.exe. Where's the difference?
Yes.
No, I'm a sysadmin. I'm the guy that gets called in when a user can't figure out whether to click on 'Yes' or 'No' in the newly-purchased application. This puts me in a very good position to judge what the problem is, and the problem is usually users who are clearly unqualified to do the jobs they have been given.
For example, if a user is trying to interact with a mouse-driven program by kicking the computer, then you might say the problem is that the UI should have been designed to accept kicking as input, but I know for a fact that you're just trying to avoid taking the blame for hiring somebody who does not know how to use a mouse.
Ah, you've used Windows, I see. Installing things is much easier on pretty much every other platform (including macosx, most of the linux-based platforms, and most of the BSDs).
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any reason to bother, because you can get exactly the same effect in software with a simple Diffie-Helman key exchange (and that's probably more secure anyway, because it doesn't rely on the precision of hardware resistors). The essential security properties appear to be identical: a secure channel is established between two endpoints, but the identify of those endpoints is not authenticated in any way, so all you know is that you're securely talking to somebody.
In both cases, you can authenticate the endpoints by prior exchange of key material. I can't see why you would want to do this in complicated, strange hardware when you can do it perfectly easily in existing software. This is the method by which ssh operates, if you have validated the host key correctly, or SSL/TLS, if you have provided the appropriate certificates.
The point of quantum encryption was that we might someday be able to prove it cannot be broken, if we can show that quantum physics works how we think it does (we are uncertain whether Diffie-Helman can be broken, like all other modern cryptographic algorithms, and have no idea whether we'll ever be able to prove it secure). No such proof appears possible with this method.
In the US, this is no longer true. Post-DMCA copyright law can stop you from expressing certain ideas.
The letter and spirit of the law is that anything potentially dangerous to the copyright model of the RIAA and MPAA cannot be expressed. The decss case was entirely consistent with this, and not an abuse of the law at all - it is precisely what the law was enacted to do. It's not the court's fault that you let them pass that law.
The barn has burned down, the horse is long since gone. Copyright in the US is not what it used to be.
But equally and in the opposite direction: if your staff can't use the system to get their work done, there is a good chance that you fucked up in hiring them. Stop blaming the system for problems caused by you hiring people with no computer literacy at all, and not bothering to test whether they had any skills before giving them the job.
There are certainly many badly designed applications in the world, but most real-world problems with computer usage in the workplace are the result of idiotic hiring practices. You do not save money by offering lower salaries.