If you've been buying music for 30+ years, then you and are are probably of a comparable age. Also, just to be clear here, I buy my music--I've been buying records and CDs (and cassettes, and even a few 8-tracks!) for decades, and have built a modest collection of about a thousand albums in one form or another. All but a dozen of them or so get regularly played.
I also download music. For that matter, I also listen to the radio. Both of them are ways to find music that I want to buy. Artists who I like get my money, as simple as that. (With the exception of out-of-print albums, which aren't available any other way and don't provide a means for paying the artist.) In fact, the new generation of artists are reveling in this, and putting albums up for sale on places like cdbaby.com, and many of them are offering two-minute-per-song samples of entire albums.
All of this, though, sidesteps most of the real issues.
1) You're not really subsidizing people with 'free' music collections. With zero-cost duplication (i.e. downloads) of music, the only cost to the music industry is in lost sales--and how many people who are downloading stuff would be spending money on it if downloads suddenly stopped? Practically none.
2) The music industry is a corrupt, bloated, obsolete structure; which no longer has any relevance to music or musicians. Instead of being a facilitator for artists to reach an audience and get paid (which is what they SHOULD be doing), they're a controller of content, and an unnecessary middleman that still takes all of the profit.
3) This agreement is based on guilty until proven innocent, and no forum to argue innocence. The Judge, jury, and plaintiff are the same unit! ISPs should not be the content police--if they are, they should be required to police ALL of the content on their wires, and be accountable to the real police, not a private for-profit organization with a vested interest in certain content.
1) Download Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, and run it. It was the only thing that found a virus on my computer recently, out of six packages (including two commercial ones). 2) Download HijackThis, if that doesn't work. Be careful with this package, though! You can do some serious damage to your computer by blindly following its advice. Read the forums. 3) How full is your hard drive? If the C: drive is full enough, fragmentation can dramatically mess up performance in a very short time. Clean and defrag. I personally find it worthwhile to use SmartDefrag, a much more powerful defragger than the one that's built into Windows. 4) Read your logs. Yes, Windows actually logs stuff! Go to "Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management" and then dig through "System Tools-->Event Viewer" TONS of useful information about what's not healthy on your system, including complete boot logs.
OK, now I see where you're coming from. Yeah, no data can be back-generated from the XOR without N-1 disks, but all non-parity data is cleartext (and striped, just like RAID-0).
I'll happily give you a mulligan, since (a) you 'fessed up in public, and (b) I kept calling striping RAID-1, even when I know better. (I blame it on a mental block about the term RAID-0, since it's not RAID at all--there's nothing redundant about striping!)
The problem with physical destruction is, how destroyed is destroyed?
I've said before that the absolute key to data destruction is KNOWING how precisely your data is gone. Software wipes of a certain type a certain number of times are a very deterministic, known, and reproducible method. A blast furnace is a very deterministic (and complete!) method. Taking a drive out back and whacking on it with a hammer, or tearing the platters out, or even shooting (or drilling) holes through the platters is NOT reproducible, NOT consistent, NOT deterministic, and NOT verifiable. Also not certifiable if you're doing it for someone else.
Physical destruction is great--if you truly destroy it. However, that ain't easy to do.
I've done contracting for the government, and worked on a proposal which would have required "Secret" clearance for all staff involved. I have also worked with medical records for the local health authority. Finally, I've worked for oil companies that have both liability of both customer records and planned exploration/acquisition to keep private.
You're making the mistake that everyone else on/. is just like you, huddled at home, worried about their pr0n collection. However, some of us are actually computing professionals, working in sensitive areas. Hopefully none of us are using/. as their sole source of useful information, but it's definitely not a bad tertiary source of input.
1) If you pull a single disk out of a stripe set (RAID-1, regardless of mirroring), you obviously can't reconstruct the data. However, you can get chunks of it, each 'chunk' being one stripe-unit width. What's a typical stripe-unit these days? 16kB? You can get a lot of information out of a 16kB block. (consider that a credit card number is only 16 bytes long)
2) RAID-5 is "cryptographically secure." Um...WHAT??!!!! In terms of partial data recovery, it's exactly the same as RAID-1, except that every Nth stripe-unit is going to be checksum data.
RAID-1 or RAID-5 make it impossible to extract a complete data set from a single drive, but it doesn't matter--security can be compromised with partial non-sequential data recovery.
Sorry, stupid typo on my part. I meant to say "paying student."
Everything else holds true though. If he's submitting original ideas in school projects, then they're most likely the school's property. With regards to WHAT HE DOES ON HIS OWN TIME, however (and that means stuff that is _not_ part of classwork in any way), you're right. The university should hold no stake in it.
However, the original question was talking about projects: "How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me?"
The odds are very good that you're SOL on this issue. By entering a class as a paid student, you're likely giving up rights to any original work you present to the university (i.e. projects, presentations, assignments, etc.). It's pretty standard, and not very different than employment contracts that the rest of us have to sign in order to get a paycheque.
So if you voluntarily signed over rights to ideas, they're not being "stolen" from you at all. Welcome to grown-up life.
Speaking as someone who lives and breathes in the Solaris world...
True enough that it's a niche market, but let's not forget that Linux was just as small (if not smaller) of a niche some time ago. Also, OpenSolaris ties directly into developers for back-end enterprise software--there's a lot of gear running Solaris out there!
But I have to ask: What _is_ the 'cost of giving people the choice'? Assuming that Toshiba has set up the environment to efficiently install OpenSolaris on their boxes, it's a matter of one command to choose between Solaris, Windows, or Linux.
Playing is something of which I approve 100%. I've smashed many a hard drive in imaginative ways. However, that's _after_ sanitizing them of important data, to a degree that I can control.
A few years ago, a friend of mine acquired a Sun RSM cabinet, fully loaded with seven trays of disks. He set up plaiding on it (RAID5 down in hardware, striping across in software) so that any significant write would access every drive in the rack.
On Christmas eve, he turned the lights down low and ran a full fsck on the volume. For hours, he had hundreds of green LEDs flashing on and off, heralding the Christmas spirit.
(I suspect he had a fair amount of Christmas spirits in him as well.)
a) 15 drives isn't a lot. b) If there were any volatile chemicals, they would have left long ago, by heating in an unsealed chamber (drives are NOT sealed to the air! If they were, the cases would rupture.) c) If there were any loose chemicals, they'd have moved around in the case and screwed things up. d) How deleted do you need your data? Do you actually know?
Realistically, you're looking at hard metals and hard ceramics. Are you eating parts from your hard drives? If not, then you've practically got nothing to worry about.
Sdelete can be quite thorough--far moreso than dismantling drives and bending platters. Specifically, "SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M..." Is that good enough for you? Do you know if it is?
I'm always slightly aggravated by people who say, "I need to destroy the data on this drive, but I didn't bother to learn how well software wipes work, so I decided to ignore all of the known data and invent my own procedure based on what I think would be a good idea."
Ask the important questions: What is the sensitivity of the data (i.e. how would your life be affected by its compromise--identity theft? divorce? jail?) and what is the desirability of it (how hard would someone work to find it)?
If you're producing kiddy porn or selling state secrets, then both of those factors are extremely high, and you should be investigating thermite. If they're tax returns and account spreadsheets from the past 15 years, then sdelete is probably overkill if used correctly (which can only be done IF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH!). Maybe you're a doctor with patient records--consider hiring a professional data destruction service.
Bending platters and wiping magnets across them is haphazard, undocumented, unreliable, and unlikely. The only reason to dismantle a drive is to scavenge the parts, not wipe the data.
As an aside, anyone with sensitive documents that would affect others (i.e. doctors) has a moral responsibility to learn a sufficient amount about this stuff to deal with it properly.
There weere two problems with this law: 1) Too little. 2) Too late.
Whether it would have been possible to restrict spam via legislation at all is a theoretical question. However, this law was not written to stop spam--it couldn't have worked, because there were too many ways around it. Furthermore, it was a law in a single country, and we already knew that that would be pointless.
HOWEVER, the real problem stems from the fact that when spam started to get rolling, a handful of rogue ISPs (AOL, I'm looking at YOU!) refused to take responsibility for it. They allowed enough momentum to develop that it became profitable, and once it was both profitable and legally questionable, it was inevitable that organised crime would step in.
Now we're facing Russian gangs acting across multiple countries in eastern Europe. Think any legislation in the USA is going to slow them down?
Griffin has something of a history in the public eye for being acerbic and difficult. He also seems to be determined to push his projects through, no matter what.
So is it really a big media headline-creation project, or is it likely that Griffin and Garver really _did_ have a heated argument?
Well, I admit that my post was how things work in an ideal world. Also, I'm lucky to have worked for several companies that have BIG accounts--one employer actually sat down with a vendor and offered input into the next version of their LDAP server software.
I've also worked at a moderately large (as opposed to huge) company that had support contracts of less than a hundred grand. After a disastrous application rollout day, I yelled at them long enough until I talked to the guy who wrote a big chunk of the code, and he found the source (literally!) of the problem. You don't have to be enormous, you just have to be loud. Your contract is simply your megaphone--if it's larger, you don't need to strain your vocal chords as much.
"If software 'x' dies and it's a vendor product, you can't fix it yourself. You have to wait. If software 'x' is open source, you have the option of fixing it yourself, or buying someone who can."
True enough. Great idea for some companies, not so great for others. If you're a software development shop, running Amanda for backups is probably the right solution. If you're an oil and gas exploration company that doesn't write any software, it's probably the wrong solution. In your own words, "Think you can do better?"
"But don't kid yourself that sticking to 'enterprise' vendors is the lowest risk solution. "
No, absolutely true. The key is that building an enterprise computing solution is a big balancing act--money, relability, maintainability, functionality, and criticality all have to weighed against each other, and the environment should be built holistically from that basis, not as a plug 'n' play mechanism.
I keep hearing about 'alternatives to enterprise software' and invariably the same mistake pops up over and over: Alternatives to enterprise software are non-enterprise software!
Seems pretty obvious, right? Let's look at what is commonly meant by "enterprise," at least by those who live in that world.
I want software that has been thoroughly documented, tested, and proven. It NEEDS a decently long track record! It NEEDS a formal support mechanism behind it.
If I buy something like backup software (with a support contract of course), The vendor has to be able to tell me, "It will work _this_ way." Not "it should..." or "we thought it would..." But hey, bugs happen, right? When I discover a bug that affects my enterprise, I have to be able to go to the vendor and say "fix this" and have it done. When something breaks in the middle of the night, I need to be able to get definitive technical support within a pre-specified time frame.
Enterprise software is only marginally about the compiled code you get on a CD. It's primarily about support, robustness, and guarantees of quality. It's about strict patch release management, and conservative changes.
If you want to run (say) Amanda instead of NetBackup, that's fine--it's a decent piece of software as far as I've seen; but understand that by itself it's not an enterprise tool. The support mechanism around it is what makes it enterprise software (or not).
It's a simple cost analysis--how much will your company lose if software "x" dies, and how much of an increased risk is there in using freeware vs. buying a commercial product from a given vendor?
Just a little while ago, there was a/. article with the headline: "Atari Purchases Cryptic Studios For $26.7 Million"
Now we hear:
"Atari executives recently commented that used game sales are "extremely painful"
Boo. Hoo.
Seriously, computers must be the only market where anyone pays attention to execs whining about used sales. (Oh, wait--except for music and movies. Can we just blame Sony for all of this?)
Maybe because you're not paying attention to the rest of the world?
Australia is as bad as any of them. The UK is comparable. Germany and France keep going back and forth. The rest of western Europe has varying track records.
Fundamentally, it's free-market capitalist societies that suffer from this sort of thing, because in authoritarian countries, it's not tolerated. On the other hand, neither is unrestricted access, generally.
It's not that one is better than the other, it's just that the shit stinks differently.
Yep. It's a transparent farce, and yet they keep getting away with it over and over again. The "concessions" are usually things that were deliberately put in the original bill with the aim of scuttling it, for repealing at a later date.
The other thing is that a few years after the second (or third) iteration of the bill has become law, they can introduce the 'TOO objectional' parts again, and have a decent chance of getting them through.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've been buying music for 30+ years, then you and are are probably of a comparable age. Also, just to be clear here, I buy my music--I've been buying records and CDs (and cassettes, and even a few 8-tracks!) for decades, and have built a modest collection of about a thousand albums in one form or another. All but a dozen of them or so get regularly played.
I also download music. For that matter, I also listen to the radio. Both of them are ways to find music that I want to buy. Artists who I like get my money, as simple as that. (With the exception of out-of-print albums, which aren't available any other way and don't provide a means for paying the artist.) In fact, the new generation of artists are reveling in this, and putting albums up for sale on places like cdbaby.com, and many of them are offering two-minute-per-song samples of entire albums.
All of this, though, sidesteps most of the real issues.
1) You're not really subsidizing people with 'free' music collections. With zero-cost duplication (i.e. downloads) of music, the only cost to the music industry is in lost sales--and how many people who are downloading stuff would be spending money on it if downloads suddenly stopped? Practically none.
2) The music industry is a corrupt, bloated, obsolete structure; which no longer has any relevance to music or musicians. Instead of being a facilitator for artists to reach an audience and get paid (which is what they SHOULD be doing), they're a controller of content, and an unnecessary middleman that still takes all of the profit.
3) This agreement is based on guilty until proven innocent, and no forum to argue innocence. The Judge, jury, and plaintiff are the same unit! ISPs should not be the content police--if they are, they should be required to police ALL of the content on their wires, and be accountable to the real police, not a private for-profit organization with a vested interest in certain content.
1) Download Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, and run it. It was the only thing that found a virus on my computer recently, out of six packages (including two commercial ones).
2) Download HijackThis, if that doesn't work. Be careful with this package, though! You can do some serious damage to your computer by blindly following its advice. Read the forums.
3) How full is your hard drive? If the C: drive is full enough, fragmentation can dramatically mess up performance in a very short time. Clean and defrag. I personally find it worthwhile to use SmartDefrag, a much more powerful defragger than the one that's built into Windows.
4) Read your logs. Yes, Windows actually logs stuff! Go to "Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management" and then dig through "System Tools-->Event Viewer" TONS of useful information about what's not healthy on your system, including complete boot logs.
Good luck.
As long as Bayard is getting a paycheque from Belkin, it's clear that they condone his tactics. Why haven't they fired his sorry ass yet?
Aaaaaahhhhh!!!
OK, now I see where you're coming from. Yeah, no data can be back-generated from the XOR without N-1 disks, but all non-parity data is cleartext (and striped, just like RAID-0).
I'll happily give you a mulligan, since (a) you 'fessed up in public, and (b) I kept calling striping RAID-1, even when I know better. (I blame it on a mental block about the term RAID-0, since it's not RAID at all--there's nothing redundant about striping!)
The problem with physical destruction is, how destroyed is destroyed?
I've said before that the absolute key to data destruction is KNOWING how precisely your data is gone. Software wipes of a certain type a certain number of times are a very deterministic, known, and reproducible method. A blast furnace is a very deterministic (and complete!) method. Taking a drive out back and whacking on it with a hammer, or tearing the platters out, or even shooting (or drilling) holes through the platters is NOT reproducible, NOT consistent, NOT deterministic, and NOT verifiable. Also not certifiable if you're doing it for someone else.
Physical destruction is great--if you truly destroy it. However, that ain't easy to do.
Nice theory, but totally full of shit.
I've done contracting for the government, and worked on a proposal which would have required "Secret" clearance for all staff involved. I have also worked with medical records for the local health authority. Finally, I've worked for oil companies that have both liability of both customer records and planned exploration/acquisition to keep private.
You're making the mistake that everyone else on /. is just like you, huddled at home, worried about their pr0n collection. However, some of us are actually computing professionals, working in sensitive areas. Hopefully none of us are using /. as their sole source of useful information, but it's definitely not a bad tertiary source of input.
Wow, this is wrong in a LOT of ways!
1) If you pull a single disk out of a stripe set (RAID-1, regardless of mirroring), you obviously can't reconstruct the data. However, you can get chunks of it, each 'chunk' being one stripe-unit width. What's a typical stripe-unit these days? 16kB? You can get a lot of information out of a 16kB block. (consider that a credit card number is only 16 bytes long)
2) RAID-5 is "cryptographically secure." Um...WHAT??!!!! In terms of partial data recovery, it's exactly the same as RAID-1, except that every Nth stripe-unit is going to be checksum data.
RAID-1 or RAID-5 make it impossible to extract a complete data set from a single drive, but it doesn't matter--security can be compromised with partial non-sequential data recovery.
Sorry, stupid typo on my part. I meant to say "paying student."
Everything else holds true though. If he's submitting original ideas in school projects, then they're most likely the school's property. With regards to WHAT HE DOES ON HIS OWN TIME, however (and that means stuff that is _not_ part of classwork in any way), you're right. The university should hold no stake in it.
However, the original question was talking about projects: "How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me?"
Hence, my answer.
The odds are very good that you're SOL on this issue. By entering a class as a paid student, you're likely giving up rights to any original work you present to the university (i.e. projects, presentations, assignments, etc.). It's pretty standard, and not very different than employment contracts that the rest of us have to sign in order to get a paycheque.
So if you voluntarily signed over rights to ideas, they're not being "stolen" from you at all. Welcome to grown-up life.
"You can't innocently follow a link because some quasi-stranger tweeted it to you without being wary"
And in turn, let me fix that for you:
You can't innocently follow a link without being wary"
T'ain't twitter that's the problem, it's the twits.
Ah yes. Because that's what bittorrent is designed and used for.
Better tell Sun that by offering OpenSolaris on bittorrent, they're actually stealing and raping children. Same thing with RedHat, for that matter.
You should go back to Eve Online. You're less likely to hurt yourself there.
I don't believe any of that, but your post was a big red flag saying "look at me, I'm a jerk!"
And incidentally, Nicholas of Myra was in fact sainted--Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of children, sailors, and many others.
It's called knowledge. You should try it some time.
Speaking as someone who lives and breathes in the Solaris world...
True enough that it's a niche market, but let's not forget that Linux was just as small (if not smaller) of a niche some time ago. Also, OpenSolaris ties directly into developers for back-end enterprise software--there's a lot of gear running Solaris out there!
But I have to ask: What _is_ the 'cost of giving people the choice'? Assuming that Toshiba has set up the environment to efficiently install OpenSolaris on their boxes, it's a matter of one command to choose between Solaris, Windows, or Linux.
Playing is something of which I approve 100%. I've smashed many a hard drive in imaginative ways. However, that's _after_ sanitizing them of important data, to a degree that I can control.
A few years ago, a friend of mine acquired a Sun RSM cabinet, fully loaded with seven trays of disks. He set up plaiding on it (RAID5 down in hardware, striping across in software) so that any significant write would access every drive in the rack.
On Christmas eve, he turned the lights down low and ran a full fsck on the volume. For hours, he had hundreds of green LEDs flashing on and off, heralding the Christmas spirit.
(I suspect he had a fair amount of Christmas spirits in him as well.)
a) 15 drives isn't a lot.
b) If there were any volatile chemicals, they would have left long ago, by heating in an unsealed chamber (drives are NOT sealed to the air! If they were, the cases would rupture.)
c) If there were any loose chemicals, they'd have moved around in the case and screwed things up.
d) How deleted do you need your data? Do you actually know?
Realistically, you're looking at hard metals and hard ceramics. Are you eating parts from your hard drives? If not, then you've practically got nothing to worry about.
Sdelete can be quite thorough--far moreso than dismantling drives and bending platters. Specifically, "SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M..." Is that good enough for you? Do you know if it is?
I'm always slightly aggravated by people who say, "I need to destroy the data on this drive, but I didn't bother to learn how well software wipes work, so I decided to ignore all of the known data and invent my own procedure based on what I think would be a good idea."
Ask the important questions: What is the sensitivity of the data (i.e. how would your life be affected by its compromise--identity theft? divorce? jail?) and what is the desirability of it (how hard would someone work to find it)?
If you're producing kiddy porn or selling state secrets, then both of those factors are extremely high, and you should be investigating thermite. If they're tax returns and account spreadsheets from the past 15 years, then sdelete is probably overkill if used correctly (which can only be done IF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH!). Maybe you're a doctor with patient records--consider hiring a professional data destruction service.
Bending platters and wiping magnets across them is haphazard, undocumented, unreliable, and unlikely. The only reason to dismantle a drive is to scavenge the parts, not wipe the data.
As an aside, anyone with sensitive documents that would affect others (i.e. doctors) has a moral responsibility to learn a sufficient amount about this stuff to deal with it properly.
There weere two problems with this law:
1) Too little.
2) Too late.
Whether it would have been possible to restrict spam via legislation at all is a theoretical question. However, this law was not written to stop spam--it couldn't have worked, because there were too many ways around it.
Furthermore, it was a law in a single country, and we already knew that that would be pointless.
HOWEVER, the real problem stems from the fact that when spam started to get rolling, a handful of rogue ISPs (AOL, I'm looking at YOU!) refused to take responsibility for it. They allowed enough momentum to develop that it became profitable, and once it was both profitable and legally questionable, it was inevitable that organised crime would step in.
Now we're facing Russian gangs acting across multiple countries in eastern Europe. Think any legislation in the USA is going to slow them down?
Spammers on /.? Bizarre way to start the week.
I have to ask--just how true is this memo?
Griffin has something of a history in the public eye for being acerbic and difficult. He also seems to be determined to push his projects through, no matter what.
So is it really a big media headline-creation project, or is it likely that Griffin and Garver really _did_ have a heated argument?
Just curious about the view from an insider.
Well, I admit that my post was how things work in an ideal world. Also, I'm lucky to have worked for several companies that have BIG accounts--one employer actually sat down with a vendor and offered input into the next version of their LDAP server software.
I've also worked at a moderately large (as opposed to huge) company that had support contracts of less than a hundred grand. After a disastrous application rollout day, I yelled at them long enough until I talked to the guy who wrote a big chunk of the code, and he found the source (literally!) of the problem. You don't have to be enormous, you just have to be loud. Your contract is simply your megaphone--if it's larger, you don't need to strain your vocal chords as much.
"If software 'x' dies and it's a vendor product, you can't fix it yourself. You have to wait. If software 'x' is open source, you have the option of fixing it yourself, or buying someone who can."
True enough. Great idea for some companies, not so great for others. If you're a software development shop, running Amanda for backups is probably the right solution. If you're an oil and gas exploration company that doesn't write any software, it's probably the wrong solution. In your own words, "Think you can do better?"
"But don't kid yourself that sticking to 'enterprise' vendors is the lowest risk solution. "
No, absolutely true. The key is that building an enterprise computing solution is a big balancing act--money, relability, maintainability, functionality, and criticality all have to weighed against each other, and the environment should be built holistically from that basis, not as a plug 'n' play mechanism.
No, not really.
Does it matter? To you, yes. To 99% of the business world (and about 98% of the rest of the world), no.
I keep hearing about 'alternatives to enterprise software' and invariably the same mistake pops up over and over: Alternatives to enterprise software are non-enterprise software!
Seems pretty obvious, right? Let's look at what is commonly meant by "enterprise," at least by those who live in that world.
I want software that has been thoroughly documented, tested, and proven. It NEEDS a decently long track record! It NEEDS a formal support mechanism behind it.
If I buy something like backup software (with a support contract of course), The vendor has to be able to tell me, "It will work _this_ way." Not "it should..." or "we thought it would..." But hey, bugs happen, right? When I discover a bug that affects my enterprise, I have to be able to go to the vendor and say "fix this" and have it done. When something breaks in the middle of the night, I need to be able to get definitive technical support within a pre-specified time frame.
Enterprise software is only marginally about the compiled code you get on a CD. It's primarily about support, robustness, and guarantees of quality. It's about strict patch release management, and conservative changes.
If you want to run (say) Amanda instead of NetBackup, that's fine--it's a decent piece of software as far as I've seen; but understand that by itself it's not an enterprise tool. The support mechanism around it is what makes it enterprise software (or not).
It's a simple cost analysis--how much will your company lose if software "x" dies, and how much of an increased risk is there in using freeware vs. buying a commercial product from a given vendor?
Just a little while ago, there was a /. article with the headline:
"Atari Purchases Cryptic Studios For $26.7 Million"
Now we hear:
"Atari executives recently commented that used game sales are "extremely painful"
Boo. Hoo.
Seriously, computers must be the only market where anyone pays attention to execs whining about used sales.
(Oh, wait--except for music and movies. Can we just blame Sony for all of this?)
Maybe because you're not paying attention to the rest of the world?
Australia is as bad as any of them. The UK is comparable. Germany and France keep going back and forth. The rest of western Europe has varying track records.
Fundamentally, it's free-market capitalist societies that suffer from this sort of thing, because in authoritarian countries, it's not tolerated. On the other hand, neither is unrestricted access, generally.
It's not that one is better than the other, it's just that the shit stinks differently.
Yep. It's a transparent farce, and yet they keep getting away with it over and over again. The "concessions" are usually things that were deliberately put in the original bill with the aim of scuttling it, for repealing at a later date.
The other thing is that a few years after the second (or third) iteration of the bill has become law, they can introduce the 'TOO objectional' parts again, and have a decent chance of getting them through.