How do you get an MS product (like Word2k) to produce sensible html like Emily apparently did with tags and nothing else? If you say "save as text" then what is wrong with any of the myriad of Linux text editors?
Television costs money to produce and most TV stations use adverts to get this and the advertisers will therefore choose which programs they advertise around based on many factors not limited to the probable number of viewers and the same for commercial radio. If the RIAA et al no longer existed (or were greatly diminished) they TV and radio stations would have a far harder time determining what to play/show and would actually have reasonable editorial responses to this. At present the MPAA et al use their monetary might to influence TV and radio (and personally I would like to see them sued for child exploitation). If you can supply another explanation as for why they all jump on the bandwagon of unheard of acts from major labels and not unheard of acts from nowhere I would love to hear it. The only artist I can remember who has seen commercial success through a lone TV or radio station spotting them is David Gray who became massive in Ireland (afaik) thanks to one radio stations decision to plug and play (hehe) him. The average persons taste in music is "more of the same please", and as long as the TV and radio markets continue to both pander to the commercial industry which works hard to ensure they supply this this will not likely change. If the music industry is flattened to artists and their music, TV and radio will probably see the advantages of catering for the minorities who will provide a loyal following instead of the lowest common denominator and then the consumer will start to get a real chance to hear what they want through choice.
The only problem will be if you develop software which a juristiction will find illegal AND subject yourself to that legal system. Just watch more and more open source projects become anonymous or created in an appropriate legal environment. If AOL are successfully sued for this I would imagine they would leave the U.S. the next day as Netscape/Mozilla is also commonly used to distribute copyrighted material (as does Windows and IE). Long die the dmca
To be as pedantic as you are being:
Read your own definition of boycotting as many times as it takes for you to realise that it says that it means to not interact with someone. So when I (as I do) refuse to buy an audio cd, dvd, vhs, cinema ticket or film rental I am boycotting numerous people in the hope that the addition of my revenue to any others who employ the same tack will coerce the interested parties. When I copy the audio via the net or friends OR watch a video in my friends house or on TV I am not in any way compromising my boycott unless I coerced another party into providing contact with the copyright owners (telling someone I would watch a video with them, which I don't, or that I would like an album). Now where in your definition did it say abstain from using?
I will not deny that I am stealing, but afaic so are the MPAA by trying to prevent me from watching dvds how and where I want and are the RIAA by trying to prevent any form of use of their works other than stright playing of original media. When these idiots stop trying to limit fair use and stop trying to extend the law to protect their positions I will return to spending thousands to tens of thousands per annum on their goods. Until then they can get stuffed and I'll miss out on the popular culture until then (I saw the Matrix one week ago when in my friends house where his brother had purchased it, is that stealing? How long before the MPAA start sellign Client access licenses for DVDs to allow me to join in the viewing legally?)
Fuck off and DIE. A CD is NOT hard to create if you have one or more actual artists involved, if you don't you have to spend a fortune to get that cheesy manufactured sound that sells so well! If you want to do a classical music album, you require a lot of live-room studio time and the artists for the instruments OR a nice setting and an orchestra, not difficult but potentially costly (unless the orchestra themselves make the recording in which case they can provide the artists and instruments...get where I'm going). If you want to create a pop track you need to pay an engineer to make it sound like you "singers" can actually sing and to master it to sound clean. Actually making a CD (and I don't mean physically pressing one, I mean from deciding to do it to master) is easy, the quality is just directly proportional to the artists involved and their interest in doing it, if they aren't interested you can pay them through the nose to get them to do good work, and thats where the RIAA et al come in.
Video games, though requiring more technical abilities alongside the artistic abilities (wherever you draw the line from code2art), and film are similar, just a lot more expensive (go and buy yourself two hours of film and a camera alone and you'll see why).
Is this the battle of the "pimply teenage twits" Vs the "stupid corporate suits"?
The important word you seem to have misunderstood in your rant is artist. The artists would no longer be forced (ask George Michel if you think that this is not force) to produce the mindless rubbish the company who owns them feels will sell best. With the crazy RIAA et al systems destroyed, Music will return to an artform even to the masses instead of falling further into corporatism which aims to brainwash the populus through media expenditure. How many artists got into the business to make money and how many to make music? I would love to see the day when no-one can convince tv/radio/press that westlife/britney should be plastered all over the place because the record company is spending $x million in the pre-publicity and instead our media would focus on the true artists of our time who attempt not to maximise profits but instead produce the music they feel and show their true brilliance. Does anyone really question the fact that if all music was distributed online by the creators with a facility to pay (either voluntary or compulsory) that the wheat and chaff would be seperated by our wallets and that our wallets would ensure that many more artists would be able to be financially viable and even rich. The real threat to the music industries is not that artists can have their music dowloaded, it is that an artist now requires a fractional percentage of the money to kit out a studio (a compressor is about the only analogue gear still required and the cost of all the digital components is dropping drastically yearly. An audio artists friend of mine has just moved from a $1500 souncard, Pulsar, to a $400 soundcard, RME Digi96 I think, with improved performance). An artist who is enslaved by a recording industry whose prime desire is to use money to make money is not as free as an artist who is free to compete in an equitable market with his peers worldwide. Nuff said
One of the best things I have seen recently was a TV summary of European Napster usage. The Spainish came out top with a wopping 31% using Napster to get an average of 3 hours audio a month! Figures throughout Europe suggested an average of about 14% usage at an hour and a half of audio a month. Sounds like enough to make Napster a martyr and to ensure that free music sharing will have a prominent place in our society for longer than the internet has already existed. Long die the Music Industry, Long live the Music!
Just when did Music become an industry anyway? Did Mozart or even the Beatles create their works for controlled distribution and maximum profits or were they just happy to be paid to do what they loved, and perhaps even happier still when they actually saw a fair return for thier work/it's results?
So what does your system do to help all the john.smith in the world? Looks to me like nothing! Oh and to stop squatting you do? And limiting yourselves to registering third level domains means you can sell how many more? Basically WTF is the point? Get a com,net,org or see if you can buy a subdomain from your favourite tld (e.g..smith.com.). As far as I can see you will just have people pilling in to buy George.Bush.name and whats.my.name and get.your.name and and and and the same old shit. Did you guys have anything of merit to your system or are you another example of why so many people are pissed with the whoel system.
The interesting question is will it be there own jvm or will it be an existing jvm (perhaps IBM, maybe even Sun). I would suspect that they will at worst fork an existing jvm as anything else would require them to do more of the work they are avoiding by choosing linux. Also, if you want to attract Linux coders it is going to be far easier if they can see your jvm.
Does any of Nintendo 64, Playstation 1 or 2 or Sega Dreamcast have any form of control device? Or do they depend on the tried and trusted solution applied in the entire home entertainment system which is that you cannot buy/rent the item unless you are old enough, and if a copy is left (such as the original posters half-life) where an unsuitable person can use it, it is the fault of the person who leaves it there! Does your VCR check video tapes to see if the person pressing play is old enough, or even if anyone is present to enter a code to watch particular levels of films?
The problem is MS are planing to introduce an extra control method for a device that nobody else has deemed necessary in the last 20 years. Why? My guess is that it is an attempt at political control (e.g. the system will cover browsing and allow you see dubya's site but not al's) and perhaps even as a form of market research (they gather "login" results to assure the parents it isn't being hacked). I don't like MS so I can only ascribe truly evil reasons. I don't like censorship and corporate control systems either, what if your 15 year old wants to play third-life and you know as their parent it is ok for them but the Y-Box only allows authorised games to be used (prevent piracy) and then only by users with authorised age proofing Id (I'd say a dermal chip but...). Is this ok? I hope not. Every parent has an incredible responsibility to ensuire that their child is brought up correctly, and it is not their job to slavishly follow corporate precedent to do so, it is their job to understand their own child(ren) and to create an appropriate environment for them.
6 months later and I only see a download version! To use the dowload version you need a decent web browser (the file manager does not cut it) and the deluxe box has all the toys to give people a good look at Linux as an alternative (from games demos to the IBM java tools).
However the Inflatable Tux rules, check out his bigger brother playing F1
A true sign of a sportsman, he retired with a 99.94 average when one innings of about 10 would have given him an eternally magical century average but instead he bowed out gracefully as simply the most incredible batsman the sport has ever seen. Pick any other sportsman who reached the pinnacle of their sport and ask yourself if they would have left their sport just below such a milestone (would Walter Payton have gone for another game if his "last" game had left him with a 9.994 yards/rush average?)
Just a minor point, you can use GPL software as you wish, you should have said "If I can't distribute your stuff without your license" . Even then a quick read of 7 definitions of proprietary leaves me wondering if the GPL is proprietary (if you just read the first two it is, read further and the doubt grows).
ok, the US courts determine that anything Napster must be blocked at all levels. The RIAA starts suing ISPs, bandwidth providers, international router hosts. The ISPs, bandwidth providers and international router hosts all start to close ports and scan packets and spend lots of money doing it. The US citizens get higher ISP charges to pay for the lawyers and techniques blocking their access to a service. The software maintainers incorporate common random port usage with compressed/encrypted packets. Rinse, lather and repeat. non-US citizens have a lovely distributed music (file) sharing system and US citizens are starting to try and figure out just when they started to lose control of the internet (about the time it became quicker to dial-in to a canadian/mexican/irish server for internet access, until the phone providers started to block it to avoid paying the RIAA any more settlements).
As you point out POST you leaves YOU open to Amazon. I like my solution, live in Ireland (Europe), code in Ireland (Europe) and keep anything I am working on outside the US (and preferably in Europe where we have no Software Patents). Enjoy your legal system:-)
I am always looking at my user info page, but not too see my karma, I want to see if anyone has responded to me or felt that what I said was worthy of one of their moderator points (and I don't care much which way they moderate me, I post what I want to say safe in the knowledge that it will take a lot of negative moderation to lose my ability to post at two). I read/. to get an overview of news items and to read the ideas it inspires in the/. community. I post to/. to try and inspire debate, advocate my point of view, find out if I'm wrong, be funny or refute rubbish. I moderate on/. to try and find -1/0/+1 posts which are worthy of being treated more seriously. I meta-moderate occassionally because it takes too much effort generally, when I'm bored I hit that link and try to see if anyone was being mad.
Treating karma as a game means that people who see/. as a forum will leave slowly but surely leaving nothing but trolls and karma whores
AT&T may have been the original home of unix but the histories I have read state that it developed from the initial system by the contributions of others. To say it was a rip-off of any other system is a bit strange to me, did a previous system use a platform independant language to write the system so that it could be ported to any platform? Is that not innovation?
Yes, perl drew it's influences from everywhere under the sun, but is it's complete construction methodology not innovative and unique? Sed and awk and sheel scripts are the building blocks of unix. They are tools that do one thing and do it well (and yes I can use them, though I am far from proficient)! Perl is a tool whose "motto is there's more than one way to do it" which attempts to provide a multi-syntactical method of accessing... well everything on your system. Was it not innovative to say "let's write a language that lets you do anything your system can using any workable method" instead of "lets write a system that lets you do X and do it well"?
Gnutella is no a clone of Napster. Gnutella is a tool to perform the same task as Napster, however it uses an entirely different system. Was their a prior peer based distributed anonymous file sharing system? Napster wasn't it and the legal system it is under is showing why now! It was a techincal innovation based on a legal requirement. As for the proprietry Vs open nature of the beast, the initial client may have been a proprietry product, however I doubt it would have appeared where it not for the Free software/Open source community as the guy in AOL who wrote and released it knew that it was never going to be an AOL product, or even a product of any company and depended on the fact that his work would live in as an open work which would defy corporate influence (and probably even legal influence). Was it innovation, YES, was it an innovation of the Free/Open Source software community depends on the mentality of the originators, does it and did it from its conception require the community, yes!,/li>
Interesting to note no-one tries to suggest a clean example of innovation from the proprietry software community.
I stress that I feel that all software is built on the back of its predecessors to such a large extent that innovation is if not an impossibility it is close. I would be sure that any "innovation" would have been seeen as a research project previously (though the "innovation" may be the redesign that makes the target of the research possible). Are our arguments against the IP laws not based on this premise, and isn't todays story on the patenting of "private" urls just a great demonstration of this?
Unix. evolved through shared source code before the concepts of Free and Open Source Software were needed
[Pp]erl. Is their anything born before it that even remotely approxiamates it?
Anonymous distributed file systems a la Nutella (I can't imagine any proprietry vendor has prior art on this though a research institue might)?
The challenge to you is to come up with an innovation of proprietry sofware? All software is built on the shoulders of giats and from the correct perspective nothing is innovative in the computer sphere.
I recently enjoyed ringing around the Irish Dial-Up service providers to cost an ISDN dial-up account. I got the price from each provider and then told them that the connection would be used by a network and asked if that was ok. There were basically four providers two of whom said "oh you need a network account and thats about 8 times the price" while one said "oh we have a network account. You don't want it? Ok the normal dial-up is sound then" and the fourth said "why would it make any difference?" and I told them about their competitors policies. Final prices £90/£120 or £750/£850. So on a 64kb line these guys were looking for an extra £600+ per annum to let you use your dial-up account on a network (sorry you got a few more email addresses etc). Not too surprisingly the ISP who couldn't even understand the concept won the bidding:-)
If I was the ISP who discovered that a building was sharing one of my connections, I would look at ways to get them to buy a second connection, and then a third etc. until they have as many connections as we would expect. Many of the people in the building may be paying for a service they would never purchase individually and in the long run we could make more money/sell more connections.
I can forsee the Dell's et al of this world shipping blank boxes (finally) and a complementary Windows X install CD which requires a internet connection and credit card. It would not suit MS to have Dell pumping out systems without MS getting the feedback they want (and the means to bill for extras) and I doubt Dell wants any more work reselling Windows and it's services (unless perhaps MS is offering them the full source to everything so they can run their own OS and application servers to push Delldows200X (but would Dell really want to do this, and if they did would they base it on the back of a resource that could be yanked from them).
Dell is never going to want to have to deal with customers ringing up saying their computer isn't working anymore only to discover it is because they haven't given MS the credit card details and the 1 year/3 month/whatever length trial has finished. If Dell can no longer ship the MS software they want with PCs as a permenent part of the PC I doubt they will charge for or ship one at all. All we have to do then is make sure all these people know that instead of being suckered for the monthly software fee they can install a number of alternatives (Be, BSD, Linux, Hurd).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to abolish copyright but I do want the author to be the holder of the copyright not the suits.
How do you get an MS product (like Word2k) to produce sensible html like Emily apparently did with
tags and nothing else? If you say "save as text" then what is wrong with any of the myriad of Linux text editors?
Television costs money to produce and most TV stations use adverts to get this and the advertisers will therefore choose which programs they advertise around based on many factors not limited to the probable number of viewers and the same for commercial radio. If the RIAA et al no longer existed (or were greatly diminished) they TV and radio stations would have a far harder time determining what to play/show and would actually have reasonable editorial responses to this. At present the MPAA et al use their monetary might to influence TV and radio (and personally I would like to see them sued for child exploitation). If you can supply another explanation as for why they all jump on the bandwagon of unheard of acts from major labels and not unheard of acts from nowhere I would love to hear it. The only artist I can remember who has seen commercial success through a lone TV or radio station spotting them is David Gray who became massive in Ireland (afaik) thanks to one radio stations decision to plug and play (hehe) him. The average persons taste in music is "more of the same please", and as long as the TV and radio markets continue to both pander to the commercial industry which works hard to ensure they supply this this will not likely change. If the music industry is flattened to artists and their music, TV and radio will probably see the advantages of catering for the minorities who will provide a loyal following instead of the lowest common denominator and then the consumer will start to get a real chance to hear what they want through choice.
The only problem will be if you develop software which a juristiction will find illegal AND subject yourself to that legal system. Just watch more and more open source projects become anonymous or created in an appropriate legal environment. If AOL are successfully sued for this I would imagine they would leave the U.S. the next day as Netscape/Mozilla is also commonly used to distribute copyrighted material (as does Windows and IE). Long die the dmca
To be as pedantic as you are being:
Read your own definition of boycotting as many times as it takes for you to realise that it says that it means to not interact with someone. So when I (as I do) refuse to buy an audio cd, dvd, vhs, cinema ticket or film rental I am boycotting numerous people in the hope that the addition of my revenue to any others who employ the same tack will coerce the interested parties. When I copy the audio via the net or friends OR watch a video in my friends house or on TV I am not in any way compromising my boycott unless I coerced another party into providing contact with the copyright owners (telling someone I would watch a video with them, which I don't, or that I would like an album). Now where in your definition did it say abstain from using?
I will not deny that I am stealing, but afaic so are the MPAA by trying to prevent me from watching dvds how and where I want and are the RIAA by trying to prevent any form of use of their works other than stright playing of original media. When these idiots stop trying to limit fair use and stop trying to extend the law to protect their positions I will return to spending thousands to tens of thousands per annum on their goods. Until then they can get stuffed and I'll miss out on the popular culture until then (I saw the Matrix one week ago when in my friends house where his brother had purchased it, is that stealing? How long before the MPAA start sellign Client access licenses for DVDs to allow me to join in the viewing legally?)
I hate to do this but....
Fuck off and DIE. A CD is NOT hard to create if you have one or more actual artists involved, if you don't you have to spend a fortune to get that cheesy manufactured sound that sells so well! If you want to do a classical music album, you require a lot of live-room studio time and the artists for the instruments OR a nice setting and an orchestra, not difficult but potentially costly (unless the orchestra themselves make the recording in which case they can provide the artists and instruments...get where I'm going). If you want to create a pop track you need to pay an engineer to make it sound like you "singers" can actually sing and to master it to sound clean. Actually making a CD (and I don't mean physically pressing one, I mean from deciding to do it to master) is easy, the quality is just directly proportional to the artists involved and their interest in doing it, if they aren't interested you can pay them through the nose to get them to do good work, and thats where the RIAA et al come in.
Video games, though requiring more technical abilities alongside the artistic abilities (wherever you draw the line from code2art), and film are similar, just a lot more expensive (go and buy yourself two hours of film and a camera alone and you'll see why).
Is this the battle of the "pimply teenage twits" Vs the "stupid corporate suits"?
The important word you seem to have misunderstood in your rant is artist. The artists would no longer be forced (ask George Michel if you think that this is not force) to produce the mindless rubbish the company who owns them feels will sell best. With the crazy RIAA et al systems destroyed, Music will return to an artform even to the masses instead of falling further into corporatism which aims to brainwash the populus through media expenditure. How many artists got into the business to make money and how many to make music? I would love to see the day when no-one can convince tv/radio/press that westlife/britney should be plastered all over the place because the record company is spending $x million in the pre-publicity and instead our media would focus on the true artists of our time who attempt not to maximise profits but instead produce the music they feel and show their true brilliance. Does anyone really question the fact that if all music was distributed online by the creators with a facility to pay (either voluntary or compulsory) that the wheat and chaff would be seperated by our wallets and that our wallets would ensure that many more artists would be able to be financially viable and even rich. The real threat to the music industries is not that artists can have their music dowloaded, it is that an artist now requires a fractional percentage of the money to kit out a studio (a compressor is about the only analogue gear still required and the cost of all the digital components is dropping drastically yearly. An audio artists friend of mine has just moved from a $1500 souncard, Pulsar, to a $400 soundcard, RME Digi96 I think, with improved performance). An artist who is enslaved by a recording industry whose prime desire is to use money to make money is not as free as an artist who is free to compete in an equitable market with his peers worldwide. Nuff said
One of the best things I have seen recently was a TV summary of European Napster usage. The Spainish came out top with a wopping 31% using Napster to get an average of 3 hours audio a month! Figures throughout Europe suggested an average of about 14% usage at an hour and a half of audio a month. Sounds like enough to make Napster a martyr and to ensure that free music sharing will have a prominent place in our society for longer than the internet has already existed. Long die the Music Industry, Long live the Music!
Just when did Music become an industry anyway? Did Mozart or even the Beatles create their works for controlled distribution and maximum profits or were they just happy to be paid to do what they loved, and perhaps even happier still when they actually saw a fair return for thier work/it's results?
or how about .lol, .fun, .sat or .not
So what does your system do to help all the john.smith in the world? Looks to me like nothing! Oh and to stop squatting you do? And limiting yourselves to registering third level domains means you can sell how many more? Basically WTF is the point? Get a com,net,org or see if you can buy a subdomain from your favourite tld (e.g. .smith.com.). As far as I can see you will just have people pilling in to buy George.Bush.name and whats.my.name and get.your.name and and and and the same old shit. Did you guys have anything of merit to your system or are you another example of why so many people are pissed with the whoel system.
The interesting question is will it be there own jvm or will it be an existing jvm (perhaps IBM, maybe even Sun). I would suspect that they will at worst fork an existing jvm as anything else would require them to do more of the work they are avoiding by choosing linux. Also, if you want to attract Linux coders it is going to be far easier if they can see your jvm.
Does any of Nintendo 64, Playstation 1 or 2 or Sega Dreamcast have any form of control device? Or do they depend on the tried and trusted solution applied in the entire home entertainment system which is that you cannot buy/rent the item unless you are old enough, and if a copy is left (such as the original posters half-life) where an unsuitable person can use it, it is the fault of the person who leaves it there! Does your VCR check video tapes to see if the person pressing play is old enough, or even if anyone is present to enter a code to watch particular levels of films?
The problem is MS are planing to introduce an extra control method for a device that nobody else has deemed necessary in the last 20 years. Why? My guess is that it is an attempt at political control (e.g. the system will cover browsing and allow you see dubya's site but not al's) and perhaps even as a form of market research (they gather "login" results to assure the parents it isn't being hacked). I don't like MS so I can only ascribe truly evil reasons. I don't like censorship and corporate control systems either, what if your 15 year old wants to play third-life and you know as their parent it is ok for them but the Y-Box only allows authorised games to be used (prevent piracy) and then only by users with authorised age proofing Id (I'd say a dermal chip but...). Is this ok? I hope not. Every parent has an incredible responsibility to ensuire that their child is brought up correctly, and it is not their job to slavishly follow corporate precedent to do so, it is their job to understand their own child(ren) and to create an appropriate environment for them.
6 months later and I only see a download version! To use the dowload version you need a decent web browser (the file manager does not cut it) and the deluxe box has all the toys to give people a good look at Linux as an alternative (from games demos to the IBM java tools).
However the Inflatable Tux rules, check out his bigger brother playing F1
A true sign of a sportsman, he retired with a 99.94 average when one innings of about 10 would have given him an eternally magical century average but instead he bowed out gracefully as simply the most incredible batsman the sport has ever seen. Pick any other sportsman who reached the pinnacle of their sport and ask yourself if they would have left their sport just below such a milestone (would Walter Payton have gone for another game if his "last" game had left him with a 9.994 yards/rush average?)
Just a minor point, you can use GPL software as you wish, you should have said "If I can't distribute your stuff without your license" . Even then a quick read of 7 definitions of proprietary leaves me wondering if the GPL is proprietary (if you just read the first two it is, read further and the doubt grows).
ok, the US courts determine that anything Napster must be blocked at all levels. The RIAA starts suing ISPs, bandwidth providers, international router hosts. The ISPs, bandwidth providers and international router hosts all start to close ports and scan packets and spend lots of money doing it. The US citizens get higher ISP charges to pay for the lawyers and techniques blocking their access to a service. The software maintainers incorporate common random port usage with compressed/encrypted packets. Rinse, lather and repeat. non-US citizens have a lovely distributed music (file) sharing system and US citizens are starting to try and figure out just when they started to lose control of the internet (about the time it became quicker to dial-in to a canadian/mexican/irish server for internet access, until the phone providers started to block it to avoid paying the RIAA any more settlements).
Where is it? I justed checked and didn't see it! It's not on users.pl (listing comments and karma) and if it is please tell us all where it is hiding!
As you point out POST you leaves YOU open to Amazon. I like my solution, live in Ireland (Europe), code in Ireland (Europe) and keep anything I am working on outside the US (and preferably in Europe where we have no Software Patents). Enjoy your legal system :-)
Treating karma as a game means that people who see /. as a forum will leave slowly but surely leaving nothing but trolls and karma whores
Curious so one by one IMHO
Interesting to note no-one tries to suggest a clean example of innovation from the proprietry software community.
I stress that I feel that all software is built on the back of its predecessors to such a large extent that innovation is if not an impossibility it is close. I would be sure that any "innovation" would have been seeen as a research project previously (though the "innovation" may be the redesign that makes the target of the research possible). Are our arguments against the IP laws not based on this premise, and isn't todays story on the patenting of "private" urls just a great demonstration of this?
just off the top of my head:
The challenge to you is to come up with an innovation of proprietry sofware? All software is built on the shoulders of giats and from the correct perspective nothing is innovative in the computer sphere.
I recently enjoyed ringing around the Irish Dial-Up service providers to cost an ISDN dial-up account. I got the price from each provider and then told them that the connection would be used by a network and asked if that was ok. There were basically four providers two of whom said "oh you need a network account and thats about 8 times the price" while one said "oh we have a network account. You don't want it? Ok the normal dial-up is sound then" and the fourth said "why would it make any difference?" and I told them about their competitors policies. Final prices £90/£120 or £750/£850. So on a 64kb line these guys were looking for an extra £600+ per annum to let you use your dial-up account on a network (sorry you got a few more email addresses etc). Not too surprisingly the ISP who couldn't even understand the concept won the bidding :-)
If I was the ISP who discovered that a building was sharing one of my connections, I would look at ways to get them to buy a second connection, and then a third etc. until they have as many connections as we would expect. Many of the people in the building may be paying for a service they would never purchase individually and in the long run we could make more money/sell more connections.
I can forsee the Dell's et al of this world shipping blank boxes (finally) and a complementary Windows X install CD which requires a internet connection and credit card. It would not suit MS to have Dell pumping out systems without MS getting the feedback they want (and the means to bill for extras) and I doubt Dell wants any more work reselling Windows and it's services (unless perhaps MS is offering them the full source to everything so they can run their own OS and application servers to push Delldows200X (but would Dell really want to do this, and if they did would they base it on the back of a resource that could be yanked from them).
Dell is never going to want to have to deal with customers ringing up saying their computer isn't working anymore only to discover it is because they haven't given MS the credit card details and the 1 year/3 month/whatever length trial has finished. If Dell can no longer ship the MS software they want with PCs as a permenent part of the PC I doubt they will charge for or ship one at all. All we have to do then is make sure all these people know that instead of being suckered for the monthly software fee they can install a number of alternatives (Be, BSD, Linux, Hurd).