I used to do that. Then I realized I was waisting 1h30m per day commuting. So I sold my house in the burbs and moved downtown. Now I can bike to work, and my wife can walk to work. Life is good w/o a commute.:)
Dell has promised me that they will have a technician *on site* with a new motherboard *tomorrow morning*.
I've worked tech support for a fairly large company. For three years we'd have dell in a couple times a month to fix laptops. Dell is very happy to come, to wherever you are, tommorow morning and replace a piece of hardware. If that piece of hardware doesn't fix the problem, they'll come out with Another piece of hardware (let's try the CPU now...), and if the problem persists, they'll be at your door the next day replacing something else (memory this time?), and if you still have a problem (my laptop freezes up) they'll come out and try again (maybe the second motherboard was faulty).
In the end, if they do fix the problem, you're set. If it isn't hardware problem though, they waste so much time of your time trying to replace the hardware. The repair guys usually won't even look at the software to fix the problem.
Of course, support.dell.com is an awsome support site. And dell shows up at your door ASAP with parts. And if you break the tab off your lid, they'll come out and replace it. And if you phone them and tell them the display is too dim, they'll come replace that too (do that before your warrenty expires.. they tend to fade with time) Dirty keyboard? Call dell for a new one.. keyboard sticks. Trackball/Pad sucks? They'll come fix that too.
But, if you have a computer that "locks up randomly" you're pretty much scrwed. m$ won't support you because it is OEM and Dell will just keep replacing harware.
Maybe running linux on dell is better than windows, unfortunatly the company i worked at wasn't ready for that...
Hello Canadian Lawyer (and anyone else who might know),
I am also a Canadian and am worried about how this law (dmca) will affect Canadians... More specifically, I have found that due to international copyright treaties, it is nearly impossible for a sigle country to try to reduce the length of its copyrights. The excuse used to prevent this goes something like this: "we need to leave that the way it is to be a member of xxx treaty. If we change the law we are likely to be sued by xxx corporation and tried by the WTO"
I am worried that one day this law will be rolled up into an international treaty (FTAA anyone?)
So, my question is this: What can Canadians (or anyone who is interested) do to affect laws being created in other countries that may one day affect the things we can do in Canada (or the any other country being affected).
Edwin C. Hettinger has provided an insightful critique of the main arguments used to justify intellectual property, so it is worthwhile summarising his analysis. [12] He begins by noting the obvious argument against intellectual property, namely that sharing intellectual objects still allows the original possessor to use them. Therefore, the burden of proof should lie on those who argue for intellectual property.
The first argument for intellectual property is that people are entitled to the results of their labour. Hettinger's response is that not all the value of intellectual products is due to labour. Nor is the value of intellectual products due to the work of a single labourer, or any small group. Intellectual products are social products.
Suppose you have written an essay or made an invention. Your intellectual work does not exist in a social vacuum. It would not have been possible without lots of earlier work - both intellectual and nonintellectual - by many other people. This includes your teachers and parents. It includes the earlier authors and inventors who provided the foundation for your contribution. It also includes the many people who discussed and used ideas and techniques, at both theoretical and practical levels, and provided a cultural foundation for your contribution. It includes the people who built printing presses, laid telephone cables, built roads and buildings and in many other ways contributed to the "construction" of society. Many other people could be mentioned. The point is that any piece of intellectual work is always built on and is inconceivable without the prior work of numerous people.
Hettinger points out that the earlier contributors to the development of ideas are not present. Today's contributor therefore cannot validly claim full credit.
Is the market value of a piece of an intellectual product a reasonable indicator of a person's contribution? Certainly not. As noted by Hettinger and as will be discussed in the next section, markets only work once property rights have been established, so it is circular to argue that the market can be used to measure intellectual contributions. Hettinger summarises this point in this fashion: "The notion that a laborer is naturally entitled as a matter of right to receive the market value of her product is a myth. To what extent individual laborers should be allowed to receive the market value of their products is a question of social policy."
A related argument is that people have a right to possess and personally use what they develop. Hettinger's response is that this doesn't show that they deserve market values, nor that they should have a right to prevent others from using the invention.
A second major argument for intellectual property is that people deserve property rights because of their labour. This brings up the general issue of what people deserve, a topic that has been analysed by philosophers. Their usual conclusions go against what many people think is "common sense." Hettinger says that a fitting reward for labour should be proportionate to the person's effort, the risk taken and moral considerations. This sounds all right - but it is not proportionate to the value of the results of the labour, whether assessed through markets or by other criteria. This is because the value of intellectual work is affected by things not controlled by the worker, including luck and natural talent. Hettinger says "A person who is born with extraordinary natural talents, or who is extremely lucky, deserves nothing on the basis of these characteristics."
A musical genius like Mozart may make enormous contributions to society. But being born with enormous musical talents does not provide a justification for owning rights to musical compositions or performances. Likewise, the labour of developing a toy like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that becomes incredibly popular does not provide a justification for owning rights to all possible uses of turtle symbols.
What about a situation where one person works hard at a task and a second person with equal talent works less hard? Doesn't the first worker deserve more reward? Perhaps so, but property rights do not provide a suitable mechanism for allocating rewards. The market can give great rewards to the person who successfully claims property rights for a discovery, with little or nothing for the person who just missed out.
A third argument for intellectual property is that private property is a means for promoting privacy and a means for personal autonomy. Hettinger responds that privacy is protected by not revealing information, not by owning it. Trade secrets cannot be defended on the grounds of privacy, because corporations are not individuals. As for personal autonomy, copyrights and patents aren't required for this.
A fourth argument is that rights in intellectual property are needed to promote the creation of more ideas. The idea is that intellectual property gives financial incentives to produce ideas. Hettinger thinks that this is the only decent argument for intellectual property. He is still somewhat sceptical, though. He notes that the whole argument is built on a contradiction, namely that in order to promote the development of ideas, it is necessary to reduce people's freedom to use them. Copyrights and patents may encourage new ideas and innovations, but they also restrict others from using them freely.
This argument for intellectual property cannot be resolved without further investigation. Hettinger says that there needs to be an investigation of how long patents and copyrights should be granted, to determine an optimum period for promoting intellectual work.
The only thing that makes this hard to fight is most of us have EULA that do not permit us to run servers of any kind. However, if that wasn't the case, I would load up my Gnutella node with legal content, public domain movies etc, and append illegal filenames to the end of the legal file names. Then when you get wrongly accused of distrbuting copyrighted content you can fight it and claim you were the victim of a witch hunt;)
I found this book a while ago... it discusses alot of things that the slashdot community believes in. It goes one step further than just bitching about the problems, it actually talks about strategies to make a change. The entire book is online and free...
Below is the introduction to the chapter Against intellectual property:
This should be a line of dashes to divide what I wrote from the quote. Lamness filter won't allow it though. Isn't it lame that the lameness filter is making this post more difficult to read?
Brian Martin presents the case against intellectual property, approaching the issue from a different background to most of us in the free software movement. (You'll note that Martin confuses "freeware", "free software", and "public domain", but that's my fault, since I should have picked this up in my proofreading.)
This is chapter three of Brian Martin's book Information Liberation, which is now online in its entirety. (Other chapters cover defamation, privacy, whistleblowing, and more.)
Against intellectual property
There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.
If there are interesting, non-warez uses for P2P file sharing that are better than server-based methods, please enlighten me!
1. I am sure there are many terabytes of movies, music and books available that are no longer protected by copyright (they have been liberated) laws. Distribution via a server based method might be better, more reliable etc, however, with no possibility for profit it would not exist.
2. It might be possible to use some sort of P2P system to distribute the traffic from high traffic websites more evenly around the internet. (what i am thinking about is kind of like caching, however each web browser would become a cache for machines around it... don't know if it is possible)
I think one thing that is slowing the adoption of "free software" is that it is very difficult to get hard numbers on the actual cost of switching from one software package to another.
For a large company the actual cost of purchasing the software may not be the most expensive part of switching. Things like retraining, time spent rolling out the software, technicial support, document convesion can add up to alot of money.
Most IT people do not know very much about writing a business case. Most management types don't know technical speak. As a result the tech who thinks it is obviously cheaper and better to use free software has a hard time convincing management.
One of the good things that Microsoft provides is business cases. If you want to move to a MS product, all the informaiton that you need is made available. (if it actually works as stated is another argument) On their website you can often find migration guides and business cases.
This is an area where free software is greatly lacking. We need to build business cases to prove our case.
I am currently taking a course that trys to bridge the gap between the tech speak and the manager speak. For my term paper for Emerging Technologies I am going to be building a business case for the adoption of OpenOffice in the enterprise. (www.openoffice.org) I will gladly donate the business case to Sun to use to help promote OpenOffice.
I would encourage anyone who has to do a term paper like this to pick a free/open source solution to try to support.
A couple years ago the company that I worked for started getting theats from microsoft. They wanted to audit our licenses. The threatened to sue us a bunch of times, and in the end we just handed over $250 000 to make them go away. They said the money was for CALS and Office. I think it was just protection money. Kind of like giving the bullys at school your lunch money.
Anyway, if you want to avoid this situation, just pirate everything. In our case, we were trying to do the right thing. We called to get estimates on some exchange licenses. The sales lady asked a bunch of questions... how many clients... do they all need it... how many servers. All the questions seemed innocent enough. In the end, they took our answers, looked at the number of licenses they knew we had, and they decided we needed to buy more.
You know, m$ does do alot of innovating. All from the cnet article:
Windows Me-like interface
Much like Apple's OS X, Windows' new desktop is designed to clear the clutter
the Windows XP Start button and Taskbar look superficially similar to Windows 98's
The first time you open that left-hand panel, a balloon help feature (like the one Apple's Mac OS has provided for the last decade) provides a quick hint about what to do next.
In the fun department, Windows XP borrows a slew of ideas from Windows Millennium Edition and a few from Apple
(witness the resurfacing of the Windows Movie Maker, clever video-editing software that mimics the popular iMovie).
Like Windows Me, XP easily displays scanners and digital cameras in its list of storage devices in My Computer
Windows XP prominently features one of Windows Me's selling points: System Restore, a backup and restoration program that erases that uh-oh moment when you realize you've installed something that messes up your computer.
Windows XP automatically polls Microsoft's Windows Update site while you're online (another top feature of Windows Me)
Of course, I'm probably just trying to make ms look bad:)
They could still post stories!! Every other story would have to be something like this though: We are at $125 670. We will post our next story when we reach $125 700! Someone pledge $30:)
There is a local radion station that uses fund raisers to raise the money it needs to stay on the air. They figure it costs about $250 to stay on the air for one hour. Twice a year they spend 10 days trying to raise enough money to keep broadcasting for another 6 months. It is the longest run public radio station in Canada. (They only have about 1 commercial an hour... I do not think they are government funded) Their product is radio waves. Unlike the RIAA they have discovered that people really are willing to pay for content that they can recieve for free.
I usually donate once a year. I donate based on what I can afford. The first time was only $10. The next was $100... the next, who knows.
The radio station is at www.ckua.org. Please don't slashdot it unless you plan on making a donation;)
Point being: Fund raising can be a good way to earn the money needed to stay in business. Ask for donations, and make it easy for people to donate as much as they can afford.
A conversation between two people is not copyright, because it is not in a format that has been made permanent. Similarly, the acting out of a play is only protected if it has been written down or recorded in some way.
An email, while being writted down, is not in a permanend form. ei) It is not expected that the person who sent the email will keep a copy for more than a few weeks (until the sent mail is emptied out). It is also not expected that the person receiving the email will keep it for very long either. Possibly only long enough to read it and delete it. Despite not being a lawyer, I would have to say that email doesn't, and shouldn't, fall under the list of works that can, by default, be protected by copyright.
However, it is entirely possible that I may want to email you something that I want to retain the copyright on. In this case, I should have to explicitly state, at the top of the email, much like on a book, that the email is copyright blah blah blah.
Further more, copyright law states that there are cases where you can force a copyright owner to allow you to redistribute a work. If the work is not made available to the public on reasonable terms, you can request (from the copyright board or something) to be able to redistribute that work. They will set any royalties or licensing fees that you will have to pay the owner of the copyright.
Note: I am a Canadian, speaking about US law in response to a story on Australian law. My only knowledge of US copyright law is two copyright-for-the-layman type books that I have read in my spare time. Please feel free to correct any of my "facts"
Note 2: You can freely reproduce this work blah blah blah.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I used to do that. Then I realized I was waisting 1h30m per day commuting. So I sold my house in the burbs and moved downtown. Now I can bike to work, and my wife can walk to work. Life is good w/o a commute. :)
How about bicycle?
I am as baffled as you are. I thought maybe it would be marked as funny, but insightful? Wierd.
You're right, and Divx ;) is business model that consumers can really embrace!!
I've worked tech support for a fairly large company. For three years we'd have dell in a couple times a month to fix laptops. Dell is very happy to come, to wherever you are, tommorow morning and replace a piece of hardware. If that piece of hardware doesn't fix the problem, they'll come out with Another piece of hardware (let's try the CPU now...), and if the problem persists, they'll be at your door the next day replacing something else (memory this time?), and if you still have a problem (my laptop freezes up) they'll come out and try again (maybe the second motherboard was faulty).
In the end, if they do fix the problem, you're set. If it isn't hardware problem though, they waste so much time of your time trying to replace the hardware. The repair guys usually won't even look at the software to fix the problem.
Of course, support.dell.com is an awsome support site. And dell shows up at your door ASAP with parts. And if you break the tab off your lid, they'll come out and replace it. And if you phone them and tell them the display is too dim, they'll come replace that too (do that before your warrenty expires.. they tend to fade with time) Dirty keyboard? Call dell for a new one.. keyboard sticks. Trackball/Pad sucks? They'll come fix that too.
But, if you have a computer that "locks up randomly" you're pretty much scrwed. m$ won't support you because it is OEM and Dell will just keep replacing harware.
Maybe running linux on dell is better than windows, unfortunatly the company i worked at wasn't ready for that...
I am also a Canadian and am worried about how this law (dmca) will affect Canadians... More specifically, I have found that due to international copyright treaties, it is nearly impossible for a sigle country to try to reduce the length of its copyrights. The excuse used to prevent this goes something like this: "we need to leave that the way it is to be a member of xxx treaty. If we change the law we are likely to be sued by xxx corporation and tried by the WTO"
I am worried that one day this law will be rolled up into an international treaty (FTAA anyone?)
So, my question is this: What can Canadians (or anyone who is interested) do to affect laws being created in other countries that may one day affect the things we can do in Canada (or the any other country being affected).
Read it at http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06219818__
The only thing that makes this hard to fight is most of us have EULA that do not permit us to run servers of any kind. However, if that wasn't the case, I would load up my Gnutella node with legal content, public domain movies etc, and append illegal filenames to the end of the legal file names. Then when you get wrongly accused of distrbuting copyrighted content you can fight it and claim you were the victim of a witch hunt ;)
Below is the introduction to the chapter Against intellectual property:
This should be a line of dashes to divide what I wrote from the quote. Lamness filter won't allow it though. Isn't it lame that the lameness filter is making this post more difficult to read?
Brian Martin presents the case against intellectual property, approaching the issue from a different background to most of us in the free software movement. (You'll note that Martin confuses "freeware", "free software", and "public domain", but that's my fault, since I should have picked this up in my proofreading.)
This is chapter three of Brian Martin's book Information Liberation, which is now online in its entirety. (Other chapters cover defamation, privacy, whistleblowing, and more.)
Against intellectual property
There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.
1. I am sure there are many terabytes of movies, music and books available that are no longer protected by copyright (they have been liberated) laws. Distribution via a server based method might be better, more reliable etc, however, with no possibility for profit it would not exist.
2. It might be possible to use some sort of P2P system to distribute the traffic from high traffic websites more evenly around the internet. (what i am thinking about is kind of like caching, however each web browser would become a cache for machines around it... don't know if it is possible)
I am sure there are more...
For a large company the actual cost of purchasing the software may not be the most expensive part of switching. Things like retraining, time spent rolling out the software, technicial support, document convesion can add up to alot of money.
Most IT people do not know very much about writing a business case. Most management types don't know technical speak. As a result the tech who thinks it is obviously cheaper and better to use free software has a hard time convincing management.
One of the good things that Microsoft provides is business cases. If you want to move to a MS product, all the informaiton that you need is made available. (if it actually works as stated is another argument) On their website you can often find migration guides and business cases.
This is an area where free software is greatly lacking. We need to build business cases to prove our case.
I am currently taking a course that trys to bridge the gap between the tech speak and the manager speak. For my term paper for Emerging Technologies I am going to be building a business case for the adoption of OpenOffice in the enterprise. (www.openoffice.org) I will gladly donate the business case to Sun to use to help promote OpenOffice.
I would encourage anyone who has to do a term paper like this to pick a free/open source solution to try to support.
Good thing its not Passport Management Services...
A couple years ago the company that I worked for started getting theats from microsoft. They wanted to audit our licenses. The threatened to sue us a bunch of times, and in the end we just handed over $250 000 to make them go away. They said the money was for CALS and Office. I think it was just protection money. Kind of like giving the bullys at school your lunch money.
Anyway, if you want to avoid this situation, just pirate everything. In our case, we were trying to do the right thing. We called to get estimates on some exchange licenses. The sales lady asked a bunch of questions... how many clients... do they all need it... how many servers. All the questions seemed innocent enough. In the end, they took our answers, looked at the number of licenses they knew we had, and they decided we needed to buy more.
Can't remember back to your own troll ^H^H^H^H^Hpost on Sunday March 18, @02:20PM MST huh?
Of course, I'm probably just trying to make ms look bad :)
+1 Astute
I wonder how you get sperm out of a stiff.
There are plenty of directx games. I'd love to be able to play aoe2 under linux. I'd finally be able to get rid of crappy ms software for good. err...
Or any other part of the body that can be controlled? I wonder how/if the porn industry will adopt this.
They could still post stories!! Every other story would have to be something like this though: We are at $125 670. We will post our next story when we reach $125 700! Someone pledge $30 :)
There is a local radion station that uses fund raisers to raise the money it needs to stay on the air. They figure it costs about $250 to stay on the air for one hour. Twice a year they spend 10 days trying to raise enough money to keep broadcasting for another 6 months. It is the longest run public radio station in Canada. (They only have about 1 commercial an hour... I do not think they are government funded) Their product is radio waves. Unlike the RIAA they have discovered that people really are willing to pay for content that they can recieve for free.
;)
I usually donate once a year. I donate based on what I can afford. The first time was only $10. The next was $100... the next, who knows.
The radio station is at www.ckua.org. Please don't slashdot it unless you plan on making a donation
Point being: Fund raising can be a good way to earn the money needed to stay in business. Ask for donations, and make it easy for people to donate as much as they can afford.
Check out some of these titles:
- Choosing a Wheelchair
- Making Informed Medical Decisions
-Organ Transplants
An email, while being writted down, is not in a permanend form. ei) It is not expected that the person who sent the email will keep a copy for more than a few weeks (until the sent mail is emptied out). It is also not expected that the person receiving the email will keep it for very long either. Possibly only long enough to read it and delete it. Despite not being a lawyer, I would have to say that email doesn't, and shouldn't, fall under the list of works that can, by default, be protected by copyright.
However, it is entirely possible that I may want to email you something that I want to retain the copyright on. In this case, I should have to explicitly state, at the top of the email, much like on a book, that the email is copyright blah blah blah.
Further more, copyright law states that there are cases where you can force a copyright owner to allow you to redistribute a work. If the work is not made available to the public on reasonable terms, you can request (from the copyright board or something) to be able to redistribute that work. They will set any royalties or licensing fees that you will have to pay the owner of the copyright.
Note: I am a Canadian, speaking about US law in response to a story on Australian law. My only knowledge of US copyright law is two copyright-for-the-layman type books that I have read in my spare time. Please feel free to correct any of my "facts"
Note 2: You can freely reproduce this work blah blah blah. :)
Because they patent stupid things like one-click shopping and we are all supposed to go to noamazon.com instead.