If all sellers are FREE to determine the price, and they all set the same price, that is not collusion, and is not a problem. The problem arises when the sellers are no longer free to set their own price, which is exactly what this case is about.
Books are not a fungible commodity. People don't decide what book to read based on price, they decide based on the book. Yes, if they set the price too high people won't buy it, but that is not the issue here. The issue here is that if you are using other businesses (retailers) to sell your product, then those other businesses should have a say in how much they will sell the product for. That competition has been completely eliminated by this collusion. And the purpose of the collusion was not simply to set the price of the product, but to ensure that a single retailer no longer had to compete on price.
The case had little to do with the 'correct' price of ebooks, and a whole lot to do with elimination of the word 'freely' that you used.
Prior to the agreement Apple made with publishers, the publisher could set their own price that the retailer paid. Nothing wrong with that. In turn, the retailer set their own price that the consumer paid. Nothing wrong with that either.
After the agreement with Apple, the publisher set the price that the consumer paid. Not really anything wrong with that (yet). However, the publishers were still using the retailers to 'sell' the books, but the retailers were no longer able to set the price they asked. Now we have a problem. Why should an agreement that Apple has with a publisher to collect 30% on every sale force Amazon to also take a 30% cut? Why should Amazon not be able to lower the price it's customers pay by taking less than a 30% cut? THAT is where the price fixing comes into play. Amazon used to be able to set the price it's customers pay, and no longer can. That is why the prices are said to be 'artificially' set. There no longer is any competition, as the collusion between Apple and the publishers has eliminated it.
Those two laws are not mutally exclusive. The 'hit' part of hit and run is covered by the second law. The 'run' part is covered by the first law. So, yes, the most you can get for running is 8 months, but that is 8 months on top of, not instead of, the other charge.
In this case, the driver was driving with a suspended license, so he will probably face the second degree murder AND the leaving the scene law.
New York State does not have any offense called 'hit and run'. They (and I assume most other places) have a law called 'leaving the scene of an incident without reporting'. That only covers the 'run' part. If a death was involved, leaving the scene is a class D felony, carrying a two to five thousand dollar penalty.
That still leaves the 'hit' part. Depending on the circumstances, the 'hit' part may be vehicular homicide, which is an additional charge to the 'leaving the scene' charge. That can also be a class D felony, carrying both a fine and/or imprisonment.
What you said may be true, but has nothing to do with what I said. The post I responded to said that BEFORE Microsoft required user control the manufacturers were not going to allow users to control secure boot. In that timeframe, Red Hat, SuSE, etc were not planning on using MS to do any signing. Therefore, the ACs post is not even remotely believable, as it implies that the server manufacturers were willing to give up the largest segment of the market. And for what? The cost of adding user key management to UEFI is minimal at best, and makes your product more attractive. All of these 'but the manufacturers could stop supporting user keys' posts are pure FUD, with absolutely nothing to back them up (that makes sense, anyway).
So all of the server manufacturers were willing to give up on the 65% of the server market that is NOT Windows? If you're going to make crap up, at least make it plausible.
And what if the server is intentionally rebooted (by you) to install malware? Ideally the management of the keys in hardware would be protected and only performed by someone who does not have root authority to the OS. Secure boot can help stop rogue admins. It gives control to the owner of the server instead of the admin.
Secure boot does nothing to prevent the end user from being in control, and it does not require anything from Microsoft. If your vendor does not allow you to install your own keys, get a better vendor.
Secure boot only ensures that you know that what you are booting is signed by someone you trust. It does not provide 'attestation'. If you want attestation, use TPM, possibly combined with secure boot. TPM is not subject to being tricked by hypervisors.
That is complete nonsense. 'Innocent until proven guilty' simply means that AT TRIAL the burden of proof falls on the prosecution. The prosecution must prove guilt, you do not have to prove innocence. What happens before trial falls under 'due process of the law'. As long as the law says that someone indicted by a grand jury (he was) for a federal crime can have their passport revoked, due process is being followed.
I don't think you have any idea what UEFI actually is or does. SOMETHING has to initialize adapters. What do you propose this to be, the kernel? How does the kernel get booted when the system doesn't even know the disk drive exists, and the drive controller has not yet been intialized? SOMETHING has to have an inventory of what devices there are. SOMETHING has to maintain the RTC. SOMETHING has to provide access to NVRAM. How is the kernel supposed to do those things?
The purpose of UEFI is to provide standard methods of doing those things, so that the kernel doesn't have to know about every possible configuration that any manufacturer could come up with.
BIOS used to be what did those things, but it is getting harder and harder to evolve BIOS to do what today's machines need. UEFI is the fix for that. Your proposal (everything in the kernel) would take us back to the nightmare of early DOS.
You obviously have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about. Yes, hardware devices have BIOSes. What do you think puts out all those messages when a server is booted (before the OS is loaded)?
You can't 'turn off' UEFI, and you certainly can't do it in the BIOS. UEFI replaces BIOS. Yes, there may be an option (in UEFI) to make UEFI act like BIOS (for operating systems that can't support UEFI), but it is still UEFI, not BIOS.
UEFI is not Secure Boot, and Secure Boot is not UEFI.
What a load of drivel. Did you just clip that from 'The Adolescent's Guide To Piracy Justification'?
The 'social good'? What the hell is that? You know what would really be for 'the social good'? Free food, shelter, clothing, etc. Therefore, by your impeccable logic you should immediately remove the locks from your house, because those locks are keeping the homeless people out, which is not really 'loving thy neighbor'. Also, any and all anti-theft measures must immediately be removed wherever they are found, because they prevent people from getting what they want.
You're being 'robbed' by DRM? Of what, exactly? What belonged to you that you no longer have? Nothing. If the price of a DRM'ed thing is too high, don't buy it, just like every other product on the planet. If you are unethical, just steal it.
Skate right past the point that copyright is not the best way to profit from artistic endeavor? OK, genius, what is?
How, exactly, could someone turn your lights off 'for good'? Can they somehow prevent you from unplugging a lamp from the automation device and plugging it directly into an outlet? If they kill the power to to whole house, call the utility - they will come and repair it in a few hours.
People die when their HVAC isn't working? No, they call someone to come and fix it.
As for circuit breakers outside the house, well, some places do have those. And almost everybody has a meter outside their house, which can easily be pulled in a few seconds using only a clipper to cut the seal. Ever hear of that happening? And anybody with a wrench could easily shut off gas service at the meter. How often does THAT happen?
Yep, you're a genius and everyone else is stupid, right? Or isn't that what you were implying with your use of shiny, ZOMG, and teh?
People don't care because in the list of 'threats' we are faced with in everyday life, the threat of getting your home automation system hacked is so low it doesn't even register. Furthermore, the consequences of getting your home automation system hacked are equally as low. Think - same likelihood as getting hit by lightning with the same consequences as getting a paper cut.
There was a show on TV recently where they showed how people's fear affected their judgement of threat. If you are afraid of something, you perceive it is a big threat, often way out of proportion to the actual threat. For instance, they asked people what creature you were most likely to be killed by in the US. Many (most?) people had no idea - it was just not something they thought about. However, many people absolutely KNEW what the answer was - snakes, spiders, vicious dogs, homicidal maniacs, whatever their particular fear was. The actual answer (which absolutely no one got) was deer, because so many of them are involved in car accidents.
Geeks are terrified of getting hacked, and they blow the threat of being hacked (and the consequences of such) way out of proportion to the actual threat. Not normally a problem, except for when they insist others must also share their fears.
What is that quote supposed to show, other than the fact that you can't read? That quote CLEARLY says that there is an operation to convert FROM character data TO BCD. Therefore, I certainly did NOT claim that character data IS BCD, only that it can be converted TO BCD in a single operation, which it can.
I guess in your careful reading you missed the definition of zoned decimal, where each byte contains ONE digit and a zone. When a zone and digit are in a byte like that we call it a character. And guess what the PACK and UNPK instructions do? Convert between zoned and packed! Amazing!
Are you illiterate? First, you confused 'pack' with 'pick'. Then, you conveniently skipped the explanation of what PACK does, which is convert CHARACTER DATA TO BCD. Nowhere did I say BCD was character data.
There is this fancy new thing you may not have heard of called multitasking. With this amazing new technique the cpu can be working on a different task when your task doesn't have anything to do. Do you really think that in this day and age an entire system is going to be nothing other than read from disk, process, write to disk? Yes, efficiency matters.
As for where I get the idea that cpus can do decimal arithematic, there are documents published by the cpu manufacturers. IBM calls theirs the Principles of Operation, Intel calls theirs Software Developer Manual. In these documents you will find the definition of the decimal instructions.
I didn't say it picked the data, I said it packed the data. As in, it generates the PACK instruction to convert CHARACTER DATA into packed BCD, then performs whatever DECIMAL operations are required, then generates the UNPK instruction to store the result as character data.
The fact that you don't know even that basic stuff means you probably shouldn't be commenting.
Slashdot Mirror
If all sellers are FREE to determine the price, and they all set the same price, that is not collusion, and is not a problem. The problem arises when the sellers are no longer free to set their own price, which is exactly what this case is about.
Books are not a fungible commodity. People don't decide what book to read based on price, they decide based on the book. Yes, if they set the price too high people won't buy it, but that is not the issue here. The issue here is that if you are using other businesses (retailers) to sell your product, then those other businesses should have a say in how much they will sell the product for. That competition has been completely eliminated by this collusion. And the purpose of the collusion was not simply to set the price of the product, but to ensure that a single retailer no longer had to compete on price.
The case had little to do with the 'correct' price of ebooks, and a whole lot to do with elimination of the word 'freely' that you used.
Prior to the agreement Apple made with publishers, the publisher could set their own price that the retailer paid. Nothing wrong with that. In turn, the retailer set their own price that the consumer paid. Nothing wrong with that either.
After the agreement with Apple, the publisher set the price that the consumer paid. Not really anything wrong with that (yet). However, the publishers were still using the retailers to 'sell' the books, but the retailers were no longer able to set the price they asked. Now we have a problem. Why should an agreement that Apple has with a publisher to collect 30% on every sale force Amazon to also take a 30% cut? Why should Amazon not be able to lower the price it's customers pay by taking less than a 30% cut? THAT is where the price fixing comes into play. Amazon used to be able to set the price it's customers pay, and no longer can. That is why the prices are said to be 'artificially' set. There no longer is any competition, as the collusion between Apple and the publishers has eliminated it.
Ever hear of a fancy new invention called a 'mirror'? I hear it lets you see what is behind you.
Those two laws are not mutally exclusive. The 'hit' part of hit and run is covered by the second law. The 'run' part is covered by the first law. So, yes, the most you can get for running is 8 months, but that is 8 months on top of, not instead of, the other charge.
In this case, the driver was driving with a suspended license, so he will probably face the second degree murder AND the leaving the scene law.
New York State does not have any offense called 'hit and run'. They (and I assume most other places) have a law called 'leaving the scene of an incident without reporting'. That only covers the 'run' part. If a death was involved, leaving the scene is a class D felony, carrying a two to five thousand dollar penalty.
That still leaves the 'hit' part. Depending on the circumstances, the 'hit' part may be vehicular homicide, which is an additional charge to the 'leaving the scene' charge. That can also be a class D felony, carrying both a fine and/or imprisonment.
What you said may be true, but has nothing to do with what I said. The post I responded to said that BEFORE Microsoft required user control the manufacturers were not going to allow users to control secure boot. In that timeframe, Red Hat, SuSE, etc were not planning on using MS to do any signing. Therefore, the ACs post is not even remotely believable, as it implies that the server manufacturers were willing to give up the largest segment of the market. And for what? The cost of adding user key management to UEFI is minimal at best, and makes your product more attractive. All of these 'but the manufacturers could stop supporting user keys' posts are pure FUD, with absolutely nothing to back them up (that makes sense, anyway).
So all of the server manufacturers were willing to give up on the 65% of the server market that is NOT Windows? If you're going to make crap up, at least make it plausible.
And why, exactly, would they do that? Especially server manufacturers? Your suggestion is pure FUD.
And what if the server is intentionally rebooted (by you) to install malware? Ideally the management of the keys in hardware would be protected and only performed by someone who does not have root authority to the OS. Secure boot can help stop rogue admins. It gives control to the owner of the server instead of the admin.
HARDWARE vendor. As in, the hardware vendor provides a way for you to manage the keys. It has NOTHING to do with vendor lockin.
Secure boot does nothing to prevent the end user from being in control, and it does not require anything from Microsoft. If your vendor does not allow you to install your own keys, get a better vendor.
Secure boot only ensures that you know that what you are booting is signed by someone you trust. It does not provide 'attestation'. If you want attestation, use TPM, possibly combined with secure boot. TPM is not subject to being tricked by hypervisors.
That is complete nonsense. 'Innocent until proven guilty' simply means that AT TRIAL the burden of proof falls on the prosecution. The prosecution must prove guilt, you do not have to prove innocence. What happens before trial falls under 'due process of the law'. As long as the law says that someone indicted by a grand jury (he was) for a federal crime can have their passport revoked, due process is being followed.
I don't think you have any idea what UEFI actually is or does. SOMETHING has to initialize adapters. What do you propose this to be, the kernel? How does the kernel get booted when the system doesn't even know the disk drive exists, and the drive controller has not yet been intialized? SOMETHING has to have an inventory of what devices there are. SOMETHING has to maintain the RTC. SOMETHING has to provide access to NVRAM. How is the kernel supposed to do those things?
The purpose of UEFI is to provide standard methods of doing those things, so that the kernel doesn't have to know about every possible configuration that any manufacturer could come up with.
BIOS used to be what did those things, but it is getting harder and harder to evolve BIOS to do what today's machines need. UEFI is the fix for that. Your proposal (everything in the kernel) would take us back to the nightmare of early DOS.
You obviously have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about. Yes, hardware devices have BIOSes. What do you think puts out all those messages when a server is booted (before the OS is loaded)?
You can't 'turn off' UEFI, and you certainly can't do it in the BIOS. UEFI replaces BIOS. Yes, there may be an option (in UEFI) to make UEFI act like BIOS (for operating systems that can't support UEFI), but it is still UEFI, not BIOS.
UEFI is not Secure Boot, and Secure Boot is not UEFI.
Wait, so the system kernel is magically going to still be functional in 10 or 20 years, but UEFI isn't? What magic makes that happen?
What a load of drivel. Did you just clip that from 'The Adolescent's Guide To Piracy Justification'?
The 'social good'? What the hell is that? You know what would really be for 'the social good'? Free food, shelter, clothing, etc. Therefore, by your impeccable logic you should immediately remove the locks from your house, because those locks are keeping the homeless people out, which is not really 'loving thy neighbor'. Also, any and all anti-theft measures must immediately be removed wherever they are found, because they prevent people from getting what they want.
You're being 'robbed' by DRM? Of what, exactly? What belonged to you that you no longer have? Nothing. If the price of a DRM'ed thing is too high, don't buy it, just like every other product on the planet. If you are unethical, just steal it.
Skate right past the point that copyright is not the best way to profit from artistic endeavor? OK, genius, what is?
How, exactly, could someone turn your lights off 'for good'? Can they somehow prevent you from unplugging a lamp from the automation device and plugging it directly into an outlet? If they kill the power to to whole house, call the utility - they will come and repair it in a few hours.
People die when their HVAC isn't working? No, they call someone to come and fix it.
As for circuit breakers outside the house, well, some places do have those. And almost everybody has a meter outside their house, which can easily be pulled in a few seconds using only a clipper to cut the seal. Ever hear of that happening? And anybody with a wrench could easily shut off gas service at the meter. How often does THAT happen?
Yep, you're a genius and everyone else is stupid, right? Or isn't that what you were implying with your use of shiny, ZOMG, and teh?
People don't care because in the list of 'threats' we are faced with in everyday life, the threat of getting your home automation system hacked is so low it doesn't even register. Furthermore, the consequences of getting your home automation system hacked are equally as low. Think - same likelihood as getting hit by lightning with the same consequences as getting a paper cut.
There was a show on TV recently where they showed how people's fear affected their judgement of threat. If you are afraid of something, you perceive it is a big threat, often way out of proportion to the actual threat. For instance, they asked people what creature you were most likely to be killed by in the US. Many (most?) people had no idea - it was just not something they thought about. However, many people absolutely KNEW what the answer was - snakes, spiders, vicious dogs, homicidal maniacs, whatever their particular fear was. The actual answer (which absolutely no one got) was deer, because so many of them are involved in car accidents.
Geeks are terrified of getting hacked, and they blow the threat of being hacked (and the consequences of such) way out of proportion to the actual threat. Not normally a problem, except for when they insist others must also share their fears.
What is that quote supposed to show, other than the fact that you can't read? That quote CLEARLY says that there is an operation to convert FROM character data TO BCD. Therefore, I certainly did NOT claim that character data IS BCD, only that it can be converted TO BCD in a single operation, which it can.
I guess in your careful reading you missed the definition of zoned decimal, where each byte contains ONE digit and a zone. When a zone and digit are in a byte like that we call it a character. And guess what the PACK and UNPK instructions do? Convert between zoned and packed! Amazing!
Are you illiterate? First, you confused 'pack' with 'pick'. Then, you conveniently skipped the explanation of what PACK does, which is convert CHARACTER DATA TO BCD. Nowhere did I say BCD was character data.
There is this fancy new thing you may not have heard of called multitasking. With this amazing new technique the cpu can be working on a different task when your task doesn't have anything to do. Do you really think that in this day and age an entire system is going to be nothing other than read from disk, process, write to disk? Yes, efficiency matters.
As for where I get the idea that cpus can do decimal arithematic, there are documents published by the cpu manufacturers. IBM calls theirs the Principles of Operation, Intel calls theirs Software Developer Manual. In these documents you will find the definition of the decimal instructions.
I didn't say it picked the data, I said it packed the data. As in, it generates the PACK instruction to convert CHARACTER DATA into packed BCD, then performs whatever DECIMAL operations are required, then generates the UNPK instruction to store the result as character data.
The fact that you don't know even that basic stuff means you probably shouldn't be commenting.