I bought a PS2 in December. Not a typo - I have 25 games and paid between $6 and $20 for them. $20 is what the red-label "Greatest hits" goes for NEW so I don't think buying it used and expecting to pay no more than that is unreasonable.
But at $20, I don't think I would get much re-selling it, so I expect to have these until I get rid of the whole system and all games at one low, low price. Not for the money, just to get it out the house really.
So no, used game sales aren't hurting new sales in my case, they are actually the only reason I bought a game system, and the 3 games I bought new. When I can't find any more decent PS2 games, I'll tink about upgrading to the next level.
Between AV scanning and the constant background Update checks, and I should have said "among" because there are other little things as well - my notebook is unusable for an hour every day.
A reboot takes 25 minutes. That's not a typo. Shutting down takes 5-10 minutes and starting up in the morning takes 15-20 minutes.
That's going from a usable system to off and to a usable system. I'm not talking about until the desktop comes up, because it's still unusable at that point.
My biggest complaint is that disk I/O is a noticeably big resource hog. "System Idle Process" could be at 95-97% but I can't click on anything because somehow disk I/O is happening. It's not the CPU, just waiting for turns on the disk. At that point I can't do anything. I can't even launch Task Manager to see if it's a CPU spike.
My only resolution has been to write a VBScript that uses WMI to set all update processes to low priority, all virus scanning processes to low priority, and turns off Windows Update, and kills the local SMS proxy. Reboot still takes 20 minutes because a lot of junk happens over our retarded network, but at least I can click around in things. It's in the startup folder and takes 10 minutes until it even runs, but by the time I can click on something it has made life significantly easier for me.
I can't tell you how many meetings I've missed the beginning of, even though Outlook is already running and everything is cached offline, because I click on the calendar (or the reminder window) and nothing happens for 15 minutes. THAT should be calculated in TCO.
Oh sure, blame my local IT guys, but I feel it's Windows design that's the fundamental problem. Virus scan, updates, and the scheduler, with possibly disk access routines all part of the problem. My home notebook doesn't have these problems.
They've made their business model on being "just good enough" for people to use it, but not smooth the rough edges. Actually they smooth the rough edges before actually measuring to make sure things are put together correctly, so it looks like it's doing to work but it never will. And then they add little shims and ties and glue to get everything together.
Most companies do this sort of thing, but few disband their web browser team after they realize the web browser is going to be the next platform to control and actually succeed. Then completely abandon it, since it's "good enough".
Until a lot of people want it, it's the perfect tool for self-selective market segmentation. Smart people will pay extra for it, dumb people won't realize they need it.
You're right, a responsible company would provide it to everyone. But this is a company after profits, not Karma. Apple won't win any points unless it's enabled by default. A small percentage of people might be advised to turn it on, but mostly it's going to be the people who know about it turning it on, and the rest never knowing it's there. Not having it and never knowing it's there are about the same thing, functionally.
Public health inspectors are responsible for health problems caused by the establishment, not the patrons.
You could argue, and probably will, that allowing people to smoke makes the business responsible. But the employees aren't smoking while they are working. I know that because that would be a health code violation for which the employer is responsible.
Now you probably want to split hairs about whether a patron who spits on the salad bar would be a health concern. Sure, because you can't get Hepatitis C through smoke, but you could if the patron had hep C and recently flossed their gingivitis infested gums and bled into their spittle.
What argument have I not forseen? Remember, "having cigarette smoke in the air" is probably not on the health code violations list, unless the city has a no-smoking ordinance. And even then it's probably not on there - you'd just get a fine, and that's possibly not even from the health department depending on who is tasked to enforce it.
You make zero sense. Keep in mind that few of us readers own a business in Virginia.
Do you have to pay your takes in advance? Do you not have the option of filing an amended return once you do know your gross? Did your employees just fail to amend the return? Have you complained to your legislators? Are other companies in the same boat, and not complaining to their legislators? Have you asked other companies if they would like to complain together?
I'm sure I have other questions, but these are a good start.
I would bet my house that given the chance, they would go back in time and do the same thing in NY. When it came up a second time, they tried a different tactic rather than lose in another state.
And even if they do lose, the next time they send warning letters affiliates are going to scream bloody murder.
And who in the fuck modded this insightful? It reads like a conspiracy theory. You're saying they had this plan and didn't execute it because it's new york of all places - do you have any evidence at all? An e-mail or a text message of someone's brother's uncle saying they overheard someone fart and it sounded like "Wit until N.C. tries this"?
I can bottle rain water and sell it to stupid people. I can take communication bandwidth which costs me nothing extra and charge people every time they send a single text message over it. I can make something people can make themselves and charge 10 times the value of the components. I can send spam to millions of people and let them send me money. If people don't take the time to evaluate their purchases, capitalism dies. We should be encouraging people not to buy junk that falls apart, so the companies go out of business. If they pay for Linux but can get it for free, should Red Hat go out of business?
I know, Red Hat is only putting a copyright on their additions, but how do we make this distinction clear from whatever else this whining is about?
Someone who takes an out of copyright text and prints it has provided a service and deserves to be paid for it. If they make any additions to the text, such as editorializing or checking or whatever, the updates are now copyright of the people who printed it. I can take an original Beethoven score and reproduce it, but if I take an editorialized edition produced 10 years ago, I can't distribute that for free because of the value added by the publisher. In most cases, origianl scores are written in old-style notation and must be updated to make sense to today's musicians, and that conversion is a new, protected work.
So the real complaint is the narrow bunch of stuff which is being reproduced, verbatim, with a copyright attached. And the real concern isn't even that businesses are making money - it's simply that copyright is being asserted. Yes?
My understanding is that even if you take something in the public domain, your arrangement of it can be copyrighted.
For example, a phone book. The data itself cannot be copyrighted. The presentation can. If you stick it in a photocopier and sell the copies, that's a problem. They give the phone book away, so giving away a copy is technically illegal but probably won't be enforced. If you re-type everything and get the company logos from the companies and effectively reproduce it so it looks nearly enough the same, you could get sued for copying the presentation - not the contents.
In this case of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, where the book is essentially scans of another book, there are parts of the book which are copyrighted. The cover is, any forward or editorial material is, notes included. Anything that was added is copyrighted, and copyright law has only one way of distinguishing that. You put the copyright notice on it like you do anything else. Would you rather make an author call out which parts of the book are covered and are not? On every page?
Put another way, a derivative work of something in copyright is not allowed. A derivative work of something out of copyright is essentially a new work. You can still go back to the source and copy it for free - that hasn't been changed.
So the complaint is really just about the fact that people *might not* understand how copyright law works, and *might* pay money to a company that makes it easily accessible instead of rummaging around trying to find the original. I see no problem here. People need to know how laws work in order to live other parts of their lives, so let's just consider this a place where people need to understand exactly what copyright means.
Any professional organization will keep you up to date on both sides. Usually they phrase it as "our opposition is planning on doing the following horrible bad criminal things, so we are going to counter with these pristine ideals," but you do get updates on what actually happens.
also, he's not keeping current with arguments on both sides, just what is actually happening with the issues. The arguments themselves have lots of emotional appeal and faulty logic on both sides, so it's just a bunch of noise to someone who has to decide things based on law and the presentations in court. He does have to figure out how to apply developments to cases in front of him, which I assume is how this professional organization would help.
Copyright is a big thing right now, it does make sense to keep up to date on it. The only question I have is whether this organization has a history of distorting facts or if it does a good job keeping things fact-based. If he belongs to a lobbying type group, this is bad.
Are you saying they should put a steep discount on the OS? Or that they shouldn't put as much functionality in it as they do?
Cos XP is worth far more than that out of the box, and if you don't hate it Vista is worth far more than XP. And 7 is apparently just Vista without some of the annoying crap.
Most of the drivers you would need are included, certainly almost any typical hardware like mouse, keyboard, printer, scanner, lots of modems. It includes basic word processing, a web browser, SMTP mail via Outlook, media player, file sharing... you can do piles of stuff without ever installing anything. It includes a lot of system utilities already.
Let me rephrase. They don't consider bugs important unless someone can turn it into a vulnerability. Previous examples have shown that it is possible to turn a seemingly benign bug into a security hole, with a little flash of insight.
I should be able to submit bug reports directly to MS, instead of having to talk to a desk jockey at the OEM who never passes it on to the company that wrote the software. They would prefer you didn't do that. They will take your "send error report to microsoft" data, but at that point it's just statistical - whatever gets the most reports gets attention.
They should say at this point, you know what, let us know if you find something and we'll take a look at it to make sure it's not going to cause problems. You know how much that would cost? Probably not as much as you think if it's simple triage.
If I didn't work at a fortune 100 company, I wouldn't have a vendor support contact I could just call up and say hey this is causing problems, can you look at it? Smart people who know what they are doing can give great feedback and have it completely ignored because it doesn't seem worthwhile to look at something that might have problems.
They will always have problems with third-party code, and not much you can do about it. But you have to realize that the attack surface area increases, and have your bug-squasher team increase in surface area along with it. I don't see an equal response. Sure I'll be your effective beta tester, but I don't want to hear one more detailed report about bug reports getting ignored.
Their OS gave rise to a cottage industry of antivirus. The whole reason we need protection is because of their insecure code. I don't trust them to protect it.
Does Avira require registration? I got pissed at other AV tools because they either require registration or magically ballooned into ridiculous clown-barf color schemes.
AVG Free was my favorite, but they discontinued the previous version (7.5?) and made 8.0 install only on XP SP2 or above. Or something like that. So I went with something else that required me to sign up. Sure they want to track users or somethinig, but I delete everything they e-mail me with so it's really me being up-front - I'm not going to upgrade nor pay you money, so you don't need my information to spam me with.
Then upgraded to SP3 because the free MS compilers require SP2... and tried AVG next version again. I right-click to scan, and there's a balloon tip type notice that I started a scan, a giant orange notice that I decided to ignore the fact that on-access scanning is off, a slide-down notice to upgrade, 60 second scan startup time, and when I close the window a balloon tip type thing to let me know if finished. Fuck all of that. I want a virus scanner, not a billboard.
TCP/IP should be in the OS - it is a resource management issue and is a hardware issue. If only a handful of apps used it, maybe third-party would be acceptable. But you don't want a third-party stack crashing the OS, so write it yourself and include it.
On the other hand, Anti-virus products shouldn't even be needed. MS should be able to write software with fewer holes in it. They have piles of static analysis tools, piles of research, and piles of other stuff. They just don't want to take the time and fix things (including testing), so they put wrappers like UAC around things instead of fixing it.
I've seen lots of bug reports ignored by MS just because it doesn't look like it's exploitable, only to have some crafty fool figure out how to exploit it. I can cause a stack overflow in Oracle 10.x drivers by sending a VALID openquery through a linked server. Runtime catches the error, but then it causes a crash in the error reporting because the stack is trashed. Currently it's a null refrence, but how hard would it be to turn a stack overflow into a server root hack? Not all that hard. But they won't fix it because the problem is in a third party module, and if that one is fixed the MS error disappears. I'm just saying these vulnerabilities are all over the place, especially since they have so much third-party code.
One person or company making the problem, and the solution to the problem, does not look good. Especially since MS only publically fixes holes they publically admit to. There might be piles of security problems no one else knows about, but MS AV might know to watch for suspicious behaviour that only MS knows about.
Giant virus outbreak because it's too expensive to patch a particular problem, or can't get it out fast enough, and only Windows SE customers are protected so everyone ditches Symantec and other AV and goes to Windows. It's not that far-fetched, and they might even do it that way by accident. When it's possible to have that kind of advantage and wipe out your competition in a single event like that, especially if it's unintentional, that's a problem.
Just saying, the mafia used to take protection money, but you were being protected from the mafia. Problem and solution should be from different sources. Therefore your analogy is invalid, same as if my hair were a bird.
Have you seen some of the license settlements to come out of patent litigation? $900MM might not be a lot to Microsoft, but a lot of companies wouldn't think twice about hiring a hitman at $10k to avoid paying $900MM. The trick is, you have to get the job done before you get dragged into court, otherwise you'll look very suspicious indeed.
Year Plaintiff Defendant Settlement ($mm) 2005 Dr. Gary K. Michelson Medtronic $1,350 1990 Polaroid Eastman Kodak 909 2004 Sun Microsystems Microsoft 900 2004 Intergraph Intel 675 2004 InterTrust Technologies Microsoft 440
copied/pasted, click the source if you want formatting.
All you're accomplishing is telling these companies that DRM is fine with you. And the ones you don't download, they figure you're just stealing that. There is no way to get feedback to the company that your purchases are dependent on breaking DRM, or in other words you won't buy anything that has DRM, because you keep stripping it without telling them.
All of the people who figure it's OK to buy something for one device and have to re-buy it later, and they do exist, appear exactly the same to these sellers. Ah they say, here's another customer who doesn't mind DRM. And so they can't get an accurate count.
People who get screwed and then don't sue are a big part of the problem. Unfortunately lawsuits cost time and money, and this is not a very soundly tested legal area because no one wants to spend the time or money to contest DRM schemes failing the user. People with the money to front a lawsuit probably can mentally write off a purchase like this and just buy again in a different format. Someone seriously hurt by a $50 purchase that doesn't work will probably not have the money.
In other words, it's your fault. Don't buy it, or sue when it doesn't work, or at least complain loudly. Call a product's help line while you're standing in the store and ask does it have DRM? Ok, sorry thanks I won't be buying it. The only way that works of course is if enough people call. "They won't listen to me," sure. But they will listen if enough people can be bothered to call.
You're a troll, moderators recognize this. But for the benefit of those listening...
1) Theft and copyright infringement are not the same. Dictionary definitions and legal definitions, along with legal punishments, say they are different. If it were theft, she would be on the hook for the value of the music, less than $24 at iTunes prices of the day, plus maybe a fine of some sort - $500 maximum in places that I know of. You're trying to say that taking something that isn't either 1) free or 2) paid for is not right, but that doesn't make it theft. Arguing this point simply diverts attention from whatever point you're trying to make. If you want to continue arguing this, then you should tell the judge who allowed a jury to make this a $2MM settlement. You can't, however, because it's not true. So please, just don't ever argue this again.
2) The media companies as a whole *fought* the internet as a way of doing business, to the point that people are *just now* realizing that there are other ways of obtaining music than downloading it. I speak to people on a daily basis who have no idea that you can rip your own CDs and make MP3s - in minutes. They download because that's what they know. Even if it's something they already have. All it would have taken is a deal with the original Napster. But they fought it for years, fighting the business model they could have been introducing to people. Instead, they put everything they could behind legislation and legal proceedings. Finally, Napster made a deal and Apple came out with iPod and iTunes. Now, people know that you get music by downloading it - because of the music industry's bad decisions. It could very well have been a vibrant new business model. Download MP3's direct from the record label - no overhead, entire catalog, rare prints, international selections. Now the recording industry would be *happy* if you partook of their DRM-free downloads from Amazon. But it's not how people know to do it.
3) I don't own any music that I have on CD or cassette tape, or vinyl. I have a license to listen to it from the copyright holder. That means I can't sell it, along with all rights to it, to someone else. I can only sell the physical medium, at which point I terminate my license. I cannot make a copy and sell the original - that would be copyright violation. I fail to see how that is theft, since I'm selling what I bought - hopefully you can see why it's not theft now, it's copyright violation instead. If not, see point #1. What if I download something I already own, seeing point 2? I have a license to listen to it, but is it illegal for me to download a compressed, lossy copy of what's in my CD rack at home? According to copyright law, I do not - I have to make the backup myself, from the original I bought. What if someone steals my CDs? I did not transfer my license to listen - does that mean my license is terminated? I didn't terminate it... but I don't have the original. Does that mean the record company *must* replace a stolen album? If I have a license which was not terminated, then legally I do have the right for a replacmenet. Go ahead, try asking for a replacement. They will say no, your physical copy is physically not in your possession. You didn't pay for a physical copy - you paid for a license. That's why you can't sell your copy with all rights attached, you don't have all rights to it. Only the right to listen to it - which has not been transferred according to the law. What is your explanation for this situation?
It's called BUSINESS for a reason, but they decided they would simply continue selling horse carriages and try to legally stop cars from being built. That's what makes no sense.
Or how about download stuff, get caught, and then make your case to the Supreme Court?
Reading this case, it looks like they intentionally threw this one. Probably didn't, but it reads that way. This gives an opportunity to fight the unreasonable awards. Plus, depending on how old the songs are she downloaded, it might make the case for lowering copyright lengths. This might not be the best case to show it, but that's not my point.
My point is, the only way to change the law is either get Congress on your side, or get Judiciary to tell Congress to buzz off. The only way to get the Judicial system is to get caught doing something.
Do it until you get caught, then stand up for yourself. If you're downloading tomorrow's #1 hits, perhaps you deserve to lose. If you're doing something you think should be legal, carry on. Either it's de facto legal because you never get caught or it's potentially going to get a law struck down.
You wouldn't protest elections in Iran by following the law would you? You'd never get anywhere! Neither will we get anywhere with copyright.
You're making the single most idiot and common mistake there is on any argument. These aren't the same people.
Lots of people dropped off the pirate ship and bought stuff when iTunes came around, because iTunes is easy and the costs (used to be) predictable and kinda reasonable. Still has DRM, but there's a workaround, and there are other, separate, not the same, individual, not part of the first group people who either don't like DRM or don't like additional data loss of the workaround. Especially since it's the provider's own admission basically saying "DRM is useless, but we're going to do it anyway".
Then lots of people disembarked at the DRM-less idea. Different people had a different opinion. Not the same group of people changing their minds.
There are still people who download because it's easy, and it's what they know - and that's the recording industry's fault for not only failing to move to a new business model, but actively trying to shut it down. They aren't necessarily even concerned about pricing - it's convenience.
There are people who aren't going to pay as long as the alternative is to not pay, but these aren't customers. And people like yourself aren't going to realize that no matter what because there is an alternative you think they should be using. Please just stop trying to lump everyone in to the same set of principles and just say "Not everyone thinks the same. A segmented market will work better than trying to serve everyone the same deal." At least it would be honest instead of hiding behind a not-so-thinly veiled curtain of ignorance.
That kind of thinking ends in just one thing - authorization servers which can turn your library off at any time. Stop paying and it stops playing. I'd be looking into the details to see if that hint is in there anywhere.
As a content producer, I'm more worried that people will download but there won't be any statistics and I wouldn't get my fair share. If someone's going to make money off my content, I want documentation and proof that I'm not being screwed by the ISP nor the record company. They already try to short you with their version of hollywood accounting. I'd hate to have a situation where they use something like MusicBrainz Picard tech to ID tunes, but they miss FLAC or REAL or other formats.
I don't see how this benefits the people who make the content - just the big companies.
Infact, Microsoft Office dumped it back in the 90s
All while their MFC platform and related documentation and books practically required MDI unless you were doing something that made absolutely no sense. I remember seeing Office and thinking, wow, these new apps don't even come close to doing what MS is recommending on every page of every discussion relating to UI development.
I guess you can either ride the wave or get soaked.
I had a Mac OS 9 freeze on me. powered off and rebooted and my disk was "unreadable" according to the Mac. I found and called their support line (free for educational institutions) and the person who answered said yeah pretty much your disk is gone.
In related news, I found a PS2 game with something in the directions that when you load a game, until you save it at the save point your game is GONE. Not restart from where you were, the save game is gone and you start over. Power outage, emergency, accident, whatever - your game is gone. I don't remember which one - might have been a mortal kombat knockoff with ninjas instead. Bought used for $6. So I'm sure it was high-quality.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a PS2 in December. Not a typo - I have 25 games and paid between $6 and $20 for them. $20 is what the red-label "Greatest hits" goes for NEW so I don't think buying it used and expecting to pay no more than that is unreasonable.
But at $20, I don't think I would get much re-selling it, so I expect to have these until I get rid of the whole system and all games at one low, low price. Not for the money, just to get it out the house really.
So no, used game sales aren't hurting new sales in my case, they are actually the only reason I bought a game system, and the 3 games I bought new. When I can't find any more decent PS2 games, I'll tink about upgrading to the next level.
Between AV scanning and the constant background Update checks, and I should have said "among" because there are other little things as well - my notebook is unusable for an hour every day.
A reboot takes 25 minutes. That's not a typo.
Shutting down takes 5-10 minutes and starting up in the morning takes 15-20 minutes.
That's going from a usable system to off and to a usable system. I'm not talking about until the desktop comes up, because it's still unusable at that point.
My biggest complaint is that disk I/O is a noticeably big resource hog. "System Idle Process" could be at 95-97% but I can't click on anything because somehow disk I/O is happening. It's not the CPU, just waiting for turns on the disk. At that point I can't do anything. I can't even launch Task Manager to see if it's a CPU spike.
My only resolution has been to write a VBScript that uses WMI to set all update processes to low priority, all virus scanning processes to low priority, and turns off Windows Update, and kills the local SMS proxy. Reboot still takes 20 minutes because a lot of junk happens over our retarded network, but at least I can click around in things. It's in the startup folder and takes 10 minutes until it even runs, but by the time I can click on something it has made life significantly easier for me.
I can't tell you how many meetings I've missed the beginning of, even though Outlook is already running and everything is cached offline, because I click on the calendar (or the reminder window) and nothing happens for 15 minutes. THAT should be calculated in TCO.
Oh sure, blame my local IT guys, but I feel it's Windows design that's the fundamental problem. Virus scan, updates, and the scheduler, with possibly disk access routines all part of the problem. My home notebook doesn't have these problems.
Are you sure he wasn't talking about his McDonald's breakfast?
They've made their business model on being "just good enough" for people to use it, but not smooth the rough edges. Actually they smooth the rough edges before actually measuring to make sure things are put together correctly, so it looks like it's doing to work but it never will. And then they add little shims and ties and glue to get everything together.
Most companies do this sort of thing, but few disband their web browser team after they realize the web browser is going to be the next platform to control and actually succeed. Then completely abandon it, since it's "good enough".
Until a lot of people want it, it's the perfect tool for self-selective market segmentation. Smart people will pay extra for it, dumb people won't realize they need it.
You're right, a responsible company would provide it to everyone. But this is a company after profits, not Karma. Apple won't win any points unless it's enabled by default. A small percentage of people might be advised to turn it on, but mostly it's going to be the people who know about it turning it on, and the rest never knowing it's there. Not having it and never knowing it's there are about the same thing, functionally.
I assume you checked the exchange rates at the moment you posted that, to be assured that the exchange rate did not make a liar out of you?
Public health inspectors are responsible for health problems caused by the establishment, not the patrons.
You could argue, and probably will, that allowing people to smoke makes the business responsible. But the employees aren't smoking while they are working. I know that because that would be a health code violation for which the employer is responsible.
Now you probably want to split hairs about whether a patron who spits on the salad bar would be a health concern. Sure, because you can't get Hepatitis C through smoke, but you could if the patron had hep C and recently flossed their gingivitis infested gums and bled into their spittle.
What argument have I not forseen? Remember, "having cigarette smoke in the air" is probably not on the health code violations list, unless the city has a no-smoking ordinance. And even then it's probably not on there - you'd just get a fine, and that's possibly not even from the health department depending on who is tasked to enforce it.
Your turn.
You make zero sense. Keep in mind that few of us readers own a business in Virginia.
Do you have to pay your takes in advance?
Do you not have the option of filing an amended return once you do know your gross?
Did your employees just fail to amend the return?
Have you complained to your legislators?
Are other companies in the same boat, and not complaining to their legislators?
Have you asked other companies if they would like to complain together?
I'm sure I have other questions, but these are a good start.
I would bet my house that given the chance, they would go back in time and do the same thing in NY. When it came up a second time, they tried a different tactic rather than lose in another state.
And even if they do lose, the next time they send warning letters affiliates are going to scream bloody murder.
And who in the fuck modded this insightful? It reads like a conspiracy theory. You're saying they had this plan and didn't execute it because it's new york of all places - do you have any evidence at all? An e-mail or a text message of someone's brother's uncle saying they overheard someone fart and it sounded like "Wit until N.C. tries this"?
It rims itself... first time I've seen that. They truly do have everything.
KOHLER K-3369-4-NA Staccato Double-Basin Self-Rimming Kitchen Sink
What I wouldn't give for a self-rimming 7 of 9 Real Doll - if it existed I'd know where to look.
I can bottle rain water and sell it to stupid people. I can take communication bandwidth which costs me nothing extra and charge people every time they send a single text message over it. I can make something people can make themselves and charge 10 times the value of the components. I can send spam to millions of people and let them send me money. If people don't take the time to evaluate their purchases, capitalism dies. We should be encouraging people not to buy junk that falls apart, so the companies go out of business. If they pay for Linux but can get it for free, should Red Hat go out of business?
I know, Red Hat is only putting a copyright on their additions, but how do we make this distinction clear from whatever else this whining is about?
Someone who takes an out of copyright text and prints it has provided a service and deserves to be paid for it. If they make any additions to the text, such as editorializing or checking or whatever, the updates are now copyright of the people who printed it. I can take an original Beethoven score and reproduce it, but if I take an editorialized edition produced 10 years ago, I can't distribute that for free because of the value added by the publisher. In most cases, origianl scores are written in old-style notation and must be updated to make sense to today's musicians, and that conversion is a new, protected work.
So the real complaint is the narrow bunch of stuff which is being reproduced, verbatim, with a copyright attached. And the real concern isn't even that businesses are making money - it's simply that copyright is being asserted. Yes?
My understanding is that even if you take something in the public domain, your arrangement of it can be copyrighted.
For example, a phone book. The data itself cannot be copyrighted. The presentation can. If you stick it in a photocopier and sell the copies, that's a problem. They give the phone book away, so giving away a copy is technically illegal but probably won't be enforced. If you re-type everything and get the company logos from the companies and effectively reproduce it so it looks nearly enough the same, you could get sued for copying the presentation - not the contents.
In this case of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, where the book is essentially scans of another book, there are parts of the book which are copyrighted. The cover is, any forward or editorial material is, notes included. Anything that was added is copyrighted, and copyright law has only one way of distinguishing that. You put the copyright notice on it like you do anything else. Would you rather make an author call out which parts of the book are covered and are not? On every page?
Put another way, a derivative work of something in copyright is not allowed. A derivative work of something out of copyright is essentially a new work. You can still go back to the source and copy it for free - that hasn't been changed.
So the complaint is really just about the fact that people *might not* understand how copyright law works, and *might* pay money to a company that makes it easily accessible instead of rummaging around trying to find the original. I see no problem here. People need to know how laws work in order to live other parts of their lives, so let's just consider this a place where people need to understand exactly what copyright means.
Any professional organization will keep you up to date on both sides. Usually they phrase it as "our opposition is planning on doing the following horrible bad criminal things, so we are going to counter with these pristine ideals," but you do get updates on what actually happens.
also, he's not keeping current with arguments on both sides, just what is actually happening with the issues. The arguments themselves have lots of emotional appeal and faulty logic on both sides, so it's just a bunch of noise to someone who has to decide things based on law and the presentations in court. He does have to figure out how to apply developments to cases in front of him, which I assume is how this professional organization would help.
Copyright is a big thing right now, it does make sense to keep up to date on it. The only question I have is whether this organization has a history of distorting facts or if it does a good job keeping things fact-based. If he belongs to a lobbying type group, this is bad.
Are you saying they should put a steep discount on the OS?
Or that they shouldn't put as much functionality in it as they do?
Cos XP is worth far more than that out of the box, and if you don't hate it Vista is worth far more than XP. And 7 is apparently just Vista without some of the annoying crap.
Most of the drivers you would need are included, certainly almost any typical hardware like mouse, keyboard, printer, scanner, lots of modems. It includes basic word processing, a web browser, SMTP mail via Outlook, media player, file sharing... you can do piles of stuff without ever installing anything. It includes a lot of system utilities already.
So how should they get down to an $80 value?
I think I remember seeing a search feature, here on /., _pixels_ ago.
Who's going to be the first to use it? You? Me?
The suspense is terrible.... I hope it lasts.
Let me rephrase. They don't consider bugs important unless someone can turn it into a vulnerability. Previous examples have shown that it is possible to turn a seemingly benign bug into a security hole, with a little flash of insight.
I should be able to submit bug reports directly to MS, instead of having to talk to a desk jockey at the OEM who never passes it on to the company that wrote the software. They would prefer you didn't do that. They will take your "send error report to microsoft" data, but at that point it's just statistical - whatever gets the most reports gets attention.
They should say at this point, you know what, let us know if you find something and we'll take a look at it to make sure it's not going to cause problems. You know how much that would cost? Probably not as much as you think if it's simple triage.
If I didn't work at a fortune 100 company, I wouldn't have a vendor support contact I could just call up and say hey this is causing problems, can you look at it? Smart people who know what they are doing can give great feedback and have it completely ignored because it doesn't seem worthwhile to look at something that might have problems.
They will always have problems with third-party code, and not much you can do about it. But you have to realize that the attack surface area increases, and have your bug-squasher team increase in surface area along with it. I don't see an equal response. Sure I'll be your effective beta tester, but I don't want to hear one more detailed report about bug reports getting ignored.
Simple, eh?
Their OS gave rise to a cottage industry of antivirus. The whole reason we need protection is because of their insecure code. I don't trust them to protect it.
Does Avira require registration? I got pissed at other AV tools because they either require registration or magically ballooned into ridiculous clown-barf color schemes.
AVG Free was my favorite, but they discontinued the previous version (7.5?) and made 8.0 install only on XP SP2 or above. Or something like that. So I went with something else that required me to sign up. Sure they want to track users or somethinig, but I delete everything they e-mail me with so it's really me being up-front - I'm not going to upgrade nor pay you money, so you don't need my information to spam me with.
Then upgraded to SP3 because the free MS compilers require SP2... and tried AVG next version again. I right-click to scan, and there's a balloon tip type notice that I started a scan, a giant orange notice that I decided to ignore the fact that on-access scanning is off, a slide-down notice to upgrade, 60 second scan startup time, and when I close the window a balloon tip type thing to let me know if finished. Fuck all of that. I want a virus scanner, not a billboard.
So - you or someone else - what makes Avira good?
TCP/IP should be in the OS - it is a resource management issue and is a hardware issue. If only a handful of apps used it, maybe third-party would be acceptable. But you don't want a third-party stack crashing the OS, so write it yourself and include it.
On the other hand, Anti-virus products shouldn't even be needed. MS should be able to write software with fewer holes in it. They have piles of static analysis tools, piles of research, and piles of other stuff. They just don't want to take the time and fix things (including testing), so they put wrappers like UAC around things instead of fixing it.
I've seen lots of bug reports ignored by MS just because it doesn't look like it's exploitable, only to have some crafty fool figure out how to exploit it. I can cause a stack overflow in Oracle 10.x drivers by sending a VALID openquery through a linked server. Runtime catches the error, but then it causes a crash in the error reporting because the stack is trashed. Currently it's a null refrence, but how hard would it be to turn a stack overflow into a server root hack? Not all that hard. But they won't fix it because the problem is in a third party module, and if that one is fixed the MS error disappears. I'm just saying these vulnerabilities are all over the place, especially since they have so much third-party code.
One person or company making the problem, and the solution to the problem, does not look good. Especially since MS only publically fixes holes they publically admit to. There might be piles of security problems no one else knows about, but MS AV might know to watch for suspicious behaviour that only MS knows about.
Giant virus outbreak because it's too expensive to patch a particular problem, or can't get it out fast enough, and only Windows SE customers are protected so everyone ditches Symantec and other AV and goes to Windows. It's not that far-fetched, and they might even do it that way by accident. When it's possible to have that kind of advantage and wipe out your competition in a single event like that, especially if it's unintentional, that's a problem.
Just saying, the mafia used to take protection money, but you were being protected from the mafia. Problem and solution should be from different sources. Therefore your analogy is invalid, same as if my hair were a bird.
Have you seen some of the license settlements to come out of patent litigation? $900MM might not be a lot to Microsoft, but a lot of companies wouldn't think twice about hiring a hitman at $10k to avoid paying $900MM. The trick is, you have to get the job done before you get dragged into court, otherwise you'll look very suspicious indeed.
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2005/04/23/largest_patent.html
Year Plaintiff Defendant Settlement ($mm)
2005 Dr. Gary K. Michelson Medtronic $1,350
1990 Polaroid Eastman Kodak 909
2004 Sun Microsystems Microsoft 900
2004 Intergraph Intel 675
2004 InterTrust Technologies Microsoft 440
copied/pasted, click the source if you want formatting.
All you're accomplishing is telling these companies that DRM is fine with you. And the ones you don't download, they figure you're just stealing that. There is no way to get feedback to the company that your purchases are dependent on breaking DRM, or in other words you won't buy anything that has DRM, because you keep stripping it without telling them.
All of the people who figure it's OK to buy something for one device and have to re-buy it later, and they do exist, appear exactly the same to these sellers. Ah they say, here's another customer who doesn't mind DRM. And so they can't get an accurate count.
People who get screwed and then don't sue are a big part of the problem. Unfortunately lawsuits cost time and money, and this is not a very soundly tested legal area because no one wants to spend the time or money to contest DRM schemes failing the user. People with the money to front a lawsuit probably can mentally write off a purchase like this and just buy again in a different format. Someone seriously hurt by a $50 purchase that doesn't work will probably not have the money.
In other words, it's your fault. Don't buy it, or sue when it doesn't work, or at least complain loudly. Call a product's help line while you're standing in the store and ask does it have DRM? Ok, sorry thanks I won't be buying it. The only way that works of course is if enough people call. "They won't listen to me," sure. But they will listen if enough people can be bothered to call.
You're a troll, moderators recognize this. But for the benefit of those listening...
1) Theft and copyright infringement are not the same. Dictionary definitions and legal definitions, along with legal punishments, say they are different. If it were theft, she would be on the hook for the value of the music, less than $24 at iTunes prices of the day, plus maybe a fine of some sort - $500 maximum in places that I know of. You're trying to say that taking something that isn't either 1) free or 2) paid for is not right, but that doesn't make it theft. Arguing this point simply diverts attention from whatever point you're trying to make. If you want to continue arguing this, then you should tell the judge who allowed a jury to make this a $2MM settlement. You can't, however, because it's not true. So please, just don't ever argue this again.
2) The media companies as a whole *fought* the internet as a way of doing business, to the point that people are *just now* realizing that there are other ways of obtaining music than downloading it. I speak to people on a daily basis who have no idea that you can rip your own CDs and make MP3s - in minutes. They download because that's what they know. Even if it's something they already have. All it would have taken is a deal with the original Napster. But they fought it for years, fighting the business model they could have been introducing to people. Instead, they put everything they could behind legislation and legal proceedings. Finally, Napster made a deal and Apple came out with iPod and iTunes. Now, people know that you get music by downloading it - because of the music industry's bad decisions. It could very well have been a vibrant new business model. Download MP3's direct from the record label - no overhead, entire catalog, rare prints, international selections. Now the recording industry would be *happy* if you partook of their DRM-free downloads from Amazon. But it's not how people know to do it.
3) I don't own any music that I have on CD or cassette tape, or vinyl. I have a license to listen to it from the copyright holder. That means I can't sell it, along with all rights to it, to someone else. I can only sell the physical medium, at which point I terminate my license. I cannot make a copy and sell the original - that would be copyright violation. I fail to see how that is theft, since I'm selling what I bought - hopefully you can see why it's not theft now, it's copyright violation instead. If not, see point #1. What if I download something I already own, seeing point 2? I have a license to listen to it, but is it illegal for me to download a compressed, lossy copy of what's in my CD rack at home? According to copyright law, I do not - I have to make the backup myself, from the original I bought. What if someone steals my CDs? I did not transfer my license to listen - does that mean my license is terminated? I didn't terminate it... but I don't have the original. Does that mean the record company *must* replace a stolen album? If I have a license which was not terminated, then legally I do have the right for a replacmenet. Go ahead, try asking for a replacement. They will say no, your physical copy is physically not in your possession. You didn't pay for a physical copy - you paid for a license. That's why you can't sell your copy with all rights attached, you don't have all rights to it. Only the right to listen to it - which has not been transferred according to the law. What is your explanation for this situation?
It's called BUSINESS for a reason, but they decided they would simply continue selling horse carriages and try to legally stop cars from being built. That's what makes no sense.
Or how about download stuff, get caught, and then make your case to the Supreme Court?
Reading this case, it looks like they intentionally threw this one. Probably didn't, but it reads that way. This gives an opportunity to fight the unreasonable awards. Plus, depending on how old the songs are she downloaded, it might make the case for lowering copyright lengths. This might not be the best case to show it, but that's not my point.
My point is, the only way to change the law is either get Congress on your side, or get Judiciary to tell Congress to buzz off. The only way to get the Judicial system is to get caught doing something.
Do it until you get caught, then stand up for yourself. If you're downloading tomorrow's #1 hits, perhaps you deserve to lose. If you're doing something you think should be legal, carry on. Either it's de facto legal because you never get caught or it's potentially going to get a law struck down.
You wouldn't protest elections in Iran by following the law would you? You'd never get anywhere! Neither will we get anywhere with copyright.
You're making the single most idiot and common mistake there is on any argument. These aren't the same people.
Lots of people dropped off the pirate ship and bought stuff when iTunes came around, because iTunes is easy and the costs (used to be) predictable and kinda reasonable. Still has DRM, but there's a workaround, and there are other, separate, not the same, individual, not part of the first group people who either don't like DRM or don't like additional data loss of the workaround. Especially since it's the provider's own admission basically saying "DRM is useless, but we're going to do it anyway".
Then lots of people disembarked at the DRM-less idea. Different people had a different opinion. Not the same group of people changing their minds.
There are still people who download because it's easy, and it's what they know - and that's the recording industry's fault for not only failing to move to a new business model, but actively trying to shut it down. They aren't necessarily even concerned about pricing - it's convenience.
There are people who aren't going to pay as long as the alternative is to not pay, but these aren't customers. And people like yourself aren't going to realize that no matter what because there is an alternative you think they should be using. Please just stop trying to lump everyone in to the same set of principles and just say "Not everyone thinks the same. A segmented market will work better than trying to serve everyone the same deal." At least it would be honest instead of hiding behind a not-so-thinly veiled curtain of ignorance.
That kind of thinking ends in just one thing - authorization servers which can turn your library off at any time. Stop paying and it stops playing. I'd be looking into the details to see if that hint is in there anywhere.
As a content producer, I'm more worried that people will download but there won't be any statistics and I wouldn't get my fair share. If someone's going to make money off my content, I want documentation and proof that I'm not being screwed by the ISP nor the record company. They already try to short you with their version of hollywood accounting. I'd hate to have a situation where they use something like MusicBrainz Picard tech to ID tunes, but they miss FLAC or REAL or other formats.
I don't see how this benefits the people who make the content - just the big companies.
All while their MFC platform and related documentation and books practically required MDI unless you were doing something that made absolutely no sense. I remember seeing Office and thinking, wow, these new apps don't even come close to doing what MS is recommending on every page of every discussion relating to UI development.
I guess you can either ride the wave or get soaked.
I had a Mac OS 9 freeze on me. powered off and rebooted and my disk was "unreadable" according to the Mac. I found and called their support line (free for educational institutions) and the person who answered said yeah pretty much your disk is gone.
In related news, I found a PS2 game with something in the directions that when you load a game, until you save it at the save point your game is GONE. Not restart from where you were, the save game is gone and you start over. Power outage, emergency, accident, whatever - your game is gone. I don't remember which one - might have been a mortal kombat knockoff with ninjas instead. Bought used for $6. So I'm sure it was high-quality.