Okay, I've been reading through these posts, and I've been seeing a good number of comments and gripes about Covad or Northpoint or whatever. Some are insightful, some are clueless. I work for a major ISP with over a thousand DSL lines through Covad, and the Powers That Be set up a department just to handle troubleshooting of DSL, Frame Relay, T1s, and ISDN. We deal with Covad every day, and there's a few realities that are getting overlooked.
Lily Tomlin was correct. They're the phone company, they don't have to care. Here's why. Covad/Northpoint/Whomever pays the ILEC - be it Bell Atlantic, US West, PacBell, whatever - a grand total of around $7 a month for each copper pair used for DSL. This doesn't precisely make the telco wanna jump when your circuit goes down.
From the DSL Provider side, an interesting statistic from Covad that we finally managed to get out of them - AFTER we threatened to leave for another Provider - is that overall, 85% of the calls that they recieve from their ISP partners are a No Trouble Found call. This means that some total twit on the ISP's front line gets a call saying that a DSL line doesn't work, doesn't bother to have the router or DSL modem powercycled, and doesn't bother to check if all the cables are seated properly before they turn around and call the DSL provider to have them troubleshoot. So when you have a legitimate line issue, like an open in your circuit, it's got to get through the 85% noise before it's considered an actual signal problem. There are a few ISPs that don't do that. We actually have a 5% No Trouble Found ratio with Covad. I don't know who the worst offenders are on this, but I DO know that Concentric is one of them.
RBOCs are LAZY. Good example? We deal with mostly East Coast customers. Bell Atlantic's repair department is open Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm. Which means that if your DSL line goes down late Friday afternoon, and it's because of a break in the circuit halfway between you and the CO, you don't have a prayer of getting it fixed until probably Tuesday. And Bell Atlantic's techs are notorious for exerting themselves to find out why they aren't the problem.
Outages. DSL is highly outage-prone because in a lot of ways it still is in a Beta phase. The 12-hour outage that someone mentioned in Los Angeles I happen to know involved a massive conference call with Covad's switch and telco vendors, their entire Network Operations department, and about half of the Senior VPs in the company in an effort to get this fixed. Our company had been through something similar prior to that, and I know for a fact that they were working their butts off to get it back up and running. They then went through their network and made VERY sure that it wouldn't happen again. But new hardware fails. you take it as it goes.
ISPs tend to be lazy on the front lines, so you may have to push hard to get results. Remember that these front line techs could be handling everything from dialup to T1, so they're busy as hell with people wanting to get their pr0n. If you've got a commercial circuit, make sure your ISP has a commercial support department.
DSL IS NOT AN INTELLIGENT CHOICE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SERVICES!!!!! I cannot count the number of people who go with a DSL line to save a lot of money when they set up their e-commerce webserver and then scream about losing hundreds and thousands of dollars an hour because their DSL line is down. If you absolutely, positively MUST be connected 24/7 and need a high speed connection, get a T1. Oh. And don't use DSL to back up DSL. If one goes down, so will the other 99% of the time. It's just a waste of money.
I hope that someone gets something out of this, and actually manages to avoid a fatal mistake. As a further note, when you've got a solid DSL line, it's worth it's weight in gold. I've got a 1.5/384 Rate Adaptive line - what people were talking about when they mentioned the Commited Information Rate - through Speakeasy.net, and I've had only one problem with it, caused by a regional outage with Covad. Enjoy!
All I'm pointing out is that you cannot purchase the right to use this based on current value - like all software does - if the current value is zero. Software companies are being narrow, shortsighted, and they're losing money by fighting the free distribution of something that no longer has any appreciable value. I think that most of us would be quite happy if companies would provide their valueless software for download.
However, my point was that there's no loss of revenue for the company, therefore a civil award cannot be granted to the company nor can a civil punishment be implemented (to my knowledge.) And is it possible to present copyright violation as a criminal charge if nothing of value is taken? All I'm doing is presenting an option. And believe me, the software companies rarely distinguish between a copyright and a financial issue. They've probably forgotten how by now, after fighting the 0-Day WaReZ KiDDi3z for so long.
This is something I've been wondering about for about a year and a half now, ever since I took Accounting 101 - still trying to figure out why that's required for CompSci - and learned about Software Amortization.
In English, this is the devaluation of the software over a period of time, usually 1 fiscal year. And I got news for you folks, but at LEAST 95% of the old games discussed are now, legally and financially, worth NOTHING to the software companies. And since you've PAID them NOTHING, then you've paid them exactly what it is currently worth to them in order to use that software. In fact, you could even say you've paid what it's worth with a reasonable retail markup, because a 50% increase of 0 is still 0.
Now. Whether or not this would actually hold up in a court of law, I don't know. But I can't see where it's a violation of copyright - I'm not distributing it as my own work, nor am I harming the potential profits of the copyright holder. I'm not even reselling it for only the cost of media. I know it's shaky, but if no harm is done to the company or original author, then who's to say that they would win?
Maybe this isn't even relevant overall. But the fact remains that these companies have already written off this software as valueless. And it happens a lot quicker than you might think. It's entirely possible that software like Windows95 is now worth about $5 to Bill Gates and Microsoft, but it makes you wonder when Staples still wants to charge a hundred for it.... No.sig here....
Actually, I think it was one of two things. Microsoft is walking a very fine line between doing what the court tells them while the trial is going on, and making sure they don't put something in there that has the potential to cripple their appeals by accident. (Sorta like DeCSS. Why argue it now that the MPAA Lawyers made sure that the source was a matter of public record?) The long and the short of it is, Microsoft won't be giving a realistic remedy to the court, and in the long run, once Judge Jackson makes his choice of remedy, all it will do is determine what will and won't be favored once all the appeals run out. Microsoft is fighting for its life right now; they're not going to bow down and submit at this early a stage in the game.
The flaw in your reasoning is that uranium, plutonium, and all the rest of it are significantly less concentrated and more shielded in nature than they are after processing. Also, the main purpose behind using radioactive materials for energy is the intense amount of heat that they generate in a fission reaction. This allows the creation of steam via heat exchange between two separate water systems - one radioactive or "hot" and one non-radioactive or "cold" - which in turn is channeled to turbines where the steam created by all that intense heat is used to turn turbines. Nuclear reactors are in essence big, expensive, highly dangerous steam-powered engines that create the single most devastating weapon known to man as an accidental byproduct. Fun, neh? Wolfstar
Slashdot Mirror
Lily Tomlin was correct. They're the phone company, they don't have to care. Here's why. Covad/Northpoint/Whomever pays the ILEC - be it Bell Atlantic, US West, PacBell, whatever - a grand total of around $7 a month for each copper pair used for DSL. This doesn't precisely make the telco wanna jump when your circuit goes down.
From the DSL Provider side, an interesting statistic from Covad that we finally managed to get out of them - AFTER we threatened to leave for another Provider - is that overall, 85% of the calls that they recieve from their ISP partners are a No Trouble Found call. This means that some total twit on the ISP's front line gets a call saying that a DSL line doesn't work, doesn't bother to have the router or DSL modem powercycled, and doesn't bother to check if all the cables are seated properly before they turn around and call the DSL provider to have them troubleshoot. So when you have a legitimate line issue, like an open in your circuit, it's got to get through the 85% noise before it's considered an actual signal problem. There are a few ISPs that don't do that. We actually have a 5% No Trouble Found ratio with Covad. I don't know who the worst offenders are on this, but I DO know that Concentric is one of them.
RBOCs are LAZY. Good example? We deal with mostly East Coast customers. Bell Atlantic's repair department is open Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm. Which means that if your DSL line goes down late Friday afternoon, and it's because of a break in the circuit halfway between you and the CO, you don't have a prayer of getting it fixed until probably Tuesday. And Bell Atlantic's techs are notorious for exerting themselves to find out why they aren't the problem.
Outages. DSL is highly outage-prone because in a lot of ways it still is in a Beta phase. The 12-hour outage that someone mentioned in Los Angeles I happen to know involved a massive conference call with Covad's switch and telco vendors, their entire Network Operations department, and about half of the Senior VPs in the company in an effort to get this fixed. Our company had been through something similar prior to that, and I know for a fact that they were working their butts off to get it back up and running. They then went through their network and made VERY sure that it wouldn't happen again. But new hardware fails. you take it as it goes.
ISPs tend to be lazy on the front lines, so you may have to push hard to get results. Remember that these front line techs could be handling everything from dialup to T1, so they're busy as hell with people wanting to get their pr0n. If you've got a commercial circuit, make sure your ISP has a commercial support department.
DSL IS NOT AN INTELLIGENT CHOICE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SERVICES!!!!! I cannot count the number of people who go with a DSL line to save a lot of money when they set up their e-commerce webserver and then scream about losing hundreds and thousands of dollars an hour because their DSL line is down. If you absolutely, positively MUST be connected 24/7 and need a high speed connection, get a T1. Oh. And don't use DSL to back up DSL. If one goes down, so will the other 99% of the time. It's just a waste of money.
I hope that someone gets something out of this, and actually manages to avoid a fatal mistake. As a further note, when you've got a solid DSL line, it's worth it's weight in gold. I've got a 1.5/384 Rate Adaptive line - what people were talking about when they mentioned the Commited Information Rate - through Speakeasy.net, and I've had only one problem with it, caused by a regional outage with Covad. Enjoy!
However, my point was that there's no loss of revenue for the company, therefore a civil award cannot be granted to the company nor can a civil punishment be implemented (to my knowledge.) And is it possible to present copyright violation as a criminal charge if nothing of value is taken? All I'm doing is presenting an option. And believe me, the software companies rarely distinguish between a copyright and a financial issue. They've probably forgotten how by now, after fighting the 0-Day WaReZ KiDDi3z for so long.
In English, this is the devaluation of the software over a period of time, usually 1 fiscal year. And I got news for you folks, but at LEAST 95% of the old games discussed are now, legally and financially, worth NOTHING to the software companies. And since you've PAID them NOTHING, then you've paid them exactly what it is currently worth to them in order to use that software. In fact, you could even say you've paid what it's worth with a reasonable retail markup, because a 50% increase of 0 is still 0.
Now. Whether or not this would actually hold up in a court of law, I don't know. But I can't see where it's a violation of copyright - I'm not distributing it as my own work, nor am I harming the potential profits of the copyright holder. I'm not even reselling it for only the cost of media. I know it's shaky, but if no harm is done to the company or original author, then who's to say that they would win?
Maybe this isn't even relevant overall. But the fact remains that these companies have already written off this software as valueless. And it happens a lot quicker than you might think. It's entirely possible that software like Windows95 is now worth about $5 to Bill Gates and Microsoft, but it makes you wonder when Staples still wants to charge a hundred for it.... No .sig here....
Actually, I think it was one of two things. Microsoft is walking a very fine line between doing what the court tells them while the trial is going on, and making sure they don't put something in there that has the potential to cripple their appeals by accident. (Sorta like DeCSS. Why argue it now that the MPAA Lawyers made sure that the source was a matter of public record?) The long and the short of it is, Microsoft won't be giving a realistic remedy to the court, and in the long run, once Judge Jackson makes his choice of remedy, all it will do is determine what will and won't be favored once all the appeals run out. Microsoft is fighting for its life right now; they're not going to bow down and submit at this early a stage in the game.
The flaw in your reasoning is that uranium, plutonium, and all the rest of it are significantly less concentrated and more shielded in nature than they are after processing. Also, the main purpose behind using radioactive materials for energy is the intense amount of heat that they generate in a fission reaction. This allows the creation of steam via heat exchange between two separate water systems - one radioactive or "hot" and one non-radioactive or "cold" - which in turn is channeled to turbines where the steam created by all that intense heat is used to turn turbines. Nuclear reactors are in essence big, expensive, highly dangerous steam-powered engines that create the single most devastating weapon known to man as an accidental byproduct. Fun, neh? Wolfstar