...Robin Williams. And I'll bet you thought I was going to say Roblimo. Actually, I didn't think The Bicentennial Man was *that* bad, but I just wish they'd stuck a little Susan Calvin footage in.
It still bugs me that KDE and GNOME still seem to be aspiring to be Win-clones. IMHO, the OS/2 WPS is still way better than Win-anything. But even if I want to accept that something better than the WPS can be done, it simply isn't. The "advanced" desktops of Linux are just chasing Windows.
At least in the desktop arena, Microsoft has nearly completely destroyed innovation, unless you want to call minor variations in colors, icons, and product bundling innovation.
I run DFM, and have played a little with the ROX filer.
I didn't install the Earthlink stuff, they had. I didn't uninstall right away, because we were trying to save their old bookmarks, which ended up getting lost, anyway.
Still, after installing Zone Alarm and blocking some outgoing requests, the popups stopped coming. Maybe the software began as connection tracking and something more got added?
A while back, my neighbors switched from Earthlink to Adelphia cable. Trying to be a good netizen, I spoke with them about getting a firewall, and set up a time to install Zone Alarm on their machine.
When I went over, they made a side mention about all the stupid popup ads they were getting on Adelphia, how they hadn't gotten them on Earthlink, and Earthlink had promoted, 'No ads with us.' I responded that we didn't get any more than normal popups, on either Linux or Windows.
So we installed Zone Alarm, and started up the cable link, again. First thing we see is a program out of an Earthlink directory attempting to contact the nameserver. Press the 'No', and the popups were gone. Apparently some piece of Earthlink software got in a tiff because the nameserver belonged to another ISP, and decided we needed to be punished.
No, I don't have the opinion that everything Dubya (Were you so strict about Clinton-isms? I wasn't.) does is wrong. In fact, he may be our last, best hope against Hollings. (Senate Dem.)
Certainly a nuclear review can be required every six years, that's not the issue. The issue is coming up with downscaled uses of nuclear bombs. The issue is battlefield nukes. The issue is the resurrection of the neutron bomb. Who wrote the review, and who drove the content?
These things make nuclear war feasible. For over half a century nuclear war was so ugly as to be unfeasible. When Carter discontinued the neutron bomb, I disagreed with him. I have since changed my opinion.
When I saw last week that AOL was moving to Mozilla last week, that was the best news I'd seen in a while. It *almost* made up for Dubya's nuclear policy mess or Holling's tramplings. (But not quite, unfortunately, and definitely couldn't make up for both, in any case.)
Still, I don't see how you perceive an open and standard web as 'inevitable'. Prior to the AOL move, I would have considered a Microsoft proprietary web considerably more 'inevitable' than open standards.
Most of the public doesn't even truly understand what open standards are or mean, much less feel them important. But these are the same people who take it for granted that the half-inch coarse-thread nut fits on the half-inch coarse-thread bolt, no matter who made each part.
financial finagling like Enron, that can give the appearance of good times when the truth is rotten to the core. Eventually it catches up. This past year, Enron was doing it. In 1929, enough more people were doing it to cause the run on the banks.
In that light, it's probably a good thing that Enron happened. It's the canary that died, and told us all to ventilate the mines and clean up business accounting practices. This type of thing *was* on the way to becoming more widespread.
Do you *really*? I suspect that most people thinking of that imagine themselves on the 'fun' (whatta sense of fun) end of the scale.
But are you willing to take the chance of being dead? How about your wife, parents, kids, siblings, etc? When you talk of burning, you may be the one in flames, with someone else holding the match. You may be looted, and someone else doing the looting.
What do you want to bet that the new filesystem is covered by patents? It would be good to see recent grants to Microsoft from the patent office to see what's coming.
But then again, they don't really need to patent it, just do their usual crufty job. I still can't get civil use of Win2k NTFS partitions under Linux. If a filesystem is THAT hard to reverse engineer, there's something ugly in the base design.
As a transplanted Vermonter of 20+ years, I think you should place the blame properly, and not with Jim Jeffords.
Blame instead the Religious Right, who have been transforming the Rupublican Party into something Jeffords no longer could reconcile with his conservative-centrist views. I'm an Independent, have never registered with any party, and never will. I vote for whomever I think/feel will do the best job, regardless of party affiliations. That includes Jim Jeffords.
Besides, there's another approach. Plus they can just take a lawyer and go to ISPs and start talking about filtering incoming connections requests.
At least cable providers don't like incoming connections at all, so they won't need much prodding. Especially once congress is done discarding the CLECS, the Baby Bells don't like DSL at all, so they may not take too much prodding. There go the high-bandwidth users, the ones people would prefer to download from. Next start going after the biggest dialup outfits, like Earthlink.
The key point here is that it's not a battle the RIAA actually has to win. They just need to make the other side feel enough pain and inconvenience. I'm sure that p2p could be encapsulated and run over UDP, http, ICMP, or what have you. The point here is that it's getting slower and more difficult to run. Plus as it gets slower, and the border filtering gets more annoying, some number of people will just give up.
They really don't have to completely eliminate filesharing, just drop it to some level below their attention span, and that is possible, and I honestly don't know what the cost is. I also fear that the higher the cost, the more WE pay.
But haven't decades of attempting to turn software from an art into science and engineering told us a few things:
- Make the code modular, cleanly separating functions.
- Clearly define the interfaces, avoiding side-effects wherever possible.
- et cetera
Had they followed these practices, re-packaging Windows to change feature sets would be a piece of cake. As someone else mentions, don't they offer this modular packaging on embedded XP?
So let's walk the logic tree on this:
Either Microsoft could modularly bundle WinXP, or they can't. They say they can't.
-> If they really can, and say they can't, they're lying, lying to the courts as well as the public, including their customers.
-> If they really can't, then why can't they? Good software practice says they should be able to. That leaves two conclusions:
--> They did this intentionally, making Windows into an inseparable mess to confound competition and the cours. (Sounds akin to malfeasance to me, but IANAL)
--> It just happened, and Windows grew that way. But wait a minute, isn't Microsoft the biggest and most profitable software company in the world? If they can't do it right, who can? (tongue in cheek for the prior questions) If even Microsoft can't do software 'the way it should be done', then maybe nobody can, and we should *really* examine carefully any trust we place in computers. Maybe we can't really trust them at all. (this sounds to me like misfeasance, but again, IANAL)
You should be correct, the CD is mine, and as long as any copies I make are for my own use, that's fine too.
But that's not where we're headed, and that's why I say they're trying to make it some bizarre combination of media and license with restrictions tighter than either.
I guess ALL innovation comes from the halls of corporations. We don't need no steenking startups. If you *think* about what's really needed to implement the SSCA as currently envisioned that's what happens.
If our government thinks we're in a hi-tech slump now, just see what happens if SSCA passes. Just watch the US fall on the wrong side of the digital divide as innovation moves elsewhere.
As others have said, it's not just hardware, but software, too. You can add all the DRM hardware you want, but unless you've got a DRM OS with signatures, security, and verification everywhere, it's broken. An OSS kernel is dead in the DRM age, and userspace may well be in trouble, too. Imagine SSCA-certified compilers that guarantee the 'DRM Devices' are only used properly.
Seems to me that the content industries want it both ways. In the days of yore, records were treated like a media purchase, and it was common practice to tape them to keep the disks pristine.
With the CD, we crossed the Digital Divide, and suddenly we're not buying media, we're buying a license. Well, if that's the case, if my CD gets a scratch, I should be able to get a replacement for a nominal fee. After all, the cost of manufacture is around $0.10. Also, if *I* am licensed to use the content, I should have a decently described set of rights for use, and they shouldn't by necessity be limited to the delivery medium.
OTOH, if they're selling me the media, a thing, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, shy of making copies for others. But of course if I scratch it, it's done for. So then prudence would dictate that first I rip and reburn, and use my copy so the original remains pristine.
Seems to me that there's not a heck of a lot of effective difference between pure (reasonable, Borland-like (remember Turbo Pascal) license) content license and simple media purchase. Video is in essentially the same bucket as CDs, though they started getting fiesty with videotape, and didn't wait for digital.
But the content industries have crafted a new hybrid that's more restricted than either media or license, alone. It sounds like I've bought a license to the media, not a license to the content. So what have I really bought?
>The RIAA is 'investigating' this company? Regardless of Brilliant Digital Entertainment's ethics or motives, the RIAA is not a >governmental body and is acting like it has the power of subpeona.
I dunno... Look at the way Congress and the Courts have been going, and there's not a heckuva lot of difference. Mostly just time-lag for the RIAA to ask the legal system to do its bidding, and them to start moving.
No significant, standing victories for our side, yet.
CDs cost less than cassettes, but are priced higher, "because of apparent value". Tell that to computer makers, who pack more and sell for less, every year. IMHO, the price of real products is a compromise between cost of manufacture and what the competition will allow. Look at the price of DRAM, for an example. And of course we all know that next to nothing of that $18 CD that cost $0.10 to make went to royalties for the artists.
Also IMHO, the only business where "apparent value" can be a true factor in pricing is where competition is absent, that is a CARTEL or MONOPOLY. In the case of CDs, we have the joy of both at the same time.
There's the old lesson from videotapes: $80 tapes get pirated bigtime, $20 tapes don't. Plus tapes aren't $20, any more.
I feel ripped off every time I buy a CD, and thus I buy very seldom, principally as gifts. At half the price, I'd buy more than twice as many. At a third the price, more than thrice. At some point, storage would become the limiting factor, not money and purchase price.
Movies are headed the same way, and what's unfortunate about all this is that we're about to take a hurting tech sector and send it down in flames with SSSCA-type legislation. We're about to say that Jobs and Woz, or Hewlett and Packard will NEVER happen again, at least not in computing, because SSSCA turns the entire computing field into sealed boxes, and locks the innovator out.
At the very least, opt-in would be workable. Strong enough crypto to require hardware chips, maybe even crypto all the way into a sealed monitor. Better than SSSCA, anyway.
Of course copyright reform would be better yet. Isn't it interesting that patent durations have remained steady? Says something about the media industries, and what we've allowed them to turn into.
Repeat after me, "Steamboat Willie" will NEVER...
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
enter the public domain. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER will the copyright expire, unless and until Disney goes bankrupt. Even then it may not, because maybe Microsoft will have bought their copyrights.
For Steamboat Willie, Snow White, and the gang, 'limited duration' means that someday the Sun will go nova, and we may not have interstellar travel by then. Beyond that, there is still an eternity between 'no available energy' and proton decay or the next brane collision, in case we do develop interstellar travel.
The real problem with this isn't Steamboat Willie, Snow White, and the gang - it's the rest of the stuff that gets dragged along in the long-copyright game, too.
I suggest that free copyright be rolled back to the original 14/28 year limits. Beyond that, you have to pay to renew. This way, corporate jewels can be retained. But the rest is released, for simple economic reasons - it's too expensive to keep renewing, and drains the bottom line.
There are details, there needs to be a concept of 'related works' to handle serialized stories or a collection of source code. But the test needs to be tight, because the Star Wars movies really should count as separate works, as should the James Bond movies.
Besides, fee-based copyright extension should appeal to Congress, since it gives the government money. At the same time, for us it starts most copyrights expiring, again. (in our lifetimes) It should also be sufficient to force some expiration mechanism into the DMCA.
Don't forget that we're in the midst of turning the trade sanction thumbscrews on the Ukyraine, because they produce CD blanks that don't have the proper "protective IDs" built-in. As one of the former members of the Soviet Union, they fit right into the category you're talking about, and we're already @#$%ing them over.
That's why we have 65535 ports, to allow for better simplification of protocols. Unfortunately some peoples' idea of security is to clamp down on as many ports as possible. Even more unfortunately, they don't seem to realize just how easy it is to tunnel over HTTP or any other protocol, so all they've bought is the illusion of security at the expense of complexity.
Perhaps the others things that should be dead are the Great Divide at 1024, or at least move it up a bit, and perhaps RPC, itself. I need to understand the security implications of RPC - whether it truly can be secured, or if rpc.statd exploits will haunt us until the Day of Valenti. (When the Internet becomes a TV-like Radio-like broadcast-only medium.)
While I am in favor of the prinicpal of this, I fear the side-effects of the monetary flow to finance it. There is a class of people that is adept at finding flowing money, and inserting themselves into the stream. Today one example is health management costs - I've heard that 1/4 to 1/3 of our health costs are spent on 'management' as opposed to medicine.
With widespread mandated fee-based recycling for computing components, I fully expect to see the leeches emerge. But at least some good should come of it.
Do you want to shell out for EVERYBODY to get the next version of Word shortly after the first (early adopter) person does? Don't forget,.doc incompatibilities come between versions, too. Sure, you can set the new Word to save by default in the old.doc, but that's essentially the same as setting it for.rtf, isn't it?
Remember when pre-recorded videotapes first came out, and cost $75-$100? Those were the days when you paid a hefty membership fee to join a rental club. Those were also the days when piracy was rampant.
Somebody got a clue, and dropped the price to $20. The rampant (Small stuff still happens, I'll agree.) piracy all but stopped, sales shot through the roof, and rental outfits dropped the fees, sending their volumes up. Further evidence that this worked is that prices have continued to drop, so evidently they're still exploring the price/volume/profit space. (Defer rant on copyright, cake and eat it, and disc media.)
Anyway, the Web is different, because it started free. So now there's a reluctance to pay at all. Unfortunately, they're trying to break us through to the $80 videotape model. If I started paying $5 to each site I follow, my site fees would quickly exceed my broadband fee. We need low-price transactions, here. We need more of what PayPal is trying to do. We need innovation in the near-trivial fee space. Not pay per click, but below the normal profit threshold of a credit card. (I know, Cringely already said this...)
So how do you keep a neutral particle in an electromagnetic field? Ionize it, and it's just an antiproton, again. It would seem to me that the lightest *anti-atom* you could keep in an electromagnetic field would be singly-ionized antihelium. (After all, doubly-ionized antihelium is just an anti-alpha particle, or is that alpha anti-particle?)
Slashdot Mirror
...Robin Williams. And I'll bet you thought I was going to say Roblimo. Actually, I didn't think The Bicentennial Man was *that* bad, but I just wish they'd stuck a little Susan Calvin footage in.
It still bugs me that KDE and GNOME still seem to be aspiring to be Win-clones. IMHO, the OS/2 WPS is still way better than Win-anything. But even if I want to accept that something better than the WPS can be done, it simply isn't. The "advanced" desktops of Linux are just chasing Windows.
At least in the desktop arena, Microsoft has nearly completely destroyed innovation, unless you want to call minor variations in colors, icons, and product bundling innovation.
I run DFM, and have played a little with the ROX filer.
I didn't install the Earthlink stuff, they had. I didn't uninstall right away, because we were trying to save their old bookmarks, which ended up getting lost, anyway.
Still, after installing Zone Alarm and blocking some outgoing requests, the popups stopped coming. Maybe the software began as connection tracking and something more got added?
A while back, my neighbors switched from Earthlink to Adelphia cable. Trying to be a good netizen, I spoke with them about getting a firewall, and set up a time to install Zone Alarm on their machine.
When I went over, they made a side mention about all the stupid popup ads they were getting on Adelphia, how they hadn't gotten them on Earthlink, and Earthlink had promoted, 'No ads with us.' I responded that we didn't get any more than normal popups, on either Linux or Windows.
So we installed Zone Alarm, and started up the cable link, again. First thing we see is a program out of an Earthlink directory attempting to contact the nameserver. Press the 'No', and the popups were gone. Apparently some piece of Earthlink software got in a tiff because the nameserver belonged to another ISP, and decided we needed to be punished.
No, I don't have the opinion that everything Dubya (Were you so strict about Clinton-isms? I wasn't.) does is wrong. In fact, he may be our last, best hope against Hollings. (Senate Dem.)
Certainly a nuclear review can be required every six years, that's not the issue. The issue is coming up with downscaled uses of nuclear bombs. The issue is battlefield nukes. The issue is the resurrection of the neutron bomb. Who wrote the review, and who drove the content?
These things make nuclear war feasible. For over half a century nuclear war was so ugly as to be unfeasible. When Carter discontinued the neutron bomb, I disagreed with him. I have since changed my opinion.
When I saw last week that AOL was moving to Mozilla last week, that was the best news I'd seen in a while. It *almost* made up for Dubya's nuclear policy mess or Holling's tramplings. (But not quite, unfortunately, and definitely couldn't make up for both, in any case.)
Still, I don't see how you perceive an open and standard web as 'inevitable'. Prior to the AOL move, I would have considered a Microsoft proprietary web considerably more 'inevitable' than open standards.
Most of the public doesn't even truly understand what open standards are or mean, much less feel them important. But these are the same people who take it for granted that the half-inch coarse-thread nut fits on the half-inch coarse-thread bolt, no matter who made each part.
financial finagling like Enron, that can give the appearance of good times when the truth is rotten to the core. Eventually it catches up. This past year, Enron was doing it. In 1929, enough more people were doing it to cause the run on the banks.
In that light, it's probably a good thing that Enron happened. It's the canary that died, and told us all to ventilate the mines and clean up business accounting practices. This type of thing *was* on the way to becoming more widespread.
Do you *really*? I suspect that most people thinking of that imagine themselves on the 'fun' (whatta sense of fun) end of the scale.
But are you willing to take the chance of being dead? How about your wife, parents, kids, siblings, etc? When you talk of burning, you may be the one in flames, with someone else holding the match. You may be looted, and someone else doing the looting.
Watch what you wish for.
What do you want to bet that the new filesystem is covered by patents? It would be good to see recent grants to Microsoft from the patent office to see what's coming.
But then again, they don't really need to patent it, just do their usual crufty job. I still can't get civil use of Win2k NTFS partitions under Linux. If a filesystem is THAT hard to reverse engineer, there's something ugly in the base design.
As a transplanted Vermonter of 20+ years, I think you should place the blame properly, and not with Jim Jeffords.
Blame instead the Religious Right, who have been transforming the Rupublican Party into something Jeffords no longer could reconcile with his conservative-centrist views. I'm an Independent, have never registered with any party, and never will. I vote for whomever I think/feel will do the best job, regardless of party affiliations. That includes Jim Jeffords.
How costly is it, really?
Besides, there's another approach. Plus they can just take a lawyer and go to ISPs and start talking about filtering incoming connections requests.
At least cable providers don't like incoming connections at all, so they won't need much prodding. Especially once congress is done discarding the CLECS, the Baby Bells don't like DSL at all, so they may not take too much prodding. There go the high-bandwidth users, the ones people would prefer to download from. Next start going after the biggest dialup outfits, like Earthlink.
The key point here is that it's not a battle the RIAA actually has to win. They just need to make the other side feel enough pain and inconvenience. I'm sure that p2p could be encapsulated and run over UDP, http, ICMP, or what have you. The point here is that it's getting slower and more difficult to run. Plus as it gets slower, and the border filtering gets more annoying, some number of people will just give up.
They really don't have to completely eliminate filesharing, just drop it to some level below their attention span, and that is possible, and I honestly don't know what the cost is. I also fear that the higher the cost, the more WE pay.
But haven't decades of attempting to turn software from an art into science and engineering told us a few things:
- Make the code modular, cleanly separating functions.
- Clearly define the interfaces, avoiding side-effects wherever possible.
- et cetera
Had they followed these practices, re-packaging Windows to change feature sets would be a piece of cake. As someone else mentions, don't they offer this modular packaging on embedded XP?
So let's walk the logic tree on this:
Either Microsoft could modularly bundle WinXP, or they can't. They say they can't.
-> If they really can, and say they can't, they're lying, lying to the courts as well as the public, including their customers.
-> If they really can't, then why can't they? Good software practice says they should be able to. That leaves two conclusions:
--> They did this intentionally, making Windows into an inseparable mess to confound competition and the cours. (Sounds akin to malfeasance to me, but IANAL)
--> It just happened, and Windows grew that way. But wait a minute, isn't Microsoft the biggest and most profitable software company in the world? If they can't do it right, who can? (tongue in cheek for the prior questions) If even Microsoft can't do software 'the way it should be done', then maybe nobody can, and we should *really* examine carefully any trust we place in computers. Maybe we can't really trust them at all. (this sounds to me like misfeasance, but again, IANAL)
Then is happening to my rights of fair use?
You should be correct, the CD is mine, and as long as any copies I make are for my own use, that's fine too.
But that's not where we're headed, and that's why I say they're trying to make it some bizarre combination of media and license with restrictions tighter than either.
I guess ALL innovation comes from the halls of corporations. We don't need no steenking startups. If you *think* about what's really needed to implement the SSCA as currently envisioned that's what happens.
If our government thinks we're in a hi-tech slump now, just see what happens if SSCA passes. Just watch the US fall on the wrong side of the digital divide as innovation moves elsewhere.
As others have said, it's not just hardware, but software, too. You can add all the DRM hardware you want, but unless you've got a DRM OS with signatures, security, and verification everywhere, it's broken. An OSS kernel is dead in the DRM age, and userspace may well be in trouble, too. Imagine SSCA-certified compilers that guarantee the 'DRM Devices' are only used properly.
Seems to me that the content industries want it both ways. In the days of yore, records were treated like a media purchase, and it was common practice to tape them to keep the disks pristine.
With the CD, we crossed the Digital Divide, and suddenly we're not buying media, we're buying a license. Well, if that's the case, if my CD gets a scratch, I should be able to get a replacement for a nominal fee. After all, the cost of manufacture is around $0.10. Also, if *I* am licensed to use the content, I should have a decently described set of rights for use, and they shouldn't by necessity be limited to the delivery medium.
OTOH, if they're selling me the media, a thing, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, shy of making copies for others. But of course if I scratch it, it's done for. So then prudence would dictate that first I rip and reburn, and use my copy so the original remains pristine.
Seems to me that there's not a heck of a lot of effective difference between pure (reasonable, Borland-like (remember Turbo Pascal) license) content license and simple media purchase. Video is in essentially the same bucket as CDs, though they started getting fiesty with videotape, and didn't wait for digital.
But the content industries have crafted a new hybrid that's more restricted than either media or license, alone. It sounds like I've bought a license to the media, not a license to the content. So what have I really bought?
>The RIAA is 'investigating' this company? Regardless of Brilliant Digital Entertainment's ethics or motives, the RIAA is not a
>governmental body and is acting like it has the power of subpeona.
I dunno... Look at the way Congress and the Courts have been going, and there's not a heckuva lot of difference. Mostly just time-lag for the RIAA to ask the legal system to do its bidding, and them to start moving.
No significant, standing victories for our side, yet.
CDs cost less than cassettes, but are priced higher, "because of apparent value". Tell that to computer makers, who pack more and sell for less, every year. IMHO, the price of real products is a compromise between cost of manufacture and what the competition will allow. Look at the price of DRAM, for an example. And of course we all know that next to nothing of that $18 CD that cost $0.10 to make went to royalties for the artists.
Also IMHO, the only business where "apparent value" can be a true factor in pricing is where competition is absent, that is a CARTEL or MONOPOLY. In the case of CDs, we have the joy of both at the same time.
There's the old lesson from videotapes: $80 tapes get pirated bigtime, $20 tapes don't. Plus tapes aren't $20, any more.
I feel ripped off every time I buy a CD, and thus I buy very seldom, principally as gifts. At half the price, I'd buy more than twice as many. At a third the price, more than thrice. At some point, storage would become the limiting factor, not money and purchase price.
Movies are headed the same way, and what's unfortunate about all this is that we're about to take a hurting tech sector and send it down in flames with SSSCA-type legislation. We're about to say that Jobs and Woz, or Hewlett and Packard will NEVER happen again, at least not in computing, because SSSCA turns the entire computing field into sealed boxes, and locks the innovator out.
At the very least, opt-in would be workable. Strong enough crypto to require hardware chips, maybe even crypto all the way into a sealed monitor. Better than SSSCA, anyway.
Of course copyright reform would be better yet. Isn't it interesting that patent durations have remained steady? Says something about the media industries, and what we've allowed them to turn into.
enter the public domain. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER will the copyright expire, unless and until Disney goes bankrupt. Even then it may not, because maybe Microsoft will have bought their copyrights.
For Steamboat Willie, Snow White, and the gang, 'limited duration' means that someday the Sun will go nova, and we may not have interstellar travel by then. Beyond that, there is still an eternity between 'no available energy' and proton decay or the next brane collision, in case we do develop interstellar travel.
The real problem with this isn't Steamboat Willie, Snow White, and the gang - it's the rest of the stuff that gets dragged along in the long-copyright game, too.
I suggest that free copyright be rolled back to the original 14/28 year limits. Beyond that, you have to pay to renew. This way, corporate jewels can be retained. But the rest is released, for simple economic reasons - it's too expensive to keep renewing, and drains the bottom line.
There are details, there needs to be a concept of 'related works' to handle serialized stories or a collection of source code. But the test needs to be tight, because the Star Wars movies really should count as separate works, as should the James Bond movies.
Besides, fee-based copyright extension should appeal to Congress, since it gives the government money. At the same time, for us it starts most copyrights expiring, again. (in our lifetimes) It should also be sufficient to force some expiration mechanism into the DMCA.
Don't forget that we're in the midst of turning the trade sanction thumbscrews on the Ukyraine, because they produce CD blanks that don't have the proper "protective IDs" built-in. As one of the former members of the Soviet Union, they fit right into the category you're talking about, and we're already @#$%ing them over.
I just wish there were some way to get the NRA on our side. They are SOOOOO much more politically effective than we are.
That's why we have 65535 ports, to allow for better simplification of protocols. Unfortunately some peoples' idea of security is to clamp down on as many ports as possible. Even more unfortunately, they don't seem to realize just how easy it is to tunnel over HTTP or any other protocol, so all they've bought is the illusion of security at the expense of complexity.
Perhaps the others things that should be dead are the Great Divide at 1024, or at least move it up a bit, and perhaps RPC, itself. I need to understand the security implications of RPC - whether it truly can be secured, or if rpc.statd exploits will haunt us until the Day of Valenti. (When the Internet becomes a TV-like Radio-like broadcast-only medium.)
While I am in favor of the prinicpal of this, I fear the side-effects of the monetary flow to finance it. There is a class of people that is adept at finding flowing money, and inserting themselves into the stream. Today one example is health management costs - I've heard that 1/4 to 1/3 of our health costs are spent on 'management' as opposed to medicine.
With widespread mandated fee-based recycling for computing components, I fully expect to see the leeches emerge. But at least some good should come of it.
Do you want to shell out for EVERYBODY to get the next version of Word shortly after the first (early adopter) person does? Don't forget, .doc incompatibilities come between versions, too. Sure, you can set the new Word to save by default in the old .doc, but that's essentially the same as setting it for .rtf, isn't it?
Remember when pre-recorded videotapes first came out, and cost $75-$100? Those were the days when you paid a hefty membership fee to join a rental club. Those were also the days when piracy was rampant.
Somebody got a clue, and dropped the price to $20. The rampant (Small stuff still happens, I'll agree.) piracy all but stopped, sales shot through the roof, and rental outfits dropped the fees, sending their volumes up. Further evidence that this worked is that prices have continued to drop, so evidently they're still exploring the price/volume/profit space. (Defer rant on copyright, cake and eat it, and disc media.)
Anyway, the Web is different, because it started free. So now there's a reluctance to pay at all. Unfortunately, they're trying to break us through to the $80 videotape model. If I started paying $5 to each site I follow, my site fees would quickly exceed my broadband fee. We need low-price transactions, here. We need more of what PayPal is trying to do. We need innovation in the near-trivial fee space. Not pay per click, but below the normal profit threshold of a credit card. (I know, Cringely already said this...)
So how do you keep a neutral particle in an electromagnetic field? Ionize it, and it's just an antiproton, again. It would seem to me that the lightest *anti-atom* you could keep in an electromagnetic field would be singly-ionized antihelium. (After all, doubly-ionized antihelium is just an anti-alpha particle, or is that alpha anti-particle?)