There's no side here to be on, and you're engaging in a bit of histrionics to compare the American Revolution with the corporations selling music. The former was important, the latter is of no consequence.
To respond to one of your assertions, when musicians sign contracts with corporations, they give away some of their rights to that music. That's what contracts are all about: I give you something and you agree to give me something else in return. If musicians want to keep those rights, they shouldn't sign the contracts.
In the end, though, it's all about throw-away pop entertainment with a half-life of about 5 minutes that appeals to a narrow minority of the population. Not worth all the fuss.
If someone is selling copies of a product, e.g., books or CD's, and if you make a copy of that product rather than buying a copy from the seller, you are taking away a potential sale from the seller. Not the same as stealing the original master version, but, still, of dubious morality
Robin Hood is fiction. Not real. Not reality. Didn't happen. Sure, the stories paint him as a populist hero, but the myth itself is rooted in a common understanding that he was engaged in theft. Only the fact that his opposition was painted as thoroughly evil pawns of an illegal usurper distinguished his theft. He wouldn't be seen as a hero if readers didn't also see his activity as theft.
In almost all cases, morality is perceived to be based on the teachings of some sort of highter, external, authority, not by consensual alignment of the majority's preferences or interests. (Whether or not those teachings are literally true is irrelevant. Morality cannot be proven to be right or wrong.)
You give your consent to be taxed by continuing residence in that entity. The state doesn't need to ask you for permission to tax you; they already have it.
It isn't a wish for elitism, it's a recognition that, in this case, "peer" does not mean the next person who happens to walk in the room. Peer review of a scientific or academic paper means review that is limited to other scientists and academcs with expertise and experience in the same discipline. Whether they review hardcopy or an online version is simply a matter of delivery. (Personally, I'd rather read anything longer than a few paragraphs in hardcopy, not on a monitor screen.)
What I really take issue with is the underlying notion that all information, every created work and every published word, is somehow instantaneously free for the picking to the entire world. That's stretching the notion of open source and free software -- software development models -- into the realms of politics and philosophy. It's a ludicrous stretch.
How do you know that someone has already "paid for" the papers? Seems to me that charging a fee for a paper is a good way of acquiring revenue to keep the operation going.
And, yes, anyone with access to a web server can publish, but I certainly wouldn't want my papers "peer" reviewed by an amorphous mob of unknown readers. Consider the puerile banalties that pass for comments here on Slashdot.
Tieing OS/2 to the 386 actually mae a lot of sense, since the target hardware was the 386. This was a consumer OS, and -- with the exception of the Apple community -- consumers used hardware based on the 386 architecture.
It's been my experience that customers do know what they want. However, most often their frame of reference is their existing work process and supporting software. Typically, customers expect new software to alleviate specific annoyances in their current environment, but they have little insight into how new software might transform their working environment. Developers should bring that insight to the effort, but, again typically, are disinclined to study the customer, preferring to go off to their cubicles and code to a requirements document. Inevitably, someone in the customer camp begins to get a clue, prompting changes to the requirements.
Requirements should be written by techies who have actually worked alongside the customers long enough to understand what it is their are really trying to do. The author of the requirements should be required to explain them, in lay terms, to the customers, to ensure that both sides think they mean the same thing. And, foremost, both the customer and the tech staff must designate one individual each -- someone who has at least a passing acquiantance with the other's working environment -- to act as a translator, a bridge, between the communities.
The occasional individual candidate here in the States has made similar virtuous pledges to deny themselves corporate fundings. It's almost always a sure road to anonymity. If voters have never heard of you or your party, they won't vote for you.
Most individuals don't buy Office -- the people they work for buy it. So, the price is irrelevant to most individual users. They'd use quill pens if that's what the boss wanted, so Microsoft's tactics mean zip to them.
Of course, MS is trying to protect their market position with Office by manipulating file formats. Why would you expect them to do anything different? MacDonald's manipulates its products and recipes to protect its market position, too.
I suspect that only people who choose their software for ideological reasons will make an effort to do a standards end-run around Office.
The real solution here, as elsewhere, is for open source to give consumers something innovative that makes Office obsolete.
The MicroCenter chain of stores in the U.S. has the same annoying habit. Every time I'd shop there, they'd demand my name and address. I'd say "No, you already have it." The clerk would say "the manager says we hafta ask for it." I'd say "I won't buy anything if you insist on getting my name and address." Clerk says "Uh... OK."
This is more just plain rudeness than it is a privacy violation, since they won't know anything about you unless you tell them. So, don't tell them.
>> So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time
What were those alternatives? Any that would work on an 8086 with 512k of memory and no hard drive? And support the commercial programs that people actually wanted to run?
The fact that DOS isn't much of an operating system is irrelevant. It was integral to the development of a consumer market for computers. Without a tiny, cheap OS that ran on cheap hardware, most of us would still be saving up to buy a Unix workstation.
Consumers who use a computer to perform tasks, rather than because they're actually interested in the computer itself, won't have a reason to upgrade until their hardware keeps them from doing something they want to do. This applies to home AOL/browse/email users as well as to corporate and institutional users. (That's why there are still lots of Win98 machines in homes and NT boxes desktops.)
For many people, bandwidth and network limitations bound performace and capability more than chip speed. The slowest piece of the foodchain will determine overall subjective performace, and increasingly that bottleneck is the network.
If the DMCA happens to make it into the history books at all, your grandchildren will look back with dismay about the pontificating by a privileged minority who had the arrogance to translate their wish to copy throw-away commercial entertainment into a human rights issue.
The notion of using biometric data to control network access is a direct parallel to the use of passwords, etc.
Compared to hundreds of millions of Windows users, and billions who don't own or use computers of any kind, I can't see a few million Mac and Unix users being a factor in their thinking. If it was, we'd see Sony cranking out the same restrictive goodies for the Mac and Unix platforms.
Well, bands of altruistic traveling troubadors won't do me much good at ten o'clock at night if I want to listen to them and they nowhere to be seen. Frankly, I believe that most musicians are as greedy as anyone else is, and that they're not about to give away their music anymore than the big recording and distribution companies are. Just because they claim to be creative doesn't mean they're saints and monks. The only music that will be "free" is music you probably wouldn't want to buy in the first place.
Dream on. If every Unix and Mac user in the world never bought another Sony CD, I doubt Sony would notice. What would they lose? A few percentage points of the market? The Windows market is the only market they care about.
You're probably right about the "last breath" stuff, but probably wrong about getting "music back to the artists and listeners". It never was there and it never will be there. The recording industry has never had anything to do with creativity -- it's a distribution and marketing business, not a music business. It will move on to whatever's next just like,it did from 78's and 45's to tape and CD's.
No, I didn't make the post from DOS, but I might have. Graphical browsers for DOS exist, and I've used them.
We owe the popularity of the web to infrastructure and a version of Netscape that ran on Windows 3.1. I'm not sure I see a great deal of innovation there.
Back in 1990, the requirements for IBM VoiceType were: DOS, 8MB RAM, 10MB of drive space with one of those new-fangled scorching 386-16MHz processors...
Except for web browsing, back in 1990 I'd have to say I was doing everything I'm doing now, with DOS running on a 386. Makes me wonder what real progress we've made. At the time, I ran DesqView, Lotus Magellan, Lotus Agenda. Brief, Word 5.5 for DOS, Borland's Turbo C and Turbo Pascal, TopsSpeed's Modula-2 compiler, the MKS Toolkit (a KSH shell in each DesqView window), and assorted odds and sods. To this day, I've seen nothing on any platform to equal Brief and Magellan, and the rest of the bunch were no slouches either.
Since then, I've spent thousands of dollars on new hardware and software with only a mrginal increase in capability. Yeah, sure, the fonts on my monitor look better, but what price prettiness?
Not really. A contract is a legally binding agreement. Anyone who violates a contract is subject to legal action brought by the other parties to the contract. In this case, the cable company claims their losses are large enough to merit felony charges.
The amount of money allegedly involved here makes this a felony. Your cable company could try the same tactic on you for running more TV's than your contract allows. Presumably, one of the first thing your lawyers would do is challenge the felony charge. Presumably, these poor saps have lawyers who will do the same thing, i.e., try to compel the cable firm to prove that their losses were actually large enough to up the ante to a felony.
This does seem a bit over the top, but I don't have much sympathy for people who knowingly break contracts.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no side here to be on, and you're engaging in a bit of histrionics to compare the American Revolution with the corporations selling music. The former was important, the latter is of no consequence.
To respond to one of your assertions, when musicians sign contracts with corporations, they give away some of their rights to that music. That's what contracts are all about: I give you something and you agree to give me something else in return. If musicians want to keep those rights, they shouldn't sign the contracts.
In the end, though, it's all about throw-away pop entertainment with a half-life of about 5 minutes that appeals to a narrow minority of the population. Not worth all the fuss.
If someone is selling copies of a product, e.g., books or CD's, and if you make a copy of that product rather than buying a copy from the seller, you are taking away a potential sale from the seller. Not the same as stealing the original master version, but, still, of dubious morality
Robin Hood is fiction. Not real. Not reality. Didn't happen. Sure, the stories paint him as a populist hero, but the myth itself is rooted in a common understanding that he was engaged in theft. Only the fact that his opposition was painted as thoroughly evil pawns of an illegal usurper distinguished his theft. He wouldn't be seen as a hero if readers didn't also see his activity as theft.
In almost all cases, morality is perceived to be based on the teachings of some sort of highter, external, authority, not by consensual alignment of the majority's preferences or interests. (Whether or not those teachings are literally true is irrelevant. Morality cannot be proven to be right or wrong.)
You give your consent to be taxed by continuing residence in that entity. The state doesn't need to ask you for permission to tax you; they already have it.
Sigh...
Robin Hood wasn't real; it's a legend.
Morals are not "set by the population".
Taxes have nothing to do with theft.
Taking something that doesn't belong to you is theft, regardless of the wealth of your target.
Your post is just a rationalization for your own moral weakness.
It isn't a wish for elitism, it's a recognition that, in this case, "peer" does not mean the next person who happens to walk in the room. Peer review of a scientific or academic paper means review that is limited to other scientists and academcs with expertise and experience in the same discipline. Whether they review hardcopy or an online version is simply a matter of delivery. (Personally, I'd rather read anything longer than a few paragraphs in hardcopy, not on a monitor screen.)
What I really take issue with is the underlying notion that all information, every created work and every published word, is somehow instantaneously free for the picking to the entire world. That's stretching the notion of open source and free software -- software development models -- into the realms of politics and philosophy. It's a ludicrous stretch.
How do you know that someone has already "paid for" the papers? Seems to me that charging a fee for a paper is a good way of acquiring revenue to keep the operation going.
And, yes, anyone with access to a web server can publish, but I certainly wouldn't want my papers "peer" reviewed by an amorphous mob of unknown readers. Consider the puerile banalties that pass for comments here on Slashdot.
Tieing OS/2 to the 386 actually mae a lot of sense, since the target hardware was the 386. This was a consumer OS, and -- with the exception of the Apple community -- consumers used hardware based on the 386 architecture.
It's been my experience that customers do know what they want. However, most often their frame of reference is their existing work process and supporting software. Typically, customers expect new software to alleviate specific annoyances in their current environment, but they have little insight into how new software might transform their working environment. Developers should bring that insight to the effort, but, again typically, are disinclined to study the customer, preferring to go off to their cubicles and code to a requirements document. Inevitably, someone in the customer camp begins to get a clue, prompting changes to the requirements.
Requirements should be written by techies who have actually worked alongside the customers long enough to understand what it is their are really trying to do. The author of the requirements should be required to explain them, in lay terms, to the customers, to ensure that both sides think they mean the same thing. And, foremost, both the customer and the tech staff must designate one individual each -- someone who has at least a passing acquiantance with the other's working environment -- to act as a translator, a bridge, between the communities.
...I might care.
The occasional individual candidate here in the States has made similar virtuous pledges to deny themselves corporate fundings. It's almost always a sure road to anonymity. If voters have never heard of you or your party, they won't vote for you.
Most individuals don't buy Office -- the people they work for buy it. So, the price is irrelevant to most individual users. They'd use quill pens if that's what the boss wanted, so Microsoft's tactics mean zip to them.
Of course, MS is trying to protect their market position with Office by manipulating file formats. Why would you expect them to do anything different? MacDonald's manipulates its products and recipes to protect its market position, too.
I suspect that only people who choose their software for ideological reasons will make an effort to do a standards end-run around Office.
The real solution here, as elsewhere, is for open source to give consumers something innovative that makes Office obsolete.
The MicroCenter chain of stores in the U.S. has the same annoying habit. Every time I'd shop there, they'd demand my name and address. I'd say "No, you already have it." The clerk would say "the manager says we hafta ask for it." I'd say "I won't buy anything if you insist on getting my name and address." Clerk says "Uh... OK."
This is more just plain rudeness than it is a privacy violation, since they won't know anything about you unless you tell them. So, don't tell them.
>> ...MS-DOS was intended only to be a stopgap until Xenix was completed.
Huh??
>> So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time
What were those alternatives? Any that would work on an 8086 with 512k of memory and no hard drive? And support the commercial programs that people actually wanted to run?
The fact that DOS isn't much of an operating system is irrelevant. It was integral to the development of a consumer market for computers. Without a tiny, cheap OS that ran on cheap hardware, most of us would still be saving up to buy a Unix workstation.
Consumers who use a computer to perform tasks, rather than because they're actually interested in the computer itself, won't have a reason to upgrade until their hardware keeps them from doing something they want to do. This applies to home AOL/browse/email users as well as to corporate and institutional users. (That's why there are still lots of Win98 machines in homes and NT boxes desktops.)
For many people, bandwidth and network limitations bound performace and capability more than chip speed. The slowest piece of the foodchain will determine overall subjective performace, and increasingly that bottleneck is the network.
If the DMCA happens to make it into the history books at all, your grandchildren will look back with dismay about the pontificating by a privileged minority who had the arrogance to translate their wish to copy throw-away commercial entertainment into a human rights issue.
The notion of using biometric data to control network access is a direct parallel to the use of passwords, etc.
Compared to hundreds of millions of Windows users, and billions who don't own or use computers of any kind, I can't see a few million Mac and Unix users being a factor in their thinking. If it was, we'd see Sony cranking out the same restrictive goodies for the Mac and Unix platforms.
Well, bands of altruistic traveling troubadors won't do me much good at ten o'clock at night if I want to listen to them and they nowhere to be seen.
Frankly, I believe that most musicians are as greedy as anyone else is, and that they're not about to give away their music anymore than the big recording and distribution companies are. Just because they claim to be creative doesn't mean they're saints and monks. The only music that will be "free" is music you probably wouldn't want to buy in the first place.
Dream on. If every Unix and Mac user in the world never bought another Sony CD, I doubt Sony would notice. What would they lose? A few percentage points of the market? The Windows market is the only market they care about.
You're probably right about the "last breath" stuff, but probably wrong about getting "music back to the artists and listeners". It never was there and it never will be there. The recording industry has never had anything to do with creativity -- it's a distribution and marketing business, not a music business. It will move on to whatever's next just like,it did from 78's and 45's to tape and CD's.
No, I didn't make the post from DOS, but I might have. Graphical browsers for DOS exist, and I've used them.
We owe the popularity of the web to infrastructure and a version of Netscape that ran on Windows 3.1. I'm not sure I see a great deal of innovation there.
Back in 1990, the requirements for IBM VoiceType were: DOS, 8MB RAM, 10MB of drive space with one of those new-fangled scorching 386-16MHz processors...
Except for web browsing, back in 1990 I'd have to say I was doing everything I'm doing now, with DOS running on a 386. Makes me wonder what real progress we've made. At the time, I ran DesqView, Lotus Magellan, Lotus Agenda. Brief, Word 5.5 for DOS, Borland's Turbo C and Turbo Pascal, TopsSpeed's Modula-2 compiler, the MKS Toolkit (a KSH shell in each DesqView window), and assorted odds and sods. To this day, I've seen nothing on any platform to equal Brief and Magellan, and the rest of the bunch were no slouches either.
Since then, I've spent thousands of dollars on new hardware and software with only a mrginal increase in capability. Yeah, sure, the fonts on my monitor look better, but what price prettiness?
Not really. A contract is a legally binding agreement. Anyone who violates a contract is subject to legal action brought by the other parties to the contract. In this case, the cable company claims their losses are large enough to merit felony charges.
The amount of money allegedly involved here makes this a felony. Your cable company could try the same tactic on you for running more TV's than your contract allows. Presumably, one of the first thing your lawyers would do is challenge the felony charge. Presumably, these poor saps have lawyers who will do the same thing, i.e., try to compel the cable firm to prove that their losses were actually large enough to up the ante to a felony.
This does seem a bit over the top, but I don't have much sympathy for people who knowingly break contracts.