THe show was cancelled because not enough people watched it.
Not enough people watched it because, like a few other shows I might name, it was so obsessive about its mythology that anyone who'd missed a few minutes somewhere along the line was left dazed, confused and clueless about what was really going on.
You cannot build a successful TV show by assuming everyone has seen every episode and two or three movies, to boot. If you depend on mythology, you've got to explain the mythology in every show.
Accept that most people on the planet do not know and do not care about about Sarah and John Connor. What they saw was a wierd little show populated with angry people, the occasional robot who liked to kill for inexplicable reasons, a mild-mannered naive guy with a coax cable stuck in his head and a red-headed women from Scotland with one facial expression.
>>... tell me again why you get to release something for general consumption and claim perpetual rights over it?
I made no such claim.
>>...ou use the word "steal." That requires loss of somethinh physical.
No, it does not. Few of anyone's assets are physical, yet they are all subject to theft. And that's not considering loss of future benefits, e.g., royalties.
>> You and only you know what "rights" you think are applied, and you've stated that you don't agree with the law's version.
I've said no such thing. I've said the law recognizes and protects rights that exist whether or not the law exists.
>> You aren't arguing about it going to Public Domain after some limited time. You are just complaining about the time in which it takes people to act like it's in the public domain.
I've made no such complaint.
I see no further purpose in continuing this sophomoric discussion because you are avoiding my questions and mis-stating and falsifying my comments. At best, you are fatally confusing rights and copyrights. But, I suspect you care little about either so long as you can steal with a free conscience.
Where do you think your right to free speech or free assembly comes from? Do you think the government gave it to you? There's a reason the Declaration talks about "inalienable" rights.
Where did I bash the law? I merely said copyright law protects and enforces -- but does not create -- the rights of an author.
I've never claimed "absolute power over things (I've) placed in the hands of others..." I've asserted they have the rights I transfer to them via a publishing contract and retail sales. That logic is supported by copyright law, since you seem to want to fixate on that.
If I publish a copywritten work and you make unauthorized copies of it before the copyright expires, then that is theft. Where can you acquire permission to make an authorized copy? From me or my publisher, depending on the terms of our contract. You cannot acquire that authorization from anyone else because they are not the source of those rights.
Yet, you continue to assume that you have some mystical right to take things that do not belong to you. Some people continue to believe in the tooth fairy.
I've had this discussion many times. No one, including you, has ever pointed to a source for the rights they claim to someone else's property, other than asserting, as you have, that the devolvement of a copywritten work to the public domain in the future means you have a right to steal it in the present.
You keep talking about copyright when I've made it abundantly clear that I see copyright as having nothing to do with my rights.
As far as Public Domain is concerned, if you wish to wait for several decades or longer before you steal my work, then more power to you. I am concerned about preventing people stealing my work today and tomorrow.
Copyright protects only what already exists. Law cannot protect an author's rights if those rights do not exist outside the law.
If the government reversed copyright law and said no protections can apply to a published work and actively encouraged unauthorized copying, that would have no impact on the author's rights. His rights would be violated by the law.
On shoes: An absurd comparison. Your shoes obviously do not exist because you do. In addition, the "wide range of discussion" on rights does not mean that "each person has different rights." It only mean that people disagree on the issue. What people think and what people say never has any impact on reality. A rose is a rose...
I haven't changed my mind and you have refused to answer my question about where you imagine your rights to something I make come from. What mystical thing happens at the moment I create something that gives you and everyone else on the planet a right to grab it, copy it and market it?
>> You've stated that the government is irrelevant when it comes to rights.
I did not say that. I said the law can only recognize and enforce rights, not create them.
>> If you claim rights on something you make available to everyone...
Even people who release software code under the GPL or a similar license do not make their code and all rights to that code available to all people. The rights they do transfer are proscribed by certain conditions. Failure to observe those conditions results in forfeiture of those rights.
Typically, when the creator of a work -- let's say a book -- arranges for that book to be published and marketed, he transfers certain limited rights to the publisher. He retains all other rights he does not wish to transfer. In effect, the publisher buys the right to print and market copies of the original book, and in exchange the author receives a portion of the profits. That's the nature of a contract.
When you or I buy a book at retail, we are explicitly not buying the right to make and market additional copies of the book, or to sell it to a studio for a movie, or to translate it and market it elsewhere, of to turn it into a PDF and post it on the web. The rights to do all those things, and everything else to do with the book, are the author's until he decides they are not.
My rights exist because I exist. They are independent of other people and of law and of government. While they cannot be taken away, my exercise of my rights can certainly be thwarted.
Hence, the fallacy with the claim that our rights come to us from an outside source -- government, "everyone else" -- becomes apparent when we realize that would mean that rights -- which really are inalienable -- could be taken away by the same agencies that granted them.
Our rights are, in fact, inalienable (check the definition) and accrue to us imply because we are here.
Slashdot has been running "Is Linux Ready For The Desktop?" stories pretty much forever. We could go back several years and find threads saying pretty muh the same things.
The question is wrong. It isn't so much "Is Linux Ready for the Big Dance?" as it is "Is Anyone Gonna Ask Linux to the Big Dance?" For instance, while it may or may not be the fault of Linux that most hardware vendors do not provide linux drivers, the fact is that they don't. If someone can't use their hardware with Linux, pointing the finger of blame isn't going to make that hardware work.
Linux lacks many (most?) of the commercial products used by other platforms. Why? Because the perception exists that Linux users won't buy commerical products. Whether that perception is accurate is irrelevant.
My own take: The more tightly an OS is associated with a specific hardware platform, the eaier it is for that vendor to control the quality and reliability of the users' experience. Due to the nature of its development culture, Linux stands farther away from hardware platforms than do Windows and, obviously, OS X. The Unix-y ability to Linux to run on many hardware flavors is a double-edged sword.
Law does not make or take away rights. Law recognizes and enforces rights. Therefore, copyright law can merely recognize and enforce the rights an author has in a work. Those rights have nothing at all to do with contracts with consumers, or with anyone else. To make that argument is also to make the argument that your right to speak or breath or eat depends on a contract and on the law. They do not.
The rights I have in a created work exist with or without copyright law, just as all my other rights exist with or without the Constitution or the law.
Again: If I make something, where do your rights regarding it come from if not from me?
Did I say consumers have no rights? No, I didn't. But the act of producing a creative work has nothing to do with consumers. A consumer is a participant in a retail transaction. Part of what a consumer buys is the right to do something with whatever he ha purchased. In terms of a created work, its author -- the sole source of rights regarding the work -- determines which rights are part of the transaction. If you think there is another way to acquire those rights, please explain their origin and how the transfer occurs.
Disney: People who accept employment with Disney know that they are relinquishing their rights re: their created works. They are selling those rights in return for a salary, just as an author sells certain rights to a publisher in return for publishing, marketing and royalties. The fact that Disney, et al, buys those rights from its employees shows Disney believes all rights to a created work originate with the work's creator.
Copyright: Again, I am not discussing copyright. Conjectures about who might lose what in some supposed scenario also have nothing to do with this.
My argument has nothing to do with copyright, other than that the law exists to recognize the state of affairs I've described.
The steak doesn't interest me because it is not germane to the question of how people other than a work's creator obtain rights to that work.
No one has ever explained to my satisfaction how anyone can acquire those rights unless and until the work's creator transfers them. I don't believe it can be done.
THe steak analogy is silly, inappropriate and tiresome. What does it have to do with the question of how people other than the creator of a work acquire any of the rights inherent in the work's creation?
As for theft, dictionary defintions of it are irrelevant. The law clearly recognizes the possibility that potential future income can be lost as a result of people engaging in certain behavior.
The law also recognizes someone's behavior violates another person's rights. That happens when someone copies, distributes or otherwise does something with created work when the work's creator has not transferred those rights to them.
The rights inherent in and surrounding a created work do not exist prior to its creation. Following that, they reside entirely and exclusively in the person of the work's creator. It is impossible for any of those rights to be acquired by anyone else unless the work's creator transfers those rights to them, either directly or indirectly. Other than the legally defined areas of fair use, society and members of that society have no rights to the work until given those rights by it's creator.
It's common in these discussions for someone to assert that, well, that's the law, but it doesn't mean it is the truth or that it's just. Those points are not relevant. Definitions of truth and justice vary from person to person, but the law remains the law. If we all agreed on what is true and just, we would have no need of the law.
I'm not that interested in why "this feeling exists in a minority of infringers." I think people found a way to get stuff they want without paying for it and constructed a scaffolding of ideology to justify their behavior. Much of it seems to borrow from free software concepts, but forgets that free software is all about allowing the creators of software to determine how their rights to that software are transfered to others. Free software does not exist to merely allow millions of people to get free stuff.
From my point of view, the only thing that counts is how rights surrounding a created work are acquired by someone other than its creator. I contend that the only possible way for that to happen is for the work's creator to transfer some or all of those rights, either permanently or temporarily. No one has ever presented a satisfactory explanation of how those rights could be otherwise acquired. Sometimes those rights might be transferred via a contract with a commercial publisher. other times via release under a different kind of license, a la Creative Commons. But, in essence, the same thing happens in all instances.
Conjecture about who might gain and who might lose, or the moral efficacy of stealing something to decide if you like it enough to buy it are peripheral. (The latter, in particular, tries to remove the buyer's risk in a transaction. Remember caveat emptor? Besides, this whole notion of justifying theft rests on the notion that people who write, play, raw, etc., have an overriding responsibility to please those who buy copies of their work, and to accept payment as a reward rather than as the buyer's part of a transaction. I think that notion is entirely bogus.)
Hmmm... I've returned books and other copyrighted material. What you can't get away with is returning a book that's obviously been read or a CD that's been opened and played.
Reading a book is directly analogous to eating a restaurant meal. If someone brings out a burnt steak, would you try to refuse payment after you ate it?
No. The waiter brings out a burnt steak and you ask him to take it back and try again. Ditto if you pick up a book in a bookstore and see that it has some physical fault. You'd put it back and find another copy.
You don't get to eat a meal in a restaurant and then refuse payment because you don't like the way it tasted. You don't get refunds at a baseball game because your team lost. You don't get refunds on creative works after you've read or otherwise consumed them simply because you didn't like them.
The point about losing potential book sales is irrelevant. Who cares? Someone copied and marketed a book without permission. Mind games about who may or may not have lost potential profit have nothing to do with this. Copying and marketing creative works unless the author has transferred that right to you is theft, plain and simple.
Why? How is it just for you to claim rights to something I made? How exactly does that work? Can I show up at your doorstep tonight and claim a right to eat the dinner you prepare?
>>...if the media companies offered refunds for junk titles...
"Junk" is a matter of opinion. You don't get your money back just because you don't like something.
Claiming that you steal something and only pay for it if you like it is equivalent to eating dinner in a restaurant and only paying if you like the food.
This guy owns his book and no one else has any right to copy, publish or distribute it unless he sells or gives them that right. You have to dance in a land of mystical mumbo-jumbo to imagine you somehow have a right to something made by someone else when he hasn't said so. No one other than its author has any rights to a created work until and unless he transfers those rights. All the rest is fairy dust and comforting rationalization.
Well, you aren't an Alienware customer. You're a customer of the guy who sold you the thing on eBay.
But, unless Alienware can prove you did, in fact, steal it, they ought to be happy to sell you anything you want to buy.
I've never bought anything from Alienware, so maybe they really are stupid enough to sell only to people who have already bought from them. (A bit of a paradox, though.)
It's reasonable for Alienware to refuse free support for used hardware they didn't sell. But it's absurd for them to refuse to sell anything to anyone, period. They could easily sell you that part with the stipulation that they won't support the old hardware unless you buy support.
This attack did not involve a virus. Users unknowingly downloaded a malevolent program, i.e., a program to turn their machine into a zombie in a DOS campaign. That's a con, not a virus.
If you use OS X, you are, in fact, much less likely to be attacked by a virus, by malware, or whatever. Some credit for that goes to OS X, but most of the credit goes to the fact that there are many fewer Macs on the planet.
Folks who insist a Mac is magically invulnerable are demonstrating that don't know what they are talking about.
I'm in North Carolina, where a city like Greensboro has little real ability to thwart companies like T-W.
If the tiered scheme had been implemented, I suspect many T-W customers would have canceled or reduced to a minimum their T-W cable TV service and applied the money to their increased T-W internet bill. TV isn't nearly as important these days as internet access.
The core problem remains the grant of effective monopolies to cable vendors within metropolitan areas. If T-W wasn't a monopoly, it wouldn't even consider jacking prices. The practice should be outlawed.
Cable TV and internet is not an open market in the U.S.
Most Americans have only a single choice. State and municipal governments grant T-W and others sole right to provide those services. Lessons from Econ 101 do not apply.
Vendors selling other methods of internet access are allowed to operate, but typically can provide no real competition to the local cable monopoly.
If states and cities are going to grant these monopolies to companies like T-W, then they need to strongly regulate the vendors and support consumer interests. This includes a la carte pricing. In contrast, cities often find themselves relatively powerless to change a vendor's behavior. For example, the government of Greensboro is finding it has little ability to intervene in T-W's tiered pricing scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
Fretting about Safari 4 privacy issues seems a bit pointless because if someone can see all that data they can see anything on your Mac.
If your Mac -- or any other PC -- is available to others, well... that's what a password is for.
THe show was cancelled because not enough people watched it.
Not enough people watched it because, like a few other shows I might name, it was so obsessive about its mythology that anyone who'd missed a few minutes somewhere along the line was left dazed, confused and clueless about what was really going on.
You cannot build a successful TV show by assuming everyone has seen every episode and two or three movies, to boot. If you depend on mythology, you've got to explain the mythology in every show.
Accept that most people on the planet do not know and do not care about about Sarah and John Connor. What they saw was a wierd little show populated with angry people, the occasional robot who liked to kill for inexplicable reasons, a mild-mannered naive guy with a coax cable stuck in his head and a red-headed women from Scotland with one facial expression.
>> ... tell me again why you get to release something for general consumption and claim perpetual rights over it?
I made no such claim.
>> ...ou use the word "steal." That requires loss of somethinh physical.
No, it does not. Few of anyone's assets are physical, yet they are all subject to theft. And that's not considering loss of future benefits, e.g., royalties.
>> You and only you know what "rights" you think are applied, and you've stated that you don't agree with the law's version.
I've said no such thing. I've said the law recognizes and protects rights that exist whether or not the law exists.
>> You aren't arguing about it going to Public Domain after some limited time. You are just complaining about the time in which it takes people to act like it's in the public domain.
I've made no such complaint.
I see no further purpose in continuing this sophomoric discussion because you are avoiding my questions and mis-stating and falsifying my comments. At best, you are fatally confusing rights and copyrights. But, I suspect you care little about either so long as you can steal with a free conscience.
All in all, pretty typical for Slashdot.
Where do you think your right to free speech or free assembly comes from? Do you think the government gave it to you? There's a reason the Declaration talks about "inalienable" rights.
Where did I bash the law? I merely said copyright law protects and enforces -- but does not create -- the rights of an author.
I've never claimed "absolute power over things (I've) placed in the hands of others..." I've asserted they have the rights I transfer to them via a publishing contract and retail sales. That logic is supported by copyright law, since you seem to want to fixate on that.
If I publish a copywritten work and you make unauthorized copies of it before the copyright expires, then that is theft. Where can you acquire permission to make an authorized copy? From me or my publisher, depending on the terms of our contract. You cannot acquire that authorization from anyone else because they are not the source of those rights.
Yet, you continue to assume that you have some mystical right to take things that do not belong to you. Some people continue to believe in the tooth fairy.
I've had this discussion many times. No one, including you, has ever pointed to a source for the rights they claim to someone else's property, other than asserting, as you have, that the devolvement of a copywritten work to the public domain in the future means you have a right to steal it in the present.
>> When you create it, it is *not* copyrighted
You keep talking about copyright when I've made it abundantly clear that I see copyright as having nothing to do with my rights.
As far as Public Domain is concerned, if you wish to wait for several decades or longer before you steal my work, then more power to you. I am concerned about preventing people stealing my work today and tomorrow.
Copyright protects only what already exists. Law cannot protect an author's rights if those rights do not exist outside the law.
If the government reversed copyright law and said no protections can apply to a published work and actively encouraged unauthorized copying, that would have no impact on the author's rights. His rights would be violated by the law.
On shoes: An absurd comparison. Your shoes obviously do not exist because you do. In addition, the "wide range of discussion" on rights does not mean that "each person has different rights." It only mean that people disagree on the issue. What people think and what people say never has any impact on reality. A rose is a rose...
I haven't changed my mind and you have refused to answer my question about where you imagine your rights to something I make come from. What mystical thing happens at the moment I create something that gives you and everyone else on the planet a right to grab it, copy it and market it?
>> You've stated that the government is irrelevant when it comes to rights.
I did not say that. I said the law can only recognize and enforce rights, not create them.
>> If you claim rights on something you make available to everyone...
Even people who release software code under the GPL or a similar license do not make their code and all rights to that code available to all people. The rights they do transfer are proscribed by certain conditions. Failure to observe those conditions results in forfeiture of those rights.
Typically, when the creator of a work -- let's say a book -- arranges for that book to be published and marketed, he transfers certain limited rights to the publisher. He retains all other rights he does not wish to transfer. In effect, the publisher buys the right to print and market copies of the original book, and in exchange the author receives a portion of the profits. That's the nature of a contract.
When you or I buy a book at retail, we are explicitly not buying the right to make and market additional copies of the book, or to sell it to a studio for a movie, or to translate it and market it elsewhere, of to turn it into a PDF and post it on the web. The rights to do all those things, and everything else to do with the book, are the author's until he decides they are not.
My rights exist because I exist. They are independent of other people and of law and of government. While they cannot be taken away, my exercise of my rights can certainly be thwarted.
Hence, the fallacy with the claim that our rights come to us from an outside source -- government, "everyone else" -- becomes apparent when we realize that would mean that rights -- which really are inalienable -- could be taken away by the same agencies that granted them.
Our rights are, in fact, inalienable (check the definition) and accrue to us imply because we are here.
Slashdot has been running "Is Linux Ready For The Desktop?" stories pretty much forever. We could go back several years and find threads saying pretty muh the same things.
The question is wrong. It isn't so much "Is Linux Ready for the Big Dance?" as it is "Is Anyone Gonna Ask Linux to the Big Dance?" For instance, while it may or may not be the fault of Linux that most hardware vendors do not provide linux drivers, the fact is that they don't. If someone can't use their hardware with Linux, pointing the finger of blame isn't going to make that hardware work.
Linux lacks many (most?) of the commercial products used by other platforms. Why? Because the perception exists that Linux users won't buy commerical products. Whether that perception is accurate is irrelevant.
My own take: The more tightly an OS is associated with a specific hardware platform, the eaier it is for that vendor to control the quality and reliability of the users' experience. Due to the nature of its development culture, Linux stands farther away from hardware platforms than do Windows and, obviously, OS X. The Unix-y ability to Linux to run on many hardware flavors is a double-edged sword.
I see you refuse to answer my question, but, instead, resort to ad hominem attacks. Typical.
The author loses potential future gain, including income. In any case, it isn't an issue of gain or loss. It's an issue of rights violation.
The trouble with this "What's Yours is Mine" philosophy is that it always means Other People's Stuff.
How many Slashdotter's would be OK with me walkng into their home and walking out with their tech toys?
People are people. They'll steal whenever they can rationalize it away.
Law does not make or take away rights. Law recognizes and enforces rights. Therefore, copyright law can merely recognize and enforce the rights an author has in a work. Those rights have nothing at all to do with contracts with consumers, or with anyone else. To make that argument is also to make the argument that your right to speak or breath or eat depends on a contract and on the law. They do not.
The rights I have in a created work exist with or without copyright law, just as all my other rights exist with or without the Constitution or the law.
Again: If I make something, where do your rights regarding it come from if not from me?
Did I say consumers have no rights? No, I didn't. But the act of producing a creative work has nothing to do with consumers. A consumer is a participant in a retail transaction. Part of what a consumer buys is the right to do something with whatever he ha purchased. In terms of a created work, its author -- the sole source of rights regarding the work -- determines which rights are part of the transaction. If you think there is another way to acquire those rights, please explain their origin and how the transfer occurs.
Disney: People who accept employment with Disney know that they are relinquishing their rights re: their created works. They are selling those rights in return for a salary, just as an author sells certain rights to a publisher in return for publishing, marketing and royalties. The fact that Disney, et al, buys those rights from its employees shows Disney believes all rights to a created work originate with the work's creator.
Copyright: Again, I am not discussing copyright. Conjectures about who might lose what in some supposed scenario also have nothing to do with this.
My argument has nothing to do with copyright, other than that the law exists to recognize the state of affairs I've described.
The steak doesn't interest me because it is not germane to the question of how people other than a work's creator obtain rights to that work.
No one has ever explained to my satisfaction how anyone can acquire those rights unless and until the work's creator transfers them. I don't believe it can be done.
THe steak analogy is silly, inappropriate and tiresome. What does it have to do with the question of how people other than the creator of a work acquire any of the rights inherent in the work's creation?
As for theft, dictionary defintions of it are irrelevant. The law clearly recognizes the possibility that potential future income can be lost as a result of people engaging in certain behavior.
The law also recognizes someone's behavior violates another person's rights. That happens when someone copies, distributes or otherwise does something with created work when the work's creator has not transferred those rights to them.
The rights inherent in and surrounding a created work do not exist prior to its creation. Following that, they reside entirely and exclusively in the person of the work's creator. It is impossible for any of those rights to be acquired by anyone else unless the work's creator transfers those rights to them, either directly or indirectly. Other than the legally defined areas of fair use, society and members of that society have no rights to the work until given those rights by it's creator.
It's common in these discussions for someone to assert that, well, that's the law, but it doesn't mean it is the truth or that it's just. Those points are not relevant. Definitions of truth and justice vary from person to person, but the law remains the law. If we all agreed on what is true and just, we would have no need of the law.
I'm not that interested in why "this feeling exists in a minority of infringers." I think people found a way to get stuff they want without paying for it and constructed a scaffolding of ideology to justify their behavior. Much of it seems to borrow from free software concepts, but forgets that free software is all about allowing the creators of software to determine how their rights to that software are transfered to others. Free software does not exist to merely allow millions of people to get free stuff.
From my point of view, the only thing that counts is how rights surrounding a created work are acquired by someone other than its creator. I contend that the only possible way for that to happen is for the work's creator to transfer some or all of those rights, either permanently or temporarily. No one has ever presented a satisfactory explanation of how those rights could be otherwise acquired. Sometimes those rights might be transferred via a contract with a commercial publisher. other times via release under a different kind of license, a la Creative Commons. But, in essence, the same thing happens in all instances.
Conjecture about who might gain and who might lose, or the moral efficacy of stealing something to decide if you like it enough to buy it are peripheral. (The latter, in particular, tries to remove the buyer's risk in a transaction. Remember caveat emptor? Besides, this whole notion of justifying theft rests on the notion that people who write, play, raw, etc., have an overriding responsibility to please those who buy copies of their work, and to accept payment as a reward rather than as the buyer's part of a transaction. I think that notion is entirely bogus.)
Hmmm... I've returned books and other copyrighted material. What you can't get away with is returning a book that's obviously been read or a CD that's been opened and played.
Reading a book is directly analogous to eating a restaurant meal. If someone brings out a burnt steak, would you try to refuse payment after you ate it?
No. The waiter brings out a burnt steak and you ask him to take it back and try again. Ditto if you pick up a book in a bookstore and see that it has some physical fault. You'd put it back and find another copy.
You don't get to eat a meal in a restaurant and then refuse payment because you don't like the way it tasted. You don't get refunds at a baseball game because your team lost. You don't get refunds on creative works after you've read or otherwise consumed them simply because you didn't like them.
The point about losing potential book sales is irrelevant. Who cares? Someone copied and marketed a book without permission. Mind games about who may or may not have lost potential profit have nothing to do with this. Copying and marketing creative works unless the author has transferred that right to you is theft, plain and simple.
Bad steak analogy. You didn't consume the steak.
"...neither makes it just nor true."
Why? How is it just for you to claim rights to something I made? How exactly does that work? Can I show up at your doorstep tonight and claim a right to eat the dinner you prepare?
>> ...if the media companies offered refunds for junk titles...
"Junk" is a matter of opinion. You don't get your money back just because you don't like something.
Claiming that you steal something and only pay for it if you like it is equivalent to eating dinner in a restaurant and only paying if you like the food.
This guy owns his book and no one else has any right to copy, publish or distribute it unless he sells or gives them that right. You have to dance in a land of mystical mumbo-jumbo to imagine you somehow have a right to something made by someone else when he hasn't said so. No one other than its author has any rights to a created work until and unless he transfers those rights. All the rest is fairy dust and comforting rationalization.
Well, you aren't an Alienware customer. You're a customer of the guy who sold you the thing on eBay.
But, unless Alienware can prove you did, in fact, steal it, they ought to be happy to sell you anything you want to buy.
I've never bought anything from Alienware, so maybe they really are stupid enough to sell only to people who have already bought from them. (A bit of a paradox, though.)
It's reasonable for Alienware to refuse free support for used hardware they didn't sell. But it's absurd for them to refuse to sell anything to anyone, period. They could easily sell you that part with the stipulation that they won't support the old hardware unless you buy support.
This isn't an attack on the internet anymore than a libel suit is an attack on the printed page.
The family has been abused by the actions of the CHP members and by those who deliberately sent deceptive and abusive email to the family.
The family has every right, and every obligation, to seek legal action -- civil and criminal -- against their abusers.
Using the internet as a communications tool does not absolve anyone of resonsibility for their behavior.
Your lack of knowledge is showing.
This attack did not involve a virus. Users unknowingly downloaded a malevolent program, i.e., a program to turn their machine into a zombie in a DOS campaign. That's a con, not a virus.
If you use OS X, you are, in fact, much less likely to be attacked by a virus, by malware, or whatever. Some credit for that goes to OS X, but most of the credit goes to the fact that there are many fewer Macs on the planet.
Folks who insist a Mac is magically invulnerable are demonstrating that don't know what they are talking about.
We all know this. Why is it being rehashed here?
I'm in North Carolina, where a city like Greensboro has little real ability to thwart companies like T-W.
If the tiered scheme had been implemented, I suspect many T-W customers would have canceled or reduced to a minimum their T-W cable TV service and applied the money to their increased T-W internet bill. TV isn't nearly as important these days as internet access.
The core problem remains the grant of effective monopolies to cable vendors within metropolitan areas. If T-W wasn't a monopoly, it wouldn't even consider jacking prices. The practice should be outlawed.
Cable TV and internet is not an open market in the U.S.
Most Americans have only a single choice. State and municipal governments grant T-W and others sole right to provide those services. Lessons from Econ 101 do not apply.
Vendors selling other methods of internet access are allowed to operate, but typically can provide no real competition to the local cable monopoly.
If states and cities are going to grant these monopolies to companies like T-W, then they need to strongly regulate the vendors and support consumer interests. This includes a la carte pricing. In contrast, cities often find themselves relatively powerless to change a vendor's behavior. For example, the government of Greensboro is finding it has little ability to intervene in T-W's tiered pricing scheme.
In Greensboro, at least, T-W points to AT&T as proof that they're not a monopoly.
I'd guess they say the same thing if any ISP was in business there.
What it is, though, is gouging.