Actually Lars and Metallica sanction tape bootlegging. They always have. Metallica supports recording their concerts and bootlegging that, too. The reason is that Metallica would never be as big as they are today without bootlegging. That is how the band was initially promoted, and their support of the practice won brownie points with fans.
Lars even admitted this and the fact that HE PERSONALLY bootlegs music even now, in his slashdot interview.
Lars had two arguments against Napster. One was that he felt Metallica should be in control of their music distribution. They sanctioned bootlegging but not napster, therefore napster should stop in deferrence to metallica.
The other points he made were based on quality and scope. Mp3's do not deteriorate when copied, and can be encoded well enough to be virtually indistinguishable from Cd except to the most rabid audiophile. (They usually arent encoded this well, though.) As for scope, he points out that the average metallica fan does not have millions of friends he can meet every day, whereas on the net millions of people can download and swap mp3's.
Lars admitted that bootlegging supports sales. To me the only point he made at all, the only part of his argument that is not full of crap, was the control issue. It is Metallica's music; if they want to be assholes and dicks about it, they can, basically, even if they are wrong.
Aftereffects and Premiere have a much better chance of happening, IMHO, mainly because of the technical difficulties you point out for the other suites. I agree that the Gimp is not all that, and certainly not nearly so easy to use as Photoshop from what I understand. Your idea of controlling fonts inside the app sounds like the best way to go. Adobe certainly has the coding manpower to do that. They have worked to conquer OS deficiencies before; for instance: they use their own paging system in PS.
You certainly have a point there. Photoshop is one of the most pirated software packages around, and adobe knows it. They basically tolerate it on the other platforms because they see it as not causing a direct cost to them while ostensibly driving legitemate sales. On the Linux platform, however, there seems to be little drive to support software that is not free (as in beer).
Actually, they already have been involved in buying pornography on and off the internet, being "outraged" at what they saw, and then bringing charges or sending threatening legal letters. A couple from California is currently in jail for running a porn site that was viewed by a prosecutor from a small county in Tennessee.
Every time I saw that "this is a free trial, your cc will not be billed" I thought, yeah right, why do you need it, then? Bottom line, you can't trust people in certain industries, like porn, drugs (including pharmaceuticals), tobacco, cars, etc. And the seedier the industry is, the more likely you will be ripped off outright. I would imagine that the company was banking (pun not intended) on the fact that people would be afraid to dispute the charges lest they be known as "perverts" or worse, being charged with a crime. (In many states, the laws are vague enough and far-reaching enough that Playboy and Penthouse, to say nothing of Hustler, could be considered illegal if they did not have big bad lawyers...)
Maximum Pc had a short segment on this, their answer was that the bank has nothing to do with crimes, and with hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on porn annually in the US, no one is alone despite the denial. (Everyone knows the Us is comprised of a populace of teetotaling virgins who never use that horrible language those Hollywood liberals from canada use, right?)
Oh and the same pornography sites that were doing this were among the worst in creating the pop-up hell (browser hijack expliot.. kill one window and two more come up). It was done through a javascript though, so a word to the wise, set javascript off or set it to "prompt" if you think you will need it for a site. No JS, no hijack!
Not just in the US. Firstly, there's Echelon, which monitors the Us and Europe, mainly. The UK has openly installed monitoring cameras in public places, but unlike the US, they did not lie about them, they admitted these were for the police to watch for criminals and terrorists from the start.
I would imagine there are similar monitoring systems elsewhere, mainly determined by the amount of money a government has to spend and the cost of the technology. Imagine what China may soon install, if they haven't done it already.
One point lurking in your subtext is that even in a situation where the judge is a staunch supporter of the Bill of rights and will *not* admit illegal evidence, the FBI only has to disclose the legally obtained evidence. They can use all the illegal information they want to decide that they want to keep an eye on you, then they get legal evidence to use in the trial.
And of course they can keep files of all the people one associates with and one's political speech, and find those who voice dissenting opinions. I would say one of the major reasons they watched civil rights leaders and other dissidents so closely, was that they were looking for any excuse to bust them for a crime. I think the lesson there is that if you want to fight the government, you'd better keep your nose clean, because Big Brother will be watching and he "don't need no steeking warrants" to do that.
The problem with this is that in reality there are judges that will give the FBI whatever it says it needs, and will side with law enforcement generally in any case, on the assumption that they are acting in good faith and need his/her rubber stamp in order to go get the "bad guys."
As for lawyers, public defenders, should you be lucky enough to live in a state where you still get one, are notoriously underzealous in pursuing the tack of "my client's rights were violated" / "this evidence should be inadmissable because..."
Firstly, if the FBI is acting in good faith here, why is it that they have hidden their actions from everyone including their superiors? Reno admitted she had gotten all her data from the press.
Ever since Louis Freeh was put in charge of the FBI, they have been increasingly hostile toward the constitution (not that they were great fans of it before). Freeh constantly argues for an erosion of basic rights and an increase in police power (and funding!) in order to fight the dangerous terrorists, cyber-criminals, and child pornographers. They have succeeded in getting snooping technology added to the phone systems, and no longer need a warrant for many surveilance activities (just a court order, which IIRC is easier to obtain).
If they really only needed the email from a user, they could get that through normal means. The FBI has gotten email before, under court order or warrant.
They have admitted that Carnivore employs a packet sniffer and sophisticated filtering. It is a complete black box at this point. If the software was only looking for to: and from: headers, someone could have whipped up a perl script to do that in five minutes. That much is obvious and has been pointed out in many instances.
I think this is a good reason for us to start pushing, as many other countries have, for total open-source solutions MANDATED in government implementations. If the FBI wants sophisticated software, it should be open-source. We as taxpayers paying for all of this should be allowed to see it, and the government would benefit from people contributing to it. Then they would not be able to hide.
Of course the FBI will never release information about what they do, because they don't want to be like a regular police agency, they want to be like the CIA (or more appropriately, the KGB). If they had to admit what they were really up to, they would be in more trouble than the criminals they claim to be after.
Adobe may be afraid to try putting photoshop in competition with the Gimp. Photoshop for linux probably would not make them much money, if it was not a losing proposition in the first place. Linux is not ready for their publishing products, either, because of poor font and display support.
Regardless of how trivial it is after install time, these things need to be done at install time. Any desktop is going to be measured against windows and the Mac, which will both have usable truetype fonts and word processing at install time. When you install more software that uses fonts, it installs more fonts in a central location and is able to find all the fonts you have.
There will always be those who enjoy doing things the hard way, but the Mac and Windows have succeeded by making it easier. Even they leave a lot to be desired, because the average person still struggles with either OS. To win, Linux needs to be better.
Linux runs on Alpha, PPC, Amiga, and god knows what else. Name a single plat that BSD runs on but Linux does not, and I could probably send you a link to the linux distro that does work on that platform.
This is basically how the Sun Community Source License works. Of course Sun got their ass eaten, spewed out, then handed back to them on a plate for daring to go from closed source to this model by the free software zealots.
I'm torn, personally. I mean it's nice to be able to look at the solaris code if one wants to, and the license ensures that Sun retains control, which is basically what they were afraid of losing. (look what happened to java!) But on the other hand Sun did get a lot of brownie points in the media ("Oh look they're making free software too! Just like that Linus fellow!") which were based on confusion...
Under *nix with X you can run any graphical app on the remote machine.
With ssh and the like under *nix you can connect remotely and have a terminal window on the remote machine, which should allow you to perform any task you would normally be able to perform at the machine.
NT does not allow that kind of power at the command line, being mostly a GUI-only OS with limited command-line capabilities. Neither does it, AFAIK allow access as if one were at the machine beyond telnet and the remote admin tools. Under *nix, there is no appreciable difference between being at the machine and being remote beyond possible lag (because of bandwidth) and not being able to hit the power.
Unfortunately, history classes being what they are, the inhabitants of the jury box are unlikely to know of that or care. I think that is what the poster was alluding to, that the great unwashed will frown upon those who do not swear by God's Holy Word(tm).
What happens when all the routers and servers in the US shut down? Besides, The key word in the post was mostly, which is essentially true. Most of the machines on the net are in the US, partially due to the jump-start, but in no small part due to it being cheaper in the us and Americans having more money.
Too bad they still qualify as web bugs, since they do point at doubleclick's servers. And/.'s cookie is not secure, therefore stealable and sendable to any site (a troll recently created a cokie stealing exploit that forged trolls from/. users unwary enough to click on a link to his homepage).
So/. might not only allow doubleclick to see ip based profiles, but give it a username as well.
It would seem to me that the source being open benefits small companies even more than large companies. First because they obtain benefits from the open source community in the sense of having many more developers than they could possibly afford.
They should have little fear that their work would be stolen wholesale because of the way the GPL works, especially if their product is complex. A good team can keep ahead of copycats and forks through continuous innovation.
The lone developer is even better helped by the GPL. After all it is much easier to land devel jobs when employers can see your code.
My God! even WIRED got it wrong. What is this world coming to? The Hackers' existence in literature and such preceded the popularization of the term in the wrong context by 20 years, yet we still see this bullshit.
I propose that we begin to use the word "reporter" to mean a spreader of unfounded gossip and lies, and "astronaut" to describe porn stars. Maybe a little of their own medicine will help them learn proper reporting.
McDonald's was attacked because it is a symbol of the american beef industry and globalization, not because they would not use roquefort cheese on a burger (what an outrage! if they did that, I would expect Jose to protest).
Besides I am sure mcdonald's will continue to use south american beef from the ranches it has helped create, encouraging slash-and-burn agriculture in rain forest areas.
"France has the right to live out of the rule of the corporate america."
No one's taken that right away. They still have it. Of course, if they engage in predatory behavior, they will lose the right to sell Roquefort in the US. Pretty nifty, huh.
Predatory behaviour? excuse me? The europeans only asked for what activists in the united states had been asking for for years, something which was the original purpose of the fda. They only wanted food to be accurately labelled, especially given fears that the hormone-injected beef created severe health risks. (BTW, there has also been some push to mark irradiated food with a radiation symbol, and genetically engineered foods. If we had to do that, most current us food would have interesting little labels on it.) US farming conglomerates (run by the bankers which had foreclosed on the original american farmers) lobbied hard against this. The request was refused.
So the americans wanted to force potentially harmful foods down the throat of the French, and the French are acting in a predatory manner because they dared to say "No more Tea?" I think not!
In a way, they are lost sales, but that would be just like someone lamenting opportunities for a new job having come and gone, and counting lost wages as a result. The people who did not buy never would have, but the ones who did might not have but for the piracy.
Perhaps you would advocate people being forced to verify their legitemate ownership of license to software in order to use it professionally, but that would have kept those "pirates" out of a job and cost autodesk sales.
Besides, even those who are using autocad without paying are making autocad money by promoting the software. They are forcing others to buy the software in order to view and take advantage of their work. They also help autodesk win sales every time someone says "Hey that's a cool design how did you make it?" "Autocad, of course. What else is there?"
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Lars and Metallica sanction tape bootlegging. They always have. Metallica supports recording their concerts and bootlegging that, too. The reason is that Metallica would never be as big as they are today without bootlegging. That is how the band was initially promoted, and their support of the practice won brownie points with fans.
Lars even admitted this and the fact that HE PERSONALLY bootlegs music even now, in his slashdot interview.
Lars had two arguments against Napster. One was that he felt Metallica should be in control of their music distribution. They sanctioned bootlegging but not napster, therefore napster should stop in deferrence to metallica.
The other points he made were based on quality and scope. Mp3's do not deteriorate when copied, and can be encoded well enough to be virtually indistinguishable from Cd except to the most rabid audiophile. (They usually arent encoded this well, though.) As for scope, he points out that the average metallica fan does not have millions of friends he can meet every day, whereas on the net millions of people can download and swap mp3's.
Lars admitted that bootlegging supports sales. To me the only point he made at all, the only part of his argument that is not full of crap, was the control issue. It is Metallica's music; if they want to be assholes and dicks about it, they can, basically, even if they are wrong.
Aftereffects and Premiere have a much better chance of happening, IMHO, mainly because of the technical difficulties you point out for the other suites. I agree that the Gimp is not all that, and certainly not nearly so easy to use as Photoshop from what I understand. Your idea of controlling fonts inside the app sounds like the best way to go. Adobe certainly has the coding manpower to do that. They have worked to conquer OS deficiencies before; for instance: they use their own paging system in PS.
You certainly have a point there. Photoshop is one of the most pirated software packages around, and adobe knows it. They basically tolerate it on the other platforms because they see it as not causing a direct cost to them while ostensibly driving legitemate sales. On the Linux platform, however, there seems to be little drive to support software that is not free (as in beer).
Actually, they already have been involved in buying pornography on and off the internet, being "outraged" at what they saw, and then bringing charges or sending threatening legal letters. A couple from California is currently in jail for running a porn site that was viewed by a prosecutor from a small county in Tennessee.
Every time I saw that "this is a free trial, your cc will not be billed" I thought, yeah right, why do you need it, then? Bottom line, you can't trust people in certain industries, like porn, drugs (including pharmaceuticals), tobacco, cars, etc. And the seedier the industry is, the more likely you will be ripped off outright. I would imagine that the company was banking (pun not intended) on the fact that people would be afraid to dispute the charges lest they be known as "perverts" or worse, being charged with a crime. (In many states, the laws are vague enough and far-reaching enough that Playboy and Penthouse, to say nothing of Hustler, could be considered illegal if they did not have big bad lawyers...)
Maximum Pc had a short segment on this, their answer was that the bank has nothing to do with crimes, and with hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on porn annually in the US, no one is alone despite the denial. (Everyone knows the Us is comprised of a populace of teetotaling virgins who never use that horrible language those Hollywood liberals from canada use, right?)
Oh and the same pornography sites that were doing this were among the worst in creating the pop-up hell (browser hijack expliot.. kill one window and two more come up). It was done through a javascript though, so a word to the wise, set javascript off or set it to "prompt" if you think you will need it for a site. No JS, no hijack!
Not just in the US. Firstly, there's Echelon, which monitors the Us and Europe, mainly. The UK has openly installed monitoring cameras in public places, but unlike the US, they did not lie about them, they admitted these were for the police to watch for criminals and terrorists from the start.
I would imagine there are similar monitoring systems elsewhere, mainly determined by the amount of money a government has to spend and the cost of the technology. Imagine what China may soon install, if they haven't done it already.
Louis Freeh is far more creative and dangerous than Hoover, and has presided over many times more wiretaps.
One point lurking in your subtext is that even in a situation where the judge is a staunch supporter of the Bill of rights and will *not* admit illegal evidence, the FBI only has to disclose the legally obtained evidence. They can use all the illegal information they want to decide that they want to keep an eye on you, then they get legal evidence to use in the trial.
And of course they can keep files of all the people one associates with and one's political speech, and find those who voice dissenting opinions. I would say one of the major reasons they watched civil rights leaders and other dissidents so closely, was that they were looking for any excuse to bust them for a crime. I think the lesson there is that if you want to fight the government, you'd better keep your nose clean, because Big Brother will be watching and he "don't need no steeking warrants" to do that.
The problem with this is that in reality there are judges that will give the FBI whatever it says it needs, and will side with law enforcement generally in any case, on the assumption that they are acting in good faith and need his/her rubber stamp in order to go get the "bad guys."
As for lawyers, public defenders, should you be lucky enough to live in a state where you still get one, are notoriously underzealous in pursuing the tack of "my client's rights were violated" / "this evidence should be inadmissable because..."
Firstly, if the FBI is acting in good faith here, why is it that they have hidden their actions from everyone including their superiors? Reno admitted she had gotten all her data from the press.
Ever since Louis Freeh was put in charge of the FBI, they have been increasingly hostile toward the constitution (not that they were great fans of it before). Freeh constantly argues for an erosion of basic rights and an increase in police power (and funding!) in order to fight the dangerous terrorists, cyber-criminals, and child pornographers. They have succeeded in getting snooping technology added to the phone systems, and no longer need a warrant for many surveilance activities (just a court order, which IIRC is easier to obtain).
If they really only needed the email from a user, they could get that through normal means. The FBI has gotten email before, under court order or warrant.
They have admitted that Carnivore employs a packet sniffer and sophisticated filtering. It is a complete black box at this point. If the software was only looking for to: and from: headers, someone could have whipped up a perl script to do that in five minutes. That much is obvious and has been pointed out in many instances.
I think this is a good reason for us to start pushing, as many other countries have, for total open-source solutions MANDATED in government implementations. If the FBI wants sophisticated software, it should be open-source. We as taxpayers paying for all of this should be allowed to see it, and the government would benefit from people contributing to it. Then they would not be able to hide.
Of course the FBI will never release information about what they do, because they don't want to be like a regular police agency, they want to be like the CIA (or more appropriately, the KGB). If they had to admit what they were really up to, they would be in more trouble than the criminals they claim to be after.
Adobe may be afraid to try putting photoshop in competition with the Gimp. Photoshop for linux probably would not make them much money, if it was not a losing proposition in the first place. Linux is not ready for their publishing products, either, because of poor font and display support.
Apple gets Adobe products because:
Regardless of how trivial it is after install time, these things need to be done at install time. Any desktop is going to be measured against windows and the Mac, which will both have usable truetype fonts and word processing at install time. When you install more software that uses fonts, it installs more fonts in a central location and is able to find all the fonts you have.
There will always be those who enjoy doing things the hard way, but the Mac and Windows have succeeded by making it easier. Even they leave a lot to be desired, because the average person still struggles with either OS. To win, Linux needs to be better.
Linux runs on Alpha, PPC, Amiga, and god knows what else. Name a single plat that BSD runs on but Linux does not, and I could probably send you a link to the linux distro that does work on that platform.
It already happened anyway, long ago.. it is called Windows Nt or something like that.
So what he says is not really unprovable...
This is basically how the Sun Community Source License works. Of course Sun got their ass eaten, spewed out, then handed back to them on a plate for daring to go from closed source to this model by the free software zealots.
I'm torn, personally. I mean it's nice to be able to look at the solaris code if one wants to, and the license ensures that Sun retains control, which is basically what they were afraid of losing. (look what happened to java!) But on the other hand Sun did get a lot of brownie points in the media ("Oh look they're making free software too! Just like that Linus fellow!") which were based on confusion...
Yes you can remote admin NT. But...
Under *nix with X you can run any graphical app on the remote machine.
With ssh and the like under *nix you can connect remotely and have a terminal window on the remote machine, which should allow you to perform any task you would normally be able to perform at the machine.
NT does not allow that kind of power at the command line, being mostly a GUI-only OS with limited command-line capabilities. Neither does it, AFAIK allow access as if one were at the machine beyond telnet and the remote admin tools. Under *nix, there is no appreciable difference between being at the machine and being remote beyond possible lag (because of bandwidth) and not being able to hit the power.
Unfortunately, history classes being what they are, the inhabitants of the jury box are unlikely to know of that or care. I think that is what the poster was alluding to, that the great unwashed will frown upon those who do not swear by God's Holy Word(tm).
What happens when all the routers and servers in the US shut down? Besides, The key word in the post was mostly, which is essentially true. Most of the machines on the net are in the US, partially due to the jump-start, but in no small part due to it being cheaper in the us and Americans having more money.
Ah so no cookies? that is nice.
Too bad they still qualify as web bugs, since they do point at doubleclick's servers. And /.'s cookie is not secure, therefore stealable and sendable to any site (a troll recently created a cokie stealing exploit that forged trolls from /. users unwary enough to click on a link to his homepage).
So /. might not only allow doubleclick to see ip based profiles, but give it a username as well.
It would seem to me that the source being open benefits small companies even more than large companies. First because they obtain benefits from the open source community in the sense of having many more developers than they could possibly afford.
They should have little fear that their work would be stolen wholesale because of the way the GPL works, especially if their product is complex. A good team can keep ahead of copycats and forks through continuous innovation.
The lone developer is even better helped by the GPL. After all it is much easier to land devel jobs when employers can see your code.
My God! even WIRED got it wrong. What is this world coming to? The Hackers' existence in literature and such preceded the popularization of the term in the wrong context by 20 years, yet we still see this bullshit.
I propose that we begin to use the word "reporter" to mean a spreader of unfounded gossip and lies, and "astronaut" to describe porn stars. Maybe a little of their own medicine will help them learn proper reporting.
McDonald's was attacked because it is a symbol of the american beef industry and globalization, not because they would not use roquefort cheese on a burger (what an outrage! if they did that, I would expect Jose to protest).
Besides I am sure mcdonald's will continue to use south american beef from the ranches it has helped create, encouraging slash-and-burn agriculture in rain forest areas.
"France has the right to live out of the rule of the corporate america."
No one's taken that right away. They still have it. Of course, if they engage in predatory behavior, they will lose the right to sell Roquefort in the US. Pretty nifty, huh.
Predatory behaviour? excuse me? The europeans only asked for what activists in the united states had been asking for for years, something which was the original purpose of the fda. They only wanted food to be accurately labelled, especially given fears that the hormone-injected beef created severe health risks. (BTW, there has also been some push to mark irradiated food with a radiation symbol, and genetically engineered foods. If we had to do that, most current us food would have interesting little labels on it.) US farming conglomerates (run by the bankers which had foreclosed on the original american farmers) lobbied hard against this. The request was refused.
So the americans wanted to force potentially harmful foods down the throat of the French, and the French are acting in a predatory manner because they dared to say "No more Tea?" I think not!
In a way, they are lost sales, but that would be just like someone lamenting opportunities for a new job having come and gone, and counting lost wages as a result. The people who did not buy never would have, but the ones who did might not have but for the piracy.
Perhaps you would advocate people being forced to verify their legitemate ownership of license to software in order to use it professionally, but that would have kept those "pirates" out of a job and cost autodesk sales.
Besides, even those who are using autocad without paying are making autocad money by promoting the software. They are forcing others to buy the software in order to view and take advantage of their work. They also help autodesk win sales every time someone says "Hey that's a cool design how did you make it?" "Autocad, of course. What else is there?"