I do agree with your take for the most part... ultimately it is up to whoever is distributing the media to do what they want with their media.
However, I don't think your summary of the complaint with copy protection is quite valid, or at least it doesn't entirely line up with my view. As I see it, copy protection in some places is not a bad thing. I can understand why a company would want to protect their media from piracy, as that obviously hurts their business tremendously, and when working with any easily-reproducable media, piracy of your product is simple.
My complaint is not that copy protection used, but rather, how it is used. For instance, mp3's are a perfectly valid medium, yet the format itself has been attacked by the RIAA and others. They should be targetting piracy, not a medium which allows piracy. This type of practice is quite similar to attacking the VHS tape merely because it can recod.
Then of course, there's the DVD CCA battle, which is a great example of misuse of copy protection. It would be one thing if they were attacking pirates who had cracked the encryption and were distributing hacked videos, but as I understand it, they're going after people who broke the encryption for a legitimate reason: to get DVD's to work. Why are they justified to stop people from making DVD's easier to watch? Their copy protection oughtn't be there to stop people from using DVD's, it ought to be there to stop people from mis-using it. There's a big dfference, it seems to me, and it will really frighten me if things go their way.
Regardless of this, ultimately I think the many current attempts to create strong copy protection are pretty silly. Perhaps it's there merely because it can be... it's certainly easier to encrypt a DVD than it is to copy protect a VHS tape. But really, what are they protecting? I can still copy all these things just as well as I ever could, but it's a big hassle for me to make my DVD drive do what it's supposed to do in Linux. Seems kind of silly to me, even if I can understand why the companies might be concerned.
Remember those old games that made you look up what the third word on page 47 of the manual was? Didn't seem to stop piracy, which is much of the reason it was removed. Pretty silly, only ended up getting in the way of legitimate users, because the pirates could just be told what the word is. But then again, Q3's copy protection is working pretty darn well, as long as you want to play an internet game, so it just depends on the context. I'd just like to see copy protection used correctly...
Just when it appeared as though that Y2K went without a hitch, it appears as though Illiad has stumbled upon some troubles with the bug. The User Friendly for January 1, 2000 seems to show signs of a quite serious Y2K bug...
Those of you too lazy to figure it out (I had a friend to the work for me):
Well, it looks like the Y2K bug didn't rear it's ugly head. Yep, the doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again. DId you see that too? Houston. We have a problem.
Not only that, but the link to the previous comic seems to be broken, sending you to 00jan/19991231.html instead of 99dec/19991231.html. Coincidence? I think not.
You don't think sick people are willing to wait 25 years to get well? I think sick people are willing to wait as long as is necessary to get well. Beyond that, this is hardly good logic for the invalidity of the current long life-span on patents.
What if a drug that entirely cures all forms of cancer were developed? Patent is approved, but it may well take those 25 years to bring the product to market. You don't think people with cancer are willing to wait 25 years to be cured? You don't think that people diagnosed with cancer 20 years after the patent was filed, and 5 years before the drug goes to market, are going to appreciate this drug that wouldn't have been developed if it hadn't been protected by a patent?
Sure, computer products can be brought to market quickly, and they die out of the market quickly. I agree, technology patents are granted for far too long. But one has to realize that the pace of computer life is not the pace of all life, and there are completely valid patents out there that would not be serving their purpose if the life span of a patent were reduced as drastically as you suggest. Drugs and genetic research are a perfect example of this; it is prohibitively expensive to do unless you can be guaranteed protection by means of a patent which will last long enough to help you.
So yes, we do need the damn patents anyway. As for the problems with technology patents, that is a different issue entirely, which needs to be dealt with in a different way. How, I'm not sure. But patenting as a whole is good. It's just the current implementation of patents in the technology field that has some problems.
I don't know, I think it would get kind of confusing to code verbally. Sure, if I have the code in front of me, speaking it might be a tad easier to enter once I got used to it, but I just don't think dictating brand new code would be easy for me.
The other thing is, even in your example ambiguities arise as to what the speaker actually intends. You say assume anything that isn't a reserved 'vocal word' is a variable/function name, but you use what would be a reserved 'vocal word' (Int). Although I'd assume you could check to see if it was a valid location to place int, the voice interpreter could easily interpret
public class hello world imp implements hello world int f
as
public class HelloWorldImp implements HelloWorld int f
instead of
public class HelloWorldImp implements HelloWorldIntF
which is clearly not the desired code.
To pull an example from my own (ugly, Windows) code:
copy memory paren amp project dot files brac project dot i file count minus one comma file comma sizeof paren fileentry clopar clopar semi
Or some variation thereof. However, that seems awfully complext to me, and typing it is fairly simple. Simply too much of the punctuation has to be dictated, and I don't see much way around it.
And I'm not even going to try to figure out what would be spoken for that one. The trouble is, syntactically, I think a language like C is just too complex for any dictation system to work. It might be easier for some, but I would much rather type my code. When I have to spell things out for my computer, I'd rather use a device designed for just that.
Certainly, it is important to draw the line early enough that we don't get an unavoidable problem on our hands. And absolutely, we don't want any information about ourselves, or our computers, or whatever else, sent out without our permission.
But it is hardly fair to blame id for crossing the line, for a couple reasons. Firstly, as has been mentioned before, the readme for Q3Test 1.08 told us about this. Admittedly, I don't have the readme on hand, but I do believe those who have said this before. While it might not be in Q3DemoTEST, Q3DemoTEST is a TEST. It is not the actual demo. The documentation seems to be quite sparse. It is intended to be this way--it was released in order to make sure all the bugs were worked out before they went gold.
And I believe this in itself is enough to redeem id. But wait, there's more. Carmack's post right here. He was entirely straightforward with us, as he has been all along in his.plan and elsewhere, about the fact that it's present, why it's present, and how we can turn it off. Sure, we aren't presented with a big "yes/no" dialog box, as some seem to be calling for, but we have the equivilant, it's just not so obvious. Why should it be?
So give id a break. They're not the ones crossing the line--not yet anyway. And if we want to bother them about it, let's wait until the final release. If they don't tell us about it there in the documentation, THEN we can complain (even though it's still common knowledge). Until then, accept the fact that all current releases are tests, and give the guys a break.
I do agree with you that at times, war is somewhat unavoidable. WWII is definitely a good example of that--somebody had to stop that jerk. The depressing truth is that sometimes, the horror of war is the only way to stop a much worse violation of human rights.
But I must say, I fail to see how pacifism and enjoyment of Half-Life and Q3Test cannot coexist, or how enjoying a game of TFC requires me to come to grips with war. These are games. They have nothing to do with real killing, real violence, or real war. It seems to me this is the same logic that links Quake to school shootings, and I think that's total crap. I just like blowing up a bunch of polygons--what's so wrong with that?
How can you possibly see the difference between life and death the same as the difference between free and proprietary software? One thing I will never understand is how this debate can come to a nearly religious level... this "if it's not GPL, it's evil and a violation of freedom" crap is more than I can take.
Don't get me wrong... I'm all for the GPL. I'm all for Linux. I use Linux regularly, and I use, obviously, GPL'd software regularly. I've released some software under the GPL.
And, likewise, I've worked on and released software which is not open source. Admittedly, I'd have no problem opening them up, but since they are Windows applications (yes, that's right, I do program and use Windows on occasion, and I even use Windows sometimes, because I see a computer as a tool, not as some kind of political or religious statement), I've never bothered to open them up.
But the thought the the latter is not freedom... that is just unbelievable to me. Your argument that the only freedom is the GPL restricts another freedom, that being the freedom to keep source closed, and to create a proprietary application. You seem to feel that these contradict each other, but they do not. In fact, your analogy of freedoms to life and murder seems to argue the complete opposite of the idea you propose.
The freedom to murder would be the freedom to deny others the freedom to life. Likewise, the freedom for all people to see all source code to all software denies others the freedom to close their source. So I don't think your analogy really works either way.. if it works your way at all.
So, let me ask you this: am I denying someone their freedom by not making my last English paper freely distributable? Am I denying someone their freedom by not making my root password readily available? It seems to me the freedom of disclosure--or lack thereof--is therefore held by he/she responsible for that disclosure, and nobody else. And the release of source code is, as I see it, disclosure.
The GPL is a great idea, but it is not unethical to use something else. Forgive me for continuing an off-topic discussion, but sometimes I find that I can't keep silent any longer.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I don't think your summary of the complaint with copy protection is quite valid, or at least it doesn't entirely line up with my view. As I see it, copy protection in some places is not a bad thing. I can understand why a company would want to protect their media from piracy, as that obviously hurts their business tremendously, and when working with any easily-reproducable media, piracy of your product is simple.
My complaint is not that copy protection used, but rather, how it is used. For instance, mp3's are a perfectly valid medium, yet the format itself has been attacked by the RIAA and others. They should be targetting piracy, not a medium which allows piracy. This type of practice is quite similar to attacking the VHS tape merely because it can recod.
Then of course, there's the DVD CCA battle, which is a great example of misuse of copy protection. It would be one thing if they were attacking pirates who had cracked the encryption and were distributing hacked videos, but as I understand it, they're going after people who broke the encryption for a legitimate reason: to get DVD's to work. Why are they justified to stop people from making DVD's easier to watch? Their copy protection oughtn't be there to stop people from using DVD's, it ought to be there to stop people from mis-using it. There's a big dfference, it seems to me, and it will really frighten me if things go their way.
Regardless of this, ultimately I think the many current attempts to create strong copy protection are pretty silly. Perhaps it's there merely because it can be... it's certainly easier to encrypt a DVD than it is to copy protect a VHS tape. But really, what are they protecting? I can still copy all these things just as well as I ever could, but it's a big hassle for me to make my DVD drive do what it's supposed to do in Linux. Seems kind of silly to me, even if I can understand why the companies might be concerned.
Remember those old games that made you look up what the third word on page 47 of the manual was? Didn't seem to stop piracy, which is much of the reason it was removed. Pretty silly, only ended up getting in the way of legitimate users, because the pirates could just be told what the word is. But then again, Q3's copy protection is working pretty darn well, as long as you want to play an internet game, so it just depends on the context. I'd just like to see copy protection used correctly...
Those of you too lazy to figure it out (I had a friend to the work for me):
Well, it looks like the Y2K bug didn't rear it's ugly head.
Yep, the doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.
DId you see that too?
Houston. We have a problem.
Copyright (c) 1900 Iliad
http://www.userfriendly.org/
Not only that, but the link to the previous comic seems to be broken, sending you to 00jan/19991231.html instead of 99dec/19991231.html. Coincidence? I think not.
What if a drug that entirely cures all forms of cancer were developed? Patent is approved, but it may well take those 25 years to bring the product to market. You don't think people with cancer are willing to wait 25 years to be cured? You don't think that people diagnosed with cancer 20 years after the patent was filed, and 5 years before the drug goes to market, are going to appreciate this drug that wouldn't have been developed if it hadn't been protected by a patent?
Sure, computer products can be brought to market quickly, and they die out of the market quickly. I agree, technology patents are granted for far too long. But one has to realize that the pace of computer life is not the pace of all life, and there are completely valid patents out there that would not be serving their purpose if the life span of a patent were reduced as drastically as you suggest. Drugs and genetic research are a perfect example of this; it is prohibitively expensive to do unless you can be guaranteed protection by means of a patent which will last long enough to help you.
So yes, we do need the damn patents anyway. As for the problems with technology patents, that is a different issue entirely, which needs to be dealt with in a different way. How, I'm not sure. But patenting as a whole is good. It's just the current implementation of patents in the technology field that has some problems.
The other thing is, even in your example ambiguities arise as to what the speaker actually intends. You say assume anything that isn't a reserved 'vocal word' is a variable/function name, but you use what would be a reserved 'vocal word' (Int). Although I'd assume you could check to see if it was a valid location to place int, the voice interpreter could easily interpret
public class hello world imp implements hello world int f
as
public class HelloWorldImp implements HelloWorld int f
instead of
public class HelloWorldImp implements HelloWorldIntF
which is clearly not the desired code.
To pull an example from my own (ugly, Windows) code:
CopyMemory( &project.files[project.iFileCount - 1], file, sizeof( FILEENTRY ) );
I guess, vocally, I could dictate it as
copy memory paren amp project dot files brac project dot i file count minus one comma file comma sizeof paren fileentry clopar clopar semi
Or some variation thereof. However, that seems awfully complext to me, and typing it is fairly simple. Simply too much of the punctuation has to be dictated, and I don't see much way around it.
And again, from wonderful windows code
ghWnd = CreateWindowEx( 0, CLASS_MAINWINDOW, WINDOW_TITLE, WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, x, y, width, height, 0, 0, ghInstance, 0 );
And I'm not even going to try to figure out what would be spoken for that one. The trouble is, syntactically, I think a language like C is just too complex for any dictation system to work. It might be easier for some, but I would much rather type my code. When I have to spell things out for my computer, I'd rather use a device designed for just that.
But it is hardly fair to blame id for crossing the line, for a couple reasons. Firstly, as has been mentioned before, the readme for Q3Test 1.08 told us about this. Admittedly, I don't have the readme on hand, but I do believe those who have said this before. While it might not be in Q3DemoTEST, Q3DemoTEST is a TEST. It is not the actual demo. The documentation seems to be quite sparse. It is intended to be this way--it was released in order to make sure all the bugs were worked out before they went gold.
And I believe this in itself is enough to redeem id. But wait, there's more. Carmack's post right here. He was entirely straightforward with us, as he has been all along in his .plan and elsewhere, about the fact that it's present, why it's present, and how we can turn it off. Sure, we aren't presented with a big "yes/no" dialog box, as some seem to be calling for, but we have the equivilant, it's just not so obvious. Why should it be?
So give id a break. They're not the ones crossing the line--not yet anyway. And if we want to bother them about it, let's wait until the final release. If they don't tell us about it there in the documentation, THEN we can complain (even though it's still common knowledge). Until then, accept the fact that all current releases are tests, and give the guys a break.
But I must say, I fail to see how pacifism and enjoyment of Half-Life and Q3Test cannot coexist, or how enjoying a game of TFC requires me to come to grips with war. These are games. They have nothing to do with real killing, real violence, or real war. It seems to me this is the same logic that links Quake to school shootings, and I think that's total crap. I just like blowing up a bunch of polygons--what's so wrong with that?
Oh dear... even more off topic.
How can you possibly see the difference between life and death the same as the difference between free and proprietary software? One thing I will never understand is how this debate can come to a nearly religious level... this "if it's not GPL, it's evil and a violation of freedom" crap is more than I can take.
Don't get me wrong... I'm all for the GPL. I'm all for Linux. I use Linux regularly, and I use, obviously, GPL'd software regularly. I've released some software under the GPL.
And, likewise, I've worked on and released software which is not open source. Admittedly, I'd have no problem opening them up, but since they are Windows applications (yes, that's right, I do program and use Windows on occasion, and I even use Windows sometimes, because I see a computer as a tool, not as some kind of political or religious statement), I've never bothered to open them up.
But the thought the the latter is not freedom... that is just unbelievable to me. Your argument that the only freedom is the GPL restricts another freedom, that being the freedom to keep source closed, and to create a proprietary application. You seem to feel that these contradict each other, but they do not. In fact, your analogy of freedoms to life and murder seems to argue the complete opposite of the idea you propose.
The freedom to murder would be the freedom to deny others the freedom to life. Likewise, the freedom for all people to see all source code to all software denies others the freedom to close their source. So I don't think your analogy really works either way.. if it works your way at all.
So, let me ask you this: am I denying someone their freedom by not making my last English paper freely distributable? Am I denying someone their freedom by not making my root password readily available? It seems to me the freedom of disclosure--or lack thereof--is therefore held by he/she responsible for that disclosure, and nobody else. And the release of source code is, as I see it, disclosure.
The GPL is a great idea, but it is not unethical to use something else. Forgive me for continuing an off-topic discussion, but sometimes I find that I can't keep silent any longer.
Moderators, please be kind, but it HAD to be said, and I've don't think I saw anyone say it for once... so...
Yes, but does it run Linux?