I don't know if the slashdot poll code can handle 16 options, but I suspect that the "fairly uncommon (less than five percent of the population)" people are probably more like 90 around here. Perhaps it is time to find out.
I know some imformal polls have been done, and indeed the normally rare INTJ and INTP types show up far more often among computer types than in the general population.
Problem: Oregon can't require all vehicles operating in Oregon to have the GPS units. They can require all vehicles registered in Oregon to have them, but they can't require them on vehicles registered anywhere else and they can't prohibit those vehicles from driving in Oregon. That means they'd either have to keep the gas tax, or lose the revenue from large trucks, tourists and the like. My guess is that they'd need to at least double their estimates of the GPS-based fees to make up for the lost revenue. This will go over real well with Oregonians, I'd imagine.
No, it's simple economics. One spammer provides X dollars of profit for the ISP. N non-spamming customers provide Y dollars each of profit for the ISP. When N*Y > X, it costs the ISP less to boot the spammer than lose the non-spamming customers. Solving for N is left as an exercise for the reader.
You hate spam, yet you're still giving UUnet your money knowing they harbor spammers. You're one of the people making it profitable for UUnet to harbor spammers. And note well, UUnet will continue to harbor spammers as long as it's legitimate customers keep giving it money despite that. They'll only change when people like you start saying "UUnet, we're switching to <alternate-upstream> because we refuse to bear the costs of you harboring spammers. When you've cleaned up your spam problem, maybe we'll think about coming back.".
Cancel your subscription, uninstall the game, delete the remains from your hard drive, break the game CDs in half and throw them and the manuals and other material in the trash. 5 minutes of resolution and the monkey is gone permanently. If you hate the game so much, you should be able to manage that in the heat of frustration.
I'd also note that the author's complaints about EQ don't differ much from problems in any RPG. Way back when AD&D came out, there were similar problems with campaigns after characters reached a certain level. A good DM could postpone the inevitable for a while, but the only permanent fix was to start a new campaign in a new world with new low-level characters.
Re:email as we know it is the problem
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 2
Right, but if you allow that then unforgeable headers are impossible because anyone can run sendmail on their machine and be a mail server and forge headers to their heart's content and no other server could tell the difference between that and a legitimate ISP's mail server. At that point validating the headers becomes completely impossible regardless of protocol.
Re:email as we know it is the problem
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually SMTP does a good job with e-mail. Mostly ISPs need to use what's already provided in SMTP and in mail servers. For example, use one mailserver for outgoing mail and require SMTP AUTH to use it. The seperate incoming server has to not require authorization, but it should only accept incoming mail and reject anything that wouldn't be delivered to one of your customers. Doing that and implementing standard anti-relaying rules and keeping current on security patches would eliminate much of the problem.
As for unforgeable headers, as long as you require people to go through an ISP's mail servers and don't have an authoritative list of all mail servers in the world, you have to allow the client system to provide headers that your server accepts. If you allow that then anyone can forge headers, and if you don't then how do you handle the headers on a message being relayed through the sender's ISP's mail server? You don't know what the sender's username is unless you trust the sending server, and if you trust the sending server then I can set my software up to impersonate a trustable server and get forged headers through. Encrypted and authenticated connections won't help, not without aforementioned authoritative list of legal mail servers which we don't have. And how do you handle legal forgery, eg. my using a "silverglass.org" e-mail address on messages originating from a non-silverglass.org system (my mail isn't handled by the same entity that handles my Internet connection and I plan on keeping it that way)?
SSH, scp and SFTP replaced Telnet, rcp and FTP because people could state what they wanted that the older protocols couldn't do and how those things could be done. Before you can replace SMTP you need to outline exactly what you want the new protocol to do and how it can do it, and resolve any conflicts between what it allows and what people need to do.
That's the interesting part. He instructed the jury that simply making a product that could be used for copyright violation wasn't enough, the company had to intend for it to be used for copyright violation. This is similar to DeCSS, where it can be but isn't intended for copyright violation. If the ElcomSoft instructions were used in the DeCSS case, they'd be found not guilty by the same reasoning. From a PR standpoint this is a win, because it undercuts the ability of companies to use the DMCA to shut down everything while still allowing them to prosecute actual violation, and it makes them prove intent instead of just possible use.
Simple: "You have nothing to hide either, right? So do you want the entire world seeing the details of your checkbook, or your boss to overhear that joke you told your friend about him? No? Why? After all, you don't have anything to hide, right?".
Re:"Moral" problems are often the commenter's
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
People who like coffee aren't neccesarily murderers, but most murderers like coffee. Therefore, eliminating all coffee from an area will also eliminate murder.
Fallacy apparent?
What Google and investors in it should think about
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Google isn't successful because it's Google. It's successful because lots and lots of people like what it's doing now, the way it's doing it now. If you change too much of that in the search for profits you'll change the reason people prefer to use it, and they'll go somewhere else that does do what they prefer. And there goes the very source of your success and revenue: the users you attract.
If you want to invest in a successful company but think it needs to be changed significantly, ask yourself why you aren't investing in a successful company that already works the way you think it should. If that's because all the companies that work the way you think they should aren't successful, maybe it's what you think that should change, not what the successful company is.
I suspect they aren't using 802.11b or cellular for their wireless connection. Probably they're using a radio datalink on a dedicated channel in a band reserved for their use. Those tend to be much less susceptible to link-lossage.
As for as Terminal Services or Citrix, I've used both. Their performance does not measure up to X11 in a remote application, because X11 was designed for network connections while TS and Citrix were both grafted onto a system that assumed it was dealing with a physical screen. You can do a lot hooking into GDI, but in the end the system wasn't designed to support the application. Server performance isn't the bottleneck, it's the relatively low-bandwidth connection between the server and the client.
As for free license fees, sure they're free now. Is MS going to guarantee that all upgrades to all future versions will also be free? I doubt it, and there's the hook inside that tasty free-license bait. With Linux, the city's guaranteed that in 10 years their system will still be available without paying license fees or worrying about license bookkeeping to keep the BSA off their backs.
Well, you can teach the mechanics. You can teach poets and writers how the language works, why it works, what can be done that's gotten a certain effect. Similarly, you can teach people the mechanics of programming.
What you can't teach is that extra something. In writers it's the uncanny ability to take some small bit from the real world and build a story from it. In poets it's coming up with that single image that the poem turns on. In programming, it's figuring out what the program should look like to do it's job.
I suspect programming is close to something like bridge engineering. At an engineering firm there's probably dozens or even hundreds of engineers who can take the plans and specs and turn them into the detailed working drawings the construction people will need to actually build the bridge, but there's only a small handful of engineers who can take a blank piece of paper and a site and come up with the initial idea for a bridge that'll actually work and turn that into the specs and overall plans that everybody else works from.
The thing is, programming isn't like building a skyscraper. It's like designing and building a skyscraper. People who ignore one part or the other will always have problems with the result.
Actually, MS went to great lengths to make the browser not part of the OS. That's the whole point of COM/COM+/DCOM/.Net/flavor-of-the-week. They have an interface called IBrowser that defines a way for applications to ask a component to render HTML pages. Components that provide that interface can be installed on the system, IE being one example. An application can ask the system for a list of all components that provide the IBrowser interface, instantiate an instance of one of them and use it. The whole point was to decouple the IBrowser interface from the component that implements it, so that you could have multiple implementations as the situation demanded.
Of course, what happened along the way was that MS went from the minor player trying to create a way to insure that there wasn't anything special about those big third-party apps that everybody had to have (if they were all just COM components that provided standard interfaces then swapping that Oracle database out for MS SQL Server would be easy) to a company trying to keep everybody else from easily replacing it's aps (if browsers are just COM components that provide a standard IBrowser interface then swapping IE out for Mozilla would be easy).
Except that in ComScore's case, #2 is "Provide that something for free if people agree to be tracked by spyware.". If this is the ComScore I'm familiar with (and it looks like it is), they're up-front about what they're doing. You get their package knowing that you're becoming the equivalent of a Nielsen family with every single page you view being tracked and recorded. I personally wouldn't agree to that, but I imagine there's a lot of people who wouldn't care (or who have another computer for the browsing they don't want recorded).
I'd send them an e-mail explaining what I'll be telling any Web site I encounter running their stuff, but alas their domain now resolves to an address that isn't accepting connections. Pity, that.:)
No, not recognition of the brand and fear of them, the brand itself. MS values it's Windows brand highly. A product is no good for them unless it prominently carries the Windows brand on it. That's why they're so adamant about retaining their logos and appearance on the desktop. The problem is, to a phone manufacturer thier brand is incredibly important, much more so than the hardware and firmware in the phone. If you pick up a Nokia phone and it doesn't have their brand clearly visible, if instead the most clearly visible label is some other company's, this is not in Nokia's best interest. I don't see any way MS can shell out enough money to convince the cel-phone makers to give up their brands, so I don't think MS is going to make much headway with them. That's undoubtably why Sendo switched away from them: technical flexibility aside, the MS licensing terms probably prohibited Sendo from removing all traces of the Windows brand and making it appear to be a completely Sendo phone.
If an ex-employer wants you to come back to do extra work and they aren't hiring you back, you always make it clear that you're working as an independent contractor and that they will be expected to pay for your services. That's just good business practice and this is business, not personal. The billing rate, though, that varies depending on how they treat (and treated) you. If they were decent about laying you off and are being decent now, you might bill a flat amount per day or a low hourly rate for actual time with no minimums. If they're rude and unprofessional about demanding you do work for free, the rates are $100+ per hour or part thereof, phone calls counting as working time as soon as you pick up, rates double outside normal working hours and travel time is billed at $50 per hour or part thereof each way. Your time is valuable, if not for work then for looking for work, any businessman understands about not giving away a valuable product without getting something in return. Why should you be any less a businessman than your former employer?
How is it that we have come to be seen as a liability?
Accounting. Your costs show up on the books attached to you. The benefits you produce, OTOH, show up on the books attached to the people you help. This makes you appear to be completely a cost center to the accountants.
Simple. With junk snail-mail, the spammer is paying. They have to pay for printing costs for the material, and they have to pay for each piece mailed. That limits the volume, and gives them an incentive to make at least some effort to not waste money on people who won't respond.
E-mail spam, OTOH, is primarily paid for by me. I'm sorry, but my connection bandwidth is not a negligible cost. Neither is the time I spend sorting out the spam that gets past my filters (at the rates my company would bill me out at, spam costs me about $30/day). As for the argument that making my e-mail address public somehow justifies spamming it, well, you probably made your phone number public by having it published in the phone book, I suppose that would make it perfectly fine for me to keep calling you, tying up your phone line so you couldn't get any other calls, right? Sauce for the gander.
Final note: just because someone wants to sell their product does not give them unlimited rights to shove it down everyone's throat.
You can't refuse to license it at all, but you can refuse to license it to particular entities and set just about whatever license terms you want. For example, it'd be entirely legal to license a patent only to software distributed under an open-source license, or to license it to Netscape, Sun, etc. but refuse to license it to Microsoft.
Frankly I think a variation on that idea would be a good thing: the patent would be licensed royalty-free, but only to companies who in turn allow royalty-free licensing of all of their patents.
That's fine for geeks, but judges typically aren't geeks. Hold up a computer drive and the RIAA guys can run a line of BS past the judge. Hold up a Walkman, though, or bring in your CD boombox and the judge's reaction to the RIAA would be along the lines of "Right, I may not be a 20-something but even I know that those things are supposed to play CDs, and if your CD won't play in them it's not because there's anything unusual or illegal about a Walkman.". Like I said, you make sure you don't give the music-company people any excuse they can use.
If large numbers of people simply stopped buying, the music industry would just explain it away as the inevitable result of piracy. OTOH, if their merchandise doesn't sell because of the huge percentage of defective products forcing stores to not carry it anymore, with a truckload of complaints and, as suggested, small-claims cases to support the contention, they can't claim that pirates forced them to produce discs that don't play.
You do three things when a disc won't play on a standard player because of copy protection:
Insure that the disc has the CDDA label on it, that you legitimately bought it and that it's a standard player (car stereo, home stereo, etc.) and not a computer drive. Basically give the music guys no toehold at all to call you a pirate, unless they want to claim that playing an original purchased CD on your stereo is piracy.
Return the disc to the store as defective.
If the store refuses to exchange it for a working disc, or refund your money if they can't find a working disc, file a complaint about the store with your local government's consumer protection office. Don't treat this as an intellectual-property issue, that's playing into the music industry's hands, treat it as a defective-merchandise issue where the warranty and related issues are much more clear-cut and much more in your favor.
When stores start getting in legal hot water for defective merchandise and failure to obey warranty laws, their legal departments will take notice and have a talk with the music industry sales reps. Even the big chains will drop labels rather than take the legal heat on a large scale.
Did you factor in the probability that, inside that 6-year timeframe, the vendor will stop making the product you bought, stop selling support for it and leave you with the choice of using a completely unsupported product or going through a probably disruptive and expensive upgrade process (new software requires a newer version of the OS which requires newer hardware, new software brings new bugs, "features" and interactions you now have to troubleshoot, etc.)? And if you know you want to stick with old software in that situation, do you really need an FTE for the open-source software after the first 3-4 years shake the glitches out of the system?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if the slashdot poll code can handle 16 options, but I suspect that the "fairly uncommon (less than five percent of the population)" people are probably more like 90 around here. Perhaps it is time to find out.
I know some imformal polls have been done, and indeed the normally rare INTJ and INTP types show up far more often among computer types than in the general population.
Problem: Oregon can't require all vehicles operating in Oregon to have the GPS units. They can require all vehicles registered in Oregon to have them, but they can't require them on vehicles registered anywhere else and they can't prohibit those vehicles from driving in Oregon. That means they'd either have to keep the gas tax, or lose the revenue from large trucks, tourists and the like. My guess is that they'd need to at least double their estimates of the GPS-based fees to make up for the lost revenue. This will go over real well with Oregonians, I'd imagine.
No, it's simple economics. One spammer provides X dollars of profit for the ISP. N non-spamming customers provide Y dollars each of profit for the ISP. When N*Y > X, it costs the ISP less to boot the spammer than lose the non-spamming customers. Solving for N is left as an exercise for the reader.
You hate spam, yet you're still giving UUnet your money knowing they harbor spammers. You're one of the people making it profitable for UUnet to harbor spammers. And note well, UUnet will continue to harbor spammers as long as it's legitimate customers keep giving it money despite that. They'll only change when people like you start saying "UUnet, we're switching to <alternate-upstream> because we refuse to bear the costs of you harboring spammers. When you've cleaned up your spam problem, maybe we'll think about coming back.".
Cancel your subscription, uninstall the game, delete the remains from your hard drive, break the game CDs in half and throw them and the manuals and other material in the trash. 5 minutes of resolution and the monkey is gone permanently. If you hate the game so much, you should be able to manage that in the heat of frustration.
I'd also note that the author's complaints about EQ don't differ much from problems in any RPG. Way back when AD&D came out, there were similar problems with campaigns after characters reached a certain level. A good DM could postpone the inevitable for a while, but the only permanent fix was to start a new campaign in a new world with new low-level characters.
Right, but if you allow that then unforgeable headers are impossible because anyone can run sendmail on their machine and be a mail server and forge headers to their heart's content and no other server could tell the difference between that and a legitimate ISP's mail server. At that point validating the headers becomes completely impossible regardless of protocol.
Actually SMTP does a good job with e-mail. Mostly ISPs need to use what's already provided in SMTP and in mail servers. For example, use one mailserver for outgoing mail and require SMTP AUTH to use it. The seperate incoming server has to not require authorization, but it should only accept incoming mail and reject anything that wouldn't be delivered to one of your customers. Doing that and implementing standard anti-relaying rules and keeping current on security patches would eliminate much of the problem.
As for unforgeable headers, as long as you require people to go through an ISP's mail servers and don't have an authoritative list of all mail servers in the world, you have to allow the client system to provide headers that your server accepts. If you allow that then anyone can forge headers, and if you don't then how do you handle the headers on a message being relayed through the sender's ISP's mail server? You don't know what the sender's username is unless you trust the sending server, and if you trust the sending server then I can set my software up to impersonate a trustable server and get forged headers through. Encrypted and authenticated connections won't help, not without aforementioned authoritative list of legal mail servers which we don't have. And how do you handle legal forgery, eg. my using a "silverglass.org" e-mail address on messages originating from a non-silverglass.org system (my mail isn't handled by the same entity that handles my Internet connection and I plan on keeping it that way)?
SSH, scp and SFTP replaced Telnet, rcp and FTP because people could state what they wanted that the older protocols couldn't do and how those things could be done. Before you can replace SMTP you need to outline exactly what you want the new protocol to do and how it can do it, and resolve any conflicts between what it allows and what people need to do.
That's the interesting part. He instructed the jury that simply making a product that could be used for copyright violation wasn't enough, the company had to intend for it to be used for copyright violation. This is similar to DeCSS, where it can be but isn't intended for copyright violation. If the ElcomSoft instructions were used in the DeCSS case, they'd be found not guilty by the same reasoning. From a PR standpoint this is a win, because it undercuts the ability of companies to use the DMCA to shut down everything while still allowing them to prosecute actual violation, and it makes them prove intent instead of just possible use.
Simple: "You have nothing to hide either, right? So do you want the entire world seeing the details of your checkbook, or your boss to overhear that joke you told your friend about him? No? Why? After all, you don't have anything to hide, right?".
People who like coffee aren't neccesarily murderers, but most murderers like coffee. Therefore, eliminating all coffee from an area will also eliminate murder.
Fallacy apparent?
Google isn't successful because it's Google. It's successful because lots and lots of people like what it's doing now, the way it's doing it now. If you change too much of that in the search for profits you'll change the reason people prefer to use it, and they'll go somewhere else that does do what they prefer. And there goes the very source of your success and revenue: the users you attract.
If you want to invest in a successful company but think it needs to be changed significantly, ask yourself why you aren't investing in a successful company that already works the way you think it should. If that's because all the companies that work the way you think they should aren't successful, maybe it's what you think that should change, not what the successful company is.
I suspect they aren't using 802.11b or cellular for their wireless connection. Probably they're using a radio datalink on a dedicated channel in a band reserved for their use. Those tend to be much less susceptible to link-lossage.
As for as Terminal Services or Citrix, I've used both. Their performance does not measure up to X11 in a remote application, because X11 was designed for network connections while TS and Citrix were both grafted onto a system that assumed it was dealing with a physical screen. You can do a lot hooking into GDI, but in the end the system wasn't designed to support the application. Server performance isn't the bottleneck, it's the relatively low-bandwidth connection between the server and the client.
As for free license fees, sure they're free now. Is MS going to guarantee that all upgrades to all future versions will also be free? I doubt it, and there's the hook inside that tasty free-license bait. With Linux, the city's guaranteed that in 10 years their system will still be available without paying license fees or worrying about license bookkeeping to keep the BSA off their backs.
Well, you can teach the mechanics. You can teach poets and writers how the language works, why it works, what can be done that's gotten a certain effect. Similarly, you can teach people the mechanics of programming.
What you can't teach is that extra something. In writers it's the uncanny ability to take some small bit from the real world and build a story from it. In poets it's coming up with that single image that the poem turns on. In programming, it's figuring out what the program should look like to do it's job.
I suspect programming is close to something like bridge engineering. At an engineering firm there's probably dozens or even hundreds of engineers who can take the plans and specs and turn them into the detailed working drawings the construction people will need to actually build the bridge, but there's only a small handful of engineers who can take a blank piece of paper and a site and come up with the initial idea for a bridge that'll actually work and turn that into the specs and overall plans that everybody else works from.
The thing is, programming isn't like building a skyscraper. It's like designing and building a skyscraper. People who ignore one part or the other will always have problems with the result.
Actually, MS went to great lengths to make the browser not part of the OS. That's the whole point of COM/COM+/DCOM/.Net/flavor-of-the-week. They have an interface called IBrowser that defines a way for applications to ask a component to render HTML pages. Components that provide that interface can be installed on the system, IE being one example. An application can ask the system for a list of all components that provide the IBrowser interface, instantiate an instance of one of them and use it. The whole point was to decouple the IBrowser interface from the component that implements it, so that you could have multiple implementations as the situation demanded.
Of course, what happened along the way was that MS went from the minor player trying to create a way to insure that there wasn't anything special about those big third-party apps that everybody had to have (if they were all just COM components that provided standard interfaces then swapping that Oracle database out for MS SQL Server would be easy) to a company trying to keep everybody else from easily replacing it's aps (if browsers are just COM components that provide a standard IBrowser interface then swapping IE out for Mozilla would be easy).
Except that in ComScore's case, #2 is "Provide that something for free if people agree to be tracked by spyware.". If this is the ComScore I'm familiar with (and it looks like it is), they're up-front about what they're doing. You get their package knowing that you're becoming the equivalent of a Nielsen family with every single page you view being tracked and recorded. I personally wouldn't agree to that, but I imagine there's a lot of people who wouldn't care (or who have another computer for the browsing they don't want recorded).
I'd send them an e-mail explaining what I'll be telling any Web site I encounter running their stuff, but alas their domain now resolves to an address that isn't accepting connections. Pity, that. :)
No, not recognition of the brand and fear of them, the brand itself. MS values it's Windows brand highly. A product is no good for them unless it prominently carries the Windows brand on it. That's why they're so adamant about retaining their logos and appearance on the desktop. The problem is, to a phone manufacturer thier brand is incredibly important, much more so than the hardware and firmware in the phone. If you pick up a Nokia phone and it doesn't have their brand clearly visible, if instead the most clearly visible label is some other company's, this is not in Nokia's best interest. I don't see any way MS can shell out enough money to convince the cel-phone makers to give up their brands, so I don't think MS is going to make much headway with them. That's undoubtably why Sendo switched away from them: technical flexibility aside, the MS licensing terms probably prohibited Sendo from removing all traces of the Windows brand and making it appear to be a completely Sendo phone.
If an ex-employer wants you to come back to do extra work and they aren't hiring you back, you always make it clear that you're working as an independent contractor and that they will be expected to pay for your services. That's just good business practice and this is business, not personal. The billing rate, though, that varies depending on how they treat (and treated) you. If they were decent about laying you off and are being decent now, you might bill a flat amount per day or a low hourly rate for actual time with no minimums. If they're rude and unprofessional about demanding you do work for free, the rates are $100+ per hour or part thereof, phone calls counting as working time as soon as you pick up, rates double outside normal working hours and travel time is billed at $50 per hour or part thereof each way. Your time is valuable, if not for work then for looking for work, any businessman understands about not giving away a valuable product without getting something in return. Why should you be any less a businessman than your former employer?
How is it that we have come to be seen as a liability?
Accounting. Your costs show up on the books attached to you. The benefits you produce, OTOH, show up on the books attached to the people you help. This makes you appear to be completely a cost center to the accountants.
Simple. With junk snail-mail, the spammer is paying. They have to pay for printing costs for the material, and they have to pay for each piece mailed. That limits the volume, and gives them an incentive to make at least some effort to not waste money on people who won't respond.
E-mail spam, OTOH, is primarily paid for by me. I'm sorry, but my connection bandwidth is not a negligible cost. Neither is the time I spend sorting out the spam that gets past my filters (at the rates my company would bill me out at, spam costs me about $30/day). As for the argument that making my e-mail address public somehow justifies spamming it, well, you probably made your phone number public by having it published in the phone book, I suppose that would make it perfectly fine for me to keep calling you, tying up your phone line so you couldn't get any other calls, right? Sauce for the gander.
Final note: just because someone wants to sell their product does not give them unlimited rights to shove it down everyone's throat.
You can't refuse to license it at all, but you can refuse to license it to particular entities and set just about whatever license terms you want. For example, it'd be entirely legal to license a patent only to software distributed under an open-source license, or to license it to Netscape, Sun, etc. but refuse to license it to Microsoft.
Frankly I think a variation on that idea would be a good thing: the patent would be licensed royalty-free, but only to companies who in turn allow royalty-free licensing of all of their patents.
That's fine for geeks, but judges typically aren't geeks. Hold up a computer drive and the RIAA guys can run a line of BS past the judge. Hold up a Walkman, though, or bring in your CD boombox and the judge's reaction to the RIAA would be along the lines of "Right, I may not be a 20-something but even I know that those things are supposed to play CDs, and if your CD won't play in them it's not because there's anything unusual or illegal about a Walkman.". Like I said, you make sure you don't give the music-company people any excuse they can use.
If large numbers of people simply stopped buying, the music industry would just explain it away as the inevitable result of piracy. OTOH, if their merchandise doesn't sell because of the huge percentage of defective products forcing stores to not carry it anymore, with a truckload of complaints and, as suggested, small-claims cases to support the contention, they can't claim that pirates forced them to produce discs that don't play.
You do three things when a disc won't play on a standard player because of copy protection:
- Insure that the disc has the CDDA label on it, that you legitimately bought it and that it's a standard player (car stereo, home stereo, etc.) and not a computer drive. Basically give the music guys no toehold at all to call you a pirate, unless they want to claim that playing an original purchased CD on your stereo is piracy.
- Return the disc to the store as defective.
- If the store refuses to exchange it for a working disc, or refund your money if they can't find a working disc, file a complaint about the store with your local government's consumer protection office. Don't treat this as an intellectual-property issue, that's playing into the music industry's hands, treat it as a defective-merchandise issue where the warranty and related issues are much more clear-cut and much more in your favor.
When stores start getting in legal hot water for defective merchandise and failure to obey warranty laws, their legal departments will take notice and have a talk with the music industry sales reps. Even the big chains will drop labels rather than take the legal heat on a large scale.Did you factor in the probability that, inside that 6-year timeframe, the vendor will stop making the product you bought, stop selling support for it and leave you with the choice of using a completely unsupported product or going through a probably disruptive and expensive upgrade process (new software requires a newer version of the OS which requires newer hardware, new software brings new bugs, "features" and interactions you now have to troubleshoot, etc.)? And if you know you want to stick with old software in that situation, do you really need an FTE for the open-source software after the first 3-4 years shake the glitches out of the system?