You're mostly right, except that MS's pricing strategy is one of the oddities of the modern business world. Pretend they were normal. They see the cost of computers go down from an average of $2000 to an average of about $1200. This means their demand curve has shifted (since the complimentary good--actual computers in this case--have fallen in price). A perfectly competitive firm would just sit there since they're not supposed to be making any profit and it doesn't behoove them to shift prices. But not even Bill Gates would claim they fit the description of "perfectly competitive". A normal non-perfectly-competitive company would then lower the cost of their good, since the demand curve has shifted. And yet for some reason they've chosen to keep the price of their product at exactly the same price that it's been at for the past several years. It boggles the mind--actually they did use this in their defense, though I doubt anyone was convinced.
The shelf-life argument is wrong. I remember reading somewhere that retailers were annoyed that Red Hat kept updating so often. They just want one product. They'll begrugdingly sell RedHat 5.1 and 5.2, but there's no way they'll do RedHat 99.1/2/3/4 or whatever. This is the same reason that you would buy the same version of Windows 95 at the store in mid-98 that you bought in 95--the updates (Win95a, etc) were only availible to OEMs--it confuses customers and annoys retailers who don't feel like restocking every 3 months. Note that I'm not saying that subscriptions would be worse for consumers or RedHat (in an abstract sense)--I think that both would be better off if it worked perfectly. But it would annoy retailers too much, so they won't do it; perhaps they'll do something like that online for a small number of customers but their big product will stay the same.
And to the other person who replied to me (sorry, I'm lazy), that works for businesses, but they're not the customers who would be buying it in the store anyway (I guess with Linux this is different, but the principle is the same). We're talking normal consumers.
I can't ever seem to get a comment posted on Freshmeat (unless they're taking 12 hours to propogate, and it's a better site than that).
My comments:
GCC is interesting. As long as there are CS majors/grad students coming out with compiler knowledge there will be at least some people willing to work on compilers. Plus there's Cygnus. Red Hat has limited resources (a large market cap but negative profits), and they seem to be doing o good job with what they have. They pay people to work on the kernel and the foundations of things like GNOME and KDE. They pay people to do the strenuous work that is either boring (not that Alan Cox's job is boring) or requires a "get it right the first time" attitude. These are the things that make sense to pay people for. GCC has been doing fine.
Also, for the subscription method. If Red Hat did that, they would die. Simply because stores do not want to sell something that will make people not come back. They want to sell a physical product that means that people will come back to the store. If Red Hat offered a subscription service, not as many stores would carry it. This would severely hurt Red Hat since they are currently very reliant on stores. It's the same reason they have the no-support option only availible online--they don't want to confuse customers or annoy stores.
But that's incompatible in a different way. Nothing there says that you can't take BSD'd stuff, slap the GPL on it (remember, you can do anything you want with it), and put it with the GPL'd stuff (except with that advertising clause, I guess; don't know about that). What you said just means that you can't take GPL'd stuff and put it in a BSD program. And aren't you using "commercial" incorrectly? I don't think you're allowed to make proprietary yet non-commercial products out of GPL'd code. As long as you intend to distribute it, it matters.
But that's the same thing that makes it so odd. The publisher negotiates with the author for a certain amount per book text (or whatever they negotiate), regardless of distribution method. The costs for distribution and production of an electronic book are lower (since there's no middle man and a small cost of distribution), yet the book costs the same amount. Your argument is a good answer to "Why do books cost money" but not one for "Why do electronic books cost more than paper ones". There's probably more profit in each electronic book sold, but I doubt the author sees it. Or maybe they do. Anybody know?
I agree that there should be some sort of discount for the e-version of a book, but you must remember that hardback books cost more for more than just their bindings.
It's a form of what economists call "price discrimination", which is something most people are familiar with. It goes like this: a company in a really "competitive" market will have to charge the same price to everyone. If they could charge more to people who want the good more and less to people who want it less, they would do so. That's why you have different prices for airline tickets, movie tickets, food coupons, etc. Same thing with books. They come out with the hardback maybe a year before the paperback. People who really want the book will buy it in hardback, sometimes convincing themselves that they're paying for the binding ($15?!). Others will wait for the paperback. So it makes sense that they charge about the same for a newer book (hardback) than an older book (paperback), though I agree there should be some discout, since distribution costs are roughly the same and the cost of production is almost entirely shifted to the consumer (who has to buy the electronic thingie in the first place).
People on the high end of Intel hardware ($3000 to $7000 range) stick with Intel because of OS flexability
I've never heard that before. Is this true? I thought they used it because of executable compatibility. Do people really buy $5000 x86 machines because they run more than one OS? Any case-studies out there?
What is Amazon worth, REALLY? I mean, take away the overinflated stock, and what do you have? Some servers, some T-1 lines, and a warehouse full of books?
That's the $60,000 question (or whatever it is up to now). Does the name "Amazon.com" mean anything to the American public? I know that at least for me, there is no such thing as retail brand loyalty online. I buy wherever has the cheapest price, not the place that I know the best (of course, I have to have at least heard a little about them; I'm not going to buy from a no-name). But what about the rest of the country/world? Will they all equate Amazon.com with books for the rest of their lives? If so, Amazon has a lot more than a couple of T-1 lines. It all depends on how pervasive things like agents become (not real agents but the excuses for agents we have now). If people can find the cheapest place to buy a book just as fast as they can find the book on Amazon, they're going to do the former. But will they? I still have to laugh at all the loss-leaders the online merchants have. I'm not going to stay around!!! But they don't know that. Another thing possibly in Amazon's favor is their developing distributor relationships. If they can end up having a lower bottom line than anyone else, they WILL be around forever.
Panel, not pager. The pager works fine, but in a perfect world E would make sure that windows never appeared BEHIND the panel (Mac and Win* apps don't appear behind their taskbars.) Changing the focus should fix your problem, though.
Wow, you're right! I don't think I've ever seen a lower STN ratio on an article before. Ah, the flame wars are back--just as the people at KDE and GNOME start getting along the users (and people who seems to either like MS products or like to make people mad, probably the latter) start fighting again.
I started using GNOME when it was the "morally superior" desktop. The Trolltech basically fixed all that, but I was already using GNOME so I didn't see the point. If KDE becomes sufficiently better than GNOME that it's worth the effort and disorientation of switching, I will. I would hope the reverse would be true for most KDE users.
Despite what a lot of people may say, recent GNOME releases have been very stable (they leave lots of core files, but that's only because my X-server dies). And this interview shows that GNOME is getting more done. It looks like GNOME Workshop will be a nice competitor to KOffice, so neither will stagnate. As long as the filesystems are compatible, I wouldn't mind having both.
Other thing that surprised me: GNOME Filesystem?!
Re:And now it's back (again) - OFFTOPIC
on
Quickie Sunday
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· Score: 2
It wasn't moderated up. Once you get moderated up enough, your posts start at 2 autmatically. On the other hand, if you get moderated down enough, your posts start a 0, then I think -1 (I can't think of anyone besides DAVEO who got moderated down enough to get a 0). You can tell this post wasn't moderated because there's no adjective after the score.
For instance, my post will have a score of 2, without moderation. Sometimes I log out and post as an AC because I don't think what I have to say is worth +2. I sort of wish we were given the option of posting with a lower score.
Or maybe you're talking about something else, but as of now nothing in this thread has been moderated.
Speaking as a Mississippian liberal, I have to correct one thing. In the South Democrat does not necessarily equal liberal. You will quite often see both parties supporting school prayer, right-to-life, less gun control, etc. Sometimes I honestly can't tell the difference. But conservative Southern Democrats are known as "Boll Weevils", or at least they used to be--don't know about now. So what you said is basically correct if you replace any party lines with conservative-liberal lines.
I wonder what this means. Slashdot was certainly shaken up a bit at first, but now it seems to be back on track again (Roblimo is doing pretty well now!)
Currently Freshmeat has no source of income, right? They're quite a different animal from Slashdot. So I guess this means they'll start having banner ads, correct? And the mirroring by other companies would probably stop too, right? (I mean, it's one thing to do something out of the good of your heart for poor scoop, but what about for Andover?) Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Just wondering what their plans are for it, since it's quite different from Slashdot.
You are probably right: being with a parent is better than being with a computer or tv.
But most of the kids who would end up going to this thing would probably (if they're like everywhere else) be part of an after-school program of some sort. These would be kids whose parents would be at work until 5 or 6 every night. For them, it's probably not a choice between "be with mom" and "play Reader Rabbit" (do they still make that? I loved that thing). It's a choice between "go to afterschool program and use computers" or "go home and watch tv, possibly get into trouble". Unfortunately, it's not about choosing whether or not to use an "eletronic babysitter"--many parents have already made this choice either from laziness or being too busy or thinking that it's good in moderation. The real choice is often about which electronic babysitter does the least damage. I think most of us here (except possibly those with CTS) would agree that a computer would do the least damage, being interactive.
So in most cases, a parent is better, but when a parent isn't an option, then what?
The real question is: Is it better to have children play with each other under supervision (not a parent) like normal or use a computer under supervision, and which requires less supervision. The answer might be the same; kids might be better off playing red rover (they still do that one, too?) instead of using the computer.
I wasn't really paying attention to computers when IBM got into trouble with the government. Whatever happened with that? Didn't that cause serious problems, despite never reaching a verdict? I'm just asking because a lot of people say that this doesn't mean anything since it will be appealed, but didn't in mean something for IBM? Someone enlighten me!
I use WinNT/Linux. I have to use a remote college box via unencrypted telnet. So first off, anyone who wants to can grab my password or whatever. I run a reasonably secure box...I don't have lots of unnecessary things running, I don't run as root, and don't make things that can write to arbitrary files suid. Even so, anyone can sit down and in 10 minutes compromise either of my OSes...either by doing a linux single reboot (which I haven't had the heart to remove, because I need it if I screw up X, which auto-runs because not using xdm is worse security-wise), or by installing another copy of WinNT onto my DOS volume, rebooting, and giving themselves admin privileges. That assumes that they can't find any holes in the OSes.
To be fair, you need an armed guard, not IPsec to fix this problem!
I do have to say that ssh was by far the easiest daemon for me to set up on Red Hat ever.
That's it. Quite drop-in. Now I suppose if you installed it manually and had to deal with generating a key it might be a bit more difficult, but that was as easy to install as anything I've ever used. Don't know about PGP, though I doubt it's that easy.
I never doubted that some people do this; and if that's what you do, good for you, I guess. It's much better than just stealing the stuff. But in my experience, most people who download MP3s off the Internet have stopped buying music. In fact, Slashdot is the only place I've seen your sentiment expressed. Maybe I just know all the wrong people. I don't doubt that it happens; I just don't think it's normal.
Duplication without permission is theft. By hitting "submit" on slashdot, you are giving permission for Slashdot to reproduce your comments. You are also giving me permission to look at them. When someone makes a CD, they give you a license to listen to the music. You are allowed to make archival backups of the music, but you are not allowed to distribute the music. This is illegal. You may not be stealing an idea, but you are stealing revenue from the people that created the idea.
What is being done is duplication and distribution. You may call that stealing, robbery, or theft. I prefer to call it what it is. Piracy is unauthorized duplication and distribution, but why does the RIAA cause
sic it piracy? Piracy has wonderful connotations to pirates on the open seas. Perfect for fooling the populace.
You are taking something that costs money. They have not technically lost anything from your piracy, but they have lost an opportunity for revenue. If you're the sort of person who would never buy anything copyrighted (just let me know if you're the sort of person who's never bought a movie-ticket, book or CD and I'll produce my unicorn). Duplication and distribution is not necessarily wrong. I give my words to slashdot so that this can be done. Unauthorized duplication and distribution is illegal and wrong. If I wrote my post on a piece of paper and CmdrTaco came to my house and stole the paper and posted it on slashdot, that would be wrong. Leaving out the "unauthorized" part in your sentence is wrong. Is the duplication and distribution of your credit card numbers ok?
Note that Macrovision discourages 'petty (at-home) duplication', but that is not strongly against the will of the populace.
WTF are you talking about? "the will of the populace"? Who died and make you Lenin? So let me get this straight:the will of the people is that music should be freely distributable but not movies?
Would you be more satisfied if there were no allowances for fair use? Then there would be no arbitrary line, and you can be sure that line is a lot closer to no fair use than uninhibited fair use. Fair use is extremely well defined through years of court history. It is not arbitrary.
Now I'm going to hit submit, thereby giving implicit permission to Slashdot to reproduce my message.
Duplication without permission is theft. By hitting "submit" on slashdot, you are giving permission for Slashdot to reproduce your comments. You are also giving me permission to look at them. When someone makes a CD, they give you a license to listen to the music. You are allowed to make archival backups of the music, but you are not allowed to distribute the music. This is illegal. You may not be stealing an idea, but you are stealing revenue from the people that created the idea.
What is being done is duplication and distribution. You may call that stealing, robbery, or theft. I prefer to call it what it is. Piracy is unauthorized duplication and distribution, but why does the RIAA cause
sic it piracy? Piracy has wonderful connotations to pirates on the open seas. Perfect for fooling the populace.
You are taking something that costs money. They have not technically lost anything from your piracy, but they have lost an opportunity for revenue. If you're the sort of person who would never buy anything copyrighted (just let me know if you're the sort of person who's never bought a movie-ticket, book or CD and I'll produce my unicorn). Duplication and distribution is not necessarily wrong. I give my words to slashdot so that this can be done. Unauthorized duplication and distribution is illegal and wrong. If I wrote my post on a piece of paper and CmdrTaco came to my house and stole the paper and posted it on slashdot, that would be wrong. Leaving out the "unauthorized" part in your sentence is wrong. Is the duplication and distribution of your credit card numbers ok?
Note that Macrovision discourages 'petty (at-home) duplication', but that is not strongly against the will of the populace.
WTF are you talking about? "the will of the populace"? Who died and make you Lenin? So let me get this straight:the will of the people is that music should be freely distributable but not movies?
Now I'm going to hit submit, thereby giving implicit permission to Slashdot to reproduce my message.
It is the same thing, most people would contribute to the artist, even if it were not manditory, because they feel the dialog, the artistic creations are worth the contribution.
Are you sure about this? Most people? I find it very hypocritical when people say they don't buy CDs because the record studios cheat the artists. Of course, by stealing the MP3, you're cheating the artist out of the $1.50 or whatever that they would have made. Do they write a check for $1.50 and put it in the mailbox? No. Perhaps you do, but I doubt most people would. In fact, I doubt most people who use stolen (I will not mince words) MP3s give anything back to the artist, and if your only point is to try to screw over the record studios because they're screwing over the artists, you accomplish little by screwing both over.
I can see MP3s are quickly eroding music copyright, and I don't particularly think this is a good thing. I'm glad that the music I listen to (classical and "World" music) has a nice body of listeners who are willing to pay for the music rather than steal it. Because once a type of music becomes "commoditized" by piracy, a studio has no interest in promomitng it. They won't hire good editors, people to draw nice covers, and the artists themselves. You will have more music than you ever had before, I'm sure, once it all comes down. But it will be the music of garage bands who can't earn a living making music. Perhaps that in itself will satisfy you, but the music will be lower quality, just because not enough money is going into it (not to say that money==quality, but in general giving sustenance to artists does more to improve the quanity/quality of their work and tarnish it).
"If people are not honest, they will never be thwarted." This is true, depending on your definition of "thwarted." You can't stop people completely, that's for sure. But you can make things more difficult and stem a LOT of it. For instance, using and finding MP3s, believe it or not, is not something the general population can do with ease. It's difficult. Therefore most people don't use them. Likewise, it is common to sidestep Macrovision protection on DVD and VHS players, but it still does a lot to stem petty piracy. Macrovision does not "thwart" piracy; it still exists, in spades. But it does prevent an awful lot of it.
Copyright and money are not as tightly linked as some people might think, but they are still linked. When a company/individual fears losing control over the distribution, they seek other ways of making money off of their intellectual privacy. I loathe the day when music tracks come dubbed with ads. In short, without copyright, the artist can make money, but it's even less of a guarantee than it is now. You not only have to achieve a certain level of fame (and there will always be a few groups which have all the fame and a lot of groups which have no fame, regardless of the distribution method; this is the way human preference works), but you have to make sure that you can make money off of it. Now you just have to worry about the first.
The only thing that will ever "encourage" people, at least in the states, to be more efficient when driving is $10/gallon gas
Oo!oo!I know this one! There has to be a $6/gallon tax (putting gas at about $6.75, I suppose) for drivers to take into account all the consequences of driving: pollution, increased death rates, The Gulf War, etc. This according to some study I read for work in July. Can't remember the source, though.
The only thing that will ever "encourage" people, at least in the states, to be more efficient when driving is $10/gallon gas
Oo!oo!I know this one! There has to be a $6/gallon tax (putting gas at about $6.75, I suppose) for drivers to take into account all the consequences of driving: pollution, increased death rates, The Gulf War, etc. This according to some study I read for work in July. Can't remember the source, though.
Well, since you are biased, could you take those points and explain how Berlin has fixed/is-attempting-to-fix these things? I can guess the answer to 3 and 4 pretty easily but I'm curious as to how a start-over approach would deal with the rest of the items.
Slashdot Mirror
You're mostly right, except that MS's pricing strategy is one of the oddities of the modern business world. Pretend they were normal. They see the cost of computers go down from an average of $2000 to an average of about $1200. This means their demand curve has shifted (since the complimentary good--actual computers in this case--have fallen in price). A perfectly competitive firm would just sit there since they're not supposed to be making any profit and it doesn't behoove them to shift prices. But not even Bill Gates would claim they fit the description of "perfectly competitive". A normal non-perfectly-competitive company would then lower the cost of their good, since the demand curve has shifted. And yet for some reason they've chosen to keep the price of their product at exactly the same price that it's been at for the past several years. It boggles the mind--actually they did use this in their defense, though I doubt anyone was convinced.
The shelf-life argument is wrong. I remember reading somewhere that retailers were annoyed that Red Hat kept updating so often. They just want one product. They'll begrugdingly sell RedHat 5.1 and 5.2, but there's no way they'll do RedHat 99.1/2/3/4 or whatever. This is the same reason that you would buy the same version of Windows 95 at the store in mid-98 that you bought in 95--the updates (Win95a, etc) were only availible to OEMs--it confuses customers and annoys retailers who don't feel like restocking every 3 months. Note that I'm not saying that subscriptions would be worse for consumers or RedHat (in an abstract sense)--I think that both would be better off if it worked perfectly. But it would annoy retailers too much, so they won't do it; perhaps they'll do something like that online for a small number of customers but their big product will stay the same.
And to the other person who replied to me (sorry, I'm lazy), that works for businesses, but they're not the customers who would be buying it in the store anyway (I guess with Linux this is different, but the principle is the same). We're talking normal consumers.
I can't ever seem to get a comment posted on Freshmeat (unless they're taking 12 hours to propogate, and it's a better site than that).
My comments:
GCC is interesting. As long as there are CS majors/grad students coming out with compiler knowledge there will be at least some people willing to work on compilers. Plus there's Cygnus. Red Hat has limited resources (a large market cap but negative profits), and they seem to be doing o good job with what they have. They pay people to work on the kernel and the foundations of things like GNOME and KDE. They pay people to do the strenuous work that is either boring (not that Alan Cox's job is boring) or requires a "get it right the first time" attitude. These are the things that make sense to pay people for. GCC has been doing fine.
Also, for the subscription method. If Red Hat did that, they would die. Simply because stores do not want to sell something that will make people not come back. They want to sell a physical product that means that people will come back to the store. If Red Hat offered a subscription service, not as many stores would carry it. This would severely hurt Red Hat since they are currently very reliant on stores. It's the same reason they have the no-support option only availible online--they don't want to confuse customers or annoy stores.
But that's incompatible in a different way. Nothing there says that you can't take BSD'd stuff, slap the GPL on it (remember, you can do anything you want with it), and put it with the GPL'd stuff (except with that advertising clause, I guess; don't know about that). What you said just means that you can't take GPL'd stuff and put it in a BSD program. And aren't you using "commercial" incorrectly? I don't think you're allowed to make proprietary yet non-commercial products out of GPL'd code. As long as you intend to distribute it, it matters.
But that's the same thing that makes it so odd. The publisher negotiates with the author for a certain amount per book text (or whatever they negotiate), regardless of distribution method. The costs for distribution and production of an electronic book are lower (since there's no middle man and a small cost of distribution), yet the book costs the same amount. Your argument is a good answer to "Why do books cost money" but not one for "Why do electronic books cost more than paper ones". There's probably more profit in each electronic book sold, but I doubt the author sees it. Or maybe they do. Anybody know?
I agree that there should be some sort of discount for the e-version of a book, but you must remember that hardback books cost more for more than just their bindings.
It's a form of what economists call "price discrimination", which is something most people are familiar with. It goes like this: a company in a really "competitive" market will have to charge the same price to everyone. If they could charge more to people who want the good more and less to people who want it less, they would do so. That's why you have different prices for airline tickets, movie tickets, food coupons, etc. Same thing with books. They come out with the hardback maybe a year before the paperback. People who really want the book will buy it in hardback, sometimes convincing themselves that they're paying for the binding ($15?!). Others will wait for the paperback. So it makes sense that they charge about the same for a newer book (hardback) than an older book (paperback), though I agree there should be some discout, since distribution costs are roughly the same and the cost of production is almost entirely shifted to the consumer (who has to buy the electronic thingie in the first place).
People on the high end of Intel hardware ($3000 to $7000 range) stick with Intel because of OS flexability
I've never heard that before. Is this true? I thought they used it because of executable compatibility. Do people really buy $5000 x86 machines because they run more than one OS? Any case-studies out there?
Yeah, I just sold my NVDA today! What a pleasant surprise! Any idea why all that happened?
Panel, not pager. The pager works fine, but in a perfect world E would make sure that windows never appeared BEHIND the panel (Mac and Win* apps don't appear behind their taskbars.) Changing the focus should fix your problem, though.
Wow, you're right! I don't think I've ever seen a lower STN ratio on an article before. Ah, the flame wars are back--just as the people at KDE and GNOME start getting along the users (and people who seems to either like MS products or like to make people mad, probably the latter) start fighting again.
I started using GNOME when it was the "morally superior" desktop. The Trolltech basically fixed all that, but I was already using GNOME so I didn't see the point. If KDE becomes sufficiently better than GNOME that it's worth the effort and disorientation of switching, I will. I would hope the reverse would be true for most KDE users.
Despite what a lot of people may say, recent GNOME releases have been very stable (they leave lots of core files, but that's only because my X-server dies). And this interview shows that GNOME is getting more done. It looks like GNOME Workshop will be a nice competitor to KOffice, so neither will stagnate. As long as the filesystems are compatible, I wouldn't mind having both.
Other thing that surprised me: GNOME Filesystem?!
It wasn't moderated up. Once you get moderated up enough, your posts start at 2 autmatically. On the other hand, if you get moderated down enough, your posts start a 0, then I think -1 (I can't think of anyone besides DAVEO who got moderated down enough to get a 0). You can tell this post wasn't moderated because there's no adjective after the score.
For instance, my post will have a score of 2, without moderation. Sometimes I log out and post as an AC because I don't think what I have to say is worth +2. I sort of wish we were given the option of posting with a lower score.
Or maybe you're talking about something else, but as of now nothing in this thread has been moderated.
Speaking as a Mississippian liberal, I have to correct one thing. In the South Democrat does not necessarily equal liberal. You will quite often see both parties supporting school prayer, right-to-life, less gun control, etc. Sometimes I honestly can't tell the difference. But conservative Southern Democrats are known as "Boll Weevils", or at least they used to be--don't know about now. So what you said is basically correct if you replace any party lines with conservative-liberal lines.
I wonder what this means. Slashdot was certainly shaken up a bit at first, but now it seems to be back on track again (Roblimo is doing pretty well now!)
Currently Freshmeat has no source of income, right? They're quite a different animal from Slashdot. So I guess this means they'll start having banner ads, correct? And the mirroring by other companies would probably stop too, right? (I mean, it's one thing to do something out of the good of your heart for poor scoop, but what about for Andover?) Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Just wondering what their plans are for it, since it's quite different from Slashdot.
You are probably right: being with a parent is better than being with a computer or tv.
But most of the kids who would end up going to this thing would probably (if they're like everywhere else) be part of an after-school program of some sort. These would be kids whose parents would be at work until 5 or 6 every night. For them, it's probably not a choice between "be with mom" and "play Reader Rabbit" (do they still make that? I loved that thing). It's a choice between "go to afterschool program and use computers" or "go home and watch tv, possibly get into trouble". Unfortunately, it's not about choosing whether or not to use an "eletronic babysitter"--many parents have already made this choice either from laziness or being too busy or thinking that it's good in moderation. The real choice is often about which electronic babysitter does the least damage. I think most of us here (except possibly those with CTS) would agree that a computer would do the least damage, being interactive.
So in most cases, a parent is better, but when a parent isn't an option, then what?
The real question is: Is it better to have children play with each other under supervision (not a parent) like normal or use a computer under supervision, and which requires less supervision. The answer might be the same; kids might be better off playing red rover (they still do that one, too?) instead of using the computer.
I wasn't really paying attention to computers when IBM got into trouble with the government. Whatever happened with that? Didn't that cause serious problems, despite never reaching a verdict? I'm just asking because a lot of people say that this doesn't mean anything since it will be appealed, but didn't in mean something for IBM? Someone enlighten me!
So he meant the client on Windows?! That's even easier. You don't have to type anything!
To be fair, you need an armed guard, not IPsec to fix this problem!
I do have to say that ssh was by far the easiest daemon for me to set up on Red Hat ever.
rpmfind ssh-server;
rpm -ivh
That's it. Quite drop-in. Now I suppose if you installed it manually and had to deal with generating a key it might be a bit more difficult, but that was as easy to install as anything I've ever used. Don't know about PGP, though I doubt it's that easy.
I never doubted that some people do this; and if that's what you do, good for you, I guess. It's much better than just stealing the stuff. But in my experience, most people who download MP3s off the Internet have stopped buying music. In fact, Slashdot is the only place I've seen your sentiment expressed. Maybe I just know all the wrong people. I don't doubt that it happens; I just don't think it's normal.
Duplication without permission is theft. By hitting "submit" on slashdot, you are giving permission for Slashdot to reproduce your comments. You are also giving me permission to look at them. When someone makes a CD, they give you a license to listen to the music. You are allowed to make archival backups of the music, but you are not allowed to distribute the music. This is illegal. You may not be stealing an idea, but you are stealing revenue from the people that created the idea.
You are taking something that costs money. They have not technically lost anything from your piracy, but they have lost an opportunity for revenue. If you're the sort of person who would never buy anything copyrighted (just let me know if you're the sort of person who's never bought a movie-ticket, book or CD and I'll produce my unicorn). Duplication and distribution is not necessarily wrong. I give my words to slashdot so that this can be done. Unauthorized duplication and distribution is illegal and wrong. If I wrote my post on a piece of paper and CmdrTaco came to my house and stole the paper and posted it on slashdot, that would be wrong. Leaving out the "unauthorized" part in your sentence is wrong. Is the duplication and distribution of your credit card numbers ok?
WTF are you talking about? "the will of the populace"? Who died and make you Lenin? So let me get this straight:the will of the people is that music should be freely distributable but not movies?
Would you be more satisfied if there were no allowances for fair use? Then there would be no arbitrary line, and you can be sure that line is a lot closer to no fair use than uninhibited fair use. Fair use is extremely well defined through years of court history. It is not arbitrary.
Now I'm going to hit submit, thereby giving implicit permission to Slashdot to reproduce my message.
Duplication without permission is theft. By hitting "submit" on slashdot, you are giving permission for Slashdot to reproduce your comments. You are also giving me permission to look at them. When someone makes a CD, they give you a license to listen to the music. You are allowed to make archival backups of the music, but you are not allowed to distribute the music. This is illegal. You may not be stealing an idea, but you are stealing revenue from the people that created the idea.
You are taking something that costs money. They have not technically lost anything from your piracy, but they have lost an opportunity for revenue. If you're the sort of person who would never buy anything copyrighted (just let me know if you're the sort of person who's never bought a movie-ticket, book or CD and I'll produce my unicorn). Duplication and distribution is not necessarily wrong. I give my words to slashdot so that this can be done. Unauthorized duplication and distribution is illegal and wrong. If I wrote my post on a piece of paper and CmdrTaco came to my house and stole the paper and posted it on slashdot, that would be wrong. Leaving out the "unauthorized" part in your sentence is wrong. Is the duplication and distribution of your credit card numbers ok?
WTF are you talking about? "the will of the populace"? Who died and make you Lenin? So let me get this straight:the will of the people is that music should be freely distributable but not movies?
Now I'm going to hit submit, thereby giving implicit permission to Slashdot to reproduce my message.
Are you sure about this? Most people? I find it very hypocritical when people say they don't buy CDs because the record studios cheat the artists. Of course, by stealing the MP3, you're cheating the artist out of the $1.50 or whatever that they would have made. Do they write a check for $1.50 and put it in the mailbox? No. Perhaps you do, but I doubt most people would. In fact, I doubt most people who use stolen (I will not mince words) MP3s give anything back to the artist, and if your only point is to try to screw over the record studios because they're screwing over the artists, you accomplish little by screwing both over.
I can see MP3s are quickly eroding music copyright, and I don't particularly think this is a good thing. I'm glad that the music I listen to (classical and "World" music) has a nice body of listeners who are willing to pay for the music rather than steal it. Because once a type of music becomes "commoditized" by piracy, a studio has no interest in promomitng it. They won't hire good editors, people to draw nice covers, and the artists themselves. You will have more music than you ever had before, I'm sure, once it all comes down. But it will be the music of garage bands who can't earn a living making music. Perhaps that in itself will satisfy you, but the music will be lower quality, just because not enough money is going into it (not to say that money==quality, but in general giving sustenance to artists does more to improve the quanity/quality of their work and tarnish it).
"If people are not honest, they will never be thwarted." This is true, depending on your definition of "thwarted." You can't stop people completely, that's for sure. But you can make things more difficult and stem a LOT of it. For instance, using and finding MP3s, believe it or not, is not something the general population can do with ease. It's difficult. Therefore most people don't use them. Likewise, it is common to sidestep Macrovision protection on DVD and VHS players, but it still does a lot to stem petty piracy. Macrovision does not "thwart" piracy; it still exists, in spades. But it does prevent an awful lot of it.
Copyright and money are not as tightly linked as some people might think, but they are still linked. When a company/individual fears losing control over the distribution, they seek other ways of making money off of their intellectual privacy. I loathe the day when music tracks come dubbed with ads. In short, without copyright, the artist can make money, but it's even less of a guarantee than it is now. You not only have to achieve a certain level of fame (and there will always be a few groups which have all the fame and a lot of groups which have no fame, regardless of the distribution method; this is the way human preference works), but you have to make sure that you can make money off of it. Now you just have to worry about the first.
Oo!oo!I know this one! There has to be a $6/gallon tax (putting gas at about $6.75, I suppose) for drivers to take into account all the consequences of driving: pollution, increased death rates, The Gulf War, etc. This according to some study I read for work in July. Can't remember the source, though.
Oo!oo!I know this one! There has to be a $6/gallon tax (putting gas at about $6.75, I suppose) for drivers to take into account all the consequences of driving: pollution, increased death rates, The Gulf War, etc. This according to some study I read for work in July. Can't remember the source, though.
Well, since you are biased, could you take those points and explain how Berlin has fixed/is-attempting-to-fix these things? I can guess the answer to 3 and 4 pretty easily but I'm curious as to how a start-over approach would deal with the rest of the items.