Hey pal, no one wants your even-handed description of factual matters! Can't you at least take a potshot at Apple or find a way to mention software licensing?;)
That's nuts. That's going too far. If I write a book, or a song, I am entitled to distribute it however I want, even I choose to use "artificial scarcity" to make profits.
And I do write books, by the way, and sell them, and it would NOT BE POSSIBLE TO DO THIS if people could legally sell photocopies of my books at 1/2 the price, or distribute copies online. My business would not be viable, I'd get a cubicle job, and there would be less books on the market. That would be bad for the economy and bad for the consumer.
In the scenario you propose, only slackers or the independently wealthly would be making content. And I am sure they could make some great stuff, but would it be enough stuff? Or good enough for everyone's tastes?
Many would propose a system of voluntary donations. And I think that is good as a way to support the people who do choose to make free stuff. It's a nice gesture. But I doubt that such a system will ever work well enough to support whole entertainment industries.
I think it is far more reasonable to simply roll back the copyright laws to the point where copyrights weren't granted seemingly forever, so that stuff would eventually enter the public domain. That way the content people can make their money and keep making content, and we aren't all held hostage to the IP companies forever.
The only moral course of action is to boycott content that isn't open.
I doubt you would be saying that if you had to try and pay the rent by creating content, as I do.
Can you look a guy like me in the eye and say with a straight face "you are an amoral bastard for selling that book you wrote?"
Until DVDs hit, laserdiscs ruled! They gave near DVD quality, and delivered it many years earlier. Flipping them was a pain, but a good player would flip the read head so you didn't have to get up. (on a long movie you still might have to put a second platter in though.)
I still have a stack of them, and I am overcome by a fit of nostalgia whenever I pick one up. They have this weird smell... something about the glue or the plastic... very distinctive, in the same way that a PCB smell is. I also have some programming that will probably never show up on DVD, and since my 12-year old LD player just bit the dust I am not sure what to do about that.
Mmm, analog spinning video media! Those were the days. But when DVDs came along and you could get them for $5-10 each (very common in the early days when there were all kinds of special deals) I bought in and never looked back.
will be the worst on migrant latino workers, the people that make this country run on a day to day basis, the most trod-upon class of Americans.
I used to live in LA. All over LA, you see people with Mexican flags on their cars, and those stupid window stickers showing Calvin peeing on something. In Los Angeles, Calvin is usually peeing on one of 3 things.
1. A Ford emblem
2. the word "America"
3. The phrase "La Migra"
Once you have seen enough "I hate your country" stickers, you start to care a little less about the "delicate sensibilities" of the illegal alien. If the Feds want to take a non-citizen out of his I-hate-America-stickered car and sweat him for 7 days, more power to them.
Maybe that makes me a white racist nationalistic baby-killing seal-clubbing monster. I don't care anymore.
Why can't I ever see someone with a Mexican AND American flag on their car? That would be great. It's OK to be into your roots and all that. It's even OK to advertise your hate for the country. But if you ain't a citizen, I don't have a problem with curtailing your rights.
I'm one of those gun nuts, I know all about the slippery slope, but I am still fed up, and I am willing to throw the aliens to the government dogs. Hopefully that will keep them busy for a while. Maybe they'll even catch some bad guys.
You may have had a bad Apple experience but there are good stories too.
My mom had a Pismo, and after 6 months it turned into a lemon. After shipping it to Apple 3 times for repair... Apple exchanged the Pismo for a new Powerbook G4. A lemon computer sucks, but they took care of the problem with style.
What is SUPER aggravating about Apple is their desktop computer repair policy. Apple does not have ANY ABILITY to repair desktop computers. If you buy one, and it is DOA, you get to take it to CompUSA or your other preferred Apple service center... and we all know how fun THAT can be.
My wife's cousin got an iMac, and it was DOA. I spent hours on the phone with Apple before I had to give up and take the damn thing to ChumpUSA. I thought that their good laptop service would extend to desktops, but I was terribly mistaken.
Come on, how can you live without the Windows "Instant Game Crashing Key?" Or the "You've accidentally hit the Menu key and now your keystrokes will start twiddling menu commands key?"
(and why don't game programmers disable the damn Windows key which can only cause evil? If the game isn't stable enough to be put into the background, they shouldn't let you try... because it happens accidentally. I had to REMOVE my Windows keys.)
Why could you possibly care about language support plug-ins? Either you area Man of the World, Concerned about Your Fellow Humans, or, I suspect, you just want to take shots at Apple where you can.
If I am mistaken and you are shopping for an MP3 player for your grandmother who speaks Farsi, apologies in advance. But that seems like an unlikely scenario.
From what I have read about the NSA, the prohibitions on spying are removed if a citizen has done certain things. Simply leaving the US is one of them; take a trip to Canada and you are eligible for all kinds of surveillance thereafter, should "they" feel the need. Communications with foreign nations puts you in the same boat, I think. Like, a domestic phone call is protected, whereas a call to you mom overseas is not.
I read about this in a book called The Puzzle Palace. Good stuff.
Well, they certainly DID in the past. Read up on Operation Shamrock, which was the wholesale monitoring of US cable communications. This isn't anti-government crazytalk; this stuff really happened. It's well documented in books like The Puzzle Palace.
Considering the audacity they showed before I am not prepared to say that they do not spy on citizens.
Here is an interesting link about another book by the Puzzle Palace guy.
Read their charter; i'm pretty sure it's not classified.
The current charter is classified. The original 1950s version is available though.
The NSA is super spooky. Read The Puzzle Palace if you have the time. A bit dry in parts, but fascinating in others.
Doesn't PS6 have a vector graphics function now? Being able to do some simple Illustrator-style work IN PS would be great, less app switching. Haven't tried it yet but that is what I read.
I think it is more likely that the required DRM components will NOT be freely available. I forsee a scenario where there are only Mac and Windows DRM modules with gov't approval, and you will have to pay handsomely to get the software, which will be distributed in binary form.
Wait, did I say Mac & Windows? I meant just Windows!
I seriously doubt that the term "source code" is in these discussions on the Hill. And major software vendors like Sun, Microsoft etc. are probably already having strategy meetings, trying to figure out how they can become the source for this new legally-required software, even if they publicly condemn it.
(It's a potential gold mine -- imagine how much $ there is to be made if every single piece of software needs to incorporate a particular function by law. The mind boggles.)
If this jive goes down, it will give a whole new meaning to "vintage computers."
If I'm on the bike and take a digger, I'd rather break the little kodak throw away then anything I've spent real money on...
Heh, there is a lesson I have yet to learn. When I go biking, my camelback is packed with the usual emergency bike stuff PLUS my Nikon 990, a ham radio, cell phone, and sometimes a pistol. It's heavy as hell, but hey, I'm out there for the exercise, right?
I don't know that camera, but my keen digicam shopper's intuition tells me that the Fuji's resolution may be inflated. For example, many flatbed scanners come with ludicrously high resolutions, but those are interpolated values. The "pure" optical resolution is generally much lower, and that is the only figure you should be concerned with.
Digicams do the same stuff with "digital zoom," which is totally useless. And I have seen some digicams doing interpolation jive with their resolution numbers too. Caveat emptor.
While I agree with what you are saying I have to take issue with one comment:
Your elected officials, those politicians that are IN FACT funded by the McWorld corporate machine, are taking this crisis as the perfect opportunity to eliminate liberal democracy and replace it with intolerant conservatism.
This isn't a liberal vs. conservative battle. This is simply about CONTROL. Do Republicans want to control us MORE than Democrats? No, they just want to control different things. Liberals want gun control; conservatives want uterus control. I'm sure both camps would like to Lojack us all, given the chance.
Don't make this a partisan issue, you dilute the strength of the underlying message:
1. Governments tend towards more control.
2. To stave off unreasonable controls we must all be vigilant and active in the political process.
(As an aside, I believe that #2 requires strong-willed people to JOIN the government. If NO idealists went to Capitol Hill, believing the system to be 100% corrupt, it seems like things would get worse a lot faster. So become part of the political machine, Joe Citizen -- someone's got to do it.)
popper3, v 3.32 I think it is. I think there were 1 or 2 others, but this is the one I have. Yes, it's a bit old, but since I only had one Outlook user it was easier to make THEM change clients.
:)
My point is simply that MS wasn't crafting great POP3 clients, they were the only ones that caused trouble.
CC companies are not white knights many make them out to be. In my experience, anyway.
We had a dispute with a moving company once. They were a load of late, lying, box-smashing bastards. They had all our stuff, couldn't tell us when it would get to our new place, and had charged our credit card a huge amount, including last-second things we never agreed to. The moving company hadn't even made us sign a contract.
We called the credit card company to see if there was any way we could stop payment or apply pressure to the movers. There wasn't. Since it wasn't a broken piece of merchandise, but a SERVICE, they utterly refused to get involved. They said that if you paid a company for a service, and that company then altered the terms of the arrangement -- charging more, delivering less, whatever -- that the CC company would not take action on your behalf. Period.
Maybe it was just one brain-dead rep. I dunno. That is the first and last time I have ever tried to get help from a CC company.
(Luckily my employer was paying for this move, so I had little motivation to go to court or something like that, and it worked out in the end. Except for the hassle of not having my stuff for 3 WEEKS when they said the move would take 4 DAYS.)
* Patches for popular software that are exploitable tend to come out real quick because the company has to save face and perhaps protect against liability suits.
Can you provide any references for software liability suits? I thought that the stupid click-through licenses typically "absolved" the publishers of liability, and this has yet to be tested in court.
I can't remember reading about anyone suing a publisher over crummy software -- does this actually happen? It fear of such a lawsuit really grounds for Microsoft/IBM/Intuit doing anything? I'd love to see MS get sued for IIS being buggy, but I can't remember anything remotely like that happening in the past. If I have missed something, fire away!
Slashdot Mirror
Hey pal, no one wants your even-handed description of factual matters! Can't you at least take a potshot at Apple or find a way to mention software licensing?
I am arguing that participation in a corrupt system is immoral.
I can agree with that, but you still haven't explained how I am "immoral" for selling a book. I'm slow; spell it out for me.
Of course, in Gamecube Resident Evil, you will have to fight the zombies by jumping onto their heads.
That's nuts. That's going too far. If I write a book, or a song, I am entitled to distribute it however I want, even I choose to use "artificial scarcity" to make profits.
And I do write books, by the way, and sell them, and it would NOT BE POSSIBLE TO DO THIS if people could legally sell photocopies of my books at 1/2 the price, or distribute copies online. My business would not be viable, I'd get a cubicle job, and there would be less books on the market. That would be bad for the economy and bad for the consumer.
In the scenario you propose, only slackers or the independently wealthly would be making content. And I am sure they could make some great stuff, but would it be enough stuff? Or good enough for everyone's tastes?
Many would propose a system of voluntary donations. And I think that is good as a way to support the people who do choose to make free stuff. It's a nice gesture. But I doubt that such a system will ever work well enough to support whole entertainment industries.
I think it is far more reasonable to simply roll back the copyright laws to the point where copyrights weren't granted seemingly forever, so that stuff would eventually enter the public domain. That way the content people can make their money and keep making content, and we aren't all held hostage to the IP companies forever.
The only moral course of action is to boycott content that isn't open.
I doubt you would be saying that if you had to try and pay the rent by creating content, as I do.
Can you look a guy like me in the eye and say with a straight face "you are an amoral bastard for selling that book you wrote?"
Is there really any Windows app I need?
Well, it is a DOS app, but X-COM UFO Defense is a great reason to put VPC on a Mac!
Until DVDs hit, laserdiscs ruled! They gave near DVD quality, and delivered it many years earlier. Flipping them was a pain, but a good player would flip the read head so you didn't have to get up. (on a long movie you still might have to put a second platter in though.)
I still have a stack of them, and I am overcome by a fit of nostalgia whenever I pick one up. They have this weird smell... something about the glue or the plastic... very distinctive, in the same way that a PCB smell is. I also have some programming that will probably never show up on DVD, and since my 12-year old LD player just bit the dust I am not sure what to do about that.
Mmm, analog spinning video media! Those were the days. But when DVDs came along and you could get them for $5-10 each (very common in the early days when there were all kinds of special deals) I bought in and never looked back.
will be the worst on migrant latino workers, the people that make this country run on a day to day basis, the most trod-upon class of Americans.
I used to live in LA. All over LA, you see people with Mexican flags on their cars, and those stupid window stickers showing Calvin peeing on something. In Los Angeles, Calvin is usually peeing on one of 3 things.
1. A Ford emblem
2. the word "America"
3. The phrase "La Migra"
Once you have seen enough "I hate your country" stickers, you start to care a little less about the "delicate sensibilities" of the illegal alien. If the Feds want to take a non-citizen out of his I-hate-America-stickered car and sweat him for 7 days, more power to them.
Maybe that makes me a white racist nationalistic baby-killing seal-clubbing monster. I don't care anymore.
Why can't I ever see someone with a Mexican AND American flag on their car? That would be great. It's OK to be into your roots and all that. It's even OK to advertise your hate for the country. But if you ain't a citizen, I don't have a problem with curtailing your rights.
I'm one of those gun nuts, I know all about the slippery slope, but I am still fed up, and I am willing to throw the aliens to the government dogs. Hopefully that will keep them busy for a while. Maybe they'll even catch some bad guys.
You may have had a bad Apple experience but there are good stories too.
My mom had a Pismo, and after 6 months it turned into a lemon. After shipping it to Apple 3 times for repair... Apple exchanged the Pismo for a new Powerbook G4. A lemon computer sucks, but they took care of the problem with style.
What is SUPER aggravating about Apple is their desktop computer repair policy. Apple does not have ANY ABILITY to repair desktop computers. If you buy one, and it is DOA, you get to take it to CompUSA or your other preferred Apple service center... and we all know how fun THAT can be.
My wife's cousin got an iMac, and it was DOA. I spent hours on the phone with Apple before I had to give up and take the damn thing to ChumpUSA. I thought that their good laptop service would extend to desktops, but I was terribly mistaken.
Come on, how can you live without the Windows "Instant Game Crashing Key?" Or the "You've accidentally hit the Menu key and now your keystrokes will start twiddling menu commands key?"
(and why don't game programmers disable the damn Windows key which can only cause evil? If the game isn't stable enough to be put into the background, they shouldn't let you try... because it happens accidentally. I had to REMOVE my Windows keys.)
Why could you possibly care about language support plug-ins? Either you area Man of the World, Concerned about Your Fellow Humans, or, I suspect, you just want to take shots at Apple where you can.
If I am mistaken and you are shopping for an MP3 player for your grandmother who speaks Farsi, apologies in advance. But that seems like an unlikely scenario.
From what I have read about the NSA, the prohibitions on spying are removed if a citizen has done certain things. Simply leaving the US is one of them; take a trip to Canada and you are eligible for all kinds of surveillance thereafter, should "they" feel the need. Communications with foreign nations puts you in the same boat, I think. Like, a domestic phone call is protected, whereas a call to you mom overseas is not.
I read about this in a book called The Puzzle Palace. Good stuff.
This was supported by my ex, who used to work for them.
A friend of mine is a cop and he says that there are no corrupt officers currently employed anywhere.
NSA does not spy/eavesdrop on US citizens.
Well, they certainly DID in the past. Read up on Operation Shamrock, which was the wholesale monitoring of US cable communications. This isn't anti-government crazytalk; this stuff really happened. It's well documented in books like The Puzzle Palace.
Considering the audacity they showed before I am not prepared to say that they do not spy on citizens.
Here is an interesting link about another book by the Puzzle Palace guy.
Read their charter; i'm pretty sure it's not classified.
The current charter is classified. The original 1950s version is available though.
The NSA is super spooky. Read The Puzzle Palace if you have the time. A bit dry in parts, but fascinating in others.
Doesn't PS6 have a vector graphics function now? Being able to do some simple Illustrator-style work IN PS would be great, less app switching. Haven't tried it yet but that is what I read.
All I have to do is break into NASA and steal one of the Mars rocks and I'm golden!
I think it is more likely that the required DRM components will NOT be freely available. I forsee a scenario where there are only Mac and Windows DRM modules with gov't approval, and you will have to pay handsomely to get the software, which will be distributed in binary form.
Wait, did I say Mac & Windows? I meant just Windows!
I seriously doubt that the term "source code" is in these discussions on the Hill. And major software vendors like Sun, Microsoft etc. are probably already having strategy meetings, trying to figure out how they can become the source for this new legally-required software, even if they publicly condemn it.
(It's a potential gold mine -- imagine how much $ there is to be made if every single piece of software needs to incorporate a particular function by law. The mind boggles.)
If this jive goes down, it will give a whole new meaning to "vintage computers."
There are analog computers, though they are not the general-purpose gadgets we have today.
If I'm on the bike and take a digger, I'd rather break the little kodak throw away then anything I've spent real money on...
Heh, there is a lesson I have yet to learn. When I go biking, my camelback is packed with the usual emergency bike stuff PLUS my Nikon 990, a ham radio, cell phone, and sometimes a pistol. It's heavy as hell, but hey, I'm out there for the exercise, right?
I don't know that camera, but my keen digicam shopper's intuition tells me that the Fuji's resolution may be inflated. For example, many flatbed scanners come with ludicrously high resolutions, but those are interpolated values. The "pure" optical resolution is generally much lower, and that is the only figure you should be concerned with.
Digicams do the same stuff with "digital zoom," which is totally useless. And I have seen some digicams doing interpolation jive with their resolution numbers too. Caveat emptor.
C'mon, it can't happen HERE!
Now excuse me while I go watch the telescreen and think about products I would like to purchase.
While I agree with what you are saying I have to take issue with one comment:
Your elected officials, those politicians that are IN FACT funded by the McWorld corporate machine, are taking this crisis as the perfect opportunity to eliminate liberal democracy and replace it with intolerant conservatism.
This isn't a liberal vs. conservative battle. This is simply about CONTROL. Do Republicans want to control us MORE than Democrats? No, they just want to control different things. Liberals want gun control; conservatives want uterus control. I'm sure both camps would like to Lojack us all, given the chance.
Don't make this a partisan issue, you dilute the strength of the underlying message:
1. Governments tend towards more control.
2. To stave off unreasonable controls we must all be vigilant and active in the political process.
(As an aside, I believe that #2 requires strong-willed people to JOIN the government. If NO idealists went to Capitol Hill, believing the system to be 100% corrupt, it seems like things would get worse a lot faster. So become part of the political machine, Joe Citizen -- someone's got to do it.)
popper3, v 3.32 I think it is. I think there were 1 or 2 others, but this is the one I have. Yes, it's a bit old, but since I only had one Outlook user it was easier to make THEM change clients.
:)
My point is simply that MS wasn't crafting great POP3 clients, they were the only ones that caused trouble.
CC companies are not white knights many make them out to be. In my experience, anyway.
We had a dispute with a moving company once. They were a load of late, lying, box-smashing bastards. They had all our stuff, couldn't tell us when it would get to our new place, and had charged our credit card a huge amount, including last-second things we never agreed to. The moving company hadn't even made us sign a contract.
We called the credit card company to see if there was any way we could stop payment or apply pressure to the movers. There wasn't. Since it wasn't a broken piece of merchandise, but a SERVICE, they utterly refused to get involved. They said that if you paid a company for a service, and that company then altered the terms of the arrangement -- charging more, delivering less, whatever -- that the CC company would not take action on your behalf. Period.
Maybe it was just one brain-dead rep. I dunno. That is the first and last time I have ever tried to get help from a CC company.
(Luckily my employer was paying for this move, so I had little motivation to go to court or something like that, and it worked out in the end. Except for the hassle of not having my stuff for 3 WEEKS when they said the move would take 4 DAYS.)
It's not ironic. It's contradictory, but that isn't irony.
irony
ironic
Irony would be if the open-source crowd had a security-through-obscurity model and Microsoft published exploit code.
* Patches for popular software that are exploitable tend to come out real quick because the company has to save face and perhaps protect against liability suits.
Can you provide any references for software liability suits? I thought that the stupid click-through licenses typically "absolved" the publishers of liability, and this has yet to be tested in court.
I can't remember reading about anyone suing a publisher over crummy software -- does this actually happen? It fear of such a lawsuit really grounds for Microsoft/IBM/Intuit doing anything? I'd love to see MS get sued for IIS being buggy, but I can't remember anything remotely like that happening in the past. If I have missed something, fire away!