Funny what you learn when you actually read the articles.... I looked through (admittedly quickly) their TOS and Subscriber agreement, and saw nothing that prohibited NAT... the subscriber agreement also makes some refernce to connection multiple computers. Maybe I missed it, I dunno, but I saw nothing.
They did have a restriction against running a dial-up server or running a router to your neighbor's apartment... while that's still a silly restriction, at least it's one that most other ISP's have for home use. Maybe that's what they're cracking down on.
Just makes no sense to crack down on simple home LAN NAT... you'd piss off more customers than you could hope to recoup by charging extra. Not that stupidity ever stopped a cable company from trying something, of course. But I can't see it lasting.... just too expensive to police for what it returns.
Good Ol' MediaOne in Massachusetts was the best... they'd let you run whatever you wanted, web servers, mail servers. A couple of people even set up NNTP servers just for the hell of it.
Just goes to show what ruthless monopolists they are.
Microsoft isn't so nice, either.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 2
> The only thing I can think of is the normal copyright protections
Yup, that's it, copyrights and patents are pretty much the answer, really. Which is not to say that those things are bad (though I'm increasingly wary of patents). But they are at the root of the situation. Normally, they're fairly benign, but the software industry is so interdependent that the one who gets a head start has a bigger advantage than in most businesses. This magnifies the effects of copyrights and patents.
Think about it... what is the strategy for any major software company? To gain control of API's and other interfaces, including the user interface... and sure enough, that's what Microsoft leveraged to squish Netscape. They're not any more mean or greedy than Netscape was, just better at the game, and they started with a lot more weapons.
In any event, Microsoft is one extreme example, and they're in an extremely complex market.
In other markets, you'll rarely find a monopoly that isn't expressly protected by some form government action. I'm sure one can find examples where it happens, but in general the notion that freedom leads to monopoly is dangerous and needs to be rebutted.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
having a totalitarian form of government does not necessarily mean a bad government
It may not lead to bad government, but it does lead to a bad economy. The problem is simply that centralized control is inefficient and subject to corruption.
Not that business is immune from corruption, but no business can survive in a truly free market unless it has customers who buy their products. That's the basic beauty of the system.
Actually, there is another ways to survive, and that is to obtain some government protection... They can be guaranteed customers through regulation (utilities and telecom monopolies are an example), they can obtain relief from competition (such as trade restrictions).
In the telecom sector, they're supposedly deregulating, but the FCC is so involved in making the process work smoothly and trying to direct the outcome that only an fool would call the current situation unregulated... I'm sure they're trying really hard, and their intentions are basically benevolent. But it's not immune to influence, either... since it's staffed largely by veterans from the industry, they inevitably think along the lines of the established companies, and they have friends who are still in the industry. Regulatory agencies always turn out this way... the only way to avoid it is to staff them with people who have no experience, and that wouldn't be much of an improvement, if any.
But the real problem with regulation is that it preserves the status quo. This can be okay in some areas where there's not much change. Electric utilities work fairly well, they've been providing the same product for a hundred years or so, and they do that well. On the flip side, they cost more than they should and they're a haven of hack jobs for the nephews of politicians. But they do provide the service, and the extra costs aren't as high as they might be in other industries.
But in a dynamic market, no government agency can foresee the outcome... indeed, most investors can't. Technological progress is in many ways a process of trial and error. Venture capitalists try a number of different business models, and most fail. Some succeed, and those become the roadmap for the future. A couple of years ago, they tried building a bunch of dot-coms, it seemed like that was going to be the way of the future. It wasn't, but the beauty of the system is that they've all closed down now. If the government had started building dot-coms in 1998, they'd still be running them fifty years later.
The Internet highlights this process more than any phenomenon I've seen in my lifetime... there is so much that is new, so many possibilities. Nobody, no matter how smart, can foresee exactly what the most efficient way to organize it will be.... should we have small ISP's or big ones? Should we have a lot of wireless or a lot of wires? The market sorts these things out... often in a way that pleases no individual person, but in a way that compromises among the various desires of many people.
If you believe strongly in the free market system, you will, sooner or later, have to contend with the issue of monopolies.
Wrong. Monopolies are created by economic friction, by impediments to competition. If the myth were true, then why isn't there a single company that runs all the dry-cleaning shops in the country? Why aren't all the convenience stores run by one huge ConvenienceCo? Why are there 20 brands of VCR's on the shelves instead of one?
The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed. In every case, monopoly power can be traced to some form of govenrment protection. And what makes the "monopoly myth" so dangerous is that it is used to pass more of the same regulations that caused the problem in the first place. The FCC is a shining example of this... they have forbidden competition in some areas because they don't think it will work. They are so involved in regulating the process of deregulation that they've made a mockery of the process, and we see the results... there's some fairly simple and extrememely useful technology that can't get to consumers.
I really don't know... and as I think about it more, a federal sales tax might be the only constitutional way, and that's unlikely to get the signature of a Republican President. (especially one whose father got bounced from the job after raising taxes!)
But they see the Internet, they see a lot of money, and politicians rarely pass up an opportunity like that. Could be that they'll just pass more and more regulations, and thereby benefit from campaign contributions by interests they're protecting.
Eventually, though... they'll eventually find a constitutional way to extract some money directly. For example, they could help the states collect their "unpaid sales taxes" and rig it so the fed gets a kickback from what they help collect.
Geez, I read through the article quickly, but nobody seemed to mention taxes.
All other Internet issues will take a back burner on the congressional agenda, although it may not happen in an election year. Watch out in 2003, though. This year, they'll probably appease the special interests, such as RIAA and MPAA, which can generate some campaign cash before the elections.
They're no fools, they want money to spend, and the Internet is a source of it. A money grab coming on the heels of the bursting bubble would have been too tacky even for politicians. But expect them to take it up again as e-commerce growth starts to recover.
Then, of course, they'll claim credit for the recovery.
(on a related note why do you think they wanted to pass a "economic stimulus package"? They know the economy is going to recover this year, and they wanted to take credit for it. Thankfully, they also wanted to make sure the opposing party didn't take credit for the recovery... so each party blocked the other's initiatives, and nothing happened. So now, if it doesn't recover, they can each blame the other side. I used to try to analyze these initiatives on their merits, until I realized what was really going on.)
Yeah, but I just can't envision Mr. Bill sitting around plotting to rig a ZDnet UK poll. Probably it's some semi-spontaneous rah-rah from somewhere within the ranks.
I'd say that it smells of a case of ZDnet trying to make news of themselves by publishing the obvious.... except that they're coming right out and detailing the flaws in their polling. A more honest headline would have been, "Our Polling System Sucks."
Ah, great... now as soon as you power on your Tivo, Real Player will prompt you to register with your e-mail address, install itself as the startup screen, add itself as a favorite recording, and make itself the default for everything else.
>> In a similar vein, I used to like MS, but have gotten more bitter over time.
Interesting point. In the early days of PC's Microsoft was a fairly cool company. And you know... management hasn't changed. They're just in a different position now. Unfortunately, it's not possible to be a cool company when you're on 90% of the desktops.
Yeah, I can make Windows 98 work reasonably well, but my father sure as hell can't. Hmmm... maybe that should be the theme of a new MS ad campaign... "Bringing Families Together," and they could show the kids talking to mom and dad on the phone explaining how to clean up after an e-mail virus.
Nobody should jump to conclusions. There's no discernible reason why every communist country has eventually turned into a murderous regime that loots its citizens, forces them to work without letting them choose their employer, and doesn't allow them to exit. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. But if we had communism here in America, the Bill of Rights would protect us from that. Heck the 13th Ammendment would ensure our right to choose our own careers. Wouldn't it?
>> strong conditioned reaction to the word "Communist".
Getting serious here, yes, I do have a strong conditioned reaction to the word "communist", just like I have a strong conditioned response to the word "Nazi." Why should communists be forgiven for their own record of death and misery? Virtually every communist regime, regardless of the idealism of its founders, has ended up being ruled by ruthless thieves and murderers. Elections don't avoid that... eventually, the ruling party always coopts the process. And what good is freedom of speech if you're not free to grow some tomatos and sell them to your neighbor?
Look, socialism addresses some valid human needs that free markets don't. The hard-core libertarian view explains the economic efficiency of free markets (which is undeniable), it explains why economic freedom is as important and moral as any other personal freedom. But the socialist view clearly addresses the human need for community, stability and security beyond what free markets can provide. A good country is one that balances the two interests. There are many nations that do so... each a little to the left or right of the other, depending on local culture. France is France, the US is the US, Hong Kong is Hong Kong... each has a balance of capitalism and socialism that suits the local culture.
But communism is the socialist view taken to the absurd extreme of eliminating private property, and that simply violates a right that's as basic as the right to speech. In every country where it's been implemented, people have fled, or tried to. The toll of mass murders committed in the names of communist regimes dwarfs the evil of the Nazis. It just does. And I don't care to hear about America's sins... sure we have flaws, but we don't have the killing fields of Cambodia, the purges of Mao, the death camps of the Nazis, the mass executions of the Cuban Revolution, Stalin's starvation campaigns, the looting of Nicauragua by a family of thugs. I don't know how many times you communist think it's going to take before you get it right, the rest of the world is getting pretty damned tired of this crap. We have to make adjustments to our society as we move into the future. I'm pretty sure at this point that communism isn't the way.
If can name a country that you think has implementted communism successfully, then I'll wager that there's a either net outflow of emigrees vs immigrants, of the country isn't really communist (eg Vietnam). I know America is far from perfect, but I do know that more people want to come here than to leave. When you come right down to it, is there any better measure of a nation than the fact that people want to live there?
Oh, BTW... I don't think open source equals communism, rather I think it's the ultimate expression of capitalism, it's the fruit of people's freedom to collaborate on cheap, plentiful computers. I think copyright laws are socialism, but that's for another day....
Remarkably, he apparently thought nobody at Microsoft was smart enough to save the message as a text file ("Well, I'll be darned, Outlook CAN do that...."). Or just print the darned thing, sneak it out of the building (in your sneakers, of course), and OCR it from home.
This is what Best Buy is for. The return clerks there think a "community string" is some sort of sex act. By the time you get around to explaining POSIX-compliant SNMP managers, they'll just issue the refund. Just make sure it's clean and all original packing is there.
One thing working in your favor, ironicly enough, is Windows Product Activation. The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.
Highly recommended setup... just replaced a 2xP3-550 board with a 2xMP1600. It screams. Board, 2 CPUs, GF3-Ti200, 512MB ECC... under $1K and it worked the first time.
>> How do you think the plans for electricity, running water, etc, etc get financed in a world where they can be copied by freeloaders?
Um, I dunno, I guess people just make generators, irrigate fields, etc. Don't know of any farmers or home builders who retain IP lawyers.
More to the point, imagine that IP laws really worked to enforce the inventor's "rights". I mean, we all know they don't work, otherwise there would be no need for software copy protection or DVD encryption.
But imagine for a moment that IP laws could be perfectly enforced. Imagine that nobody could build roads or water systems or electric plants unless they paid royalties to some American company for the idea. If you think the Afghans (and the rest of the world) are pissed off at us now....
>> rights of creators to decide what is done with the product of their creation/labour> without this fundamental human right, it is impossible to have any sort of market system
Um... let me guess, you're a lawyer, right? Get serious, nearly every economy in history existed without IP laws, or was minimally helped by them. The foundations of an economy are things like running water, electricity, roads, communication... not f***king movies.
As for a "reprehensible legal philosohpy", don't be so quiick to judge.... I accept that IP laws exist, and appreciate the need for stability. For that very reason, Free Software is a neat phenomenon because it is not destructive of anything that's in place. Rather, it grows around it, and fills needs that would otherwise go unfilled. THAT is the foundation of an economy.
Oh, dear, I'm going to have to explain this again, while I should be sipping my coffee.
Ideas (software, music, movies, etc) are not property.
Look through the Ten Commandments, and you'll see that it's wrong to covet your neighbor's wife, his goat, his house. But nothing about his ideas. Indeed, I suspect that if you study any religion, you'll find no reference to copyright or patents.
Copyright and patents emerged late in the last milennium... basically, intellectuals and scientists managed to convince governments to pass these laws... for their own benefit, of course.
But think about it... and go back to my proposition that ideas are not property. Like many have observed, "stealing" an idea (or copying software) does not deny its orginator of the "property". In fact, intellectual property laws serve to enforce scarcity. The theory is that more ideas will be generated by rewarding those who create them. But consider the number of people who are denied the use of the idea... is it a fair trade-off?
In fact, intellectual property laws themselves are a socialist construction (though they came into existence somewhat before socialism itself). They protect special interests (in this case, the interests of smart people) at the expense of the general public. That may not be socialism in the way the term is commonly used, but it's socialism in the sense that it's the opposite of a free market.
So Free Software is a true free-market phenomenon. Though it might go against the grain of what you think of as capitalism (i.e. big companies making money), think about it for a second. Intellectual property laws do nothing but grant monoplies on certain things. For example, Windows. Whatever the merits of the MS antitrust case, the real monopoly behind it all is the one that the government granted Microsoft for the use of the term "Windows" and for the code that makes it up. If Microsoft makes more money because of that, it's not because of free markets but because of artificial government protections. The fact that the government is now prosecuting MS for making the most of those laws is indeed sweet irony.
Socialist countries (or countries that lean toward it) will eventually find that they don't especially like Free software, because their impulse is to control. It might go against the grain in a fairly capitalist country like the US, but to the extent that it does, it's because of non-capitalist (more accurately, non-free-market) laws.
So, the terms "capitalist" and "socialist" are really not especially useful... think more in terms of free markets and controlled markets. In those terms, Free Software is the ultimate free market creation. That little or no money changes hands is irrelevant... the freedom of the software provides the public with software at a good price. THAT is the purpose of a free market economy, after all. It's not about making it easy for people to profit, but about providing consumers with goods and services at the lowest possible price.
Oh, and just so we're clear... I think that in an ideal world, there never would have been any IP laws. But I also feel that repealing them would be disastrous. Free Software serves to slowly undermine the IP laws in a non-destructive way, and that's why it's catching on.
Just what I need, another project... Not that it isn't tempting mind you. I'm looking at this, saying "99 bucks isn't much, looks like a perfect little hacking toy" thinking of the possibilities for a Linux appliance... ssh from the bedroom or something, for those late-night (or early morning) emergencies.
Then I remember that I have three old PC's and two old laptops sitting in the closet that are ALSO perfect for this and I'll never get around to those, either.
More to the point... if you connect to an unsecured network, you're a damned fool if you expect any privacy... regardless of what the law says. As soon as you check your e-mail through a non-WEP connection, anybody in the neighborhood can have your POP password. I've often wondered what it would be like to set up an AP with an SSID of "public", and run tcpdump on what comes through....
Slashdot Mirror
Funny what you learn when you actually read the articles.... I looked through (admittedly quickly) their TOS and Subscriber agreement, and saw nothing that prohibited NAT... the subscriber agreement also makes some refernce to connection multiple computers. Maybe I missed it, I dunno, but I saw nothing.
They did have a restriction against running a dial-up server or running a router to your neighbor's apartment... while that's still a silly restriction, at least it's one that most other ISP's have for home use. Maybe that's what they're cracking down on.
Just makes no sense to crack down on simple home LAN NAT... you'd piss off more customers than you could hope to recoup by charging extra. Not that stupidity ever stopped a cable company from trying something, of course. But I can't see it lasting.... just too expensive to police for what it returns.
Good Ol' MediaOne in Massachusetts was the best... they'd let you run whatever you wanted, web servers, mail servers. A couple of people even set up NNTP servers just for the hell of it.
Just goes to show what ruthless monopolists they are.
Microsoft isn't so nice, either.
> The only thing I can think of is the normal copyright protections
Yup, that's it, copyrights and patents are pretty much the answer, really. Which is not to say that those things are bad (though I'm increasingly wary of patents). But they are at the root of the situation. Normally, they're fairly benign, but the software industry is so interdependent that the one who gets a head start has a bigger advantage than in most businesses. This magnifies the effects of copyrights and patents.
Think about it... what is the strategy for any major software company? To gain control of API's and other interfaces, including the user interface... and sure enough, that's what Microsoft leveraged to squish Netscape. They're not any more mean or greedy than Netscape was, just better at the game, and they started with a lot more weapons.
In any event, Microsoft is one extreme example, and they're in an extremely complex market.
In other markets, you'll rarely find a monopoly that isn't expressly protected by some form government action. I'm sure one can find examples where it happens, but in general the notion that freedom leads to monopoly is dangerous and needs to be rebutted.
having a totalitarian form of government does not necessarily mean a bad government
It may not lead to bad government, but it does lead to a bad economy. The problem is simply that centralized control is inefficient and subject to corruption.
Not that business is immune from corruption, but no business can survive in a truly free market unless it has customers who buy their products. That's the basic beauty of the system.
Actually, there is another ways to survive, and that is to obtain some government protection... They can be guaranteed customers through regulation (utilities and telecom monopolies are an example), they can obtain relief from competition (such as trade restrictions).
In the telecom sector, they're supposedly deregulating, but the FCC is so involved in making the process work smoothly and trying to direct the outcome that only an fool would call the current situation unregulated... I'm sure they're trying really hard, and their intentions are basically benevolent. But it's not immune to influence, either... since it's staffed largely by veterans from the industry, they inevitably think along the lines of the established companies, and they have friends who are still in the industry. Regulatory agencies always turn out this way... the only way to avoid it is to staff them with people who have no experience, and that wouldn't be much of an improvement, if any.
But the real problem with regulation is that it preserves the status quo. This can be okay in some areas where there's not much change. Electric utilities work fairly well, they've been providing the same product for a hundred years or so, and they do that well. On the flip side, they cost more than they should and they're a haven of hack jobs for the nephews of politicians. But they do provide the service, and the extra costs aren't as high as they might be in other industries.
But in a dynamic market, no government agency can foresee the outcome... indeed, most investors can't. Technological progress is in many ways a process of trial and error. Venture capitalists try a number of different business models, and most fail. Some succeed, and those become the roadmap for the future. A couple of years ago, they tried building a bunch of dot-coms, it seemed like that was going to be the way of the future. It wasn't, but the beauty of the system is that they've all closed down now. If the government had started building dot-coms in 1998, they'd still be running them fifty years later.
The Internet highlights this process more than any phenomenon I've seen in my lifetime... there is so much that is new, so many possibilities. Nobody, no matter how smart, can foresee exactly what the most efficient way to organize it will be.... should we have small ISP's or big ones? Should we have a lot of wireless or a lot of wires? The market sorts these things out... often in a way that pleases no individual person, but in a way that compromises among the various desires of many people.
If you believe strongly in the free market system, you will, sooner or later, have to contend with the issue of monopolies.
Wrong. Monopolies are created by economic friction, by impediments to competition. If the myth were true, then why isn't there a single company that runs all the dry-cleaning shops in the country? Why aren't all the convenience stores run by one huge ConvenienceCo? Why are there 20 brands of VCR's on the shelves instead of one?
The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed. In every case, monopoly power can be traced to some form of govenrment protection. And what makes the "monopoly myth" so dangerous is that it is used to pass more of the same regulations that caused the problem in the first place. The FCC is a shining example of this... they have forbidden competition in some areas because they don't think it will work. They are so involved in regulating the process of deregulation that they've made a mockery of the process, and we see the results... there's some fairly simple and extrememely useful technology that can't get to consumers.
I really don't know... and as I think about it more, a federal sales tax might be the only constitutional way, and that's unlikely to get the signature of a Republican President. (especially one whose father got bounced from the job after raising taxes!)
But they see the Internet, they see a lot of money, and politicians rarely pass up an opportunity like that. Could be that they'll just pass more and more regulations, and thereby benefit from campaign contributions by interests they're protecting.
Eventually, though... they'll eventually find a constitutional way to extract some money directly. For example, they could help the states collect their "unpaid sales taxes" and rig it so the fed gets a kickback from what they help collect.
Geez, I read through the article quickly, but nobody seemed to mention taxes.
All other Internet issues will take a back burner on the congressional agenda, although it may not happen in an election year. Watch out in 2003, though. This year, they'll probably appease the special interests, such as RIAA and MPAA, which can generate some campaign cash before the elections.
They're no fools, they want money to spend, and the Internet is a source of it. A money grab coming on the heels of the bursting bubble would have been too tacky even for politicians. But expect them to take it up again as e-commerce growth starts to recover.
Then, of course, they'll claim credit for the recovery.
(on a related note why do you think they wanted to pass a "economic stimulus package"? They know the economy is going to recover this year, and they wanted to take credit for it. Thankfully, they also wanted to make sure the opposing party didn't take credit for the recovery... so each party blocked the other's initiatives, and nothing happened. So now, if it doesn't recover, they can each blame the other side. I used to try to analyze these initiatives on their merits, until I realized what was really going on.)
Yeah, but I just can't envision Mr. Bill sitting around plotting to rig a ZDnet UK poll. Probably it's some semi-spontaneous rah-rah from somewhere within the ranks.
I'd say that it smells of a case of ZDnet trying to make news of themselves by publishing the obvious.... except that they're coming right out and detailing the flaws in their polling. A more honest headline would have been, "Our Polling System Sucks."
Ah, great... now as soon as you power on your Tivo, Real Player will prompt you to register with your e-mail address, install itself as the startup screen, add itself as a favorite recording, and make itself the default for everything else.
>> In a similar vein, I used to like MS, but have gotten more bitter over time.
Interesting point. In the early days of PC's Microsoft was a fairly cool company. And you know... management hasn't changed. They're just in a different position now. Unfortunately, it's not possible to be a cool company when you're on 90% of the desktops.
Yeah, I can make Windows 98 work reasonably well, but my father sure as hell can't. Hmmm... maybe that should be the theme of a new MS ad campaign... "Bringing Families Together," and they could show the kids talking to mom and dad on the phone explaining how to clean up after an e-mail virus.
Nobody should jump to conclusions. There's no discernible reason why every communist country has eventually turned into a murderous regime that loots its citizens, forces them to work without letting them choose their employer, and doesn't allow them to exit. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. But if we had communism here in America, the Bill of Rights would protect us from that. Heck the 13th Ammendment would ensure our right to choose our own careers. Wouldn't it?
>> strong conditioned reaction to the word "Communist".
Getting serious here, yes, I do have a strong conditioned reaction to the word "communist", just like I have a strong conditioned response to the word "Nazi." Why should communists be forgiven for their own record of death and misery? Virtually every communist regime, regardless of the idealism of its founders, has ended up being ruled by ruthless thieves and murderers. Elections don't avoid that... eventually, the ruling party always coopts the process. And what good is freedom of speech if you're not free to grow some tomatos and sell them to your neighbor?
Look, socialism addresses some valid human needs that free markets don't. The hard-core libertarian view explains the economic efficiency of free markets (which is undeniable), it explains why economic freedom is as important and moral as any other personal freedom. But the socialist view clearly addresses the human need for community, stability and security beyond what free markets can provide. A good country is one that balances the two interests. There are many nations that do so... each a little to the left or right of the other, depending on local culture. France is France, the US is the US, Hong Kong is Hong Kong... each has a balance of capitalism and socialism that suits the local culture.
But communism is the socialist view taken to the absurd extreme of eliminating private property, and that simply violates a right that's as basic as the right to speech. In every country where it's been implemented, people have fled, or tried to. The toll of mass murders committed in the names of communist regimes dwarfs the evil of the Nazis. It just does. And I don't care to hear about America's sins... sure we have flaws, but we don't have the killing fields of Cambodia, the purges of Mao, the death camps of the Nazis, the mass executions of the Cuban Revolution, Stalin's starvation campaigns, the looting of Nicauragua by a family of thugs. I don't know how many times you communist think it's going to take before you get it right, the rest of the world is getting pretty damned tired of this crap. We have to make adjustments to our society as we move into the future. I'm pretty sure at this point that communism isn't the way.
If can name a country that you think has implementted communism successfully, then I'll wager that there's a either net outflow of emigrees vs immigrants, of the country isn't really communist (eg Vietnam). I know America is far from perfect, but I do know that more people want to come here than to leave. When you come right down to it, is there any better measure of a nation than the fact that people want to live there?
Oh, BTW... I don't think open source equals communism, rather I think it's the ultimate expression of capitalism, it's the fruit of people's freedom to collaborate on cheap, plentiful computers. I think copyright laws are socialism, but that's for another day....
Remarkably, he apparently thought nobody at Microsoft was smart enough to save the message as a text file ("Well, I'll be darned, Outlook CAN do that...."). Or just print the darned thing, sneak it out of the building (in your sneakers, of course), and OCR it from home.
This is what Best Buy is for. The return clerks there think a "community string" is some sort of sex act. By the time you get around to explaining POSIX-compliant SNMP managers, they'll just issue the refund. Just make sure it's clean and all original packing is there.
I wonder if you'll have to upgrade your cash's firmware when they find security flaws.
Imagine that, you go to pay for something and the serial number has changed to "L337". Sheesh.
I dunno, I don't have any mod points right now, so I can't see the list.
I'll go log in on my Signal11 account and check.
Hmmm... "Moderation Totals: Redundant=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1"
C'mon gang. I just need Troll, Flamebait, and Funny, and I'll have hit for the cycle. Please help.
(BTW, if you're good at math, you should be able to deduce which of the three haven't been used yet.)
One thing working in your favor, ironicly enough, is Windows Product Activation. The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.
Ahhh, it all makes sense now. No matter how hard I tried, I could never land properly in MS Flight Simulator.
I've seen /. sigs that have better graphics.
Highly recommended setup... just replaced a 2xP3-550 board with a 2xMP1600. It screams. Board, 2 CPUs, GF3-Ti200, 512MB ECC... under $1K and it worked the first time.
>> How do you think the plans for electricity, running water, etc, etc get financed in a world where they can be copied by freeloaders?
Um, I dunno, I guess people just make generators, irrigate fields, etc. Don't know of any farmers or home builders who retain IP lawyers.
More to the point, imagine that IP laws really worked to enforce the inventor's "rights". I mean, we all know they don't work, otherwise there would be no need for software copy protection or DVD encryption.
But imagine for a moment that IP laws could be perfectly enforced. Imagine that nobody could build roads or water systems or electric plants unless they paid royalties to some American company for the idea. If you think the Afghans (and the rest of the world) are pissed off at us now....
>> rights of creators to decide what is done with the product of their creation/labour> without this fundamental human right, it is impossible to have any sort of market system
Um... let me guess, you're a lawyer, right? Get serious, nearly every economy in history existed without IP laws, or was minimally helped by them. The foundations of an economy are things like running water, electricity, roads, communication... not f***king movies.
As for a "reprehensible legal philosohpy", don't be so quiick to judge.... I accept that IP laws exist, and appreciate the need for stability. For that very reason, Free Software is a neat phenomenon because it is not destructive of anything that's in place. Rather, it grows around it, and fills needs that would otherwise go unfilled. THAT is the foundation of an economy.
Oh, dear, I'm going to have to explain this again, while I should be sipping my coffee.
Ideas (software, music, movies, etc) are not property.
Look through the Ten Commandments, and you'll see that it's wrong to covet your neighbor's wife, his goat, his house. But nothing about his ideas. Indeed, I suspect that if you study any religion, you'll find no reference to copyright or patents.
Copyright and patents emerged late in the last milennium... basically, intellectuals and scientists managed to convince governments to pass these laws... for their own benefit, of course.
But think about it... and go back to my proposition that ideas are not property. Like many have observed, "stealing" an idea (or copying software) does not deny its orginator of the "property". In fact, intellectual property laws serve to enforce scarcity. The theory is that more ideas will be generated by rewarding those who create them. But consider the number of people who are denied the use of the idea... is it a fair trade-off?
In fact, intellectual property laws themselves are a socialist construction (though they came into existence somewhat before socialism itself). They protect special interests (in this case, the interests of smart people) at the expense of the general public. That may not be socialism in the way the term is commonly used, but it's socialism in the sense that it's the opposite of a free market.
So Free Software is a true free-market phenomenon. Though it might go against the grain of what you think of as capitalism (i.e. big companies making money), think about it for a second. Intellectual property laws do nothing but grant monoplies on certain things. For example, Windows. Whatever the merits of the MS antitrust case, the real monopoly behind it all is the one that the government granted Microsoft for the use of the term "Windows" and for the code that makes it up. If Microsoft makes more money because of that, it's not because of free markets but because of artificial government protections. The fact that the government is now prosecuting MS for making the most of those laws is indeed sweet irony.
Socialist countries (or countries that lean toward it) will eventually find that they don't especially like Free software, because their impulse is to control. It might go against the grain in a fairly capitalist country like the US, but to the extent that it does, it's because of non-capitalist (more accurately, non-free-market) laws.
So, the terms "capitalist" and "socialist" are really not especially useful... think more in terms of free markets and controlled markets. In those terms, Free Software is the ultimate free market creation. That little or no money changes hands is irrelevant... the freedom of the software provides the public with software at a good price. THAT is the purpose of a free market economy, after all. It's not about making it easy for people to profit, but about providing consumers with goods and services at the lowest possible price.
Oh, and just so we're clear... I think that in an ideal world, there never would have been any IP laws. But I also feel that repealing them would be disastrous. Free Software serves to slowly undermine the IP laws in a non-destructive way, and that's why it's catching on.
Shame on that woman for hoarding all the rare and valuable AOL disks, when this poor sick little girl is trying to break the Guinness record.
Just what I need, another project... Not that it isn't tempting mind you. I'm looking at this, saying "99 bucks isn't much, looks like a perfect little hacking toy" thinking of the possibilities for a Linux appliance... ssh from the bedroom or something, for those late-night (or early morning) emergencies.
Then I remember that I have three old PC's and two old laptops sitting in the closet that are ALSO perfect for this and I'll never get around to those, either.
More to the point... if you connect to an unsecured network, you're a damned fool if you expect any privacy... regardless of what the law says. As soon as you check your e-mail through a non-WEP connection, anybody in the neighborhood can have your POP password. I've often wondered what it would be like to set up an AP with an SSID of "public", and run tcpdump on what comes through....