This is kinda like selling guns unrestricted and saying "please don't shoot anyone, cuz that would be against the law". Oh wait, you guys already do that.;-)
I think that the general problem here is that there is a perception that you cannot own and use tools in a responsible manner. You cannot outlaw a screwdriver because someone in Timbuktu used one to commit murder, rape, or burglary, because screwdrivers have legitimate legal uses. Guns, screwdrivers, and DeCSS/technology of the moment are tools. Do we outlaw them because our world has decide that because there is an illegal use, that these things must be outlawed?
Personal responsibility is the issue. Does someone become a dangerous criminal solely because they have a legally purchased and safely stored firearm, screwdriver, or copy of DeCSS(used for watching their legally purchased DVD on the Linux machine that is their only computer)? At what point does the government overstep its bound in quelling the fears of the 'people' when they remove legal ownership and access rights on the basis of spurious claims of lost revenue streams by corporations who are not being held accountable for their claims of loss?
What truly justifies things like Carnivore, if not the 'compelling interest' of a would be police state? Yes, Carnivore -could- be used in ways consistent with the Constitution, but who trusts an organization whose headquarters is the J. Edgar Hoover Building? I can assure you that Freeh is even less ethical than his infamous predecessor.Or whatever? Wanna bet we have a long legal fight before we get this tool outlawed?
At the core of the American system is the struggle of the common man to use the things he owns versus the 'compelling interest' to protect the revenue streams of Tine Warner and Disney. Corporations are not citizens and should not have the ability to vote, but they do--it's called money. Citizens have the ability to vote and often don't, because they are being brainwashed by corporations NOT to. Think for a moment on the current protests in the UK and Europe about fuel prices.
Think about how mad those people are. Realize that the Prime Ministers of most of the EU are defying the people to rise up in rebellion. Think about the parallels in the MPAA and RIAA. What is going to happen when they finally get what they are begging for?
Oh, I don't miss your point in the least. It just simply is far too disgusting to think about. Come on...M$ is trying to tell the Supreme Court that they aren't qualified to hear the case!
Fortunately, this particular court is an ornery bunch. I pray daily that they take the case, simply to spite the children in Redmond who think they can bamboozle the court system. Think for a moment on the horror in Bill Gates' eyes when he hears that they took it--then sit back and watch the M$ spin doctors go to work and insult the court a few dozen more times before they get their 30 minutes....
You think Scalia and the others are going to not take the arrogance of this company into account as they look over tens of thousands of pages of documents? I'd love to be a fly on the wall while the interns are sorting all that material....
What is Maryland known for? Seafood and speeding tickets!!
And ex-governors doing jail time.... I love living in MD, honest!
Ladies, gentlemen, and/.ers, the problem is not just in the Judiciary. Even Judge Patel admitted that the DMCA has created a monumental legal snafu. A snafu which, I should point out, began in the Legislative branch where the laws were first written.
DMCA is policy laundering from no one else but Bill and Al. They failed to even get this piece of crap considered--until they ran overseas and got a treaty that we then had to enforce. This whole business is about Bill Clinton and Al Gore trying to enslave the world at the behest of their money weilding supporters...the corporations.
And even if this gets to the Federal level, remember that the judges are appointed by the Executive branch, with the approval of the Legislative branch. They have always had the ability to stack the Judiciary with whatever judges they want, and have done so for the past few decades.
Kaplan is a Clinton appointee and about as corrupt. Can you imagine what a Gore appointee would be like? They'd all have to think that Al invented the internet to get on the bench.
Please also note the 7th Amendment, which says you have a right to trial by jury in cases where more than 20 bucks is involved. Juries, on the whole, are out of the process at the federal level because they can't be bought and paid for with MPAA and RIAA money nearly as easily.
The phrases 'vertical integration' and 'captive audience' come in mind here.
I also wonder if this isn't the kind of deal that people should be writing state legislators and attorneys general about, since it looks like an antitrust action -waiting- to happen.
The CEO basically is openly plotting to be the M$ of the field...we should worry. Education is too valuable to have corps jacking in like this.
Just because these programs have changed the world doesn't mean that they've changed things for the better. The whole purpose of these agencies is to protect the creators of music, movies, etc.
This statement is wrong. These trade organizations exist to maintain and shepherd the interests of the owners of copyrights, not the actual creators. Musicians sign away their creative works to record companies, who ARE NOT the creators and don't care about anything other than making money. Refer to the Salon article about the repeal of the 'work for hire' clause, if you remain confused on this point. Movie studios simply finance distribution and rent out space in which to make movies. The writers, actors, and other involved in the industry have large groups and unions in place to protect their interests from the corporations involved.
Therefore, sir, I must call you the troll that you are.
When these producers no longer have any protection against piracy, how can they make money?
The same way they do now. Piracy has been a problem for them for decades and the real piracy is happening offshore, in the Orient and other places whose laws don't give a crap about IP. To assert that DeCSS and Napster substantively hurt the industries involved, especially with their histories of exploitation of everyone from artist to consumer(in the form of taxes to 'protect' their revenue streams), is nothing more than a strawman. I DO have a match....
When they can't make any money, what will motivate them to continue producing?
Another whiny strawman. The United States is going to be one of the most lucrative markets in the world for these people. If the studios are really that worried, which they aren't, that everyone is going to steal them blind, then they should never have gone to DVD in the first place. They are their own worst enemies.
Would a world where people got outside and started caring about what they saw be so bad? I mean, from my point of view, if Hollywood shut down tomorrow, a lot more people might find other things to do and obesity rates might plummet as well. But, alas, that's a Utopian dream that would depend on them actually have minds to open after so many years of modern media entertainment.
I think it would be cool if my Mom got a "free" device that would let her read Email and do basic Web stuff, even if it had a great big ad across the bottom (FreePC style). I for one don't want to see the business model that would permit that to happen, be destroyed.
Funny, but I love my mother enough to do all I can to educate her about banner ads, data mining, and how to protect her online privacy. In an age where companies are relying more and more on the clueless masses to walk to the slaughter for their bottom line, I would think that more tech savvy types would be alarmed that someone was using loss leading as a means to hook their loved ones into unending telemarketing calls.
Ignorance of the laws of cyberspace only puts the masses in chains.
I am so sorry to see that your vague, bellicose rantings at the open source community still haven't told me what the actual problem is with someone legally reverse engineering the CueCat, but I suppose that being merely geeks and hackers makes it okay to not express your concerns clearly enough so that other people can actually understand what the fsck you're on about.
Anyway.... When the guy at Radio Shack tried to push one of your cute little scanners off on me, he didn't have software for -any- of the OS I use(Mac and Linux), and didn't know when it would be available for either. Of course, by throwing your lawyers at the open source community, and making a lame promise of Linux software in the future doesn't help users like me -now-, but then by being a lamer who doesn't use M$ anything, I didn't get bit by the LoveBug, either. I guess the happy trade off is in my favor, not yours, since I probably -won't- want to use CueCat after all the sword rattling about this.
But I can tell you that when my mother or other close relative or friend tells me about the CueCat that they have, that since your business model is, at best, nebulous, that it probably is just another means to collect and track personally identifiable data about her and therefore shouldn't be used. It's perfectly reasonable to assume, given the layout of a free scanner, Radio Shack association, and how the device works that this is -exactly- what is going on. It's too bad, since I think once the scam is finally out in the open, that someone will link you folks to DoubleClick and you're collective goose will be cooked. Privacy is awfully important to people these days and giving away her static IP address in exchange for a gadget that scans barcodes in an ad flyer doesn't seem like much of a fair trade to me.
Wish you all the luck in the world as you try for fame and fortune, but for me, I'll be the educated consumer and look prices up the old fashioned way.
Regarding your words:"essentially mandating" that you do this or that ..
This is where you went wrong.
The moment you feel like you're under some kind of obligation is when you cut back on you walk away. This was your mistake, not AOLs.
What mistake? I left at the point that AOL demanded an NDA for the privilege of getting a 'free' account for working my ass off.
You, as many others do, assume that anyone stupid enough to even log to AOL deserves bent over a barrel and raped. I don't see where this is at all productive, especially since many of the people who got screwed over the worst were people who had literally helped build the very forums that AOL was popular for. The change was dramatic and devastating for both those who owned and built the forums and the people who had been there helping maintain them since the days when AOL was Mac only.
In 1997, with the advent of unlimited access to AOL, workloads trebled overnight for most people doing forum work of any sort. In most areas, there was no way to get guides in chat rooms, nor could you get TOS to action anything unless it was practically neo-nazi death threats. Compensation fell from $3 an hour, which was the per hour connection rate, to $19.95 a month in for the newly coined 'community leaders', who were usually the same people. The change in policy, frankly, looked a lot more like Steve Case trying to dodge any possibility of future tax obligations than anything else. A comp account is treated differently on the books than a community leader account--go figure.
AOL had not been prepared for unlimited access essentially raising login rates by ten times. They then attempted to cover their asses with bandaids while users were filing lawsuits about endless busy signals. Some forums and areas were so severely understaffed that it was no longer possible to provide the same level of services that had been traditionally offered. People actually started migrating to the net because it was 'safe' out here. Forums that had gone fallow for lack of staff were closed in favor of more dumbing down of the service in general.
We found it impossible to recruit, hire, and retain people who were qualified, because Steve Case was busy dumbing the service down more than it had been previous. Eventually, people looked at the $19.95 they got for the work that they got to do and basically averted. It didn't take long for the brain drain to kick in and then AOL slid completely into the toilet with the release of AOL 3.0.
AOL's essential problems have always been with the suits in upper management. AOL pre-Windows was a pretty decent service. AOL pre-unlimited was tolerable. AOL after unlimited was a zoo where animals walked the streets and ate pedestrians. There was a lot of misrepresentation about the duties, actual authority, and compensation that community leaders had and that came straight from corporate--so it wasn't purely stupid people getting duped. They plan great big things and unleash them on their volunteer labor force without the slightest thought to how they would have to be implemented. AOL stopped being a community and became about not offending anyone, which coincidentally cost them a lot of their fulltime internal talent at the same time.
As a former 'community leader', it is very easy to understand what brought this about. I left after AOL made numerous changes to policy about -everything- and were essentially mandating that we all do jobs for which we didn't have the authority or tools to do. Try reading 300-500 board messages a day, file upwards of 20 TOS reports, and answer numerous emails in less than 4 hours and you can begin to see the problem. In addition, the area that I worked in pretty much required a 20 hour a week committment, with no more than the promise of a free account and a lot of hate mail. It was also next to impossible to get new volunteers, because of the serious obstacles that AOL placed between them and getting training.
If AOL is being sued, given the numerous changes that were designed to only benefit the bottom line on the backs of a workforce that they are -quite- willing to exploit, then the suit is justified. Minimum wage laws may well be the extreme form of redress, but who on earth would think that people putting in the kinds of hours many volunteers have should be denied something more in the way of fair compensation for the time they give?
I'm actually amazed to see that they don't have their fingers into more than that. When you don't buy music, go to movies, or have cable the amount of Time-Warner in your life plummets drastically.:)
Oh come on. What actual evil have these companies actions resulted in?
Ultimately, loss of choice. You may not see it this way, but in places outside geek culture, where it isn't all about hardware and software and your next mp3 player, the world is very different. Try finding a quality piece of furniture or a decent set of dishes for less than an arm and a leg. Try raising kids. Try finding a car that seats six or carries equal cargo that gets 25-35MPH. Try being a single parent. Try meeting the insane goals of the college fund expectation.
Is your quality of life actually less? No.
It actually is roughly the same as ten years ago. The supposed prosperity for Americans is mostly for those who have a jobs that give them a lot of disposable income, which many, many, many lower income people don't. In most cases, families have to have two income earners or they simply cannot make ends meet. This is in part due to the pressure that the prosperity myth puts on people to buy things which they simply cannot afford or need, but also due to the fact that marketroids see themselves as entitled to the contents of our wallets.
Consumer choice is something that simply frightens these people to death. Corps don't want us to have choices or think for ourselves. An informed consumer is a dangerous one--and problematic for their bottom line.
Is the average Americans worse? No.
See above.
Have the size of libraries grown? Yes.
This depends on your point of view. My local library has levelled off in terms of non-fiction. My personal collection has grown by roughly 10 times during the same period, mostly due to inter library loan.
Is music cheaper than it was before? Yes.
No. A CD costs about 50% more than it did 10 years ago. I bought the first 25-30 CDs in my collection for about 10 bucks a piece. Price fixing had more to do with it than anything else, but I don't expect the consent decree to do much about that, either.
Have the costs of specific medicines and treatments gone up on the aggregate do the corporations? No, they've gone down, it's only society's expectations that have gone up.
Tell this to all the people who leave the doctor's office and can't afford the 100 bucks in prescriptions. Patent medications are horrifically expensive, as is any doctor's visit. Cancer patients are sitting ducks. Let's not get into Buroughs-Wellcome and what they do to AIDS sufferers. Why do you think herbs, homeopathy, and other alternatives have sprang up with such vehemence? Why does CNN have an article about how people are buying animal medicines to treat themselves? I would say that your assertion here is misinformed.
All these, and many more, mythical complaints, yet few provably bad results.
I don't see anything about these issues as mythical, but maybe I am actually old enough and conscious enough to have noticed the last 20 years--where were you when CD technology was introduced? I was a freshman in college.
There is one word for this: FUD.
Or in the case of your assertions, simple, gross, unadulterated convenient fictions.
The scary part of this is that doctors and others use textbooks as references after they graduate. My father-in-law has shelves and shelves of medical texts that he combs for everything from general and specialty to historical references.
If this keeps up, you are going to see a profession that has enough problems reduced to no better than laymen.
The reason why this is dangerous is because everyone is busy brainwashing the masses into believeing that the Digital Divide is actually something that has to be fixed. When you have the press and every imaginable outlet of anything pushing the computer revolution and how you can't have anything without one, people run out and buy what they can afford and don't realize how many computers come into being.
We have a motherboard with a busted serial port. After 5 different attempts to get the thing fixed, costing us 10 bucks a pop in postage, we gave up. The company we bought it from was a local shop and wouldn't give us adequate credit or exchange, nor would the manufacturer with the clearly clueless tech support people with the -thick- foreign accents properly fix the board. In the end, we had to relegate the board to pure ethernet duty.
A friend of mine bought a PC from Tiger Electronics for like 500 bucks. The machine never worked properly, nor would Tiger repair or replace the defective components. The real mistake was in thinking that a 500 buck PC was worth anything, but many consumers who feel pressured to join the digital age will strike and cheap, believing that they can return defective products for repair or refund.
Some companies honor their warranties and others dodge. This is not merely cluelessness and lemon laws are not about unreasonable restriction on honest businesses. PA is simply doing to the fly by night operations what was done with cars. In the history of cars, where the lemon laws became famous, they were intended to protect consumers from defects in the product that were costing them lots and lots of money and lost time to get fixed. When these laws were past, suddenly many dealerships, the ones who were half-assing repairs and charging out the butt for it, straightened up their act. Still, in some cases, the individual cars were just doomed to have eternal problems and were taken back.
Basically, if you shell out a lot of hard earned cash for a product and the thing doesn't work, you have the right to redress.
No. US gas prices are artifically low, because the oil industry is permitted to dump many of its costs onto the citizens.
If they dump the costs onto the citizens, how is it that we still pay low prices? We are paying the price in other places, believe me. Are you saying that the nebulously defined claim of 'environmental damage' is somehow added into EU fuel prices. All the claims regarding this phenomenon that I have seen have smacked of poor, if not outright contrived science. If so, how do they calculate this and not simply use it as a means to fund more government graft? In the US, no revenue from artificially maintained oil prices would be applied to alternatives--it simply is not in the government's ability to not fritter the cash away.
or sending a few thousand troops over to Iraq to keep the oil flowing. Additionally, there are huge tax breaks and government subsidies for the energy industry.
Kuwait paid the US a LOT of money to defray the costs of the Gulf War. We are talking billions and billions of dollars. Getting their country back from Iraq didn't cost as much all the wasted effort and money we spend sending the UN lamers in there to do weapons inspections.
Add it all up, and some have estimated that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline is around $5/gallon.
Please itemize that figure.
The market only produces efficient solutions when all costs are internalized. Make people pay the true costs at the pump, and see how long gasoline remains the fuel of choice, and fuel-inefficeint vehicles remain popular.
Nice speech, but you still haven't proven your point, only made a claim of something being true. In a market driven economy, rather than one driven by government agenda(which I won't say is reality in the US anymore than anywhere else), there would be numerous alternatives of transportation that would be affordable for all.
Most of the US problem is that we still allow corps to buy and bury useful tech so they can preserve their revenue streams. This is the same issue, really, but I believe that considering that a carburator existed in 1955 that got 50 miles to the gallon, and that the oil companies and car companies basically bought and buried the design to pretect their thoroughly intertwined interests, then made Americans dependent on their gas guzzling solutions, is it wholly fair to blame the people who have been forced to buy those choices?
I will cheerfully buy a vehicle that utilizes fuel cells -when- they are available in forms that let me live my life pretty much as I live it now. Being out in the rural areas, or being a farmer would make some of the supposed solutions less than viable.
I always wanted my own copy of DeCSS. Thank you, so very much.
We should really thank these bozos mightily. The EFF really needs to leap on this and get a motion for a stay filed. I think an appeals court judge or two could readily see the problem. You?
Let Jack Valenti once again that he doesn't know jack and try to spin his way out of this one.
We got a call from the admins at my son's school. Seems he was causing disturbances again. Seems he was unable to pay attention to the work at hand. Seems they think he needs to go on Ritalin (never mind getting to a doctor and having him diagnosed).
Nevermind that the admins were prescribing medication and should be reported for it. It's illegal and most parents don't really understand the gravity of the matter. Get all contact with the school in writing from now on. Report the guy far and wide.
Some of these people really need to be jail for the child abusers they really are, anyway.
While the Religion of Science continues to mask its tracks behind the rhetoric, the whole Kansas issue underscores something blatant and simple about the whole argument: That the Origins of the Universe are a philosophical, not scientific issue.
I will have to disappoint many people by pointing this out to them, but the arguments in play in this confrontation -are- philosophical and religious, not the 'science' that many have been slinging the mud about.
Does the State have the right to establish Religion? No. So in mandating a viewpoint which is widely unprovable, and pushing it off as fact, are they not doing just that? But then, if I were opting for the Public School approach, I would be suing to have the Gaia Hypothesis removed from all curriculum because I feel that the State has no right to use my religion in a classroom setting(Gaia being a Greek God and I being a Greek practitioner have issues on this--big ones).
Mind you, I am against near-sighted thinking of all sorts, but I do understand why those of religious conscience would want the 'facts' of the Big Bang played down in reference to the philosophical issues at stake. However, there is no way to deny that Evolution is and does happen, but the issue should not be placed as 'fact' to support a position that undermines religious conscience, which it is clearly presented as in the classroom setting.
Those who believe that God did it in 7 days, those who believe in an Intelligent Creator/Creatrix, and those who believe in the scientific point of view ALL have a place at the table. They all should be discussing how to approach the philosophical issues in a way that allows science to be taught as a mechanism for discovery of how our world works, not as a club to suppress the other camps.
The Postal Service has been under increasing pressure to outsource and 'run like a business' for years. This means that they have been selling off their most lucrative ventures, like Express and Priority Mail services to 3rd parties. You'll note that the quality of the service has degraded substantively at the same time.
I would think that giving out free email addys to people will invite a lot of spam, unless there is stiff regulation of it from Congress, or a relaxing of their burning need to make all government services turn a basic 'profit'. It is wise to remember that the government best handles the dispensing of needed services that are not profitable, and that you can't outsource everything under the sun and expect the remaining pieces to support themselves. In this respect, I think that the Republicans are tragically shortsighted, though never quite as shortsighted as the "new" Democrats.
Dunno, I tend to feel that honest greed is better than greed masquerading as altruism.
If you don't have access to the source, making a fix isn't possible. You can twiddle the settings in Outlook to get rid of certain loopholes and twiddle Windows for a few others, but the ultimate fix has to come from the people with the source.
If you don't have access to the source, making a fix isn't possible. You can twiddle the settings in Outlook to get rid of certain loopholes and twiddle Windows for a few others, but the ultimate fix has to come from the people with the source.
I'm boycotting. No sense in throwing money at the industry that doesn't get it and thinks I -owe- them something. I've never downloaded an MP3 from anywhere and never had the means to make them.
Like with many things, the power of the consumer to say 'no' to a product will hurt the copyright holders more than anything you can do otherwise.
Too bad RIAA, you lose a lot of money, cuz I spend a LOT of money on music.
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I thought he and Clinton already sold it to Corporate America and the UN. Man, I wouldn't want that class action hanging over my head....
I think that the general problem here is that there is a perception that you cannot own and use tools in a responsible manner. You cannot outlaw a screwdriver because someone in Timbuktu used one to commit murder, rape, or burglary, because screwdrivers have legitimate legal uses. Guns, screwdrivers, and DeCSS/technology of the moment are tools. Do we outlaw them because our world has decide that because there is an illegal use, that these things must be outlawed?
Personal responsibility is the issue. Does someone become a dangerous criminal solely because they have a legally purchased and safely stored firearm, screwdriver, or copy of DeCSS(used for watching their legally purchased DVD on the Linux machine that is their only computer)? At what point does the government overstep its bound in quelling the fears of the 'people' when they remove legal ownership and access rights on the basis of spurious claims of lost revenue streams by corporations who are not being held accountable for their claims of loss?
What truly justifies things like Carnivore, if not the 'compelling interest' of a would be police state? Yes, Carnivore -could- be used in ways consistent with the Constitution, but who trusts an organization whose headquarters is the J. Edgar Hoover Building? I can assure you that Freeh is even less ethical than his infamous predecessor.Or whatever? Wanna bet we have a long legal fight before we get this tool outlawed?
At the core of the American system is the struggle of the common man to use the things he owns versus the 'compelling interest' to protect the revenue streams of Tine Warner and Disney. Corporations are not citizens and should not have the ability to vote, but they do--it's called money. Citizens have the ability to vote and often don't, because they are being brainwashed by corporations NOT to. Think for a moment on the current protests in the UK and Europe about fuel prices.
Think about how mad those people are. Realize that the Prime Ministers of most of the EU are defying the people to rise up in rebellion. Think about the parallels in the MPAA and RIAA. What is going to happen when they finally get what they are begging for?
Did I just support Jon Katz? Gods save me!
Fortunately, this particular court is an ornery bunch. I pray daily that they take the case, simply to spite the children in Redmond who think they can bamboozle the court system. Think for a moment on the horror in Bill Gates' eyes when he hears that they took it--then sit back and watch the M$ spin doctors go to work and insult the court a few dozen more times before they get their 30 minutes....
You think Scalia and the others are going to not take the arrogance of this company into account as they look over tens of thousands of pages of documents? I'd love to be a fly on the wall while the interns are sorting all that material....
And ex-governors doing jail time.... I love living in MD, honest!
Ladies, gentlemen, and /.ers, the problem is not just in the Judiciary. Even Judge Patel admitted that the DMCA has created a monumental legal snafu. A snafu which, I should point out, began in the Legislative branch where the laws were first written.
DMCA is policy laundering from no one else but Bill and Al. They failed to even get this piece of crap considered--until they ran overseas and got a treaty that we then had to enforce. This whole business is about Bill Clinton and Al Gore trying to enslave the world at the behest of their money weilding supporters...the corporations.
And even if this gets to the Federal level, remember that the judges are appointed by the Executive branch, with the approval of the Legislative branch. They have always had the ability to stack the Judiciary with whatever judges they want, and have done so for the past few decades.
Kaplan is a Clinton appointee and about as corrupt. Can you imagine what a Gore appointee would be like? They'd all have to think that Al invented the internet to get on the bench.
Please also note the 7th Amendment, which says you have a right to trial by jury in cases where more than 20 bucks is involved. Juries, on the whole, are out of the process at the federal level because they can't be bought and paid for with MPAA and RIAA money nearly as easily.
Yeah, then sell your buying habits to the MPAA so Jack Valenti can send you smiling ads abouthow your VCR connects you to the Boston Strangler.
The phrases 'vertical integration' and 'captive audience' come in mind here.
I also wonder if this isn't the kind of deal that people should be writing state legislators and attorneys general about, since it looks like an antitrust action -waiting- to happen.
The CEO basically is openly plotting to be the M$ of the field...we should worry. Education is too valuable to have corps jacking in like this.
This statement is wrong. These trade organizations exist to maintain and shepherd the interests of the owners of copyrights, not the actual creators. Musicians sign away their creative works to record companies, who ARE NOT the creators and don't care about anything other than making money. Refer to the Salon article about the repeal of the 'work for hire' clause, if you remain confused on this point. Movie studios simply finance distribution and rent out space in which to make movies. The writers, actors, and other involved in the industry have large groups and unions in place to protect their interests from the corporations involved.
Therefore, sir, I must call you the troll that you are.
When these producers no longer have any protection against piracy, how can they make money?
The same way they do now. Piracy has been a problem for them for decades and the real piracy is happening offshore, in the Orient and other places whose laws don't give a crap about IP. To assert that DeCSS and Napster substantively hurt the industries involved, especially with their histories of exploitation of everyone from artist to consumer(in the form of taxes to 'protect' their revenue streams), is nothing more than a strawman. I DO have a match....
When they can't make any money, what will motivate them to continue producing?
Another whiny strawman. The United States is going to be one of the most lucrative markets in the world for these people. If the studios are really that worried, which they aren't, that everyone is going to steal them blind, then they should never have gone to DVD in the first place. They are their own worst enemies.
Would a world where people got outside and started caring about what they saw be so bad? I mean, from my point of view, if Hollywood shut down tomorrow, a lot more people might find other things to do and obesity rates might plummet as well. But, alas, that's a Utopian dream that would depend on them actually have minds to open after so many years of modern media entertainment.
Funny, but I love my mother enough to do all I can to educate her about banner ads, data mining, and how to protect her online privacy. In an age where companies are relying more and more on the clueless masses to walk to the slaughter for their bottom line, I would think that more tech savvy types would be alarmed that someone was using loss leading as a means to hook their loved ones into unending telemarketing calls.
Ignorance of the laws of cyberspace only puts the masses in chains.
I am so sorry to see that your vague, bellicose rantings at the open source community still haven't told me what the actual problem is with someone legally reverse engineering the CueCat, but I suppose that being merely geeks and hackers makes it okay to not express your concerns clearly enough so that other people can actually understand what the fsck you're on about.
Anyway.... When the guy at Radio Shack tried to push one of your cute little scanners off on me, he didn't have software for -any- of the OS I use(Mac and Linux), and didn't know when it would be available for either. Of course, by throwing your lawyers at the open source community, and making a lame promise of Linux software in the future doesn't help users like me -now-, but then by being a lamer who doesn't use M$ anything, I didn't get bit by the LoveBug, either. I guess the happy trade off is in my favor, not yours, since I probably -won't- want to use CueCat after all the sword rattling about this.
But I can tell you that when my mother or other close relative or friend tells me about the CueCat that they have, that since your business model is, at best, nebulous, that it probably is just another means to collect and track personally identifiable data about her and therefore shouldn't be used. It's perfectly reasonable to assume, given the layout of a free scanner, Radio Shack association, and how the device works that this is -exactly- what is going on. It's too bad, since I think once the scam is finally out in the open, that someone will link you folks to DoubleClick and you're collective goose will be cooked. Privacy is awfully important to people these days and giving away her static IP address in exchange for a gadget that scans barcodes in an ad flyer doesn't seem like much of a fair trade to me.
Wish you all the luck in the world as you try for fame and fortune, but for me, I'll be the educated consumer and look prices up the old fashioned way.
Sincerely,
This is where you went wrong.
The moment you feel like you're under some kind of obligation is when you cut back on you walk away. This was your mistake, not AOLs.
What mistake? I left at the point that AOL demanded an NDA for the privilege of getting a 'free' account for working my ass off.
You, as many others do, assume that anyone stupid enough to even log to AOL deserves bent over a barrel and raped. I don't see where this is at all productive, especially since many of the people who got screwed over the worst were people who had literally helped build the very forums that AOL was popular for. The change was dramatic and devastating for both those who owned and built the forums and the people who had been there helping maintain them since the days when AOL was Mac only.
In 1997, with the advent of unlimited access to AOL, workloads trebled overnight for most people doing forum work of any sort. In most areas, there was no way to get guides in chat rooms, nor could you get TOS to action anything unless it was practically neo-nazi death threats. Compensation fell from $3 an hour, which was the per hour connection rate, to $19.95 a month in for the newly coined 'community leaders', who were usually the same people. The change in policy, frankly, looked a lot more like Steve Case trying to dodge any possibility of future tax obligations than anything else. A comp account is treated differently on the books than a community leader account--go figure.
AOL had not been prepared for unlimited access essentially raising login rates by ten times. They then attempted to cover their asses with bandaids while users were filing lawsuits about endless busy signals. Some forums and areas were so severely understaffed that it was no longer possible to provide the same level of services that had been traditionally offered. People actually started migrating to the net because it was 'safe' out here. Forums that had gone fallow for lack of staff were closed in favor of more dumbing down of the service in general.
We found it impossible to recruit, hire, and retain people who were qualified, because Steve Case was busy dumbing the service down more than it had been previous. Eventually, people looked at the $19.95 they got for the work that they got to do and basically averted. It didn't take long for the brain drain to kick in and then AOL slid completely into the toilet with the release of AOL 3.0.
AOL's essential problems have always been with the suits in upper management. AOL pre-Windows was a pretty decent service. AOL pre-unlimited was tolerable. AOL after unlimited was a zoo where animals walked the streets and ate pedestrians. There was a lot of misrepresentation about the duties, actual authority, and compensation that community leaders had and that came straight from corporate--so it wasn't purely stupid people getting duped. They plan great big things and unleash them on their volunteer labor force without the slightest thought to how they would have to be implemented. AOL stopped being a community and became about not offending anyone, which coincidentally cost them a lot of their fulltime internal talent at the same time.
As a former 'community leader', it is very easy to understand what brought this about. I left after AOL made numerous changes to policy about -everything- and were essentially mandating that we all do jobs for which we didn't have the authority or tools to do. Try reading 300-500 board messages a day, file upwards of 20 TOS reports, and answer numerous emails in less than 4 hours and you can begin to see the problem. In addition, the area that I worked in pretty much required a 20 hour a week committment, with no more than the promise of a free account and a lot of hate mail. It was also next to impossible to get new volunteers, because of the serious obstacles that AOL placed between them and getting training.
If AOL is being sued, given the numerous changes that were designed to only benefit the bottom line on the backs of a workforce that they are -quite- willing to exploit, then the suit is justified. Minimum wage laws may well be the extreme form of redress, but who on earth would think that people putting in the kinds of hours many volunteers have should be denied something more in the way of fair compensation for the time they give?
Steve Case will do anything to make money.
I'm actually amazed to see that they don't have their fingers into more than that. When you don't buy music, go to movies, or have cable the amount of Time-Warner in your life plummets drastically. :)
Ultimately, loss of choice. You may not see it this way, but in places outside geek culture, where it isn't all about hardware and software and your next mp3 player, the world is very different. Try finding a quality piece of furniture or a decent set of dishes for less than an arm and a leg. Try raising kids. Try finding a car that seats six or carries equal cargo that gets 25-35MPH. Try being a single parent. Try meeting the insane goals of the college fund expectation.
Is your quality of life actually less? No.
It actually is roughly the same as ten years ago. The supposed prosperity for Americans is mostly for those who have a jobs that give them a lot of disposable income, which many, many, many lower income people don't. In most cases, families have to have two income earners or they simply cannot make ends meet. This is in part due to the pressure that the prosperity myth puts on people to buy things which they simply cannot afford or need, but also due to the fact that marketroids see themselves as entitled to the contents of our wallets.
Consumer choice is something that simply frightens these people to death. Corps don't want us to have choices or think for ourselves. An informed consumer is a dangerous one--and problematic for their bottom line.
Is the average Americans worse? No.
See above.
Have the size of libraries grown? Yes.
This depends on your point of view. My local library has levelled off in terms of non-fiction. My personal collection has grown by roughly 10 times during the same period, mostly due to inter library loan.
Is music cheaper than it was before? Yes.
No. A CD costs about 50% more than it did 10 years ago. I bought the first 25-30 CDs in my collection for about 10 bucks a piece. Price fixing had more to do with it than anything else, but I don't expect the consent decree to do much about that, either.
Have the costs of specific medicines and treatments gone up on the aggregate do the corporations? No, they've gone down, it's only society's expectations that have gone up.
Tell this to all the people who leave the doctor's office and can't afford the 100 bucks in prescriptions. Patent medications are horrifically expensive, as is any doctor's visit. Cancer patients are sitting ducks. Let's not get into Buroughs-Wellcome and what they do to AIDS sufferers. Why do you think herbs, homeopathy, and other alternatives have sprang up with such vehemence? Why does CNN have an article about how people are buying animal medicines to treat themselves? I would say that your assertion here is misinformed.
All these, and many more, mythical complaints, yet few provably bad results.
I don't see anything about these issues as mythical, but maybe I am actually old enough and conscious enough to have noticed the last 20 years--where were you when CD technology was introduced? I was a freshman in college.
There is one word for this: FUD.
Or in the case of your assertions, simple, gross, unadulterated convenient fictions.
The scary part of this is that doctors and others use textbooks as references after they graduate. My father-in-law has shelves and shelves of medical texts that he combs for everything from general and specialty to historical references.
If this keeps up, you are going to see a profession that has enough problems reduced to no better than laymen.
The reason why this is dangerous is because everyone is busy brainwashing the masses into believeing that the Digital Divide is actually something that has to be fixed. When you have the press and every imaginable outlet of anything pushing the computer revolution and how you can't have anything without one, people run out and buy what they can afford and don't realize how many computers come into being.
We have a motherboard with a busted serial port. After 5 different attempts to get the thing fixed, costing us 10 bucks a pop in postage, we gave up. The company we bought it from was a local shop and wouldn't give us adequate credit or exchange, nor would the manufacturer with the clearly clueless tech support people with the -thick- foreign accents properly fix the board. In the end, we had to relegate the board to pure ethernet duty.
A friend of mine bought a PC from Tiger Electronics for like 500 bucks. The machine never worked properly, nor would Tiger repair or replace the defective components. The real mistake was in thinking that a 500 buck PC was worth anything, but many consumers who feel pressured to join the digital age will strike and cheap, believing that they can return defective products for repair or refund.
Some companies honor their warranties and others dodge. This is not merely cluelessness and lemon laws are not about unreasonable restriction on honest businesses. PA is simply doing to the fly by night operations what was done with cars. In the history of cars, where the lemon laws became famous, they were intended to protect consumers from defects in the product that were costing them lots and lots of money and lost time to get fixed. When these laws were past, suddenly many dealerships, the ones who were half-assing repairs and charging out the butt for it, straightened up their act. Still, in some cases, the individual cars were just doomed to have eternal problems and were taken back.
Basically, if you shell out a lot of hard earned cash for a product and the thing doesn't work, you have the right to redress.
If they dump the costs onto the citizens, how is it that we still pay low prices? We are paying the price in other places, believe me. Are you saying that the nebulously defined claim of 'environmental damage' is somehow added into EU fuel prices. All the claims regarding this phenomenon that I have seen have smacked of poor, if not outright contrived science. If so, how do they calculate this and not simply use it as a means to fund more government graft? In the US, no revenue from artificially maintained oil prices would be applied to alternatives--it simply is not in the government's ability to not fritter the cash away. or sending a few thousand troops over to Iraq to keep the oil flowing. Additionally, there are huge tax breaks and government subsidies for the energy industry.
Kuwait paid the US a LOT of money to defray the costs of the Gulf War. We are talking billions and billions of dollars. Getting their country back from Iraq didn't cost as much all the wasted effort and money we spend sending the UN lamers in there to do weapons inspections. Add it all up, and some have estimated that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline is around $5/gallon.
Please itemize that figure. The market only produces efficient solutions when all costs are internalized. Make people pay the true costs at the pump, and see how long gasoline remains the fuel of choice, and fuel-inefficeint vehicles remain popular.
Nice speech, but you still haven't proven your point, only made a claim of something being true. In a market driven economy, rather than one driven by government agenda(which I won't say is reality in the US anymore than anywhere else), there would be numerous alternatives of transportation that would be affordable for all.
Most of the US problem is that we still allow corps to buy and bury useful tech so they can preserve their revenue streams. This is the same issue, really, but I believe that considering that a carburator existed in 1955 that got 50 miles to the gallon, and that the oil companies and car companies basically bought and buried the design to pretect their thoroughly intertwined interests, then made Americans dependent on their gas guzzling solutions, is it wholly fair to blame the people who have been forced to buy those choices?
I will cheerfully buy a vehicle that utilizes fuel cells -when- they are available in forms that let me live my life pretty much as I live it now. Being out in the rural areas, or being a farmer would make some of the supposed solutions less than viable.
I always wanted my own copy of DeCSS. Thank you, so very much.
We should really thank these bozos mightily. The EFF really needs to leap on this and get a motion for a stay filed. I think an appeals court judge or two could readily see the problem. You?
Let Jack Valenti once again that he doesn't know jack and try to spin his way out of this one.
Nevermind that the admins were prescribing medication and should be reported for it. It's illegal and most parents don't really understand the gravity of the matter. Get all contact with the school in writing from now on. Report the guy far and wide.
Some of these people really need to be jail for the child abusers they really are, anyway.
While the Religion of Science continues to mask its tracks behind the rhetoric, the whole Kansas issue underscores something blatant and simple about the whole argument: That the Origins of the Universe are a philosophical, not scientific issue.
I will have to disappoint many people by pointing this out to them, but the arguments in play in this confrontation -are- philosophical and religious, not the 'science' that many have been slinging the mud about.
Does the State have the right to establish Religion? No. So in mandating a viewpoint which is widely unprovable, and pushing it off as fact, are they not doing just that? But then, if I were opting for the Public School approach, I would be suing to have the Gaia Hypothesis removed from all curriculum because I feel that the State has no right to use my religion in a classroom setting(Gaia being a Greek God and I being a Greek practitioner have issues on this--big ones).
Mind you, I am against near-sighted thinking of all sorts, but I do understand why those of religious conscience would want the 'facts' of the Big Bang played down in reference to the philosophical issues at stake. However, there is no way to deny that Evolution is and does happen, but the issue should not be placed as 'fact' to support a position that undermines religious conscience, which it is clearly presented as in the classroom setting.
Those who believe that God did it in 7 days, those who believe in an Intelligent Creator/Creatrix, and those who believe in the scientific point of view ALL have a place at the table. They all should be discussing how to approach the philosophical issues in a way that allows science to be taught as a mechanism for discovery of how our world works, not as a club to suppress the other camps.
The Postal Service has been under increasing pressure to outsource and 'run like a business' for years. This means that they have been selling off their most lucrative ventures, like Express and Priority Mail services to 3rd parties. You'll note that the quality of the service has degraded substantively at the same time.
I would think that giving out free email addys to people will invite a lot of spam, unless there is stiff regulation of it from Congress, or a relaxing of their burning need to make all government services turn a basic 'profit'. It is wise to remember that the government best handles the dispensing of needed services that are not profitable, and that you can't outsource everything under the sun and expect the remaining pieces to support themselves. In this respect, I think that the Republicans are tragically shortsighted, though never quite as shortsighted as the "new" Democrats.
Dunno, I tend to feel that honest greed is better than greed masquerading as altruism.
Um, isn't the non-governmental use of the SSN, and even a number of those, illegal?
I never give out my SSN online, ever. I also restrict access to it in the real world as well. No Privacy Act Statement? No number. Simple.
If you don't have access to the source, making a fix isn't possible. You can twiddle the settings in Outlook to get rid of certain loopholes and twiddle Windows for a few others, but the ultimate fix has to come from the people with the source.
If you don't have access to the source, making a fix isn't possible. You can twiddle the settings in Outlook to get rid of certain loopholes and twiddle Windows for a few others, but the ultimate fix has to come from the people with the source.
I'm boycotting. No sense in throwing money at the industry that doesn't get it and thinks I -owe- them something. I've never downloaded an MP3 from anywhere and never had the means to make them.
Like with many things, the power of the consumer to say 'no' to a product will hurt the copyright holders more than anything you can do otherwise.
Too bad RIAA, you lose a lot of money, cuz I spend a LOT of money on music.