Maybe it's not economically feasible for Walmart to pay rates that union employees demand. If that's their business model, then fine. That's their choice as a corporation.
no, it isn't. workers have a right to unionize, and the tactics that walmart (and some others) use to prevent unionization are illegal.
i think some unions have unrealistic goals, and many seem to serve their leadership better than their membership. but US law isn't at all vague about the right of workers to unionize.
Parents that don't care about education are certainly a big problem. And anti-intellectualism in general doesn't help. But the societal and economic changes of the last 40 years have probably had a much larger impact. These include more women working outside the home, lower real wages, larger amounts of income spent on housing, transportation, and energy, etc. It means that most parents today have a lot less time to spend with their children, and a lot fewer resources to spend on extracurricular activities or private education.
Another big change has been the inclusion of many kids in testing who were previously just written off. Like minorities, immigrants, and the disabled. And now there is the expectation that all kids should go to college. With the general decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs (and the implosion in healthcare and pensions), it's no wonder why.
I certainly expect this move to be a disaster, like NCLB and many other changes before it. But the general idea of giving kids the ability to specialize is a good one. I certainly remember a lot of kids from when I was in high school who were only interested in theater, or band, or art, or chemistry, etc. I am personally glad that I got a broad liberal arts education, even though I'm a programmer. But I don't have any problem with other people just wanting to dive in and specialize.
And before you start jumping to ridiculous generalizations like
Parents that care, do whatever they can to send their children to a private school or home school them.
you might want to get more experience interacting with different kinds of people. Many people who are very interested in education send their children to public schools because they believe in public education. House prices in good school districts are considerably inflated because many families use school quality as the first criteria for where to live. Not everyone who's interested in education can afford private school or home schooling, and not everyone who can afford them chooses those options.
I wouldn't call her a push-over, but my wife is an experimental linguist who uses Word (and used Word for her diss). She uses a Mac, but generally upgrade to new versions as they come out to avoid problems reading docs from other people.
When she started working on her diss, I volunteered to learn LaTeX and BibTeX with her, to support her, bought a book on LaTeX, etc. But at the end of the day, she knew Word, and most of her colleagues and committee members used Word (especially the commenting and change-tracking features).
I've certainly known academics who used LaTeX, and even other stuff like roff. But most of the time, they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.
Some people have a hard time dealing with distractions, some people have a hard time prioritizing, so let's blame it on the medium. These are probably the same people who had huge piles of paper and couldn't keep up with the deluge of paper mail and memos twenty years ago.
Other people, myself included, love email. I telecommute full time (from across the country) and could not do my job without email. I have almost all of my email about back around twelve years, and some sporadic stuff going back further. And I find it very useful to be able to go back to it when I need to find an old address, figure out when something happened, etc. If other people have a hard time dealing with a new medium, it's their problem, not email's problem.
And I'm not one of the slashdot is going to hell crowd, since the quality of posts and comments doesn't seem to have changed much since I started reading in (ack: 9 years ago!). But can we please keep the trolling in the comments where it belongs?
I don't think anyone is confused about the purpose of copyright. Even if certain courts don't think that part is relevant, it's clearly To promote the progress of science and useful arts....
But science and the arts were encouraged and promoted for centuries before copyright was invented. Mostly by patronage in one form or another. Many works were commissioned by governments and the aristocracy in general, many staff positions were created to support scientists and philosophers, etc. This worked out relatively well, and not all that differently than today in many cases (many scientists are supported by universities and government research grants, many works of art are commissioned by governments, foundations, and the wealthy).
Performing arts have a different model, where the live experience is crucial. Plays, music and film work this way. The artists the RIAA is constantly "protecting" actually make the vast majority of their income from live performances, and have a net loss on recording sales once the RIAA recoups all of their expenses.
Copyright was meant to provide protection for machine-reproducible works -- in the age when copyright was invented, this was only books -- which had a large upfront investment that was being undercut by rival presses churning out unauthorized copies. Music and movies (and to a lesser degree photography, painting and other flat art) became reproducible in the intervening centuries and were handled the same. But the problem comes in the last few decades when the cost and overhead of reproducing these works has dropped to almost zero.
If the patronage and performance models work to create the original (book, song, film...), and the cost of reproduction and distribution is virtually zero, why do we need copyright again?
If you want to use iTunes, you pretty much need an iPod.
Even assuming that you're talking about the iTunes Music Store, this isn't really true, since you can listen to the music on your computer and burn CD-Rs all you want. That certainly covers the vast majority of my music listening. It would be better to say that if you want to use a portable music player with iTMS, it has to be an iPod. There are ways to circumvent the DRM, but that's really a corner case.
And IIRC, Apple sells around 1 iPod for every 10 songs sold on iTunes.
And given that iPods hold thousands of songs, this should give you a hint that most iPods are mostly full of MP3s that would play on other players just fine. Out of the thousands of songs in my iTunes library, around a hundred are from iTMS.
So I don't disagree with you that the iTMS DRM encourages iPod purchases. But I don't think the tie-in is a significant reason people get iPods, or stay with iPods. If anything, I think it's the other way around -- people get iPods because they are better than other players out there, and then they use iTunes, and buy songs from iTMS.
I know there are some different opinions about how many continents there are and what they're called. But most Americans consider Australia to be its own continent, and count all of the other islands as part of Asia. In fact, in American questionnaires about race, you will see the category "Asian/Pacific Islander".
Obviously she's unaware that something cannot have "real market value" when it's illegal to sell.
Right. Just like illegal drugs have no market value, and nobody's ever been busted for income tax evasion because they didn't report their drug dealing income...
I've been thinking about signing up with Vonage for a while now, but just haven't gotten around to it.
When I heard about the injunction, I went right over and signed up, since I figured it would be a few hours until it went into effect, even if it didn't get stayed (which it soon did).
If Vonage goes out of business, it'll take a while. And I can always switch to my cable company's VOIP. I had been dithering b/c my cable's VOIP is twice as expensive, but it's supposed to be better quality (since they use a separate channel for voice instead of competing with the other traffic).
as someone who did a double degree in Theatre and English Lit, but ended up working as an application developer and systems integrator
Small world -- I also did English and Theatre in school, and also wound up being a developer.
Unlike many of my colleagues with CS degrees who constantly complain that all their coursework (esp. assembly and compilers) have no relevance to their actual work, I use what I learned in school all the time. Because I learned how to read and think, how to analyze, how to do research, how the nuts and bolts of language work, how to communicate.
Anyway, on the main topic, yy wife is a professor and she's essentially given up on writing assignments outside of class. Plagiarism and the time spent dealing with it are the main cause. I think it's a shame that term papers are on their way out, because they do require at least a semblance of research, logic, organization and thought. Maybe we should switch to oral exams like the English, and make students display the same skills in person.
There would need to be a separate flow of money to the author that didn't involve the publishers.
Currently, there are government and non-profit grants. There are also day jobs (a lot of writers are also magazine editors, columnists, teachers of various sorts, etc.).
In the case of Rowling, and the small number of other stars, they could setup a foundation that accepted payments from fans (fan clubs could probably be re-purposed for this). I imagine a lot of people would be willing to buy her books for $5 and give the other $20 or so to her fan club, if it meant that she didn't have to have a day job and the books got written faster.
Better yet, the publisher could be removed from the equation entirely. Rowling could setup a website where you could download her books for a nominal fee. You could take your files to a copy shop, and they could print and bind them for you, if you wanted.
And authors are probably the worst case for the abolition of copyright. Almost every other kind of work (music, theatre, film, etc.) has an inherent performance aspect to it, and can be charged for directly. Authors would probably wind up in a more direct patronage system because of this.
The content if this web site is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein.
Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission. This web site is intended to be viewed on a computer. Permission and limited, non-exclusive license to reproduce this web site, by any method including but not limited to magnetically, digitally, electronically or hard copy, may be purchased for $5,000 (five thousand dollars) per printed hard copy page per copy, in advance of printing. We accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, check, money order or cash. WE DO NOT ACCEPT GOVERNMENT PO'S - this fee schedule specifically, but not exclusively, applies to any state agency, employee, contractor or CP$ service provider. The copyright holder has full, exclusive rights to set the license fee and terms of use for this intellectual property. CP$ agencies and coconspirators have found this site to be extremely valuable, preferring the contents of this site to any other site, Hence, the premium prices.
it makes me wonder if misspellings and juvenile language ("CP$", "coconspirators", etc.) have any effect on the enforceability of a contract.
and, like several other posters pointed out, i was able to access this text by clicking cancel every time i was presented with a prompt, without entering a password, etc. it would be funny to see people with such a distorted view of intellectual property laws if there weren't also stories about stroke victims and children being sued by the riaa...
technically, it's the house of representatives that accepts the vote of the electoral college and resolves disputes, ties (like jefferson v. burr in 1800), etc. there's a melodramatic bit in fahrenheit 9/11 where numerous reps try to challenge the certification of the 2000 election, but fail on procedural grounds because no senator would join in the challenge.
now, the bush v. gore ruling was a travesty of justice, and i think it will be remembered as a low point of the modern court. but they didn't actually him president.
even if they did, though (or effectively did given how high the hurdle is for challenging an election in the house), i'd rather have a court of appointed and ratified judges than a monarch. judges are at least ostensibly chosen for their merits.
...you US folks have this pre-conditioned distrust of Royalty for some unfathomable reason...
call me crazy, but as an atheist and devout (small-r) republican, i find the idea that someone is worthy of being my head of state by dint of their lineage, and ultimately because of divine right, to be not just preposterous, but offensive.
i know it doesn't make much practical difference. i lived in england for a couple of years, and i never had to make any profession of fealty or bow to royalty in any way. but still i find it bizarre that such progressive countries should allow such a remnant of despotism to linger for so long.
Those who claim that the argument has already been settled in favor of sharing over property are (IMO) missing the fact that property has always been a crucial driver of innovation and investment.
This isn't actually true. Our system of copyright is rather new, as the idea is only about as old as our country. Large scale works (opera, architecture, large paintings, manuscripts, etc. in those days) existed for centuries before copyright was invented.
The old system relied on patronage. People with money and power supplied the capital needed for large projects, and hence called the shots on their production. I think this system could be resurrected pretty easily, since there are already a number of government and non-profit organizations that fund film and television productions now. I don't know if we'd ever have patronage-funded $100M-budget blockbusters, but I'm not sure that's an argument against the system.
Also, and more broadly, our experiment with copyright started with a 14-year term. Given that the last works to enter the public domain were produced before my grand-parents were born, I think we've effectively established infinite copyright terms at this point. So I think the media conglomerates have effectively forfeited any moral right to copyright they may have had by stealing the public domain from us. After all, the enrichment of the public domain is the only excuse for giving creators a temporary monopoly in the first place.
Right you are (though there's some debate about the surveillance police-state, bit). There are a grand total of 15 European spammers on the list, even with a rather broad definition of "Europe" (Russia, Ukraine, UK, Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Italy). There are a similar number from Asia.
But I think the take-home message from the list is that most spammers are based in the US, and easily reachable by our courts.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
Actually, it was a judicial solution
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
They already know where this guy lives, and M$ is apparently collecting money from him.
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
Not really, since our courts already have wonderful ways of dealing with uncooperatives.
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
Not sure how this applies.... You sue each individual spammer, so no central authority is needed.
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
Foreign countries with different laws (or standards of justice) could be problems. But in reality, most spam comes from two or three dozen operations, and most of them are in the US or Europe. So the legal problems are not as complicated as you might think.
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
Ibid.
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
This solution specifically avoids this problem -- by removing the source of spam rather than trying to stop it technically.
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
Again, our courts have good safeguards for this.
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
Ibid.
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
The laws have only been in place for a couple of years. And the big spam-victims have started to use them. We'll see how effective they are.
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
How is this a feel-good measure? People are actually suing the spammers right now. He's saying we should do more of that (which I'm sure the major spam victims are working on as we speak).
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
Maybe not. Maybe we'll take down the big spammers only to find out that a bunch of little spammers from Indonesia take their place. But it certainly seems worth a shot, particularly if we can get large amounts of money back from the spammer assholes.
i agree that the most likely reason for.XXX is to rake in some cash.
but i think that RFC 3675 largely missed the point. they note that the US govt has the ultimate control of the DNS, but fail to come to the logical conclusion: that means that we can force all.com porn sites (using our definition of porn) to move to.XXX, and simply revoke their.com addresses if they refuse. the rest of the world can do with this what they will, but that ultimately a secondary consideration. they might even get upset enough by it to wrest control of the DNS from the US (though i doubt that). but for the moment, we are in control and can do as we like.
the technical problems presented in RFC 3675 are also seem pretty spurious to me. given the number of new domains, i don't think adding another one will cause much trouble. and the discussion of people using other names is also pretty bogus: the obvious place to enforce this would be at the DNS level, not to go after each user who made a local non-.XXX name and pointed at a.XXX site. how people choose to access sites wouldn't be the problem, it's how sites advertise themselves that would be regulated.
so i think the technical and legal problems are basically non-existent. i'd hope that we would setup an independent panel to review sites and provide a decent court of appeal in the inevitable gray areas, but strictly speaking, that's not necessary. congress could just decree a standard for what must go in.XXX, and let the courts sort it out. given the shift in the supreme court in the last couple of years, this would probably be allowed.
I hate Microsoft for a lot of reasons, but I think IE is a great microcosm:
They neglected an emerging market, instead of providing leadership.
When they noticed that Netscape was pioneering this market and felt threatened, they licensed the Mosaic code from Spyglass (a company setup by UIUC to profit off the code).
They turned around and gave IE away for free, thus screwing not only Netscape (who made the majority of its income at the time from selling commercial versions of Navigator), but also Spyglass (because their income from the licensing agreement was based on what Microsoft charged for their derivative products). Not only did they give it away for free, but they bribed and threatened OEMs and ISPs to distribute it, make it the default, not distribute Netscape, and to badger and/or force their customers into switching to IE.
They got caught red-handed in the antitrust trial. They lied on the stand, falsified evidence, and were rightly convicted of being a predatory monopolist. And what happened? Nothing much. The trial judge made some inappropriate comments, and the penalties got revisited. The administration changed to a more business-friendly one, and the penalties were gutted and then not enforced.
What did they do with this wonderful market share? Did they continue to add new features? Did they fix all the security problems? No, they basically sat around for a few years, while millions of people got rooted (and continue to be...) because of IE's idiotic security problems. They had so little intention of doing significant development on IE that they even disbanded their development team at one point. It wasn't until Firefox became enough of a threat that they bothered to add features (like tabs and popup-blocking) that other browsers have had for years.
So that's Microsoft in a nutshell: no innovation, no scruples, poor quality, rammed down your throat.
Seriously, why is voting any different from these other very important uses of computers?
Voting is different for a number of reasons:
Voting is done in secret, with the only way of knowing the results being the voting machines. And the makers of electronic voting machines are against the only decent way of double-checking them (voter-verifiable paper trail).
Voting is only done a few times a year, rather than continuously, year-round.
Voting is administered by the people who have the largest incentive and opportunity to cheat.
And most importantly, unlike the other examples you list (banking, trading, flight control), electronic voting machines have not been shown to be more reliable and accurate than humans.
This last point is a little fuzzy, because I'm sure electronic voting machines are better than poorly-designed punch-card ballots, and maybe some other flawed mechanisms. But the best system available right now is optical-scan paper ballots that can easily be hand-audited and hand-recounted. They are easy to use, require only a very circumscribed use of technology, and can easily be verified by people if there are any problems or a very close result.
Doesn't it make more sense to fix the problem rather than ban the machines?
Sure -- I don't think anyone is saying we should never use computers for voting. Fix the problems, and then use them for voting. Advocates of electronic voting seem to be saying we should do it the other way around, which is insane.
The current round of voting machines are insultingly under-engineered, considering the problems I listed above. There are many types of threats to the integrity of voting machines, and Diebold et. al. aren't interested in addressing them. They're more interested in shutting down debate and research about them, in fact, which is very worrying to me.
Better yet, email servers should refuse to accept email unless the sender has been configured to pay them $0.01 for each message it is trying to send. There are some cases that aren't handled very well by a system like this (such as mailing lists), but those could be handled by setting up a refund system where the $0.01 would be refunded unless the user marks the message as spam. This would have the added benefit of encouraging opt-in email lists when you sign up for accounts, etc.
Maybe the spammers would just start using phishing to get the financial details of people to configuring their zombies to be able to pay for messages sent. This would suck for the phished, but at least that would be wire fraud, which would kick the spammers up into the racketeering/conspiracy/mafia-type laws which have real teeth.
And since when is it a "bad thing" for a company to turn a profit.
Perhaps you're not terribly familiar with the English and their attitudes, but they are much more likely to regard success with suspicion, if not hostility, than Americans are. And given the other bit in the blurb (that Tesco takes in 1 of every 8 pounds spent in the UK), you can imagine that many of the anti-success and anti-corporate attitudes that apply to Walmart here apply to Tesco in the UK.
I lived in the UK for a couple of years, and a new Tesco store opened in my neighborhood while I was there. There was a lot of hue and cry about the impact on local businesses at the time, and it did remind me a lot of the anti-Walmart sentiment in the US. Though the snobbish aspect wasn't there as much, since Tesco tends to have better quality than Walmart. I would never shop at Walmart (or Asda, Walmart's UK branch), but I happily shopped at the new Tesco, since it was closer and the quality was indistinguishable from Sainsbury's (the other, slightly more upscale, supermarket in the area).
If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is.be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.
Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".
I sometimes wonder about the average/.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.
And I sometimes wonder about the average/.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.
If they're able to buy music or a movie they want at a price they consider fair in the format they want most will choose to do so.
This is the point that I think most often gets lost in DRM discussions.
DRM allows media companies to set unreasonable limits on movies and music -- limits we'd never tolerate in a grocery store, clothing store, etc. Instead of relying on the basic goodness of the average user, the media companies are driving many people away from DRM'd content and into the P2P and other sources.
For example, I'd love to buy music from iTunes Music Store. The integration with iTunes and my iPod is wonderful. The selection is good, and the experience overall can't be beat. Except for the DRM. The first time my computer wouldn't let me play one of my songs, because it had gotten confused about how many computers were authorized, I realized the music wasn't really mine as long as it was DRM'd. Hymn/JHymn break the old iTunes DRM, but the new DRM is still uncracked (for now...).
So what do I do? I go to a lot more effort and inconvenience to get my music elsewhere, so I can do with it as I please. If I want MP3s so I can play them on my linux box, too, why does Apple have a problem with that. If I reinstall my OS and forget to deauthorize before, why do I need to convince Apple of this? It's this kind of crap that has convinced me that I'll never buy any content with (unbroken) DRM again.
f I'm watching a TV program on my DVR and I catch up to the live program, and am thus forced to watch the commercials, I get a little annoyed, but I live with it.
you're just not dedicated enough.
as a general rule, i never watch tv even roughly when it was broadcast. but i'm badly hooked on Lost, so i made an exception and started watching it about 15minutes in, skipping the commercials until catching up with realtime at the end of the show. this worked ok, but every now and then, i'd misjudge the time and start too early, and would catch up with realtime before the last commercials.
when this happend, i'd just pause it and do something else until i'd built up enough delay to be able to skip the rest of the commercials.
though if they break the fast-forward feature, i'll just download the shows from bittorrent. sure it's a little more of a delay, but i personally find it hard to watch tv with commercials.
Slashdot Mirror
no, it isn't. workers have a right to unionize, and the tactics that walmart (and some others) use to prevent unionization are illegal.
i think some unions have unrealistic goals, and many seem to serve their leadership better than their membership. but US law isn't at all vague about the right of workers to unionize.
-esme
How simplistic.
Parents that don't care about education are certainly a big problem. And anti-intellectualism in general doesn't help. But the societal and economic changes of the last 40 years have probably had a much larger impact. These include more women working outside the home, lower real wages, larger amounts of income spent on housing, transportation, and energy, etc. It means that most parents today have a lot less time to spend with their children, and a lot fewer resources to spend on extracurricular activities or private education.
Another big change has been the inclusion of many kids in testing who were previously just written off. Like minorities, immigrants, and the disabled. And now there is the expectation that all kids should go to college. With the general decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs (and the implosion in healthcare and pensions), it's no wonder why.
I certainly expect this move to be a disaster, like NCLB and many other changes before it. But the general idea of giving kids the ability to specialize is a good one. I certainly remember a lot of kids from when I was in high school who were only interested in theater, or band, or art, or chemistry, etc. I am personally glad that I got a broad liberal arts education, even though I'm a programmer. But I don't have any problem with other people just wanting to dive in and specialize.
And before you start jumping to ridiculous generalizations like
you might want to get more experience interacting with different kinds of people. Many people who are very interested in education send their children to public schools because they believe in public education. House prices in good school districts are considerably inflated because many families use school quality as the first criteria for where to live. Not everyone who's interested in education can afford private school or home schooling, and not everyone who can afford them chooses those options.
-Esme
I wouldn't call her a push-over, but my wife is an experimental linguist who uses Word (and used Word for her diss). She uses a Mac, but generally upgrade to new versions as they come out to avoid problems reading docs from other people.
When she started working on her diss, I volunteered to learn LaTeX and BibTeX with her, to support her, bought a book on LaTeX, etc. But at the end of the day, she knew Word, and most of her colleagues and committee members used Word (especially the commenting and change-tracking features).
I've certainly known academics who used LaTeX, and even other stuff like roff. But most of the time, they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.
-Esme
<sarcasm>Yes, of course email is dead.</sarcasm>
Some people have a hard time dealing with distractions, some people have a hard time prioritizing, so let's blame it on the medium. These are probably the same people who had huge piles of paper and couldn't keep up with the deluge of paper mail and memos twenty years ago.
Other people, myself included, love email. I telecommute full time (from across the country) and could not do my job without email. I have almost all of my email about back around twelve years, and some sporadic stuff going back further. And I find it very useful to be able to go back to it when I need to find an old address, figure out when something happened, etc. If other people have a hard time dealing with a new medium, it's their problem, not email's problem.
And I'm not one of the slashdot is going to hell crowd, since the quality of posts and comments doesn't seem to have changed much since I started reading in (ack: 9 years ago!). But can we please keep the trolling in the comments where it belongs?
-Esme
I don't think anyone is confused about the purpose of copyright. Even if certain courts don't think that part is relevant, it's clearly To promote the progress of science and useful arts....
But science and the arts were encouraged and promoted for centuries before copyright was invented. Mostly by patronage in one form or another. Many works were commissioned by governments and the aristocracy in general, many staff positions were created to support scientists and philosophers, etc. This worked out relatively well, and not all that differently than today in many cases (many scientists are supported by universities and government research grants, many works of art are commissioned by governments, foundations, and the wealthy).
Performing arts have a different model, where the live experience is crucial. Plays, music and film work this way. The artists the RIAA is constantly "protecting" actually make the vast majority of their income from live performances, and have a net loss on recording sales once the RIAA recoups all of their expenses.
Copyright was meant to provide protection for machine-reproducible works -- in the age when copyright was invented, this was only books -- which had a large upfront investment that was being undercut by rival presses churning out unauthorized copies. Music and movies (and to a lesser degree photography, painting and other flat art) became reproducible in the intervening centuries and were handled the same. But the problem comes in the last few decades when the cost and overhead of reproducing these works has dropped to almost zero.
If the patronage and performance models work to create the original (book, song, film...), and the cost of reproduction and distribution is virtually zero, why do we need copyright again?
-Esme
Even assuming that you're talking about the iTunes Music Store, this isn't really true, since you can listen to the music on your computer and burn CD-Rs all you want. That certainly covers the vast majority of my music listening. It would be better to say that if you want to use a portable music player with iTMS, it has to be an iPod. There are ways to circumvent the DRM, but that's really a corner case.
And given that iPods hold thousands of songs, this should give you a hint that most iPods are mostly full of MP3s that would play on other players just fine. Out of the thousands of songs in my iTunes library, around a hundred are from iTMS.
So I don't disagree with you that the iTMS DRM encourages iPod purchases. But I don't think the tie-in is a significant reason people get iPods, or stay with iPods. If anything, I think it's the other way around -- people get iPods because they are better than other players out there, and then they use iTunes, and buy songs from iTMS.
-Esme
I know there are some different opinions about how many continents there are and what they're called. But most Americans consider Australia to be its own continent, and count all of the other islands as part of Asia. In fact, in American questionnaires about race, you will see the category "Asian/Pacific Islander".
Right. Just like illegal drugs have no market value, and nobody's ever been busted for income tax evasion because they didn't report their drug dealing income...
-Esme
I've been thinking about signing up with Vonage for a while now, but just haven't gotten around to it.
When I heard about the injunction, I went right over and signed up, since I figured it would be a few hours until it went into effect, even if it didn't get stayed (which it soon did).
If Vonage goes out of business, it'll take a while. And I can always switch to my cable company's VOIP. I had been dithering b/c my cable's VOIP is twice as expensive, but it's supposed to be better quality (since they use a separate channel for voice instead of competing with the other traffic).
-Esme
Small world -- I also did English and Theatre in school, and also wound up being a developer.
Unlike many of my colleagues with CS degrees who constantly complain that all their coursework (esp. assembly and compilers) have no relevance to their actual work, I use what I learned in school all the time. Because I learned how to read and think, how to analyze, how to do research, how the nuts and bolts of language work, how to communicate.
Anyway, on the main topic, yy wife is a professor and she's essentially given up on writing assignments outside of class. Plagiarism and the time spent dealing with it are the main cause. I think it's a shame that term papers are on their way out, because they do require at least a semblance of research, logic, organization and thought. Maybe we should switch to oral exams like the English, and make students display the same skills in person.
-Esme
There would need to be a separate flow of money to the author that didn't involve the publishers.
Currently, there are government and non-profit grants. There are also day jobs (a lot of writers are also magazine editors, columnists, teachers of various sorts, etc.).
In the case of Rowling, and the small number of other stars, they could setup a foundation that accepted payments from fans (fan clubs could probably be re-purposed for this). I imagine a lot of people would be willing to buy her books for $5 and give the other $20 or so to her fan club, if it meant that she didn't have to have a day job and the books got written faster.
Better yet, the publisher could be removed from the equation entirely. Rowling could setup a website where you could download her books for a nominal fee. You could take your files to a copy shop, and they could print and bind them for you, if you wanted.
And authors are probably the worst case for the abolition of copyright. Almost every other kind of work (music, theatre, film, etc.) has an inherent performance aspect to it, and can be charged for directly. Authors would probably wind up in a more direct patronage system because of this.
-Esme
the copyright notice starts out:
it makes me wonder if misspellings and juvenile language ("CP$", "coconspirators", etc.) have any effect on the enforceability of a contract.
and, like several other posters pointed out, i was able to access this text by clicking cancel every time i was presented with a prompt, without entering a password, etc. it would be funny to see people with such a distorted view of intellectual property laws if there weren't also stories about stroke victims and children being sued by the riaa...
-esme
technically, it's the house of representatives that accepts the vote of the electoral college and resolves disputes, ties (like jefferson v. burr in 1800), etc. there's a melodramatic bit in fahrenheit 9/11 where numerous reps try to challenge the certification of the 2000 election, but fail on procedural grounds because no senator would join in the challenge.
now, the bush v. gore ruling was a travesty of justice, and i think it will be remembered as a low point of the modern court. but they didn't actually him president.
even if they did, though (or effectively did given how high the hurdle is for challenging an election in the house), i'd rather have a court of appointed and ratified judges than a monarch. judges are at least ostensibly chosen for their merits.
-esme
call me crazy, but as an atheist and devout (small-r) republican, i find the idea that someone is worthy of being my head of state by dint of their lineage, and ultimately because of divine right, to be not just preposterous, but offensive.
i know it doesn't make much practical difference. i lived in england for a couple of years, and i never had to make any profession of fealty or bow to royalty in any way. but still i find it bizarre that such progressive countries should allow such a remnant of despotism to linger for so long.
-esme
This isn't actually true. Our system of copyright is rather new, as the idea is only about as old as our country. Large scale works (opera, architecture, large paintings, manuscripts, etc. in those days) existed for centuries before copyright was invented.
The old system relied on patronage. People with money and power supplied the capital needed for large projects, and hence called the shots on their production. I think this system could be resurrected pretty easily, since there are already a number of government and non-profit organizations that fund film and television productions now. I don't know if we'd ever have patronage-funded $100M-budget blockbusters, but I'm not sure that's an argument against the system.
Also, and more broadly, our experiment with copyright started with a 14-year term. Given that the last works to enter the public domain were produced before my grand-parents were born, I think we've effectively established infinite copyright terms at this point. So I think the media conglomerates have effectively forfeited any moral right to copyright they may have had by stealing the public domain from us. After all, the enrichment of the public domain is the only excuse for giving creators a temporary monopoly in the first place.
-Esme
Right you are (though there's some debate about the surveillance police-state, bit). There are a grand total of 15 European spammers on the list, even with a rather broad definition of "Europe" (Russia, Ukraine, UK, Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Italy). There are a similar number from Asia.
But I think the take-home message from the list is that most spammers are based in the US, and easily reachable by our courts.
-Esme
Actually, it was a judicial solution
They already know where this guy lives, and M$ is apparently collecting money from him.
Not really, since our courts already have wonderful ways of dealing with uncooperatives.
Not sure how this applies.... You sue each individual spammer, so no central authority is needed.
Foreign countries with different laws (or standards of justice) could be problems. But in reality, most spam comes from two or three dozen operations, and most of them are in the US or Europe. So the legal problems are not as complicated as you might think.
Ibid.
This solution specifically avoids this problem -- by removing the source of spam rather than trying to stop it technically.
Again, our courts have good safeguards for this.
Ibid.
The laws have only been in place for a couple of years. And the big spam-victims have started to use them. We'll see how effective they are.
How is this a feel-good measure? People are actually suing the spammers right now. He's saying we should do more of that (which I'm sure the major spam victims are working on as we speak).
Maybe not. Maybe we'll take down the big spammers only to find out that a bunch of little spammers from Indonesia take their place. But it certainly seems worth a shot, particularly if we can get large amounts of money back from the spammer assholes.
-Esme
i agree that the most likely reason for .XXX is to rake in some cash.
but i think that RFC 3675 largely missed the point. they note that the US govt has the ultimate control of the DNS, but fail to come to the logical conclusion: that means that we can force all .com porn sites (using our definition of porn) to move to .XXX, and simply revoke their .com addresses if they refuse. the rest of the world can do with this what they will, but that ultimately a secondary consideration. they might even get upset enough by it to wrest control of the DNS from the US (though i doubt that). but for the moment, we are in control and can do as we like.
the technical problems presented in RFC 3675 are also seem pretty spurious to me. given the number of new domains, i don't think adding another one will cause much trouble. and the discussion of people using other names is also pretty bogus: the obvious place to enforce this would be at the DNS level, not to go after each user who made a local non-.XXX name and pointed at a .XXX site. how people choose to access sites wouldn't be the problem, it's how sites advertise themselves that would be regulated.
so i think the technical and legal problems are basically non-existent. i'd hope that we would setup an independent panel to review sites and provide a decent court of appeal in the inevitable gray areas, but strictly speaking, that's not necessary. congress could just decree a standard for what must go in .XXX, and let the courts sort it out. given the shift in the supreme court in the last couple of years, this would probably be allowed.
-esme
I hate Microsoft for a lot of reasons, but I think IE is a great microcosm:
They neglected an emerging market, instead of providing leadership.
When they noticed that Netscape was pioneering this market and felt threatened, they licensed the Mosaic code from Spyglass (a company setup by UIUC to profit off the code).
They turned around and gave IE away for free, thus screwing not only Netscape (who made the majority of its income at the time from selling commercial versions of Navigator), but also Spyglass (because their income from the licensing agreement was based on what Microsoft charged for their derivative products). Not only did they give it away for free, but they bribed and threatened OEMs and ISPs to distribute it, make it the default, not distribute Netscape, and to badger and/or force their customers into switching to IE.
They got caught red-handed in the antitrust trial. They lied on the stand, falsified evidence, and were rightly convicted of being a predatory monopolist. And what happened? Nothing much. The trial judge made some inappropriate comments, and the penalties got revisited. The administration changed to a more business-friendly one, and the penalties were gutted and then not enforced.
What did they do with this wonderful market share? Did they continue to add new features? Did they fix all the security problems? No, they basically sat around for a few years, while millions of people got rooted (and continue to be...) because of IE's idiotic security problems. They had so little intention of doing significant development on IE that they even disbanded their development team at one point. It wasn't until Firefox became enough of a threat that they bothered to add features (like tabs and popup-blocking) that other browsers have had for years.
So that's Microsoft in a nutshell: no innovation, no scruples, poor quality, rammed down your throat.
-Esme
This last point is a little fuzzy, because I'm sure electronic voting machines are better than poorly-designed punch-card ballots, and maybe some other flawed mechanisms. But the best system available right now is optical-scan paper ballots that can easily be hand-audited and hand-recounted. They are easy to use, require only a very circumscribed use of technology, and can easily be verified by people if there are any problems or a very close result.
Sure -- I don't think anyone is saying we should never use computers for voting. Fix the problems, and then use them for voting. Advocates of electronic voting seem to be saying we should do it the other way around, which is insane.
The current round of voting machines are insultingly under-engineered, considering the problems I listed above. There are many types of threats to the integrity of voting machines, and Diebold et. al. aren't interested in addressing them. They're more interested in shutting down debate and research about them, in fact, which is very worrying to me.
-Esme
Better yet, email servers should refuse to accept email unless the sender has been configured to pay them $0.01 for each message it is trying to send. There are some cases that aren't handled very well by a system like this (such as mailing lists), but those could be handled by setting up a refund system where the $0.01 would be refunded unless the user marks the message as spam. This would have the added benefit of encouraging opt-in email lists when you sign up for accounts, etc.
Maybe the spammers would just start using phishing to get the financial details of people to configuring their zombies to be able to pay for messages sent. This would suck for the phished, but at least that would be wire fraud, which would kick the spammers up into the racketeering/conspiracy/mafia-type laws which have real teeth.
-Esme
Perhaps you're not terribly familiar with the English and their attitudes, but they are much more likely to regard success with suspicion, if not hostility, than Americans are. And given the other bit in the blurb (that Tesco takes in 1 of every 8 pounds spent in the UK), you can imagine that many of the anti-success and anti-corporate attitudes that apply to Walmart here apply to Tesco in the UK.
I lived in the UK for a couple of years, and a new Tesco store opened in my neighborhood while I was there. There was a lot of hue and cry about the impact on local businesses at the time, and it did remind me a lot of the anti-Walmart sentiment in the US. Though the snobbish aspect wasn't there as much, since Tesco tends to have better quality than Walmart. I would never shop at Walmart (or Asda, Walmart's UK branch), but I happily shopped at the new Tesco, since it was closer and the quality was indistinguishable from Sainsbury's (the other, slightly more upscale, supermarket in the area).
-Esme
If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is .be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.
Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".
And I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.
-Esme
This is the point that I think most often gets lost in DRM discussions.
DRM allows media companies to set unreasonable limits on movies and music -- limits we'd never tolerate in a grocery store, clothing store, etc. Instead of relying on the basic goodness of the average user, the media companies are driving many people away from DRM'd content and into the P2P and other sources.
For example, I'd love to buy music from iTunes Music Store. The integration with iTunes and my iPod is wonderful. The selection is good, and the experience overall can't be beat. Except for the DRM. The first time my computer wouldn't let me play one of my songs, because it had gotten confused about how many computers were authorized, I realized the music wasn't really mine as long as it was DRM'd. Hymn/JHymn break the old iTunes DRM, but the new DRM is still uncracked (for now...).
So what do I do? I go to a lot more effort and inconvenience to get my music elsewhere, so I can do with it as I please. If I want MP3s so I can play them on my linux box, too, why does Apple have a problem with that. If I reinstall my OS and forget to deauthorize before, why do I need to convince Apple of this? It's this kind of crap that has convinced me that I'll never buy any content with (unbroken) DRM again.
-Esme
you're just not dedicated enough.
as a general rule, i never watch tv even roughly when it was broadcast. but i'm badly hooked on Lost, so i made an exception and started watching it about 15minutes in, skipping the commercials until catching up with realtime at the end of the show. this worked ok, but every now and then, i'd misjudge the time and start too early, and would catch up with realtime before the last commercials.
when this happend, i'd just pause it and do something else until i'd built up enough delay to be able to skip the rest of the commercials.
though if they break the fast-forward feature, i'll just download the shows from bittorrent. sure it's a little more of a delay, but i personally find it hard to watch tv with commercials.
-esme