Before somebody makes a knee-jerk recitation of "Godwin's Law", I am compelled to point out that the parent post is correct. Wagner was a great composer ("Elsa's Procession to the Cathedral" from Lohengren always gets to me), but he also happened to be a fascist, and was Hitler's favorite composer.
Many people believe that Wagner's comments about Jews were motivated more by political expediance than by actual feelings of anti-semitism, but Wagner's fascist views were genuine, and a driving force behind most of his art. (Lohengren is about a woman who marries for her country... The Ring Cycle glorifies the pagan myths of northern Europe... You get the idea.)
It was not until the late 1990's that any orchestra in the entire nation of Israel publicly performed one of Wagner's works. IIRC correctly, it happened once, and has not been done again since.
Getting back to the Katz column, and the book he talks about, it seems to me that it is a silly distiction to call Wagner "multimedia", when very little separated him from operatic composers before him, such as Verdi (or even going back to Mozart's time). The only thing that might make Wagner different from his contemporaries (where a discussion of "multimedia" is concerned) is that he was extremely specific about his instructions to the theater director on details such as sets and blocking.
Verdi wanted you to have an "immersive" experience at the opera, too... but he trusted other people involved in the production to handle some of the visual details (focussing his attention on the music), while Wagner designed entire theaters to ensure that his works would be seen the way the composer intended it.
Wagner might not be the inventor of multimedia, but every film-maker who insists on a "director's cut" release is following his traditions.:)
Like Open Source and p2p, "multimedia" is a term that gets tossed around a lot, but in this case it's hard to find a coherent theme behind it, or a commonly- accepted definition.
"Multimedia": Use of more than one medium in a presentation or work.
In an effort to build the biggest weed-whip ever, they are talking about building the cable out of carbon using a process called "HiPCO".
Do you have any idea how much carbon that would remove from out biosphere!? The surface temperatures of the Earth would drop, growing the ice-caps and lowering the sea level! Catastrophic changes of weather patterns could occur!
We need an international treaty (which trumps all such petty issues as "national sovereignty" that might get in the way). To prevent this from happening!
Failing that, we should ramp up a massive effort to extract more carbon from the ground and introduce it into our biosphere by burning fossil fuels. Everybody leave your cars running all day, every day, for the rest of the Century... that might almost be enough to give us a chance. If you drive a small car, or an electric, go out and get the biggest-assed SUV you can afford. Hurry, your planet needs you.
So I thought I'd throw this out to the Slashdot community for discussion. Is there any hope of saving Linux on the Sparc?
Answer: Yes... If there are enough people who want it badly enough to contribute to the code.
Linux is not a product that you ask for and hope somebody will do it for you. It is a project that exists because programmers who care about it are working on it for their own use... anybody else who benifits from that work is just a pleasent bonus.
Those who do nothing other than utilize the "free" OS software, and can't even be bothered to submit the occational bug report... They can wait around for whatever the GNU/Linux damn well feels like writing.
In spite of the provacative tone I have chosen for this message, look into your heart and I think you will agree that I might have a point here.
I completely agree. If I pay for something, I expect to be able to use it in any legal way that I see fit.
If a company prevents me from doing so with the content they are selling, the solution is to choose not to buy the content.
I'm not saying boycott them in the hope of changing their actions. I am saying do without the content that they are selling. It's not important. You can live without Metallica and have a rich, full life.
I think that most of the hysteria comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about the kind of freedom the Internet enables.
"Back in the day," there really wasn't much in the way of corporate participation on the net. The Internet (and later, the web), made it possible for me to freely distribute information. It also made it possible to consume information that other people were producing and freely distributing. Even operating systems can be passed around. Hooray!
Okay, now there is a large commercial presence on the web, and these people don't really want to distribute things for free. They want to maintain control over the content that they spent ass-loads of money creating and promoting. So they use things like watermarking and encription. Boo!
Now, how much does the presense of these companies ruin my ability to use the web the way I always did before they arrived? Zero.
Sure, I can't steal their content from their distribution systems... but I couldn't do that before their distribution systems arrived on the net, either.
As long as I don't want their music, pictures, software, etc. What they do to control that content means nothing to me. (And if I do want it, I should either pay the price they are asking. If I think it is overpriced, I should produce something just as good on my own.)
All those academic and philanthropic sites that we remember from the "good ol days" of the web are still there, still free, and still useful. The addition of less-free sites does not make us less free.
The next major battle between hackers and the Corporate Republic will almost surely involve the relatively unknown fields of steganography and digital watermarking, otherwise known as Information Hiding, a scientific discipline to take very seriously.
Was there a previous "major battle" between hackers and the Corporate Republic? I thought most hackers made their livings working for corporations.
Also, is there such a thing as "the Corporate Republic"? When you use loaded expressions like that, you sound just as paranoid as Oliver Stone, ranting away about "the Military-Industrual Complex" which he blames for all his little conspiracy theories.
[skimming, skimming, skimming] It's not a huge stretch to say that steganographers may determine whether the Net -- and much of the data that moves through it -- stays free or not.
Yes it is. Not only is it a huge stretch, it is utter hysteria. Seek counciling.
Re:enough already, .com tragedies are passe in 200
on
The Worst Of Times
·
· Score: 2
No shit! Telling jokes about failed dot-coms is like telling Ike jokes at this point.
And most of the slashdotters are far to young to know who the fuck "Ike" was, or which commedian I stole that comparison from. (It was Steve Martin, talking about how stale jokes about Nixon had become in 1977. You young whippersnappers may not know it, but his stand-up acts were once popular enough to sell out football stadiums. Crap, do I ever feel old now... Pardon me while I climb onto a drifting iceburg and float out to sea...)
Instead of blindly fishing around for "clues" in anagrams of names, the auther probably should have taken a little time to read the vast body of what has already been written about this film (including interviews with Kubrick and Clarke themselves). If he had, he would have discovered:
1. The book is not based on the film. It was released later, but both projects were developed at the same time, with lots of cooperation between the two.
2. Kubrick was reading a lot of Jung at the time, so a lot of the shapes did matter... just not the ones that this reviewer seems to be focused on. The Pod looks like an egg because Bowen is soon to be "born" as the Star Child. (Hence, the stargate scene, which is essentially passage into the "womb".)
3. HAL was, by far, the most human personality on board the ship. This was to show that man had become more machine-like as machines began to seem more human.
4. Yes, the voyage was based somewhat on Homer's Oddessey. All I can say to that observation is, "duh!"
5. No Trojan Horses were anywhere to be found in the story. The astronauts were not Greeks trying to invate the Trojan moon... They were primates, mirroring the experience of the monkeys during the first chapter of the film: discovering the monolith (during a period of isolation and exile, brought about by conflict with another tribe... the monkeys were kicked out of the watering hole; the astronauts were quarentined in order to keep their project a secret from the Russians), not knowing what to make of it, and finally, deriving inspiration from it to move on to their next phase of evolution.
Funny you should mention that... I am a current Qworst customer, using the 675, and plan on switching to a local ISP (maybe yours... you didn't mention which one you are with).
Is this only a problem for location changes? If I change ISP's, but the "last 100 feet" remain the same, am I still in good shape?
Your comment on the Kyoto treaty reveals a lack of awareness concerning certain political realities.
1) Clinton didn't want it. He backed off of support for it before the ink was dry. Bush simply extended Clinton's policy of "pretend it ain't there" to "recognize that it's there, and cancel it".
2) Congress didn't want it. The senate voted 95-0 against ratification of the Kyoto agreement.
3) Europe doen't want it. The vast majority of European leaders saw this treaty for the dog that it was, and have been dragging their feet on it for months. Many of them are secretly relieved that Bush dumped it, because now they can simply cast the US as the bad guy. No treaty, and nobody blames you... If you are the Prime Minister of Great Britain, that's what you call "win-win".
4) Those who understand its full impact don't want it. The cost of energy would rise dramatically under this agreement. Can you say "another Great Depression"? Some people in ivory towers like to pretend that economic arguments are all about greed... but the truth is that the super-rich can ride out tough times without inconveniece; the true impact of economic downturns is on the other end of the spectrum - the middle-class becomes the poor, while the poor become destitute.
I did not vote for Bush, but he was 100% right for dropping Kyoto. Everybody knew it was DOA in Washington anyway... Bush was just the only one willing to stand up and take the hit for it. (This seems to be an emerging trend for Bush. Not since Truman has a president been so willing to make the tough choices, polls be damned. Like I said, I was never a Bush supporter, but I am starting to begrudgingly admit that he is not half as bad as I though he would be).
Though the dictionary does not include it, a "spade" is also a poker card suit. (heart, diamond, club, spade)
It was also a racial slur directed at people of Southern African descent (which may have originated from the British expression "black as the ace of spades")... although it is rarely used in that context in this more enlightened age, so younger people today probably have never heard it used that way.
I am not 100% sure of the etymology of the expression "call a spade a spade", but I do know that it was used as early as the 1500's by Marprel. The ethnic slur use of the word evolved much later (in America).
Alas, I have a lot of utterly useless information like this rattling around in my head... made even more useless by the fact that the Internet puts all the useless information in the world at everybody's fingertips.
Your opinion is shared by the US Departement of Justice, which found the RIAA to be an illegal trust which was artificially inflating the price of CD's. They were warned to cut prices, but little other action was taken... this time.
(When I walk through the record store, I notice that major-label CD's are still overpriced... The RIAA could easilly get spanked again. IIRC, the Microsoft breakup order happened because they also chose to ignore anti-trust warnings.)
1) Sturgeon was far from the first person to make this observation. 2) It's not really a Law. 3) 90% is really just an estimate. It could be just about anywhere between 89% and 91%. 4) Since it does not apply to "crap", it does not apply to "everything". 5) Sturgeon actually said "crud", not "crap".
That leaves the words "of" and "is"... and the fact that it is generally true. The rest is crap.
This does not define fair use as an ABSOLUTE RIGHT, it mearly EXCLUDES it from the definition of infringement.
You are splitting hairs pretty fine here. What you are saying is that it is not illegal, but I don't have a right to do it.
The fact remains that if I want to put a digitally extracted clip of a movie i have purchased on my FTP server for the purposes of education, I am not violating copyright law.
The MPAA is attempting to use the flawed language of the DMCA laws to ban the only tool which allows me to do this (DeCSS), with the intended result of extending copyright protection into areas where it does not belong (preventing criticism, educational use, and other exemptions to copyright law from being utilized).
You cannot claim that the MPAA has taken away your ability to use the work in non-infringing ways. I can, I do, and I have. It is not infringement to make a high-resolution copy of a 20-second clip from a DVD I purchace. It is not infringement to make a backup copy of equal qualitity of DVD's I buy. It is not infringement to make a second copy keep with my notebook PC for mobile use. If I own a second home, it is not infringement to make a separate copy and leave it there. All of these are examples of "fair use", and all are prevented by your reading of the DMCA.
And don't give me that bullshit about VHS or analog copies. When I make a backup copy, I should be able to expect it to be a copy of the data I purchased, which means the quality of duplication should be as near to perfect as current technology allows. Nowhere in the fair use clause that you cut-and-pasted does it state that the MPAA can require all non-infringing copies to be shitty.
Your question has inspired a great idea for an open source project: An English Compiler.
Take a few thousand English words, and English grammar rules, and allow people to write code in it. It would not be very useful in practice, but as a means of demonstrating the expressive nature of code, it would be a fantastic education tool.
For example, Hello World in Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl print "Hello, world\n";
In "GnuEnglish":
Please use the GNU English Language Compiler, which is labeled as "gelc" and found in the directory called "/usr/bin", to read these instructions.
Using the standard output selected by the operating system, print the phrase "Hello, world" and then move the cursor to the next line.
Suddenly, explaining the expressive nature of code to a layman might become a little easier.
Fair use is an EXCEPTION that allows certain infringing actions to not be considered legal infringement. Fair use does not allow you to use copyrighted material in any way that you chose.
You were not listening to what the parent post was saying.
An example of fair use that requires DeCSS:
Suppose I am running an educational web site on the craft of film-making. To demonstrate the use of deep-focus lenses, I want to make a high-resolution 20-second clip from "Citizen Kane" available for download, so my students can see what I am talking about. DeCSS allows me to decript my "Citizen Kane" DVD, extract the clip, and save it to my FTP site. Doing something like this is 100% legal under current Fair Use laws. Without DeCSS, making this digital copy is impossible... I would be forced to settle for a low-quality analog duplication which would not serve my purpose at all. Therefore, DeCSS would be restricting my Fair Use rights as an educator.
Is the point starting to sink in with you now?
The content on the DVD is licensed to you with certain restrictive conditions
Yes it is, but those restrictions do not apply when they conflict with current laws concerning Fair Use. To insist otherwise is an attempt to extend copyright protection to areas in which the law does not provide, which the courts can (and should) (and probably will) shoot down.
The problem comes down to getting what you paid for.
When debugging code, you always run into the principal of diminishing returns. Initial, obvious, critical bugs are found quickly and squished during the development and beta cycles. Eventually, your programmers will reach the point where finding and fixing more bugs would drive the product into a price range that nobody would want to buy it anymore. Bugs exist because we, the consumers, demand cutting-edge software to be delivered quickly and cheaply, and would rather pay $1000 for software with minor glitches to work around than $100,000 for software that is nearly perfect.
The same principal applies to support. They could easilly hire a tech for every 20 customers, highly trained and paid $80,000 per year... but if then they need to charge you $5,000 for a simple contact list program. Still interested? Didn't think so.
So you see, we get what we pay for, and we are not willing to pay for much, so we should not expect much. Simple as that.
You started out like you were going to flame me, but then said nothing that I disagree with, and nothing that disagrees with my comments.
It sounds to me like you are a serious user who knows better than to rely on tech support to figure things out... which is really just restating my point for me.
First of all, in order to train all those people, you would need a lot of techies with people skills to run the classes.
Also, while companies would be able to slightly scale down their helpdesk staff, the people could be kept in place and add value in other ways (such as bug tracking).
A sales person spending an hour with a helpdesk person on a problem that should have been covered in initial training is a Bad Thing. Not only does it tie up a techie who could be doing more valuable work for the company, but it ties up a sales person who could be generating revenue.
If you avoid that kind of down-time by training your people right (and not hiring people who are afraid of the Magic Box on their desks), the benifits will far outweigh the costs. Smart companies have figured that out.
but it is incredibly elitist to assume that anyone who complains about poor customer support is a "clueless luser".
I know I am splitting hairs a little here, but I did not say that all complainers are clueless. I said that as you hear more and louder complaining about support headaches, the probability that the person is a clueless luser begins to approach 100%.:)
I think most of the problem is one of expectations. A good example is how people react to air travel. When I fly, my expectations are fairly simple: "Get me there, don't kill me, and try not to lose my luggage." Most of the time, the airline pulls that off and I am happy. People with higher expectations ("don't make me wait more than an hour, feed me a meal I like, let me drink as much as I want, don't sit on the runway waiting for clearance to take off for a long time, etc.) are never happy.
The same is the case with tech support. If your expectation is, "I will submit a detailed description of the problem, which will probably be read by a rookie tech who knows less than me about this application, but eventually they will get the message that something is broken," you will be satisfied almost all the time.
If you think "I will leave a voice mail saying 'your shitty software keeps crashing on me' and they will send an on-site tech who will debug and recompile the program for me before I hang up the phone," guess what? You will not be happy, and people like me will get the pleasure of hearing you piss and moan about "poor support" over lunch, chuckling silently to ourselves that we are hearing about an "id10t error" from the perspective of the failing keyboard interface.:)
Like most of the/. crowd, I once cut my teeth doing phone support as well. I came away from it with an observation:
Too many people don't know how to use the tools required to do their jobs.
Bus drivers know how to drive, lumberjacks can operate chainsaws, but our business culture is jam-packed with office secretaries that can't even do a simple "mail merge" with MS-Office.
The companies that think they have the best helpdesks are the ones who invest in proper training for their employees. They sit their new hires down in a class room, and make sure they know the OS and all their common applications.
Companies that don't do this end up with helpdesks that spend 90% of their days training people while they are on the job (usually, when they are 10 minutes from some crucial deadline or another, too). The help desk gets all the heat, but it was short-sighted management that created the problem.
The very best companies put support much higher on the foodchain (and the org chart), and pay their support people accordingly, while insisting that RTFM is not only a valid answer in some situations, but demand that their support people give it when appropriate, so they are not wasting time that could be applied to real problems. Alas, such companies are very rare.
How do you fix problems if you don't talk or discuss that problem? The best and most employee friendly company in the world will have problems. There will be people who disagree with the way things are done. If nobody said anything then there would be no way for the company to improve.
Companies already have people who are getting paid (a lot more than you) to figure out how to improve the company. They are called executives.
The best executives are constantly soliciting feedback from their employees, but I am not talking about well-run companies here.
If a company's management is so clueless that they need one of their techies to tell them what on-call compensation should be, there is little chance of saving them anyway. Better to end the relationship as smoothly as possible. Whether they improve or not after I am gone is not my concern. In some cases, it might be a net good for the world if that company fails.
Remember, a company is not a nation, church, or marriage. You do not belong to your company, you just work for it.
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Many people believe that Wagner's comments about Jews were motivated more by political expediance than by actual feelings of anti-semitism, but Wagner's fascist views were genuine, and a driving force behind most of his art. (Lohengren is about a woman who marries for her country... The Ring Cycle glorifies the pagan myths of northern Europe... You get the idea.)
It was not until the late 1990's that any orchestra in the entire nation of Israel publicly performed one of Wagner's works. IIRC correctly, it happened once, and has not been done again since.
Getting back to the Katz column, and the book he talks about, it seems to me that it is a silly distiction to call Wagner "multimedia", when very little separated him from operatic composers before him, such as Verdi (or even going back to Mozart's time). The only thing that might make Wagner different from his contemporaries (where a discussion of "multimedia" is concerned) is that he was extremely specific about his instructions to the theater director on details such as sets and blocking.
Verdi wanted you to have an "immersive" experience at the opera, too... but he trusted other people involved in the production to handle some of the visual details (focussing his attention on the music), while Wagner designed entire theaters to ensure that his works would be seen the way the composer intended it.
Wagner might not be the inventor of multimedia, but every film-maker who insists on a "director's cut" release is following his traditions. :)
"Multimedia": Use of more than one medium in a presentation or work.
Done.
The rest is filler.
Do you have any idea how much carbon that would remove from out biosphere!? The surface temperatures of the Earth would drop, growing the ice-caps and lowering the sea level! Catastrophic changes of weather patterns could occur!
We need an international treaty (which trumps all such petty issues as "national sovereignty" that might get in the way). To prevent this from happening!
Failing that, we should ramp up a massive effort to extract more carbon from the ground and introduce it into our biosphere by burning fossil fuels. Everybody leave your cars running all day, every day, for the rest of the Century... that might almost be enough to give us a chance. If you drive a small car, or an electric, go out and get the biggest-assed SUV you can afford. Hurry, your planet needs you.
Articles, I read.
Katz columns, I skim.
They usually just repeat themselves for 500 words or so, anyway.
The post-Katz discussion threads are always more interesting than the trolls he writes to set them off.
Answer: Yes... If there are enough people who want it badly enough to contribute to the code.
Linux is not a product that you ask for and hope somebody will do it for you. It is a project that exists because programmers who care about it are working on it for their own use... anybody else who benifits from that work is just a pleasent bonus.
Those who do nothing other than utilize the "free" OS software, and can't even be bothered to submit the occational bug report... They can wait around for whatever the GNU/Linux damn well feels like writing.
In spite of the provacative tone I have chosen for this message, look into your heart and I think you will agree that I might have a point here.
If a company prevents me from doing so with the content they are selling, the solution is to choose not to buy the content.
I'm not saying boycott them in the hope of changing their actions. I am saying do without the content that they are selling. It's not important. You can live without Metallica and have a rich, full life.
"Back in the day," there really wasn't much in the way of corporate participation on the net. The Internet (and later, the web), made it possible for me to freely distribute information. It also made it possible to consume information that other people were producing and freely distributing. Even operating systems can be passed around. Hooray!
Okay, now there is a large commercial presence on the web, and these people don't really want to distribute things for free. They want to maintain control over the content that they spent ass-loads of money creating and promoting. So they use things like watermarking and encription. Boo!
Now, how much does the presense of these companies ruin my ability to use the web the way I always did before they arrived? Zero.
Sure, I can't steal their content from their distribution systems... but I couldn't do that before their distribution systems arrived on the net, either.
As long as I don't want their music, pictures, software, etc. What they do to control that content means nothing to me. (And if I do want it, I should either pay the price they are asking. If I think it is overpriced, I should produce something just as good on my own.)
All those academic and philanthropic sites that we remember from the "good ol days" of the web are still there, still free, and still useful. The addition of less-free sites does not make us less free.
Was there a previous "major battle" between hackers and the Corporate Republic? I thought most hackers made their livings working for corporations.
Also, is there such a thing as "the Corporate Republic"? When you use loaded expressions like that, you sound just as paranoid as Oliver Stone, ranting away about "the Military-Industrual Complex" which he blames for all his little conspiracy theories.
[skimming, skimming, skimming] It's not a huge stretch to say that steganographers may determine whether the Net -- and much of the data that moves through it -- stays free or not.
Yes it is. Not only is it a huge stretch, it is utter hysteria. Seek counciling.
And most of the slashdotters are far to young to know who the fuck "Ike" was, or which commedian I stole that comparison from. (It was Steve Martin, talking about how stale jokes about Nixon had become in 1977. You young whippersnappers may not know it, but his stand-up acts were once popular enough to sell out football stadiums. Crap, do I ever feel old now... Pardon me while I climb onto a drifting iceburg and float out to sea...)
1. The book is not based on the film. It was released later, but both projects were developed at the same time, with lots of cooperation between the two.
2. Kubrick was reading a lot of Jung at the time, so a lot of the shapes did matter... just not the ones that this reviewer seems to be focused on. The Pod looks like an egg because Bowen is soon to be "born" as the Star Child. (Hence, the stargate scene, which is essentially passage into the "womb".)
3. HAL was, by far, the most human personality on board the ship. This was to show that man had become more machine-like as machines began to seem more human.
4. Yes, the voyage was based somewhat on Homer's Oddessey. All I can say to that observation is, "duh!"
5. No Trojan Horses were anywhere to be found in the story. The astronauts were not Greeks trying to invate the Trojan moon... They were primates, mirroring the experience of the monkeys during the first chapter of the film: discovering the monolith (during a period of isolation and exile, brought about by conflict with another tribe... the monkeys were kicked out of the watering hole; the astronauts were quarentined in order to keep their project a secret from the Russians), not knowing what to make of it, and finally, deriving inspiration from it to move on to their next phase of evolution.
Is this only a problem for location changes? If I change ISP's, but the "last 100 feet" remain the same, am I still in good shape?
1) Clinton didn't want it. He backed off of support for it before the ink was dry. Bush simply extended Clinton's policy of "pretend it ain't there" to "recognize that it's there, and cancel it".
2) Congress didn't want it. The senate voted 95-0 against ratification of the Kyoto agreement.
3) Europe doen't want it. The vast majority of European leaders saw this treaty for the dog that it was, and have been dragging their feet on it for months. Many of them are secretly relieved that Bush dumped it, because now they can simply cast the US as the bad guy. No treaty, and nobody blames you... If you are the Prime Minister of Great Britain, that's what you call "win-win".
4) Those who understand its full impact don't want it. The cost of energy would rise dramatically under this agreement. Can you say "another Great Depression"? Some people in ivory towers like to pretend that economic arguments are all about greed... but the truth is that the super-rich can ride out tough times without inconveniece; the true impact of economic downturns is on the other end of the spectrum - the middle-class becomes the poor, while the poor become destitute.
I did not vote for Bush, but he was 100% right for dropping Kyoto. Everybody knew it was DOA in Washington anyway... Bush was just the only one willing to stand up and take the hit for it. (This seems to be an emerging trend for Bush. Not since Truman has a president been so willing to make the tough choices, polls be damned. Like I said, I was never a Bush supporter, but I am starting to begrudgingly admit that he is not half as bad as I though he would be).
It was also a racial slur directed at people of Southern African descent (which may have originated from the British expression "black as the ace of spades")... although it is rarely used in that context in this more enlightened age, so younger people today probably have never heard it used that way.
I am not 100% sure of the etymology of the expression "call a spade a spade", but I do know that it was used as early as the 1500's by Marprel. The ethnic slur use of the word evolved much later (in America).
Alas, I have a lot of utterly useless information like this rattling around in my head... made even more useless by the fact that the Internet puts all the useless information in the world at everybody's fingertips.
(When I walk through the record store, I notice that major-label CD's are still overpriced... The RIAA could easilly get spanked again. IIRC, the Microsoft breakup order happened because they also chose to ignore anti-trust warnings.)
Once again, an Apple innovation is stolen by a PC company six years later.
"Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap"
1) Sturgeon was far from the first person to make this observation.
2) It's not really a Law.
3) 90% is really just an estimate. It could be just about anywhere between 89% and 91%.
4) Since it does not apply to "crap", it does not apply to "everything".
5) Sturgeon actually said "crud", not "crap".
That leaves the words "of" and "is"... and the fact that it is generally true. The rest is crap.
You are splitting hairs pretty fine here. What you are saying is that it is not illegal, but I don't have a right to do it.
The fact remains that if I want to put a digitally extracted clip of a movie i have purchased on my FTP server for the purposes of education, I am not violating copyright law.
The MPAA is attempting to use the flawed language of the DMCA laws to ban the only tool which allows me to do this (DeCSS), with the intended result of extending copyright protection into areas where it does not belong (preventing criticism, educational use, and other exemptions to copyright law from being utilized).
You cannot claim that the MPAA has taken away your ability to use the work in non-infringing ways. I can, I do, and I have. It is not infringement to make a high-resolution copy of a 20-second clip from a DVD I purchace. It is not infringement to make a backup copy of equal qualitity of DVD's I buy. It is not infringement to make a second copy keep with my notebook PC for mobile use. If I own a second home, it is not infringement to make a separate copy and leave it there. All of these are examples of "fair use", and all are prevented by your reading of the DMCA.
And don't give me that bullshit about VHS or analog copies. When I make a backup copy, I should be able to expect it to be a copy of the data I purchased, which means the quality of duplication should be as near to perfect as current technology allows. Nowhere in the fair use clause that you cut-and-pasted does it state that the MPAA can require all non-infringing copies to be shitty.
Take a few thousand English words, and English grammar rules, and allow people to write code in it. It would not be very useful in practice, but as a means of demonstrating the expressive nature of code, it would be a fantastic education tool.
For example, Hello World in Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello, world\n";
In "GnuEnglish":
Please use the GNU English Language Compiler, which is labeled as "gelc" and found in the directory called "/usr/bin", to read these instructions.
Using the standard output selected by the operating system, print the phrase "Hello, world" and then move the cursor to the next line.
Suddenly, explaining the expressive nature of code to a layman might become a little easier.
You were not listening to what the parent post was saying.
An example of fair use that requires DeCSS:
Suppose I am running an educational web site on the craft of film-making. To demonstrate the use of deep-focus lenses, I want to make a high-resolution 20-second clip from "Citizen Kane" available for download, so my students can see what I am talking about. DeCSS allows me to decript my "Citizen Kane" DVD, extract the clip, and save it to my FTP site. Doing something like this is 100% legal under current Fair Use laws. Without DeCSS, making this digital copy is impossible... I would be forced to settle for a low-quality analog duplication which would not serve my purpose at all. Therefore, DeCSS would be restricting my Fair Use rights as an educator.
Is the point starting to sink in with you now?
The content on the DVD is licensed to you with certain restrictive conditions
Yes it is, but those restrictions do not apply when they conflict with current laws concerning Fair Use. To insist otherwise is an attempt to extend copyright protection to areas in which the law does not provide, which the courts can (and should) (and probably will) shoot down.
When debugging code, you always run into the principal of diminishing returns. Initial, obvious, critical bugs are found quickly and squished during the development and beta cycles. Eventually, your programmers will reach the point where finding and fixing more bugs would drive the product into a price range that nobody would want to buy it anymore. Bugs exist because we, the consumers, demand cutting-edge software to be delivered quickly and cheaply, and would rather pay $1000 for software with minor glitches to work around than $100,000 for software that is nearly perfect.
The same principal applies to support. They could easilly hire a tech for every 20 customers, highly trained and paid $80,000 per year... but if then they need to charge you $5,000 for a simple contact list program. Still interested? Didn't think so.
So you see, we get what we pay for, and we are not willing to pay for much, so we should not expect much. Simple as that.
You started out like you were going to flame me, but then said nothing that I disagree with, and nothing that disagrees with my comments.
It sounds to me like you are a serious user who knows better than to rely on tech support to figure things out... which is really just restating my point for me.
First of all, in order to train all those people, you would need a lot of techies with people skills to run the classes.
Also, while companies would be able to slightly scale down their helpdesk staff, the people could be kept in place and add value in other ways (such as bug tracking).
A sales person spending an hour with a helpdesk person on a problem that should have been covered in initial training is a Bad Thing. Not only does it tie up a techie who could be doing more valuable work for the company, but it ties up a sales person who could be generating revenue.
If you avoid that kind of down-time by training your people right (and not hiring people who are afraid of the Magic Box on their desks), the benifits will far outweigh the costs. Smart companies have figured that out.
I know I am splitting hairs a little here, but I did not say that all complainers are clueless. I said that as you hear more and louder complaining about support headaches, the probability that the person is a clueless luser begins to approach 100%. :)
I think most of the problem is one of expectations. A good example is how people react to air travel. When I fly, my expectations are fairly simple: "Get me there, don't kill me, and try not to lose my luggage." Most of the time, the airline pulls that off and I am happy. People with higher expectations ("don't make me wait more than an hour, feed me a meal I like, let me drink as much as I want, don't sit on the runway waiting for clearance to take off for a long time, etc.) are never happy.
The same is the case with tech support. If your expectation is, "I will submit a detailed description of the problem, which will probably be read by a rookie tech who knows less than me about this application, but eventually they will get the message that something is broken," you will be satisfied almost all the time.
If you think "I will leave a voice mail saying 'your shitty software keeps crashing on me' and they will send an on-site tech who will debug and recompile the program for me before I hang up the phone," guess what? You will not be happy, and people like me will get the pleasure of hearing you piss and moan about "poor support" over lunch, chuckling silently to ourselves that we are hearing about an "id10t error" from the perspective of the failing keyboard interface. :)
Too many people don't know how to use the tools required to do their jobs.
Bus drivers know how to drive, lumberjacks can operate chainsaws, but our business culture is jam-packed with office secretaries that can't even do a simple "mail merge" with MS-Office.
The companies that think they have the best helpdesks are the ones who invest in proper training for their employees. They sit their new hires down in a class room, and make sure they know the OS and all their common applications.
Companies that don't do this end up with helpdesks that spend 90% of their days training people while they are on the job (usually, when they are 10 minutes from some crucial deadline or another, too). The help desk gets all the heat, but it was short-sighted management that created the problem.
The very best companies put support much higher on the foodchain (and the org chart), and pay their support people accordingly, while insisting that RTFM is not only a valid answer in some situations, but demand that their support people give it when appropriate, so they are not wasting time that could be applied to real problems. Alas, such companies are very rare.
Companies already have people who are getting paid (a lot more than you) to figure out how to improve the company. They are called executives.
The best executives are constantly soliciting feedback from their employees, but I am not talking about well-run companies here.
If a company's management is so clueless that they need one of their techies to tell them what on-call compensation should be, there is little chance of saving them anyway. Better to end the relationship as smoothly as possible. Whether they improve or not after I am gone is not my concern. In some cases, it might be a net good for the world if that company fails.
Remember, a company is not a nation, church, or marriage. You do not belong to your company, you just work for it.