That won't be enough. If you don't hire a lawyer to protect your IP, someone else can hire an IP lawyer to take it away from you. It's really a great system; this way, the IP lawyers make more money. Since the most successful IP lawyers get to be IP judges, IP law is constructed in such a way as to ensure that there is work for IP lawyers. I like to think of the IP lawyers as the tailors of the emperor's new clothes.
Not everyone is affiliated with an organization that will give them printing services (or from whom they can be stolen; printing things costs money), you could pay quite a bit to have the last 100 pages of a book printed from the pdf. At a print shop I worked in, it would have cost $15 to rip the file to the DocuTech and 3 cents a page to print it. Printing on public laser printers can cost as much as $1.00 per page.
After spending all of that money, you have a bunch of loose pages. You can pay more to have them put in some kind of cheap binding. In the end, you've could have spent $30 dollars to get the last two chapters of a book you already paid for. Not a very good deal, if you ask me. Of course, if I'm not paying for the printing, I guess it doesn't matter any more than the cost of the book would if I were getting *it* for free.
Go ahead, pay for a slow wireless modem connection and be forced to transfer files across the internet to communicate with other devices on your LAN. I prefer the option to connect to my home or office LAN. Many businesses will insist on it for connectivity to their intranets. It's safer, easier, more private, and you can get a lot more bandwidth for the same money.
I still haven't been able to figure out why only Compaq is offering the general public wireless LAN connectivity from a handheld (mmm...iPaq), or why noone has produced an 802.11b CompactFlash ethernet card. I thought the idea was that all these wonderful appliances and gadgets were supposed to connect to one another. Are we really expected to maintain a separate wireless modem connection for every device in the home of the future? (Granted, it would simplify customer profiling;-))
EULA? What? I didn't see a license agreement. There was something on the cover for the CD that came with it about "Opening this software constitutes acceptance of our License terms contained herein," so I didn't open the software. Plus, it said at Radio Shack "FREE", not "FREE*", so they can either leave me alone or open their partner up to a false advertising suit.
People will generally believe the first lie they hear on any given subject. I think the "jackass moron" knows full well who said it, and is trying to re-write history by spreading the misattributed quote.
This just occurred to me: if unsolicited advertising which costs me money is against the law, and I pay per unit of volume for my municipal trash can, couldn't I argue that bulk mail was costing me money for a larger-than-otherwise-necessary trash can, and therefore was illegally sent?
On another note, I have recently hit upon a response to telemarketers that works perfectly every time: pretend you can't hear them. It's very simple, but 100% effective:
"Hello?".
(click) "Hello, Mr. Pigeon?". "Hello? Hello?"
"Hello, Mr. Pigeon, I'm with..." "Hello? Hello?"
"uh, hello, Mr. Pigeon I'm..." "Hello? Hello...Damn phone!"
"uh..."
The best part is, they have to assume you can't hear them, so nothing they say or do will make it better. Hearing the confusion in their voices as they come to grips with the situation is one of my favorite things.
They found a source of postage, paper, and phone service that costs nothing? Cool! Where do I sign up?
Yes, it's in the aisle right next to the free computer, phone line, and internet connection that the spammers use.
Each unit of paper or telephone advertising delivered to the prospective consumer costs the advertiser something. Not so with e-mail. Even if the spammer is paying for metered uploads or connection time, adding recipients has a nearly negligible effect, since the body of the spam only has to be sent once.
No, ISPs generally pay for a pipe the same way a user does. A T3 is a T3, no matter what is going through it. They don't pay per byte, or per minute, they pay for a pipe, and anything that pipe can hold is fair game.
This one tripped my BS meter. As far as I know, most ISPs charge their large-pipe customers for transfers over a certain amount. The same may apply to the ISPs themselves. Are you yourself an ISP with multiple backbone providers? Are you a backbone provider? Have you ever gotten a high-speed pipe for your home or business? Do you know anything about what you're talking about?
Not to mention the fact that an ISP has to pay for a fat enough pipe to bring over all the spam in addition to the regular traffic.
As for them "stealing" the ISPs bandwidth, the telemarketers "steal" phone bandwidth from the telephone company and the mail ads "steal" bandwidth from the post office, both of which they end up charging back to me.
The telemarketers pay the phone company for the phone bandwidth. The direct marketers pay bulk rate postage for every piece mailed. It is in fact the high volume of bulk mail and the massive amounts spent on it by direct marketers that keeps the price of a first-class stamp low in the US.
Just out of curiousity, what's it like being so incredibly stupid?
I do not have DSL service through them, but I have used Jump.net for ISDN and dial-up access for several years. I have never once had a connectivity problem; not with any OS, not with any hardware. (OK, OK, one time, their news server went down for a day or so around Christmas). If you are moving to Austin, you should be sure Jump.net is not right for you before choosing anyone else. Their prices may be a bit higher than the competition, but the level of service is so much higher that it's easily worth it.
What about a country, like China, that thinks maybe they might want to go to war with us some day? The NSA would of course take an interest in that country's plans to bomb embassies, airports, and government buildings. Even our allies might want to keep their own intelligence activities from being known by the NSA, or why else we they even bother conducting intelligence?
Put another way, imagine we had had modern computers in the years leading up to WWII: would you have counselled that the US buy closed-source software from German vendors, knowing that the German government had all kinds of backdoor access to those products? Of course not. You would insist on open-source products that you could modify to your satisfaction, or home-grown closed source products. It's not surprising that security-conscious foreign governments find software to which the American NSA might have a master key a bit distasteful.
As many times as we have to remind you limeys that the expression is "sheesh". And BTW, how can you be sure you don't have a problem with gas and the rest of us are just too polite to mention it?
Oh yes, I agree. We should not publish any more of Ms. Love's work in our peer-review journal. Really, does she think that just because she is not writing a research paper or newspaper story she can throw academic and journalistic convention out the window? I for one am from now on going to demand that everyone with whom I speak hand me a sheet of footnotes.(1)
(1) This is my own f*cking opinion. If you agree with me, don't get your underwear in a wad. I have never listened to anything anyone else has said, so I couldn't possibly have stolen it from you.
Like prohibition and the current war on drugs, all that the war on piracy will do is provide a profit center for organized criminals.
That is not *all*. They are counting on us having the reaction you're having. Prohibition, the war on drugs, and the repeal of fair use also have the effect of making criminals out of a larger and larger percentage of the population. The next step is to use selective enforcement of these laws to imprison any one you don't like.
Imagine they made the speed limit 15 mph. Sure, few people would follow it. Those who did, they would assume were doing something *really* bad. Everyone else would be subject to enforcement whenever the cops decided they felt like it.
You're forgetting that people with more time on their hands will have a unequal voice under such a system. Do we really want the retired, the unemployed, and the idle rich running the country? Not to mention the fact that access to the Internet is not anywhere near universal.
I'd also be interested as to how you propose to present the facts in a clear and unbiased nature. Under the current system, we have "official" news sources, which are just corporate shills, and "underground" news sources, which the "official" sources have marginalized quite effectively. Given that the American and European governments seem complicit in the handing over of the Internet to corporate interests, we may even lose what "underground" sources we have.
I, too, am sick and tired of corrupt politicians making choices for me, but I believe direct democracy would lead to the corporations using the mainstream media to make those same decisions even more directly than they do now.
Except that you probably will not be able to watch the copyright-protected stuff with any digital tv available right now. One of the reasons the manufacturers have opposed this is the loss of customer goodwill they will experience when all the early adopters find out they spent so much money only to get digital tv's that won't show some programs.
Everyone, even the lawmakers and judges, complain that our elected and appointed officials don't adequately understand technology. I think the problem would only get worse if we let the general public vote on tech law. By the same token, I know nothing about agriculture, and probably wouldn't make a very good agriculture policymaker. Unless we can come up with a plan that adjusts for this, direct democracy would be as successful as asking kindergartners to run the school. If we did come up with such a plan, it would surely be branded elitist (which it probably would be).
Our representative democracy may be horribly corrupt, but it's the best system found yet. Even if the representatives are as ill informed when they are elected as the general public, the organization of Congress into committees gives them some hope of informing themselves on some of the issues.
OK, then. Not everyone is just like you. Some people want to put their entire mp3 library into a suitcase, so they can listen to anything in their collection in the car, at the office, etc., etc. The only mainstream consumer product that even comes close to this has only 6 gigs of storage and costs $500. In comparison, I would say $500 was cheap for a product that has 5 times the capacity, even if it is 5 times as big. In other words, this thing is a bargain at twice the price. OTOH, if you don't want it, it's worthless.
Unless you have a sound card in your ear, you hear things differently than your computer does. Have you ever seen computer screens shown by television cameras? Conflicting scan patterns on the computer screen and the television system produce bands on all the computer screens. I think an "audio watermark" is supposed to work on some similar principle.
You're not making good sense. By your logic, the best way of proving a given sysadmin has not kept on top of security issues would be to prove that his (or her) network has been cracked. Don't let the PHB's get a hold of your theory; it will only lead to the summary dismissal of every sysadmin whose network has been compromised. Especially don't let *your* boss find out you feel this way, or you may find yourself out of a job when a new exploit has been invented while you were in the bathroom.
How do you think the db's of exploits get built, anyway? Do the script kiddies or their mentors register exploits just before they unleash them, to allow "any sysadmin worthy of his position" to "keep on top" of them? Or is part of the definition of "sysadmin worthy of his (sic) position" the ability to see the future? If so, I guess I can believe in the shortage of tech workers, as I have met some pretty clever sysadmins in my time, but so far not too many with prescient awareness.
As an aside, I'd like to point out the idiocy of many states' laws concerning ID and alcohol. I have been hassled by for having an out-of-state driver's license. I have been hassled in Maine (aka "Vacationland") for having an out-of-state ID. At one point, I had no driver's license, and I found that many retailers would not accept my passport as valid ID. I had a friend in Massachusetts who did not drive. When he turned 21, he went to the DMV and got himself a state ID, which is commonly called a "Liquor ID". Most retailers refused to sell liquor to him, telling him he needed to have a bona fide Driver's License. Apparently, you should not drink and drive, but you cannot drink if you don't drive.
Right, I see; legislate everything and let no informal "rules" be established by society at large. "Avoid all that 'public view/debate' nonsense." What do you think we are doing here? And what precisely is "sleazy and underhanded" about a retailer refusing to sell something to a minor? If you don't like it, don't buy anything from K-Mart. I don't like it either, so I won't be buying from them. I suspect you must be some kind of lawyer to want legislation on this subject.
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The VAT only applies to the value of the CD, not the value of the book.
That won't be enough. If you don't hire a lawyer to protect your IP, someone else can hire an IP lawyer to take it away from you. It's really a great system; this way, the IP lawyers make more money. Since the most successful IP lawyers get to be IP judges, IP law is constructed in such a way as to ensure that there is work for IP lawyers. I like to think of the IP lawyers as the tailors of the emperor's new clothes.
Not everyone is affiliated with an organization that will give them printing services (or from whom they can be stolen; printing things costs money), you could pay quite a bit to have the last 100 pages of a book printed from the pdf. At a print shop I worked in, it would have cost $15 to rip the file to the DocuTech and 3 cents a page to print it. Printing on public laser printers can cost as much as $1.00 per page.
After spending all of that money, you have a bunch of loose pages. You can pay more to have them put in some kind of cheap binding. In the end, you've could have spent $30 dollars to get the last two chapters of a book you already paid for. Not a very good deal, if you ask me. Of course, if I'm not paying for the printing, I guess it doesn't matter any more than the cost of the book would if I were getting *it* for free.
Go ahead, pay for a slow wireless modem connection and be forced to transfer files across the internet to communicate with other devices on your LAN. I prefer the option to connect to my home or office LAN. Many businesses will insist on it for connectivity to their intranets. It's safer, easier, more private, and you can get a lot more bandwidth for the same money.
I still haven't been able to figure out why only Compaq is offering the general public wireless LAN connectivity from a handheld (mmm...iPaq), or why noone has produced an 802.11b CompactFlash ethernet card. I thought the idea was that all these wonderful appliances and gadgets were supposed to connect to one another. Are we really expected to maintain a separate wireless modem connection for every device in the home of the future? (Granted, it would simplify customer profiling;-))
EULA? What? I didn't see a license agreement. There was something on the cover for the CD that came with it about "Opening this software constitutes acceptance of our License terms contained herein," so I didn't open the software. Plus, it said at Radio Shack "FREE", not "FREE*", so they can either leave me alone or open their partner up to a false advertising suit.
Either way is fine with me.
People will generally believe the first lie they hear on any given subject. I think the "jackass moron" knows full well who said it, and is trying to re-write history by spreading the misattributed quote.
I guess now we know what their real plans are for this thing. I think I'll be keeping mine in a locked drawer when not in use.
As it happens, I filled out *nothing* at Radio Shack. Since I didn't buy anything, they didn't ask for my phone number, either.
This just occurred to me: if unsolicited advertising which costs me money is against the law, and I pay per unit of volume for my municipal trash can, couldn't I argue that bulk mail was costing me money for a larger-than-otherwise-necessary trash can, and therefore was illegally sent?
On another note, I have recently hit upon a response to telemarketers that works perfectly every time: pretend you can't hear them. It's very simple, but 100% effective:
"Hello?".
(click) "Hello, Mr. Pigeon?".
"Hello? Hello?"
"Hello, Mr. Pigeon, I'm with..."
"Hello? Hello?"
"uh, hello, Mr. Pigeon I'm..."
"Hello? Hello...Damn phone!"
"uh..."
The best part is, they have to assume you can't hear them, so nothing they say or do will make it better. Hearing the confusion in their voices as they come to grips with the situation is one of my favorite things.
Not to mention the fact that an ISP has to pay for a fat enough pipe to bring over all the spam in addition to the regular traffic. The telemarketers pay the phone company for the phone bandwidth. The direct marketers pay bulk rate postage for every piece mailed. It is in fact the high volume of bulk mail and the massive amounts spent on it by direct marketers that keeps the price of a first-class stamp low in the US.
Just out of curiousity, what's it like being so incredibly stupid?
I do not have DSL service through them, but I have used Jump.net for ISDN and dial-up access for several years. I have never once had a connectivity problem; not with any OS, not with any hardware. (OK, OK, one time, their news server went down for a day or so around Christmas). If you are moving to Austin, you should be sure Jump.net is not right for you before choosing anyone else. Their prices may be a bit higher than the competition, but the level of service is so much higher that it's easily worth it.
P.S. I don't work for Jump.net.
I think the intent is to discuss open-source formats for electronic book publishing, not the use of open-source methods in the writing of books.
What about a country, like China, that thinks maybe they might want to go to war with us some day? The NSA would of course take an interest in that country's plans to bomb embassies, airports, and government buildings. Even our allies might want to keep their own intelligence activities from being known by the NSA, or why else we they even bother conducting intelligence?
Put another way, imagine we had had modern computers in the years leading up to WWII: would you have counselled that the US buy closed-source software from German vendors, knowing that the German government had all kinds of backdoor access to those products? Of course not. You would insist on open-source products that you could modify to your satisfaction, or home-grown closed source products. It's not surprising that security-conscious foreign governments find software to which the American NSA might have a master key a bit distasteful.
As many times as we have to remind you limeys that the expression is "sheesh". And BTW, how can you be sure you don't have a problem with gas and the rest of us are just too polite to mention it?
Oh yes, I agree. We should not publish any more of Ms. Love's work in our peer-review journal. Really, does she think that just because she is not writing a research paper or newspaper story she can throw academic and journalistic convention out the window? I for one am from now on going to demand that everyone with whom I speak hand me a sheet of footnotes.(1)
(1) This is my own f*cking opinion. If you agree with me, don't get your underwear in a wad. I have never listened to anything anyone else has said, so I couldn't possibly have stolen it from you.
You seem to be out of touch with what the FCC's job is. The name on their bribe^H^H^H^H^Hpaychecks is "MPAA/RIAA".
Imagine they made the speed limit 15 mph. Sure, few people would follow it. Those who did, they would assume were doing something *really* bad. Everyone else would be subject to enforcement whenever the cops decided they felt like it.
You're forgetting that people with more time on their hands will have a unequal voice under such a system. Do we really want the retired, the unemployed, and the idle rich running the country? Not to mention the fact that access to the Internet is not anywhere near universal.
I'd also be interested as to how you propose to present the facts in a clear and unbiased nature. Under the current system, we have "official" news sources, which are just corporate shills, and "underground" news sources, which the "official" sources have marginalized quite effectively. Given that the American and European governments seem complicit in the handing over of the Internet to corporate interests, we may even lose what "underground" sources we have.
I, too, am sick and tired of corrupt politicians making choices for me, but I believe direct democracy would lead to the corporations using the mainstream media to make those same decisions even more directly than they do now.
Except that you probably will not be able to watch the copyright-protected stuff with any digital tv available right now. One of the reasons the manufacturers have opposed this is the loss of customer goodwill they will experience when all the early adopters find out they spent so much money only to get digital tv's that won't show some programs.
LET THE PEOPLE VOTE DIRECTLY ON THE LAW.
Everyone, even the lawmakers and judges, complain that our elected and appointed officials don't adequately understand technology. I think the problem would only get worse if we let the general public vote on tech law. By the same token, I know nothing about agriculture, and probably wouldn't make a very good agriculture policymaker. Unless we can come up with a plan that adjusts for this, direct democracy would be as successful as asking kindergartners to run the school. If we did come up with such a plan, it would surely be branded elitist (which it probably would be).
Our representative democracy may be horribly corrupt, but it's the best system found yet. Even if the representatives are as ill informed when they are elected as the general public, the organization of Congress into committees gives them some hope of informing themselves on some of the issues.
OK, then. Not everyone is just like you. Some people want to put their entire mp3 library into a suitcase, so they can listen to anything in their collection in the car, at the office, etc., etc. The only mainstream consumer product that even comes close to this has only 6 gigs of storage and costs $500. In comparison, I would say $500 was cheap for a product that has 5 times the capacity, even if it is 5 times as big. In other words, this thing is a bargain at twice the price. OTOH, if you don't want it, it's worthless.
Unless you have a sound card in your ear, you hear things differently than your computer does. Have you ever seen computer screens shown by television cameras? Conflicting scan patterns on the computer screen and the television system produce bands on all the computer screens. I think an "audio watermark" is supposed to work on some similar principle.
You're not making good sense. By your logic, the best way of proving a given sysadmin has not kept on top of security issues would be to prove that his (or her) network has been cracked. Don't let the PHB's get a hold of your theory; it will only lead to the summary dismissal of every sysadmin whose network has been compromised. Especially don't let *your* boss find out you feel this way, or you may find yourself out of a job when a new exploit has been invented while you were in the bathroom.
How do you think the db's of exploits get built, anyway? Do the script kiddies or their mentors register exploits just before they unleash them, to allow "any sysadmin worthy of his position" to "keep on top" of them? Or is part of the definition of "sysadmin worthy of his (sic) position" the ability to see the future? If so, I guess I can believe in the shortage of tech workers, as I have met some pretty clever sysadmins in my time, but so far not too many with prescient awareness.
As an aside, I'd like to point out the idiocy of many states' laws concerning ID and alcohol. I have been hassled by for having an out-of-state driver's license. I have been hassled in Maine (aka "Vacationland") for having an out-of-state ID. At one point, I had no driver's license, and I found that many retailers would not accept my passport as valid ID. I had a friend in Massachusetts who did not drive. When he turned 21, he went to the DMV and got himself a state ID, which is commonly called a "Liquor ID". Most retailers refused to sell liquor to him, telling him he needed to have a bona fide Driver's License. Apparently, you should not drink and drive, but you cannot drink if you don't drive.
Right, I see; legislate everything and let no informal "rules" be established by society at large. "Avoid all that 'public view/debate' nonsense." What do you think we are doing here? And what precisely is "sleazy and underhanded" about a retailer refusing to sell something to a minor? If you don't like it, don't buy anything from K-Mart. I don't like it either, so I won't be buying from them. I suspect you must be some kind of lawyer to want legislation on this subject.