Re:Free [books|music|stuff] is not a basic right.
on
Breaking Google's DRM
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· Score: 1
I agree with your point on calling them critical features. I also tend to think it's fair for website owners to do whatever they want to try and make their page look and act a certain way--provided they don't do anything which affects other sites, install or remove data on your machine or things like that. If you don't like the way their page works, don't go there.
But I'd be very careful with the term "basic right." The natural state of information is free - IP laws are imaginary creations we made with the purpose of spurring creation. Information has no intrinsic value. Resonable people can disagree about whether our IP laws are effective or not. I most would agrue that they are so extreme that they no longer serve their purpose and we'd be better off without them, but that's just my opinion. But there is no natural right to profit from sharing ideas (which is all books, music, art are). If you want total, absolute control over your ideas, don't share them.
Peter Gibbons : What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence : I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons : That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence : Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.
Peter Gibbons : Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence : Well the kind of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.
Which is a an excellenet point. It is an admirable thing to try and get people to really stop and think about something and the ramifications of it before making a decision. BUT I question whether it should be done by bringing up a bill that you have no intention of passing. He could have gotten the floor to speak his mind on the issue when they voted for authorization or any other time it would be relavent.
And while I certainly agree with some of Rangel's points, this bill, and the Senates have been used by dishonest people as evidence of the whole "Bush is planning to bring back the draft" lie. It's dirty politics plain and simple. Not that Bush isn't getting what he deserved after some of the things his supporters did during the primary vs. McCain but that doesn't make it any less slimy.
That's true. And there's something to be said for trying to get people especially politicians to actually stop and think about something. But it is absolutely slimy and dirty politics for Kerry et. al. to say say "If Bush wins he'll reinstate the draft" and use the bills as a evidence. The Replublicans has no choice but to bring it to a vote in order to kill the bill and kill the FUD.
Re:The long tail is already here
on
The Long Tail
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· Score: 1
The only CDs I bought from TV, Time Life's The Rock n Roll Erra--1959 is my favorite and while there may be a few you don't want, if you like Stagger Lee, there's bound to be a bunch of others you'd like. My favorites:
Fats Dominos - I Want To Walk You Home
The Coasters - Poison Ivy
Kansas City - Wilbert Harrison
Clyde McPhatter - A Lover's Question
Santo And Johnny - Sleepwalk
Ray Charles - What'd I Say (Though his greatest hits is still a must have)
The Drifters - There Goes My Baby (Gotta have their greatest hits too)
Not trying to pimp for Time Life, but here's the full list.
Notice how much the price has already dropped? From $200,000 already to $100,000.
I wouldn't read too much into this. Both these numbers are just wild guesses pulled out of their asses. They've licensed the technology but since the SSO's have so far been one-off, experimental vehicles, nobody really has any idea how much each will actually cost when produced for actual commercial purposes. How can you actually determine the price you're going to charge when you have no idea what the costs are?
Sure you can spend less than a rich guy...but can you REALLY?
Yes. For example, those of us "middle class" who didn't get any help from anybody through college certainly spend less that the mommy & daddy paid everything kids. The definition of needs vs. wants that is generally accepted today almost makes me sick when I think about what a lot of people I know went through. But that's not really the point.
I think in part you may be asking the question of whether or not there should be exemptions for say milk, bread, etc. I think there could be a convincing argument that determining a set of basic staple that are exempt might address what you're talking about. But my thinking right now is that it's not necessary and only makes things more complex and opens up loopholes. The thing is if you say no exemptions, absolutely every dollar that changes hands for the purchase of a good or service whether new or used, not only does it eliminate loopholes, but it also provides such a large base the rate is low. Additionally, it makes it more apparent to everyone what government spending is really doing. If government spending goes up, the taxe rate directly goes up. And we can all put more pressure on our legislators to bring spending back down. Our current tax system is so complex, that it's much more difficult or citizens to determine that the government is spending more more and more money every year.
Pretty much everyone lives at the very edge of their means--whether they spend proportionately more of their income on "necessities" or luxuries really doesn't matter, either way they pay a small percentage of every dollar. Best of all, it brings more power to the people--right now, if you work harder and earn more money, you have to pay more taxes. It's partially a disincentive to work harder. But with a VAT, you work harder and make more money, you can keep more. You have some control over how much taxes you pay--if you don't want to give as much money to the government, don't spend so much. This is the exact opposite of your take. I believe a VAT tax is tax on money you choose to spend while you believe it is on money you must spend. My guess is this has something to do with our nature--I've very tight with my money. I really don't like where I work right now, plus I have a little girl who I absolutely hate to leave every day to go to work. Every thing I buy, I immediately think about how much time I have to spend working for a company I don't care for away from her. This makes things I consider needs or necessities a very small list. Food, water, shelter. Anything beyond that is a choice.
Progressive taxes are a bunch of crap. First of all the intention is to redistribute wealth. The "fair share" idea of trying to make the burden the same to everyone is just rhetoric. The government shouldn't try to redistribute wealth, it should provide basic services to the public that the private sector can't (like roads) and a safety net for people who absolutely can't help themselves.
The truth is no matter how the income taxes are crafted, there are always loopholes and the rich can afford to pay the smartest people to find them. In truth if a flat rate tax, sales tax or VAT tax replaced our wonderful "progressive" tax system, the rich would pay more than they do now. My former boss & his wife (who's a CFP) make probably $225,000 a year (this in the midwest where that much money buys a very nice, 3,000+ sq. foot house). That puts them in what the 33% bracket? Want to know what his effective tax rate was? 14% Guess what? Progressive taxes don't work.
You can say what you want about cleaning up existing laws, but in the tax legislation vs. tax avoidance arms race, the rich will always win.
Oh and if Poor Boy is making $20,000/yr and spends $20,000 on a car, then he gets no sympathy from me and that's an indication of some one who is choosing to be poor. But that's part of screwed up definitions of needs & wants in this country. A $20,000 car is a luxury.
I can't argue with the reasons you give as for why we won't see income tax go away. I do however think the second reason is as bad as the first. I see no reason why the government should use taxes to reward and punish behavior. Taxes should be to raise revenue to fund government services period. If the government wants to make things illegal, they can pass laws to that extent. Beyond that, they have no business encouraging or discouraging how citizens behave.
Ultimately this is a major reason I think we should move to VAT or sales taxes and just get rid of everything else. The fact is major corporations always have a cadre of lawyers to find ways around taxes. And even if they didn't, it really wouldn't matter because the government really can't tax corporations, it can only use them to help collect taxes from individuals. Whatever taxes corporations actually end up paying are just another expense and get taken care of by boosting the cost of their goods and services to cover them. The rich have very high nominal tax rates but considerably lower effective tax rates. Of course I don't actually expect sales/VAT to every become a reality. Tax prepartion and advising is a billion dollar industry. Politicians wouldn't turn their backs on millions of dollars in lobbying money, and the complexity of the tax and budget system is a main source of their power.
What the police can get from your license plate is considerably less than what they can get from black boxes and the cop has to actually want to do it. That is, unless you're doing something to attract his attention, he likely won't care enough to bother.
Not really. They can sit and run plates all day if they want and often do. My brother got pulled over once when we were on our way to our family cottage in a town about 45 minutes away from ours. There were 3 cars--I was driving the first one, my brother in the last. The cop pulld my brother over--he wasn't speeding & had no reason to pull him over except to harass. He said, "Where's the party?" My brother said, "Excuse me?" He said you're the 4th car in a row from ___(our hometown) so where's the party?" I don't know if the cop was exaggerating or there happened to be another car from our town in front of me, because there were only three of us. Anyway obviously he didn't give him a ticket or anything, but the only way he could have known where we were from is if he was just sitting there running plates for shits & giggles.
Anyway, the point being, that while I think that the tinfoil hat wearing folks are a little crazy the truth is you need to set the systems up assuming that the worst person imaginable could have access to the information, because sometimes they do.
I think that one of the best checks is to track viewing of data. This putz of a cop running plates for no good reason for example. If my brother were to file a complaint, and whoever looked at his records there's be evidence of him doing this & some sort of discipline would take place.
Why not just put the sensors on the roads instead of the cars. Make them solar powered with rechargable batteries, and communicate wirelessly via a mesh network. They shouldn't need that complex of circuitry and in mass production, should be relatively cheap. Closer together for more congested areas, say maybe every 1/8 mile and maybe every mile in lower traffic areas. You can track traffic flow, without having to track each individual vehicle. As far as the safety stuff--well the magic computer driving the cars is just stupid and won't happen for a very long time if ever.
But it should be simple enough to have the sensors broadcast a signal when traffic flow drastically drops off. Hell you could have the things broadcasting constantly for a computer in cars to hear. You could instantly get a status of the next few miles and what the average speed is.
As long as each sensor is only sensitive to read the number of vehicles that pass by it and not any further data about the vehicle (make, model, color or plate number) it could give pretty much all of the benefits of the system in the article without the privacy concerns.
Sensors? What is this sensor thing of which you speak. Ok that's a bit of an exaggeration. There are some, but not nearly enough. FWIW, Appleton, Wisconsin has the worst timed traffic lights of anywhere I've seen. Middle of the night, you're the only car in sight? You will get stopped at red lights on major streets. And you will have to wait for the turn arrows to cycle through. Even though there's no other cars around. And be prepared to stop at numerous red lights in a row. Nice area to live otherwise, but man who ever is responsible for traffic flow should be shot.
That's untrue. MS pre-selecting IE does not preclude others from competing. That's a blatantly untrue statement. It makes it more difficult. That's a big difference
It's a little more than MS just "pre-selecting" IE. Their whole argument was that you couldn't remove all of IE without disabling portions of the operating system. So others could compete--but consumers didn't really have a choice, even if they used a different web broswer, IE would still be there, vulnerabilities and all.
MS's argument all along was that it's market share was at risk, and that any moment, a competitor could grap the reigns and win back the web. They argued that the barriers to entry - regardless of what they did - were very low. Low and behold, the best browser on the market is free, open source, and multi-platform. On top of that, other browsers like Opera are low-cost and multi-platform (and also superior).
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc. Since when do you have to be successful at your goals to prove you did something wrong. I want to have all the money in the world. I rob a bank. I get caught. Sorry judge, I didn't do anything wrong because I don't have all the money in the world. The fact that there are now an number of excellent choices for web broswers has nothing to do with whether or not MS was guilty of breaking anti-trust laws.
The government was wrong. MS had a large marketshare, but short of patenting everything in sight, it is impossible to have a monopoly on intellectual property like software.
Considering MS is aggressively stepping up it's patent efforts that looking more and more likely. Granted, it's not just Microsoft there, but all the big guys may have every conceivable possibility wrapped up with increasingly vague patents.
That's always been my gripe from the time the first antitrust stuff started. They should have in one way or another split the OS division from everything else. It wouldn't have had to even be anything as drastic as actually forming separate companies--just set up a Chinese wall between divisions. The Office & other divisions cannot use any APIs or code not published to the rest of the world. That would have fixed a major portion of the uneven playing field.
I bet Kevin Rose from TechTV could hit fill 100GB pretty quick if he mentioned it on TV again. Then again nobody watches anymore since they killed TechTV by merging with G4...but anyway, for a gutwrenching laugh check out the video. If you've seen in, watch it again, every time it still has me rolling...
Certainly, it seemed obvious that information sharing between agencies was a major weakness of the way things were. But I'm most disappointed that there really seemed to be no discussion about whether the walls between government agencies should be torn down or not. I assume there were reasons why they were there in the first place, and quite possibly those reaons no longer exist or aren't as important anymore.
Can some one tell me why the CIA & FBI weren't allowed to share information?
Oh and I think I missed something, what's the deal with MLB & spy satellites?
I tend to agree--but you have to admit that this is mostly wishful thinking on our part. In actuality, judges are political creatures as well. Hopefully they act less on political gains than the others but we don't know that. I think the biggest reason to rely on judges for issuing search warrants & wiretaps is that the Judicial branch is by it's very nature, more iterative. Local rulings can be appealed to increasing levels, right on up to the Supreme Court. Generally I think this is what keeps judges in line more than anything else---they don't want to have their rulings overturned. In other words, while the Executive & Legislative branches are checked by the other branches, in a sense, the Judicial Branch is often checked by itself a number of times in addition to by the other branches.
Yes, that would be awesome. As a ton of people have said already, though, there needs to be a much more compelling reason for the common home user to switch to Open/StarOffice than a new file format standard.
I can think of about $400 compelling reasons to use Open Office at home instead of MS Office. What may be the most amusing and ironic part is that the more effective the BSA, MS and other big software companies are at fighting software piracy, ultimately the more home users will turn to the alternatives be they open source (hopefully), or just other cheaper competitor products. Personally I'd love to seem them make it completely impossible to use MS Office without a valid registration & license.
Possibly even the commoditizing of computers helps too--I know people who bought Dells recently. They built a decent system for $500, and rather that throwing down another $300-400 for MS office, just stuck with the base Word Perfect apps. When systems cost $1500-2000, tacking on Office was not a big deal, but it sure is now.
I hate that. I think it's stupid. I think once you own a piece of real estate, you should own it forever. However, that is the way the world is.
A little OT but you must love land covenants then, huh? That one has always killed me. I own this land, but must follow a bunch of stupid, usually dated & arbitray rules. Like no sheds or no clotheslines or no watering your lawn on the third thursday of the month. I've read the one that came with my house and wouldn't think twice about breaking it if I wanted to. If I bought the land, and want to paint my grass purple, then screw you I'll do as I please with my property. I can't help but wonder if they're enforcable anyway. The old farmer who created it when he developed the land has been dead & burried for years anyway.
I'm very much in favor paying a fee for copyright renewal. The additional redeeming quality of making the fee double every year, is that it is a cumulative & exponential expense, in the same way that the loss to the public domain is exponential because of the lost of derivative works. I can't remember the statistic or where I heard it but generally, a tremendous portion of the profit garnered from a work is in the initial years. Of course there are exceptions but on the whole, works protected by copyright after even a portion of their term is up really aren't making the creators much money anyway.
And if this is unagreeable to copyright holders, there's a compromise as well. If they really want mickey mouse forever fine keep the little rat. I really don't give a rip. As a trade off, copyright holders can keep their copyright forever. In exchange, they have to pay a renewal fee forever. It need not be a large sum of money either. Say $100 to renew every 5 years. BUT you have to activly take the step of sending in you money with your renewal form every time. The harm to society of the current copyright system isn't that we can't copy steamboat willie or whatever. It's everything else. Out of print books, disintegrating as we speak, that can't be copied because they're still under copyright, but won't be reprinted because they won't be profitable.
The compromise gives the greedy something more (legitimate, perpetual copyright) and gives the public domain tons more.
I believe whatever copyright existed when a work was created and released to the public should remain in force for that work, and expire on schedule. Clearly that copyright was sufficient to inspire the creation of that work at the time, which is the stated purpose of all copyrights!
Exactly. That point seemed be partially understood by the Supreme Court in the Eldred case but for whatever reason, they thought of that portion of Sony Bono as bad law but not unconstitutional. I just don't get that--the Constitution says copyright are "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Retroactive copyright extensions unequivocally do nothing to promote creation so how that portion could have been ruled Constitutional floors me.
Blame it at least in part on the stock market. Executives are not rewarded for the future, they're rewarded of increasing the share price in the short term. Not that good will can't have a positive impact on share price, but it's less so than short-term profits and takes longer.
Though I guess in fairness it's not the market's fault persay--the market does what it's supposed to. But individual shareholders, mutual funds and corporations are driven by not just greed, but instant gratification at the expense of long-term growth.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'd be very careful with the term "basic right." The natural state of information is free - IP laws are imaginary creations we made with the purpose of spurring creation. Information has no intrinsic value. Resonable people can disagree about whether our IP laws are effective or not. I most would agrue that they are so extreme that they no longer serve their purpose and we'd be better off without them, but that's just my opinion. But there is no natural right to profit from sharing ideas (which is all books, music, art are). If you want total, absolute control over your ideas, don't share them.
By the way, after his flight, would the company running the flights have to change its name?
Peter Gibbons : What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence : I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons : That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence : Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.
Peter Gibbons : Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence : Well the kind of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.
And while I certainly agree with some of Rangel's points, this bill, and the Senates have been used by dishonest people as evidence of the whole "Bush is planning to bring back the draft" lie. It's dirty politics plain and simple. Not that Bush isn't getting what he deserved after some of the things his supporters did during the primary vs. McCain but that doesn't make it any less slimy.
That's true. And there's something to be said for trying to get people especially politicians to actually stop and think about something. But it is absolutely slimy and dirty politics for Kerry et. al. to say say "If Bush wins he'll reinstate the draft" and use the bills as a evidence. The Replublicans has no choice but to bring it to a vote in order to kill the bill and kill the FUD.
- Fats Dominos - I Want To Walk You Home
- The Coasters - Poison Ivy
- Kansas City - Wilbert Harrison
- Clyde McPhatter - A Lover's Question
- Santo And Johnny - Sleepwalk
- Ray Charles - What'd I Say (Though his greatest hits is still a must have)
- The Drifters - There Goes My Baby (Gotta have their greatest hits too)
Not trying to pimp for Time Life, but here's the full list.I wouldn't read too much into this. Both these numbers are just wild guesses pulled out of their asses. They've licensed the technology but since the SSO's have so far been one-off, experimental vehicles, nobody really has any idea how much each will actually cost when produced for actual commercial purposes. How can you actually determine the price you're going to charge when you have no idea what the costs are?
Yes. For example, those of us "middle class" who didn't get any help from anybody through college certainly spend less that the mommy & daddy paid everything kids. The definition of needs vs. wants that is generally accepted today almost makes me sick when I think about what a lot of people I know went through. But that's not really the point.
I think in part you may be asking the question of whether or not there should be exemptions for say milk, bread, etc. I think there could be a convincing argument that determining a set of basic staple that are exempt might address what you're talking about. But my thinking right now is that it's not necessary and only makes things more complex and opens up loopholes. The thing is if you say no exemptions, absolutely every dollar that changes hands for the purchase of a good or service whether new or used, not only does it eliminate loopholes, but it also provides such a large base the rate is low. Additionally, it makes it more apparent to everyone what government spending is really doing. If government spending goes up, the taxe rate directly goes up. And we can all put more pressure on our legislators to bring spending back down. Our current tax system is so complex, that it's much more difficult or citizens to determine that the government is spending more more and more money every year.
Pretty much everyone lives at the very edge of their means--whether they spend proportionately more of their income on "necessities" or luxuries really doesn't matter, either way they pay a small percentage of every dollar. Best of all, it brings more power to the people--right now, if you work harder and earn more money, you have to pay more taxes. It's partially a disincentive to work harder. But with a VAT, you work harder and make more money, you can keep more. You have some control over how much taxes you pay--if you don't want to give as much money to the government, don't spend so much. This is the exact opposite of your take. I believe a VAT tax is tax on money you choose to spend while you believe it is on money you must spend. My guess is this has something to do with our nature--I've very tight with my money. I really don't like where I work right now, plus I have a little girl who I absolutely hate to leave every day to go to work. Every thing I buy, I immediately think about how much time I have to spend working for a company I don't care for away from her. This makes things I consider needs or necessities a very small list. Food, water, shelter. Anything beyond that is a choice.
The truth is no matter how the income taxes are crafted, there are always loopholes and the rich can afford to pay the smartest people to find them. In truth if a flat rate tax, sales tax or VAT tax replaced our wonderful "progressive" tax system, the rich would pay more than they do now. My former boss & his wife (who's a CFP) make probably $225,000 a year (this in the midwest where that much money buys a very nice, 3,000+ sq. foot house). That puts them in what the 33% bracket? Want to know what his effective tax rate was? 14% Guess what? Progressive taxes don't work.
You can say what you want about cleaning up existing laws, but in the tax legislation vs. tax avoidance arms race, the rich will always win.
Oh and if Poor Boy is making $20,000/yr and spends $20,000 on a car, then he gets no sympathy from me and that's an indication of some one who is choosing to be poor. But that's part of screwed up definitions of needs & wants in this country. A $20,000 car is a luxury.
I can't argue with the reasons you give as for why we won't see income tax go away. I do however think the second reason is as bad as the first. I see no reason why the government should use taxes to reward and punish behavior. Taxes should be to raise revenue to fund government services period. If the government wants to make things illegal, they can pass laws to that extent. Beyond that, they have no business encouraging or discouraging how citizens behave.
Ultimately this is a major reason I think we should move to VAT or sales taxes and just get rid of everything else. The fact is major corporations always have a cadre of lawyers to find ways around taxes. And even if they didn't, it really wouldn't matter because the government really can't tax corporations, it can only use them to help collect taxes from individuals. Whatever taxes corporations actually end up paying are just another expense and get taken care of by boosting the cost of their goods and services to cover them. The rich have very high nominal tax rates but considerably lower effective tax rates. Of course I don't actually expect sales/VAT to every become a reality. Tax prepartion and advising is a billion dollar industry. Politicians wouldn't turn their backs on millions of dollars in lobbying money, and the complexity of the tax and budget system is a main source of their power.
Not really. They can sit and run plates all day if they want and often do. My brother got pulled over once when we were on our way to our family cottage in a town about 45 minutes away from ours. There were 3 cars--I was driving the first one, my brother in the last. The cop pulld my brother over--he wasn't speeding & had no reason to pull him over except to harass. He said, "Where's the party?" My brother said, "Excuse me?" He said you're the 4th car in a row from ___(our hometown) so where's the party?" I don't know if the cop was exaggerating or there happened to be another car from our town in front of me, because there were only three of us. Anyway obviously he didn't give him a ticket or anything, but the only way he could have known where we were from is if he was just sitting there running plates for shits & giggles.
Anyway, the point being, that while I think that the tinfoil hat wearing folks are a little crazy the truth is you need to set the systems up assuming that the worst person imaginable could have access to the information, because sometimes they do.
I think that one of the best checks is to track viewing of data. This putz of a cop running plates for no good reason for example. If my brother were to file a complaint, and whoever looked at his records there's be evidence of him doing this & some sort of discipline would take place.
But it should be simple enough to have the sensors broadcast a signal when traffic flow drastically drops off. Hell you could have the things broadcasting constantly for a computer in cars to hear. You could instantly get a status of the next few miles and what the average speed is.
As long as each sensor is only sensitive to read the number of vehicles that pass by it and not any further data about the vehicle (make, model, color or plate number) it could give pretty much all of the benefits of the system in the article without the privacy concerns.
Sensors? What is this sensor thing of which you speak. Ok that's a bit of an exaggeration. There are some, but not nearly enough. FWIW, Appleton, Wisconsin has the worst timed traffic lights of anywhere I've seen. Middle of the night, you're the only car in sight? You will get stopped at red lights on major streets. And you will have to wait for the turn arrows to cycle through. Even though there's no other cars around. And be prepared to stop at numerous red lights in a row. Nice area to live otherwise, but man who ever is responsible for traffic flow should be shot.
It's a little more than MS just "pre-selecting" IE. Their whole argument was that you couldn't remove all of IE without disabling portions of the operating system. So others could compete--but consumers didn't really have a choice, even if they used a different web broswer, IE would still be there, vulnerabilities and all.
MS's argument all along was that it's market share was at risk, and that any moment, a competitor could grap the reigns and win back the web. They argued that the barriers to entry - regardless of what they did - were very low. Low and behold, the best browser on the market is free, open source, and multi-platform. On top of that, other browsers like Opera are low-cost and multi-platform (and also superior).
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc. Since when do you have to be successful at your goals to prove you did something wrong. I want to have all the money in the world. I rob a bank. I get caught. Sorry judge, I didn't do anything wrong because I don't have all the money in the world. The fact that there are now an number of excellent choices for web broswers has nothing to do with whether or not MS was guilty of breaking anti-trust laws.
The government was wrong. MS had a large marketshare, but short of patenting everything in sight, it is impossible to have a monopoly on intellectual property like software.
Considering MS is aggressively stepping up it's patent efforts that looking more and more likely. Granted, it's not just Microsoft there, but all the big guys may have every conceivable possibility wrapped up with increasingly vague patents.
That's always been my gripe from the time the first antitrust stuff started. They should have in one way or another split the OS division from everything else. It wouldn't have had to even be anything as drastic as actually forming separate companies--just set up a Chinese wall between divisions. The Office & other divisions cannot use any APIs or code not published to the rest of the world. That would have fixed a major portion of the uneven playing field.
Fill My Box
Can some one tell me why the CIA & FBI weren't allowed to share information?
Oh and I think I missed something, what's the deal with MLB & spy satellites?
I tend to agree--but you have to admit that this is mostly wishful thinking on our part. In actuality, judges are political creatures as well. Hopefully they act less on political gains than the others but we don't know that. I think the biggest reason to rely on judges for issuing search warrants & wiretaps is that the Judicial branch is by it's very nature, more iterative. Local rulings can be appealed to increasing levels, right on up to the Supreme Court. Generally I think this is what keeps judges in line more than anything else---they don't want to have their rulings overturned. In other words, while the Executive & Legislative branches are checked by the other branches, in a sense, the Judicial Branch is often checked by itself a number of times in addition to by the other branches.
Like the nice one they offer for rtf? Of course wordpad does a fine job, but not Word. Whenever we need to work with an rtf, it goes:
1. Export out to rtf from MS word.
2. Open rft in Wordpad.
3. Resave as rtf from Wordpad.
4. Use rtf (replace variables & edit programmatically).
I can think of about $400 compelling reasons to use Open Office at home instead of MS Office. What may be the most amusing and ironic part is that the more effective the BSA, MS and other big software companies are at fighting software piracy, ultimately the more home users will turn to the alternatives be they open source (hopefully), or just other cheaper competitor products. Personally I'd love to seem them make it completely impossible to use MS Office without a valid registration & license.
Possibly even the commoditizing of computers helps too--I know people who bought Dells recently. They built a decent system for $500, and rather that throwing down another $300-400 for MS office, just stuck with the base Word Perfect apps. When systems cost $1500-2000, tacking on Office was not a big deal, but it sure is now.
A little OT but you must love land covenants then, huh? That one has always killed me. I own this land, but must follow a bunch of stupid, usually dated & arbitray rules. Like no sheds or no clotheslines or no watering your lawn on the third thursday of the month. I've read the one that came with my house and wouldn't think twice about breaking it if I wanted to. If I bought the land, and want to paint my grass purple, then screw you I'll do as I please with my property. I can't help but wonder if they're enforcable anyway. The old farmer who created it when he developed the land has been dead & burried for years anyway.
And if this is unagreeable to copyright holders, there's a compromise as well. If they really want mickey mouse forever fine keep the little rat. I really don't give a rip. As a trade off, copyright holders can keep their copyright forever. In exchange, they have to pay a renewal fee forever. It need not be a large sum of money either. Say $100 to renew every 5 years. BUT you have to activly take the step of sending in you money with your renewal form every time. The harm to society of the current copyright system isn't that we can't copy steamboat willie or whatever. It's everything else. Out of print books, disintegrating as we speak, that can't be copied because they're still under copyright, but won't be reprinted because they won't be profitable.
The compromise gives the greedy something more (legitimate, perpetual copyright) and gives the public domain tons more.
Exactly. That point seemed be partially understood by the Supreme Court in the Eldred case but for whatever reason, they thought of that portion of Sony Bono as bad law but not unconstitutional. I just don't get that--the Constitution says copyright are "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Retroactive copyright extensions unequivocally do nothing to promote creation so how that portion could have been ruled Constitutional floors me.
Great leapfrog analogy too.
Though I guess in fairness it's not the market's fault persay--the market does what it's supposed to. But individual shareholders, mutual funds and corporations are driven by not just greed, but instant gratification at the expense of long-term growth.