It's important to recognize that some unions are doubleplusungood and some are doubleplusgood. Unions related to highly technical skills like plumbing, carpentry, etc etc tend to emphasize skills for all members, and most cities encourage this sort of guild structure by requiring licensed (which often more easily achieved by being a union member) workers for critical works projects.
Unions related to things like housekeeping are there to feed off lower-class workers who are no good at defending themselves against either the management or the union.
This is not different from how such trailers are presented on analog media. Is there a fast-forward feature that at least cuts the sound and reduces viewing time by at least half?
This is in no way meant to be argumentative. I will not buy a DVD player as long as they have things like "Region Coding" and don't do useful stuff like record TV shows, so I have no experience with the devices.
Why does the server-to-server transaction need to be encrypted? If the mail is not encrypted by the user before it ever gets to the mail server, then it is still insecure during several steps in each journey. I agree that it would help protect the public transmission of the data, but encrypted servers may do more to slow the adoption of user level encryption than they would actually help protect privacy.
I agree. One unprofitable movie wouldn't have any effect. I agree, negative reviews and competition can have the same disastrous effects on profitability. But negative reviews and competition are part of the notion of "fair play".
Negative reviews are information about other information. I think we're seeing certain companies do their best to limit your right to use clips of their production to assist in the review process (in spite of the law specifically allowing for that). This is a danger of linking freedom of speech to device ownership. You can easily excerpt a portion of an article or book, and provide a footnote, but how to do that in a movie review for a DVD product from which you can no longer take a clip, or a multimedia thesis on movie production in which you'd like to include examples of your theories?
Competition generally requires the same investment as the original production. Except for Blair Witch, most blockbuster movies cost on the order of millions of dollars. In order to compete with, uh, American Beauty, I have to spend at least as much money (roughly) to develop my own American Ugly movie.
I never said a company has a right to exist. They have a right to control production of copies (certainly legally they do, morally I'm only sympathetic to a point). They are attempting to take control of fair use by the devious wedding of information and device technology. In the face of such an unethical, immoral morass of foul behavior, is it appropriate for us to use "any means necessary" to do what we see fit with information? Do you expect that simply "stealing" will do more good than simply ignoring them into irrelevance? I'm not telling, I'm asking.
BTW. I've carefully avoided the prase "Intellectual Property" because there is no such thing.
I'm guessing they are not trying to work against users so much as trying to prevent rival for-profit distributions from including their hard work in non-Suse distributions. Star Office is one of the herd of dual-licensed "open source" projects. I am not going to wade through the Sun not-quite-GPL license, but I'm sure this is the license Suse is taking advantage of, since the GPL would seem to forbid this sort of restriction. Personally, all of these attempts to one-up the competition in the race to become THE Linux just make me want to send donations earmarked for Debian to SPI.
Actually the cost of making copies is not zero. Or essentially zero. Or anything close to zero. (And no offense is intended to the poster to whom this is a reply, he/she has it mostly right, but this "no cost to make copies" idea permeates this discussion... so here's my rant)
The first copy of any work is very expensive. For some movies, the first copy can cost into the several millions of dollars to produce. For software, the costs for the first copy can also be pretty high (think about how much programmer time costs, and how many of them it takes to build even a mid-sized application). For music albums the cost of the first copy varies widely. The cost of this first copy is a capital expense, and is not made greater or smaller no matter how many second copies are made.
The cost of creating second copies is also called an incremental expense. In some cases, the incremental expense for the production company is quite low. Often this expense is so small that it is very easy for unauthorized duplication to take place and have a viable market. After all, the unauthorized duplicators have none of the major capital/fixed expense associated with the first copy. They only need a high fidelity second copy to make other high fidelity second copies.
The total cost to produce a legitimate recording is capital expense + (incremental expense * units sold). The manufacturer then sets a price, in order to generate revenue to offset the total cost of production. They estimate projected unit sales and set a price such that (units sold * price) >= (total cost).
If unauthorized duplication prevents the manufacturer from selling their projected units sold by undercutting the manufacturer's price (since the unauthorized duplicators have no need to pass along the fixed cost of production they are capable of pricing at or just above the incremental expense and still generating excess revenue -- profit), then their project is unprofitable for their firm and no future projects will be possible.
Now that we have a basic understanding of micro-economics in hand, we can discuss the actual dynamics of information sharing. The cost of production is NOT the issue. The fact is, I have paid the production company to communicate their "information" to me when I make a VHS, DVD, CD, LP, or book purchase.
The key at this point isn't that I have the right to have them recommunicate it to me over and over, should my copy become non-functional. The key is that they are taking away my ability to communicate that information TO MYSELF (at whatever cost to myself for duplication). I cannot make my own copies of the information I have legitimately because they've tied the extraction of the information to a device and made it illegal to tamper with that device (even though I've paid for that too). Well, that's crap. And every time you buy a DVD, CD, Aibo robodog, Intel inside computer, Microsoft license, or buy a ticket to a mainstream movie, you are helping fund the dismantling of freedom. But all the moralistic high-grounding to attempt to justify making unauthorized copies because "if I make a copy you don't lose your copy" is misleading. It obscures the issue. The issue is freedom to use things I've paid for the way I see fit, not cost of production.
I agree, it's probably a technical matter. Something similar to why the average CD-RW won't play in the same machines that play music CD-Rs. I wish I could say it were an evil plot, but Sony are so Jekyll and Hyde on this stuff it's not even funny. Comes with being a huge multinational. The various divisions do NOT work off the same script.
No kidding. It looks like this is just another waste of time along to trail to laptop sized uber-PDAs with touch sensitive screens and robust OSs. If we're going to be pointer happy, let's just point at the screen. It is not intuitive to roll a mouse around on the table or to draw on a separate pad of paper.
I'm sorry, but when it comes to general license crap, MS kicks all over inane arguments of Free. After all, they charge you a different heaping pile of money based on which semantic argument they are perpetrating on users at the moment.
According to Kemper's proposal, IT will change the world, and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionaries Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs
Hmmm. Not exactly the first two names that come to mind these days when the phrase "technology visionary" is uttered. Maybe Jobs. After all, he was so visionary he was able to release a crippled G3 with a builtin monitor, USB-only interfacing, and no floppy drive, and revive an otherwise dying company. For his next amazing masterpiece, he'll replace your orderly, comfortable, but buggy GUI with one that never crashes, but makes much less sense visually.
I have to think that some of the moderators around here are on crack (as in why is my parent post either flamebait or a troll?). I posted very early on, with a succint summation of what a load of crap this article was-- all of my hunches were proven true as I read the comments. The guy who wrote the article apparently frequently complains about this stuff on Usenet. He is apparently widely considered a flake for it. In his article, which I read before posting, and suspect the moderators did not do before moderating me down, he comes across as someone who has lost project bids to people who were more buzzword compliant than he is. And rightfully so since he appears to want to code in Fortran and something he calls "table oriented programming". His article completely overlooks functional and logical design as alternate paradigms, additionally he has added no real world examples (his charts are completely fictitious since as he says, "no studies have been done") to back up his claims either way.
In fact he does compare OOP to communism. And rather poorly since his complaints about communism all seem to be derived from problems he has with American democratic capitalism and it's overwhelming bureaucracy. The article is lame. Slashdot putting flamebait like this on the front page is semi-lame. It did engender one of the better discussions Slashdot has had in my recent memory, which makes it forgivable in my book.
I think you have it backwards. Most people only assume that they need to have Windows at home because they saw it at work first. And since it's pretty much impossible to buy a non-Apple PC that doesn't already have Windows installed, they don't really have a choice anyway. Then what they do is borrow the CD from work so they can install Office at home. All MS is doing, since they've pretty much sold someone a licensed copy of their OS with each machine that leaves the computer superstore, is making sure that no one upgrades for free.
I have decided to charge the phone company money to list my name and number in the phone book. I have also decided to charge anyone who wants to print my address in any directory or listing. Furthermore, footnotes that use the titles of books I've written must pay a $50 fee for mentioning my book and probably an additional license fee for verbatim quotes of any size, above and beyond the right to mention my book.
There are technological means to prevent anyone anywhere from accessing any page within your web site directory hierarchy without going through the front page or any other hoop you want them to jump through. So they should be used, if an innaccessible site is the desired result. Check the NY Times for a great example of this.
the new technology I was referring to is this "internet" thing that Al Gore invented. There is simply no evidence at this point that the internet warps the thought patterns of young persons in a bad way.
okay, troll, i'll bite. prove that "thinking narratively" is good for anything other than turning otherwise inquisitive minds into drooling robots and i might care about it. otherwise, i think the ability to perform thought patterns that involve linking diverse objects from an array of sources is just as valid. then prove that the internet all by itself seems to be reinforcing the latter over the former, and i'll really care. until then, i'd say sweeping generalizations about a brand-new technology are silly. SILLY!
Frankly, I think the whole concept sounds pretty cool, whether it's extraneous or not or useful or not. The questions I have would center around whether or not writing this as a plug-in to a browser that works incrementally less well for plain old web browsing (at least I've noticed a marked decrease in IE4->IE5->IE5.5's ability to render regular text and image HTML) is a good idea at all, and have to hope that they have a Netscape and/or Konqueror version soon. Or why this can't also exist outside the browser... Or whether this is Free software, or even open source.
Exactly, besides the fact that margins being down is more likely to affect smaller makers, which tends to do some weeding in the marketplace. The time is now for any pc maker who thinks they may need to, um, think differently, if they want to avoid direct competition with 800 lb. gorillas, to start looking at more alternatives than just Linux. Their solution might include Linux, but I'd doubt that on its own, Linux is enough of a differentiating factor.
I completely agree with you, I just wanted to inject a bit of anti-rabid-spammer-hating into the discussion, since rabid anything usually results in faster than desirable erosion of civil liberties (witness the rabid fear of drugs destroying our society and the effect of the so-called War on Drugs). I do think that criminal cases related to computer crimes are going to be a case of "the big guy is always right." so that we will continue to see people like Randal Schwartz and Emmanual Goldstein get whatever legal treatment the law department of a large company decides they should get.
Slashdot Mirror
It's important to recognize that some unions are doubleplusungood and some are doubleplusgood. Unions related to highly technical skills like plumbing, carpentry, etc etc tend to emphasize skills for all members, and most cities encourage this sort of guild structure by requiring licensed (which often more easily achieved by being a union member) workers for critical works projects.
Unions related to things like housekeeping are there to feed off lower-class workers who are no good at defending themselves against either the management or the union.
This is not different from how such trailers are presented on analog media. Is there a fast-forward feature that at least cuts the sound and reduces viewing time by at least half?
This is in no way meant to be argumentative. I will not buy a DVD player as long as they have things like "Region Coding" and don't do useful stuff like record TV shows, so I have no experience with the devices.
Um, DUH. If Slashdot is down, how will anyone get to Slashdot to submit the story about Slashdot being down? And who will read it?
Why does the server-to-server transaction need to be encrypted? If the mail is not encrypted by the user before it ever gets to the mail server, then it is still insecure during several steps in each journey. I agree that it would help protect the public transmission of the data, but encrypted servers may do more to slow the adoption of user level encryption than they would actually help protect privacy.
I agree. One unprofitable movie wouldn't have any effect. I agree, negative reviews and competition can have the same disastrous effects on profitability. But negative reviews and competition are part of the notion of "fair play".
Negative reviews are information about other information. I think we're seeing certain companies do their best to limit your right to use clips of their production to assist in the review process (in spite of the law specifically allowing for that). This is a danger of linking freedom of speech to device ownership. You can easily excerpt a portion of an article or book, and provide a footnote, but how to do that in a movie review for a DVD product from which you can no longer take a clip, or a multimedia thesis on movie production in which you'd like to include examples of your theories?
Competition generally requires the same investment as the original production. Except for Blair Witch, most blockbuster movies cost on the order of millions of dollars. In order to compete with, uh, American Beauty, I have to spend at least as much money (roughly) to develop my own American Ugly movie.
I never said a company has a right to exist. They have a right to control production of copies (certainly legally they do, morally I'm only sympathetic to a point). They are attempting to take control of fair use by the devious wedding of information and device technology. In the face of such an unethical, immoral morass of foul behavior, is it appropriate for us to use "any means necessary" to do what we see fit with information? Do you expect that simply "stealing" will do more good than simply ignoring them into irrelevance? I'm not telling, I'm asking.
BTW. I've carefully avoided the prase "Intellectual Property" because there is no such thing.
I'm guessing they are not trying to work against users so much as trying to prevent rival for-profit distributions from including their hard work in non-Suse distributions. Star Office is one of the herd of dual-licensed "open source" projects. I am not going to wade through the Sun not-quite-GPL license, but I'm sure this is the license Suse is taking advantage of, since the GPL would seem to forbid this sort of restriction. Personally, all of these attempts to one-up the competition in the race to become THE Linux just make me want to send donations earmarked for Debian to SPI.
Actually the cost of making copies is not zero. Or essentially zero. Or anything close to zero. (And no offense is intended to the poster to whom this is a reply, he/she has it mostly right, but this "no cost to make copies" idea permeates this discussion... so here's my rant)
The first copy of any work is very expensive. For some movies, the first copy can cost into the several millions of dollars to produce. For software, the costs for the first copy can also be pretty high (think about how much programmer time costs, and how many of them it takes to build even a mid-sized application). For music albums the cost of the first copy varies widely. The cost of this first copy is a capital expense, and is not made greater or smaller no matter how many second copies are made.
The cost of creating second copies is also called an incremental expense. In some cases, the incremental expense for the production company is quite low. Often this expense is so small that it is very easy for unauthorized duplication to take place and have a viable market. After all, the unauthorized duplicators have none of the major capital/fixed expense associated with the first copy. They only need a high fidelity second copy to make other high fidelity second copies.
The total cost to produce a legitimate recording is capital expense + (incremental expense * units sold). The manufacturer then sets a price, in order to generate revenue to offset the total cost of production. They estimate projected unit sales and set a price such that (units sold * price) >= (total cost).
If unauthorized duplication prevents the manufacturer from selling their projected units sold by undercutting the manufacturer's price (since the unauthorized duplicators have no need to pass along the fixed cost of production they are capable of pricing at or just above the incremental expense and still generating excess revenue -- profit), then their project is unprofitable for their firm and no future projects will be possible.
Now that we have a basic understanding of micro-economics in hand, we can discuss the actual dynamics of information sharing. The cost of production is NOT the issue. The fact is, I have paid the production company to communicate their "information" to me when I make a VHS, DVD, CD, LP, or book purchase.
The key at this point isn't that I have the right to have them recommunicate it to me over and over, should my copy become non-functional. The key is that they are taking away my ability to communicate that information TO MYSELF (at whatever cost to myself for duplication). I cannot make my own copies of the information I have legitimately because they've tied the extraction of the information to a device and made it illegal to tamper with that device (even though I've paid for that too). Well, that's crap. And every time you buy a DVD, CD, Aibo robodog, Intel inside computer, Microsoft license, or buy a ticket to a mainstream movie, you are helping fund the dismantling of freedom. But all the moralistic high-grounding to attempt to justify making unauthorized copies because "if I make a copy you don't lose your copy" is misleading. It obscures the issue. The issue is freedom to use things I've paid for the way I see fit, not cost of production.
I agree, it's probably a technical matter. Something similar to why the average CD-RW won't play in the same machines that play music CD-Rs. I wish I could say it were an evil plot, but Sony are so Jekyll and Hyde on this stuff it's not even funny. Comes with being a huge multinational. The various divisions do NOT work off the same script.
No kidding. It looks like this is just another waste of time along to trail to laptop sized uber-PDAs with touch sensitive screens and robust OSs. If we're going to be pointer happy, let's just point at the screen. It is not intuitive to roll a mouse around on the table or to draw on a separate pad of paper.
I'm sorry, but when it comes to general license crap, MS kicks all over inane arguments of Free. After all, they charge you a different heaping pile of money based on which semantic argument they are perpetrating on users at the moment.
According to Kemper's proposal, IT will change the world, and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionaries Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs Hmmm. Not exactly the first two names that come to mind these days when the phrase "technology visionary" is uttered. Maybe Jobs. After all, he was so visionary he was able to release a crippled G3 with a builtin monitor, USB-only interfacing, and no floppy drive, and revive an otherwise dying company. For his next amazing masterpiece, he'll replace your orderly, comfortable, but buggy GUI with one that never crashes, but makes much less sense visually.
I have to think that some of the moderators around here are on crack (as in why is my parent post either flamebait or a troll?). I posted very early on, with a succint summation of what a load of crap this article was-- all of my hunches were proven true as I read the comments. The guy who wrote the article apparently frequently complains about this stuff on Usenet. He is apparently widely considered a flake for it. In his article, which I read before posting, and suspect the moderators did not do before moderating me down, he comes across as someone who has lost project bids to people who were more buzzword compliant than he is. And rightfully so since he appears to want to code in Fortran and something he calls "table oriented programming". His article completely overlooks functional and logical design as alternate paradigms, additionally he has added no real world examples (his charts are completely fictitious since as he says, "no studies have been done") to back up his claims either way.
In fact he does compare OOP to communism. And rather poorly since his complaints about communism all seem to be derived from problems he has with American democratic capitalism and it's overwhelming bureaucracy. The article is lame. Slashdot putting flamebait like this on the front page is semi-lame. It did engender one of the better discussions Slashdot has had in my recent memory, which makes it forgivable in my book.
I think you have it backwards. Most people only assume that they need to have Windows at home because they saw it at work first. And since it's pretty much impossible to buy a non-Apple PC that doesn't already have Windows installed, they don't really have a choice anyway. Then what they do is borrow the CD from work so they can install Office at home. All MS is doing, since they've pretty much sold someone a licensed copy of their OS with each machine that leaves the computer superstore, is making sure that no one upgrades for free.
What difference does it make if they are surfing cartoonnetwork.com or playboy.com or slashdot for that matter? They are still wasting time.
I have decided to charge the phone company money to list my name and number in the phone book. I have also decided to charge anyone who wants to print my address in any directory or listing. Furthermore, footnotes that use the titles of books I've written must pay a $50 fee for mentioning my book and probably an additional license fee for verbatim quotes of any size, above and beyond the right to mention my book.
There are technological means to prevent anyone anywhere from accessing any page within your web site directory hierarchy without going through the front page or any other hoop you want them to jump through. So they should be used, if an innaccessible site is the desired result. Check the NY Times for a great example of this.
the new technology I was referring to is this "internet" thing that Al Gore invented. There is simply no evidence at this point that the internet warps the thought patterns of young persons in a bad way.
You could be right. Is Phys Ed not the normal abbreviation for this, though? Is that a localism in America?
We can't take that troll seriously. If he's so smart, let's see him spell psych correctly for a change.
okay, troll, i'll bite. prove that "thinking narratively" is good for anything other than turning otherwise inquisitive minds into drooling robots and i might care about it. otherwise, i think the ability to perform thought patterns that involve linking diverse objects from an array of sources is just as valid. then prove that the internet all by itself seems to be reinforcing the latter over the former, and i'll really care. until then, i'd say sweeping generalizations about a brand-new technology are silly. SILLY!
Frankly, I think the whole concept sounds pretty cool, whether it's extraneous or not or useful or not. The questions I have would center around whether or not writing this as a plug-in to a browser that works incrementally less well for plain old web browsing (at least I've noticed a marked decrease in IE4->IE5->IE5.5's ability to render regular text and image HTML) is a good idea at all, and have to hope that they have a Netscape and/or Konqueror version soon. Or why this can't also exist outside the browser... Or whether this is Free software, or even open source.
Bruce, these would be trolls. You don't need to feed them. :)
He attempted to credit the source, but did not succeed. This is not really felony plagiarism, it's more like misdemeanor negligent plagiarism.
Exactly, besides the fact that margins being down is more likely to affect smaller makers, which tends to do some weeding in the marketplace. The time is now for any pc maker who thinks they may need to, um, think differently, if they want to avoid direct competition with 800 lb. gorillas, to start looking at more alternatives than just Linux. Their solution might include Linux, but I'd doubt that on its own, Linux is enough of a differentiating factor.
And if pico isn't powerful enough give nano a try, it's got the same friendly interface with some added features.
I completely agree with you, I just wanted to inject a bit of anti-rabid-spammer-hating into the discussion, since rabid anything usually results in faster than desirable erosion of civil liberties (witness the rabid fear of drugs destroying our society and the effect of the so-called War on Drugs). I do think that criminal cases related to computer crimes are going to be a case of "the big guy is always right." so that we will continue to see people like Randal Schwartz and Emmanual Goldstein get whatever legal treatment the law department of a large company decides they should get.