Presumably this would be done in a sterile room and that the patient would need to be cleared for any potentially hazardous bacterial infections and the such.
They noted that the BBB is restored within a few hours. Assuredly not a 100% safe treatment to be sure, but that's hardly new in medical science (think of all the potential side-effects listed with every medication. Never mind things like full body irradiation as prep for bone marrow transplants, cutting up (or even out) pieces of the brain to reduce seizures and so on.)
Sometimes the cure is worth taking some risks. Of course "sometimes" isn't the same as "always" and it would need to be determined case by case based on the patient's other co-existing conditions, the will of the family, financial situation, etc.
I can't think of any scenario where being cured and missing memories is in any way better than still missing those memories but having your brain slowly being eaten away and losing even more memories.
These are already confused and sickly old people.. curing them if such a thing is possible will mean that they can eventually become less confused. Probably with a lot of therapy and rehab, similar to what we do after significant physical trauma leaves a person's body incapacitated.
But absolutely, the people who will benefit the most from such a treatment would be those who are diagnosed early and can be treated before they lose too much.
Ok. So you have some long-term media. You include the player on the media itself. Solves half the problem.
You can't really just "include Linux" because future computers might not support x86/x64/whatever architecture you included. Same for including codecs and/or playback software. Including the computer requires having hardware that itself will last 50-100 years. All the Linuxes and VLCs and GPL licenses in the world will do you exactly squat if you can't even get the machine to POST.
Of course I'm assuming the most pessimistic zero-knowledge situation (which would be more on the scale of several hundred to thousands of years, realistically.)
If you relax a little and assume that say, M.Disc is still a relevant format that you can get readers for in 100 years, you can work around a lot of this. You'd want to include detailed instructions in plain text on the disc (and hope that your text encoding is still supported!) Perhaps even include source code (though also with a disclaimer -- our great-grandchildren may view today's languages the same way we view punch cards today.)
That's relying entirely on that one single technology still having support for 100 years though. If it doesn't you end up back at square one -- no way to read the media -- even if the media itself is still in tact.
Cost is also a factor. If we're committing all of human knowledge for post-apocalyptic people to use in order to rebuild society, we'd likely be willing to spend more money to ensure the data survives and is accessible (and our post-apocalyptic successors would likely spend a LOT more to ensure they can access it) as compared to say a school project or whatever.
So you take your car in to get oil change or whatever and the mechanic tells you your head gasket should be replaced. Your first response is "hold on let me just go ahead and Google that so that I can confirm with my 5 minutes of research whether your 30 years of experience is justified or if you're just trying to pull a fast one."
Or your dentist says you need a filling.. do you go home and Google how to self-diagnose a cavity? You have the proper equipment laying around to make the self-diagnosis even if you did know how?
Yes there are plenty of stupid people and I wouldn't disagree with that claim. The part I find disagreeable is the jump from "you did something that I would have known not to do" straight to "because you're stupid" based on a single data point that could have many possible alternate explanations.
1) Try to ban illegal downloads. That doesn't work. 2) Try to ban sites that link to illegal downloads. That doesn't work. 3) Try to ban sites that link to sites that link to illegal downloads. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this won't work either.... X) Ban everybody who's ever heard the word "download." Shut off the internet. Everybody goes back to direct copying and it still doesn't bloody work.
Three things need to be realized and acted upon if there's any hope of reducing copyright infringement: - Make legitimate viewing easy. Recent history with iTunes, Netflix, etc.. and hell older history in the form of things like 7-11.. have shown repeatedly that people are happy to pay, and even pay more if they have to, for the product they want to be on demand.
- Unnnlessss you price it too high. People will not pay 20% more for a one-time stream of a movie compared to buying the DVD. Its absolutely stupid to think they would. You can charge more for convenient access, but only for the part of the product that the consumer is receiving -- you must discount the cost of permanence, the cost of physical media/packaging, the cost of distribution, etc. If you don't people will just see it for the scam it is. (And of course there's an absolute maximum price point as well but that's standard economics and applies equally to the physical media.)
- Realize that reducing copyright infringement by 100% is not possible. I'm not saying to stop fighting all together, but when all of your strategies seem to be "all or nothing," you're going to end up on that "nothing" side every single time. Things like invasive DRM that stops infringers for all of about one day but annoy legitimate users until the end of time is NOT really helping the situation. When I have a better experience downloading a pirated copy of something I've already purchased rather than watching the legitimate copy, there's something wrong with the whole situation and it doesn't take too long to start skipping that whole "already purchased" step.
Film, photographs, cave drawings, etc have the advantage that they're direct representations of what they're depicting. If half a film gets destroyed, you can still watch the other half. If your projector doesn't work you can get a bright light and a magnifying glass.
Encoded representations (especially digital but even analog encodings like a vinyl record) require a working decoder. If your decoder is broken and you don't know how its encoded in order to build a new one, you're screwed. There's absolutely nothing you can recover in that case.
I mean to some extent you could consider that "bright light and magnifying glass" to be a decoder of sorts, but its an extremely obvious decoder since you can usually tell that there's "something" on a piece of film with the naked eye and its pretty natural to see a small, dark image and immediately jump to "enlarge and brighten."
Its not necessarily obvious to run a needle across the grooves in a vinyl record and amplify the.. however it reads the signal (see.. I couldn't do it! At least not without some instructions.) And its really not obvious how one would go about decoding an mpg when all you have to go by is "here's a large amount of bits" (oh and yeah.. you have to figure out how to read those bits from the physical media in the first place, which is probably even more challenging than decoding the stream given how unbelievably small a "bit" is in modern hardware.)
Define "stupid." Would you be able to tell when an auto mechanic is BSing you? When your contractor does a half-assed job building your home but still charges you full price? Any of 1000 other scams that are out there attacking areas of knowledge you haven't studied?
Just because a person can't tell a mouse from a memory stick doesn't mean they're stupid -- it means they don't know about computers. And that's still a large portion of the population, even among the younger crowd ("can use Facebook" does not indicate "knowing about computers" in any useful sense.)
Because most people have no need to know. Just like you don't need to know how to design and build the car you drive or the house you live in, most people don't need to know every detail about computers in order to use them.
There is (or at least should be) an argument that because computers (/phone/tablets/etc) are increasingly storing large chunks of our critical information that we should be training everyone in at least basic security.
Of course that's easier said than done. Its hard to make a full-term course out of that to push in public education (where they don't have the funding to support existing courses anyway.) Doing it as one of those three-day seminar type courses would be great except how do you convince more than a handful of people to attend? And nobody wants to see registration and licensing for basic computer usage (enforcing a minimal amount of training in order to obtain the license) -- even those who think programmers should be licensed generally wouldn't go that far.
So until someone figures out how to educate the entire country (/planet!), just calling people "stupid" and shutting down the conversation isn't helping anything. Or you know, since you're apparently perfect at everything (otherwise you'd be "stupid" too) maybe you can be the one to figure out how to solve the problem!
The one I got (well the only one I actually bothered listening to) wanted a credit card number before they'd connect and "fix" my machine..
I hadn't given them my IP so I'm not entirely sure how they were planning to do that, but as I don't have fake CC numbers laying around I pretty much terminated the call at that point so I never got to find out what their next step was..
My guess is that they would have just kept me on the line for another few minutes claiming to do something they weren't actually doing while they verified and charged whatever to my card. There are much more efficient attack vectors than manually calling people if your only goal is to install a back door into the home PC of someone who doesn't know how to protect themselves.
Trouble with trolling them is that they don't really care. The worst you'll accomplish is getting some low-paid (probably illegally low since you know, illegal business anyway) phone drone fired and replaced with the next one.
Most people consider backwards-compatibility to be a good thing. Not to mention it save MS having to try to redo 30 years of development every release cycle. I'm not saying the system is perfect (there's a lot of weirdnesses in the common controls that could probably have been corrected if they didn't have to worry about compatibility -- and doubly so as a C# developer where you have to break paradigm and drop into C-style win32 code in order to solve/work around some problems.) But its a hell of lot better than having to start from scratch every 2-4 years.
no second taskbar
This one bugs me as a dual-screen user. I've found third-party utilities to help with the situation but they're nowhere near as nice as the "real" taskbar. But MS is definitely not the only company to mostly ignore dual screen users (I'm not sure whether EDID detection is a video card or an OS issue or a combination, but holy hell is it annoying.. about 90% of games and other full-screen apps only support dedicated full screen -- no borderless windows -- and half of them force it to be on the primary monitor to boot.. MPC-HC refuses to stay in full screen under certain conditions (and its a totally free, open-source media player.. I even examined the code at one point and if my reading was correct, it was intentionally done that way.. not just a bug.) No idea if Linux or OSx handles multiple monitors significantly better but since most things I need to do don't support Linux and I can't stand Apple products, I'm rather stuck where I am anyway.
no free pdf
And if they included one, they'd run the risk of another antitrust lawsuit. Its not like they have a much of a choice on that one. The rest of your examples probably would fall into this category as well except a) they suck (as you pointed out), b) they've (mostly) always existed in Windows and c) most of them don't have any competition anyway (nobody is going to claim that Paint is a legitimate competitor to Photoshop.) Its kind of odd that Winzip or someone hasn't tried to challenge MS' inclusion of a compression program but maybe they just don't think its worth the legal costs.
once something goes wrong...have to call someone
That goes for any computer issue. Doesn't matter what OS (or even if its something other than the OS.) Hell it goes for any moderately complex technology.. I have to call someone if something goes wrong with my car too. Expecting everybody to be experts with every piece of technology they ever touch is just stupid.
cryptic error messages
Because "Segmentation fault" and "Kernel panic" are so much clearer than "The program has stopped working" or a blue screen. People who know what they're looking for will glean info from it. People who don't are just as confused either way.
And you sure as hell can Google Windows issues just as easily as Linux issues. I have no idea how you figure Linux is in any way easier to troubleshoot (unless you're a kernel programmer and then yes, being able to inspect the source code may help.. but most end users -- even among other programmers -- aren't kernel programmers.)
The big fact everyone ignores when making these kind of stupid claims is that most people who can't figure out Windows issues on their own also wouldn't be able to figure out Linux issues on their own. There just happens to be a significantly larger number of that type of user among the Windows world.
To go back to the car analogy, it would be like comparing your average driver to a professional racer. Even if the racer isn't actually a mechanic, there's a good chance that they know a hell of a lot more about cars than most "normal" drivers. So yes, they probably can do a lot more minor maintenance themselves without having to call a "real" mechanic. But putting a bunch of normal people into Nascar-ready cars isn't going to reduce the need for mechanics to any great extent.
No. Digital technology probably does -- people in power have always used every available option to oppress as many people as possible -- but copyright infringement specifically has very little to do with it.
If you want the punishment to fit the crime, force infringers to make their own song and distribute it for free!
You'd end up with a lot of crap of course, but there's already a lot of crap out there so that's not a significant detriment. And who knows you might end up with a few beauties going straight into the public domain.
Of course that wouldn't recompense the labels so it'd never fly.. but it would make for an interesting world.
As for charging damages based on retail pricing, that's an immediate failure: If I have a 100% chance to pay $10 for a movie legally, or a 1% chance to pay $10 for a movie illegally, I have exactly zero motivation to purchase it legally. But at the same time multiplying in the risk factor (so it would be $1000 penalty for an illegal movie using these example numbers,) you get into the situation where the defendant's entire life effectively destroyed over a handful of movies.
There needs to be a middle ground between "meaningful deterrent" and "annihilate a person's entire future." Unfortunately few people seem interested in finding such a middle ground in the legal arena.
Companies like Netflix, Hulu and Apple are helping in the sense that they're removing the incentive to infringe in the first place but avoiding the problem is not the same as solving it (unless you can completely avoid it which is unlikely in this case.)
There are a total of 12 business models that are known to have ever made money at all.
What? That's a horrific oversimplification. And if you're going to do that you may as well go all the way: There's only one business model that works -- make more money than you spend.
you don't exactly hear the Porn industry complaining that the Internet ruined their movie business, do you?
Nope, notever. And that's just a few from the first page of Google results.
recognize the obvious: Distribution online is effectively free.
While true, recent history has shown that this isn't the biggest issue. The problem is that piracy is more convenient. If I want to watch a movie legitimately I have to obtain the discs, plug it into the machine, sit through 1-2 minutes of unskippable copyright warnings (being shown only to the very people who aren't infringing.. I get that legally they need those warnings but there's no reason to make them unskippable.) 30 seconds of stupid menu animations, probably a handful of ads for other shit (which are thankfully mostly skippable but still..) Then sometimes you get shown the damned copyright notices again after you finally get to the menu to hit play. 4-5 steps and several minutes of useless shit in order to finally view your show. Assuming you're wanting to watch something old enough to have discs available in the first place. And you're paying for all that shit.
Oppose that to a torrent. Yes you have to wait for the download but with modern internet speeds that's usually less than an hour and frequently only a few minutes depending on number of seeders and the quality (file size) you're picking up. Less time than having to go to the store to pick it up for a lot of people, and far less than ordering from Amazon or other online sellers. And when you get it you hit play and you're immediately watching your movie. Two steps and no wait time beyond the initial obtaining which is comparable to obtaining a legitimate disc.
Thanks mostly to Netflix and Apple, this is improving quite a bit -- primarily in the sense that they've mostly proved that people will actually pay for content if its a) reasonably priced and b) convenient. The recording industry has mostly realized this and most music is available through iTunes, Google Play and a few other big name services (often available through all of these services.) That's exactly what people want and will pay for. Simple, fast and not unduly expensive.
The TV industry is slowly catching on. They're not there yet. Every studio is making their own access site which destroys that "convenient" aspect that's so important: If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I have to know which site is distributing it in the first place, and if its not one I've signed up for I've got to go through that whole hassle. Rinse and repeat for every single show I'm interested in.
That "knowing who distributes it" in particular is terrible. If they want to create a competitor to Netflix and Hulu for whatever reason then great -- but having 47 competitors that all offer only one or two (popular) shows each isn't going to solve anything (of course they'll use the fact that nobody cares enough to sign up for that much shit as yet more evidence that copyright infringement is destroying their business, even though that's not the underlying problem.)
The movie industry on the other hand is still stuck in the past for the most part. They usually distribute "ultraviolet" codes with discs nowadays which is great but it means I still have to pick up the discs.
$50 probably isn't sufficient given that buying the bluray is damned near $50, so when you multiply out the risk factor you'd actually be encouraging infringement at that rate!
Up here in Canada we have a pretty good system IMO. There's a $5000 maximum penalty. That is, its high enough to be punishing but not high enough to be life-destroying (for most people.) There's also a distinction for commercial infringement which allows for much higher penalties.
Its probably not perfect.. I'd like to see a scaling system (based on real, objective numbers rather than based on completely unjustified "damage" claims by the labels) so that the worst offenders could still be prosecuted without unduly punishing people who are legitimately too broke to afford the getting-rather-insane price of legit copies these days (or worse, things like Game of Thrones where you have to subscribe to an entire bloody service for one show.)
Defendant's income would be a good measure here but of course that would raise some privacy concerns (the labels would need to know your income before determining if you're worth pursuing legal measures against. Even if you somehow route it so that the labels only can learn the maximum potential judgement award, they could reverse the calculation to at least put you in an income bracket.)
Commercial copyright infringement on the other hand I'm fully behind opening wide up. I have no problem shutting down any business that's primarily illegal. Things like torrent farms and search engines are a bit of a grey area. There's a difference between a generalized torrent farm that can be used for both legitimate and illegitimate content vs trackers that are explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement. Its hard to write that sort of distinction into law, so probably best to leave the infringement penalties to those who are actually infringing and leave the "enabling" context out of it (or up to the judge on a case-by-case basis.)
1) Piracy is robbery, kidnapping, and murder on the high seas.
Stop this. Just stop. Language changes. Live with it. There are very few contexts in which one could possibly confuse tween girls downloading One Direction songs with "robbery, kidnapping, and murder on the high seas."
If you ever run into such a situation, then please do be careful to make the distinction. Lawmakers need to make the distinction when putting the law down on paper because you never know where it might be applied in the future. In all other situations, you're just shutting down the conversation without accomplishing anything beyond making people think you're a dick.
Then it may be possible to have a rational discussion.
Not if your first argument in any discussion is "Nyah nyah I won't even listen until you've consulted a thesaurus." Rational can't even come into it because there's no "discussion" in the first place when you throw down this sort of pedantry right off the top.
Pfft. If these companies stop making record profits and drop down to making merely outrageous profits, they're obviously going to just take their toys and go home.
We'd all be living in a grey world with no entertainment. And there's no way newer, more innovative people could come in to take their place. We absolutely discourage that kind of crazy idea in our society!
I don't suppose you plan on being the one to coin a new term then? Preferably one that isn't even more confusing -- especially for the physicists who've been using the term "measurement" since long before quantum mechanics was discovered.
Aside from that, where was it ever claimed that measurements had to be non-destructive? If I want to measure the explosive power of a bomb, I sure as hell won't be recovering it after I'm done (at least not in one piece!) Or if we want to stick with high school physics, how fast my beaker of HCl dissolves a chunk of Mg -- won't be getting those back in any sort of mint condition either.
So far no, you're not required to snoop through user's content, even in Canada.
But presumably since they were making money off of this, some or all of this content was being distributed. My guess is that the cops found themselves a way into the distribution chain and traced it back to a source large enough to warrant giving themselves a public pat on the back. You know, like an investigation is supposed to work.
I bet Vic Toews is crying that this didn't happen 3 years ago. His warrantless wiretapping bill would have been passed without question ("Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", which from what people smarter than me have said contained almost nothing about protecting children after the title page..) Though I'm sure someone else will step up to the plate to try and shove more warrantless wiretapping and copyright protection BS through in the name of "protecting children" now that this has happened.
Go review code you wrote 2 years ago. Its almost certain your code isn't all that great either when you get to look at it from afar. But like most forms of filth in the world, you don't really notice the smell while you're stewing in it.
Until its something critical and then you're back on the hook to fix it -- except you can't fix it because its not your code and you end up making more excuses than progress until either the vendor gets their shit together or you get canned.
Also, your quotes are really badly contexted. You can "propose that we" build a product in house, and you can also "have to" integrate with a third-party library.
it's as if they are assuming their own staff are a bunch of morons
Its not just that. Its that they tend to believe something along the lines of the Linux mantra -- with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
If you have your team of 1 or 2 or a half dozen programmers, you have up to a dozen eyeballs watching that product (and most of the time, it'll be divided up so that those 6 programmers aren't even examining the full code base.)
There's an assumption out there that because a third party library is in use by other people, those other people are doing a lot of the testing and debug work for you thus saving you time and money.
It fails to account for two things though: 1) How many of those "other" users are going to be using the exact same features you are and in the exact same way. 2) How quickly the library developer gets around to fixing bugs once they're found.
#2 seems to be especially problematic. There's a lot of libraries out there that some company built, said "hey this could be useful to other people lets make some $$ off of it!" Then moved on to other things and the maintenance of the library drops down to "John happened to finish what he was working on this week and didn't feel like starting a new (real) project."
You want to make it popular? Add a pure karaoke mode. The libraries a lot of good, high quality tracks compared to the shitty midi-based and sweat shop cover band crap you see in a lot of dedicated karaoke machines at that price point.
When you get together with a bunch of friends, everyone can sing (even badly) and have fun. Its really frustrating for non-gamers to even consider trying to screw around with one of those plastic guitars and the move to real guitars means you have to have musical talent as well. That's all fine and good for the hardcore crowd but it completely blasts out the casual market. A singing-only mode also means you can get away with selling people $20 microphones rather than $100 fake guitars.
Also, branching out to more than one core genre of music could probably attract a bit wider of an audience, especially if they add a karaoke mode. I know its probably hard to have a plastic guitar mean much in an Eminem song (or whoever's cool with the kids these days) but who cares? Might not be what you'd want to include as a base track but if people are willing to spend $2 on it as a DLC then just take the damned money.
(I know there's a few brands like SingStar that tried to do exactly what I'm suggesting but they came late to the game and never got the household recognition that GH and RB have, not to mention the cost of re-purchasing your damned library under another brand name. I also don't know what level of quality they supplied as I'm among the many that just never bothered.)
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably this would be done in a sterile room and that the patient would need to be cleared for any potentially hazardous bacterial infections and the such.
They noted that the BBB is restored within a few hours. Assuredly not a 100% safe treatment to be sure, but that's hardly new in medical science (think of all the potential side-effects listed with every medication. Never mind things like full body irradiation as prep for bone marrow transplants, cutting up (or even out) pieces of the brain to reduce seizures and so on.)
Sometimes the cure is worth taking some risks. Of course "sometimes" isn't the same as "always" and it would need to be determined case by case based on the patient's other co-existing conditions, the will of the family, financial situation, etc.
I can't think of any scenario where being cured and missing memories is in any way better than still missing those memories but having your brain slowly being eaten away and losing even more memories.
These are already confused and sickly old people.. curing them if such a thing is possible will mean that they can eventually become less confused. Probably with a lot of therapy and rehab, similar to what we do after significant physical trauma leaves a person's body incapacitated.
But absolutely, the people who will benefit the most from such a treatment would be those who are diagnosed early and can be treated before they lose too much.
I don't think you read carefully.
Apparently neither did you:
Including the computer requires having hardware that itself will last 50-100 years.
Ok. So you have some long-term media. You include the player on the media itself. Solves half the problem.
You can't really just "include Linux" because future computers might not support x86/x64/whatever architecture you included. Same for including codecs and/or playback software. Including the computer requires having hardware that itself will last 50-100 years. All the Linuxes and VLCs and GPL licenses in the world will do you exactly squat if you can't even get the machine to POST.
Of course I'm assuming the most pessimistic zero-knowledge situation (which would be more on the scale of several hundred to thousands of years, realistically.)
If you relax a little and assume that say, M.Disc is still a relevant format that you can get readers for in 100 years, you can work around a lot of this. You'd want to include detailed instructions in plain text on the disc (and hope that your text encoding is still supported!) Perhaps even include source code (though also with a disclaimer -- our great-grandchildren may view today's languages the same way we view punch cards today.)
That's relying entirely on that one single technology still having support for 100 years though. If it doesn't you end up back at square one -- no way to read the media -- even if the media itself is still in tact.
Cost is also a factor. If we're committing all of human knowledge for post-apocalyptic people to use in order to rebuild society, we'd likely be willing to spend more money to ensure the data survives and is accessible (and our post-apocalyptic successors would likely spend a LOT more to ensure they can access it) as compared to say a school project or whatever.
So you take your car in to get oil change or whatever and the mechanic tells you your head gasket should be replaced. Your first response is "hold on let me just go ahead and Google that so that I can confirm with my 5 minutes of research whether your 30 years of experience is justified or if you're just trying to pull a fast one."
Or your dentist says you need a filling.. do you go home and Google how to self-diagnose a cavity? You have the proper equipment laying around to make the self-diagnosis even if you did know how?
Yes there are plenty of stupid people and I wouldn't disagree with that claim. The part I find disagreeable is the jump from "you did something that I would have known not to do" straight to "because you're stupid" based on a single data point that could have many possible alternate explanations.
1) Try to ban illegal downloads. That doesn't work. ...
2) Try to ban sites that link to illegal downloads. That doesn't work.
3) Try to ban sites that link to sites that link to illegal downloads. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this won't work either.
X) Ban everybody who's ever heard the word "download." Shut off the internet. Everybody goes back to direct copying and it still doesn't bloody work.
Three things need to be realized and acted upon if there's any hope of reducing copyright infringement:
- Make legitimate viewing easy. Recent history with iTunes, Netflix, etc.. and hell older history in the form of things like 7-11.. have shown repeatedly that people are happy to pay, and even pay more if they have to, for the product they want to be on demand.
- Unnnlessss you price it too high. People will not pay 20% more for a one-time stream of a movie compared to buying the DVD. Its absolutely stupid to think they would. You can charge more for convenient access, but only for the part of the product that the consumer is receiving -- you must discount the cost of permanence, the cost of physical media/packaging, the cost of distribution, etc. If you don't people will just see it for the scam it is. (And of course there's an absolute maximum price point as well but that's standard economics and applies equally to the physical media.)
- Realize that reducing copyright infringement by 100% is not possible. I'm not saying to stop fighting all together, but when all of your strategies seem to be "all or nothing," you're going to end up on that "nothing" side every single time. Things like invasive DRM that stops infringers for all of about one day but annoy legitimate users until the end of time is NOT really helping the situation. When I have a better experience downloading a pirated copy of something I've already purchased rather than watching the legitimate copy, there's something wrong with the whole situation and it doesn't take too long to start skipping that whole "already purchased" step.
And you expect any of that to last 50-100 years?
Film, photographs, cave drawings, etc have the advantage that they're direct representations of what they're depicting. If half a film gets destroyed, you can still watch the other half. If your projector doesn't work you can get a bright light and a magnifying glass.
Encoded representations (especially digital but even analog encodings like a vinyl record) require a working decoder. If your decoder is broken and you don't know how its encoded in order to build a new one, you're screwed. There's absolutely nothing you can recover in that case.
I mean to some extent you could consider that "bright light and magnifying glass" to be a decoder of sorts, but its an extremely obvious decoder since you can usually tell that there's "something" on a piece of film with the naked eye and its pretty natural to see a small, dark image and immediately jump to "enlarge and brighten."
Its not necessarily obvious to run a needle across the grooves in a vinyl record and amplify the.. however it reads the signal (see.. I couldn't do it! At least not without some instructions.) And its really not obvious how one would go about decoding an mpg when all you have to go by is "here's a large amount of bits" (oh and yeah.. you have to figure out how to read those bits from the physical media in the first place, which is probably even more challenging than decoding the stream given how unbelievably small a "bit" is in modern hardware.)
Define "stupid." Would you be able to tell when an auto mechanic is BSing you? When your contractor does a half-assed job building your home but still charges you full price? Any of 1000 other scams that are out there attacking areas of knowledge you haven't studied?
Just because a person can't tell a mouse from a memory stick doesn't mean they're stupid -- it means they don't know about computers. And that's still a large portion of the population, even among the younger crowd ("can use Facebook" does not indicate "knowing about computers" in any useful sense.)
Because most people have no need to know. Just like you don't need to know how to design and build the car you drive or the house you live in, most people don't need to know every detail about computers in order to use them.
There is (or at least should be) an argument that because computers (/phone/tablets/etc) are increasingly storing large chunks of our critical information that we should be training everyone in at least basic security.
Of course that's easier said than done. Its hard to make a full-term course out of that to push in public education (where they don't have the funding to support existing courses anyway.) Doing it as one of those three-day seminar type courses would be great except how do you convince more than a handful of people to attend? And nobody wants to see registration and licensing for basic computer usage (enforcing a minimal amount of training in order to obtain the license) -- even those who think programmers should be licensed generally wouldn't go that far.
So until someone figures out how to educate the entire country (/planet!), just calling people "stupid" and shutting down the conversation isn't helping anything. Or you know, since you're apparently perfect at everything (otherwise you'd be "stupid" too) maybe you can be the one to figure out how to solve the problem!
The one I got (well the only one I actually bothered listening to) wanted a credit card number before they'd connect and "fix" my machine..
I hadn't given them my IP so I'm not entirely sure how they were planning to do that, but as I don't have fake CC numbers laying around I pretty much terminated the call at that point so I never got to find out what their next step was..
My guess is that they would have just kept me on the line for another few minutes claiming to do something they weren't actually doing while they verified and charged whatever to my card. There are much more efficient attack vectors than manually calling people if your only goal is to install a back door into the home PC of someone who doesn't know how to protect themselves.
Trouble with trolling them is that they don't really care. The worst you'll accomplish is getting some low-paid (probably illegally low since you know, illegal business anyway) phone drone fired and replaced with the next one.
Your time is more valuable than theirs..
MS still has so much legacy crap
Most people consider backwards-compatibility to be a good thing. Not to mention it save MS having to try to redo 30 years of development every release cycle. I'm not saying the system is perfect (there's a lot of weirdnesses in the common controls that could probably have been corrected if they didn't have to worry about compatibility -- and doubly so as a C# developer where you have to break paradigm and drop into C-style win32 code in order to solve/work around some problems.) But its a hell of lot better than having to start from scratch every 2-4 years.
no second taskbar
This one bugs me as a dual-screen user. I've found third-party utilities to help with the situation but they're nowhere near as nice as the "real" taskbar. But MS is definitely not the only company to mostly ignore dual screen users (I'm not sure whether EDID detection is a video card or an OS issue or a combination, but holy hell is it annoying.. about 90% of games and other full-screen apps only support dedicated full screen -- no borderless windows -- and half of them force it to be on the primary monitor to boot.. MPC-HC refuses to stay in full screen under certain conditions (and its a totally free, open-source media player.. I even examined the code at one point and if my reading was correct, it was intentionally done that way.. not just a bug.) No idea if Linux or OSx handles multiple monitors significantly better but since most things I need to do don't support Linux and I can't stand Apple products, I'm rather stuck where I am anyway.
no free pdf
And if they included one, they'd run the risk of another antitrust lawsuit. Its not like they have a much of a choice on that one. The rest of your examples probably would fall into this category as well except a) they suck (as you pointed out), b) they've (mostly) always existed in Windows and c) most of them don't have any competition anyway (nobody is going to claim that Paint is a legitimate competitor to Photoshop.) Its kind of odd that Winzip or someone hasn't tried to challenge MS' inclusion of a compression program but maybe they just don't think its worth the legal costs.
once something goes wrong...have to call someone
That goes for any computer issue. Doesn't matter what OS (or even if its something other than the OS.) Hell it goes for any moderately complex technology.. I have to call someone if something goes wrong with my car too. Expecting everybody to be experts with every piece of technology they ever touch is just stupid.
cryptic error messages
Because "Segmentation fault" and "Kernel panic" are so much clearer than "The program has stopped working" or a blue screen. People who know what they're looking for will glean info from it. People who don't are just as confused either way.
And you sure as hell can Google Windows issues just as easily as Linux issues. I have no idea how you figure Linux is in any way easier to troubleshoot (unless you're a kernel programmer and then yes, being able to inspect the source code may help.. but most end users -- even among other programmers -- aren't kernel programmers.)
The big fact everyone ignores when making these kind of stupid claims is that most people who can't figure out Windows issues on their own also wouldn't be able to figure out Linux issues on their own. There just happens to be a significantly larger number of that type of user among the Windows world.
To go back to the car analogy, it would be like comparing your average driver to a professional racer. Even if the racer isn't actually a mechanic, there's a good chance that they know a hell of a lot more about cars than most "normal" drivers. So yes, they probably can do a lot more minor maintenance themselves without having to call a "real" mechanic. But putting a bunch of normal people into Nascar-ready cars isn't going to reduce the need for mechanics to any great extent.
No. Digital technology probably does -- people in power have always used every available option to oppress as many people as possible -- but copyright infringement specifically has very little to do with it.
If you want the punishment to fit the crime, force infringers to make their own song and distribute it for free!
You'd end up with a lot of crap of course, but there's already a lot of crap out there so that's not a significant detriment. And who knows you might end up with a few beauties going straight into the public domain.
Of course that wouldn't recompense the labels so it'd never fly.. but it would make for an interesting world.
As for charging damages based on retail pricing, that's an immediate failure: If I have a 100% chance to pay $10 for a movie legally, or a 1% chance to pay $10 for a movie illegally, I have exactly zero motivation to purchase it legally. But at the same time multiplying in the risk factor (so it would be $1000 penalty for an illegal movie using these example numbers,) you get into the situation where the defendant's entire life effectively destroyed over a handful of movies.
There needs to be a middle ground between "meaningful deterrent" and "annihilate a person's entire future." Unfortunately few people seem interested in finding such a middle ground in the legal arena.
Companies like Netflix, Hulu and Apple are helping in the sense that they're removing the incentive to infringe in the first place but avoiding the problem is not the same as solving it (unless you can completely avoid it which is unlikely in this case.)
There are a total of 12 business models that are known to have ever made money at all.
What? That's a horrific oversimplification. And if you're going to do that you may as well go all the way: There's only one business model that works -- make more money than you spend.
you don't exactly hear the Porn industry complaining that the Internet ruined their movie business, do you?
Nope, not ever. And that's just a few from the first page of Google results.
recognize the obvious: Distribution online is effectively free.
While true, recent history has shown that this isn't the biggest issue. The problem is that piracy is more convenient. If I want to watch a movie legitimately I have to obtain the discs, plug it into the machine, sit through 1-2 minutes of unskippable copyright warnings (being shown only to the very people who aren't infringing.. I get that legally they need those warnings but there's no reason to make them unskippable.) 30 seconds of stupid menu animations, probably a handful of ads for other shit (which are thankfully mostly skippable but still..) Then sometimes you get shown the damned copyright notices again after you finally get to the menu to hit play. 4-5 steps and several minutes of useless shit in order to finally view your show. Assuming you're wanting to watch something old enough to have discs available in the first place. And you're paying for all that shit.
Oppose that to a torrent. Yes you have to wait for the download but with modern internet speeds that's usually less than an hour and frequently only a few minutes depending on number of seeders and the quality (file size) you're picking up. Less time than having to go to the store to pick it up for a lot of people, and far less than ordering from Amazon or other online sellers. And when you get it you hit play and you're immediately watching your movie. Two steps and no wait time beyond the initial obtaining which is comparable to obtaining a legitimate disc.
Thanks mostly to Netflix and Apple, this is improving quite a bit -- primarily in the sense that they've mostly proved that people will actually pay for content if its a) reasonably priced and b) convenient. The recording industry has mostly realized this and most music is available through iTunes, Google Play and a few other big name services (often available through all of these services.) That's exactly what people want and will pay for. Simple, fast and not unduly expensive.
The TV industry is slowly catching on. They're not there yet. Every studio is making their own access site which destroys that "convenient" aspect that's so important: If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I have to know which site is distributing it in the first place, and if its not one I've signed up for I've got to go through that whole hassle. Rinse and repeat for every single show I'm interested in.
That "knowing who distributes it" in particular is terrible. If they want to create a competitor to Netflix and Hulu for whatever reason then great -- but having 47 competitors that all offer only one or two (popular) shows each isn't going to solve anything (of course they'll use the fact that nobody cares enough to sign up for that much shit as yet more evidence that copyright infringement is destroying their business, even though that's not the underlying problem.)
The movie industry on the other hand is still stuck in the past for the most part. They usually distribute "ultraviolet" codes with discs nowadays which is great but it means I still have to pick up the discs.
$50 probably isn't sufficient given that buying the bluray is damned near $50, so when you multiply out the risk factor you'd actually be encouraging infringement at that rate!
Up here in Canada we have a pretty good system IMO. There's a $5000 maximum penalty. That is, its high enough to be punishing but not high enough to be life-destroying (for most people.) There's also a distinction for commercial infringement which allows for much higher penalties.
Its probably not perfect.. I'd like to see a scaling system (based on real, objective numbers rather than based on completely unjustified "damage" claims by the labels) so that the worst offenders could still be prosecuted without unduly punishing people who are legitimately too broke to afford the getting-rather-insane price of legit copies these days (or worse, things like Game of Thrones where you have to subscribe to an entire bloody service for one show.)
Defendant's income would be a good measure here but of course that would raise some privacy concerns (the labels would need to know your income before determining if you're worth pursuing legal measures against. Even if you somehow route it so that the labels only can learn the maximum potential judgement award, they could reverse the calculation to at least put you in an income bracket.)
Commercial copyright infringement on the other hand I'm fully behind opening wide up. I have no problem shutting down any business that's primarily illegal. Things like torrent farms and search engines are a bit of a grey area. There's a difference between a generalized torrent farm that can be used for both legitimate and illegitimate content vs trackers that are explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement. Its hard to write that sort of distinction into law, so probably best to leave the infringement penalties to those who are actually infringing and leave the "enabling" context out of it (or up to the judge on a case-by-case basis.)
1) Piracy is robbery, kidnapping, and murder on the high seas.
Stop this. Just stop. Language changes. Live with it. There are very few contexts in which one could possibly confuse tween girls downloading One Direction songs with "robbery, kidnapping, and murder on the high seas."
If you ever run into such a situation, then please do be careful to make the distinction. Lawmakers need to make the distinction when putting the law down on paper because you never know where it might be applied in the future. In all other situations, you're just shutting down the conversation without accomplishing anything beyond making people think you're a dick.
Then it may be possible to have a rational discussion.
Not if your first argument in any discussion is "Nyah nyah I won't even listen until you've consulted a thesaurus." Rational can't even come into it because there's no "discussion" in the first place when you throw down this sort of pedantry right off the top.
Pfft. If these companies stop making record profits and drop down to making merely outrageous profits, they're obviously going to just take their toys and go home.
We'd all be living in a grey world with no entertainment. And there's no way newer, more innovative people could come in to take their place. We absolutely discourage that kind of crazy idea in our society!
I don't suppose you plan on being the one to coin a new term then? Preferably one that isn't even more confusing -- especially for the physicists who've been using the term "measurement" since long before quantum mechanics was discovered.
Aside from that, where was it ever claimed that measurements had to be non-destructive? If I want to measure the explosive power of a bomb, I sure as hell won't be recovering it after I'm done (at least not in one piece!) Or if we want to stick with high school physics, how fast my beaker of HCl dissolves a chunk of Mg -- won't be getting those back in any sort of mint condition either.
A single atom isn't the complicated part. We've got a pretty good handle on that.
The complicated part is dealing with 10^30 of them or however many atoms are in a brick, and doing all that simultaneously to boot.
That is, its a complexity of scale more than of concept.
So far no, you're not required to snoop through user's content, even in Canada.
But presumably since they were making money off of this, some or all of this content was being distributed. My guess is that the cops found themselves a way into the distribution chain and traced it back to a source large enough to warrant giving themselves a public pat on the back. You know, like an investigation is supposed to work.
I bet Vic Toews is crying that this didn't happen 3 years ago. His warrantless wiretapping bill would have been passed without question ("Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", which from what people smarter than me have said contained almost nothing about protecting children after the title page..) Though I'm sure someone else will step up to the plate to try and shove more warrantless wiretapping and copyright protection BS through in the name of "protecting children" now that this has happened.
Nothing is better than your own code.
Go review code you wrote 2 years ago. Its almost certain your code isn't all that great either when you get to look at it from afar. But like most forms of filth in the world, you don't really notice the smell while you're stewing in it.
if something breaks it's the third party's fault
Until its something critical and then you're back on the hook to fix it -- except you can't fix it because its not your code and you end up making more excuses than progress until either the vendor gets their shit together or you get canned.
Also, your quotes are really badly contexted. You can "propose that we" build a product in house, and you can also "have to" integrate with a third-party library.
for large sums of money ($millions) over a 6 month period
...
rebuilt the whole system using perl in a little over 1 week
And I thought I was bad at estimates..
it's as if they are assuming their own staff are a bunch of morons
Its not just that. Its that they tend to believe something along the lines of the Linux mantra -- with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
If you have your team of 1 or 2 or a half dozen programmers, you have up to a dozen eyeballs watching that product (and most of the time, it'll be divided up so that those 6 programmers aren't even examining the full code base.)
There's an assumption out there that because a third party library is in use by other people, those other people are doing a lot of the testing and debug work for you thus saving you time and money.
It fails to account for two things though:
1) How many of those "other" users are going to be using the exact same features you are and in the exact same way.
2) How quickly the library developer gets around to fixing bugs once they're found.
#2 seems to be especially problematic. There's a lot of libraries out there that some company built, said "hey this could be useful to other people lets make some $$ off of it!" Then moved on to other things and the maintenance of the library drops down to "John happened to finish what he was working on this week and didn't feel like starting a new (real) project."
You want to make it popular? Add a pure karaoke mode. The libraries a lot of good, high quality tracks compared to the shitty midi-based and sweat shop cover band crap you see in a lot of dedicated karaoke machines at that price point.
When you get together with a bunch of friends, everyone can sing (even badly) and have fun. Its really frustrating for non-gamers to even consider trying to screw around with one of those plastic guitars and the move to real guitars means you have to have musical talent as well. That's all fine and good for the hardcore crowd but it completely blasts out the casual market. A singing-only mode also means you can get away with selling people $20 microphones rather than $100 fake guitars.
Also, branching out to more than one core genre of music could probably attract a bit wider of an audience, especially if they add a karaoke mode. I know its probably hard to have a plastic guitar mean much in an Eminem song (or whoever's cool with the kids these days) but who cares? Might not be what you'd want to include as a base track but if people are willing to spend $2 on it as a DLC then just take the damned money.
(I know there's a few brands like SingStar that tried to do exactly what I'm suggesting but they came late to the game and never got the household recognition that GH and RB have, not to mention the cost of re-purchasing your damned library under another brand name. I also don't know what level of quality they supplied as I'm among the many that just never bothered.)