So the bottom line is a PC needs Windows to run. If that isn't the most anticompetive presumption I've ever heard, I don't know what is. Did it ever occur to them that there might be people who want to put other OSes on a computer? Or that they already have valid liscenses and want to install Windows themselves from scratch, free from any of the crappy software that comes with it? Paired with the growing practise of recovery disk images, this isn't an option anymore. This is definitely a good idea for anyone who makes their own disk images for multiple computers. The truth is, though, it did occur to them, and this is one more step to making evading the Windows tax a criminal offense.
Re:no offense to the original poster, but...
on
High-Speed Greed
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the link, Mr. Spell Check! No more embbarasing speeling mesteaks for me!:)
This is disgusting. AT&T is not "delivering customers", I can go buy something on my own volition, thank you very much, and I can come from any ISP I please. AT&T did absolutely nothing special to get me there, and neither I nor the person I'm buying from should have to be penalized for that.
You think that's lazy? Thanks to my school's wonderful new "smart classrooms" (really just a crappy pc on a cart with an LCD projector), the preferred method of lecturing is powerpoint. More often then not this is accomanied by the professor/TA reading aloud the contents for the benefit of the not-quite-awake-yet students. If it's a TA, we might get lucky and a word or 2 might even be in English! And those are the good classes!
It's nice to know that at least they're trying to improve things. This and the recent carnivore backlash has brightened my opinion of the U.S. Congress to the level of my glow in the dark remote control buttons. Now if they actually pass this, I'll definitely be impressed. It may not be perfect, but the entire system isn't going to be fixed with one big cluestick-beating.
Out of touch puppet figurehead vs. cluestick-wielding law professor doesn't sound like much of a fair fight either. Why not debate with someone who actually knows more than what his litigation-thirsty pit-lawyers tell him?
People can be assholes whether they speak their minds or not, and I prefer it when assholes advertize the fact to the world John Rocker-style instead of hiding their asshole actions behind bullshit rationalizations. It makes them that much easier to ignore.
Re:How about using GPS to "dead drop" drug shipmen
on
Geocaching
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· Score: 1
http://www.triax.com/yngwie/newyork1.txt
This one appears to have prizes in zip-lock baggies for whoever finds it.:)
If he weren't on a mailing list, how do you think they know where to send free samples? The phone book? It wouln't be unsolicited only if he ordered the thing explicitly.
the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit
This runs somewhat contradictory to their cease and desist orders. This part also describes what the recipient can do with it, and doesn't mean punitive action won't be taken either
Just because they call it encryption and it looks like nonsense characters at first glance doesn't make it so. I could call the guy from DC a circus clown, but although he and a circus clown both wear funny suits, the circus clown's suit is supposed to look funny, and therefore is a circus clown. Mr DC exec, on the other hand, although looking pretty silly (in theory anyway), is not a circus clown, despite what i say.
Hmm, the guy at my local radio shack told me he wanted my address precisely so they could send me a catalog. He looked like he just started, i guess he hadn't gotten his corporate conspiracy training yet.
Nobody pays me to take a shit, but that takes time and effort. Labor is only worth something if it is directed towards something that someone else wants done for them and can't or won't do themselves.
Value, in the economic sense, is defined by scarcity, a result of material limitations. Breathable air has value, since its required for life, but it's only worth paying for if its scarce (compressed air for scuba tanks and such). Even then, you're only paying for the effort to put the air in a container that can be taken to where it is scarce, not for the air itself.
Most people understand the price of information as the cost of the media they got it on. People buy a book so they can get the information contained within, but if they want to get only the information itself, they can go to a library.
Say you developed an infinite source of food that required no maintenance, took no effort to harvest, and could easily be distributed to every corner of the globe, the only downside being that it tasted pretty bland. Would you a: give it away freely to feed everyone on earth and end world hunger, or b: Corner the world food market with your ultra-cheap yet inferior food source that completely undermined agriculture.
Or worse yet, even when a fix is found, it would take the IRS 5 years to put it in place. "More eyes" only helps if someone has a reason to look at it, and I don't think too many people have a need for tax collection software.
I think someone is going to have to drive home that the operative word here is voluntary. The US government isn't going to get anyone to use any particular liscence if they don't want to, or force develpoers to target their software for some government standard.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but hopefully what they mean by "agreeing upon a single standard liscence" is simply meant to avoid throwing money at projects which are incompatible liscence-wise with the rest of open source and avoid some of the bone-headed technicalities that RMS is always bitching about. I would think though that there's room for at least a few other liscences they could use without having to reject all others outright.
What they're trying to do is bypass it by making it so you can't record, even though you may record. Such a law is moot if there isn't any equipment capable (or in this case, all available equipment is crippled and castrated) of recording.
Up until now, the media cartels have grudgingly tolerated home recording because of quality degradation inherent in analog signals. All of a sudden "digital" comes along with the promise of infinite flawless error-corrected non-degrading copies. No tapes that wear out, no records that scratch up, no magnification of error from copy to copy. At fist they were cool with it since the equipment to write it to media large nough to hold it was beyond the means of normal people. But abruptly storage, bandwidth, compression, and processing power all caught up and turned digital media into a two way street: people could once again record their own media. Now they're all scrambling to "secure" their digital media without understanding the meaning of the word: to keep others from getting something you already have. I hate to break it to them, but they have already given or sold their stuff to us, and the only think copyright allows them to prevent us from doing is giving it to someone else. Anything else is our business.
Want to stop piracy? Convince people that copying is wrong because you honestly deserve their money and don't give them a reason to willfully rip you off because they want to see you go into bankruptcy. Hiding behind the "protecting the artists" excuse isn't working, especially when the artists don't want your protection.
My aunt and uncle have refused to get a dvd player until they can record with it (and they record a LOT of crap). There is no way in hell thay'd ever touch such a thing voluntarily if they knew it was capable oof not letting them record stuff (and the stuff they'd want t record is likely the very same stuff that this would block.
Between all the credit card companies hawking free stuff and ads being plastered to every blank surface that can be found on campus, my school's beginning to feel more like a "good consumer training center" and less like an institution where I'm supposed to be learning things that include critical thinking. They just installed tv's in the dining halls, which pump out crappy music videos (they're all rap and r&b videos since my school is in the middle of what would be called an "urban" demographic). I wouldn't put it past my school to try this either. Whatever happened to the Internet being an educational resource? The only thing I ever see it being used for is an easier way to sell crap to people that don't need it. Pretty soon banner ads are going to be a neccesary component of all internet protocols.
There seems to be a lot of effort going into turning the 20'th century's "smart box" into the 21'st century's idiot box. Far too many resources are being put into making computers less useful. Take the whole Real vs. Streambox thing: Real invested a huge amount of resources into making your computer behave like a stupid TV or radio and not allowing the most brain-dead simple function of actually saving a stream.
The lack of imagination of the suits is what really worries me. The original selling point of computers was that they can do virtually anything you program them to do, but it seems that people are content with what we've accomplished and now want to patent and sue and censor their way to keeping things exactly the way they are just so they can sell back to us what we already have for the rest of time. We haven't even begun to discover what we can do, but business doesn't seem to be in a rush to move forward if it's not something they can sell or pump advertizements through.
They sound pretty upbeat for a company that just got publicly castrated and had their eviscerated carcass put on display to ward off any future attempts to bypass anyone's multimedia crippleware that turns PCs with near-limitless potential to store, copy, transmit, process, etc. any data you can feed them into TV-like idiot boxes.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
One could also liken our incomprehension some of the more bizzare forms of "intellectual property" (business method patents, etc.) to native american's inability to understand the concept of land ownership. When you have people coming form a value system where a "resource" is so scarce it must be clinged to with the most stringent terms of property, once they encounter a new source that is virtually limitless, they still grab every corner of what has been "free" for so long that the people who were there first don't even consider it as something that can be owned.
The way ex post facto works is that you can make future use of the devices illegal but you can't hold people accountable for using the device before the law was passed.
The media cartels costantly bitch and complain about how we're stealing from the "artists" when we pirate. Their solution? Tax the products that are used to pirate. But at the same time, they're taking money away from the legitimate artists who make original content too. The media cartels are effectively saying that they are the only legitimate source of media, and all money related to it must go through them and anything else is criminal. So even if you are an "independant" artist, you're still putting money into the pockets of the cartels who either don't think you're significant enough to sign, or you explicitly don't want anything to do with precisely because they don't want to involve themselves with such corrupt orginizations. This is why deals such as the AOL-Time-Warner are so dangerous: If the tools to create and distribute content are held by the same people who create their own content, any semblance of competition is nonexistant since the cartels profit from the success of artists who they don't have a thing to do with. If every artists signed by the cartels began to suck simultaneously, and independant artists became the mainstream, the cartels would still get their money since the cartels get paid for every cd printed regardless if they had a hand in making it or not
Slashdot Mirror
So the bottom line is a PC needs Windows to run. If that isn't the most anticompetive presumption I've ever heard, I don't know what is. Did it ever occur to them that there might be people who want to put other OSes on a computer? Or that they already have valid liscenses and want to install Windows themselves from scratch, free from any of the crappy software that comes with it? Paired with the growing practise of recovery disk images, this isn't an option anymore. This is definitely a good idea for anyone who makes their own disk images for multiple computers. The truth is, though, it did occur to them, and this is one more step to making evading the Windows tax a criminal offense.
Thanks for the link, Mr. Spell Check! No more embbarasing speeling mesteaks for me! :)
Now factual mistakes, that I need to work on...
This is disgusting. AT&T is not "delivering customers", I can go buy something on my own volition, thank you very much, and I can come from any ISP I please. AT&T did absolutely nothing special to get me there, and neither I nor the person I'm buying from should have to be penalized for that.
You think that's lazy? Thanks to my school's wonderful new "smart classrooms" (really just a crappy pc on a cart with an LCD projector), the preferred method of lecturing is powerpoint. More often then not this is accomanied by the professor/TA reading aloud the contents for the benefit of the not-quite-awake-yet students. If it's a TA, we might get lucky and a word or 2 might even be in English! And those are the good classes!
It's nice to know that at least they're trying to improve things. This and the recent carnivore backlash has brightened my opinion of the U.S. Congress to the level of my glow in the dark remote control buttons. Now if they actually pass this, I'll definitely be impressed. It may not be perfect, but the entire system isn't going to be fixed with one big cluestick-beating.
Out of touch puppet figurehead vs. cluestick-wielding law professor doesn't sound like much of a fair fight either. Why not debate with someone who actually knows more than what his litigation-thirsty pit-lawyers tell him?
wtf are any of these?
People can be assholes whether they speak their minds or not, and I prefer it when assholes advertize the fact to the world John Rocker-style instead of hiding their asshole actions behind bullshit rationalizations. It makes them that much easier to ignore.
http://www.triax.com/yngwie/newyork1.txt
:)
This one appears to have prizes in zip-lock baggies for whoever finds it.
If he weren't on a mailing list, how do you think they know where to send free samples? The phone book? It wouln't be unsolicited only if he ordered the thing explicitly.
the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit
This runs somewhat contradictory to their cease and desist orders. This part also describes what the recipient can do with it, and doesn't mean punitive action won't be taken either
Just because they call it encryption and it looks like nonsense characters at first glance doesn't make it so. I could call the guy from DC a circus clown, but although he and a circus clown both wear funny suits, the circus clown's suit is supposed to look funny, and therefore is a circus clown. Mr DC exec, on the other hand, although looking pretty silly (in theory anyway), is not a circus clown, despite what i say.
Hmm, the guy at my local radio shack told me he wanted my address precisely so they could send me a catalog. He looked like he just started, i guess he hadn't gotten his corporate conspiracy training yet.
Nobody pays me to take a shit, but that takes time and effort. Labor is only worth something if it is directed towards something that someone else wants done for them and can't or won't do themselves.
Value, in the economic sense, is defined by scarcity, a result of material limitations. Breathable air has value, since its required for life, but it's only worth paying for if its scarce (compressed air for scuba tanks and such). Even then, you're only paying for the effort to put the air in a container that can be taken to where it is scarce, not for the air itself.
Most people understand the price of information as the cost of the media they got it on. People buy a book so they can get the information contained within, but if they want to get only the information itself, they can go to a library.
Say you developed an infinite source of food that required no maintenance, took no effort to harvest, and could easily be distributed to every corner of the globe, the only downside being that it tasted pretty bland. Would you a: give it away freely to feed everyone on earth and end world hunger, or b: Corner the world food market with your ultra-cheap yet inferior food source that completely undermined agriculture.
Or worse yet, even when a fix is found, it would take the IRS 5 years to put it in place. "More eyes" only helps if someone has a reason to look at it, and I don't think too many people have a need for tax collection software.
I think someone is going to have to drive home that the operative word here is voluntary. The US government isn't going to get anyone to use any particular liscence if they don't want to, or force develpoers to target their software for some government standard.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but hopefully what they mean by "agreeing upon a single standard liscence" is simply meant to avoid throwing money at projects which are incompatible liscence-wise with the rest of open source and avoid some of the bone-headed technicalities that RMS is always bitching about. I would think though that there's room for at least a few other liscences they could use without having to reject all others outright.
Anything that exponentially increases someone's probability of ending up on Jerry Springer can't be good
What they're trying to do is bypass it by making it so you can't record, even though you may record. Such a law is moot if there isn't any equipment capable (or in this case, all available equipment is crippled and castrated) of recording.
Up until now, the media cartels have grudgingly tolerated home recording because of quality degradation inherent in analog signals. All of a sudden "digital" comes along with the promise of infinite flawless error-corrected non-degrading copies. No tapes that wear out, no records that scratch up, no magnification of error from copy to copy. At fist they were cool with it since the equipment to write it to media large nough to hold it was beyond the means of normal people. But abruptly storage, bandwidth, compression, and processing power all caught up and turned digital media into a two way street: people could once again record their own media. Now they're all scrambling to "secure" their digital media without understanding the meaning of the word: to keep others from getting something you already have. I hate to break it to them, but they have already given or sold their stuff to us, and the only think copyright allows them to prevent us from doing is giving it to someone else. Anything else is our business.
Want to stop piracy? Convince people that copying is wrong because you honestly deserve their money and don't give them a reason to willfully rip you off because they want to see you go into bankruptcy. Hiding behind the "protecting the artists" excuse isn't working, especially when the artists don't want your protection.
My aunt and uncle have refused to get a dvd player until they can record with it (and they record a LOT of crap). There is no way in hell thay'd ever touch such a thing voluntarily if they knew it was capable oof not letting them record stuff (and the stuff they'd want t record is likely the very same stuff that this would block.
Between all the credit card companies hawking free stuff and ads being plastered to every blank surface that can be found on campus, my school's beginning to feel more like a "good consumer training center" and less like an institution where I'm supposed to be learning things that include critical thinking. They just installed tv's in the dining halls, which pump out crappy music videos (they're all rap and r&b videos since my school is in the middle of what would be called an "urban" demographic). I wouldn't put it past my school to try this either. Whatever happened to the Internet being an educational resource? The only thing I ever see it being used for is an easier way to sell crap to people that don't need it. Pretty soon banner ads are going to be a neccesary component of all internet protocols.
There seems to be a lot of effort going into turning the 20'th century's "smart box" into the 21'st century's idiot box. Far too many resources are being put into making computers less useful. Take the whole Real vs. Streambox thing: Real invested a huge amount of resources into making your computer behave like a stupid TV or radio and not allowing the most brain-dead simple function of actually saving a stream.
The lack of imagination of the suits is what really worries me. The original selling point of computers was that they can do virtually anything you program them to do, but it seems that people are content with what we've accomplished and now want to patent and sue and censor their way to keeping things exactly the way they are just so they can sell back to us what we already have for the rest of time. We haven't even begun to discover what we can do, but business doesn't seem to be in a rush to move forward if it's not something they can sell or pump advertizements through.
They sound pretty upbeat for a company that just got publicly castrated and had their eviscerated carcass put on display to ward off any future attempts to bypass anyone's multimedia crippleware that turns PCs with near-limitless potential to store, copy, transmit, process, etc. any data you can feed them into TV-like idiot boxes.
One could also liken our incomprehension some of the more bizzare forms of "intellectual property" (business method patents, etc.) to native american's inability to understand the concept of land ownership. When you have people coming form a value system where a "resource" is so scarce it must be clinged to with the most stringent terms of property, once they encounter a new source that is virtually limitless, they still grab every corner of what has been "free" for so long that the people who were there first don't even consider it as something that can be owned.
Don't forget the implants that will detect watermarks in stimuli and charge people accordingly.
The way ex post facto works is that you can make future use of the devices illegal but you can't hold people accountable for using the device before the law was passed.
The media cartels costantly bitch and complain about how we're stealing from the "artists" when we pirate. Their solution? Tax the products that are used to pirate. But at the same time, they're taking money away from the legitimate artists who make original content too. The media cartels are effectively saying that they are the only legitimate source of media, and all money related to it must go through them and anything else is criminal. So even if you are an "independant" artist, you're still putting money into the pockets of the cartels who either don't think you're significant enough to sign, or you explicitly don't want anything to do with precisely because they don't want to involve themselves with such corrupt orginizations. This is why deals such as the AOL-Time-Warner are so dangerous: If the tools to create and distribute content are held by the same people who create their own content, any semblance of competition is nonexistant since the cartels profit from the success of artists who they don't have a thing to do with. If every artists signed by the cartels began to suck simultaneously, and independant artists became the mainstream, the cartels would still get their money since the cartels get paid for every cd printed regardless if they had a hand in making it or not