Fewer liberties?
Well, I hail from the Golden State and when I went to Vancouver last year I was stunned to find tea shops almost like Amsterdam. How the hell did Canada become more free than the US? Well I don't really know when it happened, but somehow it did. Maybe the US should start learning from Canada.
The rockoon stuff was interesting though it seemed to have dropped off pretty quickly by the 1960s. I'm with you on the speed/altitude issue, but wouldn't you agree that you can trade inexpensively gained altitude for precious speed? I checked out that link to the Israeli X-Prize team and although it's a related idea, it doesn't seem to use the method I had in mind which is to initially drop the rocket downwards in an arc rather than going for a more or less vertical launch at altitude.
as an assist for a conventional rocket?
I wrote a letter to Aerostar, the largest commercial hotair balloon manufacturer in the States, about their largest model, the Aero 245 asking about maximum payload and altitude and I never heard back.
But I did find that they were only around 75 grand a piece. What I was wondering was if you took like five of those to say 40,000 feet towing a rocket and then launched from there, wouldn't you be able to get a lot more bang for your buck than from say a similar operation using a customized jet airliner that costs millions to modify and operate?
I mean this high altitude stunt stuff is cool and all, but I'm very curious as to why balloons can't be a practical element in launching satellites and such.
This is all quite off base.
The guy was wrong from the beginning. It's not becoming more US centric. It's quite the opposite.
I say that as an American that has lived overseas for fifteen years. The world was infinitely more US centric to me back in the eighties. In order to understand this you need to realize that the definition of being from any particular place has broken down enormously in the last few decades.
It's like saying that Japanese automakers are edging out detroit. Well, that's a bit ridiculous since many Japanese automakers are largely owned by both European and American interests and vice versa. To speak of anything being centered on any one physical region is a rapidly deteriorating notion that was far more defensible in previous decades.
Yeah, I wrote a pornographic novel on the same theme back in 1989 or so called Fucking Death. I still haven't officially published it, but I distributed a pre-print version to a friend in prison.
"The design is copyrighted"
Yes, but the customer did not purchase the design, did they? They purchased the doll and the doll cannot be copyrighted.
You are a troll.
Well, you're welcome to check the original article yourself, but it didn't seen to be saying that there were no twelve inches before and now there were some, but that there were fewer and fewer and now they're ramping production back up because of lack of profitability in the 14 and 15 inch models. It wasn't limited to Apple by any means though. It's just that the same contract manufacturers in Taiwan make the vast majority of notebooks of all flavors.
I think what's more interesting than this Toshiba is the news that Dell, IBM and Apple are all going back and re-introducing twelve inch models because the fourteen and fifteen inch models are selling poorly. Just read it at Digitimes today. Now that's an interesting story, notebook makers take a technological step back. Sounds like a somewhat foreboding indicator of the market.
If you go check out the story, note that they say that this move is partly to focus on the growing Asian market. Well, I find that interesting because China is the biggest growth market in Asia and none of those brands are major players in China except Dell, but even then it's only too a limited extent compared to Dell's marketshare in the West. And as for IBM and Apple, I'm quite sure that neither of them has a big chunk of the Chinese notebook market.
It must be that he was referring to the client's UI experience rather than the ability to publish content because it would be ridiculous thing to say that content delivery and formatting had not changed in five years.
CSS is the perfect example because CSS2 is still far from completely implemented in any brower and probably won't be for years if you include the full spec with things like audio style sheets. And when CSS2 is finally fully implemented, there will either be CSS3 or XSL or both. Knowing that there's this long term incompleted, but under construction, blueprint already in place, how could anybody suggest that the innovation eneded years ago?
It's like looking at a house that is still being framed and saying there's no more work to be done because you can get a basic idea of what it's going to look like.
Okay, I think the best thing is for me to be a bit more specific. I don't think I implied that the GPL did block commercial use because I don't believe that it does. Let's get down to the nitty gritty to keep things as clear as possible.
The issue we're dealing with is students creating content and then having researchers comes along and use the student's content as samples in curricula that the researchers then charge schools thousands of dollars to license. We feel that if the basis of the curricula is the work of the students then it should be possible for the students to keep the rights through a license.
So, what we want is something like the GPL where the researchers would have the right to sell their work, but could not force the schools to have to pay licensing fees while using students work as their examples.
This seems very similar to the case of the GPL, but doesn't seem to fit with what I'm seeing in Creative Commons license options.
Well, if anybody is familiar with Creative Commons licenses and how they're similar and dissimilar from the GPL, could you help me out with a question about their licenses?
I like the copy-left part of the GPL and I can see how the Share Alike license would be similar to the GPL if the Non-Commercial clause was added, but what about in the case where you have a share-alike license and permit commercial use? That would just be commercial license right? Where's the part about and there must also be an open version? That seems to be missing in the case where you use a Share Alike license, but permit commercial use and that seems different from the GPL. The way I'm reading it, you're forced to choose between free and not free where the GPL would allow you to have the open version and sell it at the same time.
Perhaps I'm just not reading it clearly, or I'm describing the difference too vaguely to make my point understood but if you think you get the gist of my confusion, I'd appreciate some clarification as I've been asked for guidance on this exact issue in an educational setting and I was recommending the GPL, but this does seem more appropriate. I'm just concerned that it's not a copy-left license in the sense that it doesn't insist on an open version while allowing commercial use.
I was disappointed to see this "serious" article that essentially revolves around picking up the phone and paying money to have someone else do the work.
I woudn't even let a contractor manage my framing, much less my wiring. This is a good article for someone setting up a Mac network who doesn't want to get their pants dirty. Oh, but then they'd be using WeeFee instead, wouldn't they? It would be good to add some quality adiophile site banners as well.
The CAFC is like a phone home system in an MS Windows software package called tmp.dat.
You see the name "Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit" and you assume, oh yeah that's part of our nations justice system. But it's an evil little fucker that got tacked on just a few decades ago by the administration of a vicious bastard named Ronny Raygun.
When people complain about the courts being pro-corporate or pro-patents or pro-copyrights, they're generally incorrect, but in the case of this court it's right on the money.
The CAFC was created by executive order and we damn well need to elect a president with the balls to get rid of it the same way.
I think it's rightfully complex. When it comes to law, it's so typical for people to oversimplify it into political camps of for and against business or some other vague political entity when the action is taking place in language and it is inherently complex and unstable.
Who would have thought this conservative court would come up with this recent sodomy ruling and there was much reference to privacy in the opinions. It affirms my belief that the specific wording of each case really has to be put into context when deciding what is and is not a meaningful decision.
As for Eldrgidge, I read the opinion and I found that everyting hinged on the definition of one word --"limited".
The court felt that there was no way for them to put a limit on the word "limited", so they had no basis for limiting copyright. This was the heart of the issue in the court's opinion and that meant that all these other important issues like fair use and the DMCA had to wait for another case where they were more pertinent to the language of the case at hand.
After reading the sodomy opinion, I'm fairly confident that what we're going to see is a Verizon-like case that makes it to the Supreme Court and the RIAA, or whoever is pursuing the case, will get smacked down which will effectively put the issue to rest since the services themselves have already been found to be legitimate. If the services are okay and the user's relationship to the ISP is confidential, then there's really no issue which is how it should be.
Well I didn't bother to read the article since I have an MA in Rhetoric and wasn't at all confused about the meaning of the word, but I will take the risk of being redundant by pointing out that intentionally writing a song about the word irony using examples that are not ironic IS, in fact, ironic.
I don't buy this notion that KaZaA is really totally community supported and isn't getting boosted by some well placed and well funded high-bandwidth servers with fat RAID caches of popular content. It's just a hunch and could easily be wrong, but the way it seems so homogenized compared to other P2P apps makes me suspicious that they have some uber super nodes that keep things flowing. Also, in the last K++ release, the developer cryptically noted some odd behaviors in the supernode settings right before announcing he was "tired" of playing with it.
Again, it's just a hunch and perhaps it's wrong and it's just that FastTrack roXors, but if it's true then this approach of bashing home users that share and telling leachers they're good to go isn't going to do shit to slow things down. It's just going to piss off all the nice folks who feel obligated to share and mean nothing to the more cynical types.
And if you think about it, the only people they're going to be able to nab are the small fries with cable modems and what not. There's so many what-if possibilities out there that if the KaZaA people wanted to set caching mega servers up secretly on fast, pricey fiber connections, it's easy to imagine that they would have the skills to configure the security that would make it impossible to say absolutely yes or no that these cache's actually existed. Basically you have to take them on their word and the word is -no.
Morphix has IPTables. I'm using it as a router right now. Just remember to delete sudoers.
Plus you get a browser or two and games and all kinds of goodies.
I disagree with Lessig.
With all due respect for his work and a high opinion of the man I feel that he hasn't considered his library metaphor very carefully with respect to the text of the law.
He says nobody serious thinks that mass digital copying in the context of P2P is acceptable under the wording of copyright law. But I'm serious and I think I have a lefitimate point based on the wording of the law itself.
My point is that if you consider each node on a P2P network to be a publicly accessible and non-commercial archive in it's own right (rather than the metaphor of a single library serving patroms which would be much more like a database or Napster style service) then P2P is already fair use under the wording of the law according to subsection 108.
The question is: Is a P2P node an independent, publicly available, non-commercial archive? If it isn't, how could it be made more so?
Here's the text of the libraries and archives subsection.
108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives39
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if-
(1) the reproduction or distribution is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage;
(2) the collections of the library or archives are (i) open to the public, or (ii) available not only to researchers affiliated with the library or archives or with the institution of which it is a part, but also to other persons doing research in a specialized field; and
(3) the reproduction or distribution of the work includes a notice of copyright that appears on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section, or includes a legend stating that the work may be protected by copy-right if no such notice can be found on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section.
I've been spending quite a bit of time looking at using DocBook and CSS to do layout for a book. If you read the documents they seem to suggest they offer much more than Quark. I downloaded a demo of Quark and I thought the OS alternatives had a good point. Can any of you Mac fans explain where the Mac solution would put DocBook/CSS to shame.
Phone-home was cool in the mid nineties. I was really proud of my first phone-home system. You couldn't just assume there was a network connection back then. That made it a lot more work and I must admit I never did find a surefire way to get around every proxy situation. I put all kinds of goodies in it: one-time disposable passwords, blowfish encryption --the works. I ended up with all these backdoors in my system that didn't show up till much later from researching all that security crap. But in the end, as soon as sales dropped all that junk went out the window. Sure was fun putting it together though. The good ol' days.
But hey, now we have a good start on a virtual socialist utopia. I'm not crying. It's all good. Who needs money if we can actually learn to share. Even though I had fun playing with proto-DRM back in the day, I agree that shit is evil and we're better off without it. The whole MS version of the software market is nothing but a pyramid scheme. I'm still getting paid for it, but it won't last and I'm glad.
Not to be picky, but you just used the term "piracy" in place of "copyright infringement" for which you could easily be forgiven, but hopefully you will graciously acknowledge the difference.
The argument that "piracy" is frequently used in place of "copyright infrinegment" may be true, but I don't think you can show me the text of a law uses the term "piracy" while I can certainly point you to the law about "copyright infringement."
This becomes important because the law about "copyright infringement" also contains a subsection on "fair use." And that subsection would complicate your argument.
I find it interesting that anybody would suggest that spending taxpayer money to subsidize a welfare program for a company that has been convicted of violations of the Sherman Act is somehow appropriate.
This open formats idea is naive. You don't cut deals with monopolies, you cut their goddam welfare. Do you realize how much every single elementary school in your state if forking over to these whores? The DMV is a lame example. The schools are where they're juicing the taxpayer like crazy. If your kids have a web page at school, I suggest you go see which server they're using. Oh, hmm. Who made that decision. Oh I see, that was the district information guy. Where is he anyway? Oh, he's at a Microsoft conference in Vegas. There's so much to learn you know.
Where do you think Mac got all that money that keeps them afloat? They got so bloated off edu-welfare they went limp, pulled out and gave MS a turn to ride the train. How the hell is welfare bad for the poor, but totally justified in the case of billion dollar corporation? I still don't catch that part.
Fuck the half steppin'. Get out and vote for mandatory open source and do the right thing. Don't be a suck ass apologist with this "The right tool for the right job" bullshit.
I agree that the idea seems litttle more than wishful thinking on the part of some interested parties. Many Americans don't realize that forms of international identification as seemingly important as a passport number not only can be changed in a matter of days, but cannot be kept over the period of the document's validity.
You cannot keep your passport number from one expiration date to the next even if you want to. There's no such thing as permanent identity in the international world. When you travel overseas the countries you visit often rely on your name and birthday as your sole identity for all legal purposes. Pretty flimsy, but that's how it goes.
If you can't even accurately track people's identifications internationally, tracking their residences is going to be quite a challenge.
That's an awesome idea that would sadly meet a lot of resistance. So many web sites think they have some sort of right to redefine the web user experience and go far out of their way to prevent web agents from downloading the whole site.
Typically, you hear that they are afraid it takes too much bandwidth, but I think the major factor in the majority of cases is straight up addiction to control that goes beyond logic.
Logically, it doesn't make much sense to try to control caching of your web site. I mean why publish something on the web if you don't want people to see it and why should you care if they are connected to your server when they do so. But many sites make a big deal about it despite the fact that there's no logical reason why it shouldn't be done.
Many web sites also think they can make money selling archive access. Those sites would never go for it which means you'd have to have permissions. That doesn't make it impossible. It's still doable, but it would be tricky and not for technical reasons as much as the desire to pursue the illusion of control.
The ones I've seen typically cost more than notebooks. What surprises me is that they had such good sales last year.
If you're a billionaire who doesn't need to care about dropping a few grand of electronics on the floor every so often, this is a killer toy. No surprise who the poster boy was. But likewise it's no surpise they're not taking the market by storm.
Slashdot Mirror
Fewer liberties?
Well, I hail from the Golden State and when I went to Vancouver last year I was stunned to find tea shops almost like Amsterdam. How the hell did Canada become more free than the US? Well I don't really know when it happened, but somehow it did. Maybe the US should start learning from Canada.
The rockoon stuff was interesting though it seemed to have dropped off pretty quickly by the 1960s. I'm with you on the speed/altitude issue, but wouldn't you agree that you can trade inexpensively gained altitude for precious speed? I checked out that link to the Israeli X-Prize team and although it's a related idea, it doesn't seem to use the method I had in mind which is to initially drop the rocket downwards in an arc rather than going for a more or less vertical launch at altitude.
as an assist for a conventional rocket?
I wrote a letter to Aerostar, the largest commercial hotair balloon manufacturer in the States, about their largest model, the Aero 245 asking about maximum payload and altitude and I never heard back.
But I did find that they were only around 75 grand a piece. What I was wondering was if you took like five of those to say 40,000 feet towing a rocket and then launched from there, wouldn't you be able to get a lot more bang for your buck than from say a similar operation using a customized jet airliner that costs millions to modify and operate?
I mean this high altitude stunt stuff is cool and all, but I'm very curious as to why balloons can't be a practical element in launching satellites and such.
This is all quite off base.
The guy was wrong from the beginning. It's not becoming more US centric. It's quite the opposite.
I say that as an American that has lived overseas for fifteen years. The world was infinitely more US centric to me back in the eighties. In order to understand this you need to realize that the definition of being from any particular place has broken down enormously in the last few decades.
It's like saying that Japanese automakers are edging out detroit. Well, that's a bit ridiculous since many Japanese automakers are largely owned by both European and American interests and vice versa. To speak of anything being centered on any one physical region is a rapidly deteriorating notion that was far more defensible in previous decades.
Yeah, I wrote a pornographic novel on the same theme back in 1989 or so called Fucking Death. I still haven't officially published it, but I distributed a pre-print version to a friend in prison.
"The design is copyrighted"
Yes, but the customer did not purchase the design, did they? They purchased the doll and the doll cannot be copyrighted.
You are a troll.
Well, you're welcome to check the original article yourself, but it didn't seen to be saying that there were no twelve inches before and now there were some, but that there were fewer and fewer and now they're ramping production back up because of lack of profitability in the 14 and 15 inch models. It wasn't limited to Apple by any means though. It's just that the same contract manufacturers in Taiwan make the vast majority of notebooks of all flavors.
I think what's more interesting than this Toshiba is the news that Dell, IBM and Apple are all going back and re-introducing twelve inch models because the fourteen and fifteen inch models are selling poorly. Just read it at Digitimes today. Now that's an interesting story, notebook makers take a technological step back. Sounds like a somewhat foreboding indicator of the market.
If you go check out the story, note that they say that this move is partly to focus on the growing Asian market. Well, I find that interesting because China is the biggest growth market in Asia and none of those brands are major players in China except Dell, but even then it's only too a limited extent compared to Dell's marketshare in the West. And as for IBM and Apple, I'm quite sure that neither of them has a big chunk of the Chinese notebook market.
It must be that he was referring to the client's UI experience rather than the ability to publish content because it would be ridiculous thing to say that content delivery and formatting had not changed in five years.
CSS is the perfect example because CSS2 is still far from completely implemented in any brower and probably won't be for years if you include the full spec with things like audio style sheets. And when CSS2 is finally fully implemented, there will either be CSS3 or XSL or both. Knowing that there's this long term incompleted, but under construction, blueprint already in place, how could anybody suggest that the innovation eneded years ago?
It's like looking at a house that is still being framed and saying there's no more work to be done because you can get a basic idea of what it's going to look like.
Okay, I think the best thing is for me to be a bit more specific. I don't think I implied that the GPL did block commercial use because I don't believe that it does. Let's get down to the nitty gritty to keep things as clear as possible.
The issue we're dealing with is students creating content and then having researchers comes along and use the student's content as samples in curricula that the researchers then charge schools thousands of dollars to license. We feel that if the basis of the curricula is the work of the students then it should be possible for the students to keep the rights through a license.
So, what we want is something like the GPL where the researchers would have the right to sell their work, but could not force the schools to have to pay licensing fees while using students work as their examples.
This seems very similar to the case of the GPL, but doesn't seem to fit with what I'm seeing in Creative Commons license options.
Well, if anybody is familiar with Creative Commons licenses and how they're similar and dissimilar from the GPL, could you help me out with a question about their licenses?
I like the copy-left part of the GPL and I can see how the Share Alike license would be similar to the GPL if the Non-Commercial clause was added, but what about in the case where you have a share-alike license and permit commercial use? That would just be commercial license right? Where's the part about and there must also be an open version? That seems to be missing in the case where you use a Share Alike license, but permit commercial use and that seems different from the GPL. The way I'm reading it, you're forced to choose between free and not free where the GPL would allow you to have the open version and sell it at the same time.
Perhaps I'm just not reading it clearly, or I'm describing the difference too vaguely to make my point understood but if you think you get the gist of my confusion, I'd appreciate some clarification as I've been asked for guidance on this exact issue in an educational setting and I was recommending the GPL, but this does seem more appropriate. I'm just concerned that it's not a copy-left license in the sense that it doesn't insist on an open version while allowing commercial use.
I was disappointed to see this "serious" article that essentially revolves around picking up the phone and paying money to have someone else do the work.
I woudn't even let a contractor manage my framing, much less my wiring. This is a good article for someone setting up a Mac network who doesn't want to get their pants dirty. Oh, but then they'd be using WeeFee instead, wouldn't they? It would be good to add some quality adiophile site banners as well.
The CAFC is like a phone home system in an MS Windows software package called tmp.dat.
You see the name "Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit" and you assume, oh yeah that's part of our nations justice system. But it's an evil little fucker that got tacked on just a few decades ago by the administration of a vicious bastard named Ronny Raygun.
When people complain about the courts being pro-corporate or pro-patents or pro-copyrights, they're generally incorrect, but in the case of this court it's right on the money.
The CAFC was created by executive order and we damn well need to elect a president with the balls to get rid of it the same way.
I think it's rightfully complex. When it comes to law, it's so typical for people to oversimplify it into political camps of for and against business or some other vague political entity when the action is taking place in language and it is inherently complex and unstable.
Who would have thought this conservative court would come up with this recent sodomy ruling and there was much reference to privacy in the opinions. It affirms my belief that the specific wording of each case really has to be put into context when deciding what is and is not a meaningful decision.
As for Eldrgidge, I read the opinion and I found that everyting hinged on the definition of one word --"limited".
The court felt that there was no way for them to put a limit on the word "limited", so they had no basis for limiting copyright. This was the heart of the issue in the court's opinion and that meant that all these other important issues like fair use and the DMCA had to wait for another case where they were more pertinent to the language of the case at hand.
After reading the sodomy opinion, I'm fairly confident that what we're going to see is a Verizon-like case that makes it to the Supreme Court and the RIAA, or whoever is pursuing the case, will get smacked down which will effectively put the issue to rest since the services themselves have already been found to be legitimate. If the services are okay and the user's relationship to the ISP is confidential, then there's really no issue which is how it should be.
Well I didn't bother to read the article since I have an MA in Rhetoric and wasn't at all confused about the meaning of the word, but I will take the risk of being redundant by pointing out that intentionally writing a song about the word irony using examples that are not ironic IS, in fact, ironic.
I don't buy this notion that KaZaA is really totally community supported and isn't getting boosted by some well placed and well funded high-bandwidth servers with fat RAID caches of popular content. It's just a hunch and could easily be wrong, but the way it seems so homogenized compared to other P2P apps makes me suspicious that they have some uber super nodes that keep things flowing. Also, in the last K++ release, the developer cryptically noted some odd behaviors in the supernode settings right before announcing he was "tired" of playing with it.
Again, it's just a hunch and perhaps it's wrong and it's just that FastTrack roXors, but if it's true then this approach of bashing home users that share and telling leachers they're good to go isn't going to do shit to slow things down. It's just going to piss off all the nice folks who feel obligated to share and mean nothing to the more cynical types.
And if you think about it, the only people they're going to be able to nab are the small fries with cable modems and what not. There's so many what-if possibilities out there that if the KaZaA people wanted to set caching mega servers up secretly on fast, pricey fiber connections, it's easy to imagine that they would have the skills to configure the security that would make it impossible to say absolutely yes or no that these cache's actually existed. Basically you have to take them on their word and the word is -no.
Morphix has IPTables. I'm using it as a router right now. Just remember to delete sudoers.
Plus you get a browser or two and games and all kinds of goodies.
I disagree with Lessig.
With all due respect for his work and a high opinion of the man I feel that he hasn't considered his library metaphor very carefully with respect to the text of the law.
He says nobody serious thinks that mass digital copying in the context of P2P is acceptable under the wording of copyright law. But I'm serious and I think I have a lefitimate point based on the wording of the law itself.
My point is that if you consider each node on a P2P network to be a publicly accessible and non-commercial archive in it's own right (rather than the metaphor of a single library serving patroms which would be much more like a database or Napster style service) then P2P is already fair use under the wording of the law according to subsection 108.
The question is: Is a P2P node an independent, publicly available, non-commercial archive? If it isn't, how could it be made more so?
Here's the text of the libraries and archives subsection.
108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives39
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if-
(1) the reproduction or distribution is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage;
(2) the collections of the library or archives are (i) open to the public, or (ii) available not only to researchers affiliated with the library or archives or with the institution of which it is a part, but also to other persons doing research in a specialized field; and
(3) the reproduction or distribution of the work includes a notice of copyright that appears on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section, or includes a legend stating that the work may be protected by copy-right if no such notice can be found on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section.
I've been spending quite a bit of time looking at using DocBook and CSS to do layout for a book. If you read the documents they seem to suggest they offer much more than Quark. I downloaded a demo of Quark and I thought the OS alternatives had a good point. Can any of you Mac fans explain where the Mac solution would put DocBook/CSS to shame.
Phone-home was cool in the mid nineties. I was really proud of my first phone-home system. You couldn't just assume there was a network connection back then. That made it a lot more work and I must admit I never did find a surefire way to get around every proxy situation. I put all kinds of goodies in it: one-time disposable passwords, blowfish encryption --the works. I ended up with all these backdoors in my system that didn't show up till much later from researching all that security crap. But in the end, as soon as sales dropped all that junk went out the window. Sure was fun putting it together though. The good ol' days.
But hey, now we have a good start on a virtual socialist utopia. I'm not crying. It's all good. Who needs money if we can actually learn to share. Even though I had fun playing with proto-DRM back in the day, I agree that shit is evil and we're better off without it. The whole MS version of the software market is nothing but a pyramid scheme. I'm still getting paid for it, but it won't last and I'm glad.
The argument that "piracy" is frequently used in place of "copyright infrinegment" may be true, but I don't think you can show me the text of a law uses the term "piracy" while I can certainly point you to the law about "copyright infringement."
This becomes important because the law about "copyright infringement" also contains a subsection on "fair use." And that subsection would complicate your argument.
This open formats idea is naive. You don't cut deals with monopolies, you cut their goddam welfare. Do you realize how much every single elementary school in your state if forking over to these whores? The DMV is a lame example. The schools are where they're juicing the taxpayer like crazy. If your kids have a web page at school, I suggest you go see which server they're using. Oh, hmm. Who made that decision. Oh I see, that was the district information guy. Where is he anyway? Oh, he's at a Microsoft conference in Vegas. There's so much to learn you know.
Where do you think Mac got all that money that keeps them afloat? They got so bloated off edu-welfare they went limp, pulled out and gave MS a turn to ride the train. How the hell is welfare bad for the poor, but totally justified in the case of billion dollar corporation? I still don't catch that part.
Fuck the half steppin'. Get out and vote for mandatory open source and do the right thing. Don't be a suck ass apologist with this "The right tool for the right job" bullshit.
I agree that the idea seems litttle more than wishful thinking on the part of some interested parties. Many Americans don't realize that forms of international identification as seemingly important as a passport number not only can be changed in a matter of days, but cannot be kept over the period of the document's validity.
You cannot keep your passport number from one expiration date to the next even if you want to. There's no such thing as permanent identity in the international world. When you travel overseas the countries you visit often rely on your name and birthday as your sole identity for all legal purposes. Pretty flimsy, but that's how it goes.
If you can't even accurately track people's identifications internationally, tracking their residences is going to be quite a challenge.
That's an awesome idea that would sadly meet a lot of resistance. So many web sites think they have some sort of right to redefine the web user experience and go far out of their way to prevent web agents from downloading the whole site.
Typically, you hear that they are afraid it takes too much bandwidth, but I think the major factor in the majority of cases is straight up addiction to control that goes beyond logic.
Logically, it doesn't make much sense to try to control caching of your web site. I mean why publish something on the web if you don't want people to see it and why should you care if they are connected to your server when they do so. But many sites make a big deal about it despite the fact that there's no logical reason why it shouldn't be done.
Many web sites also think they can make money selling archive access. Those sites would never go for it which means you'd have to have permissions. That doesn't make it impossible. It's still doable, but it would be tricky and not for technical reasons as much as the desire to pursue the illusion of control.
The ones I've seen typically cost more than notebooks. What surprises me is that they had such good sales last year.
If you're a billionaire who doesn't need to care about dropping a few grand of electronics on the floor every so often, this is a killer toy. No surprise who the poster boy was. But likewise it's no surpise they're not taking the market by storm.