It's simple, I doubt the motives that drive the groups who say that games lead to violent behaviour. It always seem that those who are pushing this theory have religious backgrounds or religious backers. Which, naturally, brings forth concerns of whether this is being pushed only because video games are competing for youth attention with religion. This may or may not be a conscious reason.
Second, we do not understand the causes of violent behaviour very well and it seems that many of the anti-violent games studies rely on the observations of the participants, not on objective observation, so now we have two levels of inacurracy built into the study, that's before we even begin considering the causality problem.
Thirdly, many of the claims have been simply preposterous. I have seen the people backing ludicrous claims like this before. So, you'll find that I won't get alarmed, since the number of satanic cults in Ohklahamo was greatly overstated, and role-playing games never lead to massive waves of demonic possession and mass-murder.
Lastly, if violent computer games lead to violent people, why have violence levels been declining steadily since the mid-80s?
I think the DMCA Clones in Europe have less to do with American Government lobbying and more to do with most corporations being able to expense the donations they make to government officials.
This makes government lobbying an inexpensive alternative to actually providing good service and products. Hence, with so much money looking for the easy way to make more money, there's a general trend towards what corporate executives see as corporate friendly laws.
This trend is just accelerated in the U.S. meaning while it looks like it's spreading from the U.S., actually the U.S. is just the first country succumbing to the disease, the others are already infected.
A) It's not theft. B) It's not theft. C) Technically, you copied it without permission.
Theft comes with the implied meaning that you are denying someone access to their rightful property, that's why copyright infringement is not theft. The owner still has the original, you just didn't pay him for permission to copy it.
The RIAA et al is using a cheap rhetorical trick (prejudicial language) to try and prevent anyone from disagreeing with them. After all what politician wants to be singled out as supporting thieves?
You are forgetting that the returns are filed via modem. You wouldn't have to go anywhere near the machine to tamper with the results. You could just connect to the central reporting station and edit the totals whenever it looked like your candidate was in trouble.
The tables are not the same and do not contain the same information. I'm not clear on exactly what is in the second one but it looks like the second set of tables is *just* the totals (looking at the screen shots from the article). Anytime you look at any totals they are read from the total table, not the vote record.
This is simply a bad design. The is compounded by the fact that there is no built-in way to re-check the totals against the individual votes.
On the upside it should be very easy to create a program that goes into the access database and checks to see if the totals have been changed using the same security flaws that allow the totals to be changed in the first place.
Those aren't exactly innovation, IMO. Being able to change the color and sound of your phone are rather obvious creature comforts. Kind of like the dubious steps of making different coloured couches and clothes. Sure we could mandate everything has to be a uniform grey but to what purpose.
The other things he railed against are in fact the leading edge of technology that will in time be revolutionary. For instance, if the robot vacuum is successful it will lead to increased research in robotic assistants and improvement in robotic technology those improvements may eventually be incorporated into a future space exploration mission. Beyond that it's a valuable invention because if I don't have to spend 20 minutes vaccuum the house every week, that's 18 hours I can spend on other more important work. Or simplifying my life, and I'd rather trade 6 hours of work I enjoy for 18 less of hours of drugery any day. I don't see how freeing people collectively from millions of hours of drudge work is not an important feat.
I can't see how all of these gadgets will lead to greater things. Indeed some won't. But that's what science is, trial and error. And in the long run if the gadgets produced by your research make you rich, then you're going to keep researching*.
One of the company's competitors will always buy the patents and the CVS archives at auction while the company is being sold off piecemeal. And patents on real inventions expire in 25 years, so even if it's patented the knowledge eventualy becomes free.
Heck I lived through that, when one of the company's I was working at, bit the bullet. Now Mitel produces the Gandalf line of ISDN routers...
On the flip side, it would be very difficult to show the benefit of patents. Since they are supposed to be an incentive you'd have to figure out the value of the successful inventions created by people who were enticed into becoming an inventor by the thought of becoming rich off the invention, and then somehow figure out how much longer it would have taken to invent the thing under a patentless system.
Then you have a rough estimate of how much it's worth. However, since I seem to have left my alternate reality scanner in my other pants, we may never know.
As I understand it, EULAs are simply not enforceable. The purchaser needs to agree to the EULA before the purchase of the software or else it's not a legal contract.
Two reasons: 1) By contract law, all details of an agreement must be disclosed prior to offer and acceptance. In other words, before the purchaser agrees to pay money for the software.
2) By contract law, both parties must benefit from a contract. Since the EULA provides no benefits to the end user, it is not a valid contract on it's own.
So, if the purchaser signed the EULA before paying for the software he might have a real legal problem, but otherwise it's only enforceable by intimidation and threats.
I think that's a bullshit statement. I've heard that the Microsoft exams can be rather tricky and somewhat difficult. The "anybody can be an MCSE" thing is a lie propagated on slashdot. I have a friend that's studying for MS certification, and he said only him and another two guys in his whole class passed the exam the first time.
There's two equally valid conclusions that can be drawn from your anecdotal example:
The MSCE exams are hard
Your friend was in a class of idiots
Go ahead, choose your favourite answer, but don't be surprised if the rest of the world doesn't agree with you either way.
"An issue with America is that news may not get reported that is not in the interests of the media giants that are reporting it."
That's a good point, but the report mainly concerns itself with the use of restrictive laws and force to stifle the diversity of the media. It specifically doesn't deal with issues of pervasive media bias or self-censorship by the media.
According to the article the U.S. is down at #17 because there are reporters in jail for refusing to reveal their sources, and there's been an increase in the number of arrests of reporters in security sensitive areas since 9/11.
On the other hand, Canada came in 5th place in the rankings apparently because Canada's not doing as much as the 4 1st place countries to support Freedom of the Press internationally.
If it's supposed to be a threat then it's an incredibly mediocre one.
"Governments of the world, do as we say or we'll stop selling our games console!" Not exactly time for James Bond to leap into action.
I think you'd be surprised at how effetive that threat might be, because it's hidden in an easily defencible position for Microsoft. MS can say "We had no choice, we had to refuse to sell our game consoles in Australia because the Australian laws made it impossible for us to make money selling them there."
The point of the threat is not to cripple Australia, but to make the Australian government choose between looking like the bad guy to middle class Australians who have kids who want xboxes (thus loosing votes, and maybe giving a chance that a different, more Microsoft friendly adminstration will win the next election) or giving in to Microsoft's demands and claim it's a victory for the government (thus potentially gaining votes, because few Australians are going to understand or care about the rights they gave up for the Xboxes).
Of course, if the ploy doesn't work and the Australian government doesn't take the bait, there's no real reason Microsoft can't decide to sell the Xboxes anyway. They've only said they were going to have to consider it. In the end making the "threat" doesn't hurt Microsoft and may get the law changed to their benefit. It's a win-win situation for Microsoft.
He might be in the minority, but I'd expect the majority of people (who are not terribly computer literate) are not going to go searching for free music trading sites when they get the songs they want for $0.25 each. It's a matter of the value they place on their time. Also if the majority of people can find the site so can the RIAA and they can shut it down. So either they will have to periodically find a new free music sharing site, or they can simply go the one that's advertised and pay a small (almost token) fee. In this particular case, I think the majority of people value their time more than they value a quarter. Those that don't aren't going to buy it but they're a minority and it's not going to be cost effective to try and force them to buy the music, anyways.
As I understand clickwrap is meaningless by some of the very basics of tort law. You simply can not force additional requirements on a user after the transaction has been completed.
Attempting to rig a DRM solution so that people could only run MSFT O/S would be (1) illegal and (2) very stupid since people would have a legitimate reason for bypassing the alledged DRM measures to run Linux.
That hasn't stopped MSFT from doing it before.
That won't stop criminal prosecution of anyone caught circumventing the DRM measures.
One of the things that you semm to have missed is that pointing out the possible abuses of the DRM technology is a first step in preventing those abuses.
Hmm, I'm wondering whether "Mature" software is the right type to be examining. Doesn't mature generally mean "finished development", and that there is little that needs to be improved or expanded for the project?
That would tend to decrease the likelyhood of a large developer base. What I'd like to know is if consistent results are seen when the Stable/Production category is used instead of the Mature category.
Well there's at least one. There was a guy in my software engineering classes who thought the whole CMM process was nothing but a bad joke. Somehow it just figures that he'd end up working for MS...;)
You know I don't believe you for a second, and making obviously wrong claims doesn't help the credibility of anything else you say.
It's relatively simple to see, that the problem is the government would bankrupt far too many people if they had to pay with a single check every year.
Believe or not, the payroll deduction is actually helpful to more people that it is legitimately hurtful. Though if you want to campaign for a little bit of reform that forces the government to credit you with the interest you would have earned on the money if it was in your hands, go ahead. It's not like it's going to change anything. They'd just have to raise taxes to cover that missing money...
This whole thing reeks of an bad IT department getting swindled. They should break the contract and haul the brokering company into court. Trying to defraud the government should be one of the stupidest things you can do.
From some of the reactions here, you'd think people and corporations are never defrauded... And that if they are it's entirely their fault for trusting people.
Actually, I think the point of the article was that the author doesn't understand open source. Open source is driven by needs, not markets. When someone needs an open web service, that's when the open source movement will create one. As long as it's just Microsoft sniffing vapours, there's no need for the software.
One of the strengths of open source is that people build what they can use, they don't waste their time trying to figure out what someone else might have a use for, maybe.
The open source movement has no interest in creating markets, they have an interest in creating software that allows people to do the stuff they want or need to do.
"Web services" just seems to be an annoying buzz word for some stuff that some software might do, without any substance on what exactly a web service is... I mean if it's a hyperlinked database, which is what the best description seems to imply, then it's hardly a "killer app".
I'm sorry but what you wrote doesn't make any sense. You can't use one "GUI" to do everything, that's like trying to use one form to do everything.
What you seem to be saying is that you will no longer be given the option of not installing and running new software, instead it will install and run itself without asking you, then go and download and install anything else it needs from the internet. Dangerous stuff there... It may be inevitable, but this certainly seems like a recipe for disaster if not done correctly.
Thankfully, with Microsoft at the helm, we're all doomed...
If microsoft really was as evil as a monopoly as you say they are, then why do they continue to innovate?
Because, they're really not that smart. It took a long time for them to realize that if they lease the software on time based period, then they no longer have to release cosmetically different versions of their operating system every few years. They can just hook you on a perpetual revenue stream for ever. Of course, if you can identify significant improvements in Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, go ahead. The improvement from 3.11 to 95 was entirely driven by the desire to destroy OS/2. Internet Explorer stopped improving as soon as they sunk Netscape. The list goes on and on. Microsoft only ever innovates in response to a threat to their monopolies or in an attempt to extend their monopolies. That is the true litmus test of an abusive monopolist.
Let's see, probably every group that develops a web browser for windows.
Probably at least a few hundred thousand people, probably more. I have no problem using mozilla to replace IE, I'd have no problem using Gecko to replace MSHTML.
I find it hard to believe that even Microsoft could be so amateurish (or paranoid) at developing software that they haven't already done this internally. After all, without some type of standardized interface any change between IE 4, IE 5 and IE 6 would be potentially catastrophic.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simple, I doubt the motives that drive the groups who say that games lead to violent behaviour. It always seem that those who are pushing this theory have religious backgrounds or religious backers. Which, naturally, brings forth concerns of whether this is being pushed only because video games are competing for youth attention with religion. This may or may not be a conscious reason.
Second, we do not understand the causes of violent behaviour very well and it seems that many of the anti-violent games studies rely on the observations of the participants, not on objective observation, so now we have two levels of inacurracy built into the study, that's before we even begin considering the causality problem.
Thirdly, many of the claims have been simply preposterous. I have seen the people backing ludicrous claims like this before. So, you'll find that I won't get alarmed, since the number of satanic cults in Ohklahamo was greatly overstated, and role-playing games never lead to massive waves of demonic possession and mass-murder.
Lastly, if violent computer games lead to violent people, why have violence levels been declining steadily since the mid-80s?
I think the DMCA Clones in Europe have less to do with American Government lobbying and more to do with most corporations being able to expense the donations they make to government officials.
This makes government lobbying an inexpensive alternative to actually providing good service and products. Hence, with so much money looking for the easy way to make more money, there's a general trend towards what corporate executives see as corporate friendly laws.
This trend is just accelerated in the U.S. meaning while it looks like it's spreading from the U.S., actually the U.S. is just the first country succumbing to the disease, the others are already infected.
How about ENIAC? Or maybe we can go all the way back to... Babbage's Difference engine?
A) It's not theft.
B) It's not theft.
C) Technically, you copied it without permission.
Theft comes with the implied meaning that you are denying someone access to their rightful property, that's why copyright infringement is not theft. The owner still has the original, you just didn't pay him for permission to copy it.
The RIAA et al is using a cheap rhetorical trick (prejudicial language) to try and prevent anyone from disagreeing with them. After all what politician wants to be singled out as supporting thieves?
You are forgetting that the returns are filed via modem. You wouldn't have to go anywhere near the machine to tamper with the results. You could just connect to the central reporting station and edit the totals whenever it looked like your candidate was in trouble.
The tables are not the same and do not contain the same information. I'm not clear on exactly what is in the second one but it looks like the second set of tables is *just* the totals (looking at the screen shots from the article). Anytime you look at any totals they are read from the total table, not the vote record.
This is simply a bad design. The is compounded by the fact that there is no built-in way to re-check the totals against the individual votes.
On the upside it should be very easy to create a program that goes into the access database and checks to see if the totals have been changed using the same security flaws that allow the totals to be changed in the first place.
Those aren't exactly innovation, IMO. Being able to change the color and sound of your phone are rather obvious creature comforts. Kind of like the dubious steps of making different coloured couches and clothes. Sure we could mandate everything has to be a uniform grey but to what purpose.
The other things he railed against are in fact the leading edge of technology that will in time be revolutionary. For instance, if the robot vacuum is successful it will lead to increased research in robotic assistants and improvement in robotic technology those improvements may eventually be incorporated into a future space exploration mission. Beyond that it's a valuable invention because if I don't have to spend 20 minutes vaccuum the house every week, that's 18 hours I can spend on other more important work. Or simplifying my life, and I'd rather trade 6 hours of work I enjoy for 18 less of hours of drugery any day. I don't see how freeing people collectively from millions of hours of drudge work is not an important feat.
I can't see how all of these gadgets will lead to greater things. Indeed some won't. But that's what science is, trial and error. And in the long run if the gadgets produced by your research make you rich, then you're going to keep researching*.
* Barring monumental idiots.
One of the company's competitors will always buy the patents and the CVS archives at auction while the company is being sold off piecemeal. And patents on real inventions expire in 25 years, so even if it's patented the knowledge eventualy becomes free.
Heck I lived through that, when one of the company's I was working at, bit the bullet. Now Mitel produces the Gandalf line of ISDN routers...
On the flip side, it would be very difficult to show the benefit of patents. Since they are supposed to be an incentive you'd have to figure out the value of the successful inventions created by people who were enticed into becoming an inventor by the thought of becoming rich off the invention, and then somehow figure out how much longer it would have taken to invent the thing under a patentless system.
Then you have a rough estimate of how much it's worth. However, since I seem to have left my alternate reality scanner in my other pants, we may never know.
As I understand it, EULAs are simply not enforceable. The purchaser needs to agree to the EULA before the purchase of the software or else it's not a legal contract.
Two reasons:
1) By contract law, all details of an agreement must be disclosed prior to offer and acceptance. In other words, before the purchaser agrees to pay money for the software.
2) By contract law, both parties must benefit from a contract. Since the EULA provides no benefits to the end user, it is not a valid contract on it's own.
So, if the purchaser signed the EULA before paying for the software he might have a real legal problem, but otherwise it's only enforceable by intimidation and threats.
-
IANAL
I think that's a bullshit statement. I've heard that the Microsoft exams can be rather tricky and somewhat difficult. The "anybody can be an MCSE" thing is a lie propagated on slashdot. I have a friend that's studying for MS certification, and he said only him and another two guys in his whole class passed the exam the first time.
There's two equally valid conclusions that can be drawn from your anecdotal example:
Go ahead, choose your favourite answer, but don't be surprised if the rest of the world doesn't agree with you either way.
"An issue with America is that news may not get reported that is not in the interests of the media giants that are reporting it."
That's a good point, but the report mainly concerns itself with the use of restrictive laws and force to stifle the diversity of the media. It specifically doesn't deal with issues of pervasive media bias or self-censorship by the media.
According to the article the U.S. is down at #17 because there are reporters in jail for refusing to reveal their sources, and there's been an increase in the number of arrests of reporters in security sensitive areas since 9/11.
On the other hand, Canada came in 5th place in the rankings apparently because Canada's not doing as much as the 4 1st place countries to support Freedom of the Press internationally.
"Governments of the world, do as we say or we'll stop selling our games console!" Not exactly time for James Bond to leap into action.
I think you'd be surprised at how effetive that threat might be, because it's hidden in an easily defencible position for Microsoft. MS can say "We had no choice, we had to refuse to sell our game consoles in Australia because the Australian laws made it impossible for us to make money selling them there."
The point of the threat is not to cripple Australia, but to make the Australian government choose between looking like the bad guy to middle class Australians who have kids who want xboxes (thus loosing votes, and maybe giving a chance that a different, more Microsoft friendly adminstration will win the next election) or giving in to Microsoft's demands and claim it's a victory for the government (thus potentially gaining votes, because few Australians are going to understand or care about the rights they gave up for the Xboxes).
Of course, if the ploy doesn't work and the Australian government doesn't take the bait, there's no real reason Microsoft can't decide to sell the Xboxes anyway. They've only said they were going to have to consider it. In the end making the "threat" doesn't hurt Microsoft and may get the law changed to their benefit. It's a win-win situation for Microsoft.
He might be in the minority, but I'd expect the majority of people (who are not terribly computer literate) are not going to go searching for free music trading sites when they get the songs they want for $0.25 each.
It's a matter of the value they place on their time. Also if the majority of people can find the site so can the RIAA and they can shut it down.
So either they will have to periodically find a new free music sharing site, or they can simply go the one that's advertised and pay a small (almost token) fee. In this particular case, I think the majority of people value their time more than they value a quarter.
Those that don't aren't going to buy it but they're a minority and it's not going to be cost effective to try and force them to buy the music, anyways.
As I understand clickwrap is meaningless by some of the very basics of tort law. You simply can not force additional requirements on a user after the transaction has been completed.
Attempting to rig a DRM solution so that people could only run MSFT O/S would be (1) illegal and (2) very stupid since people would have a legitimate reason for bypassing the alledged DRM measures to run Linux.
One of the things that you semm to have missed is that pointing out the possible abuses of the DRM technology is a first step in preventing those abuses.
Hmm, I'm wondering whether "Mature" software is the right type to be examining. Doesn't mature generally mean "finished development", and that there is little that needs to be improved or expanded for the project?
That would tend to decrease the likelyhood of a large developer base. What I'd like to know is if consistent results are seen when the Stable/Production category is used instead of the Mature category.
Well there's at least one. There was a guy in my software engineering classes who thought the whole CMM process was nothing but a bad joke. Somehow it just figures that he'd end up working for MS... ;)
You know I don't believe you for a second, and making obviously wrong claims doesn't help the credibility of anything else you say.
It's relatively simple to see, that the problem is the government would bankrupt far too many people if they had to pay with a single check every year.
Believe or not, the payroll deduction is actually helpful to more people that it is legitimately hurtful. Though if you want to campaign for a little bit of reform that forces the government to credit you with the interest you would have earned on the money if it was in your hands, go ahead. It's not like it's going to change anything. They'd just have to raise taxes to cover that missing money...
This whole thing reeks of an bad IT department getting swindled. They should break the contract and haul the brokering company into court. Trying to defraud the government should be one of the stupidest things you can do.
From some of the reactions here, you'd think people and corporations are never defrauded... And that if they are it's entirely their fault for trusting people.
Actually, I think the point of the article was that the author doesn't understand open source. Open source is driven by needs, not markets. When someone needs an open web service, that's when the open source movement will create one. As long as it's just Microsoft sniffing vapours, there's no need for the software.
One of the strengths of open source is that people build what they can use, they don't waste their time trying to figure out what someone else might have a use for, maybe.
The open source movement has no interest in creating markets, they have an interest in creating software that allows people to do the stuff they want or need to do.
"Web services" just seems to be an annoying buzz word for some stuff that some software might do, without any substance on what exactly a web service is... I mean if it's a hyperlinked database, which is what the best description seems to imply, then it's hardly a "killer app".
I'm sorry but what you wrote doesn't make any sense. You can't use one "GUI" to do everything, that's like trying to use one form to do everything.
What you seem to be saying is that you will no longer be given the option of not installing and running new software, instead it will install and run itself without asking you, then go and download and install anything else it needs from the internet. Dangerous stuff there... It may be inevitable, but this certainly seems like a recipe for disaster if not done correctly.
Thankfully, with Microsoft at the helm, we're all doomed...
As an actual professional web developer, I have to disagree. The only standards IE holds to are some unpublished internal MS documents.
Heck, the IE 6 Beta doesn't even support fixed positioning. Mozilla looks better, works better, and has implemented more of the standards than IE.
If microsoft really was as evil as a monopoly as you say they are, then why do they continue to innovate?
Because, they're really not that smart. It took a long time for them to realize that if they lease the software on time based period, then they no longer have to release cosmetically different versions of their operating system every few years. They can just hook you on a perpetual revenue stream for ever. Of course, if you can identify significant improvements in Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, go ahead. The improvement from 3.11 to 95 was entirely driven by the desire to destroy OS/2. Internet Explorer stopped improving as soon as they sunk Netscape. The list goes on and on. Microsoft only ever innovates in response to a threat to their monopolies or in an attempt to extend their monopolies. That is the true litmus test of an abusive monopolist.
I find it hard to believe that even Microsoft could be so amateurish (or paranoid) at developing software that they haven't already done this internally. After all, without some type of standardized interface any change between IE 4, IE 5 and IE 6 would be potentially catastrophic.
The BSA could be a double edged sword - used as a tool to inspire companies to move to open source software.
Hmm...
Use Open Source Software because we won't hire thugs to ransack your business!
Open Source Software because we don't believe in extortion!
Use Linux because Linus Torvalds won't send the police to arrest you for loosing a piece of paper!
Open Source Software knows that harrassing your users just isn't cool.
They do have a certain ring to them...