Well, what do you call abusive legal games? Threatening lawsuits that will supposedly be dropped, if only you'd start playing nice with the evil bastards that you harmed by posting the truth. And if not, they'll sue you for everything you're worth. Still without an actual statement of what they consider harmful.
Sounds almost like Traffic Power is a company with a useless service. That Traffic Power knows they have a useless service. And that Traffic Power specifically trains their representatives in lying to avoid painful questions. (Why they aren't listed on Google, do your tricks actually work, etc.)
So yeah, a company with absolutely no credibility sues someone, with the intention of driving legitimate comments offline by bankrupting anyone willing to share the truth and yeah, people do start talking about free speech being murdered.
This is as blatant as that Robert Novak thief who ran Pet Warehouse and sued people for reporting that he sent them dead pets. Assuming people can't afford to fight these bastards in court, I really wish they'd curb stomp them in real life. What good can ever come from letting a complete bastard like Max D Spilka (Traffic Power liar/lawyer) walk the earth? Sure, behind every dirty lawyer is a dirty client, but that client isn't capable of ruining hundreds of lives without the lawyer - imho the lawyers are the ones we should target. Worthless wastes of skin. Exactly what you'd expect from a company whose business is tricking people into going to sites that don't really offer what they want.
I certainly would not expect an unlocking site (something legal, but very disliked by the phone companies) to not keep records, because the phone companies could find some DMCA-like reason to get it from them. A better way to store the backup would be to let the user download it and upload it again for a restore.
However, having known about server logs, etc, I think this is a good thing to have happen. Let some punk kid get really embarassed, no real harm done. Not like some company files 10,000+ John Doe suits against various IPs for daring to unlock its phones, or something. This will illustrate how there really isn't any privacy on someone else's website. If you want it, get a few anonymizing proxies. Better your illusions shattered than living with a false sense of security.
Most of those questions without perfect answers are graded based on how hard you try (according to the tester) not how right you are. If they understood how to solve the problems they wouldn't be testers...
See it from our point of view. Someone gives you a hard problem, usually hard because it is based on millions of things you don't know (number of gas stations in the USA) and expects you to show a useful (to them - shades of grade three) train of logic to your final answer.
Things like this are good brain teasers, and there is a good correlation between brain-teaser ability and smarts, but not between "sit in a room with an interviewer and try to solve insolvable problems" and smarts. I've known comparatively dull people who are always solving complex logic problems but who get stumped by 'Pull' signs on door. Other people who are geniuses, but who have never practiced written logic problems. I wouldn't rely on these tests to pick people I wanted writing code with me.
I personally wouldn't test their syntax-level coding skill either, any idiot can write error-free C++ - it's not until it does something useful that it matters. At that, I'd probably discuss algorithms, coding style, debuging strategies, etc.
Google/Microsoft/Amazon apparently have too many resumes and have gotten creative in sorting them. Shame that nobody told them to focus on programming skill for programmers, etc.
I wouldn't argue that your rights are being violated, but I would say that it's a breach of contract and false advertising.
The casino offered you a game of chance/skill with the assumption that you could make money playing - nobody would play if the loses were guaranteed. If they throw you out for winning legitimately, they aren't really offering a chance to win, are they?
Casinos get enough of a free ride in our society - we shouldn't help them lie.
No, what's unreasonable is the willy-nilly selling of exclusive rights, even when they mean we have to enact draconian laws to censor your speech for a year. That's fucking ridiculous.
I'm going to boycot the olympics when the come to my area in 2010.
Trademark law is rapidly becoming bullshit, like most other areas of law. It started to keep people from pretending to be another company. Now it's being used to interfere with copyright cases ("Sure, the film clip is fair use, but our trademarked character is in there..."), and is spreading far beyond the narrow categories there were intended to be locked in. These days 'Coke' is a soft drink, but you'd be sued if you came out with a Coke Car, or a Coke Computer, despite the narrow nature of original trademarks.
Maybe it's just that the legal system (lawyers...) sucks. It's a conflict of interest to let someone write law when they're the ones who get paid for interpretting it.
The problem with your strategy is that "we", the non-rich, corporations or otherwise, developers are always going to be on the losing side in this battle. The patent system as it is doesn't offer any real benefit to the little guy. If Microsoft contested a patent of mine I'd be hooped, even if in the right - the patent might get bought by someone who could afford to defend it, but it wouldn't matter for me.
It may be hard to fight to dismantle the patent system, or overhaul it extensively, but that's the only way it'll ever actually be a benefit to society. Luckily, I think it'll collapse soon enough. We're firmly entering the information age and we're letting companies patent trivial algorithms that are used in all programs. Eventually nothing will be possible without infringing on some bogus patent. All companies with enough money to sue will be sued by the RAMBUSes and SCOs (same abuse, different system) of the day - to defeat these abusers, the former beneficiaries of the system (IBM, GE, 3M, etc) will, imho, have to destroy the system.
The idea of getting rid of up-front monopolies and going to royalties or something else isn't a new one. Like first-past-the-post voting - we don't do it because it's best, just because it sounded good at the time. If the patent system changed to a forced-licensing, industry-determined royalties system, you couldn't abuse it by squatting. If you did have a good idea it would be adopted and you'd get a check every year for an ammount based on the benefit to the users of your idea. If nobody used it, or did but didn't achieve any benefit from your work, you would get nothing. Pretty simple. It's not like the only option to the current patent system is anarchy with armed lawyers wandering the streets.
A rising tide floats all boats. Real capitalists know the economy isn't a zero-sum game.
Simply reverse the changes to copyright - 28 years is long, but livable. Make a requirement for copyright protection - either release the work unencrypted, or give the LoC an unecrypted copy to be distributed when it becomes public domain.
Disney, arguably one of the shining stars of the capitalist world, made their money borrowing heavily from the public domain. Requiring their copyrights to end in a reasonable time is no worse than a toll highway. Copyright law is "paid" for by the good it gives the people - the point of rewarding the author was simply to encourage the creation of more works. As I see it, there's a contract there - we the people give you these limited monopoly rights, provided you give us the right to use this thing royalty free when the monopoly runs out. Nothing communist about a contract, or suggesting that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law... Eh, comrade?
They could say the third thing, the one you forgot to mention.
- "Go out of business? Great! When was the last time a now-useless middleman removed himself from the market by choice instead of using the legal system to make them and their product either mandatory, or the only choice."
I'd really root for that last option. Distributors of information (music, books, VoiP packets) are a commodity. They should be trying to put in the lowest bid for delivering already sold information to the destination, not in trying to own and control all access to the information, even to the extent of restricting access to the customer's own property.
Many of these same questions will have to be answered by the author, who then sees all the costs (editor, proofreaders, etc). Likely though, these costs will not include printing, art, shipping, or a retail markup. So I suspect that an author won't need to charge $25 - $40 for a new novel, and instead $1 - $5. At small amounts, people are less likely to feel a financial desire to pirate, leaving only vengance motives and headache motives. The last two seem tied - if there's less headache in using the legit version (lower cost -> less need for crippling DRM) then there'll be fewer people who buy a copy that they can't use, have to break the DRM, and they keep doing so from spite.
I don't interact with these systems because I'm not in school, but if the posts on here are to be believed, this is what my problems would be.
First the slippery slope of university politics where SSNs are routinely used as student IDs, etc. While these devices will be intended to help students by allowing anonymous feedback, I feel they will soon be used to mark attendance at certain locations, to take grade-affecting quizzes with, and other inappropriate uses.
Second there's the annoyance of using the device. They're clunkier than 1970s wired TV remote controls. What could have been fifteen seconds writing a quick answer and dropping it off on the desk as you left turns into a minute of control waving and frantic button pushing. Then, to top it all off, most people have to pay for this.
Japanese kids fill out comment cards. Not as immediate, but much better than the nothing we do here. This need to gadgetize everything for some miniscule perceived gain is the same as with the electronic voting machines. Basically, if I'm going to be dehumanized by punching buttons gameshow style to determine my grades, don't insult me with a crappy system that wastes more time than it saves, costs me to use, and exposes me to a ton of security problems.
Fine, base it on the time the sun is highest in the sky. Even in 24h darkness that concept has meaning. Go four hours in either direction and you have the equivalent of an 8-4 shift. Was that hard?
Who cares if the sun is highest at 12:00, or 03:30, or whatever? You'd learn your hours the same way anyone learns their work hours - few of my past jobs have actually been 9-5. There was an 8-4, a sunrise-6pm (construction), 7-3 (food service), 10-6... If you wanted to call me at work you'd need to guess, but you could safely assume that the chance was higher when the sun was out. Exactly what it'd be under a universal system.
The difference being that if I said "Call me at Foo:Bar O'Clock you'd call when your watch said that. You wouldn't have to lookup an offset chart to call into the company's international voice conference.
Business hours in Maine are already arbitrary. As they are everywhere. Nobody tells my companyt that they must be open between 9-5, they do that because everyone else locally does that. So what if 9-5 in my area was 1-9, or 47:30 to 80:30, or Xlort:7.2 to Jylar:13 after our alien overlords conquer us?
If you want to call a business in Maine you need to calculate the timezone offset (also the "Solar Offset") between you and Maine. You then do the math and figure out what 9-5 in Maine is in your area, and you try to reach them. In a universal system you'd still (for an unsolicited call) look up the solar offset and call them in the middle of their solar day - when most businesses are open.
The big benefit is that if they say "Call at X:Y", you know exactly what time it is in your area, X:Y.
Techies would run into this - we ssh into computers on the other side of the world. But non techies? How often do people set their coffee pots on Swiss time (ignoring the Swiss, for a moment)? They'd know they get up a Foo:Bar O'Clock because they need to be at work at Foo:Bar + 1h.
Moreover, synchronization would be trivial. Global teleconferences could start at one published time, without a time, a zone, and everyone else having to calculate the offset.
But there wouldn't be any communication difficulties. If you wanted to call someone you'd have to look at the solar offset chart, which, for ease, would probably be broken into 24 strips, conveniently 1 hour wide. Singapore will still be as far away as it is now.
If you want to make an unsolicited call (one where they didn't say "Call at X:Y") you'll need to know if they'll be there, so you look at the solar chart and say "Yeah, it's in the middle of their day, they'll be there".
The difference is that solicited calls (ones where they DO say "Call between X:Y and X2:Y2") would be much easier. You wouldn't have to look anything up to know when X:Y is, it's be the exact same X:Y that your watch shows. Let them decide what solar cycle they want to be on and you use that number, unmodified.
As for the battle over which timezone is "right", what does it matter? Everyone would wake up roughly when it was light out and go to bed roughly sixteen hours after that. Exactly like we do now. It wouldn't be called 8am anymore, but really, the last four jobs I've had have required me to get up at different times anyways. What's the difference between setting the clock for 6:00 and 57:00? People learn that in their area it gets light between 52-58, so when they hear those numbers it means the same thing.
It's just like Australians with snow. If they listen to North American songs about a white christmas they go mad. In fact, there's a whole agency of the government which exists just to modify foreign media and dub over these confusing bits. Oh wait, that was the sarcasm. In reality, they adjust quite well, and they know that if they're crossing the world to go skiing, they need to look up a seasonal offset.
Quick, from memory, if you want to call someone in Zimbabwe when they wake up at 8:00am, what time do you have to place the call? In a global system you'd simply call at the time they told you to call. Which could be 8:00, or 47.2345, or whatever. But your watch would tell you. See the benefit? Your watch would also tell Zimbabwe time. And New Zealand time, etc.
Companies would stay open the same time, relative to the sun, that they're open now, because people like driving in the daylight, etc. Also, there'd be local reference agencies - like everyone keeping the same hours as the local government.
Right now everyone works 9-5 (let's pretend) but my 9am doesn't mean anything in regard to your 9am. If you ask me to call you at 9am I need to know where you live.
If everyone used Swatch Internet time, or whatever, you'd say "Call me at 37:68" or whatever and I'd know EXACTLY what that meant, because it'd be the same time here.
What do I care if you get up at 36:50 and I'm calling in your morning, or if you're in the middle of the day? My syncronization concerns are over the minute you say when to call. If I have to guess I'd figure out your daylight offset and ask myself if I'd be at work at whatever time that would be - if I would, chances are you would.
This whole Chinese timezone thing is a non-issue. Of course, farmers like getting up with the light. That's only a problem if you mandate that farmers worldwide must work at 6am UTC or something. If you let the farmers get up when it's light out, who cares what the numbers are?
Assume that most people would be open for their solar day, when it's light out.
If you need to place a call to Zimbabwe now you look up the time, find the offset, and know what time it is there, and you guess if their business will be open at those times. In the new system you'd look up for offset, figure out if you'd be open in X hours, and guess about them based on that. Seems almost identical.
But, it offers a benefit of them being able to say "I work from X to Y" and you knowing what those times are because you work from X2 to Y2, and you can tell when those ranges overlap without doing any math. Then you say "Oh, it's almost Y, I should call the Zimbabwe office." Who cares what the number is?
Really, it's no more of a problem than months. It's summer in Australia when it's winter in North America, and vice versa. This doesn't mean that my Australian friends and I have horrible culture shock when I mention spring break or anything. But, to emulate the currently broken system they'd shift the months and have December when we have June - that way the "Winter" months would always be the same. Of course, whenever you wanted to know the date anywhere you'd need to figure out how many months ahead or behind they were... It'd be a mess.
The OS developer. Someone, somewhere along the line, should have realized that one application rarely has the need to overwrite data created by another application. In fact, if you think about it, very few apps need to know that other apps exist. Common APIs exist for handling functionality that many apps need (TAPI, MAPI, OpenGL, etc) but how often does Mozilla need to overwrite Photoshop files?
We really need to sandbox everything. Steel sandboxes that simple email worms can't penetrate. There's no reason why everything needs to run in one shared space (even with memory and file protection, everything is still partly visible). This extends to inter-app protection. Why doesn't each firefox tab run separately and just dock into the display window with some form of IPC?
So really, the burden should be on platform developers. OSes, Browsers (especially like Firefox that are trying to be an application delivery system), and the like.
Rule of law is a pretty fabulous invention, [...] the people who make it happen deserve respect.
Only if they do a respectable job. The ones that abuse their situation are a horrible burden on humanity. Ditto with dirty cops.
On the other hand, if you're polite, respectful, [...] you'll likely never have a problem.
Gotcha. Toe the line, don't speak unless spoken to, do so carefully and quickly. Do all this right and you'll probably avoid unfair treatment.
The problem is that corruption and incompotence should be mandatory firing offenses. Instead, the most corrupt officials get only minimal punishment and can usually continue to bring the weight of their station to bear on the whistle blower.
I agree with the earlier poster who said that a DRM success wouldn't be any good for the consumers. We are living in a period of DRM success - just look at anyone who owns DVDs and doesn't use DVD Shrink.
They are forced to watch trailers on many disks (Sixth Sense for one), can't screenshot or record a quick excerpt, and often can't play it to secondary video devices.
This world of DRM Success shows that nobody in charge cares about the customer. Stores refuse to take back broken movies like Sixth Sense, or even ones that for a software glitch refuse to work in computer players (I have a few that won't play in PowerDVD or Xine). And then there's the fact that using non-authorized software is illegal. I'm not allowed to try to fix this.
DRM is never going to not suck - there will always be reasons for wanting to prevent things that people are free to do with unprotected media like books (annotating, removing unwanted pages, skipping dull crap). Studios don't want you to do anything to their media, or watch it any way other than they intend. Allowances for consumer choice would be a hole their ideal total DRM, as such, they'll fight against you ever getting choice.
I see them all too often - Ayn Rand-reading, pro-MS fanboys who seem to think that because they come to an open source site with a non-open source view that they're suddenly clever. Sometimes going against group-think is clever, sometimes it's just different for the sake of being contrary.
Moreover, these posts inevitably contain the words "But, I'll be modded down because Slashdot SUCKS", which must be the secret words which draw out thousands of sub-moronic moderators who give them "+1 UNCONVENTIONAL".
No, Slashdot has no shortage of dipshits spouting any and all unconventional opinions. The article is about Linux is schools, or IPod offloading, and some "free thinker" who hates both comes along and whines about censorship when people tell them that they have absolutely nothing to contibute. Much like Trekkers who go into SW threads to bash and vice versa. The lack of pro-Kirk messages in a thread about SW3 plot holes isn't censorship, it's lack of relevance.
This shows the problem with having code in your projects that you don't control. id Software ran into this with Doom - they wanted to open source it but the sound code was written by someone else. I think they released it without this and the community replaced it, but that lack of control over their own product is scary.
Nobody would say that nVidia shouldn't write Mac drivers, simply because whatever third-party code they have wouldn't run on a Mac. We'd all say that they short-sightedly traded easier startup (other people's code) for a loss of flexibility and got bitten.
Well, ditto with Linux. One of Linux's requirements is open drivers. Apple makes certain demands simply by the APIs they provide, so does Linux. You code to the OS. Some OSes require internationalized text, others don't. It's true of all platforms - some cars require different spark-plugs than others. If your product provides a dummy spark-plug it'll require customization between cars. That doesn't mean that GM, whose spark-plug you first copied, is better than Toyota who uses a different one, it just means you support your different platforms differently. If you've signed a license agreement to always use a specific spark-plug, you've made a business choice to limit your market in trade for lower costs. Your lunch will be eaten by someone more agile.
I happen to like the open-source driver requirement. I've had many pieces of hardware over the years become obsolete simply because the companies aren't around to provide drivers. My Pro-Audio Spectrum 16 sound card and 1x CDROM, my Aureal Vortex sound card, etc. There are *still* Linux drivers for these, but not for Windows (which I was using at the time) because open source drivers are fairly easy to update. Windows drivers often work between 2k and XP, but the ones that don't will never be made to work. With Linux the binary driver never works between version, but a source driver will work much longer than 2k-XP.
At some point the huge preponderance of exploits, viruses, worms, on the Windows system has to be dealt with. Dealing with these issues does indeed affect the TCO.
I agree. It's really worse than you make it out to be - credits in a movie are often played over parts of a movie you have to pay attention to. It's not something you can skip cleanly.
Where credits make sense is something like IMDB, and in trailers, which would be much more appropriate to float the names of the actors over.
Cards like this are made for a few reasons. The first is that they're making the chips that will be in the consumer level systems in a year or two. This lets them build and test the product and drivers now instead of waiting until it's cheap.
The second, and most important, is that development houses need the hardware of the future. They don't care if it needs a small bar fridge attached to make it work - the consumer product will cost $200 in a year and will be what their customers will buy.
Then there's PR. It's why car companies sponsor Rally teams who use their cars. It says something that the fastest video card in the world is an nVidia, even if only for a week until ATI claims it, and so on.
I think you'll find that these cards are loss leaders - 512MB of the fastest ram, a smoking GPU, etc, likely cost much more than $1000. When the timing isn't as critical and any ram can be used - and likely comes on 1/4 as many chips, and when the GPU yields are better than the single-digits everything starts at, the card will start to sell, but as an already known product line that has stable (we hope) drivers and games written for them.
I've never understood why apps are relied on to uninstall themselves. Seems like a silly move considering that even legitimate apps crap out - can't rely on a broken product to remove itself cleanly. The OS needs to handle this. Make a system snapshot before and after, diff the two. Reverse that to uninstall.
Personally, I think we should use something like tarfs (Mount a tarball as a filesystem overlay) and every application should think it's installed on a completely fresh computer, by itself. When you want to remove the app you simply remove the overlay - it and all of its changes just vanish.
Gets harder when you implement a binary registry and make it so easy for apps to go crazy writing anything to anywhere.
That was true, but now the time to optimize a big game enough to matter through all the machine-specific tricks often isn't available. There are a lot of tricks that depend on having fixed specs - only have one resolution of textures, etc, but the specific register, tweaking code order optimizations just can't be done in a practical time and they are what used to make consoles so amazing. If it can't be done in the API, game developers aren't going to do it. In the days of the NES it was more practical - much of the code would be hand-tweaked ASM anyways.
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Well, what do you call abusive legal games? Threatening lawsuits that will supposedly be dropped, if only you'd start playing nice with the evil bastards that you harmed by posting the truth. And if not, they'll sue you for everything you're worth. Still without an actual statement of what they consider harmful.
Sounds almost like Traffic Power is a company with a useless service. That Traffic Power knows they have a useless service. And that Traffic Power specifically trains their representatives in lying to avoid painful questions. (Why they aren't listed on Google, do your tricks actually work, etc.)
So yeah, a company with absolutely no credibility sues someone, with the intention of driving legitimate comments offline by bankrupting anyone willing to share the truth and yeah, people do start talking about free speech being murdered.
This is as blatant as that Robert Novak thief who ran Pet Warehouse and sued people for reporting that he sent them dead pets. Assuming people can't afford to fight these bastards in court, I really wish they'd curb stomp them in real life. What good can ever come from letting a complete bastard like Max D Spilka (Traffic Power liar/lawyer) walk the earth? Sure, behind every dirty lawyer is a dirty client, but that client isn't capable of ruining hundreds of lives without the lawyer - imho the lawyers are the ones we should target. Worthless wastes of skin. Exactly what you'd expect from a company whose business is tricking people into going to sites that don't really offer what they want.
I certainly would not expect an unlocking site (something legal, but very disliked by the phone companies) to not keep records, because the phone companies could find some DMCA-like reason to get it from them. A better way to store the backup would be to let the user download it and upload it again for a restore.
However, having known about server logs, etc, I think this is a good thing to have happen. Let some punk kid get really embarassed, no real harm done. Not like some company files 10,000+ John Doe suits against various IPs for daring to unlock its phones, or something. This will illustrate how there really isn't any privacy on someone else's website. If you want it, get a few anonymizing proxies. Better your illusions shattered than living with a false sense of security.
Most of those questions without perfect answers are graded based on how hard you try (according to the tester) not how right you are. If they understood how to solve the problems they wouldn't be testers...
See it from our point of view. Someone gives you a hard problem, usually hard because it is based on millions of things you don't know (number of gas stations in the USA) and expects you to show a useful (to them - shades of grade three) train of logic to your final answer.
Things like this are good brain teasers, and there is a good correlation between brain-teaser ability and smarts, but not between "sit in a room with an interviewer and try to solve insolvable problems" and smarts. I've known comparatively dull people who are always solving complex logic problems but who get stumped by 'Pull' signs on door. Other people who are geniuses, but who have never practiced written logic problems. I wouldn't rely on these tests to pick people I wanted writing code with me.
I personally wouldn't test their syntax-level coding skill either, any idiot can write error-free C++ - it's not until it does something useful that it matters. At that, I'd probably discuss algorithms, coding style, debuging strategies, etc.
Google/Microsoft/Amazon apparently have too many resumes and have gotten creative in sorting them. Shame that nobody told them to focus on programming skill for programmers, etc.
I wouldn't argue that your rights are being violated, but I would say that it's a breach of contract and false advertising.
The casino offered you a game of chance/skill with the assumption that you could make money playing - nobody would play if the loses were guaranteed. If they throw you out for winning legitimately, they aren't really offering a chance to win, are they?
Casinos get enough of a free ride in our society - we shouldn't help them lie.
No, what's unreasonable is the willy-nilly selling of exclusive rights, even when they mean we have to enact draconian laws to censor your speech for a year. That's fucking ridiculous.
I'm going to boycot the olympics when the come to my area in 2010.
Trademark law is rapidly becoming bullshit, like most other areas of law. It started to keep people from pretending to be another company. Now it's being used to interfere with copyright cases ("Sure, the film clip is fair use, but our trademarked character is in there..."), and is spreading far beyond the narrow categories there were intended to be locked in. These days 'Coke' is a soft drink, but you'd be sued if you came out with a Coke Car, or a Coke Computer, despite the narrow nature of original trademarks.
Maybe it's just that the legal system (lawyers...) sucks. It's a conflict of interest to let someone write law when they're the ones who get paid for interpretting it.
The problem with your strategy is that "we", the non-rich, corporations or otherwise, developers are always going to be on the losing side in this battle. The patent system as it is doesn't offer any real benefit to the little guy. If Microsoft contested a patent of mine I'd be hooped, even if in the right - the patent might get bought by someone who could afford to defend it, but it wouldn't matter for me.
It may be hard to fight to dismantle the patent system, or overhaul it extensively, but that's the only way it'll ever actually be a benefit to society. Luckily, I think it'll collapse soon enough. We're firmly entering the information age and we're letting companies patent trivial algorithms that are used in all programs. Eventually nothing will be possible without infringing on some bogus patent. All companies with enough money to sue will be sued by the RAMBUSes and SCOs (same abuse, different system) of the day - to defeat these abusers, the former beneficiaries of the system (IBM, GE, 3M, etc) will, imho, have to destroy the system.
The idea of getting rid of up-front monopolies and going to royalties or something else isn't a new one. Like first-past-the-post voting - we don't do it because it's best, just because it sounded good at the time. If the patent system changed to a forced-licensing, industry-determined royalties system, you couldn't abuse it by squatting. If you did have a good idea it would be adopted and you'd get a check every year for an ammount based on the benefit to the users of your idea. If nobody used it, or did but didn't achieve any benefit from your work, you would get nothing. Pretty simple. It's not like the only option to the current patent system is anarchy with armed lawyers wandering the streets.
A rising tide floats all boats. Real capitalists know the economy isn't a zero-sum game.
Simply reverse the changes to copyright - 28 years is long, but livable. Make a requirement for copyright protection - either release the work unencrypted, or give the LoC an unecrypted copy to be distributed when it becomes public domain.
Disney, arguably one of the shining stars of the capitalist world, made their money borrowing heavily from the public domain. Requiring their copyrights to end in a reasonable time is no worse than a toll highway. Copyright law is "paid" for by the good it gives the people - the point of rewarding the author was simply to encourage the creation of more works. As I see it, there's a contract there - we the people give you these limited monopoly rights, provided you give us the right to use this thing royalty free when the monopoly runs out. Nothing communist about a contract, or suggesting that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law... Eh, comrade?
They could say the third thing, the one you forgot to mention.
- "Go out of business? Great! When was the last time a now-useless middleman removed himself from the market by choice instead of using the legal system to make them and their product either mandatory, or the only choice."
I'd really root for that last option. Distributors of information (music, books, VoiP packets) are a commodity. They should be trying to put in the lowest bid for delivering already sold information to the destination, not in trying to own and control all access to the information, even to the extent of restricting access to the customer's own property.
Many of these same questions will have to be answered by the author, who then sees all the costs (editor, proofreaders, etc). Likely though, these costs will not include printing, art, shipping, or a retail markup. So I suspect that an author won't need to charge $25 - $40 for a new novel, and instead $1 - $5. At small amounts, people are less likely to feel a financial desire to pirate, leaving only vengance motives and headache motives. The last two seem tied - if there's less headache in using the legit version (lower cost -> less need for crippling DRM) then there'll be fewer people who buy a copy that they can't use, have to break the DRM, and they keep doing so from spite.
I don't interact with these systems because I'm not in school, but if the posts on here are to be believed, this is what my problems would be.
First the slippery slope of university politics where SSNs are routinely used as student IDs, etc. While these devices will be intended to help students by allowing anonymous feedback, I feel they will soon be used to mark attendance at certain locations, to take grade-affecting quizzes with, and other inappropriate uses.
Second there's the annoyance of using the device. They're clunkier than 1970s wired TV remote controls. What could have been fifteen seconds writing a quick answer and dropping it off on the desk as you left turns into a minute of control waving and frantic button pushing. Then, to top it all off, most people have to pay for this.
Japanese kids fill out comment cards. Not as immediate, but much better than the nothing we do here. This need to gadgetize everything for some miniscule perceived gain is the same as with the electronic voting machines. Basically, if I'm going to be dehumanized by punching buttons gameshow style to determine my grades, don't insult me with a crappy system that wastes more time than it saves, costs me to use, and exposes me to a ton of security problems.
Fine, base it on the time the sun is highest in the sky. Even in 24h darkness that concept has meaning. Go four hours in either direction and you have the equivalent of an 8-4 shift. Was that hard?
Who cares if the sun is highest at 12:00, or 03:30, or whatever? You'd learn your hours the same way anyone learns their work hours - few of my past jobs have actually been 9-5. There was an 8-4, a sunrise-6pm (construction), 7-3 (food service), 10-6... If you wanted to call me at work you'd need to guess, but you could safely assume that the chance was higher when the sun was out. Exactly what it'd be under a universal system.
The difference being that if I said "Call me at Foo:Bar O'Clock you'd call when your watch said that. You wouldn't have to lookup an offset chart to call into the company's international voice conference.
Business hours in Maine are already arbitrary. As they are everywhere. Nobody tells my companyt that they must be open between 9-5, they do that because everyone else locally does that. So what if 9-5 in my area was 1-9, or 47:30 to 80:30, or Xlort:7.2 to Jylar:13 after our alien overlords conquer us?
If you want to call a business in Maine you need to calculate the timezone offset (also the "Solar Offset") between you and Maine. You then do the math and figure out what 9-5 in Maine is in your area, and you try to reach them. In a universal system you'd still (for an unsolicited call) look up the solar offset and call them in the middle of their solar day - when most businesses are open.
The big benefit is that if they say "Call at X:Y", you know exactly what time it is in your area, X:Y.
Techies would run into this - we ssh into computers on the other side of the world. But non techies? How often do people set their coffee pots on Swiss time (ignoring the Swiss, for a moment)? They'd know they get up a Foo:Bar O'Clock because they need to be at work at Foo:Bar + 1h.
Moreover, synchronization would be trivial. Global teleconferences could start at one published time, without a time, a zone, and everyone else having to calculate the offset.
But there wouldn't be any communication difficulties. If you wanted to call someone you'd have to look at the solar offset chart, which, for ease, would probably be broken into 24 strips, conveniently 1 hour wide. Singapore will still be as far away as it is now.
If you want to make an unsolicited call (one where they didn't say "Call at X:Y") you'll need to know if they'll be there, so you look at the solar chart and say "Yeah, it's in the middle of their day, they'll be there".
The difference is that solicited calls (ones where they DO say "Call between X:Y and X2:Y2") would be much easier. You wouldn't have to look anything up to know when X:Y is, it's be the exact same X:Y that your watch shows. Let them decide what solar cycle they want to be on and you use that number, unmodified.
As for the battle over which timezone is "right", what does it matter? Everyone would wake up roughly when it was light out and go to bed roughly sixteen hours after that. Exactly like we do now. It wouldn't be called 8am anymore, but really, the last four jobs I've had have required me to get up at different times anyways. What's the difference between setting the clock for 6:00 and 57:00? People learn that in their area it gets light between 52-58, so when they hear those numbers it means the same thing.
It's just like Australians with snow. If they listen to North American songs about a white christmas they go mad. In fact, there's a whole agency of the government which exists just to modify foreign media and dub over these confusing bits. Oh wait, that was the sarcasm. In reality, they adjust quite well, and they know that if they're crossing the world to go skiing, they need to look up a seasonal offset.
Quick, from memory, if you want to call someone in Zimbabwe when they wake up at 8:00am, what time do you have to place the call? In a global system you'd simply call at the time they told you to call. Which could be 8:00, or 47.2345, or whatever. But your watch would tell you. See the benefit? Your watch would also tell Zimbabwe time. And New Zealand time, etc.
You're inventing problems that don't exist.
Companies would stay open the same time, relative to the sun, that they're open now, because people like driving in the daylight, etc. Also, there'd be local reference agencies - like everyone keeping the same hours as the local government.
Right now everyone works 9-5 (let's pretend) but my 9am doesn't mean anything in regard to your 9am. If you ask me to call you at 9am I need to know where you live.
If everyone used Swatch Internet time, or whatever, you'd say "Call me at 37:68" or whatever and I'd know EXACTLY what that meant, because it'd be the same time here.
What do I care if you get up at 36:50 and I'm calling in your morning, or if you're in the middle of the day? My syncronization concerns are over the minute you say when to call. If I have to guess I'd figure out your daylight offset and ask myself if I'd be at work at whatever time that would be - if I would, chances are you would.
This whole Chinese timezone thing is a non-issue. Of course, farmers like getting up with the light. That's only a problem if you mandate that farmers worldwide must work at 6am UTC or something. If you let the farmers get up when it's light out, who cares what the numbers are?
Assume that most people would be open for their solar day, when it's light out.
If you need to place a call to Zimbabwe now you look up the time, find the offset, and know what time it is there, and you guess if their business will be open at those times. In the new system you'd look up for offset, figure out if you'd be open in X hours, and guess about them based on that. Seems almost identical.
But, it offers a benefit of them being able to say "I work from X to Y" and you knowing what those times are because you work from X2 to Y2, and you can tell when those ranges overlap without doing any math. Then you say "Oh, it's almost Y, I should call the Zimbabwe office." Who cares what the number is?
Really, it's no more of a problem than months. It's summer in Australia when it's winter in North America, and vice versa. This doesn't mean that my Australian friends and I have horrible culture shock when I mention spring break or anything. But, to emulate the currently broken system they'd shift the months and have December when we have June - that way the "Winter" months would always be the same. Of course, whenever you wanted to know the date anywhere you'd need to figure out how many months ahead or behind they were... It'd be a mess.
The OS developer. Someone, somewhere along the line, should have realized that one application rarely has the need to overwrite data created by another application. In fact, if you think about it, very few apps need to know that other apps exist. Common APIs exist for handling functionality that many apps need (TAPI, MAPI, OpenGL, etc) but how often does Mozilla need to overwrite Photoshop files?
We really need to sandbox everything. Steel sandboxes that simple email worms can't penetrate. There's no reason why everything needs to run in one shared space (even with memory and file protection, everything is still partly visible). This extends to inter-app protection. Why doesn't each firefox tab run separately and just dock into the display window with some form of IPC?
So really, the burden should be on platform developers. OSes, Browsers (especially like Firefox that are trying to be an application delivery system), and the like.
Rule of law is a pretty fabulous invention, [...] the people who make it happen deserve respect.
Only if they do a respectable job. The ones that abuse their situation are a horrible burden on humanity. Ditto with dirty cops.
On the other hand, if you're polite, respectful, [...] you'll likely never have a problem.
Gotcha. Toe the line, don't speak unless spoken to, do so carefully and quickly. Do all this right and you'll probably avoid unfair treatment.
The problem is that corruption and incompotence should be mandatory firing offenses. Instead, the most corrupt officials get only minimal punishment and can usually continue to bring the weight of their station to bear on the whistle blower.
I agree with the earlier poster who said that a DRM success wouldn't be any good for the consumers. We are living in a period of DRM success - just look at anyone who owns DVDs and doesn't use DVD Shrink.
They are forced to watch trailers on many disks (Sixth Sense for one), can't screenshot or record a quick excerpt, and often can't play it to secondary video devices.
This world of DRM Success shows that nobody in charge cares about the customer. Stores refuse to take back broken movies like Sixth Sense, or even ones that for a software glitch refuse to work in computer players (I have a few that won't play in PowerDVD or Xine). And then there's the fact that using non-authorized software is illegal. I'm not allowed to try to fix this.
DRM is never going to not suck - there will always be reasons for wanting to prevent things that people are free to do with unprotected media like books (annotating, removing unwanted pages, skipping dull crap). Studios don't want you to do anything to their media, or watch it any way other than they intend. Allowances for consumer choice would be a hole their ideal total DRM, as such, they'll fight against you ever getting choice.
I see them all too often - Ayn Rand-reading, pro-MS fanboys who seem to think that because they come to an open source site with a non-open source view that they're suddenly clever. Sometimes going against group-think is clever, sometimes it's just different for the sake of being contrary.
Moreover, these posts inevitably contain the words "But, I'll be modded down because Slashdot SUCKS", which must be the secret words which draw out thousands of sub-moronic moderators who give them "+1 UNCONVENTIONAL".
No, Slashdot has no shortage of dipshits spouting any and all unconventional opinions. The article is about Linux is schools, or IPod offloading, and some "free thinker" who hates both comes along and whines about censorship when people tell them that they have absolutely nothing to contibute. Much like Trekkers who go into SW threads to bash and vice versa. The lack of pro-Kirk messages in a thread about SW3 plot holes isn't censorship, it's lack of relevance.
This shows the problem with having code in your projects that you don't control. id Software ran into this with Doom - they wanted to open source it but the sound code was written by someone else. I think they released it without this and the community replaced it, but that lack of control over their own product is scary.
Nobody would say that nVidia shouldn't write Mac drivers, simply because whatever third-party code they have wouldn't run on a Mac. We'd all say that they short-sightedly traded easier startup (other people's code) for a loss of flexibility and got bitten.
Well, ditto with Linux. One of Linux's requirements is open drivers. Apple makes certain demands simply by the APIs they provide, so does Linux. You code to the OS. Some OSes require internationalized text, others don't. It's true of all platforms - some cars require different spark-plugs than others. If your product provides a dummy spark-plug it'll require customization between cars. That doesn't mean that GM, whose spark-plug you first copied, is better than Toyota who uses a different one, it just means you support your different platforms differently. If you've signed a license agreement to always use a specific spark-plug, you've made a business choice to limit your market in trade for lower costs. Your lunch will be eaten by someone more agile.
I happen to like the open-source driver requirement. I've had many pieces of hardware over the years become obsolete simply because the companies aren't around to provide drivers. My Pro-Audio Spectrum 16 sound card and 1x CDROM, my Aureal Vortex sound card, etc. There are *still* Linux drivers for these, but not for Windows (which I was using at the time) because open source drivers are fairly easy to update. Windows drivers often work between 2k and XP, but the ones that don't will never be made to work. With Linux the binary driver never works between version, but a source driver will work much longer than 2k-XP.
At some point the huge preponderance of exploits, viruses, worms, on the Windows system has to be dealt with. Dealing with these issues does indeed affect the TCO.
I agree. It's really worse than you make it out to be - credits in a movie are often played over parts of a movie you have to pay attention to. It's not something you can skip cleanly.
Where credits make sense is something like IMDB, and in trailers, which would be much more appropriate to float the names of the actors over.
Cards like this are made for a few reasons. The first is that they're making the chips that will be in the consumer level systems in a year or two. This lets them build and test the product and drivers now instead of waiting until it's cheap.
The second, and most important, is that development houses need the hardware of the future. They don't care if it needs a small bar fridge attached to make it work - the consumer product will cost $200 in a year and will be what their customers will buy.
Then there's PR. It's why car companies sponsor Rally teams who use their cars. It says something that the fastest video card in the world is an nVidia, even if only for a week until ATI claims it, and so on.
I think you'll find that these cards are loss leaders - 512MB of the fastest ram, a smoking GPU, etc, likely cost much more than $1000. When the timing isn't as critical and any ram can be used - and likely comes on 1/4 as many chips, and when the GPU yields are better than the single-digits everything starts at, the card will start to sell, but as an already known product line that has stable (we hope) drivers and games written for them.
I've never understood why apps are relied on to uninstall themselves. Seems like a silly move considering that even legitimate apps crap out - can't rely on a broken product to remove itself cleanly. The OS needs to handle this. Make a system snapshot before and after, diff the two. Reverse that to uninstall.
Personally, I think we should use something like tarfs (Mount a tarball as a filesystem overlay) and every application should think it's installed on a completely fresh computer, by itself. When you want to remove the app you simply remove the overlay - it and all of its changes just vanish.
Gets harder when you implement a binary registry and make it so easy for apps to go crazy writing anything to anywhere.
That was true, but now the time to optimize a big game enough to matter through all the machine-specific tricks often isn't available. There are a lot of tricks that depend on having fixed specs - only have one resolution of textures, etc, but the specific register, tweaking code order optimizations just can't be done in a practical time and they are what used to make consoles so amazing. If it can't be done in the API, game developers aren't going to do it. In the days of the NES it was more practical - much of the code would be hand-tweaked ASM anyways.