It's obvious they are malicious intent, just look at the way they handled it.
Their official representative told people to take what they got and lump it, because they aren't customers and TiVo doesn't care one bit about them.
He later backpeddled and said that was an accident (sure...) and that if you merely wait three months, your Tivo will function as expected again. (If you believe that they'll get it right, this time.)
If this was an accident they'd have appologized immediately and offered free service (which restores the unit to the proper functionality) for the duration of the problem.
They did neither. They're using fraudulent business practices, false advertising, and intimidation to run their business.
The clock drifts pretty horribly, from the description of users (1+ minutes per months, in three months you're missing the beginning of all your shows.)
There's no way to set the clock from the menus, so it's not merely like any other unset clock in your house. This one you CAN'T set.
So they tell people to leave it plugged in so it calls up and grabs the correct time.
(This also sends them the demographics, so if anyone ever says unsubscribed boxes are costing them money, they're lying (It's a fact, they report a tidy chunk of their income as sales of demographics.))
Not true. People can sue mail-order companies in either the person's state, or the company's state. By doing business across state lines, that company is liable to both sets of laws.
By spamming a washington resident you're sending your spam to washington where it is illegal.
This is different than making a webpage, which someone has to choose to view, because they commit the cross-border action.
If you're not a spammer, read that as a generic 'you'.
If I publish a webpage, you have to come look at it. I'd argue that it should be covered by my laws.
If I send you a copy, I force you to look at it, thus it should be covered under the most restrictive of my laws and your laws.
UCE is sent out to people who don't want it, and tricks them into viewing it. It makes sense to me that those people should be able to use the obscenity/spam laws of their community.
Your blatantly sexist remark is annoying. Should that not be correctly rephrased as "Chicks, too timid to defend themselves"? Or, do you withdraw the blatant generalization?
That study excludes the number of people injured in yet not killed. Most self-defense related shooting (in fact, nearly 95% of all hand-gun related shootings do not result in death) only injure the attacker.
I'm not arguing to protect any of my constitutional rights, I don't live in the US and don't own a gun. I'm replying to refute bad statistics and unfounded assumptions.
> Can you honestly claim that the US justice system is wrong on gun-related issues 98.2% of the time?
I don't know about those cases. But, in cases of self-defense claims, I do think the courts (in general) are often way too harsh on people defending themselves. I don't necessarily think you should keep shooting an attacker once they're down, but if they did attack you, I do believe you have the right to defend yourself, regardless of the life of the attacker. They, imho, give up their right to safety (and perhaps life) the minute they intend to harm or kill someone else.
> He actually goes so far as to refer to statistics about how a child is 4 times more likely to drown than be killed with a gun (gee, that makes a perfect case for having guns, doesn't it?
If the chance of someone drowning is very small, then yes, it does make a case for it. People have decided that swimming pools are acceptable, despite that risk. And swimming pools are only for recreation, never for anything as potentially useful as self-defense.
> Meanwhile, I suggest we give everyone nuclear weapons since your odds of dying of heart disease are better than your odds of dying of thermonuclear war:P
If those relative statistics were based on everyone already having nuclear weapons, it'd be different. You're arguing one way, then the other...
People already have guns, and the risk is low compared to X.
People don't have nukes, yet the risk (with nobody having them) is low.
The first says that guns are, comparatively, low-risk, the second doesn't indicate anything about the safety of nukes, merely the availability.
Most of the oldtimers on those forums own stock. Many of the older threads on there were about those people discussing the prospects, etc.
It's not suprising they want to rip other people off, they're greedy asses who want their stock to rise, regardless of the cost to anyone else.
The party-line is that the BB isn't a TiVo corporate board, but the administrator and most of the oldtimers there are stock-holders, and the funding for it has never been properly explained... It's a lot like those fake fan-sites for movies.
It's just a bunch of dishonest people looking to screw someone over as the best way to make a buck.
A timely fix, or compensation for the lack of proper service.
They could easily remedy this by providing free service to the affected people until the fix is available. The unit already makes the call, it wouldn't cost them a dime.
A candidate for the "Didn't even look at the link" award.
The phone line is for setting the time. TiVo didn't provide any other way to do it and the clock consistently drifts.
Without hacking it, there is *NO WAY* to set the time.
> "You all sound like a bunch of fucking whiny kids that can't handle a couple months without TV."
How about "A bunch of fucking whiny consumers who simply want the product that they paid for to work as advertised"? That's just ever so slightly more accurate.
> A conventional VCR will work just fine
Sure, if you want to find tapes, rewind to empty spots in the tape, deal deal lower-quality pictures, and not be able to pause live TV.
But, other than all that, yeah, it's just like a VCR.
But you know, I don't really give a shit. Even if it was exactly the same as a VCR, people paid money for it, they deserve it working as it was advertised.
If TiVo never intended the product to work without service, they shouldn't have sold it in Canada. The fact that they did is pretty strong proof that in the beginning (before their revisionist history) they did intend it to be a glorified VCR that would do more with a subscription, instead of their current party-line...
TiVo can claim anything they want, or rather, disclaim, but that doesn't make it legal.
If they sell a product that can do something, and force everyone to upgrade that product (post-purchase) to a product that doesn't do as much, they're liable.
They *broke* it, it no-longer does that they said it did when they sold it.
This three month wait is bullshit too. I'm sure they could compile a working version of the code, without the crippling, in a day or two. And then simply increment the version number and upgrade people again when they next call in.
Sure, they'd want to do a little testing to make sure they didn't accidentally break anything, but if they only remove nag screens it's not exactly rocket science or anything.
I work in a company that makes software-upgradeable devices. We hit this sort of problem before where we make a 'broken' release. We can usually fix it in two business days, sometimes less. And that's the time before the customer gets it, not before it makes it into testing or something.
TiVo is simply preying on the ignorant who don't know how easy software is to change. The people who don't understand that companies have no right to screw with your product after you buy it.
They need to release a fix inside of a week, or give these people free subscriptions for the three months.
If they don't, well, they'll lose a lot of customer support. I'll certainly add a 'Proof TiVo is run by thieves' page on my website in an effort to remove any future business they might ever get. Small potatoes maybe, except that stuff like this spreads so rapidly on the net...
I know you're just answering the "do I need to sign" but what you just said shows that shrink-wrap contracts aren't valid...
1) There's no meeting of minds because this implies knowledge beforehand.
2) There's no consideration. They aren't legally entitled to prevent you from using the software, so they can't offer it to you.
As soon as you buy something, you've got 100% rights to use it in any way it was advertised, or a reasonable person would believe it should be usable. (to paraphrase the law)
Re:Selling at a loss, big blue sticker, stupid peo
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They clearly did NOT (note, past tense) that the service was required. That's a recent change. Customers who bought original units were assured they'd work without the service - they even sold to people in Canada and other unsupported areas, which should prove that they intended this.
TiVo units contain a hardware bug where they lose time at aproximately a minute per month, there is no way to set this except by dialing in, which was allowed even for unsubscribed people.
The unit is broken (bad clock) and short of a recall, the best bet is to have them automatically update the time frequently. This is TiVos fault and their fiscal responsibility, imho.
As for this whole idiotic business model of selling for a los... It's TiVo's choice to do so, and it's their choice to require a contract or not. They didn't require a contract for services in the beginning, so people fairly bought those units wanting only the hardware.
The law only insists that each side in a contract get something, not that it ends up being profitable for both parties.
Would you accept it if you bought a P3-1Ghz with 1GB of RAM and 150GB of drive space for $1200, then had the company give you a P2-500 with 64MB because "you should have known that is was unreasonable to expect that much for that price" and that when you complained they told you to quit whining, or they'd disable the computer all-together?
So they made a deal that wasn't terribly profitable, they'll do better next time, or someone else will. Not my problem.
Companies have the same moral obligations as the shareholders. And vice versa.
This whole limited-liability bullshit has gone too far. Many people would be perfectly happy buying stock in a company that contracted killings for the mob, as long as they wouldn't be held liable and as long as they thought it was profitable.
Explain why customers, who can't buy a senator and get a law passed, should follow the laws that companies buy. Law and the society it enables are based on the expectation of fairness, the law is blind and all that. If the law works in your favour, why would I follow it?
This is made worse by companies with 'no moral obligation' in the eyes of their stockholders corrupting our legal system for a quick buck.
I really don't care what TiVo expected people to do. They sold a product that (as advertised) would work without a subscription. They're later going back and crippling that product, so that it no-longer works without subscription.
That's bait and switch, and is illegal. Plain and simple.
As a side note, I see great value in a tivo without listings, it's a VCR, except higher quality and of larger capacity. They advertised it as such, but with more features as well. I currently use a VCR, so a digital VCR would be a great purchase.
Now, as for poor TiVo, who we're supposed to feel so sorry for... Tough.
As a programmer I'm still supporting much of my early work. It needs more bugfixing and I negotiated worse contracts (less pay for fixing those bugs). But I *can't* ignore those unprofitable contracts. I entered into them honestly, they are the stepping stones that got me where I am today, and I'm legally and morally obligated to continue doing what I contracted to do.
I may not understand why some of my customers still prefer to use software I wrote in the late 80s, but I didn't sell it to them with a time limit, they're free to do what they will do.
So, understandably, I have little sympathy for TiVo. They're where they are today because they sold a ton of units, many to people who simply wanted a digital VCR. It is NOT acceptable to hang those customers out to dry now.
Especially since, if they wanted to have them stop calling in, they could simply allow for manual setting of the time and remove the nag screens, then people could happily use their units in the manner they intended, without any phone calls or future software updates.
This is actually worse than I stated, TiVo didn't just ignore old customers, they deliberately went out of their way to disable those old units that were functioning correctly.
And they act as if it's the customers fault, for buying a product and expecting it to work as advertised.
Companies will adapt, to a point. Hence the word "unreasonable".
And the parent company can only be sued in some cases.
If Yahoo-France does X, and gets sued, then they pack up and leave, France has a case against Yahoo-Parent. But if Yahoo-France paid for X, and left, then Yahoo-Parent does Y, which comes into France on the Internet, France is without any recourse.
Or rather, it comes down to cases like this Aussie suing a US company for actions in the US, baseless and in the end, destined to lose.
Yup. Same as the French are slowly (quickly?) reducing the number of companies willing to deal with them. It'll continue until the people demand otherwise.
I just can't wait until someone sues for access to content that has been blocked for their country, precisely because the provider had been sued for providing it...
If France sues the French subsidiary of Yahoo in an unreasonable way, Yahoo will simply pack up and leave. Nobody will fill their shoes. France either stops this behaviour, or ends up without an internet connection (or, a government sanctioned one at any rate). Either way, the world doesn't lose anything, because, who really wanted to talk to a bunch of arrogant censors anyways?
Ditto with Australia. If their courts allow them to punish a foreign company (by demanding payments to prevent seizure of local assets, presumably) then foreign companies will leave.
There's a reason nobody except oil companies does business in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm sure those 65000 characters would better represent any asian language than German or French is represented without their accents, yet speakers of those languages didn't pull this entitlement crap to make people support larger character sets.
No language is going to be properly represented, especially when you consider ancient forms, so we'll have to accept that nothing is perfect. We've run into diminishing returns and now people want to increase the complexity of the system a hundred-fold just to get some characters than only a thousandth of one percent of the population will ever know are missing, let along want to use in conversation.
There's no written language that more than 80% of the world population uses, so I stand behind my original estimate.
I'm not at all racist in what I say, I'm merely sick of cattering to the special interest groups. Especially the special interest groups that claim to be part of a larger group. (In this case, 99.999% of the population of the original subject's country couldn't give a shit about having ancient characters from a dead language in their URLs, it's *his* issue, not theirs, but he's making it seem like a race issue and oppression of the little guy.)
Anything a white guy wants, or someone who might be a white guy, is wrong, euro-centric, penis-dominated, and wrong.
Now anything a non-white, non-guy wants wants is automatically right.
Now a person whom is completely anonymous on the internet can be assumed to be white and male if they disagree with anything said by a non-white, non-male, or someone who lives outside of 'europe or north america'.
You know, there are a lot of reasons for disliking Unicode, and a lot of reasons for not wanting to waste time implementing a system which has 1) grown monstrously beyond original specs and 2) doesn't help you at all.
IMHO, you should use those ~65K characters and stop your pathetic sniveling. If you want a character set that supports more, make it yourself and get others to use it.
If you ever want anyone outside of your immediate family to use it, you'll have to make it worth their while.
What does the other 80% of the world get out of supporting your dead language? Uglier URLs? More bloated OSes? Slower web usage?
Sure sounds important to me.
And before you scream "Racist!", ask yourself if you have any proof, or if you're just pissed that I don't agree.
Oh gawd, just listen to the feelings on entitlement in that messages...
You want the ability to search through some insanely large character set, so to do so you're willing to force everyone else to make their communications much less efficient just so you can have a free ride.
You know, it's not a coincidence that the western world (using small variations on the roman character set) pretty well invented modern technology. It's only about a thousand times easier to process a smaller and simpler alphabet.
There's a reason we don't use prose to command computers, until all cheap desktop models come with the ability to understand natural language a stripped down and unambiguous command-set will be more efficient.
I've got a lot of characters I'd find handy if we were to implement a new standard, and I'd want to expand into basic pictograms (standard symbols, etc) as well. Now I realize this isn't interesting to other people, so I'm not going to jump up and down and shout "Racist" just because people aren't anxious to bloat a new standard just to appease me. If I want those features I'll make my own font and make it available with any works that I produce which would require it.
In short, grow up, the world does *not* own you anything. If you want it, do it yourself instead of crying when someone else doesn't.
Correct, the GPL does impose a restriction. That restriction is that you may not impose that any restrictions upon code based on that code.
What the GPL does not do is impose *any* restrictions on the users, only on someone wanting to make a derivative work. As that is something that is not allowed in the case of a regular copyrighted, program, this isn't much of a restriction. Indeed, the GPL offers the right to do many things you would otherwise be unable to do.
This is why most GPL supporters don't see the GPL as being restrictive, they see it as granting many freedoms. Perhaps other licenses (BSDL) offer more rights, but there's no such things as 'the most' rights... I could write a license where you also gain the right to marry my sisten, this doesn't suddenly mean that the BSDL is restrictive because it doesn't likewise offer this right.
So, the GPL places restrictions on the behavious of a licensee, but because licensing is optional, not required for users, and grants many rights, I think it's pretty unfair to call it restrictive in any way.
My company uses a lot of free software in the things we do, mainly modifying GNU tools to handle slight kernel extensions, etc.
We have used BSDL code in the past and our lawyers told us to not release the source code for our modifications. We might be held liable for it in some way, or we might discover some tiny use for it later that we couldn't properly exploit if it was public.
But when we started using GPL they didn't mind. They realized that following the GPL is a cost of business and that it's well worth it for us to not have to rewrite all that software ourselves.
If there's no requirement for our company to release source, the tiny possibility of future lawsuits keep us from going there (because there's no benefit to offset that risk). As soon as there's the smallest requirement for us to release source, we do. Lawyers require a cost/benefit analysis and won't do *anything* without something on the benefit side.
So in my experience, the GPL is a good thing. It got a lot more source released that the BSDL would have.
The BSDL is good for things you want people to incorporate into everything, like TCP/IP, or JPEG support, but for most other things, the GPL gets my vote.
The only demand the GPL places on a developer is that they don't restrict the use of their source code/application any further than you have restricted the use of yours.
It's completely voluntary. If you don't use GPLed code, you don't need to GPL your application.
If the best libraries out are under GPL, that's an incentive to use them, but nothing prevents your writing your own libraries. If *all* the libraries out are GPLed, you can still write your own, just like the original authors did.
The GPL can never make it harder to write proprietary software than it already is, well, than it is to do without ripping off someone else's code. But if you're a good programmer you shouldn't need to do that.
If having a closed source application is so important to you, write it yourself.
Hitler was elected. Milosevic was Elected. All US presidents have been elected. Democracies do go to was, at least the sham political systems that we call democracies.
In the last election I votes in, the party I voted for got 12% of the popular vote and 0% of the elected officials. The next party got 30% of the popular vote and 4% of the elected officials, the remaining party got 55% of the popular vote and 96% of the elected officials.
Even if you fixed that, it's still a party system where you can't get an independant into power, and if you did, they wouldn't have any responsibilities or power.
And then, it's a "representative democracy", meaning that I have to hope someone runs who represents my views. If not, I could end up completely unrepresented even if the person I voted for got in.
Then top this off with the fact that in a vote to declare war, it's not just the politicians who actually risk being sent off to fight who get to vote.
Democracies are anything but, and a populace intolerant of war doesn't stop any politician from voting for the draft and sending the completely unprepresented classes off to war.
If we say that 'democracies don't go to war' it's because we conveniently only look at rich countries, without realizing that the real reason they didn't go to war is because they don't think anyone else has anything worth taking. (When they do, like the US going to protect the oil supply) they're more than willing to spend low-class soldiers securing their financial future.
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It's obvious they are malicious intent, just look at the way they handled it.
Their official representative told people to take what they got and lump it, because they aren't customers and TiVo doesn't care one bit about them.
He later backpeddled and said that was an accident (sure...) and that if you merely wait three months, your Tivo will function as expected again. (If you believe that they'll get it right, this time.)
If this was an accident they'd have appologized immediately and offered free service (which restores the unit to the proper functionality) for the duration of the problem.
They did neither. They're using fraudulent business practices, false advertising, and intimidation to run their business.
They are timebombed...
The clock drifts pretty horribly, from the description of users (1+ minutes per months, in three months you're missing the beginning of all your shows.)
There's no way to set the clock from the menus, so it's not merely like any other unset clock in your house. This one you CAN'T set.
So they tell people to leave it plugged in so it calls up and grabs the correct time.
(This also sends them the demographics, so if anyone ever says unsubscribed boxes are costing them money, they're lying (It's a fact, they report a tidy chunk of their income as sales of demographics.))
Not true. People can sue mail-order companies in either the person's state, or the company's state. By doing business across state lines, that company is liable to both sets of laws.
By spamming a washington resident you're sending your spam to washington where it is illegal.
This is different than making a webpage, which someone has to choose to view, because they commit the cross-border action.
If you're not a spammer, read that as a generic 'you'.
If I publish a webpage, you have to come look at it. I'd argue that it should be covered by my laws.
If I send you a copy, I force you to look at it, thus it should be covered under the most restrictive of my laws and your laws.
UCE is sent out to people who don't want it, and tricks them into viewing it. It makes sense to me that those people should be able to use the obscenity/spam laws of their community.
Your blatantly sexist remark is annoying. Should that not be correctly rephrased as "Chicks, too timid to defend themselves"? Or, do you withdraw the blatant generalization?
:P
That study excludes the number of people injured in yet not killed. Most self-defense related shooting (in fact, nearly 95% of all hand-gun related shootings do not result in death) only injure the attacker.
I'm not arguing to protect any of my constitutional rights, I don't live in the US and don't own a gun. I'm replying to refute bad statistics and unfounded assumptions.
> Can you honestly claim that the US justice system is wrong on gun-related issues 98.2% of the time?
I don't know about those cases. But, in cases of self-defense claims, I do think the courts (in general) are often way too harsh on people defending themselves. I don't necessarily think you should keep shooting an attacker once they're down, but if they did attack you, I do believe you have the right to defend yourself, regardless of the life of the attacker. They, imho, give up their right to safety (and perhaps life) the minute they intend to harm or kill someone else.
> He actually goes so far as to refer to statistics about how a child is 4 times more likely to drown than be killed with a gun (gee, that makes a perfect case for having guns, doesn't it?
If the chance of someone drowning is very small, then yes, it does make a case for it. People have decided that swimming pools are acceptable, despite that risk. And swimming pools are only for recreation, never for anything as potentially useful as self-defense.
> Meanwhile, I suggest we give everyone nuclear weapons since your odds of dying of heart disease are better than your odds of dying of thermonuclear war
If those relative statistics were based on everyone already having nuclear weapons, it'd be different. You're arguing one way, then the other...
People already have guns, and the risk is low compared to X.
People don't have nukes, yet the risk (with nobody having them) is low.
The first says that guns are, comparatively, low-risk, the second doesn't indicate anything about the safety of nukes, merely the availability.
This is another example of misused statistics.
Most of the oldtimers on those forums own stock. Many of the older threads on there were about those people discussing the prospects, etc.
It's not suprising they want to rip other people off, they're greedy asses who want their stock to rise, regardless of the cost to anyone else.
The party-line is that the BB isn't a TiVo corporate board, but the administrator and most of the oldtimers there are stock-holders, and the funding for it has never been properly explained... It's a lot like those fake fan-sites for movies.
It's just a bunch of dishonest people looking to screw someone over as the best way to make a buck.
So, who cares? Are we to blame for their lousy business models?
These people paid money for their TiVo, and have given TiVo demographics to sell.
They are customers with all the rights due any other customer.
A timely fix, or compensation for the lack of proper service.
They could easily remedy this by providing free service to the affected people until the fix is available. The unit already makes the call, it wouldn't cost them a dime.
A candidate for the "Didn't even look at the link" award.
The phone line is for setting the time. TiVo didn't provide any other way to do it and the clock consistently drifts.
Without hacking it, there is *NO WAY* to set the time.
> "You all sound like a bunch of fucking whiny kids that can't handle a couple months without TV."
How about "A bunch of fucking whiny consumers who simply want the product that they paid for to work as advertised"? That's just ever so slightly more accurate.
> A conventional VCR will work just fine
Sure, if you want to find tapes, rewind to empty spots in the tape, deal deal lower-quality pictures, and not be able to pause live TV.
But, other than all that, yeah, it's just like a VCR.
But you know, I don't really give a shit. Even if it was exactly the same as a VCR, people paid money for it, they deserve it working as it was advertised.
If TiVo never intended the product to work without service, they shouldn't have sold it in Canada. The fact that they did is pretty strong proof that in the beginning (before their revisionist history) they did intend it to be a glorified VCR that would do more with a subscription, instead of their current party-line...
TiVo can claim anything they want, or rather, disclaim, but that doesn't make it legal.
If they sell a product that can do something, and force everyone to upgrade that product (post-purchase) to a product that doesn't do as much, they're liable.
They *broke* it, it no-longer does that they said it did when they sold it.
This three month wait is bullshit too. I'm sure they could compile a working version of the code, without the crippling, in a day or two. And then simply increment the version number and upgrade people again when they next call in.
Sure, they'd want to do a little testing to make sure they didn't accidentally break anything, but if they only remove nag screens it's not exactly rocket science or anything.
I work in a company that makes software-upgradeable devices. We hit this sort of problem before where we make a 'broken' release. We can usually fix it in two business days, sometimes less. And that's the time before the customer gets it, not before it makes it into testing or something.
TiVo is simply preying on the ignorant who don't know how easy software is to change. The people who don't understand that companies have no right to screw with your product after you buy it.
They need to release a fix inside of a week, or give these people free subscriptions for the three months.
If they don't, well, they'll lose a lot of customer support. I'll certainly add a 'Proof TiVo is run by thieves' page on my website in an effort to remove any future business they might ever get. Small potatoes maybe, except that stuff like this spreads so rapidly on the net...
I know you're just answering the "do I need to sign" but what you just said shows that shrink-wrap contracts aren't valid...
1) There's no meeting of minds because this implies knowledge beforehand.
2) There's no consideration. They aren't legally entitled to prevent you from using the software, so they can't offer it to you.
As soon as you buy something, you've got 100% rights to use it in any way it was advertised, or a reasonable person would believe it should be usable. (to paraphrase the law)
They clearly did NOT (note, past tense) that the service was required. That's a recent change. Customers who bought original units were assured they'd work without the service - they even sold to people in Canada and other unsupported areas, which should prove that they intended this.
TiVo units contain a hardware bug where they lose time at aproximately a minute per month, there is no way to set this except by dialing in, which was allowed even for unsubscribed people.
The unit is broken (bad clock) and short of a recall, the best bet is to have them automatically update the time frequently. This is TiVos fault and their fiscal responsibility, imho.
As for this whole idiotic business model of selling for a los... It's TiVo's choice to do so, and it's their choice to require a contract or not. They didn't require a contract for services in the beginning, so people fairly bought those units wanting only the hardware.
The law only insists that each side in a contract get something, not that it ends up being profitable for both parties.
Would you accept it if you bought a P3-1Ghz with 1GB of RAM and 150GB of drive space for $1200, then had the company give you a P2-500 with 64MB because "you should have known that is was unreasonable to expect that much for that price" and that when you complained they told you to quit whining, or they'd disable the computer all-together?
So they made a deal that wasn't terribly profitable, they'll do better next time, or someone else will. Not my problem.
Companies have the same moral obligations as the shareholders. And vice versa.
This whole limited-liability bullshit has gone too far. Many people would be perfectly happy buying stock in a company that contracted killings for the mob, as long as they wouldn't be held liable and as long as they thought it was profitable.
Explain why customers, who can't buy a senator and get a law passed, should follow the laws that companies buy. Law and the society it enables are based on the expectation of fairness, the law is blind and all that. If the law works in your favour, why would I follow it?
This is made worse by companies with 'no moral obligation' in the eyes of their stockholders corrupting our legal system for a quick buck.
I really don't care what TiVo expected people to do. They sold a product that (as advertised) would work without a subscription. They're later going back and crippling that product, so that it no-longer works without subscription.
That's bait and switch, and is illegal. Plain and simple.
As a side note, I see great value in a tivo without listings, it's a VCR, except higher quality and of larger capacity. They advertised it as such, but with more features as well. I currently use a VCR, so a digital VCR would be a great purchase.
Now, as for poor TiVo, who we're supposed to feel so sorry for... Tough.
As a programmer I'm still supporting much of my early work. It needs more bugfixing and I negotiated worse contracts (less pay for fixing those bugs). But I *can't* ignore those unprofitable contracts. I entered into them honestly, they are the stepping stones that got me where I am today, and I'm legally and morally obligated to continue doing what I contracted to do.
I may not understand why some of my customers still prefer to use software I wrote in the late 80s, but I didn't sell it to them with a time limit, they're free to do what they will do.
So, understandably, I have little sympathy for TiVo. They're where they are today because they sold a ton of units, many to people who simply wanted a digital VCR. It is NOT acceptable to hang those customers out to dry now.
Especially since, if they wanted to have them stop calling in, they could simply allow for manual setting of the time and remove the nag screens, then people could happily use their units in the manner they intended, without any phone calls or future software updates.
This is actually worse than I stated, TiVo didn't just ignore old customers, they deliberately went out of their way to disable those old units that were functioning correctly.
And they act as if it's the customers fault, for buying a product and expecting it to work as advertised.
Companies will adapt, to a point. Hence the word "unreasonable".
And the parent company can only be sued in some cases.
If Yahoo-France does X, and gets sued, then they pack up and leave, France has a case against Yahoo-Parent. But if Yahoo-France paid for X, and left, then Yahoo-Parent does Y, which comes into France on the Internet, France is without any recourse.
Or rather, it comes down to cases like this Aussie suing a US company for actions in the US, baseless and in the end, destined to lose.
Yup. Same as the French are slowly (quickly?) reducing the number of companies willing to deal with them. It'll continue until the people demand otherwise.
I just can't wait until someone sues for access to content that has been blocked for their country, precisely because the provider had been sued for providing it...
This is self-regulating.
If France sues the French subsidiary of Yahoo in an unreasonable way, Yahoo will simply pack up and leave. Nobody will fill their shoes. France either stops this behaviour, or ends up without an internet connection (or, a government sanctioned one at any rate). Either way, the world doesn't lose anything, because, who really wanted to talk to a bunch of arrogant censors anyways?
Ditto with Australia. If their courts allow them to punish a foreign company (by demanding payments to prevent seizure of local assets, presumably) then foreign companies will leave.
There's a reason nobody except oil companies does business in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm sure those 65000 characters would better represent any asian language than German or French is represented without their accents, yet speakers of those languages didn't pull this entitlement crap to make people support larger character sets.
No language is going to be properly represented, especially when you consider ancient forms, so we'll have to accept that nothing is perfect. We've run into diminishing returns and now people want to increase the complexity of the system a hundred-fold just to get some characters than only a thousandth of one percent of the population will ever know are missing, let along want to use in conversation.
There's no written language that more than 80% of the world population uses, so I stand behind my original estimate.
I'm not at all racist in what I say, I'm merely sick of cattering to the special interest groups. Especially the special interest groups that claim to be part of a larger group. (In this case, 99.999% of the population of the original subject's country couldn't give a shit about having ancient characters from a dead language in their URLs, it's *his* issue, not theirs, but he's making it seem like a race issue and oppression of the little guy.)
Whoops, here comes the racism...
Anything a white guy wants, or someone who might be a white guy, is wrong, euro-centric, penis-dominated, and wrong.
Now anything a non-white, non-guy wants wants is automatically right.
Now a person whom is completely anonymous on the internet can be assumed to be white and male if they disagree with anything said by a non-white, non-male, or someone who lives outside of 'europe or north america'.
You know, there are a lot of reasons for disliking Unicode, and a lot of reasons for not wanting to waste time implementing a system which has 1) grown monstrously beyond original specs and 2) doesn't help you at all.
IMHO, you should use those ~65K characters and stop your pathetic sniveling. If you want a character set that supports more, make it yourself and get others to use it.
If you ever want anyone outside of your immediate family to use it, you'll have to make it worth their while.
What does the other 80% of the world get out of supporting your dead language? Uglier URLs? More bloated OSes? Slower web usage?
Sure sounds important to me.
And before you scream "Racist!", ask yourself if you have any proof, or if you're just pissed that I don't agree.
Oh gawd, just listen to the feelings on entitlement in that messages...
You want the ability to search through some insanely large character set, so to do so you're willing to force everyone else to make their communications much less efficient just so you can have a free ride.
You know, it's not a coincidence that the western world (using small variations on the roman character set) pretty well invented modern technology. It's only about a thousand times easier to process a smaller and simpler alphabet.
There's a reason we don't use prose to command computers, until all cheap desktop models come with the ability to understand natural language a stripped down and unambiguous command-set will be more efficient.
I've got a lot of characters I'd find handy if we were to implement a new standard, and I'd want to expand into basic pictograms (standard symbols, etc) as well. Now I realize this isn't interesting to other people, so I'm not going to jump up and down and shout "Racist" just because people aren't anxious to bloat a new standard just to appease me. If I want those features I'll make my own font and make it available with any works that I produce which would require it.
In short, grow up, the world does *not* own you anything. If you want it, do it yourself instead of crying when someone else doesn't.
You didn't answer the question, "how is this specific to the GPL?"
If nVidia can't release 3rd party source-code then they can't BSDL it, put it in the public domain, or GPL it. It's all off-limits.
So how can the GPL be to blame?
Correct, the GPL does impose a restriction. That restriction is that you may not impose that any restrictions upon code based on that code.
What the GPL does not do is impose *any* restrictions on the users, only on someone wanting to make a derivative work. As that is something that is not allowed in the case of a regular copyrighted, program, this isn't much of a restriction. Indeed, the GPL offers the right to do many things you would otherwise be unable to do.
This is why most GPL supporters don't see the GPL as being restrictive, they see it as granting many freedoms. Perhaps other licenses (BSDL) offer more rights, but there's no such things as 'the most' rights... I could write a license where you also gain the right to marry my sisten, this doesn't suddenly mean that the BSDL is restrictive because it doesn't likewise offer this right.
So, the GPL places restrictions on the behavious of a licensee, but because licensing is optional, not required for users, and grants many rights, I think it's pretty unfair to call it restrictive in any way.
My company uses a lot of free software in the things we do, mainly modifying GNU tools to handle slight kernel extensions, etc.
We have used BSDL code in the past and our lawyers told us to not release the source code for our modifications. We might be held liable for it in some way, or we might discover some tiny use for it later that we couldn't properly exploit if it was public.
But when we started using GPL they didn't mind. They realized that following the GPL is a cost of business and that it's well worth it for us to not have to rewrite all that software ourselves.
If there's no requirement for our company to release source, the tiny possibility of future lawsuits keep us from going there (because there's no benefit to offset that risk). As soon as there's the smallest requirement for us to release source, we do. Lawyers require a cost/benefit analysis and won't do *anything* without something on the benefit side.
So in my experience, the GPL is a good thing. It got a lot more source released that the BSDL would have.
The BSDL is good for things you want people to incorporate into everything, like TCP/IP, or JPEG support, but for most other things, the GPL gets my vote.
The only demand the GPL places on a developer is that they don't restrict the use of their source code/application any further than you have restricted the use of yours.
It's completely voluntary. If you don't use GPLed code, you don't need to GPL your application.
If the best libraries out are under GPL, that's an incentive to use them, but nothing prevents your writing your own libraries. If *all* the libraries out are GPLed, you can still write your own, just like the original authors did.
The GPL can never make it harder to write proprietary software than it already is, well, than it is to do without ripping off someone else's code. But if you're a good programmer you shouldn't need to do that.
If having a closed source application is so important to you, write it yourself.
I beg to differ...
Hitler was elected. Milosevic was Elected. All US presidents have been elected. Democracies do go to was, at least the sham political systems that we call democracies.
In the last election I votes in, the party I voted for got 12% of the popular vote and 0% of the elected officials. The next party got 30% of the popular vote and 4% of the elected officials, the remaining party got 55% of the popular vote and 96% of the elected officials.
Even if you fixed that, it's still a party system where you can't get an independant into power, and if you did, they wouldn't have any responsibilities or power.
And then, it's a "representative democracy", meaning that I have to hope someone runs who represents my views. If not, I could end up completely unrepresented even if the person I voted for got in.
Then top this off with the fact that in a vote to declare war, it's not just the politicians who actually risk being sent off to fight who get to vote.
Democracies are anything but, and a populace intolerant of war doesn't stop any politician from voting for the draft and sending the completely unprepresented classes off to war.
If we say that 'democracies don't go to war' it's because we conveniently only look at rich countries, without realizing that the real reason they didn't go to war is because they don't think anyone else has anything worth taking. (When they do, like the US going to protect the oil supply) they're more than willing to spend low-class soldiers securing their financial future.