So gracious of them to force me to use their validation service when someone wants to play on a server I host.
So I cracked the server. Now it doesn't check.
In a forum on Scary's, one of the id guys claimed I was breaking the law when I mentioned this, yet he was curiously silent when I asked him which law... All I'm doing it modifying software that I own, it's like writing in the margins of a book that I own.
When you buy software, you buy the right to use that software. It's *exactly* the same as buying a book.
There a no further restrictions placed on you.
If you can deface the book, you can deface the software.
If you can sell the book, you can sell the software.
If you find a page of a book offensive, you can rip that page out. If you find a CD-check offensive, you can remove it.
The DMCA says otherwise, but that's obvious. The movie industry bribed politicians and judges to pass it and uphold it. (Kaplan *is* on the take.)
The software industry is TRYING to take your rights away with the UCITA, making shrink-wrap licenses legal. But that just goes to show that they obviously aren't now, or they wouldn't be spending so much bribe money trying to pass a new law.
(Bribes = Campaign Contributions. In any sensible country people are locked up for "contributing" money to a politician. And so are the politicians if they accept it.)
I bought a dish recently (for ExpressVu) and I own all of the equipment. I didn't bother reading any of the paper in the box; they might claim otherwise, but they'd be dead wrong.
If you buy something you own it, unless you agree otherwise before you buy it.
Seeing as how nobody said anything before I bought the system (or when I registered for service) about a contract, let alone specifics of it, I'm not bound by it.
Thus, I own the smart-card in my set and I can do anything I want to it.
So if somebody put in a hearing aid, after seeing a street-corner musician, they'd be obligated to pay?
The fact is that Hughes is broadcasting to everyone, the same as that street-corner musician. If people want to listen to either, they're entitled. They don't even have to have the same intent as the sender. You could sample the DirectTV signal and use it as an encryption key, if you wanted. Or watch a decoded picture, or anything.
Imagine if I had a business model where every day I published huge columns of numbers in the newspaper, for everyone to read. And then, I charged people for a key, saying which stock each column of numbers was refering to. (And I kept shuffling the columns around.)
Would it be illegal for you to read the newspaper, recognize a few prices, figure out my pattern, and then use my numbers?
It wouldn't, and it's not illegal in any other similar circumstances.
There are NO costs to Hughes if someone buys a dish/receiver/hacked card, and starts receiving the programming.
They might not make a sale, but that sale isn't a guaranteed thing.
For instance, I'd never pay more than $20 a month for TV (and even that's a lot, imho). So if I was given a hacked card I'd use it, but it wouldn't be a lost sale because I wouldn't have paid in the first place.
It's the same thing as piracy. The SPA counts the number of counterfit MS Windows CDs in shops in Asia and then says they all represent a loss, of the full cover price.
This is wrong in two ways. The companies make about 1/4 of MSRP on a program. So at best those figures are four times higher. And the second mistake is to assume that each of those will replace a legitimate sale.
I might pay $20 to $50 for Office 2000, but there's no way I'm paying many hundreds of dollars for it. Ditto with Win2k, etc.
But the SPA expects people whose annual incomes are barely twice the price of the software, to buy a legitimate copy. And when they don't, they assume that they would have, had it not been for a pirated copy.
1) Hughes doesn't OWN any spectrum. They lease the right to use it. There are significant differences with these cases.
1.1) If they did own it, why would I care? Unless they paid me, that is. They're using a public resource and claiming nobody has the right to listen without their permission. That'd be like selling the right to use the color blue to some company and forbidding anyone to use it.
2) A expectation of privacy is insane when you're handing the signal out. Even if it's illegal to listen, criminals don't care (by definition), so if you're afraid of "criminal interception" you can't expect privacy. You may encrypt it, but that's like whispering - in a crowd. It might help, but is by no means a guarantee.
3) Dunno about Hughes, but when I *bought* my dish and receiver, I *bought* the smartcard. (They may think otherwise, but I wasn't told when I paid for it, so I own it, 100%, no question.)
3.1) Sure, they have copyright on the code in the card. But that's pretty meaningless in this situation.
3.1.1) They sold the card with the code in it. That's also selling implicit rights to use the code, and to modify it (you can write in a book...)
3.1.2) Any code that performs a function can be rewritten by the hackers, reverse engineering it gets around copyright issues.
3.1.2.1) Where code can't be rewritten, it's not expressive, and not copyrightable. (If I write code to do something and it's the only way that thing can be done, I had no lattitude in writing it, so it's not expressive.)
4) US law regarding listening to cellphone calls is a worldwide joke. Instead of actually making the calls private, the government passed useless laws which said that it's criminal to do.
4.1) Hughes is broadcasting outside of the US, so they can't expect US laws to protect them.
It comes down to, if they broadcast it, everyone has the right to listen to it. And if someone listens to something, they have to right to try to interpret it. (Can you imagine if it was illegal for you to listen to someone shouting across the road, or that if they spoke in pig-latin, it'd be illegal to try to interpret that? That's what US laws are saying about radio transmissions.)
Now, US laws like the DMCA might forbid this, but who really cares about US laws? Even your own citizens are fully aware that laws like the DMCA and UCITA are a direct product of wide-scale bribery.
Laws may in some cases reflect moral behaviour, but not in the USA.
Nobody would be upset if you did all you could to release as much source-code as possible. Especially if you were hampered not by YOUR desire to keep the code closed, but by that of a clueless company.
You've already finished it (from the sounds of it) but had you been starting now, I'd say that it likely would have been a lot easier if you could have borrowed GPLed code for your tasks. That would probably have ofset any lost time involved in breaking out the device specific routines into a seperate file.
It honestly doesn't sound like an application with a wide market, so don't sweat it.
If I write a program for my own use, I'll send the binary to a friend of testing, without worrying about this technically being distribution, etc. Ditto with something I wrote for myself that someone else wanted a copy of.
I'd only call it distribution if I was offering it to other people, on a web page or something.
That may not technically be the correct meaning, but in the case of a limited audience app, I don't think it matters. (While a high percentage of your friends might use it, I doubt many people worldwide have ever heard of FAI, let alone need to interface with hardware they certified.)
There's no reason to disallow GPLed code, except for license nazis who hate RMS.
If I write a game by using 50% GPLed code, I'll get that game out a lot faster. But I'll have to GPL the game source and release it.
If I change my mind, I can simply rewrite that 50% that I borrowed and then I'm free of the GPL.
You can't revoke a license. If you release something under any license you can't change your mind, GPL or BSD, or whatever. But you can relicense your portion of the source. That is, simply rerelease the code with a new license. Or, in this case, remove the GPLed code and then don't release the source.
But, imho, it's pretty sleazy to use open source code to write a game and then close the project when it gets popular. If you used community resources to write something, you should help the community by releasing your code. To do otherwise is terribly greedy.
Counterstrike (to use your example) would still sell just as many copies if it was open sourced. All the content (art, maps, models, etc) is copyrighted quite seperately from the GPL. To release the source code wouldn't involve giving a working copy of the game away.
Wow, I didn't think any CPU out was fast enough for realtime DiVX compression, especially seeing as how it takes a 600Mhz CPU to reliably playback a DiVX encoded movie.
Ok, any good TV-in. If all the card needs to do is capture and there's no compressor codec in hardware, then anything with video in should be fine. I've got an Asus GeForce with video in.
Then, Virtual Dub takes care of starting that, with any sort of automation program to control the scheduling.
Ok, the DiVX codec I knew, but the lossless one is a good suggestion for when I want to grab some cool clips from my favorite movies and a few MBs don't matter.
Here I was planning to have to record uncompressed (or some low-compression lossless) and DiVX later, over a few hours. This'll certainly save temp space on the drive.
Thanks for all the links, that was a very helpful post!
What topic would that be? That sites that depend on advertising are going to go away if the advertisers do?
Won't bother me.
I pay for my internet account, which include a lot of web traffic (disk space is essentially free until you hit a gig.) If I have any content that I benefit from having people see, I can host it without advertising. And in the internet culture, if my website gets too many hits, people will mirror it for me because they'll find it useful.
This may not work for Slashdot, or SomethingAwful, but then, if their users are unwilling to fund them, doesn't that say something about their perceived value? If he can't afford the bandwidth to reach people maybe he should either let people mirror the work or take it off the net.
It has often been said that money is the most sincere form of flattery, if nobody is willing to donate, they obviously don't care. And with sites like FairTunes (who aren't limited to music) appearing, anyone who wants to can help pay someone's bills.
Personally I find Something Awful quite funny, but then I read about fifteen net comics on a semi-regular basis and The Onion and other satire sites. SA is the quality of work that used to be free. Moreover, it's the quality of work that I would release for free. And yes, I am being honest here. I've written at least six freeware utilities over the years for various tasks from pulling files off of Apple ][ disk images to image conversion.
The net got along just fine before advertising, and it'll get along just fine after advertising. If, that is, advertising goes away. The net may be more popular these days but almost everything I want to do on the net has remained unchanged since the old days. Then you had to FTP to someone's site to grab the net comic, but they still existed. The main new things are banner ads, lawyers, spam, and millions of consumers (not creators) of content.
Few things make me happier than seeing some dot-com that spent millions on domain names and lawsuit over domain names, and lawyers, going out of business. Maybe if they'd saved the money they dumped into super-bowl ads and lawsuits they could afford to pay their employees. Then all they'd need would be a business plan and a product.
They could ask people to donate webspace. If my favorite net comics asked, I'd be willing to let them use the bandwidth that I pay for but don't actually use.
If the site is so popular as to cost $1500 a month to host (which seems high, considering you could get an unmetered T1 for less than that) then you should have enough readers to ask for help.
Look to the old model for clues. Someone would write a FAQ and they'd send it out. People would mirror it and send a link to the author. That author would then include the mirror links into the document so that future readers could use the mirror sites. Then if everyone picked a random link (as you should try to do when using mirrors - or the one closest to you) the bandwidth would be shared and nobody would have to pay extra.
Only if the author wanted to keep the only distributable copy of the work would they have to host the whole thing themselves. If the goal is to draw a comic and get it out to the people, to become famous, or just share the fun, then just distribute the comics.
Kevin and Kell (one netcomic I read) does this. You can download a zip file of all of the comics (well, a year at a time) to save bandwidth to the site. The author has effectively said by doing this that they care much more about people reading the comic (and probably buying a book, or asking their newspaper to carry the comic, etc) than they do about page views. I'd certainly be willing to mirror this zipfile if asked and I'm sure many other fans would agree.
Why doesn't your friend find an ISP with web hosting?
If her site is so popular as to attracts thousands of visitors she could probably get some of them to host some of the site. Perhaps she could have various people host the graphics for example. That way she wouldn't be providing all the bandwidth.
If her site is even bigger than that, maybe it's something so useful that a university or other institution will decide to host it. (Like a FAQ, or a foo-help group.)
That would completely avoid the need to go to popups (which any user with WebWasher (or programming skills) doesn't even see) or ask for cash donations.
If she's unwilling, well there IS the option of just paying for the web hosting.
Nope, not that google could find. But I did find a great quote.
"as when the Ender novels are rejected as neo-Hitlerian, male-oriented power-fantasies perpetrated by a misogynistic, myopic, militaristic anti-feminist (Radford);"
Wow, *slam*.
If you have this article, please scan it and post it. I doubt the magazine would care, being out of business and all.
And your friend would probably like it, reaching a wider audience.
Neither did market forces make lead turn into gold...
But of the reasonable outcomes, the best happened. Beta's quality was better than VHS, but VHS's convenience and price was much better.
Of the systems, the best overall system won.
Mac's may be nicer (the high-end ones) and more consistently made than cheap PCs, but the fact that they cost three times as much means that they aren't the 'best' anymore than a Cray is the 'best'. They have a specific function they are good for, but price is much more important than small gains in consistency and quality, especially when those come only with a closed platform you can't tinker with.
If digital video protection goes too far, people will stop watching TV in favor of content from the net, etc. Not everything will be protected, mainly because the barriers to new content providers are too high, so there'll always be ample unprotected media.
Some book publishers may start using that nasty shiny purple paper (the stuff used in code wheels years ago) for copy protection. None of their six customers will ever OCR that book. Other companies like Baen will release the book on the net without copy protection, and 80% of the millions who read it won't pay. But that 20% that does...
I think people should be allowed to copy and distribute copies of television shows and other broadcast media. (With some exceptions)
If the company can broadcast it and it survives based on commercials, or such, then you are doing them a favour by distributing the show to more people. As long as you leave the whole show intact.
If the person at the other end fast forwards, that's their business.
And if you want to store your own archival copy without commercials, go for it. But if you distribute that then IMHO you should run into copyright issues.
That said, I think the market will self-correct for this. If nobody cares about the companies and their inflated profits, they will pirate. I myself have a large collection of shows in RA form. (I'd like to replace them all with DiVX versions...)
If you have a link to high-quality Futurama or Simpsons....:)
Probably not. In the case of the kids doing it on their own, I think the contract is standard for a minor (ie, only binding as long as the minor wants it to be.)
Even if the parent knows the kid is going to install software with an EULA, if the parent isn't asking them to so it's not their problem.
The only way EULAs will ever be enforced (without an unjust law like the UCITA) will be against businesses. But even then it'll just be the threat of a lawsuit and years in court, without having any real legal weight.
Well, if you ask someone to do something for you, and you know of legal implications, you're (in most cases) taking the same responsibility as them.
If you buy a computer that has Office 2000 installed, you didn't see the EULA and even if it was binding, it wouldn't affect you.
But, if you buy Office 2000 and ask your friend to install it (and the judge would think you had reason to know there was an EULA) then you'd be bound by that. (Assuming once again, that it was a valid contract.)
So, if you ask your kids to do it, you're as good as doing it yourself if you knew what to expect.
But, EULAs aren't binding and have no hope at all of being binding, by regular contract law. That's why companies are pushing for the UCITA, it'd make an end run around contract law and make contract binding even if you didn't know about them, if the wording changes without your knowledge, etc. Basically the UCITA would support everything the companies already claim the EULAs can do.
It's proof, in my mind, that those companies are headed by thieves. They're bribing politicians to pass unjust laws that basically allow them to steal.
Oh, if only 'campaign contributions' were illegal in the US/Canada like that are in so many other countries. I'll love to see politicians get thrown in jail for taking bribes, but it's legal here. Even Mexico has the decency to make it illegal.
We need a Meta-Godwin's Law, for people who mistakenly invoke Godwin's Law.
FYI: Godwin's law is about comparing someone to a Nazi, or such. Simply using the Nazis as an example of something isn't covered.
For instance, if I was to talk about military uniforms through the ages, discussing Nazis is perfectly reasonable.
Now, Nazis aren't related to databases, and it is a stretch, but the poster is right, people see things happen and get comfortable, then they don't think where those things could get to if abused.
Baen is willing to show the consumer is books, and let them choose to pay if they think it's worth while.
King wanted people to pay by the chapter, and not see the goods until after they paid. H's also a jerk, he wanted to charge paper prices for something that cost him less, so he'd make like ten times as much as before, without giving anything back to the customer. And then he cancelled the project, screwing the people who had paid.
We'd laugh at someone selling MP3s for CD prices, why is it reasonable that King wanted to change paper prices for an ebook? Especially since King has his head up his anus and wants people to pay twice for another copy of the bits, despite just wanting to read it in a new place. That may be correct under a strict interpretation of copyright law, but it makes no sense if you understand how the electronic media works.
But, to answer the other part of the question, yes, I am supporting Baen. (Webscriptions, not in paper.)
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac
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Free Books Online
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Why waste the money buying a paper book that you don't want?
Go to fairtunes.org and tip the author. If you want to tip the full cover price, I'm sure they'd love it, but if you want to tip maybe a 1/4 or so (because all you're paying for is the words) then that's fine too.
If the author isn't listed, then tell some friends because I think they only tip once the ammount is over $50 or so.
That's a much better way than buy paper you don't want, supporting a system that you don't need.
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac
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Free Books Online
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Money can be exchanged for peanuts.:)
I actually don't want liner notes, or cover art. I still want to support the artist, but CDs are such a pain. I immediately rip (to mp3) any that I do get and toss them into a box where I leave them.
So I don't buy CDs, or rather, I do, but want to stop. That's why the idea of tipping the artist directly is so great. I can pay 1/4 of what I would have for the CD and the artist gets 4 times as much (easily). So if I spend the same ammount I can get four times as much music, and the RIAA doesn't get a dime.
But Baen's webscription is run by the publisher. They supply the editors, match the authors with the cover artists, help market things, and take care of the financial side. That'll always be useful. The only difference is that they won't be absolutely required so they'll have to compete for the market.
And even the paper pushers won't go out of business. It's just that instead of paying the paper tax to be able to read, I'll buy the book online and buy a poster to go on the walls. They'll adapt and survive. Some at any rate.
It'll be quite a while before paper isn't the best for some things. (Even books, in many settings.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a service that id software doesn't provide.
So gracious of them to force me to use their validation service when someone wants to play on a server I host.
So I cracked the server. Now it doesn't check.
In a forum on Scary's, one of the id guys claimed I was breaking the law when I mentioned this, yet he was curiously silent when I asked him which law... All I'm doing it modifying software that I own, it's like writing in the margins of a book that I own.
When you buy software, you buy the right to use that software. It's *exactly* the same as buying a book.
There a no further restrictions placed on you.
If you can deface the book, you can deface the software.
If you can sell the book, you can sell the software.
If you find a page of a book offensive, you can rip that page out. If you find a CD-check offensive, you can remove it.
The DMCA says otherwise, but that's obvious. The movie industry bribed politicians and judges to pass it and uphold it. (Kaplan *is* on the take.)
The software industry is TRYING to take your rights away with the UCITA, making shrink-wrap licenses legal. But that just goes to show that they obviously aren't now, or they wouldn't be spending so much bribe money trying to pass a new law.
(Bribes = Campaign Contributions. In any sensible country people are locked up for "contributing" money to a politician. And so are the politicians if they accept it.)
The cards belong to the people who bought them.
I bought a dish recently (for ExpressVu) and I own all of the equipment. I didn't bother reading any of the paper in the box; they might claim otherwise, but they'd be dead wrong.
If you buy something you own it, unless you agree otherwise before you buy it.
Seeing as how nobody said anything before I bought the system (or when I registered for service) about a contract, let alone specifics of it, I'm not bound by it.
Thus, I own the smart-card in my set and I can do anything I want to it.
So if somebody put in a hearing aid, after seeing a street-corner musician, they'd be obligated to pay?
The fact is that Hughes is broadcasting to everyone, the same as that street-corner musician. If people want to listen to either, they're entitled. They don't even have to have the same intent as the sender. You could sample the DirectTV signal and use it as an encryption key, if you wanted. Or watch a decoded picture, or anything.
Imagine if I had a business model where every day I published huge columns of numbers in the newspaper, for everyone to read. And then, I charged people for a key, saying which stock each column of numbers was refering to. (And I kept shuffling the columns around.)
Would it be illegal for you to read the newspaper, recognize a few prices, figure out my pattern, and then use my numbers?
It wouldn't, and it's not illegal in any other similar circumstances.
There are NO costs to Hughes if someone buys a dish/receiver/hacked card, and starts receiving the programming.
They might not make a sale, but that sale isn't a guaranteed thing.
For instance, I'd never pay more than $20 a month for TV (and even that's a lot, imho). So if I was given a hacked card I'd use it, but it wouldn't be a lost sale because I wouldn't have paid in the first place.
It's the same thing as piracy. The SPA counts the number of counterfit MS Windows CDs in shops in Asia and then says they all represent a loss, of the full cover price.
This is wrong in two ways. The companies make about 1/4 of MSRP on a program. So at best those figures are four times higher. And the second mistake is to assume that each of those will replace a legitimate sale.
I might pay $20 to $50 for Office 2000, but there's no way I'm paying many hundreds of dollars for it. Ditto with Win2k, etc.
But the SPA expects people whose annual incomes are barely twice the price of the software, to buy a legitimate copy. And when they don't, they assume that they would have, had it not been for a pirated copy.
Their statistics are all lies.
I didn't sign a contract when I bought my dish, or when I ordered service.
I ordered over the phone and they didn't inform me of ANY restrictions, let alone ask me to agree to them.
So, the only thing I'm prevented from doing with my Bell ExpressVu dish is that which is prevented by federal law.
1) Hughes doesn't OWN any spectrum. They lease the right to use it. There are significant differences with these cases.
1.1) If they did own it, why would I care? Unless they paid me, that is. They're using a public resource and claiming nobody has the right to listen without their permission. That'd be like selling the right to use the color blue to some company and forbidding anyone to use it.
2) A expectation of privacy is insane when you're handing the signal out. Even if it's illegal to listen, criminals don't care (by definition), so if you're afraid of "criminal interception" you can't expect privacy. You may encrypt it, but that's like whispering - in a crowd. It might help, but is by no means a guarantee.
3) Dunno about Hughes, but when I *bought* my dish and receiver, I *bought* the smartcard. (They may think otherwise, but I wasn't told when I paid for it, so I own it, 100%, no question.)
3.1) Sure, they have copyright on the code in the card. But that's pretty meaningless in this situation.
3.1.1) They sold the card with the code in it. That's also selling implicit rights to use the code, and to modify it (you can write in a book...)
3.1.2) Any code that performs a function can be rewritten by the hackers, reverse engineering it gets around copyright issues.
3.1.2.1) Where code can't be rewritten, it's not expressive, and not copyrightable. (If I write code to do something and it's the only way that thing can be done, I had no lattitude in writing it, so it's not expressive.)
4) US law regarding listening to cellphone calls is a worldwide joke. Instead of actually making the calls private, the government passed useless laws which said that it's criminal to do.
4.1) Hughes is broadcasting outside of the US, so they can't expect US laws to protect them.
It comes down to, if they broadcast it, everyone has the right to listen to it. And if someone listens to something, they have to right to try to interpret it. (Can you imagine if it was illegal for you to listen to someone shouting across the road, or that if they spoke in pig-latin, it'd be illegal to try to interpret that? That's what US laws are saying about radio transmissions.)
Now, US laws like the DMCA might forbid this, but who really cares about US laws? Even your own citizens are fully aware that laws like the DMCA and UCITA are a direct product of wide-scale bribery.
Laws may in some cases reflect moral behaviour, but not in the USA.
Nobody would be upset if you did all you could to release as much source-code as possible. Especially if you were hampered not by YOUR desire to keep the code closed, but by that of a clueless company.
You've already finished it (from the sounds of it) but had you been starting now, I'd say that it likely would have been a lot easier if you could have borrowed GPLed code for your tasks. That would probably have ofset any lost time involved in breaking out the device specific routines into a seperate file.
It honestly doesn't sound like an application with a wide market, so don't sweat it.
If I write a program for my own use, I'll send the binary to a friend of testing, without worrying about this technically being distribution, etc. Ditto with something I wrote for myself that someone else wanted a copy of.
I'd only call it distribution if I was offering it to other people, on a web page or something.
That may not technically be the correct meaning, but in the case of a limited audience app, I don't think it matters. (While a high percentage of your friends might use it, I doubt many people worldwide have ever heard of FAI, let alone need to interface with hardware they certified.)
There's no reason to disallow GPLed code, except for license nazis who hate RMS.
If I write a game by using 50% GPLed code, I'll get that game out a lot faster. But I'll have to GPL the game source and release it.
If I change my mind, I can simply rewrite that 50% that I borrowed and then I'm free of the GPL.
You can't revoke a license. If you release something under any license you can't change your mind, GPL or BSD, or whatever. But you can relicense your portion of the source. That is, simply rerelease the code with a new license. Or, in this case, remove the GPLed code and then don't release the source.
But, imho, it's pretty sleazy to use open source code to write a game and then close the project when it gets popular. If you used community resources to write something, you should help the community by releasing your code. To do otherwise is terribly greedy.
Counterstrike (to use your example) would still sell just as many copies if it was open sourced. All the content (art, maps, models, etc) is copyrighted quite seperately from the GPL. To release the source code wouldn't involve giving a working copy of the game away.
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:)
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Symmetrical encryption is much nicer to use.
Wow, I didn't think any CPU out was fast enough for realtime DiVX compression, especially seeing as how it takes a 600Mhz CPU to reliably playback a DiVX encoded movie.
Ok, any good TV-in. If all the card needs to do is capture and there's no compressor codec in hardware, then anything with video in should be fine. I've got an Asus GeForce with video in.
Then, Virtual Dub takes care of starting that, with any sort of automation program to control the scheduling.
Ok, the DiVX codec I knew, but the lossless one is a good suggestion for when I want to grab some cool clips from my favorite movies and a few MBs don't matter.
Here I was planning to have to record uncompressed (or some low-compression lossless) and DiVX later, over a few hours. This'll certainly save temp space on the drive.
Thanks for all the links, that was a very helpful post!
You've got a video card that'll compress into DiVX (in decent quality?) in realtime!? What CPU/etc do you have?
Please post a link to the hardware. I'd like to stop using VHS for taping shows, CDs would last a lot longer.
What topic would that be? That sites that depend on advertising are going to go away if the advertisers do?
Won't bother me.
I pay for my internet account, which include a lot of web traffic (disk space is essentially free until you hit a gig.) If I have any content that I benefit from having people see, I can host it without advertising. And in the internet culture, if my website gets too many hits, people will mirror it for me because they'll find it useful.
This may not work for Slashdot, or SomethingAwful, but then, if their users are unwilling to fund them, doesn't that say something about their perceived value? If he can't afford the bandwidth to reach people maybe he should either let people mirror the work or take it off the net.
It has often been said that money is the most sincere form of flattery, if nobody is willing to donate, they obviously don't care. And with sites like FairTunes (who aren't limited to music) appearing, anyone who wants to can help pay someone's bills.
Personally I find Something Awful quite funny, but then I read about fifteen net comics on a semi-regular basis and The Onion and other satire sites. SA is the quality of work that used to be free. Moreover, it's the quality of work that I would release for free. And yes, I am being honest here. I've written at least six freeware utilities over the years for various tasks from pulling files off of Apple ][ disk images to image conversion.
The net got along just fine before advertising, and it'll get along just fine after advertising. If, that is, advertising goes away. The net may be more popular these days but almost everything I want to do on the net has remained unchanged since the old days. Then you had to FTP to someone's site to grab the net comic, but they still existed. The main new things are banner ads, lawyers, spam, and millions of consumers (not creators) of content.
Few things make me happier than seeing some dot-com that spent millions on domain names and lawsuit over domain names, and lawyers, going out of business. Maybe if they'd saved the money they dumped into super-bowl ads and lawsuits they could afford to pay their employees. Then all they'd need would be a business plan and a product.
They could ask people to donate webspace. If my favorite net comics asked, I'd be willing to let them use the bandwidth that I pay for but don't actually use.
If the site is so popular as to cost $1500 a month to host (which seems high, considering you could get an unmetered T1 for less than that) then you should have enough readers to ask for help.
Look to the old model for clues. Someone would write a FAQ and they'd send it out. People would mirror it and send a link to the author. That author would then include the mirror links into the document so that future readers could use the mirror sites. Then if everyone picked a random link (as you should try to do when using mirrors - or the one closest to you) the bandwidth would be shared and nobody would have to pay extra.
Only if the author wanted to keep the only distributable copy of the work would they have to host the whole thing themselves. If the goal is to draw a comic and get it out to the people, to become famous, or just share the fun, then just distribute the comics.
Kevin and Kell (one netcomic I read) does this. You can download a zip file of all of the comics (well, a year at a time) to save bandwidth to the site. The author has effectively said by doing this that they care much more about people reading the comic (and probably buying a book, or asking their newspaper to carry the comic, etc) than they do about page views. I'd certainly be willing to mirror this zipfile if asked and I'm sure many other fans would agree.
Why doesn't your friend find an ISP with web hosting?
If her site is so popular as to attracts thousands of visitors she could probably get some of them to host some of the site. Perhaps she could have various people host the graphics for example. That way she wouldn't be providing all the bandwidth.
If her site is even bigger than that, maybe it's something so useful that a university or other institution will decide to host it. (Like a FAQ, or a foo-help group.)
That would completely avoid the need to go to popups (which any user with WebWasher (or programming skills) doesn't even see) or ask for cash donations.
If she's unwilling, well there IS the option of just paying for the web hosting.
Nope, not that google could find. But I did find a great quote.
"as when the Ender novels are rejected as neo-Hitlerian, male-oriented power-fantasies perpetrated by a misogynistic, myopic, militaristic anti-feminist (Radford);"
Wow, *slam*.
If you have this article, please scan it and post it. I doubt the magazine would care, being out of business and all.
And your friend would probably like it, reaching a wider audience.
Neither did market forces make lead turn into gold...
But of the reasonable outcomes, the best happened. Beta's quality was better than VHS, but VHS's convenience and price was much better.
Of the systems, the best overall system won.
Mac's may be nicer (the high-end ones) and more consistently made than cheap PCs, but the fact that they cost three times as much means that they aren't the 'best' anymore than a Cray is the 'best'. They have a specific function they are good for, but price is much more important than small gains in consistency and quality, especially when those come only with a closed platform you can't tinker with.
If digital video protection goes too far, people will stop watching TV in favor of content from the net, etc. Not everything will be protected, mainly because the barriers to new content providers are too high, so there'll always be ample unprotected media.
Some book publishers may start using that nasty shiny purple paper (the stuff used in code wheels years ago) for copy protection. None of their six customers will ever OCR that book. Other companies like Baen will release the book on the net without copy protection, and 80% of the millions who read it won't pay. But that 20% that does...
I think people should be allowed to copy and distribute copies of television shows and other broadcast media. (With some exceptions)
:)
If the company can broadcast it and it survives based on commercials, or such, then you are doing them a favour by distributing the show to more people. As long as you leave the whole show intact.
If the person at the other end fast forwards, that's their business.
And if you want to store your own archival copy without commercials, go for it. But if you distribute that then IMHO you should run into copyright issues.
That said, I think the market will self-correct for this. If nobody cares about the companies and their inflated profits, they will pirate. I myself have a large collection of shows in RA form. (I'd like to replace them all with DiVX versions...)
If you have a link to high-quality Futurama or Simpsons....
Probably not. In the case of the kids doing it on their own, I think the contract is standard for a minor (ie, only binding as long as the minor wants it to be.)
Even if the parent knows the kid is going to install software with an EULA, if the parent isn't asking them to so it's not their problem.
The only way EULAs will ever be enforced (without an unjust law like the UCITA) will be against businesses. But even then it'll just be the threat of a lawsuit and years in court, without having any real legal weight.
Well, if you ask someone to do something for you, and you know of legal implications, you're (in most cases) taking the same responsibility as them.
If you buy a computer that has Office 2000 installed, you didn't see the EULA and even if it was binding, it wouldn't affect you.
But, if you buy Office 2000 and ask your friend to install it (and the judge would think you had reason to know there was an EULA) then you'd be bound by that. (Assuming once again, that it was a valid contract.)
So, if you ask your kids to do it, you're as good as doing it yourself if you knew what to expect.
But, EULAs aren't binding and have no hope at all of being binding, by regular contract law. That's why companies are pushing for the UCITA, it'd make an end run around contract law and make contract binding even if you didn't know about them, if the wording changes without your knowledge, etc. Basically the UCITA would support everything the companies already claim the EULAs can do.
It's proof, in my mind, that those companies are headed by thieves. They're bribing politicians to pass unjust laws that basically allow them to steal.
Oh, if only 'campaign contributions' were illegal in the US/Canada like that are in so many other countries. I'll love to see politicians get thrown in jail for taking bribes, but it's legal here. Even Mexico has the decency to make it illegal.
We need a Meta-Godwin's Law, for people who mistakenly invoke Godwin's Law.
FYI: Godwin's law is about comparing someone to a Nazi, or such. Simply using the Nazis as an example of something isn't covered.
For instance, if I was to talk about military uniforms through the ages, discussing Nazis is perfectly reasonable.
Now, Nazis aren't related to databases, and it is a stretch, but the poster is right, people see things happen and get comfortable, then they don't think where those things could get to if abused.
King is a money grubbing asshole.
Baen is willing to show the consumer is books, and let them choose to pay if they think it's worth while.
King wanted people to pay by the chapter, and not see the goods until after they paid. H's also a jerk, he wanted to charge paper prices for something that cost him less, so he'd make like ten times as much as before, without giving anything back to the customer. And then he cancelled the project, screwing the people who had paid.
We'd laugh at someone selling MP3s for CD prices, why is it reasonable that King wanted to change paper prices for an ebook? Especially since King has his head up his anus and wants people to pay twice for another copy of the bits, despite just wanting to read it in a new place. That may be correct under a strict interpretation of copyright law, but it makes no sense if you understand how the electronic media works.
But, to answer the other part of the question, yes, I am supporting Baen. (Webscriptions, not in paper.)
Why waste the money buying a paper book that you don't want?
Go to fairtunes.org and tip the author. If you want to tip the full cover price, I'm sure they'd love it, but if you want to tip maybe a 1/4 or so (because all you're paying for is the words) then that's fine too.
If the author isn't listed, then tell some friends because I think they only tip once the ammount is over $50 or so.
That's a much better way than buy paper you don't want, supporting a system that you don't need.
Money can be exchanged for peanuts. :)
I actually don't want liner notes, or cover art. I still want to support the artist, but CDs are such a pain. I immediately rip (to mp3) any that I do get and toss them into a box where I leave them.
So I don't buy CDs, or rather, I do, but want to stop. That's why the idea of tipping the artist directly is so great. I can pay 1/4 of what I would have for the CD and the artist gets 4 times as much (easily). So if I spend the same ammount I can get four times as much music, and the RIAA doesn't get a dime.
Publishers, as they stand today, sure.
But Baen's webscription is run by the publisher. They supply the editors, match the authors with the cover artists, help market things, and take care of the financial side. That'll always be useful. The only difference is that they won't be absolutely required so they'll have to compete for the market.
And even the paper pushers won't go out of business. It's just that instead of paying the paper tax to be able to read, I'll buy the book online and buy a poster to go on the walls. They'll adapt and survive. Some at any rate.
It'll be quite a while before paper isn't the best for some things. (Even books, in many settings.)