If the artist specifically authorizes a "clean" version, then sure, I think you should be able to buy that. I also, personally, have no objection (though the law is currently against it) to CensoredMovies Inc making a film using Pulp Fiction's footage called "Downtown Gangsters", credited to "CensoredMovies Inc", with a search on "CensoredMovies.com" for "Pulp Fiction" returning "page 1 of 0 matches found", though currently the law is against that.
It's the passing off of the "clean" (ie edited by someone who isn't the artist or authorized by the artist, in effect making a different movie with a different feel and message) movie as a "version" of the original that I think is morally reprehensable here, regardless of what copyright law allows.
According to a recent law, yes, that part of the process would be legal. For some reason, Congress recently passed a law that said it's legal to publish playlists for DVDs without the artist's permission. The law doesn't apply to the modification of any other content, so essentially someone can pass off an edit as a legitimate version of movie that an artist created to have a particular message and affect, when the edit undoes all that, but you can't, legally, modify, say, critical portions of a computer program without a license, even though computer programs are functional, not expressive. This is because people hate artists but love businessmen. I can't find another explanation.
That said, while that part of the process is legal, using MPlayer itself to view a CSS-encoded DVD isn't. Indeed, using MPlayer to view a CSS-encoded DVD is punishable by several years in prison. You see, MPlayer doesn't have Hollywood's permission to view DVDs, and Congress passed another law a few years ago making the use of equipment that says over-paranoid content-control (not merely anti-piracy) schemes of the sort dreamt up by large, market-dominating, computer illiterate, corporations have legal force, and if you try to bypass them, even for the purposes of just viewing content legitimately bought, you can get fined and/or jailed.
I'm not sure much of that's true. Fair use, as often cited, is a vague defense rather than an explicit set of rights, and the more you infringe upon an artist's control of their work, the more the law tends to be against you. So even in the US, where copyright law has historically been liberal and less concerned with moral rights, the chances of winning a suit where you are redistributing a modified version, directly or (until recently) indirectly, I'd argue aren't that great. The Pythons won a case against ABC in the 1970s because ABC, licensed by the BBC to rebroadcast their works, were also modifying it at the same time. They had the right to redistribute it, and nothing in their contracts with the BBC precluded modifications, basic copyright law said they couldn't modify it.
Most Western countries outside of the US are more concerned with moral rights than the US, and their copyright laws less liberal, even taking into account the DMCA. In Britain, I know VCRs, photocopiers, etc, ended up being protected by specific revisions to copyright law to allow specific types of "fair use", whereas in the US, generic copyright law and the constitution already allowed for their existance.
FWIW, the type of indirect modification that some companies are now doing, feeding what amount to "playlists" into specially designed DVD players, has explicitly been made legal in the US, so what Cleanflix was doing wasn't merely illegal and immoral, it was arguably unnecessary to begin with.
Me, I think passing something off as a legitimate version of someone else's work with no authorization is an outrageous insult to the original creators, and I don't care if it's "Die Hard" or "Doctor Strangelove" in terms of artistic merit. If someone wants to modify someone else's movie, then in a world where this is legal, my gut says at the very least they should be required to get permission to associate the original title and artists with that work. Make your own "Brazil" if you want, but don't put the words "Brazil" or "Terry Gilliam" anywhere unless Gilliam actually wants to be associated with your cut.
The purpose of copyright is to provide incentives to artists to create and release new works. If an issue foremost in the mind of many artists is that any work they produce will end up being butchered, and they will end associated with that butchered work, then how is that not a disincentive to produce new works?
Remember, in this case, it's not merely some company using someone else's work (eg filmed material) to produce a different, credited differently, work (eg as a piece of electronic music might use a sample._ It's that company passing their shit off as a legitimate "version" of the artist's work. The movie still had the same title, the artists' names appears in the credits. The actually selling point of the movie is that it's the same movie with a few "offensive" things removed. But it's not the same movie. It no longer has the same flow. It no longer has the same message. The person watching doesn't even have a way of telling where the changes have been made. The artist hasn't blessed the cut, and probably wouldn't have made the same decisions had he or she been asked to make a "clean" version.
This type of editing is a form of fraud and defamation. Damn straight it should be illegal under copyright law. The only question, to me, is how the movie industry managed to win this given that Congress specifically passed a law legalizing the practice a few months ago. (And, in case you're wondering, Congress passed this so it only applied to content editing of movies. It remains illegal to space-shift CSS'd DVDs, something that doesn't affect artists in the least, and editing of, say, a computer program, remains technically illegal unless licensed, despite the obvious fact that a computer program isn't, usually, an expressive work.)
Is it really illegal to sell R-rated movies to minors in t he US? I thought most of the rating schemes for movies, music, and games, were technically voluntary and self-policed, not backed up by law.
I know in the case of music, this was one of Hillary Rosen's triumphs, she was able to persuade Tipper Gore to drop a manditory rating scheme by proposing the RIAA run a voluntary one.
Nah. The real way to kill rebates isn't merely to not "keep buying products because of the rebates", it's to ensure that when there is a rebate, no matter how small, you send in everything and, if you don't get the rebate, you raise holy hell until you do.
The profitability of rebates is based upon people not actually having the time to execute them. As evidenced here, companies do not want to actually fufil their part of the bargain and, in many cases, will lie, cheat, and essentially do anything else, to avoid actually paying them. They don't like paying rebates. They merely like people thinking something costs less than it actually does. Others have posted here pretending there are advantages to the operator of the program such as the ability to collect marketing information, but realistically, that's possible anyway and rebates are an absurdly expensive way of getting that data.
Rebates will die when TWO things happen. When people ignore them when buying (except to complain, loudly and obtrusively, if the retail outlet is displaying the "rebated price" in a larger, more misleading, font than the real price), and when people take notice of them after the purchase. When both happens, not only are rebates not helping sales, but they're costing the operator of the program money.
Until both happen, nothing will change. You can't simply ignore them, because there will be no evidence to the operators of the programs that they're not helping sales (and intuitively most will assume they are helping sales.) You have to make them expensive.
Yeah, but both of you are missing the point. Unless there's a large body of Macs out there, a virus is going to have difficulty spreading.
Any virus for the Mac is going to find that 97.5% of the machines it tries to infect aren't able to actually run the virus. The only way you can get this to work is with a cross platform virus which is much, much, harder to do.
That's the reality of a 2-2.5% marketshare. Unless the Mac suddenly develops a fault that means it can be infected just by sweeping IP addresses, the Mac will be more or less immune until the Mac becomes popular. And once popular, it will be targetted.
On Mac OS X, this is a VERY common sequence of events:
The Software Update icon appears and starts bouncing in the dock.
The icon stops bouncing, a dialog appears with a list of updates.
You click on "Install".
You are then prompted for your username and password, for certain updates (eg. QuickTime)
So, all your blackhat hacker needs to do is:
1. Find a way to get the program to run (exploit a buffer overflow in Safari, hide a trojan in an email, etc)
2. Have the program sleep for a little bit, to avert suspicion.
3. Make sure the program's icon's the same as Software Update (which isn't normally a permanently dock'd app, so the user's not going to know the difference between SU starting and your fake version)
4. Have it start, put up a dialog exactly like SU's, wait for user to blindly hit "Install", then put up a "Software Update requires your username and password" dialog.
5. Owned. Do what you want.
Not quite as easy as the "You could just put a picture of the dialog in a webpage!!! OMG!" suggestion above, but pretty good, and probably likely to fool the majority of users.
The "problem", and it's not that big a one, is getting the user to run your program to begin with. If you know already about something like an exploitable buffer overflow, then there's your vector. If you need to resort to social engineering, then you have other options. On Mac OS X, one way might be to put it in a zip file with, say, a bunch of jpegs, and give the "loader" application the same icon as all the other items in the zip. Unless the user views by list (and by default, they will not), they'll never realise it's not the same as the others.
Not exactly, but you're close. He said you don't have a license unless you agree to it (which is, by definition, true.) As the concept of "fair use" doesn't exist in Britain, any copying, no matter how harmless and in line with the intended use of a product, constitutes a breach of copyright law. That means that without agreeing to some form of license, the simple act of copying the software to your hard disk (otherwise known as installing it) is a breach of copyright.
Britain and the US are very different countries with respect to copyrights. Most people in Britain violate copyrights all the time completely unintentionally, indeed the music industry is, unlike the US, pushing for a liberalization of copyright law so that certain basic operations, such as ripping a CD for personal use, do not require explicit licensing.
We've been watching DVR'd Bond films on the Echostar DVR the last few weeks. We'll skip a series of ads, the movie will come back on, and then... and then a large collection of horses LOUDLY (I mean, as in drowning out the movie soundtrack) will roll across the bottom of the screen. Vision AND audio of the movie impaired. Why? Because AMC was advertising some sort of cowboy week or something.
The advertising techniques are getting worse. No matter how much it damages the viability of the content, TV companies will resort to anything they can to get their messages out rather than face reality and switch to more appropriate (eg micropayment/HBO) type business models.
TV companies live in a falicious world. They believe that their customers are advertisers, yet their product is aimed at viewers. Without viewers, they have no customers, so the product, ultimately, is tailored to the viewer. What their customers want, however, is completely at odds with what the viewers want. They can continue to try to make this work, and lose viewers and/or see viewers resorting to every method under the sun to try and make the pigs-ear that is modern TV "work", or they can sit back and ask themselves who they really should be trying to collect the money from.
I love OS X, but at the same time, having switched to Debian recently, I can't say I'm missing any major functionality or seeing anything that isn't user friendly. And if it's "not much worse than OS X", I'm amazed you even consider XP comparable to Ubuntu, let alone better. The default install of XP on my Thinkpad doesn't even allow access to your file system without either resorting to the command line or right clicking various obscure areas to get your "My Computer" icon to appear. Windows Explorer didn't even appear in the Start menu.
Leaving the specifics of a pre-install aside (and before arguing all the complaints about Windows lie in bad pre-installs, remember that installing it on a bare PC leaves you in just as much driver hell these days, if not more, than most GNU/Linux distros) Windows is diabolically awful these days. People put up with it because it's what they're used to, not because it's inherently more user friendly than the competition. I have absolutely no problem, assuming the software is available, with the notion of giving my computer-phobic mother a pre-configured modern GNOME based system. It's clean. It's user friendly. It's relatively secure (albeit in large part because of the marketshare, but yeah, Windows needs its userland cleaned up, I'm hoping that'll happen with Vista), and it has substantial software support. And there are fewer legal issues. What's not to like? How is XP in any way more cohesive, polished, or just plain better?
While I'm generally in favour of the anti-trust laws, they do have to be used as a last resort. In all honesty, I don't see the situation as quite getting there yet. Google has multiple options, including the ability to start its own open-access ecommerce site, which unlike most eBay replacements would stand a very strong chance of becoming as healthy as the original.
I'd be surprised if eBay's actions have an anti-competitive logic for that reason. I suspect the ban is a temporary one, probably applied to all new payment methods that do not have a history of trustworthiness behind them. Of course, one could argue if that's the criteria, why are they allowing their own service, Paypal, to continue operating?;-)
Because they wanted developers to design software that ran well on Windows NT, and then Windows 95.
Or do you think Microsoft should have remained 16 bit, with programmers still jumping through segmented memory hoops to get anything done, in order to ensure IBM could easily get Windows to run under OS/2?
Maybe Microsoft should get rid of.NET too, I mean, that's clearly part of their evil plot to thwart WINE.
Microsoft never implemented any of Apple's APIs. What they did do was infringe on some software patents held by Apple, but you don't need to implement an API to do that.
Microsoft is not pushing Vista, at least no more than any previous operating system, possibly less. The betas for Vista have been good, but Microsoft has officially delayed the operating system, clearly not seeing this as something that must go out now whatever the cost.
There is a hurdle to be crossed if Apple implements Win32, and that's that it's a huge PITA to implement. The Wine people have been trying to get this running for decades. They'll get close, and then Windows will move forward again. Some features, (DirectX, hard to implement as you point out, is one of them), have never been properly implemented. Even once implemented, a Windows application will need to be installed (not the case for a Mac app), it will require some massaging of the APIs to get something that even vaguely fits into the same desktop as traditional Macintosh applications, it will, in short, be half-arsed. Imagine what the WINE people have had to go through. Now apply Steve Job's perfectionism, and Apple's lack of time and resources, and ask how Apple can possibly come up with code by themselves that will work.
They'd be better off just licensing Win32. The real thing. Or applying the OS/2 approach, and allowing users to install Windows using a custom installer and a replacement module or two. Or ignoring the issue altogether, because whatever they do is going to have incompatibilities, and Apple will get it in the neck for releasing a shoddy product every time a program fails to install and/or run properly. If Apple will not release Mac OS X for generic hardware because of some supposed risk of being blamed for bad third party drivers, how likely is it they'll try EMULATING WINDOWS?
IBM didn't emulate anything. It created some hooks and patches to allow the Windows kernel to run under OS/2. Microsoft's sole attempt to break this was to make Windows 3.11 incompatible with IBM's stub. IBM quickly fixed that.
OS/2's Windows compatibility did become less useful with Windows 95, partially because, for obviously necessary reasons (which have nothing do with Microsoft being spiteful) architecturally there were substantial differences between 95 and 3.1, and because Windows 95 came with DOS and so was a full operating system in itself, rather than a halfway house between a bolt-on and a "DOS as boot loader" system like Windows 1.x-3.x. It's hard to complain that Microsoft was breaking IBM's emulation when what they did was release an entirely new operating system, something they had to do (Windows 3.x was crap.)
Good point, that would give them a significant advantage over the USPS. We can't allow that to happen!
(In all seriousness, yes, I know what your point is, but I'm pretty sure that the information needed to build rockets capable of reaching LEO, carrying some sort of weapon rather than a human being, is relatively widely known anyway. The key reason Saturn is such a technical triumph, even today, is that it was capable of going to the moon, and carrying people, relatively safely, there and back. It's hard to find a military justification for withholding that kind of information when the Germans in WW2 already knew how to get something out of Earth's atmosphere (just! The V2 flew at about 60 miles above the Earth) and where the really hard stuff (automatic flying to specific destinations) involves technologies that rapidly become obsolete if you're planning to use them for military purposes anyway.)
DR had several operating systems that could be described that way. Their first was MP/M, which was loosely based on CP/M. Despite that (heh, I'm not a CP/M fan) it had a large following of users who bought it as a single-user multi-tasking OS, a good multitasking OS rather than a a multiuser one.
MP/M came in a variety of forms including MP/M86, and then was followed by Concurrent DOS. Concurrent DOS has limited DOS compatibility, but what it did it did fairly well, and in the mid-eighties a variety of computers were built to run it.
Finally, there's DOSPlus. DOSPlus wasn't multiuser, but it was the culmination of DR's work in different areas. It was largely DOS compatible, with a few exceptions which, needless to say, prevented many major applications from running. It had a multitasking system, though it was limited to multitasking CP/M86 applications (and I don't believe you could actually switch between them, they had to be background tasks, but I've read stuff that contradicted my own experience of the system); it was arguably DR's best single user operating system, followed later by DRDOS which sacrificed most of DR's innovations for DOS compatibility. DR could probably have come out with quite a nifty, powerful, system based on DOSPlus and GEM if MSDOS compatibility wasn't so important, and if they had the option of going 32 bit rather than being limited to the 8086 architecture.
I believe a sizable amount of this code is freeware and/or free software, as Caldera released a lot of it before they turned to the dark side. It's not always provided in an easy to work with form though, especially as the source code tends to be written in languages like PL/M.
I don't think the argument, seriously, is that people will switch because of Pilgrim, Doctorow, et al. The argument is that two (more than two?) prominant long time Apple enthusiasts are switching, and their reasons are worth listening to because if that's the way they feel, then imagine how easily Apple users with less of a record of rabid loyalty will switch over the same issues.
Of course, a small group will listen to both and will consider switching when they didn't before. But that's not the major story, the major one is that proprietariness (it's not just about DRM) is becoming a sore spot, and some long time Apple loyalists are no longer prepared to put up with it.
One has to hope Apple is listening, even if the celebrity-obsessed-but-in-denial Slashdot mob isn't.
I think suggesting someone's reasons are poor because they didn't seem to consider the same things issues fifteen years ago is stretching it somewhat.
Apple has moments of positiveness and moments of negativity. Frequently, it's easy to miss instances of the latter. Right now, they're suing bloggers, refusing to release source for a project they've touted for years as their open source jewel in the crown, releasing hardware that, frankly, is no more innovative or interesting than any other PC manfuacturer's, and their software is over-proprietary as usual (Pilgrim mentions Mail.app's switch to a closed mailbox format, I'd had my fight with iTunes during the 4.x to 6.x debacle. I'm surprised more people aren't screaming at them, to be honest.) So Apple is at a low point.
Anyone who's spent 20-25 years using proprietary software with an emotional, rather than logical, attachment to their primary supplier is, at some point, going to realise that they're being screwed over, repeatedly. The move will come during a nadir in the support and offerings their supplier goes through. For Pilgrim, and many other Mac fans, the question isn't "Why weren't you complaining 25 years ago when Apple was worse, jack-ass", it's simply the subtly different "What took you so long?"
And I can't answer that, except to suggest that since 1997, most Apple fans expected "the perfect system" to be just around the corner, that with the Steve in charge, making changes, the real problems users had with Apple's products would be fixed with new, better, products. And Mac OS X was released, and now we've kind of come to a head in terms of how good OS X will ever be, and it's great, but after three or four years of using Mac OS X, some are realising that not everything that was wrong in the Apple world was a matter of products, that a hell of a lot of it is because of Apple's mentality and its proprietary approach.
Because often the issue is Mac OS X. In Pilgrim's case, the increasing closed-ness of the platform and his belated realization that closed platforms have repeatedly harmed his work during the 20-25 years he's been an Apple user are the issues here.
I, personally, have made the same decision, switching back to GNU/Linux from Mac OS X a few months ago. Mac OS X has a great GUI, but there's virtually nothing else (compared to GNU or the *BSDs) to commend it for. GNU/Linux has major problems, but I'm never going to have an issue that requires money to be spent and data to be lost to fix.
Or, like, what we could do is boycott Texaco Records. Then Texaco Records will lower their prices, which will make all the other music companies lower their prices too, and we'll be able to buy music for $1 a gallon!!!! Also we can all refuse to buy any music on Tuesdays. This will send the message that DRM sucks!
Hey, here's a thought: The RIAA is calling many of its members "customers" pirates because that's what they are. They - the "customers" in question - are making unauthorized copies of music, and indeed encouraging millions of anonymous strangers to do the same thing. I put the word "customers" in quotes because the problem, really, is that they're not really customers. That's kind of the issue. If they were buying the music rather than copying it, this wouldn't be an issue.
Rather than organizing boycots, why don't you just buy the music you want on CD (ie the format that isn't DRM'd), and not rip it and redistribute the rips? If the music's not available in a non-DRM'd format, don't buy it (or in any other way obtain it, treat it as if it never existed.) If it is, buy it. That's not a boycott, because it's not refusing to buy a product you'd otherwise buy, it's merely refusing to buy a product you don't actually want. And, well, that makes a hell of a lot more sense.
I think this illustrates the difference between "invention" and "innovation" very well. Doom wasn't the first 3D FPS, but it was the first viable FPS that turned a technology from being merely interesting to something that got into the hands of just about everybody and spawned an entire direction for the industry.
The Sinclair ZX81 had Psion's "3D Monster Maze", and doubtless there were predecessors to that, but none of the examples you gave, nor 3DMM, ended up generating much interest, however popular they may have been. The excitement started with Doom.
It's kind of like the GUI. Contrary to popular belief, there were many graphical user interfaces before the Mac. Indeed, the Mac's original, pre-Jobs, interface had little or nothing to do with the Xerox effort. It was the Mac, as released, that actually made people sit up and say "Wait, this one works" (albeit with quite some criticism), and made (despite that criticism) pretty much every new computer from 1985 onward (save for legacy systems, and even they slowly migrated to GEM and then to Windows) pretty much require a GUI.
Because some non-infringing uses do, nonetheless, in theory lessen the revenue available to the copyright holder?
One of the purposes of copyright is to ensure a stream of revenue that can used to fund the creation of the works copyrighted. You can do this by making draconian laws that make it impossible for people to use any copy of anything without the copyright holder's permission, or you can loosen the laws a little but do something to ensure the creators lose nothing from the liberalization of the law. When CDR copying became a substantial phenominem, the imbalance was seen to be upset, and many governments are using a compulsory royalty system to rebalance the system rather than "the other options" which are either to see a net decrease in revenue for copyright holders, or to introduce draconian laws banning CDR copying.
I'm sure many Slashdotters would rather see a net decrease in revenue for copyright holders, but that isn't a universally held opinion. There are many in the content industry that wish that the government would butt-out, and simply pass on all responsibility for licensing content to them, banning unlicensed CDRs. This is a middle ground that allows the technology to continue to exist while ensuring the content industry doesn't suffer for it.
Now watch me get modded down for stating the obvious, again.
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If the artist specifically authorizes a "clean" version, then sure, I think you should be able to buy that. I also, personally, have no objection (though the law is currently against it) to CensoredMovies Inc making a film using Pulp Fiction's footage called "Downtown Gangsters", credited to "CensoredMovies Inc", with a search on "CensoredMovies.com" for "Pulp Fiction" returning "page 1 of 0 matches found", though currently the law is against that.
It's the passing off of the "clean" (ie edited by someone who isn't the artist or authorized by the artist, in effect making a different movie with a different feel and message) movie as a "version" of the original that I think is morally reprehensable here, regardless of what copyright law allows.
According to a recent law, yes, that part of the process would be legal. For some reason, Congress recently passed a law that said it's legal to publish playlists for DVDs without the artist's permission. The law doesn't apply to the modification of any other content, so essentially someone can pass off an edit as a legitimate version of movie that an artist created to have a particular message and affect, when the edit undoes all that, but you can't, legally, modify, say, critical portions of a computer program without a license, even though computer programs are functional, not expressive. This is because people hate artists but love businessmen. I can't find another explanation.
That said, while that part of the process is legal, using MPlayer itself to view a CSS-encoded DVD isn't. Indeed, using MPlayer to view a CSS-encoded DVD is punishable by several years in prison. You see, MPlayer doesn't have Hollywood's permission to view DVDs, and Congress passed another law a few years ago making the use of equipment that says over-paranoid content-control (not merely anti-piracy) schemes of the sort dreamt up by large, market-dominating, computer illiterate, corporations have legal force, and if you try to bypass them, even for the purposes of just viewing content legitimately bought, you can get fined and/or jailed.
Great huh?
I'm not sure much of that's true. Fair use, as often cited, is a vague defense rather than an explicit set of rights, and the more you infringe upon an artist's control of their work, the more the law tends to be against you. So even in the US, where copyright law has historically been liberal and less concerned with moral rights, the chances of winning a suit where you are redistributing a modified version, directly or (until recently) indirectly, I'd argue aren't that great. The Pythons won a case against ABC in the 1970s because ABC, licensed by the BBC to rebroadcast their works, were also modifying it at the same time. They had the right to redistribute it, and nothing in their contracts with the BBC precluded modifications, basic copyright law said they couldn't modify it.
Most Western countries outside of the US are more concerned with moral rights than the US, and their copyright laws less liberal, even taking into account the DMCA. In Britain, I know VCRs, photocopiers, etc, ended up being protected by specific revisions to copyright law to allow specific types of "fair use", whereas in the US, generic copyright law and the constitution already allowed for their existance.
FWIW, the type of indirect modification that some companies are now doing, feeding what amount to "playlists" into specially designed DVD players, has explicitly been made legal in the US, so what Cleanflix was doing wasn't merely illegal and immoral, it was arguably unnecessary to begin with.
Me, I think passing something off as a legitimate version of someone else's work with no authorization is an outrageous insult to the original creators, and I don't care if it's "Die Hard" or "Doctor Strangelove" in terms of artistic merit. If someone wants to modify someone else's movie, then in a world where this is legal, my gut says at the very least they should be required to get permission to associate the original title and artists with that work. Make your own "Brazil" if you want, but don't put the words "Brazil" or "Terry Gilliam" anywhere unless Gilliam actually wants to be associated with your cut.
Why?
The purpose of copyright is to provide incentives to artists to create and release new works. If an issue foremost in the mind of many artists is that any work they produce will end up being butchered, and they will end associated with that butchered work, then how is that not a disincentive to produce new works?
Remember, in this case, it's not merely some company using someone else's work (eg filmed material) to produce a different, credited differently, work (eg as a piece of electronic music might use a sample._ It's that company passing their shit off as a legitimate "version" of the artist's work. The movie still had the same title, the artists' names appears in the credits. The actually selling point of the movie is that it's the same movie with a few "offensive" things removed. But it's not the same movie. It no longer has the same flow. It no longer has the same message. The person watching doesn't even have a way of telling where the changes have been made. The artist hasn't blessed the cut, and probably wouldn't have made the same decisions had he or she been asked to make a "clean" version.
This type of editing is a form of fraud and defamation. Damn straight it should be illegal under copyright law. The only question, to me, is how the movie industry managed to win this given that Congress specifically passed a law legalizing the practice a few months ago. (And, in case you're wondering, Congress passed this so it only applied to content editing of movies. It remains illegal to space-shift CSS'd DVDs, something that doesn't affect artists in the least, and editing of, say, a computer program, remains technically illegal unless licensed, despite the obvious fact that a computer program isn't, usually, an expressive work.)
Is it really illegal to sell R-rated movies to minors in t he US? I thought most of the rating schemes for movies, music, and games, were technically voluntary and self-policed, not backed up by law.
I know in the case of music, this was one of Hillary Rosen's triumphs, she was able to persuade Tipper Gore to drop a manditory rating scheme by proposing the RIAA run a voluntary one.
Nah. The real way to kill rebates isn't merely to not "keep buying products because of the rebates", it's to ensure that when there is a rebate, no matter how small, you send in everything and, if you don't get the rebate, you raise holy hell until you do.
The profitability of rebates is based upon people not actually having the time to execute them. As evidenced here, companies do not want to actually fufil their part of the bargain and, in many cases, will lie, cheat, and essentially do anything else, to avoid actually paying them. They don't like paying rebates. They merely like people thinking something costs less than it actually does. Others have posted here pretending there are advantages to the operator of the program such as the ability to collect marketing information, but realistically, that's possible anyway and rebates are an absurdly expensive way of getting that data.
Rebates will die when TWO things happen. When people ignore them when buying (except to complain, loudly and obtrusively, if the retail outlet is displaying the "rebated price" in a larger, more misleading, font than the real price), and when people take notice of them after the purchase. When both happens, not only are rebates not helping sales, but they're costing the operator of the program money.
Until both happen, nothing will change. You can't simply ignore them, because there will be no evidence to the operators of the programs that they're not helping sales (and intuitively most will assume they are helping sales.) You have to make them expensive.
Yeah, but both of you are missing the point. Unless there's a large body of Macs out there, a virus is going to have difficulty spreading.
Any virus for the Mac is going to find that 97.5% of the machines it tries to infect aren't able to actually run the virus. The only way you can get this to work is with a cross platform virus which is much, much, harder to do.
That's the reality of a 2-2.5% marketshare. Unless the Mac suddenly develops a fault that means it can be infected just by sweeping IP addresses, the Mac will be more or less immune until the Mac becomes popular. And once popular, it will be targetted.
The Software Update icon appears and starts bouncing in the dock.
The icon stops bouncing, a dialog appears with a list of updates.
You click on "Install".
You are then prompted for your username and password, for certain updates (eg. QuickTime)
So, all your blackhat hacker needs to do is:
1. Find a way to get the program to run (exploit a buffer overflow in Safari, hide a trojan in an email, etc)
2. Have the program sleep for a little bit, to avert suspicion.
3. Make sure the program's icon's the same as Software Update (which isn't normally a permanently dock'd app, so the user's not going to know the difference between SU starting and your fake version)
4. Have it start, put up a dialog exactly like SU's, wait for user to blindly hit "Install", then put up a "Software Update requires your username and password" dialog.
5. Owned. Do what you want.
Not quite as easy as the "You could just put a picture of the dialog in a webpage!!! OMG!" suggestion above, but pretty good, and probably likely to fool the majority of users.
The "problem", and it's not that big a one, is getting the user to run your program to begin with. If you know already about something like an exploitable buffer overflow, then there's your vector. If you need to resort to social engineering, then you have other options. On Mac OS X, one way might be to put it in a zip file with, say, a bunch of jpegs, and give the "loader" application the same icon as all the other items in the zip. Unless the user views by list (and by default, they will not), they'll never realise it's not the same as the others.
Not exactly, but you're close. He said you don't have a license unless you agree to it (which is, by definition, true.) As the concept of "fair use" doesn't exist in Britain, any copying, no matter how harmless and in line with the intended use of a product, constitutes a breach of copyright law. That means that without agreeing to some form of license, the simple act of copying the software to your hard disk (otherwise known as installing it) is a breach of copyright.
Britain and the US are very different countries with respect to copyrights. Most people in Britain violate copyrights all the time completely unintentionally, indeed the music industry is, unlike the US, pushing for a liberalization of copyright law so that certain basic operations, such as ripping a CD for personal use, do not require explicit licensing.
So far as I'm aware, Britain doesn't have a first sale doctrine. Otherwise, I believe you'd be right.
We've been watching DVR'd Bond films on the Echostar DVR the last few weeks. We'll skip a series of ads, the movie will come back on, and then... and then a large collection of horses LOUDLY (I mean, as in drowning out the movie soundtrack) will roll across the bottom of the screen. Vision AND audio of the movie impaired. Why? Because AMC was advertising some sort of cowboy week or something.
The advertising techniques are getting worse. No matter how much it damages the viability of the content, TV companies will resort to anything they can to get their messages out rather than face reality and switch to more appropriate (eg micropayment/HBO) type business models.
TV companies live in a falicious world. They believe that their customers are advertisers, yet their product is aimed at viewers. Without viewers, they have no customers, so the product, ultimately, is tailored to the viewer. What their customers want, however, is completely at odds with what the viewers want. They can continue to try to make this work, and lose viewers and/or see viewers resorting to every method under the sun to try and make the pigs-ear that is modern TV "work", or they can sit back and ask themselves who they really should be trying to collect the money from.
I love OS X, but at the same time, having switched to Debian recently, I can't say I'm missing any major functionality or seeing anything that isn't user friendly. And if it's "not much worse than OS X", I'm amazed you even consider XP comparable to Ubuntu, let alone better. The default install of XP on my Thinkpad doesn't even allow access to your file system without either resorting to the command line or right clicking various obscure areas to get your "My Computer" icon to appear. Windows Explorer didn't even appear in the Start menu.
Leaving the specifics of a pre-install aside (and before arguing all the complaints about Windows lie in bad pre-installs, remember that installing it on a bare PC leaves you in just as much driver hell these days, if not more, than most GNU/Linux distros) Windows is diabolically awful these days. People put up with it because it's what they're used to, not because it's inherently more user friendly than the competition. I have absolutely no problem, assuming the software is available, with the notion of giving my computer-phobic mother a pre-configured modern GNOME based system. It's clean. It's user friendly. It's relatively secure (albeit in large part because of the marketshare, but yeah, Windows needs its userland cleaned up, I'm hoping that'll happen with Vista), and it has substantial software support. And there are fewer legal issues. What's not to like? How is XP in any way more cohesive, polished, or just plain better?
I hope not.
While I'm generally in favour of the anti-trust laws, they do have to be used as a last resort. In all honesty, I don't see the situation as quite getting there yet. Google has multiple options, including the ability to start its own open-access ecommerce site, which unlike most eBay replacements would stand a very strong chance of becoming as healthy as the original.
I'd be surprised if eBay's actions have an anti-competitive logic for that reason. I suspect the ban is a temporary one, probably applied to all new payment methods that do not have a history of trustworthiness behind them. Of course, one could argue if that's the criteria, why are they allowing their own service, Paypal, to continue operating? ;-)
Because they wanted developers to design software that ran well on Windows NT, and then Windows 95.
Or do you think Microsoft should have remained 16 bit, with programmers still jumping through segmented memory hoops to get anything done, in order to ensure IBM could easily get Windows to run under OS/2?
Maybe Microsoft should get rid of .NET too, I mean, that's clearly part of their evil plot to thwart WINE.
Microsoft never implemented any of Apple's APIs. What they did do was infringe on some software patents held by Apple, but you don't need to implement an API to do that.
Microsoft is not pushing Vista, at least no more than any previous operating system, possibly less. The betas for Vista have been good, but Microsoft has officially delayed the operating system, clearly not seeing this as something that must go out now whatever the cost.
There is a hurdle to be crossed if Apple implements Win32, and that's that it's a huge PITA to implement. The Wine people have been trying to get this running for decades. They'll get close, and then Windows will move forward again. Some features, (DirectX, hard to implement as you point out, is one of them), have never been properly implemented. Even once implemented, a Windows application will need to be installed (not the case for a Mac app), it will require some massaging of the APIs to get something that even vaguely fits into the same desktop as traditional Macintosh applications, it will, in short, be half-arsed. Imagine what the WINE people have had to go through. Now apply Steve Job's perfectionism, and Apple's lack of time and resources, and ask how Apple can possibly come up with code by themselves that will work.
They'd be better off just licensing Win32. The real thing. Or applying the OS/2 approach, and allowing users to install Windows using a custom installer and a replacement module or two. Or ignoring the issue altogether, because whatever they do is going to have incompatibilities, and Apple will get it in the neck for releasing a shoddy product every time a program fails to install and/or run properly. If Apple will not release Mac OS X for generic hardware because of some supposed risk of being blamed for bad third party drivers, how likely is it they'll try EMULATING WINDOWS?
That's a massive exaggeration.
IBM didn't emulate anything. It created some hooks and patches to allow the Windows kernel to run under OS/2. Microsoft's sole attempt to break this was to make Windows 3.11 incompatible with IBM's stub. IBM quickly fixed that.
OS/2's Windows compatibility did become less useful with Windows 95, partially because, for obviously necessary reasons (which have nothing do with Microsoft being spiteful) architecturally there were substantial differences between 95 and 3.1, and because Windows 95 came with DOS and so was a full operating system in itself, rather than a halfway house between a bolt-on and a "DOS as boot loader" system like Windows 1.x-3.x. It's hard to complain that Microsoft was breaking IBM's emulation when what they did was release an entirely new operating system, something they had to do (Windows 3.x was crap.)
Good point, that would give them a significant advantage over the USPS. We can't allow that to happen!
(In all seriousness, yes, I know what your point is, but I'm pretty sure that the information needed to build rockets capable of reaching LEO, carrying some sort of weapon rather than a human being, is relatively widely known anyway. The key reason Saturn is such a technical triumph, even today, is that it was capable of going to the moon, and carrying people, relatively safely, there and back. It's hard to find a military justification for withholding that kind of information when the Germans in WW2 already knew how to get something out of Earth's atmosphere (just! The V2 flew at about 60 miles above the Earth) and where the really hard stuff (automatic flying to specific destinations) involves technologies that rapidly become obsolete if you're planning to use them for military purposes anyway.)
DR had several operating systems that could be described that way. Their first was MP/M, which was loosely based on CP/M. Despite that (heh, I'm not a CP/M fan) it had a large following of users who bought it as a single-user multi-tasking OS, a good multitasking OS rather than a a multiuser one.
MP/M came in a variety of forms including MP/M86, and then was followed by Concurrent DOS. Concurrent DOS has limited DOS compatibility, but what it did it did fairly well, and in the mid-eighties a variety of computers were built to run it.
Finally, there's DOSPlus. DOSPlus wasn't multiuser, but it was the culmination of DR's work in different areas. It was largely DOS compatible, with a few exceptions which, needless to say, prevented many major applications from running. It had a multitasking system, though it was limited to multitasking CP/M86 applications (and I don't believe you could actually switch between them, they had to be background tasks, but I've read stuff that contradicted my own experience of the system); it was arguably DR's best single user operating system, followed later by DRDOS which sacrificed most of DR's innovations for DOS compatibility. DR could probably have come out with quite a nifty, powerful, system based on DOSPlus and GEM if MSDOS compatibility wasn't so important, and if they had the option of going 32 bit rather than being limited to the 8086 architecture.
I believe a sizable amount of this code is freeware and/or free software, as Caldera released a lot of it before they turned to the dark side. It's not always provided in an easy to work with form though, especially as the source code tends to be written in languages like PL/M.
I'm surprised to hear the SATA comment, does FreeDOS not use the BIOS or is this not really enough for SATA drives as you intend to use them?
I don't think the argument, seriously, is that people will switch because of Pilgrim, Doctorow, et al. The argument is that two (more than two?) prominant long time Apple enthusiasts are switching, and their reasons are worth listening to because if that's the way they feel, then imagine how easily Apple users with less of a record of rabid loyalty will switch over the same issues.
Of course, a small group will listen to both and will consider switching when they didn't before. But that's not the major story, the major one is that proprietariness (it's not just about DRM) is becoming a sore spot, and some long time Apple loyalists are no longer prepared to put up with it.
One has to hope Apple is listening, even if the celebrity-obsessed-but-in-denial Slashdot mob isn't.
Erm, ok.
I think suggesting someone's reasons are poor because they didn't seem to consider the same things issues fifteen years ago is stretching it somewhat.
Apple has moments of positiveness and moments of negativity. Frequently, it's easy to miss instances of the latter. Right now, they're suing bloggers, refusing to release source for a project they've touted for years as their open source jewel in the crown, releasing hardware that, frankly, is no more innovative or interesting than any other PC manfuacturer's, and their software is over-proprietary as usual (Pilgrim mentions Mail.app's switch to a closed mailbox format, I'd had my fight with iTunes during the 4.x to 6.x debacle. I'm surprised more people aren't screaming at them, to be honest.) So Apple is at a low point.
Anyone who's spent 20-25 years using proprietary software with an emotional, rather than logical, attachment to their primary supplier is, at some point, going to realise that they're being screwed over, repeatedly. The move will come during a nadir in the support and offerings their supplier goes through. For Pilgrim, and many other Mac fans, the question isn't "Why weren't you complaining 25 years ago when Apple was worse, jack-ass", it's simply the subtly different "What took you so long?"
And I can't answer that, except to suggest that since 1997, most Apple fans expected "the perfect system" to be just around the corner, that with the Steve in charge, making changes, the real problems users had with Apple's products would be fixed with new, better, products. And Mac OS X was released, and now we've kind of come to a head in terms of how good OS X will ever be, and it's great, but after three or four years of using Mac OS X, some are realising that not everything that was wrong in the Apple world was a matter of products, that a hell of a lot of it is because of Apple's mentality and its proprietary approach.
I, personally, have made the same decision, switching back to GNU/Linux from Mac OS X a few months ago. Mac OS X has a great GUI, but there's virtually nothing else (compared to GNU or the *BSDs) to commend it for. GNU/Linux has major problems, but I'm never going to have an issue that requires money to be spent and data to be lost to fix.
Or, like, what we could do is boycott Texaco Records. Then Texaco Records will lower their prices, which will make all the other music companies lower their prices too, and we'll be able to buy music for $1 a gallon!!!! Also we can all refuse to buy any music on Tuesdays. This will send the message that DRM sucks!
Hey, here's a thought: The RIAA is calling many of its members "customers" pirates because that's what they are. They - the "customers" in question - are making unauthorized copies of music, and indeed encouraging millions of anonymous strangers to do the same thing. I put the word "customers" in quotes because the problem, really, is that they're not really customers. That's kind of the issue. If they were buying the music rather than copying it, this wouldn't be an issue.
Rather than organizing boycots, why don't you just buy the music you want on CD (ie the format that isn't DRM'd), and not rip it and redistribute the rips? If the music's not available in a non-DRM'd format, don't buy it (or in any other way obtain it, treat it as if it never existed.) If it is, buy it. That's not a boycott, because it's not refusing to buy a product you'd otherwise buy, it's merely refusing to buy a product you don't actually want. And, well, that makes a hell of a lot more sense.
I think this illustrates the difference between "invention" and "innovation" very well. Doom wasn't the first 3D FPS, but it was the first viable FPS that turned a technology from being merely interesting to something that got into the hands of just about everybody and spawned an entire direction for the industry.
The Sinclair ZX81 had Psion's "3D Monster Maze", and doubtless there were predecessors to that, but none of the examples you gave, nor 3DMM, ended up generating much interest, however popular they may have been. The excitement started with Doom.
It's kind of like the GUI. Contrary to popular belief, there were many graphical user interfaces before the Mac. Indeed, the Mac's original, pre-Jobs, interface had little or nothing to do with the Xerox effort. It was the Mac, as released, that actually made people sit up and say "Wait, this one works" (albeit with quite some criticism), and made (despite that criticism) pretty much every new computer from 1985 onward (save for legacy systems, and even they slowly migrated to GEM and then to Windows) pretty much require a GUI.
Because some non-infringing uses do, nonetheless, in theory lessen the revenue available to the copyright holder?
One of the purposes of copyright is to ensure a stream of revenue that can used to fund the creation of the works copyrighted. You can do this by making draconian laws that make it impossible for people to use any copy of anything without the copyright holder's permission, or you can loosen the laws a little but do something to ensure the creators lose nothing from the liberalization of the law. When CDR copying became a substantial phenominem, the imbalance was seen to be upset, and many governments are using a compulsory royalty system to rebalance the system rather than "the other options" which are either to see a net decrease in revenue for copyright holders, or to introduce draconian laws banning CDR copying.
I'm sure many Slashdotters would rather see a net decrease in revenue for copyright holders, but that isn't a universally held opinion. There are many in the content industry that wish that the government would butt-out, and simply pass on all responsibility for licensing content to them, banning unlicensed CDRs. This is a middle ground that allows the technology to continue to exist while ensuring the content industry doesn't suffer for it.
Now watch me get modded down for stating the obvious, again.