Oh? What about Star Wars? going on 24 years! Should that entire property have just become public domain a decade ago?
YES!!!!
It's truly disturbing to see how many people are all for limiting the ownership of creative properties when all they want is to profit from it themselves.
When Starwars first came out on VHS, I got them for a birthday present. When special edition came out on VHS, I bought them with my hard-earned cash.
If Lucas's copyright expired right now, then it means I would not have to pay again when the DVD's come out for something I already own 2 nearly-identical copies of.
There is absolutely no reason that anyone should EVER profit off of any star wars merchandise without the permission of the copyright holders.
This is pure profitism. You might as well say that no one should be able to profit by a creative use of electricity (Computers, Home Entertainment, Etc..) without the electric company's permission.
Say I made a ray-tracing of R2D2 in a heroic action pose. Then I printed it out, framed it and put it up for sale.
Sure, R2D2 belongs to Lucas, but the picture, pose, content, frame, etc... were all made or assembled by me. Why *shouldn't* I profit off that?
Copyright's original intention was to keep powerful individuals from picking on weak individuals by stealing their ideas and distributing them before the original creator could.
This has been brutally abused by those same powerful individuals (corporations) it was meant to limit. It no longer protects the weak from the strong but ensures that the strong have yet another whip to keep the weak in line. Unless limits are placed on copyright and patent law, this will only get worse.
In this case, every bit of energy you used to charge your electronics would be energy that WASN'T spent moving your body along. I imagine that walking like this would feel difficult and strenuous, sort of like walking in sand.
Hmm... Most geeks I know sit in front of a computer all day and then go to the gym and excercise (if they get excercise at all) on a bulky treadmill, bike, or resistance weight system.
As long as it was comfortable, I don't think most people would mind a little extra effort in the amount of 'unavoidable' excercise they got walking between offices or tapping their feet to the MP3's.
I, for one, could save serious buckage on my electrical bill if I put a pedal-type charger under my desk while I worked.
There was no air on the moon or in high earth orbit, so there was no reason to keep the astronauts quaranteened.
HOWEVER, it was a good idea, because they didn't know everything they were dealing with yet.
On Mars, Europa, and Io, there exists a remote possibility for life. Retreival missions should be geared to keep this life hermetically isolated from the Earth's biosphere.... Just in case.
'sokay. I'll just let the download run all night and maybe I'll have a whole tarball in the morning. If not, I'll try again and grab it off one of the mirrors that will inevitably spring up.
What I'd really like to see come out of this, however, are 'userland' Win32 and MacOS implimentations ala 'Triangle Boy'.
I'm simply not much of a coder, or I would spend time on this, since I think it's such an important project.
Make this usuable for both experienced and inexperienced admins, and you have done a great deal for privacy and freedom.
It has to be, or it doesn't work at all. It breaks done and ceases to protect anyone but those with 'popular' speech.
In this case, it looks like there's a possiblity that he may have committed crimes... real crimes... such as vandalising websites.
Everything else, posting bomb-making instructions, advocating the overthrow of the government, should be *strictly* protected speech under the 1st Amendment.
Lat night, Valentine's day, my wife wanted a copy of a Disney movie as a gift.
"Anything... *anything* else," I urged her. I told her about the SSSCA and how much influence Disney had had in pushing that as far as it's gotten. I told her about all the other crap that disney has been responsible for. The company pisses on its user's rights and then expects to be a loved 'Family' company.
Whatever.
Despite the fact that they have produced some compelling animation in recent years, I just can't spend money on Disney products any more. It makes me feel sick to my stomach to think that the 18.95 I spent on the 'Hunch-back of Notre Dame' will one day have helped push through the SSSCA, making it impossible for people to watch media in anything other than a Disney-approved manner.
Vacuum chamber? You're kidding, right? Please tell me you don't actually believe that.
I wish I was wrong. I really do. Please remember that the SPCA is not necessarily related to the City-funded Animal Shelter. They may work closely together, for obvious reasons, but animals who are placed in SPCA shelters have a longer 'save' time and a better chance of being adopted.
In my city, the two are actually in the same building, and when you take an animal to the pound, you can opt to pay an additional fee so that they are housed in the SPCA side of the shelter. They get 'lethal injection' rather than decompression when their time is up.
Animals who are left in the city pound or are picked up off the streets don't have nearly such an easy time. They are given days, rather than a weeks or more, and when their time is up, they are placed in the vacuum chamber.
God, I wish it wasn't true. I wish the donations I made to the SPCA would make it not true.
Scarily enough, a common science project for high-schoolers interested in biology in my town is to take an animal carcas from the pound, render the flesh, and then reassemble the skeleton. When I was in high-school, my biology teacher had instructions on how to repair rib bones that had been broken when the animal's chest cavity exploded in the near-vacuum.
This is in Texas, a big state, but the same state that is giving you 'CopyCat'.
Yes, the research is important, and will be useful. But it should *never* be used to create pets or service animals when such an overpopulation of those domestic animals exist.
The Humane Society of the United States opposes pet cloning, the Journal said, because of the danger of overpopulation.
Every year, tens of millions of cats, dogs, puppies, and kittens are 'put to sleep'.
'Put to sleep' implies the use of euthenasia drugs, giving animals a fairly quick painless death. In fact, this happens only in context of a vetrenary office. In pounds and animal shelter, animals are slaughtered by putting them in a vacumn chamber.
If you take anything other than a kitten or a puppy, you are almost certainly condeming that animal to death by explosive decompression. Sounds fun, huh?
Cloning has many, many wonderful possibilities. The idea that skin or organs could be cloned for injured people is a neat thing... a development that could possibly save lives.
For everyone out there who thinks it would be cool to clone an animal as a pet or a service animal when another could just as easily be adopted from a local pound, please remember the terrified cat or dog who doesn't understand why she's being tortured to death.
It's been said so often that it's a joke, but spaying and neutering your pets isn't an option if you care about them at all. You're preventing more domestic animals from suffering a grisly, grisly fate.
Sure, it was a pirate copy and full of OCR introduced typos, but I sure as hell wasn't going to go spend my money on a kid's book, despite the hype.
I figured, what the hell. Let's see what's so interesting.
Much to my surprise, I was blown away. Harry Potter was a morality play couched in terms of a fantasy novel. There were some rough moments... like at the end where the bad guy gives away the plot.
(Rowling's writing has improved since)
Still, I was fascinated. I downloaded the second and the third, quickly reading through them and finding scathing comments about the classism, the futility of punitive imprisonment, and the state of charity in the world.
When I went to look for the fourth book, it was not available. Instead, I went to Barnes and Noble that evening and paid 21.95 for the big hardbound copy of 'HP and the Goblet of Fire'. Since, I've put down money for all 3 of the others as well.
If Harry Potter 5 is an e-book, neither Rowling nor her publisher should fear piracy. The people who would have bought the book will buy it anyway, and the electronic copies floating around will inspire a few more to buy it as well.
Also remember that Verant has been using a name validator for some time in EQ to filter out names that are obviously obscene. It would take only a few minutes of work to add several dozen variations of 'Luke' 'Han' and 'Leia' to this setup.
GM's in both EQ and DOAC have been known to force characters to change their name. Just recently, a buddy who plays on DOAC had his name forcibly changed to something more acceptable than 'Myazz'.
On one hand, I really want FOTR to do well, but on the other, I'm afraid that the success of FOTR will change the editing/special effects process of TT and ROTK...
Still, it's a wonderful day indeed when *anything* by Tokein is nominated for an Academy Award.
You may not like that, or somehow feel it's wrong. But the companies don't care what you or I think.
Ah, but the problem with that is no company has ever succeeded in eliminating a market.
Despite the fact that Midway wants to sit forever on those old games and never let them see the light of day again, just so that they can sell more 'Mega-Super-Fighter-Alpha-Zero' machines, there is still a market for those games.
Thus, right or wrong, grey or black markets spring up. In this case, the grey market for abandoned games isfairly benign and beneficial to everyone without hurting the original developers. (They can't money off it anyway, so the only way it 'hurts' them is by taking the rom out of their control'.
In other cases where a demand for an illegal good or service, the black market can be much, much more scary. Just ask child prostitutes or 3rd world kids who are raised or sold to organ farms.
Humans are the only species disgusted by vomit...
on
Fossilized Dinosaur Vomit
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Mainly because, as social animals, we developed the ability to regurgiate possibly bad or poisonous food on instinct, rather than wait for it to start harming us.
Most other animals have a much more egalitarian approach to vomit. Birds habitually regurgitate partially digested food to feed their chicks. Ever wonder why your dog wants to lick your face? In the wild, this behavior by puppies stimulates adult wolves to 'share' their kill with their young by vomiting back up.
In the article, it goes on about how many animals have a staple food that they simply cannot digest all of. In this case, the dino couldn't digest the shells it was eating the meat out of. Instead, it simply puked them back up rather than damage its intestine. The same thing happens today in whales, who spit the beaks of squid back out after it digests them.
I can't wait until I can get this in something other than a $3,000 camera. The imagery I saw, even in jpeg format, was outstanding. Anyone wanna form a pool on when you can get a camera using this tech for $400? I say October, this year.
While cameras are the 'killer app' for this tech, I think we'll probably see it show up in flatbed document scanners first.
Still, that's not an unwelcome tradeoff. I can't wait to scan an image and *not* have to correct for saturation or gamma levels.
In the opinion of many people, an expertly shot film image is still superior to an expert digital camera image. This will be the test of that supposition.
YOU, the consumer, are not the sole arbiter of what a reasonable sale price is.
Uhm... Yes I am.
Have you ever heard of the laws of supply and demand? If you didn't sleep through highschool economics or miss out seeing the graphics, you know that the higher the (consumer) demand for any given saleable object, the higher the price the originator or merchant can sell it for.
There is zero real demand for Donkey Kong roms at any non-zero price. Therefore, Midway cannot reasonably sell those roms for a profit.
Ergo, the price... legitimate or otherwise... is $0
A lot of black market economies work on this principle. A token amount is paid for a desirable, but basically valueless or disposable item that is for some reason difficult or illegal to obtain.
pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
The problem with this argument... and the fallacy that so many corporate types fall for is that value is not an absolute.
Case in point... I am a PC owner who has aquired a Motorola processor for an older Mac. I *could* spend my money and try to build a system around that processor, but I'd rather spend it on a newer system with with an AMD processor.
I could try to sell it to a mac-owner, but most Mac ownwers are used to spending a little more on hardware than PC owners. Most probably will never have a use for my processor.
The one person who does have a use for my processor is the poor kid who's managed to scrounge, beg, and borrow all the parts necessary to build a Macintosh Quadra-era PC, but lacks a processor to make it run. (This exmple may be flawed...)
The point is, the processor only has value to someone who can't afford to buy it. It doesn't have value to anyone who could afford to buy it because they can already afford better, just because the tech has advanced so far so quickly.
The same is true of 'orphanware' and 'abandonware'. I would never seriously consider paying to have a Donkey Kong arcade machine. It's old, clunky, and probably smells of whatever bar or grease-pit it's been rotting in for the last 2 decades. I highly doubt that Midway has sold any to anyone but the most rabid of collectors in at least a decade.
To download the rom for free, (and illegally), gives me a great deal of satisfaction playing a old, great game I would not otherwise ever engage in.
While the hardware and software combination may have a small amount of value to collectors, the software itself has no value at all, except to those who wouldn't have it unless they could get it for free.
Need for product durability and stability
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When construction begins in a populated area, utility companies, including telco and cable operators, are responsible for coming out and flagging their under-ground wires, pipes, conduits, repeaters, and switch boxes.
A lot of amature 802.11b hackers are building a utility infrastructure, wether they think they are or not and even if it's for their own private use.
In the VERY near future, wireless devices like this are going to have to become *very* durable to stand up to long-term outdoor use... and I don't mean having a water-tight battery compartment. A lot of the stuff out there... Pringle Can antennas, anyone?... is homerolled hacks.
Things like wireless routers and repeaters, however, need to be designed with things like natural disaster, wild animals, and vandalism in mind.
Ever wonder why public utility stuff is so bulky and hard to get into?
One of my biggest gripes is feature-creep. The essential functionality is planned out at the beginning, a realistic timeframe is projected, and coding beings.
Earlier this week, I was in a meeting between our companies and representatives with one of our clients. They were asking for a timeframe based on a graphics creation task I would ultimately be responsible for.
I told them how long it would take.
Then they started saying they had a bunch of potential changes to the graphics that they might want to 'impliment down the line' which is marketing-speak for 'I think this is really cool and I want to do it, but I haven't stuck my nose in my boss's ass deep enough yet for him to tell me it's okay.'
For each change they suggested, I interrupted the meeting and very pointedly explained that particular change would add 'X' amount of time to the project.
One of the exec VP's for my company was sitting right there. He just kept nodding in approval every time I opened my mouth.
Our company is fairly successful, and we always come away with good 'customer service reviews' and this seemingly-rude behavior is one of the reasons why.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all they have to do in not give it away anonymously
Mod this guy up.
I worked for an artist one time on a website to sell nice framed prints of his artwork.
The trick was that the guy didn't want to put any pictures of his art on the website.
I told him very clearly and simply that he had two options. He could choose to give anyone who wanted it tiny versions of the art for free... a 1024x768 jpeg of any given piece of large framed art probably suffers about 90% resolution loss... and hope that the people who liked them would buy the full-sized wall-hangers, or he could not put them on his website and expect people to buy works of art they couldn't see.
I convinced him after a little while, and he made a few thousand dollars selling stuff. Then one of his relatives convinced him that people were stealing from him by downloading the images of the website, so he took most of them down. Now he doesn't make much money any more.
I just checked the site again, and a few of the pictures are back up... at a greatly reduced filesize. I bet he starts making money again.
Until my company switched to Linux/Apache for our web and application server needs, I was forced to run Win2k/IIS.
While it runs just fine and dandy, quite a bit of the documentation is geared toward users running Linux/Apache/MySQL
It was a very pleasant experience to see, down below the 'approved' text, a series of users who had already solved problems of how to get PHP to talk to MS SQL over ODBC, which dll's you needed, how to edit your php.ini so that it works *just* right, etc...
Shared user annotation is a very wonderful thing for technical manuals of any kind. All online resources should at least consider doing things like PHP.Net has done.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh? What about Star Wars? going on 24 years! Should that entire property have just become public domain a decade ago?
YES!!!!
It's truly disturbing to see how many people are all for limiting the ownership of creative properties when all they want is to profit from it themselves.
When Starwars first came out on VHS, I got them for a birthday present. When special edition came out on VHS, I bought them with my hard-earned cash.
If Lucas's copyright expired right now, then it means I would not have to pay again when the DVD's come out for something I already own 2 nearly-identical copies of.
There is absolutely no reason that anyone should EVER profit off of any star wars merchandise without the permission of the copyright holders.
This is pure profitism. You might as well say that no one should be able to profit by a creative use of electricity (Computers, Home Entertainment, Etc..) without the electric company's permission.
Say I made a ray-tracing of R2D2 in a heroic action pose. Then I printed it out, framed it and put it up for sale.
Sure, R2D2 belongs to Lucas, but the picture, pose, content, frame, etc... were all made or assembled by me. Why *shouldn't* I profit off that?
Copyright's original intention was to keep powerful individuals from picking on weak individuals by stealing their ideas and distributing them before the original creator could.
This has been brutally abused by those same powerful individuals (corporations) it was meant to limit. It no longer protects the weak from the strong but ensures that the strong have yet another whip to keep the weak in line. Unless limits are placed on copyright and patent law, this will only get worse.
In this case, every bit of energy you used to charge your electronics would be energy that WASN'T spent moving your body along. I imagine that walking like this would feel difficult and strenuous, sort of like walking in sand.
Hmm... Most geeks I know sit in front of a computer all day and then go to the gym and excercise (if they get excercise at all) on a bulky treadmill, bike, or resistance weight system.
As long as it was comfortable, I don't think most people would mind a little extra effort in the amount of 'unavoidable' excercise they got walking between offices or tapping their feet to the MP3's.
I, for one, could save serious buckage on my electrical bill if I put a pedal-type charger under my desk while I worked.
EQ
DOAC
UO
AO
I'd continue with the acronyms, but I'm risking invoking the lameness filter.
Charging my laptop. Honest!
There was no air on the moon or in high earth orbit, so there was no reason to keep the astronauts quaranteened.
HOWEVER, it was a good idea, because they didn't know everything they were dealing with yet.
On Mars, Europa, and Io, there exists a remote possibility for life. Retreival missions should be geared to keep this life hermetically isolated from the Earth's biosphere.... Just in case.
Downloading the code now... at a whopping .8 k/s.
'sokay. I'll just let the download run all night and maybe I'll have a whole tarball in the morning. If not, I'll try again and grab it off one of the mirrors that will inevitably spring up.
What I'd really like to see come out of this, however, are 'userland' Win32 and MacOS implimentations ala 'Triangle Boy'.
I'm simply not much of a coder, or I would spend time on this, since I think it's such an important project.
Make this usuable for both experienced and inexperienced admins, and you have done a great deal for privacy and freedom.
It has to be, or it doesn't work at all. It breaks done and ceases to protect anyone but those with 'popular' speech.
In this case, it looks like there's a possiblity that he may have committed crimes... real crimes... such as vandalising websites.
Everything else, posting bomb-making instructions, advocating the overthrow of the government, should be *strictly* protected speech under the 1st Amendment.
Damn Mickey all to hell!
I'll second that.
Lat night, Valentine's day, my wife wanted a copy of a Disney movie as a gift.
"Anything... *anything* else," I urged her. I told her about the SSSCA and how much influence Disney had had in pushing that as far as it's gotten. I told her about all the other crap that disney has been responsible for. The company pisses on its user's rights and then expects to be a loved 'Family' company.
Whatever.
Despite the fact that they have produced some compelling animation in recent years, I just can't spend money on Disney products any more. It makes me feel sick to my stomach to think that the 18.95 I spent on the 'Hunch-back of Notre Dame' will one day have helped push through the SSSCA, making it impossible for people to watch media in anything other than a Disney-approved manner.
Vacuum chamber? You're kidding, right? Please tell me you don't actually believe that.
I wish I was wrong. I really do. Please remember that the SPCA is not necessarily related to the City-funded Animal Shelter. They may work closely together, for obvious reasons, but animals who are placed in SPCA shelters have a longer 'save' time and a better chance of being adopted.
In my city, the two are actually in the same building, and when you take an animal to the pound, you can opt to pay an additional fee so that they are housed in the SPCA side of the shelter. They get 'lethal injection' rather than decompression when their time is up.
Animals who are left in the city pound or are picked up off the streets don't have nearly such an easy time. They are given days, rather than a weeks or more, and when their time is up, they are placed in the vacuum chamber.
God, I wish it wasn't true. I wish the donations I made to the SPCA would make it not true.
Scarily enough, a common science project for high-schoolers interested in biology in my town is to take an animal carcas from the pound, render the flesh, and then reassemble the skeleton. When I was in high-school, my biology teacher had instructions on how to repair rib bones that had been broken when the animal's chest cavity exploded in the near-vacuum.
This is in Texas, a big state, but the same state that is giving you 'CopyCat'.
Yes, the research is important, and will be useful. But it should *never* be used to create pets or service animals when such an overpopulation of those domestic animals exist.
The Humane Society of the United States opposes pet cloning, the Journal said, because of the danger of overpopulation.
Every year, tens of millions of cats, dogs, puppies, and kittens are 'put to sleep'.
'Put to sleep' implies the use of euthenasia drugs, giving animals a fairly quick painless death. In fact, this happens only in context of a vetrenary office. In pounds and animal shelter, animals are slaughtered by putting them in a vacumn chamber.
If you take anything other than a kitten or a puppy, you are almost certainly condeming that animal to death by explosive decompression. Sounds fun, huh?
Cloning has many, many wonderful possibilities. The idea that skin or organs could be cloned for injured people is a neat thing... a development that could possibly save lives.
For everyone out there who thinks it would be cool to clone an animal as a pet or a service animal when another could just as easily be adopted from a local pound, please remember the terrified cat or dog who doesn't understand why she's being tortured to death.
It's been said so often that it's a joke, but spaying and neutering your pets isn't an option if you care about them at all. You're preventing more domestic animals from suffering a grisly, grisly fate.
For me, Harry Potter 1 was an e-book.
Sure, it was a pirate copy and full of OCR introduced typos, but I sure as hell wasn't going to go spend my money on a kid's book, despite the hype.
I figured, what the hell. Let's see what's so interesting.
Much to my surprise, I was blown away. Harry Potter was a morality play couched in terms of a fantasy novel. There were some rough moments... like at the end where the bad guy gives away the plot.
(Rowling's writing has improved since)
Still, I was fascinated. I downloaded the second and the third, quickly reading through them and finding scathing comments about the classism, the futility of punitive imprisonment, and the state of charity in the world.
When I went to look for the fourth book, it was not available. Instead, I went to Barnes and Noble that evening and paid 21.95 for the big hardbound copy of 'HP and the Goblet of Fire'. Since, I've put down money for all 3 of the others as well.
If Harry Potter 5 is an e-book, neither Rowling nor her publisher should fear piracy. The people who would have bought the book will buy it anyway, and the electronic copies floating around will inspire a few more to buy it as well.
States: We'd really like to know what this following section of code does.
Balmer: Code? What Code?
States: The line of code that says
while 1 {
gosub microsoft.world.domination();
}
Also remember that Verant has been using a name validator for some time in EQ to filter out names that are obviously obscene. It would take only a few minutes of work to add several dozen variations of 'Luke' 'Han' and 'Leia' to this setup.
GM's in both EQ and DOAC have been known to force characters to change their name. Just recently, a buddy who plays on DOAC had his name forcibly changed to something more acceptable than 'Myazz'.
Mod this guy up!
Yes, Geek abbreviations are funny. Especially if you've every been in a conversation when someone verbally pronounces "LOL" or "ROTFL".
Remember that the Academy hates any kind of Genre film, be it Western, Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, or Fantasy.
If FOTR does win *any* non-technical awards, it will be an AMAZING acheivement.
On one hand, I really want FOTR to do well, but on the other, I'm afraid that the success of FOTR will change the editing/special effects process of TT and ROTK...
Still, it's a wonderful day indeed when *anything* by Tokein is nominated for an Academy Award.
You may not like that, or somehow feel it's wrong. But the companies don't care what you or I think.
Ah, but the problem with that is no company has ever succeeded in eliminating a market.
Despite the fact that Midway wants to sit forever on those old games and never let them see the light of day again, just so that they can sell more 'Mega-Super-Fighter-Alpha-Zero' machines, there is still a market for those games.
Thus, right or wrong, grey or black markets spring up. In this case, the grey market for abandoned games isfairly benign and beneficial to everyone without hurting the original developers. (They can't money off it anyway, so the only way it 'hurts' them is by taking the rom out of their control'.
In other cases where a demand for an illegal good or service, the black market can be much, much more scary. Just ask child prostitutes or 3rd world kids who are raised or sold to organ farms.
Mainly because, as social animals, we developed the ability to regurgiate possibly bad or poisonous food on instinct, rather than wait for it to start harming us.
Most other animals have a much more egalitarian approach to vomit. Birds habitually regurgitate partially digested food to feed their chicks. Ever wonder why your dog wants to lick your face? In the wild, this behavior by puppies stimulates adult wolves to 'share' their kill with their young by vomiting back up.
In the article, it goes on about how many animals have a staple food that they simply cannot digest all of. In this case, the dino couldn't digest the shells it was eating the meat out of. Instead, it simply puked them back up rather than damage its intestine. The same thing happens today in whales, who spit the beaks of squid back out after it digests them.
I can't wait until I can get this in something other than a $3,000 camera. The imagery I saw, even in jpeg format, was outstanding. Anyone wanna form a pool on when you can get a camera using this tech for $400? I say October, this year.
While cameras are the 'killer app' for this tech, I think we'll probably see it show up in flatbed document scanners first.
Still, that's not an unwelcome tradeoff. I can't wait to scan an image and *not* have to correct for saturation or gamma levels.
In the opinion of many people, an expertly shot film image is still superior to an expert digital camera image. This will be the test of that supposition.
YOU, the consumer, are not the sole arbiter of what a reasonable sale price is.
Uhm... Yes I am.
Have you ever heard of the laws of supply and demand? If you didn't sleep through highschool economics or miss out seeing the graphics, you know that the higher the (consumer) demand for any given saleable object, the higher the price the originator or merchant can sell it for.
There is zero real demand for Donkey Kong roms at any non-zero price. Therefore, Midway cannot reasonably sell those roms for a profit.
Ergo, the price... legitimate or otherwise... is $0
A lot of black market economies work on this principle. A token amount is paid for a desirable, but basically valueless or disposable item that is for some reason difficult or illegal to obtain.
pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
The problem with this argument... and the fallacy that so many corporate types fall for is that value is not an absolute.
Case in point... I am a PC owner who has aquired a Motorola processor for an older Mac. I *could* spend my money and try to build a system around that processor, but I'd rather spend it on a newer system with with an AMD processor.
I could try to sell it to a mac-owner, but most Mac ownwers are used to spending a little more on hardware than PC owners. Most probably will never have a use for my processor.
The one person who does have a use for my processor is the poor kid who's managed to scrounge, beg, and borrow all the parts necessary to build a Macintosh Quadra-era PC, but lacks a processor to make it run. (This exmple may be flawed...)
The point is, the processor only has value to someone who can't afford to buy it. It doesn't have value to anyone who could afford to buy it because they can already afford better, just because the tech has advanced so far so quickly.
The same is true of 'orphanware' and 'abandonware'. I would never seriously consider paying to have a Donkey Kong arcade machine. It's old, clunky, and probably smells of whatever bar or grease-pit it's been rotting in for the last 2 decades. I highly doubt that Midway has sold any to anyone but the most rabid of collectors in at least a decade.
To download the rom for free, (and illegally), gives me a great deal of satisfaction playing a old, great game I would not otherwise ever engage in.
While the hardware and software combination may have a small amount of value to collectors, the software itself has no value at all, except to those who wouldn't have it unless they could get it for free.
When construction begins in a populated area, utility companies, including telco and cable operators, are responsible for coming out and flagging their under-ground wires, pipes, conduits, repeaters, and switch boxes.
A lot of amature 802.11b hackers are building a utility infrastructure, wether they think they are or not and even if it's for their own private use.
In the VERY near future, wireless devices like this are going to have to become *very* durable to stand up to long-term outdoor use... and I don't mean having a water-tight battery compartment. A lot of the stuff out there... Pringle Can antennas, anyone?... is homerolled hacks.
Things like wireless routers and repeaters, however, need to be designed with things like natural disaster, wild animals, and vandalism in mind.
Ever wonder why public utility stuff is so bulky and hard to get into?
One of my biggest gripes is feature-creep. The essential functionality is planned out at the beginning, a realistic timeframe is projected, and coding beings.
Earlier this week, I was in a meeting between our companies and representatives with one of our clients. They were asking for a timeframe based on a graphics creation task I would ultimately be responsible for.
I told them how long it would take.
Then they started saying they had a bunch of potential changes to the graphics that they might want to 'impliment down the line' which is marketing-speak for 'I think this is really cool and I want to do it, but I haven't stuck my nose in my boss's ass deep enough yet for him to tell me it's okay.'
For each change they suggested, I interrupted the meeting and very pointedly explained that particular change would add 'X' amount of time to the project.
One of the exec VP's for my company was sitting right there. He just kept nodding in approval every time I opened my mouth.
Our company is fairly successful, and we always come away with good 'customer service reviews' and this seemingly-rude behavior is one of the reasons why.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all they have to do in not give it away anonymously
Mod this guy up.
I worked for an artist one time on a website to sell nice framed prints of his artwork.
The trick was that the guy didn't want to put any pictures of his art on the website.
I told him very clearly and simply that he had two options. He could choose to give anyone who wanted it tiny versions of the art for free... a 1024x768 jpeg of any given piece of large framed art probably suffers about 90% resolution loss... and hope that the people who liked them would buy the full-sized wall-hangers, or he could not put them on his website and expect people to buy works of art they couldn't see.
I convinced him after a little while, and he made a few thousand dollars selling stuff. Then one of his relatives convinced him that people were stealing from him by downloading the images of the website, so he took most of them down. Now he doesn't make much money any more.
I just checked the site again, and a few of the pictures are back up... at a greatly reduced filesize. I bet he starts making money again.
Until my company switched to Linux/Apache for our web and application server needs, I was forced to run Win2k/IIS.
While it runs just fine and dandy, quite a bit of the documentation is geared toward users running Linux/Apache/MySQL
It was a very pleasant experience to see, down below the 'approved' text, a series of users who had already solved problems of how to get PHP to talk to MS SQL over ODBC, which dll's you needed, how to edit your php.ini so that it works *just* right, etc...
Shared user annotation is a very wonderful thing for technical manuals of any kind. All online resources should at least consider doing things like PHP.Net has done.