Shame on them for not spending money on something they didn't think they needed.
In a related story, I plan to file suit against all readers of Slashdot who did not by the DaHat SuperFoo as I feel that you are all conspiring against me and it to make it fail and that it has nothing to do with the fact that the price per SuperFoo is more then any of you would want to pay.
That still requires you to set the PC up for her ahead of time.
There are plenty of automated methods on both sides, the built in update system in Windows and other Oses can be an invaluable tool as it does not require the user to configure it before hand.
In my book, applying patches to my mom's PC should take no more then a 30 second (voice) phone call where I remind her to go to windowsupdate.com, click Scan for updates, wait a few moments while it checks the system, click Review and install updates, and to next press the Install Now button. Finally I tell her to go do something else and return to her PC in a little while when it's prompted her to reboot and do so. 30 seconds is all that's required, and no need for pre configuration!
As does Microsoft, the patches exist, and just like Linux, the time required to apply even a single patch to multiple PC's is not small.
You are right that after a Linux hole is fixed, future Dlers are protected, that does little to help those already installed. Do you want to talk your mother through doing a kernel update rebuild, just to protect her from a new Linux hole? I prefer having mine go to windowsupdate.com, far easier IMO.
The whole tax system has always driven me nuts, I've got no problem with usage fees, but taxing nearly every unrelated aspect of life is... crazy, I often think of the old line of:
"My uncle played the lottery all his life, and finally, after 40 years he won 100 million dollars. Next thing he knows, the government comes to his door and asks for their cut to which he replied 'Why don't you buy your own lottery tickets?'"
Course taxing lottery winnings makes even less sense to me as counting a waiter/waitress's tips as part of their salary/wage. Last I checked, a gratuity is not required and is a gift for good work. Oh wait I forgot... the IRS says they can tax gifts, damn.
Yes, Pepsi would have already have paid tax on the vehicle it's self. That's sales tax.
The tax that the winner would pay I believe is capital gains tax. It's the same tax that kicks in if you win the lottery or win any money or anything of value for that matter.
Yes, it's double dipping but does this surprise you?
Just remember, there's tax on nearly everything in the US and the gov (either federal, state or local) get's their cut of nearly every transaction.
Moral of the story: Keep aware of the Critical Updates. That... or don't have unrestricted port access to your machine. Because of my efforts, no one in my extended family is permitted to plug their PC directly into their cable modem, all go through NAT routers because of the inherit security benefit of them.
I admit it, I don't keep up to date on windows updates, simply because my PC is several levels removed from the internet that a slew of cataclysmic events would have to occur for me to become infected with anything more then disk fragmentation.
Quite true, but it's not as satisfying. That and I don't mind seeing that good looking girl holding the followers from the SCO page pop up now and then.
read my original comment and you will see that my 50 million number had nothing to do with his personal wealth but instead referred to the value of the stock purchase alone.
Long ago I took up updating my hosts file with data from http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ which provides a list of known ad servers that you then point back to your local machine.
I decided to take this one step further and change the mapped to IP to be that of SCO, so that each time I come to Slashdot and don't see their ads, I instead see a small bit of the SCO homepage, what you might call a mini DoS
I apologize for being such a cheap bastard but I just can't see myself paying 9 dollars for a movie ticket, 5 dollars for a popcorn, and 4 dollars for a pop.
I also apologize for not being willing to wait 6-8 months for a movie to be released to video and dvd as I am such a lazy fool that I do not want to spend the time or money involved in walking or driving to the video store.
Most of all... I am quite sorry for getting caught, I promise you that that will not happen again.
Sincerely, A. Nonymous
P.S. I do not agree with or support any of what I just wrote in this hypothetical and mythical letter.
Also remember that MPEG4 requires significantly more CPU horse power behind it for encoding and decoding. Say what you want about MPEG2, it's a hell of a lot cheaper (CPU wise) to decode.
Regardless of what people say, it doesn't change the law. The fact is that contract law is a founding principal of the United States and permeates virtually everything in this country.
Example: I write a book and sign an exclusive publishing contract with company A for worldwide distribution in all languages for the next 50 years.
A couple of weeks later, I go to publishing company B and authorize them to publish my book. Even if I signed a contract saying so with company B, they still have no right to publish my book, company A has the exclusive rights to publish it. Why? Because I gave it to them in a legally binding contract, and a future contract contradicting the first would be nullified by the first.
In such a case, I have no doubt that both company A and B would sue me, A for breach of contract and B for attempting to sell them something that I couldn't sell to them.
As for your argument that you either have right to copyrighted material or you don't, you're only half right. Copyright is ultimately about making copies. You either have the right to copy or not to copy, and the owner of the copyright has the sole right to dictate how you may copy it.
In the case of say... iTunes DRM... the RIAA, having sole say over the distribution of most of their music (due to contracts with their artists (ethical or not)), grants permission to Apple on the distribution and sale of music under certain terms. Next, Apple has a small amount of leeway in which it can say "you may burn only X copies of a playlist" and so on. And you as the user are granted limited copying rights to music which you download, rights which granted in very specific ways and which can be revoked at anytime.
Whether you like the terms or not, by signing up for the service and purchasing from it, you agree to be bound by the terms
Here are two examples of contract law trumping normal rights which we all have.
I have a signed non disclosure agreement with my employer which I contractually agreed not to discuss the internal workings of our products, etc. While I may have the right to free speech, I do not have the right to discuss certain aspects of my job, and if I did, my employer would be right in firing and possibly even suing me.
Also, my employer could come to me tomorrow with a non compete clause and require me to sign it. For the sake of argument, this contract could say that I agree not to work as a software engineer for any company involved in digital television systems for a period of 12 month after I leave here. Note: My employer has the right to fire me if I refused to sign such a contract if it is a condition of future/continued employment with them. Now back to the example: I do have the right to work anywhere I want, however could be compelled to give up that right to continue where I am today. (This has been challenged in court several times and in most cases, the court finds for the employer).
As for the original point, if you contractually agree not to break a DRM system and in anyway support the breaking of such a system, you are in violation of the initial contract and can be held liable.
Fair use and DRM? That all depends. I believe you have forgotten a key point involved with both...
I don't know about you, but I own an iPod and have purchased songs from the iTMS for playback on it and my desktop. When I signed up for the service, I contractually agreed that I would not break/hack/etc the DRM system on the music. I also am a subscriber to Audible and agreed to the same thing.
A content provider does have the right within reason to designate how a viewer/listener/receiver may have access to material. Under most cases, the user is agreeing to such restrictions as part of using the system. Virtually all legally Dled music and movies online are protected in some way with DRM and their customers have agreed to accept such a system. In the case of a mandated FCC flag, things get quite hairy as the end user has not agreed to be bound by such a restriction.
The issue I believe that you and most/.ers fail to understand is to what extent fair use should and does exist. Just because I have access to the physical medium (file/cd/disk/etc) does not mean I have the right to do with it as I please. In the example before of iTunes and Audible, users of those services are contractually obligated NOT to crack their DRM systems. Furthermore, if I were to provide access to files I had purchased to someone else who would attempt to crack the DRM, I would again be in violation of the agreement and could even be actionable.
Thus, ALL iTMS files are ultimately bound by the iTMS service agreement, and anyone bypassing the DRM or helping to bypass the DRM by providing DRMed files, keys or other support is violating their service agreement and apple does have the right to attempt to prevent the cracking of their DRM when EVERY SINGLE legitimate user of it has agreed to be bound by it.
Take a few minutes and read some comments in stories related to music/movie piracy, breaking contractually agreed to DRM and so on and you'll find far too many people thinking it is quite alright, these sadly are many of the same people I hear/see standing up and screaming every time someone says something unkind about Linux(F)/OSS.
Quite true, but remember the group you are talking about, many of whom seem to think that downloading music and movies for free with out compensating the artist/recording company/copyright holder is alright!
Re:Lawsuits
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Your statement is overly broad, yes, whoever is to blame would be at fault... do you think it'd be easy to determine who is to blame if both 'drivers' were doing something other then watching the road (which they'd be able to do with such a system)? When we have the computer driven car, the 'who' can be taken out of the equation and it becomes 'what'.
Is the driver of the car to blame at fault because they were not in control of their vehicle at the time? Part of the reason the technology would exist would be to permit the 'driver' from having to watch the road and their surroundings at all times and let them do other things.
Is the car AI maker to blame for building an AI that screwed up in some way? Such at technology would not be intended as a driver replacement but as a driver enhancement, similar to ABS breaks or more advanced forms of traction control. They can help the driver out immensely, but they cannot replace intelligence behind the wheel. In this area of blame, it is often difficult to define a proper level of vendor/maker liability for defects in their product.
There are plenty of areas in the world where we turn over our own control of things to technology and let the code of a programmer decide what is best. This is fine and dandy so long as things work, and there have been plenty of high profile screw-ups where a software or hardware error caused a breakdown of a physical system or even death. Assigning blame for them is rarely an easy task.
I can see the lawsuits now! Either one of these cones feels suicidal and it moves it's self into traffic only to get hit at high speed... or someone realizes that they are able to move and runs into one on purpose, in either case, instant profit for who ever hits em.
It is similar to the old Q of if we had cars which could drive themselves... who is to blame when two computer driven cars get into an accident with each other.
Your admins should chat with those at DSU (where I went) sometime.
At DSU, your IP address was assigned by a reservation in the DHCP server, I was never quite sure how they did it, but until they created a lease for your MAC address, you could assign yourself an IP, but you could not get outside of the dorm.
Also, they had enough intelligence in the switch and other systems to be able to assign an unchangeable reverse look up name to your connection... regardless of what IP address may be, and even you assigned it yourself or your system was spoofing. This permitted them to be able to identify offending computers by a simple string similar to:
zd323-a.dsu.edu
which said that someone on port A of room 323 of the Zimmermann Hall dorm was doing something.
I spent a fair amount of research time trying to find a way around this... spoofing an IP is easy, beating this reverse look up name with out help from inside of the department is not, thus I didn't conduct any truly evil business on campus, but did just enough to make them think they knew what I was up to (I lost count of how many times I got disconnected from the network for being bad).
Most universities, like my old one put a clause in the network agreement you signed to get on the network that you were responsible for anything which happened on your computer, even if you are not the one using it.
That clause has been enforced a couple of times when someone blamed their computer being infected with a virus for hacking into the email server and sending campus wide e-mails.
Slashdot Mirror
Shame on them for not spending money on something they didn't think they needed.
In a related story, I plan to file suit against all readers of Slashdot who did not by the DaHat SuperFoo as I feel that you are all conspiring against me and it to make it fail and that it has nothing to do with the fact that the price per SuperFoo is more then any of you would want to pay.
That still requires you to set the PC up for her ahead of time.
There are plenty of automated methods on both sides, the built in update system in Windows and other Oses can be an invaluable tool as it does not require the user to configure it before hand.
In my book, applying patches to my mom's PC should take no more then a 30 second (voice) phone call where I remind her to go to windowsupdate.com, click Scan for updates, wait a few moments while it checks the system, click Review and install updates, and to next press the Install Now button. Finally I tell her to go do something else and return to her PC in a little while when it's prompted her to reboot and do so. 30 seconds is all that's required, and no need for pre configuration!
As does Microsoft, the patches exist, and just like Linux, the time required to apply even a single patch to multiple PC's is not small.
You are right that after a Linux hole is fixed, future Dlers are protected, that does little to help those already installed. Do you want to talk your mother through doing a kernel update rebuild, just to protect her from a new Linux hole? I prefer having mine go to windowsupdate.com, far easier IMO.
The whole tax system has always driven me nuts, I've got no problem with usage fees, but taxing nearly every unrelated aspect of life is... crazy, I often think of the old line of:
"My uncle played the lottery all his life, and finally, after 40 years he won 100 million dollars. Next thing he knows, the government comes to his door and asks for their cut to which he replied 'Why don't you buy your own lottery tickets?'"
Course taxing lottery winnings makes even less sense to me as counting a waiter/waitress's tips as part of their salary/wage. Last I checked, a gratuity is not required and is a gift for good work. Oh wait I forgot... the IRS says they can tax gifts, damn.
Yes, Pepsi would have already have paid tax on the vehicle it's self. That's sales tax.
The tax that the winner would pay I believe is capital gains tax. It's the same tax that kicks in if you win the lottery or win any money or anything of value for that matter.
Yes, it's double dipping but does this surprise you?
Just remember, there's tax on nearly everything in the US and the gov (either federal, state or local) get's their cut of nearly every transaction.
Perhaps a Laser Blazer would be the way to go, anytime someone wont shut up or is bothering you... simply put your hand in the jackets pocket.
Moral of the story: Keep aware of the Critical Updates.
That... or don't have unrestricted port access to your machine. Because of my efforts, no one in my extended family is permitted to plug their PC directly into their cable modem, all go through NAT routers because of the inherit security benefit of them.
I admit it, I don't keep up to date on windows updates, simply because my PC is several levels removed from the internet that a slew of cataclysmic events would have to occur for me to become infected with anything more then disk fragmentation.
Quite true, but it's not as satisfying. That and I don't mind seeing that good looking girl holding the followers from the SCO page pop up now and then.
read my original comment and you will see that my 50 million number had nothing to do with his personal wealth but instead referred to the value of the stock purchase alone.
$50 mil stock buy and a 800k fine... lets do the math
800,000 / 50,000,000 = 1.6%
A 1.6% fine? That seems low when so many dollars are involved.
Long ago I took up updating my hosts file with data from http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ which provides a list of known ad servers that you then point back to your local machine.
I decided to take this one step further and change the mapped to IP to be that of SCO, so that each time I come to Slashdot and don't see their ads, I instead see a small bit of the SCO homepage, what you might call a mini DoS
I just wasn't thinking when I typed 'Dir' rather than 'Dear'.
Part of it also was the original opening was "Dir Sir's", it's more likely that there was confusion in the similarity of those two.
Dir Corporate Whores,
I apologize for being such a cheap bastard but I just can't see myself paying 9 dollars for a movie ticket, 5 dollars for a popcorn, and 4 dollars for a pop.
I also apologize for not being willing to wait 6-8 months for a movie to be released to video and dvd as I am such a lazy fool that I do not want to spend the time or money involved in walking or driving to the video store.
Most of all... I am quite sorry for getting caught, I promise you that that will not happen again.
Sincerely,
A. Nonymous
P.S. I do not agree with or support any of what I just wrote in this hypothetical and mythical letter.
You should have met my father, I'd say he's far worse.
My father was one of those who when he'd buy a coupon book, he'd carefully note how much he saved to ensure he got his money's worth.
Also remember that MPEG4 requires significantly more CPU horse power behind it for encoding and decoding. Say what you want about MPEG2, it's a hell of a lot cheaper (CPU wise) to decode.
For the most part, far from it. Granted some Linux users may have gone to alternative systems, the non Linux *NIX is still going quite strong.
Many say fair use supercedes those arguments
Regardless of what people say, it doesn't change the law. The fact is that contract law is a founding principal of the United States and permeates virtually everything in this country.
Example: I write a book and sign an exclusive publishing contract with company A for worldwide distribution in all languages for the next 50 years.
A couple of weeks later, I go to publishing company B and authorize them to publish my book. Even if I signed a contract saying so with company B, they still have no right to publish my book, company A has the exclusive rights to publish it. Why? Because I gave it to them in a legally binding contract, and a future contract contradicting the first would be nullified by the first.
In such a case, I have no doubt that both company A and B would sue me, A for breach of contract and B for attempting to sell them something that I couldn't sell to them.
As for your argument that you either have right to copyrighted material or you don't, you're only half right. Copyright is ultimately about making copies. You either have the right to copy or not to copy, and the owner of the copyright has the sole right to dictate how you may copy it.
In the case of say... iTunes DRM... the RIAA, having sole say over the distribution of most of their music (due to contracts with their artists (ethical or not)), grants permission to Apple on the distribution and sale of music under certain terms. Next, Apple has a small amount of leeway in which it can say "you may burn only X copies of a playlist" and so on. And you as the user are granted limited copying rights to music which you download, rights which granted in very specific ways and which can be revoked at anytime.
Whether you like the terms or not, by signing up for the service and purchasing from it, you agree to be bound by the terms
Here are two examples of contract law trumping normal rights which we all have.
I have a signed non disclosure agreement with my employer which I contractually agreed not to discuss the internal workings of our products, etc. While I may have the right to free speech, I do not have the right to discuss certain aspects of my job, and if I did, my employer would be right in firing and possibly even suing me.
Also, my employer could come to me tomorrow with a non compete clause and require me to sign it. For the sake of argument, this contract could say that I agree not to work as a software engineer for any company involved in digital television systems for a period of 12 month after I leave here. Note: My employer has the right to fire me if I refused to sign such a contract if it is a condition of future/continued employment with them.
Now back to the example: I do have the right to work anywhere I want, however could be compelled to give up that right to continue where I am today. (This has been challenged in court several times and in most cases, the court finds for the employer).
As for the original point, if you contractually agree not to break a DRM system and in anyway support the breaking of such a system, you are in violation of the initial contract and can be held liable.
Fair use and DRM? That all depends. I believe you have forgotten a key point involved with both...
/.ers fail to understand is to what extent fair use should and does exist. Just because I have access to the physical medium (file/cd/disk/etc) does not mean I have the right to do with it as I please. In the example before of iTunes and Audible, users of those services are contractually obligated NOT to crack their DRM systems. Furthermore, if I were to provide access to files I had purchased to someone else who would attempt to crack the DRM, I would again be in violation of the agreement and could even be actionable.
I don't know about you, but I own an iPod and have purchased songs from the iTMS for playback on it and my desktop. When I signed up for the service, I contractually agreed that I would not break/hack/etc the DRM system on the music. I also am a subscriber to Audible and agreed to the same thing.
A content provider does have the right within reason to designate how a viewer/listener/receiver may have access to material. Under most cases, the user is agreeing to such restrictions as part of using the system. Virtually all legally Dled music and movies online are protected in some way with DRM and their customers have agreed to accept such a system. In the case of a mandated FCC flag, things get quite hairy as the end user has not agreed to be bound by such a restriction.
The issue I believe that you and most
Thus, ALL iTMS files are ultimately bound by the iTMS service agreement, and anyone bypassing the DRM or helping to bypass the DRM by providing DRMed files, keys or other support is violating their service agreement and apple does have the right to attempt to prevent the cracking of their DRM when EVERY SINGLE legitimate user of it has agreed to be bound by it.
Take a few minutes and read some comments in stories related to music/movie piracy, breaking contractually agreed to DRM and so on and you'll find far too many people thinking it is quite alright, these sadly are many of the same people I hear/see standing up and screaming every time someone says something unkind about Linux(F)/OSS.
Quite true, but remember the group you are talking about, many of whom seem to think that downloading music and movies for free with out compensating the artist/recording company/copyright holder is alright!
Your statement is overly broad, yes, whoever is to blame would be at fault... do you think it'd be easy to determine who is to blame if both 'drivers' were doing something other then watching the road (which they'd be able to do with such a system)? When we have the computer driven car, the 'who' can be taken out of the equation and it becomes 'what'.
Is the driver of the car to blame at fault because they were not in control of their vehicle at the time? Part of the reason the technology would exist would be to permit the 'driver' from having to watch the road and their surroundings at all times and let them do other things.
Is the car AI maker to blame for building an AI that screwed up in some way? Such at technology would not be intended as a driver replacement but as a driver enhancement, similar to ABS breaks or more advanced forms of traction control. They can help the driver out immensely, but they cannot replace intelligence behind the wheel. In this area of blame, it is often difficult to define a proper level of vendor/maker liability for defects in their product.
There are plenty of areas in the world where we turn over our own control of things to technology and let the code of a programmer decide what is best. This is fine and dandy so long as things work, and there have been plenty of high profile screw-ups where a software or hardware error caused a breakdown of a physical system or even death. Assigning blame for them is rarely an easy task.
I can see the lawsuits now! Either one of these cones feels suicidal and it moves it's self into traffic only to get hit at high speed... or someone realizes that they are able to move and runs into one on purpose, in either case, instant profit for who ever hits em.
It is similar to the old Q of if we had cars which could drive themselves... who is to blame when two computer driven cars get into an accident with each other.
Your admins should chat with those at DSU (where I went) sometime.
At DSU, your IP address was assigned by a reservation in the DHCP server, I was never quite sure how they did it, but until they created a lease for your MAC address, you could assign yourself an IP, but you could not get outside of the dorm.
Also, they had enough intelligence in the switch and other systems to be able to assign an unchangeable reverse look up name to your connection... regardless of what IP address may be, and even you assigned it yourself or your system was spoofing. This permitted them to be able to identify offending computers by a simple string similar to:
zd323-a.dsu.edu
which said that someone on port A of room 323 of the Zimmermann Hall dorm was doing something.
I spent a fair amount of research time trying to find a way around this... spoofing an IP is easy, beating this reverse look up name with out help from inside of the department is not, thus I didn't conduct any truly evil business on campus, but did just enough to make them think they knew what I was up to (I lost count of how many times I got disconnected from the network for being bad).
Most universities, like my old one put a clause in the network agreement you signed to get on the network that you were responsible for anything which happened on your computer, even if you are not the one using it.
That clause has been enforced a couple of times when someone blamed their computer being infected with a virus for hacking into the email server and sending campus wide e-mails.
or... NAT NAT NAT NAT NAT.
Although parking outside of someone's house with a cantenna is far more fun.