Hmm... Yeah, it's better to keep using and consuming products untill they're proven harmful, than to conduct proper testing before throwing them on the market.
DDT anyone? And what about "cigarettes aren't harmful" which American tobacco manufacturers have claimed for decades?
If you're too stupid to be cautious with new products before they passed proper testing, that's your problem, but don't try to push your crap on the rest of the world, and don't try to use development countries as guinea pigs to test your products on.
Lots of people have compared IM with the telephone system. Plain wrong. There is a big difference between the two, but for that we need a little lesson in history:
When Graham Bell invented the telephone investors became interrested in selling these new devices to people. They sold pairs of telephones, and the clients were responsible for connecting them with a wire. So if you wanted to be able to call up three friends of yours, you'd have to connect your phone to all three of those friends houses. Soon it became obvious that this scheme wouldn't work as the telephone became more and more popular. Bell soon realised this and created the Bell Telephone Company which connected all the phones in small communities to a central node, where an operator would use patch cables to connect the phones of the people willing to talk to each other.
The technology for all these central nodes and phones however was exactly the same. Now, people started demanding to be able to talk to people in other geographical regions as well, so that's why after a while all the small phonecentrals were interconnected.
Now compare this to IMs... Everybody can talk to a MSN user: simply install MSN. You claim that interoperability is a must, because it's similar to the telephone system? That's where you're wrong. All IMs use different protocols. They're not based on the same technology. OK, they all offer basically the same functionality: being able to send text messages to other users, and often times even have voicechats etc... Just like a telephone and a walkie-talkie or CB offer basically the same functionality: talking to people on remote locations.
So the equivalent of your claims in the phone/walkie-talkie situation would be that phone companies and companies manufacturing walkie-talkies should cooperate to make their products interoperable, meaning that I could call you up on the phone, using my walkie-talkie, and you could initialte a conversation to my walkie-talkie as well from your telephone.
Surely you do realise how silly that sounds, right?
TCP was not especially designed for symmetric connections either. Besides, what makes you think that upstream and downstream exhaustion have anything to do with each other?
Even in a symmetric environment it's perfectly possible to clog up your upstream BW and still have lots of downstream available (think webservers hosting large files).
The protocol doesn't assume anything; the protocol sends packets and waits for acknowledgement. That's all it does. It doesn't know nor care about symmetry in down or upstream capacity.
The difference is that a terrorist uses violent means to force his will upon others, especially other races/nationalities in which he has no business interfering.
Well well, this sheds some new light on the whole discussion... So in fact, what you're saying is that the United States Army, and their cronies in the UN are in fact all terrorists?
If I buy one apple of yours, that makes me a customer. No matter if I stole 5 others.
How many people do you know that never bought a movie, but have a ton of illegal copies at home? Everyone has bought a movie once in his life, so everyone is a customer.
But I must admit that it's bad choice of words on the authors behalf, since this is not what he meant at all.;-)
Would a clause in the softwares EULA work, that states that you can't install nor use the software if you're in some way associated with the MPAA/RIAA/..., and that by using this software you agree to not take any action (legal or other) that could harm other users of this software, no matter what they are using the software for...
After all, by clicking "OK" or "Continue" or whatever, you agree to the terms of the EULA.
Of course, this wouldn't stop stuff like this Ranger soft, but combined with a closed protocol and some heavy encryption scheme that would make it near to impossible to reverse engeneer the protocol so that downloading and installing the original software would be the only way to participate in the network...
But then again... Who cares? Copying movies and songs around is wrong. But if software companies can use EULAs to impose restrictions which are on the edge (or beyond) if the illegal, why wouldn't it work for the small guy?
So what you mean is that this $50/hour consultant is a thieveing bastard, since he not only deprives the $200/hour consultant of part of his work, but also affects the value of the $200/hour consultants work? Not to mention that he makes a profit while doing it.
I understand what you're trying to say, and neither does my analogy work (you can't compare competition to violation of copyright), but in fact it's all part of the system.
In fact, it's all part of the natural balance. Take the hawks and rabbits example, of which I assume most of you are already familiar with. If so, skip the following paragraph.
When there are a lot of rabbits and few hawks in a certain area, the hawk population has enough food, so it has optimal conditions to reproduce. This results in more hawks, more mouths to feed, so the rabbit population will shrink. Now this presents the hawk population with a problem: their food supplies are shrinking and they are beginning to starve. This means fewer natural enemies for the cute little bunnies, so in turn they get optimal conditions in which to reproduce. This results in the same situation than that from which we started, and thus the cycle starts all over again.
Same thing can be said about engeneers, by the way, to show that natures laws do not only apply to wildlife. When there's a great demand for engeneers because they are hard to find, lots of kids get tempted to study engeneering. Few years later there's more supply than demand, lots of engeneers don't find work, and less people go for an engeneering carreer. Then, years later, all the available engeneers found work, some have retired or moved on to take over some higher job in the corporate hierarchy due to a supperior who's retiring, and the shortage of engeneers is noticeable again, leaving us at the place we took off of.
Now, in fact, this is the way nature works. It kind of "wobbles" around a delicate balance. Now let's replace the cute little bunnies with the cute little softwarecompanies, and the hawks with the copyright infringers. Why doesn't this happen here? Why don't lots of software companies die due to excess warez trading, only to result in less warez traders due to less software to "warezenize", only to result in the birth of lots of new software companies due to the smaller threat of getting deprived of intellectual properties etc... ?
Two possible answers:
They have found the point of balance. Just like water in a closed container partialy evaporates, but after a time reaches a balance in which water becomes vapor and vapor becomes water at equal rates. So too have the software companies and the warez scene found a delicate balance in which the software companies can't significantly hurt the warez scene and vice versa, since their actions cancel each other out on a global scale. There is orderliness in the universe.;-)
Heck, let's not get too phylosophical about this... What if software companies don't die en masse at the hands of the warez scene, because the warez scene although spreading illegal versions of software to people for free, doesn't affect sales in a significant enough amount to be harmful for the software companies.
Both views are true, in a certain way. There is indeed a balance which if disturbed will try to recover to its previous state, but I won't diverge on this, and it is also a fact that warez don't hurt the industry that much that it's not worth the effort of writing commercial software anymore. The industry still makes more than enough money from their products.
What it does accomplish though is giving the industry a need to lower prices for software and/or offer valuable extras such as good manuals and support which can not be offered by the warez scene. The industry must do this to stay competitive.
As a sidenote on this last paragraph, btw, seems like game publishers don't seem to realise this. Lately they're shoving out their games in crummy DVD boxes with no printed manuals, posters or maps of the game world or any extras whatsoever. In fact, the warez leecher gets the exact same thing a legal buyer gets, except for the fact that he needs to print his own CD labels and DVD box inlay if he values such things (which most people don't anyway). So in fact they're taking away the main motivation for the gamers to buy instead of leech. Not a smart move on their behalf; instead of saving money at the expense of the legal customers so they can spend it on lawyers and anti-warez agents, they would do better to offer valuable extras no warez trader could ever offer, so that they might attract new clients instead of scaring away the current ones.
Believe it or not, but illegal copies of software circulate in business environments as well. Sometimes the company doesn't want to pay for 20 licences if they can just take 5 as to not raise sucpicion and just use copies on the other machines. Sometimes some guy wants (or has) to work on his own computer at home after hours and just copies the software instead of having the company pay for an extra licence. Etc...
It's not just the average Joe that uses illegal software. Companies do as well.
But this IS a free mrkt self-correction mechanism
on
NYTimes Looks at Warez
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· Score: 1
Umm... This might be a weird point of view, but I tend to see software "pirating" as one of the mechanisms used by our modern community to correct the "too expensive" price tags associated with software. It is a message to the software industry saying "you people charge too much, we do admit your product is useful, otherwise we wouldn't bother making copies for personal use or cheap redistribution, but it's overpriced". A message the software industry can then react on in several ways. Lowering software prices or work with pay-per-use (as long as the price is reasonable) would be the ideal solution, but unfortunately they rather charge an unreasonable amount of money for their software and spend it all on lawsuits and anti-piracy techniques. But it is in fact just as much a part of our economy than the production and sale of the software in the legal camp is.
Anyway, one of the arguments the warez people often use, and which for some reason always gets ignored is this one: most people who use "pirated" software would have never bought it anyway. I don't understand how they can come up with these wild figures: over 10 bilion dollars lost on piracy, because people who would have never bought it anyway have... Well... Not bought it... Anyway...
How can it hurt the industry? What difference in income does it make to Adobe if John Doe doesn't pay for using Photoshop, instead of not paying for not using it? Either way, John don't pay.
AFAIK, there is a region 1 version of Blackadder, and it's better than the region 2 version... Has more extras. One or two out of the series episodes and some historical stuff about the UK concerning the eras in which the four seasons of Blackadder are set... Stuff they didn't feel were necessary for the European release because they assume that the whole of Europe knows Brittish history, or so it seems...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Yeah, it's better to keep using and consuming products untill they're proven harmful, than to conduct proper testing before throwing them on the market.
DDT anyone? And what about "cigarettes aren't harmful" which American tobacco manufacturers have claimed for decades?
If you're too stupid to be cautious with new products before they passed proper testing, that's your problem, but don't try to push your crap on the rest of the world, and don't try to use development countries as guinea pigs to test your products on.
Lots of people have compared IM with the telephone system. Plain wrong. There is a big difference between the two, but for that we need a little lesson in history:
When Graham Bell invented the telephone investors became interrested in selling these new devices to people. They sold pairs of telephones, and the clients were responsible for connecting them with a wire. So if you wanted to be able to call up three friends of yours, you'd have to connect your phone to all three of those friends houses. Soon it became obvious that this scheme wouldn't work as the telephone became more and more popular. Bell soon realised this and created the Bell Telephone Company which connected all the phones in small communities to a central node, where an operator would use patch cables to connect the phones of the people willing to talk to each other.
The technology for all these central nodes and phones however was exactly the same. Now, people started demanding to be able to talk to people in other geographical regions as well, so that's why after a while all the small phonecentrals were interconnected.
Now compare this to IMs... Everybody can talk to a MSN user: simply install MSN. You claim that interoperability is a must, because it's similar to the telephone system? That's where you're wrong. All IMs use different protocols. They're not based on the same technology. OK, they all offer basically the same functionality: being able to send text messages to other users, and often times even have voicechats etc... Just like a telephone and a walkie-talkie or CB offer basically the same functionality: talking to people on remote locations.
So the equivalent of your claims in the phone/walkie-talkie situation would be that phone companies and companies manufacturing walkie-talkies should cooperate to make their products interoperable, meaning that I could call you up on the phone, using my walkie-talkie, and you could initialte a conversation to my walkie-talkie as well from your telephone.
Surely you do realise how silly that sounds, right?
TCP was not especially designed for symmetric connections either. Besides, what makes you think that upstream and downstream exhaustion have anything to do with each other?
Even in a symmetric environment it's perfectly possible to clog up your upstream BW and still have lots of downstream available (think webservers hosting large files).
The protocol doesn't assume anything; the protocol sends packets and waits for acknowledgement. That's all it does. It doesn't know nor care about symmetry in down or upstream capacity.
Well well, this sheds some new light on the whole discussion... So in fact, what you're saying is that the United States Army, and their cronies in the UN are in fact all terrorists?
If I buy one apple of yours, that makes me a customer. No matter if I stole 5 others.
;-)
How many people do you know that never bought a movie, but have a ton of illegal copies at home? Everyone has bought a movie once in his life, so everyone is a customer.
But I must admit that it's bad choice of words on the authors behalf, since this is not what he meant at all.
Would a clause in the softwares EULA work, that states that you can't install nor use the software if you're in some way associated with the MPAA/RIAA/..., and that by using this software you agree to not take any action (legal or other) that could harm other users of this software, no matter what they are using the software for...
After all, by clicking "OK" or "Continue" or whatever, you agree to the terms of the EULA.
Of course, this wouldn't stop stuff like this Ranger soft, but combined with a closed protocol and some heavy encryption scheme that would make it near to impossible to reverse engeneer the protocol so that downloading and installing the original software would be the only way to participate in the network...
But then again... Who cares? Copying movies and songs around is wrong. But if software companies can use EULAs to impose restrictions which are on the edge (or beyond) if the illegal, why wouldn't it work for the small guy?
I understand what you're trying to say, and neither does my analogy work (you can't compare competition to violation of copyright), but in fact it's all part of the system.
In fact, it's all part of the natural balance. Take the hawks and rabbits example, of which I assume most of you are already familiar with. If so, skip the following paragraph.
When there are a lot of rabbits and few hawks in a certain area, the hawk population has enough food, so it has optimal conditions to reproduce. This results in more hawks, more mouths to feed, so the rabbit population will shrink. Now this presents the hawk population with a problem: their food supplies are shrinking and they are beginning to starve. This means fewer natural enemies for the cute little bunnies, so in turn they get optimal conditions in which to reproduce. This results in the same situation than that from which we started, and thus the cycle starts all over again.
Same thing can be said about engeneers, by the way, to show that natures laws do not only apply to wildlife. When there's a great demand for engeneers because they are hard to find, lots of kids get tempted to study engeneering. Few years later there's more supply than demand, lots of engeneers don't find work, and less people go for an engeneering carreer. Then, years later, all the available engeneers found work, some have retired or moved on to take over some higher job in the corporate hierarchy due to a supperior who's retiring, and the shortage of engeneers is noticeable again, leaving us at the place we took off of.
Now, in fact, this is the way nature works. It kind of "wobbles" around a delicate balance. Now let's replace the cute little bunnies with the cute little softwarecompanies, and the hawks with the copyright infringers. Why doesn't this happen here? Why don't lots of software companies die due to excess warez trading, only to result in less warez traders due to less software to "warezenize", only to result in the birth of lots of new software companies due to the smaller threat of getting deprived of intellectual properties etc... ?
Two possible answers:
- They have found the point of balance. Just like water in a closed container partialy evaporates, but after a time reaches a balance in which water becomes vapor and vapor becomes water at equal rates. So too have the software companies and the warez scene found a delicate balance in which the software companies can't significantly hurt the warez scene and vice versa, since their actions cancel each other out on a global scale. There is orderliness in the universe.
;-) - Heck, let's not get too phylosophical about this... What if software companies don't die en masse at the hands of the warez scene, because the warez scene although spreading illegal versions of software to people for free, doesn't affect sales in a significant enough amount to be harmful for the software companies.
Both views are true, in a certain way. There is indeed a balance which if disturbed will try to recover to its previous state, but I won't diverge on this, and it is also a fact that warez don't hurt the industry that much that it's not worth the effort of writing commercial software anymore. The industry still makes more than enough money from their products.What it does accomplish though is giving the industry a need to lower prices for software and/or offer valuable extras such as good manuals and support which can not be offered by the warez scene. The industry must do this to stay competitive.
As a sidenote on this last paragraph, btw, seems like game publishers don't seem to realise this. Lately they're shoving out their games in crummy DVD boxes with no printed manuals, posters or maps of the game world or any extras whatsoever. In fact, the warez leecher gets the exact same thing a legal buyer gets, except for the fact that he needs to print his own CD labels and DVD box inlay if he values such things (which most people don't anyway). So in fact they're taking away the main motivation for the gamers to buy instead of leech. Not a smart move on their behalf; instead of saving money at the expense of the legal customers so they can spend it on lawyers and anti-warez agents, they would do better to offer valuable extras no warez trader could ever offer, so that they might attract new clients instead of scaring away the current ones.
It's not just the average Joe that uses illegal software. Companies do as well.
Anyway, one of the arguments the warez people often use, and which for some reason always gets ignored is this one: most people who use "pirated" software would have never bought it anyway. I don't understand how they can come up with these wild figures: over 10 bilion dollars lost on piracy, because people who would have never bought it anyway have... Well... Not bought it... Anyway...
How can it hurt the industry? What difference in income does it make to Adobe if John Doe doesn't pay for using Photoshop, instead of not paying for not using it? Either way, John don't pay.
Dude, you never locked yourself out of your room by accident? I have a neighbour that does it on a monthly basis...
AFAIK, there is a region 1 version of Blackadder, and it's better than the region 2 version... Has more extras. One or two out of the series episodes and some historical stuff about the UK concerning the eras in which the four seasons of Blackadder are set... Stuff they didn't feel were necessary for the European release because they assume that the whole of Europe knows Brittish history, or so it seems...