Corporations certainly behave differently from other groups of people. Although they're composed of human beings, the legal rules surrounding a corporation act as a filter, combining the efforts of many people but stripping out all of their emotions except pure, distilled greed.
The question is: Are corporations really just another tool used by a privileged minority (in this case, the very rich) to control the rest of us, essentially no different from medieval monarchies, religious cults and fascist dictatorships? Or are they a new and even more insidious form of evil? I really don't know.
It should only be a problem if you use your purchased item in the commission of a crime against another person or their property.
And this is the problem. The DMCA and other laws like it fetishize intellectual "property", so that certain ideas are owned by corporations and even thinking them is a crime. Looking inisde your own box or trying to watch a DVD on Linux is considered a trespass on the property of Microsoft or the MPAA, and thus treated in the same way as if you'd actually broken into Bill Gates's or Jack Valenti's home.
There's also the question of how they calculate the loss. The Xbox only appears to be loss-making because MS is including its R&D and marketing costs, not just the cost of manufacture, shipping, etc.
R&D and marketing costs are already paid, so additional Xbox sales don't actually cost MS any more money, and ultimately reduce the Xbox's total loss. If enough people buy one, the "loss" on each one will eventually turn into a profit.
For example, a product could cost MS $1 billion to develop, and $100 to manufacture. If MS sells 1 million of these, it can say that the cost to make each one is really $1,100, so selling them for $200 means a loss. But if it sells 1 billion of them, the cost to make each one is only $101, so selling them for $200 means a profit. It sounds like the.com business model, but most of MS's costs are R&D and marketing rather than manufacturing, so it really can sell stuff at a loss and make it up on volume.
It may be a logical fallacy, but the our legal system isn't built on logic. Lawyers use a system of precedents, so the slope is extremely slippery.
For example, one reason that the Supreme Court gave for not striking down the latest Mickey Mouse copyright extension act (in Eldred v. Ashcroft) was that it had not struck down other previous copyright extensions. Give an inch and they take a mile.
Microsoft will still be leveraging file format compatibility for at least another Office release.
They'll do this as long as they have a monopoly (or near-monopoly). The XML support isn't about making file formats compatible with competitors, or even about pretending to. It's just one more feature that MS has added to Office, in an attempt to persuade existing users to upgrade. It means that Office can be used to edit XML documents. It doesn't mean that Office's proprietary file formats are disappearing.
XML editing is a useful feature for some people, and from what I've heard it works better than the horrible HTML support in previous versions of Office, but it's still a niche. (True, it can be used to help with cross-platform compatability, but so can RTF and other existing "save as" options.) Most users just want to write a letter or design a presentation, and aren't concerned with markup languages.
I don't see why you would pay more for eating with silverware, glasses and real plates.
Some people are so rich that they don't notice the cost. But often, people pay more because they're not spending their own money, hence the name Business Class.
Tour operators regularly chartered Concorde and offered flights for a lot less than the published ticket price. U.K. newspapers used to run ads for weekend breaks in New York at about a thousand pounds ($1,600), including two nights in a hotel as well as return air fare.
These usually had to be booked long in advance, and the small print said that you'd only get one concorde flight (you'd have to return on a cramped Airbus or 7x7 charter), but it still gave the non-rich a chance to experience Concorde. The infamous Paris crash was one of these charter flights, carrying ordinary tourists, not the super-rich.
Could a company have a "reformat your hard drive" day at the end of the year and then a "reinstall Windows and Office" day at the beginning of the year, giving everyone a day off when they were reporting the numbers to MS?
Sure, it would lose three days of productivity annoy employees (though the day off might sweeten this), but it would save a lot in MS licensing.
This isn't exactly the same as getting free HBO, because that's just an "intellectual" property issue: An infinite number of people could watch HBO, without depriving anyone else of it. An Internet connection isn't like that: You're using some of its (finite) capacity, and at some point somebody might even be billed per packet or per byte.
Having said that, I don't think you did anything wrong, and I do the same thing! Many people do intentionally leave their Internet connections open, as they're paying a flat rate and want to let other people use their excess bandwidth. There's even a handshake in the 802.11 protocol where a client requests permission to log on the network and an AP gives it (or denies it), which could be thought of as an invitation.
Of course, if you're actually breaking WEP keys, spoofing MAC addresses or trying to get round an access control mechanism, that's another matter. The presence of any security (even crap security like WEP) does suggest that intruders are not welcome.
It's a brand name. Sort of like Microsoft and Intel saying you should call your box a "Windows-powered Pentium" rather than a "PC" (assuming you're not running Linux on an Athlon!)
Of course, Wi-Fi succeeds even more than these two, because it is shorter and easier to remember than 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, etc.
In the U.S., is there actually a difference between Big Business and the government? Sure, right-wingers love to attack the government and left-winger love to attack business, but I don't see much difference.
Especially when there's no privacy, as Heather wants. (How do you think Saddam Hussein gets his 100% share of the vote?) The secret police can see who you vote for, and those who don't vote for Big Brother can be targeted.
They actually do this in the UK, with a unique identifier on every ballot paper so that it can be traced back to a particular voter. Supposedly, this is only used to prevent fraud, but it's a pretty open secret that MI5 uses it to tag supporters of "extremist" parties. My guess is this only means parties that get a very small share of the vote, because of the practical problems involved in tracking everyone who votes for an opposition party, but digital technology means these problems are diminishing all the time. Be very afraid.
Note that The Times is actually a pro-war paper in its editorial line. It's owned by an American, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News and is rarely described as a liberal.
A pro-war, American-owned paper has reason to make up stories about Americans killing civilians or print Iraqi propaganda.
While banks may do bad things, they're not selling their services as a way to avoid junk mail or protect privacy. (Well, most don't. A few banks in Switzerland or various tax havens do, but that's a separate issue.)
An anti-spam service that spams its customers sounds, at the least, quite deceptive and hypocritical. It may not be totally unreasonable, but we have no way of knowing because the company doesn't say how many unsolicited messages its customers will get. I'd consider the service if it's 1 a year, but not if it's 20 a day.
Very true, except that most of the money goes to the senior executives and stockholders of RIAA member companies, not the artists.
Most artists are struggling, and the music industry is eager to take advantage. Because of the huge imbalance of power, the RIAA cartel is able to dictate the terms of contracts to any artist that wants exposure.
It's the same with most employment, of course, except that most working people in civilized countries are able to rely on certain standards of protection such as unions, the minimum wage and non-discrimination laws. The RIAA cartel is able to exploit artists without even meeting these minimum standards, then exploit them again by using them as propaganda in the war on sharing.
No, there are dozens of other leaders supporting Bush, usually because they have been bribed or threatened.
The people of Britain, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Poland and every other other country that is supporting or taking part in the War for Oil can see Bush for the unelected and dangerous psychopath that he is.
This could have enormous military applications. Imagine the advantages of being able to lift an almost unlimited quantity of bombs and artillery to any point in orbit. Might even make the missile shield work.
We need another space race. Maybe if Bush thought that the Chinese were going to build a space elevator, he'd seriously consider it.
Alternatively, a certain rich individual with plans for world domination might invest. Slashdot's favorite villain lost or gave away something like $50 billion last year (according to Fortune magazine), and $6 billion isn't much more than his profit or loss from a volatile day on the stock market.
Maybe the patents will have expired by then. Alternatively, they might also be able to negotiate relatively cheap licensing, both because of the massive production volume, and because the patents will no longer represent the bleeding edge.
I agree. Well, I don't care about ads, and/.'s aren't very intrusive anyway: If you load a page with lots comments, it doesn't take long to scroll past the ads at the top. I've just read this long thread, and I actually can't remember whether the machine I'm using has ad-blocking enabled or not!
This new feature has actually persuaded me to subscribe. I don't want to post early, and I don't think subscribers should be able to, but I like the thought of seeing stuff early.
Even to an atheist, the Bible can still be relevant. Just treat it as any other classic work of fiction, like the work of Shakespeare or Orwell. Good stories can retain their relevance hundreds of years after they're written, not because they're literally true, but because they're good metaphors.
Not anymore. The evil CSEA makes it a felony to listen in to cell phone frequencies. (It's already a misdemeanor, as the guy that taped Newt Gingrich a few years ago found out.)
They're not quite that evil. Their model is really just selling advertising through affiliate sites, a bit like Doubleclick. The difference is that Overture's ads are indexed to specific terms, exactly like Google's text-ads. Honest sites will clearly mark the ads from Overture as advertisements (again, like Google does with text ads), just as they won't try to pretend that a banner from Doubleclick is actually some kind of editorial content.
Now, Overture is still bad. (So is Doubleclick!) I think it can legitimately be criticized for abusing the patent system in its suit against Google.
The age of adulthood varies depending on the context and the region. For example, in much of the U.S. it is 21 for drinking alcohol, but 16 for driving a car, but these can both vary by state.
It's the same with the age of consent. The U.S. age (usually 18) is high by international standards. You can argue that this is because the U.S. is a more advanced country than other areas and so has decided to protect its teenagers from predatory adults for a longer portion of their lives, or that it's because America has very immature teens (I mean psychologically and emotionally, not phsically) and more puritcanical adults. Or, avoid antagonism and say cultural differences.
Perosnally, I think that regardless of the age of consent, it should be graduated: lower than usual where there isn't much age difference between the two parties (eg. Romeo and Juliet), but higher where the older party is in a position of power (eg. teacher and student).
He says that this *is* freedom of expression, following the standard corporate-libertarian line that free speech means "free of government interference" and so media monopolies can do what they like.
OTOH, he seems to favor increasing the unlicensed radio spectrum, which would hurt his (and the other) party's corporate paymasters, so maybe he actually believes some of what he says.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations certainly behave differently from other groups of people. Although they're composed of human beings, the legal rules surrounding a corporation act as a filter, combining the efforts of many people but stripping out all of their emotions except pure, distilled greed.
The question is: Are corporations really just another tool used by a privileged minority (in this case, the very rich) to control the rest of us, essentially no different from medieval monarchies, religious cults and fascist dictatorships? Or are they a new and even more insidious form of evil? I really don't know.
It should only be a problem if you use your purchased item in the commission of a crime against another person or their property.
And this is the problem. The DMCA and other laws like it fetishize intellectual "property", so that certain ideas are owned by corporations and even thinking them is a crime. Looking inisde your own box or trying to watch a DVD on Linux is considered a trespass on the property of Microsoft or the MPAA, and thus treated in the same way as if you'd actually broken into Bill Gates's or Jack Valenti's home.
There's also the question of how they calculate the loss. The Xbox only appears to be loss-making because MS is including its R&D and marketing costs, not just the cost of manufacture, shipping, etc.
.com business model, but most of MS's costs are R&D and marketing rather than manufacturing, so it really can sell stuff at a loss and make it up on volume.
R&D and marketing costs are already paid, so additional Xbox sales don't actually cost MS any more money, and ultimately reduce the Xbox's total loss. If enough people buy one, the "loss" on each one will eventually turn into a profit.
For example, a product could cost MS $1 billion to develop, and $100 to manufacture. If MS sells 1 million of these, it can say that the cost to make each one is really $1,100, so selling them for $200 means a loss. But if it sells 1 billion of them, the cost to make each one is only $101, so selling them for $200 means a profit. It sounds like the
It may be a logical fallacy, but the our legal system isn't built on logic. Lawyers use a system of precedents, so the slope is extremely slippery.
For example, one reason that the Supreme Court gave for not striking down the latest Mickey Mouse copyright extension act (in Eldred v. Ashcroft) was that it had not struck down other previous copyright extensions. Give an inch and they take a mile.
Microsoft will still be leveraging file format compatibility for at least another Office release.
They'll do this as long as they have a monopoly (or near-monopoly). The XML support isn't about making file formats compatible with competitors, or even about pretending to. It's just one more feature that MS has added to Office, in an attempt to persuade existing users to upgrade. It means that Office can be used to edit XML documents. It doesn't mean that Office's proprietary file formats are disappearing.
XML editing is a useful feature for some people, and from what I've heard it works better than the horrible HTML support in previous versions of Office, but it's still a niche. (True, it can be used to help with cross-platform compatability, but so can RTF and other existing "save as" options.) Most users just want to write a letter or design a presentation, and aren't concerned with markup languages.
I don't see why you would pay more for eating with silverware, glasses and real plates.
Some people are so rich that they don't notice the cost. But often, people pay more because they're not spending their own money, hence the name Business Class.
Tour operators regularly chartered Concorde and offered flights for a lot less than the published ticket price. U.K. newspapers used to run ads for weekend breaks in New York at about a thousand pounds ($1,600), including two nights in a hotel as well as return air fare.
These usually had to be booked long in advance, and the small print said that you'd only get one concorde flight (you'd have to return on a cramped Airbus or 7x7 charter), but it still gave the non-rich a chance to experience Concorde. The infamous Paris crash was one of these charter flights, carrying ordinary tourists, not the super-rich.
Could a company have a "reformat your hard drive" day at the end of the year and then a "reinstall Windows and Office" day at the beginning of the year, giving everyone a day off when they were reporting the numbers to MS?
Sure, it would lose three days of productivity annoy employees (though the day off might sweeten this), but it would save a lot in MS licensing.
This isn't exactly the same as getting free HBO, because that's just an "intellectual" property issue: An infinite number of people could watch HBO, without depriving anyone else of it. An Internet connection isn't like that: You're using some of its (finite) capacity, and at some point somebody might even be billed per packet or per byte.
Having said that, I don't think you did anything wrong, and I do the same thing! Many people do intentionally leave their Internet connections open, as they're paying a flat rate and want to let other people use their excess bandwidth. There's even a handshake in the 802.11 protocol where a client requests permission to log on the network and an AP gives it (or denies it), which could be thought of as an invitation.
Of course, if you're actually breaking WEP keys, spoofing MAC addresses or trying to get round an access control mechanism, that's another matter. The presence of any security (even crap security like WEP) does suggest that intruders are not welcome.
It's a brand name. Sort of like Microsoft and Intel saying you should call your box a "Windows-powered Pentium" rather than a "PC" (assuming you're not running Linux on an Athlon!)
Of course, Wi-Fi succeeds even more than these two, because it is shorter and easier to remember than 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, etc.
In the U.S., is there actually a difference between Big Business and the government? Sure, right-wingers love to attack the government and left-winger love to attack business, but I don't see much difference.
Especially when there's no privacy, as Heather wants. (How do you think Saddam Hussein gets his 100% share of the vote?) The secret police can see who you vote for, and those who don't vote for Big Brother can be targeted.
They actually do this in the UK, with a unique identifier on every ballot paper so that it can be traced back to a particular voter. Supposedly, this is only used to prevent fraud, but it's a pretty open secret that MI5 uses it to tag supporters of "extremist" parties. My guess is this only means parties that get a very small share of the vote, because of the practical problems involved in tracking everyone who votes for an opposition party, but digital technology means these problems are diminishing all the time. Be very afraid.
Note that The Times is actually a pro-war paper in its editorial line. It's owned by an American, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News and is rarely described as a liberal.
A pro-war, American-owned paper has reason to make up stories about Americans killing civilians or print Iraqi propaganda.
While banks may do bad things, they're not selling their services as a way to avoid junk mail or protect privacy. (Well, most don't. A few banks in Switzerland or various tax havens do, but that's a separate issue.)
An anti-spam service that spams its customers sounds, at the least, quite deceptive and hypocritical. It may not be totally unreasonable, but we have no way of knowing because the company doesn't say how many unsolicited messages its customers will get. I'd consider the service if it's 1 a year, but not if it's 20 a day.
Very true, except that most of the money goes to the senior executives and stockholders of RIAA member companies, not the artists.
Most artists are struggling, and the music industry is eager to take advantage. Because of the huge imbalance of power, the RIAA cartel is able to dictate the terms of contracts to any artist that wants exposure.
It's the same with most employment, of course, except that most working people in civilized countries are able to rely on certain standards of protection such as unions, the minimum wage and non-discrimination laws. The RIAA cartel is able to exploit artists without even meeting these minimum standards, then exploit them again by using them as propaganda in the war on sharing.
No, there are dozens of other leaders supporting Bush, usually because they have been bribed or threatened.
The people of Britain, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Poland and every other other country that is supporting or taking part in the War for Oil can see Bush for the unelected and dangerous psychopath that he is.
This could have enormous military applications. Imagine the advantages of being able to lift an almost unlimited quantity of bombs and artillery to any point in orbit. Might even make the missile shield work.
We need another space race. Maybe if Bush thought that the Chinese were going to build a space elevator, he'd seriously consider it.
Alternatively, a certain rich individual with plans for world domination might invest. Slashdot's favorite villain lost or gave away something like $50 billion last year (according to Fortune magazine), and $6 billion isn't much more than his profit or loss from a volatile day on the stock market.
Maybe the patents will have expired by then. Alternatively, they might also be able to negotiate relatively cheap licensing, both because of the massive production volume, and because the patents will no longer represent the bleeding edge.
I agree. Well, I don't care about ads, and /.'s aren't very intrusive anyway: If you load a page with lots comments, it doesn't take long to scroll past the ads at the top. I've just read this long thread, and I actually can't remember whether the machine I'm using has ad-blocking enabled or not!
This new feature has actually persuaded me to subscribe. I don't want to post early, and I don't think subscribers should be able to, but I like the thought of seeing stuff early.
Even to an atheist, the Bible can still be relevant. Just treat it as any other classic work of fiction, like the work of Shakespeare or Orwell. Good stories can retain their relevance hundreds of years after they're written, not because they're literally true, but because they're good metaphors.
Not anymore. The evil CSEA makes it a felony to listen in to cell phone frequencies. (It's already a misdemeanor, as the guy that taped Newt Gingrich a few years ago found out.)
A few years ago it went to Paul Davies, an astrophysicist and atheist-leaning agnostic.
They're not quite that evil. Their model is really just selling advertising through affiliate sites, a bit like Doubleclick. The difference is that Overture's ads are indexed to specific terms, exactly like Google's text-ads. Honest sites will clearly mark the ads from Overture as advertisements (again, like Google does with text ads), just as they won't try to pretend that a banner from Doubleclick is actually some kind of editorial content.
Now, Overture is still bad. (So is Doubleclick!) I think it can legitimately be criticized for abusing the patent system in its suit against Google.
The age of adulthood varies depending on the context and the region. For example, in much of the U.S. it is 21 for drinking alcohol, but 16 for driving a car, but these can both vary by state.
It's the same with the age of consent. The U.S. age (usually 18) is high by international standards. You can argue that this is because the U.S. is a more advanced country than other areas and so has decided to protect its teenagers from predatory adults for a longer portion of their lives, or that it's because America has very immature teens (I mean psychologically and emotionally, not phsically) and more puritcanical adults. Or, avoid antagonism and say cultural differences.
Perosnally, I think that regardless of the age of consent, it should be graduated: lower than usual where there isn't much age difference between the two parties (eg. Romeo and Juliet), but higher where the older party is in a position of power (eg. teacher and student).
He says that this *is* freedom of expression, following the standard corporate-libertarian line that free speech means "free of government interference" and so media monopolies can do what they like.
OTOH, he seems to favor increasing the unlicensed radio spectrum, which would hurt his (and the other) party's corporate paymasters, so maybe he actually believes some of what he says.