Actually, much of the rest of the world DOES believe that "Zero defects does not mean that the product does not have bugs".
bug: Computer Science. A defect in the code or routine of a program.
"Zero Defects" is marketing-speak. What they mean is zero undesirable or intolerable defects which is greatly affected by what they determine is undesirable or intolerable. What the industry means by "zero defects" is not what their customers mean by "zero defects" and they are using that difference in definition to their advantage. That makes it marketing-speak. It's little different than claiming unemployment is down when all you've done is change the definition of "unemployed".
That's like saying that I support MS because one of the mutual funds that I'm holding has a small percentage stock in MS.
Technically, if you own stock in MS, however you got it, you are supporting them financially. Whether you agree with their business practices is another matter entirely, but by owning stock, you are making it possible (in a very small way, I'll grant you, but helping none the less) for them to do business in that manner.
But that is a far cry from a company, which Michael Moore attacks directly in his film, purchasing the theaters in which his film is to be shown.
If Bush becomes the CEO and declears that non of the theaters owned may play Moore's films, that would be a different story.
George W. Bush need not be the CEO, or even directly involved in The Carlyle Group, in order to have influence in the company. His father was on the board and most likely still has great influence. Other members are former high goverment officials from the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Were they to remove Moore's film from the theaters (and I don't claim that this is their intention, but I wouldn't rule it out either), they could effectively suppress criticism of the government and get the same results as banning the film outright without violating the First Amendment, but the result would be the same. Yes, Michael Moore still has the right to criticize the government, but the opportunity for others to hear him no longer exists.
It's like with major news outlets: the government can't legally prevent them from criticizing the government, but they can make it much more appealing to their corporate owners to support the government rather than criticize. In the end, the effect is the same with the added benefit that the people who watch the news still believe it's a "free press". That they haven't violated the First Amendment to achieve it is, at that point, just a technicality.
In fact, why doesn't Bush and his friends just outlaw Michael Moore's movies if the Bill of Rights only applies to "corporate conglomorates and their friends"?
Because they can do it much more sneakily by having their coroporate conglomerate buddies buy the theater chains. Whether Loews will show the movie remains to be seen.
The ISP should be expected to cut the connectivity of the zombied computer. But cleaning it up is not their responsibility.
Your answering machine isn't fooling with SS#7 and telephone switches. Compromised home systems are known to wreak havoc in many ways, some of them very nasty.
Well, to extend the analogy, if your modem is calling up people at 2am, the phone company is not expected to fix your modem, but is expected to turn off your phone if you won't fix it.
but then the same kind of clueless user that allows his/her box to fester with viruses will switch to another ISP which wont cut the service off...
Hopefully most ISP's will do the same thing and the user will find it harder and harder to get internet service. Even if they do, it's still better than leaving the box connected continuously.
because the clueless user might not understand the root cause of being cut off.
Even the most clueless users understand that viruses are bad (it's usually the first thing they blame when something on their system breaks). They may not know how they get them or how to keep from getting them, but they know what they are. Even if they don't, after the third ISP kicks them off for having them they might think to ask someone.
I agree, but at the very least the ISP should cut connectivity. Allowing compromised boxes on the network allows criminals to use the network to facilitate acts of theft and fraud.
Absolutely. But that should be the extent of what they are expected to do unless they have specifically sold computer tech support as part of their contract.
Thats one of the nice things about Rick Boucher... [he] really is working in the interests of those he represents.
That's the state of the government today: we are actually surprised and offer congratulations when one of these people does the job he was hired to do.
"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name" - Henry Kissinger
I am waiting for a law that says that producers have a choice: they may a) allow consumers to back up their music/movies/games or b) agree to replace on demand and without charge any CD/DVD that has been damaged and is no longer playable.
What we need is a law that says if you lock up your content, effectively eliminating fair use and the return to the public domain (if the copyright ever expires), then you lose your copyright protection when it gets cracked.
If you don't play by the rules you can't complain to the referee when someone else doesn't.
People install email viruses themselves, too, because they are fooled into doing so.
It's (at least for the most part) an ID-10T error, not an exploit.
It's a social exploit like telling someone you're from tech support to get their password. No, they shouldn't give you their password, but that doesn't absolve you of lying to them to get it.
Are these governments going to MAKE users read and understand EULAs before installing things?
If EULAs were more understandable, people would read them more often. Few people can understand most EULAs without a lawyer's help. [ObSlashdotNote: I am aware many people here can read a EULA without a lawyer's help. You are the exception, not the rule.]
Aren't these people warned in the EULA before they install?
See above. Informing people in a EULA is taking advantage of people not reading them. Yes, people should read them, but taking advantage of the fact that they don't doesn't absolve them of attempting to mislead them.
And this doesn't address the spyware that is installed without being listed in a EULA, or installed despite the user not agreeing to the EULA.
Just making the right noises to please his masters.
Or (and this is probably closer to a tin-foil-hat type theory, but that doesn't make it false), he is taking the extreme so much farther out that the merely ridiculous looks sane by comparison.
My business model is to charge people every time they want to say bloogerglum.
The difference here is people don't need you in order to say the word bloogerglum. They are perfectly capable of uttering the word with no help from you. The fact that you invented the word doesn't change that. Yes, the word would not exist without you inventing it (unless someone else did), but, once invented, it cannot be "uninvented". Once it exists, it exists forever.
That is not the same with a signal. They must keep providing the signal in order for it to be useful and you cannot create the signal yourself without taking the same steps that they have. The signal must be maintained. If they stop sending the signal, it ceases to exist.
I claim that the right to measure the amplitude and phase of an electromagnetic wave inside your house falls in the same catagory as freedom of speech.
Nobody is claiming you can't measure the signal. What the law is claiming is that you can't use the content the signal carries without paying for it. The content of the signal is protected by an architecture which requires specific equipment, as well as specific information to decode it. All this means is that in order to decode the signal you have to make a concerted attempt to. Now, while I do not believe that every attempt to decode the signal is necessarily harmful, decoding the signal to avoid paying for it is clearly harmful. And it is this harm that the law is trying to prevent. In that the government believes providing this service is good for society, they have chosen to make it possible to profit from the service so that some will provide it. The law protecting the signal does not deprive you of anything you would have without the law because the signal would very likely not exist without it.
I know plenty of people who still use them and they are still readily available for purchase. PVRs have not yet replaced them for recording TV shows. They aren't obsolete yet but I have no doubt they will be soon. And he can work the DVD player too. He can even tell the difference between a DVD and a CD which I have trouble with from time to time.
And by the time Junior grows up, the interface on a PC will have changed at least 5 times. Soon, your kid will be in the same boat as the other poster's granny!
As will I and his children eventually. The point is the devices will be designed for him, not for me or granny, because he will be the market. Whether granny can use it will not be a consideration in their design because she won't be buying them.
It is not my job, nor is it the governments job, to protect DirectTV's profit margins.
They are doing no such thing and I never said they were. The government is protecting their ability to profit from it the same way they protect other service providers ability to profit from their services because the ability to profit from services is good for society in general. Without that protection there is little incentive for people to provide those services and society must do without them.
The question I would ask is: what obligates me to pay for it just because theyre paying to send it?
Nothing is obligating you to pay for it. You either purchase the service or you don't. Whether or not enough people choose to purchase it determines whether they keep sending it. But that they are sending it does not give you any inherent right to use it without paying for it anymore than the fact that the bus is going that way anyway means you don't have to pay to ride.
Next your gonna tell me I have to make payments to God for use of the wind.
Oh give me a fucking break. DirecTV is not co-opting some natural occurance and charging you for something that you would have access to anyway. The wind would be there whether or not anyone chose to pay for it. The signal would disappear if nobody paid for it.
...most users still can't program a digital clock without help and most techs can't develop an interface that my grandmother can use.
Not to be insensitive, but your grandmother is going to die. Meanwhile the children being born today are growing up with the technology and will have no trouble using it. At two years old (he's four now), my son could put the tape in the VCR (even looks to make sure there's not one in already and ejects it if there is), switch the TV to Video, press play, and fast forward through the previews with no help from me. He's already proficient on a PC, even understands the difference between single and double-click and knows to wait when the hourglass comes up. Again, no offense, but my son could probably kick your grandmother's ass on a computer. Your grandmother is not the market for these devices. My son is.
But they do not have the right to tell me that I cannot read the radiation that exists within my house. Period.
Question Mark?
The only reason the signal is in your house is because they are providing it. They are only providing it because they can profit from it. The law protects their ability to profit from it. Without the ability to profit from it, the signal would not exist. The law is not depriving you of anything. Rather, it is providing the incentive for them to provide the signal. The assumption that you are somehow entitled to use that signal simply because it exists is specious. If that were the case, there would be no reason to pay for it and thus no reason to provide it.
We have a system a little like this in the UK, and I think it works very well.
I know even less about UK law than I do about US law.
Small claims ( GBP 5,000 = about $8,000 US) have limited costs which most people should be able to afford,
Small claims in the US are typically $1500 (roughly GBP 900) or less, carry small filing fees, and no lawyers are used.
and there is state aid for those who can't.
No such luck here. The only time you are (theoretically at least) provided with lawyer in the US if you can't afford one is in criminal cases.
It would also be interesting to compare attorney fees in the UK versus the US...
Re:I'd rather hear about its Glories
on
Spammer Apologizes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is it just me, or is there some kind of growing groundswell that seeks to destroy the Internet by incessantly talking up its 'dangers'? Why don't we see more stories about what makes it great?
Well if you had read the damn article you would see that they are still going after people that purchase certain equipment.
I did read the article, and if you had you would have seen this:
"[...]DirecTV has agreed to stop targeting general purpose devices in its campaign and will investigate all substantive claims of innocence."
From the article. "DirecTV will, however, continue to investigate purchasers of devices that are often primarily designed for satellite signal interception, nicknamed "bootloaders" and "unloopers"."
Try reading what you're quoting. "Investigate" does not mean "sue". The indiscriminate lawsuits were the primary complaint.
Are they going to take the steps to prove that people are using this hardware to illegally grab directv's signal?
Prove it? No, but they don't have to. They only have to show a preponderance of evidence. It's a civil suit, not a criminal one. But according to the article, they have agreed to be more selective about what they do go after. Whether or not that is actually the case is yet to be determined.
Isn't this an obvious sign that it is something wrong with the legal system since the system does not account for any of the financial differences between Joe Smart Card and megacorp?
Absolutely, and that's what the argument is about. Joe Smart Card finds himself on the end of a lawsuit which will cost him a ton of money even if he wins. It's the cost of the legal process which makes this kind of extortion possible. Some people have suggested a system where the loser pays the winner's legal fees, but there are problems with that also. Someone with a legitimate but hard-to-prove claim may not have the financial resources to risk losing.
those ads on tv, and the phrase in the article "Stealing Satellite SIGNALS"... Now i may be way off base, but how the heck does one steal a satellite signal?
It's part of the campaign to equate copyright infringement with theft of property.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, much of the rest of the world DOES believe that "Zero defects does not mean that the product does not have bugs".
bug: Computer Science. A defect in the code or routine of a program.
"Zero Defects" is marketing-speak. What they mean is zero undesirable or intolerable defects which is greatly affected by what they determine is undesirable or intolerable. What the industry means by "zero defects" is not what their customers mean by "zero defects" and they are using that difference in definition to their advantage. That makes it marketing-speak. It's little different than claiming unemployment is down when all you've done is change the definition of "unemployed".
That's like saying that I support MS because one of the mutual funds that I'm holding has a small percentage stock in MS.
Technically, if you own stock in MS, however you got it, you are supporting them financially. Whether you agree with their business practices is another matter entirely, but by owning stock, you are making it possible (in a very small way, I'll grant you, but helping none the less) for them to do business in that manner.
But that is a far cry from a company, which Michael Moore attacks directly in his film, purchasing the theaters in which his film is to be shown.
If Bush becomes the CEO and declears that non of the theaters owned may play Moore's films, that would be a different story.
George W. Bush need not be the CEO, or even directly involved in The Carlyle Group, in order to have influence in the company. His father was on the board and most likely still has great influence. Other members are former high goverment officials from the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Were they to remove Moore's film from the theaters (and I don't claim that this is their intention, but I wouldn't rule it out either), they could effectively suppress criticism of the government and get the same results as banning the film outright without violating the First Amendment, but the result would be the same. Yes, Michael Moore still has the right to criticize the government, but the opportunity for others to hear him no longer exists.
It's like with major news outlets: the government can't legally prevent them from criticizing the government, but they can make it much more appealing to their corporate owners to support the government rather than criticize. In the end, the effect is the same with the added benefit that the people who watch the news still believe it's a "free press". That they haven't violated the First Amendment to achieve it is, at that point, just a technicality.
I'm pretty sure that anyone who can afford to my theater chains are rich.
One of the investors is The Carlyle Group.
Yes. Even Ray Bradbury must have been bought out by the military-industrial complex, given his rhetoric:
I'm not sure what Bradbury's belief that he owns the word "Fahrenheit" has anything to do with, if the interview even happened...
In fact, why doesn't Bush and his friends just outlaw Michael Moore's movies if the Bill of Rights only applies to "corporate conglomorates and their friends"?
Because they can do it much more sneakily by having their coroporate conglomerate buddies buy the theater chains. Whether Loews will show the movie remains to be seen.
They make money by providing connectivity.
The ISP should be expected to cut the connectivity of the zombied computer. But cleaning it up is not their responsibility.
Your answering machine isn't fooling with SS#7 and telephone switches. Compromised home systems are known to wreak havoc in many ways, some of them very nasty.
Well, to extend the analogy, if your modem is calling up people at 2am, the phone company is not expected to fix your modem, but is expected to turn off your phone if you won't fix it.
but then the same kind of clueless user that allows his/her box to fester with viruses will switch to another ISP which wont cut the service off...
Hopefully most ISP's will do the same thing and the user will find it harder and harder to get internet service. Even if they do, it's still better than leaving the box connected continuously.
because the clueless user might not understand the root cause of being cut off.
Even the most clueless users understand that viruses are bad (it's usually the first thing they blame when something on their system breaks). They may not know how they get them or how to keep from getting them, but they know what they are. Even if they don't, after the third ISP kicks them off for having them they might think to ask someone.
I agree, but at the very least the ISP should cut connectivity. Allowing compromised boxes on the network allows criminals to use the network to facilitate acts of theft and fraud.
Absolutely. But that should be the extent of what they are expected to do unless they have specifically sold computer tech support as part of their contract.
Unfortunately, calling the customer and walking him through disinfection/reinstall costs too much money, so only very, very few ISPs do it at all.
It's not really the ISP's job to fix their computer. It's a little like calling the phone company because your answering machine is broken.
Thats one of the nice things about Rick Boucher... [he] really is working in the interests of those he represents.
That's the state of the government today: we are actually surprised and offer congratulations when one of these people does the job he was hired to do.
"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name" - Henry Kissinger
I am waiting for a law that says that producers have a choice: they may a) allow consumers to back up their music/movies/games or b) agree to replace on demand and without charge any CD/DVD that has been damaged and is no longer playable.
What we need is a law that says if you lock up your content, effectively eliminating fair use and the return to the public domain (if the copyright ever expires), then you lose your copyright protection when it gets cracked.
If you don't play by the rules you can't complain to the referee when someone else doesn't.
People install spyware themselves.
People install email viruses themselves, too, because they are fooled into doing so.
It's (at least for the most part) an ID-10T error, not an exploit.
It's a social exploit like telling someone you're from tech support to get their password. No, they shouldn't give you their password, but that doesn't absolve you of lying to them to get it.
Are these governments going to MAKE users read and understand EULAs before installing things?
If EULAs were more understandable, people would read them more often. Few people can understand most EULAs without a lawyer's help. [ObSlashdotNote: I am aware many people here can read a EULA without a lawyer's help. You are the exception, not the rule.]
Aren't these people warned in the EULA before they install?
See above. Informing people in a EULA is taking advantage of people not reading them. Yes, people should read them, but taking advantage of the fact that they don't doesn't absolve them of attempting to mislead them.
And this doesn't address the spyware that is installed without being listed in a EULA, or installed despite the user not agreeing to the EULA.
Just making the right noises to please his masters.
Or (and this is probably closer to a tin-foil-hat type theory, but that doesn't make it false), he is taking the extreme so much farther out that the merely ridiculous looks sane by comparison.
"Every spelling or grammar flame must contain at least one spelling or grammar error."
let me simplify
Sentence not started with capital letter.
Sentence not ended with period (or other suitable punctuation).
one should strive it insure that the items
One should strive to ensure that the items
what you say?
"Someone set us up the bomb."
No this isn't minutia.
Then you should have taken more care in your own post.
My business model is to charge people every time they want to say bloogerglum.
The difference here is people don't need you in order to say the word bloogerglum. They are perfectly capable of uttering the word with no help from you. The fact that you invented the word doesn't change that. Yes, the word would not exist without you inventing it (unless someone else did), but, once invented, it cannot be "uninvented". Once it exists, it exists forever.
That is not the same with a signal. They must keep providing the signal in order for it to be useful and you cannot create the signal yourself without taking the same steps that they have. The signal must be maintained. If they stop sending the signal, it ceases to exist.
I claim that the right to measure the amplitude and phase of an electromagnetic wave inside your house falls in the same catagory as freedom of speech.
Nobody is claiming you can't measure the signal. What the law is claiming is that you can't use the content the signal carries without paying for it. The content of the signal is protected by an architecture which requires specific equipment, as well as specific information to decode it. All this means is that in order to decode the signal you have to make a concerted attempt to. Now, while I do not believe that every attempt to decode the signal is necessarily harmful, decoding the signal to avoid paying for it is clearly harmful. And it is this harm that the law is trying to prevent. In that the government believes providing this service is good for society, they have chosen to make it possible to profit from the service so that some will provide it. The law protecting the signal does not deprive you of anything you would have without the law because the signal would very likely not exist without it.
So what? VCR's are already obsolete.
I know plenty of people who still use them and they are still readily available for purchase. PVRs have not yet replaced them for recording TV shows. They aren't obsolete yet but I have no doubt they will be soon. And he can work the DVD player too. He can even tell the difference between a DVD and a CD which I have trouble with from time to time.
And by the time Junior grows up, the interface on a PC will have changed at least 5 times. Soon, your kid will be in the same boat as the other poster's granny!
As will I and his children eventually. The point is the devices will be designed for him, not for me or granny, because he will be the market. Whether granny can use it will not be a consideration in their design because she won't be buying them.
It is not my job, nor is it the governments job, to protect DirectTV's profit margins.
They are doing no such thing and I never said they were. The government is protecting their ability to profit from it the same way they protect other service providers ability to profit from their services because the ability to profit from services is good for society in general. Without that protection there is little incentive for people to provide those services and society must do without them.
The question I would ask is: what obligates me to pay for it just because theyre paying to send it?
Nothing is obligating you to pay for it. You either purchase the service or you don't. Whether or not enough people choose to purchase it determines whether they keep sending it. But that they are sending it does not give you any inherent right to use it without paying for it anymore than the fact that the bus is going that way anyway means you don't have to pay to ride.
Next your gonna tell me I have to make payments to God for use of the wind.
Oh give me a fucking break. DirecTV is not co-opting some natural occurance and charging you for something that you would have access to anyway. The wind would be there whether or not anyone chose to pay for it. The signal would disappear if nobody paid for it.
...most users still can't program a digital clock without help and most techs can't develop an interface that my grandmother can use.
Not to be insensitive, but your grandmother is going to die. Meanwhile the children being born today are growing up with the technology and will have no trouble using it. At two years old (he's four now), my son could put the tape in the VCR (even looks to make sure there's not one in already and ejects it if there is), switch the TV to Video, press play, and fast forward through the previews with no help from me. He's already proficient on a PC, even understands the difference between single and double-click and knows to wait when the hourglass comes up. Again, no offense, but my son could probably kick your grandmother's ass on a computer. Your grandmother is not the market for these devices. My son is.
But they do not have the right to tell me that I cannot read the radiation that exists within my house. Period.
Question Mark?
The only reason the signal is in your house is because they are providing it. They are only providing it because they can profit from it. The law protects their ability to profit from it. Without the ability to profit from it, the signal would not exist. The law is not depriving you of anything. Rather, it is providing the incentive for them to provide the signal. The assumption that you are somehow entitled to use that signal simply because it exists is specious. If that were the case, there would be no reason to pay for it and thus no reason to provide it.
We have a system a little like this in the UK, and I think it works very well.
I know even less about UK law than I do about US law.
Small claims ( GBP 5,000 = about $8,000 US) have limited costs which most people should be able to afford,
Small claims in the US are typically $1500 (roughly GBP 900) or less, carry small filing fees, and no lawyers are used.
and there is state aid for those who can't.
No such luck here. The only time you are (theoretically at least) provided with lawyer in the US if you can't afford one is in criminal cases.
It would also be interesting to compare attorney fees in the UK versus the US...
Is it just me, or is there some kind of growing groundswell that seeks to destroy the Internet by incessantly talking up its 'dangers'? Why don't we see more stories about what makes it great?
Because fear sells.
>Spammers lie.
Rule #2, nobody talks about - oh... nevermind.
Rule #3, NO POOFTERS.
Well if you had read the damn article you would see that they are still going after people that purchase certain equipment.
I did read the article, and if you had you would have seen this:
"[...]DirecTV has agreed to stop targeting general purpose devices in its campaign and will investigate all substantive claims of innocence."
From the article.
"DirecTV will, however, continue to investigate purchasers of devices that are often primarily designed for satellite signal interception, nicknamed "bootloaders" and "unloopers"."
Try reading what you're quoting. "Investigate" does not mean "sue". The indiscriminate lawsuits were the primary complaint.
Are they going to take the steps to prove that people are using this hardware to illegally grab directv's signal?
Prove it? No, but they don't have to. They only have to show a preponderance of evidence. It's a civil suit, not a criminal one. But according to the article, they have agreed to be more selective about what they do go after. Whether or not that is actually the case is yet to be determined.
Isn't this an obvious sign that it is something wrong with the legal system since the system does not account for any of the financial differences between Joe Smart Card and megacorp?
Absolutely, and that's what the argument is about. Joe Smart Card finds himself on the end of a lawsuit which will cost him a ton of money even if he wins. It's the cost of the legal process which makes this kind of extortion possible. Some people have suggested a system where the loser pays the winner's legal fees, but there are problems with that also. Someone with a legitimate but hard-to-prove claim may not have the financial resources to risk losing.
those ads on tv, and the phrase in the article "Stealing Satellite SIGNALS"... Now i may be way off base, but how the heck does one steal a satellite signal?
It's part of the campaign to equate copyright infringement with theft of property.