As others have pointed out, this time it is EMI, not BMG. I'll add my additional two cents worth as follows:
this was the Register's translation of the letter from EMI, not the actual German text
Germany has a slightly different culture - still a lot of pretty authoritarian folks running around compared to many other places. And a lot of that authoritarian attitude has gone down fairly well in the past. (Think of the German "beer purity laws", or see how far you can drive a low-rider on the Autobahn)
But having said that, I do believe that the music industry is about to discover that they are the students in a very pricey school rather than the administration.
Life plus X years is very bad law. Copyright should be the same period for everyone.
So if you come up with the "next Mickey Mouse", just kill yourself before the copyright expires
Besides, what happens to the whole life plus X years argument when people stop dying? It seems an extreme example, but what if the medical nanotech Pollannas are right?
Certainly life expectancies have increased in the past 200 odd years. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that considered 19 years an upper limit based on the actuarial(sp?) data available at the time. His concern was for limiting the freedom of the living due to the acts of the dead. (like maybe someone with a genetic melanin deficincy wanting to perform Porgy and Bess)
Have you ever bothered to watch all the credits on a movie and then at the very nd see the notice that says "for Bourne Convntion purposes, the copyright owner of this work is..."? The owner "of record"is a person not a corporation. Ever wonder how old that person is?
If copyright were for a uniform period of time it would be much easier to handle. Currently, everything written by Stephn King will fall into the public domain in 2070 (he did die last year didn't he?:)
But if copyright were for a uniform 20 years or so, we would already have his earlier (and arguably better) works already in the public domain. We also would not have silly legal arguments over the allowable name for an Austin Powers movie (as the original Bond novels would all be in the public domain)
You can argue that a CD is harder to damage than a floppy - at least proximity to an old telphone won't wipe them when it rings, but they can still be damaged. And unlike a book for example, damage to a CD will generally leave it pretty useless. If a page in a book is torn the rest of the book is still readable.
As to convenience, installing the game and putting the CD back in the box is a heck of a lot more convenient than needing a key disk installed.
This is not really an argument about piracy. It is an argument about whether or not the software publishers are making irrational decisions based on the exagerrated claims of the people trying to sell them a particular brand of snake oil. Piracy happens - more than I find comfortable. However, the "piracy prevention methods" being sold are about as effective against piracy as snake oil is against cancer. The problem is that while the victim of the snake oil salesman is his customer, the victim of the key disk copy prevention method is the customer of the software manufacturer. Go pay a visit to some of the gaming newsgroups and you will get a feel for the problems that various copy protection methods cause.
My personal gripe is that I have a relatively noisey CD-ROM drive and when it spins up to check that I am playing a legit copy of a game it makes quite a racket. There is also the delay while the drive spins up and the data is read - it just screws over my "gaming experience"
What I would advise you to do is take a moment and really think about your attitude towards "honest, legitimate" reasons. Try to get your head around the concept that many people do have honest and legitimate reasons.
Now as for the damnable idiots who consider not wanting to pay a good reason for copying, the game publishers have to ask themselves:
1> How many more copies will I sell because I am paying an extra dollar per unit to have an "uncopyable" key disk copy protection scheme in place? (bearing in mind that the "warez d00dz" will have a cracked copy of the game up in a week or so.)
2> How many sales will I lose because of consumers will refuse to buy the copy protection? (some copy protection schemes break games so they will not run on hardware well within the "system requirements - and some people will refuse as a matter of principle)
3> How many sales will I lose because I passed the cost on to the consumers by jacking up the price of the product to cover the check I have to write to Snake Oil Unlimited? (a $1.00 increas in cost per unit might be a $5.00 increase in the MSRP)
"I am sure Fritz will make an exception for many critical embedded systems if he decides to write..."
Please schedule immediate surgery to have the Fritz chip removed from your cerebellum before it is too late.
You have made a critical error in assuming that "Fritz" will have anything to do with the writing of any such law. The "Senator from Disney" did not write the proposed law. He merely took the money from the lobbyists along with the draft of the bill written by the lawyers retained by the concerned industry. There will not be any exceptions to the law - no matter how "sensible or reasonable" an exception might seem.
But let's not get despondent over this after all the bill still has to get through both houses of Congress and signed by the President before we have to worry about it.
And once it passes Congress, but before it gets to the President is the time to fix it. Simply borrow a play from the RIAA and insert a paragraph to "clarify existing standard business practices". Here is my proposed "clarification":
No case may be brought before any Court using any section of this Act save by a licensed lawyer who has had a DRM protected override chip installed on their vagus nerve for a period of ten years.
Actually, a "legit" copy can simply be a no-CD crack so you can keep the distribution CD safely in its jewel case rather than sitting in the drive. Of course, you are probably too young to remember the days of key disks (back in the days of 360K DSDD 5.25" floppies) and how big a pain in the butt they were then.
Updating the key disk copy protection scam does continue to do more to inconvenience legitimate users than it does to prevent piracy. It was that way in 1982 and it is still that way today. And of course the newest version of this particular snake oil scam does require that the publishers buy special media - just like it did back then except that the snake oil peddlers have had 20 more years to refine their paranoia inducing sales pitches.
So, the new snake oil costs more than the old snake oil, and the companies buying the stuff are now protected from "piracy". Pity they didn't think about protecting themselves from quackery.
they are saying that there are some parts of the game you will not be allowed to play if you don't have the GF4 installed. Being unfamiliar with the game, lets just guess that there will be a quest for some semi-uberweapon, but if you have a Radeon 9700,for instance, you will be unable to equip it or something equally sucky
Guess what? I can't think of a good but idiotic fast food analogy - but if I ate at BK I'd be more afraid that it might have , y'know MSG in it.
Seriously. Intel already has quite a history of promoting DRM and other initiatives deigned to prevent free use of technology. Remember the chip ID number a few years back? How about their more recent annonuncement of hardware support for DRM. (Last time I checked UWB would require hardware) Will the chips have "surplus" processing power to handle some sort of DRM enforcement encryption scheme? No - because the DRM enforcement will be part of the base design. USB and Firewire hardware is already shipping and DRM was not included in their specifications. A 3-4 year lead time suggests plenty of time to make sure that every UWB compliant chipset will include hooks for DRM as part of an overall "secure communications protocol" (note to the tinfoil hat people, this secure protocol will have a backdoor bigger than the goatse guy (supply yer own darn link) - strictly for the War on Terror y'know)
And once again, remember the big news here in comparison to USB or Firewire is that it is wireless. That means all new hardware to take advantage of it. New speakers, new monitors, new video cards, new keyboards, new mice, new PDAs, and so on. (I'm sure I don't have those in actual order of adoption - cut me a little slack OK?)
Some folks are happy over the idea that there will be no more need for umpty trillion cables. I am too. Just think how much money a UWB solution can shave off the Bill of Materials for those items. Heck, I probably have over 300 dollars worth of freaking cables in my home office. My concern is that the "standard" will incorporate something that will pretty much make DRM mandatory and that it will do so completly without discussion.
And another thought which occurred to me. If this is all embedded in the chipset, will it provide a neat little endrun on Microsoft's patent on DRM in the operating system? (It is Saturday - I don't remember if I'm supposed to hate MSFT today - I can't hate the MPAA cause it is movie day... darnit we need a banner on slashdot to tell us where we want our hate to go today)
Oh yeah. it is wireless. So,that means there is some type of receiver with a fair amount of processing power to turn that lovely EM burst back into nice clean digital data.
A receiver in every device, and of course a transmitter as well which uses that same processing power to turn digital data into EM bursts.
So, no more cables to hook up your monitor or speakers or other devices. There are some definite possibilities for convergence between HDTV and computer monitors here - why continue to build TV tuner circutry into your video display device? after all, you don't have built in FM tuners in every speaker.
BUT: This sure sounds like just the sort of massive technological change that is exactly what the DRM people are looking for to piggyback Pay-Per-Everything onto. Certainly there will be plenty of processing power to implement some nasty strong encryption scheme in the UWB hardware.
early US satelite. They called it echo becasue it was a pasive radar reflector. It was 500 ft in diameter. What was it made of you ask? How did they get somethig 500' in diameter into orbit you ask?
Try aluminumized mylar. It inflated after release from the booster (probably a Redstone - I don't remember)
It took very little to inflate it in space - just a few grams of gas was sufficient.
It didn't stay in orbit too long as it also provided proof of concept for solar sails.
JVC, unlike the fine folks who bring us music CDs does recognize a difference between computer (and probably console game) software and the data collections that the RIAA/MPAA stuffs onto audio CDs/DVDs and laughingly calls "software".
Having adequately corrected your misunderstanding (if you still forgot why you don't buy CD's you may elect treatment at your nearest re-education camp), I would venture to say that if a popular product like NWN II (hypothetically) were to use this technology, that 20 cents to 1.00 additional charge would work out to a 5.00 to 10.00 increase in the MSRP of the package.
The question the "real" software industry will have to ask themselves is:
Will using this technology actually bring in enough increased sales (from people who would otherwise pirate it) to make up for the inevitable ill will this will generate?
Historically, the answer to this question has always been NO. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Sure you can move the interior walls around, but you can't add any additional living area. Need a new room for those adorable additions to your family? Sure, but that means you will have a smaller living room/master bedroom/etc.
Sure the circular layout means less building materials needed to enclose a given living area, but it plays pure heck with the idea of putting em close together (think townhomes) - they still need a large footprint to sit on.
Also, given that they are trying to sell this as an answer in an area that needs high population density, how does that silly spire (antenna?)on top work when you want to stack them vertically?
I imagine the Integer Group ran across one of those websites extolling the advantages of geodesic domes and decided it was time to update the design because they have computers and lost of wizzy gadgets.
Those wacky folks in the gubmint made two decsions today:
1> As mentioned in the linked story the requirement for full digital tuner rollout by 2007. This vote by the commissioners was NOT unanimous.
2> As was covered elsewhere (sorry find yer own link - try zd.net), they also voted (unanimous vote!) to require that all those digital tuners recognize a "content protection flag" to prevent digital copies of protected content being made.
Umm... It seems to me that the Librarian of Congress reported a couple years back (as required by the DMCA) on specific exemptions to the DMCA that should be allowed. I believe two exemptions were recomended... One of them was specifcally to allow decryption of the list of blocked sites in censorware packages. Has this researcher or the ACLU considered this before mounting their "challenge" to the DMCA?
He sold BONDS which were to be paid back from the royalties earned by his music.
I f he really believes copyright will be dead in the near future, then he will probably be on the receiving end of a pretty darn hefty fraud investigaion.
It would be like oh Donald Trump selling Bonds to finance a new casino in Atlantic City, with the casino revenues to repay the bonds all the while expecting the state of New Jersey to outlaw all casino gambling 5 years after the casino opens.
Make it for a set number of years period. This whole life plus X years is a bunch of needless complication, and in actuality is just the sort of ambiguity that gets used 50 years later to really screw things up.
Besides, what if the life extension Pollyannas are right? Everbody lives forever, copyright only expires when an author is successfully murdered?
Plato's stuff is all in the public domain. Adams stuff is still under copyright. That means he can file the serial numbers off of Plato's work and otherwise make new works derived from Plato's original.
At least Adams was kind enough to thank everyone for all the "fish"
Maybe they really are keeping it for a "rainy day".
But MSFT really ought to start thinking about declaring some dividends, they are too big to continue growing at the same rate as they have in the past.
Seriously, if you can't shake loose more than 10 grand a year for pure hardware upgrades, your older boxes will be falling apart long before you get to them. (And your users will probably rebel and have you drawn and quartered too)
About two jobs back, I worked in an engineering firm with lots of bright tech talent. Management decided to purchase ten new PCs for the programmers. They built one from parts, but determined that the time it took to get it fully assembled and running was great enough that buying the rest pre-assembled made more sense. (I recognize that your requirement to stay on Win2K will have an impact on what is available for purchase now - sometimes life drops a litter of puppies in your lap)
In your 600 per box budget, does that include the costs of the time it will take to assemble the boxes? If not, you had better reconsider, and recognize that when you bring up the new system with the old hard drive, it will most likely complain quite a bit over the changed hardware configuration - so allow an extra two hours per box to be on the safe side in tracking down all the nasty driver changes that no one ever thinks about. (I've done this sort of thing over a dozen times - sometimes you wind up reformatting and installing from scratch)
Why are you recycling the cases? 1> The old 400mhz boxes may well be AT and not ATX form factors- if so, you will need new cases 2> Cooling. If you go with AMD, will the existing cases be able to provide enough airflow? 3>Power supply. you should at least replace the power supplies - they are still the single greatest point of hardware failure in a PC and the ones you have are all probably at or near the end of their service life anyways. The newer systems will have greater power requirements, especially if you go with AMD. Nothing like an increased load to bring a "mature" power supply to its demise.
Yeah, that steaming pile of goo is a real "crossover" show. I wish John Edwards would cross back over to Oxygen or Lifetime where his target audience hangs out.
Of course, the Sci-Fi channel nowadays has about as much to do with SF as MTV has to do with music now.
Congratulations! You have identified one of the "unintended consequences" that such a remedy would have. MSFT has shown an incredible talent for taking whatever lemons the legal system throws them and making lemonade.
Remember that billion dollar settlement where MSFT was going to "give" a "billion" dollars worth of hardware/software to schools - and just incidentally deliver a crushing blow to Apple in the education market?
How about the requirement for uniform licensing deals to all manufacturers? MSFT has been turning that to their advantage as well (The court says we have to change our sales contract with you - Dude, you're gonna be paying more now).
I have faith (and now I'm not bashing MSFT here) that if MSFT is required to provide a stripped down version of Windows they will find a way to turn that to their advantage. Just as a simple example, consider how much easier it will be for MSFT to produce a reasonably secure OS when they don't have to worry about a default setting in Outlook or IE being a virus/worm/trojan vector. If this does happen. I expect to see MSFT (after taking care of their own problems) suddenly coming out in favor of making software companies legally responsible for damage done by insecure software. (Once again making lemonade)
Before Napster, there was MP3.com. Since the RIAA jumped down their throat with both feet before Napster came along, your reasoning does not apply.
On the other hand since Napster's business plan was based on allowing widespread copyright infringement (go look at the evidence from the court case - pesky e-mails), Napster would have been shut down immediately and saved everyone involved vast sums of money.
Slashdot Mirror
- this was the Register's translation of the letter from EMI, not the actual German text
- Germany has a slightly different culture - still a lot of pretty authoritarian folks running around compared to many other places. And a lot of that authoritarian attitude has gone down fairly well in the past. (Think of the German "beer purity laws", or see how far you can drive a low-rider on the Autobahn)
But having said that, I do believe that the music industry is about to discover that they are the students in a very pricey school rather than the administration.No, China is a fitting place for the meeting.
Gopher Gulch (or whatever Ayn Rand's utopian place was) would be an ironic place for the meeting.
Life plus X years is very bad law. Copyright should be the same period for everyone.
..."? The owner "of record"is a person not a corporation. Ever wonder how old that person is?
:)
So if you come up with the "next Mickey Mouse", just kill yourself before the copyright expires
Besides, what happens to the whole life plus X years argument when people stop dying? It seems an extreme example, but what if the medical nanotech Pollannas are right?
Certainly life expectancies have increased in the past 200 odd years. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that considered 19 years an upper limit based on the actuarial(sp?) data available at the time. His concern was for limiting the freedom of the living due to the acts of the dead. (like maybe someone with a genetic melanin deficincy wanting to perform Porgy and Bess)
Have you ever bothered to watch all the credits on a movie and then at the very nd see the notice that says "for Bourne Convntion purposes, the copyright owner of this work is
If copyright were for a uniform period of time it would be much easier to handle. Currently, everything written by Stephn King will fall into the public domain in 2070 (he did die last year didn't he?
But if copyright were for a uniform 20 years or so, we would already have his earlier (and arguably better) works already in the public domain. We also would not have silly legal arguments over the allowable name for an Austin Powers movie (as the original Bond novels would all be in the public domain)
You can argue that a CD is harder to damage than a floppy - at least proximity to an old telphone won't wipe them when it rings, but they can still be damaged. And unlike a book for example, damage to a CD will generally leave it pretty useless. If a page in a book is torn the rest of the book is still readable.
As to convenience, installing the game and putting the CD back in the box is a heck of a lot more convenient than needing a key disk installed.
This is not really an argument about piracy. It is an argument about whether or not the software publishers are making irrational decisions based on the exagerrated claims of the people trying to sell them a particular brand of snake oil. Piracy happens - more than I find comfortable. However, the "piracy prevention methods" being sold are about as effective against piracy as snake oil is against cancer. The problem is that while the victim of the snake oil salesman is his customer, the victim of the key disk copy prevention method is the customer of the software manufacturer. Go pay a visit to some of the gaming newsgroups and you will get a feel for the problems that various copy protection methods cause.
My personal gripe is that I have a relatively noisey CD-ROM drive and when it spins up to check that I am playing a legit copy of a game it makes quite a racket. There is also the delay while the drive spins up and the data is read - it just screws over my "gaming experience"
What I would advise you to do is take a moment and really think about your attitude towards "honest, legitimate" reasons. Try to get your head around the concept that many people do have honest and legitimate reasons.
Now as for the damnable idiots who consider not wanting to pay a good reason for copying, the game publishers have to ask themselves:
1> How many more copies will I sell because I am paying an extra dollar per unit to have an "uncopyable" key disk copy protection scheme in place? (bearing in mind that the "warez d00dz" will have a cracked copy of the game up in a week or so.)
2> How many sales will I lose because of consumers will refuse to buy the copy protection? (some copy protection schemes break games so they will not run on hardware well within the "system requirements - and some people will refuse as a matter of principle)
3> How many sales will I lose because I passed the cost on to the consumers by jacking up the price of the product to cover the check I have to write to Snake Oil Unlimited? (a $1.00 increas in cost per unit might be a $5.00 increase in the MSRP)
Please schedule immediate surgery to have the Fritz chip removed from your cerebellum before it is too late.
You have made a critical error in assuming that "Fritz" will have anything to do with the writing of any such law. The "Senator from Disney" did not write the proposed law. He merely took the money from the lobbyists along with the draft of the bill written by the lawyers retained by the concerned industry. There will not be any exceptions to the law - no matter how "sensible or reasonable" an exception might seem.
But let's not get despondent over this after all the bill still has to get through both houses of Congress and signed by the President before we have to worry about it. And once it passes Congress, but before it gets to the President is the time to fix it. Simply borrow a play from the RIAA and insert a paragraph to "clarify existing standard business practices". Here is my proposed "clarification":
No case may be brought before any Court using any section of this Act save by a licensed lawyer who has had a DRM protected override chip installed on their vagus nerve for a period of ten years.
Kind of breathtaking in it's simplicity eh?
Actually, a "legit" copy can simply be a no-CD crack so you can keep the distribution CD safely in its jewel case rather than sitting in the drive. Of course, you are probably too young to remember the days of key disks (back in the days of 360K DSDD 5.25" floppies) and how big a pain in the butt they were then.
Updating the key disk copy protection scam does continue to do more to inconvenience legitimate users than it does to prevent piracy. It was that way in 1982 and it is still that way today. And of course the newest version of this particular snake oil scam does require that the publishers buy special media - just like it did back then except that the snake oil peddlers have had 20 more years to refine their paranoia inducing sales pitches.
So, the new snake oil costs more than the old snake oil, and the companies buying the stuff are now protected from "piracy". Pity they didn't think about protecting themselves from quackery.
they are saying that there are some parts of the game you will not be allowed to play if you don't have the GF4 installed.
Being unfamiliar with the game, lets just guess that there will be a quest for some semi-uberweapon, but if you have a Radeon 9700,for instance, you will be unable to equip it or something equally sucky
Gee, that kind of makes it difficult to share thse 30,000+ MP3 files with just a few million "close personal friends"
Oh, wait, you can automate the whole e-mail and ftp setup...
But then how are you making sure you are only serving up files to those "close personal friends"?
God Almighty.
Guess what? I can't think of a good but idiotic fast food analogy - but if I ate at BK I'd be more afraid that it might have , y'know MSG in it.
Seriously. Intel already has quite a history of promoting DRM and other initiatives deigned to prevent free use of technology. Remember the chip ID number a few years back? How about their more recent annonuncement of hardware support for DRM. (Last time I checked UWB would require hardware) Will the chips have "surplus" processing power to handle some sort of DRM enforcement encryption scheme? No - because the DRM enforcement will be part of the base design. USB and Firewire hardware is already shipping and DRM was not included in their specifications. A 3-4 year lead time suggests plenty of time to make sure that every UWB compliant chipset will include hooks for DRM as part of an overall "secure communications protocol" (note to the tinfoil hat people, this secure protocol will have a backdoor bigger than the goatse guy (supply yer own darn link) - strictly for the War on Terror y'know)
And once again, remember the big news here in comparison to USB or Firewire is that it is wireless. That means all new hardware to take advantage of it. New speakers, new monitors, new video cards, new keyboards, new mice, new PDAs, and so on. (I'm sure I don't have those in actual order of adoption - cut me a little slack OK?)
Some folks are happy over the idea that there will be no more need for umpty trillion cables. I am too. Just think how much money a UWB solution can shave off the Bill of Materials for those items. Heck, I probably have over 300 dollars worth of freaking cables in my home office. My concern is that the "standard" will incorporate something that will pretty much make DRM mandatory and that it will do so completly without discussion.
And another thought which occurred to me. If this is all embedded in the chipset, will it provide a neat little endrun on Microsoft's patent on DRM in the operating system? (It is Saturday - I don't remember if I'm supposed to hate MSFT today - I can't hate the MPAA cause it is movie day... darnit we need a banner on slashdot to tell us where we want our hate to go today)
Oh yeah. it is wireless.
So,that means there is some type of receiver with a fair amount of processing power to turn that lovely EM burst back into nice clean digital data.
A receiver in every device, and of course a transmitter as well which uses that same processing power to turn digital data into EM bursts.
So, no more cables to hook up your monitor or speakers or other devices. There are some definite possibilities for convergence between HDTV and computer monitors here - why continue to build TV tuner circutry into your video display device? after all, you don't have built in FM tuners in every speaker.
BUT:
This sure sounds like just the sort of massive technological change that is exactly what the DRM people are looking for to piggyback Pay-Per-Everything onto. Certainly there will be plenty of processing power to implement some nasty strong encryption scheme in the UWB hardware.
Yeah, well the center of gravity of the Earth -Luna system is about 100 miles below terrestrial sea level. Both bodies revolve around that point.
Some folks have argued that Earth-Luna is technically a binary planet rather than a single planet with a moon.
early US satelite.
They called it echo becasue it was a pasive radar reflector. It was 500 ft in diameter.
What was it made of you ask?
How did they get somethig 500' in diameter into orbit you ask?
Try aluminumized mylar.
It inflated after release from the booster (probably a Redstone - I don't remember)
It took very little to inflate it in space - just a few grams of gas was sufficient.
It didn't stay in orbit too long as it also provided proof of concept for solar sails.
Software CDs oh artistic one.
JVC, unlike the fine folks who bring us music CDs does recognize a difference between computer (and probably console game) software and the data collections that the RIAA/MPAA stuffs onto audio CDs/DVDs and laughingly calls "software".
Having adequately corrected your misunderstanding (if you still forgot why you don't buy CD's you may elect treatment at your nearest re-education camp), I would venture to say that if a popular product like NWN II (hypothetically) were to use this technology, that 20 cents to 1.00 additional charge would work out to a 5.00 to 10.00 increase in the MSRP of the package.
The question the "real" software industry will have to ask themselves is:
Will using this technology actually bring in enough increased sales (from people who would otherwise pirate it) to make up for the inevitable ill will this will generate?
Historically, the answer to this question has always been NO. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Sure you can move the interior walls around, but you can't add any additional living area. Need a new room for those adorable additions to your family? Sure, but that means you will have a smaller living room/master bedroom/etc.
Sure the circular layout means less building materials needed to enclose a given living area, but it plays pure heck with the idea of putting em close together (think townhomes) - they still need a large footprint to sit on.
Also, given that they are trying to sell this as an answer in an area that needs high population density, how does that silly spire (antenna?)on top work when you want to stack them vertically?
I imagine the Integer Group ran across one of those websites extolling the advantages of geodesic domes and decided it was time to update the design because they have computers and lost of wizzy gadgets.
Trekkie Trekkie Trekkie
Those wacky folks in the gubmint made two decsions today:
/.
1> As mentioned in the linked story the requirement for full digital tuner rollout by 2007. This vote by the commissioners was NOT unanimous.
2> As was covered elsewhere (sorry find yer own link - try zd.net), they also voted (unanimous vote!) to require that all those digital tuners recognize a "content protection flag" to prevent digital copies of protected content being made.
This is
Leap to your own conclusions
Umm...
It seems to me that the Librarian of Congress reported a couple years back (as required by the DMCA) on specific exemptions to the DMCA that should be allowed. I believe two exemptions were recomended...
One of them was specifcally to allow decryption of the list of blocked sites in censorware packages. Has this researcher or the ACLU considered this before mounting their "challenge" to the DMCA?
He sold BONDS which were to be paid back from the royalties earned by his music.
I f he really believes copyright will be dead in the near future, then he will probably be on the receiving end of a pretty darn hefty fraud investigaion.
It would be like oh Donald Trump selling Bonds to finance a new casino in Atlantic City, with the casino revenues to repay the bonds all the while expecting the state of New Jersey to outlaw all casino gambling 5 years after the casino opens.
Make it for a set number of years period.
This whole life plus X years is a bunch of needless complication, and in actuality is just the sort of ambiguity that gets used 50 years later to really screw things up.
Besides, what if the life extension Pollyannas are right? Everbody lives forever, copyright only expires when an author is successfully murdered?
Plato's stuff is all in the public domain. Adams stuff is still under copyright. That means he can file the serial numbers off of Plato's work and otherwise make new works derived from Plato's original.
At least Adams was kind enough to thank everyone for all the "fish"
Nah Congrescritters come real cheap.
Maybe they really are keeping it for a "rainy day".
But MSFT really ought to start thinking about declaring some dividends, they are too big to continue growing at the same rate as they have in the past.
Seriously, if you can't shake loose more than 10 grand a year for pure hardware upgrades, your older boxes will be falling apart long before you get to them. (And your users will probably rebel and have you drawn and quartered too)
About two jobs back, I worked in an engineering firm with lots of bright tech talent. Management decided to purchase ten new PCs for the programmers. They built one from parts, but determined that the time it took to get it fully assembled and running was great enough that buying the rest pre-assembled made more sense. (I recognize that your requirement to stay on Win2K will have an impact on what is available for purchase now - sometimes life drops a litter of puppies in your lap)
In your 600 per box budget, does that include the costs of the time it will take to assemble the boxes? If not, you had better reconsider, and recognize that when you bring up the new system with the old hard drive, it will most likely complain quite a bit over the changed hardware configuration - so allow an extra two hours per box to be on the safe side in tracking down all the nasty driver changes that no one ever thinks about. (I've done this sort of thing over a dozen times - sometimes you wind up reformatting and installing from scratch)
Why are you recycling the cases?
1> The old 400mhz boxes may well be AT and not ATX form factors- if so, you will need new cases
2> Cooling. If you go with AMD, will the existing cases be able to provide enough airflow?
3>Power supply. you should at least replace the power supplies - they are still the single greatest point of hardware failure in a PC and the ones you have are all probably at or near the end of their service life anyways. The newer systems will have greater power requirements, especially if you go with AMD. Nothing like an increased load to bring a "mature" power supply to its demise.
Yeah, that steaming pile of goo is a real "crossover" show. I wish John Edwards would cross back over to Oxygen or Lifetime where his target audience hangs out.
Of course, the Sci-Fi channel nowadays has about as much to do with SF as MTV has to do with music now.
Congratulations! You have identified one of the "unintended consequences" that such a remedy would have. MSFT has shown an incredible talent for taking whatever lemons the legal system throws them and making lemonade.
Remember that billion dollar settlement where MSFT was going to "give" a "billion" dollars worth of hardware/software to schools - and just incidentally deliver a crushing blow to Apple in the education market?
How about the requirement for uniform licensing deals to all manufacturers? MSFT has been turning that to their advantage as well (The court says we have to change our sales contract with you - Dude, you're gonna be paying more now).
I have faith (and now I'm not bashing MSFT here) that if MSFT is required to provide a stripped down version of Windows they will find a way to turn that to their advantage. Just as a simple example, consider how much easier it will be for MSFT to produce a reasonably secure OS when they don't have to worry about a default setting in Outlook or IE being a virus/worm/trojan vector. If this does happen. I expect to see MSFT (after taking care of their own problems) suddenly coming out in favor of making software companies legally responsible for damage done by insecure software. (Once again making lemonade)
Before Napster, there was MP3.com. Since the RIAA jumped down their throat with both feet before Napster came along, your reasoning does not apply.
On the other hand since Napster's business plan was based on allowing widespread copyright infringement (go look at the evidence from the court case - pesky e-mails), Napster would have been shut down immediately and saved everyone involved vast sums of money.