They're talking about all the customers for this service coming home and firing up their PCs instead of the TV. This won't be a small fraction of their customers using the full bandwidth, it'll be essentially all of them at once. They will be unable to plan for any meaningful fraction of idle bandwidth, because this is streaming media: if they have to delay packets at all, they've failed to deliver on their contract.
They're talking about a service that won't even tolerate as much overbooking as airline seats. Come home, sit down, get your bandwidth now.
They won't selling "HD video to your PC, except for the times when there's something really interesting available, that the provider is paying to send, and everybody wants".
So to do business on this Internet they propose to build, they have to have the bandwidth available for essentially 100% usage. Which means if you're not using it for the stuff they demand the right to also charge other people for, it's sitting idle.
Which means that, even though they say they're demanding the right to charge for priority access — delaying other, lower priority traffic — to their customers, what they're really demanding is the "right" to charge anybody they want to use bandwidth you've already paid for and will otherwise sit idle. And they say they need this "right" because if they don't get it, they can't make a profit.
They claim that unless they can charge you to access, over the Internet, TV that other people are paying to send you, they'll be losing money. But that is not all: they claim that, if you use that bandwidth to access anything but that paid content, they'll be losing money. And even that is not all. No. They claim that if you don't use that Internet bandwidth to access anything at all, they'll be losing money.
They claim that if the people paying to watch the paid content don't subsidise the ones paying but not watching paid content, they lose money.
They'll be advertising and selling a service they claim they'll be losing money on.
Perhaps "worth" was the wrong word to use. Games have a mathematical structure. I intended "worth" to refer to situations, whose mathematical structure mathematicians call "games", that have no forced win or draw strategy. Our legal system is adversarial and it follows rules. I was responding to someone's suggestion we get computers to apply those rules to presented cases, in deterministic fashion. The full spelling of my remark is that no deterministic automaton in an this situation can succeed long-term against competent, unpredictable people who choose to "game the system".
Perhaps you'd rather I used the older version of my remark: "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". I was only trying to keep it light. Sorry.
This is a multinational corporation with its global reputation on the line, not some band of trolls that can't abide sunlight. They have very, very smart people running their response. Their bland, everything's-fine, "we're just innocent li'l good boys doing what we should" arguments aren't even remotely plausible candidates for secret filings. It's a dodge, meant to convince the people who want to trust them and divert the ones who don't.
As I understand it, you've stated the difference precisely: copying for your own private use is fair. Distributing or broadcasting that copy, *especially* as part of a commercial transaction, is not. I actually agree with them on this one.
Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Now, it may be that having the case brought as a "Civil Action" makes my use of the word "criminal" incorrect. It also occurs to me that there's a legal distinction between the men who direct a company and the company itself. So, to that extent, I'll retract my statement, apologize and confess to ignorance.
Somehow, replacing ~MS management~ with ~the company MS management direct~, and ~convicted criminal~ with ~convicted of felony conduct~, just doesn't seem to make any real difference in meaning. But I do thank you. In future conversation I'll use the excruciatingly correct terminology.
So, to repeat: to whatever extent my post based on that information constitutes ignorance, or groupthink, I apologize.
First: the fraction of open source software built with U.S. Government support is minuscule. Ballmer doesn't mention that part, and continues on his screed as if it were all subsidised that way. He puts "Linux" under that umbrella. Taking the ordinary sense of repeating "government funded" in half the sentences in his paragraph, then substituting as the only concrete example of "open source" software, Linux, his statement is false.
Second: his definition of "available" must be from some other language than the English spoken at, say, IBM. Or Red Hat. IBM and Red Hat were doing quite well off the results of their using GPL'd software. Using the ordinary definition of "available", his statement is false.
Third: he says that "if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source". His definition of "use" must be from some other language than the English spoken at, to give only one, blatant example, Apple, who use GPL'd software to construct the proprietary OS X. Taking the ordinary definition of "use", his statement is false.
His entire statement is composed of parts that have, if you squint just right, truthful constructions. It takes effort to construct deniable lies like that. It takes malice.
Beta code. Compiled with all the debug options, -O1 if that. Performance is going to just flat suck. And in an OS, that's going to hurt worse than almost anywhere else, because it's going to interfere with if not wreck everything that depends on response time. Plus all the triage that betas are supposed to do: find what most desperately needs cleanup in the real world.
Vista's interface takes "ripoff" to whole new depths, but the summary headline's a bad rap./. got suckered: the whole point of the article was to keep Vista in people's minds. It's succeeding.
Have a basic understanding of how the internet actually works.
There are a lot of otherwise reasonably competent people who don't think they're "on the internet" until they've seen their ISP's bloated, ad-ridden web page.
The crucial requirement is that you can verify your partner's identity regardless of the security (or lack thereof) of the current conversation. Recognizing something unforgeable about them will do it: their voice, in this case.
This works because, in order to establish communications at all, each party has to split a secret:
AB' <—> A'B
A' being the public part of Alice's one-time key, B' Bob's. AB' can be used to generate the same key as A'B: each end is using the other's public part to share the key being used over that channel. Here's the thing: B' is already public. So, Alice's phone simply shows it to her, and she reads it aloud over the supposedly secure channel.
Now: if there's a man in the middle, Alice is really using AM', and Bob is really using BM'. Which means that when Alice reads it, Bob can tell that it's her voice, and she's not using what he sent her. So the man in the middle's screwed: if he doesn't pass along B' to be used in the conversation, he'll be detected. If he does pass it along, he won't be able to eavesdrop.
There are simplifications in this description, and they leave vulnerabilities that you can spot if you think hard enough. But if you're thinking hard enough to spot the vulnerabilities, extending the idea to cover them will be easy.
What it displays to you is based on the encryption key it's using. If there's a man in the middle, the keys won't be the same: the encryption keys are determined by randomly-chosen secrets never released by either end, so no two conversations ever arrive at the same key.
It is false to believe that a free market offers any value in "goodwill equity" of any sort.
I think there's a reverse sense: it isn't so much customers' goodwill towards the company, it's customers' belief that the company harbors good will towards them.
I'll buy from companies I believe are full of people working their butts off for me. I'll tolerate a fair amount of crap from such companies. The list of Apple's crap would fill a thick notebook. It bothers me, I keep running gut checks, but it isn't even that they suck less. It's what I believe they're trying to do. Fanboyism? I don't think so. I believe your customers are the same way: as long as they believe you're working for them, you'll do ok.
Companies have a bozo-carrying capacity: once exceeded, it's damn hard for them to recover. Small companies' capacities hover around zero, which produces your observations. Larger ones... well, Sony's been heading this way for a long time. People are starting to believe the bozos have hit critical mass: that Sony, as a whole, are no longer working for anybody but themselves.
The true fact is that there is an enormous value input to the body of "free software,"
Ok.
and as nobody is attempting to recoup that value, it's being dumped.
My, that's a lot of malarkey in a single clause. The for-profit organizations involved are very definitely charging for their work; if they weren't, most of them wouldn't be making money at all. Now, should Novell be suing Red Hat for dumping, or should Red Hat be suing Novell? Or should Novell be suing IBM? Or IBM Red Hat? Or should they all be suing the Debian crew? I know! Let's all sue ESR! THAT'll work.
But of course that's not actually loony enough to stun people's brains into insensibility. You had to pack more in there: competent businesses are making money for their work, the barriers to entry are just stunningly low, the whole business has, as you say, produced "enormous value" and, according to your reasoning, this is a bad thing... because... they're building on work that wasn't done for profit? It's supposed to be somehow illegal to make work available for public benefit on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms?
But even outlawing work for the common good isn't loony enough. No. You want to outlaw using that work. Corporations liable for using benefits freely available to all! The low, criminal depravity!
Those are odd ways to deny having possessed something. Everything you suggest presumes actually having had it, by any plain reading of the word "had"; they're just half-plausible reasons for being unable to provide it. But the law doesn't say you have to provide it unless you can't remember the password. The law says you have to provide it unless you don't have it.
Anybody care to estimate the number of people who would have even noticed this absent the media reports? How about how many more more than peripherally noticed the media reports? I'll post an entirely wild-assed guess: something like 50K people worldwide have any real clue what happened, and fewer than a five thousand of those experienced any actual symptoms.
This was nothing. We've known for years that it doesn't take a whole lot more than script kiddie competence to drop a site or two, just about any site, and that's all they did. Remember what'shisname, Gibson was it? They've been able to do it for years, and nobody is willing to install and run the technology necessary to defang them. BECAUSE IT AIN'T WORTH DOING.
<gets a brainwave> Duhhhh. Talk about overkill. Next/. poll: how long would it take the NSA to find them all? Answer number 4: There's only one.
(a) sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it, and
Perhaps you simply overlooked it. Can you suggest anything that would be sufficient evidence to even suggest that I didn't have an encryption key a month ago, let alone "raise an issue with respect to" the charge?
I'm not sure he meant it the way you took it. I've more than once gotten really, really pissed off at a few thousand lines of code when I was trying to fix its Nth should-have-been-simple problem and just rebuilt it. It was never the whole ball of wax. If you already know what the code's supposed to be doing, you've got the very familiar and (mostly-)working bad example right in front of you, it's a neatly severable chunk and you're angry enough, it goes fast and the result is rock solid. That kind of thing is of course deep into easier to ask forgiveness than permission territory.
Slashdot Mirror
They're talking about a service that won't even tolerate as much overbooking as airline seats. Come home, sit down, get your bandwidth now.
They won't selling "HD video to your PC, except for the times when there's something really interesting available, that the provider is paying to send, and everybody wants".
So to do business on this Internet they propose to build, they have to have the bandwidth available for essentially 100% usage. Which means if you're not using it for the stuff they demand the right to also charge other people for, it's sitting idle.
Which means that, even though they say they're demanding the right to charge for priority access — delaying other, lower priority traffic — to their customers, what they're really demanding is the "right" to charge anybody they want to use bandwidth you've already paid for and will otherwise sit idle. And they say they need this "right" because if they don't get it, they can't make a profit.
They claim that unless they can charge you to access, over the Internet, TV that other people are paying to send you, they'll be losing money. But that is not all: they claim that, if you use that bandwidth to access anything but that paid content, they'll be losing money. And even that is not all. No. They claim that if you don't use that Internet bandwidth to access anything at all, they'll be losing money.
They claim that if the people paying to watch the paid content don't subsidise the ones paying but not watching paid content, they lose money.
They'll be advertising and selling a service they claim they'll be losing money on.
Internet service.
Perhaps you'd rather I used the older version of my remark: "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". I was only trying to keep it light. Sorry.
The bottom line: they will only be able to profit from the regime they demand the "right" to set up if they can produce this situation:
The only way that happens is by forcibly denying service to ordinary traffic.
There's no government funding or government-mandated expense here.
They're not demanding the right to charge for a service
They're demanding the right to charge for a service and then refuse to perform it.
In adversarial games worth playing, public deterministic strategies lose.
This is a multinational corporation with its global reputation on the line, not some band of trolls that can't abide sunlight. They have very, very smart people running their response. Their bland, everything's-fine, "we're just innocent li'l good boys doing what we should" arguments aren't even remotely plausible candidates for secret filings. It's a dodge, meant to convince the people who want to trust them and divert the ones who don't.
I see NetworkWorld fixed the article.
As I understand it, you've stated the difference precisely: copying for your own private use is fair. Distributing or broadcasting that copy, *especially* as part of a commercial transaction, is not. I actually agree with them on this one.
Microsoft was found, as a conclusion of law, to have violated U.S.C 15 Sect. 2. The relevant quote from that link:
I elided the part reversed by the Supreme Court's decision on the case.Here is the full text of section 2:
Now, it may be that having the case brought as a "Civil Action" makes my use of the word "criminal" incorrect. It also occurs to me that there's a legal distinction between the men who direct a company and the company itself. So, to that extent, I'll retract my statement, apologize and confess to ignorance.
Somehow, replacing ~MS management~ with ~the company MS management direct~, and ~convicted criminal~ with ~convicted of felony conduct~, just doesn't seem to make any real difference in meaning. But I do thank you. In future conversation I'll use the excruciatingly correct terminology.
So, to repeat: to whatever extent my post based on that information constitutes ignorance, or groupthink, I apologize.
You mean like these?
Second: his definition of "available" must be from some other language than the English spoken at, say, IBM. Or Red Hat. IBM and Red Hat were doing quite well off the results of their using GPL'd software. Using the ordinary definition of "available", his statement is false.
Third: he says that "if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source". His definition of "use" must be from some other language than the English spoken at, to give only one, blatant example, Apple, who use GPL'd software to construct the proprietary OS X. Taking the ordinary definition of "use", his statement is false.
His entire statement is composed of parts that have, if you squint just right, truthful constructions. It takes effort to construct deniable lies like that. It takes malice.
Vista's interface takes "ripoff" to whole new depths, but the summary headline's a bad rap. /. got suckered: the whole point of the article was to keep Vista in people's minds. It's succeeding.
There are a lot of otherwise reasonably competent people who don't think they're "on the internet" until they've seen their ISP's bloated, ad-ridden web page.
The crucial requirement is that you can verify your partner's identity regardless of the security (or lack thereof) of the current conversation. Recognizing something unforgeable about them will do it: their voice, in this case.
This works because, in order to establish communications at all, each party has to split a secret:
AB' <—> A'B
A' being the public part of Alice's one-time key, B' Bob's. AB' can be used to generate the same key as A'B: each end is using the other's public part to share the key being used over that channel. Here's the thing: B' is already public. So, Alice's phone simply shows it to her, and she reads it aloud over the supposedly secure channel.
Now: if there's a man in the middle, Alice is really using AM', and Bob is really using BM'. Which means that when Alice reads it, Bob can tell that it's her voice, and she's not using what he sent her. So the man in the middle's screwed: if he doesn't pass along B' to be used in the conversation, he'll be detected. If he does pass it along, he won't be able to eavesdrop.
There are simplifications in this description, and they leave vulnerabilities that you can spot if you think hard enough. But if you're thinking hard enough to spot the vulnerabilities, extending the idea to cover them will be easy.
What it displays to you is based on the encryption key it's using. If there's a man in the middle, the keys won't be the same: the encryption keys are determined by randomly-chosen secrets never released by either end, so no two conversations ever arrive at the same key.
s/b http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/v2i1/sergienko.html
I'll buy from companies I believe are full of people working their butts off for me. I'll tolerate a fair amount of crap from such companies. The list of Apple's crap would fill a thick notebook. It bothers me, I keep running gut checks, but it isn't even that they suck less. It's what I believe they're trying to do. Fanboyism? I don't think so. I believe your customers are the same way: as long as they believe you're working for them, you'll do ok.
Companies have a bozo-carrying capacity: once exceeded, it's damn hard for them to recover. Small companies' capacities hover around zero, which produces your observations. Larger ones... well, Sony's been heading this way for a long time. People are starting to believe the bozos have hit critical mass: that Sony, as a whole, are no longer working for anybody but themselves.
But of course that's not actually loony enough to stun people's brains into insensibility. You had to pack more in there: competent businesses are making money for their work, the barriers to entry are just stunningly low, the whole business has, as you say, produced "enormous value" and, according to your reasoning, this is a bad thing... because ... they're building on work that wasn't done for profit? It's supposed to be somehow illegal to make work available for public benefit on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms?
But even outlawing work for the common good isn't loony enough. No. You want to outlaw using that work. Corporations liable for using benefits freely available to all! The low, criminal depravity!
'bye.
And this is /. "To lose" is idiomatic here.
Those are odd ways to deny having possessed something. Everything you suggest presumes actually having had it, by any plain reading of the word "had"; they're just half-plausible reasons for being unable to provide it. But the law doesn't say you have to provide it unless you can't remember the password. The law says you have to provide it unless you don't have it.
This was nothing. We've known for years that it doesn't take a whole lot more than script kiddie competence to drop a site or two, just about any site, and that's all they did. Remember what'shisname, Gibson was it? They've been able to do it for years, and nobody is willing to install and run the technology necessary to defang them. BECAUSE IT AIN'T WORTH DOING.
<gets a brainwave> Duhhhh. Talk about overkill. Next /. poll: how long would it take the NSA to find them all? Answer number 4: There's only one.
I'm not sure he meant it the way you took it. I've more than once gotten really, really pissed off at a few thousand lines of code when I was trying to fix its Nth should-have-been-simple problem and just rebuilt it. It was never the whole ball of wax. If you already know what the code's supposed to be doing, you've got the very familiar and (mostly-)working bad example right in front of you, it's a neatly severable chunk and you're angry enough, it goes fast and the result is rock solid. That kind of thing is of course deep into easier to ask forgiveness than permission territory.
IBM are pretty good at that "dodges completely" game, I see:
And here I thought that was addressing it head-on.That's for their TCPA. Palladium is ... well, it's on the other side of that distinction they draw.