1. Patents protect novel ideas
2. Copyright protects actual implementation
Errr... um... that's not going to work.
Copyright covers artistic works, and is limited to the aesthetic qualities expressed in the work. Works that aren't "artistic" in some way aren't covered at all. Machines, chemicals, industrial processes, etc. - these aren't artistic in any way.
Unfortunately, copyright has been ssttttrrrrreeettttchhhed to cover software products, on the VERY tenuous theory that EVERY act of writing software is an "artistic work." Back in the 1970's and 1980's, the software industry needed to find some basis for stopping people from copying their software, and copyright was chosen to patch the hole. But the logic of this solution is terrible. Sure, many aspects of software are artistic - webpage design, user interface composition, graphics, documentation - but *most* of software design is an attempt to achieve a functional result.
This poorly chosen extension of the law of copyright has resulted in many absurdities. But that's a topic for another day.
For better or worse, it does not have much influence over how the system works...
It has lots of influence over how the system works - it is the system. There are only three restraining forces on the PTO:
1) Budget constraints (I'll get to this point in a minute);
2) The limitations of its role as an administrative agency (its rules have to be administrative, because substantive rule changes [like "this general class of inventions is or isn't patentable"] are the jurisdiction of Congress); and
3) The text of the law, including the U.S. Constitution, and the international treaties signed by Congress.
There's a whole lot of freedom inside these boundaries. The USPTO has almost complete control over *how* the system runs, even if it can't arbitrarily decide *what* it's supposed to accomplish.
The PTO only gets to charge the legislature-set rates, and then its coffers get raided for 10% of their earnings.
Your information is out of date. Fee diversion at the USPTO has been brought to an end over the last four years.
This is why they have to work on a strict quota system; there's no space to make allowances for things like, say, the size of the patent application.
This is a serious problem - one of many arising from the asinine productivity requirements set for examiners by USPTO management. There are MANY problems with that system... but the effects are sufficiently downstream that blame can (and usually is) shifted to applicants, Congress, blah blah blah.
The system naturally leads to allowing exactly the outcome seen here; the Office itself has merely responded to outside pressures and control.
Which outcome do you mean? Yes, the examiner is being time-constrained from a more effective examination (by the PTO's productivity rules.) But examiners are ALSO being pressured by their supervisors ("SPEs") from issuing these applications - particularly in some groups (*cough* software.)
The result is churn: applications that are kicked around from examiner to examiner, where no one can come up with an effective basis for rejection but no one is allowed to issue it. Churn is bad for *everyone* - the applicant, the examiners, the USPTO, and the industry in general. And there's a whole lot of churn at the USPTO.
And it's our fault, because the fundamental, systematic problems came because of greedy, reprehensible legislators riding high on massive voter apathy.
Sad... your post was otherwise sound and logical... did you *have* to cap it with this bit of pandering to the/. crowd?
Congress has almost nothing to do with the state of the USPTO. They rarely amend the patent act, and when they do, it's with small changes. Several "patent reform acts" (of varying quality, but all under-informed) have been kicked around within Congressional subcommittees, but none has received traction. And the one area that Congress controls - budgeting - has been resolved in the USPTO's favor.
The *real* source of the problem is a long chain of ineffective PTO management. People get appointed to manage the PTO not through experience or leadership potential, but as a political favor. If you want to blame a branch of the federal government for that... then how about the one that does the appointing? (hint: it's not Congress.)
You do recognize that this is one step in a broader strategy, right? It's simple:
* The purchase prices on the software will steadily climb out of control, while the rentware prices (for now) remain cheap.
* Once the public has been persuaded that renting is the better option, the purchase option will be entirely phased out. App by app, Microsoft will eventually become a software-as-a-service company.
* Once there's no longer a purchase option, Microsoft can slowly ramp up the rental prices to a maximally profit price point.
Look, this is well-documented. MS has been trying to push everyone into the rentware model for probably a decade. Does the name "Hailstorm" ring a bell?
Of course, by that point, Microsoft won't even have to maintain a facade of being an "innovation company." They'll just openly sell you the same exact software year after year, instead of pretending to improve it.
The silver lining here is the rising prevalence of OpenOffice, and ODF as a format. Honestly, if OO even vaguely works, I think MS might be in for a world of hurt in the office-productivity war.
Unfortunately, the version of Office (Home and Student) that is included with Equipt does not include Outlook either.
Which is a damn shame, because Outlook is a nicer client than Thunderbird.
I used Outlook as my primary client for about five years - and hated it most of the time. The interface is very heavy and noisy: too many buttons, menu options, and visual controls that I don't want to use. The contact list didn't work well or reliably, nor did the filtering. Even checking email was a pain in the ass: often it would inexplicably fail to find my mail server, or would tell me that no new mail had arrived when there were several new messages...
My irritation grew so great that I overcame the transition barrier and switched to Thunderbird about a year ago. I've loved it thoroughly ever since - it is an outstanding mail client.
I have been a little disappointed that Tbird hasn't had any new versions in a while, and Sunbird/Lightning (the calendaring component) needs a fair amount of work. Still, having thoroughly experienced both the Microsoft suite and the Mozilla suite, I'll take the latter any day... not even factoring in the costs of each product.
And now that Microsoft is belatedly leveraging its monopoly power to force the world into rentware, I'll be giving OpenOffice a spin.
Even after using MSOffice for - wow, close to fifteen years now - I am much less married to it than Microsoft thinks I am.
You'd think one of the wireless carriers would be able to differentiate themselves in the market and make a killing off selling 10 cent text messages.
Yes, that's true. And that's how the free market works. Only, in this case, it's not doing anything of the sort - all of the major carriers are screwing their customers, way above the price point.
Isn't that interesting?
When market dynamics break down in a manner that screws all customers - where any seller could obtain a significant advantage over competitors, but doesn't, and hence customers pay more - that's a classic, clear-cut violation of antitrust laws. This is exactly the reason why the DoJ has an antitrust division.
By coincidence, this Slashdot article is adjacent to an article on the DoJ investigating the Yahoo/Google deal. Even though that story looks like a very ordinary business dealing, the DoJ looks intent on harassing these companies with a very weak antitrust claim that probably won't hold up in court. (Predicted story of '09: "WikiLeaks: MS lobbyists met with DoJ officials to formulate Yahoo/Google antitrust complaint.")
This is the reality of our off-the-rails laissez-faire capitalism - antitrust law is utterly toothless. The actions of those intended to enforce it have nothing to do with its ostensible goals of protecting marketplace competition. It's mainly a political tool and a weapon of corruption, used to smack down companies that happen to have fewer and less-funded lobbyists.
Our country is being slowly boiled to death by corporate interests. Any comparison of the commercial, employment, political, and military aspects of 1950's America with today clearly illustrates the trends. I look forward to reading the sociology and economic retrospective analyses after the shit finally stops hitting the fan.
If it's a "Downgrade", shouldn't it be *CHEAPER*?????
It's a "downgrade" only because Microsoft wants to preserve the illusion that Vista is better, and the pricing is set to discourage people from buying it.
But, yes... a significant share of the consumer market, and practically *all* of the informed market, consider XP a vastly improved upgrade over Vista.
I've been using Microsoft OSes since MS-DOS 3.2 (circa 1988), and I've never been nearly as frustrated, disappointed, and often outraged by an OS as I am with Vista. I've been using it for two months, and it's horrid in many, many aspects.
I have been making a list of irritations that are novel to Vista. Every time I run across some new irritant, I pop open this text file and add a line to it. I am also making a list of Vista features that I have turned off because they are buggy, poorly implemented, resource hogs, unsecure, frustrating to use, etc., etc. They are both very long lists, and they continue to grow.
Tell your boss he needs to read the guys book before he does something that could wreck his business.
Dude, PHBs don't read anything that isn't in cartoon form. I think that's even a prerequisite qualification of applying for a management job. The application forms are usually submitted in crayon, too.
- David Stein
/ reads too much dilbert // among other things that aren't actually comics /// like, well, fark.com //// (obviously)
You may be right, but unfortunately it will take some time before we see the unintended consequences of this law. That is where it will really bite us in the ass.
Nah... more likely it will just add to the bloated corpus of unread and unused laws in the state code of Missouri (and perhaps the U.S. Code.) And if any prosecutor with too much time on his or her hands ever tries to assert it against some poor sap defendant, any federal judge with an ounce of jurisprudence will summarily kick it to the curb as vague, an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, blah blah blah.
So the only real consequence is another iota of bloat added to a body of mostly dead laws. Well, that and a temporary popularity bump for the attention-whoring legislators who ratified this turkey. Such is the state of the union... I weep for it.
Well, this looks interesting, but isn't it just a multitouch 3D flat panel?.. sure, you don't touch the screen directly, but it doesn't seem to be projecting anything.
There's that, yes.
There's also the fact that this is still just a monitor, which projects images. The Holodeck, on the other hand, didn't generate images of any kind - it created fully materialized objects - including people! - and also created light sources, blah blah blah.
Holodeck, my ass. This is just another stupid monitor. C'mon, people, at least try to be accurate with the pop-culture references, mmmkay?
I love that all of these posts are supposed to have been done to prove that it has some sort of credence, however they have all been modded funny.
:shrug: This is Slashdot... we all know that this is this is a horrid and shocking law, but we can't really get our collective panties in a bunch 'cause it's never going to be enforced. Its sole purpose is to send a "see, WE REALLY CARE" message from some lame-ass legislators to the Oprah crowd.
So we can't really take it seriously. It's not even worthy of honest debate or devil's-advocacy. Hell, debating it just gives the reactionary, melodramatic legislators the attention they're craving.
So, screw it. We're just gonna ridicule it - that's a better use of our time (and a more appropriate response.)
So, instead of being paranoid and believing your computer may decide on its own that it won't let you run your stuff, you'd rather use a platform where you already know the stuff will never run?
Yeah, that's the big lock-in feature for Windows - I've got hundreds of apps that run only there. However, that is slowly becoming less of an issue as open-source apps start dominating.
As time passes, more and more great apps are popping up that surpass, or at least become equivalent to, my chosen Windows apps:
* I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird almost exclusively for internet access.
* Many other utility/tool-like apps (Winamp, uTorrent, VirtualDubMod) are also available for Linux.
* Many Windows-only apps (Photoshop CS3, WinZip) are either runnable under Wine (not a great solution, but an acceptable one) or have alternatives that work just as well.
Thus, even the huge lock-in advantage of Windows-only app compatibility is steadily eroding. It's an interesting time to be a software consumer - many, many choices out there!
So rather than trying to leap onto moral high ground, everyone involved needs to approach the issue from a practical perspective. That's the only way to make progress here.
Look - iTunes, right? Did Apple sell iTunes to anyone as "The Right Thing To Do?" Of course not. They just built a really damn good product and gave it a very reasonable price. It's a blockbuster hit and a cash cow! No moralizing required! And it even lets users do what they want! Wow!
Not so much, once you realize they're no longer a game company. They're a game engine company.
The day they made that announcement, I looked at my computer monitor, then at my high-precision gaming mouse, then at my Voodoo3 SLI setup, and I cursed a long, blue streak that made my dog cower.
(Figuratively. In reality, I just shook my head and went off to play Unreal Tournament again.)
Every time after that, ring up tech support, spend a while on hold, then proving you own a legitimate copy by sending a digital photo of disc plus serial number to tech support in the US -
Wait - hold on - back that thing up. You had to send them a DIGITAL PHOTO of your install media? Are you serious? Wow. Equal parts obnoxious, irritating, futile. That's - wow.
Any bets on if we'll someday see Photoshop characterized as a "notorious hacker tool?"
My wedding video was severely decayed due to a bad tape, 5 years after my wedding.
People, people, people. It's 2008 already. Digitize all of your shit and think up a solid backup scheme.
I've experienced three bad hard disk crashes in my lifetime, with loss of masses of documents... and that was back when hard drives were one gigabyte, tops.
Never again. Four 750gb drives - two at home, one at the office, one portable - same stuff everywhere. All encrypted, and with frequent synchronization.
With today's storage costs down to $0.25/GB or less, you really have no excuse. Consider it a geek imperative. =)
Just imagine, you spend $20.00 on a DVD. Then you have to go on the Internet to register the DVD and provide a credit card that can be billed when you watch the DVD. Then every time you pop the DVD in the player it runs a check to verify that you have registered the DVD and have a valid credit card that is charged $5.00 every time you play it.
"Software-as-a-service," a/k/a/ "software rental model"... translation: you never own anything - you pay and pay and pay and pay and pay, and if you stop paying, they turn off your rig. This is the holy grail for companies that don't really feel like developing new software, or in updating their software with appealing new features that you might actually buy. They'll just sell you the same thing for eternity.
Of course, two other trends will also have to occur:
1) Consumers are used to owning software, and won't voluntarily walk into a rented-software model. So they'll offer rentals as an additional option alongside purchasable software... but the MSRPs for purchasable licenses will slowly climb into the stratosphere, until cheap rentware doesn't look half-bad. Sort of disproves that whole "lipstick on a pig" thing, doesn't it?
2) Want to just run a hacked version, and do away with the messy activation stuff? Nope, sorry, won't run on your new Trusted Computing machine (which is kind of a funny name, since you can't trust it at all to do what you want, isn't it?) It only runs software (and music, and movies, etc.) that's been cryptographically signed with a limited-duration certificate. But you do want to play Halo 4, right?
Folks... I've gotta fess up. After 20 years of running MSIntel systems (dating back to MS-DOS 3.2), I am closer to jumping ship and Ubuntu-ing out than ever before. There are dark clouds on the computing horizon, gentlemen... there's a storm a-brewin', and it's gonna cloudburst probably around 2014 or so. "When did Noah build the ark? Before the rain..."
And not just any piracy group - Fairlight. Yeah, that Fairlight! Wow! Man, those guys were The Shit back in, like, 1990. Zero-day apps with full cracks, with trainers, and cool cracks with 3D demoscene graphics and great chiptunes...
Man, can you imagine waking up every morning and saying to yourself, "I used to be part of the bleeding edge of the warez scene, but now I spend my days defending the Iraq war and bending over for the RNC and the Moral Majority?" Can you imagine how much that stings? How the mighty hath fallen...
But, yeah - here in the U.S., we're hosed. Public interest is great and all, but it's a little short on campaign contributions... as opposed to, say, Big Media. So no serious politician can get any traction with a "fair use" or "balanced copyright" policy.
Look, there's only one logical solution: we're all gonna have to move to Sweden and vote for Piratbyran. Time to start brushing up on our Svesish...
Game houses rarely "go out of business", they bleed for a couple of years then get blob-sorbed by a big media conglomerate like Vivendi or Sony, and you already know how those big guys love to "do good".
RIP, Origin.:(
And Maxis (Robosport!), and Infogrames (Alone in the Dark!), and Infocom (Zork!)...
Equally sad is watching the steady decline of a formerly excellent game company... like id software.
Come to think of it - back in my Commodore 64 days, I used to adore games like Archon, and Mail Order Monsters, and M.U.L.E.... all created by this spunky little upstart with the initials "ECA"... otherwise known as Electronic Arts.
Actually, I still play M.U.L.E. occasionally via CCS64. In fact, I'd rather play M.U.L.E. than any game by EA released in the last decade.
Oh, sorry, we were discussing DRM crapware - carry on...;)
Aaaanyway - in the scheme you propose, you have to (1) allocate a machine to serve as the Jolly-Roger Activation Server, and (2) hack all of the other apps to redirect their activation requests to the avast-matey machine. Why bother with that mess? Just hack each app to get rid of the activation check. Hell, you might be able to hack the app once, deploy it on a fast network, and have everyone just use that...
Right, but that wasn't the point of the post to which I was responding. That post was just a blanket defense of DRM because "so many people do not respect the rights of others," and an attempt to characterize a copyright violation as anything "unauthorized."
Of course, he managed to make two grammatical errors in a three-sentence post (including the novel term "copy right"), so... well, that should've been an indication, I guess.
I hate how publishers have finally used technological measures to achieve what the courts won't grant them.
It's not just technological measures - it's legal measures, too. They've successfully developed the legal fiction that, even though you bought a CD with some software on it, you didn't really buy a CD with some software on it. No, you bought a license to use the software subject to certain restrictions... that thing in your hands is just a tool to help you exercise the rights that you bought.
The upshot is that the predominant right that the first sale doctrine sought to protect - your right, as a consumer, to sell a copy that you bought - is no longer available. Your CD key locks itself to your machine, and if you try to transfer the software, the buyer won't be able to activate the software.
(Of course, this scheme burns you in other ways, too. If you want to use your own software on another computer that you own, you can't... unless the company lets you. And sometimes, it won't. At least three packages that I've encountered - Transcender, Kaspersky Antivirus, and RoboForm - restrict your purchased license to a small set of computers. Oh, you got a new machine? Great! Have fun re-buying the software...)
I'll try Spore just as soon as the drm is bypassed, not before.
Sounds great... until you realize that if you try to patch your software, you're hosed. The patched software will either reinstall the DRM, or it will detect that it's been Jolly-Rogered and will take itself offline. Either way, you're stuck once again with a valid license key but invalid software.
Worse still for something that you might need to play online, like WoW or The Sims. Then again, if you've been suckered into those scenarios, you have already rolled over and accepted rentware... so you're already prepared to obey the company's demands, and to pay and pay and pay and pay and pay - or else lose your level 3600 paladin named Vash the Stampede.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr... um... that's not going to work.
Copyright covers artistic works, and is limited to the aesthetic qualities expressed in the work. Works that aren't "artistic" in some way aren't covered at all. Machines, chemicals, industrial processes, etc. - these aren't artistic in any way.
Unfortunately, copyright has been ssttttrrrrreeettttchhhed to cover software products, on the VERY tenuous theory that EVERY act of writing software is an "artistic work." Back in the 1970's and 1980's, the software industry needed to find some basis for stopping people from copying their software, and copyright was chosen to patch the hole. But the logic of this solution is terrible. Sure, many aspects of software are artistic - webpage design, user interface composition, graphics, documentation - but *most* of software design is an attempt to achieve a functional result.
This poorly chosen extension of the law of copyright has resulted in many absurdities. But that's a topic for another day.
- David Stein
It has lots of influence over how the system works - it is the system. There are only three restraining forces on the PTO:
1) Budget constraints (I'll get to this point in a minute);
2) The limitations of its role as an administrative agency (its rules have to be administrative, because substantive rule changes [like "this general class of inventions is or isn't patentable"] are the jurisdiction of Congress); and
3) The text of the law, including the U.S. Constitution, and the international treaties signed by Congress.
There's a whole lot of freedom inside these boundaries. The USPTO has almost complete control over *how* the system runs, even if it can't arbitrarily decide *what* it's supposed to accomplish.
The PTO only gets to charge the legislature-set rates, and then its coffers get raided for 10% of their earnings.
Your information is out of date. Fee diversion at the USPTO has been brought to an end over the last four years.
This is why they have to work on a strict quota system; there's no space to make allowances for things like, say, the size of the patent application.
This is a serious problem - one of many arising from the asinine productivity requirements set for examiners by USPTO management. There are MANY problems with that system... but the effects are sufficiently downstream that blame can (and usually is) shifted to applicants, Congress, blah blah blah.
The system naturally leads to allowing exactly the outcome seen here; the Office itself has merely responded to outside pressures and control.
Which outcome do you mean? Yes, the examiner is being time-constrained from a more effective examination (by the PTO's productivity rules.) But examiners are ALSO being pressured by their supervisors ("SPEs") from issuing these applications - particularly in some groups (*cough* software.)
The result is churn: applications that are kicked around from examiner to examiner, where no one can come up with an effective basis for rejection but no one is allowed to issue it. Churn is bad for *everyone* - the applicant, the examiners, the USPTO, and the industry in general. And there's a whole lot of churn at the USPTO.
And it's our fault, because the fundamental, systematic problems came because of greedy, reprehensible legislators riding high on massive voter apathy.
Sad... your post was otherwise sound and logical... did you *have* to cap it with this bit of pandering to the /. crowd?
Congress has almost nothing to do with the state of the USPTO. They rarely amend the patent act, and when they do, it's with small changes. Several "patent reform acts" (of varying quality, but all under-informed) have been kicked around within Congressional subcommittees, but none has received traction. And the one area that Congress controls - budgeting - has been resolved in the USPTO's favor.
The *real* source of the problem is a long chain of ineffective PTO management. People get appointed to manage the PTO not through experience or leadership potential, but as a political favor. If you want to blame a branch of the federal government for that... then how about the one that does the appointing? (hint: it's not Congress.)
- David Stein
Anyone else think that the music sounds like Sigur Ros?
- David Stein
I'll assume you didn't read TFA...
Actually, I did.
You do recognize that this is one step in a broader strategy, right? It's simple:
* The purchase prices on the software will steadily climb out of control, while the rentware prices (for now) remain cheap.
* Once the public has been persuaded that renting is the better option, the purchase option will be entirely phased out. App by app, Microsoft will eventually become a software-as-a-service company.
* Once there's no longer a purchase option, Microsoft can slowly ramp up the rental prices to a maximally profit price point.
Look, this is well-documented. MS has been trying to push everyone into the rentware model for probably a decade. Does the name "Hailstorm" ring a bell?
Of course, by that point, Microsoft won't even have to maintain a facade of being an "innovation company." They'll just openly sell you the same exact software year after year, instead of pretending to improve it.
The silver lining here is the rising prevalence of OpenOffice, and ODF as a format. Honestly, if OO even vaguely works, I think MS might be in for a world of hurt in the office-productivity war.
Unfortunately, the version of Office (Home and Student) that is included with Equipt does not include Outlook either.
Which is a damn shame, because Outlook is a nicer client than Thunderbird.
I used Outlook as my primary client for about five years - and hated it most of the time. The interface is very heavy and noisy: too many buttons, menu options, and visual controls that I don't want to use. The contact list didn't work well or reliably, nor did the filtering. Even checking email was a pain in the ass: often it would inexplicably fail to find my mail server, or would tell me that no new mail had arrived when there were several new messages...
My irritation grew so great that I overcame the transition barrier and switched to Thunderbird about a year ago. I've loved it thoroughly ever since - it is an outstanding mail client.
I have been a little disappointed that Tbird hasn't had any new versions in a while, and Sunbird/Lightning (the calendaring component) needs a fair amount of work. Still, having thoroughly experienced both the Microsoft suite and the Mozilla suite, I'll take the latter any day... not even factoring in the costs of each product.
And now that Microsoft is belatedly leveraging its monopoly power to force the world into rentware, I'll be giving OpenOffice a spin.
Even after using MSOffice for - wow, close to fifteen years now - I am much less married to it than Microsoft thinks I am.
You'd think one of the wireless carriers would be able to differentiate themselves in the market and make a killing off selling 10 cent text messages.
Yes, that's true. And that's how the free market works. Only, in this case, it's not doing anything of the sort - all of the major carriers are screwing their customers, way above the price point.
Isn't that interesting?
When market dynamics break down in a manner that screws all customers - where any seller could obtain a significant advantage over competitors, but doesn't, and hence customers pay more - that's a classic, clear-cut violation of antitrust laws. This is exactly the reason why the DoJ has an antitrust division.
By coincidence, this Slashdot article is adjacent to an article on the DoJ investigating the Yahoo/Google deal. Even though that story looks like a very ordinary business dealing, the DoJ looks intent on harassing these companies with a very weak antitrust claim that probably won't hold up in court. (Predicted story of '09: "WikiLeaks: MS lobbyists met with DoJ officials to formulate Yahoo/Google antitrust complaint.")
This is the reality of our off-the-rails laissez-faire capitalism - antitrust law is utterly toothless. The actions of those intended to enforce it have nothing to do with its ostensible goals of protecting marketplace competition. It's mainly a political tool and a weapon of corruption, used to smack down companies that happen to have fewer and less-funded lobbyists.
Our country is being slowly boiled to death by corporate interests. Any comparison of the commercial, employment, political, and military aspects of 1950's America with today clearly illustrates the trends. I look forward to reading the sociology and economic retrospective analyses after the shit finally stops hitting the fan.
If it's a "Downgrade", shouldn't it be *CHEAPER*?????
It's a "downgrade" only because Microsoft wants to preserve the illusion that Vista is better, and the pricing is set to discourage people from buying it.
But, yes... a significant share of the consumer market, and practically *all* of the informed market, consider XP a vastly improved upgrade over Vista.
I've been using Microsoft OSes since MS-DOS 3.2 (circa 1988), and I've never been nearly as frustrated, disappointed, and often outraged by an OS as I am with Vista. I've been using it for two months, and it's horrid in many, many aspects.
I have been making a list of irritations that are novel to Vista. Every time I run across some new irritant, I pop open this text file and add a line to it. I am also making a list of Vista features that I have turned off because they are buggy, poorly implemented, resource hogs, unsecure, frustrating to use, etc., etc. They are both very long lists, and they continue to grow.
Tell your boss he needs to read the guys book before he does something that could wreck his business.
// among other things that aren't actually comics
/// like, well, fark.com
//// (obviously)
Dude, PHBs don't read anything that isn't in cartoon form. I think that's even a prerequisite qualification of applying for a management job. The application forms are usually submitted in crayon, too.
- David Stein
/ reads too much dilbert
Tsk, tsk. Bad submitter. How could you have posted this without the URL? I mean... we need to be able to judge the material for ourselves, right?
- David Stein
You may be right, but unfortunately it will take some time before we see the unintended consequences of this law. That is where it will really bite us in the ass.
Nah... more likely it will just add to the bloated corpus of unread and unused laws in the state code of Missouri (and perhaps the U.S. Code.) And if any prosecutor with too much time on his or her hands ever tries to assert it against some poor sap defendant, any federal judge with an ounce of jurisprudence will summarily kick it to the curb as vague, an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, blah blah blah.
So the only real consequence is another iota of bloat added to a body of mostly dead laws. Well, that and a temporary popularity bump for the attention-whoring legislators who ratified this turkey. Such is the state of the union... I weep for it.
- David Stein
Well, this looks interesting, but isn't it just a multitouch 3D flat panel? .. sure, you don't touch the screen directly, but it doesn't seem to be projecting anything.
There's that, yes.
There's also the fact that this is still just a monitor, which projects images. The Holodeck, on the other hand, didn't generate images of any kind - it created fully materialized objects - including people! - and also created light sources, blah blah blah.
Holodeck, my ass. This is just another stupid monitor. C'mon, people, at least try to be accurate with the pop-culture references, mmmkay?
- David Stein
So we can't really take it seriously. It's not even worthy of honest debate or devil's-advocacy. Hell, debating it just gives the reactionary, melodramatic legislators the attention they're craving.
So, screw it. We're just gonna ridicule it - that's a better use of our time (and a more appropriate response.)
- David Stein
The day that an airline tells me they want to spritz me with some random crap as part of their screening procedure is the day that I stop flying.
Everyone has a limit beyond which flying, no matter how convenient, is just not an option. This is (one of) mine.
- David Stein
So, instead of being paranoid and believing your computer may decide on its own that it won't let you run your stuff, you'd rather use a platform where you already know the stuff will never run?
Yeah, that's the big lock-in feature for Windows - I've got hundreds of apps that run only there. However, that is slowly becoming less of an issue as open-source apps start dominating.
As time passes, more and more great apps are popping up that surpass, or at least become equivalent to, my chosen Windows apps:
* I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird almost exclusively for internet access.
* Many other utility/tool-like apps (Winamp, uTorrent, VirtualDubMod) are also available for Linux.
* Many Windows-only apps (Photoshop CS3, WinZip) are either runnable under Wine (not a great solution, but an acceptable one) or have alternatives that work just as well.
Thus, even the huge lock-in advantage of Windows-only app compatibility is steadily eroding. It's an interesting time to be a software consumer - many, many choices out there!
- David Stein
Conversely, attitudes like his develop because media companies - like many kinds of companies - are often unethical:
- * They sell software that's full of bugs, and won't even be playable for several patches... or maybe they don't even admit that there are problems.
- * They sell software that won't actually run on any state-of-the-art machine without half of the highly-touted features turned off.
- * They sell software that requires some sort of crappy upgrade that you really don't want.
- * They are trying to strongarm you into moving from a model where you buy software once, to a model where you buy the same software over and over and over and over again.
So rather than trying to leap onto moral high ground, everyone involved needs to approach the issue from a practical perspective. That's the only way to make progress here.Look - iTunes, right? Did Apple sell iTunes to anyone as "The Right Thing To Do?" Of course not. They just built a really damn good product and gave it a very reasonable price. It's a blockbuster hit and a cash cow! No moralizing required! And it even lets users do what they want! Wow!
- David Stein
Not so much, once you realize they're no longer a game company. They're a game engine company.
The day they made that announcement, I looked at my computer monitor, then at my high-precision gaming mouse, then at my Voodoo3 SLI setup, and I cursed a long, blue streak that made my dog cower.
(Figuratively. In reality, I just shook my head and went off to play Unreal Tournament again.)
- David Stein
Every time after that, ring up tech support, spend a while on hold, then proving you own a legitimate copy by sending a digital photo of disc plus serial number to tech support in the US -
Wait - hold on - back that thing up. You had to send them a DIGITAL PHOTO of your install media? Are you serious? Wow. Equal parts obnoxious, irritating, futile. That's - wow.
Any bets on if we'll someday see Photoshop characterized as a "notorious hacker tool?"
- David Stein
My wedding video was severely decayed due to a bad tape, 5 years after my wedding.
People, people, people. It's 2008 already. Digitize all of your shit and think up a solid backup scheme.
I've experienced three bad hard disk crashes in my lifetime, with loss of masses of documents... and that was back when hard drives were one gigabyte, tops.
Never again. Four 750gb drives - two at home, one at the office, one portable - same stuff everywhere. All encrypted, and with frequent synchronization.
With today's storage costs down to $0.25/GB or less, you really have no excuse. Consider it a geek imperative. =)
- David Stein
Already cookin', chief.
"Software-as-a-service," a/k/a/ "software rental model"... translation: you never own anything - you pay and pay and pay and pay and pay, and if you stop paying, they turn off your rig. This is the holy grail for companies that don't really feel like developing new software, or in updating their software with appealing new features that you might actually buy. They'll just sell you the same thing for eternity.
Of course, two other trends will also have to occur:
1) Consumers are used to owning software, and won't voluntarily walk into a rented-software model. So they'll offer rentals as an additional option alongside purchasable software... but the MSRPs for purchasable licenses will slowly climb into the stratosphere, until cheap rentware doesn't look half-bad. Sort of disproves that whole "lipstick on a pig" thing, doesn't it?
2) Want to just run a hacked version, and do away with the messy activation stuff? Nope, sorry, won't run on your new Trusted Computing machine (which is kind of a funny name, since you can't trust it at all to do what you want, isn't it?) It only runs software (and music, and movies, etc.) that's been cryptographically signed with a limited-duration certificate. But you do want to play Halo 4, right?
Folks... I've gotta fess up. After 20 years of running MSIntel systems (dating back to MS-DOS 3.2), I am closer to jumping ship and Ubuntu-ing out than ever before. There are dark clouds on the computing horizon, gentlemen... there's a storm a-brewin', and it's gonna cloudburst probably around 2014 or so. "When did Noah build the ark? Before the rain..."
- David Stein
No, this is a job for the government. If anyone has the power to defeat copy protected games, it's them. Vote Fairlight in 2008!
Coincidental that you point that out. Did you see this article? San Diego Republican Boss is Former Game Piracy Ringleader
And not just any piracy group - Fairlight. Yeah, that Fairlight! Wow! Man, those guys were The Shit back in, like, 1990. Zero-day apps with full cracks, with trainers, and cool cracks with 3D demoscene graphics and great chiptunes...
Man, can you imagine waking up every morning and saying to yourself, "I used to be part of the bleeding edge of the warez scene, but now I spend my days defending the Iraq war and bending over for the RNC and the Moral Majority?" Can you imagine how much that stings? How the mighty hath fallen...
But, yeah - here in the U.S., we're hosed. Public interest is great and all, but it's a little short on campaign contributions... as opposed to, say, Big Media. So no serious politician can get any traction with a "fair use" or "balanced copyright" policy.
Look, there's only one logical solution: we're all gonna have to move to Sweden and vote for Piratbyran. Time to start brushing up on our Svesish...
- David Stein
RIP, Origin.
And Maxis (Robosport!), and Infogrames (Alone in the Dark!), and Infocom (Zork!)...
Equally sad is watching the steady decline of a formerly excellent game company... like id software.
Come to think of it - back in my Commodore 64 days, I used to adore games like Archon, and Mail Order Monsters, and M.U.L.E.
Actually, I still play M.U.L.E. occasionally via CCS64. In fact, I'd rather play M.U.L.E. than any game by EA released in the last decade.
Oh, sorry, we were discussing DRM crapware - carry on...
- David Stein
I can see whole floors of college dorm rooms sharing pirated copies and having the answering server set up in the nerd's room.
;)
Well, it's easier than that, because -
Wait. Back up a sec. Did you really use the term "nerd?" Really? In a year after 1998, and in any forum outside a playground, let alone Slashdot? Hmm.
Amazon may have a book recommendation for you.
Aaaanyway - in the scheme you propose, you have to (1) allocate a machine to serve as the Jolly-Roger Activation Server, and (2) hack all of the other apps to redirect their activation requests to the avast-matey machine. Why bother with that mess? Just hack each app to get rid of the activation check. Hell, you might be able to hack the app once, deploy it on a fast network, and have everyone just use that...
- David Stein
Downloading free games isn't fair use, obviously.
Right, but that wasn't the point of the post to which I was responding. That post was just a blanket defense of DRM because "so many people do not respect the rights of others," and an attempt to characterize a copyright violation as anything "unauthorized."
Of course, he managed to make two grammatical errors in a three-sentence post (including the novel term "copy right"), so... well, that should've been an indication, I guess.
- David Stein
I hate how publishers have finally used technological measures to achieve what the courts won't grant them.
It's not just technological measures - it's legal measures, too. They've successfully developed the legal fiction that, even though you bought a CD with some software on it, you didn't really buy a CD with some software on it. No, you bought a license to use the software subject to certain restrictions... that thing in your hands is just a tool to help you exercise the rights that you bought.
The upshot is that the predominant right that the first sale doctrine sought to protect - your right, as a consumer, to sell a copy that you bought - is no longer available. Your CD key locks itself to your machine, and if you try to transfer the software, the buyer won't be able to activate the software.
(Of course, this scheme burns you in other ways, too. If you want to use your own software on another computer that you own, you can't... unless the company lets you. And sometimes, it won't. At least three packages that I've encountered - Transcender, Kaspersky Antivirus, and RoboForm - restrict your purchased license to a small set of computers. Oh, you got a new machine? Great! Have fun re-buying the software...)
- David Stein
I'll try Spore just as soon as the drm is bypassed, not before.
Sounds great... until you realize that if you try to patch your software, you're hosed. The patched software will either reinstall the DRM, or it will detect that it's been Jolly-Rogered and will take itself offline. Either way, you're stuck once again with a valid license key but invalid software.
Worse still for something that you might need to play online, like WoW or The Sims. Then again, if you've been suckered into those scenarios, you have already rolled over and accepted rentware... so you're already prepared to obey the company's demands, and to pay and pay and pay and pay and pay - or else lose your level 3600 paladin named Vash the Stampede.
- David Stein