I am not forced to look at ads on billboards, or even tv...
A year ago I was on the treadmill at a nearly empty fitness club that had three tvs in front of the fleet of treadmills. I chose to turn off the one on the far right, which was the one most directly in front of me; nobody else was watching it. A woman came over from way across the room to hassle me about it; I guess she was a tv junky and couldn't handle the notion that the tv was off, despite the fact that neither she nor anybody else was watching it. Her argument to me was that I didn't have to watch the tv. I disagreed. True, the tv only took up a small percentage of my total visual space, but the luminance and constant motion make it impossible to ignore if it's within 30 degrees of my center of vision. My suspicion is that many people have a similar inability to ignore a tv, as it's an undisputed observation that human eyesight is very keyed into motion (helps confer an evolutionary advantage of some kind). I think arguments that one doesn't have to watch a tv if its in their line of sight are pretty specious.
You can't "act" like a monopoly. You either are
one or not.
It's not a black/white issue, there are degrees of being a monopoly. The cut and dried idealized monopoly occurs when cost barriers which impede the entry of competition are inifinite. The strongest monopolies in the real world have erected a cost barrier that is "high enough" (though not infinite) to effectively shut out all competition. To say that a company either is or is not a monopoly is to assert that there is a precisely measureable cost barrier to competition above which there is a monopoly, and below which there is none. True monopolies happen by degrees.
And being a monopoly is not a problem.
The problem is if a monopoly abuses it's power.
Technically true, but not tenable in the real world. First, that is somewhat like saying that granting police the right to search homes without warrants is not a problem, it's when the police abuse that power; examples of unchecked power (market-based or otherwise) that aren't abused are very few and far between. Second, there's the problem of even knowing what abuses have occured; if a company has a market monopoly, who knows how many would-be competitors have decided not to get past the what-if phase of developing their own products, due to the prohibitive nature of the monopoly? These things can be very hard to measure, but the generally harmful nature of a monopoly is not in consequent doubt.
I don't know why everyone thinks this is a victory against the RIAA.
My take would be that the RIAA no longer controls the official (non-p2p) presentation of music to end consumers. The RIAA has lost the gate. Now it's Apple who will be deciding what inducers and superlatives and featured artists get splashed across the showroom floors.
I realize this isn't the spin to the article, but I do think that the open source movement needs a good search engine in the same way that it needed (and got from the Netscape code base) a good browser. Especially useful would be a design that allowed the creation of "open clusters", ad hoc networks where new machines can contribute horsepower and storage space to scale the search resources up, and where there is some degree of redundancy which helps prevent dropouts from crippling the cluster. This would make moot such predicaments as whether Microsoft acquired this or crushed that, or whether Google sold out during its IPO. While Google does do some very cool research, we don't actually need advanced features like picture search, news culling, etc; all we need is the basic bread-and-butter search.
This is why American protestors really have no idea how good they have it.
Just to clarify: when American protestors continue to try to improve their lives despite perhaps living better than various other parts of the world, it does not per se mean they're unaware of the harrowing plights of (for example) the Chinese. Don't know if you meant to imply to the contrary.
(Marge comes home having discovered that she's pregnant with child #2.) Marge: Great news, Homer. We're about to have twice as much love in this house. Homer: We're going to start doing it in the mornings too?
Is there a reason why DRM shouldn't be labeled "real technology"
DRM is certainly a real technology in the sense that it has goals and implementation details. I do think there are ways to see it as not a "real" technology; admittedly, doing so involves adopting some non-textbook interpretations of "real". Suppose that we colloquially choose to say that real technology is that which results in a clear benefit for humankind; arguably DRM doesn't. These issues aren't black and white, but that's the spirit in which I read the original post. Sort of like saying that the HMO industry isn't a real industry because it doesn't add value; yes it does enrich particular people, and yes it employs many and has lots of papers to shuffle around, but its value to humanity is highly questionable and I don't mind dissing it as "not a real industry".
By staying private they lose the ability to keep the talent on board by issuing those high-valued employees stock in the company.
An IPO is a one-time event. If an IPO is lucrative, then there's that tremendous (one-time) upside to the shareholders that pre-bust times were so famous for. But as far as affecting the ongoing state of a corporation, the IPO pales in comparison to whether the company is private vs public. Stock options can be issued for private corporations, even ones that never intend to go public, and shareholders can realize dividends from those share; so the ability to issue shares and have them be worth money does not distinguish private status from public. The real distinguishment between private and public is that public companies have a duty - both fiduciarily and (more bindingly) legally - to make money. For a public company all other concerns are secondary, including the public good, the well-being of employees, ethics, innovation... even the long-term viability of that very company. If it turns out that a public company can make the most profit by selling sandwiches made of bread and horse dung, and can through legal hair-splitting and jurisdiction shopping somehow find a way to technically remain within the law, then corporate bylaws dictate that the corporation must enact this course of action, and shareholders will expect no less.
"Growth" will be expected year after year - the innovative ideas that have made google so successful will give way.
It actually depends on the expectations of the shareholders
Corporate laws are constructed in such a manner that a company executive can be sued for failing to maximize profit, as described in this essay:
The provision in the law [which inhibits executives and corporations from being socially responsible] is the one that says that the purpose of the corporation is simply to make money for shareholders.
Distilled to its essence, it says that the people who run corporations have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money. Failing this duty can leave directors and officers open to being sued by shareholders.
Thanks for the clarification. But why would they impose a restriction that is so easy to get around and inconsequential? Because I don't understand the intended point, I worry that I don't actually understand the restriction to begin with...
The problem is not overseas workers. The real issue here is sensitive information being processed by networks of subcontractors without the knowledge of the information owner.
The "overseas" part is highly relevant. This case is frightening specifically because the person threatening to release information on the internet is beyond the reach of the laws by which such behavior is regulated in the United States. If this was some person in Illinois threatening to release info on the internet unless his contracts were paid, they'd probably just arrest him and be done with it.
if you don't want the new features then you don't have to pay for them. And, if you don't pay for them, you're existing system doesn't become any less productive
This view can only be supported by having a very static view of how software is used. I was using OSX 10.1 when 10.2 was released. I suddenly began running into many commercial and open source products that required 10.2. For example, virtually everything on osxgnu.org now requires 10.2, and this is not because these projects are using 10.2 specific features; they're binary compatibility requirements. Fink is another example, and they already note on their page that 10.3 will require a new install from them. I also encountered this in a substantial number of commercial apps and drivers. Apple itself removed the 10.1 dev tools from their page by the time I went to get them.
For some people, myself included, software is a living, dynamic thing. I don't want 10.3 because of whatever assortment of new features it has; I want it because I'm afraid of being cut off from a bunch of things on which I depend. And if I get it, it's going to force some painful transition choices on me by breaking some 10.2-dependent stuff. In some ways the transitions between these 10.x versions is more jarring than that from 9.x to osx; at least when 9.x was left behind, dual boot and emulation support was provided.
"If we had them today, they'd be at the former Saddam Hussein International Airport, making sure no one gets off a shoulder-launched missile at an aircraft," said Mike Campbell, a laser expert at General Atomics in San Diego.
Sure. In the same way that checking drivers licenses at the airport will stop bad guys from boarding planes. No hype here, just good old facts.
Who the heck runs Solaris on a crappy dual-processor machine? Solaris doesn't really even begin to show benefits until it gets at least 8 processors. It just keeps going up, and up, and up.
According to the article, Solaris for x86 runs on a maximum of 4 processors.
They decided to trust that their club members would hold off distributing the isos just for the short time of two weeks. In my mind that would've been the decent thing to do. Limit the leeching a bit for a very limited time period and create a little incentive for actually giving something to the company that has done all the work.
The next main level comment after the above that I read was the not-unusual posting of a NYTimes article, for the sake of avoiding registration at said site. I wonder if there's some interesting framework to see both that practice and the activity of torrenting Mandrake ISOs early. Similarities and differences. Mandrake club members pay with money, NYTimes registrants pay with information. Mandrake eventually releases the ISOs to the public, NYTimes sorta does via archive links. Thoughts anyone?
According to the article, Stallman declined to be interviewed for the article unless the article used "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" throughout. Which would have effectively made the article about him and not Linus.
It would seem fairer to me to say that this would have made the article be about both Stalman's work and Torvalds' work.
Stallman may be smart and may have accomplished great things, but his actions bespeak a petulant toddler more than a great man of vision.
Some people seem to perceive Stalman as resentful of Torvalds because Linux stole the spotlight and rendered GNU a distant also-ran. I don't share this perception. I believe that Stalman and Torvalds have very different agendas, which happen to overlap in Linux. Stalman is promoting the idea of Free (liberated) Software. Torvalds is trying to build an operating system.
Put another way, Torvalds has no particular allegiance to free software. The fact that he has licensed Linux under the GPL is incidental not idealogical; it is a means to the end of improving quality and development speed. If there was a non-free way to improve Linux on an ongoing basis, Linus might well adopt it. Stalman never would.
I think it's interesting to compare what our world might look like if either Stalman or Torvalds had never existed. Perhaps if Stalman hadn't come along we'd have Linux but no GNU and no free software ideology (fathoming how a non-free linux could have gathered mass support is left as an exercise to someone other than me). Whereas perhaps if Torvalds hadn't come along, we'd have GNU plus free software ideology but nobody who was as gifted at managing the complex process of kernel development. If it had to come down to one or the other, I'd actually take the world without Torvalds. Even though my definition of "visionary" fits Stalman much better than it fits Torvalds, my reasons for prefering the Stalman world are practical: I believe that the process established by Stalman would have soon enough given rise to someone like Torvalds who could have done approximately as well. People with Torvalds' skill are by no means common, but open source has a very strong natural tendency to distill the uncommon from the common.
People like Stalman who have the vision of a radically different system of values, who proceed from conceiving of the vision to implementing its foundation, who are courageous enough to unequivocally say publicly where they are trying to go... and to actually have those values make a radical and lasting difference for the better after only twenty years... that's my idea of a hero.
I got tivo four years ago and instantly fell deeply in love with it. That love continues to this day, but has changed form. About a year ago, I realized that my giddy passion had given way to serenity, by which I mean that I realized that I just didn't want to watch tv any more, even on tivo. It was tivo that got me to this state of mind. It started by seeing how intrusive commercials were, and how much better tv was without it. The next phase for me was the realization of how manipulative the networks were with their program timing and scheduling; how wonderful to be free of that too! And then last summer I found I had dined at the table of paradise enough. I had actually watched enough episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and tons of other shows. To borrow an analogy from another slashdot writer, it was like the weekly trip to the hardware store after you've bought a new house, where one day you get there and you realize that you just don't need anything else, and you turn around and leave.
This has been a profound experience for me. And I don't think I could have gotten here without Tivo. Maybe I would have and it would have taken longer, but I like to think it was tivo.
Now I keep tivo around for the kid (Sesame St, etc).
But people with an agenda can overload the system with not-true comments and distort the truth.
We have that today already. The increasingly few monolithic media companies can't be bothered to put on any stream of news that doesn't propagate their cultures of fear and consumerism, and in some cases religious agendas. I'm interested in trying to sort through the junk+truth that comes from a big cross section of the world's population than the junk+truth that comes from a very small minority of people whos only goal is to retain power.
The problem is that averages don't matter. The average child is never injured by firearms. But "Every year, 500 children die gun-related deaths." gets legislation passed.
Whatever amount of related legislation gets passed is a tiny drop in a bucket compared to what would be passed if the average was "every year, one out of two average children die gun-related deaths". Averages do matter. Even though they don't matter to the complete exclusion of outliers, they're still highly relevant.
There's a neat idea that could be borrowed from freenet: digital signing. A person could choose to digitally sign all their postings to the p2p network, even if they remain anonymous and don't give their name. In this manner, a person can build a reputation for being trustworthy, or "on the inside", or "a thinker", etc. System support for searching for legitimately signed docs might be helpful.
(Cynics need not reply - cynicism destroys and never builds. Cynics know the future. Cynics know the hearts of industry. Cynics, sitting in their dark basements, typing on their 14" VGA screens, are smarter than anyone - You and me included. Why even talk to them?)
You sound cynical about the efficacy of discussion.:)
The poster is talking about buying music and then moving to Romania or somesuch place and not being able to use the songs he bought, which is UNTRUE. You CAN use the songs any way you want, anywhere you want. The bit in the Apple license you pasted is about **purchasing music via iTMS** outside of the US, where it's not supposed to be available. For out there who don't read much before replying: Songs - YES Service - NO
This interpretation had not occurred to me. It would be more acceptable than my described interpretation. I will feel more comfortable with it if Apple defines the term "service" to specifically mean "the download of a song in return for payment", and to specifically exclude "the ongoing usage of purchased music". Right now they make no such explicit distinction. I don't know what they'd say in a press conference, but until it's in their terms (AND those terms prohibit them from changing the terms) the power remains in Apple's hands to do as they please and remain within the law.
I'm not made of stone. Apple can placate me on this point easily. All they need to do is define the term "service" as described (defining terms is a *very* standard thing to do in contracts) and contractually guarantee that no future changes to their terms of sale will retroactively affect previous purchases.
Authorization has nothing whatsoever to do with your geographical location, and everything to do with the geographical location of the bank that issued your credit card, and the billing address for that card.
Period. Pure and simple. If you have a credit card issued by a U.S. bank, and you sign up for the iTunes Music Store, you can then proceed to drag your happy Mac-using behind all over the planet, and all your iTunes stuff will still work
If Apple's stated policies agreed with the above then I'd consider the matter closed, but they don't:
U.S. SALES ONLY
Purchases from the iTunes Music Store are available only in the United States and are not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the service from outside of the available territory. Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance.
(Emphasis mine.) Note that there is no stated exemption for living outside the US while being billed within it. It may or may not be true that the current method they employ for determining location is credit card billing address, but there is no language in their terms of sale which even implies that they won't build software into OSX that maps your ip address, or time zone, or configured ISP dialup number, to a physical location. In fact, they are pretty much putting you on notice that they may well do such a thing; there's no legal requirement that they state that they "may use technology to verify compliance", yet they include explicit clear mention of the possibility. I would consider the chances of it to be better than unlikely.
The larger point here is that DRM gives Apple a continuing way in which to apply pressure, in practically any technological form that they see fit and on an ongoing basis. It would be very different if their DRM resulted in a set of implications that were frozen at the point of purchase, but their DRM combined with their terms leaves the door wide open for them in perpetuity. I don't object so much to not being able to share their music on kazaa; I object to be chained to their policies and enforcement methodologies which can change at a whim.
That one guy who had problems and raised a huge fuss? He had either gotten a card from a bank outside the U.S., or changed his billing address to be somewhere else. Okay, so maybe it's a little bit hard to move without changing your billing address... but then, there are plenty of card companies who're perfectly happy to handle your billing and all that stuff on-line, since it's cheaper for them than using paper.
For people who don't mind having to cloak their new address via the subterfuge of having a third party handle their bills, perhaps this is a solution. I remain in the group of people who believe that, at such a point, DRM has become more trouble than it's worth.
I have indeed heard that Apple is making that particular person happy, but it would appear from the front and center item of their as yet
unchanged policy that they reserve the right - and as a matter of policy will exercise that right - to stop any and all customers from playing their purchased music outside the US:
U.S. SALES ONLY
Purchases from the iTunes Music Store are available only in the United States and are not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the service from outside of the available territory. Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance.
Seems to me that making one individual happy was simply a PR move, and not a reason for people to let go of their related concerns. In fact, a funny yet true scenario is that Apple could even roll back the capabilities of that one guy; AFAIK they're not contractually or legally obligated to the contrary.
The fact that they have this power is one of my primary problems with DRM, even Apple's flavor of DRM (the other primary problem I have is that their downloads won't play on portables other than the ipod). This kind of power can be easily abused. Tomorrow's stance may not be today's stance:
Apple reserves the right to change the terms and conditions of sale at the iTunes Music Store at any time.
Nowhere do they state that such policy changes need only apply to subsequent sales. Given that they're rather actively blurring the lines between sales and rentals, they might well be able to have changes apply retroactively.
Slashdot Mirror
A year ago I was on the treadmill at a nearly empty fitness club that had three tvs in front of the fleet of treadmills. I chose to turn off the one on the far right, which was the one most directly in front of me; nobody else was watching it. A woman came over from way across the room to hassle me about it; I guess she was a tv junky and couldn't handle the notion that the tv was off, despite the fact that neither she nor anybody else was watching it. Her argument to me was that I didn't have to watch the tv. I disagreed. True, the tv only took up a small percentage of my total visual space, but the luminance and constant motion make it impossible to ignore if it's within 30 degrees of my center of vision. My suspicion is that many people have a similar inability to ignore a tv, as it's an undisputed observation that human eyesight is very keyed into motion (helps confer an evolutionary advantage of some kind). I think arguments that one doesn't have to watch a tv if its in their line of sight are pretty specious.
It's not a black/white issue, there are degrees of being a monopoly. The cut and dried idealized monopoly occurs when cost barriers which impede the entry of competition are inifinite. The strongest monopolies in the real world have erected a cost barrier that is "high enough" (though not infinite) to effectively shut out all competition. To say that a company either is or is not a monopoly is to assert that there is a precisely measureable cost barrier to competition above which there is a monopoly, and below which there is none. True monopolies happen by degrees.
And being a monopoly is not a problem. The problem is if a monopoly abuses it's power.
Technically true, but not tenable in the real world. First, that is somewhat like saying that granting police the right to search homes without warrants is not a problem, it's when the police abuse that power; examples of unchecked power (market-based or otherwise) that aren't abused are very few and far between. Second, there's the problem of even knowing what abuses have occured; if a company has a market monopoly, who knows how many would-be competitors have decided not to get past the what-if phase of developing their own products, due to the prohibitive nature of the monopoly? These things can be very hard to measure, but the generally harmful nature of a monopoly is not in consequent doubt.
My take would be that the RIAA no longer controls the official (non-p2p) presentation of music to end consumers. The RIAA has lost the gate. Now it's Apple who will be deciding what inducers and superlatives and featured artists get splashed across the showroom floors.
I realize this isn't the spin to the article, but I do think that the open source movement needs a good search engine in the same way that it needed (and got from the Netscape code base) a good browser. Especially useful would be a design that allowed the creation of "open clusters", ad hoc networks where new machines can contribute horsepower and storage space to scale the search resources up, and where there is some degree of redundancy which helps prevent dropouts from crippling the cluster. This would make moot such predicaments as whether Microsoft acquired this or crushed that, or whether Google sold out during its IPO. While Google does do some very cool research, we don't actually need advanced features like picture search, news culling, etc; all we need is the basic bread-and-butter search.
Just to clarify: when American protestors continue to try to improve their lives despite perhaps living better than various other parts of the world, it does not per se mean they're unaware of the harrowing plights of (for example) the Chinese. Don't know if you meant to imply to the contrary.
(Marge comes home having discovered that she's pregnant with child #2.)
Marge: Great news, Homer. We're about to have twice as much love in this house.
Homer: We're going to start doing it in the mornings too?
DRM is certainly a real technology in the sense that it has goals and implementation details. I do think there are ways to see it as not a "real" technology; admittedly, doing so involves adopting some non-textbook interpretations of "real". Suppose that we colloquially choose to say that real technology is that which results in a clear benefit for humankind; arguably DRM doesn't. These issues aren't black and white, but that's the spirit in which I read the original post. Sort of like saying that the HMO industry isn't a real industry because it doesn't add value; yes it does enrich particular people, and yes it employs many and has lots of papers to shuffle around, but its value to humanity is highly questionable and I don't mind dissing it as "not a real industry".
An IPO is a one-time event. If an IPO is lucrative, then there's that tremendous (one-time) upside to the shareholders that pre-bust times were so famous for. But as far as affecting the ongoing state of a corporation, the IPO pales in comparison to whether the company is private vs public. Stock options can be issued for private corporations, even ones that never intend to go public, and shareholders can realize dividends from those share; so the ability to issue shares and have them be worth money does not distinguish private status from public. The real distinguishment between private and public is that public companies have a duty - both fiduciarily and (more bindingly) legally - to make money. For a public company all other concerns are secondary, including the public good, the well-being of employees, ethics, innovation... even the long-term viability of that very company. If it turns out that a public company can make the most profit by selling sandwiches made of bread and horse dung, and can through legal hair-splitting and jurisdiction shopping somehow find a way to technically remain within the law, then corporate bylaws dictate that the corporation must enact this course of action, and shareholders will expect no less.
I won't pay a penny for it until it supports Ogg Vorbis.
Thanks for the clarification. But why would they impose a restriction that is so easy to get around and inconsequential? Because I don't understand the intended point, I worry that I don't actually understand the restriction to begin with...
The "overseas" part is highly relevant. This case is frightening specifically because the person threatening to release information on the internet is beyond the reach of the laws by which such behavior is regulated in the United States. If this was some person in Illinois threatening to release info on the internet unless his contracts were paid, they'd probably just arrest him and be done with it.
This view can only be supported by having a very static view of how software is used. I was using OSX 10.1 when 10.2 was released. I suddenly began running into many commercial and open source products that required 10.2. For example, virtually everything on osxgnu.org now requires 10.2, and this is not because these projects are using 10.2 specific features; they're binary compatibility requirements. Fink is another example, and they already note on their page that 10.3 will require a new install from them. I also encountered this in a substantial number of commercial apps and drivers. Apple itself removed the 10.1 dev tools from their page by the time I went to get them.
For some people, myself included, software is a living, dynamic thing. I don't want 10.3 because of whatever assortment of new features it has; I want it because I'm afraid of being cut off from a bunch of things on which I depend. And if I get it, it's going to force some painful transition choices on me by breaking some 10.2-dependent stuff. In some ways the transitions between these 10.x versions is more jarring than that from 9.x to osx; at least when 9.x was left behind, dual boot and emulation support was provided.
Sure. In the same way that checking drivers licenses at the airport will stop bad guys from boarding planes. No hype here, just good old facts.
According to the article, Solaris for x86 runs on a maximum of 4 processors.
The next main level comment after the above that I read was the not-unusual posting of a NYTimes article, for the sake of avoiding registration at said site. I wonder if there's some interesting framework to see both that practice and the activity of torrenting Mandrake ISOs early. Similarities and differences. Mandrake club members pay with money, NYTimes registrants pay with information. Mandrake eventually releases the ISOs to the public, NYTimes sorta does via archive links. Thoughts anyone?
It would seem fairer to me to say that this would have made the article be about both Stalman's work and Torvalds' work.
Stallman may be smart and may have accomplished great things, but his actions bespeak a petulant toddler more than a great man of vision.
Some people seem to perceive Stalman as resentful of Torvalds because Linux stole the spotlight and rendered GNU a distant also-ran. I don't share this perception. I believe that Stalman and Torvalds have very different agendas, which happen to overlap in Linux. Stalman is promoting the idea of Free (liberated) Software. Torvalds is trying to build an operating system.
Put another way, Torvalds has no particular allegiance to free software. The fact that he has licensed Linux under the GPL is incidental not idealogical; it is a means to the end of improving quality and development speed. If there was a non-free way to improve Linux on an ongoing basis, Linus might well adopt it. Stalman never would.
I think it's interesting to compare what our world might look like if either Stalman or Torvalds had never existed. Perhaps if Stalman hadn't come along we'd have Linux but no GNU and no free software ideology (fathoming how a non-free linux could have gathered mass support is left as an exercise to someone other than me). Whereas perhaps if Torvalds hadn't come along, we'd have GNU plus free software ideology but nobody who was as gifted at managing the complex process of kernel development. If it had to come down to one or the other, I'd actually take the world without Torvalds. Even though my definition of "visionary" fits Stalman much better than it fits Torvalds, my reasons for prefering the Stalman world are practical: I believe that the process established by Stalman would have soon enough given rise to someone like Torvalds who could have done approximately as well. People with Torvalds' skill are by no means common, but open source has a very strong natural tendency to distill the uncommon from the common.
People like Stalman who have the vision of a radically different system of values, who proceed from conceiving of the vision to implementing its foundation, who are courageous enough to unequivocally say publicly where they are trying to go... and to actually have those values make a radical and lasting difference for the better after only twenty years... that's my idea of a hero.
I got tivo four years ago and instantly fell deeply in love with it. That love continues to this day, but has changed form. About a year ago, I realized that my giddy passion had given way to serenity, by which I mean that I realized that I just didn't want to watch tv any more, even on tivo. It was tivo that got me to this state of mind. It started by seeing how intrusive commercials were, and how much better tv was without it. The next phase for me was the realization of how manipulative the networks were with their program timing and scheduling; how wonderful to be free of that too! And then last summer I found I had dined at the table of paradise enough. I had actually watched enough episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and tons of other shows. To borrow an analogy from another slashdot writer, it was like the weekly trip to the hardware store after you've bought a new house, where one day you get there and you realize that you just don't need anything else, and you turn around and leave.
This has been a profound experience for me. And I don't think I could have gotten here without Tivo. Maybe I would have and it would have taken longer, but I like to think it was tivo.
Now I keep tivo around for the kid (Sesame St, etc).
We have that today already. The increasingly few monolithic media companies can't be bothered to put on any stream of news that doesn't propagate their cultures of fear and consumerism, and in some cases religious agendas. I'm interested in trying to sort through the junk+truth that comes from a big cross section of the world's population than the junk+truth that comes from a very small minority of people whos only goal is to retain power.
Whatever amount of related legislation gets passed is a tiny drop in a bucket compared to what would be passed if the average was "every year, one out of two average children die gun-related deaths". Averages do matter. Even though they don't matter to the complete exclusion of outliers, they're still highly relevant.
There's a neat idea that could be borrowed from freenet: digital signing. A person could choose to digitally sign all their postings to the p2p network, even if they remain anonymous and don't give their name. In this manner, a person can build a reputation for being trustworthy, or "on the inside", or "a thinker", etc. System support for searching for legitimately signed docs might be helpful.
You sound cynical about the efficacy of discussion. :)
The poster is talking about buying music and then moving to Romania or somesuch place and not being able to use the songs he bought, which is UNTRUE. You CAN use the songs any way you want, anywhere you want. The bit in the Apple license you pasted is about **purchasing music via iTMS** outside of the US, where it's not supposed to be available. For out there who don't read much before replying: Songs - YES Service - NO
This interpretation had not occurred to me. It would be more acceptable than my described interpretation. I will feel more comfortable with it if Apple defines the term "service" to specifically mean "the download of a song in return for payment", and to specifically exclude "the ongoing usage of purchased music". Right now they make no such explicit distinction. I don't know what they'd say in a press conference, but until it's in their terms (AND those terms prohibit them from changing the terms) the power remains in Apple's hands to do as they please and remain within the law.
I'm not made of stone. Apple can placate me on this point easily. All they need to do is define the term "service" as described (defining terms is a *very* standard thing to do in contracts) and contractually guarantee that no future changes to their terms of sale will retroactively affect previous purchases.
If Apple's stated policies agreed with the above then I'd consider the matter closed, but they don't:
(Emphasis mine.) Note that there is no stated exemption for living outside the US while being billed within it. It may or may not be true that the current method they employ for determining location is credit card billing address, but there is no language in their terms of sale which even implies that they won't build software into OSX that maps your ip address, or time zone, or configured ISP dialup number, to a physical location. In fact, they are pretty much putting you on notice that they may well do such a thing; there's no legal requirement that they state that they "may use technology to verify compliance", yet they include explicit clear mention of the possibility. I would consider the chances of it to be better than unlikely.The larger point here is that DRM gives Apple a continuing way in which to apply pressure, in practically any technological form that they see fit and on an ongoing basis. It would be very different if their DRM resulted in a set of implications that were frozen at the point of purchase, but their DRM combined with their terms leaves the door wide open for them in perpetuity. I don't object so much to not being able to share their music on kazaa; I object to be chained to their policies and enforcement methodologies which can change at a whim.
That one guy who had problems and raised a huge fuss? He had either gotten a card from a bank outside the U.S., or changed his billing address to be somewhere else. Okay, so maybe it's a little bit hard to move without changing your billing address... but then, there are plenty of card companies who're perfectly happy to handle your billing and all that stuff on-line, since it's cheaper for them than using paper.
For people who don't mind having to cloak their new address via the subterfuge of having a third party handle their bills, perhaps this is a solution. I remain in the group of people who believe that, at such a point, DRM has become more trouble than it's worth.
Even with the newfound freedom given me by the shift key, I still refuse to listen to Anthony Hamilton. Whoever he is.
The fact that they have this power is one of my primary problems with DRM, even Apple's flavor of DRM (the other primary problem I have is that their downloads won't play on portables other than the ipod). This kind of power can be easily abused. Tomorrow's stance may not be today's stance:
Nowhere do they state that such policy changes need only apply to subsequent sales. Given that they're rather actively blurring the lines between sales and rentals, they might well be able to have changes apply retroactively.