Since you own the work in question, and the bit is not copyrighted, you may abuse the encryption any way you like.
I haven't read of a distinction the DMCA makes between 3rd parties vs product vendors. As far as I know, for example, Microsoft could be held accountable for revealing the internals of its own security technology. I would guess that the only requirement for prosecutability is that some customer relied on the integrity/obscurity of such technology; perhaps not even that, maybe all that is required is that Microsoft represented the technology as secure?
Another very important point: it is untrue that the DMCA only comes into effect when there is an attempt to circumvent. The DMCA comes into effect the instant that a TOOL for circumvention is manufactured or distributed. This is one of the worst aspects of the DMCA. It means that things like flaws in security cannot be publicly discussed even for the purposes of improving the academic theory involved, or spurring some manufacturer to fix the flaws in their products.
Unfortunately (as Alan Cox put it) the DMCA is every bit as lunatic as it sounds.
If this is such a bad product, don't buy it. This product is not forcing me to upgrade my stuff. I can still buy the newest althon CPU... There will still be the vast majority who DO NOT UPGRADE and use THE OLD STANDARD
Sooner or later everyone will have to upgrade, because parts malfunction. Whether one will be able to purchase an Athlon without DRM at that point is an open question. I don't feel confident that the majority won't upgrade, because "the majority" is comprised of non-technical people who respond well to marketing buzzwords. If there is a good time for those aware of the issue to try to educate that majority by loud, vocal, repeated means, now is certainly it.
On the other hand, If you choose GPL, you are aiming to restrict people's rights, so you need to be ready to be a policeman if people try and operate outside those restrictions.
A few points:
With regard to what an individual developer can do with a piece of code, note that the GPL is only "restrictive" when compared to a license like BSD. If instead you compare the GPL to "copyright", which is what the vast majority of created works are under (both code and non-code), the GPL is enormously liberating.
And, to see the issue solely in terms of an individuals's experience is to miss the larger point. By imposing the "restriction" that source code must be published with binaries, the GPL unrestricts every other programmer in the world who otherwise would never get to see that modified code at all.
Here's an idea I want to see implemented: a non-profit org website sorta like buy.com where you put in an anonymous "profile" of your agenda, for example:
I like/dislike corporate donations to the following political party
I like/dislike preserving the environment
I have liked/disliked the following legislation
etc...
You use this site to direct you to products that are from companies that fit the agenda you have described, on a sliding scale. If you're looking for an mp3 player and they're available from ten manufacturers at various price points, you end up seeing those price points AND alongside them you see the prices as moderated by your agenda. Instead of picking the cheapest mp3 player based soley on price, you pick the cheapest one via the moderated prices shown. You don't pay the moderated price; you simply CHOOSE based on the moderated price, then pay the actual price. Whether you actually buy through the website is tangential, the point of the website is to give you the information needed to choose from whom to purchase in such a way that you advance your agenda.
In the list above, the "I like xyz legislation" concept could be linked to a corporation by examining the sponsors of the legislation and then examining their corporate donors.
You can adjust your profile and the weighting factors you associate with your agenda items. You can dissect any given moderated price, diving into hyperlinks to read what foundation there is for the price moderation presented.
Crucial to this site is the notion that it doesn't exist to advance any particular agenda... it exists to allow consumers to express their agendas through their pocketbooks.
Also, this doesn't allow a single company to grab (for example) all pro-environment consumers by being the only company to promulgate a pro-environment agenda, and then gouge those consumers any price they think they can sneak in... instead, the moderated price of their item still has to compete with the moderated prices of other items, even those from anti-environmental companies, thereby allowing the competition to include the dynamics of the actual prices and the DEGREE to which a company has been deemed to align itself with a given consumer's agenda. The consumer decides how important each aspect of their agenda is.
Some of the information needed by the website org to usefully categorize a given company are publicly available, such as outright donations to members of congress. But in addition to that, more fine-grained disclosure of information can be incentivized by allowing website browsers to penalize companies that have not provided a standard suite of information as requested by a company. And a consumer has the option to extrapolate information from an owning corporation to its subsidiaries, which can fill in a few blanks as needed.
Paramount is that it is the consumer that is making the choices and expressing themselves monetarily. I believe that consumers could be attracted to this concept in large numbers, and that companies would take notice and be motivated by the direct financial consequences of their actions.
The GPL doesn't prevent hoarding. I can keep my changes to your code and not release them if I want. The only thing I can't do is release binaries of the modified code.
Which I think means one can't release products linked to GPL-derivative code for which they haven't released the modifications. About the only good that can do for a corporation is if they want to run a service bureau with data in being proceseed into data out onsite. Which is as the GPL intended. This doesn't lock users into protocols and dependencies. I'd regard this as an example of the value of the GPL.
And that only really makes a difference if you're fanatical about Free Software. For 99% of the population, Open Source is good enough (you get the source code, you get the ability to change that source code, and you get the ability to redistribute your changes -- what more can you conceivably need?).
In the recent slash discussion of this year's linuxworld, a lot of comments expressed concern over how big business appeared to be taking over the show, and how perhaps this foreshadowed a corporate cultural and financial hijacking of linux, in much the same manner that corporate interested have tried to corner the internet and other emerging technologies in the past. One of the counter arguments that I found most powerful in allaying related fears that I had was that the GPL prevents corporations from making proprietary versions of linux and locking people out through private extensions. I would argue that this is an example of one of the prime virtues of the GPL providing a much needed democratization of technology in the face of corporate interests, interests which would gladly otherwise turn linux into their own private golden goose to slaughter for short term profits as long as those profits were theirs.
One of the crucial aspects of the situation described is the timing: the submitter was required to go through these checks AFTER having accepted the job, given up the previous job, and showing up for the first day. This gives the company tremendous leverage, because the cost of refusing will result in something between a poisoned relationship and a firing, nothing better can come of it at that point. What is needed is a boilerplate document that the job seeker can submit to the employer right at the start of interviews. Just as companies often present a job seeker with an NDA right at the start, job seekers need a boilerplate doc they can submit to the company right at the start which requires full disclosure of all data that will be required from the job seeker and all policies that will need to be adhered to. It should include (though possibly not be limited to) the following list, much of which has been lifted from other entries in this discussion:
Whether drug testing will be required, and whether it is one-time, random, ongoing, etc.
Whether a credit check will be performend.
Whether any medical data will be required.
Whether a drivers license/driving record check will be performed.
Whether a non-compete clause will be required
Whether binding arbitration will be required and rights to a jury trial forfeited in the event of disputes with the company.
Disclosure of any other information that will be required, and any other arrangements that will be contractually mandated.
This document would take the form of a contract, to be signed by both parties at the same time that an NDA is signed, and which can only be changed by written permission from both parties. Some employers may take issue with this, but I suspect that those companies would end up being problematic anyhow; this is a very reasonable request for relevant information that the company should have no trouble producing. This is not as drastic an approach as saying "I refuse to submit to any of the following"... it simply puts in your hands enough information to make an informed decision about what joining the company will cost you, at a phase of the process when your leverage is still intact. And getting it signed when NDAs are signed allows you to pass it off in precisely the same pro forma atmosphere as the NDAs.
Article says that Homer once referred to a spoon as "the metal dealie...you use...to dig...food". I can't recall hearing this, and a google of the net (including snpp.com) yields nothing. Can anyone point out the episode?
The key... is that its surface is pitted with microscopic craters.
I am absolutely positive that between ten and twenty years ago I read about this exact mechanism being used to produce a new material that absorbed more light than anything previously known. Are the pits in this new material just better than the old pits, or have I noticed a glitch in the matrix?
Copyright needs reforming, nationally and internationally. Grabbing all the music you can in violation of copyright doesn't help the cause of those who actually want to do something about the problem. Enforcing the existing laws, and getting rid of the violators can only help the cause of copyright in the long run.
I just want to point out the effect of a certain word substitution:
Segregation needs reforming, nationally and internationally. Civil disobedience in violation of segregation doesn't help the cause of those who actually want to do something about the problem. Enforcing the existing laws, and getting rid of the violators can only help the cause of segregation in the long run.
Thanks for your reply. I take notice of this passage:
Even if a jury is somehow made to understand how freenet works, they will interpret it as deliberately evasive (and they'd be right), and will find guilt based on that fact.
As you probably know, freenet ends up placing encrypted material on a freenet user's node without the intervention of the user. The purpose of this is (as they put it in the architecture document) as follows:
...the node operator can plausibly deny any knowledge of the contents of her datastore, since all she knows a priori is the file key, not the encryption key. The encryption keys for keyword-signed and signed-subspace data can only be obtained by reversing a hash, and the encryption keys for content-hash data are completely unrelated. With effort, of course, a dictionary attack will reveal which keys are present--as it must in order for requests to work at all--but the burden such an effort would require is intended to provide a measure of cover for node operators.
My thinking is that if a jury can be made to understand this, then I agree they will see it as deliberately evasive, but I do not believe they will feel that the evader was the user. It seems reasonable to think that they will note that the architects designed this evasiveness into the system, but that by itself does not mean that the user was being evasive because the system has more than one purpose, i.e. it can be used to transmit material for which subterfuge is not required. Analogy: a gun's potential for killing humans does not land gun owners in jail.
Indeed, there is legal precedent for the prosecution of those anonymously or indirectly involved in a crime - posession of stolen property.
My understanding is that people who are shown to be in possession of stolen property (for reasons other than having stolen said property) are required to return the property to its owners. They don't get prosecuted, because they have not done anything wrong.
Thanks for the heads up regarding the differences in traffic analyzability between gnutella and freenet; I hadn't followed this aspect of the two systems, but am now intrigued enough to learn more.
the legal defense of deniability will evaporate when the first expert witness takes the stand and says that freenet is used extensively by pedophiles.
A legal expert stating that "freenet is used extensively by pedophiles" forces a freenet user to admit what? That their machine had porn on it? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. To prove that their machine had it, the "expert" would need verifiable copies of that data plus the encryption keys to access it; given what I've read about the architecture of freenet, EXTREMELY unlikely. And even if these conditions are met, proving that the user knew about it would mean proving that the user somehow got the encryption keys themselves (again, extremely unlikely) and went to the trouble of decrypting the information. It just isn't likely. Read the architecture docs of Freenet. It is specifically engineered to prevent these kinds of invasions of privacy.
In other words, the power is concentrated with the people who actually create things of value, rather than the people who just want to take from others?
Gee, what a f'd up world.
It may be tempting to see this issue in such stark terms but there are more angles to see it from. First, technology is making copying so easy that in order to enforce copyright as conceived of twenty years ago will basically force us to become a police state... even if one is in favor of copyrights, is that worth it? Second, the recording industry has done an exceedingly good job of making people in general think that they're not qualified to produce music and works of art that matter; this is an untruth which is a tremendous blight on our world right now, the notion that "artists signed with the recording industry" is the same as "people who are capable of creating something of value".
On the question of why BIOSes are not open sourced, the interviewee includes this comment:
In an industry driven by innovation, many companies feel they loose competitive advantage by opening their source... If there was no profit in computing, would Intel and AMD even exist?
There is profit in computing - certainly from the standpoint of hardware manufacturers such as Intel and AMD - specifically because it is not yet possible to mass-duplicate chips and hardware with the ease that software allows. It is possible that if/when chips are duplicatable as easily as software, then Intel and AMD may cease to exist (or undergo radical phase change)... but the consequence of this will not be the cessation of computing for the masses. I took the interviewee's comment to be implying the contrary, namely that the ability to profit is essential to computing. That may be true today due to current technology, but it is not intrinsic and may well change.
the CEO starts out earning 20 times as much as the $50K employees...
So this CEO, who normally contributes 20 times as much
I do not buy into the assertion that because a CEO is earning 20x, he's contributing 20x. Nor would I buy into its converse (the assertion that he's getting 20x because he contributes 20x). CEOs are grossly overpaid, and the reason is simply that there's a good ol' boys network of MBAs networking their way to these obscene salaries, and company boards that are so lacking in vision that the boldest thing they can do is burn money by hiring the most expensive person possible for the ceo role. This is one of the most fundamentally wasteful and distasteful facets of US biz, and must change as a prerequisite to the average American deriving security and self respect from being in the workforce. As in may other cross sections of the workforce, some CEOs are visionaries while others are flat out idiots... but unlike most other sectors, there is virtually no correlation whatsoever between CEO salary and CEO merit. One obvious example is Fiorina but there are many others, and most aren't even high-profile in the media. Somewhere along the line people have somehow elevated CEOs to the status of gods, where they don't even think of questioning how value is truly being created and will simply go by the numbers. Sure, the CEO has the power to fire his workers... but you still won't find my nose up his rear end.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for Lawrence Lessig, but why did slashdot ed. Michael thank him for the outcome of this case? What was Lessig's involvement? I know he argued in Eldritch recently... is this simply a confusion of Eldritch with Elcomsoft?
And that my friends, is why Nemesis didn't even have to be a really good movie.
Precisely. Churning out these heavily advertised schlock movies is no longer about quality, and hasn't been for quite some time. Back when Star Wars prequel 1 was in the works I was working in the special effects industry, and a full year in advance of its release date I remember hearing from the higher-ups at Lucas that the movie was already guaranteed profitability, because of all the merchandising follow-ons and themed advertising partnerships that were already in place. It made me feel ill, and I have refused to go see prequel 1 or 2, and in fact will not see another star wars movie. I'd rather have the time for other experiences.
1) The monthly fee is a financed $250 payment. Anyone with basic math knowledge will pay the lifetime fee and be done with it. (a used replay or tivo with lifetime subscription sells for about $250 more than one without). A tivo or replay costs $500 new, give or take 50.
Keep in mind that Tivo's so-called lifetime fee only covers the lifetime of the unit; when the unit needs replacing, so does your lifetime membership. How long will your tivo last?
if you had bought the lifetime service, you would have already saved over $100 in monthly fees, and pay nothing else going forward.
This is the perfect opportunity to note that Tivo's "lifetime membership" is NOT the payer's lifetime but the tivo unit's lifetime... which means that when your tivo unit stops working and you have to buy a new one, you have to pay the "lifetime" membership fee AGAIN.
In my opinion, this amounts to one of the sleaziest, most misleading abuses of market-speak that I have ever encountered.
They would acquire a bunch of very popular Java products! [Will they] convert it to C#?
No matter... IntelliJ is eating Borland's lunch anyway. IntelliJ's java IDE is substantially better than JBuilder (I've used both for over a year), and it's only 1/3 the price.
I just ran down to the 7-11 and liberated some Twinkies in the name of "civil disobedience" and "recovering a culture that belongs to me".
Thanks for the humor, I liked it.:)
Seriously though, interpreting one's actions has everything to do with the context in which they take place. Let's say that you live in some country where a cartel has cornered access to food, and feeding your family now costs you 90% of your income... not because there aren't enough food producers, but because the cartel has artificially restricted supply simply to squeeze more profit out of people. What does stealing twinkies amount to in this case? You can bet that way before stealing becomes a question of actual survival, there will be a revolt by the populace to recover their dignity and their ability to go about life without being squeezed at every turn.
I'm not saying that the recording industry controls a product whos scarcity can kill. But I *am* saying that the spectrum of concepts are similar, and it would be a mistake to miss these concepts by getting hung up on humor.
Just because record companies are swine, it does not mean that it's OK to steal stuff from them.
A few points:
"steal" is a heavily loaded term that has been abused enough of late that more precise language would be well advised. People who download music without paying artificially inflated cd prices and without constraining themselves to the tiny selection of what the record labels call "music" can be thought of as being civilly disobedient in the name of a worthy cause at least as easily as they can be thought of as thieves. Which interpretation you choose probably says more about you than it does about them.
People are not dowloading music for free solely out of spite as your statement would imply. It is true that the internet has enabled a very large number of people to comprehend how their choices and wallets have been commandeered over the past few decades by the recording industry. It is also true that these observations coupled with the industry's recent repugnant power grabs that place profit above any sense of human decency and which seek to violate the constitution have lead many people to conclude that the industry is a bunch of swine and vermin who should be eradicated. But the notion that the industry is full of swine is not the main reason people download. People download because they want to recover a culture that they feel belongs to them, a heritage that has been choked and strangled and squeezed into inaccessibility until now. That the industry is as swine-ridden as they come is secondary.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't read of a distinction the DMCA makes between 3rd parties vs product vendors. As far as I know, for example, Microsoft could be held accountable for revealing the internals of its own security technology. I would guess that the only requirement for prosecutability is that some customer relied on the integrity/obscurity of such technology; perhaps not even that, maybe all that is required is that Microsoft represented the technology as secure?
Another very important point: it is untrue that the DMCA only comes into effect when there is an attempt to circumvent. The DMCA comes into effect the instant that a TOOL for circumvention is manufactured or distributed. This is one of the worst aspects of the DMCA. It means that things like flaws in security cannot be publicly discussed even for the purposes of improving the academic theory involved, or spurring some manufacturer to fix the flaws in their products.
Unfortunately (as Alan Cox put it) the DMCA is every bit as lunatic as it sounds.
Sooner or later everyone will have to upgrade, because parts malfunction. Whether one will be able to purchase an Athlon without DRM at that point is an open question. I don't feel confident that the majority won't upgrade, because "the majority" is comprised of non-technical people who respond well to marketing buzzwords. If there is a good time for those aware of the issue to try to educate that majority by loud, vocal, repeated means, now is certainly it.
A few points:
- I like/dislike corporate donations to the following political party
- I like/dislike preserving the environment
- I have liked/disliked the following legislation
- etc...
You use this site to direct you to products that are from companies that fit the agenda you have described, on a sliding scale. If you're looking for an mp3 player and they're available from ten manufacturers at various price points, you end up seeing those price points AND alongside them you see the prices as moderated by your agenda. Instead of picking the cheapest mp3 player based soley on price, you pick the cheapest one via the moderated prices shown. You don't pay the moderated price; you simply CHOOSE based on the moderated price, then pay the actual price. Whether you actually buy through the website is tangential, the point of the website is to give you the information needed to choose from whom to purchase in such a way that you advance your agenda.In the list above, the "I like xyz legislation" concept could be linked to a corporation by examining the sponsors of the legislation and then examining their corporate donors.
You can adjust your profile and the weighting factors you associate with your agenda items. You can dissect any given moderated price, diving into hyperlinks to read what foundation there is for the price moderation presented.
Crucial to this site is the notion that it doesn't exist to advance any particular agenda... it exists to allow consumers to express their agendas through their pocketbooks.
Also, this doesn't allow a single company to grab (for example) all pro-environment consumers by being the only company to promulgate a pro-environment agenda, and then gouge those consumers any price they think they can sneak in... instead, the moderated price of their item still has to compete with the moderated prices of other items, even those from anti-environmental companies, thereby allowing the competition to include the dynamics of the actual prices and the DEGREE to which a company has been deemed to align itself with a given consumer's agenda. The consumer decides how important each aspect of their agenda is.
Some of the information needed by the website org to usefully categorize a given company are publicly available, such as outright donations to members of congress. But in addition to that, more fine-grained disclosure of information can be incentivized by allowing website browsers to penalize companies that have not provided a standard suite of information as requested by a company. And a consumer has the option to extrapolate information from an owning corporation to its subsidiaries, which can fill in a few blanks as needed.
Paramount is that it is the consumer that is making the choices and expressing themselves monetarily. I believe that consumers could be attracted to this concept in large numbers, and that companies would take notice and be motivated by the direct financial consequences of their actions.
Which I think means one can't release products linked to GPL-derivative code for which they haven't released the modifications. About the only good that can do for a corporation is if they want to run a service bureau with data in being proceseed into data out onsite. Which is as the GPL intended. This doesn't lock users into protocols and dependencies. I'd regard this as an example of the value of the GPL.
In the recent slash discussion of this year's linuxworld, a lot of comments expressed concern over how big business appeared to be taking over the show, and how perhaps this foreshadowed a corporate cultural and financial hijacking of linux, in much the same manner that corporate interested have tried to corner the internet and other emerging technologies in the past. One of the counter arguments that I found most powerful in allaying related fears that I had was that the GPL prevents corporations from making proprietary versions of linux and locking people out through private extensions. I would argue that this is an example of one of the prime virtues of the GPL providing a much needed democratization of technology in the face of corporate interests, interests which would gladly otherwise turn linux into their own private golden goose to slaughter for short term profits as long as those profits were theirs.
(I hope I did't miss your point)
- Whether drug testing will be required, and whether it is one-time, random, ongoing, etc.
- Whether a credit check will be performend.
- Whether any medical data will be required.
- Whether a drivers license/driving record check will be performed.
- Whether a non-compete clause will be required
- Whether binding arbitration will be required and rights to a jury trial forfeited in the event of disputes with the company.
- Disclosure of any other information that will be required, and any other arrangements that will be contractually mandated.
This document would take the form of a contract, to be signed by both parties at the same time that an NDA is signed, and which can only be changed by written permission from both parties. Some employers may take issue with this, but I suspect that those companies would end up being problematic anyhow; this is a very reasonable request for relevant information that the company should have no trouble producing. This is not as drastic an approach as saying "I refuse to submit to any of the following"... it simply puts in your hands enough information to make an informed decision about what joining the company will cost you, at a phase of the process when your leverage is still intact. And getting it signed when NDAs are signed allows you to pass it off in precisely the same pro forma atmosphere as the NDAs.Article says that Homer once referred to a spoon as "the metal dealie...you use...to dig...food". I can't recall hearing this, and a google of the net (including snpp.com) yields nothing. Can anyone point out the episode?
I am absolutely positive that between ten and twenty years ago I read about this exact mechanism being used to produce a new material that absorbed more light than anything previously known. Are the pits in this new material just better than the old pits, or have I noticed a glitch in the matrix?
.
Thanks for the heads up regarding the differences in traffic analyzability between gnutella and freenet; I hadn't followed this aspect of the two systems, but am now intrigued enough to learn more.
A legal expert stating that "freenet is used extensively by pedophiles" forces a freenet user to admit what? That their machine had porn on it? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. To prove that their machine had it, the "expert" would need verifiable copies of that data plus the encryption keys to access it; given what I've read about the architecture of freenet, EXTREMELY unlikely. And even if these conditions are met, proving that the user knew about it would mean proving that the user somehow got the encryption keys themselves (again, extremely unlikely) and went to the trouble of decrypting the information. It just isn't likely. Read the architecture docs of Freenet. It is specifically engineered to prevent these kinds of invasions of privacy.
.
It may be tempting to see this issue in such stark terms but there are more angles to see it from. First, technology is making copying so easy that in order to enforce copyright as conceived of twenty years ago will basically force us to become a police state... even if one is in favor of copyrights, is that worth it? Second, the recording industry has done an exceedingly good job of making people in general think that they're not qualified to produce music and works of art that matter; this is an untruth which is a tremendous blight on our world right now, the notion that "artists signed with the recording industry" is the same as "people who are capable of creating something of value".
.
.
So this CEO, who normally contributes 20 times as much
I do not buy into the assertion that because a CEO is earning 20x, he's contributing 20x. Nor would I buy into its converse (the assertion that he's getting 20x because he contributes 20x). CEOs are grossly overpaid, and the reason is simply that there's a good ol' boys network of MBAs networking their way to these obscene salaries, and company boards that are so lacking in vision that the boldest thing they can do is burn money by hiring the most expensive person possible for the ceo role. This is one of the most fundamentally wasteful and distasteful facets of US biz, and must change as a prerequisite to the average American deriving security and self respect from being in the workforce. As in may other cross sections of the workforce, some CEOs are visionaries while others are flat out idiots... but unlike most other sectors, there is virtually no correlation whatsoever between CEO salary and CEO merit. One obvious example is Fiorina but there are many others, and most aren't even high-profile in the media. Somewhere along the line people have somehow elevated CEOs to the status of gods, where they don't even think of questioning how value is truly being created and will simply go by the numbers. Sure, the CEO has the power to fire his workers... but you still won't find my nose up his rear end.
.
Without payphones, is there any way an anonymous call can be made?
.
Grappling with the pickle jar, Mr. Burns finds himself too weak to open it. Smithers volunteers, but has just as much luck.
Smithers: It's no use, sir. Shall I send out for some Chinese?
Burns: No, those people are all gristle. I want this jar opened!
.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for Lawrence Lessig, but why did slashdot ed. Michael thank him for the outcome of this case? What was Lessig's involvement? I know he argued in Eldritch recently... is this simply a confusion of Eldritch with Elcomsoft?
.
Precisely. Churning out these heavily advertised schlock movies is no longer about quality, and hasn't been for quite some time. Back when Star Wars prequel 1 was in the works I was working in the special effects industry, and a full year in advance of its release date I remember hearing from the higher-ups at Lucas that the movie was already guaranteed profitability, because of all the merchandising follow-ons and themed advertising partnerships that were already in place. It made me feel ill, and I have refused to go see prequel 1 or 2, and in fact will not see another star wars movie. I'd rather have the time for other experiences.
.
Keep in mind that Tivo's so-called lifetime fee only covers the lifetime of the unit; when the unit needs replacing, so does your lifetime membership. How long will your tivo last?
.
This is the perfect opportunity to note that Tivo's "lifetime membership" is NOT the payer's lifetime but the tivo unit's lifetime... which means that when your tivo unit stops working and you have to buy a new one, you have to pay the "lifetime" membership fee AGAIN.
In my opinion, this amounts to one of the sleaziest, most misleading abuses of market-speak that I have ever encountered.
.
No matter... IntelliJ is eating Borland's lunch anyway. IntelliJ's java IDE is substantially better than JBuilder (I've used both for over a year), and it's only 1/3 the price.
.
Thanks for the humor, I liked it. :)
Seriously though, interpreting one's actions has everything to do with the context in which they take place. Let's say that you live in some country where a cartel has cornered access to food, and feeding your family now costs you 90% of your income... not because there aren't enough food producers, but because the cartel has artificially restricted supply simply to squeeze more profit out of people. What does stealing twinkies amount to in this case? You can bet that way before stealing becomes a question of actual survival, there will be a revolt by the populace to recover their dignity and their ability to go about life without being squeezed at every turn.
I'm not saying that the recording industry controls a product whos scarcity can kill. But I *am* saying that the spectrum of concepts are similar, and it would be a mistake to miss these concepts by getting hung up on humor.
.
A few points:
.
... did you remember to lock your toilet shut so you won't be tempted to visit it while watching television?