I notice that you very carefully leave off the real issues.
Like Guatanamo and the whole imprisonment without due process thing.
Or like illegally spying on US citizens.
Or...
You mention only the things that noone who's seriously talking impeachment would mention. I applaud you for attacking those that talk impeachment out of a knee-jerk political stance, however, you don't seem to realize that there's a relatively strong case for it.
Strange... jonathan coulton sells his music under the creative commons liscence... yet... he's still making a living off of his music.
(In case you're not aware, the creative commons liscence allows his works to be reused, redistributed, modified, whatever, as long as it's for non-commercial use)
So he's somehow managing to compete with 'free', and he's even made the free alternative legal!
When US record companies see no positive impact in sales, will Russia be allowed to let allofmp3 reopen?
Because, for some reason I find myself really doubting that people that were paying pennies for songs are going to suddenly turn around and start paying an order of magnitude more.
But hey, what do I know? I'm just a lowly consumer...
I think Jonathon Coulton would be happy to contest your point of view.
But then he's making a living from his music. His music that he sells as DRM-less mp3s... that he releases under the Creative Commons license...
Strangely, despite it being perfectly legal for me to give his music away to the world, or for you to download it from whichever file sharing app you want... in other words... despite him making his music available for free... he's making a living.
Yeah, if you're comparing against a Dell or HP, then indeed, you're not going to be able to do much in the way of meaningful upgrades. That's the nature of the prebuilt beast:P
Mmm.. to be fair, he did look at more than the mac mini, and mostly limited his remarks there to it being too little hardware to really support the OS.
"For the first time in years I've gotten myself in the situation I'd be in every couple of years if I went the mac hardware route... "
I'm saying that due to a lack of foresight, I do need to upgrade it all at once, and that *is* the same as needing to buy a new system.
However, when you don't make a mistake in planning your upgrade path, you're only upgrading 1 set of components at any given time. It's either a video card. Or a new motherboard/proc combo. Or getting more/different ram. Or whatever.
It allows you to constantly have a powerful system. You might not ever be able to play the latest and greatest games... but it won't be long until your next upgrade and then you can... and usually right around the time thier prices starts to fall:)
And I'll say it again... who reads HardOCP? Who's the article aimed at? It's not the guy that buys a comp and never cracks it open:)
"giving your music away doesn't help your popularity. Only having good music does that."
Indeed. My music tastes have a similar profile, and a lot of the sites where artists give thier music away for free (or even sell) have the good artists hidden by the hordes who... lets say... drastically overestimate thier own talent.
I've given up trying to find music through those sites, and now I just use pandora. I've noticed that it doesn't have everyone I want it to (no Brobdingnagian Bards for instance), but I've found more new music through them than anywhere else I've tried.
Anyways, there are good artists that do give thier music away, and have entirely built their success from doing so.
Take Jonathon Coulton as an example. He's making a living from literally giving his songs away (they're all released under Creative Commons). His fans still buy his CDs; they still pay him to download mp3s. He doesn't tour a certain area to try to slowly gather a fan base through repeat performances, his fan base causes him to tour where the demand already is.
Free music provided by good artists can work wonders. It's the hordes of crappy ones that can drown them out that hide this.
The majority of the time if you're interested in doing a CPU upgrade you're wanting/needing to upgrade your MB as well as there's a new chipset out, or a new interface to another component (think IDE->SATA, PCI->AGP->PCIE, SDRAM->DDR->DDR2->DDR3, etc, etc), and if you're wanting to keep your upgrade path open, you'll need to support the new standards. I didn't guess right with PCIE, thought it'd take longer to become the de-facto standard, and I've gotten myself stuck with an expensive upgrade as my mb only supports agp and I'm on my video card part of my upgrade cycle.
For the first time in years I've gotten myself in the situation I'd be in every couple of years if I went the mac hardware route... where to get a significant performance boost I'll need to buy what amounts to a new computer instead of simply a minor upgrade of the video card, or the mb/proc, or whatever. In 10 years of this, I never wound up upgrading the proc without upgrading the motherboard. It just isn't cost effective, by the time you're back to that part of your cycle, there's new tech out that you're going to want to have support for for future upgrades (or a new socket requires you to upgrade if you're going to upgrade your proc)
With a mac, you've got maybe one cost-effective, meaningful upgrade before you really need to upgrade the mb because there's new tech out that it doesn't support.
Also... look at his target audience. Who reads HardOCP?
"very few people replace their motherboards these days"
Those people:P (and we're not as few as you think! There's a whole segment of mbs made and marketed directly for/at us!)
I see a strong difference between supervision and spying.
Supervision is something that's done with the childs knowledge and, to some degree, consent.
Going with your child and meeting his friends and thier parents is supervision. Reading your child's diary isn't.
Talking with your kid about what he watches on TV, or what he's doing on the computer is supervision. Keeping an eye on him while he's doing these activities is supervision. Installing monitoring software, (and telling him so!), is supervision. Going into the computer and reading your childs emails isn't.
Talking with your kid about online safety and asking if you can read what they put up on thier public myspace pages because you're worried about wackos out there is supervision. Reading the public areas without consent even is supervision (they're public after all!:P) Sneaking in and reading thier private friends-only areas isn't.
There's a line there, and one that I'm glad I didn't have to worry about my parents crossing.
Maybe I'm special as I grew up with tech-savvy parents (my dad introduced me to BBSes when I was around 12 I think, and yeah... that puts me in my late 20s), but they taught me how to keep myself safe, (ie, don't give out personal info, etc) and then let me and later my younger brother go. Between asking what we were getting into, and due to just being around, they had a pretty good idea what we were up to, but I didn't feel like my parents were invading my privacy or violating trust.
And, yeah, I might find that I adjust my view some if I have kids of my own. Have no problem admitting that. As you say, it is a very personal responsibility at that point, and it may well affect me more dramatically than my work over the years with the boy scouts has. I have my doubts though, my views on a lot of things have really settled down over the last 3-5 years or so. Not nearly as volatile as they were in my early 20s:P
And as I said before, I'm not saying to not know what your kid is doing, you need to know! I'm saying that there's a very important distinction between supervision and spying, as the later works to destroy the relationship between you and the child.
Ah, the old, "you're not a parent, what do you know!" arguement.
The fact that I don't have empirical parental experience with kids of my own doesn't invalidate my experiences from when I was a child. It doesn't invalidate my observances of what happened to my friends who felt like they were in a constant battle to hide things from thier parents. It doesn't invalidate my experiences working with children which've covered the range from serving as a babysitter for my nieces, to working as a summer camp counselor, or serving as an assistant Scoutmaster.
In any case you seem to be misreading what I'm saying.
I'm saying that spying is counterproductive. I haven't directly said anything about supervision... although... if you'll notice, my parents provided strong supervision.
There's a *big* difference between supervision and spying.
"If you have to spy on your kids, they probably won't feel comfortable talking to you about things that are actually quite important"
Indeed.
When I was 19 and off at uni, I wound up calling my parents wanting thier input on the idea of going drinking with friends. (19 is underage for those of y'all outside of the US)
If they'd been spying on me my whole life, this would have been nothing more than one more thing that I would have had to hide. Instead, my parents got to be involved with my decision, and I took thier input seriously.
Compare that to one of my old high-school friends when as soon as he turned 18, moved halfway across the country, and the last time his parents saw him was when he wound up in a 3-day coma following a OD...
Well, maybe there's a reason that I'm so strongly against spying on your kids...
And assuming that you do manage to keep your child from ever being hurt while they're at home... what do you do when they leave? When they go off to uni or move out?
They'll suddenly be exposed to everything that you spent 18 years shielding them from. But... because you shielded them, they won't have learned how to shield themselves.
There's times when you need to let your child touch the stove. Now, yes, there's times when you do need to step in, when they're about to dump the vat of boiling oil would be a good time... but if you keep them from ever getting burned, they're going to be in for a rude awakening when you're no longer there to save them. Then they may wind up pulling the pot off instead of touching the stove, as they've experienced neither.
And if you don't have a relationship with your child based on trust, then it's quite likely that he'll rebel the moment he's out from under you and run headlong into what you shielded him from, because he doesn't trust that you were protecting him from something real. I mean, all his friends are on myspace, and none of them were abducted and killed, you were just being mean to him!
Yes, you want to protect your child from everything. Noone likes dealing with a kid that's hurt himself, especially not if you're the parent, and really really not if you could have prevented it... but getting hurt and learning from it is part of growing up. Allowing your kid to make the painful, but not really dangerous mistakes is one of the hardest things to do as a parent... and IMO, one of the most important.
Not trying to say that you're wrong, merely suggesting a way of looking at things that I'm not sure you've thought of.:)
If you're spying on your kid, you're telling them that you don't trust them. That you don't respect them. Great thing to tell your child.
"How is it [GPS in a phone] any different than calling them asking them where they are?"
Letsee... you know, sometimes kids WANT thier parents to call?
I'd gotten myself into situations where I wasn't comfortable. Yet, I knew that my parents would call to check up on me... and when they did, I knew that I'd be able to say something like, "What do you mean I have to come home?", and that they'd be there to pick me up. They also wouldn't ask questions unless I started talking first.
By spying on them instead of, *gasp*, TALKING to them, you've removed that escape route.
Besides, as you said, spying on them like that is worthless... They'll just redirect thier phone to call thier friends, and leave thier own at an "approved" location. Or worse, they'll do as you suggested, and do without the redirect. Then you'll mistakenly think they're safe, have no way to contact them, and they're without thier phone to contact you. Congrats.
Trust and respect are wonderful things. Destroying them for a little peace of mind isn't the correct choice to make. Besides, any peace of mind you get is gone as soon as you wake up and realize that your kids know that you're spying and are now working at hiding things from you.
From looking at my friends and thier relationships with thier parents as both kids and adults I know that I'm thankful as hell that my parents showed me trust and respect. When I went to uni, I'd been trusted to make my own unrestricted decisions about who to hang out with, when I came home, etc for a couple of years. My parents knew who I was with and what I was doing (for the most part:P). They'd talk with me about why they felt something was a bad idea (and the really dumb stuff I was talked out of...), but I was *allowed* to make mistakes when I was still living at home with the parental safety net in place.
I'll leave you to imagine what my friends did at uni and what I didn't do... but it should be pretty obvious... I didn't have the desire to prove that I was on my own and could make decisions without my parents stepping on me.
Why do you assume that you have to spy to get that info?
My parents would simply talk to me. They'd ask who I was hanging out with and where I'd be. Then they'd *trust* me. It's amazing how important that "T" word is. They made it a point to open the house to my friends... so they'd know who my friends were, what they were like, get to know them more than simply as that kid down the street. They set limits, and expected me to respect them, and trusted me enough not to go snooping around. Yeah, they didn't know everything that I did, but then you can't know everything your kid does no matter how much you spy. Only way to know everything they do is to lock them in a closet and never let them out.
Spying is bad because if your kid ever knows (and he will), you've effectively destroyed any relationship built on trust and respect. Your child now knows that you don't trust him. That you don't respect him. How anyone thinks that a kid can be brought up well in an environment like that... I just don't understand.
But hey, what do I know. It's not like I was ever a kid.
There's a very distinct (and important!) difference between bypassing enforcement technology and violating copyright.
Copyright law spells out how to tell if a use of copyrighted works is infringing or not, and provides a list of examples of non-infringing use.
However, enforcement technology may well prevent you from doing any sort of copying; even what is explicitly provided as an example of allowable use! Bypassing the enforcement technology for this purpose is clearly not a violation of the owners copyright.
So, circumventing the enforcement tech, and violating copyright are two seperate things.
Now, to continue on a slightly different topic... Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place? Copyright law already handles every case where someone who is circumventing the enforcement is doing something you'd classify as wrong. It seems to add redundancy, and more importantly, target a new class of people... namely those who are trying to excersize thier fair-use rights.
I'll leave it up to you to speculate who could want such legislation and why they'd want it. I'm pretty sure you can figure out my thoughts on it, I'll leave you to develop your own.
"...while waiting for the market to get a clue. It's not looking good despite my willingness to spend money..."
Indeed.
I'm in a slightly different boat... I currently don't have cable.
I've been thinking about getting it and putting together a media box, but... as you said, it doesn't look good. I've got the money, I'm willing to spend it, but what I'm willing to spend it on isn't there.
If the cable companies want my money, they can let me watch what I want, when I want, on what I want. Currently I'd be paying them to watch what they want, when they want, on what they want. Seems like they should be paying me for that, especially when the commercials are thrown in.
mm... readability is important too, however, readability isn't what the author really seems to be attacking...
A lot of the article's complaints are focused around wikipedia providing you the technical terms that are *necessary* for you to know if you wish to explore something in-depth. Basically they're focused around wikipedia working at providing more than simply a very high level overview of something.
Yes, if you want that cursory ten thousand foot overview I can see it being somewhat intimidating; however, usually when technical term is mentioned there's a link to the appropriate wikipedia page, so if you don't know what that means you can go find out.
The reason that I love wikipedia is that I can start by looking for general information, then drill down to the level of detail that I want. If wikipedia doesn't have all the info I need, then I at least go away knowing what the technical terminology is, and can use that to hit up other sources. If we followed the recommendations of the opinion writer, wikipedia would, at least to me, lose a large portion of it's worth.
How many times have you set off an inventory control alarm because the cashier didn't properly kill the security tag?
Now, think about getting home that many times with a DVD that won't play. Then you've got to hope you can find your reciept, (cause without it, how do they know you're not one of the shoplifters they're trying to stop...), trudge back to the store, wait through the customer service line, then go back home.
Most every DVD I've bought has the typical security tag affixed to the case (some inside, some outside). Why will this new idea suddenly work where the old has failed? IMO all that's going to change is how long it takes to discover an employee screwup, and due to the delay, how much time of the consumers it'll waste.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice that you very carefully leave off the real issues.
Like Guatanamo and the whole imprisonment without due process thing.
Or like illegally spying on US citizens.
Or...
You mention only the things that noone who's seriously talking impeachment would mention. I applaud you for attacking those that talk impeachment out of a knee-jerk political stance, however, you don't seem to realize that there's a relatively strong case for it.
Strange... jonathan coulton sells his music under the creative commons liscence... yet... he's still making a living off of his music.
(In case you're not aware, the creative commons liscence allows his works to be reused, redistributed, modified, whatever, as long as it's for non-commercial use)
So he's somehow managing to compete with 'free', and he's even made the free alternative legal!
Not unless you're able to get tracks from them for a penny...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
Soo...
When US record companies see no positive impact in sales, will Russia be allowed to let allofmp3 reopen?
Because, for some reason I find myself really doubting that people that were paying pennies for songs are going to suddenly turn around and start paying an order of magnitude more.
But hey, what do I know? I'm just a lowly consumer...
I think Jonathon Coulton would be happy to contest your point of view.
But then he's making a living from his music. His music that he sells as DRM-less mp3s... that he releases under the Creative Commons license...
Strangely, despite it being perfectly legal for me to give his music away to the world, or for you to download it from whichever file sharing app you want... in other words... despite him making his music available for free... he's making a living.
Yeah, if you're comparing against a Dell or HP, then indeed, you're not going to be able to do much in the way of meaningful upgrades. That's the nature of the prebuilt beast :P
Mmm.. to be fair, he did look at more than the mac mini, and mostly limited his remarks there to it being too little hardware to really support the OS.
So you were making a joke that relied on ignorance to be funny (or even recognizable as a joke)?
Well, I guess that'd explain why it was over my head. I'm so ashamed...
"since no particular meaning was specified"
Does the word "context" mean anything to you?
The article makes it blatantly apparent what they mean when they say "non-working".
I think you missed my point...
:)
:)
"For the first time in years I've gotten myself in the situation I'd be in every couple of years if I went the mac hardware route... "
I'm saying that due to a lack of foresight, I do need to upgrade it all at once, and that *is* the same as needing to buy a new system.
However, when you don't make a mistake in planning your upgrade path, you're only upgrading 1 set of components at any given time. It's either a video card. Or a new motherboard/proc combo. Or getting more/different ram. Or whatever.
It allows you to constantly have a powerful system. You might not ever be able to play the latest and greatest games... but it won't be long until your next upgrade and then you can... and usually right around the time thier prices starts to fall
And I'll say it again... who reads HardOCP? Who's the article aimed at? It's not the guy that buys a comp and never cracks it open
"giving your music away doesn't help your popularity. Only having good music does that."
Indeed. My music tastes have a similar profile, and a lot of the sites where artists give thier music away for free (or even sell) have the good artists hidden by the hordes who... lets say... drastically overestimate thier own talent.
I've given up trying to find music through those sites, and now I just use pandora. I've noticed that it doesn't have everyone I want it to (no Brobdingnagian Bards for instance), but I've found more new music through them than anywhere else I've tried.
Anyways, there are good artists that do give thier music away, and have entirely built their success from doing so.
Take Jonathon Coulton as an example. He's making a living from literally giving his songs away (they're all released under Creative Commons). His fans still buy his CDs; they still pay him to download mp3s. He doesn't tour a certain area to try to slowly gather a fan base through repeat performances, his fan base causes him to tour where the demand already is.
Free music provided by good artists can work wonders. It's the hordes of crappy ones that can drown them out that hide this.
The majority of the time if you're interested in doing a CPU upgrade you're wanting/needing to upgrade your MB as well as there's a new chipset out, or a new interface to another component (think IDE->SATA, PCI->AGP->PCIE, SDRAM->DDR->DDR2->DDR3, etc, etc), and if you're wanting to keep your upgrade path open, you'll need to support the new standards. I didn't guess right with PCIE, thought it'd take longer to become the de-facto standard, and I've gotten myself stuck with an expensive upgrade as my mb only supports agp and I'm on my video card part of my upgrade cycle.
:P (and we're not as few as you think! There's a whole segment of mbs made and marketed directly for/at us!)
For the first time in years I've gotten myself in the situation I'd be in every couple of years if I went the mac hardware route... where to get a significant performance boost I'll need to buy what amounts to a new computer instead of simply a minor upgrade of the video card, or the mb/proc, or whatever. In 10 years of this, I never wound up upgrading the proc without upgrading the motherboard. It just isn't cost effective, by the time you're back to that part of your cycle, there's new tech out that you're going to want to have support for for future upgrades (or a new socket requires you to upgrade if you're going to upgrade your proc)
With a mac, you've got maybe one cost-effective, meaningful upgrade before you really need to upgrade the mb because there's new tech out that it doesn't support.
Also... look at his target audience. Who reads HardOCP?
"very few people replace their motherboards these days"
Those people
Well, usually when I change computers (or OSes) and a peripheral doesn't work on the new one I figure it's a driver issue.
But hey, I guess you could just assume it's a broken peripheral and go buy a new one. To each thier own I guess.
I see a strong difference between supervision and spying.
:P) Sneaking in and reading thier private friends-only areas isn't.
:P
Supervision is something that's done with the childs knowledge and, to some degree, consent.
Going with your child and meeting his friends and thier parents is supervision. Reading your child's diary isn't.
Talking with your kid about what he watches on TV, or what he's doing on the computer is supervision. Keeping an eye on him while he's doing these activities is supervision. Installing monitoring software, (and telling him so!), is supervision. Going into the computer and reading your childs emails isn't.
Talking with your kid about online safety and asking if you can read what they put up on thier public myspace pages because you're worried about wackos out there is supervision. Reading the public areas without consent even is supervision (they're public after all!
There's a line there, and one that I'm glad I didn't have to worry about my parents crossing.
Maybe I'm special as I grew up with tech-savvy parents (my dad introduced me to BBSes when I was around 12 I think, and yeah... that puts me in my late 20s), but they taught me how to keep myself safe, (ie, don't give out personal info, etc) and then let me and later my younger brother go. Between asking what we were getting into, and due to just being around, they had a pretty good idea what we were up to, but I didn't feel like my parents were invading my privacy or violating trust.
And, yeah, I might find that I adjust my view some if I have kids of my own. Have no problem admitting that. As you say, it is a very personal responsibility at that point, and it may well affect me more dramatically than my work over the years with the boy scouts has. I have my doubts though, my views on a lot of things have really settled down over the last 3-5 years or so. Not nearly as volatile as they were in my early 20s
And as I said before, I'm not saying to not know what your kid is doing, you need to know! I'm saying that there's a very important distinction between supervision and spying, as the later works to destroy the relationship between you and the child.
Ah, the old, "you're not a parent, what do you know!" arguement.
The fact that I don't have empirical parental experience with kids of my own doesn't invalidate my experiences from when I was a child. It doesn't invalidate my observances of what happened to my friends who felt like they were in a constant battle to hide things from thier parents. It doesn't invalidate my experiences working with children which've covered the range from serving as a babysitter for my nieces, to working as a summer camp counselor, or serving as an assistant Scoutmaster.
In any case you seem to be misreading what I'm saying.
I'm saying that spying is counterproductive. I haven't directly said anything about supervision... although... if you'll notice, my parents provided strong supervision.
There's a *big* difference between supervision and spying.
"If you have to spy on your kids, they probably won't feel comfortable talking to you about things that are actually quite important"
Indeed.
When I was 19 and off at uni, I wound up calling my parents wanting thier input on the idea of going drinking with friends. (19 is underage for those of y'all outside of the US)
If they'd been spying on me my whole life, this would have been nothing more than one more thing that I would have had to hide. Instead, my parents got to be involved with my decision, and I took thier input seriously.
Compare that to one of my old high-school friends when as soon as he turned 18, moved halfway across the country, and the last time his parents saw him was when he wound up in a 3-day coma following a OD...
Well, maybe there's a reason that I'm so strongly against spying on your kids...
And assuming that you do manage to keep your child from ever being hurt while they're at home... what do you do when they leave? When they go off to uni or move out?
:)
They'll suddenly be exposed to everything that you spent 18 years shielding them from. But... because you shielded them, they won't have learned how to shield themselves.
There's times when you need to let your child touch the stove. Now, yes, there's times when you do need to step in, when they're about to dump the vat of boiling oil would be a good time... but if you keep them from ever getting burned, they're going to be in for a rude awakening when you're no longer there to save them. Then they may wind up pulling the pot off instead of touching the stove, as they've experienced neither.
And if you don't have a relationship with your child based on trust, then it's quite likely that he'll rebel the moment he's out from under you and run headlong into what you shielded him from, because he doesn't trust that you were protecting him from something real. I mean, all his friends are on myspace, and none of them were abducted and killed, you were just being mean to him!
Yes, you want to protect your child from everything. Noone likes dealing with a kid that's hurt himself, especially not if you're the parent, and really really not if you could have prevented it... but getting hurt and learning from it is part of growing up. Allowing your kid to make the painful, but not really dangerous mistakes is one of the hardest things to do as a parent... and IMO, one of the most important.
Not trying to say that you're wrong, merely suggesting a way of looking at things that I'm not sure you've thought of.
"How is this any different than spying on them?"
:P). They'd talk with me about why they felt something was a bad idea (and the really dumb stuff I was talked out of...), but I was *allowed* to make mistakes when I was still living at home with the parental safety net in place.
Two words. Trust and respect.
If you're spying on your kid, you're telling them that you don't trust them. That you don't respect them. Great thing to tell your child.
"How is it [GPS in a phone] any different than calling them asking them where they are?"
Letsee... you know, sometimes kids WANT thier parents to call?
I'd gotten myself into situations where I wasn't comfortable. Yet, I knew that my parents would call to check up on me... and when they did, I knew that I'd be able to say something like, "What do you mean I have to come home?", and that they'd be there to pick me up. They also wouldn't ask questions unless I started talking first.
By spying on them instead of, *gasp*, TALKING to them, you've removed that escape route.
Besides, as you said, spying on them like that is worthless... They'll just redirect thier phone to call thier friends, and leave thier own at an "approved" location. Or worse, they'll do as you suggested, and do without the redirect. Then you'll mistakenly think they're safe, have no way to contact them, and they're without thier phone to contact you. Congrats.
Trust and respect are wonderful things. Destroying them for a little peace of mind isn't the correct choice to make. Besides, any peace of mind you get is gone as soon as you wake up and realize that your kids know that you're spying and are now working at hiding things from you.
From looking at my friends and thier relationships with thier parents as both kids and adults I know that I'm thankful as hell that my parents showed me trust and respect. When I went to uni, I'd been trusted to make my own unrestricted decisions about who to hang out with, when I came home, etc for a couple of years. My parents knew who I was with and what I was doing (for the most part
I'll leave you to imagine what my friends did at uni and what I didn't do... but it should be pretty obvious... I didn't have the desire to prove that I was on my own and could make decisions without my parents stepping on me.
Why do you assume that you have to spy to get that info?
My parents would simply talk to me. They'd ask who I was hanging out with and where I'd be. Then they'd *trust* me. It's amazing how important that "T" word is. They made it a point to open the house to my friends... so they'd know who my friends were, what they were like, get to know them more than simply as that kid down the street. They set limits, and expected me to respect them, and trusted me enough not to go snooping around. Yeah, they didn't know everything that I did, but then you can't know everything your kid does no matter how much you spy. Only way to know everything they do is to lock them in a closet and never let them out.
Spying is bad because if your kid ever knows (and he will), you've effectively destroyed any relationship built on trust and respect. Your child now knows that you don't trust him. That you don't respect him. How anyone thinks that a kid can be brought up well in an environment like that... I just don't understand.
But hey, what do I know. It's not like I was ever a kid.
I didn't say why *is* it illegal, I asked why *should* it be illegal... :P
The answer you gave is to why it is.
There's a very distinct (and important!) difference between bypassing enforcement technology and violating copyright.
Copyright law spells out how to tell if a use of copyrighted works is infringing or not, and provides a list of examples of non-infringing use.
However, enforcement technology may well prevent you from doing any sort of copying; even what is explicitly provided as an example of allowable use! Bypassing the enforcement technology for this purpose is clearly not a violation of the owners copyright.
So, circumventing the enforcement tech, and violating copyright are two seperate things.
Now, to continue on a slightly different topic... Why should circumvention be illegal in the first place? Copyright law already handles every case where someone who is circumventing the enforcement is doing something you'd classify as wrong. It seems to add redundancy, and more importantly, target a new class of people... namely those who are trying to excersize thier fair-use rights.
I'll leave it up to you to speculate who could want such legislation and why they'd want it. I'm pretty sure you can figure out my thoughts on it, I'll leave you to develop your own.
Exactly.
:)
Currently the closest I can come to the service I want is Netflix.
Needless to say, they're getting my money and the cable companies aren't.
"...while waiting for the market to get a clue. It's not looking good despite my willingness to spend money..."
:)
Indeed.
I'm in a slightly different boat... I currently don't have cable.
I've been thinking about getting it and putting together a media box, but... as you said, it doesn't look good. I've got the money, I'm willing to spend it, but what I'm willing to spend it on isn't there.
If the cable companies want my money, they can let me watch what I want, when I want, on what I want. Currently I'd be paying them to watch what they want, when they want, on what they want. Seems like they should be paying me for that, especially when the commercials are thrown in.
Ah well, Netflix makes a decent substitute
I don't think unbiased means what you think it means.
mm... readability is important too, however, readability isn't what the author really seems to be attacking...
A lot of the article's complaints are focused around wikipedia providing you the technical terms that are *necessary* for you to know if you wish to explore something in-depth. Basically they're focused around wikipedia working at providing more than simply a very high level overview of something.
Yes, if you want that cursory ten thousand foot overview I can see it being somewhat intimidating; however, usually when technical term is mentioned there's a link to the appropriate wikipedia page, so if you don't know what that means you can go find out.
The reason that I love wikipedia is that I can start by looking for general information, then drill down to the level of detail that I want. If wikipedia doesn't have all the info I need, then I at least go away knowing what the technical terminology is, and can use that to hit up other sources. If we followed the recommendations of the opinion writer, wikipedia would, at least to me, lose a large portion of it's worth.
How many times have you set off an inventory control alarm because the cashier didn't properly kill the security tag?
Now, think about getting home that many times with a DVD that won't play. Then you've got to hope you can find your reciept, (cause without it, how do they know you're not one of the shoplifters they're trying to stop...), trudge back to the store, wait through the customer service line, then go back home.
Most every DVD I've bought has the typical security tag affixed to the case (some inside, some outside). Why will this new idea suddenly work where the old has failed? IMO all that's going to change is how long it takes to discover an employee screwup, and due to the delay, how much time of the consumers it'll waste.