But fortunately there's the loophole that it's only if you knowingly report that you own the copyright someone else has that it counts. Basically any large scale notice system can get around by saying it was just a mistake.
I'm no lawyer, but if the 3rd party monitoring agent doesn't own any of the copyrights to these things, they can't mistakenly believe they owned something there was no chance of them owning in the first place.
I don't know if the individual companies are running their own servers, or if they've simply contracted a 3rd party to do the work for them. If it's the former, then sure... if it's the latter, they never could have owned the copyrights in the first place.
Of course, the fact that this is so heavily skewed to content owners and leaves little room for people to defend themselves makes this suck even more.
We'll aggressively pursue you and demand huge sums of money, but if we don't bankrupt you in the process, we can just say it was a mistake. So there's no downside for companies to just do this recklessly.
A copyright monitoring program called MarkMonitor mistakenly flagged HBO.com for pirating its own shows, and sent automatic DMCA takedown notices to the network.
Wouldn't that make these DMCA notices fraudulent?
They're not the copyright holder, and I thought a DMCA notice was the equivalent of a sworn affidavit that you were the owner of it -- and Righthaven already established that if you don't have legal standing, you can get smacked down.
I can't see how this automated service could have any legal standing to be issuing DMCA takedown notices.
And?? A 19 year old who has a child, who then has a child at 19 allows for a 19 year old grand child, a 38 year old parent, and a 57 year old grandparent -- which gives you a good chance of the great grand parent still being around since that would only be 66.
Someone who is 58 could easily have grand children in the work force. It's unlikely they'd be in management though.
Or are you a work-every-day-until-I-die kind of person?
That't not as uncommon as you'd think, because a lot of people would get utterly bored and wouldn't like it.
My father is in his 70's, and he's got his hobbies, as well as keeping a job (it takes certification to do what he does and they don't have a replacement yet, he's still being trained).
He'd be bored to tears if he didn't have several things on the go. I fully expect that he will work until he dies -- and I believe if someone forced him to stop working, he'd probably die much sooner.
For now, it keeps him out my mother's way, brings in some income, and keeps him doing things to keep himself busy.
I've known many people for whom 'retirement' mostly meant start drawing your pension and then find another job since you can't fathom not working. (And put up with less bullshit at work because you can always leave.;-)
My father will fully retire when he wants to, but so far we've seen no evidence he wants to.
... by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Sounds like they're doing exactly what the Goddamn Constitution says.
What, by creating artificial scarcity to jack up consumer prices? The Constitution was designed to support price-gouging?
I have no problem with protecting the work of people, and if you invent something new you should be able to benefit from it without someone just ripping it off.
But a patent to manipulate the economy to make sure that prices stay high solely to protect corporate profits? How does society benefit from that. That's a business model, not a "writing" or "discovery", and it's definitely not "science and useful arts".
Patents have become an absurdity designed to keep corporations rich.
I take it noone ever explained to you that "patents" and "free markets" are NOT that same thing?
On the contrary... I've read Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and all the usual stuff and drank the Kool Aid for most of a decade... and I've come to decide it's a bad fiction. I know a lot about what makes a free market, I just don't think it works or is something we'd want.
For all the hypothetical benefit of patents, they are a government interference in free markets.
While it is arguable that some government interference in free markets is necessary, government interference in free markets should be treated as necessary evils.
See, that's where I have decided the goal of a free market is bullshit, and laissez-faire capitalism is a stupid idea.
See, without someone enforcing rules on companies, they would dump toxic chemicals into streams, put melamine in baby formula, use substandard materials in construction, sell you 'medicine' which is actually lethal (or nothing at all), and generally act like the miscreants they'd like to be. Because they would be motivated only by profit, and what they can get away with.
A purely free market is an absolutely dangerous thing, and the belief that this notional (and fictional) market would find optimal solutions is complete and utter horseshit. Do you really think when that company was putting melamine into baby formula the 'market' would have found a solution and that people would be free to choose not to buy toxic baby formula? The only solution to prevent companies from generally screwing everybody else over is to impose regulations and laws on them.
If the sole function of government is to enforce property law and contracts for the wealthy, and mostly allow the corporations to do as they please up to some arbitrary point -- well then the rest of the society eventually says "fuck it, this isn't working for us at all" and decide they don't like being serfs any more.
Capitalism will never go away, because people will always own 'stuff' (which is essentially what capitalism means) -- but you really can't in the long run have some fantasy 'free' market where it's the sole job of government to protect the property and freedom of that market. You need to balance the needs of everybody else against that, and you need to make damned sure they're not fucking things up.
People advocate for getting rid of environmental laws, banking laws, product safety laws, and all of the other frameworks which would keep us from devolving into either anarcho-capitalism or an oligarchy. But those people have their own almost religiously irrational belief that this would somehow make it so we all live in a better place with awesome outcomes -- for instance, Trickle Down Economics tells us cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations claims this solves everything, when that doesn't actually work.
Sorry, but a world in which governments didn't regulate safety and the like would rapidly devolve into some really bad outcomes. And your notional market is going to do a piss poor job of fixing that.
Artificial scarcity is designed to keep prices up and screw consumers.
Tell me again how this lovely free market reaches optimal solutions and we all pay less? Someone has just patented a way to make us pay more for no other reason that corporate profit seeking.
Sadly, as long as there's intellectual property which can be transferred to another company... unless we see a definitive court ruling that amounts to something like "Consult Arvell v Pressdam" and a judge telling them they have to stop, this will keep coming back.
I think we're on the 2nd or 3rd legal entity since what was actually SCO.
Why would you want to be confined to the one form of input.
It's not that I wish to be constrained, I just can't figure out how having my desktop machine have a keyboard and a touchscreen would work from an ergonomics perspective.
I would need to extend my arm fully and lean forward six inches to reach my monitor -- so I can't even begin to think of how this would be usable.
Even in a laptop, it seems like it would be weird, and it seems like it would be harder to do anything with the touchscreen than the mouse would be. You're just not sitting in front of it in a way that seems to make the touch very helpful or comfortable.
Maybe it's because I've never seen a demo of how you'd do this, but it seems it would be very uncomfortable to try to use a vertical touch screen in conjunction with a keyboard sitting on the desk.
A lot of what I'm seeing amounts to "ZOMG, we need to make teh tuch screenz", but not a whole lot of detail on why this would be beneficial, or how the ergonomics of it would work.
Sitting here in front of my monitor, I can't figure it out. Less so if I had dual monitors like so many places have now since we'd be talking about 4-5 square feet or so to cover with waving your hand.
C gives you all the rope you could ever want, wraps it wround your neck and encourages you to run very fast across a long, wobbly plank.
I always like to think of it as being more that C leaves ropes, cliffs, pointy objects, and a few angry bears wandering around -- and it's up to the user to to look out for themselves.
If you know how to navigate it, and keep your wits about you, you'll mostly be fine. But if you're running around with your eyes closed or don't have adult supervision, you could really get hurt.
It doesn't actively come after you, but there's no safety nets either.
You don't trust Google to keep a basic list of phone numbers?
Why the fuck would I provide Google or any other cloud provider with the phone numbers of my friends and family?
What you call convenience, I call a feature I'm not interested in. I have a Facebook account with no meaningful data associated with it, and they frequently prompt me to give them my password so they can do me the great favor of importing my contacts -- guess what, they'll never get that because I don't want them to have it, and I don't trust them with my password.
I don't give 3rd parties access to my address book or anything else they don't need for the service they're giving me. And, since I have no idea of where that data ends up, and what's being done with it... the less I provide them the better. In fact, I usually try to make sure they have as little as I can get away with, with some fake stuff thrown in for good measure.
All these companies think that for convenience I'll just hand over that data -- but the level of convenience provided is of minimal in my eyes.
I personally would like ChromeOS to come touchscreen with a little android compatibility thrown in:)
I can't for the life of me figure out how you'd mix a keyboard and a touch screen and have that make sense.
Ergonomically, it would suck to have to reach up to your monitor from typing... it would look like hitting the carriage return on an old typewriter or something.:-P
On my desk, my monitor is about a foot or more behind my keyboard, I'd need to lean forward to even touch it.
Either I'm suffering from a large lack of imagination, or all of these people clamoring for a keyboard and a touch screen haven't thought this through. It seems more like you'd get a bad compromise of both.
Sure, go ahead... statistically I'll be no more wrong than pundits, economists, analysts, and CEOs will be on the topic; and I've got a 50/50 chance of being right.;-)
If you're making long-term, high-dollar decisions based on what I or anybody else on Slashdot says... well, you'd have to be an idiot to do that. In fact, from what I've seen, all those companies making choices based on what Gartner or any other market analyst says would be as well off flipping their own coins.
1) Make streaming video game service 2) ??? 3) Profit
For me, a cloud based gaming service is a non-starter. I play video games only infrequently, and have recently disconnected my XBox from my network because I was starting to see ads in games.
Combine that with paying for your network bandwidth, and I can see a lot of people deciding they're not interested.
Seriously, you should use Open Office, or Libre Office.
Seriously, you should try suggesting that a multi-billion dollar, multi-national. Small shops, maybe, but larger corporations? I doubt it.
There's a lot of inertia involved to start moving corporations to something like Open Office, and corporations want to be sure they have support contracts with a vendor who can actually fix the problems -- not someone who can look at the code and submit a patch. They don't want to post on some internet forum, they want to be able to hold someone to the terms of a contract -- and I'm not convinced Open Office even covers all of the functionality people expect.
It's all of the non-technical people in all of those other jobs that keep businesses running which are going to howl the loudest if you start removing Microsoft products. And Slashdot frequently forgets that, as a group, we are NOT representative of how the rest of the world uses computers, and most of us are even further removed from how they buy software.
What killer app is locking Microsoft into any market now?
I don't disagree that for many people, there are alternatives -- but Microsoft is firmly entrenched, and is now like IBM was in the 80's and 90's, it's what everybody uses and they don't feel a strong need to move away.
But don't confuse the fact that there are alternatives with the fact that companies will continue to go with Microsoft for years to come. I can see them losing market share for home users, but a lot of places already have invested a lot in it, and continue to invest more into it for things like Sharepoint.
Many companies are now spending literally millions of dollars to roll out Win 7... and they're not going to walk away from that expense.
I have no idea what the 'fix' is to get working economics which can predict what will happen, because I have no idea if that's even possible.
But people should start learning that just because economists say something is true based on their models, assumptions (which may or may not reflect reality), and beliefs about how the market should work (which are often philosophical instead of anything else) -- doesn't mean they actually are going to do any better than chance.
Humans will always confound the assumptions by doing irrational things, cheating, and generally not behaving in a way that any of these models claim they do.
Making policy decisions against a 'science' with a crap record at actually predicting anything is mostly casting about, and when your models are proving blatantly wrong, it causes even more damage because those in charge continue to act as if the model perfectly correlates to reality, when fact it's usually at best a loose approximation of what might happen if all of your assumptions were true.
People who believe in a certain kind of economics will continue to believe it long after it's shown to be blatantly wrong. And that means both the people who think capitalism is 100% awesome and infallible, and it also applies to communism. Reality is far more complicated, and doesn't always follow your belief system.
I've found over the last bunch of years that I don't think economists have any more knowledge than the rest of us.
Sure, they have all these fancy models... but often the assumptions of these models are so numerous and founded in theory they come down to belief systems instead of any objective measure.
People then use these dodgy models to set economic policy -- but things like asset backed paper commodities, and the fact that everybody is trying to game the system for their own benefit means it's seldom works as people expect.
And, of course, these people keep telling us that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy magically solves the other problems, when it mostly just causes those entities to get more money and hoard it.
Add this to the fact that the stock market believes companies can and will grow by a certain percentage indefinitely, and it's hard not to conclude that most of modern 'economics' is mostly a guessing game and a way of achieving political ends -- and has nothing to do at all with reality. But they still continue to believe their models are more accurate than simply hoping.
"Got news for him, even if you ARE a US citizen they look at whatever you have stored."
Where is evidence?
Under the PATRIOT act, they can't show that to you.
The fact remains, they've been increasingly looking at people's things, bypassing judicial oversight, and generally running rough shod over parts of the Constitution with "Free Speech Zones", warrantless wiretaps and the ability to do "border stops" 100 miles from the border.
Seriously, have you not even been paying attention? This shit's been all over the news.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on, we've barely begun to scratch the surface of patents like Amazon's 'creating artificial scarcity' patent from yesterday.
There's all sorts of inane business process patents and "things which look like things in real life but with a computer" patents yet to be granted.
I'm no lawyer, but if the 3rd party monitoring agent doesn't own any of the copyrights to these things, they can't mistakenly believe they owned something there was no chance of them owning in the first place.
I don't know if the individual companies are running their own servers, or if they've simply contracted a 3rd party to do the work for them. If it's the former, then sure ... if it's the latter, they never could have owned the copyrights in the first place.
Of course, the fact that this is so heavily skewed to content owners and leaves little room for people to defend themselves makes this suck even more.
We'll aggressively pursue you and demand huge sums of money, but if we don't bankrupt you in the process, we can just say it was a mistake. So there's no downside for companies to just do this recklessly.
The performance is still copyrighted.
If his version was used in a TV show without licensing it, according to the copyright wonks, that's theft.
They can't have it both ways.
Wouldn't that make these DMCA notices fraudulent?
They're not the copyright holder, and I thought a DMCA notice was the equivalent of a sworn affidavit that you were the owner of it -- and Righthaven already established that if you don't have legal standing, you can get smacked down.
I can't see how this automated service could have any legal standing to be issuing DMCA takedown notices.
Doh, I meant 76 not 66.
And?? A 19 year old who has a child, who then has a child at 19 allows for a 19 year old grand child, a 38 year old parent, and a 57 year old grandparent -- which gives you a good chance of the great grand parent still being around since that would only be 66.
Someone who is 58 could easily have grand children in the work force. It's unlikely they'd be in management though.
That't not as uncommon as you'd think, because a lot of people would get utterly bored and wouldn't like it.
My father is in his 70's, and he's got his hobbies, as well as keeping a job (it takes certification to do what he does and they don't have a replacement yet, he's still being trained).
He'd be bored to tears if he didn't have several things on the go. I fully expect that he will work until he dies -- and I believe if someone forced him to stop working, he'd probably die much sooner.
For now, it keeps him out my mother's way, brings in some income, and keeps him doing things to keep himself busy.
I've known many people for whom 'retirement' mostly meant start drawing your pension and then find another job since you can't fathom not working. (And put up with less bullshit at work because you can always leave. ;-)
My father will fully retire when he wants to, but so far we've seen no evidence he wants to.
I thought in that case, the viruses scam you.
What, by creating artificial scarcity to jack up consumer prices? The Constitution was designed to support price-gouging?
I have no problem with protecting the work of people, and if you invent something new you should be able to benefit from it without someone just ripping it off.
But a patent to manipulate the economy to make sure that prices stay high solely to protect corporate profits? How does society benefit from that. That's a business model, not a "writing" or "discovery", and it's definitely not "science and useful arts".
Patents have become an absurdity designed to keep corporations rich.
On the contrary ... I've read Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and all the usual stuff and drank the Kool Aid for most of a decade ... and I've come to decide it's a bad fiction. I know a lot about what makes a free market, I just don't think it works or is something we'd want.
See, that's where I have decided the goal of a free market is bullshit, and laissez-faire capitalism is a stupid idea.
See, without someone enforcing rules on companies, they would dump toxic chemicals into streams, put melamine in baby formula, use substandard materials in construction, sell you 'medicine' which is actually lethal (or nothing at all), and generally act like the miscreants they'd like to be. Because they would be motivated only by profit, and what they can get away with.
A purely free market is an absolutely dangerous thing, and the belief that this notional (and fictional) market would find optimal solutions is complete and utter horseshit. Do you really think when that company was putting melamine into baby formula the 'market' would have found a solution and that people would be free to choose not to buy toxic baby formula? The only solution to prevent companies from generally screwing everybody else over is to impose regulations and laws on them.
If the sole function of government is to enforce property law and contracts for the wealthy, and mostly allow the corporations to do as they please up to some arbitrary point -- well then the rest of the society eventually says "fuck it, this isn't working for us at all" and decide they don't like being serfs any more.
Capitalism will never go away, because people will always own 'stuff' (which is essentially what capitalism means) -- but you really can't in the long run have some fantasy 'free' market where it's the sole job of government to protect the property and freedom of that market. You need to balance the needs of everybody else against that, and you need to make damned sure they're not fucking things up.
People advocate for getting rid of environmental laws, banking laws, product safety laws, and all of the other frameworks which would keep us from devolving into either anarcho-capitalism or an oligarchy. But those people have their own almost religiously irrational belief that this would somehow make it so we all live in a better place with awesome outcomes -- for instance, Trickle Down Economics tells us cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations claims this solves everything, when that doesn't actually work.
Sorry, but a world in which governments didn't regulate safety and the like would rapidly devolve into some really bad outcomes. And your notional market is going to do a piss poor job of fixing that.
Artificial scarcity is designed to keep prices up and screw consumers.
Tell me again how this lovely free market reaches optimal solutions and we all pay less? Someone has just patented a way to make us pay more for no other reason that corporate profit seeking.
Sadly, as long as there's intellectual property which can be transferred to another company ... unless we see a definitive court ruling that amounts to something like "Consult Arvell v Pressdam" and a judge telling them they have to stop, this will keep coming back.
I think we're on the 2nd or 3rd legal entity since what was actually SCO.
It's not that I wish to be constrained, I just can't figure out how having my desktop machine have a keyboard and a touchscreen would work from an ergonomics perspective.
I would need to extend my arm fully and lean forward six inches to reach my monitor -- so I can't even begin to think of how this would be usable.
Even in a laptop, it seems like it would be weird, and it seems like it would be harder to do anything with the touchscreen than the mouse would be. You're just not sitting in front of it in a way that seems to make the touch very helpful or comfortable.
Maybe it's because I've never seen a demo of how you'd do this, but it seems it would be very uncomfortable to try to use a vertical touch screen in conjunction with a keyboard sitting on the desk.
A lot of what I'm seeing amounts to "ZOMG, we need to make teh tuch screenz", but not a whole lot of detail on why this would be beneficial, or how the ergonomics of it would work.
Sitting here in front of my monitor, I can't figure it out. Less so if I had dual monitors like so many places have now since we'd be talking about 4-5 square feet or so to cover with waving your hand.
I always like to think of it as being more that C leaves ropes, cliffs, pointy objects, and a few angry bears wandering around -- and it's up to the user to to look out for themselves.
If you know how to navigate it, and keep your wits about you, you'll mostly be fine. But if you're running around with your eyes closed or don't have adult supervision, you could really get hurt.
It doesn't actively come after you, but there's no safety nets either.
Why the fuck would I provide Google or any other cloud provider with the phone numbers of my friends and family?
What you call convenience, I call a feature I'm not interested in. I have a Facebook account with no meaningful data associated with it, and they frequently prompt me to give them my password so they can do me the great favor of importing my contacts -- guess what, they'll never get that because I don't want them to have it, and I don't trust them with my password.
I don't give 3rd parties access to my address book or anything else they don't need for the service they're giving me. And, since I have no idea of where that data ends up, and what's being done with it ... the less I provide them the better. In fact, I usually try to make sure they have as little as I can get away with, with some fake stuff thrown in for good measure.
All these companies think that for convenience I'll just hand over that data -- but the level of convenience provided is of minimal in my eyes.
I can't for the life of me figure out how you'd mix a keyboard and a touch screen and have that make sense.
Ergonomically, it would suck to have to reach up to your monitor from typing ... it would look like hitting the carriage return on an old typewriter or something. :-P
On my desk, my monitor is about a foot or more behind my keyboard, I'd need to lean forward to even touch it.
Either I'm suffering from a large lack of imagination, or all of these people clamoring for a keyboard and a touch screen haven't thought this through. It seems more like you'd get a bad compromise of both.
Sure, go ahead ... statistically I'll be no more wrong than pundits, economists, analysts, and CEOs will be on the topic; and I've got a 50/50 chance of being right. ;-)
If I was an Australian economist, those would be good odds.
If you're making long-term, high-dollar decisions based on what I or anybody else on Slashdot says ... well, you'd have to be an idiot to do that. In fact, from what I've seen, all those companies making choices based on what Gartner or any other market analyst says would be as well off flipping their own coins.
I think it would almost have to be ...
1) Make streaming video game service
2) ???
3) Profit
For me, a cloud based gaming service is a non-starter. I play video games only infrequently, and have recently disconnected my XBox from my network because I was starting to see ads in games.
Combine that with paying for your network bandwidth, and I can see a lot of people deciding they're not interested.
Seriously, you should try suggesting that a multi-billion dollar, multi-national. Small shops, maybe, but larger corporations? I doubt it.
There's a lot of inertia involved to start moving corporations to something like Open Office, and corporations want to be sure they have support contracts with a vendor who can actually fix the problems -- not someone who can look at the code and submit a patch. They don't want to post on some internet forum, they want to be able to hold someone to the terms of a contract -- and I'm not convinced Open Office even covers all of the functionality people expect.
It's all of the non-technical people in all of those other jobs that keep businesses running which are going to howl the loudest if you start removing Microsoft products. And Slashdot frequently forgets that, as a group, we are NOT representative of how the rest of the world uses computers, and most of us are even further removed from how they buy software.
I don't disagree that for many people, there are alternatives -- but Microsoft is firmly entrenched, and is now like IBM was in the 80's and 90's, it's what everybody uses and they don't feel a strong need to move away.
But don't confuse the fact that there are alternatives with the fact that companies will continue to go with Microsoft for years to come. I can see them losing market share for home users, but a lot of places already have invested a lot in it, and continue to invest more into it for things like Sharepoint.
Many companies are now spending literally millions of dollars to roll out Win 7 ... and they're not going to walk away from that expense.
Only if you're willing to use cloud syncing.
For those of us who don't trust or want cloud syncing, keeping it on the SIM is still good.
'Irrelevant' to a subset of people, but not to everybody.
Because you live in the real world where Windows is pretty much the corporate standard and there's no way to get away from it?
You can get away from it on personal machines, but in any office environment -- Microsoft isn't going anywhere.
I'm on something like my 4th or 5th cell phone in a decade, all with the same SIM.
Life is so much easier if your phone number and address book can be moved to a new device in a bout a minute.
I can definitely agree that GSM, for me at least, is the way to go.
I have no idea what the 'fix' is to get working economics which can predict what will happen, because I have no idea if that's even possible.
But people should start learning that just because economists say something is true based on their models, assumptions (which may or may not reflect reality), and beliefs about how the market should work (which are often philosophical instead of anything else) -- doesn't mean they actually are going to do any better than chance.
Humans will always confound the assumptions by doing irrational things, cheating, and generally not behaving in a way that any of these models claim they do.
Making policy decisions against a 'science' with a crap record at actually predicting anything is mostly casting about, and when your models are proving blatantly wrong, it causes even more damage because those in charge continue to act as if the model perfectly correlates to reality, when fact it's usually at best a loose approximation of what might happen if all of your assumptions were true.
People who believe in a certain kind of economics will continue to believe it long after it's shown to be blatantly wrong. And that means both the people who think capitalism is 100% awesome and infallible, and it also applies to communism. Reality is far more complicated, and doesn't always follow your belief system.
I've found over the last bunch of years that I don't think economists have any more knowledge than the rest of us.
Sure, they have all these fancy models ... but often the assumptions of these models are so numerous and founded in theory they come down to belief systems instead of any objective measure.
People then use these dodgy models to set economic policy -- but things like asset backed paper commodities, and the fact that everybody is trying to game the system for their own benefit means it's seldom works as people expect.
And, of course, these people keep telling us that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy magically solves the other problems, when it mostly just causes those entities to get more money and hoard it.
Add this to the fact that the stock market believes companies can and will grow by a certain percentage indefinitely, and it's hard not to conclude that most of modern 'economics' is mostly a guessing game and a way of achieving political ends -- and has nothing to do at all with reality. But they still continue to believe their models are more accurate than simply hoping.
Under the PATRIOT act, they can't show that to you.
The fact remains, they've been increasingly looking at people's things, bypassing judicial oversight, and generally running rough shod over parts of the Constitution with "Free Speech Zones", warrantless wiretaps and the ability to do "border stops" 100 miles from the border.
Seriously, have you not even been paying attention? This shit's been all over the news.