Here's one of the more poignant quotes, showing just how far out of touch these people are:
Unfortunately, theft of copyrighted works is the predominant use of peer-to-peer networks today," French said. "Peer-to-peer networks are primarily used today for the unauthorized public distribution and reproduction of copyrighted works.
In one sense, every communication between two systems is peer-to-peer, including everything from getting email to browsing the web. Unless you want to call one of the systems a "server", and then I guess it's okay.
It seems to me that a peer-to-peer network exists whenever one system talks to another. Are VOIP telephones part of a p2p net? Do I own a peer-to-peer network when I print to my printer? What if I print to the parallel port?
So, when my computer sync's my calendar with my PDA, I guess I'm doing something bad?
Hit up Google for whatever operating system and program interest you. The key phrase is "Easter Egg".
Incidentally, it's probably not the easter eggs he should be worried about, but the data integrity. I'd be interested to know if they ever fixed the 1.40737488355328 bug in Excel (See the Risks Digest for more info.)
Wasn't this tried already? Like, uhm, the Civil War?
If you had, oh say a million dollars worth of personal property you used in your business, and the Federal goverment tried to create a law to outlaw your ability to use that equipment, and just "take it away", you'd probably be up in arms too.
Think about it from the point of view of a typical southern plantation owner. It's clearly braindead thinking, but at the time, slaves were unquestioningly personal property, and that view was both written into law and affirmed by the Supreme Court. To the southern plantation owner, talk about "freeing the slaves" probably sounded as much like fighting words as "Napster" sounds to the RIAA today. You might think that the "wrongness" of "ownership of Intellectual property" is a no-brainer, but there are powerful people with much to lose who might take a dim view of a Supreme Court ruling which outlaws Copyright, or affirms the right of WaRez D00dz to distribute digital copies of anything they can get their hands on.
Or, do you get upset at the thought that some Senator from South Carolina wants to include DRM in every computer, and take away your right to run Linux? If so, then you have a hint of why the people in the Sucessionist states thought they had something meaningful to give their lives for. They were not only defending their personal property from an "illegal taking" but defending their State(s) from an invasion by the military forces of foreign States.
(Before the Americal Civil War, the phrase "United States of America" was considered to be plural, as in "The United States are..." It was not until after the Civil War that it took on a common meaning as a singular, as in "The United Stated is...". )
Or, for those readers who don't consider themselves to be "Westerners", how would you react if some World Government declared that an integral part of your culture (your language, your religion, your disrespect for Steamboat Willie, etc) were against their interests and sent troops to invade and set you right? Get the picture?
Some would go so far as to argue that Lincoln was actually losing the war for as long as he maintained it to be about Federal rights over States Rights, and that the only way he won was to change the context of the war into one against slavery. There's at least room to debate that if the Union Army has lost at Gettysburg, things in North America would be very different today.
So, personally, I wouldn't discount the chances of a movement with the moral high ground suceeding in reclaiming a state's rights over federal rights. Such a movement would likely provide benefits to all of the other states, (including ones with nothing to do with this movement) and so would likely garner support from other states as well. The key, of course, would be to maintain the moral high ground, and to have a willingness to fight for what they believe in. This would demand that all actions be taken within the constraints of law, but there's actually plenty of wiggle room there.
Are you concerned about things like Microsoft licensing, DRM in your computer, and free music? Really? Do you care enough about it to sleep out in a field this winter at Bull Run without a blanket, and eat worms (or go hungry, if you can't find any)? How about a smaller sacrifice: give up DSL for dial-up? No? Neither did the Union army, and look what happened to them.
She did it because Microsoft told her to do it, and paid her.
More likely:
Microsoft decides they need an ad campaign like Apple has to show people are switching the other way too. Calls marteters and requests they find someone who has switched and create an ad highlighting them.
Marketers look for such a person and either decide the search is too tough, or that the prospective candidates are not suitable for one reason or another. Begins to question what it takes to be a "switcher" and finds a suitably cooperative candidated in their own office.
(By one definition, I guess you could say I'm a switcher, too. When my employeer "outlawed" Macs years ago, I eventually had a PC dropped onto my desk, with the "corporate standard" Windows pre-installed to the hard disk. For all I know it's still there, too. I'm not sure since I haven't booted to that partition since the day I installed Linux. I probably should have overwritten it; but the company only demands that Windows be installed, they don't dictate how often it gets a time slice on the processor.)
It does leave one to wonder what the specific motivation was. Did they really have that hard of a time finding someone who switched from Mac to Windows? Or were there plenty of candidates, but all with some reservations, or feeling that their switch was one of duress? Or were the marketers just too lazy to look? Or were they too caught up in their own hype that they didn't realize anyone would question the story they made up? Or maybe (like Campbells and their infamous marbles trick) they just thought, "Hey this is marketing, it just has to sell, it doesn't have to reflect reality..."
I guess maybe Microsoft has this just about right; these are the kind of people you want on your team, you just don't want to get caught with these kind of people on your team.
Am I the only one who has ever gone out to see a film I already own on video just to meet up with friends, take a girl out on a date, have dinner along the way, or just to get out of the house?
Maybe other users, even the ones who THINK they know what they are doing, are just inferior to me?
There's another possibility; perhaps they are neither inferior to you, nor superior to you, but rather just different from you.
With two decades of programming experience I don't consider myself to be any sort of a "clueless newbie". I've worked on (and programmed for) everything from embedded controllers to goverment mainframe supercomputers. I don't have a problem understanding technology, but every time I work on an MS-Windows based system I have the same kinds of problems that some other people (apparently not you) describe having, regarding crashing apps, BSOD's, etc. I've reached the conclusion that Windows is fine for most of the people in the country, but that most of the people in the country just don't think like I do. I can't get my head around Windows; it seems to be designed for different kind of thinker. (Not that I'm complaining, I like being one of the minority who can think like I do.)
And I have no quarrel with anyone who chooses to use Windows (although I encourage them to try other operating systems just to make sure they know about all the alternatives so they can pick the best one for themselves) but I will complain whenever and Windows user tries to make the argument that Windows must be the best because a lot of people use it. And my position leaves me strategically opposed to Microsoft, as a corporation, because they have a financial interest in getting rid of people like me.
Go ahead a use whatever you feel like using, and don't feel like you have to defend your decision to me. But by the same token, don't hate me just because I choose to Think Different.
...if retroactive copyright extensions are constitutional, a retroactive copyright contraction [would] also be constitutional.
My point was that no one objects when copyright terms are extended, because the party (the public) which is "paying for it" (by losing access to those works for the term of the extension) doesn't realize that they are incurring the cost. (With the recent extensions, the people losing access would not even be born yet.) When the situation is reversed, and the party paying for it becomes the authors (or the publishing companies as their representatives) they are sure to bring up the fact that contraction is going to cost them money. Anyone who agrees that such a contraction does cost an author/publisher money should have no problem agreeing that the reverse (the extension) costs the public money.
I'll agree that if an extension is constitutional, then a contraction is just as constitutional. But one could go further to say that both the expansion and the contraction are unconstitutional, because they represent an uncompensated "taking" of private property (in one case from the public, in the other from the author) by the government. I won't make this argument; instead I raise it to show that the whole concept of treating Intellectual Property as real property has fundamental flaws which cannot be worked around.
The Court has indicated it's reluctance to deal with this issue: that was the first question; If the Bono extension was unconstitutional, then all others were, and that's way too much for even the Supreme Court to bite off and chew.
Instead, I would argue (as Jefferson did) that an Idea, once expressed, has no owner, and that it can only be treated as a property (and only has a value at all) because we have collectively chosen to pretend that it has a value; we have chosen to act as though the author can own it for a limited time and we assign the economic value to the author because of it. Should we collectively choose to no longer pretend that this illusion exists (as many P2P file swappers appear to have done) then such property (and the value associated with it) disappears as quickly as the waking from a dream. In this manner, then Disney has no claim to SteamBoat Willie other than the claim we have chosen to grant, and no protest to the contrary from Disney should be tolerated. Congress, however, appears to read things differently.
Now, how we square "than the claim we have chosen to grant" and "Congress reads things differently" and "Congress represents us" is something I haven't fathomed."
what's reasonable to us to day may be entirely unreasonable to our grandchildren's generation.
Which is the hidden heart of the problem. If we agree that 100 years is reasonable, but the "next generation" decides that 150 years (or anything greater than 100) is "more reasonable" to them, there's no problem with extending the copyright term. Right?
But if the next generation decides that 50 years (or anything less) is "more reasonable" to them, they still have to wait 100 years for the "just granted" copyrights to expire.
I am an author. The works I create today (heck, this post is an example) are covered under copyright for a term equal to my life plus 70 years. I can claim (and even if it's not true for me, other will claim) that I produced this work only under the expectation that I would have the currently granted term to benefit from this creation. If a law is passed which takes a portion of that term from me, am I not entitled to compensation for that taking?
Now think of all the "works" being published today (on and off the Internet) and then imagine trying to "buy out" even a year's worth of copyright term from evey blogger, IRC'er and USENET poster (spammers?) and you can see how the cost would be prohibitive. (Run the equation in reverse, and you find out how much of the public domain Congress gave away each time they extended the copyright term.)
We are just now waking up to the fact that current copyright law has created a situation which will take the better part of a century to correct. It was bought by our parents with their children's inheritance. They never felt the pain, but we will. We just haven't felt the pain yet.
There is an option, and even a precedent for it, but you won't like it. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) during the American Civil War which had a similar effect. Slave Owners had millions of dollars worth of what was at that time considered to be "property" taken from them with the stroke of a pen (later backed by a constitutional amendment), but many argue that could only have taken place in the context of a protracted and particularly bloody civil war civil. And in that case, it was done to free people, not just some Mickey Mouse. I don't know if the same political will can be mustered in this case over some Robert Frost poems.
If copyright law is going to be corrected at all, it may take a century or more, or it may (God forbid!) happen as the result of a great catastrophy (similar in scope to the Civil War) but I think it's safe at this point to say that none of the easy roads has panned out.
1: The company that provides your internet connection
2: Oh, I'm using AOL
An ISP (Internet Service Provider) is different than an IAP (Internet Access Provider). Email, USENET news, DNS name resolution, etc. are all examples of services which would be provided by an Internet Service Provider. The Amazon.com ecommerce site, Slashdot.org website and Battle.net are also Internet services, provided by Internet Service Providers, although since most people don't write a check to the providers of these Internet services, most people wouldn't consider them to be Internet Service Providers.
If you're in a game on Battle.net, you probably aren't also checking mail, reading news, or looking up IP addresses for web sites. The mail server, News server, DNS server, etc run by the company you purchase access through could all go belly-up, and you wouldn't notice a thing. Things like network lag, etc, are a function of who your IAP is, rather than who your ISP is, although many people purchase vital internet services like DNS name resolution, etc through the same company they purchase their access, and so consider their IAP to be "their ISP" as well.
If you access the Internet through your college campus network, and get your email off of HotMail, then your college is your IAP and your email ISP is Microsoft. If (like me) you never do anything but read slashdot from Starbucks, then Starbucks is your IAP and slashdot is your ISP.
Clear as mud, huh?
It's just too bad we can't explain this to the lamers you meet on Battle.net.
do you really want to endorse companies who install stuff like this on your computer?
There you go again, thinking it's your computer. You may have laid out the cash to buy the hardware, paid the electric bill to run it, and paid someone to maintain it, but once you turned the processor over to someone elses software, your priorities took a second place to theirs.
Who's writing the software you use? What's their motivation for doing so? And how do you know you can really trust them?
The characterists which make a "Please Pirate Me!" strategy work: (or why it doesn't work for everyone and why it didn't work for me)
You have to leverage the tying aspect. You'll never see a note on the side of a CD like "Requires nSync 3.5.1" or "Not compatible with Barry Manilow 1.7". There's a very tenuous connection relating the prople who pirate music to the sale of other music by the same publisher. But when someone installs a pirated Win2K, Microsoft knows that any other money spent on that computer will be promoting Win2k. And those who use Windows version x are likely to use version x+1 as well, even if they have to pay for it.
Computer software embodies loyalty. It doesn't work for music (or other "pure data") because those are just inactive data. When you pop a George Tennison CD into the drive, there's no Clippy popping up to say "Would you like me to reset your preferences so that you will always hear George Tennison?"
You have to own the lion's share of the market. Intrusive strategies only work if they seem to be taking you in the direction you think you already want to go most of the time. You understand your own music preferences better than some company, so letting someone else decide what music you're going to listen to just doesn't feel right. But if you were dealing with something you knew you didn't understand "Would you like to select Binary sorting or use the Dynamic tries method for array bounds checking?" most people will trust the computer (which in this case means trust the person who depends on you to purchase his software for his paycheck) to make the correct choice.
But it's kinda terrifying to note that the tactics which have made Microsoft so successful are exactly the tactics which the RIAA et al are trying to force on us. (Celeine Dion won't work in a Mac, visit our website if you want to burn an MP3, etc.)
Personally, I'd like to see the H1-B visa program eliminated, and anyone currently holding (or applying for) a H1-B upgraded to a full greencard. Anyone allowed to work in this country at all should not be restricted to just certain jobs under certain conditions. H1-B's allow an employer extra leverage over the employee; leaving a job for better pay/conditions elsewhere just isn't possible. I'd predict that once employers are deprived of this leverage, they'll start thinking twice about whether hiring a foreign worker is a financially sound thing to do.
I guess I have a different definition of the term leader. To me, a leader is the person I call when I have a problem I can't fix myself, rather than the apparently more common definition of the person whom others expect you to follow. It certainly is great when that's one and the same. By my definition, we can certainly still select our own leaders, and we should continue to do so. It might even help if we vote for them, rather than just voting for the person whom others expect you to vote for.
If we have stopped thinking for ourselves, and just assume things will be better if we make the same choices others expect us to make, then we truly are lost.
What about hooking up a geiger counter to your smoke detector. That would be quantum-level unpredictability.
Fairly decent for randomness (unless the blackhats can pummel your detector with nutrons, and skew your stream) but pittiful for bandwidth (less than 100 bits per sdecond, unless you want to start using something other than just a smoke detector as your alpha source).
If I give you all of the information from my credit card, you have (in theory) everything you would need to know to charge purchases to my account. If you're sharp, you might even be able to keep the card number and expiration date in your head.
If several challenge/response rounds are requiired to make a purchase, you would only get a subset of the information with each purchase. Even if you had long-term access to the card, and could issue all possible queries, you'd need a rather large hard disk to store the info, and a rather fast computer to perform the lookup, and you've only managed to compromise one card.
Imagine a reader which could be remotely controlled and answer challenges. A challenge might look like "Set laser angle vector to x123y456z789 by x321y654z987" and a response would be the bit pattern readout.
You stick your crystal bead into the reader to make your purchase.
The remote computer sends a series of a thousand or so challenges and compares the responses to the known set taken berfore the bead was sent out. If 95% or so of the bits in 95% of the queries are correct, it's probably the original, scratches and poorly maintained readers not withstanding.
The drawback of this (if there is one) is that the manufacturer does not get to choose what information goes in, but must instead maintain a database of expected challenge/response pairs for each bead.
On the other hand, the scratches and such may become a part of the challenge/response. If a certain scratch causes a 0 bit where a 1 was originally the expected response, and the 0 is consistent, then you update your database to now expect a 0 response instead. (It opens up the theorhetical possibility of "training" the C/R database to accept two different beads as identical.
IIRC, something similar to this (very low tech) was used to create tamper-evident seals on things like the boxes guarding equipment monitoring nuclear sites, etc.
I think the process involved mixing a bunch of little tinfoil sparkles into a clear epoxy resin, applying the resulting glue as a seal, and photographing it from several angles. Simple to create, yet darn near impossible to duplicate a second time. If the blob is missing or different, something fishy is going on.
Spot-On! More to the point, don't let Microsoft use this as a wedge to legitimacy. They'd love to have the whole world believe that the settlement they offered has already been accepted, that they are following it voluntarily, and that anywhere they've inadvertently screwed up they'll soon fix, which will put them fully back in compliance with the terms of the settlement.
It's not a settlement, it's a proposed settlement, so any action they've chosen to take or not take has exactly nothing to do with whether they can be expected to play by the rules from this point on out.
Slashdot Mirror
In one sense, every communication between two systems is peer-to-peer, including everything from getting email to browsing the web. Unless you want to call one of the systems a "server", and then I guess it's okay.
It seems to me that a peer-to-peer network exists whenever one system talks to another. Are VOIP telephones part of a p2p net? Do I own a peer-to-peer network when I print to my printer? What if I print to the parallel port?
So, when my computer sync's my calendar with my PDA, I guess I'm doing something bad?
Hit up Google for whatever operating system and program interest you. The key phrase is "Easter Egg".
Incidentally, it's probably not the easter eggs he should be worried about, but the data integrity. I'd be interested to know if they ever fixed the 1.40737488355328 bug in Excel (See the Risks Digest for more info.)
See also: http://www.fullertonlaw.com/chapt1.htm#mechlien
If you had, oh say a million dollars worth of personal property you used in your business, and the Federal goverment tried to create a law to outlaw your ability to use that equipment, and just "take it away", you'd probably be up in arms too.
Think about it from the point of view of a typical southern plantation owner. It's clearly braindead thinking, but at the time, slaves were unquestioningly personal property, and that view was both written into law and affirmed by the Supreme Court. To the southern plantation owner, talk about "freeing the slaves" probably sounded as much like fighting words as "Napster" sounds to the RIAA today. You might think that the "wrongness" of "ownership of Intellectual property" is a no-brainer, but there are powerful people with much to lose who might take a dim view of a Supreme Court ruling which outlaws Copyright, or affirms the right of WaRez D00dz to distribute digital copies of anything they can get their hands on.
Or, do you get upset at the thought that some Senator from South Carolina wants to include DRM in every computer, and take away your right to run Linux? If so, then you have a hint of why the people in the Sucessionist states thought they had something meaningful to give their lives for. They were not only defending their personal property from an "illegal taking" but defending their State(s) from an invasion by the military forces of foreign States.
(Before the Americal Civil War, the phrase "United States of America" was considered to be plural, as in "The United States are..." It was not until after the Civil War that it took on a common meaning as a singular, as in "The United Stated is...". )
Or, for those readers who don't consider themselves to be "Westerners", how would you react if some World Government declared that an integral part of your culture (your language, your religion, your disrespect for Steamboat Willie, etc) were against their interests and sent troops to invade and set you right? Get the picture?
Some would go so far as to argue that Lincoln was actually losing the war for as long as he maintained it to be about Federal rights over States Rights, and that the only way he won was to change the context of the war into one against slavery. There's at least room to debate that if the Union Army has lost at Gettysburg, things in North America would be very different today.
So, personally, I wouldn't discount the chances of a movement with the moral high ground suceeding in reclaiming a state's rights over federal rights. Such a movement would likely provide benefits to all of the other states, (including ones with nothing to do with this movement) and so would likely garner support from other states as well. The key, of course, would be to maintain the moral high ground, and to have a willingness to fight for what they believe in. This would demand that all actions be taken within the constraints of law, but there's actually plenty of wiggle room there.
Are you concerned about things like Microsoft licensing, DRM in your computer, and free music? Really? Do you care enough about it to sleep out in a field this winter at Bull Run without a blanket, and eat worms (or go hungry, if you can't find any)? How about a smaller sacrifice: give up DSL for dial-up? No? Neither did the Union army, and look what happened to them.
More likely:
Microsoft decides they need an ad campaign like Apple has to show people are switching the other way too. Calls marteters and requests they find someone who has switched and create an ad highlighting them.
Marketers look for such a person and either decide the search is too tough, or that the prospective candidates are not suitable for one reason or another. Begins to question what it takes to be a "switcher" and finds a suitably cooperative candidated in their own office.
(By one definition, I guess you could say I'm a switcher, too. When my employeer "outlawed" Macs years ago, I eventually had a PC dropped onto my desk, with the "corporate standard" Windows pre-installed to the hard disk. For all I know it's still there, too. I'm not sure since I haven't booted to that partition since the day I installed Linux. I probably should have overwritten it; but the company only demands that Windows be installed, they don't dictate how often it gets a time slice on the processor.)
It does leave one to wonder what the specific motivation was. Did they really have that hard of a time finding someone who switched from Mac to Windows? Or were there plenty of candidates, but all with some reservations, or feeling that their switch was one of duress? Or were the marketers just too lazy to look? Or were they too caught up in their own hype that they didn't realize anyone would question the story they made up? Or maybe (like Campbells and their infamous marbles trick) they just thought, "Hey this is marketing, it just has to sell, it doesn't have to reflect reality..."
I guess maybe Microsoft has this just about right; these are the kind of people you want on your team, you just don't want to get caught with these kind of people on your team.
Bah!. Do they issue pasports....
Er... Do they impose taxes.....
Um... Do they claim a country-level domain similar to .us, .com, .org, or .net...
bbbbbb..... Have they announced plans to improve their homeland security....
Errr... Do they thumb their nose at the US govermant and claim to be beyond the reach of US laws....
Ummm....Ummm.....a flag! Do they have a Flag? Yeah, that's it! They can't be a goverment without a flag. Whew. I knew there was something.
- Full graphical user interface.
- complete on-board peer-to-peer TCP/IP networking.
- included file server capability
in a hardware/operating system package which ran well on 512 k of RAM and an 8MHz processor.
More innovation has come out of Apple, Inc in the last 25 years than the Wintel side has produced since it's inception, regardless of market size.
There's another possibility; perhaps they are neither inferior to you, nor superior to you, but rather just different from you.
With two decades of programming experience I don't consider myself to be any sort of a "clueless newbie". I've worked on (and programmed for) everything from embedded controllers to goverment mainframe supercomputers. I don't have a problem understanding technology, but every time I work on an MS-Windows based system I have the same kinds of problems that some other people (apparently not you) describe having, regarding crashing apps, BSOD's, etc. I've reached the conclusion that Windows is fine for most of the people in the country, but that most of the people in the country just don't think like I do. I can't get my head around Windows; it seems to be designed for different kind of thinker. (Not that I'm complaining, I like being one of the minority who can think like I do.)
And I have no quarrel with anyone who chooses to use Windows (although I encourage them to try other operating systems just to make sure they know about all the alternatives so they can pick the best one for themselves) but I will complain whenever and Windows user tries to make the argument that Windows must be the best because a lot of people use it. And my position leaves me strategically opposed to Microsoft, as a corporation, because they have a financial interest in getting rid of people like me.
Go ahead a use whatever you feel like using, and don't feel like you have to defend your decision to me. But by the same token, don't hate me just because I choose to Think Different.
I saw an ad on TV last night for some PC maker who's got some sort of PC with a long neck and a flat panel, just like an Apple and comparing the two.
The funny thing was, they never showed the PC turned on. I guess they had to do something to keep it from crashing during the filming of the ad.
My point was that no one objects when copyright terms are extended, because the party (the public) which is "paying for it" (by losing access to those works for the term of the extension) doesn't realize that they are incurring the cost. (With the recent extensions, the people losing access would not even be born yet.) When the situation is reversed, and the party paying for it becomes the authors (or the publishing companies as their representatives) they are sure to bring up the fact that contraction is going to cost them money. Anyone who agrees that such a contraction does cost an author/publisher money should have no problem agreeing that the reverse (the extension) costs the public money.
I'll agree that if an extension is constitutional, then a contraction is just as constitutional. But one could go further to say that both the expansion and the contraction are unconstitutional, because they represent an uncompensated "taking" of private property (in one case from the public, in the other from the author) by the government. I won't make this argument; instead I raise it to show that the whole concept of treating Intellectual Property as real property has fundamental flaws which cannot be worked around.
The Court has indicated it's reluctance to deal with this issue: that was the first question; If the Bono extension was unconstitutional, then all others were, and that's way too much for even the Supreme Court to bite off and chew.
Instead, I would argue (as Jefferson did) that an Idea, once expressed, has no owner, and that it can only be treated as a property (and only has a value at all) because we have collectively chosen to pretend that it has a value; we have chosen to act as though the author can own it for a limited time and we assign the economic value to the author because of it. Should we collectively choose to no longer pretend that this illusion exists (as many P2P file swappers appear to have done) then such property (and the value associated with it) disappears as quickly as the waking from a dream. In this manner, then Disney has no claim to SteamBoat Willie other than the claim we have chosen to grant, and no protest to the contrary from Disney should be tolerated. Congress, however, appears to read things differently.
Now, how we square "than the claim we have chosen to grant" and "Congress reads things differently" and "Congress represents us" is something I haven't fathomed."
Which is the hidden heart of the problem. If we agree that 100 years is reasonable, but the "next generation" decides that 150 years (or anything greater than 100) is "more reasonable" to them, there's no problem with extending the copyright term. Right?
But if the next generation decides that 50 years (or anything less) is "more reasonable" to them, they still have to wait 100 years for the "just granted" copyrights to expire.
I am an author. The works I create today (heck, this post is an example) are covered under copyright for a term equal to my life plus 70 years. I can claim (and even if it's not true for me, other will claim) that I produced this work only under the expectation that I would have the currently granted term to benefit from this creation. If a law is passed which takes a portion of that term from me, am I not entitled to compensation for that taking?
Now think of all the "works" being published today (on and off the Internet) and then imagine trying to "buy out" even a year's worth of copyright term from evey blogger, IRC'er and USENET poster (spammers?) and you can see how the cost would be prohibitive. (Run the equation in reverse, and you find out how much of the public domain Congress gave away each time they extended the copyright term.)
We are just now waking up to the fact that current copyright law has created a situation which will take the better part of a century to correct. It was bought by our parents with their children's inheritance. They never felt the pain, but we will. We just haven't felt the pain yet.
There is an option, and even a precedent for it, but you won't like it. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) during the American Civil War which had a similar effect. Slave Owners had millions of dollars worth of what was at that time considered to be "property" taken from them with the stroke of a pen (later backed by a constitutional amendment), but many argue that could only have taken place in the context of a protracted and particularly bloody civil war civil. And in that case, it was done to free people, not just some Mickey Mouse. I don't know if the same political will can be mustered in this case over some Robert Frost poems.
If copyright law is going to be corrected at all, it may take a century or more, or it may (God forbid!) happen as the result of a great catastrophy (similar in scope to the Civil War) but I think it's safe at this point to say that none of the easy roads has panned out.
An ISP (Internet Service Provider) is different than an IAP (Internet Access Provider). Email, USENET news, DNS name resolution, etc. are all examples of services which would be provided by an Internet Service Provider. The Amazon.com ecommerce site, Slashdot.org website and Battle.net are also Internet services, provided by Internet Service Providers, although since most people don't write a check to the providers of these Internet services, most people wouldn't consider them to be Internet Service Providers.
If you're in a game on Battle.net, you probably aren't also checking mail, reading news, or looking up IP addresses for web sites. The mail server, News server, DNS server, etc run by the company you purchase access through could all go belly-up, and you wouldn't notice a thing. Things like network lag, etc, are a function of who your IAP is, rather than who your ISP is, although many people purchase vital internet services like DNS name resolution, etc through the same company they purchase their access, and so consider their IAP to be "their ISP" as well.
If you access the Internet through your college campus network, and get your email off of HotMail, then your college is your IAP and your email ISP is Microsoft. If (like me) you never do anything but read slashdot from Starbucks, then Starbucks is your IAP and slashdot is your ISP.
Clear as mud, huh?
It's just too bad we can't explain this to the lamers you meet on Battle.net.
There you go again, thinking it's your computer. You may have laid out the cash to buy the hardware, paid the electric bill to run it, and paid someone to maintain it, but once you turned the processor over to someone elses software, your priorities took a second place to theirs.
Who's writing the software you use? What's their motivation for doing so? And how do you know you can really trust them?
You have to leverage the tying aspect. You'll never see a note on the side of a CD like "Requires nSync 3.5.1" or "Not compatible with Barry Manilow 1.7". There's a very tenuous connection relating the prople who pirate music to the sale of other music by the same publisher. But when someone installs a pirated Win2K, Microsoft knows that any other money spent on that computer will be promoting Win2k. And those who use Windows version x are likely to use version x+1 as well, even if they have to pay for it.
Computer software embodies loyalty. It doesn't work for music (or other "pure data") because those are just inactive data. When you pop a George Tennison CD into the drive, there's no Clippy popping up to say "Would you like me to reset your preferences so that you will always hear George Tennison?"
You have to own the lion's share of the market. Intrusive strategies only work if they seem to be taking you in the direction you think you already want to go most of the time. You understand your own music preferences better than some company, so letting someone else decide what music you're going to listen to just doesn't feel right. But if you were dealing with something you knew you didn't understand "Would you like to select Binary sorting or use the Dynamic tries method for array bounds checking?" most people will trust the computer (which in this case means trust the person who depends on you to purchase his software for his paycheck) to make the correct choice.
But it's kinda terrifying to note that the tactics which have made Microsoft so successful are exactly the tactics which the RIAA et al are trying to force on us. (Celeine Dion won't work in a Mac, visit our website if you want to burn an MP3, etc.)
<OPINION>
Personally, I'd like to see the H1-B visa program eliminated, and anyone currently holding (or applying for) a H1-B upgraded to a full greencard. Anyone allowed to work in this country at all should not be restricted to just certain jobs under certain conditions. H1-B's allow an employer extra leverage over the employee; leaving a job for better pay/conditions elsewhere just isn't possible. I'd predict that once employers are deprived of this leverage, they'll start thinking twice about whether hiring a foreign worker is a financially sound thing to do.
</OPINION>
Am I off my rocker?
I guess I have a different definition of the term leader. To me, a leader is the person I call when I have a problem I can't fix myself, rather than the apparently more common definition of the person whom others expect you to follow. It certainly is great when that's one and the same. By my definition, we can certainly still select our own leaders, and we should continue to do so. It might even help if we vote for them, rather than just voting for the person whom others expect you to vote for.
If we have stopped thinking for ourselves, and just assume things will be better if we make the same choices others expect us to make, then we truly are lost.
Respectfully, Sir, yes you do. But don't fret. It's your government. You should feel blessed in that you can change it if you want to.
Fairly decent for randomness (unless the blackhats can pummel your detector with nutrons, and skew your stream) but pittiful for bandwidth (less than 100 bits per sdecond, unless you want to start using something other than just a smoke detector as your alpha source).
If several challenge/response rounds are requiired to make a purchase, you would only get a subset of the information with each purchase. Even if you had long-term access to the card, and could issue all possible queries, you'd need a rather large hard disk to store the info, and a rather fast computer to perform the lookup, and you've only managed to compromise one card.
You stick your crystal bead into the reader to make your purchase.
The remote computer sends a series of a thousand or so challenges and compares the responses to the known set taken berfore the bead was sent out. If 95% or so of the bits in 95% of the queries are correct, it's probably the original, scratches and poorly maintained readers not withstanding.
The drawback of this (if there is one) is that the manufacturer does not get to choose what information goes in, but must instead maintain a database of expected challenge/response pairs for each bead.
On the other hand, the scratches and such may become a part of the challenge/response. If a certain scratch causes a 0 bit where a 1 was originally the expected response, and the 0 is consistent, then you update your database to now expect a 0 response instead. (It opens up the theorhetical possibility of "training" the C/R database to accept two different beads as identical.
Unless they shine several lasers on several different spots at different times in quick succession.
I think the process involved mixing a bunch of little tinfoil sparkles into a clear epoxy resin, applying the resulting glue as a seal, and photographing it from several angles. Simple to create, yet darn near impossible to duplicate a second time. If the blob is missing or different, something fishy is going on.
Beautiful. That's .sig material there.
It's not a settlement, it's a proposed settlement, so any action they've chosen to take or not take has exactly nothing to do with whether they can be expected to play by the rules from this point on out.