Your "control" is an illusion, and the potential to lose your data is just as real. In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
This addresses the issue of data loss. There are plenty of other issues. Including who can look at the data and/or alter it. What happens to data which should have been deleted. Even exactly where the data is. Just using such a service can mean you have broken data protection/export laws e.g. if you are in the EU and your data ends up in North America.
In your case you may "think" you're in control, when in fact your last backup copied over the same corrupted data, your archive DVD is now unreadable, and your last full offsite backup is two months old.
On the other hand you know where your data and backups actually are. Thus arn't risking being fined to bankruptcy or even finding out that your data is in the middle of a war zone...
In fact, companies would still use their Tandys from back in the day if it still did what they need it to do. Companies only care about the bottom line, and upgrading costs money. If the current solution already does the job, then there's no need to upgrade.
It could also be the fact that any new machines bought to replace dead/broken ones came pre-installed with XP. As more of these cheap machines died or locked up due to virus attacks, as they frequently do, XP gained seats.
How many enterprise environments bother at all with whatever might come pre-loaded on machines? As opposed to using some kind of prebuilt (and tweaked) imaging process...
Basically, the real 'motivation' for not supporting this kind of stuff is usually corporate inertia and bureaucracy. 99% of the time there is no IP really to protect. However, 'the system' slaps an NDA on everything by default and although field application engineers and tech. marketing are be assigned to the visible customers theres no-one officially tasked with supporting sales-via-FOSS. Result: even if there's goodwill (which is surprisingly often) nothing happens.
It's also going to cost real money to find out about this non-existent IP...
I think it is noticeable that the businesses that responded effectively in the case of the Wireless drivers were the smaller, hungrier, more genuinely market/customer driven operations.
Probably also lacking the corporate culture of "make everything proprietary" in the first place.
Once the tools are given to a gov't agency, they will be abused, and used to target other groups that weren't the original objective.
They may not even be used that much to target the "original objective". e.g. how often do you see "animal right" and "anti-abortion" people facing terrorist charges?
9/11 was not a person murdering another person, you frame this as if it were a typical crime we should pursue through our court system. When in reality it was an extremely large entity attacking our country, not just singular persons.
Previous terrorist attacks have been handled through criminal courts. Including those in the US, including those involving paramilitary terrorists.
The conspiracy nuts are worse than right-wing christian zealots and left-wing socialist morons put together.
When it comes to "911" the term "conspiracy nuts" has to include the entire US Government. Given that the "Bin Laden did it" is a rather complex conspiracy theory with very little supporting evidence.
It's an old trick to release news on a Friday night, when less people are going to see it. Also, any day in which a major news story (superbowl, oscar night, day after elections, etc.) is scheduled -- those are the days to read the newspaper carefully-- those are days that are typically used to obscure potentially damaging news.
There's also releasing potentially politically embarrasing stories on the same day as a major disaster.
In a 24-hour news cycle it's much harder to hide bad news from the public, but there are still golden times when the government and others are virtually guaranteed no one will be paying attention. Kudos for bringing this story to light.
It isn't so much 24 hour news as "alternative media" some of which specifically looks for stories downplayed or ignored by the "mainstream".
I read once that laws in the US require cellular carriers to calculate handset position using the distance between the handset and three cellular base stations. I think the intention is to give positional information to emergency services.
More recently phones in the US have been required to incorporate a GPS receiver, possibly because such triangulation does not always work too well (especially with some US specific cellular systems). This information is available to the network, even if it is not accessible to the phone's user.
So all that's standing between innocent children and the depraved preying on them is their parents ability to choose a strong password (or worse, the ability of the phone companies to do the same!)
As well as anyone else able to access this data. How well is the phone company going to vet their employees?
For once, won't someone please think of the children and put a halt to these privacy invading schemes that are massively dangerous to the very children they're marketed to protect?
Or even attempt a reasonable cost/benefit analysis.
But there is one remedy however faulted. It is possible to have a corporate charter revoked.
This is closer to capital punishment than a castodial sentence.
In SCO's case what this woud mean is that all of SCO's assets would be auctioned off then the procedes would be used to settle outstanding debts, much like in bankrupcy.
Presumably with the same "pecking order" of creditors.
I didn't buy ANY DVD's until there was a way to crack it. I knew all along that I wanted to have a media server PC that could store and manage my videos like I could with music.
Thus being able to choose what you wanted to watch from your collection. Without first having to find the right piece of media. (Which would also tend to mean having to arrange the media in such a way that all the titles were visible and in some logical order.)
The higher resolution, while nice, is not worth the restrictions.
How much difference is the extra resolution really going to make to the average person anyway?
However, I think piracy is an important part of a free market: clearly there is a demand for the product, you're just not providing the supply at an optimal price point.
As well as simply not providing it at all. e.g. the market for a TV programme or movie in English is "Planet Earth". As opposed to "The US then the UK (or vice versa) several months later and Australia if they are lucky..."
Whether the source is digital or analog doesn't matter, it's the same content. You may get a sharper and clearer view of Will and Grace on a digital feed, but it's still Will and Grace - and if the original recording was analog, digital transmission can't improve it. You're limited by the quality of the original. The value in a digital signal is a lack of degradation, but if you can't save it and store it, that's hardly worth anything at all.
You also need to remember that one of the most sophisticated pieces of signal processing is in the viewer's brain. Which has to cope with things like blinking and the eyes having a blind spot.
People are going to avoid Vista and are going to be very pissed as M$ "updates" remove functionality from XP, which will never be allowed to view "premium" content.
Microsoft can just do what they did previously, cut off the supply of XP to OEMs
The only winners will be content providers that avoid the whole mess. Movie and music publishers who provide DRM free media are going make a lot of money while the majors continue to insult and sue their shrinking fan base.
Such a situation is also likely to create a "black market" for the provision of the "major's" content in DRM free formats. People are even likely to accept "degraded content" if it's not of the "such your CPU power to degrade it" variety. e.g. smaller files/fits on a single layer DVD/etc. What is probably driving a fair amount of "sharing" now isn't "quality"/"high definition"/etc so much as accessibility. The only effective method here would be to abandon the regional model of distribution of TV, movies and music.
The only conceivable benefit of DRM is horribly indirect, that being that supposedly this will encourage production and availability of more content, a highly questionable notion.
Is there any evidence that recent changes to copyright laws have had any such effect?
We know the value of DRM in stopping piracy is pretty close to 0, because it simply can't work, and the article mentioned that.
It's possible that using DRM will actually increase piracy if the result is that "pirate versions" end up as more desirable to end users.
Whereas the costs of Vista's DRM are right up front: audio and video WILL BE DEGRADED, or NOT WORK AT ALL.
This being content which someone has actually paid. As compared with possibly degraded/not working (free) pirated content...
And that to make these things not work, an unavoidable consequence is that systems will be more expensive and less reliable.
It's possible that this "degrading" and encryption may require more computational resources than handling the audio and video codecs.
It's quite difficult and expensive enough to maintain computers without a wholly gratuitous additional source of problems being present.
Not only does this require lots of additional software (hence bugs) this software is operating at a very privileged level of the OS. Rather undermining any attempt Microsoft might have made to secure applications.
Except pleading insanity doesn't get you off; it gets you locked up in mental hospital for the rest of your life, or at least until they decide you're no longer crazy and a danger to others.
Which may be a longer sentence than regular imprisonment... There's also an argument that a verdict of "guilty, but insane" might be more appropriate in some cases.
I'm not sure what the corporate equivalent of locking you up in a loonie bin would be.
There probably isn't one, given that there isn't an equivalent of "the slammer"...
Corporations don't do mad things. People do mad things. The people doing the mad things here are Darl McBride, the other members of the board of directors and their lawyers.
IIRC it is very much the case that "corporate people", especially with the laws which currently exist surrounding their behaviour would definitly qualify as "mad people".
If a person keeps filing lawsuits demanding that the CIA and the Pope turn off the mind control beams focused on his apartment, a judge will eventually tell him "Go away and NEVER COME BACK with this nonsense".
Assuming said person did not wind up in a "nut house".
If corporations are "legal persons", why aren't they bound by the same standard?
When it comes to the law "corporate people" are rarely treated the same as real people. Especially when it comes to criminal law. There are no jails for "corporate people", "juries of peers" or even the requirement that they must do nothing other than attend a court.
And remember--this is the PUBLIC engaging in a type of surveillance on the PUBLIC. For the tinfoil hats out there, it's not just the government's watchful eye you have to be careful around; it's that video-capable cellphone in the hands of the seemingly innocent rider sitting across from you on the train, too.
The government does tend to get upset when it's the public filming the government. Or their agents such as the police...
So did quite a lot of things which no longer exist...
2. it exists for good reason (we couldn't have the GPL without it)
The GPL would work perfectly fine with copyright radically different from the status quo. e.g. "Ten years (3,652 days) from first publication."
3. creators have the right to control the distribution of their works.
In many cases the copyright holder is not the actual creator. The reason for this position is ment to be the pragmatic "this will promote creation and distribution". So it would be a good first step to find out if it does...
Usually that results in the government royally screwing things up and making the matters worse. Think of all the kids and small women killed in cars equipped with government-mandated airbags before people knew they were that dangerous.
IIRC this is something specific to the US. Because there is no legal requirement to wear a seatbelt the airbags need to be able to cope with an unrestrained adult. Whereas in most parts of the world they are additional to rather than a replacement for a seatbelt.
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Your "control" is an illusion, and the potential to lose your data is just as real. In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
This addresses the issue of data loss. There are plenty of other issues. Including who can look at the data and/or alter it. What happens to data which should have been deleted. Even exactly where the data is. Just using such a service can mean you have broken data protection/export laws e.g. if you are in the EU and your data ends up in North America.
In your case you may "think" you're in control, when in fact your last backup copied over the same corrupted data, your archive DVD is now unreadable, and your last full offsite backup is two months old.
On the other hand you know where your data and backups actually are. Thus arn't risking being fined to bankruptcy or even finding out that your data is in the middle of a war zone...
In fact, companies would still use their Tandys from back in the day if it still did what they need it to do. Companies only care about the bottom line, and upgrading costs money. If the current solution already does the job, then there's no need to upgrade.
A lot of it in consequential costs.
It could also be the fact that any new machines bought to replace dead/broken ones came pre-installed with XP. As more of these cheap machines died or locked up due to virus attacks, as they frequently do, XP gained seats.
How many enterprise environments bother at all with whatever might come pre-loaded on machines? As opposed to using some kind of prebuilt (and tweaked) imaging process...
That and I'm not sure people want to have to retrain their staff to use the "ribbons" of Office 2007 that Bill is so excited about.
Probably easier to convert them to Star/Open Office...
Basically, the real 'motivation' for not supporting this kind of stuff is usually corporate inertia and bureaucracy. 99% of the time there is no IP really to protect. However, 'the system' slaps an NDA on everything by default and although field application engineers and tech. marketing are be assigned to the visible customers theres no-one officially tasked with supporting sales-via-FOSS. Result: even if there's goodwill (which is surprisingly often) nothing happens.
It's also going to cost real money to find out about this non-existent IP...
I think it is noticeable that the businesses that responded effectively in the case of the Wireless drivers were the smaller, hungrier, more genuinely market/customer driven operations.
Probably also lacking the corporate culture of "make everything proprietary" in the first place.
I bet there's a *huge* difference between dropping the notebook flat and dropping it on a corner.
The original claim didn't specify "flat". Anyway what's the most likely way for a machine to get dropped...
Once the tools are given to a gov't agency, they will be abused, and used to target other groups that weren't the original objective.
They may not even be used that much to target the "original objective". e.g. how often do you see "animal right" and "anti-abortion" people facing terrorist charges?
9/11 was not a person murdering another person, you frame this as if it were a typical crime we should pursue through our court system. When in reality it was an extremely large entity attacking our country, not just singular persons.
Previous terrorist attacks have been handled through criminal courts. Including those in the US, including those involving paramilitary terrorists.
The conspiracy nuts are worse than right-wing christian zealots and left-wing socialist morons put together.
When it comes to "911" the term "conspiracy nuts" has to include the entire US Government. Given that the "Bin Laden did it" is a rather complex conspiracy theory with very little supporting evidence.
In the new world order, everybody is a terror suspect until proven otherwise.
Actually there are classes of people who do not have to be proven otherwise. e.g. those who pass and enforce laws about terrorist suspects.
It's an old trick to release news on a Friday night, when less people are going to see it. Also, any day in which a major news story (superbowl, oscar night, day after elections, etc.) is scheduled -- those are the days to read the newspaper carefully-- those are days that are typically used to obscure potentially damaging news.
There's also releasing potentially politically embarrasing stories on the same day as a major disaster.
In a 24-hour news cycle it's much harder to hide bad news from the public, but there are still golden times when the government and others are virtually guaranteed no one will be paying attention. Kudos for bringing this story to light.
It isn't so much 24 hour news as "alternative media" some of which specifically looks for stories downplayed or ignored by the "mainstream".
I read once that laws in the US require cellular carriers to calculate handset position using the distance between the handset and three cellular base stations. I think the intention is to give positional information to emergency services.
More recently phones in the US have been required to incorporate a GPS receiver, possibly because such triangulation does not always work too well (especially with some US specific cellular systems). This information is available to the network, even if it is not accessible to the phone's user.
So all that's standing between innocent children and the depraved preying on them is their parents ability to choose a strong password (or worse, the ability of the phone companies to do the same!)
As well as anyone else able to access this data. How well is the phone company going to vet their employees?
For once, won't someone please think of the children and put a halt to these privacy invading schemes that are massively dangerous to the very children they're marketed to protect?
Or even attempt a reasonable cost/benefit analysis.
But there is one remedy however faulted. It is possible to have a corporate charter revoked.
This is closer to capital punishment than a castodial sentence.
In SCO's case what this woud mean is that all of SCO's assets would be auctioned off then the procedes would be used to settle outstanding debts, much like in bankrupcy.
Presumably with the same "pecking order" of creditors.
I didn't buy ANY DVD's until there was a way to crack it. I knew all along that I wanted to have a media server PC that could store and manage my videos like I could with music.
Thus being able to choose what you wanted to watch from your collection. Without first having to find the right piece of media. (Which would also tend to mean having to arrange the media in such a way that all the titles were visible and in some logical order.)
The higher resolution, while nice, is not worth the restrictions.
How much difference is the extra resolution really going to make to the average person anyway?
However, I think piracy is an important part of a free market: clearly there is a demand for the product, you're just not providing the supply at an optimal price point.
As well as simply not providing it at all. e.g. the market for a TV programme or movie in English is "Planet Earth". As opposed to "The US then the UK (or vice versa) several months later and Australia if they are lucky..."
Whether the source is digital or analog doesn't matter, it's the same content. You may get a sharper and clearer view of Will and Grace on a digital feed, but it's still Will and Grace - and if the original recording was analog, digital transmission can't improve it. You're limited by the quality of the original. The value in a digital signal is a lack of degradation, but if you can't save it and store it, that's hardly worth anything at all.
You also need to remember that one of the most sophisticated pieces of signal processing is in the viewer's brain. Which has to cope with things like blinking and the eyes having a blind spot.
People are going to avoid Vista and are going to be very pissed as M$ "updates" remove functionality from XP, which will never be allowed to view "premium" content.
Microsoft can just do what they did previously, cut off the supply of XP to OEMs
The only winners will be content providers that avoid the whole mess. Movie and music publishers who provide DRM free media are going make a lot of money while the majors continue to insult and sue their shrinking fan base.
Such a situation is also likely to create a "black market" for the provision of the "major's" content in DRM free formats. People are even likely to accept "degraded content" if it's not of the "such your CPU power to degrade it" variety. e.g. smaller files/fits on a single layer DVD/etc.
What is probably driving a fair amount of "sharing" now isn't "quality"/"high definition"/etc so much as accessibility. The only effective method here would be to abandon the regional model of distribution of TV, movies and music.
The only conceivable benefit of DRM is horribly indirect, that being that supposedly this will encourage production and availability of more content, a highly questionable notion.
Is there any evidence that recent changes to copyright laws have had any such effect?
We know the value of DRM in stopping piracy is pretty close to 0, because it simply can't work, and the article mentioned that.
It's possible that using DRM will actually increase piracy if the result is that "pirate versions" end up as more desirable to end users.
Whereas the costs of Vista's DRM are right up front: audio and video WILL BE DEGRADED, or NOT WORK AT ALL.
This being content which someone has actually paid. As compared with possibly degraded/not working (free) pirated content...
And that to make these things not work, an unavoidable consequence is that systems will be more expensive and less reliable.
It's possible that this "degrading" and encryption may require more computational resources than handling the audio and video codecs.
It's quite difficult and expensive enough to maintain computers without a wholly gratuitous additional source of problems being present.
Not only does this require lots of additional software (hence bugs) this software is operating at a very privileged level of the OS. Rather undermining any attempt Microsoft might have made to secure applications.
Except pleading insanity doesn't get you off; it gets you locked up in mental hospital for the rest of your life, or at least until they decide you're no longer crazy and a danger to others.
Which may be a longer sentence than regular imprisonment... There's also an argument that a verdict of "guilty, but insane" might be more appropriate in some cases.
I'm not sure what the corporate equivalent of locking you up in a loonie bin would be.
There probably isn't one, given that there isn't an equivalent of "the slammer"...
Corporations don't do mad things. People do mad things. The people doing the mad things here are Darl McBride, the other members of the board of directors and their lawyers.
IIRC it is very much the case that "corporate people", especially with the laws which currently exist surrounding their behaviour would definitly qualify as "mad people".
If a person keeps filing lawsuits demanding that the CIA and the Pope turn off the mind control beams focused on his apartment, a judge will eventually tell him "Go away and NEVER COME BACK with this nonsense".
Assuming said person did not wind up in a "nut house".
If corporations are "legal persons", why aren't they bound by the same standard?
When it comes to the law "corporate people" are rarely treated the same as real people. Especially when it comes to criminal law. There are no jails for "corporate people", "juries of peers" or even the requirement that they must do nothing other than attend a court.
And remember--this is the PUBLIC engaging in a type of surveillance on the PUBLIC. For the tinfoil hats out there, it's not just the government's watchful eye you have to be careful around; it's that video-capable cellphone in the hands of the seemingly innocent rider sitting across from you on the train, too.
The government does tend to get upset when it's the public filming the government. Or their agents such as the police...
1. copyright DOES exist
So did quite a lot of things which no longer exist...
2. it exists for good reason (we couldn't have the GPL without it)
The GPL would work perfectly fine with copyright radically different from the status quo. e.g. "Ten years (3,652 days) from first publication."
3. creators have the right to control the distribution of their works.
In many cases the copyright holder is not the actual creator. The reason for this position is ment to be the pragmatic "this will promote creation and distribution". So it would be a good first step to find out if it does...
Usually that results in the government royally screwing things up and making the matters worse. Think of all the kids and small women killed in cars equipped with government-mandated airbags before people knew they were that dangerous.
IIRC this is something specific to the US. Because there is no legal requirement to wear a seatbelt the airbags need to be able to cope with an unrestrained adult. Whereas in most parts of the world they are additional to rather than a replacement for a seatbelt.