However, I would have thought that would be standard practice in this day and age, most everything else done by major companies has some sort of cryptographic signature in this sort of context...
Though the study is pretty badly flawed, this phenomeenon will likely continue, perhaps not to exceed windows, but it is a possiblility. What is being seen here is that linux is gaining market share, and it at least perceived as valuable information to know by even Windows administrators. The main problem plaguing Windows security is quality of the administrators. Commercials give the impression that MCSE = big buks, so people with little drive or knowledge go for it for the cash. Administrators are suddenly a dime a dozen and with MCSEs all over place and limited knowledge of managers conducting employee selection, its hard to determine quality among candidates, so you get lazy or unknowledgable sysadmins. These large masses of people have been seeing Unix as a dying, historical thing and have ignored it. Now, to *these* people, Linux is a sort of renaissance to Unix computing, so they see it as possibly figuring into their job and start to take it up. Also, other computer people who want to feel elite also pick it up and start doing things without fully understanding the risks and consequences. As Apache and even OpenSSH have shown us, no software is perfect, and ultimately it is the awareness and competency of the sysadmins that determine security. And for linux the signal-to-noise ratio is getting lower...
Also, sysadmins of Unix systems especially are getting lazy, I'm guilty of that:) There haven't been many serious widespread issues for a while until recently. Now with the increased market and exposure, script kiddies and the like find linux a more appealing target, especially those who thinks linux users need to be taken down a notch or two. So all of a sudden, we have lazy or new sysadmins faced with an increasing number of attacks.
Personally, I think I'm going to start deploying gentoo more on servers. Patched versions seem to work into the portage tree most quickly, while other places tend to a bit slower, either because of QA or lack of maintainers.. I know QA is good, but to tie up *security* patches in QA too long is bad... I'll take my risks on testing a patch with a possible, yet unknown exploit than a certain, known exploit..
'Too much' competition does indeed cut profits to the bare minimum which the companies care to get away with, but so long as no company has a drastic advantage over the other and they all realize it, companies will sell below production costs most of the time. True, promotions come about that do this occasionally, but they are typically short lived. A company in a market full of competition *knows* they can't survive if they sell below production cost. They will of course cut production costs and maintenance, etc, but only as far as they can before the quality falls below the point the consumer will take. This results in a market-driven quality/price 'sweet point' after time is given to reach equilibrium.
The companies that will sell stuff at a loss are companies that are nearly monopolies in order to drive a perceived competitor out of business (or in the case of MS, to try to force its way into another market, the home entertainment market). Only when a company knows it has enough staying power to pull it off do they go beneath production (or if a bigger company is bullying them out of the market, forcing their hand...)
>... this seems like a really *secure* way of storing the data..
So you are also encrypting the data into the pyramids? Won't that just be a pain in the ass to archaelogists down the road? And we thought heiroglyphics were bad.....
Of course, it does seem like a relatively reliable storage medium, but by itself offers nothing more in terms of security:)
For a hardware company, Mac has put out a real killer OS. An underlying engine as powerful as linux with a polished GUI and more decent commercial application support as well as the ability to run most all of the open source projects out there... All of his issues are addressed by MacOSX.
For him, and the many users like him, it would be a great platform, if the price/performance ratio wasn't crap...
Personally, I would like both Linux and Mac. For all of its spit and polish, I think I would miss some things about fine tuning my system and having ultimate configurability I have in linux. If I could afford it, I would add a Mac system to my collection. I probably wouldn't bother with yellowdog (the whole reason I use linux over FreeBSD is thanks to some oddball hardware and applications that are linux/x86 binaries, and wouldn't work on PPC..). If only linux had an API-compatible graphics layer, then getting a company to compile for linux mgith be easier... oh well..
Obvious troll/flamebait, but I just can't resist. Linux is a very mature core system. The UI lacks the spit and polish of OSX, but under the hood you still have a superb engine....
And as far as hardware goes, though the most popular platform is x86 (price/performance sweet spot), I've run it on Sun hardware (32 and 64-bit), alpha, powerpc, sh4 (my dreamcast rox:), and, of course, x86. It can run on many other platforms, including mips and others I'm too lazzy to look up right now:) It has run pretty well on all above platforms, now what platforms does MacOSX run on? Just PowerPC and nothing else.... MacOSX is a great OS, but don't be the pot calling the silver kettle black about platform limitations...
rpm -ql packagname (minus the extensions) lists all files owned by the package.
rpm -qf filename will tell you which, if any package, installed a particular file....
rpm -qa will list all installed packages, grep for package names to figure out if it is installed....
Quite frankly, I think their ought to be a place for these common tasks to be documentated. It is all in the man pages, but this info is in the middle of a lot of rarely used exotic options of RPM. Of course, I use portage now, but no one ever said that was as friendly as RPM, especially about preserving dependencies on uninstall:)
If a person feels that being knowledgeable about more than one platform is more than trivially complicated, I would not say that person was a guru. Maybe a good administrator of whatever platform they happen to be on, but not a guru. This goes both ways.
I personally seek to learn as much about as many platforms as possible. Being tied to a particular platform by your knowledge is not too useful. For example, I also work in a software development company where Windows is the development environment. However, when the firewall broke (hardware breakage) and the replacement part would not arrive for a week, I grabbed a retired 90 Mhz system, and wiped windows 95 off of it and put linux on it and had it doing firewall stuff in half an hour. The testing department has all sorts of platforms, from HP, to Solaris, to IRIX, to AIX, and soon linux (thanks to a recent development:) I use linux as my desktop system as I can grok it and it allows me to do administration tasks cross-platform much more conveniently and quickly, using rdesktop and vnc for windows stuff.
All platforms have their strengths, to blindly follow any particular platform without the 'complications' of other platforms is foolish. For most people on slashdot, this means the blind bashing of Windows is bad too. I know the jaying 'Jack of all trades, master of none', but the goal is to be a master of all trades, or platforms as the case may be. Especially if all you are doing is administration you can certainly afford the extra knowledge of other platforms.
But looking at the market for a new system, you can either get a high-end pc, or a mac that can't match the performance. Being someone who can easily get BSD or Linux and grok it, the appeal of OSX is really insufficient to pursuade me to fork over *more* cash for less performance. Sure it's the Unix with the most supported desktop applications, but wine doesn't run on non-x86 systems so the tradeoff made is huge.... Would you pay twice or three times as much for a car that could only go 25 MPH than a car that is somewhat less sexy but can go as fast as you want?
No, he was saying clock speeds in Intel world have increased by 2.5x and therefore 2.5x faster than then, which is also erroneous, not as bad as comparing with PowerPC. Any comparison with P4 clock speeds needs to be thrown out the window immediately, since P4 clock speed is cheating to be inflated. G4s are clock for clock faster than any x86 solution out there, but they certainly no longer keep up with current x86 offerings.
And for this they charge a high premium... Apple really needs to figure out how they are going to get out of this mess. They have some good hardware but the core piece of the platform is castrated (cpu/memory). I know their target market isn't performance freaks, but a system can get only so much slower before the niceties of the platform are outweighed by the perfomrance hit taken. I would love to get quality mac hardware with OSX running on it, but one glance at what I can get in the x86 world strongly dissuades me..
Bundled with GAIN! Seriously though, if source is truly out there, someone can easily modify and redistribute without the ad fetatures enabled. However, the vast majority of users would not bother to block it themselves or get the source and build with modification, so unless another party with good distribution channels made the modifications, they would likely stick for desktop users...
Of course all o this is presuming that such an OS would have any sort of significant market penetration. Even if a decent solution can be pieced together that can be user friendly and do what they expect, lack of 100% windows compatibility would stand in the way. Lindows as seen by a 'common user' is a cheap knock off of windows that doesn't work as well, and windows only costs a little more. For the non-enthusiast the price tag is the quality benchmark, and the price difference is too small compared with the rest of the PC price to be a cause for concern. So the audience that things like Linux appeals to tends to be more technical and not an appealing audience, as ad companies know a significant portion of the audience will never see the ads. It works for common windows apps like Kazaa and DivX PRo, as the users are not highly technical on average. If you dig and experiment, you can get the free pro version and cripple Gain without bad side effects. This is no biggie because the proportion of users who are aware of this and willin gto go through the trouble of doing this is small compared to the mindset of linux users
I actually never mentioned the wind power,but I would guess a hydro plant would have similar consequences for fish.
As to the solar power issue, I am aware of the problems for most of the earth, but perhaps technology will get to the point where we can harvest solar panels in space and get it down to earth efficiently....
I guess the only current 'clean' power without ecological side effects would be geothermal energy, but that is extraordinarily limited..
An interesting point most people never consider about pure electric cars, but I would think there are more factors here than meets the eye. (Of course I am by no means an expert, this stuff is just my logical reasoning).
The whole concept of hybrid cars that run completely on gasoline, using gasoline to charge the batteries as needed shows the inefficiency of traditional combustion engines. If there is so much energy being put out that storing it enables a battery to be charged and get beter mileage, it means the energy usage of the actual engine is more efficient. This translates to less energy being wasted/expended, so while energy would be lost in transmission to refueling stations, the energy waste on the road might more than make up for it....
Also, at a power plant, I would think principles of mass production apply here. True most are still burning something to get energy, but by processing so much at once and having more sophisticated and maintained equipment, I would think a power plant would also be more efficient at energy conversion than a single, potentially badly tuned combustion engine working on a small amount of fuel. If this is true and by itself compensated for transmission loss, then hybrids would be worse than electric cars that also operate on small amounts of fuel at a time using less maintained equipment. Also, the energy plant nearby has a rare chance of being a geothermal, hydroelectric, or solar plant, all of which are environmentally friendly. Some electric cars have solar cells to help the battery keep going too. There are a fair number of nuclear plants out there as well, which burn much less fuel, produce little atmospheric waste, but leaves the horrible side effect of radioactive waste.... Personally, I'd love energy plants to move more toward hydroelectric, geothermal, and solar with some sort of fusion and perhaps solar power collected outside the atmosphere, but those dreams are far off....
So in the end, I'm not sure what the most environmentally friendly solution is, but the problem is not as simple as you say, there are so many factors. The same amount of useful energy is always consumed, but the waste to get there varies greatly depending on the extraction method.
Haven't there been just as many studies showing the exact *opposite*? I guess it must mean that it does nothing at all in the end, since half of the reaearch shows one way, and half the other. I think it all depends on the agenda the researchs/financers start out to prove...
If I run linux, why in the world would I have to pay MS? (so long as I didn't buy from an OEM that does such pricing) We are talking about products all from the same company, not from competing companies, so I say the monopoly is a moot point for windows 2000 obsolescence. I don't like MS, but I think when every thing that upsets people evokes a response "damn Microsoft! this is all because of their monopoly" it really dilutes the argument. This sucks, but on a separate note from the monopolistic suckage
I think it is good to see SOME sort of recognition of fair use. However this stops short of really saying fair use is a 'right', it is more along the lines of not kicking the ass of people just trying to do fair use stuff. What *I* want to see is some sort of penalty imposed on companies who take measures to restrict fair use in dominant standards, such as DVDs. All these so-called copy protection schemes make the right to exercise fair use a moot point, if successful one cannot exercise these rights. There are already laws in place to cover illegal copying. Of course, currently it isn't econmincally feasible to use that path as they should, so there is an issue... Chasing down the mechanisms that *could* be used for copying is wrong, as is trying to prevent the ability to copy altogether...
Step 2: post systems IP address to slashdot and say 'hack this'...... you should at least quickly see all the scripts that are all the fad right now.....
Are they 'forcing' the upgrade? Would you say the same thing if oracle for some reason stopped selling oracle 8 and your enterprise app breaks with oracle 9? Why should they be liable, especially if they continue providing support even after no longer selling the product? It's slightly different in this case as practically speaking for the majority of people the upgrade path is defined completely by MS thanks to a monopoly, but if it is an enterprise app, the organization is pretty much tied to whatever they first bought into anyway, monopoly or not....
What about fair use? If the laws could be reliably applied to copyright infringement, the legitimate need for all this Digital Rights Maiming and Copy Prevention would go away. The indirect benefit there would be fair use being protected. What I would like to see is the copyright law work two ways, one, protect IP owners from infringement, giving a means through civil courts to be compensated for violation, as it works now. An addendum I want to see is a punishment for companies going 'copyright vigilante' and implementing measures to protect copyright that have the side-effect of denying fair use rights. Fair use rights should be actively protected. Of course for the second to be fair the first half needs some beefing up to make it more economically feasible to use civil courts to punish offenders. Of course a copyright protection scheme that somehow managed to preserve fair use would still be legal and the ideal solution, but realistically there is no such scheme, or at least any such scheme that would be economically sound. But the US is a nation for and by the corporation now, sadly, so such enhancements for the people would be lobbyed out the door by big business....
Slashdot Mirror
However, I would have thought that would be standard practice in this day and age, most everything else done by major companies has some sort of cryptographic signature in this sort of context...
Though the study is pretty badly flawed, this phenomeenon will likely continue, perhaps not to exceed windows, but it is a possiblility. What is being seen here is that linux is gaining market share, and it at least perceived as valuable information to know by even Windows administrators. The main problem plaguing Windows security is quality of the administrators. Commercials give the impression that MCSE = big buks, so people with little drive or knowledge go for it for the cash. Administrators are suddenly a dime a dozen and with MCSEs all over place and limited knowledge of managers conducting employee selection, its hard to determine quality among candidates, so you get lazy or unknowledgable sysadmins. These large masses of people have been seeing Unix as a dying, historical thing and have ignored it. Now, to *these* people, Linux is a sort of renaissance to Unix computing, so they see it as possibly figuring into their job and start to take it up. Also, other computer people who want to feel elite also pick it up and start doing things without fully understanding the risks and consequences. As Apache and even OpenSSH have shown us, no software is perfect, and ultimately it is the awareness and competency of the sysadmins that determine security. And for linux the signal-to-noise ratio is getting lower...
:) There haven't been many serious widespread issues for a while until recently. Now with the increased market and exposure, script kiddies and the like find linux a more appealing target, especially those who thinks linux users need to be taken down a notch or two. So all of a sudden, we have lazy or new sysadmins faced with an increasing number of attacks.
Also, sysadmins of Unix systems especially are getting lazy, I'm guilty of that
Personally, I think I'm going to start deploying gentoo more on servers. Patched versions seem to work into the portage tree most quickly, while other places tend to a bit slower, either because of QA or lack of maintainers.. I know QA is good, but to tie up *security* patches in QA too long is bad... I'll take my risks on testing a patch with a possible, yet unknown exploit than a certain, known exploit..
Yeah, they just ship with really tight and secure IIS and Windows Media Player.....
Umm, not quite right either....
'Too much' competition does indeed cut profits to the bare minimum which the companies care to get away with, but so long as no company has a drastic advantage over the other and they all realize it, companies will sell below production costs most of the time. True, promotions come about that do this occasionally, but they are typically short lived. A company in a market full of competition *knows* they can't survive if they sell below production cost. They will of course cut production costs and maintenance, etc, but only as far as they can before the quality falls below the point the consumer will take. This results in a market-driven quality/price 'sweet point' after time is given to reach equilibrium.
The companies that will sell stuff at a loss are companies that are nearly monopolies in order to drive a perceived competitor out of business (or in the case of MS, to try to force its way into another market, the home entertainment market). Only when a company knows it has enough staying power to pull it off do they go beneath production (or if a bigger company is bullying them out of the market, forcing their hand...)
> ... this seems like a really *secure* way of storing the data..
:)
So you are also encrypting the data into the pyramids? Won't that just be a pain in the ass to archaelogists down the road? And we thought heiroglyphics were bad.....
Of course, it does seem like a relatively reliable storage medium, but by itself offers nothing more in terms of security
btw, source rpms frequently exist, and they work exactly as you describe. just look for the ones that say .src.rpm instead of .i386.rpm or whatever
For a hardware company, Mac has put out a real killer OS. An underlying engine as powerful as linux with a polished GUI and more decent commercial application support as well as the ability to run most all of the open source projects out there... All of his issues are addressed by MacOSX.
For him, and the many users like him, it would be a great platform, if the price/performance ratio wasn't crap...
Personally, I would like both Linux and Mac. For all of its spit and polish, I think I would miss some things about fine tuning my system and having ultimate configurability I have in linux. If I could afford it, I would add a Mac system to my collection. I probably wouldn't bother with yellowdog (the whole reason I use linux over FreeBSD is thanks to some oddball hardware and applications that are linux/x86 binaries, and wouldn't work on PPC..). If only linux had an API-compatible graphics layer, then getting a company to compile for linux mgith be easier... oh well..
Obvious troll/flamebait, but I just can't resist. Linux is a very mature core system. The UI lacks the spit and polish of OSX, but under the hood you still have a superb engine....
:), and, of course, x86. It can run on many other platforms, including mips and others I'm too lazzy to look up right now :) It has run pretty well on all above platforms, now what platforms does MacOSX run on? Just PowerPC and nothing else.... MacOSX is a great OS, but don't be the pot calling the silver kettle black about platform limitations...
And as far as hardware goes, though the most popular platform is x86 (price/performance sweet spot), I've run it on Sun hardware (32 and 64-bit), alpha, powerpc, sh4 (my dreamcast rox
rpm -ql packagname (minus the extensions) lists all files owned by the package.
:)
rpm -qf filename will tell you which, if any package, installed a particular file....
rpm -qa will list all installed packages, grep for package names to figure out if it is installed....
Quite frankly, I think their ought to be a place for these common tasks to be documentated. It is all in the man pages, but this info is in the middle of a lot of rarely used exotic options of RPM. Of course, I use portage now, but no one ever said that was as friendly as RPM, especially about preserving dependencies on uninstall
If a person feels that being knowledgeable about more than one platform is more than trivially complicated, I would not say that person was a guru. Maybe a good administrator of whatever platform they happen to be on, but not a guru. This goes both ways.
:) I use linux as my desktop system as I can grok it and it allows me to do administration tasks cross-platform much more conveniently and quickly, using rdesktop and vnc for windows stuff.
I personally seek to learn as much about as many platforms as possible. Being tied to a particular platform by your knowledge is not too useful. For example, I also work in a software development company where Windows is the development environment. However, when the firewall broke (hardware breakage) and the replacement part would not arrive for a week, I grabbed a retired 90 Mhz system, and wiped windows 95 off of it and put linux on it and had it doing firewall stuff in half an hour. The testing department has all sorts of platforms, from HP, to Solaris, to IRIX, to AIX, and soon linux (thanks to a recent development
All platforms have their strengths, to blindly follow any particular platform without the 'complications' of other platforms is foolish. For most people on slashdot, this means the blind bashing of Windows is bad too. I know the jaying 'Jack of all trades, master of none', but the goal is to be a master of all trades, or platforms as the case may be. Especially if all you are doing is administration you can certainly afford the extra knowledge of other platforms.
But looking at the market for a new system, you can either get a high-end pc, or a mac that can't match the performance. Being someone who can easily get BSD or Linux and grok it, the appeal of OSX is really insufficient to pursuade me to fork over *more* cash for less performance. Sure it's the Unix with the most supported desktop applications, but wine doesn't run on non-x86 systems so the tradeoff made is huge.... Would you pay twice or three times as much for a car that could only go 25 MPH than a car that is somewhat less sexy but can go as fast as you want?
No, he was saying clock speeds in Intel world have increased by 2.5x and therefore 2.5x faster than then, which is also erroneous, not as bad as comparing with PowerPC. Any comparison with P4 clock speeds needs to be thrown out the window immediately, since P4 clock speed is cheating to be inflated. G4s are clock for clock faster than any x86 solution out there, but they certainly no longer keep up with current x86 offerings.
And for this they charge a high premium... Apple really needs to figure out how they are going to get out of this mess. They have some good hardware but the core piece of the platform is castrated (cpu/memory). I know their target market isn't performance freaks, but a system can get only so much slower before the niceties of the platform are outweighed by the perfomrance hit taken. I would love to get quality mac hardware with OSX running on it, but one glance at what I can get in the x86 world strongly dissuades me..
Bundled with GAIN! Seriously though, if source is truly out there, someone can easily modify and redistribute without the ad fetatures enabled. However, the vast majority of users would not bother to block it themselves or get the source and build with modification, so unless another party with good distribution channels made the modifications, they would likely stick for desktop users...
Of course all o this is presuming that such an OS would have any sort of significant market penetration. Even if a decent solution can be pieced together that can be user friendly and do what they expect, lack of 100% windows compatibility would stand in the way. Lindows as seen by a 'common user' is a cheap knock off of windows that doesn't work as well, and windows only costs a little more. For the non-enthusiast the price tag is the quality benchmark, and the price difference is too small compared with the rest of the PC price to be a cause for concern. So the audience that things like Linux appeals to tends to be more technical and not an appealing audience, as ad companies know a significant portion of the audience will never see the ads. It works for common windows apps like Kazaa and DivX PRo, as the users are not highly technical on average. If you dig and experiment, you can get the free pro version and cripple Gain without bad side effects. This is no biggie because the proportion of users who are aware of this and willin gto go through the trouble of doing this is small compared to the mindset of linux users
I actually never mentioned the wind power,but I would guess a hydro plant would have similar consequences for fish.
As to the solar power issue, I am aware of the problems for most of the earth, but perhaps technology will get to the point where we can harvest solar panels in space and get it down to earth efficiently....
I guess the only current 'clean' power without ecological side effects would be geothermal energy, but that is extraordinarily limited..
An interesting point most people never consider about pure electric cars, but I would think there are more factors here than meets the eye. (Of course I am by no means an expert, this stuff is just my logical reasoning).
The whole concept of hybrid cars that run completely on gasoline, using gasoline to charge the batteries as needed shows the inefficiency of traditional combustion engines. If there is so much energy being put out that storing it enables a battery to be charged and get beter mileage, it means the energy usage of the actual engine is more efficient. This translates to less energy being wasted/expended, so while energy would be lost in transmission to refueling stations, the energy waste on the road might more than make up for it....
Also, at a power plant, I would think principles of mass production apply here. True most are still burning something to get energy, but by processing so much at once and having more sophisticated and maintained equipment, I would think a power plant would also be more efficient at energy conversion than a single, potentially badly tuned combustion engine working on a small amount of fuel. If this is true and by itself compensated for transmission loss, then hybrids would be worse than electric cars that also operate on small amounts of fuel at a time using less maintained equipment. Also, the energy plant nearby has a rare chance of being a geothermal, hydroelectric, or solar plant, all of which are environmentally friendly. Some electric cars have solar cells to help the battery keep going too. There are a fair number of nuclear plants out there as well, which burn much less fuel, produce little atmospheric waste, but leaves the horrible side effect of radioactive waste.... Personally, I'd love energy plants to move more toward hydroelectric, geothermal, and solar with some sort of fusion and perhaps solar power collected outside the atmosphere, but those dreams are far off....
So in the end, I'm not sure what the most environmentally friendly solution is, but the problem is not as simple as you say, there are so many factors. The same amount of useful energy is always consumed, but the waste to get there varies greatly depending on the extraction method.
but can it make my coffee!.... oh wait :)
Oh, I see, so it is kinda like whether Disney/MPAA is evil or not...
Haven't there been just as many studies showing the exact *opposite*? I guess it must mean that it does nothing at all in the end, since half of the reaearch shows one way, and half the other. I think it all depends on the agenda the researchs/financers start out to prove...
But playback is not the only issue, what about copying for backup?
If I run linux, why in the world would I have to pay MS? (so long as I didn't buy from an OEM that does such pricing) We are talking about products all from the same company, not from competing companies, so I say the monopoly is a moot point for windows 2000 obsolescence. I don't like MS, but I think when every thing that upsets people evokes a response "damn Microsoft! this is all because of their monopoly" it really dilutes the argument. This sucks, but on a separate note from the monopolistic suckage
I think it is good to see SOME sort of recognition of fair use. However this stops short of really saying fair use is a 'right', it is more along the lines of not kicking the ass of people just trying to do fair use stuff. What *I* want to see is some sort of penalty imposed on companies who take measures to restrict fair use in dominant standards, such as DVDs. All these so-called copy protection schemes make the right to exercise fair use a moot point, if successful one cannot exercise these rights. There are already laws in place to cover illegal copying. Of course, currently it isn't econmincally feasible to use that path as they should, so there is an issue... Chasing down the mechanisms that *could* be used for copying is wrong, as is trying to prevent the ability to copy altogether...
Step 2: post systems IP address to slashdot and say 'hack this'...... you should at least quickly see all the scripts that are all the fad right now.....
No, I thought Windows didn't do well with curses or ncurses...
Are they 'forcing' the upgrade? Would you say the same thing if oracle for some reason stopped selling oracle 8 and your enterprise app breaks with oracle 9? Why should they be liable, especially if they continue providing support even after no longer selling the product? It's slightly different in this case as practically speaking for the majority of people the upgrade path is defined completely by MS thanks to a monopoly, but if it is an enterprise app, the organization is pretty much tied to whatever they first bought into anyway, monopoly or not....
What about fair use? If the laws could be reliably applied to copyright infringement, the legitimate need for all this Digital Rights Maiming and Copy Prevention would go away. The indirect benefit there would be fair use being protected. What I would like to see is the copyright law work two ways, one, protect IP owners from infringement, giving a means through civil courts to be compensated for violation, as it works now. An addendum I want to see is a punishment for companies going 'copyright vigilante' and implementing measures to protect copyright that have the side-effect of denying fair use rights. Fair use rights should be actively protected. Of course for the second to be fair the first half needs some beefing up to make it more economically feasible to use civil courts to punish offenders. Of course a copyright protection scheme that somehow managed to preserve fair use would still be legal and the ideal solution, but realistically there is no such scheme, or at least any such scheme that would be economically sound. But the US is a nation for and by the corporation now, sadly, so such enhancements for the people would be lobbyed out the door by big business....