AMD is still in a position of having to make Intel-compatable chips. Intel can't make massive changes b/c of compatability issues, but if they do something that AMD has to follow to retain compatability, they will have to.
Someday there may just be an x86 standard or something, and Intel and AMD and others try to adhere to it. But given what happened with browsers, where there's a standard that is widely ignored, and where people write for IE and NS alone, I don't think it would hold up well.
Re:Why I think Xbox will, sadly, succeed
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Mario's Revenge?
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· Score: 1
Yes. Additionally, Xbox is or at least soon will be targeted at another enemy of the MS empire.
With some relatively small changes it can incorporate WebTV functionality, and utilize.Net. This means that it would be able to give MS a huge amount of control in the ~$400 PC market, where their OS is already one of the most expensive components. For people who only want to do light web surfing, email and a bit of word processing here or there, v2 or 3 of the Xbox will probably try to provide it. It wouldn't be a great general purpose computer, but it wouldn't need to be.
As for driving competitors like emachines into having to use Linux to keep costs down, I don't think that it'll endear them to users. And MS can both compete against them and be their suppliers, which is nice for them at least.
Intel released the P3 with the little GUID in it that everyone was up in arms about. Regardless, there is very little that we can do about it - Intel has many more customers than the small collection of them that view it as an invasion of privacy, and a foreshadowing of what's to come. They don't give a rat's ass about us, and the market is sufficiently big that they don't have to.
Oh, and if MS writes Windows so that it only runs when this sort of thing is present in the CPU, for instance, AMD will have to comply, or else they're sunk.
Get a few of these companies in critical spots cooperating with each other and they are no longer effected by market forces. Intel, MS, the few big HD manufacturers, that'll do it. You'll buy their stuff because you'll have no other choice.
Do you mean to say that Pacs and Ghosts are the same species? Damn, that's a pretty unusual thought. What kind of proof do you have to back it up? DNA, observations, what?
Hm- I'll have to go back and check some of that out, but I don't recall him ranting against contextual menus per se - the point underneath the cursor also satisfies Fitt's law, and is the most infinitely large thing you're going to get.
But sure, I know that Tog's not 100% right, though he's certainly worth listening to anyway.
no, key commands are slower. read through Tog's stuff for references. weird but I've little reason to doubt it.
Re:Well,well, well. Apple causing postings on /. :
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Another Look At OS X
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· Score: 2
Wow. Wow. You really think that with market share in the single digits, Unix (which does not count existing MacOS share - OS X gets to start at zero) won the OS wars.
Man, what a pyrrhic victory that must be. We win with oh,let's call it 5% to be generous, and Windows lost with ~90% to be stingy. Yeah, I bet Bill cries all the way to the bank.
Windows, and the stuff that runs under it is too attractive for chip manufacturers to ignore as we move to 64 bits. If it can't run on them, no one's going to bother trying to sell them anyway. (except possibly as servers, where Unix has a chance, but is still getting encroached upon by Windows) And sooner or later they will succeed, just as they manged to move over to 32 bits from 16.
The OS wars are indeed over, but the winner is the platform that natively runs Windows software. (which doesn't have to be Windows exclusively, but will be as long as MS is intact)
Well, games that are no longer copyrighted (due to being put into the p.d. explicitly, or the term expiring, which hasn't really happened yet) or games for which permission is granted for noncommercial copying can of course be copied and traded.
And of course, it's perfectly legal to make backups or copies as needed to run software you legally own. That it comes in cartridge format, or is a console game is irrelevant.
I dunno. At that point the games start getting fairly complicated, as well as expensive.
In Boston, Jillian's had a thoroughly kick-ass game called IIRC Lightspeed. (that could be the name of the company - I forget) Basically it consisted of eight two-man pods. Six of the pods were on hydraulic rams for motion. (the other two were cheaper, but noone ever wanted them;) Each pod had a pilot and a gunner, and the entire thing was a networked flight sim.
A 4cpu SGI Onyx ran graphics, and each pod had an NT box for networking.
The problem was that it occupied one or two operators just to keep things going. It wasn't something that could be picked up easily. It cost $5 per person per round, and each round only lasted five minutes. And it took a couple minutes to do a load/unload. And, from time to time the stupid things would crash, and the operators weren't always that good at getting it up again. Needless to say, it didn't last terribly long.
I, and several friends were great at it, and played it every chance we had. But it was no fun unless you played it against people you knew, and relatively few people could get into it enough to come back for more.
As for Battletech, there's one in Seattle, but I've never really been interested; I enjoyed piloting the little pods that I could make stand up. Another arcade here has a different flight sim that can spin around in two axes, but it's not networked to anything, so I'm still not particularly interested. And I never think that they'll get the cost down.
That's good stuff too, if it's really necessary. (though I would balk at becoming a well-poisioner) Every little bit helps. One guy with a shotgun, or even a nuke is not sufficient for a revolution. But there are millions of firearms in private hands in this country, and at that point more interesting things start to happen.
IIRC, barnesandnoble.com is a totally seperate, though afilliated company from Barnes and Noble. (the bookstore) It's certainly a tax dodge, but I can't say I mind.
Yeah, but the thing that most authors conveniently forget about when discussing the SPP is that once they do get paid, that's it. The work has to enter the public domain.
I'm willing to pay more for something if I know that it's a one time charge, and that no one will ever have to pay for it again. I'll be damned if I pay in an SPP fashion without the guarantee that it's already done (SPP is not an advance) that the author can't abscond with the payment and the work (both held by a trusted proxy) or that I, or someone else, will have to pay for it again.
And the Revolutionary War required assistance from France. (as well as a fair number of individuals from all over Europe) If it got down to the point where Americans are fighting Americans, some kind of aid by other powers is not entirely unlikely. (though it would probably also be fairly deniable, in case their side lost....) As for the Civil War, that was, at times, a very close thing. If the South had had more aid from the UK or France, or the Union had screwed up a bit more, there probably would still be a CSA. Don't kid yourself, kid. It was not a cakewalk.
Anyway, I'm certainly not saying that small pockets of resistance are sufficient to overthrow an entire country. Certainly not if everyone else is more or less happy. But if George the 2nd tried to take over everyone, as Hard_Code suggested, I suspect that the number of people unwilling to tolerate it would be enough. Hell, if he literally did proclaim himself King, I doubt that anyone would even bother fighting on his side. Which is good. But if I had to fight against an oppressive government, I would. They wouldn't be my government, after all, and it is everyone's duty to stand up to and beat back oppressive government.
I see no reason why cut and paste shouldn't be able to both copy/move/delete files as well as the traditional operations on data. Problem: how to tell the difference! If I copy a range of text files, and paste in notepad, should I get the contents of the files (desirable - rather akin to drag and drop of icons into document windows) or a list of their names.
I'll be damned if I know, but it's not easy to figure out. Both kinds of usages of cut/paste are good. Getting the computer to figure out what you wanted is not so easy.
Polices that prohibit dumping toxic waste into wells interfere with open markets. Yet everyone I know seems to prefer such policies, and damn the market.
It is a great mistake to act in accordance with the rules of some economic system. We permit capitalism, because we can exploit the efficiencies that it's capable of, in the same manner that we have domesticated dogs to serve us, or grow crops to feed us. If any of those behaves in a manner that is threatening to people (tricky to see wrt plants, but possible - kudzu, for instance) we put them down.
I certainly don't know of a better system to harness than capitalism. There may not even be one, though I rather hope that there is. But when capitalistic entities like companies do things that are not socially acceptable, it is of greater import that society win. I am not a capitalist, I am a capitalist-keeper. It's useful to me, but that's the only reason why it's worth keeping around.
If it's decided, for instance, that having a minimum wage that people can subsist on is essential, then that's yet another ground rule that capitalists had better work within. Adopt such ideas widely enough, and unlimited capitalism doesn't look so healthy.
Most people aren't, I suspect, capitalists, for they want the benefits without paying any of the price. Yet sadly, when they organize in groups, and work for businesses, they seem to leave their personal desires and consciences at home; doesn't matter. Whether they want to foist it off or not, they're responsible for what they do. I just wish they'd realize it.
See, I firmly believe that MS took to heart the idea that 'the browser is the OS.' Certainly they've been working to kill off Netscape and Java for years, it's so threatening. But at the end of the day, even they know that the real two big monopolies are Office and IE. Windows is very nice, but is ultimately expendible..Net is an attempt to combine these two monopolies in order to preserve them and in hopes that it will be more a monopoly than the sum of the two parts.
So, assuming that MS retains Windows, they'll keep the.net client software on it, and it alone. This drives people to their OS, to use their apps, with their browser.
If an insanely compelling alternative OS comes out that can't be competed with,.Net is sufficiently portable to let MS take over two whole markets on it near-instantly if they desire, then use those to harm the OS. (eg the shenannigans they pull on the Mac side with Office)
If MS is broken up into an OS company and an Apps/Internet company, the latter is still in a position to dominate the market by porting.net to other platforms. They may no longer have any real reason to conduct shenannigans, but their software is more compelling to users than an OS is. If they withdraw from a platform, that platform will lose all the users who use.net, and the network effects will seriously damage it.
I suspect that MS has been working to get.net clients - which is largely IE - working on Linux and the Mac. But most of it will not be released unless they feel that they have to. Their software may be crap, but they're very smart guys, and it'll take decades or a sea change on the scale of the entire microcomputing revolution to dislodge them. OSS is certainly not big enough, and the Internet has proven not to be either. So you get an idea of how big a change you'd need.
See, when George the 2nd wants to take over the US, even assuming that he has the full backing of the military (in truth, he wouldn't: they quite seriously take oaths to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic - both sides would have a wide range of arms and soldiers) he has to establish certain Rules of Engagement for the military.
In such a scenario, it would be pointless to simply kill everyone. Then what the hell is he ruling? No, what he would want would be to assume power. This means not killing people, just making sure that they know who's the boss. It doesn't work well, against an armed populace.
If you'll recall, the USSR got their asses kicked by Afghanistan. The US got their asses kicked by the Vietnamese. We also pulled out of Somalia due to a fairly small number of losses by people who almost are already in the Stone Age, and the Balkans have been a nightmare for ages.
Nearly any attempt at conquering a country is much more similar to a 'police action' or 'peacekeeping' in that the military is highly constrained as to what they can do, because not exercising force is their goal. Guerilla movements thrive under such circumstances. And militaries suffer.
Sure, they could nuke everyone, but there's really no chance of it. Hitler was the last really big lunatic who would have tried to do something like what you describe, expecting to reseed the empty, conquered lands with Germans. Pretty much everyone else during and since has been content just aiming to control the conquered people and their lands and industries.
Where do you draw the line then? There are plenty of democratic countries - wouldn't businesses find them to be better environments if people couldn't freely speak out against such businesses or boycott them, etc.?
The needs of real people are more important than the needs of companies. Many businesspeople, I find, have a strange habit of leaving their conscience at home when they go to work. They think that because it's a company doing things that they're not responsible. That their job precludes exercising their moral faculties. In short, they're terrible.
If we stand against letting companies tell people how to run their own lives, and subverting their rights and governments, they'll crumble. They haven't got any more power than what we grant them, yet we keep thinking of them as invincible - that's where their power is deriving from.
Say no more. The UK, while well known for doing stupid things (esp. wrt infringing on the freedoms of its citizens) has done a wise thing here. If I had a business, their attitude would appeal to me. The long term interests of society are worth more due diligence than the short term profits that I could make by attacking their soverignty. But businesspeople never realize this; they pollute, they help to corrupt and/or overthrow governments, they try to silence critics....
There's more to life than money, my friend. What good is it, if the whole world has gone to hell as a direct result of your persuit of it?
Which is of course, being hotly contested at this very moment. Personally, I don't think that the Supremes will let it stand; the lower courts are usually dumb as a sackful of hammers about copyright, I'm given to understand.
Access? Other than the author distributing it himself or through his agents, where on earth did you get the idea that they can control access to their work? Public performance, yes, but that's not the same thing.
As for encryption, I beg to differ. Encryption is not publishing. If you encrypt a work, how are you making provisions for it to be decrypted when it enters the public domain? How do people decrypt it fairly and legally without having to pay you? I personally feel that if an author encrypts a work, he's entrusting to himself to protect it; he should be denied the benefit of copyright law, and the work should be treated as being in the public domain, in both encrypted and nonencrypted form.
Arguments about locks on doors don't apply to this argument either: the POINT of copyright is to encourage widespread, unencumbered, uncommercial dissemination of works. The reward for writing a work to which this will inevitably happen is to be able to receive a grant of copyright which gives some exclusive rights. The ultimate benefit is owed to the public.
Authors can choose not to disseminate copies of their works to people as they choose. The only method, however, that they have to prevent people from exercising their Fair Use rights (among others) is to make a condition of receiving the work not to do exercise those rights.
If they don't do this - and the legality of EULAs is being contested, with the anti-EULA side winning slightly, last time I checked - they have no rights to tell people that they may not make fair use of it, or give it to others, or space-shift it, etc., all of which are wrongfully infringed upon by having this flag in the pdf.
Authors have control over what they write, and who they sell it to. Once it leaves their hands, they get to restrict some instances of copying. Sometimes. Depending on the circumstances. And only a court of law can determine if one instance of copying is legal or not - no program can tell me that.
First, the courts themselves define most Fair Uses, and created the doctrine ~150 years ago. It derives from the Constitutional guarantee of free speech, common law property rights, and the Constitutional mandate that any copyright law promote the progress of the arts, and last for a limited time.
Congress has recognized and codified some Fair Uses into law. However, that does not mean much - while Judges must recognize those Fair Uses, they can still recognize more. And if Congress declares that a judicial Fair Use is not one, it has no impact on the Courts, as Fair Use derives from higher authorities than Congress.
Additionally, the one of the points of having a judicial system is to handle new cases. If there were something incontravertable and codified, you wouldn't need a judge. However, what is piracy for one person may be Fair Use for another, despite being the same action. I don't know about you, but I prefer judges that can respond to the specifics of a case.
And, let me point out, that should copyright law somehow mandate a system that absolutely prohibits copying, it would potentially be unconstitutional. Congress cannot actually remove people's powers to copy works - it would be unconstitutional. What they do in fact, is grant to authors the right to bring suits against people who copy without authorization. Further, that right must be granted only to the author of the work in question. (though it can then be sold, given up, etc.)
A system like this, if legally mandated, would strip authors of their rights to copy works to which they themselves hold copyright - because it doesn't matter if it's a copy instead of a master, they simply DO have the uninfringable right to copy it. Copyrights cannot exclude authors legally. And sooner or later, the work must lose the copyright, and anyone has to be able to copy it at will.
Why you think that anyone who carefully studies copyright issues would prefer such an encumbered system as this that presumes to grant authors or worse still, the company that makes the media, or Congress such broad powers as you describe is beyond me.
No one is allowed to prevent you from making excerpts of a CD for review purposes, or space shift the materials to another medium. (e.g. mp3 players - this is regardless of the AHRA, which didn't cover them but are still legal! This also means that we gained nothing significant from the AHRA....) If you can't for technical reasons, you have the right to make it so that you can. The RIAA can go to hell, for all I care - they simply don't have the powers that they want to have, and there is no basis for the government to ever be able to grant them to them.
The Congress really needs to return to the idea that they must not establish prior restraints against copyright infringement, but simply make it easy for copyright holders to sue and get damages from honest-to-God pirates, without chilling Fair Use.
Re:Hey, that should give the Hollywood guys a brea
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Silicon LED
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· Score: 1
Ah yes. I remember going to the National Cryptological Museum a few years ago. It's right next to the NSA, of course - they run it, and probably swipe your DNA while you're there...
Anyway, in their hall of obselete computers was a CM5. Impressive, yes. A little humbling though. I can't imagine what they've got in there, these days.
I'll admit I haven't been paying ultra-close attention to the Napster case, but IIRC all of the current fighting has been in regards to a preliminary injunction! I don't recall that the actual case has made it to the trial court in earnest yet, and so that may yet come up there.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD is still in a position of having to make Intel-compatable chips. Intel can't make massive changes b/c of compatability issues, but if they do something that AMD has to follow to retain compatability, they will have to.
Someday there may just be an x86 standard or something, and Intel and AMD and others try to adhere to it. But given what happened with browsers, where there's a standard that is widely ignored, and where people write for IE and NS alone, I don't think it would hold up well.
Yes. Additionally, Xbox is or at least soon will be targeted at another enemy of the MS empire.
.Net. This means that it would be able to give MS a huge amount of control in the ~$400 PC market, where their OS is already one of the most expensive components. For people who only want to do light web surfing, email and a bit of word processing here or there, v2 or 3 of the Xbox will probably try to provide it. It wouldn't be a great general purpose computer, but it wouldn't need to be.
With some relatively small changes it can incorporate WebTV functionality, and utilize
As for driving competitors like emachines into having to use Linux to keep costs down, I don't think that it'll endear them to users. And MS can both compete against them and be their suppliers, which is nice for them at least.
What if there's no real pc's anymore?
Intel released the P3 with the little GUID in it that everyone was up in arms about. Regardless, there is very little that we can do about it - Intel has many more customers than the small collection of them that view it as an invasion of privacy, and a foreshadowing of what's to come. They don't give a rat's ass about us, and the market is sufficiently big that they don't have to.
Oh, and if MS writes Windows so that it only runs when this sort of thing is present in the CPU, for instance, AMD will have to comply, or else they're sunk.
Get a few of these companies in critical spots cooperating with each other and they are no longer effected by market forces. Intel, MS, the few big HD manufacturers, that'll do it. You'll buy their stuff because you'll have no other choice.
Do you mean to say that Pacs and Ghosts are the same species? Damn, that's a pretty unusual thought. What kind of proof do you have to back it up? DNA, observations, what?
Hm- I'll have to go back and check some of that out, but I don't recall him ranting against contextual menus per se - the point underneath the cursor also satisfies Fitt's law, and is the most infinitely large thing you're going to get.
But sure, I know that Tog's not 100% right, though he's certainly worth listening to anyway.
no, key commands are slower. read through Tog's stuff for references. weird but I've little reason to doubt it.
Wow. Wow. You really think that with market share in the single digits, Unix (which does not count existing MacOS share - OS X gets to start at zero) won the OS wars.
Man, what a pyrrhic victory that must be. We win with oh,let's call it 5% to be generous, and Windows lost with ~90% to be stingy. Yeah, I bet Bill cries all the way to the bank.
Windows, and the stuff that runs under it is too attractive for chip manufacturers to ignore as we move to 64 bits. If it can't run on them, no one's going to bother trying to sell them anyway. (except possibly as servers, where Unix has a chance, but is still getting encroached upon by Windows) And sooner or later they will succeed, just as they manged to move over to 32 bits from 16.
The OS wars are indeed over, but the winner is the platform that natively runs Windows software. (which doesn't have to be Windows exclusively, but will be as long as MS is intact)
Well, games that are no longer copyrighted (due to being put into the p.d. explicitly, or the term expiring, which hasn't really happened yet) or games for which permission is granted for noncommercial copying can of course be copied and traded.
And of course, it's perfectly legal to make backups or copies as needed to run software you legally own. That it comes in cartridge format, or is a console game is irrelevant.
I dunno. At that point the games start getting fairly complicated, as well as expensive.
;) Each pod had a pilot and a gunner, and the entire thing was a networked flight sim.
In Boston, Jillian's had a thoroughly kick-ass game called IIRC Lightspeed. (that could be the name of the company - I forget) Basically it consisted of eight two-man pods. Six of the pods were on hydraulic rams for motion. (the other two were cheaper, but noone ever wanted them
A 4cpu SGI Onyx ran graphics, and each pod had an NT box for networking.
The problem was that it occupied one or two operators just to keep things going. It wasn't something that could be picked up easily. It cost $5 per person per round, and each round only lasted five minutes. And it took a couple minutes to do a load/unload. And, from time to time the stupid things would crash, and the operators weren't always that good at getting it up again. Needless to say, it didn't last terribly long.
I, and several friends were great at it, and played it every chance we had. But it was no fun unless you played it against people you knew, and relatively few people could get into it enough to come back for more.
As for Battletech, there's one in Seattle, but I've never really been interested; I enjoyed piloting the little pods that I could make stand up. Another arcade here has a different flight sim that can spin around in two axes, but it's not networked to anything, so I'm still not particularly interested. And I never think that they'll get the cost down.
Deliver, yes. But the technology is HP's, and it was licensed out to Logitech, and Apple, and probably several other companies by now.
As for the wheel, wasn't that Mouse Systems?
That's good stuff too, if it's really necessary. (though I would balk at becoming a well-poisioner) Every little bit helps. One guy with a shotgun, or even a nuke is not sufficient for a revolution. But there are millions of firearms in private hands in this country, and at that point more interesting things start to happen.
IIRC, barnesandnoble.com is a totally seperate, though afilliated company from Barnes and Noble. (the bookstore) It's certainly a tax dodge, but I can't say I mind.
Yeah, but the thing that most authors conveniently forget about when discussing the SPP is that once they do get paid, that's it. The work has to enter the public domain.
I'm willing to pay more for something if I know that it's a one time charge, and that no one will ever have to pay for it again. I'll be damned if I pay in an SPP fashion without the guarantee that it's already done (SPP is not an advance) that the author can't abscond with the payment and the work (both held by a trusted proxy) or that I, or someone else, will have to pay for it again.
And the Revolutionary War required assistance from France. (as well as a fair number of individuals from all over Europe) If it got down to the point where Americans are fighting Americans, some kind of aid by other powers is not entirely unlikely. (though it would probably also be fairly deniable, in case their side lost....) As for the Civil War, that was, at times, a very close thing. If the South had had more aid from the UK or France, or the Union had screwed up a bit more, there probably would still be a CSA. Don't kid yourself, kid. It was not a cakewalk.
Anyway, I'm certainly not saying that small pockets of resistance are sufficient to overthrow an entire country. Certainly not if everyone else is more or less happy. But if George the 2nd tried to take over everyone, as Hard_Code suggested, I suspect that the number of people unwilling to tolerate it would be enough. Hell, if he literally did proclaim himself King, I doubt that anyone would even bother fighting on his side. Which is good. But if I had to fight against an oppressive government, I would. They wouldn't be my government, after all, and it is everyone's duty to stand up to and beat back oppressive government.
Heh. It's a 'do what i mean' problem.
I see no reason why cut and paste shouldn't be able to both copy/move/delete files as well as the traditional operations on data. Problem: how to tell the difference! If I copy a range of text files, and paste in notepad, should I get the contents of the files (desirable - rather akin to drag and drop of icons into document windows) or a list of their names.
I'll be damned if I know, but it's not easy to figure out. Both kinds of usages of cut/paste are good. Getting the computer to figure out what you wanted is not so easy.
Sure but do we want an open market?
Polices that prohibit dumping toxic waste into wells interfere with open markets. Yet everyone I know seems to prefer such policies, and damn the market.
It is a great mistake to act in accordance with the rules of some economic system. We permit capitalism, because we can exploit the efficiencies that it's capable of, in the same manner that we have domesticated dogs to serve us, or grow crops to feed us. If any of those behaves in a manner that is threatening to people (tricky to see wrt plants, but possible - kudzu, for instance) we put them down.
I certainly don't know of a better system to harness than capitalism. There may not even be one, though I rather hope that there is. But when capitalistic entities like companies do things that are not socially acceptable, it is of greater import that society win. I am not a capitalist, I am a capitalist-keeper. It's useful to me, but that's the only reason why it's worth keeping around.
If it's decided, for instance, that having a minimum wage that people can subsist on is essential, then that's yet another ground rule that capitalists had better work within. Adopt such ideas widely enough, and unlimited capitalism doesn't look so healthy.
Most people aren't, I suspect, capitalists, for they want the benefits without paying any of the price. Yet sadly, when they organize in groups, and work for businesses, they seem to leave their personal desires and consciences at home; doesn't matter. Whether they want to foist it off or not, they're responsible for what they do. I just wish they'd realize it.
See, I firmly believe that MS took to heart the idea that 'the browser is the OS.' Certainly they've been working to kill off Netscape and Java for years, it's so threatening. But at the end of the day, even they know that the real two big monopolies are Office and IE. Windows is very nice, but is ultimately expendible. .Net is an attempt to combine these two monopolies in order to preserve them and in hopes that it will be more a monopoly than the sum of the two parts.
.net client software on it, and it alone. This drives people to their OS, to use their apps, with their browser.
.Net is sufficiently portable to let MS take over two whole markets on it near-instantly if they desire, then use those to harm the OS. (eg the shenannigans they pull on the Mac side with Office)
.net to other platforms. They may no longer have any real reason to conduct shenannigans, but their software is more compelling to users than an OS is. If they withdraw from a platform, that platform will lose all the users who use .net, and the network effects will seriously damage it.
.net clients - which is largely IE - working on Linux and the Mac. But most of it will not be released unless they feel that they have to. Their software may be crap, but they're very smart guys, and it'll take decades or a sea change on the scale of the entire microcomputing revolution to dislodge them. OSS is certainly not big enough, and the Internet has proven not to be either. So you get an idea of how big a change you'd need.
So, assuming that MS retains Windows, they'll keep the
If an insanely compelling alternative OS comes out that can't be competed with,
If MS is broken up into an OS company and an Apps/Internet company, the latter is still in a position to dominate the market by porting
I suspect that MS has been working to get
Are you kidding? Firearms work great.
See, when George the 2nd wants to take over the US, even assuming that he has the full backing of the military (in truth, he wouldn't: they quite seriously take oaths to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic - both sides would have a wide range of arms and soldiers) he has to establish certain Rules of Engagement for the military.
In such a scenario, it would be pointless to simply kill everyone. Then what the hell is he ruling? No, what he would want would be to assume power. This means not killing people, just making sure that they know who's the boss. It doesn't work well, against an armed populace.
If you'll recall, the USSR got their asses kicked by Afghanistan. The US got their asses kicked by the Vietnamese. We also pulled out of Somalia due to a fairly small number of losses by people who almost are already in the Stone Age, and the Balkans have been a nightmare for ages.
Nearly any attempt at conquering a country is much more similar to a 'police action' or 'peacekeeping' in that the military is highly constrained as to what they can do, because not exercising force is their goal. Guerilla movements thrive under such circumstances. And militaries suffer.
Sure, they could nuke everyone, but there's really no chance of it. Hitler was the last really big lunatic who would have tried to do something like what you describe, expecting to reseed the empty, conquered lands with Germans. Pretty much everyone else during and since has been content just aiming to control the conquered people and their lands and industries.
Where do you draw the line then? There are plenty of democratic countries - wouldn't businesses find them to be better environments if people couldn't freely speak out against such businesses or boycott them, etc.?
The needs of real people are more important than the needs of companies. Many businesspeople, I find, have a strange habit of leaving their conscience at home when they go to work. They think that because it's a company doing things that they're not responsible. That their job precludes exercising their moral faculties. In short, they're terrible.
If we stand against letting companies tell people how to run their own lives, and subverting their rights and governments, they'll crumble. They haven't got any more power than what we grant them, yet we keep thinking of them as invincible - that's where their power is deriving from.
Say no more. The UK, while well known for doing stupid things (esp. wrt infringing on the freedoms of its citizens) has done a wise thing here. If I had a business, their attitude would appeal to me. The long term interests of society are worth more due diligence than the short term profits that I could make by attacking their soverignty. But businesspeople never realize this; they pollute, they help to corrupt and/or overthrow governments, they try to silence critics....
There's more to life than money, my friend. What good is it, if the whole world has gone to hell as a direct result of your persuit of it?
Which is of course, being hotly contested at this very moment. Personally, I don't think that the Supremes will let it stand; the lower courts are usually dumb as a sackful of hammers about copyright, I'm given to understand.
Access? Other than the author distributing it himself or through his agents, where on earth did you get the idea that they can control access to their work? Public performance, yes, but that's not the same thing.
As for encryption, I beg to differ. Encryption is not publishing. If you encrypt a work, how are you making provisions for it to be decrypted when it enters the public domain? How do people decrypt it fairly and legally without having to pay you? I personally feel that if an author encrypts a work, he's entrusting to himself to protect it; he should be denied the benefit of copyright law, and the work should be treated as being in the public domain, in both encrypted and nonencrypted form.
Arguments about locks on doors don't apply to this argument either: the POINT of copyright is to encourage widespread, unencumbered, uncommercial dissemination of works. The reward for writing a work to which this will inevitably happen is to be able to receive a grant of copyright which gives some exclusive rights. The ultimate benefit is owed to the public.
You are incorrect, sir.
Authors can choose not to disseminate copies of their works to people as they choose. The only method, however, that they have to prevent people from exercising their Fair Use rights (among others) is to make a condition of receiving the work not to do exercise those rights.
If they don't do this - and the legality of EULAs is being contested, with the anti-EULA side winning slightly, last time I checked - they have no rights to tell people that they may not make fair use of it, or give it to others, or space-shift it, etc., all of which are wrongfully infringed upon by having this flag in the pdf.
Authors have control over what they write, and who they sell it to. Once it leaves their hands, they get to restrict some instances of copying. Sometimes. Depending on the circumstances. And only a court of law can determine if one instance of copying is legal or not - no program can tell me that.
First, the courts themselves define most Fair Uses, and created the doctrine ~150 years ago. It derives from the Constitutional guarantee of free speech, common law property rights, and the Constitutional mandate that any copyright law promote the progress of the arts, and last for a limited time.
Congress has recognized and codified some Fair Uses into law. However, that does not mean much - while Judges must recognize those Fair Uses, they can still recognize more. And if Congress declares that a judicial Fair Use is not one, it has no impact on the Courts, as Fair Use derives from higher authorities than Congress.
Additionally, the one of the points of having a judicial system is to handle new cases. If there were something incontravertable and codified, you wouldn't need a judge. However, what is piracy for one person may be Fair Use for another, despite being the same action. I don't know about you, but I prefer judges that can respond to the specifics of a case.
And, let me point out, that should copyright law somehow mandate a system that absolutely prohibits copying, it would potentially be unconstitutional. Congress cannot actually remove people's powers to copy works - it would be unconstitutional. What they do in fact, is grant to authors the right to bring suits against people who copy without authorization. Further, that right must be granted only to the author of the work in question. (though it can then be sold, given up, etc.)
A system like this, if legally mandated, would strip authors of their rights to copy works to which they themselves hold copyright - because it doesn't matter if it's a copy instead of a master, they simply DO have the uninfringable right to copy it. Copyrights cannot exclude authors legally. And sooner or later, the work must lose the copyright, and anyone has to be able to copy it at will.
Why you think that anyone who carefully studies copyright issues would prefer such an encumbered system as this that presumes to grant authors or worse still, the company that makes the media, or Congress such broad powers as you describe is beyond me.
No one is allowed to prevent you from making excerpts of a CD for review purposes, or space shift the materials to another medium. (e.g. mp3 players - this is regardless of the AHRA, which didn't cover them but are still legal! This also means that we gained nothing significant from the AHRA....) If you can't for technical reasons, you have the right to make it so that you can. The RIAA can go to hell, for all I care - they simply don't have the powers that they want to have, and there is no basis for the government to ever be able to grant them to them.
The Congress really needs to return to the idea that they must not establish prior restraints against copyright infringement, but simply make it easy for copyright holders to sue and get damages from honest-to-God pirates, without chilling Fair Use.
Ah yes. I remember going to the National Cryptological Museum a few years ago. It's right next to the NSA, of course - they run it, and probably swipe your DNA while you're there...
Anyway, in their hall of obselete computers was a CM5. Impressive, yes. A little humbling though. I can't imagine what they've got in there, these days.
I'll admit I haven't been paying ultra-close attention to the Napster case, but IIRC all of the current fighting has been in regards to a preliminary injunction! I don't recall that the actual case has made it to the trial court in earnest yet, and so that may yet come up there.