it kind of just happens to some of the weaker willed and morally challenged
marketing is a career that one chooses once one has graduated college and realizes one has no other skills companies want
I dislike these arguments of moral superiority, which lend greater importance to these issues than they truly warrant. You are being annoyed by pop-up ads, not seriously harmed. You are free to avoid any site that uses them.
I don't think it follows that needing a salary so that one can feed one's family is equivalent to being morally challenged. I'm not sure if you have children or not. But if you did, would it be moral of you to turn down a marketing job in a tough economy?
One successful tactic in sales is to be annoying. Almost everyone hates telemarketing, yet if nobody ever bought anything from a telemarketer, it would not be profitable and nobody would do it. Same with spam.
This is a problem with technologies that allow your ad to be delivered to millions of people cheaply. If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.
... perhaps because one of the original US military airships was the USS Akron?
These blimps were actually aircraft carriers. Akron's sister ship, USS Macon, once "dive-bombed" a Navy ship carrying President Roosevelt, dropping a bundle of newspapers for his reading. The stunt was intended to prove the worth of aircraft against ship targets.
I agree with the parent. Unfortunately, the meaning of "anniversary" has been perverted in the colloquial to mean "passage of an integer number of arbitrary time units". We can thank all the teenaged girls who want to celebrate their "three week anniversary" dating the captain of the football team until he dumps their sorry asses. There are few things that annoy me more than this usage.(*)
(*)Things that annoy me more:
(1) The interchangeable use of "their", "there", and "they're"; "your" and "you're", and "its" and "it's".
(2) Not having been captain of the football team so that I could have had an unlimited supply of easy girls in high school.(**)
(**) Then again, it is almost a universal rule that the people who were popular in high school ended up being losers, and the people who actually do interesting things were the nerds in high school. The problem of peaking too early.(***)
Damn the anti-American universe. I bet it has to do with the United Nations somehow, those hippie-commie bastards. I'm going to write a stiff letter to Bill O'Reilly.
Companies that did not invent anything and have no intent of producing a useful product are gobbling up patent slips and collecting license fees or firing of C&D's.
I'm not sure this is such a good idea. A world in which patents have value but are not transferrable would strongly penalize hobbyists and small inventors. These people may patent a good idea, and either not recognize its importance or not be willing to dedicate their life to running a business, so the idea would never make it to market. So they would have the choice of surrendering their patent, or never releasing their invention.
On the other hand, if you allowed a company to buy the patent, the inventor would receive compensation and the product would be manufactured. Non-transferrable patents would also cause major problems in the business world, in areas like corporate mergers.
In my opinion the more important issue is submarine patents; the ones that surface after a decade of wide use and then extract licensing fees from what everyone thought was a free product. Patents should be like trademarks in the sense that non-enforcement (within reason) should mean invalidation.
Thanks for the reply. I wish I had time for a more complete response to your post, but here is one important flaw in your argument. The United States has enough conventional armament to completely overwhelm the army of almost any medium-sized nation, including North Korea and Iran. The US would be extremely unlikely to use a nuclear first strike given their conventional superiority against these nations. If MAD would deter these nations from using nuclear weapons, then it should logically deter them from building such weapons at all, since they would make no difference in a war.
Yet not only these nations but other enemies of the United States are trying to acquire nukes. This means they are either suicidal or don't believe in MAD, which is bad for your argument either way. In particular, if these nations believe a nuclear war can be "limited", i.e. a limited nuclear strike on the United States would not result in an overwhelming response, then acquiring nuclear weapons makes sense for them.
Deterrence and MAD works despite what the Bush administration wants you to believe.
I'm surprised anybody talks about MAD anymore, because it's an obsolete notion. Let's say we're at war with a nation having a small nuclear arsenal (say, 100 warheads), and accurate missiles capable of hitting the US. With their back against the wall, the other nation launches a limited nuclear strike against a military target not on American soil, say a carrier battle group. Tens of thousands of military personnel die.
According to the logic of MAD, the American president immediately launches a massive nuclear attack to utterly wipe out the other nation. Yet, with nothing now to lose, that would prompt the other nation to launch their entire arsenal against the USA as soon as they spotted the incoming missiles. So even the US president's threat to utterly destroy the other nation is not credible, since the consequences of following through on the threat could cost tens of millions of American lives to avenge ten thousand.
Instead, the American president would use the doctrine of limited nuclear war. He would likely order a similarly limited strike on an enemy target, communicating his intentions clearly so as not to risk massive retaliation. Missile defence is designed to fit into this doctrine, since limited nuclear war relies heavily on the ability to selectively and accurately destroy targets.
As things are right now, nuclear missiles are highly desirable because they are accurate, fast, and unstoppable. Once one is launched, its target will only survive in the rare event that the missile malfunctions. Missile defence may not stop every missile launched, but it will introduce uncertainty in the calculus of limited war. For instance, would the leader of the other nation expend one of his precious nuclear warheads if it had a 75% chance of being intercepted? Would he waste several weapons to get better odds of one succeeding? If he launched several weapons, would that be interpreted in the USA as a massive attack, inviting massive retaliation?
I think the present situation of total vulnerability is ludicrous, and missile defence will make nuclear war far less likely. It's a visionary idea that is being opposed by people who think that if we ignore nuclear weapons, they will go away.
Many supporters of the GPL do not like copyright in principle. If copyright didn't exist there would be no need for the GPL. In that light, it is perfectly reasonable to dislike copyright yet like the GPL.
Which is absurdly ironic, in my opinion. The GPL is actually quite a restrictive license compared to public domain (or no copyright), and depends heavily on copyright protection. It appears that the real contribution to the GPL is to illustrate the power and flexibility of copyright law.
The GPL involuntarily enforces a trade: I'll show you my source if you show me whatever you do with it. Without copyright protection, there is no incentive to share source code, because the ideas behind a piece of software can be locked away in binaries or used only on proprietary hardware.
calling this vulnerability severe is like screaming that highways are fundamentally unsafe because someone could point their car the wrong way and start smashing into oncoming traffic.
Too bad that, unlike the highway analogy, the cost of performing this attach is not equivalent to suicide.
I think your argument is flawed for a number of reasons, but mostly for the following: if no one can "own" a DNA sequence, then I cannot "own" my own DNA sequence! The implications of that are staggering. For instance, if my genetic makeup was found to have some desirable trait, there's no reason why millions of clones of me could not be made without my consent.
Anyway, I won't post any more in this thread. Nice chatting with you.
You seem to be falling into a trap of thinking that if some dazzling and glittering shiney thing that is being "offered" to you depends on merely giving up on some fundamental phillosophical and moral concepts, so be it because dazzling and glittering thing is more important.
This is not correct, because I don't agree that there is any fundamental philosophical point at stake. Instead I recognize that civilization is founded on the notion of trading absolute freedom for other things that are desirable. For example, I trade the freedom to drive my car however and wherever I please on "public" land, in exchange for the idea that other drivers will follow the same rules, making everyone safer and our cities a nicer place to live. If you object to this particular example, there are a thousand more.
I won't speak for you, but what I can't fathom is why a person would, for example, crack a digital TV signal and watch it, then try to justify it in terms of rights and freedoms. This is self serving and intellectually bankrupt. The only legal, ethical, and logical course of action for those who believe that DirecTV's actions are immoral is to not watch the signal, since the effect and result is the same as if DirecTV did not exist.
So can you explain why it's better to crack the signal and view for free rather than abstaining? In both cases the company fails to get money and goes bankrupt, leading to no satellite TV for anybody, which is what you seem to want. So your argument does not justify cracking.
I agree that the law should not prohibit reception and analysis of the encrypted signal for research purposes. I suppose it does, but this is not necessary in principle to legally prohibit the distribution of keys.
So the only "right" that is being violated is the right to decrypt signals with keys that are neither obtained by you (through careful analysis and research) nor obtained from an authorized source (by paying the fee).
I don't see that this is draconian, or even that it violates any widely accepted "right", other than the fact that it may have been allowed in the absence of a law to the contrary. What the law does in this case is to allow a new type of business, by creating value in an encrypted signal. Without that value, there is no point in launching satellites to broadcast the signal, because the cost is too difficult to recover by other means.
I find it odd that you mention rationality. What you seem to be saying is that you feel it is your right to view satellite signals for free, which destroys the business model that makes those signals possible in the first place. Thus, in the world you seem to want, the signals would not exist, and you would not view them. So it is a paradox that you would insist on viewing these signals for free, and indeed it is most rational for you to refuse to view them at all.
Information theory says that the descrambled and scrambled signal are not fundamentally different.
I am an information theorist, and I have to disagree with this statement.
Think about binary signals. The number of binary signals of length n is 2^n. Of those signals, the number that are valid video sequences, in any format, is relatively tiny.
So take the set of all valid binary sequences that are (for example) valid MPEG files. The number of those files that look like something (i.e., that don't look like white noise, static, snow, whatever) is also comparatively tiny.
It is precisely for this reason -- that the set of likely and useful signals is much, much smaller than the set of possible signals -- that compression is possible.
Ideally, the scrambled signal would be indistinguishable from white noise. So in an information-theoretic sense, there is something fundamentally different about the scrambled signal.
If I, as someone who's never had a relationship with DirecTV, built a device that picked up EM signals directed at me and translated them into something my TV could display, I don't see why anyone would think that (a) it's illegal or (b) I should stop.
Let me say firstly that I don't support bully tactics. But I don't reject the idea that media companies should have legal protection for their signals.
I can't find a link, but I remember a court case some time ago involving a farmer whose land was crossed by high-voltage power lines. The farmer was clever and placed a large coil beneath the lines, so that the magnetic field induced by the lines would be captured by the coil and generate electricity for his farm. The power company sued him and won, because the electricity he was acquiring was not free -- it induced a load on the power company's generators, just like every other power customer, so he was freeloading at the expense of paying customers.
Is this case the same? It is and it isn't. In both cases, someone is receiving an EM signal that is incident to their property. In the case of the power company, the cost can be measured in terms of physical energy. In the case of the satellite company, the freeloader has no physical effect on the network, but is diminishing the value of the signal. This has implications for the people who are willing to pay to receive the signal, either pushing their costs up or forcing them to do without, because not enough money could be made on the service.
I see freeloaders in this sense as spoilsports, ruining a good thing for everyone; I don't think that a properly stated law protecting the signal would be taking away rights in any meaningful sense. For instance, I would defend the legal ability to receive and analyze the encrypted signal for the sake of research (which I regret is probably not protected under the law), but most freeloaders simply obtain a code from someone else, requiring no cleverness, curiosity, or insight. If you're not willing to pay, I don't think it's too much to ask for you to abstain, and if the law is the only recourse, so be it.
Broadcast towers require maintenance, just like satellites.
Actually satellites are not designed to be maintained. It is only the rare satellite that receives servicing, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. This is for two reasons: servicing missions are absurdly expensive, and most TV satellites are in a geosynchronous orbit, which is unreachable by the Shuttle.
In fact this is the main problem with your argument. The money for the broadcasting infrastructure has to come from one of three places: advertisers, viewers, or the government. Not many people agree that the government should pay so that everyone can watch satellite TV. Furthermore, remembering that satellites can't be maintained, the costs and risks of satellite broadcasting are orders of magnitude larger than terrestrial broadcasting. Launches are expensive, and if something breaks (or if technology advances), the only option is to launch a new satellite. It's not viable to ask advertisers to bear the sole responsibility for subsidising the medium, especially since people are bitching even now about the amount of advertising on TV.
As for your claim that "DirecTV could have made a killing selling dishes," you're advocating that DirecTV should use the access equipment to subsidize the service? How would this be different from using smart cards?
The fact is that DirecTV is not viable without paying subscribers. So once again we encounter the problem of common good versus the I-want-my-MTV mentality. Why is it that people think that, just because they can do something, they have a right to do so?
The library could provide CDRs at a small profit to pay for upkeep on the system and to buy more paper references.
I'm going to nitpick. Apparently you're not familiar with the concept of a lending library?
I'm as much of a capitalist as the next guy. But the point to lending libraries is that they are free, as in beer. So all you need to borrow anything is your library card, and zero dollars. Just borrow the CD, install on your system, and bring it back.
Lending copies and providing a cost-recovery burner are not mutually exclusive ideas. I just wouldn't want the latter without the former.
Hopefully soon the design will make it in to your home PC, allowing them to run much quieter
Actually I find it odd that this is the first application that occurred to the poster.
Gentlemen, this new motor design will make battery-powered cars a reality, reduce industrial energy consumption by a third, possibly save the world from global warming... oh yes, and it will make your case mods mad 31337.
You're missing the point. Not everyone agrees that a line in the sand is necessary. The GPL is a good idea, but my greatest objection to the FSF is their rejection of the idea that free and non-free software can coexist and each have their role to play. Hopefully Lessig will moderate their views.
Slashdot Mirror
it kind of just happens to some of the weaker willed and morally challenged
marketing is a career that one chooses once one has graduated college and realizes one has no other skills companies want
I dislike these arguments of moral superiority, which lend greater importance to these issues than they truly warrant. You are being annoyed by pop-up ads, not seriously harmed. You are free to avoid any site that uses them.
I don't think it follows that needing a salary so that one can feed one's family is equivalent to being morally challenged. I'm not sure if you have children or not. But if you did, would it be moral of you to turn down a marketing job in a tough economy?
One successful tactic in sales is to be annoying. Almost everyone hates telemarketing, yet if nobody ever bought anything from a telemarketer, it would not be profitable and nobody would do it. Same with spam.
This is a problem with technologies that allow your ad to be delivered to millions of people cheaply. If even a tiny fraction of people respond, it won't matter that you annoyed the hell out of the other 99%.
God could easily have access to alternate universes (assuming they exist), and thus wouldn't be subject to the assumptions in this paper.
Remember, in the words of a Vatican astronomer, "God is not a boundary condition".
... perhaps because one of the original US military airships was the USS Akron?
These blimps were actually aircraft carriers. Akron's sister ship, USS Macon, once "dive-bombed" a Navy ship carrying President Roosevelt, dropping a bundle of newspapers for his reading. The stunt was intended to prove the worth of aircraft against ship targets.
I agree with the parent. Unfortunately, the meaning of "anniversary" has been perverted in the colloquial to mean "passage of an integer number of arbitrary time units". We can thank all the teenaged girls who want to celebrate their "three week anniversary" dating the captain of the football team until he dumps their sorry asses. There are few things that annoy me more than this usage.(*)
(*)Things that annoy me more:
(1) The interchangeable use of "their", "there", and "they're"; "your" and "you're", and "its" and "it's".
(2) Not having been captain of the football team so that I could have had an unlimited supply of easy girls in high school.(**)
(**) Then again, it is almost a universal rule that the people who were popular in high school ended up being losers, and the people who actually do interesting things were the nerds in high school. The problem of peaking too early.(***)
(***)Mod away!
(as usual) can't see it from north america!
Damn the anti-American universe. I bet it has to do with the United Nations somehow, those hippie-commie bastards. I'm going to write a stiff letter to Bill O'Reilly.
Companies that did not invent anything and have no intent of producing a useful product are gobbling up patent slips and collecting license fees or firing of C&D's.
I'm not sure this is such a good idea. A world in which patents have value but are not transferrable would strongly penalize hobbyists and small inventors. These people may patent a good idea, and either not recognize its importance or not be willing to dedicate their life to running a business, so the idea would never make it to market. So they would have the choice of surrendering their patent, or never releasing their invention.
On the other hand, if you allowed a company to buy the patent, the inventor would receive compensation and the product would be manufactured. Non-transferrable patents would also cause major problems in the business world, in areas like corporate mergers.
In my opinion the more important issue is submarine patents; the ones that surface after a decade of wide use and then extract licensing fees from what everyone thought was a free product. Patents should be like trademarks in the sense that non-enforcement (within reason) should mean invalidation.
Thanks for the reply. I wish I had time for a more complete response to your post, but here is one important flaw in your argument. The United States has enough conventional armament to completely overwhelm the army of almost any medium-sized nation, including North Korea and Iran. The US would be extremely unlikely to use a nuclear first strike given their conventional superiority against these nations. If MAD would deter these nations from using nuclear weapons, then it should logically deter them from building such weapons at all, since they would make no difference in a war.
Yet not only these nations but other enemies of the United States are trying to acquire nukes. This means they are either suicidal or don't believe in MAD, which is bad for your argument either way. In particular, if these nations believe a nuclear war can be "limited", i.e. a limited nuclear strike on the United States would not result in an overwhelming response, then acquiring nuclear weapons makes sense for them.
It's a pointer to self. Useful for creating dupe stories:
story_type dupe = this->return_story();
Deterrence and MAD works despite what the Bush administration wants you to believe.
I'm surprised anybody talks about MAD anymore, because it's an obsolete notion. Let's say we're at war with a nation having a small nuclear arsenal (say, 100 warheads), and accurate missiles capable of hitting the US. With their back against the wall, the other nation launches a limited nuclear strike against a military target not on American soil, say a carrier battle group. Tens of thousands of military personnel die.
According to the logic of MAD, the American president immediately launches a massive nuclear attack to utterly wipe out the other nation. Yet, with nothing now to lose, that would prompt the other nation to launch their entire arsenal against the USA as soon as they spotted the incoming missiles. So even the US president's threat to utterly destroy the other nation is not credible, since the consequences of following through on the threat could cost tens of millions of American lives to avenge ten thousand.
Instead, the American president would use the doctrine of limited nuclear war. He would likely order a similarly limited strike on an enemy target, communicating his intentions clearly so as not to risk massive retaliation. Missile defence is designed to fit into this doctrine, since limited nuclear war relies heavily on the ability to selectively and accurately destroy targets.
As things are right now, nuclear missiles are highly desirable because they are accurate, fast, and unstoppable. Once one is launched, its target will only survive in the rare event that the missile malfunctions. Missile defence may not stop every missile launched, but it will introduce uncertainty in the calculus of limited war. For instance, would the leader of the other nation expend one of his precious nuclear warheads if it had a 75% chance of being intercepted? Would he waste several weapons to get better odds of one succeeding? If he launched several weapons, would that be interpreted in the USA as a massive attack, inviting massive retaliation?
I think the present situation of total vulnerability is ludicrous, and missile defence will make nuclear war far less likely. It's a visionary idea that is being opposed by people who think that if we ignore nuclear weapons, they will go away.
Remember the U-2 spy plane, we found out about that almost 50 years after it was put into service!
...
Dude, the U-2 had its first flight in 1955. So according to you, we first find out about it a year from now.
I think you can expect a knock on the door from some nice gentlemen from an obscure government agency
Many supporters of the GPL do not like copyright in principle. If copyright didn't exist there would be no need for the GPL. In that light, it is perfectly reasonable to dislike copyright yet like the GPL.
Which is absurdly ironic, in my opinion. The GPL is actually quite a restrictive license compared to public domain (or no copyright), and depends heavily on copyright protection. It appears that the real contribution to the GPL is to illustrate the power and flexibility of copyright law.
The GPL involuntarily enforces a trade: I'll show you my source if you show me whatever you do with it. Without copyright protection, there is no incentive to share source code, because the ideas behind a piece of software can be locked away in binaries or used only on proprietary hardware.
calling this vulnerability severe is like screaming that highways are fundamentally unsafe because someone could point their car the wrong way and start smashing into oncoming traffic.
Too bad that, unlike the highway analogy, the cost of performing this attach is not equivalent to suicide.
With a name like Diptheria P. Cardboard, I'm thinking this person isn't getting too many dates.
That's too bad. Most of the names I get in the once-a-day "This is probably spam" list would make great pornstar names (possibly deliberately?):
Michael Payne
Lenny Champion
Carmen Dove
Katie Dickerson
Bethany Kyle
Evangelina Horne
Andre Holiday
Bradley Bravo
Linda Love
Dylan Pike
I think your argument is flawed for a number of reasons, but mostly for the following: if no one can "own" a DNA sequence, then I cannot "own" my own DNA sequence! The implications of that are staggering. For instance, if my genetic makeup was found to have some desirable trait, there's no reason why millions of clones of me could not be made without my consent.
Anyway, I won't post any more in this thread. Nice chatting with you.
You seem to be falling into a trap of thinking that if some dazzling and glittering shiney thing that is being "offered" to you depends on merely giving up on some fundamental phillosophical and moral concepts, so be it because dazzling and glittering thing is more important.
This is not correct, because I don't agree that there is any fundamental philosophical point at stake. Instead I recognize that civilization is founded on the notion of trading absolute freedom for other things that are desirable. For example, I trade the freedom to drive my car however and wherever I please on "public" land, in exchange for the idea that other drivers will follow the same rules, making everyone safer and our cities a nicer place to live. If you object to this particular example, there are a thousand more.
I won't speak for you, but what I can't fathom is why a person would, for example, crack a digital TV signal and watch it, then try to justify it in terms of rights and freedoms. This is self serving and intellectually bankrupt. The only legal, ethical, and logical course of action for those who believe that DirecTV's actions are immoral is to not watch the signal, since the effect and result is the same as if DirecTV did not exist.
So can you explain why it's better to crack the signal and view for free rather than abstaining? In both cases the company fails to get money and goes bankrupt, leading to no satellite TV for anybody, which is what you seem to want. So your argument does not justify cracking.
What "right" is being surrendered, exactly?
I agree that the law should not prohibit reception and analysis of the encrypted signal for research purposes. I suppose it does, but this is not necessary in principle to legally prohibit the distribution of keys.
So the only "right" that is being violated is the right to decrypt signals with keys that are neither obtained by you (through careful analysis and research) nor obtained from an authorized source (by paying the fee).
I don't see that this is draconian, or even that it violates any widely accepted "right", other than the fact that it may have been allowed in the absence of a law to the contrary. What the law does in this case is to allow a new type of business, by creating value in an encrypted signal. Without that value, there is no point in launching satellites to broadcast the signal, because the cost is too difficult to recover by other means.
I find it odd that you mention rationality. What you seem to be saying is that you feel it is your right to view satellite signals for free, which destroys the business model that makes those signals possible in the first place. Thus, in the world you seem to want, the signals would not exist, and you would not view them. So it is a paradox that you would insist on viewing these signals for free, and indeed it is most rational for you to refuse to view them at all.
Information theory says that the descrambled and scrambled signal are not fundamentally different.
I am an information theorist, and I have to disagree with this statement.
Think about binary signals. The number of binary signals of length n is 2^n. Of those signals, the number that are valid video sequences, in any format, is relatively tiny.
So take the set of all valid binary sequences that are (for example) valid MPEG files. The number of those files that look like something (i.e., that don't look like white noise, static, snow, whatever) is also comparatively tiny.
It is precisely for this reason -- that the set of likely and useful signals is much, much smaller than the set of possible signals -- that compression is possible.
Ideally, the scrambled signal would be indistinguishable from white noise. So in an information-theoretic sense, there is something fundamentally different about the scrambled signal.
If I, as someone who's never had a relationship with DirecTV, built a device that picked up EM signals directed at me and translated them into something my TV could display, I don't see why anyone would think that (a) it's illegal or (b) I should stop.
Let me say firstly that I don't support bully tactics. But I don't reject the idea that media companies should have legal protection for their signals.
I can't find a link, but I remember a court case some time ago involving a farmer whose land was crossed by high-voltage power lines. The farmer was clever and placed a large coil beneath the lines, so that the magnetic field induced by the lines would be captured by the coil and generate electricity for his farm. The power company sued him and won, because the electricity he was acquiring was not free -- it induced a load on the power company's generators, just like every other power customer, so he was freeloading at the expense of paying customers.
Is this case the same? It is and it isn't. In both cases, someone is receiving an EM signal that is incident to their property. In the case of the power company, the cost can be measured in terms of physical energy. In the case of the satellite company, the freeloader has no physical effect on the network, but is diminishing the value of the signal. This has implications for the people who are willing to pay to receive the signal, either pushing their costs up or forcing them to do without, because not enough money could be made on the service.
I see freeloaders in this sense as spoilsports, ruining a good thing for everyone; I don't think that a properly stated law protecting the signal would be taking away rights in any meaningful sense. For instance, I would defend the legal ability to receive and analyze the encrypted signal for the sake of research (which I regret is probably not protected under the law), but most freeloaders simply obtain a code from someone else, requiring no cleverness, curiosity, or insight. If you're not willing to pay, I don't think it's too much to ask for you to abstain, and if the law is the only recourse, so be it.
Broadcast towers require maintenance, just like satellites.
Actually satellites are not designed to be maintained. It is only the rare satellite that receives servicing, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. This is for two reasons: servicing missions are absurdly expensive, and most TV satellites are in a geosynchronous orbit, which is unreachable by the Shuttle.
In fact this is the main problem with your argument. The money for the broadcasting infrastructure has to come from one of three places: advertisers, viewers, or the government. Not many people agree that the government should pay so that everyone can watch satellite TV. Furthermore, remembering that satellites can't be maintained, the costs and risks of satellite broadcasting are orders of magnitude larger than terrestrial broadcasting. Launches are expensive, and if something breaks (or if technology advances), the only option is to launch a new satellite. It's not viable to ask advertisers to bear the sole responsibility for subsidising the medium, especially since people are bitching even now about the amount of advertising on TV.
As for your claim that "DirecTV could have made a killing selling dishes," you're advocating that DirecTV should use the access equipment to subsidize the service? How would this be different from using smart cards?
The fact is that DirecTV is not viable without paying subscribers. So once again we encounter the problem of common good versus the I-want-my-MTV mentality. Why is it that people think that, just because they can do something, they have a right to do so?
The library could provide CDRs at a small
profit to pay for upkeep on the system and
to buy more paper references.
I'm going to nitpick. Apparently you're not familiar with the concept of a lending library?
I'm as much of a capitalist as the next guy. But the point to lending libraries is that they are free, as in beer. So all you need to borrow anything is your library card, and zero dollars. Just borrow the CD, install on your system, and bring it back.
Lending copies and providing a cost-recovery burner are not mutually exclusive ideas. I just wouldn't want the latter without the former.
National Act Like a Pompous Ass Who's Better than Everyone Because You Don't Watch TV Week
To be followed by National Act All Superior Because You Are So "Liberated" That You Don't Own a Cell Phone Week
Hopefully soon the design will make it in to your home PC, allowing them to run much quieter
... oh yes, and it will make your case mods mad 31337.
Actually I find it odd that this is the first application that occurred to the poster.
Gentlemen, this new motor design will make battery-powered cars a reality, reduce industrial energy consumption by a third, possibly save the world from global warming
You're missing the point. Not everyone agrees that a line in the sand is necessary. The GPL is a good idea, but my greatest objection to the FSF is their rejection of the idea that free and non-free software can coexist and each have their role to play. Hopefully Lessig will moderate their views.