Actually, ifyou want to piss people off, install persistent init files.bashrc.login (.whatever); completely overwriting the originals, so that you bone that users *environment* without destroying their data.
Of course this is all childish, so you could just have your app use the "alternate, abbusive message set."
E.G. Dialog Box: "Update Software 4 L33t H4x0r Pussy?" Button: "Keep using my skillful hack" Button: "Get Latest Hacker Special"
script kiddies should be made to feel like... children...
In simplest terms, we all know that you can't stop software/music/whatever piracy, and the people woul will steal it *DON'T* represent lost revenue as they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Go ahead and screw with them if you want, or just ignore them. It will make no difference.
In the long term, if your product is priced for your audience and (reasonable) money==support or (reasonable) money==upgrades or whatever then you will get money. If you price gouge or offer no value add for the purchase, your product will not be bought.
I just moved and I found my old Original Tetris. It had two floppies, one of each size, and a big yellow "note about copy protection" explaining how that was a waste of effort that bothered everybody and accomplished nothing, so could we all act like adults and play nice. I seem to remember Tetris being a big seller. It was also ripped off a lot, but no more or less than any other equally popular game.
So stop sweating the activation codes and the CD-must-be-in-drive carp.
Besides, one of the best-ever CD must be in drive "copy protections" I have ever seen was on a pinball game. The CD was a music CD too, so all the pinball background music would only play if the cd was there. *that* was clever, this safe-cast stuff is just a waste of plastic.
The best serial number thing I've seen has been winzip. Give away the product and then don't go all draconian over the license. Were they to have serial-number==feature added, say name and email and serial number would let you sign archives as something other than "unregistered", that would be cool too.
But for the most part, there is *NO* model that supports straight 80's style software sales. If you have good product and good support and a good book you will sell product for a good price, otherwise you will be jacked.
Playing the copy protection and registration game is a losing scenerio. It always has been.
Back orifice was always a sniffer trojan. There have been many others. Attacks that install sniffers and attacks that install keyboard loggers have both been going on for years.
I don't remember the particular worm, but there were a bunch that looked for telnet and ftp sessions and then watched for the username/password transactions.
It's old hat.
That bigger trojans are now practical across larger bandwidth allows for more fully-featured exploits is evolutionary not revolutionary.
Good thing you told me my spelling sucks... I'd have never known otherwise... 8-) Actually I'm dyslexic as hell (not that it matters) and have lived and died by the spell checker for many years, as slashdot doesn't have a "check spelling during preview" function... 8-)
Your liberal bias theory is all bunk. Your Mathew Sheppard vs. the other guy story coverage theory doesn't hold water once you factor in _all_ the stories that didn't get coverage. (For instance, there was a serial assailant (turned out to be two sailors doing it, beatings near-to-death with several actual deaths) of gay men and boys in San Diego in the late 1980's (earily ninties?) that didn't get any mainstream news until they "accidentally" killed an "gay-seeming straight boy"; it didn't get national coverage *ever* because it made the news services look bad when they had to announce that straight-boy was something like the 12th victem. I have plenty more that make Mathew Sheppard look statistically like a "hey finaly, they reported a gay bashing" incident.
The who-killed-who and who-got-coverage game is all about the money and the publisitst. The Mathew Shepard storey was big because his people (friends and family) had the money and the time to make it big.
After all, who even hears about all the street hookers who get killed or go missing every year? Let alone the gender biases and sexual orientation or motivations of the hookers or their assailants.
It is invalid to make comparason of individual cases of media coverage, as if it is some zero sum game where every story has the unreported counter-story that subtracts from the total.
the fact of the mater is that there *ISN'T* actually a "liberal bias" to the media. If anything, "the media" is a business, and so has a general conservative bias to protect its own intrests. Since most people do not bother to look below the headlines and look for the actual facts.
You see the media as liberal leaning because you are sensitized to those stories, so they stand out. Poor people see it as biased to the rich; rich see it as biased to the poor; liberals see all the "conservative crime" going unpunished. Black people think it is all white, and some white people (you know who you are) think it is a "jew conspiracy." [The funniest are the white-power people who think that "Jew == Liberal"... its a laugh... really sad... 8-)]
So everybody seems to think the news and TV is out to get *THEM* spesifically, but that is because "everybody" are sheep and only hear the squeeking of the wheels that bother them already.
The fact of the matter is that there were not "seven stories tareting the republicians and that's biased and unfair", in truth there were seven stories targeting the people currently in power, and that's the way it must be.
No bias, Just business.
The current regime is making a horible mess (IMHO) and should be taken to task for it.
My probelms with the previous regime were different, but sex comes out of a dress a lot easier than toxins come out of a river.
That isn't liberal bias, it is pure economics. Some messes don't mean much and some kill children, or will do them serious and irreprable harm to them and their futures. Those messes take a lot of money, time, and effort to fix; so they should be criticized rather a lot.
G.W. Bush kills children, and I don't like it. (if you get my meaning.)
Do I think the press is playing down that angle? Damn straight. If the press were as liberal as you think, those stories (lowering air quality, lowering education, making medical care take a back seat to everything, war profiteering, etc) would be EVERYWHERE, relentlessly and unavoidably. But those stories arn't good for business, so they don't run.
Clinton's failings in these same areas would have run just a relentlessly, but they didn't run then either.
Congresses ongoing failings in these areas would also run relentlessly, but they don't.
There are too many jobs, routers and most of the specialty apliances are alread in existence anyway. Besides what would be the UNIQUELY PATENTABLE THING about each of these specalty boxes? It's not enough (in my plan) to add "really big single purpose computer" to the claims to make a valid patent. That computer would have to do something that every other computer couldn't do already.
The point of mine that you are missing is that computer hardware isn't all that magical. It would be easy to have specalty adapters for particularly innovative (read not common computing) tasks, but nobody would want, say, a point of sale system that required bying 30+ kinds of specalty boxes anyway. It literally wouldn't fit anybody's business plan.
See, it wouldn't be enough to say "and that is the box that you need to buy" because, if there wren't anything particularly magical about the particular box (like a super-special processing array that did fuzzy inference on a database), someone would take the same software that was "patented on the specalty box" and implement it in the general purpose PC on they already have, and volia, "no patent infringement possible."
Youl literally COULDN'T HAVE the n+x machines in the market BECAUSE they would annoy the customers and *STILL* not be enique enough to make the patent valid.
It isn't enough to say "this patent can only be used on my brand-name box #43." You would have to have "this patent requires the magic chip X that makes the calculation in claim 4 possible." and so forth.
It's not like alieware can build a PC and say "that is the patented hardware" and even if they could, by definition, people who went to the store and bought a PC and did the exact same thing on that PC as was patented would not be infringing.
So there COULDN'T POSSIBLY be any business case that leads to the "fractured server".
The unintended consequences you envision relate to your misunderstanding my idea. It, by definition, wouldn't be enough even require a custom built FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Aray) because that FPGA would be.... commodity.
So if SUN goes out and builds a VLSI implementation of something Really Great(TM) they can patent that and the software that goes with it. But anybody who does the same thing in "pure software" and on "commodity hardware" would be in safe territory. So the only motivation for the hardware would be if the hardware were *BETTER* than the eumlation.
These are ALREADY EXISTING market pressures with known economies of scale.
Repeat after me: "your chip, your patent; common chips, your patent doesn't apply."
So as long as nobody "completely destroys the commodity market" (which just wouldn't happen because you sell enough, it becomes a commodity 8-) the software patents don't apply to software in that market. But the specalty devices (like video cards and add-ons) are separate products so they get patent coverage until they become an actual "standard" at which point the patent goes PD and the cloners get to come in wiht compatability ware. And if, in the graphic card example, the same patented rendering pipeline or whatever was so hot, then the emulators would kick in anyway just not with the full hardware advantage.
Finally, the market wouldn't ever allow the creation of X+N specalty devices, because nobody could ever afford [ Resources = (X+N)*power*space*overhead*training ] so real live business pressure would be a "pay or play" on the people who wanted their patented devices sold.
So in summary:
Things like your video card and its magical drivers is patentable, so competetors cannot steal your video card hardware/software hybred solution, but only if your video chip were patentable anyway).
Intel's microcode for their Setium CPU would be patentable because it is part of the CPU chip.
The computer that Setium was in, if the Setium were sold on common market, would be a commodity box even though the parts were patented.
The ID check "law" is almost certianly the "magic regulation" that lets the Airlines be able to make sure you didn't transfer that "non transferable ticket." I mean goodness, I could buy a ticket to the next Super Bowl todya, and SCALP it later and the Ariline wouldn't see a dime of that extra revenue. Oh the humanity... 8-)
The Airlines probably asked for this law.
The other probable law is the unwritten law of Alibi. If they don't check the ID's then I could buy a ticket to Desmoins and send a random stranger or good friend on a round-trip in my name while I go out and kill my ex-wife. Then the "I went to Desmoins, here are my canceled airline tickets" alibi wouldn't work. In the existing system I'd have to get a fake ID, or an illigimate real ID, and we *know* that isn't possible...
OK, so how will this guy get a jury of his peers? Will they send out for a pool of Ausies to sit on his jury for 5 dollars a day (you pay your own transport costs to reach the court house each day too in most municipalities... 8-)
Seriously, what are his due process rights? We royally reamed the Gitmo Guys(tm) for being foriegn and having "never quite made it to US Soil even though they were in US Custody."
By the current administrative doctrine, there is no reason to beleive that John "Screw Public Intrest" Ashcroft *wouldn't* declare him a forign terrorist for defacing our Most Holy IP and send him off to cuba for a short examination.
Oh? We would never do a thing like that? You keep telling yourself that, and don't forget to plug your ears if the Jack-Boot noise gets too loud to sleep.
ASIDE: I'm "an American" [appoligies to all the other residents of North, Central, and South America for the way we appropriated and abuse that term] and the first duty of an actually patriotic American is to CRY FOUL when our government fscks everything up. Shame that isn't working very well of late.
Since the TV judges don't have to stick to the law, you would probably get sent back home and she would wack the prosicutor's peepee on national television for being an idiot.
Were you to get a Real(tm) American Justice(tm) then you would likely be judged on the color of your skin and his or her religious convictions (it is a matter of "community standards" after all) all in the privacy of a sealed (because of the publicity) trial...
'Cause we have justice* here.
(*) your milage may vary, "justice" may only be available in the presence of a large amount of liquid assets...
1) being critical of a right-wing office holder is "leftist" in the same sense that being critical of a black man is "whitist". That is, "if you choose to see it that way" but not necessarily "that way" in the intent of the speaker or in fact.
It is a mistake to view "the current office holder" as the "center" of a continum. So you have "7 of the stories criticize activities by the US government, linking republicans to the activity" as if that linkage is somehow biased. With a republican controlled White House and a repbulican controlled Senate, it is not unreasonable to link most policy-level activities of the US government today to the republican party.
The fact is that Bush *is* as *self-admitted* idalogue (OK, he doesn't wear it on a t-shirt to the best of my knowledge, but he *has* made the position quite clear) who is, as each of his predecessors have for a very long time, stacking "compatable" judicial apointees. It is the way the game is played. It is just going a bit far with the strong-arming (IMHO).
Which leads us to the second point:
2) It is impossible to report an "unbiased story" if the facts themselves are biased.
It is the *JOB* of a reporter, and the media on general, to ask questions. That's how they make their money 8-). When you question a conservative you apear liberal, when you question a liberal you apear conservative, or at least incompatablly liberal 8-). See, it is the nature of the beast. When you ask the question "are you doing enough" or "have you done too much" you *apear* "liberal" because you are almost always asking the former about the interests of people or things that cannot affect the policy themselves, and the latter about those who can.
That is, "have you done too litte for the poor?" and "have you done too much for the rich?" are "interesting" (e.g. paying) stories. The obverse stories "have you done too little for the rich?" and "have you done too much for the poor?" won't sell; or when they do, they "naturally" play out as "attacks."
For instance, no media person ever would ask "are you doing enough to help the wealthy?", and if they *did* that question would apear to be a liberal attack because the "nope, they need more help, they are suffering" line would, even if it were true, would *sound* *sarcastic* even if it were written with a straight face.
The human monkey is wired up to hear laments for the plight of the empowered as wit. That is, it doesn't ring true. Same as the "let them eat cake" we do too much for the downtroden.
So the question "are you doing enough to X the Y?" *MUST* be "provide for, poor" "protect, environment" etc. It's the very nature of asking the question. We, the consumers of infotainment, would not have it any other way.
The "exceptional class" of questions are "punish crime" and "defeat (terrorists|comunists|whatever)". In these cases, since that is a "presumed mission" of the establishment, the answer is always "we could do more with more money/manpower but we are doing our best." And that just isn't news. Cops need more money to run department! As a headline it would inspire a chorus of "no duh" in every single reader.
At some point however, "the conservatives" have invented this mythical "liberal media bias" and then fallen for their own spin hook, line, and sinker.
It just isn't an news story to back conservativism. This is *EXACTLY* the same failing of "good news" (human intrest) reporting. The public doesn't want to hear it because it isn't interesting. "Crime down 3%!" Woohoo, but then the story is over. The "how'd you do it Chief Wiggum?" story won't hold two inches of interest on page 10. There is no dirt being dug. So it is a slow news day or no print at all kind of thing.
The entertainment value of reporting is "naturally liberal" because, for whatever reason, the spinsters have created a public mental equivalance between "the hard, insteresting questions that make policy makers uncomfortable
Eh... not really... See, it would be hard for a manufacturer to calim that you needed to buy his big iron to run his ap. Among other things that ap and that big iron would have to exist as a complete patentable thing. Since you already cannot patent the bulk of the computer, you wouldn't then be able to patent a particualr construction of a computer for a particular purpose.
You are mistaking the concept of "hardware" in this usage. While a Dell(tm) is a brand, it isn't particularly unique, nor are most systems.
See, if IBM were to put out a piece of "big iron" for DB2-prime they wouldn't be able to use the same piece of patenable iron as the unique hardware piece of CICS-doulbe-prime as well. As soon as they themselves wanted their patentable ap to actually do things, they would be getting into multi-functioning and that would tend to cause the hardware to aproach the commodity threshold anyway.
It would have to be written carefully, but not that carefully.
For instance, what would be the "necessary" part of the overal system that would make it bind to the uber-database? It surely wouldn't be the memory wholly unlike everybody else's memory. Nor the "special general purpose processor" etc.
So you get to patent things like "specialty storage drives for the purpose of..." and as long as that was all that they would do, you'd be fine. Ibid ofr encryption chips and cpu microcode.
But the core general-purpose computer would never lose its "general purposeness", for reasons of pure geography. A business that needed to do 10,000 things literally couldn't accomodate the 10,000 separate computers your caveat envisions.
So you would be left with the general purpose computer(s) we all know and love. All of the pure-software stuff woudl be covered by copyright but not trademark, and then the few device-spesific things (Video adapter? sound mixing appliance? super-special microwave link?) would be patentable in conjunction with thier software, and then the regular hardware patents would keep on rolling on.
There would be no fracturing at all.
As for your last, the jig is itself a peice of specialty hardware, so the fact that it fit a standard saw isn't germane. (I think you are generalizing my idea from "hardware" to "system" which would be too vague to work.)
The Jig EULA's are already without standing and are creeping in from the sides. Technically the regular EULAs on store-bought software are without standing too. The only ruling I know of on EULAs that has upheld them were "click-though" agreements offered before purchase/acqusition of sfotware online.
"Regular" EULAs are post-sale conditions and I cannot think of any having passed muster in court, of course IANAL. I don't know the complete legal history of these things, but the fact that MS tries to encumber me, after I bough something from Best Buy (a clear third party) who bought it from some distributor is probably unsupportable. I know it has been rendered vague in court already, but since MS wouldn't be a party to the transaction I made, and since there is no "I disagree, so I will use the product as purchased" button option, the EULA "i agree" thing is the "install me" button and the patern of pixels on it is immaterial. But that's just me.
Of course, since it is me, then clearly no meeting of the minds had happened between me and any software vendor, so no contract in my case at least... 8-)
The all important "synergy" will fix most of that. First off, there is no "business middleware" under the veil of patent, unless you imagine custom-made machines to run each package.
Since customers won't stand for having to buy new hardware for each application, once a piece of hardware becomes multi-functional it starts the long descent into "commodity".
Remember that "this software requires that dongle" isnt' enough. The dongle isn't the computer.
The actual model you should look at is "Pro-Tools" (formatting?) where the software and attached hardware thingy create a digital audio mixing appliance. Such a thing would be patentable. But if someone came along and wrote "Pro-Tools for the Sound Blaster" then *that* would automatically be outside the realm of patent protection. Meanwhile if a competeter made their "Go-Tools audio mixing station" that infringed the patent with hardware and software that was covered, then *that* would remain actionable.
The thing about proprietary networking is that it fails to scale. If "microsofts's internet" were different from "apples internet" the both woudl lose a lot of money.
So we have made "pure software" unpatentable, because if it is "pure" then there is no non-commodity hardware platform that the software could run on.
Consider separetely the DVD. It is patented, lets say, and as long as Phillips want's to solely manufacture, or at least aggressively license (e.g. limitedly license), the players then the patents hold. But as soon as they license it to everybody and their sibling (as it is today) they make a nut of cash and the hardware becomes commodity, and the patents become PD.
See, now by definition, the patents protect the little business, but those businesses naturally "leave the hothouse" when they go large.
So non-computer hardware is protected the same as it is today.
And specialty )or niche) hardware is protected the same as it is today.
But things like the RAMBUS patent memory thing automatically disapears when the patent goes into the hardware standard (you don't get more commodity than "the standard" 8-).
And software is only "protectable" when it is part of a larger solution.
The pure-software naturally foalls back itnot he domain of Copyright.
I would pass a law that say, essentially, than ANY implementation of ANY patented technology can not be held as "infringing" that patnent if it is executed entirely on or using "commodity computer hardware" that is not itself the subject of that patent.
With this in place, general software is effectively unpatentable, but the software components of specialty hardware (e.g. CPU microcode) is.
This creates a basic economic pressure. If you invent a brand-new form of (say) networking, then as long as you are manufacturing the network cards that your cusomers *must* use, then you are good to go. If, however, you "really want to cash in" the act of licensing your network cards for general manufacture, or manufacture your cards for general use, then your patent automagically goes away when a commodity threshold is passed.
Another side effect is that "eumlators" are automagically legal. This means that your real devices must "outperform" the general emulation to be worth it. So a good "encyrption chip" for instance would be patentable, but the OOS/competetive implementation (which would presumably be slower unless your product sucks) would be legal and automatically non-infringing.
That also means that the agregious abuse of the patent system could go on for a while but the "regular computers" out there would be exempt from the battle. If MS made a "special" keyboard for traversing links, the commodity keyboard I am using + Lynx would not be infringing under any intrepretation.
So maybe, "Spend your presumably hard-earned money for non-exclusive, revokable access, under the terms of your co-branded hardware/player device, of one frangable copy of it... on DVD today! for only $20 and a perminant grant-of-access to trump your right to privacy!"
I thought that all the public key (etc) systems relied on a "hard math problem" to produce the public-key secret-key pair. When I generate my DES and AES keys I go through that "mostly prime" exercise.
So quantum computing should be able to do the "large nubmer factoring" exercise necessary to crack the key...
So when you use the less-than sign in a "Plain Old Text" posting instead of using the ampersand-l-e-semicolon thing, slashdot will eat some of your text.
If it's plain old text, then the system should not do an "html remove" or whatever, it should turn the plain text into the decorated text.
Someone needs to fix this text entry dialog box.
The system ate nearly a paragraph because it was trying to do _something_ _inexplicable_ about a less-than sign followed dozens of words later by a greater-than.
It's not that hard to turn an literal less-than into the actual ampersand-le thing, and having done that, the "cross-host-scripting" is prevented becase the long-form thing isn't a less-than any more...
If a term falls into public use as a generic, even without the participation of another company, then the trademark is no longer valid, *THEN* another company can use it.
Note that the public invalidation happens *before* the other companies use is permitted.
Were it as you believe, then a company could "disenfranchise" ( generic public usage => effective lapse of trademark => GROSS WEAKENING OF BRAND IDENTITY IN THE MINDS OF THE PUBLIC => use by competetor => (lost) legal fracas declaring word common => common word.
This is why the "windows" vs "lindows" thing was so important. MS "stole" the common word into their trademark registration (lots of programs had windows in the generic sense, before MS invented, let alone registered the word), and then at the first challenge, they had enough money to "back down" the "Lindows" people. In point of fact "Lindows" was a stronger trademark but the word-thief windows people had better lawyer budgets.
Trademark Word Thievery is the act of trying to climb back up the decay chart.
Maybe he was being proactive. Since the patent database is cannon with respect to Prior Art maybe this guy was seeding the patent database with prior art today so that when Real Robots(tm) finally come around this tidbit of core rationality cannot be patented at that future date.
Everybody with a little cash should be busy patenting everything they read about in Science Fiction. That way, in twenty-plus years when we start to see space hotels and Mr Fusion appliances the concepts for the device will have lapsed into the public domain and we will be free of this mess.
Just think, if I had a time machine I could go back and patent everything in Linux (et al) in 1984 and by now all the patents would be expired and we wouldnt' have to sweat a thing...
eh.. how about "not in some way that presumes I am a crook."
This would also be my perferred way to pay for games.
Quite frankly, I am *pretty* sure that I, or my roommate, have paid for every game I have played that wasn't free.
Can I make the same assertion about music? Only kind of. Back in the day I did some napsterizing, but all of that was experimental. That is, I never napsterized anything that I wanted to "own" but I did do a lot of pick a song, check out the playlist of the user that had that song, download things that looked interesting. Can't say that I listened to much, if any of that more than once.
My roomate is into audio production and I am into writing. We naturally have these conversations about theme and content. So somewhere I think I *still* have nine versions of "little bunny foo foo." They are all *quite* terrible.
In its heyday Napster was very much the Star Trek experience of "computer, find me citations on (x)" querying, even if it was just music.
And honestly, I don't know that I have scrubbed out every reference to every song that was so fetched. I also think that several other people had access to the one computer as it was a house resource for brief period of extremity.
I say all this because if there had been a way to take the song tracks that I had already fetched and use them as a key to a payment system. I'd have done that on several occasions.
The way iTunes etc work, you pay your money and then you take your chance.
Given god like powers, or the money and title to make things different I'd do the following.
1) offer a large catalog of music (in fact every title I could, no exceptions) for free download at "good quality" (at least 128bit mp3, possibly more).
2) provide an app with a big drag-and-drop target (etc)(sort of a Big Red Button). When you take the free title and apply it to the app, it sends of a dime or two to The People Who Deserve Money(tm).
2a) the app would then let that computer download "really high bitrate" versions of that same song. Yes, it is only the one computer that is so authorized, and no, the good copies are not DRMed to be frozen to that box or anything like that. I wouldn't even bother to brand the high bitrate songs as comming from that computer.
2b) even the high-bitrate titles from 2a could be dropped onto the Big Red Button (on a different computer) to send money to those who deserve to be paid.
2c) using the Big Red Button will also get you money off credits for songs containing that version of that title on full CD purchases from the attached online store.
3) provide the old napster structure of search and share, and wire it up to automatically carry the free-quality songs freely.
4) treat the persions who pay for the very-high quality tracks not to spread them around, as the "good quality" tracks are available to everyone.
5) generally treat the customers as nominally honest and dignified humans.
5a) the very-high quality tracks are suitable for burning of CDs and the people are encouraged not to share these, and the napster-like applicaiton would be "resistent" to sharing these version, but they are not blocked from doing so by DRM or "playlist burn counts" etc.
So the p2p system removes my cost to distribute. The people who are "Causal Copiers" will be given all the music they want (a-la radio) and those who want more are going to get more by paying money. Marketing is automatic and quite rich, the whole "persons who have this song also have these" is implicit. Money is to be made at the low and high end. The "illicit feeling" is removed from the transaction. And most importantly, you know exactly what you are getting with every purchase, so quality must be good and there will be no "the rest of the album sucked" or "this wasn't what I thought it was" problems because there is no risk to the purchaser.
It could be done cheaply and it would work.
(Consider... Napster is the only reason that I ever bought Green Day... 8-)
"Words Fail Me..." is an old and well understood phenomonia. That's how "being left speachless" became "an old saw."
It is easier to see this failing as classically applied to moments of great emotion. That does not, however, deminish the reality in less emotional contexts.
Often this "failure of words" comes when a pair of people lack what I would call a "bridge vocabulary". That is, when two parties lack the necessary spesific and technical lexicon to get the idea from one to the other of the participants.
Even in the presence of the bridge words, the speaker has to be able to plot the path of his speach before he begins. As the uncertianty of the speaker for the audience and the lexicon rises, the difficulty of formulating an aproach will increase as well. So talking obscura to strangers from different disciplines becomes axiomatically high.
All that being said, it is often true that this same assertion is being used to hide a fundimental failure to understand. People are like that and we have all seen it happen. So it has to be taken on a case by case basis. The probability that someone is glossing over their ignorance is inversely proportional to subtlty of the field.
So if an accountant says this of an accounting practice you are probably dealing with a failure of understanding. If an artist, or a high-energy physicist etc, says this of an esoteric technique it is probably a genuine failure of communications.
So I was thinking about the doctrine of first sale and it occurs to me that the "first sale" of most games takes place from the manufacturer to a distributor. The store buys the game from the distributor and then the store sells it to me.
Since the store and the distributor didn't have to "licence the game" and since, if they did, I was not a party to that license, isn't the doctrine of first sale long-since exhausted before I even come on the scene?
Shouldn't the BSA (et al) be going after the distributors for their act of "selling" something that they clearly should have only been "licensing".
The problem is that the two worst movies I have ever seen arn't even rateable.
Demoni is almost certianly the worst, and is the only movie I have ever demanded my money back for. It just seems to have a following amongst the "Fangoria" types, it is, after all, entirely composed of the erata central to that mentality.
Meanwhile Author! Author! is an Al Pachino movie in which absolutely nothing of any interest to anyone ever happens. It is a tiny and featureless expanse of sachrine.
For truely variant reasons both of these movies are worse than, say, "Street Fighter". Hell, you could at least laugh at "Future War". Awful movies can transcend into art, rasing the question of when does "simply bad" become "accidental satire"?
The problem is that the truely bad movies don't even attract enough interest to be voted down into the gutters where they belong. So the fiew niche participants (e.g. "I love anything Pachino no mater what") skew the results with their fetishist participation while the informed masses can't even lower themselves to the effort of pressing the little yellow button... 8-)
The only real measure of "bad movie" must be a quantum state measure of emptyness... you know, a true expression of entropy.
So Author! Author! edges out Demoni buy just a hair...
I was more offended by the break in meter (you have eleven beats [twelve if you fully pronounce 'data' as two]).
I guess I completed the rhyme by habbit, having forgotten [if I even ever knew] the original didn't... 8-)
Aside: I have a tendency to dislike rupture in scheme and meter, especially when it puts a speed-bump in music. For instance, "La Vita Loca" drives me nuts because of the way "the color mocha" is used to force the meter and rhyme. "Her skin, a supple mocha" is much better as it maintains the theme, contains the original info, and doesn't break the thematic content of the verse (which is very tactile).
Yes, I know, how sad. I paid too much attention to highschool english and clearly think too much... 8-)
Katie, Katie who can I turn to
We want you to give us something you want to hold on to
I know you think we're like the others before - Who saw your info in the WHOIS database + Who choose who's 'WHOIS' they got to ignore
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, ifyou want to piss people off, install persistent init files .bashrc .login (.whatever); completely overwriting the originals, so that you bone that users *environment* without destroying their data.
Of course this is all childish, so you could just have your app use the "alternate, abbusive message set."
E.G. Dialog Box: "Update Software 4 L33t H4x0r Pussy?" Button: "Keep using my skillful hack" Button: "Get Latest Hacker Special"
Dialog Box (confirm delete): "Couldn't figure out 'rm'?" Button: "yes" Button: "no".
script kiddies should be made to feel like... children...
In simplest terms, we all know that you can't stop software/music/whatever piracy, and the people woul will steal it *DON'T* represent lost revenue as they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Go ahead and screw with them if you want, or just ignore them. It will make no difference.
In the long term, if your product is priced for your audience and (reasonable) money==support or (reasonable) money==upgrades or whatever then you will get money. If you price gouge or offer no value add for the purchase, your product will not be bought.
I just moved and I found my old Original Tetris. It had two floppies, one of each size, and a big yellow "note about copy protection" explaining how that was a waste of effort that bothered everybody and accomplished nothing, so could we all act like adults and play nice. I seem to remember Tetris being a big seller. It was also ripped off a lot, but no more or less than any other equally popular game.
So stop sweating the activation codes and the CD-must-be-in-drive carp.
Besides, one of the best-ever CD must be in drive "copy protections" I have ever seen was on a pinball game. The CD was a music CD too, so all the pinball background music would only play if the cd was there. *that* was clever, this safe-cast stuff is just a waste of plastic.
The best serial number thing I've seen has been winzip. Give away the product and then don't go all draconian over the license. Were they to have serial-number==feature added, say name and email and serial number would let you sign archives as something other than "unregistered", that would be cool too.
But for the most part, there is *NO* model that supports straight 80's style software sales. If you have good product and good support and a good book you will sell product for a good price, otherwise you will be jacked.
Playing the copy protection and registration game is a losing scenerio. It always has been.
The rest is sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Back orifice was always a sniffer trojan. There have been many others. Attacks that install sniffers and attacks that install keyboard loggers have both been going on for years.
I don't remember the particular worm, but there were a bunch that looked for telnet and ftp sessions and then watched for the username/password transactions.
It's old hat.
That bigger trojans are now practical across larger bandwidth allows for more fully-featured exploits is evolutionary not revolutionary.
Nice job of picking out the (deliberately) inflamatory statements and missing the points they were intended to highlight... 8-)
Good thing you told me my spelling sucks... I'd have never known otherwise... 8-) Actually I'm dyslexic as hell (not that it matters) and have lived and died by the spell checker for many years, as slashdot doesn't have a "check spelling during preview" function... 8-)
Your liberal bias theory is all bunk. Your Mathew Sheppard vs. the other guy story coverage theory doesn't hold water once you factor in _all_ the stories that didn't get coverage. (For instance, there was a serial assailant (turned out to be two sailors doing it, beatings near-to-death with several actual deaths) of gay men and boys in San Diego in the late 1980's (earily ninties?) that didn't get any mainstream news until they "accidentally" killed an "gay-seeming straight boy"; it didn't get national coverage *ever* because it made the news services look bad when they had to announce that straight-boy was something like the 12th victem. I have plenty more that make Mathew Sheppard look statistically like a "hey finaly, they reported a gay bashing" incident.
The who-killed-who and who-got-coverage game is all about the money and the publisitst. The Mathew Shepard storey was big because his people (friends and family) had the money and the time to make it big.
After all, who even hears about all the street hookers who get killed or go missing every year? Let alone the gender biases and sexual orientation or motivations of the hookers or their assailants.
It is invalid to make comparason of individual cases of media coverage, as if it is some zero sum game where every story has the unreported counter-story that subtracts from the total.
the fact of the mater is that there *ISN'T* actually a "liberal bias" to the media. If anything, "the media" is a business, and so has a general conservative bias to protect its own intrests. Since most people do not bother to look below the headlines and look for the actual facts.
You see the media as liberal leaning because you are sensitized to those stories, so they stand out. Poor people see it as biased to the rich; rich see it as biased to the poor; liberals see all the "conservative crime" going unpunished. Black people think it is all white, and some white people (you know who you are) think it is a "jew conspiracy." [The funniest are the white-power people who think that "Jew == Liberal"... its a laugh... really sad... 8-)]
So everybody seems to think the news and TV is out to get *THEM* spesifically, but that is because "everybody" are sheep and only hear the squeeking of the wheels that bother them already.
The fact of the matter is that there were not "seven stories tareting the republicians and that's biased and unfair", in truth there were seven stories targeting the people currently in power, and that's the way it must be.
No bias, Just business.
The current regime is making a horible mess (IMHO) and should be taken to task for it.
My probelms with the previous regime were different, but sex comes out of a dress a lot easier than toxins come out of a river.
That isn't liberal bias, it is pure economics. Some messes don't mean much and some kill children, or will do them serious and irreprable harm to them and their futures. Those messes take a lot of money, time, and effort to fix; so they should be criticized rather a lot.
G.W. Bush kills children, and I don't like it. (if you get my meaning.)
Do I think the press is playing down that angle? Damn straight. If the press were as liberal as you think, those stories (lowering air quality, lowering education, making medical care take a back seat to everything, war profiteering, etc) would be EVERYWHERE, relentlessly and unavoidably. But those stories arn't good for business, so they don't run.
Clinton's failings in these same areas would have run just a relentlessly, but they didn't run then either.
Congresses ongoing failings in these areas would also run relentlessly, but they don't.
Insetead we see blaitant
There are too many jobs, routers and most of the specialty apliances are alread in existence anyway. Besides what would be the UNIQUELY PATENTABLE THING about each of these specalty boxes? It's not enough (in my plan) to add "really big single purpose computer" to the claims to make a valid patent. That computer would have to do something that every other computer couldn't do already.
.... commodity.
The point of mine that you are missing is that computer hardware isn't all that magical. It would be easy to have specalty adapters for particularly innovative (read not common computing) tasks, but nobody would want, say, a point of sale system that required bying 30+ kinds of specalty boxes anyway. It literally wouldn't fit anybody's business plan.
See, it wouldn't be enough to say "and that is the box that you need to buy" because, if there wren't anything particularly magical about the particular box (like a super-special processing array that did fuzzy inference on a database), someone would take the same software that was "patented on the specalty box" and implement it in the general purpose PC on they already have, and volia, "no patent infringement possible."
Youl literally COULDN'T HAVE the n+x machines in the market BECAUSE they would annoy the customers and *STILL* not be enique enough to make the patent valid.
It isn't enough to say "this patent can only be used on my brand-name box #43." You would have to have "this patent requires the magic chip X that makes the calculation in claim 4 possible." and so forth.
It's not like alieware can build a PC and say "that is the patented hardware" and even if they could, by definition, people who went to the store and bought a PC and did the exact same thing on that PC as was patented would not be infringing.
So there COULDN'T POSSIBLY be any business case that leads to the "fractured server".
The unintended consequences you envision relate to your misunderstanding my idea. It, by definition, wouldn't be enough even require a custom built FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Aray) because that FPGA would be
So if SUN goes out and builds a VLSI implementation of something Really Great(TM) they can patent that and the software that goes with it. But anybody who does the same thing in "pure software" and on "commodity hardware" would be in safe territory. So the only motivation for the hardware would be if the hardware were *BETTER* than the eumlation.
These are ALREADY EXISTING market pressures with known economies of scale.
Repeat after me: "your chip, your patent; common chips, your patent doesn't apply."
So as long as nobody "completely destroys the commodity market" (which just wouldn't happen because you sell enough, it becomes a commodity 8-) the software patents don't apply to software in that market. But the specalty devices (like video cards and add-ons) are separate products so they get patent coverage until they become an actual "standard" at which point the patent goes PD and the cloners get to come in wiht compatability ware. And if, in the graphic card example, the same patented rendering pipeline or whatever was so hot, then the emulators would kick in anyway just not with the full hardware advantage.
Finally, the market wouldn't ever allow the creation of X+N specalty devices, because nobody could ever afford [ Resources = (X+N)*power*space*overhead*training ] so real live business pressure would be a "pay or play" on the people who wanted their patented devices sold.
So in summary:
Things like your video card and its magical drivers is patentable, so competetors cannot steal your video card hardware/software hybred solution, but only if your video chip were patentable anyway).
Intel's microcode for their Setium CPU would be patentable because it is part of the CPU chip.
The computer that Setium was in, if the Setium were sold on common market, would be a commodity box even though the parts were patented.
The ID check "law" is almost certianly the "magic regulation" that lets the Airlines be able to make sure you didn't transfer that "non transferable ticket." I mean goodness, I could buy a ticket to the next Super Bowl todya, and SCALP it later and the Ariline wouldn't see a dime of that extra revenue. Oh the humanity... 8-)
The Airlines probably asked for this law.
The other probable law is the unwritten law of Alibi. If they don't check the ID's then I could buy a ticket to Desmoins and send a random stranger or good friend on a round-trip in my name while I go out and kill my ex-wife. Then the "I went to Desmoins, here are my canceled airline tickets" alibi wouldn't work. In the existing system I'd have to get a fake ID, or an illigimate real ID, and we *know* that isn't possible...
oh, wait...
OK, so how will this guy get a jury of his peers? Will they send out for a pool of Ausies to sit on his jury for 5 dollars a day (you pay your own transport costs to reach the court house each day too in most municipalities... 8-)
/sigh
Seriously, what are his due process rights? We royally reamed the Gitmo Guys(tm) for being foriegn and having "never quite made it to US Soil even though they were in US Custody."
By the current administrative doctrine, there is no reason to beleive that John "Screw Public Intrest" Ashcroft *wouldn't* declare him a forign terrorist for defacing our Most Holy IP and send him off to cuba for a short examination.
Oh? We would never do a thing like that? You keep telling yourself that, and don't forget to plug your ears if the Jack-Boot noise gets too loud to sleep.
ASIDE: I'm "an American" [appoligies to all the other residents of North, Central, and South America for the way we appropriated and abuse that term] and the first duty of an actually patriotic American is to CRY FOUL when our government fscks everything up. Shame that isn't working very well of late.
Whiners never Vote, or so it seems...
Since the TV judges don't have to stick to the law, you would probably get sent back home and she would wack the prosicutor's peepee on national television for being an idiot.
Were you to get a Real(tm) American Justice(tm) then you would likely be judged on the color of your skin and his or her religious convictions (it is a matter of "community standards" after all) all in the privacy of a sealed (because of the publicity) trial...
'Cause we have justice* here.
(*) your milage may vary, "justice" may only be available in the presence of a large amount of liquid assets...
Two thoughts:
1) being critical of a right-wing office holder is "leftist" in the same sense that being critical of a black man is "whitist". That is, "if you choose to see it that way" but not necessarily "that way" in the intent of the speaker or in fact.
It is a mistake to view "the current office holder" as the "center" of a continum. So you have "7 of the stories criticize activities by the US government, linking republicans to the activity" as if that linkage is somehow biased. With a republican controlled White House and a repbulican controlled Senate, it is not unreasonable to link most policy-level activities of the US government today to the republican party.
The fact is that Bush *is* as *self-admitted* idalogue (OK, he doesn't wear it on a t-shirt to the best of my knowledge, but he *has* made the position quite clear) who is, as each of his predecessors have for a very long time, stacking "compatable" judicial apointees. It is the way the game is played. It is just going a bit far with the strong-arming (IMHO).
Which leads us to the second point:
2) It is impossible to report an "unbiased story" if the facts themselves are biased.
It is the *JOB* of a reporter, and the media on general, to ask questions. That's how they make their money 8-). When you question a conservative you apear liberal, when you question a liberal you apear conservative, or at least incompatablly liberal 8-). See, it is the nature of the beast. When you ask the question "are you doing enough" or "have you done too much" you *apear* "liberal" because you are almost always asking the former about the interests of people or things that cannot affect the policy themselves, and the latter about those who can.
That is, "have you done too litte for the poor?" and "have you done too much for the rich?" are "interesting" (e.g. paying) stories. The obverse stories "have you done too little for the rich?" and "have you done too much for the poor?" won't sell; or when they do, they "naturally" play out as "attacks."
For instance, no media person ever would ask "are you doing enough to help the wealthy?", and if they *did* that question would apear to be a liberal attack because the "nope, they need more help, they are suffering" line would, even if it were true, would *sound* *sarcastic* even if it were written with a straight face.
The human monkey is wired up to hear laments for the plight of the empowered as wit. That is, it doesn't ring true. Same as the "let them eat cake" we do too much for the downtroden.
So the question "are you doing enough to X the Y?" *MUST* be "provide for, poor" "protect, environment" etc. It's the very nature of asking the question. We, the consumers of infotainment, would not have it any other way.
The "exceptional class" of questions are "punish crime" and "defeat (terrorists|comunists|whatever)". In these cases, since that is a "presumed mission" of the establishment, the answer is always "we could do more with more money/manpower but we are doing our best." And that just isn't news. Cops need more money to run department! As a headline it would inspire a chorus of "no duh" in every single reader.
At some point however, "the conservatives" have invented this mythical "liberal media bias" and then fallen for their own spin hook, line, and sinker.
It just isn't an news story to back conservativism. This is *EXACTLY* the same failing of "good news" (human intrest) reporting. The public doesn't want to hear it because it isn't interesting. "Crime down 3%!" Woohoo, but then the story is over. The "how'd you do it Chief Wiggum?" story won't hold two inches of interest on page 10. There is no dirt being dug. So it is a slow news day or no print at all kind of thing.
The entertainment value of reporting is "naturally liberal" because, for whatever reason, the spinsters have created a public mental equivalance between "the hard, insteresting questions that make policy makers uncomfortable
Eh... not really... See, it would be hard for a manufacturer to calim that you needed to buy his big iron to run his ap. Among other things that ap and that big iron would have to exist as a complete patentable thing. Since you already cannot patent the bulk of the computer, you wouldn't then be able to patent a particualr construction of a computer for a particular purpose.
..." and as long as that was all that they would do, you'd be fine. Ibid ofr encryption chips and cpu microcode.
You are mistaking the concept of "hardware" in this usage. While a Dell(tm) is a brand, it isn't particularly unique, nor are most systems.
See, if IBM were to put out a piece of "big iron" for DB2-prime they wouldn't be able to use the same piece of patenable iron as the unique hardware piece of CICS-doulbe-prime as well. As soon as they themselves wanted their patentable ap to actually do things, they would be getting into multi-functioning and that would tend to cause the hardware to aproach the commodity threshold anyway.
It would have to be written carefully, but not that carefully.
For instance, what would be the "necessary" part of the overal system that would make it bind to the uber-database? It surely wouldn't be the memory wholly unlike everybody else's memory. Nor the "special general purpose processor" etc.
So you get to patent things like "specialty storage drives for the purpose of
But the core general-purpose computer would never lose its "general purposeness", for reasons of pure geography. A business that needed to do 10,000 things literally couldn't accomodate the 10,000 separate computers your caveat envisions.
So you would be left with the general purpose computer(s) we all know and love. All of the pure-software stuff woudl be covered by copyright but not trademark, and then the few device-spesific things (Video adapter? sound mixing appliance? super-special microwave link?) would be patentable in conjunction with thier software, and then the regular hardware patents would keep on rolling on.
There would be no fracturing at all.
As for your last, the jig is itself a peice of specialty hardware, so the fact that it fit a standard saw isn't germane. (I think you are generalizing my idea from "hardware" to "system" which would be too vague to work.)
The Jig EULA's are already without standing and are creeping in from the sides. Technically the regular EULAs on store-bought software are without standing too. The only ruling I know of on EULAs that has upheld them were "click-though" agreements offered before purchase/acqusition of sfotware online.
"Regular" EULAs are post-sale conditions and I cannot think of any having passed muster in court, of course IANAL. I don't know the complete legal history of these things, but the fact that MS tries to encumber me, after I bough something from Best Buy (a clear third party) who bought it from some distributor is probably unsupportable. I know it has been rendered vague in court already, but since MS wouldn't be a party to the transaction I made, and since there is no "I disagree, so I will use the product as purchased" button option, the EULA "i agree" thing is the "install me" button and the patern of pixels on it is immaterial. But that's just me.
Of course, since it is me, then clearly no meeting of the minds had happened between me and any software vendor, so no contract in my case at least... 8-)
The all important "synergy" will fix most of that. First off, there is no "business middleware" under the veil of patent, unless you imagine custom-made machines to run each package.
Since customers won't stand for having to buy new hardware for each application, once a piece of hardware becomes multi-functional it starts the long descent into "commodity".
Remember that "this software requires that dongle" isnt' enough. The dongle isn't the computer.
The actual model you should look at is "Pro-Tools" (formatting?) where the software and attached hardware thingy create a digital audio mixing appliance. Such a thing would be patentable. But if someone came along and wrote "Pro-Tools for the Sound Blaster" then *that* would automatically be outside the realm of patent protection. Meanwhile if a competeter made their "Go-Tools audio mixing station" that infringed the patent with hardware and software that was covered, then *that* would remain actionable.
The thing about proprietary networking is that it fails to scale. If "microsofts's internet" were different from "apples internet" the both woudl lose a lot of money.
So we have made "pure software" unpatentable, because if it is "pure" then there is no non-commodity hardware platform that the software could run on.
Consider separetely the DVD. It is patented, lets say, and as long as Phillips want's to solely manufacture, or at least aggressively license (e.g. limitedly license), the players then the patents hold. But as soon as they license it to everybody and their sibling (as it is today) they make a nut of cash and the hardware becomes commodity, and the patents become PD.
See, now by definition, the patents protect the little business, but those businesses naturally "leave the hothouse" when they go large.
So non-computer hardware is protected the same as it is today.
And specialty )or niche) hardware is protected the same as it is today.
But things like the RAMBUS patent memory thing automatically disapears when the patent goes into the hardware standard (you don't get more commodity than "the standard" 8-).
And software is only "protectable" when it is part of a larger solution.
The pure-software naturally foalls back itnot he domain of Copyright.
I would pass a law that say, essentially, than ANY implementation of ANY patented technology can not be held as "infringing" that patnent if it is executed entirely on or using "commodity computer hardware" that is not itself the subject of that patent.
With this in place, general software is effectively unpatentable, but the software components of specialty hardware (e.g. CPU microcode) is.
This creates a basic economic pressure. If you invent a brand-new form of (say) networking, then as long as you are manufacturing the network cards that your cusomers *must* use, then you are good to go. If, however, you "really want to cash in" the act of licensing your network cards for general manufacture, or manufacture your cards for general use, then your patent automagically goes away when a commodity threshold is passed.
Another side effect is that "eumlators" are automagically legal. This means that your real devices must "outperform" the general emulation to be worth it. So a good "encyrption chip" for instance would be patentable, but the OOS/competetive implementation (which would presumably be slower unless your product sucks) would be legal and automatically non-infringing.
That also means that the agregious abuse of the patent system could go on for a while but the "regular computers" out there would be exempt from the battle. If MS made a "special" keyboard for traversing links, the commodity keyboard I am using + Lynx would not be infringing under any intrepretation.
Problem solved.
Wrong-o you don't even "own" the license....
So maybe, "Spend your presumably hard-earned money for non-exclusive, revokable access, under the terms of your co-branded hardware/player device, of one frangable copy of it... on DVD today! for only $20 and a perminant grant-of-access to trump your right to privacy!"
"I can see it now, games as the next designer drug" (paraphrased)
That was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation....
Doesn't the entire galaxy know it is unsafe to open mail from an untrusted source?
"Here's are planitary genome... have fun... Don't try anything from the red pages..."
I thought that all the public key (etc) systems relied on a "hard math problem" to produce the public-key secret-key pair. When I generate my DES and AES keys I go through that "mostly prime" exercise.
So quantum computing should be able to do the "large nubmer factoring" exercise necessary to crack the key...
Or I am full of shite... 8-)
So when you use the less-than sign in a "Plain Old Text" posting instead of using the ampersand-l-e-semicolon thing, slashdot will eat some of your text.
If it's plain old text, then the system should not do an "html remove" or whatever, it should turn the plain text into the decorated text.
Someone needs to fix this text entry dialog box.
The system ate nearly a paragraph because it was trying to do _something_ _inexplicable_ about a less-than sign followed dozens of words later by a greater-than.
It's not that hard to turn an literal less-than into the actual ampersand-le thing, and having done that, the "cross-host-scripting" is prevented becase the long-form thing isn't a less-than any more...
Very Vexing...
Dude, check the law before giving legal advice...
If a term falls into public use as a generic, even without the participation of another company, then the trademark is no longer valid, *THEN* another company can use it.
Note that the public invalidation happens *before* the other companies use is permitted.
Were it as you believe, then a company could "disenfranchise" ( generic public usage => effective lapse of trademark => GROSS WEAKENING OF BRAND IDENTITY IN THE MINDS OF THE PUBLIC => use by competetor => (lost) legal fracas declaring word common => common word.
This is why the "windows" vs "lindows" thing was so important. MS "stole" the common word into their trademark registration (lots of programs had windows in the generic sense, before MS invented, let alone registered the word), and then at the first challenge, they had enough money to "back down" the "Lindows" people. In point of fact "Lindows" was a stronger trademark but the word-thief windows people had better lawyer budgets.
Trademark Word Thievery is the act of trying to climb back up the decay chart.
So mod parent down as crap... 8-)
Maybe he was being proactive. Since the patent database is cannon with respect to Prior Art maybe this guy was seeding the patent database with prior art today so that when Real Robots(tm) finally come around this tidbit of core rationality cannot be patented at that future date.
Everybody with a little cash should be busy patenting everything they read about in Science Fiction. That way, in twenty-plus years when we start to see space hotels and Mr Fusion appliances the concepts for the device will have lapsed into the public domain and we will be free of this mess.
Just think, if I had a time machine I could go back and patent everything in Linux (et al) in 1984 and by now all the patents would be expired and we wouldnt' have to sweat a thing...
8-)
eh.. how about "not in some way that presumes I am a crook."
This would also be my perferred way to pay for games.
Quite frankly, I am *pretty* sure that I, or my roommate, have paid for every game I have played that wasn't free.
Can I make the same assertion about music? Only kind of. Back in the day I did some napsterizing, but all of that was experimental. That is, I never napsterized anything that I wanted to "own" but I did do a lot of pick a song, check out the playlist of the user that had that song, download things that looked interesting. Can't say that I listened to much, if any of that more than once.
My roomate is into audio production and I am into writing. We naturally have these conversations about theme and content. So somewhere I think I *still* have nine versions of "little bunny foo foo." They are all *quite* terrible.
In its heyday Napster was very much the Star Trek experience of "computer, find me citations on (x)" querying, even if it was just music.
And honestly, I don't know that I have scrubbed out every reference to every song that was so fetched. I also think that several other people had access to the one computer as it was a house resource for brief period of extremity.
I say all this because if there had been a way to take the song tracks that I had already fetched and use them as a key to a payment system. I'd have done that on several occasions.
The way iTunes etc work, you pay your money and then you take your chance.
Given god like powers, or the money and title to make things different I'd do the following.
1) offer a large catalog of music (in fact every title I could, no exceptions) for free download at "good quality" (at least 128bit mp3, possibly more).
2) provide an app with a big drag-and-drop target (etc)(sort of a Big Red Button). When you take the free title and apply it to the app, it sends of a dime or two to The People Who Deserve Money(tm).
2a) the app would then let that computer download "really high bitrate" versions of that same song. Yes, it is only the one computer that is so authorized, and no, the good copies are not DRMed to be frozen to that box or anything like that. I wouldn't even bother to brand the high bitrate songs as comming from that computer.
2b) even the high-bitrate titles from 2a could be dropped onto the Big Red Button (on a different computer) to send money to those who deserve to be paid.
2c) using the Big Red Button will also get you money off credits for songs containing that version of that title on full CD purchases from the attached online store.
3) provide the old napster structure of search and share, and wire it up to automatically carry the free-quality songs freely.
4) treat the persions who pay for the very-high quality tracks not to spread them around, as the "good quality" tracks are available to everyone.
5) generally treat the customers as nominally honest and dignified humans.
5a) the very-high quality tracks are suitable for burning of CDs and the people are encouraged not to share these, and the napster-like applicaiton would be "resistent" to sharing these version, but they are not blocked from doing so by DRM or "playlist burn counts" etc.
So the p2p system removes my cost to distribute. The people who are "Causal Copiers" will be given all the music they want (a-la radio) and those who want more are going to get more by paying money. Marketing is automatic and quite rich, the whole "persons who have this song also have these" is implicit. Money is to be made at the low and high end. The "illicit feeling" is removed from the transaction. And most importantly, you know exactly what you are getting with every purchase, so quality must be good and there will be no "the rest of the album sucked" or "this wasn't what I thought it was" problems because there is no risk to the purchaser.
It could be done cheaply and it would work.
(Consider... Napster is the only reason that I ever bought Green Day... 8-)
"I understand it, I just can't articulate it,"
"Words Fail Me..." is an old and well understood phenomonia. That's how "being left speachless" became "an old saw."
It is easier to see this failing as classically applied to moments of great emotion. That does not, however, deminish the reality in less emotional contexts.
Often this "failure of words" comes when a pair of people lack what I would call a "bridge vocabulary". That is, when two parties lack the necessary spesific and technical lexicon to get the idea from one to the other of the participants.
Even in the presence of the bridge words, the speaker has to be able to plot the path of his speach before he begins. As the uncertianty of the speaker for the audience and the lexicon rises, the difficulty of formulating an aproach will increase as well. So talking obscura to strangers from different disciplines becomes axiomatically high.
All that being said, it is often true that this same assertion is being used to hide a fundimental failure to understand. People are like that and we have all seen it happen. So it has to be taken on a case by case basis. The probability that someone is glossing over their ignorance is inversely proportional to subtlty of the field.
So if an accountant says this of an accounting practice you are probably dealing with a failure of understanding. If an artist, or a high-energy physicist etc, says this of an esoteric technique it is probably a genuine failure of communications.
So I was thinking about the doctrine of first sale and it occurs to me that the "first sale" of most games takes place from the manufacturer to a distributor. The store buys the game from the distributor and then the store sells it to me.
Since the store and the distributor didn't have to "licence the game" and since, if they did, I was not a party to that license, isn't the doctrine of first sale long-since exhausted before I even come on the scene?
Shouldn't the BSA (et al) be going after the distributors for their act of "selling" something that they clearly should have only been "licensing".
The problem is that the two worst movies I have ever seen arn't even rateable. Demoni is almost certianly the worst, and is the only movie I have ever demanded my money back for. It just seems to have a following amongst the "Fangoria" types, it is, after all, entirely composed of the erata central to that mentality. Meanwhile Author! Author! is an Al Pachino movie in which absolutely nothing of any interest to anyone ever happens. It is a tiny and featureless expanse of sachrine. For truely variant reasons both of these movies are worse than, say, "Street Fighter". Hell, you could at least laugh at "Future War". Awful movies can transcend into art, rasing the question of when does "simply bad" become "accidental satire"? The problem is that the truely bad movies don't even attract enough interest to be voted down into the gutters where they belong. So the fiew niche participants (e.g. "I love anything Pachino no mater what") skew the results with their fetishist participation while the informed masses can't even lower themselves to the effort of pressing the little yellow button... 8-) The only real measure of "bad movie" must be a quantum state measure of emptyness... you know, a true expression of entropy. So Author! Author! edges out Demoni buy just a hair...
Apologies...
I was more offended by the break in meter (you have eleven beats [twelve if you fully pronounce 'data' as two]).
I guess I completed the rhyme by habbit, having forgotten [if I even ever knew] the original didn't... 8-)
Aside: I have a tendency to dislike rupture in scheme and meter, especially when it puts a speed-bump in music. For instance, "La Vita Loca" drives me nuts because of the way "the color mocha" is used to force the meter and rhyme. "Her skin, a supple mocha" is much better as it maintains the theme, contains the original info, and doesn't break the thematic content of the verse (which is very tactile).
Yes, I know, how sad. I paid too much attention to highschool english and clearly think too much... 8-)
Please apply this patch to the above:
Katie, Katie who can I turn to
We want you to give us something you want to hold on to
I know you think we're like the others before
- Who saw your info in the WHOIS database
+ Who choose who's 'WHOIS' they got to ignore