I'm two minds about the DEB. On the one hand, it's obviously bad law to anyone with a clue. On the other hand, there was widespread and cross-party opposition to both parts of the bill itself and the idea forcing it through, even some of the ministers concerned have said things that wouldn't really support it in the past, and it only made it during the wash-up with about 40 MPs out of 600+ in the room for the few minutes of final debate. It has the stink of Mandelson's meddling all over it, and if I were a betting man, I would bet that campaign contributions played a part somewhere.
On the bright side, the ministers in the current administration who forced it through, including Mandy, are almost certainly all going to be gone in a month, but the senior civil servants who advise their successors will still be the same ones who are increasingly suggesting that copyright as implemented today is fundamentally broken; look at the reports coming out of the IPO in recent months.
Also, if the election does wind up with no party having an outright majority, or even one side with a majority but only a modest one, then individual MPs are going to wield much more power in the next Parliament. Many rank-and-file Members from all parties have been far more clued about about the DEB than one or two "usual suspects" from the New Labour administration.
Corporations have some of the rights of human beings so why not require that to have those rights they must be embodied by at least a single person within the company who has the ability to order anyone in the company to follow his instructions.
Then require that the embodied person(s) is/are held accountable for the actions of the corporation.
Those people already exist. Typically, they are called "directors".
The problem is that those responsible for holding them accountable have been asleep at the wheel for a while, and then sold the keys to their henhouse to the foxes to buy their way out. IIRC, the US recently passed a law that basically says commercial organisations can contribute unlimited funds to election campaigns, which means in practice that they can buy representatives legally and openly at this point.
The only thing that is going to fix that is a grassroots rebellion, because the one thing the corps don't have yet is the vote, and money only translates into votes and therefore winning elections if the people who do get votes buy into the campaign propaganda. But you'd need a hell of a rebellion to overturn the US situation as it stands today.
I suspect that in the long run, what is really going to sink the US megacorps is the rest of the world. For example, while our government here in the UK has played along more than I'd like with ACTA and public consultations talk about limited change due to international agreements, even government ministers and the senior civil servants in the relevant departments are now admitting in the lower profile stuff that copyright is no longer fit for purpose and much greater changes are going to be necessary. Reassuringly, they also seem to be reasonably clued up about the idea of alternative business models and not propping up the dinosaurs, too, but for now they still speak in guarded tones when they have a large audience.
Similar comments apply in other fields, and at European level too there is quite a strong sentiment against letting big business steamroller democracy in the way certain other places seem to have allowed in the past. When it becomes clear that the rest of the world are bored of doing what the bought-and-paid-for US government says just to be nice, the US government will have to remember who it's there to serve, and the dinosaur megacorps will die out, while those who continue to do useful things that people in the US and elsewhere actually like will survive.
Making that population statistically indistinguishable from those promoted by modern record labels, presumably?
A lot of people in any field suck at it, but in a field as big as music, even a tiny proportion of the artists being good would be enough to provide a lifetime's supply of interesting and entertaining content for people with diverse tastes. The trick is to somehow create a meritocracy where the relatively few really good performers can rise to the top and get widely noticed, without inadvertently creating Big Media all over again.
FWIW, I was thinking of C++, which has been the cripple of the VS family ever since the first.Net version. It might be possible to set up a custom build process using an older compiler with the newer IDE, but it's been a hassle at best at least up to VS2008.
One of us misunderstood the earlier posts, and I think it's probably you. The proposal isn't about upgrading the compiler without upgrading the IDE, though I can see why some people would want to do so given VS's history of getting slower and more bloated with each release. In this thread, the proposal is about upgrading the IDE without being forced to upgrade the compiler, which makes sense if you rely on legacy but now non-standard behaviour, or if you're encountering compiler bugs but could work around them with the compiler you've been using prior to the update, to give two real world scenarios.
Why have all these criticisms of the EU been modded Troll?
Probably because there is no (-1, Factually Incorrect) moderation, for which quite a few of the anti-EU posts in this discussion would qualify.
Alternatively, (-1, Offtopic) would be more relevant in several cases, since we are talking about EU ISPs here and not European-level government.
Also, who said anything about Europeans "punishing success"? Again, this isn't the people of Europe acting, it's the ISPs. In case you hadn't noticed, almost everyone in this discussion thinks they're just making a greedy cash grab, including the commenters from Europe.
You're right about the technicality, of course, but it's all too easy in this debate to get sidetracked by technicalities. The underlying point is that all these intellectual properties laws were meant to support those who create and share the fruits of their labours, so that in turn everyone else can benefit from enjoying those things. However, in reality it is mostly the huge middleman organisations who actually benefit from the current legal position, not those who do the work and certainly not society as a whole.
Please share this link with everyone you can find who cares about the Digital Economy Bill, because it is just too funny.
(Short version: In a written reply to another MP, government minister and leading proponent of the DEB thinks the IP in "IP address" stands for "Intellectual Property".)
RMS is saying what we're pondering in our own minds, but don't dare say without sounding crazy.
Well, no, he's not.
For one thing, the rest of us concerned citizens here in the UK have been following the progress of the Digital Economy Bill for months. There are several organised groups opposing the draconian penalties proposed by the more extreme advocates, there is serious opposition from many politicians, thousands of people have written to their MPs on the subject, and it has been widely covered in various parts of the media, including mainstream services like the BBC.
Moreover, as usual RMS started out with hyperbole and extreme positions that don't necessarily correspond to reality. He is the last kind of person we want wading into this discussion, and if he continues mouthing off in his usual way, the only thing he can possibly do is lend credibility to the other side of the debate with moderate politicians who are somewhat aware of the views but very aware of how to spot a quack when they see one.
Please, someone, shut the guy up, or at least stop repeating his words as if he has any significance whatsoever in this context.
I pay for a game I want to enjoy. I do not enjoy games that treat me like a criminal.
So presumably you've never played any of these games either?
That's lucky, because if you had enjoyed them enough to play them but not to pay for them, then I suppose that would make you just another guy hypocritically trying to justify ripping someone off so he can feel better about himself.
I hate to break this to you, but you're not really hurting the managers either, because they probably just get paid too. The people you're really hurting are the people who are willing to put their own cash up to invest in a game that doesn't exist yet, and those are the same people who you want on-side to fund the next game you're going to enjoy (but apparently not pay for).
That return on investment is also what pays the salaries of those people to write the next good game. Companies that don't make money can't continue to employ people.
It's always easy to argue against copyright on the basis that if we revoked it tomorrow everyone could access more stuff, but that is completely missing the point. Copyright isn't a direct benefit, and in the short term it is actually harmful, but the principle is that in the long term it incentivises behaviour that we value more: creating and sharing new works. If society reneges on its side of the copyright bargain, then sure, whatever works we already have exist and whoever was employed to help create them got paid and it's only the investors who got screwed, but who's going to invest next time and make the next fun game in that case?
Of course, since the investors probably also didn't have much if any direct influence over the DRM policy, screwing those who put up their own money to create a game you enjoy by playing it without paying for it is no more ethical than screwing the developers who actually wrote the code.
The ones who use DRM weren't getting his money either way.
I bet he still played their games, though. He's just a hypocrite, like everyone else around here who says they pirate because they don't like DRM, when what they really mean is they pirate because they think they can get away with not paying for the hard work of others as the law requires.
They will decide to switch to an all-console strategy...
...and leave a huge market opportunity for games producers who continue to support the PC market — which in reality hasn't shrunk at all, only the part willing to buy handicapped products has — in a more customer-friendly way, and now with less competition. This translates into less money for the people who gave up because their business model didn't work, and more money who produced things people actually wanted, which is exactly how it's supposed to work.
Churn house games and intrusive DRM do not make me want to pay the developers.
It takes dozens, if not hundreds, of skilled, talented people to make a AAA title worth playing. The DRM is probably the responsibility of about three managers in head office and some external outfit who come up with the implementation. Why are you punishing everyone else who worked hard on the game just to get back at the tiny minority who had any say in the DRM policy? If you don't like the game, fine, don't play it, but please don't pretend that ripping off all those people who did work hard and probably aren't actually paid very well is somehow justified because you want to play the game but don't want to pay for it.
You can't say that any significant number of people will pay for software if they can't pirate it.
You know, for a guy who was just bemoaning in another post the way we're supposed to be educated, you're awfully quick to tell us what we can and can't say, particularly when you haven't provided anything other than your personal belief to back up your position. What is it that you know so surely that none of the rest of us — including, presumably, the people whose job it is to research this topic — don't?
Right. So who sounds dumber, the one claiming that not a single person on this planet pirates a game they want just because they can but would buy it otherwise, or the one who accepts that while not all pirated versions would otherwise be converted into revenue-generating sales, some of them would, and provides a citation to support this claim?
But who cares? The fact is that if no-one buys their DRM'd game, they will either do the smart thing and remove the obstacle to legitimate players making a purchase, or they will do the dumb thing and go bankrupt, while those competitors who are more successful will see that doing the smart thing is, well, smarter.
The problem with people ripping them off, assuming the DRM gets cracked sooner or later, is that it creates a third possibility: filing genuine lawsuits against lots of people.
Regardless of the DRM's quality, it has always, always, always been cracked.
Which is why copies of Assasin's Creed II, the previous Ubisoft title whose DRM infamously screwed up a few days ago, are all over the Internet, right?
Programs that will be maintained for years. Programmers working on these projects like namespaces, strict typing, and all the things that help them manage the complexity of a large system.
None of which precludes a concise, expressive syntax. For example, Haskell is far beyond Java in its type system, yet its syntax is in many ways far simpler.
By the way, I think you are too quick to put people posting here in boxes. I'm not even close to either of your categories, neither in the kind of projects I've worked on, nor on the kind of views I have formed as a result.
Uhuh... so you determine language quality by the terseness of it's text.
Not necessarily. But being able to express powerful concepts concisely without losing readability is a benefit, and not having to write lots of boilerplate to express even simple concepts is another benefit. Java fails on both counts, lacking the expressive power of many other modern languages, and requiring obscene amounts of boilerplate code for many common tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you don't have the option for high speed Internet anyway, then.
I'm two minds about the DEB. On the one hand, it's obviously bad law to anyone with a clue. On the other hand, there was widespread and cross-party opposition to both parts of the bill itself and the idea forcing it through, even some of the ministers concerned have said things that wouldn't really support it in the past, and it only made it during the wash-up with about 40 MPs out of 600+ in the room for the few minutes of final debate. It has the stink of Mandelson's meddling all over it, and if I were a betting man, I would bet that campaign contributions played a part somewhere.
On the bright side, the ministers in the current administration who forced it through, including Mandy, are almost certainly all going to be gone in a month, but the senior civil servants who advise their successors will still be the same ones who are increasingly suggesting that copyright as implemented today is fundamentally broken; look at the reports coming out of the IPO in recent months.
Also, if the election does wind up with no party having an outright majority, or even one side with a majority but only a modest one, then individual MPs are going to wield much more power in the next Parliament. Many rank-and-file Members from all parties have been far more clued about about the DEB than one or two "usual suspects" from the New Labour administration.
Not exactly. The Supreme Court found that campaign finance laws that limited corporate contributions were unconstitutional.
Fair enough, but isn't that likely to have much the same effect in practice?
Corporations have some of the rights of human beings so why not require that to have those rights they must be embodied by at least a single person within the company who has the ability to order anyone in the company to follow his instructions.
Then require that the embodied person(s) is/are held accountable for the actions of the corporation.
Those people already exist. Typically, they are called "directors".
The problem is that those responsible for holding them accountable have been asleep at the wheel for a while, and then sold the keys to their henhouse to the foxes to buy their way out. IIRC, the US recently passed a law that basically says commercial organisations can contribute unlimited funds to election campaigns, which means in practice that they can buy representatives legally and openly at this point.
The only thing that is going to fix that is a grassroots rebellion, because the one thing the corps don't have yet is the vote, and money only translates into votes and therefore winning elections if the people who do get votes buy into the campaign propaganda. But you'd need a hell of a rebellion to overturn the US situation as it stands today.
I suspect that in the long run, what is really going to sink the US megacorps is the rest of the world. For example, while our government here in the UK has played along more than I'd like with ACTA and public consultations talk about limited change due to international agreements, even government ministers and the senior civil servants in the relevant departments are now admitting in the lower profile stuff that copyright is no longer fit for purpose and much greater changes are going to be necessary. Reassuringly, they also seem to be reasonably clued up about the idea of alternative business models and not propping up the dinosaurs, too, but for now they still speak in guarded tones when they have a large audience.
Similar comments apply in other fields, and at European level too there is quite a strong sentiment against letting big business steamroller democracy in the way certain other places seem to have allowed in the past. When it becomes clear that the rest of the world are bored of doing what the bought-and-paid-for US government says just to be nice, the US government will have to remember who it's there to serve, and the dinosaur megacorps will die out, while those who continue to do useful things that people in the US and elsewhere actually like will survive.
Making that population statistically indistinguishable from those promoted by modern record labels, presumably?
A lot of people in any field suck at it, but in a field as big as music, even a tiny proportion of the artists being good would be enough to provide a lifetime's supply of interesting and entertaining content for people with diverse tastes. The trick is to somehow create a meritocracy where the relatively few really good performers can rise to the top and get widely noticed, without inadvertently creating Big Media all over again.
OK, how many **AA souls do you need as a licensing fee?
FWIW, I was thinking of C++, which has been the cripple of the VS family ever since the first .Net version. It might be possible to set up a custom build process using an older compiler with the newer IDE, but it's been a hassle at best at least up to VS2008.
One of us misunderstood the earlier posts, and I think it's probably you. The proposal isn't about upgrading the compiler without upgrading the IDE, though I can see why some people would want to do so given VS's history of getting slower and more bloated with each release. In this thread, the proposal is about upgrading the IDE without being forced to upgrade the compiler, which makes sense if you rely on legacy but now non-standard behaviour, or if you're encountering compiler bugs but could work around them with the compiler you've been using prior to the update, to give two real world scenarios.
Why have all these criticisms of the EU been modded Troll?
Probably because there is no (-1, Factually Incorrect) moderation, for which quite a few of the anti-EU posts in this discussion would qualify.
Alternatively, (-1, Offtopic) would be more relevant in several cases, since we are talking about EU ISPs here and not European-level government.
Also, who said anything about Europeans "punishing success"? Again, this isn't the people of Europe acting, it's the ISPs. In case you hadn't noticed, almost everyone in this discussion thinks they're just making a greedy cash grab, including the commenters from Europe.
You're right about the technicality, of course, but it's all too easy in this debate to get sidetracked by technicalities. The underlying point is that all these intellectual properties laws were meant to support those who create and share the fruits of their labours, so that in turn everyone else can benefit from enjoying those things. However, in reality it is mostly the huge middleman organisations who actually benefit from the current legal position, not those who do the work and certainly not society as a whole.
Please share this link with everyone you can find who cares about the Digital Economy Bill, because it is just too funny.
(Short version: In a written reply to another MP, government minister and leading proponent of the DEB thinks the IP in "IP address" stands for "Intellectual Property".)
RMS is saying what we're pondering in our own minds, but don't dare say without sounding crazy.
Well, no, he's not.
For one thing, the rest of us concerned citizens here in the UK have been following the progress of the Digital Economy Bill for months. There are several organised groups opposing the draconian penalties proposed by the more extreme advocates, there is serious opposition from many politicians, thousands of people have written to their MPs on the subject, and it has been widely covered in various parts of the media, including mainstream services like the BBC.
Moreover, as usual RMS started out with hyperbole and extreme positions that don't necessarily correspond to reality. He is the last kind of person we want wading into this discussion, and if he continues mouthing off in his usual way, the only thing he can possibly do is lend credibility to the other side of the debate with moderate politicians who are somewhat aware of the views but very aware of how to spot a quack when they see one.
Please, someone, shut the guy up, or at least stop repeating his words as if he has any significance whatsoever in this context.
I pay for a game I want to enjoy. I do not enjoy games that treat me like a criminal.
So presumably you've never played any of these games either?
That's lucky, because if you had enjoyed them enough to play them but not to pay for them, then I suppose that would make you just another guy hypocritically trying to justify ripping someone off so he can feel better about himself.
I hate to break this to you, but you're not really hurting the managers either, because they probably just get paid too. The people you're really hurting are the people who are willing to put their own cash up to invest in a game that doesn't exist yet, and those are the same people who you want on-side to fund the next game you're going to enjoy (but apparently not pay for).
That return on investment is also what pays the salaries of those people to write the next good game. Companies that don't make money can't continue to employ people.
It's always easy to argue against copyright on the basis that if we revoked it tomorrow everyone could access more stuff, but that is completely missing the point. Copyright isn't a direct benefit, and in the short term it is actually harmful, but the principle is that in the long term it incentivises behaviour that we value more: creating and sharing new works. If society reneges on its side of the copyright bargain, then sure, whatever works we already have exist and whoever was employed to help create them got paid and it's only the investors who got screwed, but who's going to invest next time and make the next fun game in that case?
Of course, since the investors probably also didn't have much if any direct influence over the DRM policy, screwing those who put up their own money to create a game you enjoy by playing it without paying for it is no more ethical than screwing the developers who actually wrote the code.
The ones who use DRM weren't getting his money either way.
I bet he still played their games, though. He's just a hypocrite, like everyone else around here who says they pirate because they don't like DRM, when what they really mean is they pirate because they think they can get away with not paying for the hard work of others as the law requires.
They will decide to switch to an all-console strategy...
...and leave a huge market opportunity for games producers who continue to support the PC market — which in reality hasn't shrunk at all, only the part willing to buy handicapped products has — in a more customer-friendly way, and now with less competition. This translates into less money for the people who gave up because their business model didn't work, and more money who produced things people actually wanted, which is exactly how it's supposed to work.
Churn house games and intrusive DRM do not make me want to pay the developers.
It takes dozens, if not hundreds, of skilled, talented people to make a AAA title worth playing. The DRM is probably the responsibility of about three managers in head office and some external outfit who come up with the implementation. Why are you punishing everyone else who worked hard on the game just to get back at the tiny minority who had any say in the DRM policy? If you don't like the game, fine, don't play it, but please don't pretend that ripping off all those people who did work hard and probably aren't actually paid very well is somehow justified because you want to play the game but don't want to pay for it.
You can't say that any significant number of people will pay for software if they can't pirate it.
You know, for a guy who was just bemoaning in another post the way we're supposed to be educated, you're awfully quick to tell us what we can and can't say, particularly when you haven't provided anything other than your personal belief to back up your position. What is it that you know so surely that none of the rest of us — including, presumably, the people whose job it is to research this topic — don't?
We're supposed to be educated.
Right. So who sounds dumber, the one claiming that not a single person on this planet pirates a game they want just because they can but would buy it otherwise, or the one who accepts that while not all pirated versions would otherwise be converted into revenue-generating sales, some of them would, and provides a citation to support this claim?
But who cares? The fact is that if no-one buys their DRM'd game, they will either do the smart thing and remove the obstacle to legitimate players making a purchase, or they will do the dumb thing and go bankrupt, while those competitors who are more successful will see that doing the smart thing is, well, smarter.
The problem with people ripping them off, assuming the DRM gets cracked sooner or later, is that it creates a third possibility: filing genuine lawsuits against lots of people.
Regardless of the DRM's quality, it has always, always, always been cracked.
Which is why copies of Assasin's Creed II, the previous Ubisoft title whose DRM infamously screwed up a few days ago, are all over the Internet, right?
Programs that will be maintained for years. Programmers working on these projects like namespaces, strict typing, and all the things that help them manage the complexity of a large system.
None of which precludes a concise, expressive syntax. For example, Haskell is far beyond Java in its type system, yet its syntax is in many ways far simpler.
By the way, I think you are too quick to put people posting here in boxes. I'm not even close to either of your categories, neither in the kind of projects I've worked on, nor on the kind of views I have formed as a result.
Uhuh... so you determine language quality by the terseness of it's text.
Not necessarily. But being able to express powerful concepts concisely without losing readability is a benefit, and not having to write lots of boilerplate to express even simple concepts is another benefit. Java fails on both counts, lacking the expressive power of many other modern languages, and requiring obscene amounts of boilerplate code for many common tasks.
Sorry, I somehow replied to the GP post when I meant to the reply that started "Jesus that should be easy in Java."