I truly feel sorry for you. If no-one helps anyone else in your world just because it seems like the right thing to do, then it must be a very sad place to live.
It isn't a matter of being "honest" [...] it is a simple matter of economics - rationale consumers will not pay for something they can get for free.
If everyone behaved like an economically-optimal robot, as in your model, then no charity would be able to do its work, investment funds that specialise in "ethical investments" would have no subscribers, and no-one technically competent would buy Linux distributions off the shelf. Since these results are demonstrably not happening, we can reasonably conclude that humans do not base their decisions on where to put their money purely on selfish economic principles. There is a personal, ethical aspect as well, and a part of that is recognising when something you value has required others to work to make it, and feeling that a reasonable reward to those others is justified. There is also the economic issue that things like convenience have a perceived value: even if you could have something for free, sometimes it's easier to pay a little to get the product via a more convenient mechanism.
As we saw in another recent Slashdot discussion, a lot of people don't pay (or aren't allowed by their purely-economically-driven employers to pay) for things when there really is nothing in it for them, but the introduction of an "honour system" through the idea of copyright provides a sufficient motivation for many. Indeed, my answer to the original question in TFA would be:
observe that most people are basically honest, and willing to pay a perceived fair price for something they value;
introduce a law that creates a market artificially where copying for the benefit of others is not allowed;
accept that a certain number of people will rip you off, and attempt to enforce the law to the point where it makes economic sense to do so.
In other words, the market the original question asked about already exists, in part because of the existence of copyright, and many people in diverse fields are already making plenty of money in it.
You think Joe (or Jane) Businessman has any idea what ssh is?
It certainly seems to me that if Joe or Jane doesn't know what secure protocols are, they probably shouldn't be sending company data over the Internet.
Which may or may not still be relevant given the changes in legislation since that ruling. I know pseudo-lawyers around here are very fond of the Betamax shield, but AFAICS there still isn't anything that says "You have the legal right to copy this material (no matter what)", which seems to be what some posters here think they have.
Well, yes, there is a solution for at least the vast majority of the infringement. We just don't like it, because it means locking down all the mechanisms for infringing, by regulating hardware suppliers, the Internet, broadcasters, and all the other big fish who can be enumerated and forced to play along. That would leave the average punter with no way to break the system.
This is, IMHO, exactly what Big Media are systematically trying to do through DRM and the DMCA, broadcast flag proposals, HDCP, and all the rest. And right now, because copyright is so widely abused, the government can pretty much play along and make out that they're just doing the right thing by defending the law. Enough people will buy it to keep them reelectable, and that seems to be all most of them care about.
Of course it would still be possible for experts to circumvent most of the protections most of the time, but most people aren't experts, and such a draconian response would kill off the vast majority of opportunist copying. It would probably also lead to widespread abuse by the Big Media companies and a marked reduction in the quality of life for most of the population, but as they say, "out of sight, out of mind". If people thought through things enough to see that future, they would long since have started unelecting representatives who eat from Big Media's hand.
The problem with your argument, in my humble opinion, is that you absolutely suggest that because something is illegal that it is somehow REASONABLE.
Assuming you meant the opposite of what you wrote there, since what you wrote doesn't make sense...
Well, no, I didn't "absolutely suggest" anything of the sort. In fact, in various places in this thread I've explicitly said that I don't think DRM works and I'd like to see it banned, because I think the overall negative effects on society outweigh the need to protect the content providers.
However, that doesn't mean I want to see copyright laws themselves all thrown away. I think such a move would be an economic nonsense, not dissimilar to the study mentioned on Slashdot the other day where under controlled conditions far more people paid to get software when there was something in it for them than out of pure charity. The principle itself isn't unreasonable, it's just the implementation that's flawed. And if your legal system can't adapt to fix such an unpopular and obviously flawed implementation, you have bigger problems than being sued by the **AA.
What you quoted is exactly what I'm talking about. Saying that a certain action does not infringe copyright is not the same as saying that someone with the content has a right to commit that action regardless of any other laws, nor that the content provider may not attempt to prevent the user from committing that action by other means.
In other words, this claim:
Yes, US copyright law specifically grants fair use rights.
isn't supported by your citation.
Finally, if you're right that circumvention for fair use purposes is all OK in the eyes of the DMCA, why is everyone so worried about it? Maybe there's something you haven't noticed?
Well, I'm not the OP, but it sure doesn't sound like what he ordered:
I bought a laptop from them expecting a 15" 4:3 screen as pictured on their website when I ordered it. [...] Add to that my X, C, and V keys were DOA, and when I powered up the computer it informed me the CMOS battery was dead.
Your analogy is flawed as soon as you tell me there's a public right of way across the field. If there were no public right of way, then the farmer would be entirely justified in building the wall. Of course, much of the discussion in this thread seems to boil down to whether the law should be changed to give users of copyright content the equivalent of that right of way (which a lot of people mistakenly believe they currently have under fair use provision).
I don't think your comparison is entirely fair. When we talk of "hand-building" computers, we're really talking about assembling individually-selected components, not soldering transistors onto circuitboards. Selecting the right components, and in particular the most effective combinations of components, does bring big gains, and most off-the-shelf vendors don't make the effort to do it optimally.
And for the record, if you've got a car mechanic who knows what he's doing, he'll also be quite capable of tuning up his motor and swapping in better components to get better performance. But he's not recrafting the engine block, either.
It's always sad to see posts like the parent modded informative, because it's objectively, factually incorrect.
Please go and read your copyright law, and the relevant fair use details. I bet you'll find that you don't have any legal rights granted in the way you think you do. Perhaps you think you should. Perhaps you really should. But right now you don't, and writing sound-bites in bold doesn't change that.
Moreover, when you think about it a bit more deeply, you'll hopefully realise that just granting much broader rights under copyright law isn't the answer either, because sometimes it is reasonable (morally, not just legally) for someone to expect more compensation for their content, particularly when they're giving you something like broadcast rights that removes a lot of potential market in one go.
As other posters in this thread have observed, this is not as simple an issue as many (on both sides) seem to think, neither legally nor ethically.
If I publish a DRM'd version of something, then I am attempting to retain more control than copyright grants me. This is nothing more and nothing less than vigilanteism.
I was with you up until that point. But the thing is, there's nothing illegal about shipping something with DRM, and nothing forcing people to buy DRM'd content. And there is something illegal about at least some of the things the media groups would like DRM to prevent. Would you regard someone who lived in a rough neighbourhood and kept a firearm in their home as a vigilante, even though they knew they were sure to be attacked and were just doing something to protect themselves when it happened?
Now, personally I don't think DRM is particularly effective, and I'd be happy to see it made illegal because I'd rather that actively preventing fair use (or whatever the equivalent is called in your jurisdiction) wasn't allowed. As you say, copyright is effectively a trade, and DRM makes it one-sided. But I think calling it vigilantism is going too far. It's more akin to self-defence, and you can't blame the media groups for trying to defend themselves. (I suspect we'd agree that the law shouldn't permit the media groups to defend themselves in this way given all the practical problems for society at large it creates as a side effect, but this is not currently the case.)
In what way is playing a song or a video for a class in "violation of the law?"
That depends on what your copyright law says, but I can easily believe that you would be on dodgy ground if you played the entire work when a sample would have sufficed, for example.
I suppose you also think that it should be illegal to read books to the class too?
That's hardly a fair analogy, because the main value of the book isn't in the performance. If the teacher photocopied the entire textbook and gave a copy to every member of the class, that would be closer (though probably too far in the other direction to be helpful).
Like many people, including much of the media, you are confusing "law" with "license". One of those is inviolate, written by our elected representatives, and must be adhered to.
Sure. Everyone adheres to copyright. Yes. Absolutely. Whatever you say. Right.
You need to look up "fair use" (a legal term) and read some background on this issue.
Perhaps he does, but apparently so do you. Fair use is not carte blanche to make whatever copies you want if there's some passing reference in the legislation to something vaguely related to what you're making the copy for, despite what many people around these parts seem to think.
Perhaps in this case, US fair use law would allow the performance of a work in class; I'm not a lawyer and I don't know if there's any relevant case law to confirm either way. But your pseudo-legalese post doesn't change the truth of the statement you quoted:
And if the teacher is distributing content in violation of the law, then that teacher should be fired.
Please get your facts straight before giving crappy legal advice on Slashdot. You could start by looking up what an affirmative defence is, and what the educational aspects of fair use law actually say.
There is only one reasonable solution - you *trust* the consumer not to violate copyright law.
It's not the legitimate consumers they have to worry about. It's the people who are ripping the content without paying for it. I get really tired of hearing the rants about the **AA "suing their customers", which ignore the possibility that many of the people being sued, probably the vast majority, are not paying customers but simply freeloaders. Yes, the **AA's tactics in terms of threatening court action in the US and settling for silly money out of court are unethical. But it's also unreasonable to expect them to sit back and watch while freeloaders rip their stuff illegally.
Now, personally I don't see that DRM is of much use in preventing this. After all, it only takes one person to get hold of a copy and start distributing it and the Internet will do the rest. Thus I personally think DRM will only ever be a mild deterrent to those who are willing the break the law, while of course it's a royal PITA for the legitimate, paying customer. I would be quite happy to see DRM technology banned in this area, simply because in practice this is what happens.
But that doesn't mean I expect the media groups to trust everyone in the world not to rip their stuff. That's just deluded, when so many people have demonstrated very clearly that they are not trustworthy in this respect.
That usually works, it's true, but there's always the odd case. For example, my current PC started life with a Radeon 9700 Pro, but suffered intermittent stability issues. It wasn't until several months later that an incompatibility in the power supply specs with the Asus A7V8X motherboard I was using came to light.
To give credit where it's due, after explaining this to Crucial, from whom I'd bought the graphics card, several months later, they did let me upgrade to a 9800 Pro for just the difference in price. (The 9800 Pro uses a different power connection, and didn't suffer the same weakness.) At the time, that was pretty much a state-of-the-art graphics card, and I'd bought the original 9700 Pro after checking it should be OK according to Crucial's compatibility guarantee. Perhaps this shouldn't seem exceptional - after all, the original card was flawed and Crucial had guaranteed compatibility when I bought it - but nevertheless, it's nice to see a company that was willing to back-up the sales pitch.
Did you really have to pay that restocking fee? I don't know what the law is where you are, but here in the UK selling kit that wasn't fit for purpose would make the seller liable for pretty much everything automatically, and the authorities would be able to chase them pretty straightforwardly if they didn't refund everything in full. IIRC, they may even be liable for things like the return shipping. What jurisdiction are you in, and does it really not have consumer protection laws along similar lines?
If you want flexibility then custom-built is hard to beat, I'll give you that, and if you can choose compatible components with good drivers at will then of course you can control performance as well as anyone.
The thing is, I've built my own PC roughly every 3-4 years since forever. I'm getting too old (or at least too impatient) to mess around with heatsink glue, dealing with a mobo component vendor who insists it must be the other vendor's fault for supplying a dodgy processor, and all that jazz.
On the other hand, I'm also unwilling to buy an off-the-shelf box made up of mediocre components, with loads of software preinstalled (most of which I won't want, because the drivers will be out of date, I'd rather set up my own security software, etc.).
What I want, as a "power user" with some knowledge of the hardware but little time, is the ability to spec which major components I want, and have a system builder send me a box that's been tested before shipping and then wiped. I'm quite capable of installing my own multi-boot WinXP/Linux stuff, with my own hard drive partitioning scheme to share data, and so on. Just give me legit, standard-issue, unmodified copies of any software I want to install, and somewhere to download the latest Windows and Linux drivers for any hardware that isn't supported out of the box.
I was under the impression that Alienware used to supply that sort of kit, and coincidentally I've recently been thinking about buying my next PC and they were on the shortlist of possible suppliers, though I was somewhat concerned about whether the Dell buy-out would affect their business. I guess bad PR really does hurt, because the fact that I've seen this review now makes it much less likely that I'll buy from them.
And even ignoring the time factor, most of us can't get components at the same bulk prices as big name vendors. That can be significant even after the integrator adds their mark-up.
In Europe the tendency is more towards papers with national coverage with much larger numbers of journalists required to differentiate their content.
Ah, don't you believe it!
I had the misfortune of being the publicity officer for a large local club when one of the big news wires picked up some offhand comment someone in the club probably made about one of our competitive teams. The story was entirely inaccurate, wouldn't have been particularly significant even if it had been true, and certainly didn't come from anyone in the club's administration who would have had access to the required information at that time. Nevertheless, we hit two of the four big broadsheets and the BBC within a matter of hours, and several local news media during the following week.
I really expect the only "quasi-journalists" to be SEO scum who just pollute systems now with even more of their junk, because they can get paid for it. I'd much rather see a reward system for policing sites such as/. and digg to keep the link farmers out.
Indeed. I think this phenomenon is a natural reaction to the social networking trends of the past couple of years.
In the beginning, there was Web 1.0. The best content, for the most part, was provided by people who had a genuine interest in their field and a desire to share their knowledge. At first, much content was found through following hyperlinks on related sites, though search engines soon evolved to allow content to be found more easily.
With today's "Web 2.0", we have two related but (IMHO) quite distinct phenomena providing a lot of the new material: blogging/social networking, and "open contribution" sites like Wikipedia and Digg. In each case, the key distinction is that it becomes viable not just for anyone to put their content on-line, but for significant numbers of other people to find it. Good content tends to be noticed somewhere in the blogosphere, and soon gets spread by word-of-blog. The speed with which information can spread is staggering.
The problem with this, as is starting to become obvious, is that when anyone can contribute, not everyone will be an expert. Take a look at Digg, and count the number of highly-dugg posts that are reported as possibly inaccurate. Worse, just as anyone can contribute good content, anyone can also contribute corrupt it or deliberately contribute bad information. Take a look at Wikipedia, and the number of articles that get locked or otherwise flagged as controversial. How do you defeat this? You need someone to be elevated above the average contributor, to an editorial role. Here on Slashdot, we have CmdrTaco and gang reviewing submitted stories, and for all that some posters mock them, they generally do a pretty good job. Likewise on Wikipedia, you or I can't just go in and lock an article that's being repeatedly edited, but some of the admins can, and procedures have been established for dealing with common problems.
I expect that Web 3.0 will arrive rather quickly, and in a sense will come full circle. The dominant source of valuable information will be hybrid sites, where a certain degree of automation and public participation keep the content flowing in a way that a small number of editors never could, yet there is always some oversight by those responsible for the site. Perhaps ironically, perhaps predictably, many of the sites that pioneered open contributions of various kinds -- Slashdot and Wikipedia among them -- seem likely to lead the way in the new order as well. Bloggers will carry on, at least for now, but the really important underlying thing about the blogosphere is that it represents a web of trust: if you find a couple of blogs on a particular subject that you like, and those are accurate/interesting/credible, then those bloggers will often link to others whose related content they trust/respect/enjoy. As long as you start from good sources, you'll find more.
The problem of course, is where you find those good sources. In this, I think there will always be a role for mainstream sites to establish their credibility, probably through mechanisms other than just the claims they make (e.g., being verifiably written by experts in an academic field, or blogs on software products written by the guys who actually work on those products). But how do those sites know where to link to? Surely their experts will be busy enough either writing their own content or doing whatever they do in real life to become experts, and won't have time to browse the entire web themselves. Thus we come to what we see in this article: we may see a new role becoming established, for "content middlemen" who know enough about about a field to select plausible content for linking, and refer it up to the high-ranking editors
It wasn't so much your approach to problem-posing that I was noticing, but for example the focus on speed of coding that comes up multiple times in one of your paragraphs. Sure, being able to code reasonably quickly is a good thing, but would you rather take:
a guy who can write fast, but leaves in a few subtle bugs that need fixing later;
a guy who can write slightly slower, but without so many bugs;
a guy who writes much less code in the same amount of time, but that code does the same job, is easier to read, and is well-documented?
Now, for me, those guys are increasingly valuable as we go down the list. But if all you're looking for is speed and you're using toy examples where any decent guy ought to get everything right, you'll probably pick the first guy first, the second guy second, and the third guy last.
Slashdot Mirror
No-one expects snakes on a plane. Their main weapon is surprise!
Al Gore?
I truly feel sorry for you. If no-one helps anyone else in your world just because it seems like the right thing to do, then it must be a very sad place to live.
If everyone behaved like an economically-optimal robot, as in your model, then no charity would be able to do its work, investment funds that specialise in "ethical investments" would have no subscribers, and no-one technically competent would buy Linux distributions off the shelf. Since these results are demonstrably not happening, we can reasonably conclude that humans do not base their decisions on where to put their money purely on selfish economic principles. There is a personal, ethical aspect as well, and a part of that is recognising when something you value has required others to work to make it, and feeling that a reasonable reward to those others is justified. There is also the economic issue that things like convenience have a perceived value: even if you could have something for free, sometimes it's easier to pay a little to get the product via a more convenient mechanism.
As we saw in another recent Slashdot discussion, a lot of people don't pay (or aren't allowed by their purely-economically-driven employers to pay) for things when there really is nothing in it for them, but the introduction of an "honour system" through the idea of copyright provides a sufficient motivation for many. Indeed, my answer to the original question in TFA would be:
- observe that most people are basically honest, and willing to pay a perceived fair price for something they value;
- introduce a law that creates a market artificially where copying for the benefit of others is not allowed;
- accept that a certain number of people will rip you off, and attempt to enforce the law to the point where it makes economic sense to do so.
In other words, the market the original question asked about already exists, in part because of the existence of copyright, and many people in diverse fields are already making plenty of money in it.It certainly seems to me that if Joe or Jane doesn't know what secure protocols are, they probably shouldn't be sending company data over the Internet.
Which may or may not still be relevant given the changes in legislation since that ruling. I know pseudo-lawyers around here are very fond of the Betamax shield, but AFAICS there still isn't anything that says "You have the legal right to copy this material (no matter what)", which seems to be what some posters here think they have.
Well, yes, there is a solution for at least the vast majority of the infringement. We just don't like it, because it means locking down all the mechanisms for infringing, by regulating hardware suppliers, the Internet, broadcasters, and all the other big fish who can be enumerated and forced to play along. That would leave the average punter with no way to break the system.
This is, IMHO, exactly what Big Media are systematically trying to do through DRM and the DMCA, broadcast flag proposals, HDCP, and all the rest. And right now, because copyright is so widely abused, the government can pretty much play along and make out that they're just doing the right thing by defending the law. Enough people will buy it to keep them reelectable, and that seems to be all most of them care about.
Of course it would still be possible for experts to circumvent most of the protections most of the time, but most people aren't experts, and such a draconian response would kill off the vast majority of opportunist copying. It would probably also lead to widespread abuse by the Big Media companies and a marked reduction in the quality of life for most of the population, but as they say, "out of sight, out of mind". If people thought through things enough to see that future, they would long since have started unelecting representatives who eat from Big Media's hand.
Assuming you meant the opposite of what you wrote there, since what you wrote doesn't make sense...
Well, no, I didn't "absolutely suggest" anything of the sort. In fact, in various places in this thread I've explicitly said that I don't think DRM works and I'd like to see it banned, because I think the overall negative effects on society outweigh the need to protect the content providers.
However, that doesn't mean I want to see copyright laws themselves all thrown away. I think such a move would be an economic nonsense, not dissimilar to the study mentioned on Slashdot the other day where under controlled conditions far more people paid to get software when there was something in it for them than out of pure charity. The principle itself isn't unreasonable, it's just the implementation that's flawed. And if your legal system can't adapt to fix such an unpopular and obviously flawed implementation, you have bigger problems than being sued by the **AA.
What you quoted is exactly what I'm talking about. Saying that a certain action does not infringe copyright is not the same as saying that someone with the content has a right to commit that action regardless of any other laws, nor that the content provider may not attempt to prevent the user from committing that action by other means.
In other words, this claim:
isn't supported by your citation.
Finally, if you're right that circumvention for fair use purposes is all OK in the eyes of the DMCA, why is everyone so worried about it? Maybe there's something you haven't noticed?
Well, I'm not the OP, but it sure doesn't sound like what he ordered:
Your analogy is flawed as soon as you tell me there's a public right of way across the field. If there were no public right of way, then the farmer would be entirely justified in building the wall. Of course, much of the discussion in this thread seems to boil down to whether the law should be changed to give users of copyright content the equivalent of that right of way (which a lot of people mistakenly believe they currently have under fair use provision).
I don't think your comparison is entirely fair. When we talk of "hand-building" computers, we're really talking about assembling individually-selected components, not soldering transistors onto circuitboards. Selecting the right components, and in particular the most effective combinations of components, does bring big gains, and most off-the-shelf vendors don't make the effort to do it optimally.
And for the record, if you've got a car mechanic who knows what he's doing, he'll also be quite capable of tuning up his motor and swapping in better components to get better performance. But he's not recrafting the engine block, either.
It's always sad to see posts like the parent modded informative, because it's objectively, factually incorrect.
Please go and read your copyright law, and the relevant fair use details. I bet you'll find that you don't have any legal rights granted in the way you think you do. Perhaps you think you should. Perhaps you really should. But right now you don't, and writing sound-bites in bold doesn't change that.
Moreover, when you think about it a bit more deeply, you'll hopefully realise that just granting much broader rights under copyright law isn't the answer either, because sometimes it is reasonable (morally, not just legally) for someone to expect more compensation for their content, particularly when they're giving you something like broadcast rights that removes a lot of potential market in one go.
As other posters in this thread have observed, this is not as simple an issue as many (on both sides) seem to think, neither legally nor ethically.
I was with you up until that point. But the thing is, there's nothing illegal about shipping something with DRM, and nothing forcing people to buy DRM'd content. And there is something illegal about at least some of the things the media groups would like DRM to prevent. Would you regard someone who lived in a rough neighbourhood and kept a firearm in their home as a vigilante, even though they knew they were sure to be attacked and were just doing something to protect themselves when it happened?
Now, personally I don't think DRM is particularly effective, and I'd be happy to see it made illegal because I'd rather that actively preventing fair use (or whatever the equivalent is called in your jurisdiction) wasn't allowed. As you say, copyright is effectively a trade, and DRM makes it one-sided. But I think calling it vigilantism is going too far. It's more akin to self-defence, and you can't blame the media groups for trying to defend themselves. (I suspect we'd agree that the law shouldn't permit the media groups to defend themselves in this way given all the practical problems for society at large it creates as a side effect, but this is not currently the case.)
Standard copyright myth #17: US copyright law grants "fair use rights".
It doesn't. Fair use is an affirmative defence, which is a whole different game.
Perhaps it should, but that's a different issue.
That depends on what your copyright law says, but I can easily believe that you would be on dodgy ground if you played the entire work when a sample would have sufficed, for example.
That's hardly a fair analogy, because the main value of the book isn't in the performance. If the teacher photocopied the entire textbook and gave a copy to every member of the class, that would be closer (though probably too far in the other direction to be helpful).
Sure. Everyone adheres to copyright. Yes. Absolutely. Whatever you say. Right.
Perhaps he does, but apparently so do you. Fair use is not carte blanche to make whatever copies you want if there's some passing reference in the legislation to something vaguely related to what you're making the copy for, despite what many people around these parts seem to think.
Perhaps in this case, US fair use law would allow the performance of a work in class; I'm not a lawyer and I don't know if there's any relevant case law to confirm either way. But your pseudo-legalese post doesn't change the truth of the statement you quoted:
Please get your facts straight before giving crappy legal advice on Slashdot. You could start by looking up what an affirmative defence is, and what the educational aspects of fair use law actually say.
It's not the legitimate consumers they have to worry about. It's the people who are ripping the content without paying for it. I get really tired of hearing the rants about the **AA "suing their customers", which ignore the possibility that many of the people being sued, probably the vast majority, are not paying customers but simply freeloaders. Yes, the **AA's tactics in terms of threatening court action in the US and settling for silly money out of court are unethical. But it's also unreasonable to expect them to sit back and watch while freeloaders rip their stuff illegally.
Now, personally I don't see that DRM is of much use in preventing this. After all, it only takes one person to get hold of a copy and start distributing it and the Internet will do the rest. Thus I personally think DRM will only ever be a mild deterrent to those who are willing the break the law, while of course it's a royal PITA for the legitimate, paying customer. I would be quite happy to see DRM technology banned in this area, simply because in practice this is what happens.
But that doesn't mean I expect the media groups to trust everyone in the world not to rip their stuff. That's just deluded, when so many people have demonstrated very clearly that they are not trustworthy in this respect.
That usually works, it's true, but there's always the odd case. For example, my current PC started life with a Radeon 9700 Pro, but suffered intermittent stability issues. It wasn't until several months later that an incompatibility in the power supply specs with the Asus A7V8X motherboard I was using came to light.
To give credit where it's due, after explaining this to Crucial, from whom I'd bought the graphics card, several months later, they did let me upgrade to a 9800 Pro for just the difference in price. (The 9800 Pro uses a different power connection, and didn't suffer the same weakness.) At the time, that was pretty much a state-of-the-art graphics card, and I'd bought the original 9700 Pro after checking it should be OK according to Crucial's compatibility guarantee. Perhaps this shouldn't seem exceptional - after all, the original card was flawed and Crucial had guaranteed compatibility when I bought it - but nevertheless, it's nice to see a company that was willing to back-up the sales pitch.
Did you really have to pay that restocking fee? I don't know what the law is where you are, but here in the UK selling kit that wasn't fit for purpose would make the seller liable for pretty much everything automatically, and the authorities would be able to chase them pretty straightforwardly if they didn't refund everything in full. IIRC, they may even be liable for things like the return shipping. What jurisdiction are you in, and does it really not have consumer protection laws along similar lines?
If you want flexibility then custom-built is hard to beat, I'll give you that, and if you can choose compatible components with good drivers at will then of course you can control performance as well as anyone.
The thing is, I've built my own PC roughly every 3-4 years since forever. I'm getting too old (or at least too impatient) to mess around with heatsink glue, dealing with a mobo component vendor who insists it must be the other vendor's fault for supplying a dodgy processor, and all that jazz.
On the other hand, I'm also unwilling to buy an off-the-shelf box made up of mediocre components, with loads of software preinstalled (most of which I won't want, because the drivers will be out of date, I'd rather set up my own security software, etc.).
What I want, as a "power user" with some knowledge of the hardware but little time, is the ability to spec which major components I want, and have a system builder send me a box that's been tested before shipping and then wiped. I'm quite capable of installing my own multi-boot WinXP/Linux stuff, with my own hard drive partitioning scheme to share data, and so on. Just give me legit, standard-issue, unmodified copies of any software I want to install, and somewhere to download the latest Windows and Linux drivers for any hardware that isn't supported out of the box.
I was under the impression that Alienware used to supply that sort of kit, and coincidentally I've recently been thinking about buying my next PC and they were on the shortlist of possible suppliers, though I was somewhat concerned about whether the Dell buy-out would affect their business. I guess bad PR really does hurt, because the fact that I've seen this review now makes it much less likely that I'll buy from them.
And even ignoring the time factor, most of us can't get components at the same bulk prices as big name vendors. That can be significant even after the integrator adds their mark-up.
Ah, don't you believe it!
I had the misfortune of being the publicity officer for a large local club when one of the big news wires picked up some offhand comment someone in the club probably made about one of our competitive teams. The story was entirely inaccurate, wouldn't have been particularly significant even if it had been true, and certainly didn't come from anyone in the club's administration who would have had access to the required information at that time. Nevertheless, we hit two of the four big broadsheets and the BBC within a matter of hours, and several local news media during the following week.
Indeed. I think this phenomenon is a natural reaction to the social networking trends of the past couple of years.
In the beginning, there was Web 1.0. The best content, for the most part, was provided by people who had a genuine interest in their field and a desire to share their knowledge. At first, much content was found through following hyperlinks on related sites, though search engines soon evolved to allow content to be found more easily.
With today's "Web 2.0", we have two related but (IMHO) quite distinct phenomena providing a lot of the new material: blogging/social networking, and "open contribution" sites like Wikipedia and Digg. In each case, the key distinction is that it becomes viable not just for anyone to put their content on-line, but for significant numbers of other people to find it. Good content tends to be noticed somewhere in the blogosphere, and soon gets spread by word-of-blog. The speed with which information can spread is staggering.
The problem with this, as is starting to become obvious, is that when anyone can contribute, not everyone will be an expert. Take a look at Digg, and count the number of highly-dugg posts that are reported as possibly inaccurate. Worse, just as anyone can contribute good content, anyone can also contribute corrupt it or deliberately contribute bad information. Take a look at Wikipedia, and the number of articles that get locked or otherwise flagged as controversial. How do you defeat this? You need someone to be elevated above the average contributor, to an editorial role. Here on Slashdot, we have CmdrTaco and gang reviewing submitted stories, and for all that some posters mock them, they generally do a pretty good job. Likewise on Wikipedia, you or I can't just go in and lock an article that's being repeatedly edited, but some of the admins can, and procedures have been established for dealing with common problems.
I expect that Web 3.0 will arrive rather quickly, and in a sense will come full circle. The dominant source of valuable information will be hybrid sites, where a certain degree of automation and public participation keep the content flowing in a way that a small number of editors never could, yet there is always some oversight by those responsible for the site. Perhaps ironically, perhaps predictably, many of the sites that pioneered open contributions of various kinds -- Slashdot and Wikipedia among them -- seem likely to lead the way in the new order as well. Bloggers will carry on, at least for now, but the really important underlying thing about the blogosphere is that it represents a web of trust: if you find a couple of blogs on a particular subject that you like, and those are accurate/interesting/credible, then those bloggers will often link to others whose related content they trust/respect/enjoy. As long as you start from good sources, you'll find more.
The problem of course, is where you find those good sources. In this, I think there will always be a role for mainstream sites to establish their credibility, probably through mechanisms other than just the claims they make (e.g., being verifiably written by experts in an academic field, or blogs on software products written by the guys who actually work on those products). But how do those sites know where to link to? Surely their experts will be busy enough either writing their own content or doing whatever they do in real life to become experts, and won't have time to browse the entire web themselves. Thus we come to what we see in this article: we may see a new role becoming established, for "content middlemen" who know enough about about a field to select plausible content for linking, and refer it up to the high-ranking editors
It wasn't so much your approach to problem-posing that I was noticing, but for example the focus on speed of coding that comes up multiple times in one of your paragraphs. Sure, being able to code reasonably quickly is a good thing, but would you rather take:
Now, for me, those guys are increasingly valuable as we go down the list. But if all you're looking for is speed and you're using toy examples where any decent guy ought to get everything right, you'll probably pick the first guy first, the second guy second, and the third guy last.