What I don't understand is how come nobody seems to be taking action against shops that sell copy-protected "CDs" in the same area as real CDs, giving the impression that they're all the same and can be used in the same ways. That seems to be a clear misrepresentation, which I'm pretty sure is against the law in most jurisdictions. It seems some customers are now returning the pseudo-CDs for a refund, and some shops are giving that refund without a fight, but how come the various government trading standards people aren't getting involved yet?
Fantastic! Quick, somebody report Sony for knowingly trying to get people to break the law, and get us a verdict demonstrating how unhelpful the DMCA and its ilk really are.
Lawyers have an ethical code which requires them to vigorously protect their clients' interests to the best of their ability within the law, regardless of their personal feelings.
Absolutely, and that's right and proper.
However, no-one says a lawyer has to work for a major corporation whose actions strongly conflict with that lawyer's personal ethics.
I believe that under an adversarial legal system, every individual should be given the right to adequate representation if they are accused of committing a crime. Otherwise, anyone found guilty during a trial-by-public-opinion (which probably means a lot of people accused of unpleasant crimes, regardless of their innocence or guilt) is denied a fair chance to have their case heard, with potentially catastrophic results for that individual.
My personal ethics choose to hold certain organisations (including large, publicly-traded, commercial entities) to a higher standard. An organisation's past actions are often plain for all to see. For example, though I believe in copyright and the legal right of its holders to enforce it, I would not choose to work for the RIAA if I were a lawyer. They have an extensive history of taking actions of which I do not approve, regardless of whether their actions might be reasonable in the particular case I would be working on next.
It is my belief that such organisations will have no trouble retaining the services of legal staff, unless there is a very good reason that no lawyer wants to work for them. I further believe that if such a reason exists, any resulting damage to the organisation (including its destruction) is unlikely to be catastrophic to anyone who did not deserve to have a catastrophe befall them, such as those who chose to work for or invest in such an organisation.
Perhaps my position is logically inconsistent, but the legal world is not always logical.
Are you sure VC++ 2005 doesn't support nmake and CLI tools? Our group has been using makefile builds in every VC++ version for years, some of our colleagues have been working with the 2005 beta for a while now, and no-one's mentioned any fundamental changes...
I am write to you with very important business proposition. I understanding you recently to have lost much valuable data. I very please to offer you my services to recover this data.
I am expert computer consultant from Nigeria, able to help you in many ways to recover your valuable data. Please just to click here to send me details your bank accounts, so that $10,000 seed money can be taken (temporary only!) to secure our services. Honourable guarantee of funds to be returned is provided.
Looking forward to working with you,
Mr A Cowboy
Customers Service Us Department
Best Antiphishing Company In The World, Inc.
Nigeria
ADSL sucks, too. Downloading the RC of OpenOffice 2 this morning would surely have been more fun over my old 56kb modem than it was over my 2Mb ADSL line.:-)
Are you serious? Moste people don't even know they're being locked in.
If they have 100,000 official documents in.doc format, they want to move to another word processor, that word processor can import.doc files, except that they can't access them because of Microsoft's DRM, I'd say that would be a pretty big clue that lock-in is going on.
The DOJ thing is an excellent example of my point. One day, the government weren't on Microsoft's side, and they were being screwed by the legal system. (Likewise in Europe recently.) A few weeks later, under a new administration that liked Microsoft, the DOJ problem just went away, QED.:-)
The great thing about governments is that they tend to make the law. Suppose Microsoft's attempts to lock people into their own software start to get in the way of governments using other software they believe to be better, whether in features, reliability, cost, or whatever; it doesn't really matter why. It's a pretty safe bet that the fairly direct result would be legislation making that sort of lock-in explicitly anti-competitive, followed quickly by a nasty lawsuit.
The one group in any country that Microsoft and their commercial partners can't afford to piss off is the government. Not only are they a major potential source of income in their own right, they are also a powerful ally (witness the DMCA in the US and similar legislation elsewhere). Oh, and they also have the last laugh -- always.
That's a nice revenge fantasy, but it misunderstands who has the power. Jobs cut a deal with the devil. Now he's the recordos' bitch: if they walk, he doesn't have anything to vend. Empty iTMS makes Steve a sad, sad honcho.
Not really. Losing one music publisher from iTMS gets iTMS lots of street cred when they put the inevitable banners up saying why, while shafting that music publisher. Empty iTMS implies that all the music publishers walked at once. While that may make Steve a very upset honcho, he'll be a very upset honcho with just about crystal clear evidence that the major recording studios are engaging in an illegal price-fixing agreement and a whole army of lawyers.
Of all the battles they could choose to fight, that's the big one the major players in the music industry really, really can't afford to pick. They moment they do, their shares will be down 30% in a day, heads at the top will roll shortly afterwards, and their entire business model will start to collapse under the weight of a legal system that's finally woken up. I'd be very surprised if all of the big studios survived the fall-out, and those that did would be dramatically less powerful afterwards whatever happened. Are they really going to risk opening Pandora's box over a silly little thing like Steve Jobs wanting them not to make even more money from a scheme that's already making a decent profit? I think not.
And yet the "rest of the world" (which is such a ridiculously over the top generalization) still has relations with the US.
Which are strained, to say the least, and that's no good to the US or anyone else.
And it's not that much of a generalisation. The US has problems in its dealings with most of Europe, most of the Middle East, China, Japan, Russia, and those are just the major ones off the top of my head. (I'm not sure GWB actually knows where Africa is.)
Even those countries whose administrations backed Bush and co's war against Iraq did so with huge popular opposition. In the UK, for example, Blair's Labour party barely got reelected - even on a hopelessly unfair system that allows a party with only 22% of the voting population actually supporting it to form an absolute majority government. Blair's own career is toast, and it's looking like months rather than years before he loses his position altogether, such is the public opposition he now faces to just about anything (but particularly being GWB's poodle). I don't imagine his successor will be nearly so accommodating of the US. Try asking anyone from, say, Australia how they felt about sending their boys in, too; obviously anecdotes don't make a proof, but the feelings of those few Austrlians I happen to know are pretty clear, so if those are at all representative...
At the end of the day, the rest of the world maintains relations with the US because the alternative is pretty horrible. However, that alternative is a lot more horrible for the US than it is for The Rest Of The World(TM). Become a big enough pain in the ass and we'll all find out how horrible it can be, because there will come a point when the US is more trouble than it's worth, and it's seriously in danger of reaching that point in some areas already.
I'm not sure what's worse about your post, the arrogance or the factual inaccuracy.
I posted a lengthy comment here a few weeks back on how the US was far from the only party involved in the development of the technologies and infrastructure we now call the Internet (though it did provide the bulk of funding and test bed in the very early years). I gave several specific examples, right back to the early years, where crucial developments were made by others, and crucial work done outside the US. Do please look it up, or at least look up any of the several good timelines provided by people who have actually been involved from the early days. You are either deliberately trolling or desperately ill-informed.
The sad thing is, I'm really not sure this is true:
The UN is just as corrupt as the US, if not more, with a lot less accountability.
The accountability of the US government to its own electorate is questionable under the current political system. To the rest of the world, it's nothing but words; in recent years the US administration has told the rest of the world where to go on everything from environmental damage to invading whole countries, via imprisonment of foreign nationals without due process and mostly-pro-US-corporation legislation on things like IP rights.
This is exactly why so many countries are starting to complain that the US has primary control over important international activities like running the Internet.
Ewan McGregor was about the only talented actor in Eps 1-3 who actually pulled it off, and even he was really blunted.
That's a bit harsh, IMHO. Liam Neeson and Ian McDiarmid both did well, for example. It's just that several of the leads, such as the Anakins and Padmes of the universe, couldn't really keep up. It also didn't help that the script wasn't strong, and even managed to make Samuel L. Jackson not look universally cool -- "This party's over!" -- ?!
I have a much simpler approach. I don't believe in infringing copyright (regardless of my contempt for certain organisations that rely on it) so I buy DVDs, but only those I actually want. If I go to the DVD store looking for a particular film, I will buy a DVD containing that film and nothing else.
What I won't do is pay 150% of the usual price for a DVD set with the film I want and some other tenuously connected film I don't. An unwelcome recent trend has been stocking only the latter, which is resulting in a rapid switch to purchasing from on-line vendors with the exact DVD I want rather than local stores in my case.
Next Christmas, we'll see a box set of digitally re-mastered, with more scenes, and some pseudo documentary.
Pushing their luck, that would be.
Everyone knows this is the last one, and everyone knows there's going to be a box set of episodes I-III. The first film was nothing special (though I didn't find it as offensive as some die-hard fans did), the second was a modest improvement, and the third was (IMHO) a much better film. While additional scenes that were only cut for timing purposes in the cinematic version might be interesting to see, I imagine I'll buy the first serious box set, and then ignore everything afterwards, no matter how much "better" the "extras" are.
As you say, we've been blessed with a fair bit of good sci-fi/fantasy stuff recently. I've been pleased with several DVD box sets of good shows that I've bought in recent months, and with those I typically get a whole series of 20 or so episodes to watch, for a comparable price to a three-film set. I like the Star Wars series, but I'm hardly going to spend money on a second box set later that's almost the same as what I've got when I could be buying the next series of BSG, or just watching the next series of Dr Who on old-fashioned TV for free.
For these people, a thin client web appliance using applications hosted remotely on machines maintained by competent people makes a huge amount of sense.
You're right. We absolutely should not allow individuals any responsibility to control their systems and data if they're not highly trained to do so. Being able to do "enough to get the job done" isn't good enough today.
Instead, we should force them to use third party services, via a slow and unreliable link, administered by unknown people whose qualifications are probably as good as those who "designed" all the web sites using "HTML" in the late 90s, where the security guarantees are probably much less than those that allowed large numbers of credit card numbers to leak from major financial firms several times recently, and the back-ups are probably less robust than those at companies whose own IT staff can administer them and verify that they are working, and the data protection comes with no guarantees and you couldn't rely on any you did get anyway because the service is provided from some cheap labour country using former call centre staff with no laws to look after personal information, using user interfaces designed by those same "web programmers" from the late 90s, which could be automatically "upgraded" in a way that removed your favourite feature or introduced a critical bug at any time, thus creating a single, highly probably point of failure for every person doing every job at the company that is completely beyond the company's control.
On second thought, maybe that's THE DUMBEST IDEA I'VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE.
Heh... Reminds me of one of the "hints" that popped up in Baldur's Gate II while levels were loading. It said something like "Although your characters don't have to eat, please remember that YOU do. We don't want to lose any dedicated players!" If only they'd had one about how you characters could get eight hours of sleep in five seconds, but players couldn't...
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is how come nobody seems to be taking action against shops that sell copy-protected "CDs" in the same area as real CDs, giving the impression that they're all the same and can be used in the same ways. That seems to be a clear misrepresentation, which I'm pretty sure is against the law in most jurisdictions. It seems some customers are now returning the pseudo-CDs for a refund, and some shops are giving that refund without a fight, but how come the various government trading standards people aren't getting involved yet?
It would be summarily thrown out, since under US law "fair use" isn't a right, it's an affirmative defence.
Fantastic! Quick, somebody report Sony for knowingly trying to get people to break the law, and get us a verdict demonstrating how unhelpful the DMCA and its ilk really are.
Parse error on line 6: can't interpret "protected" applied to derivative of trademarked name "compact disc".
There is no such thing. If it's copy-protected, it's not a CD. Simple as that, really.
Absolutely, and that's right and proper.
However, no-one says a lawyer has to work for a major corporation whose actions strongly conflict with that lawyer's personal ethics.
I believe that under an adversarial legal system, every individual should be given the right to adequate representation if they are accused of committing a crime. Otherwise, anyone found guilty during a trial-by-public-opinion (which probably means a lot of people accused of unpleasant crimes, regardless of their innocence or guilt) is denied a fair chance to have their case heard, with potentially catastrophic results for that individual.
My personal ethics choose to hold certain organisations (including large, publicly-traded, commercial entities) to a higher standard. An organisation's past actions are often plain for all to see. For example, though I believe in copyright and the legal right of its holders to enforce it, I would not choose to work for the RIAA if I were a lawyer. They have an extensive history of taking actions of which I do not approve, regardless of whether their actions might be reasonable in the particular case I would be working on next.
It is my belief that such organisations will have no trouble retaining the services of legal staff, unless there is a very good reason that no lawyer wants to work for them. I further believe that if such a reason exists, any resulting damage to the organisation (including its destruction) is unlikely to be catastrophic to anyone who did not deserve to have a catastrophe befall them, such as those who chose to work for or invest in such an organisation.
Perhaps my position is logically inconsistent, but the legal world is not always logical.
Are you sure VC++ 2005 doesn't support nmake and CLI tools? Our group has been using makefile builds in every VC++ version for years, some of our colleagues have been working with the 2005 beta for a while now, and no-one's mentioned any fundamental changes...
Dear sir,
I am write to you with very important business proposition. I understanding you recently to have lost much valuable data. I very please to offer you my services to recover this data.
I am expert computer consultant from Nigeria, able to help you in many ways to recover your valuable data. Please just to click here to send me details your bank accounts, so that $10,000 seed money can be taken (temporary only!) to secure our services. Honourable guarantee of funds to be returned is provided.
Looking forward to working with you,
Mr A Cowboy
Customers Service Us Department
Best Antiphishing Company In The World, Inc.
Nigeria
ADSL sucks, too. Downloading the RC of OpenOffice 2 this morning would surely have been more fun over my old 56kb modem than it was over my 2Mb ADSL line. :-)
Well, if we're going by the year so far...
What little-known command performs just the right function for me?
strip, of course.
If they have 100,000 official documents in .doc format, they want to move to another word processor, that word processor can import .doc files, except that they can't access them because of Microsoft's DRM, I'd say that would be a pretty big clue that lock-in is going on.
The DOJ thing is an excellent example of my point. One day, the government weren't on Microsoft's side, and they were being screwed by the legal system. (Likewise in Europe recently.) A few weeks later, under a new administration that liked Microsoft, the DOJ problem just went away, QED. :-)
The great thing about governments is that they tend to make the law. Suppose Microsoft's attempts to lock people into their own software start to get in the way of governments using other software they believe to be better, whether in features, reliability, cost, or whatever; it doesn't really matter why. It's a pretty safe bet that the fairly direct result would be legislation making that sort of lock-in explicitly anti-competitive, followed quickly by a nasty lawsuit.
The one group in any country that Microsoft and their commercial partners can't afford to piss off is the government. Not only are they a major potential source of income in their own right, they are also a powerful ally (witness the DMCA in the US and similar legislation elsewhere). Oh, and they also have the last laugh -- always.
Not really. Losing one music publisher from iTMS gets iTMS lots of street cred when they put the inevitable banners up saying why, while shafting that music publisher. Empty iTMS implies that all the music publishers walked at once. While that may make Steve a very upset honcho, he'll be a very upset honcho with just about crystal clear evidence that the major recording studios are engaging in an illegal price-fixing agreement and a whole army of lawyers.
Of all the battles they could choose to fight, that's the big one the major players in the music industry really, really can't afford to pick. They moment they do, their shares will be down 30% in a day, heads at the top will roll shortly afterwards, and their entire business model will start to collapse under the weight of a legal system that's finally woken up. I'd be very surprised if all of the big studios survived the fall-out, and those that did would be dramatically less powerful afterwards whatever happened. Are they really going to risk opening Pandora's box over a silly little thing like Steve Jobs wanting them not to make even more money from a scheme that's already making a decent profit? I think not.
Which are strained, to say the least, and that's no good to the US or anyone else.
And it's not that much of a generalisation. The US has problems in its dealings with most of Europe, most of the Middle East, China, Japan, Russia, and those are just the major ones off the top of my head. (I'm not sure GWB actually knows where Africa is.)
Even those countries whose administrations backed Bush and co's war against Iraq did so with huge popular opposition. In the UK, for example, Blair's Labour party barely got reelected - even on a hopelessly unfair system that allows a party with only 22% of the voting population actually supporting it to form an absolute majority government. Blair's own career is toast, and it's looking like months rather than years before he loses his position altogether, such is the public opposition he now faces to just about anything (but particularly being GWB's poodle). I don't imagine his successor will be nearly so accommodating of the US. Try asking anyone from, say, Australia how they felt about sending their boys in, too; obviously anecdotes don't make a proof, but the feelings of those few Austrlians I happen to know are pretty clear, so if those are at all representative...
At the end of the day, the rest of the world maintains relations with the US because the alternative is pretty horrible. However, that alternative is a lot more horrible for the US than it is for The Rest Of The World(TM). Become a big enough pain in the ass and we'll all find out how horrible it can be, because there will come a point when the US is more trouble than it's worth, and it's seriously in danger of reaching that point in some areas already.
I'm not sure what's worse about your post, the arrogance or the factual inaccuracy.
I posted a lengthy comment here a few weeks back on how the US was far from the only party involved in the development of the technologies and infrastructure we now call the Internet (though it did provide the bulk of funding and test bed in the very early years). I gave several specific examples, right back to the early years, where crucial developments were made by others, and crucial work done outside the US. Do please look it up, or at least look up any of the several good timelines provided by people who have actually been involved from the early days. You are either deliberately trolling or desperately ill-informed.
So how much of the current Internet infrastructure in, say, Europe, did the US build in the first place?
You do realise that conceptually, the Internet is basically a network of networks, right?
The sad thing is, I'm really not sure this is true:
The accountability of the US government to its own electorate is questionable under the current political system. To the rest of the world, it's nothing but words; in recent years the US administration has told the rest of the world where to go on everything from environmental damage to invading whole countries, via imprisonment of foreign nationals without due process and mostly-pro-US-corporation legislation on things like IP rights.
This is exactly why so many countries are starting to complain that the US has primary control over important international activities like running the Internet.
No single country should. That's the point.
That's a bit harsh, IMHO. Liam Neeson and Ian McDiarmid both did well, for example. It's just that several of the leads, such as the Anakins and Padmes of the universe, couldn't really keep up. It also didn't help that the script wasn't strong, and even managed to make Samuel L. Jackson not look universally cool -- "This party's over!" -- ?!
I have a much simpler approach. I don't believe in infringing copyright (regardless of my contempt for certain organisations that rely on it) so I buy DVDs, but only those I actually want. If I go to the DVD store looking for a particular film, I will buy a DVD containing that film and nothing else.
What I won't do is pay 150% of the usual price for a DVD set with the film I want and some other tenuously connected film I don't. An unwelcome recent trend has been stocking only the latter, which is resulting in a rapid switch to purchasing from on-line vendors with the exact DVD I want rather than local stores in my case.
Pushing their luck, that would be.
Everyone knows this is the last one, and everyone knows there's going to be a box set of episodes I-III. The first film was nothing special (though I didn't find it as offensive as some die-hard fans did), the second was a modest improvement, and the third was (IMHO) a much better film. While additional scenes that were only cut for timing purposes in the cinematic version might be interesting to see, I imagine I'll buy the first serious box set, and then ignore everything afterwards, no matter how much "better" the "extras" are.
As you say, we've been blessed with a fair bit of good sci-fi/fantasy stuff recently. I've been pleased with several DVD box sets of good shows that I've bought in recent months, and with those I typically get a whole series of 20 or so episodes to watch, for a comparable price to a three-film set. I like the Star Wars series, but I'm hardly going to spend money on a second box set later that's almost the same as what I've got when I could be buying the next series of BSG, or just watching the next series of Dr Who on old-fashioned TV for free.
You're right. We absolutely should not allow individuals any responsibility to control their systems and data if they're not highly trained to do so. Being able to do "enough to get the job done" isn't good enough today.
Instead, we should force them to use third party services, via a slow and unreliable link, administered by unknown people whose qualifications are probably as good as those who "designed" all the web sites using "HTML" in the late 90s, where the security guarantees are probably much less than those that allowed large numbers of credit card numbers to leak from major financial firms several times recently, and the back-ups are probably less robust than those at companies whose own IT staff can administer them and verify that they are working, and the data protection comes with no guarantees and you couldn't rely on any you did get anyway because the service is provided from some cheap labour country using former call centre staff with no laws to look after personal information, using user interfaces designed by those same "web programmers" from the late 90s, which could be automatically "upgraded" in a way that removed your favourite feature or introduced a critical bug at any time, thus creating a single, highly probably point of failure for every person doing every job at the company that is completely beyond the company's control.
On second thought, maybe that's THE DUMBEST IDEA I'VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE.
Yeah, that'll be it. :-)
Heh... Reminds me of one of the "hints" that popped up in Baldur's Gate II while levels were loading. It said something like "Although your characters don't have to eat, please remember that YOU do. We don't want to lose any dedicated players!" If only they'd had one about how you characters could get eight hours of sleep in five seconds, but players couldn't...
Unfortunately, if you do, large numbers of popular Windows-based libraries stop working: MFC, for instance. :-(
By default it's broken in VC++ 7 as well, but you can at least disable it in isolation there with /Zc:forScope.