Bear in mind.. the DMCA was passed, not as an enforcement tool for the RIAA and MPAA, but as protection for virtually all vendors of copyrighted material
You're kidding, right? You're not that naive, are you? The DMCA benefits NOBODY but the **AA. All it does is criminalize the digitization of media currently produced, which means that companies represented by **AA don't have to modify their business plans.
The DMCA was passed to put the US in compliance with the WIPO treaties. These treaties were created expressly to combat the use of digital technologies that threaten current big business.
Please provide me with an example (either real or theoretical) where anyone else needs or could use the DMCA instead of the remaining existing copyright law.
The copyright office probably just wants to give the DMCA opponents an official chance to voice their opposition. They can't claim to be fair and impartial if they don't hear these complaints. Then, after "weighing all the arguments" (which will include 99% negative feedback on the DMCA), they will determine that everything is just fine as it is.
In fact, this conclusion will be further ammunition to the **AA. Why, if some restrictions are acceptable, *surely* more will be better!
Classified information and trade secrets are a different case: these are content that was created by a person/corporation who never intended the content to be distributed (openly anyways).
The DMCA forbids distributing content that you (or someone else) created and wants to distribute! They are outlawing the practice of communicating how to reverse-engineer a piece of "protected" content.
The first case is not a "freedom of speech" issue (since you were never free to speak of the content in the first place). The second (DMCA) most certainly is.
FAR more insidious is copyrighting the text of law
on
Democracy in the Dark?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Here is a story from almost two years ago on a case where there was a debate on the text of the law itself being copyrighted by a company. Seems a guy had the temerity to believe that since he and all his neighbours were bound by the regulations of the local building code, he should be able to post that text on the web. A court had ruled that he could not do this, that a company owned all rights to publication of the code.
This story today is not even on the same plane. Neither of these companies claim to own the text (the content) of the law they catalog: all they do is make it far more convenient to search. That's a service, nothing more. Sure, it would be nice if the government made an effort to publish the law for the public in a way that didn't require these expensive services, but they don't. Complain to Congress about it: it's not LexisNexis' fault! Without their service, who knows, you might be spending even MORE for a lawyer who has to do manual research through paper books and such.
Thank you. Obviously, I can't speak for the people who are hypocrites on this site, so I'll simply agree that it is a bit annoying to see the imbalance when you are reading at a high mod filter. (I swear, if you can stand the chaff, you get some very reasonable comments at 0 and -1).
Civil disobediance is, I believe, perfectly warranted behavior when the rationalle is just. Agreed, defending copyright in the digital age is not as earth-shatteringly important in the grand scheme as issues like racial equality, but I would argue that even if the DeCSS code very existance is considered illegal, I would still wear the T-shirt proudly! Your statement was "two wrongs don't make a right": in the majority of civil disobediance cases, the "wrong" committed by the rights activist is intentional, to show the ludirous nature of the illegality of the act, to show that it was not "wrong" at all.
Finally, on the GPL. My point was not that copyright itself would be found to be faulty (which I actually don't believe would be that massive a disaster for everyone, but guaranteed would be for existing big business interests). My point was that the licence that modifies the default copyright restrictions may be struck down. Yes, this would screw up the legality of Linux distros in the short term, as everyone who wrote code would have to be contacted for permission. But more to the point, it would be open season on challenges to EULA licences as well.
It is true that 99% of the time, I would be satisfied with the speed of dialup.
That said, I have a cable modem (a "lite" implementation which is 2-3x the speed of dialup) because:
1) It's nice having a little more speed on that 1% of the time that I could use it;
2) I'm connected a *lot* of the time of the day. I would not be able to tolerate having my phone line tied up that long, so I would require a second phone line. A second line alone is almost as much as the $25 I pay for cable access, and I'd still have to add the cost for a decent dialup ISP.
So, I get faster service for less money. Seems pretty simple to me!
Yes, they are roughly the same thing. They are licences that modify the standard "All rights reserved" clause that defaults to a copyrighted work. This means that without a licence, you really can't do much more than look at the CD that your software came on.
The difference lies in what the two types of licences say.
The EULAs that we know and love (from MS, Adobe, etc.) grant us the right use the copy we have in very limited ways (one machine/one user, no redistribution permitted, no modification permitted, no source code provided, no liability, etc.)
The GPL shares the "no liability" part, but it expressly *permits* using the software any way you want, copying it as often as you want, selling as many copies as you want. All it asks is (1)that copies (and derivatives) are themselves GPL'd, and (2)that if you distribute a copy (or a derivative) of GPL'd software, that you provide the source code (if asked) to the recipient. These were added specifically to ensure that GPL'd code cannot be co-opted by proprietary interests.
By the way, the BSD licence is also worth mentioning. It's as close to "public domain" as you can get: BSD'd code can be used any way you want, as long as you don't hold the authors liable and you give them credit. It is "free-er" code than the FSF's "Free" (GPL'd) code in the sense that there are fewer restrictions on its use. In practice, however, without the GPL's protections, eventually BSD code gets "embraced and extended" by MS et al, rendering the orginal BSD version incompatible with its proprietary derivatives.
I think you'll find that the Slashdot crowd that supports violating copyright of RIAA and MPAA content (and is opposed to copyright on the whole) and the Slashdot crowd that that opposes violations of the GPL, are in fact, two separate crowds.
For the record, I'm with the latter. I believe that the concept of copyright (a limited-time artificial monopoly) is a sound idea, and that it continues to be a fair idea today. I believe that there is such as thing as fair use, which means that there are personal uses for material that are beyond the ability of the rights-holder to dictate to you on how it may be used.
What this means is (in my opinion, anyway):
**AA content and GPL'd code should be protected by copyright:
All copyright holders should be able to dictate the terms of how they want their content used (disregarding the above fair-use exemption):
Copying/modifying a movie, a song, or a kernel is always perfectly acceptable for personal use, regardless of whether something is copyrighted or not, and regardless of the terms of the copyright. A licence may specifically forbid any such action: doesn't matter, as fair use trumps the powers of the rights holder.
Distributing copies of copyrighted materials to others is definately not fair use. Posting material for others to download counts as distribution in my (and any other rational) book.
Therefore, selling/sharing copies of copyrighted content is forbidden. By default, copyright is defined as "All rights reserved", meaning that nothing can be done without the rights-holders explicit permission. However, these rights can be modified by a relatively new device called a "licence".
The **AA's content does not have a licence (unless you count things like the FBI warnings and such, and they don't grant you any rights beyond what you already get under fair use anyway). You may not distribute their content without their permission. End of discussion.
Code licenced under the GPL expressly permits many different kinds of distribution. It actually grants you (as the recipient of the content) rights to the material that the copyright normally forbids. One thing that it does not permit, however, is any kind of distribution of GPL'd work (or derivative GPL'd work) without the source code included.
Whew! The upshot is that I believe that copyright is to be respected, but not abused. The FSF/Linus/whoever want copyright to be enforcable just as the **AA do, the difference is that the **AA wants to eliminate fair use as well. That's a whole other animal to discuss.
By the way, just a thought. People have been worrying tremendously about the GPL being tested in court, and how it could be bad if it proves to not be valid. That may be, but any test of the GPL in court is disastrous to the proprietary software industry, which rely on licence agreements to define how their customers may use their otherwise "all rights reserved" software. One of two things could happen:
The GPL is upheld as legal, forever removing any FUDing from non-open software companies; or
The GPL is found illegal, throwing GNU/Linux into (perhaps temporary) confusion, but also leaving the door wide open for testing the licences of proprietary software in court as well. If one specific software licence can be challenged successfully, all of them can. Also, the BSD licence would (logically) also be challenged, meaning that everyone who has copied BSD code (including Microsoft) will have violated copyright law in the process.
I say, bring on the GPL challenge. It'll be fun to watch MS lose something either way!
I wonder why using the pay phone is so much more expensive in the US than in Canada. It's still a quarter to make local calls here. Counting for our exchange rate, it is literal twice as expensive to make a call in the US!
Given that fact, most mega-conglomerates with.02 cents of knowledge will tell their music arm to re-adjust it's buisness model and become profitable, mainly because the fault does not lie with the technological arm.
It's highly unlikely any major company is going to tell it's profitable tech arm "stop making computers consumers like and buy" because they dont support their less profitable media arm.
According to the article, the hardware division is barely profitable at all (like Matsushita, Hitachi, etc. not able to make things as cheaply as other Asian compititors). It said that the media arm brought in a fraction of the revenue, but virutually ALL of the profit!
Plus, we don't know how DRM will (if ever) become reality. In a free, competitive market I would hazard a guess that it would eventually fizzle and die. But I would think that Sony would want to keep this together as long as the issue of *forcing* DRM (through legislation) is still a distinct possibility. Even if Sony splits off the media from the hardware arm, the RIAA/MPAA will still be there, still pushing for legislated DRM. If it becomes reality, then there is no more conundrum on Sony's part: their hardware and media will be perfectly suited to one another!
Unfortunately, I don't think many care because they're happy in their complacent white picket fence lives.
Bingo! There's the problem. As long as the vast majority of the population are comfy and view people who want to disrupt the current system as unpatriotic, dangerous oddballs (a characterzation that will be happily portrayed by big media), we have no hope of going back.
All western governments under the thumb of globalization and corporatism have become experts at "boiling the frog" (if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, he'll jump out: if you slowly boil the water in the pot with the frog in it, he'll cook because he won't have realized the danger until it was too late). We are having our rights slowly removed (heat turned up), and the general man doesn't realize it.
However, I still agree with you. Regardless of my opinion that it is futile, I will also continue to educate. I would very much like it to be proven that I was wrong about how things will go, and I will do what I can to help.
Try and make a feature length cartoon about the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Jungle Book and see how long till Disney is threatening you with C&D orders and lawsuits. That's what really burns. It's as much about stealing our culture as it is about 'protecting' their IP.
One word: Pinocchio. A very non-Disney live action movie, made by Italian Roberto Benigni (of "Life is Beautiful" fame). As far as I can tell, Disney had no input on this movie, as it was based not on Disney's animated film (copyrighted), but on the fairy tale (public domain).
I'm not saying that they didn't try to stop this movie, only that they obviously didn't succeed.
Very interesting, although I think you'd better keep your friendship with your "opponent" a very well-kept secret! I'm pretty sure that if a whiff of this plan became known to the judge (at any level of the proceedings) you'd get slapped with contempt of court (or some other conflict-of-interest-type charge) pretty quickly. And your pals at the RIAA and MPAA would helping to investigate such a relationship very closely.
Plus (dons conspiracy hat), I imagine that before you even get close to the Supremes, a lower court would be "encouraged" by folks unknown to simply refuse to hear an appeal of the decision made by the court directly under him/her/them. No appeal granted, no way to force the issue.
I just seems like nobody wants to test this new law, but everybody wants to use it like the club it was designed to be. Somebody need to fight this thing in court, but that will take years and lots of cash.
It will only happen on a case between two very rich parties (say, MPAA/RIAA vs. a consumer electronics giant) on an issue that neither thinks they can afford to lose (like the Betamax case). A lightweight defendant will always be lawyered into submission before reaching the Supreme Court. A reasonably "unimportant" issue will be settled well before it reaches the Supreme Court, as well.
Basically, the IP cartel has to seriously piss off another major corporation before this will ever be struck down by the Judiciary. Something ludicrious, like maybe deny Samsung the right to licence the next DRM-enabled audio-disc format because they start marketing players that make perfect red book CD copies, or some other legal yet non-media-corp freindly function.
And truthfully, the IP cartel isn't that stupid! They know they have a Golden Goose with this legislation: they would be idiots to ever permit this law to be tested for its Constitutionality by the Supreme Court. They'll accept many small losses (and even some big ones) just to make sure that the law stays on the books. Like you said, the "club" is precisely what this is about: the right of established, funds-giving companies to smash any new competitor with a new way of doing things with digital media before they can ever hope to compete on a level playing field.
My only hope was that with this law in effect for four years now, was that would have been enough time to make a substantial (and attributable) difference to the US economy that there would have been industry pressure to reverse the law. Sadly, this hasn't happened yet. And now most countries (including here in Canada) are moving to ratify the WIPO treaties with their own DMCA-like legislation.
CNN doesn't report things like this (or anything else like DMCA troubles) because it is fundamentally anti-government in tone, and AOL-TW (parent company of CNN) has apparently make it company policy to be pro-government on *every* story they cover.
Seriously, I can't stand to tune into CNN anymore. It's more like PNN (Propaganda News Network). Their total lack of balls to portray anything other than the World According to Bush is just painful to watch.
FUD: You have to open up all your code if you use GPL code in your software.
Fact: You have to open up all your code if you use GPL code in your software and then distribute it!
I don't think the DoD distributes very much of the software it writes, so why should it care if it uses GPL code? It shouldn't care! But let the FUD fly!
The Privacy Commission is an independant body of the Canadian government. Its existance, and its stance, gives me as a Canadian at least a bit of comfort that there is someone with influence who is looking out for some of my rights.
My question is regarding the USA. Is there an equivalent body in the American government? Is anyone "official" (read: not like lobbying bodies such as ACLU, EFF, etc.) looking out for the US citizenry's privacy rights? If so, have they been muzzled during the last 15 months?
Microsoft hopes to kill open source competition (like they killed everybody else), and then they'll go back to charging more.
Funny thing about Free software. You *can't* kill it. You can kill the companies currently distributing it, but it's still out there and freely available from anyone who wants to give it away or sell it to you.
The only way to actually kill Free software is to drive it underground (make it illegal). Okay, it wouldn't really kill it, but it wouldn't be a "legitimate" competitor to Microsoft either. Make no mistake, legislating against Free softare is very high on Microsoft's political wish list!
I can see the points of sticking with Windows (software works OK, no retraining costs, licencing cost increase doesn't outweigh short-term pain of switch). I can see the points of switching to a *real* Linux distro (Red Hat, SuSE, et al) aiming at the business desktop (Free, secure, etc).
But Lindows offers no advantage to a business. It is different enough from a user point of view that there would be big-time retraining. Most custom apps would not work (hell, most packaged Windows apps wouldn't either). They also play loose with the spirit of the GPL and it runs as root to open themselves up to viruses and hacks.
Maybe Microsoft is targeting businesses that show interest in Lindows because, when it comes to customers contemplating a switch from Windows, you might as well go after the dumbest ones first!
They still make simple telephones. They still make simple cell phones. You can stop complaining by simply buying one of these simple devices instead of a complex device.
You pointed out the issue yourself: you now have different needs. YOU (and your wife) decided that your needs were different, meaning that YOU decided that the ability to simply dial/talk or answer/talk was not enough. If you want your phone to do more, you have to put up with complexity (meaning you have a learning curve to deal with).
Do you really think that if your phone system in the 50's and 60's were CAPABLE of transfering a call from one handset to another that it would have been any more intuitive then than it is now? Conversely, if all you could do on today's phones was dial or answer (no speeddial, hold, transfer, speaker, voicemail, forward, display, etc., etc.), do you think anyone would have trouble using it today?
You want to keep it simple? Don't expect anything more than the simplest function.
BTW, I'm not unsympathetic. I too hate it that my brain resists the effort to learn how to use a new device. The effort (short-term pain) is the price I pay so that I can benefit (long-term gain)from the device's functions. But I don't see how it can be done any easier. These manufacturers hire UI designers: I certainly know they do a better job of laying out the functions than I *ever* could! But there simply is no way to pack a bunch of neat features on a tiny device so that a person could just look at it and know how it all works!
Excellent, and good luck. Normally, you don't have any opportunity to get directly to the upper levels of management: they're normally insulated behind Customer Service drones, and leaving is the only way to get the decision-makers' attention. You stand a much better chance of keeping your service and opening up another business to open standards (a win/win proposition for everyone but Microsoft;-)
As for Microsoft's site, it is most definately not in their best interests to have a standards-compliant site. They want everyone visiting them to use IE. Think about it: if there is anything on there that you want (like access to MSDN or the Knowledge Base), you must use IE or you can't get it. What's the negative? I mean, if someone at this point is using an alternative browser, they are doing so by *choice* (ie. specifically because they think it is better than IE, or they cannot run IE at all), so they won't gain any IE users by opening their site to others. Quite the opposite: that would mean one fewer reason to bother loading IE at all!
You did the right thing for a first step, but you didn't say if you left the service or not.
I don't know what "Mygo" is, but I assume it is some kind of wireless content provider (too lazy to Google). Regardless, if there is an alternative service, quit Mygo (and make sure you contact them to let them know you did and why). Even if there is not an alternative, quit anyways and sign up again if you can. The statistic that someone quit because of their web page will still be there.
Sure, you are a drop in the bucket, but the bucket doesn't have to be very big to get a company's attention. An upper-level management guy is probably responsible for tracking the reasons for people leaving their service. Even a few can probably get him thinking that maybe "Company Policy" needs to be changed.
The guy who responded to you is a low-level support guy who probably knows that it wouldn't be that hard to standards-compliant with their site. But he/she has been told "we don't lose any money by being IE-only (assumption), supporting other browsers would cost more (fact), so we are IE-only!" Only by proving that it *is* costing them money will they change.
Can someone summarize the differences between ATX, mini-ITX, mini-ATX and whatever other form factors are out there?
Same page that I linked to above has an excellent graphic of the size difference between mini-ITX, Flex-ATX, micro-ATX, and full ATX.
PS why does a motherboard have to be flat? Why not L-shaped?
If you had a dedicated PC that needed a very low profile (think super slim), then a L-shaped motherboard might be necessary to squeeze in things like the power supply, hard drive, and CD drive. The problem is that this had better be a high-volume item, otherwise you wouldn't recoup the costs of producing a board useful for only this device.
Also, you would likely be looking at a less than optimal layout design (odd shapes mean longer traces), which could lead to performance and stability issues.
BTW, I assume by your references to "flat" and "L-shaped", you are not asking about a motherboard that is literally bent into a third dimension. If you are, this is impossible to manufacture. Circuit boards cannot be printed by machine unless they are flat. If you require a device that has main boards on two planes (one laid horizontal, one 90 degrees vertical), then you would need two separate boards and some type of connector (like a motherboard and a AGP or PCI card).
I don't have a problem with legacy ports on full-size ATX motherboards. Desktop and tower PCs have a requirement in my opinion to try to be as flexible as possible, which means being able to connect older and diverse hardware.
On these mini-ITX motherboards, on the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly. These things are *small* (less than 7" square), and are ideal for tiny form factors. They would be even more attractive if they didn't have to be so tall, because all the I/O (a *lot* of I/O) is all stacked on top of each other. Take a look here to see what I mean.
A modern, tiny motherboard like this should be able to do with VGA for a display and USB/Firewire ports for *everything* else.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind.. the DMCA was passed, not as an enforcement tool for the RIAA and MPAA, but as protection for virtually all vendors of copyrighted material
You're kidding, right? You're not that naive, are you? The DMCA benefits NOBODY but the **AA. All it does is criminalize the digitization of media currently produced, which means that companies represented by **AA don't have to modify their business plans.
The DMCA was passed to put the US in compliance with the WIPO treaties. These treaties were created expressly to combat the use of digital technologies that threaten current big business.
Please provide me with an example (either real or theoretical) where anyone else needs or could use the DMCA instead of the remaining existing copyright law.
I may just be cynical, but...
The copyright office probably just wants to give the DMCA opponents an official chance to voice their opposition. They can't claim to be fair and impartial if they don't hear these complaints. Then, after "weighing all the arguments" (which will include 99% negative feedback on the DMCA), they will determine that everything is just fine as it is.
In fact, this conclusion will be further ammunition to the **AA. Why, if some restrictions are acceptable, *surely* more will be better!
Classified information and trade secrets are a different case: these are content that was created by a person/corporation who never intended the content to be distributed (openly anyways).
The DMCA forbids distributing content that you (or someone else) created and wants to distribute! They are outlawing the practice of communicating how to reverse-engineer a piece of "protected" content.
The first case is not a "freedom of speech" issue (since you were never free to speak of the content in the first place). The second (DMCA) most certainly is.
Here is a story from almost two years ago on a case where there was a debate on the text of the law itself being copyrighted by a company. Seems a guy had the temerity to believe that since he and all his neighbours were bound by the regulations of the local building code, he should be able to post that text on the web. A court had ruled that he could not do this, that a company owned all rights to publication of the code.
This story today is not even on the same plane. Neither of these companies claim to own the text (the content) of the law they catalog: all they do is make it far more convenient to search. That's a service, nothing more. Sure, it would be nice if the government made an effort to publish the law for the public in a way that didn't require these expensive services, but they don't. Complain to Congress about it: it's not LexisNexis' fault! Without their service, who knows, you might be spending even MORE for a lawyer who has to do manual research through paper books and such.
Thank you. Obviously, I can't speak for the people who are hypocrites on this site, so I'll simply agree that it is a bit annoying to see the imbalance when you are reading at a high mod filter. (I swear, if you can stand the chaff, you get some very reasonable comments at 0 and -1).
Civil disobediance is, I believe, perfectly warranted behavior when the rationalle is just. Agreed, defending copyright in the digital age is not as earth-shatteringly important in the grand scheme as issues like racial equality, but I would argue that even if the DeCSS code very existance is considered illegal, I would still wear the T-shirt proudly! Your statement was "two wrongs don't make a right": in the majority of civil disobediance cases, the "wrong" committed by the rights activist is intentional, to show the ludirous nature of the illegality of the act, to show that it was not "wrong" at all.
Finally, on the GPL. My point was not that copyright itself would be found to be faulty (which I actually don't believe would be that massive a disaster for everyone, but guaranteed would be for existing big business interests). My point was that the licence that modifies the default copyright restrictions may be struck down. Yes, this would screw up the legality of Linux distros in the short term, as everyone who wrote code would have to be contacted for permission. But more to the point, it would be open season on challenges to EULA licences as well.
It is true that 99% of the time, I would be satisfied with the speed of dialup.
That said, I have a cable modem (a "lite" implementation which is 2-3x the speed of dialup) because:
1) It's nice having a little more speed on that 1% of the time that I could use it;
2) I'm connected a *lot* of the time of the day. I would not be able to tolerate having my phone line tied up that long, so I would require a second phone line. A second line alone is almost as much as the $25 I pay for cable access, and I'd still have to add the cost for a decent dialup ISP.
So, I get faster service for less money. Seems pretty simple to me!
Yes, they are roughly the same thing. They are licences that modify the standard "All rights reserved" clause that defaults to a copyrighted work. This means that without a licence, you really can't do much more than look at the CD that your software came on.
The difference lies in what the two types of licences say.
The EULAs that we know and love (from MS, Adobe, etc.) grant us the right use the copy we have in very limited ways (one machine/one user, no redistribution permitted, no modification permitted, no source code provided, no liability, etc.)
The GPL shares the "no liability" part, but it expressly *permits* using the software any way you want, copying it as often as you want, selling as many copies as you want. All it asks is (1)that copies (and derivatives) are themselves GPL'd, and (2)that if you distribute a copy (or a derivative) of GPL'd software, that you provide the source code (if asked) to the recipient. These were added specifically to ensure that GPL'd code cannot be co-opted by proprietary interests.
By the way, the BSD licence is also worth mentioning. It's as close to "public domain" as you can get: BSD'd code can be used any way you want, as long as you don't hold the authors liable and you give them credit. It is "free-er" code than the FSF's "Free" (GPL'd) code in the sense that there are fewer restrictions on its use. In practice, however, without the GPL's protections, eventually BSD code gets "embraced and extended" by MS et al, rendering the orginal BSD version incompatible with its proprietary derivatives.
For the record, I'm with the latter. I believe that the concept of copyright (a limited-time artificial monopoly) is a sound idea, and that it continues to be a fair idea today. I believe that there is such as thing as fair use, which means that there are personal uses for material that are beyond the ability of the rights-holder to dictate to you on how it may be used.
What this means is (in my opinion, anyway):
Whew! The upshot is that I believe that copyright is to be respected, but not abused. The FSF/Linus/whoever want copyright to be enforcable just as the **AA do, the difference is that the **AA wants to eliminate fair use as well. That's a whole other animal to discuss.
By the way, just a thought. People have been worrying tremendously about the GPL being tested in court, and how it could be bad if it proves to not be valid. That may be, but any test of the GPL in court is disastrous to the proprietary software industry, which rely on licence agreements to define how their customers may use their otherwise "all rights reserved" software. One of two things could happen:
I say, bring on the GPL challenge. It'll be fun to watch MS lose something either way!
VERY off topic here...
I wonder why using the pay phone is so much more expensive in the US than in Canada. It's still a quarter to make local calls here. Counting for our exchange rate, it is literal twice as expensive to make a call in the US!
Any ideas? Or does anyone really care?
Given that fact, most mega-conglomerates with .02 cents of knowledge will tell their music arm to re-adjust it's buisness model and become profitable, mainly because the fault does not lie with the technological arm.
It's highly unlikely any major company is going to tell it's profitable tech arm "stop making computers consumers like and buy" because they dont support their less profitable media arm.
According to the article, the hardware division is barely profitable at all (like Matsushita, Hitachi, etc. not able to make things as cheaply as other Asian compititors). It said that the media arm brought in a fraction of the revenue, but virutually ALL of the profit!
Plus, we don't know how DRM will (if ever) become reality. In a free, competitive market I would hazard a guess that it would eventually fizzle and die. But I would think that Sony would want to keep this together as long as the issue of *forcing* DRM (through legislation) is still a distinct possibility. Even if Sony splits off the media from the hardware arm, the RIAA/MPAA will still be there, still pushing for legislated DRM. If it becomes reality, then there is no more conundrum on Sony's part: their hardware and media will be perfectly suited to one another!
More like "Duh!"
Maybe you commented before the "Funny" moderation to the parent post, but c'mon!
Unfortunately, I don't think many care because they're happy in their complacent white picket fence lives.
Bingo! There's the problem. As long as the vast majority of the population are comfy and view people who want to disrupt the current system as unpatriotic, dangerous oddballs (a characterzation that will be happily portrayed by big media), we have no hope of going back.
All western governments under the thumb of globalization and corporatism have become experts at "boiling the frog" (if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, he'll jump out: if you slowly boil the water in the pot with the frog in it, he'll cook because he won't have realized the danger until it was too late). We are having our rights slowly removed (heat turned up), and the general man doesn't realize it.
However, I still agree with you. Regardless of my opinion that it is futile, I will also continue to educate. I would very much like it to be proven that I was wrong about how things will go, and I will do what I can to help.
Try and make a feature length cartoon about the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Jungle Book and see how long till Disney is threatening you with C&D orders and lawsuits. That's what really burns. It's as much about stealing our culture as it is about 'protecting' their IP.
One word: Pinocchio. A very non-Disney live action movie, made by Italian Roberto Benigni (of "Life is Beautiful" fame). As far as I can tell, Disney had no input on this movie, as it was based not on Disney's animated film (copyrighted), but on the fairy tale (public domain).
I'm not saying that they didn't try to stop this movie, only that they obviously didn't succeed.
Very interesting, although I think you'd better keep your friendship with your "opponent" a very well-kept secret! I'm pretty sure that if a whiff of this plan became known to the judge (at any level of the proceedings) you'd get slapped with contempt of court (or some other conflict-of-interest-type charge) pretty quickly. And your pals at the RIAA and MPAA would helping to investigate such a relationship very closely.
Plus (dons conspiracy hat), I imagine that before you even get close to the Supremes, a lower court would be "encouraged" by folks unknown to simply refuse to hear an appeal of the decision made by the court directly under him/her/them. No appeal granted, no way to force the issue.
I just seems like nobody wants to test this new law, but everybody wants to use it like the club it was designed to be. Somebody need to fight this thing in court, but that will take years and lots of cash.
It will only happen on a case between two very rich parties (say, MPAA/RIAA vs. a consumer electronics giant) on an issue that neither thinks they can afford to lose (like the Betamax case). A lightweight defendant will always be lawyered into submission before reaching the Supreme Court. A reasonably "unimportant" issue will be settled well before it reaches the Supreme Court, as well.
Basically, the IP cartel has to seriously piss off another major corporation before this will ever be struck down by the Judiciary. Something ludicrious, like maybe deny Samsung the right to licence the next DRM-enabled audio-disc format because they start marketing players that make perfect red book CD copies, or some other legal yet non-media-corp freindly function.
And truthfully, the IP cartel isn't that stupid! They know they have a Golden Goose with this legislation: they would be idiots to ever permit this law to be tested for its Constitutionality by the Supreme Court. They'll accept many small losses (and even some big ones) just to make sure that the law stays on the books. Like you said, the "club" is precisely what this is about: the right of established, funds-giving companies to smash any new competitor with a new way of doing things with digital media before they can ever hope to compete on a level playing field.
My only hope was that with this law in effect for four years now, was that would have been enough time to make a substantial (and attributable) difference to the US economy that there would have been industry pressure to reverse the law. Sadly, this hasn't happened yet. And now most countries (including here in Canada) are moving to ratify the WIPO treaties with their own DMCA-like legislation.
CNN doesn't report things like this (or anything else like DMCA troubles) because it is fundamentally anti-government in tone, and AOL-TW (parent company of CNN) has apparently make it company policy to be pro-government on *every* story they cover.
Seriously, I can't stand to tune into CNN anymore. It's more like PNN (Propaganda News Network). Their total lack of balls to portray anything other than the World According to Bush is just painful to watch.
FUD: You have to open up all your code if you use GPL code in your software.
Fact: You have to open up all your code if you use GPL code in your software and then distribute it!
I don't think the DoD distributes very much of the software it writes, so why should it care if it uses GPL code? It shouldn't care! But let the FUD fly!
The Privacy Commission is an independant body of the Canadian government. Its existance, and its stance, gives me as a Canadian at least a bit of comfort that there is someone with influence who is looking out for some of my rights.
My question is regarding the USA. Is there an equivalent body in the American government? Is anyone "official" (read: not like lobbying bodies such as ACLU, EFF, etc.) looking out for the US citizenry's privacy rights? If so, have they been muzzled during the last 15 months?
Microsoft hopes to kill open source competition (like they killed everybody else), and then they'll go back to charging more.
Funny thing about Free software. You *can't* kill it. You can kill the companies currently distributing it, but it's still out there and freely available from anyone who wants to give it away or sell it to you.
The only way to actually kill Free software is to drive it underground (make it illegal). Okay, it wouldn't really kill it, but it wouldn't be a "legitimate" competitor to Microsoft either. Make no mistake, legislating against Free softare is very high on Microsoft's political wish list!
Is there really a company out there this stupid?
I can see the points of sticking with Windows (software works OK, no retraining costs, licencing cost increase doesn't outweigh short-term pain of switch). I can see the points of switching to a *real* Linux distro (Red Hat, SuSE, et al) aiming at the business desktop (Free, secure, etc).
But Lindows offers no advantage to a business. It is different enough from a user point of view that there would be big-time retraining. Most custom apps would not work (hell, most packaged Windows apps wouldn't either). They also play loose with the spirit of the GPL and it runs as root to open themselves up to viruses and hacks.
Maybe Microsoft is targeting businesses that show interest in Lindows because, when it comes to customers contemplating a switch from Windows, you might as well go after the dumbest ones first!
They still make simple telephones. They still make simple cell phones. You can stop complaining by simply buying one of these simple devices instead of a complex device.
You pointed out the issue yourself: you now have different needs. YOU (and your wife) decided that your needs were different, meaning that YOU decided that the ability to simply dial/talk or answer/talk was not enough. If you want your phone to do more, you have to put up with complexity (meaning you have a learning curve to deal with).
Do you really think that if your phone system in the 50's and 60's were CAPABLE of transfering a call from one handset to another that it would have been any more intuitive then than it is now? Conversely, if all you could do on today's phones was dial or answer (no speeddial, hold, transfer, speaker, voicemail, forward, display, etc., etc.), do you think anyone would have trouble using it today?
You want to keep it simple? Don't expect anything more than the simplest function.
BTW, I'm not unsympathetic. I too hate it that my brain resists the effort to learn how to use a new device. The effort (short-term pain) is the price I pay so that I can benefit (long-term gain)from the device's functions. But I don't see how it can be done any easier. These manufacturers hire UI designers: I certainly know they do a better job of laying out the functions than I *ever* could! But there simply is no way to pack a bunch of neat features on a tiny device so that a person could just look at it and know how it all works!
Excellent, and good luck. Normally, you don't have any opportunity to get directly to the upper levels of management: they're normally insulated behind Customer Service drones, and leaving is the only way to get the decision-makers' attention. You stand a much better chance of keeping your service and opening up another business to open standards (a win/win proposition for everyone but Microsoft ;-)
As for Microsoft's site, it is most definately not in their best interests to have a standards-compliant site. They want everyone visiting them to use IE. Think about it: if there is anything on there that you want (like access to MSDN or the Knowledge Base), you must use IE or you can't get it. What's the negative? I mean, if someone at this point is using an alternative browser, they are doing so by *choice* (ie. specifically because they think it is better than IE, or they cannot run IE at all), so they won't gain any IE users by opening their site to others. Quite the opposite: that would mean one fewer reason to bother loading IE at all!
You did the right thing for a first step, but you didn't say if you left the service or not.
I don't know what "Mygo" is, but I assume it is some kind of wireless content provider (too lazy to Google). Regardless, if there is an alternative service, quit Mygo (and make sure you contact them to let them know you did and why). Even if there is not an alternative, quit anyways and sign up again if you can. The statistic that someone quit because of their web page will still be there.
Sure, you are a drop in the bucket, but the bucket doesn't have to be very big to get a company's attention. An upper-level management guy is probably responsible for tracking the reasons for people leaving their service. Even a few can probably get him thinking that maybe "Company Policy" needs to be changed.
The guy who responded to you is a low-level support guy who probably knows that it wouldn't be that hard to standards-compliant with their site. But he/she has been told "we don't lose any money by being IE-only (assumption), supporting other browsers would cost more (fact), so we are IE-only!" Only by proving that it *is* costing them money will they change.
Can someone summarize the differences between ATX, mini-ITX, mini-ATX and whatever other form factors are out there?
Same page that I linked to above has an excellent graphic of the size difference between mini-ITX, Flex-ATX, micro-ATX, and full ATX.
PS why does a motherboard have to be flat? Why not L-shaped?
If you had a dedicated PC that needed a very low profile (think super slim), then a L-shaped motherboard might be necessary to squeeze in things like the power supply, hard drive, and CD drive. The problem is that this had better be a high-volume item, otherwise you wouldn't recoup the costs of producing a board useful for only this device.
Also, you would likely be looking at a less than optimal layout design (odd shapes mean longer traces), which could lead to performance and stability issues.
BTW, I assume by your references to "flat" and "L-shaped", you are not asking about a motherboard that is literally bent into a third dimension. If you are, this is impossible to manufacture. Circuit boards cannot be printed by machine unless they are flat. If you require a device that has main boards on two planes (one laid horizontal, one 90 degrees vertical), then you would need two separate boards and some type of connector (like a motherboard and a AGP or PCI card).
I don't have a problem with legacy ports on full-size ATX motherboards. Desktop and tower PCs have a requirement in my opinion to try to be as flexible as possible, which means being able to connect older and diverse hardware.
On these mini-ITX motherboards, on the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly. These things are *small* (less than 7" square), and are ideal for tiny form factors. They would be even more attractive if they didn't have to be so tall, because all the I/O (a *lot* of I/O) is all stacked on top of each other. Take a look here to see what I mean.
A modern, tiny motherboard like this should be able to do with VGA for a display and USB/Firewire ports for *everything* else.