I'm open minded to the idea of government regulation in this sort of area. However, I'm against hamfisted solutions like simply banning/taxing incandescent, or giving a credit to compact flourescent. Instead drive at the source: penalize lighting fixtures who are less efficient than X. The article claims that incandescent bulbs only convert 5% of the energy they consume into light. Assuming that's accurate, say something like, "any lighting fixture/bulb/whatever that converts less than 10% of the input energy into light is gets a tax penalty." This means that if someone somehow invents a super efficient incandescent bulb, it will correctly get the same benefits that CF bulbs do. Conversely, a company can't make really cheap but grossly inefficient CF bulbs and avoid the penalty. Even better, if you make it a sliding scale, it will continue to encourage increasingly efficient bulbs.
(This is similar to the stupid tax credits for hybrid cars that leads to insanity like a hybrid SUV that gets 27/32 MPG gets a tax break while the traditional gas engine compact car that gets 32/43 doesn't. Don't reward the technology, reward results.)
The best things Gen Con provides can't be replicated online. You can't play a LARP online. You can play some boardgames online, but you can't have hundreds of different board games, card games, wargames, and role-playing games demonstrated for you. To the extent you can, the demonstrations are less effective for the lack of a direct person-to-person connection. Gen Con provides an opportunity to play role-playing games you've never played. It provides an opportunity to play RPGs you normally do, but with exposure to new players and GMs you broaden your horizons. You can't do crazy things like the Gamer Olympics or True Dungeon over the internet. Sure, you can play some wargames online, but the online experience can't replicate physically moving figures across an elaborately built board.
The guy who posted the video of the penises attacking the wife's avatar could have just certified to YouTube that the material was non-infringing, and then YouTube under the DMCA would have left the video up...
There are two key parts: c.1.A.iii: The service provider "upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;". The legal content must be taken down "expeditiously." No window of opportunity is allowed in which to contact the person who posted it. Then g.2.B and C: "upon receipt of a counter notification described in paragraph [the service provider]... replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice."
Anyone willing to tell a lie can silence your online speech for ten days.
There is no trial, not even a judge's review. Even if your ISP wanted to, they can't put the content up faster than than ten day (at least, not without losing the safe harbor provisions). That's assuming you promptly file the counter notification. You can bring charges that the third party lied, but it's hard to prove when they claim "Oops, I guess we were wrong." Ten days might not seem like much, but it might get a company past an initial news rush. A number of companies have used the ten day window to illegally silence leaks of sale prices on "Black Friday" until the day had passed.
The take down notice system is, at its core, a good idea. I've even filed take down requests. However, it is not a good balance. It amounts to suppression of speech. If you're going to supress speech, you need a much higher standard than some random person's claims. The reason you can be silenced for 10 days is to give the original claimant time to file an infringement suit against you. Why does the claimant get such a window, but the person whose speech is being suppressed doesn't? A more fair balance would be that upon receipt of notification, a sevice provider needs to make a reasonable effort to contact the poster. If the poster fails to provide counter-notice within ten days, then the content gets yanked.
The way the industry works now, almost no developer can afford to self-fund a "full-size" game. For most of those who can, it's an all-or-nothing bet; if the game tanks (And many great games regrettably do), the developer goes out of business. So for the overwhelming majority of developers, to do a full game it means getting a publisher to fund development. Publishers are understandably cautious about funding more risky (but potentially great) games. As a result you tend to see lots of knock offs, sequels, and crappy movie licenses. Innovation is stifled. Add on that most developers exist only so long as they keep getting publishers to fund them.
One way to escape this is to simply develop smaller games. That's great if you like that sort of game, but not so good if you really want to develop a sprawling RPG, a large FPS, just about any adventure game, or something similar.
Episodic content is potentially a way forward. These days the overwhelming expense in a large game is the content, not the programming. A first episode that represents, say, 20% of a game may only need 40% of the content. (Even better, episode two probably only needs 15% more content to generate the next 20% of the game, assuming you're releasing episodes quickly enough that you don't need to update your engine or art.) It's a much lower risk. More developers can afford to self-fund in this model. More risky ideas can be tried. I'm quite confident that Bone and Sam & Max weren't going to be funded by a major publisher as full games. As the developer typically self-publishes, if the game is a success the developer can bank it to support future development, possibly even more traditional big-single-release games.
Episodic content is problematic. As a customer you're left hanging mid-story. (Did we say you'd be playing
Episode Two within six months of episode one? Did you purchase Episode One on that basis? Hope you don't mind waiting six more.)
If the developer goes bankrupt or cancels an unprofitable line you may never see the conclusion. (Sucks to be you, Sin Episodes fans. Of course, you can suffer that even in "full" game releases.) While episodic content is almost exclusively sold online, reducing overhead and costs, you pay what overhead there is once per episode, driving costs up. I'm not a fan of episodic content for these reasons. But I believe at least some developers are embracing episodic content as a way to escape extremely cautious publishers.
You left out option three: actually understand the issues involved and stop trying to play "gotcha."
DJ Dangermouse may reuse other people's work in his own creations, but he credits his sources.
If the above is to be believed, Timbaland reused someone else's creations, but didn't credit his source. That's low. Really low. If it's true, Timbaland deserves the scorn he's getting.
It is not possible to design a DRM system that prevents illegal activities while allowing all possible legal activities. No DRM system can tell if a copy is being made for a legal reason or an illegal reason. Every freedom you add to allow more fair use simultaneously makes it easier to make illegal copies. If you allow all fair use then making illegal copies will be easy.
Say I have a media player that only plays media in formats that don't support DRM. Maybe it's a lossless format. Maybe it's the same format you provide DRMed content in, but without the DRM wrapper. You can either block this fair use, or you let me make copies that I can then use to make further copies for infringing uses.
A more complex situation is free software in general. I want to to engage in fair use and play back content I've purchased using an entirely free software operating system and player. I can modify any of those layers to make an infringing copy. Or you can not allow free software players.
So to answer the impossible hypothetical question: assuming you've invented some magical, pixie dust filled, DRM system, sure, I'm all in favor of it. While you're offering the impossible, I'd really like a perpetual motion machine and a lossless compression algorithm that worked on all possible input.
The entire point of the GPL is that hackers can modify and replace GPLed software. Tivo's hardware refuses to run modified Linux kernels, ignoring the intent of the the license they agreed to. It may be legal, but it's not morally right, and it certainly is the opposite of "embracing the hacker community." That same community that gave them the operating system they built upon. It's an insult.
Check the article again, "The judges chose the photo taken during the fertile phases 60 per cent of the time."
The judges picked the fertile phase photo 60% of the time, when random chance would suggest 50%. This is an 20% more than random chance would predict. Significant, but not quite as amazing as a 60% difference that the summary erroneously suggests.
One of the tests of Fair Use is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." Obviously the use was intended to have a negative impact on the market value of the show and therefore fails the fair-use test.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
They're general areas to be considered, not simple binary tests to be applied. Note that the four are to be considered together as factors, not as a series of independent cases. Also note that it doesn't reference the fair-use-claimant's intent.
Your reading of guideline 4 is completely wrong. With a reading of "if the guideline is relevant then it's not fair use", how do you interpret guideline 1? It's not fair use for commercial or nonprofit educational use? I guess fair use only exists for for-profit educational use. How about guideline 2? No fair use of nature photography? No fair use ever because every copyright protected work has some sort of nature?
Ultimately by your reading of guideline 4 there is no fair use for reviewers ever. The entire purpose of a review is to impact a product or service's market value. That's obvious nonsense in light of the law specifically says that fair use exists for, "criticism, comment, news reporting".
So to be clear: the plaintiff has no legal basis for his case. You're representing yourself, and doing just fine. You've won every case so far and can reasonably expect to win all the appeals.
What exactly do you need the EFF and Slashdot for? You've apparently got things well under control. Your site remains up and running. No injunction has been put into place against you. You appear to have a slam dunk case against one of the regrettably large number of frivolous lawsuits currently active. Have you considered that you "have received no support from communities like Slashdot, or the EFF" not "because of my typical conservative political affiliation" but because your case isn't really all that noteworthy (Slashdot, whose views on noteworthiness are rather random) or critical to general freedom (EFF)?
As for the duress and stress, yeah, it sucks. I sympathize and hope things finish up quickly in your favor. But it cost you your local reputation? How so? Do you live in some place were people have an unusual interest in petty lawsuits? And even if they do, how would standing up for free speech harm your reputation?
I'm a supporter of the.xxx top level domain. Like, say.museum or.pro it will expand the domain names available, help companies better brand themselves, and provide a weak but useful way for people who want porn to find it. However...
This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities.
The porn isn't all going onto.xxx; nor should it. The idea that.xxx should exist to make it easier to filter is ridiculous. Do we have.museum and.pro so I can more easily protect my kids from museums and professionals? Nonsense. Many museums and professionals are in.com,.net, and elsewhere. The exact same thing will happen for.xxx..xxx won't ghettoize the porn, it will just give it a neighborhood to live in for those companies that chose to. The only way.xxx will be useful for filtering if it's illegal to put porn anywhere but in.xxx. But then, what's porn? Photographs of naked people? Photographs of topless women? Shall it henceforce be nationalgeographic.xxx? Perhaps photographs of women showing anything other than their eyes; that's considered sexual in some cultures. How about lingerie photographs? Will it become victoriassecret.xxx? Ultimately you can't draw the line in a useful way. The line will be too strict, in which case it violates the First Amendment in a way no one can ignore. Or the line will be too loose, and while people may ignore the First Amendment issues, those who want to ghettoize porn will be frustrated that things they consider porn aren't regulated.
Let's leave.xxx to the same situation.museum,.aero,.pro, and the like are in: it's branding, new names, and marginally useful tool for locating things you want. As a filtering tool it's basically useless.
On the subject of ghettoizing it:
...prohibition of child pornography, consumer fraud, deceptive marketing practices, and spam by dot-xxx domain owners...
So, the domain rules make it illegal to... do things that are already illegal. How useful. Well, maybe it makes it easier to "prosecute" since you can cancel the domain registration more easily than getting a criminal conviction. Thank God there isn't anywhere else people can put up child porn and fraud. Well, except.net,.com,.org,.tv,.cx, and dozens more. Useless, useless regulations. Clue to those reponsible: the bad guys are already on the net. Perversely you're trying to make.xxx safer than the rest of the net. Seems a bit odd.
Tog's results don't apply in all cases.
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Tog's research is only part of the answer. When he's not sharing his insane conspiracy theories about traffic engineers, Tog tends to ignore parts of the problem that are inconvienent to his theories. In particular he tends to ignore expert users. If you're doing the same thing over and over again it ceases to be aboue spending "two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press," it's muscle memory. Ever watch someone do bulk data entry on a mouse-less terminal? Once you learn to tab between fields it's extremely efficient. No moving your hands to mouse, locating the mouse pointer, and clicking on the next field. Type field, tab, type field, tab, type field, enter to submit. Conversely, whenever I've seen people use Tog's precious mouse in such interfaces I'm subjected to lots and lots of waiting while they type in a field, grab the mouse, locate the mouse pointer, click the next field, and move back to the keyboard.
The same goes for Ctrl+S. For Joe Random User who doesn't use a given piece of software very often, yes, shortcuts are indeed slower than mouse and menu. But for someware you use heavily and commands you use frequently it's faster. It's faster because Tog's core claim: that you're spending two seconds remembering what shortcut to use, is nonsense. You start thinking "I was to save" and before the thought is fully formed you've mashed Ctrl+S and gone on to the next task. Even with Tog's pet-UI designs like sticking menus at the top of the screen you've got to move to the mouse, slam it to the top, more carefully adjust it left and right to the menu you need, and carefully drag down to the specific item you want. Assuming you commit such a finicky procedure to muscle memory it's not possible to make it as fast.
If you've got good software and spend a lot of time using it, it should eventually become second nature; you move beyond thinking about which command you want for 90% of what you do.
If you can find them, watch someone really skilled at data entry whiz through form submission without a mouse. Check out a programmer really in touch with his editor of choice. I knew a man who knew Visual Studio's interface so well that he flew through it faster than I could have decided which menu I wanted.
I'm in favor of cameras watching public places, so long as they're strictly regulated. Something along the lines of, "Only law enforcement officers can see the video. If the video is recorded the video and all backups must be deleted within 14 days. The only except to the deletion is if the video is being actively used in a crime investigation, and then only the relevant sections of the video may be retained. The video can be used as evidence in criminal cases, but the sections admitted to evidence must be carefully trimmed to the minimal parts possible. Violations are subject to harsh penalties (say, several thousand dollar fine and 18+ months in prison?). "
Why? In short, because I don't want to be justifying my activities out of context five years ago.
The video is going to be recorded; if you're looking for crimes you're going to want to document those crimes. And once it's recorded, it's going end up in the hands of people with other intents. If we don't make a clear stand against it now, some cities are going to think, "well, people have no right to privacy in public anyway, and Bob's Private Investigation is offering us a bucket of money each month for copies, so let's give him a copy." Or the deal might be in the form, "Bob's Surveillence is offering us free cameras, installation, and maintenance. Zero cost, but they keep a copy of everything." If it's illegal, eventually the data will slip out anyway; Bob might bribe an officer, or perhaps the police department's IT guy to make the copies. An officer might decide to access the records himself, maybe to snoop on an ex-lover.
So, the data's out. What's the harm? Today, not much. Scanning lots of video trying to track someone is expensive. Simply transfering that much data is non-trivial. But costs are dropping and the computer technology to automate scanner video is getting better and better. Eventually it will be cost effective to scan that data. It will start out seemingly harmless. A business might pay to get a list of addresses of people who stopped to look at the store's front window display, but didn't enter. Or everyone who entered. Or everyone who shopped at a competitor. Now send these people some coupons to try and win them over.
It's the next few obvious steps that start creating real problems. A small business owner might notice his company's health insurance rates are going up. Pay a video searching company to found out which employees are visiting doctor's offices or pharmacies the most often, then fire them. Or similarly, worried about hiring a female employee for a highly skilled job because she might get pregnant, leaving you without an employee for a window? Surely someone will offer to generate monthly reports on who is visiting infant clothing and supply stores, allowing you to fire such an employee prior to her showing or potentially even being pregnant, making it harder to prove why you fired her. (Of course, thanks to "right to work" laws which are actually "right of employers to fire you" laws, it's extremely difficult to challenge being fired.)
Maybe you're part of a religion that your employer is rabidly against; you might be trapped in the job by a bad job market. Your employer might get it in his head to pay to find out who attempts the local church/temple/synogogue/mosque/shrine to weed out undesirables.
Maybe you're part of a group that is harassed because of you religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or politics. You're in a location where harassment is entirely possible b
Most of the costs for any episodic series would be for the first episode - 3D modeling, bitmapping, fine-tuning the graphics, developing the game engine, and so forth. After that, the rest if just using what tools have already been made available plus additional characters and graphics, possibly some engine tweaks as well.
For mainstream games the bulk of development costs are in the content, not the tech. It's been this way for years. Sure, you've got an engine, the models and textures for the protagonist and a few bad guys, and the models and textures for one episode. Now it's time for episode two and you've got to create new models and textures for a few new bad guys and a new level. Add in that if your episodes don't come out in rapid succession (See: Half-life 2: Episode 2), your game engine, models, and textures will need improvements to continue competing with the state of the art. Later episodes will likely be cheaper, but not majorly so.
Indeed, if the costs of doing episodic content were so frontloaded you wouldn't see developers experimenting with it. Part of the point of episodic content is that from the very start you're doing shorter cycles at reduced budgets.
Plus is gives the company a bit of capital to work with to produce additional episodes.
This is the biggest potential strength of episodic content. Right now too many developers are working paycheck to paycheck and entirely at the mercy of big publishers. Because the big publishers are financially cautious, they're unlikely to fund potentially great but higher risk games; the end result is lots of copycat games, bad movie licenses, and Madden Hawk's Xtreme Snow Basketball 2007. (I'm actually a big fan of MHXSB07, but it's hardly cutting edge game design.) Sure, you can self fund smaller games like Pop Cap, but what if you really want to make a big, expensive game? Episodic content has the possibility of making the first episode cheap enough that a developer can self-fund it, reinvesting the profits into themselves and ultimately escaping dependency on the large publishers. More diversity is good for gamers.
"Supply is low" because of scalpers (who have no intention of actually using the product) waiting on line to grab the PS3s before legitimate buyers can.
Supply is low because Sony can only make them so quickly. I don't buy that more than a few percent of the first PS3 shipment was purchased by scalpers. And so what if the scalper has no intention to use the product? People purchase scarce goods for resale all the time: comic books, stamps, decorative plates, land, stocks. Many people buy these things with no intention of using them; they're hoping to resell later for a profit. Why not electronics?
Do you similarly bemoan a corporation who buys a huge chunk of land on the edge of a growing city with the intent of reselling at a massive profit in a few years when the city grows and demand rises? Are you angry with the people who try to buy a stock the moment it is released with the intent of selling it a few hours later as the price rises?
These scalpers then attempt to generate wealth that they neither earned nor created on eBay-- with no renumeration to the designer, the manufacturer, the supplier, or the retailer.
They "earned" it in the same way someone reselling comics books, or a company's stock did. They invested their money on a risky proposition. It may not have paid off. Furthermore, they earned it by being the first in line, by standing out in the cold all night, by doing research to find out who would have the largest shipments.
As for the the designer and friends? Why should I give a rat's ass? If they wanted more money, they should have set the price higher. They knew demand would be high. Presumably they're satisifed with the money they received, otherwise the price would have been higher.
Scalping isn't an instance of "the free market", it's actually an attempt to profit through interference with the processes of the free market.
Nonsense. If you have scarce resource, some people will try to buy it out as an investment. They're taking a risk. So long as there is competition things should sort themselves out. A single scalper having a sizable percentage of a PS3s in a city would be a problem, but there is no evidence that such things are happening.
Ultimately people complain because it "feels" wrong. Their gut tells them it's wrong for people who genuinely want to own a PS3 to be denied one, or to be charged more than the manufacturer would like. The truthiness says scalping is wrong. Economics says the system is simply striving to be more efficient. If people wanted the PS3s badly enough they could go to the same work that a console scalper does to acquire one. Many people did. Those people who are neither willing to go to the work nor pay a scalper have decided that they don't want a PS3 at the current price point. They'll have to wait for prices to drop as PS3s continue to be produced.
However, no real productive work has been done, it is just people competing by lining up, holding products and then trying to sell them again.
I pay people to do plenty of tasks I'd rather not do personally. Why not pay someone to stand in line for me? Someone is going to stand in line for that scarce commodity, why shouldn't those people be paid to do so?
I find it strangely curious and sad that the holiday season has spawned a new industry of parasites.
Parasites? That's the free market you're badmouthing. Market demand is high, supply is low. Logically the price of the consoles should go up. Because Sony set the price lower than the market will support, it created a market for people willing to trade their time (by standing in line on launch day, repeatedly calling stores looking for returns, etc) in exchange for the difference between Sony's price and the price the market will accept. It's only logical that such an industry would appear. Indeed, this is hardly a new industry; the exact same free market solution appears to compensate for under-priced event tickets in the form of scalping.
One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware. Not so with this new release of Firefox.
Firefox will continue to work just fine on older hardware. But you'll have to upgrade your software. Any machine capable of running Mac OS X 10.2 should be able to upgrade to 10.3. Any machine capable of running WinME should be able to upgrade to Win2K. As for Windows 95 and 98? Antique operating systems that haven't been supported in a long, long time. Of course, if you were also running an open source operating system to take advantage of that older hardware, I'm confident you'd find that newer versions of that OS ran just jolly on your newer hardware.
It's also silly to suggest that support for older hardware is somehow a specific strength for open source software. OSS may tend to be, but there is nothing inherent to OSS that makes that the case. If anything, perhaps there is
We're more than a little beyond "telling people" being productive.
Worse, apparently a proof of concept isn't enough. The TSA is busy trying to presecute the messenger, but they still haven't fixed the core problem. I'd sadly forced to conclude that the TSA will not fix a real threat to airline security until terrorists successfully exploit that threat. While honest people are stuck measuring their shampoo out of fear of a deeply implausible liquid-bomb threat, anyone with access to a printer and a reasonably plausible state ID can get into the "sterile" area of the airport. (I find it darkly humorous that the boarding pass vulnerability makes the cost of getting 30 ounces of liquid explosives onto a plane just 10 fake boarding passes for almost no cost and 10 evil conspirators.)
He crossed the line from researcher to (potentially) criminal when he published a tool on the web that had no other purpose than to make it possible for others to circumvent security.
The purpose was to shame the TAA into fixing a problem which was widely known and publicized:
August 2003 by security expert Bruce Schneier,
February 2005 in Slate,
February 2005 press release by a US Senator, February 2006 article in CSO Online. The TSA has been ignoring the problem for over three years. Bad guys have known about the attack for at least three years, possibly longer. For all we know bad guys are using it right now; we have no way of knowing. Even without Soghoian's program, it was really, really trivial to exploit; all you need is a very basic understanding of HTML, enough to change one name to another, to execute the attack Schneier described in 2003. The media has been letting the TSA continue to ignore this. If Soghoian had simply published a "I can make fake boarding passes and get into the "sterile" area of an airport he would have gotten an article or two and nothing would have changed. By providing a working exploit things just became that much harder for the TSA. News coverage exploded. Finally something will happen.
The TSA has proven itself grossly incompetant. There is little to no oversight and zero public accountability. Drastic measures were necessary, as rational measures have clearly failed. The really sad thing is even in the face of such a drastic failure, they're not fixing the core problem.
That site is bullshit, apparently my wages put me in the top 1% of people on this planet, but I cant afford to buy my own house, i'm constantly juggling money to pay for food and have the bailiffs around to chase on unpaid utility bills. Any simplistic measure of income is absolutely useless without correlating it to the actual cost of living.
So you're making $47,500 or more each year, and you're having problems paying utility bills? Time to rethink your budget. No matter where you live, I promise you there are people working twelve hour days, seven days a week as wait-staff who somehow manage to live on a fraction of that. In all likelyhood the police who patrol your streets, the teachers educating your city's children, your garbagemen, they're all living on less than you.
Maybe things are tight, but I'm betting you live pretty comfortably. Do you have reasonably nice apartment? Do you have the luxury of not having a roommate, or if you do that roommate is your significant other? Do you own a working car or truck? Do you eat out regularly? Do you bother clipping coupons? Do you have a television? Is is larger than 25 inches? Do you pay for a cable or satellite television signal? Do you have a high speed internet connection at home? Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a computer purchased or assembled from new parts in the last 3 years? Do you have health insurance? Obviously you're not going to have all of these, but I'm guessing you have the majority of them.
Yes, you have a higher cost of living. But you also have a much higher standard of living than the majority of people in the world.
To be clear, it's not all in the name of avoiding tables. Perhaps the best reason to avoid tables is accessibility. CSS is designed to degrade well. When you say what you mean in HTML, web browser can do intelligent things in a sub-optimal environment. Is the web browsing machine simply not powerful enough to handle complex layout (say, on a cell phone or a PDA)? Chuck the CSS and get Just the Facts. Is the internet connection painfully slow or charge by the byte? Turn off CSS and maybe image (an option my my Palm's browser) to speed things up and still get the essential information. Deaf and using a screen reader? A more straightforward layout makes things easier to say to the user; tables are reserved for tabular data for which a better interface can be provided ("This is table titled Budget. Columns are titled 2004, 2005, 2006, and Total. Rows are titled Staff, Hardware, Software, and Total.")
Worse, Tivo is violating the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter. The entire point of the GPL was that a user receiving GPL protected software can modify and replace it. You can't do that with a Tivo. Their lockout solution is legal, but pretty clearly flaunts the Free Software Foundation's intent.
What he (and many others) apparently miss is that when you buy a Tivo, you're not buying a general purpose computer: you're buying a DVR.
Maybe they bought a DVR. So what? I bought it, it should be mine to hack on as I want. I can buy a cordless drill and hack on it to convert it into a powered pepper grinder (like Alton Brown did). I can modify my car into a Zamboni-like ice-resurfacer (see "Monster Garage"). I can take the freely offered CueCat and hack it to give me unencrypted data, then use it to catalog my library. I can take my Xbox game system and turn it into a general purpose computer. Check out sources like MAKE magazine for endless lists of people doing cool and completely unexpected things to their own property. If Tivo doesn't want me hacking on my box, they shouldn't sell it to me; they should lend it to me. That you've bought into the idea that you can "own" something, but not be free to use it as you like reinforces how important Stallman's message is.
I mean, God forbid that they prevent users from running them out of business by buying the hardware for far less than it costs Tivo to make it and loading MythTV onto it.
Boo-freaking-hoo. "I gave away razors, now everyone is buying replacement blades from my competitor!" There are solutions that don't require crippling the boxes they sell. Indeed, mobile phone service companies dealt with this problem a long time ago. You can either buy a phone at full price with no commitment, or you buy a discounted phone with a contract. If you get the discounted phone and break the contract early you're liable for the value of the discount, or even more.
Mind you, I own a Tivo. They made a great product, and for now I'm willing to accept their compromise. But it's completely inappropriate to bash Stallman on this. He's simply maintaining a consistant position. He's reinforcing the exact same message he has for the last twenty years. And he's quite reasonably upset that Tivo twisting the intent of the GPL while following the letter of the GPL.
How are content creators supposed to support themselves?
The short answer is, "have faith in the invisible hand."
Copyright was a government granted monopoly in the first place. If one really believes that the free market works it's silly to worry that an artificial market created by government intervention won't be replaced by something more efficient in the absence of that intervention. I have money and want the next Harry Potter novel. Rowling wants money and is capable of writing the next Harry Potter novel. We'll work something out.
In all likelyhood we'll work a whole bunch of different things out for different groups. Patronage. The Street Performer Protocol. Pledge drives. Asking people to be ethical and pay you. Sales of secondary items (t-shirt, etc). Sponsorship deals. Establishing yourself as an expert in an area and selling your expertise. Contract law. High prices for early adopters (before others make copies), then lower prices in line with the knockoffs.
"[hunting] provides funding for programs that preserve wildlife habitats...."
I agree with your core points (most guns are never used against human beings and that hunting has some good points), but I suggest leaving this particular point out in the future. "We can tax it and use the money to do warm fuzzy things" can be applied to just about anything (including, say, property ownership, professional sports, porn, gambling, prostitution, marijuana, or heroin). It's such a broad argument that it really doesn't help the gun argument in the slightest.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm open minded to the idea of government regulation in this sort of area. However, I'm against hamfisted solutions like simply banning/taxing incandescent, or giving a credit to compact flourescent. Instead drive at the source: penalize lighting fixtures who are less efficient than X. The article claims that incandescent bulbs only convert 5% of the energy they consume into light. Assuming that's accurate, say something like, "any lighting fixture/bulb/whatever that converts less than 10% of the input energy into light is gets a tax penalty." This means that if someone somehow invents a super efficient incandescent bulb, it will correctly get the same benefits that CF bulbs do. Conversely, a company can't make really cheap but grossly inefficient CF bulbs and avoid the penalty. Even better, if you make it a sliding scale, it will continue to encourage increasingly efficient bulbs.
(This is similar to the stupid tax credits for hybrid cars that leads to insanity like a hybrid SUV that gets 27/32 MPG gets a tax break while the traditional gas engine compact car that gets 32/43 doesn't. Don't reward the technology, reward results.)
The best things Gen Con provides can't be replicated online. You can't play a LARP online. You can play some boardgames online, but you can't have hundreds of different board games, card games, wargames, and role-playing games demonstrated for you. To the extent you can, the demonstrations are less effective for the lack of a direct person-to-person connection. Gen Con provides an opportunity to play role-playing games you've never played. It provides an opportunity to play RPGs you normally do, but with exposure to new players and GMs you broaden your horizons. You can't do crazy things like the Gamer Olympics or True Dungeon over the internet. Sure, you can play some wargames online, but the online experience can't replicate physically moving figures across an elaborately built board.
Incorrect.
Check section 512 yourself. (Direct link to section 512 that might work.)
There are two key parts: c.1.A.iii: The service provider "upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;". The legal content must be taken down "expeditiously." No window of opportunity is allowed in which to contact the person who posted it. Then g.2.B and C: "upon receipt of a counter notification described in paragraph [the service provider] ... replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice."
Anyone willing to tell a lie can silence your online speech for ten days.
There is no trial, not even a judge's review. Even if your ISP wanted to, they can't put the content up faster than than ten day (at least, not without losing the safe harbor provisions). That's assuming you promptly file the counter notification. You can bring charges that the third party lied, but it's hard to prove when they claim "Oops, I guess we were wrong." Ten days might not seem like much, but it might get a company past an initial news rush. A number of companies have used the ten day window to illegally silence leaks of sale prices on "Black Friday" until the day had passed.
The take down notice system is, at its core, a good idea. I've even filed take down requests. However, it is not a good balance. It amounts to suppression of speech. If you're going to supress speech, you need a much higher standard than some random person's claims. The reason you can be silenced for 10 days is to give the original claimant time to file an infringement suit against you. Why does the claimant get such a window, but the person whose speech is being suppressed doesn't? A more fair balance would be that upon receipt of notification, a sevice provider needs to make a reasonable effort to contact the poster. If the poster fails to provide counter-notice within ten days, then the content gets yanked.
The way the industry works now, almost no developer can afford to self-fund a "full-size" game. For most of those who can, it's an all-or-nothing bet; if the game tanks (And many great games regrettably do), the developer goes out of business. So for the overwhelming majority of developers, to do a full game it means getting a publisher to fund development. Publishers are understandably cautious about funding more risky (but potentially great) games. As a result you tend to see lots of knock offs, sequels, and crappy movie licenses. Innovation is stifled. Add on that most developers exist only so long as they keep getting publishers to fund them.
One way to escape this is to simply develop smaller games. That's great if you like that sort of game, but not so good if you really want to develop a sprawling RPG, a large FPS, just about any adventure game, or something similar.
Episodic content is potentially a way forward. These days the overwhelming expense in a large game is the content, not the programming. A first episode that represents, say, 20% of a game may only need 40% of the content. (Even better, episode two probably only needs 15% more content to generate the next 20% of the game, assuming you're releasing episodes quickly enough that you don't need to update your engine or art.) It's a much lower risk. More developers can afford to self-fund in this model. More risky ideas can be tried. I'm quite confident that Bone and Sam & Max weren't going to be funded by a major publisher as full games. As the developer typically self-publishes, if the game is a success the developer can bank it to support future development, possibly even more traditional big-single-release games.
Episodic content is problematic. As a customer you're left hanging mid-story. (Did we say you'd be playing Episode Two within six months of episode one? Did you purchase Episode One on that basis? Hope you don't mind waiting six more.) If the developer goes bankrupt or cancels an unprofitable line you may never see the conclusion. (Sucks to be you, Sin Episodes fans. Of course, you can suffer that even in "full" game releases.) While episodic content is almost exclusively sold online, reducing overhead and costs, you pay what overhead there is once per episode, driving costs up. I'm not a fan of episodic content for these reasons. But I believe at least some developers are embracing episodic content as a way to escape extremely cautious publishers.
You left out option three: actually understand the issues involved and stop trying to play "gotcha."
DJ Dangermouse may reuse other people's work in his own creations, but he credits his sources.
If the above is to be believed, Timbaland reused someone else's creations, but didn't credit his source. That's low. Really low. If it's true, Timbaland deserves the scorn he's getting.
DRM is fundamentally incompatible with fair use.
You might as well be asking if we're opposed to perpetual motion machines, or lossless compression algorithms that compress all possible inputs on principled or practical concerns. DRM that allows all fair use is equally nonsensical.
It is not possible to design a DRM system that prevents illegal activities while allowing all possible legal activities. No DRM system can tell if a copy is being made for a legal reason or an illegal reason. Every freedom you add to allow more fair use simultaneously makes it easier to make illegal copies. If you allow all fair use then making illegal copies will be easy.
Say I have a media player that only plays media in formats that don't support DRM. Maybe it's a lossless format. Maybe it's the same format you provide DRMed content in, but without the DRM wrapper. You can either block this fair use, or you let me make copies that I can then use to make further copies for infringing uses.
A more complex situation is free software in general. I want to to engage in fair use and play back content I've purchased using an entirely free software operating system and player. I can modify any of those layers to make an infringing copy. Or you can not allow free software players.
So to answer the impossible hypothetical question: assuming you've invented some magical, pixie dust filled, DRM system, sure, I'm all in favor of it. While you're offering the impossible, I'd really like a perpetual motion machine and a lossless compression algorithm that worked on all possible input.
The entire point of the GPL is that hackers can modify and replace GPLed software. Tivo's hardware refuses to run modified Linux kernels, ignoring the intent of the the license they agreed to. It may be legal, but it's not morally right, and it certainly is the opposite of "embracing the hacker community." That same community that gave them the operating system they built upon. It's an insult.
Check the article again, "The judges chose the photo taken during the fertile phases 60 per cent of the time."
The judges picked the fertile phase photo 60% of the time, when random chance would suggest 50%. This is an 20% more than random chance would predict. Significant, but not quite as amazing as a 60% difference that the summary erroneously suggests.
That's a serious misinterpretation of the intent. Let's take a look at the full fair use guidelines:
They're general areas to be considered, not simple binary tests to be applied. Note that the four are to be considered together as factors, not as a series of independent cases. Also note that it doesn't reference the fair-use-claimant's intent.
Your reading of guideline 4 is completely wrong. With a reading of "if the guideline is relevant then it's not fair use", how do you interpret guideline 1? It's not fair use for commercial or nonprofit educational use? I guess fair use only exists for for-profit educational use. How about guideline 2? No fair use of nature photography? No fair use ever because every copyright protected work has some sort of nature?
Ultimately by your reading of guideline 4 there is no fair use for reviewers ever. The entire purpose of a review is to impact a product or service's market value. That's obvious nonsense in light of the law specifically says that fair use exists for, "criticism, comment, news reporting".
So to be clear: the plaintiff has no legal basis for his case. You're representing yourself, and doing just fine. You've won every case so far and can reasonably expect to win all the appeals.
What exactly do you need the EFF and Slashdot for? You've apparently got things well under control. Your site remains up and running. No injunction has been put into place against you. You appear to have a slam dunk case against one of the regrettably large number of frivolous lawsuits currently active. Have you considered that you "have received no support from communities like Slashdot, or the EFF" not "because of my typical conservative political affiliation" but because your case isn't really all that noteworthy (Slashdot, whose views on noteworthiness are rather random) or critical to general freedom (EFF)?
As for the duress and stress, yeah, it sucks. I sympathize and hope things finish up quickly in your favor. But it cost you your local reputation? How so? Do you live in some place were people have an unusual interest in petty lawsuits? And even if they do, how would standing up for free speech harm your reputation?
The porn isn't all going onto .xxx; nor should it. The idea that .xxx should exist to make it easier to filter is ridiculous. Do we have .museum and .pro so I can more easily protect my kids from museums and professionals? Nonsense. Many museums and professionals are in .com, .net, and elsewhere. The exact same thing will happen for .xxx. .xxx won't ghettoize the porn, it will just give it a neighborhood to live in for those companies that chose to. The only way .xxx will be useful for filtering if it's illegal to put porn anywhere but in .xxx. But then, what's porn? Photographs of naked people? Photographs of topless women? Shall it henceforce be nationalgeographic.xxx? Perhaps photographs of women showing anything other than their eyes; that's considered sexual in some cultures. How about lingerie photographs? Will it become victoriassecret.xxx? Ultimately you can't draw the line in a useful way. The line will be too strict, in which case it violates the First Amendment in a way no one can ignore. Or the line will be too loose, and while people may ignore the First Amendment issues, those who want to ghettoize porn will be frustrated that things they consider porn aren't regulated.
Let's leave .xxx to the same situation .museum, .aero, .pro, and the like are in: it's branding, new names, and marginally useful tool for locating things you want. As a filtering tool it's basically useless.
On the subject of ghettoizing it:
So, the domain rules make it illegal to... do things that are already illegal. How useful. Well, maybe it makes it easier to "prosecute" since you can cancel the domain registration more easily than getting a criminal conviction. Thank God there isn't anywhere else people can put up child porn and fraud. Well, except .net, .com, .org, .tv, .cx, and dozens more. Useless, useless regulations. Clue to those reponsible: the bad guys are already on the net. Perversely you're trying to make .xxx safer than the rest of the net. Seems a bit odd.
Tog's research is only part of the answer. When he's not sharing his insane conspiracy theories about traffic engineers, Tog tends to ignore parts of the problem that are inconvienent to his theories. In particular he tends to ignore expert users. If you're doing the same thing over and over again it ceases to be aboue spending "two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press," it's muscle memory. Ever watch someone do bulk data entry on a mouse-less terminal? Once you learn to tab between fields it's extremely efficient. No moving your hands to mouse, locating the mouse pointer, and clicking on the next field. Type field, tab, type field, tab, type field, enter to submit. Conversely, whenever I've seen people use Tog's precious mouse in such interfaces I'm subjected to lots and lots of waiting while they type in a field, grab the mouse, locate the mouse pointer, click the next field, and move back to the keyboard.
The same goes for Ctrl+S. For Joe Random User who doesn't use a given piece of software very often, yes, shortcuts are indeed slower than mouse and menu. But for someware you use heavily and commands you use frequently it's faster. It's faster because Tog's core claim: that you're spending two seconds remembering what shortcut to use, is nonsense. You start thinking "I was to save" and before the thought is fully formed you've mashed Ctrl+S and gone on to the next task. Even with Tog's pet-UI designs like sticking menus at the top of the screen you've got to move to the mouse, slam it to the top, more carefully adjust it left and right to the menu you need, and carefully drag down to the specific item you want. Assuming you commit such a finicky procedure to muscle memory it's not possible to make it as fast.
If you've got good software and spend a lot of time using it, it should eventually become second nature; you move beyond thinking about which command you want for 90% of what you do.
If you can find them, watch someone really skilled at data entry whiz through form submission without a mouse. Check out a programmer really in touch with his editor of choice. I knew a man who knew Visual Studio's interface so well that he flew through it faster than I could have decided which menu I wanted.
I'm in favor of cameras watching public places, so long as they're strictly regulated. Something along the lines of, "Only law enforcement officers can see the video. If the video is recorded the video and all backups must be deleted within 14 days. The only except to the deletion is if the video is being actively used in a crime investigation, and then only the relevant sections of the video may be retained. The video can be used as evidence in criminal cases, but the sections admitted to evidence must be carefully trimmed to the minimal parts possible. Violations are subject to harsh penalties (say, several thousand dollar fine and 18+ months in prison?). "
Why? In short, because I don't want to be justifying my activities out of context five years ago.
The video is going to be recorded; if you're looking for crimes you're going to want to document those crimes. And once it's recorded, it's going end up in the hands of people with other intents. If we don't make a clear stand against it now, some cities are going to think, "well, people have no right to privacy in public anyway, and Bob's Private Investigation is offering us a bucket of money each month for copies, so let's give him a copy." Or the deal might be in the form, "Bob's Surveillence is offering us free cameras, installation, and maintenance. Zero cost, but they keep a copy of everything." If it's illegal, eventually the data will slip out anyway; Bob might bribe an officer, or perhaps the police department's IT guy to make the copies. An officer might decide to access the records himself, maybe to snoop on an ex-lover.
Sound impossible? Law enforcement has been caught doing exactly that. Here a Canadian cop tried to frame a journalist critical of the police. Or this collection of gems, including an officer who helped a man stalk his ex-girlfriend and an FBI agent who sold data to the mob.
So, the data's out. What's the harm? Today, not much. Scanning lots of video trying to track someone is expensive. Simply transfering that much data is non-trivial. But costs are dropping and the computer technology to automate scanner video is getting better and better. Eventually it will be cost effective to scan that data. It will start out seemingly harmless. A business might pay to get a list of addresses of people who stopped to look at the store's front window display, but didn't enter. Or everyone who entered. Or everyone who shopped at a competitor. Now send these people some coupons to try and win them over.
It's the next few obvious steps that start creating real problems. A small business owner might notice his company's health insurance rates are going up. Pay a video searching company to found out which employees are visiting doctor's offices or pharmacies the most often, then fire them. Or similarly, worried about hiring a female employee for a highly skilled job because she might get pregnant, leaving you without an employee for a window? Surely someone will offer to generate monthly reports on who is visiting infant clothing and supply stores, allowing you to fire such an employee prior to her showing or potentially even being pregnant, making it harder to prove why you fired her. (Of course, thanks to "right to work" laws which are actually "right of employers to fire you" laws, it's extremely difficult to challenge being fired.)
Maybe you're part of a religion that your employer is rabidly against; you might be trapped in the job by a bad job market. Your employer might get it in his head to pay to find out who attempts the local church/temple/synogogue/mosque/shrine to weed out undesirables.
Maybe you're part of a group that is harassed because of you religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or politics. You're in a location where harassment is entirely possible b
For mainstream games the bulk of development costs are in the content, not the tech. It's been this way for years. Sure, you've got an engine, the models and textures for the protagonist and a few bad guys, and the models and textures for one episode. Now it's time for episode two and you've got to create new models and textures for a few new bad guys and a new level. Add in that if your episodes don't come out in rapid succession (See: Half-life 2: Episode 2), your game engine, models, and textures will need improvements to continue competing with the state of the art. Later episodes will likely be cheaper, but not majorly so.
Indeed, if the costs of doing episodic content were so frontloaded you wouldn't see developers experimenting with it. Part of the point of episodic content is that from the very start you're doing shorter cycles at reduced budgets.
This is the biggest potential strength of episodic content. Right now too many developers are working paycheck to paycheck and entirely at the mercy of big publishers. Because the big publishers are financially cautious, they're unlikely to fund potentially great but higher risk games; the end result is lots of copycat games, bad movie licenses, and Madden Hawk's Xtreme Snow Basketball 2007. (I'm actually a big fan of MHXSB07, but it's hardly cutting edge game design.) Sure, you can self fund smaller games like Pop Cap, but what if you really want to make a big, expensive game? Episodic content has the possibility of making the first episode cheap enough that a developer can self-fund it, reinvesting the profits into themselves and ultimately escaping dependency on the large publishers. More diversity is good for gamers.
Supply is low because Sony can only make them so quickly. I don't buy that more than a few percent of the first PS3 shipment was purchased by scalpers. And so what if the scalper has no intention to use the product? People purchase scarce goods for resale all the time: comic books, stamps, decorative plates, land, stocks. Many people buy these things with no intention of using them; they're hoping to resell later for a profit. Why not electronics?
Do you similarly bemoan a corporation who buys a huge chunk of land on the edge of a growing city with the intent of reselling at a massive profit in a few years when the city grows and demand rises? Are you angry with the people who try to buy a stock the moment it is released with the intent of selling it a few hours later as the price rises?
They "earned" it in the same way someone reselling comics books, or a company's stock did. They invested their money on a risky proposition. It may not have paid off. Furthermore, they earned it by being the first in line, by standing out in the cold all night, by doing research to find out who would have the largest shipments.
As for the the designer and friends? Why should I give a rat's ass? If they wanted more money, they should have set the price higher. They knew demand would be high. Presumably they're satisifed with the money they received, otherwise the price would have been higher.
Nonsense. If you have scarce resource, some people will try to buy it out as an investment. They're taking a risk. So long as there is competition things should sort themselves out. A single scalper having a sizable percentage of a PS3s in a city would be a problem, but there is no evidence that such things are happening.
Ultimately people complain because it "feels" wrong. Their gut tells them it's wrong for people who genuinely want to own a PS3 to be denied one, or to be charged more than the manufacturer would like. The truthiness says scalping is wrong. Economics says the system is simply striving to be more efficient. If people wanted the PS3s badly enough they could go to the same work that a console scalper does to acquire one. Many people did. Those people who are neither willing to go to the work nor pay a scalper have decided that they don't want a PS3 at the current price point. They'll have to wait for prices to drop as PS3s continue to be produced.
I pay people to do plenty of tasks I'd rather not do personally. Why not pay someone to stand in line for me? Someone is going to stand in line for that scarce commodity, why shouldn't those people be paid to do so?
Parasites? That's the free market you're badmouthing. Market demand is high, supply is low. Logically the price of the consoles should go up. Because Sony set the price lower than the market will support, it created a market for people willing to trade their time (by standing in line on launch day, repeatedly calling stores looking for returns, etc) in exchange for the difference between Sony's price and the price the market will accept. It's only logical that such an industry would appear. Indeed, this is hardly a new industry; the exact same free market solution appears to compensate for under-priced event tickets in the form of scalping.
Firefox will continue to work just fine on older hardware. But you'll have to upgrade your software. Any machine capable of running Mac OS X 10.2 should be able to upgrade to 10.3. Any machine capable of running WinME should be able to upgrade to Win2K. As for Windows 95 and 98? Antique operating systems that haven't been supported in a long, long time. Of course, if you were also running an open source operating system to take advantage of that older hardware, I'm confident you'd find that newer versions of that OS ran just jolly on your newer hardware.
It's also silly to suggest that support for older hardware is somehow a specific strength for open source software. OSS may tend to be, but there is nothing inherent to OSS that makes that the case. If anything, perhaps there is
CSO Online told people about it in February 2006. Slate told people about it in February 2005. Senator Schumer told people about it in February 2005. Security expert Bruce Schneier told people about it in August 2003.
We're more than a little beyond "telling people" being productive.
Worse, apparently a proof of concept isn't enough. The TSA is busy trying to presecute the messenger, but they still haven't fixed the core problem. I'd sadly forced to conclude that the TSA will not fix a real threat to airline security until terrorists successfully exploit that threat. While honest people are stuck measuring their shampoo out of fear of a deeply implausible liquid-bomb threat, anyone with access to a printer and a reasonably plausible state ID can get into the "sterile" area of the airport. (I find it darkly humorous that the boarding pass vulnerability makes the cost of getting 30 ounces of liquid explosives onto a plane just 10 fake boarding passes for almost no cost and 10 evil conspirators.)
The purpose was to shame the TAA into fixing a problem which was widely known and publicized: August 2003 by security expert Bruce Schneier, February 2005 in Slate , February 2005 press release by a US Senator, February 2006 article in CSO Online . The TSA has been ignoring the problem for over three years. Bad guys have known about the attack for at least three years, possibly longer. For all we know bad guys are using it right now; we have no way of knowing. Even without Soghoian's program, it was really, really trivial to exploit; all you need is a very basic understanding of HTML, enough to change one name to another, to execute the attack Schneier described in 2003. The media has been letting the TSA continue to ignore this. If Soghoian had simply published a "I can make fake boarding passes and get into the "sterile" area of an airport he would have gotten an article or two and nothing would have changed. By providing a working exploit things just became that much harder for the TSA. News coverage exploded. Finally something will happen.
The TSA has proven itself grossly incompetant. There is little to no oversight and zero public accountability. Drastic measures were necessary, as rational measures have clearly failed. The really sad thing is even in the face of such a drastic failure, they're not fixing the core problem.
So you're making $47,500 or more each year, and you're having problems paying utility bills? Time to rethink your budget. No matter where you live, I promise you there are people working twelve hour days, seven days a week as wait-staff who somehow manage to live on a fraction of that. In all likelyhood the police who patrol your streets, the teachers educating your city's children, your garbagemen, they're all living on less than you.
Maybe things are tight, but I'm betting you live pretty comfortably. Do you have reasonably nice apartment? Do you have the luxury of not having a roommate, or if you do that roommate is your significant other? Do you own a working car or truck? Do you eat out regularly? Do you bother clipping coupons? Do you have a television? Is is larger than 25 inches? Do you pay for a cable or satellite television signal? Do you have a high speed internet connection at home? Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a computer purchased or assembled from new parts in the last 3 years? Do you have health insurance? Obviously you're not going to have all of these, but I'm guessing you have the majority of them.
Yes, you have a higher cost of living. But you also have a much higher standard of living than the majority of people in the world.
To be clear, it's not all in the name of avoiding tables. Perhaps the best reason to avoid tables is accessibility. CSS is designed to degrade well. When you say what you mean in HTML, web browser can do intelligent things in a sub-optimal environment. Is the web browsing machine simply not powerful enough to handle complex layout (say, on a cell phone or a PDA)? Chuck the CSS and get Just the Facts. Is the internet connection painfully slow or charge by the byte? Turn off CSS and maybe image (an option my my Palm's browser) to speed things up and still get the essential information. Deaf and using a screen reader? A more straightforward layout makes things easier to say to the user; tables are reserved for tabular data for which a better interface can be provided ("This is table titled Budget. Columns are titled 2004, 2005, 2006, and Total. Rows are titled Staff, Hardware, Software, and Total.")
You do know that the Free Software Foundation was founded specifically to fight this sort of behavior, right? Stallman was denied access to the source necessary to use his printer to the fullest extent. Tivo is doing the exact same thing.
Worse, Tivo is violating the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter. The entire point of the GPL was that a user receiving GPL protected software can modify and replace it. You can't do that with a Tivo. Their lockout solution is legal, but pretty clearly flaunts the Free Software Foundation's intent.
Maybe they bought a DVR. So what? I bought it, it should be mine to hack on as I want. I can buy a cordless drill and hack on it to convert it into a powered pepper grinder (like Alton Brown did). I can modify my car into a Zamboni-like ice-resurfacer (see "Monster Garage"). I can take the freely offered CueCat and hack it to give me unencrypted data, then use it to catalog my library. I can take my Xbox game system and turn it into a general purpose computer. Check out sources like MAKE magazine for endless lists of people doing cool and completely unexpected things to their own property. If Tivo doesn't want me hacking on my box, they shouldn't sell it to me; they should lend it to me. That you've bought into the idea that you can "own" something, but not be free to use it as you like reinforces how important Stallman's message is.
Boo-freaking-hoo. "I gave away razors, now everyone is buying replacement blades from my competitor!" There are solutions that don't require crippling the boxes they sell. Indeed, mobile phone service companies dealt with this problem a long time ago. You can either buy a phone at full price with no commitment, or you buy a discounted phone with a contract. If you get the discounted phone and break the contract early you're liable for the value of the discount, or even more.
Mind you, I own a Tivo. They made a great product, and for now I'm willing to accept their compromise. But it's completely inappropriate to bash Stallman on this. He's simply maintaining a consistant position. He's reinforcing the exact same message he has for the last twenty years. And he's quite reasonably upset that Tivo twisting the intent of the GPL while following the letter of the GPL.
The short answer is, "have faith in the invisible hand."
Copyright was a government granted monopoly in the first place. If one really believes that the free market works it's silly to worry that an artificial market created by government intervention won't be replaced by something more efficient in the absence of that intervention. I have money and want the next Harry Potter novel. Rowling wants money and is capable of writing the next Harry Potter novel. We'll work something out.
In all likelyhood we'll work a whole bunch of different things out for different groups. Patronage. The Street Performer Protocol. Pledge drives. Asking people to be ethical and pay you. Sales of secondary items (t-shirt, etc). Sponsorship deals. Establishing yourself as an expert in an area and selling your expertise. Contract law. High prices for early adopters (before others make copies), then lower prices in line with the knockoffs.
I agree with your core points (most guns are never used against human beings and that hunting has some good points), but I suggest leaving this particular point out in the future. "We can tax it and use the money to do warm fuzzy things" can be applied to just about anything (including, say, property ownership, professional sports, porn, gambling, prostitution, marijuana, or heroin). It's such a broad argument that it really doesn't help the gun argument in the slightest.