There is no right in the copyright law to make backup copies
That's an interesting argument until someone actually thinks about it. Congress's job is making laws. There was no law that made it illegal to break copy protection schemes until Congress created one (a bad law in my opinion).
Laws should be created to encode things that the society wants. Too often they are created to benefit a special interest to the detriment of society.
In this case, even if no current law permits making a backup copy of information that is still controlled by copyright, there should be, and I think that our society would agree, and so Congress should create a law or amend a law to that effect. Whether they will or not is a different story.
I might be ok with paying for a copy of the program to be delivered to my home (perhaps via cable), but there is no way I want to pay per view!
What I mean is that I expect to be able to record that program for viewing at another time and/or place.
It is unlikely that every program ever produced will always be available, and even if it would it is likely that prices would rise for certain items in the future. If I decide that I like a particular program enough to be willing to expend the effort to record and save it, I want that capability. I do not feel that copyright gives permission to remove that capability (I know others feel differently), and I will not support a system that does.
Hmm, that's interesting because it's OO's style approach that keeps making me return to Word.
Now I agree that Word really does seem to let people ignore using styles, but when I tried OO it didn't seem any better, and for me it was much worse, because I like to use styles when I write my documents.
In Word, I use Normal view, not page layout view (which I find incredibly annoying, who needs to see the white space borders around your text representing the paper?!), and I have the style area showing (usually at about.5-.7inch). This allows me to quickly scan though a document and see which paragraphs have the wrong style applied.
I do this frequently when working on someone else's document when they didn't use styles, or on my own, when I initially write stuff and more structure becomes clear after I've composed more of the document, so I need to go back and apply new styles to stuff I've already written.
If OO would only offer these 2 features (a normal mode with line breaks showing as a dotted line instead of 2 or more screen inches of whitespace, and a style area or some equivalent method to see the styles applied to all the visible paragraphs simultaneously), I think I would switch.
Mike
Re:Cost of Choice: Social Pressure, Societal Scale
on
The Paradox of Choice
·
· Score: 1
Excessive options and excessive information on each option drive up the cost of choice.
Actually I think that the problem is that there are a lot of options and the information on each option is difficult and time consuming to get, not that there is too much information.
For example, I would like to get an HDTV.
Well the current technologies used to make HDTV sets (which removes front projection from the equation) are:
Direct view Plasma
Direct view CRT
Direct view LCD
Rear projection CRT
Rear projection LCD
Rear projection DLP
Rear projection LCoS
Now you have to figure out how all of these technologies compare. It's likely that you will be able to quickly eliminate a couple of them because they don't match your criteria (say price or size). But it takes a lot of digging to find the information that would let you distiguish between your remaining choices. If this unbiased information was easier to come by, it would be easier to make a maximizer decision.
Interestingly enough there are now restaurant like this, and they seem to be doing quite well (I think one around here is called Fire and Ice).
Basically they have all the raw ingredients, meats, vegetable, sauces out for you to select exactly what you want, and in what proportions, put it in a bowl and give it to the "chef" who cooks it up and gives it back to you to eat.
It seems like a particularly expensive way to experiment with recipes to me.
I like the idea of only paying for the channels I want also, although it does seem like it could easily be abused.
I'd really like to know the current actual costs to the cable company for each of the channels they carry. Actually I only really care about the relative costs. I expect that the sports channels cost multiple times the other channels.
So a reasonable charge for a channel (not that I think the cable companies would be reasonable, but lets blue-sky for a sec) would be some base charge of say $1, plus the licencing fee the channel charges with say 10% extra tacked on for the cable company.
For the less popular channels, say those subscribed to by less than 10% of the cable companies customers, the base charge could be doubled to $2, giving the cable company a reason to keep it around until its subscriber base gets really small. This concept could continue, (ie raising the base cost kept by the cable company at 5% and 1% for example) until no-one wants the channel or the channel goes out of business.
I'd guess this would make the really popular channels $1.50 - $2.00, except those high fee sports channels which would probably be around $5-$6, and the less popular channels would be around $3.
I'd probably be willing to pay $2-$3 for a channel that I only occasionally watch while channel surfing, and I'd probably drop it if the price for it went past that. But on the other hand, I'd be willing to pay $5-$6 for the channels I watch all the time.
Actually I don't even think all of those other methods of cheating are actually cheating.
Some other obvious cheating examples:
Bringing in cameras and linking them so a player can see his opponent's cards.
Using a device to let you predict/influence the roll of the dice.
Hacking a slot machine to produce winning pulls
Cheating involves breaking the rules of the game.
The 1st example is cheating because you the rules specifically forbid you from circumventing your opponents ability to prevent you from seeing his cards.
The 2nd example is both cheating and not cheating. A device that influences the roll of the dice is cheating, a device that helps you predict the roll of the dice is not.
The 3rd example is also clearly cheating because hacking a slot machine is clearly changing the rules of the game. However having a device that could let you know if a slot machine was close to paying off would not be cheating.
IANAL, but I don't think that's right. Neither copyright, nor patent applies to an idea. Even if I were the 1st person to come up with it, I couldn't get a copyright or a patent on the idea that a series of sums could be represented by a single multiplication.
(2+2+2+2+2) == 5*2
I don't even think I could copyright or patent my notation of this idea, although I'm not sure about that.
Patents cover techniques, or algorithms, ie by following these steps you can create a device that holds multiple pieces of paper together (a paperclip), or a device that separates the cotton seeds from the cotton fiber (a cotton gin). Personally I think we'd be better off if only physical algorithms were covered, since I think getting a patent on checking the denominator of a division for 0 before performing the division operation in a computer program is bogus.
Copyrights cover particular expressions (or implementations if you will) of ideas, although that definition has been getting broader over time too. So I can write a story about a meteor hitting the earth (the idea) and someone else can also write a story using the same idea, and my copyright on my story does not give me any rights to that other person's story.
Jake 2.0 and Enterprise are the only 2 shows I watch on UPN now that Buffy is gone. And because of their timeslot I had to go to special effort to watch them, recording them on a 2nd VCR, since I'm never home at that time, and I also watch Smallvill and Angel.
I've even considered setting up a 3rd VCR for that night.
SCO isn't asserting that their code is in AIX, they're saying that it's in Linux. So to support that assertion, why should they have to see AIX?
Now if they were saying that they suspected that their code was in AIX in violation of their copyright, then it would make sense for them to ask to see the source for AIX.
To show that their code is in Linux, it would seen that they say, look, here's our code, and here's code in Linux that's identical. That's a problem. And then they could follow that up by saying, this code in Linux, that we own the copyright to, was submitted to Linux by IBM employees, therefore IBM is responsible for violating our copyright (and possibly for breaking our contract).
No. They claim that IBM misappropriated SCO code that was in AIX by donating it to Linux.
But if SCO code was copied to AIX and then copied to Linux, why would SCO care or need to see that intermediate AIX copy? Shouldn't they have a copy of everything that they say they own the copyright to?
Hmm, well if what you're saying really works, and auto-update can really be turned off permanently I may give it another try, although I'm still very leery about what it says in the EULA (see previous post).
I replied to a previous message that I had canceled installation of real media twice in the last year but I couldn't remember the reasons I had. You've just highlighted all of my reasons. Pretty much any one of those items would cause me to not install the software, with all of them I couldn't cancel the install fast enough!
I've canceled my install of Real twice in the last year. I don't remember right now what it was that made me decide that the benefit of installing (watching the real media that I had received) was not worth installing that software on my computer, but it says something that I've downloaded it twice and started the install twice, and both times decided against installing it. I may have installed it the 1st time and then immediately un-installed it, probably when I found I couldn't disable auto-update.
Well thanks for that, saves me the trouble of downloading the new version only to have to uninstall it.
But I'd be willing to go through that whole rigamarole if I could end up with an application that would play real media formats and NEVER attempted to access the Internet for ANYTHING without my requesting it to. This means NO updates, NO codec downloads, NO media info lookups.
And NO means NO. If I turn off auto-update, it doesn't mean turn it back on in 30 days, it means I don't want it to do auto anything!, ever.
I also don't need to have it load on start-up, and I wish the install would have an option to get that whatever out of my system tray, rather than my having to hunt it down and disable it.
Thanks, that's interesting. I don't know enough to make really intelligent comments, but it would seem to me that the materials (dye's or what not) used to make the different types of disc's would have different durability properties.
But ignoring the supposed better compatibility of DVD-R, I have your vote that DVD+R is better all around. That's more info than I had before.
Given what we've recently learned about CD & DVD longevity, (it's not as long as we thought, there was also a/. article not that long ago), I think the durability/longevity of these recordable disc's is very important to know.
Given the numbers of both types of drives and the fact that more and more drives are supported both formats, I don't expect either to go away any time soon.
So the question in my mind is, what are the technological differences between the 2 formats?
Will one have a longer lifetime than the other?
Is one more durable (in adverse conditions such as heat/cold) or scratch resistant than the other.
Given a drive that can burn both, are there applications that are better suited to one format than the other
For data the rewritable DVD-RAM format is supposed to be best although it is not all that widely supported
That may be true for the bandwidth on the backbones, however IIRC the way that a cable modem works, the down channel is way bigger than the up channel. Remember that cable was originally ONLY one direction.
Someone who is more familiar with the actual technical details please elucidate, or explain how I'm wrong.
Ah, but you just gave me permission to use it. So none of the other arguments mean anything. My whole point all along has been that using something that doesn't belong to you without permission is wrong and in most jurisdictions will be considered a crime.
Hmm, I don't agree. Ignoring the ownership of ideas question (which I have real problems with), I think another analogy to the use of the wireless internet connection would be: Your neighbor waters their lawn, and their sprinkler sprays your property. You collect that water and use it to water your own garden thereby reducing your water bill. So you're using their "property" but I hardly think it is in any way wrong.
Similarly, I have no problem with someone with a satellite dish getting a device that lets them see encrypted programs broadcast from satellites. On the other hand, I do have a problem with someone illicitly tapping into cable.
I like my mmorpg as much as most, but there's much more effort involved than with what you call push-entertainment.
There are plenty of times I just want to lie back and have someone tell me a story. I don't want any other person involved that I would have to comunicate with, and I don't want to make decisions about the story (ie walk to the left vs. walk to the right).
Those are 2 very different forms of entertainment and they both have their place.
Glad to actually hear other people saying exactly what I've been saying.
A much higher percentage than 75% of the TV I watch is time-shifted, and I watch way more TV than I should.
I haven't bothered getting an HDTV yet because it wouldn't do me much good. And if this broadcast flag and encryption happens, it will cut way down on my TV viewing.
This is not to mention those days that I am taping 3 shows at the same time. Or those shows I tape for someone else because they realized that they missed that episode for whatever reason.
Slashdot Mirror
ctrl-ins (copy), shift-ins (paste) and shift-del (cut) only need one hand (your right) to press on a normal keyboard.
And it's way easier to use them with my right hand when my left hand is on the mouse!
It is very aggravating when I have to use some application that doesn't support those keystrokes.
Mike
That's an interesting argument until someone actually thinks about it. Congress's job is making laws. There was no law that made it illegal to break copy protection schemes until Congress created one (a bad law in my opinion).
Laws should be created to encode things that the society wants. Too often they are created to benefit a special interest to the detriment of society.
In this case, even if no current law permits making a backup copy of information that is still controlled by copyright, there should be, and I think that our society would agree, and so Congress should create a law or amend a law to that effect. Whether they will or not is a different story.
Mike
I might be ok with paying for a copy of the program to be delivered to my home (perhaps via cable), but there is no way I want to pay per view!
What I mean is that I expect to be able to record that program for viewing at another time and/or place.
It is unlikely that every program ever produced will always be available, and even if it would it is likely that prices would rise for certain items in the future. If I decide that I like a particular program enough to be willing to expend the effort to record and save it, I want that capability. I do not feel that copyright gives permission to remove that capability (I know others feel differently), and I will not support a system that does.
Hmm, nice review, you should add it to the Suse reviews at the LinuxQuestions.org wiki.
Hmm, that's interesting because it's OO's style approach that keeps making me return to Word.
Now I agree that Word really does seem to let people ignore using styles, but when I tried OO it didn't seem any better, and for me it was much worse, because I like to use styles when I write my documents.
In Word, I use Normal view, not page layout view (which I find incredibly annoying, who needs to see the white space borders around your text representing the paper?!), and I have the style area showing (usually at about .5-.7inch). This allows me to quickly scan though a document and see which paragraphs have the wrong style applied.
I do this frequently when working on someone else's document when they didn't use styles, or on my own, when I initially write stuff and more structure becomes clear after I've composed more of the document, so I need to go back and apply new styles to stuff I've already written.
If OO would only offer these 2 features (a normal mode with line breaks showing as a dotted line instead of 2 or more screen inches of whitespace, and a style area or some equivalent method to see the styles applied to all the visible paragraphs simultaneously), I think I would switch.
Mike
Excessive options and excessive information on each option drive up the cost of choice.
Actually I think that the problem is that there are a lot of options and the information on each option is difficult and time consuming to get, not that there is too much information.
For example, I would like to get an HDTV.
Well the current technologies used to make HDTV sets (which removes front projection from the equation) are:
Now you have to figure out how all of these technologies compare. It's likely that you will be able to quickly eliminate a couple of them because they don't match your criteria (say price or size). But it takes a lot of digging to find the information that would let you distiguish between your remaining choices. If this unbiased information was easier to come by, it would be easier to make a maximizer decision.
Interestingly enough there are now restaurant like this, and they seem to be doing quite well (I think one around here is called Fire and Ice).
Basically they have all the raw ingredients, meats, vegetable, sauces out for you to select exactly what you want, and in what proportions, put it in a bowl and give it to the "chef" who cooks it up and gives it back to you to eat.
It seems like a particularly expensive way to experiment with recipes to me.
Thanks, that's exactly what I would have responded.
I like the idea of only paying for the channels I want also, although it does seem like it could easily be abused.
I'd really like to know the current actual costs to the cable company for each of the channels they carry. Actually I only really care about the relative costs. I expect that the sports channels cost multiple times the other channels.
So a reasonable charge for a channel (not that I think the cable companies would be reasonable, but lets blue-sky for a sec) would be some base charge of say $1, plus the licencing fee the channel charges with say 10% extra tacked on for the cable company.
For the less popular channels, say those subscribed to by less than 10% of the cable companies customers, the base charge could be doubled to $2, giving the cable company a reason to keep it around until its subscriber base gets really small. This concept could continue, (ie raising the base cost kept by the cable company at 5% and 1% for example) until no-one wants the channel or the channel goes out of business.
I'd guess this would make the really popular channels $1.50 - $2.00, except those high fee sports channels which would probably be around $5-$6, and the less popular channels would be around $3.
I'd probably be willing to pay $2-$3 for a channel that I only occasionally watch while channel surfing, and I'd probably drop it if the price for it went past that. But on the other hand, I'd be willing to pay $5-$6 for the channels I watch all the time.
Mike
Actually I don't even think all of those other methods of cheating are actually cheating.
Cheating involves breaking the rules of the game.
The 1st example is cheating because you the rules specifically forbid you from circumventing your opponents ability to prevent you from seeing his cards.
The 2nd example is both cheating and not cheating. A device that influences the roll of the dice is cheating, a device that helps you predict the roll of the dice is not.
The 3rd example is also clearly cheating because hacking a slot machine is clearly changing the rules of the game. However having a device that could let you know if a slot machine was close to paying off would not be cheating.
Mike
IANAL, but I don't think that's right. Neither copyright, nor patent applies to an idea. Even if I were the 1st person to come up with it, I couldn't get a copyright or a patent on the idea that a series of sums could be represented by a single multiplication.
(2+2+2+2+2) == 5*2
I don't even think I could copyright or patent my notation of this idea, although I'm not sure about that.
Patents cover techniques, or algorithms, ie by following these steps you can create a device that holds multiple pieces of paper together (a paperclip), or a device that separates the cotton seeds from the cotton fiber (a cotton gin). Personally I think we'd be better off if only physical algorithms were covered, since I think getting a patent on checking the denominator of a division for 0 before performing the division operation in a computer program is bogus.
Copyrights cover particular expressions (or implementations if you will) of ideas, although that definition has been getting broader over time too. So I can write a story about a meteor hitting the earth (the idea) and someone else can also write a story using the same idea, and my copyright on my story does not give me any rights to that other person's story.
Jake 2.0 and Enterprise are the only 2 shows I watch on UPN now that Buffy is gone. And because of their timeslot I had to go to special effort to watch them, recording them on a 2nd VCR, since I'm never home at that time, and I also watch Smallvill and Angel.
I've even considered setting up a 3rd VCR for that night.
I must be missing something
SCO isn't asserting that their code is in AIX, they're saying that it's in Linux. So to support that assertion, why should they have to see AIX?
Now if they were saying that they suspected that their code was in AIX in violation of their copyright, then it would make sense for them to ask to see the source for AIX.
To show that their code is in Linux, it would seen that they say, look, here's our code, and here's code in Linux that's identical. That's a problem. And then they could follow that up by saying, this code in Linux, that we own the copyright to, was submitted to Linux by IBM employees, therefore IBM is responsible for violating our copyright (and possibly for breaking our contract).
No. They claim that IBM misappropriated SCO code that was in AIX by donating it to Linux.
But if SCO code was copied to AIX and then copied to Linux, why would SCO care or need to see that intermediate AIX copy? Shouldn't they have a copy of everything that they say they own the copyright to?
Hmm, well if what you're saying really works, and auto-update can really be turned off permanently I may give it another try, although I'm still very leery about what it says in the EULA (see previous post).
Thanks.
I replied to a previous message that I had canceled installation of real media twice in the last year but I couldn't remember the reasons I had. You've just highlighted all of my reasons. Pretty much any one of those items would cause me to not install the software, with all of them I couldn't cancel the install fast enough!
Well said.
I've canceled my install of Real twice in the last year. I don't remember right now what it was that made me decide that the benefit of installing (watching the real media that I had received) was not worth installing that software on my computer, but it says something that I've downloaded it twice and started the install twice, and both times decided against installing it. I may have installed it the 1st time and then immediately un-installed it, probably when I found I couldn't disable auto-update.
Well thanks for that, saves me the trouble of downloading the new version only to have to uninstall it.
But I'd be willing to go through that whole rigamarole if I could end up with an application that would play real media formats and NEVER attempted to access the Internet for ANYTHING without my requesting it to. This means NO updates, NO codec downloads, NO media info lookups.
And NO means NO. If I turn off auto-update, it doesn't mean turn it back on in 30 days, it means I don't want it to do auto anything!, ever.
I also don't need to have it load on start-up, and I wish the install would have an option to get that whatever out of my system tray, rather than my having to hunt it down and disable it.
Thanks, that's interesting. I don't know enough to make really intelligent comments, but it would seem to me that the materials (dye's or what not) used to make the different types of disc's would have different durability properties.
But ignoring the supposed better compatibility of DVD-R, I have your vote that DVD+R is better all around. That's more info than I had before.
Given what we've recently learned about CD & DVD longevity, (it's not as long as we thought, there was also a /. article not that long ago), I think the durability/longevity of these recordable disc's is very important to know.
Given the numbers of both types of drives and the fact that more and more drives are supported both formats, I don't expect either to go away any time soon.
So the question in my mind is, what are the technological differences between the 2 formats?
For data the rewritable DVD-RAM format is supposed to be best although it is not all that widely supported
Mike
That may be true for the bandwidth on the backbones, however IIRC the way that a cable modem works, the down channel is way bigger than the up channel. Remember that cable was originally ONLY one direction.
Someone who is more familiar with the actual technical details please elucidate, or explain how I'm wrong.
Mike
Ah, but you just gave me permission to use it. So none of the other arguments mean anything. My whole point all along has been that using something that doesn't belong to you without permission is wrong and in most jurisdictions will be considered a crime.
Hmm, I don't agree. Ignoring the ownership of ideas question (which I have real problems with), I think another analogy to the use of the wireless internet connection would be: Your neighbor waters their lawn, and their sprinkler sprays your property. You collect that water and use it to water your own garden thereby reducing your water bill. So you're using their "property" but I hardly think it is in any way wrong.
Similarly, I have no problem with someone with a satellite dish getting a device that lets them see encrypted programs broadcast from satellites. On the other hand, I do have a problem with someone illicitly tapping into cable.
Not that that changes the odds for the next coin toss but still.
I don't think so.
I like my mmorpg as much as most, but there's much more effort involved than with what you call push-entertainment.
There are plenty of times I just want to lie back and have someone tell me a story. I don't want any other person involved that I would have to comunicate with, and I don't want to make decisions about the story (ie walk to the left vs. walk to the right).
Those are 2 very different forms of entertainment and they both have their place.
Glad to actually hear other people saying exactly what I've been saying.
A much higher percentage than 75% of the TV I watch is time-shifted, and I watch way more TV than I should.
I haven't bothered getting an HDTV yet because it wouldn't do me much good. And if this broadcast flag and encryption happens, it will cut way down on my TV viewing.
This is not to mention those days that I am taping 3 shows at the same time. Or those shows I tape for someone else because they realized that they missed that episode for whatever reason.