"Microsoft appears willing to spend millions and defer any potential profitability of the Zune simply to weaken Apple's bargaining power with recording companies and set a precedent for hardware manufacturers paying music companies."
Selling at cost or a loss to gain marketshare is hardly anything new, we're talking Econ 101. Apple basically did so with their on-line store, they wanted to spur use of the iPod. Microsoft is doing pretty much the same thing except they are discounting the hardware to spur use of their on-line store. On-line sales is where Microsoft sees the future, take a look at XBox Live, micropayments of add-ons, etc.
With regard to "setting a precedent", more Econ 101. Using a low price point to establish a barrier to entry. Another predictable move as digital music players become mass market commodity items. iPod dominates the current market, but the current market is a small fraction of the potential market. We are only now leaving the early adopter phase. iPod's current success is not unlike Apple's success with the Apple II when the personal computer market was in it's infancy. Apple pioneered the way then and now, but back then failed to capitalize on that early success to dominate the emerging market. Has Apple learned, or will history repeat itself? I don't know. I tend to think Apple has learned, however I think that this will translate into Apple being one of several major players in the future mature digital music player market. I don't think anyone will be able to dominate as IBM did with PC hardware and Microsoft did with PC software.
Of course, there were so many reputable peer-reviewed journals in those days which allowed for significant public discourse to affirm/deny those theories.
A peer review process existed in those days as well. In Galileo's day there were letter to others scholars, books that were published, etc. In Darwin's day the process was better refined, Darwin belonged to various scientific societies, published his work, etc. I think we merely have wider audiences and simplified communication today, and perhaps less intrusive politics. If you think today's science is devoid of politics I think you need to chat with more folks who have tried to find funding for their research, tried to get it published, etc.
I presume you are a student. Real scientists base most of their understanding of the world on consensus, and every good scientific paper starts from consensus and argues for or against a change in consensus.
Wrong on both counts. You confuse "consensus" with accepting the data and observations of others. As I said scientist have faith in observations, I did not say those observations had to be their own, although replicating observations can be very important for some experiments. Theory and conclusions may follow these observations, but there will be less faith in these and some work to verify/accept them (peer review). Theories are often viewed as models, approximation, things that may be further refined over time. Newton -> Einstein for example.
... but the guys who are most qualified seem to be in agreement...
I presume you are not a scientist. A scientist would only have faith in observations, not consensus, not conventional wisdom. Galileo and Darwin were individuals who were initially ridiculed by the most qualified men who were in agreement. I don't know to what degree global warming/cooling is effected by man, we may have no effect or a great effect, or we may have a very small effect but with the climate teetering on a natural precipice that small effect is enough to push it over. What I do know is that politics is heavily involved and that is never a good thing with respect to discovering the truth. The fact that the global warming question has a politically correct answer makes me a little skeptical, and a little more open minded toward opposing viewpoints. I'm not saying the opposition is correct, merely that political correctness makes it more important to consider the opposition's argument.
Hunter Safety and Driver Safety are supposed to keep you from killing yourself or anyone else. Surfer Safety is supposed to keep your computer from being hijacked. Please don't try to make it sound comparable to the former two.
You overstate things a bit. With respect to firearms (which is what hunter safety is nearly entirely about) and driving property damage is more common. You also understate things, getting your computer hijacked can lead to far greater financial losses than a fender bender. I think I characterized the three better: "They are to educate participants that they are engaging in a risky activity and that they can minimize some risks through good practices."
Well thank goodness I provided the relevant text and didn't rely 100% on the link. Did you think that quotes from the Chief Engineer and software developer were fraudulent? In any case the link worked in 1998 and the quotes were thoroughly vetted at the time. The publisher now seems to want to sell the article. The article didn't go into the detail you desire, it was only slightly more detailed than the original even vaguer article that started the controversy and suspicion regarding WinNT. The publisher of that original article quickly backed away from their own work and began characterizing it as "early speculation". The Unix consultant portrayed as the chief critic even admitted he was taken out of context and things were exaggerated.
... the other is a forum with mostly entries defending the smart ship concept...
Even if true, it is irrelevant. The forum participants were not being quoted or reference. The person being referenced was the Captain of the ship at the time: "In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states...". "Proceedings" is a quite authoritative magazine, http://www.usni.org/PROCEEDINGS/proceedings.html.
Hunter Safety, Driver Safety, and the proposed Surfer Safety are not supposed to provide you with 100% security. They are to educate participants that they are engaging in a risky activity and that they can minimize some risks through good practices. Some people need to be told to not determine if a gun is loaded by pulling the trigger, others need to be told to not click on a link in an email to get to their bank.
True. In that respect, I erred. I guess an OS's only line of defense against programs that crash, is not to shut down vital systems and disable manual overrides.
You are still erring. The OS does not control vital systems or manual overrides. That what applications do. Furthermore you seem to have missed the detail that this was a test platform running without safeguards to see what would go wrong.
What the software developer said:
"McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred"
And what the captain said:
"We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."
WinNT did not fail. On a test platform, not an operational ship, running non-release versions of software: A client application accepted incorrect input. A server application accepted this bad data, performed a bad calculation, and corrupted it's database. Client apps that tried to use this database crashed. These events are OS independent, the same thing would have happened under MacOS X or Linux. The publisher of the original article that blamed WinNT later distanced themselves from the article calling it "early speculation".
The chief engineer on the ship at the time, and the developer of the application software, seem to say that the problem was not with WinNT:
"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred."
In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states, "The _Yorktown_ was never towed as a result of any Smart Ship initiative. During my command, we lost propulsion power twice while using the new technology. Each time, we knew what caused the interrupt and were underway again in about 30 minutes. The September 1997 incident was caused by incorrect data insertion by a well-trained crewman. The _Yorktown_ returned to port using two FFG-7 emergency control units that specifically had been requested by me, and supported by other commands as a risk reducer. We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."
Google's refusal to comply with the DOJ over privacy issues was 'a little hypocritical [...] because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency
Oh, you mean like how he got pissed off when certain companies started preinstalling OBSD on machines and then told their customers the BSD mailing list was their support forum, without even the courtesy to tell anyone on the list what they were in for?
I can't blame Theo at all for how he responds to greedy bastards like that.
Although I prefer *BSD to Linux for anything beyond consumer desktop type usage (ok, maybe embedded too), think Apple made a wise choice to go BSD rather than Linux, believe that the BSD license is truly free while the GPL is restrictive but benevolent, I have to say I have little sympathy for Theo. This is the trade-off you make by going BSD. Freedom means everything does not go your way, that others have the right to be a-holes. Suck it up, explain what is going on to the new users, and try to sell them CDs, t-shirts, etc. Take the glass is half full view and look at these newcomers as potential future customers, or at least that they are growing your platform's market, increasing the network effect, making it easier to bring others in who will be your customers.
Just like OS/2 could run Windows executables. That didn't save OS/2 and I doubt this will do much for OpenBSD
That is a silly comparison. OS/2 tried to compete against Windows, OpenBSD does not try to compete against Linux. OpenBSD does its own thing and doesn't really care what others do. It helps to keep in mind that the OpenBSD folks are a little more mature (obviously referring to the community at large and excluding Theo:-)) and are religious only when it comes to security, not regarding platforms. As a matter of fact they tell newcomers to develop for Linux and let their app run under emulation, that it is pretty unlikely that the newcomer needs the performance advantage of running natively and should go for a larger market instead.
BTW, Linux emulation is more of a *BSD thing, not OpenBSD specific.
You can't pay me enough to be your slave. If you ever tried to own me, I'd kill you. If I couldn't kill you, I'd kill or destroy anything that had to do with you. I'd burn your fields and break your tools. In fact, that's exactly what slaves commonly did.
Uh, no. If that were true then slavery would not have been as immensely profitable as it was. While there may be rare aberrations where something like the above occurred, those involved were brutally punished, maimed or killed, as examples to others. There was also collective punishment to encourage a group to "police" itself and prevent a member from engaging in such activities.
Also, some of those quite successfully enslaved were warriors, warriors in a day where that generally meant up close and very personal. I don't mean to offend but I doubt your mental or physical preparedness comes close to theirs.
You are being quite naive to think that listening to digital audio equates to buying digital audio. Many purchase CDs and rip so that they have DRM free files and higher quality and are future proof.
Uhhh, no shit. Didn't you even read the writeup? That's exactly what this guy is saying
You have the posting hierarchy confused. I did not respond to the person you are referring to, I responded to one of his critics.
Being a researcher, or a journalist, does not allow you to break the law. The first amendment may allow you to publish your results, but it does not shield you from illegal actions you may have taken to get to the point of publication.
There are fuzzy areas, some laws specifically cite an exemption for research, like the much hated DMCA.
You are far from the average music buyer.
The average music buyer is listening to MP3's or some similar format. Period. It's you that is out of touch. Go out and actually exmine the general population and you will see the truth. You arn't part of it.
(1) You are being quite myopic and only considering the portable market where quality is not much of an issue. The in-car market would appreciate a little more quality, but road noise limits this. The in-home market is where CDs still shine. This will continue until the online providers offer higher bitrates, right now they only target the low end portable players.
(2) You are being quite naive to think that listening to digital audio equates to buying digital audio. Many purchase CDs and rip so that they have DRM free files and higher quality and are future proof. If and when formats change they can re-rip rather than have to maintain multiple players, one for their iTunes Music Store purchases and one for the non-Apple solution that they moved on to. Or if they had ripped as MP3 in the first place it is virtually assured any future player will be compatible.
A copyright monopoly is little different than, say, a cable tv monopoly. Artificial monopolies are inherently bad, depriving the market of the beneficial effects of competition for what is essentially a commodity good.
Wow that is a confused argument, at leased it was dressed up with phrases from Econ 101 so it sounds slightly better than the average rant. We are not dealing with commodity goods, we do not have equivalent goods. Each movie or song is a unique piece of art, one is not a replacement for another, the market is not deprived. The market is not closed, anyone may record a song or make a movie and make it available to the market.
Likewise, the issue is whether someone gets to control anything; if they don't, then they aren't any kind of owner, making your second point circular.
I'm afraid you are the one engaging in rationalization and circular reasoning. You confuse ownership with the ability to enforce authorized distribution. The fact that enforcement is not 100% does not change ownership.
For example, we could reduce software copyright terms to last only a few years on any particular version, but require everyone who wants a software copyright to at least reveal their source code and thoroughly comment it, so that everyone can inspect it (though not use it during the copyright term; c.f. patents) and then use the source once the copyright expires. New versions would be derivatives of the old, and so if you didn't want people to be able to copy your binaries, you'd have to get a copyright on the new material, again with source disclosure.
Who said they would copy your binaries, I stated in my post that people would take source, modify it, and release binaries but not the modified source. I'll entertain you misunderstanding for a moment though. In your scheme the GPL is still effectively destroyed, I merely wait the three years, for many application (like the embedded example I offered) a 3 year old kernel is fine. Secondly, you would completely undermine the advantage that some perceive of the GPL over BSD style licenses. You would deter developers from contributing. Something you should have learned in the Econ 101 class is to follow your changes to the system down through time and make rational guesses about how behavior will change, unanticipated outcomes.
You ought to think about this sort of thing, rather than automatically assume that the current system is the best and thus worthy of defending.
No one said the current system is the best. I would go as far as to say it is superior to what you offer.
and you think that by imposing a totally gratiuitous and unjust punishment on one person...
He got 5 months for criminal *conspiracy*, where is the injustice?
... all of a sudden everyone one else will start to think "I will get caught" and will stop...
Everyone no, but some out there will no longer continue thinking that no one ever gets caught or punished.
... The problem with the view that 'imprisoning people will make others think that they won't get away with it' is that to make people really believe that they will get caught you need a certain level of saturation of offenders being imprisoned...
Wrong. Saturation merely increases the number deterred. Going from zero to one and publicizing it widely, which is what slashdot is doing here, will deter some. As more are punished, more will be deterred,... Will it deter all? No, but some will be deterred and those who won't have had the illusion that know one gets punished removed.
... For a 'crime' which a large portion of society commits regularly you have to start imprisoning a large part of your population.
Wrong. He wasn't prosecuted for watching a pirated movie. He was prosecuted and convicted for entering a criminal *conspiracy*, very few members of society do that.
Some pretend or believe that there is some moral right for a company to milk money from old ideas forever. This is not so, but our current legal trend is leading to more artificial legal information control, and the thought crimes that result.
What a load crap you offer. First these companies are offering luxuries not necessities, so yes they should have the right to milk them. Second the owner of a movie or song should have the right to control its distribution, just as the owner of a piece of source code has the right to control its distribution. Copyright is the mechanism that owners do this with. If we did away with copyright the GPL would be unenforcible. Corporations would be free to take Linux, tweak it, embed it in proprietary products, and not distribute their changes. Things are far more complicated than you suggest, the enforcement of intellectual property laws is a good thing.
I strongly disagree that prison poses any sort of meaningful deterrent. Prison inmates are almost completely made up of people who:
a) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but didn't care.
b) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but were prepared to accept that risk and/or consequence.
c) Didn't know they were breaking the law (possibly due to "temporary insanity" - ie: "crimes of passion") and/or didn't believe that incarceration would be a consequence of being caught.
The real logic behind almost all inmates is: didn't think they would get caught. Seems even more true for this case, as is typical for white collar crime.
Sorry, hold up there. He mass-distributed/infringing intellectual property/. Labeling it as or drawing analogies comparing it to theft damages my language, and I don't intend to allow that.
He entered into a criminal conspiracy. You are not doing so well with the language yourself, perhaps your recognition wetware needs an upgrade or two. Once you do so try parsing 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' again.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft appears willing to spend millions and defer any potential profitability of the Zune simply to weaken Apple's bargaining power with recording companies and set a precedent for hardware manufacturers paying music companies."
Selling at cost or a loss to gain marketshare is hardly anything new, we're talking Econ 101. Apple basically did so with their on-line store, they wanted to spur use of the iPod. Microsoft is doing pretty much the same thing except they are discounting the hardware to spur use of their on-line store. On-line sales is where Microsoft sees the future, take a look at XBox Live, micropayments of add-ons, etc.
With regard to "setting a precedent", more Econ 101. Using a low price point to establish a barrier to entry. Another predictable move as digital music players become mass market commodity items. iPod dominates the current market, but the current market is a small fraction of the potential market. We are only now leaving the early adopter phase. iPod's current success is not unlike Apple's success with the Apple II when the personal computer market was in it's infancy. Apple pioneered the way then and now, but back then failed to capitalize on that early success to dominate the emerging market. Has Apple learned, or will history repeat itself? I don't know. I tend to think Apple has learned, however I think that this will translate into Apple being one of several major players in the future mature digital music player market. I don't think anyone will be able to dominate as IBM did with PC hardware and Microsoft did with PC software.
Of course, there were so many reputable peer-reviewed journals in those days which allowed for significant public discourse to affirm/deny those theories.
A peer review process existed in those days as well. In Galileo's day there were letter to others scholars, books that were published, etc. In Darwin's day the process was better refined, Darwin belonged to various scientific societies, published his work, etc. I think we merely have wider audiences and simplified communication today, and perhaps less intrusive politics. If you think today's science is devoid of politics I think you need to chat with more folks who have tried to find funding for their research, tried to get it published, etc.
I presume you are a student. Real scientists base most of their understanding of the world on consensus, and every good scientific paper starts from consensus and argues for or against a change in consensus.
Wrong on both counts. You confuse "consensus" with accepting the data and observations of others. As I said scientist have faith in observations, I did not say those observations had to be their own, although replicating observations can be very important for some experiments. Theory and conclusions may follow these observations, but there will be less faith in these and some work to verify/accept them (peer review). Theories are often viewed as models, approximation, things that may be further refined over time. Newton -> Einstein for example.
... but the guys who are most qualified seem to be in agreement ...
I presume you are not a scientist. A scientist would only have faith in observations, not consensus, not conventional wisdom. Galileo and Darwin were individuals who were initially ridiculed by the most qualified men who were in agreement. I don't know to what degree global warming/cooling is effected by man, we may have no effect or a great effect, or we may have a very small effect but with the climate teetering on a natural precipice that small effect is enough to push it over. What I do know is that politics is heavily involved and that is never a good thing with respect to discovering the truth. The fact that the global warming question has a politically correct answer makes me a little skeptical, and a little more open minded toward opposing viewpoints. I'm not saying the opposition is correct, merely that political correctness makes it more important to consider the opposition's argument.
I'm afraid that you're probably going to get a lot of shoddy answers to a legitimate question here.
I'm actually expecting him to get flamed for daring to ask such a "heretical" question. Comparisons to George W are also virtually assured.
Hunter Safety and Driver Safety are supposed to keep you from killing yourself or anyone else. Surfer Safety is supposed to keep your computer from being hijacked. Please don't try to make it sound comparable to the former two.
You overstate things a bit. With respect to firearms (which is what hunter safety is nearly entirely about) and driving property damage is more common. You also understate things, getting your computer hijacked can lead to far greater financial losses than a fender bender. I think I characterized the three better: "They are to educate participants that they are engaging in a risky activity and that they can minimize some risks through good practices."
... one of the links you offered is dead ...
... the other is a forum with mostly entries defending the smart ship concept ...
...". "Proceedings" is a quite authoritative magazine, http://www.usni.org/PROCEEDINGS/proceedings.html.
Well thank goodness I provided the relevant text and didn't rely 100% on the link. Did you think that quotes from the Chief Engineer and software developer were fraudulent? In any case the link worked in 1998 and the quotes were thoroughly vetted at the time. The publisher now seems to want to sell the article. The article didn't go into the detail you desire, it was only slightly more detailed than the original even vaguer article that started the controversy and suspicion regarding WinNT. The publisher of that original article quickly backed away from their own work and began characterizing it as "early speculation". The Unix consultant portrayed as the chief critic even admitted he was taken out of context and things were exaggerated.
Even if true, it is irrelevant. The forum participants were not being quoted or reference. The person being referenced was the Captain of the ship at the time: "In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states
Hunter Safety, Driver Safety, and the proposed Surfer Safety are not supposed to provide you with 100% security. They are to educate participants that they are engaging in a risky activity and that they can minimize some risks through good practices. Some people need to be told to not determine if a gun is loaded by pulling the trigger, others need to be told to not click on a link in an email to get to their bank.
True. In that respect, I erred. I guess an OS's only line of defense against programs that crash, is not to shut down vital systems and disable manual overrides.
You are still erring. The OS does not control vital systems or manual overrides. That what applications do. Furthermore you seem to have missed the detail that this was a test platform running without safeguards to see what would go wrong.
What the software developer said:
"McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred"
And what the captain said:
"We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."
WinNT did not fail. On a test platform, not an operational ship, running non-release versions of software: A client application accepted incorrect input. A server application accepted this bad data, performed a bad calculation, and corrupted it's database. Client apps that tried to use this database crashed. These events are OS independent, the same thing would have happened under MacOS X or Linux. The publisher of the original article that blamed WinNT later distanced themselves from the article calling it "early speculation".
h tml
t own.html#Schwartz1
The chief engineer on the ship at the time, and the developer of the application software, seem to say that the problem was not with WinNT:
http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.
"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred."
The captain at the time does further debunking:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/york
In a letter to the "Comment and Discussion" department, published in the Aug 98 _Naval_Institute_Proceedings_, page 22, Captain Richard T. Rushton, then-CO of _Yorktown_, categorically states, "The _Yorktown_ was never towed as a result of any Smart Ship initiative. During my command, we lost propulsion power twice while using the new technology. Each time, we knew what caused the interrupt and were underway again in about 30 minutes. The September 1997 incident was caused by incorrect data insertion by a well-trained crewman. The _Yorktown_ returned to port using two FFG-7 emergency control units that specifically had been requested by me, and supported by other commands as a risk reducer. We knew there were some risks in the engineering development model propulsion-control system installed under a rapid prototyping development effort. The bottom line: The data field safeguards found in production-level systems were not installed yet in the _Yorktown_ by intention, until complete wring-out was accomplished."
Google's refusal to comply with the DOJ over privacy issues was 'a little hypocritical [...] because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency
:-)
It is not hypocritical, it is a cover.
Oh, you mean like how he got pissed off when certain companies started preinstalling OBSD on machines and then told their customers the BSD mailing list was their support forum, without even the courtesy to tell anyone on the list what they were in for? I can't blame Theo at all for how he responds to greedy bastards like that.
Although I prefer *BSD to Linux for anything beyond consumer desktop type usage (ok, maybe embedded too), think Apple made a wise choice to go BSD rather than Linux, believe that the BSD license is truly free while the GPL is restrictive but benevolent, I have to say I have little sympathy for Theo. This is the trade-off you make by going BSD. Freedom means everything does not go your way, that others have the right to be a-holes. Suck it up, explain what is going on to the new users, and try to sell them CDs, t-shirts, etc. Take the glass is half full view and look at these newcomers as potential future customers, or at least that they are growing your platform's market, increasing the network effect, making it easier to bring others in who will be your customers.
Just like OS/2 could run Windows executables. That didn't save OS/2 and I doubt this will do much for OpenBSD
:-)) and are religious only when it comes to security, not regarding platforms. As a matter of fact they tell newcomers to develop for Linux and let their app run under emulation, that it is pretty unlikely that the newcomer needs the performance advantage of running natively and should go for a larger market instead.
That is a silly comparison. OS/2 tried to compete against Windows, OpenBSD does not try to compete against Linux. OpenBSD does its own thing and doesn't really care what others do. It helps to keep in mind that the OpenBSD folks are a little more mature (obviously referring to the community at large and excluding Theo
BTW, Linux emulation is more of a *BSD thing, not OpenBSD specific.
You can't pay me enough to be your slave. If you ever tried to own me, I'd kill you. If I couldn't kill you, I'd kill or destroy anything that had to do with you. I'd burn your fields and break your tools. In fact, that's exactly what slaves commonly did.
Uh, no. If that were true then slavery would not have been as immensely profitable as it was. While there may be rare aberrations where something like the above occurred, those involved were brutally punished, maimed or killed, as examples to others. There was also collective punishment to encourage a group to "police" itself and prevent a member from engaging in such activities.
Also, some of those quite successfully enslaved were warriors, warriors in a day where that generally meant up close and very personal. I don't mean to offend but I doubt your mental or physical preparedness comes close to theirs.
Thanks for the info
No problem, it was much needed given many of the posts around here.
You are being quite naive to think that listening to digital audio equates to buying digital audio. Many purchase CDs and rip so that they have DRM free files and higher quality and are future proof.
Uhhh, no shit. Didn't you even read the writeup? That's exactly what this guy is saying
You have the posting hierarchy confused. I did not respond to the person you are referring to, I responded to one of his critics.
Being a researcher, or a journalist, does not allow you to break the law. The first amendment may allow you to publish your results, but it does not shield you from illegal actions you may have taken to get to the point of publication.
There are fuzzy areas, some laws specifically cite an exemption for research, like the much hated DMCA.
You are far from the average music buyer. The average music buyer is listening to MP3's or some similar format. Period. It's you that is out of touch. Go out and actually exmine the general population and you will see the truth. You arn't part of it.
(1) You are being quite myopic and only considering the portable market where quality is not much of an issue. The in-car market would appreciate a little more quality, but road noise limits this. The in-home market is where CDs still shine. This will continue until the online providers offer higher bitrates, right now they only target the low end portable players.
(2) You are being quite naive to think that listening to digital audio equates to buying digital audio. Many purchase CDs and rip so that they have DRM free files and higher quality and are future proof. If and when formats change they can re-rip rather than have to maintain multiple players, one for their iTunes Music Store purchases and one for the non-Apple solution that they moved on to. Or if they had ripped as MP3 in the first place it is virtually assured any future player will be compatible.
A copyright monopoly is little different than, say, a cable tv monopoly. Artificial monopolies are inherently bad, depriving the market of the beneficial effects of competition for what is essentially a commodity good.
Wow that is a confused argument, at leased it was dressed up with phrases from Econ 101 so it sounds slightly better than the average rant. We are not dealing with commodity goods, we do not have equivalent goods. Each movie or song is a unique piece of art, one is not a replacement for another, the market is not deprived. The market is not closed, anyone may record a song or make a movie and make it available to the market.
Likewise, the issue is whether someone gets to control anything; if they don't, then they aren't any kind of owner, making your second point circular.
I'm afraid you are the one engaging in rationalization and circular reasoning. You confuse ownership with the ability to enforce authorized distribution. The fact that enforcement is not 100% does not change ownership.
For example, we could reduce software copyright terms to last only a few years on any particular version, but require everyone who wants a software copyright to at least reveal their source code and thoroughly comment it, so that everyone can inspect it (though not use it during the copyright term; c.f. patents) and then use the source once the copyright expires. New versions would be derivatives of the old, and so if you didn't want people to be able to copy your binaries, you'd have to get a copyright on the new material, again with source disclosure.
Who said they would copy your binaries, I stated in my post that people would take source, modify it, and release binaries but not the modified source. I'll entertain you misunderstanding for a moment though. In your scheme the GPL is still effectively destroyed, I merely wait the three years, for many application (like the embedded example I offered) a 3 year old kernel is fine. Secondly, you would completely undermine the advantage that some perceive of the GPL over BSD style licenses. You would deter developers from contributing. Something you should have learned in the Econ 101 class is to follow your changes to the system down through time and make rational guesses about how behavior will change, unanticipated outcomes.
You ought to think about this sort of thing, rather than automatically assume that the current system is the best and thus worthy of defending.
No one said the current system is the best. I would go as far as to say it is superior to what you offer.
and you think that by imposing a totally gratiuitous and unjust punishment on one person ...
... all of a sudden everyone one else will start to think "I will get caught" and will stop ...
... The problem with the view that 'imprisoning people will make others think that they won't get away with it' is that to make people really believe that they will get caught you need a certain level of saturation of offenders being imprisoned ...
... Will it deter all? No, but some will be deterred and those who won't have had the illusion that know one gets punished removed.
... For a 'crime' which a large portion of society commits regularly you have to start imprisoning a large part of your population.
He got 5 months for criminal *conspiracy*, where is the injustice?
Everyone no, but some out there will no longer continue thinking that no one ever gets caught or punished.
Wrong. Saturation merely increases the number deterred. Going from zero to one and publicizing it widely, which is what slashdot is doing here, will deter some. As more are punished, more will be deterred,
Wrong. He wasn't prosecuted for watching a pirated movie. He was prosecuted and convicted for entering a criminal *conspiracy*, very few members of society do that.
In this enlightened country, file-sharing is legally equivalent to operating a photocopier in a library!
:-)
Do Canadians photocopy books to have a copy for their private libraries?
Some pretend or believe that there is some moral right for a company to milk money from old ideas forever. This is not so, but our current legal trend is leading to more artificial legal information control, and the thought crimes that result.
What a load crap you offer. First these companies are offering luxuries not necessities, so yes they should have the right to milk them. Second the owner of a movie or song should have the right to control its distribution, just as the owner of a piece of source code has the right to control its distribution. Copyright is the mechanism that owners do this with. If we did away with copyright the GPL would be unenforcible. Corporations would be free to take Linux, tweak it, embed it in proprietary products, and not distribute their changes. Things are far more complicated than you suggest, the enforcement of intellectual property laws is a good thing.
I strongly disagree that prison poses any sort of meaningful deterrent. Prison inmates are almost completely made up of people who:
a) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but didn't care.
b) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but were prepared to accept that risk and/or consequence.
c) Didn't know they were breaking the law (possibly due to "temporary insanity" - ie: "crimes of passion") and/or didn't believe that incarceration would be a consequence of being caught.
"Didn't care"? Wrong.
"Accepted risk"? Wrong.
"Didn't know"? Wrong.
"Didn't believe"? Wrong
The real logic behind almost all inmates is: didn't think they would get caught. Seems even more true for this case, as is typical for white collar crime.
Sorry, hold up there. He mass-distributed /infringing intellectual property/. Labeling it as or drawing analogies comparing it to theft damages my language, and I don't intend to allow that.
He entered into a criminal conspiracy. You are not doing so well with the language yourself, perhaps your recognition wetware needs an upgrade or two. Once you do so try parsing 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' again.
"do you really think 5 months in prison is that bad?"
;-)
It only takes one prison rape to turn that 5 months into a death sentence.
Don't shower for 5 months. And let me preempt the naysayers who doubt the feasibility of doing so, three little letters: RMS.