Portraying an inconvenience or annoyance as a life and death matter. Ask Nokia to back their verbal offer with a written license? Sure, absolutely. If Nokia declines and someday enforces their patents, fine, get their Win32 app to run under Wine. Linux users would be inconvenienced but only an ideology would be harmed, and then not substantially.
Stallman's take? "In effect, Nokia is lobbying the European Union to give Nokia and many others a new kind of weapon to shoot at software authors and users with--and telling the legislators, 'Don't worry, it's safe to let private armies carry these guns, because we promise that our gunmen won't shoot anyone in that building.'""
No wonder RMS is ignored outside of portions of the FOSS community. With crackpot analogies like that he will never be taken seriously by outsiders. He gets quoted by the mainstream media for his humor value. All we have here is the reinforcement of negative stereotypes of Linux advocates.
Richard, please let other people do the PR. Stick to writing the next version of the GPL and adding another meg of code to emacs. Please.;-)
Can you (or someone else) explain, how exactly does Osama benefit from someone downloading latest movies or music off Kazaa or BT? I don't see the money getting to their caves here...
RTFA, they are talking about physical objects not bits.
Unrelated to TFA, and just as an ad hoc hypothetical since you brought up the subject, operating a system for serving porn, music, and movies would be a good way to harvest the IPs of end users who may provide useful zombie systems. Insecure end user systems may literally be worth their weight in gold to these guys. So yeah, even bits could have value.
How do you know this? I'm asking seriously: what is your evidence or sources of information that supports the claim that "counterfeiting (money, CDs, DVDs, designer labels, etc.) is popular with terrorists"?
First off, I'm going to ignore the newspaper articles and network/cable news reports that go back decades. Apparently you missed those. However I will offer an advanced internet based research technique: I typed "terrorist counterfeit" into google.
First hit, the training manual thing sounds familiar: "... the recovery of Al-Qaeda training manuals had shown that the organization recommends the sale of counterfeit products to raise funds..." http://www.fraudaid.com/ScamSpeak/conprods.htm
In other words cells should make money locally. If money doesn't flow from headquarters to the cells there is nothing for the FBI/CIA/etc to trace up or down.
"What makes this activity so popular among criminals - and, it appears, attractive to terrorists as well - are its low risks and high rewards. In other words, the penalties and the risk of getting caught are minimal, while the potential for making money is maximal."
"... the Terrorist Financing Operations Section of the FBI provided an unclassified document to our Committee three years ago - in the context of another investigation - that listed the sale of counterfeit goods among various criminal activities the terrorist organization Hezbollah uses to raise cash in the United States."http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/index.c fm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&Affiliation=R&P ressRelease_id=997&Month=5&Year=2005
"... The link between organized crime groups and counterfeit goods it well established. But Interpol is sounding the alarm that Intellectual Property Crime is becoming the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups..." http://wwwa.house.gov/international_relations/108/ nob0716.htm
Again, none of this is anything new to someone who has paid attention the last few decades. The Iranians pioneered the field with their fal $100 bills. Of course it helped that we sold the overthrown Shah the same printing presses that the US treasury department uses. The $100 bills have been handed out to terrorist organization all over the middle east and spurred redesign of our currency. http://nsi.org/Library/Law/counterfeit2.txt
Is that a shock? Terrorism is the new buzz word, slap it onto anything you don't like and it's instantly evil.
True, but counterfeiting (money, CDs, DVDs, designer labels, etc.) is popular with terrorists, its a source of income. Don't let your knee jerk reaction cause you to miss that detail. THings are more complicated than you suggest.
VHS, Cassette, etc. are poor analogies. Copies degrade at each generation, you can't get too faz from the original. Digital audio on the other hand copies perfectly.
DAT, etc are poor analogies since they never became mainstream.
Your analogies are also generally poor in that they do not have the convenience of downloading a file off of the net. All those other technologies require actual personal interaction.
Not this again, please - it genuinely saddens me to see someone who clearly has their head screwed on deceived by this. Hint: 90% of people who download something purely because it was free would never have bought the thing in the first place. There are no "lost sales" because a "sale" would most probably never have occurred in the first place. Or do you think that people will Gigs of downloaded music would actually, if piracy were miraculously stamped-out, have spent the thousands and thousands of dollars necessary to amass their collection?
Sorry but you are off on a red herring. No one is saying every pirated piece of music would have been purchased. What people are arguing is that music that would have otherwise been purchased is simply pirated. Those are the lost sales.
I think my CD-ROM may have been off of my sound card also, but I had a SoundBlaster 16 with SCSI. Yeah, I have always felt fortunate that Yggdrasil was my first impression of Linux, Linux would have been much less impressive otherwise. Much like I feel fortunate my initial experience with assembly language was 6502 not 8086.;-)
I remember before Linux was widely accepted and only the province of masochistic Unix veterans who fervently believed there had to be some way to salvage some of their investment in skill building in that area lest their suffering have truly been for no better reason than to test their endurance come the day when it died.
I remember 12 years ago when my first Linux was trivial to install, with sound and video. Yggdrasil plug and play Linux. I had used BSD at the University so one day I picked up a FreeBSD CD and a Yggdrasil CD at a local computer show, about US$20 all together. I tried FreeBSD first given my background, it crashed while installing on my 486DX2-66. I tried Yggdrasil, it installed, it recognized my ATI Mach32 (I don't think I had a 64 yet but I could be mistaken) and SoundBlaster 16 and configured automatically. How many old timers would have been turned off of Linux if it had not been so simple back then, that first generation of Linux advocates might not gotten the ball rolling.
Pirate: "I pirate games because the price is too high. If the price were lower, I'd buy more."
Largely untrue. Most people will pirate what they want if they can do so. Low-price and other reasonable terms are largely red herrings, they don't really change things. Seen it all before with software sold in university bookstores. A textbook comes with a coupon for a heavily discounted commercial software package, one that has no anti-piracy. Sales of the software are negligible. The publisher then adds trivially defeated copy-protection, sales of the software approaches the number of textbooks sold. As long as a DOS "diskcopy" command could copy the software it was pirated, when a crack was need sales jumped wildly.
hint: without available "free" software from people around you in the 80'ies, there would have never been the demand for hardware,...
I call BS. I had a computer in the early 80s and was in college in the mid to late 80s. There was little "meaningful" free software for my Apple//e or Commodore-64. What people used was commercial, bundled or retail, and like today much of it was pirated. Similar for the IBM PC that I used at work back then. The only meaningful free software I saw at the time was BSD at school and that was largely irrelevant to most people using computers at the time. Of course BSD wasn't really free, I was paying for it with my tuition and later with my taxes.
Which is why the **AA are are reporting losses. Wait, no - they're reporting record profits! Piracy has virtually no negative effect on the media industry at all, whatsoever.
(1) As I said in the GP some people download to preview. That spurs sales.
(2) Only a minority download to preview, the majority download for permanent use. That is lost sales. The fact that sales increased does not change this, it does not change the fact that without this piracy sales could be even higher. This difference between realized profits and potential profits is what the RIAA is fighting over. Your view of what is going on is very shallow.
there would be no motivation to copy things if copyright law was in the least bit reasonable
Completely untrue. Most people will pirate what they want if they can do so. Low-price and other reasonable terms are largely red herrings, they don't really change things. Seen it all before with software sold in university bookstores. A textbook comes with a coupon for a heavily discounted commercial software package, one that has no anti-piracy. Sales of the software are negligible. The publisher then adds trivially defeated copy-protection, sales of the software approaches the number of textbooks sold. As long as a DOS "diskcopy" command could copy the software it was pirated, when a crack was need sales jumped wildly.
Hasn't it been publicly stated numerous times that the whole reason China was pusing for localized Linux was to avoid having hidden backdoors on PCs in China that the government had no control over? If Intel is really installing a sub-system that is specifically designed to re-direct information it seems like a pretty obvious violation of that stated policy.
I believe you have completely misunderstood this tech. It is not a hidden backdoor, it is a tool for the Chinese government to monitor and control computer use. They have the physical and wired access to these machines.
The Processor Serial Number is not necessarily relevant here. The CPU allowed the PSN to be disabled. The chipset may not allow the DRM to be disabled. The only hope may be that Intel offers chipsets with and without DRM, allowing the motherboard manufacturer to go with or without.
The "content moguls" have fucking ruined it for everyone with their whining control-freakery.
No, pirates have ruined it for everyone. The "moguls" are just reacting to piracy, there would be no motivation for DRM if people purchased what they used.
Note: this is something separate from downloading. How you get your purchases is irrelevant, it only matter that you purchase. IF for example the vast majority of people downloading music had done so to preview their purchases rather than amass huge libraries of music they would never buy then the "moguls" would not be on their crusade. Yes, some people download to preview and then go out and purchase but regrettably this was the exception not the rule.
E3 is not about the inner workings of games. If you want to learn about technology go to SigGraph. E3 is about marketting and sales, it is not career day for college students. It is more appropriate to have manager Joe Bob from Best Buy there than a talented aspiring programmer asking about a game's implementation details. Sorry, but E3 is the wrong venue for that. E3 is about sales not development.
Our government (UK) just spend x millions in creating this ID card scheme which is says we need... Now they are going to try and sell the public the concept of dumping all that R&D and use the USA standard...
So you advocate not-invented-here syndrome? I would think that the reasonable thing to do would be compare the two systems and choose the better one.
... When that same government uses the cost so far as a reason why we can't just drop the entire project... Does anyone see a big hole in their logic?
No, but I see you oversimplifying things. The implementation of the technology of the card is only part of the cost of the project and its planning. I'm also sure there are other reasons you are neglecting to mention, presumably the government's argument regarding the need for such a system. Hint: "need" would be a far better point to argue than "cost".
Would it kill the freeloaders to buy a small cup of decaf at the very least?
That may not be good enough. In Hawaii there was a vote on outlawing smoking in buildings. One restraunt owner being interviewed pointed out that they had already done so voluntarily and it greatly improved business, contrary to the popular wisdom. They pointed out that they had much better table turnover without the smokers, and that the smokers were often only buying a coffee but occupying a table for a long time.
Yes this is a restraunt not a coffee shop but the point is that wifi'ers, like smokers, occupy a finite resource, table space, disproportionately to their purchase. The wifi'ers can only be tolerated if table space is abundant.
A local gas station did this for their car wash. If your purchase was over a certain dollar amount it printed a key on the receipt that would bypass the coin drop.
I'm sick of American's using the "Europe is great eh, what about gassing all those jews, eh?"... Europe's history is steeped in blood, I like to think we've learned from it.
We don't have to go back to 1939-1945 to find European genocide, we only need to look back at the 1990s and the Balkans. You sure Europe has learned, sounds like wishful thinking not reality.
Europe's history is steeped in blood, I like to think we've learned from it.
You are aware that this was a popular sentiment during the 1920s, both in Europe and the US? Besides, football matches prove this to be yet another fairy tale.
Unilateral action.... some of us don't do it....
The action in the balkans was a NATO thing. Not just the United States... what was that you were saying?
That there was no substantial commitment until US air/ground forces were promised. It was not a case of "unilateral action", it was a case of European nations failing to act collectively unless they had their US safety net. It's not like it was halfway around the world and no one had air/sea lift capabilities, it was genocide on European soil. To be clear I am being critical of European political leadership, not the European public.
Slashdot Mirror
WhatÄs crackpot about the anologie?
Portraying an inconvenience or annoyance as a life and death matter. Ask Nokia to back their verbal offer with a written license? Sure, absolutely. If Nokia declines and someday enforces their patents, fine, get their Win32 app to run under Wine. Linux users would be inconvenienced but only an ideology would be harmed, and then not substantially.
Stallman's take? "In effect, Nokia is lobbying the European Union to give Nokia and many others a new kind of weapon to shoot at software authors and users with--and telling the legislators, 'Don't worry, it's safe to let private armies carry these guns, because we promise that our gunmen won't shoot anyone in that building.'""
;-)
No wonder RMS is ignored outside of portions of the FOSS community. With crackpot analogies like that he will never be taken seriously by outsiders. He gets quoted by the mainstream media for his humor value. All we have here is the reinforcement of negative stereotypes of Linux advocates.
Richard, please let other people do the PR. Stick to writing the next version of the GPL and adding another meg of code to emacs. Please.
Can you (or someone else) explain, how exactly does Osama benefit from someone downloading latest movies or music off Kazaa or BT? I don't see the money getting to their caves here...
RTFA, they are talking about physical objects not bits.
Unrelated to TFA, and just as an ad hoc hypothetical since you brought up the subject, operating a system for serving porn, music, and movies would be a good way to harvest the IPs of end users who may provide useful zombie systems. Insecure end user systems may literally be worth their weight in gold to these guys. So yeah, even bits could have value.
How do you know this? I'm asking seriously: what is your evidence or sources of information that supports the claim that "counterfeiting (money, CDs, DVDs, designer labels, etc.) is popular with terrorists"?
..."
c fm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&Affiliation=R&P ressRelease_id=997&Month=5&Year=2005
..."/ nob0716.htm
...
First off, I'm going to ignore the newspaper articles and network/cable news reports that go back decades. Apparently you missed those. However I will offer an advanced internet based research technique: I typed "terrorist counterfeit" into google.
First hit, the training manual thing sounds familiar: "... the recovery of Al-Qaeda training manuals had shown that the organization recommends the sale of counterfeit products to raise funds
http://www.fraudaid.com/ScamSpeak/conprods.htm
In other words cells should make money locally. If money doesn't flow from headquarters to the cells there is nothing for the FBI/CIA/etc to trace up or down.
"What makes this activity so popular among criminals - and, it appears, attractive to terrorists as well - are its low risks and high rewards. In other words, the penalties and the risk of getting caught are minimal, while the potential for making money is maximal."
"... the Terrorist Financing Operations Section of the FBI provided an unclassified document to our Committee three years ago - in the context of another investigation - that listed the sale of counterfeit goods among various criminal activities the terrorist organization Hezbollah uses to raise cash in the United States."http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/index.
"... The link between organized crime groups and counterfeit goods it well established. But Interpol is sounding the alarm that Intellectual Property Crime is becoming the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups
http://wwwa.house.gov/international_relations/108
Again, none of this is anything new to someone who has paid attention the last few decades. The Iranians pioneered the field with their fal $100 bills. Of course it helped that we sold the overthrown Shah the same printing presses that the US treasury department uses. The $100 bills have been handed out to terrorist organization all over the middle east and spurred redesign of our currency.
http://nsi.org/Library/Law/counterfeit2.txt
You can do you own googling from here on out
Is that a shock? Terrorism is the new buzz word, slap it onto anything you don't like and it's instantly evil.
True, but counterfeiting (money, CDs, DVDs, designer labels, etc.) is popular with terrorists, its a source of income. Don't let your knee jerk reaction cause you to miss that detail. THings are more complicated than you suggest.
... there was this chick going up the stairs that had like huge freaking Hooters that was obviously fake boobs ...
:-)
So in a society swarming with aliens it is plausible to see chicks with tentacles coming out of their heads but not with big boobs?
Given your low slashdot number I'll assume you were making an attempt at humour, and not trolling.
A very very bad assumption.
VHS, Cassette, etc. are poor analogies. Copies degrade at each generation, you can't get too faz from the original. Digital audio on the other hand copies perfectly.
DAT, etc are poor analogies since they never became mainstream.
Your analogies are also generally poor in that they do not have the convenience of downloading a file off of the net. All those other technologies require actual personal interaction.
Not this again, please - it genuinely saddens me to see someone who clearly has their head screwed on deceived by this. Hint: 90% of people who download something purely because it was free would never have bought the thing in the first place. There are no "lost sales" because a "sale" would most probably never have occurred in the first place. Or do you think that people will Gigs of downloaded music would actually, if piracy were miraculously stamped-out, have spent the thousands and thousands of dollars necessary to amass their collection?
Sorry but you are off on a red herring. No one is saying every pirated piece of music would have been purchased. What people are arguing is that music that would have otherwise been purchased is simply pirated. Those are the lost sales.
I think my CD-ROM may have been off of my sound card also, but I had a SoundBlaster 16 with SCSI. Yeah, I have always felt fortunate that Yggdrasil was my first impression of Linux, Linux would have been much less impressive otherwise. Much like I feel fortunate my initial experience with assembly language was 6502 not 8086. ;-)
I remember before Linux was widely accepted and only the province of masochistic Unix veterans who fervently believed there had to be some way to salvage some of their investment in skill building in that area lest their suffering have truly been for no better reason than to test their endurance come the day when it died.
I remember 12 years ago when my first Linux was trivial to install, with sound and video. Yggdrasil plug and play Linux. I had used BSD at the University so one day I picked up a FreeBSD CD and a Yggdrasil CD at a local computer show, about US$20 all together. I tried FreeBSD first given my background, it crashed while installing on my 486DX2-66. I tried Yggdrasil, it installed, it recognized my ATI Mach32 (I don't think I had a 64 yet but I could be mistaken) and SoundBlaster 16 and configured automatically. How many old timers would have been turned off of Linux if it had not been so simple back then, that first generation of Linux advocates might not gotten the ball rolling.
Pirate: "I pirate games because the price is too high. If the price were lower, I'd buy more."
Largely untrue. Most people will pirate what they want if they can do so. Low-price and other reasonable terms are largely red herrings, they don't really change things. Seen it all before with software sold in university bookstores. A textbook comes with a coupon for a heavily discounted commercial software package, one that has no anti-piracy. Sales of the software are negligible. The publisher then adds trivially defeated copy-protection, sales of the software approaches the number of textbooks sold. As long as a DOS "diskcopy" command could copy the software it was pirated, when a crack was need sales jumped wildly.
hint: without available "free" software from people around you in the 80'ies, there would have never been the demand for hardware, ...
//e or Commodore-64. What people used was commercial, bundled or retail, and like today much of it was pirated. Similar for the IBM PC that I used at work back then. The only meaningful free software I saw at the time was BSD at school and that was largely irrelevant to most people using computers at the time. Of course BSD wasn't really free, I was paying for it with my tuition and later with my taxes.
I call BS. I had a computer in the early 80s and was in college in the mid to late 80s. There was little "meaningful" free software for my Apple
Which is why the **AA are are reporting losses. Wait, no - they're reporting record profits! Piracy has virtually no negative effect on the media industry at all, whatsoever.
(1) As I said in the GP some people download to preview. That spurs sales.
(2) Only a minority download to preview, the majority download for permanent use. That is lost sales. The fact that sales increased does not change this, it does not change the fact that without this piracy sales could be even higher. This difference between realized profits and potential profits is what the RIAA is fighting over. Your view of what is going on is very shallow.
there would be no motivation to copy things if copyright law was in the least bit reasonable
Completely untrue. Most people will pirate what they want if they can do so. Low-price and other reasonable terms are largely red herrings, they don't really change things. Seen it all before with software sold in university bookstores. A textbook comes with a coupon for a heavily discounted commercial software package, one that has no anti-piracy. Sales of the software are negligible. The publisher then adds trivially defeated copy-protection, sales of the software approaches the number of textbooks sold. As long as a DOS "diskcopy" command could copy the software it was pirated, when a crack was need sales jumped wildly.
Hasn't it been publicly stated numerous times that the whole reason China was pusing for localized Linux was to avoid having hidden backdoors on PCs in China that the government had no control over? If Intel is really installing a sub-system that is specifically designed to re-direct information it seems like a pretty obvious violation of that stated policy.
I believe you have completely misunderstood this tech. It is not a hidden backdoor, it is a tool for the Chinese government to monitor and control computer use. They have the physical and wired access to these machines.
The Processor Serial Number is not necessarily relevant here. The CPU allowed the PSN to be disabled. The chipset may not allow the DRM to be disabled. The only hope may be that Intel offers chipsets with and without DRM, allowing the motherboard manufacturer to go with or without.
The "content moguls" have fucking ruined it for everyone with their whining control-freakery.
No, pirates have ruined it for everyone. The "moguls" are just reacting to piracy, there would be no motivation for DRM if people purchased what they used.
Note: this is something separate from downloading. How you get your purchases is irrelevant, it only matter that you purchase. IF for example the vast majority of people downloading music had done so to preview their purchases rather than amass huge libraries of music they would never buy then the "moguls" would not be on their crusade. Yes, some people download to preview and then go out and purchase but regrettably this was the exception not the rule.
E3 is not about the inner workings of games. If you want to learn about technology go to SigGraph. E3 is about marketting and sales, it is not career day for college students. It is more appropriate to have manager Joe Bob from Best Buy there than a talented aspiring programmer asking about a game's implementation details. Sorry, but E3 is the wrong venue for that. E3 is about sales not development.
Our government (UK) just spend x millions in creating this ID card scheme which is says we need... Now they are going to try and sell the public the concept of dumping all that R&D and use the USA standard ...
... When that same government uses the cost so far as a reason why we can't just drop the entire project... Does anyone see a big hole in their logic?
So you advocate not-invented-here syndrome? I would think that the reasonable thing to do would be compare the two systems and choose the better one.
No, but I see you oversimplifying things. The implementation of the technology of the card is only part of the cost of the project and its planning. I'm also sure there are other reasons you are neglecting to mention, presumably the government's argument regarding the need for such a system. Hint: "need" would be a far better point to argue than "cost".
Would it kill the freeloaders to buy a small cup of decaf at the very least?
That may not be good enough. In Hawaii there was a vote on outlawing smoking in buildings. One restraunt owner being interviewed pointed out that they had already done so voluntarily and it greatly improved business, contrary to the popular wisdom. They pointed out that they had much better table turnover without the smokers, and that the smokers were often only buying a coffee but occupying a table for a long time.
Yes this is a restraunt not a coffee shop but the point is that wifi'ers, like smokers, occupy a finite resource, table space, disproportionately to their purchase. The wifi'ers can only be tolerated if table space is abundant.
A local gas station did this for their car wash. If your purchase was over a certain dollar amount it printed a key on the receipt that would bypass the coin drop.
I'm sick of American's using the "Europe is great eh, what about gassing all those jews, eh?" ... Europe's history is steeped in blood, I like to think we've learned from it.
We don't have to go back to 1939-1945 to find European genocide, we only need to look back at the 1990s and the Balkans. You sure Europe has learned, sounds like wishful thinking not reality.
Europe's history is steeped in blood, I like to think we've learned from it.
You are aware that this was a popular sentiment during the 1920s, both in Europe and the US? Besides, football matches prove this to be yet another fairy tale.
Unilateral action.... some of us don't do it.... The action in the balkans was a NATO thing. Not just the United States... what was that you were saying?
That there was no substantial commitment until US air/ground forces were promised. It was not a case of "unilateral action", it was a case of European nations failing to act collectively unless they had their US safety net. It's not like it was halfway around the world and no one had air/sea lift capabilities, it was genocide on European soil. To be clear I am being critical of European political leadership, not the European public.