There is a way. Not for fileplanet in general, but for this particular case. After all, I'm trying to download an advertisement. Bungie's got this brilliant guerrilla marketing campaign mesmerized into wanting to examine this commercial. Then I'm thinking "well, hell, I never did see the Halo 2 trailer, now would be a good time to take a gander! maybe I will finally find a place to put all these excess dollars!" Then I click on the fileplanet link, and my consumer hypnotic trance is suddenly dispelled! "What the... this is totally confusing! Now I am subconsciously associating feelings of confusion and dismay with Bungie products!" Then I no longer want to view the video, and thus their cutesy marketing campaign fails.
Really, isn't showing an extremely eager audience one of your commericals worth paying for the bandwidth cost? Surely Microsoft can spot these guys--making the XBox flagship game-- a little bit of cash for internet advertising, no? Especially since they can't think of anything better to do with their money.
That's the responsibility of law enforcement and only within certain boundaries.
Have you ever heard of the government doing that? They may investigate breakins that admins report, but they don't seem to do anything to confirm the security of the user's data that admins are trusted with.
No one likes a gadfly--but that's just how life works. Customers have a right to know if admins refuse to run secure systems.
How is the victim (i.e. the one 'visited' by the vigilante) to know that the vigilante just poked around and didn't leave any nasty things behind?
That's the point of the vigilante--if he or she can get in, that means someone else could have ALREADY gotten in and left things in there. If the vigilante can get in, then you already have to rebuild--it's just a question of whether you KNOW whether you have to rebuild. No point in killing the messenger.
If ISS was designed for long term habitation--complete with simulated gravity by rotation--then perhaps it could be taken somewhat seriously as an experiment. But as it is now, it's just an orbital camping trip that teaches us absolutely nothing the Russians didn't know when they built Mir.
If I'm going to ask the question, I'm certainly not going to refrain just because of some sequel offering better graphics. That the games everyone's all excited about (Doom 3, Halflife 2, The Sims 2, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas) are all sequels does a lot to confirm what my suspicions.
The Internet may be a subculture, but the technology industry is not. They make many billions of dollars more and offer more jobs than all of the content industries combined. That they have failed to make their voice heard to the extent that RIAA has is very disappointing to me. But basically our only hope is if the rich lobbyists who have something to lose from INDUCE start proposing compromises of their own.
I DO actually hold the legislators in question responsible for this--if they have any honest confusion regarding these matters, I'm sure someone in the EFF would love to explain everything to them. The judges who decided the Grokster case seemed to understand the technologies involved, and their life is even more law-centric than a legislator's. I blame corruption rather than ignorance--if they would bother to build relationships with academia and organisations like the EFF, instead of only talking to people with money, then they wouldn't write such terrible laws.
You can basically kiss KaZaA and the rest of those networks goodbye.
No, what I'm worried about is how much harassment U.S. software developers are going to experience. This is a very humbling fact for legislators, so I hope no one is pointing this out until after the laws in question are passed, but the dirty secret is that there is no question that networks that offer KaZaA-like services will continue to exist whether or not this legislation passes--it will just be developed in Europe instead. Most of it is already developed outside America--why do you think the big court case that Hatch is upset enough over to write INDUCE was against the lesser known Grokster instead of the more infamous Sharman Networks that currently runs Kazaa?
This is where the courts showed themselves way, way smarter than the legislators--P2P means peer-to-peer. One developer can enable billions of people to trade files, with no centralized company or programmer to control them. And there are millions of people out there with the know how to be that one developer--and most of them live beyond the reach of American law. You'll NEVER be able to stop the developers. Even the American ones will be hard to control--now that Bittorent has been released and is available to the masses, Open Source even, how is suing the original American developer going to stop everyone from using it? Some one in Europe will start writing new versions, and everyone will use Bittorent to download new copies of Bittorent. Congress would be much wiser to write new laws targetting illegal uploaders AND downloaders, (currently, the downloaders seem to get off scott-free) and American corporations that manage to make money from stealing .
It's the same argument as with cryptography--an issue vastly harder to understand than P2P, but which after much civil disobedience and lobbying, geeks have managed to get most of what they want (de facto elimination of crypto export restrictions), and law enforcement realized that they needed to adapt to technological realities (by installing keyloggers and breaking into criminal's computers to bypass cryptography.) See this.
Just as with cryptography, the only solution is to target bad USERS, not developers. Hatch will realize this once he sees that P2P doesn't decline because Americans are already using European software. Having been humbled in the area of Cryptography by inability to control Phil Zimmermann, Congress would be wise to not be humbled again for exactly the same reason by passing INDUCE.
I oppose INDUCE not because I want to use P2P networks (which will continue to exist as long as the internet exists), but because I don't want to be forced to emigrate from America to get a job as a software developer.
I think that Congress is going to paint with a broad brush, as they probably should (again, from my political background as opposed to a technological one), in order to have to avoid going back to the issue agai
Well, once we get to Heat Death, we should finally be safe from the terrorists, so our neutron-armored special forces sentient-quantum-reversible-computers can finally et a well deserved break.
There seems to be a whole lot of senators lined up behind this--it's possible that passage of SOME bill is inevitable. Perhaps the tech industry opponents could offer up some compromise that would appease Hatch and friends?
The main problem with the INDUCE act is that it's too vague--it doesn't specify exactly what I'm allowed to do and not allowed to do. What exactly is going to be criminalized by this? We know they want to get rid of Kazaa. Is Bittorrent also suspect, even though linux distributions and the mozilla project among many others have used it as a legitimate means of relieving bandwidth? Is the freenet projectfreenet now going to have to move underground? Are programs released for free with no profit incentive equally doomed? Are CD burners, MP3 players, and VCRs also doomed? No one is offering evidence of what would and would not be prohibited by this.
So, if your job was to specify a reasonable version of this law, how would you write it? Let me suggest some of the following:
Require programs likely able to be used for copying purposes to warn the user when files will be shared and which files will be shared. Advise the user to make sure they are only downloading and sharing legitimate files. A big part of Hatch's complaint is that users are tricked into sharing illegal files then sued for it--if he is being sincere, then the law needs to be targetted to prevent deception and misunderstanding, rather than just a vague notion of "inducing".
Require that all programs are actually used substantially for non-infringing purposes. Not just theoretically useable for non-infringing purposes--actually used. Bittorrent would be good, since a big chunk of bittorrent bandwidth is actually legitimate distribution. Kazaa probably wouldn't be quite so fortunate.
Exempt programs that are released with no profit incentive and no centralized control system (even auto-update can be suspect)--the contention is that programs are released in order to make money from stolen content. If that is the problem, then simply forbid questionable software from making any revenue (adware, spyware, shareware, or simple commercial software).
Some combination of these ideas would make a much more palatable INDUCE act. Software would have to be modified to fully inform the user, some business models profiting from illegal file transfer might be banned, but overall computer would still be able to do everything they can do now. Computers are universal turing machines--you can only forbid them from doing so many things before you've outlawed all computers.
If they still wouldn't be satified with this bill, might I suggest that they write a somewhat less ambitious law? Since P2P technology seems to be the inspiration for this law, then they should write a law focusing exactly on that--what sorts of P2P networks are acceptable, what sorts are forbidden. If future technologies arise, then write more laws to govern those. Trying to write a bill that governs all technologies will never work--the resulting bill is so vague that everyone on the Internet is going to end up getting sued. Heck, the record companies will probably start suing themselves by accident. Maybe Senator Hatch should be a bit more conservative in his law proposals--this one is far too ambitious.
Personally, all other things being equal, I always side with less government intrusion.
But they aren't equal--that's the point. Giving the broadcasters complete control of public property (the airwaves) is a massive corporate giveaway by the government. So all we're deciding between is control by the FCC which is appointed by people we vote for, or control by government granted monopoly of broadcasters that no one ever voted for.
Given a choice between democracy and government mandated giveaways to the powerful, I always side with democracy.
You know, when you stop and think about, is the world really a better place because of new games being created? I mean, suppose no one EVER got paid for making games, all there was to play were old games, new mods for old games, and new but not-quite-as good open source engines. Would that really be so terrible? Is it possible that the thousands/millions of games we have already are good enough?
People already have this experience in that most commercial ISPs include, in their AUP, clauses which make it grounds for termination to use in-house routers and switches.
By most commercial ISPs, you mean most cable ISPs.
Now, some will argue that very few people feel like searching out these alternate sites for news, and most are comfortable being spoon fed from the likes of CNN. To that I say this: apathy deserves no reward, and I refuse to back any idea that the freedoms of CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, etc. be curtailed because people are too lazy get off their collective asses and find different news sources.
Whoa, whoa, I was with you for a while, but it's important to distinguish between cnn.com, abcnews.com, foxnews.com, etc., and their broadcast counterparts.
The web sites and, to a lesser extent, the cable networks are protected by the first amendment. This is as it should be.
Broadcasting over the airwaves, though, is not a right. It's even more "a privilege, not a right", then driving a car. They don't own the spectrum, they license it from the FCC under the FCC's terms. This is also as it should be.
For two reasons--people don't deserve to be protected from their own laziness, but I need to protected from their laziness. If regulating the broadcast technologies to promote more diversity means we'll have a better, more informed democracy, then that's certainly reason enough to do it. Broadcast regulations should be written based on strictly utilitarian grounds.
Secondly, not everyone is economically or educationally advantaged enough to use the internet or even read the newspaper. The public still has a legitimate interest in making sure that a few oligarchs don't have complete political control of those not inclined or able to use computers.
On the internet, though, regulations shouldn't be aimed at stopping a few news sites from getting too large--but rather at ensuring the end-to-end nature of the Internet is preserved, so that alternatives to Big Media can continue to thrive as they do.
There is no problem at all in getting linux PCs. The number of Linux PCs sold significantly overestimates atual usage.
Well, as you say, US != World. And in the US, Microsoft bullying is stronger than it ever was.
Besides, if pirating Windows and installing it on linux pcs is so very common in Asia, why don't they just sell computers with no OS, like Wal Mart does? Even if Linux is license free, surely the electricity/time/labor cost of installing software starts to add up to something....
Dude, you need to see these prices. A computer with No OS is cheaper than one with Lindows installed. And you get a wider selection. Presumably because Microtel pays for their Lindows copies.
So unless Gartner counts all No OS computers as Linux, then you're absolutely right. No one is going to buy a low cost Linux computer at Walmart and slap a pirate version of Windows on it, when they can get a cheaper computer at WalMart with No OS. This is the description of the No OS computers: "These PCs are completely assembled, but do not have an operating system or any other software loaded on the hard drive. They are a perfect solution if you want a new PC and own a full version of Windows that has never been installed, or if you have an alternative operating system, such as Linux."
For the love of God or whatever you deem to be holy NEVER ALLOW WALMART INTO YOUR BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY!!!!! Terrible store, cruel labor practices, exports all jobs to Asia, strongest force for mediocrity and conformity to arise in America since the birth of television.
This is totally ridiculous. Computers with Linux pre-installed are really rare--and in fact, tend to be MORE expensive than computers with Windows installed--even though you don't have to pay the Microsoft tax, there are so few vendors selling Linux pre-installs that they either charge a premium or produce an inferior product. (Walmart always sells inferior products, so you might save money there, but No OS is $50 cheaper than Lindows, so your point doesn't hold true there.)
So if your plan is to install pirated Windows, it definitely makes way more sense buy a machine with no OS installed.
I have never encountered anyone who buys a linux pc intending to install linux on it.
Whoa...is that page trying to tell me that IBM only has four software patents? I would be extremely surprised to discover that Microsoft doesn't have many more than that. Then again, I'm extremely surprised to discover IBM has doesn't have many more than that.
Well, there's also this section on e-business and networking patents: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/network.s html
I own a tabletpc. I don't run linux on it, but it doesn't seem so ludicrously silly to do so--I'm not very interested in the handwriting recognition--I can type many times faster than I can write. I use it to draw. It's a wacom tablet, after all. Other wacom tablets work under linux (I have no idea if tablet pc wacom support could ever work under linux), so it's not completely unreasonable to want to use a tablet pc for Gimp or something. So assuming you got a model with a keyboard, then you'd theoretically have a linux laptop that lets you draw. If you were really dedicating to using the Gimp for some reason, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Defensive patents will simply not work against either SCO or these guys--companies that have no interest in actually selling products, but just living on settlements from their nuisance lawsuits. Not to mention that Microsoft is investing in SCO...
Except that Microsoft and Apple actually want to lose. They can afford to pay a billion dollars or so to these guys--but free software will be totally screwed (in America and any place else insane enough to emulate our software patent system).
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Really, isn't showing an extremely eager audience one of your commericals worth paying for the bandwidth cost? Surely Microsoft can spot these guys--making the XBox flagship game-- a little bit of cash for internet advertising, no? Especially since they can't think of anything better to do with their money.
Have you ever heard of the government doing that? They may investigate breakins that admins report, but they don't seem to do anything to confirm the security of the user's data that admins are trusted with.
No one likes a gadfly--but that's just how life works. Customers have a right to know if admins refuse to run secure systems.
That's the point of the vigilante--if he or she can get in, that means someone else could have ALREADY gotten in and left things in there. If the vigilante can get in, then you already have to rebuild--it's just a question of whether you KNOW whether you have to rebuild. No point in killing the messenger.
If ISS was designed for long term habitation--complete with simulated gravity by rotation--then perhaps it could be taken somewhat seriously as an experiment. But as it is now, it's just an orbital camping trip that teaches us absolutely nothing the Russians didn't know when they built Mir.
If I'm going to ask the question, I'm certainly not going to refrain just because of some sequel offering better graphics. That the games everyone's all excited about (Doom 3, Halflife 2, The Sims 2, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas) are all sequels does a lot to confirm what my suspicions.
I DO actually hold the legislators in question responsible for this--if they have any honest confusion regarding these matters, I'm sure someone in the EFF would love to explain everything to them. The judges who decided the Grokster case seemed to understand the technologies involved, and their life is even more law-centric than a legislator's. I blame corruption rather than ignorance--if they would bother to build relationships with academia and organisations like the EFF, instead of only talking to people with money, then they wouldn't write such terrible laws.
You can basically kiss KaZaA and the rest of those networks goodbye.
No, what I'm worried about is how much harassment U.S. software developers are going to experience. This is a very humbling fact for legislators, so I hope no one is pointing this out until after the laws in question are passed, but the dirty secret is that there is no question that networks that offer KaZaA-like services will continue to exist whether or not this legislation passes--it will just be developed in Europe instead. Most of it is already developed outside America--why do you think the big court case that Hatch is upset enough over to write INDUCE was against the lesser known Grokster instead of the more infamous Sharman Networks that currently runs Kazaa?
This is where the courts showed themselves way, way smarter than the legislators--P2P means peer-to-peer. One developer can enable billions of people to trade files, with no centralized company or programmer to control them. And there are millions of people out there with the know how to be that one developer--and most of them live beyond the reach of American law. You'll NEVER be able to stop the developers. Even the American ones will be hard to control--now that Bittorent has been released and is available to the masses, Open Source even, how is suing the original American developer going to stop everyone from using it? Some one in Europe will start writing new versions, and everyone will use Bittorent to download new copies of Bittorent. Congress would be much wiser to write new laws targetting illegal uploaders AND downloaders, (currently, the downloaders seem to get off scott-free) and American corporations that manage to make money from stealing .
It's the same argument as with cryptography--an issue vastly harder to understand than P2P, but which after much civil disobedience and lobbying, geeks have managed to get most of what they want (de facto elimination of crypto export restrictions), and law enforcement realized that they needed to adapt to technological realities (by installing keyloggers and breaking into criminal's computers to bypass cryptography.) See this.
Just as with cryptography, the only solution is to target bad USERS, not developers. Hatch will realize this once he sees that P2P doesn't decline because Americans are already using European software. Having been humbled in the area of Cryptography by inability to control Phil Zimmermann, Congress would be wise to not be humbled again for exactly the same reason by passing INDUCE.
I oppose INDUCE not because I want to use P2P networks (which will continue to exist as long as the internet exists), but because I don't want to be forced to emigrate from America to get a job as a software developer.
I think that Congress is going to paint with a broad brush, as they probably should (again, from my political background as opposed to a technological one), in order to have to avoid going back to the issue agai
I'm lovin' it!
Well, once we get to Heat Death, we should finally be safe from the terrorists, so our neutron-armored special forces sentient-quantum-reversible-computers can finally et a well deserved break.
The main problem with the INDUCE act is that it's too vague--it doesn't specify exactly what I'm allowed to do and not allowed to do. What exactly is going to be criminalized by this? We know they want to get rid of Kazaa. Is Bittorrent also suspect, even though linux distributions and the mozilla project among many others have used it as a legitimate means of relieving bandwidth? Is the freenet projectfreenet now going to have to move underground? Are programs released for free with no profit incentive equally doomed? Are CD burners, MP3 players, and VCRs also doomed? No one is offering evidence of what would and would not be prohibited by this.
So, if your job was to specify a reasonable version of this law, how would you write it? Let me suggest some of the following:
Require programs likely able to be used for copying purposes to warn the user when files will be shared and which files will be shared. Advise the user to make sure they are only downloading and sharing legitimate files. A big part of Hatch's complaint is that users are tricked into sharing illegal files then sued for it--if he is being sincere, then the law needs to be targetted to prevent deception and misunderstanding, rather than just a vague notion of "inducing".
Require that all programs are actually used substantially for non-infringing purposes. Not just theoretically useable for non-infringing purposes--actually used. Bittorrent would be good, since a big chunk of bittorrent bandwidth is actually legitimate distribution. Kazaa probably wouldn't be quite so fortunate.
Exempt programs that are released with no profit incentive and no centralized control system (even auto-update can be suspect)--the contention is that programs are released in order to make money from stolen content. If that is the problem, then simply forbid questionable software from making any revenue (adware, spyware, shareware, or simple commercial software).
Some combination of these ideas would make a much more palatable INDUCE act. Software would have to be modified to fully inform the user, some business models profiting from illegal file transfer might be banned, but overall computer would still be able to do everything they can do now. Computers are universal turing machines--you can only forbid them from doing so many things before you've outlawed all computers.
If they still wouldn't be satified with this bill, might I suggest that they write a somewhat less ambitious law? Since P2P technology seems to be the inspiration for this law, then they should write a law focusing exactly on that--what sorts of P2P networks are acceptable, what sorts are forbidden. If future technologies arise, then write more laws to govern those. Trying to write a bill that governs all technologies will never work--the resulting bill is so vague that everyone on the Internet is going to end up getting sued. Heck, the record companies will probably start suing themselves by accident. Maybe Senator Hatch should be a bit more conservative in his law proposals--this one is far too ambitious.
But they aren't equal--that's the point. Giving the broadcasters complete control of public property (the airwaves) is a massive corporate giveaway by the government. So all we're deciding between is control by the FCC which is appointed by people we vote for, or control by government granted monopoly of broadcasters that no one ever voted for.
Given a choice between democracy and government mandated giveaways to the powerful, I always side with democracy.
You know, when you stop and think about, is the world really a better place because of new games being created? I mean, suppose no one EVER got paid for making games, all there was to play were old games, new mods for old games, and new but not-quite-as good open source engines. Would that really be so terrible? Is it possible that the thousands/millions of games we have already are good enough?
By most commercial ISPs, you mean most cable ISPs.
Whoa, whoa, I was with you for a while, but it's important to distinguish between cnn.com, abcnews.com, foxnews.com, etc., and their broadcast counterparts.
The web sites and, to a lesser extent, the cable networks are protected by the first amendment. This is as it should be.
Broadcasting over the airwaves, though, is not a right. It's even more "a privilege, not a right", then driving a car. They don't own the spectrum, they license it from the FCC under the FCC's terms. This is also as it should be.
For two reasons--people don't deserve to be protected from their own laziness, but I need to protected from their laziness. If regulating the broadcast technologies to promote more diversity means we'll have a better, more informed democracy, then that's certainly reason enough to do it. Broadcast regulations should be written based on strictly utilitarian grounds.
Secondly, not everyone is economically or educationally advantaged enough to use the internet or even read the newspaper. The public still has a legitimate interest in making sure that a few oligarchs don't have complete political control of those not inclined or able to use computers.
On the internet, though, regulations shouldn't be aimed at stopping a few news sites from getting too large--but rather at ensuring the end-to-end nature of the Internet is preserved, so that alternatives to Big Media can continue to thrive as they do.
But the sad thing is when they take a game with 20 hours of good game play and add 130 hours of bad game play.
That's exactly what I find so odd--out of 23,000 patents, only a handful are for software?
Well, as you say, US != World. And in the US, Microsoft bullying is stronger than it ever was.
Besides, if pirating Windows and installing it on linux pcs is so very common in Asia, why don't they just sell computers with no OS, like Wal Mart does? Even if Linux is license free, surely the electricity/time/labor cost of installing software starts to add up to something....
Since Dell only ships servers with Linux, do you really think that 3% of all purchases of computers fall into this category?
So unless Gartner counts all No OS computers as Linux, then you're absolutely right. No one is going to buy a low cost Linux computer at Walmart and slap a pirate version of Windows on it, when they can get a cheaper computer at WalMart with No OS. This is the description of the No OS computers: "These PCs are completely assembled, but do not have an operating system or any other software loaded on the hard drive. They are a perfect solution if you want a new PC and own a full version of Windows that has never been installed, or if you have an alternative operating system, such as Linux."
For the love of God or whatever you deem to be holy NEVER ALLOW WALMART INTO YOUR BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY!!!!! Terrible store, cruel labor practices, exports all jobs to Asia, strongest force for mediocrity and conformity to arise in America since the birth of television.
So if your plan is to install pirated Windows, it definitely makes way more sense buy a machine with no OS installed.
I have never encountered anyone who buys a linux pc intending to install linux on it.
Well, there's also this section on e-business and networking patents: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/network.s html
I own a tabletpc. I don't run linux on it, but it doesn't seem so ludicrously silly to do so--I'm not very interested in the handwriting recognition--I can type many times faster than I can write. I use it to draw. It's a wacom tablet, after all. Other wacom tablets work under linux (I have no idea if tablet pc wacom support could ever work under linux), so it's not completely unreasonable to want to use a tablet pc for Gimp or something. So assuming you got a model with a keyboard, then you'd theoretically have a linux laptop that lets you draw. If you were really dedicating to using the Gimp for some reason, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
You'd be surprised.
Defensive patents will simply not work against either SCO or these guys--companies that have no interest in actually selling products, but just living on settlements from their nuisance lawsuits. Not to mention that Microsoft is investing in SCO...
Except that Microsoft and Apple actually want to lose. They can afford to pay a billion dollars or so to these guys--but free software will be totally screwed (in America and any place else insane enough to emulate our software patent system).