DSL providers still have to pay a lot of money for bandwidth (BW is like a rare jewel these days), so technology that allows us to connect faster isn't going to be implemented by most providers, and those that do will price it right out of range of being practical.
The internet economy will continue to choke until this country / world is rewired at the core to make publishing on the internet once again available to everyone. Even the companies charging for bandwidth won't show profits until bandwidth is cheapened.
How long is Slashdot going to continue discussing the same mundane, less fine points of the issues everytime copyright infringement comes up?
The userbase always degrades into a "It's not theft, it's ______" spat with no new ground broken in these discussions. Why not acknowledge it is what it is and that it's illegal and move on to talking about what happens to sailors who are caught? Compare that with the consequences of your average college kid. Anything besides the usual. There have been enough of these articles and "discussions" here that you'd think things would E-volve.
And how long are the editors of Slashdot going to continue posting these copyright infringement stories with a tone of "these people are victims," or "the RIAA is evil BECAUSE they're telling so and so to crack down on this"? I know the RIAA is evil, but not because they go after people who steal from them. Napster et al are NOT civil disobedience for 99 out of 100 people. I agree the Napster revolution was necessary, but the follow through, and the manner in which it was conducted have been so misguided that they are not having a positive effect. And the Slashdot editors aren't helping to fix the message. If the Napster generation had a clear and earnest message, they would get more done.
I'm so angry about this I'm going to use my other credit card this holiday season. It may not make a difference, but this is something I can do easily, and the more people who act this way, the more powerful we become. Somebody's got to stand up for the little guy in these stupid lawsuits that are not about reaching a just decision, but about strong arming the little guy.
Additionally, corporations who don't respect the internet (and other new technologies) and its rules, do not deserve the benefit of it's offerings.
I seriously doubt any ISP can suggest to the FBI that they go in with guns drawn without making accusations about previous violence or threats. It's the FBI's call.
That said, if guns were involved (and I see no convincing statements that any were), the FBI would be at fault for creating a dangerous situation. As a responsible gun owner, I can say that this wouldn't be a problem if they came for me, but it would be bound to get SOME people killed over a simple breach of contract that could be solved with a simple cease & desist notice. Again, I'm not convinced guns were actually involved so I'm speaking hypothetically.
Furthermore, Slashdot only soils itself when they post things with the slant "(Thieves) get shafted!" Many other good examples can be found in articles regarding P2P "sharing." I'd love to see Slashdot work harder to shed it's reputation as an editorial site run by people who think everything should be free. Maybe everything should be free, but there are better ways to achieve that than justifying lawlessness.
It's a ridiculous ploy by retailers, but it will serve them well. This year is going to suck badly for them and many of them will see a major stock sell-off when the numbers come out. They use the ads to draw people into the stores so they can profit on other items. There are plenty of reasons why they make less money if people can peruse the ads online, but I see this as a simple tactic... Cry DMCA this year and protect this year's crop. It doesn't have to be legit enough to hold up in court, it just has to scare people for one year.
There is one claim made in a documentary I saw long ago (forget the title) that there is a radiation belt (they called it) so strong that the shielding on the ship would not have protected the astronauts. Since I know nothing of the subject, I'm anxious to hear a rebuttal. I think NASA publishing this report could be educational, so I support it.
The other claim that sticks out in my head is "Why haven't we gone back if it's so easy?" Which frankly is a stupid way to make an argument. But it does seem that if we haven't gone back by this point, either there is some major technical hurdle we're not prepared to overcome, or more likely, the human race is simply regressing to focus its attention on petty political sqabbles rather than scientific achievement. It's fair to say "we're busy working on a bazillion dollar space station," or "why spend all that money to go pick up some more rocks," but either way, it would be interesting to put together a report showing what our modern technology could do towards doing a manned mission to the moon more safely, more cheaply, and with more beneficial results.
All of the "it was filmed on a soundstage" discussion is rather comical in this day and age of movie wizardry though.
Memory/Bus speed, and altivec make the biggest performance differences on Macs, especially in OS X. CPU at 400 is not hardly different than CPU at 800.
But seriously, you can't pick apart this law, because its only teeth are the same words that prevent perfectly legitimate products and acts? The whole thing must go. Congress might come up with a laundry list of devices that are legitimate (Dreamcast serial cable) vs. devices that are often illegitimate (Xbox mod chip - hold the flames), but such a list would be instantly outdated. And then there's the problem of multiple classifications when people want to run Linux on their Xboxes and make all kinds of wonderfull new toys and usefull setups out of them. That is not copyright infringement, and yet it's prevented by a law that purports to be all about copyrights.
The DMCA should be taken off the books and the problem should be reapproached with new cooperation between enforcement and lawmakers, as well as a renewed ownous on industry to create solutions. Big media has ignored companies offering (more) secure solutions for years and let many of those companies dry up. It could have been a significant boon to the economy had the uber-rich media giants invested in these solutions rather than on lawyers and lobyists. Too often I heard them saying that Bertlesman / Napster was a test case and that its failure was their reason for reluctance. But what they failed to see was that Napster didn't have the desire to change their ways, let alone the experience and skill to come up with a valid solution. If these giant record labels and movie studios don't grow some balls and try some solutions...invest in some budding technologies, they deserve to fail.
I'm not an expert, but it appears to me that the DMCA doesn't protect copyrights that weren't already protected under existing laws.
Perhaps the legislative efforts should be focused on giving enforcement more ways to go after blatantly illegal networks and their users. Less public sharing channels could be gone after much the same way law enforcement goes after the mob. They don't outlaw baseball bats and guns, they catch someone in the act go up the tree from there by getting information and following known mobsters until they trip up.
Legal issues schmissues. The school owns the network. And if a particular DHCP client or domain controller capable OS does something nasty, they can nix it. And furthermore, they can nix it regardless. Maybe you can have any OS you want in your dorm, just not on their network. Schools have been requiring students to choose particular computers (mostly hardware...Dell, Mac, etc) for years in order to make use of school provided services (tech support, file shares, groupware) with nobody standing up through the courts, so unless you're going to do it, it's not a legal issue. As always, there will be some kids smart enough to skirt the system, but this does affect the majority who don't know better, or who won't stand up for what they do know.
I use Win2k primarily, and prefer it to all other Windows OSes. I know of it's problems and think I can guess what they're referring to and experiencing. But honestly, having worked tech support in the past, if these were honestly their only motivations for making this recommendation, they should be telling students to get Macs, not XP.
We will always see through this kind of bullshit. The best we can do is to educate others without seeming too fanatical to be taken seriously.
It's not completely stupid to shrug off 25% of the web server market. Which division of Microsoft do you work for? (sorry, your post just sounded like it came from a PR firm) Sure you want to try to work on as many systems as possible, but most companies and open source efforts aren't big enough to cover all the bases. Just ask Oracle.
As someone who has worked for a company that made a delivery / DRM solution for video and music, I can tell you that all the major studios are testing this kind of technology. Record labels have somewhat given up for now, but most companies with video content (including Warner) have been testing the various solutions for at least a year, and are just now starting to come public with limited test scenarios. All of the solutions still in existance (to my knowledge) are based on the Microsoft DRM technology, which is pretty solid, but of course, not perfect. Unfortunately, I think these tests will yield little. The content being offered, and the rules under which it's being offered don't appeal to anyone, so the tests will not show flaws in the DRM or delivery platforms. Additionally, studios may get the impression that there isn't sufficient consumer interest in downloading movies at this time, and they may be right. Unfortunately, until everyone has a set-top box and can download movies like they would select a pay-per-view show on cable, this is going to remain a limited market. Even moreso considering the idiotic constraints studios are insisting on.
So the set-top box is where Microsoft comes in. And now they've got Intel involved. Try sticking a mod-chip on your cpu. Wait until your parents and all the other tech-illiterate people out there are buying Dell's with DRM in the cpu and OS. It's going to get tougher and tougher to work around Microsoft's rules until the hackers out there put their efforts towards providing an equal or better alternative platform. And even if one day we do see an equal platform, good luck convincing the studios to encode their content for everyone.
Competition is the only thing that can defeat Microsoft at this point. The problem with creating an open DRM solution is that if the source is available, it's too easy for hackers to write tools to unlock content forever once a single license is granted. So while Microsoft is somewhat protected from these kinds of hacks by the DMCA, their primary competitor (Linux) is, by nature, not. So not only has the DOJ failed consumers, so has Congress. Other companies could take up the cause and build a DRM solution into other OSes, but Linux wouldn't be usable for this cause because the GNU license would force them to release their source code. Apple isn't going to step up to the plate on this one as they have too many other things to worry about, and with their closed hardware platform, there isn't any more competition to be had there. Right now the best most of us can do is to boycott MS and Intel, and to urge those around us to do the same. It's long past time to create an alternative.
I can only assume, so maybe someone could spell it out. Maybe even Bruce because it seems he, like myself, is going to have more time on his hands these days.
Everyone is correct to say that there was a problem and that something had to be done. That does not make Napster et al right. It was widespread looting. There is a system folks. Follow it or lose it.
You haven't mentioned WHY they didn't work out. If there's any kind of common theme, that's a good starting point. If not, there might be a more underlying theme anyway. Two general possibilities come to mind that require different approaches.
Incompetent or minimally experienced coder
If you're hiring people who just don't do a very good job, you're not weeding that out in the interview process (sorry, obvious). Source samples brought in can be immeasurably tainted. Don't try to learn much from them. A person may be able to recite their samples and explain the whys and hows of every line, but that can come from simply studying someone else's code. If they're incompetent, you need to schedule more time for, and be tougher in the interview. If they have to write code on a whiteboard for 3 hours, that's easily worth the investment. I've known people hired by Microsoft who would write code on a whiteboard for 8 hours to answer a single question. Don't finish their sentences. I see people doing that a lot, and then not really counting it against the interviewee in the evaluation meeting.
unmotivated
This is the person who has the requisit number of years experience in their field, but doesn't do any of it at home. Or maybe they bring their home projects into work when there's work to be done. Maybe they read TOO MUCH Slashdot (Me). Maybe this person worked in a team, and can easily mask their level of involvement. Find a way to weed these people out in the interview. They may seem less than excited after spending an hour writing code on the board. Ask them about projects where they felt like they carried the brunt of the load.
Are you interviewing for technical skills beyond your own? You're going to need some help if that's the case. Don't try to assume that because you're good at what you do, you'll be able to spot someone who is good at what they do, because that obviously isn't working out.
But of course, without knowing what kinds of problems you've had with the people you've tried, it's hard to say where you're going wrong. There's so much talent out there and out of work, that it's almost safe to say you should be looking only for people who've lead teams and done the majority of the work before. That can be a good indication of talent as well as motivation that you won't always have the luxury of filtering for.
The scary thing about this suit to me is not that users will be blocked from using that site, but it's about what may happen to entire sites in the future where one bit of content is deemed illegal. Message boards for example. One letter from a lawyer...your favorite site gets blocked, and suddenly we're living in a censored society.
Yet again the RIAA goes after someone other than the guilty parties (thieves). They're too stupid to figure out how to catch crooks so they want to blanket everyone with blackouts and annoying DRM's. It's time people stopped listening to and cowering to the RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that would work. Most sysadmins have consciences and morals.
We should send a team of Disney lawyers to check it out in person.
The internet economy will continue to choke until this country / world is rewired at the core to make publishing on the internet once again available to everyone. Even the companies charging for bandwidth won't show profits until bandwidth is cheapened.
The userbase always degrades into a "It's not theft, it's ______" spat with no new ground broken in these discussions. Why not acknowledge it is what it is and that it's illegal and move on to talking about what happens to sailors who are caught? Compare that with the consequences of your average college kid. Anything besides the usual. There have been enough of these articles and "discussions" here that you'd think things would E-volve.
And how long are the editors of Slashdot going to continue posting these copyright infringement stories with a tone of "these people are victims," or "the RIAA is evil BECAUSE they're telling so and so to crack down on this"? I know the RIAA is evil, but not because they go after people who steal from them. Napster et al are NOT civil disobedience for 99 out of 100 people. I agree the Napster revolution was necessary, but the follow through, and the manner in which it was conducted have been so misguided that they are not having a positive effect. And the Slashdot editors aren't helping to fix the message. If the Napster generation had a clear and earnest message, they would get more done.
Additionally, corporations who don't respect the internet (and other new technologies) and its rules, do not deserve the benefit of it's offerings.
That said, if guns were involved (and I see no convincing statements that any were), the FBI would be at fault for creating a dangerous situation. As a responsible gun owner, I can say that this wouldn't be a problem if they came for me, but it would be bound to get SOME people killed over a simple breach of contract that could be solved with a simple cease & desist notice. Again, I'm not convinced guns were actually involved so I'm speaking hypothetically.
Furthermore, Slashdot only soils itself when they post things with the slant "(Thieves) get shafted!" Many other good examples can be found in articles regarding P2P "sharing." I'd love to see Slashdot work harder to shed it's reputation as an editorial site run by people who think everything should be free. Maybe everything should be free, but there are better ways to achieve that than justifying lawlessness.
It's a ridiculous ploy by retailers, but it will serve them well. This year is going to suck badly for them and many of them will see a major stock sell-off when the numbers come out. They use the ads to draw people into the stores so they can profit on other items. There are plenty of reasons why they make less money if people can peruse the ads online, but I see this as a simple tactic... Cry DMCA this year and protect this year's crop. It doesn't have to be legit enough to hold up in court, it just has to scare people for one year.
I would have emailed a short, curt note saying you felt it was rude and that your services wouldn't be so easily had next time.
Now we just need to archive the delicious images from the defunct PC Accelerator featuring Stevie Case as the naughty teacher.
The other claim that sticks out in my head is "Why haven't we gone back if it's so easy?" Which frankly is a stupid way to make an argument. But it does seem that if we haven't gone back by this point, either there is some major technical hurdle we're not prepared to overcome, or more likely, the human race is simply regressing to focus its attention on petty political sqabbles rather than scientific achievement. It's fair to say "we're busy working on a bazillion dollar space station," or "why spend all that money to go pick up some more rocks," but either way, it would be interesting to put together a report showing what our modern technology could do towards doing a manned mission to the moon more safely, more cheaply, and with more beneficial results.
All of the "it was filmed on a soundstage" discussion is rather comical in this day and age of movie wizardry though.
Ahhh yes, because XP will protect your copyrighted material from even you! Sorry, I had to. Thanks for the info.
What bloody format is that avi encoded in? I do a lot of video editing, but my Win2k system doesn't have the correct video codec.
Memory/Bus speed, and altivec make the biggest performance differences on Macs, especially in OS X. CPU at 400 is not hardly different than CPU at 800.
But seriously, you can't pick apart this law, because its only teeth are the same words that prevent perfectly legitimate products and acts? The whole thing must go. Congress might come up with a laundry list of devices that are legitimate (Dreamcast serial cable) vs. devices that are often illegitimate (Xbox mod chip - hold the flames), but such a list would be instantly outdated. And then there's the problem of multiple classifications when people want to run Linux on their Xboxes and make all kinds of wonderfull new toys and usefull setups out of them. That is not copyright infringement, and yet it's prevented by a law that purports to be all about copyrights.
The DMCA should be taken off the books and the problem should be reapproached with new cooperation between enforcement and lawmakers, as well as a renewed ownous on industry to create solutions. Big media has ignored companies offering (more) secure solutions for years and let many of those companies dry up. It could have been a significant boon to the economy had the uber-rich media giants invested in these solutions rather than on lawyers and lobyists. Too often I heard them saying that Bertlesman / Napster was a test case and that its failure was their reason for reluctance. But what they failed to see was that Napster didn't have the desire to change their ways, let alone the experience and skill to come up with a valid solution. If these giant record labels and movie studios don't grow some balls and try some solutions...invest in some budding technologies, they deserve to fail.
I'm not an expert, but it appears to me that the DMCA doesn't protect copyrights that weren't already protected under existing laws.
Perhaps the legislative efforts should be focused on giving enforcement more ways to go after blatantly illegal networks and their users. Less public sharing channels could be gone after much the same way law enforcement goes after the mob. They don't outlaw baseball bats and guns, they catch someone in the act go up the tree from there by getting information and following known mobsters until they trip up.
Intel's troubles in the Itanium front may spur them to invest even MORE in DRM hoping to gain revenue from another market segment.
Legal issues schmissues. The school owns the network. And if a particular DHCP client or domain controller capable OS does something nasty, they can nix it. And furthermore, they can nix it regardless. Maybe you can have any OS you want in your dorm, just not on their network. Schools have been requiring students to choose particular computers (mostly hardware...Dell, Mac, etc) for years in order to make use of school provided services (tech support, file shares, groupware) with nobody standing up through the courts, so unless you're going to do it, it's not a legal issue. As always, there will be some kids smart enough to skirt the system, but this does affect the majority who don't know better, or who won't stand up for what they do know.
We will always see through this kind of bullshit. The best we can do is to educate others without seeming too fanatical to be taken seriously.
Offtopic my ass. This is a statement from someone who worked there who is giving testimony to what may have caused this.
It's not completely stupid to shrug off 25% of the web server market. Which division of Microsoft do you work for? (sorry, your post just sounded like it came from a PR firm) Sure you want to try to work on as many systems as possible, but most companies and open source efforts aren't big enough to cover all the bases. Just ask Oracle.
You must be new here.
So the set-top box is where Microsoft comes in. And now they've got Intel involved. Try sticking a mod-chip on your cpu. Wait until your parents and all the other tech-illiterate people out there are buying Dell's with DRM in the cpu and OS. It's going to get tougher and tougher to work around Microsoft's rules until the hackers out there put their efforts towards providing an equal or better alternative platform. And even if one day we do see an equal platform, good luck convincing the studios to encode their content for everyone.
Competition is the only thing that can defeat Microsoft at this point. The problem with creating an open DRM solution is that if the source is available, it's too easy for hackers to write tools to unlock content forever once a single license is granted. So while Microsoft is somewhat protected from these kinds of hacks by the DMCA, their primary competitor (Linux) is, by nature, not. So not only has the DOJ failed consumers, so has Congress. Other companies could take up the cause and build a DRM solution into other OSes, but Linux wouldn't be usable for this cause because the GNU license would force them to release their source code. Apple isn't going to step up to the plate on this one as they have too many other things to worry about, and with their closed hardware platform, there isn't any more competition to be had there. Right now the best most of us can do is to boycott MS and Intel, and to urge those around us to do the same. It's long past time to create an alternative.
I can only assume, so maybe someone could spell it out. Maybe even Bruce because it seems he, like myself, is going to have more time on his hands these days.
Everyone is correct to say that there was a problem and that something had to be done. That does not make Napster et al right. It was widespread looting. There is a system folks. Follow it or lose it.
- Incompetent or minimally experienced coder
- unmotivated
Are you interviewing for technical skills beyond your own? You're going to need some help if that's the case. Don't try to assume that because you're good at what you do, you'll be able to spot someone who is good at what they do, because that obviously isn't working out.If you're hiring people who just don't do a very good job, you're not weeding that out in the interview process (sorry, obvious). Source samples brought in can be immeasurably tainted. Don't try to learn much from them. A person may be able to recite their samples and explain the whys and hows of every line, but that can come from simply studying someone else's code. If they're incompetent, you need to schedule more time for, and be tougher in the interview. If they have to write code on a whiteboard for 3 hours, that's easily worth the investment. I've known people hired by Microsoft who would write code on a whiteboard for 8 hours to answer a single question. Don't finish their sentences. I see people doing that a lot, and then not really counting it against the interviewee in the evaluation meeting.
This is the person who has the requisit number of years experience in their field, but doesn't do any of it at home. Or maybe they bring their home projects into work when there's work to be done. Maybe they read TOO MUCH Slashdot (Me). Maybe this person worked in a team, and can easily mask their level of involvement. Find a way to weed these people out in the interview. They may seem less than excited after spending an hour writing code on the board. Ask them about projects where they felt like they carried the brunt of the load.
But of course, without knowing what kinds of problems you've had with the people you've tried, it's hard to say where you're going wrong. There's so much talent out there and out of work, that it's almost safe to say you should be looking only for people who've lead teams and done the majority of the work before. That can be a good indication of talent as well as motivation that you won't always have the luxury of filtering for.
Yet again the RIAA goes after someone other than the guilty parties (thieves). They're too stupid to figure out how to catch crooks so they want to blanket everyone with blackouts and annoying DRM's. It's time people stopped listening to and cowering to the RIAA.