For me, the "apology" doesn't sound heartfelt at all. It is easily written, doesn't cost much and makes good PR.
The value of any apology is that you are committing not to commit the same offense in future. If Amazon now repeats the same stunt with another book, there will be a massive impact on sales and public image of the company.
If you search slashdot using Google, the articles and comments you read are already used to deliver targeted advertisement and would probably be available to law enforcement. Why should searching an out-of-copyright book receive any more or less protection? If anything, the issues in old books are probably less related to present-day calamities than many of present-day blogs.
Every software has bugs, including security vulnerabilities. Actively fixing such bugs and releasing updates already gives a credit to a company, even if there is a slight delay incorporating patches into an official download. Complaining that initial download contains 9.1 vs 9.1.2 is just splitting hairs.
I am not sure if soot is an obstacle for infrared radiation mentioned in the article. For all we know, the lenses may not even be transparent to visible light to start with.
As someone who was there at the time, I can confirm that USSR fell because of glasnost. Once people learned that so much that they were told about the rest of the world, and especially US, was deception, government lost ability to motivate the masses. As I understand, with Putin/Medvedyev since are coming back to good old days, patriotism and all.
One could argue that move from time-sharing systems to PCs stifled innovation by constraining developers to 64-640k of memory and single-threaded applications running one at a time. Yet, lots of progress in using computers was made this way. Now we see a resurgence of modern time-sharing systems. While their administrators may impose restrictions, they enable many new options at the same time. For example, hosted apps make it easier for individual users to adopt Linux, since they are no longer tied to Windows apps. And employees enjoy an increase in privacy by using a word processor hosted over HTTPs as opposed to storing files on their work desktops. Neither personal nor time-sharing systems are going away, although an advance made in one or the other naturally attracts developers in that direction until the newness wears off.
As long as you provide the source code on demand, it doesn't matter if the binary only works for Windows or even if you are charged $1000 to get a copy. Splashtop is designed as a secondary system for Windows. Other installers are probably not their priority.
I am sure commercial users of Libreria derivative who bought it in good faith would mind if you break in - physically or logically - into their data centers and delete the software they rely on to run their businesses. Believe me or not, even if own rights are violated, you are legally and morally obligated to defend them in civilized manner. If you break into burglar's apartment to steal back your TV, you are going to jail.
About as long as it takes the producers to allow that. Steve Jobs made consistent statements in favor of DRM-free content and Apple introduced DRM-free music as soon as they could convince the record companies - even though it allows iTunes music to play on Palm Pre.
Precedent doesn't support using a trademark as an ersatz patent or copyright.
Which of the precedents you quoted restricts how a company develops it's own software? If Apple had a monopoly in either online music store or MP3 players, there may have been a case. But, although they are popular, there many other reasonably successful players in either sector.
They are able to do this precisely until they are found to be a monopoly in either market, at which point locking hardware (iPod is definitely at monopoly stage) and software (iTunes must have over half the music download market) is abusive behaviour.
Except they do no such locking at this point. iTunes music is now DRM-free and can be played on any device including Palm Pre. iTunes music library is an XML file with straightforward schema and there are various SDKs for accessing it even more easily. All Palm has to do is develop a separate preference panel to specify what gets synced.
What Apple is trying to prevent is people connecting a Palm and getting a tab in iTunes that has multiple occurrences of the word "iPod". This can be seen as a subtle case of trademark dilution.
It depends on what you mean by safe. There is a likely price of being compromised and there is a cost of spending two weeks of your time hunting down the CDs and reinstalling all your applications just the way they used to be. For most people, this is a prohibitive form of insurance compared to buying an antimalware tool. For example, the article's author was able to recover from the actual exploit in less time than it would have taken him to rebuild the PC in the first place.
The equation is very different if your data is extremely valuable (government top secret documents) or the value of your time is very little (most computer science students).
Do you complain that you can't fine tune your fuel injection enough for stoplights vs stop signs?
You do realize that custom performance profiles are a booming business for muscle car owners? Although, since my car supports ACPI and puts itself to sleep on stoplights and stop signs, I wouldn't really see the point.
On the other hand, I found Gentoo useful on a Mac, although I use Leopard most of the time. Sometimes you want the latest version of some package like Gimp and you don't want to manually track down RPMs for dozens of updated dependencies. Being able to customize your system from source is useful when you do need it.
We will never see a device with this variety of games - and this variety of games that older, more affluent gamers already know - in US. Instead companies are holding on to - or neglecting - old copyrights where they could be making decent money from products they haven't touched for 20 years. We need a system that only supports copyright owners who do something about their creation. Much shorter duration (that gets reset for derivative works, such as port to a new platform) and compulsory licensing of commercially abandoned products would do wonders for both creativity and wallets.
If I want reality, I turn off the computer. As for video games, they should:
1. Have graphics simple enough to quickly locate usable objects without having to strain through all the distractions. Myst series is a bad offender, especially since the objective is to solve puzzles. 2. Take you to an alternative world to take your mind away from real life 3. Be installable on a typical hard drive in dozens, without a need to hunt for - or worse swap - CDs or DVDs 4. Be playable in half an hour intervals, so that someone with kids can also participate.
I have the disposable income to buy pretty much all the titles I like and have time to play. Yet, chiefly because of #4, I am mostly downloading DOS games from abandon ware sites. I would gladly pay if someone was selling them for reasonable price and with instant download available. As a hobbyist, I think you would do well to write some adventure-style games and gain some audience without competition from most commercial developers.
I encourage you to investigate lovely things like "starving to death" and "debtors prisons" if you think a free market will solve all of our ills. What it does, it does perfectly -- but it can't do everything, and can't be trusted to do anything how we'd like it done.
To be fair, starving to death requires a society where nobody has moral, religious or pragmatic convictions to feed you. If anything, rich may institute food programs to the poor as a way to quell crime and forestall a bloody revault. And, debtor prisons have nothing to do with free market economy. One position is that nobody is forced to lend you money and, if they do, they are on the hook for the consequences. Finally, what's wrong with prostitutes and drug dealers? These are services that people want and, with some pot and some love, economy would be quite a bit better today.
On the other hand, I don't consider free market to be the most economically efficient. It will be dominated by huge corporations that have suffocated competition and have no incentive to innovate.
If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
You don't. However, most people do not know in advance if they will someday require a million dollar medical treatment. Therefore, it is to their advantage to pay a flat fee into a huge risk-amortization pool managed by US government. To avoid ethical questions about government's use of force, let people opt out of the pool and stop paying any related taxes. However, they will then have to rely on their own private hospitals for treatments, even in emergency. And organ donations made to public system will not be available for private transplants. Let them see if resources of 10 million mega-rich people can buy more MRI machines than resources of 300 million not-so-rich people. And rejoining the pool will not be easy/cheap as it's not fiscally sound to let people join the insurance pool only when they get sick.
So hard-core libertarians get to die on the road after a car accident, knowing that nobody forced them to pay taxes for a public ambulance service. And the rest of us, who think that government services are for emergencies such as fire, disaster relief or cancer and private sector is for extras like iPods, dining out or plastic surgery, get to have some peace of mind.
It is well established that public airwaves are subject to strict regulation, for example to exclude obscenity. It doesn't make sense to allow private entities to charge fees of their choosing to anyone who wants to receive these airwaves. It would be fine to patent one particular implementation of the decoder, but not all or most realistic implementations. The standard should have been chosen with royalty-free interoperability in mind. Now that the die is cast, the patents involved should be nationalized under eminent domain and owner compensated for development expenses and risks, but not $25 for every TV in America.
Hmm, we routinely "shut down" beings that we are pretty sure are conscious, if not very intelligent. Been to McDonald lately? And we certainly limit the amount of money to continue "supplying power" to human brains that have faulty transformers. Generally this is limited by the amount of money in the brain's checking account. Finally, we have no problem turning off computers who beat us at chess or algebra.
So I suspect that we'll have no problem shipping intelligent and possibly conscious computers to toxic dumps in third world countries. As long as they are not too cute, that is.
Only if the children in question are fucking or striking suggestive poses. What, you thought pictures of nude children are illegal? Think again, perhaps even of your baby album.
There are plenty of people who enjoy firearms for pleasure
While I all for any consensual activity taking place between adults, I think the line is crossed when the objects involved can kill others later. Just try breath play or, I don't know, use the gun that the nature already gave you.
People are always the problem, however you can chose to enable them or not with various laws. If an abusive husband doesn't have a gun handy, he may change his mind while looking for a suitable murder weapon, his wife may be able to run away from an object which is only effective at close range and also he is more likely to deliver a non-lethal blow. If gang members duke it out with knives, one is not that as likely to fly through the window and kill my sleeping child as a bullet would be.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, the "apology" doesn't sound heartfelt at all. It is easily written, doesn't cost much and makes good PR.
The value of any apology is that you are committing not to commit the same offense in future. If Amazon now repeats the same stunt with another book, there will be a massive impact on sales and public image of the company.
If you search slashdot using Google, the articles and comments you read are already used to deliver targeted advertisement and would probably be available to law enforcement. Why should searching an out-of-copyright book receive any more or less protection? If anything, the issues in old books are probably less related to present-day calamities than many of present-day blogs.
Every software has bugs, including security vulnerabilities. Actively fixing such bugs and releasing updates already gives a credit to a company, even if there is a slight delay incorporating patches into an official download. Complaining that initial download contains 9.1 vs 9.1.2 is just splitting hairs.
I am not sure if soot is an obstacle for infrared radiation mentioned in the article. For all we know, the lenses may not even be transparent to visible light to start with.
As someone who was there at the time, I can confirm that USSR fell because of glasnost. Once people learned that so much that they were told about the rest of the world, and especially US, was deception, government lost ability to motivate the masses. As I understand, with Putin/Medvedyev since are coming back to good old days, patriotism and all.
One could argue that move from time-sharing systems to PCs stifled innovation by constraining developers to 64-640k of memory and single-threaded applications running one at a time. Yet, lots of progress in using computers was made this way. Now we see a resurgence of modern time-sharing systems. While their administrators may impose restrictions, they enable many new options at the same time. For example, hosted apps make it easier for individual users to adopt Linux, since they are no longer tied to Windows apps. And employees enjoy an increase in privacy by using a word processor hosted over HTTPs as opposed to storing files on their work desktops. Neither personal nor time-sharing systems are going away, although an advance made in one or the other naturally attracts developers in that direction until the newness wears off.
As long as you provide the source code on demand, it doesn't matter if the binary only works for Windows or even if you are charged $1000 to get a copy. Splashtop is designed as a secondary system for Windows. Other installers are probably not their priority.
I am sure commercial users of Libreria derivative who bought it in good faith would mind if you break in - physically or logically - into their data centers and delete the software they rely on to run their businesses. Believe me or not, even if own rights are violated, you are legally and morally obligated to defend them in civilized manner. If you break into burglar's apartment to steal back your TV, you are going to jail.
But how long until video follows music's lead?
About as long as it takes the producers to allow that. Steve Jobs made consistent statements in favor of DRM-free content and Apple introduced DRM-free music as soon as they could convince the record companies - even though it allows iTunes music to play on Palm Pre.
Precedent doesn't support using a trademark as an ersatz patent or copyright.
Which of the precedents you quoted restricts how a company develops it's own software? If Apple had a monopoly in either online music store or MP3 players, there may have been a case. But, although they are popular, there many other reasonably successful players in either sector.
They are able to do this precisely until they are found to be a monopoly in either market, at which point locking hardware (iPod is definitely at monopoly stage) and software (iTunes must have over half the music download market) is abusive behaviour.
Except they do no such locking at this point. iTunes music is now DRM-free and can be played on any device including Palm Pre. iTunes music library is an XML file with straightforward schema and there are various SDKs for accessing it even more easily. All Palm has to do is develop a separate preference panel to specify what gets synced.
What Apple is trying to prevent is people connecting a Palm and getting a tab in iTunes that has multiple occurrences of the word "iPod". This can be seen as a subtle case of trademark dilution.
It depends on what you mean by safe. There is a likely price of being compromised and there is a cost of spending two weeks of your time hunting down the CDs and reinstalling all your applications just the way they used to be. For most people, this is a prohibitive form of insurance compared to buying an antimalware tool. For example, the article's author was able to recover from the actual exploit in less time than it would have taken him to rebuild the PC in the first place.
The equation is very different if your data is extremely valuable (government top secret documents) or the value of your time is very little (most computer science students).
Do you complain that you can't fine tune your fuel injection enough for stoplights vs stop signs?
You do realize that custom performance profiles are a booming business for muscle car owners? Although, since my car supports ACPI and puts itself to sleep on stoplights and stop signs, I wouldn't really see the point.
On the other hand, I found Gentoo useful on a Mac, although I use Leopard most of the time. Sometimes you want the latest version of some package like Gimp and you don't want to manually track down RPMs for dozens of updated dependencies. Being able to customize your system from source is useful when you do need it.
I think $10-odd price is reasonable, but I should be able to use it on a platform of my choice through compulsory licensing.
If it keeps you wet for 70 years after your death, your shower has clearly not been narrowly tailored towards the purpose of making you clean.
We will never see a device with this variety of games - and this variety of games that older, more affluent gamers already know - in US. Instead companies are holding on to - or neglecting - old copyrights where they could be making decent money from products they haven't touched for 20 years. We need a system that only supports copyright owners who do something about their creation. Much shorter duration (that gets reset for derivative works, such as port to a new platform) and compulsory licensing of commercially abandoned products would do wonders for both creativity and wallets.
If I want reality, I turn off the computer. As for video games, they should:
1. Have graphics simple enough to quickly locate usable objects without having to strain through all the distractions. Myst series is a bad offender, especially since the objective is to solve puzzles.
2. Take you to an alternative world to take your mind away from real life
3. Be installable on a typical hard drive in dozens, without a need to hunt for - or worse swap - CDs or DVDs
4. Be playable in half an hour intervals, so that someone with kids can also participate.
I have the disposable income to buy pretty much all the titles I like and have time to play. Yet, chiefly because of #4, I am mostly downloading DOS games from abandon ware sites. I would gladly pay if someone was selling them for reasonable price and with instant download available. As a hobbyist, I think you would do well to write some adventure-style games and gain some audience without competition from most commercial developers.
Cue in to Apple ads where people are sent to Best Buy to find an operating system for fifty bucks.
I encourage you to investigate lovely things like "starving to death" and "debtors prisons" if you think a free market will solve all of our ills. What it does, it does perfectly -- but it can't do everything, and can't be trusted to do anything how we'd like it done.
To be fair, starving to death requires a society where nobody has moral, religious or pragmatic convictions to feed you. If anything, rich may institute food programs to the poor as a way to quell crime and forestall a bloody revault. And, debtor prisons have nothing to do with free market economy. One position is that nobody is forced to lend you money and, if they do, they are on the hook for the consequences. Finally, what's wrong with prostitutes and drug dealers? These are services that people want and, with some pot and some love, economy would be quite a bit better today.
On the other hand, I don't consider free market to be the most economically efficient. It will be dominated by huge corporations that have suffocated competition and have no incentive to innovate.
If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
You don't. However, most people do not know in advance if they will someday require a million dollar medical treatment. Therefore, it is to their advantage to pay a flat fee into a huge risk-amortization pool managed by US government. To avoid ethical questions about government's use of force, let people opt out of the pool and stop paying any related taxes. However, they will then have to rely on their own private hospitals for treatments, even in emergency. And organ donations made to public system will not be available for private transplants. Let them see if resources of 10 million mega-rich people can buy more MRI machines than resources of 300 million not-so-rich people. And rejoining the pool will not be easy/cheap as it's not fiscally sound to let people join the insurance pool only when they get sick.
So hard-core libertarians get to die on the road after a car accident, knowing that nobody forced them to pay taxes for a public ambulance service. And the rest of us, who think that government services are for emergencies such as fire, disaster relief or cancer and private sector is for extras like iPods, dining out or plastic surgery, get to have some peace of mind.
It is well established that public airwaves are subject to strict regulation, for example to exclude obscenity. It doesn't make sense to allow private entities to charge fees of their choosing to anyone who wants to receive these airwaves. It would be fine to patent one particular implementation of the decoder, but not all or most realistic implementations. The standard should have been chosen with royalty-free interoperability in mind. Now that the die is cast, the patents involved should be nationalized under eminent domain and owner compensated for development expenses and risks, but not $25 for every TV in America.
Hmm, we routinely "shut down" beings that we are pretty sure are conscious, if not very intelligent. Been to McDonald lately? And we certainly limit the amount of money to continue "supplying power" to human brains that have faulty transformers. Generally this is limited by the amount of money in the brain's checking account. Finally, we have no problem turning off computers who beat us at chess or algebra.
So I suspect that we'll have no problem shipping intelligent and possibly conscious computers to toxic dumps in third world countries. As long as they are not too cute, that is.
Only if the children in question are fucking or striking suggestive poses. What, you thought pictures of nude children are illegal? Think again, perhaps even of your baby album.
Virtual machines don't support hardware accelerated gaming
I am sorry to hear Windows is lacking behind Mac in concurrent gaming area. Under MacOSX they generally do.
There are plenty of people who enjoy firearms for pleasure
While I all for any consensual activity taking place between adults, I think the line is crossed when the objects involved can kill others later. Just try breath play or, I don't know, use the gun that the nature already gave you.
People are always the problem, however you can chose to enable them or not with various laws. If an abusive husband doesn't have a gun handy, he may change his mind while looking for a suitable murder weapon, his wife may be able to run away from an object which is only effective at close range and also he is more likely to deliver a non-lethal blow. If gang members duke it out with knives, one is not that as likely to fly through the window and kill my sleeping child as a bullet would be.