I would be continually amazed at all the really stupid stuff governments and corporate executives try to do (come to think of it, there really isn't a whole lot of difference except that in democratic countries there are laws against what the former can do while corporations run roughshod)
Exactly the opposite. When morons in government want to eliminate your rights, they pass a law and shoot those who disobey. (I'm told we have a "Constitution" thingy, but apparently it's mostly an historical curiosity these days). When corporate morons want to eliminate your rights, they can do so only by convincing government to act as their proxy. The MPAA can bitch and moan all they want about the scourge of piracy and how all computers must be redesigned to increase their profits, but it takes an act of Congress to actually make it happen.
Support any and all campaign finance reform that regulates the contributions -- limits their size, limits their frequency and mandates reporting.
Aside from the fact that this is probably unconstitutional, it won't work. Big Money, Inc. will always be able to find ways to pay off their congresscritters, and all you'll do is prevent real grass-roots organizations from expressing their views. The real solution is to elect candidates who understand that government should not have unlimited power and should not be in the business of dispensing handouts to favored groups. Unfortunately, most voters have repeatedly shown that they care less about freedom than about getting federal pork and reciting "for the children" mantras.
True, and it makes perfect sense. The DMCA and its buddies are direct assaults on the concept of general purpose computing. If things continue on their present course, it will eventually be illegal for you to open the case of "your" computer, or use it in any other way that Disney or Microsoft disapproves of.
For how long has the music economy been socialist?
For quite a while. This is hardly their first attack on the free market. The DMCA and whatever the SSSCA is called this week are blatantly anti-capitalist; their primary goal is to use government guns to protect their outdated business models from new competitors.
Since when did MS become more evil than Sony? Many people here seem to be getting a PS2 because MS is evil yet we all know how much more evil Sony really is.
Excellent point. At the risk of invoking Godwin, the current PS2-Xbox war reminds me of the battle of Stalingrad. I'd be quite happy if there were a way for both of them to lose.
I doubt that; it does come with a (almost certainly low-end) ATI graphics card. Of course, there's no reason you have to have the GUI running, it is Unix after all. And when Aqua is running but not doing anything its CPU usage is extremely close to 0. (It would be using memory though, so you're still better off disabling it unless you need it for some reason).
In the first case, rebates, this is the sort of explicit gamble that is more analogous to the advertiser showing you a commercial and hoping you will buy the product.
Agreed, and I'd argue that whether or not I pay attention to the commercial is also part of their gamble.
If they wanted to charge you 18% on everything you buy, they could. But then you would get a different credit card. Again, the company has some control over the pricing of their product.
True, but TV broadcasters also have control over the pricing of their product; they could make their shows pay-per-view or put them on cable channels. But like credit card companies they choose to make the base product free (or less, my card pays me 1%), and also bundle a revenue-generating product with negative utility for the customer (ads for TV, high-interest loans for credit cards). In both cases they are betting that customers will "use" these bundled products without taking the effort to unbundle them. That's certainly their right, but I fail to see how it can be my ethical responsibility to validate a such a business model.
So maybe ad-supported TV goes away. Really, so what? I can easily see this leading to an increase in quality, since a show would then have to be good enough for viewers to pay for, rather than just watching it because it's on. This would especially help shows with relatively low ratings but a strong following. While millions more people watch Friends than Futurama, I bet the percentage of those willing to pay for each would be quite different.
Ok, exactly how much do I have to cooperate with a corporation's business model to be "ethical"? They employ business models all the time that assume that customers will not act in their best interests. Rebates are another example; they assume that many or most customers won't send them in, so is it "unethical" if I actually do?
ask yourself, what would happen if everyone did what I do - would the result be a good one or a bad one?
This doesn't always apply. I pay off my credit card bill every month. If everyone did this, credit card companies would lose huge amounts of interest income and either go out of business or charge cardholders more. Am I being immoral by declining to pay 18% interest rates?
Now, you mentioned the "leader in freedom and democracy," who is the ONLY industrialized, democratic nation that has refused to sign, in fact "unsigned" what was previously signed this treat. Yup, the United States.
Yes, because we have this wacky notion that Americans accused of crimes should be afforded the protection of the US legal system, rather than being hauled before unelected and unaccountable UN bureaucrats with political axes to grind. (There's already been talk of bringing Sharon before the ICC, but none for Arafat, I can't imagine why...)
They've been trying for years to claim that there is no evidence that smoking causes diseases such as lung cancer, bringing in their own paid "scientists" into "debates" in an attempt to legitimize their "viewpoint".
That was really stupid of them. They should have said something like "Yes, our product is unhealthy; so is candy, fast food, and sitting in front of the TV all day. But this is America, and people have the right to make unhealthy choices". Blatantly lying to the public rarely works out in the long term.
Philip Morris ("Phillip"?) recently published a report on the "indirect positive economic effects of early death". Thats sickening.
Maybe, but it's also true. A RAND studay has shown that by dying earlier and collecting less Social Security and Medicare benefits, smokers pay substantially more in cigarette taxes than they cost the public in increased medical care. This is probably why governments at all levels would rather raise taxes on cigarettes than ban them, even when they are more than willing to ban other drugs that are far less dangerous.
yes I know you can plug a three button mouse into a MAC, try using right click to bring up context sensitive menus.
Just in case somebody takes this troll seriously, Mac OS X has full support for multiple mouse buttons and context menus. I'm using a Microsoft optical mouse; the extra buttons and scroll wheel work out of the box with no driver needed. Also for future reference, using "MAC" instead of "Mac" is a clear sign that you have no idea what you are talking about.
However, if you and everyone else choose to ignore the commercials, you can kiss TV goodbye.
Showtime and HBO appear to be doing rather well.
It's not enough to say "they have a lousy business model". That's a cop-out.
Why? Some business models are just crappy and deserve to die; that's part of capitalism.
as soon as you buy a device to strip them from the show, you're violating the contract between the TV station and you
Please supply a definition of "contract" that makes this sentence remotely accurate. Does this "contract" also require me to actively buy the products of the advertisers? After all, if I don't, I'm reducing the value of the advertising and ultimately "stealing" just as much from the station.
This is, by the way, 100% equivalent to using internet ad blockers.
So there is a temporary iterator object, but it's only in the scope of the for loop so it doesn't really bother me. I'm actually more annoyed with the cast, hopefully the generics in 1.5 will take care of that.
Apple people laughing at X Window system, while they know that Apple leech the community and refuse to share Aqua.
Apple to my knowledge has never bad-mouthed X Windows; in fact the Unix ad you mention shows XDarwin running. And Apple has opened up far more of their source than they are required to. Yes, they're only releasing some of the code they've spent millions of dollars writing, rather than all of it. That hardly makes them the enemy.
something that can have an EULA pasted in to it, parse it (as best it can) and churn out a nice, short, readable summary that ditches all the standard rubbish and tells you in plain English what your rights are when you install the software.
Yeesh, natural language parsers are hard enough, and you want to parse lawyer-speak? Good luck. On the other hand, a program to list only *your* rights under most EULAs is trivial:
Because Microsoft says something does not make it true. See the recent Adobe bundling case, where the ruling was that if it looks like a sale, it's a sale.
It's like I walked down the street, unbolted the "NO PARKING ANYTIME" sign from the post and say "well, I didn't agree to the sign, so I removed it, and now I can park here persuant to normal traffic laws!"
Do you own the "No Parking" sign? Probably not, so you're guilty of vandalism at a minimum. On the other hand, you do own the *copy* of the software.
That's an excellent idea, and you might not even have to go that far. Most EULAs have a clause saying something to the effect of "this license will terminate without notice if you violate any of the terms". Great! As soon as I violate the terms (say, "reverse engineering" by opening the executable in a hex editor), the EULA is void and I now have a piece of software that I can use in accordance with standard copyright law. Of course, this assumes that EULAs have any validity to begin with, which I don't believe, but it's yet another example of how ludicrous the entire concept is.
But to actively take income from people simply because you don't approve of their business model is heinous.
Anti-spyware programs are no more robbing you of income than VCR makers rob advertisers by including fast-forward buttons. You've chosen a business model (a poor one, IMHO) that relies on consumers accepting and responding to advertising. You have that right, but you have no right to control their systems to enforce that model.
You do have a valid point that anti-spyware programs should fully inform the user as to the effects of removing spyware. But attacking users who are trying to assert some control over what runs on their machines is preposterous.
Um, we have a shiny new 100 billion dollar deficit, a neverending "war" on a common noun that gives an administration carte blanc to imprison whomever they want for eternity
All of which have full bipartisan support. In fact, most of the complaints about the Patriot Act I hear come from conservatives who are rightly concerned with what someone like Hillary could do with that expanded power.
The NYT story and most of the others that reported that Bush won the recount were extremely erroneous. Frankly, if you exclude the military vote illegally cast after the election was over, Gore would have won.
Ok, I'll trust your obviously impartial opinion over the detailed studies of several left-leaning newspapers. Or not. If all the legal military votes had been counted, Bush would have won by even more. I'm really not interested in getting into the whole postmark/consent decree thing again, but everyone except those completely blinded by their hatred of Republicans has accepted the repeatedly verified results and moved on.
8 years of prosperity and peace, with a healed Social Security system, gone.
Those are some impressive drugs you have. Clinton inherited a good economy from GHWB (yes, we were well out of recession before the 1992 elections), managed not to screw it up too badly thanks to Republicans blocking his more destructive plans (i.e. HillaryCare), and handed W a failing economy which is now largely turned around. Regarding peace, Clinton repeatedly failed to deal effectively with terrorism, unless blowing up asprin factories is an innovative military strategy I'm unfamiliar with. Social Security was never financially sound (you don't really believe there's a "trust fund", do you?), and never will be until it is shifted from a pay-as-you-go Ponzi scheme into an actual investement program. Of course liberals can't allow that since it means fewer retired people dependent on government, and thus fewer Democrat votes.
Presently, a President selected into office by a dirty network of far-right wingers, including 4 on the SCOTUS
Hmm, since the relevant SCOTUS ruling was 7-2, does that mean that 3 of the noble and pure left-wingers were in on the plot as well?
give the foxes the keys to the henhouse corporatewise
The best you guys can come up with is Enron, which is instructive because there is no indication whatsoever that they received any assistance from the Bush administration. And even if they did, I'd much prefer that our politicians are bought by American corporations than the Chinese military.
Keeping this vaguely on topic, it has to be really annoying for you that virtually all the support for the CBDTPA comes from Democrats. I'd expect nothing less; since liberals acknowledge no limits on government power, when their campaign contributers tell them to destroy another industry for their own benefit, they will do so without hesitation. I'm disappointed that conservatives didn't stand up for the Constitution and oppose the DMCA, but at least they're standing up for free enterprise and opposing Hollings's abomination.
Mac OS X users should check out SlashDock, which is also free and has similar functionality. It sits in the dock and polls the XML feeds of the sites you select (you can add new ones too), and flashes the icons of new stories when they appear.
Yeah, that's a really screwy ruling. Peak was sued because they "copied" (to RAM) MAI's software in the process of servicing computers owned by third parties, and since they were not the "owners" of the copy of MAI software they got no protection from 17 USC 117. While this is clearly insane, it doesn't look like it affects the rights of a normal user who buys and installs commercial software, since he is an "owner of a copy". Even so, I can't believe this ruling was allowed to stand; it would appear to make a criminal out of any consultant who turns on a client's computer.
No, perhaps not, but consider this: if you don't consider it binding, you have a cdrom and packaging, but no right to copy the data thereon.
I don't know how this meme got started, but it's entirely false. See 17 USC 117; it is not a violation of copyright to make a copy of software if doing so is an "essential step" in using it.
Everyone seems to agree that EULAs are legal in as far as they are enforcable (just like any other contract).
Er, I certainly don't agree to that. A EULA is not a contract, primarily because there is no consideration. It purports to give you the right to run the software, but you already have that right (see 17 USC 117, so a EULA attempts to remove your rights in exchange for nothing. Also, you are presented with a EULA after you've already paid for the software; it attempts to retroactively convert a sale into a "license", which seems just a tiny bit fishy.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly the opposite. When morons in government want to eliminate your rights, they pass a law and shoot those who disobey. (I'm told we have a "Constitution" thingy, but apparently it's mostly an historical curiosity these days). When corporate morons want to eliminate your rights, they can do so only by convincing government to act as their proxy. The MPAA can bitch and moan all they want about the scourge of piracy and how all computers must be redesigned to increase their profits, but it takes an act of Congress to actually make it happen.
Aside from the fact that this is probably unconstitutional, it won't work. Big Money, Inc. will always be able to find ways to pay off their congresscritters, and all you'll do is prevent real grass-roots organizations from expressing their views. The real solution is to elect candidates who understand that government should not have unlimited power and should not be in the business of dispensing handouts to favored groups. Unfortunately, most voters have repeatedly shown that they care less about freedom than about getting federal pork and reciting "for the children" mantras.
True, and it makes perfect sense. The DMCA and its buddies are direct assaults on the concept of general purpose computing. If things continue on their present course, it will eventually be illegal for you to open the case of "your" computer, or use it in any other way that Disney or Microsoft disapproves of.
For quite a while. This is hardly their first attack on the free market. The DMCA and whatever the SSSCA is called this week are blatantly anti-capitalist; their primary goal is to use government guns to protect their outdated business models from new competitors.
Excellent point. At the risk of invoking Godwin, the current PS2-Xbox war reminds me of the battle of Stalingrad. I'd be quite happy if there were a way for both of them to lose.
I doubt that; it does come with a (almost certainly low-end) ATI graphics card. Of course, there's no reason you have to have the GUI running, it is Unix after all. And when Aqua is running but not doing anything its CPU usage is extremely close to 0. (It would be using memory though, so you're still better off disabling it unless you need it for some reason).
Agreed, and I'd argue that whether or not I pay attention to the commercial is also part of their gamble.
If they wanted to charge you 18% on everything you buy, they could. But then you would get a different credit card. Again, the company has some control over the pricing of their product.
True, but TV broadcasters also have control over the pricing of their product; they could make their shows pay-per-view or put them on cable channels. But like credit card companies they choose to make the base product free (or less, my card pays me 1%), and also bundle a revenue-generating product with negative utility for the customer (ads for TV, high-interest loans for credit cards). In both cases they are betting that customers will "use" these bundled products without taking the effort to unbundle them. That's certainly their right, but I fail to see how it can be my ethical responsibility to validate a such a business model.
So maybe ad-supported TV goes away. Really, so what? I can easily see this leading to an increase in quality, since a show would then have to be good enough for viewers to pay for, rather than just watching it because it's on. This would especially help shows with relatively low ratings but a strong following. While millions more people watch Friends than Futurama, I bet the percentage of those willing to pay for each would be quite different.
ask yourself, what would happen if everyone did what I do - would the result be a good one or a bad one?
This doesn't always apply. I pay off my credit card bill every month. If everyone did this, credit card companies would lose huge amounts of interest income and either go out of business or charge cardholders more. Am I being immoral by declining to pay 18% interest rates?
Yes, because we have this wacky notion that Americans accused of crimes should be afforded the protection of the US legal system, rather than being hauled before unelected and unaccountable UN bureaucrats with political axes to grind. (There's already been talk of bringing Sharon before the ICC, but none for Arafat, I can't imagine why...)
That was really stupid of them. They should have said something like "Yes, our product is unhealthy; so is candy, fast food, and sitting in front of the TV all day. But this is America, and people have the right to make unhealthy choices". Blatantly lying to the public rarely works out in the long term.
Philip Morris ("Phillip"?) recently published a report on the "indirect positive economic effects of early death". Thats sickening.
Maybe, but it's also true. A RAND studay has shown that by dying earlier and collecting less Social Security and Medicare benefits, smokers pay substantially more in cigarette taxes than they cost the public in increased medical care. This is probably why governments at all levels would rather raise taxes on cigarettes than ban them, even when they are more than willing to ban other drugs that are far less dangerous.
Just in case somebody takes this troll seriously, Mac OS X has full support for multiple mouse buttons and context menus. I'm using a Microsoft optical mouse; the extra buttons and scroll wheel work out of the box with no driver needed. Also for future reference, using "MAC" instead of "Mac" is a clear sign that you have no idea what you are talking about.
This is not true. If you don't accept the GPL, standard copyright applies and you can exercise fair use rights, including running the software.
20th century democide. Note the plethora of socialist countries and lack of capitalist countries among the top murderers.
Showtime and HBO appear to be doing rather well.
It's not enough to say "they have a lousy business model". That's a cop-out.
Why? Some business models are just crappy and deserve to die; that's part of capitalism.
as soon as you buy a device to strip them from the show, you're violating the contract between the TV station and you
Please supply a definition of "contract" that makes this sentence remotely accurate. Does this "contract" also require me to actively buy the products of the advertisers? After all, if I don't, I'm reducing the value of the advertising and ultimately "stealing" just as much from the station.
This is, by the way, 100% equivalent to using internet ad blockers.
Yes, and neither is legally or morally wrong.
Which is fine until you get handed a linked list instead, and your algorithm goes from N to N^2. I like to write iterators like this:
for(Iterator i=list.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
SomeClass obj = (SomeClass)i.next();
}
So there is a temporary iterator object, but it's only in the scope of the for loop so it doesn't really bother me. I'm actually more annoyed with the cast, hopefully the generics in 1.5 will take care of that.
Apple to my knowledge has never bad-mouthed X Windows; in fact the Unix ad you mention shows XDarwin running. And Apple has opened up far more of their source than they are required to. Yes, they're only releasing some of the code they've spent millions of dollars writing, rather than all of it. That hardly makes them the enemy.
Yeesh, natural language parsers are hard enough, and you want to parse lawyer-speak? Good luck. On the other hand, a program to list only *your* rights under most EULAs is trivial:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("0\n");
return 0;
}
Because Microsoft says something does not make it true. See the recent Adobe bundling case, where the ruling was that if it looks like a sale, it's a sale.
It's like I walked down the street, unbolted the "NO PARKING ANYTIME" sign from the post and say "well, I didn't agree to the sign, so I removed it, and now I can park here persuant to normal traffic laws!"
Do you own the "No Parking" sign? Probably not, so you're guilty of vandalism at a minimum. On the other hand, you do own the *copy* of the software.
That's an excellent idea, and you might not even have to go that far. Most EULAs have a clause saying something to the effect of "this license will terminate without notice if you violate any of the terms". Great! As soon as I violate the terms (say, "reverse engineering" by opening the executable in a hex editor), the EULA is void and I now have a piece of software that I can use in accordance with standard copyright law. Of course, this assumes that EULAs have any validity to begin with, which I don't believe, but it's yet another example of how ludicrous the entire concept is.
Anti-spyware programs are no more robbing you of income than VCR makers rob advertisers by including fast-forward buttons. You've chosen a business model (a poor one, IMHO) that relies on consumers accepting and responding to advertising. You have that right, but you have no right to control their systems to enforce that model.
You do have a valid point that anti-spyware programs should fully inform the user as to the effects of removing spyware. But attacking users who are trying to assert some control over what runs on their machines is preposterous.
Um, we have a shiny new 100 billion dollar deficit, a neverending "war" on a common noun that gives an administration carte blanc to imprison whomever they want for eternity
All of which have full bipartisan support. In fact, most of the complaints about the Patriot Act I hear come from conservatives who are rightly concerned with what someone like Hillary could do with that expanded power.
The NYT story and most of the others that reported that Bush won the recount were extremely erroneous. Frankly, if you exclude the military vote illegally cast after the election was over, Gore would have won.
Ok, I'll trust your obviously impartial opinion over the detailed studies of several left-leaning newspapers. Or not. If all the legal military votes had been counted, Bush would have won by even more. I'm really not interested in getting into the whole postmark/consent decree thing again, but everyone except those completely blinded by their hatred of Republicans has accepted the repeatedly verified results and moved on.
8 years of prosperity and peace, with a healed Social Security system, gone.
Those are some impressive drugs you have. Clinton inherited a good economy from GHWB (yes, we were well out of recession before the 1992 elections), managed not to screw it up too badly thanks to Republicans blocking his more destructive plans (i.e. HillaryCare), and handed W a failing economy which is now largely turned around. Regarding peace, Clinton repeatedly failed to deal effectively with terrorism, unless blowing up asprin factories is an innovative military strategy I'm unfamiliar with. Social Security was never financially sound (you don't really believe there's a "trust fund", do you?), and never will be until it is shifted from a pay-as-you-go Ponzi scheme into an actual investement program. Of course liberals can't allow that since it means fewer retired people dependent on government, and thus fewer Democrat votes.
Presently, a President selected into office by a dirty network of far-right wingers, including 4 on the SCOTUS
Hmm, since the relevant SCOTUS ruling was 7-2, does that mean that 3 of the noble and pure left-wingers were in on the plot as well?
give the foxes the keys to the henhouse corporatewise
The best you guys can come up with is Enron, which is instructive because there is no indication whatsoever that they received any assistance from the Bush administration. And even if they did, I'd much prefer that our politicians are bought by American corporations than the Chinese military.
Keeping this vaguely on topic, it has to be really annoying for you that virtually all the support for the CBDTPA comes from Democrats. I'd expect nothing less; since liberals acknowledge no limits on government power, when their campaign contributers tell them to destroy another industry for their own benefit, they will do so without hesitation. I'm disappointed that conservatives didn't stand up for the Constitution and oppose the DMCA, but at least they're standing up for free enterprise and opposing Hollings's abomination.
Mac OS X users should check out SlashDock, which is also free and has similar functionality. It sits in the dock and polls the XML feeds of the sites you select (you can add new ones too), and flashes the icons of new stories when they appear.
Yeah, that's a really screwy ruling. Peak was sued because they "copied" (to RAM) MAI's software in the process of servicing computers owned by third parties, and since they were not the "owners" of the copy of MAI software they got no protection from 17 USC 117. While this is clearly insane, it doesn't look like it affects the rights of a normal user who buys and installs commercial software, since he is an "owner of a copy". Even so, I can't believe this ruling was allowed to stand; it would appear to make a criminal out of any consultant who turns on a client's computer.
I don't know how this meme got started, but it's entirely false. See 17 USC 117; it is not a violation of copyright to make a copy of software if doing so is an "essential step" in using it.
Er, I certainly don't agree to that. A EULA is not a contract, primarily because there is no consideration. It purports to give you the right to run the software, but you already have that right (see 17 USC 117, so a EULA attempts to remove your rights in exchange for nothing. Also, you are presented with a EULA after you've already paid for the software; it attempts to retroactively convert a sale into a "license", which seems just a tiny bit fishy.