In each of your three cases, there was no contract between the user and the producer. Microsoft claims that their EULA prevents you from reverse engineering or reselling Windows; but in my opinion that the EULA is a meaningless document with no legal force, exactly as valid as me writing "by reading this post you agree to pay me $500". However, if Microsoft had required me to sign an actual contract before purchasing their software, and that contract stipulated that I was not allowed to reverse engineer or resell it, I see no reason why that should not be enforceable. If I don't like the terms of the contract, I don't have to sign it.
Not me, but I will firmly claim that it is much better than China.
When you criticize China, are you doing so because you've really thought about the issues, or because that's all the media has told you to do here?
I criticize the Chinese government because they are fundamentally hostile to individual freedom, believe that the citizens exist to serve them, and have no reservations about abusing their people to maintain their power. Yes, I know you can list things the US government has done that are not good, but the magnitude of the abuses is not comparable. Even the fact that you can criticize the US in this forum is a testament to the freedom that you enjoy here that you would not in China.
I agree completely. The 85% of it I saw was fantastic. Of course my VCR set to record for one hour failed to get the last 10 minutes, thanks for the warning UPN. Off to Morpheus tonight.
I'm astounded that it was able to get a PG rating with the Tara-Willow scene.
Stephen King did not use the street performer protocol. He required a certain percentage of downloaders to pay
Moderate the parent up, it's exactly correct. This was one of the major flaws in King's system, the other being that payments weren't refunded if the goal was not met. The Street Performer Protocol requires this so that potential customers don't risk getting nothing for their payment.
This is the flavor we get from the small-government, get-the-Fed-out conservatives.
Huh? The SSSCA is diametrically opposed to the conservative philosophy of limited and constitutional government. Note that the leading proponent is a Democrat. I'm sure several misguided Republicans will support it too, but blaming this on conservatives doesn't make much sense.
Bull. They slaughtered thousands of innocent people, for the specific purpose of slaughtering thousands of innocent people. The men, women, and children that they murdered had nothing to do with the allegedly unreasonable policies of the US government. These terrorists (note lack of quotation marks) are as close to pure evil as you're going to find, and for the sake of all civilized people they must be destroyed.
It also sends the message that "we're just fine out here by ourselves" which, judging by the predatory actions of MS, Disney, RIAA, etc., isn't true at all
But most of these predatory actions are only possible because corporations can use government force as their proxy. Without the DMCA and grossly unbalanced copyright laws, the **AAs would have far less power, and the ridiculous terms of Microsoft's "licenses" would be laughed out of court. We don't need help from the government, we just need the government to stop screwing us over and undo the damage that it has done (by repealing the bad laws, not making new ones).
If a corporation benefits, it does not automatically mean that the general public loses. If oil companies can use 2000 acres out of 15,000,000 in ANWR, resulting in cheaper oil and less dependence on the Middle East, that's good for everyone. And the arsenic issue was beaten to death months ago, but I'll repeat what I said then: if miniscule amounts of arsenic are so deadly, why did Clinton and Gore wait 8 years before enacting regulations, the cost of which would be paid only after they were out of office?
Has there been ANY decision that the Bush administration has made that hasn't come down on that corporate side of things?
Well, he's rejected a national ID card, which surely disappoints Larry Ellison. I disagree with your implication that things would be better under Gore. Clinton and Gore presided over the Clipper chip, Carnivore, Know Your Customer, CDA, DMCA, COPA, etc, etc. Anybody looking to Democrats for civil liberties is going to be disappointed, because they recognize no limits on government power. At least some Republicans grasp the concept of limited government, even if they don't always apply it.
does the average user on a Mac OS X system have sufficent privlages to destroy anything outside of his home directory?
"Admin" users do, non-admin users don't. The default user account Mac OS X sets up is a member of the admin group, and can create other admin and non-admin users./Applications and/Library are root/admin and group-writable. The kernel and/System are only writable by root, as are the/bin,/usr/bin,/usr/lib and other "Unix" directories. An admin user doing rm -rf / would trash the installed applications, but probably wouldn't render the system unbootable (although I'm not willing to test that right now...)
What does IBM think about this bill? They invested a lot of money in Linux, what do they think about Linux becoming illegal?
I'm not sure they'd mind terribly. They might figure that the SSSCA would expand the market for their government-approved AIX version. Likewise for Sun and Solaris. And here's a scary thought I just had: bytecode-based languages like Java could become a key tool for enforcement. Try to open an MP3 file, get a NoCopyrightAuthorizationException, and of course any tools which allowed you to directly access the bits on "your" computer would be illegal.
The one company I would expect to be 100% opposed to this is Apple. Their "digital hub" strategy is based on being able to freely move data between different devices.
In your otherwise masterful display of rhetoric, you seem to have left out the part where you actually refuted my statement. Here's another article that says the same thing.
Sorry, it wasn't clear that you were referring to clicking on normal banners instead of popups.
It is my firm beleif that banner ads would have been sufficient for the internet if people hadn't been so obstinate about trying to get rid of them.
And I maintain that that's very unlikely, given the small percentage of users that use ad blockers. Even before blockers had any kind of mainstream publicity, I recall seeing articles about how banner ads were not as effective as advertisers had hoped.
I'd say it is the content providers right to not have his page altered by anyone who views it.
First, there is no such right. Publishers can control redistribution of their products, but not use (ignoring the DMCA for now). Second, the nature of HTML makes it fundamentally impossible to not "alter" the page as you view it.
Much like the debate about the MS smart tags. One of the biggest things people were against was that they changed a content providers pages without their constent.
True, and that was a bogus argument. If the end user wants to use smart tags, that should be his choice.
Did that make things (or my view of them) any clearer?
Yeah, I don't think we're that much in disagreement. If people would stick to simple banner ads, I probably wouldn't bother blocking them. But it's already been established that banner ads don't produce sufficient results for advertisers, so we've been sucked into the cycle of more obnoxious ads/better ad blockers.
The fundamental problem is that online ads of any type are just not as valuable as lots of people thought they were, and in most cases are not a sufficient business model. They're going to be replaced by something else, whether it's subscriptions, micropayments, or voluntary contributions.
Doesn't really bother anyone, and if it is interesting... I click.
Of course by accepting and clicking on popup ads you are encouraging their further use, which will cause even more people to investigate ad blockers.
I'm equally depressed by the sorry mofos that use filters. That is kinda like stealing.
It is nothing like stealing. The provider makes the content publicly available, and it is my right to view all or part of it in any way I choose. Is it also stealing if I load the banner but simply ignore it? Is it stealing unless I consciously base my purchase decisions on how many banner ads I've seen for each product?
i'm not being specious, but where is this in the Constitution? Bill of Rights? anywhere? i honestly don't think anonymity is a "right".
(IANAL) The 1st Amendment says that the right to free speech shall not be infringed. Free speech is the ability to say what you want to, and to not say what you don't want to. If you do not want to state your identity, government attempts to force you to do are a violation of your rights.
if they did, they can break any encryption you cared to apply to it, because all it takes is cycles.
The time required for a brute force crack is exponential with the key size. The energy output of the sun over its entire lifetime is not enough to power a computer to count to 2^256, let alone crack a 256-bit key.
Oh, but record labels and book publishers would LOVE to limit sales of used product.
Which would actually work against their best interests. If I know that I can't resell a CD that I buy, I won't be willing to pay as much for it because its value has been decreased. Rational capitalists do not spend their resources trying to make their products less valuable. Of course, it is obvious by now that RIAA members are neither rational nor capitalists.
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In each of your three cases, there was no contract between the user and the producer. Microsoft claims that their EULA prevents you from reverse engineering or reselling Windows; but in my opinion that the EULA is a meaningless document with no legal force, exactly as valid as me writing "by reading this post you agree to pay me $500". However, if Microsoft had required me to sign an actual contract before purchasing their software, and that contract stipulated that I was not allowed to reverse engineer or resell it, I see no reason why that should not be enforceable. If I don't like the terms of the contract, I don't have to sign it.
Which is exactly why the DMCA and privacy violations must be stopped now, before they become worse.
Not me, but I will firmly claim that it is much better than China.
When you criticize China, are you doing so because you've really thought about the issues, or because that's all the media has told you to do here?
I criticize the Chinese government because they are fundamentally hostile to individual freedom, believe that the citizens exist to serve them, and have no reservations about abusing their people to maintain their power. Yes, I know you can list things the US government has done that are not good, but the magnitude of the abuses is not comparable. Even the fact that you can criticize the US in this forum is a testament to the freedom that you enjoy here that you would not in China.
I'm astounded that it was able to get a PG rating with the Tara-Willow scene.
Which is the root of the problem. It shouldn't matter whether DVDs are classified as film or software, fair use rights should exist for both.
<burns>Excellent</burns>. Now to craft a lawsuit against Sun for their unauthorized use of the >>> operator in Java...
Wouldn't that be x*27? x <<< 1 would be x*3.
Hello moderators, this is not offtopic.
Could you post your speech or your notes? Sounds like it would be good talking points for letters to Congresscritters.
Moderate the parent up, it's exactly correct. This was one of the major flaws in King's system, the other being that payments weren't refunded if the goal was not met. The Street Performer Protocol requires this so that potential customers don't risk getting nothing for their payment.
Huh? The SSSCA is diametrically opposed to the conservative philosophy of limited and constitutional government. Note that the leading proponent is a Democrat. I'm sure several misguided Republicans will support it too, but blaming this on conservatives doesn't make much sense.
Please list the actions of the United States for which "retaliation" by murdering 5000 innocent civilians is justifiable.
Bull. They slaughtered thousands of innocent people, for the specific purpose of slaughtering thousands of innocent people. The men, women, and children that they murdered had nothing to do with the allegedly unreasonable policies of the US government. These terrorists (note lack of quotation marks) are as close to pure evil as you're going to find, and for the sake of all civilized people they must be destroyed.
But most of these predatory actions are only possible because corporations can use government force as their proxy. Without the DMCA and grossly unbalanced copyright laws, the **AAs would have far less power, and the ridiculous terms of Microsoft's "licenses" would be laughed out of court. We don't need help from the government, we just need the government to stop screwing us over and undo the damage that it has done (by repealing the bad laws, not making new ones).
Has there been ANY decision that the Bush administration has made that hasn't come down on that corporate side of things?
Well, he's rejected a national ID card, which surely disappoints Larry Ellison. I disagree with your implication that things would be better under Gore. Clinton and Gore presided over the Clipper chip, Carnivore, Know Your Customer, CDA, DMCA, COPA, etc, etc. Anybody looking to Democrats for civil liberties is going to be disappointed, because they recognize no limits on government power. At least some Republicans grasp the concept of limited government, even if they don't always apply it.
Umm, no. Apple does not develop Microsoft Internet Explorer.
"Admin" users do, non-admin users don't. The default user account Mac OS X sets up is a member of the admin group, and can create other admin and non-admin users.
I'm not sure they'd mind terribly. They might figure that the SSSCA would expand the market for their government-approved AIX version. Likewise for Sun and Solaris. And here's a scary thought I just had: bytecode-based languages like Java could become a key tool for enforcement. Try to open an MP3 file, get a NoCopyrightAuthorizationException, and of course any tools which allowed you to directly access the bits on "your" computer would be illegal.
The one company I would expect to be 100% opposed to this is Apple. Their "digital hub" strategy is based on being able to freely move data between different devices.
In your otherwise masterful display of rhetoric, you seem to have left out the part where you actually refuted my statement. Here's another article that says the same thing.
For the record, the Bush administration has ruled out national ID cards. Not that I expect democrats.com to rely on facts.
Sorry, it wasn't clear that you were referring to clicking on normal banners instead of popups.
It is my firm beleif that banner ads would have been sufficient for the internet if people hadn't been so obstinate about trying to get rid of them.
And I maintain that that's very unlikely, given the small percentage of users that use ad blockers. Even before blockers had any kind of mainstream publicity, I recall seeing articles about how banner ads were not as effective as advertisers had hoped.
I'd say it is the content providers right to not have his page altered by anyone who views it.
First, there is no such right. Publishers can control redistribution of their products, but not use (ignoring the DMCA for now). Second, the nature of HTML makes it fundamentally impossible to not "alter" the page as you view it.
Much like the debate about the MS smart tags. One of the biggest things people were against was that they changed a content providers pages without their constent.
True, and that was a bogus argument. If the end user wants to use smart tags, that should be his choice.
Did that make things (or my view of them) any clearer?
Yeah, I don't think we're that much in disagreement. If people would stick to simple banner ads, I probably wouldn't bother blocking them. But it's already been established that banner ads don't produce sufficient results for advertisers, so we've been sucked into the cycle of more obnoxious ads/better ad blockers.
The fundamental problem is that online ads of any type are just not as valuable as lots of people thought they were, and in most cases are not a sufficient business model. They're going to be replaced by something else, whether it's subscriptions, micropayments, or voluntary contributions.
Of course by accepting and clicking on popup ads you are encouraging their further use, which will cause even more people to investigate ad blockers.
I'm equally depressed by the sorry mofos that use filters. That is kinda like stealing.
It is nothing like stealing. The provider makes the content publicly available, and it is my right to view all or part of it in any way I choose. Is it also stealing if I load the banner but simply ignore it? Is it stealing unless I consciously base my purchase decisions on how many banner ads I've seen for each product?
And wasn't opening the "real" Pandora's box a bad idea? It appears that Microsoft was accidentally more truthful than they intended.
(IANAL) The 1st Amendment says that the right to free speech shall not be infringed. Free speech is the ability to say what you want to, and to not say what you don't want to. If you do not want to state your identity, government attempts to force you to do are a violation of your rights.
if they did, they can break any encryption you cared to apply to it, because all it takes is cycles.
The time required for a brute force crack is exponential with the key size. The energy output of the sun over its entire lifetime is not enough to power a computer to count to 2^256, let alone crack a 256-bit key.
Which would actually work against their best interests. If I know that I can't resell a CD that I buy, I won't be willing to pay as much for it because its value has been decreased. Rational capitalists do not spend their resources trying to make their products less valuable. Of course, it is obvious by now that RIAA members are neither rational nor capitalists.