First off, realize that Microsoft has no right to demand a license to write compatible software to connect to their service. Reverse-engineering is and always has been a legitimate practice and, if you're trying to achieve interoperability, is expressly granted by copyright law. Microsoft demanding a license to write compatible IM software is exactly analogous to Pacific Bell/QWest/BellSouth demanding a license from Radio Shack to manufacture compatible telephone sets -- which is to say, they can't.
As such, I recommend you deal with Microsoft as if you were in the superior position (because you are). Your first question to them should be, "What are you going to do for us to make this worth our while?" Since you have ably demonstrated you're willing to go ahead on your own, do not give Microsoft any other choice other than to offer you a sweet deal.
And if they fail to do so, walk out. Remember: you are in control, and under no obligation to agree to anything. Your right to achieve interoperability exists whether Microsoft "licenses" it to you or not.
You begin from the endpoint. Software belongs to the copyright owners and is licensed to the users. This is the starting point.
That is incorrect.
The correct starting point is to look around yourself and notice reality.
Reality is that computers are designed to copy data, without prejudice. This is how it always has been; this is how it always will be. This is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of copyright. So one of them needs to be fundamentally reexamined.
Perhaps I am wrong for doing so, but I value very highly the near-infinite flexibility and power afforded by computers and their ability to transform numbers and information into new forms. I do not want to see these abilities limited in any way whatsoever.
So I choose to reexamine copyright. I choose to deconstruct and analyze what social benefits copyright tries to accomplish, and see if there are different ways to achieve the same (or better!) social benefits with a different structure. And I discover, to my delight, that the existing copyright regime probably can be junked and replaced with a new construct, and still keep most everyone happy.
The alternative viewpoint -- to reexamine computers -- in my opinion would cause far too much social damage and give even more power to unaccountable, already-entrenched interests.
My editorial, though it does not directly address the issue of unsanctioned copying in a world where copying is ubiquitous and cheap (although see this essay for some thoughts on that issue), is possibly the most detailed introduction I have yet written into the idea that, just maybe, the "social bargain" of copyright -- at least as applied to computer software -- might be just the slightest bit out of whack.
Even assuming your characterization of the FSF were at all accurate, you use this term as if such an agenda were prima facie a bad thing.
Also, kindly observe that my editorial predates RMS's short story The Right to Read by a few years. RMS has also expressly repudiated my editorial, owing to my assertion about one-third of the way in, "For the sake of argument, I presume most of us can agree that copying software is bad."
Glib dismissal may please the members already in your gallery, but it will not change minds or win you converts. You're going to have to be more thoughtful and do more work for that.
Software has every right to phone home. It's what software does, i.e. it executes code that it was told to execute. If you believe (as I believe) that software has the right to be Free (as in Freedom), then you have to be in favor of software publishers reserving the right to verify that you are not using their software in violation of agreement [... ].
What a load of fetid rabbit droppings.
As a software developer, your "rights" extend exactly as far as the computer's owner decides they should. You are a guest in another person's castle. Your presence there is a privilege, and you will respect the sanctity of their castle and all that goes on there.
This is all part of a nearly-forgotten code of behavior known as, "Common Courtesy."
As for these "agreements" of which you speak, I commend you to the editorial I wrote on the subject.
Adobe would be my first guess as well. They've been snots about this sort of thing for well over ten years.
Back in the day when Photoshop only existed on the Mac, it would ping your LAN to see if another copy of Photoshop was running with the same serial number. If it found one, it would refuse to launch. That's about the limit of obnoxiousness anyone should tolerate.
Nope, your first translation is incorrect. Recall that i-- is a post-decrement operation; the decrement always happens, but the lvalue of i is the value it has before it gets decremented. This means you'll end up with the following:
I used to do that a long time ago, too, until I realized what it was doing:
for (i = MAX; i--; ) {... }
i gets copied to a temporary, i is decremented (read-modify-write), then the temporary (the value i used to have) is tested against zero. Quite ugly.
for (i = MAX; --i >= 0; ) {... }
i gets decremented immediately. On most CPUs, this also sets the condition flags according to the result. The result is then compared to zero -- Oh, look, we already have those conditions laying around, so we can drop in a branch instruction right away. Also, no temporary variable is involved.
If an undergraduate experienced in C were asked to do the same problem the code would look very similar. Hardly a trade secret.
Yeah, and you'd also think that, if an undergraduate student were asked to write a simple cursor display routine, they'd naturally use XOR. Hardly a secret, novel technique, right?
Wrong. A bunch of assholes under the name of CadTrak patented the XOR cursor techynique, and successfully sued companies over it. The patent finally expired a few years ago.
Now while SCO is currently litigating a contract dispute, there's no reason to believe they won't expand into frivolous patents as well. Indeed, given their track record, how many people here honestly believe the USPTO wouldn't grant a patent on a first-fit memory allocation algorithm?
when you see [the register keyword] in code, it is almost always old code, copied from somewhere.
...Or perhaps it's new code written by an old fart who knows through long, bitter experience that there's no such thing as an optimizing compiler.
I have yet to witness a compiler that did anything even remotely clever with register usage, much less correctly identify where the performance hot-spots were. Hell, I still use a couple of coding idioms that puzzle most people because of bugs in ancient compilers, or just because I know how the compiler should be turning the code into assembly.
Please, Mr. McBride. Attempting to draw a parallel between yourself and James Bond is beyond laughable. The only legitimate similarily between your plight and a Bond yarn is that they are both complete works of fiction.
If an analogy must be drawn, it obviously must be to the character of Ernst Blofeld, a crippled has-been defeated early in Bond's career, who now foolishly pursues revenge, thereby relegating himself to little more than a minor, if shrill, annoyance. Even that white cat was more competent than Blofeld...
Back in the days of Word 5.1a (the last good version), I recall hidden data only getting saved if you used Word's "Fast Save" feature. Since Fast Save wasn't measurably faster, I turned it off. Is this no longer the case? (A quick look through the preferences panel in my copy of Word reveals a Fast Save option; it's turned off.)
This is a copy of a message I sent to a mailing list some time back. They are the guidelines I use when updating my Windows system.
______________________
Some tricks -- mostly born out of antipathy and paranoia -- on dealing with Windoze Update:
Never accept the default update selections as, in true Micros~1 tradition, they're always wrong. Deselect everything and then select only those pieces you want/need.
Never download HW device drivers from Microsoft. Always get them from the HW vendor. The vendor knows more about supporting their own hardware than MS possibly could, so it makes little sense to get them from MS. MS might also take it upon themselves to slip in copy protection measures, which you don't want.
Don't update DirectX through Windows Update; it does not and never has worked. Instead, download separately the very large DirectX update package from Microsoft and install it by hand.
Don't install the next major version of Internet Explorer, as it's sure to disrupt your system. EXCEPTION: If you're using IE5, you should patch to IE v5.5. IE5 had boatloads of bugs (quelle surprise) which have mostly been addressed in 5.5.
Don't install the next major version of Windows Media Player. This is where Microsoft's copy protection and usage monitoring measures will first appear in earnest, which you don't want to support. Also, it's not a very good player; there are better free ones available.
Do download security updates, but be wary of such updates for Windows Media, as Microsoft are trying to change the definition of the word, "security."
Other things you might want to do:
Unless you are using the calendar/scheduling system, there is absolutely no reason for you to be using Outlook/Outlook Express, and every reason not to. Delete it. With extreme prejudice.
Download the DivX;-) video codec. You can also install their player, but you don't need to; the codec is usable by any application.
Download and run RegClean.exe. It's a bit tough to find, but it's a good tool for cleaning the fluff out of the registry from time to time.
Download and install VirtuaWin, a virtual desktop manager for Windows. This increases the utility of the Windows desktop ten-fold. I hate to tell people about it since it makes Windows tremendously more useful. (It's so nifty, I expect Microsoft to "invent" it in the next major Windows release.)
Although I mostly live in Win2K (when I'm not in Linux or BeOS), I have a Win98 partition that's still working fine without a single re-install. Basically, if you take a minimalist approach, and presume Microsoft to be an untrustworthy/unreliable source, you can greatly extend the life of your Windows installation.
Is it just me, or is this nearly the identical condition that triggered the 1965 blackout?
At 17:15:11, 9 November 1965, an overload at a generation plant near Niagara Falls tripped out a relay, whose load was dumped on adjacent lines, overloading them and tripping them out. The effect cascaded down the power network and, within fifteen minutes, almost all of New England and eastern Canada was in darkness.
It's almost 40 years later, and it's beginning to sound like the same damn thing happened again!
I imagine the "troubled partnership" between Micros~1 and NVidia is largely based on the fact that NVidia made damn sure they had a good contract in place.
NVidia and Microsoft cut their deal when NVidia was the undisputed leader in graphics chips, and Microsoft was the undisputed leader in anti-trust crimes. NVidia, being founded in part by ex-Sun employees, knew full well that dealing with Microsoft was a sure-fire way to get screwed. So no small amount of time was spent making absolutely certain the contract between them left no room for "creative misinterpretation" on either side.
I imagine NVidia wants/wanted to exercise the same care in the Xbox2 deal, but Microsoft would rather have someone they can walk over. Hence the "troubled partnership."
Right now, the trend/plan is to kill tags at the cash register when the item is purchased. You may have noticed that that is already being done to enable you to leave the store without setting off an alarm.
Uh huh, right.
Assuming the RFID has a globally unique serial number in addition to a UPC code, then all that has to happen at the register is for that serial number to be marked as, "purchased." Then when you walk out the door, the computer sees the serial number, looks it up in the database and sees that it's been purchased, and doesn't sound the alarm. A software-only solution that's much more "cost-effective" than designing the extra circuitry for a killable RFID.
It also has the added "benefit" of allowing the retailer to scan the cloud of RFID numbers coming off you as you enter the store (or even as you stroll past the entrance), thereby triggering special discounts or incentives ("We're having a special on shirts that match those pants you're wearing.").
In effect, what you're working on will afford unprecedented snooping powers to government agencies as well as corporate entities (who, unlike government agencies, don't even have to pretend to be accountable). And, of course, it will do absolutely nothing to improve public safety.
So, ordinarily, I'd decry BayTSP for being a bunch of soulless mercenaries who, like their employers, are simply out to make a buck for themselves without giving a single thought to the long-term repercussions of their actions. But then I thought harder, and came up with a way for BayTSP to redeem themselves.
If, as BayTSP claims, there is nowhere to hide, that they can turn any Internet identity into a realspace name and address and serve them with a subpoena, then I hereby charge BayTSP with the following mission:
Find and publish the identity of each and every spammer on the Internet.
By doing this, BayTSP will be contributing to the quality of the Internet community, rather than tearing it apart for meager economic gain.
what should/can be done by OSS project leads to ensure that all code others contribute is entirely legal?
Well, first of all, if all the symbols are in Hungarian notation, it's a fairly safe bet it's tainted code. No competent, sane programmer uses that style.
Second, a port of code from Outlook to KMail would introduce a bug, not a feature.
And finally (a serious answer), there is no way for OSS project leaders to determine by looking at it if a piece of code labors under copyright or trade secret restrictions. Patent problems are ostensibly easier to check, since patents are public (ha ha, very ha), but in practice it's just as impossible. Indeed, from the outside, there is no way to tell if tainted code introduced to an OSS project was an "honest mistake" or deliberate sabotage by hostile forces.
The only reason closed-source software vendors haven't fallen on each other like a pack of hyenas is because they keep their code -- and their potential copyright and patent transgressions -- hidden. (And they don't always succeed; just ask Informix.)
This is but one reason why Open Source is superior. It doesn't have the luxury of concealing wrongdoing, so it has to not only be scrupulously reliable, it has to be scrupulously honest. Open Source interprets patents as damage and codes around them. Thus, patent holders are not infringed against wantonly, OSS remains immune to frivolous patent claims, and you get reliable, inexpensive software. Everyone wins.
They have made it abundantly clear that if we don't support DRM, they will not give us any content. There is no room for negotiation. [... ] When every single company you work with is starting to make those demands, you have no chance but to comply.
While I can appreciate that you believe yourself to be in a bind, you are, in fact, in no such position.
Once you analyze it, what these childish organizations are telling you is:
"Either you sacrifice your personal morals and ethics and give us Digital Restriction Mechanisms, or,
We will refuse to enter this market."
Analyze this closely: They are making it plain that they will stay out of the market, leaving it wide open for new entrants to innovate and provide new products and services that don't require copy protection. Frankly, I can't imagine a sweeter deal for people wanting to get in on the ground floor of digital distribution and be utterly unconcerned that Sony or whoever will waltz in with their marketing powerhouse and take it away from them.
It is these new entrants that you want to be dealing with, not the shrill, bleating organizations demanding you create something you don't want to exist. Besides, the new entrants are likely to be far more imaginative than the older organizations you've been dealing with, and the work will probably be much more fun. And once it becomes clear that staying out of the market is "costing" them more money than entering the market without copy protection, the older organizations' shareholders will see to it that management is replaced with less childish, wiser, more forward-thinking people.
While it may not seem so, you are in the driver's seat. They are petitioning you, not the other way around. You can afford to stand firm on your principles, and say No to copy protection. They may walk out the door today, but they will be back tomorrow. The superior economics of digital distribution give them little choice.
You see, Diebold's customers for ATM machines -- the banks -- have a vested interest in making certain that no money leaves their hands that isn't supposed to. Even their internal practices and procedures assume the employees to be untrustworthy. So the banks obviously gave Diebold a requirements document that ensures that no money leaves an ATM that isn't supposed to.
OTOH, Diebold's customers for voting systems -- the Republicans (yeah, I know, cheap shot, so sue me) -- have a vested interest in keeping their positions of power. Hence, the requirements document Diebold got from them was very likely bereft of any security considerations whatsoever.
Back in the days of Minox spy cameras, that might have made sense. Now it's just silly. Does your prohibition also mean no cell phones with cameras in them? How about laptop computers with cameras in them? Or digital cameras with video record features (which is most of them)?
Copyright is obsolete. Starting thinking about what you want to replace it with.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, realize that Microsoft has no right to demand a license to write compatible software to connect to their service. Reverse-engineering is and always has been a legitimate practice and, if you're trying to achieve interoperability, is expressly granted by copyright law. Microsoft demanding a license to write compatible IM software is exactly analogous to Pacific Bell/QWest/BellSouth demanding a license from Radio Shack to manufacture compatible telephone sets -- which is to say, they can't.
As such, I recommend you deal with Microsoft as if you were in the superior position (because you are). Your first question to them should be, "What are you going to do for us to make this worth our while?" Since you have ably demonstrated you're willing to go ahead on your own, do not give Microsoft any other choice other than to offer you a sweet deal.
And if they fail to do so, walk out. Remember: you are in control, and under no obligation to agree to anything. Your right to achieve interoperability exists whether Microsoft "licenses" it to you or not.
Best of fortune to you.
Schwab
That is incorrect.
The correct starting point is to look around yourself and notice reality.
Reality is that computers are designed to copy data, without prejudice. This is how it always has been; this is how it always will be. This is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of copyright. So one of them needs to be fundamentally reexamined.
Perhaps I am wrong for doing so, but I value very highly the near-infinite flexibility and power afforded by computers and their ability to transform numbers and information into new forms. I do not want to see these abilities limited in any way whatsoever.
So I choose to reexamine copyright. I choose to deconstruct and analyze what social benefits copyright tries to accomplish, and see if there are different ways to achieve the same (or better!) social benefits with a different structure. And I discover, to my delight, that the existing copyright regime probably can be junked and replaced with a new construct, and still keep most everyone happy.
The alternative viewpoint -- to reexamine computers -- in my opinion would cause far too much social damage and give even more power to unaccountable, already-entrenched interests.
My editorial, though it does not directly address the issue of unsanctioned copying in a world where copying is ubiquitous and cheap (although see this essay for some thoughts on that issue), is possibly the most detailed introduction I have yet written into the idea that, just maybe, the "social bargain" of copyright -- at least as applied to computer software -- might be just the slightest bit out of whack.
Schwab
Even assuming your characterization of the FSF were at all accurate, you use this term as if such an agenda were prima facie a bad thing.
Also, kindly observe that my editorial predates RMS's short story The Right to Read by a few years. RMS has also expressly repudiated my editorial, owing to my assertion about one-third of the way in, "For the sake of argument, I presume most of us can agree that copying software is bad."
Glib dismissal may please the members already in your gallery, but it will not change minds or win you converts. You're going to have to be more thoughtful and do more work for that.
Schwab
What a load of fetid rabbit droppings.
As a software developer, your "rights" extend exactly as far as the computer's owner decides they should. You are a guest in another person's castle. Your presence there is a privilege, and you will respect the sanctity of their castle and all that goes on there.
This is all part of a nearly-forgotten code of behavior known as, "Common Courtesy."
As for these "agreements" of which you speak, I commend you to the editorial I wrote on the subject.
Schwab
Adobe would be my first guess as well. They've been snots about this sort of thing for well over ten years.
Back in the day when Photoshop only existed on the Mac, it would ping your LAN to see if another copy of Photoshop was running with the same serial number. If it found one, it would refuse to launch. That's about the limit of obnoxiousness anyone should tolerate.
Schwab
Nope, your first translation is incorrect. Recall that i-- is a post-decrement operation; the decrement always happens, but the lvalue of i is the value it has before it gets decremented. This means you'll end up with the following:
There's a MOV and TST in there that don't need to be there. Your second translation was more correct:
Schwab
I used to do that a long time ago, too, until I realized what it was doing:
for (i = MAX; i--; ) { ... }
i gets copied to a temporary, i is decremented (read-modify-write), then the temporary (the value i used to have) is tested against zero. Quite ugly.
for (i = MAX; --i >= 0; ) { ... }
i gets decremented immediately. On most CPUs, this also sets the condition flags according to the result. The result is then compared to zero -- Oh, look, we already have those conditions laying around, so we can drop in a branch instruction right away. Also, no temporary variable is involved.
Schwab
The tone of your reply makes it clear you wouldn't know shitty code if walked up and blue-screened on you.
Quick test: Which for statement will compile more efficient code (no fair peeking at your compiler's output):
for (i = 0; i < MAX; i++) { ... }
for (i = MAX; --i >= 0; ) { ... }
Schwab
Yeah, and you'd also think that, if an undergraduate student were asked to write a simple cursor display routine, they'd naturally use XOR. Hardly a secret, novel technique, right?
Wrong. A bunch of assholes under the name of CadTrak patented the XOR cursor techynique, and successfully sued companies over it. The patent finally expired a few years ago.
Now while SCO is currently litigating a contract dispute, there's no reason to believe they won't expand into frivolous patents as well. Indeed, given their track record, how many people here honestly believe the USPTO wouldn't grant a patent on a first-fit memory allocation algorithm?
Schwab
...Or perhaps it's new code written by an old fart who knows through long, bitter experience that there's no such thing as an optimizing compiler.
I have yet to witness a compiler that did anything even remotely clever with register usage, much less correctly identify where the performance hot-spots were. Hell, I still use a couple of coding idioms that puzzle most people because of bugs in ancient compilers, or just because I know how the compiler should be turning the code into assembly.
So yeah, I still use register from time to time.
Schwab
I wonder if Martin Rimm is the guy conducting SCO's "analysis" to locate plagiarized code?
Schwab
Please, Mr. McBride. Attempting to draw a parallel between yourself and James Bond is beyond laughable. The only legitimate similarily between your plight and a Bond yarn is that they are both complete works of fiction.
If an analogy must be drawn, it obviously must be to the character of Ernst Blofeld, a crippled has-been defeated early in Bond's career, who now foolishly pursues revenge, thereby relegating himself to little more than a minor, if shrill, annoyance. Even that white cat was more competent than Blofeld...
Schwab
Back in the days of Word 5.1a (the last good version), I recall hidden data only getting saved if you used Word's "Fast Save" feature. Since Fast Save wasn't measurably faster, I turned it off. Is this no longer the case? (A quick look through the preferences panel in my copy of Word reveals a Fast Save option; it's turned off.)
Schwab
This is a copy of a message I sent to a mailing list some time back. They are the guidelines I use when updating my Windows system.
______________________
Some tricks -- mostly born out of antipathy and paranoia -- on dealing with Windoze Update:
Other things you might want to do:
Although I mostly live in Win2K (when I'm not in Linux or BeOS), I have a Win98 partition that's still working fine without a single re-install. Basically, if you take a minimalist approach, and presume Microsoft to be an untrustworthy/unreliable source, you can greatly extend the life of your Windows installation.
Schwab
Is it just me, or is this nearly the identical condition that triggered the 1965 blackout?
At 17:15:11, 9 November 1965, an overload at a generation plant near Niagara Falls tripped out a relay, whose load was dumped on adjacent lines, overloading them and tripping them out. The effect cascaded down the power network and, within fifteen minutes, almost all of New England and eastern Canada was in darkness.
It's almost 40 years later, and it's beginning to sound like the same damn thing happened again!
Schwab
Y'know, I'm fairly agnostic as things go, but if I got an email from God Almighty asking to be my friend, I'd be hard pressed to turn it down.
Schwab
I imagine the "troubled partnership" between Micros~1 and NVidia is largely based on the fact that NVidia made damn sure they had a good contract in place.
NVidia and Microsoft cut their deal when NVidia was the undisputed leader in graphics chips, and Microsoft was the undisputed leader in anti-trust crimes. NVidia, being founded in part by ex-Sun employees, knew full well that dealing with Microsoft was a sure-fire way to get screwed. So no small amount of time was spent making absolutely certain the contract between them left no room for "creative misinterpretation" on either side.
I imagine NVidia wants/wanted to exercise the same care in the Xbox2 deal, but Microsoft would rather have someone they can walk over. Hence the "troubled partnership."
This is, of course, all pure speculation.
Schwab
Uh huh, right.
Assuming the RFID has a globally unique serial number in addition to a UPC code, then all that has to happen at the register is for that serial number to be marked as, "purchased." Then when you walk out the door, the computer sees the serial number, looks it up in the database and sees that it's been purchased, and doesn't sound the alarm. A software-only solution that's much more "cost-effective" than designing the extra circuitry for a killable RFID.
It also has the added "benefit" of allowing the retailer to scan the cloud of RFID numbers coming off you as you enter the store (or even as you stroll past the entrance), thereby triggering special discounts or incentives ("We're having a special on shirts that match those pants you're wearing.").
In effect, what you're working on will afford unprecedented snooping powers to government agencies as well as corporate entities (who, unlike government agencies, don't even have to pretend to be accountable). And, of course, it will do absolutely nothing to improve public safety.
Schwab
It's a single keystroke command: U
Schwab
Who read the Quickstart tutorial.
So, ordinarily, I'd decry BayTSP for being a bunch of soulless mercenaries who, like their employers, are simply out to make a buck for themselves without giving a single thought to the long-term repercussions of their actions. But then I thought harder, and came up with a way for BayTSP to redeem themselves.
If, as BayTSP claims, there is nowhere to hide, that they can turn any Internet identity into a realspace name and address and serve them with a subpoena, then I hereby charge BayTSP with the following mission:
Find and publish the identity of each and every spammer on the Internet.
By doing this, BayTSP will be contributing to the quality of the Internet community, rather than tearing it apart for meager economic gain.
Schwab
Well, first of all, if all the symbols are in Hungarian notation, it's a fairly safe bet it's tainted code. No competent, sane programmer uses that style.
Second, a port of code from Outlook to KMail would introduce a bug, not a feature.
And finally (a serious answer), there is no way for OSS project leaders to determine by looking at it if a piece of code labors under copyright or trade secret restrictions. Patent problems are ostensibly easier to check, since patents are public (ha ha, very ha), but in practice it's just as impossible. Indeed, from the outside, there is no way to tell if tainted code introduced to an OSS project was an "honest mistake" or deliberate sabotage by hostile forces.
The only reason closed-source software vendors haven't fallen on each other like a pack of hyenas is because they keep their code -- and their potential copyright and patent transgressions -- hidden. (And they don't always succeed; just ask Informix.)
This is but one reason why Open Source is superior. It doesn't have the luxury of concealing wrongdoing, so it has to not only be scrupulously reliable, it has to be scrupulously honest. Open Source interprets patents as damage and codes around them. Thus, patent holders are not infringed against wantonly, OSS remains immune to frivolous patent claims, and you get reliable, inexpensive software. Everyone wins.
Schwab
While I can appreciate that you believe yourself to be in a bind, you are, in fact, in no such position.
Once you analyze it, what these childish organizations are telling you is:
Analyze this closely: They are making it plain that they will stay out of the market, leaving it wide open for new entrants to innovate and provide new products and services that don't require copy protection. Frankly, I can't imagine a sweeter deal for people wanting to get in on the ground floor of digital distribution and be utterly unconcerned that Sony or whoever will waltz in with their marketing powerhouse and take it away from them.
It is these new entrants that you want to be dealing with, not the shrill, bleating organizations demanding you create something you don't want to exist. Besides, the new entrants are likely to be far more imaginative than the older organizations you've been dealing with, and the work will probably be much more fun. And once it becomes clear that staying out of the market is "costing" them more money than entering the market without copy protection, the older organizations' shareholders will see to it that management is replaced with less childish, wiser, more forward-thinking people.
While it may not seem so, you are in the driver's seat. They are petitioning you, not the other way around. You can afford to stand firm on your principles, and say No to copy protection. They may walk out the door today, but they will be back tomorrow. The superior economics of digital distribution give them little choice.
Schwab
Another bunch of guys who cobbled together a report on Diebold's laughable voting machines is available here, complete with plenty of screen shots.
Schwab
Nope.
You see, Diebold's customers for ATM machines -- the banks -- have a vested interest in making certain that no money leaves their hands that isn't supposed to. Even their internal practices and procedures assume the employees to be untrustworthy. So the banks obviously gave Diebold a requirements document that ensures that no money leaves an ATM that isn't supposed to.
OTOH, Diebold's customers for voting systems -- the Republicans (yeah, I know, cheap shot, so sue me) -- have a vested interest in keeping their positions of power. Hence, the requirements document Diebold got from them was very likely bereft of any security considerations whatsoever.
Or, to put it another way: "Follow the money."
Schwab
Back in the days of Minox spy cameras, that might have made sense. Now it's just silly. Does your prohibition also mean no cell phones with cameras in them? How about laptop computers with cameras in them? Or digital cameras with video record features (which is most of them)?
Copyright is obsolete. Starting thinking about what you want to replace it with.
Schwab