I am curious - how would your idea apply to art (illustration, graphic design, etc)? I'm not so sure that alternate forms of payment would come up...
Well, most graphic artists at the moment get paid for doing bespoke designs - websites, book covers, adverts, and so on.
So the answer is - pretty much the same way they do now.
There are a lot of people who, if they didn't have copyright laws to protect their creations, wouldn't create them, either because those creations cost too much or simply because there was a more profitable use of their time.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? This is really the problem - people making
broad claims for or against copyright, but no one actually spending any time to
find out what is the truth of the matter.
As for football -- well, people played football commercially before TV rights allowed
players to get enormous salaries. Those older players didn't earn as much in
a week as most people earn in a year, yet football was still immensely
popular and the players put their hearts into it.
I guess the submitter would prefer it if the whole concept of copyright and IP did not exist, but I wouldn't get your hopes up for any new movies, TV, music, softwre or games in that case.
Do you have any actual evidence for this statement?
On the contrary, TV and radio programs are broadcast free and unencrypted into the air for anyone with a set
to watch (in fact the companies want as many people to watch as possible).
Similarly music, plays and books were written long before copyright existed in its modern form.
Screen went black after 14 months (ie. just outside the warranty period). Apple
quoted £300 ($500) to fix it, which was almost as much as the thing is worth. For various
reasons I didn't pursue this further (work bought me a laptop at the same time,
was very busy, etc.) but really I should have gone to the small claims court - any
judge would have told Apple where to get off.
The good news is it looks easy to fix. Does anyone know of where this
joint is -- the article only shows a very small part of the mobo, and it's in Danish...
hi, just checking you've heard that the freeware player VLC ignores the region coding on DVDs and will play them just fine in OSX
VLC is great, but unfortunately it doesn't help with RPC-2
drives which don't have firmware cracks -- such as the
Matsushita DVD drive in my old iBook. In these drives,
the firmware reads the disk and won't even deliver up the
blocks to software layers. If hardware can ever be called
evil, then this is surely it.
I have never heard one convincing argument why open source is inherently better than closed source.
OK, feeding the troll but here are a few:
I may not understand the source, but I can hire a programmer who does to fix it for me.
-- example: Would you hire an architect to design you a new-build house and expect the architect to hide the floorplans from you? What would you do if you didn't like architect #1 and wanted to hire a replacement?
I have no idea about house architecture (I'm a programmer, not an architect), but I know that if I
have the plans I can find another expert in the area.
I'm a programmer and I've found a really strange bug in this API call - when I pass
a NULL pointer and a zero length, it does something really unexpected. Can I (a) just go and
check the implementation of the call to see what the problem is, fully understand it and fix it, or work around it.
Or (b) have to guess at what is going on inside this binary blob? [Situation (a) happened to me just this week when
working with libxml2].
If you were presented with two operating systems, identical for what you wanted to do,
but one came with source and the other didn't, which would you choose? Would you really
choose the closed source one? Why? Closed source is just like DRM -- really bad for you the
customer and only good for the one hiding the plans.
BTW, Windows could be "source available" without being free of copyright (just as is the case with Linux in fact).
Open source is not the same as truly free software.
Take movies for example - I can go visit my parents in another city and bring a couple of movies along, and the DVDs are quite light, easy to carry, and all I have to do is put them into any DVD player in North America to have them work. No file copying, no waiting for a download to finish, no taking up space on my hard disk - everything is just on the DVD. When it comes to the DRM stupidity we have been seeing, we have to remember that it's the DRM causing the problems, not the physical format itself.
When I was in the USA last time I bought a load of DVDs (£-$ makes it very cheap), but guess what, they don't play back home in the UK. Unless I type in some magic codes into my DVD player, and they won't play at all on my computer. A hard disk full of ripped movies is lighter, smaller and more useful.
GP: "Nowadays there is no compelling reason to buy things from the copyright holders other than maybe feeling guilty or an affinity for tangible copies."
To meet one gross over-generalization with another, you mean besides keeping the copyright holders in business so that they can continue to produce content? There's a basic economic reality you're missing here - producing any product or content takes time and resources, and to continue to do that requires that money is made to pay for the time and resources.
This is probably true in some limited areas -- big budget movies for example. But
it may surprise you to know that people were making plays, music and even life-saving
drugs long before the era of government-granted artificial monopolies on thought, and
they'll be doing the same thing after too. It'll happen in a different way: for example
universities will research life-saving drugs for real diseases, instead of overstuffed
drug companies concentrating on drugs to make your penis stay erect. And musicians
will make music for "the man" (rich patrons) as opposed to now when they,... erm,
well that won't change.
Ok, so this isn't the fault of Windows at all. It's the fault of its developer community. Yeah, this I can definitely understand. It is important to distinguish however when you are talking about the developers as opposed to the OS.
No it's not, it's the fault of closed source. How can you argue that
closed source (Windows) is better than open source? On what possible planet can not being
able to see the source code be better than being able to see it?
The parent post is full of inaccuracies, in particular:
The Z80 had special support for memory refresh, built in (the R register
and a bunch of associated circuitry). This was the reason why the Z80
was popular - you didn't an external memory controller if you used
dynamic RAM.
All common Z80-based home computers had memory-mapped graphics, including
the Spectrum (subject of this discussion) and Amstrad machines.
of patents and copyrights seems to be due for a major overhaul. It's OK to get patents for a limited time to protect your investments. On the other hand - other companies may also invest in similar or the same solution. As it is now it's first come, first served when patents are handled, which means that even though there are several different vendors for an invention, there will be only one "winner", which ultimately is bad for competition.
Well we could start by doing some scientific studies into whether having
patents and copyrights (government-granted monopolies which limit
free market competition) actually work to promote the arts
and sciences. Much anecdotal evidence says they don't. What's the
truth?
What I see is more the horrible state of software security. A security model that relies on all the writers of driver code in your computer to do their job right is a poor security model.
You're right. Unfortunately with the current design of PC hardware it's difficult
to provide protection from poorly written drivers. For example, it's very
common for drivers to be able to (a) initiate DMA transfers to/from any part
of physical memory, and (b) lock the PCI bus by messing with the bus arbitration.
You can do things like having an exokernel -- small trusted multiplexers go in
the kernel and the larger parts of your drivers sit (untrusted) in userspace, but
performance generally sucks. Some hardware (eg. graphics cards) makes it
hard even to do this.
Luckily virtualisation is driving better solutions, and they're coming to
a PC near you soon (in fact, they've already come to the PCs I'm using
daily, but those are test articles). Primarily with virtualisation we want to
be able to hand off devices to untrusted guest operating systems. For
example give each guest its own physical network card. That won't work
too well if guests can stomp on each others memory using DMA transfers.
The new hardware actually has hardware support to stop the guests doing
bad things.
Funnily enough I just let my old company's.eu domain lapse. They didn't use it for anything, and I'm sure it would just confuse people if they had started to (they keep the.com, of course).
AFAIR running OSX on non-Apple hardware is illegal.
If I didn't buy a copy it would be illegal. But if I did buy a copy
then in the UK at least it would be quite legal for me to run it
anywhere I wanted. Under the Unfair Contract Terms Act and the Software Directive / Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, any
license terms which tried to prevent me from running OS X virtualised or
on non-Apple hardware are sure to be tossed out in court.
What the poster is saying that it doesn't really cost anymore to have 100 boxes on the shelf, than it does to have 500, so they are encouraging shops to take lots of boxes rather than a few, in the hopes they will create massive displays. This is marketing 101.
It's called "channel stuffing" and while it is indeed marketing 101,
companies can't get away with it for too long before the channel
becomes mighty pissed off and starts sending the product back.
When you finally get it, the UI is an excercise in how many good UI design principles can we possibly break on one screen. Response to comments on the UI ? - "Vee are the third largest softvare company in zee vorld" (or in other words, they're so successful they must be right).
For a moment I thought you were talking about Oracle Applications.
But you couldn't be, because then you would have mentioned how
not only is it totally unusable, but it also crashes all the time.
Gotta love ERP...
If we encrypt everything, it will simply become infeasible to perform long-term dragnet surveillance of innocent people. When someone is suspected of a crime, police will need to investigate that specific person, rather than assume everyone alive is a criminal.
We could start by making HTTPS simpler,
supporting TLS Server Name Indication on all web servers (and browsers),
and having a free CA authority for encryption without
necessarily needing strong authentication.
Why should we have to opt out from being cached, why can't we opt in instead?
[...]
If you need your page to be found on Google or other search engines, add a meta tag, which explicitely lets a search engine to collect this page for indexing/caching.
Yeah right, and maybe you should have to opt in to be read as well.
What a stupid argument. Charitably it shows that you have no
understanding at all of how webservers work. Don't worry about
that - many people have no clue. Uncharitably it
shows that you want the web to act like it's a printed book or magazine, which
it is not. If they don't want their stuff downloaded and used in
all sorts of useful and innovative ways, don't put it up on the webserver in the first place.
I ran a spam archive for a number of years, with emails dating back to around 1997. It's a lot of trouble - classifying spam isn't 100%, so there ended up being a few personal emails in there. However the big problems were these:
Spammers or people whose names/company names appeared in spam (actual spam, that this)
would send me random legal threats. None of them panned out in the end, but you can never tell.
Everyone would be downloading the whole archive (gigabytes) to train their
filters, at first killing my DSL, later blowing my bandwidth cap.
Now, none of these things can't be overcome of course (Bittorrent, no Google
indexing), but I can understand
why spamarchive.org wouldn't want the hassle, particularly since they
probably weren't making any money out of it.
I still make my spam archive available to legitimate researchers,
and I'm glad to say that a paper has been published and another
is in preparation.
The advantage is that it is possible to get your medical journal when you are visiting a different country, which in turn can improve the ability to get the correct medication and avoid medical hazards.
If you have some disease or allergy that doctors should be aware of, you should wear
a medical necklace. But of course such a simple low-tech solution won't
pour billions into the IT contracting industry, the likes of EDS etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds a lot like when a spammer tried to sue me for publishing their "copyrighted" spam.
Previous slashdot story.
Rich.
I am curious - how would your idea apply to art (illustration, graphic design, etc)? I'm not so sure that alternate forms of payment would come up...
Well, most graphic artists at the moment get paid for doing bespoke designs - websites, book covers, adverts, and so on. So the answer is - pretty much the same way they do now.
Rich.
There are a lot of people who, if they didn't have copyright laws to protect their creations, wouldn't create them, either because those creations cost too much or simply because there was a more profitable use of their time.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? This is really the problem - people making broad claims for or against copyright, but no one actually spending any time to find out what is the truth of the matter.
As for football -- well, people played football commercially before TV rights allowed players to get enormous salaries. Those older players didn't earn as much in a week as most people earn in a year, yet football was still immensely popular and the players put their hearts into it.
Rich.
I guess the submitter would prefer it if the whole concept of copyright and IP did not exist, but I wouldn't get your hopes up for any new movies, TV, music, softwre or games in that case.
Do you have any actual evidence for this statement?
On the contrary, TV and radio programs are broadcast free and unencrypted into the air for anyone with a set to watch (in fact the companies want as many people to watch as possible).
Similarly music, plays and books were written long before copyright existed in its modern form.
Rich.
Screen went black after 14 months (ie. just outside the warranty period). Apple quoted £300 ($500) to fix it, which was almost as much as the thing is worth. For various reasons I didn't pursue this further (work bought me a laptop at the same time, was very busy, etc.) but really I should have gone to the small claims court - any judge would have told Apple where to get off.
The good news is it looks easy to fix. Does anyone know of where this joint is -- the article only shows a very small part of the mobo, and it's in Danish ...
Rich.
hi, just checking you've heard that the freeware player VLC ignores the region coding on DVDs and will play them just fine in OSX
VLC is great, but unfortunately it doesn't help with RPC-2 drives which don't have firmware cracks -- such as the Matsushita DVD drive in my old iBook. In these drives, the firmware reads the disk and won't even deliver up the blocks to software layers. If hardware can ever be called evil, then this is surely it.
Rich.
Because the .NET languages don't suck quite as hard
as Java? There's even now a promising set of
functional languages available.
Rich.
I have never heard one convincing argument why open source is inherently better than closed source.
OK, feeding the troll but here are a few:
BTW, Windows could be "source available" without being free of copyright (just as is the case with Linux in fact). Open source is not the same as truly free software.
Rich.
Take movies for example - I can go visit my parents in another city and bring a couple of movies along, and the DVDs are quite light, easy to carry, and all I have to do is put them into any DVD player in North America to have them work. No file copying, no waiting for a download to finish, no taking up space on my hard disk - everything is just on the DVD. When it comes to the DRM stupidity we have been seeing, we have to remember that it's the DRM causing the problems, not the physical format itself.
When I was in the USA last time I bought a load of DVDs (£-$ makes it very cheap), but guess what, they don't play back home in the UK. Unless I type in some magic codes into my DVD player, and they won't play at all on my computer. A hard disk full of ripped movies is lighter, smaller and more useful.
GP: "Nowadays there is no compelling reason to buy things from the copyright holders other than maybe feeling guilty or an affinity for tangible copies."
To meet one gross over-generalization with another, you mean besides keeping the copyright holders in business so that they can continue to produce content? There's a basic economic reality you're missing here - producing any product or content takes time and resources, and to continue to do that requires that money is made to pay for the time and resources.
This is probably true in some limited areas -- big budget movies for example. But it may surprise you to know that people were making plays, music and even life-saving drugs long before the era of government-granted artificial monopolies on thought, and they'll be doing the same thing after too. It'll happen in a different way: for example universities will research life-saving drugs for real diseases, instead of overstuffed drug companies concentrating on drugs to make your penis stay erect. And musicians will make music for "the man" (rich patrons) as opposed to now when they, ... erm,
well that won't change.
Rich.
Ok, so this isn't the fault of Windows at all. It's the fault of its developer community. Yeah, this I can definitely understand. It is important to distinguish however when you are talking about the developers as opposed to the OS.
No it's not, it's the fault of closed source. How can you argue that closed source (Windows) is better than open source? On what possible planet can not being able to see the source code be better than being able to see it?
Rich.
The parent post is full of inaccuracies, in particular:
The Z80 had special support for memory refresh, built in (the R register and a bunch of associated circuitry). This was the reason why the Z80 was popular - you didn't an external memory controller if you used dynamic RAM.
All common Z80-based home computers had memory-mapped graphics, including the Spectrum (subject of this discussion) and Amstrad machines.
Rich.
of patents and copyrights seems to be due for a major overhaul. It's OK to get patents for a limited time to protect your investments. On the other hand - other companies may also invest in similar or the same solution. As it is now it's first come, first served when patents are handled, which means that even though there are several different vendors for an invention, there will be only one "winner", which ultimately is bad for competition.
Well we could start by doing some scientific studies into whether having patents and copyrights (government-granted monopolies which limit free market competition) actually work to promote the arts and sciences. Much anecdotal evidence says they don't. What's the truth?
Just a thought ...
Rich.
What I see is more the horrible state of software security. A security model that relies on all the writers of driver code in your computer to do their job right is a poor security model.
You're right. Unfortunately with the current design of PC hardware it's difficult to provide protection from poorly written drivers. For example, it's very common for drivers to be able to (a) initiate DMA transfers to/from any part of physical memory, and (b) lock the PCI bus by messing with the bus arbitration. You can do things like having an exokernel -- small trusted multiplexers go in the kernel and the larger parts of your drivers sit (untrusted) in userspace, but performance generally sucks. Some hardware (eg. graphics cards) makes it hard even to do this.
Luckily virtualisation is driving better solutions, and they're coming to a PC near you soon (in fact, they've already come to the PCs I'm using daily, but those are test articles). Primarily with virtualisation we want to be able to hand off devices to untrusted guest operating systems. For example give each guest its own physical network card. That won't work too well if guests can stomp on each others memory using DMA transfers. The new hardware actually has hardware support to stop the guests doing bad things.
Look at Intel's VT-d for example.
Rich.
Funnily enough I just let my old company's .eu domain lapse. They didn't use it for anything, and I'm sure it would just confuse people if they had started to (they keep the .com, of course).
Rich.
AFAIR running OSX on non-Apple hardware is illegal.
If I didn't buy a copy it would be illegal. But if I did buy a copy then in the UK at least it would be quite legal for me to run it anywhere I wanted. Under the Unfair Contract Terms Act and the Software Directive / Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, any license terms which tried to prevent me from running OS X virtualised or on non-Apple hardware are sure to be tossed out in court.
Rich.
Rich.
What the poster is saying that it doesn't really cost anymore to have 100 boxes on the shelf, than it does to have 500, so they are encouraging shops to take lots of boxes rather than a few, in the hopes they will create massive displays. This is marketing 101.
It's called "channel stuffing" and while it is indeed marketing 101, companies can't get away with it for too long before the channel becomes mighty pissed off and starts sending the product back.
Rich.
When you finally get it, the UI is an excercise in how many good UI design principles can we possibly break on one screen. Response to comments on the UI ? - "Vee are the third largest softvare company in zee vorld" (or in other words, they're so successful they must be right).
For a moment I thought you were talking about Oracle Applications. But you couldn't be, because then you would have mentioned how not only is it totally unusable, but it also crashes all the time. Gotta love ERP ...
Rich.
If we encrypt everything, it will simply become infeasible to perform long-term dragnet surveillance of innocent people. When someone is suspected of a crime, police will need to investigate that specific person, rather than assume everyone alive is a criminal.
We could start by making HTTPS simpler, supporting TLS Server Name Indication on all web servers (and browsers), and having a free CA authority for encryption without necessarily needing strong authentication.
Rich.
The same craziness happened for the London Olympics too. (Although nothing our government does at the moment surprises me).
Rich.
Presumably there's a decent number of blameless consumers already using that player. What's the commercial impact of pissing them off?
It's HD-DVD/Blu-Ray we're talking about. I bet both of the consumers will be really pissed.
Rich.
Why should we have to opt out from being cached, why can't we opt in instead? [...] If you need your page to be found on Google or other search engines, add a meta tag, which explicitely lets a search engine to collect this page for indexing/caching.
Yeah right, and maybe you should have to opt in to be read as well.
What a stupid argument. Charitably it shows that you have no understanding at all of how webservers work. Don't worry about that - many people have no clue. Uncharitably it shows that you want the web to act like it's a printed book or magazine, which it is not. If they don't want their stuff downloaded and used in all sorts of useful and innovative ways, don't put it up on the webserver in the first place.
Rich.
I ran a spam archive for a number of years, with emails dating back to around 1997. It's a lot of trouble - classifying spam isn't 100%, so there ended up being a few personal emails in there. However the big problems were these:
Now, none of these things can't be overcome of course (Bittorrent, no Google indexing), but I can understand why spamarchive.org wouldn't want the hassle, particularly since they probably weren't making any money out of it.
I still make my spam archive available to legitimate researchers, and I'm glad to say that a paper has been published and another is in preparation.
Rich.
The advantage is that it is possible to get your medical journal when you are visiting a different country, which in turn can improve the ability to get the correct medication and avoid medical hazards.
If you have some disease or allergy that doctors should be aware of, you should wear a medical necklace. But of course such a simple low-tech solution won't pour billions into the IT contracting industry, the likes of EDS etc.
Rich
A hacker can break into one person's home computer and get their info, or they can break into a google server and have 2 million people.
I'd be more worried about a rogue government or future government deciding
they want to mine that data to find out who all the "terrorists" are.
Oh, wait
Rich.