"Quick, get to the health fountain.... What the.. My character DIED so I can learn about Diet Caffeine Free Tab??"
Don't take this the wrong way, because you earned that +5 Funny but... man, that's not funny. I'd be torqued into a pretzel if my OS did that to me.
This is becoming more and more analogous to product placements in TV shows, movies and yes, video games. They know we're skipping past the traditional advertising so now they're literally embedding it into the product, no way to get rid of it. Of course, we're buying into it, hook, line and sinker. Microsoft would just love to start making money from ads that are fully integrated into our "computing experience" and cannot ever be blocked, skipped or otherwise eliminated.
Really, that company has forgotten to whom this computer belongs. I don't rent it from Microsoft.
Actually, slavery literally took place in many capitalist nations, including America.
And it's still going on in some countries. Oddly, most of them don't seem to be capitalist countries. Those nations generally substituted a machine culture for one based upon slavery. Industrialization (the hallmark of capitalism) and slavery are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. Once you have machines doing the work slaves are less important.
If the government hadn't stepped in...
Maybe you've forgotten a few facts yourself. The government did step in! Yes, at one time part of America had a slave economy, but we fought an internecine war over that very issue in order to put a stop to it. I'd say we held ourselves to a higher standard than the Communists ever have.
You missed the point. You're concerned about pigging your share of the goodies that result from creative works being packaged, protected and sold, including those to which no valid copyright even exists. That's not what the Founders were trying to achieve: revenue-enhancement for massive copyright holders was not the primary function of copyright, so far as they were concerned..
What I'm talking about is what copyright law was originally designed to promote... a "bigger pie", in that context, means more creative works in the public domain, not more wealth being transferred from the buying public. Copyright, as currently implemented in the United States, is no longer about "advancing the useful arts and sciences" but about enhancing the private domain at the direct expense of the public. In other words, about limiting ownership of that pie to a few powerful corporations, where no benefits are being handed out, where the pie doesn't belong to the many but to the few.
If Thomas Jefferson isn't turning over in his grave he will be, once somebody tells him what's going on.
It's potentially different in another aspect. IBM was not just trying to win the case against SCO: they could have done that any number of times. What they were trying to was make an example of SCO, crushing them slowly and draining all the legal juice out, setting sufficient precedent that no-one in their right minds would ever do anything like that again. I don't see another SCO happening for a long, long time.
I wouldn't mind seeing someone take the same road with NTP. IBM's executives correctly understood that appeasement rarely works. If you have the resources, winning a head-on battle is better in the long run than a buy-off, because you won't be a target when it's over.
Fair use generates vast sums of money for some people (hardware manufacturers, for one) that completely dwarfs the income generated by copyright on materials played or viewed by that equipment. Furthermore, if it were not for widespread exercise of fair use, a hell of a lot of technology (home audio recording, VCRS, CD & DVD burners, MP3 players, and so forth) would never have seen the light of day. People would have had much less use for such things if it were not for fair use. Furthermore, the content creators and copyright holders themselves have benefited from fair use, to the tune of many billions of dollars in sales they would otherwise never have made.
Copyright generates a lot of money to some people.
A lot fewer people, many of whom (unlike the hardware manufacturers) provide no creative or other useful contributions to society, and in fact have historically stood in the way of progress.
So the real question is what does our society value? Many people getting a slice of the the pie, or a few people getting all the pie?
You have it wrong, it's not zero-sum. What society values (and is the underlying goal of the specific legal environment originally crafted by the Founders) is a bigger pie! Copyright no longer serves that purpose in many areas, and is in need of serious repair (or reversion.)
Doesn't fair use mean you don't pay for content? Where is all this money coming from?
People that (for example) buy computers and DVD burners and software and tons of blank media to copy movies and music. People that buy iPods to play tracks from the CDs they buy. Etc etc.
Face it, the lessons Microsoft learned from IBM were from the IBM of the sixties and seventies. You know, the IBM that would crush anyone and anything that threatened to "interoperate" with IBM equipment. There's a guy named Amdahl that could probably enlighten you about that.
From their perspective, who cares if Open Source is the future of the market (it's doubtless the future of some portion of the market.) What does matter is that non-Microsoft, non-proprietary systems are a significant and growing aspect to modern computing, and they'd just continue to be fools to ignore it.
I can name several groups of "professionals" that pay lip service to official "Codes of Ethics" while routinely violating said codes for personal gain. The only real way to for ethics to mean anything is for them to permeate a society: people act ethically because that's how they were raised, and consequently don't know any other way to behave. Dependence upon the law, professional censure or any other external influence to assure compliance with some arbitrary ethical standard is doomed to failure. There are just too many ways to violate a standard without any penalty whatsoever.
Yeah, I know. Really, that ought to be a mod category. Actually, if I'd noticed the last line where you referred to a big bomb I wouldn't have bothered. But I'm on vacation and I was a few sheets to the wind at the time.
A better way of measuring vast amounts of storage in manner relevant to the iPod generation would be the "RIAA". The actual value of this unit would continuously increase depending upon the total number of musical tracks in existence at any given point in time. This would allow it to scale nicely with advances in storage technology. For example, "My MP3 player has one RIAA of storage". That's all you would ever need.
That's only one of several meanings, and not the one most relevant to this discussion. As usual, Wikipedia has a nice writeup on the subject of Petards:
In medieval and Renaissance siege warfare, a common tactic was to dig a shallow trench close to the enemy gate, and then erect a small hoisting engine that would lift the lit petard out of the trench, swing it up, out, and over to the gate, where it would detonate and (hopefully) breach the gate. It was not impossible, however, that this procedure would go awry, and the engineer lighting the bomb could be snagged in the ropes and lifted out with the petard and consequently blown up. Thus to be 'hoist with his own petar' is to be caught up (and destroyed) by his own plot. Thus, Hamlet's actual meaning is "cause the bomb maker to be blown up with his own bomb", metaphorically turning the tables on Claudius, whose messengers are killed instead of Hamlet.
... and why the top individuals from these countries are still going to America and Europe to get their PhDs and teach once they have them. There's something else going on here.
Yes, it's called "transfer of intellectual capital". We are training our replacements. Why we're doing this is another question (it's a foot-in-self-shoot scenario, when you get right down to it) but that is precisely what is happening.
Exactly... except, perhaps, on those rare occasions when the incumbent purveyors of some product or service see something new and different and say, "Whoa, cool!" and jump all over it and make it happen.
Offhand I can't think of any examples of that, though.
There's so much third-party support for PDF in so many areas that there's little reason to buy Adobe's bloatware anyway. Amazing how their PDF reader has turned into such a POC when there are much more efficient offerings out there.
If you're a Windows user and you just want to render printer output into PDF, give PDF Creator a shot. Somebody else here on Slashdot recommended it a couple of months ago, and it seems to work well. It's also open source, GPLed, and free for personal or commercial use.
So, it's not impossible to beat a major company at its own game. Difficult maybe, but not impossible.
That, actually, is frightening. It was bad when Microsoft was simply shipping insecure products in the Internet age, but now they've begun using the Internet to directly extend their control over their user base. Today, Black Screen of Disablement, tomorrow... hard to say, but it's probably not going to get any better from our perspective. Just wait until the next step comes along, where Windows won't even run unless it has an active Internet connection.
No you can't. Not anymore. That's like saying you have a strong dislike for black people without being a bigot. People will immediately lump you in with the true bigots (or anti-Semites) and any valid criticisms you might have will be ignored.
If people want to use licensed, commercial software, I don't object to it (even though I use almost totally free software), but they should realize that means they have to pay for it.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Microsoft should be required to hand out free copies of its software, or that people shouldn't buy software. We are arguing that their ability to control, restrict or disable the use of said software after it has been purchased is unconscionable, unacceptable and risky.
But, whatever. There are other operating systems out there, other ways of getting the job done. Let Microsoft bathe itself in the waters of competition and realize that even their customers have limits. I had a purchased copy of Microsoft Office (the real thing, original box, etc.) deny me access to OfficeUpdate a few weeks ago. "Your key has been deactivated as one of a number of keys revoked by Microsoft" etc. etc. I don't know what the reason for it was... perhaps it wasn't even Microsoft's "fault" (some store employee could have ripped off the number) but the fact remains that Microsoft's anti-piracy crap screwed over someone that paid them a pretty penny. Fucktards. Their software is already overpriced: adding random failures of their drain-bamaged copy-protection system to the mix just costs me even more time and money and really torques me into a pretzel.
Honestly, it's getting harder and harder to recommend a Microsoft product. Let's face it, there are always risks associated with having a distant, unavailable and unreliable landlord. Better to own your property outright and be done with it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Quick, get to the health fountain.... What the.. My character DIED so I can learn about Diet Caffeine Free Tab??"
... man, that's not funny. I'd be torqued into a pretzel if my OS did that to me.
Don't take this the wrong way, because you earned that +5 Funny but
This is becoming more and more analogous to product placements in TV shows, movies and yes, video games. They know we're skipping past the traditional advertising so now they're literally embedding it into the product, no way to get rid of it. Of course, we're buying into it, hook, line and sinker. Microsoft would just love to start making money from ads that are fully integrated into our "computing experience" and cannot ever be blocked, skipped or otherwise eliminated.
Really, that company has forgotten to whom this computer belongs. I don't rent it from Microsoft.
Actually, slavery literally took place in many capitalist nations, including America.
...
And it's still going on in some countries. Oddly, most of them don't seem to be capitalist countries. Those nations generally substituted a machine culture for one based upon slavery. Industrialization (the hallmark of capitalism) and slavery are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. Once you have machines doing the work slaves are less important.
If the government hadn't stepped in
Maybe you've forgotten a few facts yourself. The government did step in! Yes, at one time part of America had a slave economy, but we fought an internecine war over that very issue in order to put a stop to it. I'd say we held ourselves to a higher standard than the Communists ever have.
You missed the point. You're concerned about pigging your share of the goodies that result from creative works being packaged, protected and sold, including those to which no valid copyright even exists. That's not what the Founders were trying to achieve: revenue-enhancement for massive copyright holders was not the primary function of copyright, so far as they were concerned..
... a "bigger pie", in that context, means more creative works in the public domain, not more wealth being transferred from the buying public. Copyright, as currently implemented in the United States, is no longer about "advancing the useful arts and sciences" but about enhancing the private domain at the direct expense of the public. In other words, about limiting ownership of that pie to a few powerful corporations, where no benefits are being handed out, where the pie doesn't belong to the many but to the few.
What I'm talking about is what copyright law was originally designed to promote
If Thomas Jefferson isn't turning over in his grave he will be, once somebody tells him what's going on.
It's potentially different in another aspect. IBM was not just trying to win the case against SCO: they could have done that any number of times. What they were trying to was make an example of SCO, crushing them slowly and draining all the legal juice out, setting sufficient precedent that no-one in their right minds would ever do anything like that again. I don't see another SCO happening for a long, long time.
I wouldn't mind seeing someone take the same road with NTP. IBM's executives correctly understood that appeasement rarely works. If you have the resources, winning a head-on battle is better in the long run than a buy-off, because you won't be a target when it's over.
Fair use generates some money to a lot of people.
Fair use generates vast sums of money for some people (hardware manufacturers, for one) that completely dwarfs the income generated by copyright on materials played or viewed by that equipment. Furthermore, if it were not for widespread exercise of fair use, a hell of a lot of technology (home audio recording, VCRS, CD & DVD burners, MP3 players, and so forth) would never have seen the light of day. People would have had much less use for such things if it were not for fair use. Furthermore, the content creators and copyright holders themselves have benefited from fair use, to the tune of many billions of dollars in sales they would otherwise never have made.
Copyright generates a lot of money to some people.
A lot fewer people, many of whom (unlike the hardware manufacturers) provide no creative or other useful contributions to society, and in fact have historically stood in the way of progress.
So the real question is what does our society value? Many people getting a slice of the the pie, or a few people getting all the pie?
You have it wrong, it's not zero-sum. What society values (and is the underlying goal of the specific legal environment originally crafted by the Founders) is a bigger pie! Copyright no longer serves that purpose in many areas, and is in need of serious repair (or reversion.)
Doesn't fair use mean you don't pay for content? Where is all this money coming from?
People that (for example) buy computers and DVD burners and software and tons of blank media to copy movies and music. People that buy iPods to play tracks from the CDs they buy. Etc etc.
Face it, the lessons Microsoft learned from IBM were from the IBM of the sixties and seventies. You know, the IBM that would crush anyone and anything that threatened to "interoperate" with IBM equipment. There's a guy named Amdahl that could probably enlighten you about that.
I think the Cluster Fuck is in Sun's boardroom.
From their perspective, who cares if Open Source is the future of the market (it's doubtless the future of some portion of the market.) What does matter is that non-Microsoft, non-proprietary systems are a significant and growing aspect to modern computing, and they'd just continue to be fools to ignore it.
I can name several groups of "professionals" that pay lip service to official "Codes of Ethics" while routinely violating said codes for personal gain. The only real way to for ethics to mean anything is for them to permeate a society: people act ethically because that's how they were raised, and consequently don't know any other way to behave. Dependence upon the law, professional censure or any other external influence to assure compliance with some arbitrary ethical standard is doomed to failure. There are just too many ways to violate a standard without any penalty whatsoever.
... or we're not.
Either we're an ethical society
Found On Road Dead.....
Fixed Or Repaired Daily
Fucked Over Rebuilt Dodge
Factory Outlet Rolling Defect
Yeah, I know. Really, that ought to be a mod category. Actually, if I'd noticed the last line where you referred to a big bomb I wouldn't have bothered. But I'm on vacation and I was a few sheets to the wind at the time.
I love those "pull-significant-digits-out-of-my-ass" unit conversions.
That's actually where most significant digits come from, especially in the Catholic Church.
Sorry, sorry, couldn't resist. It was the beer talking.
A better way of measuring vast amounts of storage in manner relevant to the iPod generation would be the "RIAA". The actual value of this unit would continuously increase depending upon the total number of musical tracks in existence at any given point in time. This would allow it to scale nicely with advances in storage technology. For example, "My MP3 player has one RIAA of storage". That's all you would ever need.
Albert Einstein for one.
... he was out in left field.
Shockley for another. Outside of his field
It's a lot safer to criticize Christians.
Not really. They're just more patient.
I guess that means you get First Roast!
That's only one of several meanings, and not the one most relevant to this discussion. As usual, Wikipedia has a nice writeup on the subject of Petards:
In medieval and Renaissance siege warfare, a common tactic was to dig a shallow trench close to the enemy gate, and then erect a small hoisting engine that would lift the lit petard out of the trench, swing it up, out, and over to the gate, where it would detonate and (hopefully) breach the gate. It was not impossible, however, that this procedure would go awry, and the engineer lighting the bomb could be snagged in the ropes and lifted out with the petard and consequently blown up. Thus to be 'hoist with his own petar' is to be caught up (and destroyed) by his own plot. Thus, Hamlet's actual meaning is "cause the bomb maker to be blown up with his own bomb", metaphorically turning the tables on Claudius, whose messengers are killed instead of Hamlet.
... and why the top individuals from these countries are still going to America and Europe to get their PhDs and teach once they have them. There's something else going on here.
Yes, it's called "transfer of intellectual capital". We are training our replacements. Why we're doing this is another question (it's a foot-in-self-shoot scenario, when you get right down to it) but that is precisely what is happening.
Exactly ... except, perhaps, on those rare occasions when the incumbent purveyors of some product or service see something new and different and say, "Whoa, cool!" and jump all over it and make it happen.
Offhand I can't think of any examples of that, though.
There's so much third-party support for PDF in so many areas that there's little reason to buy Adobe's bloatware anyway. Amazing how their PDF reader has turned into such a POC when there are much more efficient offerings out there.
If you're a Windows user and you just want to render printer output into PDF, give PDF Creator a shot. Somebody else here on Slashdot recommended it a couple of months ago, and it seems to work well. It's also open source, GPLed, and free for personal or commercial use.
So, it's not impossible to beat a major company at its own game. Difficult maybe, but not impossible.
Okay, I'll buy that, I just thought you might have a more entertaining complaint. Certainly I've seen enough of that show for several lifetimes.
That, actually, is frightening. It was bad when Microsoft was simply shipping insecure products in the Internet age, but now they've begun using the Internet to directly extend their control over their user base. Today, Black Screen of Disablement, tomorrow ... hard to say, but it's probably not going to get any better from our perspective. Just wait until the next step comes along, where Windows won't even run unless it has an active Internet connection.
No you can't. Not anymore. That's like saying you have a strong dislike for black people without being a bigot. People will immediately lump you in with the true bigots (or anti-Semites) and any valid criticisms you might have will be ignored.
If people want to use licensed, commercial software, I don't object to it (even though I use almost totally free software), but they should realize that means they have to pay for it.
... perhaps it wasn't even Microsoft's "fault" (some store employee could have ripped off the number) but the fact remains that Microsoft's anti-piracy crap screwed over someone that paid them a pretty penny. Fucktards. Their software is already overpriced: adding random failures of their drain-bamaged copy-protection system to the mix just costs me even more time and money and really torques me into a pretzel.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Microsoft should be required to hand out free copies of its software, or that people shouldn't buy software. We are arguing that their ability to control, restrict or disable the use of said software after it has been purchased is unconscionable, unacceptable and risky.
But, whatever. There are other operating systems out there, other ways of getting the job done. Let Microsoft bathe itself in the waters of competition and realize that even their customers have limits. I had a purchased copy of Microsoft Office (the real thing, original box, etc.) deny me access to OfficeUpdate a few weeks ago. "Your key has been deactivated as one of a number of keys revoked by Microsoft" etc. etc. I don't know what the reason for it was
Honestly, it's getting harder and harder to recommend a Microsoft product. Let's face it, there are always risks associated with having a distant, unavailable and unreliable landlord. Better to own your property outright and be done with it.