Freedom of speech, as it is usually defined, involves a government suppressing speech which it finds unacceptable. The United States Constitution and its various amendments are mostly concerned with what our government can do to us in that regard, and really doesn't care all that much about what we do to each other. In any event, freedom of speech has nothing whatsoever to do with a private organization like, oh, Slashdot deciding on a particular method of determining what speech is valuable and what is not. You may not like the way the software works, but it simply is not a "freedom of speech" issue. Now, if Congress mandated that sites like this cannot publish certain classes of communication, or certain words (e.g., "Beelzebush") it most certainly would be.
I wouldn't say that they are stupid, exactly. I would say, unethical if not criminal. But not necessarily stupid.
In any event, comparisons of the United States to any imperial power are fundamentally flawed. What confuses people like you is that never before in history has there been a nation with so much military and economic capability (relative to most others) that has so little interest in running a true Empire (you need to understand what that word really means before you go bandying it about like that.) We're just not about military conquest, although because we have a lot of guns and tanks and planes and bombs and so forth you think we are. You're afraid that we are. However, unlike the Soviet Empire (and that was an honest-to-God empire, acquired by main strength) and the British Empire before it, we really haven't used our military to do much in the way of annexation. We've mixed it up in a lot of different conflicts around the world, sure, but we didn't keep what we took. And you can go on about Iraq if you like, but keep in mind that that "war" is just about as unpopular here as it is there, and the reality is that we're not likely to get much out of it, except more in debt.
What you are seeing in the United States is called malfeasance in office, if not outright treason, and it happens in every government on the planet: some are far more corrupt than ours ever was, or ever will be. The difference is that America has had enough economic and political power that ignorant, greedy moves by our politicians have effects far beyond our own borders. That has little to do with imperialism, however. It's just an extreme example of undue corporate influence upon our political leadership, and let me add that much of that influence comes from foreign corporations that aren't even based in the U.S. but have the unmitigated gall to buy our Congresspeople! Before you start bitching about how evil our Senators are (and they are) do some research and you'll figure out that most of the money and influence is coming from overseas.
Understand me, I'm not excusing the behavior of our elected leaders. However, if people in other countries don't want our government pressuring their leaders to "harmonize" their intellectual property laws with ours, they should reign in some of their own lobbyists and corporate sponsors and keep them the hell out of our affairs. Multinational media conglomerates are perfectly happy using the United States Federal Government as a private arm-twisting force, even if that means shafting their own.
And no I'm not talking about Canada. But there sure as hell are some major European media companies that are guilty of this, or of indirectly funding lobbying activity in Washington on their behalf.
To expand a little on your expansion, when I said, The rest is picked off by businesses that have litte raison d'être in the Internet age I was referring to the old-line music publishers that have been at the root of so much hate and discontent recently. Middlemen can certainly provide a valuable service so long as they, as you say, take their proper place. Those people think they are some indespensible God-given national resource that needs to be protected at all costs.
Looking back, it seems to me that most of this can be laid at the feet of artists giving up the rights to their music in exchange for the dubious services provided by the music publishers. Given the onerous contractual obligations many musicians labor under, it's not surprising that many of them are choosing the path you are taking. Power corrupts, and the power the music companies traditionally held over the artists (and consumers!) corrupted them pretty thoroughly.
Ideally, I'd say that artists should retain copyright to their own works, and sell distribution rights to whomever they choose. Let those who would distribute and promote our music compete to give the artist the best terms. That's the way it works in pretty much every other industry: the supplier sets the price based upon whatever criteria he wants, and buyers decide if the price is right. If you're just starting out, your music will be worth only so much, but if your work proves popular, it is worth more. That's how it should work: that's the way it seems to be going.
The way the music industry has operated for the past century or so is just... bent.
I still remember a classic Holodeck scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Commander Data was playing poker with Newton, Einstein and Stephen Hawking. You could tell he was enjoying himself.
Not much doubt that he's deserving of his status, celebrity or otherwise. He earned it.
There is a strange self sacrificing expectation people have.
Well, unless you're very well-to-do, if you decide to have children then you'd better be prepared to make sacrifices. It's part of the game... being able to comfortably support yourself doesn't mean you can comfortably support some number of offspring. Yet people have kids thinking it'll just mean a few sleepless nights, and are astonished when they see how much money a family costs, when their lifestyle suffers, when they have to make sacrifices. Frankly, I don't think the GP was unreasonable in expecting a father to put feeding his children on a somewhat higher plane than watching Monday night football and jamming cancersticks in his doughnuthole.
Are the children going to self sacrifice in a hopeless situation too?
A child being raised by parents that are unable to even feed him or her properly is already being made into a sacrifice.
Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?
Yes, as in having underdeveloped cognitive areas that make one subject to the imposition of complex belief systems that may or may not have a logical foundation. There's a reason why organized religions have always placed great emphasis on indoctrinating children (those that fail in this regard tend to disappear.) A child's cognitive areas are by definition underdeveloped, with little capacity to evaluate or reject anything that is fed into them. Furthermore, ideas and values that are instilled at an early age are exceedingly hard to change later, which is ideal for condemning one's offspring to a lifetime chained to one's own intellectual inadequacies. You don't need to invoke a special "God" gene to explain why organized religion has survived as long as it has: it's largely self-sustaining as long as there are sufficiently large groups of people that have faith, and want their children to believe as they do.
The Bishop, a character out of one of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels once said, "Man is a rationalizing animal, and requires training to become a rational one." Pretty much says it all.
This news follows complaints from the FDA that it is no longer getting the funds needed to do the research required for the desired level of food safety.
I'd say they are receiving sufficient funds to achieve the desired level of food safety. It's just that Congress has lowered the level.
Of course, I'm hoping that the study was conducted correctly and that its conclusions are actually valid.
... and that they can be applied across-the-board, to all students, all personality types, all levels of intelligence, all families, and all ethnic and racial backgrounds. That implicit assumption is what scares me.
At this point, given what's been done to the educational system I no longer trust anything that comes out of anyone's mouth on the subject. They've spent fifty years mucking with the public school system, mutating it from a once-powerful tool for economic and personal growth into a bureaucrat's heaven, more concerned with graduating students at all costs and defending their precious little egos than actually teaching them anything useful. None of the schools I went to cared about bruising anyone's ego (admittedly, that was some time ago.) If you got an F on a test or a paper the teacher had no problem laying it on you: "Dude, you got an F."
If you cared at all about what you were doing you tried harder next time. If you didn't particularly care, the stigma of having your fellow students think less of you, laugh at you, was usually enough in the peer-pressure department to get things moving. Even if you were an independent cuss (like me) who wasn't very concerned about peer pressure, you'd still have to face your parents on report card day. Ouch. Yeah, it could be unpleasant but there was a simple solution: study! When faced with multiple unpleasant alternatives, most people will choose the path of least resistance, so it's important that studying be perceived as the least of all evils.
Egos be damned... we have those things for a reason, they are supposed to take a licking now and then, since it's a big part of what motivates us to improve our lot in life. It also teaches us about what "expections" (sic) others have for us, and makes us more able to handle all the crap that the real world will throw at us. Erroneously trying to prevent a student from feeling bad about not meeting the standards laid out for him or her does nothing positive for that student at any level.
School has one real purpose, so far as society is concerned: to give people the mental tools they need to be productive citizens, to help them make whatever they can from their time on Earth. School is penance for living in a civilized State and if you do well enough they'll let you out. Anything else is fluff.
(No I didn't RTFA, it was more fun to shoot first.)
I can believe that part: they did it to me one too many times, which is why I quit shopping there. A few years ago I picked out an nice (rather expensive) cordless phone with two handsets. The thing was shrinkwrapped with official-looking stickers all over it. I took it home, opened it up, and found something that looked like it had been through a world war. Well, I figure it had been badly abused by someone's undisciplined children. Scuffed up, display cracked... hell, one of the handsets rattled when I shook it gently. I'll never know if the phones actually worked because the base station's power supply had torn wiring. I took it right back to Best Buy and had to argue with their customer disservice personnel about how I had damaged the phones and didn't want to admit it.
Long story short, I got my money back... but I wonder who the next sucker was who ended up with it. Personally, I believe it should be illegal for questionable operations like Best Buy to own and operate shrinkwrap machines.
Maybe not to the average Slashdotter, but you just try and explain "rooting" to a politician: you have to speak to people in terms with which they are familiar. Believe me, our Congressional representatives are very familiar with girls, and bars, and mornings after.
The old AT&T and the Regional Bell Operating Companies were heavily regulated. It worked well for a long time, but the original laws were written by a government that truly wanted a reliable phone system for an entire nation. They succeeded in that, because those regulations (such as the Telecommunications Act of 1934) were actually pretty decent. The problem is that things are qualitatively different today, with a government that is heavily influenced by corporate money, and a Congress with a habit of labeling onerous laws with names that belie the law's true intent. You can bet your bottom dollar that any "Net Neutrality" legislation that gets passed, at least during this Administration, would be anything but.
The unfortunate truth is not that the Internet must be "neutral" with regards to packet transmission: it can't, really. The real question is who decides what prioritization and filtering occurs, and for what purpose. The problem is that there's a whole lot of wiggle room here, and no amount of lawmaking will be able to account for everything a sleazy ISP can pull off.
No argument from me on that score. The fact that iTunes not only handles a huge percentage of the major labels sales and accepts submissions from independent artists is not lost on the RIAA types. Quite possibly it gives them nightmares (one can only hope) but more importantly I think you've hit on the real reason they dislike iTunes so much. Not only does iTunes control their distribution to a degree they currently find unacceptable (what was that? A contract you say? Talk about poetic justice) but Apple also sells music over which they hold no copyright and (*gasp choke*) pays the artist. If I were an RIAA or studio exec, I'd be sweating bullets right about now.
Sometimes empires are lost overnight, but often it takes longer and nothing lasts forever. This is a chink in their armor: all we can do is watch as the cracks slowly widen.
Those might be compelling if you need them: the vast majority of features and functions offered by a modern OS will go completely unused by a given user or organization. Sure, over millions of installations everything will find a place, but if your current environment supports all of your own requirements, there's no legitimate need to trigger an upgrade cycle. That's why Microsoft spends so much time and money trying to force their big customers to upgrade, whether they want to or not, because the perceived need just isn't there any longer.
Guilder's Rule applies here: 98 to 2K was an order of magnitude (or better!) improvement on pretty much every score but performance, and even that became moot as faster processors and cheap memory became available. Really, Windows 2000 was the Windows '98 GUI stuck on top of the NT kernel, but because Windows '98 was so unreliable businesses that went with 2K saw immediate returns. Consequently, it was worth the investment to upgrade. That big a gain in productivity justifies the expense, because the payback period is so short.
Contrast that to going from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. What most users received was a modified user interface that was not intrinsically better and, more importantly, it was less stable than Windows 2000. Was that a worthwhile tradeoff. Many didn't think so, and Microsoft had to put the screws to some of its biggest customers to get them to buy into XP.
Now comes Vista. Will it provide net benefits to its customers relative to Windows XP? Sure... but will those benefits be of sufficient magnitude to truly justify the cost of upgrading? Time will tell, but if it doesn't sell on its own merits you can bet there will be plenty of armtwisting.
I know, our elected representatives are citizens too, and you would think that they wouldn't want to live under the bad law they make. I've come to accept that the profiteering that goes on in Congress is rewarding enough that it's worth moving the country in the wrong direction by leaps and bounds, and they must figure that, as powerful as they are, they aren't really subject to those laws anyway. For the most part they're right. Occasionally one of them gets sacrificed to make the plebs think that Washington is policing itself, but that has little apparent effect on the rest of them, fine-sounding speeches aside.
People like to make jokes about Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field". I'd like to point out that a much more powerful version of the same effect permeates Washington D.C.. I was born there, as it happens, and even as a small child I could feel it, a little. I wasn't sure what it was, but something was definitely out-of-kilter even way back then. When we returned home (to another state) I felt an overwhelming sense of normalcy so I know our leaders are driving the country while under the influence of something.
So, our elected officials go to Washington with the best of intentions, perhaps with a sincere desire to make the nation a better place... and then they get within range of the D.C. distortion field. I believe that it's a lot like picking up a girl in a bar and going home with her. It all seems to make perfect sense at the time, but the next morning you wake up and go "Oh my God... what have I done?"
Because until recently, they could. If you wanted your music published, there were only a few ways to go. That has of course changed. The music outfits would like, very much, to return to those days.
Me too. For as long as we can. Eventually, it's going to be a forced putt... Gates, Hell & Co. won't leave us any choice. But maybe by then it will have matured into something useful.
What's she's really saying is that if there were some technological measure that could be widely implemented to prevent any and all copyright or patent infringement, it should be forced on us.
I'm not impressed with this woman. I agree with one of the earlier posters... I think she should take a skiing holiday. We might get lucky.
Actually, I think it's more a perception (largely correct) that the big copyright holders are screwing both the creators and the buyers. Certainly that's the case when it comes to music, and given the creative accounting for which Hollywood is so famous, that likely applies to the movie industry as well. Consequently, you are right, copyright infringement is not victimless, but the victims are generally not the people that the RIAA/MPAA types would like us to believe. Much of the verbiage those outfits spew on that topic is downright disingenuous.
Now I do believe that one should pay for what one receives, and I've no problem buying music, but I'd just rather buy from a source that is as close as possible to the creator. That way, as much of my money as possible goes to the creative elements of our society rather than the parasitic ones. Take iTunes: yes, Apple gets very little of the vast stream of raw dollars pouring into it's DRM-constricted throat, but the people actually producing that music don't get even that much. The rest is picked off by businesses that have litte raison d'être in the Internet age.
But that is nothing new in and of itself. Middlemen generally suck, when you get right down to it. But pinning down who, exactly, is a "victim" is not always so black-and-white, and given that many of the "victims" here are organizations that have criminally abused their own customers it's hard to work up much sympathy.
In truth, the recent corruption of IP law in this country is turning a nation of people into victims, in many ways. Think about that for a moment. Something isn't right, and it can't all be laid at the feet of P2P technology and downloaders.
It amazes me to hear people like you rambling on about "jail terms" for civil violations like copyright infringement. Apparently you've bought into the idea that downloading a song is somehow the moral equivalent to a violent crime. It's not, never has been, and copyright law never said so. Heaping on more penalties isn't the solution. Besides, copyright infringement is already against the law, and given the extreme penalties that could already be (mis)applied to an individual I don't see how tougher laws would help.
A freer-market is the solution, one that is not controlled by a handful of abusive corporations. That would be better for both the content creators and their customers. Bad for the middlemen, but odds are we won't miss them.
Slashdot Mirror
So long ... and thanks for all the fish.
Freedom of speech, as it is usually defined, involves a government suppressing speech which it finds unacceptable. The United States Constitution and its various amendments are mostly concerned with what our government can do to us in that regard, and really doesn't care all that much about what we do to each other. In any event, freedom of speech has nothing whatsoever to do with a private organization like, oh, Slashdot deciding on a particular method of determining what speech is valuable and what is not. You may not like the way the software works, but it simply is not a "freedom of speech" issue. Now, if Congress mandated that sites like this cannot publish certain classes of communication, or certain words (e.g., "Beelzebush") it most certainly would be.
("Law cruft"?)
In Microsoft terms, "legal bloat".
I wouldn't say that they are stupid, exactly. I would say, unethical if not criminal. But not necessarily stupid.
In any event, comparisons of the United States to any imperial power are fundamentally flawed. What confuses people like you is that never before in history has there been a nation with so much military and economic capability (relative to most others) that has so little interest in running a true Empire (you need to understand what that word really means before you go bandying it about like that.) We're just not about military conquest, although because we have a lot of guns and tanks and planes and bombs and so forth you think we are. You're afraid that we are. However, unlike the Soviet Empire (and that was an honest-to-God empire, acquired by main strength) and the British Empire before it, we really haven't used our military to do much in the way of annexation. We've mixed it up in a lot of different conflicts around the world, sure, but we didn't keep what we took. And you can go on about Iraq if you like, but keep in mind that that "war" is just about as unpopular here as it is there, and the reality is that we're not likely to get much out of it, except more in debt.
What you are seeing in the United States is called malfeasance in office, if not outright treason, and it happens in every government on the planet: some are far more corrupt than ours ever was, or ever will be. The difference is that America has had enough economic and political power that ignorant, greedy moves by our politicians have effects far beyond our own borders. That has little to do with imperialism, however. It's just an extreme example of undue corporate influence upon our political leadership, and let me add that much of that influence comes from foreign corporations that aren't even based in the U.S. but have the unmitigated gall to buy our Congresspeople! Before you start bitching about how evil our Senators are (and they are) do some research and you'll figure out that most of the money and influence is coming from overseas.
Understand me, I'm not excusing the behavior of our elected leaders. However, if people in other countries don't want our government pressuring their leaders to "harmonize" their intellectual property laws with ours, they should reign in some of their own lobbyists and corporate sponsors and keep them the hell out of our affairs. Multinational media conglomerates are perfectly happy using the United States Federal Government as a private arm-twisting force, even if that means shafting their own.
And no I'm not talking about Canada. But there sure as hell are some major European media companies that are guilty of this, or of indirectly funding lobbying activity in Washington on their behalf.
but can it perform a "reverse algorithmic", CSI-style?
To expand a little on your expansion, when I said, The rest is picked off by businesses that have litte raison d'être in the Internet age I was referring to the old-line music publishers that have been at the root of so much hate and discontent recently. Middlemen can certainly provide a valuable service so long as they, as you say, take their proper place. Those people think they are some indespensible God-given national resource that needs to be protected at all costs.
... bent.
Looking back, it seems to me that most of this can be laid at the feet of artists giving up the rights to their music in exchange for the dubious services provided by the music publishers. Given the onerous contractual obligations many musicians labor under, it's not surprising that many of them are choosing the path you are taking. Power corrupts, and the power the music companies traditionally held over the artists (and consumers!) corrupted them pretty thoroughly.
Ideally, I'd say that artists should retain copyright to their own works, and sell distribution rights to whomever they choose. Let those who would distribute and promote our music compete to give the artist the best terms. That's the way it works in pretty much every other industry: the supplier sets the price based upon whatever criteria he wants, and buyers decide if the price is right. If you're just starting out, your music will be worth only so much, but if your work proves popular, it is worth more. That's how it should work: that's the way it seems to be going.
The way the music industry has operated for the past century or so is just
I still remember a classic Holodeck scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Commander Data was playing poker with Newton, Einstein and Stephen Hawking. You could tell he was enjoying himself.
Not much doubt that he's deserving of his status, celebrity or otherwise. He earned it.
There is a strange self sacrificing expectation people have.
... being able to comfortably support yourself doesn't mean you can comfortably support some number of offspring. Yet people have kids thinking it'll just mean a few sleepless nights, and are astonished when they see how much money a family costs, when their lifestyle suffers, when they have to make sacrifices. Frankly, I don't think the GP was unreasonable in expecting a father to put feeding his children on a somewhat higher plane than watching Monday night football and jamming cancersticks in his doughnuthole.
Well, unless you're very well-to-do, if you decide to have children then you'd better be prepared to make sacrifices. It's part of the game
Are the children going to self sacrifice in a hopeless situation too?
A child being raised by parents that are unable to even feed him or her properly is already being made into a sacrifice.
Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?
Yes, as in having underdeveloped cognitive areas that make one subject to the imposition of complex belief systems that may or may not have a logical foundation. There's a reason why organized religions have always placed great emphasis on indoctrinating children (those that fail in this regard tend to disappear.) A child's cognitive areas are by definition underdeveloped, with little capacity to evaluate or reject anything that is fed into them. Furthermore, ideas and values that are instilled at an early age are exceedingly hard to change later, which is ideal for condemning one's offspring to a lifetime chained to one's own intellectual inadequacies. You don't need to invoke a special "God" gene to explain why organized religion has survived as long as it has: it's largely self-sustaining as long as there are sufficiently large groups of people that have faith, and want their children to believe as they do.
The Bishop, a character out of one of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels once said, "Man is a rationalizing animal, and requires training to become a rational one." Pretty much says it all.
This news follows complaints from the FDA that it is no longer getting the funds needed to do the research required for the desired level of food safety.
I'd say they are receiving sufficient funds to achieve the desired level of food safety. It's just that Congress has lowered the level.
Of course, I'm hoping that the study was conducted correctly and that its conclusions are actually valid.
... and that they can be applied across-the-board, to all students, all personality types, all levels of intelligence, all families, and all ethnic and racial backgrounds. That implicit assumption is what scares me.
... we have those things for a reason, they are supposed to take a licking now and then, since it's a big part of what motivates us to improve our lot in life. It also teaches us about what "expections" (sic) others have for us, and makes us more able to handle all the crap that the real world will throw at us. Erroneously trying to prevent a student from feeling bad about not meeting the standards laid out for him or her does nothing positive for that student at any level.
At this point, given what's been done to the educational system I no longer trust anything that comes out of anyone's mouth on the subject. They've spent fifty years mucking with the public school system, mutating it from a once-powerful tool for economic and personal growth into a bureaucrat's heaven, more concerned with graduating students at all costs and defending their precious little egos than actually teaching them anything useful. None of the schools I went to cared about bruising anyone's ego (admittedly, that was some time ago.) If you got an F on a test or a paper the teacher had no problem laying it on you: "Dude, you got an F."
If you cared at all about what you were doing you tried harder next time. If you didn't particularly care, the stigma of having your fellow students think less of you, laugh at you, was usually enough in the peer-pressure department to get things moving. Even if you were an independent cuss (like me) who wasn't very concerned about peer pressure, you'd still have to face your parents on report card day. Ouch. Yeah, it could be unpleasant but there was a simple solution: study! When faced with multiple unpleasant alternatives, most people will choose the path of least resistance, so it's important that studying be perceived as the least of all evils.
Egos be damned
School has one real purpose, so far as society is concerned: to give people the mental tools they need to be productive citizens, to help them make whatever they can from their time on Earth. School is penance for living in a civilized State and if you do well enough they'll let you out. Anything else is fluff.
(No I didn't RTFA, it was more fun to shoot first.)
I believe the teacher was trying to spell "expectorations", as it is important to know how to spit properly.
Who said I was joking.
I can believe that part: they did it to me one too many times, which is why I quit shopping there. A few years ago I picked out an nice (rather expensive) cordless phone with two handsets. The thing was shrinkwrapped with official-looking stickers all over it. I took it home, opened it up, and found something that looked like it had been through a world war. Well, I figure it had been badly abused by someone's undisciplined children. Scuffed up, display cracked ... hell, one of the handsets rattled when I shook it gently. I'll never know if the phones actually worked because the base station's power supply had torn wiring. I took it right back to Best Buy and had to argue with their customer disservice personnel about how I had damaged the phones and didn't want to admit it.
... but I wonder who the next sucker was who ended up with it. Personally, I believe it should be illegal for questionable operations like Best Buy to own and operate shrinkwrap machines.
Long story short, I got my money back
"Girl", "bar" and "morning" are not even words.
Maybe not to the average Slashdotter, but you just try and explain "rooting" to a politician: you have to speak to people in terms with which they are familiar. Believe me, our Congressional representatives are very familiar with girls, and bars, and mornings after.
The old AT&T and the Regional Bell Operating Companies were heavily regulated. It worked well for a long time, but the original laws were written by a government that truly wanted a reliable phone system for an entire nation. They succeeded in that, because those regulations (such as the Telecommunications Act of 1934) were actually pretty decent. The problem is that things are qualitatively different today, with a government that is heavily influenced by corporate money, and a Congress with a habit of labeling onerous laws with names that belie the law's true intent. You can bet your bottom dollar that any "Net Neutrality" legislation that gets passed, at least during this Administration, would be anything but.
The unfortunate truth is not that the Internet must be "neutral" with regards to packet transmission: it can't, really. The real question is who decides what prioritization and filtering occurs, and for what purpose. The problem is that there's a whole lot of wiggle room here, and no amount of lawmaking will be able to account for everything a sleazy ISP can pull off.
No argument from me on that score. The fact that iTunes not only handles a huge percentage of the major labels sales and accepts submissions from independent artists is not lost on the RIAA types. Quite possibly it gives them nightmares (one can only hope) but more importantly I think you've hit on the real reason they dislike iTunes so much. Not only does iTunes control their distribution to a degree they currently find unacceptable (what was that? A contract you say? Talk about poetic justice) but Apple also sells music over which they hold no copyright and (*gasp choke*) pays the artist. If I were an RIAA or studio exec, I'd be sweating bullets right about now.
Sometimes empires are lost overnight, but often it takes longer and nothing lasts forever. This is a chink in their armor: all we can do is watch as the cracks slowly widen.
Those might be compelling if you need them: the vast majority of features and functions offered by a modern OS will go completely unused by a given user or organization. Sure, over millions of installations everything will find a place, but if your current environment supports all of your own requirements, there's no legitimate need to trigger an upgrade cycle. That's why Microsoft spends so much time and money trying to force their big customers to upgrade, whether they want to or not, because the perceived need just isn't there any longer.
... but will those benefits be of sufficient magnitude to truly justify the cost of upgrading? Time will tell, but if it doesn't sell on its own merits you can bet there will be plenty of armtwisting.
Guilder's Rule applies here: 98 to 2K was an order of magnitude (or better!) improvement on pretty much every score but performance, and even that became moot as faster processors and cheap memory became available. Really, Windows 2000 was the Windows '98 GUI stuck on top of the NT kernel, but because Windows '98 was so unreliable businesses that went with 2K saw immediate returns. Consequently, it was worth the investment to upgrade. That big a gain in productivity justifies the expense, because the payback period is so short.
Contrast that to going from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. What most users received was a modified user interface that was not intrinsically better and, more importantly, it was less stable than Windows 2000. Was that a worthwhile tradeoff. Many didn't think so, and Microsoft had to put the screws to some of its biggest customers to get them to buy into XP.
Now comes Vista. Will it provide net benefits to its customers relative to Windows XP? Sure
I know, our elected representatives are citizens too, and you would think that they wouldn't want to live under the bad law they make. I've come to accept that the profiteering that goes on in Congress is rewarding enough that it's worth moving the country in the wrong direction by leaps and bounds, and they must figure that, as powerful as they are, they aren't really subject to those laws anyway. For the most part they're right. Occasionally one of them gets sacrificed to make the plebs think that Washington is policing itself, but that has little apparent effect on the rest of them, fine-sounding speeches aside.
... and then they get within range of the D.C. distortion field. I believe that it's a lot like picking up a girl in a bar and going home with her. It all seems to make perfect sense at the time, but the next morning you wake up and go "Oh my God ... what have I done?"
People like to make jokes about Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field". I'd like to point out that a much more powerful version of the same effect permeates Washington D.C.. I was born there, as it happens, and even as a small child I could feel it, a little. I wasn't sure what it was, but something was definitely out-of-kilter even way back then. When we returned home (to another state) I felt an overwhelming sense of normalcy so I know our leaders are driving the country while under the influence of something.
So, our elected officials go to Washington with the best of intentions, perhaps with a sincere desire to make the nation a better place
But by the time you wake up, it is way too late.
And if you're too much of a couch potato to power up your cell phone, you can always spot the neighbor kid five bucks to charge it for you.
Yeah, well, mebi I'll use those terms and mebi I won't. So there.
Why do copyright holders screw the creators?
Because until recently, they could. If you wanted your music published, there were only a few ways to go. That has of course changed. The music outfits would like, very much, to return to those days.
We'll be sticking with XP.
... Gates, Hell & Co. won't leave us any choice. But maybe by then it will have matured into something useful.
Me too. For as long as we can. Eventually, it's going to be a forced putt
What's she's really saying is that if there were some technological measure that could be widely implemented to prevent any and all copyright or patent infringement, it should be forced on us.
... I think she should take a skiing holiday. We might get lucky.
I'm not impressed with this woman. I agree with one of the earlier posters
Actually, I think it's more a perception (largely correct) that the big copyright holders are screwing both the creators and the buyers. Certainly that's the case when it comes to music, and given the creative accounting for which Hollywood is so famous, that likely applies to the movie industry as well. Consequently, you are right, copyright infringement is not victimless, but the victims are generally not the people that the RIAA/MPAA types would like us to believe. Much of the verbiage those outfits spew on that topic is downright disingenuous.
Now I do believe that one should pay for what one receives, and I've no problem buying music, but I'd just rather buy from a source that is as close as possible to the creator. That way, as much of my money as possible goes to the creative elements of our society rather than the parasitic ones. Take iTunes: yes, Apple gets very little of the vast stream of raw dollars pouring into it's DRM-constricted throat, but the people actually producing that music don't get even that much. The rest is picked off by businesses that have litte raison d'être in the Internet age.
But that is nothing new in and of itself. Middlemen generally suck, when you get right down to it. But pinning down who, exactly, is a "victim" is not always so black-and-white, and given that many of the "victims" here are organizations that have criminally abused their own customers it's hard to work up much sympathy.
In truth, the recent corruption of IP law in this country is turning a nation of people into victims, in many ways. Think about that for a moment. Something isn't right, and it can't all be laid at the feet of P2P technology and downloaders.
It amazes me to hear people like you rambling on about "jail terms" for civil violations like copyright infringement. Apparently you've bought into the idea that downloading a song is somehow the moral equivalent to a violent crime. It's not, never has been, and copyright law never said so. Heaping on more penalties isn't the solution. Besides, copyright infringement is already against the law, and given the extreme penalties that could already be (mis)applied to an individual I don't see how tougher laws would help.
A freer-market is the solution, one that is not controlled by a handful of abusive corporations. That would be better for both the content creators and their customers. Bad for the middlemen, but odds are we won't miss them.