Why do nerds always seem to not understand that people might not be ignorant: they might be apathetic. The theoretical losses due to DRM are outweighed by the perceived benefits.
There is also the nerd's boundless sense of entitlement:
Not every bookseller wants to be known as an adult book store.
Not every bookseller wants to be busted every six weeks for interstate or international trafficking in porn.
They have consistently shown they're in the money biz, and don't give a fig about art or freedom of speech.
We are fortunate enough to have in this town an 84 year old family owned independent bookstore.
Three floors of new and used books, collectible editions, reading rooms and so on. It has outlived the cigar stores, newstands, strip malls, Galleria malls, adult book stores and comic book shops which were once its competition.
The loft offers a well-equipted space for perfomance and rehearsals that has been free to local artists for as long as anyone can remember.
It's the kind of place where your great grand-dad took his kids - who settled in to stay for three generations - and it has never traded in porn.
That was both a personal decision and a business decision - and. for this business, the right decision.
The main problem with software patents is that it costs your own time for so many months in your mom's basement (which amounts to about $70K if you count lost wages, less if you just count the food and lodging you consume) to produce a decent, market worthy software product.
This is the fantasy, of course.
But how many real - marketable - patentable - software products come straight out of Mom's basement?
All I'm saying is that the constitution protects free speech and lists no exceptions.
The constitution doesn't define free speech:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The constitution simply prohibited Congress from limiting the freedom of speech - as it was then understood.
It was never a license to libel or harass anyone.
The Absolutist Approach is most often associated with Justice Black, who held that the First Amendment meant exactly what it says: that Congress shall make NO law abridging the freedom of speech. Under this approach, the only question is whether the action in conduct is truly "speech" (and therefore protected) or "conduct" (and therefore subject to reasonable governmental regulation. Even absolutists such as Justice Black recognized that words might be so closely connected with producing a specific action (such as entering into a contract with a hitman or yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater) as to be unprotected.
Things like this are becoming much more difficult for any rational person to reach a sensible conclusion on. My initial reaction would be that you don't censor or criminalize thoughts.
When thoughts become words and the words are pubished, they become actions.
how do we make sure that we deal with this in a rational way and don't just say "that pisses me off, so I'm going to make a blanket law about it" like with that stupid bitch and her family that drove that little girl to kill herself over myspace? A case where it was so tempting to have so much anger and hatred over the incident that even the completely logical person was tempted to say "fuck it, I don't care what the lasting legal consequences are for the rest of society, as long as we come up with a way to stick that bitch in a max security prison for life".
Tell me what is socially redeeming about the mischief and malice that drives a child to suicide? What is irrational in saying that this is conduct that no healthy society is obliged to permit or ignore?
The roots of free speech in the American legal and political tradition are rooted in the desire for open - on-going - political debate without fear of government interference.
It was never - at least the beginning - defined as a right to say whatever you damned pleased without regard for the consequences.
That path leads to settlement outside the law. The horsewhip. The duel. The family fued.
Linux is huge, what the public really wants even though the masses aren't smart enough to realize it's what they want. They're happy as long as we spoon feed it to them with Android phones and in embedded devices they use and love while calling Linux that freaking weird hard to use thing their nephew likes.
In other words, Linux is huge where the geek is kept at arm's length.
The Google phone is Android and its mascot, Evo, is Eve's brother from Wall-E - and not Tux.
The apps on yout Internet enabled HDTV may be powered by Linux.
But the UI will be defined by Mitsubishi, Samsung or Sony. The apps by the needs of Netflix, The NFL and Major League Basebakkm Hula and Pandora.
If H.265/HEVC delivers 1080p video at half the bit rate of WebM, and scakes to a futuristic 4kx2k home theater then HEVC it will be.
The browser may not exist recogizable form. There will be an app store but not app-get.
No Linux distribution, no respository, as the geek understands it.
Source code may be posted - somewhere.
But the chances are quite good your wife will veto any hack into your big screen home theater ptoject that won't be paid off until 2015.
This means Microsoft can finally start doing the illegal things they've been doing behind closed doors out in the open, like strong arming suppliers without being hounded by the feds.
Microsoft's "suppliers" - bu which I assume you mean its OEM and retail partners - have been crying all the way to the bank since Day 1.
MSDOS and Windows were sold at a mass market price - orginally, 1/5 that of CPM/86.
The Microsoft OS worked well on consumer-grade commodity hardware that was mid-line at the time of release and entry level a year or so later.
The Microsoft OS promised backwards compatibility and long-term support.
This is a damn good strategy when you are selling the PC as a big ticket home applicance or workhorse office machine.
All these forces combined with a non-exclusive OS license encouraged the production of an astonishing range of product for every price point and market niche.
Walmart.com currently lists 301 Win 7 laptops and 174 Win 7 desktops priced from $218 to $1850.
Hardware prices drop rapidly and specs become more and more impressive as you ramp up to mass production on a global scale - to serve what would become 1.5 billion or so Windows users.
Today, $1850 at Walmart buys a liquid-cooled i7-Extreme 64 bit Win 7 gaming system with 12 GB RAM and NIVIDIA GTX470 graphics.
The brand name "multi-core" laptop at Walmart.com is more likely to sell for less than $800.
In 1995 a Win 95 Packard Bell with a P-75, 8 MB RAM, a 545 MB HDD and 1 MB of integrated graphics, sold for about $1200.
So what's a good alternative to Skype that works cross-platform? I use Skype with Linux and Android connecting to Mac and Windows users. Is Jitsi a reasonable solution?
Only if the 1.5 billion or so Mac and Windows user have heard of Jitsi and are willing to install it.
Only if Jitsi can be integrated into Windows Live!, Outlook and Microsoft's enterprise messaging solutions.
Ony if Jitsi can dial out to any telephone on the planet.
Since the court ruling of IP address != identity. I would certainly like to see said copyright group charged with extortion.
The rulings of a single district court judge counts for damn little in the American federal system.
Tracing an IP address stands a pretty good chance of leading yoiu to the primary account owner.
The legally responsible adult, if you like.
It isn't perfect. But nothing in the law has to be perfect. Least of all in the earliest stages of civil litigation.
That a plaintiff disagrees with a lower court judge in Texas on the law of evidence does not make the offer of a settlement in New York or California extortion.
Considering PSN is apparently 75 million users, if the numbers for Ubuntu keep growing then we will hopefully see more developers who consider it worthwhile to port their games over.
PSN serves 75 million console gamers.
Who also have a taste for HD media play and online subscription services like Hulu Plus and Netflix.
Batman: Arkham Asylum becomes the perfect companion piece to the The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray.
You won't see that kind of pay-off in a port to Ubuntu.
Can someone explain to me why someone who is monitoring sufficient backbones and running sufficient Tor nodes himself can't just watch a packet stream being bounced between Tor nodes?
I've asked the same question about Freenet.
The network depends on users volunteering to route and store high-risk traffic. The files may be in fragments and encrypted. But if your client application, node or supernode is exposed, the consequences may be - unpleasant.
That is not a problem for the three-letter agency, foreign or domestic that can build depth by running tens of thosands of nodes and supernodes, if it chooses.
The move to digital has significantly lowered requirement #1,
Has it really?
I would like to see how much the pro budgets for cameras, optics, lighting, computer hardware, software, peripherals, services and supplies of every sort.
Also, while I'm not positive on this, I believe WordPerfect introduced the grammar-check before Word.
1991:
Microsoft had introduced a new version of WindWord at COMDEX (their official abbreviation for Word for Windows was WinWord, but I liked to add the extra d), and the new version included some new features we did not have. Among other things, they included a grammar checker and feature called Word Art. I liked to think the features were not very useful, but they did look very nice in a demonstration.
Similar capabilities exist in other programs. Apple's iWork, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org have an equivalent feature in more recent versions, and The GIMP's Script-Fu is somewhat similar (although often used for different purposes). OpenOffice.org's version is called Fontwork. WordArt also exist as a drawing option in Google Docs.
The PS3 cluster was a hardware hack for the cash-strapped research lab.
The cluster took 2,000 consoles out of retail distribution channels with no return to Sony from after-market purchases of games, peripherals, videos and online services.
It cannibalized sales of Sony's own cell-based HPC product.
All good things come to an end.
The OtherOS makes [its entirely predictable] exit with the introduction of the PS2 Slim.
Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was. WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.
That is not how the story is told by someone who was there from the beginning:
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
Afterword
What, in your opinion, were the critical marketing mistakes made by WordPerfect from your departure up until the acquisition by Novell?
WPCorp spent themselves to death. The last full year I was there (1991) sales were approximately $600 million and pre-tax profit was $200 million. In 1992, sales fell to about $570 million, but expenses grew to equal sales. 1993 sales were about $700 million (if that number can be believed), but expenses grew to more than $700 million. The employee count from early 1992 to the end of 1993 grew from about 3,300 to 5,500, and the company was bleeding cash.
WPCorp needed better products to compete, and they needed a suite of products. The products didn't get better, and selling a Borland Office (rather than a WordPerfect Office) was silly. By spending away all their cash, the company had no chance of recovering. By not developing better products in a productive and efficient way, the company had no chance of recovering. Given Microsoft's strength, perhaps WordPerfect Corp never would have been able to reclaim their number one position in the word processing market, but they could have survived if they would have kept their expenses in check.
In the DOS era, WordPerfect was supporting every platform known to man - and distracted by internal partisan rivalries. The transition to a GUI came particularly hard.
The app store is a sales and marketing tool. It can be one-stop shopping for product reviews, screenshots, tutorials, user forums and so on.
Resources like Download.com have been very successful in placing FOSS apps on the Windows PC for precisely this reason. Consider the abomination which is Sourceforge in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do nerds always seem to not understand that people might not be ignorant: they might be apathetic. The theoretical losses due to DRM are outweighed by the perceived benefits.
There is also the nerd's boundless sense of entitlement:
Not every bookseller wants to be known as an adult book store.
Not every bookseller wants to be busted every six weeks for interstate or international trafficking in porn.
They have consistently shown they're in the money biz, and don't give a fig about art or freedom of speech.
We are fortunate enough to have in this town an 84 year old family owned independent bookstore.
Three floors of new and used books, collectible editions, reading rooms and so on. It has outlived the cigar stores, newstands, strip malls, Galleria malls, adult book stores and comic book shops which were once its competition.
The loft offers a well-equipted space for perfomance and rehearsals that has been free to local artists for as long as anyone can remember.
It's the kind of place where your great grand-dad took his kids - who settled in to stay for three generations - and it has never traded in porn.
That was both a personal decision and a business decision - and. for this business, the right decision.
There's no need for every basic discipline to have a degree granting department at every school
Western has about 15,000 students - 100 in CS. It is not unfair to ask if this is where the school's strength or focus really lies.
Indeed, Disney's well known from taking from the public domain only to permanently copyright the result so as to never give back.
This is nonsense.
Search IMDB for a title like Snow White or Cinderella and you will typically find one hundred or so variations on a theme -
dating back to the nickelodeon days of 1903.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella musical produced for television in 1957. The Jim Henson version from 1970. Cinderella
If you are any damn good at all you don't sit there whining that Disney got there first - he didn't - or that Disney did it better -
which is why you need his art, script, voices and music.
The main problem with software patents is that it costs your own time for so many months in your mom's basement (which amounts to about $70K if you count lost wages, less if you just count the food and lodging you consume) to produce a decent, market worthy software product.
This is the fantasy, of course.
But how many real - marketable - patentable - software products come straight out of Mom's basement?
All I'm saying is that the constitution protects free speech and lists no exceptions.
The constitution doesn't define free speech:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The constitution simply prohibited Congress from limiting the freedom of speech - as it was then understood.
It was never a license to libel or harass anyone.
The Absolutist Approach is most often associated with Justice Black, who held that the First Amendment meant exactly what it says: that Congress shall make NO law abridging the freedom of speech. Under this approach, the only question is whether the action in conduct is truly "speech" (and therefore protected) or "conduct" (and therefore subject to reasonable governmental regulation. Even absolutists such as Justice Black recognized that words might be so closely connected with producing a specific action (such as entering into a contract with a hitman or yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater) as to be unprotected.
Introduction to the Free Speech Clause
Things like this are becoming much more difficult for any rational person to reach a sensible conclusion on. My initial reaction would be that you don't censor or criminalize thoughts.
When thoughts become words and the words are pubished, they become actions.
how do we make sure that we deal with this in a rational way and don't just say "that pisses me off, so I'm going to make a blanket law about it" like with that stupid bitch and her family that drove that little girl to kill herself over myspace? A case where it was so tempting to have so much anger and hatred over the incident that even the completely logical person was tempted to say "fuck it, I don't care what the lasting legal consequences are for the rest of society, as long as we come up with a way to stick that bitch in a max security prison for life".
Tell me what is socially redeeming about the mischief and malice that drives a child to suicide? What is irrational in saying that this is conduct that no healthy society is obliged to permit or ignore?
The roots of free speech in the American legal and political tradition are rooted in the desire for open - on-going - political debate without fear of government interference.
It was never - at least the beginning - defined as a right to say whatever you damned pleased without regard for the consequences.
That path leads to settlement outside the law. The horsewhip. The duel. The family fued.
Someone needs to REALLY accept responsibility.
Beginning with whoever broke into Sony's networks and systems? That part of the story doesn't seem to excite the geek so much.
You have the strangest idea of "just works". Needs a re-install every year is part of "just works"?
I have been trying to thnk of the last time I found a compelling need to re-install Windows at home.
The closest I could get was "1995."
Linux is huge, what the public really wants even though the masses aren't smart enough to realize it's what they want. They're happy as long as we spoon feed it to them with Android phones and in embedded devices they use and love while calling Linux that freaking weird hard to use thing their nephew likes.
In other words, Linux is huge where the geek is kept at arm's length.
The Google phone is Android and its mascot, Evo, is Eve's brother from Wall-E - and not Tux.
The apps on yout Internet enabled HDTV may be powered by Linux.
But the UI will be defined by Mitsubishi, Samsung or Sony. The apps by the needs of Netflix, The NFL and Major League Basebakkm Hula and Pandora.
If H.265/HEVC delivers 1080p video at half the bit rate of WebM, and scakes to a futuristic 4kx2k home theater then HEVC it will be.
The browser may not exist recogizable form. There will be an app store but not app-get.
No Linux distribution, no respository, as the geek understands it.
Source code may be posted - somewhere.
But the chances are quite good your wife will veto any hack into your big screen home theater ptoject that won't be paid off until 2015.
This means Microsoft can finally start doing the illegal things they've been doing behind closed doors out in the open, like strong arming suppliers without being hounded by the feds.
Microsoft's "suppliers" - bu which I assume you mean its OEM and retail partners - have been crying all the way to the bank since Day 1.
And what about all these small OSes that died?
What about them?
MSDOS and Windows were sold at a mass market price - orginally, 1/5 that of CPM/86.
The Microsoft OS worked well on consumer-grade commodity hardware that was mid-line at the time of release and entry level a year or so later.
The Microsoft OS promised backwards compatibility and long-term support.
This is a damn good strategy when you are selling the PC as a big ticket home applicance or workhorse office machine.
All these forces combined with a non-exclusive OS license encouraged the production of an astonishing range of product for every price point and market niche.
Walmart.com currently lists 301 Win 7 laptops and 174 Win 7 desktops priced from $218 to $1850.
Hardware prices drop rapidly and specs become more and more impressive as you ramp up to mass production on a global scale - to serve what would become 1.5 billion or so Windows users.
Today, $1850 at Walmart buys a liquid-cooled i7-Extreme 64 bit Win 7 gaming system with 12 GB RAM and NIVIDIA GTX470 graphics.
The brand name "multi-core" laptop at Walmart.com is more likely to sell for less than $800.
In 1995 a Win 95 Packard Bell with a P-75, 8 MB RAM, a 545 MB HDD and 1 MB of integrated graphics, sold for about $1200.
The Amber Alert system has been used many times by one parent who didn't want the other parent to take little Johny for the weekend.
The Scripps-Howard story is six years old.
"Code Amber" itself archives alerts back to September 2003. Code Amber News Service ---
and once again I see no evidence that there has been any significant abuse of the system.
it is hard to argue against the idea of the "Amber Alert", but everyone should go read up about the false alarms and abuses of the system.
I thought it worthwhile to search Google News for "Amber Alert." I can see very few signs that the system is bring abused.
With the Microsoft/Ford collaboration, what if Microsoft built Skype into the next version of their car software?
It isn't a question of "If," it is only a question of "When?"
Internet Radio In Your Car
So what's a good alternative to Skype that works cross-platform? I use Skype with Linux and Android connecting to Mac and Windows users. Is Jitsi a reasonable solution?
Only if the 1.5 billion or so Mac and Windows user have heard of Jitsi and are willing to install it.
Only if Jitsi can be integrated into Windows Live!, Outlook and Microsoft's enterprise messaging solutions.
Ony if Jitsi can dial out to any telephone on the planet.
Since the court ruling of IP address != identity. I would certainly like to see said copyright group charged with extortion.
The rulings of a single district court judge counts for damn little in the American federal system.
Tracing an IP address stands a pretty good chance of leading yoiu to the primary account owner.
The legally responsible adult, if you like.
It isn't perfect. But nothing in the law has to be perfect. Least of all in the earliest stages of civil litigation.
That a plaintiff disagrees with a lower court judge in Texas on the law of evidence does not make the offer of a settlement in New York or California extortion.
Considering PSN is apparently 75 million users, if the numbers for Ubuntu keep growing then we will hopefully see more developers who consider it worthwhile to port their games over.
PSN serves 75 million console gamers.
Who also have a taste for HD media play and online subscription services like Hulu Plus and Netflix.
Batman: Arkham Asylum becomes the perfect companion piece to the The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray.
You won't see that kind of pay-off in a port to Ubuntu.
Can someone explain to me why someone who is monitoring sufficient backbones and running sufficient Tor nodes himself can't just watch a packet stream being bounced between Tor nodes?
I've asked the same question about Freenet.
The network depends on users volunteering to route and store high-risk traffic. The files may be in fragments and encrypted. But if your client application, node or supernode is exposed, the consequences may be - unpleasant.
That is not a problem for the three-letter agency, foreign or domestic that can build depth by running tens of thosands of nodes and supernodes, if it chooses.
The move to digital has significantly lowered requirement #1,
Has it really?
I would like to see how much the pro budgets for cameras, optics, lighting, computer hardware, software, peripherals, services and supplies of every sort.
Also, while I'm not positive on this, I believe WordPerfect introduced the grammar-check before Word.
1991:
Microsoft had introduced a new version of WindWord at COMDEX (their official abbreviation for Word for Windows was WinWord, but I liked to add the extra d), and the new version included some new features we did not have. Among other things, they included a grammar checker and feature called Word Art. I liked to think the features were not very useful, but they did look very nice in a demonstration.
Almost Perfect - Chapter 13
Word Art survives, of course.
Similar capabilities exist in other programs. Apple's iWork, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org have an equivalent feature in more recent versions, and The GIMP's Script-Fu is somewhat similar (although often used for different purposes). OpenOffice.org's version is called Fontwork. WordArt also exist as a drawing option in Google Docs.
WordArt, Word Art Generator
there's no reason why the PC should not be on the rise now and console market share declining...
You buy the Kinect comtroller as much as to watch your kids at play as to play yourself.
Console gaming is family room gaming. No matter how good the online component, it will always be secondary in this market.
The United States Air Force are "nobody"?
Let's be honest here.
The PS3 cluster was a hardware hack for the cash-strapped research lab.
The cluster took 2,000 consoles out of retail distribution channels with no return to Sony from after-market purchases of games, peripherals, videos and online services.
It cannibalized sales of Sony's own cell-based HPC product.
All good things come to an end.
The OtherOS makes [its entirely predictable] exit with the introduction of the PS2 Slim.
Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was.
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.
That is not how the story is told by someone who was there from the beginning:
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
Afterword
What, in your opinion, were the critical marketing mistakes made by WordPerfect from your departure up until the acquisition by Novell?
WPCorp spent themselves to death. The last full year I was there (1991) sales were approximately $600 million and pre-tax profit was $200 million. In 1992, sales fell to about $570 million, but expenses grew to equal sales. 1993 sales were about $700 million (if that number can be believed), but expenses grew to more than $700 million. The employee count from early 1992 to the end of 1993 grew from about 3,300 to 5,500, and the company was bleeding cash.
WPCorp needed better products to compete, and they needed a suite of products. The products didn't get better, and selling a Borland Office (rather than a WordPerfect Office) was silly. By spending away all their cash, the company had no chance of recovering. By not developing better products in a productive and efficient way, the company had no chance of recovering. Given Microsoft's strength, perhaps WordPerfect Corp never would have been able to reclaim their number one position in the word processing market, but they could have survived if they would have kept their expenses in check.
Almost Perfect
In the DOS era, WordPerfect was supporting every platform known to man - and distracted by internal partisan rivalries. The transition to a GUI came particularly hard.
The app store is a sales and marketing tool. It can be one-stop shopping for product reviews, screenshots, tutorials, user forums and so on.
Resources like Download.com have been very successful in placing FOSS apps on the Windows PC for precisely this reason. Consider the abomination which is Sourceforge in comparison.