I don't know that I'd call the functionality itself irresponsible on Symantec's part, as how to handle advertising has always been (and should be) the viewer's choice. Enabling it by default, though, that's a problem
I suppose you're one of the asshats that thinks buying a traffic light switcher is a perfectly acceptable thing to do?
I don't know that I'd call myself an asshat, but I sure do. It's inevitable that people will. Everyone ELSE is doing it, and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage. In an economic system that ENCOURAGES self-interest, we cannot rely on people's willingness to subvert their own interests for the good of the whole. It's the government's job to correct these kinds of Prisoner's Dilemmas by outlawing traffic light switchers or by securing the system so they're technologically infeasible.
It may not be feasible to outlaw ad blockers, as the web is international, and that'd just be a Prisoner's Dilemma for nations rather than individuals. In that case it'll be up to the webmasters to design their own solutions. Whitepages.com has a button next to each name you look up; "Buy this person flowers," it says, and redirects to a partner site that delivers bouquets. Excellent source of revenue: it's lucrative for both sites, and it's useful enough that the common user will not WANT to block it.
Even slashdot offers a link after every book review: "Buy this book at [bookstore]." There are alternate means of revenue that do not require the exploitation of the user.
Dude, it's in your own damn interests to view the ads (not look at them, simply let them load and ignore them). Why? Because that is what keeps the site "free" for you.
Wrongo.
It's in my interest that enough other people view ads that the site is profitable. Whether or not that's the case, unless I am the user that actually tips the balance (the odds of which are not worth consideration), I am always better off blocking them. Therefore we have what we call a Prisoner's Dilemma, and your best-interest analysis fails.
Writing that Apache module would be exactly the solution to the dilemma. Of course, if we kept rendering them without displaying them, eventually advertisers would catch on as their revenues plummet, and there'll be no fancy-pants way of stopping it. So the market is screwed either way.
For now, though, I greatly enjoy the protections afforded me by Privoxy.
Ok, on one hand you have a company a with ~5% OS marketshare writing software for another OS and specifically telling people it will disable certain other software on the system.
Right, well, you're being disingenuous. Their monopoly isn't in the OS, obviously. It's in the high-end mp3 player market. The iPod is the only game in town at the high end. And they are (perhaps explicitly) trying to extend their desktop market by leveraging their mp3 player market, which is EXACTLY what MS wrongly did with a number of their products.
I'm typically a fanatical Apple apologist, and in this case I happen to think that the iPod isn't a monopoly: rather, that it's the most favored of a number of options only because it is the best option -- winning fairly in a still-competitive market. But you've got to admit that the argument is worth consideration.
No. No one contests that the people who wrote the emails have copyrights to them; the point of contention is whether spreading them around the internet for the purpose of exposing Diebold's flagrant incompetence constitutes Fair Use of copyrighted material.
You're missing my point. The Dred Scott decision is a gross example of Court negligence and wrong-headedness. It is universally recognized as such. It's thoroughly discredited. Justice Taney's dictum about guns has absolutely no modern bearing on second amendment jurisprudence. It'll never be quoted, never be cited, and never serve as anything besides a monument to human idiocy and bigotry.
Here's an exercise for you: go and read the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme court decided that blacks weren't citizens. Among the statements in the decision, was the horrified speculation that if blacks were citizens, they'd have to be allowed to bear arms!
Here's news for you: the Dred Scott decision is no longer law. It's been overruled repeatedly in subsequent cases, Brown v. Board of Ed being the most famous. It's also regarded by pretty much everybody as one of the biggest mistakes in the Court's history.
Point is, nothing in that miscarriage of a decision that former Justice Taney penned should be viewed as anything other than a history lesson.
If you want second amendment jurisprudence, there are more recent and more relevant examples.
The ISP is being sued for 'profiting' (by hosting it) from a site which distributes copyright-infringing material.
Auto manufacturers profit when their cars are bought by drug dealers for the purpose of smuggling drugs. Handgun makers profit when someone buys their gun and uses it in a murder. Gardening stores profit when a customer buys large quantities of fertilizer, makes a bomb, and blows up large federal buildings in Oklahoma City.
Should the auto manufacturer, handgun maker, and gardening store be legally liable for the crimes of their customers? Should they even be responsible for following their customers around to make sure they do nothing illegal?
You can't indicate something that doesn't exist; I can't, for example, publically indicate my status as U.S. President for the simple reason that I'm not.
So Microsoft's obligation is twofold: they first and foremost must agree to undertake actions, and secondly must publically indicate said agreement.
Now that the other (and let's face it, a bit more technical and hackerish) 90% of the world has real solid access to the format, it'll be cracked in a couple weeks or so.
I can't say for sure, but I have the feeling that Apple knows this and doesn't care.
For every informed Slashdot type with access to the crack, there are 10,000 people who don't.
Apple's appeasing the record industry with their DRM, not themselves. Think of the iPod. It was introduced in a time when "mp3 player" meant "hardware extension of copyright infringement," yet Apple got around the stigma (and largely won over the entire industry) by including some going-through-the-motions restrictions. You can't reverse sync an iPod... oh wait, you can, but it's not apparent, and that was good enough.
Most of the other DRM the industry already accepts is even more vulnerable -- I recall that the most recent state-of-the-art CD protection could be bypassed with the shift key. Apple's scheme is Fort Knox compared to that garbage.
This is a bit clunky though, and I doubt any meta tag updates she does will be reflected in my Library, and vice versa.
Clunky or not, the meta tags WOULD update -- they are stored in the mp3 itself, not the Library file. This is the sort of thing you could have actually checked in five minutes rather than accidently misleading Slashdot's 350,000 readers.
I don't think they were actually shut down. They were the ones who filed the lawsuit; the outcome is that they lost the lawsuit and are barred from suing again.
This means that the anti-spam outfit is free to continue blacklisting the spammers, but the spammers haven't actually been legally enjoined from continuing.
The real gain, IMO, is that this case demonstrates that the legal mindset is strongly against spammers. It seems like a sort of litmus test to me -- not deciding so much as revealing -- and I'm very happy to see the result.
Perhaps I'm hopelessly libertarian in these sentiments, but doesn't it seem cheaper, more effective, and much more efficient to allow parents to control what their children can access?
Great, yes, put on the packaging that the game contains nudity/violence/swearing/whatever, but don't legally restrict anyone from buying it. The state can't insure that, for example, the kid doesn't sniff his new bottle of whiteout in his room -- at some point, we MUST fall back on parental oversight. Why don't we use it by default?
Good question. Insurance companies think that they do not, and they've got their actuaries to back them up.
ABS is give-and-take. On the one hand, it takes less mental and physical agility to stomp on the brake pedal than to pump it. On the other hand, you can stop significantly sooner if you're good at pumping the brake in a car without ABS than if you rely on ABS. Moreover, ABS lends a false sense of security: when you're rounding a corner, it can't prevent you from spinning out, yet people believe that it can.
The statistics suggest that there is no advantage whatsoever to ABS.
Yes, of course, Fight Club. It shows nothing. Certainly, it's possible, but the risk of such a strategy (national outcry, Arthur Anderson-style drawing and quartering of the entire corporation) offset the cost-benefit analysis that Tyler Durden so smugly explicates.
By the way, quotes from movies are not an overly credible source. Try making explosives with the method Tyler Durden gives you; that's wrong too.
Don't be dumb. The reason that there was a scandal with firestone tires is PRECISELY THE REASON that there is (perhaps) a scandal involving Nokia phones detonating on your face. Both are preventable by the manufacturer; hence, both invoke public outcry.
It's pretty sad that people organize "protests" in a fucking -game- but won't stand up for their rights in real life. What is the matter with you people?
Please stop grandstanding. I feel confident guessing that many more protests happen every hour in real life than have ever happened in any massively multiplayer game anywhere.
We protest what affects us. We protest what we care about. If I lived in Australia and spent a signifcant part of my life playing Second Life, you'd better believe that I would be far more interested in changes in Second Life than in America's laws.
Further, as the article indicates (did you read it?), online protests are often mostly recreational. If playing a game is fun enough to spend hours doing, and protesting within that game is even more fun, then many players will protest. If you somehow made protesting the PATRIOT act the most enjoyable out of the three, then they'd do that instead.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that being upset or offended is a right, not a responsibility. It follows that protest should be similarly optional. No one is stepping on your toes by being apathetic about the PATRIOT act, so your vitriolic straw man doesn't seem terribly justifiable.
SimCity 2000 was an excellent, truly open-ended game. NeverWinter Nights is NOT open-ended, nor was it ever intended to be; while one can construct one's own modules, playing that module is riding the rails the creator laid.
I like both kinds of games, but the open-ended ones stay with me much longer. I still play SimCity 2000 to this day, yea, even though it requires Classic to boot.
Would it be legal or wouldn't it? And if Apple established that it was, wouldn't I feel better about buying from the iTunes music store?
It's not Apple's job to tell you whether something is legal; that's for the courts to do. Apple was compelled only to explain why they objected to a particular auction.
That said, the First Sale Doctrine doesn't apply to digital goods without some thought. It's founded on the notion that selling something in its entirety means you no longer own it; this property is not necessarily endemic to digital goods.
For those really secure passwords, I look around in my office, pick a token, and use something from it as a password
This is a terrible, terrible way to pick a password that needs to be secure. It's the first thing anyone will mimic after they've tried your name, your birthday, your pet's name, etc.
It's one of the classic examples of what NOT to do.
Slashdot Mirror
How his this worse than disabling it by default?
My apology: bad choice of words. I mean revenue gathering in a way that compromises the user's experience rather than enhances it.
Anything the user would disable, given a choice.
I don't know that I'd call myself an asshat, but I sure do. It's inevitable that people will. Everyone ELSE is doing it, and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage. In an economic system that ENCOURAGES self-interest, we cannot rely on people's willingness to subvert their own interests for the good of the whole. It's the government's job to correct these kinds of Prisoner's Dilemmas by outlawing traffic light switchers or by securing the system so they're technologically infeasible.
It may not be feasible to outlaw ad blockers, as the web is international, and that'd just be a Prisoner's Dilemma for nations rather than individuals. In that case it'll be up to the webmasters to design their own solutions. Whitepages.com has a button next to each name you look up; "Buy this person flowers," it says, and redirects to a partner site that delivers bouquets. Excellent source of revenue: it's lucrative for both sites, and it's useful enough that the common user will not WANT to block it.
Even slashdot offers a link after every book review: "Buy this book at [bookstore]." There are alternate means of revenue that do not require the exploitation of the user.
Wrongo.
It's in my interest that enough other people view ads that the site is profitable. Whether or not that's the case, unless I am the user that actually tips the balance (the odds of which are not worth consideration), I am always better off blocking them. Therefore we have what we call a Prisoner's Dilemma, and your best-interest analysis fails.
Writing that Apache module would be exactly the solution to the dilemma. Of course, if we kept rendering them without displaying them, eventually advertisers would catch on as their revenues plummet, and there'll be no fancy-pants way of stopping it. So the market is screwed either way.
For now, though, I greatly enjoy the protections afforded me by Privoxy.
Right, well, you're being disingenuous. Their monopoly isn't in the OS, obviously. It's in the high-end mp3 player market. The iPod is the only game in town at the high end. And they are (perhaps explicitly) trying to extend their desktop market by leveraging their mp3 player market, which is EXACTLY what MS wrongly did with a number of their products.
I'm typically a fanatical Apple apologist, and in this case I happen to think that the iPod isn't a monopoly: rather, that it's the most favored of a number of options only because it is the best option -- winning fairly in a still-competitive market. But you've got to admit that the argument is worth consideration.
No. No one contests that the people who wrote the emails have copyrights to them; the point of contention is whether spreading them around the internet for the purpose of exposing Diebold's flagrant incompetence constitutes Fair Use of copyrighted material.
I think.
You're missing my point. The Dred Scott decision is a gross example of Court negligence and wrong-headedness. It is universally recognized as such. It's thoroughly discredited. Justice Taney's dictum about guns has absolutely no modern bearing on second amendment jurisprudence. It'll never be quoted, never be cited, and never serve as anything besides a monument to human idiocy and bigotry.
Here's news for you: the Dred Scott decision is no longer law. It's been overruled repeatedly in subsequent cases, Brown v. Board of Ed being the most famous. It's also regarded by pretty much everybody as one of the biggest mistakes in the Court's history.
Point is, nothing in that miscarriage of a decision that former Justice Taney penned should be viewed as anything other than a history lesson.
If you want second amendment jurisprudence, there are more recent and more relevant examples.
Auto manufacturers profit when their cars are bought by drug dealers for the purpose of smuggling drugs. Handgun makers profit when someone buys their gun and uses it in a murder. Gardening stores profit when a customer buys large quantities of fertilizer, makes a bomb, and blows up large federal buildings in Oklahoma City.
Should the auto manufacturer, handgun maker, and gardening store be legally liable for the crimes of their customers? Should they even be responsible for following their customers around to make sure they do nothing illegal?
Anyway, I doubt a judge would accept such an abusive reading of the semantics.
You can't indicate something that doesn't exist; I can't, for example, publically indicate my status as U.S. President for the simple reason that I'm not.
So Microsoft's obligation is twofold: they first and foremost must agree to undertake actions, and secondly must publically indicate said agreement.
At least that's how I read it.
I can't say for sure, but I have the feeling that Apple knows this and doesn't care.
For every informed Slashdot type with access to the crack, there are 10,000 people who don't.
Apple's appeasing the record industry with their DRM, not themselves. Think of the iPod. It was introduced in a time when "mp3 player" meant "hardware extension of copyright infringement," yet Apple got around the stigma (and largely won over the entire industry) by including some going-through-the-motions restrictions. You can't reverse sync an iPod... oh wait, you can, but it's not apparent, and that was good enough.
Most of the other DRM the industry already accepts is even more vulnerable -- I recall that the most recent state-of-the-art CD protection could be bypassed with the shift key. Apple's scheme is Fort Knox compared to that garbage.
This is a bit clunky though, and I doubt any meta tag updates she does will be reflected in my Library, and vice versa.
Clunky or not, the meta tags WOULD update -- they are stored in the mp3 itself, not the Library file. This is the sort of thing you could have actually checked in five minutes rather than accidently misleading Slashdot's 350,000 readers.
I don't think they were actually shut down. They were the ones who filed the lawsuit; the outcome is that they lost the lawsuit and are barred from suing again.
This means that the anti-spam outfit is free to continue blacklisting the spammers, but the spammers haven't actually been legally enjoined from continuing.
The real gain, IMO, is that this case demonstrates that the legal mindset is strongly against spammers. It seems like a sort of litmus test to me -- not deciding so much as revealing -- and I'm very happy to see the result.
Perhaps I'm hopelessly libertarian in these sentiments, but doesn't it seem cheaper, more effective, and much more efficient to allow parents to control what their children can access?
Great, yes, put on the packaging that the game contains nudity/violence/swearing/whatever, but don't legally restrict anyone from buying it. The state can't insure that, for example, the kid doesn't sniff his new bottle of whiteout in his room -- at some point, we MUST fall back on parental oversight. Why don't we use it by default?
"Well that's not what the Narrator in Fight Club would have us believe"
Surprise! There is a reason that the narrator in Fight Club is not a credible news source.
"Q: Do anti-lock brakes save lives?"
Good question. Insurance companies think that they do not, and they've got their actuaries to back them up.
ABS is give-and-take. On the one hand, it takes less mental and physical agility to stomp on the brake pedal than to pump it. On the other hand, you can stop significantly sooner if you're good at pumping the brake in a car without ABS than if you rely on ABS. Moreover, ABS lends a false sense of security: when you're rounding a corner, it can't prevent you from spinning out, yet people believe that it can.
The statistics suggest that there is no advantage whatsoever to ABS.
A: Learn before you post.
Yes, of course, Fight Club. It shows nothing. Certainly, it's possible, but the risk of such a strategy (national outcry, Arthur Anderson-style drawing and quartering of the entire corporation) offset the cost-benefit analysis that Tyler Durden so smugly explicates.
By the way, quotes from movies are not an overly credible source. Try making explosives with the method Tyler Durden gives you; that's wrong too.
Don't be dumb. The reason that there was a scandal with firestone tires is PRECISELY THE REASON that there is (perhaps) a scandal involving Nokia phones detonating on your face. Both are preventable by the manufacturer; hence, both invoke public outcry.
Q: How many of the deaths due to auto accidents are preventable by the car manufacturer?
A: None of them, presumably.
Q: How many of the cell phone explosions are preventable by Nokia?
A: All of them, presumably.
That's why this is a big deal, or at least has the potential to be a big deal.
Please stop grandstanding. I feel confident guessing that many more protests happen every hour in real life than have ever happened in any massively multiplayer game anywhere.
We protest what affects us. We protest what we care about. If I lived in Australia and spent a signifcant part of my life playing Second Life, you'd better believe that I would be far more interested in changes in Second Life than in America's laws.
Further, as the article indicates (did you read it?), online protests are often mostly recreational. If playing a game is fun enough to spend hours doing, and protesting within that game is even more fun, then many players will protest. If you somehow made protesting the PATRIOT act the most enjoyable out of the three, then they'd do that instead.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that being upset or offended is a right, not a responsibility. It follows that protest should be similarly optional. No one is stepping on your toes by being apathetic about the PATRIOT act, so your vitriolic straw man doesn't seem terribly justifiable.
SimCity 2000 was an excellent, truly open-ended game. NeverWinter Nights is NOT open-ended, nor was it ever intended to be; while one can construct one's own modules, playing that module is riding the rails the creator laid.
I like both kinds of games, but the open-ended ones stay with me much longer. I still play SimCity 2000 to this day, yea, even though it requires Classic to boot.
It's not Apple's job to tell you whether something is legal; that's for the courts to do. Apple was compelled only to explain why they objected to a particular auction.
That said, the First Sale Doctrine doesn't apply to digital goods without some thought. It's founded on the notion that selling something in its entirety means you no longer own it; this property is not necessarily endemic to digital goods.
Right. 80,000,000 users of KaZaA alone and 261 are being sued.
That gives any given user a 0.000003625% of getting sued.
If you're concerned about odds like that, I hope you never step into an automobile.
Oh, and buy a lottery ticket. Or twenty.
This is a terrible, terrible way to pick a password that needs to be secure. It's the first thing anyone will mimic after they've tried your name, your birthday, your pet's name, etc.
It's one of the classic examples of what NOT to do.