There's no part of copyright law that allows a tool creator to dictate how the output of the tool can be licensed.
You make a good point. Suppose it was demanded that everything compiled under gcc had to be open-sourced? That probably wouldn't go over too well with everybody.
Much as I like OSS, I don't like the forced approach here to requiring you to license your creative work for free. Encourage it sure, but to force it? Suppose you just want your own personal font? It won't be yours here, since anyone else can have it too.
Even if they had just said you can't make it here for free and then sell it for money on your own I'd feel better about that. That way my own font could remain my own.
So while it's a nice idea, couldn't they have been a little less heavy-handed about it?
And a 250G monthly cap sounds entirely reasonable.
And there is your BIG MISTAKE. Of course they have to start at something "reasonable" to get everybody onboard. You don't really expect them to STAY at 250GB do you?
Well do you?
Would you like to buy a bridge?
The only way to profit from this is to own Comcast stock, then you can cheer every increase as offsetting your monthly bills.
There are so many options they could use that don't include putting caps and cutting people off or charging them more once they've hit the cap.
None of those options generate any extra revenue for Comcast. In fact it costs them money to upgrade their system to support your sensible ideas of traffic flow.
and should perhaps look into getting a professional connection.
And please tell me how if 250GB/month is killing the system as it is, that paying twice as much for a business account suddenly isn't killing the system on your local cable loop? Yes please tell me, because I do not understand it otherwise since Comcast isn't changing anything about the hardware in the process.
Comcast has the capacity. Heavy users aren't the problem in technical terms because the solution to all this is simply money to Comcast in the form of higher bills.
And yes I wouldn't be so angry about it if Comcast had actually been honest from the beginning and not said that they were selling "unlimited" all-you-can-eat Internet. But they did sell it, and I bought it, under those terms. And I hate being lied to.
As for your 20GB limit, I want to rent movies and watch missed television over my internet. You obviously don't. That doesn't give you the right to criticize how I think a fat data-pipe into my home is best used.
You assume that this completely trial balloon unimplemented cap will actually come in at 250GB, and stay at 250GB afterwards.
Would be great if the regulators who allow this afterwards WOULD NOT LET COMCAST EVER REVISE IT DOWNWARDS by so much as a single byte. Then we might find it reasonable.
They just cut me off 2 weeks ago without notice for bandwidth 'abuse.'
Have you considered going to your municipal/state regulators, and then to court, over this? It's breech of contract on Comcast's part since they sell "unlimited usage" and caps are not clearly spelled out, and your regulators should be on your side. If they're not, you need new regulators.
Seems to me that you now have 12 months of extra time on your hands to pursue this.
(Btw, Comcast typically can't identify where a cable modem is. Get a neighbor on the same cable loop to get the service while you're paying them for it, and then move the modem back to your house. Unless they've installed in "internet filter" on your drop, you should be just fine again.)
And there's always open WiFi's in any neighborhood, which will let you get your neighbors kicked off as well. Then you can all get the pitchforks and torches and go visit Comcast en masse)
I think I'd have trouble hitting that. That's about 8GB a day.
Right! And a single 30GB BluRay equivalent High Def download/rental takes out 4 days of that per movie. Think of that the next time you hear about Apple trying to kill off Netflix and rentals by mail in favor of their more expensive AppleTV and iTMS replacement.
I note that this is being mooted about just as Comcast is rolling out the much higher speed DOCSIS 3.0 modems that will make it easier than ever to reach this cap.
And just as Apple is trying to kill off BluRay High Def discs in favor of HD downloads.
All the pieces for a royal screwing over are falling neatly into place, and people are walking meekly into the slaughterhouse.
The problem is that once they can draw the line, then they can move it afterwards ad infinitum.
An analogy:
Once upon a time all calls to 411 information were free. Well not free really, but included in what you paid for telephone service. Then the telephone companies cried out how much 411 was costing them. (They weren't already making enough profits.) They claimed that this high cost was caused by only a few people who used the service excessively as opposed to using the nicely provided telephone directories. They got the regulators to set a limit that only the first 15 calls to 411 each month would be "free", after which you'd have to pay per call. This would only impact the "excessive users of the service" they successfully argued to quell public opposition.
Well, you guessed it. That 15-free-calls-per-month quickly dropped in broad steps to 3-free-calls-per-month, and then 411 service was spun off into its own profit-making enterprise and now you pay every time you use it. And you phone bills were never reduced from this "savings".
How long before Comcasts 250GB/month cap becomes 220GB/month. 200GB/month. Down so low that you can't watch video online (unless you watch Comcast's video delivery service, which will mysteriously not count against your bandwidth cap) without paying extra. Just watch it happen.
Two interesting things about this Comcast proposal:
First: For the heavy user, simply buying two accounts at the ~$50/month rate and having two modems is a far cheaper way to get to 500GB/month than paying the cap-breaking charge.
Secondly: Although Comcast decrys how a few heavy users are overloading their system to the detriment of all the other users on the cable loop, simply by paying more money WITH NO IMPROVEMENTS TO THE CABLE LOOP AT ALL this heavy usage problem magically goes away and you can use all you want to pay for.
Obvious conclusion: Comcast Lies like a Rug to try and squeeze out increased profits in every manner possible. Something that should not be allowed in a regulated monopoly.
If this is made retroactive to all existing Zunes, or put in new ones without clear notice of this limitation, I hope Microsoft will be sued out of all the money they didn't spend trying to acquire Yahoo!
This is really aimed at killing the resale/rental markets. 3 activations total? You can't sell the game after you're done with it (who would know how many activations were left?), and you can't rent or trade the game. Each activation diminishes the value of your game until it goes to zero. Given that, the game itself should cost half of what it would otherwise cost new - but I rather doubt that this will be the case.
Your only recourse to prevent even more of this in the future is to refuse to buy this game at all as long as these usage restrictions remain. Buy it under these conditions and you're only screwing over yourselves on every future game which will also incorporate the same, or worse, restrictions!
Why Blizzard is so Pissed!
on
Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Blizzard is just pissed (American definition, not British pissed) because Glyder gets around The Warden. They hate it when that happens.
They also hate it when you complete the game sooner rather than later because all that grinding earns them additional months of revenue from you, sucker!
By using this product (Microsoft Word, hereafter referred to as Word) you agree to never never ever write anything critical about The Microsoft Corporation, Mr. Bill Gates, Mr. Steve Ballmer's chair throwing...
That is typically what they will "cap" you to on OOL.
Once they cap you, however, then they cannot claim that they're selling you 15mbps/2mpbs down/up any longer - even if they virtually never provided it to you in the first place. They now know that any claim to higher speeds is fraudulent.
I don't like Ballmer, but his Yahoo strategy is anything but a failure! Yahoo is in chaos. The shareholders are out hunting for Yang's head over this. They'd probably take a $29/share offer right now which is below Microsoft's original $31 offer. MS stock is up, while Yahoo's is falling like a stone back towards $19. Any Yahoo anti-takeover defense is now likely off the table forever, meaning that this game is hardly over. So to say that Ballmer should go over his "failure" simply indicates that Geeks are truly stupid when it comes to understanding how business works.
But we knew that already. That's why we don't make good CEO's, and often not even good managers.
I call your attention to the What's interesting... thread above in this discussion where the poster is pointing out just how unreliable the RIAA method of identifying IP addresses and timestamps is proving to be in the real world. If this is the only method the RIAA has at their disposal to identify lawsuit targets, and it's as widely bad as the poster states, this might serve to rip apart the RIAA cases at the very beginning.
While not an exact analogy, although the basis of it in terms of unreliability is the same, imagine if people tried to use fingerprint data in court in a world where 1 out of 10 people had the same fingerprints. No court would accept that. If the RIAA is so provably wrong so often, then maybe the courts shouldn't be accepting this data as identification of anything at all.
(Note: this would also explain the two tier system of the RIAA cases. First a multiply joined John Doe case to get identities, followed by extortion, followed by individual cases. The first case filters out all the bad or unidentifiable addresses when the ISP says they can't identify a user for that IP address/timestamp. Of course, if the RIAA is following this stragety then they already know how flawed their methods of identification are, and are using this method to compensate for it by having addresses that at least identify somebody.)
This story needs to be spread more widely. The RIAA has claimed that their methods are close to perfect (you'll catch a few dolphins maybe, but not many). Yet when they sue the wrong person because the inaccurate IP address happened to match up with somebody else's account that person either capitulates, or pays thousands in lawyer bills to clear their name only to see the RIAA attempt to walk away without reimbursing them (like you're guilty just for having a broadband account in the first place) for their costs.
This is so wrong, and the RIAA continues to get away with it because they refuse to admit to any errors in their methods. If the unreliability of the RIAA IP identification methods got wide circulation they might not be able to pursue any of these cases based on IP address/timestamp information alone.
C) Many colleges and ISPs (Dartmouth and Optimum Online, at least) will often reduce the speed of account holders who have been the target of DCMA letters.
While colleges and universities probably don't give service guarantees, a commercial ISP who suddenly starts providing less bandwidth than you're paying for is opening themselves up for a very well deserved lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
1: Give up the immunity necklace?
2: Let Microsoft dictate their product design, especially into a less competitive stance?
Of course by the time you get enough low-power processors running to solve the the problem you'll be a major contributor to climate change yourself.
You make a good point. Suppose it was demanded that everything compiled under gcc had to be open-sourced? That probably wouldn't go over too well with everybody.
Even if they had just said you can't make it here for free and then sell it for money on your own I'd feel better about that. That way my own font could remain my own.
So while it's a nice idea, couldn't they have been a little less heavy-handed about it?
And there is your BIG MISTAKE. Of course they have to start at something "reasonable" to get everybody onboard. You don't really expect them to STAY at 250GB do you?
Well do you?
Would you like to buy a bridge?
The only way to profit from this is to own Comcast stock, then you can cheer every increase as offsetting your monthly bills.
None of those options generate any extra revenue for Comcast. In fact it costs them money to upgrade their system to support your sensible ideas of traffic flow.
And please tell me how if 250GB/month is killing the system as it is, that paying twice as much for a business account suddenly isn't killing the system on your local cable loop? Yes please tell me, because I do not understand it otherwise since Comcast isn't changing anything about the hardware in the process.
Comcast has the capacity. Heavy users aren't the problem in technical terms because the solution to all this is simply money to Comcast in the form of higher bills.
And yes I wouldn't be so angry about it if Comcast had actually been honest from the beginning and not said that they were selling "unlimited" all-you-can-eat Internet. But they did sell it, and I bought it, under those terms. And I hate being lied to.
As for your 20GB limit, I want to rent movies and watch missed television over my internet. You obviously don't. That doesn't give you the right to criticize how I think a fat data-pipe into my home is best used.
You assume that this completely trial balloon unimplemented cap will actually come in at 250GB, and stay at 250GB afterwards.
Would be great if the regulators who allow this afterwards WOULD NOT LET COMCAST EVER REVISE IT DOWNWARDS by so much as a single byte. Then we might find it reasonable.
BluRay movies tend to come in at around 30GB. That's far over your 8GB limit per day under a 250GB cap per month.
Have you considered going to your municipal/state regulators, and then to court, over this? It's breech of contract on Comcast's part since they sell "unlimited usage" and caps are not clearly spelled out, and your regulators should be on your side. If they're not, you need new regulators.
Seems to me that you now have 12 months of extra time on your hands to pursue this.
(Btw, Comcast typically can't identify where a cable modem is. Get a neighbor on the same cable loop to get the service while you're paying them for it, and then move the modem back to your house. Unless they've installed in "internet filter" on your drop, you should be just fine again.)
And there's always open WiFi's in any neighborhood, which will let you get your neighbors kicked off as well. Then you can all get the pitchforks and torches and go visit Comcast en masse)
Where does Cox explicitly state this limit? I haven't seen them advertising "limited" broadband.
And do they provide measurement tools to let you know where you usage stands at the moment, and the number of days before the count resets again?
Right! And a single 30GB BluRay equivalent High Def download/rental takes out 4 days of that per movie. Think of that the next time you hear about Apple trying to kill off Netflix and rentals by mail in favor of their more expensive AppleTV and iTMS replacement.
And just as Apple is trying to kill off BluRay High Def discs in favor of HD downloads.
All the pieces for a royal screwing over are falling neatly into place, and people are walking meekly into the slaughterhouse.
Oh, right, this is Comcast!
An analogy:
Once upon a time all calls to 411 information were free. Well not free really, but included in what you paid for telephone service. Then the telephone companies cried out how much 411 was costing them. (They weren't already making enough profits.) They claimed that this high cost was caused by only a few people who used the service excessively as opposed to using the nicely provided telephone directories. They got the regulators to set a limit that only the first 15 calls to 411 each month would be "free", after which you'd have to pay per call. This would only impact the "excessive users of the service" they successfully argued to quell public opposition.
Well, you guessed it. That 15-free-calls-per-month quickly dropped in broad steps to 3-free-calls-per-month, and then 411 service was spun off into its own profit-making enterprise and now you pay every time you use it. And you phone bills were never reduced from this "savings".
How long before Comcasts 250GB/month cap becomes 220GB/month. 200GB/month. Down so low that you can't watch video online (unless you watch Comcast's video delivery service, which will mysteriously not count against your bandwidth cap) without paying extra. Just watch it happen.
Two interesting things about this Comcast proposal:
First: For the heavy user, simply buying two accounts at the ~$50/month rate and having two modems is a far cheaper way to get to 500GB/month than paying the cap-breaking charge.
Secondly: Although Comcast decrys how a few heavy users are overloading their system to the detriment of all the other users on the cable loop, simply by paying more money WITH NO IMPROVEMENTS TO THE CABLE LOOP AT ALL this heavy usage problem magically goes away and you can use all you want to pay for.
Obvious conclusion: Comcast Lies like a Rug to try and squeeze out increased profits in every manner possible. Something that should not be allowed in a regulated monopoly.
If you don't like GPL terms, don't use GPL software. How much simpler can it be?
If this is made retroactive to all existing Zunes, or put in new ones without clear notice of this limitation, I hope Microsoft will be sued out of all the money they didn't spend trying to acquire Yahoo!
Your only recourse to prevent even more of this in the future is to refuse to buy this game at all as long as these usage restrictions remain. Buy it under these conditions and you're only screwing over yourselves on every future game which will also incorporate the same, or worse, restrictions!
They also hate it when you complete the game sooner rather than later because all that grinding earns them additional months of revenue from you, sucker!
By using this product (Microsoft Word, hereafter referred to as Word) you agree to never never ever write anything critical about The Microsoft Corporation, Mr. Bill Gates, Mr. Steve Ballmer's chair throwing...
Once they cap you, however, then they cannot claim that they're selling you 15mbps/2mpbs down/up any longer - even if they virtually never provided it to you in the first place. They now know that any claim to higher speeds is fraudulent.
But we knew that already. That's why we don't make good CEO's, and often not even good managers.
I call your attention to the What's interesting ... thread above in this discussion where the poster is pointing out just how unreliable the RIAA method of identifying IP addresses and timestamps is proving to be in the real world. If this is the only method the RIAA has at their disposal to identify lawsuit targets, and it's as widely bad as the poster states, this might serve to rip apart the RIAA cases at the very beginning.
While not an exact analogy, although the basis of it in terms of unreliability is the same, imagine if people tried to use fingerprint data in court in a world where 1 out of 10 people had the same fingerprints. No court would accept that. If the RIAA is so provably wrong so often, then maybe the courts shouldn't be accepting this data as identification of anything at all.
(Note: this would also explain the two tier system of the RIAA cases. First a multiply joined John Doe case to get identities, followed by extortion, followed by individual cases. The first case filters out all the bad or unidentifiable addresses when the ISP says they can't identify a user for that IP address/timestamp. Of course, if the RIAA is following this stragety then they already know how flawed their methods of identification are, and are using this method to compensate for it by having addresses that at least identify somebody.)
This is so wrong, and the RIAA continues to get away with it because they refuse to admit to any errors in their methods. If the unreliability of the RIAA IP identification methods got wide circulation they might not be able to pursue any of these cases based on IP address/timestamp information alone.
While colleges and universities probably don't give service guarantees, a commercial ISP who suddenly starts providing less bandwidth than you're paying for is opening themselves up for a very well deserved lawsuit.