That's a good example of the wishful thinking that pervades DRM. Dwell on the technical details while failing to realize it has only a tenuous connection with the real world.
There's no point in being able to take ownership when the OS is keyed to the key you're about to delete. Classic example of real world ownership not matching the DRM theory.
The problem here is both the vendor and the purported owner have entangled rights to the OS. The problem with TPM is that it is one or the other, not both. The owner (really a renter) is relying on the good will of the vendor to be able to do what he wants with his copy of the OS e.g. run it on other hardware, on-sell it, back it up, reverse engineer it, fair use, use it in any way when copyright lapses etc.
In the real world what normally happens is the vendor locks it down hard and takes away all the purported owner's rights. That's not good.
The GP's example would be even worse with TPM because would not have the option of booting a Linux disk to recover his data without disabling the existing OS. And that's assuming the disk is not encrypted by the existing OS.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
That's probably true, but sometimes optimizing for programmers' convenience is more important than reducing every ounce of bloat to the bare minimum.
For prototypes yes. For most other things no. Depends on what you mean by a bare minimum though.
RAM is cheap enough and reusable; programmers' time isn't either.
Neither is the user's time. And there are usually a lot more users than programmers.
If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue.
or a database or a real time system or a desktop app or...
RAM use has a very high inverse correlation with speed/responsiveness. A working set using even one byte more than the first level cache is enough to slow a program down by 5 or more times. And that's not even counting the other levels of cache.
For me "280 Slides" is way too slow to be useful on this core 2 duo laptop with GB's of memory.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Well, the owners of the laptop have that capability, which seems to me to be just fine.
Circular reasoning. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control.
The question here is, who has ownership? The contractor here has the not unreasonable expectation that his laptop would continue to operate so he could get his own stuff (ie. stuff that he owned long term) off it, stuff that his contract required him to put there. There should have been some level of protocol before ownership of the laptop returned to the corp so that his own stuff could be disentangled from it. At a bare minimum they should have told him this was going to happen.
The problem with DRM like this is that it usually has only a tenuous relationship with the complexities of the real world. It often interferes with one set of ownership rights while claiming to protect another.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
I'd rather have entertaining entertainment than accurate yet extremely boring movies.
I'd rather have entertaining entertainment with accurate science movies.
The two are not mutually incompatible like many people like to imply. e.g. 2001. The basic problem is that most Hollywood types are scientifically illiterate, are actively proud of it and don't care that they're not very entertaining to people who are scientifically literate. Many movies are like fingers on a blackboard. e.g. The tilting helicopter in Tomorrow Never Dies. Ridiculous and it spoiled the whole movie.
---
DRM dilutes ownership. It reduces the value and that means the vendor gets less for it.
Nonsense. It could be free advertising and a net win for them.
The fact that you've been round slashdot long enough to see that argument many times, and others, and still pretend that those arguments don't exist strongly suggests that you are being willfully ignorant.
Copyright fanatics like you really need to get out more.
Both wine and VMWare+M$Windows are simply layers that separate an M$Windows program from a Unix OS. Pretty much by definition wine is a much thinner layer than VM+Win and so it has to be more "seamless". Despite desktop tricks.
Only if a VM+Win individually and fully reflected every single OS call to the underlying OS that accesses hardware could it considered to be seamless. Including file and file attribute access, memory allocation and device access. And then it wouldn't really be a VM.
VM's have their uses but running software seamlessly is not one of them.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
In Open Source? One might as well ask Stallman to run Vista.
"In Closed Source? One might as well ask Gates to run Debian."
Whether a project is open source or closed source is irrelevant in this context and people who continually pretend that open source is any more political than closed source are talking nonsense.
All decisions, including monetary decisions, that affect other people are political decisions, whatever marketers might like to pretend.
An expert in the field would make more money working in the field than they would as an examiner.
Yes, it's generally a more productive use of an expert's time to create something rather than assess/control some other expert's something, hence they're paid more.
First disallow software patents, software is already protected by copyright.
I'd take it further. Disallow patents (ie. interference by the government in the citizen's business) for all areas where it cannot be scientifically justified that patents are a clear net win for society. In other words the onus is on the patent office to justify their costly existence, not on us to justify that they shouldn't.
Secondly have patents terms last only a short tyme, say 5 to 7 years.
Have patent times varying by field, again scientifically justified. e.g. if we have pharmacy patents at all it might be justified having the time length extended by the length of testing.
After that if the patent holder wants to keep the patent then require them to pay a royalty, the first five year extension would cost say 5% of the average of revenue the product had generated the first five years.
Too easily gamed. Form two companies. One sells the product with the patented technology at minimal cost to the second company. Use structural impediments to make sure nobody else will buy it. Second company makes all the profits.
Another way to reform the patent system is to require patent holders to release a product utilizing the patents within a couple of years of the issue of them.
Too easily gamed. Sell a hand made, useless product at a ruinous cost that nobody in their right mind would buy. Keep patents on the shelf indefinitely doing that.
Notice when talking about keeping a patent I said a royalty on the revenue the product made not on the profit.
Doesn't help. cf. the two companies above. You also have the problem of deciding how much value a patent adds to a product. e.g. a printer has a new printing system. What does the patent cover in the chassis, carriage, cartridge, nozzle, ink formulation and what is it actually worth?
The problem with all solutions like you've described (and mine!) is that they're working in the universe of ideas, the creation of the mind. Company and "IP" law included. A creation of the mind has only a tenuous connection with reality and is very, very hard to pin down in a way that cannot be manipulated to get the required real world outcome ie. gamed.
Like the entire patent edifice. It is based on the being able to say whether two completely arbitrary ideas, possibly expressed in very different language and structure, are the same or different. Until they have a objective test for that everything else in the patent office is built on shifting sands. As it is they operate on the pornography principle i.e. "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." Not nearly good enough given the amount of money involved and the willingness of many people with alley cat morals to game the system.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
Why not? He's taking home a paycheck on what is basically a fraudulent activity, claiming to assess prior art when it's humanly impossible with the resources he has at his disposal.
His negligence has directly created a multi-million (?) dollar lawsuit. At the very least he should be fired. With a rational legal system it would've been possible to sue him for damages as well so that he does not have a perverse incentive to abuse the system.
The whole idea of a small government department being able to assess all of human knowledge for prior art is bizarre, particularly when the definition of prior art they use is so meaningless.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Fact is, you have no way of knowning if it is a nonsensical patent claim or not.
Yes he does if he is an expert in the field. In fact this is the only group which can say whether a patent is obvious, despite what self-serving patent parasites might like to claim.
A large part of the patent problem are completely unproductive patent lawyers and bureaucrats claiming to act as gatekeepers for all of technology. Parasitic middlemen in other words. I'd like to use stronger language.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
That's why DRM will fail with the masses. Not because of the privacy invasion or the "phoning home". People don't care about that. But they do care about the loss of convenience.
A related way to look at it is simply ownership.
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control.
DRM means you control less, you own less, it's worth less.
And that means the vendor can't charge as much for it. Why was the vendor doing this again?
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
There are lots of countries who have met the basic requirements for survival, but who lack the infrastructure and wealth we enjoy in 1st world countries. This is for them.
Keep in mind that the reason you've had to keep making this argument again and again is because some people are probably being paid to ignore you and spread FUD. Lowlifes all of them.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now"
conservative viewpoint.
True. There's also a huge amount of the old "we'd better nip this in the bud by paying for lots of FUD marketing before it costs us our profitable monopoly position" conservative viewpoint as well.
The Classmate or XO running Windows is fundamentally a bog-standard laptop. It doesn't require a commitment to a western theory of education or a philosophy of open source.
Just a commitment to M$'s incredibly narrow monopoly view of the world.
i.e. not requiring a team of lawyers to be involved before I can talk to you.
That's called spam.
You are completely ignoring the fact that all communications have costs for both the sender and the recipient. The current status quo is that a sender has to verify with a low overhead communication before they send a high overhead communication. This appears to be an appropriate balance. You want to increase costs for a recipient doing nothing more than minding their own business.
Sorry, but f*k you. You are being just another marketing parasite.
In your world it would be worthwhile for your "great billboard designer" could spam their content to ten thousand "Mazda"'s. The overhead for the designer is low, but that's only because he's managed to transfer most of his costs to the recipients. All unsolicited mass marketing does that; spam is just an extreme example.
Try to get your head around the fact that it is possible to have too much unsolicited communication, as well as too little, before you suggest any more harebrained, parasitic schemes.
Most unsolicited mass marketers really are parasites; it's no accident that they're almost always selling crappy products (good products sell themselves) and they rate very low on respect surveys (because all of the time and attention they've stolen with no recourse from others).
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Way to shoot yourself in the foot there, buddy; you had such a nice argument going, too.
Nonsense, very little computing involves image processing. In any case transferring any large uncompressible dataset over a comparatively slow link is going to be slow. Doesn't matter what the protocol is and no magical thinking is going to change that.
GP's experience mirrors mine, btw.
Then you need to check your network and setup too. My running setup is an existence proof that you and the GP are flat out wrong.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Problem not solved. Ever tried to buy software second hand? It almost never comes with the keys needed. Plus DRM software is usually the first thing to fail when the software is moved to a new platform. DRM deliberately makes software fragile, a seriously stupid thing to do.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
You register your game using your CD key and that way if you ever lose it, you can just log on and get it back.
"Just log on"? Not an option; software often lasts a lot longer than companies do.
Not to mention being perpetually beholden to a company's need to maximize their revenue stream at your expense. You seriously underestimate just how many options a company has for messing with you, and the financial incentive to do so, when they have a hold on you like that.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And the X protocol itself? Well, it sucks.
You are exaggerating hugely.
I have an 802.11g network here at home, and X sessions are completely unusable over it.
You have a problem and it doesn't appear to be X. I use X11 over a similar network via WPA2 and ssh -X all the time with no problems. GUI editors, utilities, whatever. I don't bother with NX or ssh -C. A few programs are badly coded and do unnecessary screen updates causing slowness. Working with images can be slow also. Fortunately I'm not interested in running those programs remotely.
I'd suggest you check your wireless network throughput. I get 1.2-1.7ms ping times with 100KB/s throughput on mine. Possibly there's interference from another WiFi network running on the same channel or other interference like metal, an electric motor or faulty network hardware.
The X11 code base is crufty and needs cleaning up but it works, and for many use cases it works well.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
No, it's a deliberate game breakage by the vendor. It's crippleware. It's only human to lose things, particularly things as ephemeral and meaningless as a license number, and to pretend it never happens is dishonest. Your game will die.
The game still theoretically works.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." ~ Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut/Yogi Berra.
Ownership is, by definition, the right to control. If the vendor controls it then you don't own it.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
No company has an obligation to sell a particular customer anything.
Your reasoning is circular. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control. Many people here feel that the company concerned doesn't own the copies and so, by definition, have no say about how the copies should be dealt with.
It's just a tough break - and an example of how freedom to act operates.
Not at all, just a company's self-serving definition of it.
---
Astroturfers and sock puppets are liars and companies have no right of anonymity. Please have the common decency to put the company you're representing in your sig and stop rationalizing deceit.
Without copy-protection its just too easy for people to rip-off the publishers.
With copy-protection it's just too easy for the publishers to rip off people.
I know where I stand.
I especially think the "treating us as criminals" arguments is given way more weight than it's really worth. I mean, does anybody have a better idea about how to validate s/w as being legally purchased other than using some product activation mechanism (whether it works over the phone or net?)
Yes. Don't validate at all. "Validation" (less dishonestly, canceling invalidation) is just guilty until proven innocent.
The vast majority of piracy is done by people who are time rich and money poor and don't affect sales much at all, particularly when the free advertising is taken into account.
Yes, many publishers get a bee in their bonnet about people who use a copy of their product without paying, ignoring the fact that most never would've bought the product anyway. So what?
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Breaking copy protection does not need to be impossible, only difficult enough to discourage an alpha value worth of customers.
No, difficult enough to discourage the single [non-]customer who has the means and the will to break and distribute it while not discouraging the large number of potential customers. With 6,673,182,752+ people in the world that's not good odds. Most vendors seem to get away with it at all only by flat-out lying to their potential customers e.g. "WGA"; to call it an "advantage" is an outright lie and the only reason they can get away with is because of economic network effects.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
You know, if it wasn't for that pesky 1st Amendment, we could fix a lot of the problems that people think they have.
Please, take your religious views elsewhere.
The 1st Amendment is already limited in a host of different ways, everything from shouting fire in a movie theater to fraud to publishing official secrets to threatening the president to publishing in-camera judicial proceedings to copyright piracy to you name it.
All the things you mentioned can, and in many cases should, be limited because it's of net benefit to society.
Free speech can be compromised every bit as much by too much noise as too little message and the fruitcakes are who refuse to acknowledge that are denying reality.
You can argue all you like over what is and is not of net benefit but pure free speech in the way that you are implying has never existed in the US.
---
"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good example of the wishful thinking that pervades DRM. Dwell on the technical details while failing to realize it has only a tenuous connection with the real world.
There's no point in being able to take ownership when the OS is keyed to the key you're about to delete. Classic example of real world ownership not matching the DRM theory.
The problem here is both the vendor and the purported owner have entangled rights to the OS. The problem with TPM is that it is one or the other, not both. The owner (really a renter) is relying on the good will of the vendor to be able to do what he wants with his copy of the OS e.g. run it on other hardware, on-sell it, back it up, reverse engineer it, fair use, use it in any way when copyright lapses etc.
In the real world what normally happens is the vendor locks it down hard and takes away all the purported owner's rights. That's not good.
The GP's example would be even worse with TPM because would not have the option of booting a Linux disk to recover his data without disabling the existing OS. And that's assuming the disk is not encrypted by the existing OS.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
That's probably true, but sometimes optimizing for programmers' convenience is more important than reducing every ounce of bloat to the bare minimum.
For prototypes yes. For most other things no. Depends on what you mean by a bare minimum though.
RAM is cheap enough and reusable; programmers' time isn't either.
Neither is the user's time. And there are usually a lot more users than programmers.
If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue.
or a database or a real time system or a desktop app or ...
RAM use has a very high inverse correlation with speed/responsiveness. A working set using even one byte more than the first level cache is enough to slow a program down by 5 or more times. And that's not even counting the other levels of cache.
For me "280 Slides" is way too slow to be useful on this core 2 duo laptop with GB's of memory.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Well, the owners of the laptop have that capability, which seems to me to be just fine.
Circular reasoning. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control.
The question here is, who has ownership? The contractor here has the not unreasonable expectation that his laptop would continue to operate so he could get his own stuff (ie. stuff that he owned long term) off it, stuff that his contract required him to put there. There should have been some level of protocol before ownership of the laptop returned to the corp so that his own stuff could be disentangled from it. At a bare minimum they should have told him this was going to happen.
The problem with DRM like this is that it usually has only a tenuous relationship with the complexities of the real world. It often interferes with one set of ownership rights while claiming to protect another.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
I'd rather have entertaining entertainment than accurate yet extremely boring movies.
I'd rather have entertaining entertainment with accurate science movies.
The two are not mutually incompatible like many people like to imply. e.g. 2001. The basic problem is that most Hollywood types are scientifically illiterate, are actively proud of it and don't care that they're not very entertaining to people who are scientifically literate. Many movies are like fingers on a blackboard. e.g. The tilting helicopter in Tomorrow Never Dies. Ridiculous and it spoiled the whole movie.
---
DRM dilutes ownership. It reduces the value and that means the vendor gets less for it.
They *are* costing the studios money
Nonsense. It could be free advertising and a net win for them.
The fact that you've been round slashdot long enough to see that argument many times, and others, and still pretend that those arguments don't exist strongly suggests that you are being willfully ignorant.
Copyright fanatics like you really need to get out more.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
can run programs seamlessly on the host desktop
Both wine and VMWare+M$Windows are simply layers that separate an M$Windows program from a Unix OS. Pretty much by definition wine is a much thinner layer than VM+Win and so it has to be more "seamless". Despite desktop tricks.
Only if a VM+Win individually and fully reflected every single OS call to the underlying OS that accesses hardware could it considered to be seamless. Including file and file attribute access, memory allocation and device access. And then it wouldn't really be a VM.
VM's have their uses but running software seamlessly is not one of them.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
In Open Source? One might as well ask Stallman to run Vista.
"In Closed Source? One might as well ask Gates to run Debian."
Whether a project is open source or closed source is irrelevant in this context and people who continually pretend that open source is any more political than closed source are talking nonsense.
All decisions, including monetary decisions, that affect other people are political decisions, whatever marketers might like to pretend.
---
Beware deceptive astroturfers.
An expert in the field would make more money working in the field than they would as an examiner.
Yes, it's generally a more productive use of an expert's time to create something rather than assess/control some other expert's something, hence they're paid more.
First disallow software patents, software is already protected by copyright.
I'd take it further. Disallow patents (ie. interference by the government in the citizen's business) for all areas where it cannot be scientifically justified that patents are a clear net win for society. In other words the onus is on the patent office to justify their costly existence, not on us to justify that they shouldn't.
Secondly have patents terms last only a short tyme, say 5 to 7 years.
Have patent times varying by field, again scientifically justified. e.g. if we have pharmacy patents at all it might be justified having the time length extended by the length of testing.
After that if the patent holder wants to keep the patent then require them to pay a royalty, the first five year extension would cost say 5% of the average of revenue the product had generated the first five years.
Too easily gamed. Form two companies. One sells the product with the patented technology at minimal cost to the second company. Use structural impediments to make sure nobody else will buy it. Second company makes all the profits.
Another way to reform the patent system is to require patent holders to release a product utilizing the patents within a couple of years of the issue of them.
Too easily gamed. Sell a hand made, useless product at a ruinous cost that nobody in their right mind would buy. Keep patents on the shelf indefinitely doing that.
Notice when talking about keeping a patent I said a royalty on the revenue the product made not on the profit.
Doesn't help. cf. the two companies above. You also have the problem of deciding how much value a patent adds to a product. e.g. a printer has a new printing system. What does the patent cover in the chassis, carriage, cartridge, nozzle, ink formulation and what is it actually worth?
The problem with all solutions like you've described (and mine!) is that they're working in the universe of ideas, the creation of the mind. Company and "IP" law included. A creation of the mind has only a tenuous connection with reality and is very, very hard to pin down in a way that cannot be manipulated to get the required real world outcome ie. gamed.
Like the entire patent edifice. It is based on the being able to say whether two completely arbitrary ideas, possibly expressed in very different language and structure, are the same or different. Until they have a objective test for that everything else in the patent office is built on shifting sands. As it is they operate on the pornography principle i.e. "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." Not nearly good enough given the amount of money involved and the willingness of many people with alley cat morals to game the system.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
Don't blame the patent examiner on this one
Why not? He's taking home a paycheck on what is basically a fraudulent activity, claiming to assess prior art when it's humanly impossible with the resources he has at his disposal.
His negligence has directly created a multi-million (?) dollar lawsuit. At the very least he should be fired. With a rational legal system it would've been possible to sue him for damages as well so that he does not have a perverse incentive to abuse the system.
The whole idea of a small government department being able to assess all of human knowledge for prior art is bizarre, particularly when the definition of prior art they use is so meaningless.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Fact is, you have no way of knowning if it is a nonsensical patent claim or not.
Yes he does if he is an expert in the field. In fact this is the only group which can say whether a patent is obvious, despite what self-serving patent parasites might like to claim.
A large part of the patent problem are completely unproductive patent lawyers and bureaucrats claiming to act as gatekeepers for all of technology. Parasitic middlemen in other words. I'd like to use stronger language.
---
A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
That's why DRM will fail with the masses. Not because of the privacy invasion or the "phoning home". People don't care about that. But they do care about the loss of convenience.
A related way to look at it is simply ownership.
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control.
DRM means you control less, you own less, it's worth less.
And that means the vendor can't charge as much for it. Why was the vendor doing this again?
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
There are lots of countries who have met the basic requirements for survival, but who lack the infrastructure and wealth we enjoy in 1st world countries. This is for them.
Keep in mind that the reason you've had to keep making this argument again and again is because some people are probably being paid to ignore you and spread FUD. Lowlifes all of them.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now" conservative viewpoint.
True. There's also a huge amount of the old "we'd better nip this in the bud by paying for lots of FUD marketing before it costs us our profitable monopoly position" conservative viewpoint as well.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
The Classmate or XO running Windows is fundamentally a bog-standard laptop. It doesn't require a commitment to a western theory of education or a philosophy of open source.
Just a commitment to M$'s incredibly narrow monopoly view of the world.
No thanks.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
i.e. not requiring a team of lawyers to be involved before I can talk to you.
That's called spam.
You are completely ignoring the fact that all communications have costs for both the sender and the recipient. The current status quo is that a sender has to verify with a low overhead communication before they send a high overhead communication. This appears to be an appropriate balance. You want to increase costs for a recipient doing nothing more than minding their own business.
Sorry, but f*k you. You are being just another marketing parasite.
In your world it would be worthwhile for your "great billboard designer" could spam their content to ten thousand "Mazda"'s. The overhead for the designer is low, but that's only because he's managed to transfer most of his costs to the recipients. All unsolicited mass marketing does that; spam is just an extreme example.
Try to get your head around the fact that it is possible to have too much unsolicited communication, as well as too little, before you suggest any more harebrained, parasitic schemes.
Most unsolicited mass marketers really are parasites; it's no accident that they're almost always selling crappy products (good products sell themselves) and they rate very low on respect surveys (because all of the time and attention they've stolen with no recourse from others).
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
"Working with images can be slow"?
Way to shoot yourself in the foot there, buddy; you had such a nice argument going, too.
Nonsense, very little computing involves image processing. In any case transferring any large uncompressible dataset over a comparatively slow link is going to be slow. Doesn't matter what the protocol is and no magical thinking is going to change that.
GP's experience mirrors mine, btw.
Then you need to check your network and setup too. My running setup is an existence proof that you and the GP are flat out wrong.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Problem solved.
Problem not solved. Ever tried to buy software second hand? It almost never comes with the keys needed. Plus DRM software is usually the first thing to fail when the software is moved to a new platform. DRM deliberately makes software fragile, a seriously stupid thing to do.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
You register your game using your CD key and that way if you ever lose it, you can just log on and get it back.
"Just log on"? Not an option; software often lasts a lot longer than companies do.
Not to mention being perpetually beholden to a company's need to maximize their revenue stream at your expense. You seriously underestimate just how many options a company has for messing with you, and the financial incentive to do so, when they have a hold on you like that.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
And the X protocol itself? Well, it sucks.
You are exaggerating hugely.
I have an 802.11g network here at home, and X sessions are completely unusable over it.
You have a problem and it doesn't appear to be X. I use X11 over a similar network via WPA2 and ssh -X all the time with no problems. GUI editors, utilities, whatever. I don't bother with NX or ssh -C. A few programs are badly coded and do unnecessary screen updates causing slowness. Working with images can be slow also. Fortunately I'm not interested in running those programs remotely.
I'd suggest you check your wireless network throughput. I get 1.2-1.7ms ping times with 100KB/s throughput on mine. Possibly there's interference from another WiFi network running on the same channel or other interference like metal, an electric motor or faulty network hardware.
The X11 code base is crufty and needs cleaning up but it works, and for many use cases it works well.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
If I lose the key, that's my fault.
No, it's a deliberate game breakage by the vendor. It's crippleware. It's only human to lose things, particularly things as ephemeral and meaningless as a license number, and to pretend it never happens is dishonest. Your game will die.
The game still theoretically works.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." ~ Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut/Yogi Berra.
Ownership is, by definition, the right to control. If the vendor controls it then you don't own it.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
No company has an obligation to sell a particular customer anything.
Your reasoning is circular. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control. Many people here feel that the company concerned doesn't own the copies and so, by definition, have no say about how the copies should be dealt with.
It's just a tough break - and an example of how freedom to act operates.
Not at all, just a company's self-serving definition of it.
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Astroturfers and sock puppets are liars and companies have no right of anonymity. Please have the common decency to put the company you're representing in your sig and stop rationalizing deceit.
Without copy-protection its just too easy for people to rip-off the publishers.
With copy-protection it's just too easy for the publishers to rip off people.
I know where I stand.
I especially think the "treating us as criminals" arguments is given way more weight than it's really worth. I mean, does anybody have a better idea about how to validate s/w as being legally purchased other than using some product activation mechanism (whether it works over the phone or net?)
Yes. Don't validate at all. "Validation" (less dishonestly, canceling invalidation) is just guilty until proven innocent.
The vast majority of piracy is done by people who are time rich and money poor and don't affect sales much at all, particularly when the free advertising is taken into account.
Yes, many publishers get a bee in their bonnet about people who use a copy of their product without paying, ignoring the fact that most never would've bought the product anyway. So what?
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Breaking copy protection does not need to be impossible, only difficult enough to discourage an alpha value worth of customers.
No, difficult enough to discourage the single [non-]customer who has the means and the will to break and distribute it while not discouraging the large number of potential customers. With 6,673,182,752+ people in the world that's not good odds. Most vendors seem to get away with it at all only by flat-out lying to their potential customers e.g. "WGA"; to call it an "advantage" is an outright lie and the only reason they can get away with is because of economic network effects.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
You know, if it wasn't for that pesky 1st Amendment, we could fix a lot of the problems that people think they have.
Please, take your religious views elsewhere.
The 1st Amendment is already limited in a host of different ways, everything from shouting fire in a movie theater to fraud to publishing official secrets to threatening the president to publishing in-camera judicial proceedings to copyright piracy to you name it.
All the things you mentioned can, and in many cases should, be limited because it's of net benefit to society.
Free speech can be compromised every bit as much by too much noise as too little message and the fruitcakes are who refuse to acknowledge that are denying reality.
You can argue all you like over what is and is not of net benefit but pure free speech in the way that you are implying has never existed in the US.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
While we may not see open source voting machine anytime in the near future,
Already in use in at least one place.
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Stop using tab characters in your code!