in doing so he saves his labor in expectation of a future return on his investment.
Until, in the absence of democratic government, it gets stolen from him by the local warlord with a gun. eg. Somalia
Democratic government is nothing more than a group of like-minded people getting together to cooperate in getting rid of the parasites. The parasites disagree of course. And just to make things more interesting in a modern society different people can have very different ideas about what a parasite is.
You can argue all you like about the fact that we don't need government but the reality is you have to have it in some form and the only thing worse than a tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority.
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
I used to be 24 hour on-call system/network administrator. Not a problem.
I just designed good, reliable systems so that the odds of being called out after hours was low.
I didn't install software with reliability problems, I provided tools and documentation so users could help themselves, I made sure that users had all the access they needed to get their job done, I invested the effort in scripting and tools in-hours so that the systems would look after themselves after hours, I made key hardware redundant, not false economizing by underestimating personnel costs (both IT & non-IT), I made sure I had remote reset and administration everywhere etc. etc.. I worked smart rather than hard.
If you're working in an environment where you don't have control over what makes your job 24 hour then I agree, leave as quickly as possible, you're probably working in a badly managed environment anyway.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Give it a rest. M$ is playing semantic word games with the words "Vista" and "Aero", not to mention crippling their software in various ways, in a deliberate attempt to deceive the consumer. Showing one thing and giving another. False advertising in other words.
They have along history of doing similar things. One reason they're disliked. This time they've been called on it. We'll see what the court says but at a bare minimum they should get their wrist slapped.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
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.
Remember folks, we need to get rid of free speech to protect free speech! Right after we destroy the village to save it!
No, you are willfully misinterpreting and emotionally exaggerating what I said to distract the reader. You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.
A marketing executive claiming that fraudulently misrepresenting paid propaganda as objective third party opinion is somehow okay? He's the one that should be in jail, not the so-called terrorists.
So he should go to jail for expressing his opinions on ethics?
Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.
It's a real shame truth-in-advertising law hasn't caught up with them yet.
"truth-in-advertisment" laws can only apply to traditional media. The internet is international, and impossible to track without big bother controls.
Ah, yes. The false dichotomy. Beloved of self-serving politicians everywhere. It's not perfectly possible, it's not perfectly impossible. It's actually somewhere in between, like most real world law.
There is no reason why a company cannot just operate out of a country where paying people for blog reviews is legal. The only way to stop it then would be big brother spying on all blog operators.
And now we have the straw man. There are many possibilities, you've just chosen the one you think you can argue against. Some other ways to reduce/stop it would be to rely on competitors and consumers to report it, do statistical analysis of blog traffic and to make the penalties so severe (e.g. per-sale fines and executives personally liable) that even a small chance of being caught makes it unprofitable.
(which I am sure you wouldn't be against - Any loss of freedom is justified to you protect us from those terrible terrible advertisments - but would be nearly impossible to implement).
Fraudulent advertising is actually costing me my freedom. The time of my life is the most important thing I have and I don't want it being stolen by these scumbags. Advertising in general is terrible when it's stealing as much of people's lives as it does these days.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
They support the computer that they sent you, meaning every bit on that hard drive must be the same as it was when it left the factory.
That's technically almost impossible, if for no other reason than the clock bits and boot log have changed.
What you really mean is that the software load is similar to that originally sold, for some ill-defined meaning of the word "similar". Most people are going to have a variety of different software installed and still expect warranty service.
You are somewhat arbitrarily stating that another OS is sufficiently dissimilar to the original load to make helpdesk troubleshooting impossible. That's silly; many basic hardware faults, such as a stuck keyboard, can be dealt with easily regardless of the software installed with a reasonable help desk script, starting with "we don't officially support that software but we'll do what we can and if you return non-faulty hardware or take too much of our time we'll charge you for it" which pretty much covers the cost issue in one line.
In the case of a stuck keyboard the help desk script says "start a text editor (or BIOS) and see if it echoes". Not exactly rocket science and your argument, while somewhat valid, is highly exaggerated.
We looked at white-collar workers -- executive recruiters.
Not office workers in general - executive recruiters are in no way shape or form representative of general office workers. Not groundbreaking and quantity does not equal quality if the basis of the study is limited.
Look at who the sponsors were:
The National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp. sponsored their work.
Cisco and Intel have a vested interest in encouraging IT use. The NSF will fund anything that follows their science guidelines.
Look at where it was presented:
at the International Conference on Information Systems, the largest academic IT conference in the world.
That sounds impressive to a non-academic. Until you realize that a large conference means lowest common denominator standards. Academic conferences in general are much easier to publish in than academic journals.
Look at the results:
IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking; and IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did.
Lovely piece of spin there. IT use was orthogonal to productivity. Phones were regarded as "IT". Face-to-face meetings were implicitly regarded as "IT".
They found that executive recruiters, who have the job of recruiting people, had a higher success rate when they communicated with more people.
Well, duh.
This study is a great example of the sponsors getting the result they payed for: some astroturf to encourage the use of IT technology.
Based on the ComputerWorld article the study itself seems reasonable but is narrowly focused and justifies almost none of the comments being made here about IT increasing the productivity of the average office worker.
If VMWare can show that it's as much about anti-competition as it is anti-piracy, they have a valid argument.
VM's allow OS' to be treated as just another application. Why should OS-application vendors have any special legal privileges compared to every other software package vendor on the planet? Most software packages are already running in a virtual environment - the OS.
If somebody wrote a package that allowed, e.g. an M$Word instance to be snapshot and reanimated on another machine, could M$ be legally able to stop that from happening? I don't know.
Ethically though, I'd say it's highly anti-competitive; being able to legally kill business opportunities at will simply because they impact your business.
it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.
And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.
With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.
I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.
Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Wow! What a tragedy. On some minor level, folks are growing up a little and becoming smarter.
No, folks that are just as smart as they were before will have to waste more of their lives dealing with shills and imposters. What a waste and a less civilized society.
One example is telemarketers; every hour of their so-called "work" means they are stealing an hour of other people's time, more if you include computer dialing and other tricks. Another example is TV advertising, where people end up paying twice over, once to watch/avoid the ad and secondly the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. The net value of broadcast television for the vast majority of the population is now approaching zero because of advertising.
The time of our life and what we spend it on is the most important thing we have.
Marketing frauds like to pretend that they add value and that it doesn't matter. They've lying.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Simple: hype. It's just easier to hype it up this way.
Of course marketers never ask themselves why it's easier to hype it up that way.
They are fraudulently misrepresenting themselves as a more trusted information source. There's a reason why reputable publications have a "Advertisement" on anything that might otherwise reasonably be construed as third party information.
I live in hope that the law will eventually catch up and put some of these people in jail for false advertising. We'll see.
Besides that, if you have no way to know which sources to trust, you have no way to get rid of that ignorance. That is the problem with viral marketing.
No, the problem is noise. A message can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. That is the problem with viral marketing and marketing in general.
In the real world you do not have the time to all evaluate the messages you receive. You must always trust your sources to greater or lesser extent. Marketing deliberately tries to subvert trusted sources by flooding them out with content free trash. It's no accident that the most successful advertising campaigns tend to be the ones with the most money spent. If the value of messages was inherent that would not be true. An arms race to get mindshare in other words. Everybody loses except the marketing "industry". It's also fraudulent but unfortunately the legal system isn't even close to being able to deal with it.
Complaining about the ridiculousness of a pending patent *application* is about as useful as complaining about people spending time thinking of what they'd wish for if they found a bottle with a genie in it.
Given the ease with which the PTO issues silly patents and the sometimes ridiculuous cost of breaking patents to claim that questioning a patent application is not useful is disingenuous at best.
So someone thought they had a cool new idea because they hadn't ever seen anything like it and they were wrong... so what?
So these idiots could cost many other people doing nothing more than minding their own business a lot of money if this is not questioned before it's issued.
If the patent *issues* then there's something to complain about (though pointing the patent office at the prior art would be a useful public service, unlike whining on Slashdot).
The fact that the people making this patent application thought it might succeed says more about the technical ability of the PTO than anything else.
The entire idea that a small government department is capable of assessing all of technology created by 6,500,000,000+ people for prior art is silly. Only scientists working in very narrow fields for a lifetime can do that and even then they make mistakes. The assumption that in a population of billions of people most technological inventions are not going to be independently reinvented many times is also silly.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
I think it's more likely to be a case of "they don't want you to buy 1 copy of Vista, install it in a VM, and then put the VM image up on a BT tracker for a billion of your close personal friends".
If that were true they'd block all forms of virtualization and put VMware out of business.
This just has the side-effect, purely unintentional I'm sure, of making it more expensive/inconvenient to run M$Windows/Vista/whatever-they're-marketing-it-as-t his-week in tandem with other OS'. Anti-competitive behavior at it's very best.
They allow less crippled, more expensive copies of M$Vista to virtualize to keep their business users happy. I'm sure the happy side-effect of reducing anti-trust issues is also purely accidental.
Actually, they've probably calculated very carefully what they can legally get away with, what will maximize their profit and thus minimize the cost/benefit ratio for everybody else.
It's secret (police hacking). Just like "real world" searches, computers may not be searched secretly. So far.
Oh, they can be secretly searched alright, but only by the M$+CIA, and possibly other organizations like the RIAA+MPAA that have done a backroom deal with M$. TC will help insure that not even governments can see them doing it.
Forget terrorists, foreign organizations and governments should be much more paranoid about being spied upon via their PC's for business and military intelligence than they currently appear to be. It's just too easy.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Vista will be a "success" simply because it comes pre-loaded with all new PCs and releases like this will keep the corps buying the steady income support licenses from MS.
Vista may or may not be a "success", depending on how you define success, but assuming an expectation that "everybody will be using vista" means "using vista too to be compatible and take advantage of network effects". ie. buying.
M$ marketing is currently doing everything they can to create that perception to bootstrap vista use and avoid a version of prisoner's dilemma.
That perception has nothing to do with reality yet. Currently, it's just marketing.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Please, for the love of whatever it is you believe in, if you want to be taken seriously...it's MS, not M$.
Until M$ stops putting their marketing keys on general purpose computer keyboards and stops taxing the world $40,000,000,000+/year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most difficult bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties the use of "M$" is a minor and useful reminder.
M$ and their astroturfers would dearly love for the world to forget just how much they're costing us and their campaign pretending (ie. lying) that "M$" is not a useful acronym is but one example of that.
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Astroturfers are lying scum, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
So, wouldn't you agree that it is better to steal the car than the music? Because in either case the "owner" is being deprived of payment.
Reasoning by assumption. You are automatically assuming that the original creator of the music owns a particular copy of the music and therefore they deserve payment. It is equally reasonable to assume that when somebody has a copy they own it and they can do what they like with it.
If you're going to argue that the original creator of a piece of music deserves all payment that's fine but don't pretend it's simply because they own it. Ownership itself is arguable and has little to do with who deserves what.
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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.
And the work being "protected" has to actually be under copyright.
Which is bizarre. 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.
A copyright "protection mechanism" has nothing to do with security.
Sorry, but that's double-think. Double-plus un-good.
It has everything to do with security. The vendor's security. Security is all about physically enforcing somebody's view of ownership in the face of other people's different view of ownership. Ownership, by definition, is simply the legal right to control something to the exclusion of others. Security in general has nothing to do with secrecy though secrecy is often used to achieve security.
In this case the vendor thinks they should be able to legally enforce their view of ownership. This happens to be in conflict with most people's view of ownership which includes the right to share. Reasonable people can dis/agree with either point of view.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Look everybody, a lying M$ astroturfer fraudulently misrepresenting themselves as an objective third party using "bold face" for "emphasis" and emotionally loaded terminology to distract people from the fact that they don't actually have anything factual to say.
What antitrust issue do you see here?
Duh. M$ is leveraging their desktop operating system monopoly to gain an advantage (cross-subsidizing from their monopoly) in console gaming. That may be illegal.
You pretending not to know that is telling. And a typical example of why many people don't trust M$. M$ reaps what it sows.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
AOP is object oriented come from. It can trash maintainability. In any program using AOP you can't look at any call in the entire program without assuming there's an arbitrarily large block of code somewhere else messing things up.
While it's true that AOP can help the classes of problems it solves are fairly small compared to the cost it brings. Instead, adding calls to the first/last line of method implementations is no big deal. Less consistency checking but more debugability. If all you've got is binaries then AOP will get you going but in that case your solution of a derived class is workable and documents the fact that you've changed the behavior of the entire class.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
in doing so he saves his labor in expectation of a future return on his investment.
Until, in the absence of democratic government, it gets stolen from him by the local warlord with a gun. eg. Somalia
Democratic government is nothing more than a group of like-minded people getting together to cooperate in getting rid of the parasites. The parasites disagree of course. And just to make things more interesting in a modern society different people can have very different ideas about what a parasite is.
You can argue all you like about the fact that we don't need government but the reality is you have to have it in some form and the only thing worse than a tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
I used to be 24 hour on-call system/network administrator. Not a problem.
I just designed good, reliable systems so that the odds of being called out after hours was low.
I didn't install software with reliability problems, I provided tools and documentation so users could help themselves, I made sure that users had all the access they needed to get their job done, I invested the effort in scripting and tools in-hours so that the systems would look after themselves after hours, I made key hardware redundant, not false economizing by underestimating personnel costs (both IT & non-IT), I made sure I had remote reset and administration everywhere etc. etc.. I worked smart rather than hard.
If you're working in an environment where you don't have control over what makes your job 24 hour then I agree, leave as quickly as possible, you're probably working in a badly managed environment anyway.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Monopolies aren't inherently bad.
Actually, they are.
Monopolies means no competitors to control the retail pricing of companies who are usually legally required to maximize profits.
Unless you want government price controls. Do you want government price controls?
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
Give it a rest. M$ is playing semantic word games with the words "Vista" and "Aero", not to mention crippling their software in various ways, in a deliberate attempt to deceive the consumer. Showing one thing and giving another. False advertising in other words.
They have along history of doing similar things. One reason they're disliked. This time they've been called on it. We'll see what the court says but at a bare minimum they should get their wrist slapped.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Remember folks, we need to get rid of free speech to protect free speech! Right after we destroy the village to save it!
No, you are willfully misinterpreting and emotionally exaggerating what I said to distract the reader. You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.
A marketing executive claiming that fraudulently misrepresenting paid propaganda as objective third party opinion is somehow okay? He's the one that should be in jail, not the so-called terrorists.So he should go to jail for expressing his opinions on ethics?
Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.
It's a real shame truth-in-advertising law hasn't caught up with them yet."truth-in-advertisment" laws can only apply to traditional media. The internet is international, and impossible to track without big bother controls.
Ah, yes. The false dichotomy. Beloved of self-serving politicians everywhere. It's not perfectly possible, it's not perfectly impossible. It's actually somewhere in between, like most real world law.
There is no reason why a company cannot just operate out of a country where paying people for blog reviews is legal. The only way to stop it then would be big brother spying on all blog operators.
And now we have the straw man. There are many possibilities, you've just chosen the one you think you can argue against. Some other ways to reduce/stop it would be to rely on competitors and consumers to report it, do statistical analysis of blog traffic and to make the penalties so severe (e.g. per-sale fines and executives personally liable) that even a small chance of being caught makes it unprofitable.
(which I am sure you wouldn't be against - Any loss of freedom is justified to you protect us from those terrible terrible advertisments - but would be nearly impossible to implement).
The appeal to "freedom", manipulatively trying to frame the argument.
Fraudulent advertising is actually costing me my freedom. The time of my life is the most important thing I have and I don't want it being stolen by these scumbags. Advertising in general is terrible when it's stealing as much of people's lives as it does these days.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
They support the computer that they sent you, meaning every bit on that hard drive must be the same as it was when it left the factory.
That's technically almost impossible, if for no other reason than the clock bits and boot log have changed.
What you really mean is that the software load is similar to that originally sold, for some ill-defined meaning of the word "similar". Most people are going to have a variety of different software installed and still expect warranty service.
You are somewhat arbitrarily stating that another OS is sufficiently dissimilar to the original load to make helpdesk troubleshooting impossible. That's silly; many basic hardware faults, such as a stuck keyboard, can be dealt with easily regardless of the software installed with a reasonable help desk script, starting with "we don't officially support that software but we'll do what we can and if you return non-faulty hardware or take too much of our time we'll charge you for it" which pretty much covers the cost issue in one line.
In the case of a stuck keyboard the help desk script says "start a text editor (or BIOS) and see if it echoes". Not exactly rocket science and your argument, while somewhat valid, is highly exaggerated.
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DRM. You don't control it = you don't own it.
A marketing executive claiming that fraudulently misrepresenting paid propaganda as objective third party opinion is somehow okay?
He's the one that should be in jail, not the so-called terrorists.
It's a real shame truth-in-advertising law hasn't caught up with them yet.
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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.
Look at who they're studying:
We looked at white-collar workers -- executive recruiters.
Not office workers in general - executive recruiters are in no way shape or form representative of general office workers. Not groundbreaking and quantity does not equal quality if the basis of the study is limited.
Look at who the sponsors were:
The National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp. sponsored their work.
Cisco and Intel have a vested interest in encouraging IT use. The NSF will fund anything that follows their science guidelines.
Look at where it was presented:
at the International Conference on Information Systems, the largest academic IT conference in the world.
That sounds impressive to a non-academic. Until you realize that a large conference means lowest common denominator standards. Academic conferences in general are much easier to publish in than academic journals.
Look at the results:
IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking; and IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did.
Lovely piece of spin there. IT use was orthogonal to productivity. Phones were regarded as "IT". Face-to-face meetings were implicitly regarded as "IT".
They found that executive recruiters, who have the job of recruiting people, had a higher success rate when they communicated with more people.
Well, duh.
This study is a great example of the sponsors getting the result they payed for: some astroturf to encourage the use of IT technology.
Based on the ComputerWorld article the study itself seems reasonable but is narrowly focused and justifies almost none of the comments being made here about IT increasing the productivity of the average office worker.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
If VMWare can show that it's as much about anti-competition as it is anti-piracy, they have a valid argument.
VM's allow OS' to be treated as just another application. Why should OS-application vendors have any special legal privileges compared to every other software package vendor on the planet? Most software packages are already running in a virtual environment - the OS.
If somebody wrote a package that allowed, e.g. an M$Word instance to be snapshot and reanimated on another machine, could M$ be legally able to stop that from happening? I don't know.
Ethically though, I'd say it's highly anti-competitive; being able to legally kill business opportunities at will simply because they impact your business.
---
Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.
And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.
With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.
I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.
Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Wow! What a tragedy. On some minor level, folks are growing up a little and becoming smarter.
No, folks that are just as smart as they were before will have to waste more of their lives dealing with shills and imposters. What a waste and a less civilized society.
One example is telemarketers; every hour of their so-called "work" means they are stealing an hour of other people's time, more if you include computer dialing and other tricks. Another example is TV advertising, where people end up paying twice over, once to watch/avoid the ad and secondly the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. The net value of broadcast television for the vast majority of the population is now approaching zero because of advertising.
The time of our life and what we spend it on is the most important thing we have.
Marketing frauds like to pretend that they add value and that it doesn't matter. They've lying.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Simple: hype. It's just easier to hype it up this way.
Of course marketers never ask themselves why it's easier to hype it up that way.
They are fraudulently misrepresenting themselves as a more trusted information source. There's a reason why reputable publications have a "Advertisement" on anything that might otherwise reasonably be construed as third party information.
I live in hope that the law will eventually catch up and put some of these people in jail for false advertising. We'll see.
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New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
Besides that, if you have no way to know which sources to trust, you have no way to get rid of that ignorance. That is the problem with viral marketing.
No, the problem is noise. A message can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. That is the problem with viral marketing and marketing in general.
In the real world you do not have the time to all evaluate the messages you receive. You must always trust your sources to greater or lesser extent. Marketing deliberately tries to subvert trusted sources by flooding them out with content free trash. It's no accident that the most successful advertising campaigns tend to be the ones with the most money spent. If the value of messages was inherent that would not be true. An arms race to get mindshare in other words. Everybody loses except the marketing "industry". It's also fraudulent but unfortunately the legal system isn't even close to being able to deal with it.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers
Complaining about the ridiculousness of a pending patent *application* is about as useful as complaining about people spending time thinking of what they'd wish for if they found a bottle with a genie in it.
Given the ease with which the PTO issues silly patents and the sometimes ridiculuous cost of breaking patents to claim that questioning a patent application is not useful is disingenuous at best.
So someone thought they had a cool new idea because they hadn't ever seen anything like it and they were wrong... so what?
So these idiots could cost many other people doing nothing more than minding their own business a lot of money if this is not questioned before it's issued.
If the patent *issues* then there's something to complain about (though pointing the patent office at the prior art would be a useful public service, unlike whining on Slashdot).
The fact that the people making this patent application thought it might succeed says more about the technical ability of the PTO than anything else.
The entire idea that a small government department is capable of assessing all of technology created by 6,500,000,000+ people for prior art is silly. Only scientists working in very narrow fields for a lifetime can do that and even then they make mistakes. The assumption that in a population of billions of people most technological inventions are not going to be independently reinvented many times is also silly.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
I think it's more likely to be a case of "they don't want you to buy 1 copy of Vista, install it in a VM, and then put the VM image up on a BT tracker for a billion of your close personal friends".
If that were true they'd block all forms of virtualization and put VMware out of business.
This just has the side-effect, purely unintentional I'm sure, of making it more expensive/inconvenient to run M$Windows/Vista/whatever-they're-marketing-it-as-t his-week in tandem with other OS'. Anti-competitive behavior at it's very best.
They allow less crippled, more expensive copies of M$Vista to virtualize to keep their business users happy. I'm sure the happy side-effect of reducing anti-trust issues is also purely accidental.
Actually, they've probably calculated very carefully what they can legally get away with, what will maximize their profit and thus minimize the cost/benefit ratio for everybody else.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
It's secret (police hacking). Just like "real world" searches, computers may not be searched secretly. So far.
Oh, they can be secretly searched alright, but only by the M$+CIA, and possibly other organizations like the RIAA+MPAA that have done a backroom deal with M$. TC will help insure that not even governments can see them doing it.
If you're naive enough to think they're not doing it consider the CIA's annual budget, consider what they've been discovered doing behind closed doors already (conventional spying, Echelon, some printer tracking, passenger tracking, ...).
Forget terrorists, foreign organizations and governments should be much more paranoid about being spied upon via their PC's for business and military intelligence than they currently appear to be. It's just too easy.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
It's a living, not a war, and the sooner the sociopaths at M$ realize that the better off everybody will be.
Tangential to your point but relevant to the tone of yours and many other M$ missives.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Blaming Microsoft for this DRM fiasco is lame.
Yes, M$ is trying very hard to get rid of it, promoting Orwellian doublspeak like Windows Genuine [Dis]Advantage and [Un]Trusted Computing.
buy your media from sources that don't promote it.
M$ is promoting the hell out of it, attempting to leverage other media value to sell Vista and to control the market. Your entire argument is bogus.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Vista will be a "success" simply because it comes pre-loaded with all new PCs and releases like this will keep the corps buying the steady income support licenses from MS.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Vista may or may not be a "success", depending on how you define success, but assuming an expectation that "everybody will be using vista" means "using vista too to be compatible and take advantage of network effects". ie. buying.
M$ marketing is currently doing everything they can to create that perception to bootstrap vista use and avoid a version of prisoner's dilemma.
That perception has nothing to do with reality yet. Currently, it's just marketing.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Please, for the love of whatever it is you believe in, if you want to be taken seriously...it's MS, not M$.
Until M$ stops putting their marketing keys on general purpose computer keyboards and stops taxing the world $40,000,000,000+/year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most difficult bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties the use of "M$" is a minor and useful reminder.
M$ and their astroturfers would dearly love for the world to forget just how much they're costing us and their campaign pretending (ie. lying) that "M$" is not a useful acronym is but one example of that.
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Astroturfers are lying scum, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Telling people what they can think is NEVER correct.
Yep, all unsolicited advertising should be made illegal.
In other words; it's not as simple as you imply. Most marketing is trying to control what people think.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
So, wouldn't you agree that it is better to steal the car than the music? Because in either case the "owner" is being deprived of payment.
Reasoning by assumption. You are automatically assuming that the original creator of the music owns a particular copy of the music and therefore they deserve payment. It is equally reasonable to assume that when somebody has a copy they own it and they can do what they like with it.
If you're going to argue that the original creator of a piece of music deserves all payment that's fine but don't pretend it's simply because they own it. Ownership itself is arguable and has little to do with who deserves what.
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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.
And the work being "protected" has to actually be under copyright.
Which is bizarre. 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.
A copyright "protection mechanism" has nothing to do with security.
Sorry, but that's double-think. Double-plus un-good.
It has everything to do with security. The vendor's security. Security is all about physically enforcing somebody's view of ownership in the face of other people's different view of ownership. Ownership, by definition, is simply the legal right to control something to the exclusion of others. Security in general has nothing to do with secrecy though secrecy is often used to achieve security.
In this case the vendor thinks they should be able to legally enforce their view of ownership. This happens to be in conflict with most people's view of ownership which includes the right to share. Reasonable people can dis/agree with either point of view.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Look everybody, a lying M$ astroturfer fraudulently misrepresenting themselves as an objective third party using "bold face" for "emphasis" and emotionally loaded terminology to distract people from the fact that they don't actually have anything factual to say.
What antitrust issue do you see here?
Duh. M$ is leveraging their desktop operating system monopoly to gain an advantage (cross-subsidizing from their monopoly) in console gaming. That may be illegal.
You pretending not to know that is telling. And a typical example of why many people don't trust M$. M$ reaps what it sows.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
AOP is object oriented come from. It can trash maintainability. In any program using AOP you can't look at any call in the entire program without assuming there's an arbitrarily large block of code somewhere else messing things up.
While it's true that AOP can help the classes of problems it solves are fairly small compared to the cost it brings. Instead, adding calls to the first/last line of method implementations is no big deal. Less consistency checking but more debugability. If all you've got is binaries then AOP will get you going but in that case your solution of a derived class is workable and documents the fact that you've changed the behavior of the entire class.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.