You do realize that every time you use "M$" fewer and fewer people could care any less about what you have to say, right?
I'll be happy to stop using it when M$ stops putting their marketing keys on millions of general purpose PC keyboards.
"M$" is just a handy reminder that Microsoft is still taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with most of the most difficult bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties.
You attribute Microsoft's actions to greed... guess what, THEY ARE A FOR PROFIT COMPANY. Greed is another word for the desire for profits.
Yep, and being paid justifies any action. At least in M$' eyes. Some companies are more ethical.
The decisions Microsoft made were the correct ones AT THE TIME they made them.
I've already reminded you that both the problems and the solutions were well understood long before M$ came along. M$ chose not to implement them.
In 1992, when Microsoft began what would become Windows 95, they didn't see the Internet coming.
Floppy based computer viruses were widespread by 1988, 4 years before. Similar security problems with similar solutions. M$ chose not to implement them.
By the time they realized that the net posed a security risk it was far too late to redesign Windows and have any hope of making real money on what was then one of the most expensive software projects in history.
The expense would've been much the same whether or not they'd implemented security features, the security risks were well understood by everybody at that time. M$ chose to ignore them.
You speak of "virtual machines" and claim that these were feasible on 386 hardware. First of all, you really must be delusional.
No delusions. I was referring to virtual machines in the more general sense of virtual memory with a cooperating OS. Something well understood long before then with the 80386 designed to support it. The 80286 was supposed to support it too but because of a major design mistake it wasn't practical.
Virtual machines are becoming popular today because hardware is finally at a point where the performance is expectable.
So emm386 and unix V using virtual memory paging were just a figment of my imagination? Virtualisation can also be done at software level, redirecting file open's, block writes and the like.
Do you honestly believe this was the case 12 or 15 years ago?
Yes. Virtualisation is taking off again now (it was common on other boxes decades ago) because there is a market need for it. It's just another layer isolating OS services from the hardware.
Second, I think you are dramatically underestimating the scope of creating an embedded virtual machine in the OS to run legacy applications. Even if Microsoft were to accomplish this, it would be at the expense of new features and improvements that customers demand.
False dichotomy. This is not an all or nothing situation. There is much than M$ could've done to improve the situation without trying to emulate every bit of their own OS. They chose not to.
You specifically said that Microsoft has claimed that users running as admin was never a problem, but your only support is the fact they use the terms "enterprise ready" or "internet ready".
So what does "enterprise ready" or "internet ready" mean to you? That it comes with a Twinkie?
Give me a break. Next you'll claim that anybody who criticizes the President wants terrorists to destroy America. You and I both know that in no way means that Microsoft thinks it's not a problem,
M$' actions speak louder than words. They think admin by default is not a problem and have done so for decades.
not to mention the fact that it is ENTIRELY possible to run XP without admin privs if you don't mind legacy apps often brea
Protected OS' were being sold before even the first version of Windows was written. It was and is a well understood problem with a well understood solution.
M$ chose to ignore that, initially because it was easier and more profitable and because in the context of an isolated desktop machine running one app, basically a program loader, it was a reasonable approach. In addition they made no realistic attempt to isolate the code from the underlying hardware, again because it was easier, faster and more profitable at the time than to plan for the future. At the expense of the customers of course.
That became less reasonable when they started running a windowing system and it became completely unreasonable the moment they connected it to the net, and also started supporting multiple app's and assorted services, triply so when they deliberately put un-sandboxed, executable code into the web browser and email client. I can remember the first time I heard about that.
Isolating dodgy code in a virtual machine is a well understood problem, again with a well understood solution. Again, M$ could've solved the problem early on by gradually moving customer code to a virtual machine isolated from the hardware and tightened up the security as they went. That could've happened with the 80386. They chose not to. Again because they were greedy and were paying only lip service to security.
They could've limited the problem almost trivially by having a visible popup, disable-able with some effort, if an application tried to perform an administrative action. M$ chose not to. M$ could've done numerous technical tricks to reduce and eventually eliminate the exposure of insecure system code. They chose not to.
Clearly this isn't as simple as Microsoft being "fraudulent", nor is it "marketing bullshit", and they certainly have never claimed it wasn't a problem.
Bullshit. They've been claiming since the year dot they're "enterprise ready", "internet ready" and "professional". Everything they've done in terms of security until the last few years has been almost the exact opposite.
Their history, created almost entirely by them, has come back to bite them. The entire virus "industry" came into existence largely because of them. The current problems with security are largely M$' fault. Compounded by their lying spin about security and professionalism over the years.
So please, enough with the marketing nonsense and attempts to revise history.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
As you can see, the adage in question is perfectly reasonable and applies to everybody, not just Windows users.
No. Windows is the only OS that has users running as administrator by default.
And with executable code in data areas. And with no warning when they do something that might compromise the system such as suspect dll's in system areas.
Vista may fix some of that. Finally. After more than twenty years of fraudulent marketing bullshit trying to claim it wasn't a problem.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Having a separate boot disk dramatically increases costs because current OS licensing requirements means that the boot disk needs a separate OS license. That's why vendors don't do it now. Stupid but true.
The anti-virus vendors should pay to finish the OSS NTFS driver. They can then use it to create their own boot disk that can fix compromised NTFS volumes with no separate license required. Everybody wins.
There is no "free" content. With advertising you're paying twice over, once in time/attention for the ad and twice in increased price of product to pay for the ad. And that's ignoring transaction overheads and spammers. I for for one would love to pay for my content and classified advertising directly and avoid the unsolicited advertising value shell game.
Admittedly, internet advertising is nowhere near as bad as TV/radio advertising. Yet.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
In theory normal OS' are perfectly safe from rootkits because of file protections. Doesn't stop it from happening though and that's because rootkit installers deliberately exploit bugs to break the OS' semantics, whether it be file protections, type safety or passwords.
Type safety can help, but just like every other protection mechanism it's only a bugless abstraction of what's actually happening on the box.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You laugh, but just how much easier is it to click a button in a GUI or type a keyboard shortcut as compared to clicking up-arrow+Enter to re-invoke make on the command line?
IDE's are productivity enhancers but they are often overrated. Programmers need to think more about what makes a development environment productive. Hand waving about buttons and "integration" doesn't cut it.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You appear to misunderstand. What I'm suggesting is that, just like contents labelling on food and the intrinsic reverse-engineering-ability of a house, a purchaser of software should have some means of determining whether the product they've purchased does everything the supplier claims it does. I said nothing about releasing source to the public at large.
which is really quite antithetical to personal freedoms
Nope, it says nothing about who can sell their software to whom or price or what that software can do. All it says is that the customer must be able to verify the claims of the vendor. A free market depends totally on transparency and communication. Until now software was generally isolated and could only be malicious in limited ways. Now that most everything is connected to the net the skies the limit in terms of misuse of information and laws are needed to insure that free markets can operate efficiently and effectively.
If you think supplying source is bad idea how would you, as government, go about insuring that software, now DMCA protected, is not doing malicious things? Everything from phoning home personal information to making competitors products die to dying on command when a new version comes out to blocking competitors marketing to etc. Particularly if/when TCPA becomes widespread? And please, no nonsense about how the market will fix the problem when the market can't even see potential problems.
Incidentally, I love the way certain people around here like to claim that anything that doesn't fit their rather narrow ideology is "socialist". I've got news for you; the world is more complicated than that. By your logic copyright law itself, a fundamental interference in the right of somebody to do as they please with something they have, is socialist.
All laws trade off the rights of different groups of people. The simplistic capitalist v. socialist nonsense is just one of many dimensions that laws and human behaviour can be measured over. The world is a complicated place; learn to deal with it.
If Microsoft adds a feature that's not part of the standard they'll be accused of trying to embrace and extend to dominate the world
Depends. If the feature is documented, fulfills an obvious need, is backwards compatible, is not restricted by a manipulative license so others really can use it, isn't tied to a particular platform and doesn't try to manipulate the market with technical tricks then I for one would have no problem. And I'm not the most vocal of M$ supporters.
Basically, if they act as honest brokers about the standard then they will find people respond in kind, if with a high degree of suspicion until they've proven themselves trustworthy.
I'm continually surprised by M$ employees who claim they can't understand the antagonism to M$. M$ reaps what it sows. When M$ competes negatively in any sense, whether it be proprietary formats breaking compatibility, deceptive marketing, licensing tricks, technical tricks fooling a non-technically trained public or even self-serving default values or interface tricks then they are going to make enemies.
Competing positively, by making a better product, makes friends. Competing negatively, by hindering the competition or the customer, makes enemies.
Why don't save your work in RTF until you convert the final draft to DOC? I haven't tried it but I imagine with appropriate markers you could parse the RTF sufficiently to drop in blobs of code. Use a makefile and dependency management should be easy. Alternatively, VB macros checking file dates or OLE though that could get messy.
Having said that, agreed; I've used both LaTeX and MSWord for large documents and after the initial learning curve LaTeX is more reliable, easier to use and gives a superior result.
---
If you haven't tested your code under heavy load on an SMP machine then you haven't tested it.
Windows Disengenuous Disadvantage can track all copies. There'd be no problem tracking/blocking any new copies the day after such a ruling was reversed.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
So, you either support the GPL, and by proxy the laws that underpin it, or you don't.
False dichotomy. GPL was written in a particular context to acomplish particular goals. If the context, copyright, changes, there is no reason to expect that GPL would remain the same. The copyright law we currently have is a creation of the mind only one of an infinite number of possibilities.
Personally, amongst other changes, one law I'd like to see is that all software sales must include the source. Binaries and DRM can hide too many sins and a functioning free market depends on openness.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you really want to compensate for bad journalism, it's not by doing more bad journalism yourself, but to do good journalism.
Yes, preferably, but failing that balancing biased journalism is better than nothing.
Showing some really "insightful" comments (instead of the ones that get modded up just for defending one side) would make the whole discussion on/. more credible.
There's much insightful comment on slashdot both for and against existing copyright and alternative forms of copyright. Insightful points on both sides are mod'ed up. That fact that people like you are too bigotted to see that doesn't make it any less true.
Now they just lowered themselves to the level of the "mass media" (nice generalisation by the way).
No, just fighting fire with fire. The mass propaganda by entrenched interests needs to be combatted. Taking it on the chin is stupid. When 95% of mainstream media stories don't even discuss alternative forms of copyright and patents, portray virtually all stories as "fighting piracy" and automatically assume that current copyright laws are the only possibility I'd hardly call it an over-generalisation.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
not a *single* comment was referenced which took this stance.
Entirely apropriate. When the mass media presents a more balanced view on copyright then maybe we can revisit whether slashdot is biased too.
Slashdot is just balancing out in a tiny way the extremely biased propaganda by entrenched interests you see in the mass media, including movie theaters.
---
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.
Permitting the unlicensed creation and redistribution of derivative content where the transformation constitutes removing a non-trivial amount of those ads directly harms this model.
I do the same when I pay the garage to remove the car dealer's sticker from my new car or pull down the for sale sign on my new house.
The copy is mine; I should be able to do anything I like with it, including paying a third party to cut out the naughty bits, even if that third party is used a different-but-identical copy of what I have. Copyright law is broken.
---
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.
It's quite obvious it's a derivative work, and distributing it therefore violates copyright law.
And that's why copyright law is broken. It's quite reasonable to want buy a copy, modify it and on-sell the modified version, as long as there is no attempt to misrepresent the modified version as the original.
Copyright law should be changed so that one person can own any number of copies of some work. It's not as if they can watch/listen to more than one copy at a time. People would pay for new versions but could modify/copy what they've got, or pay somebody else do it for them, as they pleased.
---
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.
As long as somebody who edits your work and on-sells it does not misrepresent it as your work you should should have no say in the matter.
---
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.
"Libertarianism is an extreme ideology. Its supports a total freedom, even when it conflicts with other people's freedom, and complete devotion to the "magical non-state-like entity that somehow makes everyone of equal power". Communism is not extreme. It supports a government activity, just not a completely unlimited one that allows some freedom."
Depending on implementation both libertarianism and communism can be extreme. The real world is complicated unfortunately and is not amenable to such simple ideologies.
And you ignored my main point; that people gang up on people. Until libertarianism addresses that fundamental point it will continue to be utopian.
Depends on your location, wealth and spending power. Just making the point that pursuing money at the expense of other things can eventually be counter productive.
There's nothing special about application signing. Making your existing read-write partitions and any mount no-execute is the equivalent of saying all existing applications are signed and no others are and would solve this problem.
Application signing can be compromised just as much as the above. If done properly it does give an extra layer of protection.
You might say that one difference is that application signing can be done remotely so that the owner of the computer loses control but that's no different from the owner not having the root/administrator password.
Both can be compromised by physical access to the hardware though TCPA does try to make access to the key hardware hard.
Application encryption can block the owner from executing anything the encryptor has encrypted but that still requires the keys to be obtained from somewhere when the application runs, either the net or embedded hardware, and there is a potential hole if the owner can capture those keys.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
All your base are belong to us!
Since it's the biggest piece of DNA ever made after all...
You do realize that every time you use "M$" fewer and fewer people could care any less about what you have to say, right?
I'll be happy to stop using it when M$ stops putting their marketing keys on millions of general purpose PC keyboards.
"M$" is just a handy reminder that Microsoft is still taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with most of the most difficult bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties.
You attribute Microsoft's actions to greed... guess what, THEY ARE A FOR PROFIT COMPANY. Greed is another word for the desire for profits.
Yep, and being paid justifies any action. At least in M$' eyes. Some companies are more ethical.
The decisions Microsoft made were the correct ones AT THE TIME they made them.
I've already reminded you that both the problems and the solutions were well understood long before M$ came along. M$ chose not to implement them.
In 1992, when Microsoft began what would become Windows 95, they didn't see the Internet coming.
Floppy based computer viruses were widespread by 1988, 4 years before. Similar security problems with similar solutions. M$ chose not to implement them.
By the time they realized that the net posed a security risk it was far too late to redesign Windows and have any hope of making real money on what was then one of the most expensive software projects in history.
The expense would've been much the same whether or not they'd implemented security features, the security risks were well understood by everybody at that time. M$ chose to ignore them.
You speak of "virtual machines" and claim that these were feasible on 386 hardware. First of all, you really must be delusional.
No delusions. I was referring to virtual machines in the more general sense of virtual memory with a cooperating OS. Something well understood long before then with the 80386 designed to support it. The 80286 was supposed to support it too but because of a major design mistake it wasn't practical.
Virtual machines are becoming popular today because hardware is finally at a point where the performance is expectable.
So emm386 and unix V using virtual memory paging were just a figment of my imagination? Virtualisation can also be done at software level, redirecting file open's, block writes and the like.
Do you honestly believe this was the case 12 or 15 years ago?
Yes. Virtualisation is taking off again now (it was common on other boxes decades ago) because there is a market need for it. It's just another layer isolating OS services from the hardware.
Second, I think you are dramatically underestimating the scope of creating an embedded virtual machine in the OS to run legacy applications. Even if Microsoft were to accomplish this, it would be at the expense of new features and improvements that customers demand.
False dichotomy. This is not an all or nothing situation. There is much than M$ could've done to improve the situation without trying to emulate every bit of their own OS. They chose not to.
You specifically said that Microsoft has claimed that users running as admin was never a problem, but your only support is the fact they use the terms "enterprise ready" or "internet ready".
So what does "enterprise ready" or "internet ready" mean to you? That it comes with a Twinkie?
Give me a break. Next you'll claim that anybody who criticizes the President wants terrorists to destroy America. You and I both know that in no way means that Microsoft thinks it's not a problem,
M$' actions speak louder than words. They think admin by default is not a problem and have done so for decades.
not to mention the fact that it is ENTIRELY possible to run XP without admin privs if you don't mind legacy apps often brea
But did you ever ask yourself why?
Of course I know why. Greed.
Protected OS' were being sold before even the first version of Windows was written. It was and is a well understood problem with a well understood solution.
M$ chose to ignore that, initially because it was easier and more profitable and because in the context of an isolated desktop machine running one app, basically a program loader, it was a reasonable approach. In addition they made no realistic attempt to isolate the code from the underlying hardware, again because it was easier, faster and more profitable at the time than to plan for the future. At the expense of the customers of course.
That became less reasonable when they started running a windowing system and it became completely unreasonable the moment they connected it to the net, and also started supporting multiple app's and assorted services, triply so when they deliberately put un-sandboxed, executable code into the web browser and email client. I can remember the first time I heard about that.
Isolating dodgy code in a virtual machine is a well understood problem, again with a well understood solution. Again, M$ could've solved the problem early on by gradually moving customer code to a virtual machine isolated from the hardware and tightened up the security as they went. That could've happened with the 80386. They chose not to. Again because they were greedy and were paying only lip service to security.
They could've limited the problem almost trivially by having a visible popup, disable-able with some effort, if an application tried to perform an administrative action. M$ chose not to. M$ could've done numerous technical tricks to reduce and eventually eliminate the exposure of insecure system code. They chose not to.
Clearly this isn't as simple as Microsoft being "fraudulent", nor is it "marketing bullshit", and they certainly have never claimed it wasn't a problem.
Bullshit. They've been claiming since the year dot they're "enterprise ready", "internet ready" and "professional". Everything they've done in terms of security until the last few years has been almost the exact opposite.
Their history, created almost entirely by them, has come back to bite them. The entire virus "industry" came into existence largely because of them. The current problems with security are largely M$' fault. Compounded by their lying spin about security and professionalism over the years.
So please, enough with the marketing nonsense and attempts to revise history.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
You're a zealot. I'd suggest you get out more.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
As you can see, the adage in question is perfectly reasonable and applies to everybody, not just Windows users.
No. Windows is the only OS that has users running as administrator by default.
And with executable code in data areas. And with no warning when they do something that might compromise the system such as suspect dll's in system areas.
Vista may fix some of that. Finally. After more than twenty years of fraudulent marketing bullshit trying to claim it wasn't a problem.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Having a separate boot disk dramatically increases costs because current OS licensing requirements means that the boot disk needs a separate OS license. That's why vendors don't do it now. Stupid but true.
The anti-virus vendors should pay to finish the OSS NTFS driver. They can then use it to create their own boot disk that can fix compromised NTFS volumes with no separate license required. Everybody wins.
---
Keep your options open!
No more "free" content on the Internet. Woohoo!
There is no "free" content. With advertising you're paying twice over, once in time/attention for the ad and twice in increased price of product to pay for the ad. And that's ignoring transaction overheads and spammers. I for for one would love to pay for my content and classified advertising directly and avoid the unsolicited advertising value shell game.
Admittedly, internet advertising is nowhere near as bad as TV/radio advertising. Yet.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Type safety is only a partial fix.
In theory normal OS' are perfectly safe from rootkits because of file protections. Doesn't stop it from happening though and that's because rootkit installers deliberately exploit bugs to break the OS' semantics, whether it be file protections, type safety or passwords.
Type safety can help, but just like every other protection mechanism it's only a bugless abstraction of what's actually happening on the box.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You laugh, but just how much easier is it to click a button in a GUI or type a keyboard shortcut as compared to clicking up-arrow+Enter to re-invoke make on the command line?
IDE's are productivity enhancers but they are often overrated. Programmers need to think more about what makes a development environment productive. Hand waving about buttons and "integration" doesn't cut it.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Depends on whether it's general education or M$ vocational training.
And don't forget that most of the "funding" is likely to be M$ licenses, pseudo-money that costs M$ nothing. Hardly kudos for that.
---
Keep your options open!
You appear to misunderstand. What I'm suggesting is that, just like contents labelling on food and the intrinsic reverse-engineering-ability of a house, a purchaser of software should have some means of determining whether the product they've purchased does everything the supplier claims it does. I said nothing about releasing source to the public at large.
which is really quite antithetical to personal freedoms
Nope, it says nothing about who can sell their software to whom or price or what that software can do. All it says is that the customer must be able to verify the claims of the vendor. A free market depends totally on transparency and communication. Until now software was generally isolated and could only be malicious in limited ways. Now that most everything is connected to the net the skies the limit in terms of misuse of information and laws are needed to insure that free markets can operate efficiently and effectively.
If you think supplying source is bad idea how would you, as government, go about insuring that software, now DMCA protected, is not doing malicious things? Everything from phoning home personal information to making competitors products die to dying on command when a new version comes out to blocking competitors marketing to etc. Particularly if/when TCPA becomes widespread? And please, no nonsense about how the market will fix the problem when the market can't even see potential problems.
Incidentally, I love the way certain people around here like to claim that anything that doesn't fit their rather narrow ideology is "socialist". I've got news for you; the world is more complicated than that. By your logic copyright law itself, a fundamental interference in the right of somebody to do as they please with something they have, is socialist.
All laws trade off the rights of different groups of people. The simplistic capitalist v. socialist nonsense is just one of many dimensions that laws and human behaviour can be measured over. The world is a complicated place; learn to deal with it.
---
You communist! Breathing shared air!
If Microsoft adds a feature that's not part of the standard they'll be accused of trying to embrace and extend to dominate the world
Depends. If the feature is documented, fulfills an obvious need, is backwards compatible, is not restricted by a manipulative license so others really can use it, isn't tied to a particular platform and doesn't try to manipulate the market with technical tricks then I for one would have no problem. And I'm not the most vocal of M$ supporters.
Basically, if they act as honest brokers about the standard then they will find people respond in kind, if with a high degree of suspicion until they've proven themselves trustworthy.
I'm continually surprised by M$ employees who claim they can't understand the antagonism to M$. M$ reaps what it sows. When M$ competes negatively in any sense, whether it be proprietary formats breaking compatibility, deceptive marketing, licensing tricks, technical tricks fooling a non-technically trained public or even self-serving default values or interface tricks then they are going to make enemies.
Competing positively, by making a better product, makes friends. Competing negatively, by hindering the competition or the customer, makes enemies.
---
Keep your options open!
Why don't save your work in RTF until you convert the final draft to DOC? I haven't tried it but I imagine with appropriate markers you could parse the RTF sufficiently to drop in blobs of code. Use a makefile and dependency management should be easy. Alternatively, VB macros checking file dates or OLE though that could get messy.
Having said that, agreed; I've used both LaTeX and MSWord for large documents and after the initial learning curve LaTeX is more reliable, easier to use and gives a superior result.
---
If you haven't tested your code under heavy load on an SMP machine then you haven't tested it.
Windows Disengenuous Disadvantage can track all copies. There'd be no problem tracking/blocking any new copies the day after such a ruling was reversed.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
What they're really saying is that the default install has administrator access.
---
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.
So, you either support the GPL, and by proxy the laws that underpin it, or you don't.
False dichotomy. GPL was written in a particular context to acomplish particular goals. If the context, copyright, changes, there is no reason to expect that GPL would remain the same. The copyright law we currently have is a creation of the mind only one of an infinite number of possibilities.
Personally, amongst other changes, one law I'd like to see is that all software sales must include the source. Binaries and DRM can hide too many sins and a functioning free market depends on openness.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you really want to compensate for bad journalism, it's not by doing more bad journalism yourself, but to do good journalism.
Yes, preferably, but failing that balancing biased journalism is better than nothing.
Showing some really "insightful" comments (instead of the ones that get modded up just for defending one side) would make the whole discussion on /. more credible.
There's much insightful comment on slashdot both for and against existing copyright and alternative forms of copyright. Insightful points on both sides are mod'ed up. That fact that people like you are too bigotted to see that doesn't make it any less true.
Now they just lowered themselves to the level of the "mass media" (nice generalisation by the way).
No, just fighting fire with fire. The mass propaganda by entrenched interests needs to be combatted. Taking it on the chin is stupid. When 95% of mainstream media stories don't even discuss alternative forms of copyright and patents, portray virtually all stories as "fighting piracy" and automatically assume that current copyright laws are the only possibility I'd hardly call it an over-generalisation.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
Your logic is lacking. One does not imply the other.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
not a *single* comment was referenced which took this stance.
Entirely apropriate. When the mass media presents a more balanced view on copyright then maybe we can revisit whether slashdot is biased too.
Slashdot is just balancing out in a tiny way the extremely biased propaganda by entrenched interests you see in the mass media, including movie theaters.
---
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.
Permitting the unlicensed creation and redistribution of derivative content where the transformation constitutes removing a non-trivial amount of those ads directly harms this model.
I do the same when I pay the garage to remove the car dealer's sticker from my new car or pull down the for sale sign on my new house.
The copy is mine; I should be able to do anything I like with it, including paying a third party to cut out the naughty bits, even if that third party is used a different-but-identical copy of what I have. Copyright law is broken.
---
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.
It's quite obvious it's a derivative work, and distributing it therefore violates copyright law.
And that's why copyright law is broken. It's quite reasonable to want buy a copy, modify it and on-sell the modified version, as long as there is no attempt to misrepresent the modified version as the original.
Copyright law should be changed so that one person can own any number of copies of some work. It's not as if they can watch/listen to more than one copy at a time. People would pay for new versions but could modify/copy what they've got, or pay somebody else do it for them, as they pleased.
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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.
As long as somebody who edits your work and on-sells it does not misrepresent it as your work you should should have no say in the matter.
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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.
"Libertarianism is an extreme ideology. Its supports a total freedom, even when it conflicts with other people's freedom, and complete devotion to the "magical non-state-like entity that somehow makes everyone of equal power". Communism is not extreme. It supports a government activity, just not a completely unlimited one that allows some freedom."
Depending on implementation both libertarianism and communism can be extreme. The real world is complicated unfortunately and is not amenable to such simple ideologies.
And you ignored my main point; that people gang up on people. Until libertarianism addresses that fundamental point it will continue to be utopian.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
Depends on your location, wealth and spending power. Just making the point that pursuing money at the expense of other things can eventually be counter productive.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
There's nothing special about application signing. Making your existing read-write partitions and any mount no-execute is the equivalent of saying all existing applications are signed and no others are and would solve this problem.
Application signing can be compromised just as much as the above. If done properly it does give an extra layer of protection.
You might say that one difference is that application signing can be done remotely so that the owner of the computer loses control but that's no different from the owner not having the root/administrator password.
Both can be compromised by physical access to the hardware though TCPA does try to make access to the key hardware hard.
Application encryption can block the owner from executing anything the encryptor has encrypted but that still requires the keys to be obtained from somewhere when the application runs, either the net or embedded hardware, and there is a potential hole if the owner can capture those keys.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.