We need do nothing. The copyright extenders defeat themselves. Did you not read it? 160 years since, and there's nothing more need be said about copyright that wasn't said then. The Law has broken the bargain, and it's every man for himself.
Were you looking for me to save your licensing of whatever property you hold dear? Kiss my ass. You stand on the shoulders of giants, and hope to claim not only your own stance, but the giants too. Eat shit and die. Die in a fire. Give it up. Your position is that we should surrender our right to a culture so that you might have profits. You're screwed because no matter how beautiful and artful your constructions of ideas might be,they don't compensate us for the total loss of our culture.
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
This fine composer is the victim of the theft of the commons. He seems a reasonable guy. Unfortunately for him copyright is no longer a square deal and since people are now ignoring all copyrights, they're ignoring his too. That's not fair, but what is there to do? We as individuals have no power to make copyright back into a square deal again and to research every author and contributor to a work for each use to determine if there's net sanity there is just too high a burden. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. His loss is no greater than ours: he's lost some potential income; we've lost our culture.
Microsoft is getting that many licenses, yes. So many people are trying to say that that means the thing is popular. Vista licensed 10 Million units a month in the face of a global recession. What does this mean? That license figures have nothing to do with adoption rates for Windows versions, nor for popularity of the software. It's just a measure of how effectively the company has cowed the industry that enterprises automatically get a license seat of their latest software under Software Assurance and most OEMs purchase a license for every machine shipped whether the machine will even run the software or not, or even if the end-user gets that license. It's a measure of the pent-up demand in a market that avoided purchasing hardware to avoid Vista and just can't wait any more. It's also not new money: Microsoft would pretty much get that money even if W7 was a blank disc.
Where is W7 adoption at really? 13.7%. That's doing pretty well but 1/3 of that was taken from Vista - the widely reviled product people can't get off of fast enough. As a whole Windows share is off by 2% in the past year. That's not a free-fall, but it's not a move in Microsoft's favor either.
The article is about IE9. IE9 will not install on Windows XP. Enterprises looking to migrate to IE9 services and applications cannot do so until they migrate to Windows 7. Application developers can't target the market for services that leverage IE9 technologies until the market moves to a platform that supports IE9. It's a catch-22. It's a real problem and you shouldn't pooh-pooh it.
On the other hand, other standards based browsers use the latest technologies and run on whatever platform you're running, so they make the better target for the application developer.
IE 9 doesn't work on 72% of the machines out there and it never will. It doesn't run on Windows XP. How standard does such a fringe browser have to be?
No doubt Verizon is thrilled about this news and eager to back Microsoft's next effort with lots of co-marketing dollars, shelf space and sales face time after spending many millions up front for an exclusive. Developers must be lining up three deep.
It had 200,000 "fans" on FaceBook from the very beginning. That's really funny when you consider how many they actually sold. Apparently not all of the FaceBook fans have gotten the word yet that they can stop astroturfing now:
Tommy Marcus: MAN, I WANT THIS PHONE SO BADLY!! ITS BETTER THAN THE IPHONE AND DROID COMBINED!!!!!!!!!
Did you know that if you experience this problem that you can achieve electrical isolation yourself without any offensive looking rubber bumper? A $1 bottle of clear nail varnish and you're all set.
You're not going to win this one. Whatever your reason for taking up this absurd mission, it's lost. There will be no grand grassroots campaign to demonize IBM for this because in this particular case they've done nothing wrong.
Now give it up before you do your reputation and your cause any more damage.
Or don't. I'm not exactly wishing you luck in either case. It's just annoying to watch you try.
Automation is good, but where are they going to get the humans to evaluate the gigabits per second of data? Are they looking for a volunteer effort, or have they got it?
Once the Microsoft monopoly power to manipulate hardware vendors is broken by this paradigm shift, every existing OEM besides Apple will be aligning behind Android because they must. Apple isn't going to let them design and sell Apple products, and they want to survive, so Android it is. Apple has grown huge - but it may not yet be huge enough to battle them all.
Don't worry. Once Intel gets Android 2.2 running on X86, it's a five minute deal to get it installed in a virtual machine. A little RDP app and you're off to the races with Adroid on your iPad, or Android device or whatever. At that point a little cloud fusion magic happens that changes everything.
HP didn't buy Palm and Dell isn't selling Android slates because they want a better deal on Windows. If they want to live they have to compete with Apple, so they must break free of Microsoft's control no matter how hard their arm is twisted.
It's not the money. It's the control that's Microsoft's milkshake. Apple is indeed drinking it - drinking it up.
Maybe sometime in 1998 he decided that he had "won" whatever his goal was, evaluated the methods he had used to win, and decided to spend the rest of his days doing penance. Perhaps his first humanitarian endeavor was to pull the teeth of the monster he had created and set it on a course of eventual destruction, for the good of progress. So he depletes the huge cash arsenal with special dividends, demands the company pay out much of its profits in dividends and fritter away the rest. Then, just to be sure, appoints the guy most capable of destroying a company that turns a billion dollars a month in profits he can find to replace him.
Then he set about getting rid of the resulting vast personal wealth in the least harmful way he can find - no mean trick in and of itself.
I guess this is as good a place as any to pick up our conversation. I think I was hinting at the fifth amendment to the US Constitution's protections of property, here provided for reference (Yeah, I know you know. We have an audience too.):
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
This does open the question of conditions. I think we can dispense with just compensation - I don't recall being paid in this particular case. What's left is due process, and whether that was followed. I think we'll find it was not on appeal. I Am Not A Lawyer, but this looks like an interesting course.
[PJ: I'm sure this will be appealed. This is the same court that stretched itself into a pretzel to find for SCO, not that it benefited SCO in the end.]
It really annoys me, as I'm sure it does you, that the US government has been stealing the public domain from us in law since 1962 - longer than I've been alive (though lately with less success). Happily, there has been a cure for this for much longer that lies beyond the power of Congress to legislate. It lies in the sense that our right to our culture and to build upon what has gone before are basic human rights that are beyond even our own power to abdicate, assign or surrender:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restrain
Expect? That they would make pronouncements and weak policy, which would be completely ineffectual - just like every feckless "X Czar" and impotent "war on X" since the LBJ administration.
So far they're playing to form.
I had fair hopes for an effective Obama presidency, and so far he's holding up. In this case it's the effectiveness in getting all of the copyright lobby's money for no real action except for some lip service. I'm still worried, since they pulled almost every Justice appointee from the RIAA, but it seems like they housebroke them quickly.
The clawback of culture that we in common own in the public domain into private monopoly without compensation for our loss is theft. It is a theft from each of us. It is a theft from all of us. It is theft on a grand scale. It's unconstitutional. It's wrong.
The part you missed is that these new mobile platforms can do everything a computer can do through RDP or other remote desktop applications, and in addition can do a whole host of things a "computer" can't do.
It's called cannibalization. When there's an established monopoly any possible invention "cannibalizes" the markets of established product groups and must be suppressed. It takes a long time because monopoly is tremendously profitable, but ultimately this is a stagnant path that goes extinct in much the same form as it existed when it achieved monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's an accident that this thread occurs on Independence day. I think not, but you're welcome to your opinion.
This is my culture. Maybe it's not yours.
We need do nothing. The copyright extenders defeat themselves. Did you not read it? 160 years since, and there's nothing more need be said about copyright that wasn't said then. The Law has broken the bargain, and it's every man for himself.
Were you looking for me to save your licensing of whatever property you hold dear? Kiss my ass. You stand on the shoulders of giants, and hope to claim not only your own stance, but the giants too. Eat shit and die. Die in a fire. Give it up. Your position is that we should surrender our right to a culture so that you might have profits. You're screwed because no matter how beautiful and artful your constructions of ideas might be,they don't compensate us for the total loss of our culture.
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
- Thomas Macaulay, 1841
This fine composer is the victim of the theft of the commons. He seems a reasonable guy. Unfortunately for him copyright is no longer a square deal and since people are now ignoring all copyrights, they're ignoring his too. That's not fair, but what is there to do? We as individuals have no power to make copyright back into a square deal again and to research every author and contributor to a work for each use to determine if there's net sanity there is just too high a burden. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. His loss is no greater than ours: he's lost some potential income; we've lost our culture.
Microsoft is getting that many licenses, yes. So many people are trying to say that that means the thing is popular. Vista licensed 10 Million units a month in the face of a global recession. What does this mean? That license figures have nothing to do with adoption rates for Windows versions, nor for popularity of the software. It's just a measure of how effectively the company has cowed the industry that enterprises automatically get a license seat of their latest software under Software Assurance and most OEMs purchase a license for every machine shipped whether the machine will even run the software or not, or even if the end-user gets that license. It's a measure of the pent-up demand in a market that avoided purchasing hardware to avoid Vista and just can't wait any more. It's also not new money: Microsoft would pretty much get that money even if W7 was a blank disc.
Where is W7 adoption at really? 13.7%. That's doing pretty well but 1/3 of that was taken from Vista - the widely reviled product people can't get off of fast enough. As a whole Windows share is off by 2% in the past year. That's not a free-fall, but it's not a move in Microsoft's favor either.
The article is about IE9. IE9 will not install on Windows XP. Enterprises looking to migrate to IE9 services and applications cannot do so until they migrate to Windows 7. Application developers can't target the market for services that leverage IE9 technologies until the market moves to a platform that supports IE9. It's a catch-22. It's a real problem and you shouldn't pooh-pooh it.
On the other hand, other standards based browsers use the latest technologies and run on whatever platform you're running, so they make the better target for the application developer.
IE 9 doesn't work on 72% of the machines out there and it never will. It doesn't run on Windows XP. How standard does such a fringe browser have to be?
No doubt Verizon is thrilled about this news and eager to back Microsoft's next effort with lots of co-marketing dollars, shelf space and sales face time after spending many millions up front for an exclusive. Developers must be lining up three deep.
It had 200,000 "fans" on FaceBook from the very beginning. That's really funny when you consider how many they actually sold. Apparently not all of the FaceBook fans have gotten the word yet that they can stop astroturfing now:
Tommy Marcus: MAN, I WANT THIS PHONE SO BADLY!! ITS BETTER THAN THE IPHONE AND DROID COMBINED!!!!!!!!!
Or maybe Tommy's being sarcastic. Hard to tell.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war and to create patents. The constitution does not require of Congress either of these things.
Did you know that if you experience this problem that you can achieve electrical isolation yourself without any offensive looking rubber bumper? A $1 bottle of clear nail varnish and you're all set.
You're not going to win this one. Whatever your reason for taking up this absurd mission, it's lost. There will be no grand grassroots campaign to demonize IBM for this because in this particular case they've done nothing wrong.
Now give it up before you do your reputation and your cause any more damage.
Or don't. I'm not exactly wishing you luck in either case. It's just annoying to watch you try.
Automation is good, but where are they going to get the humans to evaluate the gigabits per second of data? Are they looking for a volunteer effort, or have they got it?
Once the Microsoft monopoly power to manipulate hardware vendors is broken by this paradigm shift, every existing OEM besides Apple will be aligning behind Android because they must. Apple isn't going to let them design and sell Apple products, and they want to survive, so Android it is. Apple has grown huge - but it may not yet be huge enough to battle them all.
Don't worry. Once Intel gets Android 2.2 running on X86, it's a five minute deal to get it installed in a virtual machine. A little RDP app and you're off to the races with Adroid on your iPad, or Android device or whatever. At that point a little cloud fusion magic happens that changes everything.
Cloud-based touch-centric resource efficient virtual desktops running on x86 virtual machines, from any client running any architecture.
What this means, literally, is that Intel has decided not to go down with the ship.
HP didn't buy Palm and Dell isn't selling Android slates because they want a better deal on Windows. If they want to live they have to compete with Apple, so they must break free of Microsoft's control no matter how hard their arm is twisted.
It's not the money. It's the control that's Microsoft's milkshake. Apple is indeed drinking it - drinking it up.
He's been diversifying since the early 80's. Proper billionaire financial management. There's no guessing how much he really owns at this point.
Maybe sometime in 1998 he decided that he had "won" whatever his goal was, evaluated the methods he had used to win, and decided to spend the rest of his days doing penance. Perhaps his first humanitarian endeavor was to pull the teeth of the monster he had created and set it on a course of eventual destruction, for the good of progress. So he depletes the huge cash arsenal with special dividends, demands the company pay out much of its profits in dividends and fritter away the rest. Then, just to be sure, appoints the guy most capable of destroying a company that turns a billion dollars a month in profits he can find to replace him.
Then he set about getting rid of the resulting vast personal wealth in the least harmful way he can find - no mean trick in and of itself.
Not according to Don Reisinger.
I guess this is as good a place as any to pick up our conversation. I think I was hinting at the fifth amendment to the US Constitution's protections of property, here provided for reference (Yeah, I know you know. We have an audience too.):
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
This does open the question of conditions. I think we can dispense with just compensation - I don't recall being paid in this particular case. What's left is due process, and whether that was followed. I think we'll find it was not on appeal. I Am Not A Lawyer, but this looks like an interesting course.
I also like Pam Jones' insight into these things:
[PJ: I'm sure this will be appealed. This is the same court that stretched itself into a pretzel to find for SCO, not that it benefited SCO in the end.]
It really annoys me, as I'm sure it does you, that the US government has been stealing the public domain from us in law since 1962 - longer than I've been alive (though lately with less success). Happily, there has been a cure for this for much longer that lies beyond the power of Congress to legislate. It lies in the sense that our right to our culture and to build upon what has gone before are basic human rights that are beyond even our own power to abdicate, assign or surrender:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restrain
Expect? That they would make pronouncements and weak policy, which would be completely ineffectual - just like every feckless "X Czar" and impotent "war on X" since the LBJ administration.
So far they're playing to form.
I had fair hopes for an effective Obama presidency, and so far he's holding up. In this case it's the effectiveness in getting all of the copyright lobby's money for no real action except for some lip service. I'm still worried, since they pulled almost every Justice appointee from the RIAA, but it seems like they housebroke them quickly.
The clawback of culture that we in common own in the public domain into private monopoly without compensation for our loss is theft. It is a theft from each of us. It is a theft from all of us. It is theft on a grand scale. It's unconstitutional. It's wrong.
Here's a Forbes Blog post from Henry Blodgett, CEO and Editor in Chief of Business Insider: Could Microsoft Collapse?
The part you missed is that these new mobile platforms can do everything a computer can do through RDP or other remote desktop applications, and in addition can do a whole host of things a "computer" can't do.
It's called cannibalization. When there's an established monopoly any possible invention "cannibalizes" the markets of established product groups and must be suppressed. It takes a long time because monopoly is tremendously profitable, but ultimately this is a stagnant path that goes extinct in much the same form as it existed when it achieved monopoly.
Then please drag it up to Redmond and turn it in. I understand they've lost it, and there's a reward for finding it.