3. I write an emulator for an entire non-DRM computer, and run it on my DRM-crippled computer. I install Debian Linux with DRM-free MPlayer inside the emulator. Performance sucks, but Moore's Law still means it's faster than a current 3GHz system.
I don't see how this would work in a hardware DRM system. AFAIK, it's supposed to actually intercept data being passed around in the computer. However, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that people will end up emulating DRM-crippled hardware on non-DRM-crippled machines, except that the DRM emulation would of course always be "authorized..."
Apple's DRM is considerably more restrictive than WMA's. All sound quality aside, Apple gives you one store, one media player, and one portable player. WMA gives you many stores, several players, and quite a few portables.
Well, if you'd read the article... as of a few hours ago, there aren't any DRM restrictions on iTMS anymore.
I, for one, will probably start using iTMS until they do something to make the crack stop working.
There's no other solution that's been shown to work, but that's only because no other solution is even being tried at the moment, other than things that have already been tried.
Capitalism is just another stage in human progression. Just like we moved from hunting-gathering to agriculture to industry and beyond, we moved from tribes to city-states to kingdoms to democracy. We can't see past democratic capitalism just as people during the agrarian period couldn't see past agriculture.
Capitalism will fail eventually, and it's not until then that we'll find out what's next.
And who, exactly, is being immoral under your judgement? The executive who makes the decision, or the buying public, who continuously sends strong signals to companies that lowering prices is the most important thing they can do to increase sales? People vote with their buying power every day, and you've seen the results in the rise of discount chains like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
You may also notice that companies that have plans to send work to India, or are in the process, or in fact do have work there, are usually very secretive about it. It's hard to "vote with your buying power" when you don't even know what you're voting for.
Well, just in case, remember that the antidote for methanol poisoning is to drink large amounts of liquor. (it's true. ethanol competes for and is favored by the metabolic pathway that turns methanol into formaldehyde, which is what actually causes the toxicity - so the methanol passes out of the body unmetabolized)
The consumer will also lose out on those 78 channels of original programming, but such is life in a free-market economy: if not enough people want it, you can't get it.
That's not how a free-market economy works. If not enough people want it, you can get it, it's just more expensive. It's why an 8" LCD panel costs more than a 15" one.
There are a lot of channels that maybe NOBODY cares about, but I think that certain niche channels (like TechTV) probably have viewers that are interested enough to pay more for it. I don't think the proposed legislation says anything about all of the channels having to be the same price.
For example, on cable here, there is a Hindi channel, but it costs $20/month for ONE CHANNEL. But, apparently people pay it anyway, because it's still being offered.
Yeah, but imagine the fiasco if Florida had just burned all of the ballots after the first count. That's basically what happens in the Diebold system.
Well, maybe it would have prevented a fiasco, since after the first count, all that would have been said is "Tough shit."
Besides, the physical ballot flaws are only part of the story. You left out the part about all the people who had been mistakenly listed as felons.
Personally, I think that felons should be allowed to vote anyway.
1) There are only two people to pick from anyway, so it's not like they're going to be able to elect Charles Manson for president.
2) If there are enough felons running around to actually have an impact on the outcome of an election, something is wrong anyway.
Of course, it'll never happen, because it's fairly obvious that felons would lean Democrat. I'm not saying anything about a Republican scheme, just that it's hard to get anything like this done that highly favors one party over the other.
If you don't like paying the taxes, you can always go on welfare.
As I see it, the only way conditions will get any better in this circumstance is for people to refuse to work in unreasonable conditions. I'm basically on strike, except it's a strike against all employers rather than a specific one.
I still look for jobs, but there's certainly no motivation on my part to settle for 80-hour-week-rotating-shift-at-mercy-of-management nonsense.
Like I already said. I liked my work, hated the hours. Problem is, everyone has realized that the current job situation is such that there isn't any reason to treat employees with respect.
I keep reading these articles about "future jobs" saying that they'll be the ones that are heavy on "people skills"... The problem is that "people skills" aren't really something that is learned, it's more of an innate talent. Sure, you can take a bunch of Dale Carnegie courses and try to fake it, but personally, the more I have to deal with people, the more irritated I get - especially when these people are the "people people" they keep talking about.
I don't know how long that can last, though... Someone has to do work. We can't function as an economy full of marketroids selling bullshit back and forth to each other forever.
It would seem that there would be a breaking point where places like India realize that upper management doesn't really serve any function other than as a money sink. Nameless programmers at Bangalore sweatcubicles will eventually come up with their own ideas, and there will be no reason for them to pay tribute to American managers anymore.
Marketing itself has become more and more irrelevant as time goes on. It's no longer a matter of marketroids trying to push a solution for a problem that never existed, it's a matter of people looking for ready solutions - large distribution networks aren't really an issue with the internet, if a Bangalore programmer comes up with a niche package and offers it for sale on the internet, someone having that problem will find them, a sale will be made. After many sales, they will have a reputation. If it's a good reputation, they can branch out into more and more general projects.
So what's the solution? It certainly doesn't look like there's any painless one.
A severe devaluation of the US housing market would help. People say it's the taxes that make us unable to compete - which isn't necessarily true (aside from property taxes, which are part and parcel of the housing market). Taxes are a proportion of income, and the income required to live is far higher than competitive.
It would be a lot easier to compete if it were possible to find living spaces for less than $100/month. We certainly can't compete if it costs an entire Indian yearly salary every month for some shitbox apartment.
I think an interesting experiment would be a US-based "coding commune"... say.. 50 programmers living in a single building where each person outright owns a share of the building. Companies could "offshore" their work to the commune - their negligible cost of living compared to US programmers flushing their income down the toilet in $1500/month rents would offset the now-marginal cost benefit of hiring Indian programmers.
This is true. I absolutely HATED my last job... Not because of what I did, which I actually enjoyed... but because I was sick of doing it for 80 hours a week.
One day I basically snapped.. not in post-office rampage style, but I walked in, and looking ahead to another 12 hour day, I just decided then and there that I couldn't do it anymore. I told them that I quit, then went home and took a three-day nap.
However, I had also forgotten how much it sucks to look for a job..
So, I went on welfare. Honestly, it's the most satisfying job i've ever had. I'm absolutely broke, but after working 80 hour weeks, it feels like I'm getting paid in time. It's more satisfying to spend all day looking out the window than blowing $1000 at Best Buy on the way home from work to justify what I went through on a daily basis.
As for feeling like a "productive member of society", I don't really care. Just think about it as another available job for your greedy ass.
I remember seeing a story about this thing on slashdot a long time ago, figured it was vaporware and totally forgot.. Maybe there was a story about it actually being released, maybe there wasn't.. in any case, I didn't know it was actually out. I wants it!
Honestly.. if this is the worst thing you run into trying to download warez off Gnutella, consider yourself extremely lucky. I wouldn't touch anything on there with a 100 foot VM.
I think your argument does work, but only for serious applications. I've paid for the applications I use frequently. There are some extremely expensive applications that I'd be interested in exploring out of personal curiosity (specifically, Gaussian and Fortran95), that I would pirate if I could even find. However, if I found a serious application for it, I'd pay for them - since their software would be directly benefiting me in my work. As it stands, if I pirate the software, it only benefits them: They get market mindshare, and they haven't lost a sale - I'm not buying it either way at this point.
The problem with the argument comes from games. There is really no serious use for games, and no business use either. Personally, I will pirate games but either delete them or buy them if I find that I've continued to play it. However, there is no reason that this should be so for anyone else. Back in the old days, if you were under working age, getting a game involved hours of parent-begging to buy NES carts. Now it involves piracy, and I don't really have a good answer for that. I don't think that kids appreciate having an actual boxed copy of their game, or the complexities of IP ethics. They just want it, and they want it now, consequences and fairness be damned.
However, related to the topic at hand. These people are reporting me as a pirate for using cracks. I think that anyone who has ever purchased a game, and hunted around for the install CD so they could play the game that they already installed on their HD would prefer to not have to do that. So, even if I have purchased a game legitimately, I'll generally run the cracked version.
Slashdot Mirror
3. I write an emulator for an entire non-DRM computer, and run it on my DRM-crippled computer. I install Debian Linux with DRM-free MPlayer inside the emulator. Performance sucks, but Moore's Law still means it's faster than a current 3GHz system.
I don't see how this would work in a hardware DRM system. AFAIK, it's supposed to actually intercept data being passed around in the computer. However, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that people will end up emulating DRM-crippled hardware on non-DRM-crippled machines, except that the DRM emulation would of course always be "authorized..."
Apple's DRM is considerably more restrictive than WMA's. All sound quality aside, Apple gives you one store, one media player, and one portable player. WMA gives you many stores, several players, and quite a few portables.
Well, if you'd read the article... as of a few hours ago, there aren't any DRM restrictions on iTMS anymore.
I, for one, will probably start using iTMS until they do something to make the crack stop working.
There's no other solution that's been shown to work, but that's only because no other solution is even being tried at the moment, other than things that have already been tried.
Capitalism is just another stage in human progression. Just like we moved from hunting-gathering to agriculture to industry and beyond, we moved from tribes to city-states to kingdoms to democracy. We can't see past democratic capitalism just as people during the agrarian period couldn't see past agriculture.
Capitalism will fail eventually, and it's not until then that we'll find out what's next.
If you don't like it -- you are welcome to start your own company and hire whoever you please.
Yeah, but I wouldn't be able to compete with you. But, hey, that's just how capitalism works - whoever is the most vicious bastard wins.
And who, exactly, is being immoral under your judgement? The executive who makes the decision, or the buying public, who continuously sends strong signals to companies that lowering prices is the most important thing they can do to increase sales? People vote with their buying power every day, and you've seen the results in the rise of discount chains like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
You may also notice that companies that have plans to send work to India, or are in the process, or in fact do have work there, are usually very secretive about it. It's hard to "vote with your buying power" when you don't even know what you're voting for.
Yeah, because threatening a guy at knifepoint is one thing, but most criminals draw the line at pirating music.
So, you have to buy a new fuel cartridge. They'll probably make them in such a way that they can't be refilled for "safety reasons".
If you can find an American-made battery-operated product anywhere in your house, i'll be impressed.
Well, just in case, remember that the antidote for methanol poisoning is to drink large amounts of liquor. (it's true. ethanol competes for and is favored by the metabolic pathway that turns methanol into formaldehyde, which is what actually causes the toxicity - so the methanol passes out of the body unmetabolized)
The consumer will also lose out on those 78 channels of original programming, but such is life in a free-market economy: if not enough people want it, you can't get it.
That's not how a free-market economy works. If not enough people want it, you can get it, it's just more expensive. It's why an 8" LCD panel costs more than a 15" one.
There are a lot of channels that maybe NOBODY cares about, but I think that certain niche channels (like TechTV) probably have viewers that are interested enough to pay more for it. I don't think the proposed legislation says anything about all of the channels having to be the same price.
For example, on cable here, there is a Hindi channel, but it costs $20/month for ONE CHANNEL. But, apparently people pay it anyway, because it's still being offered.
Since only people (consumers) vote, they have all the power
Mod Parent +5 Funny.
I'm 25 years old and have 20/15 vision, and I can barely read that shit on a 15" LCD.
Needs work.
Yeah, but imagine the fiasco if Florida had just burned all of the ballots after the first count. That's basically what happens in the Diebold system.
Well, maybe it would have prevented a fiasco, since after the first count, all that would have been said is "Tough shit."
Besides, the physical ballot flaws are only part of the story. You left out the part about all the people who had been mistakenly listed as felons.
Personally, I think that felons should be allowed to vote anyway.
1) There are only two people to pick from anyway, so it's not like they're going to be able to elect Charles Manson for president.
2) If there are enough felons running around to actually have an impact on the outcome of an election, something is wrong anyway.
Of course, it'll never happen, because it's fairly obvious that felons would lean Democrat. I'm not saying anything about a Republican scheme, just that it's hard to get anything like this done that highly favors one party over the other.
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com
Maybe this will be more up your alley. Rather than watching wannabe nerds trying to be cool, you can just watch real nerds being real nerds.
Yeah, you.
t nonsense.
If you don't like paying the taxes, you can always go on welfare.
As I see it, the only way conditions will get any better in this circumstance is for people to refuse to work in unreasonable conditions. I'm basically on strike, except it's a strike against all employers rather than a specific one.
I still look for jobs, but there's certainly no motivation on my part to settle for 80-hour-week-rotating-shift-at-mercy-of-managemen
Like I already said. I liked my work, hated the hours. Problem is, everyone has realized that the current job situation is such that there isn't any reason to treat employees with respect.
I keep reading these articles about "future jobs" saying that they'll be the ones that are heavy on "people skills"... The problem is that "people skills" aren't really something that is learned, it's more of an innate talent. Sure, you can take a bunch of Dale Carnegie courses and try to fake it, but personally, the more I have to deal with people, the more irritated I get - especially when these people are the "people people" they keep talking about.
I don't know how long that can last, though... Someone has to do work. We can't function as an economy full of marketroids selling bullshit back and forth to each other forever.
It would seem that there would be a breaking point where places like India realize that upper management doesn't really serve any function other than as a money sink. Nameless programmers at Bangalore sweatcubicles will eventually come up with their own ideas, and there will be no reason for them to pay tribute to American managers anymore.
Marketing itself has become more and more irrelevant as time goes on. It's no longer a matter of marketroids trying to push a solution for a problem that never existed, it's a matter of people looking for ready solutions - large distribution networks aren't really an issue with the internet, if a Bangalore programmer comes up with a niche package and offers it for sale on the internet, someone having that problem will find them, a sale will be made. After many sales, they will have a reputation. If it's a good reputation, they can branch out into more and more general projects.
So what's the solution? It certainly doesn't look like there's any painless one.
A severe devaluation of the US housing market would help. People say it's the taxes that make us unable to compete - which isn't necessarily true (aside from property taxes, which are part and parcel of the housing market). Taxes are a proportion of income, and the income required to live is far higher than competitive.
It would be a lot easier to compete if it were possible to find living spaces for less than $100/month. We certainly can't compete if it costs an entire Indian yearly salary every month for some shitbox apartment.
I think an interesting experiment would be a US-based "coding commune"... say.. 50 programmers living in a single building where each person outright owns a share of the building. Companies could "offshore" their work to the commune - their negligible cost of living compared to US programmers flushing their income down the toilet in $1500/month rents would offset the now-marginal cost benefit of hiring Indian programmers.
This is true. I absolutely HATED my last job... Not because of what I did, which I actually enjoyed... but because I was sick of doing it for 80 hours a week.
One day I basically snapped.. not in post-office rampage style, but I walked in, and looking ahead to another 12 hour day, I just decided then and there that I couldn't do it anymore. I told them that I quit, then went home and took a three-day nap.
However, I had also forgotten how much it sucks to look for a job..
So, I went on welfare. Honestly, it's the most satisfying job i've ever had. I'm absolutely broke, but after working 80 hour weeks, it feels like I'm getting paid in time. It's more satisfying to spend all day looking out the window than blowing $1000 at Best Buy on the way home from work to justify what I went through on a daily basis.
As for feeling like a "productive member of society", I don't really care. Just think about it as another available job for your greedy ass.
Why should I bother thinking about the attachment? If something bad happens, I can just call the computer guy to fix it.
These are the same people who piss all over the toilet seat and the floor of the bathroom because the company has a janitor.
Mod up.
I remember seeing a story about this thing on slashdot a long time ago, figured it was vaporware and totally forgot.. Maybe there was a story about it actually being released, maybe there wasn't.. in any case, I didn't know it was actually out. I wants it!
Maybe it's just me, but I feel incredibly stupid trying to use voice-recognition in public.
The need for all this stuff would vanish if it somehow became socially acceptable for men to carry purses...
Honestly.. if this is the worst thing you run into trying to download warez off Gnutella, consider yourself extremely lucky. I wouldn't touch anything on there with a 100 foot VM.
I think your argument does work, but only for serious applications. I've paid for the applications I use frequently. There are some extremely expensive applications that I'd be interested in exploring out of personal curiosity (specifically, Gaussian and Fortran95), that I would pirate if I could even find. However, if I found a serious application for it, I'd pay for them - since their software would be directly benefiting me in my work. As it stands, if I pirate the software, it only benefits them: They get market mindshare, and they haven't lost a sale - I'm not buying it either way at this point.
The problem with the argument comes from games. There is really no serious use for games, and no business use either. Personally, I will pirate games but either delete them or buy them if I find that I've continued to play it. However, there is no reason that this should be so for anyone else. Back in the old days, if you were under working age, getting a game involved hours of parent-begging to buy NES carts. Now it involves piracy, and I don't really have a good answer for that. I don't think that kids appreciate having an actual boxed copy of their game, or the complexities of IP ethics. They just want it, and they want it now, consequences and fairness be damned.
However, related to the topic at hand. These people are reporting me as a pirate for using cracks. I think that anyone who has ever purchased a game, and hunted around for the install CD so they could play the game that they already installed on their HD would prefer to not have to do that. So, even if I have purchased a game legitimately, I'll generally run the cracked version.
A friend of mine once said "Orwell was a bitter man, but he never thought we'd BUY the fucking telescreens"
As far as I can tell, the "America" that you speak of no longer exists.
If you noticed someone staring in your window, would you just go back to whatever it was you were doing, even if it was legal?