Ford sells cars, that are pure 'Ford' cars without any additional hardware, at a set price.
Ford also sells the same cars with branding and additional 3rd party doodads at a lower price, with the some of the difference in cost being made up by the money they get from the other companies.
Both cars can be modified to remove or add doodads but the cars that come with extras come with an easily bypassible plastic lock on most of those doodads, because the people paying for the branding don't want you to just buy the cheaper car and then toss all the stuff they paid for away to get the 'base' car.
Either way, Ford isn't putting forth as much effort as Toyota in keeping you 'out' of the car customization scene. Where Ford is planning on selling many different versions of the cars with different sponsers for each, Toyota only has one. And where Ford's 'lock' is plastic and easily bypassed, Toyota not only has a far sturdier lock, but they constantly check back up with you to see if you've removed the lock and try to replace it if you've beaten it.
After all, wasn't the majority of the world slightly buzzed in the 'dark ages' due to alcoholic beverages being some of the few things that could be safely drunk without having to worry about parasites and diseases?
The Roman army used to drink a mixture of vinegar and honey called Posca to avoid problems with the local water.
And if we play that game, we should also remember that the tighter grasp a government attempts to have on it's people, the shorter it's lifespan. Regardless of how feasible Orwell's Oceania seems and as scary as places such as North Korea or Iran seem, they are still nations in their infancy, history has proven over and over again that when the burden of actual oppression (and not simply the inconvenience of not having your own porn domain with a catchy.ie at the end) reaches a point, the oppressors find themselves helped out of office.
I have a healthy cynicism, and it is in place not just to cover this topic but the topic of flag waving, gung ho, "We must stop this before anything happens, EVER!" rehtoric comes into play. Act with thought, as the humans we were born to be, not with catchprhases and kneejerk reactions that the sheep those who would control us wish us to be.
And yet, when they've only moved a centimeter, and a centimeter that has absolutely no connection to the hypothesized destination other than being in a direction on the same hemisphere as it, it seems rather overreactionary and ridiculous to get up in arms.
When the course is obvious, then take action. Don't simply refuse to allow any movement whatsoever under the mistaken guise of 'preventing what could happen'.
Yes yes, dear me I got a reference wrong, therefore my entire thought process must be incorrect. I should stop posting immediately. Or perhaps, you should stop looking for the small details to nit pick about and actually provide a rebuttal to the points I've presented.
So... that whole thing about "don't make faces dear, someday it'll freeze like that" makes me a bit worried. What happens when I pull a muscle and all the sudden Opera takes it as my "O" face and keeps popping up porn sites?
PS. Anyone else notice the Achievements section in their profile now? ^_^
Is it really any business of those not living in Ireland to tell those living in Ireland how to live or how 'prudish' is OK?
If you want a stake in how a place is run, have a stake in it. Live there. Join the 'rebels' attempting to over throw the government, do SOMETHING other than sit there outside it and criticize those in it for not being as enlightened as you. Till then, while the group running the domain isn't government controlled it is government sanctioned with a Sword of Damascus hanging over their head ready to fall should they decide to do things that the government doesn't like. That's sufficiently 'government connected' to me to count as being run by the government.
Seriously though, the difference between the.ie TLD and the.us TLD is that one is being run by a government sanctioned group of academics and the other is being run as a profit center for a company with a contract with the government. Prior to 2002, the.us domain was run with the same 'iron grip' that the.ie one is currently.
How is it that my above post was modded +4 insightful, with the thread having several people supporting my position, until I responded to YOUR post, in a negative way?
Now your post is +5 insightful, and I'm down exactly -5...an apparent troll.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not accusing you of anything, it just seems REALLY odd to me.
Maybe people waking up this morning realized that modding a post by someone who spouts only rhetoric and attempts ad hominem attacks as an argument against the 'slippery slope of censorship' as insightful was a dangerous step towards chaos and anarchy on the site, and thus refused to take that step down a slippery slope and reversed the moderation.
Or you know, maybe the folk who woke up this morning read your post and realized it was just a troll.
Slippery Slope arguements are fallacy's. There is no proof that one step forward equates the same thing as ensuring that someone is going to go the full nine yards, or even that if they were, they'd end up where you want to paint them as going.
There is a middle ground here, there are plenty of TLD's out there that you can register with that are open to all comers. Government TLD's, despite the recent trend towards poorer countries whoring them out, are meant for that nation's government's use. If the government of Ireland wants to nix porn on the government owned TLD, that's entirely their perogative (till they are no longer the government of Ireland).
When I start seeing porn sites on.us,.gov, or.edu domains, then you have a point. Till then, this is a non-story. There are TDL's out there that are open to everyone. The nationally owned ones are solely responsible to that nation's government.
Late response, but another poster commented on something else and I realized I never followed back up on this one.
Sadly the answer is neither option 1 or option 2. It's option 3. GP was stupid enough not to realize that the DVDs they thought were region coded were the ones they watched on TV and the ones they thought were not were played through software players that ignore the region code.
On the other hand, after noticing this, the GP did go back and verify that a large number of their DVDs are lacking in CSS. Big studio movies had it, the remainder seemed not to.
You basically explain that DVD region encoding was invented so big corporations could circumvent free markets mechanisms and thereby disable free competition......and this is good WHY exactly???
....
Now that's not a defense for region locking as much as the reason why it exists. But frankly I'm alot more tolerant of DVD's that need a region unlocked player than I am of DVD's that require I uninstall programs from my machine and will only install three times before I have to jump through hoops with customer service.
Where did I say it was? My main point in the thread was that DRM isn't region coding and region coding isn't DRM. They both harm the consumer for the advantage of the producer, and I would be willing to accede that they are parts of the same superset of anti-consumer practices, but that doesn't make them the same thing.
Region locking, IMO, is far less severe than DRM. Especially since the first is trivially bypassable in a legal manner for the majority of the world while the second is either not trivially bypassable or is not legally bypassable, or both.
"opt-out" meaning that unless you are careful, Google will start selling your books whether you want them to or not.
and by this you mean "I'd like to redefine what is actually happening to the most FUD worthy version possible."
Here is the reality of what they are doing:
In-copyright and in-print books In-print books are books that publishers are still actively selling, the ones you see at most bookstores. This agreement expands the online marketplace for in-print books by letting authors and publishers turn on the "preview" and "purchase" models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search.
In-copyright but out-of-print books Out-of-print books aren't actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to "turn off" that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.
Out-of-copyright books This agreement doesn't affect how we display out-of-copyright books; we will continue to allow Book Search users to read, download and print these titles, just as we do today.
The agreement will also create an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry to represent authors, publishers and other rightsholders. In essence, the Registry will help locate rightsholders and ensure that they receive the money their works earn under this agreement. You can visit the settlement administration site, the Authors Guild or the AAP to learn more about this important initiative.
If your OUT OF PRINT books are important enough to you that you care whether or not that they are 'republished' then go to the 10 minute effort of registering and marking them as such. If they aren't that important, then don't whine.
Um. Your first statement makes about as much sense as saying, "Yes, 1+1 = 2, thus 1+2= 2!"
The point is, under an opt-in system, a work that is 'lost' is lost till someone can prove its in the public domain. Under an opt-out system, a work that is 'lost' is returned to the public, with the owner having the option of coming back and resuming control.
I think the real problem here is that most creators forget they didn't create in a vaccum. Your works were created with you standing on the backs of everyone that came before you. Yes, we provide you incentive to create more by providing you the right to control who can copy 'your' work for a period of time, but ultimately everything is a derived work at it's core. And ultimately it should belong to everyone in the end.
This Disney bullshit of removing content from distribution in an attempt to create artificial demand is just that, bullshit. If you aren't publishing a work under your own terms, you should at least let someone else publish it and give you part of the profits.
The sad part is I used an external editor to check the post, caught the error and several other typos, copied that and pasted it into the comment box, and somehow missed that the copy buffer was still the crappy version for some reason.
You've forgotten, Twitter is UTF-8 compatible, meaning it handles over 2,000,000,000 possible glyphs. To take that to the 140th power, you might need a bigger calculator.
Don't get me wrong, globalization is something that needs to happen.
But it's going to hurt alot of people putting it in place, and there isn't any reason to expect them to simply go "Oh, you want to fuck me over? Well, sure, let's see if I have any Crisco left in the house..." just because you want cheap flicks.
In your world, you expect everyone to price fix their goods at the lowest common denomiator. But you are ignoring the fact even if there were a fixed cost to making the physical product, getting it and distributing it in, say America where per capita income is around $30,000, is going to cost a different price than doing so in say, Ethiopia where per capital income is around $700.
Since DRM has no actual definition, much like "Nerd" or "Geek" or any number of other labels which are applied to a general stereotype as viewpoints warrant, I find it hard to swallow that anything "by its definition" is DRM.
Region locking is sufficently dissimilar from any other form of DRM that I don't beleive it to be DRM. Region locking is not, for instance, protected under the DMCA. It is not used to 'prevent unauthorized copying'.
If you went down the list of things that your normal "DRM" does and what region locking does, I would agree that there would be a number checks in common, but not the majority.
And under the broad strokes people are using to paint region locking as DRM, SNES cartridges would be considered DRM because you can't play the game enclosed in them using your Atari 2600 or Sega.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's more like this:
Ford sells cars, that are pure 'Ford' cars without any additional hardware, at a set price.
Ford also sells the same cars with branding and additional 3rd party doodads at a lower price, with the some of the difference in cost being made up by the money they get from the other companies.
Both cars can be modified to remove or add doodads but the cars that come with extras come with an easily bypassible plastic lock on most of those doodads, because the people paying for the branding don't want you to just buy the cheaper car and then toss all the stuff they paid for away to get the 'base' car.
Either way, Ford isn't putting forth as much effort as Toyota in keeping you 'out' of the car customization scene. Where Ford is planning on selling many different versions of the cars with different sponsers for each, Toyota only has one. And where Ford's 'lock' is plastic and easily bypassed, Toyota not only has a far sturdier lock, but they constantly check back up with you to see if you've removed the lock and try to replace it if you've beaten it.
And then, there's Volvo...
After all, wasn't the majority of the world slightly buzzed in the 'dark ages' due to alcoholic beverages being some of the few things that could be safely drunk without having to worry about parasites and diseases?
The Roman army used to drink a mixture of vinegar and honey called Posca to avoid problems with the local water.
And if we play that game, we should also remember that the tighter grasp a government attempts to have on it's people, the shorter it's lifespan. Regardless of how feasible Orwell's Oceania seems and as scary as places such as North Korea or Iran seem, they are still nations in their infancy, history has proven over and over again that when the burden of actual oppression (and not simply the inconvenience of not having your own porn domain with a catchy .ie at the end) reaches a point, the oppressors find themselves helped out of office.
I have a healthy cynicism, and it is in place not just to cover this topic but the topic of flag waving, gung ho, "We must stop this before anything happens, EVER!" rehtoric comes into play. Act with thought, as the humans we were born to be, not with catchprhases and kneejerk reactions that the sheep those who would control us wish us to be.
And yet, when they've only moved a centimeter, and a centimeter that has absolutely no connection to the hypothesized destination other than being in a direction on the same hemisphere as it, it seems rather overreactionary and ridiculous to get up in arms.
When the course is obvious, then take action. Don't simply refuse to allow any movement whatsoever under the mistaken guise of 'preventing what could happen'.
Yes yes, dear me I got a reference wrong, therefore my entire thought process must be incorrect. I should stop posting immediately. Or perhaps, you should stop looking for the small details to nit pick about and actually provide a rebuttal to the points I've presented.
I mean I had just finished this game and now I can play again here! ^_^
So... that whole thing about "don't make faces dear, someday it'll freeze like that" makes me a bit worried. What happens when I pull a muscle and all the sudden Opera takes it as my "O" face and keeps popping up porn sites?
PS. Anyone else notice the Achievements section in their profile now? ^_^
Is it really any business of those not living in Ireland to tell those living in Ireland how to live or how 'prudish' is OK?
If you want a stake in how a place is run, have a stake in it. Live there. Join the 'rebels' attempting to over throw the government, do SOMETHING other than sit there outside it and criticize those in it for not being as enlightened as you. Till then, while the group running the domain isn't government controlled it is government sanctioned with a Sword of Damascus hanging over their head ready to fall should they decide to do things that the government doesn't like. That's sufficiently 'government connected' to me to count as being run by the government.
Too late to retract .us from the list? ^_^
Seriously though, the difference between the .ie TLD and the .us TLD is that one is being run by a government sanctioned group of academics and the other is being run as a profit center for a company with a contract with the government. Prior to 2002, the .us domain was run with the same 'iron grip' that the .ie one is currently.
Maybe people waking up this morning realized that modding a post by someone who spouts only rhetoric and attempts ad hominem attacks as an argument against the 'slippery slope of censorship' as insightful was a dangerous step towards chaos and anarchy on the site, and thus refused to take that step down a slippery slope and reversed the moderation.
Or you know, maybe the folk who woke up this morning read your post and realized it was just a troll.
Slippery Slope arguements are fallacy's. There is no proof that one step forward equates the same thing as ensuring that someone is going to go the full nine yards, or even that if they were, they'd end up where you want to paint them as going.
There is a middle ground here, there are plenty of TLD's out there that you can register with that are open to all comers. Government TLD's, despite the recent trend towards poorer countries whoring them out, are meant for that nation's government's use. If the government of Ireland wants to nix porn on the government owned TLD, that's entirely their perogative (till they are no longer the government of Ireland).
When I start seeing porn sites on .us, .gov, or .edu domains, then you have a point. Till then, this is a non-story. There are TDL's out there that are open to everyone. The nationally owned ones are solely responsible to that nation's government.
Late response, but another poster commented on something else and I realized I never followed back up on this one.
Sadly the answer is neither option 1 or option 2. It's option 3. GP was stupid enough not to realize that the DVDs they thought were region coded were the ones they watched on TV and the ones they thought were not were played through software players that ignore the region code.
On the other hand, after noticing this, the GP did go back and verify that a large number of their DVDs are lacking in CSS. Big studio movies had it, the remainder seemed not to.
....
Where did I say it was? My main point in the thread was that DRM isn't region coding and region coding isn't DRM. They both harm the consumer for the advantage of the producer, and I would be willing to accede that they are parts of the same superset of anti-consumer practices, but that doesn't make them the same thing.
Region locking, IMO, is far less severe than DRM. Especially since the first is trivially bypassable in a legal manner for the majority of the world while the second is either not trivially bypassable or is not legally bypassable, or both.
and by this you mean "I'd like to redefine what is actually happening to the most FUD worthy version possible."
Here is the reality of what they are doing:
If your OUT OF PRINT books are important enough to you that you care whether or not that they are 'republished' then go to the 10 minute effort of registering and marking them as such. If they aren't that important, then don't whine.
Um. Your first statement makes about as much sense as saying, "Yes, 1+1 = 2, thus 1+2= 2!"
The point is, under an opt-in system, a work that is 'lost' is lost till someone can prove its in the public domain. Under an opt-out system, a work that is 'lost' is returned to the public, with the owner having the option of coming back and resuming control.
I think the real problem here is that most creators forget they didn't create in a vaccum. Your works were created with you standing on the backs of everyone that came before you. Yes, we provide you incentive to create more by providing you the right to control who can copy 'your' work for a period of time, but ultimately everything is a derived work at it's core. And ultimately it should belong to everyone in the end.
This Disney bullshit of removing content from distribution in an attempt to create artificial demand is just that, bullshit. If you aren't publishing a work under your own terms, you should at least let someone else publish it and give you part of the profits.
Why yes my friend. Yes.
The sad part is I used an external editor to check the post, caught the error and several other typos, copied that and pasted it into the comment box, and somehow missed that the copy buffer was still the crappy version for some reason.
And some neon light trim for the edges.
Hydrolics, press a button and the laptop starts trying to hump the your desk.
Replace the fan with a smaller diameter one with higher RPM, get the jet engine noise when it kicks in.
Bling, use a solid gold chain to keep it closed.
Don't shave, wear a mussed up t-shirt. And add scorch marks to the plastic exterior.
You've forgotten, Twitter is UTF-8 compatible, meaning it handles over 2,000,000,000 possible glyphs. To take that to the 140th power, you might need a bigger calculator.
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite
fullwise upsub antefiling
Don't get me wrong, globalization is something that needs to happen.
But it's going to hurt alot of people putting it in place, and there isn't any reason to expect them to simply go "Oh, you want to fuck me over? Well, sure, let's see if I have any Crisco left in the house..." just because you want cheap flicks.
In your world, you expect everyone to price fix their goods at the lowest common denomiator. But you are ignoring the fact even if there were a fixed cost to making the physical product, getting it and distributing it in, say America where per capita income is around $30,000, is going to cost a different price than doing so in say, Ethiopia where per capital income is around $700.
The DISTRIBUTOR wants exclusivity. Not the publisher. And yes, it's about maximizing profit, which is not intermittently immoral or unethical.
Since DRM has no actual definition, much like "Nerd" or "Geek" or any number of other labels which are applied to a general stereotype as viewpoints warrant, I find it hard to swallow that anything "by its definition" is DRM.
Region locking is sufficently dissimilar from any other form of DRM that I don't beleive it to be DRM. Region locking is not, for instance, protected under the DMCA. It is not used to 'prevent unauthorized copying'.
If you went down the list of things that your normal "DRM" does and what region locking does, I would agree that there would be a number checks in common, but not the majority.
And under the broad strokes people are using to paint region locking as DRM, SNES cartridges would be considered DRM because you can't play the game enclosed in them using your Atari 2600 or Sega.