In the corporate world, they do not differentiate those two terms much. A consumer is a person who buys something then consumes it. A customer is a person who will buy something in the future. Someone who doesn't buy something, but consumes it anyway is usually referred to as a "pirate", "leech", "theif", "i'll pay you tommorrow guy", or "one of those open source hippies" Crap like that.
High quality case??? Are you buying plastic ones for a couple farthings? All the ones I've seen are just a bunch of punched out sheet metal, even the lower priced ones. Some of the "high quality" cases seem to be transparent molded plastic (I don't buy flashy crap), but for all the extra cost, they are just more "cool" looking, not any more durable. Is there some titanium case made to withstand a nuclear war? What problems have you had with cases? I can beat up on all of my cases and they don't fall apart. I have a ten year old case on my 486. It has been through hell, yet the case is still flawless. The only thing wrong with the entire computer is the ancient video card died (and it is Vesa Local Bus--just try to find a card. I dare you.;-) With some cleaning I could easily reuse the case. The emachine's case seems just as solid. I didn't pay a premium for any of my cases either.
High quality cases, fans and power supplies don't cost that much. Unless you are talking about flashy casemodder parts which are more for show than anything. In addition, why do you need to "upgrade" a case?...and if the power supply indeed is high quality, it should last at least ten years.
Fans don't cost that much, so there is no excuse to pay hundreds of dollars just for them--maximum $50 for a more than ample supply. But who cares about fans? Unless you go for the ultra cheap crappiest ones you can find, the mechanical parts on the lower priced fans last about as long as the more expensive ones.
For a new computer, the cases, fans, and power supply shouldn't cost more than $200 for the highest quality. Any more and you are being ripped off or you have some very special needs (what, are you in the military and use it in a tank?). For an upgrade if you need a new case or power supply, they were most certainly not high quality. I have had one power supply fail, and I found it in a dumpster.
Unless you guys are talking about brand name computers (not parts), then well, you always get crap. If you don't have time to put a computer together yourself, then get some knowledgeable kid to do it for $20. It only takes about an hour.
If wasting processor time in a game was an option, using "higher level" languages would've already been done. (But I think you really mean uncompiled stuff) I am sure they still use assembly for optimizing, not C. Probably compiled code from any language would work as long as they can meld in some assembly for optimizing of time critical code sections.
With Mozilla, you have a different issue. You can run 2 instances (separate processes) of Mozilla with 1 profile, but to run 2 separate versions of Mozilla, you'll need 2 different profiles. (You can copy the profile from one directory to another, though, so you'd be running off of a clone)
The other poster already mentioned this, but you never heard of proper file locking?
This makes sense, as the profile is where application specific information is stored regarding the user, and using 2 different versions could cause corruption.
Yeah, if you are an MS trained programmer. Even if you need a complex pattern of reading/writing portions of the file data, you'll have to go with a binary format (faster anyway), but it can be done.
You are using the Soviet definition of "capitalizm." In the real world, no one in their right mind would sell their children for food. No one in their right mind would buy "food" made from children. No one in their right mind would accept payment to make children into food. No one in their right mind would allow this to be done at all. Only sick fucks who don't give a shit about anyone else would take part. If they were in any significant position in a communist system, they would do similar things to a huge group of people. It would take a major revolution to get the guy out of power too.
This is a major reason why communism doesn't work: the people in power can do anything they want and enforce it by the state's militia. If a capitalist acted that way, people would refuse to do business with him. Unless they were trained in the school of communism (like they are in the US), then they just shrug their shoulders, say "this is how capitalizm is supposed to work," and bend over.
Your post is stupid for two reasons (okay, three):
The Chin will probably start helping existing open source projects produce and review code, with special attention put on multi-language support. Especially good for those who don't speak english. I imagine half the projects out there suck on nonenglish (or nonnative) systems just because of poor multilanguage support.
With their own project, all someone has to do is translate the chinese into their native language, and maybe some code modifications. I don't know if there is a form of Chinese only language support (how does big5 work?), if there isn't or they use international codin (say they use unicode or some sort of extended ascii), then no coding is needed to translate a project at all.
Don't forget Taiwan. They will probably translate all the projects to US English just to spite the Chin.;-)
Consumers are people who buy things, not copy it from their friends.
Sounds more like the Chinese want open source (or at least some sort of free software, not nessesarily "Free"), but don't know what it is. Maybe someone should point them to sourceforge, freshmeat.net and kernel.org, then again their government probably blocked those sites out...
I think you've been smoking too much of the taliban's crack. Obviously you need someone to determine your eyeglass prescription. However if all the doctors insist you need 20/1 vision when 20/20 or even 20/40 will do, and the hugely overcorrected lenses cause your eyes to go crosseyed, and the stupid doctors won't listen, you can't get glasses that work! This has happened not only to me, but several people I know. Do you like crosseyes? Do you like tripping over flat ground? Do you like walking as if you are on the edge of a cliff while on flat ground? I don't! Having a slightly weaker prescription fixes the problem.
So what the hell do prescriptions have to do with needing to go to a pharmacist, and what is wrong with letting people handle their own medications? If they just start popping pills without finding out about interactions or checking with doctors, it is their problem if they die. Some medications interact with OTC stuff too, so why don't they require pharmacists as well? Not requiring a pharmacist to buy a drug doesn't mean you will not be allowed to see one. You don't have to check with anyone to buy window cleaner and bleach, but if you mix them and breath the vapors, you will either get really sick or die. Should we require a pharmacist for window cleaners and bleach too?
You also completely ignored my statements about being denied medical care. Prescriptions are one of the methods used to do it.
I don't think you are very good at math. Nearly every bit of tech in you computer is doubled or price halved every 1-2 years, RAM being the possible exception. A computer you buy this year for $2k will only cost $1k next year or the year after, and in 2-4 years will only be $500. About 4-8 years you'll be buying it at walmart for ~$250, maybe less. All depending upon what advancements come out, competition, markets and such. So if you really do pay $2k and only upgrade your computer once a decade, you would pay much less money for two $500 computers or a few $250 ones.
Seriously, look through your old catalogs and do the math. You will see I am right. Of course, if you are trying to save yourself time configuring and installing crap, then just copy your hard drive. Linux will certainly let you do that, though if it is a MS OS, then well, you usually have to reinstall at least once a year (unless you do nothing with your computer) and upgrades become mandatory, because eventually the new proprietary OS won't support your old hardware with its old proprietary drivers.
First, a quad core probably wasn't intended for gamers. Think servers and people needing to do tasks which scale well to multiprocessors (such as raytracing). I'm sure many universities will order these.
Second, single user programs don't scale well to multiple processors because most of them are programmed by stupid programmers trained by MS. They don't understand even the basics of running in a multitasked environment, so how could they possibly write a program which would use more than one core?
Seriously, try to do more than one thing with any given program written for WinXP. Not only does the UI usually make it difficult, but some of them even have major bugs or race or lock problems when trying to use them. Hell, try to use two separate instances of Mozilla--you have to make another profile!!! WTF??? Too many sucky programmers writing user level apps, even in major open source projects.
Setting up large chunks of bandwidth for broadcasting is ridiculous, it would be like setting up large chunks of the Internet for one-way non-interactive websites
This is the way the media cartels want it and do everything to push it in this directon. Radio can also be two way. Ever hear of CB? If the FCC really worked for the public, you'd be able to make phone calls for free as long as you were within a reasonable range of your house--say a few miles.
The internet is becoming the same way. Usenet (a P2P system) is useless. Full of spammers, FAQ nazis, "copyright" bots which send (often false) complaints or cancel requests to your ISP/the network, so the average person not only has to wade through tons of crap, but also has to worry about being denied access because they named a file which has a word that matches some song or movie. Or having some asshole complain that their on topic post is off topic or is spam, which the ISP's staff has no time to investigate, so they just cut you off.
Websites aren't too far off. You also have the "copyright" bots, which will not only falsely DMCA you, but use up half your bandwidth quota (or more), so you may end up with a huge bill. Then of course there is the fact you have to pay for space on a server somewhere and live by thier rules in addition to your ISP's. Some people don't have the money. Yeah, basic plans are cheap, but if you want to publish audio or video, those aren't good enough, especially if those files become popular, such as being slashdotted.
Many people don't want to go to the trouble of creating a website or forum. It does take some technical know how. So guess what they do? Find some web forum that already exists, often owned by big media. The website owner determines what subjects are allowed and what posts are deleted. You have to answer to them for everything.
Home brew "P2P" systems have been mostly destroyed. The music and movie companies advertised everywhere on the "news" that P2P was only for "pirated" content, so 99% of the people looking to use them only use them to copy big media music and movies. Not files released under an open source or creative commons license, which would be perfect use. You could have a P2P system to help create collaborative works, such as for software devlopment or photo publishing and editing. The legitimate developers and users have been all but chased away by constant threats of lawsuits and such, whether these complaints have any basis on fact or are the fault of the defendant or not.
The entertainment cartel has ruined nearly all forms of communcation for the public. Unfortunately there is no lobby group for the common man's communication choices. There used to be lots of radio clubs, and I think they used to fight the FCC to keep parts of the spectrum public, but not so much anymore.
Well, my experience was with eMachines and Linux, so I didn't see any of those problems. Hahaha! So I guess if you install some other OS, they are okay... Maybe?
That could be why it died so fast when my dad had it. I don't think he ever heard of linux.
Most brand name manufacturers ship their crap overclocked? I didn't notice it with this machine ( I didn't fiddle with the bios. Linux ran rock solid, IIRC.), but that is just another reason not to go with brand name computers. Cheap parts and screwed up configs.
I just go with brand name parts and put it together myself, but many people don't know how to do that, so they just pick a brand name computer. Problem is, there is no one solution. You can't just tell them to find a local computer store to put one together, because half of them have the same problem. Not as many as the national corps, but enough to worry.
I thought Emachines were a piece of crap too. My dad's had been infected with a virus/trojan and didn't work (piece of crap OS--I think it came with WinME and they gave him WinXP to upgrade), so he bought another computer. He gave it to me, and I installed Linux on it. Except for needing --directisa (or some simiar flag) on hwclock, it works flawlessly. It is all integrated and probably not very upgradeable, but overall not a bad machine. I don't know if other models are worse though...
Speak for yourself. I am on dialup. There are way to many sites out there with 100kb+ pages. Often just for simple crap like a few links or less than 1k of text in the main body. They take minutes to load.
Gmail is one of the worst offenders (of well known sites). It takes several minutes before the message shows up in my browser. Even worse, the javascript crap disables the page loading animation after the initial load, so I can't just look at the tab to see if it is done. WTF???
Your machine's IP stack takes care of this, and caches DNS entries regardless.
I don't think GNU libc does this. At least on my linux system here, DNS lookups have the same delay whether they should have already been cached or not...
I have been thinking of finding a decent daemon for DNS caching, but I don't want something I'll have to fiddle with alot to get working or uses a huge amount of resources. (I don't want to use bind)
5 make sure everyone is trained to do their job. Arranging for training those who are not, unless they said they were in the interview/on the resume, in which case, they should be fired.
But if people create their own culture, then the rich, greedy and powerful won't have a basis in copyright to squash the fans. Question is: how to do it?
Have you ever had a manager who didn't delegate responsibility? I have. It doesn't work. (I'm sure there is a pun in there somewhere) They sit and micromanage everything, wasting time and pissing off the people under them. (I know how to fasten a stembolt, thank you.)
My cat hacked into your computer and disabled it. Sorry. I know it doesn't make up for your suffering, but I took away his litterbox as punishment. He's been holding it for three days now. His tail is turning yellow.
No, it is an IBM invention. They had a blink attribute built into the video hardware for their PCs. Too bad that didn't make it into the graphics modes, eh?
Well, the one big advantage the entertainment "industry" has over the apple guy: if one person comes buy and takes all the apples, his apples are gone, and so is the labor and materials to produce the apples. All the sales for those apples are gone. If someone uploads a song or movie somewhere on the internet and countless people download it, it doesn't cost the entertainment corps a thing, and they still have the CDs and DVDs on store shelves, available for sale.
So if the honest people outnumber the dishonest--and I think they do--the apple guy would still be screwed because he has no apples to sell, but the music / movie people would still get plenty of sales. The only losses would be potential sales if the downloaders would have bought the CDs in the first place. Who says they would?
I'm sure most people who download lots of mp3s or videos certainly could not afford the full retail price of every single item they get.
I assume you were referring to one of the following two passages?
I was referring to the end of your post (the second quote) where you said:
It is rather odd that despite their rejection of aristocratic titles and Merchantilist legal monopolies the founders chose to grant Congress the authority to grant monopolies on artistic works and inventions.
I was just trying to point out the "monopoly" on copyrighted works is only supposed to apply to one specific work, and others are free to create other works, while with a physical monopoly, others aren't free to compete for whatever reason (by law, difficulty in creating a business infrastructure, etc).
In fact, I would say one of the reasons why MS is a monopoly is because it is difficult to recreate a compatible interface for programs to use, not because of their copyright. Many programs which run on MS windows also depend on the bugs in MS's system. You would have to find and emulate all the bugs to be sure every given program will work. Even if it were legal to copy and do whatever to their software, they only release binaries, so you would still have a lot of work to create a competing system or make an existing one (such as linux) compatible with programs made for MSwin.
I think copyright was supposed to bring artistic works and such in line with selling physical goods.
That may have been the intention, but it was not the result.
But you're still a freaking idiot for being in the unattended-pile-of-apples business. It should be your problem if you choose to sell a product that is too easy to steal for you to turn a profit, not the taxpayer's.
It sounds like you are advocating DRM here. Many things are easy to steal, but most people don't because they are honest. In fact, I think copyright infringement doesn't really affect the "entertainment" and software companies because many people still buy their products even if they don't have to (I do, but I don't use commercial software much anymore). The people who copy the movies, music and warez probably wouldn't buy it anyway. They either don't have the money or are like "pay you back tomorrow guy" and just mooch off everyone.
DRM is just a way for the cartel to screw people even more. Instead of just having to pay for low quality software and entertainment, and all the commercial interests I've seen (MS, RIAA companies and hollywood) are putting out low quality crap for high prices, they'll make you pay to copy things you make.
To make software, you'll have to buy a cert to sign it, otherwise it won't run. You'll probably also have to watch a bunch of adverts before the OS will start your program too. To copy your pictures from your digital cam to your computer for editing, you'll have to pay a fee for each one, since they "own" the camera and/or computer and not taking them to a developer you are depriving them of profit. They've already fooled my mother into buying a "developer system" which requires her to pay as much for her printer's picture paper as she would to go down to the local mart and have it developed.
DRM is a way to milk more money out of the people.
IANAL. Well, the difference with a copyright monopoly you could make a competing work and have a monopoly too. I think copyright was supposed to bring artistic works and such in line with selling physical goods.
The problem is the laws have been so distorted that the first guy will sue you into the ground claiming any vague similarites are "copyright infringement" when they are not. If you can't afford expensive lawyers, you are compeletly screwed. Even if he loses, you have spent lots of money on lawyers, and he can DMCA you off the 'net by using bots who complain your work "kitten love" is the same as "Love of ages" because they both have the word "love" in the title. It is slander of title, but when have you ever heard of anyone even bringing a slander of title suit against anyone who filed a false DMCA?
Slashdot Mirror
In the corporate world, they do not differentiate those two terms much. A consumer is a person who buys something then consumes it. A customer is a person who will buy something in the future. Someone who doesn't buy something, but consumes it anyway is usually referred to as a "pirate", "leech", "theif", "i'll pay you tommorrow guy", or "one of those open source hippies" Crap like that.
High quality case??? Are you buying plastic ones for a couple farthings? All the ones I've seen are just a bunch of punched out sheet metal, even the lower priced ones. Some of the "high quality" cases seem to be transparent molded plastic (I don't buy flashy crap), but for all the extra cost, they are just more "cool" looking, not any more durable. Is there some titanium case made to withstand a nuclear war? What problems have you had with cases? I can beat up on all of my cases and they don't fall apart. I have a ten year old case on my 486. It has been through hell, yet the case is still flawless. The only thing wrong with the entire computer is the ancient video card died (and it is Vesa Local Bus--just try to find a card. I dare you. ;-) With some cleaning I could easily reuse the case. The emachine's case seems just as solid. I didn't pay a premium for any of my cases either.
High quality cases, fans and power supplies don't cost that much. Unless you are talking about flashy casemodder parts which are more for show than anything. In addition, why do you need to "upgrade" a case? ...and if the power supply indeed is high quality, it should last at least ten years.
Fans don't cost that much, so there is no excuse to pay hundreds of dollars just for them--maximum $50 for a more than ample supply. But who cares about fans? Unless you go for the ultra cheap crappiest ones you can find, the mechanical parts on the lower priced fans last about as long as the more expensive ones.
For a new computer, the cases, fans, and power supply shouldn't cost more than $200 for the highest quality. Any more and you are being ripped off or you have some very special needs (what, are you in the military and use it in a tank?). For an upgrade if you need a new case or power supply, they were most certainly not high quality. I have had one power supply fail, and I found it in a dumpster.
Unless you guys are talking about brand name computers (not parts), then well, you always get crap. If you don't have time to put a computer together yourself, then get some knowledgeable kid to do it for $20. It only takes about an hour.
If wasting processor time in a game was an option, using "higher level" languages would've already been done. (But I think you really mean uncompiled stuff) I am sure they still use assembly for optimizing, not C. Probably compiled code from any language would work as long as they can meld in some assembly for optimizing of time critical code sections.
The other poster already mentioned this, but you never heard of proper file locking?
Yeah, if you are an MS trained programmer. Even if you need a complex pattern of reading/writing portions of the file data, you'll have to go with a binary format (faster anyway), but it can be done.
You are using the Soviet definition of "capitalizm." In the real world, no one in their right mind would sell their children for food. No one in their right mind would buy "food" made from children. No one in their right mind would accept payment to make children into food. No one in their right mind would allow this to be done at all. Only sick fucks who don't give a shit about anyone else would take part. If they were in any significant position in a communist system, they would do similar things to a huge group of people. It would take a major revolution to get the guy out of power too.
This is a major reason why communism doesn't work: the people in power can do anything they want and enforce it by the state's militia. If a capitalist acted that way, people would refuse to do business with him. Unless they were trained in the school of communism (like they are in the US), then they just shrug their shoulders, say "this is how capitalizm is supposed to work," and bend over.
Your post is stupid for two reasons (okay, three):
Consumers are people who buy things, not copy it from their friends.
Sounds more like the Chinese want open source (or at least some sort of free software, not nessesarily "Free"), but don't know what it is. Maybe someone should point them to sourceforge, freshmeat.net and kernel.org, then again their government probably blocked those sites out...
I think you've been smoking too much of the taliban's crack. Obviously you need someone to determine your eyeglass prescription. However if all the doctors insist you need 20/1 vision when 20/20 or even 20/40 will do, and the hugely overcorrected lenses cause your eyes to go crosseyed, and the stupid doctors won't listen, you can't get glasses that work! This has happened not only to me, but several people I know. Do you like crosseyes? Do you like tripping over flat ground? Do you like walking as if you are on the edge of a cliff while on flat ground? I don't! Having a slightly weaker prescription fixes the problem.
So what the hell do prescriptions have to do with needing to go to a pharmacist, and what is wrong with letting people handle their own medications? If they just start popping pills without finding out about interactions or checking with doctors, it is their problem if they die. Some medications interact with OTC stuff too, so why don't they require pharmacists as well? Not requiring a pharmacist to buy a drug doesn't mean you will not be allowed to see one. You don't have to check with anyone to buy window cleaner and bleach, but if you mix them and breath the vapors, you will either get really sick or die. Should we require a pharmacist for window cleaners and bleach too?
You also completely ignored my statements about being denied medical care. Prescriptions are one of the methods used to do it.
In which case, you didn't need to upgrade your processor in the first place.
I don't think you are very good at math. Nearly every bit of tech in you computer is doubled or price halved every 1-2 years, RAM being the possible exception. A computer you buy this year for $2k will only cost $1k next year or the year after, and in 2-4 years will only be $500. About 4-8 years you'll be buying it at walmart for ~$250, maybe less. All depending upon what advancements come out, competition, markets and such. So if you really do pay $2k and only upgrade your computer once a decade, you would pay much less money for two $500 computers or a few $250 ones.
Seriously, look through your old catalogs and do the math. You will see I am right. Of course, if you are trying to save yourself time configuring and installing crap, then just copy your hard drive. Linux will certainly let you do that, though if it is a MS OS, then well, you usually have to reinstall at least once a year (unless you do nothing with your computer) and upgrades become mandatory, because eventually the new proprietary OS won't support your old hardware with its old proprietary drivers.
First, a quad core probably wasn't intended for gamers. Think servers and people needing to do tasks which scale well to multiprocessors (such as raytracing). I'm sure many universities will order these.
Second, single user programs don't scale well to multiple processors because most of them are programmed by stupid programmers trained by MS. They don't understand even the basics of running in a multitasked environment, so how could they possibly write a program which would use more than one core?
Seriously, try to do more than one thing with any given program written for WinXP. Not only does the UI usually make it difficult, but some of them even have major bugs or race or lock problems when trying to use them. Hell, try to use two separate instances of Mozilla--you have to make another profile!!! WTF??? Too many sucky programmers writing user level apps, even in major open source projects.
This is the way the media cartels want it and do everything to push it in this directon. Radio can also be two way. Ever hear of CB? If the FCC really worked for the public, you'd be able to make phone calls for free as long as you were within a reasonable range of your house--say a few miles.
The internet is becoming the same way. Usenet (a P2P system) is useless. Full of spammers, FAQ nazis, "copyright" bots which send (often false) complaints or cancel requests to your ISP/the network, so the average person not only has to wade through tons of crap, but also has to worry about being denied access because they named a file which has a word that matches some song or movie. Or having some asshole complain that their on topic post is off topic or is spam, which the ISP's staff has no time to investigate, so they just cut you off.
Websites aren't too far off. You also have the "copyright" bots, which will not only falsely DMCA you, but use up half your bandwidth quota (or more), so you may end up with a huge bill. Then of course there is the fact you have to pay for space on a server somewhere and live by thier rules in addition to your ISP's. Some people don't have the money. Yeah, basic plans are cheap, but if you want to publish audio or video, those aren't good enough, especially if those files become popular, such as being slashdotted.
Many people don't want to go to the trouble of creating a website or forum. It does take some technical know how. So guess what they do? Find some web forum that already exists, often owned by big media. The website owner determines what subjects are allowed and what posts are deleted. You have to answer to them for everything.
Home brew "P2P" systems have been mostly destroyed. The music and movie companies advertised everywhere on the "news" that P2P was only for "pirated" content, so 99% of the people looking to use them only use them to copy big media music and movies. Not files released under an open source or creative commons license, which would be perfect use. You could have a P2P system to help create collaborative works, such as for software devlopment or photo publishing and editing. The legitimate developers and users have been all but chased away by constant threats of lawsuits and such, whether these complaints have any basis on fact or are the fault of the defendant or not.
The entertainment cartel has ruined nearly all forms of communcation for the public. Unfortunately there is no lobby group for the common man's communication choices. There used to be lots of radio clubs, and I think they used to fight the FCC to keep parts of the spectrum public, but not so much anymore.
Well, my experience was with eMachines and Linux, so I didn't see any of those problems. Hahaha! So I guess if you install some other OS, they are okay... Maybe?
That could be why it died so fast when my dad had it. I don't think he ever heard of linux.
Most brand name manufacturers ship their crap overclocked? I didn't notice it with this machine ( I didn't fiddle with the bios. Linux ran rock solid, IIRC.), but that is just another reason not to go with brand name computers. Cheap parts and screwed up configs.
I just go with brand name parts and put it together myself, but many people don't know how to do that, so they just pick a brand name computer. Problem is, there is no one solution. You can't just tell them to find a local computer store to put one together, because half of them have the same problem. Not as many as the national corps, but enough to worry.
I thought Emachines were a piece of crap too. My dad's had been infected with a virus/trojan and didn't work (piece of crap OS--I think it came with WinME and they gave him WinXP to upgrade), so he bought another computer. He gave it to me, and I installed Linux on it. Except for needing --directisa (or some simiar flag) on hwclock, it works flawlessly. It is all integrated and probably not very upgradeable, but overall not a bad machine. I don't know if other models are worse though...
Speak for yourself. I am on dialup. There are way to many sites out there with 100kb+ pages. Often just for simple crap like a few links or less than 1k of text in the main body. They take minutes to load.
Gmail is one of the worst offenders (of well known sites). It takes several minutes before the message shows up in my browser. Even worse, the javascript crap disables the page loading animation after the initial load, so I can't just look at the tab to see if it is done. WTF???
I don't think GNU libc does this. At least on my linux system here, DNS lookups have the same delay whether they should have already been cached or not...
I have been thinking of finding a decent daemon for DNS caching, but I don't want something I'll have to fiddle with alot to get working or uses a huge amount of resources. (I don't want to use bind)
Yes, this isn't kindergarden.
I might add a 5th point:
5 make sure everyone is trained to do their job. Arranging for training those who are not, unless they said they were in the interview/on the resume, in which case, they should be fired.
But if people create their own culture, then the rich, greedy and powerful won't have a basis in copyright to squash the fans. Question is: how to do it?
Have you ever had a manager who didn't delegate responsibility? I have. It doesn't work. (I'm sure there is a pun in there somewhere) They sit and micromanage everything, wasting time and pissing off the people under them. (I know how to fasten a stembolt, thank you.)
My cat hacked into your computer and disabled it. Sorry. I know it doesn't make up for your suffering, but I took away his litterbox as punishment. He's been holding it for three days now. His tail is turning yellow.
No, it is an IBM invention. They had a blink attribute built into the video hardware for their PCs. Too bad that didn't make it into the graphics modes, eh?
Well, the one big advantage the entertainment "industry" has over the apple guy: if one person comes buy and takes all the apples, his apples are gone, and so is the labor and materials to produce the apples. All the sales for those apples are gone. If someone uploads a song or movie somewhere on the internet and countless people download it, it doesn't cost the entertainment corps a thing, and they still have the CDs and DVDs on store shelves, available for sale.
So if the honest people outnumber the dishonest--and I think they do--the apple guy would still be screwed because he has no apples to sell, but the music / movie people would still get plenty of sales. The only losses would be potential sales if the downloaders would have bought the CDs in the first place. Who says they would?
I'm sure most people who download lots of mp3s or videos certainly could not afford the full retail price of every single item they get.
I was referring to the end of your post (the second quote) where you said:
I was just trying to point out the "monopoly" on copyrighted works is only supposed to apply to one specific work, and others are free to create other works, while with a physical monopoly, others aren't free to compete for whatever reason (by law, difficulty in creating a business infrastructure, etc).
In fact, I would say one of the reasons why MS is a monopoly is because it is difficult to recreate a compatible interface for programs to use, not because of their copyright. Many programs which run on MS windows also depend on the bugs in MS's system. You would have to find and emulate all the bugs to be sure every given program will work. Even if it were legal to copy and do whatever to their software, they only release binaries, so you would still have a lot of work to create a competing system or make an existing one (such as linux) compatible with programs made for MSwin.
Thus the phrase "supposed to."
There also appears to be a summary at newsforge. A discussion on someone's mailing list. Mentioned in the LKML.
It sounds like you are advocating DRM here. Many things are easy to steal, but most people don't because they are honest. In fact, I think copyright infringement doesn't really affect the "entertainment" and software companies because many people still buy their products even if they don't have to (I do, but I don't use commercial software much anymore). The people who copy the movies, music and warez probably wouldn't buy it anyway. They either don't have the money or are like "pay you back tomorrow guy" and just mooch off everyone.
DRM is just a way for the cartel to screw people even more. Instead of just having to pay for low quality software and entertainment, and all the commercial interests I've seen (MS, RIAA companies and hollywood) are putting out low quality crap for high prices, they'll make you pay to copy things you make.
To make software, you'll have to buy a cert to sign it, otherwise it won't run. You'll probably also have to watch a bunch of adverts before the OS will start your program too. To copy your pictures from your digital cam to your computer for editing, you'll have to pay a fee for each one, since they "own" the camera and/or computer and not taking them to a developer you are depriving them of profit. They've already fooled my mother into buying a "developer system" which requires her to pay as much for her printer's picture paper as she would to go down to the local mart and have it developed.
DRM is a way to milk more money out of the people.
IANAL. Well, the difference with a copyright monopoly you could make a competing work and have a monopoly too. I think copyright was supposed to bring artistic works and such in line with selling physical goods.
The problem is the laws have been so distorted that the first guy will sue you into the ground claiming any vague similarites are "copyright infringement" when they are not. If you can't afford expensive lawyers, you are compeletly screwed. Even if he loses, you have spent lots of money on lawyers, and he can DMCA you off the 'net by using bots who complain your work "kitten love" is the same as "Love of ages" because they both have the word "love" in the title. It is slander of title, but when have you ever heard of anyone even bringing a slander of title suit against anyone who filed a false DMCA?