Identity theft, you are deprived of the uniqueness of your identity and the trust that people may put into it.
In case of illegal copying, recordign companies are also deprived of soemthign at times, they are deprived of the exclusiveness granted by copyright. while the illegal copy is being made.
It could be correct to talk about copyright theft along the same lines of identity theft, but that is not the meaning that is implied with stealing when the recording industry is using that word.
Last but not least, you agree it is used for emotional and not reasonal arguments, so why do you yourself go on using it like that? THat is clouding any decent discussion about the subject, and makes your opinion suspect beforehand.
> Sure, someone in a developed country might have come up with something more innovative, but they probably don't need the money as much as this guy would.
Hmm.. my inbox tells me they have milions of dollars just lying around there..
Commandline scripting is as fragile as your scripting environment. There are litteraly thousands of tools out there that use it in the background, and you may not realize it, but you use them daily (for example when reading slashdot or many other websites out there)
Its not that I do not see the use of scriptable gui components, its just that I see that it is really not the holy grail of scripting, it is a usefull tool, no more and no less.
Also, I'd still like to hear an example, cd recordign tools work very well in my experience, that they didn't for you, well.. there can be a few dozen reasons for that, tell me what STRUCTURAL reason there was for them failing (not something like having the wrong version of a script)
Then, pipes aren't perfect, but they are very usefull, and in the initial cd burning example, would have been very usefull for the intermediate output from unzip for example.
I remember that time quite well.. and the solution for your problem is still around.
You may never have noticed, but there is a whole bunch of windows apps that can be switched between fullscreen mode and windowed mode.
That feature exists for a reason and is used a lot.
It sounds to me like a communications problem, one that is likely caused by entrenched thinking, the programmers insisting on tha a windows app should have those buttons, and the users insistign on not wanting to see them, both not realizing that they can have both at the same time.
I have been working in IT since mid 1989, so I quite remember the time you are talkign about, and I had the same discussion a few times. We ended up at where everyone else ended up, allowing the user to switch between windowed and fullscreen mode.
I think you bought the wrong PDA then. Oh, and somethign that is purely meant as PDA shouldn't be costing you $400 either. It is a bit different if you want a portable 'do everything' machine, but in that case $400 is not gonna cut it.
Ah well, a PDA is not for everyone, but I had a lot of fun seeing my dad pickup one of my old Palms and using it as his agenda/addressbook/notepad now. He has sworn with paper stuff for the last 60 or so years, but the fact that he could sync that little bit of info he always wants to take with him with his computer was what changed his mind.
If you don't rely on the actual PIM functionality of such a device, then you are not looking for a PDA but for a pocket sized PC.. and you will be hard pressed to justify the money such a thing will cost unless you have a very good application in mind already.
Yeah, PDAs can run all kinds of software, and I use mine often for reading slashdot for example, but that is simply not their primary purpose, and I have yet to find any bit of software for it other then the PIC software that I really couldn't do without.
Well, you have a point with regards to GUI tools being scriptable on OSX and Windows, while there is no generic way for that on Linux.
That said, commandline scripting is a lot more powerfull, and virtually all unix tools are scriptable that way.
For your example, the only 'trick' needed is getting the list from the clipboard and the only gui tool is the browser.
In fact, most of the GUI frontends for burnign cds on Linux do just that, be a frontend, and use underlying commandline tools with help of the scripting support.
Anyway, a generic way of scripting gui components is usefull, but I have yet to see an example of performing a scriptable procedure that can be done with scriptable gui components that cannot be done on Linux. The way in which to do it is different tho.
Unix scripting doesn't easily allow you to tell the gui to press a button, but it does a good job at tellign a tool to perform a job.
With the way piping works on Unix, this is extremely powerfull also.
What you cannot do easily on Linux is embeding a gui control from one application into another (yes, KDE can do this, and prolly other environments as well, ie gnome. THere is however no standard way for doing this) That however has little to do with scripting, it just happens to be soemthing you can also use from scripting languages on Windows.
Unix needs a generic way to talk to gui objects regardless of what produced that gui object. This is needed in general, and would provide for 'Windows/OSX' like scripting of gui components as well.
This however is not the fault of the scripting tools on Unix or Linux, it is the fault of X.
Our consultant had never seen such a meeting. Never had he heard people answer "yes" to the question "are you saying you want to ignore all these recommendations, industry best practices (and standards) and suggestions presented by this industry giant who have proven that they know what they're talking about?"
Heh, I have seen quite a few such meetings with consultants gettign all worked up because the users didn't listen.
I have a simple message for such consultants. The users may not know what they want technically or functionally, but they damn well know how their job is done, and if you make a tool to help them do their job, you should be listenign to them first, and come back to them with every 'technical solution' you think up.
'modern' systems often include languages like perl. For what you want however I'd take a look at python or tcl/tk
Your problem seems to be that you have too much choice. Whatever MS made you believe, they did not invent scripting, and were not the first one to introduce a language that is somewhere inbetween scripting and a full programing language.
Your post is interestign generally, but I have one comment.
You say you read slashdot (this forum) regularely, and have quite a bit of knowledge regardign marketing. You surely should have known that 4 years of administrating NT does not qualify for havign experience to make general statements that concern administration? Its first of all bad amrketing on slashdot (bad marketing for yourself as a trustworthy source) and second, you simply didn't see alternatives, so your opinion about it (technical and marketingwise) is rather likely based on very selective information.
You seem to be putting people into only one of two categories: the people who are determined to be pirates as a moneymaking venture, and everyone else.
I differentiate between uses that violate copyrigth law and those that don't. The motivation for the violation is only really relevant for how much money someone can justify to throw at the problem. For as far as content providers are concerned both need to be stopped.
But there is, in fact, a third category: people who normally wouldn't pirate content, but do so when it's so darn easy.
Yes, companies like Sony in fact played on that by selling tapedrives that allowed for high speed copying...
The Napster/Gnutella phenomenon has amply demonstrated that this group exists.
That was already demonstrated by the amount of record/tape to tape copying done with traditional audio equipment.
We can argue all we want about whether file sharing is wrong, or whether or not content providers would do a better business by embracing file sharing instead of fighting it. But the fact remains that very little of what occurs on file sharing networks constitutes fair use; most falls clearly outside of its bounds.
Filesharing is a distribution medium. Copying and distributing are 2 seperate issues, and 2 seperate exclusive rights in copyright law.
But the whole p2p issue is irrelevant to this because macrovision in no way hinders ripping a DVD and posting a divx.
Also, whatever the motivations are for macrovision and similar measures, it is still unethical to first force a levy scheme on us and then make it impossible to use what we pay for. Solution, if they insist on this stuff, then remove the levy.
The point is that Google's GMail will combine one of the most privacy-invading data retention policies with one of the most private services on the net: E-Mail. I for one will not accept that kind of tradeoff.
Right... untill you start encrypting things, you should not consider anything you do onlien to be private.
Are you sure nobody's rights are trampled on? I know I can control whether my browser connects to Google's servers. But if I send email to you, how can I be sure my mail won't end up in Google's eternal archives by way of forwarding, complete with email addresses, host ip addresses, exact time, etc.?
That is not the real problem of this because it already happens anyway.
The problem is that by making a link between the advertisements served to a specific user, Google can make a guess what the mail is about without having to actually read it (beyond what happens while showing the mail already)
This produces interesting statistical information, for them and others (targetted spam anyone?)
Not at all. The DMCA (or in my case the EU copyright directive) makes it illegal. This was pushed for by content providers, which was not very ethical at all.
Hardware manufacterors who try to play nice with those content providers are definitely not beign ethical, they support an unethical practise knowingly.
That has nothign to do with DMCA or equivalent laws, it has everything to do with a useless (for DRM purposes) bit of technology that achieves one single thing, making it difficult on purpose for people to make use of rights they are paying for.
It in no way prevents peopel who want to pirate the stuff, it ONLY, I repeat, ONLY hurts the legitimate user.
Sorry, but DMCA or not, this is not ethical, neither from hardware or content providers. The DMCA just makes it worse, but senseless use of DRM is the problem here.
However, using a technical measure to prevent copying, together with DMCA (or in my case the EU copyright directive, which is equivalent) makes that it is now ILLEGAL to excersice my right.
Not making it easy is ok. Makign it difficult and illegal on purpose while havign peopel pay for the right is simply unethical.
Heh, 'Pioneers of flight' on discovery channel comes to mind.. airbus advertising, but heh... who is gonna buy an airbus for their private plane collection anyway, and its sortof informative, esp. for those who never really looked into the early days of the airplane.
At any rate, realize that advertisements are playing for your free web content. Too much of it is annoying, the right amount of it is quite fine (ie, I do not mind Slashdot's advertisements at all, they are there, but non intrusive. Google is even better)
It seems to me however that previous attempts to get the advertisement through no matter what has pissed off so many peopel that the tolerance level for advertisements is amazingly low, so low in fact that many people will respond negatively whenever they hear the word regardless of the context.
That is something advertisers shoudl keep in mind, they did a very very bad job advertising themselves.
However, implementing DRM isn't unethical, in fact, it is easily argued that it IS ethical to try to stop people from using your product to break the law
When I buy a videotape I pay a levy due to the fact that I have a right to make a personal copy of a copyrighted work on it.
How is it ethical for the movie industrie and hardware producers to take away that possibility while on the other side I AM PAYING FOR IT ???
Sorry but it is not ethical, and it doesn't stop piracy either, never did.
After reading up a bit more on the subject, it seems that this measure is temporary. What the USA wants in the end is biometric information on the passport itself for everyone entering and leaving the country, and of course the possibility to verify that information (which imho makes a lot more sense)
Keeping a database with that information seems to be meant as a stopgap measure untill such passports are introduced by other countries (and the USA itself? don't know if its already in there)
The USA is a party to the declaration of human rights. That declaration concerns humans regardless of nationality. Even if you are trying to argue that somehow the constitution reserves human rights for citizens only, the fact that such international treaties are part of the law of the country still makes that EVERYONE visiting the USA should get their human rights protected.
No, you have to do the right thing to make yourself safer. Doing just something will just give a false sense of security and is likely making things less safe as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
> When you provide a sizeable portion of its support....
So I suggest we let the police and military make the policies in the USA then?
Your reasoning is flawed to put it mildly.
Lets restate that a little bit, it is the only way that is acceptable to you.
And who the fuck do you think you are to tell me what is acceptable to me?
If your only answer is your belief then just believe what you want and let others believe what they want.
Not doing so makes you equally close minded as Islamic fundamentalists (who incidentely will quite agree on this specific issue of sex and marriage)
Identity theft, you are deprived of the uniqueness of your identity and the trust that people may put into it.
In case of illegal copying, recordign companies are also deprived of soemthign at times, they are deprived of the exclusiveness granted by copyright. while the illegal copy is being made.
It could be correct to talk about copyright theft along the same lines of identity theft, but that is not the meaning that is implied with stealing when the recording industry is using that word.
Last but not least, you agree it is used for emotional and not reasonal arguments, so why do you yourself go on using it like that? THat is clouding any decent discussion about the subject, and makes your opinion suspect beforehand.
> Sure, someone in a developed country might have come up with something more innovative, but they probably don't need the money as much as this guy would.
Hmm.. my inbox tells me they have milions of dollars just lying around there..
Commandline scripting is as fragile as your scripting environment. There are litteraly thousands of tools out there that use it in the background, and you may not realize it, but you use them daily (for example when reading slashdot or many other websites out there)
Its not that I do not see the use of scriptable gui components, its just that I see that it is really not the holy grail of scripting, it is a usefull tool, no more and no less.
Also, I'd still like to hear an example, cd recordign tools work very well in my experience, that they didn't for you, well.. there can be a few dozen reasons for that, tell me what STRUCTURAL reason there was for them failing (not something like having the wrong version of a script)
Then, pipes aren't perfect, but they are very usefull, and in the initial cd burning example, would have been very usefull for the intermediate output from unzip for example.
I remember that time quite well.. and the solution for your problem is still around.
You may never have noticed, but there is a whole bunch of windows apps that can be switched between fullscreen mode and windowed mode.
That feature exists for a reason and is used a lot.
It sounds to me like a communications problem, one that is likely caused by entrenched thinking, the programmers insisting on tha a windows app should have those buttons, and the users insistign on not wanting to see them, both not realizing that they can have both at the same time.
I have been working in IT since mid 1989, so I quite remember the time you are talkign about, and I had the same discussion a few times. We ended up at where everyone else ended up, allowing the user to switch between windowed and fullscreen mode.
I think you bought the wrong PDA then.
Oh, and somethign that is purely meant as PDA shouldn't be costing you $400 either. It is a bit different if you want a portable 'do everything' machine, but in that case $400 is not gonna cut it.
Ah well, a PDA is not for everyone, but I had a lot of fun seeing my dad pickup one of my old Palms and using it as his agenda/addressbook/notepad now. He has sworn with paper stuff for the last 60 or so years, but the fact that he could sync that little bit of info he always wants to take with him with his computer was what changed his mind.
If you don't rely on the actual PIM functionality of such a device, then you are not looking for a PDA but for a pocket sized PC.. and you will be hard pressed to justify the money such a thing will cost unless you have a very good application in mind already.
Yeah, PDAs can run all kinds of software, and I use mine often for reading slashdot for example, but that is simply not their primary purpose, and I have yet to find any bit of software for it other then the PIC software that I really couldn't do without.
Not even trying to look like an article, just direct advertisement instead?
Give me a break Michael, you can at least write a little bit so we don't have to read the article ourselves!
Well, you have a point with regards to GUI tools being scriptable on OSX and Windows, while there is no generic way for that on Linux.
That said, commandline scripting is a lot more powerfull, and virtually all unix tools are scriptable that way.
For your example, the only 'trick' needed is getting the list from the clipboard and the only gui tool is the browser.
In fact, most of the GUI frontends for burnign cds on Linux do just that, be a frontend, and use underlying commandline tools with help of the scripting support.
Anyway, a generic way of scripting gui components is usefull, but I have yet to see an example of performing a scriptable procedure that can be done with scriptable gui components that cannot be done on Linux. The way in which to do it is different tho.
Unix scripting doesn't easily allow you to tell the gui to press a button, but it does a good job at tellign a tool to perform a job.
With the way piping works on Unix, this is extremely powerfull also.
What you cannot do easily on Linux is embeding a gui control from one application into another (yes, KDE can do this, and prolly other environments as well, ie gnome. THere is however no standard way for doing this) That however has little to do with scripting, it just happens to be soemthing you can also use from scripting languages on Windows.
Unix needs a generic way to talk to gui objects regardless of what produced that gui object. This is needed in general, and would provide for 'Windows/OSX' like scripting of gui components as well.
This however is not the fault of the scripting tools on Unix or Linux, it is the fault of X.
Our consultant had never seen such a meeting. Never had he heard people answer "yes" to the question "are you saying you want to ignore all these recommendations, industry best practices (and standards) and suggestions presented by this industry giant who have proven that they know what they're talking about?"
Heh, I have seen quite a few such meetings with consultants gettign all worked up because the users didn't listen.
I have a simple message for such consultants. The users may not know what they want technically or functionally, but they damn well know how their job is done, and if you make a tool to help them do their job, you should be listenign to them first, and come back to them with every 'technical solution' you think up.
> where's Linux's entry into this race?
Lets see...
sh? csh? bash? have done scripting for ages.
'modern' systems often include languages like perl. For what you want however I'd take a look at python or tcl/tk
Your problem seems to be that you have too much choice. Whatever MS made you believe, they did not invent scripting, and were not the first one to introduce a language that is somewhere inbetween scripting and a full programing language.
Your post is interestign generally, but I have one comment.
You say you read slashdot (this forum) regularely, and have quite a bit of knowledge regardign marketing. You surely should have known that 4 years of administrating NT does not qualify for havign experience to make general statements that concern administration? Its first of all bad amrketing on slashdot (bad marketing for yourself as a trustworthy source) and second, you simply didn't see alternatives, so your opinion about it (technical and marketingwise) is rather likely based on very selective information.
You seem to be putting people into only one of two categories: the people who are determined to be pirates as a moneymaking venture, and everyone else.
I differentiate between uses that violate copyrigth law and those that don't. The motivation for the violation is only really relevant for how much money someone can justify to throw at the problem. For as far as content providers are concerned both need to be stopped.
But there is, in fact, a third category: people who normally wouldn't pirate content, but do so when it's so darn easy.
Yes, companies like Sony in fact played on that by selling tapedrives that allowed for high speed copying...
The Napster/Gnutella phenomenon has amply demonstrated that this group exists.
That was already demonstrated by the amount of record/tape to tape copying done with traditional audio equipment.
We can argue all we want about whether file sharing is wrong, or whether or not content providers would do a better business by embracing file sharing instead of fighting it. But the fact remains that very little of what occurs on file sharing networks constitutes fair use; most falls clearly outside of its bounds.
Filesharing is a distribution medium. Copying and distributing are 2 seperate issues, and 2 seperate exclusive rights in copyright law.
But the whole p2p issue is irrelevant to this because macrovision in no way hinders ripping a DVD and posting a divx.
Also, whatever the motivations are for macrovision and similar measures, it is still unethical to first force a levy scheme on us and then make it impossible to use what we pay for. Solution, if they insist on this stuff, then remove the levy.
> IE user on Slashdot = Flame Bait
In other words.. most users on Slashdot are flame bait... hmm, could be true indeed.
The point is that Google's GMail will combine one of the most privacy-invading data retention policies with one of the most private services on the net: E-Mail. I for one will not accept that kind of tradeoff.
Right... untill you start encrypting things, you should not consider anything you do onlien to be private.
Are you sure nobody's rights are trampled on? I know I can control whether my browser connects to Google's servers. But if I send email to you, how can I be sure my mail won't end up in Google's eternal archives by way of forwarding, complete with email addresses, host ip addresses, exact time, etc.?
That is not the real problem of this because it already happens anyway.
The problem is that by making a link between the advertisements served to a specific user, Google can make a guess what the mail is about without having to actually read it (beyond what happens while showing the mail already)
This produces interesting statistical information, for them and others (targetted spam anyone?)
Not at all. The DMCA (or in my case the EU copyright directive) makes it illegal. This was pushed for by content providers, which was not very ethical at all.
Hardware manufacterors who try to play nice with those content providers are definitely not beign ethical, they support an unethical practise knowingly.
That has nothign to do with DMCA or equivalent laws, it has everything to do with a useless (for DRM purposes) bit of technology that achieves one single thing, making it difficult on purpose for people to make use of rights they are paying for.
It in no way prevents peopel who want to pirate the stuff, it ONLY, I repeat, ONLY hurts the legitimate user.
Sorry, but DMCA or not, this is not ethical, neither from hardware or content providers. The DMCA just makes it worse, but senseless use of DRM is the problem here.
They do not have to make it easy.
However, using a technical measure to prevent copying, together with DMCA (or in my case the EU copyright directive, which is equivalent) makes that it is now ILLEGAL to excersice my right.
Not making it easy is ok. Makign it difficult and illegal on purpose while havign peopel pay for the right is simply unethical.
Heh, 'Pioneers of flight' on discovery channel comes to mind.. airbus advertising, but heh... who is gonna buy an airbus for their private plane collection anyway, and its sortof informative, esp. for those who never really looked into the early days of the airplane.
At any rate, realize that advertisements are playing for your free web content. Too much of it is annoying, the right amount of it is quite fine (ie, I do not mind Slashdot's advertisements at all, they are there, but non intrusive. Google is even better)
It seems to me however that previous attempts to get the advertisement through no matter what has pissed off so many peopel that the tolerance level for advertisements is amazingly low, so low in fact that many people will respond negatively whenever they hear the word regardless of the context.
That is something advertisers shoudl keep in mind, they did a very very bad job advertising themselves.
Just a small note, there are cases where dvd + mplayer + tvout will result in mactrovision being used. Read the mplayer documentation.
When I buy a videotape I pay a levy due to the fact that I have a right to make a personal copy of a copyrighted work on it.
How is it ethical for the movie industrie and hardware producers to take away that possibility while on the other side I AM PAYING FOR IT ???
Sorry but it is not ethical, and it doesn't stop piracy either, never did.
After reading up a bit more on the subject, it seems that this measure is temporary.
What the USA wants in the end is biometric information on the passport itself for everyone entering and leaving the country, and of course the possibility to verify that information (which imho makes a lot more sense)
Keeping a database with that information seems to be meant as a stopgap measure untill such passports are introduced by other countries (and the USA itself? don't know if its already in there)
Getting more reliable identification of who enters the country is not the problem. The way it is motivated is.
The USA is a party to the declaration of human rights. That declaration concerns humans regardless of nationality. Even if you are trying to argue that somehow the constitution reserves human rights for citizens only, the fact that such international treaties are part of the law of the country still makes that EVERYONE visiting the USA should get their human rights protected.
) we need to do something to make ourselves safer
No, you have to do the right thing to make yourself safer. Doing just something will just give a false sense of security and is likely making things less safe as a result.
And how exactly are fingerprints going to prevent such things?