/puts asbestos suit on.
here are a few thoughts on just why M$ would consider doing something like this.
Firstly some posters are saying that M$ is already very slow in patching its os for vulnerabilities.
Whether this is even true or not does not matter, but it does mean they are already IN the anti-virus business, because everybody blames them for os vulnerabilities anyway.
It was only a matter of time until some creative person at M$ came to the conclusion that if they were already in the anti-virus biz. they might as well get paid for it.
This is a pretty smart move imo. By separating it from the os they get 5 major benefits. 1 the possibility of anti-trust legal problems are removed. 2 they get a new source of revenue for work they were doing anyway. 3 this shifts pressure from their os having to deal with malicious attacks. The blanket statement can be if you are at risk to said attacks please buy the anti-virus software. 4 They can now easily get away with charging extra for it; if anyone does not like this policy, they can just state they are doing this to a) not be sued, b) because they are nice guys and want to give the consumer/competition a fair shake. 5 Further reducing piracy, all of these auto up dates &c are one of the most effective ways of geting poeple to buy software. But there are hacks out there to get auto updates anyway. Piracy will always be out there, M$ knows this, and doesnt really give a $hit about the hardcore pirates anyway--they are the group that will never pay.
The casual pirate, however, that gets their corporate xp off kazaa, will be hung out to dry.
Someone also posted some conspiracy idea about M$ also employing those who produce Virii. What you may call conspiracy is business as usual at M$. They can buy any virus creator on the planet, anytime they want. In fact they have a history of hiring those who caused them serious competition. There is nothing unethical about this, it is simple business practice; any company will want the best employees. This also happened with banking software, many hackers who were not very good criminals were caught stealing funds from banks. The banks offered non prosecution, and a decent salary for helping them prevent anymore such hacking. The previous "security experts" that were working for the bank became living history like Gary Coleman.
What is different about M$ is the fact that they have an UNHEALTHY cash position. I dont know what it is at this moment, but a year ago their cash was at 48 BILLION. Now the scary part of this was that very smart finacial advisors told the company that this was bad--it was too much cash to just have lying around. I am not a very good financial advisor I suppose, because I would never tell anyone with 48 billion in cash lying around that they had a problem. I would call it a solution.
The next question is how will it affect other anti-virus "experts". M$'s answer is simple business; we dont care. They are under no obligation to baby sit other companies, and the world is a harsh place.
Being a corporation, they have a specific modus operandi; to do what is best for them. That is to expand their business, have a healthy bottom line, and protect themselves from attacks on various levels, both known and unpredictable.
This is not immoral, but amoral. To put it in prespective, if M$ wanted to be percieved as a moral company they could use just their cashola to colonize Mars, invade/liberate Iraq, or even wipe out world hunger and employ very many subsidized farmers at the same time.
There is a serious flaw in this concept. Textbooks are a very big industry. They are expensive for a reason: a captive audience can't dictate prices.
For anyone who has done undergrad, just look at the way students are fleeced for textbooks. Sure most universities have a used text book store/system to help recoop the cost of that book you will only use once.
However the text book manufacturers also have a system to deal with this. Every couple of years (shorter in some cases) there is a "major revision" But if you look closely, there is really not very much new info on shakespeare, or stress strain curves, or the various branches of math, humanities, etc. What is different is that all the chapters are routinely scrambled, and much effort is made into putting the same info on very different pages. This does not make used texts obsolete, but it makes them unuseable.
Another growing trend is professors self publishing (usually kinko's) what can be called "course kits". In these kits anything goes, public domain material, licenced material (usually obscure, and cheap to get), to the profs actually writing some thing themselves.
At that level students are relatively helpless against these practices, and it is unlikeley that any institutions will give up such a cash cow and embrace public domain work. In fact there is often resistance to the use of works already in the public domain, by using the revision method for textbooks.
On the other side of the tracks are elementary and secondary institutions. These are usually govt run, and can hire someone to write their books, or buy them on a large enough scale as to have fair prices with publishers.
It is really too bad, since free, and public domain creativity will always benefit and strengthen any culture that allows it.
Many of the ppl quoted here are re-hashing ideas from THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE.
One of the best statements in that book is about how media interacts with our senses. "the printed word is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, the integrated circuit (yes this was written in halcyon days when chips were called ic's) an extension of the central nervous system."
Moving on to the idea of convergence, it is not possible in the way the article puts forth, as different types of media are generally hostile to one another. The alphabet destroyed the Homeridae, and the tradition of reciting epic poetry. A few thousand years later, television destroyed the printed word in a few short decades. Tapes destroyed the radio, while cd's destroyed tapes, and are being destroyed by mp3's etc.The internet may destroy television, or they may become one and the same.
Jakob Nielsen's idea about chanels and networks dissappearing is quaint at best. Groups that have tons of money, create and control content, lobby governments, etc, will not be killed off easily.
Is the implication that piracy, along with open source, and a free voice for everyone will somehow threaten large media and telcom players? I think that this struggle will continue, and is for the most part a healthy and neccessary one. Especially the idea about free open source software. It is not a spectre haunting software giants, as the article states, but holds the potential to spark a concept that has never really manifested itself in human history before. People working on a large scale, across political, and physical boudaries, for free, to help other people on a large scale, also for free.
The focus of the article is on media content delivery vs hardware. But it is not realistic. The very competative hardware market has been known for many years now, and saying just wait until the greater asian co-prosperity sphere musters another assembly line is not really journalism--it is talking out of a different hole.
What I found funny was the mindset of Macromedia Inc. 24 months from subsidised televsions? IN SOVIET RUSSIA THE TELEVISIONS WERE REALLY SUBSIDISED, or did they subsidize you, with a talking head platform? Does this mean all new tv's will now be free and have flash or real player on them? If so then Juha Christensen will become the true Shogun of the Dark.
When ever someone writes about home convergence it is always about some sort of castle in the sky. The Japanese have their home robots, the western world has Pee-Wee Herman's automatic house.
This is exactly the same kind of buzz generated when online sales became popular. The attitude was one of dire concern. What ever shall those "brick and mortar" establishments do now? They might as well close shop right away, since online sales will do them in.
It is the same buzz when the first advertisements appeared on the internet. Many people automatically assumed that it was the end and that it would become like television. But things like google cannot exist without money. It is very simple how things worked out actually. Before anybody could own a dial up isp. But as more elaborate media began to find its way into the net, broadband became the only way to fly. Strange how those big, brick and mortar establishments ended up completely dominating the broadband isp market.
When you look back at the development of tech, and digital hardware it really is not as fast as it could be. Intel goes on about "putting all their resources into...", but their processors havent got that much faster in the past few years. Meanwhile the folks at amd have a new 64 bit chip out, but it also has no significant increase in speed.
Isp's put caps on speed, amount of data one can download/upload, have "lite" versions of their service, and many other revenue generating schemes.
Looking at things in this way, it seems that it is in the interest of the big players to stifle rapid development of technology, and focus on ways to get more out of existing technology.
This new digital age will not show up with a big bang; it will be a drawn out, muffled whimper from consumers as they have to sit through wave after wave of useless crap before any real technological development actually happens.
I have a general security question about open source software. I am not a programmer so bear with me if this is redundant.
The idea I have is that open source would by nature be more vulnerable to viri, spywarez, etc because anyone can see the source code. wouldnt this be much easier for "evildoers" to take advantage of?
obviously the argument that keeping source code secret makes it safer is a shaky one, kinda like to one about outlawing guns (then only outlaws will have em...)
people are already finding tons of flaws in windsows, and M$ writing quality on the box doesnt seem to do much about this. and this is with little or no info on sourrce code. wouldnt this type of activity be much higher (if it is easier to do, more people will do it) with open source software?
I think there are 2 reasons why linux virii are not a factor. 1 there are too few computers out there for anything to replicate itself. 2 more importantly, the linux crowd is a tech savvy one, keeping a regular eye on their machines, and if a problem is found they deal with it themselves.
I see a big problem here with open source goin mainstream. even if open source became simple to install. ie fool proof gui, that said install, yes, no, back and next. sure more people would have it, but there will always be people that are not tech savvy. some of them may be very intelligent etc, but just do not have the time to worry about it.
I know this is kinda off topic, but would be really interested to read what the/. crowd thinks about open source being more secure, and why.
no worries about this ever becoming useful.
there have been many teeth transplants in hospital settings, usually from impacted wisdom teeth being removed and put in a gap. the success rate is very low, under 1 % i believe. take artificial implats, with a titanium bolt that is actually bio reactive (the titanium fuses with the bone for a stronger seal), and you have a 95% success rate.
given the success of the artificial teeth, cloning of teeth will be used more to study cloning individual body parts more than dentistry.
relax. computing will not end, nor will good ol' piracy. There will always be hackers (bless them) who will take it upon themselves to prevent total control by the conglomerates.
there will always be a segment of society that will not pay for their bullshit, no matter what. M$ knows this. At a certain point fighting piracy is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
My guess is that janus is the new sucker format that M$ is using to get money out of dell, aol, etc. it will be cracked in no time. rule # 1: observable = copyable. soon this will mean non lossy copying through observation. rule # 2 any security can be broken.
M$ likes money. they will ony go so far in pissing off the consumer. if they cripple windows too much, then more people will either switch to another os, or get the pirated version of windows that can handle more "scenarios". this is a very real threat to windows. if the legit version is percieved as more limited than the pirated, then even the most average consumer will come to the conclusion that it is for suckers only.
as for drm pc's and boises, these can be flashed. the pc world is not goin anywhere near hell. thats what apple and macs are for. if a user wants to have their every move controlled, and pay way more than they should the answer is simple; buy a mac.
if you want to see piracy, just look at the game console world. here the company gets a huge head start. they get to use their own encryption, bois, etc. and to date every console that has ever come out has been hacked, cracked,, chipped, and copied.
M$ is talking out of their ass when they say they can get drm to work. how can they when they cant even prevent xbox from being hacked? but that wont stop them from taking billions in development fees from the media conglomerates. Yes M$ is very predatory, treating other big companies like imbeciles.
in the end, the content providers strategy of trying to gain controll, then fix prices will be their undoing. these concepts may have worked on people in the distant past, but with each new generation getting used to free, i dont see it holding out much longer.
and if you still think that people will be forced into this, then ill give you one last example to calm your fears. when was the last time you, or anyone else here logged into napster after they became not free? an image of a dried out ball of tumbleweed rolling across the new digital dustbowl that is napster, itunes, and any other pay site.
and to those that say pirating is stealing, allow me to present my rebuttal. (homer unzips, bends over...). software, media will alwas be free, because you can conjure it out of thin air. no its not magic, its technology. I have my copy, the wrecka stow still has their copy. unlike the wrecka stow copy, which is collecting dust, mine is being put to good use conjuring up new scenarios of use. now i suppose some people will try and argue the abstract concept of me robbing the record moguls of potential income--one less ivory backscratcher and all that. but if you look at the fact that I realize the prices are fixed, and that I never had any intention of giving them any money at all (that would only encourage them), i dont see the existence of any potential revenue. i'll even grant that the record label can charge what ever they want for their copy, as long as they dont presume that users are obliged to buy their copy. in the spirit of freedom, a buyer is also allowed to set their price(zero in this case). this is what is known as a free market, and it happens all the time in free countries.
lastly, what was M$ thinking with the name janus? i have never heard of a more ridiculous case of delusions of grandeur. note to microsoft: Quod licet Jovi, nod licet bovi.
What i find disturbing is the fact that people are actually getting paid (ie make work projects) to decide what words we can or cannot use.
good thing bono is free from those chains.
as far as the fcc goes; fuck the fucking fuckers.. (look up the history fot he word fuck on any p2p for a much better mp3 description of this.)
and as far as tv bringing up chilldren, thats been trendy since Neil Postman's AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH.
and to those worried about religious profanity, how can a rude word about a god given bodily function br profane? just read voltaire's dialogue betwen a jesuit and a brahmin. in it the brahmin says "everything in this universe is perfect, including your dissatisfaction with it." mebbe he meant the jesuit wasnt getting enough:P
there is the issue of bad faith.
If you want to get into legal concepts this one should not be overlooked.
most if not all of the ppl scanning, typing, proofing the texts did so pro bono, under the impression that they were making a very valuable contribution to society, and that it would be free and beneficial to all.
there was always the caveat that free enterprise could try an generate revenue from these pd texts, and nobody saw anything inherently wrong with that. there have been many companies who have tried this. when the dust settled, they were buried under it.
getting back to mr. Hart, it is highly unlikely that having started this project in 1971, he harboured the idea of tricking ppl into copying vast amounts of public domain texts, so he could profit some 30 years later
Mr. hart has every right to engage in a commercial activity of this sort, since he has already given permission to anyone else to do so.
The only time I would be considering bad faith on the part of the gutenberg team would be when tey stop offering free texts (there have always been many impoverished ppl who have benefitted from such help, and even went to to give soemthing back to society. It is a proud and noble tradition started by the athenians, when a citizen declared tey could not afford to pay to see a play, the state would pay it for them.)
things like this strenghten any society greatly, and much of gutenberg's value would be lost if this was changed. it really would hurt more people than it helped.
I agree that it goes against all the hard work the PG crew has done over the years.
to try and lock in something pppl have worked hard on to give away to improve humanity almost sounds like theft.
But I have a good solution. here it is, i'd appreciate any comments, kudos, flames (puts on asbestos bodysuit) suggestions etc.
the solution is to send your money to us instead. we have been folowing pg, and other pd libraries for some time. we are not doing this for any monetary gain (it doesnt take an mba to figure out you wont make much trying to sell what can be gotten for free.) You can easily make more flipping burgers, working IT, cobbling shoes etc.
our product is the gutenberg files zipped on 2 cd's and sells for 20$. we take paypal, and the email addy is 8000books@mail.com.
now you may ask why are we doing this. there are several reasons. 1 we want to spread computer literacy, as it has developed recently. in the past few decades there has been a lot of computer aided textual, literary, philosphic , theological analyses. tact is one ofthe more recent ones being done at u of t.
this will only become more necessary. why did they have to say 10,000 books? no man can read 10,000 books...
our goal is to make these public domain libraries as mainstream as possible. one way of doing this is putting it into a box and selling it thru retail.
this has a 3 fold benefit. 1 it exposes pl to pc libraries nad all the really cool search, concordance and other functions that can be done with simple an free software out there.
2 a search cannot be done easily without having al of the books on your hd, cd etc. the free option is to download them all. this can take some time, even with broadband--believe me i tried it, and i'd rather pay 20$ than have to do that again. nobody who has bought the product to date has complained that they culd have gotten it for free by spending a few days dragin n dropping.
3 all of that downloading costs project gutenberg real money in bandwidth costs.
4 buy buying our cd, you not only save them this money, but will provide more money for them since we donate generated revenue. this in turn wil alllow then to release even more books.
5 sure it is a small difference, but it may grow to bea big one someday.
thx for your time in reading this post and any response will be appreciated (ie money, kudos, sugestions, volunteering time, hell even flames and trolls. I wil try an answer everyone just hope nobody signs me up for any spam lists. sorry for putting an advertisement on this site, i kinda feel bad about it, but since its not for monetary gain, i felt it might be worthwhile. I wont be advertising anything else on this site, and only got this idea in my head cuz it was a thread about gutenberg, and wanted people to know about this little hobbly some friends and I are working on.
btw i will send a free copy of the cd's to anyone who tells me what shnives means. by free i mean winners pay shipping, since if 200 ppl guess it , and its like 5 bucks per, that would tenderize the ol' wallet a bit too mcuh. those who win can choose any shipping method they want, and il give my addy to calculate the exact cost.
ps please excuse they bad typing. got a broken finger and scaphoid, so cnat aim or time the keys as fast as im used to , dont want to go back to 2 finger typing.
hope to hear from you soon:)
Slashdot Mirror
/puts asbestos suit on. here are a few thoughts on just why M$ would consider doing something like this. Firstly some posters are saying that M$ is already very slow in patching its os for vulnerabilities. Whether this is even true or not does not matter, but it does mean they are already IN the anti-virus business, because everybody blames them for os vulnerabilities anyway. It was only a matter of time until some creative person at M$ came to the conclusion that if they were already in the anti-virus biz. they might as well get paid for it. This is a pretty smart move imo. By separating it from the os they get 5 major benefits. 1 the possibility of anti-trust legal problems are removed. 2 they get a new source of revenue for work they were doing anyway. 3 this shifts pressure from their os having to deal with malicious attacks. The blanket statement can be if you are at risk to said attacks please buy the anti-virus software. 4 They can now easily get away with charging extra for it; if anyone does not like this policy, they can just state they are doing this to a) not be sued, b) because they are nice guys and want to give the consumer/competition a fair shake. 5 Further reducing piracy, all of these auto up dates &c are one of the most effective ways of geting poeple to buy software. But there are hacks out there to get auto updates anyway. Piracy will always be out there, M$ knows this, and doesnt really give a $hit about the hardcore pirates anyway--they are the group that will never pay. The casual pirate, however, that gets their corporate xp off kazaa, will be hung out to dry. Someone also posted some conspiracy idea about M$ also employing those who produce Virii. What you may call conspiracy is business as usual at M$. They can buy any virus creator on the planet, anytime they want. In fact they have a history of hiring those who caused them serious competition. There is nothing unethical about this, it is simple business practice; any company will want the best employees. This also happened with banking software, many hackers who were not very good criminals were caught stealing funds from banks. The banks offered non prosecution, and a decent salary for helping them prevent anymore such hacking. The previous "security experts" that were working for the bank became living history like Gary Coleman. What is different about M$ is the fact that they have an UNHEALTHY cash position. I dont know what it is at this moment, but a year ago their cash was at 48 BILLION. Now the scary part of this was that very smart finacial advisors told the company that this was bad--it was too much cash to just have lying around. I am not a very good financial advisor I suppose, because I would never tell anyone with 48 billion in cash lying around that they had a problem. I would call it a solution. The next question is how will it affect other anti-virus "experts". M$'s answer is simple business; we dont care. They are under no obligation to baby sit other companies, and the world is a harsh place. Being a corporation, they have a specific modus operandi; to do what is best for them. That is to expand their business, have a healthy bottom line, and protect themselves from attacks on various levels, both known and unpredictable. This is not immoral, but amoral. To put it in prespective, if M$ wanted to be percieved as a moral company they could use just their cashola to colonize Mars, invade/liberate Iraq, or even wipe out world hunger and employ very many subsidized farmers at the same time.
There is a serious flaw in this concept. Textbooks are a very big industry. They are expensive for a reason: a captive audience can't dictate prices. For anyone who has done undergrad, just look at the way students are fleeced for textbooks. Sure most universities have a used text book store/system to help recoop the cost of that book you will only use once. However the text book manufacturers also have a system to deal with this. Every couple of years (shorter in some cases) there is a "major revision" But if you look closely, there is really not very much new info on shakespeare, or stress strain curves, or the various branches of math, humanities, etc. What is different is that all the chapters are routinely scrambled, and much effort is made into putting the same info on very different pages. This does not make used texts obsolete, but it makes them unuseable. Another growing trend is professors self publishing (usually kinko's) what can be called "course kits". In these kits anything goes, public domain material, licenced material (usually obscure, and cheap to get), to the profs actually writing some thing themselves. At that level students are relatively helpless against these practices, and it is unlikeley that any institutions will give up such a cash cow and embrace public domain work. In fact there is often resistance to the use of works already in the public domain, by using the revision method for textbooks. On the other side of the tracks are elementary and secondary institutions. These are usually govt run, and can hire someone to write their books, or buy them on a large enough scale as to have fair prices with publishers. It is really too bad, since free, and public domain creativity will always benefit and strengthen any culture that allows it.
Many of the ppl quoted here are re-hashing ideas from THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE. One of the best statements in that book is about how media interacts with our senses. "the printed word is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, the integrated circuit (yes this was written in halcyon days when chips were called ic's) an extension of the central nervous system." Moving on to the idea of convergence, it is not possible in the way the article puts forth, as different types of media are generally hostile to one another. The alphabet destroyed the Homeridae, and the tradition of reciting epic poetry. A few thousand years later, television destroyed the printed word in a few short decades. Tapes destroyed the radio, while cd's destroyed tapes, and are being destroyed by mp3's etc.The internet may destroy television, or they may become one and the same. Jakob Nielsen's idea about chanels and networks dissappearing is quaint at best. Groups that have tons of money, create and control content, lobby governments, etc, will not be killed off easily. Is the implication that piracy, along with open source, and a free voice for everyone will somehow threaten large media and telcom players? I think that this struggle will continue, and is for the most part a healthy and neccessary one. Especially the idea about free open source software. It is not a spectre haunting software giants, as the article states, but holds the potential to spark a concept that has never really manifested itself in human history before. People working on a large scale, across political, and physical boudaries, for free, to help other people on a large scale, also for free. The focus of the article is on media content delivery vs hardware. But it is not realistic. The very competative hardware market has been known for many years now, and saying just wait until the greater asian co-prosperity sphere musters another assembly line is not really journalism--it is talking out of a different hole. What I found funny was the mindset of Macromedia Inc. 24 months from subsidised televsions? IN SOVIET RUSSIA THE TELEVISIONS WERE REALLY SUBSIDISED, or did they subsidize you, with a talking head platform? Does this mean all new tv's will now be free and have flash or real player on them? If so then Juha Christensen will become the true Shogun of the Dark. When ever someone writes about home convergence it is always about some sort of castle in the sky. The Japanese have their home robots, the western world has Pee-Wee Herman's automatic house. This is exactly the same kind of buzz generated when online sales became popular. The attitude was one of dire concern. What ever shall those "brick and mortar" establishments do now? They might as well close shop right away, since online sales will do them in. It is the same buzz when the first advertisements appeared on the internet. Many people automatically assumed that it was the end and that it would become like television. But things like google cannot exist without money. It is very simple how things worked out actually. Before anybody could own a dial up isp. But as more elaborate media began to find its way into the net, broadband became the only way to fly. Strange how those big, brick and mortar establishments ended up completely dominating the broadband isp market. When you look back at the development of tech, and digital hardware it really is not as fast as it could be. Intel goes on about "putting all their resources into ...", but their processors havent got that much faster in the past few years. Meanwhile the folks at amd have a new 64 bit chip out, but it also has no significant increase in speed.
Isp's put caps on speed, amount of data one can download/upload, have "lite" versions of their service, and many other revenue generating schemes.
Looking at things in this way, it seems that it is in the interest of the big players to stifle rapid development of technology, and focus on ways to get more out of existing technology.
This new digital age will not show up with a big bang; it will be a drawn out, muffled whimper from consumers as they have to sit through wave after wave of useless crap before any real technological development actually happens.
I have a general security question about open source software. I am not a programmer so bear with me if this is redundant. The idea I have is that open source would by nature be more vulnerable to viri, spywarez, etc because anyone can see the source code. wouldnt this be much easier for "evildoers" to take advantage of? obviously the argument that keeping source code secret makes it safer is a shaky one, kinda like to one about outlawing guns (then only outlaws will have em...) people are already finding tons of flaws in windsows, and M$ writing quality on the box doesnt seem to do much about this. and this is with little or no info on sourrce code. wouldnt this type of activity be much higher (if it is easier to do, more people will do it) with open source software? I think there are 2 reasons why linux virii are not a factor. 1 there are too few computers out there for anything to replicate itself. 2 more importantly, the linux crowd is a tech savvy one, keeping a regular eye on their machines, and if a problem is found they deal with it themselves. I see a big problem here with open source goin mainstream. even if open source became simple to install. ie fool proof gui, that said install, yes, no, back and next. sure more people would have it, but there will always be people that are not tech savvy. some of them may be very intelligent etc, but just do not have the time to worry about it. I know this is kinda off topic, but would be really interested to read what the /. crowd thinks about open source being more secure, and why.
no worries about this ever becoming useful. there have been many teeth transplants in hospital settings, usually from impacted wisdom teeth being removed and put in a gap. the success rate is very low, under 1 % i believe. take artificial implats, with a titanium bolt that is actually bio reactive (the titanium fuses with the bone for a stronger seal), and you have a 95% success rate. given the success of the artificial teeth, cloning of teeth will be used more to study cloning individual body parts more than dentistry.
relax. computing will not end, nor will good ol' piracy. There will always be hackers (bless them) who will take it upon themselves to prevent total control by the conglomerates.
there will always be a segment of society that will not pay for their bullshit, no matter what. M$ knows this. At a certain point fighting piracy is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
My guess is that janus is the new sucker format that M$ is using to get money out of dell, aol, etc. it will be cracked in no time. rule # 1: observable = copyable. soon this will mean non lossy copying through observation. rule # 2 any security can be broken.
M$ likes money. they will ony go so far in pissing off the consumer. if they cripple windows too much, then more people will either switch to another os, or get the pirated version of windows that can handle more "scenarios". this is a very real threat to windows. if the legit version is percieved as more limited than the pirated, then even the most average consumer will come to the conclusion that it is for suckers only.
as for drm pc's and boises, these can be flashed. the pc world is not goin anywhere near hell. thats what apple and macs are for. if a user wants to have their every move controlled, and pay way more than they should the answer is simple; buy a mac.
if you want to see piracy, just look at the game console world. here the company gets a huge head start. they get to use their own encryption, bois, etc. and to date every console that has ever come out has been hacked, cracked,, chipped, and copied.
M$ is talking out of their ass when they say they can get drm to work. how can they when they cant even prevent xbox from being hacked? but that wont stop them from taking billions in development fees from the media conglomerates. Yes M$ is very predatory, treating other big companies like imbeciles.
in the end, the content providers strategy of trying to gain controll, then fix prices will be their undoing. these concepts may have worked on people in the distant past, but with each new generation getting used to free, i dont see it holding out much longer.
and if you still think that people will be forced into this, then ill give you one last example to calm your fears. when was the last time you, or anyone else here logged into napster after they became not free? an image of a dried out ball of tumbleweed rolling across the new digital dustbowl that is napster, itunes, and any other pay site.
and to those that say pirating is stealing, allow me to present my rebuttal. (homer unzips, bends over...). software, media will alwas be free, because you can conjure it out of thin air. no its not magic, its technology. I have my copy, the wrecka stow still has their copy. unlike the wrecka stow copy, which is collecting dust, mine is being put to good use conjuring up new scenarios of use. now i suppose some people will try and argue the abstract concept of me robbing the record moguls of potential income--one less ivory backscratcher and all that. but if you look at the fact that I realize the prices are fixed, and that I never had any intention of giving them any money at all (that would only encourage them), i dont see the existence of any potential revenue. i'll even grant that the record label can charge what ever they want for their copy, as long as they dont presume that users are obliged to buy their copy. in the spirit of freedom, a buyer is also allowed to set their price(zero in this case). this is what is known as a free market, and it happens all the time in free countries.
lastly, what was M$ thinking with the name janus? i have never heard of a more ridiculous case of delusions of grandeur. note to microsoft: Quod licet Jovi, nod licet bovi.
What i find disturbing is the fact that people are actually getting paid (ie make work projects) to decide what words we can or cannot use. good thing bono is free from those chains. as far as the fcc goes; fuck the fucking fuckers.. (look up the history fot he word fuck on any p2p for a much better mp3 description of this.) and as far as tv bringing up chilldren, thats been trendy since Neil Postman's AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH. and to those worried about religious profanity, how can a rude word about a god given bodily function br profane? just read voltaire's dialogue betwen a jesuit and a brahmin. in it the brahmin says "everything in this universe is perfect, including your dissatisfaction with it." mebbe he meant the jesuit wasnt getting enough :P
there is the issue of bad faith. If you want to get into legal concepts this one should not be overlooked. most if not all of the ppl scanning, typing, proofing the texts did so pro bono, under the impression that they were making a very valuable contribution to society, and that it would be free and beneficial to all. there was always the caveat that free enterprise could try an generate revenue from these pd texts, and nobody saw anything inherently wrong with that. there have been many companies who have tried this. when the dust settled, they were buried under it. getting back to mr. Hart, it is highly unlikely that having started this project in 1971, he harboured the idea of tricking ppl into copying vast amounts of public domain texts, so he could profit some 30 years later Mr. hart has every right to engage in a commercial activity of this sort, since he has already given permission to anyone else to do so. The only time I would be considering bad faith on the part of the gutenberg team would be when tey stop offering free texts (there have always been many impoverished ppl who have benefitted from such help, and even went to to give soemthing back to society. It is a proud and noble tradition started by the athenians, when a citizen declared tey could not afford to pay to see a play, the state would pay it for them.) things like this strenghten any society greatly, and much of gutenberg's value would be lost if this was changed. it really would hurt more people than it helped.
I agree that it goes against all the hard work the PG crew has done over the years. to try and lock in something pppl have worked hard on to give away to improve humanity almost sounds like theft. But I have a good solution. here it is, i'd appreciate any comments, kudos, flames (puts on asbestos bodysuit) suggestions etc. the solution is to send your money to us instead. we have been folowing pg, and other pd libraries for some time. we are not doing this for any monetary gain (it doesnt take an mba to figure out you wont make much trying to sell what can be gotten for free.) You can easily make more flipping burgers, working IT, cobbling shoes etc. our product is the gutenberg files zipped on 2 cd's and sells for 20$. we take paypal, and the email addy is 8000books@mail.com. now you may ask why are we doing this. there are several reasons. 1 we want to spread computer literacy, as it has developed recently. in the past few decades there has been a lot of computer aided textual, literary, philosphic , theological analyses. tact is one ofthe more recent ones being done at u of t. this will only become more necessary. why did they have to say 10,000 books? no man can read 10,000 books... our goal is to make these public domain libraries as mainstream as possible. one way of doing this is putting it into a box and selling it thru retail. this has a 3 fold benefit. 1 it exposes pl to pc libraries nad all the really cool search, concordance and other functions that can be done with simple an free software out there. 2 a search cannot be done easily without having al of the books on your hd, cd etc. the free option is to download them all. this can take some time, even with broadband--believe me i tried it, and i'd rather pay 20$ than have to do that again. nobody who has bought the product to date has complained that they culd have gotten it for free by spending a few days dragin n dropping. 3 all of that downloading costs project gutenberg real money in bandwidth costs. 4 buy buying our cd, you not only save them this money, but will provide more money for them since we donate generated revenue. this in turn wil alllow then to release even more books. 5 sure it is a small difference, but it may grow to bea big one someday. thx for your time in reading this post and any response will be appreciated (ie money, kudos, sugestions, volunteering time, hell even flames and trolls. I wil try an answer everyone just hope nobody signs me up for any spam lists. sorry for putting an advertisement on this site, i kinda feel bad about it, but since its not for monetary gain, i felt it might be worthwhile. I wont be advertising anything else on this site, and only got this idea in my head cuz it was a thread about gutenberg, and wanted people to know about this little hobbly some friends and I are working on. btw i will send a free copy of the cd's to anyone who tells me what shnives means. by free i mean winners pay shipping, since if 200 ppl guess it , and its like 5 bucks per, that would tenderize the ol' wallet a bit too mcuh. those who win can choose any shipping method they want, and il give my addy to calculate the exact cost. ps please excuse they bad typing. got a broken finger and scaphoid, so cnat aim or time the keys as fast as im used to , dont want to go back to 2 finger typing. hope to hear from you soon :)