Several have mentioned a third possibility, that Microsoft is just not used to being unable to throw its weight around and get its captive audience for expounding on its special right to innovate that ordinary people like me can't have, and has gone home to pout.
So to speak.
I can think of a few other possibilities, such as planning to sue the EU for not allowing them their "day" in court.
If your analogy is not a fiction, my condolences about your father.
I have to wonder, is that crater where they mined the phosphate?
The no-browser, but a download button would at least draw more attention to the fact that there is such a thing as a web browser. That could be a small but significant change.
But, yeah, the best answer would be to require them to bundle several popular browsers: Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and maybe some of the less-well-known. I'm pretty sure they could come to reasonable agreements with the several companies on the bundling.
OEMs would be free to bundle what they want, and MS required to refrain from telling the OEMs which. My guess is that most OEMs would just bundle all the popular ones.
What I'd like to see, however, is the bundling of some special-purpose browsers, as well, browsers with limited functionality so that they would be safe to access bank accounts with. (And Microsoft restrained from producing such browsers.)
I see Macs on the train every now and then. About four in twenty at the office are Mac users when they get the chance.
I'm a full-time Mac user, myself. Almost. Every now and then, I boot my Mac under Redhat or openbsd to do something. I use that Mac on the train, and sometimes it's running Redhat when I'm on the train.
I'd use Redhat it on the train more, but I need to figure out the trackpad settings. At the office and at home, I can just hang a USB mouse on it.
There's the problem with the statistics -- how do you tell a "Linux user"? Not by the box he's using, by any means, as you say.
(And I'm not sure most people could tell from the screen side, either.)
I don't feel good about sending my bank account, passport, or insurance numbers to the office of the company I'm working for by e-mail because they run their office on Microsoft software.
You want to tell me again that MSWindows is manageable?
You really want to tell me again that MSWindows is manageable?
By a couple of women who can't afford to bring in an MSCEE or whatever every other week to update things and tweak all the settings? By the half-trained MSCEE they do bring in once or twice a year to help them clean up the mess Microsoft's junk leaves behind?
Salesmen like you should be locked up for a couple of months in a padded cell with nothing but a MSWindows box hanging naked on the net to play with, just to see how "manageable" it is.
As someone else points out, there are many ways of reading between the lines.
When risks hit certain points, you tend to re-consider even a "sure thing". Approximately USD 130,000 could feed my family for three or four years, easily.
If we are going to read between the lines, I'll offer this: He says there are other lawyers ready and willing to take over, if given the time (continuance). I'm guessing he's getting out of the way so a specialist can take over and make good and sure that the client gets her legal fees paid. (That's why she is pursuing the issue, remember.)
"Yeah, it's pretty scummy of RIAA, but [unsubstantiated speculation]."
The RIAA will say anything they can get away with. The war they are fighting is not just in the court rooms. They are trying to cow the public (us) into the desired behavior in spite of the fact that they haven't a legal leg to stand on.
Why would they object to a continuance if they really think they can win?
The guy who wrote this insane piece is at best a troll, most likely an expendable pawn.
The guys who want to tie down our "intellectual property" and use it, not just to take our money, but to control what we think, say, and do, are feeding us a decoy.
There are lots of options between (and outside of)
(1) We know this plane is safe and the reason for escorting it is entirely friendly.
and
(2) We know this plane is in the control of terrorists who are bent on taking down yet another tall building in New York.
Moreover, neither of those options is going to seem reasonable to me.
If there is a friendly plane and escort, why didn't I know about the air show?
Terrorists who knew what they were doing have done the running airplanes into towers trick once, and got the reaction they wanted (validation).
Even if terrorists take over a plane, the passengers now know it's war and they know they have no chance of surviving. When you know you're going to die anyway, you suddenly know that fear is useless, and fear is the only real weapon the terrorists have to control the passengers. The terrorists who know what they are doing know this.
Terrorists who don't understand this won't be able to organize another one of these.
That leaves a couple of options, and none of the options that come quickly to mind are comforting.
Maybe there is a plane with pilots who have been incapacitated?
Maybe a crew member has gone crazy?
In any of the cases that seem plausible, the fighter escorts are going to be focused on support or on warning more than on shooting. That means, if shooting down becomes the only option, it will be taken at the last moment.
Even for those of us who understand the physics, who ought to know, for instance, to look for another escort plane a mile back, ready to fire when the close-up escorts peel away, aren't going to necessarily decode the incident in the panic of the moment.
Clearly, the bureaucrats who failed to pass this on to the public fell down on the job.
There are good artists and good authors and there are bad artists and bad authors.
Some of the distinction is a matter of taste.
Some of the distinction is a matter of the viewer/listeners' interest, effort, whatnot.
Some of the distinction is a matter of the author/artist's effort.
I've noticed that the ones who are exclaiming the loudest about how the world owes them a living are the ones who tend most to crib from other people's work, tweak it a little, re-name a few things, and brag that they've made it better than the original. Or the ones who regurgitate random bits of lots of stuff that has made it big, without any real cohesion, purpose, design, or meaning. Or the ones who think that other people should be interested in their body functions just because they are.
One of the problems with both patents and copyright is the difficulty in determining just how much value a particular work or invention adds to what is already in the commons, determining how much work it took, determining how much of the work was real work (for some meaning of "real"), etc.
That's why we put a reasonably high, but not too high, limit of duration on the copyright and the patent -- a little benefit of the doubt, and not trying to make judges play critic.
And it's also part of the reason we define fair use, because we know that every producer of creative work is, to a very great extent, derivative. (We wouldn't have it any other way. If it is not connected to our world, how do relate to it? How do we figure out any good use to put it to?)
Without fair use, we are giving the creative type reason to believe that, just because he was especially creative at one point, he should get retroactive control over things his work derived from.
Without fair use, we are condemning the ethical creative types to wear out their lives trying to create something meaningful without stepping on other people's toes.
Another part of the reason we define fair use is that, without fair use, we could not recommend a work or a product without permission from the author/inventor. Think about that, then think about pirate bay again.
I don't think every instance of copying is morally defensible. Okay?
Copying against the wishes of the author/artist is generally not a moral activity.
But how are you going to get people to buy your software?
Every time I buy software without trying it first, I regret it. I do not tend to follow that purchase up with a purchase of the next version, or with more purchases from the same author.
I'm definitely not going to buy software I can't find.
If I were running something like TPB or google, I'd probably remove search results or links at the request of the author. But that would leave me with a problem -- how am I sure that the e-mail (or even snail mail) containing the take-down request really is from the author?
I'd say that if Sweden, or any government, wants to prevent sites like TPB from indexing everybody, they have a responsibility to provide some sort of index of authors, with a repository of public keys to check against.
You want to spend a month, an hour or two a day, putting random bits on 600 pages of dead tree and claim the right to a lifetime of residuals from the government.
Nobody writes in a vacuum.
Ten years may be too short for many kinds of creative works, but 70 years is way too long.
I personally would be less worried about a pub than about the software the members were working on and the hours they were putting in.
On the other hand, I suppose that, if I knew that I had a lot of members who might be tempted to backslide if they were working late and a pub was available, and if I had already not had any success on influencing the company to behave more morally towards the customers and employees, I might want to quietly discourage the pub, or push to have it changed to a soft-drink bar or something.
(Yeah, I know about that performance curve. If the performance curve were all there was to worry about, we wouldn't be so uptight about alcohol. One problem with that curve is maintaining the sweet spot when the sellers have a hidden interest in pushing the customer beyond the sweet spot, so to speak.)
But I'll tell you what, if I knew my local leaders had this kind of pull with Microsoft, I'd have been after them to put pressure on Microsoft to back down during the anti-monopoly suit ten years ago. And if I were a stake president in the area now, I'd be tempted to gently encourage the members who work for Microsoft to remember that they have certain moral responsibilities to do what they can to influence the company they work for to behave morally.
A problem with that is that many of the less experienced members would jump to the conclusion that I was requesting that the OS contain methods of forcibly preventing the user from downloading pornography or visiting gaming sites, or something similar. So, if I did so, I'd want to remind them that we respect the freedoms of the end-user, and I'd want to make sure they understood that it is just _my_ opinion, and not church doctrine, that a systems company should build systems designed to help the user avoid malware rather than designed to help them get infected.
So I guess I can't say that I really would, just that I'd be tempted to.
The problem with fingering the backside (:-/ Can't think of any really polite way to put that.) is that the index finger will mess up the gripping forces of the other fingers as it ranges around the device.
A trackball on the center of the back would avoid the ranging problem, although you then lose the ability to jump from one place on the screen to another. (My imagination is now telling me this is going to end up feeling like those stupid nipple-in-keyboard pointer devices that basically assume that the user will mostly navigate with command keys and use the pointer device every now and then to bump the pointer.)
Clicking is going to be awkward, even with a trackball in the center of the back.
Is "copyrighted trademarks" a legally meaningful term?
But, actually, the argument that Mormons can't be considered Christian may, indeed, derive from the same sort of motivations that induce some people to want to protect indirect use of their trademarks.
Which, if we assume that such use should usually not be protectable, would seem a little ironic, if a number of prominent "Mormon" politicians might be support this kind of legislation.
There was another UWB competing with the intel camp UWB, but intel was/is so bent on owning everybody's pipes that they squashed it even when the other UWB's backing vendor (Motorola/Freescale) essentially offered it royalty-free. My impression was that the other UWB was set up to avoid this kind of issue, although I might be wrong.
(I personally know a test engineer who worked on it, so it's second person data for me.)
Look around and open your eyes. But you have to look in the corners and shadows, too.
(Click the show more and read all the comments.)
My distaste for iNTEL comes from several sources, one is the lies they told about segmentation and about turing complete back in the 1980s. One recent one is what they did to UWB.
But you have to look really close, because their PR thugs are very good at locating the negative information and "cleaning" it up.
Ask yourself, what good will even the GPL do when iNTEL owns the tech behind all the pipes and pumps.
Look this gift horse in the mouth.
Or not. The fly in iNTEL's ointment is their processors. Shoot, they sold Marvell off, so the only thing they have is that segmentation-legacy-laden, energy-sucking x86. (Can't imagine what people see in 'core, other than the theory that, if everyone is crossing on the red light, it seems safer.)
The more-or-less serious comment first: that envelope should probably be sent registered mail.
Okay, now, how does one "return" a download? We know the bits are ephemeral, so a CD or DVD with the image burned on it would be a nice piece of sarcasm.
But I like sending the download printed at 300 BPI as a bitmap graphic. Monochrome would be the easiest to claim can be read at the other end, but grayscale or color would work, if the printout included a calibration header. (Let's see, how many pages is that going to be in monochrome? hmm. That could be a kind of fat envelope.)
e-mail the image back to them?
(The friend does know perl, right? Python, Ruby, whatever.)
Another possibility might be a request for a url that would accept the image as HTTP POST.
Gotta request that URL. If you just POST the thing to their on-line form without a warning, you're likely to be charged with an attempted DOS. Especially if you rent a bot-farm to make the POST. (No, I'm not encouraging this kind of behavior. Just for the record.)
(I'm trying to invent a protocol for returning digital images that will hold up in court. Heh.)
Slashdot Mirror
Several have mentioned a third possibility, that Microsoft is just not used to being unable to throw its weight around and get its captive audience for expounding on its special right to innovate that ordinary people like me can't have, and has gone home to pout.
So to speak.
I can think of a few other possibilities, such as planning to sue the EU for not allowing them their "day" in court.
If your analogy is not a fiction, my condolences about your father.
I have to wonder, is that crater where they mined the phosphate?
The no-browser, but a download button would at least draw more attention to the fact that there is such a thing as a web browser. That could be a small but significant change.
But, yeah, the best answer would be to require them to bundle several popular browsers: Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and maybe some of the less-well-known. I'm pretty sure they could come to reasonable agreements with the several companies on the bundling.
OEMs would be free to bundle what they want, and MS required to refrain from telling the OEMs which. My guess is that most OEMs would just bundle all the popular ones.
What I'd like to see, however, is the bundling of some special-purpose browsers, as well, browsers with limited functionality so that they would be safe to access bank accounts with. (And Microsoft restrained from producing such browsers.)
You loose your cow in the pasture to let her browse on the grass in a matter that is not detrimental to the pasture's ability to keep growing grass.
I see Macs on the train every now and then. About four in twenty at the office are Mac users when they get the chance.
I'm a full-time Mac user, myself. Almost. Every now and then, I boot my Mac under Redhat or openbsd to do something. I use that Mac on the train, and sometimes it's running Redhat when I'm on the train.
I'd use Redhat it on the train more, but I need to figure out the trackpad settings. At the office and at home, I can just hang a USB mouse on it.
There's the problem with the statistics -- how do you tell a "Linux user"? Not by the box he's using, by any means, as you say.
(And I'm not sure most people could tell from the screen side, either.)
I don't feel good about sending my bank account, passport, or insurance numbers to the office of the company I'm working for by e-mail because they run their office on Microsoft software.
You want to tell me again that MSWindows is manageable?
You really want to tell me again that MSWindows is manageable?
By a couple of women who can't afford to bring in an MSCEE or whatever every other week to update things and tweak all the settings? By the half-trained MSCEE they do bring in once or twice a year to help them clean up the mess Microsoft's junk leaves behind?
Salesmen like you should be locked up for a couple of months in a padded cell with nothing but a MSWindows box hanging naked on the net to play with, just to see how "manageable" it is.
bohemian.
Probabilities improve if she gets a lawyer who is a specialist.
As someone else points out, there are many ways of reading between the lines.
When risks hit certain points, you tend to re-consider even a "sure thing". Approximately USD 130,000 could feed my family for three or four years, easily.
If we are going to read between the lines, I'll offer this: He says there are other lawyers ready and willing to take over, if given the time (continuance). I'm guessing he's getting out of the way so a specialist can take over and make good and sure that the client gets her legal fees paid. (That's why she is pursuing the issue, remember.)
"Yeah, it's pretty scummy of RIAA, but [unsubstantiated speculation]."
The RIAA will say anything they can get away with. The war they are fighting is not just in the court rooms. They are trying to cow the public (us) into the desired behavior in spite of the fact that they haven't a legal leg to stand on.
Why would they object to a continuance if they really think they can win?
or is this entire thread essentially based on unsubstantiated speculation?
what are we talking about here?
Read the article, especially the second declaration.
-- especially the second declaration --
The lawyer says he has put in a lot of potentially effective gratis. He also indicates that he's stretched a little beyond his ability.
Also mentions that there are a number of lawyers ready and able to take over, if they can be given the time to prepare.
Ergo, he's tagging a partner.
Which is why the RIAA wants to object to a continuance.
checked at dictionary.com, and period has 18 definitions as a noun, 1 as an adjective, and 1 as an interjection.
I see no verb definitions, related to sisters or otherwise.
Has period become a verb on the streets or something?
Oh, yeah, note that interjection.
You guys are missing the point.
The guy who wrote this insane piece is at best a troll, most likely an expendable pawn.
The guys who want to tie down our "intellectual property" and use it, not just to take our money, but to control what we think, say, and do, are feeding us a decoy.
Watch the other hand.
You're thinking too much in binary terms.
There are lots of options between (and outside of)
(1) We know this plane is safe and the reason for escorting it is entirely friendly.
and
(2) We know this plane is in the control of terrorists who are bent on taking down yet another tall building in New York.
Moreover, neither of those options is going to seem reasonable to me.
If there is a friendly plane and escort, why didn't I know about the air show?
Terrorists who knew what they were doing have done the running airplanes into towers trick once, and got the reaction they wanted (validation).
Even if terrorists take over a plane, the passengers now know it's war and they know they have no chance of surviving. When you know you're going to die anyway, you suddenly know that fear is useless, and fear is the only real weapon the terrorists have to control the passengers. The terrorists who know what they are doing know this.
Terrorists who don't understand this won't be able to organize another one of these.
That leaves a couple of options, and none of the options that come quickly to mind are comforting.
Maybe there is a plane with pilots who have been incapacitated?
Maybe a crew member has gone crazy?
In any of the cases that seem plausible, the fighter escorts are going to be focused on support or on warning more than on shooting. That means, if shooting down becomes the only option, it will be taken at the last moment.
Even for those of us who understand the physics, who ought to know, for instance, to look for another escort plane a mile back, ready to fire when the close-up escorts peel away, aren't going to necessarily decode the incident in the panic of the moment.
Clearly, the bureaucrats who failed to pass this on to the public fell down on the job.
There are good artists and good authors and there are bad artists and bad authors.
Some of the distinction is a matter of taste.
Some of the distinction is a matter of the viewer/listeners' interest, effort, whatnot.
Some of the distinction is a matter of the author/artist's effort.
I've noticed that the ones who are exclaiming the loudest about how the world owes them a living are the ones who tend most to crib from other people's work, tweak it a little, re-name a few things, and brag that they've made it better than the original. Or the ones who regurgitate random bits of lots of stuff that has made it big, without any real cohesion, purpose, design, or meaning. Or the ones who think that other people should be interested in their body functions just because they are.
One of the problems with both patents and copyright is the difficulty in determining just how much value a particular work or invention adds to what is already in the commons, determining how much work it took, determining how much of the work was real work (for some meaning of "real"), etc.
That's why we put a reasonably high, but not too high, limit of duration on the copyright and the patent -- a little benefit of the doubt, and not trying to make judges play critic.
And it's also part of the reason we define fair use, because we know that every producer of creative work is, to a very great extent, derivative. (We wouldn't have it any other way. If it is not connected to our world, how do relate to it? How do we figure out any good use to put it to?)
Without fair use, we are giving the creative type reason to believe that, just because he was especially creative at one point, he should get retroactive control over things his work derived from.
Without fair use, we are condemning the ethical creative types to wear out their lives trying to create something meaningful without stepping on other people's toes.
Another part of the reason we define fair use is that, without fair use, we could not recommend a work or a product without permission from the author/inventor. Think about that, then think about pirate bay again.
I don't think every instance of copying is morally defensible. Okay?
Copying against the wishes of the author/artist is generally not a moral activity.
But how are you going to get people to buy your software?
Every time I buy software without trying it first, I regret it. I do not tend to follow that purchase up with a purchase of the next version, or with more purchases from the same author.
I'm definitely not going to buy software I can't find.
If I were running something like TPB or google, I'd probably remove search results or links at the request of the author. But that would leave me with a problem -- how am I sure that the e-mail (or even snail mail) containing the take-down request really is from the author?
I'd say that if Sweden, or any government, wants to prevent sites like TPB from indexing everybody, they have a responsibility to provide some sort of index of authors, with a repository of public keys to check against.
You want to spend a month, an hour or two a day, putting random bits on 600 pages of dead tree and claim the right to a lifetime of residuals from the government.
Nobody writes in a vacuum.
Ten years may be too short for many kinds of creative works, but 70 years is way too long.
I personally would be less worried about a pub than about the software the members were working on and the hours they were putting in.
On the other hand, I suppose that, if I knew that I had a lot of members who might be tempted to backslide if they were working late and a pub was available, and if I had already not had any success on influencing the company to behave more morally towards the customers and employees, I might want to quietly discourage the pub, or push to have it changed to a soft-drink bar or something.
(Yeah, I know about that performance curve. If the performance curve were all there was to worry about, we wouldn't be so uptight about alcohol. One problem with that curve is maintaining the sweet spot when the sellers have a hidden interest in pushing the customer beyond the sweet spot, so to speak.)
But I'll tell you what, if I knew my local leaders had this kind of pull with Microsoft, I'd have been after them to put pressure on Microsoft to back down during the anti-monopoly suit ten years ago. And if I were a stake president in the area now, I'd be tempted to gently encourage the members who work for Microsoft to remember that they have certain moral responsibilities to do what they can to influence the company they work for to behave morally.
A problem with that is that many of the less experienced members would jump to the conclusion that I was requesting that the OS contain methods of forcibly preventing the user from downloading pornography or visiting gaming sites, or something similar. So, if I did so, I'd want to remind them that we respect the freedoms of the end-user, and I'd want to make sure they understood that it is just _my_ opinion, and not church doctrine, that a systems company should build systems designed to help the user avoid malware rather than designed to help them get infected.
So I guess I can't say that I really would, just that I'd be tempted to.
I'm still working this over in my mind ...
The problem with fingering the backside (:-/ Can't think of any really polite way to put that.) is that the index finger will mess up the gripping forces of the other fingers as it ranges around the device.
A trackball on the center of the back would avoid the ranging problem, although you then lose the ability to jump from one place on the screen to another. (My imagination is now telling me this is going to end up feeling like those stupid nipple-in-keyboard pointer devices that basically assume that the user will mostly navigate with command keys and use the pointer device every now and then to bump the pointer.)
Clicking is going to be awkward, even with a trackball in the center of the back.
Is "copyrighted trademarks" a legally meaningful term?
But, actually, the argument that Mormons can't be considered Christian may, indeed, derive from the same sort of motivations that induce some people to want to protect indirect use of their trademarks.
Which, if we assume that such use should usually not be protectable, would seem a little ironic, if a number of prominent "Mormon" politicians might be support this kind of legislation.
What is bigoted about adding a "mormon" tag when over 80% of the Utah state legislature are members of the LDS church?
Link, please? Quote? Cite?
There was another UWB competing with the intel camp UWB, but intel was/is so bent on owning everybody's pipes that they squashed it even when the other UWB's backing vendor (Motorola/Freescale) essentially offered it royalty-free. My impression was that the other UWB was set up to avoid this kind of issue, although I might be wrong.
(I personally know a test engineer who worked on it, so it's second person data for me.)
Look around and open your eyes. But you have to look in the corners and shadows, too.
(Click the show more and read all the comments.)
My distaste for iNTEL comes from several sources, one is the lies they told about segmentation and about turing complete back in the 1980s. One recent one is what they did to UWB.
But you have to look really close, because their PR thugs are very good at locating the negative information and "cleaning" it up.
Ask yourself, what good will even the GPL do when iNTEL owns the tech behind all the pipes and pumps.
Look this gift horse in the mouth.
Or not. The fly in iNTEL's ointment is their processors. Shoot, they sold Marvell off, so the only thing they have is that segmentation-legacy-laden, energy-sucking x86. (Can't imagine what people see in 'core, other than the theory that, if everyone is crossing on the red light, it seems safer.)
The more-or-less serious comment first: that envelope should probably be sent registered mail.
Okay, now, how does one "return" a download? We know the bits are ephemeral, so a CD or DVD with the image burned on it would be a nice piece of sarcasm.
But I like sending the download printed at 300 BPI as a bitmap graphic. Monochrome would be the easiest to claim can be read at the other end, but grayscale or color would work, if the printout included a calibration header. (Let's see, how many pages is that going to be in monochrome? hmm. That could be a kind of fat envelope.)
e-mail the image back to them?
(The friend does know perl, right? Python, Ruby, whatever.)
Another possibility might be a request for a url that would accept the image as HTTP POST.
Gotta request that URL. If you just POST the thing to their on-line form without a warning, you're likely to be charged with an attempted DOS. Especially if you rent a bot-farm to make the POST. (No, I'm not encouraging this kind of behavior. Just for the record.)
(I'm trying to invent a protocol for returning digital images that will hold up in court. Heh.)