"Agreed, patents aren't really a bad idea in theory..."
Uhh, yes they are!
(Q) What's the best approach to help society develop a new technology?
(A) Make sure that only one person is working on it!
Genius.
Even better in software, where you can patent the process of attaching a client to a server, and prevent the other 99% of industry from doing their jobs.
How can a newspaper setup an IT system that completely hides every trace (including emails, phone calls notes, logs and so forth) of an anonymous source's identity?"
(a) Make the whole frigging website accessible by HTTPS. That way, someone looks like they're reading the news, so far as a network sniffer is concerned.
(b) Stop requiring people to register their full name, age, occupation, and list of health problems before reading your website. Somehow, I think the New York Times missed this lesson.
(c) Stop logging. By which I mean, your website doesn't set cookies and apache doesn't log IP addresses. You don't get the "average length of visit" on your web stats, but who cares anyway?!?
(d) Allow feedback. Someone wants to comment on a story, they will. You might call them an anonymous whistleblower, but it's just comments on a story, so far as your website is concerned.
(c2) Check your ISP. Check their 'we'll squeal without prompting' policy. Then move your website to XS4ALL.
Just serve a different stylesheet to IE7 users, which makes the text overlap the edge of their window or something... people won't flame you for it, they'll just think their web browser is broken.
"The people who are saying the one button mouse has merits are considering grandma and grandpa, who had to practice to learn to double click."
To be fair, those people will have all sorts of problems in Mac OS X, where no two buttons require the same sort of mouse-click.
For example, single-click to go into a folder in system preferences, but double-click to go into a folder in Finder.
They'll love learning to click-and-hold to get any context menus, or apple-click (much more intuitive than a second button, if you're an EMACS user...)
X11 applications are the best - click twice on GIMP's toolbox to select a tool, then click twice on the image to use that tool...
Oh, and don't expect alt-tab (apple-tab) to work consistantly -- if the window you want is too similar to the one you're using, it becomes apple-backtick.
"They've always had Opera and the version in the useragent string - they just have the MSIE bit in there as well."
We just have to hope that Opera doesn't become popular, otherwise you'll have to have "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible, MSIE 7) (Opera) TheActualBrowserName" in a user-agent to get pages served to you...
"There was a case in the Netherlands where a state prosecutor just put his personal pc at the trash when it didn't work anymore due to spyware:"
Does it even matter who found the PC? The information on it was already available to the spyware authors, who might be even more interested than taxi drivers in government confidential files
"We simply tell our clients (who are all windows users anyway) to use IE. Not giving further choice means less headache for us when it comes to supporting our product."
And these IE-using users don't give you any headaches when the latest malware, viruses, etc. do the rounds?
"I wish I was just being cynical, but at this point the stubborness of the *IAA to fight pirates is really disheartening."
While the internet music revolution will make a lot more money than was previously available, it won't be making money for their members, who have pretty unanimously shunned internet music, either by taking legal action against everyone involved in it, or by ignoring it, or by "embracing it" and putting up a website of DRM-encrusted crap.
The people making all this new money are going to be computer companies, new startups, and other entrepreneurs. It's not the money they're worried about, it's losing their control of the music industry. For them, it's not about having lots of new competitors, it's about people being able to obtain music without their permission.
As you rightly point out, the way they're going about it at the moment is by trying to destroy the music industry in the hope that it will keep the "16 million CDs from a hit artist" model going for a few months longer. If they can't have the industry to themselves, they'd rather kill it than share it.
Which is a pity. Personally, I'm not buying any music which isn't in MP3 format and redistributable, which limits the options somewhat. But better that than spending money on a WMA or AAC file which will suddenly stop working one day when the record company decides to stop giving you permission to use it. (In fact I couldn't use those filetypes anyway, as I use my MP3 player for everything..)
"I mean, we have MS losing money on a pirated copy of windows."
Yeah, apparently all these copies of windows are 'stolen', which means that Microsoft had to manufacture the CDs, package them, and mail them out to the pirates...
Seriously, if a software company claims that they're losing money to copyright infringement, shouldn't that show up as a loss on their accounts?
"It's kind of like someone stealing a car from the lot of a dealership, then taking it back a few months later for it's customary 3,000 mile oil change."
In fact, even more similar, as cars are the only other consumer product I can think of that continually require you to present proof of purchase (in this case, car keys) before allowing you to use the product.
"I for one would go out and finally buy an HD TV and subscribe to a channel that consisted solely of Earth views from an HD-capable camera placed in orbit permanently."
Would that look significantly different from an xplanet image kept updated with the latest cloud pictures?
"$178 billion a year to web surfing in the workplace"
OK, I'm a technical guy. Let's pretend I'm one of those people who read websites for 3.4 hours per week, thus ruining the economy.
Your CEO gets paid 100 times your salary, plus the golden handshake, plus the share options. And produces no code, and sells to no customers, and designs no products. And spends most of his time "working from home" (i.e. slacking), and is accountable to noone.
So surely, the presence of CEOs must cost 17 trillion to the economy, even assuming that they do the job they were hired to do? If we're going to talk about wasting money, we should start by looking at who's wasting the most money...
"You're telling me we should let riots roam unchecked because you can't separate the actual rioters from innocent bystanders? That's silly. Riots are dangerous and cause all kinds of property damage (owners of that property are the real victims) and must be stopped."
The police's response to riots causes all sorts of physiological damage, to real people. Are you saying that's less important than protecting property?
Yes, often enough that I'd like to start experimenting with parabolic placards...
The interesting thing is, that if you were to expose police officers to concentrated microwave radiation, then that would probably be considered unlawful. Even if you're trying to break up a group of policemen who are "violent antisocial youths" attacking a bystander.
There don't seem to be any reservations about pointing the weapon in the other direction though...
"Just looking at my website statistics from people coming to my website via slashdot.org, I actually have a large number at the beginning of the workday, and towards the end, but during the day, it looks like most people stay pretty productive..."
Looking at my website, I see a large number of hits during the american evening, then a tail-off during the pacific evening, not much during the asian evening, then another peak when the europeans leave work...
It's interesting to see the two different ways of viewing time-domain statistics...
"Companies telling me that they cannot process an order without my telephone number, companies telling their employees that they must take a telephone number down for pickup orders placed over the phone, and requiring a phone number to ship a package."
Companies telling you they can't register a domain without publishing your name, address, and phone number on the internet
Oh, and don't tell Microsoft, because they're applying for a patent on the IsNot() comparaison which does the same thing, but was invented afterwards...
"Isn't if(false!==strpos( the same as if(strpos(. If something is not false, it must be true, right?!"
Strpos returns the position at which the text is found. If the string is found at the first (0th) character, strpos returns 0
If the string is not found, strpos returns false
You can test whether something is the same type and value by using the 3-character comparaisons === and !==. 0 is an integer, and false is a boolean, which means that they're not equivalent. 0==false, but 0!==false.
See comparisons, and note that this only applies to PHP4 and later.
"Only the Windows Windows Media Player can play files encoded with some flavors of digital restrictions management. If the major online CD stores that ship to your country all use one of these flavors for their 30 second previews, then you have to purchase an Intel machine and purchase and install a copy of Microsoft Windows in order to play such previews."
Well according to the WMP/MacOS X site, it does actually support DRM, and worryingly, lists this as a "feature". Which means that I could use it to preview music at Amazon.
However, Windows Media Player was designed from the ground-up to ensure that I can't do anything with it which isn't specifically permitted by the record company. If they want to decide that I'm only allowed to play a song 3 times and that it requests permission from a certain website each time I do so, that's what Windows Media Player does.
In comparaison to this, every Free Software application I know does exactly what I tell it to, which is why I got the whole Linux system in the first place. I don't want some fancy 'internet kiosk', where I'm permitted to do thing by the leave of my landlord^W^W^W my content provider.
There used to be lots of bands who would allow you to download their songs, free of charge, in MP3 format, and trust that if you liked them that you'd buy it. In software terms, that's like what shareware used to be before it turned into crippleware and spyware. Surprisingly, I bought a lot of those albums, because I already knew I liked them. It's like radio (which is funded to the tune of $ridiculous by the record companies because they know people buy stuff they've previewed)
You wouldn't buy a game that you hadn't played the preview. You wouldn't buy an artwork based on somebody's description of it. And you wouldn't buy music without having heard it.
So why try to gain complete control of my computer before allowing it to play music? People get put in prison for maliciously gaining that level of access to someone else's computer.
"[sarcasm]Be my guest. Live without TV. Live without movies. Live without music."
I tried to buy a CD today, from an artist I'd never heard of before, and wanted to listen to a preview to see if it was any good.
Amazon, ArtistsDirect, SuperGRecords, JR, Barnes and Noble, and Global Groove, were all exactly the same: You could install RealPlayer, or you could install Windows Media Player.
The worst part is that theoretically, both of those products are available for my computers, if I wanted to have malicious software running on my machine. Windows Media Player is available for the Mac, and RealPlayer is available for Linux.
Thanks, I'll pass. Yet another year goes by where I buy no music. All I want is to be sure the music is good before I buy it. MP3.com seemed to manage this perfectly well, so why is it impossible now?
Slashdot Mirror
"Agreed, patents aren't really a bad idea in theory..."
Uhh, yes they are!
(Q) What's the best approach to help society develop a new technology?
(A) Make sure that only one person is working on it!
Genius.
Even better in software, where you can patent the process of attaching a client to a server, and prevent the other 99% of industry from doing their jobs.
How can a newspaper setup an IT system that completely hides every trace (including emails, phone calls notes, logs and so forth) of an anonymous source's identity?"
(a) Make the whole frigging website accessible by HTTPS. That way, someone looks like they're reading the news, so far as a network sniffer is concerned.
(b) Stop requiring people to register their full name, age, occupation, and list of health problems before reading your website. Somehow, I think the New York Times missed this lesson.
(c) Stop logging. By which I mean, your website doesn't set cookies and apache doesn't log IP addresses. You don't get the "average length of visit" on your web stats, but who cares anyway?!?
(d) Allow feedback. Someone wants to comment on a story, they will. You might call them an anonymous whistleblower, but it's just comments on a story, so far as your website is concerned.
(c2) Check your ISP. Check their 'we'll squeal without prompting' policy. Then move your website to XS4ALL.
Just serve a different stylesheet to IE7 users, which makes the text overlap the edge of their window or something... people won't flame you for it, they'll just think their web browser is broken.
"The people who are saying the one button mouse has merits are considering grandma and grandpa, who had to practice to learn to double click."
To be fair, those people will have all sorts of problems in Mac OS X, where no two buttons require the same sort of mouse-click.
For example, single-click to go into a folder in system preferences, but double-click to go into a folder in Finder.
They'll love learning to click-and-hold to get any context menus, or apple-click (much more intuitive than a second button, if you're an EMACS user...)
X11 applications are the best - click twice on GIMP's toolbox to select a tool, then click twice on the image to use that tool...
Oh, and don't expect alt-tab (apple-tab) to work consistantly -- if the window you want is too similar to the one you're using, it becomes apple-backtick.
"They've always had Opera and the version in the useragent string - they just have the MSIE bit in there as well."
We just have to hope that Opera doesn't become popular, otherwise you'll have to have "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible, MSIE 7) (Opera) TheActualBrowserName" in a user-agent to get pages served to you...
"There was a case in the Netherlands where a state prosecutor just put his personal pc at the trash when it didn't work anymore due to spyware:"
Does it even matter who found the PC? The information on it was already available to the spyware authors, who might be even more interested than taxi drivers in government confidential files
"This sounds like a business directory, only online. How the hell could you patent something like this?"
No, it sounds like a pricelist. $0.01 per use for maps? Patent approved!
It's not even holiday season is it? Who's Amazon trying to kill today to maintain their market position?
"So when is Database Administrator Appreciation Day?"
Uhh, every time they get paid $500 for a day's work?
"We simply tell our clients (who are all windows users anyway) to use IE. Not giving further choice means less headache for us when it comes to supporting our product."
And these IE-using users don't give you any headaches when the latest malware, viruses, etc. do the rounds?
"I wish I was just being cynical, but at this point the stubborness of the *IAA to fight pirates is really disheartening."
While the internet music revolution will make a lot more money than was previously available, it won't be making money for their members, who have pretty unanimously shunned internet music, either by taking legal action against everyone involved in it, or by ignoring it, or by "embracing it" and putting up a website of DRM-encrusted crap.
The people making all this new money are going to be computer companies, new startups, and other entrepreneurs. It's not the money they're worried about, it's losing their control of the music industry. For them, it's not about having lots of new competitors, it's about people being able to obtain music without their permission.
As you rightly point out, the way they're going about it at the moment is by trying to destroy the music industry in the hope that it will keep the "16 million CDs from a hit artist" model going for a few months longer. If they can't have the industry to themselves, they'd rather kill it than share it.
Which is a pity. Personally, I'm not buying any music which isn't in MP3 format and redistributable, which limits the options somewhat. But better that than spending money on a WMA or AAC file which will suddenly stop working one day when the record company decides to stop giving you permission to use it. (In fact I couldn't use those filetypes anyway, as I use my MP3 player for everything..)
"Don't you love Apple URLs?"
Not really. Try referring someone to the iPod store for example...
(that link will expire in a few hours, b.t.w., so I can't even bookmark it)
"I mean, we have MS losing money on a pirated copy of windows."
Yeah, apparently all these copies of windows are 'stolen', which means that Microsoft had to manufacture the CDs, package them, and mail them out to the pirates...
Seriously, if a software company claims that they're losing money to copyright infringement, shouldn't that show up as a loss on their accounts?
"It's kind of like someone stealing a car from the lot of a dealership, then taking it back a few months later for it's customary 3,000 mile oil change."
In fact, even more similar, as cars are the only other consumer product I can think of that continually require you to present proof of purchase (in this case, car keys) before allowing you to use the product.
"300 people using the same single user registration key/serial number is a pretty damn good indication."
Technically, that only proves that they're entered the same unlock-code, not that they don't have a valid license.
"I for one would go out and finally buy an HD TV and subscribe to a channel that consisted solely of Earth views from an HD-capable camera placed in orbit permanently."
Would that look significantly different from an xplanet image kept updated with the latest cloud pictures?
"$178 billion a year to web surfing in the workplace"
OK, I'm a technical guy. Let's pretend I'm one of those people who read websites for 3.4 hours per week, thus ruining the economy.
Your CEO gets paid 100 times your salary, plus the golden handshake, plus the share options. And produces no code, and sells to no customers, and designs no products. And spends most of his time "working from home" (i.e. slacking), and is accountable to noone.
So surely, the presence of CEOs must cost 17 trillion to the economy, even assuming that they do the job they were hired to do? If we're going to talk about wasting money, we should start by looking at who's wasting the most money...
"You're telling me we should let riots roam unchecked because you can't separate the actual rioters from innocent bystanders? That's silly. Riots are dangerous and cause all kinds of property damage (owners of that property are the real victims) and must be stopped."
The police's response to riots causes all sorts of physiological damage, to real people. Are you saying that's less important than protecting property?
"Did you ever put tinfoil in the microwave?"
Yes, often enough that I'd like to start experimenting with parabolic placards...
The interesting thing is, that if you were to expose police officers to concentrated microwave radiation, then that would probably be considered unlawful. Even if you're trying to break up a group of policemen who are "violent antisocial youths" attacking a bystander.
There don't seem to be any reservations about pointing the weapon in the other direction though...
"Just looking at my website statistics from people coming to my website via slashdot.org, I actually have a large number at the beginning of the workday, and towards the end, but during the day, it looks like most people stay pretty productive..."
Looking at my website, I see a large number of hits during the american evening, then a tail-off during the pacific evening, not much during the asian evening, then another peak when the europeans leave work...
It's interesting to see the two different ways of viewing time-domain statistics...
"Companies telling me that they cannot process an order without my telephone number, companies telling their employees that they must take a telephone number down for pickup orders placed over the phone, and requiring a phone number to ship a package."
Companies telling you they can't register a domain without publishing your name, address, and phone number on the internet
Oh, and don't tell Microsoft, because they're applying for a patent on the IsNot() comparaison which does the same thing, but was invented afterwards...
"Isn't if(false!==strpos( the same as if(strpos(. If something is not false, it must be true, right?!"
Strpos returns the position at which the text is found. If the string is found at the first (0th) character, strpos returns 0
If the string is not found, strpos returns false
You can test whether something is the same type and value by using the 3-character comparaisons === and !==. 0 is an integer, and false is a boolean, which means that they're not equivalent. 0==false, but 0!==false.
See comparisons, and note that this only applies to PHP4 and later.
"Only the Windows Windows Media Player can play files encoded with some flavors of digital restrictions management. If the major online CD stores that ship to your country all use one of these flavors for their 30 second previews, then you have to purchase an Intel machine and purchase and install a copy of Microsoft Windows in order to play such previews."
/MacOS X site, it does actually support DRM, and worryingly, lists this as a "feature". Which means that I could use it to preview music at Amazon.
Well according to the WMP
However, Windows Media Player was designed from the ground-up to ensure that I can't do anything with it which isn't specifically permitted by the record company. If they want to decide that I'm only allowed to play a song 3 times and that it requests permission from a certain website each time I do so, that's what Windows Media Player does.
In comparaison to this, every Free Software application I know does exactly what I tell it to, which is why I got the whole Linux system in the first place. I don't want some fancy 'internet kiosk', where I'm permitted to do thing by the leave of my landlord^W^W^W my content provider.
There used to be lots of bands who would allow you to download their songs, free of charge, in MP3 format, and trust that if you liked them that you'd buy it. In software terms, that's like what shareware used to be before it turned into crippleware and spyware. Surprisingly, I bought a lot of those albums, because I already knew I liked them. It's like radio (which is funded to the tune of $ridiculous by the record companies because they know people buy stuff they've previewed)
You wouldn't buy a game that you hadn't played the preview. You wouldn't buy an artwork based on somebody's description of it. And you wouldn't buy music without having heard it.
So why try to gain complete control of my computer before allowing it to play music? People get put in prison for maliciously gaining that level of access to someone else's computer.
"[sarcasm]Be my guest. Live without TV. Live without movies. Live without music."
I tried to buy a CD today, from an artist I'd never heard of before, and wanted to listen to a preview to see if it was any good.
Amazon, ArtistsDirect, SuperGRecords, JR, Barnes and Noble, and Global Groove, were all exactly the same: You could install RealPlayer, or you could install Windows Media Player.
The worst part is that theoretically, both of those products are available for my computers, if I wanted to have malicious software running on my machine. Windows Media Player is available for the Mac, and RealPlayer is available for Linux.
Thanks, I'll pass. Yet another year goes by where I buy no music. All I want is to be sure the music is good before I buy it. MP3.com seemed to manage this perfectly well, so why is it impossible now?