"Remember to take all packages and property with you when you leave the boat. Please make sure you also take your children. Because if you don't want them, then we don't want them either... For many of the same reasons."
"Any children left behind at the end of the day become property of Walt Disney World Incorporated. At which time we take them over to the It's A Small World pavilion , staple their feet to the floor and teach them that awful little song in forty-two different languages. I myself used to be the hula-girl"
- Boat operator on the Jungle Safari Cruise at Disney World Magic Kingdom, Spring 1996.
So SCO accuses IBM of copying SCO's source code into Linux. Then delays claiming that IBM hasn't given the source code over for examination. This is what happened, isn't it?
SCO obviously already has their own code. The Linux code is open source and freely available all over the net. So how can SCO credibly make such a claim?
Why, through lawyers of course.
God! We are so in need of tort reform.
$400,000,000,000 spent every year on their gigantic military machine
Well, the U.S. used to spend next to nothing on its military, but then Europe came to the U.S. twice in a quarter century, hat in hand, begging for help when they didn't have the sense(WW I) or the balls (WW II) to take care of problems in their own countries. Given the increasingly global reach of any potential enemy, isolationism was no longer an option for the U.S.
Feel free to flame away about the U.S. some more and choke on the bitter dregs of your sour grapes.
As a general rule, mantraps are illegal and expose you to civil liability as well. As I recall the landmark case was a property owner who set up a shotgun to kneecap anyone who triggered the trap.
Here in South Carolina the word from the top prosecutor in the state is, if someone breaks into your home then shoot them dead. You will not be prosecuted.
A Local, long time, hobby/game/comic store owner caught someone breaking into his neighbor's home one day (a common occurance at the time) and sliced his butt open with a katana as the thief's rear was hanging out a window. The police took the attitude that the guy had it coming. That was the last time anyone tried to steal from the old lady next door. I guess the story of the crazed, katana wielding, half naked hippie was enough to keep everyone away after that.
I haven't been following this thing religiously, but am I to understand that SCO still hasn't ponied up any evidence in the way of source code to show where code was copied?
If so this would be a rather long time the judge let the case go on without SCO replying to IBM's discovery attempts.
To reply:
1) I didn't know that, but I'm sceptical that the chips used in console games were the expensive variety.
2) I could accept this argument if not for the fact that no new CD manufacturing facilities were needed. Music CDs were nothing new at the time so production facilities, where the high cost of retooling would come from, already existed. Music CDs are just another form of data to be imprinted. I can think of no technological leap in the production of a consumer product that resulted in such a massive jump in price. We are talking about a seventy-five percent plus jump in price here, that's just plain ridiculous.
As an example, people lose fingers and whole hands to table saws every year. A couple of years ago a company developed a method of detecting when someone has touched the blade of an operating saw and stopping the saw so fast that usually no blood would be drawn. As yet no major manufacturer has included this technology on their machines becuase they felt that a price increase of five to twenty percent(the approximate price increase would have been $100.00) would cause lower sales.
This makes a seventy odd percent increase in price look much less like a reasonable recoupment on new technology and much more like blind greed.
3) You are correct, but the average price of games today is still ten to fifteen dollars short of the initial boost that occurred ten years ago.
I still believe the massive increase in prices at the time was driven not by production costs, but by a business model of "squeezem' for all we can, since they have no alternative."
The real cost of piracy is not higher prices as we are told by MPAA, RIAA etc. It is lower prices.
I'm not advocating piracy here, but drawing a logical conclusion from experience.
Several years ago PC games were all on floppy disks and could easily be copied. At that time the average price for a PC game was about $35.00. At the same time the average price for a game console cartridge (difficult to copy EPROM chips) was nearly $70.00.
In a about a three month span of time almost all games for the PC were made available only on CD-ROM. At the same time the average price for a PC game jumped to $60.00 and more. Quite a coincidence there isn't it? But I'm not done yet.
When this happened CD burning was expensive and error prone. I don't think there were any non-SCSI interface burners out there and burners were expensive to purchase and not very easy to use. Over the next year the total cost of aquiring and using a CD burner dropped like a rock. Once the burner prices dropped below four or five hundred dollars, the price for PC games began dropping as well. This is more than just a coincidence.
This little sequence of events in the real world tells me that as soon as the producers of content think they have an impossible to copy medium(or nearly so), they will jack the price up through the roof.
Kind of like the Laffer curve. The higher the financial burden, the more the consumer will seek a way to avoid paying it. You want to curb piracy, improve value by dropping prices and stop producing crap for content (especially the record industry).
Slashdot Mirror
"Remember to take all packages and property with you when you leave the boat. Please make sure you also take your children. Because if you don't want them, then we don't want them either... For many of the same reasons."
"Any children left behind at the end of the day become property of Walt Disney World Incorporated. At which time we take them over to the It's A Small World pavilion , staple their feet to the floor and teach them that awful little song in forty-two different languages. I myself used to be the hula-girl"
- Boat operator on the Jungle Safari Cruise at Disney World Magic Kingdom, Spring 1996.
So SCO accuses IBM of copying SCO's source code into Linux. Then delays claiming that IBM hasn't given the source code over for examination. This is what happened, isn't it? SCO obviously already has their own code. The Linux code is open source and freely available all over the net. So how can SCO credibly make such a claim? Why, through lawyers of course. God! We are so in need of tort reform.
Well, the U.S. used to spend next to nothing on its military, but then Europe came to the U.S. twice in a quarter century, hat in hand, begging for help when they didn't have the sense(WW I) or the balls (WW II) to take care of problems in their own countries. Given the increasingly global reach of any potential enemy, isolationism was no longer an option for the U.S.
Feel free to flame away about the U.S. some more and choke on the bitter dregs of your sour grapes.
As a general rule, mantraps are illegal and expose you to civil liability as well. As I recall the landmark case was a property owner who set up a shotgun to kneecap anyone who triggered the trap.
Here in South Carolina the word from the top prosecutor in the state is, if someone breaks into your home then shoot them dead. You will not be prosecuted.
A Local, long time, hobby/game/comic store owner caught someone breaking into his neighbor's home one day (a common occurance at the time) and sliced his butt open with a katana as the thief's rear was hanging out a window. The police took the attitude that the guy had it coming. That was the last time anyone tried to steal from the old lady next door. I guess the story of the crazed, katana wielding, half naked hippie was enough to keep everyone away after that.
I haven't been following this thing religiously, but am I to understand that SCO still hasn't ponied up any evidence in the way of source code to show where code was copied? If so this would be a rather long time the judge let the case go on without SCO replying to IBM's discovery attempts.
To reply: 1) I didn't know that, but I'm sceptical that the chips used in console games were the expensive variety. 2) I could accept this argument if not for the fact that no new CD manufacturing facilities were needed. Music CDs were nothing new at the time so production facilities, where the high cost of retooling would come from, already existed. Music CDs are just another form of data to be imprinted. I can think of no technological leap in the production of a consumer product that resulted in such a massive jump in price. We are talking about a seventy-five percent plus jump in price here, that's just plain ridiculous. As an example, people lose fingers and whole hands to table saws every year. A couple of years ago a company developed a method of detecting when someone has touched the blade of an operating saw and stopping the saw so fast that usually no blood would be drawn. As yet no major manufacturer has included this technology on their machines becuase they felt that a price increase of five to twenty percent(the approximate price increase would have been $100.00) would cause lower sales. This makes a seventy odd percent increase in price look much less like a reasonable recoupment on new technology and much more like blind greed. 3) You are correct, but the average price of games today is still ten to fifteen dollars short of the initial boost that occurred ten years ago. I still believe the massive increase in prices at the time was driven not by production costs, but by a business model of "squeezem' for all we can, since they have no alternative."
The real cost of piracy is not higher prices as we are told by MPAA, RIAA etc. It is lower prices. I'm not advocating piracy here, but drawing a logical conclusion from experience. Several years ago PC games were all on floppy disks and could easily be copied. At that time the average price for a PC game was about $35.00. At the same time the average price for a game console cartridge (difficult to copy EPROM chips) was nearly $70.00. In a about a three month span of time almost all games for the PC were made available only on CD-ROM. At the same time the average price for a PC game jumped to $60.00 and more. Quite a coincidence there isn't it? But I'm not done yet. When this happened CD burning was expensive and error prone. I don't think there were any non-SCSI interface burners out there and burners were expensive to purchase and not very easy to use. Over the next year the total cost of aquiring and using a CD burner dropped like a rock. Once the burner prices dropped below four or five hundred dollars, the price for PC games began dropping as well. This is more than just a coincidence. This little sequence of events in the real world tells me that as soon as the producers of content think they have an impossible to copy medium(or nearly so), they will jack the price up through the roof. Kind of like the Laffer curve. The higher the financial burden, the more the consumer will seek a way to avoid paying it. You want to curb piracy, improve value by dropping prices and stop producing crap for content (especially the record industry).