I just modded you up. While yeah, it's *always* about money to an extent - I think you're right on the mark pointing out the "control" factor (which most managers won't readily admit to, either).
Even when you finally manage to prove to your boss that you can do excellent work outside the walls of the company, he/she often still clings to outdated ideas of time management and employee tracking.
(EG. The guy I work for right now has me work on all sorts of projects for him, including producing and editing a computer training video he wants to use in-house. I do all of the work on this video at home, and keep track of my hours. When I get back in to work though, he forces me to religiously punch in and out on a time clock! So basically, I end up with a time card full of handwritten notes about hours I worked outside the office, plus all the time-stamps on it when I came in. Ridiculous - but another case of a boss who can't quite adjust to giving employees control.)
I think you're quite right.... but the problem is, these types of technological improvements displace the lower-salaried, lower-skilled worker. In exchange, yes, it opens up new job opportunities, but they are usually for people of a more advanced skillset.
To some extent, I'm tempted to say "So what! This is a good thing! If you aren't willing to learn a little something new, you don't deserve a job anyway!" But then, I also think about the people who can't handle the more advanced career type jobs. What about all the mentally handicapped people in our workforce? Right now, industries like fast food and retail give many of them the ability to earn their own living - rather than sit back and collect government handouts.
I'm not sure anyone can accurately predict a time-frame when specific jobs will be 'lost to robots and machines" -- but I do think we're gradually headed towards a world where any job involving repetitious labor will become mechanized. I can see janitorial jobs going away someday, as we create machines that can automatically mop up floors, clean windows, and vacuum. I also see truck driving jobs disappearing one of these days. (If you can build an automated system that moves product from point A to point B, why pay a live person to sit there and drive a truck between those points?)
Well, don't be *too* hard on the original poster. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri myself and I laughed at it.
Many folks who live near the coasts really don't have a clue what midwestern cities are like though. I've talked to a good number of native Californians on IRC chat in the past - and it's surprising how often the *only* thing they know of St. Louis is "Oh yeah, you're the city with that big arch, right?" They also often seem to think there is nothing else in Missouri except for farmland and camp sites. (We've got a LOT of that - but that sure wouldn't describe Kansas City, MO or even Springfield, MO.)
Speaking of colleges in particular though, you might also point out that another part of the "triangle" of "University of Missouri" schools, "Mizzou" (in Columbia, MO), is nationally recognized for turning out top quality writers and English literature majors.
Of lesser note, perhaps, but still worth mentioning - St. Louis, MO is also home of Logan School of Chiropractic -- probably one of the largest Chiropractic colleges in the United States.
In reality, this is quite simply another "barb" thrown at the Linux community.
The "change in policy" where companies getting software audits are notified 30 days in advance (rather than 15) sounds bogus to me too.
The real issue with software licensing audits is usually what happens *after* an audit begins. Whether you get 15 or 30 days' notice that they'd like to audit you, it probably matters zilch. If you're given even one week notice, it's enough warning to make the phone calls to buy your licenses for the stuff you know you don't legally own. If you *don't* know what's licensed and what's not, you may as well let the auditors do that work for you, and conduct "business as usual" until then. (They're typically going to give you a certain amount of time to "get legal" without penalties anyway, as long as they can see you made some effort to buy your licenses and didn't intentionally pirate everything.)
Well, cost per page is a really tricky number to state accurately anyway. I'm not a big fan of using it for anything other than giving you relative cost information between different models of the same type of printer.
I mean, does the "cost per page" for inkjet printing take into account ink used up on the cleaning cycles they go through every time you turn them on? How about when you haven't printed for a few weeks and the thing is clogged up, needing 4 or 5 cleaning cycles done before it prints properly? For a laser, all sorts of things skew the figures. For a long time, Tektronics sold a model of color laser printer with a promotion saying they'd supply all of your black toner for free for as long as you owned the printer. Do you buy the high-capacity cartridges or the regular size toners? Do you/can you refill them when they run out? (Often, you can refill your own toners with better results than refilled inkjet cartridges.)
I think the RIAA assumes this argument would ultimately boil down to a case of the downloader of the files not being able to prove he/she had legal permission to receive those tracks. (Just because the RIAA makes the files available on p2p servers doesn't mean they granted you any type of license to download the songs.) The RIAA could always create a hypothetical reason for the tracks being online, such as "They were supposed to be there only for the convenience of the artists themselves, and our own people who might need to download them."
Actually, if this issue was pressed in the courts, I think it would open up an interesting "can of worms" the RIAA never considered.
If the downloader is forced to prove he/she was in the clear, legally-speaking, when he/she downloaded the tracks offered by the RIAA - he/she could produce purchased CDs (with receipts) that contained those tracks on them. Then, the courts would be forced to decide if it's legal to download tracks from a p2p network, as long as you own the original music.
If they decide it is legal, then it seems the RIAA would have to cease trying to chase after the downloaders of music (since the effort of proving each downloader didn't ever own original albums containing each track in question would be more effort than it was worth). Instead, all they could do is try to stop people from sharing files out to others without authorization to make the works publically available.
(Ultimately, I think anyone sharing MP3s via p2p on the net should be held to the same standards as anyone running an Internet-based radio station. At some point, I think it will have to come down to that anyway. If you want to publically share music, you'll need to pay some sort of royalties or licensing fee for whatever you're offering. Receivers, on the other hand, will be innocent until proven guilty of an infringement.)
Actually, I'm well aware of the information you mentioned about system enablers. The point of my post wasn't to troll, but to point out that these types of hassles happened with Apple hardware too. It's not just a PC specific thing.
When you're dealing with older Apple "legacy" systems, you don't always have the option of "just loading a newer version of MacOS" that has all the system enablers rolled into it.
Some systems can't run anything newer than System 7.1 (say, for example, a Mac SE/30).
This type of thing made my life very difficult when trying to build a disk image of software to place on a number of different models of obsolete Macs. I had to have seperate physical external SCSI drives that booted with different verisons of MacOS and had different OS builds on them, for different lines of Macs.
I've been dealing with LOTS of printing issues and printer headaches for years and years. (I did PC support for 6 years for a company with lots of networked printers, not to mention doing sales for a few years that often involved printer recommendations.)
I really do like a good color laser printer, BUT, I'm not convinced these are practical yet for most home users. I know prices have come down quite a bit - but a color laser is still a very complex piece of machinery. You generally have 4 toner cartridges, plus all the additional hardware that allows the printer to mix those toner colors on the page, fuser rolls, charger grids, and other assorted "disposable" items that aren't a factor with a plain black and white laser.
Everyone I know who bought a Xerox (formerly Tektronics) color laser is sitting there now with a broken laser in need of expensive repairs.
Inkjet printers have virtually no repair costs, because if one stops feeding paper properly or a print nozzle just quits squirting ink - you throw the thing away and buy a whole new (likely faster and better) printer for less than the cost of a service call, and you're back up and running.
Last time I saw a real cost analysis done, a color laser cost you about 2 or 3 cents per page to print in full color. If you buy the right inkjet printer, the cost is probably about 4 to 5 cents per page.
These cost calculations don't factor in the issue of repairing or replacing broken printers. They make the assumption that both units are fully functional for the duration of time you print those pages. Figuring in repair costs, I'd say an inkjet becomes cheaper and more convenient in the long-haul. (They use less electricity too.)
Oh, come on now.... I really do like Apple's new product line, and can think of MANY reasons to buy a new Powerbook G5. But this isn't really a legitimate one.
In fact, in the past, Apple was notorious for selling systems that included specialized CDs of customized MacOS just for that particular system. If you tried to install a generic MacOS of the same version, you'd run into problems unless you downloaded special extensions called "system enablers" and copied them over.
I know this isn't the case any more with OS X, but still - Apple likes to ship Powerbooks with "Recovery CDs" instead of giving you seperate application CDs of all the software packages bundled. I hate it when all I want to do is install one specific app - and my only option is to do a full system restore to get it.
Umm, last I checked, I *WAS* thinking like an American - only perhaps my definition of American is more traditional than you'd like.
Yes, we do live in an era of litigation (much of it *frivolous* litigation!) - but as they say, "fight fire with fire". If you're starting an ISP, have an attorney write you up a good, solid "Terms of Service" agreement that absolves you from liability over such B.S. as disconnecting users from Usenet services. Make everyone sign an agreement and mail it back to you before you turn on their service, if need be! But don't get caught up in silly lawsuits in the first place!
There is no Constitutional right to Internet access. If you're providing a user with a net connection, and you decide you'd like to discontinue their service for *any* reason, you should be well within your legal rights to do so. I see no need to log details of exactly what every user does on your Usenet server, just to protect against the possibility of lawsuit over disconnecting them from said service!
(Now, granted, there's a need to be reasonable. Just as a landlord has to give notice before evicting a tenant, I think a respectable ISP needs to give customers enough time to line up a new ISP and let people know of pending email address changes.)
If you're concerned with shutting down spammers, I guess I still don't see the need to log quite so much detail on where users go when web-surfing or reading/posting to Usenet? Logging IPs and "raw" information about Kb sent/received should alert you to abuse anyway. (EG. If a supposed "home user" suddenly starts blasting hundreds of megs. per hour of email traffic to your mail server, it's plenty of reason to suspect spamming, and start specifically logging details of what that *one* user does. It doesn't require blanket logging of everyone, all the time.
Yep! You're exactly right. The big problem nowdays is, there are so many "middle men" (aka. collections agencies) involved in recouping unpaid charges - the whole concept of tracking down the *real* person charging the stuff has become practically pointless.
The collections people simply know they get a cut if they can force the card-holder to pay up. If, say, 20% of the people they harass are actually fraud victims, so what? It isn't going to earn them any more money if they have to pay their employees for a bunch of time and effort to prove that's the case. It's more cost-effective for them to go after the people in their database, plain and simple - and not to take "not my charge!" as an answer.
Meanwhile, the original company owed money for the purchase(s) has long since forgotten about the whole situation, since they wrote it off as a loss, and shelled out the money to make it someone else's problem (the collection agency hired to get back whatever they can from a big list of debts owed).
The way credit is issued and credit reports are handled in the U.S. these days - I honestly can see why some people just say "screw it" and max out their cards, change their phone number, and refuse to make payments.
It's harder to get by with "no credit" than "bad credit". If your credit report is basically a blank sheet of paper (due to not having any credit cards or buying a car or house on a loan), nobody wants to offer you a thing. But heck, bad credit and bankruptcies are "no problem!" at most car dealerships.
No, ISP's don't *have* to log all of this information "for the sake of liability". They do so because they cave in to the government's scare tactics.
I can understand keeping track of the time users connect to the service. Like you said, that's a necessary function of billing. Tracking details such as which newsgroups a user accessed (and moreover, keeping that information for long periods of time on tape backups) is above and beyond what I'd consider "necessary".
To make an analogy, that's like your local phone company tracking not only the numbers you dialed and when, but also recording your conversations on audio tape and archiving them for at least 1 year.
If the FBI shows up and demands information on one of your users, fine - give them his name, billing/mailing address, and last known good phone number. That's not enough to help them out? Well, fine - give them info on how many hours the user was connected and what time they connected. Still not enough?? Tell them to go do a little *investigation* and quit making you do their job for them!
(Pardon the all-caps up there, please - but that's a huge pet-peeve of mine!)
One of the biggest headaches I've gone through with my MP3 collection is editing incomplete (and often flat out incorrect) ID3 tags.
I have a Rio Empeg Car player - and it supports a number of nice features such as playing songs by they year they were recorded. When 90% of the people passing around MP3s don't bother to fill in the date - it makes that feature pretty worthless.
So yes, I'd be willing to pay money for good quality MP3s of music I really liked, assuming they contain all the proper info. (Album covers can be added as thumbnail graphics to the MP3 files themselves now too. Many players don't support the feature, but it doesn't seem to affect their ability to play the files properly.)
Exactly! At least somebody understood my message.... Ever wonder why many people say they don't want to ever have kids? I doubt it's often because they truly dislike kids. (Don't you think you'd have to be pretty cold-hearted to not so much as smile when a child says "Hello!" to you in a grocery store?)
I think the more common reason is they watch what children do to people's free time. They soak 90% of it up!
I had a good female friend in college who worked as a nanny - and I have lots of respect for her. (The family she worked for was involved in politics, incidently.) I don't think she ever felt like she was giving love that the parents didn't want to give. It was simply a sensible arrangement for all the parties involved. Politicians don't generally get lots of free time at home, and I doubt many people with a successful political career would throw it all away just because they had a kid.
I think, given the circumstances, the parents did the right thing. Better to pay for a carefully selected nanny to make sure the kids are well cared for than to leave them feeling like their parents just left them to fend for themselves.
I think a properly done tablet PC would take hold in special markets (such as package delivery), where the devices used now are much more limited than a full-blown PC.
(Look at the wireless slabs carried around by UPS drivers, for example. Sure, they get the job done pretty well - but I bet much more information could be presented to a driver if it was an actual tablet PC. Perhaps, an instant display of package tracking results for the current customer the driver is doing a daily pick-up for?)
Generally though, I agree. Tablet computing is a solution in search of a problem -- and it's got just enough "cool" factor to convince retailers it's worth trying to sell, time and time again.
I agree with your statement to a point, but I don't think we draw the same conclusions.
The U.S. is only going "TO PAY" for ignoring these other countries if we slack off and let them dictate our future.
What I mean is, innovation and creativity ultimately result in production of desirable products worthy of export. The vast majority of innovation in the tech sector seems to come from the Japanese, and increasingly, other countries (like Malaysia) that are getting on the high-tech bandwagon in a big way.
If U.S. companies continue to be content to play "follow the leader" and create nothing more than copies of whatever the consumer is fascinated with (originating in another country), our economy will continue to go down the tubes.
I don't think the economic game was really ever about "bringing them along". Similar companies compete with each other, and it's true whether you're talking about 2 American companies, or 1 American and 1 Chinese company producing similar products.
If we expect to maintain a high standard of living, we need to continue making products and providing services that are worthy of that standard. Yes, India and other such countries have citizens content with receiving lower wages than us -- but the more they're exposed to technology and the "unnecessary but entertaining, useful, and/or life-improving" gadgets out there, the more they'll want to earn salaries that allow buying them.
This can be a very GOOD thing, or a very BAD thing for the United States. It all depends on how many of those innovative products are built first (and built best) here!
Although I'd still be very interested to hear what the legal team has to say about your question -- I'm quite certain that they'll tell you "fair use" doesn't ever extend to making copies of copyrighted works for anyone other than yourself. Qualifiers such as "it was for my relative", "my brother", or "my friend" are pretty meaningless. They're still other individuals who are supposed to be paying for licenses to use software.
(That's one reason you see such things as "Family Packs" of Mac OS X for sale. The idea is, up to 5 systems in a household can be licensed for one discounted price, instead of making every family member using a Mac have to go out and buy a seperate copy for him/herself.)
When you say "letting an immediate relative or direct friend make use of a software package" - I assume you're talking about loaning them the software so they can install it on their own computer. If you simply mean letting them use your machine to run the program when they need it, that's different (and quite legal).
I agree that if you're going to create a human being, then it's your responsibility to make sure they're well cared for. That doesn't have to mean putting your whole life on the shelf, so you can plow all your spare time into making your toddler laugh at you and have daddy as a playmate.
If you're out there earning enough money to afford a nanny, what's the harm in that? You're helping another person stay gainfully employed, and you're still caring for your child. People who don't care do stupid things like leave their kid home alone while they run off to work.
I'm married with a 14 month old daughter myself, and I can tell you, she's a MAJOR time-sink. Sometimes it's fine, and I enjoy watching her grow up and learn how to do things. Other times though, I wonder about the toll it takes on me and my own aspirations.
Honestly, I have no choice right now - because I barely have enough spare money for the occasional babysitter, much less a live-in nanny. For people who do, I think it's a great example of your money being very liberating.
I think your reasoning is flawed, though. Who still has sex or gets time to think much about it after marriage??
Also, some of my best ideas come to me in the early morning, right before I've fully woken up. I think it has to do with it being a brief period of time when you don't yet have a list of "to do" items on your plate. You get a little time to ponder things and come up with interesting ideas - which usually get pushed to the back burner or completely forgotten as soon as you're up and everyone starts expecting you to do chores, get ready for work, etc. etc.
Hey, I know this is wandering off-topic, but since you mention recompiling software (presumably for Apple X11 for OS X?), I have a question....
Have you gotten the latest KDE (3.1) build to work properly? Under Apple's X11 beta 3, using Fink and Fink Commander, I download the pre-compiled binaries for KDE and when I launch it, it works except the fonts are all gatbled. I just get squares and stuff in place of readable text on every menu.
I saw a few others with the same problem, including one guy who said he recompiled from the source and had the same issue as with the binaries. So far, I haven't seen anyone with a fix or workaround....
I dunno... With all the recent class-action lawsuits against PC perihperal and laptop makers for items more frivolous than this, I'd be recalling as fast as possible if I were Sony!
Look how many millions Toshiba was soaked for, just because of the theoretical problem where, under very high CPU load, the laptop might not correctly write a byte of data to a floppy disk. (Even if this happened, say, once a month, to users regularly saving files to floppies - I suspect few would ever really care, or pin the problem down to being a flaw in a controller chip on the laptop. I get plenty of bad sectors on floppies with perfectly working drives....)
No, perhaps I wasn't clear. (First of all, I'm a Missouri resident, and I'm pretty sure our system works quite like Ohio's does.)
My complaint is, when you're issued a traffic ticket, the "court date" is for traffic court - which generally ends up being a parade of "offenders" lined up to get 10 seconds of time with the judge. You have no opportunity to plead your case at this point. All the judge wants to hear is "guilty" or "innocent". (Of course, most people who didn't already value their time enough to simply pay a lawyer to convert the ticket into a non-moving violation and pay said fines just plead "guilty" at this point, and get it all over with.)
If you do claim your innocence at this stage of the "game", you're given another court date (typically scheduled right at the dinner hour, or immediately after you get home from work - so better not be late!). This time through, you still don't get much of a trial. Again, you wait your turn to talk to the judge, who pretty much just wants you to agree to some sort of "deal". (EG. How about you just pay us $100 and we'll knock the points off on this violation?) If you truly stand your ground and say "I'm NOT GUILTY so I WON"T PAY A DIME!" - the rest of the people laugh at you, and you're sent to the "prosecutor" to "work something out".
From here, it's anyone's guess how it will play out - but they REALLY don't want to have to schedule another trial date for you, so they'll try their hardest to just get you to pay them some cash to make it all go away. (If you're lucky and persistent enough, they might just throw the case out... but you never got to actually argue your innocence.)
That's why I say, you don't REALLY get a trial on traffic offenses anymore. They simply give out too many tickets for this stuff - and they want to run you through a system that amounts to tax collection.
In my experience, motorcycle drivers are often some of the more dangerous folks on the road. Just because they have a smaller vehicle, they believe it gives them "carte blanche" to weave in and out of traffic, driving between two lanes - and assuming everyone can see them just fine the whole time.
I'm not advocating people trying to read text-based messages while driving either. That's just idiocy, IMHO. Any GPS system for vehicles worth its salt should be voice operated and give voice feedback. Any graphical display should be set up so only a passenger can view it (so they can act as co-pilot if they wish, when they're in the car with the driver).
Because voice recognition is still relatively "iffy" - this technology isn't quite ready for prime time yet. That's why you see the lame attempts at scrolling text data, etc.
No, you're absolutely correct - and the only thing that scares me is the complacency some folks seem to have nowdays. The old "you're better off not rocking the boat!" mentality.... When you're making a good income and have lots of free/leisure time, it's sometimes all too easy to let things slide, and say "I'll obey the stupid little laws. Doesn't bother me... I can go disappear into my nice little house and watch my satellite TV on my home theater, and forget it all."
Of course, as they keep passing more and more legislation, it's eventually bound to affect even the complacent ones who think they're "above it all"....
Already, I see one big problem. We've already turned over far too much control to the local court system. When people perform acts of civil disobedience (such as speeding, parking where it says not to park, or illegal possession of fireworks), punishment inevitably is "pay us a large sum of money". "Big brother" gets bigger and bigger the more we break his laws. We're directly funding more of the crap by paying our tickets and fines.
These days, you can't get a trial over a fireworks possession offense or a traffic ticket. You're just run through the system and ordered to pay up. If you don't pay, then you REALLY get in hot water - because you're subject to arrest and imprisonment, forfeiture of your driver's license, and any number of other things far too severe for the offense initially committed.
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I just modded you up. While yeah, it's *always* about money to an extent - I think you're right on the mark pointing out the "control" factor (which most managers won't readily admit to, either).
Even when you finally manage to prove to your boss that you can do excellent work outside the walls of the company, he/she often still clings to outdated ideas of time management and employee tracking.
(EG. The guy I work for right now has me work on all sorts of projects for him, including producing and editing a computer training video he wants to use in-house. I do all of the work on this video at home, and keep track of my hours. When I get back in to work though, he forces me to religiously punch in and out on a time clock! So basically, I end up with a time card full of handwritten notes about hours I worked outside the office, plus all the time-stamps on it when I came in. Ridiculous - but another case of a boss who can't quite adjust to giving employees control.)
I think you're quite right.... but the problem is, these types of technological improvements displace the lower-salaried, lower-skilled worker. In exchange, yes, it opens up new job opportunities, but they are usually for people of a more advanced skillset.
To some extent, I'm tempted to say "So what! This is a good thing! If you aren't willing to learn a little something new, you don't deserve a job anyway!" But then, I also think about the people who can't handle the more advanced career type jobs. What about all the mentally handicapped people in our workforce? Right now, industries like fast food and retail give many of them the ability to earn their own living - rather than sit back and collect government handouts.
I'm not sure anyone can accurately predict a time-frame when specific jobs will be 'lost to robots and machines" -- but I do think we're gradually headed towards a world where any job involving repetitious labor will become mechanized. I can see janitorial jobs going away someday, as we create machines that can automatically mop up floors, clean windows, and vacuum. I also see truck driving jobs disappearing one of these days. (If you can build an automated system that moves product from point A to point B, why pay a live person to sit there and drive a truck between those points?)
Well, don't be *too* hard on the original poster. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri myself and I laughed at it.
Many folks who live near the coasts really don't have a clue what midwestern cities are like though. I've talked to a good number of native Californians on IRC chat in the past - and it's surprising how often the *only* thing they know of St. Louis is "Oh yeah, you're the city with that big arch, right?" They also often seem to think there is nothing else in Missouri except for farmland and camp sites. (We've got a LOT of that - but that sure wouldn't describe Kansas City, MO or even Springfield, MO.)
Speaking of colleges in particular though, you might also point out that another part of the "triangle" of "University of Missouri" schools, "Mizzou" (in Columbia, MO), is nationally recognized for turning out top quality writers and English literature majors.
Of lesser note, perhaps, but still worth mentioning - St. Louis, MO is also home of Logan School of Chiropractic -- probably one of the largest Chiropractic colleges in the United States.
Tell 'em you'll drop the wi-fi access at the stadium when they drop the computerized umpires!
In reality, this is quite simply another "barb" thrown at the Linux community.
The "change in policy" where companies getting software audits are notified 30 days in advance (rather than 15) sounds bogus to me too.
The real issue with software licensing audits is usually what happens *after* an audit begins. Whether you get 15 or 30 days' notice that they'd like to audit you, it probably matters zilch. If you're given even one week notice, it's enough warning to make the phone calls to buy your licenses for the stuff you know you don't legally own. If you *don't* know what's licensed and what's not, you may as well let the auditors do that work for you, and conduct "business as usual" until then. (They're typically going to give you a certain amount of time to "get legal" without penalties anyway, as long as they can see you made some effort to buy your licenses and didn't intentionally pirate everything.)
Well, cost per page is a really tricky number to state accurately anyway. I'm not a big fan of using it for anything other than giving you relative cost information between different models of the same type of printer.
I mean, does the "cost per page" for inkjet printing take into account ink used up on the cleaning cycles they go through every time you turn them on? How about when you haven't printed for a few weeks and the thing is clogged up, needing 4 or 5 cleaning cycles done before it prints properly? For a laser, all sorts of things skew the figures. For a long time, Tektronics sold a model of color laser printer with a promotion saying they'd supply all of your black toner for free for as long as you owned the printer. Do you buy the high-capacity cartridges or the regular size toners? Do you/can you refill them when they run out? (Often, you can refill your own toners with better results than refilled inkjet cartridges.)
Yes, this is an interesting one.....
I think the RIAA assumes this argument would ultimately boil down to a case of the downloader of the files not being able to prove he/she had legal permission to receive those tracks. (Just because the RIAA makes the files available on p2p servers doesn't mean they granted you any type of license to download the songs.) The RIAA could always create a hypothetical reason for the tracks being online, such as "They were supposed to be there only for the convenience of the artists themselves, and our own people who might need to download them."
Actually, if this issue was pressed in the courts, I think it would open up an interesting "can of worms" the RIAA never considered.
If the downloader is forced to prove he/she was in the clear, legally-speaking, when he/she downloaded the tracks offered by the RIAA - he/she could produce purchased CDs (with receipts) that contained those tracks on them. Then, the courts would be forced to decide if it's legal to download tracks from a p2p network, as long as you own the original music.
If they decide it is legal, then it seems the RIAA would have to cease trying to chase after the downloaders of music (since the effort of proving each downloader didn't ever own original albums containing each track in question would be more effort than it was worth). Instead, all they could do is try to stop people from sharing files out to others without authorization to make the works publically available.
(Ultimately, I think anyone sharing MP3s via p2p on the net should be held to the same standards as anyone running an Internet-based radio station. At some point, I think it will have to come down to that anyway. If you want to publically share music, you'll need to pay some sort of royalties or licensing fee for whatever you're offering. Receivers, on the other hand, will be innocent until proven guilty of an infringement.)
Actually, I'm well aware of the information you mentioned about system enablers. The point of my post wasn't to troll, but to point out that these types of hassles happened with Apple hardware too. It's not just a PC specific thing.
When you're dealing with older Apple "legacy" systems, you don't always have the option of "just loading a newer version of MacOS" that has all the system enablers rolled into it.
Some systems can't run anything newer than System 7.1 (say, for example, a Mac SE/30).
This type of thing made my life very difficult when trying to build a disk image of software to place on a number of different models of obsolete Macs. I had to have seperate physical external SCSI drives that booted with different verisons of MacOS and had different OS builds on them, for different lines of Macs.
I've been dealing with LOTS of printing issues and printer headaches for years and years. (I did PC support for 6 years for a company with lots of networked printers, not to mention doing sales for a few years that often involved printer recommendations.)
I really do like a good color laser printer, BUT, I'm not convinced these are practical yet for most home users. I know prices have come down quite a bit - but a color laser is still a very complex piece of machinery. You generally have 4 toner cartridges, plus all the additional hardware that allows the printer to mix those toner colors on the page, fuser rolls, charger grids, and other assorted "disposable" items that aren't a factor with a plain black and white laser.
Everyone I know who bought a Xerox (formerly Tektronics) color laser is sitting there now with a broken laser in need of expensive repairs.
Inkjet printers have virtually no repair costs, because if one stops feeding paper properly or a print nozzle just quits squirting ink - you throw the thing away and buy a whole new (likely faster and better) printer for less than the cost of a service call, and you're back up and running.
Last time I saw a real cost analysis done, a color laser cost you about 2 or 3 cents per page to print in full color. If you buy the right inkjet printer, the cost is probably about 4 to 5 cents per page.
These cost calculations don't factor in the issue of repairing or replacing broken printers. They make the assumption that both units are fully functional for the duration of time you print those pages. Figuring in repair costs, I'd say an inkjet becomes cheaper and more convenient in the long-haul. (They use less electricity too.)
Oh, come on now.... I really do like Apple's new product line, and can think of MANY reasons to buy a new Powerbook G5. But this isn't really a legitimate one.
In fact, in the past, Apple was notorious for selling systems that included specialized CDs of customized MacOS just for that particular system. If you tried to install a generic MacOS of the same version, you'd run into problems unless you downloaded special extensions called "system enablers" and copied them over.
I know this isn't the case any more with OS X, but still - Apple likes to ship Powerbooks with "Recovery CDs" instead of giving you seperate application CDs of all the software packages bundled. I hate it when all I want to do is install one specific app - and my only option is to do a full system restore to get it.
Umm, last I checked, I *WAS* thinking like an American - only perhaps my definition of American is more traditional than you'd like.
Yes, we do live in an era of litigation (much of it *frivolous* litigation!) - but as they say, "fight fire with fire". If you're starting an ISP, have an attorney write you up a good, solid "Terms of Service" agreement that absolves you from liability over such B.S. as disconnecting users from Usenet services. Make everyone sign an agreement and mail it back to you before you turn on their service, if need be! But don't get caught up in silly lawsuits in the first place!
There is no Constitutional right to Internet access. If you're providing a user with a net connection, and you decide you'd like to discontinue their service for *any* reason, you should be well within your legal rights to do so. I see no need to log details of exactly what every user does on your Usenet server, just to protect against the possibility of lawsuit over disconnecting them from said service!
(Now, granted, there's a need to be reasonable. Just as a landlord has to give notice before evicting a tenant, I think a respectable ISP needs to give customers enough time to line up a new ISP and let people know of pending email address changes.)
If you're concerned with shutting down spammers, I guess I still don't see the need to log quite so much detail on where users go when web-surfing or reading/posting to Usenet? Logging IPs and "raw" information about Kb sent/received should alert you to abuse anyway. (EG. If a supposed "home user" suddenly starts blasting hundreds of megs. per hour of email traffic to your mail server, it's plenty of reason to suspect spamming, and start specifically logging details of what that *one* user does.
It doesn't require blanket logging of everyone, all the time.
Yep! You're exactly right. The big problem nowdays is, there are so many "middle men" (aka. collections agencies) involved in recouping unpaid charges - the whole concept of tracking down the *real* person charging the stuff has become practically pointless.
The collections people simply know they get a cut if they can force the card-holder to pay up. If, say, 20% of the people they harass are actually fraud victims, so what? It isn't going to earn them any more money if they have to pay their employees for a bunch of time and effort to prove that's the case. It's more cost-effective for them to go after the people in their database, plain and simple - and not to take "not my charge!" as an answer.
Meanwhile, the original company owed money for the purchase(s) has long since forgotten about the whole situation, since they wrote it off as a loss, and shelled out the money to make it someone else's problem (the collection agency hired to get back whatever they can from a big list of debts owed).
The way credit is issued and credit reports are handled in the U.S. these days - I honestly can see why some people just say "screw it" and max out their cards, change their phone number, and refuse to make payments.
It's harder to get by with "no credit" than "bad credit". If your credit report is basically a blank sheet of paper (due to not having any credit cards or buying a car or house on a loan), nobody wants to offer you a thing. But heck, bad credit and bankruptcies are "no problem!" at most car dealerships.
No, ISP's don't *have* to log all of this information "for the sake of liability". They do so because they cave in to the government's scare tactics.
I can understand keeping track of the time users connect to the service. Like you said, that's a necessary function of billing. Tracking details such as which newsgroups a user accessed (and moreover, keeping that information for long periods of time on tape backups) is above and beyond what I'd consider "necessary".
To make an analogy, that's like your local phone company tracking not only the numbers you dialed and when, but also recording your conversations on audio tape and archiving them for at least 1 year.
If the FBI shows up and demands information on one of your users, fine - give them his name, billing/mailing address, and last known good phone number. That's not enough to help them out? Well, fine - give them info on how many hours the user was connected and what time they connected. Still not enough?? Tell them to go do a little *investigation* and quit making you do their job for them!
(Pardon the all-caps up there, please - but that's a huge pet-peeve of mine!)
One of the biggest headaches I've gone through with my MP3 collection is editing incomplete (and often flat out incorrect) ID3 tags.
I have a Rio Empeg Car player - and it supports a number of nice features such as playing songs by they year they were recorded. When 90% of the people passing around MP3s don't bother to fill in the date - it makes that feature pretty worthless.
So yes, I'd be willing to pay money for good quality MP3s of music I really liked, assuming they contain all the proper info. (Album covers can be added as thumbnail graphics to the MP3 files themselves now too. Many players don't support the feature, but it doesn't seem to affect their ability to play the files properly.)
Exactly! At least somebody understood my message.... Ever wonder why many people say they don't want to ever have kids? I doubt it's often because they truly dislike kids. (Don't you think you'd have to be pretty cold-hearted to not so much as smile when a child says "Hello!" to you in a grocery store?)
I think the more common reason is they watch what children do to people's free time. They soak 90% of it up!
I had a good female friend in college who worked as a nanny - and I have lots of respect for her. (The family she worked for was involved in politics, incidently.) I don't think she ever felt like she was giving love that the parents didn't want to give. It was simply a sensible arrangement for all the parties involved. Politicians don't generally get lots of free time at home, and I doubt many people with a successful political career would throw it all away just because they had a kid.
I think, given the circumstances, the parents did the right thing. Better to pay for a carefully selected nanny to make sure the kids are well cared for than to leave them feeling like their parents just left them to fend for themselves.
Ehh... may not quite THAT bad, but you're close.
I think a properly done tablet PC would take hold in special markets (such as package delivery), where the devices used now are much more limited than a full-blown PC.
(Look at the wireless slabs carried around by UPS drivers, for example. Sure, they get the job done pretty well - but I bet much more information could be presented to a driver if it was an actual tablet PC. Perhaps, an instant display of package tracking results for the current customer the driver is doing a daily pick-up for?)
Generally though, I agree. Tablet computing is a solution in search of a problem -- and it's got just enough "cool" factor to convince retailers it's worth trying to sell, time and time again.
I agree with your statement to a point, but I don't think we draw the same conclusions.
The U.S. is only going "TO PAY" for ignoring these other countries if we slack off and let them dictate our future.
What I mean is, innovation and creativity ultimately result in production of desirable products worthy of export. The vast majority of innovation in the tech sector seems to come from the Japanese, and increasingly, other countries (like Malaysia) that are getting on the high-tech bandwagon in a big way.
If U.S. companies continue to be content to play "follow the leader" and create nothing more than copies of whatever the consumer is fascinated with (originating in another country), our economy will continue to go down the tubes.
I don't think the economic game was really ever about "bringing them along". Similar companies compete with each other, and it's true whether you're talking about 2 American companies, or 1 American and 1 Chinese company producing similar products.
If we expect to maintain a high standard of living, we need to continue making products and providing services that are worthy of that standard. Yes, India and other such countries have citizens content with receiving lower wages than us -- but the more they're exposed to technology and the "unnecessary but entertaining, useful, and/or life-improving" gadgets out there, the more they'll want to earn salaries that allow buying them.
This can be a very GOOD thing, or a very BAD thing for the United States. It all depends on how many of those innovative products are built first (and built best) here!
Although I'd still be very interested to hear what the legal team has to say about your question -- I'm quite certain that they'll tell you "fair use" doesn't ever extend to making copies of copyrighted works for anyone other than yourself. Qualifiers such as "it was for my relative", "my brother", or "my friend" are pretty meaningless. They're still other individuals who are supposed to be paying for licenses to use software.
(That's one reason you see such things as "Family Packs" of Mac OS X for sale. The idea is, up to 5 systems in a household can be licensed for one discounted price, instead of making every family member using a Mac have to go out and buy a seperate copy for him/herself.)
When you say "letting an immediate relative or direct friend make use of a software package" - I assume you're talking about loaning them the software so they can install it on their own computer. If you simply mean letting them use your machine to run the program when they need it, that's different (and quite legal).
I agree that if you're going to create a human being, then it's your responsibility to make sure they're well cared for. That doesn't have to mean putting your whole life on the shelf, so you can plow all your spare time into making your toddler laugh at you and have daddy as a playmate.
If you're out there earning enough money to afford a nanny, what's the harm in that? You're helping another person stay gainfully employed, and you're still caring for your child. People who don't care do stupid things like leave their kid home alone while they run off to work.
I'm married with a 14 month old daughter myself, and I can tell you, she's a MAJOR time-sink. Sometimes it's fine, and I enjoy watching her grow up and learn how to do things. Other times though, I wonder about the toll it takes on me and my own aspirations.
Honestly, I have no choice right now - because I barely have enough spare money for the occasional babysitter, much less a live-in nanny. For people who do, I think it's a great example of your money being very liberating.
I think your reasoning is flawed, though. Who still has sex or gets time to think much about it after marriage??
Also, some of my best ideas come to me in the early morning, right before I've fully woken up. I think it has to do with it being a brief period of time when you don't yet have a list of "to do" items on your plate. You get a little time to ponder things and come up with interesting ideas - which usually get pushed to the back burner or completely forgotten as soon as you're up and everyone starts expecting you to do chores, get ready for work, etc. etc.
Hey, I know this is wandering off-topic, but since you mention recompiling software (presumably for Apple X11 for OS X?), I have a question....
Have you gotten the latest KDE (3.1) build to work properly? Under Apple's X11 beta 3, using Fink and Fink Commander, I download the pre-compiled binaries for KDE and when I launch it, it works except the fonts are all gatbled. I just get squares and stuff in place of readable text on every menu.
I saw a few others with the same problem, including one guy who said he recompiled from the source and had the same issue as with the binaries. So far, I haven't seen anyone with a fix or workaround....
I dunno... With all the recent class-action lawsuits against PC perihperal and laptop makers for items more frivolous than this, I'd be recalling as fast as possible if I were Sony!
Look how many millions Toshiba was soaked for, just because of the theoretical problem where, under very high CPU load, the laptop might not correctly write a byte of data to a floppy disk. (Even if this happened, say, once a month, to users regularly saving files to floppies - I suspect few would ever really care, or pin the problem down to being a flaw in a controller chip on the laptop. I get plenty of bad sectors on floppies with perfectly working drives....)
No, perhaps I wasn't clear. (First of all, I'm a Missouri resident, and I'm pretty sure our system works quite like Ohio's does.)
My complaint is, when you're issued a traffic ticket, the "court date" is for traffic court - which generally ends up being a parade of "offenders" lined up to get 10 seconds of time with the judge. You have no opportunity to plead your case at this point. All the judge wants to hear is "guilty" or "innocent". (Of course, most people who didn't already value their time enough to simply pay a lawyer to convert the ticket into a non-moving violation and pay said fines just plead "guilty" at this point, and get it all over with.)
If you do claim your innocence at this stage of the "game", you're given another court date (typically scheduled right at the dinner hour, or immediately after you get home from work - so better not be late!). This time through, you still don't get much of a trial. Again, you wait your turn to talk to the judge, who pretty much just wants you to agree to some sort of "deal". (EG. How about you just pay us $100 and we'll knock the points off on this violation?) If you truly stand your ground and say "I'm NOT GUILTY so I WON"T PAY A DIME!" - the rest of the people laugh at you, and you're sent to the "prosecutor" to "work something out".
From here, it's anyone's guess how it will play out - but they REALLY don't want to have to schedule another trial date for you, so they'll try their hardest to just get you to pay them some cash to make it all go away. (If you're lucky and persistent enough, they might just throw the case out... but you never got to actually argue your innocence.)
That's why I say, you don't REALLY get a trial on traffic offenses anymore. They simply give out too many tickets for this stuff - and they want to run you through a system that amounts to tax collection.
In my experience, motorcycle drivers are often some of the more dangerous folks on the road. Just because they have a smaller vehicle, they believe it gives them "carte blanche" to weave in and out of traffic, driving between two lanes - and assuming everyone can see them just fine the whole time.
I'm not advocating people trying to read text-based messages while driving either. That's just idiocy, IMHO. Any GPS system for vehicles worth its salt should be voice operated and give voice feedback. Any graphical display should be set up so only a passenger can view it (so they can act as co-pilot if they wish, when they're in the car with the driver).
Because voice recognition is still relatively "iffy" - this technology isn't quite ready for prime time yet. That's why you see the lame attempts at scrolling text data, etc.
No, you're absolutely correct - and the only thing that scares me is the complacency some folks seem to have nowdays. The old "you're better off not rocking the boat!" mentality.... When you're making a good income and have lots of free/leisure time, it's sometimes all too easy to let things slide, and say "I'll obey the stupid little laws. Doesn't bother me... I can go disappear into my nice little house and watch my satellite TV on my home theater, and forget it all."
Of course, as they keep passing more and more legislation, it's eventually bound to affect even the complacent ones who think they're "above it all"....
Already, I see one big problem. We've already turned over far too much control to the local court system. When people perform acts of civil disobedience (such as speeding, parking where it says not to park, or illegal possession of fireworks), punishment inevitably is "pay us a large sum of money". "Big brother" gets bigger and bigger the more we break his laws. We're directly funding more of the crap by paying our tickets and fines.
These days, you can't get a trial over a fireworks possession offense or a traffic ticket. You're just run through the system and ordered to pay up. If you don't pay, then you REALLY get in hot water - because you're subject to arrest and imprisonment, forfeiture of your driver's license, and any number of other things far too severe for the offense initially committed.