Then it's not a question of democracy, but of freedom. IMHO People have a right to freedom, even if 99% of the population were to vote against it (though in practice they would just publicly execute you I'm afraid). The freedom to run an ISP and to buy from an ISP is one such freedom and any government that wants to implement *any* censorship deverves to get f* in the A*.
By the way, concerning the US: you guys should really split up again into the North and South. The south wants a republic, so Let There Be One. The rest wants a more democratic solution, so Let There Be One. Yes, CA and FL would belong to the North I guess. And generally speaking: wasn't independence the whole point of the federacy? Maybe federal power and taxation should be reduced (yes, in Germany too). Too bad nobody listens to me.;)
If just one music company cancels the deal on Apple, then it will lose lots of revenue compared to all the other labels, plus customers won't be too happy (and the artists on that label!).
But even if all labels would quit iTunes, that would be *incredibly* stupid. How much money does a label make on selling one CD, with high-cost distribution? And how much do they make on selling it on iTunes, even if Apple shaves off a couple of cents?
This whole complaining that iTunes is too cheap is pure rip-off planning.
It's not just about FREE software, or about agreeing to a license. It's also about software you pay for. I'm afraid you can't sue Microsoft, because all their licenses say that they aren't liable for anything.
It's about responsibility and liability, no matter what you say.
Under German law refusing liability is not even possible. You're always responsible for your actions. If someone takes software that's public domain or GPLed and it breaks, that's their problem. But selling software and refusing to be held liable for errors is something that is unique to the software business.
Would you buy a car that says if the brakes break, you're SOL? I guess it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car like that. But software companies do that all the time. Even if their software eats all your data, you're simply SOL.
Sounds like lots of people would simply quit using GPLed stuff then and move to one of the BSD systems. For web frameworks and platforms the vendors would have to choose. Most Java frameworks are Apache-licensed anyway, and for other GPLed project the group would have to choose either to turn into hobby-only projects or to keep the old GPL.
The hard part about this is that probably every single copyright holder under the GPL has the right to choose to upgrade to GPL3, so that only singly-owned project could choose to really stay GPL2. But IANAL.
Yes, and with huge benefits at that: only selling them to poor countries means that the per-unit fixed production costs are higher than they could be (because sales are less). Profit is lower than it could be, so that this will never turn into a real commercial opportunity that might build more of these machines, years from now.
Oh yes, and like the monochrome Linux-PDA manufactured for India a few years ago it will probably flop grandiosely, because it doesn't even try to compete with the rest of the world.
I think we're talking about different things. When you transfer a file *onto* the card, you tell it that it's just a blob without restrictions.
If you want to transfer a DRMed file from the card, of course that won't work without authentication etc. But if the file on the card isn't restricted (because your OS said that the file put onto the card wasn't restricted), then there should be no problem. At least it cannot prevent copying of data, unless the data was put onto the medium (any DRMed medium, that is) by a DRM-respecting source.
When I copy a chunk of data onto the card, the card CANNOT know what kind of file it is. When I tell it that it's an image of a database and that the card may not change that file in any way, then how could it? (it could, but then it would be a totally useless storage medium, corrupting my data!)
Yeah, but if you tell the card that you're copying just a binary blob, then how is the card to decide that it wants to twiddle a bit, or to NOT even copy it?
And a copy command in a good OS would tell the card just that.
Most of all they need to be informed about DRM. PC and Mac magazines have for years (decades?) informed their readers how to circumvent arbitrary barriers, and how to make their machines do what they want them to.
As this becomes necessary with phones it will bubble up into mainstream knowledge, just like basic computer knowledge already has.
Well, the market will in the end punish those who produce crap:)
Excuse me? I can shove onto my Nokia phone whatever file I want (with Bluetooth). If it's a Java program, I suppose I could also just run it from the builtin file browser.
Writing native apps is another story, but that's because there are no published, portable standard APIs in C.
Hm, then why is Linux a collection of a kernel, the glibc and various other userland things that you have to assemble on your own (when using LFS, otherwise your distro does that), while the BSDs have one consistent base system?
Yes, Linux is more popular. But does that have any value at all?
I've been a huge fan of this idea for some time. I guess the Music Mafia pays stores to not do that, even though most new records aren't really CDs anymore.
I agree with your view, with one correction: you don't need to buy their stuff. If they choose to sell crippleware, that's their decision. Yours can be to avoid the market involving that crap.
Overall I find that more and more culture and human interaction is leaving the corporate crapshere, and moving to more voluntary, common-sense, and decentralized communities. Maybe the Media Mafia will end up just producing Britney Spears lookalikes for the part of society that doesn't care, like the ringtone mafia does today.
Well, most political entities and people that are called Conservative these days really aren't. They are just pro-Rich and pro-Christianity and pro-Control.
Conservative is also economic conservatism (like American Libertarians or European Liberals), ecologic conservatism (like various tree hugger movements), or conservative values, like a prejudiced anti-Hype stance.
Unfortunately the Neoconses have MUCH more power than the various conservatives that are mostly against centralized power in the first place.
Sorry, but I really don't understand what capabilities would have to do with system startup etc. It's just a permissions system.
I guess you could have a Unix-like system with capabilities (maybe ACLs are a start for the file stuff), and have it startup/shutdown just like other Unices.
What kind of crashes? When a program crashes, it crashes. That's fine. Just don't give third-party apps enough rights to, for instance, run hardware-level drivers, so they can't crash your system;) (containing those drivers in user-space would make them slower, but safer)
The problem with language-level capabilities as opposed to OS-level rights is that the language is quite often subverted. When was the last time one program on your machine could read another processes's memory?
One of the things that I miss from the USA (there being quite many). I wrote them several times, but it seems that they don't want to provide subscriptions to Europeans.
Weird, since their FAQ contains a point on how to access web content if you're European.
Whatever that would be. Use an operating system that gives you memory protection, and even better: capabilities (rights to read/write files and other things), and you can run ANY program, written in ANY language, without the programs even being ABLE to do any harm.
Oh, that would be too much of progress, wouldn't it?
IANA specialist, but if the DRM is open, wouldn't it be easy to circumvent it or strip the DRM off the files?
After all there have to be ways to extract the raw data from the DRM container, so what prevents the user from just piping that data into a new, clean, file?
Slashdot Mirror
Then it's not a question of democracy, but of freedom. IMHO People have a right to freedom, even if 99% of the population were to vote against it (though in practice they would just publicly execute you I'm afraid). The freedom to run an ISP and to buy from an ISP is one such freedom and any government that wants to implement *any* censorship deverves to get f* in the A*.
;)
By the way, concerning the US: you guys should really split up again into the North and South. The south wants a republic, so Let There Be One. The rest wants a more democratic solution, so Let There Be One. Yes, CA and FL would belong to the North I guess. And generally speaking: wasn't independence the whole point of the federacy? Maybe federal power and taxation should be reduced (yes, in Germany too). Too bad nobody listens to me.
If just one music company cancels the deal on Apple, then it will lose lots of revenue compared to all the other labels, plus customers won't be too happy (and the artists on that label!).
But even if all labels would quit iTunes, that would be *incredibly* stupid. How much money does a label make on selling one CD, with high-cost distribution? And how much do they make on selling it on iTunes, even if Apple shaves off a couple of cents?
This whole complaining that iTunes is too cheap is pure rip-off planning.
Hacking something together is craft, or somewhat like an art. (Since the things produced are to have practical value it's not just an art.)
Mixed with a formal process and a good architecture hacking becomes engineering.
It's not just about FREE software, or about agreeing to a license. It's also about software you pay for. I'm afraid you can't sue Microsoft, because all their licenses say that they aren't liable for anything.
It's about responsibility and liability, no matter what you say.
Under German law refusing liability is not even possible. You're always responsible for your actions. If someone takes software that's public domain or GPLed and it breaks, that's their problem. But selling software and refusing to be held liable for errors is something that is unique to the software business.
Would you buy a car that says if the brakes break, you're SOL? I guess it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car like that. But software companies do that all the time. Even if their software eats all your data, you're simply SOL.
IMHO this needs to change.
Sounds like lots of people would simply quit using GPLed stuff then and move to one of the BSD systems. For web frameworks and platforms the vendors would have to choose. Most Java frameworks are Apache-licensed anyway, and for other GPLed project the group would have to choose either to turn into hobby-only projects or to keep the old GPL.
The hard part about this is that probably every single copyright holder under the GPL has the right to choose to upgrade to GPL3, so that only singly-owned project could choose to really stay GPL2. But IANAL.
*** Dangerous Virus ***
Yes, and with huge benefits at that: only selling them to poor countries means that the per-unit fixed production costs are higher than they could be (because sales are less). Profit is lower than it could be, so that this will never turn into a real commercial opportunity that might build more of these machines, years from now.
Oh yes, and like the monochrome Linux-PDA manufactured for India a few years ago it will probably flop grandiosely, because it doesn't even try to compete with the rest of the world.
Why arbitrarily restrict the sales of something?
It doesn't even need the $25. If the machines are built at a (maybe very small) profit, then the more the better.
And if they can make more sales, economies of scale will help to drive the constant per-model costs even further down, increasing per-unit margins.
Yes, I want one of those, and up to 120 would be fine with me.
I think we're talking about different things. When you transfer a file *onto* the card, you tell it that it's just a blob without restrictions.
If you want to transfer a DRMed file from the card, of course that won't work without authentication etc. But if the file on the card isn't restricted (because your OS said that the file put onto the card wasn't restricted), then there should be no problem. At least it cannot prevent copying of data, unless the data was put onto the medium (any DRMed medium, that is) by a DRM-respecting source.
When I copy a chunk of data onto the card, the card CANNOT know what kind of file it is. When I tell it that it's an image of a database and that the card may not change that file in any way, then how could it? (it could, but then it would be a totally useless storage medium, corrupting my data!)
Yeah, but if you tell the card that you're copying just a binary blob, then how is the card to decide that it wants to twiddle a bit, or to NOT even copy it?
And a copy command in a good OS would tell the card just that.
will tell the card that the current data file is just binary junk and doesn't have a copy limit.
Or is the "copy protection" just a byte pattern in the file, so that the card will refuse to copy certain files?
consumers need to unhappy about DRM...
:)
Most of all they need to be informed about DRM. PC and Mac magazines have for years (decades?) informed their readers how to circumvent arbitrary barriers, and how to make their machines do what they want them to.
As this becomes necessary with phones it will bubble up into mainstream knowledge, just like basic computer knowledge already has.
Well, the market will in the end punish those who produce crap
Excuse me? I can shove onto my Nokia phone whatever file I want (with Bluetooth). If it's a Java program, I suppose I could also just run it from the builtin file browser.
Writing native apps is another story, but that's because there are no published, portable standard APIs in C.
Just imagine the SCO history without the GPL.
Exactly. There is a reason why SCO sued over Linux and not the BSD organizations.
Hm, then why is Linux a collection of a kernel, the glibc and various other userland things that you have to assemble on your own (when using LFS, otherwise your distro does that), while the BSDs have one consistent base system?
Yes, Linux is more popular. But does that have any value at all?
I've been a huge fan of this idea for some time. I guess the Music Mafia pays stores to not do that, even though most new records aren't really CDs anymore.
I agree with your view, with one correction: you don't need to buy their stuff. If they choose to sell crippleware, that's their decision. Yours can be to avoid the market involving that crap.
Overall I find that more and more culture and human interaction is leaving the corporate crapshere, and moving to more voluntary, common-sense, and decentralized communities. Maybe the Media Mafia will end up just producing Britney Spears lookalikes for the part of society that doesn't care, like the ringtone mafia does today.
Well, most political entities and people that are called Conservative these days really aren't. They are just pro-Rich and pro-Christianity and pro-Control.
Conservative is also economic conservatism (like American Libertarians or European Liberals), ecologic conservatism (like various tree hugger movements), or conservative values, like a prejudiced anti-Hype stance.
Unfortunately the Neoconses have MUCH more power than the various conservatives that are mostly against centralized power in the first place.
I suggest a meme, (hate that word)... start calling "DRM'ed CDs" something else. Say, maybe non-standard-and-playable-only-on-certain-player-t hingies resembling CDs.
The Disc, formerly known as CD, formerly known as Compact Disc
that he'll post the review to Eclipse (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/eclipse/index.html released a year ago) around Xmas.
Sorry, but I really don't understand what capabilities would have to do with system startup etc. It's just a permissions system.
I guess you could have a Unix-like system with capabilities (maybe ACLs are a start for the file stuff), and have it startup/shutdown just like other Unices.
What kind of crashes? When a program crashes, it crashes. That's fine. Just don't give third-party apps enough rights to, for instance, run hardware-level drivers, so they can't crash your system ;) (containing those drivers in user-space would make them slower, but safer)
The problem with language-level capabilities as opposed to OS-level rights is that the language is quite often subverted. When was the last time one program on your machine could read another processes's memory?
One of the things that I miss from the USA (there being quite many). I wrote them several times, but it seems that they don't want to provide subscriptions to Europeans.
Weird, since their FAQ contains a point on how to access web content if you're European.
Whatever that would be. Use an operating system that gives you memory protection, and even better: capabilities (rights to read/write files and other things), and you can run ANY program, written in ANY language, without the programs even being ABLE to do any harm.
Oh, that would be too much of progress, wouldn't it?
IANA specialist, but if the DRM is open, wouldn't it be easy to circumvent it or strip the DRM off the files?
After all there have to be ways to extract the raw data from the DRM container, so what prevents the user from just piping that data into a new, clean, file?
So what? The slashcode link above (alistapart) exists TODAY and it looks really good (lightyears better than most other forums on the web).
Why wait another ten years for Taco and others to do some NIH?