You own the disc. The publisher can not take that away from you. Just as with a book where you own the paper. You don't own the music on the disc or the words on the paper. The author/publisher owns them. By selling you a CD or a book, the author has given you the right to use the music or words that are contained on the medium.
In your example, you are taking a copy of the music off of the medium and distributing it sans the disc. Unless the owner give you permission to do so, you are not allowed to do that.
Data is not a tangable object; you can't pick up an idea. You can do anything with the medium that you would please you. However, unless the owner gives you permission to do so, you can not take the data and distribute it independantly of the medium.
The courts have already ruled on "first sale". Once the publisher sells the copy, they have no say over what you do with it, wether its read it and throw it out, give it away, sell it, burn it, etc.
This is why college textbook publishers change the edition every few years. The slight changes are enough that using older versions when the professor is basing his/her course over the new one becomes unfeasable.
Lemme tell you this. WHO IN THE HELL IS GONNA ENFORCE THIS????!!!
Its not about enforcement, its about precident. Courts typically make rulings based upon previous rulings. Getting a judge to break a standing precident is tough since judges don't want to get their rulings overturned. They tend to rule based upon what previous judges have ruled in similar cases.
Let's say that the court hears the case and decides in favor of Newmark, and that both time shifting and commercial skipping are acceptable forms of fair use under copyright laws.
Let's further suppose that I begin marketing a device that will record your favorite television shows, remove commercials, and stores them for later viewing, but instead of using a built-in harddisk that has finite space, my device uses a storage medium that could be expanded and the only limit is the amount of money you're willing to spend on it. Television studios are unhappy that my device can record digitally record as much as the user wants and decide to sue me to prevent me from selling the device. The studios will probablly argue that viewers shouldn't have as much control over television that my device would give them. In my defence, I can cite Newmark v. Turner's ruling that timeshifting a commercial skipping is fair use. Further, I could argue that because timeshifting and fair use is a non infringing use, I can also cite Sony (the Betamax case) that because my device has substantial non-infringing uses, I should still be able to sell it.
Here's another reason: the studios have the ability to flag HDTV signals so that they can't be recorded. If I sell a video recording device that conveniently "ignores" that flag, the studios are probablly going to sue me over it. Again, this ruling, if in the favor of Newmark, could shield such devices or modifications to other devices that would normally not record such flagged broadcasts, from suit.
The point here is that one would generally consider a public library a place where one could let one's children go safely and without supervision instead of worrying about pornography and whatnot. Do you want (or are able to) to supervise your children every second of their lives?
This is the FUD that has been dished out over "protecting children".
The public library is the cornerstone of our free society. There, you can access tons of information and entertainment for free. The Internet is the logical extension of the library. To have the government forcefully block off part of it is like having anything with the word Shakespeare in it blocked because he might not be popular with someone. In fact, censoring Shakespeare might be a good idea to protect children. After all, Romeo and Juliet has killings and suicides which are both dangerous to children.
If you look at the filtering software, none of them are totally objective. In fact, most are quite subjective. They block not just "obscene" material but also unpopular speech and anything else that the software publisher feels like blocking, including material that is critical of them.
And if a child would be looking at pornography over the Internet, they surely wouldn't be doing it at the library, where the computers are out in the open for anyone to see. They're doing it at home (or a friend's house) while unsupervised.
That's right, at home. Where you, the parents, are supposed to be watching over them. Not at the library, not at school, but at home.
The best defense to pornography on the Internet is simple parents monitoring their children. Moniroting them all of the time comes with the territory. Barring having your eye on them all the time, parents at least need to instill in their children what's right and wrong and how to make the right decision. If you aren't prepared or willing to do that, then maybe you shouldn't have children.
You can't sue the United States Federal Government directly (unless it gives you permission to do so). But you can sue officials of said government. In this case, the suit is agaist the John Ashcroft the Attourny General, not John Ashcroft the private citizen. The legal documents usually clarify this with something along the lines of "in the capacity of attourney general" when naming Ashcroft.
I tried Quicken and thought that it was a little overkill for what I wanted to use it for. I only need to keep a register of what my account ballances are and want to be able to quickly and easily look up how much money I have and enter new transactions with the same ease. So, I ditched the personal finance software and fired up my favorite spreadsheet application. All I needed to do was to set up the worksheet so that the first collumn was the check number, the second was the date, the third the payee, the fourth the amount of the transaction, and the fifth my ending balance. The balance is taken from adding (or subtracting) the amount of the transaction from the ending balance of the line from above. Very simple and I don't need to wade through the excess features that I don't want or need.
Personal finance software brings several tool together into one package. But most of those you can easily recreate with other software.
Everywhere I turn, someone is calling something a "nightmare": the DMV is a nightmare, planning event x was a nightmare, dealing with my contractor is a nightmare... We seem to be living really shitty lives if everything out there is a nightmare.
Its not necessarlly a problem with Microsoft's security stance (although that still is a problem), but more that the security flaws are always in the componants that the whole line of Microsoft software and third-party software uses, as this current example shows. Its great to be able to reuse some code or link to an external library to make your job writing the software easier, but this just shows how dangerous that can be.
For example, let's say that I write a program that uses pages written in HTML and use Microsoft's Internet Explorer HTML display libraries. Now, any security holes and exploits that are in IE are now in my program.
Security through obscurity can be a useful tool (not the only method of security, of course) but you can easily see where one failure point can propogate to many other programs.
Now, using my hypothetical program that uses Microsoft's HTML libraries... if I write my own HTML libraries for my program, its likely to have bugs and holes of its own. But the difference is that is that not only are they going to be different ones, but I now have control over them, i.e. I can fix it and not be at the mercy of someone else to write fix their program (that became my problem).
Globalization is definately NOT evil. Yes, the U.S. does lose blue collar jobs to "third-world countries" but that is not necessarlly a bad thing. The reason that labor is so cheap in undeveloped nations in that it is very unproductive. If an employee wasn't working in a textile mill, making $1 a day, they would be without a job entirely. Sure, that wage is low according to our standards but when your next-best option is no job and starving, which would you pick? As the workforce becomes more skilled and educated, the price of labor becomes more expensive. Look at Japan: following World War II, they were an underdeveloped nation and labor was cheap. Now, as the country has developed, the price of labor in Japan is near that in the US. Take Germany: highly skilled labor is, in fact, more expensive than in the U.S. but is used to produce finer-quality products (luxary vehicles are one).
It would be exploiting a worker in the United States or other simarlly industrialized nation where the standard of living was high to pay a very low wage. So what happens? Ideally, the price of the imported goods are cheaper than they would be if they were made domestically. The aggregate savings that society relizes can be used to reeducate the workforce that would have been manufacturing the imported good to perform work that requires more education or skills and then the standard of living for ALL Americans can increase. At the same time, underdeveloped countries will develop more and increase the standard of living in those countries.
So, while globalization might force change, it is a change for the better. We get cheaper goods and a better standard of living. The foreign countries get meaningful jobs, the workforce and economy develops, and their standard of living increases. Global society as a whole is better off then it was before.
I don't shop at Wal-Mart because of their illegal actions towards the attempted organization of their employees, among other reasons. But the fact that they sell foreign-made goods is not one of them.
Its not that techies don't have money or care to take it to the Supreme Court. Whenever the media companies get close to a court being able to make a decision to rule on the law, they back off. They do this so that the law doesn't get overturned, not because they don't want to go to court. This way, the law is still on the books and perhapps they scared some people into submission.
Investors determine stock prices based on the return that they receive on the stock. This return is in the form of dividends, that is, money paid to the owners of a stock as a reward for assuming the risk of owning the stock. The reason that Microsoft's stock value is high is that there is an expectation that dividends will be paid in the future. Using the past as a model for the future, it is my conclusion that Microsoft will continue to not pay dividends. Because of that, the value of Microsoft stock should be zero.
Re:More Best Buy Screwups...
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All of the customer service problems that you and others (including myself) have faced are brought about by the existance of mass-market stores such as Best Buy. The electronic and computer hardware are sold right at cost. The store is making very little profit off of them. The real money is in the extended warranties which is just about 100% profit for the store. The mentality is that a sale without the extended warranty is a wasted sale. These stores don't need knowledgable exployees as long as they can say "Would you like the extended warranty? Its only..." If no one bought the extended warranty, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and most other mass-market stores would be forced to close their doors.
If you want to hurt these companies, go buy hardware on sale but NEVER, EVER buy the extended warranty.
Re:Best Buy = Best Fraud
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The store can refuse to accept returns if they say that all sales are final. (or as-is). They can also refust to accept returns of products that you opened (ala the typical no return of software if you opened it).
However the products that they sell must at least work. The EULA that says that the software has no warrantee or guarantee of fitness or merchantability (legaleeze for "if it doesn't work, screw you") is between you and the publisher. It is not between you and the store. If the store sells you a product that is defective and not disclaimed to be as-is, they are required to do something about it.
I purchase pratically everything with credit card because of the protections that credit cards give you. You can contest a charge if the product you were sold was defective and the merchant wouldn't remedy the situation, even if you signed the sales slip.
I agree with the spirit of Hollings' proposed bill (and it pains me to say that). However, my "ideal" online privacy law would be:
1. Companies are forbidden to share/sell/reveal, intentionally or not, any information that a consumer gives to the company or authorizes the company to obtain unless expressly authorized by the consumer. So, anything that you give the company can not be shared with anyone else unless you give them permission to do so.
2. Companies are forbidden to share/sell/reveal, intentionally or not, any information created through consumers' transactions with the company that can be associated with a partifular consumer unless expressly authorized by the consumer. In other words, Company X can tell a marketing company that Y consumers purchased Product Z. They can NOT say that Consumer A purchased Product Z unless Consumer A authorizes it. If the company creates the data, they can use it, but can only associate the data with particular consumers with permission.
3. Any permission given for a company to use your data must be an informed decision. The company must provide to the consumer who they will share the data with (specific comapnies), what data will be shared, what the receiving company will do with the data, and what the company will get for sharing the data. This information must be provided to the consumer before she agrees to give permission, not something that can get received "on request" later after agreeing.
4. Companies that violate these three premises will be fined by the government and there will be a procedure set in place for consumers to collect damages.
Hopefully, this would prevent companies from playing fast and loose with your information and force them to make sure that their systems are secure (note the "intentionally or not" would cause the company to violate this "law" if some third party, such as a cracker, gets the data).
Self-regulation doesn't work. There will always be someone who will violate the "regulations" that the industry comes up with. The only solution is a legislative solution.
Entrapment would be if a cop (not in uniform, of course) saw you walking by and said "Hey, you know you want to help me steal this car." or something else that coerced you into commiting the crime.
Bascially (keep in mind that IANAL) entrapment defences say that the accused would not have commited the crime if the pollice officer did not urge him to do so. This is definately not extrapment. The car is sitting there, just as other cars are. If someone steals it, they're going to get caught.
This is going to be a great technology to protect your car fron theft and deter would-be criminals from doing so.
Yes, the license agreement of OEM software typically ties it to the hardware it was sold with. In other words, if you buy a PC with Windows XP installed on it, the license says that the copy of Windows XP can only be used on that PC (and the recovery discs tend to "enforce" that too).
This "guide" reverses the statement to say that the hardware is tied to the software. It says that schools should not (the baseless legal threats turn that into a "can not") accept donated computer hardware unless it includes the origial software with accompanying media and documentation.
That is pure shit.
Microsoft does have a program that gives a school a site-license for software upgrades, provided that the systems that they are installed on have a license for the original software. In other words, if the hardware has a license for Windows 98, the school can install their site-licensed Windows 2000 upgrade on it. If the system does not have an existing license, the school can not.
This is pure Microsoft FUD. I actually laughed when I read it the first time. Then I realized that some educator somewhere will read this and actually believe it and get rid of donated computers because of this. Microsoft is not trying to be charitable here by helping to prevent schools from getting into legal trouble. They're trying to take used computers out of schools so that the schools are forced to buy new ones and new Microsoft software licesnes.
It is using less than ten per cent of the mainframe's capacity, they do plan to migrate other server jobs currently on discrete machines to the mainframe
Exactly.
This sroty is turning into a whole bunch of "But I can do email suing this old 486 in my basement". But you are all missing the point. Since the mainframe's capacity isn't full, there are a lot of things that can be put on to it.
I guess no one saw the the IBM commercial where the company manager calls the cops because he thinks that all the servers were stolen. The tech walks out and says that they weren't and the room of servers was moved onto one machine. "It will save us a bundle."
...is the lack of interoperability between different programs on different systems. You don't need the latest version of MS Eyes 2002 to read a paper document. Despite all of the advances in user interfaces, computers are still hard to use.
Not to mention that everyone is always more trusting of paper copies. It is usually very easy to discover if a paper copy has been altered.
When you are able to talk to your computer in plain language, ie "Bring up the invoice from last month" you might be able to begin to eliminate paper. Don't get me wrong, computers are great for indexing and retreiving data. Getting the data into the computer is the hard part.
You mean that they never gave you that "secret" dialup number that we all know exists that will get you right in all the time? Man, sucks to be working for AOL-Time Warner...
The earlier story linked to this page which lists what the radio stations would have to report to the RIAA, under these proposed rules. The record companies aren't planning on counting listeners. They are hoping that the radio companies won't be able to jump through these hoops just for the opportunity to pay the royalties in the first place. The goal is to kill Internet radio on their path to put the digital music "toothpase" back into the tube.
They also can't distribute the stolen car to every single person who could want a car on earth either.
But they can do those things with e-books. Were you guys just a victim of your own analogy, or were you hoping on the DMCA to keep people from distributing cracking tools?
A thief can do the same thing with a print book and a photocopier. Or, to the low-tech extreme, pencil and paper. Nothing is or can be immune to copying. If you can see or hear it, it can be copied. That is a risk that an author takes when he or she releases a work.
If you want to be absolutely sure that no one will be able to copy your work, you must keep it to yourself.
DRM will not work and can not work for the simple reason that the data must, at some point, be unlocked. Once it is unlocked ("autorized" or not) it can be copied.
For that matter, regular advertising doesn't work either. How many of you actually watch the ads on TV? Which the exception of the Superbowl, not very many. For most, the TV ad is time to get a snack or go to the bathroom, or similar non-ad-watching activity. How about a magazine or newspaper? Unless you are specifically looking for an ad (like the flyer for CompUSA or such) you flip right past ads.
Web advertising is a real bargain. Usually the advertiser doesn't even have to pay for the ad unless the user clicks the add. The advertisers are getting a lot more than traditional media for a lot less, to the point of ripping off webmasters such as yourself. The reader seeing the ad aparently has no value anymore. And as I said above, for TV and print, the viewer/reader probablly doesn't see the ad either.
I have been getting really ticked off at advertising. I've gotten to the point that if I am baraged with a pop-up or pop-under ad, I will actually decide to NOT ever buy that product. And kudos for spam as well.
And to be honest, I've clicked some of the Think Geek banners because the stuff I saw looked interesting.
You're telling me that a CompUSA employee caught the kid and knew what the kid was doing? Did the employee still try to sell the kid the extended warrantee?
According to opensecrets.org, Representative Ernest F. Hollings received $260,034 from the TV/Movie/Music industry from 1997-2001. This was the second highest contributer; the highest was lawyers and law firms. He also received $18,000 in contributions from TV/Movie/Music PACs for 2001-2002. You can read all the details here.
So, yes, Hollings is in the entertainment industry's pocket.
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You own the disc. The publisher can not take that away from you. Just as with a book where you own the paper. You don't own the music on the disc or the words on the paper. The author/publisher owns them. By selling you a CD or a book, the author has given you the right to use the music or words that are contained on the medium.
In your example, you are taking a copy of the music off of the medium and distributing it sans the disc. Unless the owner give you permission to do so, you are not allowed to do that.
Data is not a tangable object; you can't pick up an idea. You can do anything with the medium that you would please you. However, unless the owner gives you permission to do so, you can not take the data and distribute it independantly of the medium.
The courts have already ruled on "first sale". Once the publisher sells the copy, they have no say over what you do with it, wether its read it and throw it out, give it away, sell it, burn it, etc.
This is why college textbook publishers change the edition every few years. The slight changes are enough that using older versions when the professor is basing his/her course over the new one becomes unfeasable.
Lemme tell you this. WHO IN THE HELL IS GONNA ENFORCE THIS????!!!
Its not about enforcement, its about precident. Courts typically make rulings based upon previous rulings. Getting a judge to break a standing precident is tough since judges don't want to get their rulings overturned. They tend to rule based upon what previous judges have ruled in similar cases.
Let's say that the court hears the case and decides in favor of Newmark, and that both time shifting and commercial skipping are acceptable forms of fair use under copyright laws.
Let's further suppose that I begin marketing a device that will record your favorite television shows, remove commercials, and stores them for later viewing, but instead of using a built-in harddisk that has finite space, my device uses a storage medium that could be expanded and the only limit is the amount of money you're willing to spend on it. Television studios are unhappy that my device can record digitally record as much as the user wants and decide to sue me to prevent me from selling the device. The studios will probablly argue that viewers shouldn't have as much control over television that my device would give them. In my defence, I can cite Newmark v. Turner's ruling that timeshifting a commercial skipping is fair use. Further, I could argue that because timeshifting and fair use is a non infringing use, I can also cite Sony (the Betamax case) that because my device has substantial non-infringing uses, I should still be able to sell it.
Here's another reason: the studios have the ability to flag HDTV signals so that they can't be recorded. If I sell a video recording device that conveniently "ignores" that flag, the studios are probablly going to sue me over it. Again, this ruling, if in the favor of Newmark, could shield such devices or modifications to other devices that would normally not record such flagged broadcasts, from suit.
The point here is that one would generally consider a public library a place where one could let one's children go safely and without supervision instead of worrying about pornography and whatnot. Do you want (or are able to) to supervise your children every second of their lives?
This is the FUD that has been dished out over "protecting children".
The public library is the cornerstone of our free society. There, you can access tons of information and entertainment for free. The Internet is the logical extension of the library. To have the government forcefully block off part of it is like having anything with the word Shakespeare in it blocked because he might not be popular with someone. In fact, censoring Shakespeare might be a good idea to protect children. After all, Romeo and Juliet has killings and suicides which are both dangerous to children.
If you look at the filtering software, none of them are totally objective. In fact, most are quite subjective. They block not just "obscene" material but also unpopular speech and anything else that the software publisher feels like blocking, including material that is critical of them.
And if a child would be looking at pornography over the Internet, they surely wouldn't be doing it at the library, where the computers are out in the open for anyone to see. They're doing it at home (or a friend's house) while unsupervised.
That's right, at home. Where you, the parents, are supposed to be watching over them. Not at the library, not at school, but at home.
The best defense to pornography on the Internet is simple parents monitoring their children. Moniroting them all of the time comes with the territory. Barring having your eye on them all the time, parents at least need to instill in their children what's right and wrong and how to make the right decision. If you aren't prepared or willing to do that, then maybe you shouldn't have children.
IANAL, but...
You can't sue the United States Federal Government directly (unless it gives you permission to do so). But you can sue officials of said government. In this case, the suit is agaist the John Ashcroft the Attourny General, not John Ashcroft the private citizen. The legal documents usually clarify this with something along the lines of "in the capacity of attourney general" when naming Ashcroft.
I tried Quicken and thought that it was a little overkill for what I wanted to use it for. I only need to keep a register of what my account ballances are and want to be able to quickly and easily look up how much money I have and enter new transactions with the same ease. So, I ditched the personal finance software and fired up my favorite spreadsheet application. All I needed to do was to set up the worksheet so that the first collumn was the check number, the second was the date, the third the payee, the fourth the amount of the transaction, and the fifth my ending balance. The balance is taken from adding (or subtracting) the amount of the transaction from the ending balance of the line from above. Very simple and I don't need to wade through the excess features that I don't want or need.
Personal finance software brings several tool together into one package. But most of those you can easily recreate with other software.
The whole website looks like its straight from one of the many MLM scam spams I've received lately, especially the page on Choosing a Stock Portfolio Based on Patent Indicators.
Not to mention that the web site is sooo 1996...
Everywhere I turn, someone is calling something a "nightmare": the DMV is a nightmare, planning event x was a nightmare, dealing with my contractor is a nightmare... We seem to be living really shitty lives if everything out there is a nightmare.
Its not necessarlly a problem with Microsoft's security stance (although that still is a problem), but more that the security flaws are always in the componants that the whole line of Microsoft software and third-party software uses, as this current example shows. Its great to be able to reuse some code or link to an external library to make your job writing the software easier, but this just shows how dangerous that can be.
For example, let's say that I write a program that uses pages written in HTML and use Microsoft's Internet Explorer HTML display libraries. Now, any security holes and exploits that are in IE are now in my program.
Security through obscurity can be a useful tool (not the only method of security, of course) but you can easily see where one failure point can propogate to many other programs.
Now, using my hypothetical program that uses Microsoft's HTML libraries... if I write my own HTML libraries for my program, its likely to have bugs and holes of its own. But the difference is that is that not only are they going to be different ones, but I now have control over them, i.e. I can fix it and not be at the mercy of someone else to write fix their program (that became my problem).
Globalization is definately NOT evil. Yes, the U.S. does lose blue collar jobs to "third-world countries" but that is not necessarlly a bad thing. The reason that labor is so cheap in undeveloped nations in that it is very unproductive. If an employee wasn't working in a textile mill, making $1 a day, they would be without a job entirely. Sure, that wage is low according to our standards but when your next-best option is no job and starving, which would you pick? As the workforce becomes more skilled and educated, the price of labor becomes more expensive. Look at Japan: following World War II, they were an underdeveloped nation and labor was cheap. Now, as the country has developed, the price of labor in Japan is near that in the US. Take Germany: highly skilled labor is, in fact, more expensive than in the U.S. but is used to produce finer-quality products (luxary vehicles are one).
It would be exploiting a worker in the United States or other simarlly industrialized nation where the standard of living was high to pay a very low wage. So what happens? Ideally, the price of the imported goods are cheaper than they would be if they were made domestically. The aggregate savings that society relizes can be used to reeducate the workforce that would have been manufacturing the imported good to perform work that requires more education or skills and then the standard of living for ALL Americans can increase. At the same time, underdeveloped countries will develop more and increase the standard of living in those countries.
So, while globalization might force change, it is a change for the better. We get cheaper goods and a better standard of living. The foreign countries get meaningful jobs, the workforce and economy develops, and their standard of living increases. Global society as a whole is better off then it was before.
I don't shop at Wal-Mart because of their illegal actions towards the attempted organization of their employees, among other reasons. But the fact that they sell foreign-made goods is not one of them.
Its not that techies don't have money or care to take it to the Supreme Court. Whenever the media companies get close to a court being able to make a decision to rule on the law, they back off. They do this so that the law doesn't get overturned, not because they don't want to go to court. This way, the law is still on the books and perhapps they scared some people into submission.
Despite all of that cash on hand, Microsoft has never paid one cent to investors in dividends.
Investors determine stock prices based on the return that they receive on the stock. This return is in the form of dividends, that is, money paid to the owners of a stock as a reward for assuming the risk of owning the stock. The reason that Microsoft's stock value is high is that there is an expectation that dividends will be paid in the future. Using the past as a model for the future, it is my conclusion that Microsoft will continue to not pay dividends. Because of that, the value of Microsoft stock should be zero.
All of the customer service problems that you and others (including myself) have faced are brought about by the existance of mass-market stores such as Best Buy. The electronic and computer hardware are sold right at cost. The store is making very little profit off of them. The real money is in the extended warranties which is just about 100% profit for the store. The mentality is that a sale without the extended warranty is a wasted sale. These stores don't need knowledgable exployees as long as they can say "Would you like the extended warranty? Its only..." If no one bought the extended warranty, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and most other mass-market stores would be forced to close their doors.
If you want to hurt these companies, go buy hardware on sale but NEVER, EVER buy the extended warranty.
The store can refuse to accept returns if they say that all sales are final. (or as-is). They can also refust to accept returns of products that you opened (ala the typical no return of software if you opened it).
However the products that they sell must at least work. The EULA that says that the software has no warrantee or guarantee of fitness or merchantability (legaleeze for "if it doesn't work, screw you") is between you and the publisher. It is not between you and the store. If the store sells you a product that is defective and not disclaimed to be as-is, they are required to do something about it.
I purchase pratically everything with credit card because of the protections that credit cards give you. You can contest a charge if the product you were sold was defective and the merchant wouldn't remedy the situation, even if you signed the sales slip.
I agree with the spirit of Hollings' proposed bill (and it pains me to say that). However, my "ideal" online privacy law would be:
1. Companies are forbidden to share/sell/reveal, intentionally or not, any information that a consumer gives to the company or authorizes the company to obtain unless expressly authorized by the consumer. So, anything that you give the company can not be shared with anyone else unless you give them permission to do so.
2. Companies are forbidden to share/sell/reveal, intentionally or not, any information created through consumers' transactions with the company that can be associated with a partifular consumer unless expressly authorized by the consumer. In other words, Company X can tell a marketing company that Y consumers purchased Product Z. They can NOT say that Consumer A purchased Product Z unless Consumer A authorizes it. If the company creates the data, they can use it, but can only associate the data with particular consumers with permission.
3. Any permission given for a company to use your data must be an informed decision. The company must provide to the consumer who they will share the data with (specific comapnies), what data will be shared, what the receiving company will do with the data, and what the company will get for sharing the data. This information must be provided to the consumer before she agrees to give permission, not something that can get received "on request" later after agreeing.
4. Companies that violate these three premises will be fined by the government and there will be a procedure set in place for consumers to collect damages.
Hopefully, this would prevent companies from playing fast and loose with your information and force them to make sure that their systems are secure (note the "intentionally or not" would cause the company to violate this "law" if some third party, such as a cracker, gets the data).
Self-regulation doesn't work. There will always be someone who will violate the "regulations" that the industry comes up with. The only solution is a legislative solution.
Entrapment would be if a cop (not in uniform, of course) saw you walking by and said "Hey, you know you want to help me steal this car." or something else that coerced you into commiting the crime.
Bascially (keep in mind that IANAL) entrapment defences say that the accused would not have commited the crime if the pollice officer did not urge him to do so. This is definately not extrapment. The car is sitting there, just as other cars are. If someone steals it, they're going to get caught.
This is going to be a great technology to protect your car fron theft and deter would-be criminals from doing so.
Yes, the license agreement of OEM software typically ties it to the hardware it was sold with. In other words, if you buy a PC with Windows XP installed on it, the license says that the copy of Windows XP can only be used on that PC (and the recovery discs tend to "enforce" that too).
This "guide" reverses the statement to say that the hardware is tied to the software. It says that schools should not (the baseless legal threats turn that into a "can not") accept donated computer hardware unless it includes the origial software with accompanying media and documentation.
That is pure shit.
Microsoft does have a program that gives a school a site-license for software upgrades, provided that the systems that they are installed on have a license for the original software. In other words, if the hardware has a license for Windows 98, the school can install their site-licensed Windows 2000 upgrade on it. If the system does not have an existing license, the school can not.
This is pure Microsoft FUD. I actually laughed when I read it the first time. Then I realized that some educator somewhere will read this and actually believe it and get rid of donated computers because of this. Microsoft is not trying to be charitable here by helping to prevent schools from getting into legal trouble. They're trying to take used computers out of schools so that the schools are forced to buy new ones and new Microsoft software licesnes.
It is using less than ten per cent of the mainframe's capacity, they do plan to migrate other server jobs currently on discrete machines to the mainframe
Exactly.
This sroty is turning into a whole bunch of "But I can do email suing this old 486 in my basement". But you are all missing the point. Since the mainframe's capacity isn't full, there are a lot of things that can be put on to it.
I guess no one saw the the IBM commercial where the company manager calls the cops because he thinks that all the servers were stolen. The tech walks out and says that they weren't and the room of servers was moved onto one machine. "It will save us a bundle."
Bingo.
...is the lack of interoperability between different programs on different systems. You don't need the latest version of MS Eyes 2002 to read a paper document. Despite all of the advances in user interfaces, computers are still hard to use.
Not to mention that everyone is always more trusting of paper copies. It is usually very easy to discover if a paper copy has been altered.
When you are able to talk to your computer in plain language, ie "Bring up the invoice from last month" you might be able to begin to eliminate paper. Don't get me wrong, computers are great for indexing and retreiving data. Getting the data into the computer is the hard part.
You mean that they never gave you that "secret" dialup number that we all know exists that will get you right in all the time? Man, sucks to be working for AOL-Time Warner...
The earlier story linked to this page which lists what the radio stations would have to report to the RIAA, under these proposed rules. The record companies aren't planning on counting listeners. They are hoping that the radio companies won't be able to jump through these hoops just for the opportunity to pay the royalties in the first place. The goal is to kill Internet radio on their path to put the digital music "toothpase" back into the tube.
They also can't distribute the stolen car to every single person who could want a car on earth either.
But they can do those things with e-books. Were you guys just a victim of your own analogy, or were you hoping on the DMCA to keep people from distributing cracking tools?
A thief can do the same thing with a print book and a photocopier. Or, to the low-tech extreme, pencil and paper. Nothing is or can be immune to copying. If you can see or hear it, it can be copied. That is a risk that an author takes when he or she releases a work.
If you want to be absolutely sure that no one will be able to copy your work, you must keep it to yourself.
DRM will not work and can not work for the simple reason that the data must, at some point, be unlocked. Once it is unlocked ("autorized" or not) it can be copied.
For that matter, regular advertising doesn't work either. How many of you actually watch the ads on TV? Which the exception of the Superbowl, not very many. For most, the TV ad is time to get a snack or go to the bathroom, or similar non-ad-watching activity. How about a magazine or newspaper? Unless you are specifically looking for an ad (like the flyer for CompUSA or such) you flip right past ads.
Web advertising is a real bargain. Usually the advertiser doesn't even have to pay for the ad unless the user clicks the add. The advertisers are getting a lot more than traditional media for a lot less, to the point of ripping off webmasters such as yourself. The reader seeing the ad aparently has no value anymore. And as I said above, for TV and print, the viewer/reader probablly doesn't see the ad either.
I have been getting really ticked off at advertising. I've gotten to the point that if I am baraged with a pop-up or pop-under ad, I will actually decide to NOT ever buy that product. And kudos for spam as well.
And to be honest, I've clicked some of the Think Geek banners because the stuff I saw looked interesting.
You're telling me that a CompUSA employee caught the kid and knew what the kid was doing? Did the employee still try to sell the kid the extended warrantee?
According to opensecrets.org, Representative Ernest F. Hollings received $260,034 from the TV/Movie/Music industry from 1997-2001. This was the second highest contributer; the highest was lawyers and law firms. He also received $18,000 in contributions from TV/Movie/Music PACs for 2001-2002. You can read all the details here.
So, yes, Hollings is in the entertainment industry's pocket.