So you find an IP address. The RIAA would just love it if somehow it were possible to conclusively prove a connection to an individual. It isn't. So I don't see how it is possible to connect anyone with an action "on the Internet".
Yes, this means that pretty much you can do, say or publish anything you want without any consequences, as long as it is on the Internet and you don't go bragging about it. Just about all of the hackers/crackers/script kiddies that have been caught were caught because of bragging. The few real RIAA victories have been because a tracable email address was connected with uploading music files to others.
I don't see how it can have anything but this kind of effect. Any penalty now could be called into question by a judge.
Dumping a contract that seems to have unfavorable terms - in hindsight - has always had some kind of penalty associated with it. This may have a very strong effect on consulting contracts and other types of term licenses. You know, someone contracts with a consultant for 2 years and decides after 9 months they don't need they anymore. Whatever penalties might have been written into the contract could (in theory) be called into question. Especially if they are not directly tied to monetary losses.
Why? What is wrong with a "penalty" that is contracted for and spelled out as a penalty for early termination right there in the original agreement that you signed?
The problem with this is the judge is taking it upon himself to decide there is no proper basis for such a penalty, when it is clearly intended as a penalty - a disincentive to terminate the contract.
What is next? A court reviewing a software license agreement that has a large penalty clause in it? It seems that a "penalty" that is not identified as a penalty but stated to the customer as a cost recovery, a pro-rated subsidy or something else would be a problem. But every cell phone agreement I have seen says it is basically a penalty.
I see this as being a huge problem if it is taken as any sort of precedent.
So, does this mean that any contract could potentially be reviewed by a court and parts of it thrown out? After the fact? In some cases, long after the contract was terminated?
This seems a little uncomfortable to me. It sounds like the judge decided the fees weren't valid and that he decided Sprint didn't justify the fees in terms of actual monetary losses. I know lots of fees for non-compliance that aren't based in any way on monetary losses - the fee exists as a penalty.
I suppose I could see a judge ruling that the cell phone carrier service agreement contract was invalid and new customers could not be signed up until it was revised. But changing the terms of a terminated contract sounds a little fishy. And it does not seem like a good idea in terms of contract law in general.
So, are CD penalties to be thrown out next? Aren't they just as unfair? How about traffic tickets? What monetary loss is represented by a $200 speeding ticket? And besides, where was the contract that I signed that made me agree to pay the $200 fine anyway?
Today we have a media that feeds on salicious gossip. We have YouTube and other web sites that host any video you care to upload.
What this means is that if I take pictures of someone being arrested for some socially-unacceptable crime (child molestation, for example) it will certain make the local news and can be posted to YouTube and others just for laughs. Of course their being arrested has no bearing on their real guilt which might take a trial months later to really decide. But by the mere fact of their being arrested we can destroy their lives. People for the most part are very reluctant to give up the notion that you have to be guilty to get arrested.
Did you consider that randomly recording police actions will often lead to this sort of thing far more than "catching" the police in some sort of abusive actions? No, of course not. All cops are corrupt weasles that just want to abuse their power over ordinary people and every interaction between a police officer and ordinary citizens will result in some kind of abuse.
The reason that "professional" photographers have stayed away from perp walks and photographing arrests is because doing otherwise is clearly abusive. Sure, some people will do anything for a picture that sells. And think how much a video of some celebrity getting arrested will sell for...
The Clinton administration did far, far worse. Such as using the FBI to perform investigations on suspected members of the "vast rightwing conspiracy". The Clinton administration didn't need to do much in the way of these kind of searches because they just cleaned house - anyone affiliated with the previous Reagan/Bush administrations was just out on their ear, day one.
They also had staff that were so utterly petty as to destroy keyboards and office furniture when they left office.
OK, but with this sort of outlook we also need to line the TV news (network, cable, all of 'em) up against the wall and execute them. For treason. Why? Because they are well on their way to overthrowing the country.
What happened in in 2000 was pretty simple. Sure, you can focus on Florida and such but pause a moment and remember how the results where announced. CBS announced that Gore won. Not "looking good for Gore", not "perhaps Mr. Gore has won", it was just "the next president is Al Gore."
People went to bed knowing that Gore won. They got up the next morning and found out the election went a little differently. Many of these people haven't gotten over the idea that because of this the election was obviously stolen. After all, their trusted news people SAID GORE WON.
Paper ballots simply cannot be counted in time for the midnight deadline for the news folks to announce the winner. They have to announce by then or their entire election coverate is pointless and nobody will watch. If nobody watches, they lose millions (or tens of millions or hundreds of millions) of dollars in ad revenue. This will not happen. Therefore, they will clearly announce a winner in order to remain relevent.
They might get lucky. After all, there is a 50/50 chance of them being right. With today's split of voters, I don't see it being much closer than that unless the results are really in. Otherwise the results announced will be based on exit polls and other information like surveys. Accurate? Probably not. But the ad revenue will remain.
If the 2008 election is announced incorrectly (again), my guess is we will see an uprising like hasn't been seen since 1917.
Yes, but "public domain" should not be simply a means for someone to make a ton of money by republishing. What most people miss is that opening things up will simply result in the biggest, baddest mega-distributor winning. Because they can out-distribute, online and offline, anyone else.
Think WalMart on steroids. Or Sony owning all the TV stations.
Unfortunately, the people have changed. In 1940 the education system had people that spoke English, didn't have to contend with children that "knew" they had no reason to be in the 4th grade, and dealt harshly with disruptive and violent children.
Today, half or more of a classroom may speak English only at school and not very well at that. Reading in English is not practical for them and given a multicultural and diversity-seeking education system, it is not made a requirement. The violent and disruptive children take all of the teacher's focus and the teachers quickly find out that the administration already knows there is no place else for the children. The teacher also finds out that grabbing a child to prevent them from hitting another can result in an interview with the police - child abuse, you see.
It isn't 1940 anymore. We are losing the fight to maintain a cohesive nation, in fact many believe this is the wrong thing to strive for. The end of the road in the multicultural and diverse society we are heading towards there is no unity, just endless competing factions. Education used to bring the immigrant children together - today it maintains their separation. The result of this is easy to see, but I do not see anyone publicly saying such maintained diversity is bad, even though it is demonstratably the core of many, many of the problems we face today.
Sorry, no copyright notice is needed for there to be a copyright. This was resolved in 1976 and is (I believe) part of the Berne Convention.
While it would be nice if removing the copyright notice (or not propagating it) effectively removed the copyright, that isn't the way it works. It doesn't matter if there is a notice or not, just creating something effectively creates "copyright privileges". Before 1976 it was required to register works with the government in order to have any such rights.
What the industry is defending against is their right to exist. They don't have any. For music, the pirates have pretty much one.
As far as suing downloaders, it isn't happening as far as I know. They really can't be caught. What they are suing are people "making available" that they can find because their computer is offering to supply all or part of a file. Obviously, the problem is that if you can't track downloaders you have no idea if one person is supplying (or has supplied) the file to 1, 10, 100 or 10,000,000 people. In court it comes down to what you can prove, and they can prove nothing.
Recorded music is being supported by people that either don't understand or don't know how to download it. This will change over time to the point where everyone is educated. Sales will then be zero and the "business" of recorded music will be over. Pirates aren't going to allow it to be any different and they are most certainly in control of this now.
The idea that a person can be sued for supplying a file to an unknown (and unknowable) number of others illegally is silly. If they could prove that Person A supplied the entire file to John Does 1 through 150 and each of these 150 copyright infringements had a penalty associated with it that would be different. The truth is that they can't even prove a single download in entirety. That pretty much ends the RIAA litigation right there.
However, until we get to the "zero sales" point, the RIAA and their member companies are going to continue to threaten and litigate. They have no choice because the pirates are impacting revenue - how can they not if nobody that knows how to download is paying for music?
First off, the pirates are getting better all the time. As access to digital prints improves, you will find "cam" versions disappearing. The pirates have access to ad revenue as well as other revenue sources to bribe folks. Also, there are just a heck of a lot of people that want to support the pirates.
Secondly, if you can't wait 38 hours to see a movie I feel sorry for you. You aren't going to be happy with a free download no matter what if you are that impatient. I expect to see you in line for the midnight opening show. The rest of the folks will take their free download (digital transform, no cam versions) and watch in the comfort, privacy and safety of their homes.
If it is possible to obtain access to the digital version of the movie and post it on the Internet for all to have, the movie theater is dead. It is possible today and will become more and more common as time goes on. The production companies cannot stop this from happening and it will destroy their revenue stream. If Freeloading Freddy can download the movie and save it to a DVD they are going to. Buy the DVD? Why? They've seen it already and have it saved if they want to watch it again.
Sorry folks, but you better figure out a "business model" that works without any revenue.
The problem starts with your statement "If I like a work, I will buy it". Why? You already got it for free. Your willingness to "buy" it changes nothing in the economic equation - you got it for free. Therefore, keep it. You are freeloading. So is half the planet at this point. Get over it, admit it and move on.
Anyone that claims they just want to "try it" is being silly. The transaction is over, they got what they wanted. Period. No enforcement beyond that is possible. The RIAA is beginning to figure that out - an IP does not equal a person. Just because you can track events to an IP does not mean you can then connect that with a real person. Especially when the ISP or University has a direct policy to shield real people from events connected with a electronic address.
I keep hearing the "I'll pay for it later" argument but have yet to see anyone actually do any paying. Nobody I know would ever spend a dime for recorded music again because it is all available for free somewhere on the Internet. Movies are getting that way, especially if you can stand a "cam" version. As bandwidth capacities improve, movies will be the next to fall, I am sure.
The information provided is of highly technical nature and aims to assist a system administrator or software developer in diagnosing the problem.
The problem is, for most users that are "administering" their own systems having a message that is only of use to trained administrators or software developers is, well, useless.
It doesn't help make Linux more mainstream and user-friendly. Sure, it is rare. But so what? When it happens it pretty much kills a Linux user.
And why can the BIOS "detect" Linux in the first place, anyway?
More to the point, it is highly likely the Faxcomm is using the 97/3 rule and neither they nor AMI ever tested Linux. They copied some block of code from somewhere and that was it.
By what mechanism is the BIOS "detecting" Linux? Should not the BIOS be OS-blind? If there is some technique by which the BIOS is able to differentiate between Linux and Vista, shouldn't Linux be changed to eliminate that possibility?
Threatening (or at least pretending to threaten) the manufacturer is a joke, right? The manufacturer is looking at the 80/20 rule - or in this case more like the 97/3 rule and isn't going to be swayed by all of their prospective Linux customers deserting.
Some Linux-weenie thought this would be a good way to get hardware manufacturers to respect them, right? Wrong. This is childish whining. OK, so the BIOS that comes with the motherboard is defective. The board manufacturer almost certainly did not write the BIOS - they bought it. You may never find out where the BIOS came from. Gosh, I think this means the alternative is to declare this motherboard "not certified for Linux" and move on. The manufacturer certainly did.
Again, I seriously question why it is a good thing for Linux to be able to be detected by the BIOS for ACPI purposes and separated from Windows versions. This seems like a trap in the long run.
Most people don't really have the discipline to work at home. I used to write video games at home (no office, ever) for a company. They had about a 60% failure rate with people trying to do this - most of them just couldn't maintain focus and motivation. It has almost nothing to do with being watched and everything to do with there being an infinite number of distractions and other things that interrupt you. Everything from dripping faucets to Jehovah's Witnesses coming to the door.
Lots of companies have tried telecommuting and had miserable results. Wrong people, wrong projects, there are a million excuses. But the statistics have been collected pretty well and they are not encouraging. Would "employee monitoring" services and devices make companies more open to telecommuting? Maybe. That would be a good thing, especially if it made telecommuting more of a reality than it is today.
However, the one thing you can't get away from with telecommuting is it removes people from a social environment - the office. People aren't made to work for hours at a time in isolation in most cases. Without the social interaction they aren't happy people. Probably the underlying reason why telecommuting will always be a niche thing and will always fail on a large scale.
So how about coming up with a better way? Trusting people isn't going to cut it - would you go to a doctor that was 100% educated online? With no indication that he or she was the same person as the one taking exams? Besides, as many have said, people will try to find a way around this to cheat anyway.
How about the attitude that not only is cheating wrong but that cheating to get ahead results in problems later. Online education is today unproven and unreliable. Sure, for an MBA or an English degree is probably doesn't matter and nobody cares what sort of program you went through. Would you want a lawyer from University of Phoenix? No? Why not? Could it be that their program might not be all that great?
There is a simpler solution to this - forget online education. If it makes cheating easier and any measures implemented gotten around, then the whole concept is dead, at least for anything important.
How about people here actually think for a change and come up with a foolproof, reliable way to ensure the exam-taker is the enrolled person?
Sadly, there are some things that people will do to "get ahead". Now cheating on an English exam to pass so you can get an Engineering degree is probably somewhat meaningless. However, there are some classes that are pretty important and a degree is certainly a certification to lots of folks that you did indeed pass.
Many online institutions and certification exams require physical presence for tests. You have to go to a testing facility and pay their fees.
Wait until we have some major engineering failure or medical screwup where the person "responsible" came from an online institution. If there is even the slightest hint that some kind of fraud occurred this would be a death blow to online education, at least for anything serious. You want to avoid that and make online learning have the same credibility as physical campuses? Get behind this kind of thing with ways to prove who is behind the keyboard.
Are there ways to do this less intrusively? Sure. Let's hear about them.
I would offer that anything new in compression or similar things has now been pushed into hardware. You would then need a specific chip in order to implement the process and that chip does not just execute software but has specific hardware implementation of parts of the process. This would then be able to be patented, I would suspect.
The result is that what could be a "software upgrade" is now a hardware change. You want to play the new video streams from the Internet, you need a new card which allows decoding of them. You want to decompress some compressed file, you need the card for that as well.
Practical and efficient? No. Patentable and protectable? Yes.
Copyright affects only a single instance. The problem is that it doesn't begin to cover true innovation.
The example is someone comes up with a radically different audio or video compression technique. Copyright is meaningless because it will simply be stolen, reworked (slightly) and published by a large corporation. Who will then use the full weight of the legal system to defend "their" proprietary property.
The only defense against that today was the patent office. True, you can copyright a program, but it doesn't mean that someone cannot take that and reverse-engineer it or modify it slightly with a hex editor and republish it. Is it a "derivative work" subject to the original copyright? Maybe, maybe not. Chances are nobody is going to win that fight because it will never be brought out.
Similarly, using a GPL-licensed program as a "reference" isn't anything that can be stopped. You take the original code and use it as a model. Now someone has done all the hard work for you. This is especially true in areas where it took a considerable amount of research to figure out the hardware behind it.
Were software patents good? No, almost certainly not. Is copyright a good replacement? No, not at all because it doesn't begin to cover the real issues today.
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So you find an IP address. The RIAA would just love it if somehow it were possible to conclusively prove a connection to an individual. It isn't. So I don't see how it is possible to connect anyone with an action "on the Internet".
Yes, this means that pretty much you can do, say or publish anything you want without any consequences, as long as it is on the Internet and you don't go bragging about it. Just about all of the hackers/crackers/script kiddies that have been caught were caught because of bragging. The few real RIAA victories have been because a tracable email address was connected with uploading music files to others.
I don't see how it can have anything but this kind of effect. Any penalty now could be called into question by a judge.
Dumping a contract that seems to have unfavorable terms - in hindsight - has always had some kind of penalty associated with it. This may have a very strong effect on consulting contracts and other types of term licenses. You know, someone contracts with a consultant for 2 years and decides after 9 months they don't need they anymore. Whatever penalties might have been written into the contract could (in theory) be called into question. Especially if they are not directly tied to monetary losses.
Sounds like a really bad decision to me.
Why? What is wrong with a "penalty" that is contracted for and spelled out as a penalty for early termination right there in the original agreement that you signed?
The problem with this is the judge is taking it upon himself to decide there is no proper basis for such a penalty, when it is clearly intended as a penalty - a disincentive to terminate the contract.
What is next? A court reviewing a software license agreement that has a large penalty clause in it? It seems that a "penalty" that is not identified as a penalty but stated to the customer as a cost recovery, a pro-rated subsidy or something else would be a problem. But every cell phone agreement I have seen says it is basically a penalty.
I see this as being a huge problem if it is taken as any sort of precedent.
So, does this mean that any contract could potentially be reviewed by a court and parts of it thrown out? After the fact? In some cases, long after the contract was terminated?
This seems a little uncomfortable to me. It sounds like the judge decided the fees weren't valid and that he decided Sprint didn't justify the fees in terms of actual monetary losses. I know lots of fees for non-compliance that aren't based in any way on monetary losses - the fee exists as a penalty.
I suppose I could see a judge ruling that the cell phone carrier service agreement contract was invalid and new customers could not be signed up until it was revised. But changing the terms of a terminated contract sounds a little fishy. And it does not seem like a good idea in terms of contract law in general.
So, are CD penalties to be thrown out next? Aren't they just as unfair? How about traffic tickets? What monetary loss is represented by a $200 speeding ticket? And besides, where was the contract that I signed that made me agree to pay the $200 fine anyway?
Most of the ads are not pay-per-click but pay-per-view. Can't boycott Google without turning off the Internet today.
Today we have a media that feeds on salicious gossip. We have YouTube and other web sites that host any video you care to upload.
What this means is that if I take pictures of someone being arrested for some socially-unacceptable crime (child molestation, for example) it will certain make the local news and can be posted to YouTube and others just for laughs. Of course their being arrested has no bearing on their real guilt which might take a trial months later to really decide. But by the mere fact of their being arrested we can destroy their lives. People for the most part are very reluctant to give up the notion that you have to be guilty to get arrested.
Did you consider that randomly recording police actions will often lead to this sort of thing far more than "catching" the police in some sort of abusive actions? No, of course not. All cops are corrupt weasles that just want to abuse their power over ordinary people and every interaction between a police officer and ordinary citizens will result in some kind of abuse.
The reason that "professional" photographers have stayed away from perp walks and photographing arrests is because doing otherwise is clearly abusive. Sure, some people will do anything for a picture that sells. And think how much a video of some celebrity getting arrested will sell for...
The Clinton administration did far, far worse. Such as using the FBI to perform investigations on suspected members of the "vast rightwing conspiracy". The Clinton administration didn't need to do much in the way of these kind of searches because they just cleaned house - anyone affiliated with the previous Reagan/Bush administrations was just out on their ear, day one.
They also had staff that were so utterly petty as to destroy keyboards and office furniture when they left office.
OK, but with this sort of outlook we also need to line the TV news (network, cable, all of 'em) up against the wall and execute them. For treason. Why? Because they are well on their way to overthrowing the country.
What happened in in 2000 was pretty simple. Sure, you can focus on Florida and such but pause a moment and remember how the results where announced. CBS announced that Gore won. Not "looking good for Gore", not "perhaps Mr. Gore has won", it was just "the next president is Al Gore."
People went to bed knowing that Gore won. They got up the next morning and found out the election went a little differently. Many of these people haven't gotten over the idea that because of this the election was obviously stolen. After all, their trusted news people SAID GORE WON.
Paper ballots simply cannot be counted in time for the midnight deadline for the news folks to announce the winner. They have to announce by then or their entire election coverate is pointless and nobody will watch. If nobody watches, they lose millions (or tens of millions or hundreds of millions) of dollars in ad revenue. This will not happen. Therefore, they will clearly announce a winner in order to remain relevent.
They might get lucky. After all, there is a 50/50 chance of them being right. With today's split of voters, I don't see it being much closer than that unless the results are really in. Otherwise the results announced will be based on exit polls and other information like surveys. Accurate? Probably not. But the ad revenue will remain.
If the 2008 election is announced incorrectly (again), my guess is we will see an uprising like hasn't been seen since 1917.
Yes, but "public domain" should not be simply a means for someone to make a ton of money by republishing. What most people miss is that opening things up will simply result in the biggest, baddest mega-distributor winning. Because they can out-distribute, online and offline, anyone else.
Think WalMart on steroids. Or Sony owning all the TV stations.
Unfortunately, the people have changed. In 1940 the education system had people that spoke English, didn't have to contend with children that "knew" they had no reason to be in the 4th grade, and dealt harshly with disruptive and violent children.
Today, half or more of a classroom may speak English only at school and not very well at that. Reading in English is not practical for them and given a multicultural and diversity-seeking education system, it is not made a requirement. The violent and disruptive children take all of the teacher's focus and the teachers quickly find out that the administration already knows there is no place else for the children. The teacher also finds out that grabbing a child to prevent them from hitting another can result in an interview with the police - child abuse, you see.
It isn't 1940 anymore. We are losing the fight to maintain a cohesive nation, in fact many believe this is the wrong thing to strive for. The end of the road in the multicultural and diverse society we are heading towards there is no unity, just endless competing factions. Education used to bring the immigrant children together - today it maintains their separation. The result of this is easy to see, but I do not see anyone publicly saying such maintained diversity is bad, even though it is demonstratably the core of many, many of the problems we face today.
Sorry, no copyright notice is needed for there to be a copyright. This was resolved in 1976 and is (I believe) part of the Berne Convention.
While it would be nice if removing the copyright notice (or not propagating it) effectively removed the copyright, that isn't the way it works. It doesn't matter if there is a notice or not, just creating something effectively creates "copyright privileges". Before 1976 it was required to register works with the government in order to have any such rights.
What the industry is defending against is their right to exist. They don't have any. For music, the pirates have pretty much one.
As far as suing downloaders, it isn't happening as far as I know. They really can't be caught. What they are suing are people "making available" that they can find because their computer is offering to supply all or part of a file. Obviously, the problem is that if you can't track downloaders you have no idea if one person is supplying (or has supplied) the file to 1, 10, 100 or 10,000,000 people. In court it comes down to what you can prove, and they can prove nothing.
Recorded music is being supported by people that either don't understand or don't know how to download it. This will change over time to the point where everyone is educated. Sales will then be zero and the "business" of recorded music will be over. Pirates aren't going to allow it to be any different and they are most certainly in control of this now.
The idea that a person can be sued for supplying a file to an unknown (and unknowable) number of others illegally is silly. If they could prove that Person A supplied the entire file to John Does 1 through 150 and each of these 150 copyright infringements had a penalty associated with it that would be different. The truth is that they can't even prove a single download in entirety. That pretty much ends the RIAA litigation right there.
However, until we get to the "zero sales" point, the RIAA and their member companies are going to continue to threaten and litigate. They have no choice because the pirates are impacting revenue - how can they not if nobody that knows how to download is paying for music?
Yes, I saw "Mary Poppins" four times. Want to know how many times I've seen a movie more than once since then? Pretty much zero.
The "geek factor" doesn't equate to lots of revenue and they know it. For most people, once is enough. No matter what.
First off, the pirates are getting better all the time. As access to digital prints improves, you will find "cam" versions disappearing. The pirates have access to ad revenue as well as other revenue sources to bribe folks. Also, there are just a heck of a lot of people that want to support the pirates.
Secondly, if you can't wait 38 hours to see a movie I feel sorry for you. You aren't going to be happy with a free download no matter what if you are that impatient. I expect to see you in line for the midnight opening show. The rest of the folks will take their free download (digital transform, no cam versions) and watch in the comfort, privacy and safety of their homes.
If it is possible to obtain access to the digital version of the movie and post it on the Internet for all to have, the movie theater is dead. It is possible today and will become more and more common as time goes on. The production companies cannot stop this from happening and it will destroy their revenue stream. If Freeloading Freddy can download the movie and save it to a DVD they are going to. Buy the DVD? Why? They've seen it already and have it saved if they want to watch it again.
Sorry folks, but you better figure out a "business model" that works without any revenue.
The problem starts with your statement "If I like a work, I will buy it". Why? You already got it for free. Your willingness to "buy" it changes nothing in the economic equation - you got it for free. Therefore, keep it. You are freeloading. So is half the planet at this point. Get over it, admit it and move on.
Anyone that claims they just want to "try it" is being silly. The transaction is over, they got what they wanted. Period. No enforcement beyond that is possible. The RIAA is beginning to figure that out - an IP does not equal a person. Just because you can track events to an IP does not mean you can then connect that with a real person. Especially when the ISP or University has a direct policy to shield real people from events connected with a electronic address.
I keep hearing the "I'll pay for it later" argument but have yet to see anyone actually do any paying. Nobody I know would ever spend a dime for recorded music again because it is all available for free somewhere on the Internet. Movies are getting that way, especially if you can stand a "cam" version. As bandwidth capacities improve, movies will be the next to fall, I am sure.
Excuse me, but all I want is the music. And nobody I know will pay for it, now that it is all free.
Business? I see no hope for a "business" of any sort whatsoever here. Revenue = 0. This isn't a business, it is a charity for freeloaders.
The problem is, for most users that are "administering" their own systems having a message that is only of use to trained administrators or software developers is, well, useless.
It doesn't help make Linux more mainstream and user-friendly. Sure, it is rare. But so what? When it happens it pretty much kills a Linux user.
Right on.
And why can the BIOS "detect" Linux in the first place, anyway?
More to the point, it is highly likely the Faxcomm is using the 97/3 rule and neither they nor AMI ever tested Linux. They copied some block of code from somewhere and that was it.
Some Linux-weenie thought this would be a good way to get hardware manufacturers to respect them, right? Wrong. This is childish whining. OK, so the BIOS that comes with the motherboard is defective. The board manufacturer almost certainly did not write the BIOS - they bought it. You may never find out where the BIOS came from. Gosh, I think this means the alternative is to declare this motherboard "not certified for Linux" and move on. The manufacturer certainly did.
Again, I seriously question why it is a good thing for Linux to be able to be detected by the BIOS for ACPI purposes and separated from Windows versions. This seems like a trap in the long run.
Most people don't really have the discipline to work at home. I used to write video games at home (no office, ever) for a company. They had about a 60% failure rate with people trying to do this - most of them just couldn't maintain focus and motivation. It has almost nothing to do with being watched and everything to do with there being an infinite number of distractions and other things that interrupt you. Everything from dripping faucets to Jehovah's Witnesses coming to the door.
Lots of companies have tried telecommuting and had miserable results. Wrong people, wrong projects, there are a million excuses. But the statistics have been collected pretty well and they are not encouraging. Would "employee monitoring" services and devices make companies more open to telecommuting? Maybe. That would be a good thing, especially if it made telecommuting more of a reality than it is today.
However, the one thing you can't get away from with telecommuting is it removes people from a social environment - the office. People aren't made to work for hours at a time in isolation in most cases. Without the social interaction they aren't happy people. Probably the underlying reason why telecommuting will always be a niche thing and will always fail on a large scale.
There are plenty of those test taking centers already. And some online schools require them. A lot of certification programs require them as well.
So how about coming up with a better way? Trusting people isn't going to cut it - would you go to a doctor that was 100% educated online? With no indication that he or she was the same person as the one taking exams? Besides, as many have said, people will try to find a way around this to cheat anyway.
How about the attitude that not only is cheating wrong but that cheating to get ahead results in problems later. Online education is today unproven and unreliable. Sure, for an MBA or an English degree is probably doesn't matter and nobody cares what sort of program you went through. Would you want a lawyer from University of Phoenix? No? Why not? Could it be that their program might not be all that great?
There is a simpler solution to this - forget online education. If it makes cheating easier and any measures implemented gotten around, then the whole concept is dead, at least for anything important.
How about people here actually think for a change and come up with a foolproof, reliable way to ensure the exam-taker is the enrolled person?
Sadly, there are some things that people will do to "get ahead". Now cheating on an English exam to pass so you can get an Engineering degree is probably somewhat meaningless. However, there are some classes that are pretty important and a degree is certainly a certification to lots of folks that you did indeed pass.
Many online institutions and certification exams require physical presence for tests. You have to go to a testing facility and pay their fees.
Wait until we have some major engineering failure or medical screwup where the person "responsible" came from an online institution. If there is even the slightest hint that some kind of fraud occurred this would be a death blow to online education, at least for anything serious. You want to avoid that and make online learning have the same credibility as physical campuses? Get behind this kind of thing with ways to prove who is behind the keyboard.
Are there ways to do this less intrusively? Sure. Let's hear about them.
I would offer that anything new in compression or similar things has now been pushed into hardware. You would then need a specific chip in order to implement the process and that chip does not just execute software but has specific hardware implementation of parts of the process. This would then be able to be patented, I would suspect.
The result is that what could be a "software upgrade" is now a hardware change. You want to play the new video streams from the Internet, you need a new card which allows decoding of them. You want to decompress some compressed file, you need the card for that as well.
Practical and efficient? No. Patentable and protectable? Yes.
Copyright affects only a single instance. The problem is that it doesn't begin to cover true innovation.
The example is someone comes up with a radically different audio or video compression technique. Copyright is meaningless because it will simply be stolen, reworked (slightly) and published by a large corporation. Who will then use the full weight of the legal system to defend "their" proprietary property.
The only defense against that today was the patent office. True, you can copyright a program, but it doesn't mean that someone cannot take that and reverse-engineer it or modify it slightly with a hex editor and republish it. Is it a "derivative work" subject to the original copyright? Maybe, maybe not. Chances are nobody is going to win that fight because it will never be brought out.
Similarly, using a GPL-licensed program as a "reference" isn't anything that can be stopped. You take the original code and use it as a model. Now someone has done all the hard work for you. This is especially true in areas where it took a considerable amount of research to figure out the hardware behind it.
Were software patents good? No, almost certainly not. Is copyright a good replacement? No, not at all because it doesn't begin to cover the real issues today.