and no harmfull intent (such as deliberatly giving away large numbers of copies for free to drive a competitor out of business), it wasn't illegal.
Exactly. Today's copier generally has exactly that harmful intent in mind - drive the copyright holder out of business. Microsoft, Adobe, Metallica, and so on. The problem is that it isn't just these folks now. GPL software has started to see the effects of this. How long is PearPC going to withstand the assault of CherryOS?
But could we please call Ahead Software by their name instead of calling the company Nero? The product by Ahead Software is Nero. Yes, Nero was their original and sole product for a long time. I believe it was originally written by one guy. The company now has revenues exceeding $30 million a year.
Obviously it isn't shitty music to someone else. Somebody is buying it.
So, if it is shitty music in your opinion then it shouldn't be allowed to be produced in the first place? How about a phone number so we can play our music for your approval?
Except you forget the one factor here that would make this real. eBay.
All they have to do is say to eBay that nobody from the state of Ohio can be registered on eBay to sell stuff without a valid Ohio license number. Ohio provides a way for eBay to check the license number. eBay says you can't sell without a license. Period. No more people from Ohio selling on eBay without a license.
How long would it be before anyone, anywhere on eBay needs to have a "license"?
Advertising "stolen" OEM software, being churned out in out-of-the-way places? Windows for $10, Office for $50. Where do these prices come from, anyway? Anything Microsoft can do to shut this market off is for the better.
Besides, if Linux got mainstream, these same people - if allowed to - would just buy one copy of some major Linux distribution and resell it over and over with ink-jet printed disc labels. Who's benefit is that for? Should Mandrake and Suse be put out of business because they try to sell software? I'm sure everyone would agree that RedHat should be put out of business - they actually DO make money, right?
Sorry, but you are mistaken. Every penny you put in goes to pay current benefits. Every penny your children put in will go to pay your benefits. There is no "saving" here, just a government-managed tax-funded retirement plan.
Social security was never designed as you somehow believe - it was always current workers paying for current retirees. The plan has worked until now because there have always been 3-4 workers per retiree. We are looking at a general reduction in both the population and labor force which means there might be 1.5-2 workers per retiree. This would mean doubling the current taxation to continue paying the same benefits to the same number of people. Only problem is that there is even more people going to be retired with a smaller labor force. That will exhaust both the "trust fund" (what they laughingly call the IOU's to the Social Security Administration) and worker taxation.
What "privatization" is focused on is taking the money that you put in and paying it back with interest. The track record of this hasn't been so good in the late 80's and early 90's but the theory is pretty good. It looked really good when Clinton was proposing it around the time of the dot-com bubble.
Of course, the problem is how do you transition from a tax-funded benefit to a savings plan? That is where all the "extra costs" come in when you start taking money that people are paying in and actually saving it for them while continuing to pay benefits.
One way "out" of the current mess is to just say that Social Security is a government-managed, tax-funded pension plan that everyone pays into so old people can live in style and nobody has to save anything. Only problem is that isn't very popular, so people end up deluded into believing their money is really being "saved" for their benefit. Let's see some honesty and just call it elder welfare and be done with it.
But why would anyone buy a "real" DVD? Come on, I've seen this argument with music and the truth is that nobody should need to buy anything ever again - it is all being shared for free.
My daughter hasn't bought anything "musical" in two or three years. I've given up trying to explain it to her. In the current climate, only an idiot would actually buy a CD at a store. Or someone that didn't know how to use the Internet.
The whole point of this is that pretty soon anyone with a broadband connection will feel the same way about movies. Why not? So, then it will just be the people without the Internet that will buy DVDs. Oh sure, someone will have to buy or rent one, once, to rip it. But then it is will be posted for everyone in the world to download - as long as they have a broadband connection.
Ha. Ha. Ha. You misunderstand. The total DVD players sold in the US is closer to 100 million units. Multiplying that by 20 isn't the world population of them, but their are at least 200 million DVD players, probably totallying around 150 million families with one or more players.
Do I believe that there are 1000 discs produced each year for each player? Probably closer to 100, and not all of them sell which is what WalMart is selling for $7.95 in their junk bin.
Hundreds of billions of movie discs being made each year is perhaps somewhat of an exaggeration, but the number is way more than 10 billion a year.
It is much simpler than that - sequester all employees that have access to "trade secret" information. Therefore, no leaks.
I will admit that it a rather draconian approach to the problem, but if people think that "trade secret" and "NDA" means "I can tell anyone I want to", that is the sort of result we can expect. Apple sets up a new product development center on an island and there are no phones.
Also a serious security exposure because of the necessity of allowing aircraft in the downtown area. Specifically, look back at the small plane that crashed into the White House in an assassination attempt. The airport was shut down from Sept. 11 2001 and was opened again only under extreme protest by the city.
It is also true that Mayor Daley wanted is park to replace it and was trying to get the airport closed for a long time. Way before 2001. So, you could say that 9/11 was the best thing to happen to him in quite a while.
New York is an unlikely target. Seoul is far more likely to be a hostage. And Tokyo. With those two cities held hostage, they can pretty much get whatever they want. Reunification with the South, under their terms. Non-agression pact with Japan, including trade - meaning Japan becomes a client state. Korea and Japan's animosity goes back over 1,000 years and they finally have the tools to make the Japan do whatever they want. And economic domination is just the beginning - they are likely to want to avenge the women Japan captured and turned into brothel slaves. This would make for an interesting state of affairs in Japan.
Maybe North Korea has had 50+ years of indoctrination about how the US is the root of all evil in the world. Maybe they are just itching for a fight because they want unification (on the North's terms) with the South - basically just a takeover. Maybe if we stand back and let them have whatever they want, the will set their sights on Japan next.
Come on, the last time around we didn't want to risk war with China, so we left the job half done. Even though China was participating in the war anyway. Look at all the half-done wars and unfinished battles that have languished for years and tell me what good came out of them. You end up with a more powerful enemy with the idea that since you didn't fight to the end before that you'll not push the issue the next time.
We can either fight North Korea in North Korea or in Japan. Just a matter of timing.
Sure you can modify it, just don't distribute it. A large part of this is about distribution. Once you put nude skins on the game and distribute it, you have set the company up for being party to various sorts of lawsuits that they weren't planning on when they created the game.
It is one thing to play with the game in the privacy of your home. But, when you distribute it in an uncontrolled manner - like posting it on the Internet - you bring all sorts of other stuff into play. Since Tecmo makes most of the game, it could be construed that they have a majority of the liability for corrupting minors that go play the game with minor modifications.
The problem I'm sure the company has is the modifications take a game with one rating and makes it into the same game but would need a different rating. This changes it from a Teen to Mature (or whatever the ratings are) without their knowledge, consent or control. Since they are likely to be chosen as the "deep pockets" in a lawsuit, can you really blame them for wanting to have at least a little control over the situation?
Well, from what was posted above, I would say that what they are worried about is the clear possibility of being sued and getting hurt real bad.
14-year-old buys game, 14-year-old applies said patches/mods/hacks/whatever. Parents discover gameplay and are shocked. Next day file suit for corrupting their minor child.
Do you really believe in the current legal environment that this couldn't happen? Ha. Parents might actually win lots of money because it would all fall on what the jury thought when they saw the game. If they were shocked, the award would be big. The idea that this wasn't the way the game came originally would likely be a minor issue. Perhaps very important to the defendent, but I doubt it would be the deciding factor.
So when are you going to start killing Americans? That is the only right answer, isn't it? Because otherwise, left to our own devices, haven't we proven over and over again that we will cause death and destruction on a global scale?
Or, are you, like the rest of the world, too afraid of your own shadows to actually do something? Come on, let's get the united armies of Europe over here, invade and start cleaning the world of the scourge of "Americans". Come on, let see some action behind those words.
No? I thought not. Fine. Then STFU and move out of the way while we demonstrate to Saudi Arabia why they need to reform their government before we have to come and do it for them.
Saddam had one more thing going for him: we like to clean up our own messes when we leave them. You can say the Saddam mess started in 1979, or 1991 - it doesn't matter. It was our mess and we needed to clean it up.
Important corallary to this - stuff is getting done. Overtime is irrelevent and potentially harmful if "stuff isn't getting done". It shows a general inability to manage time, to work with others (that are there during the day) and a lot of other bad things.
Yes, management should be aware of the hours people are working, at least at a general level. If projects are being designed with 70-hour-weeks in mind but nobody knows it outside of the lowest manager, well then nothing is going to change. On the other hand, someone that works 70-hour-weeks normally but is accomplishing nothing more than everyone else it probably in trouble - maybe they are in over their head, maybe drugs, maybe a lot of things. But it is a red flag and trying to keep people in the dark about it is just silly.
The original "idea" of pretending to be committed to a project's success while putting forth a minimal effort will have its own rewards in the end as well. Don't think everyone is that stupid to fall for it.
If you think you're getting paid by the line of code, you're wrong. I don't care what arrangement you have. Internal development for a company, contractor being paid hourly, independent consultant paid for a job, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that the end result is usable and fits what is needed. If you can get away with "making it the way they described" and the doing it over "the way it should be" once, you probably won't get away with it twice. Serious relationship-shortening move. Oh, you might not get fired but you won't be relied upon. If they have a choice - where you're a contractor - they will just find someone else.
This is the kind of short-sighted nonsense that people came up with in the late '80s and '90s. The result - the dotcom experience. Sure way to have a company burn through a lot of VC money "getting it right" or (worse) "accepting the limitations". Where are those companies today? Right.
It devalues everything I do. I own a software publishing company. Users on Windows - and one day Linux - aren't programmers and aren't interested in becoming programmers. They are also not interested in either (a) tailoring every aspect of their applications or (b) paying someone to create them - both are too much trouble and too expensive. They expect to benefit from economies of scale where there is an application for realtors (for example) that instead of every realtor across the country paying someone to tinker with every realtor buys the same $49.99 package.
This is absolutely contrary to the GPL philosophy, but is basically how computer software has worked for the past 50 years or so. Since the introduction of the "Independent Software Vendor". What the GPL proposes is that these people cannot exist and the common user cannot benefit from their labors. Instead, the common user is supposed to support someone paying for "support" that in a properly-written application wouldn't be needed. And, they also have the benefit of obtaining the source code which they will never understand, perhaps so they can pay (yet again) some contractor to modify something that should have been capable of doing the job properly in the first place.
Lastly, what the GPL does allow and encourage is for someone to take the publicly distributed source code and create something from all that research. OK, so they don't exactly copy the code - just use the knowledge contained in it. Just extract the value (or the IP) that is there and use it to create their own product which isn't GPL'ed. Not happening? If it isn't it is just because nobody really believes there is anything worth taking away from the currently GPL'ed codebase that is there.
A/D and D/A converters aren't "endangered" anymore than vacuum tubes are. They are fundamental electronic components.
DVD X Copy is gone because it wasn't a DVD "backup" utility, it was a "copy rented movies" utility and a "lemme borrow your DVD and copy it" utility. Tech support for the product was very conflicted over this because the owner couldn't help talking out of both sides of his face - "We don't help pirates" and "Why is there anything wrong with that". If you sell heroin on the street you will make lots of money, but eventually you will get busted. They got busted. End of story.
When someone can actually show that Morpheus and WinMX are more useful than FTP for moving files around, they might have a case. When these two in particular have searches that return something besides music and porn, we can talk about how useful existing P2P search and download facilities are. Note I am not saying that P2P has any attributes whatsoever - just that current search tools seem to return a lot of stuff that is under copyright.
The Replay PVR decided to push the envelope and allow "sharing" over the Internet. This is essentially redistributing content and the Replay folks knew this would cause problems. There have been several court cases recently about exactly that - redistributing broadcast content. There was never a doubt that this would be settled by removing the capability and likely costing the company a great deal of money.
ElcomSoft is a password-cracking software company. They sell password cracking tools to forensic professionals. If you think your "protected" document or EFS file system is safe, think again - ElcomSoft makes a product for cracking it in a short period of time, and your local police certainly have access to it. I can imagine lots of people not having a lot of sympathy for ElcomSoft. They also use misspelled domain names to "advertise" - if you misspell their competition's name you get their web site. Scum, no matter how nice a face you put on it.
Linksys - come on, these guys put it on the list to scare people and then never mentioned it in their scary paragraph. Why? Because it is completely off-topic.
All in all, this entire web page is just a lot of scare-mongering with the idea that they can stir people up by trying to convince them that something terrible is about to happen. For donations? For more membership? I have to question any organization that uses as many distortions, untruths and outright lies to make a point.
Sounds to me like the answer is better-quality downloads. That would eliminate the retail market for movies completely. Right?
See, what people don't understand is we're mid-way on a journey between "paying" and "everything is free". So, right now low-quality is free and high-quality is paid for. When we finish the journey, high quality will be free and available to everyone.
The questions are (a) who will be producing all this free stuff, and (b) what suckers will be paying when they could have it for free? The MPAA and RIAA have quite a stake in the answers to these questions, even to the point of wanting to stop the bus before it gets to the "everything is free" point. Once we're there and slowly but surely run out of suckers that pay, their usefulness is at an end. Of course, their usefulness may come to an end long before that because most of the producers will see where things are going and sell hot dogs instead.
The problem is that we already know exactly how to stop dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The problem is none of the implementations of stopping are consequences-free. People will die, either from lack of transportation (like to the hospital or lack of food), lack of heat or other energy-use considerations. Maybe a lot of people, maybe not quite so many - nobody knows.
The answer is simple and requires no study at all. Tear up some expressways and force people to use public transportation. Stop the ethanol hoax. Stop all farm subsidies - this makes farmers grow crops that aren't vital. Stop all price controls on food - if the need isn't there, it shouldn't be grown.
Do you really think the political will exists anywhere in the world today to do that?
No, you have hit the solution on the head. If you want a "sustainable" environment and treat the Earth as a closed system, then you have to have "sustainable" energy use and "sustainable" waste products.
The last time the US had anything remotely like a sustainable management of waste products was about 1850 or so. Everything after that has just piled the waste up waiting for something else to happen. And, to manage it requires more and more energy. It is an endless cycle.
As long as you treat the Earth as a closed system. Ever consider there are resources elsewhere besides Earth?
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No, but schools did filter them. No pagers. Period. Because it was assumed that if someone had a pager, they were selling drugs.
Exactly. Today's copier generally has exactly that harmful intent in mind - drive the copyright holder out of business. Microsoft, Adobe, Metallica, and so on. The problem is that it isn't just these folks now. GPL software has started to see the effects of this. How long is PearPC going to withstand the assault of CherryOS?
But could we please call Ahead Software by their name instead of calling the company Nero? The product by Ahead Software is Nero. Yes, Nero was their original and sole product for a long time. I believe it was originally written by one guy. The company now has revenues exceeding $30 million a year.
So, if it is shitty music in your opinion then it shouldn't be allowed to be produced in the first place? How about a phone number so we can play our music for your approval?
All they have to do is say to eBay that nobody from the state of Ohio can be registered on eBay to sell stuff without a valid Ohio license number. Ohio provides a way for eBay to check the license number. eBay says you can't sell without a license. Period. No more people from Ohio selling on eBay without a license.
How long would it be before anyone, anywhere on eBay needs to have a "license"?
Besides, if Linux got mainstream, these same people - if allowed to - would just buy one copy of some major Linux distribution and resell it over and over with ink-jet printed disc labels. Who's benefit is that for? Should Mandrake and Suse be put out of business because they try to sell software? I'm sure everyone would agree that RedHat should be put out of business - they actually DO make money, right?
Social security was never designed as you somehow believe - it was always current workers paying for current retirees. The plan has worked until now because there have always been 3-4 workers per retiree. We are looking at a general reduction in both the population and labor force which means there might be 1.5-2 workers per retiree. This would mean doubling the current taxation to continue paying the same benefits to the same number of people. Only problem is that there is even more people going to be retired with a smaller labor force. That will exhaust both the "trust fund" (what they laughingly call the IOU's to the Social Security Administration) and worker taxation.
What "privatization" is focused on is taking the money that you put in and paying it back with interest. The track record of this hasn't been so good in the late 80's and early 90's but the theory is pretty good. It looked really good when Clinton was proposing it around the time of the dot-com bubble.
Of course, the problem is how do you transition from a tax-funded benefit to a savings plan? That is where all the "extra costs" come in when you start taking money that people are paying in and actually saving it for them while continuing to pay benefits.
One way "out" of the current mess is to just say that Social Security is a government-managed, tax-funded pension plan that everyone pays into so old people can live in style and nobody has to save anything. Only problem is that isn't very popular, so people end up deluded into believing their money is really being "saved" for their benefit. Let's see some honesty and just call it elder welfare and be done with it.
My daughter hasn't bought anything "musical" in two or three years. I've given up trying to explain it to her. In the current climate, only an idiot would actually buy a CD at a store. Or someone that didn't know how to use the Internet.
The whole point of this is that pretty soon anyone with a broadband connection will feel the same way about movies. Why not? So, then it will just be the people without the Internet that will buy DVDs. Oh sure, someone will have to buy or rent one, once, to rip it. But then it is will be posted for everyone in the world to download - as long as they have a broadband connection.
Do I believe that there are 1000 discs produced each year for each player? Probably closer to 100, and not all of them sell which is what WalMart is selling for $7.95 in their junk bin.
Hundreds of billions of movie discs being made each year is perhaps somewhat of an exaggeration, but the number is way more than 10 billion a year.
I will admit that it a rather draconian approach to the problem, but if people think that "trade secret" and "NDA" means "I can tell anyone I want to", that is the sort of result we can expect. Apple sets up a new product development center on an island and there are no phones.
Honestly, what do you expect?
It is also true that Mayor Daley wanted is park to replace it and was trying to get the airport closed for a long time. Way before 2001. So, you could say that 9/11 was the best thing to happen to him in quite a while.
The question is are we going to let them?
Come on, the last time around we didn't want to risk war with China, so we left the job half done. Even though China was participating in the war anyway. Look at all the half-done wars and unfinished battles that have languished for years and tell me what good came out of them. You end up with a more powerful enemy with the idea that since you didn't fight to the end before that you'll not push the issue the next time.
We can either fight North Korea in North Korea or in Japan. Just a matter of timing.
It is one thing to play with the game in the privacy of your home. But, when you distribute it in an uncontrolled manner - like posting it on the Internet - you bring all sorts of other stuff into play. Since Tecmo makes most of the game, it could be construed that they have a majority of the liability for corrupting minors that go play the game with minor modifications.
The problem I'm sure the company has is the modifications take a game with one rating and makes it into the same game but would need a different rating. This changes it from a Teen to Mature (or whatever the ratings are) without their knowledge, consent or control. Since they are likely to be chosen as the "deep pockets" in a lawsuit, can you really blame them for wanting to have at least a little control over the situation?
14-year-old buys game, 14-year-old applies said patches/mods/hacks/whatever. Parents discover gameplay and are shocked. Next day file suit for corrupting their minor child.
Do you really believe in the current legal environment that this couldn't happen? Ha. Parents might actually win lots of money because it would all fall on what the jury thought when they saw the game. If they were shocked, the award would be big. The idea that this wasn't the way the game came originally would likely be a minor issue. Perhaps very important to the defendent, but I doubt it would be the deciding factor.
Or, are you, like the rest of the world, too afraid of your own shadows to actually do something? Come on, let's get the united armies of Europe over here, invade and start cleaning the world of the scourge of "Americans". Come on, let see some action behind those words.
No? I thought not. Fine. Then STFU and move out of the way while we demonstrate to Saudi Arabia why they need to reform their government before we have to come and do it for them.
Saddam had one more thing going for him: we like to clean up our own messes when we leave them. You can say the Saddam mess started in 1979, or 1991 - it doesn't matter. It was our mess and we needed to clean it up.
Yes, management should be aware of the hours people are working, at least at a general level. If projects are being designed with 70-hour-weeks in mind but nobody knows it outside of the lowest manager, well then nothing is going to change. On the other hand, someone that works 70-hour-weeks normally but is accomplishing nothing more than everyone else it probably in trouble - maybe they are in over their head, maybe drugs, maybe a lot of things. But it is a red flag and trying to keep people in the dark about it is just silly.
The original "idea" of pretending to be committed to a project's success while putting forth a minimal effort will have its own rewards in the end as well. Don't think everyone is that stupid to fall for it.
What matters is that the end result is usable and fits what is needed. If you can get away with "making it the way they described" and the doing it over "the way it should be" once, you probably won't get away with it twice. Serious relationship-shortening move. Oh, you might not get fired but you won't be relied upon. If they have a choice - where you're a contractor - they will just find someone else.
This is the kind of short-sighted nonsense that people came up with in the late '80s and '90s. The result - the dotcom experience. Sure way to have a company burn through a lot of VC money "getting it right" or (worse) "accepting the limitations". Where are those companies today? Right.
This is absolutely contrary to the GPL philosophy, but is basically how computer software has worked for the past 50 years or so. Since the introduction of the "Independent Software Vendor". What the GPL proposes is that these people cannot exist and the common user cannot benefit from their labors. Instead, the common user is supposed to support someone paying for "support" that in a properly-written application wouldn't be needed. And, they also have the benefit of obtaining the source code which they will never understand, perhaps so they can pay (yet again) some contractor to modify something that should have been capable of doing the job properly in the first place.
Lastly, what the GPL does allow and encourage is for someone to take the publicly distributed source code and create something from all that research. OK, so they don't exactly copy the code - just use the knowledge contained in it. Just extract the value (or the IP) that is there and use it to create their own product which isn't GPL'ed. Not happening? If it isn't it is just because nobody really believes there is anything worth taking away from the currently GPL'ed codebase that is there.
- A/D and D/A converters aren't "endangered" anymore than vacuum tubes are. They are fundamental electronic components.
- DVD X Copy is gone because it wasn't a DVD "backup" utility, it was a "copy rented movies" utility and a "lemme borrow your DVD and copy it" utility. Tech support for the product was very conflicted over this because the owner couldn't help talking out of both sides of his face - "We don't help pirates" and "Why is there anything wrong with that". If you sell heroin on the street you will make lots of money, but eventually you will get busted. They got busted. End of story.
- When someone can actually show that Morpheus and WinMX are more useful than FTP for moving files around, they might have a case. When these two in particular have searches that return something besides music and porn, we can talk about how useful existing P2P search and download facilities are. Note I am not saying that P2P has any attributes whatsoever - just that current search tools seem to return a lot of stuff that is under copyright.
- The Replay PVR decided to push the envelope and allow "sharing" over the Internet. This is essentially redistributing content and the Replay folks knew this would cause problems. There have been several court cases recently about exactly that - redistributing broadcast content. There was never a doubt that this would be settled by removing the capability and likely costing the company a great deal of money.
- ElcomSoft is a password-cracking software company. They sell password cracking tools to forensic professionals. If you think your "protected" document or EFS file system is safe, think again - ElcomSoft makes a product for cracking it in a short period of time, and your local police certainly have access to it. I can imagine lots of people not having a lot of sympathy for ElcomSoft. They also use misspelled domain names to "advertise" - if you misspell their competition's name you get their web site. Scum, no matter how nice a face you put on it.
- Linksys - come on, these guys put it on the list to scare people and then never mentioned it in their scary paragraph. Why? Because it is completely off-topic.
All in all, this entire web page is just a lot of scare-mongering with the idea that they can stir people up by trying to convince them that something terrible is about to happen. For donations? For more membership? I have to question any organization that uses as many distortions, untruths and outright lies to make a point.See, what people don't understand is we're mid-way on a journey between "paying" and "everything is free". So, right now low-quality is free and high-quality is paid for. When we finish the journey, high quality will be free and available to everyone.
The questions are (a) who will be producing all this free stuff, and (b) what suckers will be paying when they could have it for free? The MPAA and RIAA have quite a stake in the answers to these questions, even to the point of wanting to stop the bus before it gets to the "everything is free" point. Once we're there and slowly but surely run out of suckers that pay, their usefulness is at an end. Of course, their usefulness may come to an end long before that because most of the producers will see where things are going and sell hot dogs instead.
The answer is simple and requires no study at all. Tear up some expressways and force people to use public transportation. Stop the ethanol hoax. Stop all farm subsidies - this makes farmers grow crops that aren't vital. Stop all price controls on food - if the need isn't there, it shouldn't be grown.
Do you really think the political will exists anywhere in the world today to do that?
The last time the US had anything remotely like a sustainable management of waste products was about 1850 or so. Everything after that has just piled the waste up waiting for something else to happen. And, to manage it requires more and more energy. It is an endless cycle.
As long as you treat the Earth as a closed system. Ever consider there are resources elsewhere besides Earth?
Gosh, in the US we've been insulating with government grants for about 35 years or so. I guess it is time the rest of the world catches up on that.