Right, but think of all the cops, prosecutors, social workers, judges, forensic scientists and whoever else would be out of a job. It's madness, madness! You'd have people thinking for themselves! Chaos! Anarchy! Won't someone please think of the children! (Wait, isn't that what got us in this mess?) No! Think of the children!
Which is to say, that most people, myself included, are waiting and hoping that the Wii is even half as good as indicated. I will at least find a way to take it for a test drive once its available. I also think it will play well with my 3 year old daughter, though she's more of a PC gamer.:)
This is not even remotely constitutional. Even as impotent as the courts seem to be these days, this will get shot down in no time. This is simply euphorian election year politics at its dumbest. But you'll note that effectively no one voted against it because "it's for the children."
Personally, what I'd like to see is any politician voting for legislation struck down by SCOTUS as unconstitutional automatically removed from office. That would put a swift end to this kind of crap. Likewise for the president. Failure to uphold the constitution (his first and foremost duty) should be grounds for removal from office.
I haven't read the actual text of the bill, but I don't think there is any specific list of banned words. For example, if the model's name was Barbie, it would be perfectly fair to have the word Barbie on the page. To be strictly constitutional, you would have to be somehow engaged in interstate commerce to be subject to this law. Unfortunately, the US Surpreme court, in some of its most idiotic decisions, has ruled that so long as anyone engaged in the activity is involved in interstate commerece, everyone engaged in the activity is involved in interstate commerece.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA, but you know as well as I do that the rest of the world is going to copy this bad law, just like they did the US-style copyright laws.
2 things: Not living in the US isn't a defense as we've recently learned. Also, don't blame the US for everything that's wrong with copyright. It's the damn French that gave us the concept of "moral rights" to a work. But I blame Disney for most of the rest of the problems we have.
It's time to start cracking down on car usage, given how much ecological damage cars do. When driving becomes less and less attractive, maybe the people will see the light and demand practical public transit!
That's a joke, right? People will cut down on car usage if a better way of getting from place to place emerges. When oil gets expensive enough, people will start taking the bus. We don't need draconian government incentives. Personally, I'd like to see people start talking about the real problem - overpopulation. But then we're getting off topic a bit.
The real point of this discussion, though, is the growing surveilance state. And it's not all governement, either. And, this is just the beginning. One of the few bright spots of the movie "Minority Report" was the prediction of ubiquitous retina scanners so that you can't go anywhere without being scanned, tracked, and identified. While that was atrocious science fiction, the basic idea is valid: you are being watched and it's only going to get worse.
Typical Slashdot. Either post a story with no real facts to work with, or wait 2 weeks until it's old news. Apparently, this chap is due to make a court appearance on Monday at which point he, and the public at large, should be made aware of the charges. On the bright side, by the time the backslash is posted tomorrow (full of speculation and police abuse annecdotes) there should be some actual facts emerging.
Whatever the Wii and the XBox draw, it's nothing compared to my computers (which are always running) and the lights that my kid leaves on. But I live in Minnesota, so half the year, they're helping to heat my house, so I don't mind much. Now electric heat used to cost more, but with the way that natural gas prices have shot up the last few years, it's not the difference that it used to be.
Watermarked content would be sufficient to limit supply. The problem with digital content without some sort of encumberence to it is how do you establish ownership? The powers that be will never allow anarchy to reign in the digital market. Watermarking provides a means to trace files back to a single owner, who then has some explaining to do. In short, security through paranoia, which works about as well as DRM. Watermarking is by far as good of a compromise as we will ever see. As someone who buys his content legally, I can live with that.
Extortion. The word you want is extortion. Or maybe racketeering. I've never really understood racketeering. Regardless, this why I'm against any new legislation in this area. What the big ISPs are proposing is already illegal. Unless of course, they really are creating a secondary network that is pay only. In which case, good luck to them. But if they want to throttle traffic from sites that don't pay protection money, that's already illegal and we don't need any extra laws confusing the issue (and creating more lawyers).
Not so. A lot of consumers will be happy to buy stuff legally if they're not being gouged. But when you're being asked to fork out $18 for a new CD - when you know that the band is actually only getting $0.17 out of the deal -- then people tend to say fuck it I'll bootleg a copy. If that copy was only $10, it'd fly off the shelf with a lot less piracy. Having a public domain would also help. It's been 30 years since anything has entered the public domain in the US.
Now, when I was a kid, I pirated shit left and right. Why? No money. I'm older now, I know better, and I can and do buy most things legit.
Interesting point, but not really relevent. If I can edit a video for my own personal private viewing, why can't I pay someone to do that for me? Taking the judge's ruling to its logical conclusion is that it's illegal to modify a dvd for personal viewing.
As a species, yes we'll survive through quite a bit. I think one of the things implied in the question, is how to survive at our current lifestyle. There, we have a bit of an engineering problem. We have some 6 billion people chewing through resources at an astounding rate. To maintain the modern standard of living, we need to reduce the global population by an order of magnitude. Either we can all start learning to practice birth control soon, or in the not too distant future, nature will do that for us. Elementary thermodynamics: put a stress on a system and the system will act to reduce the stress.
Bah, screw that coordination crap. We're Americans, we don't play that game. In any event, I've long been a "living language" proponent. This causes my wife no end of consternation as she's a spelling purist. While watching the Scripps spelling bee on TV last month, she remarked, "by your logic it would be impossible to lose a spelling bee." Exactly.
Some people are just operating system enthusiasts. I've variously ran versions of DOS, Windows, OS/2, Irix, Solaris, Linux, BSD, AtheOS, FreeDOS, and a few others I can't remember the names of. I'd think about running Sky just to be different. And really, for a small development team, they only need to sell a few thousand hobbyists to stay in business. And who knows, they might even find a nice little niche that that can take ten or twenty thousand copies.
I would think that if most sellers had the option, they would set their auction for X days or Y hours after the last bid is placed, whichever is longer. You need a little time for buyers to find your auction and you wouldn't want auctions to end until people stop bidding. I always thought the fixed length auctions were sort've dumb. Then again, I don't sell things on the interweb either.
Oh, I don't know about that. If you throw out all the idotic liberal arts requirements and some of the irrelevent 'core' classes, you're left with a 2 year program. If you have strong math skills and generally understand DC circuits, it's not that difficult. I work with an 8 bit PIC as part of the project I'm working on. I do all of the programming and we have an engineer that we contract with to do the primary design. I don't need to be able to design the circuits from scratch, but I do need to understand the basic circuits so I can test and debug and write up design specs/change orders.
I'd be happy if we could just stick to MS managers that I've actually heard of before. Ballmer, Allchin, Mundie, etc. I've never heard of this guy before and probably never will again. Why is this news?
You state that you copy movies because it's easy and costs basically nothing; that ideology has nothing to do with it. I would dispute that ideology has nothing to do with it. It's clear that you don't respect copyright. I don't blame you for that, I don't respect copyright either. Copyright has changed from being a reward mechanism allowing people to earn a living as an artist (and benefitting society) to some sort of perpetual divine right. As such, we've got 2 full generations that have never seen a work pass into the public domain and they are in open revolt. The younger generations will only get more agressive until the balance swings back to neutral.
Sharing. Funny choice of words there. Because you're not sharing, you're copying. Now, if you had a system set up where listening/watching a given copy of a song/movie precluded others from accesing that particular copy, that would be sharing. And in my opinion, that's where we ought to be headed. You buy a copy of a movie and you can share it with anyone you want, but only with one person at a time.
So there needs to be a wide open developer mode for the OS. Big deal. 99.99% of users don't need that and are better off without. Heck, the vast majority of developers don't need that either. Very few people would turn off the security to get their job done. Windows is currently unmanageable in every sense of the word.
Bah, it's the wrong approach to security. The underlying OS is still wide open if you have appropriate credentials. Note that OS-X and Linux suffer the same problem. Executable code needs to be encapsulated. User programs should not be able to modify the OS or other programs at all. Note that this doesn't preculde programs from interacting. You can still have programs with public interfaces. And regradless of their internal structure, programs should behave as though they were a single file. What Microsoft is doing is a very poor approach to security that doesn't fix the underlying problems, but it does create a confusing hassle for users.
The basic idea that the telcos are pushing is that they want to prioritize traffic. They have a network segment that gets saturated. So packets get queued before being forwarded. Packets on a higher tier get to jump to the head of the queue. The other scenario is that they lay in extra pipes like the express lane on the highway, and only preferred traffic gets to travel over them (reducing latency and increasing bandwidth).
The problem with either scenario is that neither of them benefits the consumer. Whatever the consumer is currently downloading is their highest priority. The first scenario shorts one consumer to benefit another. The second scenario, they would argue, is a way of financing more bandwitdh to provide more/better service. The problem is that it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. You pass on the costs to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. and they pass it back on to the consumer.
The reason the telcos and cable operators can't just charge the consumer for it up front is that most consumers would settle for the lower price and forgo the extra service or take their business elsewhere. So, to pay for all of this, you get into this kind of accounting shell game that hides costs and coerces people to pay more.
Bah, I suppose it's too much for anyone on slashdot to actually read the ruling in question. The question before the court (and I don't know how it ever got this far to begin with) was whether writings and memos produced during the ordinary course of employment are a form of protected speech. The ruling essentially states that these sorts of writings are subject to ordinary performance evaluations. Furthermore, I don't see how the plantiff had any standing to file the case in the first place as it had already been ruled that he wasn't retaliated against. Also, this ruling has nothing to do with whistleblowers. If you're a government employee and you go to the press to expose some bit of corruption that's still protected.
And do the people who write these articles (citing unnamed sources) ever study economics?
If true, such a move would be a massive boost for publishers and developers which do not profit from the lucrative and damaging retail trade in used games. In fact, many publishers are furious that they have to spend support money on consumers who have not actually contributed a dime to the company's coffers.
The secondary market adds value for the consumer. The average consumer will be more likely to buy a new release for $60 if they think they'll be able to resell it for $35 when they're done with it. Furthermore, publishers wouldn't be spending support money if they didn't release buggy products to begin with. All in all, the secondary market probably has a very small effect on how much publishers actually pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but think of all the cops, prosecutors, social workers, judges, forensic scientists and whoever else would be out of a job. It's madness, madness! You'd have people thinking for themselves! Chaos! Anarchy! Won't someone please think of the children! (Wait, isn't that what got us in this mess?) No! Think of the children!
Which is to say, that most people, myself included, are waiting and hoping that the Wii is even half as good as indicated. I will at least find a way to take it for a test drive once its available. I also think it will play well with my 3 year old daughter, though she's more of a PC gamer. :)
This is not even remotely constitutional. Even as impotent as the courts seem to be these days, this will get shot down in no time. This is simply euphorian election year politics at its dumbest. But you'll note that effectively no one voted against it because "it's for the children."
Personally, what I'd like to see is any politician voting for legislation struck down by SCOTUS as unconstitutional automatically removed from office. That would put a swift end to this kind of crap. Likewise for the president. Failure to uphold the constitution (his first and foremost duty) should be grounds for removal from office.
I haven't read the actual text of the bill, but I don't think there is any specific list of banned words. For example, if the model's name was Barbie, it would be perfectly fair to have the word Barbie on the page. To be strictly constitutional, you would have to be somehow engaged in interstate commerce to be subject to this law. Unfortunately, the US Surpreme court, in some of its most idiotic decisions, has ruled that so long as anyone engaged in the activity is involved in interstate commerece, everyone engaged in the activity is involved in interstate commerece.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA, but you know as well as I do that the rest of the world is going to copy this bad law, just like they did the US-style copyright laws.
2 things: Not living in the US isn't a defense as we've recently learned. Also, don't blame the US for everything that's wrong with copyright. It's the damn French that gave us the concept of "moral rights" to a work. But I blame Disney for most of the rest of the problems we have.
And as we've learned, occasionally people switch planes in the US on the way to Costa Rica.
- Driving a car is a privilege, not a right.
It's time to start cracking down on car usage, given how much ecological damage cars do. When driving becomes less and less attractive, maybe the people will see the light and demand practical public transit!
That's a joke, right? People will cut down on car usage if a better way of getting from place to place emerges. When oil gets expensive enough, people will start taking the bus. We don't need draconian government incentives. Personally, I'd like to see people start talking about the real problem - overpopulation. But then we're getting off topic a bit.
The real point of this discussion, though, is the growing surveilance state. And it's not all governement, either. And, this is just the beginning. One of the few bright spots of the movie "Minority Report" was the prediction of ubiquitous retina scanners so that you can't go anywhere without being scanned, tracked, and identified. While that was atrocious science fiction, the basic idea is valid: you are being watched and it's only going to get worse.
Typical Slashdot. Either post a story with no real facts to work with, or wait 2 weeks until it's old news. Apparently, this chap is due to make a court appearance on Monday at which point he, and the public at large, should be made aware of the charges. On the bright side, by the time the backslash is posted tomorrow (full of speculation and police abuse annecdotes) there should be some actual facts emerging.
Whatever the Wii and the XBox draw, it's nothing compared to my computers (which are always running) and the lights that my kid leaves on. But I live in Minnesota, so half the year, they're helping to heat my house, so I don't mind much. Now electric heat used to cost more, but with the way that natural gas prices have shot up the last few years, it's not the difference that it used to be.
Watermarked content would be sufficient to limit supply. The problem with digital content without some sort of encumberence to it is how do you establish ownership? The powers that be will never allow anarchy to reign in the digital market. Watermarking provides a means to trace files back to a single owner, who then has some explaining to do. In short, security through paranoia, which works about as well as DRM. Watermarking is by far as good of a compromise as we will ever see. As someone who buys his content legally, I can live with that.
>which is basically blackmail, in my eyes.
Extortion. The word you want is extortion. Or maybe racketeering. I've never really understood racketeering. Regardless, this why I'm against any new legislation in this area. What the big ISPs are proposing is already illegal. Unless of course, they really are creating a secondary network that is pay only. In which case, good luck to them. But if they want to throttle traffic from sites that don't pay protection money, that's already illegal and we don't need any extra laws confusing the issue (and creating more lawyers).
Not so. A lot of consumers will be happy to buy stuff legally if they're not being gouged. But when you're being asked to fork out $18 for a new CD - when you know that the band is actually only getting $0.17 out of the deal -- then people tend to say fuck it I'll bootleg a copy. If that copy was only $10, it'd fly off the shelf with a lot less piracy. Having a public domain would also help. It's been 30 years since anything has entered the public domain in the US.
Now, when I was a kid, I pirated shit left and right. Why? No money. I'm older now, I know better, and I can and do buy most things legit.
Interesting point, but not really relevent. If I can edit a video for my own personal private viewing, why can't I pay someone to do that for me? Taking the judge's ruling to its logical conclusion is that it's illegal to modify a dvd for personal viewing.
As a species, yes we'll survive through quite a bit. I think one of the things implied in the question, is how to survive at our current lifestyle. There, we have a bit of an engineering problem. We have some 6 billion people chewing through resources at an astounding rate. To maintain the modern standard of living, we need to reduce the global population by an order of magnitude. Either we can all start learning to practice birth control soon, or in the not too distant future, nature will do that for us. Elementary thermodynamics: put a stress on a system and the system will act to reduce the stress.
Bah, screw that coordination crap. We're Americans, we don't play that game. In any event, I've long been a "living language" proponent. This causes my wife no end of consternation as she's a spelling purist. While watching the Scripps spelling bee on TV last month, she remarked, "by your logic it would be impossible to lose a spelling bee." Exactly.
Some people are just operating system enthusiasts. I've variously ran versions of DOS, Windows, OS/2, Irix, Solaris, Linux, BSD, AtheOS, FreeDOS, and a few others I can't remember the names of. I'd think about running Sky just to be different. And really, for a small development team, they only need to sell a few thousand hobbyists to stay in business. And who knows, they might even find a nice little niche that that can take ten or twenty thousand copies.
I would think that if most sellers had the option, they would set their auction for X days or Y hours after the last bid is placed, whichever is longer. You need a little time for buyers to find your auction and you wouldn't want auctions to end until people stop bidding. I always thought the fixed length auctions were sort've dumb. Then again, I don't sell things on the interweb either.
Oh, I don't know about that. If you throw out all the idotic liberal arts requirements and some of the irrelevent 'core' classes, you're left with a 2 year program. If you have strong math skills and generally understand DC circuits, it's not that difficult. I work with an 8 bit PIC as part of the project I'm working on. I do all of the programming and we have an engineer that we contract with to do the primary design. I don't need to be able to design the circuits from scratch, but I do need to understand the basic circuits so I can test and debug and write up design specs/change orders.
I'd be happy if we could just stick to MS managers that I've actually heard of before. Ballmer, Allchin, Mundie, etc. I've never heard of this guy before and probably never will again. Why is this news?
You state that you copy movies because it's easy and costs basically nothing; that ideology has nothing to do with it. I would dispute that ideology has nothing to do with it. It's clear that you don't respect copyright. I don't blame you for that, I don't respect copyright either. Copyright has changed from being a reward mechanism allowing people to earn a living as an artist (and benefitting society) to some sort of perpetual divine right. As such, we've got 2 full generations that have never seen a work pass into the public domain and they are in open revolt. The younger generations will only get more agressive until the balance swings back to neutral.
Sharing. Funny choice of words there. Because you're not sharing, you're copying. Now, if you had a system set up where listening/watching a given copy of a song/movie precluded others from accesing that particular copy, that would be sharing. And in my opinion, that's where we ought to be headed. You buy a copy of a movie and you can share it with anyone you want, but only with one person at a time.
Garbage. I don't lock the front door to my house. If you walk in uninvited and watch my TV, you're still tresspassing.
So there needs to be a wide open developer mode for the OS. Big deal. 99.99% of users don't need that and are better off without. Heck, the vast majority of developers don't need that either. Very few people would turn off the security to get their job done. Windows is currently unmanageable in every sense of the word.
Bah, it's the wrong approach to security. The underlying OS is still wide open if you have appropriate credentials. Note that OS-X and Linux suffer the same problem. Executable code needs to be encapsulated. User programs should not be able to modify the OS or other programs at all. Note that this doesn't preculde programs from interacting. You can still have programs with public interfaces. And regradless of their internal structure, programs should behave as though they were a single file. What Microsoft is doing is a very poor approach to security that doesn't fix the underlying problems, but it does create a confusing hassle for users.
The basic idea that the telcos are pushing is that they want to prioritize traffic. They have a network segment that gets saturated. So packets get queued before being forwarded. Packets on a higher tier get to jump to the head of the queue. The other scenario is that they lay in extra pipes like the express lane on the highway, and only preferred traffic gets to travel over them (reducing latency and increasing bandwidth).
The problem with either scenario is that neither of them benefits the consumer. Whatever the consumer is currently downloading is their highest priority. The first scenario shorts one consumer to benefit another. The second scenario, they would argue, is a way of financing more bandwitdh to provide more/better service. The problem is that it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. You pass on the costs to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. and they pass it back on to the consumer.
The reason the telcos and cable operators can't just charge the consumer for it up front is that most consumers would settle for the lower price and forgo the extra service or take their business elsewhere. So, to pay for all of this, you get into this kind of accounting shell game that hides costs and coerces people to pay more.
Bah, I suppose it's too much for anyone on slashdot to actually read the ruling in question. The question before the court (and I don't know how it ever got this far to begin with) was whether writings and memos produced during the ordinary course of employment are a form of protected speech. The ruling essentially states that these sorts of writings are subject to ordinary performance evaluations. Furthermore, I don't see how the plantiff had any standing to file the case in the first place as it had already been ruled that he wasn't retaliated against. Also, this ruling has nothing to do with whistleblowers. If you're a government employee and you go to the press to expose some bit of corruption that's still protected.
And do the people who write these articles (citing unnamed sources) ever study economics?
If true, such a move would be a massive boost for publishers and developers which do not profit from the lucrative and damaging retail trade in used games. In fact, many publishers are furious that they have to spend support money on consumers who have not actually contributed a dime to the company's coffers.
The secondary market adds value for the consumer. The average consumer will be more likely to buy a new release for $60 if they think they'll be able to resell it for $35 when they're done with it. Furthermore, publishers wouldn't be spending support money if they didn't release buggy products to begin with. All in all, the secondary market probably has a very small effect on how much publishers actually pocket.