Is the FCC a higher court than the Supreme Court? Maybe the FCC can also overrule the Supreme Court Beta Max case which ruled consumers have a right to record and time shift content with their VCRs.
The decision in Sony v. Universal (the "Betamax" case) is very narrowly drawn. In footnote 2, Justice Stevens writes "This case involves only the home recording for home use of television programs broadcast free over the airwaves. No issue is raised concerning cable or pay television, or the sharing or trading of tapes." As far as I know, there are no cases concerning the applicability of this decision to cable or pay services.
I believe the argument that swayed the Court concerned advertising revenues. If VCRs made it possible to watch programs at times other than when they were broadcast, the size of the program's audience would grow. With a larger audience come higher advertising revenues, enabling program producers to demand more from the broadcasters for the rights to show their products.
Stevens, for the majority, writes:
[Time-shifting] enlarges the television viewing audience. For that reason, a significant amount of television programming may be used in this manner without objection from the owners of the copyrights on the programs. For the same reason, even the two respondents in this case, who do assert objections to time-shifting in this litigation, were unable to prove that the practice has impaired the commercial value of their copyrights or has created any likelihood of future harm.
As far as I know, the applicability of Sony v. Universal to cable and pay services has never been resolved. So I'd argue the applicability of this decision to a digital, high-definition, pay-per-view service is, at best, equally unresolved. If you read the article, you'll see the studios are putting a lot of emphasis on potential harm to the rights holders, because that plays an important role in copyright litigation. The studios had a hard time showing harm in the case of time-shifting advertiser-supported broadcast television programs. They may not have as difficult a time showing harm in this case.
Finally, the narrowness of the Betamax decision leaves open the question of whether of not it's legitimate to enforce a no-recording switch on certain types of programming distributed in certain ways for certain periods of time. I don't think it's unreasonable for the FCC to begin a rule-making proceeding in this area, nor do I think the Commission is somehow claiming it has more authority in this instance than the Supreme Court. The Commissioners are quite aware what the limitations to their authority are. But by opening a rule-making proceeding the Commission has enabled there to be a debate over the applicability of the Betamax decision to this particular proposal by the studios. You might prefer that the debate not take place at all, or you might think that the studios hold all the cards. I'm not so convinced as the average Slashdotter that every case like this one will be resolved in favor of the moneyed interests. Nor do I think that we're necessarily headed down some proverbial "slippery slope" were we to allow studios to enforce their rights in this particular narrow instance.
I'm sure that were the FCC to adopt this change in its rules, the decision would be immediately appealed by public-interest organizations and forced into Federal court. We'd then see how the system applies the Betamax decision, and decisions since then like Grokster, to this particular rule. At some point it could reach the Supreme Court again, but not for at least three years, probably more. It's also possible some lower Federal court will enjoin the FCC from carrying out the rule change, leaving us with the status quo until a final determination is made.
Not at the moment, but TFA indicates that the movie studios are considering some type of high-definition pay-per-view service in advance of DVD release. It's this hypothetical window that they're trying to protect here.
No one would benefit more from a trend to home theaters than the studios. Selling their product directly to viewers squeezes out the networks and other program distributors on the one hand, and the theater owners on the other. The studios hate having to sell their product through distributors, so direct-to-home delivery is a dream come true. (At one time some studios owned their own theaters, but they were forced to divest them on antitrust grounds by the Supreme Court in 1948.)
I'd still pay to see Indiana Jones and its ilk on a lovely wide screen as we did just recently, but there are lots of films that don't require the big-screen treatment. I doubt we'll lose theaters entirely as they provide a social function as well as a method of distributing programming. I doubt we'll see television networks disappear any time soon either. But the allure of direct-to-home programming will continue to attract the studios' attention in the years to come.
I've wondered about this myself. As a FiOS subscriber, our analog channels are being replaced with QAM channels, so Verizon is distributing the mandated digital-to-analog converters. It's just a guess, but I'd be surprised if these boxes tuned anything other than the mandatory local broadcast stations. Cable operators are required to provide the "must-carry" local broadcast stations; they aren't required to provide ESPN. If you want ESPN, you'll probably have to rent a set-top box or use a TiVO with a cable card.
it can be seen as supporting the first-sale doctrine
That's exactly why this decision is an important one. Content owners want to shrink the first-sale exemption through one-way "licensing" schemes like the one struck down here. They want the right to distribute their works as they see fit but not relinquish control over the copies as the law requires.
I'm going to put on my ex-political-scientist hat here for a moment to talk about the relationship between contributions and voting patterns.
Of course the *AA's contribute a lot of John Conyers. He's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee which has jurisdiction over copyright matters. You'll notice that his most substantial contributions come from the legal profession whose interests are also quite closely linked with what happens in Judiciary. This pattern of contribution to committee chairs depends little on party. When the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, many industrial organizations started contributing to the new committee chairs and reduced their support for the deposed Republicans. If you look at the current contributions to Lamar Smith, the Ranking Minority Member on Judiciary, you'll see they come from the same places as do Conyers', just in smaller amounts.
As another example, look at the pattern of contributions to Barney Frank, one of the most liberal members of the Congress, who happens to now be the chair of the Financial Services (formerly Banking) Committee. Despite his rather populist views, Frank's received substantial contributions from the investment, real estate, and insurance industries.
The fact is that industries contribute to the chairs of committees with jurisdiction over those industries. Determining the direction of causality between contributions and voting patterns is made much more difficult by these types of "selection bias" problems.
Overall wouldn't you expect that contributors would donate to candidates who share their opinions? So how do you know if the candidates are bending their opinions to fit the contributors' wishes, or if we're just seeing a rather obvious pattern of correlation based on shared opinions? Answering these questions adequately takes a lot more work that pointing at contribution patterns alone.
I've had these same thoughts since I discovered how far advanced household 3D printing had become. I don't think you're wearing any hats unless it's a thinking cap. I doubt I'll see this in my remaining 20 or 30 years left, but it's certainly coming.
In a world where everyone has a replicator for ordinary objects, what property is there to own? The answer is obviously the software instructions required to produce the object. Suppose I want to build a coffee maker because my last one died. I'll download code to the "printer" and eventually have a new coffee maker. How many different kinds of coffee makers will there be? Will there be brands because people choose to pay the equivalents of Braun and Phillips real money for their supposedly-superior plans? Or will the world generally rely on open-sourced plans? For commodity items like coffee makers, I'd guess open source will be the norm as it is now for an ever-growing list of software commodities.
Obviously some physical objects like land will retain their value in this world. Energy resources might also still be an issue. Then there's foodstuffs. Will people join Capt. Picard at the replicator for a nice cup of "tea, Earl Grey, hot," or will they fear "manufactured" foods the same way genetically-engineered food scares some people now?
The local and state prosecutors in Missouri didn't think it was already illegal. They decided they didn't have grounds to prosecute Lori Drew. I would imagine the prosecutors desperately wished the reverse were true, don't you?
I'm almost 59, and I understand the Internet just fine, thank you. Hell, I'm even posting here on Slashdot.
Age isn't the real factor, it's exposure. Most older people in senior positions have staff to deal with things like phones and the Internet. I know lots of older people who function quite well with email and web browsing. Just because they, like me, don't use IM or MySpace doesn't make them stupid or inexperienced. We just don't see any use for these technologies in our daily lives.
The law applies to "severe, repeated, and hostile behavior." What constitutes such behavior is up to a jury to decide, but I doubt a little name-calling would be sufficient. The Lori Drew/Megan Meier case is quite different from "name-calling" in that a middle-aged adult conducted a systematic and lengthy campaign of harassment against a 13-year-old girl. I'd call what Drew did far more "severe" than any of the name-calling I see on Internet forums.
I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of this particular law, but the characterization of the bill presented here on Slashdot is frankly a parody of the actual language. Moreover you don't even have to read TFA; the actual language is right there in the summary at the top of the page.
Again I'll note that if you want to worry about the implications of this case, I suggest looking at the Federal indictment of Drew last month. It has the potential to establish much more worrisome precedents.
This isn't about your little guy getting beaten up by bullies at school (that's still pretty much legal, at least this law doesn't address it at all). It's about being called names on the internet.
No, actually it's about Megan Meier who committed suicide after being harassed by a 49 year-old woman named Lori Drew. Missouri prosecutors decided there was no legal basis to pursue Drew for her acts; this bill is the result.
The real concern isn't this bill, but the Federal indictment against Drew in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Drew is being prosecuted under anti-hacking statutes because she violated MySpace's Terms of Service and impersonated a teen-aged boy in order to carry out her harassment. I'm much more concerned with establishing a Federal precedent that website operators' Terms of Service can be backed up by Federal law than I am about this Missouri law. Of course my submission on the LA case here was rejected; I guess it wasn't as easy to laugh at as the Missouri bill.
Thank you for having read TFA and reminding people here we're talking about one particular model of router. The Slashdot headline about "router crashes" would lead you to think the problem is widespread and occurring across a variety of brands. As far as I can tell, it is only this router that's having problems.
Personally, I'd something have to do with the implementation of uPNP is at fault, but that's just a wild guess.
This is a common affliction in home routers when people run torrents. The problem is that the torrent client establishes dozens of TCP/IP connections to peers. Eventually the router's NAT table runs out of memory, and traffic comes to a halt.
The solution is to limit the [i]number of connections[/i] (not bandwidth) so as not to overtax the router. Try an upper limit of 100 connections or so and see if the problem goes away. If not, bring the limit down until things work smoothly again.
The FBI likely will investigate this matter, and the only way I could see media sentry getting out of criminal charges is by paying off Rev 3 enough that they drop all criminal charges against media sentry.
If there is a criminal prosecution, Revision3 doesn't have any say over whether it goes forward or not. That's up to the Federal or state prosecutors involved. Revision3 could reach a settlement with MediaDefender in lieu of a pursuing a civil case against the latter, but even if they reached such an agreement, a Federal or state prosecutor could still pursue a criminal case against MediaDefender.
I found your reply quite informative. I wrote about a particular type of scurrilous lending practice, though I had no doubt many more exist.
Homes are dropping in price not because they are not worth it, but because there is a tie between what people can afford and interest rates. When rates are low, prices should go up beacuse you can buy the same house for less. When rates go up, you have to pay more for the same house, so you the sale price must be lowered or you won't buy it. It's that inverse relationship and the large use of variable rates when they were low that caused the crunch.
I have more problems with this, however. By this line of argument the "fault," if there is any, for the decline in housing prices needs to be laid at the door of the Federal Reserve. The practice, particularly under Greenspan, of holding down rates for such a long period of time was the real culprit. Houses became artificially overvalued because, as you argue, their prices rose in line with falling interest rates. Now that rates are returning to more sensible levels, housing prices must invariably fall. I think there's a lot of merit in this point of view, but I still believe the psychology of the bubble market had its own role to play. When everyone thinks that prices will do nothing but climb, there are strong pressures to jump on board and ride the wave. I don't think rational behavior in reaction to interest rate changes entirely explains how lenders at all levels failed to conduct sufficient "due diligence" to determine the credit-worthiness of borrowers and now find themselves holding dramatically less-valuable portfolios.
People are usually cheap SOBs looking for the lowest price on food, clothes, toys, computers, cars, etc., yet they all of a sudden got Truly Stupid paying huge prices for homes. Why???
1) Houses were seen as a lifetime investment that would not depreciate.
2) Home ownership in the US is highly subsidized by the Federal Government through the mortgage interest and property tax deductions.
3) A lot of shady operators took advantage of poorer and less well-informed people by writing them mortgages with ridiculous terms (like a late payment increases your interest rate to double digits), waiting for the borrowers to run afoul of those terms, then foreclosing on a house the family had owned for years. It's called "predatory lending" for a reason.
There's been lots of corruption in the "secondary" and "subprime" lending sectors, too. Borrowers were encouraged to hedge, and sometimes lie, about their qualifications because the lenders felt no risk. Lenders found they could sell almost any mortgage into the securities markets where the liabilities were sliced and diced into pieces and repackaged as equity holdings. The Federal Reserve Board also helped fuel the housing bubble by holding down key interest rates and failing to perform any real oversight of its member institutions' lending practices. Many, many people, including many supposedly well-informed financial types, simply believed real estate would continue to rise in value over the years ahead.
Whenever large numbers of people become convinced that the price of a particular item, be it tulip bulbs or homes, can never fall, you have the potential for a pricing "bubble." In this particular instance, public policies and private greed together created the over-valuation of residential property that occurred over the past decade.
I guess I'm still a bit confused. You're saying these technologies could be bolted on to existing platforms in the way anti-virus programs are now? Won't they have to be supported by operating system and applications programmers as well? Even if they're included in the next generation of software, it'll take many years before that generation of software replaces the infrastructure we have now.
I'd also wonder what the user interface would look like. Popups that say "application X has tried to use port Z and has been disabled?" What's an uninformed user supposed to do in that case if they need to use application X? That's a lot different from saying "file Q has a virus; delete or quarantine?" False positives would also seem rather deadly in this case.
I'm not doubting any of what you report. I'm just trying to imagine how it might be applied to a global universe of computers running very disparate operating systems and collections of applications. I also suspect it's going to be very difficult to develop reporting and control interfaces that will be meaningful and useful to uninformed users. I remember how totally befuddled most people were when Windows firewall software started popping up those "program X has attempted to access the Internet" kind of warnings. I'd be shocked if most ordinary users chose any other response to such notices other than "Fine, go for it!"
I still think we're talking at least a decade before this might be the norm on even half the world's personal computers.
I've said this before here on Slashdot, but I think it's worth repeating.
I, for one, don't think Microsoft implemented DRM controls in Vista because Hollywood threatened to attack Redmond with the entire array of Marvel superheroes. Microsoft is already quite well established in the content industry and, I expect, sees future opportunities there as well. I expect Microsoft will continue its ventures in the audiovisual industries, either by buying a studio outright, or entering into some type of joint venture like MSNBC. (Negotiating with Fox to assist in the purchase of Yahoo! might be a harbinger of things to come.)
In the developed world the long-term outlook for profitable commodity software like an OS or office products is clearly on the decline. However the world-wide demand for mainstream audio and video content like the MPAA and RIAA members produce still seems pretty robust, and the profitability of these productions is well-known.
An economist studies how people and collections of people make choices.
In general, yes, though economics is hardly the only discipline where individual and social choices are studied. Psychology and political science both have much to say about these matters.
The most famous example is the choice of "guns versus butter"--that's an economics issue.
No, I'd say that's really a political issue and not an economic one. Social choice theory can help us understand how institutions meld individual preferences into a "social welfare function," to use the economics term for it, but economics avoids the question of how those individual preferences are determined. Economics works well when preferences are "exogenous" and not manipulable by producers (through advertising) or the government (through propaganda). If the government can influence preferences (say encouraging an over-production of "guns" as has been common in postwar America), then the notion of a democratically-determined "social" preference akin to a market equilibrium falls apart. (I'm leaving aside the entire thorny problem of even determining a social preference that was raised by Condorcet and Arrow.)
Economics does a fine job of explaining the equilibrium distribution of prices and quantities for, say, carrots and broccoli, but not so well with "guns" and "butter."
Well, that's a much clearer presentation of your argument; sorry if I offended you.
I think you raise an important issue. One answer might be that Microsoft provides alternative methods for obtaining Windows than buying it bundled with a computer. So you're not forced to buy this computer in order to obtain Windows. While it's true that you can buy computers from a different manufacturer without Windows, you apparently can't buy this specific computer from ASUS that way. You're forced to buy the bundled good.
(I'm leaving aside all the issues about Microsoft's monopoly position in the OS marketplace and trying to deal with the bundling argument itself.)
Personally I'm not sure I thing it would be a bad policy to let you keep the license and return the computer. Suppose the hardware were defective and you decide you don't want this specific brand or model again. You bought both the computer and the Windows license originally. Why shouldn't you be able to return the computer and keep the license? Microsoft even offers you the opportunity to reassign the license to another machine by obtaining a new license key.
If this actually were the policy, I'd bet we'd see a lot closer alignment between OEM and retail prices for Windows.
I'm really puzzled why this question is being asked repeatedly.
The answer is that the EULA is a contract between the purchaser and Microsoft while the remainder of the computer is governed by a contract between the purchaser and the manufacturer. The OS is a licensed copyrighted work; the hardware is not. There are many obvious legal differences between the hardware and the operating system, but for some reason many otherwise intelligent people in this thread keep missing this point.
open Windows Explorer file manager and type in a URL - it does not launch IE, it is IE or morphs in to IE, open Internet Explorer and type in C: hit enter and you can use it as a file manager and change & delete files
Sounds a lot like Konqueror to me. Having the ability to treat local and remote files equivalently seems like a good thing to me. In fact, one of the features I like best about Konqueror is its ability to handle all sorts of URLs like smb:// and fish://. I don't use it routinely to browse the Internet; I use Firefox for that. But I certainly have used it as a file manager and a web browser from time to time.
Thanks to you and ratboy above for these excellent responses.
However aren't you both really talking about a solution whose implementation, if if ever happens, is decades into the future? We have hundreds of millions of computers in the world running operating systems and applications that represent the current state of technology. Wouldn't these approaches literally require all those computers switch to entirely new operating systems and applications than are installed today?
If so, I don't see this as a realistic approach to the problem for years to come.
Indeed. I don't really care if it's Linux or Open Solaris or OS X or, hell, even HP-UX. It doesn't even have to be *nix if it's built on a sound security model.
The fact that the global computing infrastructure is so homogeneously based an operating system as vulnerable as Windows just never gets discussed in these sorts of articles. Most Windows users I know just accept that virus protection, spyware protection, and the occasional reinstallation of the OS, are all the normal state of affairs in computing. Why would they think otherwise?
While I'm sure that the jump in Mac sales has a lot to do with the success of the iPod, I wonder what fraction of Mac buyers consider the "no-viruses" feature of OS X an important selling point?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like he was at the age where the contents of the sweater were more interesting than the sweater itself.
The decision in Sony v. Universal (the "Betamax" case) is very narrowly drawn. In footnote 2, Justice Stevens writes "This case involves only the home recording for home use of television programs broadcast free over the airwaves. No issue is raised concerning cable or pay television, or the sharing or trading of tapes." As far as I know, there are no cases concerning the applicability of this decision to cable or pay services.
I believe the argument that swayed the Court concerned advertising revenues. If VCRs made it possible to watch programs at times other than when they were broadcast, the size of the program's audience would grow. With a larger audience come higher advertising revenues, enabling program producers to demand more from the broadcasters for the rights to show their products.
Stevens, for the majority, writes:
As far as I know, the applicability of Sony v. Universal to cable and pay services has never been resolved. So I'd argue the applicability of this decision to a digital, high-definition, pay-per-view service is, at best, equally unresolved. If you read the article, you'll see the studios are putting a lot of emphasis on potential harm to the rights holders, because that plays an important role in copyright litigation. The studios had a hard time showing harm in the case of time-shifting advertiser-supported broadcast television programs. They may not have as difficult a time showing harm in this case.
Finally, the narrowness of the Betamax decision leaves open the question of whether of not it's legitimate to enforce a no-recording switch on certain types of programming distributed in certain ways for certain periods of time. I don't think it's unreasonable for the FCC to begin a rule-making proceeding in this area, nor do I think the Commission is somehow claiming it has more authority in this instance than the Supreme Court. The Commissioners are quite aware what the limitations to their authority are. But by opening a rule-making proceeding the Commission has enabled there to be a debate over the applicability of the Betamax decision to this particular proposal by the studios. You might prefer that the debate not take place at all, or you might think that the studios hold all the cards. I'm not so convinced as the average Slashdotter that every case like this one will be resolved in favor of the moneyed interests. Nor do I think that we're necessarily headed down some proverbial "slippery slope" were we to allow studios to enforce their rights in this particular narrow instance.
I'm sure that were the FCC to adopt this change in its rules, the decision would be immediately appealed by public-interest organizations and forced into Federal court. We'd then see how the system applies the Betamax decision, and decisions since then like Grokster, to this particular rule. At some point it could reach the Supreme Court again, but not for at least three years, probably more. It's also possible some lower Federal court will enjoin the FCC from carrying out the rule change, leaving us with the status quo until a final determination is made.
Not at the moment, but TFA indicates that the movie studios are considering some type of high-definition pay-per-view service in advance of DVD release. It's this hypothetical window that they're trying to protect here.
No one would benefit more from a trend to home theaters than the studios. Selling their product directly to viewers squeezes out the networks and other program distributors on the one hand, and the theater owners on the other. The studios hate having to sell their product through distributors, so direct-to-home delivery is a dream come true. (At one time some studios owned their own theaters, but they were forced to divest them on antitrust grounds by the Supreme Court in 1948.)
I'd still pay to see Indiana Jones and its ilk on a lovely wide screen as we did just recently, but there are lots of films that don't require the big-screen treatment. I doubt we'll lose theaters entirely as they provide a social function as well as a method of distributing programming. I doubt we'll see television networks disappear any time soon either. But the allure of direct-to-home programming will continue to attract the studios' attention in the years to come.
I've wondered about this myself. As a FiOS subscriber, our analog channels are being replaced with QAM channels, so Verizon is distributing the mandated digital-to-analog converters. It's just a guess, but I'd be surprised if these boxes tuned anything other than the mandatory local broadcast stations. Cable operators are required to provide the "must-carry" local broadcast stations; they aren't required to provide ESPN. If you want ESPN, you'll probably have to rent a set-top box or use a TiVO with a cable card.
it can be seen as supporting the first-sale doctrine
That's exactly why this decision is an important one. Content owners want to shrink the first-sale exemption through one-way "licensing" schemes like the one struck down here. They want the right to distribute their works as they see fit but not relinquish control over the copies as the law requires.
I'm going to put on my ex-political-scientist hat here for a moment to talk about the relationship between contributions and voting patterns.
Of course the *AA's contribute a lot of John Conyers. He's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee which has jurisdiction over copyright matters. You'll notice that his most substantial contributions come from the legal profession whose interests are also quite closely linked with what happens in Judiciary. This pattern of contribution to committee chairs depends little on party. When the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, many industrial organizations started contributing to the new committee chairs and reduced their support for the deposed Republicans. If you look at the current contributions to Lamar Smith, the Ranking Minority Member on Judiciary, you'll see they come from the same places as do Conyers', just in smaller amounts.
As another example, look at the pattern of contributions to Barney Frank, one of the most liberal members of the Congress, who happens to now be the chair of the Financial Services (formerly Banking) Committee. Despite his rather populist views, Frank's received substantial contributions from the investment, real estate, and insurance industries.
The fact is that industries contribute to the chairs of committees with jurisdiction over those industries. Determining the direction of causality between contributions and voting patterns is made much more difficult by these types of "selection bias" problems.
Overall wouldn't you expect that contributors would donate to candidates who share their opinions? So how do you know if the candidates are bending their opinions to fit the contributors' wishes, or if we're just seeing a rather obvious pattern of correlation based on shared opinions? Answering these questions adequately takes a lot more work that pointing at contribution patterns alone.
I've had these same thoughts since I discovered how far advanced household 3D printing had become. I don't think you're wearing any hats unless it's a thinking cap. I doubt I'll see this in my remaining 20 or 30 years left, but it's certainly coming.
In a world where everyone has a replicator for ordinary objects, what property is there to own? The answer is obviously the software instructions required to produce the object. Suppose I want to build a coffee maker because my last one died. I'll download code to the "printer" and eventually have a new coffee maker. How many different kinds of coffee makers will there be? Will there be brands because people choose to pay the equivalents of Braun and Phillips real money for their supposedly-superior plans? Or will the world generally rely on open-sourced plans? For commodity items like coffee makers, I'd guess open source will be the norm as it is now for an ever-growing list of software commodities.
Obviously some physical objects like land will retain their value in this world. Energy resources might also still be an issue. Then there's foodstuffs. Will people join Capt. Picard at the replicator for a nice cup of "tea, Earl Grey, hot," or will they fear "manufactured" foods the same way genetically-engineered food scares some people now?
The local and state prosecutors in Missouri didn't think it was already illegal. They decided they didn't have grounds to prosecute Lori Drew. I would imagine the prosecutors desperately wished the reverse were true, don't you?
I'm almost 59, and I understand the Internet just fine, thank you. Hell, I'm even posting here on Slashdot.
Age isn't the real factor, it's exposure. Most older people in senior positions have staff to deal with things like phones and the Internet. I know lots of older people who function quite well with email and web browsing. Just because they, like me, don't use IM or MySpace doesn't make them stupid or inexperienced. We just don't see any use for these technologies in our daily lives.
The law applies to "severe, repeated, and hostile behavior." What constitutes such behavior is up to a jury to decide, but I doubt a little name-calling would be sufficient. The Lori Drew/Megan Meier case is quite different from "name-calling" in that a middle-aged adult conducted a systematic and lengthy campaign of harassment against a 13-year-old girl. I'd call what Drew did far more "severe" than any of the name-calling I see on Internet forums.
I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of this particular law, but the characterization of the bill presented here on Slashdot is frankly a parody of the actual language. Moreover you don't even have to read TFA; the actual language is right there in the summary at the top of the page.
Again I'll note that if you want to worry about the implications of this case, I suggest looking at the Federal indictment of Drew last month. It has the potential to establish much more worrisome precedents.
This isn't about your little guy getting beaten up by bullies at school (that's still pretty much legal, at least this law doesn't address it at all). It's about being called names on the internet.
No, actually it's about Megan Meier who committed suicide after being harassed by a 49 year-old woman named Lori Drew. Missouri prosecutors decided there was no legal basis to pursue Drew for her acts; this bill is the result.
The real concern isn't this bill, but the Federal indictment against Drew in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Drew is being prosecuted under anti-hacking statutes because she violated MySpace's Terms of Service and impersonated a teen-aged boy in order to carry out her harassment. I'm much more concerned with establishing a Federal precedent that website operators' Terms of Service can be backed up by Federal law than I am about this Missouri law. Of course my submission on the LA case here was rejected; I guess it wasn't as easy to laugh at as the Missouri bill.
Thank you for having read TFA and reminding people here we're talking about one particular model of router. The Slashdot headline about "router crashes" would lead you to think the problem is widespread and occurring across a variety of brands. As far as I can tell, it is only this router that's having problems.
Personally, I'd something have to do with the implementation of uPNP is at fault, but that's just a wild guess.
This is a common affliction in home routers when people run torrents. The problem is that the torrent client establishes dozens of TCP/IP connections to peers. Eventually the router's NAT table runs out of memory, and traffic comes to a halt.
The solution is to limit the [i]number of connections[/i] (not bandwidth) so as not to overtax the router. Try an upper limit of 100 connections or so and see if the problem goes away. If not, bring the limit down until things work smoothly again.
The FBI likely will investigate this matter, and the only way I could see media sentry getting out of criminal charges is by paying off Rev 3 enough that they drop all criminal charges against media sentry.
If there is a criminal prosecution, Revision3 doesn't have any say over whether it goes forward or not. That's up to the Federal or state prosecutors involved. Revision3 could reach a settlement with MediaDefender in lieu of a pursuing a civil case against the latter, but even if they reached such an agreement, a Federal or state prosecutor could still pursue a criminal case against MediaDefender.
I found your reply quite informative. I wrote about a particular type of scurrilous lending practice, though I had no doubt many more exist.
Homes are dropping in price not because they are not worth it, but because there is a tie between what people can afford and interest rates. When rates are low, prices should go up beacuse you can buy the same house for less. When rates go up, you have to pay more for the same house, so you the sale price must be lowered or you won't buy it. It's that inverse relationship and the large use of variable rates when they were low that caused the crunch.
I have more problems with this, however. By this line of argument the "fault," if there is any, for the decline in housing prices needs to be laid at the door of the Federal Reserve. The practice, particularly under Greenspan, of holding down rates for such a long period of time was the real culprit. Houses became artificially overvalued because, as you argue, their prices rose in line with falling interest rates. Now that rates are returning to more sensible levels, housing prices must invariably fall. I think there's a lot of merit in this point of view, but I still believe the psychology of the bubble market had its own role to play. When everyone thinks that prices will do nothing but climb, there are strong pressures to jump on board and ride the wave. I don't think rational behavior in reaction to interest rate changes entirely explains how lenders at all levels failed to conduct sufficient "due diligence" to determine the credit-worthiness of borrowers and now find themselves holding dramatically less-valuable portfolios.
People are usually cheap SOBs looking for the lowest price on food, clothes, toys, computers, cars, etc., yet they all of a sudden got Truly Stupid paying huge prices for homes. Why???
1) Houses were seen as a lifetime investment that would not depreciate.
2) Home ownership in the US is highly subsidized by the Federal Government through the mortgage interest and property tax deductions.
3) A lot of shady operators took advantage of poorer and less well-informed people by writing them mortgages with ridiculous terms (like a late payment increases your interest rate to double digits), waiting for the borrowers to run afoul of those terms, then foreclosing on a house the family had owned for years. It's called "predatory lending" for a reason.
There's been lots of corruption in the "secondary" and "subprime" lending sectors, too. Borrowers were encouraged to hedge, and sometimes lie, about their qualifications because the lenders felt no risk. Lenders found they could sell almost any mortgage into the securities markets where the liabilities were sliced and diced into pieces and repackaged as equity holdings. The Federal Reserve Board also helped fuel the housing bubble by holding down key interest rates and failing to perform any real oversight of its member institutions' lending practices. Many, many people, including many supposedly well-informed financial types, simply believed real estate would continue to rise in value over the years ahead.
Whenever large numbers of people become convinced that the price of a particular item, be it tulip bulbs or homes, can never fall, you have the potential for a pricing "bubble." In this particular instance, public policies and private greed together created the over-valuation of residential property that occurred over the past decade.
I guess I'm still a bit confused. You're saying these technologies could be bolted on to existing platforms in the way anti-virus programs are now? Won't they have to be supported by operating system and applications programmers as well? Even if they're included in the next generation of software, it'll take many years before that generation of software replaces the infrastructure we have now.
I'd also wonder what the user interface would look like. Popups that say "application X has tried to use port Z and has been disabled?" What's an uninformed user supposed to do in that case if they need to use application X? That's a lot different from saying "file Q has a virus; delete or quarantine?" False positives would also seem rather deadly in this case.
I'm not doubting any of what you report. I'm just trying to imagine how it might be applied to a global universe of computers running very disparate operating systems and collections of applications. I also suspect it's going to be very difficult to develop reporting and control interfaces that will be meaningful and useful to uninformed users. I remember how totally befuddled most people were when Windows firewall software started popping up those "program X has attempted to access the Internet" kind of warnings. I'd be shocked if most ordinary users chose any other response to such notices other than "Fine, go for it!"
I still think we're talking at least a decade before this might be the norm on even half the world's personal computers.
I've said this before here on Slashdot, but I think it's worth repeating.
I, for one, don't think Microsoft implemented DRM controls in Vista because Hollywood threatened to attack Redmond with the entire array of Marvel superheroes. Microsoft is already quite well established in the content industry and, I expect, sees future opportunities there as well. I expect Microsoft will continue its ventures in the audiovisual industries, either by buying a studio outright, or entering into some type of joint venture like MSNBC. (Negotiating with Fox to assist in the purchase of Yahoo! might be a harbinger of things to come.)
In the developed world the long-term outlook for profitable commodity software like an OS or office products is clearly on the decline. However the world-wide demand for mainstream audio and video content like the MPAA and RIAA members produce still seems pretty robust, and the profitability of these productions is well-known.
Hmm, I bet there's quite a few "Course 15" (Management) graduates from MIT doing more than working as clerks and secretaries when they graduate.
An economist studies how people and collections of people make choices.
In general, yes, though economics is hardly the only discipline where individual and social choices are studied. Psychology and political science both have much to say about these matters.
The most famous example is the choice of "guns versus butter"--that's an economics issue.
No, I'd say that's really a political issue and not an economic one. Social choice theory can help us understand how institutions meld individual preferences into a "social welfare function," to use the economics term for it, but economics avoids the question of how those individual preferences are determined. Economics works well when preferences are "exogenous" and not manipulable by producers (through advertising) or the government (through propaganda). If the government can influence preferences (say encouraging an over-production of "guns" as has been common in postwar America), then the notion of a democratically-determined "social" preference akin to a market equilibrium falls apart. (I'm leaving aside the entire thorny problem of even determining a social preference that was raised by Condorcet and Arrow.)
Economics does a fine job of explaining the equilibrium distribution of prices and quantities for, say, carrots and broccoli, but not so well with "guns" and "butter."
Well, that's a much clearer presentation of your argument; sorry if I offended you.
I think you raise an important issue. One answer might be that Microsoft provides alternative methods for obtaining Windows than buying it bundled with a computer. So you're not forced to buy this computer in order to obtain Windows. While it's true that you can buy computers from a different manufacturer without Windows, you apparently can't buy this specific computer from ASUS that way. You're forced to buy the bundled good.
(I'm leaving aside all the issues about Microsoft's monopoly position in the OS marketplace and trying to deal with the bundling argument itself.)
Personally I'm not sure I thing it would be a bad policy to let you keep the license and return the computer. Suppose the hardware were defective and you decide you don't want this specific brand or model again. You bought both the computer and the Windows license originally. Why shouldn't you be able to return the computer and keep the license? Microsoft even offers you the opportunity to reassign the license to another machine by obtaining a new license key.
If this actually were the policy, I'd bet we'd see a lot closer alignment between OEM and retail prices for Windows.
Why is the OS license special in this case?
I'm really puzzled why this question is being asked repeatedly.
The answer is that the EULA is a contract between the purchaser and Microsoft while the remainder of the computer is governed by a contract between the purchaser and the manufacturer. The OS is a licensed copyrighted work; the hardware is not. There are many obvious legal differences between the hardware and the operating system, but for some reason many otherwise intelligent people in this thread keep missing this point.
open Windows Explorer file manager and type in a URL - it does not launch IE, it is IE or morphs in to IE, open Internet Explorer and type in C: hit enter and you can use it as a file manager and change & delete files
Sounds a lot like Konqueror to me. Having the ability to treat local and remote files equivalently seems like a good thing to me. In fact, one of the features I like best about Konqueror is its ability to handle all sorts of URLs like smb:// and fish://. I don't use it routinely to browse the Internet; I use Firefox for that. But I certainly have used it as a file manager and a web browser from time to time.
Thanks to you and ratboy above for these excellent responses.
However aren't you both really talking about a solution whose implementation, if if ever happens, is decades into the future? We have hundreds of millions of computers in the world running operating systems and applications that represent the current state of technology. Wouldn't these approaches literally require all those computers switch to entirely new operating systems and applications than are installed today?
If so, I don't see this as a realistic approach to the problem for years to come.
Indeed. I don't really care if it's Linux or Open Solaris or OS X or, hell, even HP-UX. It doesn't even have to be *nix if it's built on a sound security model.
The fact that the global computing infrastructure is so homogeneously based an operating system as vulnerable as Windows just never gets discussed in these sorts of articles. Most Windows users I know just accept that virus protection, spyware protection, and the occasional reinstallation of the OS, are all the normal state of affairs in computing. Why would they think otherwise?
While I'm sure that the jump in Mac sales has a lot to do with the success of the iPod, I wonder what fraction of Mac buyers consider the "no-viruses" feature of OS X an important selling point?