The downloads weren't envisioned at the time of the contract. The contract has two sets of rules - one for record sales, one for licensed music. Sony has been treating iTunes as record sales, this is where they get the breakage deductions and the like. The artists are suing saying that these should fall under the licensed music terms instead, which does not include those deductions. Looks like a pretty straightforward argument to me.
Not only that, we also subsidised all that fibre already as well. The telecoms pocketed most of the money and now they're complaining they need to finance the fibre we already paid them for once.
On the bright side, it's nice to see MS money going to a good cause. I bet Bill Gates is rolling over in his coffin at the thought.
Again this crap is being modded up! AllOfMP3.com don't pay the appropriate royalties to their artists.
Umm actually they do. They sell under a license from the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems, an umbrella organisation tasked with collecting royalties and distributing them to the artists. What they don't do is pay royalties to "other copyright holders" i.e. the RIAA. Frankly sounds perfect to me.
Unfortunately, no one can guarantee you won't be sued by anyone in the US, for anything.
It would be seem to be nearly impossible to be sued succesfully for this in the US, however. It's not illegal to import music from abroad, yet at least.
There's nothing wrong with selling free software. There IS something wrong with confusing proprietary mushware, like the drivers and codecs they distribute, with free software. Big difference.
Unfortunately, I don't think Sony will be going broke any time soon.
But it's not just about 'jerkhood' in the sense that some folks are just jerks in ways that are jerky no matter what the context. It's a bit deeper than that.
Different people play these games for different reasons, and different things matter to them. What one group sees as simply playing the game, another may see as exploiting, and destroying the game for them. Good mud admins work very hard to keep the various groups (4, in one famous analysis) in a sort of balance, where none of them destroy the game for the others. The graphical muds I've seen seemed to be run by admins who either didn't understand this, or else were simply overruled by their suit wearing superiors, I'm not sure which... but at any rate... glad to hear you're enjoying city of heroes. I've heard some good things about guild wars too.
because you can't see past the actions of a few people
Unfortunately it's not just a few people. It's a very large part of the population of every big commercial mud today. Where on a traditional, nonprofit mud these folks get taught better, and if they won't listen, they get banned, on the new wave of fancy commercial graphical muds, the business side gets in the way of that. Many times the jerks are even catered to, since there are a lot of them and they're putting money in the coffers.
Immunity is almost always a trap. It's just the lawyers way of getting around the fifth amendment on the one hand, and of letting the guilty walk on the other. It's hard to think of a single time it's been used that wasn't a perversion of justice.
And it's very hard to 'admit everything' when, like Stewart, the 'crime' you're accused of is so ill-defined that teams of lawyers can study it in depth and still have difficulty agreeing on which actions it actually criminalises and which it doesn't.
Well, you should have, but no, actually, it doesn't. If you were shortsighted and got rid of them, you can download the tarball again, untar it and make uninstall.
And, if you run into one of those silly ones that don't have a make uninstall target (fortunately that's quite rare,) you can use a switch (-n I think? man make) to do a dry run install. This will tell you exactly what was installed, and where, to do a manual uninstall from.
Actually proper Mac applications DO reside entirely in a specially tagged directory called an 'app bundle' which you can install by simply dragging somewhere on your harddrive, and cleanly uninstall by simply dragging to the trash. Unix applications in Mac land, and system components count, are the major exception. They are tracked in a database similiar to RPM, and can be cleanly uninstalled as a result of that, although for some odd reason Apple doesn't include a tool to do that. But OSXPM, Free Software, handles it nicely.
And this is what's throwing me.
If you read the article, Cringely is suggesting both a WinXP layer on Mac OS, AND a switch away from the Mach kernel to a monolithic (FreeBSD?) kernel for more speed.
One or the other might make sense. Not both together. If you're going to throw a second OS personality on top, you want to use a microkernel.
Now, if they're going to implement a WinXP layer as he says, and also switch to a kernel with better performance, as he says, then I suspect the kernel will be a more advanced microkernel instead of a monolithic kernel. Perhaps L4?
Look at TIVO. GPL sources are available, but if you compile them, the hardware will refuse to load your version. You have to have a secret key to sign it. It's a loophole created by the fact that all this stuff hadn't really been thought of when GPL v2 was created, except in the abstract sense that it was realised there would be unforseen issues in the future, the reason that 'or later versions' clause was so recommended.
GPL v3 closes that particular loophole, and hopefully all GPL projects will migrate to that shortly, but sadly some projects (linux being the most visible example) are currently under v2 without the 'or later' clause, which may make that difficult.
Not AT ALL. It's a privilege, and necessarily involves interference with fundamental rights in abstract, although until recently it interfered very little in practice.
Property is rivalrous. Data, when divorced from an actual physical exemplar, is not. I can own a book, I can own a copier, therefore if property rights are respected, I can copy the book. But copyright sets that aside, and forbids me from using my property in certain ways, to protect the privilege that has been granted.
In the early days of copyright, it was an explicit trade - the state granted copyright only on works for which it was explicitly applied for, only in return for several copies of the work to be lodged with the library of congress, ensuring its continued availability to posterity long after the copyright had expired. And in those days, the copying machines were extraordinarily expensive, so that very few people were actually affected by the law anyway. It was a limitation on large commercial ventures, not on private people, which was why it was tolerated and generally approved. And the terms were, of course, for limited times.
Only in the last century have large companies with vast amounts of 'wealth' which consists of these profitable monopoly grants called copyrights inserted this notion that their privileges are somehow rights. And with that comes the logical consequences - terms are now practically infinite, there is no trade involved - no registration, no copies on record... and at the same time, copying technology has become cheap enough that 'the ordinary joe' can now afford it. So we come to a critical conflict, between property rights and the monopoly grants of the politically powerful. A fork in the road, with two very distinct paths possible. We may choose human rights, or we may choose a new form of serfdom and slavery. I can't tell you which way it goes, but I can say for sure that either way, historians 100 years from now will point to these years as critical to the formation of whichever type of society we become.
With actual, tangible goods, you can't just make infinite copies.
Exactly why DRM is anti-social and anti-human. It's simply an attempt to create artificial scarcity.
As you correctly observed, we don't have matter duplicators. But imagine that they were developed. Suddenly we'd have the ability to eliminate hunger, to eliminate poverty. Would it not be the very definition of evil if, for instance, large agricultural companies banded together to lobby for the outlawing of this technology, to preserve their ability to continue making a profit at an activity for which there was no longer demand?
This is exactly what the Record and Movie industries are doing today. They built their businesses, and made wonderful fat profits for many, many years, by duplicating rare objects. The duplication technology, however, has progressed to the point that we no longer NEED large companies with deep pockets to make those copies for us, and they are fighting tooth and nail to avoid having to adjust their business model to the new reality.
So, yes, I do think it's as simple as the GP says.
I recall the problem was bottlenecks; it was hard *not* to end up with one or two bits of the chip slowing everything else down and so they never really got the chip to be better than a normal clocked version.
Presumably this has been fixed?
Just guessing here, but perhaps they simply redefined 'better?' This chip won't be crunching numbers any faster than the synchronous version, from what I read - but it WILL take a lot less power in situations where it's not actually crunching numbers most of the time.
I'm sorry, Mr. Carmody, but I'm going to have to join in the bashing.
This is an INSANE setup. Given your target audience for Linspire, it's really no different than the early mistake.
Given your target audience, it's predictable that the vast majority have no idea what adding users means, is, or does, and won't do it. The very people that need it the most are the ones that won't have a clue to do it.
Please, have your guys take a look at OS X or (I'm told) Ubuntu. It's not a difficult thing to do, and it manages to make things user friendly without throwing the security model straight out the window and stomping on it.
Interesting. I haven't used either of those (well, I used mandrake for awhile before the name change, but it didn't do that then.) But it sure works fine on my Apple, and I know I could set it up manually on Debian or Slackware without much trouble, so I don't see why they can't do it.
I remember, way back when I was first trying Linux, I made the mistake of trying to 'startx' while logged in as root. It absolutely refused to run that way, forcing me to learn how to make a user account and run it properly. Seems to me more programs should do that, but I'm guessing the reverse is true these days.
Exactly. And this is why their protestations, while technically true, aren't relevant. The users that *need* the protection of a user account the most, the ones they explicitly market to, are exactly the ones that aren't gonna have a freakin CLUE what 'create user account' means and will just hit cancel and go on their merry way.
They really should work out a system like Apple is using, where the first user account is automatically in the wheel group and can sudo, but is otherwise a normal user account, with the root account disabled entirely. If it's friendly enough for Apple, it sure shouldn't be a problem for Linspire. Until they figure this out, I can't in good faith recommend Linspire to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Good to see *someone* got it.
The downloads weren't envisioned at the time of the contract. The contract has two sets of rules - one for record sales, one for licensed music. Sony has been treating iTunes as record sales, this is where they get the breakage deductions and the like. The artists are suing saying that these should fall under the licensed music terms instead, which does not include those deductions. Looks like a pretty straightforward argument to me.
Not only that, we also subsidised all that fibre already as well. The telecoms pocketed most of the money and now they're complaining they need to finance the fibre we already paid them for once.
On the bright side, it's nice to see MS money going to a good cause. I bet Bill Gates is rolling over in his coffin at the thought.
Umm actually they do. They sell under a license from the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems, an umbrella organisation tasked with collecting royalties and distributing them to the artists. What they don't do is pay royalties to "other copyright holders" i.e. the RIAA. Frankly sounds perfect to me.
Unfortunately, no one can guarantee you won't be sued by anyone in the US, for anything.
It would be seem to be nearly impossible to be sued succesfully for this in the US, however. It's not illegal to import music from abroad, yet at least.
Actually I believe there are several services already doing this generically, ePassporte for example.
I don't speak a word of French. But je ne sais quoi was adopted into English as a fixed phrase loooong ago.
Sorry, Quebe-what?
Oh, I slay myself.
There's nothing wrong with selling free software. There IS something wrong with confusing proprietary mushware, like the drivers and codecs they distribute, with free software. Big difference.
Unfortunately, I don't think Sony will be going broke any time soon.
But it's not just about 'jerkhood' in the sense that some folks are just jerks in ways that are jerky no matter what the context. It's a bit deeper than that.
Different people play these games for different reasons, and different things matter to them. What one group sees as simply playing the game, another may see as exploiting, and destroying the game for them. Good mud admins work very hard to keep the various groups (4, in one famous analysis) in a sort of balance, where none of them destroy the game for the others. The graphical muds I've seen seemed to be run by admins who either didn't understand this, or else were simply overruled by their suit wearing superiors, I'm not sure which... but at any rate... glad to hear you're enjoying city of heroes. I've heard some good things about guild wars too.
Unfortunately it's not just a few people. It's a very large part of the population of every big commercial mud today. Where on a traditional, nonprofit mud these folks get taught better, and if they won't listen, they get banned, on the new wave of fancy commercial graphical muds, the business side gets in the way of that. Many times the jerks are even catered to, since there are a lot of them and they're putting money in the coffers.
Neither do the guys in the federal prisons getting raped as we speak. What's your point?
Immunity is almost always a trap. It's just the lawyers way of getting around the fifth amendment on the one hand, and of letting the guilty walk on the other. It's hard to think of a single time it's been used that wasn't a perversion of justice.
And it's very hard to 'admit everything' when, like Stewart, the 'crime' you're accused of is so ill-defined that teams of lawyers can study it in depth and still have difficulty agreeing on which actions it actually criminalises and which it doesn't.
Well, you should have, but no, actually, it doesn't. If you were shortsighted and got rid of them, you can download the tarball again, untar it and make uninstall.
And, if you run into one of those silly ones that don't have a make uninstall target (fortunately that's quite rare,) you can use a switch (-n I think? man make) to do a dry run install. This will tell you exactly what was installed, and where, to do a manual uninstall from.
Ummm sure there is. 'Make uninstall.' Easy.
Actually proper Mac applications DO reside entirely in a specially tagged directory called an 'app bundle' which you can install by simply dragging somewhere on your harddrive, and cleanly uninstall by simply dragging to the trash. Unix applications in Mac land, and system components count, are the major exception. They are tracked in a database similiar to RPM, and can be cleanly uninstalled as a result of that, although for some odd reason Apple doesn't include a tool to do that. But OSXPM, Free Software, handles it nicely.
Actually, that would be the word for the other kind of movies - the ones that shamelessly pander to the illiterate lowest common denominator.
And this is what's throwing me. If you read the article, Cringely is suggesting both a WinXP layer on Mac OS, AND a switch away from the Mach kernel to a monolithic (FreeBSD?) kernel for more speed. One or the other might make sense. Not both together. If you're going to throw a second OS personality on top, you want to use a microkernel. Now, if they're going to implement a WinXP layer as he says, and also switch to a kernel with better performance, as he says, then I suspect the kernel will be a more advanced microkernel instead of a monolithic kernel. Perhaps L4?
No.
Look at TIVO. GPL sources are available, but if you compile them, the hardware will refuse to load your version. You have to have a secret key to sign it. It's a loophole created by the fact that all this stuff hadn't really been thought of when GPL v2 was created, except in the abstract sense that it was realised there would be unforseen issues in the future, the reason that 'or later versions' clause was so recommended.
GPL v3 closes that particular loophole, and hopefully all GPL projects will migrate to that shortly, but sadly some projects (linux being the most visible example) are currently under v2 without the 'or later' clause, which may make that difficult.
Not AT ALL. It's a privilege, and necessarily involves interference with fundamental rights in abstract, although until recently it interfered very little in practice.
Property is rivalrous. Data, when divorced from an actual physical exemplar, is not. I can own a book, I can own a copier, therefore if property rights are respected, I can copy the book. But copyright sets that aside, and forbids me from using my property in certain ways, to protect the privilege that has been granted.
In the early days of copyright, it was an explicit trade - the state granted copyright only on works for which it was explicitly applied for, only in return for several copies of the work to be lodged with the library of congress, ensuring its continued availability to posterity long after the copyright had expired. And in those days, the copying machines were extraordinarily expensive, so that very few people were actually affected by the law anyway. It was a limitation on large commercial ventures, not on private people, which was why it was tolerated and generally approved. And the terms were, of course, for limited times.
Only in the last century have large companies with vast amounts of 'wealth' which consists of these profitable monopoly grants called copyrights inserted this notion that their privileges are somehow rights. And with that comes the logical consequences - terms are now practically infinite, there is no trade involved - no registration, no copies on record... and at the same time, copying technology has become cheap enough that 'the ordinary joe' can now afford it. So we come to a critical conflict, between property rights and the monopoly grants of the politically powerful. A fork in the road, with two very distinct paths possible. We may choose human rights, or we may choose a new form of serfdom and slavery. I can't tell you which way it goes, but I can say for sure that either way, historians 100 years from now will point to these years as critical to the formation of whichever type of society we become.
Exactly why DRM is anti-social and anti-human. It's simply an attempt to create artificial scarcity.
As you correctly observed, we don't have matter duplicators. But imagine that they were developed. Suddenly we'd have the ability to eliminate hunger, to eliminate poverty. Would it not be the very definition of evil if, for instance, large agricultural companies banded together to lobby for the outlawing of this technology, to preserve their ability to continue making a profit at an activity for which there was no longer demand?
This is exactly what the Record and Movie industries are doing today. They built their businesses, and made wonderful fat profits for many, many years, by duplicating rare objects. The duplication technology, however, has progressed to the point that we no longer NEED large companies with deep pockets to make those copies for us, and they are fighting tooth and nail to avoid having to adjust their business model to the new reality.
So, yes, I do think it's as simple as the GP says.
Just guessing here, but perhaps they simply redefined 'better?' This chip won't be crunching numbers any faster than the synchronous version, from what I read - but it WILL take a lot less power in situations where it's not actually crunching numbers most of the time.
I'm sorry, Mr. Carmody, but I'm going to have to join in the bashing.
This is an INSANE setup. Given your target audience for Linspire, it's really no different than the early mistake.
Given your target audience, it's predictable that the vast majority have no idea what adding users means, is, or does, and won't do it. The very people that need it the most are the ones that won't have a clue to do it.
Please, have your guys take a look at OS X or (I'm told) Ubuntu. It's not a difficult thing to do, and it manages to make things user friendly without throwing the security model straight out the window and stomping on it.
Interesting. I haven't used either of those (well, I used mandrake for awhile before the name change, but it didn't do that then.) But it sure works fine on my Apple, and I know I could set it up manually on Debian or Slackware without much trouble, so I don't see why they can't do it.
I remember, way back when I was first trying Linux, I made the mistake of trying to 'startx' while logged in as root. It absolutely refused to run that way, forcing me to learn how to make a user account and run it properly. Seems to me more programs should do that, but I'm guessing the reverse is true these days.
Exactly. And this is why their protestations, while technically true, aren't relevant. The users that *need* the protection of a user account the most, the ones they explicitly market to, are exactly the ones that aren't gonna have a freakin CLUE what 'create user account' means and will just hit cancel and go on their merry way.
They really should work out a system like Apple is using, where the first user account is automatically in the wheel group and can sudo, but is otherwise a normal user account, with the root account disabled entirely. If it's friendly enough for Apple, it sure shouldn't be a problem for Linspire. Until they figure this out, I can't in good faith recommend Linspire to anyone.