If there was *any* question, he should have consulted his staff, or the court, BEFORE he decided.
I'm genuinely curious what you feel should have been done, then. Should he have told the military & law enforcement that they couldn't detain or capture anybody, no matter how much suspicion and evidence they had, because he had to figure out with the courts what to do with detainees?
Or should we have simply killed them all and let God sort it out? A simple double-tap to the back of the head, Sopranos-style, to make sure there's nobody to file a suit?
To say "we can't do anything until we deliberate with the finest legal minds and weigh all aspects of this delicate, nuanced constitutional theory & precedent," is a little disingenuous. I don't like the decision to try and keep detainees indefinitely without a trial, and I think the federal courts made the right decision... but I'm also quite all right with somebody being detained while the courts sorted out the issue.
As someone who splits his radio-listening time mostly between the local FM Talk station here in the Boston area, and Howard Stern on my Sirius receiver, I have to agree with most of what you've written here.
The best radio, in general, is the type that makes you "feel at home" -- it's why I listen to Howard Stern, it's why I listen to the John & Jeff show (syndicated out of L.A., I think?) when I'm working late, and it's the reason I listen to Jay Severin on the aforementioned Boston talk station. Listening makes you feel kind of like you're sitting around with a few of your friends, just talking and having a good time, and that's exactly the type of feeling that a radio program needs to engender if it wants to keep people listening, and it sounds like exactly what you're talking about when you mention the inside jokes, and how it takes a few weeks to really "get to know" the program.
What I don't understand is how anybody could think that somebody with a radio program -- liberal or conservative -- is somehow a threat to their own values and principles. I don't agree with all of the viewpoints and thoughts of the people I hear on the radio. But then, I could say the same thing about every single one of my friends, too -- we don't agree on everything, but when we get together, the talk is lively, fun, and good-natured, even in disagreement.
The guy you're responding to hit the nail on the head, though -- it's not as if the liberal talk show hosts haven't had their opportunities, it's that they have a huge difficulty maintaining an audience that can sustain the talk format as a viable business model.
If you want to see the real reason why, look to the supporters: by and large, conservatives tend to be "mostly" in agreement on a lot of issues, which means someone speaking with a conservative bent will be at least a little more likely to attract a large conservative audience. On the other hand, liberals are often a very fractious and divisive lot... which makes it a lot harder to gather, and keep, an audience of appreciable size for someone who talks about liberal stuff -- you know, pink frilly panties and garden parties with the illegal Mexican immigrants. (For those of you who are humor-impaired, yes, that WAS a joke. Don't get your pink french-cut panties in a bunch.:)
What it boils down to is, audience drives advertising rates drives talk radio success. Some liberals have found reasonable degrees of success in talk radio, at least to the extent that they are nationally syndicated: Ed Schultz, Alan Colmes, Thom Hartmann, Bill Press, and Stephanie Miller, for example. Other liberal talk hosts have NOT found reasonable degrees of success -- Al Franken & the rest of his colleagues at Air America, for example.
I agree, the grandparent post was thoughtful, lucid, and well-written. Unfortunately on Slashdot, those traits seem to be about as welcome as a fart in a space suit.:)
Does the university *at least* have an exceptions policy, for granting access to sites which are blocked, but for which a student or teacher can demonstrate an educational need? Most companies today with similar filtering will grant an exception for a site if it's justifiably related to business, and not a porn/gambling/warez site.
I understand that the appeal / exception process can be time-consuming, and annoying in the case of legitimate news & information sites, but imagine how quickly the university will reconsider their choice of filters if they're flooded with thousands of requests to access legitimate information, which some poor schlub in the IT group will spend weeks wading through. If you can show that there is a real problem accessing LOTS of educational content, then they should at the least be inclined to seek out a better filtering device / service.
And if turns out that only a handful of requests are submitted to unblock a handful of sites, then your students should also learn how to work within the established system for addressing these "false positives". Learning how to work within a system of limitations and rules is also a valuable workforce skill... most companies out there are going to filter / block at least some sites.
In 2003, Scheff sued Bock for defamation. Bock hired a lawyer, but he left the case when she no longer could afford to pay him.
When Katrina hit in August 2005, Bock's house was flooded and she moved temporarily to Texas before returning to Louisiana last June. Court papers that Scheff and her attorney David H. Pollack mailed to Bock were returned to Pollack's office in Miami.
She knew she was being sued LONG before Katrina ever hit -- at *LEAST* 1 year & 8 months, assuming the case was filed at the end of December 2003. While I certainly am sorry for her plight, did it ever occur to her at some point after relocating to call the court, or the plaintiff's lawyers, or a lawyer who might be willing to do some pro bono work to help her out? I'm sure that she could have filed for a continuance pretty easily if she had bothered to explain her situation to the court, and try to provide a forwarding address, or at least communicate her whereabouts...
Okay, I'm going to ask the obvious question here. Let's look at the facts:
"Azhar" is the submitter, and the author of the linked-to article.
The linked-to article is poorly written, contains no factual information, and basically can be boiled down to, "NO way, iPods are teh r0x0rz!!!!one!!!1111!!!one!"
The submitter is clearly trying to simply generate traffic to his site with this opinion piece.
Given these... how does this constitute "news" for anybody, much less nerds?
I don't know... given all the heating issues we've heard about in the Apple MacBooks & MBP's... imagine if they had a bigger market share, and everybody then turned their laptop on at the same time!! You'd probably see a 2 or 3 degree jump in average atmospheric temperature overnight!!!!!!!!!!oneone!!111!!!
I'm sure that everybody was far too busy thinking up cute "+5 Funny" comments to go out and actually take a look at the actual study... but for anybody who's perhaps interested in formulating a defensible position on the matter based on facts rather than groupthink, the actual publication is available here.
For a bunch of geeks, I'd think that doing a bit of research & gathering the facts before reaching a conclusion would be the *first* thing you'd do when trying to combat what you decry as a campaign of FUD & misinformation. Sarcasm isn't going to win the case in a courtroom, or in Congress. Deconstruct their argument & their methods. Show their assumptions & conclusions to be faulty.
Yeah, but the jokes on GM's workers; GM may have entered into those obligations, but never intended to follow through. And now, some poor dumb ass class action lawyer has to prove "intent" on an agreement made decades ago by executives who are now dead.
Well shit, since I'm sure you have some form of factual proof -- you know other than the "it's a big company, everything they do is evil," knee-jerk -- for your assertion that GM entered into thos obligations with absolutely no intention of following through on them, why don't you go work with said dumb-ass class action lawyers? You'll make a killing! You know, since you have proof, and not just a generally paranoid disposition... right?
I see you've never made cubicledrone's acquaintance. There are three main "themes" he seems to enjoy:
Un-funny "film at 11" comments.
Rabid screeds about "lying, ass-crack, salad bar ordering hairpieces", i.e., middle management.
Rants about Disney and their animation division.
Don't expect much in the way of logic or cohesiveness. And really, after you've seen him do 1, 2, and 3 a few times on multiple threads, that "new psycho" smell wears off and he even stops being an amusing novelty act.
Don't be obtuse. Have health care costs stayed level (when adjusted for inflation) over that entire 100 year period, too?
Health care spending in the United States has increased by $621 billion since 2000 to $1.9 trillion this year, and current expenditures for health care services account for about 24% of the increase in the gross domestic product between 2000 and 2005, according to a report by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health.
There's a very real reason why companies are moving away from defined benefit retirement plans and towards defined contribution retirement plans, and a huge part of that reason is skyrocketing healthcare costs as the Baby Boomers start retiring -- saddling your company with the guaranteed retirement benefits for all of it's retired workers is not a sustainable practice.
You say that as if the RIAA have some kind of God-given right to be paid for that song. Let me assure you that this is not the case.
I like your straw man. Do you have a red herring to go with that? I never claimed they have any "rights" to demand payment for it, god-given or otherwise.
My point was that, in the grand scheme of things, claiming that the RIAA's influence must be counteracted by force, because they represent some "malevolent cabal" out to subvert our entire way of life is more than a little over the top.
The proper venue for this discussion of licensing & copyrights is in a court, governed by a system of laws. Knee-jerk responses about rounding up the posse to dole out a little frontier justice may get you "+5, Insightful" here on Slashdot, but I assure you, it does NOTHING but harm the rational legal arguments being put forth by lots of very smart legal experts, because then the rational people get associated with the fringe elements who get the TV time, and so are the public "face" of the folks who are anti-DRM.
Nobody has any kind of inherent "Right" to information they create. They never did. And it isn't an issue of fairness, it's an issue of public benefit.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe you overstated the case. I read this to mean that any unspecified member of any unspecified public can claim it's "in the public benefit" for them to hack into my computer at home, and take whatever photos, videos, recipes, essays, stories, etc. that I may have created that I haven't seen fit to release to the public? By your argument, it's just information, and I have no right to that information that I've created, after all.
Or maybe it's that this is a very complex, nuanced issue not well suited for blanket statements like "Nobody has any kind of inherent right to the information they create", where a balance between "public benefit", "privacy", and "ownership" of your creations must be struck, much like with current patent & copyright laws?
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. -- Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782.
And . . .
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. -- Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.
Wait. I'm sincerely curious. How do you get from Point A, "They're trying to stop me from downloading the latest Britney Spears single," to Point B -- and I quote:
Don't attempt to call these "individuals" a "group", and try to characterize them as if they are anything more than a malevolent cabal out to subvert the intent of our forefathers in founding the us and writing the US constitution.
The RIAA wants you to pay for that single, not download it for free. And while I agree that it may suck that you would have to go to Tower to indulge in your obsessive love for all things Britney, it's not as if the RIAA is trying to steal or throw out your vote, or kill your grandmother.
There are SO many things in the world that are way more likely to "subvert" our culture than this. Get some damn perspective.
My guess is they simply hope to make it as painful & costly as possible to "take the place" of Limewire, thereby discouraging others from stepping up.
I do agree though -- they're ultimately fighting a losing battle. Instead of fighting new technology, they should be embracing it and figuring out how to make it work for them. Itunes, and other services of that nature, are a step in the right direction. Rather than spending millions of dollars suing Aunt Edna and Little Timmy down the block, they should be investing that money in R&D, and exploring new business models that incorporate digital distribution channels... but then, history is littered with the carcasses of failed enterprises.
(And, since this is slashdot, I should include an obligatory disclaimer: yes, I understand that there are some sublte shades of gray (or, on/., black & white only) raised by the DRM restrictions these services impose. And while I know this won't be a populare stance here, the Itunes restrictions really *aren't* that draconian for the *majority of the music-buying public.*)
Um... the dismissal is caused by failing to state a claim which constitutes grounds for providing the relief of a dismissal.
It doesn't mean that Limewire can't identify how it would relieve them (that's a no-brainer), it means that they have shaky (perhaps no) legal grounds for seeking that relief.
I think you just answered your own question about why:
The company has released something like 2 distributions over the last four years or so while being heavily funded by the Chinese government.
It's funded by the Chinese Government == lucrative government contracts == profit.
IBM is in the business of making a profit. If doing so results in a net contribution to open source software, then good for IBM & good for OSS. If doing so doesn't result in a net contribution to open source software, you'd be wrong to think that IBM gives a toss, so long as they're still making money.
I promise, "experiments" into DRM will be avoided.
I'd love to have a business that was "avoided" to the extent that it had well over a billion sales, and whose sales figures looked much closer to y=x^2 than they do to y = x
You may not like DRM, but it's clear that your predictions of its imminent demise are greatly exaggerated.
Be an apologist all you like ("But, it's HARD to write secure software! Wahh!") but we're not going to have secure systems unless the bugs are squashed BEFORE being discovered. Am I crazy?
Problem is, what this implies is that your code must be *perfect* -- all bugs, gone, before release -- or you can't release it.
So let's say you accomplish near-perfection in your code, and you have 1 bug in the entire program. Now, put that program on an operating system, made up of thousands of other binaries, each with only *1* bug in them. Individually, each one of those binaries is nearly perfect. Taken all together, you have a buggy, quirky, unpredictable system of interactions. So do you not release your software until everybody else in the universe also gets theirs right?
Or do you just do the reasonable thing -- release it when it's "okay" so people can use it, and continue improving it via some patching or update process?
Did *you* read the entire article, yourself? Did you notice this part (emphasis mine):
Lockyer -- a Democratic candidate for state treasurer in the November election -- said the lawsuit states that under federal and state common law the automakers have created a public nuisance by producing "millions of vehicles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide."
There are certainly people who dispute the conclusion that the earth is warming, but I don't think any of those people arguing against the global warming hypothesis have come out and said that warming things up would be a good thing.
So Lockyer -- a politician up for election to another political office gets lots of free publicity for taking a public stand on a hot-button issue that nobody on earth would say they're in favor of. So whether or not he wins the case, he still wins because he:
gets millions of dollars of free publicity in newspapers around the country
gets a bump in his approval rating because he took a stand on behalf of the environment & the "little people" who are being harmed by those evil, nasty auto companies.
It's a page from the Spitzer political playbook -- which is not necessarily a criticism of Spitzer, as it's a wonderfully effective strategy. But this is demagoguery, plain and simple.
This analogy is so mind-numbingly retarded that the mind boggles.
Do you REALLY mean to say that if Osama Bin Laden had donated money to George Bush's campaign, the US wouldn't have bothered responding to 9/11?
Are you REALLY so brain-dead that you can't see the essential difference between selling tobacco (a legal enterprise, which people purchase voluntarily, not at the point of a gun) and hijacking planes with hundreds of people on board, and flying them into buildings? I'd like to think not, but you leave very little room for optimism.
You're joking, I hope? Do you really think that, with ALL of the billions of dollars Microsoft makes & spends every year, they haven't put any of that money into marketing studies & forecasting? Love them or hate them, Microsoft got where they are by out-competing in the marketplace (it wasn't a monopoly when it was founded, it was a little guy). They have a ridiculously huge market share. They have lots of very intelligent people working there. They know how to make a piece of software that's "good enough", and they know how to market it and sell it.
People will buy workstations with Vista on it. Some people will upgrade to Vista. Microsoft will continue making products that a lot of people will buy. CORPORATIONS will buy Vista workstations. CORPORATIONS will upgrade to Vista (maybe not in 2007, but it'll come), in spite of all the gleeful baseless predictions being made here on Slashdot. Microsoft will continue making products that a lot of people will buy.
That's not to say that Linux can't take away some market share... but unless Linux offers a fundamentally better user experience, then what's the impetus for change? To exchange one set of hassles with Windows with another set of hassles with Linux? My Linux system isn't a no-brainer to use & keep running, and I'm sure a lot of people here will argue it shouldn't be, and isn't meant to be. But as long as that's the state of Linux, you'll run into a lot of resistance from the users who don't want their computing experience to be any more mentally taxing than using a dishwasher or a refrigerator. And for them, Microsoft will always be happy to provide that.
Unless we find out that Microsoft is giving sanctuary & money to Osama Bin Laden at their Redmond HQ, I think we can expect to see Microsoft as a fairly big player in the software market for some time to come, and I don't see Linux making much more of an inroad on the desktop than Apple has. Which is not, in my opinion, a criticism. Look at Apple -- judging by their profits & stock price, there's certainly a lot of room for growth & business even in distant second or third place.
And lest I be shouted down as a Microsoft shill, I'm writing this via Firefox on a Mac Mini which sits quietly on my desk next to a tower system running Kubuntu. The only Microsoft things in my house are an XBox, and XP on my work laptop.
So your reason for getting SO wound up over an article claiming Linux will never unseat Microsoft as "top dog" is because that conclusion hurts "the people"? That *is* what the gp poster asked -- why does this article elicit so much of an emotional outburst?
I call bullshit on THAT claim of yours -- I'm a little skeptical of anybody I don't know who claims to have "MY" best interests at heart as their sole reason for doing something. If you're so altrusitically-minded, why aren't you out there evangelizing against McDonald's and cigarettes? After all, in terms of harm, I think that smoking & fast food do more harm to people than Microsoft's monopoly status ever will.
I'll take a stab at answering the grandparent's question about why this article drew such a knee-jerk, emotional response. I'm going to burn a lot of good karma for saying this, but what the fuck, I aim to misbehave.
I'm going to preface this with a statement, however: at home I use Mac OS X and a Ubuntu system. At work, our servers run AIX, Solaris, and Red Hat, and my laptop runs Windows. I use all of these systems more or less every day, so I'm not saying what I'm about to say as a Windows user, or a Mac user... I'm saying it as someone who uses the appropriate tool for the job at hand. Now, with that obligatory disclaimer out of the way, I'll proceed to answer.
For a lot of geeks, getting Linux accepted by the mainstream user is a validation of their "coolness" which they crave. And in that obsessive subculture, O/S choice has become a dick measuring contest, with the following accepted guidelines:
Mac users are always obsessive whiny fanboys; they're smart enough to choose a Unix-based operating system, but still gay enough to crave pretty graphics & functional apps that do things they want to get done. Dick size: A little below average, maybe average.
Windows users are stupid, mindless sheep; they're too dumb to figure out how to use Linux, and they're too dumb to stop paying the Microsoft tax. Insert other snarky comments about Ballmer & chair throwing, Gates & 640 kb, Clippy & MS Bob, and sprinkle with rants about BSODs, and top with a yell of "PROVEN MONOPOLY!", and you've effectively negated ANY point about Microsoft anybody makes here on Slashdot. Dick size: REALLY small. We're talking vanishingly small. Doesn't-she-know-about-shrinkage small.
Unix users are old-school, and deserve a little respect. But they still work on proprietary, vendor-locked-in code & hardware, like chumps. Dick size: A little above average.
Linux users are the smart ones. They're "free", even if it means that they don't have all the applications they want or need. They'll just wait for someone to write one. Dick size: HUGE. Monstrous. ENORMOUS. Throbbing.
So, when you say something like, O/S choice isn't that big a deal, what the geeks hear is, "It doesn't matter how big your dick is." And of course, to the insecure, that's just not true.
What the zealot evangelists in the "Free" software movement don't understand is that true freedom also means the ability for the individual to make BAD choices, even if they hurt that individual. Freedom comes with the responsibility to be informed, and choose wisely. They step beyond "educating" users and into the realm of harassment of other users, and this is both counterproductive to their case for Linux, and detrimental to their stated goals of freedom.
Okay, I shall sit down now, and patiently wait for the -1, Trolls, to roll in.
Microsoft is great at MARKETING their products. They do not write great software.
Let's be honest, and fair -- very few organizations, ANYWHERE, write "great software." Most software has enough bugs, quirks, and eccentricities to annoy the piss out of people. But we live with it because it saves us time, or has a few features that make it worth struggling through. So Microsoft is better at marketing their "crap" better than most other companies.
A large amount of the software (both commercial & free) available & in use today falls in the category of "polished turd in a pretty box."
So what do you do, decide that you can't use software until it's "great"? Or only use the "great" packages out there? Or do you make do with what you've got, learn from the experience, and continue improving?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm genuinely curious what you feel should have been done, then. Should he have told the military & law enforcement that they couldn't detain or capture anybody, no matter how much suspicion and evidence they had, because he had to figure out with the courts what to do with detainees?
Or should we have simply killed them all and let God sort it out? A simple double-tap to the back of the head, Sopranos-style, to make sure there's nobody to file a suit?
To say "we can't do anything until we deliberate with the finest legal minds and weigh all aspects of this delicate, nuanced constitutional theory & precedent," is a little disingenuous. I don't like the decision to try and keep detainees indefinitely without a trial, and I think the federal courts made the right decision... but I'm also quite all right with somebody being detained while the courts sorted out the issue.
As someone who splits his radio-listening time mostly between the local FM Talk station here in the Boston area, and Howard Stern on my Sirius receiver, I have to agree with most of what you've written here.
The best radio, in general, is the type that makes you "feel at home" -- it's why I listen to Howard Stern, it's why I listen to the John & Jeff show (syndicated out of L.A., I think?) when I'm working late, and it's the reason I listen to Jay Severin on the aforementioned Boston talk station. Listening makes you feel kind of like you're sitting around with a few of your friends, just talking and having a good time, and that's exactly the type of feeling that a radio program needs to engender if it wants to keep people listening, and it sounds like exactly what you're talking about when you mention the inside jokes, and how it takes a few weeks to really "get to know" the program.
What I don't understand is how anybody could think that somebody with a radio program -- liberal or conservative -- is somehow a threat to their own values and principles. I don't agree with all of the viewpoints and thoughts of the people I hear on the radio. But then, I could say the same thing about every single one of my friends, too -- we don't agree on everything, but when we get together, the talk is lively, fun, and good-natured, even in disagreement.
The guy you're responding to hit the nail on the head, though -- it's not as if the liberal talk show hosts haven't had their opportunities, it's that they have a huge difficulty maintaining an audience that can sustain the talk format as a viable business model.
:)
If you want to see the real reason why, look to the supporters: by and large, conservatives tend to be "mostly" in agreement on a lot of issues, which means someone speaking with a conservative bent will be at least a little more likely to attract a large conservative audience. On the other hand, liberals are often a very fractious and divisive lot... which makes it a lot harder to gather, and keep, an audience of appreciable size for someone who talks about liberal stuff -- you know, pink frilly panties and garden parties with the illegal Mexican immigrants. (For those of you who are humor-impaired, yes, that WAS a joke. Don't get your pink french-cut panties in a bunch.
What it boils down to is, audience drives advertising rates drives talk radio success. Some liberals have found reasonable degrees of success in talk radio, at least to the extent that they are nationally syndicated: Ed Schultz, Alan Colmes, Thom Hartmann, Bill Press, and Stephanie Miller, for example. Other liberal talk hosts have NOT found reasonable degrees of success -- Al Franken & the rest of his colleagues at Air America, for example.
I agree, the grandparent post was thoughtful, lucid, and well-written. Unfortunately on Slashdot, those traits seem to be about as welcome as a fart in a space suit. :)
Does the university *at least* have an exceptions policy, for granting access to sites which are blocked, but for which a student or teacher can demonstrate an educational need? Most companies today with similar filtering will grant an exception for a site if it's justifiably related to business, and not a porn/gambling/warez site.
I understand that the appeal / exception process can be time-consuming, and annoying in the case of legitimate news & information sites, but imagine how quickly the university will reconsider their choice of filters if they're flooded with thousands of requests to access legitimate information, which some poor schlub in the IT group will spend weeks wading through. If you can show that there is a real problem accessing LOTS of educational content, then they should at the least be inclined to seek out a better filtering device / service.
And if turns out that only a handful of requests are submitted to unblock a handful of sites, then your students should also learn how to work within the established system for addressing these "false positives". Learning how to work within a system of limitations and rules is also a valuable workforce skill... most companies out there are going to filter / block at least some sites.
She knew she was being sued LONG before Katrina ever hit -- at *LEAST* 1 year & 8 months, assuming the case was filed at the end of December 2003. While I certainly am sorry for her plight, did it ever occur to her at some point after relocating to call the court, or the plaintiff's lawyers, or a lawyer who might be willing to do some pro bono work to help her out? I'm sure that she could have filed for a continuance pretty easily if she had bothered to explain her situation to the court, and try to provide a forwarding address, or at least communicate her whereabouts...
- "Azhar" is the submitter, and the author of the linked-to article.
- The linked-to article is poorly written, contains no factual information, and basically can be boiled down to, "NO way, iPods are teh r0x0rz!!!!one!!!1111!!!one!"
- The submitter is clearly trying to simply generate traffic to his site with this opinion piece.
Given these... how does this constitute "news" for anybody, much less nerds?Seriously, slashdot. I want my 5 minutes back.
I don't know... given all the heating issues we've heard about in the Apple MacBooks & MBP's... imagine if they had a bigger market share, and everybody then turned their laptop on at the same time!! You'd probably see a 2 or 3 degree jump in average atmospheric temperature overnight!!!!!!!!!!oneone!!111!!!
It's science. You can't argue with that.
I'm sure that everybody was far too busy thinking up cute "+5 Funny" comments to go out and actually take a look at the actual study... but for anybody who's perhaps interested in formulating a defensible position on the matter based on facts rather than groupthink, the actual publication is available here.
For a bunch of geeks, I'd think that doing a bit of research & gathering the facts before reaching a conclusion would be the *first* thing you'd do when trying to combat what you decry as a campaign of FUD & misinformation. Sarcasm isn't going to win the case in a courtroom, or in Congress. Deconstruct their argument & their methods. Show their assumptions & conclusions to be faulty.
Well shit, since I'm sure you have some form of factual proof -- you know other than the "it's a big company, everything they do is evil," knee-jerk -- for your assertion that GM entered into thos obligations with absolutely no intention of following through on them, why don't you go work with said dumb-ass class action lawyers? You'll make a killing! You know, since you have proof, and not just a generally paranoid disposition... right?
Don't expect much in the way of logic or cohesiveness. And really, after you've seen him do 1, 2, and 3 a few times on multiple threads, that "new psycho" smell wears off and he even stops being an amusing novelty act.
There's a very real reason why companies are moving away from defined benefit retirement plans and towards defined contribution retirement plans, and a huge part of that reason is skyrocketing healthcare costs as the Baby Boomers start retiring -- saddling your company with the guaranteed retirement benefits for all of it's retired workers is not a sustainable practice.
I like your straw man. Do you have a red herring to go with that? I never claimed they have any "rights" to demand payment for it, god-given or otherwise.
My point was that, in the grand scheme of things, claiming that the RIAA's influence must be counteracted by force, because they represent some "malevolent cabal" out to subvert our entire way of life is more than a little over the top.
The proper venue for this discussion of licensing & copyrights is in a court, governed by a system of laws. Knee-jerk responses about rounding up the posse to dole out a little frontier justice may get you "+5, Insightful" here on Slashdot, but I assure you, it does NOTHING but harm the rational legal arguments being put forth by lots of very smart legal experts, because then the rational people get associated with the fringe elements who get the TV time, and so are the public "face" of the folks who are anti-DRM.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe you overstated the case. I read this to mean that any unspecified member of any unspecified public can claim it's "in the public benefit" for them to hack into my computer at home, and take whatever photos, videos, recipes, essays, stories, etc. that I may have created that I haven't seen fit to release to the public? By your argument, it's just information, and I have no right to that information that I've created, after all.
Or maybe it's that this is a very complex, nuanced issue not well suited for blanket statements like "Nobody has any kind of inherent right to the information they create", where a balance between "public benefit", "privacy", and "ownership" of your creations must be struck, much like with current patent & copyright laws?
And . . .
The RIAA wants you to pay for that single, not download it for free. And while I agree that it may suck that you would have to go to Tower to indulge in your obsessive love for all things Britney, it's not as if the RIAA is trying to steal or throw out your vote, or kill your grandmother.
There are SO many things in the world that are way more likely to "subvert" our culture than this. Get some damn perspective.
My guess is they simply hope to make it as painful & costly as possible to "take the place" of Limewire, thereby discouraging others from stepping up.
/., black & white only) raised by the DRM restrictions these services impose. And while I know this won't be a populare stance here, the Itunes restrictions really *aren't* that draconian for the *majority of the music-buying public.*)
I do agree though -- they're ultimately fighting a losing battle. Instead of fighting new technology, they should be embracing it and figuring out how to make it work for them. Itunes, and other services of that nature, are a step in the right direction. Rather than spending millions of dollars suing Aunt Edna and Little Timmy down the block, they should be investing that money in R&D, and exploring new business models that incorporate digital distribution channels... but then, history is littered with the carcasses of failed enterprises.
(And, since this is slashdot, I should include an obligatory disclaimer: yes, I understand that there are some sublte shades of gray (or, on
Um... the dismissal is caused by failing to state a claim which constitutes grounds for providing the relief of a dismissal.
It doesn't mean that Limewire can't identify how it would relieve them (that's a no-brainer), it means that they have shaky (perhaps no) legal grounds for seeking that relief.
It's funded by the Chinese Government == lucrative government contracts == profit.
IBM is in the business of making a profit. If doing so results in a net contribution to open source software, then good for IBM & good for OSS. If doing so doesn't result in a net contribution to open source software, you'd be wrong to think that IBM gives a toss, so long as they're still making money.
I'd love to have a business that was "avoided" to the extent that it had well over a billion sales, and whose sales figures looked much closer to y=x^2 than they do to y = x
You may not like DRM, but it's clear that your predictions of its imminent demise are greatly exaggerated.
So let's say you accomplish near-perfection in your code, and you have 1 bug in the entire program. Now, put that program on an operating system, made up of thousands of other binaries, each with only *1* bug in them. Individually, each one of those binaries is nearly perfect. Taken all together, you have a buggy, quirky, unpredictable system of interactions. So do you not release your software until everybody else in the universe also gets theirs right?
Or do you just do the reasonable thing -- release it when it's "okay" so people can use it, and continue improving it via some patching or update process?
There are certainly people who dispute the conclusion that the earth is warming, but I don't think any of those people arguing against the global warming hypothesis have come out and said that warming things up would be a good thing. So Lockyer -- a politician up for election to another political office gets lots of free publicity for taking a public stand on a hot-button issue that nobody on earth would say they're in favor of. So whether or not he wins the case, he still wins because he:
- gets millions of dollars of free publicity in newspapers around the country
- gets a bump in his approval rating because he took a stand on behalf of the environment & the "little people" who are being harmed by those evil, nasty auto companies.
It's a page from the Spitzer political playbook -- which is not necessarily a criticism of Spitzer, as it's a wonderfully effective strategy. But this is demagoguery, plain and simple.This analogy is so mind-numbingly retarded that the mind boggles.
Do you REALLY mean to say that if Osama Bin Laden had donated money to George Bush's campaign, the US wouldn't have bothered responding to 9/11?
Are you REALLY so brain-dead that you can't see the essential difference between selling tobacco (a legal enterprise, which people purchase voluntarily, not at the point of a gun) and hijacking planes with hundreds of people on board, and flying them into buildings? I'd like to think not, but you leave very little room for optimism.
You're joking, I hope? Do you really think that, with ALL of the billions of dollars Microsoft makes & spends every year, they haven't put any of that money into marketing studies & forecasting? Love them or hate them, Microsoft got where they are by out-competing in the marketplace (it wasn't a monopoly when it was founded, it was a little guy). They have a ridiculously huge market share. They have lots of very intelligent people working there. They know how to make a piece of software that's "good enough", and they know how to market it and sell it.
People will buy workstations with Vista on it. Some people will upgrade to Vista. Microsoft will continue making products that a lot of people will buy. CORPORATIONS will buy Vista workstations. CORPORATIONS will upgrade to Vista (maybe not in 2007, but it'll come), in spite of all the gleeful baseless predictions being made here on Slashdot. Microsoft will continue making products that a lot of people will buy.
That's not to say that Linux can't take away some market share... but unless Linux offers a fundamentally better user experience, then what's the impetus for change? To exchange one set of hassles with Windows with another set of hassles with Linux? My Linux system isn't a no-brainer to use & keep running, and I'm sure a lot of people here will argue it shouldn't be, and isn't meant to be. But as long as that's the state of Linux, you'll run into a lot of resistance from the users who don't want their computing experience to be any more mentally taxing than using a dishwasher or a refrigerator. And for them, Microsoft will always be happy to provide that.
Unless we find out that Microsoft is giving sanctuary & money to Osama Bin Laden at their Redmond HQ, I think we can expect to see Microsoft as a fairly big player in the software market for some time to come, and I don't see Linux making much more of an inroad on the desktop than Apple has. Which is not, in my opinion, a criticism. Look at Apple -- judging by their profits & stock price, there's certainly a lot of room for growth & business even in distant second or third place.
And lest I be shouted down as a Microsoft shill, I'm writing this via Firefox on a Mac Mini which sits quietly on my desk next to a tower system running Kubuntu. The only Microsoft things in my house are an XBox, and XP on my work laptop.
I call bullshit on THAT claim of yours -- I'm a little skeptical of anybody I don't know who claims to have "MY" best interests at heart as their sole reason for doing something. If you're so altrusitically-minded, why aren't you out there evangelizing against McDonald's and cigarettes? After all, in terms of harm, I think that smoking & fast food do more harm to people than Microsoft's monopoly status ever will.
I'll take a stab at answering the grandparent's question about why this article drew such a knee-jerk, emotional response. I'm going to burn a lot of good karma for saying this, but what the fuck, I aim to misbehave.
I'm going to preface this with a statement, however: at home I use Mac OS X and a Ubuntu system. At work, our servers run AIX, Solaris, and Red Hat, and my laptop runs Windows. I use all of these systems more or less every day, so I'm not saying what I'm about to say as a Windows user, or a Mac user... I'm saying it as someone who uses the appropriate tool for the job at hand. Now, with that obligatory disclaimer out of the way, I'll proceed to answer.
For a lot of geeks, getting Linux accepted by the mainstream user is a validation of their "coolness" which they crave. And in that obsessive subculture, O/S choice has become a dick measuring contest, with the following accepted guidelines:
So, when you say something like, O/S choice isn't that big a deal, what the geeks hear is, "It doesn't matter how big your dick is." And of course, to the insecure, that's just not true.
What the zealot evangelists in the "Free" software movement don't understand is that true freedom also means the ability for the individual to make BAD choices, even if they hurt that individual. Freedom comes with the responsibility to be informed, and choose wisely. They step beyond "educating" users and into the realm of harassment of other users, and this is both counterproductive to their case for Linux, and detrimental to their stated goals of freedom.
Okay, I shall sit down now, and patiently wait for the -1, Trolls, to roll in.
A large amount of the software (both commercial & free) available & in use today falls in the category of "polished turd in a pretty box."
So what do you do, decide that you can't use software until it's "great"? Or only use the "great" packages out there? Or do you make do with what you've got, learn from the experience, and continue improving?