If you want to make a car analogy - many sports cars are marketed on the basis of their relative exclusivity, even though theoretically everyone could choose to go out and buy one (okay, they artificially enforce this exclusivity through high prices and restricted supply), it doesn't mean that exclusivity isn't a factor in purchasing the car, because clearly it is.
Maybe the security factor of Linux is artificially low at the moment, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid factor. Sure, if everyone in the world switched to Linux then it might see the level of attacks Windows does within a year or two, but a user-base switch on that scale is unlikely to happen any time soon. In the meantime, for individual users for whom security is worth the effort of switching, this is a valid choice, and the only way to reach those particular users is to tell everyone that Linux is secure and hope the message gets through.
Especially irritating is when some guy in the office sets his laptop to ad-hoc mode and I keep getting the wireless network found popup, even after I've specifically added his machine to the excluded wireless network list. You'd think the software would be smart enough to say, 'hmm, I'm excluded from connecting to this network, no need to fire up the ol' popup this time', but alas...
Exactly what I thought when I saw this - Jeremy is funny not because he's "cool", but because he's trying so desperately hard to be cool (and quite often just ends up looking silly). So in essence, they're saying Macs are for people who aren't especially cool but want to look/act like they are (and don't mind parting with more money to achieve it), which is perhaps not the message they were aiming for. Maybe by choosing this pairing for the ads, Apple themselves are trying to be cool and missing the point somewhat, too? (On a sidenote, I love Mitchell and Webb, for all their faults).
It's funny that you should blame Meyer for suggesting that the technology be used the way it was intended to be used, rather than blaming MS for creating a browser with poor CSS support which forces developers to, as you say, spend time debugging code across browsers. Incidentally, try adding a border, margin and padding to a fixed-width table and see how well that displays cross-browser...
I think GP was talking about the specific technology, rather than technology in general. It's reasonable to assume that, if these companies weren't wasting their research and development budgets on DRM, they would still be employing those budgets to improve the technology. Obviously taking people off a HDCP project isn't going to feed the starving or fight terrorism, but we might just have better, cheaper, more compatible televisions.
Except the GP was referring to the fact that you whack one mole and another one appears. Or two. Or fifty. It doesn't matter how hard that first mole got whacked, there will always be more moles. Sure, some moles might think twice about the risk of being whacked, but others will see an opportunity and take it. Nobody cares if the first mole was left with a headache or went splat, the whacking is a pointless exercise in the long term, enough people have already gone through this and been replaced to show the truth of that.
The more the **AAs whack, the more people will look for a water-tight loophole (forcing through a case establishing legal precedent protecting aggregator sites? Moving to a country where sharing isn't prohibited? Buying Sealand...), and if they happen to find one it will be too late for the **AAs to offer to play nicely. They should be getting these people on board and looking at ways to make their business model work with these sites, not against them. But like most people who rely on whacking things to provide answers, they're not noted for thinking things through...
I'm sure the **AAs would love to sue Google if they thought for a second they could get away with it. Unfortunately for them, Google has a little more financial clout to fight it's corner, and as we've seen in the past, the **AAs are a little shy of fighting battles they aren't sure they'll win (the last thing they want is to go to court and end up setting a legal precedent saying that these aggregators are fine and above board...)
I think the argument runs that, as they're not doing anything illegal (they don't even host torrents, just index other people's - data that is probably readily available from Google/Yahoo/MSN if you went looking), they shouldn't have to move to a country where file-sharing is legally permitted. As a search aggregator rather than a file-sharer, they believe they should be allowed to operate in the US, but since they are being denied that ability, they have chosen to move to a country with similar laws and make a stand there, rather than one which makes them look guilty.
People who care about web standards support
People who don't use windows
People who care about open source solutions
People who realise competition gets them a better deal
The security conscious
Web developers
Companies (with or commissioning websites)
IT support/Administrators
Microsoft
A large proportion of Slashdot
I won't tell you how to change the download location or call you an idiot. What I will say in FF's defence is that this (and many other things) are incredibly easy to do with very little thought or effort required. The problem is that the majority of users are used to the way IE works, and because FF is different they can find it intimidating at first, but with a little exploration it's actually a lot more intuitive to the casual user and massively more useful to the power user.
As for why it downloads everything to the desktop... well, I can take an educated guess that you've never had to work in an IT support role. It can be a nightmare talking people through downloading a patch over the telephone when they have no clue where it went or how to find it - IE might have put it in their documents folder, or the last location that their kid downloaded something to, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. I can only begin to imagine how much stress these users experience when trying to do this without a tech on the other end of the line to help. Most casual users like the fact that they can find their downloads, more experienced users can quickly and easily find the option to change the default location - the majority of (though evidently not all) users are happy.
I may be wrong, but I think the GP is acknowledging that innovations such as tabbed browsing came from Opera and other browsers, but it was the much higher (web) market share and more effective marketing of FF that made these features better-known and a threat to MS/IE. That doesn't take anything away from the achievements of Opera (which is an awesome browser, regardless of its heritage), but at the same time it's hard to argue that Opera has been the driving force in bringing these innovations to a wider audience.
Not only that, people who don't have XP/Vista (and in the corporate world there are a LOT of people still using Win2k+IE6) don't even get a choice in the matter.
Actually... if I were conspiracy-theory-minded, I might think IE purposely made IE7 more standards compliant so when people make their sites work with it, all those company's have to upgrade from IE6 move to XP/IE7... then IE8 will probably bring back the broken standards and proprietary code, forcing people to upgrade again to Vista... and then... Ouch! My tinfoil melted...
I think it's mildly surprising (though pleasantly so). MS seemed sure that borrowing innovations such as tabbed browsing would win them back some FF defectors. While it's not surprising that there were 100M downloads of a product which was pretty much forced on users, it is a surprise and nice to note that the migratory trend away from IE and towards FF hasn't slowed, in other words people are still coming to realise that IE7 to FF would be a step backwards. IE7 is a massive improvement over IE6 (horrible UI aside), but still no match for FF, and it's great to see people realising that in large numbers.
It seems to me that if Apple really were worried about Sarbanes Oxley, the obvious solution would be to not release the updated firmware to past customers. Just include it with current and future sales and let it "find its own way" onto the internet.
The time for paying for patches has been coming down the pipe for a long time now [...] really they don't need an excuse to successfully charge us more for software.
Honestly the law and reasoning seems legitimate.
Ignoring the present case for the time being, I find it difficult to accept that the reasoning is legitimate, even if the law is. Companies have got away with releasing unfinished, bug-ridden code for years because there have always been free updates and patches should enough people complain about a particular broken feature. Now that people accept they will be buying a broken product with the promise of fixes in the future, it seems morally dubious for the companies to suddenly about face and start charging for these fixes.
If I buy a TV, I expect it to work out of the box. I'd have a hard time accepting the situation where I buy a broken TV and get incremental free repairs from the TV company. If they then tell me I have to pay for those repairs...
If companies are going to charge for patches then they need to start producing software that needs fewer fixes in the first place, otherwise this is a massive conflict of interest.
I vote for fog of war - anything beyond a few hundred feet of your current location is lost to the fog. As long as one side doesn't find the disable fog cheat it should all work out quite well.
The distinction is that not having the credits doesn't prevent the main body of the work being enjoyed. When all you have is a random collection of data this is almost certainly not the case - even if you could somehow piece it all together it's unlikely that you'd end up with anything close to the original work, you may as well claim a disk full of white noise is an infringement because, every once in a while, a pixel on the screen corresponds to a pixel on the official DVD.
Ah. So if I walk up to someone in the street and say "Hey, this cash machine here just dispensed $100, do you want $50?" and they say "Sure", that means that, as a private party, I can argue they were predisposed to committing a crime and use this as the basis to get access to all their personal banking details (to check whether they have committed this same crime previously)? No? Then how can the MPAA say to someone "Here, have this movie" and then when the person accepts, use that as the basis to get personal details from their ISP? That's ignoring the fact that downloading a movie is not a crime; that the person with copyright is allowed to distribute and downloading from them is certainly not a crime and both these factors massively mitigate any "predisposition" on behalf of the downloader. I'm sorry but it just doesn't work that way, and I have a hard time describing their behaviour as anything other than despicable.
Point one: The cops do a lot of things to catch criminals which, were you or I to do them, would be deemed illegal and land us in a lot of trouble. Just because the cops do something to catch criminals, that doesn't mean a company can take the law into their own hands to catch them any more than we as individuals are allowed to turn vigilante.
Point two: Downloading a file is not breaking the law, it is breaching a copyright, so all your analogies about catching criminals fail right there. If the **AA's really cared about catching criminals, they could use their courtroom sluch fund to pay for more cops to track down people selling copied materials (the real pirates that they expect us to believe they're concerned about - you know, the ones who fund terrorism). Going after individual infringers achieves nothing long-term other than scaring people. It doesn't affect the guy on the street corner selling DVD's from a suitcase (if anything, it's good for his business since less people downloading means a few more people buying his wares).
Point three: Regardless of whether downloading a file is breaking the law or breaching copyright, the copyright holder is perfectly within their rights to distribute items they own the rights to. It doesn't even matter that the downloader thought it was an illegal copy! Imagine you buy a car stereo from some dodgy looking guy in a bar and, on the way out, you are both grabbed by the police. It transpires that he actually was the owner of the stereo and well within his rights to sell it to you. Have you broken a law because you thought it was an illegal transaction? No. If you download something from someone who has the right to distribute that item, you have done nothing wrong, even if you thought you were doing something wrong when you did it.
Finally, as someone else has pointed out already, Slashdot is a community and made up of many, many viewpoints. If there is a consensus view then that merely indicates the way the majority of people here feel about a subject. It doesn't make it the official "Slashdot view", and this consensus can change over time. If the **AA's really cared about our views enough to take our advice they would have done what the majority suggested a long time ago - embraced a business model which worked with new technologies, not against them. Had they done that, they would have saved everyone a lot of time and hassle and the consensus view of said organisations might be a little more favourable in these parts. Their decision to pursue individual infringers has less to do with them following our advice and more to do with them fighting tooth and nail not to give up their precious control of our bought-and-paid-for media. When people can't watch/listen to media they've paid for and they come to realise they have vastly more freedom when they download those files, the providers can react in one of two ways - they can release their strangelhold and work with people or they can bully and threaten and take the vigilante route. I think it speaks volumes for the (lack of) maturity of the **AA's that they chose the latter route, and I'm only sorry that you feel people who feel this way are somehow pirate sympathisers.
"Criminals break the law!" isn't news - if people are pirating and this is illegal then they're doing what's expected. When a company which is on a moral crusade against said criminals starts acting in a highly dubious manner, this is news and it's of public interest. The law is already on the side of the artists, the MPAA should keep out and let the police handle the "criminals". Vigilante action on the behalf of a supposedly "respectable" (I couldn't even type that with a straight face) body is not the way to handle the situation.
It's also highly debatable whether the **AA's care any more for the rights of the artists than the pirates do...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we can do lots of things badly at once...
If you want to make a car analogy - many sports cars are marketed on the basis of their relative exclusivity, even though theoretically everyone could choose to go out and buy one (okay, they artificially enforce this exclusivity through high prices and restricted supply), it doesn't mean that exclusivity isn't a factor in purchasing the car, because clearly it is.
Maybe the security factor of Linux is artificially low at the moment, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid factor. Sure, if everyone in the world switched to Linux then it might see the level of attacks Windows does within a year or two, but a user-base switch on that scale is unlikely to happen any time soon. In the meantime, for individual users for whom security is worth the effort of switching, this is a valid choice, and the only way to reach those particular users is to tell everyone that Linux is secure and hope the message gets through.
Especially irritating is when some guy in the office sets his laptop to ad-hoc mode and I keep getting the wireless network found popup, even after I've specifically added his machine to the excluded wireless network list. You'd think the software would be smart enough to say, 'hmm, I'm excluded from connecting to this network, no need to fire up the ol' popup this time', but alas...
Super Hans!
Exactly what I thought when I saw this - Jeremy is funny not because he's "cool", but because he's trying so desperately hard to be cool (and quite often just ends up looking silly). So in essence, they're saying Macs are for people who aren't especially cool but want to look/act like they are (and don't mind parting with more money to achieve it), which is perhaps not the message they were aiming for. Maybe by choosing this pairing for the ads, Apple themselves are trying to be cool and missing the point somewhat, too? (On a sidenote, I love Mitchell and Webb, for all their faults).
It's funny that you should blame Meyer for suggesting that the technology be used the way it was intended to be used, rather than blaming MS for creating a browser with poor CSS support which forces developers to, as you say, spend time debugging code across browsers. Incidentally, try adding a border, margin and padding to a fixed-width table and see how well that displays cross-browser...
I think GP was talking about the specific technology, rather than technology in general. It's reasonable to assume that, if these companies weren't wasting their research and development budgets on DRM, they would still be employing those budgets to improve the technology. Obviously taking people off a HDCP project isn't going to feed the starving or fight terrorism, but we might just have better, cheaper, more compatible televisions.
Except the GP was referring to the fact that you whack one mole and another one appears. Or two. Or fifty. It doesn't matter how hard that first mole got whacked, there will always be more moles. Sure, some moles might think twice about the risk of being whacked, but others will see an opportunity and take it. Nobody cares if the first mole was left with a headache or went splat, the whacking is a pointless exercise in the long term, enough people have already gone through this and been replaced to show the truth of that.
The more the **AAs whack, the more people will look for a water-tight loophole (forcing through a case establishing legal precedent protecting aggregator sites? Moving to a country where sharing isn't prohibited? Buying Sealand...), and if they happen to find one it will be too late for the **AAs to offer to play nicely. They should be getting these people on board and looking at ways to make their business model work with these sites, not against them. But like most people who rely on whacking things to provide answers, they're not noted for thinking things through...
I'm sure the **AAs would love to sue Google if they thought for a second they could get away with it. Unfortunately for them, Google has a little more financial clout to fight it's corner, and as we've seen in the past, the **AAs are a little shy of fighting battles they aren't sure they'll win (the last thing they want is to go to court and end up setting a legal precedent saying that these aggregators are fine and above board...)
I think the argument runs that, as they're not doing anything illegal (they don't even host torrents, just index other people's - data that is probably readily available from Google/Yahoo/MSN if you went looking), they shouldn't have to move to a country where file-sharing is legally permitted. As a search aggregator rather than a file-sharer, they believe they should be allowed to operate in the US, but since they are being denied that ability, they have chosen to move to a country with similar laws and make a stand there, rather than one which makes them look guilty.
At least they're not copying the gaming industry, "Use the starforce, Luke"
Well, amongst others:
People who care about web standards support
People who don't use windows
People who care about open source solutions
People who realise competition gets them a better deal
The security conscious
Web developers
Companies (with or commissioning websites)
IT support/Administrators
Microsoft
A large proportion of Slashdot
The list goes on but I think you get the point...
I won't tell you how to change the download location or call you an idiot. What I will say in FF's defence is that this (and many other things) are incredibly easy to do with very little thought or effort required. The problem is that the majority of users are used to the way IE works, and because FF is different they can find it intimidating at first, but with a little exploration it's actually a lot more intuitive to the casual user and massively more useful to the power user.
As for why it downloads everything to the desktop... well, I can take an educated guess that you've never had to work in an IT support role. It can be a nightmare talking people through downloading a patch over the telephone when they have no clue where it went or how to find it - IE might have put it in their documents folder, or the last location that their kid downloaded something to, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. I can only begin to imagine how much stress these users experience when trying to do this without a tech on the other end of the line to help. Most casual users like the fact that they can find their downloads, more experienced users can quickly and easily find the option to change the default location - the majority of (though evidently not all) users are happy.
I may be wrong, but I think the GP is acknowledging that innovations such as tabbed browsing came from Opera and other browsers, but it was the much higher (web) market share and more effective marketing of FF that made these features better-known and a threat to MS/IE. That doesn't take anything away from the achievements of Opera (which is an awesome browser, regardless of its heritage), but at the same time it's hard to argue that Opera has been the driving force in bringing these innovations to a wider audience.
Not only that, people who don't have XP/Vista (and in the corporate world there are a LOT of people still using Win2k+IE6) don't even get a choice in the matter.
Actually... if I were conspiracy-theory-minded, I might think IE purposely made IE7 more standards compliant so when people make their sites work with it, all those company's have to upgrade from IE6 move to XP/IE7... then IE8 will probably bring back the broken standards and proprietary code, forcing people to upgrade again to Vista... and then... Ouch! My tinfoil melted...
I think it's mildly surprising (though pleasantly so). MS seemed sure that borrowing innovations such as tabbed browsing would win them back some FF defectors. While it's not surprising that there were 100M downloads of a product which was pretty much forced on users, it is a surprise and nice to note that the migratory trend away from IE and towards FF hasn't slowed, in other words people are still coming to realise that IE7 to FF would be a step backwards. IE7 is a massive improvement over IE6 (horrible UI aside), but still no match for FF, and it's great to see people realising that in large numbers.
It seems to me that if Apple really were worried about Sarbanes Oxley, the obvious solution would be to not release the updated firmware to past customers. Just include it with current and future sales and let it "find its own way" onto the internet.
The time for paying for patches has been coming down the pipe for a long time now [...] really they don't need an excuse to successfully charge us more for software.
Honestly the law and reasoning seems legitimate.
Ignoring the present case for the time being, I find it difficult to accept that the reasoning is legitimate, even if the law is. Companies have got away with releasing unfinished, bug-ridden code for years because there have always been free updates and patches should enough people complain about a particular broken feature. Now that people accept they will be buying a broken product with the promise of fixes in the future, it seems morally dubious for the companies to suddenly about face and start charging for these fixes.
If I buy a TV, I expect it to work out of the box. I'd have a hard time accepting the situation where I buy a broken TV and get incremental free repairs from the TV company. If they then tell me I have to pay for those repairs...
If companies are going to charge for patches then they need to start producing software that needs fewer fixes in the first place, otherwise this is a massive conflict of interest.
I vote for fog of war - anything beyond a few hundred feet of your current location is lost to the fog. As long as one side doesn't find the disable fog cheat it should all work out quite well.
The distinction is that not having the credits doesn't prevent the main body of the work being enjoyed. When all you have is a random collection of data this is almost certainly not the case - even if you could somehow piece it all together it's unlikely that you'd end up with anything close to the original work, you may as well claim a disk full of white noise is an infringement because, every once in a while, a pixel on the screen corresponds to a pixel on the official DVD.
Ah. So if I walk up to someone in the street and say "Hey, this cash machine here just dispensed $100, do you want $50?" and they say "Sure", that means that, as a private party, I can argue they were predisposed to committing a crime and use this as the basis to get access to all their personal banking details (to check whether they have committed this same crime previously)? No? Then how can the MPAA say to someone "Here, have this movie" and then when the person accepts, use that as the basis to get personal details from their ISP? That's ignoring the fact that downloading a movie is not a crime; that the person with copyright is allowed to distribute and downloading from them is certainly not a crime and both these factors massively mitigate any "predisposition" on behalf of the downloader. I'm sorry but it just doesn't work that way, and I have a hard time describing their behaviour as anything other than despicable.
Point one: The cops do a lot of things to catch criminals which, were you or I to do them, would be deemed illegal and land us in a lot of trouble. Just because the cops do something to catch criminals, that doesn't mean a company can take the law into their own hands to catch them any more than we as individuals are allowed to turn vigilante.
Point two: Downloading a file is not breaking the law, it is breaching a copyright, so all your analogies about catching criminals fail right there. If the **AA's really cared about catching criminals, they could use their courtroom sluch fund to pay for more cops to track down people selling copied materials (the real pirates that they expect us to believe they're concerned about - you know, the ones who fund terrorism). Going after individual infringers achieves nothing long-term other than scaring people. It doesn't affect the guy on the street corner selling DVD's from a suitcase (if anything, it's good for his business since less people downloading means a few more people buying his wares).
Point three: Regardless of whether downloading a file is breaking the law or breaching copyright, the copyright holder is perfectly within their rights to distribute items they own the rights to. It doesn't even matter that the downloader thought it was an illegal copy! Imagine you buy a car stereo from some dodgy looking guy in a bar and, on the way out, you are both grabbed by the police. It transpires that he actually was the owner of the stereo and well within his rights to sell it to you. Have you broken a law because you thought it was an illegal transaction? No. If you download something from someone who has the right to distribute that item, you have done nothing wrong, even if you thought you were doing something wrong when you did it.
Finally, as someone else has pointed out already, Slashdot is a community and made up of many, many viewpoints. If there is a consensus view then that merely indicates the way the majority of people here feel about a subject. It doesn't make it the official "Slashdot view", and this consensus can change over time. If the **AA's really cared about our views enough to take our advice they would have done what the majority suggested a long time ago - embraced a business model which worked with new technologies, not against them. Had they done that, they would have saved everyone a lot of time and hassle and the consensus view of said organisations might be a little more favourable in these parts. Their decision to pursue individual infringers has less to do with them following our advice and more to do with them fighting tooth and nail not to give up their precious control of our bought-and-paid-for media. When people can't watch/listen to media they've paid for and they come to realise they have vastly more freedom when they download those files, the providers can react in one of two ways - they can release their strangelhold and work with people or they can bully and threaten and take the vigilante route. I think it speaks volumes for the (lack of) maturity of the **AA's that they chose the latter route, and I'm only sorry that you feel people who feel this way are somehow pirate sympathisers.
"Criminals break the law!" isn't news - if people are pirating and this is illegal then they're doing what's expected. When a company which is on a moral crusade against said criminals starts acting in a highly dubious manner, this is news and it's of public interest. The law is already on the side of the artists, the MPAA should keep out and let the police handle the "criminals". Vigilante action on the behalf of a supposedly "respectable" (I couldn't even type that with a straight face) body is not the way to handle the situation.
It's also highly debatable whether the **AA's care any more for the rights of the artists than the pirates do...
And it's sometimes difficult to remove without extensive surgery (although the *AA is refining the procedure so there's almost no side effects now).
Refining it now? They've been making instantly forgettable movies for years...
Oh boy...