A lot of left handed people buy right-handed guitars when the guitar they want comes in left-handed. You can learn to play a damn game right handed if it's not possible. And what would they do for left-hand mode here anyway? Switch to left-aligned text? Mirror?
Restringing a right handed guitar to make it lefty friendly is quite a bit different than swapping a digital control scheme. Especially when the DS has y,x,a,b buttons on the other side of the screen that could easily be swapped with the control pad.
That's why I play guitar right-handed, thats why I taught myself to use a right-handed mouse, thats why I've had to learn to use most power tools right-handed. Physical goods can't be flipped easily, it requires it's own assembly line, smaller production runs mean higher prices, so lefties adapting to right-handed things is necessary. But with a digital device-with software, there is no excuse for not including a simple switch between left and right hand modes. It's a few lines of code that can expand the market by 10%
I propose forcing women to think like computers instead of like women. They would be much easier to interact with.
What? are you crazy? that would be horrible....Just imagine trying to have a conversation with a woman who continually pauses, buffers, and freezes as she is talking to you......damn, that actually sounds pretty awesome!
As much as I disagree with just about everything NK stands for, South Korea isn't winning an points in my book by blocking access.
note: before any westerners point out that blocking access will only spike curiosity and make those in SK more interested it the account, I would like to point out that Korean culture values authority far more than ours, and from my own experience living there, the children in south Korea had little to no interest in the North.
A little off topic I guess, but how did college professors get around the ethical challenge of selling their own books to their class as a requirement and charging whatever they felt like for it?
~S
Money trumps ethics every time.
If you would like to see a detailed case study of an experiment into this effect, please look up "America"
I actually had one proff who wrote a 400-page humanities textbook for her class, and sold it as a photocopied reader for $25 (to cover the print and binding costs). That was the only time I know of where ethics were maintained in a situation like that.
Wouldn't being a sound sleeper be a liability in the Darwin game? I would think that waking up when there's unusual stimuli would be something helpful to keep from being lunch for a nocturnal predator.
Possibly, yes, but not everyone has this deep sleep ability, and humans are social animals. it is possible that a balance between deep sleepers and light sleepers offered other advantages. maybe the light sleepers would hear something, then wake the deep sleepers and they could all run away, while if it was a false alarm that woke the light sleepers in the tribe, the more rested heavy sleepers would still be up for a long days hunting...
(thats probably not even close to being right, but its just an example of what could have been the case - where variety benefits both sides.)
I don't know the Australian rationale but I wonder when Americans discuss the need for patents and copyrights. Why do content creators want to abolish patents? America is rich today because of patents and copyrights. If every second guy could rip off a great idea, we'd have nothing left to offer. We cannot compete on prices. The innovation and creativity of Americans is what has made US powerful...
That's funny. I always though one of the reasons that America was rich today was because when they were developing, they did not respect patents and copyrights, specifically foreign copyrights, such as books from Europe. They just copied and reproduced the content they wanted at will. Oh, and slaves. You can get rich pretty easily when you don't have to pay for the stuff you need/want.
From BoingBoing: "Update: We've removed the CC-licensed image as it appears the photographer is unhappy with our usage of it here. We support the Creative Commons and will always do our best to honor the creator's interpretation of non-commerciality. Please accept our apologies. - Rob"
It also doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to change the xbox architecture that much, since it has always been basically a PC and it has all the same systems like DirectX,.NET and the usual compatibility with Windows.
It would however make perfect sense for Windows Mobile.
Maybe they are going for "x-box portable"
although if they just shrunk down the existing x-box design to hand-held proportions, they could advertise themselves as having the world's first hand-held gaming system/hotplate.
In advertising, it is common for several companies to work on an idea for one client, pitch a proposal, and only one wins the deal, the others lose out. That's the industry. Because of the high risk - lots of work for no pay, it is only fair that when payment does arrive, it is large enough to compensate for all the unpaid work they have done over the past.
Any good deal leaves with both sides felling satisfied:
The designer wants to make as much money as possible, and produce a great design that adds to their portfolio and wins some future clients. The company wants to have the best design work possible for the lowest price they can get away with.
They both want good design (although they may argue over what, exactly that is) For payment, where their is a big disagreement, both sides must agree to meet somewhere in the middle where both sides will accept the deal.
The problem for emerging designers is getting noticed, getting established, and companies know this. Thats why new designers often get stuck doing free work, it will "give them exposure", their clients promise. So, the designers manage to scrape by for a few years, happily exposing themselves to anyone who will provide the opportunity. Eventually, the designer gets sick of working 90 hour weeks for nearly nothing. Exposing yourself to the public might be fun, and it is a great way to develop the skills needed for the profession, but it just doesn't pay the bills. When the next 'no payment, but good exposure' job comes along, the experienced designer either turns it down, or demands fair payment and doesn't land the deal. The companies know that this particular source of free labour is exhausted, but there are plenty of new, less experienced designers out there who will still produce acceptable work for free.
The problem, however, is that these young designers don't have the experience and the skills, so their quality isn't there. Overall, the quality of the design work goes down along with the prices. Students stop pursuing design education because of the abysmal pay, so the quality drops further.
Seriously, transcribe it manually... automatic speech recognition just doesn't work. And can never work, because much of the time the only reason humans can understand each other is by making informed guesses based on context, which a computer program cannot do.
...I'm surprised there aren't automated sentry guns, barb wire fencing, huge ditches, tall walls, flood lights, and a special "nuke" drop in case all shit hits the fan.
There are several of those things on the boarder. On the South Korean side of the DMZ, I saw a very tall razor-wire fence, then a deep trench, then another large razor-wire fence on the other side of the trench. On every few fence poles their is either a floodlight, a camera, or a super sensitive microphone. Apparently, they can hear just about anything that moves on their side of the DMZ, then figure out the exact location from the delay between different microphones. Every 500 meters is a manned guard tower with a big-ass machine gun.
There is also a huge wall inside the DMZ, separating the two Koreas. SK says their isn't, but it is clearly visible from the North. (this knowledge is from a documentary video from another group of people, I refuse to go to the North myself, I do not want my dollars going to their government)
...the simplest solution is to use music from the enormous amount of music that's licensed under Creative Commons... Or does your creativity require you to use "Eye of the Tiger" for every single video of your sports team?
it's not always about creativity, it's about what associations and ideas using popular materials brings to your work.
if I record a video of myself running up the stairs, or take video of me punching a guy and freeze framing it right before fists connect, the connection I am reaching for might still be vague, adding "Eye of the Tiger" will instantly make my audience think of the Rocky franchise. If that is the connection I wish my audience to make, then yes, creativity does require the use of that particular song. Nothing else will do, no other song will make that same connection. This technique is called appropriation, and it can be a very powerful tool for artists.
that being said, if they are using it just because 'eye of the tiger' is a good track for a sports event, then yea, it's lame and lazy; but there are times when using one specific element over another is necessary to make an artistic point.
How did you get into that list? Why is my local pirate party missing? What should we have been doing so that we ended up in that list as well? Just so that I can make sure my name will also occur in such a list the next time.
A call for signatures was posted on both BoingBoing and TechDirt several days before the list was published. I followed a link to the site, read the document, then I emailed them stating that I agree with the cause and would like to have my name added to the petition.
It was an email to a gmail account, not a standard petition fill-in-the blanks form, so I can imagine some poor person having to go through each item on the inbox, read each submission and copy the name onto the petition.
in other news: how the hell did my original comment get rated '+5 insightful'? My statement, "It's not just experts, my name is on that list too" was intended to imply that I am a non-expert. I was hoping for at most "+3 funny" for my shot at some self-deprecating humour. I don't see how I was in any way insightful.
what does it matter if only 16%, or 1.6%, or even 0.16% of all posts are any good?
The power of aggregates, filters, and search engines is that it doesn't matter what the signal to noise ratio is, you can quite easily cut through it all and find more of what you want.
Hell yeah! Free speech doesn't just mean you can speak out against real injustice, it means you should be intentionally abusive of other people's cultures and religions! As often as possible!
This attitude utterly disgusts me. You people are pathetic. "Not drawing pictures of Mohammed" (PBUH) takes away precisely one "right" of yours, the right to be an idiot with no sense of tact or respect.... I'm a British atheist. What say I go to Alabama, defecate on a bible, wrap it in the US flag and burn the bundle. That's free speech isn't it? That's me exercising the right of a person living in the US isn't it?
No, it's me being an offensive dick for the sake of it. I'd get lynched, and rightly so. Grow up, the lot of you.
No, it is free speech.
During protests, Muslims will often protest by desecrating or burning flags, and openly uttering death threats. All of these are actions that are intentionally offensive. Media outlets will routinely insult Christianity, especially Catholicism, Judaism and other belief systems, as well as insulting atheism, certain nationalities, etc. without ever receiving a threat of violence. Everything we hold dear to us in this culture is open to offence. Only Islam is magically off limits and unable to be criticized. People who insult Islam fear a very real possibility of a violent death, including the South Park creators, who were threatened, sent pictures of another filmmaker who was murdered for criticizing Islam, along with having their home addresses published on an Islamic fundamentalist website.
This specific act of causing offence to Muslims in this situation had a very important function. The South Park guys had their lives threatened for daring to present images of Muhammad. The idea behind "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" was to present the world with so many offending images that the South Park guys would be flooded out. Their would simply be too many offending images out their for the Islamic fundamentalists to murder everyone who had drawn one.
As soon as certain topics are declared forbidden, freedom of speech dies, and a dangerous precedent is set. "If that topic is forbidden, then surly it's ok to ban this topic, too" "well, since those topics are banned, we can also ban this list of topics." Freedom of speech makes certain undesirable things possible -offence, hate speech, pornography, evangelicals, etc. but developed countries are based on the idea that free speech is a greater good than all those negative side effects combined. One slashdotter's sig sums it up nicely "The act of censorship is always worse than what is being censored. Always."
Offence is a necessary part of free speech for the simple reason that not every shares the same views and opinions, and the way to handle this difference of opinion in an open and civilized country is not by censoring one side of the debate, driving it underground, or brutally murder your opponents, the way to deal with it is to have an open debate, and discuss the issue, knowing that no matter how offensive some may find the topic, it is still safe to discuss.
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers...Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity
Posts like this one make me wish that scores could be modded up to +6
Time and time again, I get sucked into the debate, without noticing that the way the whole issue has been framed is what is really at fault.
While child porn is certainly a very terrible thing, the rush to suppress it brings up an interesting point.
we often hear these two arguments:
possessing child porn = supports the industry and encourages further production possessing downloaded music/movies = damages the industry and threatens further production
If downloading media is such a serious threat to the production of new content that laws have to be introduced to prevent unauthorized sharing, why isn't anyone suggesting that downloading child porn be encouraged to drive the producers out of business?
I guess one, (or both) of the above statements is false. Anyone care to take a guess which?
GIMP still just wouldn't fly in any of the technical photography classes I had - we lost whole letter grades for the typical magenta or green color casts.
To cover their ass and get the mark back, did anyone point out that Ansel Adams' prints all had a slight magenta hue?
Of course, the instructor might point out that their is a slight difference between developing gelatin silver prints by hand, and printing out some Gimped jpegs at walmart.
And to demonstrate what is better about it. Far too often OSS is portrayed as "I can't buy X, so I'll download Y" rather than "Y is better than X, so I'll download it". Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.
and being 'better' isn't necessarily always about OSS doing the job better than the proprietary alternative. Sometimes, it's just a better fit for a certain environment or situation, and that in itself is a reason to push OSS.
Here is an example: A friend of mine teaches art. When they get to the photography units, he can have the class schedule their lives around access to 1 computer, he can require them to each pay hundreds of dollars for photoshop (good luck with that) encourage piracy (potential of getting caught/losing job), OR he can hand out burnt copies of Gimp to every student to use at home.
is Gimp objectively better than photoshop? no way, but it does the job, and for that situation, Gimp is a much better fit. And the Gimp GUI for the last few versions has been similar enough that what is learned in one program will work in the other.
but pushing a vastly inferior OSS project, who's only merit is that "it's free" probably does more harm than good. Lets not forget, the super expensive proprietary version is also 'free' to anyone with a high speed connection and some free time.
...piracy is usually as much about convenience as free product....The best way to fight piracy on the DS is to give us an easy way to store games on the device digitally.
That hits it pretty much right on the head. People talk of piracy like pirates are a bunch of cheap buggers who just don't want to pay for anything, but often, they pirate because it offers something that is not offered through official channels.
I bough the M3DS so I can use my NDS as an mp3 player (moonshine has a much nicer interface than my cheap dedicated mp3 player does) the sketchpad of DS organize also came in handy. At first, I was using the M3DS to get those features that I felt should have been build in to the device, but weren't.
Then the convenience factor kicks in: why carry around 10 individual cartridges, when I can load all my games on one micro SD card and carry them all with me? so much easier. Then, I quickly get used to that level of convenience, and when a new game comes out, I tell myself I will 'try before I buy' If the game is bad, it is promptly deleted. If the game is good, I purchase a physical copy, but keep it in the box, and continue playing the downloaded version. (sadly, I've yet to find 'the world ends with you' for sale in Canada) So now I'm in the habit of downloading for convenience, and not being able to find the legitimate copies to purchase, so I stop looking for legit copies.
If is their were a legitimate service that offered the level of convenience offered by piracy, I doubt piracy would be the problem it is today.
...Canadians love free speech as much as anyone. It's even enshrined in their constitution.
actually, in Canada, its not "free speech" its "free expression", 2. "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:... (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication" so it sounds even more powerful than the American 1st amendment...we can express ourselves freely across any medium.
but then their are the weasel words from section 1 that take all the teeth right out of that statement: "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society"
reasonable limits? well, that's not so good.....but its still reasonable, I guess.....it's a good thing we don't have a notwithstanding clause at the very end of the charter, turning the entire document into a farce...oh, wait...Damn.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of left handed people buy right-handed guitars when the guitar they want comes in left-handed. You can learn to play a damn game right handed if it's not possible. And what would they do for left-hand mode here anyway? Switch to left-aligned text? Mirror?
Restringing a right handed guitar to make it lefty friendly is quite a bit different than swapping a digital control scheme. Especially when the DS has y,x,a,b buttons on the other side of the screen that could easily be swapped with the control pad.
That's why I play guitar right-handed, thats why I taught myself to use a right-handed mouse, thats why I've had to learn to use most power tools right-handed. Physical goods can't be flipped easily, it requires it's own assembly line, smaller production runs mean higher prices, so lefties adapting to right-handed things is necessary. But with a digital device-with software, there is no excuse for not including a simple switch between left and right hand modes. It's a few lines of code that can expand the market by 10%
I propose forcing women to think like computers instead of like women. They would be much easier to interact with.
What? are you crazy? that would be horrible....Just imagine trying to have a conversation with a woman who continually pauses, buffers, and freezes as she is talking to you... ...damn, that actually sounds pretty awesome!
As much as I disagree with just about everything NK stands for, South Korea isn't winning an points in my book by blocking access.
note: before any westerners point out that blocking access will only spike curiosity and make those in SK more interested it the account, I would like to point out that Korean culture values authority far more than ours, and from my own experience living there, the children in south Korea had little to no interest in the North.
A little off topic I guess, but how did college professors get around the ethical challenge of selling their own books to their class as a requirement and charging whatever they felt like for it?
~S
Money trumps ethics every time.
If you would like to see a detailed case study of an experiment into this effect, please look up "America"
I actually had one proff who wrote a 400-page humanities textbook for her class, and sold it as a photocopied reader for $25 (to cover the print and binding costs). That was the only time I know of where ethics were maintained in a situation like that.
Wouldn't being a sound sleeper be a liability in the Darwin game? I would think that waking up when there's unusual stimuli would be something helpful to keep from being lunch for a nocturnal predator.
Possibly, yes, but not everyone has this deep sleep ability, and humans are social animals. it is possible that a balance between deep sleepers and light sleepers offered other advantages. maybe the light sleepers would hear something, then wake the deep sleepers and they could all run away, while if it was a false alarm that woke the light sleepers in the tribe, the more rested heavy sleepers would still be up for a long days hunting...
(thats probably not even close to being right, but its just an example of what could have been the case - where variety benefits both sides.)
I don't know the Australian rationale but I wonder when Americans discuss the need for patents and copyrights. Why do content creators want to abolish patents? America is rich today because of patents and copyrights. If every second guy could rip off a great idea, we'd have nothing left to offer. We cannot compete on prices. The innovation and creativity of Americans is what has made US powerful...
That's funny. I always though one of the reasons that America was rich today was because when they were developing, they did not respect patents and copyrights, specifically foreign copyrights, such as books from Europe. They just copied and reproduced the content they wanted at will. Oh, and slaves. You can get rich pretty easily when you don't have to pay for the stuff you need/want.
From BoingBoing: "Update: We've removed the CC-licensed image as it appears the photographer is unhappy with our usage of it here. We support the Creative Commons and will always do our best to honor the creator's interpretation of non-commerciality. Please accept our apologies. - Rob"
It seems like they got the message.
how can anyone even begin to think about committing code from a Chinese company into the mainstream linux kernel?
Because it's open and can be read by anyone to make sure nothing sneaky is in there?
It also doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to change the xbox architecture that much, since it has always been basically a PC and it has all the same systems like DirectX, .NET and the usual compatibility with Windows.
It would however make perfect sense for Windows Mobile.
Maybe they are going for "x-box portable"
although if they just shrunk down the existing x-box design to hand-held proportions, they could advertise themselves as having the world's first hand-held gaming system/hotplate.
In advertising, it is common for several companies to work on an idea for one client, pitch a proposal, and only one wins the deal, the others lose out. That's the industry. Because of the high risk - lots of work for no pay, it is only fair that when payment does arrive, it is large enough to compensate for all the unpaid work they have done over the past.
Any good deal leaves with both sides felling satisfied:
The designer wants to make as much money as possible, and produce a great design that adds to their portfolio and wins some future clients.
The company wants to have the best design work possible for the lowest price they can get away with.
They both want good design (although they may argue over what, exactly that is)
For payment, where their is a big disagreement, both sides must agree to meet somewhere in the middle where both sides will accept the deal.
The problem for emerging designers is getting noticed, getting established, and companies know this. Thats why new designers often get stuck doing free work, it will "give them exposure", their clients promise.
So, the designers manage to scrape by for a few years, happily exposing themselves to anyone who will provide the opportunity.
Eventually, the designer gets sick of working 90 hour weeks for nearly nothing. Exposing yourself to the public might be fun, and it is a great way to develop the skills needed for the profession, but it just doesn't pay the bills.
When the next 'no payment, but good exposure' job comes along, the experienced designer either turns it down, or demands fair payment and doesn't land the deal. The companies know that this particular source of free labour is exhausted, but there are plenty of new, less experienced designers out there who will still produce acceptable work for free.
The problem, however, is that these young designers don't have the experience and the skills, so their quality isn't there.
Overall, the quality of the design work goes down along with the prices. Students stop pursuing design education because of the abysmal pay, so the quality drops further.
let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Seriously, transcribe it manually... automatic speech recognition just doesn't work. And can never work, because much of the time the only reason humans can understand each other is by making informed guesses based on context, which a computer program cannot do.
...a computer program cannot do yet
...I'm surprised there aren't automated sentry guns, barb wire fencing, huge ditches, tall walls, flood lights, and a special "nuke" drop in case all shit hits the fan.
There are several of those things on the boarder.
On the South Korean side of the DMZ, I saw a very tall razor-wire fence, then a deep trench, then another large razor-wire fence on the other side of the trench. On every few fence poles their is either a floodlight, a camera, or a super sensitive microphone. Apparently, they can hear just about anything that moves on their side of the DMZ, then figure out the exact location from the delay between different microphones. Every 500 meters is a manned guard tower with a big-ass machine gun.
There is also a huge wall inside the DMZ, separating the two Koreas. SK says their isn't, but it is clearly visible from the North. (this knowledge is from a documentary video from another group of people, I refuse to go to the North myself, I do not want my dollars going to their government)
...the simplest solution is to use music from the enormous amount of music that's licensed under Creative Commons...
Or does your creativity require you to use "Eye of the Tiger" for every single video of your sports team?
it's not always about creativity, it's about what associations and ideas using popular materials brings to your work.
if I record a video of myself running up the stairs, or take video of me punching a guy and freeze framing it right before fists connect, the connection I am reaching for might still be vague, adding "Eye of the Tiger" will instantly make my audience think of the Rocky franchise. If that is the connection I wish my audience to make, then yes, creativity does require the use of that particular song. Nothing else will do, no other song will make that same connection.
This technique is called appropriation, and it can be a very powerful tool for artists.
that being said, if they are using it just because 'eye of the tiger' is a good track for a sports event, then yea, it's lame and lazy; but there are times when using one specific element over another is necessary to make an artistic point.
How did you get into that list? Why is my local pirate party missing? What should we have been doing so that we ended up in that list as well? Just so that I can make sure my name will also occur in such a list the next time.
A call for signatures was posted on both BoingBoing and TechDirt several days before the list was published.
I followed a link to the site, read the document, then I emailed them stating that I agree with the cause and would like to have my name added to the petition.
It was an email to a gmail account, not a standard petition fill-in-the blanks form, so I can imagine some poor person having to go through each item on the inbox, read each submission and copy the name onto the petition.
in other news:
how the hell did my original comment get rated '+5 insightful'?
My statement, "It's not just experts, my name is on that list too" was intended to imply that I am a non-expert. I was hoping for at most "+3 funny" for my shot at some self-deprecating humour. I don't see how I was in any way insightful.
It's not just experts who believe ACTA threatens public interest.
My name is on that list, too.
I felt it in my basement apartment in Toronto.
But was it really an earthquake, or did the thought of all those politicians gathering for the G20 make the ground vomit?
what does it matter if only 16%, or 1.6%, or even 0.16% of all posts are any good?
The power of aggregates, filters, and search engines is that it doesn't matter what the signal to noise ratio is, you can quite easily cut through it all and find more of what you want.
Hell yeah! Free speech doesn't just mean you can speak out against real injustice, it means you should be intentionally abusive of other people's cultures and religions! As often as possible!
This attitude utterly disgusts me. You people are pathetic. "Not drawing pictures of Mohammed" (PBUH) takes away precisely one "right" of yours, the right to be an idiot with no sense of tact or respect. ...
I'm a British atheist. What say I go to Alabama, defecate on a bible, wrap it in the US flag and burn the bundle. That's free speech isn't it? That's me exercising the right of a person living in the US isn't it?
No, it's me being an offensive dick for the sake of it. I'd get lynched, and rightly so. Grow up, the lot of you.
No, it is free speech.
During protests, Muslims will often protest by desecrating or burning flags, and openly uttering death threats. All of these are actions that are intentionally offensive. Media outlets will routinely insult Christianity, especially Catholicism, Judaism and other belief systems, as well as insulting atheism, certain nationalities, etc. without ever receiving a threat of violence. Everything we hold dear to us in this culture is open to offence.
Only Islam is magically off limits and unable to be criticized. People who insult Islam fear a very real possibility of a violent death, including the South Park creators, who were threatened, sent pictures of another filmmaker who was murdered for criticizing Islam, along with having their home addresses published on an Islamic fundamentalist website.
This specific act of causing offence to Muslims in this situation had a very important function. The South Park guys had their lives threatened for daring to present images of Muhammad. The idea behind "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" was to present the world with so many offending images that the South Park guys would be flooded out. Their would simply be too many offending images out their for the Islamic fundamentalists to murder everyone who had drawn one.
As soon as certain topics are declared forbidden, freedom of speech dies, and a dangerous precedent is set.
"If that topic is forbidden, then surly it's ok to ban this topic, too" "well, since those topics are banned, we can also ban this list of topics."
Freedom of speech makes certain undesirable things possible -offence, hate speech, pornography, evangelicals, etc. but developed countries are based on the idea that free speech is a greater good than all those negative side effects combined. One slashdotter's sig sums it up nicely "The act of censorship is always worse than what is being censored. Always."
Offence is a necessary part of free speech for the simple reason that not every shares the same views and opinions, and the way to handle this difference of opinion in an open and civilized country is not by censoring one side of the debate, driving it underground, or brutally murder your opponents, the way to deal with it is to have an open debate, and discuss the issue, knowing that no matter how offensive some may find the topic, it is still safe to discuss.
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers...Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity
Posts like this one make me wish that scores could be modded up to +6
Time and time again, I get sucked into the debate, without noticing that the way the whole issue has been framed is what is really at fault.
While child porn is certainly a very terrible thing, the rush to suppress it brings up an interesting point.
we often hear these two arguments:
possessing child porn = supports the industry and encourages further production
possessing downloaded music/movies = damages the industry and threatens further production
If downloading media is such a serious threat to the production of new content that laws have to be introduced to prevent unauthorized sharing, why isn't anyone suggesting that downloading child porn be encouraged to drive the producers out of business?
I guess one, (or both) of the above statements is false. Anyone care to take a guess which?
GIMP still just wouldn't fly in any of the technical photography classes I had - we lost whole letter grades for the typical magenta or green color casts.
To cover their ass and get the mark back, did anyone point out that Ansel Adams' prints all had a slight magenta hue?
Of course, the instructor might point out that their is a slight difference between developing gelatin silver prints by hand, and printing out some Gimped jpegs at walmart.
And to demonstrate what is better about it. Far too often OSS is portrayed as "I can't buy X, so I'll download Y" rather than "Y is better than X, so I'll download it". Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.
and being 'better' isn't necessarily always about OSS doing the job better than the proprietary alternative. Sometimes, it's just a better fit for a certain environment or situation, and that in itself is a reason to push OSS.
Here is an example:
A friend of mine teaches art. When they get to the photography units, he can have the class schedule their lives around access to 1 computer, he can require them to each pay hundreds of dollars for photoshop (good luck with that) encourage piracy (potential of getting caught/losing job), OR he can hand out burnt copies of Gimp to every student to use at home.
is Gimp objectively better than photoshop? no way, but it does the job, and for that situation, Gimp is a much better fit. And the Gimp GUI for the last few versions has been similar enough that what is learned in one program will work in the other.
but pushing a vastly inferior OSS project, who's only merit is that "it's free" probably does more harm than good. Lets not forget, the super expensive proprietary version is also 'free' to anyone with a high speed connection and some free time.
Maybe a sufficiently advanced scientific-technological elite's control of public policy is indistinguishable from no control at all.
Everyone knows the elite use magic, not sufficiently advanced technology, to control society.
...piracy is usually as much about convenience as free product....The best way to fight piracy on the DS is to give us an easy way to store games on the device digitally.
That hits it pretty much right on the head. People talk of piracy like pirates are a bunch of cheap buggers who just don't want to pay for anything, but often, they pirate because it offers something that is not offered through official channels.
I bough the M3DS so I can use my NDS as an mp3 player (moonshine has a much nicer interface than my cheap dedicated mp3 player does) the sketchpad of DS organize also came in handy. At first, I was using the M3DS to get those features that I felt should have been build in to the device, but weren't.
Then the convenience factor kicks in: why carry around 10 individual cartridges, when I can load all my games on one micro SD card and carry them all with me? so much easier.
Then, I quickly get used to that level of convenience, and when a new game comes out, I tell myself I will 'try before I buy' If the game is bad, it is promptly deleted. If the game is good, I purchase a physical copy, but keep it in the box, and continue playing the downloaded version. (sadly, I've yet to find 'the world ends with you' for sale in Canada)
So now I'm in the habit of downloading for convenience, and not being able to find the legitimate copies to purchase, so I stop looking for legit copies.
If is their were a legitimate service that offered the level of convenience offered by piracy, I doubt piracy would be the problem it is today.
...Canadians love free speech as much as anyone. It's even enshrined in their constitution.
actually, in Canada, its not "free speech" its "free expression", ... (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication"
2. "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
so it sounds even more powerful than the American 1st amendment...we can express ourselves freely across any medium.
but then their are the weasel words from section 1 that take all the teeth right out of that statement:
"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society"
reasonable limits?
well, that's not so good.....but its still reasonable, I guess.....it's a good thing we don't have a notwithstanding clause at the very end of the charter, turning the entire document into a farce...oh, wait...Damn.