Who cares? If they want to change it, they will. If they get in trouble for it, that's their problem. I'm sure they're quite aware that they aren't supposed to change the music. And I'm equally sure that if they were really attached to their job at Starbucks, they wouldn't do it. Apparently they aren't all that attached.
I think some Peruvian government officials have been bought by Microsoft (of course that's normal for Peru). I think that they know that the deal is bad for the country in the long run, for all the reasons that Villanueva pointed out in his letter to MS. I think that they are doing it anyway because Microsoft is fattening their own wallets. That's just how things are done in Peru. It's not much different in the US, except that they have to be a bit more discreet about it.
Different people take "free" to mean different things. Context does not always make it clear, which is why we always see things like "free (as in speech)" used in posts and stories to clarify.
1st: He's talking about Microsoft giving away software that they normally charge for, such as this case with Peru, not charging for software that is normally free.
2nd: Dual licensing makes no difference to the free-ness of GPL'd software. Once you release something under the GPL or similar license, you can't unrelease it. Sure, you can license it to someone else under different terms if you own the copyright, but you still can't take back the GPL'd code. If you decide not to maintain or improve it, someone else will.
Any chance we could arrange a Slashdot interview with either the Head of the Patent Office (or their main P.R. guy) or with the Senator heading up the Patent Office Committee (whatever that is)?
It would be a very frustrating endeavor. These are the kinds of people that can actually defend patents like this with a straight face. They can sit there and talk about how we just don't understand the innovation and that these patents really are worthy of protection. And they'll never once burst out in maniacal laughter. They're that good at what they do.
I'm not so worried about idiots on bikes. They tend to weed themselves out just fine. I'm worried about idiots in vehicles of similar size or larger than mine. Last thing we need is an Expedition with this kind of acceleration. (that would be a heck of an electric engine in that thing though)
Big difference between building a good product and selling it at a fair price, and building a product designed to break in expensive ways in order to increase profits. You don't stick a $600 crappy plastic grill on a car that breaks even in a relatively mild rear-end accident if you're trying to build a quality car. You would, however, do that if you were simply trying to wring money out of people.
Of course it's best to avoid the but I'm 1337 and need to w4r3z everything POV. Somehow I don't think they're sympathetic to that...
What I'm afraid of is that they aren't sympathetic to much of anything except the fears of big campaign contributors. I can't afford to cut a check for a thousand bucks to each senator and rep. That would seem to make my opinions much less important.
If they gave me reasonable prices and a reasonable method of monitoring my usage, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But that's definitely not what they're doing. They aren't even telling anyone what they're doing. Strange though. I live in South/Central Texas and RR doesn't seem to be blocking Kazaa here.
Yeah, but there's usually umpteen different versions of the same movie/song out there too. They won't have the same checksums. Maybe their encoded at a different bitrate. Maybe they used different codecs, etc.
Plus I choose to use IE over all the other browsers because it simply works the best.
I guess you haven't used Mozilla lately. Either that or you enjoy pop-ups, not being able to control cookies decently, shoddy CSS support, 20 windows open in your taskbar, etc.
Fair use seems to be such a straight-forward thing. I have written my representatives several times about this.
I hope you have more luck than I do. I've written to my reps several times too. I always get the same tripe back in response. They understand my interest in copyright, but they feel that copyright is what makes the world go round and it must be strengthened and protected at all costs. Sorry, have a nice day.
I live in Texas,and I get the same response from both senators, as well as my rep. I just got the response from a letter I wrote a few months ago to Kay Bailey Hutchison. Same drivel. What's more frustrating is that I didn't even vote for these people, so not voting for them again doesn't seem like a real recourse. What's even worse is that the candidates that I did vote for didn't have a chance anyway. But I wasn't going to vote either democrat or republican because the candidates on both sides were just as bad.
It's RIAA (recording industry) or MPAA (motion picture).:)
I pretty much agree with you I think. If I was selling a program for 10K or more and I only expected to sell a couple thousand copies, then I would most likely have some serious security features. Even ~$3K 3DS Max uses a hardware dongle. Not foolproof, but a lot better than a lot of companies do. But like you say, the more the software is worth, the more security it should have. I also think that companies that use pirated software should have the proverbial legal hammer dropped on them. They are attempting to profit at the expense of the companies whose software they are stealing. I'm not as convinced on home use. I think that the argument about people using a program in order to learn it is a good one. I know that I wouldn't want to blow 500 bucks or more just to see if I really wanted to use this program. If it weren't for warez, I probably never would have learned a lot of software packages that I now use at work. It helped me get a decent job.
Nope. It was trendy a couple years ago I suppose. Now it's just part of the culture. Sometimes it's done as a sort of in-joke. Slashdot is supposed to hate Microsoft, so someone will post these kinds of things all the time. Kind of a game to see how anything in the world can be tied to the evilness of Bill and Microsoft. In a way it's funny. Some of them are so absurd that it's hard not to laugh at them.
Well, it ain't Copernicus, but it didn't seem all that bad to me. No worse than stileproject.com or others in the same vein. I opened the site in Mozilla and it jacked my cpu usage up to 100%. MP3s started skipping. That was horrible.
I've read about the bird problems. Not sure how they plan to deal with it yet. As for being big and ugly, I don't know where you got that from. They're quite beautiful, IMO. Mesmerizing when you see vast stretches of them like they have in Texas. On the power generation issue, they work quite well when they're built in the right areas. Some areas have a lot higher average winds than other areas. They build in areas with class 4 or 5 winds. I live in a class 1 area, so it's not likely that I'll see a wind farm around here anytime soon.
Funny thing is, there's still gonna be a lot of the stuff all over the place in unsecure facilities. The stuff has to cool for 5 years before they can transport it. Then when they transport it, you have the potential for terrorists to have an easy way to detonate a dirty bomb. They just need to get a car full of explosives close enough to a transport truck and it's all over.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares? If they want to change it, they will. If they get in trouble for it, that's their problem. I'm sure they're quite aware that they aren't supposed to change the music. And I'm equally sure that if they were really attached to their job at Starbucks, they wouldn't do it. Apparently they aren't all that attached.
Must suck to only have one button. I can't imagine playing an FPS without 3 buttons and a wheel. I don't want to have to alt-click to alt-fire.
I think some Peruvian government officials have been bought by Microsoft (of course that's normal for Peru). I think that they know that the deal is bad for the country in the long run, for all the reasons that Villanueva pointed out in his letter to MS. I think that they are doing it anyway because Microsoft is fattening their own wallets. That's just how things are done in Peru. It's not much different in the US, except that they have to be a bit more discreet about it.
Different people take "free" to mean different things. Context does not always make it clear, which is why we always see things like "free (as in speech)" used in posts and stories to clarify.
1st: He's talking about Microsoft giving away software that they normally charge for, such as this case with Peru, not charging for software that is normally free.
2nd: Dual licensing makes no difference to the free-ness of GPL'd software. Once you release something under the GPL or similar license, you can't unrelease it. Sure, you can license it to someone else under different terms if you own the copyright, but you still can't take back the GPL'd code. If you decide not to maintain or improve it, someone else will.
That's ok, I intended it as a bit of both really. As Homer Simpson would say, "It's funny because it's true."
Any chance we could arrange a Slashdot interview with either the Head of the Patent Office (or their main P.R. guy) or with the Senator heading up the Patent Office Committee (whatever that is)?
It would be a very frustrating endeavor. These are the kinds of people that can actually defend patents like this with a straight face. They can sit there and talk about how we just don't understand the innovation and that these patents really are worthy of protection. And they'll never once burst out in maniacal laughter. They're that good at what they do.
I'm not so worried about idiots on bikes. They tend to weed themselves out just fine. I'm worried about idiots in vehicles of similar size or larger than mine. Last thing we need is an Expedition with this kind of acceleration. (that would be a heck of an electric engine in that thing though)
Big difference between building a good product and selling it at a fair price, and building a product designed to break in expensive ways in order to increase profits. You don't stick a $600 crappy plastic grill on a car that breaks even in a relatively mild rear-end accident if you're trying to build a quality car. You would, however, do that if you were simply trying to wring money out of people.
Oh crap. I would NOT want to be on the road with people driving that car. The last thing I need is to deal with idiots that can accelerate that fast.
Of course it's best to avoid the but I'm 1337 and need to w4r3z everything POV. Somehow I don't think they're sympathetic to that...
What I'm afraid of is that they aren't sympathetic to much of anything except the fears of big campaign contributors. I can't afford to cut a check for a thousand bucks to each senator and rep. That would seem to make my opinions much less important.
Every artist/band in your post sucks, mmkay?
I'm in South/Central Texas, and RR doesn't seem to be blocking Kazaa here. I'm downloading just fine right now. Did some searches too. Worked for me.
If they gave me reasonable prices and a reasonable method of monitoring my usage, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But that's definitely not what they're doing. They aren't even telling anyone what they're doing. Strange though. I live in South/Central Texas and RR doesn't seem to be blocking Kazaa here.
They are attempting to regulate without disclosing what they are doing, why shouldn't users attempt to bypass the regulations?
Yeah, but there's usually umpteen different versions of the same movie/song out there too. They won't have the same checksums. Maybe their encoded at a different bitrate. Maybe they used different codecs, etc.
Plus I choose to use IE over all the other browsers because it simply works the best.
I guess you haven't used Mozilla lately. Either that or you enjoy pop-ups, not being able to control cookies decently, shoddy CSS support, 20 windows open in your taskbar, etc.
Fair use seems to be such a straight-forward thing. I have written my representatives several times about this.
I hope you have more luck than I do. I've written to my reps several times too. I always get the same tripe back in response. They understand my interest in copyright, but they feel that copyright is what makes the world go round and it must be strengthened and protected at all costs. Sorry, have a nice day.
I live in Texas,and I get the same response from both senators, as well as my rep. I just got the response from a letter I wrote a few months ago to Kay Bailey Hutchison. Same drivel. What's more frustrating is that I didn't even vote for these people, so not voting for them again doesn't seem like a real recourse. What's even worse is that the candidates that I did vote for didn't have a chance anyway. But I wasn't going to vote either democrat or republican because the candidates on both sides were just as bad.
Sure, it's irrelevant, but it's also extremely dishonest. Kinda hypocritical coming from people complaining about others being dishonest.
These companies are like the RPAA
:)
It's RIAA (recording industry) or MPAA (motion picture).
I pretty much agree with you I think. If I was selling a program for 10K or more and I only expected to sell a couple thousand copies, then I would most likely have some serious security features. Even ~$3K 3DS Max uses a hardware dongle. Not foolproof, but a lot better than a lot of companies do. But like you say, the more the software is worth, the more security it should have. I also think that companies that use pirated software should have the proverbial legal hammer dropped on them. They are attempting to profit at the expense of the companies whose software they are stealing. I'm not as convinced on home use. I think that the argument about people using a program in order to learn it is a good one. I know that I wouldn't want to blow 500 bucks or more just to see if I really wanted to use this program. If it weren't for warez, I probably never would have learned a lot of software packages that I now use at work. It helped me get a decent job.
Nope. It was trendy a couple years ago I suppose. Now it's just part of the culture. Sometimes it's done as a sort of in-joke. Slashdot is supposed to hate Microsoft, so someone will post these kinds of things all the time. Kind of a game to see how anything in the world can be tied to the evilness of Bill and Microsoft. In a way it's funny. Some of them are so absurd that it's hard not to laugh at them.
Well, it ain't Copernicus, but it didn't seem all that bad to me. No worse than stileproject.com or others in the same vein. I opened the site in Mozilla and it jacked my cpu usage up to 100%. MP3s started skipping. That was horrible.
A single mid-sized moving van took out the federal building in Oklahoma. I think something similar could be done to take out a transport truck.
I've read about the bird problems. Not sure how they plan to deal with it yet. As for being big and ugly, I don't know where you got that from. They're quite beautiful, IMO. Mesmerizing when you see vast stretches of them like they have in Texas. On the power generation issue, they work quite well when they're built in the right areas. Some areas have a lot higher average winds than other areas. They build in areas with class 4 or 5 winds. I live in a class 1 area, so it's not likely that I'll see a wind farm around here anytime soon.
Funny thing is, there's still gonna be a lot of the stuff all over the place in unsecure facilities. The stuff has to cool for 5 years before they can transport it. Then when they transport it, you have the potential for terrorists to have an easy way to detonate a dirty bomb. They just need to get a car full of explosives close enough to a transport truck and it's all over.