Re:Who you gonna buy, what laws you gonna allow?
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Digital TV Approaches
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· Score: 1
Please forgive me - I did not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with movies or tv, or windows or mac, for that matter. What I object to is the way people have used them to gain control over their users - window's crazy eula, or the way Apple throws lawyers around so often, the way the MPAA and RIAA bought the DMCA, etc.
I give up TV, not because I think there is anything wrong with it, but because I think there is something wrong with the people in control of the entertainment industry. I am not a media bigot. I am bigoted against control freaks, those people who amass power to themselves and trample the innocent.
I think he has a good point. Watching TV but not the commercials, listening to the radio but flipping the station whenever the music stops, reading a book at the library but never buying it from the bookstore, buying books and CDs used instead of new, listening to illegal mp3s from irc...
What's the difference? Please, I'd really like to know what you think.
The Linux community is way different from the Napster/Gnutella community. Remember Linus cheering for Metallica?
Diss music sharing if you want to, but please don't take it out on Linux. The vast majority of the so-called "pirates" out there use Windows, and a lot of Linux users agree with you 100%.
Re:Who you gonna buy, what laws you gonna allow?
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Digital TV Approaches
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· Score: 1
"Gonna buy a new TV set with all the new features?"
No. Or an old TV, either. 99% of the great stories out there are in books, and the stories that are in movies and books are better in the books anyway. I don't even have to support book publishers, either, if they get evil - I can buy from used bookstores.
It is really sad, what the entertainment industry has managed to pull off, but everybody seems to be forgetting that this isn't a choice we have to make.
"It is critical that we take steps today to encrypt our television signals so that if they ever fall into enemy hands, appear like mindless garbage and a waste of time to try to comprehend."
As long as there is a demand there will be a supply, but that supply may be made illegal. Alcohol was still availiable during the Prohibition, after all. My worries are that it will be made illegal to record data, not impossible. We already know that the industry can make it illegal, now it's just a matter of when.
Personally, I won't be getting cable TV either - for that matter, I don't see much of a reason to get a TV at all. I'll be spending my time at libraries and bookstores.
Honestly, is there anything in TV and movies that isn't in books? Other than the obvious, and that doesn't matter much to me.
"the boy, from his suicide note, felt that he was going to be sent to prison - when the worst he appeared to be destined for was a negative mark on his school record - this obviously wasn't made clear to him, and his suicide was the result."
Yeah - this is one of the things that gets me about this story - he was terrified of something that didn't pose a threat to him. Why? My guess would be that the school authorities decided to scare him straight, put the fear of God in him. This might work on the rough bullies and violent types they get most of the time, but it's the exact wrong kind of thing to do to a sensitive, caring type. A sensitive person is liable to curl up and shut down, or strike out at somebody in terror. They seemed to hit him with a lot of overkill. They claimed not to, but the boy is dead - so we can be sure they are trying to make themselves look better than they were, especially now that the other side of the story will never be told. I do not believe them.
"Jayanta alleges Mayer told Shinjan during their meeting that he could go to jail for his offenses, but Fitzsimons said that never happened."
Maybe, just maybe Fitzsimons is telling the truth here, but I doubt it - he's the one who's scared now. Even if he did nothing wrong, even if he didn't bully the kid, he'll still try to cover himself and look better than he is. He'll be afraid of being (falsely or truely) accused of driving the boy to suicide.
The other thing that gets me is that they gave him a harsh punishment for a non-violent crime. There's no excuse for punishing non-violent crimes at near the same level as violent ones, and anyone who does that has a severe disorder of priorities, imho.
> and no innitative to try new things, when you didn't push him in school to try out many different activities. How can he/she find out "what they enjoy" when they aren't pushed to try new things?
If you push a kid to do new things, you almost ensure that he will have no intrest in them. Read some Psychology, or Mark Twain. That which we choose to do is play, while that which we are forced to do is work. Pushing a kid into new things is a wrong thing to do, and the worst way to make him well-rounded. If you want to lead, lead by example. Even being offered a reward for doing something we already enjoy reduces how much we enjoy it.
> Sitting at home playing Nintendo doesn't count.
It does. I know this because I did this, too. I challenged my parents to push me and crack down on me. Though they were concerned, they didn't force me into or out of anything, and I got tired of trying to tempt them, and bored of wasting my time. I started doing really fun stuff like gardening, calculus, and programming. They, of course, were thrilled.
Using their own intrinsic motivation is the only way to motivate someone for good - it is the only long-term solution.
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
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Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 2
No, I own both a copy of Windows and a "license" to use it. Do you see Microsoft giving out free copies of Windows to people who already bought licenses? M$ demands money for both.
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
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Mozilla 0.9 Out
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There's no difference in the software world. It's still stealing, no matter how you may try to rationalize or justify it. The bottom line is that you're doing what you're saying your doing, "using something without the authors' permission" which in plain and simple words is stealing.
I just copied your entire post. You didn't give me permission to. Did I violate your copyright? If I did, how much would be okay? If I didn't, how long would your post have to be before I was wrong to copy it?
You've equated authorship with ownership. They are not the same thing. Stealing is when you take something away from someone. The kind of copyright violation I believe we are talking about is copying, not stealing. The only thing the owner of the original copy of the information has lost is exclusivity. Exclusivity does not exist, just like shadows do not exist - both are defined as the absence of something else. If I shine a light, I am not stealing shadows, I am spreading light and driving away darkness. If I copy and distribute a copyrighted work, I am not stealing exclusivity from the author or publisher, I am spreading the art and driving away the artificial scarcity of that art.
Please don't misunderstand me. Copies of information can be owned. I own copies of Windows and of Startide Rising. I do not own the words in the book or the bytes on the CD, but I own the book and the CD. If you took my book away from me, you would be stealing. If you go to the library and read Startide Rising, you have not stolen anything from David Brin or anybody else. If you listen to music on the radio and change the station every time commercials come on, you're still not stealing.
Taking something that belongs to someone else is stealing. Using something without the author's permission? Why would I need the author's permission? I've copied articles out of magazines.(for education, for research) Is that stealing? If it is, it's stealing no matter what I use it for. If it isn't, then I should be allowed to do whatever I want with it, as long as I am not hurting anybody else.
BTW, potential profits also cannot be stolen because they don't belong to the profiter yet. Potential profits are a guess of future success in business, not of some inherent right. The RIAA lost a lot of potential profits to me when I found out what they had done. Am I stealing from them because I am boycotting them?
Re:People only use Mozilla to spite MS...
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Mozilla 0.9 Out
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A friend of mine who writes webpages would be the one to talk to about this, but she's not here. This is what I gather from her:
Netscape is not very tolerant of bad code. IE is more tolerant of certain types of errors. Frontpage will introduce those errors and make Netscape load only a blank screen. Load a page made by Frontpage, look at "View Source" and the html comes up, but nothing is rendered on the screen. The idea is to give Netscape a bad reputation. As Frontpage use becomes more common, Netscape works on fewer and fewer sites.
I'm no expert on this, but she is. I've personally seen two pages that were made with Frontpage, and neither of them loaded with Netscape 4.x, but did with IE. I didn't have Mozilla at the time, so I couldn't try that. I wish I remembered where those two sites were. I remember that one was written by a tesla coiler who lived in my town and the other was a *professional* newspaper website, if you can believe that!
This problem is apparantly well-known in web authoring circles. I don't know. She's very good at what she does but I'm afraid I can't quite keep up with her sometimes.
Re:People only use Mozilla to spite MS...
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Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
"People only use Mozilla to spite MS..."
No, I use Mozilla because IE hasn't been ported to Linux, and even if it was I wouldn't trust it. I would, however, keep it around for looking at pages that wouldn't work in Netscape/Mozilla.
I don't use IE, not to spite MS, but because I don't have Windows. If I had a bigger hard drive, I'd be happy to install an old used copy of Windows and IE. I wouldn't get anything new because I refuse to support the MS monopoly. That part may be for spite, but using Mozilla isn't.
"Netscape 6 and Mozilla are better, but there no where *near* as fast as IE 5.5 or IE 6b. This is not MS bias, this is just the truth."
From what I have seen, I agree with you. Another advantage of IE is that it loads more of the pages on the web than Netscape does because Frontpage is deliberately broken.
On the other hand, Windows 3.1, NT, and 9x are nowhere near as fast or stable as Linux. I can't speak for 2K or ME because I haven't seen those, but I have seen 3.1, NT, and 9x, and imho they are completely nuts. I've used Linux heavily and exclusively for one or two years and during this time my system has crashed *once* and that was because I didn't give it enough virtual memory. I am very happy with what I have.
Sadly, MS has not seen fit to port IE to Linux. If they do, I'll consider installing it. With the permissions of a two year old, of course.
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
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Not steal. It's "use without authors' permission." Has anything important ever been stolen from you? There's a huge difference between unauthorized copying and stealing.
Not only are you being inaccurate, you're insulting people who have had something stolen from them.
> What kind of h0r$e$h!t is that? I love music of all kinds. I listen to as much as I can. I respect the musicians who work hard to create it. And I believe in compensating them for it, not turning around and telling them that I shouldn't pay them because, hey, it's the nature of music to be free.
Music has always been free up until the last century or so. That's what I'm talking about by the nature of music.
I respect musicians as well as all artists, too. I believe in supporting them, and I believe we should all support them: voluntarily, not by force. I simply don't believe they should be able to use force to extract support out of people.
I don't like Napster, either, btw. I think it's a company run by a bunch of spoiled, selfish people who got together to hurt the record industry. I also happen to think the record industry is controlled by spoiled, selfish people.
But how can I have anything against Napster users? What were they doing that they couldn't have done at the library, or by listening to the radio? Or for that matter, by bootlegging tapes? What makes those things not-so-bad and suddenly Napster is evil?
I've spend months at libraries, reading books for free that I never intended to buy. I suppose you're going to tell me I'm a book pirate. Not that it matters that I buy books very frequently now.
No, it's not. You should read about zero-sum games.
"#2 no one is going to get up and say it is not."
*stands up*
It's not theft. It's copyright violation. I'll tell that to anyone.
*sits down*
"#3 The only point you have it the record companies are big evil bastards, and we deserve the music for free because they bent us over for years."
No, we deserve the music for free (beer) because it is the nature of the price of anything that can be copied infinitely to approach zero.
We deserve the music for free (speech) because it is the nature of music to be free and it is only recently, with the rise of the corporate police state, that it has been any different.
"#4 They need to find a better, cheap way to distribute music. Until they do I am going to pilage every thing I see."
Not pillage, not pirate, not steal. Violation of copyright. There's a world of difference there. If you want to convince anyone, get your definitions straight. You use words like theft and pillage because you want to make people get emotional and angry at Napster users. That's a Big Lie, and I'm calling you on it.
You call copyright violation pillaging, piracy, and theft. You, Sir Coward, are a liar.
They can, too. Corporations donate property all the time to charities or various community groups. It's called building goodwill with potential customers, and many companies do it.
Mind you, not that anything intellectual should be classified as property, but I digress...
As for "in the interests of profit," there are many times where sueing people for violating patents or copyrights is not profitable, and companies look the other way. Unlike trademarks, copyrights and patents do not have to be constantly enforced to retain their legal strength.
I seem to remember a little company that gave its patented algorithm away for free, let it become established, and then started suing anyone who wrote programs that used this algorithm. Also, record and movie companies don't pursue copyright violators unless the violators either A: pose some great threat to them or B: have a lot of money that can be stolen via settlements.
There are many different reasons that a company might not enforce IP, ranging from altruistic through selfish down to just plain stupid.
If Apple has wronged the opensource community, it doesn't matter who they answer to first. If it's wrong for Apple to include BSD-licensed code in their programs, they should not have done it even if it was the only way to keep from going out of business. It is not wronging their stockholders to not wrong the opensource community.
OTOH, I'm not convinced Apple's done anything wrong here, so it's no big deal to me. You seem to be implying, though, that it's okay for Apple to do bad things if it helps their stockholders. I'm sure that's not what you meant, but that's how it came across at first.
"Those are some of the realities of the business world, it is done in every industry by every company every day all the time."
And you call that an excuse? Maybe it is okay, but not because everyone does it. "Everyone" in the US used to do slavery. "Everyone" in old mexico practiced cannibalism.
"Did Linus write the Linux kernel from scratch?"
At first, yes. Later, he had help from volunteers all over the world. Your point?
"No, he essentially ported Unix to X86."
Linus wrote the kernel so it would be compatible with GNU. The FSF ported Unix to X86. Get your facts straight, please.
"Microsoft buys technology because they can."
Are you saying this makes it okay for M$ to buy technology? It does not.
You are a jerk because of the way you talked to grub. Please apologize to him.
You also excuse Microsoft for predatory and anticompetitive business practices. Do you believe in a free market? A Microsoft monopoly will kill the free market in this area. Do you believe in a well-regulated economy? Microsoft has broken the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and a similar, later act that I have forgotten the name for, as well as copyright law. Microsoft has also abused patent law and contract law.
You defend a corporation that is predatory and dangerous, you insult and whine about a poster who was peacefully expressing his opinion, and you got your facts wrong.
I don't pay much attension to the code behind the scenes, but the OSS that I've used has been sometimes a lot worse, and sometimes a lot better than the CSS I've used. Most of the time it's about the same. However, there are four major areas where OSS is far better than CSS.
1: Practical. Updates and upgrades actually help. They fix bugs and improve performance. OSS projects start out worse than CSS ones, and then they get better.
2: Emotional. No legal threats in the software license. I don't like threats.
3: Ethical. It's free (as in beer) quite often. CSS is also sometimes free as in beer, but it's very rarely if ever free as in speech. I like being free, and I like supporting people who want me to be free.
4: Customizable. You can take apart an OSS program and change it in any way you want. I like control of my computer. I don't like giving corporations control of my computer.
"On the other hand, perhaps open source has something to offer, even if it is just a cheap way to exploit programmers."
"Slashdotters, engage in some honest self-assessment before you dispute this. Can you code, or should you maybe keep your mouth shut about this?"
I can code.
"And just how much of a typical linux distro can you defend as useful?"
For me? About 500 megs of Debian. The rest I don't install.
"Linux today is turning rapidly into what windows was four or five years ago."
Support? Any at all? How do you justify this?
"Windows, in case you haven't looked in the last four or five years (and those still claiming it crashes all the time obviously haven't), is getting better."
I am sometimes forced to use Windows for some things and it still disgusts me. It is wasteful, unstable, slow, unconfigurable, and incompatible.
I would agree that nobody's being forced to go digital. Personally, I don't care about TV, analog or digital.
I've already left TV in favor of books, the internet, and Other Things.
People are being forced off of analog, though, and that sucks. I agree with you and the poster you are replying to.
This could be made into a good thing, though, by increasing the numbers of people who have left beind TV and movies altogether. Trouble is, in order to make it a good thing for you, you'd have to leave TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Please forgive me - I did not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with movies or tv, or windows or mac, for that matter. What I object to is the way people have used them to gain control over their users - window's crazy eula, or the way Apple throws lawyers around so often, the way the MPAA and RIAA bought the DMCA, etc.
I give up TV, not because I think there is anything wrong with it, but because I think there is something wrong with the people in control of the entertainment industry. I am not a media bigot. I am bigoted against control freaks, those people who amass power to themselves and trample the innocent.
I misled you before, I am sorry.
Aye, that's the truth. I gave up TV cold turkey some time back. My only problem now is...
I might as well admit it, I'm addicted to Slashdot!
No, that's got neither rhythm nor rhyme. Phooey. Ohwell, I'm sleepy. G'night.
Now, what MS Office needs is Tivo software and a card...
:) Oh, Office Trek II: The Wrath of Binky.
"The last thing I need is some helpful box popping up saying that I'm copying too much."
You just know it's going to be a paper clip or something.
I think he has a good point. Watching TV but not the commercials, listening to the radio but flipping the station whenever the music stops, reading a book at the library but never buying it from the bookstore, buying books and CDs used instead of new, listening to illegal mp3s from irc...
What's the difference? Please, I'd really like to know what you think.
The Linux community is way different from the Napster/Gnutella community. Remember Linus cheering for Metallica?
Diss music sharing if you want to, but please don't take it out on Linux. The vast majority of the so-called "pirates" out there use Windows, and a lot of Linux users agree with you 100%.
"Gonna buy a new TV set with all the new features?"
No. Or an old TV, either. 99% of the great stories out there are in books, and the stories that are in movies and books are better in the books anyway. I don't even have to support book publishers, either, if they get evil - I can buy from used bookstores.
It is really sad, what the entertainment industry has managed to pull off, but everybody seems to be forgetting that this isn't a choice we have to make.
Apple or Microsoft? Linux.
Digital TV or analog TV? Books.
LOL
+1 Funny
"It is critical that we take steps today to encrypt our television signals so that if they ever fall into enemy hands, appear like mindless garbage and a waste of time to try to comprehend."
Oh, well it must already be encrypted, then.
How do you record Realvideo streams? I'm interested in that one.
As long as there is a demand there will be a supply, but that supply may be made illegal. Alcohol was still availiable during the Prohibition, after all. My worries are that it will be made illegal to record data, not impossible. We already know that the industry can make it illegal, now it's just a matter of when.
Personally, I won't be getting cable TV either - for that matter, I don't see much of a reason to get a TV at all. I'll be spending my time at libraries and bookstores.
Honestly, is there anything in TV and movies that isn't in books? Other than the obvious, and that doesn't matter much to me.
Count me out, too.
"the boy, from his suicide note, felt that he was going to be sent to prison - when the worst he appeared to be destined for was a negative mark on his school record - this obviously wasn't made clear to him, and his suicide was the result."
Yeah - this is one of the things that gets me about this story - he was terrified of something that didn't pose a threat to him. Why? My guess would be that the school authorities decided to scare him straight, put the fear of God in him. This might work on the rough bullies and violent types they get most of the time, but it's the exact wrong kind of thing to do to a sensitive, caring type. A sensitive person is liable to curl up and shut down, or strike out at somebody in terror. They seemed to hit him with a lot of overkill. They claimed not to, but the boy is dead - so we can be sure they are trying to make themselves look better than they were, especially now that the other side of the story will never be told. I do not believe them.
"Jayanta alleges Mayer told Shinjan during their meeting that he could go to jail for his offenses, but Fitzsimons said that never happened."
Maybe, just maybe Fitzsimons is telling the truth here, but I doubt it - he's the one who's scared now. Even if he did nothing wrong, even if he didn't bully the kid, he'll still try to cover himself and look better than he is. He'll be afraid of being (falsely or truely) accused of driving the boy to suicide.
The other thing that gets me is that they gave him a harsh punishment for a non-violent crime. There's no excuse for punishing non-violent crimes at near the same level as violent ones, and anyone who does that has a severe disorder of priorities, imho.
> and no innitative to try new things, when you didn't push him in school to try out many different activities. How can he/she find out "what they enjoy" when they aren't pushed to try new things?
If you push a kid to do new things, you almost ensure that he will have no intrest in them. Read some Psychology, or Mark Twain. That which we choose to do is play, while that which we are forced to do is work. Pushing a kid into new things is a wrong thing to do, and the worst way to make him well-rounded. If you want to lead, lead by example. Even being offered a reward for doing something we already enjoy reduces how much we enjoy it.
> Sitting at home playing Nintendo doesn't count.
It does. I know this because I did this, too. I challenged my parents to push me and crack down on me. Though they were concerned, they didn't force me into or out of anything, and I got tired of trying to tempt them, and bored of wasting my time. I started doing really fun stuff like gardening, calculus, and programming. They, of course, were thrilled.
Using their own intrinsic motivation is the only way to motivate someone for good - it is the only long-term solution.
No, I own both a copy of Windows and a "license" to use it. Do you see Microsoft giving out free copies of Windows to people who already bought licenses? M$ demands money for both.
There's no difference in the software world. It's still stealing, no matter how you may try to rationalize or justify it. The bottom line is that you're doing what you're saying your doing, "using something without the authors' permission" which in plain and simple words is stealing.
I just copied your entire post. You didn't give me permission to. Did I violate your copyright? If I did, how much would be okay? If I didn't, how long would your post have to be before I was wrong to copy it?
You've equated authorship with ownership. They are not the same thing. Stealing is when you take something away from someone. The kind of copyright violation I believe we are talking about is copying, not stealing. The only thing the owner of the original copy of the information has lost is exclusivity. Exclusivity does not exist, just like shadows do not exist - both are defined as the absence of something else. If I shine a light, I am not stealing shadows, I am spreading light and driving away darkness. If I copy and distribute a copyrighted work, I am not stealing exclusivity from the author or publisher, I am spreading the art and driving away the artificial scarcity of that art.
Please don't misunderstand me. Copies of information can be owned. I own copies of Windows and of Startide Rising. I do not own the words in the book or the bytes on the CD, but I own the book and the CD. If you took my book away from me, you would be stealing. If you go to the library and read Startide Rising, you have not stolen anything from David Brin or anybody else. If you listen to music on the radio and change the station every time commercials come on, you're still not stealing.
Taking something that belongs to someone else is stealing. Using something without the author's permission? Why would I need the author's permission? I've copied articles out of magazines.(for education, for research) Is that stealing? If it is, it's stealing no matter what I use it for. If it isn't, then I should be allowed to do whatever I want with it, as long as I am not hurting anybody else.
BTW, potential profits also cannot be stolen because they don't belong to the profiter yet. Potential profits are a guess of future success in business, not of some inherent right. The RIAA lost a lot of potential profits to me when I found out what they had done. Am I stealing from them because I am boycotting them?
A friend of mine who writes webpages would be the one to talk to about this, but she's not here. This is what I gather from her:
Netscape is not very tolerant of bad code. IE is more tolerant of certain types of errors. Frontpage will introduce those errors and make Netscape load only a blank screen. Load a page made by Frontpage, look at "View Source" and the html comes up, but nothing is rendered on the screen. The idea is to give Netscape a bad reputation. As Frontpage use becomes more common, Netscape works on fewer and fewer sites.
I'm no expert on this, but she is. I've personally seen two pages that were made with Frontpage, and neither of them loaded with Netscape 4.x, but did with IE. I didn't have Mozilla at the time, so I couldn't try that. I wish I remembered where those two sites were. I remember that one was written by a tesla coiler who lived in my town and the other was a *professional* newspaper website, if you can believe that!
This problem is apparantly well-known in web authoring circles. I don't know. She's very good at what she does but I'm afraid I can't quite keep up with her sometimes.
"People only use Mozilla to spite MS..."
No, I use Mozilla because IE hasn't been ported to Linux, and even if it was I wouldn't trust it. I would, however, keep it around for looking at pages that wouldn't work in Netscape/Mozilla.
I don't use IE, not to spite MS, but because I don't have Windows. If I had a bigger hard drive, I'd be happy to install an old used copy of Windows and IE. I wouldn't get anything new because I refuse to support the MS monopoly. That part may be for spite, but using Mozilla isn't.
"Netscape 6 and Mozilla are better, but there no where *near* as fast as IE 5.5 or IE 6b. This is not MS bias, this is just the truth."
From what I have seen, I agree with you. Another advantage of IE is that it loads more of the pages on the web than Netscape does because Frontpage is deliberately broken.
On the other hand, Windows 3.1, NT, and 9x are nowhere near as fast or stable as Linux. I can't speak for 2K or ME because I haven't seen those, but I have seen 3.1, NT, and 9x, and imho they are completely nuts. I've used Linux heavily and exclusively for one or two years and during this time my system has crashed *once* and that was because I didn't give it enough virtual memory. I am very happy with what I have.
Sadly, MS has not seen fit to port IE to Linux. If they do, I'll consider installing it. With the permissions of a two year old, of course.
Not steal. It's "use without authors' permission." Has anything important ever been stolen from you? There's a huge difference between unauthorized copying and stealing.
Not only are you being inaccurate, you're insulting people who have had something stolen from them.
> "it is the nature of music to be free"
> What kind of h0r$e$h!t is that? I love music of all kinds. I listen to as much as I can. I respect the musicians who work hard to create it. And I believe in compensating them for it, not turning around and telling them that I shouldn't pay them because, hey, it's the nature of music to be free.
Music has always been free up until the last century or so. That's what I'm talking about by the nature of music.
I respect musicians as well as all artists, too. I believe in supporting them, and I believe we should all support them: voluntarily, not by force. I simply don't believe they should be able to use force to extract support out of people.
I don't like Napster, either, btw. I think it's a company run by a bunch of spoiled, selfish people who got together to hurt the record industry. I also happen to think the record industry is controlled by spoiled, selfish people.
But how can I have anything against Napster users? What were they doing that they couldn't have done at the library, or by listening to the radio? Or for that matter, by bootlegging tapes? What makes those things not-so-bad and suddenly Napster is evil?
I've spend months at libraries, reading books for free that I never intended to buy. I suppose you're going to tell me I'm a book pirate. Not that it matters that I buy books very frequently now.
"#1 even in the purest form, this is theft."
No, it's not. You should read about zero-sum games.
"#2 no one is going to get up and say it is not."
*stands up*
It's not theft. It's copyright violation. I'll tell that to anyone.
*sits down*
"#3 The only point you have it the record companies are big evil bastards, and we deserve the music for free because they bent us over for years."
No, we deserve the music for free (beer) because it is the nature of the price of anything that can be copied infinitely to approach zero.
We deserve the music for free (speech) because it is the nature of music to be free and it is only recently, with the rise of the corporate police state, that it has been any different.
"#4 They need to find a better, cheap way to distribute music. Until they do I am going to pilage every thing I see."
Not pillage, not pirate, not steal. Violation of copyright. There's a world of difference there. If you want to convince anyone, get your definitions straight. You use words like theft and pillage because you want to make people get emotional and angry at Napster users. That's a Big Lie, and I'm calling you on it.
You call copyright violation pillaging, piracy, and theft. You, Sir Coward, are a liar.
They can, too. Corporations donate property all the time to charities or various community groups. It's called building goodwill with potential customers, and many companies do it.
Mind you, not that anything intellectual should be classified as property, but I digress...
As for "in the interests of profit," there are many times where sueing people for violating patents or copyrights is not profitable, and companies look the other way. Unlike trademarks, copyrights and patents do not have to be constantly enforced to retain their legal strength.
I seem to remember a little company that gave its patented algorithm away for free, let it become established, and then started suing anyone who wrote programs that used this algorithm. Also, record and movie companies don't pursue copyright violators unless the violators either A: pose some great threat to them or B: have a lot of money that can be stolen via settlements.
There are many different reasons that a company might not enforce IP, ranging from altruistic through selfish down to just plain stupid.
If Apple has wronged the opensource community, it doesn't matter who they answer to first. If it's wrong for Apple to include BSD-licensed code in their programs, they should not have done it even if it was the only way to keep from going out of business. It is not wronging their stockholders to not wrong the opensource community.
OTOH, I'm not convinced Apple's done anything wrong here, so it's no big deal to me. You seem to be implying, though, that it's okay for Apple to do bad things if it helps their stockholders. I'm sure that's not what you meant, but that's how it came across at first.
Ah, whatever. Posting now...
"Those are some of the realities of the business world, it is done in every industry by every company every day all the time."
And you call that an excuse? Maybe it is okay, but not because everyone does it. "Everyone" in the US used to do slavery. "Everyone" in old mexico practiced cannibalism.
"Did Linus write the Linux kernel from scratch?"
At first, yes. Later, he had help from volunteers all over the world. Your point?
"No, he essentially ported Unix to X86."
Linus wrote the kernel so it would be compatible with GNU. The FSF ported Unix to X86. Get your facts straight, please.
"Microsoft buys technology because they can."
Are you saying this makes it okay for M$ to buy technology? It does not.
You are a jerk because of the way you talked to grub. Please apologize to him.
You also excuse Microsoft for predatory and anticompetitive business practices. Do you believe in a free market? A Microsoft monopoly will kill the free market in this area. Do you believe in a well-regulated economy? Microsoft has broken the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and a similar, later act that I have forgotten the name for, as well as copyright law. Microsoft has also abused patent law and contract law.
You defend a corporation that is predatory and dangerous, you insult and whine about a poster who was peacefully expressing his opinion, and you got your facts wrong.
Again, you owe grub an apology.
I don't pay much attension to the code behind the scenes, but the OSS that I've used has been sometimes a lot worse, and sometimes a lot better than the CSS I've used. Most of the time it's about the same. However, there are four major areas where OSS is far better than CSS.
1: Practical. Updates and upgrades actually help. They fix bugs and improve performance. OSS projects start out worse than CSS ones, and then they get better.
2: Emotional. No legal threats in the software license. I don't like threats.
3: Ethical. It's free (as in beer) quite often. CSS is also sometimes free as in beer, but it's very rarely if ever free as in speech. I like being free, and I like supporting people who want me to be free.
4: Customizable. You can take apart an OSS program and change it in any way you want. I like control of my computer. I don't like giving corporations control of my computer.
"On the other hand, perhaps open source has something to offer, even if it is just a cheap way to exploit programmers."
Troll.
How can you defend this?
"Slashdotters, engage in some honest self-assessment before you dispute this. Can you code, or should you maybe keep your mouth shut about this?"
I can code.
"And just how much of a typical linux distro can you defend as useful?"
For me? About 500 megs of Debian. The rest I don't install.
"Linux today is turning rapidly into what windows was four or five years ago."
Support? Any at all? How do you justify this?
"Windows, in case you haven't looked in the last four or five years (and those still claiming it crashes all the time obviously haven't), is getting better."
I am sometimes forced to use Windows for some things and it still disgusts me. It is wasteful, unstable, slow, unconfigurable, and incompatible.
I would agree that nobody's being forced to go digital. Personally, I don't care about TV, analog or digital.
I've already left TV in favor of books, the internet, and Other Things.
People are being forced off of analog, though, and that sucks. I agree with you and the poster you are replying to.
This could be made into a good thing, though, by increasing the numbers of people who have left beind TV and movies altogether. Trouble is, in order to make it a good thing for you, you'd have to leave TV.