Here in the Netherlands cell phone providers have been forced to let customers keep their existing phone numbers from competitors for a few years now. They don't charge extra for it (I don't think they're allowed, the mobile phone business is very strictly regulated over here), but they do have a tendency to take much longer to port your number than they should. I think it works moderately well, prices aren't exactly low but I think they'd be signigicantly higher without mandatory number portability.
Slashdot doesn't allow accents for some reason. Here's what happens when I type an o-umlaut: "o". And here's what happens when I use ö: "". Especially that last thing is very strange, why on earth does Slashdot not allow entity tags?! I know we're not allowed to complain about Slashdot's US-centeredness, but this is ridiculuous...
There is a small plastic gearbox that works a bit like the differential in a car.
If the robot is on the ground then the gearbox turns the little wheels and the robot moves forward.
When the robot gets stuck the force of the motor has to go somewhere and the gearbox 'slips' and rotates the turret instead (until the wheels start moving again).
I had battery operated toy cars tenty years ago that worked like that! They'd drive around the room, automatically changing direction whenever they hit an obstacle.
My main argument why spam is evil is that it costs me money. The spammer is forcing me to spend money downloading his crap, since I have a dial-up Internet connection and metered local calls (and no alternatives), so I pay for every byte I have to download. Morally, I consider it to be on the same level as theft, since the spammers cause me to lose money (not to mention time) without me gaining anything in return.
Not really. You need to think past the simplistic "because it's the law" argument and ask yourself *why* "stealing" is "bad".
Where did I say "because it's the law"?! A lot of people put their time, energy and money into creating the thing that you're stealing, and they deserve and depend on receiving compensation. It's immoral to take advantage of them by benefitting from their work (it doesn't matter whether the work was creating and distributing a stick of gum or a piece of music) without compensating them (except when you have their permission).
The moral case should be enough, but in addition you're (contributing to) depriving them of income, since even if you yourself would not have bought the music had you not stolen it, there will certainly be those in the long, long chain of people who benefit from the copy you stole (by downloading your copy over a P2P network for instance) who would have otherwise bought it.
Both of these arguments are essentially the same for stealing a stick of gum and for illegally copying music.
It's because physical and "intellectual" property are fundamentally different.
Maybe, but stealing the "property" comes down to the same thing. If it was OK to copy music to whomever you want as often as you want without compensating the people who made and distributed it, most people would do so, and the music industry would certainly collapse, just like there would quickly not be any chewing gum on the market anymore if everybody stole it instead of buying it.
You're being pedantic. Of course what I said is factually incorrect, to be entirely factually correct would take many orders of magnitude more words than the crowd here is generally willing to read, so what good would that do?
The point is that buying a CD does not give you either the moral, or the legal right of doing whatever you want with the music, which is what was being implied in the original post. Music companies say you're not allowed to copy their music. The law backs them up. Morally, they have a right to do that. If you copy it nonetheless, you're doing something that's legally and morally wrong.
> Stealing music is the equivalent of shoplifting.
Bollocks. They're not even remotely similar crimes (legally *or* morally).
Don't just assert something, argue it.
In my opinion illegally copying music is exactly like shoplifting. Not something expensive, but say, a pack of gum. You're taking something without paying that you (rightly) have to pay for. You may think it's too expensive, but the only correct response to that is not to buy it.
There's a word for taking something without paying that you should pay for: "stealing". There's also a word for a person who steals: "thief". It really is that simple. If you think it isn't, explain what you think the fundamental difference is between illegally copying digital music and shoplifting a pack of gum.
You own the medium, yes. You can do with it whatever you want, for example in your case you're free to stick it up your ass.
You don't own the music that's on the medium. In a moral sense, the music is still owned by the artist, since he created it. In a legal sense, it's owned by whomever the artist sold his copyrights to. Copyright law says that whoever owns the copyright to something gets to tell what you can do with it, and music companies tell you that you can't copy music they own, you can only listen to it privately. You may not like this, but that's the way it is.
Fair use says that a copyright owner can't sue for certain things, such as making a personal backup copy or copying a small sample, but it's still technically illegal. None of this is wrong, if you think it is, please specify exactly what you think is wrong about it and what you think the truth is, backed up by some facts, instead of just randomly insulting people.
That's also true when you buy a CD or a tape or acquire music on any other medium. You don't own the music, you just get a license to play the copy of the music you received, and then only in private. You can't copy it (fair use just says copyright holders can't sue in certain circumstances), you can't broadast it, etc.
You only ever own the music you write and perform yourself...
Security issues caused by low-level buffer overruns have vanished.
They haven't. What will happen is that the thousands of C/C++ developers who will eventually flock to C# will not have the patience to learn to program in a safe way. Instead, they will use the "unsafe code" feature which allows pointer arithmetic, so they can continue to program the way they're used to. The result will be the same kinds of security problems that C code has always been plagued by. Unsafe code is a very bad idea and one of the big drawbacks of.NET.
Companies should compete on implementations, not standards. We already had a perfectly good web application platform specification in J2EE. What Microsoft should have done is make a better JDK and application server. Instead, they rip off Java and create their own platform, yet again showing their total contempt for the best interests of the market.
All music I buy is ripped and transferred to a servers and various portable MP3 players as soon as it enters my house. The CD dissappears into a box never to be seen again, so including cover and inlay graphics would not be an incentive for me.
I suspect that there are already many people for whom this is true and the number will only increase in the future, so I don't think that's the way to go to sell MP3's.
Personally, I don't really need any more incentive past good quality (I rip my MP3's in VBR to about the same size as 192 kbit CBR MP3's), a reasonable price (say, 0.75 per song?) and no restrictions on what I do with the file.
I envy you; you obviously have a broadband, flat-rate Internet connection in your home, at work, in your car, in the park, in the train, in the air, everywhere! Very cool, where can I get that?
You're missing the point. The benchmark does try to measure real-world performance, and the problem here is that the driver is optimized in such a way that only the benchmark runs faster. So it's not the benchmark that's useless, it's the driver that's cheating.
While I agree with your point, I think Lord of the Rings is not a good example, since PJ actually made an effort to use all kinds of special and visual effects besides CGI. For example, most of the hobbit-human size difference was achieved with forced perspective (even shots where the camera moves relative to the actors), which is about as old-fashioned as you could want. Also, huge models and real locations were used extensively where most other movies these days would have just gone for computer animation. This fact (of not being lazy about using CGI) is one of the things why I like the LOTR movies so much and why PJ is now my favorite director.
They are probably talking about the finals, which are not done over the web. It wouldn't do you much good to cheat in the preliminaries if you have to do it all on your own in the finals, you'd sink like a stone...
Presuming you're American, you would use feet, pounds, find metric too complicated, etc, etc - so probably wont care if it does.
Except that the definition of the American pounds is based on the kilogram, so it actually does affect Americans when the kilogram diminishes in mass, because that means the pound does too!
...to hear that their own imperial units are also based on the SI. The inch, for instance, is defined to be exactly 2.54 centimeters, and the pound is defined to be exactly 453.59237 gram. So, when the kilogram dimishes in mass, so does the American pound!
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the Netherlands cell phone providers have been forced to let customers keep their existing phone numbers from competitors for a few years now. They don't charge extra for it (I don't think they're allowed, the mobile phone business is very strictly regulated over here), but they do have a tendency to take much longer to port your number than they should. I think it works moderately well, prices aren't exactly low but I think they'd be signigicantly higher without mandatory number portability.
Slashdot doesn't allow accents for some reason. Here's what happens when I type an o-umlaut: "o". And here's what happens when I use ö: "". Especially that last thing is very strange, why on earth does Slashdot not allow entity tags?! I know we're not allowed to complain about Slashdot's US-centeredness, but this is ridiculuous...
There is a small plastic gearbox that works a bit like the differential in a car. If the robot is on the ground then the gearbox turns the little wheels and the robot moves forward. When the robot gets stuck the force of the motor has to go somewhere and the gearbox 'slips' and rotates the turret instead (until the wheels start moving again).
I had battery operated toy cars tenty years ago that worked like that! They'd drive around the room, automatically changing direction whenever they hit an obstacle.
Who the hell modded parent as "funny"?!
My main argument why spam is evil is that it costs me money. The spammer is forcing me to spend money downloading his crap, since I have a dial-up Internet connection and metered local calls (and no alternatives), so I pay for every byte I have to download. Morally, I consider it to be on the same level as theft, since the spammers cause me to lose money (not to mention time) without me gaining anything in return.
How did you manage to type an o where you meant an a when those letters are on opposite ends of the keyboard? :)
Now you too can easily pay your expensive $32 license fee, in four easy installments of $10!
Where did I say "because it's the law"?! A lot of people put their time, energy and money into creating the thing that you're stealing, and they deserve and depend on receiving compensation. It's immoral to take advantage of them by benefitting from their work (it doesn't matter whether the work was creating and distributing a stick of gum or a piece of music) without compensating them (except when you have their permission).
The moral case should be enough, but in addition you're (contributing to) depriving them of income, since even if you yourself would not have bought the music had you not stolen it, there will certainly be those in the long, long chain of people who benefit from the copy you stole (by downloading your copy over a P2P network for instance) who would have otherwise bought it.
Both of these arguments are essentially the same for stealing a stick of gum and for illegally copying music.
It's because physical and "intellectual" property are fundamentally different.
Maybe, but stealing the "property" comes down to the same thing. If it was OK to copy music to whomever you want as often as you want without compensating the people who made and distributed it, most people would do so, and the music industry would certainly collapse, just like there would quickly not be any chewing gum on the market anymore if everybody stole it instead of buying it.
The point is that buying a CD does not give you either the moral, or the legal right of doing whatever you want with the music, which is what was being implied in the original post. Music companies say you're not allowed to copy their music. The law backs them up. Morally, they have a right to do that. If you copy it nonetheless, you're doing something that's legally and morally wrong.
Bollocks. They're not even remotely similar crimes (legally *or* morally).
Don't just assert something, argue it.
In my opinion illegally copying music is exactly like shoplifting. Not something expensive, but say, a pack of gum. You're taking something without paying that you (rightly) have to pay for. You may think it's too expensive, but the only correct response to that is not to buy it.
There's a word for taking something without paying that you should pay for: "stealing". There's also a word for a person who steals: "thief". It really is that simple. If you think it isn't, explain what you think the fundamental difference is between illegally copying digital music and shoplifting a pack of gum.
You own the medium, yes. You can do with it whatever you want, for example in your case you're free to stick it up your ass.
You don't own the music that's on the medium. In a moral sense, the music is still owned by the artist, since he created it. In a legal sense, it's owned by whomever the artist sold his copyrights to. Copyright law says that whoever owns the copyright to something gets to tell what you can do with it, and music companies tell you that you can't copy music they own, you can only listen to it privately. You may not like this, but that's the way it is.
Fair use says that a copyright owner can't sue for certain things, such as making a personal backup copy or copying a small sample, but it's still technically illegal. None of this is wrong, if you think it is, please specify exactly what you think is wrong about it and what you think the truth is, backed up by some facts, instead of just randomly insulting people.
That's also true when you buy a CD or a tape or acquire music on any other medium. You don't own the music, you just get a license to play the copy of the music you received, and then only in private. You can't copy it (fair use just says copyright holders can't sue in certain circumstances), you can't broadast it, etc.
You only ever own the music you write and perform yourself...
Security issues caused by low-level buffer overruns have vanished.
They haven't. What will happen is that the thousands of C/C++ developers who will eventually flock to C# will not have the patience to learn to program in a safe way. Instead, they will use the "unsafe code" feature which allows pointer arithmetic, so they can continue to program the way they're used to. The result will be the same kinds of security problems that C code has always been plagued by. Unsafe code is a very bad idea and one of the big drawbacks of .NET.
Companies should compete on implementations, not standards. We already had a perfectly good web application platform specification in J2EE. What Microsoft should have done is make a better JDK and application server. Instead, they rip off Java and create their own platform, yet again showing their total contempt for the best interests of the market.
Subject says it all...
All music I buy is ripped and transferred to a servers and various portable MP3 players as soon as it enters my house. The CD dissappears into a box never to be seen again, so including cover and inlay graphics would not be an incentive for me.
I suspect that there are already many people for whom this is true and the number will only increase in the future, so I don't think that's the way to go to sell MP3's.
Personally, I don't really need any more incentive past good quality (I rip my MP3's in VBR to about the same size as 192 kbit CBR MP3's), a reasonable price (say, 0.75 per song?) and no restrictions on what I do with the file.
What?
"Who are the Borg?"
I envy you; you obviously have a broadband, flat-rate Internet connection in your home, at work, in your car, in the park, in the train, in the air, everywhere! Very cool, where can I get that?
You're missing the point. The benchmark does try to measure real-world performance, and the problem here is that the driver is optimized in such a way that only the benchmark runs faster. So it's not the benchmark that's useless, it's the driver that's cheating.
While I agree with your point, I think Lord of the Rings is not a good example, since PJ actually made an effort to use all kinds of special and visual effects besides CGI. For example, most of the hobbit-human size difference was achieved with forced perspective (even shots where the camera moves relative to the actors), which is about as old-fashioned as you could want. Also, huge models and real locations were used extensively where most other movies these days would have just gone for computer animation. This fact (of not being lazy about using CGI) is one of the things why I like the LOTR movies so much and why PJ is now my favorite director.
They are probably talking about the finals, which are not done over the web. It wouldn't do you much good to cheat in the preliminaries if you have to do it all on your own in the finals, you'd sink like a stone...
A rouge nation? As in, the French word for red? How ironic...
> and why should I care if it detoritates?
Presuming you're American, you would use feet, pounds, find metric too complicated, etc, etc - so probably wont care if it does.
Except that the definition of the American pounds is based on the kilogram, so it actually does affect Americans when the kilogram diminishes in mass, because that means the pound does too!
...to hear that their own imperial units are also based on the SI. The inch, for instance, is defined to be exactly 2.54 centimeters, and the pound is defined to be exactly 453.59237 gram. So, when the kilogram dimishes in mass, so does the American pound!