Children develop their interests in a more effective and ultimately more fulfilling way when they are guided to take an approach that will teach them to understand and really get inside what they are doing, rather than taking a shortcut to the exciting bit.
For instance, I play guitar, and whenever anyone asks me about playing guitar the first thing I recommend is to put away the electric guitar and practice amp they just bought and go and buy a streel-string acoustic. I know that many people, particularly teenagers, want to play electric, but I also know that people who learn to play chords and listen properly to what they are doing ultimately become better guitarists than those who pick up an electric and thrash away.
I agree with the former poster that, for children who are genuinely interested in computers, learning about the CLI and learning some basic programming first would be much more rewarding eventually than just getting hooked up to Facebook and World of Warcraft. Your examples are spurious because you suggest frustrating a child by giving them something totally different than what they want. This is about guiding them to pursue and enjoy something without missing out on the fundamentals.
Another example would be radio. When I was 6 or 7 years old I was interested in radio. I'm glad my Dad bought me a crystal radio set that I put together myself and learnt about how a receiver works. He understood that I was at least as interested in the technology as I was in the music, and that just buying me an FM receiver would have been a great shame.
I didn't say eBay didn't have a monopoly on auction sites, I said that the integration of PayPal isn't an abuse of monopoly. Read my post again. Tight integration with a payment system isn't abuse of monopoly powers, because payment systems are an integral part of an e-commerce website. To make the Microsoft analogy, they were found to have abused their monopoly powers by bundling IE *and* penalising their supply chain for pre-installing alternatives, but they weren't in trouble for including their FAT32 file system because that's an integrated part of the operating system, and anyone buying an operating system would expect it to be integrated with a filing system.
As a side note, I think it's unlikely that Microsoft would have been found guilty if they were tried in 2010, because it's common for a web browser to be tightly integrated with the OS, and they're really sold as one product. In the '90s browser wars, MS abused their monopoly status in operating systems to try to dominate a different market. In 2010, although there are alternative web browsers, all consumer operating systems have a tightly integrated browser and it's really one product.
Actually, PayPal do have call centres. They have an invitation-only helpline (at least in the UK) which they issue to customers that have done a certain amount of business with them. One of the nice things is, they can do dispute resolution immediately. I've had a couple of sellers try to rip me off, and I've opened a dispute on PayPal and then called the helpline the next day. Usually they listen and then authorise a refund pending confirmation of the goods being returned. If you make enough fuss, you can even talk to their agents who are proper analysts that can authorise chargebacks and suchlike rather than just the call centre script-readers. Via email the process takes 2-3 weeks.
Well, not really. Abuse of monopoly is about using monopoly status in one market to drive sales of a product in a different market. At the time of the IE/Windows issues, it was common for people to buy/download a web browser for their operating system, a market which Microsoft killed by bundling IE. They also penalised system builders who tried to include an alternative browser by threatening to change their licensing terms. Payment processing is an integral part of all websites that sell merchandise. eBay allow a variety of payment methods, but recently have made it mandatory for sellers to accept PayPal in most categories. They've also recently banned Western Union, but I think that was more about preventing fraud. I don't think payment processing can really be considered a separate product.
...if your cell phone heats up the side of your head your holding it to then your body isn't going to react to that heat in the same manner.
Sounds clever, but you're totally wrong. If you cause local heating to a part of the body, then the capillaries in that area will dilate, increasing the blood flow in order to bring the temperature back to normal. If there's enough local heating, it will cause the systemic response that you describe, but to be honest I think it would be impossible to do that (except in torture I suppose) because the individual would withdraw the body part before any systemic response would be needed.
In the UK I'm pretty sure this practice wouldn't be allowed, and wouldn't even need to go to court, the FSA would deal with it. I've not come across it on any UK-based sites so far.
I've found that you can get a long way by complaining. I signed up for a credit card offered by Amazon (I'm in the UK) with 10 months' interest-free credit. I have the money, but why not get the interest and/or invest in other things on their credit, right? On my second statement I had a huge amount added on for interest etc. as I had supposedly missed a 'minimum payment'. I phoned them up and said that I had never seen any warning that the 'interest free' period required a minimum payment, and they took the payments and the interest charges straight off. Consumer protection law is really strong in the UK.
When you buy a DVD, you're buying a piece of plastic with bits on it. Why is it anyone's business what you do with those bits?
Because, as a society, we've chosen to create a temporary artifical monopoly on creative works so that the artist can profit from them in order to encourge the creation of more works. The particular arrangement of those bits happens to be pleasing to many people, and it has taken a vast amount of time and money to acheive that arrangement. If the artist(s) don't receive reasonable renumeration, it is unlikely that they will continue to arrange bits in a way that many people find to be pleasing.
Are you willing to extend this to everyone? For example, if I buy a suit to wear to a dinner party, and you buy the same suit to wear to an interview that lands you a high-paying job, is it unfair that the tailor makes the same profit from both of us: should he get a cut of your salary instead?
No. The tailor can continue to make suits and profit from them regardless of the use you put them to. However, for a DVD, if the purchaser could perform that DVD to crowds and profit from it, the market for further sales, cinema showings etc., would totally disappear. That would be a bad thing for the reasons above.
You do understand that [restrictive] copyright is optional, don't you? Artists and film-makers are perfectly at liberty to release their works into the public domain and allow distribution by any means, just like Free/Open Source Software. With the proliferation of cheap bandwidth, there's no longer the argument that artists need to use the industry to be able to distribute their works.
The reality is that most artists/film makers/lighting designers/costume designers/recordists etc. etc., need to put food on the table and therefore would like their work to be protected for a period of time so that they can make money out of it. Even LInux is now mostly created by paid developers. The difference between software and, e.g., the film industry, is that it's possible to create high-quality software as a by-product of another profitable business (e.g. support) whereas it's difficult to create a movie and then sell some other related thing in order to actually put food on the table.
It's prevented so that content creators get paid in proportion to the money being made from their creation. When you buy a DVD you're buying a license to "perform" that DVD in a particular context, and for a retail sale that means a private view in a private home. If you wish to do anything else with it, you need a separate/additional license. For instance, my church carries a license to screen films, without which it would be a breach of the copyright terms of the DVD I purchased. Shops who buy DVDs for rental pay a lot more (I think in the hundred pound region in the UK) for the same reason.
These rules were created to deal with the specific issues of sound and motion performances which differ from, e.g. books, where they don't have to be "performed" in order to be enjoyed by the purchaser. Another interesting one is play scripts. In the UK, there are restrictions on the licensing of play scripts a certain distance from the West End [of London]. When I was at school we had to be very careful about the timing of plays we wanted to perform because we were within an easy train journey of London.
I'm very against the indefinite extension of copyright terms, but I'm totally in agreement that the licensing of creative works should be in proportion to the likely profits to be made from them by the purchaser (which in the case of retail DVD/Blu-Ray should be zero). If we want to have a system where content creators are granted a time-limited monopoly on their created work, it is necessary to have licenses under different terms and at different costs depending on the intended use.
I don't think I've ever seen a photo of Bill Watterson, but having just seen the article, I have to say... Bill Watterson looks like Calvin's Dad! Or, rather, Calvin's Dad looks like Bill Watterson. Maybe this is old news, but it's news to me:D.
It's not me that says I have a license, it's the RIAA who claim that you don't buy a CD, you license the music and buy a copy of the media. I'm not trying to make any analogy at all, it's a concrete example of 'fair use' to counter the GP's claim that "there is no fair use for downloading an entire song, movie or TV show". For instance, I have no problem "pirating" copies of software for which I have licenses, for instance I have at least 3 older small form factor PCs which have Windows XP stickers with license codes, but only 1 disk floating around that I would use to reinstall. If I lost that, then I would happily download a copy of XP from somewhere on the 'net, and my only concern would be its legitimacy in terms of not being riddled with trojans.
You have a Tiger system on which you wish to run Windows 7? Unless it's an early Mac Pro... uh, have fun. And if you do have an early Mac Pro, why are you running it with an OS that's two generations out of date?
Boot Camp is not just a boot manager, it includes tools to share files between the two installations. Those features are supported in Snow Leopard, which is a $30 upgrade from Leopard.
Is it really unreasonable for Apple to require a $30 upgrade to get support for the latest Microsoft operating system? I guess if you see a Mac as a generic PC that ought to be able to run any operating system, then maybe (although many smaller manufacturers will _never_ release Windows 7 drivers for their older hardware). However, Boot Camp is more than a boot manager, and it's designed to get the two systems running alongside each other with the minimum hassle. Requiring you to use the latest version of their OS to do that isn't really unreasonable at all.
I'm not sure property is an 'artificial concept'. Animals will display behaviour that shows a sense of ownership over a particular object, and humans have had a concept of ownership since pre-history. Copyright, however - the idea that an arrangement of words, notes, pigments etc. should be controlled and restricted - is very much a pragmatic (and arguably useful) invention, that certainly has no parallel in nature. The problem is, copyright has been conflated with ownership such that many people who produce creative works feel that they have a natural right to completely control that work for perpetuity, even when the copying of that work actually causes them no material loss at all. And, to that end, many people have tried to cast the copying of an arrangement of words, notes or pigments as 'stealing' even though the creator of said arrangement has not had any property taken.
Their claim of lost sales is bogus, we all know that, but so is the claim that it's not stealing since you wouldn't have bought it anyway.
It's not stealing because it's not stealing. Stealing is when you permanently deprive someone of their property. It's also not a whole load of other crimes that have nothing to do with the transfer of digital information, e.g. it's not arson (even though you've "burned up their profits") and it's not assault (even though you've "hit them where it hurts"). Pretending it's a particular crime to make it sound worse just makes debate more difficult and confuses the issue.
There is no fair use for downloading an entire song, movie or TV show. There is no justification that makes this ok.
What about this - you bought the CD (apparently a 'license' according to the RIAA) and the CD got scratched, or accidentally thrown away, or in some other fashion damaged. So you download mp3s of the tracks that it contains. If you bought a license to keep and listen to the songs, surely that would be entirely fair use?
Really? Take a look at this article from a week ago which pretty much describes the interface that the iPad has. I'm excited about the idea of a locked-down device. Why? Because I like my iPhone. It does everything I want it to do and nothing that I don't want it to do. It's never crashed. I'm not tempted to fill it with junk. I would love an iPad but can't afford it at the moment. I would love the ebook reader and being able to browse from the couch without my MacBook burning a hole in my legs. I would love to be able to hand it to our teenage cousins and know that they can't break it on the software side, again unlike my MacBook.
Slashdot Mirror
Children develop their interests in a more effective and ultimately more fulfilling way when they are guided to take an approach that will teach them to understand and really get inside what they are doing, rather than taking a shortcut to the exciting bit.
For instance, I play guitar, and whenever anyone asks me about playing guitar the first thing I recommend is to put away the electric guitar and practice amp they just bought and go and buy a streel-string acoustic. I know that many people, particularly teenagers, want to play electric, but I also know that people who learn to play chords and listen properly to what they are doing ultimately become better guitarists than those who pick up an electric and thrash away.
I agree with the former poster that, for children who are genuinely interested in computers, learning about the CLI and learning some basic programming first would be much more rewarding eventually than just getting hooked up to Facebook and World of Warcraft. Your examples are spurious because you suggest frustrating a child by giving them something totally different than what they want. This is about guiding them to pursue and enjoy something without missing out on the fundamentals.
Another example would be radio. When I was 6 or 7 years old I was interested in radio. I'm glad my Dad bought me a crystal radio set that I put together myself and learnt about how a receiver works. He understood that I was at least as interested in the technology as I was in the music, and that just buying me an FM receiver would have been a great shame.
My goodness, what do you think will happen to a child if you "force" them to use a CLI?
Wow! You worked all that out from one sentence.
Wow, I can't decide which you're more ignorant of: music, or art.
I didn't say eBay didn't have a monopoly on auction sites, I said that the integration of PayPal isn't an abuse of monopoly. Read my post again. Tight integration with a payment system isn't abuse of monopoly powers, because payment systems are an integral part of an e-commerce website. To make the Microsoft analogy, they were found to have abused their monopoly powers by bundling IE *and* penalising their supply chain for pre-installing alternatives, but they weren't in trouble for including their FAT32 file system because that's an integrated part of the operating system, and anyone buying an operating system would expect it to be integrated with a filing system.
As a side note, I think it's unlikely that Microsoft would have been found guilty if they were tried in 2010, because it's common for a web browser to be tightly integrated with the OS, and they're really sold as one product. In the '90s browser wars, MS abused their monopoly status in operating systems to try to dominate a different market. In 2010, although there are alternative web browsers, all consumer operating systems have a tightly integrated browser and it's really one product.
Actually, PayPal do have call centres. They have an invitation-only helpline (at least in the UK) which they issue to customers that have done a certain amount of business with them. One of the nice things is, they can do dispute resolution immediately. I've had a couple of sellers try to rip me off, and I've opened a dispute on PayPal and then called the helpline the next day. Usually they listen and then authorise a refund pending confirmation of the goods being returned. If you make enough fuss, you can even talk to their agents who are proper analysts that can authorise chargebacks and suchlike rather than just the call centre script-readers. Via email the process takes 2-3 weeks.
Well, not really. Abuse of monopoly is about using monopoly status in one market to drive sales of a product in a different market. At the time of the IE/Windows issues, it was common for people to buy/download a web browser for their operating system, a market which Microsoft killed by bundling IE. They also penalised system builders who tried to include an alternative browser by threatening to change their licensing terms. Payment processing is an integral part of all websites that sell merchandise. eBay allow a variety of payment methods, but recently have made it mandatory for sellers to accept PayPal in most categories. They've also recently banned Western Union, but I think that was more about preventing fraud. I don't think payment processing can really be considered a separate product.
Sounds clever, but you're totally wrong. If you cause local heating to a part of the body, then the capillaries in that area will dilate, increasing the blood flow in order to bring the temperature back to normal. If there's enough local heating, it will cause the systemic response that you describe, but to be honest I think it would be impossible to do that (except in torture I suppose) because the individual would withdraw the body part before any systemic response would be needed.
In the UK I'm pretty sure this practice wouldn't be allowed, and wouldn't even need to go to court, the FSA would deal with it. I've not come across it on any UK-based sites so far.
I've found that you can get a long way by complaining. I signed up for a credit card offered by Amazon (I'm in the UK) with 10 months' interest-free credit. I have the money, but why not get the interest and/or invest in other things on their credit, right? On my second statement I had a huge amount added on for interest etc. as I had supposedly missed a 'minimum payment'. I phoned them up and said that I had never seen any warning that the 'interest free' period required a minimum payment, and they took the payments and the interest charges straight off. Consumer protection law is really strong in the UK.
When you buy a DVD, you're buying a piece of plastic with bits on it. Why is it anyone's business what you do with those bits?
Because, as a society, we've chosen to create a temporary artifical monopoly on creative works so that the artist can profit from them in order to encourge the creation of more works. The particular arrangement of those bits happens to be pleasing to many people, and it has taken a vast amount of time and money to acheive that arrangement. If the artist(s) don't receive reasonable renumeration, it is unlikely that they will continue to arrange bits in a way that many people find to be pleasing.
Are you willing to extend this to everyone? For example, if I buy a suit to wear to a dinner party, and you buy the same suit to wear to an interview that lands you a high-paying job, is it unfair that the tailor makes the same profit from both of us: should he get a cut of your salary instead?
No. The tailor can continue to make suits and profit from them regardless of the use you put them to. However, for a DVD, if the purchaser could perform that DVD to crowds and profit from it, the market for further sales, cinema showings etc., would totally disappear. That would be a bad thing for the reasons above.
Hmm.. based on that photo, maybe Uncle Max + Calvin's Dad's glasses would be about right.
You do understand that [restrictive] copyright is optional, don't you? Artists and film-makers are perfectly at liberty to release their works into the public domain and allow distribution by any means, just like Free/Open Source Software. With the proliferation of cheap bandwidth, there's no longer the argument that artists need to use the industry to be able to distribute their works.
The reality is that most artists/film makers/lighting designers/costume designers/recordists etc. etc., need to put food on the table and therefore would like their work to be protected for a period of time so that they can make money out of it. Even LInux is now mostly created by paid developers. The difference between software and, e.g., the film industry, is that it's possible to create high-quality software as a by-product of another profitable business (e.g. support) whereas it's difficult to create a movie and then sell some other related thing in order to actually put food on the table.
It's prevented so that content creators get paid in proportion to the money being made from their creation. When you buy a DVD you're buying a license to "perform" that DVD in a particular context, and for a retail sale that means a private view in a private home. If you wish to do anything else with it, you need a separate/additional license. For instance, my church carries a license to screen films, without which it would be a breach of the copyright terms of the DVD I purchased. Shops who buy DVDs for rental pay a lot more (I think in the hundred pound region in the UK) for the same reason.
These rules were created to deal with the specific issues of sound and motion performances which differ from, e.g. books, where they don't have to be "performed" in order to be enjoyed by the purchaser. Another interesting one is play scripts. In the UK, there are restrictions on the licensing of play scripts a certain distance from the West End [of London]. When I was at school we had to be very careful about the timing of plays we wanted to perform because we were within an easy train journey of London.
I'm very against the indefinite extension of copyright terms, but I'm totally in agreement that the licensing of creative works should be in proportion to the likely profits to be made from them by the purchaser (which in the case of retail DVD/Blu-Ray should be zero). If we want to have a system where content creators are granted a time-limited monopoly on their created work, it is necessary to have licenses under different terms and at different costs depending on the intended use.
I don't think I've ever seen a photo of Bill Watterson, but having just seen the article, I have to say... Bill Watterson looks like Calvin's Dad! Or, rather, Calvin's Dad looks like Bill Watterson. Maybe this is old news, but it's news to me :D.
It's not me that says I have a license, it's the RIAA who claim that you don't buy a CD, you license the music and buy a copy of the media. I'm not trying to make any analogy at all, it's a concrete example of 'fair use' to counter the GP's claim that "there is no fair use for downloading an entire song, movie or TV show". For instance, I have no problem "pirating" copies of software for which I have licenses, for instance I have at least 3 older small form factor PCs which have Windows XP stickers with license codes, but only 1 disk floating around that I would use to reinstall. If I lost that, then I would happily download a copy of XP from somewhere on the 'net, and my only concern would be its legitimacy in terms of not being riddled with trojans.
You have a Tiger system on which you wish to run Windows 7? Unless it's an early Mac Pro... uh, have fun. And if you do have an early Mac Pro, why are you running it with an OS that's two generations out of date?
Boot Camp is not just a boot manager, it includes tools to share files between the two installations. Those features are supported in Snow Leopard, which is a $30 upgrade from Leopard.
I've not had any problems getting my OEM copy of Windows XP installed under Parallels. I can't vouch for news OSs.
Is it really unreasonable for Apple to require a $30 upgrade to get support for the latest Microsoft operating system? I guess if you see a Mac as a generic PC that ought to be able to run any operating system, then maybe (although many smaller manufacturers will _never_ release Windows 7 drivers for their older hardware). However, Boot Camp is more than a boot manager, and it's designed to get the two systems running alongside each other with the minimum hassle. Requiring you to use the latest version of their OS to do that isn't really unreasonable at all.
I'm not sure property is an 'artificial concept'. Animals will display behaviour that shows a sense of ownership over a particular object, and humans have had a concept of ownership since pre-history. Copyright, however - the idea that an arrangement of words, notes, pigments etc. should be controlled and restricted - is very much a pragmatic (and arguably useful) invention, that certainly has no parallel in nature. The problem is, copyright has been conflated with ownership such that many people who produce creative works feel that they have a natural right to completely control that work for perpetuity, even when the copying of that work actually causes them no material loss at all. And, to that end, many people have tried to cast the copying of an arrangement of words, notes or pigments as 'stealing' even though the creator of said arrangement has not had any property taken.
Copyright law is _nothing to do with_ property.
Their claim of lost sales is bogus, we all know that, but so is the claim that it's not stealing since you wouldn't have bought it anyway.
It's not stealing because it's not stealing. Stealing is when you permanently deprive someone of their property. It's also not a whole load of other crimes that have nothing to do with the transfer of digital information, e.g. it's not arson (even though you've "burned up their profits") and it's not assault (even though you've "hit them where it hurts"). Pretending it's a particular crime to make it sound worse just makes debate more difficult and confuses the issue.
There is no fair use for downloading an entire song, movie or TV show. There is no justification that makes this ok.
What about this - you bought the CD (apparently a 'license' according to the RIAA) and the CD got scratched, or accidentally thrown away, or in some other fashion damaged. So you download mp3s of the tracks that it contains. If you bought a license to keep and listen to the songs, surely that would be entirely fair use?
Really? Take a look at this article from a week ago which pretty much describes the interface that the iPad has. I'm excited about the idea of a locked-down device. Why? Because I like my iPhone. It does everything I want it to do and nothing that I don't want it to do. It's never crashed. I'm not tempted to fill it with junk. I would love an iPad but can't afford it at the moment. I would love the ebook reader and being able to browse from the couch without my MacBook burning a hole in my legs. I would love to be able to hand it to our teenage cousins and know that they can't break it on the software side, again unlike my MacBook.