...we can finally change copyright back to 50 years...
why not 17? Or even shorter. Seriously. The reason why copyright was established (to recuperate publishing costs) is a non-issue in modern society. It only makes sense to abolish copyright laws.
just out of randomness, I built a crossbow during summer vacation. Me and my friends had a bunch of free time, knives, and scrap wood from a freshly cut down tree. We took sticks, notched them, made a bow, ect. We all competed against eachother. One of my adversaries actually developed a working lock mechanism so he could fire his bolt at the click of a switch.
512MB a crime? I would have to disagree. I've been gaming on a computer with 512MB of ram and an 8 year old athlon-xp. I've played HL2, CS:S, as many Q3A mods as I can count, and a few others. With Windows, the computer starts to crawl after about a month. I don't blame the hardware though. I blame the operating system. I have had ArchLinux running flawlessly on the same box for about 6 months now and I was using Gentoo for about a year before that.
Windows became a pain, having to be reinstalled on a monthly basis (I even had to call Microsoft once and have them reactivate my product key). I'm glad I dumped it (along with as much proprietary software as I could - with the exception of those wretched video drivers).
Wal-Mart sells physical items. When you steal a physical item from Wal-Mart, someone looses money. When you copy information from someone, they still have everything they did before and suffer no loss. It's your pencil, your blank piece of paper. You should certainly be allowed to write whatever you want on it. You should certainly be allowed to hand out copies of that piece of paper without worrying about a $10,000 lawsuit. Intellectual Property law does nothing but hinder the growth of the publics' intellect.
The original purpose of copyright was to motivate people to produce creative works. It was not intended for these creative works to be restricted from public use until 70 years after the death of the author of the work. We also notice all over the internet that people are creating all sorts of creative works with no compensation. Look to sites such as jamendo, YTMND, or Something Awful. Look at all of the hundreds of thousands of blogs. Look at the Free Software movement. All of these communities are built upon sharing information and media with the community. There is no form of compensation to the users of these communities, yet they still produce works. There is no need for copyright.
Copyright shouldn't create monopolies for the sake of milking the public for money for the next century. It should create strictly limited monopolies to recoup development and publishing costs of the work. The copyright laws of today are completely counter-intuitive and unfair. I enjoy many works which were published over a decade before I was even born, and yet a monopoly is still held on them.
If you think this is far-fetched, pay The Pirate Party a visit. Action must be taken if we want anything to change.
The beginners are the ones who want convenience. Those of us who have been listening to music for a while, or do our own recording, can easily pick out the shitty quality. If it weren't for the RIAA's slimeball tactics, I would buy CDs of a lot of the music I listen to (but I refuse to reward theit behavior with money)
I am on AT&T's, and believe me, it's not much better.
Nor is Verizon's - Just incase anyone was curious. (They eat packets coming to certian incoming ports to prevent hosting servers. I see this as discrimanatory. A connection to the internet should be a connection to the internet. It shouldn't be a home/enterprise sort of thing. It should sell by the tube, not what passes through the tube.)
This should not have been modded 'funny.' It is a very insightful statement. Look at all of the shit Microsoft throws together in the name of copy prevention. There are several millions of dollars invested in developing these anti-piracy systems. All of this money is waisted though, because for each measure in mathematics, there is a countermeasure. Perhaps if Microsoft spent their time making improvements to their operating system, instead of causing problems and downtime for their unfortunate customers all over the world, Windows Vista wouldn't be the flop that it is.
Enter Free Software. Volunteers who donate their time to free software understand that their time is limited. They don't waist any of it on useless features - especially features that would inhibit the rest of their useful work. I'm a very picky person, yet I've survived solely upon free software for about a year now and I'm getting along pretty fine. Those of you who are still using Windows and complaining about it should really consider making the jump. Freedom is worth a month or so of inconvenience as you get used to a new operating system.
I say we return copyright expiration to a sensible period (about 10 years should be good) and see how these fucking recording companies do instead trying to fix their broken business model which is based on corrupted copyright laws. The world's governments cradle the corporations so much it makes me sick.
You are uninformed. The zealotry is not for the operating system, but for the freedom of what you can do with it and to it. You don't get the same freedom with proprietary software products. Any OS containing proprietary software has less features - not more - in my opinion.
What would you prefer? Would you rather pay money to these scumbags or protest through downloading/sharing files? The choice is a clear one to me. I will protest. They can't sue the whole country, can they?
Exactly. And this is what grants proprietary software vendors their monopoly on the desktop market. Without support for the world's more common video and audio codecs, (MP3, MPEG, much more) we all have to make the decision of weither to (knowingly and intentionally - big fines) infringe on patents to run our desktops the way we'd like, or to use an artificially worsened system. You can't use true-type fonts (the right way) without infringing on patents, the alternative is a hack. There are patents on many commercial file formats which are used to lock in consumers (look at OOXML for example). There are patents on almost everything.
There are actually several patents on the linked list (not that they would hold up in court).
I had a forced class on all of Microsoft's office products in my freshman year of highschool. This world sucks. There's not all too much we can seriously do about it:(.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! I wish verizon would open ports for me like that. The fuckers.
"Birth is a miracle!"
Not when you're 16.
just out of randomness, I built a crossbow during summer vacation. Me and my friends had a bunch of free time, knives, and scrap wood from a freshly cut down tree. We took sticks, notched them, made a bow, ect. We all competed against eachother. One of my adversaries actually developed a working lock mechanism so he could fire his bolt at the click of a switch.
It's a ballpark estimate. I didn't search through the dump to find all my sales receipts and determine the actual date of purchase.
There is an outstanding difference between stolen code and a stolen physical object. You cannot compare.
Just goes to show how out-of-touch the author of TFA is.
512MB a crime? I would have to disagree. I've been gaming on a computer with 512MB of ram and an 8 year old athlon-xp. I've played HL2, CS:S, as many Q3A mods as I can count, and a few others. With Windows, the computer starts to crawl after about a month. I don't blame the hardware though. I blame the operating system. I have had ArchLinux running flawlessly on the same box for about 6 months now and I was using Gentoo for about a year before that.
Windows became a pain, having to be reinstalled on a monthly basis (I even had to call Microsoft once and have them reactivate my product key). I'm glad I dumped it (along with as much proprietary software as I could - with the exception of those wretched video drivers).
The joke is on you. I'm running a spectacularly configured desktop system and am beholding to no monopolies.
Wal-Mart sells physical items. When you steal a physical item from Wal-Mart, someone looses money. When you copy information from someone, they still have everything they did before and suffer no loss. It's your pencil, your blank piece of paper. You should certainly be allowed to write whatever you want on it. You should certainly be allowed to hand out copies of that piece of paper without worrying about a $10,000 lawsuit. Intellectual Property law does nothing but hinder the growth of the publics' intellect.
The original purpose of copyright was to motivate people to produce creative works. It was not intended for these creative works to be restricted from public use until 70 years after the death of the author of the work. We also notice all over the internet that people are creating all sorts of creative works with no compensation. Look to sites such as jamendo, YTMND, or Something Awful. Look at all of the hundreds of thousands of blogs. Look at the Free Software movement. All of these communities are built upon sharing information and media with the community. There is no form of compensation to the users of these communities, yet they still produce works. There is no need for copyright.
Copyright shouldn't create monopolies for the sake of milking the public for money for the next century. It should create strictly limited monopolies to recoup development and publishing costs of the work. The copyright laws of today are completely counter-intuitive and unfair. I enjoy many works which were published over a decade before I was even born, and yet a monopoly is still held on them.
If you think this is far-fetched, pay The Pirate Party a visit. Action must be taken if we want anything to change.
The beginners are the ones who want convenience. Those of us who have been listening to music for a while, or do our own recording, can easily pick out the shitty quality. If it weren't for the RIAA's slimeball tactics, I would buy CDs of a lot of the music I listen to (but I refuse to reward theit behavior with money)
all this shit should be public domain now anyway.
This should not have been modded 'funny.' It is a very insightful statement. Look at all of the shit Microsoft throws together in the name of copy prevention. There are several millions of dollars invested in developing these anti-piracy systems. All of this money is waisted though, because for each measure in mathematics, there is a countermeasure. Perhaps if Microsoft spent their time making improvements to their operating system, instead of causing problems and downtime for their unfortunate customers all over the world, Windows Vista wouldn't be the flop that it is.
Enter Free Software. Volunteers who donate their time to free software understand that their time is limited. They don't waist any of it on useless features - especially features that would inhibit the rest of their useful work. I'm a very picky person, yet I've survived solely upon free software for about a year now and I'm getting along pretty fine. Those of you who are still using Windows and complaining about it should really consider making the jump. Freedom is worth a month or so of inconvenience as you get used to a new operating system.
I say we return copyright expiration to a sensible period (about 10 years should be good) and see how these fucking recording companies do instead trying to fix their broken business model which is based on corrupted copyright laws. The world's governments cradle the corporations so much it makes me sick.
No, instead we will have TheVideoBay. We won't even need to worry about the content being taken down.
But does it run on linux?
I would be nice to see that happen just to spite lawmakers. Perhaps the site isn't tailored to be accessible, but any site is better then no site.
I dumped Windows like the dirty bitch she is and ran off with GNU.
You are uninformed. The zealotry is not for the operating system, but for the freedom of what you can do with it and to it. You don't get the same freedom with proprietary software products. Any OS containing proprietary software has less features - not more - in my opinion.
What would you prefer? Would you rather pay money to these scumbags or protest through downloading/sharing files? The choice is a clear one to me. I will protest. They can't sue the whole country, can they?
Exactly. And this is what grants proprietary software vendors their monopoly on the desktop market. Without support for the world's more common video and audio codecs, (MP3, MPEG, much more) we all have to make the decision of weither to (knowingly and intentionally - big fines) infringe on patents to run our desktops the way we'd like, or to use an artificially worsened system. You can't use true-type fonts (the right way) without infringing on patents, the alternative is a hack. There are patents on many commercial file formats which are used to lock in consumers (look at OOXML for example). There are patents on almost everything. There are actually several patents on the linked list (not that they would hold up in court).
100k is less then 222k
Just out of curiosity, why do you use outdated software?
I had a forced class on all of Microsoft's office products in my freshman year of highschool. This world sucks. There's not all too much we can seriously do about it :(.