Bah. Until certain whiners in the OSS community gets off their asses and work on the existing OSS implementations instead of demanding a non-OSS implementation should be opened up, it's simply not worth it debating with them like that.
Basically, you have a contract with ISP A, and Google has a contract with ISP B. Both of you are paying for access and bandwidth. ISP A also wants you to use their portal/services to generate ad revenue, but they suck (I assume) compared to the popular sites. So ISP A wants compensation from Google/whatever or else the traffic from Google to you is throttled. Note that this is a different reason from the other one listed, that they need money to upgrade because of the increased traffic - as others have pointed out, they never upgrade anyway and there's plenty of unused capacity.
What ISP A ignores is 1) the demand for "compensation" from another ISP's customer is pretty close to extortion 2) Google could not care less that a tiny, tiny fraction of their potential users are blocked. The loser in the case of a block is YOU, the ISP A customer. And you will probably want to switch to ISP C, which does not have such blocking.
Yes, because referring to someone's blog beats referring to e.g. a court decision answering the question of whether ISP have common carrier status or not. Blogs rule! Courts are so last century! Opinion is king!
Securing a studio and some session musicians; Finding an engineer and mixer to create a commercial-quality recording; Publicity photos, and wardrobe and makeup consultants, so I can get some attention amongst the thousands of other pretty people who are vying for attention; Getting my music reproduced on CD and distributed to thousands of radio stations (and I also want somebody to call all these radio stations to pester them to play it); Some publicity, so that magazines and newspapers will write about me; Some advertising and promotion -- and I don't mean that "put it on P2P and let people spread it via word of mouth" promotion that everybody gets for free. I want real advertising and promotion. Arranging some concert gigs to promote my music -- including booking, transportation, and all the various minor expenses and details.
It's amazing that the music industry apparently has made you believe all of those are necessary to make and publish music. Are you in a hurry to become a cocaine-addicted star or something? R.E.M. spent years on the road before making their first album - that was what brought their dominance.
Think of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. One man, a basement, three instruments and a four-track recorder. Hailed as one of the best acoustic (except the electric guitar on "Open All Night") albums ever. Admittedly, he could "ride the coattails" of a success (The River) though.
And why should you as a musican have it any easier establishing a business than a non-musican? Either you become a worker-for-hire for some soulless corporation (which is what your checklist will lead to) or you actually strike out on your own. Perhaps you can publish your self-recorded and mixed (do you really need more than Garageband on a Mac?) on eMusic or Magnatune? Perhaps take up a loan for the initial finances - you know like what practically EVERY OTHER START-UP has to do?
If you are a musican, you'll have to ask yourself if you want to be a slave to the system ("work" for the music publishers you sign over your rights to) or be your own master.
the producer creates content to entertain you at a set cost, and you acquire the entertainment without paying the cost.... to the creator. Just like when you buy a second-hand product from someone: No money beyond the initial purchase goes to the creator, yet more than the original purchaser benefits from the item. Any such arguments against copying is also an argument against second-hand sales.
In most cases I am not paying the creator anyway: I am paying a chain of companies (record company/publisher, distributor, retailer) that have interposed themselves between the creator and me, each taking a "cut" of the money. Sometimes a very large cut. How did these companies manage to convince the creator they were necessary in the age of digital content? They are leeches who have yet to wake up to the fact that their business model is faulty.
Not to mention that original copyright laws - a time-limited monopoly - has been twisted into an abomination that only serves the industries. Seventy years after the creator's death? Combined with "work-for-hire" clauses which effectively makes a company the "creator"? Society is not served by that, only the media megacorporations.
This argument drives me nuts. They're not selling you the paper on which the book was printed. They are selling you the entertainment/knowledge/whatever you derive from the content of the book.
Actually, they are selling you both. After you have consumed the content of your purchased book/CD/DVD you can sell it second-hand. Though the industries are fighting that tooth and nail. Well, except the retailers like EB Games, which actively support the practice.
1) How pathetic must you be to waste your time downloading shit you don't value?
Ooh, your level of discourse is... not high, really. How do you know how good something is without sampling it?
2) If you delete a bunch of vital information on a company's server, would you use the defense that "I didn't physically destroy anything, I just realigned some bits on a hard drive"?
What the heck does that have to do with the subject? Are you a believer in the "taking data from somewhere removes it" theories of William Gibson? When he wrote Neuromancer he knew very little about how computers worked, which he admitted.
it is THEFT in the "I'm taking something that I'm not authorized to take" sense.
But not in the legal sense. Which is the sense that matters. It's "theft" only in the "the industry wants to abuse words for scare-mongering while insulting their lawful customers by putting unskippable 'Don't be a thief' shit at the beginning of my DVDs" sense.
Explain why a business owner in Vietnam should pay the same $200 for software as the American businessman, when incomes in Vietnam are less than one tenth of American incomes?
The businessman just chooses that he shouldn't be the one to go hungry because of over-prices software.
And don't pretend software companies are making no money. They are just making slightly less than they theoretically could, but for many illegal users, the option for legal use simply is unaffordable so they wouldn't have been real customers anyway.
I'm desperately trying to figure out when Slashdot became pro-piracy.
There's a difference between "pro-piracy" and "anti-equating-illegal-copying-with-theft-or-pirac y". Why can't people be allowed to point out fallacies in the BSA and *AA's arguments? Or attack the mis-appropriation of existing terms (theft and piracy) that obviously are used to manipulate opinion?
Is this another one of the "those that aren't with me are with the enemy, the terrorists" ploys?
the fact that the software, music, or other intellectual property was stolen.
If I walk into a store, nab a CD and run, then I stole it. If I download some binary data somewhere, it's not stolen. Can people (including BSA and *AA) stop mis-applying the term? It's illegally copied, a violation of a totally different part of law than the one that governs theft.
Someone who downloads and uses digital "intellectual property" (a term invented when they stopped making works of art) does not misappropriate one of the publisher's physical products. That product is still in a store ready to be purchased. However, the person is "leeching" the service that consuming the product is, without having paid the rights holders for that privilege. Violations of copyright are closer to taking a bus ride without paying the fare.
The industries' mistake is that they have both licensed content (music, movies, software) and physical product (disks), and try to get the "advantages" of both (advantages for them and not the customers), while denying consumers any of their rights (like the "first sale doctrine" - second-hand market is destroyed by using online registered keys). With the politicans firmly in the lobbyist pocket, the angry consumers resort to the only path available to protest: "civil disobedience" against the corporations running the country. So piracy of these industry-work-for-hire products is akin to the Boston Tea Party in a way...
The problem is that the company makes (product[s]) while the union only makes money. Off of its members.
Well, it's financed by members much like PBS is financed by subscribers. In both cases, those paying do so because they feel they get something in return, whether it's Six Feet Under or legal counseling if the member feels wronged by an employer.
A union member DOES NOT work for the union. He pays for a service, with the money earned by working for the company. It's the same way you don't WORK for your ISP when you pay them a fee for your internet connection.
Do you believe that Karl Marx did not consider the economy to be a zero-sum model? He didn't, he knew the added value of labor. What he also knew was the negative value of administration and owners skimming the fruits of the same labor. So you should ideally work for yourself (as in, worker ownership of companies).
I used to work for a company that tried to "fix" its economy by changing to a system where a part of your salary was dependent on results. During the "push" of this system, it was presented in a way that tried to sell it as a potential raise (if results were good). However, it stunk badly.
First, since the system was introduced to reduce expenses, the average salaries would go down. Second, to administer the system, ten new economists were hired, none of which had to submit to the system. Third, it was said that the system's introduction was to prevent staff reductions - reductions that came shortly thereafter anyway.
So I left. I don't like working for weasels.
My point is: I was a worker (contributor), the people behind the salary scheme were leeches on what us workers did. That was the kind of people Marx disliked.
Unions did kill the industries you mention. No. The American auto industry was killed because the naïve assumption that American buyers would pick American cars no matter the quality was wrong. So better-quality, lower-consumption Japanese and European cars smashed into them like an iceberg.
But of course management couldn't face up to having been wrong, so the "blame game" started, and the unions were a target. Thanks for contributing to the further spread of the anti-union
American workers are expensive because excessive consumption has driven up prices and hence wages in relative terms to the (socialist) societies of India and China. So you lose in the labor market.
Intelligent Design is truth: but the designers were aliens. Proof? Scriptures unearthed in the 1980s and 1990, written by St. Adams and St. Pratchett. The theory of Douglas Adams was that the Earth was made as a supercomputer to find the Great Question about Life, the Universe and Everything. Terry Pratchett's theory is that the Earth is 70,000 years old and was made by a (literal) terraforming company that put in the fossils as jokes.
Cue long discussion regarding open sourcing Java... AT&T didn't opensource C/C++ - the "community" wrote GCC. Why can't the "community" write and use a Java implementation instead of demanding the free-as-in-beer implementation should be opened up?
Slashdot Mirror
ACID2 test: It fails miserably, just like every other browser out there
Except Konqueror, Safari and Opera 9.
Bah. Until certain whiners in the OSS community gets off their asses and work on the existing OSS implementations instead of demanding a non-OSS implementation should be opened up, it's simply not worth it debating with them like that.
It's not like GCC was written by AT&T.
(concat (reverse (string-to-list "I can do that just as easily.")))
Oh, and Emacs rocks for other uses as well.
Basically, you have a contract with ISP A, and Google has a contract with ISP B. Both of you are paying for access and bandwidth. ISP A also wants you to use their portal/services to generate ad revenue, but they suck (I assume) compared to the popular sites. So ISP A wants compensation from Google/whatever or else the traffic from Google to you is throttled. Note that this is a different reason from the other one listed, that they need money to upgrade because of the increased traffic - as others have pointed out, they never upgrade anyway and there's plenty of unused capacity.
What ISP A ignores is
1) the demand for "compensation" from another ISP's customer is pretty close to extortion
2) Google could not care less that a tiny, tiny fraction of their potential users are blocked. The loser in the case of a block is YOU, the ISP A customer. And you will probably want to switch to ISP C, which does not have such blocking.
Yes, because referring to someone's blog beats referring to e.g. a court decision answering the question of whether ISP have common carrier status or not. Blogs rule! Courts are so last century! Opinion is king!
Securing a studio and some session musicians;
Finding an engineer and mixer to create a commercial-quality recording;
Publicity photos, and wardrobe and makeup consultants, so I can get some attention amongst the thousands of other pretty people who are vying for attention;
Getting my music reproduced on CD and distributed to thousands of radio stations (and I also want somebody to call all these radio stations to pester them to play it);
Some publicity, so that magazines and newspapers will write about me;
Some advertising and promotion -- and I don't mean that "put it on P2P and let people spread it via word of mouth" promotion that everybody gets for free. I want real advertising and promotion.
Arranging some concert gigs to promote my music -- including booking, transportation, and all the various minor expenses and details.
It's amazing that the music industry apparently has made you believe all of those are necessary to make and publish music. Are you in a hurry to become a cocaine-addicted star or something? R.E.M. spent years on the road before making their first album - that was what brought their dominance.
Think of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. One man, a basement, three instruments and a four-track recorder. Hailed as one of the best acoustic (except the electric guitar on "Open All Night") albums ever. Admittedly, he could "ride the coattails" of a success (The River) though.
And why should you as a musican have it any easier establishing a business than a non-musican? Either you become a worker-for-hire for some soulless corporation (which is what your checklist will lead to) or you actually strike out on your own. Perhaps you can publish your self-recorded and mixed (do you really need more than Garageband on a Mac?) on eMusic or Magnatune? Perhaps take up a loan for the initial finances - you know like what practically EVERY OTHER START-UP has to do?
If you are a musican, you'll have to ask yourself if you want to be a slave to the system ("work" for the music publishers you sign over your rights to) or be your own master.
You know, to report on any under-age drinking. Um.
the producer creates content to entertain you at a set cost, and you acquire the entertainment without paying the cost. ... to the creator. Just like when you buy a second-hand product from someone: No money beyond the initial purchase goes to the creator, yet more than the original purchaser benefits from the item. Any such arguments against copying is also an argument against second-hand sales.
In most cases I am not paying the creator anyway: I am paying a chain of companies (record company/publisher, distributor, retailer) that have interposed themselves between the creator and me, each taking a "cut" of the money. Sometimes a very large cut. How did these companies manage to convince the creator they were necessary in the age of digital content? They are leeches who have yet to wake up to the fact that their business model is faulty.
Not to mention that original copyright laws - a time-limited monopoly - has been twisted into an abomination that only serves the industries. Seventy years after the creator's death? Combined with "work-for-hire" clauses which effectively makes a company the "creator"? Society is not served by that, only the media megacorporations.
This argument drives me nuts. They're not selling you the paper on which the book was printed. They are selling you the entertainment/knowledge/whatever you derive from the content of the book.
Actually, they are selling you both. After you have consumed the content of your purchased book/CD/DVD you can sell it second-hand. Though the industries are fighting that tooth and nail. Well, except the retailers like EB Games, which actively support the practice.
1) How pathetic must you be to waste your time downloading shit you don't value?
Ooh, your level of discourse is... not high, really. How do you know how good something is without sampling it?
2) If you delete a bunch of vital information on a company's server, would you use the defense that "I didn't physically destroy anything, I just realigned some bits on a hard drive"?
What the heck does that have to do with the subject? Are you a believer in the "taking data from somewhere removes it" theories of William Gibson? When he wrote Neuromancer he knew very little about how computers worked, which he admitted.
it is THEFT in the "I'm taking something that I'm not authorized to take" sense.
But not in the legal sense. Which is the sense that matters. It's "theft" only in the "the industry wants to abuse words for scare-mongering while insulting their lawful customers by putting unskippable 'Don't be a thief' shit at the beginning of my DVDs" sense.
Explain why a business owner in Vietnam should pay the same $200 for software as the American businessman, when incomes in Vietnam are less than one tenth of American incomes?
The businessman just chooses that he shouldn't be the one to go hungry because of over-prices software.
And don't pretend software companies are making no money. They are just making slightly less than they theoretically could, but for many illegal users, the option for legal use simply is unaffordable so they wouldn't have been real customers anyway.
I'm desperately trying to figure out when Slashdot became pro-piracy.
c y". Why can't people be allowed to point out fallacies in the BSA and *AA's arguments? Or attack the mis-appropriation of existing terms (theft and piracy) that obviously are used to manipulate opinion?
There's a difference between "pro-piracy" and "anti-equating-illegal-copying-with-theft-or-pira
Is this another one of the "those that aren't with me are with the enemy, the terrorists" ploys?
the fact that the software, music, or other intellectual property was stolen.
If I walk into a store, nab a CD and run, then I stole it. If I download some binary data somewhere, it's not stolen. Can people (including BSA and *AA) stop mis-applying the term? It's illegally copied, a violation of a totally different part of law than the one that governs theft.
Someone who downloads and uses digital "intellectual property" (a term invented when they stopped making works of art) does not misappropriate one of the publisher's physical products. That product is still in a store ready to be purchased. However, the person is "leeching" the service that consuming the product is, without having paid the rights holders for that privilege. Violations of copyright are closer to taking a bus ride without paying the fare.
The industries' mistake is that they have both licensed content (music, movies, software) and physical product (disks), and try to get the "advantages" of both (advantages for them and not the customers), while denying consumers any of their rights (like the "first sale doctrine" - second-hand market is destroyed by using online registered keys). With the politicans firmly in the lobbyist pocket, the angry consumers resort to the only path available to protest: "civil disobedience" against the corporations running the country. So piracy of these industry-work-for-hire products is akin to the Boston Tea Party in a way...
The problem is that the company makes (product[s]) while the union only makes money. Off of its members.
Well, it's financed by members much like PBS is financed by subscribers. In both cases, those paying do so because they feel they get something in return, whether it's Six Feet Under or legal counseling if the member feels wronged by an employer.
A union member DOES NOT work for the union. He pays for a service, with the money earned by working for the company. It's the same way you don't WORK for your ISP when you pay them a fee for your internet connection.
But the company is worthless if there aren't any employees to do the work that generates revenue.
Do you believe that Karl Marx did not consider the economy to be a zero-sum model?
He didn't, he knew the added value of labor. What he also knew was the negative value of administration and owners skimming the fruits of the same labor. So you should ideally work for yourself (as in, worker ownership of companies).
I used to work for a company that tried to "fix" its economy by changing to a system where a part of your salary was dependent on results. During the "push" of this system, it was presented in a way that tried to sell it as a potential raise (if results were good). However, it stunk badly.
First, since the system was introduced to reduce expenses, the average salaries would go down. Second, to administer the system, ten new economists were hired, none of which had to submit to the system. Third, it was said that the system's introduction was to prevent staff reductions - reductions that came shortly thereafter anyway.
So I left. I don't like working for weasels.
My point is: I was a worker (contributor), the people behind the salary scheme were leeches on what us workers did. That was the kind of people Marx disliked.
Unions did kill the industries you mention.
No. The American auto industry was killed because the naïve assumption that American buyers would pick American cars no matter the quality was wrong. So better-quality, lower-consumption Japanese and European cars smashed into them like an iceberg.
But of course management couldn't face up to having been wrong, so the "blame game" started, and the unions were a target. Thanks for contributing to the further spread of the anti-union
American workers are expensive because excessive consumption has driven up prices and hence wages in relative terms to the (socialist) societies of India and China. So you lose in the labor market.
"Pizza Hut" ... which is a German name ("Hut" being the hat in the logo), and hence should be pronounced like "hoot".
Intelligent Design is truth: but the designers were aliens. Proof? Scriptures unearthed in the 1980s and 1990, written by St. Adams and St. Pratchett. The theory of Douglas Adams was that the Earth was made as a supercomputer to find the Great Question about Life, the Universe and Everything. Terry Pratchett's theory is that the Earth is 70,000 years old and was made by a (literal) terraforming company that put in the fossils as jokes.
See? It all makes sense.
God created Adam. Then she looked in the mirror, said "oops!" and created Eve.
(Proof that God is female: The movie "Dogma". Got any proof to counter that? Huh? Thought not.)
Where did the 4.5 million come from? Worldwide, the subscription numbers have passed 6 million.
The key point the Blizzard are rolling in teh dough still stands of course. Even firmer, if anything.
Great! Now go back to your memory-leaking, buffer overrrun-vulnerable C++ and oh-so-modern CORBA tools.
Cue long discussion regarding open sourcing Java...
AT&T didn't opensource C/C++ - the "community" wrote GCC. Why can't the "community" write and use a Java implementation instead of demanding the free-as-in-beer implementation should be opened up?
This is Slashdot in normal mode: Now they are linking to other sites' stories (as they usually do), except the stories are April Fool's articles.
(Personally I am waiting for QBasic on Rails.)
That would be easy since Hasbro ("Hasborg") own Wizards of the Coast.
Trademark that, b!tches.