- Hundreds of students cower under desks waiting be rescued from 1 man with 2 handguns, and the only person to do ANYTHING is an octogenarian who gets killed for his efforts to protect the strong, healthy, 18-22 year old "adults" hiding in fear. The most played interview is of a young man who was simply waiting to die. He is called "heroic".
- Hundreds of students cower under desks waiting be rescued from 1 man with 2 handguns, and the only person to do ANYTHING is an octogenarian who gets killed for his efforts to protect the strong, healthy, 18-22 year old "adults" hiding in fear. The most played interview is of a young man who was simply waiting to die. He is called "heroic".
Real strong words from an anonymous poster on the Internet. But I'm willing to bet that if you were in the same situation, where you had to choose between trying to fight or flee, you would flee. Do you regularly carry your revolver around with you to class, just in case something like this happens? Did you go to college where sudden bursts of armed gunmen were routine?
How about not labeling those who were merely trying to keep themselves from being killed in the only way they know how as "cowards"?
I never said that at all. All I said was that there are and continue to be victims in this. The fact that said victims are a minority of people does not mean that we should discount them due to the inevitable failure of the recording labels to try and stop people from copying. Just because they will fail long-term doesn't mean that their short-term actions are inconsequential.
Unfortunately, traditional methods like that won't work here. If enough people do this to cause a significant dent in revenue, the RIAA and MPAA will blame it all on "piracy" and only use it to continue to fuel their cause even further.
Doing the reverse won't help either. Surges in revenue will only give them the ability to say "See, our tactics are working" or "We're making progress, but we have to ramp it up."
PS: I fail to understand why listening to the radio is counterproductive, but buying used CDs is not.
...that we may already be able to see where, in general, the future will lead with regard to copyright enforcement. The music industry has more or less given up on DRM; there were enough places that started selling DRM-free music, and made a mint at it, that the big dogs finally gave up. Why?
Because Steve Jobs refused to allow price hikes with DRM, and would not license FairPlay to competitors nor support non-FairPlay DRM on iPods. The labels had three choices: bow to Jobs and sell on the iTunes Store for 99 cents, open competing stores that use incompatible DRM but (supposedly) work on a number of less popular players, or sell DRM-free. Because the iPod failed to be usurped by a PlaysForSure player, the competing stores had poor success. The only way a competing store could sell to iPod customers was to use DRM-free formats that the iPod supports. Hence the abandonment of DRM at non-Apple stores. The DRM drop in the iTunes Store was so that the labels could have flexible pricing.
So yes, the labels did the right thing, but not for the right reasons.
If everyone had the "why pay when I can take it for free?" philosophy, the record labels would have gone bankrupt years ago.
Clearly there are a good amount of people that believe that there is value (monetarily speaking) in copyrightable works, even if the Internet had made the direct payment for them, for all practical purposes, optional.
Thanks to cable and satellite companies encrypting everything, most TVs today are dumb monitors. The TV companies probably would not even bother putting tuners in the sets if the FCC didn't mandate it.
The day I can plug in a tuner card or TV set or anything else directly into the digital cable feed and have the thing work without CableCARD or other such nonsense is the day that digital cable becomes "open."
Copyrighted works are not the same thing as private property. Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted by the government for the express purpose of providing incentives for the creation of further copyrightable works. Just as copyright is granted by the government, so too is it taken away when copyrightable works expire and are placed into the public domain. Copyright can not be infinite, or else it would violate the Constitution.
This is in complete contrast to private property. Private property is yours for life. It does not expire after a set term. It is not a right that exists only because it was granted to you by the government. No one is allowed to take it from you, not even the government (at least, not without just compensation).
The Mozilla EULA doesn't say anything similar to the clause in the Chrome terms, yet they somehow managed to avoid a lawsuit. Moreover, both EULAs can be avoided completely by compiling from the freely-licensed source code.
The Chrome clause seems to be more related to a service than to a product. Probably more legal recycling by Google.
But if and when public perception has changed, but no one feels the need to change the law because it is so easy to ignore, then the law does not change.
Consider this: the other side is represented very well in Congress. If all viewpoints are not represented in the debate, then it just makes the decision to do as the other side desires all the easier for our elected officials. It is hard to perceive an issue in the system if no one complains.
Just because a stupid law is basically unenforceable does not mean that it should not be repealed.
It's attitudes like yours that are the reason these awful laws continue to be on the books. Rather than participate in governmental policy and try to reform the law, too many people are just subverting it, retarding progress and allowing for the possibility of even worse laws in the future.
We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice. If we do this, we will post the changes to these Terms of Use on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the date these terms were last revised. Your continued use of the Service or the Site after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use.
Basically, if you continue to use the service, you have accepted the changes regardless of whether or not you knew about them. As far as Facebook is concerned, it is your responsibility to check the ToS date and look for changes before accessing the site.
Slashdot Mirror
Far from it. But at least now I can send collaborative documents in their native ODF instead of having to convert them to the binary formats first.
Fair enough. My last sentence is invalid. But I stand by the rest of my post.
- Hundreds of students cower under desks waiting be rescued from 1 man with 2 handguns, and the only person to do ANYTHING is an octogenarian who gets killed for his efforts to protect the strong, healthy, 18-22 year old "adults" hiding in fear. The most played interview is of a young man who was simply waiting to die. He is called "heroic".
- Hundreds of students cower under desks waiting be rescued from 1 man with 2 handguns, and the only person to do ANYTHING is an octogenarian who gets killed for his efforts to protect the strong, healthy, 18-22 year old "adults" hiding in fear. The most played interview is of a young man who was simply waiting to die. He is called "heroic".
Real strong words from an anonymous poster on the Internet. But I'm willing to bet that if you were in the same situation, where you had to choose between trying to fight or flee, you would flee. Do you regularly carry your revolver around with you to class, just in case something like this happens? Did you go to college where sudden bursts of armed gunmen were routine?
How about not labeling those who were merely trying to keep themselves from being killed in the only way they know how as "cowards"?
Um, what?
I never said that at all. All I said was that there are and continue to be victims in this. The fact that said victims are a minority of people does not mean that we should discount them due to the inevitable failure of the recording labels to try and stop people from copying. Just because they will fail long-term doesn't mean that their short-term actions are inconsequential.
Unfortunately, traditional methods like that won't work here. If enough people do this to cause a significant dent in revenue, the RIAA and MPAA will blame it all on "piracy" and only use it to continue to fuel their cause even further.
Doing the reverse won't help either. Surges in revenue will only give them the ability to say "See, our tactics are working" or "We're making progress, but we have to ramp it up."
PS: I fail to understand why listening to the radio is counterproductive, but buying used CDs is not.
...that we may already be able to see where, in general, the future will lead with regard to copyright enforcement. The music industry has more or less given up on DRM; there were enough places that started selling DRM-free music, and made a mint at it, that the big dogs finally gave up. Why?
Because Steve Jobs refused to allow price hikes with DRM, and would not license FairPlay to competitors nor support non-FairPlay DRM on iPods. The labels had three choices: bow to Jobs and sell on the iTunes Store for 99 cents, open competing stores that use incompatible DRM but (supposedly) work on a number of less popular players, or sell DRM-free. Because the iPod failed to be usurped by a PlaysForSure player, the competing stores had poor success. The only way a competing store could sell to iPod customers was to use DRM-free formats that the iPod supports. Hence the abandonment of DRM at non-Apple stores. The DRM drop in the iTunes Store was so that the labels could have flexible pricing.
So yes, the labels did the right thing, but not for the right reasons.
If everyone had the "why pay when I can take it for free?" philosophy, the record labels would have gone bankrupt years ago.
Clearly there are a good amount of people that believe that there is value (monetarily speaking) in copyrightable works, even if the Internet had made the direct payment for them, for all practical purposes, optional.
I'm sure the "occasional grandmother or soccer mom" that was bankrupted cares about this very much.
Third law? I thought it was the second law of thermodynamics that says that not all heat can be converted back into energy.
So why don't they submit it to a standards body? They did it with PDF.
Thanks to cable and satellite companies encrypting everything, most TVs today are dumb monitors. The TV companies probably would not even bother putting tuners in the sets if the FCC didn't mandate it.
The day I can plug in a tuner card or TV set or anything else directly into the digital cable feed and have the thing work without CableCARD or other such nonsense is the day that digital cable becomes "open."
Three words: solar panel roof.
Copyrighted works are not the same thing as private property. Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted by the government for the express purpose of providing incentives for the creation of further copyrightable works. Just as copyright is granted by the government, so too is it taken away when copyrightable works expire and are placed into the public domain. Copyright can not be infinite, or else it would violate the Constitution.
This is in complete contrast to private property. Private property is yours for life. It does not expire after a set term. It is not a right that exists only because it was granted to you by the government. No one is allowed to take it from you, not even the government (at least, not without just compensation).
When developers stop writing software for Windows XP. That is when people will start to upgrade.
Mandriva and Ubuntu are not community distributions.
Why on Earth would you want WGA updates?
I'm sorry to say that this guy is dead on. As of this post, of the nearly 50 netbooks Newegg sells, only 4 do not have Windows preinstalled.
Graphics make the game? I guess no one told all of those Wii customers.
Compiz Fusion might be the culprit. Try turning it off before playing.
The Mozilla EULA doesn't say anything similar to the clause in the Chrome terms, yet they somehow managed to avoid a lawsuit. Moreover, both EULAs can be avoided completely by compiling from the freely-licensed source code.
The Chrome clause seems to be more related to a service than to a product. Probably more legal recycling by Google.
But if and when public perception has changed, but no one feels the need to change the law because it is so easy to ignore, then the law does not change.
Consider this: the other side is represented very well in Congress. If all viewpoints are not represented in the debate, then it just makes the decision to do as the other side desires all the easier for our elected officials. It is hard to perceive an issue in the system if no one complains.
Just because a stupid law is basically unenforceable does not mean that it should not be repealed.
It's attitudes like yours that are the reason these awful laws continue to be on the books. Rather than participate in governmental policy and try to reform the law, too many people are just subverting it, retarding progress and allowing for the possibility of even worse laws in the future.
From Facebook's ToS:
We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice. If we do this, we will post the changes to these Terms of Use on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the date these terms were last revised. Your continued use of the Service or the Site after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use.
Basically, if you continue to use the service, you have accepted the changes regardless of whether or not you knew about them. As far as Facebook is concerned, it is your responsibility to check the ToS date and look for changes before accessing the site.