If I bought Apples, they'd all be out of a job! But even with these, I get a little more use out of them than the normal user...I just found out the main line of computers I have is considered to be completely out of date for my university...even if someone sends them to central surplus, I can't requisition them even for parts for my department because the university wants me to upgrade. Why? I'll be damned if I have Vista installed on any of our computers.
But job security...I buy that many to keep students working on crappy PCs and keeping them off the dope.
"Got burned on my MacBook, so I think I'll be waiting."
How exactly did you get burned? It sounds like you bought the product you wanted, at a price you found acceptable, and Apple brought out a new product sometime afterward.
You can wait all you want, and either the product will be incrementally improved or discontinued. There really is only two choices. If you buy the upgraded model, that too will be upgraded at some point. Would you complain that you were burned again?
I buy probably a dozen or more Dells a year. If I wait a year, they will have better graphic cards, more ram and probably a better processor. They don't send me emails telling me that there is going to be a new product coming out in a few months. I buy what I need when I need to. And I know that something better will be coming out soon after I buy it.
"The world is a better place with a few cover bands less..."
I completely agree. I never understand the whole sheeple bahhhing we get here on Slashdot about copyright limiting creativity...when instead it DEMANDS that if you want something of your own, you create it on your own.
I *HATE* going into a bar and seeing a coverband. Its usually enough to make me walk out. Hypocritically, I'll admit, I was in a band a few years back that did a *FEW* covers...we did a quick and dirty motown review (though two of our members actually were in the bands that did these the first time around). The venues we played required us to submit a playlist afterwards and I know these were used for licensing. If you are using someone elses creative works for the purpose of making money, why shouldn't you be required to pay a fee? Is it a fairly assessed fee? I don't know...I never got a breakdown in my royalty checks stating where the money came from (actually, I could ask, or log in I think, but I really don't care because I just know its all going to be gone the minute I hit Taco Bell anyways!)
I now have a SE Z520a as I had switched to Cingular, and I believe the previous one was a SE T610 variant...it was the only one that SE had with Bluetooth on Sprint at the time (and it was crippled in this capacity and was a waste of money...the other variants could run Java, this one could only if signed by Sprint and wouldn't sign anything that was related to BT).
My Cingular phone is almost at the point where the battery is nearly dead too...I don't think its a first gen phone issue...
But why would anyone shut off their phone? Doesn't make sense? My iPod was running constantly and actually accessing the HD and the speakers and I'd routinely find that I forgot to stop play at night and have to charge it at work to have music on my ride home. Seriously...I used it A LOT.
As for the solder? You mean you can't pull the sticky tape off the battery on the iPhone and solder two leads??? Ones that aren't even soldered to the motherboard??? I'm sorry, I thought this was slashdot...my bad...
Lets see...I replaced the battery in my 1st Gen iPod after 5 years of constant usage. Cost me $20...could have paid someone else to do it and insure the work for another $15.
I replaced the battery on my SonyErikson phone that I bought at the same time, 3 times. I use it maybe an hour a day. The batteries cost me $40 each.
Keeping count, thats $20 for the iPod before I finally gave it away and bought a nano. Thats $120 for the batteries in the phone.
So based on my knowledge of the cost of the batteries in the iPod, I'm sure there will be a service available that will allow me to send the device in and they guarantee the work for probably around $40...$50 for quick turn around (in which time, I pop my card into my ancient SE phone for a few days).
"it's probably got alot more to do with how the number of people that would be diagnosed would effect the economy."
Actually, you are right on track with this way of thinking. The DSM regularly accounts for items such as social and economic pressure...certain drugs that 'cured' certain 'illnesses' are pushed by big business, and thus if Big Pharm can get to enough psychologists to vote (and they aren't above paying people off), you get inclusion. It has happened more than once, and it will happen again.
This also works in the social aspects. The biggest example was that the DSM classified homosexuality as a deviance until the mid-70s (err...I think, I never paid much attention to the history aspects of abnormal psych). It was mostly the psychs from the US propped up by conservative Christians (err...one could argue in the 70s, even the liberal christians weren't too willing to go to bat for these people) along with rightwing politicians. Europe had long since stopped calling this a classifiable deviance. And even after it was stricken, there was a LOT of debate over physicians that refused to go by the revised edition because it didn't follow their moral ethics.
So yeah, economic, social and other pressures state what becomes diagnosable. Heck, and sometimes its right...its looking for deviance from the norm. If there are enough people away from the center, even though in another time, another place they'd have been perfectly 'normal' -- it occasionally merits inclusion, so this isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Most of psychology is trying to help folks fit in and understand themselves. Don't want to fit in, not causing any harm to others...then you are perfectly fine! I love my quirks and wouldn't do anything to change them (and all my studies in psychology have proven to me that I'm actually much more normal than most who think I'm some sort of deviant freak!)
Actually, they didn't raise the prices unless you are buying individual tracks.
I *RARELY* buy individual tracks unless I am evaluating a single and want to see if I want to buy the next one. In which case, I have like 6 months to buy the rest of the album at the cost of said album minus the cost of the tracks I've already bought.
If you want singles, feel free to get hosed. Singles have ALWAYS been the way the industry made money until recently (in which time they decided albums were pretty much going to be one single mixed with lots of shit).
And again, this is why *I* was called in to validate and calibrate the exam. It had never touched a single test taker. How good was the test? It was a hell of a lot better after my team got through with it:-)
Beyond that, quite a few things in testing are looking for application of logic. If you can discern even the slightest bit of knowledge from the wording (i.e., those latin classes? Hell, just mythology for the nerds...like me)...you can get a lot. I still failed though:-) But yes, this is exactly what an educated guess is...learning to look at content, weed out the inappropriate through what ever means you have available, and pick something from what remains.
In a well designed exam, the 'educated guess' is just as much a part of the design as anything else. You *HAVE* to have questions that have answers somewhat similar, or you make it way too easy to guess the answer by way of elimination. At the same time, we want enough questions that one can eliminate one or more questions immediately.
For instance, I'm a testing person, but not a content person (i.e., I design towards what the stats tell me, as well as the actual wording and structure of the exam...I always work with someone who understands the content areas from a very advanced level and can deal with that end). One of the last MC exams I was helping validate, I knew NOTHING about the content -- it was a medical exam. First thing I did was go through the entire exam, read all the questions quickly, and see if logic could remove any of the answers. Statistically, I would have gotten a 20% by random means, but in this case, I received somewhere around 43% (if I remember correctly). The educated guess is a BIG part of these things...you aren't just measuring content knowledge, but application and that means if someone can raise the bar, they might actually do well in the real world. If I had a doctor who had never seen a case like mine, and it defied traditional practice, I think I'd be more impressed with the man that got 40% on purely logic, than the guy that got the 40% based around actually knowing something about the problem (and actually, I had a team of doctors several years ago like this...I sat around trying to figure out how I was going to die for a couple of months while one doctor who had seen problems like mine couldn't figure out what the cause was, while the one that wasn't an expert in the field methodologically ruled out what wasn't the cause, and ended up finding me a specialist that the first doctor SHOULD have been able to do because his field encompassed a hell of a lot more of the specialty than my general physician's 'specialty').
And it kinda depends on the type of test and what you are measuring. When designing these things, you ask a lot of questions based around the type of assessment one is looking for. And you design accordingly. By correlating my exams with others that have some sense of validity, I can see the levels of the testees before they take the new one. This in itself will show you quite a few things about the design of the new exam. For instance, we can tell certain questions might have 50% of the folks answering correctly, but which 50%? On the original test, you have two groups take the exam, novices and experts (and heavily simplifying this for/.). If the experts get the question wrong, while the novices get it right -- the question is struck. Someone with little experience in test design may look at the question and wonder whats wrong -- the answer is correct and all of your colleagues agree -- but in some way it is wrongly worded. So again, it is either struck, or restructured to be inserted for calibration and validation at a later point (on a large exam like the Bar the author had derided, a good chunk of the questions are probably not scored and are only there to see how well they work and if they can be put into the next exam).
Beyond that, you have panels of experts who go over questions. Have them all vote on things like the difficulty of the item, the appropriateness for the exam. Things like that. Folks like me will take these and sort the items into usable or unusable stacks, rewrite them (again with experts), and then sort X amount of the lower difficulty, Y of the medium, Z of the hard (the easy questions are there to give motivation...its amazing how much better someone will do if they get positive reinforcement in that they KNOW this questions...it will prime the neural pathways to hopefully give more routes to specific knowledge in order to get the reward...I can feel the endorphin rush when I'm doing poorly but then get a win every now and then and it helps). And finally, one analyzes everything to see h
"Get a good music lawyer before signing anything. If the record company refuses to deal with you once you've "lawyered up" then walk away"
You know, I've never understood why this is soooooo fucking hard for musicians to understand. It is a business deal. Its not called the Music Nonprofit Organization, its the MUSIC BIZ.
The fact is, a good lawyer will be your manager and represent you. A good lawyer won't take the easy way out and kick under some side deal because they know better than 'Uncle' Frank about the consequences -- and a good lawyer might be slimey, but they are YOUR slime.
My band got thrown out the minute they found out I had a lawyer...next thing I knew, I had two others fighting over me because the word was that we were good enough to bring in the big guns (and the thrown out part was probably a negotiating tactic because I did get a few calls after that from the same guys).
Showing up without a lawyer is like the old phrase, showing up to a gun fight with a pocket knife.
Sadly, of the three options, most of my friends have gone with #3 on your list (sign the deal, 'get rich')...rarely works out (at least on the recording side). Heck, #2 isn't without just as many pitfalls as #3 -- pretty much have to give up most of the time you'd be out being a musician and learning to be a corporate whore, learning the ins and outs of business deals, equipment loans, insurance, accounting, and all that crap...I'd rather be a musician and leave this up to the folks that know what they are doing, so I can do what I know how to do.
Getting a good lawyer is the only real option. If the labels won't deal with you with one, have to say, your band sucks and you'd never have had a chance anyways...
I've heard what the man has to say, and yeah, a lot of it is typical Libertarian wacko BS.
As the same time, he hasn't been bought off by the usual suspects. Like the poster above, I would have voted for McCain in a HEARTBEAT in 2000, even knowing what I do now about Gore (Gore 2000 is a different man than Gore 2007 regardless of what he'd like to say...I still think he has been one of the most consistently smartest people in politics for 20 years, just not a great politician).
But I'll take a president that offers wacko ideas just to break the monotony. No party is going to get lockstepped behind him the way the Republicans did Bush, or partly the way the Dems did behind Clinton before the Republican uprising. Which brings up another thing -- one of the greatest things of the Clinton era was that EVERYONE had to compromise. No one got what they wanted. And because of it, there was discussion and debate and things had to happen because everyone found a common platform that they could agree on and the country had some of the largest gains because of it.
With Ron Paul, I could see the same thing happening again. I'd LOVE to see a president that actually understood how to veto. And knew when it was appropriate. Clinton understood how to do this and even tried to get a line-item veto in that would allow his to use his pen even more (unfortunately, it was passed in an unconstitutional manner...I bet if they did something like this with Riders it might actually pass the supreme's muster...errr...then again, maybe thats what it was...it was a long time ago that I read up on this stuff).
I'd love to see a real maverick running the country. I could care less if his politics match mine or not. I just don't want some jingoistic motherfucking corporate whore that seems to be able to convince the lower half of the bell curve that something is right and thus you shouldn't question nor educate yourself about such matters (you only need 51% in the US of A).
And the Fakebooks go out of their way to make certain that it is fair use. No lyrics, no nothing. Sometimes they won't even state the name of the band -- you can't copyright a title though, and thus you can get away with that.
A lot of fakebooks anymore are becoming 'authorized' fakes...they do it in the style of the old ways with just chords and adding the lyrics and band names through permission.
I'm a little mixed on this sort of stuff. Back before I was an academic (and technically anytime someone actually cares enough to ask) I was a writer and contributed to others musics...the last album I worked on was enough to put a down payment on a house (of which, you can argue that it is asinine that someone can make a few grand by writing a few words and putting it to music, or ya can say its asinine that I'm out there making certain kids get educated and can't even afford to get my '97 Saturn fixed, let alone buy a house without taking up outside employment).
Learning to play guitar now, I hit the tab sites all the time. Most of the tabs are completely wrong or just bad. Half the time, I have to sit down at my piano and transcribe out the chords and figure out what the simplest way it is to play the tune on the guitar.
The only problem I see is that if the half ass'd chords are allowed, people are going to push the lines and state that full typeset transcriptions should be legal too...and then why not the music? There is a line that can't be crossed, but both sides want it crossed and neither know just where it is. And I'm not so sure I want the line defined either...
"Your comparison to the religon and national wellfare state model is flawed, since that means you as a receiver have to pay membership fees or taxes to receive that benefit."
I've never HAD to pay anything to be a part of my church. And in this instance, I was using them as the example for welfare -- not the gov't. I'm a firm believer in the idea that welfare should be in the hands of people and not gov'ts...but until such time as we have people not being cheap and selfish, I'll accept the idea that the gov't should have to step in for now.
And that is how I feel about the GPL vs. BSD. BSD is how it SHOULD be. I've contributed patches back to BSD software for stuff that I was using and packaging with my own software. It would be stupid not to -- as a developer, I only gain from being a part of the larger group and I'm not going to close it off. Of course, there are selfish people that don't want to do this. They want it all for themselves and see the short term as opposed to the larger picture.
And thats where it all comes down to. Do you want to set a better example by giving choice? Or do you want to mandate morality? More often than not, people are going to contribute to where there is the most good. Its all in the marketing and if you throw out the aspects of the BSD as YOU CAN TAKE IT AND RUN, its as bad as the GPL as a VIRUS arguments. To me it comes down to not wanting to regulate someone's morality.
As for BSD being PD with attribution, yeah...you can look at it as that. I believe the older versions made this attribution a lot more prominant and it was a little restrictive in the fact you needed hundreds of pages of copyright / authored by notices in some instances. I think they fixed this, but who knows. The stuff I've worked on never really bothered me to take this stuff off or try to minimize it in any way. Why would I? Heck, I just don't want my name showing up anywhere -- I know my selfish bits are mostly limited to not wanting to be bothered once I resubmit the patch (and I do make certain its fully documented...heck, I'll go through and document stuff thats not mine so that I understand whats going on).
Oh noes! You put a product out for free and someone figures out how to make a business plan arounds it!1!
So when someone talks about BSD being a more mature license because it doesn't restrict what the original authors had expected, i.e., do whatever you want with it but give us credit, I could point them to the old WINE?
"Anyway, all that work that Transgaming and the others did really inspired a lot of people to join the WINE project. It provided proof that WINE could do what people had been saying for years that it could do."
Sounds like it worked well then? Everyone benefited?
Seriously, why are people who claim to be giving to the gift culture so upset about what others do with that gift? Here son, I'm giving you $1000, but if you give any of it to Planned Parenthood or the DNC, I'm disinheriting you. And I'll be tracking your every move from here on out to make certain that you don't use that money to create a business, make more money and then give to one of your hippie causes because that is even worse, using capitalism against itself!
The fact is, both licenses have their place. GPL is for folks that want to spread religion in the form of restrictions on developers rights. Nothing wrong with that -- I belong to an organized religion myself and not all services available are available for nonmembers. It is something I'm not too thrilled with, but as a friend recently mentioned there is limited resources and thus the politicalization of religion has to be. BSD is for the no strings attached gift giving. Some people don't believe in giving gifts with no strings attached and thus its not for them.
"it really is Apple's fault since they make the battery impossible or expensive to replace."
Yeah, because that $20 battery and 15 minutes to change it was sooooo much more expensive and impossibler than $40 I had to pay for the battery in my Sony Erikson phone...come to think about it, I changed the battery in my iPod once in 5 years where as I've changed the battery in my phone every other year. Which gets more use?
"Let's say a band can make $20,000 for performing at a 5,000 seat venue as a self-promoted event without record labels getting involved. Now, if said band were signed to a label and had to pay to play (or had to sell even more to get the record company the profits they want), the band may very well have to play a 30,000 seat arena to see the same $20,000."
I've worked with larger and smaller bands over the years.
The problems with physical spaces come with need for roadies, techies, engineers, insurance and everything else.
I've seen a small band go bankrupt for a single concert that goes badly because of poor planning and the idea that they can do things cheaper and make more money. Hell, I've seen a multimillion dollar festival I was once involved with go bankrupt because the board decided not to go with weather insurance. Sure, they would have doubled their profits if things had gone well without it, but the director who signed his name to a personal loan ended up losing his house.
I have to say, my career with the music industry as both a labeled artist as well as a consultant / hired gun, I never found anything unfair. It was all up front to what they will take and what risks they assume for you. Working in tech, I know the year I did as a technical on-call consultant, my company that did nothing but take calls took 50% of my take home...and only later did I find out they were charging a fee to the businesses as well. This is a common complaint in the field. AND I had to be bonded...they took absolutely no risk.
But a band playing to a 5000 large audience or a 30k one? Who cares if they make $20k for both. The first one will require a hell of a lot more work and coordination. I have done work as a production director in the past (its amazing how tech project management skills fit right into this area) and I know others in my field have charged $20k for a single night because of the coordination involved (I've done the bigger stuff under the auspices of charity, so I get a check that I turn right back in, though I've seen others that walk away with these checks and never look back).
The fact is, the band that has to do a 30k large show does a LOT less work than one that does it in front of a 5k one and assume a lot less risk.
The problem with the music industry is that geeks and nerds really just don't understand what is all involved in the real world, yet they pass along suggestions and pat each other on the back for being so insightful about how bad this industry is. It is almost as bad as non-technical managers showing up to a development meeting and telling the programmers that we need XYZ feature and it should be a slam dunk because its obviously easy as they've seen others do it (not realizing they have had a team of 20 and a budget of $10M...where as you have 3 people who are also dealing with desktop support and told that when Bob leaves we don't have the funding to replace him).
How is that? This is why I'm generally careful with words around nerds.
They know exactly what I'm talking about, but want to pretend language is like code, if there is a single error contained within, they can attack as it must be invalidated.
Seriously. I know you are smarter and better than this.
That is the conundrum. And one of the reasons I choose my words carefully. You can do research from different observational methods. The big problem is the whole correlation / causation thing can't be studied. Its been well observed from a number of angles that children learn behavior and aggressive nature from imitating others in 'hypothetical' situations. For instance, the big studies by Bandura with the 'Bobo Dolls' (pretty much an inflatable punch toy) showed that children pick up on adults beating the sucker and go on to exhibit aggressive behavior to both the doll and other kids far more than kids that were placed into the same environment with an adult that talked and treated the doll respectfully.
This was done from a way that it minimized the behaviors once outside the environment (but would still be dangerous to repeat in todays legally over-reacting environment).
Honestly, I don't know why folks get all defensive about the science behind this stuff. Its like the Religious Right getting pissy and asking pointed questions about Global Warming:-)
Yeah, its unlikely that 20 minutes is going to do much. At the same time, any research that could possibly change the childs disposition towards the negative is also not going to get approved.
The fact of the matter is, it is a proven statistic that the vast majority of children playing violent video games or watching violent movies act out scenes from within them and become desensitized to the 'message'. Well, not the vast majority of children, but those that partake (which seems to be balanced out to males).
If these sorts of things did no shape children's minds, there would be far less advertising in the world. Advertising works, and its 30 seconds at a time. Of course, a single ad isn't going to do anything, but when you realize that on a half hour of television, you are LUCKY if you have 22 minutes of 'content' (one of the big reasons I miss my tivo...then again, I canceled my cable at the time I got rid of it...so it was a net gain).
So what does all this tell us? Tells us the research is bullshit, but its the best we can do without purposely screwing up kids for the mere idea that we want to see if we can screw them up. Research succeeds? Expect to be sued.
Personally, I like violent media. I'd be pissed if it were taken away (bitching at a friend the other day about the deleted scenes from the new grindhouse flick and think it should be MORE over the top and pissed I had to see these scenes online as opposed to in the theatre). At the same time, I find it wrong that parents don't police what their children watch / play, and the fact that the publishers care so little that they package it for younger and younger audiences stating its the parents fault. Both blame the others for the faults. Its great to be a part of an age of no culpability.
I know if the prices on something that I got use to were raised 30%, I'd be pissed.
Even as a sometimes pro-musician (the RIAA kind that everyone here hates), I really don't care much about the quality of the recordings...if I want something great, I'll just see the artist live. Recordings are always a compromised solution anyways (anyone talking about 'lossless' music really haven't heard it in the studio...tons of loss by the time it gets to you). And I own an iPod, so technically, the 30% increase does nothing for me.
But as a nerd who enjoys freedom to put my stuff on anything I want...I support this.
In a way, it is a sneaky way to up prices. At the same time, labels have been getting killed on singles. Which is odd because singles (in one format or another) changed the entire scope of the music industry and more than industry -- the artform of music itself. The prices on singles are going up, but the prices on entire albums stay the same. So, if you are buying one DRM-free song, you are going to pay more...buy a dozen (i.e., the entire album) and you get everything for the same price as you would the non-DRM.
So it looks as though the DRM-Free and Up'd Quality is a way to get more folks to buy entire albums. And this is something I support. Most of the artists I've worked with are less interested in stand-alone songs and more about a body of work...which goes towards the idea of a long play album.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out...I hope to see other labels sign up soon...I know I have a few friends on Indie labels waiting for the new contract (and have been bothering Apple about this since Jobs wrote his manifesto back in early Feb).
"You work for a top 30 Uni that doesn't have an ERP system?"
I too work for a 'top 30' (actually, I believe mine is a 'Big 4') -- and while there are certainly tools that can manage the extremely tedious details, these are generally not in the hands of rank and file employees, and really don't suit departmental needs for managing and scheduling groups of peoples.
When you talk larger universities, you are talking hundreds of offices, probably multiple campuses, and many thousands of employees. I believe my university is one of the largest employer in the state. The tools that they can offer don't really meet the needs of individual areas of service. For instance, one of the BIG reasons we are a 'Microsoft Campus' is because Exchange offered the tools needed for collaboration and scheduling. I normally hate M$ products, but this one does its needs. Still, the scheduling component is not very useful for scheduling students, or managing time sheets, or otherwise.
So the larger employers can and do offer tools that meet the requirement of the organization, but rarely do they give anything that is truly useful for managing the details.
I tried a few times to contact the folks that were responsible for the software to contribute to the source.
No response back. I had actually thought of setting up a fork'd project, but I was too busy with a few other projects to have everyone asking me questions. I wanted to donate to the original project and be done with it. I had cleaned up a LOT of HTML, converted it all to CSS (for instance, the web view and the print view used separate files that needed to be hacked twice to change anything...I used a print style sheet and threw away almost half the code), and de-spaghetti coded the PHP. Beyond that, it was mostly hacks to get things working for me (i.e., lots of crap with the prototype js library)
But all in all, I've had too much attitude thrown at me when I work open source apps. I prefer to get in and get out ASAP. I don't want my name associated because of it. I generally contribute anonymously when I do have to interact -- but most of the time, I prefer to just comment the hell out of code so that it is obvious to the newbie what I'm doing -- and honestly, this is why most of the BIG code I've given out has been put into the public domain because I don't want to get into arguments as to people's religion on code.
Either way, the point is moot now. By the time I had my head above water enough to do anything (running a university office and a music industry consultancy saps the energy outta ya), I found that the development server I had this on was wiped. Backups are probably on some DVDr, but who knows at this point. The code could be re-done in a day or two either way (and probably a lot cleaner now that I've gotten a lot more proficient at CSS and JS -- the PHP stuff was dead simple).
Before we switched to a commercial solution (which was a mistake in retrospect), I had implemented an open source / php app I found over on SourceForge -- Employee Scheduler.
It was written for managing student employees in a library -- and its not half bad.
I ended up hacking the hell out of it, adding ajax calls so that it was a little more user friendly, and had ended up with a clock in / clock out solution (using student id cards and a card reader). Tried to contact a few folks listed on the site, but it looks like a dead project (and my source is gone...don't ask...wasn't that hard to do though). If there was a community around it, I would have kept using the software and contributed...but there wasn't.
Its good software, but it needs some work. If you are a php coder, you might want to think about trying it out and seeing if you can hack the functionality you need.
I gotta say, that $50 television cost Best Buy $20, and it cost the manufacturer $10.
So if I steal a television, I should argue that I really didn't take $50 worth of material, I was just reducing the artifical scarcity of the product, and in the scheme of things, it really doesn't cost anyone anyways because this is actually calculated into the price. Best Buy didn't lose anything, the customers all lost maybe a dime each for that television.
Where as if someone steals my work, its not just a reduction in artificial scarcity, it is a real loss of productivity. I could have easily been creating something physical that while not all that interesting, or useful to the world, its not going to dismissed as artificial just because it can be copied.
To someone like me, it is EXACTLY the same as theft. You took my time. It is a non-artificial scarcity. With my health, it is becoming more and more valuable. There is no difference...they aren't taking my product, they are taking a little piece of me. Ok, this is less theft and more rape. Argue as much as you like, an illegal act is the same as another illegal act and it doesn't matter if its copyright infringement, or the illegal impoundments of ships on the high seas. There is no muddying of the subject except for folks that want to pretend they are better. The only muddying is coming from folks that want to distinguish two separate items into a group of tangible vs. intangible because the general public is still trapped into blue collar lifestyles and thus incapable of understanding the second.
In fact, the more I hear of those muddying these waters, the more I'm glad I have the RIAA working on my side (even if the last royalty check was enough to pick up taco bell). I know I would have never been able to put a downpayment on my home with the money I make in education. I just wish I had someone carrying about my well being enough in my current profession like I did my last. I would GLADLY pay a manager 20% of my salary what it is truly worth to educate your or your children...instead, I got politician demanding more and more each day and promising tax payers they will be able to pay me less.
"However, the media industry has violated the spirit of the contract by manipulating the system."
I have *NEVER* seen the industry go after a person that is making copies of 50 year old media. It is always the latest, greatest that someone wants to rip.
Personally, I believe the creators of media should have the right to keep or bury their creations for as long as they want (and pass along this right to anyone that they so choose). Why? Because they created it. I don't see this moral right given up just because they have distributed their creation to someone else.
Of course, simply because I believe that this right should exist, doesn't mean I agree with artists or other creators who decide to do so. I'd be happy writing into my contract that 14 years after the release, my works fall into the public domain (that is the stuff I didn't just plain put into the public domain to begin with).
But all in all, I can't understand why intellectual properties are not protected entirely the same as physical ones. We don't give up land after 70 years. If I buy a chair, it is still mine without anyone trying to claim it as communal properties simply because it can be reproduced (i.e., if they take it away, I can simply have another one made...shitty analogy, but all analogies are shitty). But how does someone come about owning property? Through social contract. It is generally considered good to allow ownership of this somewhat artificial idea. Before the modern times, property was considered to be communal or owned by the king. Never a single ownership. And this was considered bad. These days, we may own property, but in order to do so, we pay a portion of its price to the government in the form of property taxes.
So, if copyright were a matter of paying a fee every year based around the properties worth (or a minimal fee, whichever is higher) -- it would be right back into the same spot as the rest of properties in terms of the social contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, its job security for my techs.
If I bought Apples, they'd all be out of a job! But even with these, I get a little more use out of them than the normal user...I just found out the main line of computers I have is considered to be completely out of date for my university...even if someone sends them to central surplus, I can't requisition them even for parts for my department because the university wants me to upgrade. Why? I'll be damned if I have Vista installed on any of our computers.
But job security...I buy that many to keep students working on crappy PCs and keeping them off the dope.
"Got burned on my MacBook, so I think I'll be waiting."
How exactly did you get burned? It sounds like you bought the product you wanted, at a price you found acceptable, and Apple brought out a new product sometime afterward.
You can wait all you want, and either the product will be incrementally improved or discontinued. There really is only two choices. If you buy the upgraded model, that too will be upgraded at some point. Would you complain that you were burned again?
I buy probably a dozen or more Dells a year. If I wait a year, they will have better graphic cards, more ram and probably a better processor. They don't send me emails telling me that there is going to be a new product coming out in a few months. I buy what I need when I need to. And I know that something better will be coming out soon after I buy it.
"The world is a better place with a few cover bands less..."
I completely agree. I never understand the whole sheeple bahhhing we get here on Slashdot about copyright limiting creativity...when instead it DEMANDS that if you want something of your own, you create it on your own.
I *HATE* going into a bar and seeing a coverband. Its usually enough to make me walk out. Hypocritically, I'll admit, I was in a band a few years back that did a *FEW* covers...we did a quick and dirty motown review (though two of our members actually were in the bands that did these the first time around). The venues we played required us to submit a playlist afterwards and I know these were used for licensing. If you are using someone elses creative works for the purpose of making money, why shouldn't you be required to pay a fee? Is it a fairly assessed fee? I don't know...I never got a breakdown in my royalty checks stating where the money came from (actually, I could ask, or log in I think, but I really don't care because I just know its all going to be gone the minute I hit Taco Bell anyways!)
I now have a SE Z520a as I had switched to Cingular, and I believe the previous one was a SE T610 variant...it was the only one that SE had with Bluetooth on Sprint at the time (and it was crippled in this capacity and was a waste of money...the other variants could run Java, this one could only if signed by Sprint and wouldn't sign anything that was related to BT).
My Cingular phone is almost at the point where the battery is nearly dead too...I don't think its a first gen phone issue...
But why would anyone shut off their phone? Doesn't make sense? My iPod was running constantly and actually accessing the HD and the speakers and I'd routinely find that I forgot to stop play at night and have to charge it at work to have music on my ride home. Seriously...I used it A LOT.
As for the solder? You mean you can't pull the sticky tape off the battery on the iPhone and solder two leads??? Ones that aren't even soldered to the motherboard??? I'm sorry, I thought this was slashdot...my bad...
Lets see...I replaced the battery in my 1st Gen iPod after 5 years of constant usage. Cost me $20...could have paid someone else to do it and insure the work for another $15.
I replaced the battery on my SonyErikson phone that I bought at the same time, 3 times. I use it maybe an hour a day. The batteries cost me $40 each.
Keeping count, thats $20 for the iPod before I finally gave it away and bought a nano. Thats $120 for the batteries in the phone.
So based on my knowledge of the cost of the batteries in the iPod, I'm sure there will be a service available that will allow me to send the device in and they guarantee the work for probably around $40...$50 for quick turn around (in which time, I pop my card into my ancient SE phone for a few days).
"it's probably got alot more to do with how the number of people that would be diagnosed would effect the economy."
Actually, you are right on track with this way of thinking. The DSM regularly accounts for items such as social and economic pressure...certain drugs that 'cured' certain 'illnesses' are pushed by big business, and thus if Big Pharm can get to enough psychologists to vote (and they aren't above paying people off), you get inclusion. It has happened more than once, and it will happen again.
This also works in the social aspects. The biggest example was that the DSM classified homosexuality as a deviance until the mid-70s (err...I think, I never paid much attention to the history aspects of abnormal psych). It was mostly the psychs from the US propped up by conservative Christians (err...one could argue in the 70s, even the liberal christians weren't too willing to go to bat for these people) along with rightwing politicians. Europe had long since stopped calling this a classifiable deviance. And even after it was stricken, there was a LOT of debate over physicians that refused to go by the revised edition because it didn't follow their moral ethics.
So yeah, economic, social and other pressures state what becomes diagnosable. Heck, and sometimes its right...its looking for deviance from the norm. If there are enough people away from the center, even though in another time, another place they'd have been perfectly 'normal' -- it occasionally merits inclusion, so this isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Most of psychology is trying to help folks fit in and understand themselves. Don't want to fit in, not causing any harm to others...then you are perfectly fine! I love my quirks and wouldn't do anything to change them (and all my studies in psychology have proven to me that I'm actually much more normal than most who think I'm some sort of deviant freak!)
Actually, they didn't raise the prices unless you are buying individual tracks.
I *RARELY* buy individual tracks unless I am evaluating a single and want to see if I want to buy the next one. In which case, I have like 6 months to buy the rest of the album at the cost of said album minus the cost of the tracks I've already bought.
If you want singles, feel free to get hosed. Singles have ALWAYS been the way the industry made money until recently (in which time they decided albums were pretty much going to be one single mixed with lots of shit).
Actually, randomly I should have gotten a 20%.
:-)
:-) But yes, this is exactly what an educated guess is...learning to look at content, weed out the inappropriate through what ever means you have available, and pick something from what remains.
And again, this is why *I* was called in to validate and calibrate the exam. It had never touched a single test taker. How good was the test? It was a hell of a lot better after my team got through with it
Beyond that, quite a few things in testing are looking for application of logic. If you can discern even the slightest bit of knowledge from the wording (i.e., those latin classes? Hell, just mythology for the nerds...like me)...you can get a lot. I still failed though
In a well designed exam, the 'educated guess' is just as much a part of the design as anything else. You *HAVE* to have questions that have answers somewhat similar, or you make it way too easy to guess the answer by way of elimination. At the same time, we want enough questions that one can eliminate one or more questions immediately.
/.). If the experts get the question wrong, while the novices get it right -- the question is struck. Someone with little experience in test design may look at the question and wonder whats wrong -- the answer is correct and all of your colleagues agree -- but in some way it is wrongly worded. So again, it is either struck, or restructured to be inserted for calibration and validation at a later point (on a large exam like the Bar the author had derided, a good chunk of the questions are probably not scored and are only there to see how well they work and if they can be put into the next exam).
For instance, I'm a testing person, but not a content person (i.e., I design towards what the stats tell me, as well as the actual wording and structure of the exam...I always work with someone who understands the content areas from a very advanced level and can deal with that end). One of the last MC exams I was helping validate, I knew NOTHING about the content -- it was a medical exam. First thing I did was go through the entire exam, read all the questions quickly, and see if logic could remove any of the answers. Statistically, I would have gotten a 20% by random means, but in this case, I received somewhere around 43% (if I remember correctly). The educated guess is a BIG part of these things...you aren't just measuring content knowledge, but application and that means if someone can raise the bar, they might actually do well in the real world. If I had a doctor who had never seen a case like mine, and it defied traditional practice, I think I'd be more impressed with the man that got 40% on purely logic, than the guy that got the 40% based around actually knowing something about the problem (and actually, I had a team of doctors several years ago like this...I sat around trying to figure out how I was going to die for a couple of months while one doctor who had seen problems like mine couldn't figure out what the cause was, while the one that wasn't an expert in the field methodologically ruled out what wasn't the cause, and ended up finding me a specialist that the first doctor SHOULD have been able to do because his field encompassed a hell of a lot more of the specialty than my general physician's 'specialty').
And it kinda depends on the type of test and what you are measuring. When designing these things, you ask a lot of questions based around the type of assessment one is looking for. And you design accordingly. By correlating my exams with others that have some sense of validity, I can see the levels of the testees before they take the new one. This in itself will show you quite a few things about the design of the new exam. For instance, we can tell certain questions might have 50% of the folks answering correctly, but which 50%? On the original test, you have two groups take the exam, novices and experts (and heavily simplifying this for
Beyond that, you have panels of experts who go over questions. Have them all vote on things like the difficulty of the item, the appropriateness for the exam. Things like that. Folks like me will take these and sort the items into usable or unusable stacks, rewrite them (again with experts), and then sort X amount of the lower difficulty, Y of the medium, Z of the hard (the easy questions are there to give motivation...its amazing how much better someone will do if they get positive reinforcement in that they KNOW this questions...it will prime the neural pathways to hopefully give more routes to specific knowledge in order to get the reward...I can feel the endorphin rush when I'm doing poorly but then get a win every now and then and it helps). And finally, one analyzes everything to see h
"Get a good music lawyer before signing anything. If the record company refuses to deal with you once you've "lawyered up" then walk away"
You know, I've never understood why this is soooooo fucking hard for musicians to understand. It is a business deal. Its not called the Music Nonprofit Organization, its the MUSIC BIZ.
The fact is, a good lawyer will be your manager and represent you. A good lawyer won't take the easy way out and kick under some side deal because they know better than 'Uncle' Frank about the consequences -- and a good lawyer might be slimey, but they are YOUR slime.
My band got thrown out the minute they found out I had a lawyer...next thing I knew, I had two others fighting over me because the word was that we were good enough to bring in the big guns (and the thrown out part was probably a negotiating tactic because I did get a few calls after that from the same guys).
Showing up without a lawyer is like the old phrase, showing up to a gun fight with a pocket knife.
Sadly, of the three options, most of my friends have gone with #3 on your list (sign the deal, 'get rich')...rarely works out (at least on the recording side). Heck, #2 isn't without just as many pitfalls as #3 -- pretty much have to give up most of the time you'd be out being a musician and learning to be a corporate whore, learning the ins and outs of business deals, equipment loans, insurance, accounting, and all that crap...I'd rather be a musician and leave this up to the folks that know what they are doing, so I can do what I know how to do.
Getting a good lawyer is the only real option. If the labels won't deal with you with one, have to say, your band sucks and you'd never have had a chance anyways...
"Oh please not Ron Paul..."
I've heard what the man has to say, and yeah, a lot of it is typical Libertarian wacko BS.
As the same time, he hasn't been bought off by the usual suspects. Like the poster above, I would have voted for McCain in a HEARTBEAT in 2000, even knowing what I do now about Gore (Gore 2000 is a different man than Gore 2007 regardless of what he'd like to say...I still think he has been one of the most consistently smartest people in politics for 20 years, just not a great politician).
But I'll take a president that offers wacko ideas just to break the monotony. No party is going to get lockstepped behind him the way the Republicans did Bush, or partly the way the Dems did behind Clinton before the Republican uprising. Which brings up another thing -- one of the greatest things of the Clinton era was that EVERYONE had to compromise. No one got what they wanted. And because of it, there was discussion and debate and things had to happen because everyone found a common platform that they could agree on and the country had some of the largest gains because of it.
With Ron Paul, I could see the same thing happening again. I'd LOVE to see a president that actually understood how to veto. And knew when it was appropriate. Clinton understood how to do this and even tried to get a line-item veto in that would allow his to use his pen even more (unfortunately, it was passed in an unconstitutional manner...I bet if they did something like this with Riders it might actually pass the supreme's muster...errr...then again, maybe thats what it was...it was a long time ago that I read up on this stuff).
I'd love to see a real maverick running the country. I could care less if his politics match mine or not. I just don't want some jingoistic motherfucking corporate whore that seems to be able to convince the lower half of the bell curve that something is right and thus you shouldn't question nor educate yourself about such matters (you only need 51% in the US of A).
And the Fakebooks go out of their way to make certain that it is fair use. No lyrics, no nothing. Sometimes they won't even state the name of the band -- you can't copyright a title though, and thus you can get away with that.
A lot of fakebooks anymore are becoming 'authorized' fakes...they do it in the style of the old ways with just chords and adding the lyrics and band names through permission.
I'm a little mixed on this sort of stuff. Back before I was an academic (and technically anytime someone actually cares enough to ask) I was a writer and contributed to others musics...the last album I worked on was enough to put a down payment on a house (of which, you can argue that it is asinine that someone can make a few grand by writing a few words and putting it to music, or ya can say its asinine that I'm out there making certain kids get educated and can't even afford to get my '97 Saturn fixed, let alone buy a house without taking up outside employment).
Learning to play guitar now, I hit the tab sites all the time. Most of the tabs are completely wrong or just bad. Half the time, I have to sit down at my piano and transcribe out the chords and figure out what the simplest way it is to play the tune on the guitar.
The only problem I see is that if the half ass'd chords are allowed, people are going to push the lines and state that full typeset transcriptions should be legal too...and then why not the music? There is a line that can't be crossed, but both sides want it crossed and neither know just where it is. And I'm not so sure I want the line defined either...
Who knows...
"Your comparison to the religon and national wellfare state model is flawed, since that means you as a receiver have to pay membership fees or taxes to receive that benefit."
I've never HAD to pay anything to be a part of my church. And in this instance, I was using them as the example for welfare -- not the gov't. I'm a firm believer in the idea that welfare should be in the hands of people and not gov'ts...but until such time as we have people not being cheap and selfish, I'll accept the idea that the gov't should have to step in for now.
And that is how I feel about the GPL vs. BSD. BSD is how it SHOULD be. I've contributed patches back to BSD software for stuff that I was using and packaging with my own software. It would be stupid not to -- as a developer, I only gain from being a part of the larger group and I'm not going to close it off. Of course, there are selfish people that don't want to do this. They want it all for themselves and see the short term as opposed to the larger picture.
And thats where it all comes down to. Do you want to set a better example by giving choice? Or do you want to mandate morality? More often than not, people are going to contribute to where there is the most good. Its all in the marketing and if you throw out the aspects of the BSD as YOU CAN TAKE IT AND RUN, its as bad as the GPL as a VIRUS arguments. To me it comes down to not wanting to regulate someone's morality.
As for BSD being PD with attribution, yeah...you can look at it as that. I believe the older versions made this attribution a lot more prominant and it was a little restrictive in the fact you needed hundreds of pages of copyright / authored by notices in some instances. I think they fixed this, but who knows. The stuff I've worked on never really bothered me to take this stuff off or try to minimize it in any way. Why would I? Heck, I just don't want my name showing up anywhere -- I know my selfish bits are mostly limited to not wanting to be bothered once I resubmit the patch (and I do make certain its fully documented...heck, I'll go through and document stuff thats not mine so that I understand whats going on).
Oh noes! You put a product out for free and someone figures out how to make a business plan arounds it!1!
So when someone talks about BSD being a more mature license because it doesn't restrict what the original authors had expected, i.e., do whatever you want with it but give us credit, I could point them to the old WINE?
"Anyway, all that work that Transgaming and the others did really inspired a lot of people to join the WINE project. It provided proof that WINE could do what people had been saying for years that it could do."
Sounds like it worked well then? Everyone benefited?
Seriously, why are people who claim to be giving to the gift culture so upset about what others do with that gift? Here son, I'm giving you $1000, but if you give any of it to Planned Parenthood or the DNC, I'm disinheriting you. And I'll be tracking your every move from here on out to make certain that you don't use that money to create a business, make more money and then give to one of your hippie causes because that is even worse, using capitalism against itself!
The fact is, both licenses have their place. GPL is for folks that want to spread religion in the form of restrictions on developers rights. Nothing wrong with that -- I belong to an organized religion myself and not all services available are available for nonmembers. It is something I'm not too thrilled with, but as a friend recently mentioned there is limited resources and thus the politicalization of religion has to be. BSD is for the no strings attached gift giving. Some people don't believe in giving gifts with no strings attached and thus its not for them.
"it really is Apple's fault since they make the battery impossible or expensive to replace."
Yeah, because that $20 battery and 15 minutes to change it was sooooo much more expensive and impossibler than $40 I had to pay for the battery in my Sony Erikson phone...come to think about it, I changed the battery in my iPod once in 5 years where as I've changed the battery in my phone every other year. Which gets more use?
"Let's say a band can make $20,000 for performing at a 5,000 seat venue as a self-promoted event without record labels getting involved. Now, if said band were signed to a label and had to pay to play (or had to sell even more to get the record company the profits they want), the band may very well have to play a 30,000 seat arena to see the same $20,000."
I've worked with larger and smaller bands over the years.
The problems with physical spaces come with need for roadies, techies, engineers, insurance and everything else.
I've seen a small band go bankrupt for a single concert that goes badly because of poor planning and the idea that they can do things cheaper and make more money. Hell, I've seen a multimillion dollar festival I was once involved with go bankrupt because the board decided not to go with weather insurance. Sure, they would have doubled their profits if things had gone well without it, but the director who signed his name to a personal loan ended up losing his house.
I have to say, my career with the music industry as both a labeled artist as well as a consultant / hired gun, I never found anything unfair. It was all up front to what they will take and what risks they assume for you. Working in tech, I know the year I did as a technical on-call consultant, my company that did nothing but take calls took 50% of my take home...and only later did I find out they were charging a fee to the businesses as well. This is a common complaint in the field. AND I had to be bonded...they took absolutely no risk.
But a band playing to a 5000 large audience or a 30k one? Who cares if they make $20k for both. The first one will require a hell of a lot more work and coordination. I have done work as a production director in the past (its amazing how tech project management skills fit right into this area) and I know others in my field have charged $20k for a single night because of the coordination involved (I've done the bigger stuff under the auspices of charity, so I get a check that I turn right back in, though I've seen others that walk away with these checks and never look back).
The fact is, the band that has to do a 30k large show does a LOT less work than one that does it in front of a 5k one and assume a lot less risk.
The problem with the music industry is that geeks and nerds really just don't understand what is all involved in the real world, yet they pass along suggestions and pat each other on the back for being so insightful about how bad this industry is. It is almost as bad as non-technical managers showing up to a development meeting and telling the programmers that we need XYZ feature and it should be a slam dunk because its obviously easy as they've seen others do it (not realizing they have had a team of 20 and a budget of $10M...where as you have 3 people who are also dealing with desktop support and told that when Bob leaves we don't have the funding to replace him).
How is that? This is why I'm generally careful with words around nerds.
They know exactly what I'm talking about, but want to pretend language is like code, if there is a single error contained within, they can attack as it must be invalidated.
Seriously. I know you are smarter and better than this.
That is the conundrum. And one of the reasons I choose my words carefully. You can do research from different observational methods. The big problem is the whole correlation / causation thing can't be studied. Its been well observed from a number of angles that children learn behavior and aggressive nature from imitating others in 'hypothetical' situations. For instance, the big studies by Bandura with the 'Bobo Dolls' (pretty much an inflatable punch toy) showed that children pick up on adults beating the sucker and go on to exhibit aggressive behavior to both the doll and other kids far more than kids that were placed into the same environment with an adult that talked and treated the doll respectfully.
:-)
This was done from a way that it minimized the behaviors once outside the environment (but would still be dangerous to repeat in todays legally over-reacting environment).
Honestly, I don't know why folks get all defensive about the science behind this stuff. Its like the Religious Right getting pissy and asking pointed questions about Global Warming
Yeah, its unlikely that 20 minutes is going to do much. At the same time, any research that could possibly change the childs disposition towards the negative is also not going to get approved.
The fact of the matter is, it is a proven statistic that the vast majority of children playing violent video games or watching violent movies act out scenes from within them and become desensitized to the 'message'. Well, not the vast majority of children, but those that partake (which seems to be balanced out to males).
If these sorts of things did no shape children's minds, there would be far less advertising in the world. Advertising works, and its 30 seconds at a time. Of course, a single ad isn't going to do anything, but when you realize that on a half hour of television, you are LUCKY if you have 22 minutes of 'content' (one of the big reasons I miss my tivo...then again, I canceled my cable at the time I got rid of it...so it was a net gain).
So what does all this tell us? Tells us the research is bullshit, but its the best we can do without purposely screwing up kids for the mere idea that we want to see if we can screw them up. Research succeeds? Expect to be sued.
Personally, I like violent media. I'd be pissed if it were taken away (bitching at a friend the other day about the deleted scenes from the new grindhouse flick and think it should be MORE over the top and pissed I had to see these scenes online as opposed to in the theatre). At the same time, I find it wrong that parents don't police what their children watch / play, and the fact that the publishers care so little that they package it for younger and younger audiences stating its the parents fault. Both blame the others for the faults. Its great to be a part of an age of no culpability.
I know if the prices on something that I got use to were raised 30%, I'd be pissed.
Even as a sometimes pro-musician (the RIAA kind that everyone here hates), I really don't care much about the quality of the recordings...if I want something great, I'll just see the artist live. Recordings are always a compromised solution anyways (anyone talking about 'lossless' music really haven't heard it in the studio...tons of loss by the time it gets to you). And I own an iPod, so technically, the 30% increase does nothing for me.
But as a nerd who enjoys freedom to put my stuff on anything I want...I support this.
In a way, it is a sneaky way to up prices. At the same time, labels have been getting killed on singles. Which is odd because singles (in one format or another) changed the entire scope of the music industry and more than industry -- the artform of music itself. The prices on singles are going up, but the prices on entire albums stay the same. So, if you are buying one DRM-free song, you are going to pay more...buy a dozen (i.e., the entire album) and you get everything for the same price as you would the non-DRM.
So it looks as though the DRM-Free and Up'd Quality is a way to get more folks to buy entire albums. And this is something I support. Most of the artists I've worked with are less interested in stand-alone songs and more about a body of work...which goes towards the idea of a long play album.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out...I hope to see other labels sign up soon...I know I have a few friends on Indie labels waiting for the new contract (and have been bothering Apple about this since Jobs wrote his manifesto back in early Feb).
"You work for a top 30 Uni that doesn't have an ERP system?"
I too work for a 'top 30' (actually, I believe mine is a 'Big 4') -- and while there are certainly tools that can manage the extremely tedious details, these are generally not in the hands of rank and file employees, and really don't suit departmental needs for managing and scheduling groups of peoples.
When you talk larger universities, you are talking hundreds of offices, probably multiple campuses, and many thousands of employees. I believe my university is one of the largest employer in the state. The tools that they can offer don't really meet the needs of individual areas of service. For instance, one of the BIG reasons we are a 'Microsoft Campus' is because Exchange offered the tools needed for collaboration and scheduling. I normally hate M$ products, but this one does its needs. Still, the scheduling component is not very useful for scheduling students, or managing time sheets, or otherwise.
So the larger employers can and do offer tools that meet the requirement of the organization, but rarely do they give anything that is truly useful for managing the details.
Ignoring the obvious attitude,
I tried a few times to contact the folks that were responsible for the software to contribute to the source.
No response back. I had actually thought of setting up a fork'd project, but I was too busy with a few other projects to have everyone asking me questions. I wanted to donate to the original project and be done with it. I had cleaned up a LOT of HTML, converted it all to CSS (for instance, the web view and the print view used separate files that needed to be hacked twice to change anything...I used a print style sheet and threw away almost half the code), and de-spaghetti coded the PHP. Beyond that, it was mostly hacks to get things working for me (i.e., lots of crap with the prototype js library)
But all in all, I've had too much attitude thrown at me when I work open source apps. I prefer to get in and get out ASAP. I don't want my name associated because of it. I generally contribute anonymously when I do have to interact -- but most of the time, I prefer to just comment the hell out of code so that it is obvious to the newbie what I'm doing -- and honestly, this is why most of the BIG code I've given out has been put into the public domain because I don't want to get into arguments as to people's religion on code.
Either way, the point is moot now. By the time I had my head above water enough to do anything (running a university office and a music industry consultancy saps the energy outta ya), I found that the development server I had this on was wiped. Backups are probably on some DVDr, but who knows at this point. The code could be re-done in a day or two either way (and probably a lot cleaner now that I've gotten a lot more proficient at CSS and JS -- the PHP stuff was dead simple).
Before we switched to a commercial solution (which was a mistake in retrospect), I had implemented an open source / php app I found over on SourceForge -- Employee Scheduler.
It was written for managing student employees in a library -- and its not half bad.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/empscheduler/
I ended up hacking the hell out of it, adding ajax calls so that it was a little more user friendly, and had ended up with a clock in / clock out solution (using student id cards and a card reader). Tried to contact a few folks listed on the site, but it looks like a dead project (and my source is gone...don't ask...wasn't that hard to do though). If there was a community around it, I would have kept using the software and contributed...but there wasn't.
Its good software, but it needs some work. If you are a php coder, you might want to think about trying it out and seeing if you can hack the functionality you need.
I gotta say, that $50 television cost Best Buy $20, and it cost the manufacturer $10.
So if I steal a television, I should argue that I really didn't take $50 worth of material, I was just reducing the artifical scarcity of the product, and in the scheme of things, it really doesn't cost anyone anyways because this is actually calculated into the price. Best Buy didn't lose anything, the customers all lost maybe a dime each for that television.
Where as if someone steals my work, its not just a reduction in artificial scarcity, it is a real loss of productivity. I could have easily been creating something physical that while not all that interesting, or useful to the world, its not going to dismissed as artificial just because it can be copied.
To someone like me, it is EXACTLY the same as theft. You took my time. It is a non-artificial scarcity. With my health, it is becoming more and more valuable. There is no difference...they aren't taking my product, they are taking a little piece of me. Ok, this is less theft and more rape. Argue as much as you like, an illegal act is the same as another illegal act and it doesn't matter if its copyright infringement, or the illegal impoundments of ships on the high seas. There is no muddying of the subject except for folks that want to pretend they are better. The only muddying is coming from folks that want to distinguish two separate items into a group of tangible vs. intangible because the general public is still trapped into blue collar lifestyles and thus incapable of understanding the second.
In fact, the more I hear of those muddying these waters, the more I'm glad I have the RIAA working on my side (even if the last royalty check was enough to pick up taco bell). I know I would have never been able to put a downpayment on my home with the money I make in education. I just wish I had someone carrying about my well being enough in my current profession like I did my last. I would GLADLY pay a manager 20% of my salary what it is truly worth to educate your or your children...instead, I got politician demanding more and more each day and promising tax payers they will be able to pay me less.
"However, the media industry has violated the spirit of the contract by manipulating the system."
I have *NEVER* seen the industry go after a person that is making copies of 50 year old media. It is always the latest, greatest that someone wants to rip.
Personally, I believe the creators of media should have the right to keep or bury their creations for as long as they want (and pass along this right to anyone that they so choose). Why? Because they created it. I don't see this moral right given up just because they have distributed their creation to someone else.
Of course, simply because I believe that this right should exist, doesn't mean I agree with artists or other creators who decide to do so. I'd be happy writing into my contract that 14 years after the release, my works fall into the public domain (that is the stuff I didn't just plain put into the public domain to begin with).
But all in all, I can't understand why intellectual properties are not protected entirely the same as physical ones. We don't give up land after 70 years. If I buy a chair, it is still mine without anyone trying to claim it as communal properties simply because it can be reproduced (i.e., if they take it away, I can simply have another one made...shitty analogy, but all analogies are shitty). But how does someone come about owning property? Through social contract. It is generally considered good to allow ownership of this somewhat artificial idea. Before the modern times, property was considered to be communal or owned by the king. Never a single ownership. And this was considered bad. These days, we may own property, but in order to do so, we pay a portion of its price to the government in the form of property taxes.
So, if copyright were a matter of paying a fee every year based around the properties worth (or a minimal fee, whichever is higher) -- it would be right back into the same spot as the rest of properties in terms of the social contract.
Anyhoo...