That may be true of the first way, but Napster definitely harms their market the second way - I would choose Napster over some lame attempt by the recording industry to enter the online music scene.
If napster wasn't there, we wouldn't have a choice, and would have to use whatever constrained system the music industry came up with, one that would probably exist soley to preverse their current business model (but that's a sidetrack).
When people say "vote with your dollar", I normally write them off as clueless - this is for many reasons but the one mentioned before is one of the bigger ones.
It's a universal problem, extending far beyond the RIAA, MPAA & McDonalds. I have often wished there was a website somewhere that I could just type in the name of a company or corportation and it would report back with all the major shareholders are and who their major shareholders are etc (or who owns it if it's private).
Anyone know of such a site?
Like many/.'s I imagine, I have the knowledge and resources to put up the web site, but not the knowledge or resources to obtain the ownership graph (or keep it current).
<daydreaming>
Customisable thresholds and names to specifically scan the entire ownership chain for ("Search on Blargle Inc. finds that Disney has an 3% stake and Microsoft has a 1% stake") would be nice.
</daydreaming>
One site we can make though, is one where people can submit (under a company name) a product they boycotted and why. This would facilitate (I can't believe I just used that word) easy access for those high up in corporations to the various reasons plebs like us aren't buying their products (and pretty statistical analysis), as that is another of the big reasons voting with your dollar doesn't work - not buying does not inform the company why you didn't buy, and neither does telling the minimum wage guy behind the counter.
Oh yeah, and fonts on the Linux version suck. They don't just look bad - I've actually come across pages that you just can't read at all. Embedded fonts are also not supported (NS for windows supports these and NS for Linux has the icon on the about screen - but embedded fonts just dont seem to work on it, apparently the TrueDoc guys have hassled NS about this but NS dont care), but hey, embedded fonts aren't too common tho and they don't really add content.
I hear a lot of the font problems are really X's fault.
The character set is also dodgy, on both Netscapes (tho I remember the linux version as worse, but I haven't investigated that), have you seen ™ instead of the trademark symbol , maybe " for " as well, I can't tell, I'm on a windows machine. I don't actually know what standard those are in because Netscape makes it not very useful to learn/use them (for TM you can use a superscripted small font, unless you are posting to slashdot).
yeah, I was running either redhat 6.0 or 6.2 (can't remember). The image problem isn't a huge deal because most web pages display images at their natural size, but there are some uses for displaying images at other sizes.
The resizing probably gets mentioned a lot because it's quite impressive watching IE dynamically resize a page as you resize the window (MS have written something fast!?!?).
Actually in my experience, IE on windows is far more stable than NS on windows, and NS on windows is more stable than NS on Linux, but hey, that's just subjective experience (NS on Linux seems to leak memory until eventually the whole linux box is unuseable - to point where I can't even bring up a command line to kill NS with).
I'm still stubbornly a netscape user, but as a web designer I see how far ahead IE is to NS every day and I have to question my sanity. I'm probably hanging on to an ideal, more than any useful reason to use the buggy piece of crap.
Actually I guess there is a reason to use it, if I develope pages for NS then making them work in IE is a breaze, if I develop pages under IE then [re-]making them to work around NS bugs can be quite annoying.
To answer your question, rendering speed doesn't matter if the netscape window is static, but that isn't always the case, IE is so fast it re-renders the page on the fly as you resize it.
Ever gone to web pages and found them blank? Netscape has poor error recovery, if someone creates a table and forgets to terminate it (or terminates it with a <table> instead of a </table>) then netscape just doesn't draw the page - convenient. IE renders those pages just fine, sure it's the web authors fault, but it's your problem.
Netscape resizes images poorly, IE interpolates (in laymens terms, Netscape looks like a software rendered game, IE looks like same game on a 3d card).
While I've worked with netscape long enough that I can pretty much javascript it to do what I want, most people I've encountered who write their own javascript for their pages can't be bothered making it work under netscape. And yes, javascript can add content (and not just stupid status bar animations), infact I've just recently been shown a page where the javascript improved download time and added impressive functionality to the page - didn't work in netscape tho.
It takes an age to boot up compared to IE (though this might be MS embedding bits of it in windows, not sure).
The only reason you see little reason to switch is because of the immense amount of time professional web designers waste making sure their sites are netscape compliant. If we just wrote straight html you'd figure out how much netscape sucks real fast.
When NS goes down in a ball of flames it takes out all the browser windows with it. When IE goes down in a ball of flames it just takes out the window crashed.
If you're running in say 1280x1024, Netscape can have its frame sizes wrong by up to 12 pixels and there's nothing you can do about it - you can't even predict the amount as it varies depending on the size of the window. The graphic designers hate that one as it effectively means graphics can't span frames under netscape (another good reason not to use frames).
I'm confident that if I used IE as my main browser and then came back to Netscape, I could (off the top of my head) list far more major issues it has.
Despite it not being the politically correct mail program, I do like Netscape's mail messanger - that probably helps to keep me using NS too.
Re:What's more important than replacing X
on
X Windows Must Die!
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· Score: 1
As much as I'd like to see X go, you've hit the real nail on the head here. It's the appalling quality of X app user interfaces and complete lack of consistency across them that really kills unix's usefulness as a desktop OS.
Window managers can make unix look pretty - but that impression lasts only until you sit down and actually try to use the apps.
A re-occuring theme in open-source seems to be that 90% of programmers can't design effective user interfaces, yet alone UI's "for the rest of us" (I have a personal suspicion that GUI's like KDE will never mature until the programmers have their CLI's removed and are forced to do everything in the GUI they are building, you sometimes get the impression they're just copying something they don't really understand).
I feel I should also say something positive and encouraging instead of just trashing other peoples noble (and appreciated) efforts, but I can't see a light at the end of this tunnel yet.
Slashdot ran a story about it, and a whole lot of people downloaded and read the essay. We got a whole lot of fan mail. A bunch of activists and academics posted the essay and software on their own Web sites ("mirroring" it). This was all more or less what we expected to happen.
If you have to cover up what you are saying so that other people don't arrest you for it, that is not free speach at all. I think it is submission to repressive goverments and corporations. Free speach means saying (typing) whatever you want, not having to hide it.
but if you want to say something about a corporation... libel laws tend to be "guilty until proven innocent", what if you can't afford to prove your innocence, reveal your source or proof is no longer available?
What if you wish to say something about the church of scientology but can't be bothered with being dragged through a hundred appeals and being harrassed through the courts until you are broke?
Libel laws probably wont change anytime soon as politicians and the wealthy are the primary benifactors. Politicians have little interest in changing a law that protects their public image.
I was not refering specifically to the US here, libel laws in the US might be different (I doubt it).
People should be able to speak without fear of harrassment (legal or otherwise), I believe that claims made anonymously would be taken with the grain of salt appropriate to something bypassing libel laws.
Quick - how many brand names or logos are visible on the outside of your clothing?
None.
The whole concept of paying money to a corportion to advertise for them has seemed rediculous to me for years (I'm 24, must be getting old, losing it). I was in town with some people when someone with "tommy hilfinger" written all over the back of their jacket walked in front of us - I wasn't the only one who smiled at their expense. This Tommy Hilfinger thing has only recently arrived in New Zealand - who is this guy? Is Tommy fictional? A sports star? Some suited gimp who laughs all the way to the bank or what?
Anyway, in hindsight, learning to fully trust my own sense of style has been surprisingly empowering*. I don't have any labels on my jeans mainly because quick-unpicks are fun and addictive, but also because having a brown square sewn on the back of black jeans looks silly (sillier if you don't wear a belt to cover it). If you trust your sense of what looks good (as opposed to what brand is in fashion etc) it liberates you from all of this, however I should warn you that it may make you pretentious - you may start looking down on the plebs who pay money to wear branded clothes.
While scoffing at the people who wear their insecurities on the outside may be bad for your personality, it could grow to be a blow against the brand bullies. I however wont be leading that blow:), I'm not religious enough - I think stupidity is it's own reward : ).
And now to offend the slashdotters, I think the coffee club is similar - people go out of their way to brand themselves as coffee drinkers, little things like animated steaming coffee mug icons for an hourglass, mugs with images proclaiming coffee club membership. You've probably never noticed how much effort coffee drinkers put into being recognised but you might now (I like coffee, but the club...)
* I really hate that word, I'm sorry to use it but I couldn't think of a closer word. It's normally so meaningless - for most people it seems that all you to have to do to become empowered is to say "I am empowered" or "I feel empowered", and magically you are.
I think ageism is just as bad at the other end of the spectrum. I'm 15, and while I'm no Kung Foo master, I've been frequently doubted as per my coding ability. Just cause I lack experience doesn't mean I'm bad at coding. I was best in my class (a class I took at IU), but the social dynamic was often that of condescention. It's just as hard for us little guys, I'll have you know.
You remember when you were little and your parents were telling you that one day you would _like_ girls (meanwhile you were flatly denying it)?
Well... maybe that was just me... but anyway, I suspect this might come across the same way.
At high school my code rocked, 2 years later it looked pretty shoddy, but that was OK because by then I was an excellent coder, 2 years later...
I believe there are a number of posts to this effect here. There's a reason for that - it's true, though I imagine only time will convince you of this. In 10 years time I bet that you wont want to employ someone who is as good as you are today (even if you are a better coder at 15 than I am now I still bet this will be true, you will learn soo much).
The whole focus of what Good Programming(tm) is shifts when you move away from assignments and pet projects, experience is extremely important.
A while ago I found an old CV from when I was in high school trying to get a job programming for the summer, I felt silly reading it. Back then I felt exactly the same way you did. I would never employ a 15 year old coder for anything serious, and neither will you.
Also, don't judge yourself by your classmates. I wouldn't trust any of the students I did a cosc degree with to program as far as I could throw them, after that I got a job working with talented people and it was quite humbling.
I'm sure you rock, but you'll rock so much more in a few years.
He didn't claim to have learned all of perl. You don't need to learn all of a language to use it effectively - just a good functional subset, and the more types of languages you have experience with, the better feel you'll have for getting that good functional subset.
If he learned C in a couple of days and you went through his code you might find
index = index + 1;
Obviously he doesn't know all of C, but that's irrelevant because knowledge of neat little features like index++ is superfluous to both program design and the concepts of the language.
I like the idea of a non-commerical net. However there seems to be more than one issue mixed up here.
plain text - this seems like a personal preference. I for one would not like a non-commerical net to be crippled in a such a manner and I don't see why it would help.
litigation - you will still be open to it, do you percieve this private net dodging lawsuits by not having enough people read it so the Bad Guys wont know about it? By being unidentifiable?
Perhaps you could define a protocal that requires a license agreement to use (eg to use the non-commerical net DNS service you have to agree not to blah blah blah).
You could go to www.coollist.com and set up a mailing list for this and put up a web page.
This is probably the latest tool their R&D department has come up with, now they're testing it.
From the article it sounds like the seller is the only person who can bring action against CoS. Is this the case with perjury in the US?
If this is true then they may well be doing this to assess risk/reward - confirm their assumption that nobody is going to take the CoS to court over an isolated injuction[1] (isolated because all the other 3rd parties can't get involved).
Unless of course, someone started auctioning E-Meters on eBay with the express purpose of being able to bring a suit againt the CoS.: )
<hint><hint>
(I'm not in America, so it can't be me)
It's probably better for you guys in the long run if someone quickly stomped on them heavily.
[1] You know what I mean - an illicit infringment notice that when coupled with the ambiguity of the DMCA is effectively an injuction.
Microsoft software makes me more agressive than Quake.
Ignorant idiots posting on public forums and letters to the editor make more agravated than a violent video game (irony not intended).
The bullshit is in the ideology behind the study, not that the study found a correlation. The study will be conveyed as showing that it was not continual bullying that made them plan revenge, it was not windows crashing or Word messing with their assignment that made them violent, it was not violence on TV since age 5, it was DOOM (at the expense of trenchcoats?).
Don't you think that to be valid the study really should have put the correlation into perspective - Violence induced by video games vs violence induced by traffic. Instead it's going to be used as evidence that games cause killings.
I do agree with you that I'm no psych expert and neither are most people here. However my opinions on that relevance are coloured by the only person I know [that I know] has a psych degree saying the only thing this taught her was that they don't know squat (I don't think those were her exact words, but I can't remember them). That and the fact that you don't need a psych degree to have introspection and social interaction to draw from, both of which are more educational than anything a psych degree can teach you (of course, a psych degree is extra).
If we start putting the iron fist on criminals online too, we can prevent the internet from remaining a hotbed of bogus information and obnoxious literature.
Oh? You mean you don't have the faculty to judge the credibilty of a source of information and you don't credit anyone else with that ability and would prefer it if all information on the internet only came though authorised channels.
Leave the internet for those who want to talk to each other unhindered and go and watch TV or read a book or something instead. There is your controlled medium, you can't have your say heard in those mediums unless a publisher likes what you have to say - which is exactly what are advocating for the Internet when you raise your voice in support of an ISP who took down a site because they thought some time in the future it might say something radical.
You should be free to voice any opinion you have without fear of legal bullying.
You should be free to state as fact anthing you believe to be so, but you must be prepared to accept the consequences if you are in error.
You, and only you, should accept consequences of a false assertion. Publishers and ISPs are not responsible. If you didn't write it, you are not responsible for it (however, you may be made responsible for removing false information that has been brought to your attention).
Posting anonymously can be done for many very valid reasons. If libel is written anonymously, it doesn't carry any weight. If you must, then educate people to see anonymous slander for what it is - unconfirmed - something you make up your own mind about.
The points above do not seem immoral, they will not bring the downfall of the human race. You seem focused on the tiny fraction we have lost and not looking at the huge gains we have made by having a free medium.
Don't advocate new legislation to screw up the only mass medium this planet has ever had that allows everyone to have a voice, and allows everyone to choose where they get their information from. The old laws are strong enough to cover libel cases on the internet (too strong infact, most libel laws are 'guilty until you prove your innocence'). A heaving crackdown on ISPs will only make things worse.
Take your lawyers, go outside, and get yourselves lives. There is more to the world than worrying about what some anonymous coward is able to say about you in a slashdot forum.
But don't just register yourself with W.A.V.E., register yourself on The Psycho-Killer Registry as well. In fact, don't stop there, register all your friends and family too.
Have you ever listened to Marilyn Manson, or other "dark" music, and not disliked it?
Have you ever gone to hollywood movies, and enjoyed them?
Have you ever played computer games?
Have you ever felt lonely?
If any of the above are true of you, then you may be a threat to society, ready to snap at any moment!
I doubt you have any musical pieces, specific recording nuances and all, perfectly stored in your mind. I'll digress.
I doubt you have any musical pieces, specific recording nuances and all, perfectly stored on CD.
For the short sighted person? Thanks, but I've given the topic quite a bit of thought (as have many others) and it seems we disagree on some fundamental points, as many do.
You've misread what I said, it is short sighted people who claim information has mass. I make no claims regarding the sightedness of people with differing opinions on ownership of information:).
You also appear to have missed why I mentioned that information has no mass, I was not claiming 'you can't own information because it has no mass'. You asked me to define information, and I did, however the definition pivoted on the fact that information has no mass (and because there is always one person who hasn't thought it through who pipes up and claims information has mass, I put in an explaination)
do you own the information to your genome? Should you allow a hospital to copy the information one day in the future, do you believe you no longer have control over whether they make further copies of it and pass it along, to say, insurance companies?
You are confusing two issues here, namely intellectual rights and privacy. I don't have any intellectual rights (and I don't mean the legal sense of the term) to my name or unlisted phone number, that doesn't stop it from being a breach of my privacy for you to give that information to someone who I don't want to be able to call me. I don't have to own the information (or have created it myself) for it to be able to breach my privacy, because of this (and the complexity of privacy) I'm just going to conclude that privacy isn't very relevant to this argument of whether or not someone can 'own' information, and drop it. (No, I do not 'own' the information in my genome)
How can someone have the freedom to control their creations if they can NOT control the copies of it? In that case you only have freedom as long as you never allow a copy to be made. That is a highly restricted choice, incompatible with the word freedom.
We are on different wavelengths here, I wasn't clear enough. I am saying you have complete freedom to control your actual creation (eg taking that high note and making it higher), you are talking about freedom to control how other people use or distribute a copy of something once you've created it. This ambiguity is why there is a distinction between "freedom to control your creation" and "freedom to control copies of your creation"
Now my intensly personal love ballad is being used in a Pepsi commercial played 20 times a day solving two ducks. Do you really find this posistion fair?
:) You've just dived back into the privacy issue again. Allow me to edit your text to avoid this. (We can get into privacy issues later if you like)
Now my impersonal instrumental that I put blood sweat and tears into is being used by Pepsi to make them money. Do you really find this posistion fair?
Lets imagine you weren't going to see a cent out of Pepsi whether they used your song or not - in the no ownership of information world they use your song without paying you (making them assholes), in the copyrighted world you tell them you want $5000 and they tell you where to stick your $5000 and use another song (making them cheap assholes). How much did you really lose out in the no ownsership of information world? You gained exposure for a start.
No I do not find this position fair, but the world is not fair. That sentence is not the cop-out you think it is, I will elaborate. In a NOIW (no ownership of information world), you can get ripped off by assholes. I'm not going to deny that, but you seem to think that this is all the justification required to say a NOIW is silly - the news is you don't live in a NOIW yet you still get ripped off by assholes (I don't just mean people pirating your stuff either). You're now thinking 'yeah but I'll get ripped off even more in the NOIW', which might be true but I wonder if you've really thought about what you would gain in such a world? Instead of focusing on what you lose in a NOIW, focus on whether you are currently losing more than you gain. The humans I've met seem to have a fundamental 'credit where credit is due', 'support what they like or believe in' thing going. Granted this wont carry over into the 'it might have been immoral but it was was my job' businesses, but with a total overhaul of the patent system, they might work (note that patents aren't about owning information, they were originally invented to reward people for disclosing information, because disclosing information is benifical to innovation, anyway, like privacy, that is another thread)
With regard to your GPL example, we don't live in a NOIW world so we don't have any of it's benifits. Because of this the GPL is needed to make NOI viable, the GPL is essentually using ownership of information to wall off ownership of information (hense the term copyleft). When a company takes my GPL code and breaks the GPL, what they have done is taken free information and made it no longer free. So I see no conflict of interest with someone who supports free information screaming bloody murder when the GPL is broken.
However, if you feel somethings overpriced, it doesn't mean you are allowed to steal it.
Agreed, but it might well mean it's ok to copy it (morally).
Among my friends, mp3 trading is rampant, but how much that affects what they buy is a little shaky. Right now I don't think it's having much effect. As broadband continues to roll out, super cheap HDs and DVD-RW/RAM cost very little, I think there will be a more profound impact, negatively.
Yes, the future will be interesting.
I'm curious though how you reconcile your views as not ripping off artists?
Well, many of my views (like copy a CD and mail the artist money directly) are more for ripping out the middleman than ripping off artists.
Incidently, I'm not convinced that intellectual rights are bad. I have a paid job programming and havn't yet released anything under the GPL (it's the 'if everyone else is taking advantage of the few benifits of this screwed up system, why shouldn't I' mentality), but have a few opensrc projects in mind that I'd like to do. I wasn't playing devils advocate, I find the NOIW intreiging, and people like nadador (who can't see the big picture beyond the square and so condemn those who can) irritate me
The only problem - the definition of information. Do you consider music "information"?
How is the defintion a problem? Of course music is information.
'Something you can store in your mind' is a nice broad idea of information for a start.
How about "Something with no mass which someone wants to preserve" as a definition for information. The no mass part cuts it down to data or weird physics phenomina, the wanting to preserve it cuts out the weird physics phenoma as preservation makes no semantic sense with something that is not physical unless it is information, the 'wanting' parts differentiates between information and noise
A short explaination for the short sighted person who can't grok that information has no mass - there's always one:
A storage medium always has mass, but the data 'in' the storage medium doesn't. For instance, a peice of paper with some ink thrown on it contains no information, another piece of paper with the ink arranged into words weighs no more yet 'contains' information. Another common example is take three atoms, divide the distance between atom1 and atom2 by the distance between atom2 and atom3, you'll get a fraction, write the number down as a decimal (eg 0.65077) and split those digits into groups of 3 digits (eg 65, 77) and read those groups as ascii values, you now have a string that doesn't mean anything. Change the distance of the two atoms so the fraction produces the string of the contents of encyclopedia britanica. Congratulations, you just stored the contents of Encyclopedia Britannica on 3 atoms (those three atoms are your storage medium). No, we don't have the technology to 'read' your three atoms yet, and the nature of the universe (it might be decrete and we currently are told it is limited in size) might put a limit on the amount of data you can store this way, but it illustrates that information is stored by arranging matter meaningfully and is not itself matter.
Anyway, that was a long diversion. back to the topic at hand
The issue is does the creator have the freedom to control their creation
The issue is not whether they have the freedom to control their creation, they do, unconditionally. The issue you are are confusing this with is whether they have the right to control someone elses copy of their information.
Do you have the right to say how much a copy of my music is worth, or do I?
Both of us are perfectly free to make claims about how much a copy of your music is worth, those claims are meaninless however. I assume you mean 'Do you have the right to determine how much a copy of my music will cost' - how much it is worth is independant of how much it costs, how much you claim it is worth or even how much you think it is worth. I think the worth of you music is individual to the person seeking the copy.
People will pretty much pay for a CD what it is worth to them, so your belief in your fundamental human right to charge what you think the CD is worth, is going to be sidelined by what the CD is worth to the purchaser anyway. mp3's haven't stoped me buying music I thought was worthwhile (so given this statistical study of 1 I naturally assume most people are like that:))
I'm not for ripping off artists either, but many people seem to be stuck in the flawed mindset of "copyright law defines what is fair" and I was trying to point out soem of the status-quo assumptions you were making.
it belongs to them is arguable, legal does not equate to moral (slavery being the extreme example posted). Contracts and Copyright law can be dodgy in some areas.
The Recording industry are not the artists, they are middle-men making a fortune off the backs of artists and ripping them off to the point where the artists hate them (see Prince and George Micheal etc)
So I'll concentrate on other points:
I'm trying to propogate a neat idea someone else posted on slashdot so... copy CDs instead of buying them and mail the artist $5 directly, that way the artist makes 5 to 10 times what they would normally make, and the RIAA can't complain because you didn't take advantage of any of their services. (Might not be the best idea for unknown bands as it might stop shops from carrying their CDs)
The whole piracy thing is bollox, sod-all people who pirate an album would have bought it and it aids marketting of songs. I started to suspect that the piracy thing was bollox when it was pointed out all the crap the RIAA is pulling on us in the name of the piracy bogeyman. We get regional coded DVDs to stop piracy not because it allows the MPAA to run an international pricing scam, we pay tax on blank media to subsidise the RIAA for piracy, they encrypt the content of DVDs (presumably audio DVD will be the same) to stop piracy not to give them monopoly control on the player market and certainly not to remove our rights such as fair use and other restrictions placed on them by copyright law (which is weird because the encryption doesn't actually prevent piracy). I don't even want to think what laws for the internet benifiting corporations at the expense of everyone else are being drafted as we speak in the name of piracy. Now we find out that rabid piracy bogeyman has just cost the industry negative 1.6 billion dollars.
Wake up, piracy is laymens terms is the wool the RIAA is pulling over your eyes.
Next time you see someone pushing something in the name of piracy, open your eyes and have a think about it - what is it really doing? Is it stopping piracy or lineing pockets?
Now you know what kind of moral fibre you're up against it looks like you will have to adapt to their behavior. In future do not title your statistical results
Censored Internet Access in Utah Public Schools and Libraries
Instead try something like
The Alarming Incompetence found in all Internet Censorship Software in use by Utah Public Schools and Libraries
Maybe less wordy and extreme:)
This way, pro-censorship propagander can't directly quote your research paper without tipping people off that they're not being shown the full picture (thus losing the truth menome). I imagine you wanted the paper to sound neutral and objective, a fair enough decision at the time, but hindsight suggests the loss may have been more than the gain.
My second suggestion is to pick a statistically valid subset of the pages let through and analyse them for pages that shouldn't have been let through (rather than look at all 53 million). Once you've done that by the books you can then do the whole process again using David Burt's standards and count pages that include a link to a PGP FAQ etc to see how useful censorware is.
1 in a million sites incorrectly blocked and 999999 immoral [by David Burt] sites let through for every wholesome one.
You buy CDs worth about a dollar and you pay the remainder for a license to use the movie under the terms of the license. This has always been true, even for books, where the license is implied (by copyright law) and even for your beloved GPL'd software
Yeah, and past cases have shown that you aren't allowed to apply the restrictions that CCS applies to DVDs to books. Copyright law can cut both ways, it gives rights to both parties, the MPAA doesn't like this so they take your rights away with technology instead of law.
Also, if what you said was true and I scratch my CD I could get a replacement from the CD store for about a dollar - having already bought the license. However this is irrelevant to the argument. You seem to misunderstand copyright law also.
Returning to your book analogy, blind people occasionally have OCR text readers with speech synthesis to read for them. The DVD-CCA trying to control what players we use to view our DVDs is akin to book publishers trying to outlaw these machines (presumably by printing text that people can read but which throws OCR software - and then suing whoever makes an OCR speaker that can read it).
If you don't like the laws, get them changed.
I lost faith in laws a long time ago. They are written by the influencial for the influencial. Lemmi guess... you think in America money isn't power and multibillion dollar multinational corporations have no more lobbying ability than Joe Bloggs in the street?
Did you see the TV Nation episode where they showed how easy it was to pass a law if you have money? (They went and had their own law passed to prove the point). Your legal system is a sham, and I doubt ours is any better.
Wouldn't it have been better to act professionally, go to the MPAA, show the crack to them, show the ability for people to get through their defenses, show the desires of people who want to watch DVDs on their Linux machines and work together to find a way for everyone to be happy - to find a win-win scenario?
This is far bigger than just watching DVDs on linux. If the CSS hack is found to be legal, then DVD player manufacturers don't have to line the pockets of the DVD association with licencing fees (read: cheaper players), but more importantly, don't have to sign an agreement with the DVD association.
At the moment, the DVD association can demand anything it wants for the license - take it or shove off. Once that's gone, we get cheap players that can do more. You guys for instance will be able to buy multi-region players (we already have them 'cause it's supposedly illegal in NZ to pull that zoned scam). You could get players that allow you to duplicate their output on VHS etc.
Finding DeCSS legal will bust a monopoly that is moving directly against consumer interests.
The blurb and petition used phrases such as Quicktime client, Quicktime player, Quicktime software etc. This is clear and refers not to the quicktime format, but to software that plays both the quicktime format and codecs associated with the format.
What would you like the blurb or comments to say - "We want a linux player for Sorenson"? How many people would understand that?
<hint> The human language game is about communication.
When you say "QuickTime for Linux" everyone knows what you mean. Calling it Quicktime is communication, calling it Sorenson is not.
There is no difference between QuickTime and Sorenson if QuickTime players are the only thing that can play Sorenson. The Slashdot crowd has no reason to distinguish QuickTime from Sorenson when they talk about sorenson, or cinecrap, or any other Quicktime codec.
Once the codecs become open (hah!) then they might deserve to be regarded seperately.
Saying "QuickTime is an open format" might be true from a pedantic-video-compression-geek point of view, but it's blatently misleading to the rest of the world, a really dumb way to communicate. Sorry if I've read more into your post than you intented.
Copy protection has historically done just as [badly] at rewarding the artists. This is why I have recommended that anyone who copies a CD (or tape, or whatever) that they haven't bought should voluntarily mail five bucks or so directly to the artist. THEY'RE the ones who deserve it!
I like this idea a lot, I would moderate you up if I had points:)
Does anyone know how much an artist makes off a CD sale? I often hear it is so little that even big bands get most of their money from gigs - the CDs are just good promotion (and good money for the execs). Hell... what else could explain a Chemical Brothers tour??:)
Anyway, that might just be urban myth. It would be nice to actually know so that I know I am paying the artist more. Anyone have some real figures? I would actually consider this ethical, as you are not costing the record company any distribution costs (you covered the distribution costs yourself) and distribution is all that they *should* be getting money for.
A reason why copy protection is stupid that I forgot to list in my previous post:
-It pisses off legitimate users, this isn't true of all schemes but do you trust the RIAA to get it right?
Take for example regional coding on DVDs, I am in a country where video rental stores have DVD shelves where half the DVDs are zone 4 and the other half zone 1 (but all mixed together). You can buy regionless players but the main appliance stores don't sell them - and more importantly, you have to be clued up enought about DVD to specifically ask for one. Otherwise you find you can't play the movie you payed for (or, if you're 'lucky', you have to do dumbass things with the remote control to change zones).
Slashdot Mirror
That may be true of the first way, but Napster definitely harms their market the second way - I would choose Napster over some lame attempt by the recording industry to enter the online music scene.
If napster wasn't there, we wouldn't have a choice, and would have to use whatever constrained system the music industry came up with, one that would probably exist soley to preverse their current business model (but that's a sidetrack).
When people say "vote with your dollar", I normally write them off as clueless - this is for many reasons but the one mentioned before is one of the bigger ones.
/.'s I imagine, I have the knowledge and resources to put up the web site, but not the knowledge or resources to obtain the ownership graph (or keep it current).
It's a universal problem, extending far beyond the RIAA, MPAA & McDonalds. I have often wished there was a website somewhere that I could just type in the name of a company or corportation and it would report back with all the major shareholders are and who their major shareholders are etc (or who owns it if it's private).
Anyone know of such a site?
Like many
<daydreaming>
Customisable thresholds and names to specifically scan the entire ownership chain for ("Search on Blargle Inc. finds that Disney has an 3% stake and Microsoft has a 1% stake") would be nice.
</daydreaming>
One site we can make though, is one where people can submit (under a company name) a product they boycotted and why. This would facilitate (I can't believe I just used that word) easy access for those high up in corporations to the various reasons plebs like us aren't buying their products (and pretty statistical analysis), as that is another of the big reasons voting with your dollar doesn't work - not buying does not inform the company why you didn't buy, and neither does telling the minimum wage guy behind the counter.
Oh yeah, and fonts on the Linux version suck. They don't just look bad - I've actually come across pages that you just can't read at all. Embedded fonts are also not supported (NS for windows supports these and NS for Linux has the icon on the about screen - but embedded fonts just dont seem to work on it, apparently the TrueDoc guys have hassled NS about this but NS dont care), but hey, embedded fonts aren't too common tho and they don't really add content.
I hear a lot of the font problems are really X's fault.
The character set is also dodgy, on both Netscapes (tho I remember the linux version as worse, but I haven't investigated that), have you seen ™ instead of the trademark symbol , maybe " for " as well, I can't tell, I'm on a windows machine. I don't actually know what standard those are in because Netscape makes it not very useful to learn/use them (for TM you can use a superscripted small font, unless you are posting to slashdot).
Sorry about the grammar, I'm a bit rushed.
yeah, I was running either redhat 6.0 or 6.2 (can't remember). The image problem isn't a huge deal because most web pages display images at their natural size, but there are some uses for displaying images at other sizes.
The resizing probably gets mentioned a lot because it's quite impressive watching IE dynamically resize a page as you resize the window (MS have written something fast!?!?).
I'm still stubbornly a netscape user, but as a web designer I see how far ahead IE is to NS every day and I have to question my sanity. I'm probably hanging on to an ideal, more than any useful reason to use the buggy piece of crap.
Actually I guess there is a reason to use it, if I develope pages for NS then making them work in IE is a breaze, if I develop pages under IE then [re-]making them to work around NS bugs can be quite annoying.
To answer your question, rendering speed doesn't matter if the netscape window is static, but that isn't always the case, IE is so fast it re-renders the page on the fly as you resize it.
- Ever gone to web pages and found them blank? Netscape has poor error recovery, if someone creates a table and forgets to terminate it (or terminates it with a <table> instead of a </table>) then netscape just doesn't draw the page - convenient. IE renders those pages just fine, sure it's the web authors fault, but it's your problem.
- Netscape resizes images poorly, IE interpolates (in laymens terms, Netscape looks like a software rendered game, IE looks like same game on a 3d card).
- While I've worked with netscape long enough that I can pretty much javascript it to do what I want, most people I've encountered who write their own javascript for their pages can't be bothered making it work under netscape. And yes, javascript can add content (and not just stupid status bar animations), infact I've just recently been shown a page where the javascript improved download time and added impressive functionality to the page - didn't work in netscape tho.
- It takes an age to boot up compared to IE (though this might be MS embedding bits of it in windows, not sure).
- The only reason you see little reason to switch is because of the immense amount of time professional web designers waste making sure their sites are netscape compliant. If we just wrote straight html you'd figure out how much netscape sucks real fast.
- When NS goes down in a ball of flames it takes out all the browser windows with it. When IE goes down in a ball of flames it just takes out the window crashed.
- If you're running in say 1280x1024, Netscape can have its frame sizes wrong by up to 12 pixels and there's nothing you can do about it - you can't even predict the amount as it varies depending on the size of the window. The graphic designers hate that one as it effectively means graphics can't span frames under netscape (another good reason not to use frames).
I'm confident that if I used IE as my main browser and then came back to Netscape, I could (off the top of my head) list far more major issues it has.Despite it not being the politically correct mail program, I do like Netscape's mail messanger - that probably helps to keep me using NS too.
As much as I'd like to see X go, you've hit the real nail on the head here. It's the appalling quality of X app user interfaces and complete lack of consistency across them that really kills unix's usefulness as a desktop OS.
Window managers can make unix look pretty - but that impression lasts only until you sit down and actually try to use the apps.
A re-occuring theme in open-source seems to be that 90% of programmers can't design effective user interfaces, yet alone UI's "for the rest of us" (I have a personal suspicion that GUI's like KDE will never mature until the programmers have their CLI's removed and are forced to do everything in the GUI they are building, you sometimes get the impression they're just copying something they don't really understand).
I feel I should also say something positive and encouraging instead of just trashing other peoples noble (and appreciated) efforts, but I can't see a light at the end of this tunnel yet.
(I would mod you up but you know the story).
but if you want to say something about a corporation... libel laws tend to be "guilty until proven innocent", what if you can't afford to prove your innocence, reveal your source or proof is no longer available?
What if you wish to say something about the church of scientology but can't be bothered with being dragged through a hundred appeals and being harrassed through the courts until you are broke?
Libel laws probably wont change anytime soon as politicians and the wealthy are the primary benifactors. Politicians have little interest in changing a law that protects their public image.
I was not refering specifically to the US here, libel laws in the US might be different (I doubt it).
People should be able to speak without fear of harrassment (legal or otherwise), I believe that claims made anonymously would be taken with the grain of salt appropriate to something bypassing libel laws.
The whole concept of paying money to a corportion to advertise for them has seemed rediculous to me for years (I'm 24, must be getting old, losing it). I was in town with some people when someone with "tommy hilfinger" written all over the back of their jacket walked in front of us - I wasn't the only one who smiled at their expense. This Tommy Hilfinger thing has only recently arrived in New Zealand - who is this guy? Is Tommy fictional? A sports star? Some suited gimp who laughs all the way to the bank or what?
Anyway, in hindsight, learning to fully trust my own sense of style has been surprisingly empowering*. I don't have any labels on my jeans mainly because quick-unpicks are fun and addictive, but also because having a brown square sewn on the back of black jeans looks silly (sillier if you don't wear a belt to cover it). If you trust your sense of what looks good (as opposed to what brand is in fashion etc) it liberates you from all of this, however I should warn you that it may make you pretentious - you may start looking down on the plebs who pay money to wear branded clothes.
While scoffing at the people who wear their insecurities on the outside may be bad for your personality, it could grow to be a blow against the brand bullies. I however wont be leading that blow
And now to offend the slashdotters, I think the coffee club is similar - people go out of their way to brand themselves as coffee drinkers, little things like animated steaming coffee mug icons for an hourglass, mugs with images proclaiming coffee club membership. You've probably never noticed how much effort coffee drinkers put into being recognised but you might now (I like coffee, but the club...)
* I really hate that word, I'm sorry to use it but I couldn't think of a closer word. It's normally so meaningless - for most people it seems that all you to have to do to become empowered is to say "I am empowered" or "I feel empowered", and magically you are.
Well... maybe that was just me... but anyway, I suspect this might come across the same way.
At high school my code rocked, 2 years later it looked pretty shoddy, but that was OK because by then I was an excellent coder, 2 years later...
I believe there are a number of posts to this effect here. There's a reason for that - it's true, though I imagine only time will convince you of this. In 10 years time I bet that you wont want to employ someone who is as good as you are today (even if you are a better coder at 15 than I am now I still bet this will be true, you will learn soo much).
The whole focus of what Good Programming(tm) is shifts when you move away from assignments and pet projects, experience is extremely important.
A while ago I found an old CV from when I was in high school trying to get a job programming for the summer, I felt silly reading it. Back then I felt exactly the same way you did. I would never employ a 15 year old coder for anything serious, and neither will you.
Also, don't judge yourself by your classmates. I wouldn't trust any of the students I did a cosc degree with to program as far as I could throw them, after that I got a job working with talented people and it was quite humbling.
I'm sure you rock, but you'll rock so much more in a few years.
If he learned C in a couple of days and you went through his code you might find
Obviously he doesn't know all of C, but that's irrelevant because knowledge of neat little features like index++ is superfluous to both program design and the concepts of the language.
- plain text - this seems like a personal preference. I for one would not like a non-commerical net to be crippled in a such a manner and I don't see why it would help.
- litigation - you will still be open to it, do you percieve this private net dodging lawsuits by not having enough people read it so the Bad Guys wont know about it? By being unidentifiable?
Perhaps you could define a protocal that requires a license agreement to use (eg to use the non-commerical net DNS service you have to agree not to blah blah blah).You could go to www.coollist.com and set up a mailing list for this and put up a web page.
From the article it sounds like the seller is the only person who can bring action against CoS. Is this the case with perjury in the US?
If this is true then they may well be doing this to assess risk/reward - confirm their assumption that nobody is going to take the CoS to court over an isolated injuction[1] (isolated because all the other 3rd parties can't get involved).
Unless of course, someone started auctioning E-Meters on eBay with the express purpose of being able to bring a suit againt the CoS.: )
<hint><hint>
(I'm not in America, so it can't be me)
It's probably better for you guys in the long run if someone quickly stomped on them heavily.
[1] You know what I mean - an illicit infringment notice that when coupled with the ambiguity of the DMCA is effectively an injuction.
- Microsoft software makes me more agressive than Quake.
- Ignorant idiots posting on public forums and letters to the editor make more agravated than a violent video game (irony not intended).
The bullshit is in the ideology behind the study, not that the study found a correlation. The study will be conveyed as showing that it was not continual bullying that made them plan revenge, it was not windows crashing or Word messing with their assignment that made them violent, it was not violence on TV since age 5, it was DOOM (at the expense of trenchcoats?).Don't you think that to be valid the study really should have put the correlation into perspective - Violence induced by video games vs violence induced by traffic. Instead it's going to be used as evidence that games cause killings.
I do agree with you that I'm no psych expert and neither are most people here. However my opinions on that relevance are coloured by the only person I know [that I know] has a psych degree saying the only thing this taught her was that they don't know squat (I don't think those were her exact words, but I can't remember them). That and the fact that you don't need a psych degree to have introspection and social interaction to draw from, both of which are more educational than anything a psych degree can teach you (of course, a psych degree is extra).
Leave the internet for those who want to talk to each other unhindered and go and watch TV or read a book or something instead. There is your controlled medium, you can't have your say heard in those mediums unless a publisher likes what you have to say - which is exactly what are advocating for the Internet when you raise your voice in support of an ISP who took down a site because they thought some time in the future it might say something radical.
- You should be free to voice any opinion you have without fear of legal bullying.
- You should be free to state as fact anthing you believe to be so, but you must be prepared to accept the consequences if you are in error.
- You, and only you, should accept consequences of a false assertion. Publishers and ISPs are not responsible. If you didn't write it, you are not responsible for it (however, you may be made responsible for removing false information that has been brought to your attention).
- Posting anonymously can be done for many very valid reasons. If libel is written anonymously, it doesn't carry any weight. If you must, then educate people to see anonymous slander for what it is - unconfirmed - something you make up your own mind about.
The points above do not seem immoral, they will not bring the downfall of the human race. You seem focused on the tiny fraction we have lost and not looking at the huge gains we have made by having a free medium.Don't advocate new legislation to screw up the only mass medium this planet has ever had that allows everyone to have a voice, and allows everyone to choose where they get their information from. The old laws are strong enough to cover libel cases on the internet (too strong infact, most libel laws are 'guilty until you prove your innocence'). A heaving crackdown on ISPs will only make things worse.
Take your lawyers, go outside, and get yourselves lives. There is more to the world than worrying about what some anonymous coward is able to say about you in a slashdot forum.
But don't just register yourself with W.A.V.E., register yourself on The Psycho-Killer Registry as well. In fact, don't stop there, register all your friends and family too.
- Have you ever listened to Marilyn Manson, or other "dark" music, and not disliked it?
- Have you ever gone to hollywood movies, and enjoyed them?
- Have you ever played computer games?
- Have you ever felt lonely?
If any of the above are true of you, then you may be a threat to society, ready to snap at any moment!Go on, do the right thing - register.
I doubt you have any musical pieces, specific recording nuances and all, perfectly stored on CD.
You've misread what I said, it is short sighted people who claim information has mass. I make no claims regarding the sightedness of people with differing opinions on ownership of information :).
You also appear to have missed why I mentioned that information has no mass, I was not claiming 'you can't own information because it has no mass'. You asked me to define information, and I did, however the definition pivoted on the fact that information has no mass (and because there is always one person who hasn't thought it through who pipes up and claims information has mass, I put in an explaination)
You are confusing two issues here, namely intellectual rights and privacy. I don't have any intellectual rights (and I don't mean the legal sense of the term) to my name or unlisted phone number, that doesn't stop it from being a breach of my privacy for you to give that information to someone who I don't want to be able to call me. I don't have to own the information (or have created it myself) for it to be able to breach my privacy, because of this (and the complexity of privacy) I'm just going to conclude that privacy isn't very relevant to this argument of whether or not someone can 'own' information, and drop it. (No, I do not 'own' the information in my genome)
We are on different wavelengths here, I wasn't clear enough. I am saying you have complete freedom to control your actual creation (eg taking that high note and making it higher), you are talking about freedom to control how other people use or distribute a copy of something once you've created it. This ambiguity is why there is a distinction between "freedom to control your creation" and "freedom to control copies of your creation"
:)
You've just dived back into the privacy issue again. Allow me to edit your text to avoid this. (We can get into privacy issues later if you like)
- Lets imagine you weren't going to see a cent out of Pepsi whether they used your song or not - in the no ownership of information world they use your song without paying you (making them assholes), in the copyrighted world you tell them you want $5000 and they tell you where to stick your $5000 and use another song (making them cheap assholes). How much did you really lose out in the no ownsership of information world? You gained exposure for a start.
- No I do not find this position fair, but the world is not fair. That sentence is not the cop-out you think it is, I will elaborate. In a NOIW (no ownership of information world), you can get ripped off by assholes. I'm not going to deny that, but you seem to think that this is all the justification required to say a NOIW is silly - the news is you don't live in a NOIW yet you still get ripped off by assholes (I don't just mean people pirating your stuff either). You're now thinking 'yeah but I'll get ripped off even more in the NOIW', which might be true but I wonder if you've really thought about what you would gain in such a world? Instead of focusing on what you lose in a NOIW, focus on whether you are currently losing more than you gain. The humans I've met seem to have a fundamental 'credit where credit is due', 'support what they like or believe in' thing going. Granted this wont carry over into the 'it might have been immoral but it was was my job' businesses, but with a total overhaul of the patent system, they might work (note that patents aren't about owning information, they were originally invented to reward people for disclosing information, because disclosing information is benifical to innovation, anyway, like privacy, that is another thread)
With regard to your GPL example, we don't live in a NOIW world so we don't have any of it's benifits. Because of this the GPL is needed to make NOI viable, the GPL is essentually using ownership of information to wall off ownership of information (hense the term copyleft). When a company takes my GPL code and breaks the GPL, what they have done is taken free information and made it no longer free. So I see no conflict of interest with someone who supports free information screaming bloody murder when the GPL is broken. Agreed, but it might well mean it's ok to copy it (morally). Yes, the future will be interesting. Well, many of my views (like copy a CD and mail the artist money directly) are more for ripping out the middleman than ripping off artists.Incidently, I'm not convinced that intellectual rights are bad. I have a paid job programming and havn't yet released anything under the GPL (it's the 'if everyone else is taking advantage of the few benifits of this screwed up system, why shouldn't I' mentality), but have a few opensrc projects in mind that I'd like to do. I wasn't playing devils advocate, I find the NOIW intreiging, and people like nadador (who can't see the big picture beyond the square and so condemn those who can) irritate me
How is the defintion a problem? Of course music is information.
'Something you can store in your mind' is a nice broad idea of information for a start.
How about "Something with no mass which someone wants to preserve" as a definition for information. The no mass part cuts it down to data or weird physics phenomina, the wanting to preserve it cuts out the weird physics phenoma as preservation makes no semantic sense with something that is not physical unless it is information, the 'wanting' parts differentiates between information and noise
A short explaination for the short sighted person who can't grok that information has no mass - there's always one:
A storage medium always has mass, but the data 'in' the storage medium doesn't. For instance, a peice of paper with some ink thrown on it contains no information, another piece of paper with the ink arranged into words weighs no more yet 'contains' information. Another common example is take three atoms, divide the distance between atom1 and atom2 by the distance between atom2 and atom3, you'll get a fraction, write the number down as a decimal (eg 0.65077) and split those digits into groups of 3 digits (eg 65, 77) and read those groups as ascii values, you now have a string that doesn't mean anything. Change the distance of the two atoms so the fraction produces the string of the contents of encyclopedia britanica. Congratulations, you just stored the contents of Encyclopedia Britannica on 3 atoms (those three atoms are your storage medium). No, we don't have the technology to 'read' your three atoms yet, and the nature of the universe (it might be decrete and we currently are told it is limited in size) might put a limit on the amount of data you can store this way, but it illustrates that information is stored by arranging matter meaningfully and is not itself matter.Anyway, that was a long diversion. back to the topic at hand
The issue is does the creator have the freedom to control their creation
The issue is not whether they have the freedom to control their creation, they do, unconditionally. The issue you are are confusing this with is whether they have the right to control someone elses copy of their information.
Do you have the right to say how much a copy of my music is worth, or do I?
Both of us are perfectly free to make claims about how much a copy of your music is worth, those claims are meaninless however. I assume you mean 'Do you have the right to determine how much a copy of my music will cost' - how much it is worth is independant of how much it costs, how much you claim it is worth or even how much you think it is worth. I think the worth of you music is individual to the person seeking the copy.
People will pretty much pay for a CD what it is worth to them, so your belief in your fundamental human right to charge what you think the CD is worth, is going to be sidelined by what the CD is worth to the purchaser anyway. mp3's haven't stoped me buying music I thought was worthwhile (so given this statistical study of 1 I naturally assume most people are like that :))
I'm not for ripping off artists either, but many people seem to be stuck in the flawed mindset of "copyright law defines what is fair" and I was trying to point out soem of the status-quo assumptions you were making.- it belongs to them is arguable, legal does not equate to moral (slavery being the extreme example posted). Contracts and Copyright law can be dodgy in some areas.
- The Recording industry are not the artists, they are middle-men making a fortune off the backs of artists and ripping them off to the point where the artists hate them (see Prince and George Micheal etc)
So I'll concentrate on other points:Wake up, piracy is laymens terms is the wool the RIAA is pulling over your eyes.
Next time you see someone pushing something in the name of piracy, open your eyes and have a think about it - what is it really doing? Is it stopping piracy or lineing pockets?
Censored Internet Access in Utah Public Schools and Libraries
Instead try something like
The Alarming Incompetence found in all Internet Censorship Software in use by Utah Public Schools and Libraries
Maybe less wordy and extreme :)
This way, pro-censorship propagander can't directly quote your research paper without tipping people off that they're not being shown the full picture (thus losing the truth menome). I imagine you wanted the paper to sound neutral and objective, a fair enough decision at the time, but hindsight suggests the loss may have been more than the gain.
My second suggestion is to pick a statistically valid subset of the pages let through and analyse them for pages that shouldn't have been let through (rather than look at all 53 million). Once you've done that by the books you can then do the whole process again using David Burt's standards and count pages that include a link to a PGP FAQ etc to see how useful censorware is.
1 in a million sites incorrectly blocked and 999999 immoral [by David Burt] sites let through for every wholesome one.
Yeah, and past cases have shown that you aren't allowed to apply the restrictions that CCS applies to DVDs to books. Copyright law can cut both ways, it gives rights to both parties, the MPAA doesn't like this so they take your rights away with technology instead of law.
Also, if what you said was true and I scratch my CD I could get a replacement from the CD store for about a dollar - having already bought the license. However this is irrelevant to the argument. You seem to misunderstand copyright law also.
Returning to your book analogy, blind people occasionally have OCR text readers with speech synthesis to read for them. The DVD-CCA trying to control what players we use to view our DVDs is akin to book publishers trying to outlaw these machines (presumably by printing text that people can read but which throws OCR software - and then suing whoever makes an OCR speaker that can read it).
If you don't like the laws, get them changed.
I lost faith in laws a long time ago. They are written by the influencial for the influencial. Lemmi guess... you think in America money isn't power and multibillion dollar multinational corporations have no more lobbying ability than Joe Bloggs in the street?
Did you see the TV Nation episode where they showed how easy it was to pass a law if you have money? (They went and had their own law passed to prove the point). Your legal system is a sham, and I doubt ours is any better.
This is far bigger than just watching DVDs on linux. If the CSS hack is found to be legal, then DVD player manufacturers don't have to line the pockets of the DVD association with licencing fees (read: cheaper players), but more importantly, don't have to sign an agreement with the DVD association.
At the moment, the DVD association can demand anything it wants for the license - take it or shove off. Once that's gone, we get cheap players that can do more. You guys for instance will be able to buy multi-region players (we already have them 'cause it's supposedly illegal in NZ to pull that zoned scam). You could get players that allow you to duplicate their output on VHS etc.
Finding DeCSS legal will bust a monopoly that is moving directly against consumer interests.
The blurb and petition used phrases such as Quicktime client, Quicktime player, Quicktime software etc. This is clear and refers not to the quicktime format, but to software that plays both the quicktime format and codecs associated with the format.
What would you like the blurb or comments to say - "We want a linux player for Sorenson"? How many people would understand that?
<hint> The human language game is about communication.
When you say "QuickTime for Linux" everyone knows what you mean. Calling it Quicktime is communication, calling it Sorenson is not.
There is no difference between QuickTime and Sorenson if QuickTime players are the only thing that can play Sorenson. The Slashdot crowd has no reason to distinguish QuickTime from Sorenson when they talk about sorenson, or cinecrap, or any other Quicktime codec.
Once the codecs become open (hah!) then they might deserve to be regarded seperately.
Saying "QuickTime is an open format" might be true from a pedantic-video-compression-geek point of view, but it's blatently misleading to the rest of the world, a really dumb way to communicate. Sorry if I've read more into your post than you intented.
I like this idea a lot, I would moderate you up if I had points :)
Does anyone know how much an artist makes off a CD sale? I often hear it is so little that even big bands get most of their money from gigs - the CDs are just good promotion (and good money for the execs). Hell... what else could explain a Chemical Brothers tour?? :)
Anyway, that might just be urban myth. It would be nice to actually know so that I know I am paying the artist more. Anyone have some real figures? I would actually consider this ethical, as you are not costing the record company any distribution costs (you covered the distribution costs yourself) and distribution is all that they *should* be getting money for.
-It pisses off legitimate users, this isn't true of all schemes but do you trust the RIAA to get it right?
Take for example regional coding on DVDs, I am in a country where video rental stores have DVD shelves where half the DVDs are zone 4 and the other half zone 1 (but all mixed together). You can buy regionless players but the main appliance stores don't sell them - and more importantly, you have to be clued up enought about DVD to specifically ask for one. Otherwise you find you can't play the movie you payed for (or, if you're 'lucky', you have to do dumbass things with the remote control to change zones).