Re:That argument didn't work for warez sites
on
Kazaa Sues Record Labels
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Suing the record labels for not letting people get away with illegal activities involving the RIAA's property is just idiotic.
Police aren't legally allowed to beat a confession out of a suspect. The DEA can't force you to snort some cocaine to get an indictment. An undercover(pardon the pun) police woman can't strip naked in front of you and demand money for sex in order to arrest you.
The point is this. You can't break one law (presumably contract law in this case) in order ot enforce another law.
What the RIAA is doing with their specialized client is nothing that can't be done with the "official" client. The RIAA just has it easier with their custom software. And we all know about Kazaa Lite and I don't see them bitching about that.
So if the police kick in your grandmother's front door and torture her with a stun gun to get information about you, they're not doing anything that they can't with a warrant, but they're just doing it the easy way. Is that ok with you?
With MSN and AIM et all, using a third party client is stealing resources from MS and/or AOL et al. Using a third party client with Kazaa doesn't affect them in the least.
If you used an official client, you'd be utilizing the same resources as you are when you use an unofficial client. What is the difference?
Maybe Gnutella should sue Kazaa off their network. Kazaa is only hurting P2P with this kind of idiocy.
Kazaa uses FastTrack, not Gnutella. Do you know anything about the topic at hand?
Have you even _tried_ encoding to Ogg with Vorbis Tools 1.0 at the lowest quality?
No, and frankly I don't ever plan to. After several years I have ripped and encoded several GIGABYTES of my music as MP3s, there is no pressing need for me to switch to Ogg. I have seen car stereos that will play MP3 cds for under $130. I have yet to see one that will play Ogg cds at any price.
It was just a day late and a dollar short when it came to me and my music collection.
There is no world of difference. It is a fundamental flaw in thinking. When you realize that, you will start to see what is real.
So like I said, you are going to risk losing a POWERFUL ally in the fight against "Trusted Computing" and The Patriot Act just because you have an axe to grind about not being able to openly smoke your weed.
The charts at the end show entries for 128kbps LAME MP3 and 64kbps FhG MP3, but these are used as high and low anchors for reference, as MP3 is really out of its league at bitrates such as these."
I guess that it's good that whenever I buy and rip a CD I always encode it as 256kbps MP3s.
But seriously, what is the point of these ultra low bitrate audio tests? Hard drive space is constantly getting cheaper, memory for portable devices is constantly getting cheaper, so what is the point? Sure, my MP3s take up 4 times the space of AM radio quality encodings, but unless you are listening to classic oration, where there is no music, why not use a higher bitrate?
Though I disagree with Mr. Barr on this point, he is being consistant in his views.
How can you be worried about censorship, Patriot Act, and government abuses when you were the very person who prevented the people from governing themselves?
Oh stop it! There is a world of difference between thinking that 'medical marijuana' is not legally acceptable and thinking that it is ok for the feds to execute search warrantless searches and to convene secret grand juries without ever telling you what evidence was collected during their warrantless search.
Are you really willing to reject the help of someone who will be a helpful ally on this issue just because he doesn't want to make it legal for you to smoke your weed?
A combustion engine yielding 100kW (about 120 horese powers) driving your car with a speed of 60 miles, likely uses up about 7 liters gasoline per hour(or per 100km distance).
Sorry, I'm from the U.S., I don't think in metric terms.
Driving a electric car, filled with power from a coal plant or a nuclear plant, uses only half a liter of oil/gasoline or teh equivalent amount of coal.
Perhaps in terms of just the energy used at runtime, but there are other concerns that are often ignored. Batteries are grossly inefficient, if you use 100kwh to charge a battery, you'll be lucky to get 75% of it back when you use the battery.
Energy is lost through transmission. Everytime it passes through a transformer, energy is lost, when you charge the batteries, energy is lost, when you retrieve energy from the batteries, some is lost.
Electric engines are about 10 to 20 times more efficient than combustion engines. That means at the point of usage, that is in your car, you produce only a tenth of the amount of environmental damaging stuff than with a combustion engine. And further more: you can handel the environmental damaging stuff in a plant far better than all over the land where it is distributed by combustion engines.
Your arguement falls apart one we look at the "big picture" instead of just the point of usage.
Regardless of if we produce it in concentrated areas or spread out across the landscape, CO2 is still CO2, you can't change that. SO2 is still SO2. Same for SO, and the myriad hydrocarbons that are produced when we burn fossil fuels.
The arguement can be made that it is easier to deal with environmental pollutants when they're distributed over a greater distance. There is a limited amount of space around a powerplant, that limited space can only contain so many trees to process CO2. Over a larger area, there can be more natural mechanisms to deal with pollutants.
Is this where we are heading if there ever is a nuclear war?
700Kg rats?
In the event of a nuclear way, 3/4 ton animals of any type would be welcome. You could feed a nice sized group of people for a long time on a 1500 pound animal.
That would be true but on the other side of that coin we're not dependent on a bunch of psychopathic goat herders at the ass end of the world for coal.
I have no tolerance for any type of racial or religious discrimination. If that's what you think this is about, please feel free to ignore anything else that I have to say.
And with an electric vehicle there is also the possibility of using alternative energy sources for charging. Solar, wind turbine, small project hydro.
No, don't delude yourself. In the current state of the world, none of those is a viable energy source.
But you are correct that until we can utilize alternate energy on a broader scale the only real benefit is being able to relax our dependence on foreign oil.
Foreign oil is good for us IMHO, it is our need for foreign oil that has kept us out of trouble with a large portion of the middle east. That however isn't the topic of this conversation.
I used to use an S3 card back in the day (Virge?) for 2D processing. I'm a bit curious about how they're going to break into the current 3D marketplace, though, given the barrier to entry posed by the market leader ATi and the technically superior nVidia lines.
I remember the Virge chips, wildly popular, but by most accounts the world's first 3d decellerator. I wish the best to S3 because another choice in the marketplace can obly be a good thing, but their track record does not inspire confidence.
If I write C code that compiles under C++ would that be considerd "C++" (for the purpose of said competition . While I can program C++ if its a timed competition C would be faster for me).
Would your code compile under a C++ compiler without "using namespace std;"?
If you include that one statement, your code is no longer standard C and is now C++.
Double standards? Doesnt the US military give its soldiers Methampetamine?
At one time they did on a widespread basis. I suppose that it's possible that some elite black ops type units are still issued them.
But on the grand scheme of things. When falling asleep WILL be fatal, and taking some meth might be addictive the choice is easy. They can send you to rehab for meth addiction, they can't rehab you from a 7.62x39mm bullet hole in your face.
You can add more elmer's glue, or more Borate to the mixture to thicken and harden the resultant mixture. It becomes rather rubber-like and it bounces more than you would imagine. You can add more water to the mixture and end up with a slimier putty. I had loads of fun with this stuff before I got too old to get high and play around with equipment from the chemistry lab.
Although I'm not saying that music isn't overpriced (it is), it's clear that you'll get alot more use out of a $15 CD than a $15 DVD. For one thing unless you're a massive movie buff you probably won't watch that DVD any more than 5-10 times in your life.
Maybe you won't watch a dvd movie more than 10-15 times, but I personally have watched my copy of Night Of The Living Dead at least 5-10 times per year since I first got it on VHS back in 1993.
Spending $30 for the VHS & DVD of the movie were worth it to me. I have gotten more than my money's worth out of them. If you're talking about Pr0n, you have a point. But people often do watch regular movies enough to make it worthwhile to buy them.
Yet a music CD you'll listen to at work, on your computer, in your car, walking down the street.. you get the idea - many more times. For this reason alone in terms of total entertainment hours something gives you a good CD is much more valuable than a DVD.
This I agree with completely. Whenever I buy a new CD, the first thing I do is EAC and bladeenc it on my PC and then put the originals in my truck. Right now, I'm listening to an MP3 from an album that was released in 1992. So, sure music CDs will be used far more than DVDs, but the record companies are making much more profit per unit than the movie companies are.
Canada. You can join the flood of "evil" potheads & free thinkers fleeing the police state that the US is becoming. And I know we aren't evil. But to George Bush and his cronies we sure are.
Say what want about President Bush, but there is no proof of him committing any felonies while in office.
Can you say the same about any Democrat presidents over the past 20 years?
What a naive view, particularly in light of the reference to office buildings in NYC. Skyscrapers have _FAR_ more window area than they do roof surface.
Don't forget that in the northern states most windows are not covered with snow the way that roofs are.
I mean, lying for money. Lying to save someone or telling white lies not to hurt people, ok, but for money?
All three of those is lying to further one's own interests. Right, wrong or indifferent you have to expect them all.
Please don't subscribe to the 'I can pollute/steal/lie/deceive, because I'm a business, and we're about the bottom line' credo just because it's what everybody does.
I don't subscribe to that theory, but the problem is that most businesses do. Making money is what business is about. Bad business decisions are what put 3dfx out of business. Remember Glide had a few advantages over D3D and OpenGL when 3dfx wasted their lead in the market? I could speak volumes on how poorly thought out the decision to bank on their existing technology instead of developing next gen tech, but I won't.
All of the smart money is betting on HL2 being HUGE, ATI is making a calculated risk by working with Valve to increase their market share.
Despicable as lying for money may be, you have to expect it.
Having a mobile phone with a built-in blood glucose meter would be a real useful thing, especially since the number of people with the disease is growing at an alarming rate.
Unfortunately eventually there may be enough diabetics to make this necessary.
But the thought of someone piercing his skin with his phone to monitor his BG while sitting next to me at Applebees freaks me out.
Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?
In a word. Business.
This illustrates perfectly the potential pitfalls that lie before us as Linux makes progress in the "Business" market. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that one day we'll see articles and press releases about how much faster Oracle runs on Red Hat than it does on Debian.
It's called a conflict of interest people, when someone has a financial interest in one particular version of the truth you can't expect them to work against their own interests.
This should have been marked as "Funny" instead of insightful. This guy was obviously illustrating absurdity by behaving in an absurd manner.
There is no argument that can be made that any company has a right to have their marketing strategy or business model succeed. If my business model is that I develop my own cologne and require a license for people to smell it, then sue everyone who uses an unlicensed nose to smell my cologne, I have no right to have that model succeed. I have the right to try it, but no right to success.
If you wanted to expand on your own theme... it is ok to sell alcohol to people 16 and older in America, because hey-- that's how it is in Germany.
Morally and ethically, yes. But it would not be legal. It is not illegal to sell a game to a minor. To refuse to sell someone a game based soley upon age is a matter of corporate or company policy, not law.
As far as school vouchers go, you said that as if it were a bad thing. I don't think there should be any stipulations if a parent doesn't want their kid taught at a particular school for whatever reason. A parent should have that right. However, arguing that the reason behind vouchers is propoganda, I think you should take a second look. We have people being miseducated and failing, and because of poor grades vouchers have become a popular idea.
In many parts of the country public schools are failing. Vouchers are a great incentive for them to clean up their acts.
It is simply a delegation of authority that is provided in the same way the "we card" function works.
It is usurped authority. They have the right to not sell a product to someone, that is their right. I have the right to not like it, and unless I'm told to leave the store, I have the right to voice my opposition to their policy.
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Suing the record labels for not letting people get away with illegal activities involving the RIAA's property is just idiotic.
Police aren't legally allowed to beat a confession out of a suspect. The DEA can't force you to snort some cocaine to get an indictment. An undercover(pardon the pun) police woman can't strip naked in front of you and demand money for sex in order to arrest you.
The point is this. You can't break one law (presumably contract law in this case) in order ot enforce another law.
What the RIAA is doing with their specialized client is nothing that can't be done with the "official" client. The RIAA just has it easier with their custom software. And we all know about Kazaa Lite and I don't see them bitching about that.
So if the police kick in your grandmother's front door and torture her with a stun gun to get information about you, they're not doing anything that they can't with a warrant, but they're just doing it the easy way. Is that ok with you?
With MSN and AIM et all, using a third party client is stealing resources from MS and/or AOL et al. Using a third party client with Kazaa doesn't affect them in the least.
If you used an official client, you'd be utilizing the same resources as you are when you use an unofficial client. What is the difference?
Maybe Gnutella should sue Kazaa off their network. Kazaa is only hurting P2P with this kind of idiocy.
Kazaa uses FastTrack, not Gnutella. Do you know anything about the topic at hand?
LK
-I wrote my sig for people like you.
Have you even _tried_ encoding to Ogg with Vorbis Tools 1.0 at the lowest quality?
No, and frankly I don't ever plan to. After several years I have ripped and encoded several GIGABYTES of my music as MP3s, there is no pressing need for me to switch to Ogg. I have seen car stereos that will play MP3 cds for under $130. I have yet to see one that will play Ogg cds at any price.
It was just a day late and a dollar short when it came to me and my music collection.
LK
There is no world of difference. It is a fundamental flaw in thinking. When you realize that, you will start to see what is real.
So like I said, you are going to risk losing a POWERFUL ally in the fight against "Trusted Computing" and The Patriot Act just because you have an axe to grind about not being able to openly smoke your weed.
I truly feel sad for you.
LK
The charts at the end show entries for 128kbps LAME MP3 and 64kbps FhG MP3, but these are used as high and low anchors for reference, as MP3 is really out of its league at bitrates such as these."
I guess that it's good that whenever I buy and rip a CD I always encode it as 256kbps MP3s.
But seriously, what is the point of these ultra low bitrate audio tests? Hard drive space is constantly getting cheaper, memory for portable devices is constantly getting cheaper, so what is the point? Sure, my MP3s take up 4 times the space of AM radio quality encodings, but unless you are listening to classic oration, where there is no music, why not use a higher bitrate?
LK
Though I disagree with Mr. Barr on this point, he is being consistant in his views.
How can you be worried about censorship, Patriot Act, and government abuses when you were the very person who prevented the people from governing themselves?
Oh stop it! There is a world of difference between thinking that 'medical marijuana' is not legally acceptable and thinking that it is ok for the feds to execute search warrantless searches and to convene secret grand juries without ever telling you what evidence was collected during their warrantless search.
Are you really willing to reject the help of someone who will be a helpful ally on this issue just because he doesn't want to make it legal for you to smoke your weed?
LK
Most of us are libertarian, but often the conservatives have libertarian ideas.
You have it backwards. Libertarians have conservative ideas. Conservatives were here first.
Liberals want 'personal' freedom. Conservatives want financial freedom. Libertarians have coopted ideas from both camps.
LK
A combustion engine yielding 100kW (about 120 horese powers) driving your car with a speed of 60 miles, likely uses up about 7 liters gasoline per hour(or per 100km distance).
Sorry, I'm from the U.S., I don't think in metric terms.
Driving a electric car, filled with power from a coal plant or a nuclear plant, uses only half a liter of oil/gasoline or teh equivalent amount of coal.
Perhaps in terms of just the energy used at runtime, but there are other concerns that are often ignored. Batteries are grossly inefficient, if you use 100kwh to charge a battery, you'll be lucky to get 75% of it back when you use the battery.
Energy is lost through transmission. Everytime it passes through a transformer, energy is lost, when you charge the batteries, energy is lost, when you retrieve energy from the batteries, some is lost.
Electric engines are about 10 to 20 times more efficient than combustion engines. That means at the point of usage, that is in your car, you produce only a tenth of the amount of environmental damaging stuff than with a combustion engine. And further more: you can handel the environmental damaging stuff in a plant far better than all over the land where it is distributed by combustion engines.
Your arguement falls apart one we look at the "big picture" instead of just the point of usage.
Regardless of if we produce it in concentrated areas or spread out across the landscape, CO2 is still CO2, you can't change that. SO2 is still SO2. Same for SO, and the myriad hydrocarbons that are produced when we burn fossil fuels.
The arguement can be made that it is easier to deal with environmental pollutants when they're distributed over a greater distance. There is a limited amount of space around a powerplant, that limited space can only contain so many trees to process CO2. Over a larger area, there can be more natural mechanisms to deal with pollutants.
LK
Is this where we are heading if there ever is a nuclear war?
700Kg rats?
In the event of a nuclear way, 3/4 ton animals of any type would be welcome. You could feed a nice sized group of people for a long time on a 1500 pound animal.
LK
That would be true but on the other side of that coin we're not dependent on a bunch of psychopathic goat herders at the ass end of the world for coal.
I have no tolerance for any type of racial or religious discrimination. If that's what you think this is about, please feel free to ignore anything else that I have to say.
And with an electric vehicle there is also the possibility of using alternative energy sources for charging. Solar, wind turbine, small project hydro.
No, don't delude yourself. In the current state of the world, none of those is a viable energy source.
But you are correct that until we can utilize alternate energy on a broader scale the only real benefit is being able to relax our dependence on foreign oil.
Foreign oil is good for us IMHO, it is our need for foreign oil that has kept us out of trouble with a large portion of the middle east. That however isn't the topic of this conversation.
LK
Where do you think that the electricity to charge this car is going to come from?
In the US, most likely from a coal or nuclear power plant.
This whole electric/hybrid hype is idiocy, until we change the source of our energy, how we use it is immaterial.
LK
I used to use an S3 card back in the day (Virge?) for 2D processing. I'm a bit curious about how they're going to break into the current 3D marketplace, though, given the barrier to entry posed by the market leader ATi and the technically superior nVidia lines.
I remember the Virge chips, wildly popular, but by most accounts the world's first 3d decellerator. I wish the best to S3 because another choice in the marketplace can obly be a good thing, but their track record does not inspire confidence.
LK
If I write C code that compiles under C++ would that be considerd "C++" (for the purpose of said competition . While I can program C++ if its a timed competition C would be faster for me) .
Would your code compile under a C++ compiler without "using namespace std;"?
If you include that one statement, your code is no longer standard C and is now C++.
Problem solved.
Double standards? Doesnt the US military give its soldiers Methampetamine?
At one time they did on a widespread basis. I suppose that it's possible that some elite black ops type units are still issued them.
But on the grand scheme of things. When falling asleep WILL be fatal, and taking some meth might be addictive the choice is easy. They can send you to rehab for meth addiction, they can't rehab you from a 7.62x39mm bullet hole in your face.
LK
You can add more elmer's glue, or more Borate to the mixture to thicken and harden the resultant mixture. It becomes rather rubber-like and it bounces more than you would imagine. You can add more water to the mixture and end up with a slimier putty. I had loads of fun with this stuff before I got too old to get high and play around with equipment from the chemistry lab.
LK
Although I'm not saying that music isn't overpriced (it is), it's clear that you'll get alot more use out of a $15 CD than a $15 DVD. For one thing unless you're a massive movie buff you probably won't watch that DVD any more than 5-10 times in your life.
Maybe you won't watch a dvd movie more than 10-15 times, but I personally have watched my copy of Night Of The Living Dead at least 5-10 times per year since I first got it on VHS back in 1993.
Spending $30 for the VHS & DVD of the movie were worth it to me. I have gotten more than my money's worth out of them. If you're talking about Pr0n, you have a point. But people often do watch regular movies enough to make it worthwhile to buy them.
Yet a music CD you'll listen to at work, on your computer, in your car, walking down the street.. you get the idea - many more times. For this reason alone in terms of total entertainment hours something gives you a good CD is much more valuable than a DVD.
This I agree with completely. Whenever I buy a new CD, the first thing I do is EAC and bladeenc it on my PC and then put the originals in my truck. Right now, I'm listening to an MP3 from an album that was released in 1992. So, sure music CDs will be used far more than DVDs, but the record companies are making much more profit per unit than the movie companies are.
LK
Canada. You can join the flood of "evil" potheads & free thinkers fleeing the police state that the US is becoming. And I know we aren't evil. But to George Bush and his cronies we sure are.
Say what want about President Bush, but there is no proof of him committing any felonies while in office.
Can you say the same about any Democrat presidents over the past 20 years?
LK
Have you forgotten that this is Slashdot?
We have geeks here who can cobble together a dialing machine from an old 2400bps modem and a telephone handset.
LK
In a word "Amish", those people don't use anything that has been invented in the last 100 years.
LK
What a naive view, particularly in light of the reference to office buildings in NYC. Skyscrapers have _FAR_ more window area than they do roof surface.
Don't forget that in the northern states most windows are not covered with snow the way that roofs are.
LK
I can and I do expect them not to lie for money.
Then prepare for a lifetime of disappointment.
I mean, lying for money. Lying to save someone or telling white lies not to hurt people, ok, but for money?
All three of those is lying to further one's own interests. Right, wrong or indifferent you have to expect them all.
Please don't subscribe to the 'I can pollute/steal/lie/deceive, because I'm a business, and we're about the bottom line' credo just because it's what everybody does.
I don't subscribe to that theory, but the problem is that most businesses do. Making money is what business is about. Bad business decisions are what put 3dfx out of business. Remember Glide had a few advantages over D3D and OpenGL when 3dfx wasted their lead in the market? I could speak volumes on how poorly thought out the decision to bank on their existing technology instead of developing next gen tech, but I won't.
All of the smart money is betting on HL2 being HUGE, ATI is making a calculated risk by working with Valve to increase their market share.
Despicable as lying for money may be, you have to expect it.
LK
Having a mobile phone with a built-in blood glucose meter would be a real useful thing, especially since the number of people with the disease is growing at an alarming rate.
Unfortunately eventually there may be enough diabetics to make this necessary.
But the thought of someone piercing his skin with his phone to monitor his BG while sitting next to me at Applebees freaks me out.
LK
What if the submitter had suggested a custom faceplate showing Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, eating a bowl of hot grits?
In Soviet Russia, the bowls of hot grits put Natalie Portman down their pants.
LK
Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?
In a word. Business.
This illustrates perfectly the potential pitfalls that lie before us as Linux makes progress in the "Business" market. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that one day we'll see articles and press releases about how much faster Oracle runs on Red Hat than it does on Debian.
It's called a conflict of interest people, when someone has a financial interest in one particular version of the truth you can't expect them to work against their own interests.
LK
This should have been marked as "Funny" instead of insightful. This guy was obviously illustrating absurdity by behaving in an absurd manner.
There is no argument that can be made that any company has a right to have their marketing strategy or business model succeed. If my business model is that I develop my own cologne and require a license for people to smell it, then sue everyone who uses an unlicensed nose to smell my cologne, I have no right to have that model succeed. I have the right to try it, but no right to success.
LK
If you wanted to expand on your own theme... it is ok to sell alcohol to people 16 and older in America, because hey-- that's how it is in Germany.
Morally and ethically, yes. But it would not be legal. It is not illegal to sell a game to a minor. To refuse to sell someone a game based soley upon age is a matter of corporate or company policy, not law.
As far as school vouchers go, you said that as if it were a bad thing. I don't think there should be any stipulations if a parent doesn't want their kid taught at a particular school for whatever reason. A parent should have that right. However, arguing that the reason behind vouchers is propoganda, I think you should take a second look. We have people being miseducated and failing, and because of poor grades vouchers have become a popular idea.
In many parts of the country public schools are failing. Vouchers are a great incentive for them to clean up their acts.
It is simply a delegation of authority that is provided in the same way the "we card" function works.
It is usurped authority. They have the right to not sell a product to someone, that is their right. I have the right to not like it, and unless I'm told to leave the store, I have the right to voice my opposition to their policy.
LK