1. A bazaar is always a better place to find open and valid information than a cathedral.
Why do you say this? You think that the medieval Church scholars were somehow more poorly informed than the people in the bazaar? It seems obvious that your bazaar has informed you rather badly about history, then.
Distributing it (sharing files in Napster) is another matter.
I've often speculated about this, and when I ask legal experts, they all sort of shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, of course that's illegal." I'm not convinced.
The way the law is written, it relies on the purposes for which you have made the copies of the music:
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c) [. ..]
The problem with such an approach is that the courts are usually careful about ascribing motive. If you can plausibly make the argument that the purpose of your ogg/mp3 encoding of the music was for your own enjoyment, but that you also happened to put it in a network-accessible area of your computer, no-one could argue that you'd contravened subsection 2 unless they were saying that you didn't really intend to listen to the recordings in question. All you need do is prove that you have listened to said recordings, and you'd be protected.
In the long run, of course, the music industry would likely get that provision changed some. But I don't think a suitably neutral court is likely to read in the extended meaning of the legislation (of course, the Supreme Court of Canada is anything bit suitably neutral, and might read in anything at all. But that's the fault of the composition of the court, and not exactly relevant).
And when they are critical of the government, they side with the socialist NDP because they're the only other federal party that supports massive government funding of the CBC--the Alliance, BQ and Conservatives certainly don't have a track record of being CBC sympathisers.
In the last election, actually, I noticed a rather tremendous sympathy for the Conservatives on the CBC (at least, the radio, and This Hour has 22 Minutes, which is pretty much all I see of the Mother Corp's teevee).
and don't say the CBC is independent of government influence--the government can manipulate the CBC because it controls its funding
I hate that sort of silly argument. You need evidence that the CBC is, in fact, so influenced. In my view, the CBC news does not seem unduly biased in favour of the government: it sure gave J.C. and his merry group a hard time over the pepper spray, for instance. Just because the government could do something does not mean it does. Appealing to the bogeyman of funding is not an argument.
To fix the CBC, it should be modelled after PBS in the US.
PBS, in fact, takes advertisements. It just doesn't call them that. And it is nothing so much as low-brow highbrow commercial television. Now that A&E has proven it can do the same thing without government money, the reasons for PBS are completely opaque to me. I'm sure the need of YAPPMRC (Yet Another Peter, Paul and Mary Reunion Concert) does not justify PBS.
Some (ok, several) musicians complain about digital not because it introduces noise -- mere amplification alone can cause enough of this -- but because it's not as "warm". This is one of those terms that is mighty hard to explain in words, but it seems nevertheless to identify something: many musicians I have known can identify "blindly" a digital versus an analogue recording.
Of course, this could reflect alternative aesthetics. After all, some musicians like digital recordings better. The question, I suspect, is really one of what makes sound better. And it does seem obvious that a multiple-laser reading system will necessarily be subject to a DSP. Given that, the lack of "warmth" will show up. Whether this is good or bad, then, is related only to the listener.
No. AfterStep is an X window manager. The GNUstep/* hierarchy is part of the specification of GNUstep, so AfterStep aims at conforming to that standard. AS has not been officially accepted as a GNUstep window manager. There was some attempt during the 1.6.x releases to get authorization as a GNUstep window manager; I have not heard any reports of success.
I disagree. I believe OSS wins because it does better at parallizing those tasks that can be parallized, not because it lacks deadlines.
You should have looked at Cox's argument more before posting this, because he addresses it. He says that free software is "always late", in that it's already not there to do the function that the programmer -- the "leader" -- wants. In this, he accepts wholesale the view (from ESR) that free software always scratches an itch (and, perhaps more contentiously, the programmer's own itch).
Actually, there are already patents on DNA. The interesting bit is that the "owners" of the DNA are the biologists who took it, and not the humans who provided it. Last I checked (this could be expired info now), no-one had challenged the patent.
Clearly, there's a problem in abstentionism: governments can simply argue that those who don't vote don't care. It's certainly true that non-participation can make an impression, but only if it is understood as actual rejection.
I suggest that the better answer, if you really want to abstain, is to spoil the ballot. In Ontario (Canada) elections, you can refuse your ballot (and your refusal gets recorded); that isn't true nationally in Canada (and I don't know about the U.S.), but you can still spoil your ballot.
Imagine the effect of, say, 15% of all ballots being spoiled. Surely, some eyebrows would be raised? Well, maybe I'm being too optimistic.
In "W0m1n" (by Anonymous Coward) on Thursday, we saw
Looking for a preview of the new world?
One thing that will remain, at least, in the "new world" is the continuous fruitless prognosticating of doom- and brilliance-sayers, telling us that things in the future will be such-and-thus.
There is nothing about a technology which is inherently evil or good. Of course, since people are, mostly, venal and distasteful, the results of most technologies will be (or, to keep with the empiricist theme here, have ever been until the present) mostly bad. So what? Humans are nasty? Big surprise!
Sorry, I think this must be wrong. I work with one fellow who discovered at some point that an OS upgrade to an NT IIS server broke all his Perl stuff; so he abandoned Perl, in favour of VBScript. Honest to every deity you can imagine.
To me, a webserver always has Perl available. If NT 4.0 broke my server, I know what I would have replaced. Hint: it wouldn't be Perl. But for many NT admins, the point is single-sourcing. If it's an MS product, it's in; and if it's not an MS product, it's out. This is because of the putative greater compatibility between programs on an all-MS box.
And never you mind the evidence! Integrated solutions work, no matter what your experience is. If your experience suggests otherwise, you need thousands of dollars in support services.
There's another problem here. If the wrong program goes out -- a buggy, or otherwise failed attempt -- one can issue a patch after the fact. So, suppose that a "closed" competitor to an open project notices a bug in the open project, but doesn't say so. The open programmers then can issue a patch after the fact; this is one of the big bonuses for users of open software.
Not so with legal arguments. Generally, the courts allow only one chance to make the novel arguments. (New evidence, or other reasons for appeal, will allow extra chances; but that's not the baseline situation.) So, if one's opposition knows what one is going to say, and notices a problem, s/he has lots of time to tear that problem to bits; but one does not really have adequate opportunity to respond. Hence, there's an advantage to surprise in law that doesn't show up in programming.
I belive that this one's already been posted, way back in Dec. I know I looked for my fathers copy of Technology Review when I visited at Christmas, and read the article. See the previous posting. --A
Um...so I guess all the iMacs that have been sold in the last 6 months have just been false reports?
Nope, not false reports. Commendable marketing savvy. But technically, not even slightly insanely great. Not even a little great. Indeed, not even a new idea.
And not even the world's greatest sales success, considering what's been sold in toto during the last six months of computer sales. The iMac mostly looks good compared to the flatlined sales Apple had been experiencing.
My, my, so much discussion of how tied Linux is to Intel, and so can't "turn on a dime", like Apple can.
The last time Apple turned, as far as I can see, it did so as though it were a several-million-tons displacement ship. Apple can no more turn on a dime than it can spin straw into gold. Steve Jobs or not. Especially, "Steve Jobs".
When are the Apple fans going to learn? Jobs is of an age where he's, frankly, past it in terms of spotting the "insanely great". Sorry. We all age. I don't understand the culture of 15 year-olds any more, and I'm only 29. But too late for me.
Here's an interesting note: those Technology Review articles about Linux and GNOME and MS's research labs (there was a reference about this on/.; I read the article in my father's issue, while home for Christmas) struck me as missing the obvious factor: all the folks portrayed in the Linux article, with the exception of RMS, were young. The MS-research guys, for the most part, were people who had invented this or that, usually more than 10 years ago. In other words, they were done inventing. They're smart. They have other things to say. But they're past the really creative point for coders. (Don't believe me? Go visit your local maths department.)
Actually, several of the people who responded got it right only technically.
Bell Canada was (in many ways still is) a regulated monopoly. Just as AT&T ("Bell Telephone" until the break-up) in the U.S. was a heavily-regulated company with a monopoly position, Bell Canada has an iron lock (until the near future) on local telephone service. And, for years, it controlled all phones.
In this sense, they were a branch of the government of the day: they had to do what they were told, or risk reprisals from the policy makers.
The sad thing is that now, both in the U.S. and in Canada, we've given in: we have what were effectively government-provided monopoly positions "deregulated". All this does is to enrich the new self-proclaimed "entrepreneurs". These are people who were (yesterday!) simple bureaucrats; but now, they get to lecture us all on our lax ways. How nice for them that they can afford to be lax.
Of course, the Grope and Flail is even more mediocre. Why can't we have an intelligent, left-leaning but libertarian paper? Call it the Co-operative Commonwealth, perhaps.
As far as I recall, the reason here had to do with the transport problems: How sure are you that weapons-grade plutonium will move from A to B without mishap? How willing are you to bet on it?
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Why do you say this? You think that the medieval Church scholars were somehow more poorly informed than the people in the bazaar? It seems obvious that your bazaar has informed you rather badly about history, then.
I've often speculated about this, and when I ask legal experts, they all sort of shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, of course that's illegal." I'm not convinced.
The way the law is written, it relies on the purposes for which you have made the copies of the music:
The problem with such an approach is that the courts are usually careful about ascribing motive. If you can plausibly make the argument that the purpose of your ogg/mp3 encoding of the music was for your own enjoyment, but that you also happened to put it in a network-accessible area of your computer, no-one could argue that you'd contravened subsection 2 unless they were saying that you didn't really intend to listen to the recordings in question. All you need do is prove that you have listened to said recordings, and you'd be protected.
In the long run, of course, the music industry would likely get that provision changed some. But I don't think a suitably neutral court is likely to read in the extended meaning of the legislation (of course, the Supreme Court of Canada is anything bit suitably neutral, and might read in anything at all. But that's the fault of the composition of the court, and not exactly relevant).
In the last election, actually, I noticed a rather tremendous sympathy for the Conservatives on the CBC (at least, the radio, and This Hour has 22 Minutes, which is pretty much all I see of the Mother Corp's teevee).
I hate that sort of silly argument. You need evidence that the CBC is, in fact, so influenced. In my view, the CBC news does not seem unduly biased in favour of the government: it sure gave J.C. and his merry group a hard time over the pepper spray, for instance. Just because the government could do something does not mean it does. Appealing to the bogeyman of funding is not an argument.
PBS, in fact, takes advertisements. It just doesn't call them that. And it is nothing so much as low-brow highbrow commercial television. Now that A&E has proven it can do the same thing without government money, the reasons for PBS are completely opaque to me. I'm sure the need of YAPPMRC (Yet Another Peter, Paul and Mary Reunion Concert) does not justify PBS.
Some (ok, several) musicians complain about digital not because it introduces noise -- mere amplification alone can cause enough of this -- but because it's not as "warm". This is one of those terms that is mighty hard to explain in words, but it seems nevertheless to identify something: many musicians I have known can identify "blindly" a digital versus an analogue recording.
Of course, this could reflect alternative aesthetics. After all, some musicians like digital recordings better. The question, I suspect, is really one of what makes sound better. And it does seem obvious that a multiple-laser reading system will necessarily be subject to a DSP. Given that, the lack of "warmth" will show up. Whether this is good or bad, then, is related only to the listener.
No. AfterStep is an X window manager. The GNUstep/* hierarchy is part of the specification of GNUstep, so AfterStep aims at conforming to that standard. AS has not been officially accepted as a GNUstep window manager. There was some attempt during the 1.6.x releases to get authorization as a GNUstep window manager; I have not heard any reports of success.
Well, wouldn't be the first time for me. Now I see. Thanks for the clarification.
You should have looked at Cox's argument more before posting this, because he addresses it. He says that free software is "always late", in that it's already not there to do the function that the programmer -- the "leader" -- wants. In this, he accepts wholesale the view (from ESR) that free software always scratches an itch (and, perhaps more contentiously, the programmer's own itch).
Yep. Get 'em drunk on power, and then sell 'em anything at all. It's too perfectly right not to be true!
Actually, there are already patents on DNA. The interesting bit is that the "owners" of the DNA are the biologists who took it, and not the humans who provided it. Last I checked (this could be expired info now), no-one had challenged the patent.
Clearly, there's a problem in abstentionism: governments can simply argue that those who don't vote don't care. It's certainly true that non-participation can make an impression, but only if it is understood as actual rejection.
I suggest that the better answer, if you really want to abstain, is to spoil the ballot. In Ontario (Canada) elections, you can refuse your ballot (and your refusal gets recorded); that isn't true nationally in Canada (and I don't know about the U.S.), but you can still spoil your ballot.
Imagine the effect of, say, 15% of all ballots being spoiled. Surely, some eyebrows would be raised? Well, maybe I'm being too optimistic.
In "W0m1n" (by Anonymous Coward) on Thursday, we saw
One thing that will remain, at least, in the "new world" is the continuous fruitless prognosticating of doom- and brilliance-sayers, telling us that things in the future will be such-and-thus.
There is nothing about a technology which is inherently evil or good. Of course, since people are, mostly, venal and distasteful, the results of most technologies will be (or, to keep with the empiricist theme here, have ever been until the present) mostly bad. So what? Humans are nasty? Big surprise!
Sorry, I think this must be wrong. I work with one fellow who discovered at some point that an OS upgrade to an NT IIS server broke all his Perl stuff; so he abandoned Perl, in favour of VBScript. Honest to every deity you can imagine.
To me, a webserver always has Perl available. If NT 4.0 broke my server, I know what I would have replaced. Hint: it wouldn't be Perl. But for many NT admins, the point is single-sourcing. If it's an MS product, it's in; and if it's not an MS product, it's out. This is because of the putative greater compatibility between programs on an all-MS box.
And never you mind the evidence! Integrated solutions work, no matter what your experience is. If your experience suggests otherwise, you need thousands of dollars in support services.
There's another problem here. If the wrong program goes out -- a buggy, or otherwise failed attempt -- one can issue a patch after the fact. So, suppose that a "closed" competitor to an open project notices a bug in the open project, but doesn't say so. The open programmers then can issue a patch after the fact; this is one of the big bonuses for users of open software.
Not so with legal arguments. Generally, the courts allow only one chance to make the novel arguments. (New evidence, or other reasons for appeal, will allow extra chances; but that's not the baseline situation.) So, if one's opposition knows what one is going to say, and notices a problem, s/he has lots of time to tear that problem to bits; but one does not really have adequate opportunity to respond. Hence, there's an advantage to surprise in law that doesn't show up in programming.
I belive that this one's already been posted, way back in Dec. I know I looked for my fathers copy of Technology Review when I visited at Christmas, and read the article. See the previous posting. --A
Nope, not false reports. Commendable marketing savvy. But technically, not even slightly insanely great. Not even a little great. Indeed, not even a new idea.
And not even the world's greatest sales success, considering what's been sold in toto during the last six months of computer sales. The iMac mostly looks good compared to the flatlined sales Apple had been experiencing.
My, my, so much discussion of how tied Linux is to Intel, and so can't "turn on a dime", like Apple can.
The last time Apple turned, as far as I can see, it did so as though it were a several-million-tons displacement ship. Apple can no more turn on a dime than it can spin straw into gold. Steve Jobs or not. Especially, "Steve Jobs".
When are the Apple fans going to learn? Jobs is of an age where he's, frankly, past it in terms of spotting the "insanely great". Sorry. We all age. I don't understand the culture of 15 year-olds any more, and I'm only 29. But too late for me.
Here's an interesting note: those Technology Review articles about Linux and GNOME and MS's research labs (there was a reference about this on /.; I read the article in my father's issue, while home for Christmas) struck me as missing the obvious factor: all the folks portrayed in the Linux article, with the exception of RMS, were young. The MS-research guys, for the most part, were people who had invented this or that, usually more than 10 years ago. In other words, they were done inventing. They're smart. They have other things to say. But they're past the really creative point for coders. (Don't believe me? Go visit your local maths department.)
Guess which group Jobs fits into?
Actually, several of the people who responded got it right only technically.
Bell Canada was (in many ways still is) a regulated monopoly. Just as AT&T ("Bell Telephone" until the break-up) in the U.S. was a heavily-regulated company with a monopoly position, Bell Canada has an iron lock (until the near future) on local telephone service. And, for years, it controlled all phones.
In this sense, they were a branch of the government of the day: they had to do what they were told, or risk reprisals from the policy makers.
The sad thing is that now, both in the U.S. and in Canada, we've given in: we have what were effectively government-provided monopoly positions "deregulated". All this does is to enrich the new self-proclaimed "entrepreneurs". These are people who were (yesterday!) simple bureaucrats; but now, they get to lecture us all on our lax ways. How nice for them that they can afford to be lax.
I sometimes wonder.
Of course, the Grope and Flail is even more mediocre. Why can't we have an intelligent, left-leaning but libertarian paper? Call it the Co-operative Commonwealth, perhaps.
As far as I recall, the reason here had to do with the transport problems: How sure are you that weapons-grade plutonium will move from A to B without mishap? How willing are you to bet on it?