I use OS X. I've always used a Mac because it is the best computing experience, but I BELIEVE in Linux. Linux has the potential to be cumulatively better than any computer operating system because it has potential input from far more skilled people.
Hey, I hear that the greater the number of chefs that cook a meal, the better it tastes.
When I first started reading the article, I figured they were talking about New York versus California. I've worked on bi-coastal projects, and the cultural differences in how things get decided (and even coding styles) are palpable.
Not to be the neighborhood scold, but this attitude is really insulting.
I don't mean the "I don't not want to pay for it" attitude -- hey, there's lots of things we all don't pay for. But the idea that you would only feel guilty if you use their bandwidth. It kind of implies that the "valuable" part of Red Vs. Blue is the money that goes in to hosting their site and streaming the media instead of, oh, I dunno, the time and sweat and effort it takes to produce something -- anything -- worth watching.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but I just had to say it. If you're going to feel guilty about not donating, feel guilty because you're not paying them for the huge effort they put in to create something you enjoy. If and when you decide to donate (or buy a DVD), do it because you want to reward them for their creativity. Not for their bandwidth.
At $150 they would fly off the shelves faster than anything else out there. At $200 they'd be a great deal and would sell fantastically.
I can imagine that pricing presentation. "Let's price them at $150! We'll lose money on each one, but make up for it in volume!"
Apple is already selling iPods as fast as they can make them. Why in the world would they want to cannibalize their own sales with a stupidly low price on a different device that they obviously think there's a market for?
Apple's making a good bet here. They're selling the iPod mini on features, not on price. If you're not interested in buying one, that just means they're not marketing it to you.
We'll know in 6 months whether this was a good bet or not. I think it is.
You are just proving my point. God, I hate this attitude so much.
USER: "I need to cut and paste." SLASHDOT POSTER: "Why do you need to cut and paste? You shouldn't cut and paste. Write a script and pipe your output to stdout." USER: "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to shoot you now." [shoots slashdot poster]
If you want people to use programs you develop, one of the most important steps is the part where you shut the hell up and actually LISTEN to what people want.
It's not a part of any reasonable development process to tell the user that they should find a stupider, more complicated way of doing what they want. That, fferreres, is what you are doing.
If more GUIs are really what's needed in the UNIX world, then writing them is not a problem.
Y'know, people keep saying that this is such a trivial little matter of implementation, but I can't help but observe that 20 years after the Macintosh came out, cut and paste in X windows is still completely fucking broken.
At some point, you have to abandon the excuses and admit that it's not just an implementation problem, it's a broken paradigm.
DEVELOPER: "Here's our GUI! Enjoy!" USER: "Wow, thanks! This sure is pretty. So, how do I cut and paste?" DEVELOPER: "Well, that depends on which toolkit the app you're running uses." USER: "Uh, OK. Thanks." [user turns off computer, goes back to his Windows or OS X machine.]
In the above scenario, the user is right, and the developer is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I disagree; that's like saying I need to desalinate the water in the ocean; it's an impossibly hard task.
While I'm not a big believer in "technical solutions to social problems," it's clear to me that SMTP as it currently exists is not up to the task of meeting the needs of the community in a world where noise exceeds signal by several orders of magnitude. The first, biggest problem is that we can't reliably trace messages back to their source, thus allowing spammers to operate indefinitely. We need a mail system that uses cryptographic signatures to get some accountability into the system.
I can't believe none of you have even thought to mention Karel the Robot.
Learning how to program is completely orthogonal to learning how to use a specific language or platform. What's needed is not teaching a specific skill set, that will be obsolete in a year or two, but teaching the metaphor and process. Karel does that. (The first part of CMU's "intro" programming course used to use Karel).
When reading tidbits like this, it's important to keep in mind that Sandra Day wasn't giving any clues as to the Supreme Court's take on the merits of the case. It looks to me like a purely procedural question, that of personal jurisdiction -- does the California court have the right to drag someone from Texas into Court there. Nothing to do specifically with DeCSS at all.
Still, it's always nice to see things get just a little bit harder for the entertainment industry.
Why do we need to waste the time and effort of so many skilled coders and frontiersmen of the Open Source revolution on a Web server project that should clearly be marked -1, Redundant?
Wait a minute, who is "we"?
I mean, no offense, but who the hell are you to tell a programmer what she should work on? Oh wait, did I say "no offense?" I meant "plenty of offense." As long as the Boa guys are enjoying what they're doing, more power to them. Now, maybe you're whining about Slashdot writing an article on it, but that's hardly the Boa guys fault.
And, frankly, you sound like the type of person that's going to find something irritating to whine about no matter what.
I mean, think about it folks. Then, with their newly saved time, these Boa developers could have embarked on another project that's of high merit, something that we as Open Sourcers truly need, and, to quote typical manager talk, "needed yesterday".
Well, maybe some of us want to do work because it's fun, and we're interested in it, rather than because some random internet bozo thinks he 'needs' it.
I am doing my part for our revolution, people.
Yeah, I can see that -- you're already trying to impose your own narrowminded "managerial" (your label, not mine) viewpoint on the people that are trying to get work done, and touting your own superiority. Whooooo, how innovative and revolutionary.
So why don't you just crawl back into your hole and write whatever code you want to, instead of whining that other people are working on things that don't benefit you personally?
I have to admit, I've been lusting after the new Tibooks, which come with the Radeon 9000 mobility video cards. I know that they don't get -all- of the new games right away, but how do they perform on those games they do get?
The phrase "intellectual property" does not necessarily refer to the ownership of ideas. As I've explained, ad nauseam, copyright does not subsist in ideas, but in the ownership of the right to copy expression.
In case you haven't been listening, the term 'Intellectual property' is bogus double speak that was not used by the framers and really has nothing to do with the limited exclusive right to make _copies_ of a work. The framers had no intention of turning ideas into some kind of possession. Yes, you might say the authors of a work 'possess' the copy right, but they do not 'possess' the actual work or idea... just the _copyright_. Understand? They simply wanted to create an incentive for the public release of previously private (or non-existant) ideas.
I'm not going to debate the finer points of copyright with someone who thinks, incorrectly, that copyright has anything to do with "ideas." I already explained, above, that it does not.
Okay, yes, you CAN grant me the right to use your property under almost any terms you care to invent. Note the phrasing, though? It's still YOUR property! I may have an exclusive right to use it, even to the exclusion of your usage rights; but in order to withold any rights from me, you have to maintain ownership of those rights. I'm buying the rights, not the land.
Ownership of property is entirely about rights. The owner of a set of rights (remember my "bundle of sticks" discussion?) is always free to subdivide any rights that he or she owns and dispose of them as she or he sees fit. Owning real property in fee simple is just a special case of the above.
There's nothing magical about ownership. If you grant me an estate in fee tail, let's say, saying that I can keep the property as long as I have an heir of the body, then I am free to sell that property to someone else, subject to the rules of the original purchase.
I mean, it's OK for you to not like it, but denying that that's a property right seems kind of silly.
You've got this backwards. So-called intellectual property starts out naturally belonging to the public because an idea cannot by its very nature be property, and therefore cannot be owned by an individual -- the Founding Fathers were very clear about this. The creator/inventor is granted a limited period of exclusive exploitation of the idea as a reward for having created the idea in order to promote the creation of new ideas. So nothing's being taken from the inventor when the idea is placed in the public domain -- the idea is reverting to its natural state after a temporary reward has been given to the inventor.
You're half-right.
The part that you're missing is that an author or creator is never under any obligation to disclose or publish their works. They could (for example) keep them for their own enjoyment. Because the government wants to incent the creation of works that benefit the people as a whole, they create a property right where none existed previously. That's why I started this whole thread talking about copyright as an example of positive, as opposed to natural, law. People who claim "there's no such thing as intellectual property" have missed the train at the station. Maybe there wasn't any such thing before...but the moment the various Copyright (and patent!) acts became law, there was.
It's very dangerous to think of information as property. It's not property. Don't use that term unless you want more laws that treat it as if it was.
Copyrights expire. Property rights don't.
You are completely and utterly incorrect. Property rights can and do expire. For example, I can grant you real estate in perpetuity ("fee simple"), or I can grant you a life estate. Or an estate for a certain length of time.
Property rights are not an all or nothing proposition. One useful metaphor we were taught in school was property rights as a "bundle of sticks." You can separate the sticks and hand them out as you like ("You have the right use this in this way, you have the right to copy it, you have the right to make a sandwich with it...").
There are "fair use" rights with information. There are no similar rights with real property. I can't "borrow" Hillary Rosen's car for "scholarly purposes", but I can copy her words.
Again, you're quite simply wrong. Fair use is not a right at all, but a (statutory) affirmative defense to infringement. You probably could "borrow" Hillary's car if she leased it or licensed it to you. You could probably have an affirmative defense to borrowing her car without permission if you needed it to, say, save a houseful of orphans from a rampaging serial killer. Just like fair use.
The copyright on a work remains with the copyright holder, even after I buy it. A piece of physical property is mine when I buy it, and not even the government can touch it without the appropriate legal papers.
Yes. Different types of property can be treated differently in different circumstances.
These differences should make you think twice about calling copyrights "property rights" without caveats. If the Framers wanted them treated as physical property, they would've put it in the Constitution.
They didn't want copyrights treated as physical property. They wanted them treated as intellectual property.
See, uh, that's why they put it in the Constitution ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;")
The exclusive right for a limited time is unquestionably, without any doubt whatsoever, a property right. Just because you don't understand what the term "property rights" mean doesn't mean you should be miseducating others.
There are a lot of good arguments against copyright law, including that it impedes the free exchange of ideas, adds to corporate exploitation of the working class, and contributes to intellectual, industrial, and artistic stagnation in general. It's pretty easy to see the difference between the Rennaisance (pre-copyright) and the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards (post-copyright). We're not even in the same league anymore, and it's easy to see why.
I think you couldn't be more wrong; copyright in no way impedes the "free exchange of ideas." Copyright doesn't protect ideas from being copied, it protects expression from being copied. You can't copyright an idea at all, period. Copyright doesn't stagnate the creation of ideas, and by any standard it certainly encourages creativity. You compare us to the Renaissance, when a few staggering works of genius were created, generally under the patronage of kings and popes. I don't have figures, but surely the number of, say, books, works of music, and graphic images being created today dwarfs the output of the Renaissance by several orders of magnitude. That says nothing about quality, of course, but I'd like to think that a genius is a genius regardless of what the government regulations are. Could Michaelangelo have painted the Sistine Chapel without money for paint? No. Copyright is one method of making sure he can fund his works.
Now, reasonable people can (and do!) disagree about the length of copyright restrictions and whether it's appropriate to extend them retroactively. I personally feel that this is moving the goalposts. But to argue that copyright is somehow completely outdated and has no use anymore is to present yourself, very firmly, as someone that has probably never created any intellectual work of significant value.
Look at how difficult it is for the Supreme Court to understand the First and Second Amendments, which are pretty freaking straightforward in comparison; do you really think we have a *prayer* of understanding the original copyright laws?
Yes, I do we have more than a prayer. I think it's pretty easy to understand copyright law, if you try (some may find the copyright FAQ useful).
Law is something that is supposed to last. Good laws -- and I think the copyright laws, as they were originally intended to apply, are good law -- take changing technology into account. "We have Linux now!" is not an adequate reason to dismiss a thoughtful analysis of property rights. Does that mean we should unquestioningly accept everything and never try to change it? No. But it does mean that we need to understand the reasons things work the way they do so that we know how to change them, instead of just saying "We're so cyber we don't need all this old stuff."
It does raise the issue that copyright is not a consequence of natural law, but of positive law (eg, there wouldn't be copyright without an act of the sovereign.
The part of it I disagree with somewhat is his characterization of copyright as not really being about property rights, but about free speech. Copyright is very explicitly a property trade off: "We will give you the following property right in return for that property eventually reverting to the public." Copyright owners often make the mistake of speaking as if copyright exists for their benefit. It doesn't. The entire point of copyright is to encourage the creation of intellectual property for the benefit of the public. The fact that the mechanism by which the creation of that intellectual property is achieved is by granting a benefit to the author is purely incidental.
Look, meat puppets, you are PART OF THIS ECOSYSTEM, you are stuck here in the mud with the rest of us. You are never leaving this planet, at least for any appreciable length of time. Ever. So how about taking some of the energy you put into escapist fantasies and focus those gigantic brains of yours on improving what we've got, instead of running away from our problems, huh?
-Peterb PS: That goes for you escapist religious freaks, also. Same disease, different symptoms.
Creepy...
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It must take a very special sort of soldier to submit to the claustrophobic surroundings and lack of freedom inherent in being in a submarine. I can only wonder what that's like when you're in a submarine that nobody knows about.
Watching Das Boot was as close as I ever want to get to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I hear that the greater the number of chefs that cook a meal, the better it tastes.
Gah, I suck, that was the wrong URL.
I meant, re: mother teresa, this one
That's because you are uninformed.
When I first started reading the article, I figured they were talking about New York versus California. I've worked on bi-coastal projects, and the cultural differences in how things get decided (and even coding styles) are palpable.
Not to be the neighborhood scold, but this attitude is really insulting.
I don't mean the "I don't not want to pay for it" attitude -- hey, there's lots of things we all don't pay for. But the idea that you would only feel guilty if you use their bandwidth. It kind of implies that the "valuable" part of Red Vs. Blue is the money that goes in to hosting their site and streaming the media instead of, oh, I dunno, the time and sweat and effort it takes to produce something -- anything -- worth watching.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but I just had to say it. If you're going to feel guilty about not donating, feel guilty because you're not paying them for the huge effort they put in to create something you enjoy. If and when you decide to donate (or buy a DVD), do it because you want to reward them for their creativity. Not for their bandwidth.
I can imagine that pricing presentation. "Let's price them at $150! We'll lose money on each one, but make up for it in volume!"
Apple is already selling iPods as fast as they can make them. Why in the world would they want to cannibalize their own sales with a stupidly low price on a different device that they obviously think there's a market for?
Apple's making a good bet here. They're selling the iPod mini on features, not on price. If you're not interested in buying one, that just means they're not marketing it to you.
We'll know in 6 months whether this was a good bet or not. I think it is.
You are just proving my point. God, I hate this attitude so much.
USER: "I need to cut and paste."
SLASHDOT POSTER: "Why do you need to cut and paste? You shouldn't cut and paste. Write a script and pipe your output to stdout."
USER: "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to shoot you now." [shoots slashdot poster]
If you want people to use programs you develop, one of the most important steps is the part where you shut the hell up and actually LISTEN to what people want.
It's not a part of any reasonable development process to tell the user that they should find a stupider, more complicated way of doing what they want. That, fferreres, is what you are doing.
We should be so lucky.
Y'know, people keep saying that this is such a trivial little matter of implementation, but I can't help but observe that 20 years after the Macintosh came out, cut and paste in X windows is still completely fucking broken.
At some point, you have to abandon the excuses and admit that it's not just an implementation problem, it's a broken paradigm.
DEVELOPER: "Here's our GUI! Enjoy!"
USER: "Wow, thanks! This sure is pretty. So, how do I cut and paste?"
DEVELOPER: "Well, that depends on which toolkit the app you're running uses."
USER: "Uh, OK. Thanks." [user turns off computer, goes back to his Windows or OS X machine.]
In the above scenario, the user is right, and the developer is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I disagree; that's like saying I need to desalinate the water in the ocean; it's an impossibly hard task.
While I'm not a big believer in "technical solutions to social problems," it's clear to me that SMTP as it currently exists is not up to the task of meeting the needs of the community in a world where noise exceeds signal by several orders of magnitude. The first, biggest problem is that we can't reliably trace messages back to their source, thus allowing spammers to operate indefinitely. We need a mail system that uses cryptographic signatures to get some accountability into the system.
[cue conspiracy theorists.]
I can't believe none of you have even thought to mention Karel the Robot.
Learning how to program is completely orthogonal to learning how to use a specific language or platform. What's needed is not teaching a specific skill set, that will be obsolete in a year or two, but teaching the metaphor and process. Karel does that. (The first part of CMU's "intro" programming course used to use Karel).
When reading tidbits like this, it's important to keep in mind that Sandra Day wasn't giving any clues as to the Supreme Court's take on the merits of the case. It looks to me like a purely procedural question, that of personal jurisdiction -- does the California court have the right to drag someone from Texas into Court there. Nothing to do specifically with DeCSS at all.
Still, it's always nice to see things get just a little bit harder for the entertainment industry.
See, that's why I said "like" Apple's SuperDrive, which suggests, to people that know how to read, that I'm only calling it out as a single example.
A DVD/CD-RW? That's sooooooooooooooooo 2001!
I'm holding out for DVD-R/CD-RW's, like Apple's Superdrive, baby.
Wait a minute, who is "we"?
I mean, no offense, but who the hell are you to tell a programmer what she should work on? Oh wait, did I say "no offense?" I meant "plenty of offense." As long as the Boa guys are enjoying what they're doing, more power to them. Now, maybe you're whining about Slashdot writing an article on it, but that's hardly the Boa guys fault.
And, frankly, you sound like the type of person that's going to find something irritating to whine about no matter what.
Well, maybe some of us want to do work because it's fun, and we're interested in it, rather than because some random internet bozo thinks he 'needs' it.
Yeah, I can see that -- you're already trying to impose your own narrowminded "managerial" (your label, not mine) viewpoint on the people that are trying to get work done, and touting your own superiority. Whooooo, how innovative and revolutionary.
So why don't you just crawl back into your hole and write whatever code you want to, instead of whining that other people are working on things that don't benefit you personally?
I have to admit, I've been lusting after the new Tibooks, which come with the Radeon 9000 mobility video cards. I know that they don't get -all- of the new games right away, but how do they perform on those games they do get?
-Pete
The phrase "intellectual property" does not necessarily refer to the ownership of ideas. As I've explained, ad nauseam, copyright does not subsist in ideas, but in the ownership of the right to copy expression.
Peter G. Berger, Esq.
I'm not going to debate the finer points of copyright with someone who thinks, incorrectly, that copyright has anything to do with "ideas." I already explained, above, that it does not.
Pay attention.
Ownership of property is entirely about rights. The owner of a set of rights (remember my "bundle of sticks" discussion?) is always free to subdivide any rights that he or she owns and dispose of them as she or he sees fit. Owning real property in fee simple is just a special case of the above.
There's nothing magical about ownership. If you grant me an estate in fee tail, let's say, saying that I can keep the property as long as I have an heir of the body, then I am free to sell that property to someone else, subject to the rules of the original purchase.
I mean, it's OK for you to not like it, but denying that that's a property right seems kind of silly.
You're half-right.
The part that you're missing is that an author or creator is never under any obligation to disclose or publish their works. They could (for example) keep them for their own enjoyment. Because the government wants to incent the creation of works that benefit the people as a whole, they create a property right where none existed previously. That's why I started this whole thread talking about copyright as an example of positive, as opposed to natural, law. People who claim "there's no such thing as intellectual property" have missed the train at the station. Maybe there wasn't any such thing before...but the moment the various Copyright (and patent!) acts became law, there was.
You are completely and utterly incorrect. Property rights can and do expire. For example, I can grant you real estate in perpetuity ("fee simple"), or I can grant you a life estate. Or an estate for a certain length of time.
Property rights are not an all or nothing proposition. One useful metaphor we were taught in school was property rights as a "bundle of sticks." You can separate the sticks and hand them out as you like ("You have the right use this in this way, you have the right to copy it, you have the right to make a sandwich with it...").
Again, you're quite simply wrong. Fair use is not a right at all, but a (statutory) affirmative defense to infringement. You probably could "borrow" Hillary's car if she leased it or licensed it to you. You could probably have an affirmative defense to borrowing her car without permission if you needed it to, say, save a houseful of orphans from a rampaging serial killer. Just like fair use.
Yes. Different types of property can be treated differently in different circumstances.
They didn't want copyrights treated as physical property. They wanted them treated as intellectual property.
See, uh, that's why they put it in the Constitution ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;")
The exclusive right for a limited time is unquestionably, without any doubt whatsoever, a property right. Just because you don't understand what the term "property rights" mean doesn't mean you should be miseducating others.
I think you couldn't be more wrong; copyright in no way impedes the "free exchange of ideas." Copyright doesn't protect ideas from being copied, it protects expression from being copied. You can't copyright an idea at all, period. Copyright doesn't stagnate the creation of ideas, and by any standard it certainly encourages creativity. You compare us to the Renaissance, when a few staggering works of genius were created, generally under the patronage of kings and popes. I don't have figures, but surely the number of, say, books, works of music, and graphic images being created today dwarfs the output of the Renaissance by several orders of magnitude. That says nothing about quality, of course, but I'd like to think that a genius is a genius regardless of what the government regulations are. Could Michaelangelo have painted the Sistine Chapel without money for paint? No. Copyright is one method of making sure he can fund his works.
Now, reasonable people can (and do!) disagree about the length of copyright restrictions and whether it's appropriate to extend them retroactively. I personally feel that this is moving the goalposts. But to argue that copyright is somehow completely outdated and has no use anymore is to present yourself, very firmly, as someone that has probably never created any intellectual work of significant value.
Yes, I do we have more than a prayer. I think it's pretty easy to understand copyright law, if you try (some may find the copyright FAQ useful).
Law is something that is supposed to last. Good laws -- and I think the copyright laws, as they were originally intended to apply, are good law -- take changing technology into account. "We have Linux now!" is not an adequate reason to dismiss a thoughtful analysis of property rights. Does that mean we should unquestioningly accept everything and never try to change it? No. But it does mean that we need to understand the reasons things work the way they do so that we know how to change them, instead of just saying "We're so cyber we don't need all this old stuff."
It does raise the issue that copyright is not a consequence of natural law, but of positive law (eg, there wouldn't be copyright without an act of the sovereign.
The part of it I disagree with somewhat is his characterization of copyright as not really being about property rights, but about free speech. Copyright is very explicitly a property trade off: "We will give you the following property right in return for that property eventually reverting to the public." Copyright owners often make the mistake of speaking as if copyright exists for their benefit. It doesn't. The entire point of copyright is to encourage the creation of intellectual property for the benefit of the public. The fact that the mechanism by which the creation of that intellectual property is achieved is by granting a benefit to the author is purely incidental.
Look, meat puppets, you are PART OF THIS ECOSYSTEM, you are stuck here in the mud with the rest of us. You are never leaving this planet, at least for any appreciable length of time. Ever. So how about taking some of the energy you put into escapist fantasies and focus those gigantic brains of yours on improving what we've got, instead of running away from our problems, huh?
-Peterb
PS: That goes for you escapist religious freaks, also. Same disease, different symptoms.
It must take a very special sort of soldier to submit to the claustrophobic surroundings and lack of freedom inherent in being in a submarine. I can only wonder what that's like when you're in a submarine that nobody knows about.
Watching Das Boot was as close as I ever want to get to that.