You're not going to get me to disagree with any of that. I'd like to point out, though, that even if artists very much would like to make money, very few of them make much, copyright or not. It's probably true that there's no lack of creators, and that we don't need to encourage them with money as a reward. We need to pay them so that they have the time to perform. Art takes time, and time is money.
After 50 years, I'm no longer sure it's necessary.
Bach (I suppose you mean Johann Sebastian; there were several others) was an organist and a composer, and hardly the best performer of his solo violin and orchestral works. His notes could be published, and re-published by pirates. Many works were; most of Shakespeare's dramas were published by pirates even years before there was a legit version, by people who memorised or shorthanded the plays and wrote them down afterwards. Those were the "cam" versions of the days. Since proper publishing was a more time consuming activity back then, it was even more difficult being first to market.
Of course all of this is irrelevant as to whether Paul McCartney needs copyright extension. I don't care about him. Another problem is the other artists who are about to fall out of copyright, those who aren't world famous superstars, and won't be on iTunes, and won't be re-released on CD. With a copyright extension, those would still be illegal to distribute. A copyright extension will come to protect the already rich.
Search your favourite torrent site for XP JACKED. It's a heavily tweaked Windows XP install CD, with most of the bloat removed. The download is around 120 MB, an you can install it in qemu and run it with as little as 20 MB RAM. Not everything works as it should,but it installs fine and can run games, which is my only reason for pirating XP in the first place.
I can't imagine a SCO-style suit from MS because of a document interoperability plug-in would be accepted by the EU, or even a non-Republican USA. Lack of interoperability is the very reason why so many want to move from MS Office, since it's such a magnificently bad idea, and "Open XML" is Microsoft's answer. In addition to Microsoft's position as a convicted monopolist, the format itself would be perceived as a legal minefield, and even businesses would think twice before standardising on a format which effectively takes away their rights to their own data. Think about it: It would be like DRM, but locking out the producer instead of the consumer. Today's closed format is merely a practical problem that people never considered since "everyone uses Office", but it's starting to become a serious problem: Office isn't always compatible with itself, and you need to dig out old computers with old software to read your own data.
The ODF format is something different. People who use ODF apps will probably use it internally just like they would do if Microsoft never introduced Open XML, and then convert it to whatever when they send it to the outside world. Nothing changes, except that OpenOffice can write Open XML documents, and Office 2003 can't.
To me it looks like Novell develops interoperability with Microsoft's new document format. That's a good thing, since nothing is going to stop the format anyway. Embrace? Novell "embraces" Microsoft's format insofar as they support it, which OpenOffice.org already does with the old format. Extend? That would be insane, since it would leave OOo incompatible.
If Novell can develop good plugins for Microsoft's new format, users could actually switch to OOo instead of upgrading Office. Yes, there's the patent situation, but Microsoft can't do much about interoperability as a convicted monopolist.
So this is what passes as insightful on this site nowadays. It's more like libertarian utopianism. Your main contradiction is that threats limit other people's freedom (of speech. movement, whatever): If someone threatens to kill you under certain conditions, then they've already succeeded if they scare you sufficiently to do as they say, not when they've finally murdered you. That's not a civil offence.
So you think libel and threats of violence should be protected as free speech? How about planning terrorism? I mean, as long as no one has died, it's just words, right?
It has to be said, though, that OS X was dead slow until Panther. So that's three years of public beta before finally getting it right with v.3. Kind of reminds me of that other company.
Well, why don't you come up with any ideas for the original poster, Mr. on topic not-being-a-dick guy? Or perhaps spend some time taking reading lessons instead.
Basically, you're advocating living a simulated life instead of a "real" one. Swimming in a pool instead of in the ocean, where dangerous currents may disrupt your repetitive rhythm, doing tai chi instead of a contact sport where you have to improvise instead of forever repeat, slowly, a relatively small selection of movements. I've got nothing against those things, but getting outside and doing something in a natural environment is more varied, and more fun.
If you think going outside is so terribly dangerous, you've probably been intimidated from watching too many Hollywood movies like Jaws, i.e., you don't have any real experience of outdoor life, and start believing what you see on your precious TV. Truth is, if it was so dangerous out there, there wouldn't be any humans left on the planet now.
A virus doesn't self-replicate either. It's replicated by a host, perhaps making the host sick in some way, or even killing it, and it doesn't turn the host into the virus itself. Programs that make use of GPL code don't replicate the it, nor the license agreement. They incorporate it. That's no more viral than a heart transplant. Of course the GPL has terms that would be unreasonable for a heart transplant, and it can have them because it's for computer code.
A better analogy would be that with GPL code, I let you fuck my wife, but if you have any offspring, you must let everyone who wants fuck them under the same condition. This analogy seems incredibly unreasonable, until you someone reminds you that you're not married to your code.
I don't know, but I did manage to get the turtle to move about a bit when I fiddled with Logo on the C64 as a child. From what I remember, I think I started out with whatever was there as "instructions" (wow, reverse-engineering), then made my own stuff from how I understood it worked. Actually, that has often been my approach to shell scripting as an adult as well. As long as you aren't afraid to destroy something, you should be able to learn a lot from just playing with it.
That's a good point, but it's not mentioned in the article. It seems to me that the Mapuche are against any translation at all. Then again, it could be poor journalism, which isn't unusual. But even if you're right, I'm not so sure the Mapuche are; the "Chilean Ministry of Education" would most likely be a bunch of linguists who have studied the language and decided upon what constitutes correct spelling and grammar. That may not be the traditional approach to a group of people that relies on its elders to make important decisions, but I would guess it's more competent.
But most of the nations that standardise and regulate language do it to protect the language. Most of the time, that means they enforce use of the language, for instance so that schoolchildren can get books in their particular language. Why else would the Chilean Ministry of Education be involved in the translation in the first place? What the Mapuche are doing here seems downright stupid if they actually want their language to survive.
Then again, they might just be greedy. Or perhaps they have some weird religious reasoning that I just don't know anything about.
Well, that's what happens when iPods and OS X are allowed to become the height of cool. Back in the days, Slashdot was about what you can do with technology (using an old 486 running Linux (or even DOS, who cares) to control a percolator through the serial port, for instance), now it's about what technology can do to you, or, rather, to your grandma. It's all about finished and polished products, ready for purchase by the consumer, to be seamlessly intergrated into an experience. Everything has to just work in the way consumers have come to expect from Big Corporations.
So what do you expect? There's no reason why people here still should be interested in how and why things work.
I'm not sure there can be much of a consensus on things that happen on a global scale. Not only because it's too complex and all, but also because the impact will vary a lot. I know a scientist who has done some work on climate change, and her conclusion was that according to their specific model, global warming would improve the climate in that particular area of the planet. Even though global warming is global, it's not like all problems caused by it will be global.
Then again, some of the countries with improved climate can probably suffer from mass immigration or other problems.
Agree on the ones I know. I still waste time on Q3DM17 when I need a quick fix of adrenaline to keep going through the day. That and Quake 2's Q2DM1 or The Edge are my favourites for 1 vs 1s.
It's been a long time since I played it, but Lode Runner on the C64 must have had plenty of good levels. I believe there were more than 150 of them, so they must have got some of them right.
Ah, Slashdot at its finest: +5, insightful for a comment that basically states that it only wants mindless entertainment.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have games being attacked by idiot lawyers, and some people trying to defend the games on the basis of freedom of speech. I'd rather take the social criticism angle than the "But you honor, beating up kids in school entertains and engages me! Whatever happened to fun for fun's sake?!?" defense. And further, girl, this article is probably not about your entertainment, but rather about in what way this particular game is meaningful activity. Yes, consider that: It's not about you and your entertainment.
Oblivion and GTA exist for consoles, but not for consoles that I've got. On the other hand, I can play them in Windows. Cedega doesn't work with my Radeon 9800.
Except your little parable would only work if what was happening with Mac OS X was that Dell decided to start selling it with their computers. On the other hand, if I decided to try installing OS X on my generic PC, it would be more like if someone decided they wanted to use their skills with Premiere or whatever to put a Radiohead soundtrack on a Chevy ad, and not even upload it to Youtube. Copyright law is supposed to let the creator control the copying and distribution of her/his work, not what people decide to do with it in the privacy of their own homes.
Apple's protection limits use, not copying.
This isn't something new, btw, they have done similar things without encryption for earlier versions of OS X to force people with old Macs to upgrade to newer, even when there's no sensible reason to do so. Panther won't install on my Wallstreet Powerbook, even though it works very well[1] when installed with a third party hack named XPostFacto. And since Apple always decide to introduce new APIs and feature sets in new versions of OS X, you'll soon be forced to upgrade if you want to use new software. For instance, NeoOffice and QuickSilver won't work with Jaguar.
Illegal fishing is actually a huge problem as well. Not only "theft", but also dumping of less valuable (smaller) fish to fill the legal quotas with only the most expensive kind.
Then again, overfishing is one of the biggest environmental and political problems we have on this planet. There just isn't any effective legislation for international waters and disputed areas on the borders. Maybe music piracy is a bigger "economic problem" than illegal fishing, but that's just because the cost of music files and CDs are grossly inflated. When it comes to fish, the resources are limited and shrinking, but there seems no lack of kids growing up wanting to be pop stars because of music piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not going to get me to disagree with any of that. I'd like to point out, though, that even if artists very much would like to make money, very few of them make much, copyright or not. It's probably true that there's no lack of creators, and that we don't need to encourage them with money as a reward. We need to pay them so that they have the time to perform. Art takes time, and time is money.
After 50 years, I'm no longer sure it's necessary.
Bach (I suppose you mean Johann Sebastian; there were several others) was an organist and a composer, and hardly the best performer of his solo violin and orchestral works. His notes could be published, and re-published by pirates. Many works were; most of Shakespeare's dramas were published by pirates even years before there was a legit version, by people who memorised or shorthanded the plays and wrote them down afterwards. Those were the "cam" versions of the days. Since proper publishing was a more time consuming activity back then, it was even more difficult being first to market.
Of course all of this is irrelevant as to whether Paul McCartney needs copyright extension. I don't care about him. Another problem is the other artists who are about to fall out of copyright, those who aren't world famous superstars, and won't be on iTunes, and won't be re-released on CD. With a copyright extension, those would still be illegal to distribute. A copyright extension will come to protect the already rich.
Yeah, but extremely lightweight.
Search your favourite torrent site for XP JACKED. It's a heavily tweaked Windows XP install CD, with most of the bloat removed. The download is around 120 MB, an you can install it in qemu and run it with as little as 20 MB RAM. Not everything works as it should,but it installs fine and can run games, which is my only reason for pirating XP in the first place.
I can't imagine a SCO-style suit from MS because of a document interoperability plug-in would be accepted by the EU, or even a non-Republican USA. Lack of interoperability is the very reason why so many want to move from MS Office, since it's such a magnificently bad idea, and "Open XML" is Microsoft's answer. In addition to Microsoft's position as a convicted monopolist, the format itself would be perceived as a legal minefield, and even businesses would think twice before standardising on a format which effectively takes away their rights to their own data. Think about it: It would be like DRM, but locking out the producer instead of the consumer. Today's closed format is merely a practical problem that people never considered since "everyone uses Office", but it's starting to become a serious problem: Office isn't always compatible with itself, and you need to dig out old computers with old software to read your own data.
The ODF format is something different. People who use ODF apps will probably use it internally just like they would do if Microsoft never introduced Open XML, and then convert it to whatever when they send it to the outside world. Nothing changes, except that OpenOffice can write Open XML documents, and Office 2003 can't.
No. The same security update would also break Office's compatibility with itself.
And interoperability does just make "it easier to migrate FROM Microsoft's standards".
To me it looks like Novell develops interoperability with Microsoft's new document format. That's a good thing, since nothing is going to stop the format anyway. Embrace? Novell "embraces" Microsoft's format insofar as they support it, which OpenOffice.org already does with the old format. Extend? That would be insane, since it would leave OOo incompatible.
If Novell can develop good plugins for Microsoft's new format, users could actually switch to OOo instead of upgrading Office. Yes, there's the patent situation, but Microsoft can't do much about interoperability as a convicted monopolist.
So this is what passes as insightful on this site nowadays. It's more like libertarian utopianism. Your main contradiction is that threats limit other people's freedom (of speech. movement, whatever): If someone threatens to kill you under certain conditions, then they've already succeeded if they scare you sufficiently to do as they say, not when they've finally murdered you. That's not a civil offence.
So you think libel and threats of violence should be protected as free speech? How about planning terrorism? I mean, as long as no one has died, it's just words, right?
It has to be said, though, that OS X was dead slow until Panther. So that's three years of public beta before finally getting it right with v.3. Kind of reminds me of that other company.
Sounds like Parkinson's disease, really.
(Well, it doesn't, but someone had to make the obvious joke.)
Well, why don't you come up with any ideas for the original poster, Mr. on topic not-being-a-dick guy? Or perhaps spend some time taking reading lessons instead.
Basically, you're advocating living a simulated life instead of a "real" one. Swimming in a pool instead of in the ocean, where dangerous currents may disrupt your repetitive rhythm, doing tai chi instead of a contact sport where you have to improvise instead of forever repeat, slowly, a relatively small selection of movements. I've got nothing against those things, but getting outside and doing something in a natural environment is more varied, and more fun.
If you think going outside is so terribly dangerous, you've probably been intimidated from watching too many Hollywood movies like Jaws, i.e., you don't have any real experience of outdoor life, and start believing what you see on your precious TV. Truth is, if it was so dangerous out there, there wouldn't be any humans left on the planet now.
A virus doesn't self-replicate either. It's replicated by a host, perhaps making the host sick in some way, or even killing it, and it doesn't turn the host into the virus itself. Programs that make use of GPL code don't replicate the it, nor the license agreement. They incorporate it. That's no more viral than a heart transplant. Of course the GPL has terms that would be unreasonable for a heart transplant, and it can have them because it's for computer code.
A better analogy would be that with GPL code, I let you fuck my wife, but if you have any offspring, you must let everyone who wants fuck them under the same condition. This analogy seems incredibly unreasonable, until you someone reminds you that you're not married to your code.
I don't know, but I did manage to get the turtle to move about a bit when I fiddled with Logo on the C64 as a child. From what I remember, I think I started out with whatever was there as "instructions" (wow, reverse-engineering), then made my own stuff from how I understood it worked. Actually, that has often been my approach to shell scripting as an adult as well. As long as you aren't afraid to destroy something, you should be able to learn a lot from just playing with it.
That's a good point, but it's not mentioned in the article. It seems to me that the Mapuche are against any translation at all. Then again, it could be poor journalism, which isn't unusual. But even if you're right, I'm not so sure the Mapuche are; the "Chilean Ministry of Education" would most likely be a bunch of linguists who have studied the language and decided upon what constitutes correct spelling and grammar. That may not be the traditional approach to a group of people that relies on its elders to make important decisions, but I would guess it's more competent.
But most of the nations that standardise and regulate language do it to protect the language. Most of the time, that means they enforce use of the language, for instance so that schoolchildren can get books in their particular language. Why else would the Chilean Ministry of Education be involved in the translation in the first place? What the Mapuche are doing here seems downright stupid if they actually want their language to survive.
Then again, they might just be greedy. Or perhaps they have some weird religious reasoning that I just don't know anything about.
Well, that's what happens when iPods and OS X are allowed to become the height of cool. Back in the days, Slashdot was about what you can do with technology (using an old 486 running Linux (or even DOS, who cares) to control a percolator through the serial port, for instance), now it's about what technology can do to you, or, rather, to your grandma. It's all about finished and polished products, ready for purchase by the consumer, to be seamlessly intergrated into an experience. Everything has to just work in the way consumers have come to expect from Big Corporations.
So what do you expect? There's no reason why people here still should be interested in how and why things work.
I'm not sure there can be much of a consensus on things that happen on a global scale. Not only because it's too complex and all, but also because the impact will vary a lot. I know a scientist who has done some work on climate change, and her conclusion was that according to their specific model, global warming would improve the climate in that particular area of the planet. Even though global warming is global, it's not like all problems caused by it will be global.
Then again, some of the countries with improved climate can probably suffer from mass immigration or other problems.
Agree on the ones I know. I still waste time on Q3DM17 when I need a quick fix of adrenaline to keep going through the day. That and Quake 2's Q2DM1 or The Edge are my favourites for 1 vs 1s.
It's been a long time since I played it, but Lode Runner on the C64 must have had plenty of good levels. I believe there were more than 150 of them, so they must have got some of them right.
Ah, Slashdot at its finest: +5, insightful for a comment that basically states that it only wants mindless entertainment.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have games being attacked by idiot lawyers, and some people trying to defend the games on the basis of freedom of speech. I'd rather take the social criticism angle than the "But you honor, beating up kids in school entertains and engages me! Whatever happened to fun for fun's sake?!?" defense. And further, girl, this article is probably not about your entertainment, but rather about in what way this particular game is meaningful activity. Yes, consider that: It's not about you and your entertainment.
Kids today...
Oblivion and GTA exist for consoles, but not for consoles that I've got. On the other hand, I can play them in Windows. Cedega doesn't work with my Radeon 9800.
Except your little parable would only work if what was happening with Mac OS X was that Dell decided to start selling it with their computers. On the other hand, if I decided to try installing OS X on my generic PC, it would be more like if someone decided they wanted to use their skills with Premiere or whatever to put a Radiohead soundtrack on a Chevy ad, and not even upload it to Youtube. Copyright law is supposed to let the creator control the copying and distribution of her/his work, not what people decide to do with it in the privacy of their own homes.
Apple's protection limits use, not copying.
This isn't something new, btw, they have done similar things without encryption for earlier versions of OS X to force people with old Macs to upgrade to newer, even when there's no sensible reason to do so. Panther won't install on my Wallstreet Powerbook, even though it works very well[1] when installed with a third party hack named XPostFacto. And since Apple always decide to introduce new APIs and feature sets in new versions of OS X, you'll soon be forced to upgrade if you want to use new software. For instance, NeoOffice and QuickSilver won't work with Jaguar.
Illegal fishing is actually a huge problem as well. Not only "theft", but also dumping of less valuable (smaller) fish to fill the legal quotas with only the most expensive kind.
Then again, overfishing is one of the biggest environmental and political problems we have on this planet. There just isn't any effective legislation for international waters and disputed areas on the borders. Maybe music piracy is a bigger "economic problem" than illegal fishing, but that's just because the cost of music files and CDs are grossly inflated. When it comes to fish, the resources are limited and shrinking, but there seems no lack of kids growing up wanting to be pop stars because of music piracy.