Fine. If I lived where you live, I'd probably have the same opinion about the local paper. If it's a daily, your lucky; it's pretty hard to attract the advertising revenue to sustain a paper in small-town market. It's great that you can still read the news on the local site and on Google and elsewhere.
What annoys me, though, is the enthusiasm for the newspaper's demise, and the usual assertions that no one needs papers anymore because they can read the news on Google. That's what I took from your first post. If that's not what you intended, my apologies.
People need to understand that the news comes from people who are paid to write the news. Almost all of them still work for newspapers and the wire services. Google, etc., can't supplant newspapers because they don't create news. In fact, if newspapers die, so will Google News. If Google wants to hire reporters, that's OK with me. If newspapers can abandon paper and just use the web, that's OK, too.
I'm usually a big copyright supporter -- not because of all the financial incentive business but because copyright simply recognizes the uncontestable fact that the person who writes something owns that thing and all rights inherent in it and that others have none of those rights unless they are transferred to them -- but Egypt is making a bogus claim. Good luck collecting those fees.
For centuries, people have been willing to pay for good, great and less than good art. However you measrues it, what set it apart was the fact that you knew that you could not produce anything as original or creative. Art, in all its forms, was, and is, a scarce resource. Art will continue to be a scarce resource. That scarcity creates an incentive to create art and an incentive to acquire art. (The simplistic argument that "true" artists are blind to the economic aspect of their work and create only because they are compelled by some mystic force is naive.)
People now have the means to copy and widely redistribute art, whether or not they have permission to do that. It's only natural that they quickly decide that they aren't behaving immorally. At the least, that's the obvious way to rationalize the guilt.
But the production of art -- good, bad, whatever -- has always been intimately linked to the economics of distribution. If you want to see, hear or feel art, someone usually had to pay. That created revenue that funded the creation of new art. It was, and remains, our way of determining what we like.
Severing that link means people who create art may stop creating art. Sure, technology now allows everyone to create what they think is art and distribute it around the world. But, what I'm capable of creating isn't art, and, almost certainly, what you're capable of creating isn't art.
A world where artists can't protect their work is a world with a lot less art, and it's a world with a lot of Everyman rubbish masquerading as art.
>>"I stated my opinion... and I got an asshole response. Go figure."
Is that how you characterize everyone who disagrees with you?
Newspapers and the wire services that exist to produce and sell news copy to the papers, create news. Operations like community websites, top-of-the-hour radio news, Google News, etc., simply distribute news others have created. They could all vanish with no reduction in the amount of available news.
1. The OP seemed to be cheerleading for the demise of newspapers, but my guess is he wouldn't subscribe to a paper if it was the only way to get the news.
2. My point: Google News is software and serves. It contributes nothing to the pool of original news writing and reportage. My local newspaper -- which is smart enough to have had a serious web presence for years -- creates original news that I can get only from it, whether I read it at the breakfast table or inside my browser.
My guess, Cory, is that you probably don't really care what's going on outside your own little world. Otherwise, you wouldn't say newspapers provide "little to no news." My local daily is full of wire service reports from around the world. A typical edition usually has one or two lengthy staff-written pieces about local and regional matters that will not appear in any other mediium. Can the paper's distribution system compete with the speed of other media? No. But no other media reports in the depth that the newspaper does. If my local newspaper runs a 5-part series of 10,000 word articles about local politcal corruption, do you even imagine that any other news source is going to cover it in the same depth? Come on. Internet readers get annoyed if they need to scroll, and TV and radio seem to have a prohibition on any story lasting longer than a minute or so. That local community radio site is likely buying copy from the wire services, too, and doesn't contribute much of anything itself.
Sounds like you're satisified with 3.5 minutes of news at the top of the hour. I'm not, and neither are a lot of other people. That's the market newspapers serve. So, if you are happy with knowing that "A bomb just went off in Iraq and lots of people were killed" or "More people are losing their homes because they can't handle the hike in their adjustable mortage", then stick to the radio, But, if you want to have a chance to understand why all that is happening, you need to start reading a good newspaper.
And, remember, paper is only a publication medium. If papers were invented today, they'd go straight to the web. Everything in my paper's "paper" edition is on its site, plus a lot more. A smart newspaper knows it will take more than paper to survive.
An accurate summary, but I don't think it means much to SixApart. They are interested in selling MT. Customers who buy a product like MT care about a long list of other issues before they care about the license. After all, it isn't like those customers are going to stay up nights forking MT.
WordPress is a business, not a charity, too. It makes money from selling WP. The fact that the basic product is free doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things.
Remember, people who buy software don't buy code. They buy features and capabilities. (And, by and large, anyone who refuses to pay for software never was part of the market, so a business has little reason to care what they think.) When a product goes GPL, it can take advantage of the free coding labor of all those open source developers.
Can't say that I blame those folks for wanting to keep trucks off their streets. It appears that the GPS systems are simply choosing the shorter route and drivers are following blindly. You can probably hear and feel each vehicle in every village home as it roars through.
How about instituting a surcharge on every truck that passes through the village? Announce it with signs on the roads approaching the village. Set up cameras to photograph the trucks and their license tags. Trace the tags to the people who operate the trucks and bill them.
This approach assumes that the village can find the funds to pay for this. You'd likely need to stir up some publicity by chasing down and taking to court the firms that inevitably ignore the bills. No driver, or his or her boss, wants to save 5 miles at the cost of fines and potential litigation.
Taking a trillion dollars, loading it on a Shuttle, and dispersing it all on orbit would have been just as productive a use of the money. A purposeless war we were lied into by an incompetent fraud.
If it is the wind, it ought to be easy to test. Just soak some of the desert floor surrounding a rock, generate a breeze of sufficent force, and see what happens.
This is the reason a thing called a "model release" exists. If the photographer had asked the kid to sign a release, and if she'd done that, then the rights of each party would be spelled out in the release.
Now, I'm sure hardly anyone who posts to Flickr gets model releases, or even knows they exist. But, the notion of suing for unauthorized use of your image is not at all new. Creative Commons, and the others, might be vulnerable on the grounds that they failed to exercise due diligence in ensuring that the girl had, in fact, agreed that her photo could be used in that way.
I don't think the license aspect has anything to do with this; the girl did not license anything.
The number of crimes solved is no indicator of the number of crimes deterred by the cameras. Arguing that the cameras are a failure because the police in certain locations aren't arresting more people is tantamount to saying that the police themselves are failures and should be removed.
To measure the effectiveness of the cameras as a deterrent to crime, you would need to measure the number of crimes that do not take place. Good luck with that.
1. Ubuntu does not run on my hardware (late-model iMac G5) and Ubuntu isn't going to make it work. 2. I don't want a "funky" UI. I'm not 17 years old. 3. Not all the software I want to run is available on Linux. (Yes, that means Adobe. It also means Transmit and Textmate and others. Why use a wanna-be on Linux when I already own the real thing?) 4. Buying a computer is always a matter of taste. It isn't only the look of an iMac that appeals. It's the simplicity.Linux' Achilles heel is that it runs on the same miserable ugly noisy overheated boxes that Windows uses.
All that from someone who used Linux for 10 years before he got off that particular treadmill.
No agreement or contract is worth anything unless it can be legally defended. Any license can be violated with impunity if the licensor fails to enforce the license.
This is about legal culpability, not network design. Without that statement, they are vulnerable to claims that they haven't taken due diligence to ensure their servers are not being used by pornographers and pedophiles. The statement is an indication that they have exercised some due diligence by telling their customers that they, the customers, are responsible for the content they post, and for what happens to it after they post it. That's a bit -- not much, I think -- of legal protection. The alternatives are, first, to assert customers are not responsible for the content they post, or, two, that no one is responsible for changes made to content after it is posted.
The fact that a third party may be able to redirect links after they are posted is an issue that needs to be demonstrated after a legal challenge arises. The law isn't going to be premised on a "stuff happens" notion.
I don't use Windows, and the presence of Safari on Windows is not going to seduce me into switching from OS X.
On OS X, I spend most of my with Safari because it has fewer annoyances than any other browser I use. The latest Camino release is very good, but not quite enough for me to use exclusively. Firefox is a better browser on Windows than on OS X. All the Gecko-based browsers I've tried on OS X are slow to return the cursor when you open a new tab when several are already open, and they all are frustratingly too precise about cursor hover location when doing the middle-button-to-open bit.
And, Safari's text display is better than the others.
Meanwhile... isn't comparing a Safari beta to two full releases just a tad unfair.
Did you read my post? I'm making the case that it is precisely the invisibility of Linux in retail stores that largely accounts for its widespread unacceptance. Linux is not sold in shrinkwrapped boxes and it isn't advertised in media outlets that ordinary consumers read, watch, or hear. Until that happens, the vast majority of Windows users won't even know Linux exists. The fact the Linux is available for free on many, many servers has zero impact on its visibiity.
I used Linux for ten years. I've never met a non-geek, not-in-the-industry person who has installed it.
Even if someone grows annoyed enough with Windows to start looking for a replacement, in all probability the only way they are actually going to see a computer running Linux is if they have a friend who is using it. Most people do not have friends using Linux. Most people don't have friends who have heard of Linux.
Linux has a lot of buzz among the cognoscenti who represent a tiny fraction of the market. It has zero buzz, and essentially zero name recognition, among the rest of the population.
Linux has no visibility to those folks. It isn't in the retail chain and it isn't sitting on store shelves. Until it is, Linux will not be seen by mainstream computer users as an alternative to Windows. In fact, it wont be seen at all.
Consider: I live in a techie area. Red Hat headquarters is 10 miles from me. Linux is not available in any retail store in the area. Apple has shops in two local malls.
The fact that Linux is available as a free download from a zillion servers is not that much of a selling point unless you are a starving student. It certainly doesn't count for much with people who are spending $100 every time they fill up the SUV.
Slashdot Mirror
... one I never need to be in.
Fine. If I lived where you live, I'd probably have the same opinion about the local paper. If it's a daily, your lucky; it's pretty hard to attract the advertising revenue to sustain a paper in small-town market. It's great that you can still read the news on the local site and on Google and elsewhere.
What annoys me, though, is the enthusiasm for the newspaper's demise, and the usual assertions that no one needs papers anymore because they can read the news on Google. That's what I took from your first post. If that's not what you intended, my apologies.
People need to understand that the news comes from people who are paid to write the news. Almost all of them still work for newspapers and the wire services. Google, etc., can't supplant newspapers because they don't create news. In fact, if newspapers die, so will Google News. If Google wants to hire reporters, that's OK with me. If newspapers can abandon paper and just use the web, that's OK, too.
I'm usually a big copyright supporter -- not because of all the financial incentive business but because copyright simply recognizes the uncontestable fact that the person who writes something owns that thing and all rights inherent in it and that others have none of those rights unless they are transferred to them -- but Egypt is making a bogus claim. Good luck collecting those fees.
It isn't a moral issue, it's an economic issue.
For centuries, people have been willing to pay for good, great and less than good art. However you measrues it, what set it apart was the fact that you knew that you could not produce anything as original or creative. Art, in all its forms, was, and is, a scarce resource. Art will continue to be a scarce resource. That scarcity creates an incentive to create art and an incentive to acquire art. (The simplistic argument that "true" artists are blind to the economic aspect of their work and create only because they are compelled by some mystic force is naive.)
People now have the means to copy and widely redistribute art, whether or not they have permission to do that. It's only natural that they quickly decide that they aren't behaving immorally. At the least, that's the obvious way to rationalize the guilt.
But the production of art -- good, bad, whatever -- has always been intimately linked to the economics of distribution. If you want to see, hear or feel art, someone usually had to pay. That created revenue that funded the creation of new art. It was, and remains, our way of determining what we like.
Severing that link means people who create art may stop creating art. Sure, technology now allows everyone to create what they think is art and distribute it around the world. But, what I'm capable of creating isn't art, and, almost certainly, what you're capable of creating isn't art.
A world where artists can't protect their work is a world with a lot less art, and it's a world with a lot of Everyman rubbish masquerading as art.
>>"I stated my opinion... and I got an asshole response. Go figure."
Is that how you characterize everyone who disagrees with you?
Newspapers and the wire services that exist to produce and sell news copy to the papers, create news. Operations like community websites, top-of-the-hour radio news, Google News, etc., simply distribute news others have created. They could all vanish with no reduction in the amount of available news.
1. The OP seemed to be cheerleading for the demise of newspapers, but my guess is he wouldn't subscribe to a paper if it was the only way to get the news.
2. My point: Google News is software and serves. It contributes nothing to the pool of original news writing and reportage. My local newspaper -- which is smart enough to have had a serious web presence for years -- creates original news that I can get only from it, whether I read it at the breakfast table or inside my browser.
My guess, Cory, is that you probably don't really care what's going on outside your own little world. Otherwise, you wouldn't say newspapers provide "little to no news." My local daily is full of wire service reports from around the world. A typical edition usually has one or two lengthy staff-written pieces about local and regional matters that will not appear in any other mediium. Can the paper's distribution system compete with the speed of other media? No. But no other media reports in the depth that the newspaper does. If my local newspaper runs a 5-part series of 10,000 word articles about local politcal corruption, do you even imagine that any other news source is going to cover it in the same depth? Come on. Internet readers get annoyed if they need to scroll, and TV and radio seem to have a prohibition on any story lasting longer than a minute or so. That local community radio site is likely buying copy from the wire services, too, and doesn't contribute much of anything itself.
Sounds like you're satisified with 3.5 minutes of news at the top of the hour. I'm not, and neither are a lot of other people. That's the market newspapers serve. So, if you are happy with knowing that "A bomb just went off in Iraq and lots of people were killed" or "More people are losing their homes because they can't handle the hike in their adjustable mortage", then stick to the radio, But, if you want to have a chance to understand why all that is happening, you need to start reading a good newspaper.
And, remember, paper is only a publication medium. If papers were invented today, they'd go straight to the web. Everything in my paper's "paper" edition is on its site, plus a lot more. A smart newspaper knows it will take more than paper to survive.
An accurate summary, but I don't think it means much to SixApart. They are interested in selling MT. Customers who buy a product like MT care about a long list of other issues before they care about the license. After all, it isn't like those customers are going to stay up nights forking MT.
WordPress is a business, not a charity, too. It makes money from selling WP. The fact that the basic product is free doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things.
Remember, people who buy software don't buy code. They buy features and capabilities. (And, by and large, anyone who refuses to pay for software never was part of the market, so a business has little reason to care what they think.) When a product goes GPL, it can take advantage of the free coding labor of all those open source developers.
Can't say that I blame those folks for wanting to keep trucks off their streets. It appears that the GPS systems are simply choosing the shorter route and drivers are following blindly. You can probably hear and feel each vehicle in every village home as it roars through.
How about instituting a surcharge on every truck that passes through the village? Announce it with signs on the roads approaching the village. Set up cameras to photograph the trucks and their license tags. Trace the tags to the people who operate the trucks and bill them.
This approach assumes that the village can find the funds to pay for this. You'd likely need to stir up some publicity by chasing down and taking to court the firms that inevitably ignore the bills. No driver, or his or her boss, wants to save 5 miles at the cost of fines and potential litigation.
>>"Let people pay what they want to pay..."
Why?
Bad choices are still bad choices, whether they are made by one tyrant or a majority of 6 billion voters.
People want whatever they think is best for them, and they are quite prepared to ruin your life and mine to get it.
Taking a trillion dollars, loading it on a Shuttle, and dispersing it all on orbit would have been just as productive a use of the money. A purposeless war we were lied into by an incompetent fraud.
Didn't you just say that the rocks move because they are pushed by something strong enough to move them?
If it is the wind, it ought to be easy to test. Just soak some of the desert floor surrounding a rock, generate a breeze of sufficent force, and see what happens.
This is the reason a thing called a "model release" exists. If the photographer had asked the kid to sign a release, and if she'd done that, then the rights of each party would be spelled out in the release.
Now, I'm sure hardly anyone who posts to Flickr gets model releases, or even knows they exist. But, the notion of suing for unauthorized use of your image is not at all new. Creative Commons, and the others, might be vulnerable on the grounds that they failed to exercise due diligence in ensuring that the girl had, in fact, agreed that her photo could be used in that way.
I don't think the license aspect has anything to do with this; the girl did not license anything.
The number of crimes solved is no indicator of the number of crimes deterred by the cameras. Arguing that the cameras are a failure because the police in certain locations aren't arresting more people is tantamount to saying that the police themselves are failures and should be removed.
To measure the effectiveness of the cameras as a deterrent to crime, you would need to measure the number of crimes that do not take place. Good luck with that.
Here's why I don't run Ubuntu:
1. Ubuntu does not run on my hardware (late-model iMac G5) and Ubuntu isn't going to make it work.
2. I don't want a "funky" UI. I'm not 17 years old.
3. Not all the software I want to run is available on Linux. (Yes, that means Adobe. It also means Transmit and Textmate and others. Why use a wanna-be on Linux when I already own the real thing?)
4. Buying a computer is always a matter of taste. It isn't only the look of an iMac that appeals. It's the simplicity.Linux' Achilles heel is that it runs on the same miserable ugly noisy overheated boxes that Windows uses.
All that from someone who used Linux for 10 years before he got off that particular treadmill.
Apple wants to make money. That is not necessarily the same thing as selling more copies of OS X.
No agreement or contract is worth anything unless it can be legally defended. Any license can be violated with impunity if the licensor fails to enforce the license.
Don't be naive. "Community" is just marketing hype, and always has been, in any instance of its use on the web.
This is about legal culpability, not network design. Without that statement, they are vulnerable to claims that they haven't taken due diligence to ensure their servers are not being used by pornographers and pedophiles. The statement is an indication that they have exercised some due diligence by telling their customers that they, the customers, are responsible for the content they post, and for what happens to it after they post it. That's a bit -- not much, I think -- of legal protection. The alternatives are, first, to assert customers are not responsible for the content they post, or, two, that no one is responsible for changes made to content after it is posted.
The fact that a third party may be able to redirect links after they are posted is an issue that needs to be demonstrated after a legal challenge arises. The law isn't going to be premised on a "stuff happens" notion.
Those who can blog, blog. Those who can't post to Slashdot.
No weapon. It's a reconnaissance craft.
At 4000 mph, it would be able to outrun any anti-aircraft missile.
I don't use Windows, and the presence of Safari on Windows is not going to seduce me into switching from OS X.
On OS X, I spend most of my with Safari because it has fewer annoyances than any other browser I use. The latest Camino release is very good, but not quite enough for me to use exclusively. Firefox is a better browser on Windows than on OS X. All the Gecko-based browsers I've tried on OS X are slow to return the cursor when you open a new tab when several are already open, and they all are frustratingly too precise about cursor hover location when doing the middle-button-to-open bit.
And, Safari's text display is better than the others.
Meanwhile... isn't comparing a Safari beta to two full releases just a tad unfair.
Did you read my post? I'm making the case that it is precisely the invisibility of Linux in retail stores that largely accounts for its widespread unacceptance. Linux is not sold in shrinkwrapped boxes and it isn't advertised in media outlets that ordinary consumers read, watch, or hear. Until that happens, the vast majority of Windows users won't even know Linux exists. The fact the Linux is available for free on many, many servers has zero impact on its visibiity.
I used Linux for ten years. I've never met a non-geek, not-in-the-industry person who has installed it.
Even if someone grows annoyed enough with Windows to start looking for a replacement, in all probability the only way they are actually going to see a computer running Linux is if they have a friend who is using it. Most people do not have friends using Linux. Most people don't have friends who have heard of Linux.
Linux has a lot of buzz among the cognoscenti who represent a tiny fraction of the market. It has zero buzz, and essentially zero name recognition, among the rest of the population.
Linux has no visibility to those folks. It isn't in the retail chain and it isn't sitting on store shelves. Until it is, Linux will not be seen by mainstream computer users as an alternative to Windows. In fact, it wont be seen at all.
Consider: I live in a techie area. Red Hat headquarters is 10 miles from me. Linux is not available in any retail store in the area. Apple has shops in two local malls.
The fact that Linux is available as a free download from a zillion servers is not that much of a selling point unless you are a starving student. It certainly doesn't count for much with people who are spending $100 every time they fill up the SUV.