Yes, it's illegal, but it's not theft. It's a different offense covered by a different part of the criminal code. Calling it theft equates intellectual property with physical property which is false.
Well at some point we'll hit a limit where the drive capacity is too much for the transfer rate of the interface. Since the days of that 200MB drive, space has increased 1000 times while speed has increased maybe 20-100 times (depending on how you measure). Maybe with holographic memory we can search quickly through that much data.
One of the fun things about consoles is the economical multiplayer gaming. With sports and fighting games you plug in up to 4 controllers in one console with one copy of the game, and have at it with your friends. A LAN party with one PC per player takes a much bigger commitment in both money and effort. As much as Sony and Nintendo would like to sell more consoles and more games, I don't think they're stupid enough to think that gamers would put up with the inconvenience of bringing their consoles everywhere just to play multiplayer.
"It's almost like saying it's GM's fault that someone can drive a car drunk and kill themselves"
I have yet to see a GM car that you can command remotely to shut down and then after it starts up again, swerve all over the road with the engine stuck full throttle.
I got that message from Bill Gates too in a spamtrap mailbox (deleted user from years ago). Just for fun, I went into the profile for that user and put in all fake names and addresses. Homer Simpson, 123 Fake St, Springfield CA, 90210. unsubscribe90210@microsoft.com
Let's see them try and spam that address. BTW I also checked the box to please send me junk snailmail and let telemarketers call.
Aside from the fact that the lawsuit is about air travel and not car travel, freedom of travel by car is a myth too. There's traffic enforcement (don't drive a flashy car and don't drive faster than the rest of traffic), police profiling of drug couriers (hope you're not DWB- Driving While Black) and INS checkpoints 50-100 miles NORTH of the Mexican border (hope you're not DWB- Driving While Brown).
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it be hard to steer a train into a shopping mall without TRAIN TRACKS leading into the mall? I suppose the smart terrorist would take the Bugs Bunny approach and paint new train tracks to where he wanted to train to go.
Let's see what happens to your affordable housing and light traffic after the high tech building boom gets done with the town. And in the end, you'll still be stuck with that lovely upstate NY weather.
Most cities have at least one supermarket chain that doesn't have those club cards. Around here there's Albertsons and Trader Joes. They also never check ID, so it's easy to sign up as Homer Simpson, 123 Fake St, Springfield. Now try using an alias for your residential phone service; not gonna happen. For years the privacy nuts have used shell corporations for these things. Now it looks like they were right all along.
One obvious "affiliate" would be long distance companies. People who call a lot of long distance will be aggressively targeted by telemarketers offering to switch their long distance. Maybe if you call China a lot, you'll get a Chinese-speaking telemarketer too.
The reason the government doesn't keep track of everybody's moves now is because that kind of surveillance is expensive and labor intensive. What happens when technology makes it cheap enough to spy on everyone? Sure, facial recognition that works and microrobotic cameras are far off in the future. But what about a giant data-mining computer that cross references a few things like say... telephone calling records, mobile phone coordinates, credit card purchases, and the toll-road transponder in your car? You leave a paper trail everywhere you go.
"the streamed version would yield a DIGITAL copy of the song in question, and is therefore evil and scary"
And what's the bitrate on the stream? 64K or less? No MP3 collector would ever bother saving a crappy 64K MP3 of a song they wanted to keep. It would sound better taping off the radio. I know there's a few 128K Shoutcast stations out there, and someday 128K and higher might be the norm but not anytime soon.
I don't think any Internet music law could be completely fair unless it took into account bitrates to distinguish between high quality (good enough for archiving) and low quality (for previewing and sampling) streams.
As abused as this world may seem, it's as perfect as it gets for evolving life. The Earth has just the right size and orbit. Any smaller, all the atmosphere would escape into space. Any bigger, the gravity would be strong enough to hold onto hydrogen and we'd be a gas giant. It's also important that our temperatures are mostly in the range where water is liquid and organic molecules like DNA do not break down from heat.
Autonomous at this level isn't bad. I'll worry when they're self-replicating, self-repairing and adaptable to threat environments. Right now, they depend on us humans for all kinds of things like fuel, spare parts, runways, R&D, etc.
"Uh, technology is what has kept us free of plagues"
Well, yeah, but it's not rocket science or even genetic engineering. 90% of the public health problem is just sanitation and nutrition: clean water, clean food, and sewage treatment.
Sure, that might be important if we launch a mission to divert an asteroid, but there's still the problem of thrusting it out of the way. A few hundred nukes may or may not do the job.
And forget about colonizing the planets as an escape plan. It's orders of magnitude cheaper to build underground shelters with a few years of supplies to outlast the nuclear winter. As long as they don't take a direct hit, the shelters would survive.
Re:Ferrous based magnetic tapes last FOREVER!
on
Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 1
"floppy disk is the second most unreliable medium in the history of IT - just pipped by the Jaz disk"
Nah, I think the Syquest drives got you beat there.
Before you all laugh at this, it could be done. Games take so much disk space already why not add another hundred megs or two and make a mini distro in a loopback filesystem? It'll be one big file you can put on a FAT partition and maybe a bootloader like loadlin. The weakness in this plan is of course driver support for things like video, sound and game controllers, but still, it could be done with minimal pain to Windows users.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times do we have to repeat this?
Copyright infringement != Theft
Yes, it's illegal, but it's not theft. It's a different offense covered by a different part of the criminal code. Calling it theft equates intellectual property with physical property which is false.
I remember Corel trying to rewrite Wordperfect in Java back in the Pentium 133 days, and it was godawful slow. I sure hope this turns out better.
I use Metapad for a lightweight notepad replacement. It needs no install and translates DOS and UNIX linebreaks.
Well at some point we'll hit a limit where the drive capacity is too much for the transfer rate of the interface. Since the days of that 200MB drive, space has increased 1000 times while speed has increased maybe 20-100 times (depending on how you measure). Maybe with holographic memory we can search quickly through that much data.
One of the fun things about consoles is the economical multiplayer gaming. With sports and fighting games you plug in up to 4 controllers in one console with one copy of the game, and have at it with your friends. A LAN party with one PC per player takes a much bigger commitment in both money and effort. As much as Sony and Nintendo would like to sell more consoles and more games, I don't think they're stupid enough to think that gamers would put up with the inconvenience of bringing their consoles everywhere just to play multiplayer.
Trade secrets. If you didn't sign an NDA or break into KFC's safe, you can publish it all you want.
"It's almost like saying it's GM's fault that someone can drive a car drunk and kill themselves"
I have yet to see a GM car that you can command remotely to shut down and then after it starts up again, swerve all over the road with the engine stuck full throttle.
I've used it too. It's the easiest install I've seen yet of the Cygwin+OpenSSH ports. www.networksimplicity.com
I got that message from Bill Gates too in a spamtrap mailbox (deleted user from years ago). Just for fun, I went into the profile for that user and put in all fake names and addresses. Homer Simpson, 123 Fake St, Springfield CA, 90210. unsubscribe90210@microsoft.com
Let's see them try and spam that address. BTW I also checked the box to please send me junk snailmail and let telemarketers call.
Aside from the fact that the lawsuit is about air travel and not car travel, freedom of travel by car is a myth too. There's traffic enforcement (don't drive a flashy car and don't drive faster than the rest of traffic), police profiling of drug couriers (hope you're not DWB- Driving While Black) and INS checkpoints 50-100 miles NORTH of the Mexican border (hope you're not DWB- Driving While Brown).
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it be hard to steer a train into a shopping mall without TRAIN TRACKS leading into the mall? I suppose the smart terrorist would take the Bugs Bunny approach and paint new train tracks to where he wanted to train to go.
Let's see what happens to your affordable housing and light traffic after the high tech building boom gets done with the town. And in the end, you'll still be stuck with that lovely upstate NY weather.
Most cities have at least one supermarket chain that doesn't have those club cards. Around here there's Albertsons and Trader Joes. They also never check ID, so it's easy to sign up as Homer Simpson, 123 Fake St, Springfield. Now try using an alias for your residential phone service; not gonna happen. For years the privacy nuts have used shell corporations for these things. Now it looks like they were right all along.
One obvious "affiliate" would be long distance companies. People who call a lot of long distance will be aggressively targeted by telemarketers offering to switch their long distance. Maybe if you call China a lot, you'll get a Chinese-speaking telemarketer too.
The reason the government doesn't keep track of everybody's moves now is because that kind of surveillance is expensive and labor intensive. What happens when technology makes it cheap enough to spy on everyone? Sure, facial recognition that works and microrobotic cameras are far off in the future. But what about a giant data-mining computer that cross references a few things like say... telephone calling records, mobile phone coordinates, credit card purchases, and the toll-road transponder in your car? You leave a paper trail everywhere you go.
"On an aside: Anyone know of a list of recording labels that do not belong to the RIAA?"
I found this through a little gooogling. There's also a link on the page to fake indies.
"the streamed version would yield a DIGITAL copy of the song in question, and is therefore evil and scary"
And what's the bitrate on the stream? 64K or less? No MP3 collector would ever bother saving a crappy 64K MP3 of a song they wanted to keep. It would sound better taping off the radio. I know there's a few 128K Shoutcast stations out there, and someday 128K and higher might be the norm but not anytime soon.
I don't think any Internet music law could be completely fair unless it took into account bitrates to distinguish between high quality (good enough for archiving) and low quality (for previewing and sampling) streams.
You can sell retail boxed software on Ebay. Preferably unopened and sealed. Only OEM software has to be sold with hardware.
As abused as this world may seem, it's as perfect as it gets for evolving life. The Earth has just the right size and orbit. Any smaller, all the atmosphere would escape into space. Any bigger, the gravity would be strong enough to hold onto hydrogen and we'd be a gas giant. It's also important that our temperatures are mostly in the range where water is liquid and organic molecules like DNA do not break down from heat.
Autonomous at this level isn't bad. I'll worry when they're self-replicating, self-repairing and adaptable to threat environments. Right now, they depend on us humans for all kinds of things like fuel, spare parts, runways, R&D, etc.
"Uh, technology is what has kept us free of plagues"
Well, yeah, but it's not rocket science or even genetic engineering. 90% of the public health problem is just sanitation and nutrition: clean water, clean food, and sewage treatment.
No wonder they send and relay so much spam. They have the bandwidth to burn. There's even a DNSBL just for Korea: http://korea.services.net/
Sure, that might be important if we launch a mission to divert an asteroid, but there's still the problem of thrusting it out of the way. A few hundred nukes may or may not do the job.
And forget about colonizing the planets as an escape plan. It's orders of magnitude cheaper to build underground shelters with a few years of supplies to outlast the nuclear winter. As long as they don't take a direct hit, the shelters would survive.
"floppy disk is the second most unreliable medium in the history of IT - just pipped by the Jaz disk"
Nah, I think the Syquest drives got you beat there.
Before you all laugh at this, it could be done. Games take so much disk space already why not add another hundred megs or two and make a mini distro in a loopback filesystem? It'll be one big file you can put on a FAT partition and maybe a bootloader like loadlin. The weakness in this plan is of course driver support for things like video, sound and game controllers, but still, it could be done with minimal pain to Windows users.