and that making copies for personal use and then playing them while your friends come over is illegal.
Exactly the quote that the parent to my previous post cited.
Basically, parent asked what may have been a rhetorical question, and I decided to answer it. The message that the RIAA is trying to send is that there's no legal way to copy music files once you've gotten your hands on your CD of choice. If they present scenarios of legal copying, then their statement is false.
If copying CDs to my computer for backup (or for main use while having the CDs lying around somewhere) is fine, but letting my friends listen to this, without copying it to their devices, isn't, exactly what is or is not legal to do with my music?
And if letting friends listen is illegal, why should I be allowed to, say, broadcast the song from my computer's speakers? There's a chance that someone who didn't buy the CD could hear the music!
This really raises two questions: 1.) What, exactly, is "fair use"? 2.) Does the RIAA have any authority whatsoever to define what "fair use" means?
One of them has some legal business, the other is purely illegal and harmful.
We know that Microsoft is harmful and has been convicted of an illegal monopoly, but I thought that people have also been jailed for distributing malware before.
So, you'll have be be more specific than "one of them" and "the other."
Why would they mention "making copies for personal use" at all if they're presenting all copying as illegal?
Exactly. If they were to do that, it would contradict other things that they say, and they'd end up with no credibility.
Obviously, they're going to misrepresent the law if it suits their purposes. How else are you supposed to get anyone to believe you, except by spinning larger and larger webs of lies to make what you say consistent with the lies you have already told?
Slashdot has editors? I thought they just had a select few people that they allowed to post links to other news sites. Sure, the job title is "editor," but there's no indication that this is actually what they do.
How can the law which every citizen expected to comply with be allowed to exist under Copyright? How can keeping us from copying the law possibly be an advancement of the sciences and useful arts? Once it becomes law it is no longer a creative work and is now a fact, a fact which is by its very nature that which least deserves to be kept from the public.
Simple answer: There are few, if any, good reasons why it can happen. For any law to be reasonably enforceable, it must be communicated to the citizens in a timely manner and in language that the average citizen can understand.
To prevent distribution of the text of a law by any means is to make that law ineffective. In short, they can't keep it from you if they mean to enforce it.
I don't care if the text of United States law or Oregon law reads differently; this is how it is from an ethical standpoint.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Why are you so quick to accuse Microsoft of malice here? Clearly, they're just incompetent, and so still not worth your time. Microsoft's programmers are obviously too stupid to backport the patch.
No "Microsoft Windows", no "Conficker", no "Downadup"...what kind of worthless malware repository is this? They're missing all the good stuff that people want to see. It's like having a museum of things used to kill people and not having an example of a car.
I guess Carnegie Mellon does, since we've got clusters running RHEL 5, and the AFS system (the one any {student, faculty} member can SSH into to do work on school computers) recently went to Red Hat. However, I don't think Computing Services will troubleshoot your OS for you if you do something stupid with your personally-owned Linux computer.
CMU has Linux clusters, and they do let Linux computers onto the networks, but I don't think they help with repairs. Granted, the stereotypical Linux user should be able to save himself, anyway, but anyway, I can't really answer this for my school, because from certain points of view, the answer could be "yes" or "no".
Keep them in that order, and I have no political problem with your actions.
I agree that with crap like the RIAA is pulling in court, the time for the ammo box may not be far off, but please, keep this civil for as long as possible.
Last I heard, there were more people learning English [in China] than the entire population of the United States.
Isn't this only true because there are more of them there than there are of us here, and they have to learn English to do business with us? Of course more people are going to be learning English there than here; the same should be true for any other develop{ed, ing} country whose population exceeds that of the United States of America!
In other news, about 40% of sick days are taken on either Monday or Friday.
Also, I'd like to point out that if China's language becomes the next language in which to do business, English will fall. Engrish will replace it. Have you read some of the English instructions on some of their products? They aren't learning English. They're learning some barely-understandable dialect thereof.
It's not that they don't care. It's that to the n00b, it looks so esoteric and unwelcoming. All this talk of command-lines, kernels, and compiling applications from source really doesn't incline one to try it.
Really, YouTube gives a more accurate image of Linux than any stereotype does.
What would the world be like if everyone could enjoy the same patent system we use in the USA?
Innovation would be stifled in the name of monopoly, the computer market would generally stagnate, and law would become a more lucrative field than computer science.
I hereby disapprove of this move by Microsoft on the basis that implementation of the idea would strengthen their monopoly stranglehold on the first-world computer market. That consequence is precisely what needs to be avoided at all costs, because for as long as Microsoft has wielded the power that they do, they have shown time and time again that Microsoft, as a controlling entity, is not a benevolent dictator or benevolent overlord.
I swear, these lobbyists have less of a life than any of us on/.. Do we really need a judicial ruling made under United States Law about whether or not global warming is harmful? Ask anyone. The only people who care about this ruling are the lobbyists (not unusual, I'm sure).
Assuming that global warming exists, if global warming ain't harmful now, it will be in the future, when Earth becomes too hot to sustain human life. An increase in temperature of even a fraction of a degree per year could kill us all off within a couple of centuries.
It's going to be very, very funny when Antarctica goes from being the only uninhabitable continent to being the only inhabitable continent, thanks to global warming making temperatures rise everywhere and forcing everyone to move to relatively colder areas.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - - Arthur C. Clarke
The problem is, a lot of people are insufficiently advanced, and are unable to make that distinction.
I think I get what you're saying here, but the flip-side of this is that the technology itself is not sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic. Humans have been building these systems from the ground up ever since we figured out how to do it. We, on our own, have created a meaningful way to read the different states of different switches. We have, in fact, organized it in a logical fashion that can be broken down into pretty much just the most complex, most adaptable cipher the world has ever seen. And we know that no form of encryption of any kind is in any way magical, not even the 1's and 0's inside the computer that we decide to interpret.
Sure, the people who want to believe that it's magic will believe it's magic, but the fact remains that, in itself, the inner workings of a computer are very, very different from magic.
In my experience, it normally comes right before the Profit step.
Mostly I was poking fun at Google's Open Handset Alliance, which may be "open", but at the end of the day has most of the same restrictions that the iPhone does in practical terms.
Ah. I see. Well, that was a giant "whoosh" over my head, then. My bad.
If Amazon had any intention of selling these books, they'd be selling these books!
I thought that was the point of that Kindle thingy. However, I could be wrong; I'm not very familiar with the device
No, wait, I see where I'm going wrong. For all that DRM, Amazon is selling licenses to view the texts, rather than selling the books themselves. Never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
From the fine summary:
and that making copies for personal use and then playing them while your friends come over is illegal.
Exactly the quote that the parent to my previous post cited.
Basically, parent asked what may have been a rhetorical question, and I decided to answer it. The message that the RIAA is trying to send is that there's no legal way to copy music files once you've gotten your hands on your CD of choice. If they present scenarios of legal copying, then their statement is false.
If copying CDs to my computer for backup (or for main use while having the CDs lying around somewhere) is fine, but letting my friends listen to this, without copying it to their devices, isn't, exactly what is or is not legal to do with my music?
And if letting friends listen is illegal, why should I be allowed to, say, broadcast the song from my computer's speakers? There's a chance that someone who didn't buy the CD could hear the music!
This really raises two questions:
1.) What, exactly, is "fair use"?
2.) Does the RIAA have any authority whatsoever to define what "fair use" means?
One of them has some legal business, the other is purely illegal and harmful.
We know that Microsoft is harmful and has been convicted of an illegal monopoly, but I thought that people have also been jailed for distributing malware before.
So, you'll have be be more specific than "one of them" and "the other."
Why would they mention "making copies for personal use" at all if they're presenting all copying as illegal?
Exactly. If they were to do that, it would contradict other things that they say, and they'd end up with no credibility.
Obviously, they're going to misrepresent the law if it suits their purposes. How else are you supposed to get anyone to believe you, except by spinning larger and larger webs of lies to make what you say consistent with the lies you have already told?
Slashdot has editors? I thought they just had a select few people that they allowed to post links to other news sites. Sure, the job title is "editor," but there's no indication that this is actually what they do.
How can the law which every citizen expected to comply with be allowed to exist under Copyright? How can keeping us from copying the law possibly be an advancement of the sciences and useful arts? Once it becomes law it is no longer a creative work and is now a fact, a fact which is by its very nature that which least deserves to be kept from the public.
Simple answer: There are few, if any, good reasons why it can happen. For any law to be reasonably enforceable, it must be communicated to the citizens in a timely manner and in language that the average citizen can understand.
To prevent distribution of the text of a law by any means is to make that law ineffective. In short, they can't keep it from you if they mean to enforce it.
I don't care if the text of United States law or Oregon law reads differently; this is how it is from an ethical standpoint.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Why are you so quick to accuse Microsoft of malice here? Clearly, they're just incompetent, and so still not worth your time. Microsoft's programmers are obviously too stupid to backport the patch.
*did not read TFA*
No "Microsoft Windows", no "Conficker", no "Downadup"...what kind of worthless malware repository is this? They're missing all the good stuff that people want to see. It's like having a museum of things used to kill people and not having an example of a car.
Is he one of these people?
I guess Carnegie Mellon does, since we've got clusters running RHEL 5, and the AFS system (the one any {student, faculty} member can SSH into to do work on school computers) recently went to Red Hat. However, I don't think Computing Services will troubleshoot your OS for you if you do something stupid with your personally-owned Linux computer.
CMU has Linux clusters, and they do let Linux computers onto the networks, but I don't think they help with repairs. Granted, the stereotypical Linux user should be able to save himself, anyway, but anyway, I can't really answer this for my school, because from certain points of view, the answer could be "yes" or "no".
Linux is too hard.
Er, why are you on /., then? If you think Linux is too hard, then you should-
*notes five-digit UID*
Um...sorry about that, sir....
*bows in respect to the elder*
*gets off the lawn*
If you're going to increment the stupidity of the DRM, shouldn't it be DRM++;?
At least for the week it takes someone to figure out how to duplicate the keys, anyway.
$ cp ~you/car/key ~me/yourcar/key
It's very simple, really....
Remember: Soap, Ballot, Jury, Ammo.
Keep them in that order, and I have no political problem with your actions.
I agree that with crap like the RIAA is pulling in court, the time for the ammo box may not be far off, but please, keep this civil for as long as possible.
It's likely the most extensible [...] language on earth.
So...it's like the Firefox of linguistics? Or is that not true because it's the de facto common language?
Last I heard, there were more people learning English [in China] than the entire population of the United States.
Isn't this only true because there are more of them there than there are of us here, and they have to learn English to do business with us? Of course more people are going to be learning English there than here; the same should be true for any other develop{ed, ing} country whose population exceeds that of the United States of America!
In other news, about 40% of sick days are taken on either Monday or Friday.
Also, I'd like to point out that if China's language becomes the next language in which to do business, English will fall. Engrish will replace it. Have you read some of the English instructions on some of their products? They aren't learning English. They're learning some barely-understandable dialect thereof.
*trio
If serious, [citation needed].
If silly, please get modded +5, Funny. That was a nice one. :)
It's not that they don't care. It's that to the n00b, it looks so esoteric and unwelcoming. All this talk of command-lines, kernels, and compiling applications from source really doesn't incline one to try it.
Really, YouTube gives a more accurate image of Linux than any stereotype does.
What would the world be like if everyone could enjoy the same patent system we use in the USA?
Innovation would be stifled in the name of monopoly, the computer market would generally stagnate, and law would become a more lucrative field than computer science.
I hereby disapprove of this move by Microsoft on the basis that implementation of the idea would strengthen their monopoly stranglehold on the first-world computer market. That consequence is precisely what needs to be avoided at all costs, because for as long as Microsoft has wielded the power that they do, they have shown time and time again that Microsoft, as a controlling entity, is not a benevolent dictator or benevolent overlord.
Details, details...
Seriously, I've used ShamWows. They really are quite good at what they do.
Of course. Because it comes from Germany, and you know the Germans make good stuff.
Just like that ShamWow thing.
I swear, these lobbyists have less of a life than any of us on /.. Do we really need a judicial ruling made under United States Law about whether or not global warming is harmful? Ask anyone. The only people who care about this ruling are the lobbyists (not unusual, I'm sure).
Assuming that global warming exists, if global warming ain't harmful now, it will be in the future, when Earth becomes too hot to sustain human life. An increase in temperature of even a fraction of a degree per year could kill us all off within a couple of centuries.
It's going to be very, very funny when Antarctica goes from being the only uninhabitable continent to being the only inhabitable continent, thanks to global warming making temperatures rise everywhere and forcing everyone to move to relatively colder areas.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - - Arthur C. Clarke
The problem is, a lot of people are insufficiently advanced, and are unable to make that distinction.
I think I get what you're saying here, but the flip-side of this is that the technology itself is not sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic. Humans have been building these systems from the ground up ever since we figured out how to do it. We, on our own, have created a meaningful way to read the different states of different switches. We have, in fact, organized it in a logical fashion that can be broken down into pretty much just the most complex, most adaptable cipher the world has ever seen. And we know that no form of encryption of any kind is in any way magical, not even the 1's and 0's inside the computer that we decide to interpret.
Sure, the people who want to believe that it's magic will believe it's magic, but the fact remains that, in itself, the inner workings of a computer are very, very different from magic.
Yeah, I wasn't sure where to put the ???.
In my experience, it normally comes right before the Profit step.
Mostly I was poking fun at Google's Open Handset Alliance, which may be "open", but at the end of the day has most of the same restrictions that the iPhone does in practical terms.
Ah. I see. Well, that was a giant "whoosh" over my head, then. My bad.
If Amazon had any intention of selling these books, they'd be selling these books!
I thought that was the point of that Kindle thingy. However, I could be wrong; I'm not very familiar with the device
No, wait, I see where I'm going wrong. For all that DRM, Amazon is selling licenses to view the texts, rather than selling the books themselves. Never mind.
Er, exactly how often do "open" and "profit" coincide, anyway? They appear to contradict each other at first glance.
Or did you just forget the ??? step?