This isn't interesting unless the page actually doesn't work on other browsers. The name they give their "everything but IE" stylesheet is just not that important.
The big 5 have announced online music distribution before. Sometimes they've even implemented it. Usually it means you can buy a small set of songs you don't want for a price you'd never pay.
Don't fall for this vaporware any more than you would a software company's.
Slashdot is required to remove copyrighted material from its site, if and when notified by the copyright owner, unless the poster contests the removal, in which case I forget what happens.
It's not a question of conceding; this is the law.
1. It's not clear whether Slashdot is liable for libellous statements; that isn't covered by the DMCA. It is "liable" for warez posted to the site (say, as a shar file), in that it must take them down if the copyright owner demands it. However, it is unclear whether a link to warez is covered by the DMCA. Unfortunately, the MPAA/2600 and Napster cases so far seem to suggest that Slashdot could be required to remove links to copyrighted material.
2. You are liable if you publish a book you don't have the copyright on. Why wouldn't you be liable if you posted it on Slashdot?
Slashdot never had common carrier status. Internet folks used to consider common carrier a good analogy for web sites and other online discussion fora, but neither courts nor legislation ever addressed the matter until the DMCA. The DMCA rejects the common carrier analogy in favor of a new set of rules.
Innovation only matters to people who play a lot of games. If you play most of the games that come out, then you'll spot an innovation as soon as it happens. But if Quake 3 is your first FPS, it doesn't matter that it's just the latest in a long line of the same thing--it's new to you. And it's fun.
I'm more inclined to boycott the bad, and support the good. I just wish the lines dividing the two were clearer...
Actually it's not that hard to spot the RIAA productions. The RIAA mostly represents five companies: EMI, BMG, Warner Brothers, Sony, and Universal. If you look at the outside of the CD, the name of one of those companies will almost always be somewhere in the fine print. If there isn't, it's probably not a major-label CD, and you should buy it.
You won't have a perfect success rate:
There are smaller labels that are in the RIAA but are independent. You can learn what these are, or you can decide they probably don't deserve your boycott because they're not the ones that hold the reins.
There are always changes in the music industry, and you may pick up a CD from a label that was independent when it was printed but has since been absorbed.
There are some CDs with no copyright notice on the outside. Most of these are from tiny labels, but some of them might be from major labels.
But you'll still be right ninety-some percent of the time.
I'm not, incidentally, taking a position on the morality or pragmatics of an RIAA boycott. (I tend to avoid the major labels, which is why I know how to do it, but I'm not thoroughly consistent, and I do it mostly for non-napster reasons.) But if you want to do it, it's not that hard to do a pretty good job.
Those of you who are shocked, shocked that an American would even consider such a thing should at least be aware that compulsory licensing is not a new idea. For example, under certain circumstances, someone who invents new medical technology but refuses to license it "to a responsible applicant under reasonable terms" can be compelled to do so by law.
Less tangentially, copyright holders in nondramatic musical works--like, songwriters--are already subject to compulsory licensing in the United States. If you write a song, you get to decide who makes the first recording of it. But once there's a legitimate recording distributed in the US, anyone else can license your song at a rate mandated by law.
I know it's not an option for everybody, but, you know, I just like to flip through the pages of a book before I buy it. Heck, I like to flip through books I don't buy. I like being around books. When I go to Amazon I'm just on a web site.
I suspect it will end up being something more along the line of providing example results, and having the computer then try to mimic them.
For more on this idea--sometimes called "Programming by Example"--see Henry Lieberman's PBE home page, or the fascinating book (now available online) Watch What I Do.
"This"--Amazon's tip jar, the system described in the article--is a purely voluntary payment mechanism. The only people who would pay for it are people who already "care" about Slashdot. They wouldn't care because they were paying, they would pay because they care. The trolls and the goatsex would continue, because they wouldn't be forced to "tip".
As it happens, I don't think Slashdot should force subscriptions either--Slashdot is what it is because of the chaos it allows, and its moderation system is a fascinating experiment in balancing free speech with the desire to separate wheat from chaff. But if you did want that, you couldn't get it from the system under discussion.
Sun sometimes makes a distinction between "the Java programming language" and "the Java platform". AFAICT, C# is like the language. Microsoft's "Common Language Runtime" is like a Java VM. After that, comparisons start to get fuzzy (in part because the descriptions we get from Sun and Microsoft are fuzzy).
.NET, according to Microsoft, is a "strategy". But it also includes a ".NET platform", which might usefully be compared to the Java platform by someone with more free time than I have. Part of the.NET platform is "the.NET framework", which consists of the runtime, a set of Framework classes (comparable to Java's standard class library), and ASP.NET. I don't know what ASP.NET is.
Both are comparable in that they are ill-defined concepts surrounded by millennial marketing hype.
In comparing the two platforms it might be useful to focus on Jini, which is Sun's "vision" of network services, etc., just as.NET is Microsoft's.
Mailing bricks and such is not only a pain for the USPS and of questionable impact on your junk mail inflow, it just sounds like a lot of work. If your goal is to get less junk mail, there are steps you can take that are easier, more effective, and have fewer innocent victims.
Many junk mailers belong to the Direct Marketing Association. The DMA maintains an opt-out list--you can tell them you don't want junk mail, and member organizations will stop sending it to you. I haven't tried the mail service (mail doesn't bother me) but I've registered with the DMA that I don't want telemarketing calls, and it worked great.
Even companies that haven't joined the DMA generally don't get much value from sending mail to people who hate it. If you write them a letter asking to be removed from their mailing list, that may do the trick.
If they persist, you can legally bar any non-governmental organization from sending you mail. There's a little trick to this: The law you have to use was designed to stop unsolicited pornographic mail, so if you want to stop getting mail from Microsoft you may have to claim with a straight face that Windows 2000 turns you on. But, you know, maybe it does. And in any case the post office is prohibited from deciding you're lying. (Also, that's a bad example--Microsoft isn't persistent enough to necessitate legal action.)
Of course, none of these tactics will cause a major philosophical shift in the U.S.'s view of junk mail. If that's your goal, well, good luck, maybe your bricks will really make them think. But if you just want to get less junk mail, do it the easy way.
Note that the National Association of Broadcasters wants to get in on the encryption action too.
This Variety article describes a letter from the NAB president about how "it would be a betrayal of the public interest to protect digital TV programs shown on cable from being recorded by consumers, but to not protect those broadcast over the airwaves."
Apparently it's in the public interest to prevent people from recording cable programs for home viewing... as long as you prevent them from recording broadcast TV, too!
Oh, I don't know. I was a member of something I thought was a virtual community in 1990, and I'm a member of something that's pretty much the same now. It's not the WELL, and I don't think I'm alone. Virtual communities are still around.
But in the meantime the phrase "virtual community" has been co-opted to mean some things it didn't then.
Katz is right that the idea of "community" is something mythologized and yearned for in American culture. For that reason, marketers have applied it to things that just aren't communities. (A message board where people can talk about your products is not in itself a community. A newsletter for your fans is even less so.) We want to belong to communities, the reasoning goes, so we'll be attracted to web sites that say they have communities.
Another thing that's happened is the conflation of "community" with "community of interest". On the web we sometimes use the term "community" to mean things like "everyone who's interested in Black and Decker power tools". But power tools are a pretty tenuous connection between people; if people don't form stronger and deeper bonds, there's nothing there to carry them through the rough times that are defining moments for real communities.
Anyway, I don't think the virtual communities we had when Rheingold wrote his book have changed that much. (The presence of hostile and disruptive members, and the debate over what to do about them, is certainly not new.) But the term "community" has been subject to various "dramatic reconceptions" that block our old communities from view.
No, I don't think Google is tampering with search results. The point is, there are good resources on the Holocaust and Auschwitz now, and there's a search engine capable of finding them and prioritizing them before the deniers and the revisionists--not because Google acts to suppress the distorters, but because the Web ignores them and Google recognizes that.
If you want Holocaust deniers, you can still get them from Google--they just don't appear as central resources on the subject, as per Jamie's article.
Re:The only way this could be done. . .
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
Since I didn't clarify this in my previous post: I'm not saying I like this idea. But the argument from technical infeasibility is a losing one. We need to focus on the ethical points instead. Like you're doing, I guess.
Re:The only way this could be done. . .
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
No, they could comply by taking an approach similar to the one they've used for copyright violation under the DMCA: Provide a way for users to report Nazi music, provide a process for determining whether it really is, eliminate music that's judged offensive.
"Is this nazi propaganda?" may be harder to judge than "Is this a song somebody else wrote?" But it's just a matter of having more tricky cases, a matter of degree.
The fact that something can't be implemented automatically or "perfectly" doesn't mean it can't be implemented.
Call up any internet search engine, and search for any typical keywords like "Holocaust," "Auschwitz," and so on. Chances are, you'll get at least two Holocaust-denial hits in the top ten: worthless bunk, yet probably indistinguishable from any other amateur work on history for someone who doesn't know the subject matter.
The good news is, if you search Google for "Holocaust" or "Auschwitz", you no longer get any deniers. Better living through technology!
If "what they think is right" is the answer, then "do they have a responsibility" is a meaningless question. What we mean when we ask each other "do they have a responsibility" is, what do *you* think is right? What do *we* think? "Not really" is Jamie's answer.
Actually, the last time I looked, Activision wasn't selling the big package, and was only selling a few of the 5-game bundles. I ordered the CD with all but one of the Infocom games right after it came out... but then I lost it. If you've got a URL, I'll buy it again.
AMFV was neat, but my favorite was Trinity--as some other poster said, it felt more like literature than any of the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
The MPAA didn't sue Napster. That was the RIAA.
This isn't interesting unless the page actually doesn't work on other browsers. The name they give their "everything but IE" stylesheet is just not that important.
The big 5 have announced online music distribution before. Sometimes they've even implemented it. Usually it means you can buy a small set of songs you don't want for a price you'd never pay.
Don't fall for this vaporware any more than you would a software company's.
Well, if you're going to make long off-topic posts you could at least credit the author.
"They're Made Out Of Meat", by Terry Bisson.
Slashdot is required to remove copyrighted material from its site, if and when notified by the copyright owner, unless the poster contests the removal, in which case I forget what happens.
It's not a question of conceding; this is the law.
1. It's not clear whether Slashdot is liable for libellous statements; that isn't covered by the DMCA. It is "liable" for warez posted to the site (say, as a shar file), in that it must take them down if the copyright owner demands it. However, it is unclear whether a link to warez is covered by the DMCA. Unfortunately, the MPAA/2600 and Napster cases so far seem to suggest that Slashdot could be required to remove links to copyrighted material.
2. You are liable if you publish a book you don't have the copyright on. Why wouldn't you be liable if you posted it on Slashdot?
Slashdot never had common carrier status. Internet folks used to consider common carrier a good analogy for web sites and other online discussion fora, but neither courts nor legislation ever addressed the matter until the DMCA. The DMCA rejects the common carrier analogy in favor of a new set of rules.
Innovation only matters to people who play a lot of games. If you play most of the games that come out, then you'll spot an innovation as soon as it happens. But if Quake 3 is your first FPS, it doesn't matter that it's just the latest in a long line of the same thing--it's new to you. And it's fun.
But they weren't prosecuted under the CDA, or even in a federal court. They were charged with Criminal Facilitation in the state of New York.
Actually it's not that hard to spot the RIAA productions. The RIAA mostly represents five companies: EMI, BMG, Warner Brothers, Sony, and Universal. If you look at the outside of the CD, the name of one of those companies will almost always be somewhere in the fine print. If there isn't, it's probably not a major-label CD, and you should buy it.
You won't have a perfect success rate:
But you'll still be right ninety-some percent of the time.
I'm not, incidentally, taking a position on the morality or pragmatics of an RIAA boycott. (I tend to avoid the major labels, which is why I know how to do it, but I'm not thoroughly consistent, and I do it mostly for non-napster reasons.) But if you want to do it, it's not that hard to do a pretty good job.
Greed has no generation gap.
Those of you who are shocked, shocked that an American would even consider such a thing should at least be aware that compulsory licensing is not a new idea. For example, under certain circumstances, someone who invents new medical technology but refuses to license it "to a responsible applicant under reasonable terms" can be compelled to do so by law.
Less tangentially, copyright holders in nondramatic musical works--like, songwriters--are already subject to compulsory licensing in the United States. If you write a song, you get to decide who makes the first recording of it. But once there's a legitimate recording distributed in the US, anyone else can license your song at a rate mandated by law.
See also Bob Kohn's A Primer on the Law of Webcasting and Digital Music Delivery , and, if you're hard core, Title 17 of the US Code. (Compulsory licensing of musical works is covered in chapter 1, section 115.)
No, I'll probably continue to frequent my local independent bookseller.
I know it's not an option for everybody, but, you know, I just like to flip through the pages of a book before I buy it. Heck, I like to flip through books I don't buy. I like being around books. When I go to Amazon I'm just on a web site.
For more on this idea--sometimes called "Programming by Example"--see Henry Lieberman's PBE home page, or the fascinating book (now available online) Watch What I Do.
"This"--Amazon's tip jar, the system described in the article--is a purely voluntary payment mechanism. The only people who would pay for it are people who already "care" about Slashdot. They wouldn't care because they were paying, they would pay because they care. The trolls and the goatsex would continue, because they wouldn't be forced to "tip".
As it happens, I don't think Slashdot should force subscriptions either--Slashdot is what it is because of the chaos it allows, and its moderation system is a fascinating experiment in balancing free speech with the desire to separate wheat from chaff. But if you did want that, you couldn't get it from the system under discussion.
YM Slate. HTH.
Amazon does track you, and says so.
What it doesn't do, it says, is tell the web site you're paying who you are, or remember what sites you paid (or considered paying).
Sun sometimes makes a distinction between "the Java programming language" and "the Java platform". AFAICT, C# is like the language. Microsoft's "Common Language Runtime" is like a Java VM. After that, comparisons start to get fuzzy (in part because the descriptions we get from Sun and Microsoft are fuzzy).
.NET platform is "the .NET framework", which consists of the runtime, a set of Framework classes (comparable to Java's standard class library), and ASP.NET. I don't know what ASP.NET is.
.NET is Microsoft's.
.NET, according to Microsoft, is a "strategy". But it also includes a ".NET platform", which might usefully be compared to the Java platform by someone with more free time than I have. Part of the
Both are comparable in that they are ill-defined concepts surrounded by millennial marketing hype.
In comparing the two platforms it might be useful to focus on Jini, which is Sun's "vision" of network services, etc., just as
Mailing bricks and such is not only a pain for the USPS and of questionable impact on your junk mail inflow, it just sounds like a lot of work. If your goal is to get less junk mail, there are steps you can take that are easier, more effective, and have fewer innocent victims.
Many junk mailers belong to the Direct Marketing Association. The DMA maintains an opt-out list--you can tell them you don't want junk mail, and member organizations will stop sending it to you. I haven't tried the mail service (mail doesn't bother me) but I've registered with the DMA that I don't want telemarketing calls, and it worked great.
Even companies that haven't joined the DMA generally don't get much value from sending mail to people who hate it. If you write them a letter asking to be removed from their mailing list, that may do the trick.
If they persist, you can legally bar any non-governmental organization from sending you mail. There's a little trick to this: The law you have to use was designed to stop unsolicited pornographic mail, so if you want to stop getting mail from Microsoft you may have to claim with a straight face that Windows 2000 turns you on. But, you know, maybe it does. And in any case the post office is prohibited from deciding you're lying. (Also, that's a bad example--Microsoft isn't persistent enough to necessitate legal action.)
For more useful tips, see the JunkBusters page on how you can gain control of your mailbox.
Of course, none of these tactics will cause a major philosophical shift in the U.S.'s view of junk mail. If that's your goal, well, good luck, maybe your bricks will really make them think. But if you just want to get less junk mail, do it the easy way.
Note that the National Association of Broadcasters wants to get in on the encryption action too.
This Variety article describes a letter from the NAB president about how "it would be a betrayal of the public interest to protect digital TV programs shown on cable from being recorded by consumers, but to not protect those broadcast over the airwaves."
Apparently it's in the public interest to prevent people from recording cable programs for home viewing... as long as you prevent them from recording broadcast TV, too!
Oh, I don't know. I was a member of something I thought was a virtual community in 1990, and I'm a member of something that's pretty much the same now. It's not the WELL, and I don't think I'm alone. Virtual communities are still around.
But in the meantime the phrase "virtual community" has been co-opted to mean some things it didn't then.
Katz is right that the idea of "community" is something mythologized and yearned for in American culture. For that reason, marketers have applied it to things that just aren't communities. (A message board where people can talk about your products is not in itself a community. A newsletter for your fans is even less so.) We want to belong to communities, the reasoning goes, so we'll be attracted to web sites that say they have communities.
Another thing that's happened is the conflation of "community" with "community of interest". On the web we sometimes use the term "community" to mean things like "everyone who's interested in Black and Decker power tools". But power tools are a pretty tenuous connection between people; if people don't form stronger and deeper bonds, there's nothing there to carry them through the rough times that are defining moments for real communities.
Anyway, I don't think the virtual communities we had when Rheingold wrote his book have changed that much. (The presence of hostile and disruptive members, and the debate over what to do about them, is certainly not new.) But the term "community" has been subject to various "dramatic reconceptions" that block our old communities from view.
No, I don't think Google is tampering with search results. The point is, there are good resources on the Holocaust and Auschwitz now, and there's a search engine capable of finding them and prioritizing them before the deniers and the revisionists--not because Google acts to suppress the distorters, but because the Web ignores them and Google recognizes that.
If you want Holocaust deniers, you can still get them from Google--they just don't appear as central resources on the subject, as per Jamie's article.
Since I didn't clarify this in my previous post: I'm not saying I like this idea. But the argument from technical infeasibility is a losing one. We need to focus on the ethical points instead. Like you're doing, I guess.
No, they could comply by taking an approach similar to the one they've used for copyright violation under the DMCA: Provide a way for users to report Nazi music, provide a process for determining whether it really is, eliminate music that's judged offensive.
"Is this nazi propaganda?" may be harder to judge than "Is this a song somebody else wrote?" But it's just a matter of having more tricky cases, a matter of degree.
The fact that something can't be implemented automatically or "perfectly" doesn't mean it can't be implemented.
If "what they think is right" is the answer, then "do they have a responsibility" is a meaningless question. What we mean when we ask each other "do they have a responsibility" is, what do *you* think is right? What do *we* think? "Not really" is Jamie's answer.
So I'd say two for three. Go Jamie!
Actually, the last time I looked, Activision wasn't selling the big package, and was only selling a few of the 5-game bundles. I ordered the CD with all but one of the Infocom games right after it came out... but then I lost it. If you've got a URL, I'll buy it again.
AMFV was neat, but my favorite was Trinity--as some other poster said, it felt more like literature than any of the rest.