In the case of copyright, the UK's laws are actually worse. We don't have the concept of fair use, for example, and so technically it's illegal for me to buy a CD and rip the music to mp3. It doesn't stop anyone of course (not least because not many people realise), and I can't imagine it ever going to court (or the plaintiff winning if it did), but that's not the point.
tell him that the massive amount of money he spent, doesn't give him the right to use his purchased product in a way he desires.
But that's not true. All Joe wants to do is play the game. He has no interest in running his own server, creating mods for it or anything like that. Sure, he'll likely play it online if the servers are there, and he may even play mods if they're available, but they're not things that he actually wants to do.
Any computer forensics investigator worthy of the title wouldn't be stopped by a file merely having been deleted (depending on drive usage patterns, length of time since deletion, etc)
That said, from the sounds of this, a lot of them *aren't* worthy of the title...
Surely it is an inalienable right to attempt to profit from your labours. If there is no copyright, and copying of electronic media is essentially effortless and free, how then do content creators profit from their labours?
Sure, bands can tour (although that can take a large initial investment), but what of authors? Merely being good with words doesn't make you a good public speaker, so they can't all give public readings or speak at functions.
Yes, of course some people will continue to produce such things in their spare time, and a very lucky few may even be sponsored by the wealthy "elite", but what of the rest?
Personally, I'm happy to accept reasonable copyright laws if it means that more people have the chance to follow their dream. No, they won't all be successful, but more will be with copyright laws than without, I think. Increasing the amount of content available as a whole can only be a good thing.
(Note that I said "reasonable copyright laws"; the current extensions are not reasonable, but I think it unwise tosimply scrap the whole system because the legislators have allowed it to be warped by a few self-interested parties)
So campaign against the laws you see as being unjust. Practice civil disobedience if you must, but remember that the whole point of civil disobedience is to get caught. You don't hide your activities, you're blatant about it, as though they were perfectly legal. You're supposed to be demonstrating the wrongness of the law, in court if necessary, not hiding from the authorities and thus admitting that what you're doing is wrong. It's not wrong (in your view), that's the point!
Yes, I feel sorry for all those who got extorted by the RIAA.
Extorted? I fail to see how suing for copyright infringement is extortion. You may argue with the size of the damages claimed, and I'd agree, but the general idea is fair, I think.
The more lawsuits that come from those baffoons the more people will get pissed off and finally start giving a shit about how they are treated.
Don't want to be sued for copyright infringement? Don't infringe copyright. It's really quite simple.
Look at it this way - what if we exchanged RedHat for RIAA and GPL violators for music downloaders. People here are always up in arms (and rightly so) about GPL violations. Well, that's just copyright infringement.
I infer from your post that you wish to see the demise of copyright ("They are the few (soon not so few), the proud, the ones who will help change the system!"). If that happens, there's nothing to enforce the GPL with. People can take source, modify it, slap the binaries in a product and never release the modifications. Sure, you can reverese engineer it, but so what? You can do that now, yet we still scream about GPL violations.
Bottom line is that if you wish people to respect one set of copyrights (those of GPL licensors), you must respect the copyrights of others (eg the RIAA's members).
Besides, it's not like people don't have a choice; they don't have to listen to music. Not that all music is controlled by the RIAA in any case. Don't like them or their business methods? Fine, ignore them; just don't copy their stuff thereby giving them even more exposure.
It's pretty simple, at 1/5 the profit per disc, but selling 50 times as many discs, profits multiply by 10.
That's assuming that the CDs can be sold at $5 and still make a profit. If it costs $6 per CD overall to get the songs from the head(s) of the artist(s) to the pressed CDs sat on the shop shelf, then it doesn't matter how many you sell, you're still going out of business.
As handy as iTunes might be, there is a good quote; "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes"; a truckload of CD's heading to the music store is a more efficent than pumping bits through the internet.
No. All that quote means is that it would be faster for the shop to have the CDs shipped to them than it would be for them to download the equivalent data. It also ignores the fact that mp3s are compressed and you need only download each track once, so that would have to be a truckload of unique songs.
In any case, it is more energy and time efficient for me to sit at home downloading tracks from iTunes (or wherever), than it is for the truck to transport CDs to the store, the store to put those CDs out on display, then for me to travel to the store to buy one or two. (Cheaper, too, in fact)
Difference is that nowadays the typical computer buyer is also the owner of dozens of not hundreds of musical phonorecords in CDDA format.
That's true, but they are also increasingly buying mp3 players and ripping their CDs to them. I have utterly non-technical friends who are now moving to mp3. Yes, they're still buying CDs, but they're all being ripped mp3.
I don't think CDs will disappear any time soon, but as the OP said, that's what I thought about floppies 10 years ago. I've not had a floppy drive in my home PC in about 3 years, and I've not missed it.
And the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3, the one with the built-in 3" disk drive. Although actually, I guess it may have been Amstrad making them by the time that model was released.
That bullshit about the files being polluted and corrupted is a myth
No it isn't. I've lost count of the number of misnamed files I've seen on eMule.
Since you can preview them instantly
No you can't. I've had files that have refused to allow previewing until they were all-but downloaded. It depends on the format, the exact order you download chunks in, etc.
That little Linksys router isn't capable of doing it. Well, maybe if you put linux on it
Some Linksys routers are running Linux. Any router/firewall that can't handle a couple of thousand connections should go in the bin in any case.
I am currently running FF with a single window open, which has 12 tabs (including this one), which has been running for about 6 hours now, mostly in the background. Task Manager reports its memory usage to be 97MB. I regularly see FF's memory usage go over 100MB.
I'm running 1.0.6 with the Noia theme and 2 extensions (ad block and web developer).
FF is great, but in my experience its a real memory hog.
Apple is famed for its attention to usability and stylistic issues, and for concentrating on producing a system that is cohesive and coherent.
Linux, isn't.
And that's fine, because Linux and OS X are aimed at entirely different sets of people. OS X is aimed at style-conscious people who don't want to have to know or care about the computer, just about the tasks they want to perform with it. Linux is aimed mainly at its developers, who by their very nature (ie they're developers!) actually know and care about the technical aspects of computer use.
That's not to say that Linux is some arcane system that only the elite can use, far from it; but it is *not* developed with the same exacting attention to being accessible to the average guy and gal on the street that OS X is.
That is why OS X is "so freakin' easy" for people to use, because it's been designed to be from the start.
Perhaps it cost that much at first, but right now you can get the V3 for free. No, I don't work for Orange, that was just the first link on a google for "V3 RAZR".
Should Creative be given a hard enough pranging to get the attention of other software manufacturers?
Careful what you wish for; don't forget that RedHat, the Ubuntu people, and the hobbyist tinkering away on his small shareware/freeware projects are all "software manufacturers" too.
If the likes of Creative and Microsoft should be liable, then why not them? Simply not charging is not enough, cost should not be used as the measure for liability (especially as Creative's software is effectively free with their hardware)
The only way to upgrade to an OS with more features on the same hardware and get improved speed is if the original OS wasn't properly optimised. That's definitely the case with OS X (currently each release is better optimised than the previous, it's a selling point), and most certainly has been the case with KDE (they made some pretty large changes to improve speed). That cannot continue, however; there comes a point where code simply can't be any faster and do the same things.
Now, you may consider those extra features to be bloat, but that's a separate discussion. Doing more requires more resources, unless you're making better use of the resources than before. That doesn't necessarily make your new code amazing, however; it might just mean that your old code was suboptimal.
it's main uses are to bypass the adblocking and cookie-deleting people.
What utter bullshit. I have no hard figures to back me up (but then, neither do you I suspect), but I'd be amazed if that sort of use accounted for more than a tiny fraction of the total Flash usage on the web.
Yes, Flash *can* be used for that, and doubtless as time passes will be, but that doesn't mean that it *is* or that that was the *intention*. Hell, the internet can be misused - it's used for spam, chid porn, terrorist and criminal communication, facillitation of GPL violation, the list goes on. What a horrible horrible piece of junk...
"Probably"? Every time I see that, I read it as "I don't actually know, but my prejudice is that...".
So, here are some actual numbers, courtesy of the World Health Organisation. As it turns out, you underestimated it, at least for the period in the report.
Still, it's worth pointing out that the UK population is in the region of 60million or so, so the number of cases is tiny.
Because Word's version tracking is completely different to what you'd get with svn. Word's version tracking highlights changes made to a document inside the document, showing what was changed, who changed it, etc.
Svn can do that, but not in place, and not in a meaningful way for binary file formats such as Word's. Also, my clients can use Word's version tracking features to see what was changed; even if we could set up the svn infrastructure there's no way my clients would be able to use it, even for text files.
But in virtually every Linux distro, there's far more GNU code running than Linux code.
I'd hazard a guess that there's far more KDE and gnome code than Linux code too, and a lot of people who are running Linux distros wouldn't be without one or the other. So, GNU/KDE/Gnome/Linux?
You would call it "Mach" because that's the kernel it uses.
Actually, I think you'd still call it OS X because while Mach is the name of its kernel, there is only one Mac OS X. In contrast, there are a great many Linux distributions, so we need a shorthand when referring to all/most of them. Sure, we could say "Linux distributions" or "Linux distros" (and lots of people do), but let's face it, most people are lazy. So, in much the same way as people shorten "Windows XP" to "XP" or "Windows NT" to "NT", people tend to shorten "Linux distribution" to "Linux".
No-one is trying to deny the contribution of the FSF or the importance of the GNU tool set, but a lot of people find "GNU/Linux" unwieldy, and I'm one of them. So, I'm sorry, but I'll continue using the word "Linux" when meaning "Linux distributions" or similar.
has dedicated his life to making Linux, however you call it, come true
No he hasn't, he's dedicated his life to making Free Software (as in Software Libre, not as in no-cost software) come true. That most of his efforts are used in conjunction with Linux is more or less a coincidence. He seeks to create a world in which all software is Free (as in Libre). Linux is a useful aid in that goal, but do not forget that the Hurd is still being developed.
Slashdot Mirror
Everytime I read "SFU", my brain tried to parse it as "STFU"...
In the case of copyright, the UK's laws are actually worse. We don't have the concept of fair use, for example, and so technically it's illegal for me to buy a CD and rip the music to mp3. It doesn't stop anyone of course (not least because not many people realise), and I can't imagine it ever going to court (or the plaintiff winning if it did), but that's not the point.
tell him that the massive amount of money he spent, doesn't give him the right to use his purchased product in a way he desires.
But that's not true. All Joe wants to do is play the game. He has no interest in running his own server, creating mods for it or anything like that. Sure, he'll likely play it online if the servers are there, and he may even play mods if they're available, but they're not things that he actually wants to do.
Not yet, but you do have a flamebait.
Kids these days, don't know what a real flamewar is...
Any computer forensics investigator worthy of the title wouldn't be stopped by a file merely having been deleted (depending on drive usage patterns, length of time since deletion, etc)
That said, from the sounds of this, a lot of them *aren't* worthy of the title...
Surely it is an inalienable right to attempt to profit from your labours. If there is no copyright, and copying of electronic media is essentially effortless and free, how then do content creators profit from their labours?
Sure, bands can tour (although that can take a large initial investment), but what of authors? Merely being good with words doesn't make you a good public speaker, so they can't all give public readings or speak at functions.
Yes, of course some people will continue to produce such things in their spare time, and a very lucky few may even be sponsored by the wealthy "elite", but what of the rest?
Personally, I'm happy to accept reasonable copyright laws if it means that more people have the chance to follow their dream. No, they won't all be successful, but more will be with copyright laws than without, I think. Increasing the amount of content available as a whole can only be a good thing.
(Note that I said "reasonable copyright laws"; the current extensions are not reasonable, but I think it unwise tosimply scrap the whole system because the legislators have allowed it to be warped by a few self-interested parties)
So campaign against the laws you see as being unjust. Practice civil disobedience if you must, but remember that the whole point of civil disobedience is to get caught. You don't hide your activities, you're blatant about it, as though they were perfectly legal. You're supposed to be demonstrating the wrongness of the law, in court if necessary, not hiding from the authorities and thus admitting that what you're doing is wrong. It's not wrong (in your view), that's the point!
Yes, I feel sorry for all those who got extorted by the RIAA.
Extorted? I fail to see how suing for copyright infringement is extortion. You may argue with the size of the damages claimed, and I'd agree, but the general idea is fair, I think.
The more lawsuits that come from those baffoons the more people will get pissed off and finally start giving a shit about how they are treated.
Don't want to be sued for copyright infringement? Don't infringe copyright. It's really quite simple.
Look at it this way - what if we exchanged RedHat for RIAA and GPL violators for music downloaders. People here are always up in arms (and rightly so) about GPL violations. Well, that's just copyright infringement.
I infer from your post that you wish to see the demise of copyright ("They are the few (soon not so few), the proud, the ones who will help change the system!"). If that happens, there's nothing to enforce the GPL with. People can take source, modify it, slap the binaries in a product and never release the modifications. Sure, you can reverese engineer it, but so what? You can do that now, yet we still scream about GPL violations.
Bottom line is that if you wish people to respect one set of copyrights (those of GPL licensors), you must respect the copyrights of others (eg the RIAA's members).
Besides, it's not like people don't have a choice; they don't have to listen to music. Not that all music is controlled by the RIAA in any case. Don't like them or their business methods? Fine, ignore them; just don't copy their stuff thereby giving them even more exposure.
It's pretty simple, at 1/5 the profit per disc, but selling 50 times as many discs, profits multiply by 10.
That's assuming that the CDs can be sold at $5 and still make a profit. If it costs $6 per CD overall to get the songs from the head(s) of the artist(s) to the pressed CDs sat on the shop shelf, then it doesn't matter how many you sell, you're still going out of business.
As handy as iTunes might be, there is a good quote; "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes"; a truckload of CD's heading to the music store is a more efficent than pumping bits through the internet.
No. All that quote means is that it would be faster for the shop to have the CDs shipped to them than it would be for them to download the equivalent data. It also ignores the fact that mp3s are compressed and you need only download each track once, so that would have to be a truckload of unique songs.
In any case, it is more energy and time efficient for me to sit at home downloading tracks from iTunes (or wherever), than it is for the truck to transport CDs to the store, the store to put those CDs out on display, then for me to travel to the store to buy one or two. (Cheaper, too, in fact)
Difference is that nowadays the typical computer buyer is also the owner of dozens of not hundreds of musical phonorecords in CDDA format.
That's true, but they are also increasingly buying mp3 players and ripping their CDs to them. I have utterly non-technical friends who are now moving to mp3. Yes, they're still buying CDs, but they're all being ripped mp3.
I don't think CDs will disappear any time soon, but as the OP said, that's what I thought about floppies 10 years ago. I've not had a floppy drive in my home PC in about 3 years, and I've not missed it.
Only ever really used on Amstrad machines.
And the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3, the one with the built-in 3" disk drive. Although actually, I guess it may have been Amstrad making them by the time that model was released.
but I have to pair it first
But you only have to pair it once. Depending on how you configure things, after that you only have to accept the connection (possibly not even that).
Line of sight *is* cool, don't get me wrong, but so is not even having to take my phone out of my pocket to copy files to my PC.
That bullshit about the files being polluted and corrupted is a myth
No it isn't. I've lost count of the number of misnamed files I've seen on eMule.
Since you can preview them instantly
No you can't. I've had files that have refused to allow previewing until they were all-but downloaded. It depends on the format, the exact order you download chunks in, etc.
That little Linksys router isn't capable of doing it. Well, maybe if you put linux on it
Some Linksys routers are running Linux. Any router/firewall that can't handle a couple of thousand connections should go in the bin in any case.
I am currently running FF with a single window open, which has 12 tabs (including this one), which has been running for about 6 hours now, mostly in the background. Task Manager reports its memory usage to be 97MB. I regularly see FF's memory usage go over 100MB.
I'm running 1.0.6 with the Noia theme and 2 extensions (ad block and web developer).
FF is great, but in my experience its a real memory hog.
Apple is famed for its attention to usability and stylistic issues, and for concentrating on producing a system that is cohesive and coherent.
Linux, isn't.
And that's fine, because Linux and OS X are aimed at entirely different sets of people. OS X is aimed at style-conscious people who don't want to have to know or care about the computer, just about the tasks they want to perform with it. Linux is aimed mainly at its developers, who by their very nature (ie they're developers!) actually know and care about the technical aspects of computer use.
That's not to say that Linux is some arcane system that only the elite can use, far from it; but it is *not* developed with the same exacting attention to being accessible to the average guy and gal on the street that OS X is.
That is why OS X is "so freakin' easy" for people to use, because it's been designed to be from the start.
Perhaps it cost that much at first, but right now you can get the V3 for free. No, I don't work for Orange, that was just the first link on a google for "V3 RAZR".
Should Creative be given a hard enough pranging to get the attention of other software manufacturers?
Careful what you wish for; don't forget that RedHat, the Ubuntu people, and the hobbyist tinkering away on his small shareware/freeware projects are all "software manufacturers" too.
If the likes of Creative and Microsoft should be liable, then why not them? Simply not charging is not enough, cost should not be used as the measure for liability (especially as Creative's software is effectively free with their hardware)
The only way to upgrade to an OS with more features on the same hardware and get improved speed is if the original OS wasn't properly optimised. That's definitely the case with OS X (currently each release is better optimised than the previous, it's a selling point), and most certainly has been the case with KDE (they made some pretty large changes to improve speed). That cannot continue, however; there comes a point where code simply can't be any faster and do the same things.
Now, you may consider those extra features to be bloat, but that's a separate discussion. Doing more requires more resources, unless you're making better use of the resources than before. That doesn't necessarily make your new code amazing, however; it might just mean that your old code was suboptimal.
it's main uses are to bypass the adblocking and cookie-deleting people.
What utter bullshit. I have no hard figures to back me up (but then, neither do you I suspect), but I'd be amazed if that sort of use accounted for more than a tiny fraction of the total Flash usage on the web.
Yes, Flash *can* be used for that, and doubtless as time passes will be, but that doesn't mean that it *is* or that that was the *intention*. Hell, the internet can be misused - it's used for spam, chid porn, terrorist and criminal communication, facillitation of GPL violation, the list goes on. What a horrible horrible piece of junk...
"Probably"? Every time I see that, I read it as "I don't actually know, but my prejudice is that...".
So, here are some actual numbers, courtesy of the World Health Organisation. As it turns out, you underestimated it, at least for the period in the report.
Still, it's worth pointing out that the UK population is in the region of 60million or so, so the number of cases is tiny.
Because Word's version tracking is completely different to what you'd get with svn. Word's version tracking highlights changes made to a document inside the document, showing what was changed, who changed it, etc.
Svn can do that, but not in place, and not in a meaningful way for binary file formats such as Word's. Also, my clients can use Word's version tracking features to see what was changed; even if we could set up the svn infrastructure there's no way my clients would be able to use it, even for text files.
Before a vowel, "a" becomes "an", thus the headline should read "Sri Lanka declares an Open Source Week".
Really, this is trivial English grammar, and it does matter!
But in virtually every Linux distro, there's far more GNU code running than Linux code.
I'd hazard a guess that there's far more KDE and gnome code than Linux code too, and a lot of people who are running Linux distros wouldn't be without one or the other. So, GNU/KDE/Gnome/Linux?
You would call it "Mach" because that's the kernel it uses.
Actually, I think you'd still call it OS X because while Mach is the name of its kernel, there is only one Mac OS X. In contrast, there are a great many Linux distributions, so we need a shorthand when referring to all/most of them. Sure, we could say "Linux distributions" or "Linux distros" (and lots of people do), but let's face it, most people are lazy. So, in much the same way as people shorten "Windows XP" to "XP" or "Windows NT" to "NT", people tend to shorten "Linux distribution" to "Linux".
No-one is trying to deny the contribution of the FSF or the importance of the GNU tool set, but a lot of people find "GNU/Linux" unwieldy, and I'm one of them. So, I'm sorry, but I'll continue using the word "Linux" when meaning "Linux distributions" or similar.
anyone with half a brain can see exactly what he meant
That means that upwards of half the readership is in grave danger of misinterpreting it...
has dedicated his life to making Linux, however you call it, come true
No he hasn't, he's dedicated his life to making Free Software (as in Software Libre, not as in no-cost software) come true. That most of his efforts are used in conjunction with Linux is more or less a coincidence. He seeks to create a world in which all software is Free (as in Libre). Linux is a useful aid in that goal, but do not forget that the Hurd is still being developed.