Very well then: people want access to information to be free, regardless of cost to the original creator(s) (in terms of money, time and/or effort). How's that?
quite revealing of your attitude towards the universe: everything in yours has its price
You know, I'd love to be able to spend my time doing things that don't earn me money. I enjoy my day job, but not as much as my hobbies, or as much as spending time with my family and friends.
Unfortunately, that won't pay my mortgage, or utility bills, or for food or clothing - you get the picture. As long as other people charge me for things, I have to charge other people for things, whether those "things" are physical objects, some of my (limited) time, ideas, or whatever.
I consider it a fair trade - it takes time and skill to create (for example) a song. Not just the time to write and refine the song, but the time spent learning to play the instruments, to sing, and so on. Now, you can argue that all of that is due at least in part to other people - other people doubtless taught the person to sing and to play, other people were the inspiration for the songs whether directly or through their actions, words, etc, and that's true.
But, I am likely not one of those people, or one of the people connected to those people, or to *those* people... Even the oft-repeated "six degrees of freedom" probably don't link me to my chosen artists in any meaningful way, so I consider myself to have no claim to their works. Even if I was one of the people who directly influence and aided them, however, I would still not consider myself to have a claim to them. Why not? Because almost no matter my influence on them, they are the ones who took all of those influences and, with time, effort and talent, produced the work in question. Unless I actually created some part of it, I don't see that I have any claim to it.
Setting aside questions of the motivations of the RIAA, et al, and of the use and abuse of copyright laws, etc - do you not consider it proper that the creator(s) of something be paid fairly for it? Or do you honestly think that the cost of everything should be reduced to the cost of duplication and distribution? If so, then how do you propose people earn enough money to live, except by producing and/or distributing physical objects, or providing services based around intangibles?
Do you honestly think that the US has become an "empire" since Bush took office?
Become an empire? No.
But two countries invaded in four years is certainly a step in the right direction, if that's the direction you want to be going in.
We have not conquered Iraq, we have liberated it.
But at what cost? The situation there is much worse now (at least for the Iraqi people) than it was before we went in.
For now the US helps their new government off it's feet.
Nice Freudian slip there; from where I'm sat, it does look a lot like the "coallition of the willing" has kicked the Iraqi government's feet out from under them.
They just have a bug in the code, and your haughty dismissal of intelligent systems for lacking this capability smacks of some pretty cruel callousness.
No, it smacks of not having thought through everything properly before making a comment, which is a common-enough problem here.
It's becoming more and more common for advertisors to sponsor a show
Yeah, we get that sort of thing for some shows on some satellite channels here in the UK. Only, we don't get them ad-free, we just get an extra ad at the start and end of every ad break for the sponsor.
being a non-broadcast cable channel they can get away with some profanity like "shit" and near nudity
Well, if that's what's important to you in a show/film, then you're living in the wrong country...
Indeed - my young daughter has spent many happy hours on the CBeebies website. That, to me, is almost worth the licence fee in itself. Throw in the amount of time she's spent watching the CBeebies TV channel, and it's starting to feel like I owe them more money...
Road tax should perhaps be collected through a tax on petrol, so that it is more fairly placed upon those who use and wear down the road system.
How do the goods you buy arrive at the shops you buy them from? Unless you're paying a premium on them for the wear and tear of the lorries delivering them, I'd say a universal road tax is reasonable. As it is, road tax is *not* completely indiscriminate - if you don't own a car or similar vehicle, you don't pay it.
Universal health care is ethically necessary
Not only that, it's also enlightened self-interest. By paying a proportion of my income to help keep other people healthy (as I'm almost never sick, and have never needed hospital treatment myself), I'm helping to keep them in the workforce. That helps keep the economy as a whole in better shape (all other factors being equal, of course), thus helping to ensure my own income. Everybody wins, as long as everbody follows the rules. With the money taken before I receive my pay, that's almost guaranteed.
Private health care should be mandatory and the State should pay the private insurance bill for people who cannot themselves afford it.
Sounds an awful lot like national insurance to me, except that you're almost guaranteed that the premiums you pay will not cover the full cost of any treatment you may require.
Not exactly - the licence fee goes to the BBC, which provides two of those five channels you mentioned (plus a great many radio stations and a few "non-terrestial" stations). Those two channels do not carry any advertising. The remaining three do, but then they're not what your licence fee is paying for.
It doesn't bother you *at all* that you have to pay a monthly fee to accelerate electrons into a phosphor-coated plate of glass?
No, it doesn't bother me at all that I have to pay a fee to help pay for broadcasts that I receive that are otherwise unfinanced. Here in the UK the licence fee is about £10/month - I don't know about you, but that doesn't even cover a night out for me.
And if you install software that is NOT CONCLUSIVELY proven to be safe, you are committing negligent behavior, and should be fired.
You might want to be careful there, given that it's extremely difficult to prove that any non-trivial software is safe. Rather, you should be fired if you knowingly and/or needlessly expose your system(s)/employer to an unacceptable degree of risk.
should we start firing those who leave lights on at night? What about those who don't turn off their monitors?
Firing them no, but employees should definitely be encouraged to safe electricity where practical. I was once told by a member of staff at my old college that they'd estimated that people not turning off their monitors (and not setting them to go into stanby mode automatically) cost the college about £30,000/year. Not a huge amount, but it would pay another person's salary.
How about those who have their own coffeemakers/(insert appliance here) ?
If I'm using my coffeemaker/kettle rather than the company-supplied one, in all likelihood I'm using the same amount of electricity anyway, *and* reducing wear and tear on the provided facilities, helping to prolong their useful life. That's doing the company a favour...
How about those who open their office windows in the dead of winter because their office is too hot (instead of calling the HVAC people to fix it)?
Well now, I appreciate that my experience is limited and probably not representative, but I've given up calling in faulty air conditioning where I work. In the 5.5 years I've been there, in two offices, the air conditioning has never been satisfactory. In the first office, those people sat near the outlets froze, while the rest were generally too warm. In the new office, almost all of the office is either fine or a little too warm, while the part I'm in (along with one or two other areas) are absolutely freezing. The last few days have been some of the coldest since we moved in 6 months ago, yet the airconditioning was on full-blast all day - my hands were painfully cold. Of course I reported it, but nothing seemed to happen about it. Oh sure, emails were sent, and doubtless people were phoned, but no-one came to see how cold it was.
So, I can sympathise with people who open a window or bring in a fan or heater, as in my experience, if you're too hot or cold, it's generally tough on you.
Firing this guy is severe and unwarranted. A simple warning should have been enough.
Now there I agree with you, but at the same time, installing unauthorised software on the machines was a pretty stupid thing to do. It's common for companies, especially large ones, to have an explicit policy against that. Technically, I can get in to trouble for doing so where I work (in fact, technically just having copyright infringing materials (eg a copied CD) on the premises is gross misconduct and grounds for summary dismissal...) So, I think he was stupid, but agree that the punishment seems unjustly harsh.
They can already sue for damages up to $150,000 per SONG.
Presumably that's because with no way to work out how many people you've distributed it to, they've come up with a (probably arbitrary) figure and based the damages on that.
IANAL (of course), but surely you can sue for whatever damages you like? (The court can tell you where to go and reduce them, but that doesn't stop you *asking* - or am I wrong?)
It looks like you may have found a browser bug; the page renders perfectly in Mozilla 1.6 (running on Windows XP Pro SP2)
The validator shows up 23 errors, but they all seem minor to me, mostly lack of required attribtues (eg rows and cols on a textarea) or presence of illegal attributes (eg type on the textarea) or references to missing ids. Not perfect, but I've seen far, far worse (slashdot, for example...)
- Drag an application onto the taskbar. This will create a shortcut. Now move the location of the application. The shortcut will still work!!!
The same is true under Windows XP (at least; possibly 2k and NT too). Create a shortcut to a file (eg by dragging and dropping it on the quicklaunch toolbar), then move the file, and the shortcut will be updated automatically. That's done by the Distributed Link Tracking Client service, which "Maintains links between NTFS files within a computer or across computers in a domain network". Switch it off and move the file, and Windows will popup the traditional "can't find the file..." dialogue and start searching for it.
Open a text file in TextEdit. Move the file. Make a change to it in TextEdit. Notice that TextEdit doesn't care you moved (or renamed) the file, it writes to the correct place! No more accidentally duplicated files!
Now that *does* sound useful - although occasionally, I'll move a file I have open in a text editor in order to back it up before saving some sweeping change to it; I assume that copying the file would have the desired effect though.
right-click and hold it, hit enter for the Alert() and let go, your context menu will pop up
Never mind that - apart from the first time I right-clicked, every other time the alert has appeared, but so has the context menu... I'm using Mozilla 1.6 [note to self: time to upgrade!]
I wanted the ability to create a popup as a tab, independent of how the user specified "open popus as tabs". I can't do it: there is no openNewTab function, even as an extension under Moz
Good. We'll clearly have to agree to disagree, but it's my machine, running my software - your content displays as I please, or not at all. Let's face it, it's probably more important to you/your client that the content is displayed than it is to me. If it is important to me, then fine, I'll either live with not seeing it, or putting up with unrequested popups or tabs.
I hav eno God-given right to view the content, you have no God-given right to spawn popups or tabs on my machine. Deal?:-)
I know a young single mother in the US who got sued and had to use her kid's college fund to pay the RIAA.
Would you be so outraged by this if she had commited some other crime and been fined for that? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested - is it the thing that she's being punished for that's so bad, or the fact that she did something wrong and now her kid is having to pay for it too?
After all, the alternative way to look at this is that the kid would still have their college fund if only the mother hadn't broken the law. Would you still be so revolted had she been caught shoplifting, or committing fraud or similar? I realise that copyright infringement is not the same as shoplifting, but if it's to be punished (and even if you just have to buy everything you have infringing copies of, that's a fair amount of money if you've downloaded a lot of stuff), how would you punish the woman in a way that doesn't impact her family, as both fines and jail time would?
To be fair to timothy (just this once, I promise) anyone who can't figure out how to circumvent a referer header check (by copy/paste/open in new window or tab) probably shouldn't be reading slashdot anyway...
Indeed. As a professional web programmer, I've contributed to several. None of them are publicly available, however, all being for extranets. The one I'm working on currently (go live is tomorrow night!) has a userbase of around 1.2 million people though, so we're not exactly talking little niche sites.
If Windows would demand an administrator password before installing spyware/viruses/etc. instead of a mere click on a Yes button, I bet we'd see far less of it.
Modern Windows operating systems already do this, as long as you're not running as an administrative account. Yes, that's the default on a non-domain member install of XP, but I expect that to change with Longhorn. Going straight from "no such thing as user accounts*" to "you *must* log in, you *must* install stuff as Administrator" in one step would've been too much for home Windows users who don't also use it at work in a properly-managed domain.
As for "installing viruses", a virus in the true sense of the word doesn't need to be installed, it just infects other executables that the user has write access to. Installing software as admin and running it as a normal user will help a lot, but if the installer is infected then there's an opportunity for infection anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Very well then: people want access to information to be free, regardless of cost to the original creator(s) (in terms of money, time and/or effort). How's that?
quite revealing of your attitude towards the universe: everything in yours has its price
You know, I'd love to be able to spend my time doing things that don't earn me money. I enjoy my day job, but not as much as my hobbies, or as much as spending time with my family and friends.
Unfortunately, that won't pay my mortgage, or utility bills, or for food or clothing - you get the picture. As long as other people charge me for things, I have to charge other people for things, whether those "things" are physical objects, some of my (limited) time, ideas, or whatever.
I consider it a fair trade - it takes time and skill to create (for example) a song. Not just the time to write and refine the song, but the time spent learning to play the instruments, to sing, and so on. Now, you can argue that all of that is due at least in part to other people - other people doubtless taught the person to sing and to play, other people were the inspiration for the songs whether directly or through their actions, words, etc, and that's true.
But, I am likely not one of those people, or one of the people connected to those people, or to *those* people... Even the oft-repeated "six degrees of freedom" probably don't link me to my chosen artists in any meaningful way, so I consider myself to have no claim to their works. Even if I was one of the people who directly influence and aided them, however, I would still not consider myself to have a claim to them. Why not? Because almost no matter my influence on them, they are the ones who took all of those influences and, with time, effort and talent, produced the work in question. Unless I actually created some part of it, I don't see that I have any claim to it.
Setting aside questions of the motivations of the RIAA, et al, and of the use and abuse of copyright laws, etc - do you not consider it proper that the creator(s) of something be paid fairly for it? Or do you honestly think that the cost of everything should be reduced to the cost of duplication and distribution? If so, then how do you propose people earn enough money to live, except by producing and/or distributing physical objects, or providing services based around intangibles?
Do you honestly think that the US has become an "empire" since Bush took office?
Become an empire? No.
But two countries invaded in four years is certainly a step in the right direction, if that's the direction you want to be going in.
We have not conquered Iraq, we have liberated it.
But at what cost? The situation there is much worse now (at least for the Iraqi people) than it was before we went in.
For now the US helps their new government off it's feet.
Nice Freudian slip there; from where I'm sat, it does look a lot like the "coallition of the willing" has kicked the Iraqi government's feet out from under them.
I can run similar "AI" on my TI-85. And I could write it all from scratch in the time it takes for a launch vehicle to reach the stratosphere.
Go on then.
They just have a bug in the code, and your haughty dismissal of intelligent systems for lacking this capability smacks of some pretty cruel callousness.
No, it smacks of not having thought through everything properly before making a comment, which is a common-enough problem here.
Less bloat for the install. Now maybe we can get Slackware back down to one CD for installation!
CDs? I still remember the days you could take Slackware home on floppies. Lots of floppies, it's true, but on floppies all the same...
In fact, those words can be applied to just about every single person in the world at one point of their lives or another.
Sure, we should all strive to be the best we can, but at the same time, we should all remember our own failings when condeming the failings of others.
It's becoming more and more common for advertisors to sponsor a show
Yeah, we get that sort of thing for some shows on some satellite channels here in the UK. Only, we don't get them ad-free, we just get an extra ad at the start and end of every ad break for the sponsor.
being a non-broadcast cable channel they can get away with some profanity like "shit" and near nudity
Well, if that's what's important to you in a show/film, then you're living in the wrong country...
By the way, have you ever seen a good feature movie without having it interrupted with an hour long newscast?
Yeah, I really hate the way ITV1 does that.
. Your post is full of lies (that most people might take at face value)
Care to point some out then? References to back up your claims would be appreciated.
Otherwise, it's just your word against his, and why should I believe your unsubstantiated statements any more than I should his?
Indeed - my young daughter has spent many happy hours on the CBeebies website. That, to me, is almost worth the licence fee in itself. Throw in the amount of time she's spent watching the CBeebies TV channel, and it's starting to feel like I owe them more money...
Road tax should perhaps be collected through a tax on petrol, so that it is more fairly placed upon those who use and wear down the road system.
How do the goods you buy arrive at the shops you buy them from? Unless you're paying a premium on them for the wear and tear of the lorries delivering them, I'd say a universal road tax is reasonable. As it is, road tax is *not* completely indiscriminate - if you don't own a car or similar vehicle, you don't pay it.
Universal health care is ethically necessary
Not only that, it's also enlightened self-interest. By paying a proportion of my income to help keep other people healthy (as I'm almost never sick, and have never needed hospital treatment myself), I'm helping to keep them in the workforce. That helps keep the economy as a whole in better shape (all other factors being equal, of course), thus helping to ensure my own income. Everybody wins, as long as everbody follows the rules. With the money taken before I receive my pay, that's almost guaranteed.
Private health care should be mandatory and the State should pay the private insurance bill for people who cannot themselves afford it.
Sounds an awful lot like national insurance to me, except that you're almost guaranteed that the premiums you pay will not cover the full cost of any treatment you may require.
And, yes, there will commercials.
Not exactly - the licence fee goes to the BBC, which provides two of those five channels you mentioned (plus a great many radio stations and a few "non-terrestial" stations). Those two channels do not carry any advertising. The remaining three do, but then they're not what your licence fee is paying for.
It doesn't bother you *at all* that you have to pay a monthly fee to accelerate electrons into a phosphor-coated plate of glass?
No, it doesn't bother me at all that I have to pay a fee to help pay for broadcasts that I receive that are otherwise unfinanced. Here in the UK the licence fee is about £10/month - I don't know about you, but that doesn't even cover a night out for me.
And if you install software that is NOT CONCLUSIVELY proven to be safe, you are committing negligent behavior, and should be fired.
You might want to be careful there, given that it's extremely difficult to prove that any non-trivial software is safe. Rather, you should be fired if you knowingly and/or needlessly expose your system(s)/employer to an unacceptable degree of risk.
should we start firing those who leave lights on at night? What about those who don't turn off their monitors?
Firing them no, but employees should definitely be encouraged to safe electricity where practical. I was once told by a member of staff at my old college that they'd estimated that people not turning off their monitors (and not setting them to go into stanby mode automatically) cost the college about £30,000/year. Not a huge amount, but it would pay another person's salary.
How about those who have their own coffeemakers/(insert appliance here) ?
If I'm using my coffeemaker/kettle rather than the company-supplied one, in all likelihood I'm using the same amount of electricity anyway, *and* reducing wear and tear on the provided facilities, helping to prolong their useful life. That's doing the company a favour...
How about those who open their office windows in the dead of winter because their office is too hot (instead of calling the HVAC people to fix it)?
Well now, I appreciate that my experience is limited and probably not representative, but I've given up calling in faulty air conditioning where I work. In the 5.5 years I've been there, in two offices, the air conditioning has never been satisfactory. In the first office, those people sat near the outlets froze, while the rest were generally too warm. In the new office, almost all of the office is either fine or a little too warm, while the part I'm in (along with one or two other areas) are absolutely freezing. The last few days have been some of the coldest since we moved in 6 months ago, yet the airconditioning was on full-blast all day - my hands were painfully cold. Of course I reported it, but nothing seemed to happen about it. Oh sure, emails were sent, and doubtless people were phoned, but no-one came to see how cold it was.
So, I can sympathise with people who open a window or bring in a fan or heater, as in my experience, if you're too hot or cold, it's generally tough on you.
Firing this guy is severe and unwarranted. A simple warning should have been enough.
Now there I agree with you, but at the same time, installing unauthorised software on the machines was a pretty stupid thing to do. It's common for companies, especially large ones, to have an explicit policy against that. Technically, I can get in to trouble for doing so where I work (in fact, technically just having copyright infringing materials (eg a copied CD) on the premises is gross misconduct and grounds for summary dismissal...) So, I think he was stupid, but agree that the punishment seems unjustly harsh.
They can already sue for damages up to $150,000 per SONG.
Presumably that's because with no way to work out how many people you've distributed it to, they've come up with a (probably arbitrary) figure and based the damages on that.
IANAL (of course), but surely you can sue for whatever damages you like? (The court can tell you where to go and reduce them, but that doesn't stop you *asking* - or am I wrong?)
It looks like you may have found a browser bug; the page renders perfectly in Mozilla 1.6 (running on Windows XP Pro SP2)
The validator shows up 23 errors, but they all seem minor to me, mostly lack of required attribtues (eg rows and cols on a textarea) or presence of illegal attributes (eg type on the textarea) or references to missing ids. Not perfect, but I've seen far, far worse (slashdot, for example...)
- Drag an application onto the taskbar. This will create a shortcut. Now move the location of the application. The shortcut will still work!!!
The same is true under Windows XP (at least; possibly 2k and NT too). Create a shortcut to a file (eg by dragging and dropping it on the quicklaunch toolbar), then move the file, and the shortcut will be updated automatically. That's done by the Distributed Link Tracking Client service, which "Maintains links between NTFS files within a computer or across computers in a domain network". Switch it off and move the file, and Windows will popup the traditional "can't find the file..." dialogue and start searching for it.
Open a text file in TextEdit. Move the file. Make a change to it in TextEdit. Notice that TextEdit doesn't care you moved (or renamed) the file, it writes to the correct place! No more accidentally duplicated files!
Now that *does* sound useful - although occasionally, I'll move a file I have open in a text editor in order to back it up before saving some sweeping change to it; I assume that copying the file would have the desired effect though.
. If (and it is a big "if") IBM will back FireFox in the same way that IBM has backed Linux, then FireFox could easily grab 60% of the browser market.
I don't follow your logic there - how would IBM backing FireFox push it to 60% market share?
right-click and hold it, hit enter for the Alert() and let go, your context menu will pop up
Never mind that - apart from the first time I right-clicked, every other time the alert has appeared, but so has the context menu... I'm using Mozilla 1.6 [note to self: time to upgrade!]
I wanted the ability to create a popup as a tab, independent of how the user specified "open popus as tabs". I can't do it: there is no openNewTab function, even as an extension under Moz
:-)
Good. We'll clearly have to agree to disagree, but it's my machine, running my software - your content displays as I please, or not at all. Let's face it, it's probably more important to you/your client that the content is displayed than it is to me. If it is important to me, then fine, I'll either live with not seeing it, or putting up with unrequested popups or tabs.
I hav eno God-given right to view the content, you have no God-given right to spawn popups or tabs on my machine. Deal?
I know a young single mother in the US who got sued and had to use her kid's college fund to pay the RIAA.
Would you be so outraged by this if she had commited some other crime and been fined for that? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested - is it the thing that she's being punished for that's so bad, or the fact that she did something wrong and now her kid is having to pay for it too?
After all, the alternative way to look at this is that the kid would still have their college fund if only the mother hadn't broken the law. Would you still be so revolted had she been caught shoplifting, or committing fraud or similar? I realise that copyright infringement is not the same as shoplifting, but if it's to be punished (and even if you just have to buy everything you have infringing copies of, that's a fair amount of money if you've downloaded a lot of stuff), how would you punish the woman in a way that doesn't impact her family, as both fines and jail time would?
To be fair to timothy (just this once, I promise) anyone who can't figure out how to circumvent a referer header check (by copy/paste/open in new window or tab) probably shouldn't be reading slashdot anyway...
I'm sure there are countless examples like this.
Indeed. As a professional web programmer, I've contributed to several. None of them are publicly available, however, all being for extranets. The one I'm working on currently (go live is tomorrow night!) has a userbase of around 1.2 million people though, so we're not exactly talking little niche sites.
If Windows would demand an administrator password before installing spyware/viruses/etc. instead of a mere click on a Yes button, I bet we'd see far less of it.
Modern Windows operating systems already do this, as long as you're not running as an administrative account. Yes, that's the default on a non-domain member install of XP, but I expect that to change with Longhorn. Going straight from "no such thing as user accounts*" to "you *must* log in, you *must* install stuff as Administrator" in one step would've been too much for home Windows users who don't also use it at work in a properly-managed domain.
As for "installing viruses", a virus in the true sense of the word doesn't need to be installed, it just infects other executables that the user has write access to. Installing software as admin and running it as a normal user will help a lot, but if the installer is infected then there's an opportunity for infection anyway.