That successful artist's wife and kids didn't produce any works of social value, therefore protecting their interest doesn't serve the ostensible purpose of copyright. Besides, if the airplane crash victim was a successful coal miner, there would be no "residuals" to argue about & the wife and kids, after insurance payout, would be left for the wolves.
For that matter, it doesn't say "with the aid of a barometer and a superintendent" either, but it doesn't say "with ONLY the aid of a barometer," so I'm going to give him a pass.
A TI-85 got me through high school. Symbolic evaluation is all it's missing and that's more "nice" than "necessary."
I use a TI-89 now and think it's fabulous, but I remember the TI-85 fondly. I think it was a smart calculator that just kind of got ignored because it wasn't as badass as the TI-92 (later 89) and was more expensive than the 82/83, which were functional enough for your average student.
I spent many a physics class writing and running silly arithmetic programs...
You either believe in hoarding pirated material because it makes you l33t and gets you l33t access to all the l33t 0-day BBSes (in, uh, 1986)...... or you don't want to spend hard-to-come-by $$$ on decent software/music/what-have-you for casual use, don't really give a shit about intellectual property rights at the end of the day, and just want your song/software/etc. with a minimum of hassle and l33t5p34k (in whatever form it may take -- including civil conversation in IRC).
IRC, newsgroups, these are a pain in the ass compared to point-and-click on-demand downloading via P2P (which can also be, to be fair, a pain in the ass). In 99-00 I only had dial-up (rural area) and the majority of my MP3 collection came from friends' and libraries' CDs which I ripped myself. Napster supplemented me with the odd single. Nowadays I only delve deeper than k-lite if I need some truly funky files.
Also: my musical tastes are not *wildly* divergent but they are certainly not along "top-40" or contemporary lines. The selection of obscure music, then and now, is not as great as it could be but IT IS GREAT NONETHELESS. And no, I have probably not heard of whatever sweet local band you are currently into; and no, this does not make me a pop-culture junkie.
Wake up, dude, they already HAVE all kinds of retarded legislation. $150,000/song (or whatever they are charging now)? Subpoena power on a clerk's rubber-stamp instead of a 200-year-old system of due process and judicial review? What more do they need?
I guess they would like the legal ability to break into your house, kick your computer apart, and piss on your rug for suspected file-sharing... and last time I checked that bill was still in committee. (Seriously... kind of.)
The argument about "property" and "defense" is being carried out quite eloquently and flamboyantly in the parent thread, but what I *will* note is that this is not an direct attempt to "defend" anything other than an outdated revenue model and is pretty clearly part of an intense intimidation campaign conducted by the RIAA. My hope is that it is a last gasp before we see some real change in the recording industry and not the start of a protracted "War on Copyright Infringement" as the many unwinnable wars we are already fighting have taxed our government to the point of collapse.
Leave people alone, let them share their files in peace. If you hadn't noticed people have been doing it on a national scale for several years now and the sky has not fallen. It doesn't matter whether people "deserve" to hear music or not, based on their wealth; the ability to enjoy a massive and diverse music collection is now open to everyone with a PC and an ISP, and the immense cultural good of that far outweighs the interests of a few federally-subsidized monopolists.... Orpheus got by OK without a label. All that will happen in this postmodern rearrangement of the music biz is that music will become closer to the people, as it has always been and should be anyway, and talent will matter more than luck or investment.
That's the way things seem to be going these days... people do what they damn well please, and the government (which is powerless to stop them) resorts to increasingly harsh penalties.
P2P War = price support for RIAA, etc. (regardless of how many otherwise 'innocent' lives are capsized)
Drug War = price support for illicit drug industry as well as justification for massive $multi-billion domestic-and-abroad public enforcement program netting tens of thousands of gov't jobs and ungodly amounts of asset seizure
British Salt Laws = keep salt trade alive and well in India by making it illegal to dry seawater and collect the salt
Terrorism War = attempt to consolidate all other Unwinnable Wars (TM) under total bureaucratic cryptofascist control, liberate large corporations, and forward American jingoism at the common man's expense while the music never stops at the fat-cat party.
Or P2P networks could NOT verify "legality," NOT pay Fanning anything, remain distributed enough to avoid any serious legal problems, shift the responsibility (rightfully) onto users, and music will remain -- as it was and ever shall be -- completely free.
It won't help when the police state, at the behest of the corporate feudalists, obtains broad and sweeping authority to censor and tap every access point to every node on the information superhighway... but at that point I will have taken up arms and won't much care about expanding my music library.
When diligent-but-not-superior FBI agents -- lacking anything even as important a private marijuana bust to attend -- grab IPs and bully ISPs into divulging addresses, thence to send FBI-letterhead warnings, etc. etc., Freenet (or any other anonymous encrypted data-storage system) may prove an awkward nut to crack.
Eh, we'll see. No sympathy on my part for MonsterMedia, and I don't want to hear any bullshit about "the artists." Talented and creative people have been successful since the dawn of civilization and certainly since before the recording industry showed up.
But it's been about six years since MP3 came along and I am getting tired of having this argument with the self-righteous and well-behaved.
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"Not until the workers control the means of production will social equity be achieved!"
If a piece of software serves your needs -- whether you built it yourself, modified something someone else made, or just downloaded a pirated copy of something commercial -- it is "successful software."
"Success" is not really a concept that can be accurately applied to "software in general."
If you are an OSS designer you will have your own standards of what is "successful" and what is not for your baby. These are not necessarily standards held by anyone else, nor should they be.
Kazaa sucks but at least they are sketchy enough to survive, which is ultimately the final test of a P2P as far as I'm concerned. The widely touted & distributed Kazaa Lite is not at all obnoxious, and approximately 2 petabytes (!) of available data at any given time is something I find kinda attractive.
It's not perfect but I'm not too picky, it's all free anyway.
Given that "digital piracy" (etc. etc.) is already illegal under existing pre-digital-age copyright laws, is it really necessary to pass waves of new anti-technology legislation that seriously threaten the digital infrastructure that took 40 years to build?
Prairie iNet (www.prairieinet.com) came through the town I was living near last year (in central Iowa). They have a lot of transceivers in rural Midwestern towns; the antennae go on the water tower or grain elevator and cover a line-of-sight area within the town & surrounding countryside.
As I lived on a farm and the fastest access I had was a modem through miles of dirty telephone wire (24k baud on good days) I was excited about the service, but unfortunately:
- It has about a 4-mile range (I was farther out than that). - It's expensive ($50/mo. + equipment rental, service fees, etc.) - You need a crapload of hardware (cables, roof mount, PC connector cards or whatever) and you have to pay for the professional installation. - It's slow. The absolute maximum speed is 256kbps. Residential service is 128kpbs.
It's a nice idea and I guess it's a good option (a lot of smaller towns have few or no broadband options, and in the un-cabled boonies it's a lost cause), but I couldn't afford to pay that much for packet radio setup that wasn't much faster than modem service.
"Technology really is a double-edged sword when it comes to cheating," said Thomas Hall, student chairman of the university's honor committee. "The means for detecting cheating are catching up with the means for cheating."
-----
Time for a new development in Cheating Technology. Remember when graphing calculators were still new and alien, and nobody made you wipe the memory or tape over the IR port before an exam?
All this just means that the *good* cheaters are still under the radar. Maybe someone will develop a modified version of the professor's software to check their paper against the original and insert a synonym every five words or something. (Hey, that would be a decent shareware app, if you could only trust cheaters to pay you on the honor system...)
I lived for two years in University residence and, frankly, my college didn't seem to have much respect for the privacy of students in any regard: all mail came through University-owned mailboxes, and packages had to be picked up at the dormitory desk, staffed by hall RAs -- students with a significant disciplinary function. All telephone service went through the university switchboard. Your room could be searched, by university staff or by police, without your permission and without any sort of warrant. Most tenant rights were violated (for instance, eviction with two weeks' notice any time of year), and now the university informs students' parents of on-campus alcohol or disciplinary violations (these are adults whose academic transcripts cannot be released to parents without a signed waiver).
It is not any surprise to me that fascist user agreements are in place concerning electronic media in light of the general control-oriented attitude of many universities towards their on-campus student populations. Perhaps the problem runs deeper than simple technophobia?
Slightly off-topic but hey, the blurb brought it up.
OK, I understand the logic behind not letting felons have guns, but taking away their vote? I don't see the democratic value in that...
Just make something politically unpopular a felony (like, um, recreational drugs, for starters?) and you begin to silence your opponents with every conviction.
Is it any wonder that recidivism is so high when ex-cons don't even have a voice in the system?
We have our own collision coming up, with Andromeda, fairly soon (possibly within the lifetime of our own sun, something like 5 billion years from now). I wonder if it will look this cool, and who will be watching?
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/97/34/af1.ht ml has some more info, although I think this page is getting a bit dated.
Are you thinking of Olney's lesions, which are caused (extremely rarely) by heavy exposure to the dissociative anaesthetics (PCP, dextromethorphan [DXM], ketamine)? That's one of the few cases I've ever heard of where drug use has actually caused, or at least been implicated in, documented brain damage.
And dextromethorphan is sold OTC in about every cough syrup made! Of course it is very non-toxic in cough-suppressant doses, and even dissociative doses... if my memory isn't failing me the lesions were noted only in cases of long-term psyechedelic-ranger-dose exposure.
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That successful artist's wife and kids didn't produce any works of social value, therefore protecting their interest doesn't serve the ostensible purpose of copyright. Besides, if the airplane crash victim was a successful coal miner, there would be no "residuals" to argue about & the wife and kids, after insurance payout, would be left for the wolves.
For that matter, it doesn't say "with the aid of a barometer and a superintendent" either, but it doesn't say "with ONLY the aid of a barometer," so I'm going to give him a pass.
Great, a commercial search engine. I wish there were a web service that could NOT show me all that crap.
A TI-85 got me through high school. Symbolic evaluation is all it's missing and that's more "nice" than "necessary."
...
I use a TI-89 now and think it's fabulous, but I remember the TI-85 fondly. I think it was a smart calculator that just kind of got ignored because it wasn't as badass as the TI-92 (later 89) and was more expensive than the 82/83, which were functional enough for your average student.
I spent many a physics class writing and running silly arithmetic programs
Wow, not only can you grow your own drugs, now you can make your own lava lamp.
... how lovely ... how un-American!
All the fun of enduring pop-subculture at a fraction of the price. How inspiring
You either believe in hoarding pirated material because it makes you l33t and gets you l33t access to all the l33t 0-day BBSes (in, uh, 1986) ... ... or you don't want to spend hard-to-come-by $$$ on decent software/music/what-have-you for casual use, don't really give a shit about intellectual property rights at the end of the day, and just want your song/software/etc. with a minimum of hassle and l33t5p34k (in whatever form it may take -- including civil conversation in IRC).
IRC, newsgroups, these are a pain in the ass compared to point-and-click on-demand downloading via P2P (which can also be, to be fair, a pain in the ass). In 99-00 I only had dial-up (rural area) and the majority of my MP3 collection came from friends' and libraries' CDs which I ripped myself. Napster supplemented me with the odd single. Nowadays I only delve deeper than k-lite if I need some truly funky files.
Also: my musical tastes are not *wildly* divergent but they are certainly not along "top-40" or contemporary lines. The selection of obscure music, then and now, is not as great as it could be but IT IS GREAT NONETHELESS. And no, I have probably not heard of whatever sweet local band you are currently into; and no, this does not make me a pop-culture junkie.
Wake up, dude, they already HAVE all kinds of retarded legislation. $150,000/song (or whatever they are charging now)? Subpoena power on a clerk's rubber-stamp instead of a 200-year-old system of due process and judicial review? What more do they need?
... and last time I checked that bill was still in committee. (Seriously ... kind of.)
... Orpheus got by OK without a label. All that will happen in this postmodern rearrangement of the music biz is that music will become closer to the people, as it has always been and should be anyway, and talent will matter more than luck or investment.
I guess they would like the legal ability to break into your house, kick your computer apart, and piss on your rug for suspected file-sharing
The argument about "property" and "defense" is being carried out quite eloquently and flamboyantly in the parent thread, but what I *will* note is that this is not an direct attempt to "defend" anything other than an outdated revenue model and is pretty clearly part of an intense intimidation campaign conducted by the RIAA. My hope is that it is a last gasp before we see some real change in the recording industry and not the start of a protracted "War on Copyright Infringement" as the many unwinnable wars we are already fighting have taxed our government to the point of collapse.
Leave people alone, let them share their files in peace. If you hadn't noticed people have been doing it on a national scale for several years now and the sky has not fallen. It doesn't matter whether people "deserve" to hear music or not, based on their wealth; the ability to enjoy a massive and diverse music collection is now open to everyone with a PC and an ISP, and the immense cultural good of that far outweighs the interests of a few federally-subsidized monopolists.
That's the way things seem to be going these days ... people do what they damn well please, and the government (which is powerless to stop them) resorts to increasingly harsh penalties.
P2P War = price support for RIAA, etc. (regardless of how many otherwise 'innocent' lives are capsized)
Drug War = price support for illicit drug industry as well as justification for massive $multi-billion domestic-and-abroad public enforcement program netting tens of thousands of gov't jobs and ungodly amounts of asset seizure
British Salt Laws = keep salt trade alive and well in India by making it illegal to dry seawater and collect the salt
Terrorism War = attempt to consolidate all other Unwinnable Wars (TM) under total bureaucratic cryptofascist control, liberate large corporations, and forward American jingoism at the common man's expense while the music never stops at the fat-cat party.
Or P2P networks could NOT verify "legality," NOT pay Fanning anything, remain distributed enough to avoid any serious legal problems, shift the responsibility (rightfully) onto users, and music will remain -- as it was and ever shall be -- completely free.
Avast, me hearty! Arrrr!
I wish the proceeds from the sale of all .com, .org, and .net domains went to giving US citizens free (and anonymous) net access.
I should have said
"Not until the workers control the means of distribution will social equity be achieved".
Cheers.
Freenet is coming along nicely ...
... but at that point I will have taken up arms and won't much care about expanding my music library.
It won't help when the police state, at the behest of the corporate feudalists, obtains broad and sweeping authority to censor and tap every access point to every node on the information superhighway
When diligent-but-not-superior FBI agents -- lacking anything even as important a private marijuana bust to attend -- grab IPs and bully ISPs into divulging addresses, thence to send FBI-letterhead warnings, etc. etc., Freenet (or any other anonymous encrypted data-storage system) may prove an awkward nut to crack.
Eh, we'll see. No sympathy on my part for MonsterMedia, and I don't want to hear any bullshit about "the artists." Talented and creative people have been successful since the dawn of civilization and certainly since before the recording industry showed up.
But it's been about six years since MP3 came along and I am getting tired of having this argument with the self-righteous and well-behaved.
Pacer
"Not until the workers control the means of production will social equity be achieved!"
If a piece of software serves your needs -- whether you built it yourself, modified something someone else made, or just downloaded a pirated copy of something commercial -- it is "successful software."
"Success" is not really a concept that can be accurately applied to "software in general."
If you are an OSS designer you will have your own standards of what is "successful" and what is not for your baby. These are not necessarily standards held by anyone else, nor should they be.
Does it really matter?
Kazaa sucks but at least they are sketchy enough to survive, which is ultimately the final test of a P2P as far as I'm concerned. The widely touted & distributed Kazaa Lite is not at all obnoxious, and approximately 2 petabytes (!) of available data at any given time is something I find kinda attractive.
It's not perfect but I'm not too picky, it's all free anyway.
Pacer
Given that "digital piracy" (etc. etc.) is already illegal under existing pre-digital-age copyright laws, is it really necessary to pass waves of new anti-technology legislation that seriously threaten the digital infrastructure that took 40 years to build?
... now something is going to be *done* about it.
What you get for distributing neat hacks in "for dummies" packaging.
Way it goes I guess. Every decent scam has a half-life that's a function of popularity.
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Prairie iNet (www.prairieinet.com) came through the town I was living near last year (in central Iowa). They have a lot of transceivers in rural Midwestern towns; the antennae go on the water tower or grain elevator and cover a line-of-sight area within the town & surrounding countryside.
As I lived on a farm and the fastest access I had was a modem through miles of dirty telephone wire (24k baud on good days) I was excited about the service, but unfortunately:
- It has about a 4-mile range (I was farther out than that).
- It's expensive ($50/mo. + equipment rental, service fees, etc.)
- You need a crapload of hardware (cables, roof mount, PC connector cards or whatever) and you have to pay for the professional installation.
- It's slow. The absolute maximum speed is 256kbps. Residential service is 128kpbs.
It's a nice idea and I guess it's a good option (a lot of smaller towns have few or no broadband options, and in the un-cabled boonies it's a lost cause), but I couldn't afford to pay that much for packet radio setup that wasn't much faster than modem service.
Pacer
"Technology really is a double-edged sword when it comes to cheating," said Thomas Hall, student chairman of the university's honor committee. "The means for detecting cheating are catching up with the means for cheating."
...)
-----
Time for a new development in Cheating Technology. Remember when graphing calculators were still new and alien, and nobody made you wipe the memory or tape over the IR port before an exam?
All this just means that the *good* cheaters are still under the radar. Maybe someone will develop a modified version of the professor's software to check their paper against the original and insert a synonym every five words or something. (Hey, that would be a decent shareware app, if you could only trust cheaters to pay you on the honor system
I lived for two years in University residence and, frankly, my college didn't seem to have much respect for the privacy of students in any regard: all mail came through University-owned mailboxes, and packages had to be picked up at the dormitory desk, staffed by hall RAs -- students with a significant disciplinary function. All telephone service went through the university switchboard. Your room could be searched, by university staff or by police, without your permission and without any sort of warrant. Most tenant rights were violated (for instance, eviction with two weeks' notice any time of year), and now the university informs students' parents of on-campus alcohol or disciplinary violations (these are adults whose academic transcripts cannot be released to parents without a signed waiver).
It is not any surprise to me that fascist user agreements are in place concerning electronic media in light of the general control-oriented attitude of many universities towards their on-campus student populations. Perhaps the problem runs deeper than simple technophobia?
Pacer
Don't people pay for cable TV too? And they have just as many ads as broadcast television, and just as stupid.
Pacer
Slightly off-topic but hey, the blurb brought it up.
...
OK, I understand the logic behind not letting felons have guns, but taking away their vote? I don't see the democratic value in that
Just make something politically unpopular a felony (like, um, recreational drugs, for starters?) and you begin to silence your opponents with every conviction.
Is it any wonder that recidivism is so high when ex-cons don't even have a voice in the system?
Pacer
We have our own collision coming up, with Andromeda, fairly soon (possibly within the lifetime of our own sun, something like 5 billion years from now). I wonder if it will look this cool, and who will be watching?
t ml has some more info, although I think this page is getting a bit dated.
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/97/34/af1.h
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Great! Now I can listen to music filtered through the MP3 codec AND through a $40 low-power transmitter/receiver set!
Pacer
Are you thinking of Olney's lesions, which are caused (extremely rarely) by heavy exposure to the dissociative anaesthetics (PCP, dextromethorphan [DXM], ketamine)? That's one of the few cases I've ever heard of where drug use has actually caused, or at least been implicated in, documented brain damage. And dextromethorphan is sold OTC in about every cough syrup made! Of course it is very non-toxic in cough-suppressant doses, and even dissociative doses ... if my memory isn't failing me the lesions were noted only in cases of long-term psyechedelic-ranger-dose exposure.
Pacer