Just because you're ripping off a corporation, it doesn't become ok.. nor does it change from an being an illegal activity to a moral anti-capitalist gesture.
Um, these aren't mutually exclusive. The whole point of civil disobedience, for example, is to explicitly break a bad law and to be arrested for doing so, to call attention to the injustice of the law. Not that ripping MP3s is, in general, a case of civil disobedience (hint: few song-swappers actively court jail time) but it's disingenuous to equate "illegal" with "immoral" identically.
are they non-profit or do they charge you money since they are a company??
Um, these two are not at all exclusive of each other. One can incorporate a not-for-profit corporation. As an example, my school is incorporated, with the powers of the corporation vested in the Board of Trustees. It is that corporation that owns the land, pays the bills, etc.
Not-for-profits charge for access all the time. That's why, for example, you have to join, say, the New York Public Theater to receive full access to shows. Their motive isn't profit but it's positively insane to say they can't handle money, as if it makes them unclean.
Punishing MS because you don't like their products or
their business tactics or their authentication practices or.NET or just plain because Word crashed on you in the middle of a term paper is wrong [emphasis added]
Unless their business practices are illegal. The argument against Microsoft is that they have leveraged the legitimate power they accrued through the decision of consumers (although I don't believe that that choice was entirely free... I had to pay for Windows on my machine whether I wanted it or not) into areas quite unrelated to it.
Did most people choose Internet Explorer because it was technically superior or because Microsoft made it integral to the OS and made the OS unstable for other browsers? (BTW, don't tell me about how much more wonderful IE is. Let's talk about its relative merit at the time they began bundling it. I used NS and IE at that time and they were comparable. I actually preferred NS. Lately Netscape/AOL has really dropped the ball, but that isn't strictly relevant.)
The drive behind the antitrust case is exactly that consumers were denied the ability to make choices based on merit. Just because Soviet candidates always received 100% of the vote doesn't mean people actually wanted them in office...
I noticed the same thing. Last I grep'ed through the good ole
constitution (sorry to you Non-US peoples out there), I don't recall
seeing anything about anonymous speech. This whole thing seems out of
line, somehow.
Of course, it doesn't say anything about thermal imaging, either. But luckily, even the current Supreme Court saw that that violated the 4th Amendment prohibition against unwarranted search-and-seizure.
The point is, the document was written 200+ years ago. Society evolves and so the interpretation of the document changes. It always has, thank goodness, and it always will. In the case of anonymous (or "unsigned") speech there is a large body of casework protecting such.
Main Entry: 1kvetch
Pronunciation: 'kvech, 'kfech
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: Yiddish kvetshn, literally, to squeeze, pinch, from Middle High German quetschen
Date: circa 1952
: to complain habitually : GRIPE
So, it is an English word (in the linguo-imperialist sense that English blob-like absorbs many other languages).
I grew up in New York City and can distinctly remember waking up to the sound of thunder (sometime in 1983 or 1984) and wondering, "Well, was that The Big One?"
And some local paper -- probably the Daily News -- would dutifully do a report every May Day on the newest Soviet military equipment set to roll over Western Europe, with the little "One army man = 10,000 soldiers" and "one tank icon = 100 tanks" pictographs.
The same paper would, from time to time, in the Sunday supplement, publish a map of the NYC region with circles centered on the Empire State Building drawn for the different "death radii" of an airburst from a Soviet nuke.
And, as a teacher interacting with children of the 1990s, no, young people have no idea. Which is both frightening and, oddly, hopeful.
Sure, at first getting it up is easy, but maintaing it from the home users point of view- i dont think so.
Hmmm, at first read, I thought the poster was describing Windows, not OSS. I'm not exactly a power user and I don't run a lot of freaky exotic software, and I still spend a lot of time every week keeping my NT box chugging along... I think we're really talking more of a perceived difference than a real one, in usability and stability.
What you can't legally do is provide that copy to others
for profit. [emphasis added]
This is one of the most common, and potentially most dangerous, of the many Myths about Copyright. Your profit motive in distributing copies is irrelevant to your liability for infringing copyright. To quote the source linked,
hether you charge can affect the damages awarded in
court, but that's essentially the only difference. It's still a
violation if you give it away -- and there can still be
serious damages if you hurt the commercial value of the
property. There is an exception for personal copying of music, which
is not a violation, though courts are right now deciding if that
includes such widescale personal copying as Napster.
So don't bet the bank on the "I didn't charge for it, Your Honor" defense.
Uh, no. The poster did not blockquote anything. YOU did. The poster merely stated, in a non-block-quoted format.
Um, no, but thanks for playing. Admittedly I am playing with words using "blockquoth" as modeled on "quoth". But consider, if you will, that famous line from Poe's "The Raven":
Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."
Obviously the raven is not quoting anyone; nor is the narrator stating that the raven quoted someone. Rather the narrator is quoting the raven. That's why the quotation marks are there. Likewise, I was quoting the original poster; hence the blockquote format.
Which is far too much explanation for what was intended to be a silly little linguisitic graffito.
I do. My conception of "plain English" is something beyond an eighth grade reading level. The strength of English, as well as its bane, is its eager incorporation of ideas, words, and entire phrases from other languages. These create a richness and a depth of expression that can be staggering.
English is like mega-Perl. (Perl's motto is "There's more than one way to do it.") In English, glorious English, there's more than one way to say something. Meaning can operate on different levels. That's the root and font of the beautiful poetry that has been written in English (a language without the almost cut-and-paste lyricism of the Romance tounges).
Posting to slashdot, perhaps it is a propos -- I'm sorry, "fitting" -- to note the trend language took in Orwell's 1984: a gradual stripping away of synonym and nuance, so that thoughts could be expressed in only one (state-approved) way. That was to be followed by a slow pruning of language until people could only express Party wisdom, leading eventually to only thinking Party wisdom.
If the Cylons have been around for a thousand, hell even a hundred years, their targeting software should be BETTER. It took us six years or so to go from Doom to UT.
Of course, if the Colonies have been around for a thousand, heck, even a hundred years, they might have invented ECM (electronic countermeasures, also known as jamming). And the Cylons would have invented ECCM (counter-jamming), and the Colonies would have improved their jamming...
In other words, it's almost a crap shoot, technologically, who has the advantage at the particular moment the show begins. Maybe the Colonies had just leapfrogged in jamming tech, whereas the Cylons were left with old systems. That could help explain the ridiculous kill ratios.
Not that I think the series creators had this in mind. It just amuses me to see people assume that technological advances would apply to only one half of the equation...
Hmmm. I didn't realize that I was a foaming-at-the-mouth B5 fanbody, but I am responding, so...
The main reason that fans use "story arc" nearly exclusively is that JMS used it extensively. For those who don't know, the show's creator J. Michael Straczynski kept a very visible presence on the Net, especially in the B5 Usenet newsgroups. Especially early in the show, he engaged in a running give-and-take wherein he seemed genuinely interested in the feedback of the viewers. He also gave us a rare insight into the mechanics of producing a TV show, including the special challenges of a sci-fi show.
JMS used "arc" quite deliberately. To quote the poster,
Like a story *line* just won't cut it, nope, two dimensions are better than one
For B5, in my opinion, this is actually true: The story didn't just progress linearly. Borrowing a line from literary criticism, there was a rising action, a crest, a climax, and a falling action/denoument. Also, characters and situations evolved in multiple directions and multiple manners. G'kar, for example, started as (deliberately) cardboard villian, moved through wary ally to noble warrior and eventually, priest. Londo Mollari, in JMS' phrasing went from "funny light" to "funny dark" to "serious dark" to just plain dark, toward an eventual redemption.
These are significant character developments, and most of them seemed quite believable. This, BTW, is what helped B5 rise above "space opera" and into, dare one say it, epic. The themes were grand and sweeping, but the characters were individual and three-dimensional.
Now, that doesn't mean that one should ban all other references besides "arc". But it's a useful piece of jargon for what distinguished B5 from (nearly) all other sci-fi shows, and from the vast majority of TV shows, period. Useful jargon tends to propagate itself.
Sounds more like religious experience is central to the human experience, which was the heart of B5. Don't confuse the author with his story. JMS said on several occasions that religion popped up because it resonates with us as human beings.
Perhaps the poster really intended "prima facie", that is, "on the face of it" -- used in jurisprudence (I believe) when an argument is so obviously true (or so obviously false) that no reasoning need be done or given.
While there is plenty of grey between the black and white, there are also plenty of unambiguous cases of abuse of Usenet.
I have only the guy's word to go on, but he claims that they have significant anti-abuse policies. Have you reported these unambiguous cases to him? What was the response?
OK, it doesn't sound absolutely out there, as currently constituted. But I was reading the St. Peters Times story and came across the reasoning that (a) makes me really worried and (b) convinces me we won't be able to stop things like this. To wit, a citizen-on-the-street says,
"If you don't have anything to worry about, it won't bother you. As far as any invasion of rights --
if you're breaking the law, your rights are kind of dissolved." (emphasis mine)
Does this terrify anyone else? I hadn't realized that our citizens' grasp of the fundamental elements of due process was so shaky. As a teacher, perhaps I should have.
We have politicians who want to introduce the Ten Commandments into every classroom. Why isn't anyone clamoring to introduce the Bill of Rights into every classroom?
but they've been doing this kinda thing in high risk ventures (most notably, Las Vegas) for years and years. But then again, I suppose that the ones in Vegas are looking for cheats and not just random people with records
And it's done in a private venue that you opted to enter, and the highest punishment is simply ejection from the private venue... It is different when it's the cops.
She also states that it is not their job to be discriminating.
It's hard to tell without the complete context. Could she perhaps have been saying it's not her job to discriminate, in the current narrower meaning (i.e., against a group)?
Like, say, in voting machines, where (for FL) 0.01% translates to 600 people.
Hmmm.... Same state. You think they'd be a bit more cautious with technology right now.
Re:The GPL is about as un-American as it gets.
on
Microsoft and the GPL
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
If my comments seemed revolutionary, it's because they ARE revolutionary. The GPL is revolutionary. And if the notion of "revolution" conjures up only images of hippies in the street waving signs, then you're simple minded and perhaps you should go learn something other than computers for a while.
Amen.
People forget that things like freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, the sanctity of one's home, and accountability of governance were all "revolutionary" in their day. And, for we American readers, as Independence Day approaches, we should probably recall that, from time to time, "in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them".
Or, in other words, when The System is corrupt, Revolution can be good.
It's a shame, because if nothing else, every American is a consumer first
No. No. No. and No.
That's the sort of attitude that will, eventually, sink this nation. I am not a consumer first. I am only incidentally a consumer, in that it's what I do to take care of necessities to get on with my life.
I am a citizen first, foremost, and above all.
And my government exists for the welfare of citizens, not for consumers. The distinction is getting lost and the Republic is ailing for it.
What's the damn point? Who's going to counter any move by a single company with a single focus?
Yeats would be proud:
The best lack all conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity
But perhaps Ford Prefect said it best:
"...And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." --
Life, The Universe, and Everything
It might entirely be true that fighting back against Microsoft FUD is essentially futile, that we can't change the world or win the war, that big money will triumph over the small guy. But if we don't even try, the result is the same... and who knows? Maybe the horse will sing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not-for-profits charge for access all the time. That's why, for example, you have to join, say, the New York Public Theater to receive full access to shows. Their motive isn't profit but it's positively insane to say they can't handle money, as if it makes them unclean.
Of course, it's a popular and cool-sounding tidbit so I'm sure that Asimov said it at some point... but Clarke said it first/most famously.
Did most people choose Internet Explorer because it was technically superior or because Microsoft made it integral to the OS and made the OS unstable for other browsers? (BTW, don't tell me about how much more wonderful IE is. Let's talk about its relative merit at the time they began bundling it. I used NS and IE at that time and they were comparable. I actually preferred NS. Lately Netscape/AOL has really dropped the ball, but that isn't strictly relevant.)
The drive behind the antitrust case is exactly that consumers were denied the ability to make choices based on merit. Just because Soviet candidates always received 100% of the vote doesn't mean people actually wanted them in office...
The point is, the document was written 200+ years ago. Society evolves and so the interpretation of the document changes. It always has, thank goodness, and it always will. In the case of anonymous (or "unsigned") speech there is a large body of casework protecting such.
And some local paper -- probably the Daily News -- would dutifully do a report every May Day on the newest Soviet military equipment set to roll over Western Europe, with the little "One army man = 10,000 soldiers" and "one tank icon = 100 tanks" pictographs.
The same paper would, from time to time, in the Sunday supplement, publish a map of the NYC region with circles centered on the Empire State Building drawn for the different "death radii" of an airburst from a Soviet nuke.
And, as a teacher interacting with children of the 1990s, no, young people have no idea. Which is both frightening and, oddly, hopeful.
Reasonable people can disagree on what constitutes "good" writing or "bad" writing, but to say that there is no bad writing...? Sheesh.
Which is far too much explanation for what was intended to be a silly little linguisitic graffito.
English is like mega-Perl. (Perl's motto is "There's more than one way to do it.") In English, glorious English, there's more than one way to say something. Meaning can operate on different levels. That's the root and font of the beautiful poetry that has been written in English (a language without the almost cut-and-paste lyricism of the Romance tounges).
Posting to slashdot, perhaps it is a propos -- I'm sorry, "fitting" -- to note the trend language took in Orwell's 1984: a gradual stripping away of synonym and nuance, so that thoughts could be expressed in only one (state-approved) way. That was to be followed by a slow pruning of language until people could only express Party wisdom, leading eventually to only thinking Party wisdom.
Let us resolve to never let such come to pass.
In other words, it's almost a crap shoot, technologically, who has the advantage at the particular moment the show begins. Maybe the Colonies had just leapfrogged in jamming tech, whereas the Cylons were left with old systems. That could help explain the ridiculous kill ratios.
Not that I think the series creators had this in mind. It just amuses me to see people assume that technological advances would apply to only one half of the equation...
The main reason that fans use "story arc" nearly exclusively is that JMS used it extensively. For those who don't know, the show's creator J. Michael Straczynski kept a very visible presence on the Net, especially in the B5 Usenet newsgroups. Especially early in the show, he engaged in a running give-and-take wherein he seemed genuinely interested in the feedback of the viewers. He also gave us a rare insight into the mechanics of producing a TV show, including the special challenges of a sci-fi show.
JMS used "arc" quite deliberately. To quote the poster,
For B5, in my opinion, this is actually true: The story didn't just progress linearly. Borrowing a line from literary criticism, there was a rising action, a crest, a climax, and a falling action/denoument. Also, characters and situations evolved in multiple directions and multiple manners. G'kar, for example, started as (deliberately) cardboard villian, moved through wary ally to noble warrior and eventually, priest. Londo Mollari, in JMS' phrasing went from "funny light" to "funny dark" to "serious dark" to just plain dark, toward an eventual redemption.These are significant character developments, and most of them seemed quite believable. This, BTW, is what helped B5 rise above "space opera" and into, dare one say it, epic. The themes were grand and sweeping, but the characters were individual and three-dimensional.
Now, that doesn't mean that one should ban all other references besides "arc". But it's a useful piece of jargon for what distinguished B5 from (nearly) all other sci-fi shows, and from the vast majority of TV shows, period. Useful jargon tends to propagate itself.
Perhaps the poster really intended "prima facie", that is, "on the face of it" -- used in jurisprudence (I believe) when an argument is so obviously true (or so obviously false) that no reasoning need be done or given.
We have politicians who want to introduce the Ten Commandments into every classroom. Why isn't anyone clamoring to introduce the Bill of Rights into every classroom?
Hmmm.... Same state. You think they'd be a bit more cautious with technology right now.
People forget that things like freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, the sanctity of one's home, and accountability of governance were all "revolutionary" in their day. And, for we American readers, as Independence Day approaches, we should probably recall that, from time to time, "in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them".
Or, in other words, when The System is corrupt, Revolution can be good.
That's the sort of attitude that will, eventually, sink this nation. I am not a consumer first. I am only incidentally a consumer, in that it's what I do to take care of necessities to get on with my life.
I am a citizen first, foremost, and above all.
And my government exists for the welfare of citizens, not for consumers. The distinction is getting lost and the Republic is ailing for it.
OK, I guess I've met my rant quota for the day.