It's actually more private to have a conversation in a Starbucks with 100 people in it than with 3 people - with 100 people, the other 98 are probably engaged with each other and the noise will drown out any attempts to hear you except when the speaker and the listener are much closer to each other than to anyone else - like the two people talking at a table. With 3 people, the outsider is all alone and has nothing but your conversation to listen to.
Not only do they not use copy protection, they let you download the client an unlimited number of times if you have the right account status (basic, BC, WLK). They don't need to - even if every computer in the world has WoW on it, you still need to pay to get an account on their server to play it.
I'm willing to bet it's most likely a reciprocal deal (you spy on my citizens, I'll spy on yours, we can both claim we're not spying on our own citizens), not subordination.
Slashdot (or at least the segment you are referring to) is not trying to increase piracy, it's trying to reduce copyright, and one of the desired reductions is to make personal file sharing legal. If the artists are doing fine without the draconian laws some people are proposing then it supports the (Slashdot-approved) idea that we do not need those laws.
Many wars are started by rational self-interested people. "Nobody wins in a war" is completely false - the mistake is thinking of a country as a single entity where 100% of the population follow a benevolent dictator like sheep (this is the model pretty much all video games teach you). There are people within a country who would benefit from a war - military industries, people getting bribes from a third country or organization trying to bring two countries down by setting them against each other for its own purposes, governments who want an excuse to restrict freedom and exercise more brutality, and many more.
99% of code is simple applications that all do the same thing (usually printing "hello world"). If you want to do a real comparison between popularity you should think in terms of the number of users - popular software like Windows, Linux and Photoshop should be worth more than some internal banking app that affects maybe 200 people.
"You are searching using Firefox on Ubuntu" - Did you mean to install Windows and Internet Explorer, destroying all existing data on this partition in the process? []Yes []Next time my browser starts
And no one's advocating that we regulate the Kindle. For a free market to function, it's important for consumers to have all the information about what their options are, so if a company abuses its customers like this we're doing a public service by spreading the information around.
What if we won't need to work to survive? If we assume humans have 5 basic needs to have a deccent living - food, water, air, shelter and entertainment, air is free, water flows out of fountains, entertainment flows out of pirate networks, so we're already 60% there!
Ok, define benefit. If you follow that the purpose of humanity is to produce something for some purpose then yes, disabled people would be discarded. But what if the purpose, that is the "score" which the robot is attempting to maximize, is the quality of life of humans? Then helping a disabled person would be a perfectly legitimate use of resources.
I'm at my grandparents' place, using (shudder) IE6. I tried to install Firefox 10 times, but the dialup Internet connection was too unstable to survive long enough to get the entire download finished, and I don't feel like draining their per-kilobyte connection plan trying 50 more times.
Parents can read a book, watch a movie or listen to a CD to discern if it is appropriate for their child. These violent video games, on the other hand, can contain up to 800 hours of footage with the most atrocious content often reserved for the highest levels and can be accessed only by advanced players after hours upon hours of progressive mastery
A person has a certain amount of free time, and they can spend it on one 800-hour game or 400 2-hour movies. If you're a parent and want to check their entertainment in its entirety, you're going to be going through 800 hours of material either way.
It's not compulsory speech in the same way paying for house insurance is not theft - you do not have to apply for copyright protection, releasing the source is (or rather, should be) one of the conditions of getting copyright.
If you release your code under BSD/public domain and someone incorporates it into a proprietary system you can still do whatever you want with the code you yourself wrote - the only way you can lose that right is if you wrote it as a work-for-hire or something like that - it's just the proprietary additions the other people added on that you can't use.
Disney made a derivative work of (public domain)Cinderella, so you can't (yet, hopefully) make a derivative work of their derivative of it, but you can take the original Cinderella and freely make a derivative work of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait for when we invent immortality. Of course, it probably won't be a big deal since the medicines would all be patented anyway.
Like piracy or hate it, I think their bravery in the face of overwhelmingly powerful interests is an example to us all.
It's actually more private to have a conversation in a Starbucks with 100 people in it than with 3 people - with 100 people, the other 98 are probably engaged with each other and the noise will drown out any attempts to hear you except when the speaker and the listener are much closer to each other than to anyone else - like the two people talking at a table. With 3 people, the outsider is all alone and has nothing but your conversation to listen to.
The GPL equivalent for non-software IP is Creative Commons
Not only do they not use copy protection, they let you download the client an unlimited number of times if you have the right account status (basic, BC, WLK). They don't need to - even if every computer in the world has WoW on it, you still need to pay to get an account on their server to play it.
I'm willing to bet it's most likely a reciprocal deal (you spy on my citizens, I'll spy on yours, we can both claim we're not spying on our own citizens), not subordination.
Slashdot (or at least the segment you are referring to) is not trying to increase piracy, it's trying to reduce copyright, and one of the desired reductions is to make personal file sharing legal. If the artists are doing fine without the draconian laws some people are proposing then it supports the (Slashdot-approved) idea that we do not need those laws.
I have to agree here. Redefining fair use is something that should be left to the Supreme Court to decide, not some town judge.
Many wars are started by rational self-interested people. "Nobody wins in a war" is completely false - the mistake is thinking of a country as a single entity where 100% of the population follow a benevolent dictator like sheep (this is the model pretty much all video games teach you). There are people within a country who would benefit from a war - military industries, people getting bribes from a third country or organization trying to bring two countries down by setting them against each other for its own purposes, governments who want an excuse to restrict freedom and exercise more brutality, and many more.
soundz liek most f teh internetz wont bee afected atall
1 million * 1 million = 1 trillion. The US has twelve of these in its national debt.
99% of code is simple applications that all do the same thing (usually printing "hello world"). If you want to do a real comparison between popularity you should think in terms of the number of users - popular software like Windows, Linux and Photoshop should be worth more than some internal banking app that affects maybe 200 people.
So you would prefer people to write boring console apps that ask you to input 3 numbers and tell you whether or not the sum is greater than 10?
"You are searching using Firefox on Ubuntu" - Did you mean to install Windows and Internet Explorer, destroying all existing data on this partition in the process? []Yes []Next time my browser starts
And no one's advocating that we regulate the Kindle. For a free market to function, it's important for consumers to have all the information about what their options are, so if a company abuses its customers like this we're doing a public service by spreading the information around.
Why is a 60-year-old book so important to our modern culture under someone's copyright control anyway?
What if we won't need to work to survive? If we assume humans have 5 basic needs to have a deccent living - food, water, air, shelter and entertainment, air is free, water flows out of fountains, entertainment flows out of pirate networks, so we're already 60% there!
Ok, define benefit. If you follow that the purpose of humanity is to produce something for some purpose then yes, disabled people would be discarded. But what if the purpose, that is the "score" which the robot is attempting to maximize, is the quality of life of humans? Then helping a disabled person would be a perfectly legitimate use of resources.
You mean like the subtitles in this trailer?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVfhjfvrVtM
I'm at my grandparents' place, using (shudder) IE6. I tried to install Firefox 10 times, but the dialup Internet connection was too unstable to survive long enough to get the entire download finished, and I don't feel like draining their per-kilobyte connection plan trying 50 more times.
Parents can read a book, watch a movie or listen to a CD to discern if it is appropriate for their child. These violent video games, on the other hand, can contain up to 800 hours of footage with the most atrocious content often reserved for the highest levels and can be accessed only by advanced players after hours upon hours of progressive mastery
A person has a certain amount of free time, and they can spend it on one 800-hour game or 400 2-hour movies. If you're a parent and want to check their entertainment in its entirety, you're going to be going through 800 hours of material either way.
Win7 doesn't look like Windows to normal people? Sounds like a great chance to push Ubuntu right now.
It's not compulsory speech in the same way paying for house insurance is not theft - you do not have to apply for copyright protection, releasing the source is (or rather, should be) one of the conditions of getting copyright.
Doesn't the Magna Carta say something about releasing source code for copyleft web applications?
If you release your code under BSD/public domain and someone incorporates it into a proprietary system you can still do whatever you want with the code you yourself wrote - the only way you can lose that right is if you wrote it as a work-for-hire or something like that - it's just the proprietary additions the other people added on that you can't use.
Disney made a derivative work of (public domain)Cinderella, so you can't (yet, hopefully) make a derivative work of their derivative of it, but you can take the original Cinderella and freely make a derivative work of that.