Ya are aware, Mr. Moderator, that moderating in a 3-day old article doesn't save you from metamoderation, right? You're s'posed to use "overrated" when you want to pull that kind of stuff.
So, do you refuse to listen to music now, since nobody "lets" you steal it, or do you just go and say, "Well, if I couldn't steal it, then I wouldn't listen to it..."
Guess what. That last attitude isn't ideological. It's cheap. When enough people believe in the cause of free music enough to actually do the former, then maybe somebody will pay attention.
Actually, I've been thinking that next time I go and install Linux, I'll probably go with Slackware... because of just what you mentioned. After having lots of problems with package managers (I want to get the latest version of x, and then need to figure out how to tell the package manager that I really do have the program in question on my system...), I've simply been starting with a Debian base system, and then installing/compiling everything I want from source. (Since most programs are just fine with a./configure; make install, it seems simpler that way.) However, it does seem a little silly to be installing Debian when I intend to remove just about everything at some point to make room for the new, and thus making the package system useless. Would Slackware be a good distribution for someone who tends to use their system in this manner?
All right: First off, I use Debian. The main reason is that, with Red Hat (and Mandrake, and SuSE... haven't tried any others, as I stuck with Debian after I was happy) I had a lot of trouble getting anything set up correctly that wasn't packaged up with the distro. Nonstandard locations for things, strange scripts that I couldn't find documented anywhere, etc., etc.
However, I have found Debian to have one big shortcoming... you have to know what your hardware is. Not much of a problem if you just bought your computer, but if you're setting it up on an old system that you don't know much about, or something of the like, you can end up having to go through headaches trying to find out which modules you need, etc. Red Hat and Mandrake, in comparison, did a great job of detecting all my hardware, so I could just go at it.
So... if all you want to do is plug in the CD and have it work, I'd say go with Mandrake. (It was the nicest of the "other distros" that I tried.) But if you're going to want to fiddle around a lot, then get Debian. Oh, it's also the beloved "free as in speech, beer, walnuts, fish,..." distro of choice, if you find that sort of stuff important:) Just ask vrms.
Y'know, this is about the closest to an even-handed, well-reasoned political opinion I've ever seen on Slashdot. Bravo. I wish the moderators had gotten to this one (but, as we know, chances of being moderated drop to about nil after post #100 or so.)
A pregnant woman left alone will bring a human life into the world. An early
embryo left alone will not.
Yeah, but if you noticed, "early embryos" don't just spontaneously spring into existance. Eggs and sperm do. (Or, at least, without our control and intervention.)
The only real difference between the two situations is the location of the embryo. In my opinion, an object in a different position is still the same object. Therefore, if you believe that life begins at conception, then "rolling your own" is just as unethical.
It will make you wonder how can they make such a cool (and very fast) demo like that in Java.
Actually, it makes me wonder how Java can slow down a computer so much it's considered impressive when you can almost match the stuff they did back in 1993.
Right. Like you've never thought you recognized somebody as they passed by, and found out later that it wasn't them. Mistaken identity happens all the time. Though we have a huge amount of information coming through our eyes, we only use a little bit of it in most cases.
By your logic, someone with poorer-than-average eyesight should not be allowed to identify a criminal, just because the chances of misidentification are a little higher than if the eyewitness was Superman.
For those who have been under a rock for the last few years, the MPAA isn't exactly dead-set against the DMCA either. Just because (illegal and unethical) use of bad laws is possible doesn't make make it a certainty.
Although there wasn't anything in the article about it, I sincerely doubt that the license will say that you've 'purchased' the content; you're just allowed to look at it for 10 hours. Exactly why do people get all riled up about this, and yet I haven't yet seen a big story yet about "Blockbuster video intends to make you return that movie after 2 days!" The only difference is that you get the convenience of not having to leave home, and have better control over your use of the product -- when you want to use it, what you want to read it on, etc.
Also, if you look near the bottom, it says that you can buy it (and presumably own it as much as you own any print book.) for $4.99. So your precious rights aren't being abused. Unless, of course, your "rights" include getting the product for 1/5 of the price it's being sold for. If that's true, I've been wasting an awful lot of my money...
Well, I think that the idea that he (and most others with that mentality) have is that the KDE and GNOME user bases are from the same group; and therefore working on both is fragmenting the users of open source.
I happen to think that's wrong -- not everyone in the open source community needs/wants the same thing. I happen to be very jealous of my CPU cycles; so I don't use either. I'm sure there are similar differences that help people make the choice between KDE/GNOME (I don't really know the specifics of how they're different.) I wouldn't want One True Desktop, as I'm pretty much guaranteed that it wouldn't be what I want, and many others feel the same way.
That's true; and it's possible that the artists would indeed do better than they do now if there was an easy way to pay them for their work. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea at all; I do think that they deserve more for what they do. I'm just of the opinion, however, that online (and elsewhere) music trading has very little to do with the ethics of how much the musician is getting paid. If 49 out of 50 don't buy the CD, I'd say that constitutes the "vast majority" I was talking about, and trading will go on as usual.
What I do think will make a difference is when the record companies come up with (1) an easy way to obtain and pay for music online, and (2) methods of making piracy so difficult that people would rather just fork over the cash. Obviously, we're not going to like it if/when that happens, but that's what they're shooting for.
Until someone does something about that basic equation, I doubt piracy will ever be impacted.
The vast majority of people don't care that artists don't make any money. A lot of people use that as an excuse, but in reality they just want the free music. (How many people ever got around sending money to the artists after Naptering/etc. the music? Not many.) Most people don't feel any responsibility towards someone that they don't know personally, and so they don't see anything wrong with taking the music for free.
Sounds like you really are serious about getting money to the artists. Good for you. But even if the distribution of money changes, piracy isn't going to slow down much.
He didn't say it was illegal to have kids and guns in the same house -- he said you were responsible if you leave a gun where your children can get to it, and they shoot themselves.
I don't quite agree with his statement that there should never be guns in a home with children (although I do think that anyone getting a gun should think hard about it first), however, if you own a gun, it should be under control at all times. Locking it up, keeping it on or near your person is reasonable. Unattended in a dresser is not.
To whichever moderator marked this post as insightful: this post was not insightful. It missed the point of the original poster, who never said that porn wasn't free speech. The correct moderation choices include "troll" and "offtopic", or, probably the best choice of all, skipping this post in favor of moderating up something that really was insightful.
There was some internet voting done in AZ... for the democratic primary, if I remember correctly. (I was not a participant, and only heard of it by the thousands of idiots who claim that "internet voting oppresses the minorities.") Not in the general election, though.
I might believe that, if he had made any comments about what might help. But he didn't; he just spouted meaningless nonsense while trashing the original poster. I tend to give more credence to the people who engage their brains before starting into an argument, even if they may not be totally correct.
Um...right. Only a naive person would actually try to make a difference, rather than sit around and complain to slashdot.
Gee, I'm sure glad we have you cynics around to kick some sense into us. No reason to get up out of the chair and put forth some effort when the most effective means of protest is to whine to oneself. After all, trolling gets you karma points.
He was talking about technical reasons for doing so, not censorship. (And notice that he specifically said, in the section you quoted, that large files would still be postable.)
You're right, nobody can force you to be a responsible citizen on usenet, and in general the people who have always been jerks will continue to be jerks. Funny how those here whine constantly about how we greed and irresponsibility is bad, as long as we're talking about someone else. When not being greedy impinges on your rights, though, there's an instant uproar.
but also when the price of electricity goes higher than the state wants to pay for it
That's not exactly a limiting factor. A few days ago they ran an article in the local paper that California is $16 million in debt to TEP (Tucson Electric Power, which is providing electricity to those silly people out west), and the debt isn't likely to be repaid. I don't know what the total numbers are like, but I betcha it's a lot of money.
It's not exactly that big a deal -- as they pointed out, you want to use all your electricity, no matter how much you're going to get out of it -- but California's not going to stop using their neighbors' power until they can't get any more. In the middle of the summer, we already use up all our power. (There's been talk of rolling blackouts here, but it doesn't look like it'll happen.) Then, suddenly, they use more power and there's less surplus to give them... and they'll be in trouble again.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya are aware, Mr. Moderator, that moderating in a 3-day old article doesn't save you from metamoderation, right? You're s'posed to use "overrated" when you want to pull that kind of stuff.
[ls -l /etc/]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 766 Jul 31 14:16 /etc/c
GOD: Oops.
[chmod 666 /etc/c]
Guess what. That last attitude isn't ideological. It's cheap. When enough people believe in the cause of free music enough to actually do the former, then maybe somebody will pay attention.
Actually, I've been thinking that next time I go and install Linux, I'll probably go with Slackware ... because of just what you mentioned. After having lots of problems with package managers (I want to get the latest version of x, and then need to figure out how to tell the package manager that I really do have the program in question on my system...), I've simply been starting with a Debian base system, and then installing/compiling everything I want from source. (Since most programs are just fine with a ./configure; make install, it seems simpler that way.) However, it does seem a little silly to be installing Debian when I intend to remove just about everything at some point to make room for the new, and thus making the package system useless. Would Slackware be a good distribution for someone who tends to use their system in this manner?
However, I have found Debian to have one big shortcoming ... you have to know what your hardware is. Not much of a problem if you just bought your computer, but if you're setting it up on an old system that you don't know much about, or something of the like, you can end up having to go through headaches trying to find out which modules you need, etc. Red Hat and Mandrake, in comparison, did a great job of detecting all my hardware, so I could just go at it.
So ... if all you want to do is plug in the CD and have it work, I'd say go with Mandrake. (It was the nicest of the "other distros" that I tried.) But if you're going to want to fiddle around a lot, then get Debian. Oh, it's also the beloved "free as in speech, beer, walnuts, fish, ..." distro of choice, if you find that sort of stuff important :) Just ask vrms.
Y'know, this is about the closest to an even-handed, well-reasoned political opinion I've ever seen on Slashdot. Bravo. I wish the moderators had gotten to this one (but, as we know, chances of being moderated drop to about nil after post #100 or so.)
Yeah, but if you noticed, "early embryos" don't just spontaneously spring into existance. Eggs and sperm do. (Or, at least, without our control and intervention.)
The only real difference between the two situations is the location of the embryo. In my opinion, an object in a different position is still the same object. Therefore, if you believe that life begins at conception, then "rolling your own" is just as unethical.
Actually, it makes me wonder how Java can slow down a computer so much it's considered impressive when you can almost match the stuff they did back in 1993.
All right, I'm done trolling for now...
By your logic, someone with poorer-than-average eyesight should not be allowed to identify a criminal, just because the chances of misidentification are a little higher than if the eyewitness was Superman.
For those who have been under a rock for the last few years, the MPAA isn't exactly dead-set against the DMCA either. Just because (illegal and unethical) use of bad laws is possible doesn't make make it a certainty.
Also, if you look near the bottom, it says that you can buy it (and presumably own it as much as you own any print book.) for $4.99. So your precious rights aren't being abused. Unless, of course, your "rights" include getting the product for 1/5 of the price it's being sold for. If that's true, I've been wasting an awful lot of my money...
I happen to think that's wrong -- not everyone in the open source community needs/wants the same thing. I happen to be very jealous of my CPU cycles; so I don't use either. I'm sure there are similar differences that help people make the choice between KDE/GNOME (I don't really know the specifics of how they're different.) I wouldn't want One True Desktop, as I'm pretty much guaranteed that it wouldn't be what I want, and many others feel the same way.
What I do think will make a difference is when the record companies come up with (1) an easy way to obtain and pay for music online, and (2) methods of making piracy so difficult that people would rather just fork over the cash. Obviously, we're not going to like it if/when that happens, but that's what they're shooting for.
The vast majority of people don't care that artists don't make any money. A lot of people use that as an excuse, but in reality they just want the free music. (How many people ever got around sending money to the artists after Naptering/etc. the music? Not many.) Most people don't feel any responsibility towards someone that they don't know personally, and so they don't see anything wrong with taking the music for free.
Sounds like you really are serious about getting money to the artists. Good for you. But even if the distribution of money changes, piracy isn't going to slow down much.
I don't quite agree with his statement that there should never be guns in a home with children (although I do think that anyone getting a gun should think hard about it first), however, if you own a gun, it should be under control at all times. Locking it up, keeping it on or near your person is reasonable. Unattended in a dresser is not.
To whichever moderator marked this post as insightful: this post was not insightful. It missed the point of the original poster, who never said that porn wasn't free speech. The correct moderation choices include "troll" and "offtopic", or, probably the best choice of all, skipping this post in favor of moderating up something that really was insightful.
There was some internet voting done in AZ ... for the democratic primary, if I remember correctly. (I was not a participant, and only heard of it by the thousands of idiots who claim that "internet voting oppresses the minorities.") Not in the general election, though.
Madness? You bet. http://www.nethack.org
I might believe that, if he had made any comments about what might help. But he didn't; he just spouted meaningless nonsense while trashing the original poster. I tend to give more credence to the people who engage their brains before starting into an argument, even if they may not be totally correct.
Drool...
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
Um...right. Only a naive person would actually try to make a difference, rather than sit around and complain to slashdot.
Gee, I'm sure glad we have you cynics around to kick some sense into us. No reason to get up out of the chair and put forth some effort when the most effective means of protest is to whine to oneself. After all, trolling gets you karma points.
After all, that orange tree would have taken years to grow.
You're right, nobody can force you to be a responsible citizen on usenet, and in general the people who have always been jerks will continue to be jerks. Funny how those here whine constantly about how we greed and irresponsibility is bad, as long as we're talking about someone else. When not being greedy impinges on your rights, though, there's an instant uproar.
That's not exactly a limiting factor. A few days ago they ran an article in the local paper that California is $16 million in debt to TEP (Tucson Electric Power, which is providing electricity to those silly people out west), and the debt isn't likely to be repaid. I don't know what the total numbers are like, but I betcha it's a lot of money.
It's not exactly that big a deal -- as they pointed out, you want to use all your electricity, no matter how much you're going to get out of it -- but California's not going to stop using their neighbors' power until they can't get any more. In the middle of the summer, we already use up all our power. (There's been talk of rolling blackouts here, but it doesn't look like it'll happen.) Then, suddenly, they use more power and there's less surplus to give them ... and they'll be in trouble again.