Well, since my tongue was obviouisly not planted firmly enough in my cheek, I'll just continue with the concept of civil disobedience. Specifically in regards to only violating copyrights of songs older than 14 years old. Why should the artists be compensated for this? They've earned their money. Of course they likely don't even own the copyrights anyway, and regardless this is not an argument for "making sure the artist recieves no compensation", only for setting copyrights back to their original, pretty darn fair duration.
Is this anywhere near as nobel as the most famous acts of disobedience recorded? Not in the least. But does that make it automatically something to be mocked?
to quote Thoreau:
"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?"
The full text of Civil Disobedience is here. Maybe you or someone would like to read it. I don't feel that, just because the law seems relatively insignficant or benign, that it is to just be accepted as the definition of right and wrong. Of course, who's to say that I have the fortitude to go through with any of this, I never said I did. I'm just pointing out that there is plenty of justification, and that copyright protection, especially in its current form, is in no way some universal truth or undeniably just law.
Really? I know this gets hashed out here a lot on slashdot, but there was a specific period of time set down for copyrights when this country was founded - 14 years. Now, that time has been changed to "basically forever". This is just as "wrong". Or maybe there should be no copyrights at all...while I don't love that idea, copyrights are in no way any kind of natural right, or commandment or anything like that.
Say it with me everybody - Just because the government makes it illegal doesn't make it "wrong". It just makes it illegal. I shouldn't have to give examples to demonstrate this point. Just because the RIAA or disney or whoever want to lock everything up forever and bleed everyone dry doesn't mean they can get away with it. Heck, every time you download something, consider it civil disobedience. Maybe try only downloading things 14 years old or older, make a statement. Unless you feel the founding fathers were wrong and the current government is right, or at least scary. Copyright is not nearly as important as the many other ways governments have abused their powers or made perfectly ok things "wrong". There are plenty of examples of civil disobedience with no moral leg to stand on. But anyone who thinks this is one of those cases, or that all music downloading is automatically wrong, worries me.
The best part, to me, is how disney animated movies of the last decade are almost always retellings of old, copyright-long-expired stories.
But anyway...I think that your statement about rock n roll has a lot more to do with the media machine that has existed over the last 60 years than anything else. You see it in all aspects of society, really, not just music. Also, your statements about ragtime, jazz, swing, don't really take a very long term view of music. How long was what we deem "clasical" music the only game in town? Were people really coming up with all these new forms every 10 or 20 years until rock n roll, the end of musical history? I don't really think so. Plus, have you ever heard of Hip-Hop? Rap? Electronica? Rock n Roll has definitely had staying power, which I think is largely attributable to the aforementioned media machine, but is sure isn't stoping other music. And it's not like The Rolling Stones have a copyright on A, E and D chords or something. I think other bands have been formed since then, without getting sued into the ground for violating the Stones copyrights...
It doesn't matter who you think he's clearly addressing this to - he specifically says who he is addressing this to. EVERY nation. In EVERY region. Not just specifically countires that provide aid or a safe haven to terrorists. The last sentence just qualifies what "with the terrorists" means. So, being "with us", from this paragraph, just means don't harbor or support terrorism, but thats just the problem that people have with this, because the definition of terrorisim is so nebulous and, in the hands of people like John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, etc, so potentially dangerous to people who really have nothing to do with actual terrorisim.
The sequel is being released 6 months after the previous film. When do you expect them to release the DVD? This is only happening because they decided to release both movies in the same year. Wow, so exciting. But imagine if these movies were made by lucas, heck, we may not even have the first matrix dvd yet.
This is not true. Conservatives may give lip service to staying out of the free market, but really they are about messing with the free market in a different way than most liberals. Government business subsidys are NOT promoting the free market, they are messing with it. And I'd be hard pressed to find many conservatives that aren't gung ho for helping business.
I don't think this is true. There is a low chance of getting a speeding ticket, and for the most part the actual costs of getting a ticket are pretty low, so long as you don't get one more than once every 18 months, here in california at least.
While obviously it wouldn't happen, if speeding was a felony, or one ticket and you lost your license, or they increased the number of highway patrolmen 100 fold, I think speeding would decrease very significantly.
People often base their decisions on some kind of internal risk/reward accessment. It seems likely that risk/cost of punishment for speeding is much lower than peoples percived reward. This may be simplistic, but I find it hard to believe people would continue to speed if the punishment was scarier.
While this article is total fluff, It made me wonder what kind of effect this news might have had on anyone. So I did an informal poll of people here at work, only about 15 people of varying tech knowledge and general-informedness but all of whom I knew used filesharing programs. What I found was:
6/15 knew what the RIAA was.
1/15 knew about any RIAA lawsuits.
7/15 became/at least acted concerned when told about the lawsuits, and the potential for themselves to be sued.
The numbers are way too low to really mean anything, but it seems to follow that just MAYBE people don't act like they care because they really don't know. We'll see what happens when the RIAA actually gets a file sharer in court.
Last week I had two englishmen in my house. One of them used my phone to text his girlfriend, as his phone got no service here. Of course I had never called her. I don't think this is a good solution, solutions like this seem like giving up to me, spam needs to be stopped at the source not the destination.
It is OK for the writer of the article to use the Dell-provided benchmarks for dells. It is OK for the writer to use the Apple provided benchmarks for apples. It is NOT OK to use the Apple provided dell benchmarks. This is what the poster said. So, what you should have said was:
Yep, that's right - the Dell/Intel benchmarks were provided by Apple, and had been taken with Hyperthreading turned off (sugar put in the petrol tank, to use your analogy).
This is EXACTLY what the parent post is saying.
To answer your "Still think its OK" question:
No, he never thought that it was ok to put sugar in the gas tank, turn off hyperthreading, whatever, that was the whole point of his post, that it is not ok. He can't still think it's ok, since he never did.
Apple is in the wrong, because they (probably) optimized their own benchmarks and (definitely) crippled dells.
The writer of the article is correct, as he just takes everyones own personal optimized benchmarks. Not perfect, but much better than apples alternative.
This has nothing to do with his ungrateful followers or who he implements what for. This has everything to do with someone acting like the world owes him a living. I don't care what the heck you do, you can't put something under the GPL and then whine when you don't get paid, whether or not my grandma is using it or some huge company. As has been said before here, the GPL is a double edged sword. Would the LRP have been known at all if it wasn't GPLed? Could he have even made it without existing GPL code? Maybe not. Should he have any expectation of his mentioned six digits for any of this work? Of course not. If you're a programmer or an artist or a biochemist or whatever, if you make something free you cannot expect to get paid for it. You can quit working on it, blame your users, blame your lack of time, I don't care...but don't act like you're getting screwed out of money, and don't act like a bratty child going on and on about all the great stuff you supposedly did that no one else will see, because you got no money.
Uh, what the heck is wrong with you moderators. Hopefully the third time's the charm, I think rewarding people for replying to their own replies is one of those apocalypse signs or something.
Though, admittedly, I did try to mod myself up until I remembered the rules.
Congratulations on getting karma for answering your own question. Hopefully you won't get a karma boost for the question as well, I can just see it now, everyone asking and then answering themselves to get double the karma!
I mean Choosing Batman and Robin as an example of a movie that is expensive, yet inferior. That movie was inferior to almost everything ever made, so it makes for a poor choice for comparison if your goal is to imply something is good. I know nothing about those movies now other than they are cheap, and they are better than total garbage. So what, they're just garbage? Useless information, worthless comparison.
I think the FUD about a third movie would only exist IF Sam Raimi and/or Tobey Maguire don't participate. One of the things that really sunk those Batman Movies was no Michael Keaton and no Tim Burton. If the story is good, and the same team is there, there is no reason a third or fourth or fifth movie cannot be good.
Not that that ever really happens, but hey, a man can dream.
I'm sure you're 100% right, but at the same time choosing Batman and Robin doesn't really say much...there are very, very few movies less entertaining or watchable than Batman and Robin, so I still have no idea if the inexpensive movies you mention are worth anything.
The oil shortages in the 1970's were caused by our reaction to OPEC, not opec itself. The government instituted price ceilings on gasoline, instead of just letting the price go to the market level.
Originally there were no political parties, and if I remember correctly some portion of the more important founding fathers were very against them (quotes escape me). But they formed almost instantly regardless, and they seem to be a pretty automatic formation.
I agree that politicians are more answerable to their party than the voters, but for example Bob Dole was quoted during his 1996 campaign as saying "I'm not bound by the platform. I probably agree with most everything in it, but I haven't read it."
Joe Lieberman would be another example of a politician that is far from his partys platform - I'd say most people are surprised he's not a republican. John McCain is another obvious example of not always going with the party line. I think that a partial solution to this problem, instead of eliminating political parties, would be the elimination of the ridiculous gerrymandering of voting districts that goes on and has gone on for what seems like ever. When the republican or democratic candidates don't have any worries about losing in a district, it definitely makes a cookie cutter, party line candidate easy to pass through.
I can agree with Money being a big help (anywhere, not just in the US), but calling the electoral college "ludicrous" is, well, ludicrous.
This article here gives a decent overview over why the electoral college is probably superior to just counting straight votes. It mostly has to do with lessening the power of voting blocs. Of course, voting blocs reminds me of the huge problem with gerrymandering in this country. Sigh.
Perhaps the electoral college is really a problem, and I'm not looking at it correctly, but I really doubt it. Twice in 200 years have we had the person who won the popular vote lose the election, and that seems like a small problem if the system decreases the power of large blocs.
You're 100% right, Hollings is a bad example, and probably tech in general is a bad example of what I'm talking about. But the fact remains that I'll rarely if ever find any legislators that agree with me on a large majority of the issues, and there is something wrong with that. I know that over time what is important to political parties changes quite a bit, so maybe my question is, how do we influence that change? If a third or fourth or seventeenth political party is not going to work it's way into relevance, what has to happen to change either or both of the parties we have into something closer to what I want?
Even though Microsoft commands a vulgar profit margin on each copy of WindowsXP that it sells (a sign of an inefficient market)
How is Microsoft exercising its monopoly power a "sign of an inefficient market". It has nothing to do with the efficiency of the software market and everything to do with what happens when you have a monopoly. You're correct, microsoft is doing something right - using their monopoly to the fullest advantage.
I'm so sick of people on slashdot talking about "the market" and how it will cure all of these ills. The market can very well be what creates monopolies. The market is full of externalities that will never be corrected for without legislation or some other non market action. Truthfully, it's a pointless argument. Almost nowhere do markets just operate without any government intervention. To say that changing the laws can make markets inefficient is perfectly true - but some other law can improve its efficieny, often due only to market flaws, but sometimes just because a previous law that the new law affects is even worse. Maybe your fear of "RIAA, BSA, MPAA" lobbying means you think that lobbying by people you like to create laws is perfectly fine, but I suspect that any legislation that affects your precious markets is anathema to you.
Your elected officials get things half right? Or get half of what you want done. Example:
Backing the entertainment industry, Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., may reintroduce a bill to prohibit the making and distribution of "digital media devices" unless they include government-approved copy restriction technology.
Hollings has said that he really doesn't want the legislation, but some type of compromise is needed. Various tech industry groups and the Recording Industry Association of America recently promised to fight any such mandates and work out the piracy problem.
---
Hollings, along with Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., are also likely to introduce a comprehensive privacy bill to protect online surfers, who before Sept. 11 were pre-occupied with identity theft, but now must add government surveillance to their list of concerns.
I guess with all I've been seeing recently, half right is better than expected. But my frustration with our two party system grows. Too often I see two candidates who both agree with me on half the issues and disagree with me on the other half. I can't send a message by voting for either of them, other than "this set of my beliefs is more important than that set". Other than writing letters, or running for office myself, what really can be done to get the message across?
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Is this anywhere near as nobel as the most famous acts of disobedience recorded? Not in the least. But does that make it automatically something to be mocked?
to quote Thoreau:
The full text of Civil Disobedience is here. Maybe you or someone would like to read it. I don't feel that, just because the law seems relatively insignficant or benign, that it is to just be accepted as the definition of right and wrong. Of course, who's to say that I have the fortitude to go through with any of this, I never said I did. I'm just pointing out that there is plenty of justification, and that copyright protection, especially in its current form, is in no way some universal truth or undeniably just law.
Ok, I'll bite. You say:
downloading music you haven't paid for is wrong
Really? I know this gets hashed out here a lot on slashdot, but there was a specific period of time set down for copyrights when this country was founded - 14 years. Now, that time has been changed to "basically forever". This is just as "wrong". Or maybe there should be no copyrights at all...while I don't love that idea, copyrights are in no way any kind of natural right, or commandment or anything like that.
Say it with me everybody - Just because the government makes it illegal doesn't make it "wrong". It just makes it illegal. I shouldn't have to give examples to demonstrate this point. Just because the RIAA or disney or whoever want to lock everything up forever and bleed everyone dry doesn't mean they can get away with it. Heck, every time you download something, consider it civil disobedience. Maybe try only downloading things 14 years old or older, make a statement. Unless you feel the founding fathers were wrong and the current government is right, or at least scary. Copyright is not nearly as important as the many other ways governments have abused their powers or made perfectly ok things "wrong". There are plenty of examples of civil disobedience with no moral leg to stand on. But anyone who thinks this is one of those cases, or that all music downloading is automatically wrong, worries me.
The best part, to me, is how disney animated movies of the last decade are almost always retellings of old, copyright-long-expired stories.
But anyway...I think that your statement about rock n roll has a lot more to do with the media machine that has existed over the last 60 years than anything else. You see it in all aspects of society, really, not just music. Also, your statements about ragtime, jazz, swing, don't really take a very long term view of music. How long was what we deem "clasical" music the only game in town? Were people really coming up with all these new forms every 10 or 20 years until rock n roll, the end of musical history? I don't really think so. Plus, have you ever heard of Hip-Hop? Rap? Electronica? Rock n Roll has definitely had staying power, which I think is largely attributable to the aforementioned media machine, but is sure isn't stoping other music. And it's not like The Rolling Stones have a copyright on A, E and D chords or something. I think other bands have been formed since then, without getting sued into the ground for violating the Stones copyrights...
It doesn't matter who you think he's clearly addressing this to - he specifically says who he is addressing this to. EVERY nation. In EVERY region. Not just specifically countires that provide aid or a safe haven to terrorists. The last sentence just qualifies what "with the terrorists" means. So, being "with us", from this paragraph, just means don't harbor or support terrorism, but thats just the problem that people have with this, because the definition of terrorisim is so nebulous and, in the hands of people like John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, etc, so potentially dangerous to people who really have nothing to do with actual terrorisim.
The sequel is being released 6 months after the previous film. When do you expect them to release the DVD? This is only happening because they decided to release both movies in the same year. Wow, so exciting. But imagine if these movies were made by lucas, heck, we may not even have the first matrix dvd yet.
This is not true. Conservatives may give lip service to staying out of the free market, but really they are about messing with the free market in a different way than most liberals. Government business subsidys are NOT promoting the free market, they are messing with it. And I'd be hard pressed to find many conservatives that aren't gung ho for helping business.
I don't think this is true. There is a low chance of getting a speeding ticket, and for the most part the actual costs of getting a ticket are pretty low, so long as you don't get one more than once every 18 months, here in california at least.
While obviously it wouldn't happen, if speeding was a felony, or one ticket and you lost your license, or they increased the number of highway patrolmen 100 fold, I think speeding would decrease very significantly.
People often base their decisions on some kind of internal risk/reward accessment. It seems likely that risk/cost of punishment for speeding is much lower than peoples percived reward. This may be simplistic, but I find it hard to believe people would continue to speed if the punishment was scarier.
Sorry, by lawsuits I mean "potential lawsuits towards filesharers"
While this article is total fluff, It made me wonder what kind of effect this news might have had on anyone. So I did an informal poll of people here at work, only about 15 people of varying tech knowledge and general-informedness but all of whom I knew used filesharing programs. What I found was:
6/15 knew what the RIAA was.
1/15 knew about any RIAA lawsuits.
7/15 became/at least acted concerned when told about the lawsuits, and the potential for themselves to be sued.
The numbers are way too low to really mean anything, but it seems to follow that just MAYBE people don't act like they care because they really don't know. We'll see what happens when the RIAA actually gets a file sharer in court.
Last week I had two englishmen in my house. One of them used my phone to text his girlfriend, as his phone got no service here. Of course I had never called her. I don't think this is a good solution, solutions like this seem like giving up to me, spam needs to be stopped at the source not the destination.
It is OK for the writer of the article to use the Dell-provided benchmarks for dells. It is OK for the writer to use the Apple provided benchmarks for apples. It is NOT OK to use the Apple provided dell benchmarks. This is what the poster said. So, what you should have said was:
Yep, that's right - the Dell/Intel benchmarks were provided by Apple, and had been taken with Hyperthreading turned off (sugar put in the petrol tank, to use your analogy).
This is EXACTLY what the parent post is saying.
To answer your "Still think its OK" question:
No, he never thought that it was ok to put sugar in the gas tank, turn off hyperthreading, whatever, that was the whole point of his post, that it is not ok. He can't still think it's ok, since he never did.
Apple is in the wrong, because they (probably) optimized their own benchmarks and (definitely) crippled dells.
The writer of the article is correct, as he just takes everyones own personal optimized benchmarks. Not perfect, but much better than apples alternative.
This has nothing to do with his ungrateful followers or who he implements what for. This has everything to do with someone acting like the world owes him a living. I don't care what the heck you do, you can't put something under the GPL and then whine when you don't get paid, whether or not my grandma is using it or some huge company. As has been said before here, the GPL is a double edged sword. Would the LRP have been known at all if it wasn't GPLed? Could he have even made it without existing GPL code? Maybe not. Should he have any expectation of his mentioned six digits for any of this work? Of course not. If you're a programmer or an artist or a biochemist or whatever, if you make something free you cannot expect to get paid for it. You can quit working on it, blame your users, blame your lack of time, I don't care...but don't act like you're getting screwed out of money, and don't act like a bratty child going on and on about all the great stuff you supposedly did that no one else will see, because you got no money.
Thank god. After my first self reply went up to funny, who knows how far it could have gone. course, now it's at -1
Uh, what the heck is wrong with you moderators. Hopefully the third time's the charm, I think rewarding people for replying to their own replies is one of those apocalypse signs or something.
Though, admittedly, I did try to mod myself up until I remembered the rules.
Hopefully I won't get karma for this post. Everyone posting jokes after their jokes would be even worse!
Congratulations on getting karma for answering your own question. Hopefully you won't get a karma boost for the question as well, I can just see it now, everyone asking and then answering themselves to get double the karma!
I mean Choosing Batman and Robin as an example of a movie that is expensive, yet inferior. That movie was inferior to almost everything ever made, so it makes for a poor choice for comparison if your goal is to imply something is good. I know nothing about those movies now other than they are cheap, and they are better than total garbage. So what, they're just garbage? Useless information, worthless comparison.
I think the FUD about a third movie would only exist IF Sam Raimi and/or Tobey Maguire don't participate. One of the things that really sunk those Batman Movies was no Michael Keaton and no Tim Burton. If the story is good, and the same team is there, there is no reason a third or fourth or fifth movie cannot be good.
Not that that ever really happens, but hey, a man can dream.
I'm sure you're 100% right, but at the same time choosing Batman and Robin doesn't really say much...there are very, very few movies less entertaining or watchable than Batman and Robin, so I still have no idea if the inexpensive movies you mention are worth anything.
The oil shortages in the 1970's were caused by our reaction to OPEC, not opec itself. The government instituted price ceilings on gasoline, instead of just letting the price go to the market level.
Originally there were no political parties, and if I remember correctly some portion of the more important founding fathers were very against them (quotes escape me). But they formed almost instantly regardless, and they seem to be a pretty automatic formation.
I agree that politicians are more answerable to their party than the voters, but for example Bob Dole was quoted during his 1996 campaign as saying "I'm not bound by the platform. I probably agree with most everything in it, but I haven't read it."
Joe Lieberman would be another example of a politician that is far from his partys platform - I'd say most people are surprised he's not a republican. John McCain is another obvious example of not always going with the party line. I think that a partial solution to this problem, instead of eliminating political parties, would be the elimination of the ridiculous gerrymandering of voting districts that goes on and has gone on for what seems like ever. When the republican or democratic candidates don't have any worries about losing in a district, it definitely makes a cookie cutter, party line candidate easy to pass through.
I can agree with Money being a big help (anywhere, not just in the US), but calling the electoral college "ludicrous" is, well, ludicrous.
This article here gives a decent overview over why the electoral college is probably superior to just counting straight votes. It mostly has to do with lessening the power of voting blocs. Of course, voting blocs reminds me of the huge problem with gerrymandering in this country. Sigh.
Perhaps the electoral college is really a problem, and I'm not looking at it correctly, but I really doubt it. Twice in 200 years have we had the person who won the popular vote lose the election, and that seems like a small problem if the system decreases the power of large blocs.
You're 100% right, Hollings is a bad example, and probably tech in general is a bad example of what I'm talking about. But the fact remains that I'll rarely if ever find any legislators that agree with me on a large majority of the issues, and there is something wrong with that. I know that over time what is important to political parties changes quite a bit, so maybe my question is, how do we influence that change? If a third or fourth or seventeenth political party is not going to work it's way into relevance, what has to happen to change either or both of the parties we have into something closer to what I want?
Even though Microsoft commands a vulgar profit margin on each copy of WindowsXP that it sells (a sign of an inefficient market)
How is Microsoft exercising its monopoly power a "sign of an inefficient market". It has nothing to do with the efficiency of the software market and everything to do with what happens when you have a monopoly. You're correct, microsoft is doing something right - using their monopoly to the fullest advantage.
I'm so sick of people on slashdot talking about "the market" and how it will cure all of these ills. The market can very well be what creates monopolies. The market is full of externalities that will never be corrected for without legislation or some other non market action.
Truthfully, it's a pointless argument. Almost nowhere do markets just operate without any government intervention. To say that changing the laws can make markets inefficient is perfectly true - but some other law can improve its efficieny, often due only to market flaws, but sometimes just because a previous law that the new law affects is even worse. Maybe your fear of "RIAA, BSA, MPAA" lobbying means you think that lobbying by people you like to create laws is perfectly fine, but I suspect that any legislation that affects your precious markets is anathema to you.
Your elected officials get things half right? Or get half of what you want done. Example:
Backing the entertainment industry, Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., may reintroduce a bill to prohibit the making and distribution of "digital media devices" unless they include government-approved copy restriction technology.
Hollings has said that he really doesn't want the legislation, but some type of compromise is needed. Various tech industry groups and the Recording Industry Association of America recently promised to fight any such mandates and work out the piracy problem.
---
Hollings, along with Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., are also likely to introduce a comprehensive privacy bill to protect online surfers, who before Sept. 11 were pre-occupied with identity theft, but now must add government surveillance to their list of concerns.
I guess with all I've been seeing recently, half right is better than expected. But my frustration with our two party system grows. Too often I see two candidates who both agree with me on half the issues and disagree with me on the other half. I can't send a message by voting for either of them, other than "this set of my beliefs is more important than that set". Other than writing letters, or running for office myself, what really can be done to get the message across?