Maybe you're just very, very new to this discussion, and have missed the past twenty years' worth of debate.
First, I'll pick a hole in your over-simplified statement:
Taking and/or receiving items that have value without paying the price for such items is THEFT, whether it be a car, software or a "Snickers" bar
I'll give you a Snickers bar. If you receive it, just say thanks, and don't pay for it, you are not a thief.
Right, that's not so hard to understand, it it?
Now, last month I saw a photograph in a of a very nice wooden bowl, oval, about 35cm long and 8cm wide, hand carved in birch wood. It took the internationally renowned sculptor over 300 hours to make this one-off piece. I could buy it for 26 thousand thalers. Or I could get a piece of birch wood, quite legally, for nothing, sit down with my gouges, chisels, elbow grease, and make one for myself. Since there is no way that I would have paid the asking price for the original, my copy has not denied the sculptor of any revenue. Since I have not taken the original object, I have not denied anybody else possession of the object.
Now, imagine some very expensive piece of software and some Malaysian fifteen year old. He doesn't have the money to buy a license for the software, so he makes a copy that he uses in order to learn how to use it. The software editor doesn't lose any revenue, since the kid in question could not possibly have afforded to pay. The copy that the kid makes and uses does not deprive anybody else of enjoying possession or use of the software.
Final example, just to prove a point. Imagine that I have just lost all my life's savings because I followed the advice of some affluent merchant banker (half-euphemism) and put all my money into shares in a company run by a bunch of corrupt, greedy, and/or incompetent executives (on enormous salaries and whose own savings are quite safe, thankyou very much). Could be Enron, WorldCom, Vivendi... So, I've got just enough money to live on, and I'm looking for a job, and I go to an interview on the train without buying a ticket. It's 9am, and the train is packed. I get in and sit down. Now, I'm in the wrong; my presence is depriving someone else of a place.
Now, I an not a lwayer, but the point is that for there to be "theft", at least one of two conditions must be met:
some legitimate revenue or benefit must be denied,
possession must be denied.
There are too many individuals and corporations taking a "holier than thou" attitude, claiming that "software piracy is theft" when they are just out to fill their pockets as full and as quickly as possible, and are simply jealous in the most petty way conceivable, that someone can benefit from their work without paying for it. But at the same time, these indivduals and corporations set the minimum possible contribution at a level that is so high that it excludes too many possible contributors.
The way to stop copyright infringement (what the BSA and others would like to term "software piracy") is not by shouting very loudly "SOFTWARE PIRACY IS THEFT". It is by making contribution possible and even convenient!
Because, you have to admit it, if there was a way to pay an affordable one thaler for a personal (educational, non-commercial, or home) license, how many would go ahead if to do so required three or four hours of getting certificates, filling in credit-card forms, setting up secure payment schemes...... What we need is a secure, standardised, open, easy to use system of micropaymentss/strong>.
Indonesians are supposed to drive on the left, but seem to drive in the shade and around the potholes. Oh, and around the one-way systems that change direction to take account of rush-hour traffic. But then, they also, apparently, drive like fish
I'm English, learned to drive in England; now live in France and have driven here since the month after I got my British licence.
I have noticed no inherent advantage to riving on the left or on the right. It's just a question of habit. Admittedly, it takes a bit of thought to be able to swap from one to the other; this would be a problem if, for example the Belgians drove on the left, with an open border with France... drive over the border without noticing, and you're on the wring side of the road!
Except that when the web site "suggests" a particular title because you have already bought similar books, and then claims that it's "on special offer today, 25% off", that should set alarm bells ringing!
There's a big, big difference between the bricks-and-mortar shop and the on-line store... In the bricks-and-mortar shop the price is physically displayed and, if you leave out haggling (negotiation) for simplicity's sake, the price is the same for each and every customer.
You've already been to the on-line store, the store has some kind of profile of your tastes. It can "suggest" a title, with a good chance that you'll buy. Just to ram home the message further, it pretends that there is (oh! happy chance!) that today, and only today, you are getting this title at a spacially reduced price. Unless you have a second browser open, connecting to the store as an anonymous first-timer, how are you going to check the "normal" price of the title? You should try it... you may well find that the price for a first-time buyer, with a special introductory discout on the first order, is much lower that the "special offer, today only" being touted.
That's great! I don't agree that tickets to concerts worth seeing will necessarily cost as much as you state.
However, this scenario will give us more live music and give us more of a participation culture.
We now have mostly recorded music, and a consumer/voyeuristic culture.
Moby assembled some quite nice tunes, I'll say that for him.
But I reckon he makes so much money from allowing his work to be used in advertising that his albums should be downloadable for free. I think most people have already payed for a copy of "Play" without knowing it.
And let's admit it, he borrows enormously heavily from old Blues and Gospel records... and does he pay anything for all the samples he's ripped?
choose one of the following, and write it out a hundred times:
I'm a troll, a slimy fat troll;
I don't know how to build a computer, but I know how to bitch when I can't run Linux on it;
I'm just too stupid to be playing with any flavour of Linux.
I've been using Linux since 2.0.36 (RedHat, perhaps 4.2), and for the past three years or so Mandrake flavour, on a variety of Intel-based machines.
First of all on a home built 486/50MHz with 80MB disc and 8MB Ram, then Pentium 120MHz with 2.5GB disc and 64MB Ram (the small machine became a printer server for a while)
Currently I have a BP6 with 2 × 400MHz Celerons (overclocked to 550MHz) with 384MB Ram and about 20GB on three discs.
Straight out of the box, Mandrake 7.0 worked great. Mandrake 7.1 was admittedly a little flaky as an upgrade, but a full install worked much better. Release 8.0 was good, 8.1 even better and after a couple of months with 8.2 at home, I installed it yesterday at work on the server I look after.
Apps downloaded and compiled work fine (Ogle DVD player, lm_sensors, a few others) so it looks like the compilers, libraries and other development bits and pieces are all there. If lm_sensors (very low-level stuff on the I2c bus / SMBus) works on the BP6 (described by the manufacturer as an "experimental" board) without causing stability problems, then I call this a sturdy set-up.
If "consciousness" is a property of each elementary particle, perhaps we could add this to the list of quarks... Not just up, down, strange, charm and whatever... We now have a "soul" quark.
Now, how about we try to teleport with an "economy" mode, that recreates only half the mass of the original?
Billy, weighing 86 kilos, steps into the machine in Santa Clara. He steps out of the machine in Boulder weighing 43 kilos. If he has all the memories that he had when he was in Santa Clara, we may have demonstrated that consciousness is holographic; that all the information is present in each elementary particle. Maybe Billy's memory will be a little less precise that before. We will have invented "lossy compression of consciousness".
Reading the Cringely article, the problem seems to be a temporary one, that won't even hit us straight away...
These new light bulbs are not ready yet. By the time they are ready, a new WiFi standard will be available, using a spectrum with which the bulbs do not interfere... Well, there may be some overlap, between early adopters of the new light technology, and people who cling to the outdated first WiFi.
For these people, how about requiring the use of Faraday Cage Light Shades [TM] around these new bulbs?
Re:Let's learn from "Unbreakable Oracle"
on
'Unbreakable Linux'
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So how about tamper evident, like food packaging?
You know, when you log in as root, you should hear the pop. If you don't, it means someone else has already r00t3d J00r 80X.
I'm not sure where I heard this first one; it concerns page breaks and wording, in a manual for some piece of agricultural machinery.
Open hatch [A] on the top of the machine, and reach inside to grasp drum [C]
<page break>
after having switched off the machine and having let it come to a complete halt.
You can imagine somebody starting to open tha hatch with the machine running...
My wife has a JVC stereo (from before I met her). The manual is in about a dozen languages (hey, I live in Europe); I read the French part. In the section on cleaning the external casing, there is the hilarious:
ne pas utiliser un amincissant
Which translates as "do not use a slimmming aid".
I am willing to bet a thousand thalers that this is a translation of the English phrase "do not use thinners".
Why do you people take so much notice of such bad journalism? This is a piece of sensationalist rubbish. A mountain is being made out of a molehill, for the sake of justifying the actions of the BSA. While we're on it, how about mentioning that the Business Software Alliance should not steal the use of the acronym BSA, which rightly means "Birmingham Small Arms", manufacturer of motor and pedal cycles (and perhaps small firearms, too).
I don't remember ever paying for a file (be it a piece of software, of music, or a pictorial image).
The nearest I have got to this is downloading a limited, evaluation copy of a program before ordering (by post) or buying (in a shop) the full version. I guess that I have done this approximately three times in the twenty three years that I have been using computers.
The article doesn't mention anything about the users who download an evaluation version of copyrighted work X, find it's a piece of rubbish, and never buy the full monty. But these people are counted, I am sure, in the group of "thieves" who "never pay for downloaded software". So, I'm in that group, too.
On the other hand, I have downloaded source code and pre-compiled binaries totalling probably something like twelve gigabytes of copyrighted works, entirely legally, without paying for it. There gain, the BuSofAll Boys want to count this as being theft.
So, a dodgy organisation carries out a dodgy survey (1026 people... where did the last two dissappear?) gets a dodgy article in a dodgy publication. I fart in the general direction of Ziff Davis, of the Business Software Alliance, and of anybody who takes this whole story with anything less than a very big pinch of salt.
I like to be able to watch films at home on DVD. That means playing them on my Linux box...
Luckily, Ogle uses libdvdcss, so I can watch DVDs that use the lame "scrambling". I'm dissapointed that the authors of Xine haven't included DeCSS support (they seem to have got cold feet).
But I have no intention of copying these films. This proves, to my mind, that DeCSS (or libdvdcss) has "significant legitimate use", in that it allows me to watch a film on DVD, which is the sole declared purpose of the DVDs in question.
Of course, I'm much less worried about that knock on the door at 3am, since I live in Europe, and the DMCA and all that Hollywood lobby hasn't bought of all our elected representatives.
Right, so you avoid using the product, or you could avoid Disney stuff. Cut off your nose to spite your face, while you're at it.
You want the convenience of this product, don't you? How feasible is it to build your own?
The administrators of my building took the antenna off the roof, and replaced it with cable from the local operator Noos (formerly Lyonnaise Cable). I get something like ten channels out of a coaxial socket. Now, with Xawtv or Kwintv I can watch these on my Linux box. Maybe one or both of these can be improved to record straight to disc... making a PVR.
Oh, and I suppose I should add that I watch DVDs on my box. Any zone, CSS no problem. Ogle is great. The menus work: subtitles, languages...
Slashdot Mirror
If your were'nt wearing trousers, and sat on your fat arse, your voice would be muffled........
Are you deliberately refusing to understand?
Maybe you're just very, very new to this discussion, and have missed the past twenty years' worth of debate.
First, I'll pick a hole in your over-simplified statement:
I'll give you a Snickers bar. If you receive it, just say thanks, and don't pay for it, you are not a thief.
Right, that's not so hard to understand, it it?
Now, last month I saw a photograph in a of a very nice wooden bowl, oval, about 35cm long and 8cm wide, hand carved in birch wood. It took the internationally renowned sculptor over 300 hours to make this one-off piece. I could buy it for 26 thousand thalers. Or I could get a piece of birch wood, quite legally, for nothing, sit down with my gouges, chisels, elbow grease, and make one for myself. Since there is no way that I would have paid the asking price for the original, my copy has not denied the sculptor of any revenue. Since I have not taken the original object, I have not denied anybody else possession of the object.
Now, imagine some very expensive piece of software and some Malaysian fifteen year old. He doesn't have the money to buy a license for the software, so he makes a copy that he uses in order to learn how to use it. The software editor doesn't lose any revenue, since the kid in question could not possibly have afforded to pay. The copy that the kid makes and uses does not deprive anybody else of enjoying possession or use of the software.
Final example, just to prove a point. Imagine that I have just lost all my life's savings because I followed the advice of some affluent merchant banker (half-euphemism) and put all my money into shares in a company run by a bunch of corrupt, greedy, and/or incompetent executives (on enormous salaries and whose own savings are quite safe, thankyou very much). Could be Enron, WorldCom, Vivendi... So, I've got just enough money to live on, and I'm looking for a job, and I go to an interview on the train without buying a ticket. It's 9am, and the train is packed. I get in and sit down. Now, I'm in the wrong; my presence is depriving someone else of a place.
Now, I an not a lwayer, but the point is that for there to be "theft", at least one of two conditions must be met:
There are too many individuals and corporations taking a "holier than thou" attitude, claiming that "software piracy is theft" when they are just out to fill their pockets as full and as quickly as possible, and are simply jealous in the most petty way conceivable, that someone can benefit from their work without paying for it. But at the same time, these indivduals and corporations set the minimum possible contribution at a level that is so high that it excludes too many possible contributors.
The way to stop copyright infringement (what the BSA and others would like to term "software piracy") is not by shouting very loudly "SOFTWARE PIRACY IS THEFT". It is by making contribution possible and even convenient!
Because, you have to admit it, if there was a way to pay an affordable one thaler for a personal (educational, non-commercial, or home) license, how many would go ahead if to do so required three or four hours of getting certificates, filling in credit-card forms, setting up secure payment schemes...... What we need is a secure, standardised, open, easy to use system of micropaymentss/strong>.
You seem to know quite a bit about this sort of thing. It's good to see this kind of post in DashSlot.
I would use the term 'transliteration' to describe your example... but then again, I'm a cunning linguist, not a microprocessor expert ;-)
How would you compare the "x86 decoder / RISC core" to the TransMeta "Code Morphing" engine, turning x86 code into VLIW code for the core?
Indonesians are supposed to drive on the left, but seem to drive in the shade and around the potholes. Oh, and around the one-way systems that change direction to take account of rush-hour traffic. But then, they also, apparently, drive like fish
I'm English, learned to drive in England; now live in France and have driven here since the month after I got my British licence.
I have noticed no inherent advantage to riving on the left or on the right. It's just a question of habit. Admittedly, it takes a bit of thought to be able to swap from one to the other; this would be a problem if, for example the Belgians drove on the left, with an open border with France... drive over the border without noticing, and you're on the wring side of the road!
Except that when the web site "suggests" a particular title because you have already bought similar books, and then claims that it's "on special offer today, 25% off", that should set alarm bells ringing!
There's a big, big difference between the bricks-and-mortar shop and the on-line store... In the bricks-and-mortar shop the price is physically displayed and, if you leave out haggling (negotiation) for simplicity's sake, the price is the same for each and every customer.
You've already been to the on-line store, the store has some kind of profile of your tastes. It can "suggest" a title, with a good chance that you'll buy. Just to ram home the message further, it pretends that there is (oh! happy chance!) that today, and only today, you are getting this title at a spacially reduced price. Unless you have a second browser open, connecting to the store as an anonymous first-timer, how are you going to check the "normal" price of the title? You should try it... you may well find that the price for a first-time buyer, with a special introductory discout on the first order, is much lower that the "special offer, today only" being touted.
That's great! I don't agree that tickets to concerts worth seeing will necessarily cost as much as you state.
However, this scenario will give us more live music and give us more of a participation culture.
We now have mostly recorded music, and a consumer/voyeuristic culture.
Thanks, Tom.
Why not mention that not everybody has a motherboard with high CPU-RAM bandwidth between the processor and the memory?
Moby assembled some quite nice tunes, I'll say that for him.
But I reckon he makes so much money from allowing his work to be used in advertising that his albums should be downloadable for free. I think most people have already payed for a copy of "Play" without knowing it.
And let's admit it, he borrows enormously heavily from old Blues and Gospel records... and does he pay anything for all the samples he's ripped?
This will show lots of links to sories about this AI lab...
choose one of the following, and write it out a hundred times:
I've been using Linux since 2.0.36 (RedHat, perhaps 4.2), and for the past three years or so Mandrake flavour, on a variety of Intel-based machines.
First of all on a home built 486/50MHz with 80MB disc and 8MB Ram, then Pentium 120MHz with 2.5GB disc and 64MB Ram (the small machine became a printer server for a while)
Currently I have a BP6 with 2 × 400MHz Celerons (overclocked to 550MHz) with 384MB Ram and about 20GB on three discs.
Straight out of the box, Mandrake 7.0 worked great. Mandrake 7.1 was admittedly a little flaky as an upgrade, but a full install worked much better. Release 8.0 was good, 8.1 even better and after a couple of months with 8.2 at home, I installed it yesterday at work on the server I look after.
Apps downloaded and compiled work fine (Ogle DVD player, lm_sensors, a few others) so it looks like the compilers, libraries and other development bits and pieces are all there. If lm_sensors (very low-level stuff on the I2c bus / SMBus) works on the BP6 (described by the manufacturer as an "experimental" board) without causing stability problems, then I call this a sturdy set-up.
If "consciousness" is a property of each elementary particle, perhaps we could add this to the list of quarks... Not just up, down, strange, charm and whatever... We now have a "soul" quark.
Now, how about we try to teleport with an "economy" mode, that recreates only half the mass of the original?
Billy, weighing 86 kilos, steps into the machine in Santa Clara. He steps out of the machine in Boulder weighing 43 kilos. If he has all the memories that he had when he was in Santa Clara, we may have demonstrated that consciousness is holographic; that all the information is present in each elementary particle. Maybe Billy's memory will be a little less precise that before. We will have invented "lossy compression of consciousness".
I'm off to file a patent!
I often takes trains in England surbubs, and I never yet been deaded by it.
I takes train every day in France, and it slowly killing me!
When you have learned what the "preview" button is for, maybe I'll take your comments seriously.
8 furlongs
1760 yards
Reading the Cringely article, the problem seems to be a temporary one, that won't even hit us straight away...
These new light bulbs are not ready yet. By the time they are ready, a new WiFi standard will be available, using a spectrum with which the bulbs do not interfere... Well, there may be some overlap, between early adopters of the new light technology, and people who cling to the outdated first WiFi.
For these people, how about requiring the use of Faraday Cage Light Shades [TM] around these new bulbs?
So how about tamper evident, like food packaging?
You know, when you log in as root, you should hear the pop. If you don't, it means someone else has already r00t3d J00r 80X.
Either you play with very costly equipment, or your life is worth very little
Two little anecdotes.
I'm not sure where I heard this first one; it concerns page breaks and wording, in a manual for some piece of agricultural machinery.
You can imagine somebody starting to open tha hatch with the machine running...
My wife has a JVC stereo (from before I met her). The manual is in about a dozen languages (hey, I live in Europe); I read the French part. In the section on cleaning the external casing, there is the hilarious:
Which translates as "do not use a slimmming aid". I am willing to bet a thousand thalers that this is a translation of the English phrase "do not use thinners".Why do you people take so much notice of such bad journalism? This is a piece of sensationalist rubbish. A mountain is being made out of a molehill, for the sake of justifying the actions of the BSA. While we're on it, how about mentioning that the Business Software Alliance should not steal the use of the acronym BSA, which rightly means "Birmingham Small Arms", manufacturer of motor and pedal cycles (and perhaps small firearms, too).
I don't remember ever paying for a file (be it a piece of software, of music, or a pictorial image).
The nearest I have got to this is downloading a limited, evaluation copy of a program before ordering (by post) or buying (in a shop) the full version. I guess that I have done this approximately three times in the twenty three years that I have been using computers.
The article doesn't mention anything about the users who download an evaluation version of copyrighted work X, find it's a piece of rubbish, and never buy the full monty. But these people are counted, I am sure, in the group of "thieves" who "never pay for downloaded software". So, I'm in that group, too.
On the other hand, I have downloaded source code and pre-compiled binaries totalling probably something like twelve gigabytes of copyrighted works, entirely legally, without paying for it. There gain, the BuSofAll Boys want to count this as being theft.
So, a dodgy organisation carries out a dodgy survey (1026 people... where did the last two dissappear?) gets a dodgy article in a dodgy publication. I fart in the general direction of Ziff Davis, of the Business Software Alliance, and of anybody who takes this whole story with anything less than a very big pinch of salt.
If you hosed your system by watercooling it, I think you need to go back to the design stage...
Here in France there are quite a few cities running buses on bio-diesel made from rapeseed oil (look for "je roule au colza" on the side of the bus).
Google searches for "veggie-van", "diester" (that's di-esterized vegetable oil), or "bio-diesel" turn up truckloads of links.
Which means that a government can use chemical weapons on its own population, but not on an enemy population...
this definition you cited includes CS gas as a chemical weapon, since it causes temporary incapacitation.
You used th "C" word!
I like to be able to watch films at home on DVD. That means playing them on my Linux box...
Luckily, Ogle uses libdvdcss, so I can watch DVDs that use the lame "scrambling". I'm dissapointed that the authors of Xine haven't included DeCSS support (they seem to have got cold feet).
But I have no intention of copying these films. This proves, to my mind, that DeCSS (or libdvdcss) has "significant legitimate use", in that it allows me to watch a film on DVD, which is the sole declared purpose of the DVDs in question.
Of course, I'm much less worried about that knock on the door at 3am, since I live in Europe, and the DMCA and all that Hollywood lobby hasn't bought of all our elected representatives.
Right, so you avoid using the product, or you could avoid Disney stuff. Cut off your nose to spite your face, while you're at it.
You want the convenience of this product, don't you? How feasible is it to build your own?
The administrators of my building took the antenna off the roof, and replaced it with cable from the local operator Noos (formerly Lyonnaise Cable). I get something like ten channels out of a coaxial socket. Now, with Xawtv or Kwintv I can watch these on my Linux box. Maybe one or both of these can be improved to record straight to disc... making a PVR.
Oh, and I suppose I should add that I watch DVDs on my box. Any zone, CSS no problem. Ogle is great. The menus work: subtitles, languages...
No.
The low-intensity X-rays used at airports don't even cloud film, unless you have special (X-ray sensitive?) film.
Of course, you can always insist on a hand check, as you point out.