Hmmm, you're responding to a guy who's just pointed out the futility of using personal testimonials in these kinds of arguments, and your brilliant rebuttal is... a personal testimonial.
Sometimes I think the drug issue is to convoluted and emotional to ever make any sense of. No one will ever admit that their drug of choice is causing them brain damage, because who wants to be known as "that brain-damaged guy"? By the same token, no government agency will admit that the drug doesn't cause brain damage, because there's too much at stake. And, I hate to say it, but I doubt that more than 5% of the population, tops, can remain objective.
Can anyone think of a drug user who admits that their favorite drug might have nasty side effects? Or a drug virgin who admits that the government's stance on drugs could be completely wrong? Hmmm...
Re:Commodities and art.. Art? Ha.
on
Pay Lars
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· Score: 1
Yeah, don't people have any taste? Personally, I think you should be able to go into Tower Records and pay $17.99 for a CD-ROM full of uncommented CGI scripts. Now, that's art.
Hey, wait a minute, I am an artist. And when my band gets together enough money to record, we're going to put everything up on mp3.com and hope it makes its way to Napster - because everyone knows artists actually make their real money on concerts. I've got friends who did exactly that and it's really helped out with exposure and concert revenue.
And it's my deeply-held belief that when someone makes more than $3 or $4 million on art, they should shut up and stop whining - about anything - forever.
Also, although this is beside the point, Metallica has always sucked. Stupid butt metal.
Writing CGIs isn't the equivalent of blueprinting designs. It's an art - like painting. Did Michaelangelo put little hash signs all over the Sistine and stencil in "I used a #5 brush here" or "This paint was made from pig fat"?
So, maybe people will want to review your code because they're bored or want to make themselves seem useful, but if they're actually worth anything as programmers, they'll be able to figure out how you did it.
That's funny, I seem to remember a Saturday Night Live sketch where Alan Greenspan was a pawn of evil Canadians trying to destroy our economy. And as far as I know, SNL is still on the air.
> The real problem is an industry that wants to be immune to the way the Internet has changed the business landscape.
See, this is the point that everyone overlooks. Yes, of course, it's illegal to trade copywrited songs, and probably wrong, to steal music, but record companies can't just prevent the public from using a new technology. We're smarter than them, and we have more manpower.
The only question is whether this is going to be more like alcohol prohibition (where the powers that be realized that they couldn't win the fight and figured out there was a lot of money to be made) or marijuana prohibition (where one in a thousand smokers is slapped with a token arrest and the rest of them live in fear and bitterness of the government)
Yeah, I actually know the lawyer who sued Judas Priest on a first-name basis.
Supposedly there were "subliminal messages" on the album that our brains could decode despite the fact that they were backwards.
For example, one of the court exhibits was a five-second clip of music played backwards: it sounded like "goggit gooooogy" which, according to the prosecution, was clearly "commit suicide"
This kind of lawsuit, though, doesn't really have anything to do with Napster or copyrights. In fact, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything.
Agreed. If Gates ran for President, it would guarantee the Democratic party victory.
Why is it that third-party candidates always hurt the Republicans, anyway? Maybe it's because successful businessmen, religious zealots, military nuts, and rednecks have such a tentative agreement to play on the same team.
Of course, if Al Gore were president, with his "computer-friendly" image but complete lack of actual computing knowledge, he might do a lot of things very beneficial to Microsoft. So, in conclusion, Gates should run in 2000.
When you talk about Napster stealing from legitimate artists, keep in mind that the artists in question - the people who actually make the music - make comparatively little money from royalties. Their money comes primarily from concerts, endorsements, and merchandising.
When you buy a CD, most of your money is going to the cost of Distribution - and if the means of distribution has been rendered obselete, we shouldn't have to keep paying for the old, outdated method, out of some sense of duty or tradition.
Obviously our environment has effects on who we will become, but consider identical twin (i.e. clone) studies:
When two identical twins are raised together, they usually develop completely opposite views, interests, philosophies, hobbies, etc. This is called "twinning" and it seems to be a basic human response to the need to be an individual.
However, some studies have been done on identical twins separated at birth - and they're amazing. One pair, for example, was reunited after forty-something years. They were both firefighters, they both had relatively the same income, they had both been married at roughly the same age, and their wives looked the same.
Remember - it might be in Michael Jordan's genetic coding to have the Drive (not just the ability) to play basketball - and unless some environmental situation "shuts him off", it doesn't seem unlikely that he, or any of his clones, would develop the same way.
We've all seen "freenets" before - consider USENET back in 1990 before anyone in authority really knew what it was.
Sure, the potential for really useful information arose, but let's face it, if something is legal and useful, the author will put it on the web.
Does anyone remember early USENET? Or IRC? You had to crawl through so much spam, porn, warez, trojans, flames, ads, misrepresented files, files that didn't work, and just general nuisances, that unless you were there specifically for one of the above-mentioned reasons, it was useless.
I have no doubt that the first file I downloaded on FreeNet would actually be an advertisement for alladvantage.com... grrr
It's very difficult to make legal analogies when we're dealing with electronic media. You cannot physically "hand" a criminal your neighbor's crowbar if he keeps it in his toolshed. But, you can link directly to a file - making the link essentially the equivalent of the file. Your average kid who wants to play DVDs doesn't care where the file literally came from.
Also, in this case, the copyright protection is more important than the media itself. The MPAA is well-aware that once the player gets out, piracy will be completely out of control (consider the effect of WinPlay3 and, later, Winamp and Sonique). Anyone can figure out how to rip a file to their hard drive. Not anyone can figure out what to do with it.
What the MPAA really needs to figure out is that it's inevitable that all media will eventually be as good as free, and figure out other ways to make money. Eventually, I'm willing to bet, DVDs will be as free as TV - and they'll have commercials every 10 minutes.
There should be a major market for Linux-based music software, because the pre-existing Win and Mac software is terrible. Possibly this problem arises from the fact that very few people share interests in coding and in music theory. I don't want to get into the problems at length, but they include: 1. Staff notation for writing/editing - this was useful in the 17th century on parchment, but on a computer, it's one of the worst interfaces I can imagine. I know some people still want it, but little alternative is provided. The one other notation, "piano roll", is even worse. 2. Complete lack of interpretation on the staff - come on, how hard can it be to determine why an accidental exists?? Professional musicians are confused by finding an A sharp when they expect a B flat. 3. Reliance on only MIDI and WAV - MIDI sounds terrible, and electronic music has so much more potential than being used as an expensive 4-track. Professional software completely fails to incorporate MOD or its upgrades, or support for mixing soundfonts into the audio, or anything. There are more. Personally, I and many other musicians I know feel an intense need for open-source music software - after all, composition was pretty much perfected in the 16th century, and ever since Hendrix tried ripping up his amp tubes, modern musical creativity has relied almost entirely on experimenting with and modifying sound and the media that produce it.
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Hmmm, you're responding to a guy who's just pointed out the futility of using personal testimonials in these kinds of arguments, and your brilliant rebuttal is... a personal testimonial.
Sometimes I think the drug issue is to convoluted and emotional to ever make any sense of. No one will ever admit that their drug of choice is causing them brain damage, because who wants to be known as "that brain-damaged guy"? By the same token, no government agency will admit that the drug doesn't cause brain damage, because there's too much at stake. And, I hate to say it, but I doubt that more than 5% of the population, tops, can remain objective.
Can anyone think of a drug user who admits that their favorite drug might have nasty side effects? Or a drug virgin who admits that the government's stance on drugs could be completely wrong? Hmmm...
Yeah, don't people have any taste? Personally, I think you should be able to go into Tower Records and pay $17.99 for a CD-ROM full of uncommented CGI scripts. Now, that's art.
Hey, wait a minute, I am an artist. And when my band gets together enough money to record, we're going to put everything up on mp3.com and hope it makes its way to Napster - because everyone knows artists actually make their real money on concerts. I've got friends who did exactly that and it's really helped out with exposure and concert revenue.
And it's my deeply-held belief that when someone makes more than $3 or $4 million on art, they should shut up and stop whining - about anything - forever.
Also, although this is beside the point, Metallica has always sucked. Stupid butt metal.
I say, screw commenting code.
Writing CGIs isn't the equivalent of blueprinting designs. It's an art - like painting. Did Michaelangelo put little hash signs all over the Sistine and stencil in "I used a #5 brush here" or "This paint was made from pig fat"?
So, maybe people will want to review your code because they're bored or want to make themselves seem useful, but if they're actually worth anything as programmers, they'll be able to figure out how you did it.
This is one of the funniest things I have ever read, and should be moderated up.
See, here I was out smashing windows in Seattle and the whoe time I was just helping a crappy Japanese law stay on the books.
That's funny, I seem to remember a Saturday Night Live sketch where Alan Greenspan was a pawn of evil Canadians trying to destroy our economy. And as far as I know, SNL is still on the air.
> The real problem is an industry that wants to be immune to the way the Internet has changed the business landscape.
See, this is the point that everyone overlooks. Yes, of course, it's illegal to trade copywrited songs, and probably wrong, to steal music, but record companies can't just prevent the public from using a new technology. We're smarter than them, and we have more manpower.
The only question is whether this is going to be more like alcohol prohibition (where the powers that be realized that they couldn't win the fight and figured out there was a lot of money to be made) or marijuana prohibition (where one in a thousand smokers is slapped with a token arrest and the rest of them live in fear and bitterness of the government)
Yeah, I actually know the lawyer who sued Judas Priest on a first-name basis.
Supposedly there were "subliminal messages" on the album that our brains could decode despite the fact that they were backwards.
For example, one of the court exhibits was a five-second clip of music played backwards: it sounded like "goggit gooooogy" which, according to the prosecution, was clearly "commit suicide"
This kind of lawsuit, though, doesn't really have anything to do with Napster or copyrights. In fact, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything.
Agreed. If Gates ran for President, it would guarantee the Democratic party victory.
Why is it that third-party candidates always hurt the Republicans, anyway? Maybe it's because successful businessmen, religious zealots, military nuts, and rednecks have such a tentative agreement to play on the same team.
Of course, if Al Gore were president, with his "computer-friendly" image but complete lack of actual computing knowledge, he might do a lot of things very beneficial to Microsoft. So, in conclusion, Gates should run in 2000.
Isn't it ironic that Mr. Reed was hired for the very same task he's intended to accomplish?
When you talk about Napster stealing from legitimate artists, keep in mind that the artists in question - the people who actually make the music - make comparatively little money from royalties. Their money comes primarily from concerts, endorsements, and merchandising.
When you buy a CD, most of your money is going to the cost of Distribution - and if the means of distribution has been rendered obselete, we shouldn't have to keep paying for the old, outdated method, out of some sense of duty or tradition.
Obviously our environment has effects on who we will become, but consider identical twin (i.e. clone) studies:
When two identical twins are raised together, they usually develop completely opposite views, interests, philosophies, hobbies, etc. This is called "twinning" and it seems to be a basic human response to the need to be an individual.
However, some studies have been done on identical twins separated at birth - and they're amazing. One pair, for example, was reunited after forty-something years. They were both firefighters, they both had relatively the same income, they had both been married at roughly the same age, and their wives looked the same.
Remember - it might be in Michael Jordan's genetic coding to have the Drive (not just the ability) to play basketball - and unless some environmental situation "shuts him off", it doesn't seem unlikely that he, or any of his clones, would develop the same way.
We've all seen "freenets" before - consider USENET back in 1990 before anyone in authority really knew what it was.
Sure, the potential for really useful information arose, but let's face it, if something is legal and useful, the author will put it on the web.
Does anyone remember early USENET? Or IRC? You had to crawl through so much spam, porn, warez, trojans, flames, ads, misrepresented files, files that didn't work, and just general nuisances, that unless you were there specifically for one of the above-mentioned reasons, it was useless.
I have no doubt that the first file I downloaded on FreeNet would actually be an advertisement for alladvantage.com... grrr
It's very difficult to make legal analogies when we're dealing with electronic media. You cannot physically "hand" a criminal your neighbor's crowbar if he keeps it in his toolshed. But, you can link directly to a file - making the link essentially the equivalent of the file. Your average kid who wants to play DVDs doesn't care where the file literally came from.
Also, in this case, the copyright protection is more important than the media itself. The MPAA is well-aware that once the player gets out, piracy will be completely out of control (consider the effect of WinPlay3 and, later, Winamp and Sonique). Anyone can figure out how to rip a file to their hard drive. Not anyone can figure out what to do with it.
What the MPAA really needs to figure out is that it's inevitable that all media will eventually be as good as free, and figure out other ways to make money. Eventually, I'm willing to bet, DVDs will be as free as TV - and they'll have commercials every 10 minutes.
There should be a major market for Linux-based music software, because the pre-existing Win and Mac software is terrible. Possibly this problem arises from the fact that very few people share interests in coding and in music theory. I don't want to get into the problems at length, but they include: 1. Staff notation for writing/editing - this was useful in the 17th century on parchment, but on a computer, it's one of the worst interfaces I can imagine. I know some people still want it, but little alternative is provided. The one other notation, "piano roll", is even worse. 2. Complete lack of interpretation on the staff - come on, how hard can it be to determine why an accidental exists?? Professional musicians are confused by finding an A sharp when they expect a B flat. 3. Reliance on only MIDI and WAV - MIDI sounds terrible, and electronic music has so much more potential than being used as an expensive 4-track. Professional software completely fails to incorporate MOD or its upgrades, or support for mixing soundfonts into the audio, or anything. There are more. Personally, I and many other musicians I know feel an intense need for open-source music software - after all, composition was pretty much perfected in the 16th century, and ever since Hendrix tried ripping up his amp tubes, modern musical creativity has relied almost entirely on experimenting with and modifying sound and the media that produce it.