No, we're saying it's not OK to pirate, and it's even worse to pirate and then sell it, and then suggest that the artist should pay us for the privilege.
Kind of like we say it's not OK to point a gun at someone, and it's even more not OK to shoot them, and it's especially not OK to then charge them for the bullet.
Well, assuming they're not behind a pay wall, they are in the public domain. But even works which are in the public domain through the permission of their authors cannot be copied and put in the private domain for profit without obtaining permission.
If I take a picture and put it on my website, I am giving everyone who has access to the site implicit permission to view it, and of course I am giving implicit permission to my web host to host the file. I am not giving them permission to download it, adjust it a bit in photoshop, and then publish it in a book of photography for $50 a copy.
You're right in that my post was not at all intended as a flame-bait. But we disagree on the rest.
Here in the USA we have a distinct legal line between competent and incompetent - - and those are not pejorative terms when used here, they simply refer to people who are not capable of properly supervising themselves. Children, even those older than 5, are not capable of consistently making good decisions. That's why they live with their parents until they're adults. The parents are supposed to watch their children and do their best to make sure the children aren't doing things that will lead to disaster.
As I said in another sub-reply, if your kid is well-behaved and responsible, then spying on his phone conversation is probably (and I say probably because even well-behaved and responsible kids can get into trouble through no fault of their own) going too far.
But if your kid has been caught doing drugs, or stealing, or he hangs out with gang members (all of these are not uncommon among American teenagers), then it would be irresponsible of the parent not to do everything possible to monitor the kid's behavior, and put a stop to bad decisions.
Put another way, if as a parent I determine that my kid might be using his phone to engage in bad behavior, then I'm going to check into it. And if I can't, then he's going to lose the phone.
BTW, in this country the terms "freedom of expression" and "right to privacy" involve restrictions on what the government can and can't do. They do not trump parental responsibilities.
To be quite clear, children do not and should not have the right to freedom of expression beyond that which the parent approves of (No, son, you may not dress as a Nazi and scream "white power" while you live in my house) and they do not have the right to privacy beyond that which the parent approves of (no, son, you may not take your girlfriend into your bedroom and lock the door).
The government cannot tell my child what he can or can't say, and the government cannot spy on my child, but I can, and when necessary, I will.
I wasn't making a comment on the effectiveness of the tactic. I was making the comment that kids don't have the right to privacy. I know nothing of your childhood, but if you were a "good kid" then your mom was over the line. But if, for instance, you had been caught smoking dope behind the stadium, then you deserved what you got. Either way, what your mom did was not illegal, and neither is spying on a kid's phone activities.
One would presume that a mechanic would pay a licensing fee and then be allowed to print 1 copy of whatever part he needed, like newspapers do with copyrighted photos today. If it's a really popular part, like the 9 foot tall wings people put on their Civics, he could probably pay a 1 year volume license fee and print as many as he wanted.
Better yet, he could measure all the bolt holes and print his own part, that doesn't match the factory specs, but radically changes its appearance. Custom-designed bodykits anyone?
Bull. They just have to go through the back door, as Rove has done by forming his own corporation which runs ads on behalf of the politicians he chooses. Sure, the money never actually passes through the politician's hands, but it's used exclusively for his benefit.
This is the same utter BS that the Republicans have been trying to convince us of for over 3 decades.
I'm not going to bother dissecting your post point by point, but I will make a couple observations:
First, Verizon isn't making the public whole. That's the whole point of Sonny's post. They're paying back less than a third of the *conservative* estimate of what they stole. That sounds like a great arrangement to me. Hell, I'd be happy to rob 30 grand from a bank, and then give them 10 grand back and have the case be dropped. That's a great way to make a quick 20 thou. Funny how Verizon gets away with it, but I'd be in jail for decades.
Which brings me to my second: What was that you were saying about being fair in our judicial system and criminal prosecution?
Then you bring up the tired old Republican line of "Fines are REALLY punitive and REALLY teach corporations lessons." That's a load of crap. Microsoft made $6.66 BILLION in pure profit in Q42009. If they commit a crime and we fine them even a hundred million, which is a level of fine we almost never see levied on corporations, they will earn it back in about a day and a half. That's not a penalty. It's a minor annoyance.
The idea that fining corporations will make them behave is total crap, as has been proven by the bevy of corporations who illegally screw their customers despite the "awful, damaging fines."
The really amusing bit is that corporations are legally considered people, unless it's disadvantageous to the corporation in a given situation. Want to donate to a politician? You're a PERSON! Want to run ads blasting another politician? You're a PERSON!
Want to avoid the felony grand theft penalties PEOPLE face when they steal millions of dollars? Oh, well, OK, I guess you're not a person until the judge makes his decision on the penalty you face.
To my way of thinking, if corporations want to be considered people, then that's fine. But if the corporation commits a crime, it goes to jail, by which I mean no business transactions except for payment of debt, at ALL, for the length of the jail sentence. Verizon steals millions of dollars? Guess what folks? You're shut down for the 1-20 year jail sentence. Yes, that will ruin you, but you're the one who wanted to be a person.
Yeah, you might well be right. Hell who'd have thought an OS/word processor company would have achieved supreme dominance in home flight simulation? And then who'd have thought that they'd abruptly exit the genre and fire everyone associated with it. And then re-enter the genre with some new thing that they won't release details on?;)
MS has certainly done some unexpected things in the past, but unlike Xbox, WP7 is not their first entry into its market. And enough of us have had miserable experiences with previous WinMo phones that we might not want to give them more money for it, even if WP7 really were as good as my Droid.
I think the core of what I'm thinking is that just about everything Microsoft has ever done that has been wildly successful was either bought or stolen from other companies. Windows was swiped from Apple (who admittedly stole it from Xerox), Flight Sim was bought from SubLogic, and Office was pretty much a no-brainer that drew ideas from Wordstar (and presumably the typewriter;) ), and hell, even their launch product MSDOS was just a reworked QDOS.
In short, they've historically not been very innovative as far as figuring out what people will want and being the first to bring it to market. About the only thing I can think of that they really pioneered was the Office Assistant, and who the hell wants that?
So as I said in another reply, I hope you guys are right and they do make a go of WP7, but history says I have a pretty good chance of not being proven wrong.
Hell I hope you're right. Three major non-Blackberry players in the smartphone market will only be good, as far as I'm concerned, as it'll push development of hardware and software.
But then I look at MS's track record in the mobile field and start to worry that you're wrong.
Your first two points are absolutely correct, but ignore the fact that the herd is stampeding (stupidly, imo) headlong toward the mystical Cloud. Microsoft needs to be ahead of the herd in order to survive on the consumer market. And in today's ADD consumer market, that means being able to change course about every 6 months in some areas.
Your WP7 point is equally valid, but I think it might be a case of too-little, too-late. The iPhone users aren't going to change unless Apple literally starts shipping bricks with their logo on them instead of real phones. And some might not even change then. The rest of us who were waiting for a useful smart phone to come along that did not have a piece of fruit on the back, have already switched to Android. And why would I spend a few hundred to give up my Droid when I'm perfectly happy with it, and it does everything I need in a beautiful interface?
Microsoft may be commercially dying but as for Linux, it's hard to commercially die when you haven't even been born. And that's why it's going to stay around for a nice long time. It's free, and the type of people who read/. are generally the type of people willing to separate from the herd and try something new. Especially if it's free. And being free and opensource, Linux doesn't really have to get popular in order to survive.
And what's more, you guys shouldn't WANT it to get popular. Remember yesterday's "games are too easy because they got popular and had to be dumbed down for the unwashed masses" thread? You really want that to happen to Linux?
I noticed this trend first in the Sierra games. Used to be you had to type in what you wanted to do. Then they went to a mouse interface, so if you were stuck you could just click randomly around the screen until you hit the trigger point. The challenge level between Space Quest 1 and Space Quest 5 dropped off a cliff.
Did you know you can still play it? There are independent servers still running, and the original publisher has released the client to the public domain. Do a quick search and you'll find 'em. I still load it from time to time.
The trick now is finding vanilla servers. Most of them have been modded so that every weapon is uber, and then a heavy just sits at his base entrance and blows hell out of you when you poke your head outside of your base.
Assuming he hard coded it onto the CPU, where's he going to find a microchip fabrication facility in the Old West? The blacksmith just isn't gonna cut it;)
If it's user-programmable, then where's he going to find the PC to interface with the DeLorean?
Better to just work with the way the time machine was designed, since if you screw something up you'll theoretically be stuck.
Of course, the immediate argument against this will be that the "you can't build this crap in the 1800's" theory goes out the window with the flying time traveling train at the end of III. But if you're thinking that, you're forgetting about that second DeLorean TFA talked about. The Doc probably cannibalized that. Getting Marty back was mission critical - no point sending him back to 1985 after 5 years of rebuilding because his age would be wrong.
Getting the doc's family through time didn't have to happen right away, and after the near-disaster with Marty's trip, the Doc would probably have wanted to spend a lot of time making sure things were nice and safe before he made the trip.
More likely the Doc didn't want to build the required infrastructure to support twice the plutonium. You'd have to put more shielding in there and, depending on design, have twin detonation chambers rather than just the one. After all, the plutonium presumably is essentially blown up since we've seen that all the energy required for the time jump is consumed at the beginning, otherwise the bolt of lightning wouldn't have been able to sustain the entire trip back to 1985.
All this would add mass, which would probably effect the time travel itself (requiring more fuel to carry more fuel), and would also compromise the handling of the vehicle when it was being driven around.
Not necessarily. It could have been just a safety interlock that the Doc built in, to be sure you were REALLY committed to the timejump. 88 is an unlikely speed to hit just driving around town. If he'd not put in that interlock, and just had a button to initiate the time travel instead, it'd pretty much suck if you accidentally bumped it and only had the one vial of plutonium in the chamber. Remember he'd set it at one point to go to the birth of Jesus. If he'd accidentally hit the button, it's fairly unlikely that even Christ himself could have gotten you the necessary plutonium to get back home.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're saying it's not OK to pirate, and it's even worse to pirate and then sell it, and then suggest that the artist should pay us for the privilege.
Kind of like we say it's not OK to point a gun at someone, and it's even more not OK to shoot them, and it's especially not OK to then charge them for the bullet.
Well, assuming they're not behind a pay wall, they are in the public domain. But even works which are in the public domain through the permission of their authors cannot be copied and put in the private domain for profit without obtaining permission.
If I take a picture and put it on my website, I am giving everyone who has access to the site implicit permission to view it, and of course I am giving implicit permission to my web host to host the file. I am not giving them permission to download it, adjust it a bit in photoshop, and then publish it in a book of photography for $50 a copy.
You're right in that my post was not at all intended as a flame-bait. But we disagree on the rest.
Here in the USA we have a distinct legal line between competent and incompetent - - and those are not pejorative terms when used here, they simply refer to people who are not capable of properly supervising themselves. Children, even those older than 5, are not capable of consistently making good decisions. That's why they live with their parents until they're adults. The parents are supposed to watch their children and do their best to make sure the children aren't doing things that will lead to disaster.
As I said in another sub-reply, if your kid is well-behaved and responsible, then spying on his phone conversation is probably (and I say probably because even well-behaved and responsible kids can get into trouble through no fault of their own) going too far.
But if your kid has been caught doing drugs, or stealing, or he hangs out with gang members (all of these are not uncommon among American teenagers), then it would be irresponsible of the parent not to do everything possible to monitor the kid's behavior, and put a stop to bad decisions.
Put another way, if as a parent I determine that my kid might be using his phone to engage in bad behavior, then I'm going to check into it. And if I can't, then he's going to lose the phone.
BTW, in this country the terms "freedom of expression" and "right to privacy" involve restrictions on what the government can and can't do. They do not trump parental responsibilities.
To be quite clear, children do not and should not have the right to freedom of expression beyond that which the parent approves of (No, son, you may not dress as a Nazi and scream "white power" while you live in my house) and they do not have the right to privacy beyond that which the parent approves of (no, son, you may not take your girlfriend into your bedroom and lock the door).
The government cannot tell my child what he can or can't say, and the government cannot spy on my child, but I can, and when necessary, I will.
I wasn't making a comment on the effectiveness of the tactic. I was making the comment that kids don't have the right to privacy. I know nothing of your childhood, but if you were a "good kid" then your mom was over the line. But if, for instance, you had been caught smoking dope behind the stadium, then you deserved what you got. Either way, what your mom did was not illegal, and neither is spying on a kid's phone activities.
How is 200mpg worse than a conventional vehicle?
One would presume that a mechanic would pay a licensing fee and then be allowed to print 1 copy of whatever part he needed, like newspapers do with copyrighted photos today. If it's a really popular part, like the 9 foot tall wings people put on their Civics, he could probably pay a 1 year volume license fee and print as many as he wanted.
Better yet, he could measure all the bolt holes and print his own part, that doesn't match the factory specs, but radically changes its appearance. Custom-designed bodykits anyone?
I noticed this app. . Must be 6 months ago now. I reported it. Seems they finally listened.
Children do not have a right to privacy from their parents.
Adults enjoy rights and freedoms that children do not.
Bull. They just have to go through the back door, as Rove has done by forming his own corporation which runs ads on behalf of the politicians he chooses. Sure, the money never actually passes through the politician's hands, but it's used exclusively for his benefit.
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-21/politics/campaign.finance.ruling_1_corporate-campaign-spending-supreme-court-money-into-election-campaigns?_s=PM:POLITICS
This is the same utter BS that the Republicans have been trying to convince us of for over 3 decades.
I'm not going to bother dissecting your post point by point, but I will make a couple observations:
First, Verizon isn't making the public whole. That's the whole point of Sonny's post. They're paying back less than a third of the *conservative* estimate of what they stole. That sounds like a great arrangement to me. Hell, I'd be happy to rob 30 grand from a bank, and then give them 10 grand back and have the case be dropped. That's a great way to make a quick 20 thou. Funny how Verizon gets away with it, but I'd be in jail for decades.
Which brings me to my second: What was that you were saying about being fair in our judicial system and criminal prosecution?
Then you bring up the tired old Republican line of "Fines are REALLY punitive and REALLY teach corporations lessons." That's a load of crap. Microsoft made $6.66 BILLION in pure profit in Q42009. If they commit a crime and we fine them even a hundred million, which is a level of fine we almost never see levied on corporations, they will earn it back in about a day and a half. That's not a penalty. It's a minor annoyance.
The idea that fining corporations will make them behave is total crap, as has been proven by the bevy of corporations who illegally screw their customers despite the "awful, damaging fines."
The really amusing bit is that corporations are legally considered people, unless it's disadvantageous to the corporation in a given situation. Want to donate to a politician? You're a PERSON! Want to run ads blasting another politician? You're a PERSON!
Want to avoid the felony grand theft penalties PEOPLE face when they steal millions of dollars? Oh, well, OK, I guess you're not a person until the judge makes his decision on the penalty you face.
To my way of thinking, if corporations want to be considered people, then that's fine. But if the corporation commits a crime, it goes to jail, by which I mean no business transactions except for payment of debt, at ALL, for the length of the jail sentence. Verizon steals millions of dollars? Guess what folks? You're shut down for the 1-20 year jail sentence. Yes, that will ruin you, but you're the one who wanted to be a person.
Helicopters, I think. ;)
What the. . . Hell. . are you talking about?
Yeah, you might well be right. Hell who'd have thought an OS/word processor company would have achieved supreme dominance in home flight simulation? And then who'd have thought that they'd abruptly exit the genre and fire everyone associated with it. And then re-enter the genre with some new thing that they won't release details on? ;)
MS has certainly done some unexpected things in the past, but unlike Xbox, WP7 is not their first entry into its market. And enough of us have had miserable experiences with previous WinMo phones that we might not want to give them more money for it, even if WP7 really were as good as my Droid.
I think the core of what I'm thinking is that just about everything Microsoft has ever done that has been wildly successful was either bought or stolen from other companies. Windows was swiped from Apple (who admittedly stole it from Xerox), Flight Sim was bought from SubLogic, and Office was pretty much a no-brainer that drew ideas from Wordstar (and presumably the typewriter ;) ), and hell, even their launch product MSDOS was just a reworked QDOS.
In short, they've historically not been very innovative as far as figuring out what people will want and being the first to bring it to market. About the only thing I can think of that they really pioneered was the Office Assistant, and who the hell wants that?
So as I said in another reply, I hope you guys are right and they do make a go of WP7, but history says I have a pretty good chance of not being proven wrong.
Hell I hope you're right. Three major non-Blackberry players in the smartphone market will only be good, as far as I'm concerned, as it'll push development of hardware and software.
But then I look at MS's track record in the mobile field and start to worry that you're wrong.
Your first two points are absolutely correct, but ignore the fact that the herd is stampeding (stupidly, imo) headlong toward the mystical Cloud. Microsoft needs to be ahead of the herd in order to survive on the consumer market. And in today's ADD consumer market, that means being able to change course about every 6 months in some areas.
Your WP7 point is equally valid, but I think it might be a case of too-little, too-late. The iPhone users aren't going to change unless Apple literally starts shipping bricks with their logo on them instead of real phones. And some might not even change then. The rest of us who were waiting for a useful smart phone to come along that did not have a piece of fruit on the back, have already switched to Android. And why would I spend a few hundred to give up my Droid when I'm perfectly happy with it, and it does everything I need in a beautiful interface?
Microsoft may be commercially dying but as for Linux, it's hard to commercially die when you haven't even been born. And that's why it's going to stay around for a nice long time. It's free, and the type of people who read /. are generally the type of people willing to separate from the herd and try something new. Especially if it's free. And being free and opensource, Linux doesn't really have to get popular in order to survive.
And what's more, you guys shouldn't WANT it to get popular. Remember yesterday's "games are too easy because they got popular and had to be dumbed down for the unwashed masses" thread? You really want that to happen to Linux?
Neither would I. But I wouldn't confuse "Actually having to think about the problem and type a solution" with "obtuse interface" either.
"Get keycard" is not obtuse, but it does require you to look around and find the keycard.
Clicking around the screen randomly until you happen to click on the keycard is not challenging.
I noticed this trend first in the Sierra games. Used to be you had to type in what you wanted to do. Then they went to a mouse interface, so if you were stuck you could just click randomly around the screen until you hit the trigger point. The challenge level between Space Quest 1 and Space Quest 5 dropped off a cliff.
Did you know you can still play it? There are independent servers still running, and the original publisher has released the client to the public domain. Do a quick search and you'll find 'em. I still load it from time to time.
The trick now is finding vanilla servers. Most of them have been modded so that every weapon is uber, and then a heavy just sits at his base entrance and blows hell out of you when you poke your head outside of your base.
-laughs-
Well played.
Assuming he hard coded it onto the CPU, where's he going to find a microchip fabrication facility in the Old West? The blacksmith just isn't gonna cut it ;)
If it's user-programmable, then where's he going to find the PC to interface with the DeLorean?
Better to just work with the way the time machine was designed, since if you screw something up you'll theoretically be stuck.
Of course, the immediate argument against this will be that the "you can't build this crap in the 1800's" theory goes out the window with the flying time traveling train at the end of III. But if you're thinking that, you're forgetting about that second DeLorean TFA talked about. The Doc probably cannibalized that. Getting Marty back was mission critical - no point sending him back to 1985 after 5 years of rebuilding because his age would be wrong.
Getting the doc's family through time didn't have to happen right away, and after the near-disaster with Marty's trip, the Doc would probably have wanted to spend a lot of time making sure things were nice and safe before he made the trip.
Maybe with an adjustable lens to point it up and down.
I have a beam-angle-adjustment mechanism already. It's called a neck ;)
More likely the Doc didn't want to build the required infrastructure to support twice the plutonium. You'd have to put more shielding in there and, depending on design, have twin detonation chambers rather than just the one. After all, the plutonium presumably is essentially blown up since we've seen that all the energy required for the time jump is consumed at the beginning, otherwise the bolt of lightning wouldn't have been able to sustain the entire trip back to 1985.
All this would add mass, which would probably effect the time travel itself (requiring more fuel to carry more fuel), and would also compromise the handling of the vehicle when it was being driven around.
Not necessarily. It could have been just a safety interlock that the Doc built in, to be sure you were REALLY committed to the timejump. 88 is an unlikely speed to hit just driving around town. If he'd not put in that interlock, and just had a button to initiate the time travel instead, it'd pretty much suck if you accidentally bumped it and only had the one vial of plutonium in the chamber. Remember he'd set it at one point to go to the birth of Jesus. If he'd accidentally hit the button, it's fairly unlikely that even Christ himself could have gotten you the necessary plutonium to get back home.