"slippery slope" isn't a logical fallacy in a courtroom. It's a valid argument, and oftentimes a compelling one.
The courts are also extremely reticent to rule on hypothetical future damages which COULD occur in theory but as yet HAVEN'T, as evidenced by Eldred v. Ashcroft and many other cases.
Please don't use the same word to refer to robbery and murder on the high seas, and copyright violation
Please don't avoid answering the question by nitpicking terminology. Is it okay to violate copyright by making unlicensed copies of games and software?
after three decades [...] our society several times more violent
Funny you should say that, because according to the DOJ violent crime has trended downward significantly since the early 1970's.
Where did you get your information from?
I've been suggesting for years that a model similar to that of songwriter royalites should be applied - copying is free (just like singing a song), profit-making use rquires royalties.
But singing a song isn't "copying" -- duplicating sheet music for the song is.
A resolution is not a law. Basically, the state government was ASKING the Dixie Chicks to perform a free concert, not FORCING them to. It was still wrong of South Carolina, though.
Howard Stern was dropped from a handful of stations (he's on hundreds) in markets that he was doing poorly in.
Perhaps you haven't been following the story very closely, but Stern has now been punted from EVERY Clear Channel station -- of which there are seven hundred and change. Now granted, Stern's show was only carried by a small fraction of those, but for those that did which is more likely: that his ratings were doing poorly in EVERY market simultaneously, or that the FCC's latest flurry of arbitrary fines made him too much of a risk even in the markets he was doing well in?
Frankly, his show has gotten tired.
IRRELEVANT. The FCC didn't fine Clear Channel because Stern is "tired". You know what's tired? Listening to people who governmental chilling effects on speech on the grounds that they personally didn't find much merit in the contested speech anyway.
He'll be off the air eventually, but it'll be because he has no audience left.
If it happens that audiences get bored and tune him out, that's okay. It's good when the media industry responds to market forces.
If Stern's audience disappears because the government compels broadcasters to prevent the market from listening to him DESPITE the market's demand, there's something seriously wrong.
I cannot get a good cell phone anymore that doesn't come with a camera
They may not sell them at Circuit City or the disheveled little storefront that used to be a beeper store 5 years ago, but you can still get Last Year's Model of phones if you know where to look -- ESPECIALLY if you're a corporate buyer and looking to purchase a lot of units.
Imagine the number of court cases which will litigate agains CC when they claim that the driver was distracted by the billboards.
I imagine the number of SUCCESSFUL court cases will be somewhere around zero.
There's already plenty of billboard and advertisements that draw attention away from the road, or rotate mechanically between two or three different messages, or feature a giant animated neon cowboy waving at you. If there was no precedent set that THOSE billboard types were dangerous to drivers' concentration, it would seem likely that the incremental novelty of this new type wouldn't be dangerous either.
It doesn't have to be networked to get hacked. If it's a DVD player, for instance, it could be hacked by climbing up the ladder to where the DVD player is located and swapping out the advertising disc with "Real Butts 14".
More likely the displays have a small amount of solid-state storage in them, and a serial port so they can be updated by plugging a laptop into them.
the rules SUCK for computer implementation. There are special cases and exceptions to everything.
That's why God created conditional expressions, my friend.
I'd be more concerned with the inability of the typical computer system to generate truly random numbers than with a series of special cases that have to be dealt with once as the game logic is being coded. It's very possible that a pseudorandom sequence of numbers just won't cut it for AD&D-based gaming systems.
More evidence that Europeans are a more civilized in their driving?
I'd rather drive in any major American city than any major European city -- much of Old Europe was not build with automobiles in mind, and the cities have the perplexing roundabouts and jagged, narrow one-way streets to prove it.
(For the purposes of this scenario, I guess Boston is a European city though, huh.)
If they start selling more than a few of these players, that ought to be a signal to the studios that there is a market out there for "clean" versions of their films.
From a cost-benefit analysis, it's very unlikely that the studios would want to release more than one version of the same movie.
(The exception to this is Army of Darkness, apparently -- how many different DVD versions of it are there now? 5? 6?)
Look, I'm all in favor of pornography, but let's not confuse it with a healthy expression of sexuality. Objectifying the female body on Page Three of the daily paper, or Justin Timberlake pawing at Janet Jackson's costume while singing about getting her naked by the end of the song, is not the baseline of normal sexuality that I would want my kids to pick up from the media.
Should sexually suggestive material be allowed? Absolutely. Should it be completely unrestricted? In my opinion, no. Perhaps the weight given to sexual and violent content by the rating boards ought to be re-evaluated, but they have a good reason for existing.
They also don't have permission to do most things that users are used to doing, such as installing new software.
And? In most cases installing software SHOULD be the job of an Administrator. Ask any corporate desktop support technician.
Then again, there are applications (Media Center, some AV software) that can't even RUN unless you're Admin. And few software installers even acknowledge the multi-user abilities of Windows -- if you log in as Administrator to install software, it's a crapshoot as to whether that software will work for any user on the machine, or just for the Administrator account.
Which leads more credence to my theory that they can't possibly still be losing money on it.
For MS to still be losing money on each Xbox today, it has to cost them $150 or more to manufacture and sell. By misapplying Moore's Law very badly, one might estimate that a computer that costs $150 to build today would have cost around $500 to build in 2002.
It seems unlikely that Microsoft would have subsidized a full 40% of the cost of each unit at the Xbox's product launch.
This may have been true two years ago when the console first hit the market, but do you think it's still true? Heck, I bought a new PC in December, and the same model's sale price today is already down to 75% of what I paid just three months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Cancel Cable. Save $50 a month and read a good book.
OK.
What's the ISBN number for The Daily Show?
840k per page. Make a double sided version and yo have nearly 1.7MB.
Wow, you can fit as much data on a sheet of 8.5x11" paper as you can on a 15-year-old 3.5x3.5" floppy disk! Sign me up!
"slippery slope" isn't a logical fallacy in a courtroom. It's a valid argument, and oftentimes a compelling one.
The courts are also extremely reticent to rule on hypothetical future damages which COULD occur in theory but as yet HAVEN'T, as evidenced by Eldred v. Ashcroft and many other cases.
Just how much hacking is needed to take the red light out of a consumer camcorder?
Probably not as easy as it sounds... it could take almost an entire square centimeter of black electrical tape to do the trick!
To anyone who says "illegal copying == theft", I say "you are murdering both language and law."
Misusing language and misrepresenting the law is not murder. Sheesh.
I didn't agree to a license of any type when I bought my ticket.
You didn't have to. The movie had a copyright notice on it. Viewing the movie binds you to the rules of copyright law.
Define public place.
I don't have to -- there's already generally accepted legal definitions of public and private places. Your point is moot.
Please don't use the same word to refer to robbery and murder on the high seas, and copyright violation
Please don't avoid answering the question by nitpicking terminology. Is it okay to violate copyright by making unlicensed copies of games and software?
after three decades [...] our society several times more violent
Funny you should say that, because according to the DOJ violent crime has trended downward significantly since the early 1970's.
Where did you get your information from?
I've been suggesting for years that a model similar to that of songwriter royalites should be applied - copying is free (just like singing a song), profit-making use rquires royalties.
But singing a song isn't "copying" -- duplicating sheet music for the song is.
Well, at least Frank Welker (voice of both Santa's Little Helper and Nibbler, along with most other animals) will have a job either way.
Then again, Welker has already been the most prolific voice actor in animation for like 30 years already...
If you freeze this stuff does it turn into Ice-Nine?
A resolution is not a law. Basically, the state government was ASKING the Dixie Chicks to perform a free concert, not FORCING them to. It was still wrong of South Carolina, though.
Howard Stern was dropped from a handful of stations (he's on hundreds) in markets that he was doing poorly in.
Perhaps you haven't been following the story very closely, but Stern has now been punted from EVERY Clear Channel station -- of which there are seven hundred and change. Now granted, Stern's show was only carried by a small fraction of those, but for those that did which is more likely: that his ratings were doing poorly in EVERY market simultaneously, or that the FCC's latest flurry of arbitrary fines made him too much of a risk even in the markets he was doing well in?
Frankly, his show has gotten tired.
IRRELEVANT. The FCC didn't fine Clear Channel because Stern is "tired". You know what's tired? Listening to people who governmental chilling effects on speech on the grounds that they personally didn't find much merit in the contested speech anyway.
He'll be off the air eventually, but it'll be because he has no audience left.
If it happens that audiences get bored and tune him out, that's okay. It's good when the media industry responds to market forces.
If Stern's audience disappears because the government compels broadcasters to prevent the market from listening to him DESPITE the market's demand, there's something seriously wrong.
I cannot get a good cell phone anymore that doesn't come with a camera
They may not sell them at Circuit City or the disheveled little storefront that used to be a beeper store 5 years ago, but you can still get Last Year's Model of phones if you know where to look -- ESPECIALLY if you're a corporate buyer and looking to purchase a lot of units.
What ever happened to a plain phone, that rings, vibrates and stores contact information.
Contact information? Vibrate feature? MOBILITY? You kids and your damned newfangled gizmos.
Give me a 30-pound Bell rotary-dialer with a length of RJ-11 coming out the bottom of it, that's a REAL man's phone.
Imagine the number of court cases which will litigate agains CC when they claim that the driver was distracted by the billboards.
I imagine the number of SUCCESSFUL court cases will be somewhere around zero.
There's already plenty of billboard and advertisements that draw attention away from the road, or rotate mechanically between two or three different messages, or feature a giant animated neon cowboy waving at you. If there was no precedent set that THOSE billboard types were dangerous to drivers' concentration, it would seem likely that the incremental novelty of this new type wouldn't be dangerous either.
It doesn't have to be networked to get hacked. If it's a DVD player, for instance, it could be hacked by climbing up the ladder to where the DVD player is located and swapping out the advertising disc with "Real Butts 14".
More likely the displays have a small amount of solid-state storage in them, and a serial port so they can be updated by plugging a laptop into them.
the rules SUCK for computer implementation. There are special cases and exceptions to everything.
That's why God created conditional expressions, my friend.
I'd be more concerned with the inability of the typical computer system to generate truly random numbers than with a series of special cases that have to be dealt with once as the game logic is being coded. It's very possible that a pseudorandom sequence of numbers just won't cut it for AD&D-based gaming systems.
BTW, I'd like to just point out that I haven't touched a P+P game since I was 12
That's funny, because when I was 12 I STARTED playing games with my peepee. Still do, in fact.
More evidence that Europeans are a more civilized in their driving?
I'd rather drive in any major American city than any major European city -- much of Old Europe was not build with automobiles in mind, and the cities have the perplexing roundabouts and jagged, narrow one-way streets to prove it.
(For the purposes of this scenario, I guess Boston is a European city though, huh.)
If they start selling more than a few of these players, that ought to be a signal to the studios that there is a market out there for "clean" versions of their films.
From a cost-benefit analysis, it's very unlikely that the studios would want to release more than one version of the same movie.
(The exception to this is Army of Darkness, apparently -- how many different DVD versions of it are there now? 5? 6?)
Sexuality is natural
Look, I'm all in favor of pornography, but let's not confuse it with a healthy expression of sexuality. Objectifying the female body on Page Three of the daily paper, or Justin Timberlake pawing at Janet Jackson's costume while singing about getting her naked by the end of the song, is not the baseline of normal sexuality that I would want my kids to pick up from the media.
Should sexually suggestive material be allowed? Absolutely. Should it be completely unrestricted? In my opinion, no. Perhaps the weight given to sexual and violent content by the rating boards ought to be re-evaluated, but they have a good reason for existing.
They also don't have permission to do most things that users are used to doing, such as installing new software.
And? In most cases installing software SHOULD be the job of an Administrator. Ask any corporate desktop support technician.
Then again, there are applications (Media Center, some AV software) that can't even RUN unless you're Admin. And few software installers even acknowledge the multi-user abilities of Windows -- if you log in as Administrator to install software, it's a crapshoot as to whether that software will work for any user on the machine, or just for the Administrator account.
Which leads more credence to my theory that they can't possibly still be losing money on it.
For MS to still be losing money on each Xbox today, it has to cost them $150 or more to manufacture and sell. By misapplying Moore's Law very badly, one might estimate that a computer that costs $150 to build today would have cost around $500 to build in 2002.
It seems unlikely that Microsoft would have subsidized a full 40% of the cost of each unit at the Xbox's product launch.
Secondly, just use paper ballots and be done with it. If you need to see how it's done, come to Canada.
If the Diebold machines give Bush a second term, I expect you'll be seeing a lot of Americans do just that.
"Microsoft takes a loss on each Xbox sold."
This may have been true two years ago when the console first hit the market, but do you think it's still true? Heck, I bought a new PC in December, and the same model's sale price today is already down to 75% of what I paid just three months ago.