I actually tried taking notes in Emacs, and I liked it for some things. After years of typing everything in Emacs my brain thinks in Emacs keystrokes. Putting Emacs into artist mode even allowed me to draw crude ASCII art for graphs and such. Presentations with lots of bullet points, for example, were perfect for that sort of thing. For difficult classes, however, I found that it actually helped to type up my notes after taking them with a pen. For easy classes I didn't see the point of using anything besides a pen.
I will admit that anything that involves LaTeX is very cool.
I am not saying that there aren't *some* students that use their laptops like you, but they are hardly the majority. In fact, they are not even a signficant minority from what I have seen.
I don't see anything wrong with "caring about your work." The important thing to remember is that sometimes what we believe is our "work" and what we actually are getting paid for are two totally different things. In a college course what the students are actually paying for is a structure that allows them to demonstrate that they have a basic working knowledge of the topics that the course covers. The students could learn economics (as an example) much less expensively by simply purchasing a text book and spending some time reading. The value add of a university is that they certify a certain level of understanding and ability in a wide array of topics. This allows employers to filter prospective employees by "ability" without having to resort to creating and administering their own tests.
Many teachers get confused by this. They feel that they are being paid to "teach," and in many circumstances that is simply not the case. Don't get me wrong, I have had lots of professors over the years that have taught me a great deal. However, you can basically judge the caliber of the professor's lectures by the amount of effort they put into "forcing" you to participate. In the classes where I learned the most the professor didn't have to worry about forcing me to pay attention in class. I paid attention because I knew that if I didn't I would get a poor grade on the exam. If the teacher has to give you points for merely showing up to a lecture, then clearly the lecture itself isn't going to be particularly stimulating. The best professors that I have had have all been the sort that didn't care less what you did during their lecture as long as it didn't disrupt others. They maintained control of the class by A) being interesting speakers and B) going over stuff that was going to be featured on the exam. In several of these cases it was probably theoretically possible to get a good grade in the class without paying close attention, but it wasn't particularly *likely*.
If a teacher wants students to "think" and "be engaged" in a lecture, then she needs to consider rewarding students that think. If "thinking" is what you have to do to get a good grade, then the majority of the class with endeavor to think. If you can get a good grade without thinking then don't expect taking away laptops to make much of a difference.
I want professors that care about their work, but I want them to understand that I am paying them to help me learn enough to get a good grade in their class, not because I need someone to babysit me for an hour.
I recently went back to school after a long time (10 years) off campus, and I was expecting laptops to be a much bigger deal than they are. For the most part it looks to me like the folks that are actually taking notes are still using paper. The folks with laptops appear to spend most of their time either surfing the web or chatting online.
I suppose I can understand a teacher wanting her students to actually pay attention. Of course, if she gets paid either way...
I agree completely. I generally find PJ to be thoughtful and intelligent, but after reading and re-reading both the Economist article and PJ's response I can only assume that PJ needs to get some sleep or something. The Economist article was great. PJ's response, not so good.
Yes, but that simply means that the U.S. would probably settle for cleaning up the domains that it could clean up. Heck, com, net, org, biz, us (and gov, of course) would probably be good enough. Nothing personal, but most Americans have no idea that there is a cx domain. Those that do know about the cx domains don't click on them for fear of the goatse.cx guy. Personally, I would settle for someone cleaning up python.com. I read on the comp.os.python about a website redesign and I typed in the wrong url by mistake.
The results were not business friendly.
Not that I trust the government to do a very good job of regulating this stuff.
Actually, most of the DNS infrastructure *is* in the U.S. It wouldn't really matter if the hosts were up if the root nameservers said that the domain didn't exist.
We have different criteria for "justice". In my books, if you have to say you are guilty for a crime you did not commit in order to avoid the process to defend yourself against a different crime, then that is not justice.
Generally speaking they confess to being guilty of a similar crime, or are guaranteed a lighter sense in return for not dragging the case through the courts. In criminal cases this is generally a win for both the prosecution (who doesn't have to go to the expense of trying a case) and for the defense (who doesn't have to pay as large a fine or spend as much time in prison). In the cases where the person is actually guilty this works very well with the possible issue that some victims might feel that the accused is getting off easy.
Justice is when you are not penalised for committing a crime, either by way of penalty, costs to defend yourself nor public "outing", until its been proved to an appropriate level, that you actually did it.
If the person isn't guilty, then there are problems. That goes without saying:). The U.S. system of justice goes out of its way to mitigate those problems in criminal cases. Defendents are provided an attorney free of charge and efforts are made to safeguard your rights. However, those rights *have* to be weighed against the rights of the rest of us in society. For example, if you are accused of murder you can't hardly expect society to not penalize you until after you are convicted. At the very least you are going to need to be incarcerated so that you can't flee. We try and balance this by making laws that make it illegal to falsely accuse someone, but it does happen. There's no question that our justice system has some problems, but you would be hard pressed to find a system that works better.
On the other hand, if you are a victim of crime, you shouldn't have to invest huge amounts of money in discovery before being able to accuse.
Generally speaking, you don't have to invest in discovery for criminal cases. I don't have to do anything but call the police to get them to investigate a robbery. They just show up when you ask them too and start dusting for prints. The disconnect is that the RIAA doesn't really want to accuse these people of a crime, despite the fact that it thinks that they are guilty and probably has enough evidence to convict them in a court of law. Like the example I used earlier of a neighbor boy stealing your apples in a country where the penalty for stealing apples was to lose a hand the RIAA doesn't really want the law to get involved. They don't want the neighbor boys hand, they just want to deter future apple stealing and to be paid for the apples. The RIAA doesn't want to put people in prison and so they forgo some of the rights they have as accusers, assuming of course, that the defendent is willing to also forgo some of his or her rights. It really is a special case, and what makes the case special has more to do with the fact that the RIAA doesn't want to press charges, not that it has a lot of cash.
If the shoe was on the other foot and the RIAA was distributing your copyrighted material illegally you could simply bring your initial evidence to the police and let them do the rest.
For the most part the fact that the RIAA is well funded actually works against them. Let's say that I was completely innocent of ever distributing someone else's copyrighted material and the RIAA accused me of being a major filesharer. If I refused to confess, was drug before a jury, and found not guilty I would have an excellent chances of getting damages from the RIAA in a civil suit. With enough of the right evidence I could probably even interest the government into launching a criminal investigation. Because the RIAA is rich finding a lawyer to help would be easy as there is the possibility of receiving a very large settlement.
Once again, it's not perfect, but it's as good as anything anyone else does.
I've seen one. Interestingly enough, however, it never got rolled into production. It's basically a known fact that these beasts sold very very poorly. In fact, they sold so poorly that you can now get UNISYS support for Linux on them as well.
Massive "mainframe-style" machine simply aren't the way that the market is going right, especially for those folks that are using Windows. Heck, Microsoft points to the UNISYS machines when it wants to show that Windows can scale straight to the mainframe, but then Microsoft salespeople will happily point out that a cluster of commodity servers running Windows is a much less expensive alternative. Microsoft isn't in the business of selling hardware, it wants to sell software. UNISYS' machine is nothing more than a commercial to Microsoft.
And so, several years after UNISYS debuted with its Windows mainframes it is now marketing the same machines running Linux so that Microsoft's sales people don't get involved.
The problem with this is, of course, is that if the RIAA presses criminal charges, they can't "take them back." Once it becomes a criminal matter then the government steps in and prosecutes according the the laws on the books which are ridiculously harsh. The RIAA doesn't really want to see these people end up in prison. It is happy with a few thousand dollars and a promise not to do it again.
Basically it is like this. Let's imagine that you catch your neighbors kid climbing over your fence to steal some of your apples, and let's further imagine that you live in some crazy country where the penalty for theft (even petty theft) is to lose one of your hands. That's basically the situation that the RIAA is in. If it presses criminal charges then the people accused stand to go to prison and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Unless you really hated your neighbor's kid you probably wouldn't get the police involved over some apples. Instead you would work something out with your neighbor privately and leave the government out of it. Depending on how you felt about your neighbor you might require a great deal from him in exchange for not pressing charges, but compared to what *should* have happened he is still getting off very lightly.
Now, people that don't understand how the system really works might complain about "due process of law" and how the kid never got his day in court, but that's primarily because their only experience with how the justice system works is what they see on TV. Only a fool wants his "day in court." Most criminals plea to a lesser charge in exchange for the government not having to go through the expense of actually bringing in jurors and holding a trial. They have the right to pull twelve people out of their normal lives for a few days and patiently explain that they don't know how the marijuana got in their backpack, but, for the most part, that ends up being a poor choice. So instead they plead guilty in return for a reduced sentence and justice is done.
It really is the same thing in the case of the RIAA and these file sharers. The RIAA could simply bring their evidence to the government and allow the government to build a case. The government wouldn't have any of the problems that the RIAA has faced getting access to the identities of the individuals involved either. Agents would come into the ISP with a search warrant signed by a judge for a felony case of distributing copyrighted works illegally and the ISP would fall all over itself to hand over the information necessary to convict its client. The suspect's computer would be confiscated and gone over for evidence, parents, neighbors, and friends would get questioned, and a case would be built that would basically guarantee that someone was going to prison (possibly several people).
The only reason that ISPs resisted turning over identities to the RIAA when it tries to deal with these issues through the civil courts is that the ISPs know that filesharing is pretty much the primary reason why most people get broadband. The ISPs knew that if people couldn't share large files over the Internet there is much less reason to pay extra for broadband. The ISPs knew that the RIAA didn't want to prosecute the filesharers as criminals and so they dragged their heels on sharing information in the civil courts because they knew they could. Fortunately for all of us this tactic has pretty much fallen through.
Don't let your distaste for the RIAA fool you. No one is being robbed of their right to due process. People are giving up that right voluntarily because they know that they'll get a far better deal from the RIAA than they would if the RIAA turned the case into a criminal matter and let the government deal with it. The RIAA has evidence linking these people to a crime that would put them in jail for several years, take away their right to vote, and cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the crime in question became a criminal matter the government could almost c
Says you... However, if one of these targets thought that they had a good case they could countersue for harrassment and whatnot. If they had a good case it would almost certainly be worth a good deal of money. Enough money where getting a lawyer wouldn't be a problem, the RIAA is well bankrolled, and you can't just accuse people of felonies with no proof.
The reason that the people aren't doing that is because the evidence is good enough. These people are distributing RIAA's property illegally. Sure, they could get up in court and try and argue that someone broke into their house and used their computer, but juries don't buy that. My father's a judge, and before that he was a public defender. I used to work for him in the summers. I lost track of the times that I heard someone tell my father that they didn't know how that marijuana got in their backpack. It was always the same story. Some people that they met at the A) concert, B) grocery store, C) bar, but that they didn't know, had carried the backpack for a while, and they must have put the pot in there. Either there is a massive conspiracy of criminals adept at framing people they just met, or most people are horrible liars. In the end they would plea out the charges and justic would get done.
That's how our system works. Heck, the best defense that someone has tried so far is that the RIAA charged the mother instead of the daughter. You can keep convincing yourself that the RIAA would never win in criminal court, but if the defense lawyers thought they could beat the charges they wouldn't counsel their clients to roll over.
I agree with you that it's impossible to be cogniscant of every law. However, except in one or two cases that have been widely publicized that hasn't been the case at all. The RIAA is in a precarious situation, people should respect its copyrights and they aren't. The RIAA has a right to protect its property and I would much rather that they went after people that were breaking the law than subvert my computer.
All things consider the RIAA could certainly be more heavy handed. Distributing copyrighted material on the scale that the RIAA generally prosecutes is the sort of crime that could land you in prison for years. A couple of grand in fines is a high price to pay for ignorance, but at this point if you are still distributing music I really have a hard time feeling sorry for you.
Yes, but concentrating on the hardcore pirates is a waste of time. They aren't going to pay Hollywood money no matter what happens. I, on the other hand, am more than willing to pay Hollywood. I am *not* going to pay for media that I can't use. If Hollywood concentrates its efforts on trying to get the hardcore pirates to pay money they will fail to get money from the pirates and from me.
I mean, let's be serious. No amount of DRM is going to stop the truly criminal element. These are the same people that smuggle cameras into movie theaters despite the very real possibility of getting caught. I, on the other hand, have always respected other people's copyrights.
I think that in the long run what's going to happen is that Hollywood is going to be profoundly changed. Currently the economics in Hollywood are based around works that are expensive to create, produce, and distribute, but that's becoming less true all of the time. These days nearly anyone can afford the equipment necessary to produce and distribute music, and video isn't really all that far behind. If it isn't expensive to produce, market, and distribute the works of art then we don't really need Hollywood. I personally think that Napolean Dynamite was one of the better movies I saw last year, and it didn't get Hollywood's attention until it was already a fairly big hit.
No one is forcing these artists to do what they do, and I am sure that in the end they will make enough to make it worth their while.
In civil cases it is not "innocent until proven guilty." The folks that the RIAA targets should be grateful that the RIAA isn't pressing criminal charges. The penalties for distribution of copyrighted works were set up for the days when it took organized crime to bootleg a record.
There's a perfectly good reason that most people simply settle, and that is that the RIAA has basically got the goods on them. It's much better to pay a few thousand dollars than face the prospect of hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and time in prison. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that the RIAA requires some sort of an admission of wrongdoing. Remember, ignorance isn't a defense.
Then the content providers need to get into another business. I am not going to pay for media I can't use, and the pirates aren't going to pay even if they can use it.
Somehow I think that market will work something out.
That's a job for the prosecutors. That's why I don't have a problem with the RIAA rounding up people that distribute their works illegally. We have laws to prevent people from distributing other people's copyrighted material. The laws are already ridiculously harsh. Use them, don't try and turn my home studio equipment against me.
Here's a thought. The folks celebrating the pirating of copyrighted materials, they probably aren't going to buy your movie anyhow, but I will. Unless, of course, I can't play it on my equipment.
If you read the article it would be pretty clear that early versions of Vista contained *more*.NET assemblies than the ones that Microsoft has released later. In fact, it would appear that Microsoft is rewriting new software that was originally written in.NET in "unmanaged" code.
I can understand not wanting to rewrite stuff that works, but apparently Microsoft actually attempted to write some new stuff in.NET and backed off.
I suppose that's possible. However, it's pretty safe to say that Windows developers that don't work for Microsoft are already using.NET in large numbers. Unless Microsoft is worried that Novell is going to poach Microsoft employees it should simply use the best Microsoft tool for the job at hand. It's not like Microsoft employees are likely to wake up one day with a overpowering desire to port to Mono.
The folks using Mono think that it's a huge advantage over writing applications in C, and they should know, many of them have extensive C experience including the development of complex C applications like Evolution or Gnumeric. So why is it that Microsoft appears to be unconvinced?
I am not suggesting that Great Brittain hand out sample hardware to various Free Software hackers and expect to get a working fly by wire system, if that's what you mean. I am not expecting to see a fly-by-wire project on sourceforge or anything like that. What I am saying is that there are a lot of systems that the British might want to upgrade themselves over time, and they would probably want to be able to hire their own software teams to make any modifications that they might deem necessary.
For this to be effective they will need access to the source code. Otherwise they are stuck with whatever options we Americans give them.
I piggybacked on the humurous comment because A) I thought it was funny, and B) because it demonstrated precisely the problem that Brittain would face if it allowed the U.S. to sell it a weapons system without source code. As you pointed out you can't expect "open source grognards" to write flight controls for a modern combat aircraft. If Brittain doesn't get source, it is screwed.
I don't mind that notepad.exe is a pure text editor. What I mind is that it is the stupidest text editor ever. For example, at the very least it could deal with UNIX and Mac style text files intelligently. I mean seriously, how much is that to ask?
I realize that you mean this as a joke, but that is almost precisely what the U.S. is worried about. Right now the U.S. has the high end defense industry locked up tight. If the U.S. can guarantee that these fighters remain black boxes then not only will they get the bulk of the manufacturing business but they will get all of the service, support, and modification business as well. Maintaining control of the software is key to maintaining control of the entire project.
If there was ever an application that screamed out for replacing it is notepad.exe. Seriously, you can't throw a rock without hitting 10 better basic text editors for Windows, and yet for whatever reason Microsoft still relies on notepad.exe for this important niche. I mean seriously, how hard would it be to replace notepad.exe with a fancier.NET version that didn't suck so completely? I would bet that if Microsoft simply asked the developers there that they would find that they have half a dozen notepad.exe replacements written in.NET technologies. Not only would this mean that systems administrators like myself wouldn't have to include a decent text editor in our base images, but it would help showcase.NET.
I do agree that Microsoft seems to be mostly unimpressed by its own marketing machine, but its pretty clear that Microsoft is still trying to gain marketshare for.NET, and every little bit helps.
I don't think that's an entirely fair assessment. I use several applications on Linux that are written in Mono on a daily basis, none of them seem remotely sluggish. f-spot, for example, performs very well. The only Java application that I use on a somewhat regular basis is Eclipse and it certainly is slow. In fact, when I played around with Monodevelop the one thing that really surprised me was how quickly it started up and how well it performed once started (especially compared to Eclipse). Now, I realize that Monodevelop isn't nearly the program that Eclipse is, but it's still a pretty useful tool and it started several orders of magnitude faster than Eclipse.
Now, assuming that Microsoft's.NET isn't considerably worse than Mono you would think that Microsoft would have included some visible new feature written in.NET. Heck, how about replacing notepad.exe, for instance. I mean, seriously, how much would that cost?
Exactly, Novell is perfectly happy to be building nearly all of its new tools with Mono, and some of my favorite Gnome applications have been written in C#. If.NET is so cool why isn't Microsoft doing something similar?
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I actually tried taking notes in Emacs, and I liked it for some things. After years of typing everything in Emacs my brain thinks in Emacs keystrokes. Putting Emacs into artist mode even allowed me to draw crude ASCII art for graphs and such. Presentations with lots of bullet points, for example, were perfect for that sort of thing. For difficult classes, however, I found that it actually helped to type up my notes after taking them with a pen. For easy classes I didn't see the point of using anything besides a pen.
I will admit that anything that involves LaTeX is very cool.
I am not saying that there aren't *some* students that use their laptops like you, but they are hardly the majority. In fact, they are not even a signficant minority from what I have seen.
I don't see anything wrong with "caring about your work." The important thing to remember is that sometimes what we believe is our "work" and what we actually are getting paid for are two totally different things. In a college course what the students are actually paying for is a structure that allows them to demonstrate that they have a basic working knowledge of the topics that the course covers. The students could learn economics (as an example) much less expensively by simply purchasing a text book and spending some time reading. The value add of a university is that they certify a certain level of understanding and ability in a wide array of topics. This allows employers to filter prospective employees by "ability" without having to resort to creating and administering their own tests.
Many teachers get confused by this. They feel that they are being paid to "teach," and in many circumstances that is simply not the case. Don't get me wrong, I have had lots of professors over the years that have taught me a great deal. However, you can basically judge the caliber of the professor's lectures by the amount of effort they put into "forcing" you to participate. In the classes where I learned the most the professor didn't have to worry about forcing me to pay attention in class. I paid attention because I knew that if I didn't I would get a poor grade on the exam. If the teacher has to give you points for merely showing up to a lecture, then clearly the lecture itself isn't going to be particularly stimulating. The best professors that I have had have all been the sort that didn't care less what you did during their lecture as long as it didn't disrupt others. They maintained control of the class by A) being interesting speakers and B) going over stuff that was going to be featured on the exam. In several of these cases it was probably theoretically possible to get a good grade in the class without paying close attention, but it wasn't particularly *likely*.
If a teacher wants students to "think" and "be engaged" in a lecture, then she needs to consider rewarding students that think. If "thinking" is what you have to do to get a good grade, then the majority of the class with endeavor to think. If you can get a good grade without thinking then don't expect taking away laptops to make much of a difference.
I want professors that care about their work, but I want them to understand that I am paying them to help me learn enough to get a good grade in their class, not because I need someone to babysit me for an hour.
I recently went back to school after a long time (10 years) off campus, and I was expecting laptops to be a much bigger deal than they are. For the most part it looks to me like the folks that are actually taking notes are still using paper. The folks with laptops appear to spend most of their time either surfing the web or chatting online.
I suppose I can understand a teacher wanting her students to actually pay attention. Of course, if she gets paid either way...
I agree completely. I generally find PJ to be thoughtful and intelligent, but after reading and re-reading both the Economist article and PJ's response I can only assume that PJ needs to get some sleep or something. The Economist article was great. PJ's response, not so good.
Yes, but that simply means that the U.S. would probably settle for cleaning up the domains that it could clean up. Heck, com, net, org, biz, us (and gov, of course) would probably be good enough. Nothing personal, but most Americans have no idea that there is a cx domain. Those that do know about the cx domains don't click on them for fear of the goatse.cx guy. Personally, I would settle for someone cleaning up python.com. I read on the comp.os.python about a website redesign and I typed in the wrong url by mistake.
The results were not business friendly.
Not that I trust the government to do a very good job of regulating this stuff.
Actually, most of the DNS infrastructure *is* in the U.S. It wouldn't really matter if the hosts were up if the root nameservers said that the domain didn't exist.
Generally speaking they confess to being guilty of a similar crime, or are guaranteed a lighter sense in return for not dragging the case through the courts. In criminal cases this is generally a win for both the prosecution (who doesn't have to go to the expense of trying a case) and for the defense (who doesn't have to pay as large a fine or spend as much time in prison). In the cases where the person is actually guilty this works very well with the possible issue that some victims might feel that the accused is getting off easy.
If the person isn't guilty, then there are problems. That goes without saying :). The U.S. system of justice goes out of its way to mitigate those problems in criminal cases. Defendents are provided an attorney free of charge and efforts are made to safeguard your rights. However, those rights *have* to be weighed against the rights of the rest of us in society. For example, if you are accused of murder you can't hardly expect society to not penalize you until after you are convicted. At the very least you are going to need to be incarcerated so that you can't flee. We try and balance this by making laws that make it illegal to falsely accuse someone, but it does happen. There's no question that our justice system has some problems, but you would be hard pressed to find a system that works better.
Generally speaking, you don't have to invest in discovery for criminal cases. I don't have to do anything but call the police to get them to investigate a robbery. They just show up when you ask them too and start dusting for prints. The disconnect is that the RIAA doesn't really want to accuse these people of a crime, despite the fact that it thinks that they are guilty and probably has enough evidence to convict them in a court of law. Like the example I used earlier of a neighbor boy stealing your apples in a country where the penalty for stealing apples was to lose a hand the RIAA doesn't really want the law to get involved. They don't want the neighbor boys hand, they just want to deter future apple stealing and to be paid for the apples. The RIAA doesn't want to put people in prison and so they forgo some of the rights they have as accusers, assuming of course, that the defendent is willing to also forgo some of his or her rights. It really is a special case, and what makes the case special has more to do with the fact that the RIAA doesn't want to press charges, not that it has a lot of cash.
If the shoe was on the other foot and the RIAA was distributing your copyrighted material illegally you could simply bring your initial evidence to the police and let them do the rest.
For the most part the fact that the RIAA is well funded actually works against them. Let's say that I was completely innocent of ever distributing someone else's copyrighted material and the RIAA accused me of being a major filesharer. If I refused to confess, was drug before a jury, and found not guilty I would have an excellent chances of getting damages from the RIAA in a civil suit. With enough of the right evidence I could probably even interest the government into launching a criminal investigation. Because the RIAA is rich finding a lawyer to help would be easy as there is the possibility of receiving a very large settlement.
Once again, it's not perfect, but it's as good as anything anyone else does.
I've seen one. Interestingly enough, however, it never got rolled into production. It's basically a known fact that these beasts sold very very poorly. In fact, they sold so poorly that you can now get UNISYS support for Linux on them as well.
Massive "mainframe-style" machine simply aren't the way that the market is going right, especially for those folks that are using Windows. Heck, Microsoft points to the UNISYS machines when it wants to show that Windows can scale straight to the mainframe, but then Microsoft salespeople will happily point out that a cluster of commodity servers running Windows is a much less expensive alternative. Microsoft isn't in the business of selling hardware, it wants to sell software. UNISYS' machine is nothing more than a commercial to Microsoft.
And so, several years after UNISYS debuted with its Windows mainframes it is now marketing the same machines running Linux so that Microsoft's sales people don't get involved.
The problem with this is, of course, is that if the RIAA presses criminal charges, they can't "take them back." Once it becomes a criminal matter then the government steps in and prosecutes according the the laws on the books which are ridiculously harsh. The RIAA doesn't really want to see these people end up in prison. It is happy with a few thousand dollars and a promise not to do it again.
Basically it is like this. Let's imagine that you catch your neighbors kid climbing over your fence to steal some of your apples, and let's further imagine that you live in some crazy country where the penalty for theft (even petty theft) is to lose one of your hands. That's basically the situation that the RIAA is in. If it presses criminal charges then the people accused stand to go to prison and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Unless you really hated your neighbor's kid you probably wouldn't get the police involved over some apples. Instead you would work something out with your neighbor privately and leave the government out of it. Depending on how you felt about your neighbor you might require a great deal from him in exchange for not pressing charges, but compared to what *should* have happened he is still getting off very lightly.
Now, people that don't understand how the system really works might complain about "due process of law" and how the kid never got his day in court, but that's primarily because their only experience with how the justice system works is what they see on TV. Only a fool wants his "day in court." Most criminals plea to a lesser charge in exchange for the government not having to go through the expense of actually bringing in jurors and holding a trial. They have the right to pull twelve people out of their normal lives for a few days and patiently explain that they don't know how the marijuana got in their backpack, but, for the most part, that ends up being a poor choice. So instead they plead guilty in return for a reduced sentence and justice is done.
It really is the same thing in the case of the RIAA and these file sharers. The RIAA could simply bring their evidence to the government and allow the government to build a case. The government wouldn't have any of the problems that the RIAA has faced getting access to the identities of the individuals involved either. Agents would come into the ISP with a search warrant signed by a judge for a felony case of distributing copyrighted works illegally and the ISP would fall all over itself to hand over the information necessary to convict its client. The suspect's computer would be confiscated and gone over for evidence, parents, neighbors, and friends would get questioned, and a case would be built that would basically guarantee that someone was going to prison (possibly several people).
The only reason that ISPs resisted turning over identities to the RIAA when it tries to deal with these issues through the civil courts is that the ISPs know that filesharing is pretty much the primary reason why most people get broadband. The ISPs knew that if people couldn't share large files over the Internet there is much less reason to pay extra for broadband. The ISPs knew that the RIAA didn't want to prosecute the filesharers as criminals and so they dragged their heels on sharing information in the civil courts because they knew they could. Fortunately for all of us this tactic has pretty much fallen through.
Don't let your distaste for the RIAA fool you. No one is being robbed of their right to due process. People are giving up that right voluntarily because they know that they'll get a far better deal from the RIAA than they would if the RIAA turned the case into a criminal matter and let the government deal with it. The RIAA has evidence linking these people to a crime that would put them in jail for several years, take away their right to vote, and cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the crime in question became a criminal matter the government could almost c
Says you... However, if one of these targets thought that they had a good case they could countersue for harrassment and whatnot. If they had a good case it would almost certainly be worth a good deal of money. Enough money where getting a lawyer wouldn't be a problem, the RIAA is well bankrolled, and you can't just accuse people of felonies with no proof.
The reason that the people aren't doing that is because the evidence is good enough. These people are distributing RIAA's property illegally. Sure, they could get up in court and try and argue that someone broke into their house and used their computer, but juries don't buy that. My father's a judge, and before that he was a public defender. I used to work for him in the summers. I lost track of the times that I heard someone tell my father that they didn't know how that marijuana got in their backpack. It was always the same story. Some people that they met at the A) concert, B) grocery store, C) bar, but that they didn't know, had carried the backpack for a while, and they must have put the pot in there. Either there is a massive conspiracy of criminals adept at framing people they just met, or most people are horrible liars. In the end they would plea out the charges and justic would get done.
That's how our system works. Heck, the best defense that someone has tried so far is that the RIAA charged the mother instead of the daughter. You can keep convincing yourself that the RIAA would never win in criminal court, but if the defense lawyers thought they could beat the charges they wouldn't counsel their clients to roll over.
I agree with you that it's impossible to be cogniscant of every law. However, except in one or two cases that have been widely publicized that hasn't been the case at all. The RIAA is in a precarious situation, people should respect its copyrights and they aren't. The RIAA has a right to protect its property and I would much rather that they went after people that were breaking the law than subvert my computer.
All things consider the RIAA could certainly be more heavy handed. Distributing copyrighted material on the scale that the RIAA generally prosecutes is the sort of crime that could land you in prison for years. A couple of grand in fines is a high price to pay for ignorance, but at this point if you are still distributing music I really have a hard time feeling sorry for you.
Yes, but concentrating on the hardcore pirates is a waste of time. They aren't going to pay Hollywood money no matter what happens. I, on the other hand, am more than willing to pay Hollywood. I am *not* going to pay for media that I can't use. If Hollywood concentrates its efforts on trying to get the hardcore pirates to pay money they will fail to get money from the pirates and from me.
I mean, let's be serious. No amount of DRM is going to stop the truly criminal element. These are the same people that smuggle cameras into movie theaters despite the very real possibility of getting caught. I, on the other hand, have always respected other people's copyrights.
I think that in the long run what's going to happen is that Hollywood is going to be profoundly changed. Currently the economics in Hollywood are based around works that are expensive to create, produce, and distribute, but that's becoming less true all of the time. These days nearly anyone can afford the equipment necessary to produce and distribute music, and video isn't really all that far behind. If it isn't expensive to produce, market, and distribute the works of art then we don't really need Hollywood. I personally think that Napolean Dynamite was one of the better movies I saw last year, and it didn't get Hollywood's attention until it was already a fairly big hit.
No one is forcing these artists to do what they do, and I am sure that in the end they will make enough to make it worth their while.
In civil cases it is not "innocent until proven guilty." The folks that the RIAA targets should be grateful that the RIAA isn't pressing criminal charges. The penalties for distribution of copyrighted works were set up for the days when it took organized crime to bootleg a record.
There's a perfectly good reason that most people simply settle, and that is that the RIAA has basically got the goods on them. It's much better to pay a few thousand dollars than face the prospect of hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and time in prison. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that the RIAA requires some sort of an admission of wrongdoing. Remember, ignorance isn't a defense.
Cheers.
If PHP developers could read they would be using Python...
Thanks, I will be here all week...
Then the content providers need to get into another business. I am not going to pay for media I can't use, and the pirates aren't going to pay even if they can use it.
Somehow I think that market will work something out.
That's a job for the prosecutors. That's why I don't have a problem with the RIAA rounding up people that distribute their works illegally. We have laws to prevent people from distributing other people's copyrighted material. The laws are already ridiculously harsh. Use them, don't try and turn my home studio equipment against me.
Here's a thought. The folks celebrating the pirating of copyrighted materials, they probably aren't going to buy your movie anyhow, but I will. Unless, of course, I can't play it on my equipment.
Food for thought.
If you read the article it would be pretty clear that early versions of Vista contained *more* .NET assemblies than the ones that Microsoft has released later. In fact, it would appear that Microsoft is rewriting new software that was originally written in .NET in "unmanaged" code.
I can understand not wanting to rewrite stuff that works, but apparently Microsoft actually attempted to write some new stuff in .NET and backed off.
That almost makes sense. Microsoft has a crappy text editor because they don't want people to actually edit text.
I suppose that's possible. However, it's pretty safe to say that Windows developers that don't work for Microsoft are already using .NET in large numbers. Unless Microsoft is worried that Novell is going to poach Microsoft employees it should simply use the best Microsoft tool for the job at hand. It's not like Microsoft employees are likely to wake up one day with a overpowering desire to port to Mono.
The folks using Mono think that it's a huge advantage over writing applications in C, and they should know, many of them have extensive C experience including the development of complex C applications like Evolution or Gnumeric. So why is it that Microsoft appears to be unconvinced?
I am not suggesting that Great Brittain hand out sample hardware to various Free Software hackers and expect to get a working fly by wire system, if that's what you mean. I am not expecting to see a fly-by-wire project on sourceforge or anything like that. What I am saying is that there are a lot of systems that the British might want to upgrade themselves over time, and they would probably want to be able to hire their own software teams to make any modifications that they might deem necessary.
For this to be effective they will need access to the source code. Otherwise they are stuck with whatever options we Americans give them.
I piggybacked on the humurous comment because A) I thought it was funny, and B) because it demonstrated precisely the problem that Brittain would face if it allowed the U.S. to sell it a weapons system without source code. As you pointed out you can't expect "open source grognards" to write flight controls for a modern combat aircraft. If Brittain doesn't get source, it is screwed.
I don't mind that notepad.exe is a pure text editor. What I mind is that it is the stupidest text editor ever. For example, at the very least it could deal with UNIX and Mac style text files intelligently. I mean seriously, how much is that to ask?
I realize that you mean this as a joke, but that is almost precisely what the U.S. is worried about. Right now the U.S. has the high end defense industry locked up tight. If the U.S. can guarantee that these fighters remain black boxes then not only will they get the bulk of the manufacturing business but they will get all of the service, support, and modification business as well. Maintaining control of the software is key to maintaining control of the entire project.
If there was ever an application that screamed out for replacing it is notepad.exe. Seriously, you can't throw a rock without hitting 10 better basic text editors for Windows, and yet for whatever reason Microsoft still relies on notepad.exe for this important niche. I mean seriously, how hard would it be to replace notepad.exe with a fancier .NET version that didn't suck so completely? I would bet that if Microsoft simply asked the developers there that they would find that they have half a dozen notepad.exe replacements written in .NET technologies. Not only would this mean that systems administrators like myself wouldn't have to include a decent text editor in our base images, but it would help showcase .NET.
I do agree that Microsoft seems to be mostly unimpressed by its own marketing machine, but its pretty clear that Microsoft is still trying to gain marketshare for .NET, and every little bit helps.
I don't think that's an entirely fair assessment. I use several applications on Linux that are written in Mono on a daily basis, none of them seem remotely sluggish. f-spot, for example, performs very well. The only Java application that I use on a somewhat regular basis is Eclipse and it certainly is slow. In fact, when I played around with Monodevelop the one thing that really surprised me was how quickly it started up and how well it performed once started (especially compared to Eclipse). Now, I realize that Monodevelop isn't nearly the program that Eclipse is, but it's still a pretty useful tool and it started several orders of magnitude faster than Eclipse.
Now, assuming that Microsoft's .NET isn't considerably worse than Mono you would think that Microsoft would have included some visible new feature written in .NET. Heck, how about replacing notepad.exe, for instance. I mean, seriously, how much would that cost?
Exactly, Novell is perfectly happy to be building nearly all of its new tools with Mono, and some of my favorite Gnome applications have been written in C#. If .NET is so cool why isn't Microsoft doing something similar?