It really *is* as simple as 'theft is theft'. If it's copyrighted, and you don't follow the originators EULA (superceded by govermnet regulations of course, as in the 'fair use' act), you are stealing. Please live with it, because the other option is a world where there is no reason to create anything.
Giggle. Trust me, money isn't the only reason to do things. I'll happily forgo all the crap thats created to make money (Titanic, Backstreet Boys, Jurassic Park) for REAL art thats made out of love.
If money is all that you will create for, I, for one, would hate to see what you create.
ASCAP is what keeps music piracy at a minimum. If sowtware had an orginization like this, software piracy would be at a low, and software would be less expensive due to it. Games would cost 20$ because they don't have to compensate for you buying it and burning 13 copies for all of your friends.
This is debatable. Pure economics says that piracy drives the cost of products DOWN, since it provides an identical product for less money. Add to that the fact that I GUARANTEE you that at most one of the thirteen of your hypothetical friends would buy the stupid game at $40 bucks if they couldn't copy it.
I see this stupid myth over and over again. Don't buy it. Its total garbage.
The information economy is a sham. In case you havent noticed, its a SELLER's market. They choose what price is optimal, since they can always drop the per unit cost arbritrarily low until it reaches manfacturing costs, which, for a non-material good, is basically zero.
If i see one more llama bleating that piracy is costing software manufacturers' money, im going to scream.
Part 1: Journalists research their stories, and investigate all sides of the story, and try and discover the truth.
Whoa. I've not seen this effect. You'll have to show it to me some time. I don't know what news you read or watch, but its very rarely impartial, let alone researched. The danger is NOT that its biased and sloppily researched, but that people like you seem to think that it is.
Part 2: CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the other guys look at a list of interesting submissions and then put the best of those out there. The don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to the story.
As opposed to journalists, who look at all the stuff that comes off of AP and then put up the stuff that gets the best ratings of those out there. They don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to to story, as long as it has sex or violence and a good hook.
As somebody pointed it, this is and OLD page, and only shows exactly how clueless about the net community Mindcraft is.
It is the prototypical first reaction of a newbie to a mailbox full of flame mail: "WAAAA I acted like a retard and look at all the flamage I got! Somebody do something! I didn't say anything wrong, because look at how content free those flames are!"
What's next? Going to go run to your mommies and cry?
The first rule of net communication is that of instant criticism, fair AND unfair. If you can't handle content-free flames, don't post flame bait. In fact, don't participate at all. Sooner or later you will get flamed. Deal with it.
Which leads me to the second rule of net communication: grow a thick skin. Its only words, right? Isn't that what you tell your twelve year old? "Sticks and stones... etc"?
Mindcraft: your posting of other peoples immature flames have only verified the obvious to me. You people are just as immature, AND net-newbies to boot.
Finally, for those of you flamers out there: don't stop. Sure, a well thought out critcism is better, and an outright mailbomb is a BAD IDEA(tm), but somewhere in between lies the happy, soul cleansing, first amendment protected, uncensored flame.
WOOO I was at that SIGGRAPH! I'm guessing it was 1992 or so.
As I recall, the pong game was much more successful.
This is a good analogy. You can play pong by consensus (and it happens to be a problem that can be easily parallelized) but flying a plane isn't.
Add me to the list of people who think chess by consensus is a completely braindead idea.
BTW. There were other cool things. They had an overhead graphical representation of what the pattern of red and blue was, and they had a little card that told you an order of things to do (just like at football game) so it would make pretty patterns on the display.
Also, at this Siggraph was the start of a war between graphic "artists" and graphic "scientists"
Up until this era, most computer animation was done like regular animation, where artists would interpret and dictate how a given character or object would move.
There was a group of less "arty" minded programmers that had started on using constraint based physical modeling to do the actual animation, with startling results. This pissed off many of the artists, who would rather animate say, a bowl of jello, by hand.
Needless to say, the constraint based jello model was frightengly convincing, wheras constraint based modeling of a human being walking was pathetic.
HELLOOO? Is there anybody in there? The GPL is more free. If MS successfully embraces and extends perl with proprietary extentions, and then does not release those under GPL, then YOUR freedoms have been infringed upon. You can't look at the source. You can't give a friend a copy. You can't add your own extensions. If MS added stuff and THEN GPL'ed it we wouldn't be HAVING this discussion.
Why is it that people always assume corporate presence is part of a "free market"? Wake up call: people like microsoft depend heavily on government intervention to enforce their stupid patents and copyrights. This is not free. This is usually called a monopoly.
Repeat after me:
Copyrights and IP law generate government condoned monopolies.
This is not a difficult concept to grasp. Sure, its supposed to spur competition, but modern corporations like microsoft have become very adept at exploiting it.
There is no correlation between money and software.
Money is a symbol of a rare resource. It used to be based on a _fixed_ amount of gold. Now its not. Its value varies from day to day. But it is still a symbol of something real and material, and most importantly, something that is limited.
This is because money represents all of our concepts of an economy. We try to distribute limited resources as best we can.
Information is NOT a symbol of a limited resource. Information is just one alternative from a set of possibilities, either finite, or infinite. Shannon happened to boil this down to a sequence of binary bits, and found a way to represent any one of these alternatives, and general ways of intermixing them. Turing gave us general ways of manipulating information.
All our attempts at preventing information exchange are because 1) competition is necessary to ensure the best possible information products and 2) it is (or was) viable to restrict who and how this information is distrubuted. #2 is only nesessary insofar as our only concept of competition involves the consumption of limited resources, which we represent with money.
When 2) is no longer technically viable, or the free flow of information is more advantageous than its restriction, we need to look to alternatives.
Here's my list (in some vage order of personal preference):
I. Subsidies. At worst, welfare for programmers, at best, treat as R&D in corporations. Educational/governmental grants (ala NSF) are a middle ground here. Taxation of ISPs. Taxation/metering of bandwidth usage.
II. Service/Support. Give for free, sell documentation and support. Contract software programmers for in-house software projects. Online fees (e.g. funding an online game).
III. The artist factor. Sometimes, the best stuff is made for love, not for money. Compare _Titanic_ and _Jurassic Park_ to _Brazil_ and _Life is Beautiful_. Compare Mingus to Back Street Boys. Compare van Gogh to velvet paintings of Elvis. Compare Linus' early GPL'ing of his tiny Minux clone to Bill's infamous bigfoot letter to Altair hobbiests over their alleged misuse of "his" code.
Never argue copyrights/IP from an economic standpoint. It just doesn't work.
Gold is a limited resource, and it happens to be rare. It can't be synthesized, unless you happen to believe in alchemy.
Information is a limitless resource, and it is not rare.
Human civilization has spent countless millenia trying to equitibly distribute limited resources, and at the first sign of a truley limiteless one, we regulate it to make it look limited. Boy, how stupid can we be.
Hint to software authors who are depending solely on our rapidly aging IP concepts: better find a new way to make a living, because moving information is becoming easier everyday. No amount of "but my kids will starve" bleating will save your skins. You'll be better off trying to sell horseshoes in Los Angeles.
Its not just software either. All information is moving this way.
Music: only 60 megs for a cd if they're mp3s
Movies: only 1.2 g for a vcd pair (still poor quality but sooner or later..)
Books: I happen to prefer hard copy anyway. As long as its hard to bind a book, authors are safe;)
Sooner or later, all of this information "production" will have to be subsidized. Sorry folks. I give it 20 years tops. If the whole pathetic system hasn't collapsed by then, we will be living in a police state, and I'm moving into a cave and resorting to hunting/gathering.
Lucas is bright enough to see that digital distribution is the wave of the future... what he doesn't see is that restricting the flow of information to his LIKING has nothing to do with cracking down on "Wild West" (GIGGLE - this Internet cliche is only about 30 years old) lawlessness.
It is about as pointless as trying to hold water in a sieve. Their whole delicate world is crumbling around them and all they can do is bleat about the lack of morality on the 'net.
They're on the ropes...
The argument about the quality of the pirated films being poor enough that people will still see the movies in theatres is a specious one. This trend will not stop at cheap bootlegged ripoffs. Sooner or later technology will make transporting full resolution full frame rate copies trivial.
It is all bits people. Once we can move enough of them at a time, the result is inevitable.
Even if we make the assumption as given in the previous essay mentioned "Anarchism Triumphant", that all information can be reduced to some indefinitely long bitstream (i.e. just a number) there are far more uninteresting numbers than there are interesting ones.
Giggle. You ever hear of a guy named Shannon? This is not an "assumption."
I still say, burn it all, let the chips fall where they may: IP, copyrights, trademarks, export laws, the whole kit and kaboodle.
Read Wired for wannabe-geek toys, not /.
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DO NOT stop posting stuff like this.
If I want to read about stuff I can buy in the Sharper Image I read Wired, or hell, I read the Sharper Image.
This is great news indeed, but lawyers and judges and most everybody else have no clue where this leads.
If source code is considered a language and is therefore protected under free speech, it is obvious that all information transmission is protected. While this happy news to me, and probably also a GOOD IDEA(TM), 99.999% of the brainwashed masses (and unfortunately many/. readers) would probably refuse to accept this.
I expect this to get overruled almost instantaneously. Either that, or they will pile hack upon hack upon hack on top of the legal wording to make sure IP stays intact, as well as the ability to make information "ownable".
The white paper says: We posted notices on various Linux and Apache newsgroups and received no relevant responses. Also, we searched the various Linux and Apache knowledge bases on the Web and found nothing that we could use to improve the performance we were observing.
Anybody see these? Somebody do a dejanews search.
Btw. Is is possible to do all the NIC tweaks they describe with the Intel 100 linux drivers?
I can only hope that this will not get a reaction from Sony/vendors of upping the prices to 'make up for lossess due to piracy'. I buy all my games and the only reason I would get a Mod-chip is to play imports (I hate not being able to play Parasite Eve!!). PSX games are expensive enough as it is, I wouldn't want another 20% tacked onto it, just because some immoral people decide that they want to play pirated PSX games on their PCs.
If you believe software vendors increase their prices due to "losses" incurred from piracy, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.
Anybody with the smallest clue will recogize that this is not how economies of information products work.
The per unit cost for a product like a PSX game is basically 0. This means the retail cost structure has nothing to do with supply. It has EVERYTHING to do with demand.
Compare: If you want to make more money with a conventional material good, you jack up the margins, and hope that demand is enough that the decreased sales wont kill you. This only works if the margin is a (relatively) small percentage of the goods' cost.
An information-based good has zero cost of production. This means that no matter how many units you sell, your margin is always 100%. What does this mean? This means increasing your price gets you nowhere. The assumption is that you are already at the price point where people are willing to buy your product. i.e. if you were to raise it any more, the marginal increase in sales $$ is less than the marginal decrease in sales # of units.
What does this mean? If there is piracy, the only way you can compete is by LOWERING the price (duh).
Look at it this way if you don't understand economics.. you are competing with a "company" (pirate) that is "selling" (giving) an identical product of yours for $0 (for free). How do you compete? By INCREASING the price? Please. Don't be a moron.
You can't compete with piracy by raising prices. Ever. You can only trust that the government intervenes for you, and prosecutes the pirates. Our economy can't handle products that are inexhaustible (like information) without government intervention.
That piracy INCREASES the cost to the consumer is the biggest UL ever. But people like you continue to buy the corporate line. Pathetic.
If a company raises their price "due to piracy", its only because people like you believe them.
I can read you a copyrighted book. That's speech. I can read you a representation of a DSS signal in "human speakable format". That's also speech.
According to the first amendment, those are fine.
Now you say, "aha, but you are copying information, and that's the part that is illegal, because of copyright law". Fine. Your DSS receiver copies information constantly to decode it. Sooner or later it ends up either in a RAMDAC, where the information is "copied" to your monitor, or a analog video DA, where its "copied" to your PC. I guess I can't watch it at all. Thats illegal.
How about if I "remember" the movie I just saw? Is that copying it? Am I not allowed to think about what I just saw? Can I tell others about the movie i just saw? Can I write a review? A parody? OH yah I forgot, we have another lame hack that covers that - "fair use". Swell. Yet another kludge.
How about the information that is "copied" from my retina's receptors to my visual core?
Don't like those examples? How about this one:
The EM spectrum (light) from your CRT is constantly being radiated. If I point it up, say to the moon, and somebody else splits the light with a refractor, has it bounce around a few times, then send it back, say a few minutes later, is that copying?
Copyright law is one hack piled upon another. And another. IP is even worse. Time to scrap the whole thing, because our increasing cabilities to replicate and transmit information is going to make Moore's law look like the understatement of the millenium.
Better rething the whole system before its too late.
If source code is speech, ALL information is speech.
Some examples:
A political tirade against an incumbant A political tirade against an incumbant on TV A TV signal A radio signal A cable signal A scrambled cable signal A descrambled (previously scrambled) cable signal A DSS signal A screen play A movie Rembering a movie that was on a DSS signal you received. A re-enactment of a movie that was on a DSS signal you received. A copy of a DSS signal you received A supermarket shopping list Bomb making instructions A newspaper article A book Source code Source code to an encryption method (is that story about exporting PGP overseas via book and then OCR'ing it true?) A physical law (F=ma) A logical truism (if a=b && b==c, a==c) A method to rasterize (LERP) a line Bresenham's algorithm An API to rasterize a line An API to fill a polygon The GLIDE API and SDK A VHDL/Verilog description of an ASIC A PCADs file describing a PCB layout A poem A piece of music An mp3 (I can read an mp3's data to you, it just takes a long time) CDDA Redbook audio on a CD ISO data on a CD Data on a hard drive Microsoft Word
The fact that people are JUST starting to realize this is more evidence that people are hopelessly brainwashed re: IP/copyrights.
Where is the line? If the PGP story is true, is the line at a book? Or is it closer to smoke signals? Maybe the other direction... closer to ultra-broadband? Make up your fucking minds already, because I'm tired of all the bullshit.
Wake up, before the information age passes you by. There are more advantages to free exchange of all types of information than anybody realizes.
For once there is a resource on this planet that is truly inexhaustible, and what do we do? Make up copyrights to make them look like a material resource. Silly humans. 100 years from now our descendants will look back on the sorry state of contemporary IP/copyright law and laugh and laugh and laugh.
"There is an unlimited supply" "We are an edition" - Sex Pistols _The_Great_Rock_and_Roll_Swindle_
I wish those hackers spent their time on projects with a better chance of survival. It's their time to waste, but I hope they've learned something.
I disagree. This is not a waste of effort. I hope all you would be coders and hackers emulate this. Code what you feel is intersting and fun. If you get sued, leak your source as quickly and as widely as you can. DON'T HIDE YOUR CODE. Companies and corporations are tied strongly to controlling the movement of material goods. Show them they have no control over what you think and the information you create. Spread everything far and wide. That is why information is fundamentally different from a car, or a house, or a TV.
The whole point of open development is to keep companies like 3dfx from fucking you over when they feel threatened. Every time a corporation hides their inability to compete with marketing and legal wrangling is evidence of a chink in the armor. Don't let them shore up their defenses.
Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May Four Embarcadero Center San Francisco, CA 94111-4106 USA nkoenig@chrm.com 415-659-6792
Sincerely, Nathan Koenig
Same scum for both the tale of woe and the stuff on the underground site. Somebody find me lat/lon coords and ill get a tactical nuke out there post haste.
Concise listing of the more useful RFCs
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First off, I did not label him a-priori. As many others have already said, he has popped up before.
Yes, slashdotters are prone to flameage. When a flamee says things that cause flames, sometimes they are undeserved. Sometimes, however, they are not. In this particular case, many of the original flames were totally uncalled for, but only because the flamee wasn't particularly clueful. This doesn't mean that his points had any validity. Lets be perfectly clear on this point. They didn't make sense then, and they don't now. In any event, allow me to move on.
Obviously, many people use their full names. Many people use potpourri and have squeegees in their showers and happen to like quiche. Single bits of circumstantial evidence mean nothing. But, when put all together, many things are painfully obvious, and circumstantial evidence can provide the nail in the coffin.
Say somebody drones on and on and on about a subject, and when at first glance the material looks ok, but on closer inspection, almost anybody reading it will call bullshit on it. Many times the author, in order to appear as though he knows what he's talking about, will put stuff like PhD, and Esq, etc. etc. behind his name, just to show his blathering is coming from an educated person.
Crackpots in particular do this a lot. And I don't mean just online either. If any of you have ever written a paper to any scientific rag, you know that inevitably you get a ton of crap from crackpots, most of which appear to have enough PhDs and Esqs et all to form their own MENSA. But when you read their papers, you quickly realize that despite their apparent PhD in physics, TIME DOES NOT HAVE INERTIA.
My rambling is done. I shall make up a few degrees to lend my posting some credence. If you flame me, remember, I didn't deserve it because you are all arrogant.
1) He claims expert knowledge in something he has only passing experience in.
2) He covers ground others have already discussed at length. FYI experts this time: no less than Ritchie (or maybe it was Kernighan - I can't find the url now;-) himself has discussed inserting self replicating exploits in COMPILERS.
3) He does not respond to criticism directly (i.e. point by point), only regurgitates what he has said before over and over again.
AND! MOST IMPORTANTLY (this is always a dead givaway)
4) He uses a full name, followed by a silly status designator to show he is an expert and/or really smart.
In any case, am I being arrogant if I tell you his concerns securing open source pale in comparison to the damage one can do with a closed, trojan binary?
Trust me, we've been THROUGH this damn discussion before, ad nauseum.
Slashdot Mirror
It really *is* as simple as 'theft is theft'. If it's copyrighted, and you don't follow the originators EULA (superceded by govermnet regulations of course, as in the 'fair use' act), you are stealing. Please live with it, because the other option is a world where there is no reason to create anything.
Giggle. Trust me, money isn't the only reason to do things. I'll happily forgo all the crap thats created to make money (Titanic, Backstreet Boys, Jurassic Park) for REAL art thats made out of love.
If money is all that you will create for, I, for one, would hate to see what you create.
ASCAP is what keeps music piracy at a minimum. If sowtware had an orginization like this, software piracy would be at a low, and software would be less expensive due to it. Games would cost 20$ because they don't have to compensate for you buying it and burning 13 copies for all of your friends.
This is debatable. Pure economics says that piracy drives the cost of products DOWN, since it provides an identical product for less money. Add to that the fact that I GUARANTEE you that at most one of the thirteen of your hypothetical friends would buy the stupid game at $40 bucks if they couldn't copy it.
I see this stupid myth over and over again. Don't buy it. Its total garbage.
The information economy is a sham. In case you havent noticed, its a SELLER's market. They choose what price is optimal, since they can always drop the per unit cost arbritrarily low until it reaches manfacturing costs, which, for a non-material good, is basically zero.
If i see one more llama bleating that piracy is costing software manufacturers' money, im going to scream.
Part 1:
Journalists research their stories, and investigate all sides of the story, and try and discover the truth.
Whoa. I've not seen this effect. You'll have to show it to me some time. I don't know what news you read or watch, but its very rarely impartial, let alone researched. The danger is NOT that its biased and sloppily researched, but that people like you seem to think that it is.
Part 2:
CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the other guys look at a list of interesting submissions and then put the best of those out there. The don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to the story.
As opposed to journalists, who look at all the stuff that comes off of AP and then put up the stuff that gets the best ratings of those out there. They don't really check to see if it's true, or if there's more to to story, as long as it has sex or violence and a good hook.
As somebody pointed it, this is and OLD page, and only shows exactly how clueless about the net community Mindcraft is.
It is the prototypical first reaction of a newbie to a mailbox full of flame mail: "WAAAA I acted like a retard and look at all the flamage I got! Somebody do something! I didn't say anything wrong, because look at how content free those flames are!"
What's next? Going to go run to your mommies and cry?
The first rule of net communication is that of instant criticism, fair AND unfair. If you can't handle content-free flames, don't post flame bait. In fact, don't participate at all. Sooner or later you will get flamed. Deal with it.
Which leads me to the second rule of net communication: grow a thick skin. Its only words, right? Isn't that what you tell your twelve year old? "Sticks and stones... etc"?
Mindcraft: your posting of other peoples immature flames have only verified the obvious to me. You people are just as immature, AND net-newbies to boot.
Finally, for those of you flamers out there: don't stop. Sure, a well thought out critcism is better, and an outright mailbomb is a BAD IDEA(tm), but somewhere in between lies the happy, soul cleansing, first amendment protected, uncensored flame.
WOOO I was at that SIGGRAPH! I'm guessing it was 1992 or so.
As I recall, the pong game was much more successful.
This is a good analogy. You can play pong by consensus (and it happens to be a problem that can be easily parallelized) but flying a plane isn't.
Add me to the list of people who think chess by consensus is a completely braindead idea.
BTW. There were other cool things. They had an overhead graphical representation of what the pattern of red and blue was, and they had a little card that told you an order of things to do (just like at football game) so it would make pretty patterns on the display.
Also, at this Siggraph was the start of a war between graphic "artists" and graphic "scientists"
Up until this era, most computer animation was done like regular animation, where artists would interpret and dictate how a given character or object would move.
There was a group of less "arty" minded programmers that had started on using constraint based physical modeling to do the actual animation, with startling results. This pissed off many of the artists, who would rather animate say, a bowl of jello, by hand.
Needless to say, the constraint based jello model was frightengly convincing, wheras constraint based modeling of a human being walking was pathetic.
It was a great contrast.
Saints htons() and htonl().
They will save us from the mess Intel left with us, and allow the Internet to spread the gospel of bigendianess.
Captain, my tricorder readings are off the scale.
Spock, what is it?
Fascinating, Jim, I believe this strange life form is a certified net-crackpot!
HELLOOO? Is there anybody in there? The GPL is more free. If MS successfully embraces and extends perl with proprietary extentions, and then does not release those under GPL, then YOUR freedoms have been infringed upon. You can't look at the source. You can't give a friend a copy. You can't add your own extensions. If MS added stuff and THEN GPL'ed it we wouldn't be HAVING this discussion.
Why is it that people always assume corporate presence is part of a "free market"? Wake up call: people like microsoft depend heavily on government intervention to enforce their stupid patents and copyrights. This is not free. This is usually called a monopoly.
Repeat after me:
Copyrights and IP law generate government condoned monopolies.
This is not a difficult concept to grasp. Sure, its supposed to spur competition, but modern corporations like microsoft have become very adept at exploiting it.
I disagree strongly.
/governmental grants (ala NSF) are a middle ground here. Taxation of ISPs. Taxation/metering of bandwidth usage.
There is no correlation between money and software.
Money is a symbol of a rare resource. It used to be based on a _fixed_ amount of gold. Now its not. Its value varies from day to day. But it is still a symbol of something real and material, and most importantly, something that is limited.
This is because money represents all of our concepts of an economy. We try to distribute limited resources as best we can.
Information is NOT a symbol of a limited resource. Information is just one alternative from a set of possibilities, either finite, or infinite. Shannon happened to boil this down to a sequence of binary bits, and found a way to represent any one of these alternatives, and general ways of intermixing them. Turing gave us general ways of manipulating information.
All our attempts at preventing information exchange are because 1) competition is necessary to ensure the best possible information products and 2) it is (or was) viable to restrict who and how this information is distrubuted. #2 is only nesessary insofar as our only concept of competition involves the consumption of limited resources, which we represent with money.
When 2) is no longer technically viable, or the free flow of information is more advantageous than its restriction, we need to look to alternatives.
Here's my list (in some vage order of personal preference):
I. Subsidies. At worst, welfare for programmers, at best, treat as R&D in corporations. Educational
II. Service/Support. Give for free, sell documentation and support. Contract software programmers for in-house software projects. Online fees (e.g. funding an online game).
III. The artist factor. Sometimes, the best stuff is made for love, not for money. Compare _Titanic_ and _Jurassic Park_ to _Brazil_ and _Life is Beautiful_. Compare Mingus to Back Street Boys. Compare van Gogh to velvet paintings of Elvis. Compare Linus' early GPL'ing of his tiny Minux clone to Bill's infamous bigfoot letter to Altair hobbiests over their alleged misuse of "his" code.
Give me more if you can.
Wrong.
;)
Information is not rare.
Never argue copyrights/IP from an economic standpoint. It just doesn't work.
Gold is a limited resource, and it happens to be rare. It can't be synthesized, unless you happen to believe in alchemy.
Information is a limitless resource, and it is not rare.
Human civilization has spent countless millenia trying to equitibly distribute limited resources, and at the first sign of a truley limiteless one, we regulate it to make it look limited. Boy, how stupid can we be.
Hint to software authors who are depending solely on our rapidly aging IP concepts: better find a new way to make a living, because moving information is becoming easier everyday. No amount of "but my kids will starve" bleating will save your skins. You'll be better off trying to sell horseshoes in Los Angeles.
Its not just software either. All information is moving this way.
Music: only 60 megs for a cd if they're mp3s
Movies: only 1.2 g for a vcd pair (still poor quality but sooner or later..)
Books: I happen to prefer hard copy anyway. As long as its hard to bind a book, authors are safe
Sooner or later, all of this information "production" will have to be subsidized. Sorry folks. I give it 20 years tops. If the whole pathetic system hasn't collapsed by then, we will be living in a police state, and I'm moving into a cave and resorting to hunting/gathering.
They all fail to see the writing on the wall.
Lucas is bright enough to see that digital distribution is the wave of the future... what he doesn't see is that restricting the flow of information to his LIKING has nothing to do with cracking down on "Wild West" (GIGGLE - this Internet cliche is only about 30 years old) lawlessness.
It is about as pointless as trying to hold water in a sieve. Their whole delicate world is crumbling around them and all they can do is bleat about the lack of morality on the 'net.
They're on the ropes...
The argument about the quality of the pirated films being poor enough that people will still see the movies in theatres is a specious one. This trend will not stop at cheap bootlegged ripoffs. Sooner or later technology will make transporting full resolution full frame rate copies trivial.
It is all bits people. Once we can move enough of them at a time, the result is inevitable.
Even if we make the assumption as given in the previous essay mentioned "Anarchism Triumphant", that all information can be reduced to some indefinitely long bitstream (i.e. just a number) there are far more uninteresting numbers than there are interesting ones.
Giggle. You ever hear of a guy named Shannon? This is not an "assumption."
I still say, burn it all, let the chips fall where they may: IP, copyrights, trademarks, export laws, the whole kit and kaboodle.
DO NOT stop posting stuff like this.
If I want to read about stuff I can buy in the Sharper Image I read Wired, or hell, I read the Sharper Image.
This is great news indeed, but lawyers and judges and most everybody else have no clue where this leads.
/. readers) would probably refuse to accept this.
If source code is considered a language and is therefore protected under free speech, it is obvious that all information transmission is protected. While this happy news to me, and probably also a GOOD IDEA(TM), 99.999% of the brainwashed masses (and unfortunately many
I expect this to get overruled almost instantaneously. Either that, or they will pile hack upon hack upon hack on top of the legal wording to make sure IP stays intact, as well as the ability to make information "ownable".
Foolish humans.
Anybody know what this does:
Used the affinity tool to bind one NIC to each CPU
(ftp://ftp.microsof t.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/tools/affinity/)
If this does what I THINK it does it would explain a lot.
The white paper says:
We posted notices on various Linux and Apache newsgroups and received no relevant responses. Also, we searched the various Linux and Apache knowledge bases on the Web and found nothing that we could use to improve the performance we were observing.
Anybody see these? Somebody do a dejanews search.
Btw. Is is possible to do all the NIC tweaks they describe with the Intel 100 linux drivers?
I can only hope that this will not get a reaction from Sony/vendors of upping the prices to 'make up for lossess due to piracy'. I buy all my games and the only reason I would get a Mod-chip is to play imports (I hate not being able to play Parasite Eve!!). PSX games are expensive enough as it is, I wouldn't want another 20% tacked onto it, just because some immoral people decide that they want to play pirated PSX games on their PCs.
If you believe software vendors increase their prices due to "losses" incurred from piracy, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.
Anybody with the smallest clue will recogize that this is not how economies of information products work.
The per unit cost for a product like a PSX game is basically 0. This means the retail cost structure has nothing to do with supply. It has EVERYTHING to do with demand.
Compare: If you want to make more money with a conventional material good, you jack up the margins, and hope that demand is enough that the decreased sales wont kill you. This only works if the margin is a (relatively) small percentage of the goods' cost.
An information-based good has zero cost of production. This means that no matter how many units you sell, your margin is always 100%. What does this mean? This means increasing your price gets you nowhere. The assumption is that you are already at the price point where people are willing to buy your product. i.e. if you were to raise it any more, the marginal increase in sales $$ is less than the marginal decrease in sales # of units.
What does this mean? If there is piracy, the only way you can compete is by LOWERING the price (duh).
Look at it this way if you don't understand economics.. you are competing with a "company" (pirate) that is "selling" (giving) an identical product of yours for $0 (for free). How do you compete? By INCREASING the price? Please. Don't be a moron.
You can't compete with piracy by raising prices. Ever. You can only trust that the government intervenes for you, and prosecutes the pirates. Our economy can't handle products that are inexhaustible (like information) without government intervention.
That piracy INCREASES the cost to the consumer is the biggest UL ever. But people like you continue to buy the corporate line. Pathetic.
If a company raises their price "due to piracy", its only because people like you believe them.
You misunderstand my point.
I can read you a copyrighted book. That's speech.
I can read you a representation of a DSS signal in "human speakable format". That's also speech.
According to the first amendment, those are fine.
Now you say, "aha, but you are copying information, and that's the part that is illegal, because of copyright law". Fine. Your DSS receiver copies information constantly to decode it. Sooner or later it ends up either in a RAMDAC, where the information is "copied" to your monitor, or a analog video DA, where its "copied" to your PC. I guess I can't watch it at all. Thats illegal.
How about if I "remember" the movie I just saw? Is that copying it? Am I not allowed to think about what I just saw? Can I tell others about the movie i just saw? Can I write a review? A parody? OH yah I forgot, we have another lame hack that covers that - "fair use". Swell. Yet another kludge.
How about the information that is "copied" from my retina's receptors to my visual core?
Don't like those examples? How about this one:
The EM spectrum (light) from your CRT is constantly being radiated. If I point it up, say to the moon, and somebody else splits the light with a refractor, has it bounce around a few times, then send it back, say a few minutes later, is that copying?
Copyright law is one hack piled upon another. And another. IP is even worse. Time to scrap the whole thing, because our increasing cabilities to replicate and transmit information is going to make Moore's law look like the understatement of the millenium.
Better rething the whole system before its too late.
If source code is speech, ALL information is speech.
Some examples:
A political tirade against an incumbant
A political tirade against an incumbant on TV
A TV signal
A radio signal
A cable signal
A scrambled cable signal
A descrambled (previously scrambled) cable signal
A DSS signal
A screen play
A movie
Rembering a movie that was on a DSS signal you received.
A re-enactment of a movie that was on a DSS signal you received.
A copy of a DSS signal you received
A supermarket shopping list
Bomb making instructions
A newspaper article
A book
Source code
Source code to an encryption method (is that story about exporting PGP overseas via book and then OCR'ing it true?)
A physical law (F=ma)
A logical truism (if a=b && b==c, a==c)
A method to rasterize (LERP) a line
Bresenham's algorithm
An API to rasterize a line
An API to fill a polygon
The GLIDE API and SDK
A VHDL/Verilog description of an ASIC
A PCADs file describing a PCB layout
A poem
A piece of music
An mp3 (I can read an mp3's data to you, it just takes a long time)
CDDA Redbook audio on a CD
ISO data on a CD
Data on a hard drive
Microsoft Word
The fact that people are JUST starting to realize this is more evidence that people are hopelessly brainwashed re: IP/copyrights.
Where is the line? If the PGP story is true, is the line at a book? Or is it closer to smoke signals? Maybe the other direction... closer to ultra-broadband? Make up your fucking minds already, because I'm tired of all the bullshit.
Wake up, before the information age passes you by.
There are more advantages to free exchange of all types of information than anybody realizes.
For once there is a resource on this planet that is truly inexhaustible, and what do we do? Make up copyrights to make them look like a material resource. Silly humans. 100 years from now our descendants will look back on the sorry state of contemporary IP/copyright law and laugh and laugh and laugh.
"There is an unlimited supply"
"We are an edition"
- Sex Pistols _The_Great_Rock_and_Roll_Swindle_
I wish those hackers spent their time on projects with a better chance of survival. It's their time to waste, but I hope they've learned something.
I disagree. This is not a waste of effort. I hope all you would be coders and hackers emulate this. Code what you feel is intersting and fun. If you get sued, leak your source as quickly and as widely as you can. DON'T HIDE YOUR CODE. Companies and corporations are tied strongly to controlling the movement of material goods. Show them they have no control over what you think and the information you create. Spread everything far and wide. That is why information is fundamentally different from a car, or a house, or a TV.
The whole point of open development is to keep companies like 3dfx from fucking you over when they feel threatened. Every time a corporation hides their inability to compete with marketing and legal wrangling is evidence of a chink in the armor. Don't let them shore up their defenses.
Go for the jugular.
Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May
Four Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA 94111-4106
USA
nkoenig@chrm.com
415-659-6792
Sincerely,
Nathan Koenig
Same scum for both the tale of woe and the stuff on the underground site. Somebody find me lat/lon coords and ill get a tactical nuke out there post haste.
I always have problems finding the RFCs I need.
Here's my list.
First off, I did not label him a-priori. As many others have already said, he has popped up before.
Yes, slashdotters are prone to flameage. When a flamee says things that cause flames, sometimes they are undeserved. Sometimes, however, they are not. In this particular case, many of the original flames were totally uncalled for, but only because the flamee wasn't particularly clueful. This doesn't mean that his points had any validity. Lets be perfectly clear on this point. They didn't make sense then, and they don't now. In any event, allow me to move on.
Obviously, many people use their full names. Many people use potpourri and have squeegees in their showers and happen to like quiche. Single bits of circumstantial evidence mean nothing. But, when put all together, many things are painfully obvious, and circumstantial evidence can provide the nail in the coffin.
Say somebody drones on and on and on about a subject, and when at first glance the material looks ok, but on closer inspection, almost anybody reading it will call bullshit on it. Many times the author, in order to appear as though he knows what he's talking about, will put stuff like PhD, and Esq, etc. etc. behind his name, just to show his blathering is coming from an educated person.
Crackpots in particular do this a lot. And I don't mean just online either. If any of you have ever written a paper to any scientific rag, you know that inevitably you get a ton of crap from crackpots, most of which appear to have enough PhDs and Esqs et all to form their own MENSA. But when you read their papers, you quickly realize that despite their apparent PhD in physics, TIME DOES NOT HAVE INERTIA.
My rambling is done. I shall make up a few degrees to lend my posting some credence. If you flame me, remember, I didn't deserve it because you are all arrogant.
Sir Nyet J.Q. Smith III Esq. DDS. PhD. MD.
He passes the crackpot test:
;-) himself has discussed inserting self replicating exploits in COMPILERS.
1) He claims expert knowledge in something he has only passing experience in.
2) He covers ground others have already discussed at length. FYI experts this time: no less than Ritchie (or maybe it was Kernighan - I can't find the url now
3) He does not respond to criticism directly (i.e. point by point), only regurgitates what he has said before over and over again.
AND! MOST IMPORTANTLY (this is always a dead givaway)
4) He uses a full name, followed by a silly status designator to show he is an expert and/or really smart.
In any case, am I being arrogant if I tell you his concerns securing open source pale in comparison to the damage one can do with a closed, trojan binary?
Trust me, we've been THROUGH this damn discussion before, ad nauseum.
You can safely ignore him.