The reason I decry the semantics in this case is that many people seem to think "copying music is OK because it isn't theft". As you so clearly point out, theft isn't the only crime out there -- the debate over calling something "theft" is symantic, and really auxillary to the important debate of whether copyright violations deserve the degree of response they are getting.
Fair use is a limitation on the rights granted to the copyright holder. You can not deprive someone of something they never had.
Read what I wrote again. You can't use copyright-protected content without permission. That permission can come in the form of "fair use" or other forms. The whole point of a parenthetical is to modify the last object, not the primary subject.
> Remember that the world does NOT subscribe to the American idea of freedom and democracy.
Awwww.. Good post right up until there.. Don't go there mate, just don't go there.. You are opening a can of worms better left unopened.
Everyone seems to be misunderstanding the poster. He isn't saying "the world isn't free or democratic, only America is." Instead it is more "the world doesn't always agree with America on the definitions of 'freedom' and 'democracy'". Which is a completely accurate statement.
Read the context people -- in the very next paragraph, he explains what he means.
I'd like to find an MP3 player, HD based or replacement memory sticks (SD, xD, whatever), that has the ability to record using a built in microphone and an FM tuner. A microphone jack would be a plus.
MP3, FLAC, OGG, expandable/updatable firmware to add more and/or update codecs later. Gapless support for OGG on the way very soon (it's in the beta firmware).
FM-tuner, built-in FM transmitter (for listening [with a quality hit] on your car stereo and the like), record from FM to MP3. Mic port, line-in port, direct to WAV or MP3. Media is a "backpack" that's swappable, so you can have your 128/256MB lightweight memory player, or your heavier 20-80GB HDD player depending on what you need that day.
It's a little heavier and chunkier than an iPod, and the interface isn't good. It isn't an "iPod killer". But, it does come with software for Linux, Win, and Mac, and is reliable and fairly easy to use. The software-sync operation is almost as slick as iPod's, as well (not quite as automatic - requires a button-press on the software for sync - but really close).
Price point is iPod-comparable. Oh, and their software is OpenSource.:P
Re:Buy your music from any download service
on
Virgin's New iPod Rival
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
it is Virgins choice not to make it compatible to the iTMS
Except that Apple owns the FairPlay system, which is what makes iTunes tick. Cracking the DRM on FairPlay AAC files is in a legal gray-area, and is likely to cause corporate animosity -- rarely a good thing.
If Apple refused to license FairPlay to Virgin, then Virgin is correct in saying that their lack of iTunes support is Apple's choice.
(even if it's only MP3 they play)
"Digital Music" is not all "MP3". iTunes are AAC, not MP3 (yes, I know, they both use MPEG-style encoding). Pedantic, perhaps, but important. Encoded music comes in lots of formats, not just WMA and MP3.
I know a lot of people playing music on thier pcs/portable devices and not a one uses OGG
That's a bit of chicken-and-egg. I know lots of portable-music people who rip everything to MP3 because their favorite player has no OGG support. The industry says OGG won't be supported on portables until OGG is in wider use -- but OGG won't be in wider use until portables support it. It's a challenge.
Thing is, OGG is at least as good as any other psycho-acoustic encoding system -- even if the file sizes are slightly larger (with 20G in your pocket, who cares anyhow?). But, the majority of portable users will use whatever choices their portable gives them -- so if the iPod added OGG support and had iTunes enabled to rip to OGG by default, people would use it. As long as OGG lacks DRM, though, there is no compelling reason to add its support.
Of course, if you really want your OGG files, but have an MP3-based portable, you could always transcode... the loss from a Quality-10 OGG to a 192kbps MP3 isn't terribly significant -- and those that could tell probably don't use anything less than FLAC anyhow -- but the idea of transcoding is lost on the average consumer.
Zero is implying that there is a value there and that it is in fact the number zero. Null would imply that no value ever existed, zero or otherwise.
One place this is particularly useful is in recording scientific data. A value of 0.00 means a measuremet was taken, and that measurement is zero. A value of NULL means no measurement was taken. That is the primary difference between 0 and NULL: while both "false", NULL works as an undefined value.
In all of my db designs I try to avoid nulls unless absolutely neccessary.
Probably a sound practice. NULLs should only be allowed where the lack of data is significant.
I no longer have the patience to babysit an MD-deck and CD player to make compilations
Why on earth would you do that? Your computer does have an audio card and media player, right? My CD collection has been ripped to FLAC and/or high-bitrate OGG for some time. Set up XMMS to have a 2s pause between songs, and set up your playlist. Hit record on your MD recorder, hit play on XMMS, and walk away.
The 2s sound gap causes a track break on the MD player to form automatically. You then have a fully-tracked MD copy of a playlist. Yes, if your source is OGG or MP3 you lose a tiny bit of audio quality -- if your source files are decent bitrate (even just 192k), it's not enough to notice through any but the very best headphones.
Here's a thought. Have the sitter call the theater, and the usher can come and get you. It's less disturbing, and people are less likely to abuse it.
Yeah, so it takes a minute longer. None of the scenarios I've seen are likely to suffer from a minute or two delay. People did manage to receive emergency phone calls before cell phones. They also did things like find capable baby-sitters.
Yeah, I can see why you'd want to know ASAP if little Betty broke her arm while you were away. Use your cellphone to call the sitter -- outside the theater -- and make sure she knows what movie you're in and what the theater's phone number is. Then, let it be blocked during the film. A delay of a few minutes before you find out about that isn't the end of the world.
In reality, the number of people who get calls from a girl/boyfriend or somesuch during a movie far outnumber those who get emergency calls. So, since the theater is more than willing to convey emergency messages, why have the cellphone on?
What if The Onion registered "new-yorktimes.com/net/org" and placed their satrical articles under the header "The New-York Times, newspaper of record"?
And, what if all of their satire was designed to get people to become their customers instead of the real NYT?
Illegally copying music is not strictly "theft" or "stealing", but that's symantics. It is still illegal, it is still a tort. You are still depriving someone.
Who, of what? Easy... you are depriving the copyright-holder of the right to distribute the copyright-bearing work as he/she/it sees fit. Copyright grants that right exclusively to the copyright holder -- if you deprive them of that right, you are acting against the law.
If you feel that copyright has no place in our society, then add your voice and pocketbook to the fight to legislate it out or reform it. Simply deciding to commit criminal and civil copyright violation is not some noble protest -- you want a copy of something you don't have a right to, or to provide a copy to someone else that they don't have a right to.
And yes, I'm well aware that there are cases where P2P and filesharing are not copyright infringement, and I support those technologies. I'm just so sick of people arguing about whether the terms "theft" or "piracy" are accurate.
I repeat: you are depriving someone of their rights when you download copyright-protected content without permission (through fair use or otherwise).
Not if you are planning on rolling out a thousand desktops across an organization to users with potentially no experience outside of Windows. Stop applying Debian rules to the business market.
You needn't install KDE and GNOME just to get GTK+ and Qt. In fact, there are a large number of windowing-related toolkits on a common Linux-based system. Motif, Notif, tk, GTK(+), Qt, and so on. Maintaining the toolkits is easy as pie, if you keep your distro updated.
So, you can standardize a Linux Desktop Environment, keep all the toolkits installed, and developers continue to be able to choose the toolkit that best satisfies the product requirements.
There are actually a number of toolkits available for Windows as well (wxWindows, GTK+, Qt, etc.) -- it's just that they way Windows allows users with install permission to install libraries means that developers can (and do) package the toolkit with the app. As long as the toolkits remain interoperable (and they are, esp. between Qt and GTK), there should be no real issue in deploying them in the business world.
And before I get flames of "You've obviously never done any of this", let me just say that my main source of income is deploying Linux on both server and desktop in the Medium-Large business market.
the teacher refered to Red Hat and Linux as one in the same.
And *that* is part of the reason Linux isn't more popular. Teachers and PHBs who find that RedHat doesn't fit with their business model suddenly discount all distributions. We need to educate these people that part of the benefit of Linux is choice between niche distributions.
His pronunciation of Suse bothered me as he said it like 'Sue-say', where I prefered 'Suzy'.
'SOO-zuh'. If you're following the pronunciation rules of German, that's most likely. A previous client solved the dilemma by using the acronym SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) pronounced as 'slez'.
You don't even want to know about the d-bee-ann vs deb-e-an fights we got into.
Actually, there is a right way for that. IIRC, the people who first created the distribution named it after Deborah and Ian -- thus Deb-Ian or Debian. Ian is pronounced "ee-an", so it's "deb-ee-an". This is (was?) buried on the Debian website.
See, this is why mobile plans are more expensive in the US. No one wants a plan that only works in certain areas -- they want plans that cover 90% or better of their region.
If you're a college student or are otherwise bound to a metro area for the vast majority of the time, very inexpensive service can be had. However, the biggest users (business people) need out-of-metro coverage. That's expensive.
My plan is about $45 US, I can talk all I want on weekends, and unless I'm underground or in a thick-walled (or otherwise sheilded) room, I have service.
Cray systems may not always be the fastest thing around, but they are solid. It would be nice to see more producers paying careful attention to clean design and reliability over having the latest speed-booster.
It's nice to see our old friend Cray continue to keep a foot in the market -- if nothing else, it makes everyone else stay on their toes.
1) Roughly what percent of your music collection is unauthorized files from P2P like Kazaa, FTP, etc.?
< 1%
2) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
~ 3%
3) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
- 0%
4) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
~ 93%
5) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
~ 3%
It's worth noting that the last category is music I haven't been able to find my own copy of, or music that the artist has told me "I don't have any more copies of the disc, please rip this".
Yeah, I may not be a typical user, and I don't have an iPod (doesn't play OGG or FLAC, not interested). However, on my portable music device, the files are "unprotected" by DRM -- and they'd probably be considered "stolen" by that measure. It's crap, because I legally use nearly all that music!
It makes me sad that Ballmer is propagating the "any digital music without DRM is stolen digital music" meme. It especially irritates me because I've worked with a few artists to explicitly distribute non-DRM media files; the copyright holder doens't always want DRM.
The reality is: If you commute to work and you're not living out in the country, why use a MTB? Get a decent commuter, I have one two which I use to get around downtown with a heavy lock so that it doesn't get stolen.
I must be the only person in NA who does not own a MTB, it seems that is the only type of bike that people know here.... Almost like the SUV craze (suspension while riding on the road? Sure, if I want to hammer 20 - 30% of my output in the shocks).
I own an MTB. I commute to work with it. It's not SUV mentality -- rather, it's practical concern. While I do live in the city, the city I live in provides a goodly number of bike trails, so I needn't ride city streets to commute. Taking the trails is not only less stressful (no real traffic), but faster as well (fewer intersections, etc.). Unfortunately, there are sections of trail that are gravel, dirt, or badly-damaged asphault. Road bikes are an utter waste on those sections of trail.
So, I have a y-frame MTB with a suspension - I'd rather waste some of my output (about 12%, BTW, not 20-30%) in absorbing the back-trail type of terrain and saving my back (rear shock). The front shocks are worth it because I can maintain a higher average speed over rough terrain, as the shocks help keep the tire on the trail.
While I agree that a lot of people buy MTB-style bikes for how they look (or because they don't know any better), one can't automatically assume that every city-rider who has an MTB is clueless. Especially when not everyone can afford multiple bikes -- I know people who commute on city streets, but buy the MTB because they off-road on weekends and don't want to own two bikes.
"encouraging and assisting in the circumvention of copywrite protection systems"
Normally I'm not Kommandant Grammar. However, this one is really important, because meaning can easily drift here.
It's copyright and copyright protected (or copyrighted). Not copywrite or copywritten. This is so important because it isn't about authorship, it's about distribution and publishing rights. Copyright is the right to copy.
Copyright law says that when I create a work, I'm granted an exclusive right to control how it is reproduced and distributed. Further, the law says that certain rights to reproduce and distrubute a work are "fair use", and those rights belong to everyone. As the original copyright holder, I can transfer, license, or assign my copy rights to another party (e.g. a publisher or distributor). If I tranfer my rights (by selling them, for example), I no longer have copy rights for that work. That doesn't make me any less the original producer.
The concept of copy rights is a trade: consumers get access to a work, authors get to choose the "first use" (i.e. publish or set in a drawer). In trade, consumers are guaranteed certain rights, like the right to quote from a work &c.
When we take the word "right" out of copyright it's far easier to forget what copyright law really protects -- not just the rights of a publisher or author to control copying of the author's works, but the rights of the consumer for fair use. When we forget that copyright is about controlling the rights to copy, we get lawyers attacking individuals who make obvious parodies and satires. We get the idea that work must be "protected" for years after the copyright-holder's death. We get corporate copyright grants for 75 years.
If we could all realize -- and remember -- that copyrights are rights to distribute, we might see more pressure on Congress to make sensible decisions about who can sue whom over copy rights.
Just use the same userid and password for everything.
Not very secure, of course, but it is a *single* sign-on.
No, it's a single identity. Single sign-on doesn't mean "same authentication for everything", it means that I log in *once* -- to my domain account -- and everything else is transparently authenticated until I log out.
In theory, with SSO I should be able to sit down and log in when I get to work, and never enter my password again until after I log out for the evening (and when I lock PC in between).
Does OpenOffice support the same level of editting markup and internal versioning? I'll be honest, its nothing I use so I've never looked, but I know alot of people around here who live by it.
Well, yes and no. OOo does do revision control quite well; IMO, it works more cleanly than any version of MS-Office. However, it lacks the ability to tightly integrate with e-mail applications and the like. While I (and probably a lot of OOo users) think that's a feature, others (like your org, apparently) find integration the strongest selling point of MS-Office.
The wonderful part of the OOo project is that we now have a viable choice in Office suites. If Word is really the best choice, great -- but just the fact that it's not the only choice anymore is good for consumers. Competition leads to innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the context people -- in the very next paragraph, he explains what he means.
MP3, FLAC, OGG, expandable/updatable firmware to add more and/or update codecs later. Gapless support for OGG on the way very soon (it's in the beta firmware).
FM-tuner, built-in FM transmitter (for listening [with a quality hit] on your car stereo and the like), record from FM to MP3. Mic port, line-in port, direct to WAV or MP3. Media is a "backpack" that's swappable, so you can have your 128/256MB lightweight memory player, or your heavier 20-80GB HDD player depending on what you need that day.
It's a little heavier and chunkier than an iPod, and the interface isn't good. It isn't an "iPod killer". But, it does come with software for Linux, Win, and Mac, and is reliable and fairly easy to use. The software-sync operation is almost as slick as iPod's, as well (not quite as automatic - requires a button-press on the software for sync - but really close).
Price point is iPod-comparable. Oh, and their software is OpenSource.
If Apple refused to license FairPlay to Virgin, then Virgin is correct in saying that their lack of iTunes support is Apple's choice."Digital Music" is not all "MP3". iTunes are AAC, not MP3 (yes, I know, they both use MPEG-style encoding). Pedantic, perhaps, but important. Encoded music comes in lots of formats, not just WMA and MP3.
Thing is, OGG is at least as good as any other psycho-acoustic encoding system -- even if the file sizes are slightly larger (with 20G in your pocket, who cares anyhow?). But, the majority of portable users will use whatever choices their portable gives them -- so if the iPod added OGG support and had iTunes enabled to rip to OGG by default, people would use it. As long as OGG lacks DRM, though, there is no compelling reason to add its support.
Of course, if you really want your OGG files, but have an MP3-based portable, you could always transcode... the loss from a Quality-10 OGG to a 192kbps MP3 isn't terribly significant -- and those that could tell probably don't use anything less than FLAC anyhow -- but the idea of transcoding is lost on the average consumer.
The 2s sound gap causes a track break on the MD player to form automatically. You then have a fully-tracked MD copy of a playlist. Yes, if your source is OGG or MP3 you lose a tiny bit of audio quality -- if your source files are decent bitrate (even just 192k), it's not enough to notice through any but the very best headphones.
Yeah, so it takes a minute longer. None of the scenarios I've seen are likely to suffer from a minute or two delay. People did manage to receive emergency phone calls before cell phones. They also did things like find capable baby-sitters.
Yeah, I can see why you'd want to know ASAP if little Betty broke her arm while you were away. Use your cellphone to call the sitter -- outside the theater -- and make sure she knows what movie you're in and what the theater's phone number is. Then, let it be blocked during the film. A delay of a few minutes before you find out about that isn't the end of the world.
In reality, the number of people who get calls from a girl/boyfriend or somesuch during a movie far outnumber those who get emergency calls. So, since the theater is more than willing to convey emergency messages, why have the cellphone on?
What if The Onion registered "new-yorktimes.com/net/org" and placed their satrical articles under the header "The New-York Times, newspaper of record"?
And, what if all of their satire was designed to get people to become their customers instead of the real NYT?
It's starting to get grey...
I'm sick of this whole debate, you're both wrong.
Illegally copying music is not strictly "theft" or "stealing", but that's symantics. It is still illegal, it is still a tort. You are still depriving someone.
Who, of what? Easy... you are depriving the copyright-holder of the right to distribute the copyright-bearing work as he/she/it sees fit. Copyright grants that right exclusively to the copyright holder -- if you deprive them of that right, you are acting against the law.
If you feel that copyright has no place in our society, then add your voice and pocketbook to the fight to legislate it out or reform it. Simply deciding to commit criminal and civil copyright violation is not some noble protest -- you want a copy of something you don't have a right to, or to provide a copy to someone else that they don't have a right to.
And yes, I'm well aware that there are cases where P2P and filesharing are not copyright infringement, and I support those technologies. I'm just so sick of people arguing about whether the terms "theft" or "piracy" are accurate.
I repeat: you are depriving someone of their rights when you download copyright-protected content without permission (through fair use or otherwise).
So, you can standardize a Linux Desktop Environment, keep all the toolkits installed, and developers continue to be able to choose the toolkit that best satisfies the product requirements.
There are actually a number of toolkits available for Windows as well (wxWindows, GTK+, Qt, etc.) -- it's just that they way Windows allows users with install permission to install libraries means that developers can (and do) package the toolkit with the app. As long as the toolkits remain interoperable (and they are, esp. between Qt and GTK), there should be no real issue in deploying them in the business world.
And before I get flames of "You've obviously never done any of this", let me just say that my main source of income is deploying Linux on both server and desktop in the Medium-Large business market.
Automatically
Done without human intervention
Magically
Done in an incomprehensible way, apparently as if by magic
Automagically
Done without human intervention, apparently as if by magic
So, my work computer automatically boots at 6:00am, for I set its timer to do so.
When I reach into my tophat, a rabbit magically appears. (note the human intervention).
Apparently, some people think that we can ignore the economy because it will automagically correct itself.
If you're a college student or are otherwise bound to a metro area for the vast majority of the time, very inexpensive service can be had. However, the biggest users (business people) need out-of-metro coverage. That's expensive.
My plan is about $45 US, I can talk all I want on weekends, and unless I'm underground or in a thick-walled (or otherwise sheilded) room, I have service.
Cray systems may not always be the fastest thing around, but they are solid. It would be nice to see more producers paying careful attention to clean design and reliability over having the latest speed-booster.
It's nice to see our old friend Cray continue to keep a foot in the market -- if nothing else, it makes everyone else stay on their toes.
It's worth noting that the last category is music I haven't been able to find my own copy of, or music that the artist has told me "I don't have any more copies of the disc, please rip this".
Yeah, I may not be a typical user, and I don't have an iPod (doesn't play OGG or FLAC, not interested). However, on my portable music device, the files are "unprotected" by DRM -- and they'd probably be considered "stolen" by that measure. It's crap, because I legally use nearly all that music!
It makes me sad that Ballmer is propagating the "any digital music without DRM is stolen digital music" meme. It especially irritates me because I've worked with a few artists to explicitly distribute non-DRM media files; the copyright holder doens't always want DRM.
So, I have a y-frame MTB with a suspension - I'd rather waste some of my output (about 12%, BTW, not 20-30%) in absorbing the back-trail type of terrain and saving my back (rear shock). The front shocks are worth it because I can maintain a higher average speed over rough terrain, as the shocks help keep the tire on the trail.
While I agree that a lot of people buy MTB-style bikes for how they look (or because they don't know any better), one can't automatically assume that every city-rider who has an MTB is clueless. Especially when not everyone can afford multiple bikes -- I know people who commute on city streets, but buy the MTB because they off-road on weekends and don't want to own two bikes.
It's copyright and copyright protected (or copyrighted). Not copywrite or copywritten. This is so important because it isn't about authorship, it's about distribution and publishing rights. Copyright is the right to copy.
Copyright law says that when I create a work, I'm granted an exclusive right to control how it is reproduced and distributed. Further, the law says that certain rights to reproduce and distrubute a work are "fair use", and those rights belong to everyone. As the original copyright holder, I can transfer, license, or assign my copy rights to another party (e.g. a publisher or distributor). If I tranfer my rights (by selling them, for example), I no longer have copy rights for that work. That doesn't make me any less the original producer.
The concept of copy rights is a trade: consumers get access to a work, authors get to choose the "first use" (i.e. publish or set in a drawer). In trade, consumers are guaranteed certain rights, like the right to quote from a work &c.
When we take the word "right" out of copyright it's far easier to forget what copyright law really protects -- not just the rights of a publisher or author to control copying of the author's works, but the rights of the consumer for fair use. When we forget that copyright is about controlling the rights to copy, we get lawyers attacking individuals who make obvious parodies and satires. We get the idea that work must be "protected" for years after the copyright-holder's death. We get corporate copyright grants for 75 years.
If we could all realize -- and remember -- that copyrights are rights to distribute, we might see more pressure on Congress to make sensible decisions about who can sue whom over copy rights.
In theory, with SSO I should be able to sit down and log in when I get to work, and never enter my password again until after I log out for the evening (and when I lock PC in between).
The wonderful part of the OOo project is that we now have a viable choice in Office suites. If Word is really the best choice, great -- but just the fact that it's not the only choice anymore is good for consumers. Competition leads to innovation.