What "regular" user is installing software from source code in the first place? Wanna know how I usually uninstall software? Now pay attention, it's complex: "apt-get remove software". Shall I write it down for you?
Mind you, I used to install a lot of code from source, but then that got boring, especially when Debian 3 came out. I hardly consider myself a regular user, but if I ever find myself wanting to compile large pieces of software from source again, the first thing I'll learn is how to turn tarballs into.debs, then use those.debs to install the software. This means the software integrates properly with my package management system-- a real benefit in a multi-machine environment... and a real time-saver in the administration department.
You want to pray in school? Try doing it aloud while your teacher is giving a lecture. So much for freedom of religion. A teacher leading the class in a prayer (whether the PoA is a prayer is a separate issue I don't care to discuss) is not about your right to practice religion, it's a government official forcing children to participate in a religious practice. I've heard of very few cases of public schools removing private expressions of deist religion in schools. Usually public schools are found engaging in timeworn Christian practices like persecuting pagans or celebrating Christmas (even if they do attempt to secularize it).
What a bizarre diatribe. All of the communications I've gotten from the ACLU centered on things like religious issues in *public* schools, library internet filtering, due process, equal protection, overall lessening of civil liberty through vehicles like USA-PATRIOT, and the drug war.
IN FACT: just last week the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the DMCA (http://www.aclu.org/news/2002/n072502a.html). So your criticism of their supposed inaction on this front is totally offbase. Sheesh!
That your rant got modded up is even further cause for alarm.
A little late in replying, but I don't think less of Bruce Perens for not doing this. I was just trying to elucidate the conversation in such a way that made HP's likely stance a lot gentler. The parent post made them sound like drooling jackals... and I wanted to point out that if they let him do this, they lose credibility as they (to quote you) work within the system.
And yes, I am willing to go to jail and spend the next year in court for my convictions. Except that in this case I see no reason to do that, I simply avoid DVDs altogether. Problem solved.
So maybe it requires more than a phrase. But hell, my Slashdot posts, my Usenet posts, all of the content of my personal web site(s), and anything else I've ever put on the net where the public can get at it *is* copyrighted. I've certainly posted mp3s of music I've recorded and photos I've taken and fonts I've designed. All of this is copyrighted. If the [MP|RI]AA can crack my box, I sure as fsck can crack theirs. Although I'll be much more interested in cracking heads than servers at that point.
I don't see how HP can "blacklist" him. That would point to major collusion among computer manufacturers bordering if not overstepping the bounds of legality altogether.
However, the discussion probably went more like "We're going to fire you even if you take this on and don't get thrown in jail, because we'd rather not be associated with such things-- it hurts our credibility with Congress and industry groups to have prominent employees flouting the law."
Hmmm. Getting new email addresses is a pain in the kiester. Why not try something like SpamAssassin instead? I still get a few spam to my inbox, but the other 40-50/day go straight to the trash. I have a few domains, and I sometimes use customized email addresses, but it still all funnels through SA. I've been very pleased. What I need to do is figure out if it's been updated to catch Klez. That one always gets through and is very annoying.
Well, as long as no one has a patent on ASCII, I propose we just stick to ASCII art from now on.;)
Seriously, the user community should hold off on trying to mass migrate from JPG until a)we have a viable alternative (is JPEG2000 ready for mass adoption?) b)Forgent actually wins a case against someone for violating this patent.
While I think patents on what amounts to math are ridiculous, I also think there needs to be some recognition that Forgent has forfeited its right to profit on this invention by waiting several years for the technology to spread into wide use. Forgent should have been filing C&Ds several years ago when JPGs were already all over Usenet (I remember seeing JPGs in 1995 at least). I realize this is patent and not trademark law, but had they tried to enforce these rights earlier probably an alternative to JPG would have been generated a lot sooner.
This isn't going to kill home users at all, but HP's not gonna be happy.
It will raise prices overall and harm the shareware/freeware/Free Software world, though. Imagine all those freely available tools that do all kinds of fun stuff with JPGs going away... well, at least I have the source code to many of my favorites.:)
And if you like that line, feel free to use it. I probably read it somewhere else myself.
If this is anything like GIF, the challenge is not to files that have this format, but to programs that can read/write this format. Individual users can still own, share, and make JPG, it's just the programs they use (or more accurately, the people who make that software) that will be liable for licensing fees.
Frankly, I think it's a bunch of sh!t. There should be no way to patent what is, at its core, a bunch of math. Software, and the expression of a "device" purely as software, should be protected under copyright-- not under patent. But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Hey wait a minute. I have my own basement, thank you.
As to writing letters to congresspersons, just be thankful you got a response and that you could understand it. At least he laid out his thoughts, so you can be certain to vote for someone else in the next election. If it was just some sort of doubletalk malarky like I got from one of my senators, you'd have no idea what to think.
You can buy a drive that doesn't have bundled burner software? Used, I suppose, but it's a damn Mac, they run Unix. cdrecord is Free Software that runs on Unix-- I assume it will work on Mac OS X, right?. So what's to buy?
I especially like their charges for web space and email... it's not like you're on a vanity domain there guys, you're on mac.com. They are way overestimating the value of this service, since most ISP accounts include email and web space. People got the mac.com addresses 'cuz they wanted to, uh, "give props" to Apple, not because they were in dire need of this service (I suspect). Any idiot can register a domain name of his/her own, and find cheap web hosting for $100/year or less. I certainly did.
While mod-friendly engines may not be the same. I think what has taken the place of construction set games (yeehaw for the old EA Racing Destruction Set, see http://www.planetflibble.com/rds/ for some info on what appears to be a PC remake of this classic) is the Sim games. Yeah, it was fun to build games that you could play, but it's even more fun to build games that play themselves while you're doing the building (plus, you get to feel more like a god than a mere game designer. At least that's my take on this paradigm shift. Now if only there was a SimCity construction set, where you could design types of buildings and change key ratios in the gameplay algorithms, etc.:)
Gee, and that's without the normal MPAA BS where they make you buy new copies for the car, the vacation home, for watching with groups of unrelated acquaintances, for the next shiny device they make to show the same content, etc etc. And from the looks of Slashdot, it's going to work wonders. The MPAA lawyers thank you all for helping pay their lobbying expenses.:)
Actually the age of consent in America varies from 12 to 18, with different jurisdictions having different rules about how far in age the participants may be. But no, America is not very good about teaching this stuff to its kids. I'm guessing European views on abortion are much more liberal in general as well.
There are two possible reasons that sales lag behind predictions: 1) the predictions were padded by a manager who had some reason to pad those predictions, 2) sales are slow because customers already paid for Office on OS 8 or 9 and don't feel like coughing up three hundred bucks for essentially the same software. It could also be a bit of both. Personally, my feeling is that a lot of people buy Macs to get away from Microsoft. Mac comes with rudimentary office-type software (usually). Finally, the price of Office X is insulting. It costs something like $100 more than the Windows version. Maybe, like with X-box, Microsoft is going to have to learn the hard way to price things fairly for the consumers to take an active interest.
I'm sorry, did I miss you being nominated (and elected) master debate leader?
I think you must have.:)
By the way, I don't see the word China or the word communism in the post to which you were replying. I think you inferred that. How I'm not sure, since the description was more one of lawlessness than anything else.
The first admendment protects free speech. The second admendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. You can't weaken one right without weakening all rights. ignoring either admendment weakens the other.
Good gods man! You are totally off-kilter, you know? You were the one that brought up guns in the first place, like there was some connection. There is not, legally. In a practical sense there may be, but to bring up guns is supremely distracting, since the argument here is about DRM. Let's stick to the topic instead of making inflammatory analogies.
I agree file sharers are showing contempt for the rights of copyright holders, who are showing contempt for Fair Use, but this whole situation is very much chicken-and-egg right now. We cannot base our intended actions and remedies on evidence of first harm, we'll be chasing our tails forever.
All that said, I mostly agree with you. If you don't like the DRM, don't buy their crap at all. To me filesharing is not a way to live, but I'm not opposed to it either (mostly because it has substantial non-infringing uses).
No, it's REAL scarcity because we, society in general, realized that without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place.
Wrong. It's a generated scarcity based on the *assumption* that without copyright protection those works wouldn't be made. FWIW, I support the idea on faith... in many cases artists could not afford to continue making art if anyone could duplicate and copy their works. But without scientific studies to bear this out, we are operating on faith and conjecture.
Either way, the simple fact is that extending the period of copyright protection to even one minute past the artist's death does nothing to incent that artist create more art. Several extensions of copyright have (by being --illegally, imho-- retroactive) actually prevented work from falling into the public domain at the time it would have were the law not applied retroactively. Hopefully the Supreme Court will judge that retroactive copyright laws are unconstitutional.
Finally, your "move to China" tactic is lame. Stuff it, okay? It is totally unnecessary and only makes your otherwise cogent post look like a bunch of drooling reactionary claptrap. I suppose if you want to some like some "love it or leave it" redneck tool, go ahead, but it's jingoistic garbage in a debate this complex.
At this point I have no clue what your point is. Guns are guns. Speech is speech. Trying to argue a case about one based on experience with the other is distracting. There are very different laws for each for a reason.
What we need to focus on is not how file-sharing is "a tool". File-sharing is about speech to some extent. But more importantly, the topic at hand is DRM-- which is a specific effort to thwart speech altogether, not just file-sharing per se.
Guns and speech and the laws pertaining to each are not remotely similar. Your analogy is completely flawed. Therefore, your conclusion may be valid, but it does not follow from your assumptions.
(I doubt we'll agree with each other, wanna just agree to disagree? I'm not trying to fight with ya or anything.)
OK. I don't think we're that far off from each other anyway. You obviously take this issue seriously enough to have moved to be able to walk to work and let it steer your purchasing decisions. If more people made the choices you've made, I'd have almost nothing left to complain about.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, I used to install a lot of code from source, but then that got boring, especially when Debian 3 came out. I hardly consider myself a regular user, but if I ever find myself wanting to compile large pieces of software from source again, the first thing I'll learn is how to turn tarballs into .debs, then use those .debs to install the software. This means the software integrates properly with my package management system-- a real benefit in a multi-machine environment... and a real time-saver in the administration department.
You want to pray in school? Try doing it aloud while your teacher is giving a lecture. So much for freedom of religion. A teacher leading the class in a prayer (whether the PoA is a prayer is a separate issue I don't care to discuss) is not about your right to practice religion, it's a government official forcing children to participate in a religious practice. I've heard of very few cases of public schools removing private expressions of deist religion in schools. Usually public schools are found engaging in timeworn Christian practices like persecuting pagans or celebrating Christmas (even if they do attempt to secularize it).
What a bizarre diatribe. All of the communications I've gotten from the ACLU centered on things like religious issues in *public* schools, library internet filtering, due process, equal protection, overall lessening of civil liberty through vehicles like USA-PATRIOT, and the drug war.
IN FACT: just last week the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the DMCA (http://www.aclu.org/news/2002/n072502a.html). So your criticism of their supposed inaction on this front is totally offbase. Sheesh!
That your rant got modded up is even further cause for alarm.
And yes, I am willing to go to jail and spend the next year in court for my convictions. Except that in this case I see no reason to do that, I simply avoid DVDs altogether. Problem solved.
So maybe it requires more than a phrase. But hell, my Slashdot posts, my Usenet posts, all of the content of my personal web site(s), and anything else I've ever put on the net where the public can get at it *is* copyrighted. I've certainly posted mp3s of music I've recorded and photos I've taken and fonts I've designed. All of this is copyrighted. If the [MP|RI]AA can crack my box, I sure as fsck can crack theirs. Although I'll be much more interested in cracking heads than servers at that point.
However, the discussion probably went more like "We're going to fire you even if you take this on and don't get thrown in jail, because we'd rather not be associated with such things-- it hurts our credibility with Congress and industry groups to have prominent employees flouting the law."
Hmmm. Getting new email addresses is a pain in the kiester. Why not try something like SpamAssassin instead? I still get a few spam to my inbox, but the other 40-50/day go straight to the trash. I have a few domains, and I sometimes use customized email addresses, but it still all funnels through SA. I've been very pleased. What I need to do is figure out if it's been updated to catch Klez. That one always gets through and is very annoying.
Seriously, the user community should hold off on trying to mass migrate from JPG until a)we have a viable alternative (is JPEG2000 ready for mass adoption?) b)Forgent actually wins a case against someone for violating this patent.
While I think patents on what amounts to math are ridiculous, I also think there needs to be some recognition that Forgent has forfeited its right to profit on this invention by waiting several years for the technology to spread into wide use. Forgent should have been filing C&Ds several years ago when JPGs were already all over Usenet (I remember seeing JPGs in 1995 at least). I realize this is patent and not trademark law, but had they tried to enforce these rights earlier probably an alternative to JPG would have been generated a lot sooner.
Didn't you see the references to the NSA? This means free Linux distros for everybody!!! Woohoo! (oh wait. we have that already don't we?)
And if you like that line, feel free to use it. I probably read it somewhere else myself.
Frankly, I think it's a bunch of sh!t. There should be no way to patent what is, at its core, a bunch of math. Software, and the expression of a "device" purely as software, should be protected under copyright-- not under patent. But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
As to writing letters to congresspersons, just be thankful you got a response and that you could understand it. At least he laid out his thoughts, so you can be certain to vote for someone else in the next election. If it was just some sort of doubletalk malarky like I got from one of my senators, you'd have no idea what to think.
I especially like their charges for web space and email... it's not like you're on a vanity domain there guys, you're on mac.com. They are way overestimating the value of this service, since most ISP accounts include email and web space. People got the mac.com addresses 'cuz they wanted to, uh, "give props" to Apple, not because they were in dire need of this service (I suspect). Any idiot can register a domain name of his/her own, and find cheap web hosting for $100/year or less. I certainly did.
While mod-friendly engines may not be the same. I think what has taken the place of construction set games (yeehaw for the old EA Racing Destruction Set, see http://www.planetflibble.com/rds/ for some info on what appears to be a PC remake of this classic) is the Sim games. Yeah, it was fun to build games that you could play, but it's even more fun to build games that play themselves while you're doing the building (plus, you get to feel more like a god than a mere game designer. At least that's my take on this paradigm shift. Now if only there was a SimCity construction set, where you could design types of buildings and change key ratios in the gameplay algorithms, etc. :)
You really ought to attribute your George Carlin quotes.
Gee, and that's without the normal MPAA BS where they make you buy new copies for the car, the vacation home, for watching with groups of unrelated acquaintances, for the next shiny device they make to show the same content, etc etc. And from the looks of Slashdot, it's going to work wonders. The MPAA lawyers thank you all for helping pay their lobbying expenses. :)
Actually the age of consent in America varies from 12 to 18, with different jurisdictions having different rules about how far in age the participants may be. But no, America is not very good about teaching this stuff to its kids. I'm guessing European views on abortion are much more liberal in general as well.
There are two possible reasons that sales lag behind predictions: 1) the predictions were padded by a manager who had some reason to pad those predictions, 2) sales are slow because customers already paid for Office on OS 8 or 9 and don't feel like coughing up three hundred bucks for essentially the same software. It could also be a bit of both. Personally, my feeling is that a lot of people buy Macs to get away from Microsoft. Mac comes with rudimentary office-type software (usually). Finally, the price of Office X is insulting. It costs something like $100 more than the Windows version. Maybe, like with X-box, Microsoft is going to have to learn the hard way to price things fairly for the consumers to take an active interest.
I think you must have. :)
By the way, I don't see the word China or the word communism in the post to which you were replying. I think you inferred that. How I'm not sure, since the description was more one of lawlessness than anything else.
Good gods man! You are totally off-kilter, you know? You were the one that brought up guns in the first place, like there was some connection. There is not, legally. In a practical sense there may be, but to bring up guns is supremely distracting, since the argument here is about DRM. Let's stick to the topic instead of making inflammatory analogies.
I agree file sharers are showing contempt for the rights of copyright holders, who are showing contempt for Fair Use, but this whole situation is very much chicken-and-egg right now. We cannot base our intended actions and remedies on evidence of first harm, we'll be chasing our tails forever.
All that said, I mostly agree with you. If you don't like the DRM, don't buy their crap at all. To me filesharing is not a way to live, but I'm not opposed to it either (mostly because it has substantial non-infringing uses).
Wrong. It's a generated scarcity based on the *assumption* that without copyright protection those works wouldn't be made. FWIW, I support the idea on faith... in many cases artists could not afford to continue making art if anyone could duplicate and copy their works. But without scientific studies to bear this out, we are operating on faith and conjecture.
Either way, the simple fact is that extending the period of copyright protection to even one minute past the artist's death does nothing to incent that artist create more art. Several extensions of copyright have (by being --illegally, imho-- retroactive) actually prevented work from falling into the public domain at the time it would have were the law not applied retroactively. Hopefully the Supreme Court will judge that retroactive copyright laws are unconstitutional.
Finally, your "move to China" tactic is lame. Stuff it, okay? It is totally unnecessary and only makes your otherwise cogent post look like a bunch of drooling reactionary claptrap. I suppose if you want to some like some "love it or leave it" redneck tool, go ahead, but it's jingoistic garbage in a debate this complex.
What we need to focus on is not how file-sharing is "a tool". File-sharing is about speech to some extent. But more importantly, the topic at hand is DRM-- which is a specific effort to thwart speech altogether, not just file-sharing per se.
Guns and speech and the laws pertaining to each are not remotely similar. Your analogy is completely flawed. Therefore, your conclusion may be valid, but it does not follow from your assumptions.
OK. I don't think we're that far off from each other anyway. You obviously take this issue seriously enough to have moved to be able to walk to work and let it steer your purchasing decisions. If more people made the choices you've made, I'd have almost nothing left to complain about. :)
Asked and answered. Can we have less of the metaSlashdot discussions please? :)