Well, if the site itself belongs to the record companies now, the "apology" might be the record companies speaking for the people who originally ran Grooveshark rather than those people being seriously apologetic for their actions.
The best hope that the media companies have for squashing piracy is not the legal route. Yes, by suing some people or having governments ban some tools, they'll move one step forward. Unfortunately, for them, those who write the programs used for piracy will move five steps forward during this time. Instead, their best hope are services like Netflix. Imagine if the media companies got over their fear of putting stuff online and opened the doors to everything being on Netflix (and a few competing services just to keep one from being too powerful). Even if Netflix had to raise their prices, it would be worth it. Add in the fact that this would be legal (no worrying if you'll get a "we're suing you for piracy" letter) and safe (no worrying if that rip actually contains a virus) and demand for piracy would drop.
Yes, there will always be piracy. Media companies could release DRM-free copies of their movies for a dime each and some pirates would say they'll only buy them if they cost a nickle. Some people rationalize their piracy and will never stop no matter what alternatives are presented to them. Still, those people aren't really potential customers and can be ignored.
Of course, the "Everything On Netflix" scenario isn't likely to happen. Instead, the media companies will double-down on their fear of the Internet, demand massive DRM before even their oldest titles can touch the online world, price their online offerings high to drive people to DVD/Blu-Ray, restrict access based on when the discs are released/where you live, and generally shoot themselves in the foot by driving people to piracy.
When my grandmother was alive, nearly every conversation with her included "So how are things going with your job? Have you been promoted yet?" The problem was that, at my company, the only promotion would mean becoming a manager and not coding anymore. I know that I'd make an awful manager, so I didn't even try to get promoted.
Except that every study seems to show that actual voter fraud is minimal. Voter ID laws are (taken at face value) an attempt to reduce a small number of people from voting illegitimately while keeping a larger number of people from voting legitimately. It's trying to swat a fly by swinging around a sledgehammer. Sure, you might kill that pesky fly, but your walls and furniture won't look really nice afterwards.
Let's assume that you had some sort of battery that could store the same amount of energy as a full airplane fuel tank and was light enough to not cause issues. Couldn't you standardize the batteries across aircraft, make the battery removable, and charge them in the airport between flights. So airplane lands, everyone disembarks, the flight crew (among other things) removes the depleted battery, puts in a fully charged battery, and then puts the depleted battery in the airport's charging system until it is fully charged and ready for use again. This would make time to get the airplane from low charge to full charge very low (as low as the "pop out old one, put in new one" takes).
Such a system wouldn't work for cars because you don't want your average person ripping out his car's battery, but for planes you have a crew of trained mechanics checking the plane between each flight. Surely, they could handle this task.
It's not so much the amount of disinformation spewed that separates Republicans and Democrats as it is what subjects the disinformation gets spewed on. When it comes to science, many Republicans seem to have made it their goal to spew as much disinformation on as much science as possible. I feel sorry for the pro-science Republicans who are left. It must be disheartening to see so much anti-science coming from your party.
(Disclaimer: Historically, I've sided with Democrats but have been more and more dissatisfied with them. I'm in the "nowhere land" between both parties where neither party seems to satisfy me and will likely be voting third party more and more.)
Whenever I hear of religious people claiming that the Universe is only 6000 or so years old and that it was all created in 7 days, I say that they are making God smaller, not larger by claiming this.
No matter what your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), imagine that there was some supreme being who had a plan, initiated the Big Bang, and set everything into motion so that, billions of years later, humans would evolve into being. Isn't that a much more impressive god than one who just says "Abra-ca-humans!" and poofs them into existence. Sure the latter god can apparently create life out of thin air, but the former can plan insanely complicated interactions over a billion year time frame just to arrive at a certain scenario. To me, the former is much more impressive than the literal-Genesis latter.
Sort of like this? Is there, somewhere, an unpublished music industry press release decrying the release of all works into the public domain and the abolishment of copyright?
By this point, anybody who believes capitalist democracy isn't broken is just clinging on to false hope.
Or is an executive/lobbyist for the music industry (or another big business). Capitalist democracy works VERY well for them. They throw around their capital and the democracy does what they want it to do.
The other problem with labeling people SJWs - when it comes down to interpreting intent - is that you could label the very people who are calling people SJWs AS SJWs.
Do they repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet? I've seen some big rants against SJWs that qualifies as "engaging in arguments" about this subject.
"often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way"? Subjective, like you said, but could easily be applied to the anti-SJW poster as well as to the labeled-as-SJW poster.
"for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation"? Again, like you said, subjective and requires guessing as to the individual's motivation but could be applied to anti-SJW posters as well.
And so on. If a definition is so vague that it can be used to define both sides of a debate, then it's useless (at least as far as being used by one side to label the other).
But warrants are [whining voice]SOOOO HAAARD. You have to show probable cause and all that stuff. It's too much work.[/whining voice]
Plus, [overly paranoid voice]in the time it takes to get a warrant, a criminal could enact another 9-11 or could destroy the evidence that they were planning that.[/overly paranoid voice].
Those are the reasons why law enforcement needs access to stuff without a warrant. The whiny, paranoid reasons why.
My wife is a teacher by trade (though currently not in a classroom). She's seen this first hand. Both parents who didn't care that their kid was barely scraping a D- and parents who insisted that their kid HAD to get an A because it was a private school and they were PAYING for the A. (Yes, she got that argument from parents.)
When it comes to our kids, my wife's teacher background comes in handy. She knows educational terms and procedures that I wouldn't have a clue about. Meanwhile, my strong math/science background means I'm able to make sense of the Common Core math questions that leave my kids and wife stumped. (She's no slouch in Math. It's just that these questions are phrased so weirdly that it's almost like they're TRYING to be confusing for the kids.) Her reading teacher background helps with the ELA assignments.
We believe that we're partners with our kids' teachers. We're not there to overrule the teachers. Nor should the teachers just ignore us out of hand. (We had that happen with a few teachers who ignored our advice when it came to our oldest with special needs - it ended badly.) When we work together, our kids do better in school, learn more with less fuss, and everyone wins.
We looked into a private school for our kids. It would have cost $16,000 per child per year. They offered financial assistance, but we were warned that this requires the school to look into all of your finances and gives them the right to question all of your financial decisions. Took a vacation last year? Why did you do that when you could have given the school more money? Even with financial assistance, though, we would have stretched our budget to the breaking point with private school.
In NY we have charter schools to "compete" with public schools. They draw funds from public school coffers leaving public schools with less money. They also get to accept or reject any student so all low performing or special needs students get booted to the public schools. You wind up with low funded public schools struggling to deal with tons of low performing/special needs students while the charter schools seem to be doing really well. This leads the politicians to call for more charter schools and less public schools. Repeat as the kids who need the most help continuously get less and less.
And yet, a significant number of the 'reformers' aren't really looking to fix the system, so much as privatize large chunks and turn a profit.
We're going through this in NY right now. Our governor (and his state Senate buddies who tagged along for fear of political reprisal) passed a budget with "educational reform" that includes high stakes tests which count for 50% of a teacher's evaluation. If a teacher's students improve by the amount State Ed mandates two or three years in a row, they can be booted out - no taking into account that the teacher's kids might be special education students with severe challenges or honors students with little room to "improve" on the test or even that some people just don't test well. Add in that the tests are geared to MAKE students fail (leaked questions showed college level reading material on the 6th grade test) and statements from the governor blaming teachers left and right, and it's clear he's gunning for the teachers. (The teachers' union didn't support him in the last election. Political reprisal.)
If a school doesn't do well, they can also be put into receivership and have a charter school take over. Our governor has consistently knocked public schools and praised charters. It's no secret that he'd love to close all public schools and replace them all with charter schools. Now he has a plan in place to do just that.
My oldest son has refused the tests for the third year in a row and this year he was joined by about 200,000 (possibly more) other kids. The governor even admitted that these tests don't mean anything for the kids but they should take them "for practice." Until the tests are independently evaluated and actually return useful data, I'm not going to subject my son to them and stress him out just to help the governor target people who didn't support him politically.
NY has "solved" this with EngageNY. This is a series of modules that the teachers are required to use to teach their subjects. The modules say just what they are supposed to teach, how they are to teach it (both method and emotion used), the exact wording they must use, the questions that students should ask, and the responses that the teachers should give. It's an exact script so actual teachers aren't really needed anymore, just glorified actors. Which means it should come as no surprise that our Governor is blaming all school problems on teachers and trying to get rid of them all.
What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?
In NY, they get their individual score on the one-size-fits-all standardized test based on the one-size-fits-all state mandated curriculum that the teacher can't customize to suit each student. That's as individualized as our governor wants education. Arnie Duncan - the US Secretary of Education - even went so far as to claim that merely expecting special needs kids to clear a higher bar would mean they would do so. No matter what their challenges. So instead of setting up Individualized Education Plans with supports to help those kids with difficulties, we should just push them harder and that will make their difficulties magically disappear.
The problem is politicians acting as "education experts" often while listening to corporations who stand to make a profit in education (e.g. Pearson) and ignoring teachers who are actually trying to teach students. That would be like a PHB trying to figure out how to configure some computer systems, listening to a Microsoft sales pitch, and ignoring his company's technicians who deal with the systems every day.
Except when the music industry needs to pay out royalties to artists. Then, suddenly, they can't find where the artists live to send the royalty payments.
Or running the Disney Princess angle into the ground with Brave (at least other Princess films had a legend or fairy tale background, Brave was just a complete fabrication)?
Wait, so Disney is criticized when they take stories from the public domain and retell them but also criticized if they come up with new stories? I know that Disney's not the most popular company when it comes to copyright discussions, but you can't have it both ways. If you didn't like Brave, that's fine, but criticizing them for coming up with an original story is really reaching.
Not to mention the legal morass we would have if we had perpetual copyrights. Take some random video game from the 80s and try to find out who owns it. For many games, it's impossible. The original company was bought, split up, shuffled around, went bankrupt, had its assets sold, etc. This is for a work that is only 30 years old. Imagine if Shakespeare's works were still copyrighted. You would need to dig through 400 years of legal proceedings just to find the owner of Romeo and Juliet so you could base a work off of it. Want to mix in some Midsummer Night's Dream? Another 400 years of legal proceedings to sort through since they might not have arrived at the same owner-destination. Perpetual copyright would be a huge legal nightmare.
But if the GPL lacked any enforcement mechanisms, a closed source vendor could take GPL software, incorporate it into their product (perhaps making improvements or linking to proprietary code) without giving back to the community. If IP laws went away tomorrow and Adobe incorporated the exact code that GIMP used for a feature without even crediting the authors, there would be nothing you could do to stop them. Without IP laws, big companies would just hide the IP they "used to own" behind systems to keep people from having anything but the most transitory of copies. They would buy up or simply steal outright whatever they wanted from the little guy.
The better solution isn't no IP laws at all, but a sane copyright length. It shouldn't be 50 years or 70 years. It should be 14 years plus an optional, one-time 14 year renewal (that you would need to opt into for a nominal fee). Alternatively, allow companies to renew their works indefinitely but put an increasingly higher price tag on the renewal. e.g. 10 year Registration is free. First 10 year renewal costs $10. Second 10 year renewal costs $100. Third 10 year renewal costs $1,000. Disney could renew the original Star Wars movie's copyright by paying $10,000 (fourth renewal) while other, less profitable, movies wouldn't be worth that renewal fee and would go into the Public Domain.
After getting a bunch of people sick, she was given an option: Be free but don't work in food service or at least take some basic precautions to prevent infecting others. She refused and was kept in custody. Finally, she agreed and was released at which point, she quickly moved, changed her name, went back into food service, and got more people sick. At least one person died. So she was taken back into custody again and this time held for the rest of her life.
You can claim that her rights were violated, but her right to work in the food service industry ends where the patrons' right to live without typhoid begins. She wasn't ignorant of the threat she posed and yet she knowingly exposed other people to a contagious disease, killing some and sickening others.
What would you have done to balance her rights and their rights when she clearly didn't care about the risks she posed to others and when she demonstrated clear willingness to move/change names/infect more people? Honestly, she should have been charged with murder at that point. (Or at least manslaughter.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if the site itself belongs to the record companies now, the "apology" might be the record companies speaking for the people who originally ran Grooveshark rather than those people being seriously apologetic for their actions.
The best hope that the media companies have for squashing piracy is not the legal route. Yes, by suing some people or having governments ban some tools, they'll move one step forward. Unfortunately, for them, those who write the programs used for piracy will move five steps forward during this time. Instead, their best hope are services like Netflix. Imagine if the media companies got over their fear of putting stuff online and opened the doors to everything being on Netflix (and a few competing services just to keep one from being too powerful). Even if Netflix had to raise their prices, it would be worth it. Add in the fact that this would be legal (no worrying if you'll get a "we're suing you for piracy" letter) and safe (no worrying if that rip actually contains a virus) and demand for piracy would drop.
Yes, there will always be piracy. Media companies could release DRM-free copies of their movies for a dime each and some pirates would say they'll only buy them if they cost a nickle. Some people rationalize their piracy and will never stop no matter what alternatives are presented to them. Still, those people aren't really potential customers and can be ignored.
Of course, the "Everything On Netflix" scenario isn't likely to happen. Instead, the media companies will double-down on their fear of the Internet, demand massive DRM before even their oldest titles can touch the online world, price their online offerings high to drive people to DVD/Blu-Ray, restrict access based on when the discs are released/where you live, and generally shoot themselves in the foot by driving people to piracy.
When my grandmother was alive, nearly every conversation with her included "So how are things going with your job? Have you been promoted yet?" The problem was that, at my company, the only promotion would mean becoming a manager and not coding anymore. I know that I'd make an awful manager, so I didn't even try to get promoted.
Except that every study seems to show that actual voter fraud is minimal. Voter ID laws are (taken at face value) an attempt to reduce a small number of people from voting illegitimately while keeping a larger number of people from voting legitimately. It's trying to swat a fly by swinging around a sledgehammer. Sure, you might kill that pesky fly, but your walls and furniture won't look really nice afterwards.
Let's assume that you had some sort of battery that could store the same amount of energy as a full airplane fuel tank and was light enough to not cause issues. Couldn't you standardize the batteries across aircraft, make the battery removable, and charge them in the airport between flights. So airplane lands, everyone disembarks, the flight crew (among other things) removes the depleted battery, puts in a fully charged battery, and then puts the depleted battery in the airport's charging system until it is fully charged and ready for use again. This would make time to get the airplane from low charge to full charge very low (as low as the "pop out old one, put in new one" takes).
Such a system wouldn't work for cars because you don't want your average person ripping out his car's battery, but for planes you have a crew of trained mechanics checking the plane between each flight. Surely, they could handle this task.
Well, at least users won't be confused. They can still "click on the E" to get to the Internet.
It's not so much the amount of disinformation spewed that separates Republicans and Democrats as it is what subjects the disinformation gets spewed on. When it comes to science, many Republicans seem to have made it their goal to spew as much disinformation on as much science as possible. I feel sorry for the pro-science Republicans who are left. It must be disheartening to see so much anti-science coming from your party.
(Disclaimer: Historically, I've sided with Democrats but have been more and more dissatisfied with them. I'm in the "nowhere land" between both parties where neither party seems to satisfy me and will likely be voting third party more and more.)
Whenever I hear of religious people claiming that the Universe is only 6000 or so years old and that it was all created in 7 days, I say that they are making God smaller, not larger by claiming this.
No matter what your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), imagine that there was some supreme being who had a plan, initiated the Big Bang, and set everything into motion so that, billions of years later, humans would evolve into being. Isn't that a much more impressive god than one who just says "Abra-ca-humans!" and poofs them into existence. Sure the latter god can apparently create life out of thin air, but the former can plan insanely complicated interactions over a billion year time frame just to arrive at a certain scenario. To me, the former is much more impressive than the literal-Genesis latter.
Or it's a "democracy" where one dollar = one vote. Those with the most dollar-votes win!
Sort of like this? Is there, somewhere, an unpublished music industry press release decrying the release of all works into the public domain and the abolishment of copyright?
Or is an executive/lobbyist for the music industry (or another big business). Capitalist democracy works VERY well for them. They throw around their capital and the democracy does what they want it to do.
The other problem with labeling people SJWs - when it comes down to interpreting intent - is that you could label the very people who are calling people SJWs AS SJWs.
Do they repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet? I've seen some big rants against SJWs that qualifies as "engaging in arguments" about this subject.
"often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way"? Subjective, like you said, but could easily be applied to the anti-SJW poster as well as to the labeled-as-SJW poster.
"for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation"? Again, like you said, subjective and requires guessing as to the individual's motivation but could be applied to anti-SJW posters as well.
And so on. If a definition is so vague that it can be used to define both sides of a debate, then it's useless (at least as far as being used by one side to label the other).
But warrants are [whining voice]SOOOO HAAARD. You have to show probable cause and all that stuff. It's too much work.[/whining voice]
Plus, [overly paranoid voice]in the time it takes to get a warrant, a criminal could enact another 9-11 or could destroy the evidence that they were planning that.[/overly paranoid voice].
Those are the reasons why law enforcement needs access to stuff without a warrant. The whiny, paranoid reasons why.
My wife is a teacher by trade (though currently not in a classroom). She's seen this first hand. Both parents who didn't care that their kid was barely scraping a D- and parents who insisted that their kid HAD to get an A because it was a private school and they were PAYING for the A. (Yes, she got that argument from parents.)
When it comes to our kids, my wife's teacher background comes in handy. She knows educational terms and procedures that I wouldn't have a clue about. Meanwhile, my strong math/science background means I'm able to make sense of the Common Core math questions that leave my kids and wife stumped. (She's no slouch in Math. It's just that these questions are phrased so weirdly that it's almost like they're TRYING to be confusing for the kids.) Her reading teacher background helps with the ELA assignments.
We believe that we're partners with our kids' teachers. We're not there to overrule the teachers. Nor should the teachers just ignore us out of hand. (We had that happen with a few teachers who ignored our advice when it came to our oldest with special needs - it ended badly.) When we work together, our kids do better in school, learn more with less fuss, and everyone wins.
We looked into a private school for our kids. It would have cost $16,000 per child per year. They offered financial assistance, but we were warned that this requires the school to look into all of your finances and gives them the right to question all of your financial decisions. Took a vacation last year? Why did you do that when you could have given the school more money? Even with financial assistance, though, we would have stretched our budget to the breaking point with private school.
In NY we have charter schools to "compete" with public schools. They draw funds from public school coffers leaving public schools with less money. They also get to accept or reject any student so all low performing or special needs students get booted to the public schools. You wind up with low funded public schools struggling to deal with tons of low performing/special needs students while the charter schools seem to be doing really well. This leads the politicians to call for more charter schools and less public schools. Repeat as the kids who need the most help continuously get less and less.
We're going through this in NY right now. Our governor (and his state Senate buddies who tagged along for fear of political reprisal) passed a budget with "educational reform" that includes high stakes tests which count for 50% of a teacher's evaluation. If a teacher's students improve by the amount State Ed mandates two or three years in a row, they can be booted out - no taking into account that the teacher's kids might be special education students with severe challenges or honors students with little room to "improve" on the test or even that some people just don't test well. Add in that the tests are geared to MAKE students fail (leaked questions showed college level reading material on the 6th grade test) and statements from the governor blaming teachers left and right, and it's clear he's gunning for the teachers. (The teachers' union didn't support him in the last election. Political reprisal.)
If a school doesn't do well, they can also be put into receivership and have a charter school take over. Our governor has consistently knocked public schools and praised charters. It's no secret that he'd love to close all public schools and replace them all with charter schools. Now he has a plan in place to do just that.
My oldest son has refused the tests for the third year in a row and this year he was joined by about 200,000 (possibly more) other kids. The governor even admitted that these tests don't mean anything for the kids but they should take them "for practice." Until the tests are independently evaluated and actually return useful data, I'm not going to subject my son to them and stress him out just to help the governor target people who didn't support him politically.
NY has "solved" this with EngageNY. This is a series of modules that the teachers are required to use to teach their subjects. The modules say just what they are supposed to teach, how they are to teach it (both method and emotion used), the exact wording they must use, the questions that students should ask, and the responses that the teachers should give. It's an exact script so actual teachers aren't really needed anymore, just glorified actors. Which means it should come as no surprise that our Governor is blaming all school problems on teachers and trying to get rid of them all.
In NY, they get their individual score on the one-size-fits-all standardized test based on the one-size-fits-all state mandated curriculum that the teacher can't customize to suit each student. That's as individualized as our governor wants education. Arnie Duncan - the US Secretary of Education - even went so far as to claim that merely expecting special needs kids to clear a higher bar would mean they would do so. No matter what their challenges. So instead of setting up Individualized Education Plans with supports to help those kids with difficulties, we should just push them harder and that will make their difficulties magically disappear.
The problem is politicians acting as "education experts" often while listening to corporations who stand to make a profit in education (e.g. Pearson) and ignoring teachers who are actually trying to teach students. That would be like a PHB trying to figure out how to configure some computer systems, listening to a Microsoft sales pitch, and ignoring his company's technicians who deal with the systems every day.
Annoying people online is a crime?
Windows is so much better than Linux in every way!
Ok, I'll go turn myself in now. ;-)
Except when the music industry needs to pay out royalties to artists. Then, suddenly, they can't find where the artists live to send the royalty payments.
Wait, so Disney is criticized when they take stories from the public domain and retell them but also criticized if they come up with new stories? I know that Disney's not the most popular company when it comes to copyright discussions, but you can't have it both ways. If you didn't like Brave, that's fine, but criticizing them for coming up with an original story is really reaching.
Not to mention the legal morass we would have if we had perpetual copyrights. Take some random video game from the 80s and try to find out who owns it. For many games, it's impossible. The original company was bought, split up, shuffled around, went bankrupt, had its assets sold, etc. This is for a work that is only 30 years old. Imagine if Shakespeare's works were still copyrighted. You would need to dig through 400 years of legal proceedings just to find the owner of Romeo and Juliet so you could base a work off of it. Want to mix in some Midsummer Night's Dream? Another 400 years of legal proceedings to sort through since they might not have arrived at the same owner-destination. Perpetual copyright would be a huge legal nightmare.
But if the GPL lacked any enforcement mechanisms, a closed source vendor could take GPL software, incorporate it into their product (perhaps making improvements or linking to proprietary code) without giving back to the community. If IP laws went away tomorrow and Adobe incorporated the exact code that GIMP used for a feature without even crediting the authors, there would be nothing you could do to stop them. Without IP laws, big companies would just hide the IP they "used to own" behind systems to keep people from having anything but the most transitory of copies. They would buy up or simply steal outright whatever they wanted from the little guy.
The better solution isn't no IP laws at all, but a sane copyright length. It shouldn't be 50 years or 70 years. It should be 14 years plus an optional, one-time 14 year renewal (that you would need to opt into for a nominal fee). Alternatively, allow companies to renew their works indefinitely but put an increasingly higher price tag on the renewal. e.g. 10 year Registration is free. First 10 year renewal costs $10. Second 10 year renewal costs $100. Third 10 year renewal costs $1,000. Disney could renew the original Star Wars movie's copyright by paying $10,000 (fourth renewal) while other, less profitable, movies wouldn't be worth that renewal fee and would go into the Public Domain.
After getting a bunch of people sick, she was given an option: Be free but don't work in food service or at least take some basic precautions to prevent infecting others. She refused and was kept in custody. Finally, she agreed and was released at which point, she quickly moved, changed her name, went back into food service, and got more people sick. At least one person died. So she was taken back into custody again and this time held for the rest of her life.
You can claim that her rights were violated, but her right to work in the food service industry ends where the patrons' right to live without typhoid begins. She wasn't ignorant of the threat she posed and yet she knowingly exposed other people to a contagious disease, killing some and sickening others.
What would you have done to balance her rights and their rights when she clearly didn't care about the risks she posed to others and when she demonstrated clear willingness to move/change names/infect more people? Honestly, she should have been charged with murder at that point. (Or at least manslaughter.)
Not that I would do this, but it might be fun to see someone stick something like this in a backpack and walk past an Apple store.