Not only is most Sci-fi of much higher quality than the John Grisham/Daneille Steele/Oprah-book-of-the-month mainstream garbage that gets passed off to a guillible public, but it appeals to a much more intellectual and intelligent sector of society. How many hackers do you know who read sci-fi? Compare that to non-hackers. Tells you something, eh?
Robert Heinein was without a doubt the greatest American philosopher of the twentieth century (Ayn Rand is a close second). His ideas have shaped the mindset of educated people for the last half a century. Most other authors can only dream about doing the same.
While I'm not much of a Mac user, it seems that with Darwin, Apple is showing that it finally groks open source, and all it's implications. It's good to know that I can tinker under the hood of the operating system, and I think most other users can appreciate that too.
OTOH, their hardware designs are becoming more and more outrageous. While I'll be the first to admit that the iMac is nice looking, in a sort of sickeningly-cute way, I don't think most geeks (myself and my friends included) would want to be seen with such a thing. It's hard to keep up with hacking Perl programs all night when you're using a computer designed to attract computer-illiterates. Beige is fine by me, thank you very much.
But if Apple does remain as clued in as it seems to be know, I might just buy one. Maybe.
You seem to be too completely lost in the world which has been created for you by corporations and government. There is no theft unless something of value is taken, and with IP, there is, by definition nothing of value.
Is a public library theft? I can read a book without paying an outrageous fee to the publisher. Do you consider that wrong? Give it time, and I'm sure the publishers will.
If you listen to the music at all, you're either supporting them (in which case you're a hypocrite and don't have any grounds to argue from)
I only listen to independant music, from places like mp3.com. There are some very talented musicians there. You might want to check it out.
or breaking the law (in which case you should be arrested).
The notion that any government has the right to put another person in confinement is absurd and goes against the very grain of the Constitution. Madison had some choice words in the Federalist Papers, but it's far too long to include here.
Mighty big words for somebody who doesn't want to pay for the creation and distribution of books, movies, and music.
Name me one great artist who was inspired to great achievements only by the thought of monetary reward. You can't? How strange.
You could certainly judge them as stupid. If you want democracy, demonstrating that you're a bunch of unruly hooligans in the main square of the capital is not the way to get it.
If you're satisfied with corporate totalitarianism, whining about "legality" is a perfect way to maintain the status quo, however.
And even so, by recent accounts, more soldiers were killed than protestors, and the protestors started the violence first.
Revolutions are violent processes. Certainly that's how the Maoists took power. I hope you don't believe that the American Revolution was a bloodless cold war? Freedom had to be won through the lives of many.
First, I don't think so, and second, how do you intend to create democracy when you refuse to enforce basic property rights?
Many systems of government are entirely democratic without the need for property. For example, the Utopia envisioned by Thomas More.
Pirate an mp3 for democracy today!
A revolution is a revolution. And the liberation of information will be every bit as important as any sort of political bickering.
corporations undermining our rights, and how bad that is, and how good freedom and free speech are. I agree.
Sounds good to me.
What if I create a program, or a digital movie, or a song - anything that can be downloaded? Do you really mean to say that I should have no rights to and no recompense for that work? That I should be happy to give it away for free?
There are no "rights", only privileges which you can create for yourself. If you are vigilent, I suppose you could create a way to prevent "unauthorized" usage, but I think we both know it's a meaningless proposition.
This sort of thing falls into the "one hand clapping" category. Nice to think about as an intellectual excercise, but totally without value in the Real World.
What if your song, movie, or program gets put on Napster or Freenet? What can you do to stop it? You might as well accustom yourself to the fact that controlling digital media in the internetworked world is impossible.
The fact is, true artists will create works without any form of recompense. Picasso was laughed at. Joyce was censored. Yet who can deny the genius of these men? Popular acclaim and money mean nothing in art.
As it is now, we have free reign. the internet is a virtual playground. no one has any idea how to control it. great. this proposed change to music distribution won't make a difference until the internet is policed/stifled/censored/etc.
Exactly. The Internet is, and will remain a medium of free speech. This is why we must remain vigilent and resist all attempts at corporations to destroy the censorship-free nature of the net. Why did SDMI fail? Because the users (ie, us) refused to accept it. Score one for the good guys.
how should they handle the fact that a digital medium in this day and age can become obsolete within a matter of months?
Unlike physical media, you can just run a program to convert files to different formats. I'm sure there will be away around it.
Property is property. There's a reason that we use the same noun in both phrases.
Arguments through linguistics are almost always facetious.
During the Renaissance, the highest peak of learning and culture in the world, the idea of "intellectual property" simply did not exist. How many of the stories of Shakespeare's plays are original? Should the Bard have paid licensing fees to write Romeo and Juliet? And I'm not even going to consider the scholarly works of the "natural philosophers" who would have been shocked at the idea of their ideas being limited only to those who could afford them.
Not at all. I live in China. If living here doesn't turn you into a free market advocate, I don't know what will.
Yes, converts of any religion are always the most zealous.
That's funny, the last time I checked, I paid money to an ISP that paid money to other ISPs. I don't think I'm depending on the government here.
Well, sir, you are obviously quite ignorant of the history of the Internet. The money you pay is largely sucked up by corporations who provide no special service except to hook up to public (as in government-owned) networks.
Oh. I get it. If I don't like Wal-Mart, so I break in and steal everything in the Electronics section, that's Civil Disobediance too, right?
If WalMart attacks your Freedom, will you stand idly by and allow it to happen? Change does not occur by standing still. Action is needed. If Walmart, or the RIAA, or the MPAA doesn't respect your rights, why should you cling to the idea of respecting theirs?
With "theft" included, right?
We live in an era when personal rights must be "stolen" from those who undermine them? Jefferson must be rolling in his grave!
Because the Internet is just one big happy hedonistic romper-room with absolutely no connection to the real world or real people
Since the corproration-dominated mega-conglomerate you so charmingly consider the "real world" has not assimilated everyone yet, the question is largely meaningless to many people. My "world" is not one in which you can be dragged to court for practicing your right to free speech on the internet, or anywhere else.
And who's supporting the monopoly? That would be you.
Few people would claim that napster users are "supporting" a monopoly. Artists yes, but not the middleman (aka the Big Record Companies).
or educate people about the "evils" of the big ones.
I think I'm doing so now. The more people that know, even if they don't understand, the better.
Don't go doing the Internet equivalent of rioting and looting because you can't be bothered to shell out for a CD.
Legality is an artificial construct created by those in power to justify that power. Consider ethicality instead. You no doubt remember the Tienammin Square "incident"? What those protesters did was, according to the government, illegal. But no one could judge them as unethical. Democracy is a right which everyone is entitled to. And our fight agianst the RIAA is no different than theirs against the Chinese government.
So it pretty much boils down to two questions. 1)Are you paying for the music, or the right to listen to the music.
Actually, technology has made this question obsolete. The question isn't whether you have some "right" to listen to an mp3. It's whether you have the means.
The RIAA will crack down on Napster. If the win that case, they'll go after gnutella users, and mp3 irc channels/ftp sites/newsgroups. The simple act of evading this persecution guarentees your "right" do listen to that music. If the RIAA, MPAA, and other four-letter words had their way, there would be NO rights at all. My friend, you must create your own rights. And the Internet lets you.
2)If you're actually paying for the media....do you have the right to do whatever the hell you want with that media.
Once again, it doesn't have anything to do with money. Money was simply the old way to control access to media: if you paid cash, you got a CD. Nowadays, as the corporate assaults on personal rights is at almost unbelievable proportions, the way to prevent access is to attempt to make it impossible (or not worth the effort) to physically obtain a copy of an mp3 file. Their tactics in this new battle are lawsuits and threats, rather than the old practice of price-fixing. It's all the same in the end: the RIAA will continue to control all but a few, those who have the time, equipment, and tech-savvy to evade them.
It's a crazy world ahead, but no worse, I think, than what we have now.
There's something called a market economy that you're dealing with here, and the only way that you could possibly make it fairer is to take the damn government out of it completely.
Maybe in some Randian dream world. I know enough free-market advocates to know that 99% of them are upper-middle class suburbanites and think that everyone is as privileged as they are. Capitalism is an inherently flawed system, with equallly flawed apologists.
Complaining while still buying and using what you're complaining about is sheer hypocrisy.
You complain about government intervention, yet you use the Internet, a government-sponsered network. Better go check the dictionary again.
Breaking the law to obtain access to whatever you're not willing to pay for is downright criminal
Actually, it's Civil Disobediance in a state where corporations have all the power. It is not only a right, but as free persons, it is a duty.
They don't let you go into Tower Records and tape CD's out of the listening stations, why should the Internet be any different?
The Internet was designed to be used for all forms of free speech. The convential view of "legality" has no meaning in a libertarian anarchy such as the net. Get used to it. You lost.
In short: if the industry's terms are unacceptable, don't deal with the industry.
It's hard to do so when you're dealing with a monopolized industry, such as major record studios. When corporations try to worm their way into controlling every aspect of your life, it's hard to get them out.
In short: if the industry's terms are unacceptable, don't deal with the industry.
Actually, it's not original at all. Da Vinci, the genius that he was, had the idea of "celestial travel" in mind when he worked out the original designs for the proto-helicopter. Granted, the renaissance view of space was very different from what we know now, but you get the point.
The Russian economy has never been stronger, owing greatly to the recovery of lost natural resources in areas experiencing seditious activities (most notably Chechnya, which you seem to know a little about). It was the Russians who opened the door to space, as you might recall. Both Sputnik and Yuri Gargalin beat the US by years, proving how embarassingly bad the US space system was (and in many ways, still is). I hesitate to point it out, but no Russian space engineers have yet to completely fsck up a simple metric conversion function.
This being said, inclusion of the Russians is seen as a must by all reasonable men, and I applaud those in charge who managed to overcome their fears of "Sovietism" -- and the supposed violence it entails -- and chose rather to develop a truly International space station. It was a lesson learned by the UN and it's predeccesor, the League of Nations: you cannot spurn Russia in any attempt at internationalism. Though it is coldly regarded by the Westerners who know Russians only as villians in cheap spy movies, Russia has shown time and again that it has more than ample strength, intelligence, and most of all Freedom, to compete with any nation, on this planet or beyond.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to be a troll, but I'll bite anyway.
Not only is most Sci-fi of much higher quality than the John Grisham/Daneille Steele/Oprah-book-of-the-month mainstream garbage that gets passed off to a guillible public, but it appeals to a much more intellectual and intelligent sector of society. How many hackers do you know who read sci-fi? Compare that to non-hackers. Tells you something, eh?
Robert Heinein was without a doubt the greatest American philosopher of the twentieth century (Ayn Rand is a close second). His ideas have shaped the mindset of educated people for the last half a century. Most other authors can only dream about doing the same.
-- Floyd
Whoops. I see. I'm a little slow to-day :)
-- Floyd
It certainly helps the reputation of MacInsider considering
...that it's posted on another website?
-- Floyd
While I'm not much of a Mac user, it seems that with Darwin, Apple is showing that it finally groks open source, and all it's implications. It's good to know that I can tinker under the hood of the operating system, and I think most other users can appreciate that too.
OTOH, their hardware designs are becoming more and more outrageous. While I'll be the first to admit that the iMac is nice looking, in a sort of sickeningly-cute way, I don't think most geeks (myself and my friends included) would want to be seen with such a thing. It's hard to keep up with hacking Perl programs all night when you're using a computer designed to attract computer-illiterates. Beige is fine by me, thank you very much.
But if Apple does remain as clued in as it seems to be know, I might just buy one. Maybe.
-- Floyd
What about your "right" to theft?
Sigh.
You seem to be too completely lost in the world which has been created for you by corporations and government. There is no theft unless something of value is taken, and with IP, there is, by definition nothing of value.
Is a public library theft? I can read a book without paying an outrageous fee to the publisher. Do you consider that wrong? Give it time, and I'm sure the publishers will.
If you listen to the music at all, you're either supporting them (in which case you're a hypocrite and don't have any grounds to argue from)
I only listen to independant music, from places like mp3.com. There are some very talented musicians there. You might want to check it out.
or breaking the law (in which case you should be arrested).
The notion that any government has the right to put another person in confinement is absurd and goes against the very grain of the Constitution. Madison had some choice words in the Federalist Papers, but it's far too long to include here.
Mighty big words for somebody who doesn't want to pay for the creation and distribution of books, movies, and music.
Name me one great artist who was inspired to great achievements only by the thought of monetary reward. You can't? How strange.
You could certainly judge them as stupid. If you want democracy, demonstrating that you're a bunch of unruly hooligans in the main square of the capital is not the way to get it.
If you're satisfied with corporate totalitarianism, whining about "legality" is a perfect way to maintain the status quo, however.
And even so, by recent accounts, more soldiers were killed than protestors, and the protestors started the violence first.
Revolutions are violent processes. Certainly that's how the Maoists took power. I hope you don't believe that the American Revolution was a bloodless cold war? Freedom had to be won through the lives of many.
First, I don't think so, and second, how do you intend to create democracy when you refuse to enforce basic property rights?
Many systems of government are entirely democratic without the need for property. For example, the Utopia envisioned by Thomas More.
Pirate an mp3 for democracy today!
A revolution is a revolution. And the liberation of information will be every bit as important as any sort of political bickering.
-- Floyd
corporations undermining our rights, and how bad that is, and how good freedom and free speech are. I agree.
Sounds good to me.
What if I create a program, or a digital movie, or a song - anything that can be downloaded? Do you really mean to say that I should have no rights to and no recompense for that work? That I should be happy to give it away for free?
There are no "rights", only privileges which you can create for yourself. If you are vigilent, I suppose you could create a way to prevent "unauthorized" usage, but I think we both know it's a meaningless proposition.
This sort of thing falls into the "one hand clapping" category. Nice to think about as an intellectual excercise, but totally without value in the Real World.
What if your song, movie, or program gets put on Napster or Freenet? What can you do to stop it? You might as well accustom yourself to the fact that controlling digital media in the internetworked world is impossible.
The fact is, true artists will create works without any form of recompense. Picasso was laughed at. Joyce was censored. Yet who can deny the genius of these men? Popular acclaim and money mean nothing in art.
-- Floyd
As it is now, we have free reign. the internet is a virtual playground. no one has any idea how to control it. great. this proposed change to music distribution won't make a difference until the internet is policed/stifled/censored/etc.
Exactly. The Internet is, and will remain a medium of free speech. This is why we must remain vigilent and resist all attempts at corporations to destroy the censorship-free nature of the net. Why did SDMI fail? Because the users (ie, us) refused to accept it. Score one for the good guys.
how should they handle the fact that a digital medium in this day and age can become obsolete within a matter of months?
Unlike physical media, you can just run a program to convert files to different formats. I'm sure there will be away around it.
-- Floyd
Property is property. There's a reason that we use the same noun in both phrases.
Arguments through linguistics are almost always facetious.
During the Renaissance, the highest peak of learning and culture in the world, the idea of "intellectual property" simply did not exist. How many of the stories of Shakespeare's plays are original? Should the Bard have paid licensing fees to write Romeo and Juliet? And I'm not even going to consider the scholarly works of the "natural philosophers" who would have been shocked at the idea of their ideas being limited only to those who could afford them.
-- Floyd
Not at all. I live in China. If living here doesn't turn you into a free market advocate, I don't know what will.
Yes, converts of any religion are always the most zealous.
That's funny, the last time I checked, I paid money to an ISP that paid money to other ISPs. I don't think I'm depending on the government here.
Well, sir, you are obviously quite ignorant of the history of the Internet. The money you pay is largely sucked up by corporations who provide no special service except to hook up to public (as in government-owned) networks.
Oh. I get it. If I don't like Wal-Mart, so I break in and steal everything in the Electronics section, that's Civil Disobediance too, right?
If WalMart attacks your Freedom, will you stand idly by and allow it to happen? Change does not occur by standing still. Action is needed. If Walmart, or the RIAA, or the MPAA doesn't respect your rights, why should you cling to the idea of respecting theirs?
With "theft" included, right?
We live in an era when personal rights must be "stolen" from those who undermine them? Jefferson must be rolling in his grave!
Because the Internet is just one big happy hedonistic romper-room with absolutely no connection to the real world or real people
Since the corproration-dominated mega-conglomerate you so charmingly consider the "real world" has not assimilated everyone yet, the question is largely meaningless to many people. My "world" is not one in which you can be dragged to court for practicing your right to free speech on the internet, or anywhere else.
And who's supporting the monopoly? That would be you.
Few people would claim that napster users are "supporting" a monopoly. Artists yes, but not the middleman (aka the Big Record Companies).
or educate people about the "evils" of the big ones.
I think I'm doing so now. The more people that know, even if they don't understand, the better.
Don't go doing the Internet equivalent of rioting and looting because you can't be bothered to shell out for a CD.
Legality is an artificial construct created by those in power to justify that power. Consider ethicality instead. You no doubt remember the Tienammin Square "incident"? What those protesters did was, according to the government, illegal. But no one could judge them as unethical. Democracy is a right which everyone is entitled to. And our fight agianst the RIAA is no different than theirs against the Chinese government.
-- Floyd
So it pretty much boils down to two questions. 1)Are you paying for the music, or the right to listen to the music.
Actually, technology has made this question obsolete. The question isn't whether you have some "right" to listen to an mp3. It's whether you have the means.
The RIAA will crack down on Napster. If the win that case, they'll go after gnutella users, and mp3 irc channels/ftp sites/newsgroups. The simple act of evading this persecution guarentees your "right" do listen to that music. If the RIAA, MPAA, and other four-letter words had their way, there would be NO rights at all. My friend, you must create your own rights. And the Internet lets you.
2)If you're actually paying for the media....do you have the right to do whatever the hell you want with that media.
Once again, it doesn't have anything to do with money. Money was simply the old way to control access to media: if you paid cash, you got a CD. Nowadays, as the corporate assaults on personal rights is at almost unbelievable proportions, the way to prevent access is to attempt to make it impossible (or not worth the effort) to physically obtain a copy of an mp3 file. Their tactics in this new battle are lawsuits and threats, rather than the old practice of price-fixing. It's all the same in the end: the RIAA will continue to control all but a few, those who have the time, equipment, and tech-savvy to evade them.
It's a crazy world ahead, but no worse, I think, than what we have now.
-- Floyd
There's something called a market economy that you're dealing with here, and the only way that you could possibly make it fairer is to take the damn government out of it completely.
Maybe in some Randian dream world. I know enough free-market advocates to know that 99% of them are upper-middle class suburbanites and think that everyone is as privileged as they are. Capitalism is an inherently flawed system, with equallly flawed apologists.
Complaining while still buying and using what you're complaining about is sheer hypocrisy.
You complain about government intervention, yet you use the Internet, a government-sponsered network. Better go check the dictionary again.
Breaking the law to obtain access to whatever you're not willing to pay for is downright criminal
Actually, it's Civil Disobediance in a state where corporations have all the power. It is not only a right, but as free persons, it is a duty.
They don't let you go into Tower Records and tape CD's out of the listening stations, why should the Internet be any different?
The Internet was designed to be used for all forms of free speech. The convential view of "legality" has no meaning in a libertarian anarchy such as the net. Get used to it. You lost.
In short: if the industry's terms are unacceptable, don't deal with the industry.
It's hard to do so when you're dealing with a monopolized industry, such as major record studios. When corporations try to worm their way into controlling every aspect of your life, it's hard to get them out.
In short: if the industry's terms are unacceptable, don't deal with the industry.
"IP theft" is an oxymoron.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
Don't bother looking for those songs on Napster; I've already replaced them with cuckoo sounds...
Actually, it's not original at all. Da Vinci, the genius that he was, had the idea of "celestial travel" in mind when he worked out the original designs for the proto-helicopter. Granted, the renaissance view of space was very different from what we know now, but you get the point.
The "space age" indeed! A few centuries too late.
LOL!
The Russian economy has never been stronger, owing greatly to the recovery of lost natural resources in areas experiencing seditious activities (most notably Chechnya, which you seem to know a little about). It was the Russians who opened the door to space, as you might recall. Both Sputnik and Yuri Gargalin beat the US by years, proving how embarassingly bad the US space system was (and in many ways, still is). I hesitate to point it out, but no Russian space engineers have yet to completely fsck up a simple metric conversion function.
This being said, inclusion of the Russians is seen as a must by all reasonable men, and I applaud those in charge who managed to overcome their fears of "Sovietism" -- and the supposed violence it entails -- and chose rather to develop a truly International space station. It was a lesson learned by the UN and it's predeccesor, the League of Nations: you cannot spurn Russia in any attempt at internationalism. Though it is coldly regarded by the Westerners who know Russians only as villians in cheap spy movies, Russia has shown time and again that it has more than ample strength, intelligence, and most of all Freedom, to compete with any nation, on this planet or beyond.
-- Floyd