many people see the Recording Industry as dishonest
Like the great Adam Smith, I would regard any industry-wide or industry-dominant organisation as suspect. What is an industry organisation but a cartel - or a cartel in the making? Industry organisations are anti-competitive, and serious attention should be given to banning them for the same reasons that Microsoft et al are taken to court for abusing their monopoly.
How does the recording medium (CD) know which copying is illegal (eg to give to others) and which copying is legal (to use for yourself, or to keep as a backup)? And how does the recording medium stop illegal distribution of itself - eg can CDs prevent someone stealing them and giving them out to their friends (that is an example of illegal distribution that concerns me)?
A CD would have to contain a lawyer and a policeman to prevent *illegal* copying and *illegal* distribution, *without taking away existing rights* to *legally* copy (eg to make up a backup copy for myself) and to *legally* distribute (eg to lend my working copy to my child, like lending them one of my books).
So do you REALLY mean: "Do you believe that businesses should be allowed to distribute media that prevent any copying (including both legal and illegal copying) of their content?"
Or perhaps: "Do you believe that governments should prop up broken business models by taking away citizens' rights?"
After all, the real point is that the RIAA expects the government to take away citizens' rights in order to prop up their business model.
Re:cheapest domain name?
on
See Ya .su
·
· Score: 1
And someone has registered the domain name tcl.tk, though the server doesn't seem to accept a connection.
And for what? To have your feet stick to the floor? To listen to the idiot with the cell phone, or the couple/group that spend more time talking than watching? Perhaps for the joy of screaming "Focus! Focus!" when the monkey upstairs in the projection booth lets everything go fuzzy?
And you left out the really big guy who sits straight in front of you and blocks out about a third of the screen, so you have to keep squirming back and forth to see the film.
I once had to watch a movie standing up at the back of the theatre, because my seat was behind a massively tall guy with a big polynesian hairdo. There were no other seats empty.
A few variables need to be filled in here, at least for the public sector bit.
What country? Local, state, or federal? Large or small organisation?
I work in a small (25 employee) state government authority outside the US. It has plenty of flexibility and innovation. We get to work on interesting projects - like building large data base systems in PHP for other agencies. Almost all the systems staff run Linux desktops, with VMware for legacy applications.
The staff are all well-qualified (half have Masters degrees and half have Bachelor degrees), we get to experiment, are rewarded and praised fairly for coming up with new programs, and so on.
It depends on where you work. I have known great places to work, and great places to leave, in the public sector. It is not homogeneous.
I must have been dreaming when my Red Hat 7.1 desktop self-configured on plugging in a new USB Zip 250 drive.
The OS even automatically created a new mount point for the drive and updated/etc/fstab and loaded the kernel modules.
Unlike Windows, where you have to run some dawky install CD to get the hardware drivers, and end up with buckets of useless "utilities" and other junk.
I heard the Southern States just let the yankees win, because they felt sorry for them. All that cold weather, and the yankees would have nowhere in the South to go to get away from it all. Miami would be in a foreign country to all them New Yorkers.
Pirating software is still stealing software, no matter how you look at it.
No. If I steal your installation disks, I have stolen your software. But if I merely copy them (which is not real piracy[1] at all), I have stolen (deprived someone of) nothing. All I have done is illegally copied them. It may be an offence, but it isn't the offence called THEFT.
Think of a hammer. If I take your hammer, that is theft - I am depriving you of the use of your hammer. If I see some gadget you have made, and I build an exact replica - I haven't deprived you of anything. You still have your gadget exactly as it was before I copied it.
What's more, I haven't even deprived you of the money you might want me to pay for copying the gadget. Why? Because there is no guarantee that I would have bought it at the price you charge. That is why estimates of the value of illegally copied software are quite ridiculous - they assume that the demand would remain steady even if the price were severely increased (from zero for illegally copied software to hundreds or thousands of dollars if bought)... I really doubt that demand for any software is THAT inelastic. Only some users must have a particular version - most others can use alternatives. Even MS sells Works for people who won't buy Office. That is why so many companies are now considering Linux instead of paying MS's new prices. The software market IS price-sensitive.
Illegally copying software is illegal - but the government can determine which instances of copying are legal and which are not. A government could pass a law saying that software licences do not apply to educational institutions. Of course, the governments of other countries may fight against such laws. And the country with the most significant software companies (the US) carries a lot of clout in international markets and trade forums. The Malaysian government is trying to have a bet each way, I think: Retain "strong" copyright laws as required by international trade agreements, but wink at breaches in certain local circumstances. Trouble is, the rest of the world can see them do it.
[1] When did you ever see a pirate movie where the raiders came on board and COPIED the contents of their victim's ship? (Gee, great gold chain you have here. Could I make one just like it?)
This bill, if it becomes law, could have some interesting international ramifications.
Say, the MPAA/RIAA attack, or sponsor an attck on, some website OUTSIDE THE U.S. - where this law is not valid, but electronic anti-terrorism laws may well be valid.
This would make the MPAA/RIAA terrorists (or in a conspiracy to commit terrorism) with respect to the country of the web site.
At the very least, a good lawyer would be worth having, as suing a rich *foreign* organisation for committing an act of terrorism could be an interesting activity. Some European countries might be particularly concerned about an American law sanctioning what is really cyber-crime by U.S. firms.
Some of us have this thing called a government. You see, you can't just run a TV station whenever you like to - you gotta get a licence. And the public have a say in the licence. It is called democracy. It works like this. TV company decides to put ads inside programs. TV station licencing authority say "no you don't" and revoke TV station licence. TV station realises that ads inside programs is NOT a good idea, because they no longer have a business.
It is just a matter of deciding whether the public or the TV companies run the government. If the TV companies run the government, then you DON'T have a democracy - if you do have a democracy, why can't you revoke their licences until they behave themselves?
I don't feel like I'm informed enough to make a good enough decision regarding my elected officials.
Democracy (the power of the people) is a wonderful idea, but it carries with it a responsibility: the people must become informed enough to make a good enough decision. You fail your duty to democracy (aka to your fellow citizens) if you don't.
In fact, in my country, voting (at least, attending the polling booth and getting a ballot paper) is compulsory. Democracy is a duty, not just a right or a privilege. Use or lose it.
In my lifetime, Australia switched its currency from pounds-shillings-pence to dollars-cents (1966-68), and switched from imperial to metric (more recently, can't remember the exact dates).
Proportionate to our population we managed the cost and the re-learning exercise both times. Would the US cost per head to make just one of these changes be that much worse than the cost to Australia?
Just think. No more lost spacecraft because of confusion over meters and feet. I've found a saving for you already! More to the point, it would reduce many incompatibilities with other countries, and so reduce costs.
In Australia, if you live in Sydney and Brisbane, "football" means Rugby League. If you live in Melbourne or Adelaide, it means Australian Rules - quite a different code of football. Moral: no single game can claim a monopoly on the name "football".
The game Americans play (which is of little interest to most Australians) is usually referred to here as "gridiron". PS: We tend to be amazed (and amused) at the large amount of armour worn by US footballers - our footballers don't wear armour.
Soccer is played throughout Australia, often by members of migrant communities (our largest ethnic minority is Italian). The World Cup is very popular here - even among people who don't follow the local soccer competition.
Now I see that I have been right all along!! I'm not really pirating MS software, I'm helping MS to maintain their dominant user-base!
Yes, you are. You are an accomplice to a corporation with the morals of a drug pusher.
Get legal. Use open source.
MS: Free, as in "the first one is on me"
MS: Unfree, as in "We'll charge you when you're hooked"
Only suckers play MS's game. If you are already dependent, *plan* to get off their software. For all new projects, use open source equivalents. For old projects, gradually port them to the open source equivalents. You *can* do something about it. Start now.
Isn't "pressuring people to do things" what got MS into trouble in the first place?
No. They got into trouble for abusing their monopoly status. Not "pressuring", but "being a monopoly, pressuring".
It is one thing to pick fights if you are the weakest kid in the playground, it is quite another thing to pick fights if you are the strongest kid in the playground. The latter is called bullying. And that is what Microsoft did/does.
It is not surprising that we are doing this in Australia. Given our wide open spaces, and the price of domestic airfares, we need a new way to get around.
But what if they create a replica of me at the other end, and forget to destroy the original me at this end?
Will that mean there are two of me?
And can I go to more than one destination at the same time? (My life as a forked process)
Still, no more 24-hour plane trips to the other side of the world. Cool!
So DON'T try to provide it for a living. Customise it for paying customers. Maintain installations of it. Provide SERVICES for a fee, not "PROPERTY" for rent.
Works for IBM. Even Red Hat.
And free software is not charity. It is (a) co-operation (or do you really think Linus wrote the entire current Linux kernel by himself) and (b) ego and (c) need and... Moral: The whole world doesn't divide up into a neat dualism of charity and profit.
PS: the "entire" free software IS NOT public domain. Much of it is copyright. Read the GPL, and other licences. Linux, Apache, Mozilla, etc are NOT public domain. Shakespeare's plays are public domain, though, as far as I know.
Actually, the safest time to film in George Street Sydney is probably on the first Tuesday in November, around 3.15pm. A certain famous horse race would guarantee that the streets of Sydney are absolutely empty at that time - Sydney is practically a ghost town while everyone stays indoors to watch the race.
the way they say making a copy of the software you bought in RAM is a copyright violation
Imagine if I memorised a copyright text - I have made an illegal copy... inside my head.
The fact is, you went and saw Spiderman - and (gasp) you remember it! That means you have made an unlawful copy of the movie inside your head.
And this piracy is hurting the movie industry, because the fact that you remember seeing it means you won't go again straight away.
If all law-abiding citizens immediately forgot everything they watched, then they would go and watch movies much more. The poor movie industry is being ripped off millions by our "piracy through memory".
We need a law to stamp out this blatant theft of our intellectual property. Movie-goers must not be allowed to remember what they saw. They must go again, and again, to watch the same stuff - never keep illegal copies of movies in your heads. It is pure communism!
Try someone in Australia buys from California if you want to illustrate a "world" market. The amazing thing is that I can buy used books from the US - good quality at much cheaper prices - and beat the incredible cost of imported tech books in Australia.
The internet is much better than the old international "mail order" way of buying books. Finding those mail-order firms by looking through imported journals and newspapers was a lot harder than using the web.
Better still, I want to buy some German books that never even make it to the academic library shelves here, let alone the bookshops. This is a lot easier to do on the web.
KDEs file manager uses the built in Konquer engine. If you completely removed Konq from a KDE install then the file manager is crippled or completely non functional.
And the mc file manager uses the lynx html engine, and...
Er, no. MC works perfectly fine as a file manager without needing an html engine at all, and guess what?
It is faster, easier to use, and I use it all the time for managing files - inside a GUI. I have never liked the gmc/kfm etc filemanagers which are still trying to render their cutesy icons while mc has done listing all files. Text mode file managers are noticeably faster than GUI ones, especially at hopping back and forth between viewing the contents of a file and viewing a file list.
HTML file managers are pretty, but slow. Even the old binary filemanagers (eg Win95 explorer) were faster than the browser based ones (eg Win98 explorer) - as the 98lite site will tell you. HTML file mangers exist for cutesy marketing reasons (let's make everything "web like"), not for efficiency.
Really, I think the best advice I can give is this: get to really know an API before you start to use it
Here is some more "really helpful" advice: Be perfect. Never make mistakes.
My point is: you can only "get to really know an API" because "you start to use it" beforehand.
I don't know anybody who really knew something before they used it.
Perhaps what you really mean is: using C++/STL competently takes a lot of time to learn, and you will make many mistakes along the way. Don't start out by writing air traffic control or heart monitoring software for use in production sites. Or if you do, let me which hospitals/airports use your software.
Perhaps another piece of advice: consider other languages/libraries that do not take as long to learn.
This is one of the real downsides to the STL - the complexity. Not all projects need it. Mac software (OSX) can get by without it. Do PC software projects really need it? The answer need not always be "yes".
I am often caught out registering for some eval software, then not downloading.
Why?
Simple - the JERKS who run those sites leave out one extremely important thing that many people around the world need to know:
What size is the download file?
I am sick of looking into promising software, only to find that it is ten times larger than I imagined, or than my phone line bandwidth can handle(effectively 33.4Kbps, despite the so-called 56Kbps modem).
Not everybody in the world has 1.5Mbps ADSL.
If only they would indicate up front what the download size was, I could make an informed choice about downloading.
Slashdot Mirror
many people see the Recording Industry as dishonest
Like the great Adam Smith, I would regard any industry-wide or industry-dominant organisation as suspect. What is an industry organisation but a cartel - or a cartel in the making? Industry organisations are anti-competitive, and serious attention should be given to banning them for the same reasons that Microsoft et al are taken to court for abusing their monopoly.
How does the recording medium (CD) know which copying is illegal (eg to give to others) and which copying is legal (to use for yourself, or to keep as a backup)? And how does the recording medium stop illegal distribution of itself - eg can CDs prevent someone stealing them and giving them out to their friends (that is an example of illegal distribution that concerns me)?
A CD would have to contain a lawyer and a policeman to prevent *illegal* copying and *illegal* distribution, *without taking away existing rights* to *legally* copy (eg to make up a backup copy for myself) and to *legally* distribute (eg to lend my working copy to my child, like lending them one of my books).
So do you REALLY mean: "Do you believe that businesses should be allowed to distribute media that prevent any copying (including both legal and illegal copying) of their content?"
Or perhaps: "Do you believe that governments should prop up broken business models by taking away citizens' rights?"
After all, the real point is that the RIAA expects the government to take away citizens' rights in order to prop up their business model.
And someone has registered the domain name tcl.tk, though the server doesn't seem to accept a connection.
And for what? To have your feet stick to the floor? To listen to the idiot with the cell phone, or the couple/group that spend more time talking than watching? Perhaps for the joy of screaming "Focus! Focus!" when the monkey upstairs in the projection booth lets everything go fuzzy?
And you left out the really big guy who sits straight in front of you and blocks out about a third of the screen, so you have to keep squirming back and forth to see the film.
I once had to watch a movie standing up at the back of the theatre, because my seat was behind a massively tall guy with a big polynesian hairdo. There were no other seats empty.
A few variables need to be filled in here, at least for the public sector bit.
What country?
Local, state, or federal?
Large or small organisation?
I work in a small (25 employee) state government authority outside the US. It has plenty of flexibility and innovation. We get to work on interesting projects - like building large data base systems in PHP for other agencies. Almost all the systems staff run Linux desktops, with VMware for legacy applications.
The staff are all well-qualified (half have Masters degrees and half have Bachelor degrees), we get to experiment, are rewarded and praised fairly for coming up with new programs, and so on.
It depends on where you work. I have known great places to work, and great places to leave, in the public sector. It is not homogeneous.
Gee whizz.
/etc/fstab and loaded the kernel modules.
I must have been dreaming when my Red Hat 7.1 desktop self-configured on plugging in a new USB Zip 250 drive.
The OS even automatically created a new mount point for the drive and updated
Unlike Windows, where you have to run some dawky install CD to get the hardware drivers, and end up with buckets of useless "utilities" and other junk.
I heard the Southern States just let the yankees win, because they felt sorry for them. All that cold weather, and the yankees would have nowhere in the South to go to get away from it all. Miami would be in a foreign country to all them New Yorkers.
Always knew that Robert E Lee was a gentleman.
Pirating software is still stealing software, no matter how you look at it.
No. If I steal your installation disks, I have stolen your software. But if I merely copy them (which is not real piracy[1] at all), I have stolen (deprived someone of) nothing. All I have done is illegally copied them. It may be an offence, but it isn't the offence called THEFT.
Think of a hammer. If I take your hammer, that is theft - I am depriving you of the use of your hammer. If I see some gadget you have made, and I build an exact replica - I haven't deprived you of anything. You still have your gadget exactly as it was before I copied it.
What's more, I haven't even deprived you of the money you might want me to pay for copying the gadget. Why? Because there is no guarantee that I would have bought it at the price you charge. That is why estimates of the value of illegally copied software are quite ridiculous - they assume that the demand would remain steady even if the price were severely increased (from zero for illegally copied software to hundreds or thousands of dollars if bought) ... I really doubt that demand for any software is THAT inelastic. Only some users must have a particular version - most others can use alternatives. Even MS sells Works for people who won't buy Office. That is why so many companies are now considering Linux instead of paying MS's new prices. The software market IS price-sensitive.
Illegally copying software is illegal - but the government can determine which instances of copying are legal and which are not. A government could pass a law saying that software licences do not apply to educational institutions. Of course, the governments of other countries may fight against such laws. And the country with the most significant software companies (the US) carries a lot of clout in international markets and trade forums. The Malaysian government is trying to have a bet each way, I think: Retain "strong" copyright laws as required by international trade agreements, but wink at breaches in certain local circumstances. Trouble is, the rest of the world can see them do it.
[1] When did you ever see a pirate movie where the raiders came on board and COPIED the contents of their victim's ship? (Gee, great gold chain you have here. Could I make one just like it?)
This bill, if it becomes law, could have some interesting international ramifications.
Say, the MPAA/RIAA attack, or sponsor an attck on, some website OUTSIDE THE U.S. - where this law is not valid, but electronic anti-terrorism laws may well be valid.
This would make the MPAA/RIAA terrorists (or in a conspiracy to commit terrorism) with respect to the country of the web site.
At the very least, a good lawyer would be worth having, as suing a rich *foreign* organisation for committing an act of terrorism could be an interesting activity. Some European countries might be particularly concerned about an American law sanctioning what is really cyber-crime by U.S. firms.
Some of us have this thing called a government. You see, you can't just run a TV station whenever you like to - you gotta get a licence. And the public have a say in the licence. It is called democracy. It works like this. TV company decides to put ads inside programs. TV station licencing authority say "no you don't" and revoke TV station licence. TV station realises that ads inside programs is NOT a good idea, because they no longer have a business.
It is just a matter of deciding whether the public or the TV companies run the government. If the TV companies run the government, then you DON'T have a democracy - if you do have a democracy, why can't you revoke their licences until they behave themselves?
I don't feel like I'm informed enough to make a good enough decision regarding my elected officials.
Democracy (the power of the people) is a wonderful idea, but it carries with it a responsibility: the people must become informed enough to make a good enough decision. You fail your duty to democracy (aka to your fellow citizens) if you don't.
In fact, in my country, voting (at least, attending the polling booth and getting a ballot paper) is compulsory. Democracy is a duty, not just a right or a privilege. Use or lose it.
In my lifetime, Australia switched its currency from pounds-shillings-pence to dollars-cents (1966-68), and switched from imperial to metric (more recently, can't remember the exact dates).
Proportionate to our population we managed the cost and the re-learning exercise both times. Would the US cost per head to make just one of these changes be that much worse than the cost to Australia?
Just think. No more lost spacecraft because of confusion over meters and feet. I've found a saving for you already! More to the point, it would reduce many incompatibilities with other countries, and so reduce costs.
In Australia, if you live in Sydney and Brisbane, "football" means Rugby League. If you live in Melbourne or Adelaide, it means Australian Rules - quite a different code of football. Moral: no single game can claim a monopoly on the name "football".
The game Americans play (which is of little interest to most Australians) is usually referred to here as "gridiron". PS: We tend to be amazed (and amused) at the large amount of armour worn by US footballers - our footballers don't wear armour.
Soccer is played throughout Australia, often by members of migrant communities (our largest ethnic minority is Italian). The World Cup is very popular here - even among people who don't follow the local soccer competition.
Now I see that I have been right all along!! I'm not really pirating MS software, I'm helping MS to maintain their dominant user-base!
Yes, you are. You are an accomplice to a corporation with the morals of a drug pusher.
Get legal. Use open source.
MS: Free, as in "the first one is on me"
MS: Unfree, as in "We'll charge you when you're hooked"
Only suckers play MS's game. If you are already dependent, *plan* to get off their software. For all new projects, use open source equivalents. For old projects, gradually port them to the open source equivalents. You *can* do something about it. Start now.
if you can divide you problem into two problems, and divide these into two problems etc... you'll end up with ...
More and more problems, I should think.
Isn't "pressuring people to do things" what got MS into trouble in the first place?
No. They got into trouble for abusing their monopoly status. Not "pressuring", but "being a monopoly, pressuring".
It is one thing to pick fights if you are the weakest kid in the playground, it is quite another thing to pick fights if you are the strongest kid in the playground. The latter is called bullying. And that is what Microsoft did/does.
But what if they create a replica of me at the other end, and forget to destroy the original me at this end?
Will that mean there are two of me?
And can I go to more than one destination at the same time? (My life as a forked process)
Still, no more 24-hour plane trips to the other side of the world. Cool!
it's damn hard to do it by provinding the stuff.
So DON'T try to provide it for a living. Customise it for paying customers. Maintain installations of it. Provide SERVICES for a fee, not "PROPERTY" for rent.
Works for IBM. Even Red Hat.
And free software is not charity. It is (a) co-operation (or do you really think Linus wrote the entire current Linux kernel by himself) and (b) ego and (c) need and ... Moral: The whole world doesn't divide up into a neat dualism of charity and profit.
PS: the "entire" free software IS NOT public domain. Much of it is copyright. Read the GPL, and other licences. Linux, Apache, Mozilla, etc are NOT public domain. Shakespeare's plays are public domain, though, as far as I know.
It only applies to things that were created before the 20th Century, right? :)
Yeah, but those are the best things anyway, right? :-)
Why not just shoot the thing at 5 in the morning
Too many people coming out of night clubs.
Actually, the safest time to film in George Street Sydney is probably on the first Tuesday in November, around 3.15pm. A certain famous horse race would guarantee that the streets of Sydney are absolutely empty at that time - Sydney is practically a ghost town while everyone stays indoors to watch the race.
the way they say making a copy of the software you bought in RAM is a copyright violation
Imagine if I memorised a copyright text - I have made an illegal copy ... inside my head.
The fact is, you went and saw Spiderman - and (gasp) you remember it! That means you have made an unlawful copy of the movie inside your head.
And this piracy is hurting the movie industry, because the fact that you remember seeing it means you won't go again straight away.
If all law-abiding citizens immediately forgot everything they watched, then they would go and watch movies much more. The poor movie industry is being ripped off millions by our "piracy through memory".
We need a law to stamp out this blatant theft of our intellectual property. Movie-goers must not be allowed to remember what they saw. They must go again, and again, to watch the same stuff - never keep illegal copies of movies in your heads. It is pure communism!
the world ... Illinois ... New York ... California
It truly is a small world after all!
Try someone in Australia buys from California if you want to illustrate a "world" market. The amazing thing is that I can buy used books from the US - good quality at much cheaper prices - and beat the incredible cost of imported tech books in Australia.
The internet is much better than the old international "mail order" way of buying books. Finding those mail-order firms by looking through imported journals and newspapers was a lot harder than using the web.
Better still, I want to buy some German books that never even make it to the academic library shelves here, let alone the bookshops. This is a lot easier to do on the web.
You need a bigger concept of the world.
KDEs file manager uses the built in Konquer engine. If you completely removed Konq from a KDE install then the file manager is crippled or completely non functional.
And the mc file manager uses the lynx html engine, and ...
Er, no. MC works perfectly fine as a file manager without needing an html engine at all, and guess what?
It is faster, easier to use, and I use it all the time for managing files - inside a GUI. I have never liked the gmc/kfm etc filemanagers which are still trying to render their cutesy icons while mc has done listing all files. Text mode file managers are noticeably faster than GUI ones, especially at hopping back and forth between viewing the contents of a file and viewing a file list.
HTML file managers are pretty, but slow. Even the old binary filemanagers (eg Win95 explorer) were faster than the browser based ones (eg Win98 explorer) - as the 98lite site will tell you. HTML file mangers exist for cutesy marketing reasons (let's make everything "web like"), not for efficiency.
Really, I think the best advice I can give is this: get to really know an API before you start to use it
Here is some more "really helpful" advice: Be perfect. Never make mistakes.
My point is: you can only "get to really know an API" because "you start to use it" beforehand.
I don't know anybody who really knew something before they used it.
Perhaps what you really mean is: using C++/STL competently takes a lot of time to learn, and you will make many mistakes along the way. Don't start out by writing air traffic control or heart monitoring software for use in production sites. Or if you do, let me which hospitals/airports use your software.
Perhaps another piece of advice: consider other languages/libraries that do not take as long to learn.
This is one of the real downsides to the STL - the complexity. Not all projects need it. Mac software (OSX) can get by without it. Do PC software projects really need it? The answer need not always be "yes".
I am often caught out registering for some eval software, then not downloading.
Why?
Simple - the JERKS who run those sites leave out one extremely important thing that many people around the world need to know:
What size is the download file?
I am sick of looking into promising software, only to find that it is ten times larger than I imagined, or than my phone line bandwidth can handle(effectively 33.4Kbps, despite the so-called 56Kbps modem).
Not everybody in the world has 1.5Mbps ADSL.
If only they would indicate up front what the download size was, I could make an informed choice about downloading.