From the Reuters story: Napster would prefer an even stronger proposal to create a compulsory license that would force record labels to let any company sell any song at a price determined by the U.S. Copyright Office.
Anybody still want to argue that Napster is on the side of the angels? Cyberspace rebels, freeing the people from the bonds of Corporate America?
When they think it will benefit them, they're as pro-government as a good socialist.
Not only is this post not "offtopic", it may not even be a troll;)
With thousands and thousand of miles of unlit fiber in the ground in the U.S. it is far from impossible that a consortium of well-capitalized business could decide to set up a new network with different capabilities. It is pretty apparent by now that a lot of the pie-in-the-sky hopes for this internet are never going to be realized. Who the hell would trust their pacemaker's remote monitor function to this network? While it's not possible to make a network that is totally secure and reliable, that doesn't mean that there isn't room some serious improvement.
This could even be a very good thing. If business got the internet it wants without dicking around with this one so none of us recognize it, we might all be happier.
First, some asshole (that you Kevin?) modifies the old BSD-is-dying troll to cover Linux. Then somebody loses self-control for a second and takes the bait with a one-line 'fuck you'. Now this guy wants to support the troll! He produces a long-winded lecture about trying to squelch people's freedom to post cut-n-paste flamebait AND IT GETS MODDED UP TO 3!
This is exactly what I was going to say. When they're trying that hard to explain what the damn thing is good for, it's usually not good for much. Did
you have to have hyperlinks explained to you with a bunch of acronyms and eight-syllable buzzwords?
Well, I sort of agree with you that Slashdot discussions frequently degenerate into an unsavory mixture of commie/anarchist/technocrat (did I mention logically inconsistent?) ravings, but in this case Michael's comments actually do go to the heart of the situation. One of the primary motivators behind trademark law was to prevent companies from misleading the public. In cases like this, where the connection between products is quite tenuous, it may be that there's no infringement.
I'm the last person to claim any expertise on this, but I think the problems start when you try to save the data in a format other than the CD's original (e.g. MP3). You end up with a faithful reproduction of both music and artificial static, which your MP3 player will faithfully, but annoyingly, reproduce.
If this is true, couldn't the software to play the MP3s be rewritten to interpolate across uncorrectable errors, like the CD players do?
I know it's still in beta, but so far, after a few test searches, I'd have to say it's a far cry from Google. I don't find the results as useful for a couple of reasons:
1. Searches default to allow embedded matches, so that a search for '2gb bios limit' yields a bunch of crap about 3.2gb limits, etc.
2. Results give about a line and a half of text from the site for you to review, but it's not necessarily text that contains your search criteria, so it's hard to judge relevance for yourself.
`where people think that the moon landings were fake, but that television wrestling is for real'
Funny thing is, here in Georgia, we say this about the people in Alabama. I wonder, who do they tell 'stupid' jokes about in Poland?
Seriously, I've lived here almost 30 years now (childhood in Pennsylvania), and I'm still appalled by the culture of insularity and ignorance that dominates in this part of the U.S.
Not at all. It's called bankruptcy protection because it holds creditors claims in abeyance while new terms can be negotiated. In the best case, it is arranged for all creditors to be repaid on an extended schedule. Worse is for creditors to accept less than they are actually due (but they take this on the theory that a debtor who is still in business may be able to pay back more than one which is liquidated). But even in the worst case, where the bankrupt enterprise is liquidated, its assets still belong to someone--in this case the creditors. But never are their assets just thrown into the 'public domain'.
obvious flip side is that by using such features to "enhance" your visit, you are at the same time working against the site itself. As everyone knows the market is going to fuck, and people using pop-up disabling features/programs are just making the situation worse
I haven't searched hard, but this is the first mention I've seen here of this important point. However, I'd like to take a different tack and point out the simple fact that everybody who sees these ads seems to take one of two options: ignore them patiently or ignore them angrily. This kind of advertising will not sell any more product than banner ads because the internet isn't like tv or radio--it's like a magazine. Ads have to be targeted like a laser to have any effect.
Whether you Junkbust 'em or Konquer 'em or just close the damn things manually, they aren't going to save the business model that's depending on them. Get ready to lose a lot of sites in the relatively near future.
Easy there, Jin. I think most of us are smart enough to understand the difference between art and the programmed output of a machine. Even if by some fluke you and a computer were to produce the exact same image in the exact same medium, only yours would be art--pretty much by definition, I would think.
To make a machine produce art would require the technology for a sentient computer. If the machine is really sentient, then it's probably as entitled to express itself as you or I.
BTW, I like your stuff (sorry, that's the limit of my knowledge of art--I like it or I don't).
I disagree with this post (and completely agree with the responses from nels_tomlinson and nobody.de), but it still shouldn't be modded down as a troll. It's this person's opinion, honestly stated. Somebody mod this back up so it rejoins the conversation.
Totally_Lost,
I find your outlook on this subject (and the lack of name-calling in your posts;) refreshing, but I'm afraid I've gotten a bit too old and cynical to agree with you on several points:
Businesses are collective voices - to claim that businesses are bad is to imply their employees are bad. Not really. It's possible for the collective work of a group of perfectly decent human beings to be useless or even harmful to society at large. I work for an organization where I'm able to observe this phenomenon first-hand.
People generally live up to the expecations placed on them, if it's fundmentally clear the environment is one of mutual respect and trust, then that is likely to be the resulting environment.
I can't say I disagree with this because you've used enough weasel-words to effectively void this sentence of meaning;) However, I would like to emphasize the words 'generally' and 'likely'; assholes DO happen, and just a few can screw things up for the rest of us. This is why ESR champions the right to bear arms, and this is why RMS wrote a license that enforces its expectation that people will share the benefits of what they have borrowed.
But really, it's in your response to my other post in this thread that you gave me a real insight into how you and I can have such similar goals for open source and yet disagree so fundamentally on how to achieve them. It had never occurred to me that anyone might consider ANY corporation to be 'one or us' or 'one of the good guys'; you do. So where I see the GPL protecting free software from corporate ripoff, you see it as undermining support from a bunch of well-heeled allies. I disagree with you on this, because I'm old enough to have seen many times (and read about many more) just how badly perverted the efforts of good employees can be by bad leadership, but at least I now understand a bit of where you Open Source/BSD folks are coming from.
I'm not sure how to reconcile my skepticism about white-hat corporations with your cheerful optimism. Perhaps the best available solution is for the free/open source community to (continue to) provide multiple implementations of the tools we consider important under various licenses. But that means continuing to support software released under the GPL, and you said no to that, so....
Unfortunately, reading this post is like watching those talking-head political shows on CNN: plenty of controversy and naysaying, but not much in the way of hard facts. The poster even sites the FSF's refutation of his arguments within the post, but doesn't present anything but his own opinions to counter their opinions. Personally, I find RMS more credible in this instance.
Obviously, there's a world of disagreement about what constitutes 'making a living'. Unfortunately for well-educated, ambitious young programmers, the real truth about making a living is (no matter what your mom and dad may have led you to believe when they were trying to get you to quit masturbating in your room and apply yourself to something useful) if your job was a lot of fun, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY YOU TO DO IT. So planning to make a killing from doing something plenty of other people will do in their spare time for kicks is not a great idea, unless you happen to be one of the most talented people in the game (pretty much like professional sports). What RMS and the FSF do is legal, and the reason a lot of people get upset when they see Microsoft and other proponents of super-strict IP rights try to put the screws to it is because if you make the FSF illegal or untenable, a lot of our basic civil rights will be trampled in the process.
The poster talks about maintaining a balance in society between these two competing forces, but then prescribes abandoning the FSF and the GPL. Sounds fishy to me.
Over and over and over we get treated to this fucked up line of reasoning. If you don't want to abide by license, then don't use the software. Just pretend it doesn't even exist if that makes you feel better. But don't complain because people won't do your work for you AND let you fold it into a proprietary product.
Imbecile. It's also the Senate and the moon and the Beatles, but nobody ever said "I just watched a debate on the the Senate floor," or "there's a the moon rock on display," or "I just bought the new the Beatles album."
And this is apropos of what? Many treaties require their signatories to submit to the judgment of the World Court in disagreements concerning those treaties, but that's not to say that the World Court would have jurisdiction in the cases this convention governs. This is about enforcing judgments made by LOCAL courts across international borders. If the US signs and ratifies the treaty (assuming it is ever completed), US citizens (and our court system) are bound by it.
Is it about time for somebody to ring up Eric Raymond and see if he's figured out where he miscalculated? As I recall, it was his considered opinion that Microsoft would be starting to fold under its own weight just about now.
And on a related note, those of us (yes, I include myself) who have not always been kind in our thoughts toward Richard Stallman might want take a reality check. Over the years, he has pointed the free software community in the right direction when more personable, more optimistic, more...uh, opportunistic spokesmen have mis-stepped. The longer this whole commercial software thing plays out, the more the GPL and Free Software look like the best hope we all have to retain a lot of freedoms...freedoms that computer geeks like us consider basic.
This is, I'm sorry to say, terribly naive. First of all, Gates and Ballmer own almost a billion (1000000000) shares of MSFT between them. We'd all have to buy several shares, and some for our kids and pets too, to match them. Second, once you've owned stock in a company, you'll find out something unpleasant about yourself: when it's YOUR company that the environmental/diversity/free speech/antitobacco/whatever freaks start targetting for action, it's pretty hard to remember who the good guys are. Which is to say, don't count on the other 4 billion shares jumping on the bandwagon with you when you start explaining what a problem it is that Microsoft is kicking everybody's ass. You'll find yourself with mighty few friends at those stockholders meetings your planning to attend.
I was gonna do the ironic thing and mod you down one for offtopic, but there was no way to include the smiley so you'd see it was a joke. Here it is anyway;)
Actually, I've read that RMS got a degree in physics from Harvard from 1970 to 1974, parallel to his work at MIT AI lab (which he began in 1971. That's pretty amazing.
While we're on the subject of RMS, ain't it strange that he (RMS) considers himself slightly autistic and not good at face-to-face relations with other people, and yet people who know him personally swear that his writings don't do him justice. Apparently he's not quite so uptight all the time when you're in the same room with him.
I find it amusing that everyone cries about how thin or obvious patents are until it's something they like. Then it's 'go Tivo!'. Is the idea of tivo really that novel, or is it just a fiddly refinement/enumeration of something that is painfully obvious?
I agree. I clicked on this story expecting the normal outpouring of outrage at the idiocy of this patent. I was surprised to find that these guys are apparently considered too cool for school, and just this once the government did right. Go figure.
A question for the patent lawyers among us: does this patent, despite specifying recording in MPEG format, render a patent on a similar process using a different compression format "obvious"? It seems to me that tivo might come to regret being so specific about using MPEG when the next, better format comes along, since they might not be able to patent that one.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Reuters story:
Napster would prefer an even stronger proposal to create a compulsory license that would force record labels to let any company sell any song at a price determined by the U.S. Copyright Office.
Anybody still want to argue that Napster is on the side of the angels? Cyberspace rebels, freeing the people from the bonds of Corporate America?
When they think it will benefit them, they're as pro-government as a good socialist.
Not only is this post not "offtopic", it may not even be a troll ;)
With thousands and thousand of miles of unlit fiber in the ground in the U.S. it is far from impossible that a consortium of well-capitalized business could decide to set up a new network with different capabilities. It is pretty apparent by now that a lot of the pie-in-the-sky hopes for this internet are never going to be realized. Who the hell would trust their pacemaker's remote monitor function to this network? While it's not possible to make a network that is totally secure and reliable, that doesn't mean that there isn't room some serious improvement.
This could even be a very good thing. If business got the internet it wants without dicking around with this one so none of us recognize it, we might all be happier.
First, some asshole (that you Kevin?) modifies the old BSD-is-dying troll to cover Linux. Then somebody loses self-control for a second and takes the bait with a one-line 'fuck you'. Now this guy wants to support the troll! He produces a long-winded lecture about trying to squelch people's freedom to post cut-n-paste flamebait AND IT GETS MODDED UP TO 3!
What the hell is Slashdot coming to?
This is exactly what I was going to say. When they're trying that hard to explain what the damn thing is good for, it's usually not good for much.
Did you have to have hyperlinks explained to you with a bunch of acronyms and eight-syllable buzzwords?
Well, I sort of agree with you that Slashdot discussions frequently degenerate into an unsavory mixture of commie/anarchist/technocrat (did I mention logically inconsistent?) ravings, but in this case Michael's comments actually do go to the heart of the situation. One of the primary motivators behind trademark law was to prevent companies from misleading the public. In cases like this, where the connection between products is quite tenuous, it may be that there's no infringement.
Or maybe there is. Good thing we have courts.
I'm the last person to claim any expertise on this, but I think the problems start when you try to save the data in a format other than the CD's original (e.g. MP3). You end up with a faithful reproduction of both music and artificial static, which your MP3 player will faithfully, but annoyingly, reproduce.
If this is true, couldn't the software to play the MP3s be rewritten to interpolate across uncorrectable errors, like the CD players do?
I know it's still in beta, but so far, after a few test searches, I'd have to say it's a far cry from Google. I don't find the results as useful for a couple of reasons:
1. Searches default to allow embedded matches, so that a search for '2gb bios limit' yields a bunch of crap about 3.2gb limits, etc.
2. Results give about a line and a half of text from the site for you to review, but it's not necessarily text that contains your search criteria, so it's hard to judge relevance for yourself.
I judge it not ready for prime time.
`where people think that the moon landings were fake, but that television wrestling is for real'
Funny thing is, here in Georgia, we say this about the people in Alabama. I wonder, who do they tell 'stupid' jokes about in Poland?
Seriously, I've lived here almost 30 years now (childhood in Pennsylvania), and I'm still appalled by the culture of insularity and ignorance that dominates in this part of the U.S.
Not at all. It's called bankruptcy protection because it holds creditors claims in abeyance while new terms can be negotiated. In the best case, it is arranged for all creditors to be repaid on an extended schedule. Worse is for creditors to accept less than they are actually due (but they take this on the theory that a debtor who is still in business may be able to pay back more than one which is liquidated). But even in the worst case, where the bankrupt enterprise is liquidated, its assets still belong to someone--in this case the creditors. But never are their assets just thrown into the 'public domain'.
obvious flip side is that by using such features to "enhance" your visit, you are at the same time working against the site itself. As everyone knows the market is going to fuck, and people using pop-up disabling features/programs are just making the situation worse
I haven't searched hard, but this is the first mention I've seen here of this important point. However, I'd like to take a different tack and point out the simple fact that everybody who sees these ads seems to take one of two options: ignore them patiently or ignore them angrily. This kind of advertising will not sell any more product than banner ads because the internet isn't like tv or radio--it's like a magazine. Ads have to be targeted like a laser to have any effect.
Whether you Junkbust 'em or Konquer 'em or just close the damn things manually, they aren't going to save the business model that's depending on them. Get ready to lose a lot of sites in the relatively near future.
Why is this funny? He's right.
Easy there, Jin. I think most of us are smart enough to understand the difference between art and the programmed output of a machine. Even if by some fluke you and a computer were to produce the exact same image in the exact same medium, only yours would be art--pretty much by definition, I would think.
To make a machine produce art would require the technology for a sentient computer. If the machine is really sentient, then it's probably as entitled to express itself as you or I.
BTW, I like your stuff (sorry, that's the limit of my knowledge of art--I like it or I don't).
I disagree with this post (and completely agree with the responses from nels_tomlinson and nobody.de), but it still shouldn't be modded down as a troll. It's this person's opinion, honestly stated. Somebody mod this back up so it rejoins the conversation.
Totally_Lost, ;) refreshing, but I'm afraid I've gotten a bit too old and cynical to agree with you on several points:
;) However, I would like to emphasize the words 'generally' and 'likely'; assholes DO happen, and just a few can screw things up for the rest of us. This is why ESR champions the right to bear arms, and this is why RMS wrote a license that enforces its expectation that people will share the benefits of what they have borrowed.
I find your outlook on this subject (and the lack of name-calling in your posts
Businesses are collective voices - to claim that businesses are bad is to imply their employees are bad. Not really. It's possible for the collective work of a group of perfectly decent human beings to be useless or even harmful to society at large. I work for an organization where I'm able to observe this phenomenon first-hand.
People generally live up to the expecations placed on them, if it's fundmentally clear the environment is one of mutual respect and trust, then that is likely to be the resulting environment.
I can't say I disagree with this because you've used enough weasel-words to effectively void this sentence of meaning
But really, it's in your response to my other post in this thread that you gave me a real insight into how you and I can have such similar goals for open source and yet disagree so fundamentally on how to achieve them. It had never occurred to me that anyone might consider ANY corporation to be 'one or us' or 'one of the good guys'; you do. So where I see the GPL protecting free software from corporate ripoff, you see it as undermining support from a bunch of well-heeled allies. I disagree with you on this, because I'm old enough to have seen many times (and read about many more) just how badly perverted the efforts of good employees can be by bad leadership, but at least I now understand a bit of where you Open Source/BSD folks are coming from.
I'm not sure how to reconcile my skepticism about white-hat corporations with your cheerful optimism. Perhaps the best available solution is for the free/open source community to (continue to) provide multiple implementations of the tools we consider important under various licenses. But that means continuing to support software released under the GPL, and you said no to that, so....
Unfortunately, reading this post is like watching those talking-head political shows on CNN: plenty of controversy and naysaying, but not much in the way of hard facts. The poster even sites the FSF's refutation of his arguments within the post, but doesn't present anything but his own opinions to counter their opinions. Personally, I find RMS more credible in this instance.
Obviously, there's a world of disagreement about what constitutes 'making a living'. Unfortunately for well-educated, ambitious young programmers, the real truth about making a living is (no matter what your mom and dad may have led you to believe when they were trying to get you to quit masturbating in your room and apply yourself to something useful) if your job was a lot of fun, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY YOU TO DO IT. So planning to make a killing from doing something plenty of other people will do in their spare time for kicks is not a great idea, unless you happen to be one of the most talented people in the game (pretty much like professional sports). What RMS and the FSF do is legal, and the reason a lot of people get upset when they see Microsoft and other proponents of super-strict IP rights try to put the screws to it is because if you make the FSF illegal or untenable, a lot of our basic civil rights will be trampled in the process.
The poster talks about maintaining a balance in society between these two competing forces, but then prescribes abandoning the FSF and the GPL. Sounds fishy to me.
Over and over and over we get treated to this fucked up line of reasoning. If you don't want to abide by license, then don't use the software. Just pretend it doesn't even exist if that makes you feel better. But don't complain because people won't do your work for you AND let you fold it into a proprietary product.
I seriously cannot figure this one out.
Imbecile. It's also the Senate and the moon and the Beatles, but nobody ever said "I just watched a debate on the the Senate floor," or "there's a the moon rock on display," or "I just bought the new the Beatles album."
And this is apropos of what? Many treaties require their signatories to submit to the judgment of the World Court in disagreements concerning those treaties, but that's not to say that the World Court would have jurisdiction in the cases this convention governs. This is about enforcing judgments made by LOCAL courts across international borders. If the US signs and ratifies the treaty (assuming it is ever completed), US citizens (and our court system) are bound by it.
Is it about time for somebody to ring up Eric Raymond and see if he's figured out where he miscalculated? As I recall, it was his considered opinion that Microsoft would be starting to fold under its own weight just about now.
And on a related note, those of us (yes, I include myself) who have not always been kind in our thoughts toward Richard Stallman might want take a reality check. Over the years, he has pointed the free software community in the right direction when more personable, more optimistic, more...uh, opportunistic spokesmen have mis-stepped. The longer this whole commercial software thing plays out, the more the GPL and Free Software look like the best hope we all have to retain a lot of freedoms...freedoms that computer geeks like us consider basic.
This is, I'm sorry to say, terribly naive.
First of all, Gates and Ballmer own almost a billion (1000000000) shares of MSFT between them. We'd all have to buy several shares, and some for our kids and pets too, to match them.
Second, once you've owned stock in a company, you'll find out something unpleasant about yourself: when it's YOUR company that the environmental/diversity/free speech/antitobacco/whatever freaks start targetting for action, it's pretty hard to remember who the good guys are. Which is to say, don't count on the other 4 billion shares jumping on the bandwagon with you when you start explaining what a problem it is that Microsoft is kicking everybody's ass. You'll find yourself with mighty few friends at those stockholders meetings your planning to attend.
after 140 or so comments posted:
It's your money. Do what makes you happy with it.
I was gonna do the ironic thing and mod you down one for offtopic, but there was no way to include the smiley so you'd see it was a joke. Here it is anyway ;)
Actually, I've read that RMS got a degree in physics from Harvard from 1970 to 1974, parallel to his work at MIT AI lab (which he began in 1971. That's pretty amazing.
While we're on the subject of RMS, ain't it strange that he (RMS) considers himself slightly autistic and not good at face-to-face relations with other people, and yet people who know him personally swear that his writings don't do him justice. Apparently he's not quite so uptight all the time when you're in the same room with him.
I find it amusing that everyone cries about how thin or obvious patents are until it's something they like. Then it's 'go Tivo!'. Is the idea of tivo really that novel, or is it just a fiddly refinement/enumeration of something that is painfully obvious?
I agree. I clicked on this story expecting the normal outpouring of outrage at the idiocy of this patent. I was surprised to find that these guys are apparently considered too cool for school, and just this once the government did right. Go figure.
A question for the patent lawyers among us: does this patent, despite specifying recording in MPEG format, render a patent on a similar process using a different compression format "obvious"? It seems to me that tivo might come to regret being so specific about using MPEG when the next, better format comes along, since they might not be able to patent that one.
Just pray he doesn't try to become the number nazi instead.
1.
2.
uh..?
5.
We would be left trying to discern shades of worthlessness.