Again, everything that the religious right is at odds with. You can't say "bullshit" on the air, or display nudity, or even talk about sex, and it's even hard to talk about breast cancer pregnancy, or STD's (ignorance of which leads to serious problems for kids). Many fiction and nonfiction books are banned in schools by so-called "Christian" groups for even alluding to these topics.
Actually, both political parties seem to be more or less against this sort of thing. The only difference is the reason.
Republicans tend to get self-righteous, think they have the right to dictate the nation's morals, and attack the aforementioned topics on those grounds.
Democrats, on the other hand, have a different reason. They tend to get self-righteous, think that no one's smart enough to govern themselves, see things which might possibly influence someone who can't tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and attack the topics on those grounds. Children are a particular favorite target of theirs; "We must protect the children!"
And people wonder why I stay politically neutral...
As far as assembly goes, the Arizona politician in question thought about prohibiting different-sex association. In Tennessee, I know people who are harrassed because they're not Christian, and their children are harrassed at school.
I know people like that from all over the place; New York, Virginia, and Texas, to name a few. That's one of the major problems with the Religious Right; it's not a majority (no matter what it might claim) but it's very powerful and pervasive in this country. And when zealots of any cause (religious, political, or whatever) get too much power, they start abusing it, such as with this bit about banning coed dorms and opposite-sex visits.
I'm still wondering what a "radical homosexual" is. "Radical activist" maybe, but a person has no choice over whether or not they're gay.
I still don't believe those studies, but you do have one point: how exactly dcan one be a "radical homosexual." Last I checked homosexuality wasn't a political platform. It's a lifestyle choice, one that ought to be respected like any other. It's also not one that seems to lend itself particularly well to varying degrees (what separates a radical from a moderate from a reactionary?). But I digress, and I get the feeling that this may well lead to a long offtopic discussion and possibly a flamewar, so I'll just shut up about it now.
Actually, I've seen studies that indicate members of the religious right are something like twice as likely to vote as others. Unfortunately I don't have any links to those studies, but I've seen more than one.
I haven't seen those statistics, but it certainly seems to make sense. Zealots are more likely to do what it takes achieve their goals, and voting is the way that's done in this country (for political matters anyway). In other regions it's done by different means, but here it's all done more or less with votes, so of course the zealots are going to vote.
They don't address the problem. All they do is cover it up, literally.
Reminds me of a quote from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. I can't remember the quote exactly, but here's a rough paraphrase: "The idiot may point out that the Emperor has no clothes. But the idiot remains an idiot, and the Emperor remains an Emperor."
The point: uniforms may cover up a symbol, but they don't solve the problem behind it. It seems that, anymore, kids are being raised with a basic lack of respect for anyone or anything, the most important lack of respect being for each other. No uniforms will cover that problem up; only education will. Uniforms are a mere quick-fix.
Now, you ask why it's acceptable when grownups in various professions wear uniforms? Here are a few examples:
Military uniforms are functional. Take trenchcoats, for example (they were invented in World War 1, as standard issue for armies in the trenches). Every part of those things serves a purpose, even the shoulder loops (to which grenades were attached.
Sports uniforms are there to serve the specific needs of the sport. Football uniforms are heavily padded, to protect the wearer. Most basketball uniforms are loose, light, and flowing, allowing for maximum maneuverability. And so on and so forth. So these, too, serve a purpose.
Emergency personnel uniforms have a variety of uses. Firefighters' uniforms protect their wearers from the searing heat their profession sends them into. Police uniforms vary depending on assignment; the simple blue uniform allows for easy recognition by civilians, riot gear protects the officer from makeshift (and sometimes not-so-makeshift) weapons, bomb squad uniforms protect the wearer from bombs.
Those are just a few examples. And the point is, they all serve some purpose. School uniforms are nothing more than pretentious cover-ups for the real problems facing our schools and children today. I came from a high school with such a dress code, so I know what uniforms do and don't do. I've seen administrators use them as tools to manipulate the students. I saw one director who used them as an excuse to basically ogle and grope students, male and female alike (thankfully he didn't last long).
Never once did I see uniforms stop anyone from ostracizing anyone else. They never stopped any fights, nor did they prevent any other kind of rule infractions. They didn't increase school spirit at all; if anything they lowered it. On the few days when the dress codes were relaxed, no one seemed to extol the "convenience" of uniforms; everyone dressed as themselves, and you know what? There was no evidence of the "fashion-slavery" uniform advocates claim happens when uniforms aren't present (that bit about "the kids all wear uniforms now anyway" is complete and total crap, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise).
All the uniforms did was feed the school's ego. That's all school uniforms ever do. They suppres the individual in the very enviornment that's supposed to teach students to live, do, and think for themselves.
That's got to be among the funniest blunders I've ever heard of. Court records, as far as I know, are public, and have to stay that way. So by including the DeCSS code in their filing, the DVD-CCA managed to destroy its own trade secret! Probably without even realizing just what it had done! And while DVD-CCA may be able to argue that posting DeCSS on the Net didn't destroy the trade secret, certainly publishing it in a court document destroys it.
Ooooooh, I get the feeling there's a lawyer who's going to be looking for a new job after news of this gets out...
Why? Look at all the potential for good it has. Finding traffic jams before anyone even calls in. Locating someone who calls 911. This technology could improve our roads, even perhaps save lives.
But along with that comes the potential for abuse. And that abuse will happen, given enough time. Or at least, someone will certainly try to abuse it.
Right now, though, tracking people via cellphone isn't very practical. Each phone has a fingerprint, but you have to map fingerprints to individuals before you can track specific people, and I don't believe anyone has records of that sort (perhaps the phone company, but I'm not sure if they do). Without those records, you need to find the cellphone itself, which means finding the user, which renders the whole tracking pointless because you've already found the target.
Now, if our pals in the government were to require cellphone registration with the Feds, that's another matter entirely. I wonder when someone's going to try and get that bill passed...
Last I checked, a mathematical equation couldn't be patented under US law. Granted, that didn't stop RSA (I won't even go into what I think that should stand for), but this one's more clearly a mathematical equation than a piece of software. I doubt it'll be granted the patent.
They can easily prove they wrote it, since they claim to have done so.
True, but for this kind of suit that fact is meaningless.
To shut them down all they need to do is prove it is used for piracy as a primary purpose.
Not quite. You cannot hold a manufacturer responsible if someone intentionally misuses its product. RIAA has to prove that Napster wrote it specifically for pirating MP3's. Check Napster's documentation; it's chock-full of warnings that Napster is not meant to promote piracy. There's even a warning or two in the program itself. Simply put, Napster does everything it can reasonably do to prevent its illegal use. That's a big point against RIAA. Frankly, I don't see what RIAA can legally do about it.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has provisions to prevent the possesion, use, creation, etc. of software and tools that have primary usage of copyright violation. So it is legal. And regardless of what the stated intent of Napster Co., an simple observation is enough to indicate that the primary use of the napster software and servers is the illegal distribution of mp3s.
Agreed, on all counts.
Now, prove it in court. Thanks to our lovely "innocent until proven guilty" clause in the Constitution (a Very Good Thing, by the way), you have to prove that when Napster wrote the software, he did it to promote piracy. Proof of intent is a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to do.
If RIAA can't prove this, and I very much doubt that they can, then they have no legal grounds for pressing charges against Napster.
...but the bandwidth concerns are legitimate. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, after all. Of course, colleses should be upgrading to 100BT at least; these networks are meant to be used for research but I've noticed that 10BT networks seem to get clogged very easily at colleges (recently there hasn't been a night where I could do almost anything on the Net because RIT's network, and that of its chosen ISP, were down or choked with who knows what). Research cannot be done with a clogged network.
This is a troubling issue. Censorship shouldn't happen at universities. But this isn't censorship (see below for my explanation oh why it's not). And hogging significant portions of a campus network's bandwidth just so you can get MP3's is very inconsiderate, if not outright rude.
I remember the old days, when people didn't rely on Napster to get their MP3's; those methods work just as well today as they ever did before. Even if Napster is banned, that doesn't mean you'll be unable to get your music fix. Banning Napster is certainly a Bad Thing. But you can't deny that Napster is a bandwidth-hog by its nature, and it's clogging up very expensive networks that were never meant for this purpose.
Now, the RIAA lawsuits are another matter entirely. I hold that the RIAA has no legal grounds for suing Napster, since the software does not itself infringe on any copyrights, and even states that it's not meant to be used to infringe on them (OK, so everyone knows that it is meant precisely to infringe on copyrights, but thanks to our wonderful legal system only that which is written down has any legal bearing at all). Frankly, I think the RIAA's going to spend millions of dollars on a suit which they'll lose out of technicalities.
True, I don't (I'm a college student). But even if I did, consider the cost of theater tickets for oneself, one's spouse, two kids, and don't forget the refreshments. For that price I can just get a DVD I can watch again and again; after several viewings it ends up costing less than it would have with the disposables. And if you have kids, you know they're going to want to see the same movies many times.
Now, as for the cutting down on the violence. I do object to their reason: pandering to the ratings board. However, none of the D&D games are about violence. Only bad DM's ever have to resort to a real hack-and-slash campaign to keep the players entertained, and such campaigns miss the point entirely.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing how this one turns out. It's been a very long time indeed since I played any of the D&D games, and I can feel the nostalgia already.
You have to start somewhere. This guy probably didn't pay for the implants at all, seeing as he was a volunteer.
And hey, remember, this implant is from 1978. That means the hardware is, for the most part, ancient in our current technological terms. If he were to get another implant using something more modern, it's quite possible he'd be able to see significantly more.
But, this is a start. There's a saying out there, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Well, consider this to be that single step.
I just hope this one is used responsibly, unlike the antibacterial things we now use.
Note that by responsible use I mean that it's not overused. That was the problem with antibacterial stuff. It was used so much that natural selection kicked in, and now we're stuck with drug-resistant versions of many of the old diseases we thought we had conquered.
If this is used as a treatment for the common cold, I'm all for it. I just hope they don't try and market this thing as a way to prevent the common cold. Otherwise, we'll be able to hear our old buddy Darwin laughing at us as this stops working in a few decades.
I'm a fan of the Scrollites themes myself. I have them all; even the "classic" three that were never released in 1.5 versions (and so cannot be used with the current version).
And none of them looked anything like Aqua. I suppose you could make a very big stretch and show a small bit of similarity in the scroll bars. The two both use "glassies" but that's not what's being talked about here. The themes in question are pixel-for-pixel copies of Aqua. I don't know if that's "right" or "wrong" but it is in poor taste.
1) I may be a vicious Mac defender, but I'm not an Apple apologist. When Apple does something dumb, I'm right there in line to smack them along with everyone else.
2) Frankly, I'm torn. I do think that it's in extremely poor taste to copy a GUI on a system that hasn't even been released yet, even more so than copying one that's already been released. This said, however, Apple shouldn't be threatening legal action. One, they have no legal grounds for it. Perhaps they could try and nail you on copyright violations (since, at least for now, the only way to get the images used in these themes is to swipe them from Apple's own screenshots). But that's taking things just a bit too far.
3) I don't think OS-based themes should be on the public sites anyway. The major sites like Themes.org are supposed to be for original works. At least, that was my undrstanding. The Aqua-based themes (and the Win9X-based things, and the Amiga-based themes, and the NeXT-based themes, and so on) are not original work by a long shot. Even the AquaOS line for Sawmill (which makes a few trivial changes to the button layout) couldn't be considered truly original. I suppose the Win9X GUI can't either (perhaps it's not really a MacOS ripoff, but the buttons are copied pixel-for-pixel from NeXTStep, not to mention most of the test of the GUI).
4) The Linux community doesn't need an Aqua theme. We've always striven to be original, and succeeded. Witness the BlueSteel theme for E; there's proof right there that the Linux community can turn out a GUI that's even cooler than Aqua. Even those of you who don't like BlueSteel probably have your own favorites, and in most cases I'll bet it bears little resemblance to any existing GUI. Aqua's original. So were NeXTStep and BeOS. The Linux community can make and has made original GUI's in the past. Part of the appeal of Linux is that it isn't Windows or MacOS or BeOS or anything else. Why make it something it's not?
This isn't an attempt by the FCC to block the advancement of technology.
It's an attempt by the media to kill the concept of fair use. Their goal isn't malicious; frankly I'd be less disgusted with them if it were. No, the motive is plain and simple: pure, unadulterated greed. And not even by the artists, mind you (the artists only ever see a comparatively tiny fraction of the mopney their work makes). It's by the execs.
The media, particularly the recording industry, would love nothing more than to make all media pay-per-view (or per-hear, or per-read, or whatever is appropriate to the given medium). It's far more lucrative than being sponsor-based. HBO can tell you that one; I've never seen any commercials on their various channels, except for things on other HBO-affiliated channels, and yet they make huge amounts of money. They're not strictly pay-per-view, I know, but the concept is similar.
Now, if this money went to the people who actually made the works, I wouldn't mind so much. Artists should be paid for their creations; they work hard to bring them to life. But very little of the money goes to the artists, actually. Or to the people who do the work to make the media on which the works are distributed. An artist may make a million dollars, but untold millions more go to execs who haven't done anything but give contractual deals which no one in their right mind in any other industry would ever take.
Nope; the media wants to kill fair use because it's not lucrative for them. This was never much of an issue before, because it was impossible to realize; how does one make a local file on a hard disk pay-per-view without the Net to connect to a server? But now, with today's advances, it is possible for them to do this. Witness DIVX as a proof-of-concept. Yeah, DIVX died, but that was only because no one supported it; if everyone had gone to DIVX rather than DVD, there would have been no choice. And the only reason no one went for DIVX was because unless everyone had gone for it, the public wouldn't have stood for it, and you can't count on everyone doing anything.
Frankly, this is a scary time as far as the media is concerned. As long as the people make it out with their rights intact, I'm OK with whatever happens. But the media industries don't want that, not necessarily out of any wish to destroy people's rights, but simply out of a lust for The Almighty Dollar.
This is what *should* happen ro rogue ISP's. If they allow spam, make sure they can't spread it. This company has done a lot of things for the Net business, most of them wrong.
A former employee posted earlier, talking about how @Hone's employees were spread too thin to handle the abuse. The way I read that, it sounds more like the execs got greedy. They expanded the company more quickly than it could realistically handle, which is why the employees were so overloaded. The bosses called a bad tune, now it's time to pay the piper. I have no sympathy for a business that gambles like that and gets burned. I do feel sorry for the employees, but that's another matter entirely.
Besides which, I don't expect this UDP to last very long. Either @Home will clean up its act, or it'll wither under the stigma of being UDP'd. Either way, their fate is in their own hands. They can bouce back, or they can screw themselves royally, but either way they will do it. No one else. I have a lot of trouble with people who are told again and again that there will be consequences for doing bad stuff, but then when those consequences finally do come about people say it's unfair. It is unfair for the legitimate @Home customers, who are going to get screwed. @Home should have realized that sooner, because they face the possibility of a class-action suit if the UDP goes into effect. Even if there's no suit, people will simply leave (and thus not be hurt by the UDP anymore, which is why I'm still supporting it; the ligitimate customers can get away from the UDP's adverse effects).
First, it's incoherent: how can "physical or mental prowess" not be an example of "objective, individual merit"?
Apply it to any one of numerous physical or mental handicaps, and there you go.
Second, it relies upon undefined terms: if you think "harassment" is a well-defined concept then you haven't been paying attention to the state of sexual harassment law.
I appear to have made a poor word choice. "Intimidation" might be a better term to use, however it has its own problems, which I'll adress later.
Third, it is an affront to freedom of association: by your definition, a desire to separate oneself from bores and louts (which I certainly regard as inferior, but which cannot be defined in objective terms) is "hate speech".
Not quite. I say nothing about your desire to separate yourself from bores and louts. Now, if you go out and say that bores and louts should be thrown out of society, that's another matter entirely.
Fourth, exactly how does one engage in "harassment" against "places", "things", or "concepts"?
Point taken, although vandalism and slander could fall under this category. However, I'm not so sure there's a word in this language which accurately desctibes the point I'm trying to get across, and at the same time can apply to all those things and people equally well. Perhaps "thing" should be replaced by "object" also; "thing" isn't very well-defined.
Sorry, but you'll have to show your work, with proof that the definition is immune to politically based targeting by government.
I can't do that. No one can. If it were possible, things would be so much simpler. No single person, group, or entity has the right to create a truly universal definition of pornography. The reason: it deals with sexuality, a very personal subject which is somewhat different for everybody.
Hate speech is more easily defined. How does the following definition sound to you...
Hate speech - n. speech promoting the annhilation, harassment, or separation of any group of people, places, things, or concepts, on the grounds that said group is inferior to another group, with that inferiority being based on anything other than objective, individual merit, e.g. race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical or mental prowess, etc.
Honest question: how does that definition sound?
Why is it possible to define hate speech and not pornography? Like I said, pornography deals with sexuality, which is not a constant. Hate speech by its nature deals with violence, which is constant; when a person is killed, it's rather difficult to argue that he's not dead.
Honestly. Xerox does deserve credit for a lot of things. Certainly more than it gets. But Xerox of all companies should know just how wrong software patents are, how they hold back the whole industry. The fact is, were it not for Xerox it's quite likely we'd all be sitting at our commandlines, typing away on Lynx (assuming the Web had ever been invented in the first place; Slashdot could well have become just a newsgroup), printing to our dot-matrix printers, and running on machines which are outright pathetic by today's standards (I very much doubt PC technology would have ever gone past the 386, for example; without the extra power that a lot of Xerox's inventions needed, there would be no incentive to advance the technology).
Frankly, I feel betrayed by this one. I hope this case gets shot down in higher courts.
There is no ethical use for this sort of thing. It's tantamount to altering the viewers' reality. As someone who believes that free will is one of the two things that define humanity (the other being the ability to exchange complex information) I find the very idea of altering a broadcast in this manner to be outright immoral (certainly more so than anything they could possibly block out could ever be).
I suppose inserting ads is borderline, since at least the alteration is obvious. Same for sticking the score in the corner of the screen. But other than that, I see no potentially ethical use for this sort of thing.
Worse, it seems that both sides operate off of a logical fallacy. The pro-censorship peole believe that an adult can only handle seeing that which is fit for a child. The anti-censorship people seem to believe that everything is fit for a child.
I propose a compromise. Government-mandated censorship is simply wrong (in fact, it's more immoral than any amount of pornography could ever be). Parental censorship (and self-censorship) is another matter entirely. Therefore, enact laws which make it easier for parents to block out material, while never mandating such blocking by anybody.
I've always been intrigued by the ".xxx TLD plan" Under that rule, all porn sites (the definition would have to be decided upon, of course) must go into this TLD. This makes content-filtering absurdly simply for parents; simply disallow connnections to or from those domains. I would add a clause which allows a site to petition to be allowed to "escape" that domain, since invariably some non-pornographic sites will fall under any definition of pornography that the lawmakers care to make.
Of course, this does nothing for the other big problem in the Net (hate speech) but a similar plan could be used.
I agree that free speech is important. I agree that the only truly effective methods of keeping a child away from sotes parents don't want them to see is for the parents to do their damn job and spend time with their children on the Net. But let's face it; many parents will pick the easy way out and use filtering software (and then of course there's the issue of schools and libraries, whose computers are meant for research and really shouldn't be used for picking up pr0n anyway). So you might as well make the filtering easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, everything that the religious right is at odds with. You can't say "bullshit" on the air, or display nudity, or even talk about sex, and it's even hard to talk about breast cancer pregnancy, or STD's (ignorance of which leads to serious problems for kids). Many fiction and nonfiction books are banned in schools by so-called "Christian" groups for even alluding to these topics.
Actually, both political parties seem to be more or less against this sort of thing. The only difference is the reason.
Republicans tend to get self-righteous, think they have the right to dictate the nation's morals, and attack the aforementioned topics on those grounds.
Democrats, on the other hand, have a different reason. They tend to get self-righteous, think that no one's smart enough to govern themselves, see things which might possibly influence someone who can't tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and attack the topics on those grounds. Children are a particular favorite target of theirs; "We must protect the children!"
And people wonder why I stay politically neutral...
As far as assembly goes, the Arizona politician in question thought about prohibiting different-sex association. In Tennessee, I know people who are harrassed because they're not Christian, and their children are harrassed at school.
I know people like that from all over the place; New York, Virginia, and Texas, to name a few. That's one of the major problems with the Religious Right; it's not a majority (no matter what it might claim) but it's very powerful and pervasive in this country. And when zealots of any cause (religious, political, or whatever) get too much power, they start abusing it, such as with this bit about banning coed dorms and opposite-sex visits.
I'm still wondering what a "radical homosexual" is. "Radical activist" maybe, but a person has no choice over whether or not they're gay.
I still don't believe those studies, but you do have one point: how exactly dcan one be a "radical homosexual." Last I checked homosexuality wasn't a political platform. It's a lifestyle choice, one that ought to be respected like any other. It's also not one that seems to lend itself particularly well to varying degrees (what separates a radical from a moderate from a reactionary?). But I digress, and I get the feeling that this may well lead to a long offtopic discussion and possibly a flamewar, so I'll just shut up about it now.
Actually, I've seen studies that indicate members of the religious right are something like twice as likely to vote as others. Unfortunately I don't have any links to those studies, but I've seen more than one.
I haven't seen those statistics, but it certainly seems to make sense. Zealots are more likely to do what it takes achieve their goals, and voting is the way that's done in this country (for political matters anyway). In other regions it's done by different means, but here it's all done more or less with votes, so of course the zealots are going to vote.
Reminds me of a quote from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. I can't remember the quote exactly, but here's a rough paraphrase: "The idiot may point out that the Emperor has no clothes. But the idiot remains an idiot, and the Emperor remains an Emperor."
The point: uniforms may cover up a symbol, but they don't solve the problem behind it. It seems that, anymore, kids are being raised with a basic lack of respect for anyone or anything, the most important lack of respect being for each other. No uniforms will cover that problem up; only education will. Uniforms are a mere quick-fix.
Now, you ask why it's acceptable when grownups in various professions wear uniforms? Here are a few examples:
Those are just a few examples. And the point is, they all serve some purpose. School uniforms are nothing more than pretentious cover-ups for the real problems facing our schools and children today. I came from a high school with such a dress code, so I know what uniforms do and don't do. I've seen administrators use them as tools to manipulate the students. I saw one director who used them as an excuse to basically ogle and grope students, male and female alike (thankfully he didn't last long).
Never once did I see uniforms stop anyone from ostracizing anyone else. They never stopped any fights, nor did they prevent any other kind of rule infractions. They didn't increase school spirit at all; if anything they lowered it. On the few days when the dress codes were relaxed, no one seemed to extol the "convenience" of uniforms; everyone dressed as themselves, and you know what? There was no evidence of the "fashion-slavery" uniform advocates claim happens when uniforms aren't present (that bit about "the kids all wear uniforms now anyway" is complete and total crap, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise).
All the uniforms did was feed the school's ego. That's all school uniforms ever do. They suppres the individual in the very enviornment that's supposed to teach students to live, do, and think for themselves.
That's got to be among the funniest blunders I've ever heard of. Court records, as far as I know, are public, and have to stay that way. So by including the DeCSS code in their filing, the DVD-CCA managed to destroy its own trade secret! Probably without even realizing just what it had done! And while DVD-CCA may be able to argue that posting DeCSS on the Net didn't destroy the trade secret, certainly publishing it in a court document destroys it.
Ooooooh, I get the feeling there's a lawyer who's going to be looking for a new job after news of this gets out...
Why? Look at all the potential for good it has. Finding traffic jams before anyone even calls in. Locating someone who calls 911. This technology could improve our roads, even perhaps save lives.
But along with that comes the potential for abuse. And that abuse will happen, given enough time. Or at least, someone will certainly try to abuse it.
Right now, though, tracking people via cellphone isn't very practical. Each phone has a fingerprint, but you have to map fingerprints to individuals before you can track specific people, and I don't believe anyone has records of that sort (perhaps the phone company, but I'm not sure if they do). Without those records, you need to find the cellphone itself, which means finding the user, which renders the whole tracking pointless because you've already found the target.
Now, if our pals in the government were to require cellphone registration with the Feds, that's another matter entirely. I wonder when someone's going to try and get that bill passed...
Last I checked, a mathematical equation couldn't be patented under US law. Granted, that didn't stop RSA (I won't even go into what I think that should stand for), but this one's more clearly a mathematical equation than a piece of software. I doubt it'll be granted the patent.
They can easily prove they wrote it, since they claim to have done so.
True, but for this kind of suit that fact is meaningless.
To shut them down all they need to do is prove it is used for piracy as a primary purpose.
Not quite. You cannot hold a manufacturer responsible if someone intentionally misuses its product. RIAA has to prove that Napster wrote it specifically for pirating MP3's. Check Napster's documentation; it's chock-full of warnings that Napster is not meant to promote piracy. There's even a warning or two in the program itself. Simply put, Napster does everything it can reasonably do to prevent its illegal use. That's a big point against RIAA. Frankly, I don't see what RIAA can legally do about it.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has provisions to prevent the possesion, use, creation, etc. of software and tools that have primary usage of copyright violation. So it is legal. And regardless of what the stated intent of Napster Co., an simple observation is enough to indicate that the primary use of the napster software and servers is the illegal distribution of mp3s.
Agreed, on all counts.
Now, prove it in court. Thanks to our lovely "innocent until proven guilty" clause in the Constitution (a Very Good Thing, by the way), you have to prove that when Napster wrote the software, he did it to promote piracy. Proof of intent is a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to do.
If RIAA can't prove this, and I very much doubt that they can, then they have no legal grounds for pressing charges against Napster.
...but the bandwidth concerns are legitimate. Bandwidth is an expensive thing, after all. Of course, colleses should be upgrading to 100BT at least; these networks are meant to be used for research but I've noticed that 10BT networks seem to get clogged very easily at colleges (recently there hasn't been a night where I could do almost anything on the Net because RIT's network, and that of its chosen ISP, were down or choked with who knows what). Research cannot be done with a clogged network.
This is a troubling issue. Censorship shouldn't happen at universities. But this isn't censorship (see below for my explanation oh why it's not). And hogging significant portions of a campus network's bandwidth just so you can get MP3's is very inconsiderate, if not outright rude.
I remember the old days, when people didn't rely on Napster to get their MP3's; those methods work just as well today as they ever did before. Even if Napster is banned, that doesn't mean you'll be unable to get your music fix. Banning Napster is certainly a Bad Thing. But you can't deny that Napster is a bandwidth-hog by its nature, and it's clogging up very expensive networks that were never meant for this purpose.
Now, the RIAA lawsuits are another matter entirely. I hold that the RIAA has no legal grounds for suing Napster, since the software does not itself infringe on any copyrights, and even states that it's not meant to be used to infringe on them (OK, so everyone knows that it is meant precisely to infringe on copyrights, but thanks to our wonderful legal system only that which is written down has any legal bearing at all). Frankly, I think the RIAA's going to spend millions of dollars on a suit which they'll lose out of technicalities.
True, I don't (I'm a college student). But even if I did, consider the cost of theater tickets for oneself, one's spouse, two kids, and don't forget the refreshments. For that price I can just get a DVD I can watch again and again; after several viewings it ends up costing less than it would have with the disposables. And if you have kids, you know they're going to want to see the same movies many times.
But, in the end, useless. Who's going to buy a DVD that you can only watch once? For that price, I might as well see it when it's in the theaters.
The media will love this thing (finally, a take-home movie that's pay-per-view) but they won't dare adopt it; the public won't stand for it.
And as much as I hate to use FUD, this one's just begging for it. Would you buy a disk that destroyed itself while it was still in your DVD player?
First, it's PG-13, not PG.
Now, as for the cutting down on the violence. I do object to their reason: pandering to the ratings board. However, none of the D&D games are about violence. Only bad DM's ever have to resort to a real hack-and-slash campaign to keep the players entertained, and such campaigns miss the point entirely.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing how this one turns out. It's been a very long time indeed since I played any of the D&D games, and I can feel the nostalgia already.
You have to start somewhere. This guy probably didn't pay for the implants at all, seeing as he was a volunteer.
And hey, remember, this implant is from 1978. That means the hardware is, for the most part, ancient in our current technological terms. If he were to get another implant using something more modern, it's quite possible he'd be able to see significantly more.
But, this is a start. There's a saying out there, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Well, consider this to be that single step.
I just hope this one is used responsibly, unlike the antibacterial things we now use.
Note that by responsible use I mean that it's not overused. That was the problem with antibacterial stuff. It was used so much that natural selection kicked in, and now we're stuck with drug-resistant versions of many of the old diseases we thought we had conquered.
If this is used as a treatment for the common cold, I'm all for it. I just hope they don't try and market this thing as a way to prevent the common cold. Otherwise, we'll be able to hear our old buddy Darwin laughing at us as this stops working in a few decades.
I'm a fan of the Scrollites themes myself. I have them all; even the "classic" three that were never released in 1.5 versions (and so cannot be used with the current version).
And none of them looked anything like Aqua. I suppose you could make a very big stretch and show a small bit of similarity in the scroll bars. The two both use "glassies" but that's not what's being talked about here. The themes in question are pixel-for-pixel copies of Aqua. I don't know if that's "right" or "wrong" but it is in poor taste.
1) I may be a vicious Mac defender, but I'm not an Apple apologist. When Apple does something dumb, I'm right there in line to smack them along with everyone else.
2) Frankly, I'm torn. I do think that it's in extremely poor taste to copy a GUI on a system that hasn't even been released yet, even more so than copying one that's already been released. This said, however, Apple shouldn't be threatening legal action. One, they have no legal grounds for it. Perhaps they could try and nail you on copyright violations (since, at least for now, the only way to get the images used in these themes is to swipe them from Apple's own screenshots). But that's taking things just a bit too far.
3) I don't think OS-based themes should be on the public sites anyway. The major sites like Themes.org are supposed to be for original works. At least, that was my undrstanding. The Aqua-based themes (and the Win9X-based things, and the Amiga-based themes, and the NeXT-based themes, and so on) are not original work by a long shot. Even the AquaOS line for Sawmill (which makes a few trivial changes to the button layout) couldn't be considered truly original. I suppose the Win9X GUI can't either (perhaps it's not really a MacOS ripoff, but the buttons are copied pixel-for-pixel from NeXTStep, not to mention most of the test of the GUI).
4) The Linux community doesn't need an Aqua theme. We've always striven to be original, and succeeded. Witness the BlueSteel theme for E; there's proof right there that the Linux community can turn out a GUI that's even cooler than Aqua. Even those of you who don't like BlueSteel probably have your own favorites, and in most cases I'll bet it bears little resemblance to any existing GUI. Aqua's original. So were NeXTStep and BeOS. The Linux community can make and has made original GUI's in the past. Part of the appeal of Linux is that it isn't Windows or MacOS or BeOS or anything else. Why make it something it's not?
This isn't an attempt by the FCC to block the advancement of technology.
It's an attempt by the media to kill the concept of fair use. Their goal isn't malicious; frankly I'd be less disgusted with them if it were. No, the motive is plain and simple: pure, unadulterated greed. And not even by the artists, mind you (the artists only ever see a comparatively tiny fraction of the mopney their work makes). It's by the execs.
The media, particularly the recording industry, would love nothing more than to make all media pay-per-view (or per-hear, or per-read, or whatever is appropriate to the given medium). It's far more lucrative than being sponsor-based. HBO can tell you that one; I've never seen any commercials on their various channels, except for things on other HBO-affiliated channels, and yet they make huge amounts of money. They're not strictly pay-per-view, I know, but the concept is similar.
Now, if this money went to the people who actually made the works, I wouldn't mind so much. Artists should be paid for their creations; they work hard to bring them to life. But very little of the money goes to the artists, actually. Or to the people who do the work to make the media on which the works are distributed. An artist may make a million dollars, but untold millions more go to execs who haven't done anything but give contractual deals which no one in their right mind in any other industry would ever take.
Nope; the media wants to kill fair use because it's not lucrative for them. This was never much of an issue before, because it was impossible to realize; how does one make a local file on a hard disk pay-per-view without the Net to connect to a server? But now, with today's advances, it is possible for them to do this. Witness DIVX as a proof-of-concept. Yeah, DIVX died, but that was only because no one supported it; if everyone had gone to DIVX rather than DVD, there would have been no choice. And the only reason no one went for DIVX was because unless everyone had gone for it, the public wouldn't have stood for it, and you can't count on everyone doing anything.
Frankly, this is a scary time as far as the media is concerned. As long as the people make it out with their rights intact, I'm OK with whatever happens. But the media industries don't want that, not necessarily out of any wish to destroy people's rights, but simply out of a lust for The Almighty Dollar.
Sick, isn't it?
NSA Public License (NSAPL) v1.0... We could give you the source, but then we'd have to kill you.
As I see it, either one of two things has happened.:
Either way, doesn't look like we have a choice. Might as well keep using it...
This is what *should* happen ro rogue ISP's. If they allow spam, make sure they can't spread it. This company has done a lot of things for the Net business, most of them wrong.
A former employee posted earlier, talking about how @Hone's employees were spread too thin to handle the abuse. The way I read that, it sounds more like the execs got greedy. They expanded the company more quickly than it could realistically handle, which is why the employees were so overloaded. The bosses called a bad tune, now it's time to pay the piper. I have no sympathy for a business that gambles like that and gets burned. I do feel sorry for the employees, but that's another matter entirely.
Besides which, I don't expect this UDP to last very long. Either @Home will clean up its act, or it'll wither under the stigma of being UDP'd. Either way, their fate is in their own hands. They can bouce back, or they can screw themselves royally, but either way they will do it. No one else. I have a lot of trouble with people who are told again and again that there will be consequences for doing bad stuff, but then when those consequences finally do come about people say it's unfair. It is unfair for the legitimate @Home customers, who are going to get screwed. @Home should have realized that sooner, because they face the possibility of a class-action suit if the UDP goes into effect. Even if there's no suit, people will simply leave (and thus not be hurt by the UDP anymore, which is why I'm still supporting it; the ligitimate customers can get away from the UDP's adverse effects).
First, it's incoherent: how can "physical or mental prowess" not be an example of "objective, individual merit"?
Apply it to any one of numerous physical or mental handicaps, and there you go.
Second, it relies upon undefined terms: if you think "harassment" is a well-defined concept then you haven't been paying attention to the state of sexual harassment law.
I appear to have made a poor word choice. "Intimidation" might be a better term to use, however it has its own problems, which I'll adress later.
Third, it is an affront to freedom of association: by your definition, a desire to separate oneself from bores and louts (which I certainly regard as inferior, but which cannot be defined in objective terms) is "hate speech".
Not quite. I say nothing about your desire to separate yourself from bores and louts. Now, if you go out and say that bores and louts should be thrown out of society, that's another matter entirely.
Fourth, exactly how does one engage in "harassment" against "places", "things", or "concepts"?
Point taken, although vandalism and slander could fall under this category. However, I'm not so sure there's a word in this language which accurately desctibes the point I'm trying to get across, and at the same time can apply to all those things and people equally well. Perhaps "thing" should be replaced by "object" also; "thing" isn't very well-defined.
I can't do that. No one can. If it were possible, things would be so much simpler. No single person, group, or entity has the right to create a truly universal definition of pornography. The reason: it deals with sexuality, a very personal subject which is somewhat different for everybody.
Hate speech is more easily defined. How does the following definition sound to you...
Honest question: how does that definition sound?
Why is it possible to define hate speech and not pornography? Like I said, pornography deals with sexuality, which is not a constant. Hate speech by its nature deals with violence, which is constant; when a person is killed, it's rather difficult to argue that he's not dead.
Et tu, Xerox?
Honestly. Xerox does deserve credit for a lot of things. Certainly more than it gets. But Xerox of all companies should know just how wrong software patents are, how they hold back the whole industry. The fact is, were it not for Xerox it's quite likely we'd all be sitting at our commandlines, typing away on Lynx (assuming the Web had ever been invented in the first place; Slashdot could well have become just a newsgroup), printing to our dot-matrix printers, and running on machines which are outright pathetic by today's standards (I very much doubt PC technology would have ever gone past the 386, for example; without the extra power that a lot of Xerox's inventions needed, there would be no incentive to advance the technology).
Frankly, I feel betrayed by this one. I hope this case gets shot down in higher courts.
There is no ethical use for this sort of thing. It's tantamount to altering the viewers' reality. As someone who believes that free will is one of the two things that define humanity (the other being the ability to exchange complex information) I find the very idea of altering a broadcast in this manner to be outright immoral (certainly more so than anything they could possibly block out could ever be).
I suppose inserting ads is borderline, since at least the alteration is obvious. Same for sticking the score in the corner of the screen. But other than that, I see no potentially ethical use for this sort of thing.
Worse, it seems that both sides operate off of a logical fallacy. The pro-censorship peole believe that an adult can only handle seeing that which is fit for a child. The anti-censorship people seem to believe that everything is fit for a child.
I propose a compromise. Government-mandated censorship is simply wrong (in fact, it's more immoral than any amount of pornography could ever be). Parental censorship (and self-censorship) is another matter entirely. Therefore, enact laws which make it easier for parents to block out material, while never mandating such blocking by anybody.
I've always been intrigued by the ".xxx TLD plan" Under that rule, all porn sites (the definition would have to be decided upon, of course) must go into this TLD. This makes content-filtering absurdly simply for parents; simply disallow connnections to or from those domains. I would add a clause which allows a site to petition to be allowed to "escape" that domain, since invariably some non-pornographic sites will fall under any definition of pornography that the lawmakers care to make.
Of course, this does nothing for the other big problem in the Net (hate speech) but a similar plan could be used.
I agree that free speech is important. I agree that the only truly effective methods of keeping a child away from sotes parents don't want them to see is for the parents to do their damn job and spend time with their children on the Net. But let's face it; many parents will pick the easy way out and use filtering software (and then of course there's the issue of schools and libraries, whose computers are meant for research and really shouldn't be used for picking up pr0n anyway). So you might as well make the filtering easier.
It's certainly a nice curiosity. I can't imagine any practical use for the things. Then again, that fact alone makes them the perfect geek gag gift :)