No, but using the Case Logic sleeves (jewel cases are for losers), I can carry about 50 CD's of MP3's in a small bag. That's about 30GB of data for about $25. Try that with a hard-disk (at the same price...). Yes, there is some inconvenience when you have to change CD's, but ultimately, you get more flexibility with a CD device at less cost and only sacrifice a little convenience.
Again, it's only a matter of preference, but I'll go with flexibility any day of the week.
It might hold _your_ entire music collection, but 6GB comes out to roughly 100 CD's, which is about 1/8th of my collection. I could carry 5 times that in my CD bag.
From my point of view, the CD players are the way to go. I just don't want to be saddled with some crappy transfer utility and I've already got many of my CD's ripped to CD-R's already.
Of course, different products for different customers. It depends on what you want or need.
Actually what I was saying was they're not all bad despite them being big in part because of unfair business practices. I rail against Microsoft's products and practices as much as the next guy, but I am also willing to give them credit for some things that they do well (or at least better than anyone else).
Thanks for the correction. Apparently their worth have gone down significantly in the last several months. However, any company that can measure it's value as a sizeable fraction of a trillion dollars is already bigger and more powerful than a lot of entire countries.
As far as "delusional" goes. Gates' "delusion" of his pre-eminence as a technological messiah looks to the majority of the world to be a fact.
I think the article, and presumably the book, has a level of arrogance that assumes some kind of failure of Microsoft that has not and may never happen. As much as some of us would like to think otherwise, Microsoft, a half _trillion_ dollar company is not going away any time soon. I personally don't think that's a bad thing even if they are in dire need of a good spanking, but as my bio says, I'm a "shameless Microsoft user".
Different genre: Bill & Ted was funny and witty, and deceptively stupid, i.e., at second look it wasn't as stupid as you would expect. While I am far from the targeted demographic, probably more likely to be a target of such movies, I really enjoyed Bill and Ted, but found anything Mike Myers was ever associated with the be tediously unfunny. Needless to say, I haven't seen another teenage gross out movie since "Fast Times", which was good when trying to be funny but truly and deeply offensive when it tried to be a serious movie. Another difference, I would let my kids see Bill & Ted (though not the sequel... it's a little too mean in places), I wouldn't even watch most of these more recent films myself, even if I was interested.
If I recall correctly from my college days (in the early-mid 80's), basically no. My understanding was that you pretty much gave up all your Constitutional rights in order to live in the dorms at a Virginia Tech in the U.S.
The ironic thing about constitutional rights... they generally don't apply to non-governmental organizations.
The situation is not exactly analogous because there are not (yet) companies putting them out of business by exploiting the new technology. Customers themselves are going to put them out of business by exploiting the information infrastructure that is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. I don't think most people want to deliberately rip off the people who create the media, but on the other hand, they have no compunctions against ripping off people. What goes around comes around.
Furthermore, people like Napster, MP3, and who knows who else are trying to find a chink in the corporate-driven intellectual property armor to provide the services that the media companies refuse to provide and eventually they will succeed. The AOL/Time-Warner/Netscape/Yahoo!/Microsoft/Sony/Nin tendo/Sacco/Vanzetti's of the world will have to evolve or face the consequences. Whether they can do this entirely on their own terms remains to be seen. I don't think so and certainly hope not.
...and a hundred years ago the automobile put the horse-and-buggy manufacturers in a bad situation. No one suggested they had any rights to continue being profitable.
The media companies are refusing to evolve to reflect the new technology that almost everyone has access to. They are forcing an outmoded form of distribution on us, because the newer technology gives them less control and less chance to gouge people. Customers aren't going to stand around and take it from an industry that flagrantly fixes prices in our faces and pitches a tantrum when people won't stand for it (even if they are breaking the law by violating copyrights). What do you expect? Screw with people and they'll screw with you.
Right now, we pay and exorbitant price for a music distribution system that is technologically obsolete. Until and unless the media companies offer something more reasonable, people are going to continue to flout the law more and more brazenly. Right now it seems that the consumers and the media companies are in a pissing match with each other. The media companies started it, and until they back down in some way, the consumers won't stop trying to circumvent their "protections".
This goes back to an idea that will gain momentum in this country (Don't blame it on France):
The media giants want to force everything to a per-use charge based system. Look at DIVX. This was the media companies' dream: every time you want to watch your copy of "Broken Arrow", your DIVX machine dials up the Central Server and you account gets charged and a record is made that you watched "Broken Arrow" for the 144th time a 3:56 A.M. on 1 February 2001. Not only do they eliminate those pesky consumers cheating them out of good revenue by viewing something over and over again (like with VHS tapes... that's tantamount to piracy!), but they also get excruciatingly granular usage info, which the marketing folks will snap up with great glee.
DIVX failed because no one considered that the customer wouldn't want a product that screws him over without providing any real new benefits, but the idea is just in its infancy. Just look at all the copy-protection schemes being bandied about for hard-drives, digital TV's, new generations of CD players, and you can see that the might of billions of dollars is being plied against the concept of fair use.
The French folks are just a little ahead of the curve by applying the same logic to books. If you have to pay everytime you watch a movie, someone should have to pay every time he reads a book. Lending a book (or DVD, or CD) to a friend is stealing, by this (ludicrous) reasoning and should be prevented.
As the media companies marge and accrete size and power to rival national governments, this trend will continue to gain momentum despite the wishes of us poor law-abiding citizens who just want to listen to our Cyndi Lauper CD's.
The sad truth is that I work with people that pretty much have that attitude. Maybe that's not what they intend, but that's the result. When I've asked how to make a change to a JavaScript parser, I was told: I had to trace through the code, so you should too. This coming from the guy who requested the change. The thing is, when I pressed him for more information, he finally explained enough that I was able to make the fix in a couple of minutes, otherwise it would have been hours.
You're absolutely right, but I would bring up that Free Speech protections do not apply when you are inciting people. Again, "inciting people" is yet another in a long list of vague words that the courts and legislature must rely on. If I wear a sandwich board on the streets of <insert your favorite ethnic minority neighborhood> that says "<ethnic minorities> should be shot.>" Is that an exercise of Free Speech. Absolutely! However stupid it might be, you have the right to do it. Of course, there's the whole issue of "hate crimes" where a crimes severity depends on who the victim is, I won't go down that road, because there lies madness. But if you gather together a bunch of <ethnic minority>-hating bigots and say "Let's go shoot some <ethnic minorities>!" and get them fired up in a frenzy that they might actually do it, is that Free Speech? Yes (because all speech in the country is Free), but there are legitimate reasons for it _not_ to be protected anyway. There are legitimate reasons to make narrow exceptions to many, if not all, rights as granted in the Bill of Rights, but it doesn't affect the fundamnetal nature of our form of government. Of course, vigilance is necessary because even well-meaning people can abuse rights.
You're absolutely right, but I would bring up that Free Speech protections do not apply when you are inciting people. Again, "inciting people" is yet another in a long list of vague words that the courts and legislature must rely on. If I wear a sandwich board on the streets of that says " should be shot.>" Is that an exercise of Free Speech. Absolutely! However stupid it might be, you have the right to do it. Of course, there's the whole issue of "hate crimes" where a crimes severity depends on who the victim is, I won't go down that road, because there lies madness. But if you gather together a bunch of -hating bigots and say "Let's go shoot some !" and get them fired up in a frenzy that they might actually do it, is that Free Speech? Yes (because all speech in the country is Free), but there are legitimate reasons for it _not_ to be protected anyway. There are legitimate reasons to make narrow exceptions to many, if not all, rights as granted in the Bill of Rights, but it doesn't affect the fundamnetal nature of our form of government. Of course, vigilance is necessary because even well-meaning people can abuse rights.
Um, first you are reiterating the last paragraph of my post.
Second, I am talking about "sick" which is not the same as "should be illegal", nor did I ever state that.
Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure you read my previous posts either, or you would see that my original thesis was that under the First Amendment I reluctantly agreed that this should be Free Speech.
Before you accuse me of being an out-of-touch computer nerd, perhaps you should respond to what I say, rather than what you want to pigeonhole me into believing. Didn't 400 years of American history teach you anything about prejudice, or were you too busy playing computer games?
If you're trying to back me into a corner, it won't work. I _agree_ that there's a double standard for alcohol with respect to other harmful drugs. However, there are differences.
People can and do die accidently from overdoses even when they know what they are doing or know the purity of what they are dealing with. Illegal drugs are _dangerous_, which is why they are illegal. If you apply the logic of why drugs are illegal to alcohol, it's almost (but not entirely) an open-and-shut decision that it should
be illegal, too. People die from alcohol. People cause others to be killed through use of alcohol.
However, it's not exactly the same. While it is possible, I hardly think there's a significant risk that someone will keel over after having a glass of wine. No one ever got in a fight at a Catholic Mass because he was suddenly drunk from Communion.
The problem with alcohol, in contrast, is that using it responsibly confers a trivial, if any, risk to the user or those around him. This is not true for illegal drugs, otherwise they wouldn't be illegal. I know this point is debated with some drugs, such as marijuana, but I think that is the driving force behind drugs being made controlled substances and makes for a legitimate and convincing argument.
So you are saying that the families and nuns and orphans and Superbowl VIP's in my examples are not victims? Maybe my examples are a little exaggerated for effect, but the logic still holds.
Before you insult me, perhaps you should read my post a little more carefully. Furthermore, I don't recall anyone ever stating your definition of "victimless". It is very possible to be a victim of yourself when you harm yourself due to ignorance, stupidity or poor judgement. That doesn't mitigate your culpability in any way, but the idea behind the illegality of drugs is because people harm themselves and others when they use them. I think the term "victimless crime" is a rationalization created by people that really don't have a good argument for the legalization of drugs.
Here's a similar example. If you don't want to wear a motorcycle helmet and you are hurt more because of it, that's your right, but when you affect me because more insurance money goes towards fixing your fractured skull, then society has a responsibility to consider on my behalf whether it's worth it to _me_ that you don't want to wear a helmet.
In your example, you mention a grieving widow. Now bungie jumping is not a crime, but if it were, how could you argue she's not a victim.
When someone OD's and dies, he or she most certainly affects other people, even if it's just because someone has to haul his or her sorry carcass away. People do not live in a vacuum, and anyone who argues that harming yourself (especially seriously) affects no one else has an overly simplistic view of the world.
You're right. But I was looking at it from the point of view of prurient interests rather than describing something that did, or could happen to someone. I'm sorry I didn't make myself more clear.
You've got a point, but proving a negative is still logically much harder than the opposite.
Your story about your roommate brings me to another point I discussed elsewhere in this topic:
Like a smoker who steps outside a non-smoker friend's house to light up, your roommate at least had the deceny not to inflict his "hobby" on you. People seem to forget that that is part of the responsibility that comes with Free Speech.
Slashdot Mirror
or even a station wagon full of mag tapes...
No, but using the Case Logic sleeves (jewel cases are for losers), I can carry about 50 CD's of MP3's in a small bag. That's about 30GB of data for about $25. Try that with a hard-disk (at the same price...). Yes, there is some inconvenience when you have to change CD's, but ultimately, you get more flexibility with a CD device at less cost and only sacrifice a little convenience.
Again, it's only a matter of preference, but I'll go with flexibility any day of the week.
It might hold _your_ entire music collection, but 6GB comes out to roughly 100 CD's, which is about 1/8th of my collection. I could carry 5 times that in my CD bag.
From my point of view, the CD players are the way to go. I just don't want to be saddled with some crappy transfer utility and I've already got many of my CD's ripped to CD-R's already.
Of course, different products for different customers. It depends on what you want or need.
I never said they're good because they're big.
Actually what I was saying was they're not all bad despite them being big in part because of unfair business practices. I rail against Microsoft's products and practices as much as the next guy, but I am also willing to give them credit for some things that they do well (or at least better than anyone else).
Thanks for the correction. Apparently their worth have gone down significantly in the last several months. However, any company that can measure it's value as a sizeable fraction of a trillion dollars is already bigger and more powerful than a lot of entire countries.
Agreed.
As far as "delusional" goes. Gates' "delusion" of his pre-eminence as a technological messiah looks to the majority of the world to be a fact.
I think the article, and presumably the book, has a level of arrogance that assumes some kind of failure of Microsoft that has not and may never happen. As much as some of us would like to think otherwise, Microsoft, a half _trillion_ dollar company is not going away any time soon. I personally don't think that's a bad thing even if they are in dire need of a good spanking, but as my bio says, I'm a "shameless Microsoft user".
Of course, who can forget the immortal "Hit me!" from Johnny Mnemonic?
Different genre: Bill & Ted was funny and witty, and deceptively stupid, i.e., at second look it wasn't as stupid as you would expect. While I am far from the targeted demographic, probably more likely to be a target of such movies, I really enjoyed Bill and Ted, but found anything Mike Myers was ever associated with the be tediously unfunny. Needless to say, I haven't seen another teenage gross out movie since "Fast Times", which was good when trying to be funny but truly and deeply offensive when it tried to be a serious movie. Another difference, I would let my kids see Bill & Ted (though not the sequel... it's a little too mean in places), I wouldn't even watch most of these more recent films myself, even if I was interested.
If I recall correctly from my college days (in the early-mid 80's), basically no. My understanding was that you pretty much gave up all your Constitutional rights in order to live in the dorms at a Virginia Tech in the U.S.
The ironic thing about constitutional rights... they generally don't apply to non-governmental organizations.
...i.e., They know who butters their bread.
n tendo/Sacco/Vanzetti's of the world will have to evolve or face the consequences. Whether they can do this entirely on their own terms remains to be seen. I don't think so and certainly hope not.
The situation is not exactly analogous because there are not (yet) companies putting them out of business by exploiting the new technology. Customers themselves are going to put them out of business by exploiting the information infrastructure that is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. I don't think most people want to deliberately rip off the people who create the media, but on the other hand, they have no compunctions against ripping off people. What goes around comes around.
Furthermore, people like Napster, MP3, and who knows who else are trying to find a chink in the corporate-driven intellectual property armor to provide the services that the media companies refuse to provide and eventually they will succeed. The AOL/Time-Warner/Netscape/Yahoo!/Microsoft/Sony/Ni
...and a hundred years ago the automobile put the horse-and-buggy manufacturers in a bad situation. No one suggested they had any rights to continue being profitable.
The media companies are refusing to evolve to reflect the new technology that almost everyone has access to. They are forcing an outmoded form of distribution on us, because the newer technology gives them less control and less chance to gouge people. Customers aren't going to stand around and take it from an industry that flagrantly fixes prices in our faces and pitches a tantrum when people won't stand for it (even if they are breaking the law by violating copyrights). What do you expect? Screw with people and they'll screw with you.
Right now, we pay and exorbitant price for a music distribution system that is technologically obsolete. Until and unless the media companies offer something more reasonable, people are going to continue to flout the law more and more brazenly. Right now it seems that the consumers and the media companies are in a pissing match with each other. The media companies started it, and until they back down in some way, the consumers won't stop trying to circumvent their "protections".
This goes back to an idea that will gain momentum in this country (Don't blame it on France):
The media giants want to force everything to a per-use charge based system. Look at DIVX. This was the media companies' dream: every time you want to watch your copy of "Broken Arrow", your DIVX machine dials up the Central Server and you account gets charged and a record is made that you watched "Broken Arrow" for the 144th time a 3:56 A.M. on 1 February 2001. Not only do they eliminate those pesky consumers cheating them out of good revenue by viewing something over and over again (like with VHS tapes... that's tantamount to piracy!), but they also get excruciatingly granular usage info, which the marketing folks will snap up with great glee.
DIVX failed because no one considered that the customer wouldn't want a product that screws him over without providing any real new benefits, but the idea is just in its infancy. Just look at all the copy-protection schemes being bandied about for hard-drives, digital TV's, new generations of CD players, and you can see that the might of billions of dollars is being plied against the concept of fair use.
The French folks are just a little ahead of the curve by applying the same logic to books. If you have to pay everytime you watch a movie, someone should have to pay every time he reads a book. Lending a book (or DVD, or CD) to a friend is stealing, by this (ludicrous) reasoning and should be prevented.
As the media companies marge and accrete size and power to rival national governments, this trend will continue to gain momentum despite the wishes of us poor law-abiding citizens who just want to listen to our Cyndi Lauper CD's.
Welcome to the future.
Well, you _could_ grow the clone up and see what he or she looks like.
p.s. This is a joke: I don't think we should be cloning people. Period.
Well put. I wish more people had your level of understanding.
Rick
Umm... they _could_ sell phones to some of the other 6 billion people on the planet.
Still, 300 million is a huge run for any product, except for mabye paper clips, matches, AOL disks, etc.
The sad truth is that I work with people that pretty much have that attitude. Maybe that's not what they intend, but that's the result. When I've asked how to make a change to a JavaScript parser, I was told: I had to trace through the code, so you should too. This coming from the guy who requested the change. The thing is, when I pressed him for more information, he finally explained enough that I was able to make the fix in a couple of minutes, otherwise it would have been hours.
Sorry, here's the readable version....
You're absolutely right, but I would bring up that Free Speech protections do not apply when you are inciting people. Again, "inciting people" is yet another in a long list of vague words that the courts and legislature must rely on. If I wear a sandwich board on the streets of <insert your favorite ethnic minority neighborhood> that says "<ethnic minorities> should be shot.>" Is that an exercise of Free Speech. Absolutely! However stupid it might be, you have the right to do it. Of course, there's the whole issue of "hate crimes" where a crimes severity depends on who the victim is, I won't go down that road, because there lies madness. But if you gather together a bunch of <ethnic minority>-hating bigots and say "Let's go shoot some <ethnic minorities>!" and get them fired up in a frenzy that they might actually do it, is that Free Speech? Yes (because all speech in the country is Free), but there are legitimate reasons for it _not_ to be protected anyway. There are legitimate reasons to make narrow exceptions to many, if not all, rights as granted in the Bill of Rights, but it doesn't affect the fundamnetal nature of our form of government. Of course, vigilance is necessary because even well-meaning people can abuse rights.
Where to draw that line is difficult to decide.
You're absolutely right, but I would bring up that Free Speech protections do not apply when you are inciting people. Again, "inciting people" is yet another in a long list of vague words that the courts and legislature must rely on. If I wear a sandwich board on the streets of that says " should be shot.>" Is that an exercise of Free Speech. Absolutely! However stupid it might be, you have the right to do it. Of course, there's the whole issue of "hate crimes" where a crimes severity depends on who the victim is, I won't go down that road, because there lies madness. But if you gather together a bunch of -hating bigots and say "Let's go shoot some !" and get them fired up in a frenzy that they might actually do it, is that Free Speech? Yes (because all speech in the country is Free), but there are legitimate reasons for it _not_ to be protected anyway. There are legitimate reasons to make narrow exceptions to many, if not all, rights as granted in the Bill of Rights, but it doesn't affect the fundamnetal nature of our form of government. Of course, vigilance is necessary because even well-meaning people can abuse rights.
Where to draw that line is difficult to decide.
Yes, you're absolutely right. And while I have explained myself elsewhere in this thread, I should have chosen my words more carefully.
If no one talks about these things, no one can fix them. I never meant to say anything different.
Um, first you are reiterating the last paragraph of my post.
Second, I am talking about "sick" which is not the same as "should be illegal", nor did I ever state that.
Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure you read my previous posts either, or you would see that my original thesis was that under the First Amendment I reluctantly agreed that this should be Free Speech.
Before you accuse me of being an out-of-touch computer nerd, perhaps you should respond to what I say, rather than what you want to pigeonhole me into believing. Didn't 400 years of American history teach you anything about prejudice, or were you too busy playing computer games?
If you're trying to back me into a corner, it won't work. I _agree_ that there's a double standard for alcohol with respect to other harmful drugs. However, there are differences.
People can and do die accidently from overdoses even when they know what they are doing or know the purity of what they are dealing with. Illegal drugs are _dangerous_, which is why they are illegal. If you apply the logic of why drugs are illegal to alcohol, it's almost (but not entirely) an open-and-shut decision that it should
be illegal, too. People die from alcohol. People cause others to be killed through use of alcohol.
However, it's not exactly the same. While it is possible, I hardly think there's a significant risk that someone will keel over after having a glass of wine. No one ever got in a fight at a Catholic Mass because he was suddenly drunk from Communion.
The problem with alcohol, in contrast, is that using it responsibly confers a trivial, if any, risk to the user or those around him. This is not true for illegal drugs, otherwise they wouldn't be illegal. I know this point is debated with some drugs, such as marijuana, but I think that is the driving force behind drugs being made controlled substances and makes for a legitimate and convincing argument.
An "ignoramus"?
So you are saying that the families and nuns and orphans and Superbowl VIP's in my examples are not victims? Maybe my examples are a little exaggerated for effect, but the logic still holds.
Before you insult me, perhaps you should read my post a little more carefully. Furthermore, I don't recall anyone ever stating your definition of "victimless". It is very possible to be a victim of yourself when you harm yourself due to ignorance, stupidity or poor judgement. That doesn't mitigate your culpability in any way, but the idea behind the illegality of drugs is because people harm themselves and others when they use them. I think the term "victimless crime" is a rationalization created by people that really don't have a good argument for the legalization of drugs.
Here's a similar example. If you don't want to wear a motorcycle helmet and you are hurt more because of it, that's your right, but when you affect me because more insurance money goes towards fixing your fractured skull, then society has a responsibility to consider on my behalf whether it's worth it to _me_ that you don't want to wear a helmet.
In your example, you mention a grieving widow. Now bungie jumping is not a crime, but if it were, how could you argue she's not a victim.
When someone OD's and dies, he or she most certainly affects other people, even if it's just because someone has to haul his or her sorry carcass away. People do not live in a vacuum, and anyone who argues that harming yourself (especially seriously) affects no one else has an overly simplistic view of the world.
No, I haven't, and no doubt it's worse, but both would elicit a strong reaction and I think people have the right not to have to experience either.
You're right. But I was looking at it from the point of view of prurient interests rather than describing something that did, or could happen to someone. I'm sorry I didn't make myself more clear.
You've got a point, but proving a negative is still logically much harder than the opposite.
Your story about your roommate brings me to another point I discussed elsewhere in this topic:
Like a smoker who steps outside a non-smoker friend's house to light up, your roommate at least had the deceny not to inflict his "hobby" on you. People seem to forget that that is part of the responsibility that comes with Free Speech.