No need to get defensive! In case you didn't notice I was largely agreeing with you.:-) I wasn't claiming that either side was in the right, or any less in the wrong; merely pointing out that the music-trading craze doesn't have that much in common with the Tea Party. Incidentally, isn't the US still getting billed for that brouhaha?
#include <disclaimers/IANAL.h>
One creative approach is making one's own recording of live performances, since IIRC the copyright on a sound recording is owned by the party that fixed it in its initial medium.
The analogy falls apart in another way as well: in the Boston Tea Party, the "evil vendor" was deprived of saleable goods; neither pirating nor boycotting would have this impact on the RIAA. To have a similar effect, profitable artists would have to break contract with the labels, and somehow get away with it-- and I don't see this as very likely. The labels can apparently afford a large-scale legal offensive (witness the Napsmash) to punish anyone who doesn't play ball. Even if an artist avoids the labels, though, there are still all the other middle-men to deal with, like independent promoters (apparently the only way to get massive radio play is to pay off these guys).
IIRC the "closed" in "closed caption" refers to the captions only being displayed if a decoder is active. "Open caption" programming has the text incorporated directly into the video signal.
Won't Microsoft be pissed...
on
Linux TV
·
· Score: 1
over another company shipping an Internet browsing product-- Linux-based, at that-- having a "channel bar", as it were, that blows the doors off IE's gimmicky bookmark pane?
On a side note, I wonder if you can actually get a shell on this beastie as shipped, or whether we're gonna have to wait for someone to take the thing apart to figure that out.
ObSlashdotStupidity: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh, never mind.:-)
IANAL, but if they find him(?) in any country that the U.S. has an extradition treaty with (I don't know the list of 'em), the U.S. can have their police nab and hand over said suspect, right?
The prospect of this nightmare scenario makes you wonder which side really won the Cold War. We may have beaten the Stalinist dictatorships in the short term, but giving the powers that be control over the technology available to us will eventually gravitate us towards Orwell's "1984" scenario.
No, Joe Sixpack will just buy whatever format the content comes out on, especially if he doesn't have any choice. With TV being what it is, the content corps already to a large extent control what Joe Sixpack thinks. The controlling measures will win by default, and we'll end up not at "1984" but at "Fahrenheit 451".
Capital and people are to a significant extent interchangeable resources, and power is proportional to total resources. Even in cases where people specifically matter-- i.e. elections and referenda-- the vote is largely blown about by spin machinery, which is powered by, guess what, capital.
That power is often used to attack competition directly rather than to improve one's own desirability-- witness Standard Oil before they got the business end of antitrust law, the DMCA, the Microsoft/Sun FUD wars, ILECs like Pacific Bell, or any number of vendor lock-in techniques.
As if that wasn't enough, change policies too far from the center in any direction and you get loss of choice! Laissez-faire permits the large industries to sell at a loss for no reason other than to drive the next guy out of business, tie and bundle products and services ad nauseam, demand lock-in agreements from resellers, and other coercive measures. Regulate things too much and you get subsidies, price supports, licensed monopolies (so there's a single point of pressure for regulators!), and other coercive measures.
I'm beginning to think there's no hope for real free markets, since it's always in some powerful group's interest to keep markets controlled.
Mountain View, CA - A number of low-traffic commercial sites that had been attempting to draw users to their sites were suddenly awash in unexpected hits this Friday, bringing them to a grinding halt. The apparent source of this traffic surge was a reference to a banner-laden page on Slashdot, known for bringing down sites simply by posting links to them.
A member of the Slashdot staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "Banners are annoying, it's a good thing those advertisers went down!" This may also be the first time a second-order Slashdot effect has brought down a web server. The advertisers could not be reached for comment, since no e-mail addresses could be obtained from the crushed Web servers.
Just like abandonware, no doubt the labels will either sit on these songs or re-release them every once in a while in a "best of", genre mix, As Seen on TV collection, or other such obscurity.
It'll probably also be aggregated with a pile of stuff you don't want to listen to. Wait a minute, they do that with albums now anyway, never mind.
You're missing one of the key points of social disobedience: willingness to be prosecuted and convicted (martyred?) under the apparent bad law to raise public awareness of its brokenness. You may have a "God given right" to do as you please, but you also have a paired responsibility to accept the consequences of your actions.
For one thing, cassettes are a much less durable medium than CD's, and wear out fairly quickly from repeated playing due to tape tension and direct contact with the heads and rollers. I've seen VERY few people keep their originals socked away in cabinets and play only from copies (another thing RIAA probably didn't like, but isn't it a protected use?) so sales due to media replacement would be driven down by the shift to CD's. This probably accounts for part of the cassette sales drop not compensated elsewhere.
So which is it? Do we think it's better for a trademark owner to go after every single petty violation? Or does it seem to be more
fair when a trademark owner lets some of the little guys slip through the cracks, but then has to take action if they become larger? You can't have both worlds...
Perhaps if the trademark holder was considerate enough to just notify the little guy early on that the mark was already taken, before they invested a lot of money, time, effort, goodwill, or whatever into the mark, without letting slip the hounds of litigation, we could have the best of both worlds.
In case you hadn't noticed, this is going on all over the place in the PC games arena. For example, StarEdit (the level editor that ships with Blizzard's StarCraft) includes the following provision in its EULA (emphasis mine):
... The Program also contains a Level Editor (the "Editor") that
allows you to create custom levels or other materials for your
personal use in connection with the Program ("New Materials"). All use
of the Editor or any New Materials is subject to this License
Agreement....
... You are entitled to use the Program as a single
product for your own use, but you are not entitled
to use or allow third parties to use the Editor and
the New Materials created thereby for commercial
purposes including, but not limited to, distribution
of New Materials on a stand alone basis or
packaged with other software or hardware through
any and all distribution channels, including, but not
limited to retail sales and on-line electronic
distribution without the written consent of Blizzard...
Blizzard actually suedMicro Star over their unauthorized release of a Starcraft levels pack in '98. Blizzard claims that this is to keep the aftermarket quality in line; while their own quality standards are so high as to be virtually unheard-of for the PC games industry, the most positive thing I have to say so far (since I never finished the campaign) about authorized levels pack Insurrection by Aztech New Media is that the dialogue is rather humorous.
One thing that MS SQL does have going for it is the most ANSI-compliant syntax I've seen in a while. Oracle will choke if you hand it:
select Company.CompanyName, Contact.ContactName from Company left join Contact on Company.CompanyID = Contact.CompanyID where Company.CompanyName like 'Acme%'
Oracle uses some arcane outer join syntax I can't even remember off the top of my head. I've written a crapload of Transact-SQL and some (more recent) PL/SQL before though.
Hmmm... sorta like quantum mechanics... a photon is both a wave and particle, a book is both medium and content. It seems like the publishing industry is interfering with itself on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to get defensive! In case you didn't notice I was largely agreeing with you. :-) I wasn't claiming that either side was in the right, or any less in the wrong; merely pointing out that the music-trading craze doesn't have that much in common with the Tea Party. Incidentally, isn't the US still getting billed for that brouhaha?
#include <disclaimers/IANAL.h>
One creative approach is making one's own recording of live performances, since IIRC the copyright on a sound recording is owned by the party that fixed it in its initial medium.
The analogy falls apart in another way as well: in the Boston Tea Party, the "evil vendor" was deprived of saleable goods; neither pirating nor boycotting would have this impact on the RIAA. To have a similar effect, profitable artists would have to break contract with the labels, and somehow get away with it-- and I don't see this as very likely. The labels can apparently afford a large-scale legal offensive (witness the Napsmash) to punish anyone who doesn't play ball. Even if an artist avoids the labels, though, there are still all the other middle-men to deal with, like independent promoters (apparently the only way to get massive radio play is to pay off these guys).
IIRC the "closed" in "closed caption" refers to the captions only being displayed if a decoder is active. "Open caption" programming has the text incorporated directly into the video signal.
over another company shipping an Internet browsing product-- Linux-based, at that-- having a "channel bar", as it were, that blows the doors off IE's gimmicky bookmark pane?
:-)
On a side note, I wonder if you can actually get a shell on this beastie as shipped, or whether we're gonna have to wait for someone to take the thing apart to figure that out.
ObSlashdotStupidity: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh, never mind.
IANAL, but if they find him(?) in any country that the U.S. has an extradition treaty with (I don't know the list of 'em), the U.S. can have their police nab and hand over said suspect, right?
Capital and people are to a significant extent interchangeable resources, and power is proportional to total resources. Even in cases where people specifically matter-- i.e. elections and referenda-- the vote is largely blown about by spin machinery, which is powered by, guess what, capital.
That power is often used to attack competition directly rather than to improve one's own desirability-- witness Standard Oil before they got the business end of antitrust law, the DMCA, the Microsoft/Sun FUD wars, ILECs like Pacific Bell, or any number of vendor lock-in techniques.
As if that wasn't enough, change policies too far from the center in any direction and you get loss of choice! Laissez-faire permits the large industries to sell at a loss for no reason other than to drive the next guy out of business, tie and bundle products and services ad nauseam, demand lock-in agreements from resellers, and other coercive measures. Regulate things too much and you get subsidies, price supports, licensed monopolies (so there's a single point of pressure for regulators!), and other coercive measures.
I'm beginning to think there's no hope for real free markets, since it's always in some powerful group's interest to keep markets controlled.
Mountain View, CA - A number of low-traffic commercial sites that had been attempting to draw users to their sites were suddenly awash in unexpected hits this Friday, bringing them to a grinding halt. The apparent source of this traffic surge was a reference to a banner-laden page on Slashdot, known for bringing down sites simply by posting links to them.
A member of the Slashdot staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that "Banners are annoying, it's a good thing those advertisers went down!" This may also be the first time a second-order Slashdot effect has brought down a web server. The advertisers could not be reached for comment, since no e-mail addresses could be obtained from the crushed Web servers.
Just like abandonware, no doubt the labels will either sit on these songs or re-release them every once in a while in a "best of", genre mix, As Seen on TV collection, or other such obscurity.
It'll probably also be aggregated with a pile of stuff you don't want to listen to. Wait a minute, they do that with albums now anyway, never mind.
You're missing one of the key points of social disobedience: willingness to be prosecuted and convicted (martyred?) under the apparent bad law to raise public awareness of its brokenness. You may have a "God given right" to do as you please, but you also have a paired responsibility to accept the consequences of your actions.
For one thing, cassettes are a much less durable medium than CD's, and wear out fairly quickly from repeated playing due to tape tension and direct contact with the heads and rollers. I've seen VERY few people keep their originals socked away in cabinets and play only from copies (another thing RIAA probably didn't like, but isn't it a protected use?) so sales due to media replacement would be driven down by the shift to CD's. This probably accounts for part of the cassette sales drop not compensated elsewhere.
So which is it? Do we think it's better for a trademark owner to go after every single petty violation? Or does it seem to be more fair when a trademark owner lets some of the little guys slip through the cracks, but then has to take action if they become larger? You can't have both worlds...
Perhaps if the trademark holder was considerate enough to just notify the little guy early on that the mark was already taken, before they invested a lot of money, time, effort, goodwill, or whatever into the mark, without letting slip the hounds of litigation, we could have the best of both worlds.
Just my two copper, anyway.
One thing that MS SQL does have going for it is the most ANSI-compliant syntax I've seen in a while. Oracle will choke if you hand it:
select Company.CompanyName, Contact.ContactName from Company left join Contact on Company.CompanyID = Contact.CompanyID where Company.CompanyName like 'Acme%' Oracle uses some arcane outer join syntax I can't even remember off the top of my head. I've written a crapload of Transact-SQL and some (more recent) PL/SQL before though.Hmmm... sorta like quantum mechanics... a photon is both a wave and particle, a book is both medium and content. It seems like the publishing industry is interfering with itself on this one.