When you walk into a book store and pick up a book that looks interesting and browse a few pages, is _that_ "stealing"? It is possible to honestly read a book without having paid for it (preview browsing, borrow from a friend), and this analogy can carefully carry over to the music world.
If you camped out in the bookstore and read the entire book, that would be pretty tacky, but I'm not positive even that would be stealing the book. The store owner might ask you to pay up after a little while. Stealing the book would mean tucking it under your trenchcoat and running for the door. The main difference is when you steal a book, it is gone off the shelf and no one else can buy it. Book store customers have _some_ reasonable right to browse books before they decide to buy or not, and you are in fact allowed to "share" your books with friends. Music users have some reasonable rights when it comes to Fair Use of music browsing and sharing as well. I think the RIAA and its companies are in danger of crossing the line from defending their work to cracking down on musical competition and locking it out with with constrictive permissions technology, designed to totally dominate the music world, in the name of self defense.
getting something for free when you're supposed to be paying is stealing.
The main problem here is who decides what's "supposed" to be paid for. A minority of corporate lawyers, government politicians, and law enforcement people with weapons or the tens of millions of people in the public masses? They're gonna give you a case of the "Sposed-tas" that closely fits their own needs to the exclusion of others. Hopefully the US Courts will find a Solomon-like compromise that balances these freedoms of companies with freedoms of the public.
I've made music and put it on Napster. I want it there for free. Maybe you'll tell me I'm "supposed" to charge for it. Maybe I'm crazy or something, but I happen to be willing to let it be out there for FREE. I don't want some big RIAA telling me I can't put it there without their permission, or force Napster to control me with some audio signature for my songs that will give them permission. They can protect their own stuff, but they don't have the right to conquer, assimilate, shut down, lock out with fingerprints, or destroy everything else while they're at it.
The line "There's some things money can't buy, for everything else there's Mastercard" line adds NOTHING to the Columbine joke or any other "priceless" jokes. No one cares which particular credit card buys the ammo. It doesn't make the joke more funny, but it does make the Mastercard people a lot more angry. Logical solution- drop the last line. It's not worth fighting for.
I sometimes wonder what the most powerful information-finding institutions have in the way of meme searching. Most people aren't random- when they think of a passphrase, they're going to to choose whatever is on their mind. For example, consider the "Ilovetux" passhrase. A slashdot user suggesting a Linux-realted passphrase seems pretty obvious. How many linux phrases are their in wordspace anyway? 1,000?
It seems to me a sophisticated conspiracy type group could drastically reduce the "keyspace" of words by compiling a playbook of words things people like and starting with that. Instead of comparing all words, why not compare words and quotes from pop songs, the Simpsons (and other tv shows), Final Fantasy characters (and other video games), User Friendly and Penny-Arcade sayings (and other comics). Then they start their search by building phrases from those. (IloveMiranda, IloveTycho, IhateMicrosoft) x2 x3 x4 etc etc.)
I guess this line of thinking stems from my own personal paranoia that people are almost shamefully predictable, and that powerful, possibly sinister forces understand this and use it to their advantage. ; -)
This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
I think that assumption is actually more true than not. Of the world's population, perhaps 1% are smart and educated enough to handle writing their own Linux stuff. The geek elite are like the top 1% of the intellectual pyramid. The money is all lower down, in the huge bottom rungs.
My mom and most of her friends, for example, can barely handle the "dumbed down" Microsoft as is. These people need their experience to be as easy as possible. When it comes to make their own decisions on system configurations or file permissions for example, they don't have a prayer of making a good choice- or even understanding the issues. Since Linux won't make it easy for them, Microsoft and Macintosh will.
Seems though, that larger companies seem to think they're doing you a huge favor by redistributing your work, so they feel justified in doing so.
Just like how software pirates usually think they're doing big companies a favor by distributing their work! ; -)
The Ultimate Case Upgrade
on
Cool Case
·
· Score: 1
I'd like a handle on my case. Sort of like the one on the back of an iMac. That way I can carry my CPU tower to netparties. So practical, so useful! Opening side door good + add a handle = even better! The most obvious is always the hardest.
Water is "free", it's available in any over most of the surface of the earth, and piped to most of the civilized world. Even with such an abundance, there are bottled water companies that sell water for a huge mark-up. Their strategy is two-fold- to send a negative message about pollution and mud in the regular water, and tout their water as cleaner and more deliscious by comparison. In reality there is probably little difference. "Home-made" water from local wells is often tastier than city water, and exposes of bottled water find trace amounts biological and metal contamination in some brands comparable to non-bottled water.
But can the bottled water companies ask the government to ban regular water suppliers? "We're selling you our product for your own good- everything else is polluted!! Think of the children!!" But in reality, most of the public water supply is just as drinkable- and much cheaper!
The bottled water companies are selling a "commerically purified" version of something that covers 90% of the planet for free. What is Microsoft selling by comparison? ; -) Asking the government to dry up all the "lakes, wells, rivers, and oceans" to leave only their product is simply not going to work.
In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."
Maybe they mean "Might constrain profit-making." Adding more information to the pool increases "innovating"- ideally, no two people need to spend time solving the same problems.
I guess with the GPL, you either get why it's useful and okay or you don't.
Maybe what you could do is hold more than one magical book in your hand. If the limit for magical books in hand is two, and you hold a third magical book, the auras temporarily cancel out and the first book briefly loses its magical cursed properties. Then you can set it down as if it were an ordinary book, waiting for some other unlucky soul to pick it up. Of course, where you do you get more magical books? Amazon's Rare and Out of Print Section? No- O-Reiley ; -)
"[Quake3 Team Arena is] couched in the traditional competitive zero sum winner takes all game, but the actual game itself is so much more than just being the winner of 9 rounds."
Yeah, I definitely agree. Even if my team loses, I can still feel like a winner if I personally did a good job for my part of the action. If it's a really close game and my team does a really great job but still doesn't win, I think we can all feel good about our performance.
That could be a trick question. The answer could be "Both", or "Neither". Conquest is still aggressive even if you decide to do it 100 miles at a time, over 4000 years. Using the phrase "outside China's presnt borders" hides that past borders may have been smaller.
Those two points of comparison don't really tell us about aggression or motives of the individual actions- but it does suggest a certain sense of isolation on China's history. That the United States has been involved in military actions nearly worldwide does not necesarily imply it is aggressive- but it does suggest that the United States cares more about the world as a whole than China.
Now, as to range: 100 miles is as far as a Chinese soldier (or their weapons) will go, you say? I wonder if they'd go farther than 100 miles _upwards_ into space? Would China only deploy satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit over the Chinese mainland? Do/will they deploy military satellites in orbits over all parts of the world? When a country's military satellites are floating over someone else's backyard, they are outside their own borders- and inside someone elses'.
Because then "the United States would go from a world super-power to a third world nation overnight." This would let Max and the other Project Manticore kids escape and have various adventures each week. Dark Angel. Tuesday Nights on FOX. And it would also defeat any sentinel hunter-killer squids sent out to stop matrix-hacking hovercrafts. You know how ecoterrorists hate to harm biomechanical squids.
I'd guess huge EMPS only wipe things out in science fiction. Doesn't magnetism decrease by the cube of distance? The earth's magnetic field doesn't erase disks or satellites. Sounds like you'd need several more orders of magnitude to harm satellites with EMP.
One of the things that makes rare items valuable is the time it takes to collect them. People could aruge that they are being paid for rendering an Everquest-related consulting service for which they are being paid for their time, then transferring the item itself for free? ; -)
What if someone paid not just to have the item, but instead to have someone show them where they could find it in the game? Of course it's a sorry person who needs cash motivation for the fun of helping others in a game, but would the EULA prohibit that as sale of an Everquest-related service? Would it be illegal to teach a class on Everquest for money? I know the demand is high for Everquest Seminars and Motivational Speakers! ; -) Maybe Verant would change their tune if they were bribed- by receiving a certain cut of all sales of Everquest items.
I personally avoid such corporate-control dilemmas by not playing EverCrack ; -) Ahhhh.
Verant could inrease the supply of valuable items, thus driving down demand. In a game like this, all Scarcity is Artificial, no doubt about that. A few clicks in the admin mode and Godly Plates of Depleted Uranium come raining out of the sky, newbies rejoice and people who paid $400 real cash for a virtaul item would weep at their squandered misfortune.
"And so the first will be last, and the last first." *grin*
The carefully cultivated artificial scarcity and competition for scarce resources with others are what make artificial bits worth real money, so they wouldn't tamper with that. Verant is on a fine line here- they want their game and the items in it to be worth playing, but not worth paying?
Most people I know like to see beautiful shooting stars at night. If anything, the DoD needs to fund MORE artificial shooting stars so people get used to it.
I always wondered, what would happen if NASA took a refrigerator box full of steel lugnuts and launched them towards the earth? Would they have enough mass to make a shooting star on re-entry? If so, the US could put on a worldwide pyrotechnics show with a man-made meteor shower. I think that would have an interesting psychological morale boost for the space programs of the world: "Space isn't some obscure place millions of miles away- it's close and friendly enough that we can launch meteor showers in it." I personally would like to see NASA flaunt the rather godlike ability to announce and then create meteor showers the world over.
Also, if perfectly good lugnuts would be a waste just to melt on re-entry, we could always use trash with no other practical use, like: [INSERT HUMOROUS ITEM HERE] (Possible Examples- Furbies, Aibos, AOL CDs, Florida Ballot trucks, Playstation 2s, iMacs..)Heh heh heh. With dry, cool, and topical wit like that I could be a tech cartoonist! ; -)
A quick gamer's reference... In the new Shiny Game, Sacrifice, the ultimate evil unit is a flying death dragon named- you guessed it- a HELLMOUTH.
Just a coincidence? I think Shiny developers read Slashdot! ; -)
"Video games are not a culture. They are entertainment."
No one who was in the gaming culture would say that! ; -)
The level of shared experience among video gamers that is strong enough to count as a culture. Gaming culture also has its own norms, language, etiquette, and social rankings. It's at least on the order of say, the 'culture' of "high school football". Communities form up around games, electronic and otherwise. But computer games are far more likely to be incorporated as a way of life and seeing the world.
The culture of gaming is strong enough that there is even some alienation between groups- strong enough that gamers often don't know what to talk about with non-gamers. Their world views about what is interesting to discuss is too different. Endless detail on minute gaming strategies and stories of battles seem like trivia to non-gaming people - to hardcore gamers, everything besides that seems somewhat banal. ; -) "Real life? How many frags per second is that?"
My final criteria was met when I found that gaming culture even has its own comic strip:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3
If I.T. Culture has User Friendly, then Gaming Culture has Penny Arcade.
; -) Databass
I'm very very right-brained. I want to see my calendar in lots of beautiful colors! Can you do that, or at least make it an option? Here is how I imagine the problem of finding a time that works for a group of people:
Imagine that each person's schedule is made out of colored Saran wrap. For example, if I am free Monday 1-5PM, then I have a red patch over those times. Everyone has different colors for their free time. Then to find out when they are available, you just put all the "pages" on top of each other and see where all the colors overlap.
This would help visual people greatly! You could spot all kind of partial matches just by color, quickly. For example, if a Yellow and Blue person overlap on a time, the overlapped region would be green. Times where most people could go would probably be sort of brownish, and places where everyone could go would be black. (If I understand the general idea of the color spectrum filters right.)
My request is: Make it Colorful!
Slashdot Mirror
When you walk into a book store and pick up a book that looks interesting and browse a few pages, is _that_ "stealing"? It is possible to honestly read a book without having paid for it (preview browsing, borrow from a friend), and this analogy can carefully carry over to the music world.
If you camped out in the bookstore and read the entire book, that would be pretty tacky, but I'm not positive even that would be stealing the book. The store owner might ask you to pay up after a little while. Stealing the book would mean tucking it under your trenchcoat and running for the door. The main difference is when you steal a book, it is gone off the shelf and no one else can buy it. Book store customers have _some_ reasonable right to browse books before they decide to buy or not, and you are in fact allowed to "share" your books with friends. Music users have some reasonable rights when it comes to Fair Use of music browsing and sharing as well. I think the RIAA and its companies are in danger of crossing the line from defending their work to cracking down on musical competition and locking it out with with constrictive permissions technology, designed to totally dominate the music world, in the name of self defense.
getting something for free when you're supposed to be paying is stealing.
The main problem here is who decides what's "supposed" to be paid for. A minority of corporate lawyers, government politicians, and law enforcement people with weapons or the tens of millions of people in the public masses? They're gonna give you a case of the "Sposed-tas" that closely fits their own needs to the exclusion of others. Hopefully the US Courts will find a Solomon-like compromise that balances these freedoms of companies with freedoms of the public.
I've made music and put it on Napster. I want it there for free. Maybe you'll tell me I'm "supposed" to charge for it. Maybe I'm crazy or something, but I happen to be willing to let it be out there for FREE. I don't want some big RIAA telling me I can't put it there without their permission, or force Napster to control me with some audio signature for my songs that will give them permission. They can protect their own stuff, but they don't have the right to conquer, assimilate, shut down, lock out with fingerprints, or destroy everything else while they're at it.
Sometimes the enablers do get screwed by bigger companies.
The line "There's some things money can't buy, for everything else there's Mastercard" line adds NOTHING to the Columbine joke or any other "priceless" jokes. No one cares which particular credit card buys the ammo. It doesn't make the joke more funny, but it does make the Mastercard people a lot more angry. Logical solution- drop the last line. It's not worth fighting for.
I sometimes wonder what the most powerful information-finding institutions have in the way of meme searching. Most people aren't random- when they think of a passphrase, they're going to to choose whatever is on their mind. For example, consider the "Ilovetux" passhrase. A slashdot user suggesting a Linux-realted passphrase seems pretty obvious. How many linux phrases are their in wordspace anyway? 1,000?
It seems to me a sophisticated conspiracy type group could drastically reduce the "keyspace" of words by compiling a playbook of words things people like and starting with that. Instead of comparing all words, why not compare words and quotes from pop songs, the Simpsons (and other tv shows), Final Fantasy characters (and other video games), User Friendly and Penny-Arcade sayings (and other comics). Then they start their search by building phrases from those. (IloveMiranda, IloveTycho, IhateMicrosoft) x2 x3 x4 etc etc.)
I guess this line of thinking stems from my own personal paranoia that people are almost shamefully predictable, and that powerful, possibly sinister forces understand this and use it to their advantage. ; -)
This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them. I think that assumption is actually more true than not. Of the world's population, perhaps 1% are smart and educated enough to handle writing their own Linux stuff. The geek elite are like the top 1% of the intellectual pyramid. The money is all lower down, in the huge bottom rungs. My mom and most of her friends, for example, can barely handle the "dumbed down" Microsoft as is. These people need their experience to be as easy as possible. When it comes to make their own decisions on system configurations or file permissions for example, they don't have a prayer of making a good choice- or even understanding the issues. Since Linux won't make it easy for them, Microsoft and Macintosh will.
Seems though, that larger companies seem to think they're doing you a huge favor by redistributing your work, so they feel justified in doing so.
Just like how software pirates usually think they're doing big companies a favor by distributing their work! ; -)
I'd like a handle on my case. Sort of like the one on the back of an iMac. That way I can carry my CPU tower to netparties. So practical, so useful! Opening side door good + add a handle = even better! The most obvious is always the hardest.
But can the bottled water companies ask the government to ban regular water suppliers? "We're selling you our product for your own good- everything else is polluted!! Think of the children!!" But in reality, most of the public water supply is just as drinkable- and much cheaper!
The bottled water companies are selling a "commerically purified" version of something that covers 90% of the planet for free. What is Microsoft selling by comparison? ; -) Asking the government to dry up all the "lakes, wells, rivers, and oceans" to leave only their product is simply not going to work.
In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use ... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."
Maybe they mean "Might constrain profit-making."
Adding more information to the pool increases "innovating"- ideally, no two people need to spend time solving the same problems.
I guess with the GPL, you either get why it's useful and okay or you don't.
"Hey Microsoft- I'll Paypal you $.10 cents to use Word for one hour."
Maybe what you could do is hold more than one magical book in your hand. If the limit for magical books in hand is two, and you hold a third magical book, the auras temporarily cancel out and the first book briefly loses its magical cursed properties. Then you can set it down as if it were an ordinary book, waiting for some other unlucky soul to pick it up. Of course, where you do you get more magical books? Amazon's Rare and Out of Print Section? No- O-Reiley ; -)
"[Quake3 Team Arena is] couched in the traditional competitive zero sum winner takes all game, but the actual game itself is so much more than just being the winner of 9 rounds."
Yeah, I definitely agree. Even if my team loses, I can still feel like a winner if I personally did a good job for my part of the action. If it's a really close game and my team does a really great job but still doesn't win, I think we can all feel good about our performance.
"Which country is the aggressive one?"
That could be a trick question. The answer could be "Both", or "Neither". Conquest is still aggressive even if you decide to do it 100 miles at a time, over 4000 years. Using the phrase "outside China's presnt borders" hides that past borders may have been smaller.
Those two points of comparison don't really tell us about aggression or motives of the individual actions- but it does suggest a certain sense of isolation on China's history. That the United States has been involved in military actions nearly worldwide does not necesarily imply it is aggressive- but it does suggest that the United States cares more about the world as a whole than China.
Now, as to range: 100 miles is as far as a Chinese soldier (or their weapons) will go, you say? I wonder if they'd go farther than 100 miles _upwards_ into space? Would China only deploy satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit over the Chinese mainland? Do/will they deploy military satellites in orbits over all parts of the world? When a country's military satellites are floating over someone else's backyard, they are outside their own borders- and inside someone elses'.
Because then "the United States would go from a world super-power to a third world nation overnight." This would let Max and the other Project Manticore kids escape and have various adventures each week. Dark Angel. Tuesday Nights on FOX. And it would also defeat any sentinel hunter-killer squids sent out to stop matrix-hacking hovercrafts. You know how ecoterrorists hate to harm biomechanical squids.
I'd guess huge EMPS only wipe things out in science fiction. Doesn't magnetism decrease by the cube of distance? The earth's magnetic field doesn't erase disks or satellites. Sounds like you'd need several more orders of magnitude to harm satellites with EMP.
One of the things that makes rare items valuable is the time it takes to collect them. People could aruge that they are being paid for rendering an Everquest-related consulting service for which they are being paid for their time, then transferring the item itself for free? ; -)
What if someone paid not just to have the item, but instead to have someone show them where they could find it in the game? Of course it's a sorry person who needs cash motivation for the fun of helping others in a game, but would the EULA prohibit that as sale of an Everquest-related service? Would it be illegal to teach a class on Everquest for money? I know the demand is high for Everquest Seminars and Motivational Speakers! ; -) Maybe Verant would change their tune if they were bribed- by receiving a certain cut of all sales of Everquest items.
I personally avoid such corporate-control dilemmas by not playing EverCrack ; -) Ahhhh.
Verant could inrease the supply of valuable items, thus driving down demand. In a game like this, all Scarcity is Artificial, no doubt about that. A few clicks in the admin mode and Godly Plates of Depleted Uranium come raining out of the sky, newbies rejoice and people who paid $400 real cash for a virtaul item would weep at their squandered misfortune.
"And so the first will be last, and the last first." *grin*
The carefully cultivated artificial scarcity and competition for scarce resources with others are what make artificial bits worth real money, so they wouldn't tamper with that. Verant is on a fine line here- they want their game and the items in it to be worth playing, but not worth paying?
Most people I know like to see beautiful shooting stars at night. If anything, the DoD needs to fund MORE artificial shooting stars so people get used to it.
I always wondered, what would happen if NASA took a refrigerator box full of steel lugnuts and launched them towards the earth? Would they have enough mass to make a shooting star on re-entry? If so, the US could put on a worldwide pyrotechnics show with a man-made meteor shower. I think that would have an interesting psychological morale boost for the space programs of the world: "Space isn't some obscure place millions of miles away- it's close and friendly enough that we can launch meteor showers in it." I personally would like to see NASA flaunt the rather godlike ability to announce and then create meteor showers the world over.
Also, if perfectly good lugnuts would be a waste just to melt on re-entry, we could always use trash with no other practical use, like: [INSERT HUMOROUS ITEM HERE] (Possible Examples- Furbies, Aibos, AOL CDs, Florida Ballot trucks, Playstation 2s, iMacs..)Heh heh heh. With dry, cool, and topical wit like that I could be a tech cartoonist! ; -)
Databass
A quick gamer's reference... In the new Shiny Game, Sacrifice, the ultimate evil unit is a flying death dragon named- you guessed it- a HELLMOUTH. Just a coincidence? I think Shiny developers read Slashdot! ; -)
No one who was in the gaming culture would say that! ; -)
The level of shared experience among video gamers that is strong enough to count as a culture. Gaming culture also has its own norms, language, etiquette, and social rankings. It's at least on the order of say, the 'culture' of "high school football". Communities form up around games, electronic and otherwise. But computer games are far more likely to be incorporated as a way of life and seeing the world.
The culture of gaming is strong enough that there is even some alienation between groups- strong enough that gamers often don't know what to talk about with non-gamers. Their world views about what is interesting to discuss is too different. Endless detail on minute gaming strategies and stories of battles seem like trivia to non-gaming people - to hardcore gamers, everything besides that seems somewhat banal. ; -) "Real life? How many frags per second is that?"
My final criteria was met when I found that gaming culture even has its own comic strip:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3
If I.T. Culture has User Friendly, then Gaming Culture has Penny Arcade.
; -) Databass
I'm very very right-brained. I want to see my calendar in lots of beautiful colors! Can you do that, or at least make it an option? Here is how I imagine the problem of finding a time that works for a group of people:
Imagine that each person's schedule is made out of colored Saran wrap. For example, if I am free Monday 1-5PM, then I have a red patch over those times. Everyone has different colors for their free time. Then to find out when they are available, you just put all the "pages" on top of each other and see where all the colors overlap.
This would help visual people greatly! You could spot all kind of partial matches just by color, quickly. For example, if a Yellow and Blue person overlap on a time, the overlapped region would be green. Times where most people could go would probably be sort of brownish, and places where everyone could go would be black. (If I understand the general idea of the color spectrum filters right.)
My request is: Make it Colorful!
shane2020@hotmail.com