Because, after all, nothing will get the
suits to approve your geek-toy upgrade budget
like using a language that makes even "hello
world" feel slow...;-)
Because, after all, so many legit uses
exist for a trademark related to a product you
have no right to, and in fact, arguably
compete with?
I'll agree people aught not overreact so much,
since this looks like a pretty solid case if
Foley gets the trademark and the MAME team
decide to take it to court. But giving someone
the "benefit of the doubt" requires some actual
"doubt" about their intentions.
Well, beside the black mark on her credit, we
also visit State A fairly often (every couple of
months), as all of our family still lives there.
Kinda inconvenient when simply getting pulled
over means a night in jail (since they
could put out a warrant for her in that
state).
And, although I don't know how much of it they
can actually do, they threatened all
manner of nasties, from getting her insurance,
license, and registration suspended, to actual
prison time if they ever did manage to catch her
back in state A.
Overall, not worth the hassle for a few hundred
bucks... Also not worth getting a lawyer over,
which would certainly cost 10x the bill
itself.
And sadly, that last point nicely sums up exactly
why tax agencies get away with so much...
The cost of fighting the BS fees exceeds the fees
themselves.
Just because the states claim the right
doesn't mean that they will be allowed the
right.
You make a HUGE mistake in trying to apply logic
to tax laws...
Yes, you could point to a million possible ways
that the "use" taxes don't apply. But state
taxation departments simply don't care - They
can and will make your life hell, even if you
"win" your argument.
Case in point... My SO and I moved from state
A to state B roughly four years ago. Last year,
she received an excise tax bill from state A,
plus tons in penalties, for those three
years.
After literally dozens of hours wasted on the
phone (which at her salary, arguably cost quite
a bit more than the tax bill itself), she
finally convinced them she no longer lived in
state A. She STILL had to pay the late
penalty charges on the bill that everyone
involved agreed she never actually owed (the
"logic", if you can call it that, ran something
like "You may not have owed us that money, but
you did fail to pay it promptly, so the
penalties still apply even though the original
bill doesn't"... Whiskey Tango Foxtrot???).
She paid it just to get the whole miserable mess
over with. Okay, all seemed great.
Guess where she got a new excise tax bill from
this spring?
Are GPL programs part of the "culture,"
thereby meaning anybody can break the GPL
and do whatever they want with the code?
The GPL doesn't restrict my actual access to
works under it, nor even my ability to modify
such code. It only "limits" my ability
to make changes and then deprive the
world of those changes (I put "limits" in
quotes because the GPL really only restricts
the actions of those who already have the idea
of reducing our access to our own culture, for profit).
The person who made the media content owns the
content and can do what they want with it
Careful not to mistake law for reality. They don't really
mesh all that well, you know...
The person who made the content has a lot of power.
They have the power to add to our culture, if only a
tiny bit at a time, or the power to never reveal their
creation. Once they chose one of those paths, their
power ends. The law attempts to put a sort of
flow regulator on that decision, turning the power
into profit over time. But in reality, that means
nothing. The power of creation ends with release.
When someone makes media content, it doesn't
magically travel up into the clouds and become
part of some global collective accessible to
everyone.
Yes, actually, thanks to the internet, it does.
The only true barrier to free information,
the physical access, has effectively vanished.
I consider this a good thing. You may not agree,
and you don't have to. But both our opinions
have become moot, since the barrier has
vanished. You can either fret about the dam
breaking, or you can finally quench your thirst.
Your choice.
The RIAA is evil.
While true, I conside this probably the single
worst reason to pirate content. Just because
the RIAA sucks rotten monkey cocks doesn't mean
I have the right to exploit them.
Information/culture/whatever wants to
be free (the basic argument you're putting
forward).
Although probably closest to my actual
opinion, still quite a bit off. Animism,
while cute, dosn't really work well in the
real world. Rocks don't feel pain. Books
don't get offended if you dislike them.
Information doesn't want freedom.
The music industry is using an "obsolete
business model,"
Their problem, not mine. I would actually
go farther and say that the industry as a whole
counts as obsolete, and don't particularly care
whether or not they update their models for
exploiting both the artists and the public.
The "poor record company executives" don't even
enter my thoughts when I choose to pirate
something or not. They have entered the realm
of uselessness, now that artists can realistically
publish their works on the internet for a cost
approaching zero.
It's "free advertising."
Again, purely a business issue, and it means
nothing to me. Free advertising... Yeah, okay,
so what? In my case, I'd say it does
count as free advertising, because I buy what
I like, and I can't like what I haven't heard.
I won't act so naive as to deny that, particularly
the current generation of younger kids, many people
see "free" music as nothing more than free music.
Irrelevant either way.
People just want something for free when they
learn they don't have to pay for it.
Certainly a well-defendable position, if we take the
undeniably realistic stance that very few of us
have attained so deep a Zen-like state that we no
longer experience desire. But still, it has a flaw,
which I believe I personally exemplify.
I buy a lot of media... Books, CDs, DVDs,
a few hundred dollars worth per month. For the most
part I try to stick with independant artists, but
won't deny that a few bucks goes to RIAA members.
Believe it or not, I do consider the new Napster
style of distribution a damned good idea. They need to
expand their catalog to include quite a lot more, and
need to not use
Yes, heaven forbid we ask people to stop
breaking the law because it's WRONG.
Yes, many people do consider the law
wrong in this case. Not your meaning, but
your choice of phrasing came out all too
conveniently ambiguous.
The problem here involves the length
of copyright, and the sources of "real"
creativity...
First, publishing and distribution have become
much easier and cheaper than when the
idea of copyrights first entered the law. As
a result, you don't need word of mouth and 20
years of slow trickle to get a new book/album/whatever
out to the public, it takes hours to months. The
vast majority of the profit that will
eventually derive from sales, comes in within a year
or two. So, considering that, why has the duration
of copyrights increased rather than decreased?
At present, I would say that even a decade should
suffice.
But, the standard comback goes, why shouldn't
the "creator" of a work get to keep copyrights forever?
That goes back to my comment on the source of
creativity. People do not create new content in a
vacuum. They do so as part of a specific culture,
with a cultural heritage on which to draw (and
theoretically contribute to). As an example, how
much "modern" music have you heard that uses, almost
verbatim, one (or more) of the voices of Pachelbel's
Canon in D? So, if you play classical music on an
electric guitar and rap to it, does that really count
as a "new" song for which you deserve royalties for
the next few centuries? Going further, the entire style
of music that people will tolerate (and buy) depends
heavily on the culture as well. How do you
think the same audience that hissed at Brahm's 1859
Leipzig performance of his first piano concerto (now
"generally regarded as one of his most romantic works"),
would have reacted to, say, Metallica? Or how do you
suppose the puritans would have received Ozzy (I suspect
"warmly", in the bonfire sense). Artistic creations
depend on their culture to have value. They represent
miniscule additions to that culture, not giant leaps
that would warrant such enormous legal protections.
Or to put it another way, they don't have value because
of their uniqueness, but precisely because of their
almost total lack of uniqueness, with a tiny grain
of novelty thrown in.
So, does this justify pirating music? That depends...
Do you believe you have the right to access your own
culture; or, do you believe that others have the right
to lock your own culture away from you and make you
pay to experience it?
Re:Who thought, it would take Slashdot this long?
on
Napster Has Been Cracked
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You can
Get it here, about ten lines down, the
"Output Stacker".
Oddly, this doesn't seem to have appeared on thousands
of mirrors across the web yet, so please, take pity on
Marv and, if you can, mirror it and post a link here.
just any single reason it is a bad idea in
and of itself
Because, like Television, it supplants
actual supervision and human interaction
with (potential) role-model adults.
Because itinvites a plethora of abuses (directly,
not slippery-slope arguments) such as ID-swapping
to actually make cutting class easier.
Because it reduces physical security against
those who should not enter a school or
a classroom, ie, the psycho mommy who just
lost custody in a divorce and plans to flee
to Canada, but oh bother, she doesn't
have a tag and so doesn't set off any red
flags when she goes where she aught not.
Because, like it or not, kids have just as much
of a deity-imparted (though legislatively deprived)
right to privacy as anyone else.
You don't need a slippery slope. I could come up
with more direct problems, probably hundreds
of slippery-slope argument, but I think most of us
who feel strongly against this can all agree on one
point... We simply consider it wrong. Just plain
abhorrent. Kids needs "parents", not "overseers".
You are well aware that it is harder than
that to get a restraining order.
I would imagine that it does vary from place
to place, and from judge to judge.
In my experience, however (with only an N of 3,
so not statistically valid, but acceptible "proof
of concept"), when women apply for a restraining
order, it takes very little "evidence"...
Basically if she'll stand there and say "He
scares me", she'll get it. When men ask for
them, then they need to jump through
hoops. I have one friend currently in a messy
divorce, who has a number of police reports of
her beating up him. They both
applied for restraining orders. Guess who
got one and who didn't?
Especially given the violent nature behind
many restraining order allocations, this is
a good implementation of GPS tracking
technology.
Violent nature? I can tell you've don't actually
know anyone who has either applied for
one or gotten one against them... The process
runs like this: "Hi, judge, I'd like a
restraining order against Fred", "Okay,
granted". Seriously. You ask, you get, very
little in the way of "proof", particularly if
you belong to the ovary-bearing half of our
species.
in this case (when one choses to break
the law), it is appropriate
I would almost agree with you, if
restraining orders had anything to
do with some form of actual "conviction" for
a crime. But they don't.
I do, however, have one further point that
makes me wary of this... What counts as
"entering a restricted zone"? If you ride
the bus to work and, without ever leaving
the highway, it happens to pass within 50 feet
of an ex-GF's workplace (goddess forbid she
works somewhere big enough that the bus actually
stops there)... Do you really have
faith that the government will apply enough
intelligence in their monitoring of such a
system to not fire off an automatic summons for
violating the restraining order?
one of the witnesses had put stuff on the internet that made her seem less credible
Not familiar with the case (or Canadian law,
for that matter) - How does that count as a
mistrial? "Waah, we had to actually do some
work to find this really old drivel she posted
on the internet a decade ago!"??? Sure, if
the defense lawyers encouraged her to remove it
and then deny it ever existing, I could see
it as not quite kosher, but this sounds more
like a precedent by which any case
would mistrial, uncomfortable near the realm
of thoughtcrime... "The witness can't prove she
never fantasized about Jesus Christ
jackhammering Mickey Mouse in the doo-doo
hole with a lawn dart as Garth Brooks gives
birth to something resembling a cheddar cheese
log with almonds on Santa Claus's tummy-tum,
so we request a mistrial". Doesn't make much
sense, IMO...
I guess from my point of view it is
PERFECTLY sane request.
Tell me... How does one properly give credit to
the author of a given section of code if you
can't mention that author by name?
Granted, in the case of open source code you
don't strictly need to credit the original
author, but common practice tends more toward
politely giving kudos to whomever did most of
the work...
So, if Recalcitrantly-Euphemistic-Development
-House-Abusing-Trademarks doesn't want credit for
their work, I would agree with you, this turns
into a non-issue. But it looks an awfully lot
like shooting themselves in the foot.
Not quite true, but I don't technically work as a
"mathematician", whatever that would mean (most
likely, it would mean a professor of mathematics),
so okay...
I take it you can claim both of those
titles, that you bring them up as relevant,
rather than merely committing a poisoning-the-well
argumentative fallacy?
Actually, $9 in 1980 with 25 years of
compound @ 2.5% inflation (your figures,
not mine) is ~$16
Yep... And if we currently payed $7.42 to
$16.69 per CD, I would agree that sounds
reasonable. However, you mixed and matched
incorrectly - You compared the low
end of the modern range to the high
end of the 1980-range. Some used
CDs cost more than $7.42, and the only time
I bought a "new" (non-single) CD that low,
I did so at a going-out-of-business sale
at a local mom-n-pop record store.
Try it yourself here.
Okay... $4 to $9, according to your link,
becomes $9.67 to $21.76.
Fair enough, that comes out a bit closer...
But still short of $12-$25 that a modern
CD actually costs, despite the CD costing
far less to manufacture than a cassette tape.
By analogy, inflation-adjusted, what used to
get you the equivalent of a deluxe edition
type-IV double-cassette edition, will now get
you a typical new-release top-40. And what used
to get a typical new-release top-40 tape will
get you a copy of "Deaf Steve's Polka Favorites"
from the cutout bin.
Folks who pay for all their content will probably
pay (relatively) less than they do now.
You mean like what happened with the switch from
the (relatively) mechanically complex and expensive
to manufacture cassettes, to the mind-numbingly simple
and cheap CDs?
Hmm, does $4-$9 in 1980-dollars equate to $12-$25 in 2005
dollars? At 2.5% inflation per year, it doesn't even
come close. Bummer.
A tipical/. comment appropriately modded insightful.
At the same time it's completely wrong.
A tYpical **AA apologist comment modded
insightful. At the same time it directly contradicts
historical evidence.
Tell me, do you guys really believe this crap, or do
you just post it as a form of trolling? Or do you
all work for the **AA and they actually pay you to
betray the rights of your own species to your soulless
corporate masters?
For each of your examples, you omitted two rather
critical steps...
1) optain hardware on which to play media.
2) configure software/firmware with which to play media.
3) maintain #'s one and two indefinitely.
In the case of a CD player, this means a $20 CD player,
and maybe you'll need to set the clock on it. It
will work for many years (I have a >15YO CD Walkman
that still works as well as the day I bought it) exacactly
the same way as when you bought it, and you'll never need
to upgrade either the hardware or software in it. It
consumes a few watts at most.
In the case of a computer, this means a $400-and-up hardware
platform. You'll need to install an OS, configure it; install
iTMS software, configure it, get an iTMS account; install a
player, configure it. It will work like that until you install
a single incompatible program that happens to clobber any of
the above dependancies. In 2-3 years, you'll need to upgrade
your hardware just to play the newest compressed media format,
which still fails to give true-CD quality. It consumes
power best measured in hundreds of watts.
And you seriously don't see why the physical CD player
counts as a the more simple of the two options?
Finally, as a sort of full-disclosure, I keep my music in
FLAC format, on my file server, and can access that music
from any of the computers in my house, including my actual
entertainment center. This, however, involves SOOOOOOO
much more knowledge, setup, and expense than popping a disc in
a $20 player, however, that you can't even compare them. For
me, it works "better". But it doesn't even come close
to "easier".
Even still, PC cdrom drives can process the
audio off of a CD on their own (See grey cable)
which is a testament to how little processing
raw PCM data must take.
Yeah... "None".
Raw PCM. You said it, you know enough to know
what a CD contains (though not much detail, more
than 99% of people), yet apparently missed
the point of what PCM actually means.
CDs contain raw PCM data. Your sound card
turns digital PCM directly into analog voltages.
Your speakers express those voltages as a magnetic
field strength, which in turn translates directly
into a cone position, the change in which (over
time) we perceive as sound. One PCM sample
translates directly into one position of your
speaker's cone, no CPU-time involved, just one
signed 16-bit D2A conversion.
I bet some in-depth tests might show the
'eggs' are simply not entirely random.
Wow, with one closing sentence you managed to
destroy the rest of your fairly good post...
First of all, "truly" random numbers with a zero
mean over time can and do stray
arbitrarily far from zero. No big deal there.
However, the entire premise of the GCP involves
why these eggs take such trips away from
zero for a while. I have no doubt that Radin
would agree with you 100% that the "'eggs' are
simply not entirely random". The difference,
he would apparently claim they deviate from
truely random in response (or anticipation of)
major global events, while skeptics (I don't
use that as a "bad" word here) such as yourself
would claim the eggs just produce poor random
numbers and Radin has abused a selection bias
in interpreting the outcome.
Both of those points of view miss the reality that
I mention in my second sentence, however - "Perfect"
random numbers will deviate from mean on the short-term
(in fact, they can do so indefinitely as well,
but you couldn't then say they have a distribution
with a population mean, only a sample mean). So
selection bias in interpreting results, yes. But poor
random numbers? Probably not.
Don't forget that Napster going out of
business or not, this is probably an offense
under the DMCA.
To quote a recent Slashdot FP about Norway's
new CD ripping law... "We are going to be a
nation of lawbreakers if this law is passed
in its current form."
Most Americans remain happily oblivious
of the DMCA. Those of us that know about it,
break it on a regular basis (Daily? It has
such vague wording, that if you consider a
physical CD as an "access control mechanism",
ripping even your own music collection to
Vorbis would technically violate it).
So, does it matter?
Right up there with the PATRIOT act; The
establishment of "secret" laws that the
public doesn't have the right to know
until they break them, at which time
they vanish without formal charges; And
a plethora of other all-too-1984-like laws,
this crap puts a great big neon sign over
the US's continuing slide into totalitarianism.
Aside from that, no. No one cares. We all
break "stupid" laws daily, from speeding on
our way to work to breaking the DMCA to "40%"
of us "trying at least once" weed every now
and then. Very, very scary world we live in,
where most people consider the law a
joke, but even worse, the laws do seem
almost like a bad joke - And worst of all,
the government actually puts people in prison
based on those jokes!
don't software sound cards that just dump
the song as a wave still work(thus taking it
a straight D-to-D conversion)?
Perhaps, but I seem to recall hearing that
MS's Janus makes use of a "secure sound path",
meaning that it won't play unless the player,
the OS, the driver, and the actual hardware all
promise not to let the user have access to
anything but the end result (usually, analog
line-level audio).
Though I may have overstated it - Perhaps they
just have that as a sort of ideal target, but
the current implementation falls far short
of it.
Hmm, kind funny, legally downloading music so
you can steal it later?
Yah, it does have a certain irony to it...
Who knows... I personally prefer my digital music as
lossless CD rips, but for filling (at least temporarily
until I can find original CDs) all the hundreds of
one-hit-wonder gaps in my collection? Seem like a
pretty sweet deal...
On one hand, a person with a dual core chip is likely to
get slightly better performance than 2 actual chips.
...And a person with a 2GHz processor will get better performance
than a 1GHz processor (with the the same processor core, of course),
so why not charge based on clock rate?
But then, a person with a bigger L1 cache will also get better
performance, so why not charge based on transistor count?
Why not just charge based on MFLOPS or MIPS? Why not charge based
on actual transaction throughput?
This amounts to nothing more than a quick-and-easy way to try to
sneak through a regular doubling of their pricing structure.
Realistically, we can expect Moore's law to start applying to
number of cores, rather than number of transistors. So, in 20
years, will Larry expect their customers to pay more than the
GDP of most smaller industrialized nations? In 30 years, will
he let us use Oracle if we just make him "Emperor Ellison I, monarch
of Earth and the Lunar Colonies"?
No. In a few years, Oracle will simply reverse this policy,
and go back to their current approach of striking the corporate
rock with a big stick until it runs out of blood. That, or
they will cease to exist. In the meantime... Anyone currently
dependant on Oracle would do well to start migrating now,
because, of the three possible outcomes (no change; no per-core
pricing; going under), two mean you'll need to change eventually,
and the remaining option means you'll at least get raped over
the short-term.
Would I like grass that grows to 2" tall and
has built-in resistance to weed killer?
That all depends...
Will Monsanto sue me if I don't use their
brand of glyphosate, that cost 10x as much?
If it does grow to more than 2", just
very slowly, will they sue me for not using
their brand of lawnmower blades, in their
brand of lawnmower, running on their brand
of gasoline, all of which cost 10x as much
as normal?
If I go away for the summer and this grass
actually goes to seed, with they sue me for
millions in lost profits because a few of
those seeds landed in my neighbors' yards?
No, thank-you-very-much! I intend to stay as
far away from GE products as I possibly can...
And that has nothing to do with the
BS fears about "franken"-products.
Unless I am missing some clause that allows
you to keep the songs should they go out of
business.
Ah, you must have missed the "Moore's Law"
clause in the fine print. No worries, they
put it in really quite small words, very
easy to miss. For your convenience:
"In the event that Napster Inc
(tm)(s)(r)(c)(FOAD) should return once more
to the realm of insolvency, your music will
temporarily become unavailable. This period
of unavailability shall last for a period of
between a week and eight years, depending on
the existance of any flaws in our encryption
algorithm, advancement in CPU technology, and
the general petulance of newly-unemployed
Napster engineers with access to the key to
our DRM implementation. In the meantime,
we encourage you to make due with a lower
quality DtoA-to-AtoD transcoded version,
which most of our potential customers lack
the aural discrimination to notice as
massively inferior.".
So, as you can see, you'll eventually get access
to your music back. Perhaps sooner (possibly
even long before Napster goes under, depending
on algorithmic weaknesses in their DRM), perhaps
later, probably not quite legally, but it will
happen, eventually.
By modding it as 'funny' you've actually
deprived the OP of total karma. I wish more/. mods would realize that +1 FUNNY actually
detracts from total Karma.
You assume that a "typical" article would hit
+5 eventually, which does not hold true. Most
posts get no moderation, a decent number get to
+3, a few get to +4, and the rare one makes +5
(or -1... strange how those two seem to occur
with rougly equal frequency - Fortunately, +5
helps a lot more than -1 hurts <G>)
So, looking at it like that... For a truly +5
informative or interesting post, yes, a funny
mod hurts. But for the typical +2 or 3 post,
a +1 funny means that more people will see it
(Hey, I'd like to have the time to read
at a threshold of 0 or 1, but I also have a
life outside Slashdot), and as a result, it
may get more karma-augmenting moderation
than it would have otherwise.
Oh, and for those mods reading this,
while you may at first consider it offtopic
to the FP article, if you read the actual
parent to which I responded, you'll find
that it counts as 100% on-topic.
Wrong. Here in Finland, a new 160 GB hard
disk ( Maxtor DiamondMax 10) costs 89 euros.
An empty 700 MB cd costs 1 euro.
WOW do blank media prices suck in Europe!
I don't mean that as a taunt or as nationalistic
gloating, but just... Wow.
Here in the US, I can get a 100ct spool of
blank name-brand 8x DVD+R for $35 (for noname
4x media, I found them as low as $19/100, but
wouldn't really trust those for anything but
a throwaway means of getting some large but
replaceable files between two places). Comparing
that to HDDs, I could almost get a cheap
60GB EIDE HDD. 450GB vs 60GB, making the
HDD solution literally 7.5x more expensive,
per GB.
Slashdot Mirror
It's far more cool now that it's in Java too.
;-)
Because, after all, nothing will get the suits to approve your geek-toy upgrade budget like using a language that makes even "hello world" feel slow...
Get a grip, people.
Because, after all, so many legit uses exist for a trademark related to a product you have no right to, and in fact, arguably compete with?
I'll agree people aught not overreact so much, since this looks like a pretty solid case if Foley gets the trademark and the MAME team decide to take it to court. But giving someone the "benefit of the doubt" requires some actual "doubt" about their intentions.
By what mechanism can they collect?
Well, beside the black mark on her credit, we also visit State A fairly often (every couple of months), as all of our family still lives there. Kinda inconvenient when simply getting pulled over means a night in jail (since they could put out a warrant for her in that state).
And, although I don't know how much of it they can actually do, they threatened all manner of nasties, from getting her insurance, license, and registration suspended, to actual prison time if they ever did manage to catch her back in state A.
Overall, not worth the hassle for a few hundred bucks... Also not worth getting a lawyer over, which would certainly cost 10x the bill itself.
And sadly, that last point nicely sums up exactly why tax agencies get away with so much... The cost of fighting the BS fees exceeds the fees themselves.
Just because the states claim the right doesn't mean that they will be allowed the right.
You make a HUGE mistake in trying to apply logic to tax laws...
Yes, you could point to a million possible ways that the "use" taxes don't apply. But state taxation departments simply don't care - They can and will make your life hell, even if you "win" your argument.
Case in point... My SO and I moved from state A to state B roughly four years ago. Last year, she received an excise tax bill from state A, plus tons in penalties, for those three years.
After literally dozens of hours wasted on the phone (which at her salary, arguably cost quite a bit more than the tax bill itself), she finally convinced them she no longer lived in state A. She STILL had to pay the late penalty charges on the bill that everyone involved agreed she never actually owed (the "logic", if you can call it that, ran something like "You may not have owed us that money, but you did fail to pay it promptly, so the penalties still apply even though the original bill doesn't"... Whiskey Tango Foxtrot???). She paid it just to get the whole miserable mess over with. Okay, all seemed great.
Guess where she got a new excise tax bill from this spring?
If only we could produce hotties like Madeleine Albright, Condaleeza Rice, and Barbara Bush.
;-)
Well, you do have Margaret Thatcher...
Not to mention the whole royal family...
Are GPL programs part of the "culture," thereby meaning anybody can break the GPL and do whatever they want with the code?
The GPL doesn't restrict my actual access to works under it, nor even my ability to modify such code. It only "limits" my ability to make changes and then deprive the world of those changes (I put "limits" in quotes because the GPL really only restricts the actions of those who already have the idea of reducing our access to our own culture, for profit).
The person who made the media content owns the content and can do what they want with it
Careful not to mistake law for reality. They don't really mesh all that well, you know...
The person who made the content has a lot of power. They have the power to add to our culture, if only a tiny bit at a time, or the power to never reveal their creation. Once they chose one of those paths, their power ends. The law attempts to put a sort of flow regulator on that decision, turning the power into profit over time. But in reality, that means nothing. The power of creation ends with release.
When someone makes media content, it doesn't magically travel up into the clouds and become part of some global collective accessible to everyone.
Yes, actually, thanks to the internet, it does. The only true barrier to free information, the physical access, has effectively vanished. I consider this a good thing. You may not agree, and you don't have to. But both our opinions have become moot, since the barrier has vanished. You can either fret about the dam breaking, or you can finally quench your thirst. Your choice.
The RIAA is evil.
While true, I conside this probably the single worst reason to pirate content. Just because the RIAA sucks rotten monkey cocks doesn't mean I have the right to exploit them.
Information/culture/whatever wants to be free (the basic argument you're putting forward).
Although probably closest to my actual opinion, still quite a bit off. Animism, while cute, dosn't really work well in the real world. Rocks don't feel pain. Books don't get offended if you dislike them. Information doesn't want freedom.
The music industry is using an "obsolete business model,"
Their problem, not mine. I would actually go farther and say that the industry as a whole counts as obsolete, and don't particularly care whether or not they update their models for exploiting both the artists and the public. The "poor record company executives" don't even enter my thoughts when I choose to pirate something or not. They have entered the realm of uselessness, now that artists can realistically publish their works on the internet for a cost approaching zero.
It's "free advertising."
Again, purely a business issue, and it means nothing to me. Free advertising... Yeah, okay, so what? In my case, I'd say it does count as free advertising, because I buy what I like, and I can't like what I haven't heard. I won't act so naive as to deny that, particularly the current generation of younger kids, many people see "free" music as nothing more than free music. Irrelevant either way.
People just want something for free when they learn they don't have to pay for it.
Certainly a well-defendable position, if we take the undeniably realistic stance that very few of us have attained so deep a Zen-like state that we no longer experience desire. But still, it has a flaw, which I believe I personally exemplify.
I buy a lot of media... Books, CDs, DVDs, a few hundred dollars worth per month. For the most part I try to stick with independant artists, but won't deny that a few bucks goes to RIAA members.
Believe it or not, I do consider the new Napster style of distribution a damned good idea. They need to expand their catalog to include quite a lot more, and need to not use
Yes, heaven forbid we ask people to stop breaking the law because it's WRONG.
Yes, many people do consider the law wrong in this case. Not your meaning, but your choice of phrasing came out all too conveniently ambiguous.
The problem here involves the length of copyright, and the sources of "real" creativity...
First, publishing and distribution have become much easier and cheaper than when the idea of copyrights first entered the law. As a result, you don't need word of mouth and 20 years of slow trickle to get a new book/album/whatever out to the public, it takes hours to months. The vast majority of the profit that will eventually derive from sales, comes in within a year or two. So, considering that, why has the duration of copyrights increased rather than decreased? At present, I would say that even a decade should suffice.
But, the standard comback goes, why shouldn't the "creator" of a work get to keep copyrights forever?
That goes back to my comment on the source of creativity. People do not create new content in a vacuum. They do so as part of a specific culture, with a cultural heritage on which to draw (and theoretically contribute to). As an example, how much "modern" music have you heard that uses, almost verbatim, one (or more) of the voices of Pachelbel's Canon in D? So, if you play classical music on an electric guitar and rap to it, does that really count as a "new" song for which you deserve royalties for the next few centuries? Going further, the entire style of music that people will tolerate (and buy) depends heavily on the culture as well. How do you think the same audience that hissed at Brahm's 1859 Leipzig performance of his first piano concerto (now "generally regarded as one of his most romantic works"), would have reacted to, say, Metallica? Or how do you suppose the puritans would have received Ozzy (I suspect "warmly", in the bonfire sense). Artistic creations depend on their culture to have value. They represent miniscule additions to that culture, not giant leaps that would warrant such enormous legal protections. Or to put it another way, they don't have value because of their uniqueness, but precisely because of their almost total lack of uniqueness, with a tiny grain of novelty thrown in.
So, does this justify pirating music? That depends... Do you believe you have the right to access your own culture; or, do you believe that others have the right to lock your own culture away from you and make you pay to experience it?
You can Get it here, about ten lines down, the "Output Stacker".
Oddly, this doesn't seem to have appeared on thousands of mirrors across the web yet, so please, take pity on Marv and, if you can, mirror it and post a link here.
just any single reason it is a bad idea in and of itself
Because, like Television, it supplants actual supervision and human interaction with (potential) role-model adults.
Because itinvites a plethora of abuses (directly, not slippery-slope arguments) such as ID-swapping to actually make cutting class easier.
Because it reduces physical security against those who should not enter a school or a classroom, ie, the psycho mommy who just lost custody in a divorce and plans to flee to Canada, but oh bother, she doesn't have a tag and so doesn't set off any red flags when she goes where she aught not.
Because, like it or not, kids have just as much of a deity-imparted (though legislatively deprived) right to privacy as anyone else.
You don't need a slippery slope. I could come up with more direct problems, probably hundreds of slippery-slope argument, but I think most of us who feel strongly against this can all agree on one point... We simply consider it wrong. Just plain abhorrent. Kids needs "parents", not "overseers".
You are well aware that it is harder than that to get a restraining order.
I would imagine that it does vary from place to place, and from judge to judge.
In my experience, however (with only an N of 3, so not statistically valid, but acceptible "proof of concept"), when women apply for a restraining order, it takes very little "evidence"... Basically if she'll stand there and say "He scares me", she'll get it. When men ask for them, then they need to jump through hoops. I have one friend currently in a messy divorce, who has a number of police reports of her beating up him. They both applied for restraining orders. Guess who got one and who didn't?
Especially given the violent nature behind many restraining order allocations, this is a good implementation of GPS tracking technology.
Violent nature? I can tell you've don't actually know anyone who has either applied for one or gotten one against them... The process runs like this: "Hi, judge, I'd like a restraining order against Fred", "Okay, granted". Seriously. You ask, you get, very little in the way of "proof", particularly if you belong to the ovary-bearing half of our species.
in this case (when one choses to break the law), it is appropriate
I would almost agree with you, if restraining orders had anything to do with some form of actual "conviction" for a crime. But they don't.
I do, however, have one further point that makes me wary of this... What counts as "entering a restricted zone"? If you ride the bus to work and, without ever leaving the highway, it happens to pass within 50 feet of an ex-GF's workplace (goddess forbid she works somewhere big enough that the bus actually stops there)... Do you really have faith that the government will apply enough intelligence in their monitoring of such a system to not fire off an automatic summons for violating the restraining order?
I, for one, do not.
one of the witnesses had put stuff on the internet that made her seem less credible
Not familiar with the case (or Canadian law, for that matter) - How does that count as a mistrial? "Waah, we had to actually do some work to find this really old drivel she posted on the internet a decade ago!"??? Sure, if the defense lawyers encouraged her to remove it and then deny it ever existing, I could see it as not quite kosher, but this sounds more like a precedent by which any case would mistrial, uncomfortable near the realm of thoughtcrime... "The witness can't prove she never fantasized about Jesus Christ jackhammering Mickey Mouse in the doo-doo hole with a lawn dart as Garth Brooks gives birth to something resembling a cheddar cheese log with almonds on Santa Claus's tummy-tum, so we request a mistrial". Doesn't make much sense, IMO...
I guess from my point of view it is PERFECTLY sane request.
Tell me... How does one properly give credit to the author of a given section of code if you can't mention that author by name?
Granted, in the case of open source code you don't strictly need to credit the original author, but common practice tends more toward politely giving kudos to whomever did most of the work...
So, if Recalcitrantly-Euphemistic-Development -House-Abusing-Trademarks doesn't want credit for their work, I would agree with you, this turns into a non-issue. But it looks an awfully lot like shooting themselves in the foot.
A typical non-economist
True...
(and non-mathematician)
Not quite true, but I don't technically work as a "mathematician", whatever that would mean (most likely, it would mean a professor of mathematics), so okay...
I take it you can claim both of those titles, that you bring them up as relevant, rather than merely committing a poisoning-the-well argumentative fallacy?
Actually, $9 in 1980 with 25 years of compound @ 2.5% inflation (your figures, not mine) is ~$16
Yep... And if we currently payed $7.42 to $16.69 per CD, I would agree that sounds reasonable. However, you mixed and matched incorrectly - You compared the low end of the modern range to the high end of the 1980-range. Some used CDs cost more than $7.42, and the only time I bought a "new" (non-single) CD that low, I did so at a going-out-of-business sale at a local mom-n-pop record store.
Try it yourself here.
Okay... $4 to $9, according to your link, becomes $9.67 to $21.76.
Fair enough, that comes out a bit closer... But still short of $12-$25 that a modern CD actually costs, despite the CD costing far less to manufacture than a cassette tape. By analogy, inflation-adjusted, what used to get you the equivalent of a deluxe edition type-IV double-cassette edition, will now get you a typical new-release top-40. And what used to get a typical new-release top-40 tape will get you a copy of "Deaf Steve's Polka Favorites" from the cutout bin.
Folks who pay for all their content will probably pay (relatively) less than they do now.
/. comment appropriately modded insightful.
At the same time it's completely wrong.
You mean like what happened with the switch from the (relatively) mechanically complex and expensive to manufacture cassettes, to the mind-numbingly simple and cheap CDs?
Hmm, does $4-$9 in 1980-dollars equate to $12-$25 in 2005 dollars? At 2.5% inflation per year, it doesn't even come close. Bummer.
A tipical
A tYpical **AA apologist comment modded insightful. At the same time it directly contradicts historical evidence.
Tell me, do you guys really believe this crap, or do you just post it as a form of trolling? Or do you all work for the **AA and they actually pay you to betray the rights of your own species to your soulless corporate masters?
Where is the simplicity of the CD player again?
For each of your examples, you omitted two rather critical steps...
1) optain hardware on which to play media.
2) configure software/firmware with which to play media.
3) maintain #'s one and two indefinitely.
In the case of a CD player, this means a $20 CD player, and maybe you'll need to set the clock on it. It will work for many years (I have a >15YO CD Walkman that still works as well as the day I bought it) exacactly the same way as when you bought it, and you'll never need to upgrade either the hardware or software in it. It consumes a few watts at most.
In the case of a computer, this means a $400-and-up hardware platform. You'll need to install an OS, configure it; install iTMS software, configure it, get an iTMS account; install a player, configure it. It will work like that until you install a single incompatible program that happens to clobber any of the above dependancies. In 2-3 years, you'll need to upgrade your hardware just to play the newest compressed media format, which still fails to give true-CD quality. It consumes power best measured in hundreds of watts.
And you seriously don't see why the physical CD player counts as a the more simple of the two options?
Finally, as a sort of full-disclosure, I keep my music in FLAC format, on my file server, and can access that music from any of the computers in my house, including my actual entertainment center. This, however, involves SOOOOOOO much more knowledge, setup, and expense than popping a disc in a $20 player, however, that you can't even compare them. For me, it works "better". But it doesn't even come close to "easier".
Even still, PC cdrom drives can process the audio off of a CD on their own (See grey cable) which is a testament to how little processing raw PCM data must take.
Yeah... "None".
Raw PCM. You said it, you know enough to know what a CD contains (though not much detail, more than 99% of people), yet apparently missed the point of what PCM actually means.
CDs contain raw PCM data. Your sound card turns digital PCM directly into analog voltages. Your speakers express those voltages as a magnetic field strength, which in turn translates directly into a cone position, the change in which (over time) we perceive as sound. One PCM sample translates directly into one position of your speaker's cone, no CPU-time involved, just one signed 16-bit D2A conversion.
I bet some in-depth tests might show the 'eggs' are simply not entirely random.
Wow, with one closing sentence you managed to destroy the rest of your fairly good post...
First of all, "truly" random numbers with a zero mean over time can and do stray arbitrarily far from zero. No big deal there.
However, the entire premise of the GCP involves why these eggs take such trips away from zero for a while. I have no doubt that Radin would agree with you 100% that the "'eggs' are simply not entirely random". The difference, he would apparently claim they deviate from truely random in response (or anticipation of) major global events, while skeptics (I don't use that as a "bad" word here) such as yourself would claim the eggs just produce poor random numbers and Radin has abused a selection bias in interpreting the outcome.
Both of those points of view miss the reality that I mention in my second sentence, however - "Perfect" random numbers will deviate from mean on the short-term (in fact, they can do so indefinitely as well, but you couldn't then say they have a distribution with a population mean, only a sample mean). So selection bias in interpreting results, yes. But poor random numbers? Probably not.
Don't forget that Napster going out of business or not, this is probably an offense under the DMCA.
To quote a recent Slashdot FP about Norway's new CD ripping law... "We are going to be a nation of lawbreakers if this law is passed in its current form."
Most Americans remain happily oblivious of the DMCA. Those of us that know about it, break it on a regular basis (Daily? It has such vague wording, that if you consider a physical CD as an "access control mechanism", ripping even your own music collection to Vorbis would technically violate it).
So, does it matter?
Right up there with the PATRIOT act; The establishment of "secret" laws that the public doesn't have the right to know until they break them, at which time they vanish without formal charges; And a plethora of other all-too-1984-like laws, this crap puts a great big neon sign over the US's continuing slide into totalitarianism. Aside from that, no. No one cares. We all break "stupid" laws daily, from speeding on our way to work to breaking the DMCA to "40%" of us "trying at least once" weed every now and then. Very, very scary world we live in, where most people consider the law a joke, but even worse, the laws do seem almost like a bad joke - And worst of all, the government actually puts people in prison based on those jokes!
don't software sound cards that just dump the song as a wave still work(thus taking it a straight D-to-D conversion)?
Perhaps, but I seem to recall hearing that MS's Janus makes use of a "secure sound path", meaning that it won't play unless the player, the OS, the driver, and the actual hardware all promise not to let the user have access to anything but the end result (usually, analog line-level audio).
Though I may have overstated it - Perhaps they just have that as a sort of ideal target, but the current implementation falls far short of it.
Hmm, kind funny, legally downloading music so you can steal it later?
Yah, it does have a certain irony to it...
Who knows... I personally prefer my digital music as lossless CD rips, but for filling (at least temporarily until I can find original CDs) all the hundreds of one-hit-wonder gaps in my collection? Seem like a pretty sweet deal...
On one hand, a person with a dual core chip is likely to get slightly better performance than 2 actual chips.
...And a person with a 2GHz processor will get better performance
than a 1GHz processor (with the the same processor core, of course),
so why not charge based on clock rate?
But then, a person with a bigger L1 cache will also get better performance, so why not charge based on transistor count?
Why not just charge based on MFLOPS or MIPS? Why not charge based on actual transaction throughput?
This amounts to nothing more than a quick-and-easy way to try to sneak through a regular doubling of their pricing structure. Realistically, we can expect Moore's law to start applying to number of cores, rather than number of transistors. So, in 20 years, will Larry expect their customers to pay more than the GDP of most smaller industrialized nations? In 30 years, will he let us use Oracle if we just make him "Emperor Ellison I, monarch of Earth and the Lunar Colonies"?
No. In a few years, Oracle will simply reverse this policy, and go back to their current approach of striking the corporate rock with a big stick until it runs out of blood. That, or they will cease to exist. In the meantime... Anyone currently dependant on Oracle would do well to start migrating now, because, of the three possible outcomes (no change; no per-core pricing; going under), two mean you'll need to change eventually, and the remaining option means you'll at least get raped over the short-term.
Would I like grass that grows to 2" tall and has built-in resistance to weed killer?
That all depends...
Will Monsanto sue me if I don't use their brand of glyphosate, that cost 10x as much?
If it does grow to more than 2", just very slowly, will they sue me for not using their brand of lawnmower blades, in their brand of lawnmower, running on their brand of gasoline, all of which cost 10x as much as normal?
If I go away for the summer and this grass actually goes to seed, with they sue me for millions in lost profits because a few of those seeds landed in my neighbors' yards?
No, thank-you-very-much! I intend to stay as far away from GE products as I possibly can... And that has nothing to do with the BS fears about "franken"-products.
Ah, you must have missed the "Moore's Law" clause in the fine print. No worries, they put it in really quite small words, very easy to miss. For your convenience:
So, as you can see, you'll eventually get access to your music back. Perhaps sooner (possibly even long before Napster goes under, depending on algorithmic weaknesses in their DRM), perhaps later, probably not quite legally, but it will happen, eventually.
By modding it as 'funny' you've actually deprived the OP of total karma. I wish more /. mods would realize that +1 FUNNY actually
detracts from total Karma.
You assume that a "typical" article would hit +5 eventually, which does not hold true. Most posts get no moderation, a decent number get to +3, a few get to +4, and the rare one makes +5 (or -1... strange how those two seem to occur with rougly equal frequency - Fortunately, +5 helps a lot more than -1 hurts <G>)
So, looking at it like that... For a truly +5 informative or interesting post, yes, a funny mod hurts. But for the typical +2 or 3 post, a +1 funny means that more people will see it (Hey, I'd like to have the time to read at a threshold of 0 or 1, but I also have a life outside Slashdot), and as a result, it may get more karma-augmenting moderation than it would have otherwise.
Oh, and for those mods reading this, while you may at first consider it offtopic to the FP article, if you read the actual parent to which I responded, you'll find that it counts as 100% on-topic.
Wrong. Here in Finland, a new 160 GB hard disk ( Maxtor DiamondMax 10) costs 89 euros. An empty 700 MB cd costs 1 euro.
WOW do blank media prices suck in Europe! I don't mean that as a taunt or as nationalistic gloating, but just... Wow.
Here in the US, I can get a 100ct spool of blank name-brand 8x DVD+R for $35 (for noname 4x media, I found them as low as $19/100, but wouldn't really trust those for anything but a throwaway means of getting some large but replaceable files between two places). Comparing that to HDDs, I could almost get a cheap 60GB EIDE HDD. 450GB vs 60GB, making the HDD solution literally 7.5x more expensive, per GB.