Time to move on from this argument
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This whole concept of something ephemeral like an image or a sound being intellectual property is a manufactured concept. Consider that if somebody snaps your picture on the street and uses it in a jeans ad, you can sue them because you didn't sign a modelling release form. However, a news reporter can publish your picture or broadcast a recording of your voice free and clear. You don't inherently own your own image or the sounds you make, you only control them in certain contexts which are defined by laws. The laws aren't fundamental principles of the universe, they are rules we made up and they can be changed.
The recording industry only exists because complex, expensive recording and transmission technology was invented before today's cheap and simple technology that does the same things. If Edison had somehow invented computers and the Internet before the phonograph, there would never have been a reason for a recording industry. We would be accustomed to making and trading recordings of performances since the beginning of the 20th century. It would be completely ridiculous for somebody to jump up and say that this is suddenly evil, and there is going to be a new industry that acquires proprietary rights to performances and sells copies on proprietary media. But it will be a great boon to musicians because they will get 5 or 10 cents for each copy that sells for $20. Huh?? Are you nuts??
Until recording technology, musicians and other performance artists got paid only to perform. They have been able to make more money for a while, and a huge industry has been able to evolve that has made 100 times more money than they have. Well that's all fine, but musicians got along for centuries without any of it. Things have changed and we no longer need the temporary technology or the rules, so let's evolve and move on, and stop moralizing endlessly about it.
We are already pretty close to having the ability to launch nuclear waste into the sun and get rid of it permanently. Within the next century, doing it cheaply and safely will be a no-brainer, and this stupid monument to short-sightedness will probably have bathrooms AND a gift shop.
Since you proclaimed your christianity and specifically asked if it was a problem, I will reply on-topic that I do have a problem with that. Christianity as an organized force has been responsible for as much murder, rape and general carnage as Hitler, Mao, you name the bad guy. Yes, I do have a problem with your fucking religion.
The issue here is not artistic expression or game publishers' freedom of speech. The publisher is not being prevented in any way from publishing the games. The law is just trying to regulate access by minors, and guess what, that's not an issue of the rights of the minors either, it's an issue of the rights of their parents.
Kids really have very few legal rights, but they also have very few legal responsibilities. They also have very few people in their lives who see them as anything other than faucets plugged into bank accounts. Along with feeding, clothing and sheltering their kids, part of a parent's job is to shield them from candy-waving marketers who know that kids with low self-esteem will buy lots more stuff. Until you get to a certain age your parents are supposed to outsmart these PhD psychologists, usually with little help from the government.
The cutoff point between childhood and adulthood may be ridiculously arbitrary and inappropriate in some cases, but at some point you suddenly do get the basic human rights our founding fathers fought for, like lawsuits, credit card debt, and unrestricted access to cigarettes and video games. Until then your parents get to call the shots. There's nothing draconian about it, it's just their job.
I'm worried about this whole monitoring thing, especially in light of the earlier comment by the CEO of Turner Broadcasting to the effect that people who don't watch commercials are stealing programming. If the content industry wins this one against Sonic Blue, what's next? Will some astute judge order webcams installed in our homes to make sure we don't skip out to the bathroom during the commercials? Will our telephones have embedded anti-content-theft software that deactivates them during commercials, lest our attention be illegally diverted by conversation with real humans?
Just watched both versions of Rollerball. Now I'm imagining a game played with skates, motorcycles, napalm grenades and fire extinguisher balls. Mmmmmmm... napaaaalm.
Not to belittle the concept, but the term "wireless cable" reminds me of a mysterious product I once saw advertised on the side of a bus: "Oil-free Oil of Olay."
Several years ago I wanted to run a small web database app for parents of kids at my daughter's school. The only relevant server-side technologies I knew were ASP and MS Access. I was pretty much stuck with Win98 on my home computer because we had tons of kid games that wouldn't run under NT, and we couldn't afford a second computer anyway.
So what I did was use Personal Web Server, a free mini-version of IIS that does about everything IIS does. To get to my machine from the web I hosted a domain on a cheap host (HostSave, $7.95/mo) and did redirects to my home IP address. Although I wasn't paying for a static IP, it tended to stay the same for months at a time. Whenever it changed I simply fixed the links. The small number of users (parents from my daughter's school) were mostly hitting my site one at a time, and my DSL line was fast enough to give them decent response. Bandwidth was not an issue, but I bet it isn't for most people. This solution worked just fine, was dirt cheap and was perfect for a non-Unix person.
I was surprised Microsoft abandoned Personal Web Server. To run a server now under XP you have to upgrade to Professional. They have drawn in so many kids with Visual Basic, providing an easy and accessible way to play webmaster seems like a great idea. I guess it's part of casting the home Internet user as a consumer rather than a peer.
Adult freehosts are in business to promote specific pay sites, not to provide free hosting for you to use any way you want (duh!!). They will pull non-porn pages, or porn pages that promote non-approved sponsors.
By accepting this message into your email system you agree to allow the embedded script to remove all data, applications and operating systems from your network.
Hillary's comment about getting an A on a paper is pretty self-condemning, considering that her whole career is based on taking 99.9% of each "A" and giving the writer one tenth of one percent. Self-assured moralizers always fall on her faces trying to turn "It's legal and we can" into "It's Right."
What bothers me the most about this article is that it makes tremendous sense. Using the proven intimidation tactics of groups like right-wing Christians does make sense. Kicking a few carefully targeted politicians out of office would be a good way to get their colleagues' attention.
What's sad is that the bought and paid for nature of government in America is such an accepted fact nowadays. Apparently we finally woke up and smelled the coffee, but then all we did was order biscotti to go with it. Plotkin is suggesting throwing it right in some senator's face instead, and I think that's a hell of a good idea. I hope somebody at GeekPAC is listening to him.
Some time ago/. mentioned this story about inventor Larry Fullerton, who spent 25 years developing radio burst technology in his backyard lab. His company, Time Domain, is listed in the Entrepreneurs box of the SciAm article. It's nice to see 2 things happening: 1) the technology has not disappeared, and 2) one of the original pioneers is actually getting a piece of it.
An important point often missed by distributors of evaluation software is that it is NOT the same as FREE software, and should not be promoted as such. Tang is not orange juice. A free copy of crippleware or expireware is not the same as freeware.
I have no problem with people not giving away software for free, but I have a big problem with them pretending they are, just to get their foot in my door. In my mind it's in the same league as telemarketers who start out telling you they are conducting a survey. I have bought plenty of software after downloading the eval version, but NEVER after being tricked into downloading the eval copy in the guise of freeware.
Although the article does not mention it, Wil Wheaton is one of the hosts on the new G4 all-games network. As he describes on his website, he is having a great time playing games, writing and talking about them. A job many of us would envy!
About 10 years ago I read about a solid state device called a "holostore" that was in the prototype stage. It consisted of crystalline cylinders about a millimeter or so in diameter and 5 or 10 mm long, standing next to each other in a 50x50 array. Data was stored and read optically by three laser beams aimed at different angles polarizing the molecules, same principle as an LCD. I forget the total capacity but the transfer rate figure of 8 or 80Gb/second seems familiar. The prototype was said to have the same form factor as a 5-1/4-inch floppy drive, and like everything else it was supposed to be on the market in 2 or 3 years.
What I'm wondering is why the government has to be involved to any great extent. Didn't radio, television, cable and the Internet all become viable without this level of tax-fueled encouragement? If they want to sharpen the picture and add a BUY button, fine by me, but can't they do it without sucking up tax dollars?
I agree wholeheartedly that PetsWarehouse is the earthly home of his infernal majesty, Satan. PetsWarehouse has been an active force of evil ever since the 1960's, when its agents gave free drugs to Jimi Hendrix and fed Mama Cass a sandwich moments before she passed out in bed. They introduced Yoko Ono to John Lennon, and used death threats against the head of NBC to get the original Star Trek cancelled. In the eighties, PetsWarehouse hired hypnotists to force Coca Cola executives to change the taste of Coke, and was instrumental in the development of karaoke machines.
How about personal medallions that learn your pickup preferences and glow when you approach someone compatible. That way you could, for example, bypass the ones who are searching for that special someone and go right to the ones who just came in to get laid.
My oldest memory of reading about amorphous semiconductor photocells of the future is from the early 70's. They were the brainchild of Stanford Ovshinski, who later invented metal hydride batteries. Good to know amorphous solar cells might finally be taking off.
In his book 3001, the Earth's equator is studded with a series of tethered space platforms. Clarke's vision of these things includes a lot of interesting detail that I suspect is accurate.
I don't know where they get the figure of 1400 spams per year, because honestly I didn't read the article. But there are over 12 million companies in the United States alone. If a mere one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, you would get over 1000 msgs per month.
I've never tried this approach because it hasn't come up yet, but if an employer ever tries to force one of those blanket IP clauses on me, my plan is to remind them that by owning all my software they will be assuming complete legal liability for it. So if I decide to develop, say, the next generation peer-to-peer file sharing system at home, or for that matter, if any of the other employees who have already signed this contract are doing exactly that right now, the company will get to fend off the RIAA when the time comes.
I would be interested to know how a corporate lawyer would react to this.
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This whole concept of something ephemeral like an image or a sound being intellectual property is a manufactured concept. Consider that if somebody snaps your picture on the street and uses it in a jeans ad, you can sue them because you didn't sign a modelling release form. However, a news reporter can publish your picture or broadcast a recording of your voice free and clear. You don't inherently own your own image or the sounds you make, you only control them in certain contexts which are defined by laws. The laws aren't fundamental principles of the universe, they are rules we made up and they can be changed.
The recording industry only exists because complex, expensive recording and transmission technology was invented before today's cheap and simple technology that does the same things. If Edison had somehow invented computers and the Internet before the phonograph, there would never have been a reason for a recording industry. We would be accustomed to making and trading recordings of performances since the beginning of the 20th century. It would be completely ridiculous for somebody to jump up and say that this is suddenly evil, and there is going to be a new industry that acquires proprietary rights to performances and sells copies on proprietary media. But it will be a great boon to musicians because they will get 5 or 10 cents for each copy that sells for $20. Huh?? Are you nuts??
Until recording technology, musicians and other performance artists got paid only to perform. They have been able to make more money for a while, and a huge industry has been able to evolve that has made 100 times more money than they have. Well that's all fine, but musicians got along for centuries without any of it. Things have changed and we no longer need the temporary technology or the rules, so let's evolve and move on, and stop moralizing endlessly about it.
We are already pretty close to having the ability to launch nuclear waste into the sun and get rid of it permanently. Within the next century, doing it cheaply and safely will be a no-brainer, and this stupid monument to short-sightedness will probably have bathrooms AND a gift shop.
Since you proclaimed your christianity and specifically asked if it was a problem, I will reply on-topic that I do have a problem with that. Christianity as an organized force has been responsible for as much murder, rape and general carnage as Hitler, Mao, you name the bad guy. Yes, I do have a problem with your fucking religion.
The issue here is not artistic expression or game publishers' freedom of speech. The publisher is not being prevented in any way from publishing the games. The law is just trying to regulate access by minors, and guess what, that's not an issue of the rights of the minors either, it's an issue of the rights of their parents.
Kids really have very few legal rights, but they also have very few legal responsibilities. They also have very few people in their lives who see them as anything other than faucets plugged into bank accounts. Along with feeding, clothing and sheltering their kids, part of a parent's job is to shield them from candy-waving marketers who know that kids with low self-esteem will buy lots more stuff. Until you get to a certain age your parents are supposed to outsmart these PhD psychologists, usually with little help from the government.
The cutoff point between childhood and adulthood may be ridiculously arbitrary and inappropriate in some cases, but at some point you suddenly do get the basic human rights our founding fathers fought for, like lawsuits, credit card debt, and unrestricted access to cigarettes and video games. Until then your parents get to call the shots. There's nothing draconian about it, it's just their job.
I'm worried about this whole monitoring thing, especially in light of the earlier comment by the CEO of Turner Broadcasting to the effect that people who don't watch commercials are stealing programming. If the content industry wins this one against Sonic Blue, what's next? Will some astute judge order webcams installed in our homes to make sure we don't skip out to the bathroom during the commercials? Will our telephones have embedded anti-content-theft software that deactivates them during commercials, lest our attention be illegally diverted by conversation with real humans?
Just watched both versions of Rollerball. Now I'm imagining a game played with skates, motorcycles, napalm grenades and fire extinguisher balls. Mmmmmmm... napaaaalm.
Not to belittle the concept, but the term "wireless cable" reminds me of a mysterious product I once saw advertised on the side of a bus: "Oil-free Oil of Olay."
Several years ago I wanted to run a small web database app for parents of kids at my daughter's school. The only relevant server-side technologies I knew were ASP and MS Access. I was pretty much stuck with Win98 on my home computer because we had tons of kid games that wouldn't run under NT, and we couldn't afford a second computer anyway.
So what I did was use Personal Web Server, a free mini-version of IIS that does about everything IIS does. To get to my machine from the web I hosted a domain on a cheap host (HostSave, $7.95/mo) and did redirects to my home IP address. Although I wasn't paying for a static IP, it tended to stay the same for months at a time. Whenever it changed I simply fixed the links. The small number of users (parents from my daughter's school) were mostly hitting my site one at a time, and my DSL line was fast enough to give them decent response. Bandwidth was not an issue, but I bet it isn't for most people. This solution worked just fine, was dirt cheap and was perfect for a non-Unix person.
I was surprised Microsoft abandoned Personal Web Server. To run a server now under XP you have to upgrade to Professional. They have drawn in so many kids with Visual Basic, providing an easy and accessible way to play webmaster seems like a great idea. I guess it's part of casting the home Internet user as a consumer rather than a peer.
Adult freehosts are in business to promote specific pay sites, not to provide free hosting for you to use any way you want (duh!!). They will pull non-porn pages, or porn pages that promote non-approved sponsors.
Rod Hill, Store Manager for Best Buy... informed police that Abraham Cherian, an Indian American, was trying to rip off the store...
Indian American? What race was the store manager? Or do we not need to know that for some reason?
Dear RadLight,
By accepting this message into your email system you agree to allow the embedded script to remove all data, applications and operating systems from your network.
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Have a nice d#* 7j
Hillary's comment about getting an A on a paper is pretty self-condemning, considering that her whole career is based on taking 99.9% of each "A" and giving the writer one tenth of one percent. Self-assured moralizers always fall on her faces trying to turn "It's legal and we can" into "It's Right."
What bothers me the most about this article is that it makes tremendous sense. Using the proven intimidation tactics of groups like right-wing Christians does make sense. Kicking a few carefully targeted politicians out of office would be a good way to get their colleagues' attention.
What's sad is that the bought and paid for nature of government in America is such an accepted fact nowadays. Apparently we finally woke up and smelled the coffee, but then all we did was order biscotti to go with it. Plotkin is suggesting throwing it right in some senator's face instead, and I think that's a hell of a good idea. I hope somebody at GeekPAC is listening to him.
Some time ago /. mentioned this story about inventor Larry Fullerton, who spent 25 years developing radio burst technology in his backyard lab. His company, Time Domain, is listed in the Entrepreneurs box of the SciAm article. It's nice to see 2 things happening: 1) the technology has not disappeared, and 2) one of the original pioneers is actually getting a piece of it.
An important point often missed by distributors of evaluation software is that it is NOT the same as FREE software, and should not be promoted as such. Tang is not orange juice. A free copy of crippleware or expireware is not the same as freeware.
I have no problem with people not giving away software for free, but I have a big problem with them pretending they are, just to get their foot in my door. In my mind it's in the same league as telemarketers who start out telling you they are conducting a survey. I have bought plenty of software after downloading the eval version, but NEVER after being tricked into downloading the eval copy in the guise of freeware.
Although the article does not mention it, Wil Wheaton is one of the hosts on the new G4 all-games network. As he describes on his website, he is having a great time playing games, writing and talking about them. A job many of us would envy!
About 10 years ago I read about a solid state device called a "holostore" that was in the prototype stage. It consisted of crystalline cylinders about a millimeter or so in diameter and 5 or 10 mm long, standing next to each other in a 50x50 array. Data was stored and read optically by three laser beams aimed at different angles polarizing the molecules, same principle as an LCD. I forget the total capacity but the transfer rate figure of 8 or 80Gb/second seems familiar. The prototype was said to have the same form factor as a 5-1/4-inch floppy drive, and like everything else it was supposed to be on the market in 2 or 3 years.
What I'm wondering is why the government has to be involved to any great extent. Didn't radio, television, cable and the Internet all become viable without this level of tax-fueled encouragement? If they want to sharpen the picture and add a BUY button, fine by me, but can't they do it without sucking up tax dollars?
I agree wholeheartedly that PetsWarehouse is the earthly home of his infernal majesty, Satan. PetsWarehouse has been an active force of evil ever since the 1960's, when its agents gave free drugs to Jimi Hendrix and fed Mama Cass a sandwich moments before she passed out in bed. They introduced Yoko Ono to John Lennon, and used death threats against the head of NBC to get the original Star Trek cancelled. In the eighties, PetsWarehouse hired hypnotists to force Coca Cola executives to change the taste of Coke, and was instrumental in the development of karaoke machines.
How about personal medallions that learn your pickup preferences and glow when you approach someone compatible. That way you could, for example, bypass the ones who are searching for that special someone and go right to the ones who just came in to get laid.
My oldest memory of reading about amorphous semiconductor photocells of the future is from the early 70's. They were the brainchild of Stanford Ovshinski, who later invented metal hydride batteries. Good to know amorphous solar cells might finally be taking off.
In his book 3001, the Earth's equator is studded with a series of tethered space platforms. Clarke's vision of these things includes a lot of interesting detail that I suspect is accurate.
I don't know where they get the figure of 1400 spams per year, because honestly I didn't read the article. But there are over 12 million companies in the United States alone. If a mere one tenth of one percent of them sent you one email per year, you would get over 1000 msgs per month.
I've never tried this approach because it hasn't come up yet, but if an employer ever tries to force one of those blanket IP clauses on me, my plan is to remind them that by owning all my software they will be assuming complete legal liability for it. So if I decide to develop, say, the next generation peer-to-peer file sharing system at home, or for that matter, if any of the other employees who have already signed this contract are doing exactly that right now, the company will get to fend off the RIAA when the time comes.
I would be interested to know how a corporate lawyer would react to this.
is a gadget that can use any surface to display spam and online porn. For example:
From: Sasha234x3qu8r@yahoo.com
To: jb234923j492j34
Subject: saw your recent posting
Click Here to see Debbie Diamond, live in 3-D, on the kitchen counter next to the dish drainer!