and, even if there was, unless you lose a lot of money, the FBI simply isn't interested.
for example, domain hijacking via Network Solutions crappy email verfication system - due to their weak security (and my not knowing enough to choose the better methods that they do offer but don't promote) i lost my web site for almost a week while NetSol sat on their thumbs. when i called the FBI to see about finding the asshole who stole my domain, they flat out told me that they would not do anything unless the losses exceeded five thousand dollars. this is certainly not a lot of money to a large company, but it's a whole month's worth of business to me.
so, to put it simply, the FBI isn't interested in people who give you headaches. they will only act when there is sufficient money at stake.
Fortunately we have the opportunity to ensure that systemic failures that bring down civilisation are not possible. The question is, will we have the wisdom to take advantage of this?
Of course not. People are notorious for refusing to fix what isn't broken yet. It's almost a given that nothing is done about anything, until the shit hits the fan.
Pessimistic? Sure. Blame the last 1/4 of Metamagical Themas.
Programmers are artists, not engineers. Engineers have to wear shoes and act like adults. Programmers don't even need to wear socks and are perfectly within their rights to have swordfights in the hall whenever the mood strikes.
Formal methods are for book-following engineers, not free-spirited artists.
why not... you already have different laws depending on the race or sex of the victim/perpetrator (hate crime, domestic abuse, etc).
why not have different laws for different professions? "Five years? That's nothing. You're lucky you aren't a bricklayer; they get 10 years for murder!".
A: the corporation. but i'd like to think if i put in 10-14 hours/day on my music, and 0-1 on programming, i might make more playing music than my corp. would.
it's called supply and demand. price fixing is when two or more companies get together and set the price of something, thereby eliminating competition.
This has little to do with the actual topic and a lot to do with the usage of the word "corporation" on/....
Musicians are rarely wealthy. Corporations almost always.
Musician and corporation are not mutually exclusive. I am both.
As a musician I play guitar (poorly).
Also, I am the sole shareholder and sole employee of my own software company. As a corporation, I have to run my busniness in a certain way, obey certain tax laws and file forms on time. In exchange for that, I get a small tax break on a small portion of the corporate income and some legal insulation in case something goes wrong, provided I have strictly followed all of the rules.
There's nothing in the corporate laws that says "As a corporation you shall be able to get laws passed that screw the citizens of this and other countries for your own benefit."
A corporation on its own is not an evil entity. And, I would feel confident in saying that the majority of any corporation's employees are not evil. It is the combined greed of politicians and a few powerful corporate employees that create the evil. And, I would blame the politicians more - for if they were doing their job correctly, the system would be immune to any monetary pressures from any source, corporate, private company, church, union, etc..
If you want someone to blame, blame any government that allows such laws, treaties, etc. to be put in place. It's not the abstract idea of the "corporation" that causes this kind of trouble.
That's nice, if you're only talking about music. Unfortunately, a lot of 'content' is produced as pure information (maps, dictionaries, reference books), not as art. These are either re-packagings of information that is already available to everyone (everyone with a sattelite or everyone with a truly comprehensive knowledge of a particular language), or nicely formatted research results.
Since artistic satisfaction isn't the incentive for creation for all copyrightable works, we must be sure to protect the right of people who create very useful but strictly non-artistic works to make money from their creations.
even more (less?) than COM, it's called "an interface that doesn't change".
at its very basic level, COM does its stuff by providing a few standardized function calls for finding and calling specialized calls. nothing magical there...
COM doesn't guarantee that future revisions of a component won't break current apps. all it does is promise not to change the interface. and that's a promise that can easily be broken by anyone familiar with.IDL files.
when you get right down to it, COM doesn't do anything for backwards compatibility that a good library author couldn't manage on his own. it's simple, actually : don't change the friggin interface!
oh hell yeah, i statically link everything. i don't trust the MFC DLLs to stay compatible. you can't trust a ZLib.DLL or LibPNG.DLL to be the right version. DLL APIs or worse, parameter struct sizes (!!!), change all the time.
besides, who wants to distribute 1.5MB of MFC DLLs for every 200K app ?
People don't cheat to win. People who cheat don't really care about winning.
As i see it, cheaters do care about winning. But they think that winning is the entire point of the game. In fact, the point of any game is winning by playing.
Games are like sex, in this respect: the finish is obvious, but if you think the goal is to finish ASAP, you've missed the point entirely.
Based on what i've seen, Katz is less of an inverstigative reporter and more of a commentator: he doesn't do a lot of deep fact-finding, but rather comments on what he sees in broad terms. If this is the case, his job is not to pry into people's private lives but rather to comment on parts of society that should be obvious to everyone, in ways that make us reconsider how we see said parts of society.
Yes, it's difficult to enforce these laws when they are trivially easy to break on a small scale. But we do need these laws: not to prevent Joe Public from copying CDs for his friends, but rather to discourage Joe Public from opening up a store where he sells photocopies of this week's New York Times bestsellers, CD-Rs of this week's Billboard Top 20 and CD-Rs of some game I just spent two years writing.
If it's easy and legal to copy and sell a work without the author's, or the copyright holder's, permission, then that eliminates a huge incentive for people to make copy-able things in the first place.
It's nice to think that people will still write games in their free time, instead of doing it as their 9-5 job. But the fact is, 9-5 is a lot of time. If you send a former programmer off to bake bread (or whatever) for 9 hours a day, you've just cut out most of his waking hours and probably most of his energy. The volume of new works will plummet, as a few hobbyists take over what millions of professionals used to do. The quality will also plummet, as there will be no economic incentive for people to gain higher education in these fields; you don't find many people with degrees in coin collecting or bicycle repair - why ? Nobody bothers offering a degree they know nobody will pay to get.
Copyright laws foster professionalism in areas where it's easy to copy the finished product. They ensure that the author can except to make something on his efforts (assuming, of course, that his efforts have produced something for which there's a demand). Take them away and we're all brick layers.
Slashdot Mirror
I am too a star!
bullshit.
Being a resident of North Carolina, i never got a chance to vote yes or no on McCain. His fate was decided months before we ever had a chance.
The primary process is totally fucked up. Why do ten (mostly insignificant) states get to decide who will run? McCain never had a chance.
-c
but unfortunately... there's no USB on NT. (Iomega's proprietary hack doesn't count).
so, i either have to to go Win2K, ME or back to 98, if i want to use those cute little connectors on the back of my box.
-c
fine... hack the OS.
-c
and, even if there was, unless you lose a lot of money, the FBI simply isn't interested.
for example, domain hijacking via Network Solutions crappy email verfication system - due to their weak security (and my not knowing enough to choose the better methods that they do offer but don't promote) i lost my web site for almost a week while NetSol sat on their thumbs. when i called the FBI to see about finding the asshole who stole my domain, they flat out told me that they would not do anything unless the losses exceeded five thousand dollars. this is certainly not a lot of money to a large company, but it's a whole month's worth of business to me.
so, to put it simply, the FBI isn't interested in people who give you headaches. they will only act when there is sufficient money at stake.
Though my post was 100% sarcasm, i agree, 100%.
-c
Of course not. People are notorious for refusing to fix what isn't broken yet. It's almost a given that nothing is done about anything, until the shit hits the fan.
Pessimistic? Sure. Blame the last 1/4 of Metamagical Themas.
-c
Programmers are artists, not engineers. Engineers have to wear shoes and act like adults. Programmers don't even need to wear socks and are perfectly within their rights to have swordfights in the hall whenever the mood strikes.
Formal methods are for book-following engineers, not free-spirited artists.
or something...
why not have different laws for different professions? "Five years? That's nothing. You're lucky you aren't a bricklayer; they get 10 years for murder!".
-c
...and you're forgetting the part about people not doing it anymore, if there's no money to be made from doing it.
take 28% of my paycheck before i can even say "what the hell for?".
where my cookie?
A: the corporation. but i'd like to think if i put in 10-14 hours/day on my music, and 0-1 on programming, i might make more playing music than my corp. would.
:)
-c
it's called supply and demand. price fixing is when two or more companies get together and set the price of something, thereby eliminating competition.
Musicians are rarely wealthy. Corporations almost always.
Musician and corporation are not mutually exclusive. I am both.
As a musician I play guitar (poorly).
Also, I am the sole shareholder and sole employee of my own software company. As a corporation, I have to run my busniness in a certain way, obey certain tax laws and file forms on time. In exchange for that, I get a small tax break on a small portion of the corporate income and some legal insulation in case something goes wrong, provided I have strictly followed all of the rules.
There's nothing in the corporate laws that says "As a corporation you shall be able to get laws passed that screw the citizens of this and other countries for your own benefit."
A corporation on its own is not an evil entity. And, I would feel confident in saying that the majority of any corporation's employees are not evil. It is the combined greed of politicians and a few powerful corporate employees that create the evil. And, I would blame the politicians more - for if they were doing their job correctly, the system would be immune to any monetary pressures from any source, corporate, private company, church, union, etc..
If you want someone to blame, blame any government that allows such laws, treaties, etc. to be put in place. It's not the abstract idea of the "corporation" that causes this kind of trouble.
-c
country
the easiest way to transmit something faster is to make that something smaller. compression isn't going away.
-c
Since artistic satisfaction isn't the incentive for creation for all copyrightable works, we must be sure to protect the right of people who create very useful but strictly non-artistic works to make money from their creations.
ObAntiCorp: Corporations Suck!!
(oh wait, i am a corporation...)
-c
even more (less?) than COM, it's called "an interface that doesn't change".
.IDL files.
at its very basic level, COM does its stuff by providing a few standardized function calls for finding and calling specialized calls. nothing magical there...
COM doesn't guarantee that future revisions of a component won't break current apps. all it does is promise not to change the interface. and that's a promise that can easily be broken by anyone familiar with
when you get right down to it, COM doesn't do anything for backwards compatibility that a good library author couldn't manage on his own. it's simple, actually : don't change the friggin interface!
-c
oh hell yeah, i statically link everything. i don't trust the MFC DLLs to stay compatible. you can't trust a ZLib.DLL or LibPNG.DLL to be the right version. DLL APIs or worse, parameter struct sizes (!!!), change all the time.
besides, who wants to distribute 1.5MB of MFC DLLs for every 200K app ?
time to go home.
As i see it, cheaters do care about winning. But they think that winning is the entire point of the game. In fact, the point of any game is winning by playing.
Games are like sex, in this respect: the finish is obvious, but if you think the goal is to finish ASAP, you've missed the point entirely.
-c
i thought it was the publisher (maybe even andover) who collected those quotes for the book. it wasn't katz at all....
no. people are lazy and stupid.
unless encryption comes standard on Outlook and friends, nobody but the truly paranoid will send encrypted email.
Based on what i've seen, Katz is less of an inverstigative reporter and more of a commentator: he doesn't do a lot of deep fact-finding, but rather comments on what he sees in broad terms. If this is the case, his job is not to pry into people's private lives but rather to comment on parts of society that should be obvious to everyone, in ways that make us reconsider how we see said parts of society.
no need for irony tags
If it's easy and legal to copy and sell a work without the author's, or the copyright holder's, permission, then that eliminates a huge incentive for people to make copy-able things in the first place.
It's nice to think that people will still write games in their free time, instead of doing it as their 9-5 job. But the fact is, 9-5 is a lot of time. If you send a former programmer off to bake bread (or whatever) for 9 hours a day, you've just cut out most of his waking hours and probably most of his energy. The volume of new works will plummet, as a few hobbyists take over what millions of professionals used to do. The quality will also plummet, as there will be no economic incentive for people to gain higher education in these fields; you don't find many people with degrees in coin collecting or bicycle repair - why ? Nobody bothers offering a degree they know nobody will pay to get.
Copyright laws foster professionalism in areas where it's easy to copy the finished product. They ensure that the author can except to make something on his efforts (assuming, of course, that his efforts have produced something for which there's a demand). Take them away and we're all brick layers.
-c
"earthly levels"...
are you talking about price?
i think my C64 cost less than 1/2 of the PC of the day.
-c