Similarly, schools have good pipes and make great distribution nodes, either surreptitiously or blatantly.
At my college, a co-worker ran a 0 day distribution server that also provided intranet services to a dormitory. I found out about it, because he tried to get me to take it over for him when he graduated. I declined when it became obvious he also wanted me to be his patsy.
Luckily, the school found that box before the FBI did. Because this guy was in charge of a LOT of servers on campus. If they had found him, they would have confiscated everything!
Well, the problem with Pastor Niemoeller's excellent quote is that it does not make a separation between the stated purpose of a group and its actual actions.
Certainly, it's fascist to go after all Muslim people. But if a Muslim cell is plotting terror, is it fascist to go after them because they are Muslims?
They didn't "kick down school doors" here. They went into a school because there were claims of massive infringement. The FBI has jurisdiction in all crimes that cross state lines, and investigating infringment is surely in that area. They were armed, because this is America, we have the right to bear arms, and police definitely shouldn't be denied that right. By playing the fasicst card, we're making massive assumptions. Maybe it was not "students," who they were going after, but specific criminals who are also students.
Wow, that's a crass, inaccurate overstatement if I've ever seen one. Have you considered writing for Adbusters? They're looking for people like you -- how are your skills with the Photoshop Mosaic filter?
Well, infringement != theft. Theft is decided by (fairly) concrete laws in a criminal court. Infringment is decided by interpretting law in a civil court.
If you leave a book on your coffee table, and somebody steals it, copies it, and puts it back, I doubt you'd be in trouble. The judge would agree that you had little hand in the infringement.
But if you give someone the book, wink at them, and say "Go ahead and make a copy," I doubt you'd be okay. It's the same if you pay somebody to rob you and claim it as theft. People do this all the time, for the insurance money. Now, whether you're guilty of theft or of misreporting a crime depends on the case...but either way, you CAN go to jail if you ask somebody to steal from you and report it as a crime.
Conversely, if somebody hacked your computer to share your personal much collection, you'd probably be okay. But the chance of a judge or jury believing this argument are slim, especially when they confiscate your computer and discover your KaZaa download folder.
Straw man arguments are cute and all, but they don't replace good old fashioned thinking before you post.
It's not that Easier == Illegal. Copying an entire book line by line is probably infringement, even if you scribe it by hand. Copying a single paragraph is probably not. There's no hard rule as to where the cut off is -- the right of prosecution is in the hands of the copyright holder, and if that holder claims your use was infringing, it goes to court. If your use is decided to be infringing, it's illegal, and you could owe money, or worse.
Now, if your infringment is one copy, and you keep it to yourself, maybe loan it to a friend, nobody will know. And it won't come to the attention of the copyright holder. So there's no problem. In fact, if you wanted to scan in all your own books into PDF, that's your right.
Now, when you take that PDF, and spread it -- that is, you give it to a friend, who gives it to a frend, etc -- you are more likely to call attention to yourself. Hence, the copyright holder is more likely to discover you.
Continue that trend. If you scan a hundred books, and spread them to a hundred people, you've committed not one, but ten thousand acts of infringement. If the copyright holder finds out, they're likely to be pissed. And they're likely to request that the courts help them figure out who you are, before your infringment cuts into their profits selling the book.
This sort of thing happens with photocopiers on college campuses all the time. So much that most campuses have established an expensive fee on their copiers to discourage this sort of use.
It's not the EASE of use that makes the infringement worse. It's the SCOPE. The EASE can increase the SCOPE, so maybe there's an indirect link...but that's not the logical link.
The fact that the more time the FBI spends chasing eight year olds downloading copies of Hillery Duff, is less time catching kidnappers, or foiling the next 9/11 terrorist conspiracy is irrelevant to the RIAA and their bottom line.
The FBI has many, many agents. They're not all working on kidnapping and terrorism all the time. The FBI has a LOT of laws to enforce and I don't think either of us want to ignore a subset of them just because they're unpopular. The 14th Ammendment was pretty unpopular, but it was enforced. So was the 18th.
You won't see it. There is no such law -- distribution of copyrighted materials is ALWAYS illegal, there's no fair use protection.
Of course, since it's up to the copyright holder to prosecute infringement, I doubt they'd go after anybody if the extent of this was friends sharing mixtapes. That's a good will thing...I'm sure it bugs some record exists, but not so much that they'd risk the PR disaster of "tape raids."
The problem is when the infringement is organized and blatant. How can they let it go? If every person with a computer can get any album they want for free, there's a problem, because the allure is too great.
So you're saying that crimes aren't crimes unless the criminal makes money off them?
What about harrassment, vandalism, assault, rape? What about stealing cars to joyride, dining and dashing, hopping turnstiles, giving drugs to friends?
Are you saying that we shouldn't prosecute gangs if they're engaged in these activities if they're not out for a profit?
but not enough to make a stink about it or go raiding places for pirated works.
Unless it is the possibility of these raids that keeps the majority (if it is a majority) buying CDs and games.
After all, if it weren't for the threat of getting a ticket, we'd all commit more traffic infringements. I've seen a lot of people make turns at red lights simply because they knew there weren't any cops around.
Regulations and demands are worth nothing unless people know you're going to enforce them.
I think the major problem with digital copyright infringment is that it doesn't FEEL like theft. Theft of physical property doesn't occur in comfortable rooms full of friends. It generally doesn't have the party atmosphere we see on KaZaa.
As such, there's a need to rationalize this. If it doesn't FEEL like breaking the law, it's not breaking the law, right? In fact, it must be a moral imperative to buck the evil record labels!
I think a few scare raids are going to change that emotion REAL quick. The reason I stopped pirating software was somebody tried to set me up as the patsy admin on his distro server. I disappeared instead. Good thing, too...three months later, the FBI was interviewing my superiors at our work -- this cat escaped being expelled, prosecuted and fined by a few days. That could have been my head in the noose if I hadn't seen the sinister forces behind the "glamour" of weekend LAN parties, "free" hardware and international chat sessions.
It's apparent that the RIAA is coming down on "innocent" file sharing with the same force. It's not chat and Napster anymore, folks, and if they put you in their sights it won't matter whether you boycott cds or not. You're gonna need a lawyer and a shitload of luck.
Uh, by definition, a universal 3D format developed by a consortium of 30 companies cannot be proprietary. Proprietary means that only the inventor has control over the format.
As for Open Source/Free Software formats for 3d, why not? It's worked so well for PNG, OGG and SXW, which have completely replaced the closed JPG, MP3 and DOC standards. </sarcasm>
please no comments on how you use these technologies all the time. I do too. the point is, open source file formats have a history of piecemeal support and lukeworm adoption while industry supported formats succeed.
MPEG-4 was another neat idea designed by committee, and it's pretty awesome.
It's not committees that ruin concepts, but lack of a concrete agenda. Start with a solid goal, continue with cutting edge research, and round it out with a coherent standards doc. That's how you make a file format.
If you want to read a book with a great ending, pick up anything by Carl Hiassen. He's an investigative reporter who writes very funny and bizarre novels of tragedy and redemption. In his books, there's an uncanny sense of justice: the guy who's good at heart always wins and the guy who's bad at heart always loses, regardless of what their actions were or what their position in society is. The degree -- and the entertainment value -- of the win or loss is proportional to the degree of their crimes...for example, in Striptease, the multiple murdering sleazeball lawyer gets killed with a belaying pin and dumped into the chum bucket of a fishing boat, while the bouncer with a heart of gold that aids our protagonist throughout the novel fulfills his lifelong dream of successfully suing a yogurt company (for finding a cockroach that he himself sealed in the container).
Some really bizarre stuff. But hilarious, and never a let down. If anything, Hiassen's biggest problem is that he toys with you. In a beautiful passage in Skin Tight, a barracuda takes off the hand of the main villain. Come to find out later that the only reason Hiassen took the hand was so the guy could strap a weed wacker to it later. What's worse is, Hiassen makes that absurd stuff really work.
For what it's worth, this technique was mastered by Issac Asimov, who stole it in turn from Socrates. Read -- well, anything Asimov wrote, especially the Foundation books which all follow the dialectic model. The Foundation books are still good, though, because eventually the characters of one book die and are subsequently revered or hated by their descendents in the next book for their role in "psychohistory."
Oh, and to see where it all started, read Plato's "Phaedrus," it won't take too long and it's a really great glimpse of Socratian discourse, if a little boring.
Point and click allows for quick, easy and precise associations to create complex arbitrary data relationships. Console does not. Your BOTTOM LINE is somewhat trivial if what I need to do requires more human interaction than mere numbers crunching.
Incidentally, I'm shocked that you think that you can't automate tasks in a windowing system since I've built a career doing exactly that. See, most functions performed by programs in a GUI operating system can be accessed without using a point and click interface. It is trivial to access these functions programmatically. If I wanted to replace text in a dozen text files using a series of regular expressions, I can write a very script to do exactly that. It would take about ten minutes, including testing. I could even do it in Perl, though some of the libraries on Windows are a tad different.
I am insulted, and bit shamed, that you feel I was being anti-erudite. I'm not. Two of my favorite authors are Carl Sagan and Carl Hiassen, fer crying out loud! If I'm anti-anything, I'm anti spending-a-lot-of-effort-researching-something-and -then-being-unable-to-present-the-information-in-a -subtle-and-engaging-manner-without-acting-like-it -is-the-most-important-shit-ever-and-then-never-br inging-it-up-again. But I suppose that comes from being an essay buff. If you want to research an intriguing topic and present an insightful view of it, go write for the Utne Reader.
You may be right about the research, though. So I'd like to see what Stephenson could do with Terry Pratchett, who has amazing insight and a bit more humility. That, and Good Omens proved Pratchett could make a cohesive collaborative entity.
Is it hiring the best people for the job or is it removing the worst enemy from active duty?
I think it's obviously both.
Someone who is honest and displays a fair comparison between products may not be your best recruit for the job of promoting spin.
How do we know he's honest? How do we know he's showing fair comparisons? It's entirely possible that he LIED to Munich about the robustness of SuSE, the completeness of compatibility, the time to install, etc. It's likely that he spun the competing products as costly packages that don't innovate like Linux doeso. It's probable he spread FUD about forced paid upgrades, deplorable security, unrepaired bugs and expensive support.
Of course, a lot of the people around here would call that an honest and fair comparison, but it's really spin in the opposite direction. There is no inherently "better" OS or development philosophy. Analyzing the software packages available and whether they meet your needs is the job of a consultant. The job of a sales person is to skew your needs and exagerate how they're met by the software he's selling. He did that for SuSE, he'll do it for Microsoft.
Which is why I prefer to avoid salesmen and "partnered" consultants wherever possible. If a guy's got a big Cisco logo on his business card, chances are he's not going to sell you a D-Link hub, even if that's what you need.
Gotta be careful though. I heard tell that a certain local mapping company had friday "keggers," one of which resulted in some property damage and some firings, including, I think, a C_O.
I don't like Stephenson. I tried Cryptonomicon, and found midway through the beginning that even if I was going to eventually get into the story, I would never be able to get over the way he writes almost everything in superlatives.
I mean, the guy was describing the sound of a pipe organ for two pages. And this heightened sensitivity to emotional states caused his characters to quickly became charicatures of themselves. It's the literary equivalent of a nerdy kid who won't shut up about how smart he is. Look at this metaphor! Isn't it clever! Look how the sound of the pipe organ drives my savant character into mathematics! Look, the churl doesn't even understand homosexuality!
We get it, man! Calm down and write your book.
Maybe I'm too much of an English major, here, but symbolism only works if it's organic and adjectives shouldn't be applied with a brick. How about a little subtlty -- shit, even Gibson treats his flashy, negative future with a more gentle hand.
god, i wish. In bagalore, $43600 would go sooo so far. here it bvarely covers my car payment and hpuse. but it does cover! with $50 to spre for liquor!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh word. Thanks. i hadn't thought of that.
Similarly, schools have good pipes and make great distribution nodes, either surreptitiously or blatantly.
At my college, a co-worker ran a 0 day distribution server that also provided intranet services to a dormitory. I found out about it, because he tried to get me to take it over for him when he graduated. I declined when it became obvious he also wanted me to be his patsy.
Luckily, the school found that box before the FBI did. Because this guy was in charge of a LOT of servers on campus. If they had found him, they would have confiscated everything!
Well, the problem with Pastor Niemoeller's excellent quote is that it does not make a separation between the stated purpose of a group and its actual actions.
Certainly, it's fascist to go after all Muslim people. But if a Muslim cell is plotting terror, is it fascist to go after them because they are Muslims?
They didn't "kick down school doors" here. They went into a school because there were claims of massive infringement. The FBI has jurisdiction in all crimes that cross state lines, and investigating infringment is surely in that area. They were armed, because this is America, we have the right to bear arms, and police definitely shouldn't be denied that right. By playing the fasicst card, we're making massive assumptions. Maybe it was not "students," who they were going after, but specific criminals who are also students.
Wow, that's a crass, inaccurate overstatement if I've ever seen one. Have you considered writing for Adbusters? They're looking for people like you -- how are your skills with the Photoshop Mosaic filter?
I don't think the FBI needs to see a distinction between [`~._.~`Rippin_Krew`~._.~`] and the Gambino family.
If a crime is committed routinely by a group, it's organized crime. Right? And the distribution network for infringing works is pretty well organized.
Well, infringement != theft. Theft is decided by (fairly) concrete laws in a criminal court. Infringment is decided by interpretting law in a civil court.
If you leave a book on your coffee table, and somebody steals it, copies it, and puts it back, I doubt you'd be in trouble. The judge would agree that you had little hand in the infringement.
But if you give someone the book, wink at them, and say "Go ahead and make a copy," I doubt you'd be okay. It's the same if you pay somebody to rob you and claim it as theft. People do this all the time, for the insurance money. Now, whether you're guilty of theft or of misreporting a crime depends on the case...but either way, you CAN go to jail if you ask somebody to steal from you and report it as a crime.
Conversely, if somebody hacked your computer to share your personal much collection, you'd probably be okay. But the chance of a judge or jury believing this argument are slim, especially when they confiscate your computer and discover your KaZaa download folder.
Straw man arguments are cute and all, but they don't replace good old fashioned thinking before you post.
It's not that Easier == Illegal. Copying an entire book line by line is probably infringement, even if you scribe it by hand. Copying a single paragraph is probably not. There's no hard rule as to where the cut off is -- the right of prosecution is in the hands of the copyright holder, and if that holder claims your use was infringing, it goes to court. If your use is decided to be infringing, it's illegal, and you could owe money, or worse.
Now, if your infringment is one copy, and you keep it to yourself, maybe loan it to a friend, nobody will know. And it won't come to the attention of the copyright holder. So there's no problem. In fact, if you wanted to scan in all your own books into PDF, that's your right.
Now, when you take that PDF, and spread it -- that is, you give it to a friend, who gives it to a frend, etc -- you are more likely to call attention to yourself. Hence, the copyright holder is more likely to discover you.
Continue that trend. If you scan a hundred books, and spread them to a hundred people, you've committed not one, but ten thousand acts of infringement. If the copyright holder finds out, they're likely to be pissed. And they're likely to request that the courts help them figure out who you are, before your infringment cuts into their profits selling the book.
This sort of thing happens with photocopiers on college campuses all the time. So much that most campuses have established an expensive fee on their copiers to discourage this sort of use.
It's not the EASE of use that makes the infringement worse. It's the SCOPE. The EASE can increase the SCOPE, so maybe there's an indirect link...but that's not the logical link.
The fact that the more time the FBI spends chasing eight year olds downloading copies of Hillery Duff, is less time catching kidnappers, or foiling the next 9/11 terrorist conspiracy is irrelevant to the RIAA and their bottom line.
The FBI has many, many agents. They're not all working on kidnapping and terrorism all the time. The FBI has a LOT of laws to enforce and I don't think either of us want to ignore a subset of them just because they're unpopular. The 14th Ammendment was pretty unpopular, but it was enforced. So was the 18th.
You won't see it. There is no such law -- distribution of copyrighted materials is ALWAYS illegal, there's no fair use protection.
Of course, since it's up to the copyright holder to prosecute infringement, I doubt they'd go after anybody if the extent of this was friends sharing mixtapes. That's a good will thing...I'm sure it bugs some record exists, but not so much that they'd risk the PR disaster of "tape raids."
The problem is when the infringement is organized and blatant. How can they let it go? If every person with a computer can get any album they want for free, there's a problem, because the allure is too great.
So you're saying that crimes aren't crimes unless the criminal makes money off them?
What about harrassment, vandalism, assault, rape? What about stealing cars to joyride, dining and dashing, hopping turnstiles, giving drugs to friends?
Are you saying that we shouldn't prosecute gangs if they're engaged in these activities if they're not out for a profit?
but not enough to make a stink about it or go raiding places for pirated works.
Unless it is the possibility of these raids that keeps the majority (if it is a majority) buying CDs and games.
After all, if it weren't for the threat of getting a ticket, we'd all commit more traffic infringements. I've seen a lot of people make turns at red lights simply because they knew there weren't any cops around.
Regulations and demands are worth nothing unless people know you're going to enforce them.
I think the major problem with digital copyright infringment is that it doesn't FEEL like theft. Theft of physical property doesn't occur in comfortable rooms full of friends. It generally doesn't have the party atmosphere we see on KaZaa.
As such, there's a need to rationalize this. If it doesn't FEEL like breaking the law, it's not breaking the law, right? In fact, it must be a moral imperative to buck the evil record labels!
I think a few scare raids are going to change that emotion REAL quick. The reason I stopped pirating software was somebody tried to set me up as the patsy admin on his distro server. I disappeared instead. Good thing, too...three months later, the FBI was interviewing my superiors at our work -- this cat escaped being expelled, prosecuted and fined by a few days. That could have been my head in the noose if I hadn't seen the sinister forces behind the "glamour" of weekend LAN parties, "free" hardware and international chat sessions.
It's apparent that the RIAA is coming down on "innocent" file sharing with the same force. It's not chat and Napster anymore, folks, and if they put you in their sights it won't matter whether you boycott cds or not. You're gonna need a lawyer and a shitload of luck.
They have these books you can read for free too!
It's such a scam!
Maybe next time you're there, you can get one, and realize that the word "you" has three letters. You're only using one of them.
Uh, by definition, a universal 3D format developed by a consortium of 30 companies cannot be proprietary. Proprietary means that only the inventor has control over the format.
As for Open Source/Free Software formats for 3d, why not? It's worked so well for PNG, OGG and SXW, which have completely replaced the closed JPG, MP3 and DOC standards. </sarcasm>
please no comments on how you use these technologies all the time. I do too. the point is, open source file formats have a history of piecemeal support and lukeworm adoption while industry supported formats succeed.
MPEG-4 was another neat idea designed by committee, and it's pretty awesome.
It's not committees that ruin concepts, but lack of a concrete agenda. Start with a solid goal, continue with cutting edge research, and round it out with a coherent standards doc. That's how you make a file format.
Hopefully, all four in such a way that you can encapsulate one of them in the others. Something like layers on a GIS map or photoshop doc.
If you want to read a book with a great ending, pick up anything by Carl Hiassen. He's an investigative reporter who writes very funny and bizarre novels of tragedy and redemption. In his books, there's an uncanny sense of justice: the guy who's good at heart always wins and the guy who's bad at heart always loses, regardless of what their actions were or what their position in society is. The degree -- and the entertainment value -- of the win or loss is proportional to the degree of their crimes...for example, in Striptease, the multiple murdering sleazeball lawyer gets killed with a belaying pin and dumped into the chum bucket of a fishing boat, while the bouncer with a heart of gold that aids our protagonist throughout the novel fulfills his lifelong dream of successfully suing a yogurt company (for finding a cockroach that he himself sealed in the container).
Some really bizarre stuff. But hilarious, and never a let down. If anything, Hiassen's biggest problem is that he toys with you. In a beautiful passage in Skin Tight, a barracuda takes off the hand of the main villain. Come to find out later that the only reason Hiassen took the hand was so the guy could strap a weed wacker to it later. What's worse is, Hiassen makes that absurd stuff really work.
For what it's worth, this technique was mastered by Issac Asimov, who stole it in turn from Socrates. Read -- well, anything Asimov wrote, especially the Foundation books which all follow the dialectic model. The Foundation books are still good, though, because eventually the characters of one book die and are subsequently revered or hated by their descendents in the next book for their role in "psychohistory."
Oh, and to see where it all started, read Plato's "Phaedrus," it won't take too long and it's a really great glimpse of Socratian discourse, if a little boring.
Point and click allows for quick, easy and precise associations to create complex arbitrary data relationships. Console does not. Your BOTTOM LINE is somewhat trivial if what I need to do requires more human interaction than mere numbers crunching.
Incidentally, I'm shocked that you think that you can't automate tasks in a windowing system since I've built a career doing exactly that. See, most functions performed by programs in a GUI operating system can be accessed without using a point and click interface. It is trivial to access these functions programmatically. If I wanted to replace text in a dozen text files using a series of regular expressions, I can write a very script to do exactly that. It would take about ten minutes, including testing. I could even do it in Perl, though some of the libraries on Windows are a tad different.
anti-erudite phase of American history
d -then-being-unable-to-present-the-information-in-a -subtle-and-engaging-manner-without-acting-like-it -is-the-most-important-shit-ever-and-then-never-br inging-it-up-again. But I suppose that comes from being an essay buff. If you want to research an intriguing topic and present an insightful view of it, go write for the Utne Reader.
I am insulted, and bit shamed, that you feel I was being anti-erudite. I'm not. Two of my favorite authors are Carl Sagan and Carl Hiassen, fer crying out loud! If I'm anti-anything, I'm anti spending-a-lot-of-effort-researching-something-an
You may be right about the research, though. So I'd like to see what Stephenson could do with Terry Pratchett, who has amazing insight and a bit more humility. That, and Good Omens proved Pratchett could make a cohesive collaborative entity.
Is it hiring the best people for the job or is it removing the worst enemy from active duty?
I think it's obviously both.
Someone who is honest and displays a fair comparison between products may not be your best recruit for the job of promoting spin.
How do we know he's honest? How do we know he's showing fair comparisons? It's entirely possible that he LIED to Munich about the robustness of SuSE, the completeness of compatibility, the time to install, etc. It's likely that he spun the competing products as costly packages that don't innovate like Linux doeso. It's probable he spread FUD about forced paid upgrades, deplorable security, unrepaired bugs and expensive support.
Of course, a lot of the people around here would call that an honest and fair comparison, but it's really spin in the opposite direction. There is no inherently "better" OS or development philosophy. Analyzing the software packages available and whether they meet your needs is the job of a consultant. The job of a sales person is to skew your needs and exagerate how they're met by the software he's selling. He did that for SuSE, he'll do it for Microsoft.
Which is why I prefer to avoid salesmen and "partnered" consultants wherever possible. If a guy's got a big Cisco logo on his business card, chances are he's not going to sell you a D-Link hub, even if that's what you need.
Gotta be careful though. I heard tell that a certain local mapping company had friday "keggers," one of which resulted in some property damage and some firings, including, I think, a C_O.
After that, they switched to diet cola.
I don't like Stephenson. I tried Cryptonomicon, and found midway through the beginning that even if I was going to eventually get into the story, I would never be able to get over the way he writes almost everything in superlatives.
I mean, the guy was describing the sound of a pipe organ for two pages. And this heightened sensitivity to emotional states caused his characters to quickly became charicatures of themselves. It's the literary equivalent of a nerdy kid who won't shut up about how smart he is. Look at this metaphor! Isn't it clever! Look how the sound of the pipe organ drives my savant character into mathematics! Look, the churl doesn't even understand homosexuality!
We get it, man! Calm down and write your book.
Maybe I'm too much of an English major, here, but symbolism only works if it's organic and adjectives shouldn't be applied with a brick. How about a little subtlty -- shit, even Gibson treats his flashy, negative future with a more gentle hand.
Of course, maybe I just didn't like it.
Yes I did. Now I'm putting in a request to use petty cash for a hangover cure. Owww.
god, i wish. In bagalore, $43600 would go sooo so far. here it bvarely covers my car payment and hpuse. but it does cover! with $50 to spre for liquor!
Maybe some places. I've got several years under my belt and that's upper range of what people will offer me around here.
Of course, you can live VERY comfortably here on 35-45k. I have friends with families living well on less.