Then if I refuse to watch a movie in my own house (for whatever reason... maybe complete ignorance of the movie's existence is the only reason), is that censorship? By your definition, it is, solely because I didn't allow it to exist. By his definition (by the examples he gave) something is censorship if a group restricts access to information solely because of it's content. So no, if you don't show a movie because you don't know about it then it is not censorship by anyone's definition.
On the other hand you won't watch a movie in your house because you dislike the content then yeah, it is self-censorship, in the same way that refraining from saying everything that comes to mind is self-censorship. I've heard that term used on many occasions, and it doesn't in anyway water down my opinion of censorship in general.
What you describe above is simply a business decision. Don't like the decision? Find a business that will support your stance. These aren't mutually exclusive. A company can choose to censor it's content, and I can refuse to business with them because of it.
I have two problems with corporate censorship. One other is that they want it both ways - they want to be able to control what people say on their medium, but not have any responsibility for it either. The other is that as communication technology evolves, all these separate mediums (TV, newspaper, telephone, mail) are converging to where everything is done over one network - the internet. Censoring what your newspaper prints, or what your store sells isn't a big deal when there are hundreds more to choose from. Censoring the medium over which all news is delivered is a huge deal.
Both of these boil down to the difference between a content provider and a content carrier. A common carrier is not liability for the content he relays, provided that he does not discriminate according to content. Alternately a content provider can be as discriminating as it wants in choosing it's content, and in the end they can live with the consequences of what they print. Both are acceptable to me. Either take responsibility for the derivative works you create by censoring, or don't censor.
(I do disagree that the GP's assertion that ratings bodies are participating in censorship. In fact they are doing the exact opposite - using the right to free speech. It is the people that restrict access to the games/movies based on those ratings that are censoring.)
It doesn't need to be said because it isn't true. If you allow public speech on your property, or through your service, but pick and choose what is allowed then you are censoring people. It right there in the dictionary. It isn't a violation of your constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech, but it is censorship.
One other thing to note is that their terms of service explicitly state that you are only receiving a license, and there are restrictions on what is allowed by that license. For the most part you can do anything that would be considered fair use, but there are a few exceptions. For example you may not resell the files, or "modify or edit them" even for personal use.
So you don't have quite as many "rights" as you would buying a CD, but at least they are trusting their customers to follow the law rather than punishing everyone with DRM.
And the President said, "Lewis, Clark, I want you to go explore the moon. The country needs inspiration and I am going to provide it for them"
Lewis replied, "But, sir we have no way to get to the moon. Why don't we explore all that land out west that we just purchased. Few if any european has ever seen it. Meanwhile we can learn more about the moon with new telescopes, which will make us more prepared if we ever do go there."
To which the president slammed his fist into the desk, "You have no vision! Besides, building telescopes and taking long trips like that would actually cost real money. I want you to work on some inexpensive pipe-dream that sounds good in political speeches, feasibility be damned."
Knowing they were beat, Lewis and Clark resigned themselves to designing successively large cannons. The never reached the moon, and the midwest filled out slowly, but few ever crossed the rockies, much to the delight of the native tribes, who were successful in fighting off the settlers for quite some time. Until the large cannons came of course:)
I don't know about other places, but the cable company here compresses their digital channels so much that they look worse than cable analog channels (although better than over the air). Furthermore, it is much harder to record digital channels using cable card than it is to record analog channels using a plain old tuner.
As far as I am concerned SDTV is just a means for the cable company to free up bandwidth for other purposes, not to provide better service. I could see pushing the cable company to ditch analog to improve your cable modem bandwidth, but not to improve TV quality.
It is that annoying design of having all the windows for an application be contained within another window, which serves no purpose but to display the menubar, and make it life more difficult.
According to this ubuntu bug report the ABI changed along with the schedules direct change, so you do need to update everything, not just one module. At least that's how I read it - I may be wrong.
Seagate is pretty much the only computer componets company that hasn't wavered much in quality over the years. IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor have all gone through phases ranging from good quality to absolute crap, while Seagate has continued to put out consistently good products.
I understand that theory that larger companies can decrease overhead and thus be more efficient, but that never seems to happen. The success rate on mergers looks almost as bad as on startups. But this stupid economic model that is the stockmarket rewards growth (even artificial growth) over all else - quality, efficiency you name it. We created this system, and the laws that govern it, and then we act shocked, just shocked, when the market consolidates to the point of a monopoly. What is the point of even having anti-trust laws when we not only allow but encourage consolidation at every turn.
Sorry, I'm just so tired of seeing all these mergers that decrease the amount of competition in the field and end up destroying everything that was good about the company to begin with.
I didn't like it when he was submitting stories that only contained a link to his (ad-supported) blog, but all his recent articles have had links to the original source as well, and this one didn't even link to his blog at all. In addition slashdot added the no-follow tag to the submitter link (the one on his name).
So, he isn't getting ad-revenue, or even a search engine advantage from this article and he submits interesting stories. What's the problem? How is that any different from any other slashdot submitter?
Yeah, I should have RTFA before I posted. I'm surprised that I got modded up, especially after several people had already corrected me. What I think is most interesting about this is that rather than playing it safe and flying Pixel in the Level 1 competition, they are still planning on using it for the Level 2 event, and using one of the smaller Module crafts for the Level 1. That makes the upcoming contest far more interesting. I'm excited.
Yeah, after RTFA and John's forum post, it appears that they only crashed their smaller unit and their larger craft is still fine. I also hadn't heard that they were shooting for the level 2 with pixel. That should be interesting.
Ahh, I'm bummed out now. I was really looking forward to seeing them at the X-Prize Cup in October. They were expected to claim the prize (for the level 1 lander challenge), as they had already completed flights matching the profile on their own, and just had to repeat it a the cup for it to be official. I don't know if they'll have enough time to rebuild the craft in time for the event.
I'm not a huge gamer, and had stopped buying PC games because none of them support Win2k anymore. Seeing as how I almost never use Windows much anyway, I wasn't about to pay hundreds of dollars for XP just to play the occasional game, not to mention all the EULA garbage.
I didn't realize there was such a simple fix - Looks like I will be picking up a copy of Overlord after all.
Yeah the big question to me is what other options are there for cooling a power plant other than using river water, and are they more sustainable / resilient to climate change? I don't think that underground cooling would be sufficient. I looked at how some of the desert plants operate and they too use running water - from the sewage lines of "nearby" cities, which is treated before use in the plant and then returned for reuse.
Seeing as how nuclear is really the only option we have for decreasing our power-plant C02 output on a large scale, and that low water levels, and increasing water temperature are only going to become more frequent (especially if more plants are using them for cooling) that seems like a pretty important issue. It may already be solved - this is just the first I have heard of it.
One that I still see all the time is calling a ~6 song album an EP, even if it never touches vinyl. I don't blame'em as I can't think of a better term to use myself, but I do find it funny that the common term for a short album is still "Extended Play".
The question is, why is IBM interested? That is obvious - they want Sun's customers. IBM doesn't make any money off of operating systems, they make money off of hardware and support contracts, which is why they have been so supportive of linux. Using an open source operating system decreases their development costs, but more importantly make it easier for people to migrate to their hardware. No one starts off using IBM anymore. They start small with individual servers, then move up to clusters, and when that starts getting out of hand they migrate it over to IBM servers. By providing the option of running Solaris on IBM hardware, there is now another large customer base that can easily migrate over to IBM as their data center grows.
I never used Claris Works much (or System 7 in general - our school skipped from Apple IIe to PC, and didn't own any Macs), but it was always my mother's favorite program. My dad said she was constantly cursing at MS Office when she eventually had to switch.
I have used Gobe productive which was a works suite designed by many of the original Claris works developers. It was originally made for BeOS, and latter ported to Windows and Linux. Unfortunately, the company went under, and for a while there was talk of it going open source. I really would have liked to see that happen, as it was a far better piece of software than OpenOffice, and even pledged some money towards it (although not much as I was a college student at the time), but alas it was not to be. They sold the product to someone else who has been maintaining just the windows version.
ASCAP sued the Girls Scouts for singing Happy Birthday at campfires without paying public performance royalties. The copyright is held by Summy-Birchard Music, a subsidiary of Time Warner.
Sure the GPLv3 does not apply to Microsoft unless they distribute software that is licensed under it. The purpose of the new patent clauses were never intended to directly hamper someone like Microsoft, but rather prevent someone like Novell from making similar deals in the future. Now it may or may not do a good job at that, but the article didn't even get into that issue, instead pointing out a bunch of facts that are both irrelevant and well known to those who followed the GPLv3 drafting process. Pretty worthless analysis (or at least worthless reporting).
PS. Yes the Novell deal,and any other deals prior to 28 March 2007, were grandfathered in - see the second to last paragraph in section 11.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the municipal broadband for the reasons that you stated. From what I've seen monopolies pretty much always such whether it is a corporate or government monopoly. Having the government provide subsidized service is the quickest way I know to kill competition and consoledate broadband providers even more than they already are.
So if my city was proposing something along those lines I would definitely be against it. At the same time, if a community does decide to provide broadband then that is their prerogative to do so. Hell, if they want to go so far as to try and create a perfect little socialistic community, they are welcome to try. I won't live there. The fact that the federal government is stepping in to "defend" these telcoms against the big bad local governments, is absolutely ridiculous, even if the bill isn't completely onesided.
This is purely regional matter that has nothing to do with fundamental human rights, just different ideas about the best way to manage local infrastructure, and the feds should keep their noses out it.
This is a special setup where you can download songs directly onto your phone. That requires special software on the phone that the iPhone doesn't have. The files are not obfuscated in any way - they are plain old mp3s.
If you don't want to pay the obscene prices they are charging for this service, you can always get a normal subscription at the eMusic website, download music at your computer and sync to whatever you want just like you always have been able to.
Of course you can. You can sync anything that is in iTunes into iPod. Considering that by Job's own reckoning only 2% of the music on iPods is from iTMS they would be damn stupid not to allow it.
You are not renting music when you sign up with eMusic - you download it in non-DRM mp3 format and it is yours to keep forever. They have worked that way since they first began almost 10 years ago.
That said, $7.50 for 5 songs is far more than I would be willing to pay just for the convenience of downloading directly on the phone. Especially considering that their normal plan is $10 for 30 songs. The only use that I can think for that would be impulse purchases (at party, ooh I want to hear ) but that's not what eMusic's catalog is tailored towards.
Last but one time it was not at all surprised to be flagged, since I had only noticed that there was a screw up with my booking when I went to collect my ticked and I was, in fact, booked on the flight exactly one month earlier (fortunately the airline just charged me a token 'don't be a numpty again' fee and let me on). Yeah, any ticket changes made on the day of the flight (with the exception of changes due to canceled or late flights) will result in extra screening. In this case, if you look at your ticket you will see an "SSS" printed on it which is what lets the TSA know to give you extra attention. I've had it happen to me on several occasions. A couple times I was also carrying electronic equipment (S-band transmitters / receivers / in-house designed PCI cards), which is fun to try and explain.
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On the other hand you won't watch a movie in your house because you dislike the content then yeah, it is self-censorship, in the same way that refraining from saying everything that comes to mind is self-censorship. I've heard that term used on many occasions, and it doesn't in anyway water down my opinion of censorship in general. What you describe above is simply a business decision. Don't like the decision? Find a business that will support your stance. These aren't mutually exclusive. A company can choose to censor it's content, and I can refuse to business with them because of it.
I have two problems with corporate censorship. One other is that they want it both ways - they want to be able to control what people say on their medium, but not have any responsibility for it either. The other is that as communication technology evolves, all these separate mediums (TV, newspaper, telephone, mail) are converging to where everything is done over one network - the internet. Censoring what your newspaper prints, or what your store sells isn't a big deal when there are hundreds more to choose from. Censoring the medium over which all news is delivered is a huge deal.
Both of these boil down to the difference between a content provider and a content carrier. A common carrier is not liability for the content he relays, provided that he does not discriminate according to content. Alternately a content provider can be as discriminating as it wants in choosing it's content, and in the end they can live with the consequences of what they print. Both are acceptable to me. Either take responsibility for the derivative works you create by censoring, or don't censor.
(I do disagree that the GP's assertion that ratings bodies are participating in censorship. In fact they are doing the exact opposite - using the right to free speech. It is the people that restrict access to the games/movies based on those ratings that are censoring.)
It doesn't need to be said because it isn't true.
If you allow public speech on your property, or through your service, but pick and choose what is allowed then you are censoring people. It right there in the dictionary. It isn't a violation of your constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech, but it is censorship.
One other thing to note is that their terms of service explicitly state that you are only receiving a license, and there are restrictions on what is allowed by that license. For the most part you can do anything that would be considered fair use, but there are a few exceptions. For example you may not resell the files, or "modify or edit them" even for personal use.
So you don't have quite as many "rights" as you would buying a CD, but at least they are trusting their customers to follow the law rather than punishing everyone with DRM.
And the President said, "Lewis, Clark, I want you to go explore the moon. The country needs inspiration and I am going to provide it for them"
:)
Lewis replied, "But, sir we have no way to get to the moon. Why don't we explore all that land out west that we just purchased. Few if any european has ever seen it. Meanwhile we can learn more about the moon with new telescopes, which will make us more prepared if we ever do go there."
To which the president slammed his fist into the desk, "You have no vision! Besides, building telescopes and taking long trips like that would actually cost real money. I want you to work on some inexpensive pipe-dream that sounds good in political speeches, feasibility be damned."
Knowing they were beat, Lewis and Clark resigned themselves to designing successively large cannons. The never reached the moon, and the midwest filled out slowly, but few ever crossed the rockies, much to the delight of the native tribes, who were successful in fighting off the settlers for quite some time. Until the large cannons came of course
I don't know about other places, but the cable company here compresses their digital channels so much that they look worse than cable analog channels (although better than over the air). Furthermore, it is much harder to record digital channels using cable card than it is to record analog channels using a plain old tuner.
As far as I am concerned SDTV is just a means for the cable company to free up bandwidth for other purposes, not to provide better service. I could see pushing the cable company to ditch analog to improve your cable modem bandwidth, but not to improve TV quality.
It is that annoying design of having all the windows for an application be contained within another window, which serves no purpose but to display the menubar, and make it life more difficult.
According to this ubuntu bug report the ABI changed along with the schedules direct change, so you do need to update everything, not just one module. At least that's how I read it - I may be wrong.
Seagate is pretty much the only computer componets company that hasn't wavered much in quality over the years. IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor have all gone through phases ranging from good quality to absolute crap, while Seagate has continued to put out consistently good products.
I understand that theory that larger companies can decrease overhead and thus be more efficient, but that never seems to happen. The success rate on mergers looks almost as bad as on startups. But this stupid economic model that is the stockmarket rewards growth (even artificial growth) over all else - quality, efficiency you name it. We created this system, and the laws that govern it, and then we act shocked, just shocked, when the market consolidates to the point of a monopoly. What is the point of even having anti-trust laws when we not only allow but encourage consolidation at every turn.
Sorry, I'm just so tired of seeing all these mergers that decrease the amount of competition in the field and end up destroying everything that was good about the company to begin with.
Didn't think of that did you? No, the solution here is clearly to outline the subject of the frame with dancing ants. Behold Photoshop: The Movie.
I didn't like it when he was submitting stories that only contained a link to his (ad-supported) blog, but all his recent articles have had links to the original source as well, and this one didn't even link to his blog at all. In addition slashdot added the no-follow tag to the submitter link (the one on his name).
So, he isn't getting ad-revenue, or even a search engine advantage from this article and he submits interesting stories. What's the problem? How is that any different from any other slashdot submitter?
Yeah, I should have RTFA before I posted. I'm surprised that I got modded up, especially after several people had already corrected me. What I think is most interesting about this is that rather than playing it safe and flying Pixel in the Level 1 competition, they are still planning on using it for the Level 2 event, and using one of the smaller Module crafts for the Level 1. That makes the upcoming contest far more interesting. I'm excited.
Yeah, after RTFA and John's forum post, it appears that they only crashed their smaller unit and their larger craft is still fine. I also hadn't heard that they were shooting for the level 2 with pixel. That should be interesting.
Ahh, I'm bummed out now. I was really looking forward to seeing them at the X-Prize Cup in October. They were expected to claim the prize (for the level 1 lander challenge), as they had already completed flights matching the profile on their own, and just had to repeat it a the cup for it to be official. I don't know if they'll have enough time to rebuild the craft in time for the event.
I'm not a huge gamer, and had stopped buying PC games because none of them support Win2k anymore. Seeing as how I almost never use Windows much anyway, I wasn't about to pay hundreds of dollars for XP just to play the occasional game, not to mention all the EULA garbage.
I didn't realize there was such a simple fix - Looks like I will be picking up a copy of Overlord after all.
Yeah the big question to me is what other options are there for cooling a power plant other than using river water, and are they more sustainable / resilient to climate change? I don't think that underground cooling would be sufficient. I looked at how some of the desert plants operate and they too use running water - from the sewage lines of "nearby" cities, which is treated before use in the plant and then returned for reuse.
Seeing as how nuclear is really the only option we have for decreasing our power-plant C02 output on a large scale, and that low water levels, and increasing water temperature are only going to become more frequent (especially if more plants are using them for cooling) that seems like a pretty important issue. It may already be solved - this is just the first I have heard of it.
One that I still see all the time is calling a ~6 song album an EP, even if it never touches vinyl. I don't blame'em as I can't think of a better term to use myself, but I do find it funny that the common term for a short album is still "Extended Play".
I never used Claris Works much (or System 7 in general - our school skipped from Apple IIe to PC, and didn't own any Macs), but it was always my mother's favorite program. My dad said she was constantly cursing at MS Office when she eventually had to switch.
I have used Gobe productive which was a works suite designed by many of the original Claris works developers. It was originally made for BeOS, and latter ported to Windows and Linux. Unfortunately, the company went under, and for a while there was talk of it going open source. I really would have liked to see that happen, as it was a far better piece of software than OpenOffice, and even pledged some money towards it (although not much as I was a college student at the time), but alas it was not to be. They sold the product to someone else who has been maintaining just the windows version.
ASCAP sued the Girls Scouts for singing Happy Birthday at campfires without paying public performance royalties. The copyright is held by Summy-Birchard Music, a subsidiary of Time Warner.
Sure the GPLv3 does not apply to Microsoft unless they distribute software that is licensed under it. The purpose of the new patent clauses were never intended to directly hamper someone like Microsoft, but rather prevent someone like Novell from making similar deals in the future. Now it may or may not do a good job at that, but the article didn't even get into that issue, instead pointing out a bunch of facts that are both irrelevant and well known to those who followed the GPLv3 drafting process. Pretty worthless analysis (or at least worthless reporting).
PS. Yes the Novell deal,and any other deals prior to 28 March 2007, were grandfathered in - see the second to last paragraph in section 11.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the municipal broadband for the reasons that you stated. From what I've seen monopolies pretty much always such whether it is a corporate or government monopoly. Having the government provide subsidized service is the quickest way I know to kill competition and consoledate broadband providers even more than they already are.
So if my city was proposing something along those lines I would definitely be against it. At the same time, if a community does decide to provide broadband then that is their prerogative to do so. Hell, if they want to go so far as to try and create a perfect little socialistic community, they are welcome to try. I won't live there. The fact that the federal government is stepping in to "defend" these telcoms against the big bad local governments, is absolutely ridiculous, even if the bill isn't completely onesided.
This is purely regional matter that has nothing to do with fundamental human rights, just different ideas about the best way to manage local infrastructure, and the feds should keep their noses out it.
This is a special setup where you can download songs directly onto your phone. That requires special software on the phone that the iPhone doesn't have. The files are not obfuscated in any way - they are plain old mp3s.
If you don't want to pay the obscene prices they are charging for this service, you can always get a normal subscription at the eMusic website, download music at your computer and sync to whatever you want just like you always have been able to.
Of course you can. You can sync anything that is in iTunes into iPod. Considering that by Job's own reckoning only 2% of the music on iPods is from iTMS they would be damn stupid not to allow it.
You are not renting music when you sign up with eMusic - you download it in non-DRM mp3 format and it is yours to keep forever. They have worked that way since they first began almost 10 years ago.
That said, $7.50 for 5 songs is far more than I would be willing to pay just for the convenience of downloading directly on the phone. Especially considering that their normal plan is $10 for 30 songs. The only use that I can think for that would be impulse purchases (at party, ooh I want to hear ) but that's not what eMusic's catalog is tailored towards.