I don't disagree that rightsholders should be paid. But the word most certainly is *not* "stealing." The filesharers are making "unauthorized copies," they aren't "stealing." I've been the victim of both burglary and infringement of my copyright, and I can assure you they are quite different.
You want to talk about stealing, let's talk about the way ASCAP and BMI take money from venues but don't actually bother to accurately figure out who is entitled to get the royalties they collect, as well as trying to claim license fees for music that they don't have the right to claim license fees for.
For the record, 90% of the music I've acquired in the last year was either *purchased* directly from the artists in question or through CD Baby. The remaining 10% was *purchased* from Amazon, Borders, or the used record store down the street.
Marriage only requires a man and a woman in some places during some periods of history. In other places/times it might require a man and more than one women, or a woman and more than one men. That's true in other parts of the world even today. So the scenario you describe is pretty much irrelvant.
Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not late Middle English. Chaucer wrote in Middle English. And yes, Beowulf is in Old English.
Old English: Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum theodcyninga thrym gefrunon, hu ða æthelingas ellen fremedon! (Listen! We --of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore, of those clan-kings-- heard of their glory. How those nobles performed courageous deeds.)
One fun thing about Old English is how as you read along you come across things that are understandable even if you just know modern English: "thæt wæs god cyning!" = "that was a good king!"
Middle English: Whilom, as olde stories tellen us, Ther was a duc that highte Theseus; Of Atthenes he was lord and governour, And in his tyme swich a conquerour, That gretter was ther noon under the sonne. (Once, as the old stories tell us, there was a Duke named Theseus; of Athens he was lord and governor, and in his time such a conqueror, that greater was there none under the sun.)
Early Modern English: Our father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heauen. Giue us this day our daily bread. And forgiue us our debts as we forgiue our debters. And lead us not into temptation, but deliuer us from euill. Amen.
My issue is this: Although a woman, I always play a male character for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into right now. (Yes, people I play with regularly know my true gender.) And I'd just as soon that people I'm playing with casually don't know that I'm a woman. Voice chat makes that impossible. And even in the case of people I play with regularly who know I'm a woman and might even know me in real life, voice chat makes it harder -- if not impossible -- to role-play a guy convincingly.
pbhj writes: A simple "passport photo" (small portrait shot used on ID documents) is not likely to have enough about it to be deemed an artistic work.
True in some countries (Germany, I think) but not in the United States. A passport photo is just as entitled to copyright protection as any other photograph, "artistic" or not.
I think of information I get on Wikipedia this way-- it is about as reliable as information that I get from conversation with a random stranger met at a cocktail party.
That person may have a Ph.D. in the subject, or that person may have read about it in "Reader's Digest" three years ago while visiting his grandmother. Or he may be lying or making it up. Or he might have a Ph.D. but be too drunk to give me an accurate answer. But if I'm lucky, the information will be reliable enough for me to start searching elsewhere for reliable information, and if I'm really lucky, I'll get a citation of some useful source material of some kind.
That's why my favorite part of Wikipedia is the "reference desk." People ask all kinds of strange questions about obscure topics and get apparently careful, well-reasoned answers. It doesn't take the place of a good library reference desk, but on the other hand, the Wikipedians are there at 3am.
I was into programming when I was in "middle school" and so were a couple of other female friends of mine. However, when we tried to show up at the computer club meetings we were basically run out by guys who didn't know what to make of us. So we just worked on things among ourselves, the guys at school didn't know what we were up to.
I was fortunate that my father bought one of the first Apple computers and I was allowed to experiment with it. I spent countless hours teaching myself to program it and had a wonderful time.
However, while my interest in it continues I wound up not going into the computer field professionally because I find my current carreer path even more interestng.
Don't know about open source CAD, but the folks at http://www.emachineshop.com/ have a free downloadable CAD program that can be used to design things that their company can then make for you. No reason why you can't download it and try it out just to learn how CAD works.
Before people get too riled, note that this decision was on a preliminary injunction. That means that the judge has NOT decided that deep-linking is illegal. He has only found that the plaintiff, SFX Motor Sports, has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of the case, harm to SFX Motor Sports that cannot adequately remedied with money, and that less harm will be done to the defendant if the injunction were issued than to plaintiff if it were not. And so the judge has issued the injunction.
At this point, the case will go forward on the merits. So all of you who are crying that the EFF should get involved should get busy and set up a Robert Davis defense fund and try to connect him up with the EFF. Because there is still a chance to convince the judge that deep linking is not copyright infringement.
I personally have negotiated lower prices at major department stores and chain stores. It is more successful if the item to be purchased is the last in the store. Note, I have not tried this at Wal-Mart because the nearest one is over an hour away and I never shop there.
Typically it works best if you give them a reason to give you a discount: "Excuse me, major chain bookstore manager, this book is damaged (book is shopworn) and it is the last copy in the store. Will you give me a discount?"
Or point out that the sale starts tomorrow or ends tomorrow, and wouldn't they like to make you a happy customer and give you the lower price. But once in a while you can get a lower price just for asking without any "justification," it depends on the store.
My grandmother is the one who taught me to do this. She always said that it never hurts to ask.
The Tetris music is a Russian folk dance called "Korobochka" or "Korobeiniki" which is about 150 years old. Glorious fun to dance, it starts out being played slowly and speeds up as the dance continues until you are whirling around.
What are the reccomended hardware specifications for the game?
Operating System: Windows 98/2000/ME/XP Processor: 2 GHz or greater RAM: 1 GB Video Card: DirectX 9 compatible; pixel shader and vertex shader compatible hardware with 128 MB or more of texture memory Sound Card: DirectSound compatible audio hardware
An update for the benefit of the parent poster: My husband just called again, now they are saying the boards that the collector's editions were tied up in customs.
Hum.
Hubby just called the local game store, found the collector's edition was available there and bought it. We are canceling our Sony order. You might want to do the same.
My current theory is that Sony didn't have enough collector's editions to fulfill all their direct pre-orders and retailer sales and figured that they'd have more trouble in the long run if they disappointed the retailers than their own retail customers. After all, you are only buying a few (if more than one) copies of the game. EB Games and the like are buying hundreds of thousands and no doubt would be displeased if Sony forced them to disappoint their own pre-order customers.
Same thing happened to me and my husband. He just called me to tell me that according to the EQ2 boards on Sony's site, whoever packed the boxes foolishly did not properly secure the DVD's in the collector's edition tins and they all got scratched.
AC wrote: So, surprise, you bought an FX-era nVidia card, you have a shit graphics card. The rest of the specs are fine.
I disagree, I was playing the beta for a while and let me tell you, you need a lot more RAM. In fact, if you look at Sony's own site they tell you that you need at least 1G RAM.
I'm in the beta right now. There are some good things and bad things . . . way too much for me to comment on here.
But, I feel I should respond to your remark about Automatic Zone Instancing-- It may seem freaky and weird, but really, it is much better than the old EQ way where there are hordes of people in the same zone fighting for the chance to beat on something. The automatic zones are much better. And the newbie zone-- which is instanced-- you will stay in the same instanced zone for at least four levels of play. It is better, I assure you!
As for colors, you can get your trademark in a specific color (to distinguish it from similar marks, but there are very few color only trademarks. The only one I know of is Orange, which gets the color orange for cell phones.
Just to add to the list: Pink is a mark of Owens-Corning insulation and greenish-gold is a mark of Qualitex dry-cleaning pads.
I thought it sounded odd also. Reading the Google translation of the German article, it sounds like first he managed to remove the smart card (after several attempts) and then was finally able to stop the car with the brakes.
Maybe removing the smart card disengaged something that was preventing the brakes from working properly-- could an automatic anti-skid system or something like that have added to the problem?
Actual technique for baby-watching used by my brother-in-law's parents in the late 1960's when he was an infant: When they wanted to go to a cocktail party down the street, they would move the phone into the room with the crib. One parent would then go the party and call home. The other parent would pick up the phone in the baby's room and leave it off the hook. The other parent would then join the first parent at the party. No babysitter. Every 15-20 minutes or so, one or the other of them would pick up the phone at the party to listen if the baby was crying, and if so, one of them would go home to check on him.
My brother-in-law turned out okay despite this treatment, though I wouldn't recommend doing something like that today. (And DCFS would take the kid away if you tried it.)
I was along for the ride when Mike Doyle pitched Eolas to some of my relatives back in the mid-90's after the patent was applied for but before it was issued and I've gone to some of their stockholder's meetings. I have the following observations to make:
1) Mike Doyle's father considered himself an inventor and had several patents. Doyle also considers himself an inventor. That's probably why, unlike many programmers, his first instinct when he thinks of a clever way to solve a programming problem is to patent it. He is very much in favor of patents because he strongly believes that they protect the little guy from exploitation by big business.
2) The "Eolas patent" isn't Doyle's only patent; it would be interesting to know what you all think of the other patents' validity. Back at the original pitch session I mentioned above, Doyle commented that he had a patent on a way of handling collisions in computer games and similar interactive, graphical application. He observed that people had been infringing his patent for years but he didn't find out in time to enforce it-- he only found out about the infringement when he read the book "Secrets of the Game Designers" (or something like that). He explained that this wasn't going to be a problem with the "Eolas patent" because he already knew it was being infringed. My reaction to his story was that the "game designers" had probably come up with the technique independently (would not necessarily invalidate the patent) and may have even done so before he did (would invalidate the patent). Say what you like about the man, but you've got to give him credit for self-confidence and faith in his own abilities.
3) Doyle also has a patent on a cryptographic system that he tried to spin out into its own company (as a subsidiary of Eolas) called "ProofSpace" or "ProofStamp" or something like that. I no longer recall the details of the product, but it was to be some kind of web-accessible digital timestamp. I think it was a good idea to actually make a product, and it was a product that was needed-- but the company was probably doomed from the get-go. I'm not convinced that Doyle's idea ever could have been made into a workable product. I was at their one and only shareholder's meeting, again the guest of a relative. I asked their main technical guy there some very pointed questions about they planned to secure the time signal they were planning to use and he absolutely could not answer them. I don't know much about cryptography and it is possible that my question was a "bad" one that couldn't be answered, but I don't think so. (If it were, I would imagine that the technical guy would have told me that.) It did not come as a surprise to me when later it turned out that their programming team was unable to make the product work and they went bankrupt.
In my opinion, Doyle is a bright guy. He should have taken his ideas and implemented them into a product or product(s) rather than just trying to play the patent lottery. Early on Eolas did try to do that. They sold a Tcl/tk development environment among other things. It could have potentially slowly grown into a profitable company. Instead, they bet everything on this one patent lawsuit against Microsoft. It took too much of Doyle's time to deal with it and they had to stop trying to exist as a real company. It's a shame.
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I don't disagree that rightsholders should be paid. But the word most certainly is *not* "stealing." The filesharers are making "unauthorized copies," they aren't "stealing." I've been the victim of both burglary and infringement of my copyright, and I can assure you they are quite different.
You want to talk about stealing, let's talk about the way ASCAP and BMI take money from venues but don't actually bother to accurately figure out who is entitled to get the royalties they collect, as well as trying to claim license fees for music that they don't have the right to claim license fees for.
For the record, 90% of the music I've acquired in the last year was either *purchased* directly from the artists in question or through CD Baby. The remaining 10% was *purchased* from Amazon, Borders, or the used record store down the street.
Wow, the "cuddly stuffed animal version" is very appealing. Does anyone know where I can get one of these? I feel that I must have one for my desk.
Good news, someone saved the information from that page here:
http://dragonwritingprompts.blogsome.com/wikipedias-list-of-fictional-expletives/
Marriage only requires a man and a woman in some places during some periods of history. In other places/times it might require a man and more than one women, or a woman and more than one men. That's true in other parts of the world even today. So the scenario you describe is pretty much irrelvant.
Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not late Middle English. Chaucer wrote in Middle English. And yes, Beowulf is in Old English.
Old English:
Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum
theodcyninga thrym gefrunon,
hu ða æthelingas ellen fremedon!
(Listen! We --of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore,
of those clan-kings-- heard of their glory.
How those nobles performed courageous deeds.)
One fun thing about Old English is how as you read along you come across things that are understandable even if you just know modern English: "thæt wæs god cyning!" = "that was a good king!"
Middle English:
Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
(Once, as the old stories tell us, there was a Duke named Theseus; of Athens he was lord and governor, and in his time such a conqueror, that greater was there none under the sun.)
Early Modern English:
Our father which art in heauen,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth as it is in heauen.
Giue us this day our daily bread.
And forgiue us our debts as we forgiue our debters.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliuer us from euill. Amen.
Yes, I was replying to your post. I was AGREEING with you that having the "wrong" voice is a problem.
My issue is this: Although a woman, I always play a male character for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into right now. (Yes, people I play with regularly know my true gender.) And I'd just as soon that people I'm playing with casually don't know that I'm a woman. Voice chat makes that impossible. And even in the case of people I play with regularly who know I'm a woman and might even know me in real life, voice chat makes it harder -- if not impossible -- to role-play a guy convincingly.
pbhj writes: A simple "passport photo" (small portrait shot used on ID documents) is not likely to have enough about it to be deemed an artistic work.
True in some countries (Germany, I think) but not in the United States. A passport photo is just as entitled to copyright protection as any other photograph, "artistic" or not.
I think of information I get on Wikipedia this way-- it is about as reliable as information that I get from conversation with a random stranger met at a cocktail party.
That person may have a Ph.D. in the subject, or that person may have read about it in "Reader's Digest" three years ago while visiting his grandmother. Or he may be lying or making it up. Or he might have a Ph.D. but be too drunk to give me an accurate answer. But if I'm lucky, the information will be reliable enough for me to start searching elsewhere for reliable information, and if I'm really lucky, I'll get a citation of some useful source material of some kind.
That's why my favorite part of Wikipedia is the "reference desk." People ask all kinds of strange questions about obscure topics and get apparently careful, well-reasoned answers. It doesn't take the place of a good library reference desk, but on the other hand, the Wikipedians are there at 3am.
Actually, raw milk cheese is perfectly legal in the U.S. so long as it is a variety that has been aged at least 60 days.
I was into programming when I was in "middle school" and so were a couple of other female friends of mine. However, when we tried to show up at the computer club meetings we were basically run out by guys who didn't know what to make of us. So we just worked on things among ourselves, the guys at school didn't know what we were up to.
I was fortunate that my father bought one of the first Apple computers and I was allowed to experiment with it. I spent countless hours teaching myself to program it and had a wonderful time.
However, while my interest in it continues I wound up not going into the computer field professionally because I find my current carreer path even more interestng.
Don't know about open source CAD, but the folks at http://www.emachineshop.com/ have a free downloadable CAD program that can be used to design things that their company can then make for you. No reason why you can't download it and try it out just to learn how CAD works.
Before people get too riled, note that this decision was on a preliminary injunction. That means that the judge has NOT decided that deep-linking is illegal. He has only found that the plaintiff, SFX Motor Sports, has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of the case, harm to SFX Motor Sports that cannot adequately remedied with money, and that less harm will be done to the defendant if the injunction were issued than to plaintiff if it were not. And so the judge has issued the injunction.
At this point, the case will go forward on the merits. So all of you who are crying that the EFF should get involved should get busy and set up a Robert Davis defense fund and try to connect him up with the EFF. Because there is still a chance to convince the judge that deep linking is not copyright infringement.
I meant to say, "the sale starts tomorrow or ended yesterday."
I personally have negotiated lower prices at major department stores and chain stores. It is more successful if the item to be purchased is the last in the store. Note, I have not tried this at Wal-Mart because the nearest one is over an hour away and I never shop there.
Typically it works best if you give them a reason to give you a discount: "Excuse me, major chain bookstore manager, this book is damaged (book is shopworn) and it is the last copy in the store. Will you give me a discount?"
Or point out that the sale starts tomorrow or ends tomorrow, and wouldn't they like to make you a happy customer and give you the lower price. But once in a while you can get a lower price just for asking without any "justification," it depends on the store.
My grandmother is the one who taught me to do this. She always said that it never hurts to ask.
The Tetris music is a Russian folk dance called "Korobochka" or "Korobeiniki" which is about 150 years old. Glorious fun to dance, it starts out being played slowly and speeds up as the dance continues until you are whirling around.
Also from the FAQ:
What are the reccomended hardware specifications for the game?
Operating System: Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Processor: 2 GHz or greater
RAM: 1 GB
Video Card: DirectX 9 compatible; pixel shader and vertex shader compatible hardware with 128 MB or more of texture memory
Sound Card: DirectSound compatible audio hardware
An update for the benefit of the parent poster: My husband just called again, now they are saying the boards that the collector's editions were tied up in customs.
Hum.
Hubby just called the local game store, found the collector's edition was available there and bought it. We are canceling our Sony order. You might want to do the same.
My current theory is that Sony didn't have enough collector's editions to fulfill all their direct pre-orders and retailer sales and figured that they'd have more trouble in the long run if they disappointed the retailers than their own retail customers. After all, you are only buying a few (if more than one) copies of the game. EB Games and the like are buying hundreds of thousands and no doubt would be displeased if Sony forced them to disappoint their own pre-order customers.
Same thing happened to me and my husband. He just called me to tell me that according to the EQ2 boards on Sony's site, whoever packed the boxes foolishly did not properly secure the DVD's in the collector's edition tins and they all got scratched.
Apparently they are shipping on Thursday.
AC wrote: So, surprise, you bought an FX-era nVidia card, you have a shit graphics card. The rest of the specs are fine.
I disagree, I was playing the beta for a while and let me tell you, you need a lot more RAM. In fact, if you look at Sony's own site they tell you that you need at least 1G RAM.
I'm in the beta right now. There are some good things and bad things . . . way too much for me to comment on here.
But, I feel I should respond to your remark about Automatic Zone Instancing-- It may seem freaky and weird, but really, it is much better than the old EQ way where there are hordes of people in the same zone fighting for the chance to beat on something. The automatic zones are much better. And the newbie zone-- which is instanced-- you will stay in the same instanced zone for at least four levels of play. It is better, I assure you!
As for colors, you can get your trademark in a specific color (to distinguish it from similar marks, but there are very few color only trademarks. The only one I know of is Orange, which gets the color orange for cell phones.
Just to add to the list: Pink is a mark of Owens-Corning insulation and greenish-gold is a mark of Qualitex dry-cleaning pads.
I thought it sounded odd also. Reading the Google translation of the German article, it sounds like first he managed to remove the smart card (after several attempts) and then was finally able to stop the car with the brakes.
Maybe removing the smart card disengaged something that was preventing the brakes from working properly-- could an automatic anti-skid system or something like that have added to the problem?
Actual technique for baby-watching used by my brother-in-law's parents in the late 1960's when he was an infant: When they wanted to go to a cocktail party down the street, they would move the phone into the room with the crib. One parent would then go the party and call home. The other parent would pick up the phone in the baby's room and leave it off the hook. The other parent would then join the first parent at the party. No babysitter. Every 15-20 minutes or so, one or the other of them would pick up the phone at the party to listen if the baby was crying, and if so, one of them would go home to check on him.
My brother-in-law turned out okay despite this treatment, though I wouldn't recommend doing something like that today. (And DCFS would take the kid away if you tried it.)
I was along for the ride when Mike Doyle pitched Eolas to some of my relatives back in the mid-90's after the patent was applied for but before it was issued and I've gone to some of their stockholder's meetings. I have the following observations to make:
1) Mike Doyle's father considered himself an inventor and had several patents. Doyle also considers himself an inventor. That's probably why, unlike many programmers, his first instinct when he thinks of a clever way to solve a programming problem is to patent it. He is very much in favor of patents because he strongly believes that they protect the little guy from exploitation by big business.
2) The "Eolas patent" isn't Doyle's only patent; it would be interesting to know what you all think of the other patents' validity. Back at the original pitch session I mentioned above, Doyle commented that he had a patent on a way of handling collisions in computer games and similar interactive, graphical application. He observed that people had been infringing his patent for years but he didn't find out in time to enforce it-- he only found out about the infringement when he read the book "Secrets of the Game Designers" (or something like that). He explained that this wasn't going to be a problem with the "Eolas patent" because he already knew it was being infringed. My reaction to his story was that the "game designers" had probably come up with the technique independently (would not necessarily invalidate the patent) and may have even done so before he did (would invalidate the patent). Say what you like about the man, but you've got to give him credit for self-confidence and faith in his own abilities.
3) Doyle also has a patent on a cryptographic system that he tried to spin out into its own company (as a subsidiary of Eolas) called "ProofSpace" or "ProofStamp" or something like that. I no longer recall the details of the product, but it was to be some kind of web-accessible digital timestamp. I think it was a good idea to actually make a product, and it was a product that was needed-- but the company was probably doomed from the get-go. I'm not convinced that Doyle's idea ever could have been made into a workable product. I was at their one and only shareholder's meeting, again the guest of a relative. I asked their main technical guy there some very pointed questions about they planned to secure the time signal they were planning to use and he absolutely could not answer them. I don't know much about cryptography and it is possible that my question was a "bad" one that couldn't be answered, but I don't think so. (If it were, I would imagine that the technical guy would have told me that.) It did not come as a surprise to me when later it turned out that their programming team was unable to make the product work and they went bankrupt.
In my opinion, Doyle is a bright guy. He should have taken his ideas and implemented them into a product or product(s) rather than just trying to play the patent lottery. Early on Eolas did try to do that. They sold a Tcl/tk development environment among other things. It could have potentially slowly grown into a profitable company. Instead, they bet everything on this one patent lawsuit against Microsoft. It took too much of Doyle's time to deal with it and they had to stop trying to exist as a real company. It's a shame.