Try proving P=NP by copying an answer from a friend
As an aside, I've just asked around my office. We're a mature and well paying software development house. Three people admitted to familiarity with the problem, the best part of two dozen just looked blankly at me then went back to coding "for(i=0;i<10;i++) do(i);"
I wont garner a lot of support on this as I can already here replies to the above but people who like to look at child pornography become people who want to act out on what they have been taking in.
I agree. Unfortunately, that applies to any activity. Anything you see a lot becomes glamourised and more acceptable. TV violence, selfish and abusive behaviour (especially when it's funny, and the camera quickly pans away from the anonymous victim). The frenzy of aquisition and domination that is Pokemon. TV lawyers (shudder).
Where we draw the line is pretty arbitrary, and it's important that we do remember to treat people as being responsible for their own actions, or we'll all start suing EveryQuest (an Slashdot for that matter) for stealing our lives.
All that said, I do actually agree with you. Tell you what, I'll volunteer here and now to give up my rights to watch portrayals of kiddie porn (real or faked) on the basis that it will turn me into a paedophile, in return for an agrement from the DoJ that merely having access to content copying devices and copyable content will not automatically turn me into a thief. Does that sound like a fair trade?
Law cannot be 'up for interpretation'. This is why the drinking age is 21, why the pr0n age is 18
And that's exactly the problem with our legal system. An adversarial system, presided over by an allegedly impartial judge, that demands a binary verdict, is neither social, nor natural nor just.
All legal systems are just formalizations of mob rule. No? Then why do we have juries? The trouble is that we allowed lawyers into the system, then we allowed lawyers to decide what the law would be. 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. If that doesn't scare you, then it should. We will never see meaningful legal reform, or a streamlining of our bloated system, as long as our laws are written by lawyers, for lawyers.
The argument that virtual child pornography whets pedophiles' appetites and encourages them to engage in illegal conduct is unavailing because the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is not a sufficient reason for banning it
So, depictions of kiddie porn are protected speech and watching them doesn't make you a paedophile, but if you tell someone where to get DeCSS, then that proves that you're both evil copyright thieves.
No you wouldn't. [...] There would still be thousands of rationalizations for pirating music
Shall I give you my number one reason? DRM.
The partner in this instance is Soundbuzz, and - as usual - they're missing the fucking point, big time.
The one thing that their site managed to tell me before it squealed and died was that they use a Digital Rights Management system.
Sigh. Forget it then. If I want to listen to music where and when it suits the music to be listened to, I'll use the radio. I won't pay 10 cents for a crippled.wmf. I wouldn't take a rights restricted.wmf file if you gave it to me, and if the labels keep pushing on down this insane road, it might very well come to that.
It's a pretty simple proposition. We can all get completely uncrippled music for nothing. It's no big secret. And the labels just don't have a big enough stick to threaten us with. The guilt trip doesn't work, because we can all see that sharing isn't hurting the music industry nearly as bad as they claim. DMCA hasn't made a dent in it, and CDBPTA looks like it's failed the laugh test. Crippleware music disks (not CD's, dammit) are about the worst idea they have come up with yet; if you buy one and want to assert your fair use rights to space shift, you have to break the DMCA (which demonstrates how insane that is) and/or grab an MP3 from a P2P system (and they are all over it like a rash). DRM just illustrates how great MP3 (/ogg) is for music lovers.
I can't believe that the labels don't get that. They must understand that by trying to sell DRM content (on disk and online), all they're doing is driving people - including their best paying customers - to P2P.
It's not a difficult proposition. Give me a site where I can enter my CC details, listen to a low quality streaming mp3, then download a high quality (200 kb/s+) version at 25 cents(*) a pop. Bill me monthly. I'll use it. Yes I damn well will.
MP3.com is close, but no cigar. It's too service oriented, too limited, too much aimed at pushing specific end uses ("burn CD's!") and maintaining a customer relationship. Often you can only buy without streaming. Sometimes you can stream without buying (!). I don't want a relationship, all I want is the mp3. Just give me the track, and I'll give you money, and we can both go away happy.
I mean, what is the label's major malfunction, that they can't understand this simple proposition: I'll pay them 25 cents for the same content that I'm already getting for nothing. I hadn't paid a red cent for music for ten years before Napster appeared, and I haven't paid any since. If I'm allowed to, I will pay for tthe good tracks, even though I don't have to. However, if they continue to offer padded, over produced, over promoted, over priced CD's and DRM protected music disks, and crippled DRM downloads (at any price), I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing right now and sharing it for nothing.
Don't they want my money?
(*) 25 cents a track. Yes, that's right, not a dollar, not fifty cents, twenty five cents. Maybe less. Because as we've seen with the instant Slashdotting of an Indian site, we're in a global market, so we need a global price. If you're wondering about the real reason why the labels won't offer online music, keep on thinking about the implications of global pricing on their market segmentation.
Mozilla is licenced under the Netscape Public Licence [mozilla.org], not the GPL
That's not nitpicking, it's a very important point. NPL is functionally equivelant to LGPL, but it does not trigger any of the banning clauses. In fact, there are no licenses - including the GPL and LGPL - that trigger these clauses. That's why the GPL and LGPL are explicitely prohibited. Everything after LGPL is obfuscation and FUD, implying that the GPL and LGPL do trigger these conditions, when in fact they absolutely do not.
Let's get this straight: this is an attack on the FSF, not on open source.
As the price of oil goes up, reserves that cost more to extract will now be profitable. We'll still have oil, but it will just be more expensive [...] clear-eyed skepticism is more productive than knee-jerk idealism.
OK, but if we're not knee jerking, then we should be taking a long term view. I fully agree with you that we'll keep drilling for oil (in combination with shifting to other sources, slowly, slowly) until it's really not viable any more.
My question then becomes: what happens after the next ice age?
We know it's coming. It's not a knee jerk concern, it's a mid term certainty. The questions are: when, how bad, and how much can we save?
The great thing about oil is that it can bootstrap you. Solar, wind, wave and nuclear need a heap of energy input up front to create the hardware. Even today, a typical solar energy plant can't produce enough energy from the cells it makes to sustain production of more cells. I find that pretty damn chilling.
When the ice sheets recede, are our descendants going to have to jump from wood or coke fired steam straight to nuclear powered steam? Sure, we can drill all of the easily available oil now, but then what are we leaving our descendants? Off shore fields, fields in the chilly ass end of nowhere. I care about that. I care enough to pay more now to make the switch away from oil voluntarily, while we still have a choice, in order to give our descendants a fair swing at the ball.
Or, do we just want to rape the planet and then write it off for the next few million years until some new deposits get laid down? Good luck to the pigs and rats, in that case.
Give me a break it is an original peice of art done by the developer of Space HoRSE
Sure, if you like. You're saying that this isn't just one of these with the guns removed and little shoulderpads added? OK, I believe you. Really, I do. No, really. Look at the straight face.
Please, if you do work for Shrapnel, ask your lawyers about the Lanham Act, specifically the snappily named "Title 15, Chapter 22, Subchapter III, Section 1114". Specifically, do as another poster suggested here, and quote Gamespot as saying that H.O.R.S.E. is a M.U.L.E. derivative. Don't claim it yourself!
Sure, EA might overlook it, but you don't want to be worrying about that, right? You just want to develop great games. Fine, develop a great game and then sell it on its own merits. Don't try and piggyback sales off of EA's trademark, which is really what you're doing here.
My windows 98 box boots in less then 10 seconds (Sony vaio z505js) and linux on the same box boots in less then 5 seconds after POST [...] 12 seconds for a "Fast restore" blows.
Sigh. 12 second including POST. And that's not "until you see the desktop". It restores to exactly the same state it was in when you shut it down, and is immediately available. That's a big difference; it's a genuine pause button.
Incidentally, what's your problem with WinXP? You're advocating booting a stripped down linux as an alternative (did you not read my point about "dozens of running processes and services"?) so I assume you'd accept that you can strip XP down until it's effectively Win2K. You seem to be more anti-XP than pro-any other solution. I like linux, but that doesn't mean that I have to hate XP, or to pretend that XP hibernate is a wonderful feature that I'd really like to see on my linux boxen - as I described it. Now, let's go again. Do you know of any linux solution that does effectively what XP hibernate does?
Re:rebooting will not die, yet.
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No More Rebooting?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
We could easily dump the memory contents onto the hard drive straigh away and we are not doing it (except in laptops, but even there it doesn't always work)
Uh, have you seen WinXP's hibernate feature? On my 256Mb Athlon desktop, it writes the RAM to disk and shuts down in under five seconds, and comes back up (from wakeup keypress, through POST, then writes disk to ram) and is fully usable in twelve seconds. I've hibernated it with dozens of running processes and services, and not yet seen any problems on restore. I even took it down and brought it back up during a game of Deus Ex, and just kept right on playing where I'd left off.
Given a reasonably reliable OS, you should only be wiping the RAM when the system changes significantly, e.g. switching kernels or hardware. XP's hibernate feature demonstrates that merely turning the power off shouldn't require you to shut anything down. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anything that works as well on my linux boxen, including my laptop. Suggestions gratefully received!
why change the name, and the name of the resources? What was wrong with "Multi-Use Labor Element", chrystite, and smithore
"Inspired by the 1980's classic, M.U.L.E" they say, which is just about the most stupid thing they could have done. It's clearly not licensed, it's a commercial product, and they've just tried to make money off of EA's trademark. Arguably, they are flat out passing off, something that Slashdot has just happily contributed to by calling this a "port". Note that Gamespot are very careful not to do this.
It is possible to produce a commercial "inspired by" version of a classic game if you're careful to not make any claims about what you're emulating. It doesn't matter if every magazine in the world calls your version a "XYZ clone", as long as you don't try and leverage someone else's trademark, you're safe. But it looks like Shrapnel reckon that the M.U.L.E trademark is abandonware, or they just don't understand what they've done. EA's nose has been tweaked, and now they can either throw a lawyer or ten at protecting their trademark, or they can admit that it's lapsed. Which is more likely?
At the very least, EA will be able to get Shrapnel to stop mentioning M.U.L.E. And if EA can show that they have any plans to produce their own port, they can ream Shrapnel for cutting into their market, even their potential market.
I don't necessarily think that's right or fair, it's just what's going to happen. EA can make Shrapnel dance like organ grinders' monkeys now just by throwing a few lawyers at them. It looks like Shrapnel doesn't have any big corporate backers to fight their corner for them. Damn shame, but they've kind of brought it on themselves.
And incidentally (or otherwise), isn't that an AT-ST walker they're using for cover art? Now they're tweaking the nose of Lucasart? Oh dear.:(
Re:More Info
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e-Denounce
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· Score: 3, Interesting
in its effort to short-circuit pirates selling illegal software over the Internet
Now, here I am 100% behind them. But that's not what they are going to catch with this. Try and find a web site actually selling pirated software. Go on, try. If you find one, is it based in the UK? Didn't think so, and that's all FAST cares about, despite any claims they make to the contrary.
Here's my experience with FAST. I agree with them that commercial piracy does steal from developers (where I disagree is that the amount of lost revenue is the retail cost of the pirated software, not the full price of the licensed version). And so I do actually report commercial piracy to them when I find it. I wouldn't say I'm a vigilante, just that I occasionally spend ten minutes trolling eBay.co.uk looking for obvious pirate sales, and querying the sellers about whether they are selling originals. You'd be surprised how honest and open people are about what they're selling, and it's that casual "of course they're copies, you got a problem with that?" attitude that actually pisses me off the most.
Want to know the net results of about a year of such reporting? A bunch of auctions got pulled. One guy lost his ISP access. And I received a bunch of email threats, including a death threat from a guy who lives just a few miles away (although he doesn't know that, I hope). The police have told me that they aren't in the least bit interested in handling these threats, and in fact the local constabulary suggested (informally) that I consider "not making such a bloody nuisance" of myself. FAST thank me for my efforts, assure me that all necessary steps have been taken to prevent the sale, but regret to inform me that the amounts in question are too small for them to allocate resources to a prosecution.
So, there you go. Net result to commercial pirates: a tiny little bit of inconvenience. Net result to me: I have to buy better locks for my door and keep a fire extinguisher handy.
What FAST are interested in is The Big Bust, tens of thousands of pounds. But they are not going to find this on the web, which is all this tool deals with. The Big Bust happens when they raid a market trader with thousands of CD's, or crash an office (or government department) running unlicensed Microsoft gear. But none of this is exposed on the web. This is a great solution to a problem that never really existed.
Re:Someone start a support group! / Why it won't l
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The Lure of Heroinware
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I can no longer easily count the friends I have seen do serious damage to their "real" lives by playing these games. [...] there WILL be some sort of legislation to wean geeks away from these games.
Given our track record in this area, what's more likely is that there will be doomed attempts - driven by ratings grabbing media hysterics - to ban "these" games. Note that "these" games will always mean whatever people with addictive personalites become addicted to.
First they came for EverQuest, but that didn't worry me because I didn't play EverQuest... and so on.
What we will never do is to actually address the problem of people with addictive personalities. We'll carry on doing what we do now, which is to provide patchy and erratic treatment programs for a few select substances. We have programs for heroin uses, programs for alcohol users, programs for nicotene users. But how many people kick heroin (some through methodone), get chalked up as a success, then go on kill themselves with alcohol or the tar and toxic additives in cigarettes?
Newsflash: people with addictive personalities will become addicted to addicting substances or activities. What we need are clinics where you can walk in and say "I'm an addict", and you get helped to find a new addiction that's less prone to binge abuse of tainted substances, and that's less socially destructive.
The reason why we'll never have that (I believe) is that then billionaire scions of the US Royal Families might end up in the same program as the lowest scum from the streets that they exploit to pay for their cocaine habits. Think that one through. Substance based treatments ensure that you generally mix with Your Sort of Person. That sounds pretty cynical, but if you look at our track record of banning substances specifically to ostracise and criminalise certain ethnic and social groups, it really makes sense.
Linux has a small but appreciable market share, and that market share is more apt to get WiFi than most other users
Ooh, so wrong. Linux has a decent share of the server market, which is 100% wired. It has some desktops, mostly wired. But the 802.11* market is laptops. Sure, I'm writing this on my couch with a (wired) laptop running SuSE, and I once heard of a guy in Portland using a linux laptop as well, but he may be a myth. I mean really, what percentage of laptops are running linux? 5%? And what percentage of corporate laptops are running linux? 1%?
We know that it costs nothing to release technical specs, but apparently manufacturers don't know that. Even manufacturers like Creative - who have a linux driver project - can be very slow and reluctant to release specs (no? I still can't get my Creative Webcam Go to work reliably). I'm guessing that we'll have to prod and poke and guess and hack WinWiFi like we had to do with WinModems for years.:(
That would (as I understand it) mean that verbatim copies of the original stories are public domain, but "derivative works" using any of the trademarked characters or settings would need to license them
Yes, if you want to use them in a commercial way, or to pass your interpretation off as canon, or use them in a transformative fashion that might dilute or cheapen the brand. Writing a non-commercial fan fiction work in the spirit of the originals that does not attempt to pass itself off as an original is protected (assuming you've got the resources to prove your innocence when the estate sicks a pack of lawyers on you).
I'll just go ahead and assert that everything Burroughs wrote is in the public domain.
His family [...] renews the copyrights on all of his works whenever they are due to expire.
Pish tosh. Please don't post such utter nonsense. There is no mechanism for "renewing copyright" on a work, other than by bribing Congress to change the law. You can defend a trademark, which is probably what you are talking about, but that's not what you said.
If I release a non-commercial derivative work based on Barsoom trademarks that does not pass itself off as an original, or cheapen the brand, then any reasonably objective court would protect that usage. However, whether I could afford to let it go to court is a different question. The irony of it is that anyone with the resources to defend their use of Burrough's trademarks (like a production company) will likely be using them in a commercial and transformative way that is not protected fair use.
Re:Surprised? No. Opportunity? Yes.
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XP, Phone Home
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somehow [marketing departments are] able to prove their worth. demographic type information shows it's worth
Pish tosh. Established companies spend a fixed proportion of their revenues on marketing. There's no justification required, it's simply one of those things that you do if you want to attract corporate investors. Too much or too little, and you look different and are a bad risk. I know this for a bare naked fact, as my own company is about to lay off half of the marketing department due to a sales slump. The ironic part is that we've just completed a kick ass product, and we actually need marketing droid to pimp it to customers, but we also need short term investment, and we are simply spending too much on marketing to attract any.
There's no logic to it, no connection between marketing and sales: our sales drop was because we had a crap product, not bad marketing, and now we have a great product but a bad reputation and a desparate need of marketing. There's no rhyme or reason to marketing, just complying with industry standards.
Consider the source
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For those who don't know, Thomas C. Greene is the Register's equivelant of Jon Katz. His job is basically to find things to be angry about, and he does that very well indeed. He has just enough technical savvy to appear credible (think Steve!!! Gibson!!!!!), but that doesn't actually give him any deep cosmic insights.
Re:Surprised? No. Opportunity? Yes.
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XP, Phone Home
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You have information Microsoft could possibly sell
Bah, it's just more idiots burning money on a slightly refined version of the.com business plan:
(New step) Find out what people are searching for.
Give away a great product to gain mindshare.
...
Profit!
Who is it that keeps telling us that demographics information is valuable? Marketeers. Nuff said.
It's perfectly legal to buy a handgun. [...] the Government does not mandate the crippling of potential gun owners' hands in order to decrease one's killing capacity. Nor does the government mandate that guns be as inaccurate as possible in order to stem victims being hit by bullets
Ooh, poor example. Depending on where you live, I wish you luck in trying to buy a fully automatic weapon, or a semi automatic shotgun, or a handgun with a magazine capacity in excess of ten rounds. That's why the CDBTPA was such a mistake; it was too much all at once. If rights are just nibbled away a little at a time, too few people are pissed off enough at any one time to do anything about it.
First they came for the people who had automatic weapons or hosted DeCSS, but I didn't have an automatic weapon or host DeCSS...
In other words, expect Son of CDBTPA to be a much watered down "compromise", liberally slathered in lubrication. It'll be eased into our collective asses just a little at a time. Lovely image.
Does anyone know if it's legal to make an e-mail, sent to you personaly, public?
If that isn't investigative journalism, I don't know what is. If the Netherlands doesn't have explicit laws in place to protect that kind of journalism, then I'd be most surprised. Marx (Karl, not Groucho) liked to point out that freedom of the press in Holland didn't prevent crippling national debt or a revolution, and I assume that you've still got some of that left. Freedom of the press, not the debt or revolution, I mean.;-)
Of course, IANA(D)L, and you might want to consider that access to liar^H^H^H^H lawyers tends to de facto define what the law is at the moment. You'd have to be a brave person to do it, but there's still some of us who respect courage, Dutch or otherwise.;-)
Hell I know people who used to get Mp3's so they could decide whether to buy an album who now just get them to piss off RIAA
Whenever I set up a new system or OS, the first thing I do is install a gnutella client and pull down a Metallica track.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't actually listen to it. Inf act, I've recently started looking for.wma tracks for putting on *nix boxen, and.ogg tracks for Windows boxen.
Pop quiz: what's the actual monetary loss to Metallica's label when I make a copy of what (as far as the applications on the OS are concerned) is a bunch of random bits? I mean, how much does their bank balance drop when I do this? Really, how much? And how does their bank know to transfer the money to me?
Next question. If I do copy data that I can actually listen to, is that worse? If so, why?
If I listen to it once, have I now caused a monetary loss? Note: a loss, which is what they always talk about. There's less money in their account. But the data was right there on my hard drive, so can you explain why the act of modulating it through a speaker actually removes a physical amount of money from their bank account?
If I listen to it a hundred times, have I stolen (i.e. removed) resouces from them every time? If I listen to it enough times, will that steal all of the money in their accounts? Will they go bankrupt and die hungry and alone in the gutter?
Strangely, before Metallica turned into the RIAA's glove puppet on this issue, I just blithely assumed that because I hadn't paid to listen to music for ten years before I started using Napster, I couldn't possibly be "stealing" anything from them, because they weren't going to get it from me anyway.
But once they'd brought it to my attention that sharing is stealing, it occurred to me that if I just listened to shared music enough, then I could steal all of the resoures in the free world and collapse the entire fabric of capitalist society. Phew. That's a big responsibility. I mean, I don't know how much Metallica I can really listen to. Maybe if we all helped...
It's hard to believe that the bulk of American's accept CNN as a reliable media outlet
Hey! I'm a bulky American, and I'm outraged to read about all of these damn paedophiles and junkie hackers and what not stealing my credit card using this RCI. In fact, I'm going to write my Congressman and demand that... ooh, a squirrel! Heheheheh! They're so cute.
(In other words, don't sweat it. This too shall pass.)
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, I've just asked around my office. We're a mature and well paying software development house. Three people admitted to familiarity with the problem, the best part of two dozen just looked blankly at me then went back to coding "for(i=0;i<10;i++) do(i);"
Curiously, we all get paid much the same.
I agree. Unfortunately, that applies to any activity. Anything you see a lot becomes glamourised and more acceptable. TV violence, selfish and abusive behaviour (especially when it's funny, and the camera quickly pans away from the anonymous victim). The frenzy of aquisition and domination that is Pokemon. TV lawyers (shudder).
Where we draw the line is pretty arbitrary, and it's important that we do remember to treat people as being responsible for their own actions, or we'll all start suing EveryQuest (an Slashdot for that matter) for stealing our lives.
All that said, I do actually agree with you. Tell you what, I'll volunteer here and now to give up my rights to watch portrayals of kiddie porn (real or faked) on the basis that it will turn me into a paedophile, in return for an agrement from the DoJ that merely having access to content copying devices and copyable content will not automatically turn me into a thief. Does that sound like a fair trade?
And that's exactly the problem with our legal system. An adversarial system, presided over by an allegedly impartial judge, that demands a binary verdict, is neither social, nor natural nor just.
All legal systems are just formalizations of mob rule. No? Then why do we have juries? The trouble is that we allowed lawyers into the system, then we allowed lawyers to decide what the law would be. 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. If that doesn't scare you, then it should. We will never see meaningful legal reform, or a streamlining of our bloated system, as long as our laws are written by lawyers, for lawyers.
So, depictions of kiddie porn are protected speech and watching them doesn't make you a paedophile, but if you tell someone where to get DeCSS, then that proves that you're both evil copyright thieves.
Nice to know we've got our priorities straight.
Shall I give you my number one reason? DRM.
The partner in this instance is Soundbuzz, and - as usual - they're missing the fucking point, big time.
The one thing that their site managed to tell me before it squealed and died was that they use a Digital Rights Management system.
Sigh. Forget it then. If I want to listen to music where and when it suits the music to be listened to, I'll use the radio. I won't pay 10 cents for a crippled .wmf. I wouldn't take a rights restricted .wmf file if you gave it to me, and if the labels keep pushing on down this insane road, it might very well come to that.
It's a pretty simple proposition. We can all get completely uncrippled music for nothing. It's no big secret. And the labels just don't have a big enough stick to threaten us with. The guilt trip doesn't work, because we can all see that sharing isn't hurting the music industry nearly as bad as they claim. DMCA hasn't made a dent in it, and CDBPTA looks like it's failed the laugh test. Crippleware music disks (not CD's, dammit) are about the worst idea they have come up with yet; if you buy one and want to assert your fair use rights to space shift, you have to break the DMCA (which demonstrates how insane that is) and/or grab an MP3 from a P2P system (and they are all over it like a rash). DRM just illustrates how great MP3 (/ogg) is for music lovers.
I can't believe that the labels don't get that. They must understand that by trying to sell DRM content (on disk and online), all they're doing is driving people - including their best paying customers - to P2P.
It's not a difficult proposition. Give me a site where I can enter my CC details, listen to a low quality streaming mp3, then download a high quality (200 kb/s+) version at 25 cents(*) a pop. Bill me monthly. I'll use it. Yes I damn well will.
MP3.com is close, but no cigar. It's too service oriented, too limited, too much aimed at pushing specific end uses ("burn CD's!") and maintaining a customer relationship. Often you can only buy without streaming. Sometimes you can stream without buying (!). I don't want a relationship, all I want is the mp3. Just give me the track, and I'll give you money, and we can both go away happy.
I mean, what is the label's major malfunction, that they can't understand this simple proposition: I'll pay them 25 cents for the same content that I'm already getting for nothing. I hadn't paid a red cent for music for ten years before Napster appeared, and I haven't paid any since. If I'm allowed to, I will pay for tthe good tracks, even though I don't have to. However, if they continue to offer padded, over produced, over promoted, over priced CD's and DRM protected music disks, and crippled DRM downloads (at any price), I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing right now and sharing it for nothing.
Don't they want my money?
(*) 25 cents a track. Yes, that's right, not a dollar, not fifty cents, twenty five cents. Maybe less. Because as we've seen with the instant Slashdotting of an Indian site, we're in a global market, so we need a global price. If you're wondering about the real reason why the labels won't offer online music, keep on thinking about the implications of global pricing on their market segmentation.
That's not nitpicking, it's a very important point. NPL is functionally equivelant to LGPL, but it does not trigger any of the banning clauses. In fact, there are no licenses - including the GPL and LGPL - that trigger these clauses. That's why the GPL and LGPL are explicitely prohibited. Everything after LGPL is obfuscation and FUD, implying that the GPL and LGPL do trigger these conditions, when in fact they absolutely do not.
Let's get this straight: this is an attack on the FSF, not on open source.
OK, but if we're not knee jerking, then we should be taking a long term view. I fully agree with you that we'll keep drilling for oil (in combination with shifting to other sources, slowly, slowly) until it's really not viable any more.
My question then becomes: what happens after the next ice age?
We know it's coming. It's not a knee jerk concern, it's a mid term certainty. The questions are: when, how bad, and how much can we save?
The great thing about oil is that it can bootstrap you. Solar, wind, wave and nuclear need a heap of energy input up front to create the hardware. Even today, a typical solar energy plant can't produce enough energy from the cells it makes to sustain production of more cells. I find that pretty damn chilling.
When the ice sheets recede, are our descendants going to have to jump from wood or coke fired steam straight to nuclear powered steam? Sure, we can drill all of the easily available oil now, but then what are we leaving our descendants? Off shore fields, fields in the chilly ass end of nowhere. I care about that. I care enough to pay more now to make the switch away from oil voluntarily, while we still have a choice, in order to give our descendants a fair swing at the ball.
Or, do we just want to rape the planet and then write it off for the next few million years until some new deposits get laid down? Good luck to the pigs and rats, in that case.
Sure, if you like. You're saying that this isn't just one of these with the guns removed and little shoulderpads added? OK, I believe you. Really, I do. No, really. Look at the straight face.
Please, if you do work for Shrapnel, ask your lawyers about the Lanham Act, specifically the snappily named "Title 15, Chapter 22, Subchapter III, Section 1114". Specifically, do as another poster suggested here, and quote Gamespot as saying that H.O.R.S.E. is a M.U.L.E. derivative. Don't claim it yourself!
Sure, EA might overlook it, but you don't want to be worrying about that, right? You just want to develop great games. Fine, develop a great game and then sell it on its own merits. Don't try and piggyback sales off of EA's trademark, which is really what you're doing here.
Sigh. 12 second including POST. And that's not "until you see the desktop". It restores to exactly the same state it was in when you shut it down, and is immediately available. That's a big difference; it's a genuine pause button.
Incidentally, what's your problem with WinXP? You're advocating booting a stripped down linux as an alternative (did you not read my point about "dozens of running processes and services"?) so I assume you'd accept that you can strip XP down until it's effectively Win2K. You seem to be more anti-XP than pro-any other solution. I like linux, but that doesn't mean that I have to hate XP, or to pretend that XP hibernate is a wonderful feature that I'd really like to see on my linux boxen - as I described it. Now, let's go again. Do you know of any linux solution that does effectively what XP hibernate does?
Uh, have you seen WinXP's hibernate feature? On my 256Mb Athlon desktop, it writes the RAM to disk and shuts down in under five seconds, and comes back up (from wakeup keypress, through POST, then writes disk to ram) and is fully usable in twelve seconds. I've hibernated it with dozens of running processes and services, and not yet seen any problems on restore. I even took it down and brought it back up during a game of Deus Ex, and just kept right on playing where I'd left off.
Given a reasonably reliable OS, you should only be wiping the RAM when the system changes significantly, e.g. switching kernels or hardware. XP's hibernate feature demonstrates that merely turning the power off shouldn't require you to shut anything down. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anything that works as well on my linux boxen, including my laptop. Suggestions gratefully received!
"Inspired by the 1980's classic, M.U.L.E" they say, which is just about the most stupid thing they could have done. It's clearly not licensed, it's a commercial product, and they've just tried to make money off of EA's trademark. Arguably, they are flat out passing off, something that Slashdot has just happily contributed to by calling this a "port". Note that Gamespot are very careful not to do this.
It is possible to produce a commercial "inspired by" version of a classic game if you're careful to not make any claims about what you're emulating. It doesn't matter if every magazine in the world calls your version a "XYZ clone", as long as you don't try and leverage someone else's trademark, you're safe. But it looks like Shrapnel reckon that the M.U.L.E trademark is abandonware, or they just don't understand what they've done. EA's nose has been tweaked, and now they can either throw a lawyer or ten at protecting their trademark, or they can admit that it's lapsed. Which is more likely?
At the very least, EA will be able to get Shrapnel to stop mentioning M.U.L.E. And if EA can show that they have any plans to produce their own port, they can ream Shrapnel for cutting into their market, even their potential market.
I don't necessarily think that's right or fair, it's just what's going to happen. EA can make Shrapnel dance like organ grinders' monkeys now just by throwing a few lawyers at them. It looks like Shrapnel doesn't have any big corporate backers to fight their corner for them. Damn shame, but they've kind of brought it on themselves.
And incidentally (or otherwise), isn't that an AT-ST walker they're using for cover art? Now they're tweaking the nose of Lucasart? Oh dear. :(
Now, here I am 100% behind them. But that's not what they are going to catch with this. Try and find a web site actually selling pirated software. Go on, try. If you find one, is it based in the UK? Didn't think so, and that's all FAST cares about, despite any claims they make to the contrary.
Here's my experience with FAST. I agree with them that commercial piracy does steal from developers (where I disagree is that the amount of lost revenue is the retail cost of the pirated software, not the full price of the licensed version). And so I do actually report commercial piracy to them when I find it. I wouldn't say I'm a vigilante, just that I occasionally spend ten minutes trolling eBay.co.uk looking for obvious pirate sales, and querying the sellers about whether they are selling originals. You'd be surprised how honest and open people are about what they're selling, and it's that casual "of course they're copies, you got a problem with that?" attitude that actually pisses me off the most.
Want to know the net results of about a year of such reporting? A bunch of auctions got pulled. One guy lost his ISP access. And I received a bunch of email threats, including a death threat from a guy who lives just a few miles away (although he doesn't know that, I hope). The police have told me that they aren't in the least bit interested in handling these threats, and in fact the local constabulary suggested (informally) that I consider "not making such a bloody nuisance" of myself. FAST thank me for my efforts, assure me that all necessary steps have been taken to prevent the sale, but regret to inform me that the amounts in question are too small for them to allocate resources to a prosecution.
So, there you go. Net result to commercial pirates: a tiny little bit of inconvenience. Net result to me: I have to buy better locks for my door and keep a fire extinguisher handy.
What FAST are interested in is The Big Bust, tens of thousands of pounds. But they are not going to find this on the web, which is all this tool deals with. The Big Bust happens when they raid a market trader with thousands of CD's, or crash an office (or government department) running unlicensed Microsoft gear. But none of this is exposed on the web. This is a great solution to a problem that never really existed.
Given our track record in this area, what's more likely is that there will be doomed attempts - driven by ratings grabbing media hysterics - to ban "these" games. Note that "these" games will always mean whatever people with addictive personalites become addicted to.
First they came for EverQuest, but that didn't worry me because I didn't play EverQuest... and so on.
What we will never do is to actually address the problem of people with addictive personalities. We'll carry on doing what we do now, which is to provide patchy and erratic treatment programs for a few select substances. We have programs for heroin uses, programs for alcohol users, programs for nicotene users. But how many people kick heroin (some through methodone), get chalked up as a success, then go on kill themselves with alcohol or the tar and toxic additives in cigarettes?
Newsflash: people with addictive personalities will become addicted to addicting substances or activities. What we need are clinics where you can walk in and say "I'm an addict", and you get helped to find a new addiction that's less prone to binge abuse of tainted substances, and that's less socially destructive.
The reason why we'll never have that (I believe) is that then billionaire scions of the US Royal Families might end up in the same program as the lowest scum from the streets that they exploit to pay for their cocaine habits. Think that one through. Substance based treatments ensure that you generally mix with Your Sort of Person. That sounds pretty cynical, but if you look at our track record of banning substances specifically to ostracise and criminalise certain ethnic and social groups, it really makes sense.
Damn! There goes your job market!
----> ;-) <----
Ooh, so wrong. Linux has a decent share of the server market, which is 100% wired. It has some desktops, mostly wired. But the 802.11* market is laptops. Sure, I'm writing this on my couch with a (wired) laptop running SuSE, and I once heard of a guy in Portland using a linux laptop as well, but he may be a myth. I mean really, what percentage of laptops are running linux? 5%? And what percentage of corporate laptops are running linux? 1%?
We know that it costs nothing to release technical specs, but apparently manufacturers don't know that. Even manufacturers like Creative - who have a linux driver project - can be very slow and reluctant to release specs (no? I still can't get my Creative Webcam Go to work reliably). I'm guessing that we'll have to prod and poke and guess and hack WinWiFi like we had to do with WinModems for years. :(
Yes, if you want to use them in a commercial way, or to pass your interpretation off as canon, or use them in a transformative fashion that might dilute or cheapen the brand. Writing a non-commercial fan fiction work in the spirit of the originals that does not attempt to pass itself off as an original is protected (assuming you've got the resources to prove your innocence when the estate sicks a pack of lawyers on you).
I'll just go ahead and assert that everything Burroughs wrote is in the public domain.
Pish tosh. Please don't post such utter nonsense. There is no mechanism for "renewing copyright" on a work, other than by bribing Congress to change the law. You can defend a trademark, which is probably what you are talking about, but that's not what you said.
If I release a non-commercial derivative work based on Barsoom trademarks that does not pass itself off as an original, or cheapen the brand, then any reasonably objective court would protect that usage. However, whether I could afford to let it go to court is a different question. The irony of it is that anyone with the resources to defend their use of Burrough's trademarks (like a production company) will likely be using them in a commercial and transformative way that is not protected fair use.
Pish tosh. Established companies spend a fixed proportion of their revenues on marketing. There's no justification required, it's simply one of those things that you do if you want to attract corporate investors. Too much or too little, and you look different and are a bad risk. I know this for a bare naked fact, as my own company is about to lay off half of the marketing department due to a sales slump. The ironic part is that we've just completed a kick ass product, and we actually need marketing droid to pimp it to customers, but we also need short term investment, and we are simply spending too much on marketing to attract any.
There's no logic to it, no connection between marketing and sales: our sales drop was because we had a crap product, not bad marketing, and now we have a great product but a bad reputation and a desparate need of marketing. There's no rhyme or reason to marketing, just complying with industry standards.
For those who don't know, Thomas C. Greene is the Register's equivelant of Jon Katz. His job is basically to find things to be angry about, and he does that very well indeed. He has just enough technical savvy to appear credible (think Steve!!! Gibson!!!!!), but that doesn't actually give him any deep cosmic insights.
Bah, it's just more idiots burning money on a slightly refined version of the .com business plan:
Who is it that keeps telling us that demographics information is valuable? Marketeers. Nuff said.
Which magazine would you buy based on these covers:
Now, which one is more likely to be honest?
You see the problem yet? No? Look in a mirror.
Ooh, poor example. Depending on where you live, I wish you luck in trying to buy a fully automatic weapon, or a semi automatic shotgun, or a handgun with a magazine capacity in excess of ten rounds. That's why the CDBTPA was such a mistake; it was too much all at once. If rights are just nibbled away a little at a time, too few people are pissed off enough at any one time to do anything about it.
First they came for the people who had automatic weapons or hosted DeCSS, but I didn't have an automatic weapon or host DeCSS...
In other words, expect Son of CDBTPA to be a much watered down "compromise", liberally slathered in lubrication. It'll be eased into our collective asses just a little at a time. Lovely image.
If that isn't investigative journalism, I don't know what is. If the Netherlands doesn't have explicit laws in place to protect that kind of journalism, then I'd be most surprised. Marx (Karl, not Groucho) liked to point out that freedom of the press in Holland didn't prevent crippling national debt or a revolution, and I assume that you've still got some of that left. Freedom of the press, not the debt or revolution, I mean. ;-)
Of course, IANA(D)L, and you might want to consider that access to liar^H^H^H^H lawyers tends to de facto define what the law is at the moment. You'd have to be a brave person to do it, but there's still some of us who respect courage, Dutch or otherwise. ;-)
Whenever I set up a new system or OS, the first thing I do is install a gnutella client and pull down a Metallica track.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't actually listen to it. Inf act, I've recently started looking for .wma tracks for putting on *nix boxen, and .ogg tracks for Windows boxen.
Pop quiz: what's the actual monetary loss to Metallica's label when I make a copy of what (as far as the applications on the OS are concerned) is a bunch of random bits? I mean, how much does their bank balance drop when I do this? Really, how much? And how does their bank know to transfer the money to me?
Next question. If I do copy data that I can actually listen to, is that worse? If so, why?
If I listen to it once, have I now caused a monetary loss? Note: a loss, which is what they always talk about. There's less money in their account. But the data was right there on my hard drive, so can you explain why the act of modulating it through a speaker actually removes a physical amount of money from their bank account?
If I listen to it a hundred times, have I stolen (i.e. removed) resouces from them every time? If I listen to it enough times, will that steal all of the money in their accounts? Will they go bankrupt and die hungry and alone in the gutter?
Strangely, before Metallica turned into the RIAA's glove puppet on this issue, I just blithely assumed that because I hadn't paid to listen to music for ten years before I started using Napster, I couldn't possibly be "stealing" anything from them, because they weren't going to get it from me anyway.
But once they'd brought it to my attention that sharing is stealing, it occurred to me that if I just listened to shared music enough, then I could steal all of the resoures in the free world and collapse the entire fabric of capitalist society. Phew. That's a big responsibility. I mean, I don't know how much Metallica I can really listen to. Maybe if we all helped...
Hey! I'm a bulky American, and I'm outraged to read about all of these damn paedophiles and junkie hackers and what not stealing my credit card using this RCI. In fact, I'm going to write my Congressman and demand that... ooh, a squirrel! Heheheheh! They're so cute.
(In other words, don't sweat it. This too shall pass.)