My attitude on this matter so far has always been the same. Free Market.
The only thing I'd add would be that that my attitude has always included: the public good. Regulation of the free market - e.g. antitrust legislation - are sometimes necessary for the public good.
The reality of our current broken sociopolitics is that regulation under the auspices of the public good is often used for the opposite result, namely for the profit of corporations at the expense of consumer choice and even of basic freedoms. Likewise, the free market concept is often successfully invoked by corporations to achieve detriments to the public good. So in terms of implementation, perhaps neither "free market" nor "public good" has a particularly better record. But in a parallel universe where politicians are noble and corporations behave, the public good takes precedence over the free market, and sets policy for it.
He forgot to mention RIAA/MPAA's attempts to control the very way we can use their products after we legally purchase and pay for them.
It's not that he forgot, it's that this topic actually doesn't fall into the domain he's discussing. He's talking about re-conceptualizing the end-to-end substrate of the internet, and hinting at some simple technical protocols/implementations to accompany and bolster such a shift in conceptualization. The goal of this shift is to enable innovation again. This does have some similarities to the topic you suggest, but only to the extent that there are technical and legal issues, and that big companies want more money at the expense of the public... which pretty much includes just about everything.
I don't want a G5 on my lap anyway. It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package
Guilty about what, how useful the machine would be? Can't say I relate. But I will note my recollection that when Apple released the powerbook 170 (a 25MHz chip) circa 1991, I remember the tag line they used: "Take the AWESOME POWER of a IIci anywhere you go." Perhaps true enough at the time, but believe me: now as then, this will seem like nothing in a few years.
you can only call [something] "Civil Disobedience" if you're willing to face the consequences of your act (and not try to weasel out of it).
Point #1: I don't think anybody in this thread has weighed in on whether facing consequences is or is not part of their plan.
Point #2: If someone chooses to break the law in an effort to cause change, what authority defines what "weaseling out of the consequences" is and its bearing on whether the term civil disobedience applies? Would Rosa Parks have been weaseling out if she'd accepted legal representation from a better attorney? Websters says that "civil disobedience" is:
refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government
I didn't notice anything in there regarding facing consequences or weaseling out. I wonder if the dictionary people are up to date.
Point #3: What does it matter whether an illegal action gets to be called civil disobedience as long as the action has the desired effect?
If it will make anyone happy, then by all means people can invent a new term that categorically denotes breaking the law with the ultimate intent to increase freedom but with the specific proviso that the lawbreaker does not intend to face consequences. Then those same people can get busy debating just exactly what shall be deemed "facing consequences". Be sure to let us all know how it comes out, we'll be on the edges of our bus seats.
Orrrrrr you could go through VALID channels and work for reform of intellectual property laws. Because as it stands now, if you trade in MS's intellectual property, it's WELL within their legal rights to come after you. If you don't like it, do something about it.
IMO it's pretty understandable if by this time people don't believe in the efficacy of writing their congressman. Congress is known to be for sale to the highest bidder, and corporations are outbidding Joe Q Public by a high margin.
Something BESIDES breaking the law anyway because it suits you and hiding behind "civil disobedience".
Whether one calls it "enacting civil disobediece" or "hiding behind civil disobedience" is, I suppose, a matter of how high a regard one has for civil disobedience. I for one do not look back at Rosa Parks and consider her to have been hiding behind civil disobedience.
Nothing like being moderated up for encouraging people to break the law.
If peoples' ability to disseminate information serves as a message to corporations that their attempts to turn the US into a police state won't work, then I can live with that.
Politicians distort the truth.
Nothing to see here, move along...
The notable thing here is that a concerned group of people are DOING something about said distortion, rather than simply waving a jaded hand at the television. That is newsworthy and I'm glad to hear it.
Funny, this seems to be one of those double standards. People like ESR and Linus are praised and recognized as the fathers of OSS, heros among their kind, but as soon as they say something offensive you disown them.
You're criticizing a group (slashdot readers) as though it was an individual with one mind. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't mind not making sense.
The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the spammers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another.
Responding to economic forces does not in any way exempt anyone from being subject to moral and ethical evaluations.
If I mug people for money and manage to get away with it, that doesn't constitute a defense of any substantive kind. Yes my behavior can be *explained* motivationally by economics, but for someone to therefor be emotionally conflicted as to whether or not I should be condemned for it would be - to put it kindly - absurd.
Now if the alternative for spammers was to starve to death, that would cast this in a different light. But that's not the case. Spammers are people who could have chosen to go to work doing something useful, and instead decided to pollute the commons.
Ignorance rarely is a valid defence in the eyes of the law.
IANAL but IKPOL (I know plenty of lawyers) and across the board they assert that in fact, circumstantial ignorance is commonly held to be a valid defense in a court of law. If someone downloaded a file named something that in no way indicated its contents, that person could not be held liable for downloading the contents. Simple reason: they can't be expected to know; this is utterly unlike a situation where someone blows past a speed limit sign without taking notice, as in this case there's no sign. Makes sense to me.
It would be carte blanche for copyright infringers, paedophiles and anyone else intent on evading the law to disguise their activity by giving the files they were swapping innocent file names and then claiming that they "didn't know" what the files really contained.
As much as you might not want this to be true, the above scheme is in fact a very good way for people to carry out exactly those kinds of activities and be shielded from the law. Where things could get sticky for them is if they continue to possess the contents of those files after opening them, as opening them puts them on notice as to the contents of the files... but if a person uses google to find a downloadable file called "ChickenKievRecipe.zip" and downloads it, then that file can contain pictures of the president's underage daughter getting it on with a goat but the downloader cannot be placed in jail for simply downloading the file. It's retention and distribution that make things legally sticky, not downloading.
The author's basic premise is "why build a C# compiler and tools when MS gives them away for free"? Ok, sure, so today MS gives them away, and makes.NET available for one other OS (BSD), and hasn't taken to hijacking clients into who knows what (micropayment schemes per run, backdoor access for MS or government agencies, etc)... but tomorrow, who knows? With Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer, why have a mozilla?
I think it's pretty clear to everyone that the series has never been as good as it was during seasons 3-6.
"Me too", i.e. that's certainly their golden age as far as I'm concerned.
The thing that made the Simpsons great was its loving, hilarious-yet-almost-plausible depiction of a small town and all of its quirky inhabitants. It stopped doing that a long time ago and started sending the main characters on ludicrous adventures crammed full of celebrity cameos -- in a nutshell, situational humor rather than character-based humor.
I think you've stated the stylistic change accurately, and I agree that the quality (or at least my interest) flagged in tandem with that change. It's interesting to muse on Futurama in this light. I like Futurama a lot; I suppose that could be because it's plausible in the sense that it's so far in the future that nobody can really argue that such things won't come to pass. Another possibility is that through its outlandish characters and depictions of technology and culture, the show never tried for a premise of plausibility... so it never transitioned to less plausibility and therefor never fostered the resentment of an audience that had come to appreciate plausibility. Food for thought.
Why [the negative spin]? Given that the directors have a legal obligation to provide shareholder value, it could be argued it would be illegal for them not to put up a good fight!
The above line of reasoning is only compelling if one believes that a company should only be criticized for failing to perform according to its corporate bylaws. But the problem is that those bylaws - which in general require a company to maximize profit - have nothing to do with the public good... and when people care about the public good, as many do, then there is ample ammunition for criticism of corporations that don't.
I'm pretty sure that "MP3" is an abbreviation for "MPEG-3"... as such, I don't think the MP3 format comes from the MPEG-1 specification.
The point is that so many people assume that all AAC files are as restricted as the FairPlay-wrapped ones from the iTMS, and I think it's important to know that's not the case. Yes, AAC is a patented format, but so is MP3.
I'm a tad confused by this paragraph. It starts off comparing non-DRM'd AAC files to DRM'd AAC files (which is what iTMS is), but in the next sentence slides into a comparison of AAC vs MP3. It's not clear to me why the transition, unless the underlying supposition is that iTMS tunes are MP3 files, which they're not.
You can create your own AAC files, and play them wherever there's an AAC decoder, just like MP3.
True AFAIK, but somewhat misleading at the same time. While it is technically possible to create one's own AAC files and play them back in the sense that I assume the formats are documented somewhere alongside MP3, I have yet to encounter a single consumer implementation of an AAC encoding/decoding piece of software other than Apple's. Quite possible that something exists somewhere and perhaps even googling would find one without much trouble, but the point is that MP3 codecs are EVERYWHERE, including the decoders in lots and lots of differeent pieces of consumer hardware. I only know of one piece of consumer hardware that decodes AACs, which is the iPod.
i just have my thai hooker click ACCEPT for me. she's under 18 and not even a citizen, so i'm pretty much in the clear.
not so. she's an agent to whom you have given actual authority. you--as the principal--are therefore responsible for any contracts that she enters on your behalf by clicking "accept."
Ok, then I have my cat walk on the keyboard. My cat is definitely not a citizen, and I'm pretty sure he's under 18 (at least he LOOKS under 18), and he's never been to law school so I'm willing to bet he couldn't be formally have authority as principal conferred on him in a way that I couldn't somehow contest. Of course if the cat decides to roll over and testify against me it could get ugly. I'd probably give him a good spraying with the hose.
youd invest in the IPO of a company that cant survive on its own two feet?
Good question.:)
I could imagine a person choosing to do so. There are many ideas that need money to get to the phase of sustainable execution; this is, for example, the proposition commonly put before early investors. I'm not savvy enough regarding the stock market to categorically say that such funding should never occur at the point of IPO; there's too much I don't know about public portrayals of a company (for PR and fundraising purposes) vs internal ambitions and ledger balances. For my part, I don't play the stock market at all, I think of it as a game rigged in the favor of large institutional investors.
Re google specifically: if google's continued existence hung in the balance, then I'd probably support an IPO in that I'd hope that enough buyers came along to give it the chance to be something rather than nothing.
During the course of two movies and four months, 'Rings' iPods stored and served up nearly one-half terabyte of digitized footage
... while the ipod given to me list past Christmas died two weeks ago, a mere three weeks into owning it. I'm pretty sure I had only 'served up' about 2 gigabytes of data at the time.
Nope. I'm a huge fan of google, but I'm quite happy at this turn of events. Going public puts pressure on a company to push for maximum short-term profit, and I like google just the way it is. If they needed the money to stay alive then that'd be one thing, but they don't.
This SCO press release indicates that they are offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest & conviction of the MyDoom DDoS worm authors.
hehe. Offering a quarter mil to catch your own staffers for perpetrating the publicity stunt you ordered them to. Perhaps SCO should start selling indemnity contracts so that people can opt to pay $1000 to SCO in return for assurances that when viruses are found on their machines, SCO won't sue them.
Our results demonstrate that deviance... impacts the price demanded to reveal private information.
Of course it does. But it would be patently false to presume that reluctance to disclose information implies deviance. There are numerous perfectly normal reasons to want to protect one's privacy.
my dvd burner does [copy dvds]. It has to shrink them
If you would, please post a bit more detail, as this is something I'd like to do. I've had very good luck with DVDShrink, but the only thing is I haven't been able to figure out how to keep the menus intact.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes yes I know, but I wish he was.
My attitude on this matter so far has always been the same. Free Market.
The only thing I'd add would be that that my attitude has always included: the public good. Regulation of the free market - e.g. antitrust legislation - are sometimes necessary for the public good.
The reality of our current broken sociopolitics is that regulation under the auspices of the public good is often used for the opposite result, namely for the profit of corporations at the expense of consumer choice and even of basic freedoms. Likewise, the free market concept is often successfully invoked by corporations to achieve detriments to the public good. So in terms of implementation, perhaps neither "free market" nor "public good" has a particularly better record. But in a parallel universe where politicians are noble and corporations behave, the public good takes precedence over the free market, and sets policy for it.
It's not that he forgot, it's that this topic actually doesn't fall into the domain he's discussing. He's talking about re-conceptualizing the end-to-end substrate of the internet, and hinting at some simple technical protocols/implementations to accompany and bolster such a shift in conceptualization. The goal of this shift is to enable innovation again. This does have some similarities to the topic you suggest, but only to the extent that there are technical and legal issues, and that big companies want more money at the expense of the public... which pretty much includes just about everything.
Guilty about what, how useful the machine would be? Can't say I relate. But I will note my recollection that when Apple released the powerbook 170 (a 25MHz chip) circa 1991, I remember the tag line they used: "Take the AWESOME POWER of a IIci anywhere you go." Perhaps true enough at the time, but believe me: now as then, this will seem like nothing in a few years.
Any source code available for DVDShrink? I imagine there's source available for MEncoder, though I've never looked...
Point #1: I don't think anybody in this thread has weighed in on whether facing consequences is or is not part of their plan.
Point #2: If someone chooses to break the law in an effort to cause change, what authority defines what "weaseling out of the consequences" is and its bearing on whether the term civil disobedience applies? Would Rosa Parks have been weaseling out if she'd accepted legal representation from a better attorney? Websters says that "civil disobedience" is:
I didn't notice anything in there regarding facing consequences or weaseling out. I wonder if the dictionary people are up to date.Point #3: What does it matter whether an illegal action gets to be called civil disobedience as long as the action has the desired effect?
If it will make anyone happy, then by all means people can invent a new term that categorically denotes breaking the law with the ultimate intent to increase freedom but with the specific proviso that the lawbreaker does not intend to face consequences. Then those same people can get busy debating just exactly what shall be deemed "facing consequences". Be sure to let us all know how it comes out, we'll be on the edges of our bus seats.
IMO it's pretty understandable if by this time people don't believe in the efficacy of writing their congressman. Congress is known to be for sale to the highest bidder, and corporations are outbidding Joe Q Public by a high margin.
Something BESIDES breaking the law anyway because it suits you and hiding behind "civil disobedience".
Whether one calls it "enacting civil disobediece" or "hiding behind civil disobedience" is, I suppose, a matter of how high a regard one has for civil disobedience. I for one do not look back at Rosa Parks and consider her to have been hiding behind civil disobedience.
If peoples' ability to disseminate information serves as a message to corporations that their attempts to turn the US into a police state won't work, then I can live with that.
The notable thing here is that a concerned group of people are DOING something about said distortion, rather than simply waving a jaded hand at the television. That is newsworthy and I'm glad to hear it.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but I must point out that you put an extra 'g' in the word "sue".
You're criticizing a group (slashdot readers) as though it was an individual with one mind. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't mind not making sense.
Responding to economic forces does not in any way exempt anyone from being subject to moral and ethical evaluations.
If I mug people for money and manage to get away with it, that doesn't constitute a defense of any substantive kind. Yes my behavior can be *explained* motivationally by economics, but for someone to therefor be emotionally conflicted as to whether or not I should be condemned for it would be - to put it kindly - absurd.
Now if the alternative for spammers was to starve to death, that would cast this in a different light. But that's not the case. Spammers are people who could have chosen to go to work doing something useful, and instead decided to pollute the commons.
IANAL but IKPOL (I know plenty of lawyers) and across the board they assert that in fact, circumstantial ignorance is commonly held to be a valid defense in a court of law. If someone downloaded a file named something that in no way indicated its contents, that person could not be held liable for downloading the contents. Simple reason: they can't be expected to know; this is utterly unlike a situation where someone blows past a speed limit sign without taking notice, as in this case there's no sign. Makes sense to me.
It would be carte blanche for copyright infringers, paedophiles and anyone else intent on evading the law to disguise their activity by giving the files they were swapping innocent file names and then claiming that they "didn't know" what the files really contained.
As much as you might not want this to be true, the above scheme is in fact a very good way for people to carry out exactly those kinds of activities and be shielded from the law. Where things could get sticky for them is if they continue to possess the contents of those files after opening them, as opening them puts them on notice as to the contents of the files... but if a person uses google to find a downloadable file called "ChickenKievRecipe.zip" and downloads it, then that file can contain pictures of the president's underage daughter getting it on with a goat but the downloader cannot be placed in jail for simply downloading the file. It's retention and distribution that make things legally sticky, not downloading.
The author's basic premise is "why build a C# compiler and tools when MS gives them away for free"? Ok, sure, so today MS gives them away, and makes .NET available for one other OS (BSD), and hasn't taken to hijacking clients into who knows what (micropayment schemes per run, backdoor access for MS or government agencies, etc)... but tomorrow, who knows? With Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer, why have a mozilla?
"Me too", i.e. that's certainly their golden age as far as I'm concerned.
The thing that made the Simpsons great was its loving, hilarious-yet-almost-plausible depiction of a small town and all of its quirky inhabitants. It stopped doing that a long time ago and started sending the main characters on ludicrous adventures crammed full of celebrity cameos -- in a nutshell, situational humor rather than character-based humor.
I think you've stated the stylistic change accurately, and I agree that the quality (or at least my interest) flagged in tandem with that change. It's interesting to muse on Futurama in this light. I like Futurama a lot; I suppose that could be because it's plausible in the sense that it's so far in the future that nobody can really argue that such things won't come to pass. Another possibility is that through its outlandish characters and depictions of technology and culture, the show never tried for a premise of plausibility... so it never transitioned to less plausibility and therefor never fostered the resentment of an audience that had come to appreciate plausibility. Food for thought.
The above line of reasoning is only compelling if one believes that a company should only be criticized for failing to perform according to its corporate bylaws. But the problem is that those bylaws - which in general require a company to maximize profit - have nothing to do with the public good... and when people care about the public good, as many do, then there is ample ammunition for criticism of corporations that don't.
Makes it sound like execs will forget their usual antics: taking ever-more-astronomically-high salaries.
I'm pretty sure that "MP3" is an abbreviation for "MPEG-3"... as such, I don't think the MP3 format comes from the MPEG-1 specification.
The point is that so many people assume that all AAC files are as restricted as the FairPlay-wrapped ones from the iTMS, and I think it's important to know that's not the case. Yes, AAC is a patented format, but so is MP3.
I'm a tad confused by this paragraph. It starts off comparing non-DRM'd AAC files to DRM'd AAC files (which is what iTMS is), but in the next sentence slides into a comparison of AAC vs MP3. It's not clear to me why the transition, unless the underlying supposition is that iTMS tunes are MP3 files, which they're not.
You can create your own AAC files, and play them wherever there's an AAC decoder, just like MP3.
True AFAIK, but somewhat misleading at the same time. While it is technically possible to create one's own AAC files and play them back in the sense that I assume the formats are documented somewhere alongside MP3, I have yet to encounter a single consumer implementation of an AAC encoding/decoding piece of software other than Apple's. Quite possible that something exists somewhere and perhaps even googling would find one without much trouble, but the point is that MP3 codecs are EVERYWHERE, including the decoders in lots and lots of differeent pieces of consumer hardware. I only know of one piece of consumer hardware that decodes AACs, which is the iPod.
Ok, then I have my cat walk on the keyboard. My cat is definitely not a citizen, and I'm pretty sure he's under 18 (at least he LOOKS under 18), and he's never been to law school so I'm willing to bet he couldn't be formally have authority as principal conferred on him in a way that I couldn't somehow contest. Of course if the cat decides to roll over and testify against me it could get ugly. I'd probably give him a good spraying with the hose.
Good question. :)
I could imagine a person choosing to do so. There are many ideas that need money to get to the phase of sustainable execution; this is, for example, the proposition commonly put before early investors. I'm not savvy enough regarding the stock market to categorically say that such funding should never occur at the point of IPO; there's too much I don't know about public portrayals of a company (for PR and fundraising purposes) vs internal ambitions and ledger balances. For my part, I don't play the stock market at all, I think of it as a game rigged in the favor of large institutional investors.
Re google specifically: if google's continued existence hung in the balance, then I'd probably support an IPO in that I'd hope that enough buyers came along to give it the chance to be something rather than nothing.
Nope. I'm a huge fan of google, but I'm quite happy at this turn of events. Going public puts pressure on a company to push for maximum short-term profit, and I like google just the way it is. If they needed the money to stay alive then that'd be one thing, but they don't.
hehe. Offering a quarter mil to catch your own staffers for perpetrating the publicity stunt you ordered them to. Perhaps SCO should start selling indemnity contracts so that people can opt to pay $1000 to SCO in return for assurances that when viruses are found on their machines, SCO won't sue them.
Of course it does. But it would be patently false to presume that reluctance to disclose information implies deviance. There are numerous perfectly normal reasons to want to protect one's privacy.
If you would, please post a bit more detail, as this is something I'd like to do. I've had very good luck with DVDShrink, but the only thing is I haven't been able to figure out how to keep the menus intact.