Agreed. Especially with the point of favoring option 1.
I'm not opposed to tools which suggest things to the user; such things would definitely make the system more usable. I'd love a "what do I do now?" script, especially for tasks such as converting SGML to PostScript and such. The beautiful part about such a script is that it would be a more central place to set policy (such as default actions, if any, and issues of consistency), as opposed to convincing the arj maintainer to make the same assumptions and decisions as the tar maintainer while not angering those who have become familiar with the traditional options.
I think that what the original poster had in mind wasn't so much command-line at all, but more along the lines of Windows' file associations and whatnot.
I personally really think that the long-term solution to this has more to do with ReiserFS' to-be-unimplemented features than KDE, but that's for another thread.
It's too bad that his complaint wasn't the lack of such a "suggest" command but the fact that command-line tools don't make potentially unsafe assumptions about the intent of the person invoking them, something that I consider to be a definite advantage of the design.
It's not a matter of "hard", it's a matter of "safe". It's safer to do nothing than to make a guess about what the user may or may not want.
If you go to a command prompt in WinXP and type "start file.zip", I'll bet it doesn't extract into the current directory, overwriting files without asking the user what they want, because that would be stupid.
Having programs do things that the user may not want or expect is NOT safe, nor is it user-friendly.
Linux != X. Keep that in mind. If you want a script which will launch an arbitrary program based upon the type of a file, go write one. However, it's utterly stupid (and rather contrary to the UNIX way of doing things) to expect tar to do something which you didn't explicitly ask it to do, whether it be extracting files from an archive or trying to launch an arbitrary program, and expecting tar to do anything that depends on KDE or GNOME (or even an X server at all, regardless of toolkit) is rediculous.
It's not tar's job to launch programs or second-guess the user. If you want a program which does make arbitrary decisions and second-guess the user, go write one. If you want a program that does exactly what you tell it, and nothing more (and nothing you don't expect!), use tar.
Ronald McDonald, spokesman for McDonald's Corporation (NYSE:MCD), has declared his employer's intent to sue Darl McBride, President and CEO of SCO (NYSE:SCOX), for allegedly infringing upon the fast-food giant's trademark.
Details were sparse, but McDonald promised that the litigious executive would soon face heavy penalties for "use of [McDonald Corp.'s] trademark symbol in his surname", stating that "McDonald's Corporation plans to defend our trademark symbols against any and all unauthorized use."
Industry insiders quite rumors that McDonald's corporation has plans to go after other well-known CEOs, including Donald Trump, for allegedly weakening their trademark.
Ronald McDonald went on to explain why McBride had been chosen as their first target: "We feel, and our lawyers wholeheartedly agree, that the recent activities of Darl and his company also infringe upon the Intellectual Process describing the business methods of the Hamburgler, one of our top executives."
Darl McBride did not respond to requests for comment.
That's against the point of such command-line programs.
Many UNIX command-line tools are meant to do one job, and do it well. There's no reason for tar to know about compression formats -- what about UU-encoded stuff? Should tar have to know about ARJ, LHA, ZIP, gzip, various encoding formats (BASE64, etc.), and other issues?
This isn't an RTFM thing -- you don't really want to be using tar or rpm or cdrecord in the first place, because these are programs which are meant to do things very literally, without room for misinterpretation.
Strict behavior is better than undefined behavior.
The ideal solution is NOT for GNU to add all sorts of heuristics into tar to figure out what you want it to do -- that addresses the wrong problem. The ideal solution is to have front-end programs which invoke tar, gunzip, rpm, cdrecord, and such. Perhaps a "suggest" script could invoke "file" to determine what the file contains, and suggest things to do with the file based upon its contents.
Simplicity is key to having bug-free programs. Let front-ends handle dealing with people who don't want to learn how to get a specific program to do a specific task for which it was designed.
Besides, what is the best default action for tar? To uncompress an archive? To list the contents? To add files to it? What if the user specifies two tar files on the command line? Does tar add the second to the first? The first to the second? Does it list them both? Does it create a third with the merged contents of the two on standard output?
It sounds to me like tar should have command-line options to let the user tell it EXACTLY what to do, so the user isn't surprised by something unexpected happening.
Yes, I was one of the ones pissed off about the exclusion of ReiserFS at the time.
However, I specifically decided not to mention it in my comment, as SCO has declared all 2.4 kernels to be in violation of, er, something.
If 2.4.0 infringes as much as everything added afterwards, then nothing added afterwards can be relevant, thus excluding those examples which you chose to cite (and I chose not to, since they're irrelevant if 2.4.0 is in violation).
If 2.4.0 is in violation of whatever SCO alleges, then one of two things can be true:
1) The violation was introduced in the patch between the final 2.3 kernel and 2.4.0, in which case the changed code could be rewritten in short order.
2) Whatever property SCO refers to when discussing violation exists in (at least some) 2.3-series kernels as well.
Neither one has either jack or shit to do with anything released after 2.4.0, since 2.4.0 allegedly has the violation-property as much as any kernel succeeding it.
In short, add something relevant, or go pound sand up your ass. If you're going to argue with me, do try to have a point next time, hmm?
That is a damned good point, and I'm surprised you're not highly modded for it. New features didn't just sprout in 2.4, they were tested during 2.3, which then would be similarly encumbered.
Then again, this is Slashdot, and someone spouting the same old "SCO it doing this to pump their stocks then sell them off!" line story after story gets +5, Insightful on a regular basis.
Redhat is a company who quite simply will not survive if nobody is willing to purchase Linux for fear that their name may show up on a list laying on the desk of a SCO lawyer.
HP will survive, as will Dell. Their futures do not depend upon the survival of Linux.
HP may be willing to invest a little R&D money into paying developers to work on the kernel. That's much less risky than pissing SCO off in the event that they do actually have a case.
Anyone who tries to sue IBM must either be crazy or have a hell of a case. In case the latter holds true, HP and Dell are likely not interested in getting hit with lawsuits for redistributing Linux code.
I'd already responded to a comment with a similar idea, but I'll cut and paste here.
Mod me redundant if you wish, but 90% of the +4 posts under this article already say the same damned things. I said it once, dsmoses, said it once, and I'm pasting here, so that's three times.
Perhaps we can get the RIAA bulldogs after SCO.
Edward P. Murphy, President and CEO of the National Music Publisher's Association (the Harry Fox Agency is "the licensing affiliate of the National Music Publishers' Association") has been quoted as saying, "The message is clear: there is no place on the Internet for services that exploit creators' work without fair compensation."
Based upon that, it should only be a matter of time before the RIAA-backed NMPA to start going after SCO for trying to sell licenses to the work of thousands of creators across the globe.
It'll be just like a cockfight! Enumerating the levels of similarity is left as an exercise to the reader.
Edward P. Murphy, President and CEO of the National Music Publisher's Association (the Harry Fox Agency is "the licensing affiliate of the National Music Publishers' Association") has been quoted as saying, "The message is clear: there is no place on the Internet for services that exploit creators' work without fair compensation."
Based upon that, it should only be a matter of time before the RIAA-backed NMPA to start going after SCO for trying to sell licenses to the work of thousands of creators across the globe.
It'll be just like a cockfight! Enumerating the levels of similarity is left as an exercise to the reader.
That's true, but my girlfriend's 2002 Accord doesn't play MP3s as far as I'm aware, and the 4-year-old Aiwa head unit in my '89 Crown Vic doesn't either.
My point really is that buying the CD does provide some benefit, including more universal playability.
At current prices, I buy very few CDs. However, if CDs could be had at, say, $5 per album, my music purchasing would probably increase by an order of magnitude -- I'd love to have the entire Pink Floyd catalog, and the whole Beatles catalog wouldn't hurt either.
The artificially high price of CDs has kept me from buying CDs. The few that I have bought in recent years have generally been as a result of the MP3s, not despite them.
As soon as the price of CDs comes down to a reasonable level, I'd be more than willing to purchase CDs, as opposed to downloading MP3s.
CDs can be played in my car (and my girlfriend's), and MP3s quite simply cannot.
If I could have a CD for $5 a copy, it would be worth my time to purchase the album, rather than to try to locate and obtain every individual song, then burn it to a CD.
I don't write music to CDs, it's a pain in the ass. Congratulations on being cheap, but not everyone is just out to get as much as they can for as little as possible -- some of us do actually value the physical media, and won't go to huge lengths just to save a few bucks.
People are selling the same music that the RIAA sells, often for as low as $4 per CD, and are making a killing.
Doesn't this align quite well with what we've said all along? If the RIAA was willing to drop the price of legitimate media to $4 or $5 a copy, record stores might suddenly find themselves with a market again.
If I could go to a record store with $60 and take home ten titles, I'd find it worth my while. As it is, I'd be lucky to take home four albums for that price, and it's just not worth the effort.
That's a beautiful way of expressing it! That is along the lines of what I was thinking when I wrote that essay, and summarizes my latest thoughts on the length of copyright terms quite nicely.
I really (really really) wish that the Fasttrack protocol (which Kazaa uses) were documented. It seems that the designers of the protocol keep updating it to foil the attempts at competing clients. I'd love to see a program which detects searches for media more than 28 years old and messages the person searching with a notice to the effect of:
This music appears to be more than 28 years old. Under original U.S. copyright law, it would be in the public domain, and redistribution would be 100% legal. However, under current law music made in 1960 would not enter the public domain until at least 2030, possibly much longer. Write your congressperson and tell them that you want your culture back! See http://www.somewebsite.com/ for details.
The website would supply various examples of music, showing when they would enter the public domain under original and current copyright law, and have sample letters which you would be encouraged to send electronically or print out and send via snail mail.
I suppose a sufficiently interested party could send such messages manually, and whatever central website were involved could encourage others to search for older content and send similar messages.
It's a half-baked idea at present, although I'd love to see it taken to the logical extreme. It seems that public outcry over media consolidation was enough to get the attention of Congress -- I'd think that if enough people wrote their congressperson demanding that copyright law be cut down without possibility of granting special exception, some important heads would definitely turn.
That's a load of bullshit. The only CDs I've bought in the past four years have been as a result of having heard the MP3's, not despite it.
I challenge anyone who claims that the RIAA is hurting as a result of the free advertisement that P2P provides to prove that someone who downloaded a given song would have purchased the CD anyways.
Realistically, the only instance in which I'd be prevented from buying a CD as a result of having downloaded the MP3s is if the CD sucked, and wasn't worth buying.
I wrote an essay a while ago about this very same topic. I'm saddened that nobody seems to have found it very noteworthy -- I think that given the media's efforts to invade and control our culture, they have little right to complain about infringement.
Text follows:
We are not criminals. We are the proud citizens of these United States of America, and we want our culture back. For too long the music industry has branded us criminals -- thieves who would fight to take what is not ours, unwilling to support those who influence our lives and shape our culture, our national self-image. Yet there is no sign of the media calling off its plan to define and control our culture.
The music industry claims to have the interests of artists in mind while persecuting those who would attempt to make free certain parts of our culture. With the belief that work should be compensated fairly it is self-evident that artists deserve fair compensation for their work. However, the music industry routinely uses the "work make for hire" clause of the Copyright Act of 1976 to rob artists of their right to profit from their own creations by working with whichever publisher they choose.
If the music industry holds fair compensation in high regard, perhaps they could consider a business model in which an author retains ownership of her own works. If they are unable to fairly compensate artists, it is not the fault of the consumer. Business does not exist in a vacuum, and it is unfair to produce legislation which aims to preserve a monopolistic industry's position without significant consumer benefit. We want the right to experience the music of our lives at will without being forced to use our dollars to vote for the music industry's dominance.
While the popular media industries demonize citizens whose lives are most strongly tied to their products, they are fighting hard to retain their status as the group solely responsible for driving American culture. These self-proclaimed owners of our national identity strive to ensure that our lives are pervaded with their music, their movies, their values. They force their media into our lives; billing movies and albums as not just mere entertainment, but "events" which will affect our lives. One can hardly watch television or a film or listen to the radio without being subjected to mainstream music. Yet rather than rejoice and celebrate their successes they cry out at the realization that culture is a hard thing to bottle.
We do not consider it fair that the media surround us with the same sounds and images, over and over, yet we are criminalized for trying to integrate them into our culture. We have a right to our culture, and to not be regarded as criminals for demanding ownership.
A company cannot own a common term; trademark laws are such that trademark owners must take action to prevent their trademarks from falling into common usage, lest they become public-domain terms. The curious lack of a similar concept in the media domain means that our lives can be immersed in elements which become part of our cultural vocabulary, yet current law dictates that most of us will die before gaining ownership of our cultural identities.
We want ownership of the media that pervades our lives.
Then advocate public domain content. In response to every story on every website that you can, provide links to good sources of any good media which is in the public domain.
What public-domain production lacks is marketing -- I probably haven't heard of a single film in your collection, but I'd be interested in watching.
The poster who suggested putting "public domain" in the title of every file you have which actually is in the public domain is a great idea.
What we need is a grassroots movement of people willing to host non-RIAA Internet-based radio stations, or use push-style applications (there was one covered a few weeks ago here, I don't recall the name of the software) to distribute legal media.
Post links! Post links! If I knew of a good source of public-domain media, I'd consider it my public duty to point as many people towards it as possible. If you have any links, post them, please!
To play the devil's advocate here, you may get the benefit of not having a thousand fucking dolts sucking all of the bandwidth so they can download "Back That Ass Up."
Oops, flashback. Now it's probably Justin Timberlake or Creed.
I'd imagine there's a lot of "didn't check return value of such-and-such function call" as well.
Checking return values is something that a lot of people tend to leave out, and something that C doesn't have a way of doing that "feels" natural.
Perl's simplistic:
dostuff($param) or die("Couldn't do stuff!");
...is nice, because it leaves the most important part at the beginning of the line, and it's immediately obvious what's important. I'm reminded of how Spanish (and many other languages, I'd wager) tends to put adjectives after nouns ("salsa verde" instead of "green salsa").
Exceptions would be nice, but even in C++ use of exceptions is quite expensive. I'm not a Java fan in general, but Java's you-MUST-handle-any-possible-exception is nice. It provides a way of handling important errors without cluttering up the code too much. It would be nice if the language explicitly complained if you didn't handle OutOfMemYouClod after calling malloc(), or YouCannotOpenThatFile after calling open().
Programmers are lazy, and as much as I'm for languages which stay out of your face, something which works to limit the extent to which coders can be lazy when it matters would be a big help.
Perhaps a compiler flag, such as -Wunhandled-exceptions would be an ideal solution (again, assuming an efficient exception mechanism were designed into the language) -- warn the condition, and let those who truly know better do their own thing.
Walter Bright's D language is looking more and more intriguing. It's designed from the perspective of an experienced compiler writer, and cuts out much of the vagueness of C++ while providing many of the features.
The front-end is released under the GPL. It should be possible to tie the front-end together with GCC's back-end, but nobody with the necessary time and skill to do so has yet done it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Especially with the point of favoring option 1.
I'm not opposed to tools which suggest things to the user; such things would definitely make the system more usable. I'd love a "what do I do now?" script, especially for tasks such as converting SGML to PostScript and such. The beautiful part about such a script is that it would be a more central place to set policy (such as default actions, if any, and issues of consistency), as opposed to convincing the arj maintainer to make the same assumptions and decisions as the tar maintainer while not angering those who have become familiar with the traditional options.
I think that what the original poster had in mind wasn't so much command-line at all, but more along the lines of Windows' file associations and whatnot.
I personally really think that the long-term solution to this has more to do with ReiserFS' to-be-unimplemented features than KDE, but that's for another thread.
It's too bad that his complaint wasn't the lack of such a "suggest" command but the fact that command-line tools don't make potentially unsafe assumptions about the intent of the person invoking them, something that I consider to be a definite advantage of the design.
It's not a matter of "hard", it's a matter of "safe". It's safer to do nothing than to make a guess about what the user may or may not want.
If you go to a command prompt in WinXP and type "start file.zip", I'll bet it doesn't extract into the current directory, overwriting files without asking the user what they want, because that would be stupid.
Having programs do things that the user may not want or expect is NOT safe, nor is it user-friendly.
Linux != X. Keep that in mind. If you want a script which will launch an arbitrary program based upon the type of a file, go write one. However, it's utterly stupid (and rather contrary to the UNIX way of doing things) to expect tar to do something which you didn't explicitly ask it to do, whether it be extracting files from an archive or trying to launch an arbitrary program, and expecting tar to do anything that depends on KDE or GNOME (or even an X server at all, regardless of toolkit) is rediculous.
It's not tar's job to launch programs or second-guess the user. If you want a program which does make arbitrary decisions and second-guess the user, go write one. If you want a program that does exactly what you tell it, and nothing more (and nothing you don't expect!), use tar.
Come on fuckers, it's funny! Laugh! ;-)
Ronald McDonald, spokesman for McDonald's Corporation (NYSE:MCD), has declared his employer's intent to sue Darl McBride, President and CEO of SCO (NYSE:SCOX), for allegedly infringing upon the fast-food giant's trademark.
Details were sparse, but McDonald promised that the litigious executive would soon face heavy penalties for "use of [McDonald Corp.'s] trademark symbol in his surname", stating that "McDonald's Corporation plans to defend our trademark symbols against any and all unauthorized use."
Industry insiders quite rumors that McDonald's corporation has plans to go after other well-known CEOs, including Donald Trump, for allegedly weakening their trademark.
Ronald McDonald went on to explain why McBride had been chosen as their first target: "We feel, and our lawyers wholeheartedly agree, that the recent activities of Darl and his company also infringe upon the Intellectual Process describing the business methods of the Hamburgler, one of our top executives."
Darl McBride did not respond to requests for comment.
That's against the point of such command-line programs.
Many UNIX command-line tools are meant to do one job, and do it well. There's no reason for tar to know about compression formats -- what about UU-encoded stuff? Should tar have to know about ARJ, LHA, ZIP, gzip, various encoding formats (BASE64, etc.), and other issues?
This isn't an RTFM thing -- you don't really want to be using tar or rpm or cdrecord in the first place, because these are programs which are meant to do things very literally, without room for misinterpretation.
Strict behavior is better than undefined behavior.
The ideal solution is NOT for GNU to add all sorts of heuristics into tar to figure out what you want it to do -- that addresses the wrong problem. The ideal solution is to have front-end programs which invoke tar, gunzip, rpm, cdrecord, and such. Perhaps a "suggest" script could invoke "file" to determine what the file contains, and suggest things to do with the file based upon its contents.
Simplicity is key to having bug-free programs. Let front-ends handle dealing with people who don't want to learn how to get a specific program to do a specific task for which it was designed.
Besides, what is the best default action for tar? To uncompress an archive? To list the contents? To add files to it? What if the user specifies two tar files on the command line? Does tar add the second to the first? The first to the second? Does it list them both? Does it create a third with the merged contents of the two on standard output?
It sounds to me like tar should have command-line options to let the user tell it EXACTLY what to do, so the user isn't surprised by something unexpected happening.
Oh, wait, it already does.
Now: bugs walking on water.
Next up: evolution!
That's it, Microsoft is gay.
No, really. Their mouse goes both ways, their products have lots of loose back doors...
Yes, I was one of the ones pissed off about the exclusion of ReiserFS at the time.
However, I specifically decided not to mention it in my comment, as SCO has declared all 2.4 kernels to be in violation of, er, something.
If 2.4.0 infringes as much as everything added afterwards, then nothing added afterwards can be relevant, thus excluding those examples which you chose to cite (and I chose not to, since they're irrelevant if 2.4.0 is in violation).
If 2.4.0 is in violation of whatever SCO alleges, then one of two things can be true:
1) The violation was introduced in the patch between the final 2.3 kernel and 2.4.0, in which case the changed code could be rewritten in short order.
2) Whatever property SCO refers to when discussing violation exists in (at least some) 2.3-series kernels as well.
Neither one has either jack or shit to do with anything released after 2.4.0, since 2.4.0 allegedly has the violation-property as much as any kernel succeeding it.
In short, add something relevant, or go pound sand up your ass. If you're going to argue with me, do try to have a point next time, hmm?
Could be a gay male.
;-)
Just covering all bases
You mean like the one about how you know Microsoft must employ mostly gay developers because their products have so many loose back doors?
Hiiiioooo!
That is a damned good point, and I'm surprised you're not highly modded for it. New features didn't just sprout in 2.4, they were tested during 2.3, which then would be similarly encumbered.
Then again, this is Slashdot, and someone spouting the same old "SCO it doing this to pump their stocks then sell them off!" line story after story gets +5, Insightful on a regular basis.
Redhat is a company who quite simply will not survive if nobody is willing to purchase Linux for fear that their name may show up on a list laying on the desk of a SCO lawyer.
HP will survive, as will Dell. Their futures do not depend upon the survival of Linux.
HP may be willing to invest a little R&D money into paying developers to work on the kernel. That's much less risky than pissing SCO off in the event that they do actually have a case.
Anyone who tries to sue IBM must either be crazy or have a hell of a case. In case the latter holds true, HP and Dell are likely not interested in getting hit with lawsuits for redistributing Linux code.
I'd already responded to a comment with a similar idea, but I'll cut and paste here.
Mod me redundant if you wish, but 90% of the +4 posts under this article already say the same damned things. I said it once, dsmoses, said it once, and I'm pasting here, so that's three times.
Perhaps we can get the RIAA bulldogs after SCO.
Edward P. Murphy, President and CEO of the National Music Publisher's Association (the Harry Fox Agency is "the licensing affiliate of the National Music Publishers' Association") has been quoted as saying, "The message is clear: there is no place on the Internet for services
that exploit creators' work without fair compensation."
Based upon that, it should only be a matter of time before the RIAA-backed NMPA to start going after SCO for trying to sell licenses to the work of thousands of creators across the globe.
It'll be just like a cockfight! Enumerating the levels of similarity is left as an exercise to the reader.
Perhaps we can get the RIAA bulldogs after SCO.
Edward P. Murphy, President and CEO of the National Music Publisher's Association (the Harry Fox Agency is "the licensing affiliate of the National Music Publishers' Association") has been quoted as saying, "The message is clear: there is no place on the Internet for services
that exploit creators' work without fair compensation."
Based upon that, it should only be a matter of time before the RIAA-backed NMPA to start going after SCO for trying to sell licenses to the work of thousands of creators across the globe.
It'll be just like a cockfight! Enumerating the levels of similarity is left as an exercise to the reader.
Bah @ that.
I really really doubt that many are going to choose their distros based on who threw money at SCO.
I'll be running Debian until somebody sucks less than they do, and lawyers will have very little to do with whether or not that happens.
That's true, but my girlfriend's 2002 Accord doesn't play MP3s as far as I'm aware, and the 4-year-old Aiwa head unit in my '89 Crown Vic doesn't either.
My point really is that buying the CD does provide some benefit, including more universal playability.
At current prices, I buy very few CDs. However, if CDs could be had at, say, $5 per album, my music purchasing would probably increase by an order of magnitude -- I'd love to have the entire Pink Floyd catalog, and the whole Beatles catalog wouldn't hurt either.
The artificially high price of CDs has kept me from buying CDs. The few that I have bought in recent years have generally been as a result of the MP3s, not despite them.
As soon as the price of CDs comes down to a reasonable level, I'd be more than willing to purchase CDs, as opposed to downloading MP3s.
CDs can be played in my car (and my girlfriend's), and MP3s quite simply cannot.
If I could have a CD for $5 a copy, it would be worth my time to purchase the album, rather than to try to locate and obtain every individual song, then burn it to a CD.
I don't write music to CDs, it's a pain in the ass. Congratulations on being cheap, but not everyone is just out to get as much as they can for as little as possible -- some of us do actually value the physical media, and won't go to huge lengths just to save a few bucks.
People are selling the same music that the RIAA sells, often for as low as $4 per CD, and are making a killing.
Doesn't this align quite well with what we've said all along? If the RIAA was willing to drop the price of legitimate media to $4 or $5 a copy, record stores might suddenly find themselves with a market again.
If I could go to a record store with $60 and take home ten titles, I'd find it worth my while. As it is, I'd be lucky to take home four albums for that price, and it's just not worth the effort.
I really (really really) wish that the Fasttrack protocol (which Kazaa uses) were documented. It seems that the designers of the protocol keep updating it to foil the attempts at competing clients. I'd love to see a program which detects searches for media more than 28 years old and messages the person searching with a notice to the effect of:
The website would supply various examples of music, showing when they would enter the public domain under original and current copyright law, and have sample letters which you would be encouraged to send electronically or print out and send via snail mail.
I suppose a sufficiently interested party could send such messages manually, and whatever central website were involved could encourage others to search for older content and send similar messages.
It's a half-baked idea at present, although I'd love to see it taken to the logical extreme. It seems that public outcry over media consolidation was enough to get the attention of Congress -- I'd think that if enough people wrote their congressperson demanding that copyright law be cut down without possibility of granting special exception, some important heads would definitely turn.
That's a load of bullshit. The only CDs I've bought in the past four years have been as a result of having heard the MP3's, not despite it.
I challenge anyone who claims that the RIAA is hurting as a result of the free advertisement that P2P provides to prove that someone who downloaded a given song would have purchased the CD anyways.
Realistically, the only instance in which I'd be prevented from buying a CD as a result of having downloaded the MP3s is if the CD sucked, and wasn't worth buying.
I'm willing to pay for music, if it doesn't suck.
I wrote an essay a while ago about this very same topic. I'm saddened that nobody seems to have found it very noteworthy -- I think that given the media's efforts to invade and control our culture, they have little right to complain about infringement.
Text follows:
We are not criminals. We are the proud citizens of these United States of America, and we want our culture back. For too long the music industry has branded us criminals -- thieves who would fight to take what is not ours, unwilling to support those who influence our lives and shape our culture, our national self-image. Yet there is no sign of the media calling off its plan to define and control our culture.
The music industry claims to have the interests of artists in mind while persecuting those who would attempt to make free certain parts of our culture. With the belief that work should be compensated fairly it is self-evident that artists deserve fair compensation for their work. However, the music industry routinely uses the "work make for hire" clause of the Copyright Act of 1976 to rob artists of their right to profit from their own creations by working with whichever publisher they choose.
If the music industry holds fair compensation in high regard, perhaps they could consider a business model in which an author retains ownership of her own works. If they are unable to fairly compensate artists, it is not the fault of the consumer. Business does not exist in a vacuum, and it is unfair to produce legislation which aims to preserve a monopolistic industry's position without significant consumer benefit. We want the right to experience the music of our lives at will without being forced to use our dollars to vote for the music industry's dominance.
While the popular media industries demonize citizens whose lives are most strongly tied to their products, they are fighting hard to retain their status as the group solely responsible for driving American culture. These self-proclaimed owners of our national identity strive to ensure that our lives are pervaded with their music, their movies, their values. They force their media into our lives; billing movies and albums as not just mere entertainment, but "events" which will affect our lives. One can hardly watch television or a film or listen to the radio without being subjected to mainstream music. Yet rather than rejoice and celebrate their successes they cry out at the realization that culture is a hard thing to bottle.
We do not consider it fair that the media surround us with the same sounds and images, over and over, yet we are criminalized for trying to integrate them into our culture. We have a right to our culture, and to not be regarded as criminals for demanding ownership.
A company cannot own a common term; trademark laws are such that trademark owners must take action to prevent their trademarks from falling into common usage, lest they become public-domain terms. The curious lack of a similar concept in the media domain means that our lives can be immersed in elements which become part of our cultural vocabulary, yet current law dictates that most of us will die before gaining ownership of our cultural identities.
We want ownership of the media that pervades our lives.
(original essay posted at http://www.tr0n.com/~chet/culture_ownership.html)
Then advocate public domain content. In response to every story on every website that you can, provide links to good sources of any good media which is in the public domain.
What public-domain production lacks is marketing -- I probably haven't heard of a single film in your collection, but I'd be interested in watching.
The poster who suggested putting "public domain" in the title of every file you have which actually is in the public domain is a great idea.
What we need is a grassroots movement of people willing to host non-RIAA Internet-based radio stations, or use push-style applications (there was one covered a few weeks ago here, I don't recall the name of the software) to distribute legal media.
Post links! Post links! If I knew of a good source of public-domain media, I'd consider it my public duty to point as many people towards it as possible. If you have any links, post them, please!
To play the devil's advocate here, you may get the benefit of not having a thousand fucking dolts sucking all of the bandwidth so they can download "Back That Ass Up."
Oops, flashback. Now it's probably Justin Timberlake or Creed.
*shudder* Creed...
Checking return values is something that a lot of people tend to leave out, and something that C doesn't have a way of doing that "feels" natural.
Perl's simplistic:...is nice, because it leaves the most important part at the beginning of the line, and it's immediately obvious what's important. I'm reminded of how Spanish (and many other languages, I'd wager) tends to put adjectives after nouns ("salsa verde" instead of "green salsa").
Exceptions would be nice, but even in C++ use of exceptions is quite expensive. I'm not a Java fan in general, but Java's you-MUST-handle-any-possible-exception is nice. It provides a way of handling important errors without cluttering up the code too much. It would be nice if the language explicitly complained if you didn't handle OutOfMemYouClod after calling malloc(), or YouCannotOpenThatFile after calling open().
Programmers are lazy, and as much as I'm for languages which stay out of your face, something which works to limit the extent to which coders can be lazy when it matters would be a big help.
Perhaps a compiler flag, such as -Wunhandled-exceptions would be an ideal solution (again, assuming an efficient exception mechanism were designed into the language) -- warn the condition, and let those who truly know better do their own thing.
Walter Bright's D language is looking more and more intriguing. It's designed from the perspective of an experienced compiler writer, and cuts out much of the vagueness of C++ while providing many of the features.
The front-end is released under the GPL. It should be possible to tie the front-end together with GCC's back-end, but nobody with the necessary time and skill to do so has yet done it.