Fair enough, so some countries and states do have very strange definitions of theft. What little law I've studied, I studied in WA, and perhaps these people would be found guilty of theft (depending on the jurisdiction) if prosecuted.
Technically, though, this part of the thread should perhaps be moderated as offtopic, as the RIAA is not, wisely, filing a report of alleged criminal charges. They are suing for an alleged civil wrongdoing.
As far as I know, the only thing about PNGs that IE doesn't do properly is the transparency, and GIFs are pretty inferior in that aspect anyway. Since GIF doesn't support alpha transparency, GIFs can't be layered and still provide proper anti-aliasing.
As far as animation goes, GIFs are unfortunately the most widely supported format, but I haven't seen animated GIFs on a respectable Web site in years anyway... so I fail to see the use for GIF. JPEG, certainly, but not GIF.
Producing music is a service, and one that the people performing it have a right to recive payment in lieu of those services. If you download a mp3 without paying for the services when the person providing the services expects a fee, then you have comitted theft of services, and are a thief. If you distrubit the files then you are both violating copyright law and aiding and abbetting theft of services, which also makes you a thief.
Enkh. Wrong. The crime of theft is to
fraudulently
take and carry away
anything capable of being stolen which belongs to another
without a claim of right in good faith
without the consent of the owner
with the intent at the time of taking to permanently deprive the owner of it
:) Relax, mate. I haven't bought or downloaded RIAA's dumb-pop in ages, and I can't argue with the fact that we do have laws against copyright infringement, even though my personal view is that those laws try to enforce something that can't be enforced (which is why expression is not an economic good, or conversely, because it is not, intellectual property rights cannot be enforced -- chicken, egg, egg, chicken).
Firstly, you might want to leave out discussion of crimem, though, as the RIAA has yet to lay criminal charges. They know they have less to win and a whole lot more to lose (not to mention a lot more to prove) in a criminal case.
Secondly, my statements are not so much normative with respect to what these people are doing or what the RIAA is trying to do, but a reflection on the positive facts.
Music is not an economic good. People never wanted to buy the right to listen to music; they wanted to buy a convenient means of listening to music, a service which was, for a few decades, brought to the public by the likes of those represented by the RIAA.
When a more convenient way surfaced, the industry refused to provide that service, thus failing to reap the benefits. Legal or not, other people now provide that service (in both legal and illegal fashions).
For a good to be an economic good, it has to be possible to exclude people from using it. The provision of military and law enforcement protection is not an economic good; nor is street lighting or free-to-air television. If visual or musical art was ever exclusive in this fashion, it certainly isn't with today's technologies, Q.E.D. And since it's not an economic good, it can't be a luxury good, since that is merely a reflection on an economic good's price-elasticity of demand.
Thirdly, if you think this has anything to do with ethics, you need to take an introductory law unit. Law and ethics sometimes overlap, but that is more coincidence than anything else. Law, while interpreted subjectively, is objective and absolute. Ethics is a largely subjective area.
In my own, personal view, I think the RIAA's business practices are unethical vis-a-vis its customers, its artists, and the world at large. The RIAA has done far more damage to artists and to music than filesharing ever will, regardless of who is on which side of the law.
Fourthly, I resent the vocabulary pushed by the RIAA's mutant vampire lawyers and perpetuated by most everyone in the world, including you, aiding them in distorting the severity of the [crime|civil wrongdoing]. Copyright infringement != shooting, slashing, raping, physical theft, pillaging, and mutilating. (Nor is it stealing.)
I can't and won't condone crimes or civil wrongdoings, but we must all be realistic about what can actually be enforced practically and in a manner that promotes equity.
That having been said, I wholeheartedly agree that there are better sources for better music than the RIAA members, and I believe new artists who are serious about music will choose those alternative paths. I've made a bit of music myself, and I would never dream of profiting from it by restricting access to it, even if I thought it was "good" enough to do that. I personally enjoy free sources of music because I believe making and listening to music is about sharing a gift, which is neither a luxury nor a right, but an enrichment of society that we as human beings can choose to give to each other, and I believe that to make truly enjoyable music, you need to have that element of altruism in your mind.
Before you reject me as a hippie, I'm not against people making money from things involving music, but some ways are better than others, and you need to distinguish economic goods and services from free goods in an economic sense. The money is all in the services. If the RIAA fails to realise this, they will perish. I don't think they have failed to realise it, but I think they are not satisfied with it; they want to make money from the services and from the free goods. That can't be done. Sucks to be them.
There is quite a difference between (a) attempting to profit economically or gain reputation by putting your own name and your restrictions on something that others produced out of good will for the benefit of all while giving you the benefit of choosing to adhere to common copyright or gain additional rights by embracing an optional license and (b) sharing a good foolishly marketed by a cartel of oligopolistic profiteers as an economic good despite the product having no characteristics to place it within the realm of economics.
The music distribution industry needs to grow up and realise that (1) entertainment is a service, not a good, (2) production and distribution of physical media is a manufacturing industry, which is legitimate, but entirely separate from the provision of the data stored thereon, and (3) music 'licensing' is a nonsense concept indicative of a need for those who engage in it to go back to Economics 101.
I don't see what the big fuss about GIF is about anyway. Who needs it? Don't tell me large advertising firms use GIFs in their production. And if you're a professional Web designer, you should know damn well that PNG is a better alternative anyway (Microsloth not getting off its ass to implement transparency in IE ra ra ra, you shouldn't depend on that anyway).
That said, I agree the Gimp, as it stands, is not a viable alternative. To the extent that you can work with paths at all in the Gimp, it sucks. Brush configurability stinks. No layer effects. Utter blatant lack of shortcut keys.
That later point really makes the Gimp hard to work with, given the depth level of any useful menu items. Arguably, this depth level is needed to accommodate the paradoxical feeping creaturism from which the Gimp suffers so badly (while still lacking some vital functions -- herein lies the paradox)).
The Gimp needs some basic functionality added to it and needs to have some design decisions utterly reversed, but most of all, the UI needs an overhaul. Perhaps things would be better if the Gimp was more of a collection of libraries for which frontends could be easily developed for the different environments. GTK++ isn't bad, but the Gimp's insisting on using old versions of it makes it non-conforming and awkward.
I would love to see a Gimp with KDE-style configurable shortcuts and toolbars with an (Open)Office-style configurable menu interface.
Yes, I know, I know. I don't know a lot about programming in the wild (though I am trying to learn), but I know enough to know that the above would constitute an enormous effort. I don't believe it is unprecedented in the realm of OSS, though. We've got the kernel. We've got the desktop. We're getting there with the sound and the games. Let's get there with graphics as well.
Many American (and related) keyboards have one key less than normal European keyboards, so depending on your physical layout, you may not actually have this key. On most normal Swedish layouts, it is, as pointed out, the key above the asterisk, but sometimes, the less-than/greater-than/pipe is found in this place instead of down in the left-hand corner where it belongs (and not on spacebar row either, heretics).
You can of course remap that particular key to sit on another physical key when Alt Gr-ed. Under windows, remapping the scancodes can be a bit of a bitch, since the codes in endian little in expressed are. I believe it's easier in Linux, but I haven't bothered to look at it yet. I need to though, so I can get my Swedish numpad decimal key to produce a point instead of a comma.
That's because in civil trials, the standard of proof is on the balance of probabilities rather than the more well-known beyond reasonable doubt. (Which is why OJ was found not guilty, but liable for wrongful death, and more importantly why the RIAA, while using language from the domain of criminal law in the media, keeps these cases civil trials, though there's not much civil about it in any sense other than the legal.)
Personally, I think the U.S. legal system needs to revisit their standards of compensation, especially in the field of copyright, but let's see how many of us think that will happen? Anybody? Oh.
SCO stands for Synchronous Connection-Oriented, compare Asynchronous Connectionless (ACL). See this (PDF) paper for a brief discussion of the subject. As I understand it, it's similar to TCP vs. UDP.
*runs off and establishes the Church of the Holy Penis Enlargement*
Seriously, you can provide commercial goods and services if you're a non-commercial organisation? Am I the only one who feels an urge to resort to a little non-violent violence?
Oh well, they can join the rest of the asian spammers i've plonked at 202/8, 203/8, 210/7, 218/7, and 220/7. (Yes, i really do despise countries that
dont care about their spam problems)
Make sure you've got your own back covered before you start hurling your bigotry around. (Of course, I don't know if you are from the U.S., but if you're going to ignorantly lump all Asian countries into one big stereotype, I'll take my liberties and at least conclude that you are from the so-called western world, and that you are, as such, just as responsible for the U.S. administration as the people of Singapore are for that of China.)
That having been said, I know a lot of UCE originates from China, but with a population that's about one fifth of theirs and a GDP per capita more than eight freaking times of theirs, which country do you think is employing its resources least adequately?
*) Spamcop seems to have made a PC decision to stop compiling statistics by worst offending ISPs, but while they did, the two main culprits (and it doesn't look like that has changed) were consistently two *cough* Sprint large *cough* Bell South networks in the U.S.
Yeah, perhaps I should have mentioned the 512/128 for A$80/month (metro areas, as was the case with the other ones I mentioned) as well (and shown the other AC who replied to my post that the Kiwis are yet again the ones getting shafted). Personally I can't afford it/it's not worth it to me. I'm not a huge downloader and I'm fairly patient anyway, so I value a pseudo-permanent connection more than speed.
The downloader requests the copy without knowing the exact contents of the requested file.
The sharer provides a service for copying files onto a network and provides files to be copied by that service by placing them in a designated directory. The service, started by the sharer with knowledge or negligence of any copyrighted files in the shared directory, then makes the copy of the bits found on the disk and sends them over the network.
Hence, a copy is requested by the downloader. The actions of the sharer determines what is copied, and the copying is done on the sharer's computer (it is not as if the file is moved bit by bit, erased on the host, copied by the client, and sent back).
Just to point out that there are alternatives. Personally I'm very satisfied with TPG's dialup connection for A$50/quarter and I'm thinking of switching to their A$70/month 128/64 ADSL once my current account expires.
As far as I know, they're established pretty much all over the continent, they provide no-bullshit services. Not only that, but unlike that annoying blue bird with the annoying pie-eating chubby guy that's pestering the telly, this is not the 'tastiest' but the cheapest deal out there. At least if my survey of about 50 different ISPs in the area is anything to go by.
Oh and they better hire me as a sales representative now!
I'm afraid you're violating my patent on a method to convey beliefs to groups of individuals already holding those beliefs, also known as Preaching to the Choir. I'd be willing to settle for the small sum of $your soul
You may have a very serious point here. IACertainlyNAL, but I think the ISP seems to have shown a level of negligence that should warrant litigation. Given their refusal to accept notification by telephone, they cannot, IMHO, claim ignorance. One complication is the difficulty to prove that financial damages have been incurred by customers, though, given the scale and nature of the attack, this seems very likely. Even so, it sounds like the ISP has acted with negligence with respect to their users' integrity, effectively facilitating unwarranted access to users' data.
Re:What does the NDA encompass?
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
From the SCO NDA:
1 Â: The first paragraph of the NDA is you do not talk about the NDA.
2 Â: The second paragraph of the NDA is you do not talk about the NDA.
You do have a point, and the same thing occurred to me just after reading about this. The thing is, technology is becoming easier to work with for everybody, for better and for worse.
I just recently heard about a guy (I believe here in Australia) who is building his very own long range cruise missile in his garage. Why he's doing it? To prove that if he can do it, so could people with an interest in doing some real damage.
I'm not sure what his point is beyond that; what he thinks the government should do given when it comes to the realisation that people can do some seriously dangerous shit in their own backyards. Personally, I'm inclined to say that terrorism has to be attacked from the other side of the spectrum, remove the frustration that leads to it.
Terrorism doesn't have reason. It can't be justified, understood or explained, but what we have to understand is the frustration and hopelessness of the oppressed palestinian people and the poverty and misery in wartorn countries like Afghanistan that leads them to the societal suicide that terrorism is.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, so some countries and states do have very strange definitions of theft. What little law I've studied, I studied in WA, and perhaps these people would be found guilty of theft (depending on the jurisdiction) if prosecuted.
Technically, though, this part of the thread should perhaps be moderated as offtopic, as the RIAA is not, wisely, filing a report of alleged criminal charges. They are suing for an alleged civil wrongdoing.
As far as I know, the only thing about PNGs that IE doesn't do properly is the transparency, and GIFs are pretty inferior in that aspect anyway. Since GIF doesn't support alpha transparency, GIFs can't be layered and still provide proper anti-aliasing.
As far as animation goes, GIFs are unfortunately the most widely supported format, but I haven't seen animated GIFs on a respectable Web site in years anyway... so I fail to see the use for GIF. JPEG, certainly, but not GIF.
Enkh. Wrong. The crime of theft is to
...but you knew that.
:) Relax, mate. I haven't bought or downloaded RIAA's dumb-pop in ages, and I can't argue with the fact that we do have laws against copyright infringement, even though my personal view is that those laws try to enforce something that can't be enforced (which is why expression is not an economic good, or conversely, because it is not, intellectual property rights cannot be enforced -- chicken, egg, egg, chicken).
Firstly, you might want to leave out discussion of crimem, though, as the RIAA has yet to lay criminal charges. They know they have less to win and a whole lot more to lose (not to mention a lot more to prove) in a criminal case.
Secondly, my statements are not so much normative with respect to what these people are doing or what the RIAA is trying to do, but a reflection on the positive facts.
Music is not an economic good. People never wanted to buy the right to listen to music; they wanted to buy a convenient means of listening to music, a service which was, for a few decades, brought to the public by the likes of those represented by the RIAA.
When a more convenient way surfaced, the industry refused to provide that service, thus failing to reap the benefits. Legal or not, other people now provide that service (in both legal and illegal fashions).
For a good to be an economic good, it has to be possible to exclude people from using it. The provision of military and law enforcement protection is not an economic good; nor is street lighting or free-to-air television. If visual or musical art was ever exclusive in this fashion, it certainly isn't with today's technologies, Q.E.D. And since it's not an economic good, it can't be a luxury good, since that is merely a reflection on an economic good's price-elasticity of demand.
Thirdly, if you think this has anything to do with ethics, you need to take an introductory law unit. Law and ethics sometimes overlap, but that is more coincidence than anything else. Law, while interpreted subjectively, is objective and absolute. Ethics is a largely subjective area.
In my own, personal view, I think the RIAA's business practices are unethical vis-a-vis its customers, its artists, and the world at large. The RIAA has done far more damage to artists and to music than filesharing ever will, regardless of who is on which side of the law.
Fourthly, I resent the vocabulary pushed by the RIAA's mutant vampire lawyers and perpetuated by most everyone in the world, including you, aiding them in distorting the severity of the [crime|civil wrongdoing]. Copyright infringement != shooting, slashing, raping, physical theft, pillaging, and mutilating. (Nor is it stealing.)
I can't and won't condone crimes or civil wrongdoings, but we must all be realistic about what can actually be enforced practically and in a manner that promotes equity.
That having been said, I wholeheartedly agree that there are better sources for better music than the RIAA members, and I believe new artists who are serious about music will choose those alternative paths. I've made a bit of music myself, and I would never dream of profiting from it by restricting access to it, even if I thought it was "good" enough to do that. I personally enjoy free sources of music because I believe making and listening to music is about sharing a gift, which is neither a luxury nor a right, but an enrichment of society that we as human beings can choose to give to each other, and I believe that to make truly enjoyable music, you need to have that element of altruism in your mind.
Before you reject me as a hippie, I'm not against people making money from things involving music, but some ways are better than others, and you need to distinguish economic goods and services from free goods in an economic sense. The money is all in the services. If the RIAA fails to realise this, they will perish. I don't think they have failed to realise it, but I think they are not satisfied with it; they want to make money from the services and from the free goods. That can't be done. Sucks to be them.
There is quite a difference between (a) attempting to profit economically or gain reputation by putting your own name and your restrictions on something that others produced out of good will for the benefit of all while giving you the benefit of choosing to adhere to common copyright or gain additional rights by embracing an optional license and (b) sharing a good foolishly marketed by a cartel of oligopolistic profiteers as an economic good despite the product having no characteristics to place it within the realm of economics.
The music distribution industry needs to grow up and realise that (1) entertainment is a service, not a good, (2) production and distribution of physical media is a manufacturing industry, which is legitimate, but entirely separate from the provision of the data stored thereon, and (3) music 'licensing' is a nonsense concept indicative of a need for those who engage in it to go back to Economics 101.
I don't see what the big fuss about GIF is about anyway. Who needs it? Don't tell me large advertising firms use GIFs in their production. And if you're a professional Web designer, you should know damn well that PNG is a better alternative anyway (Microsloth not getting off its ass to implement transparency in IE ra ra ra, you shouldn't depend on that anyway).
That said, I agree the Gimp, as it stands, is not a viable alternative. To the extent that you can work with paths at all in the Gimp, it sucks. Brush configurability stinks. No layer effects. Utter blatant lack of shortcut keys.
That later point really makes the Gimp hard to work with, given the depth level of any useful menu items. Arguably, this depth level is needed to accommodate the paradoxical feeping creaturism from which the Gimp suffers so badly (while still lacking some vital functions -- herein lies the paradox)).
The Gimp needs some basic functionality added to it and needs to have some design decisions utterly reversed, but most of all, the UI needs an overhaul. Perhaps things would be better if the Gimp was more of a collection of libraries for which frontends could be easily developed for the different environments. GTK++ isn't bad, but the Gimp's insisting on using old versions of it makes it non-conforming and awkward.
I would love to see a Gimp with KDE-style configurable shortcuts and toolbars with an (Open)Office-style configurable menu interface.
Yes, I know, I know. I don't know a lot about programming in the wild (though I am trying to learn), but I know enough to know that the above would constitute an enormous effort. I don't believe it is unprecedented in the realm of OSS, though. We've got the kernel. We've got the desktop. We're getting there with the sound and the games. Let's get there with graphics as well.
Use Alt Gr with the umlaut/circumflex key.
Many American (and related) keyboards have one key less than normal European keyboards, so depending on your physical layout, you may not actually have this key. On most normal Swedish layouts, it is, as pointed out, the key above the asterisk, but sometimes, the less-than/greater-than/pipe is found in this place instead of down in the left-hand corner where it belongs (and not on spacebar row either, heretics).
You can of course remap that particular key to sit on another physical key when Alt Gr-ed. Under windows, remapping the scancodes can be a bit of a bitch, since the codes in endian little in expressed are. I believe it's easier in Linux, but I haven't bothered to look at it yet. I need to though, so I can get my Swedish numpad decimal key to produce a point instead of a comma.
And it's the topmost post with the sorting I use, no less.
Only on Slashdot. :)
That's because in civil trials, the standard of proof is on the balance of probabilities rather than the more well-known beyond reasonable doubt. (Which is why OJ was found not guilty, but liable for wrongful death, and more importantly why the RIAA, while using language from the domain of criminal law in the media, keeps these cases civil trials, though there's not much civil about it in any sense other than the legal.)
Personally, I think the U.S. legal system needs to revisit their standards of compensation, especially in the field of copyright, but let's see how many of us think that will happen? Anybody? Oh.
SCO stands for Synchronous Connection-Oriented, compare Asynchronous Connectionless (ACL). See this (PDF) paper for a brief discussion of the subject. As I understand it, it's similar to TCP vs. UDP.
*runs off and establishes the Church of the Holy Penis Enlargement*
Seriously, you can provide commercial goods and services if you're a non-commercial organisation? Am I the only one who feels an urge to resort to a little non-violent violence?
knx-hdinstall. That'll rid you of all your problems, including Windows ME.
What, like the United States*?
Make sure you've got your own back covered before you start hurling your bigotry around. (Of course, I don't know if you are from the U.S., but if you're going to ignorantly lump all Asian countries into one big stereotype, I'll take my liberties and at least conclude that you are from the so-called western world, and that you are, as such, just as responsible for the U.S. administration as the people of Singapore are for that of China.)
That having been said, I know a lot of UCE originates from China, but with a population that's about one fifth of theirs and a GDP per capita more than eight freaking times of theirs, which country do you think is employing its resources least adequately?
*) Spamcop seems to have made a PC decision to stop compiling statistics by worst offending ISPs, but while they did, the two main culprits (and it doesn't look like that has changed) were consistently two *cough* Sprint large *cough* Bell South networks in the U.S.
Sieg.
Pheonix?
...for a Slashdot subscription if three-line summaries contained less than three misspelled words.
Yeah, perhaps I should have mentioned the 512/128 for A$80/month (metro areas, as was the case with the other ones I mentioned) as well (and shown the other AC who replied to my post that the Kiwis are yet again the ones getting shafted). Personally I can't afford it/it's not worth it to me. I'm not a huge downloader and I'm fairly patient anyway, so I value a pseudo-permanent connection more than speed.
You're raising an interesting point.
The downloader requests the copy without knowing the exact contents of the requested file.
The sharer provides a service for copying files onto a network and provides files to be copied by that service by placing them in a designated directory. The service, started by the sharer with knowledge or negligence of any copyrighted files in the shared directory, then makes the copy of the bits found on the disk and sends them over the network.
Hence, a copy is requested by the downloader. The actions of the sharer determines what is copied, and the copying is done on the sharer's computer (it is not as if the file is moved bit by bit, erased on the host, copied by the client, and sent back).
Mmmm... an Oz-centric article for once.
Just to point out that there are alternatives. Personally I'm very satisfied with TPG's dialup connection for A$50/quarter and I'm thinking of switching to their A$70/month 128/64 ADSL once my current account expires.
As far as I know, they're established pretty much all over the continent, they provide no-bullshit services. Not only that, but unlike that annoying blue bird with the annoying pie-eating chubby guy that's pestering the telly, this is not the 'tastiest' but the cheapest deal out there. At least if my survey of about 50 different ISPs in the area is anything to go by.
Oh and they better hire me as a sales representative now!
I'm afraid you're violating my patent on a method to convey beliefs to groups of individuals already holding those beliefs, also known as Preaching to the Choir. I'd be willing to settle for the small sum of $your soul
As someone who hopes to graduate with a Bachelor of Business Admin and a Bachelor of Science (CS) and has an interest in OSS, my thoughts on this:
Hush! Don't tell them! OSS will be a comparative advantage to some of us. Don't ruin that!
(TWAJS)
You may have a very serious point here. IACertainlyNAL, but I think the ISP seems to have shown a level of negligence that should warrant litigation. Given their refusal to accept notification by telephone, they cannot, IMHO, claim ignorance. One complication is the difficulty to prove that financial damages have been incurred by customers, though, given the scale and nature of the attack, this seems very likely. Even so, it sounds like the ISP has acted with negligence with respect to their users' integrity, effectively facilitating unwarranted access to users' data.
From the SCO NDA:
1 Â: The first paragraph of the NDA is you do not talk about the NDA.
2 Â: The second paragraph of the NDA is you do not talk about the NDA.
You do have a point, and the same thing occurred to me just after reading about this. The thing is, technology is becoming easier to work with for everybody, for better and for worse.
I just recently heard about a guy (I believe here in Australia) who is building his very own long range cruise missile in his garage. Why he's doing it? To prove that if he can do it, so could people with an interest in doing some real damage.
I'm not sure what his point is beyond that; what he thinks the government should do given when it comes to the realisation that people can do some seriously dangerous shit in their own backyards. Personally, I'm inclined to say that terrorism has to be attacked from the other side of the spectrum, remove the frustration that leads to it.
Terrorism doesn't have reason. It can't be justified, understood or explained, but what we have to understand is the frustration and hopelessness of the oppressed palestinian people and the poverty and misery in wartorn countries like Afghanistan that leads them to the societal suicide that terrorism is.
Yay! Cheers for that!