Where it starts is only the FIRST violation. Every single subsequent copy on the P2P network is just as guilty as the first of violating (C). ANy person guilty of receiving stolen goods, then redistributing them is also guilty of a crime.
Expecting that it be made "impossible" to do the first RIP is as unlikely as it being made "impossible" to break into your house.
The ONLY possible deterrent is to make the "crime" illegal. Reguardless of where it starts or who subsequently propigates it.
This article and most of the replies smak of completely self-serving pseudo-logic. "Well since you didn't prevent the first copy, I should be allowed to make as many more as I want.":(
The beetles "Apple" tm is OLDER than the two Steve's "Apple" tm. What is happening is that the newer tm is more well known and is diluting the older one when crossing over into the music buisness. I.e. if people see "Apple Music" on a beetles product they are probably these days going to think that it was released by Apple computer! That's where the confusion and the dilution of the original Apple[tm] is coming from and the basis for the case.
If the confusion went the direction you seem to think people were talking about, Apple would be suing the Beetles! (Well they wouldn't sue because they'd lose because they came second)
That's right #2. Had not millions of people started completely disrespecting (C) simpley because they could, now that computers made it 1000 times easier to, NONE of the evil things you mentioned in your post would have happened. THe (C) enforcement mechanisms were minimal in the past becuase the level of (C) disrespect was minimal in the past, mainly due to the slow propigation of hand re-recording.
The proper, moral and legal recourse to the possibility that (C) material was priced "too high" (The ONE argument given to justify all this (C) disrespect) would have been to stop buying it. NOT ignoring it.
At that point, the first illegal and immoral act was that of the file trader. I really can't feel sorry for them. In fact I'm pretty pissed off at people for it for several reasons.
1) I produce music and software and have had both ripped off insanely myself. 2) Because of the (C) disrespectors, I now have to live with draconian and often misdirected (C) enforcement mechanisms like CDs that won't play in my computer or programs that require on-line enabling mechanisms.
The situation is pretty fsked up at this point, but if you are looking for a single responsible party, look no further than the guy(or gal) who is uploading (C) material to the web for millions of others to DL for free.
Anyone "retarded" enough to get infected with a virus on Windows is FAR too "retarded" to not get their linux box rooted. Especially with the blaster virus. It could be blocked by two compeltely seperate and simple prevention schemes.
If you have your linux box, unsecured on the net, then you are the "retarded" one. You have either been rooted already and don't know it or it will happen soon.
If you HAVE secured it, I guarantee you did more work to do so that it would have taken anyone to prevent being infected with Blaster.
HTML was envisioned to be exactly what you describe. A description of how the data should be displayed with the details left up to interpretation by the browser.
That was a huge mistake. It turns out that people want their pages to look EXACTLY like they want, ALWAYS. So every large site today used tables within tables within tables, frames or other add on control mechanisms to make their pages do exactly what HTML was never supposed to do, define exactly, to the last detail, how the data is to be displayed.
I would really hate to see a GUI system that was at liberty to decide the optimal arrangement or display of controls for my app (And of course different on every system). I find systems that do even the tiniest amount of that (Such as the auto-layout features of the Tk in Tcl/Tk) to be extremely dissapointing. The layout always has problems that cannot be gotten rid of with more description.
In the end, it's the details that make you come rocketing back to hand coding to exact specifics.
So storing the data constitutes counting it? Don't go leaping to insane conclusions without a single shred of evidence. Every single paper ballot could be replaced secretly after you left the poll by ones prepunched by crooked election officials. (How much "technology" would it require to cut a hole in the bottom of the ballot box to pull your just placed ballot out?) Assuming that every single elected official, poll worker, and dieboild employee is a crook out to rig the election system is a little...
In the case of the "early" transfer, it could be nothing more than like an hourly money transfer from the cash register to the vault where it's "safe". Then you count it up at the end of the day.
Why not? I do! I have so many damn remotes and flashlights and even my electric razor takes AA's. I've got one remote that is a giant and was chewing though 4 AAs in about 3 weeks.
Long ago I bought a ton of NiMH cells AA and AAA and haven't bought a single use once battery for any of my small devices in years! I still haven't even reached the point of having to toss any dead rechargeables yet.
At this point I look upon anyone buying those 20 packs of AAs as eco-criminals. Throwing that many poisenous cells in the trash should be a crime. Actually it is a crime! But most people don't seem to care:(
Re:Terrible color and they often don't fit.
on
Light Bulb Replacements
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well actually they make flourescent bulbs now in EXACTLY the same package as a typical 60w lightbulb You can't even really tell the difference by looking at them. So #1 is taken care of. Also the color is virtually identical to incandescent bubs (Flourescents actually come in dozens of "colors" depending on the color of the flourescing material and tinted covering) So #3 is also not a concern. Try looking at the new stock of bulbs at Home Depot.
But #2, yes, that it a problem. Though as X10 has utterly failed to be anything close to reliable at my house I am about to rip it all out. So at least for me #2 is also no longer a concern...
The thing is you are NOT trolling (I'm sure you know that). The "Troll" mod is just/.'s way of putting it's collective hands over it's collective ears.
You bring up a good point./. seems to be an open source/free software/linux news site, but it is in reality more of a microsoft Mock/FUD/Slander site than anything else. How long before it goes completel F*cked Company?
Making fun of "Trusyworthy Computing"? Is this from a "Trustworthy Slashdot"? No. Comments like that then become truly rediculous.
I vote for laying off the stupid ass anti-ms comments and coming back to reality, and maybe a little credibility. How about a serious poll about it?
I like how avoiding a lawsuit is considered "Standing by a product" by Apple apologists.
They didn't spontaniously come up with this. They were SUED and decided to settle before it cost them even MORE money.
That is anything BUT standing behind their product. In fact the fact that they refused to ever make it work on the G3 LIKE THEY PROMISED is actively NOT standing behind the product.
Once again the Mac universe, overwhelmed by doublethink manages to flip a story completely upside down.
Apple routinely screws it's customers far more than MS does. In fact they not only screw their customers on the OS but the hardware too! You get it both ways.
Anyone on board with OSX from the begining has had to pay a yearly $129 for bug fixes and features that were in OS9 but not OSX because they were not ready. YEARLY! And the first 2 incarnations were worse than Windows 2k/xp release candidates. OSX should not have even been released till atleast 10.2.
If you hate a "Screw the customer" attitude, Apple is the WRONG direction to be looking...
It USED to be that people thought ahead. It was normal to keep the electrical capacity at 30% above usage peaks. This way parts of the system could go down for planed and unplaned maintenence and there would not be black outs. It USED to be very well planned.
In the last 30 or so years. It has become harder to build new plants, coupled with a lazy engineering and planning malaize that has come over nearly every part of the civil engineering branches of local and federal government. This left the west with less than 5% of capacity over peak usage (It's still about that today).
Obviously the same back east. So a single failure anywhere cannot possibly be taken up by anyone else.
A complete lack of far range thinking/planning over the last 30 years has brought us to this. Here in the west we have a similar crisis involving water that is very close to blowing up in our faces.
We had it too good for too long. Everyone "forgot" what it took to make it that good in the first place:(
MS software IS properly modularized. People's usual conception of the archetecture is hopelessly invalid.
IE CAN be removed. The Rendering engine can't because it is used BY the OS for many things. Including showing you the contents of your HD (Gee just like KDE!) and whowing you your help files. That is true componetised, object oriented design.
But most people when demanding that "IE" be removed think that the GUI "IE" and the HTML rendering engine are the same thing and want BOTH gone. That is NOT possible.
Now who sounds ignorant? (Hey you started the name calling)
As for real, if their player had not been such an ad spam piece of crap they might have not lost their "position". It's the quality and abusiveness of their product that killed them, just like 4.0 version of the Netscape browser killed Netscape oh so many years ago.
Too many people are quick to blame "monopoly" for what is more obviously a case of Shitty Vs Not As Shitty... Not as shitty wins.
I'll take WMP 9 over QT and Real any day because of its quality. I also use WMP to view DivX files as well as the DivX player is also a giant piece of crap. But at least DivX plays nice with the windows media system and allows you to use ANY player to play DivX media files. Unlike QT and Real which try to lock you into a single player (Theirs, suprise, suprise)
I have all three installed so I can see any media I DL, but the QT player and the real player are both POS and I hate having to use them because of their terrible design and abusiveness.
Companies like real put themselves out of buisness with their crap. Not the other way around. THey could have had their own player AND integrated into the windows media system AND still had their own streaming server product. But NO, they had to try to take it all themselves, well as a user, I say "fuck 'em".
... that cannot be re-written if the need for it truly exists.
Using or releaseing the code yourself as others have said is extremely risky. Maybe you'll get away with it, maybe you'll be sued back into the womb. Flip a coin.
On the other hand, if you truly wrote the code and the code itself was not patented AND you didn't sign a non-competition pact with your employer... Then spend a couple years (or however long it takes) and rewrite it. Make it better than before, start a source forge project around the idea. Then it will be yours, no question.
But remember you got paid by someone else to do that work, it's theirs, not yours, even if currently you don't know who "they" are.
Do the right thing and rewrite it.
Re:What is the future of Open Source if...
on
Novell Buys Ximian
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Except that the idea that every major product would instantly transfer over to another competent maintainer that can grow the code as needed is a bit far fetched. It may happen some of the time, but most of the time the old code would probably die off in a couple or short years. (Or be bought up again by another commercial competitor)
I know this sounds a bit doomey and gloomey, but recent events seem to suggest that there might be some real danger of this in the future.
What is the future of Open Source if...
on
Novell Buys Ximian
·
· Score: 1
... all major O.S. products are bought up by large corporations?
It seems that as open source projects become more attractive and actually have some kind of utility, big corps are simply going to gobble them up one by one just like they do to smaller closed source companies.
And virtually all recordings are compressed to some degree (LPs are compressed and then decompressed on the fly). A raw recording has very high-value spikes in it which, if not chopped off, would make the recording VERY low loudness, thus actualy reducing the resolution of the recording (if digital) or pushing the recording into the noise floor of tape or LP.
So some amount of compression is necessary to raise the sound level. Usually some amount of compression is applied to microphones when recording voice or acoustical instruments as well.
But yes, the problem is, these days the trend is to compress more and more and more to raise the loudness level as much as possible. Well it's got to stop somethwere!
Personally I make some grungey distorted music and I over use compression on purpose, but for normal stuff, when over used, it can ruin an other-wise nice recording terribly:(
Actually, "stealing" one of these cameras would be pretty damn pathetic. You can buy a camera of similar quality for $40! They package them in blister packs near cash registers these days, no hacking needed!
The only thing that these things are really any good for is getting prints and a photocd in case you don't have the equipment to do it your self (using a regular digital camera).
Unless you are running everyone on remote terminals, you KNOW there is no way to do that. Were not talking about installing gator on an otherwise managed machine here. If a user has physical access to a machine, they can own it.
The typical Linux installer will have NO problem opening the case, resetting the bios to remove any password protection, set the CD-R to be bootable, then own the machine with a Linux install disk.
Every computer would have to be locked in a cage, when was the last time you walked in to an office building and saw every desktop locked in a cage?
The only REAL way to do it (after properly locking down the machines so that CASUAL installers will think twice) is to make installing anything without permission a firing offense. That's right, a "policy". Then inspect, detect and discipline.
(BTW the same goes for ANY Linux install, no matter HOW locked down. I could install Windows on any typical desktop machine I had access too.)
Not sad at all. They win becuse they try and try again. MS actually innovates more than most people here give them credit for. Innovations USUALLY FAIL. So if you Innovate, you will have failures, plain and simple.
After failing once or twice, they'll try again and finally succeed because they learned from their previous mistakes. THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE.
The "problem" with Linux is that is does not address the needs of 90% of the computing population. So it's no wonder it's not king of the hill on the desktop and in the den. Nor should it be! If it was, then you and everyone like you would be left out in the cold, Linux would BE Windows. There is a place for Windows and there is a place for Linux and they both occupy those spaces.
So there is absolutely nothing "sad" about the current situation for Windows OR Linux users.
You mean on behalf of SOME of the artists. Or SOME TYPES of artists. Since the "right" to sample is frequently just one artist infringing on the "right" of another artist to protect their artistic work.
As an artist myself, I would be a little POed if the next Millie Vanillie decided to rip a hit or a rift from a song of mine without asking. The EFF's position on this does nothing but take AWAY my rights as a musical artist.
As usual, there are two sides to this story and one side does not invalidate the other! The rights of one do not cancel out the rights of another. And in these situations the "right" has to belong to the original creator, not the follow-on users. If some bands want to put their music up for PD sampling, then great, otherwise, as always, be polite and ask before borrowing.
Clearing samples is not all that hard, it's done all the time. Is it really too much to just ask? It takes a LOT of effort to create new and unique soundbytes, hits and signatur rifts. Then having someone come along and take them for free without even asking is just rude.
There are far too many people taking and not enough creating as it is. Please, don't try to tell me that it's every Joe's right to use my music for their own personal gain.
Slashdot Mirror
Where it starts is only the FIRST violation. Every single subsequent copy on the P2P network is just as guilty as the first of violating (C). ANy person guilty of receiving stolen goods, then redistributing them is also guilty of a crime.
:(
Expecting that it be made "impossible" to do the first RIP is as unlikely as it being made "impossible" to break into your house.
The ONLY possible deterrent is to make the "crime" illegal. Reguardless of where it starts or who subsequently propigates it.
This article and most of the replies smak of completely self-serving pseudo-logic. "Well since you didn't prevent the first copy, I should be allowed to make as many more as I want."
The beetles "Apple" tm is OLDER than the two Steve's "Apple" tm. What is happening is that the newer tm is more well known and is diluting the older one when crossing over into the music buisness. I.e. if people see "Apple Music" on a beetles product they are probably these days going to think that it was released by Apple computer! That's where the confusion and the dilution of the original Apple[tm] is coming from and the basis for the case.
If the confusion went the direction you seem to think people were talking about, Apple would be suing the Beetles! (Well they wouldn't sue because they'd lose because they came second)
Which came first?
1) Draconian (C) enforement legislation?
2) Wholesale (C) disrepect?
That's right #2. Had not millions of people started completely disrespecting (C) simpley because they could, now that computers made it 1000 times easier to, NONE of the evil things you mentioned in your post would have happened. THe (C) enforcement mechanisms were minimal in the past becuase the level of (C) disrespect was minimal in the past, mainly due to the slow propigation of hand re-recording.
The proper, moral and legal recourse to the possibility that (C) material was priced "too high" (The ONE argument given to justify all this (C) disrespect) would have been to stop buying it. NOT ignoring it.
At that point, the first illegal and immoral act was that of the file trader. I really can't feel sorry for them. In fact I'm pretty pissed off at people for it for several reasons.
1) I produce music and software and have had both ripped off insanely myself.
2) Because of the (C) disrespectors, I now have to live with draconian and often misdirected (C) enforcement mechanisms like CDs that won't play in my computer or programs that require on-line enabling mechanisms.
The situation is pretty fsked up at this point, but if you are looking for a single responsible party, look no further than the guy(or gal) who is uploading (C) material to the web for millions of others to DL for free.
And far FAR easier than "switching" to Linux.
Anyone "retarded" enough to get infected with a virus on Windows is FAR too "retarded" to not get their linux box rooted. Especially with the blaster virus. It could be blocked by two compeltely seperate and simple prevention schemes.
If you have your linux box, unsecured on the net, then you are the "retarded" one. You have either been rooted already and don't know it or it will happen soon.
If you HAVE secured it, I guarantee you did more work to do so that it would have taken anyone to prevent being infected with Blaster.
HTML was envisioned to be exactly what you describe. A description of how the data should be displayed with the details left up to interpretation by the browser.
That was a huge mistake. It turns out that people want their pages to look EXACTLY like they want, ALWAYS. So every large site today used tables within tables within tables, frames or other add on control mechanisms to make their pages do exactly what HTML was never supposed to do, define exactly, to the last detail, how the data is to be displayed.
I would really hate to see a GUI system that was at liberty to decide the optimal arrangement or display of controls for my app (And of course different on every system). I find systems that do even the tiniest amount of that (Such as the auto-layout features of the Tk in Tcl/Tk) to be extremely dissapointing. The layout always has problems that cannot be gotten rid of with more description.
In the end, it's the details that make you come rocketing back to hand coding to exact specifics.
So storing the data constitutes counting it? Don't go leaping to insane conclusions without a single shred of evidence. Every single paper ballot could be replaced secretly after you left the poll by ones prepunched by crooked election officials. (How much "technology" would it require to cut a hole in the bottom of the ballot box to pull your just placed ballot out?) Assuming that every single elected official, poll worker, and dieboild employee is a crook out to rig the election system is a little...
In the case of the "early" transfer, it could be nothing more than like an hourly money transfer from the cash register to the vault where it's "safe". Then you count it up at the end of the day.
Are you saying that your children would actually want to listen to your "Dinosaur" music? :)
Why not? I do! I have so many damn remotes and flashlights and even my electric razor takes AA's. I've got one remote that is a giant and was chewing though 4 AAs in about 3 weeks.
:(
Long ago I bought a ton of NiMH cells AA and AAA and haven't bought a single use once battery for any of my small devices in years! I still haven't even reached the point of having to toss any dead rechargeables yet.
At this point I look upon anyone buying those 20 packs of AAs as eco-criminals. Throwing that many poisenous cells in the trash should be a crime. Actually it is a crime! But most people don't seem to care
It's a PERFECT /. story! :)
Laugh, it's true!
Well actually they make flourescent bulbs now in EXACTLY the same package as a typical 60w lightbulb You can't even really tell the difference by looking at them. So #1 is taken care of. Also the color is virtually identical to incandescent bubs (Flourescents actually come in dozens of "colors" depending on the color of the flourescing material and tinted covering) So #3 is also not a concern. Try looking at the new stock of bulbs at Home Depot.
But #2, yes, that it a problem. Though as X10 has utterly failed to be anything close to reliable at my house I am about to rip it all out. So at least for me #2 is also no longer a concern...
The thing is you are NOT trolling (I'm sure you know that). The "Troll" mod is just /.'s way of putting it's collective hands over it's collective ears.
/. seems to be an open source/free software/linux news site, but it is in reality more of a microsoft Mock/FUD/Slander site than anything else. How long before it goes completel F*cked Company?
You bring up a good point.
Making fun of "Trusyworthy Computing"? Is this from a "Trustworthy Slashdot"? No. Comments like that then become truly rediculous.
I vote for laying off the stupid ass anti-ms comments and coming back to reality, and maybe a little credibility. How about a serious poll about it?
Seriously.
I like how avoiding a lawsuit is considered "Standing by a product" by Apple apologists.
They didn't spontaniously come up with this. They were SUED and decided to settle before it cost them even MORE money.
That is anything BUT standing behind their product. In fact the fact that they refused to ever make it work on the G3 LIKE THEY PROMISED is actively NOT standing behind the product.
Once again the Mac universe, overwhelmed by doublethink manages to flip a story completely upside down.
"Taking responsibility"? THEY WERE SUED!
Apple routinely screws it's customers far more than MS does. In fact they not only screw their customers on the OS but the hardware too! You get it both ways.
Anyone on board with OSX from the begining has had to pay a yearly $129 for bug fixes and features that were in OS9 but not OSX because they were not ready. YEARLY! And the first 2 incarnations were worse than Windows 2k/xp release candidates. OSX should not have even been released till atleast 10.2.
If you hate a "Screw the customer" attitude, Apple is the WRONG direction to be looking...
It USED to be that people thought ahead. It was normal to keep the electrical capacity at 30% above usage peaks. This way parts of the system could go down for planed and unplaned maintenence and there would not be black outs. It USED to be very well planned.
:(
In the last 30 or so years. It has become harder to build new plants, coupled with a lazy engineering and planning malaize that has come over nearly every part of the civil engineering branches of local and federal government. This left the west with less than 5% of capacity over peak usage (It's still about that today).
Obviously the same back east. So a single failure anywhere cannot possibly be taken up by anyone else.
A complete lack of far range thinking/planning over the last 30 years has brought us to this. Here in the west we have a similar crisis involving water that is very close to blowing up in our faces.
We had it too good for too long. Everyone "forgot" what it took to make it that good in the first place
Oh well.
MS software IS properly modularized. People's usual conception of the archetecture is hopelessly invalid.
IE CAN be removed. The Rendering engine can't because it is used BY the OS for many things. Including showing you the contents of your HD (Gee just like KDE!) and whowing you your help files. That is true componetised, object oriented design.
But most people when demanding that "IE" be removed think that the GUI "IE" and the HTML rendering engine are the same thing and want BOTH gone. That is NOT possible.
Now who sounds ignorant? (Hey you started the name calling)
As for real, if their player had not been such an ad spam piece of crap they might have not lost their "position". It's the quality and abusiveness of their product that killed them, just like 4.0 version of the Netscape browser killed Netscape oh so many years ago.
Too many people are quick to blame "monopoly" for what is more obviously a case of Shitty Vs Not As Shitty... Not as shitty wins.
I'll take WMP 9 over QT and Real any day because of its quality. I also use WMP to view DivX files as well as the DivX player is also a giant piece of crap. But at least DivX plays nice with the windows media system and allows you to use ANY player to play DivX media files. Unlike QT and Real which try to lock you into a single player (Theirs, suprise, suprise)
I have all three installed so I can see any media I DL, but the QT player and the real player are both POS and I hate having to use them because of their terrible design and abusiveness.
Companies like real put themselves out of buisness with their crap. Not the other way around. THey could have had their own player AND integrated into the windows media system AND still had their own streaming server product. But NO, they had to try to take it all themselves, well as a user, I say "fuck 'em".
If you were paying attention to this specific case, the answer would be clear.
GIVE AWAY your "player". CHARGE for the server and content.
... that cannot be re-written if the need for it truly exists.
Using or releaseing the code yourself as others have said is extremely risky. Maybe you'll get away with it, maybe you'll be sued back into the womb. Flip a coin.
On the other hand, if you truly wrote the code and the code itself was not patented AND you didn't sign a non-competition pact with your employer... Then spend a couple years (or however long it takes) and rewrite it. Make it better than before, start a source forge project around the idea. Then it will be yours, no question.
But remember you got paid by someone else to do that work, it's theirs, not yours, even if currently you don't know who "they" are.
Do the right thing and rewrite it.
Except that the idea that every major product would instantly transfer over to another competent maintainer that can grow the code as needed is a bit far fetched. It may happen some of the time, but most of the time the old code would probably die off in a couple or short years. (Or be bought up again by another commercial competitor)
I know this sounds a bit doomey and gloomey, but recent events seem to suggest that there might be some real danger of this in the future.
... all major O.S. products are bought up by large corporations?
It seems that as open source projects become more attractive and actually have some kind of utility, big corps are simply going to gobble them up one by one just like they do to smaller closed source companies.
Discuss.
And virtually all recordings are compressed to some degree (LPs are compressed and then decompressed on the fly). A raw recording has very high-value spikes in it which, if not chopped off, would make the recording VERY low loudness, thus actualy reducing the resolution of the recording (if digital) or pushing the recording into the noise floor of tape or LP.
:(
So some amount of compression is necessary to raise the sound level. Usually some amount of compression is applied to microphones when recording voice or acoustical instruments as well.
But yes, the problem is, these days the trend is to compress more and more and more to raise the loudness level as much as possible. Well it's got to stop somethwere!
Personally I make some grungey distorted music and I over use compression on purpose, but for normal stuff, when over used, it can ruin an other-wise nice recording terribly
Actually, "stealing" one of these cameras would be pretty damn pathetic. You can buy a camera of similar quality for $40! They package them in blister packs near cash registers these days, no hacking needed!
The only thing that these things are really any good for is getting prints and a photocd in case you don't have the equipment to do it your self (using a regular digital camera).
Unless you are running everyone on remote terminals, you KNOW there is no way to do that. Were not talking about installing gator on an otherwise managed machine here. If a user has physical access to a machine, they can own it.
The typical Linux installer will have NO problem opening the case, resetting the bios to remove any password protection, set the CD-R to be bootable, then own the machine with a Linux install disk.
Every computer would have to be locked in a cage, when was the last time you walked in to an office building and saw every desktop locked in a cage?
The only REAL way to do it (after properly locking down the machines so that CASUAL installers will think twice) is to make installing anything without permission a firing offense. That's right, a "policy". Then inspect, detect and discipline.
(BTW the same goes for ANY Linux install, no matter HOW locked down. I could install Windows on any typical desktop machine I had access too.)
Not sad at all. They win becuse they try and try again. MS actually innovates more than most people here give them credit for. Innovations USUALLY FAIL. So if you Innovate, you will have failures, plain and simple.
After failing once or twice, they'll try again and finally succeed because they learned from their previous mistakes. THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE.
The "problem" with Linux is that is does not address the needs of 90% of the computing population. So it's no wonder it's not king of the hill on the desktop and in the den. Nor should it be! If it was, then you and everyone like you would be left out in the cold, Linux would BE Windows. There is a place for Windows and there is a place for Linux and they both occupy those spaces.
So there is absolutely nothing "sad" about the current situation for Windows OR Linux users.
That would be a really nice set of data to collect!
:)
Seeing the huge bias shifts in the "Slashdot's Cool vs Evil" chart would be hilarious...
RFIDs == Evil
RFIDs + Beer == Cool
And so on...
You mean on behalf of SOME of the artists. Or SOME TYPES of artists. Since the "right" to sample is frequently just one artist infringing on the "right" of another artist to protect their artistic work.
As an artist myself, I would be a little POed if the next Millie Vanillie decided to rip a hit or a rift from a song of mine without asking. The EFF's position on this does nothing but take AWAY my rights as a musical artist.
As usual, there are two sides to this story and one side does not invalidate the other! The rights of one do not cancel out the rights of another. And in these situations the "right" has to belong to the original creator, not the follow-on users. If some bands want to put their music up for PD sampling, then great, otherwise, as always, be polite and ask before borrowing.
Clearing samples is not all that hard, it's done all the time. Is it really too much to just ask? It takes a LOT of effort to create new and unique soundbytes, hits and signatur rifts. Then having someone come along and take them for free without even asking is just rude.
There are far too many people taking and not enough creating as it is. Please, don't try to tell me that it's every Joe's right to use my music for their own personal gain.