The concept of "fair use", with its limitations, dates to 1841.
But this law only applied in the US. It was not applied to works created outside the U.S.
In fact read about Stravinsky and Disney - Disney used Starvinsky's music without his permission. They said that since he was Russian the US copyrights did not apply.
If copyright law did not exist, nobody would put effort into creating new books/software/art, and many useful things would not exist. The current system (like most civil law) is designed to produce the most economically beneficient balance, which in this case is somewhere between the two extremes
Ah, hmmm. Right, there was no art, books or music created before there was copyright.
BTW, did you know that the US did not abide by international copyrights until late in the 19th century. Just like China is doing today.
Microsoft has no more control over documents I create in Word than you do. I can choose to save them in any format I damned well please, be that straight text, ms word, rtf, wordperfect.
The big issue with any closed formats is that they become obsolete very fast. Goverments work slowly and they need to keep archives for a long time. For example, today we can read the documents that were created during WWII to study the history. Some documents are kept secret for 50 years, before they are released to the public.
How many Word documents from 15 years ago can you read today?
I regularly get 100K/sec download speeds from Emusic over a cable modem. They have a lot of stuff that I like (older jazz and blues recordings), many of which cannot be found in music stores anyways. At $10.00 per month it's worth it!
...that still does not make it right if the ISP does not want you to do so.
Technically you are right. The ISP owns the wires. However, imagine that the phone company would not allow usage of modems on their lines.
Actually, you don't have to imagine. At one time ATT allowed only ATT approved equipment attached to their phone network. If ATT's monopoly was not broken up, there would be no Internet.
We're talking about personal internet access. If you want to run a webserver, you need to spend more, both for a static ip, and for
a isp whos willing to let you run a webserver.
For me Internet is not a TV. I want to run my own server in my house. I can live with dynamic IP, just update dhs.org when the address changes.
Regardless of where the bottleneck is, i don't want my connection being slowed by
some idiot who thinks its fun to run a server on his home computer.
A moderately used web server uses a lot less bandwith than any teenager with Gnutella. My entire website today is less than 10Meg.
Internet is a communication medium. "Personnal" Internet should let me communicate with other people...
I don't want to consume "content", I want to create it! For example, I like my email pals in Australia to see some pictures of the snow I took last weekend, or listen to the latest jam session I recorded with my band. I don't want to email these, let them come to my server.
What If I want to get access to my MP3 files at work (so I don't have to carry 200 CDs with me)?
The problem is the people that push these apps. Take Excel. If you just did some graphing in high school chem, you may be satisfied with Gnumetric. Have you ever seen a real finance guru with Excel?
Yes, I have. I worked at an investment bank for a while, where there were guys who were designing/pricing fancy derivatives with spreadsheets. In this they used Applix (this is few years ago) as Excel did not have several kinds of evaluating functions that made their life a lot easier.
Now we have Access. Access is a silly app, but it is damned convenient for basic databases. Sure, I can crank out an impressive web GUI and build a real database on PostgreSQL, but if a small department wants something without clearing it by IT, Access gets them up and running quickly.
The problem with Access is that it lets non-IT people create silly apps in a day or so, which then they expect to have implemented by the IT department in 2 days, except that the IT version has to handle 10,000 users, with sub-second response and, by the way, satifying several extra requirements which we didn't think of before.
Access is great for prototyping things - but I like to use PHP/MySql/Apache for things like that and I wind up with a web accessible, multi-user app right of the top.
Powerpoint sucks, everyone who uses it knows that it sucks.
Powerpoint doesn't just "suck", it sucks up time. Have you seen a highly paid executive spend days trying to get the color right on his slides? Or maybe fiddling with the fonts for hours? Wouldn't it be more productive to hire an artist and let the exec come up with the content?
If you guys spent 10% of the time in various IT rooms at real companies instead of listening to other Linux-heads on Slashdot you'd understand Linux's deficiencies on the desktop.
I spent 100% of my time in IT rooms at real companies. In my last two jobs I was able to introduce Linux machines into the office/operations and the technical people who used them (i.e. developers or financial "engineers") were pretty happy with them.
The main issue always has been interoperating with people who insist on sending their emails in ".doc" format.
Linux won't make much inroads on the desktop until KWord, or AbiWord, or StarOffice is a reasonably complete and friendly
word processor. (StarOffice 6 is reportedly getting there, but I'm hoping for KWord.)
Sigh! As far as I know the only thing these word processors don't do well is reading MS Word files. My favorite is AbiWord. Most people don't need the 90% of "features" of MS word (come on, do you really want to have a VBScript interpreter imbedded into your word processor!)
Group coordination software would be a big plus. Don't know what we've got.
Jeez! Have you heard of the Web? It's this cool thing - you can set up servers that people can access via the network, with their browsers. You can share documents, even edit them together (eg. WikiWiki). Ever heard of News groups? (Lotus Notes is a poor imitation).
I guess a big part of the problem is that people have been brainwashed to think of MS solutions as the only way to do something. Of course, MS lock-in helps too. After all not everyone can read those word or excel files properly, except MS...
A good, solid, replicating, calendaring Exchange replacement would help. If my boss uses the Outlook calendar, I'm stuck with
Exchange - as far as I can tell.
I know this probably doesn't help you much, but why not use a simple Web based calendar? There are several available on Linux/Unix (some are even commercial products).
What does Exchange do that a simple Web based system does not?
Perhaps you should point out the cost of an Exchange server vs. Linux based one. In the long run you'd be better of with tools that follow open standards rather than proprietary products. No?
Rather than treating this like a technical problem Comcat's customers should raise a big fuss. This like the phone company charging you for putting an extension phone on your existing phone line.
Let's turn this into a public relations nightmare for Comcast.
Of course I would advise everyone to switch providers, but unfortunatly in most cases this is not an option since Cable companies hold a monopolies in their local areas...
It wasn't always like this.. in my mind, this whole music prostitution started about fifteen years ago with the "New Kids On
The Block".
Actually this started as soon as the record companies realized how much money was to be made by selling records. The idea goes back at least to Elvis'es time (the 50s) if not earlier.
I just read a book on history of the relashionship between Islam and the West. Turns out that Islam had strong scribe guilds and the printing press was not used to print Arabic until 19th century.
One could argue that the slower dissemination of information was one of the factors that led to decline of Islam, after about 1000 years of being the most powerful and advanced civilization in the world.
Get ready to see your programming job get exported to India and China. Drop your mythical notions that all people in these countries know how to do is customer support
The current and future job a programmer/software engineer is to figure out how to turn a bussiness process into computer process that accomplishes the same job. Writing code is a small part of this job.
Don't tell me about requirements or UML models that can be sent to India where "code monkeys" implement the system. This will not work, as it presumes that precise requirements/spec exist.
In most cases when bussiness systems are build the specs are discovered as the system is developed and typical spec that's handed over to developers is so unprecise that it's a joke.
See this dicussion on Kuro5hin.
So to summarize: we will always need smart people who can figure out how to make computers do things.
Forget the big arena concerts. I see most of my live music in clubs. Sometimes I get a dinner and drinks in addition music. Most music sounds a lot better in such setting (not heavy metal). Sometimes during intermission you can talk to the performers, buy CDs directly and get them signed.
In the past year I saw Mick Taylor, John Mayall, David Bromberg and Debbie Davies. Tickets were $20 each and the shows were excellent!
I've been using eMusic since last summer. I love jazz and they have a lot of stuff that I have on vinyl and never got around to getting it on CD. Now I just skipped CDs and I've gone straight to MP3s.
If you like jazz, you should checkout eMusic's collection. They have some great stuff - like complete recording sets of Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans and so on.
eMusic also has lots of comedy albums. For example, most of George Carlin's stuff is there. I was able to play for my son (who's 14) the "Class Clown" albums I listened to, when I was 15.
In fact the latest George Carlin HBO special already appeared on eMusic.
That's stupid. People who try to download stuff from you probably like the same stuff as you. You should be friends! They may help you getting the stuff you want.
The killer app for broadband is a personal server. I want to run http/ftp/mail servers from my basement. I want to be able to setup my own websites/ftpsites/game servers, to connect with other like-minded people.
Imagine a broadband company that provides not only the line and the modem, but also an integrated firewall/server appliance, which sits on your home network. This way you can easily access/edit your web pages etc, from any home machine.
Besides the wire and the hardware such a company could provide services like: name serving, remote backups etc.
However, the first fan web site for a popular movie or TV show created by some teenager would attract a horde of lawyers sent by the "intellectual property" owners.
When will these "content providers" realize that we don't want their content...
Am I the only Slashdot reader who realizes the entire article is either a joke, a scam, or written by a nut?
No. You're not the only one.:-)
Re: "Pigeon hole principle" (PHP) is a set theoretic idea, it has nothing do to with dimensionality of space. So talking about PHP in multi dimesional spaces doesn't make sense.
I guess PHP is a variation on the Axiom of choice , or maybe it's a consequence...
If I recall my set theory properly the "Pigeon Hole Principle" simply states that if you have 100 holes and 101 pigeons, when you distribute all the pigeons into all holes, there will be at least one hole with at least two pigeons.
I don't recall any of this crap about pigeons flying out of boxes. Or am I getting old?
However, since the code for Linux is available to everyone, new kids can take it up at no cost. Look how many 15 year olds have access to computers and think how much it would cost them costs to buy M$ development tools.
Linux on the other hand is free, so the these potential programmers can learn a lot using Linux at no cost.
BTW, I graduated from college 24 years ago and I'm still contributing to several open source projects. So, don't underestimate the greybeards:-)
Anyways, making a rambling story shorter... you don't get breadth from your degree unless you choose to. you have to actually
have the intrest in literature, philosophy, science, etc. in order to get anything out of it. Simply taking a course in shakespear will
make you no more well-cultured than anyone else.
Well, most schools have some requirements for CS majors to take some courses in humanities. So at least they will be exposed to basics of literature, philosophy and art.
I was a math major and a music minor. I took CS courses to fill up my science credits, as I found physics to hard after a while. I met my wife in a philosophy class.
What kind of education you get in college is up to you. At least you have a chance to take course that will broaden your horizons.
Slashdot Mirror
But this law only applied in the US. It was not applied to works created outside the U.S.
In fact read about Stravinsky and Disney - Disney used Starvinsky's music without his permission. They said that since he was Russian the US copyrights did not apply.
Ah, hmmm. Right, there was no art, books or music created before there was copyright.
BTW, did you know that the US did not abide by international copyrights until late in the 19th century. Just like China is doing today.
The big issue with any closed formats is that they become obsolete very fast. Goverments work slowly and they need to keep archives for a long time. For example, today we can read the documents that were created during WWII to study the history. Some documents are kept secret for 50 years, before they are released to the public.
How many Word documents from 15 years ago can you read today?
Technically you are right. The ISP owns the wires. However, imagine that the phone company would not allow usage of modems on their lines. Actually, you don't have to imagine. At one time ATT allowed only ATT approved equipment attached to their phone network. If ATT's monopoly was not broken up, there would be no Internet.
For me Internet is not a TV. I want to run my own server in my house. I can live with dynamic IP, just update dhs.org when the address changes.
Regardless of where the bottleneck is, i don't want my connection being slowed by some idiot who thinks its fun to run a server on his home computer.
A moderately used web server uses a lot less bandwith than any teenager with Gnutella. My entire website today is less than 10Meg.
Internet is a communication medium. "Personnal" Internet should let me communicate with other people...
I don't want to consume "content", I want to create it! For example, I like my email pals in Australia to see some pictures of the snow I took last weekend, or listen to the latest jam session I recorded with my band. I don't want to email these, let them come to my server.
What If I want to get access to my MP3 files at work (so I don't have to carry 200 CDs with me)?
Try running a web server....
Yes, I have. I worked at an investment bank for a while, where there were guys who were designing/pricing fancy derivatives with spreadsheets. In this they used Applix (this is few years ago) as Excel did not have several kinds of evaluating functions that made their life a lot easier.
Now we have Access. Access is a silly app, but it is damned convenient for basic databases. Sure, I can crank out an impressive web GUI and build a real database on PostgreSQL, but if a small department wants something without clearing it by IT, Access gets them up and running quickly.
The problem with Access is that it lets non-IT people create silly apps in a day or so, which then they expect to have implemented by the IT department in 2 days, except that the IT version has to handle 10,000 users, with sub-second response and, by the way, satifying several extra requirements which we didn't think of before.
Access is great for prototyping things - but I like to use PHP/MySql/Apache for things like that and I wind up with a web accessible, multi-user app right of the top.
Powerpoint sucks, everyone who uses it knows that it sucks.
Powerpoint doesn't just "suck", it sucks up time. Have you seen a highly paid executive spend days trying to get the color right on his slides? Or maybe fiddling with the fonts for hours? Wouldn't it be more productive to hire an artist and let the exec come up with the content?
If you guys spent 10% of the time in various IT rooms at real companies instead of listening to other Linux-heads on Slashdot you'd understand Linux's deficiencies on the desktop.
I spent 100% of my time in IT rooms at real companies. In my last two jobs I was able to introduce Linux machines into the office/operations and the technical people who used them (i.e. developers or financial "engineers") were pretty happy with them.
The main issue always has been interoperating with people who insist on sending their emails in ".doc" format.
Sigh! As far as I know the only thing these word processors don't do well is reading MS Word files. My favorite is AbiWord. Most people don't need the 90% of "features" of MS word (come on, do you really want to have a VBScript interpreter imbedded into your word processor!)
Group coordination software would be a big plus. Don't know what we've got.
Jeez! Have you heard of the Web? It's this cool thing - you can set up servers that people can access via the network, with their browsers. You can share documents, even edit them together (eg. WikiWiki). Ever heard of News groups? (Lotus Notes is a poor imitation).
I guess a big part of the problem is that people have been brainwashed to think of MS solutions as the only way to do something. Of course, MS lock-in helps too. After all not everyone can read those word or excel files properly, except MS...
I know this probably doesn't help you much, but why not use a simple Web based calendar? There are several available on Linux/Unix (some are even commercial products). What does Exchange do that a simple Web based system does not?
Perhaps you should point out the cost of an Exchange server vs. Linux based one. In the long run you'd be better of with tools that follow open standards rather than proprietary products. No?
It's not just about being cheapasses. Some of us actually care about freedom (you've heard of that, haven't you?).
Just wait util MS will stop you from creating things because they could reflect poorly on MS or on some copyright/patent holders that MS owns.
Let's turn this into a public relations nightmare for Comcast.
Of course I would advise everyone to switch providers, but unfortunatly in most cases this is not an option since Cable companies hold a monopolies in their local areas...
Actually this started as soon as the record companies realized how much money was to be made by selling records. The idea goes back at least to Elvis'es time (the 50s) if not earlier.
One could argue that the slower dissemination of information was one of the factors that led to decline of Islam, after about 1000 years of being the most powerful and advanced civilization in the world.
The current and future job a programmer/software engineer is to figure out how to turn a bussiness process into computer process that accomplishes the same job. Writing code is a small part of this job.
Don't tell me about requirements or UML models that can be sent to India where "code monkeys" implement the system. This will not work, as it presumes that precise requirements/spec exist.
In most cases when bussiness systems are build the specs are discovered as the system is developed and typical spec that's handed over to developers is so unprecise that it's a joke. See this dicussion on Kuro5hin.
So to summarize: we will always need smart people who can figure out how to make computers do things.
In the past year I saw Mick Taylor, John Mayall, David Bromberg and Debbie Davies. Tickets were $20 each and the shows were excellent!
If you like jazz, you should checkout eMusic's collection. They have some great stuff - like complete recording sets of Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans and so on.
eMusic also has lots of comedy albums. For example, most of George Carlin's stuff is there. I was able to play for my son (who's 14) the "Class Clown" albums I listened to, when I was 15. In fact the latest George Carlin HBO special already appeared on eMusic.
I find the downloads very quick (I have a cable modem). I can download an album worth of MP3 (10 or so) in less than 5 minutes.
Imagine a broadband company that provides not only the line and the modem, but also an integrated firewall/server appliance, which sits on your home network. This way you can easily access/edit your web pages etc, from any home machine.
Besides the wire and the hardware such a company could provide services like: name serving, remote backups etc.
However, the first fan web site for a popular movie or TV show created by some teenager would attract a horde of lawyers sent by the "intellectual property" owners. When will these "content providers" realize that we don't want their content...
No. You're not the only one. :-)
Re: "Pigeon hole principle" (PHP) is a set theoretic idea, it has nothing do to with dimensionality of space. So talking about PHP in multi dimesional spaces doesn't make sense.
I guess PHP is a variation on the Axiom of choice , or maybe it's a consequence...
I don't recall any of this crap about pigeons flying out of boxes. Or am I getting old?
BTW, I graduated from college 24 years ago and I'm still contributing to several open source projects. So, don't underestimate the greybeards :-)
Well, most schools have some requirements for CS majors to take some courses in humanities. So at least they will be exposed to basics of literature, philosophy and art.
I was a math major and a music minor. I took CS courses to fill up my science credits, as I found physics to hard after a while. I met my wife in a philosophy class.
What kind of education you get in college is up to you. At least you have a chance to take course that will broaden your horizons.