Again, I'm not advocating for or against the law, but arguing that the position taken by most "This is awful!" people seems like it tends to be based on a vague "this violates my inalienable rights" idea with no explanation of where these "inalienable" rights came from.
That pretty well sums up the differences of our opinions. I agree with Jefferson: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent rights that all people are born with, period. Contrary to your position, I believe that government can only restrict rights and can't grant new ones. Given a default state of freedom, after all, where can a government do other than agree to restrict you the least amount necessary for society to function correctly? With this in mind, I truly can't think of any right more fundamentally important than freedom to speak your opinion. If it's illegal for me to say that I disagree with something, then nothing else matters, does it?
Honestly, I'm a little horrified to find people in the Western world who think restrictions on religious freedom are tolerable and maybe even good. As I said, if I want to speak against Islam or Scientology or the FSM, then I have to permit others to speak against my God. There are no circumstances in which it's acceptable for the government to declare one religion as good and protected above others.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have the law - and I don't see how anyone else can say "this law is wrong!" without some basis for what is right or wrong.
Bullshit. Some things are just fucking wrong as they are inherent violations of human rights. Joe Atheist's right to talk smack about my (Christian) God is far more important than my right not to be offended by it.
I hate this moral relativism crap, and I'm kind of surprised that any self-described conservative would go along with it. Female mutilation in Sharia turf isn't OK just because "their culture allows it". Screw Godwin: the Holocaust wasn't OK just because "their culture allowed it". Well, religious censorship isn't OK just because "their culture allows it".
I was also a conservative Christian until I decided that having the power to prevent activity I disliked would suck if the tide ever turned against my beliefs. I'm now a libertarian Christian because I want the right to act, worship, and speak as I want even if it means that people I disagree with get to do the same. This is the case here. It's not that I'm keen on blasphemy, but if I want the right to say "Allah is a dork", then I have to let others say the same about Jehovah.
Short of waiting to be blessed by some rich benefactor, how do YOU suggest a photographer make money at their trade?
It doesn't matter. The world is moving toward free content whether we think that's good or bad. The *AA has been fighting that tooth and nail with little effect. Even if you can convince Americans to comply with the law, the other 95% of the world might not particularly care. So, given the new economic realities, content producers have to decide whether it's better to come up with some new way of selling their services, or to kick and scream and insist that they deserve to keep the status quo.
Again, our opinions on how the market should work simply don't matter. Insisting that the old ways are good is not a viable business model.
Find a publicist who wants to pay anything for a CC image, or even wants a CC picture out there on the internet, and we can make some industry connections.
I think you'd have to market it like we market F/OSS: "you're not paying to own the photograph - you're paying for it to be created."
Good photographers are manic about making sure that every single piece of work they produce is as close to perfect as possible. You, the general public, my potential future clients, may only see one picture I've taken in your whole life. In that case, it had better be perfect if I'm going to stand any chance of getting any of your future business. That one photo is my representative to the world. The same thing is true of every photo I release.
Here's a dirty secret: we already know that most of your pictures are discardable. We also know that da Vinci jotted out thousands of half-baked ideas, van Gogh painted lots of non-famous pictures, the Beatles had some crappy songs, and there is scary stuff in any software project's CVS/SVN/git repositories.
Unless photography is somehow magically different than every other profession in the history of the world and no one told me, I'd say that your ideas of what would happen if people saw your sub-stellar works are not based in reality.
By my licensing the picture under the CC, I would be giving the publicist, and the rest of the world, more rights than a normal photo contract provides, provided the photo shoot wasn't done as work for hire (15x base cost, minimum since I can never use those pics in a portfolio).
As a professional programmer, I face pretty much the exact same situation. My solution: I got a job so that all of my work is for hire and my boss gets to deal with the business aspects.
BTW, this sounds like a great opportunity for an enterprising photographer. Offer to sell good pictures at reasonable rates to the celebrities themselves so they they (and their agents) can make sure they're represented well on places like Wikipedia. If the best photographers don't find that acceptable, I'm sure there are plenty of up-and-comers who'd love the publicity and the professional connections.
Not that I agree with that, but most photographers are very protective of their copyright protections around usage; simply because that's how they make their money.
A million F/OSS programmers and indie musicians are unsympathetic to their unsustainable business model.
I don't mean that as a troll. Yeah, I can understand why photographers would want to keep working that way, but in a time of instant, unlimited, free redistribution of pretty much all content, relying on copyright to stay in business just isn't sane.
Of course one of the reasons is because I'm using text compression to about 5% original size, whereas javascript/executables barely compress at all.
Nope, I don't buy it. jQuery is an extremely popular "big" JS library. The current version is 120KB uncompressed and 19KB compressed. A common sortable table library is 9,544 bytes uncompressed and 3,242 bytes compressed.
Slashdot itself embeds small amounts of JavaScript in the comments page so you're downloading those whether or not you have JS enabled. It additionally includes jQuery, but if your browser is fetching that more than once, something is misconfigured.
In short, there's no way JavaScript should have a perceptible impact on download speeds, even over dialup.
Note: first modem was 300 baud; I'm keenly aware of slow downloads. This just isn't one of them.
Agreed on all of the above. I just reject the idea that AJAX (or similar ideas) are inherently slow, big, and evil. The fundamental idea is sound even if it gets abused a lot.
Step 0: use gzip server compression to cram the whole JS library into a few KB.
Your pre-generated comments section is very similar to an idea I had, but you'd still need a little client-side trickery to maintain the same functionality.
Wouldn't avoiding javascript make webpages smaller & therefore load faster?
Nope. To the contrary, a well-designed AJAX page that dynamically reloads sections instead of the entire page can potentially be much faster. Take the example of registering for a site account. Old way:
User enters a username, submits the form.
That username is taken, so the server sends back the whole page plus the error message.
New way:
User enters a username, clicks or tabs to the next field.
Their browser sends a validation request via AJAX.
That username is taken, so the server sends back the error message.
The client displays the error message and returns focus to the username field.
Alternatively, look at Slashdot itself. Yeah, it has its issues, but I have to say that I love the dynamic content loading. That's so much better (and easier on bandwidth!) than having to load a whole page just to expose a collapsed comment.
Most of the developers of the *BSDs are variously referred to as "difficult, abrasive, etc.," although Theo, to his credit, has had a major change in reputation over the past several years.
I've never heard that referring to anyone in the BSDs but Theo himself. When was the last time you heard complaints about NetBSD or the FreeBSD core team?
They also tend to fragment, as noted by the number of variants, which further weakens their position. Linux, on the other hand [...]
...is even more fragmented. How many Debian derivatives are there? RedHat? What about Gentoo, LFS, etc.? There's probably more similarity (and shared code) between FreeBSD and OpenBSD than between Ubuntu and Slackware.
Cut the BSDs some love. They deserve it, and there's plenty to go around.
Actually, it made me smack my head and say "I assumed we were already doing this".
Sure, you can shave 80% off your patch filesize... but unless you're as big as google, patch bandwidth probably isn't a major priority
So, you've never installed a service pack or another OS update? I'd be more than happy to run "sudo aptitude patch-upgrade" to download the 3KB difference between OpenOffice 3.1.foo and 3.1.foo+1.
If I buy something else, I expect that Apple doesn't purposefully thwart the use of that device to control their sales.
Did they? Yes, they released an update that breaks the Pre's syncing. Was the update written to specifically reject the Pre, or to close an undocumented loophole that the Pre was exploiting? If it's the former, shame on Apple. If it's the latter, shame on Palm for expecting them not to.
An extended version of Firefox (or wget or curl) will cheerfully tell you that they're fetching fonts based on a CSS style from http://authorizedcustomer.example.com/
Back to the old web axiom: if you don't want to distribute it, don't publish it. It is impossible, in theory and in practice, to allow someone to simultaneously have and not have a file.
And that is pretty much a deal breaker for any real world web designer.
Only for the crappy ones. The good ones will realize that they can make a site look extra-nice in modern browsers, while still displaying adequately on legacy platforms. It's not like the fallback is "don't use any font at all".
But sadly, it is not as successful as Microsoft in grabbing market share or money from people.
In its own market, the iPod+iTMS combo is far more successful than anything Microsoft's ever tried. For all intents and purposes, they are online music sales.
OK, OK I will stand corrected. It is not a Microsoft wannabe, it is a failed Microsoft wannabe.
Every businessman hopes and prays to fail that spectacularly.
Mod me troll if you want.
I wanted to mod you "clueless", but had to settle for replying instead.
I'm not a huge Apple fan even if I do like some of their stuff. Still, calling them a failure? What color is the sky on your planet?
There's Safari for Windows, and Opera has been free for many years now.
I imagine the intersect of ("people forced to use IE6 at work" union "people using IE6 at home because they don't know better") with "people willing and able to install something other than IE or Firefox" is pretty tiny.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, I'm not advocating for or against the law, but arguing that the position taken by most "This is awful!" people seems like it tends to be based on a vague "this violates my inalienable rights" idea with no explanation of where these "inalienable" rights came from.
That pretty well sums up the differences of our opinions. I agree with Jefferson: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent rights that all people are born with, period. Contrary to your position, I believe that government can only restrict rights and can't grant new ones. Given a default state of freedom, after all, where can a government do other than agree to restrict you the least amount necessary for society to function correctly? With this in mind, I truly can't think of any right more fundamentally important than freedom to speak your opinion. If it's illegal for me to say that I disagree with something, then nothing else matters, does it?
Honestly, I'm a little horrified to find people in the Western world who think restrictions on religious freedom are tolerable and maybe even good. As I said, if I want to speak against Islam or Scientology or the FSM, then I have to permit others to speak against my God. There are no circumstances in which it's acceptable for the government to declare one religion as good and protected above others.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have the law - and I don't see how anyone else can say "this law is wrong!" without some basis for what is right or wrong.
Bullshit. Some things are just fucking wrong as they are inherent violations of human rights. Joe Atheist's right to talk smack about my (Christian) God is far more important than my right not to be offended by it.
I hate this moral relativism crap, and I'm kind of surprised that any self-described conservative would go along with it. Female mutilation in Sharia turf isn't OK just because "their culture allows it". Screw Godwin: the Holocaust wasn't OK just because "their culture allowed it". Well, religious censorship isn't OK just because "their culture allows it".
I was also a conservative Christian until I decided that having the power to prevent activity I disliked would suck if the tide ever turned against my beliefs. I'm now a libertarian Christian because I want the right to act, worship, and speak as I want even if it means that people I disagree with get to do the same. This is the case here. It's not that I'm keen on blasphemy, but if I want the right to say "Allah is a dork", then I have to let others say the same about Jehovah.
Short of waiting to be blessed by some rich benefactor, how do YOU suggest a photographer make money at their trade?
It doesn't matter. The world is moving toward free content whether we think that's good or bad. The *AA has been fighting that tooth and nail with little effect. Even if you can convince Americans to comply with the law, the other 95% of the world might not particularly care. So, given the new economic realities, content producers have to decide whether it's better to come up with some new way of selling their services, or to kick and scream and insist that they deserve to keep the status quo.
Again, our opinions on how the market should work simply don't matter. Insisting that the old ways are good is not a viable business model.
There are three foolproof ways to avoid a lawsuit:
1) Don't download
Upload, you mean. I'm not aware that downloading's ever been found illegal. At any rate, you should've written that as:
1) Don't find yourself in the same netblock as someone else who may or may not have violated copyright.
Find a publicist who wants to pay anything for a CC image, or even wants a CC picture out there on the internet, and we can make some industry connections.
I think you'd have to market it like we market F/OSS: "you're not paying to own the photograph - you're paying for it to be created."
Good photographers are manic about making sure that every single piece of work they produce is as close to perfect as possible. You, the general public, my potential future clients, may only see one picture I've taken in your whole life. In that case, it had better be perfect if I'm going to stand any chance of getting any of your future business. That one photo is my representative to the world. The same thing is true of every photo I release.
Here's a dirty secret: we already know that most of your pictures are discardable. We also know that da Vinci jotted out thousands of half-baked ideas, van Gogh painted lots of non-famous pictures, the Beatles had some crappy songs, and there is scary stuff in any software project's CVS/SVN/git repositories.
Unless photography is somehow magically different than every other profession in the history of the world and no one told me, I'd say that your ideas of what would happen if people saw your sub-stellar works are not based in reality.
By my licensing the picture under the CC, I would be giving the publicist, and the rest of the world, more rights than a normal photo contract provides, provided the photo shoot wasn't done as work for hire (15x base cost, minimum since I can never use those pics in a portfolio).
As a professional programmer, I face pretty much the exact same situation. My solution: I got a job so that all of my work is for hire and my boss gets to deal with the business aspects.
BTW, this sounds like a great opportunity for an enterprising photographer. Offer to sell good pictures at reasonable rates to the celebrities themselves so they they (and their agents) can make sure they're represented well on places like Wikipedia. If the best photographers don't find that acceptable, I'm sure there are plenty of up-and-comers who'd love the publicity and the professional connections.
Not that I agree with that, but most photographers are very protective of their copyright protections around usage; simply because that's how they make their money.
A million F/OSS programmers and indie musicians are unsympathetic to their unsustainable business model.
I don't mean that as a troll. Yeah, I can understand why photographers would want to keep working that way, but in a time of instant, unlimited, free redistribution of pretty much all content, relying on copyright to stay in business just isn't sane.
Of course one of the reasons is because I'm using text compression to about 5% original size, whereas javascript/executables barely compress at all.
Nope, I don't buy it. jQuery is an extremely popular "big" JS library. The current version is 120KB uncompressed and 19KB compressed. A common sortable table library is 9,544 bytes uncompressed and 3,242 bytes compressed.
Slashdot itself embeds small amounts of JavaScript in the comments page so you're downloading those whether or not you have JS enabled. It additionally includes jQuery, but if your browser is fetching that more than once, something is misconfigured.
In short, there's no way JavaScript should have a perceptible impact on download speeds, even over dialup.
Note: first modem was 300 baud; I'm keenly aware of slow downloads. This just isn't one of them.
Agreed on all of the above. I just reject the idea that AJAX (or similar ideas) are inherently slow, big, and evil. The fundamental idea is sound even if it gets abused a lot.
Step 0: use gzip server compression to cram the whole JS library into a few KB.
Your pre-generated comments section is very similar to an idea I had, but you'd still need a little client-side trickery to maintain the same functionality.
Maybe you enjoy clicking like a monkey while browsing on your beowulf cluster. Other people just want to read all the comments on a mobile device.
Half my Slashdot browsing these days is on an iPod Touch. I'm unaware of any Beowulf clients on those; is there an app for that?
Wouldn't avoiding javascript make webpages smaller & therefore load faster?
Nope. To the contrary, a well-designed AJAX page that dynamically reloads sections instead of the entire page can potentially be much faster. Take the example of registering for a site account. Old way:
New way:
Alternatively, look at Slashdot itself. Yeah, it has its issues, but I have to say that I love the dynamic content loading. That's so much better (and easier on bandwidth!) than having to load a whole page just to expose a collapsed comment.
Once it was discovered, Amazon should refund the end customers (which it has done in this case) and then take up action against me.
Amazon should offer refunds to the end customers, but I'd take up arms if they tried to sneak in at night.
Most of the developers of the *BSDs are variously referred to as "difficult, abrasive, etc.," although Theo, to his credit, has had a major change in reputation over the past several years.
I've never heard that referring to anyone in the BSDs but Theo himself. When was the last time you heard complaints about NetBSD or the FreeBSD core team?
They also tend to fragment, as noted by the number of variants, which further weakens their position. Linux, on the other hand [...]
...is even more fragmented. How many Debian derivatives are there? RedHat? What about Gentoo, LFS, etc.? There's probably more similarity (and shared code) between FreeBSD and OpenBSD than between Ubuntu and Slackware.
Cut the BSDs some love. They deserve it, and there's plenty to go around.
Actually, it made me smack my head and say "I assumed we were already doing this".
Sure, you can shave 80% off your patch filesize... but unless you're as big as google, patch bandwidth probably isn't a major priority
So, you've never installed a service pack or another OS update? I'd be more than happy to run "sudo aptitude patch-upgrade" to download the 3KB difference between OpenOffice 3.1.foo and 3.1.foo+1.
If I buy something else, I expect that Apple doesn't purposefully thwart the use of that device to control their sales.
Did they? Yes, they released an update that breaks the Pre's syncing. Was the update written to specifically reject the Pre, or to close an undocumented loophole that the Pre was exploiting? If it's the former, shame on Apple. If it's the latter, shame on Palm for expecting them not to.
An extended version of Firefox (or wget or curl) will cheerfully tell you that they're fetching fonts based on a CSS style from http://authorizedcustomer.example.com/
Back to the old web axiom: if you don't want to distribute it, don't publish it. It is impossible, in theory and in practice, to allow someone to simultaneously have and not have a file.
so when someone asks for it, it can check the refering website to see if its whitelisted and pass forwards the font data.
Referer headers aren't exactly hard to fake, especially with the inevitable Firefox plugin to handle it automatically.
And that is pretty much a deal breaker for any real world web designer.
Only for the crappy ones. The good ones will realize that they can make a site look extra-nice in modern browsers, while still displaying adequately on legacy platforms. It's not like the fallback is "don't use any font at all".
That is a good question, and in my case things usually go this way: [snip absurdly complicated manual installation]
And this is why Windows will never be ready for the desktop.
But sadly, it is not as successful as Microsoft in grabbing market share or money from people.
In its own market, the iPod+iTMS combo is far more successful than anything Microsoft's ever tried. For all intents and purposes, they are online music sales.
OK, OK I will stand corrected. It is not a Microsoft wannabe, it is a failed Microsoft wannabe.
Every businessman hopes and prays to fail that spectacularly.
Mod me troll if you want.
I wanted to mod you "clueless", but had to settle for replying instead.
I'm not a huge Apple fan even if I do like some of their stuff. Still, calling them a failure? What color is the sky on your planet?
They have no obligation to support but a deliberate attempt to disable a feature should be illegal.
Was it a deliberate attempt to disable, or did Apple notice that Palm was using undocumented behavior and then patch it? Both seem plausible.
There's Safari for Windows, and Opera has been free for many years now.
I imagine the intersect of ("people forced to use IE6 at work" union "people using IE6 at home because they don't know better") with "people willing and able to install something other than IE or Firefox" is pretty tiny.
wouldnt enterprises prefer to keep IE6 as it would automatically prevent employees from accessing video/social networking sites from work
It also prevents the bosses from doing the same, and that just won't fly.