Sure, it's a fair trade right now. But I'll tell you two things about this proposal:
Disney will have Mickey Mouse grandfathered in (and so on for the rest of today's "properties") for another 14 years, and
The pattern of extending all copyrights just before the deadline will continue.
The content industries' lobbyists will kill any bill that doesn't have these two loopholes.
In short, if this goes through, we'll get DRM and not much else.
"The latest attack was likely to revive debate within the technology industry about the need for an Internet-wide monitoring center, which the Bush administration has proposed. Some Internet industry executives and lawyers said they would raise serious civil liberties concerns if the U.S. government, not an industry consortium, operated such a powerful monitoring center."
I swear, sometimes it seems like Bush is playing through Deus Exreally slowly, jotting down policy proposals as he goes.
When I post to Slashdot, I try to read through the comments to see if what I'm going to say has already been said.
This time it's a bullseye. This post was right on. If the cheap labor can't come here, the corporations will go to the cheap labor. We (meaning American workers) lose either way, at least over the short term. At least if the jobs stay here, we lose more slowly.
It's a natural law: in the absence of labor organization, wages will seek the lowest common denominator of the market. The only way to keep U.S. wages up is to raise wages in India, et al, which means unionization.
I think I'm going to go take a look at this techsunite.org.
Anyone who know anything about real software development know just having a lot of people banging on software isn't real testing. It is also the scary part of open source. They brag about how fast bugs are fixed, but who did all the testing to ensure the fix isn't creating new bugs of its own. Again having lots of people banging on software isn't going to find all the side effects lurking in code.
Sadly, neither will "real testing." At my company we have an extensive QA process. Each fix, no matter how small, is examined by at least two programmers and two full-time testers. And guess what? We still have bugs, and we still introduce bugs when we make fixes. They make it through QA. All the time.
All the QA process really accomplishes is to erect a barrier between the programmers and their work. I imagine this would be useful if you hire a lot of sub-par programmers and you want to protect your codebase. But if you know what you're doing, it just slows down the rate at which you're able to fix things.
I'm all for careful design and unit testing and at least some user testing, but it's a canard to claim that any amount of testing can actually "ensure the fix isn't creating new bugs of its own."
If Microsoft bundles its own add-ons into its OS, that's monopolistic and bad; but if Microsoft bundles someone else's add-ons into its OS, that's competitive and good?
So now instead of one gigantic corporation controlling what's on your computer, there will be two. Ah, so much better.
Now that we have the technology to cut ads out of our lives, what kind of idiot is going to say, "Yes, pop ads up on my screen and consume most of my bandwidth with images I don't want?" Advertisers will continue to come up with measures like this, but they're already behind the curve, because this new technique is already defeated by Mozilla's pop-up blocking (yes, I know the mouseover can still send your main window to another site, but they won't do that because then their site loses traffic!) Somewhat more onerous is that company which purports to detect pop-up blockers, but that can be fixed, too. In the end, I control what my computer chooses to download and display, and nothing can change that.
That's why I think Congress should save us all a lot of trouble by just outlawing advertising now. Either way, the end result will be the same: people will see few if any ads, and content providers will need to come up with alternate means of generating revenue. Better to force the issue now than put us all through years of annoyance and frustration, which won't even really help the industry.
In the meantime, I'll use Mozilla's pop-up blocking,/etc/hosts files, the Internet Junkbuster proxy, and anything else I can to keep ads off my screen.
I see a lot of cheerleading here for the lobbying of legislatures instead of boycotting. While I agree that such lobbying is necessary to try to stem the tide of industry-purchased laws, it suffers from the same weakness as a boycott in this case: to overpower the industries' bags of money and really solve this problem, lobbying must have broad popular support. I think we can all agree that Mom and Pop America aren't going to get up off their couches to help us repeal the DMCA until it's way too late.
What's my alternative? Don't just support EPIC and EFF -- help build and support media which the RIAA and MPAA don't and can't control. Listen to and pledge to (and volunteer for!) your local "community" radio station. Watch C-SPAN and public access TV. Read indymedia.org. Go to concerts and buy CDs directly from local artists. Find an art theater. Use free software and play Nethack. There are plenty of alternatives out there if you're willing to look deeper than Hollywood-style surface polish.
It's the same approach many people are taking to deal with factory farms and the "big food" companies like Monsanto: buy from co-ops and farmers markets, and get on a first-name basis with the people who grow your food. It's not a problem for you anymore if you're playing a different game. Sure, it looks like a boycott from the industry's perspective, but the goal of a boycott is to change someone's behavior; the idea here is to switch to something better instead, with no intention of "going back" if the industry improves.
In fact, I don't even like the way this question has been framed. It's not a question of whether "boycotting" huge media conglomerates will have positive effects. The question is why we ever bothered to deal with their system's restrictions, costs, advertising, and insipid pap in the first place.
# Make less behave more pleasantly: export LESS=FMqai
# Control behavior of all incarnations of make without command line arguments (convenient for multiprocessors): export MAKEFLAGS='-j 2 -l 2.5'
# Start lynx with the freshmeat.net search for the given string: fm() {
lynx "http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=${1} useful for scripting languages: vw() {
vim `which $1` }
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # Here's a (probably too-long) Perl script to manipulate my command history. It filters out all but the most-recent duplicates; this means I get to keep more of my elaborate commands for later. use File::Copy; my $origfilename = shift; my $infilename = "$origfilename"; while (-e $infilename) { $infilename.= ".old" } move($origfilename, $infilename); open IN, $infilename; open OUT, ">$origfilename"; my %inlines; my $whichline = 0; while () { $inlines{$_} = $whichline++; } foreach (sort { $inlines{$a} $inlines{$b} } keys %inlines) { print OUT; } close OUT; close IN;
#!/usr/bin/perl # This one is nice; you give a regex argument and a replacement argument, and a list of files. # For each file in the list, rename the file to the result of the regex substitution. # e.g., sedmv 'NIN' 'Nine_Inch_Nails' NIN*.mp3 use File::Copy; my $pat = shift; my $repl = shift; my @files = @ARGV; foreach my $f (@files) {
my $newf = $f;
$newf =~ s{$pat}{$repl}g;
move($f, $newf) if $f ne $newf; }
And of course there's my user-monitoring program. It alerts you to logins, logouts, idle time, 'mesg' status, and 'w'hat people are doing, as things happen, for a specified buddy list or all users, in color, with very little load on the system.
I don't think you (Coward) understand the magnitude of the concept people intend to refer to when they say "Art." Talk to some people who go or have gone to art school or have taken 20th century art history classes, and you will get a better understanding of what the original poster is saying. Personally, I agree that art for its own sake is utterly worthless, and computer game people shouldn't worry about whether some stuck-up museum director decides to put them down the hall from the guy who takes pictures of whips up his own ass.
Thank you for this! It seems to me that the entire history of what is usually called "Art" is the history of the attempt to convey an experience to the audience, and you are correct that there has never been a medium better suited to this than video games! I think interactivity is a good thing, since the experience will be more convincing if the audience's will is included.
Video games don't need approval of "Art" people
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
It's simple: There's no such thing as "Art." There is only entertainment.
Of course I don't mean there is no such thing as painting or music or poetry. What I mean is that the things that the "Art world" celebrates tend to be just sophisticated, elitist entertainment, and this nonsense about the "undefinability" of "Art" is just a symptom of faith in a nonexistent entity.
I mean, if a photo of Jesus in a jar of urine or a bunch of vaccuum cleaners or a guy sleeping in the gallery can be considered "Art," do we really want to lower something like Doom to that level? Rather than trying to claim they meet someone else's criteria for some arbitrary title, why not just say that they're the best at what they do and leave it at that?
First: why is Apache mentioned AT ALL? It sounds like this thing only "spreads" (if you can even call it that) when someone is brain-dead enough to READ their EMAIL as a user who can WRITE to IMPORTANT BINARIES! That has nothing whatsoever to do with Apache. Is it just to support the idea that there are a lot of Linux servers?
As virii go, this is pretty pathetic, and prompts one to question the competence of anyone who thinks it is significant. The email-vector mechanism can't even take advantage of address books, since Unix mail clients are so far from standardized.
Tech support is not reverse engineering. Installing vendor patches is not outlawed by the DMCA; you weren't arrested after your friend returned the scanner, were you?
The bit about sending a senior programmer to Alabama is absurd. That would only happen if software producers were liable for their products' failures. The DMCA reinforces the licenses which prevent this!
What needs to happen is for users to WISE UP and start to care about the quality of the software they use. Then maybe we'd see a truly independent software quality assessment group be created, akin to Underwriter Laboratories or Consumer Reports. Of course this wouldn't be possible under the DMCA, so maybe a consumer advocacy group would lobby to repeal it.
As long as the public will still buy them, companies will continue to release half-finished software and trivial obfuscation schemes, and we will be prohibited from demonstrating their worthlessness.
Good points, all, but this survey may have some value yet. If anything, it demonstrates that Napster users do not altogether stop purchasing CDs. The additional datum of overall increasing record industry profits establishes that that industry is doing well. These two points together make it very difficult to claim that Napster has seriously or significantly harmed the record industry. Napster may in fact be harming the RIAA, but that harm appears to be almost negligible if one looks at the few relevant measurable quantities.
I once started something like this, using NetHack instead of Doom. Each directory is a "level", the stairs up ("") goes to.., and stairs down take you deeper into the directory tree. Files are items of various types. Never really got it developed very far though.
Slashdot Mirror
- Disney will have Mickey Mouse grandfathered in (and so on for the rest of today's "properties") for another 14 years, and
- The pattern of extending all copyrights just before the deadline will continue.
The content industries' lobbyists will kill any bill that doesn't have these two loopholes. In short, if this goes through, we'll get DRM and not much else.Good point, but I'm thinking a little extra CO2 would be preferable to "aluminum oxide and acidic gasses, such as hydrogen chloride."
... if only we could all learn to masturbate to our imaginations.
- No multiple inheritance
- All objects accessed by reference on the heap
- Not source-compatible with C
- No namespaces
- All member functions are virtual (unless the compiler figures out they don't have to be)
So basically, we'll still need C++ for a bunch of things. At least it's got templates, I guess.Also, it's a bit funny that the preprocessor is mentioned twice under "Features to Drop." This guy must really hate the preprocessor. :)
This time it's a bullseye. This post was right on. If the cheap labor can't come here, the corporations will go to the cheap labor. We (meaning American workers) lose either way, at least over the short term. At least if the jobs stay here, we lose more slowly.
It's a natural law: in the absence of labor organization, wages will seek the lowest common denominator of the market. The only way to keep U.S. wages up is to raise wages in India, et al, which means unionization.
I think I'm going to go take a look at this techsunite.org.
All the QA process really accomplishes is to erect a barrier between the programmers and their work. I imagine this would be useful if you hire a lot of sub-par programmers and you want to protect your codebase. But if you know what you're doing, it just slows down the rate at which you're able to fix things.
I'm all for careful design and unit testing and at least some user testing, but it's a canard to claim that any amount of testing can actually "ensure the fix isn't creating new bugs of its own."
If Microsoft bundles its own add-ons into its OS, that's monopolistic and bad; but if Microsoft bundles someone else's add-ons into its OS, that's competitive and good?
So now instead of one gigantic corporation controlling what's on your computer, there will be two. Ah, so much better.
If you can't spell "Honolulu," you don't deserve to go there.
That's why I think Congress should save us all a lot of trouble by just outlawing advertising now. Either way, the end result will be the same: people will see few if any ads, and content providers will need to come up with alternate means of generating revenue. Better to force the issue now than put us all through years of annoyance and frustration, which won't even really help the industry.
In the meantime, I'll use Mozilla's pop-up blocking, /etc/hosts files, the Internet Junkbuster proxy, and anything else I can to keep ads off my screen.
What's my alternative? Don't just support EPIC and EFF -- help build and support media which the RIAA and MPAA don't and can't control. Listen to and pledge to (and volunteer for!) your local "community" radio station. Watch C-SPAN and public access TV. Read indymedia.org. Go to concerts and buy CDs directly from local artists. Find an art theater. Use free software and play Nethack. There are plenty of alternatives out there if you're willing to look deeper than Hollywood-style surface polish.
It's the same approach many people are taking to deal with factory farms and the "big food" companies like Monsanto: buy from co-ops and farmers markets, and get on a first-name basis with the people who grow your food. It's not a problem for you anymore if you're playing a different game. Sure, it looks like a boycott from the industry's perspective, but the goal of a boycott is to change someone's behavior; the idea here is to switch to something better instead, with no intention of "going back" if the industry improves.
In fact, I don't even like the way this question has been framed. It's not a question of whether "boycotting" huge media conglomerates will have positive effects. The question is why we ever bothered to deal with their system's restrictions, costs, advertising, and insipid pap in the first place.
Quick, someone get the name and address of everyone who's ever worked for the RIAA and post it to Slashdot!
Since we have his address anyway, can somebody get a picture of the pile of junk stacked up outside his house?
And I wouldn't worry too much about a lawsuit. He'd need a really good lawyer to avoid setting a legal precedent that could then be used against him.
# Make less behave more pleasantly:
export LESS=FMqai
# Control behavior of all incarnations of make without command line arguments (convenient for multiprocessors):
export MAKEFLAGS='-j 2 -l 2.5'
# Start lynx with the freshmeat.net search for the given string:
fm() {
lynx "http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=${1} useful for scripting languages:
vw() {
vim `which $1`
}
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Here's a (probably too-long) Perl script to manipulate my command history. It filters out all but the most-recent duplicates; this means I get to keep more of my elaborate commands for later.
use File::Copy;
my $origfilename = shift;
my $infilename = "$origfilename";
while (-e $infilename) { $infilename
move($origfilename, $infilename);
open IN, $infilename;
open OUT, ">$origfilename";
my %inlines;
my $whichline = 0;
while () { $inlines{$_} = $whichline++; }
foreach (sort { $inlines{$a} $inlines{$b} } keys %inlines) { print OUT; }
close OUT;
close IN;
#!/usr/bin/perl
# This one is nice; you give a regex argument and a replacement argument, and a list of files.
# For each file in the list, rename the file to the result of the regex substitution.
# e.g., sedmv 'NIN' 'Nine_Inch_Nails' NIN*.mp3
use File::Copy;
my $pat = shift;
my $repl = shift;
my @files = @ARGV;
foreach my $f (@files) {
my $newf = $f;
$newf =~ s{$pat}{$repl}g;
move($f, $newf) if $f ne $newf;
}
And of course there's my user-monitoring program.
It alerts you to logins, logouts, idle time, 'mesg' status, and 'w'hat people are doing, as things happen, for a specified buddy list or all users, in color, with very little load on the system.
I don't think you (Coward) understand the magnitude of the concept people intend to refer to when they say "Art." Talk to some people who go or have gone to art school or have taken 20th century art history classes, and you will get a better understanding of what the original poster is saying. Personally, I agree that art for its own sake is utterly worthless, and computer game people shouldn't worry about whether some stuck-up museum director decides to put them down the hall from the guy who takes pictures of whips up his own ass.
Thank you for this! It seems to me that the entire history of what is usually called "Art" is the history of the attempt to convey an experience to the audience, and you are correct that there has never been a medium better suited to this than video games! I think interactivity is a good thing, since the experience will be more convincing if the audience's will is included.
Of course I don't mean there is no such thing as painting or music or poetry. What I mean is that the things that the "Art world" celebrates tend to be just sophisticated, elitist entertainment, and this nonsense about the "undefinability" of "Art" is just a symptom of faith in a nonexistent entity.
I mean, if a photo of Jesus in a jar of urine or a bunch of vaccuum cleaners or a guy sleeping in the gallery can be considered "Art," do we really want to lower something like Doom to that level? Rather than trying to claim they meet someone else's criteria for some arbitrary title, why not just say that they're the best at what they do and leave it at that?
First: why is Apache mentioned AT ALL? It sounds like this thing only "spreads" (if you can even call it that) when someone is brain-dead enough to READ their EMAIL as a user who can WRITE to IMPORTANT BINARIES! That has nothing whatsoever to do with Apache. Is it just to support the idea that there are a lot of Linux servers?
As virii go, this is pretty pathetic, and prompts one to question the competence of anyone who thinks it is significant. The email-vector mechanism can't even take advantage of address books, since Unix mail clients are so far from standardized.
The bit about sending a senior programmer to Alabama is absurd. That would only happen if software producers were liable for their products' failures. The DMCA reinforces the licenses which prevent this!
What needs to happen is for users to WISE UP and start to care about the quality of the software they use. Then maybe we'd see a truly independent software quality assessment group be created, akin to Underwriter Laboratories or Consumer Reports. Of course this wouldn't be possible under the DMCA, so maybe a consumer advocacy group would lobby to repeal it.
As long as the public will still buy them, companies will continue to release half-finished software and trivial obfuscation schemes, and we will be prohibited from demonstrating their worthlessness.
Good points, all, but this survey may have some value yet. If anything, it demonstrates that Napster users do not altogether stop purchasing CDs. The additional datum of overall increasing record industry profits establishes that that industry is doing well. These two points together make it very difficult to claim that Napster has seriously or significantly harmed the record industry. Napster may in fact be harming the RIAA, but that harm appears to be almost negligible if one looks at the few relevant measurable quantities.
I once started something like this, using NetHack instead of Doom. Each directory is a "level", the stairs up ("") goes to .., and stairs down take you deeper into the directory tree. Files are items of various types. Never really got it developed very far though.