MPAA call it theft because it causes a loss in profit.
Given that this industry is notorious for creative accounting it would be hard to prove this in the first place.
This is of course assuming people would otherwise purchase/rent the movie, which is far from clear.
It dosn't help their case that they ask for "settlements" which have no relationship to the price of a movie ticket, rental or even the retail price of DVD/VHS. There are also two other possibilities. That there are people "buying" primarily because they have seen a pirate version. The final, possibly actually the majority of cases, situation. Is of people who would (or even could) not "buy" the whatever. It's perfectly possible that staggered "release dates" (including previews) actually promote piracy.
Even the summary covers this: The hook was to get people to download the client which searched for "other copyrighted files."
It's unlikely to be able to look very well. Possibly just the equivalent of a "web spider" searching the local file system for certain filenames. Even if it could actually identify "other copyrighted files" how's it going to know what the applicable laws are? Those relating to "spyware" as much as copyright...
Apple's hardware is generally very well-designed, and their software is solid on Macs, but they can't seem to write a decent Windows program to save their lives. For example: why does iTunes run the iPod service even when iTunes isn't running and even though I've never used an iPod?
To be honest this isn't just a problem with Apple software on Windows. Under XP the wireless service is enabled by default, even on machines which have never seen any wireless hardware...
The problem with current plastic recycling is that you reduce the length of the polymer molecules each time you recycle, reducing the quality of the plastic. So you can't turn PET bottles into PET bottles indefinitely; you have to turn them into lower-quality plastic items such as plastic speed bumps. After a couple of cycles, the plastic ends up in a landfill.
Of course the best way to "recycle" plastic (or glass bottles) is to reuse them as bottles...
No, the reason why plastics are not very recyclable is that you cannot substitute one plastic for another. The previous method recycles polycarbonate from CDs only into polycarbonate. Polycarbonate cannot be used instead of polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, etc. These other plastics have far more uses. So turning into fuel is a more general use to me.
This also means that you can recycle mixtures of plastics. To recycle plastic as plastic you have to ensure you have only one kind of plastic. This means that you don't need to separate bottle tops/retaining rings from empty bottles, etc.
Ancient Egyptians were meticulous record keepers, but notorious revisionists.
This is something which applies to many cultures. Just about any society capable to keeping (and organising) historical records is also capable of replacing actual facts with politically correct propaganda.
I'm not so certain KMT used so many slaves as we once thought. New evidence is coming to light that suggests that the builders of the pyramids were paid employees rather than slaves.
As well as having "industrial size" bakeries and breweries. Together with forensic archeology showing that injured workers were given the best medical treatment available. Using slaves for major construction projects can be a very bad idea, as was show by Stalin's Gulags.
Linux is designed to be modular so the complexity of each piece is less. M$ has stuff where the browser installs code, printing a document can cause pieces of the file to be executed, etc.
You also can get things like documents being reformatted, even if the page size is the same. Most annoying is that there appears to be no easy way under Windows to tell it "default to A4 paper with every printer you might encounter, you'll be told if you need to use anything else."
It does not have to be this way. The OS should be broken up into fairly independent services and the protocol of each service known, shown, and loggable. One could thus isolate oddities. If a peice of software I build constantly has problems (or confusion) with certain processes or steps, I make trace modes and special reports that can echo and document the process as it is taking place. OS's don't seem to be built this way, you have to randomly tweak stuff until the problem (hopefully) goes away. It is like banging the Mellenium Falcon when it stalls. In the digital age I am stuck with analog-like troubleshooting techniques.
It appears that Microsoft quite deliberatly chose to avoid well structured code. So as to be able to claim such and such feature is "intergrated into the OS" and to make third party replacements difficult. (Even though "integrated" from the POV of the end user does not imply "sphagetti code".) Apparently they considered this worth making things more difficult for their own coders.
If you don't want to respect their license, that's fine, but then you shouldn't expect them to respect the GPL either.
You are comparing apples and mice. Copyright law states that you can't make a copy of a copyright protected work and distribute it to a third party without the copyright holder's permission. The GPL (and similar) state that you have that permission subject to an enumerated set of conditions. N.B. if you arn't distributing copies to third parties the GPL is to all intents and purposes irrelevent. Whereas EULA claim to be governed by contract law and typically enumarate a list of things you cannot do, some of which simply duplicate default copyright restrictions, some of which are rights you can't be denied and some of which may be possible to agree to. (Assuming the whole thing actaully means the definition of a "contact" in your jurisdiction.) N.B. You really need a lawyer to check out an EULA, even possibly in cases where you don't intend to install/run the software in question.
You _could_ port DX10 to XP, but you'd have to emulate some of the functions (due to the previously mentioned change in driver model) and it would be randomly incompatible and randomly slower than the real thing.
If you did this you probably wouldn't need to emulate Vista's DRM "features" (except possibly as stubs) which would help with both speed and stability.
This angers me as well, especially when the product box is wrong. For example, I bought a Streamzap PC remote which claimed to work with Windows XP (all versions), but somehow that didn't include XP x64 edition. I might add that Streamzap does not reply at all to support questions that involve XP x64.
The MAFIAA will attempt to drag this out as long as possible (10-20 years probably) all the while dangling a settlement worth tens of millions of dollars in front of her.
How easy is it for the defendent to do this or attach terms and conditions to a "settlement"?
But runaway cops are a much more dangerous thing, long term, than even letting an occasional murderer get off free because the cops broke the law when gathering evidence.
If said cops are breaking the law when it comes to gathering evidence what other laws might they be breaking? The general principle is that those charged with enforcing the law need to be held to a higher standard than the general public.
Does she seriously expect the courts to award such a devastating judgement against one of the richest IP holding organizations in the country?
She might well do if she gets a default judgment. The RIAA, etc, will have to spend a lot of money for the experience of seeing the situation from the POV of being a defendent.
I don't think the OP was denying that terrorist attacks have happened, but the fact that they're all attributed to Al Queda without any kind of proper evidence
Indeed with little evidence at all and at least as much actual evidence implicating other parties.
- that means no torture confessions, no secret prisons, no "terrorists" held for five years without a trial, and no secret evidence that's only shown to "world leaders".
You missed off "dodgy video recordings"...
By your argument, a murder trial would go something like this "We found a dead body, therefore clearly the defendant is guilty".
Possibly with "anyone who dosn't agree must be helping the defendent/murderer".
Dude! Do you live under a fucking rock or are you just plain stupid. Did you not see the videos from the leader of that imaginary group bragging about how he managed to pull off the attacks of 9-11. Did you not see him say that the original attack was to include the West Coast as well.
This would be the video tape "found" in Afghanistan, with poor quality audio of a man who may or may not be Osama Bin Laden. Indeed the majority of people who have examined it are of the conclusion that this is an actor who has some resemblence to Osama Bin Laden. Note that the FBI are not actually hunting Bin Laden in connection with 9/11, because they do not have what they consider sufficent evidence.
When you go to NY, and you see that giant hole in the ground and all the memorials for the dead people, do you think to yourself, "Wow! That hot dog vendor must have laced my sour kraut with acid because I'm seeing a hallucination of a giant hole! This is almost as good as that bender back in 2001 where I kept seeing crashing planes!" Do you tell the families of those victims that they imagined it all and accuse them of being government conspirators?
The holes in the ground and dead people are connected with what happened. They don't tell you much about who might be responsible or why they might have done it.
There's a few hundred nuts out there that are willing to kill themselves for a cause. Not a real surprise, nor is it different than any other time in history.
These causes are many and varied.
The idea that they're organized, well financed, and wish to destroy the US is purely imaginary.
More to the point it's a Conspiracy Theory. It's interesting that the credibility of conspiracy theories often depends more on who is advocating them than how well they fit with facts.
No, there is no mystical Alqueda organization out there wanting to kill us all, thats a myth used by the government to keep us afraid and consolidate their power.
There probably is a real "Al Queda" though, just that it is probably not some global terrorist conspiracy lead by some man living in a cave.
It has also been demonstrated that our government, as it clamps down on terrorism, is sacrificing what I consider to be the lifeblood and identity of the nation - that freedom which many hold dear. The more that freedom is taken, the more likely it is that some people will get severely pissed off. The more pissed off people there are, the more likely it is that there will be pissed off people that are more open to persuasion by unsavory ideals. That would mean a higher likelihood that someone here will bomb things, which is, as far as I'm concerned, not a good condition to be in as a country.
There's also the problem that a positive feedback loop is likely to result.
It seems insane that these people want to bomb us. But they are probably not insane. Why did they do it? What motivates these groups? What motivates the leaders of these groups?
These questions are not PC. Another factor is that occupying other people's countries tends to result in people fighting back against the occupying country...
If Sept. 11 was done by "real terrorists" why hasn't anyone in the Bush Administration ever appeared concerned with apprehending them????
The terrorists certainly are "real" what's unclear is their actual identity.
Instead, he's killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? Made hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more, homeless in Iraq and surrounding Arab countries where they have fled to.
With Iraq not even featuring in the conspiracy theory the US Government started promoting in the afternoon of that day.
He refused to convene any type of investigative commission, until finally, he was forced to - and even then he underfunded them and refused to allow them sub peona powers.
Indeed the whole event is notorious for a complete lack of proper investigation.
Well obviously they don't need to watch Granny Goodness bake pies and muffins all day, so that gives them more than 198$ to spend on watching people that "May possibly some day pose a potential threat of some kind."
I wonder how much of these problems are really due to lack of funding and how much are just tactics to yank an even bigger chunk of money from the guys in Washington. After all, the problems that they describe should only exist if the person in charge purposedly screwed up the budget.
Of course if the budget is that messed up how can you tell if any extra money actually goes where it is neeed. It's quite possible that adding extra money means more "pork" with continuing underfunding...
Or how about for our troops on the combat field,they would hopefully be found before them scum kill or behead them.
How soon before arms dealers will be offering an "enemy soldier finder"? Either as a handheld unit or built into weapons systems (e.g. to help target artillary.)
Employers are requiring a medical procedure as a condition of employment. How about tattooing the employee ID, or neutering the staff to make them more docile
There are also privacy implications in that this identifies the them as an employee even when they are not at work. (It may even be useful to criminals such as burglers.) Would requiring a barcode tatoo (on a piece of skin not usually covered by clothing) be legal currently?
Slashdot Mirror
MPAA call it theft because it causes a loss in profit.
Given that this industry is notorious for creative accounting it would be hard to prove this in the first place.
This is of course assuming people would otherwise purchase/rent the movie, which is far from clear.
It dosn't help their case that they ask for "settlements" which have no relationship to the price of a movie ticket, rental or even the retail price of DVD/VHS.
There are also two other possibilities. That there are people "buying" primarily because they have seen a pirate version. The final, possibly actually the majority of cases, situation. Is of people who would (or even could) not "buy" the whatever. It's perfectly possible that staggered "release dates" (including previews) actually promote piracy.
Even the summary covers this: The hook was to get people to download the client which searched for "other copyrighted files."
It's unlikely to be able to look very well. Possibly just the equivalent of a "web spider" searching the local file system for certain filenames. Even if it could actually identify "other copyrighted files" how's it going to know what the applicable laws are? Those relating to "spyware" as much as copyright...
Apple's hardware is generally very well-designed, and their software is solid on Macs, but they can't seem to write a decent Windows program to save their lives. For example: why does iTunes run the iPod service even when iTunes isn't running and even though I've never used an iPod?
To be honest this isn't just a problem with Apple software on Windows. Under XP the wireless service is enabled by default, even on machines which have never seen any wireless hardware...
The problem with current plastic recycling is that you reduce the length of the polymer molecules each time you recycle, reducing the quality of the plastic. So you can't turn PET bottles into PET bottles indefinitely; you have to turn them into lower-quality plastic items such as plastic speed bumps. After a couple of cycles, the plastic ends up in a landfill.
Of course the best way to "recycle" plastic (or glass bottles) is to reuse them as bottles...
No, the reason why plastics are not very recyclable is that you cannot substitute one plastic for another. The previous method recycles polycarbonate from CDs only into polycarbonate. Polycarbonate cannot be used instead of polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, etc. These other plastics have far more uses. So turning into fuel is a more general use to me.
This also means that you can recycle mixtures of plastics. To recycle plastic as plastic you have to ensure you have only one kind of plastic. This means that you don't need to separate bottle tops/retaining rings from empty bottles, etc.
No matter how you slice it, if an appreciable number of slaves depart, it will be felt and recorded.
In the Biblical story the slaves left after there had been a set of "plagues"/natural disasters. Thus you'd expect an already very troubled situation.
Ancient Egyptians were meticulous record keepers, but notorious revisionists.
This is something which applies to many cultures. Just about any society capable to keeping (and organising) historical records is also capable of replacing actual facts with politically correct propaganda.
I'm not so certain KMT used so many slaves as we once thought. New evidence is coming to light that suggests that the builders of the pyramids were paid employees rather than slaves.
As well as having "industrial size" bakeries and breweries. Together with forensic archeology showing that injured workers were given the best medical treatment available.
Using slaves for major construction projects can be a very bad idea, as was show by Stalin's Gulags.
Linux is designed to be modular so the complexity of each piece is less. M$ has stuff where the browser installs code, printing a document can cause pieces of the file to be executed, etc.
You also can get things like documents being reformatted, even if the page size is the same. Most annoying is that there appears to be no easy way under Windows to tell it "default to A4 paper with every printer you might encounter, you'll be told if you need to use anything else."
It does not have to be this way. The OS should be broken up into fairly independent services and the protocol of each service known, shown, and loggable. One could thus isolate oddities. If a peice of software I build constantly has problems (or confusion) with certain processes or steps, I make trace modes and special reports that can echo and document the process as it is taking place. OS's don't seem to be built this way, you have to randomly tweak stuff until the problem (hopefully) goes away. It is like banging the Mellenium Falcon when it stalls. In the digital age I am stuck with analog-like troubleshooting techniques.
It appears that Microsoft quite deliberatly chose to avoid well structured code. So as to be able to claim such and such feature is "intergrated into the OS" and to make third party replacements difficult. (Even though "integrated" from the POV of the end user does not imply "sphagetti code".) Apparently they considered this worth making things more difficult for their own coders.
If you don't want to respect their license, that's fine, but then you shouldn't expect them to respect the GPL either.
You are comparing apples and mice. Copyright law states that you can't make a copy of a copyright protected work and distribute it to a third party without the copyright holder's permission. The GPL (and similar) state that you have that permission subject to an enumerated set of conditions. N.B. if you arn't distributing copies to third parties the GPL is to all intents and purposes irrelevent.
Whereas EULA claim to be governed by contract law and typically enumarate a list of things you cannot do, some of which simply duplicate default copyright restrictions, some of which are rights you can't be denied and some of which may be possible to agree to. (Assuming the whole thing actaully means the definition of a "contact" in your jurisdiction.) N.B. You really need a lawyer to check out an EULA, even possibly in cases where you don't intend to install/run the software in question.
You _could_ port DX10 to XP, but you'd have to emulate some of the functions (due to the previously mentioned change in driver model) and it would be randomly incompatible and randomly slower than the real thing.
If you did this you probably wouldn't need to emulate Vista's DRM "features" (except possibly as stubs) which would help with both speed and stability.
This angers me as well, especially when the product box is wrong. For example, I bought a Streamzap PC remote which claimed to work with Windows XP (all versions), but somehow that didn't include XP x64 edition. I might add that Streamzap does not reply at all to support questions that involve XP x64.
Why could you not return it for a refund?
The MAFIAA will attempt to drag this out as long as possible (10-20 years probably) all the while dangling a settlement worth tens of millions of dollars in front of her.
How easy is it for the defendent to do this or attach terms and conditions to a "settlement"?
But runaway cops are a much more dangerous thing, long term, than even letting an occasional murderer get off free because the cops broke the law when gathering evidence.
If said cops are breaking the law when it comes to gathering evidence what other laws might they be breaking? The general principle is that those charged with enforcing the law need to be held to a higher standard than the general public.
Does she seriously expect the courts to award such a devastating judgement against one of the richest IP holding organizations in the country?
She might well do if she gets a default judgment. The RIAA, etc, will have to spend a lot of money for the experience of seeing the situation from the POV of being a defendent.
I don't think the OP was denying that terrorist attacks have happened, but the fact that they're all attributed to Al Queda without any kind of proper evidence
Indeed with little evidence at all and at least as much actual evidence implicating other parties.
- that means no torture confessions, no secret prisons, no "terrorists" held for five years without a trial, and no secret evidence that's only shown to "world leaders".
You missed off "dodgy video recordings"...
By your argument, a murder trial would go something like this "We found a dead body, therefore clearly the defendant is guilty".
Possibly with "anyone who dosn't agree must be helping the defendent/murderer".
Dude! Do you live under a fucking rock or are you just plain stupid. Did you not see the videos from the leader of that imaginary group bragging about how he managed to pull off the attacks of 9-11. Did you not see him say that the original attack was to include the West Coast as well.
This would be the video tape "found" in Afghanistan, with poor quality audio of a man who may or may not be Osama Bin Laden. Indeed the majority of people who have examined it are of the conclusion that this is an actor who has some resemblence to Osama Bin Laden. Note that the FBI are not actually hunting Bin Laden in connection with 9/11, because they do not have what they consider sufficent evidence.
When you go to NY, and you see that giant hole in the ground and all the memorials for the dead people, do you think to yourself, "Wow! That hot dog vendor must have laced my sour kraut with acid because I'm seeing a hallucination of a giant hole! This is almost as good as that bender back in 2001 where I kept seeing crashing planes!" Do you tell the families of those victims that they imagined it all and accuse them of being government conspirators?
The holes in the ground and dead people are connected with what happened. They don't tell you much about who might be responsible or why they might have done it.
There's a few hundred nuts out there that are willing to kill themselves for a cause. Not a real surprise, nor is it different than any other time in history.
These causes are many and varied.
The idea that they're organized, well financed, and wish to destroy the US is purely imaginary.
More to the point it's a Conspiracy Theory. It's interesting that the credibility of conspiracy theories often depends more on who is advocating them than how well they fit with facts.
No, there is no mystical Alqueda organization out there wanting to kill us all, thats a myth used by the government to keep us afraid and consolidate their power.
There probably is a real "Al Queda" though, just that it is probably not some global terrorist conspiracy lead by some man living in a cave.
It has also been demonstrated that our government, as it clamps down on terrorism, is sacrificing what I consider to be the lifeblood and identity of the nation - that freedom which many hold dear. The more that freedom is taken, the more likely it is that some people will get severely pissed off. The more pissed off people there are, the more likely it is that there will be pissed off people that are more open to persuasion by unsavory ideals. That would mean a higher likelihood that someone here will bomb things, which is, as far as I'm concerned, not a good condition to be in as a country.
There's also the problem that a positive feedback loop is likely to result.
It seems insane that these people want to bomb us. But they are probably not insane. Why did they do it? What motivates these groups? What motivates the leaders of these groups?
These questions are not PC. Another factor is that occupying other people's countries tends to result in people fighting back against the occupying country...
If Sept. 11 was done by "real terrorists" why hasn't anyone in the Bush Administration ever appeared concerned with apprehending them????
The terrorists certainly are "real" what's unclear is their actual identity.
Instead, he's killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? Made hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more, homeless in Iraq and surrounding Arab countries where they have fled to.
With Iraq not even featuring in the conspiracy theory the US Government started promoting in the afternoon of that day.
He refused to convene any type of investigative commission, until finally, he was forced to - and even then he underfunded them and refused to allow them sub peona powers.
Indeed the whole event is notorious for a complete lack of proper investigation.
Well obviously they don't need to watch Granny Goodness bake pies and muffins all day, so that gives them more than 198$ to spend on watching people that "May possibly some day pose a potential threat of some kind."
Are mirrors really that expensive in the US?
I wonder how much of these problems are really due to lack of funding and how much are just tactics to yank an even bigger chunk of money from the guys in Washington. After all, the problems that they describe should only exist if the person in charge purposedly screwed up the budget.
Of course if the budget is that messed up how can you tell if any extra money actually goes where it is neeed. It's quite possible that adding extra money means more "pork" with continuing underfunding...
Or how about for our troops on the combat field,they would hopefully be found before them scum kill or behead them.
How soon before arms dealers will be offering an "enemy soldier finder"? Either as a handheld unit or built into weapons systems (e.g. to help target artillary.)
Employers are requiring a medical procedure as a condition of employment. How about tattooing the employee ID, or neutering the staff to make them more docile
There are also privacy implications in that this identifies the them as an employee even when they are not at work. (It may even be useful to criminals such as burglers.) Would requiring a barcode tatoo (on a piece of skin not usually covered by clothing) be legal currently?