I would also have a hard time calling 'try before you buy' stealing. But (and I am generalizing here) many people seem to have the attitude that if they can get it via napster, why bother to buy the CD.
In an ideal world all people would/could do what you are doing -- sample and then purchase those things that they like. This would benefit music lovers, as they would have a wider variety of stuff, and musicians, as they wouldn't go broke producing music for free.
TANSTAAFL -- if you don't pay the musicians now, in a few years all that will be available to buy/download will be Britney Spears and the like because no one else will be able to afford to make decent recordings of thier work.
As far as buying a book goes -- I spend a fortune on them as it is.
But as you steal from the "evil corporate bad guys" you are also stealing from the musicians whose music you presumably like (as you ARE downloading it.) If you wanted to rip of the "bad guys" without ripping off the musician you could always send money to the musician directly.
Of course, that makes artists dependent on your goodwill, and, again, most people would rather get it for free than bother to behave in an ethical manner.
It seems that the people defending napster and its ilk fall into 2 categories. The first (which appears to be much much smaller) has a philosophical commitment to the free exchange of ideas and art and software and so on. The second, while claiming to be the first, is thinking "free music dude -- why should I pay for it if I can get it free." These are the sorts of people who justify shoplifting by saying "I'm stealing from Macy's (or whatever) not an individual" and who sneak out of restaurants congratulating themselves for getting away with something rather than thinking about the waitress they just screwed over. This is called stealing, and the last time I checked it was against most (all?) major religions, and the laws of most countries.
1. Last time I checked some of the schools in our public school system needed better roofs and asbestos removal, and, whatever-deity-makes-you-happy help us, up to date text books. Spending money on computers isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a priority for some school districts.
2. What are schools going to do when the computers break? Hire a bunch of network admins and techs? Maybe in wealthy districts, but those kids probably already have computers at home, so the "digital divide" will morph into "rich kids have working computers and poor kids have broken computers" Great. That's a real improvement.
3. How many teachers will realistically use the machines for more than busy work? It will take a person with the energy to learn a new skill while working a full time job that often includes running the drama club, the chess team, or the yearbook on top of classroom work.
Our public education system is in many ways a nightmare. Teachers are underpaid, as a profession it doesn't rank up there even with VB Developer in the eyes of many people and thus doesn't always draw the cream of the crop, classrooms are overcrowded, in outdated buildings. Success is increasingly measured in test scores...
Wait -- I've got it -- schools can use the computers to more efficiently drill students for standardized exams! Because it's much more important for a person to do well on achievement tests than anything else...right...
MRA members must sign (every year, not just when they join) a Code of Data Collection Standards. Note: Enforcement is pretty much on the honor principle.) Right now the code does NOT reflect the ability to track people via cookies, etc. Whatever my feelings about privacy are (I spend more time than I'd like to admit refusing to give out my SSN, and then explaining why it is a bad choice to use the SSN as an all purpose ID) I alone cannot rewrite MRA policy. There is an Internet Ethics Task Force in the process of evaluating how the Association should respond to modern data collection. However, a lot of these people are not computer savvy (or even computer literate) and are not fully aware of the concerns many informed consumers have regarding privacy and data collection. If you want a chance to perhaps influence them, you can post a message in the forum or e-mail me or the general e-mail box and express your concerns.
This is slightly off topic, but the main topic brishes against one of my pet peeves. (disclaimer -- I was an English major in college)
Teacher's in formal education RUIN books by almost universally selecting the "classics" that are, frankly, rather dull.
Take Shakespeare -- great playwrite. On the stage (or the screen, sometimes) his stuff is wonderful. Love, War, Betrayal...But they aren't that fun to read. But almost every student is forced to read several plays. Usually, all this does is handicap Shakespeare by forcing people to experience it NOT in its native medium, and makes people hate Shakespeare.
And other books -- most great literature is about topics that are, ahem, uncomfortable. The Miller's Tale (Chaucer) -- sex and violence. Huck Finn (Twain) racism. But (I can only assume for fear of pissing people off) high school English teacher's almost ievitable choose the dullest, driest stuff. Forget the Hobbit (fantasy != classic to some people), let's teach Dickens!
F--451 is a great book. I haven't read it in years. I only wish I'd had teacher's who used the interesting books in their class.
Of course, I tended to ignore what was going on since I was reading anyway, so all my complaining should be taken with a grain of salt. Intellectually stimulating things may have been going on, and I just missed them.
Right now the world is spared IP tracking by MRA because, frankly, we wouldn't know how. Other than a part time off-site sysadmin I'm it for techies. But we are a membership organization and many of our members are marketing research firms that are not so, ahem, ignorant. MRA doesn't want your data, we have our hands full keeping track of our members. But they do want your data. It's what fuels thier business.
No one (or hardly anyone) is going to read that far down, which is why they buried it so deeply. They want the information they are collecting. Sure, "privacy nuts" will read the whole thing, but that isn't most people. If they really wanted to warn people about thier little game the gem you mentioned would be right at the top.
Download Demon may well claim that "this is all anonymous, we don't link names with activity, blah blah blah" but as we have seen in the past with DoubleClick (who just created a special privacy panel within their company to act as window dressing while addressing privacy issues) companies start out collecting 'anonymous' data and then later suddenly decide to link the data to names.
I work in Marketing Research, where data collection is mostly what we do and so privacy issues, especially internet privacy, is "suddenly" a hot topic. MRA has a forum where any marketing research issue, including how you feel about your privacy, can be addressred. If you are interested in having some voice in how that data is used and collected, please post at www.mra-net.org/forum/. MRA sets a lot of marketing research industry standards which our members follow, and I'd rather privacy was a bigger concern, not a brief one or two lines buried in policies somewhere. We don't even have a privacy policy right now.
You can keep marketing research from doing what other industries are doing.
I've emailed the story link to my PHB, who asked me to recommend what to use for a firewall. I wrote a report that concluded OpenBSD -- it's free, an it's good. Now he keeps asking me about various little "firewall" boxes where you plug the server into one end and the internet into the other and hope for the best. Any ideas of how to explain "You would pay more money for a less good thing"?
They've already tagged me as "that wierd linux girl" so every non-microsoft solution I suggest gets nodded at and then pretty much ignored. I mean, you morons hired me to handle your technology, why oh why won't you listen?
Hmm. I think I'll rob this store. On the way in I'll sign my name on thier catalog mailing list, then I'll pose for a photo with the owner's kid, and once I've robbed the place I'll leave my business card in the "get a free lunch" fish bowl on my way out.
Dictionaries, although invaluable references, are always a little behind the way people really speak. Just as grammer can be viewed as prescriptive (telling, or prescribing what the correct way to speak is -- probably what you remember from school) or descriptive (describing how people ACTUALLY speak) so do dictionaries end up being a little prescriptive (what words ought to mean, what they USED to mean, what they historically meant) and a little descriptive (how people actually use words.)
English can be a little vague. What does love mean? I say I love strawberries (yum!) and my cat (frankly, I doubt so yummy -- all that fur) and although I use the SAME word we all know I mean differnt things. This is hardly an ideal situation.
A sensible paper, one might hope, would choose the more precise word (cracker when they mean "malicious slob who breaks into computer systems and causes damage" and hacker when they mean "talented computer enthusiast".
Just because the dictionarys haven't caught up with the vernacular is no reason to hold up the dictionaries as the "holy grail" of word knowledge.
I spend more time that I'd like to admit trying to get around the "but if they aren't doing it for money it must suck" arguments. "If its free it must be bad" sort of thing.
This doesn't really surprise me with various non-technical relatives and friends, most of whom have a simplistic grasp of economics to begin with, but coming from people who are supposed to follow the industry to some extent -- its like hearing an actor say "well, that Shakespeare guy, he's not so good. I mean, let's face it, Timon of Athens is terrible"
Sigh. What can you expect. My husband's boss (software developer no less) asks me "what's linux" and I am shocked. I mean, bud, you work with computers for a livng, get out more. All I can do is thank god I get to work with java, not VB, so I am spared the total idiots. I get the partial idiots.
the worst thing about web design -- trying to make the pages usable by people who have never used the internet before.
I "babysit" a 500+ page web site for a membership association, and I am constantly dumbing down stuff to make it easier for morons to navigate, which must annoy the more sophisticated users no end.
I have the great joy (ahem) of working for an association of marketing researchers who spend a lot of their time trying to explain to the world that they are different from telemarketers. And in some ways they are -- when they call to bother you they aren't trying to see you anything, just bother you. There are some repercussions from this. Although you can ask to be put on a do-not-call list and be spared telemarketers, these lists don't actually apply to market researchers.
Within the Marketing Research Association there is an ethics committee that sets policy for the association which member companies have to uphold.
If the idea that you can be called at 8:30 by some guy who wants your opinion about some inane thing even though you are on a do-not-call list (or privacy issues and who has access to demographic info about you) bugs you, you can, well, spam the MRA.
I work (ick) for a Marketing Research Association that is in the process of trying to establish ethical guidelines for our members on internet research for marketing purposes. We have public forums for anyone to go and share their opinions. If you think what Double Click did is vile (or if you think they are just wonderful)and if you want to express concern about the Double Click CEO making it to the board of the AMA, I encourage you to go and post (post early, post often) and get these people to include your privacy conerns in their ethical guidelines for internet research.
You can also e-mail me with your concerns and I can pass them on to the ethics committee.
I try and explain to people here about privacy concerns, but a lot of them just don't get it. In the theory of "strength in numbers" maybe slashdot readers can help.
Hey, I'm a chick (girl? woman? grrl? I'm too tired to pick whatever is polically correct this week)and if you didn't have books I would ignore you utterly.
The first thing I ever do at someone's place is look at their bookshelves.
Smart women prefer smart men. Smart people tend to read. Ergo...
A careful look at the intent of the framers of the Constitution reveals that when they said "militia" they meant all citizens. The idea was that should the government ever descend into tyranny all people would be able to rise up and defend freedom. Now, an intersting thing here is that a strict reading of the second amendment could suggest that military weapons are OK to have lying around, whereas simpler "hunting" or "self defense" weapons would be of little use in any citizenry militia, and thus aren't actually covered by the second amendment. Although what happened in Colorado is horrifying, to strip civil liberties away from all the people in order to protect society from a psycho few is abhorrent. We need to remember that freedom can be taken away very easily, and defend it ruthlessly. And we cannot defend the freedom of speech and religion guaranteed by the first amendment without defending the second as well. To give up freedom for safety is the choice of a coward. I reccomend "The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment" from the Yale Law Review (sorry - don't have the full citation off the top of my head) which offers fairly in depth analyses of the various ways to interpret the second amendment if you are actually interested in thinking about this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I would also have a hard time calling 'try before you buy' stealing. But (and I am generalizing here) many people seem to have the attitude that if they can get it via napster, why bother to buy the CD.
In an ideal world all people would/could do what you are doing -- sample and then purchase those things that they like. This would benefit music lovers, as they would have a wider variety of stuff, and musicians, as they wouldn't go broke producing music for free.
TANSTAAFL -- if you don't pay the musicians now, in a few years all that will be available to buy/download will be Britney Spears and the like because no one else will be able to afford to make decent recordings of thier work.
As far as buying a book goes -- I spend a fortune on them as it is.
But as you steal from the "evil corporate bad guys" you are also stealing from the musicians whose music you presumably like (as you ARE downloading it.) If you wanted to rip of the "bad guys" without ripping off the musician you could always send money to the musician directly.
Of course, that makes artists dependent on your goodwill, and, again, most people would rather get it for free than bother to behave in an ethical manner.
It seems that the people defending napster and its ilk fall into 2 categories. The first (which appears to be much much smaller) has a philosophical commitment to the free exchange of ideas and art and software and so on. The second, while claiming to be the first, is thinking "free music dude -- why should I pay for it if I can get it free." These are the sorts of people who justify shoplifting by saying "I'm stealing from Macy's (or whatever) not an individual" and who sneak out of restaurants congratulating themselves for getting away with something rather than thinking about the waitress they just screwed over. This is called stealing, and the last time I checked it was against most (all?) major religions, and the laws of most countries.
1. Last time I checked some of the schools in our public school system needed better roofs and asbestos removal, and, whatever-deity-makes-you-happy help us, up to date text books. Spending money on computers isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a priority for some school districts.
2. What are schools going to do when the computers break? Hire a bunch of network admins and techs? Maybe in wealthy districts, but those kids probably already have computers at home, so the "digital divide" will morph into "rich kids have working computers and poor kids have broken computers" Great. That's a real improvement.
3. How many teachers will realistically use the machines for more than busy work? It will take a person with the energy to learn a new skill while working a full time job that often includes running the drama club, the chess team, or the yearbook on top of classroom work.
Our public education system is in many ways a nightmare. Teachers are underpaid, as a profession it doesn't rank up there even with VB Developer in the eyes of many people and thus doesn't always draw the cream of the crop, classrooms are overcrowded, in outdated buildings. Success is increasingly measured in test scores...
Wait -- I've got it -- schools can use the computers to more efficiently drill students for standardized exams! Because it's much more important for a person to do well on achievement tests than anything else...right...
It's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I think.
MRA members must sign (every year, not just when they join) a Code of Data Collection Standards. Note: Enforcement is pretty much on the honor principle.) Right now the code does NOT reflect the ability to track people via cookies, etc. Whatever my feelings about privacy are (I spend more time than I'd like to admit refusing to give out my SSN, and then explaining why it is a bad choice to use the SSN as an all purpose ID) I alone cannot rewrite MRA policy. There is an Internet Ethics Task Force in the process of evaluating how the Association should respond to modern data collection. However, a lot of these people are not computer savvy (or even computer literate) and are not fully aware of the concerns many informed consumers have regarding privacy and data collection. If you want a chance to perhaps influence them, you can post a message in the forum or e-mail me or the general e-mail box and express your concerns.
This is slightly off topic, but the main topic brishes against one of my pet peeves. (disclaimer -- I was an English major in college)
Teacher's in formal education RUIN books by almost universally selecting the "classics" that are, frankly, rather dull.
Take Shakespeare -- great playwrite. On the stage (or the screen, sometimes) his stuff is wonderful. Love, War, Betrayal...But they aren't that fun to read. But almost every student is forced to read several plays. Usually, all this does is handicap Shakespeare by forcing people to experience it NOT in its native medium, and makes people hate Shakespeare.
And other books -- most great literature is about topics that are, ahem, uncomfortable. The Miller's Tale (Chaucer) -- sex and violence. Huck Finn (Twain) racism. But (I can only assume for fear of pissing people off) high school English teacher's almost ievitable choose the dullest, driest stuff. Forget the Hobbit (fantasy != classic to some people), let's teach Dickens!
F--451 is a great book. I haven't read it in years. I only wish I'd had teacher's who used the interesting books in their class.
Of course, I tended to ignore what was going on since I was reading anyway, so all my complaining should be taken with a grain of salt. Intellectually stimulating things may have been going on, and I just missed them.
Right now the world is spared IP tracking by MRA because, frankly, we wouldn't know how. Other than a part time off-site sysadmin I'm it for techies. But we are a membership organization and many of our members are marketing research firms that are not so, ahem, ignorant. MRA doesn't want your data, we have our hands full keeping track of our members. But they do want your data. It's what fuels thier business.
No one (or hardly anyone) is going to read that far down, which is why they buried it so deeply. They want the information they are collecting. Sure, "privacy nuts" will read the whole thing, but that isn't most people. If they really wanted to warn people about thier little game the gem you mentioned would be right at the top.
Download Demon may well claim that "this is all anonymous, we don't link names with activity, blah blah blah" but as we have seen in the past with DoubleClick (who just created a special privacy panel within their company to act as window dressing while addressing privacy issues) companies start out collecting 'anonymous' data and then later suddenly decide to link the data to names.
I work in Marketing Research, where data collection is mostly what we do and so privacy issues, especially internet privacy, is "suddenly" a hot topic. MRA has a forum where any marketing research issue, including how you feel about your privacy, can be addressred. If you are interested in having some voice in how that data is used and collected, please post at www.mra-net.org/forum/. MRA sets a lot of marketing research industry standards which our members follow, and I'd rather privacy was a bigger concern, not a brief one or two lines buried in policies somewhere. We don't even have a privacy policy right now.
You can keep marketing research from doing what other industries are doing.
*shrug*
Have you READ Marx?
I've emailed the story link to my PHB, who asked me to recommend what to use for a firewall. I wrote a report that concluded OpenBSD -- it's free, an it's good. Now he keeps asking me about various little "firewall" boxes where you plug the server into one end and the internet into the other and hope for the best. Any ideas of how to explain "You would pay more money for a less good thing"?
They've already tagged me as "that wierd linux girl" so every non-microsoft solution I suggest gets nodded at and then pretty much ignored. I mean, you morons hired me to handle your technology, why oh why won't you listen?
Aarrrgh
Wow.
Scary.
I'd say, "well, thank god the US doesn't have something like that" but I'd choke on my own naivetee.
Is the fact that it's encrypted suppossed to make people feel better?
Hmm. I think I'll rob this store. On the way in I'll sign my name on thier catalog mailing list, then I'll pose for a photo with the owner's kid, and once I've robbed the place I'll leave my business card in the "get a free lunch" fish bowl on my way out.
I is a very clever thief, isn't I?
Dictionaries, although invaluable references, are always a little behind the way people really speak. Just as grammer can be viewed as prescriptive (telling, or prescribing what the correct way to speak is -- probably what you remember from school) or descriptive (describing how people ACTUALLY speak) so do dictionaries end up being a little prescriptive (what words ought to mean, what they USED to mean, what they historically meant) and a little descriptive (how people actually use words.)
English can be a little vague. What does love mean? I say I love strawberries (yum!) and my cat (frankly, I doubt so yummy -- all that fur) and although I use the SAME word we all know I mean differnt things. This is hardly an ideal situation.
A sensible paper, one might hope, would choose the more precise word (cracker when they mean "malicious slob who breaks into computer systems and causes damage" and hacker when they mean "talented computer enthusiast".
Just because the dictionarys haven't caught up with the vernacular is no reason to hold up the dictionaries as the "holy grail" of word knowledge.
Eeep.
I spend more time that I'd like to admit trying to get around the "but if they aren't doing it for money it must suck" arguments. "If its free it must be bad" sort of thing.
This doesn't really surprise me with various non-technical relatives and friends, most of whom have a simplistic grasp of economics to begin with, but coming from people who are supposed to follow the industry to some extent -- its like hearing an actor say "well, that Shakespeare guy, he's not so good. I mean, let's face it, Timon of Athens is terrible"
Sigh. What can you expect. My husband's boss (software developer no less) asks me "what's linux" and I am shocked. I mean, bud, you work with computers for a livng, get out more. All I can do is thank god I get to work with java, not VB, so I am spared the total idiots. I get the partial idiots.
I'm rambling. I'll stop now.
You don't actually think a sampling of slashdot readers it gonna give you decent market research, do you?
the worst thing about web design -- trying to make the pages usable by people who have never used the internet before.
I "babysit" a 500+ page web site for a membership association, and I am constantly dumbing down stuff to make it easier for morons to navigate, which must annoy the more sophisticated users no end.
Sigh.
I have the great joy (ahem) of working for an association of marketing researchers who spend a lot of their time trying to explain to the world that they are different from telemarketers. And in some ways they are -- when they call to bother you they aren't trying to see you anything, just bother you. There are some repercussions from this. Although you can ask to be put on a do-not-call list and be spared telemarketers, these lists don't actually apply to market researchers.
Within the Marketing Research Association there is an ethics committee that sets policy for the association which member companies have to uphold.
If the idea that you can be called at 8:30 by some guy who wants your opinion about some inane thing even though you are on a do-not-call list (or privacy issues and who has access to demographic info about you) bugs you, you can, well, spam the MRA.
The forums are one place to vent.
So is the general e-mail.
I work (ick) for a Marketing Research Association that is in the process of trying to establish ethical guidelines for our members on internet research for marketing purposes. We have public forums for anyone to go and share their opinions. If you think what Double Click did is vile (or if you think they are just wonderful)and if you want to express concern about the Double Click CEO making it to the board of the AMA, I encourage you to go and post (post early, post often) and get these people to include your privacy conerns in their ethical guidelines for internet research.
Marketing Research Association Forums
You can also e-mail me with your concerns and I can pass them on to the ethics committee.
I try and explain to people here about privacy concerns, but a lot of them just don't get it. In the theory of "strength in numbers" maybe slashdot readers can help.
Hey, I'm a chick (girl? woman? grrl? I'm too tired to pick whatever is polically correct this week)and if you didn't have books I would ignore you utterly.
The first thing I ever do at someone's place is look at their bookshelves.
Smart women prefer smart men. Smart people tend to read. Ergo...
A careful look at the intent of the framers of the Constitution reveals that when they said "militia" they meant all citizens. The idea was that should the government ever descend into tyranny all people would be able to rise up and defend freedom. Now, an intersting thing here is that a strict reading of the second amendment could suggest that military weapons are OK to have lying around, whereas simpler "hunting" or "self defense" weapons would be of little use in any citizenry militia, and thus aren't actually covered by the second amendment. Although what happened in Colorado is horrifying, to strip civil liberties away from all the people in order to protect society from a psycho few is abhorrent. We need to remember that freedom can be taken away very easily, and defend it ruthlessly. And we cannot defend the freedom of speech and religion guaranteed by the first amendment without defending the second as well. To give up freedom for safety is the choice of a coward. I reccomend "The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment" from the Yale Law Review (sorry - don't have the full citation off the top of my head) which offers fairly in depth analyses of the various ways to interpret the second amendment if you are actually interested in thinking about this issue.