You'll want to check out some of the various 'home automation' sites, like smarthome.com. They have all sorts of ways to pipe audio (and video) around your house using existing AC or phone wiring, or wireless. FM is a really brute-force nasty way to send audio, and the frequency response is terrible; on top of the already less-than-adequate fidelity of MP3's, I think you'd be unhappy with the results.
No, 24/96 is 24-bit audio, sampled at 96kHz, so it can theoretically reproduce up to 48K. DAT can sample at either 44.1kHz (CD-compatible) or 48kHz, for 22,050Hz and 24,000Hz frequency response, respectively.
(*bow) Yes, just so. Napster folks swiping MP3's and thumbing their nose at "stink'n laws" are analagous to warez-doods in this ecology.
The folks I respect are the ones who are analagous to open-source software authors, those actually BUILDING new models for content, making music and distributing it freely, or setting up pay-for-download schemes or the like, instead of just complaining about the existing models from the comfort of their dorm rooms.
No. Read what I actually say, not what you'd like to think I'm saying.
I'm taking the position that being gouged for something and/or disliking the copyright is NOT a viable excuse for breaking the law and violating licensing terms.
There are other options to being gouged that hold water, buying discounted/used CD's, buying CD's from independant bands (I'll sell you some of our CD's for $10 at http://www.elfhill.com/Annwn), or just not buying CD's.
But taking something illegally is simply not a justifiable position just because you don't like the price point. You might not like the copyright laws (I sure don't either), but putting your fingers in your ears and singing la-la-la doesn't make the unsupportability of your position go away.
Copyright law is the only law we have for being able to make licensing demands on content. The GPL only exists because of the strength of copyright law, as does the BSD license, as does any licensing of content, open or not. Undermining just some licenses because you don't like them paints you as selfish and hypocritical; part of the 'gimme-gimme' crowd that makes Open Source and Linux and most of this community look bad to the outside world.
There are constructive ways to make changes in things you don't like; freely taking for your own personal gain is not one of them.
You probably already saw this by Larry Wall, but it's deeply well-spoken and correct: "When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."
I'm not on an anti-Napster crusade; I think most of the content there is crap, but people are welcome to it.
I get out of the house a lot; specifically as a musician in a band that uses MP3's a LOT to promote ourselves.
I'm not arguing for the RIAA; they're a bunch of money-grubbing morons.
However, I didn't paint computer users as aristocrats; just as people who definitionally can afford luxury items roughly a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than the price of a CD. And I'm not necessarily talking about entry-level PC's in the first place, I'm just taking a nice middle ground between a $500 entry-level machine, and a $5000 monster Dell box, both of which are represented in the Napster-using population.
I'm just trying to make the point that the cost argument is stupid. If you don't want to pay that much for music, don't get music, or shop the cutout bin, there's a lot of $2.99 CD's that are full of great stuff. But don't try to tell me that $17 for a band you appreciate is too much to pay; you CAN afford it, you just don't want to.
It's not that simple. To store an analog sinewave at 1000Hz digitally, 44.1kHz sampling is WAY more than adequate -- you have 45 samples along each cycle of the sine wave to interpolate between. Unless you're expecting sudden single-cycle 80,000Hz spikes in the middle of this wave, you're losing nothing; reconstructing a waveform from sporadic individual points is high-school algebra stuff.
When you get into more complicated waveforms, with higher frequencies, there's the possibility for distortion as you approach the Nyquist limit of half your sampling rate. This is one of the reasons that recording and mastering studios have moved to a 96kHz sampling rate, even though it gets mastered down to 44.1 later.
So, yes, there's a subtle argument to be made that sampling an analog waveform can cause loss of information (although it doesn't necessarily cause that loss, per my sinewave example above), but at some point, this becomes moot even at the analog level, because there comes a level past which we're talking about information that CANNOT move the human eardrum, and even if we want to get more pedantic than that, energy itself is quantized, so if your sampling rate is fast enough, you're going to bump up against Planck time in measuring the motion of the molecules.
Meaning there's no need for "infinite" storage space to get an analog waveform perfectly, just really large amounts, because an analog waveform is not actually infinitely complex; Fourier proved that a long time ago, and failing all else, Planck showed us that even nature is quantized at a super small level. --
Ah. A good point, but somewhat a change in context. CD encoding does have a top-end brickwall of ~ 22KHz, and sometimes has a rumble filter of below 20Hz (although that information usually self-recreates to some degree through subharmonic interactions of speakers).
This information is outside the range of hearing, theoretically (although we can argue all day about whether it's important; I'd probably agree that it was, but only very slightly so relative to, say, 1KHz); MP3 compression actually loses information that's in the unarguably audible frequencies. A perfect encoding algorithm would only lose "subperceptible" information, but I haven't heard a perfect one yet at anything less than about 256k bitrate, roughly 1:4 compression, like used on DCC and MiniDisk, only better. 128k and below cause perciptibly audible distortions to the original material; CD doesn't.
And for that matter, almost ALL consumer media throw away the 20-20000 range you're talking about -- cassette tops out at about 18k on a REALLY good day, DAT gets up to 24k if you're doing everything right, and so forth. The new 96/24 pro standard can get frequencies up to about 48kHz, and at 24-bit resolution, but that always gets mastered down to 44/16 at best, and then typically played back through bookshelf speakers that only go down to 45Hz and up to 18.5k, so 20Hz and 20kHz is kind of moot unless you're in the mastering studio or have built a $15,000 listening room in your home.
>It's really too bad that Madonna has come out against Napster. Surely she, if anyone, should be >able to find some way to use it to further her own fame.
She has. It's the first rule she learned: even bad press is good press.
"CDs cost too much! Why should I pay them $12-$18 when CDs are so cheap?"
Why should you have bought the $2000 computer and $40+ monthly Internet service that you're using to download MP3's? After all, that's all so cheap to produce!
I find it hard to take cost rationalizations seriously from people who are definitionally among the more wealthy half, by virtue of their owning a computer in the FIRST place.
Oh, but I forgot, all their allowance has to be saved to get the Voodoo5 at $399 the day it comes out so they can get that extra 5fps in Quake III. It's a necessity of life.
Umn, no. CD audio is an uncompressed bitstream that doesn't throw away any of the information. It can be argued that using digital sampling innately loses information from the original waveform, but that's not the same thing. CD audio is full-bandwidth, zero-compression.
DVD audio I'm no expert on, so I won't even speculate.
>And i can't even name it's inventor off the top of my head
That's because two teams were working on it simultaneously, a large-scale one from RCA, who were trying to get the same rights for television that they had with radios -- per-unit royalties (the MPAA and RIAA didn't invent this kind of content distribution licensing concept, they're just standing on the shoulders of giants), and a smaller private team lead by Philo Farnsworth.
It's a long, sordid story, but in the long run, Farnsworth won the 'TV arms race,' but because of nasty patent disputes and the like, RCA won the mindshare race and Farnsworth went broke. Some number of years later, the patent dispute was settled in his favor, and RCA began to have to reimburse Farnsworth, but he'd already dropped out of inventing, and died bitter and angry.
I'm reminded of a story my housemate showed me at one point, where some telcos in South America were having trouble with people digging up and reselling any copper line they laid.
Solution? They placed 56K frame signals (or maybe it was X.25, my memory is fuzzy) on the existing barbed wire fences; nobody was going to cut those down and risk losing their cattle, in fact, that made for free repairs of the frame line, since the ranchers would repair the fence on their own dime....
> Yep - for the actual headwords being defined. But calling "taking writings" "robbing" is an > incorrect explanation of the headword because "taking writings" is not "robbery". (Unless he > meant "walking off with someone's book" which I doubt).
Hmmn. Really, what you're doing here is saying that your definition is more correct, which is just you and Noah Webster arguing over how a word should be used.
My point is that, regardless of the actual tiny semantics of the definition, there has been a precedent of 'piracy' being used as 'misappropriation of content' and not just 'robbery on the seas' for nearly two centuries. The fact that Webster defined this, correctly or not, as 'robbery' back in 1828 strengthens my point that this usage, and all of its inherent overtones, is older than the hills and shouldn't be attacked as 'corporate doublespeak.'
> There's a distinction between a breach of *civil* law, which is not a crime, and a breach of > *criminal* law, which is.
Aha. A subtle, yet very important distinction; I'll take the correction. I was misusing the word 'crime' in my argument, it's true.
So, let me withdraw that part of the argument, but supplement it again by repeating that whether piracy (definition 2 -- 'misappropration of content') is or is not a crime is not the point here. The point is that Webster, recording common usage of English language, recorded that as a definition. You might agree or disagree with the definition, but the fact remains that in 1828, there were people, apparently MANY of them, using this word in this way; the definition has been around for nearly two centuries.
>Then allow me to clear the waters and clarify the need for both.
Totally agreed; I wasn't trying to make the case that either is unneccesary or worthless. I just think it's important to keep clear on what we mean. If our only tool for privacy is currently anonymity, as you suggest, then by all means those wishing privacy should investigate and use various options for anonymity.
But they're not innately the same thing; that's my only point.
Webster didn't invent anything in the dictionary; he/they only reported on usage. If you can demonstrate that this term was not in usage in this way in 1828, then it was an error of Webster's.
> Illegal copying has never been a crime.
This sentence makes no sense. If it's illegal, it's a crime. If not, it's not.
Apologies for the run-on link; There's some weird posting/preview bug that ate my , as well as put a spare blob of whitespace in the middle of the link text. Fortunately the link still works. Sigh.... --
PI'RACY, n. [L. piratica, from Gr. to attempt, to dare, to enterprise, whence L. periculum, experior; Eng. to fare.]
1. The act, practice or crime of robbing on the high seas; the taking of property from others by open violence and without authority, on the sea; a crime that answers to robbery on land.
Other acts than robbery on the high seas, are declared by statute to be piracy. See Act of Congress, April 30, 1790.
2. The robbing of another by taking his writings.
-------------
The word 'piracy' was not only in use, but in common enough use to be canonized in the dictionary, as meaning 'appropriation of content' over 100 years before RMS was even _BORN_. RMS is fighting a fight that was over and done nearly 175 years ago.
He also slanders the original sense of the word, alleging it's synonymous with kidnapping and even rape. Nothing could be further from the truth. Piracy, in the original sense of 'robbery on the seas,' means just that -- robbery. It's analagous to a charge of armed robbery today; that doesn't imply rape or kidnapping, and if those crimes occured during a robbery, the suspect would be charged with those crimes separately.
Just wanted to get that off my chest -- I'm tired of people alleging that this word usage is 'corporate propaganda' when it was in use long before the existance of the corporations alleged to have invented it.
> And just because someone who steps into that bank might steal something doesn't give you the > right to force them to hand over their photo ID, their social security card, their passport, their > medical history, their address, their phone number, how many children they have, etc.
No, not for walking in. But to be an actual banking customer, to use the services of the bank, you need to supply some credentials that you are who you say you are. Your rattling off a huge list of absurd things that banks don't actually ask for doesn't hide the fact that you probably appreciate my not being able to waltz into your bank, say I'm you with no proof, and empty your account.
> unlike eBay, my auction site doesn't require people to send me a photocopy of their driver's > license, their social security number and their credit card number.
Um, did you ever stop to check if this person was on crack or not? eBay requires no such thing. Either you're making the story up, or you're blithely taking at face value the word of this AOLer that you spend the rest of your missive trying to discredit.
Not that it matters, anecdotal evidence not being worth the paper it's printed on, to mix aphorisms.
The actual problem with your rant is that you freely interchange 'anonymity' and 'privacy' as synonymous, essentially begging the question that you're alleging to answer. So, in simple terms:
Anonymity is not having to supply any identifying information. This is a good thing in certain contexts, expressing unpopular opinions, for instance; it's very very bad in others, the above-mentioned banking being one of the best.
Privacy is a related but different issue. Given that complete anonymity is roughly impossible in a closely-knit society, privacy is the issue of to what degree people can expect their personal information to be kept secret by third parties that acquire it in the course of normal business. Almost always a good thing, although I'm sure we could all come up with a situational straw man or two where privacy could be considered harmful.
They really are two different things, there are situations where privacy should be expected but not anonymity, and that's as it should be, as best I can tell. Freely interchanging the two terms muddies the water of the privacy debate in a harmful way.
>I refuse to see any MI movie that doesn't have the theme song in 5. Lalo where are you?
For what it's worth, Schiffren later acknowledged in an interview that if he'd thought of the trick of introducing the theme in 5 and then switching to 4 like U2 did for the original MI movie, he'd have preferred to have done it that way.
Damn, and I used up all my moderator points yesterday.
Thanks for a very concise and well-spoken explanation of the exact point I've tried to make (much less successfully) to people complaining about "Think different"'s grammatical "error."
Excellent.
(Although your *'d sentences in the look examples are not at all ungrammatical:
This AIBO uses a CCD camera for its vision. That one looks differently...
...for instance. I leave the other as an exercise for the reader.) --
Yup. Slashdot suffers from horrible misrepresentation as a 'news' site. It's really just a page of (often mis-summarized) links to topics that hopefully will cause a lot of feedback and therefore ad hits.
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe that they do this intentionally, misrepresent news just to keep churn happening on stories, but the realist in me has to believe they're just not very good at what they claim to do.
One interesting side point, when you start to break down their revenue model, is that the only actual fresh content on the pages are the comments -- they post flamebait, let the community provide actual content, and they make money off of that.
Kind of parasitic, if you ask me, but here I am contributing, heh. --
Oh, come on -- how would Andover get all those banner ad impressions without running two or three stories a day that have no actual meat, but are guaranteed to generate 500+ comments (read: at least two page views each) rehashing the same old crap we heard yesterday about the same story?!?
"Here's our letter to Microsoft!"
"Metallica still hasn't answered; just thought we'd give you all the chance to comment."
"Ask Slashdot: Is God Real?"
"Our phone rang and we were in the bathroom, but it MIGHT have been Microsoft's lawyers."
"Feature: Jon Katz on why Microsoft and Metallica might be doomed in the New Digital Age(tm)."
"Nothing happened on the Microsoft/Andover front today, but we'll give you a forum to vent anyway."
"Ask Slashdot: Should Napster be illegal?"
...and so forth. The ratio of actual news articles to page-view-generators has taken a steep nosedive in the past months, and I don't see it coming back anytime soon...
Back to fantasizing about moderating stories -- then we could browse without seeing all these (-1, Redundant) and (-2, Obvious Page-Hit Troll). Ah, well.
--
Re:Loose as a goose (-1 Offtopic, -5 Spelling flam
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 2
Theoretically, this is almost correct usage, actually -- there's a sense of loose as a transitive verb meaning "to let free," although it's not in regular use.
And, of course, it implies willfilly letting go, not just accidentally leaving on the bus.
Just being even more pedantic for the sake of doing it; I'm with you, confusing lose/loose really annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Good point. I'll fix, thx.
--
You'll want to check out some of the various 'home automation' sites, like smarthome.com. They have all sorts of ways to pipe audio (and video) around your house using existing AC or phone wiring, or wireless. FM is a really brute-force nasty way to send audio, and the frequency response is terrible; on top of the already less-than-adequate fidelity of MP3's, I think you'd be unhappy with the results.
Here's a starter at smarthome, the Leapfrog Home Network System, which uses phone lines for A/V transmission.
Have fun!
--
No, 24/96 is 24-bit audio, sampled at 96kHz, so it can theoretically reproduce up to 48K. DAT can sample at either 44.1kHz (CD-compatible) or 48kHz, for 22,050Hz and 24,000Hz frequency response, respectively.
--
(*bow) Yes, just so. Napster folks swiping MP3's and thumbing their nose at "stink'n laws" are analagous to warez-doods in this ecology.
The folks I respect are the ones who are analagous to open-source software authors, those actually BUILDING new models for content, making music and distributing it freely, or setting up pay-for-download schemes or the like, instead of just complaining about the existing models from the comfort of their dorm rooms.
Thanks for the note of support....
--
No. Read what I actually say, not what you'd like to think I'm saying.
I'm taking the position that being gouged for something and/or disliking the copyright is NOT a viable excuse for breaking the law and violating licensing terms.
There are other options to being gouged that hold water, buying discounted/used CD's, buying CD's from independant bands (I'll sell you some of our CD's for $10 at http://www.elfhill.com/Annwn), or just not buying CD's.
But taking something illegally is simply not a justifiable position just because you don't like the price point. You might not like the copyright laws (I sure don't either), but putting your fingers in your ears and singing la-la-la doesn't make the unsupportability of your position go away.
Copyright law is the only law we have for being able to make licensing demands on content. The GPL only exists because of the strength of copyright law, as does the BSD license, as does any licensing of content, open or not. Undermining just some licenses because you don't like them paints you as selfish and hypocritical; part of the 'gimme-gimme' crowd that makes Open Source and Linux and most of this community look bad to the outside world.
There are constructive ways to make changes in things you don't like; freely taking for your own personal gain is not one of them.
You probably already saw this by Larry Wall, but it's deeply well-spoken and correct: "When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."
--
I'm not on an anti-Napster crusade; I think most of the content there is crap, but people are welcome to it.
I get out of the house a lot; specifically as a musician in a band that uses MP3's a LOT to promote ourselves.
I'm not arguing for the RIAA; they're a bunch of money-grubbing morons.
However, I didn't paint computer users as aristocrats; just as people who definitionally can afford luxury items roughly a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than the price of a CD. And I'm not necessarily talking about entry-level PC's in the first place, I'm just taking a nice middle ground between a $500 entry-level machine, and a $5000 monster Dell box, both of which are represented in the Napster-using population.
I'm just trying to make the point that the cost argument is stupid. If you don't want to pay that much for music, don't get music, or shop the cutout bin, there's a lot of $2.99 CD's that are full of great stuff. But don't try to tell me that $17 for a band you appreciate is too much to pay; you CAN afford it, you just don't want to.
--
It's not that simple. To store an analog sinewave at 1000Hz digitally, 44.1kHz sampling is WAY more than adequate -- you have 45 samples along each cycle of the sine wave to interpolate between. Unless you're expecting sudden single-cycle 80,000Hz spikes in the middle of this wave, you're losing nothing; reconstructing a waveform from sporadic individual points is high-school algebra stuff.
When you get into more complicated waveforms, with higher frequencies, there's the possibility for distortion as you approach the Nyquist limit of half your sampling rate. This is one of the reasons that recording and mastering studios have moved to a 96kHz sampling rate, even though it gets mastered down to 44.1 later.
So, yes, there's a subtle argument to be made that sampling an analog waveform can cause loss of information (although it doesn't necessarily cause that loss, per my sinewave example above), but at some point, this becomes moot even at the analog level, because there comes a level past which we're talking about information that CANNOT move the human eardrum, and even if we want to get more pedantic than that, energy itself is quantized, so if your sampling rate is fast enough, you're going to bump up against Planck time in measuring the motion of the molecules.
Meaning there's no need for "infinite" storage space to get an analog waveform perfectly, just really large amounts, because an analog waveform is not actually infinitely complex; Fourier proved that a long time ago, and failing all else, Planck showed us that even nature is quantized at a super small level.
--
Ah. A good point, but somewhat a change in context. CD encoding does have a top-end brickwall of ~ 22KHz, and sometimes has a rumble filter of below 20Hz (although that information usually self-recreates to some degree through subharmonic interactions of speakers).
This information is outside the range of hearing, theoretically (although we can argue all day about whether it's important; I'd probably agree that it was, but only very slightly so relative to, say, 1KHz); MP3 compression actually loses information that's in the unarguably audible frequencies. A perfect encoding algorithm would only lose "subperceptible" information, but I haven't heard a perfect one yet at anything less than about 256k bitrate, roughly 1:4 compression, like used on DCC and MiniDisk, only better. 128k and below cause perciptibly audible distortions to the original material; CD doesn't.
And for that matter, almost ALL consumer media throw away the 20-20000 range you're talking about -- cassette tops out at about 18k on a REALLY good day, DAT gets up to 24k if you're doing everything right, and so forth. The new 96/24 pro standard can get frequencies up to about 48kHz, and at 24-bit resolution, but that always gets mastered down to 44/16 at best, and then typically played back through bookshelf speakers that only go down to 45Hz and up to 18.5k, so 20Hz and 20kHz is kind of moot unless you're in the mastering studio or have built a $15,000 listening room in your home.
--
>It's really too bad that Madonna has come out against Napster. Surely she, if anyone, should be
>able to find some way to use it to further her own fame.
She has. It's the first rule she learned: even bad press is good press.
--
You forgot this one:
"CDs cost too much! Why should I pay them $12-$18 when CDs are so cheap?"
Why should you have bought the $2000 computer and $40+ monthly Internet service that you're using to download MP3's? After all, that's all so cheap to produce!
I find it hard to take cost rationalizations seriously from people who are definitionally among the more wealthy half, by virtue of their owning a computer in the FIRST place.
Oh, but I forgot, all their allowance has to be saved to get the Voodoo5 at $399 the day it comes out so they can get that extra 5fps in Quake III. It's a necessity of life.
--
Umn, no. CD audio is an uncompressed bitstream that doesn't throw away any of the information. It can be argued that using digital sampling innately loses information from the original waveform, but that's not the same thing. CD audio is full-bandwidth, zero-compression.
DVD audio I'm no expert on, so I won't even speculate.
--
>And i can't even name it's inventor off the top of my head
That's because two teams were working on it simultaneously, a large-scale one from RCA, who were trying to get the same rights for television that they had with radios -- per-unit royalties (the MPAA and RIAA didn't invent this kind of content distribution licensing concept, they're just standing on the shoulders of giants), and a smaller private team lead by Philo Farnsworth.
It's a long, sordid story, but in the long run, Farnsworth won the 'TV arms race,' but because of nasty patent disputes and the like, RCA won the mindshare race and Farnsworth went broke. Some number of years later, the patent dispute was settled in his favor, and RCA began to have to reimburse Farnsworth, but he'd already dropped out of inventing, and died bitter and angry.
FYI.
--
I'm reminded of a story my housemate showed me at one point, where some telcos in South America were having trouble with people digging up and reselling any copper line they laid.
Solution? They placed 56K frame signals (or maybe it was X.25, my memory is fuzzy) on the existing barbed wire fences; nobody was going to cut those down and risk losing their cattle, in fact, that made for free repairs of the frame line, since the ranchers would repair the fence on their own dime....
--
> Yep - for the actual headwords being defined. But calling "taking writings" "robbing" is an
> incorrect explanation of the headword because "taking writings" is not "robbery". (Unless he
> meant "walking off with someone's book" which I doubt).
Hmmn. Really, what you're doing here is saying that your definition is more correct, which is just you and Noah Webster arguing over how a word should be used.
My point is that, regardless of the actual tiny semantics of the definition, there has been a precedent of 'piracy' being used as 'misappropriation of content' and not just 'robbery on the seas' for nearly two centuries. The fact that Webster defined this, correctly or not, as 'robbery' back in 1828 strengthens my point that this usage, and all of its inherent overtones, is older than the hills and shouldn't be attacked as 'corporate doublespeak.'
> There's a distinction between a breach of *civil* law, which is not a crime, and a breach of
> *criminal* law, which is.
Aha. A subtle, yet very important distinction; I'll take the correction. I was misusing the word 'crime' in my argument, it's true.
So, let me withdraw that part of the argument, but supplement it again by repeating that whether piracy (definition 2 -- 'misappropration of content') is or is not a crime is not the point here. The point is that Webster, recording common usage of English language, recorded that as a definition. You might agree or disagree with the definition, but the fact remains that in 1828, there were people, apparently MANY of them, using this word in this way; the definition has been around for nearly two centuries.
--
>Then allow me to clear the waters and clarify the need for both.
Totally agreed; I wasn't trying to make the case that either is unneccesary or worthless. I just think it's important to keep clear on what we mean. If our only tool for privacy is currently anonymity, as you suggest, then by all means those wishing privacy should investigate and use various options for anonymity.
But they're not innately the same thing; that's my only point.
--
> This is incorrect on Webster's part.
Webster didn't invent anything in the dictionary; he/they only reported on usage. If you can demonstrate that this term was not in usage in this way in 1828, then it was an error of Webster's.
> Illegal copying has never been a crime.
This sentence makes no sense. If it's illegal, it's a crime. If not, it's not.
--
Apologies for the run-on link; There's some weird posting/preview bug that ate my , as well as put a spare blob of whitespace in the middle of the link text. Fortunately the link still works. Sigh....
--
From Webster 's 1828 Dictionary:
PI'RACY, n. [L. piratica, from Gr. to attempt, to dare, to enterprise, whence L. periculum, experior; Eng. to fare.]
1. The act, practice or crime of robbing on the high seas; the taking of property from others by open violence and without authority, on the sea; a crime that answers to robbery on land.
Other acts than robbery on the high seas, are declared by statute to be piracy. See Act of Congress, April 30, 1790.
2. The robbing of another by taking his writings.
-------------
The word 'piracy' was not only in use, but in common enough use to be canonized in the dictionary, as meaning 'appropriation of content' over 100 years before RMS was even _BORN_. RMS is fighting a fight that was over and done nearly 175 years ago.
He also slanders the original sense of the word, alleging it's synonymous with kidnapping and even rape. Nothing could be further from the truth. Piracy, in the original sense of 'robbery on the seas,' means just that -- robbery. It's analagous to a charge of armed robbery today; that doesn't imply rape or kidnapping, and if those crimes occured during a robbery, the suspect would be charged with those crimes separately.
Just wanted to get that off my chest -- I'm tired of people alleging that this word usage is 'corporate propaganda' when it was in use long before the existance of the corporations alleged to have invented it.
Propaganda cuts both ways.
--
> And just because someone who steps into that bank might steal something doesn't give you the
> right to force them to hand over their photo ID, their social security card, their passport, their
> medical history, their address, their phone number, how many children they have, etc.
No, not for walking in. But to be an actual banking customer, to use the services of the bank, you need to supply some credentials that you are who you say you are. Your rattling off a huge list of absurd things that banks don't actually ask for doesn't hide the fact that you probably appreciate my not being able to waltz into your bank, say I'm you with no proof, and empty your account.
> unlike eBay, my auction site doesn't require people to send me a photocopy of their driver's
> license, their social security number and their credit card number.
Um, did you ever stop to check if this person was on crack or not? eBay requires no such thing. Either you're making the story up, or you're blithely taking at face value the word of this AOLer that you spend the rest of your missive trying to discredit.
Not that it matters, anecdotal evidence not being worth the paper it's printed on, to mix aphorisms.
The actual problem with your rant is that you freely interchange 'anonymity' and 'privacy' as synonymous, essentially begging the question that you're alleging to answer. So, in simple terms:
Anonymity is not having to supply any identifying information. This is a good thing in certain contexts, expressing unpopular opinions, for instance; it's very very bad in others, the above-mentioned banking being one of the best.
Privacy is a related but different issue. Given that complete anonymity is roughly impossible in a closely-knit society, privacy is the issue of to what degree people can expect their personal information to be kept secret by third parties that acquire it in the course of normal business. Almost always a good thing, although I'm sure we could all come up with a situational straw man or two where privacy could be considered harmful.
They really are two different things, there are situations where privacy should be expected but not anonymity, and that's as it should be, as best I can tell. Freely interchanging the two terms muddies the water of the privacy debate in a harmful way.
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>I refuse to see any MI movie that doesn't have the theme song in 5. Lalo where are you?
For what it's worth, Schiffren later acknowledged in an interview that if he'd thought of the trick of introducing the theme in 5 and then switching to 4 like U2 did for the original MI movie, he'd have preferred to have done it that way.
But yeah, 5 is cooler; confuse the dance crowd.
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Damn, and I used up all my moderator points yesterday.
Thanks for a very concise and well-spoken explanation of the exact point I've tried to make (much less successfully) to people complaining about "Think different"'s grammatical "error."
Excellent.
(Although your *'d sentences in the look examples are not at all ungrammatical:
This AIBO uses a CCD camera for its vision. That one looks differently...
...for instance. I leave the other as an exercise for the reader.)
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(*laugh out loud)
...yah, or that...
Good one.
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Yup. Slashdot suffers from horrible misrepresentation as a 'news' site. It's really just a page of (often mis-summarized) links to topics that hopefully will cause a lot of feedback and therefore ad hits.
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe that they do this intentionally, misrepresent news just to keep churn happening on stories, but the realist in me has to believe they're just not very good at what they claim to do.
One interesting side point, when you start to break down their revenue model, is that the only actual fresh content on the pages are the comments -- they post flamebait, let the community provide actual content, and they make money off of that.
Kind of parasitic, if you ask me, but here I am contributing, heh.
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Oh, come on -- how would Andover get all those banner ad impressions without running two or three stories a day that have no actual meat, but are guaranteed to generate 500+ comments (read: at least two page views each) rehashing the same old crap we heard yesterday about the same story?!?
"Here's our letter to Microsoft!"
"Metallica still hasn't answered; just thought we'd give you all the chance to comment."
"Ask Slashdot: Is God Real?"
"Our phone rang and we were in the bathroom, but it MIGHT have been Microsoft's lawyers."
"Feature: Jon Katz on why Microsoft and Metallica might be doomed in the New Digital Age(tm)."
"Nothing happened on the Microsoft/Andover front today, but we'll give you a forum to vent anyway."
"Ask Slashdot: Should Napster be illegal?"
...and so forth. The ratio of actual news articles to page-view-generators has taken a steep nosedive in the past months, and I don't see it coming back anytime soon...
Back to fantasizing about moderating stories -- then we could browse without seeing all these (-1, Redundant) and (-2, Obvious Page-Hit Troll). Ah, well.
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Theoretically, this is almost correct usage, actually -- there's a sense of loose as a transitive verb meaning "to let free," although it's not in regular use.
And, of course, it implies willfilly letting go, not just accidentally leaving on the bus.
Just being even more pedantic for the sake of doing it; I'm with you, confusing lose/loose really annoying.
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