Okay, we're arguing about two different things here.
You're trying to convince me that pirating software is illegal. I know. I never said otherwise. The "casual user" who used it once was to point out that not every "pirated" copy out there is being used, and therefore shouldn't be counted as a "loss". If I sit here and burn CDs of photoshop over and over again, they don't lose more money.
The company is NOT LOSING MONEY.
I was arguing that when a company says "We lost $5 Billion" from piracy, that they're full of it.
Oh, and "ethics" _are_ a matter of opinion. Like religion. And "emacs vs vi". All opinion.
If you decide to respond don't bother telling me that piracy is illegal. Don't tell me that piracy is unethical. that's your opinion. We all already know it.
they feel that for every user of their software out there, they should receive money for it.
Whatever, doesn't change my argument one way or the other. Feel free to substitute that in my previous post.
As for the argument of having lost NUMPIRATES*PRICE dollars in lost revenue being inaccurate due to some folks copying software that they otherwise would not have bought, if software is crucial enough for someone to use, they will find a way to pay for it or do without the functionality or find an alternative.
I know people who have pirated copies of Photoshop on their computers. Why? They installed it once to make a button for their web page. And that was the last they used of it. Sure, MS Paint could do the same thing, but in their mind "Graphics = Photoshop" so they wanted to use Photoshop.
Now this user hasn't used the software since the day after installing it. It's not "crucial" to them, so would you insist this represents a $PRICE loss to Adobe? I'd say that it doesn't. The software really has no use to the person who has it. They installed it to play with it once.
These people wouldn't buy Photoshop if it cost $1. They have no use for it.
if software is crucial enough for someone to use, they will find a way to pay for it or do without the functionality or find an alternative.
Or find a way to use it without paying. What if the software isn't crucial, and they just want to play with it for a while? To understand the software to be used in a job?
Oh, no job, no money, can't buy software, can't learn software, therefore no job.
it is unethical for those users to do the casual copying in the first place. Not to mention illegal.
Ethics is all a matter of opinion. Law isn't. (well sorta..)
Where the hell did you come up with that lottery ticket thing?
Some people just can't read can they?
Because I feel like I should have gotten that money, and I didn't, that means that I lost it.
Want to read that again? I guess you're eyes must be going bad to have missed it earlier.
Because I feel like I should have gotten that money, and I didn't, that means that I lost it.
That's the entire point of their argument. And it's wrong.
They feel that for every copy of X out there, that they should recieve money for it. Fair enough. But just because they believe they should have recieved the money doesn't mean that they've "lost it" when they don't.
So if they sell one copy for $50, and two copies are pirated, they suddenly are in the hole $50? How does that work?
They're selling their stuff. They do NOT give you permission to have it for free. If you don't like those terms, walk.
Umm.. I never argued that. Irrelevent to the discussion.
Tell ya what. We'll make your salary completely lotto based, and see how you feel then. How does that sound?
What? Are you high on something? Irrelevent to the discussion.
I didn't win the lottery, so I've suffered a net lost of $320 million this year. Damn. At least I should get a tax break. Because I feel like I should have gotten that money, and I didn't, that means that I lost it.
And another popular belief now is that there is no Atlantis, but rather it was a conglomerate of stories about several sunken cities that was written about one city that never really existed.
Kinda like a made for TV movie about child abuse. The characters in the movie probably didn't exist, but it was based on several real stories.
Very interesting, now that we've seen that there have been several cities lost in this way.
I used to work for a univeristy IT department, while I was there as a student. We often shut off peoples network ports for various reasons: running commercial servers, pr0n, port scanning, mp3 ftp servers, flooding, etc.
We also had nothing about running Wireless APs (hell, they even gave us iBooks with 802.11b cards... we had an AP in our room) But we were also geeks and had it secured (well, as good as it can be)
One problem was people using the campus bandwith for other people... such as setting up a dial-in server on their phone lines to give free access to their friends. Oddly enough, they got their ports shut off too.
You can't really complain about it too much, though. At my university, students were paying about $3 a month for internet access... at 10 Base! (okay, maxed at 100 Base total per building, but still faster than a modem) And the entire point of university networks is for academic use.
So basically, it's their network, their rules. Doesn't mean they have to be draconion, but if they want to, they can.
Oh and be polite when you talk to the campus IT guys... they have to deal with a LOT of crap, and experinced users should know how to be nice. (Unless you want to get your connection back and have it throttled to 1kb/s:)
With the prices of RAM being as low as they are, you might want to consider building a ram disk to store the data that's going to get burned. That way you don't have to worry about the speed of the hard drives, the ram will always be faster.
We have one box here with 4 SCSI burners in it with a 700 meg ram drive. Everything works wonderfully in it.
I see comments like this on slashdot all the time, and I can't help but wonder why people never think about it this way: it's all about choice. Choice.
You can use whatever you want. How do ya like that? If you don't like Evolution, then don't use it. If you don't like mutt, then don't use it. The point is that there are many, many, many options. You get to pick what's right for you. and what's right for you might not be right for someone else.
I personally love mutt. And I'm also starting to dig evolution. So wich do I use? Well, both really. I use mutt remotely and usually use evolution locally.
So even if you don't like the way something is designed (in this case large applications) that doesn't mean that it's "bad" for what you want the "unix way". It's better... more choice is better.
I'm a huge fan of freedmon to choose, thats why I'm so addicted to freshmeat... I'll check out what's coming out and if I see something I like better I give it a shot.
You seem to be missing the most important point here. Choice.
There are tons of small email programs... tons of text mode ones... lots of text calanders... if you want them, you can use them. But what if you _want_ something like Outlook on Linux? What if you _like_ having nice fancy graphics and everything all built together?
Slamming projects because _you_ don't want to use it is not the point.
FWIW, I still use mutt and fetchmail, but I'm glad to see there is always more CHOICE.
Yeah brand new. Only been using it since about '95. And that would be why my user number on slashdot is so high. So, uh, what does that have to do with anything? I still believe that if you purchase the right to use software, then you have the right to use the software.
You can't compare software to physical objects. You take a physical object, and someone else doesn't have it. You copy 1s and 0s and the original ones are still there.
How's this for a better way to look at it: It's absurd for a company to tell you that you can only play the CD you bought in one of your cars, even though you have 3. (Don't tell the RIAA, they may try to enforce that) Using software on multiple personal computers is the EXACT SAME as that. And just because the EULA says something, doesn't mean it's so. You paid to use the software, changing which machine you use it on is not the same as stealing cars.
Hell, even if doing it is illegal, it's still not _wrong_.
That's the way it worked BEFORE they changed it. It would connect to the login server and get a list of supernodes to try to connect to. If it couldn't connect then it used whatever it had in it's hosts cache.
Now if it can't connect it just sits there. Firewall off all of kazaa.com and see if you can connect. Nope, nothing doing.
I don't think the DMCA applies here. The DMCA was designed to outlaw circumventing encryption for the purpose of obtaining copyrighted materials. Since the protocol isn't "copyrighted" and some clients don't even mention reverse engineering in the EULA, I don't think FastTrak could do anything about it.
Err.. well.. it WAS decentralized... that is until the FastTrak guys decided to be complete bastards and try to shut out Linux users using the giFT client. Then they changed it so that each client HAS to authenticate to a central server.
Thus putting them in the same boat as Napster. Well, serves them right, piss off users they wouldn't support anyway AND get sued by the RIAA. Oh well, they killed themselves.
If you were giving advice/instruction on a subject that has bonafide uses
Oh, you mean sort of like creating a program that would allow people to view DVDs that they bought on a DVD player that they bought? But since it has the ability to be used to pirate films, it's still illegal? I'm sorry, I don't have that much faith as to believe that they'll know the difference.
A provision like this simply puts more power into the hands of companies to get rid of people they don't approve of. Ugh.
Wait... are you honestly upset that when you tried to DOS the site by flooding it with comments that they temporarily banned you?
No, reading further I see it's only because it doesn't say in their FAQ that they'll ban people who try to DOS the site.
So.. you acted like a dick, got banned to keep you from DOSing the site, and you have the nerve to be UPSET about it?
I reread your post, and I still don't see how you can justify being upset.
If i see a site at blah.com with a problem, then I'm going to contact the admin@blah.com If I see merchant X is running a site with problems, I'm going to try to contact merchant X.
So let me get you strait... you think he should go to jail because he notified the wrong person first? Are you serious or just trolling? He found a contact address and told them.
I honestly can't believe you think he should go to jail for not finding the exact right guy to report this to. "What? You told the sergant about it! Only the captian handles these vandalism reports. Put you hands behind your head. This is a serious offense."
"No, Officer, I didn't want to steal that car, I was just going to notify the owner of the insecurity."
This is the worst anology ever. This is more like someone parking his car out front and yelling "Come look at my car! Come look at my car!" And When someone looks in the window and says the door is unlocked and keys are in the ingition calling the cops to have them arrested.
The part you seem to be missing is that it was an explicitly public access site and he inadvertantly found a hole. He wasn't look for one, he just found one. Would you be arrested for robbery if you saw a $20 bill laying on the sidewalk?
Would you expect to get sued for having a copy of "dd" that comes standard on most every Linux distro? No? Why not. It makes it very easy to pirate CDs, DVDs, hell even floppies. And it does so by making a bit by bit copy. Amazing.
DeCSS does not aid in Piracy. It aids in being able to view the content that you paid for in a player that you paid for. That's it.
Hell, maybe we should start sueing everyone who figures out how to copy files by right clicking them and picking "copy" in Windows.
Anyway, my point was that DeCSS does not make pirating movies any easier.
Slashdot Mirror
How can I breach a contract I never agreed to?
(By reading this comment, you agree to send me all your money. Thank you.)
They can put whatever the hell they want in their "Acceptable use" policy or whatever. Doesn't mean they can sue to enforce it.
Okay, we're arguing about two different things here.
.
You're trying to convince me that pirating software is illegal. I know. I never said otherwise. The "casual user" who used it once was to point out that not every "pirated" copy out there is being used, and therefore shouldn't be counted as a "loss". If I sit here and burn CDs of photoshop over and over again, they don't lose more money.
The company is NOT LOSING MONEY
I was arguing that when a company says "We lost $5 Billion" from piracy, that they're full of it.
Oh, and "ethics" _are_ a matter of opinion. Like religion. And "emacs vs vi". All opinion.
If you decide to respond don't bother telling me that piracy is illegal. Don't tell me that piracy is unethical. that's your opinion. We all already know it.
they feel that for every user of their software out there, they should receive money for it.
Whatever, doesn't change my argument one way or the other. Feel free to substitute that in my previous post.
As for the argument of having lost NUMPIRATES*PRICE dollars in lost revenue being inaccurate due to some folks copying software that they otherwise would not have bought, if software is crucial enough for someone to use, they will find a way to pay for it or do without the functionality or find an alternative.
I know people who have pirated copies of Photoshop on their computers. Why? They installed it once to make a button for their web page. And that was the last they used of it. Sure, MS Paint could do the same thing, but in their mind "Graphics = Photoshop" so they wanted to use Photoshop.
Now this user hasn't used the software since the day after installing it. It's not "crucial" to them, so would you insist this represents a $PRICE loss to Adobe? I'd say that it doesn't. The software really has no use to the person who has it. They installed it to play with it once.
These people wouldn't buy Photoshop if it cost $1. They have no use for it.
if software is crucial enough for someone to use, they will find a way to pay for it or do without the functionality or find an alternative.
Or find a way to use it without paying. What if the software isn't crucial, and they just want to play with it for a while? To understand the software to be used in a job?
Oh, no job, no money, can't buy software, can't learn software, therefore no job.
it is unethical for those users to do the casual copying in the first place. Not to mention illegal.
Ethics is all a matter of opinion. Law isn't. (well sorta..)
Where the hell did you come up with that lottery ticket thing?
Some people just can't read can they?
Because I feel like I should have gotten that money, and I didn't, that means that I lost it.
Want to read that again? I guess you're eyes must be going bad to have missed it earlier.
Because I feel like I should have gotten that money, and I didn't, that means that I lost it.
That's the entire point of their argument. And it's wrong.
They feel that for every copy of X out there, that they should recieve money for it. Fair enough. But just because they believe they should have recieved the money doesn't mean that they've "lost it" when they don't.
So if they sell one copy for $50, and two copies are pirated, they suddenly are in the hole $50? How does that work?
They're selling their stuff. They do NOT give you permission to have it for free. If you don't like those terms, walk.
Umm.. I never argued that. Irrelevent to the discussion.
Tell ya what. We'll make your salary completely lotto based, and see how you feel then. How does that sound?
What? Are you high on something? Irrelevent to the discussion.
Exactly! Oh, wait. No. You're exactly wrong.
I didn't win the lottery, so I've suffered a net lost of $320 million this year. Damn. At least I should get a tax break. Because I feel like I should have gotten that money, and I didn't, that means that I lost it.
I'd email you, but you have no email listed. I have some very OT questions for you. Please drop me a line.
Why is it that bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics? Evolution. This is a reality and we have to deal with it daily.
True... but this is a form of micro-evolution. Macro-evolution is something else. Even some creationists believe in micro-evolution
And another popular belief now is that there is no Atlantis, but rather it was a conglomerate of stories about several sunken cities that was written about one city that never really existed.
Kinda like a made for TV movie about child abuse. The characters in the movie probably didn't exist, but it was based on several real stories.
Very interesting, now that we've seen that there have been several cities lost in this way.
I used to work for a univeristy IT department, while I was there as a student. We often shut off peoples network ports for various reasons: running commercial servers, pr0n, port scanning, mp3 ftp servers, flooding, etc.
:)
We also had nothing about running Wireless APs (hell, they even gave us iBooks with 802.11b cards... we had an AP in our room) But we were also geeks and had it secured (well, as good as it can be)
One problem was people using the campus bandwith for other people... such as setting up a dial-in server on their phone lines to give free access to their friends. Oddly enough, they got their ports shut off too.
You can't really complain about it too much, though. At my university, students were paying about $3 a month for internet access... at 10 Base! (okay, maxed at 100 Base total per building, but still faster than a modem) And the entire point of university networks is for academic use.
So basically, it's their network, their rules. Doesn't mean they have to be draconion, but if they want to, they can.
Oh and be polite when you talk to the campus IT guys... they have to deal with a LOT of crap, and experinced users should know how to be nice. (Unless you want to get your connection back and have it throttled to 1kb/s
It's still not "expensive". When prices go up from "dirt cheap" they can still be "cheap".
With the prices of RAM being as low as they are, you might want to consider building a ram disk to store the data that's going to get burned. That way you don't have to worry about the speed of the hard drives, the ram will always be faster.
We have one box here with 4 SCSI burners in it with a 700 meg ram drive. Everything works wonderfully in it.
I see comments like this on slashdot all the time, and I can't help but wonder why people never think about it this way: it's all about choice. Choice.
You can use whatever you want. How do ya like that? If you don't like Evolution, then don't use it. If you don't like mutt, then don't use it. The point is that there are many, many, many options. You get to pick what's right for you. and what's right for you might not be right for someone else.
I personally love mutt. And I'm also starting to dig evolution. So wich do I use? Well, both really. I use mutt remotely and usually use evolution locally.
So even if you don't like the way something is designed (in this case large applications) that doesn't mean that it's "bad" for what you want the "unix way". It's better... more choice is better.
I'm a huge fan of freedmon to choose, thats why I'm so addicted to freshmeat... I'll check out what's coming out and if I see something I like better I give it a shot.
You seem to be missing the most important point here. Choice.
There are tons of small email programs... tons of text mode ones... lots of text calanders... if you want them, you can use them. But what if you _want_ something like Outlook on Linux? What if you _like_ having nice fancy graphics and everything all built together?
Slamming projects because _you_ don't want to use it is not the point.
FWIW, I still use mutt and fetchmail, but I'm glad to see there is always more CHOICE.
Are you new to Linux?
Yeah brand new. Only been using it since about '95. And that would be why my user number on slashdot is so high. So, uh, what does that have to do with anything? I still believe that if you purchase the right to use software, then you have the right to use the software.
(God I hate ACs, make an account already)
_sigh_
You can't compare software to physical objects. You take a physical object, and someone else doesn't have it. You copy 1s and 0s and the original ones are still there.
How's this for a better way to look at it: It's absurd for a company to tell you that you can only play the CD you bought in one of your cars, even though you have 3. (Don't tell the RIAA, they may try to enforce that) Using software on multiple personal computers is the EXACT SAME as that. And just because the EULA says something, doesn't mean it's so. You paid to use the software, changing which machine you use it on is not the same as stealing cars.
Hell, even if doing it is illegal, it's still not _wrong_.
That's the way it worked BEFORE they changed it. It would connect to the login server and get a list of supernodes to try to connect to. If it couldn't connect then it used whatever it had in it's hosts cache.
Now if it can't connect it just sits there. Firewall off all of kazaa.com and see if you can connect. Nope, nothing doing.
I don't think the DMCA applies here. The DMCA was designed to outlaw circumventing encryption for the purpose of obtaining copyrighted materials. Since the protocol isn't "copyrighted" and some clients don't even mention reverse engineering in the EULA, I don't think FastTrak could do anything about it.
Err.. well.. it WAS decentralized... that is until the FastTrak guys decided to be complete bastards and try to shut out Linux users using the giFT client. Then they changed it so that each client HAS to authenticate to a central server.
Thus putting them in the same boat as Napster. Well, serves them right, piss off users they wouldn't support anyway AND get sued by the RIAA. Oh well, they killed themselves.
If you were giving advice/instruction on a subject that has bonafide uses
Oh, you mean sort of like creating a program that would allow people to view DVDs that they bought on a DVD player that they bought? But since it has the ability to be used to pirate films, it's still illegal? I'm sorry, I don't have that much faith as to believe that they'll know the difference.
A provision like this simply puts more power into the hands of companies to get rid of people they don't approve of. Ugh.
Wait... are you honestly upset that when you tried to DOS the site by flooding it with comments that they temporarily banned you?
No, reading further I see it's only because it doesn't say in their FAQ that they'll ban people who try to DOS the site.
So.. you acted like a dick, got banned to keep you from DOSing the site, and you have the nerve to be UPSET about it?
I reread your post, and I still don't see how you can justify being upset.
If i see a site at blah.com with a problem, then I'm going to contact the admin@blah.com If I see merchant X is running a site with problems, I'm going to try to contact merchant X.
So let me get you strait... you think he should go to jail because he notified the wrong person first? Are you serious or just trolling? He found a contact address and told them.
I honestly can't believe you think he should go to jail for not finding the exact right guy to report this to. "What? You told the sergant about it! Only the captian handles these vandalism reports. Put you hands behind your head. This is a serious offense."
*blink*
Tell me you're kidding.
"No, Officer, I didn't want to steal that car, I was just going to notify the owner of the insecurity."
This is the worst anology ever. This is more like someone parking his car out front and yelling "Come look at my car! Come look at my car!" And When someone looks in the window and says the door is unlocked and keys are in the ingition calling the cops to have them arrested.
The part you seem to be missing is that it was an explicitly public access site and he inadvertantly found a hole. He wasn't look for one, he just found one. Would you be arrested for robbery if you saw a $20 bill laying on the sidewalk?
"Argv! Cursed nanoworm!"
Hey! It's not the size of the worm, it's... oh forget it.
I'm an alum as well (WRC BACS/MANA) and actually lived only a few doors down from Adam. Incredibly smart guy.
I bet this has never been seen on slashodot before: RFR!
WFR
Would you expect to get sued for having a copy of "dd" that comes standard on most every Linux distro? No? Why not. It makes it very easy to pirate CDs, DVDs, hell even floppies. And it does so by making a bit by bit copy. Amazing.
DeCSS does not aid in Piracy. It aids in being able to view the content that you paid for in a player that you paid for. That's it.
Hell, maybe we should start sueing everyone who figures out how to copy files by right clicking them and picking "copy" in Windows.
Anyway, my point was that DeCSS does not make pirating movies any easier.
Ya know, that was almost funny.
:-P