You forget, we never elected the current administration in the first place. Fortunately, we will certainly get a chance to unelect them in the fairly near future.
Perhaps, in the spirit of the "changing the law to get one person is OK because public opinion that we've stirred up is against him" news articles we've seen this week, the next administration could change the law retrospectively so we could try the current lot for crimes against humanity?
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I think there are some fundamental differences between LinkedIn and the likes of Facebook, which is why I'm happy to be listed on the one but not the others.
In particular, LinkedIn has access only to professional information about me that I would typically share with a prospective client/employer anyway, and it only collects that information from me personally apart from the basic networking information that is the whole point (and is only collected/reliable with my confirmation anyway).
Facebook, in sharp contrast, got almost no information from me personally when I briefly signed up, yet practically had my whole life story within a couple of days because their entire MO is to get friends to volunteer information about each other. Moreover, the information that Facebook attempts to collect is often very personal and certainly not the sort of thing I would voluntarily share on-line.
Something that always jars with me in these discussions is the implicit assumption that having more choice gets a better result. If you can have either one vendor-locked, closed product that does something well, or a choice between five mutually compatible, publicly documented, open format products, none of which does more than a mediocre job, then you are better off with the better product if what you care about is getting a good job done.
It's fair to be concerned about future-proofing, but provided that there are no legal impediments to extracting the data afterwards if you wish to, the whole closed format thing seems to be fear of a problem that history has shown is usually illusory. If people want to migrate away from a popular closed format, the market for conversion tools will deal with the problem. Until that happens, it's just tough that competing with an established, complex software offering comes with a high barrier to entry. Again, if the established product starts to suck enough, it will become worthwhile for a competitor to climb over that barrier because the market will reward them. If not, well, that suggests that existing product was doing its job well enough anyway and the lock-in wasn't causing a problem in practice.
You can curb the expected curtilage rights to varying degrees by posting "Do Not Enter" signs, fencing in your yard, gating your driveway, etc. Otherwise the default is "anyone can enter," for reasonable/expected use.
Indeed, and that's probably a reasonable default. The thing is, I imagine most people would expect and consider it reasonable for, say, the postman to walk up their drive to deliver the mail. (I appreciate that in some places, you have a separate mailbox at the roadside anyway, but not everywhere does.) I don't think most people would expect or consider it reasonable for a commercial organisation to drive a spy van up to their backyard, film the area where their children play, and then put it on the Internet in a searchable form. It's disturbing how many people in these discussions don't seem to see any difference between those two activities.
Any edge a manager, HR person has to find out about potential staff they will use.
Unfortunately, in practice that isn't quite true. Anything they can find they might use. There is no guarantee that they will be at all diligent about it; realistically, it's pretty unlikely if you're applying for a job with a lot of demand, as they'll be looking to cut the pile down dramatically as quickly and easily as possible.
This is regrettable, because it does mean they'll probably lose a few good candidates possibly including the best one, but from their point of view that's OK as long as there are still some acceptable candidates left and they can hire one of them. Heck, I do the same: I've ruled out working for what might have been quite good employers because something tingled my sixth sense the wrong way at interview or one of my standard red flags occurred in the contract. Unless they are exceptional in other ways — and exactly zero places I've ever applied to that have also exhibited warning signs has been — I don't bother negotiating further to find out whether they would be willing to change their contractual conditions or whether it was just one isolated person who put me off at interview.
Your argument for effective alternatives to patronage and copyright is that one person has received a little over 1,000 donations for an alpha-level ASCII-art game over the course of several years?
How is this different from the current situation where a limited number of corporations are funding a select few artists, then effectively building a marketing haystack around said artists, tranforming all other outlets into the proverbial needle?
That's an interesting analogy, and a much better argument than I've heard from most around here.
I think the first key difference is that in this case the corporations actually derive their income from sharing the works. They do not sponsor artists out of charity, but out of an expectation that the works produced by the artist will be sufficiently valuable to generate good returns. This in turn means they are in some sense acting as a meritocracy. Of course, you or I might not personally like the mass-market, low-cost products that tend to dominate the results from such a system, but that's just capitalist economics at work: lots of people do like that stuff, which is why they pay for it, and those of us who might prefer more niche products have to accept that it will cost more for us to sponsor their creation and distribution because the work involved is similar but the market smaller.
The other key difference is that the Internet itself is something of a meritocracy in this respect: anyone is free to share their work if they wish, and then anyone else is free to enjoy it. If a work has sufficient value, there are plenty of places for it to be discovered and plenty of opportunities to generate lots of income for the artist. If this does not happen for small-time artists but does for big name artists backed by Big Media, and as a consequence many more people enjoy the work of the big name artists, then that is a strong argument for the current system, because it shows that the system is having the intended effect of incentivising the creation and distribution of works.
Most of it never will run out in our lifetimes because of the perversion of copyright.
It doesn't matter how many times you repeat that, it's still a straw man, because the music and movies being traded over P2P are usually recent releases or even pre-releases.
That suggests the question, what does "fully informed" mean? [...] People will copy music at the least provocation, so I suspect that most people don't think copying music is wrong, or at least, any more wrong than what the record companies do.
People used not to see what was wrong with using a mobile phone while driving, even though the evidence plainly showed that it dramatically increased the risk of accidents. They stubbornly maintained that they knew better, and they were in the top x% of drivers, and they wouldn't have an accident. However, when shown the hard data, or better yet put on a simulator that can show them objectively their own abilities, most people agree with laws banning the use of mobile phones while driving. The few who do not and continue to behave in a way that has negative consequences for others are what we call "criminals".
An analogous argument can be applied to copyright. A lot of people, acting in isolation, see copyright infringement as a "victimless crime", and rationalise their own infringement away as somehow getting even with Big Media who have enough money already. And yet those same people, when faced with a small-time artist just trying to make an honest living and pay the rent, go strangely quiet: witness the comments on forums like this one when a regular Slashdot poster who happens to be an independent game developer in the UK asked some honest questions about how to deal with piracy a few months ago. Moreover, those infringers who are happy to rip off big companies because "they have enough money" are often the first people to bitch about how their pension funds and savings aren't worth what they used to be in the current economic climate, conveniently ignoring the fact that those big companies don't just make money for half a dozen top executives, they also pay dividends to shareholders — most of which are institutions managing pensions and savings.
People still make media for the pure joy of it and - shock amazement - it tends to be of higher quality than that which is made for commercial purposes. The commercial stuff often has more complexity especially in video and video games, but usually they are overconvoluted where they should be simple. [...] Your chosen vision of copyright law does nothing to induce the production of genuinely valuable art which advances our society, yet instead produces more backstreet boys and christina aguilera albums.
And here your entire argument falls apart. Who are you to judge what art is "genuinely valuable" and "advances our society"? Millions of people enjoy listening to the kinds of music you describe: many of them pay good money for it, and if many more didn't rip it illegally then we wouldn't be having this conversation. As a total benefit in terms of enjoyment in society, those big name artists who make it on the back of Big Media support generate vastly more benefit than any small-time independent artist or author or high-brow literature.
It's called civil disobedience and it is well recognized as a valid tactic of last resort.
No, it's not, though it makes a convenient excuse for those who condone illegal behaviour to pretend it's OK.
The point of civil disobedience is to break the law and then accept the consequences. The rationale is that if too many people in a society are willing to do that, it overloads the legal system, and thus demonstrates the unjustness of the law and forces the administration of the day to act.
Ripping content illegally while hoping you don't get caught doing it isn't civil disobedience, it's just breaking the law.
I see this trial as a trial of Sweden's sovereignty.
<Devil's advocate>
Sweden is a signatory to major international copyright agreements such as TRIPS.
If they have chosen not to implement the required protections in their own national law, while availaing themselves of the protection of others under these agreements, then they are untrustworthy and deceitful.
This is a trial of Sweden's willingness to meet its obligations under agreements it signed up to more than a decade ago and whose benefits its own citizens have enjoyed ever since.
Like there's a good defense of endless copyright extension and patent trolling?
Hardly any of the content being traded over P2P and attracting the attention of Big Media is anywhere near running out of copyright, even on the original terms of just a few years. Patents have nothing to do with this at all.
I could go on, but lets face it. When has anyone fought what the majority of people want and won?
What few studies there have been that might realistically indicate the views of a whole population mostly don't support your implied position about what the majority of people support. Of course, if you get all your news on a controversial subject like this from heavily biased sources like Slashdot, you probably place a lot of weight on the one or two headline-grabbing stories about exceptions to this, and overlook everything else.
Even then, you're ignoring the fact that a lot of people don't really understand the issues surrounding copyright or the arguments for and against it. The important question if you're looking at the ethics is what the majority of people would want if fully informed. (I suspect the answer is for governments to penalise Big Media for price gouging; for smaller, independent artists to have better opportunities; and for legitimate sources of content that offer fair prices to be more easily identifiable.)
Trying to act like a resource is scarce when it is not is part of the whole problem to begin with, once made, digital works are not scarce and can always fulfill supply.
Sure, it's just those little words "once made" that you seem to be completely ignoring in your argument.
There's no good argument considering the resource is not scarce.
The good argument is that if you can't amortize the cost of making the work in the first place over a large number of sales, you go back to the old patronage model of yestercentury, where a lot of things only get made if one very rich patron chooses to fund them, and then that patron is the only person who gets to choose who can enjoy them.
IMHO piracy is fair reaction regardless of whether the people pirating do so for political reasons in addition to the fact that it's possible. Considering to how twisted the law and legal system has become. How the law is bought and sold by those with the most money. And the endless attempts at DRM and trying to licesense everything instead of people actually owning the stuff they buy. I consider it a counter force to the overwhelming concentration of corporate and private power at the expense of the public good and the individuals rights to own what they buy and not trying to be turned into serfs of consumption via legal corruption of the law and peoples rights.
So because some aspects of the legal system are not working as well as they could in some countries, and some suppliers are offering deliberately crippled products to the market, you think the correct solution is to revert to anarchy where anyone can do anything they like regardless of the law, rather than simply not using products from suppliers you don't like and letting market forces educate them? If that is the case, then I submit that you are completely lacking in perspective on the significance of this whole issue compared to the general principles of law in a civilised society. Not being able to listen to a bit of music without coughing up less than a dollar for it at an online download service is some way short of justifying civil disobedience — not that ripping music in the hope that you won't get caught is really civil disobedience anyway.
Of course it could be that. I just think it's sad how many people around here seem to be assuming that it is that, just because this particular high-ranking official is female. I hope it's just a young male insecurity thing amplified by the profile of Slashdot posters, and not a reflection of how sexist society as a whole still remains.
How about posting questions straight to slashdot, you might just get some true, no kiss-ass, answers for once from people who aren't trying to make points and kissing up to ambitions.
Of course, the advice from Slashdot would be completely neutral and have no bias at all... except where anything to do with software or databases was concerned, but I can't imagine how this role would be affected by that sort of contraint!
Repeat after me: If you use a free service, you are entitled to exactly what you paid for.
Repeat after that: If I don't back up my work, one day I may lose it all.
It's not like either of these things is news, and if it really is a freebie blogging service that Google provides where this is allegedly happening, then of course Google are perfectly within their rights to do anything up to and including shutting down the whole service without notice if they want to.
It also amazes me that people still trust so much stuff they'd want to keep to free on-line e-mail services, Google's or otherwise. These things do go wrong or get closed down, and you have absolutely no comeback if that happens.
Gurlz iz rare in IT. The work/life balance sucks hard. I hope she knows that.
Yes, because obviously being female and having only made it to a senior position appointed by the most powerful man in the world, she must be a clueless newbie in need of advice on work-life balance from Slashdot...
Actually that depends on what you're doing. I don't know about Visio but photographers use both GIMP and CinePaint for photo editing.
Sure, and some people use low-end commercial offerings like Paint Shop Pro for basic retouching, too. Nevertheless, with my web design hat on, I've met a fair few digital artists and a handful of serious photographers, and 100% of both groups used Photoshop for serious work.
An open source program for editing vector graphics is Inkscape while Scribus is for desktop publishing.
Ironically, I almost preemptively countered those two in my previous post, but decided that probably no-one would seriously put them up against Creative Suite so didn't bother.
I have nothing against either of those products, and I don't doubt that they have potential, but right now they are children's toys in an adult world. Scribus is a DTP package that can't do proper typography with OpenType fonts. Inkscape is a vector art package that saves as a variation of SVG, which introduces all kinds of fundamental limitations in what it can do (also, coincidentally, including typography). Both have cumbersome interfaces that make what should be routine operations very difficult; last time I checked, the recommended "workaround" for some basic bugs in Inkscape was still to edit the underlying SVG by hand! And from direct personal experience, on several occasions when I've given them a fair try, they are hopelessly unstable, at least on Windows.
Bottom line, if I were a professional designer trying to produce professional-looking business cards and brochures for a client, could I realistically use these products? No. And that's the end of the debate, really.
I will give you that visio and photoshop is currently better than the oss solutions
That's very generous of you. Can I have Illustrator and InDesign too, if I ask really nicely?
how the hell is office better than openoffice (subject to my criticisms posted else where)
Looking through your posting history, the last comment you made on that subject seems to be "For example, openoffice sucks, compared to MS Office." Then again, I notice that you kept getting modded down as a troll as well, so perhaps I won't waste any more time on this point.
And what the fuck are you smoking when you tell me outlook and exchange is better than an OSS solution? What is in outlook that you *must have*?
What OSS solution do you propose that offers all the centralised co-ordination features of the Outlook/Exchange combination? One of these millenia, the Mozilla gang might actually have a basic calendar application... but I wouldn't bet on it.
For the students it is of great value, if they are able to work efficiently with open source software.
Why? Variations on this argument are common on Slashdot, but rarely backed up.
Students can work with OSS anyway if they want to, without any help from the university beyond supplying a broadband Internet connection.
Meanwhile, students cannot necessarily work with industry standard commercial software without the university providing it for them, even though such software is:
usually more powerful and able to produce better results than the OSS knock-offs, and
much more widely used in industries where graduates may need to get jobs.
(I'm assuming we're talking about things like Microsoft Office, Outlook/Exchange for e-mail, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics and DTP work, and similar applications where OSS really have no competition to offer, not things like programming tools, multimedia players and TeX.)
All they will have to do is randomly accuse people with and sit back and watch the show and collect money.
Hang on a minute. If this is to be a criminal act, shouldn't the fines be treated the same way as those in any other criminal case, so that any punitive damages (in jurisdictions that have the concept) are retained by the government to use for the benefit of all? Big Media might be awarded some financial compensation, but my impression was that in most legal systems, that would only be on the level of provable financial loss in a criminal case, and as we know, the provable financial loss in cases like these is a subject of much debate and courts haven't been quick to accept the "one copy = one lost sale" argument.
OK, but if you have an insane legal system trying to enforce laws that are reasonable in principle, then it's the mechanics of your legal system that need fixing, not the laws.
I don't get the problem people have with this. You don't accidentally run a service that people use to commit commercial scale copyright infringement. Such infringement is bound to be damaging to some degree to the legal rightsholder; claiming that this is not so is no more credible than the opposite extreme of claiming that every copy represents a lost sale. And last time I looked, you didn't have to commit murder or GBH for financial gain in order for it to be considered a criminal activity.
I get that some people just have a problem with copyright in the first place, but I don't understand why anyone else would have a problem with a law that punishes exactly the people who knowingly commit acts that are certain to be significantly damaging to the holders of the legal rights. What other kind of law do you want, one that punishes accidental infringers, one that punishes minor/incidental infringers who do little real harm, or one that protects someone other than the legal rightsholder?
I don't think there's much doubt that money could be saved through increased government efficiency. It's just that every party at every election seems to make some sort of dramatic claim about how they'll do this and save us all a fortune in wasted taxes, yet after every election it never happens. I have little faith that the Lib Dems would do better than anyone else on this count if they ever actually got themselves elected.
The problem we have in the UK isn't just football team mentality, it's the bizarre way our "representatives" are elected. Well, the way some of them are elected, anyway. It is disturbing that the so-called "upper house" was, until recently, a group of people who hold office only because a distant ancestor was rich or because they hold a high office in a particular religion (yes, really). These days, they are almost all appointed, though I think the 92 hereditary peers who survived Labour's initial reforms are still there, and the Lords conveniently overturned a strong vote in the Commons for a 100% appointed upper house, arguing for 100% appointed (and therefore their own jobs) instead. In any case, members of the upper house still retain office regardless of trivia like criminal convictions and accepting bribes to "do the right thing" with certain laws. Perhaps we should just go back to the fifteenth century and let the church run the show? At least 5% of the population are practising Christians, which gives them more moral authority than our upper house today!
Meanwhile, the first-past-the-post voting system ensures that the Commons alternates between the two dominant parties with a huge majority each, even though that is in no way representative of the strength of support the party in power actually carries among the population at the time. Don't even get me started on European government, which is a fantastic excuse for political parties to push through legislation their electorate don't want because "Europe told me to, mummy!", while conveniently overlooking the way that Europe only considered the issue because the unelected representatives of the country asked them to.
In any case, none of this helps me: I have fairly moderate, well-considered, and (I think) consistent political views, yet none of the parties with even a chance of getting a seat in Parliament represents my views. Labour are a complete waste of space, even if you're one of the "hard-working families" they were formed to look out for, and the current administration has no democratic mandate anyway. The Tories don't know what their policies are, though they keep trying to sound really convinced about what they believe this week, and they're certainly still on the draconian side when it comes to state power and even worse when it comes to allowing businesses to become the most powerful players in the game. (They're in favour of copyright term extension too, BTW, despite an overwhelming majority — for once the over-used term is justified — of respondents to the government's Gowers Review criticising such a move.) Cameron all but washed his hands of one of the few guys he had with the guts to stand up for what he believed in. The Lib Dems seem to think an arbitrarily high level of tax on people who earn more than average is "fair", probably because very few such people will ever vote for them anyway, and their policies on things like the environment and transport are the kind of thing you can only say if you're never going to achieve office because they conveniently overlook trivia like keeping the lights on and getting people to work. The one guy they had with any sort of clue was leader only briefly, and then stepped aside for another guy with all the depth of a two-dimensional object. Then, in England at least, you're into minor parties like the Greens (whose one issue got stolen by everyone else), the BNP (who do a disturbingly good job of sounding reasonable on some topics, until you realise what they really mean), the UKIP (who also might sound plausible on those sorts of issues, but have no credibility after pulling stunts like letting Kilroy-Silk's ego run the show for a while), and so on.
So who does that leave for me, and a heavy majority of friends I've talked to on political subjects, who believe in things like individual rights and freedoms, in exchange for individual responsibility; strong laws, but due process to enforce them; small, weak government; low taxes; healthy European relationships for tr
Exactly. While it's cute to argue that all sites should degrade gracefully, it's simply not worth it for a lot of site operators to make everything work as best it can without Javascript, just to cater to a tiny part of the market who block JS. If those people choose to disable fundamental functionality, they get to suck up the consequences. Meanwhile, for most people visiting most sites and hoping for a good experience without irritations, NoScript isn't even close to an acceptable solution.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget, we never elected the current administration in the first place. Fortunately, we will certainly get a chance to unelect them in the fairly near future.
Perhaps, in the spirit of the "changing the law to get one person is OK because public opinion that we've stirred up is against him" news articles we've seen this week, the next administration could change the law retrospectively so we could try the current lot for crimes against humanity?
I think there are some fundamental differences between LinkedIn and the likes of Facebook, which is why I'm happy to be listed on the one but not the others.
In particular, LinkedIn has access only to professional information about me that I would typically share with a prospective client/employer anyway, and it only collects that information from me personally apart from the basic networking information that is the whole point (and is only collected/reliable with my confirmation anyway).
Facebook, in sharp contrast, got almost no information from me personally when I briefly signed up, yet practically had my whole life story within a couple of days because their entire MO is to get friends to volunteer information about each other. Moreover, the information that Facebook attempts to collect is often very personal and certainly not the sort of thing I would voluntarily share on-line.
Yes, indeed.
Something that always jars with me in these discussions is the implicit assumption that having more choice gets a better result. If you can have either one vendor-locked, closed product that does something well, or a choice between five mutually compatible, publicly documented, open format products, none of which does more than a mediocre job, then you are better off with the better product if what you care about is getting a good job done.
It's fair to be concerned about future-proofing, but provided that there are no legal impediments to extracting the data afterwards if you wish to, the whole closed format thing seems to be fear of a problem that history has shown is usually illusory. If people want to migrate away from a popular closed format, the market for conversion tools will deal with the problem. Until that happens, it's just tough that competing with an established, complex software offering comes with a high barrier to entry. Again, if the established product starts to suck enough, it will become worthwhile for a competitor to climb over that barrier because the market will reward them. If not, well, that suggests that existing product was doing its job well enough anyway and the lock-in wasn't causing a problem in practice.
You can curb the expected curtilage rights to varying degrees by posting "Do Not Enter" signs, fencing in your yard, gating your driveway, etc. Otherwise the default is "anyone can enter," for reasonable/expected use.
Indeed, and that's probably a reasonable default. The thing is, I imagine most people would expect and consider it reasonable for, say, the postman to walk up their drive to deliver the mail. (I appreciate that in some places, you have a separate mailbox at the roadside anyway, but not everywhere does.) I don't think most people would expect or consider it reasonable for a commercial organisation to drive a spy van up to their backyard, film the area where their children play, and then put it on the Internet in a searchable form. It's disturbing how many people in these discussions don't seem to see any difference between those two activities.
Any edge a manager, HR person has to find out about potential staff they will use.
Unfortunately, in practice that isn't quite true. Anything they can find they might use. There is no guarantee that they will be at all diligent about it; realistically, it's pretty unlikely if you're applying for a job with a lot of demand, as they'll be looking to cut the pile down dramatically as quickly and easily as possible.
This is regrettable, because it does mean they'll probably lose a few good candidates possibly including the best one, but from their point of view that's OK as long as there are still some acceptable candidates left and they can hire one of them. Heck, I do the same: I've ruled out working for what might have been quite good employers because something tingled my sixth sense the wrong way at interview or one of my standard red flags occurred in the contract. Unless they are exceptional in other ways — and exactly zero places I've ever applied to that have also exhibited warning signs has been — I don't bother negotiating further to find out whether they would be willing to change their contractual conditions or whether it was just one isolated person who put me off at interview.
Your argument for effective alternatives to patronage and copyright is that one person has received a little over 1,000 donations for an alpha-level ASCII-art game over the course of several years?
Do you actually have any evidence beyond wishful thinking to support such a claim?
Or are you just hoping that if you state it as fact often enough with a sympathetic audience on Slashdot, it will become true?
How is this different from the current situation where a limited number of corporations are funding a select few artists, then effectively building a marketing haystack around said artists, tranforming all other outlets into the proverbial needle?
That's an interesting analogy, and a much better argument than I've heard from most around here.
I think the first key difference is that in this case the corporations actually derive their income from sharing the works. They do not sponsor artists out of charity, but out of an expectation that the works produced by the artist will be sufficiently valuable to generate good returns. This in turn means they are in some sense acting as a meritocracy. Of course, you or I might not personally like the mass-market, low-cost products that tend to dominate the results from such a system, but that's just capitalist economics at work: lots of people do like that stuff, which is why they pay for it, and those of us who might prefer more niche products have to accept that it will cost more for us to sponsor their creation and distribution because the work involved is similar but the market smaller.
The other key difference is that the Internet itself is something of a meritocracy in this respect: anyone is free to share their work if they wish, and then anyone else is free to enjoy it. If a work has sufficient value, there are plenty of places for it to be discovered and plenty of opportunities to generate lots of income for the artist. If this does not happen for small-time artists but does for big name artists backed by Big Media, and as a consequence many more people enjoy the work of the big name artists, then that is a strong argument for the current system, because it shows that the system is having the intended effect of incentivising the creation and distribution of works.
Most of it never will run out in our lifetimes because of the perversion of copyright.
It doesn't matter how many times you repeat that, it's still a straw man, because the music and movies being traded over P2P are usually recent releases or even pre-releases.
That suggests the question, what does "fully informed" mean? [...] People will copy music at the least provocation, so I suspect that most people don't think copying music is wrong, or at least, any more wrong than what the record companies do.
People used not to see what was wrong with using a mobile phone while driving, even though the evidence plainly showed that it dramatically increased the risk of accidents. They stubbornly maintained that they knew better, and they were in the top x% of drivers, and they wouldn't have an accident. However, when shown the hard data, or better yet put on a simulator that can show them objectively their own abilities, most people agree with laws banning the use of mobile phones while driving. The few who do not and continue to behave in a way that has negative consequences for others are what we call "criminals".
An analogous argument can be applied to copyright. A lot of people, acting in isolation, see copyright infringement as a "victimless crime", and rationalise their own infringement away as somehow getting even with Big Media who have enough money already. And yet those same people, when faced with a small-time artist just trying to make an honest living and pay the rent, go strangely quiet: witness the comments on forums like this one when a regular Slashdot poster who happens to be an independent game developer in the UK asked some honest questions about how to deal with piracy a few months ago. Moreover, those infringers who are happy to rip off big companies because "they have enough money" are often the first people to bitch about how their pension funds and savings aren't worth what they used to be in the current economic climate, conveniently ignoring the fact that those big companies don't just make money for half a dozen top executives, they also pay dividends to shareholders — most of which are institutions managing pensions and savings.
People still make media for the pure joy of it and - shock amazement - it tends to be of higher quality than that which is made for commercial purposes. The commercial stuff often has more complexity especially in video and video games, but usually they are overconvoluted where they should be simple. [...] Your chosen vision of copyright law does nothing to induce the production of genuinely valuable art which advances our society, yet instead produces more backstreet boys and christina aguilera albums.
And here your entire argument falls apart. Who are you to judge what art is "genuinely valuable" and "advances our society"? Millions of people enjoy listening to the kinds of music you describe: many of them pay good money for it, and if many more didn't rip it illegally then we wouldn't be having this conversation. As a total benefit in terms of enjoyment in society, those big name artists who make it on the back of Big Media support generate vastly more benefit than any small-time independent artist or author or high-brow literature.
It's called civil disobedience and it is well recognized as a valid tactic of last resort.
No, it's not, though it makes a convenient excuse for those who condone illegal behaviour to pretend it's OK.
The point of civil disobedience is to break the law and then accept the consequences. The rationale is that if too many people in a society are willing to do that, it overloads the legal system, and thus demonstrates the unjustness of the law and forces the administration of the day to act.
Ripping content illegally while hoping you don't get caught doing it isn't civil disobedience, it's just breaking the law.
In any case, if yo
I see this trial as a trial of Sweden's sovereignty.
<Devil's advocate>
Sweden is a signatory to major international copyright agreements such as TRIPS.
If they have chosen not to implement the required protections in their own national law, while availaing themselves of the protection of others under these agreements, then they are untrustworthy and deceitful.
This is a trial of Sweden's willingness to meet its obligations under agreements it signed up to more than a decade ago and whose benefits its own citizens have enjoyed ever since.
</Devil's advocate>
Like there's a good defense of endless copyright extension and patent trolling?
Hardly any of the content being traded over P2P and attracting the attention of Big Media is anywhere near running out of copyright, even on the original terms of just a few years. Patents have nothing to do with this at all.
I could go on, but lets face it. When has anyone fought what the majority of people want and won?
What few studies there have been that might realistically indicate the views of a whole population mostly don't support your implied position about what the majority of people support. Of course, if you get all your news on a controversial subject like this from heavily biased sources like Slashdot, you probably place a lot of weight on the one or two headline-grabbing stories about exceptions to this, and overlook everything else.
Even then, you're ignoring the fact that a lot of people don't really understand the issues surrounding copyright or the arguments for and against it. The important question if you're looking at the ethics is what the majority of people would want if fully informed. (I suspect the answer is for governments to penalise Big Media for price gouging; for smaller, independent artists to have better opportunities; and for legitimate sources of content that offer fair prices to be more easily identifiable.)
Trying to act like a resource is scarce when it is not is part of the whole problem to begin with, once made, digital works are not scarce and can always fulfill supply.
Sure, it's just those little words "once made" that you seem to be completely ignoring in your argument.
There's no good argument considering the resource is not scarce.
The good argument is that if you can't amortize the cost of making the work in the first place over a large number of sales, you go back to the old patronage model of yestercentury, where a lot of things only get made if one very rich patron chooses to fund them, and then that patron is the only person who gets to choose who can enjoy them.
IMHO piracy is fair reaction regardless of whether the people pirating do so for political reasons in addition to the fact that it's possible. Considering to how twisted the law and legal system has become. How the law is bought and sold by those with the most money. And the endless attempts at DRM and trying to licesense everything instead of people actually owning the stuff they buy. I consider it a counter force to the overwhelming concentration of corporate and private power at the expense of the public good and the individuals rights to own what they buy and not trying to be turned into serfs of consumption via legal corruption of the law and peoples rights.
So because some aspects of the legal system are not working as well as they could in some countries, and some suppliers are offering deliberately crippled products to the market, you think the correct solution is to revert to anarchy where anyone can do anything they like regardless of the law, rather than simply not using products from suppliers you don't like and letting market forces educate them? If that is the case, then I submit that you are completely lacking in perspective on the significance of this whole issue compared to the general principles of law in a civilised society. Not being able to listen to a bit of music without coughing up less than a dollar for it at an online download service is some way short of justifying civil disobedience — not that ripping music in the hope that you won't get caught is really civil disobedience anyway.
In most cases, exploits don't appear in the wild until Microsoft release a patch for it.
If that were a good argument, Microsoft would do well never to release any patches at all.
Of course it could be that. I just think it's sad how many people around here seem to be assuming that it is that, just because this particular high-ranking official is female. I hope it's just a young male insecurity thing amplified by the profile of Slashdot posters, and not a reflection of how sexist society as a whole still remains.
How about posting questions straight to slashdot, you might just get some true, no kiss-ass, answers for once from people who aren't trying to make points and kissing up to ambitions.
Of course, the advice from Slashdot would be completely neutral and have no bias at all... except where anything to do with software or databases was concerned, but I can't imagine how this role would be affected by that sort of contraint!
Repeat after me: If you use a free service, you are entitled to exactly what you paid for.
Repeat after that: If I don't back up my work, one day I may lose it all.
It's not like either of these things is news, and if it really is a freebie blogging service that Google provides where this is allegedly happening, then of course Google are perfectly within their rights to do anything up to and including shutting down the whole service without notice if they want to.
It also amazes me that people still trust so much stuff they'd want to keep to free on-line e-mail services, Google's or otherwise. These things do go wrong or get closed down, and you have absolutely no comeback if that happens.
Gurlz iz rare in IT. The work/life balance sucks hard. I hope she knows that.
Yes, because obviously being female and having only made it to a senior position appointed by the most powerful man in the world, she must be a clueless newbie in need of advice on work-life balance from Slashdot...
Actually that depends on what you're doing. I don't know about Visio but photographers use both GIMP and CinePaint for photo editing.
Sure, and some people use low-end commercial offerings like Paint Shop Pro for basic retouching, too. Nevertheless, with my web design hat on, I've met a fair few digital artists and a handful of serious photographers, and 100% of both groups used Photoshop for serious work.
An open source program for editing vector graphics is Inkscape while Scribus is for desktop publishing.
Ironically, I almost preemptively countered those two in my previous post, but decided that probably no-one would seriously put them up against Creative Suite so didn't bother.
I have nothing against either of those products, and I don't doubt that they have potential, but right now they are children's toys in an adult world. Scribus is a DTP package that can't do proper typography with OpenType fonts. Inkscape is a vector art package that saves as a variation of SVG, which introduces all kinds of fundamental limitations in what it can do (also, coincidentally, including typography). Both have cumbersome interfaces that make what should be routine operations very difficult; last time I checked, the recommended "workaround" for some basic bugs in Inkscape was still to edit the underlying SVG by hand! And from direct personal experience, on several occasions when I've given them a fair try, they are hopelessly unstable, at least on Windows.
Bottom line, if I were a professional designer trying to produce professional-looking business cards and brochures for a client, could I realistically use these products? No. And that's the end of the debate, really.
I will give you that visio and photoshop is currently better than the oss solutions
That's very generous of you. Can I have Illustrator and InDesign too, if I ask really nicely?
how the hell is office better than openoffice (subject to my criticisms posted else where)
Looking through your posting history, the last comment you made on that subject seems to be "For example, openoffice sucks, compared to MS Office." Then again, I notice that you kept getting modded down as a troll as well, so perhaps I won't waste any more time on this point.
And what the fuck are you smoking when you tell me outlook and exchange is better than an OSS solution? What is in outlook that you *must have*?
What OSS solution do you propose that offers all the centralised co-ordination features of the Outlook/Exchange combination? One of these millenia, the Mozilla gang might actually have a basic calendar application... but I wouldn't bet on it.
For the students it is of great value, if they are able to work efficiently with open source software.
Why? Variations on this argument are common on Slashdot, but rarely backed up.
Students can work with OSS anyway if they want to, without any help from the university beyond supplying a broadband Internet connection.
Meanwhile, students cannot necessarily work with industry standard commercial software without the university providing it for them, even though such software is:
(I'm assuming we're talking about things like Microsoft Office, Outlook/Exchange for e-mail, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics and DTP work, and similar applications where OSS really have no competition to offer, not things like programming tools, multimedia players and TeX.)
All they will have to do is randomly accuse people with and sit back and watch the show and collect money.
Hang on a minute. If this is to be a criminal act, shouldn't the fines be treated the same way as those in any other criminal case, so that any punitive damages (in jurisdictions that have the concept) are retained by the government to use for the benefit of all? Big Media might be awarded some financial compensation, but my impression was that in most legal systems, that would only be on the level of provable financial loss in a criminal case, and as we know, the provable financial loss in cases like these is a subject of much debate and courts haven't been quick to accept the "one copy = one lost sale" argument.
OK, but if you have an insane legal system trying to enforce laws that are reasonable in principle, then it's the mechanics of your legal system that need fixing, not the laws.
I don't get the problem people have with this. You don't accidentally run a service that people use to commit commercial scale copyright infringement. Such infringement is bound to be damaging to some degree to the legal rightsholder; claiming that this is not so is no more credible than the opposite extreme of claiming that every copy represents a lost sale. And last time I looked, you didn't have to commit murder or GBH for financial gain in order for it to be considered a criminal activity.
I get that some people just have a problem with copyright in the first place, but I don't understand why anyone else would have a problem with a law that punishes exactly the people who knowingly commit acts that are certain to be significantly damaging to the holders of the legal rights. What other kind of law do you want, one that punishes accidental infringers, one that punishes minor/incidental infringers who do little real harm, or one that protects someone other than the legal rightsholder?
Get involved in the party closer to your heart and change things
The problem is that there isn't a party that's anywhere near my heart at all. If there were, then sure, I'd consider helping.
I don't think there's much doubt that money could be saved through increased government efficiency. It's just that every party at every election seems to make some sort of dramatic claim about how they'll do this and save us all a fortune in wasted taxes, yet after every election it never happens. I have little faith that the Lib Dems would do better than anyone else on this count if they ever actually got themselves elected.
The problem we have in the UK isn't just football team mentality, it's the bizarre way our "representatives" are elected. Well, the way some of them are elected, anyway. It is disturbing that the so-called "upper house" was, until recently, a group of people who hold office only because a distant ancestor was rich or because they hold a high office in a particular religion (yes, really). These days, they are almost all appointed, though I think the 92 hereditary peers who survived Labour's initial reforms are still there, and the Lords conveniently overturned a strong vote in the Commons for a 100% appointed upper house, arguing for 100% appointed (and therefore their own jobs) instead. In any case, members of the upper house still retain office regardless of trivia like criminal convictions and accepting bribes to "do the right thing" with certain laws. Perhaps we should just go back to the fifteenth century and let the church run the show? At least 5% of the population are practising Christians, which gives them more moral authority than our upper house today!
Meanwhile, the first-past-the-post voting system ensures that the Commons alternates between the two dominant parties with a huge majority each, even though that is in no way representative of the strength of support the party in power actually carries among the population at the time. Don't even get me started on European government, which is a fantastic excuse for political parties to push through legislation their electorate don't want because "Europe told me to, mummy!", while conveniently overlooking the way that Europe only considered the issue because the unelected representatives of the country asked them to.
In any case, none of this helps me: I have fairly moderate, well-considered, and (I think) consistent political views, yet none of the parties with even a chance of getting a seat in Parliament represents my views. Labour are a complete waste of space, even if you're one of the "hard-working families" they were formed to look out for, and the current administration has no democratic mandate anyway. The Tories don't know what their policies are, though they keep trying to sound really convinced about what they believe this week, and they're certainly still on the draconian side when it comes to state power and even worse when it comes to allowing businesses to become the most powerful players in the game. (They're in favour of copyright term extension too, BTW, despite an overwhelming majority — for once the over-used term is justified — of respondents to the government's Gowers Review criticising such a move.) Cameron all but washed his hands of one of the few guys he had with the guts to stand up for what he believed in. The Lib Dems seem to think an arbitrarily high level of tax on people who earn more than average is "fair", probably because very few such people will ever vote for them anyway, and their policies on things like the environment and transport are the kind of thing you can only say if you're never going to achieve office because they conveniently overlook trivia like keeping the lights on and getting people to work. The one guy they had with any sort of clue was leader only briefly, and then stepped aside for another guy with all the depth of a two-dimensional object. Then, in England at least, you're into minor parties like the Greens (whose one issue got stolen by everyone else), the BNP (who do a disturbingly good job of sounding reasonable on some topics, until you realise what they really mean), the UKIP (who also might sound plausible on those sorts of issues, but have no credibility after pulling stunts like letting Kilroy-Silk's ego run the show for a while), and so on.
So who does that leave for me, and a heavy majority of friends I've talked to on political subjects, who believe in things like individual rights and freedoms, in exchange for individual responsibility; strong laws, but due process to enforce them; small, weak government; low taxes; healthy European relationships for tr
Exactly. While it's cute to argue that all sites should degrade gracefully, it's simply not worth it for a lot of site operators to make everything work as best it can without Javascript, just to cater to a tiny part of the market who block JS. If those people choose to disable fundamental functionality, they get to suck up the consequences. Meanwhile, for most people visiting most sites and hoping for a good experience without irritations, NoScript isn't even close to an acceptable solution.