I would say that another user downloading a file from your PC would definitely count as "assigning". You are either implicitly or explicitly making your legal mp3s available for download by others. That's distribution in my book.
Besides, even if you might not be violating the exact letter of the law, you're certainly violating the spirit of it, and that can get a judgement levied against you if the defintion is close enough that the judge decides it'll work.
It might be legal for the person downloading, since they are legitimately entitled to space/time shift copyrighted material as long as it's covered by Fair Use. It's only legal if the source they're downloading from is an agent authorized by the copyright holder to distribute those songs.
It's still not legal for the person providing the file to download to distribute those songs without permission of the copyright holder.
Let me repeat this in case everyone else didn't get it the first time: It is not legal for one to make copyrighted material available for downloading without the permission of the copyright holder.
It doesn't matter if both you and the person downloading a song from you own the CD from which the given song comes. It is still illegal for you to distribute that song to that person without the permission of the copyright holder.
I know I'm beating this subject to death, but it seems like a lot of people have having a very difficult time grasping this concept.
The downloading isn't the part that's always illegal, it's the unauthorized distribution that's landing people in court. The larger distributors are the people that the RIAA are going after. This is exactly what we've wanted to see.
Come off of the limb, I'd hate to see it snap out from under you. There's several MS services that run as System and are flagged Interactive in Win XP.
Like the Print Spooler, for example. As well as Protected Storage, Task Scheduler, and a few others, including Network Connections.
That's right, if your machine is connected to any kind of network at all, you're vulnerable.
Policies? I remember a handy little program that would reset a system's policies and prevent them from being pulled from the server at next boot.
I've probably still got it sitting on my hard drive somewhere. I don't know if this will still work XP, or even 2k. Should I ever get the opportunity again, I might check.:)
It doesn't really require someone to be sitting at the console.
Socially engineer yourself a login and hijack the machine remotely via Terminal Services (or Remote Desktop Connection, which is ENABLED by default in XP). Owie.
Yes, clueful sysadmins or netadmins will make sure that port 3389 (IIRC) is firewalled, but there's lots of admins that are either not clueful or overrided by a PHB.
Don't believe me? Check with a sysadmin running a web server. Ask them how many Code Red or Nimda hits they still get per hour.
Let's face it, who could resist the idea of getting a cool computer while at the same time losing Microsoft money?
I'm never going to quite understand this mindset. So what if it costs MS $300, $400, or even $1000 to manufacture the XBox? Buying one is only going to help them.
That's right. Buying an XBox, no matter what kind of a deal it is, no matter how much money MS "loses" on it, helps them out. For starters, while they might lose $100 for each XBox bought, they lose $200 more when you don't buy it.
Then you have the marketing figures that say that these boxes are flying off of the shelves. That they should press on with their unwavering determination and $40 billion to dominate the market, because people want them there.
If we really want to shaft MS out of the console market, the way to do it is to not buy XBoxes. Eventually they'll realize that nobody wants their crap, their inventory is sitting in warehouses (or worse yet, getting shipped back to them to make room for the PS3), and we'd rather bow to the Lord God Sony for our home entertainment.
BlueWave was the BOMB. When I ran a point system, I even went to the bother of setting up BBS Software and a mail tosser (ahem, Maximus and Squid, actually) just to be able to use BlueWave and have all the routing information intact.
I must say I quite fondly remember the long-gone era of the local BBS. Spent WAY too much time playing Trade War and hanging out in the FidoNet echos. TEEN, in particular. I was 14 -- not the same kind of mindset when one mentions "(Hot) Teen" and "Internet" in the same sentence today.:-)
At any rate, I'd wager that it taught me more about communication than anything I ever learned in school.
You're forgetting something about IE (and maybe Moz too?): The file is downloaded in the background while waiting for the user to accept or deny the download, so you're still wasting time and bandwidth by receiving a file you probably don't want. For broadband users, it's not such a big deal (but it does eat up more bandwidth of the scum that uses such a technique), but for modem users it will slow things to a crawl.
The compression on lossless audio codecs can vary widely. FLAC's website has a comparison of most of the major (and many of the minor) players in lossless audio compression.
Most of the time I average 2:1. If you're not getting better than 1.5:1 on average then you're not compressing music.:-)
One of my CS profs created a program to do something similar for himself. It would take two programs and compare them and give a similarity score between 0.0 and 1.0. Seeing anything up to 0.6 in intro courses was considered normal, since the assignments were easier, but much above that and things got suspicious fast. Of course, any red flags were hand checked. Seeing as this is the prof that taught the compiler courses, I don't think there were many false positives.:-)
It caught a few guys that I know. When confronted they tried to say that they didn't cheat. So the prof does the only sensible thing that a CS prof should do when dealing with cheating intro students: Single out a common line of code in their programs and ask them what it did. Hint: How many of you knew the ternary operator in your first forays into C?:-) Having a URL to an identical file from an algorithm archive helped too.
Ogg-Tarkin is still in the very earliest stages of development. It'll probably stay there for a while until the guys over at Xiph get Ogg Vorbis 1.0 out the door.
And if Vorbis is any indication of the quality level that Monty, et al want to achieve with Tarkin, it's going to kick some serious ass.:-)
To be on topic, if you guys aren't getting anywhere with investing, it may be worthwhile to see if the Tarkin guys are interested. I mean, if you're really thinking about giving it away anyway, maybe you can give some another project some serious help.
If I were a business user, and I needed support for a program, I'd pay for it. Whether that's in the form of hiring a coder to be our in-house OSS keep it together geek, or contracting with a company that provides support for said product, or actually getting a piece of commercial software and the support that comes with that (typically little).
In fact, the support I see for most OSS projects that have some steam rolling is very impressive. People tend to be polite and try to be helpful if you seem to be having a real problem that isn't caused by dismissing the manuals and how-tos. Sure, sometimes there's flame wars, jerks, trolls, and other assorted assholes. That happens. If I'm not paying for the support, I don't mind too much. How many customer service horror stories do we all have? And that's for products and service that we actually paid money for! There's something really wrong when the customer service track record for free stuff is better than that of stuff that I paid for.
Yeah, paying only for songs you like would be nice too. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 for a song. Let me download it in an uncompressed or losslessly compressed format, and I'd be a super happy camper.
But we have to take baby steps.:-)
By the by, I think that they DID try to bad used CD sales. At least, they tried to make it very uncomfortable to do so.
A lot of people seem to be pissed about the price of CDs. I can't blame them, CDs were supposed to be cheaper, and their price was supposed to go down as more people hopped on the bandwagon. Watch DVDs do the same thing.
Truth be told, I wouldn't mind giving an artist $20 for a CD. The problem is that the artists see very little of that $17, or $14, or $20 that we fork over at the register. THAT pisses me off, and slows my CD buying habit.
You should check out the AskSlashdot story on building an Artist's PC.
The reason Graphic Artists still use Macs is because they're still better. They have little things, like well-supported, OS-level color correction. These people like to know that things are going to print out (at both their proofer and the print shop that runs the job) the same way they look on screen. I mean, who would think that a professional artist would give a fuss over the fact that this red and that red don't match?
If you want to piss off the design dept. at a print shop, send them a Publisher file.:-)
Maybe you've just never used a well-built AMD system. I've gone through 3 AMD systems now, and the only two times that mine have been unreliable have been: 1. When the memory went south. and 2. When the Heatsink fan died.
Otherwise they didn't (and still don't) crash unless I do something stupid.
And perhaps you didn't notice that in the benchmarks where the P4 does show up, it had it's ass handed to it. In terms of actually getting work done, AMD is winning hands down. The P4 SSE-2 optimizations found in some programs only let them catch up. The only places I've seen the P4 be a runaway winner are in Quake3 and some synthetic benchmarks. Everywhere else, AMD wins.
Perhaps, but the tech is really cheap and the software is redaily available. If Nintendo wanted to get into the online game market, they blew it. A conscious decision to make sure to provide an on-board modem or ethernet port early in the design might have made $20 difference.
Let's face it: The add-on market for consoles blows goats. Most people will get extra controllers, but that's about it. Many don't get "fancy" controllers either (rapid fire excluded).
Game developers will make sure that the game works as much as possible on the lowest common denominator system, which means no connectivity. The only system add-ons I've ever seen sell well are mod chips and Game[Genie, Shark, etc.] units.
Maybe the online game market isn't one that Nintendo every really intended to dig into. By explicitly not providing that option to developers at launch, few of them will want to get into it.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that another user downloading a file from your PC would definitely count as "assigning". You are either implicitly or explicitly making your legal mp3s available for download by others. That's distribution in my book.
Besides, even if you might not be violating the exact letter of the law, you're certainly violating the spirit of it, and that can get a judgement levied against you if the defintion is close enough that the judge decides it'll work.
It might be legal for the person downloading, since they are legitimately entitled to space/time shift copyrighted material as long as it's covered by Fair Use. It's only legal if the source they're downloading from is an agent authorized by the copyright holder to distribute those songs.
It's still not legal for the person providing the file to download to distribute those songs without permission of the copyright holder.
Let me repeat this in case everyone else didn't get it the first time: It is not legal for one to make copyrighted material available for downloading without the permission of the copyright holder.
It doesn't matter if both you and the person downloading a song from you own the CD from which the given song comes. It is still illegal for you to distribute that song to that person without the permission of the copyright holder.
I know I'm beating this subject to death, but it seems like a lot of people have having a very difficult time grasping this concept.
The downloading isn't the part that's always illegal, it's the unauthorized distribution that's landing people in court. The larger distributors are the people that the RIAA are going after. This is exactly what we've wanted to see.
Come off of the limb, I'd hate to see it snap out from under you. There's several MS services that run as System and are flagged Interactive in Win XP.
Like the Print Spooler, for example. As well as Protected Storage, Task Scheduler, and a few others, including Network Connections.
That's right, if your machine is connected to any kind of network at all, you're vulnerable.
Policies? I remember a handy little program that would reset a system's policies and prevent them from being pulled from the server at next boot.
:)
I've probably still got it sitting on my hard drive somewhere. I don't know if this will still work XP, or even 2k. Should I ever get the opportunity again, I might check.
It doesn't really require someone to be sitting at the console.
Socially engineer yourself a login and hijack the machine remotely via Terminal Services (or Remote Desktop Connection, which is ENABLED by default in XP). Owie.
Yes, clueful sysadmins or netadmins will make sure that port 3389 (IIRC) is firewalled, but there's lots of admins that are either not clueful or overrided by a PHB.
Don't believe me? Check with a sysadmin running a web server. Ask them how many Code Red or Nimda hits they still get per hour.
I'm never going to quite understand this mindset. So what if it costs MS $300, $400, or even $1000 to manufacture the XBox? Buying one is only going to help them.
That's right. Buying an XBox, no matter what kind of a deal it is, no matter how much money MS "loses" on it, helps them out. For starters, while they might lose $100 for each XBox bought, they lose $200 more when you don't buy it.
Then you have the marketing figures that say that these boxes are flying off of the shelves. That they should press on with their unwavering determination and $40 billion to dominate the market, because people want them there.
If we really want to shaft MS out of the console market, the way to do it is to not buy XBoxes. Eventually they'll realize that nobody wants their crap, their inventory is sitting in warehouses (or worse yet, getting shipped back to them to make room for the PS3), and we'd rather bow to the Lord God Sony for our home entertainment.
BlueWave was the BOMB. When I ran a point system, I even went to the bother of setting up BBS Software and a mail tosser (ahem, Maximus and Squid, actually) just to be able to use BlueWave and have all the routing information intact.
I must say I quite fondly remember the long-gone era of the local BBS. Spent WAY too much time playing Trade War and hanging out in the FidoNet echos. TEEN, in particular. I was 14 -- not the same kind of mindset when one mentions "(Hot) Teen" and "Internet" in the same sentence today. :-)
At any rate, I'd wager that it taught me more about communication than anything I ever learned in school.
You're forgetting something about IE (and maybe Moz too?): The file is downloaded in the background while waiting for the user to accept or deny the download, so you're still wasting time and bandwidth by receiving a file you probably don't want. For broadband users, it's not such a big deal (but it does eat up more bandwidth of the scum that uses such a technique), but for modem users it will slow things to a crawl.
...and amazingly, we've never received a single complaint about not receiving mail from S. Korea.
Given, this is Northwestern Pennsylvania, so there aren't many Koreans up here.
The compression on lossless audio codecs can vary widely. FLAC's website has a comparison of most of the major (and many of the minor) players in lossless audio compression.
:-)
Most of the time I average 2:1. If you're not getting better than 1.5:1 on average then you're not compressing music.
Well, depending on your hardware, Ogg Vorbis may be coming soon to player near you.
Iomega's Hip Zip already has support, but he firmware isn't available to the general public.
The IRiver (nearly identical to the Rio Volts) has announced support for Vorbis in an upcoming firmware update.
Why not use FLAC for lossless? That's what it is. Or was that a typo?
Modded Troll?
I was going to say something funny here, but apparently few people would get it.
One of my CS profs created a program to do something similar for himself. It would take two programs and compare them and give a similarity score between 0.0 and 1.0. Seeing anything up to 0.6 in intro courses was considered normal, since the assignments were easier, but much above that and things got suspicious fast. Of course, any red flags were hand checked. Seeing as this is the prof that taught the compiler courses, I don't think there were many false positives. :-)
:-) Having a URL to an identical file from an algorithm archive helped too.
It caught a few guys that I know. When confronted they tried to say that they didn't cheat. So the prof does the only sensible thing that a CS prof should do when dealing with cheating intro students: Single out a common line of code in their programs and ask them what it did. Hint: How many of you knew the ternary operator in your first forays into C?
A bit pedantic, but we can extend that idea to take into account all those sex-starved geeks and call it "Mammary".
Change the logo a bit and it wouldn't be much of a stretch either.
:-)
Ogg-Tarkin is still in the very earliest stages of development. It'll probably stay there for a while until the guys over at Xiph get Ogg Vorbis 1.0 out the door.
:-)
And if Vorbis is any indication of the quality level that Monty, et al want to achieve with Tarkin, it's going to kick some serious ass.
To be on topic, if you guys aren't getting anywhere with investing, it may be worthwhile to see if the Tarkin guys are interested. I mean, if you're really thinking about giving it away anyway, maybe you can give some another project some serious help.
If I were a business user, and I needed support for a program, I'd pay for it. Whether that's in the form of hiring a coder to be our in-house OSS keep it together geek, or contracting with a company that provides support for said product, or actually getting a piece of commercial software and the support that comes with that (typically little).
:-)
In fact, the support I see for most OSS projects that have some steam rolling is very impressive. People tend to be polite and try to be helpful if you seem to be having a real problem that isn't caused by dismissing the manuals and how-tos. Sure, sometimes there's flame wars, jerks, trolls, and other assorted assholes. That happens. If I'm not paying for the support, I don't mind too much. How many customer service horror stories do we all have? And that's for products and service that we actually paid money for! There's something really wrong when the customer service track record for free stuff is better than that of stuff that I paid for.
Whoo, I just got trolled.
Yeah, paying only for songs you like would be nice too. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 for a song. Let me download it in an uncompressed or losslessly compressed format, and I'd be a super happy camper.
:-)
But we have to take baby steps.
By the by, I think that they DID try to bad used CD sales. At least, they tried to make it very uncomfortable to do so.
A lot of people seem to be pissed about the price of CDs. I can't blame them, CDs were supposed to be cheaper, and their price was supposed to go down as more people hopped on the bandwagon. Watch DVDs do the same thing.
Truth be told, I wouldn't mind giving an artist $20 for a CD. The problem is that the artists see very little of that $17, or $14, or $20 that we fork over at the register. THAT pisses me off, and slows my CD buying habit.
You should check out the AskSlashdot story on building an Artist's PC.
:-)
The reason Graphic Artists still use Macs is because they're still better. They have little things, like well-supported, OS-level color correction. These people like to know that things are going to print out (at both their proofer and the print shop that runs the job) the same way they look on screen. I mean, who would think that a professional artist would give a fuss over the fact that this red and that red don't match?
If you want to piss off the design dept. at a print shop, send them a Publisher file.
Maybe you've just never used a well-built AMD system. I've gone through 3 AMD systems now, and the only two times that mine have been unreliable have been: 1. When the memory went south. and 2. When the Heatsink fan died.
Otherwise they didn't (and still don't) crash unless I do something stupid.
And perhaps you didn't notice that in the benchmarks where the P4 does show up, it had it's ass handed to it. In terms of actually getting work done, AMD is winning hands down. The P4 SSE-2 optimizations found in some programs only let them catch up. The only places I've seen the P4 be a runaway winner are in Quake3 and some synthetic benchmarks. Everywhere else, AMD wins.
Perhaps, but the tech is really cheap and the software is redaily available. If Nintendo wanted to get into the online game market, they blew it. A conscious decision to make sure to provide an on-board modem or ethernet port early in the design might have made $20 difference.
Let's face it: The add-on market for consoles blows goats. Most people will get extra controllers, but that's about it. Many don't get "fancy" controllers either (rapid fire excluded).
Game developers will make sure that the game works as much as possible on the lowest common denominator system, which means no connectivity. The only system add-ons I've ever seen sell well are mod chips and Game[Genie, Shark, etc.] units.
Maybe the online game market isn't one that Nintendo every really intended to dig into. By explicitly not providing that option to developers at launch, few of them will want to get into it.
Then why not get the Ti200? They're less than $200 (retail, IIRC).
Whoops, my bad. Yeah, it's a BCD clock. Yeah, inary seconds-since-epoch would be damn difficult to read. :-)
I doesn't take too awful long to get used to it. I was running the Gnome Binary Clock applet and could read it at a glance.
Only a hair harder than reading an analog clock. Possibly more so if you don't do binary well.
The watch looks pretty cool. I agree though, that blinking LEDs would have been kick ass.
Now, if only I could find a nice, relatively unintrusive binary clock for Windows.