Dude, get a grip. I didn't say that the whole of Europe went completely nuts but your dismissal of the millions killed and mamed and of the psychological effects of WWII is appalling. What's your argument? That its okay because the percentage wasn't higher?
A bit of distress is NOT a good thing for children and it does not make them stronger. It makes them distrustful and resentful when the people they rely on turn on them. Society not giving a shit and telling these kids they should be tougher and it makes them stronger is the reason lunatics with guns eventually snap. You can teach a kid to be self-reliant without doing psychological damage or making them feel scared for the life and/or worthless.
If things keep progressing at this rate, and if they do start enforcing these fucking insane laws, it'll only be a matter of a few years before owning music is undesirable as it would be difficult ot prove any music is legit and could have you thrown into jail at any moment.
Why not just cut out all the BS and just make any kind of music ownership illegal. Musical instruments could be covered by the DMCA too since they can be used to copy (read play) a tune.
Oh that's we can't skip the BS right, because rich greed assholes can a make profit for a while this way.
Owning/buying music is quickly becoming no different morally to owning/buying blood diamonds. Hell, if they make musical instruments illegal perhaps the penalty for owning one could be that they cut off your hands.
IP law? It's just fucking entertainment. Get a grip!
My parents were subject to a LOT of "emotional distress" when they were children. My children father was a refugee from the Italian-Yugoslavia border during the WW II, fleeing to leave most of his relatives (except for his brother and his parents) slaughtered by the Tito army. My grandma, when a child, slept on the ruins of her bombed house. My mother, when a child, lived in Venezuela, with only my grandma caring of her while my grandpa worked 500 km apart and there were earthquakes and revolutions.
Your grand parents are the ones that survived. A combination of being strong, and being lucky. Otherwise they wouldn't have been there to have your parents and you wouldn't be around to talk such nonsense. You're basically arguing that war, famine and poverty are good and character building and holding up your grandparents as an example, meanwhile forgetting that others in the same circumstances perished or yes cracked under the pressure and went crazy or took their own lives or worse became war mongers themselves. This isn't a good argument to subject children to the same sorts of pressures and stresses - it's just a good way to increase the amount of misery in the world.
I agree that it shouldn't be trivially easy to obtain efficient killing weapons including guns, especially when that's the sole purpose the weapon serves.
However there are countries where gun ownership is higher per capita than the US with lower per capita gun crime, so relying on that as a basis or opening to your argument actually weakens it. You can bring up the UK to demonstrate your point and a gun advocate can bring up Canada to demonstrate there's. There's actually something particularly broken about US society that some portion of the population would be happy to pick up a gun the moment they are angered. However that's come about it presents a real danger if you allow small arms to remain as prolific as they are. The idea of a militia defending against a foreign invader is impractical in this day and age and belongs a few centuries ago in history. Unless of course you're going to start arguing the right to bear missile launchers. You just can't repell an invader with small arms today. The problem is the technology has moved along and whatever arms you procure someone wishing to do you harm can outdo you. That unfortunately isn't limited to foreign invaders but organised (and disorganised) crime.
The rest of your argument, though not quantitative or backed with statistics (something rarely seen in Internet discussion sadly) easily could be...and it makes sense. You either have to improve people's respect for life or take away the tools to terminate it. The later is sadly much easier than the former.
Soooo that means teh average person copying a movie that they have already gone to see, or a piece of software they cant afford anyway and just want to play with, wont get a fine at all since they didnt make any profit.
No since the memory or knowledge is stored in your brain confiscating ill gotten gains means they get to rip your brains out of your head.
It's garbage. The story line's not plausible and lacks continuity and direction. The characters you can't relate to, the writing and directing and acting are all just rubbish. I find it unwatchable. I think I'd HAVE to be a robot to like it. I'll go as far as saying it makes season 5 of bab 5 (which wasn't brilliant but wasn't bad either) look like Shakespeare, and I'd even rather re-watch Crusade which made me fall asleep more than once than watch Battle Star Gal-actica. My gripe is that there's so little new sci-fi now that if a series that is shit becomes popular, that's all you're ever likely to see.
As for your dig about me being an evangelical, gimme a break and re-read what I wrote. No evangelical is going to suggest you get your porn elsewhere.
How ironic that your banter about mobthink sees you modded up as high as you can go FOR falling into line with mobthink.
As a kid I was a big fan of Galactica. It's now hard to watch because as an adult I painfully understand just how corny it got. However I've seen one other slashdotter refer to it as baywatch in space, with hot cyclons and a hot starbuck etc. I agree. More specifically I hate:
- the bad acting. Please don't hire a supermodel to look sexy in my sci fi. If i want porn it's not exactly hard to find - don't waste my time with soft-pseudo porn actresses who couldn't act to save themselves.
- the awful cinematography and camera work. I haven't watched since season 1, but are they still doing that awful backing music and quick zooms etc. to try to build tension. Keep the fucking camera still or smooth it out jackasses!
- the awful plot and scripting. I mean please I've seen better scripting on daytime soapies. Quit already with the twists that go no where and make no sense.
In short, as a sci fi fan I feel it's trash. In fact there's not been anything since Babylon 5 that's really captured my imagination. (Original stuff, I fucking hated Crusade and all the movies except "In the beginning". I watched the whole season of Crusade because I paid for the DVDs but while there were some good moments most of it it bored me to tears)
You over-estimate the influence of the show. If star trek hadn't been there other sci-fi would have filled its place. Imagination isn't the sole domain of any one piece of sci-fi, so lets not overstate it.
My last two pastors were both stockbrokers who quit their jobs to preach full-time. They are both making far less money now than they did (One is even below the poverty line now). It's clear to me that they believe in what they are doing (which doesn't mean they are correct, it just means they think they are).
It just proves that stock brokers are prone to nervous breakdowns.
Let me give you a more accurate translation: If I think that the user has too much power for me to be able to do my job...and then later...
As the systems age and become less popular it becomes more and more difficult to support them, and they consume more and more of your time and other resources (often monetary ones.)
Your inability to realize this fact is pathetic.
Just what the fuck do you think your job is? You've been hired to support those aging pain in the ass systems. If it was easy there wouldn't be a dedicated full time position. The business doesn't employ you to only look after the shiny and new. All I can say is thank goodness you're not my sysadmin. You're clueless.
Actually, I have an excellent clue about intelligent design in which everything is a simple link easily replaced. I also have the experience to know that it's not always easy. Sometimes, some idiot that came before you did something amazingly stupid that makes it horribly hard to get away from their poor decisions.
Hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes that incredibly idiotic thing was done for good reason, sometimes not. Walking away from a system or treating it as second rate because it's old is immature. All that matters is how it serves your employer AND the users. If you're making the user's life a misery you're not doing that.
I'm not surprised that this article describes emotional attachments. They've become pets, and not just a pile of hardware. Most people love their pets and they cry when their pets die
This is slashdot, goddamn it. I always cry when my hardware dies!
Don't make assumptions. It will only get you into trouble.
You mean like your assumption about what people do and don't need at work? Pot. Kettle. Black.
Actually, I'm the kind of administrator who likes to do things the secure and efficient way. Sometimes that means locking things down. Sometimes it means just reimaging often.
Translation: If I think a user has any more power than they absolutely need to do their job, I'll take that away from them. The power I've been given to secure the network trumps their efficiency, their sanity and their right to be treated like a human being who may actually shock horror take a 5 minute break and do something that for their own personal reasons.
What a colorful insult, child. But the fact is that FTP is a gigantic pain in the ass and instead of continually being "updated" to (almost) fit the needs of people today, it should have been abandoned and replaced long ago.
Guess what. This is the real world. You can't just magically replace systems that are well entrenched, do their job and are rock solid stable. I'd love to see you come to my workplace and suggest VMS be replaced. That's only what our team has been doing for the last 4 years or so. You have no freaking clue about enterprise systems if you think that everything's a simple link easily replaced....and I'm the child? Honestly if you're going to act like a cross between a network nazi and a grizzly bear, expect people not to like you - after all you're not payed to be liked and quality of the workplace probably doesn't have much meaning to you. Your entire world view and your views about being an admin are backward. You're there to serve the end users as well as management. You should only take away things they need or want if you're left with no other choice, not as a first reaction. The whole "lets lock down anything not absolutely necessary" philosophy might be lovely from a paranoid security admin point of view, but you forget that the proliferation of the modern computer came about because it is an enabler. Anything you do to make it a burden to use the computer systems is an anethma.
VMS is over and OpenVMS is a farce by all accounts. Sorry if I don't have sympathy for those stuck in the dark ages. (VMS did lots of wonderful things that no one else did back in the day, but now other people do them.)
Oh yes, if it's not shiny and new lets throw it out and start again. Your sympathy is not wanted where I work, nor is that attitude. You have no concept whatsoever of what systems are out there still running. However please continue this way. When I have experience with a wide gamut of systems, and you're stuck with the most common one, I'm the one that'll pick up the well paying job, while your arrogant ass whines about why no one likes you (because you keep limiting what they can do, and increasing their workload, how tough your job is, and how you should be paid twice as much.
Really I'm not suggesting that we make it go away entirely - I mean, last I checked I still had a telnet binary pretty much everywhere. It's still good for testing.
But I am suggesting that we should have long ago supplanted it and whiny people like you who complain that they will have work to do if progress continues are the primary reason why we haven't.
You're talking out of your backside. You don't test a different system to what you implement in prod. You get them as close as possible. I'm not complaining that I have work to do. I'm a developer and I like having a stable job. Your inability to comprehend that it can take a very long time to replace a system however is astounding. Good luck with that. In the meantime if I have to work around one more know-it-all sysadmin that doesn't have a clue how things really work I'm going to vomit. Thing is it's amazing how in previous jobs I've seen such sysadmins fall out of favour once they tread on a senior manager's toes. There's one I can think of that was forced out altogether.
I assume it's because today the moderators have a pulse and two neurons to rub together.
When you make a really good or interesting point, it would help your credibility and allow others to take the argument more seriously if you didn't mis-spell the key word: it's speech not speach.
It's worth mentioning that there is little or no reason for most people to run these programs at work, with certain notable exceptions like FTP (Which should just be allowed to fucking die already) and Bittorrent (which can be configured to use a single port.)
Spoken like a man truly out of touch!
First of all making such a blanket statement about what people do and don't need at work, presumably based only on your own experience is totally asinine. Even with lots of research deciding what everyone in every job does or does not need is not an easy thing. Let me guess you're the kind of system administrator that likes to lock down an IT worker's policies so that they no longer have an admin account, then wonder why the get upset at you.
Secondly what kind of fugknuckle suggests that FTP should "be allowed to fucking die already". Do you realise there are systems out there that don't even have a decent implementation for SFTP? (Hint: Look up VMS) Realise that there are systems that would need to be reworked and re-tested if you got rid of internal FTP? I'm not saying they shouldn't be migrated to something more secure in most cases, but not catering for such systems is not an option. IPV4 interoperability is going to be critical for the forseeable future.
How the FUCK does the parent post get moderated as insightful in a community of IT professionals?
If you don't compensate the rights holder in some way, you remove a major incentive for the artist to produce work, and you pretty much wipe out the professional artist since all but a handful of independently wealthy artists would need a job to pay the bills which is unrelated to their art.
I think you can in fact compensate the artist without giving them control over how their work is used. I believe this is important, and I don't think these ideas are incompatible with a fair system where people's everyday activity is not criminalised.
So let me get this straight. You've got one example of a site that you believe isn't abusing the current copyright system that you happen to like. On this basis you wish to keep the existing system despite the overwhelming amount of abuse? We're talking human rights issues when you're willing to throw someone in jail for protecting their work. That's irrational.
Nothing under my proposed ideas prevents a site from distributing an artists work or even selling it. It would just mean if a competing site popped up, selling the same works, they couldn't be sued.
By the way I'm an avid amateur photographer myself and find the current copyright laws draconian. If I take a picture at the local zoo, and it's absolutely stunning, I can't legally sell that picture because the zoo claims intellectual property rights over the animals and enclosures which it will vigorously assert if you try to do anything commercial with the photos you take. They're not even interested in buying people's photos because they have exclusive arrangements with the artists.
I'm also a flight simulator enthusiast. If I wish to use music as a backing track to a recording and put it up on YouTube I have to pick from a handful of unknown tunes released as open source. The reality is most good music (and all recognisable music) is copyright in such a way that to use it legally in my own work require negotiating with a record company for large sums of money, and most of the time those record companies aren't interested in any case about some bloke doing a limited distribution YouTube video. I refuse to risk years in prison or publicly break the law like that so I end up with no backing tune. (I simply don't have the time to write my own music, or find an unsigned artist and commission the work)
Don't even pretend for one minute that the existing laws are condusive to artistic creativity. They're not. Any kind of change would require sites like your pet favourite adapt. It would also leave them with genuine competition for the first time in history, so yes some of them would die. That's a good thing. Breaking a monopoly and stimulating competition would give you new options. No one would make zillions running these sites - instead they'd make an honest living.
I never said anything about relying on the honour system, or anything that stems from that little argument. What you've shot down isn't my ideas but your own, that you'd already discarded. It's a classic straw man.
All of what I've put forward is possible and could be enforced without resorting to an honour system only type approach. It wouldn't be perfectly enforceable but neither is copyright law as it stands - not by a long shot. We'd be no worse of on enforceability. You'd need new checks and balances, like new reporting systems for income derived from copyright (to prove that say 10% is all the profit you've made instead of 99%). That doesn't mean it can't work better than the current system.
What I don't have is a solution as to how to change from the existing system which a lot of powerful people profit from. You'll always encounter incredible resistance from a few wealthy and powerful people who'll block any move towards this that you try to take.
Participation... Call it Web2.0, but that IS the future.
First of all, no it's not the future. Participation the present, and has been since any monkey who could install the Hotdog HTML editor de jour could write their own web page.
Secondly, not everyone wants to contribute to everything. I may wish to add a comment to an article, but I don't need to modify the article. I certainly don't need to modify someone's resume.
Web 2.0 = Web 1.0 + marketing - page refreshes + dynamic content
So yeah, just do a little animation on your screen without the page refreshes, then hand it over to the marketing department and you'll be riding that next wave in no time all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, get a grip. I didn't say that the whole of Europe went completely nuts but your dismissal of the millions killed and mamed and of the psychological effects of WWII is appalling. What's your argument? That its okay because the percentage wasn't higher?
A bit of distress is NOT a good thing for children and it does not make them stronger. It makes them distrustful and resentful when the people they rely on turn on them. Society not giving a shit and telling these kids they should be tougher and it makes them stronger is the reason lunatics with guns eventually snap. You can teach a kid to be self-reliant without doing psychological damage or making them feel scared for the life and/or worthless.
I hope to fuck you're not a parent.
If things keep progressing at this rate, and if they do start enforcing these fucking insane laws, it'll only be a matter of a few years before owning music is undesirable as it would be difficult ot prove any music is legit and could have you thrown into jail at any moment.
Why not just cut out all the BS and just make any kind of music ownership illegal. Musical instruments could be covered by the DMCA too since they can be used to copy (read play) a tune.
Oh that's we can't skip the BS right, because rich greed assholes can a make profit for a while this way.
Owning/buying music is quickly becoming no different morally to owning/buying blood diamonds. Hell, if they make musical instruments illegal perhaps the penalty for owning one could be that they cut off your hands.
IP law? It's just fucking entertainment. Get a grip!
They got a fucking 2 week unpaid holiday??? Insane.
My parents were subject to a LOT of "emotional distress" when they were children. My children father was a refugee from the Italian-Yugoslavia border during the WW II, fleeing to leave most of his relatives (except for his brother and his parents) slaughtered by the Tito army. My grandma, when a child, slept on the ruins of her bombed house. My mother, when a child, lived in Venezuela, with only my grandma caring of her while my grandpa worked 500 km apart and there were earthquakes and revolutions.
Your grand parents are the ones that survived. A combination of being strong, and being lucky. Otherwise they wouldn't have been there to have your parents and you wouldn't be around to talk such nonsense. You're basically arguing that war, famine and poverty are good and character building and holding up your grandparents as an example, meanwhile forgetting that others in the same circumstances perished or yes cracked under the pressure and went crazy or took their own lives or worse became war mongers themselves. This isn't a good argument to subject children to the same sorts of pressures and stresses - it's just a good way to increase the amount of misery in the world.
I agree that it shouldn't be trivially easy to obtain efficient killing weapons including guns, especially when that's the sole purpose the weapon serves.
However there are countries where gun ownership is higher per capita than the US with lower per capita gun crime, so relying on that as a basis or opening to your argument actually weakens it. You can bring up the UK to demonstrate your point and a gun advocate can bring up Canada to demonstrate there's. There's actually something particularly broken about US society that some portion of the population would be happy to pick up a gun the moment they are angered. However that's come about it presents a real danger if you allow small arms to remain as prolific as they are. The idea of a militia defending against a foreign invader is impractical in this day and age and belongs a few centuries ago in history. Unless of course you're going to start arguing the right to bear missile launchers. You just can't repell an invader with small arms today. The problem is the technology has moved along and whatever arms you procure someone wishing to do you harm can outdo you. That unfortunately isn't limited to foreign invaders but organised (and disorganised) crime.
The rest of your argument, though not quantitative or backed with statistics (something rarely seen in Internet discussion sadly) easily could be...and it makes sense. You either have to improve people's respect for life or take away the tools to terminate it. The later is sadly much easier than the former.
Soooo that means teh average person copying a movie that they have already gone to see, or a piece of software they cant afford anyway and just want to play with, wont get a fine at all since they didnt make any profit.
No since the memory or knowledge is stored in your brain confiscating ill gotten gains means they get to rip your brains out of your head.
Kirk, is that you?
It's garbage. The story line's not plausible and lacks continuity and direction. The characters you can't relate to, the writing and directing and acting are all just rubbish. I find it unwatchable. I think I'd HAVE to be a robot to like it. I'll go as far as saying it makes season 5 of bab 5 (which wasn't brilliant but wasn't bad either) look like Shakespeare, and I'd even rather re-watch Crusade which made me fall asleep more than once than watch Battle Star Gal-actica. My gripe is that there's so little new sci-fi now that if a series that is shit becomes popular, that's all you're ever likely to see.
As for your dig about me being an evangelical, gimme a break and re-read what I wrote. No evangelical is going to suggest you get your porn elsewhere.
How ironic that your banter about mobthink sees you modded up as high as you can go FOR falling into line with mobthink.
Sorry all but the first 2 lines refer to the new Galactica. Old one just died because it got corny.
As a kid I was a big fan of Galactica. It's now hard to watch because as an adult I painfully understand just how corny it got. However I've seen one other slashdotter refer to it as baywatch in space, with hot cyclons and a hot starbuck etc. I agree. More specifically I hate:
- the bad acting. Please don't hire a supermodel to look sexy in my sci fi. If i want porn it's not exactly hard to find - don't waste my time with soft-pseudo porn actresses who couldn't act to save themselves.
- the awful cinematography and camera work. I haven't watched since season 1, but are they still doing that awful backing music and quick zooms etc. to try to build tension. Keep the fucking camera still or smooth it out jackasses!
- the awful plot and scripting. I mean please I've seen better scripting on daytime soapies. Quit already with the twists that go no where and make no sense.
In short, as a sci fi fan I feel it's trash. In fact there's not been anything since Babylon 5 that's really captured my imagination. (Original stuff, I fucking hated Crusade and all the movies except "In the beginning". I watched the whole season of Crusade because I paid for the DVDs but while there were some good moments most of it it bored me to tears)
Bring back good sci fi.
You over-estimate the influence of the show. If star trek hadn't been there other sci-fi would have filled its place. Imagination isn't the sole domain of any one piece of sci-fi, so lets not overstate it.
Radioactive spiders^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hracoons???
Haven't logged on in some time. Wonder if we're both still there...
My last two pastors were both stockbrokers who quit their jobs to preach full-time. They are both making far less money now than they did (One is even below the poverty line now). It's clear to me that they believe in what they are doing (which doesn't mean they are correct, it just means they think they are).
It just proves that stock brokers are prone to nervous breakdowns.
But carry them in space and land them (and now .. to lose them)? What the hell was the effin point of this whole thing?
Why to boldly go where no cremated remains had gone before of course!!!
That said I agree with you - what a waste of money, time, and resources.
Let me give you a more accurate translation: If I think that the user has too much power for me to be able to do my job ...and then later...
As the systems age and become less popular it becomes more and more difficult to support them, and they consume more and more of your time and other resources (often monetary ones.)
Your inability to realize this fact is pathetic.
Just what the fuck do you think your job is? You've been hired to support those aging pain in the ass systems. If it was easy there wouldn't be a dedicated full time position. The business doesn't employ you to only look after the shiny and new. All I can say is thank goodness you're not my sysadmin. You're clueless.
Actually, I have an excellent clue about intelligent design in which everything is a simple link easily replaced. I also have the experience to know that it's not always easy. Sometimes, some idiot that came before you did something amazingly stupid that makes it horribly hard to get away from their poor decisions.
Hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes that incredibly idiotic thing was done for good reason, sometimes not. Walking away from a system or treating it as second rate because it's old is immature. All that matters is how it serves your employer AND the users. If you're making the user's life a misery you're not doing that.
I'm wasting my breath. Good day to you.
I'm not surprised that this article describes emotional attachments. They've become pets, and not just a pile of hardware. Most people love their pets and they cry when their pets die
This is slashdot, goddamn it. I always cry when my hardware dies!
Don't make assumptions. It will only get you into trouble.
...and I'm the child? Honestly if you're going to act like a cross between a network nazi and a grizzly bear, expect people not to like you - after all you're not payed to be liked and quality of the workplace probably doesn't have much meaning to you. Your entire world view and your views about being an admin are backward. You're there to serve the end users as well as management. You should only take away things they need or want if you're left with no other choice, not as a first reaction. The whole "lets lock down anything not absolutely necessary" philosophy might be lovely from a paranoid security admin point of view, but you forget that the proliferation of the modern computer came about because it is an enabler. Anything you do to make it a burden to use the computer systems is an anethma.
You mean like your assumption about what people do and don't need at work? Pot. Kettle. Black.
Actually, I'm the kind of administrator who likes to do things the secure and efficient way.
Sometimes that means locking things down. Sometimes it means just reimaging often.
Translation: If I think a user has any more power than they absolutely need to do their job, I'll take that away from them. The power I've been given to secure the network trumps their efficiency, their sanity and their right to be treated like a human being who may actually shock horror take a 5 minute break and do something that for their own personal reasons.
What a colorful insult, child. But the fact is that FTP is a gigantic pain in the ass and instead of continually being "updated" to (almost) fit the needs of people today, it should have been abandoned and replaced long ago.
Guess what. This is the real world. You can't just magically replace systems that are well entrenched, do their job and are rock solid stable. I'd love to see you come to my workplace and suggest VMS be replaced. That's only what our team has been doing for the last 4 years or so. You have no freaking clue about enterprise systems if you think that everything's a simple link easily replaced.
VMS is over and OpenVMS is a farce by all accounts. Sorry if I don't have sympathy for those stuck in the dark ages. (VMS did lots of wonderful things that no one else did back in the day, but now other people do them.)
Oh yes, if it's not shiny and new lets throw it out and start again. Your sympathy is not wanted where I work, nor is that attitude. You have no concept whatsoever of what systems are out there still running. However please continue this way. When I have experience with a wide gamut of systems, and you're stuck with the most common one, I'm the one that'll pick up the well paying job, while your arrogant ass whines about why no one likes you (because you keep limiting what they can do, and increasing their workload, how tough your job is, and how you should be paid twice as much.
Really I'm not suggesting that we make it go away entirely - I mean, last I checked I still had a telnet binary pretty much everywhere. It's still good for testing.
But I am suggesting that we should have long ago supplanted it and whiny people like you who complain that they will have work to do if progress continues are the primary reason why we haven't.
You're talking out of your backside. You don't test a different system to what you implement in prod. You get them as close as possible. I'm not complaining that I have work to do. I'm a developer and I like having a stable job. Your inability to comprehend that it can take a very long time to replace a system however is astounding. Good luck with that. In the meantime if I have to work around one more know-it-all sysadmin that doesn't have a clue how things really work I'm going to vomit. Thing is it's amazing how in previous jobs I've seen such sysadmins fall out of favour once they tread on a senior manager's toes. There's one I can think of that was forced out altogether.
I assume it's because today the moderators have a pulse and two neurons to rub together.
Two neurons definitely sounds about right.
When you make a really good or interesting point, it would help your credibility and allow others to take the argument more seriously if you didn't mis-spell the key word: it's speech not speach.
It's worth mentioning that there is little or no reason for most people to run these programs at work, with certain notable exceptions like FTP (Which should just be allowed to fucking die already) and Bittorrent (which can be configured to use a single port.)
Spoken like a man truly out of touch!
First of all making such a blanket statement about what people do and don't need at work, presumably based only on your own experience is totally asinine. Even with lots of research deciding what everyone in every job does or does not need is not an easy thing. Let me guess you're the kind of system administrator that likes to lock down an IT worker's policies so that they no longer have an admin account, then wonder why the get upset at you.
Secondly what kind of fugknuckle suggests that FTP should "be allowed to fucking die already". Do you realise there are systems out there that don't even have a decent implementation for SFTP? (Hint: Look up VMS) Realise that there are systems that would need to be reworked and re-tested if you got rid of internal FTP? I'm not saying they shouldn't be migrated to something more secure in most cases, but not catering for such systems is not an option. IPV4 interoperability is going to be critical for the forseeable future.
How the FUCK does the parent post get moderated as insightful in a community of IT professionals?
If you don't compensate the rights holder in some way, you remove a major incentive for the artist to produce work, and you pretty much wipe out the professional artist since all but a handful of independently wealthy artists would need a job to pay the bills which is unrelated to their art.
I think you can in fact compensate the artist without giving them control over how their work is used. I believe this is important, and I don't think these ideas are incompatible with a fair system where people's everyday activity is not criminalised.
So let me get this straight. You've got one example of a site that you believe isn't abusing the current copyright system that you happen to like. On this basis you wish to keep the existing system despite the overwhelming amount of abuse? We're talking human rights issues when you're willing to throw someone in jail for protecting their work. That's irrational.
Nothing under my proposed ideas prevents a site from distributing an artists work or even selling it. It would just mean if a competing site popped up, selling the same works, they couldn't be sued.
By the way I'm an avid amateur photographer myself and find the current copyright laws draconian. If I take a picture at the local zoo, and it's absolutely stunning, I can't legally sell that picture because the zoo claims intellectual property rights over the animals and enclosures which it will vigorously assert if you try to do anything commercial with the photos you take. They're not even interested in buying people's photos because they have exclusive arrangements with the artists.
I'm also a flight simulator enthusiast. If I wish to use music as a backing track to a recording and put it up on YouTube I have to pick from a handful of unknown tunes released as open source. The reality is most good music (and all recognisable music) is copyright in such a way that to use it legally in my own work require negotiating with a record company for large sums of money, and most of the time those record companies aren't interested in any case about some bloke doing a limited distribution YouTube video. I refuse to risk years in prison or publicly break the law like that so I end up with no backing tune. (I simply don't have the time to write my own music, or find an unsigned artist and commission the work)
Don't even pretend for one minute that the existing laws are condusive to artistic creativity. They're not. Any kind of change would require sites like your pet favourite adapt. It would also leave them with genuine competition for the first time in history, so yes some of them would die. That's a good thing. Breaking a monopoly and stimulating competition would give you new options. No one would make zillions running these sites - instead they'd make an honest living.
I never said anything about relying on the honour system, or anything that stems from that little argument. What you've shot down isn't my ideas but your own, that you'd already discarded. It's a classic straw man.
All of what I've put forward is possible and could be enforced without resorting to an honour system only type approach. It wouldn't be perfectly enforceable but neither is copyright law as it stands - not by a long shot. We'd be no worse of on enforceability. You'd need new checks and balances, like new reporting systems for income derived from copyright (to prove that say 10% is all the profit you've made instead of 99%). That doesn't mean it can't work better than the current system.
What I don't have is a solution as to how to change from the existing system which a lot of powerful people profit from. You'll always encounter incredible resistance from a few wealthy and powerful people who'll block any move towards this that you try to take.
Participation... Call it Web2.0, but that IS the future.
First of all, no it's not the future. Participation the present, and has been since any monkey who could install the Hotdog HTML editor de jour could write their own web page.
Secondly, not everyone wants to contribute to everything. I may wish to add a comment to an article, but I don't need to modify the article. I certainly don't need to modify someone's resume.
The shock! The horror! Say it ain't so.
Web 2.0 = Web 1.0 + marketing - page refreshes + dynamic content
So yeah, just do a little animation on your screen without the page refreshes, then hand it over to the marketing department and you'll be riding that next wave in no time all the way to the bank.