Sometimes *I* wish there was a -1 Get a sense of humor moderation. Then we could avoid silliness like your page-long rant about how people who are convinced that stealing a CD is a worse offense than downloading 20 songs are st00pid.
There has been a conspiracy in the works for years now where the RIAA has been actively pursuing the legalization of hacking for the purposes of destroying PCs with copyrighted material. The first anti-terrorism bill after 9/11 had them trying to attach a rider allowing it, and they haven't stopped since. It's a publicly reported conspiracy. If you don't see anything wrong with that, I guess you won't mind me breaking into your house and smashing your posessions -- you know, just in case you have any of my intellectual property?
1000 songs isn't as much as it sounds. Since most people aren't aware that they can delete multiples, failed downloads, fakes, songs they didn't like, and songs they don't like anymore, it's not preposterous to think, after a couple years of trading on a PC belonging to an entire family, 1000 isn't a stretch at all. It certainly isn't enough to warrant a financial death sentence.
I haven't downloaded an illegal MP3 since High School, back when napster still existed. You don't need to be a downloader to understand why destroying peoples lives for something as petty as personal non-commercial copyright infringement is fundamentally wrong.
On the other hand, maybe you're just insane. Tell me, how much to you believe that these terrible pirates need to be punished? How many of the people sued do you think even knew they were sharing anything? How much do you think these people should be sued for? If you find yourself advocating destroying this girls bloodline financially for more than ten generations, I'd recommend you re-check your priorities.
That and Copyright infringement was, for the longest time, only covered by Civil law. Only recently has it become even possible to be charged criminally.
First of all, I don't know why everyone thinks because I don't think it's right to sue an individual for millions of dollars for a trivial offense, I therefore must be stealing music. I stopped giving the RIAA the privilege of my mindshare over a year ago. I haven't spent a penny on new albums in even longer.
Secondly, I am not slashdot. Stop addressing me as if I am a collective mind.
Thirdly, Intellectual property cannot be stolen. It's a physical and legal impossibility. If this fact were otherwise, this little girl would have been charged with grand larceny, NOT copyright infringement. There is a differentiation between the two at every level of law. If you take pictures of a plan for a top-secret tank, you will get a different sentence under a different law than if you steal said tank. This is because, unlike you, the government realizes that physical property is handled differently than intellectual property. Had this girl stolen 2000 singles, I wouldn't be saying anything. The fact is, she didn't. She downloaded some songs. For years, personal infringement (as opposed to commercial infringement) has been completely unenforced, and all of a sudden, they're suing kids for $150,000 per song. Like I've said before; This crime is about as serious as jay-walking. You're just blinded by the propoganda. Make no mistake, there is some on both sides, but only one side of this equasion is having their lives destroyed. In my eyes, that's true theft.
I dunno. I was thinking about this. I asked myself why it was right that I didn't care that people were downloading music, but computers getting hacked and people being sued for millions of dollars(settling for thousands) is so hard for me. I realized that the truth is, the RIAA is ruining peoples lives. Like something out of a nightmare best left in Soviet Russia, the RIAA is indiscriminately cutting people down for a crime most sane people would put on par with jay walking. These lives don't deserve to be ruined for personal non-commerical infringement.
For a couple years I worked for a school board up north, and one of our techs wrote a helpdesk database system. By your benchmark, what she did was terribly unfair. In my view, it saved the school board and tax payers huge amounts of money, and saved, saved our department from hours of beurocratic areobatics, and saved us from worrying about licenses and such.
To be blunt, You aren't being forced to use CIA-OS at home, and probably aren't even allowed to. If, however, they have a business case for it(you need to be able to make one, even in government organizations), and if they have a technical need for it (see: Windows XP is looser than a 65 year old whore), there is no rational reason that it could be considered unfair that they spend some money to develop it just because some two-bit software company couldn't sell it's product instead.
Except that the governments are customers. So, either you destroy the influence altogether by giving all software to all governments for free(because if a software company gets a lucrative government contract, it will more likely survive than a company relying on civil contracts, and therefore this mythical free competition has failed), or, you let the governments decide what to use, or if they so desire, let them decide to write their own software.
If Microsoft doesn't like it, they should probably take all that DARPA developed internet stuff out of their software.
I can't speak for special cases like the ones you mentioned in terms of whether it will work or not, but the sound quality would definitely not deteriorate in any way because you use a Brand X CD rather than a Brand Y CD. The very reason digital music is so popular with musicians is just that -- regardless of the medium, barring any fatal fault of the media, the data is the same.
Beyond that, try giving her a data-CD turned music CD. I bet you hit the nail on the head with possibility 1.
You're seriously deluded as to the nature of the RIAA music industry. The place many new artists are going for a decent paycheque is the advertising world, because somehow they pay better and have better terms, in spite of not selling a million records.
The advertising world doesn't threaten to hack the entire world either, and that's a plus too...
Yeah...it's great...Except that they're trying to sue hundreds of people who might otherwise be considered customers, and they're trying to hack them on the side.
I think this news is a pathetic attempt to distract attention away from "hey! We're suing a bunch of high school kids for hundreds of thousands of dollars!". You might think differently, but it's timing just yells "distraction!!!".
He who says "I'm surrounded by idiots" often finds himself in a hall of mirrors.
Welcome to slashdot, home of anti-RIAA. Unless you are ready to defend the sleaziest bunch of scumbags out there, I'd quit while I'm ahead if I were you.
Yeah, I was in a hurry this morning and didn't get to finish it.
Anyway, her assertion was that we should somehow simplify games to the point where any channel surfer can pick them up and somehow, despite not having the attention span to grasp "forwards, backwards, mouse to aim, left click shoots"(or in the case of strategy games, click this guy, then click there to move him), become engrossed in the game and will start buying games.
She's wrong because she's misunderstanding the very nature of the medium. Beyond simple arcade games, which exist already but don't bring in monster revenue, video games take time to complete, and if they are to be rewarding, they need to be difficult or players won't invest the time nessessary to win or enjoy a large scale game.
My depiction of non-game players in that light was important, not because they were inferior to game players, but because they just weren't suited to the medium. Just as a person who wants the immense depth of a Final Fantasy or an epic novel won't enjoy an action flick, the people who don't play video games just won't be swayed without a fundamental shift(towards the worse, in my opinion) in the way video games are presented and meant to be played.
I have to admit, it looks more like a clueless management type is making stupid assumptions and letting the world know about them. Yeah. You think games are too hard. Maybe that's because you're a retarded exec. We're not making games for Cletus, who thinks Jerry Springer is considered quality entertainment, but couldn't solve a simple jumping puzzle to save his 20 kids. We're not making games for sleepwalker joe, who has to have all his opinions handed to him on a silver platter and couldnt think outside the box long enough to download a walkthrough for Quake I. Games are made for people who enjoy a challenge; people who are willing to play for longer than 30 seconds.
If things were as cut and dry as you made them out to be, he wouldn't have a case and therefore wouldn't be suing. Don't assume the company is without guilt here -- for one thing, if they were breaking labour laws, contracts are no way out. There are specific provisions in labour law that state that certain things can't be changed, even with an agreement with the employee. Thank god -- I don't feel like having to worry about a third world sweatshop opening up in my back yard which is completely legal because the seven year olds signed a waiver(I'm sorry, I know that having things like overtime, minimum wage, minimum working age, and other terrible things like that are 'legalized theft' in your eyes, but so is the terrible world of near-slavery that would happen (and did happen -- remember the industrial revolution?) if big companies got what they wanted) . Also, I think "don't rock the boat because it would be against the common good" sounds pretty socialist to me. It's the same quasi-socialist bullshit that stops major corporations from getting in trouble because it might put people out of work, and has turned our schools into labratories for every nut-job that thinks banning cola will solve the nations obeasity problem.
Big picture. If you get screwed by an entity with all the rights and powers of a corp, you aren't to blame if you try to get your due payment.
Why don't you just get another job and work for a living instead of suing in order to be "fairly well-to-do"? While you are sitting pretty off un-earned lawsuit gains, your former coworkers will either be getting canned to make up for the money you sued for, or honest investors in your company will be losing money to pay for your scumbag lawyer's next car.
Oh, I cry tears of blood for you. See how they glimmer as they reach my chin, and create wounds upon the earth?
Actually, people like you are destroying the modern world. With your quasi-socialist, idealistic "just because you got screwed over doesn't mean they should have to actually pay you for the word you did!", you completely ignore the bigger picture. "I was working 80 hours a week on this project and only got paid for 40" was a very common post-dotcom story, and now that IT guys aren't the super-employable, "My company is doing terrible things to the IT staff, but I don't want to lose my job, so I'm just going to grin and bear it" is on the rise.
Let me paint the big picture for you. Companies will screw their employees. The only recourse for employees is the law. The intent of this law, in the big picture, isn't to ensure a perfect resolution happens in the end in every case, but to make companies sit back and go "well, if someone calls our bluff and sues us, like happened with that other company, we would be devastated. We'd better make sure we don't do that". The reason the settlements are so big is that the companies are.
If the investors lose because this guy sues, it's not his problem. Investors are gamblers, and if they couldn't afford to lose the money, they shouldn't have been spending it. It will be the management at that company who has to explain to investors why they have to pay out a multimillion dollar settlement, and it will be their fault entirely for breaking the law. Employees hurt by the lawsuit can thank their bosses for breaking the law as well. They'll just have to rough it. It's an unfortunate reality, but hey -- that's the price one pays for living in a society of laws. Just as you can't kill your boss and steal all the moeny and source code in the safe, they can't stiff you out of earnings owed.
First off, this is SO FREAKING OLD it's not even funny. Secondly, does it matter now that the Opterons are whomping ass against Xeons in multiproc configs?
But they don't and you're mistaken. Read it again. They're not talking about architectures, they're talking about PRODUCTS. Using the 32 bit code on a 64 bit architecture with their wording is just fine, just as using some code from Unix for a PDP-11 on a 64-bit machine(if any was applicable) would be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes *I* wish there was a -1 Get a sense of humor moderation. Then we could avoid silliness like your page-long rant about how people who are convinced that stealing a CD is a worse offense than downloading 20 songs are st00pid.
There has been a conspiracy in the works for years now where the RIAA has been actively pursuing the legalization of hacking for the purposes of destroying PCs with copyrighted material. The first anti-terrorism bill after 9/11 had them trying to attach a rider allowing it, and they haven't stopped since. It's a publicly reported conspiracy. If you don't see anything wrong with that, I guess you won't mind me breaking into your house and smashing your posessions -- you know, just in case you have any of my intellectual property?
1000 songs isn't as much as it sounds. Since most people aren't aware that they can delete multiples, failed downloads, fakes, songs they didn't like, and songs they don't like anymore, it's not preposterous to think, after a couple years of trading on a PC belonging to an entire family, 1000 isn't a stretch at all. It certainly isn't enough to warrant a financial death sentence.
I haven't downloaded an illegal MP3 since High School, back when napster still existed. You don't need to be a downloader to understand why destroying peoples lives for something as petty as personal non-commercial copyright infringement is fundamentally wrong.
On the other hand, maybe you're just insane. Tell me, how much to you believe that these terrible pirates need to be punished? How many of the people sued do you think even knew they were sharing anything? How much do you think these people should be sued for? If you find yourself advocating destroying this girls bloodline financially for more than ten generations, I'd recommend you re-check your priorities.
That and Copyright infringement was, for the longest time, only covered by Civil law. Only recently has it become even possible to be charged criminally.
Or is it? I should sue you for $150,000 per word and see if you still agree that it's not ruining anyones life.
First of all, I don't know why everyone thinks because I don't think it's right to sue an individual for millions of dollars for a trivial offense, I therefore must be stealing music. I stopped giving the RIAA the privilege of my mindshare over a year ago. I haven't spent a penny on new albums in even longer.
Secondly, I am not slashdot. Stop addressing me as if I am a collective mind.
Thirdly, Intellectual property cannot be stolen. It's a physical and legal impossibility. If this fact were otherwise, this little girl would have been charged with grand larceny, NOT copyright infringement. There is a differentiation between the two at every level of law. If you take pictures of a plan for a top-secret tank, you will get a different sentence under a different law than if you steal said tank. This is because, unlike you, the government realizes that physical property is handled differently than intellectual property. Had this girl stolen 2000 singles, I wouldn't be saying anything. The fact is, she didn't. She downloaded some songs. For years, personal infringement (as opposed to commercial infringement) has been completely unenforced, and all of a sudden, they're suing kids for $150,000 per song. Like I've said before; This crime is about as serious as jay-walking. You're just blinded by the propoganda. Make no mistake, there is some on both sides, but only one side of this equasion is having their lives destroyed. In my eyes, that's true theft.
Apprently stealing is legal so long as you don't like the people you steal from.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I dunno. I was thinking about this. I asked myself why it was right that I didn't care that people were downloading music, but computers getting hacked and people being sued for millions of dollars(settling for thousands) is so hard for me. I realized that the truth is, the RIAA is ruining peoples lives. Like something out of a nightmare best left in Soviet Russia, the RIAA is indiscriminately cutting people down for a crime most sane people would put on par with jay walking. These lives don't deserve to be ruined for personal non-commerical infringement.
For a couple years I worked for a school board up north, and one of our techs wrote a helpdesk database system. By your benchmark, what she did was terribly unfair. In my view, it saved the school board and tax payers huge amounts of money, and saved, saved our department from hours of beurocratic areobatics, and saved us from worrying about licenses and such.
To be blunt, You aren't being forced to use CIA-OS at home, and probably aren't even allowed to. If, however, they have a business case for it(you need to be able to make one, even in government organizations), and if they have a technical need for it (see: Windows XP is looser than a 65 year old whore), there is no rational reason that it could be considered unfair that they spend some money to develop it just because some two-bit software company couldn't sell it's product instead.
One billion YEN. About 86 million dollars.
Except that the governments are customers. So, either you destroy the influence altogether by giving all software to all governments for free(because if a software company gets a lucrative government contract, it will more likely survive than a company relying on civil contracts, and therefore this mythical free competition has failed), or, you let the governments decide what to use, or if they so desire, let them decide to write their own software.
If Microsoft doesn't like it, they should probably take all that DARPA developed internet stuff out of their software.
I can't speak for special cases like the ones you mentioned in terms of whether it will work or not, but the sound quality would definitely not deteriorate in any way because you use a Brand X CD rather than a Brand Y CD. The very reason digital music is so popular with musicians is just that -- regardless of the medium, barring any fatal fault of the media, the data is the same.
Beyond that, try giving her a data-CD turned music CD. I bet you hit the nail on the head with possibility 1.
You know, in some of the departments at places I've worked, you would be dead right now. ^ ^
Do your own damn research. All I'd be doing is pulling up a google search you could do yourself.
There are artists who support it. They've just been drowned out by all the pop stars who feel their 10 billion sales just isn't quite enough.
You're seriously deluded as to the nature of the RIAA music industry. The place many new artists are going for a decent paycheque is the advertising world, because somehow they pay better and have better terms, in spite of not selling a million records.
The advertising world doesn't threaten to hack the entire world either, and that's a plus too...
Yeah...it's great...Except that they're trying to sue hundreds of people who might otherwise be considered customers, and they're trying to hack them on the side.
I think this news is a pathetic attempt to distract attention away from "hey! We're suing a bunch of high school kids for hundreds of thousands of dollars!". You might think differently, but it's timing just yells "distraction!!!".
He who says "I'm surrounded by idiots" often finds himself in a hall of mirrors.
Welcome to slashdot, home of anti-RIAA. Unless you are ready to defend the sleaziest bunch of scumbags out there, I'd quit while I'm ahead if I were you.
Yeah, I was in a hurry this morning and didn't get to finish it.
Anyway, her assertion was that we should somehow simplify games to the point where any channel surfer can pick them up and somehow, despite not having the attention span to grasp "forwards, backwards, mouse to aim, left click shoots"(or in the case of strategy games, click this guy, then click there to move him), become engrossed in the game and will start buying games.
She's wrong because she's misunderstanding the very nature of the medium. Beyond simple arcade games, which exist already but don't bring in monster revenue, video games take time to complete, and if they are to be rewarding, they need to be difficult or players won't invest the time nessessary to win or enjoy a large scale game.
My depiction of non-game players in that light was important, not because they were inferior to game players, but because they just weren't suited to the medium. Just as a person who wants the immense depth of a Final Fantasy or an epic novel won't enjoy an action flick, the people who don't play video games just won't be swayed without a fundamental shift(towards the worse, in my opinion) in the way video games are presented and meant to be played.
I have to admit, it looks more like a clueless management type is making stupid assumptions and letting the world know about them. Yeah. You think games are too hard. Maybe that's because you're a retarded exec. We're not making games for Cletus, who thinks Jerry Springer is considered quality entertainment, but couldn't solve a simple jumping puzzle to save his 20 kids. We're not making games for sleepwalker joe, who has to have all his opinions handed to him on a silver platter and couldnt think outside the box long enough to download a walkthrough for Quake I. Games are made for people who enjoy a challenge; people who are willing to play for longer than 30 seconds.
Get over it.
If things were as cut and dry as you made them out to be, he wouldn't have a case and therefore wouldn't be suing. Don't assume the company is without guilt here -- for one thing, if they were breaking labour laws, contracts are no way out. There are specific provisions in labour law that state that certain things can't be changed, even with an agreement with the employee. Thank god -- I don't feel like having to worry about a third world sweatshop opening up in my back yard which is completely legal because the seven year olds signed a waiver(I'm sorry, I know that having things like overtime, minimum wage, minimum working age, and other terrible things like that are 'legalized theft' in your eyes, but so is the terrible world of near-slavery that would happen (and did happen -- remember the industrial revolution?) if big companies got what they wanted) . Also, I think "don't rock the boat because it would be against the common good" sounds pretty socialist to me. It's the same quasi-socialist bullshit that stops major corporations from getting in trouble because it might put people out of work, and has turned our schools into labratories for every nut-job that thinks banning cola will solve the nations obeasity problem.
Big picture. If you get screwed by an entity with all the rights and powers of a corp, you aren't to blame if you try to get your due payment.
Why don't you just get another job and work for a living instead of suing in order to be "fairly well-to-do"? While you are sitting pretty off un-earned lawsuit gains, your former coworkers will either be getting canned to make up for the money you sued for, or honest investors in your company will be losing money to pay for your scumbag lawyer's next car.
Oh, I cry tears of blood for you. See how they glimmer as they reach my chin, and create wounds upon the earth?
Actually, people like you are destroying the modern world. With your quasi-socialist, idealistic "just because you got screwed over doesn't mean they should have to actually pay you for the word you did!", you completely ignore the bigger picture. "I was working 80 hours a week on this project and only got paid for 40" was a very common post-dotcom story, and now that IT guys aren't the super-employable, "My company is doing terrible things to the IT staff, but I don't want to lose my job, so I'm just going to grin and bear it" is on the rise.
Let me paint the big picture for you. Companies will screw their employees. The only recourse for employees is the law. The intent of this law, in the big picture, isn't to ensure a perfect resolution happens in the end in every case, but to make companies sit back and go "well, if someone calls our bluff and sues us, like happened with that other company, we would be devastated. We'd better make sure we don't do that". The reason the settlements are so big is that the companies are.
If the investors lose because this guy sues, it's not his problem. Investors are gamblers, and if they couldn't afford to lose the money, they shouldn't have been spending it. It will be the management at that company who has to explain to investors why they have to pay out a multimillion dollar settlement, and it will be their fault entirely for breaking the law. Employees hurt by the lawsuit can thank their bosses for breaking the law as well. They'll just have to rough it. It's an unfortunate reality, but hey -- that's the price one pays for living in a society of laws. Just as you can't kill your boss and steal all the moeny and source code in the safe, they can't stiff you out of earnings owed.
First off, this is SO FREAKING OLD it's not even funny. Secondly, does it matter now that the Opterons are whomping ass against Xeons in multiproc configs?
So don't complain that all the girls you meet are superficial bitches, you superficial asshole! ;P
That sounds like the beginning of a great joke.
"Diamonds are forever!!!"
"So are severed limbs!"
But they don't and you're mistaken. Read it again. They're not talking about architectures, they're talking about PRODUCTS. Using the 32 bit code on a 64 bit architecture with their wording is just fine, just as using some code from Unix for a PDP-11 on a 64-bit machine(if any was applicable) would be fine.