There are several posts pointing out that "pirate" and "piracy" has been used to describe copyright infringement for quite a long time.
That's very nice.
It's also not relevant.
Various copyright industries are waging a propoganda war. They're attempting to sway public opinion; not through reasoned argument, but through deception and misdirection. (No matter what you might like to believe, downloading a song off a peer-to-peer network is not identical to shoplifting a CD.)
These industries really like the term pirate. It's a scary word. It suggests violence and severity. It suggests a very physical act.
People's views of piracy aren't entirely consistent. "Pirates are always other people, I just share my favorite songs with my friends." People don't view themselves as pirates, even if they are infringing on copyright protection, as a result people tend to not think about the increasingly strict laws.
It's extremely hard to have a reasoned debate about modern copyright law when one side is using an emotionally loaded, ambiguous term.
We should avoid the words pirate and piracy for exactly those reasons. Pick a more precise term. I happen to like the phrase copyright infringer. It clearly identifies the crime and in fact specifies what you'll be charged as if you're caught violating the law.
Yet electronic media should also be protected from the loopholes the bill originally solved.
What loopholes?
It is illegal to distribute copies of works protected by copyright without the copyright holder's permission.
Nice and simple. It doesn't matter if you're distributing photocopies on the street corner and sharing them over a peer-to-peer client. It's still illegal. No loopholes.
Allow for the use of back-engineering tools with HARSH punishments for people who knowingly use them to break copyrighted material with intent to distribute.
But it's already illegal to distribute works protected by copyright. What will adding a another rule do to help? This is just hyper-criminalization, an amazingly bad idea.
Perhaps we need a law with additional penalties for disabling a home security system. Sure, it's already illegal to break into my home, but I don't feel safe enough. Surely a criminal who has decided to break and enter will be thwarted when he discovers that disabling my alarm system is illegal.
Allow publications on computer security to be done freely and thoroughly if tied to legitimate academic or corporate entities.
Lots of important security work is being done by loosely associated individuals. What's magic about working for an academic or corporate entity that makes the research more valid?
Pointing fingers makes us feel good, but unless we propose alternatives and compromises, are we really doing anything but venting? Does anyone else have potential solutions/thoughts on how to resolve this issue?
Yes, there are potential solutions. Repeal the law, it does way more harm than good. The benefits are miniscule and unworthy of protection. We already protect the rights of copyright holders.
Quoth Gupta's signature (just in case he changes it):
Samir Gupta, Ph.D
New Technology Research Department
Nintendo Co, Ltd.
Kyoto, Japan
Gupta is an old troll. He's pretty good at generating a combination of techno-babble and plausible facts, but he sure as hell isn't really involved in Nintendo research.
Mind you, sometimes he's actually posts interesting ideas, but he claims that his ideas represent current Nintendo research. If any of his claims do match Nintendo actions, it's only by accident or external research by the author; it's not based on inside information.
I suspect Gupta gets a kick out of knowing that he is misleading people, "Look, they all believe I work at Nintendo and am privy to secrets, aren't I clever."
Apparently Gupta is getting lazy, this post is just
a copy of his post from last month. (At the very least, this duplication should earn him a "Redundant") And that post
is an almost word-for-word retrend of
one of his posts from July.
Some classic Gupta for comparison. Some of his technobabble can be hard to sort through if you're not familiar with the field.
Clustering GameCubes - No, GameCubes are not a terribly good system for doing clustering with, anyone doing so is doing it on a lark, not as real work.
Some strange ideas on reducing crashes - One of the goals of an operating system is to reduce the impact of a crash or malicious code, running everything at the highest level doesn't really gain you stability. Catching a NULL pointer dereference is handy, but recovering from it is nearly impossible; anything that caused a null pointer dereference this frame is likely going to cause it again next frame.
GameCubes have Zen Buddhist design - Ummmm, right. There is nothing like a bright purple box to "fitting into the big picture without standing out."
I just got a legitimate email returned because spamcop claims that the smtp server of the webhosting provider has an abnormal rate of spam.
That's nice.
But why do we care?
Come to think of it, how do you know that your email is legitimate? After all, if it was legitimate, it would have gone through. The owner over the mail server that bounced your message has decided that he doesn't true your source of email. That is his right, isn't it?
Perhaps you disagree with the owner of the mail server in question about what defines legitimate email. If that's the case, take it up with the owner of the mail server. SpamCop is just providing that person with a list. The mail server's owner decided to use that list for blocking despite SpamCop's explicit warnings against doing so
I agree with most of your rant. I forked over my cash for your game, why do I need to just through more hoops to play? Gosh, you know, I really love shuffling disks in and out of CD drive when I decide to switch games solely to satisfy some copyprotection system. Add to that that my CD driver works fine but hums like jet engine if any CD is in at all, so I have to remove the disk when I finish to cut down on the noise. And while I'm playing I need to stupid disk in the drive (solely for copy protection), so I just get to enjoy the hum while I play.)
Having to enter registration keys is all very nice and not so much of a hassle except why aren't they printed on the fucking cd's.
Or at the very least, don't make the entire CD black! Leave a light colored area so I can use a Sharpie to write the registration key on the CD. No, I'm not going to keep your stupid jewel case. I own a lot of games, so I keep them in a CD binder to save space. The only thing a gamer is certain to keep is the CD itself, that's where the registration key belongs.
Ideally, they'd choose the best platform and tools for the task at hand, and not bog the process down by ideology at the taxpayers expense...
True enough. But "best platform and tools for the task at hand" should include the cost of being able to prove your license to all software you run on demand, a non-trivial task. And you need to include the risk of being auditted; even if they don't find any violations it will cost them money, if a few employees snuck on some illegal copies it will cost even more. And you need to include the risk that the supplier of a given piece of software will provide essential security upgrades, that those upgrades will have licenses that you can accept, that the supplier will still be in business and that the upgrades won't be bundled into an upgrade you can't afford.
Open Source / Free Software is a form of insurance. It can be more expensive up front, but if all hell breaks loose at least you can deal with it yourself. Prior supplier disappear? Hire a new one. In fact, by its very nature companies providing Open Source software need to price extremely aggresively, a competitor is constantly there, able to pick up where you left off.
Unfortunately government (just like business) tends to think short term. "It's cheapest right now, to hell with the future." This could very well be an attempt save the most money in the future. Unfortunately it's hard to be sure, I can't find any sort of official announcement giving the specifics. I definately agree that a "100% Free Software" could be more harmful than good, but if the policy is "You must consider Free Software first, and if all other things are basically even take the Free Software," that sounds like a great win.
A good chunk of the artists out there doing 3D stuff need Photoshop. What are they using in its place? (or do they have a Mac room running Photoshop elsewhere?)
Disney funded Linux developer CodeWeavers to make the CrossOver emulator run Windows Adobe Photoshop 7 on Linux -- without Windows.
and
Deep paint, with more than 8 bits per channel of color depth, is necessary to support the higher dynamic range of film. Could the Hollywood market support a commercial deep paint tool tailored to motion picture production? Considering the small market niche, studio technologists didn't think so.
Hollywood came up with a novel solution. What if the popular Linux open-source GIMP program was enhanced for motion picture work? Although the industry couldn't justify developing a deep paint program from scratch, it could support a few open-source programmers to make a deep GIMP.
...
Film Gimp was subsequently used by Rhythm & Hues for Scooby-Doo, Dr. Dolittle 2, and Planet of the Apes. Sony Pictures Imageworks picked up Film Gimp for use in Stuart Little 2. Hammerhead Productions used it in Showtime, Blue Crush, and 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Really depressingly, some companies only work through headhunters. When they advertise the job they drown in resumes. So instead they get a headhunter to post the job (absent company details). Feh.
Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.
Interesting. We were recently considering other options for our development team when GAIM stopped talking to Yahoo. One of my coworkers downloaded and got the Jabber daemons running in about ten minutes. He and I were chatting using GAIM a few minutes later.
If you need more advanced features perhaps what you say is true. But for basic functionality it worked quite well out of the box. And many people just need the basic functionality.
Listen dudes, just because it's got a high percentage of profit,
doesn't mean it's a rip-off. It's an example of supply and demand. If $5 USB
cables are being sold for $30, then it's because enough people are spending $30
a piece to buy them. When people stop paying $30 a piece, the price will
drop.
It's both a rip-off and a sign of an inefficient (malfunctioning) market.
Say the real cost to put a USB cable into my hand is $5, but you charge me $30 for the privledge. Well, with a markup like that some enterprising businessman else should be able to undercut you and sell me USB cables for $25. Of course, he'll get undercut to $20, then $15, and the cycle will eventually drive the price down to just a tad over the actual cost to put it in my hand. This is the theoretical magic of the free market.
Of course, theory and practice aren't on speaking terms right now, so enjoy your $30 cable and your malfunctioning market.
The FTC basically wants to give telemarketers a list of people who, 99% of the time, will just hang up on them anyway.
1% would be a pretty good return rate.
Also, the telemarketers believe that the return rate on numbers on the Do Not Call list will be higher than 1%. Many people logically know that buying stuff from a telemarketer is a bad idea, but when confronted with a high pressure salemen start reacting emotionally and may make a bad decision.
Basically telemarketers are seeking permission to continue preying on these people, even though these people have chosen to opt out. (And "these people" isn't "the old and senile", it's lots of otherwise ordinary people who simply aren't good at handling pressure tactics.)
Given that the Do Not Call list consists solely of people who are
not interested in buying telemarketers' products, you'd think they'd be happy about this.
While that's the common sense case, it fails to account for the fundamentally irrational behavior of people. People know they should eat healthy, but they eat junk food anyway (mmmm, junk food). They know they should exersize, but they put it off. And they know that they shouldn't trust random strangers who interrupt them to with telemarketing offers, but they actually buy stuff from telemarketters!
If you ask people, "do you want telemarketing calls?" you'll get a nearly unanimous "NO!" But if you actually call those same people up and pressure sell them something, a non-trivial number will actually buy. You know you shouldn't, but telemarketers (or at least their phone script writers) are quite good at using psychological tricks to work around your logic with drive at emotions. (These aren't strictly telemarketing techniques, anyone doing one-on-one sales is typically familiar with the techniques. People working car sales are the sterotypical example.)
Telemarketers argue that since people do buy things, they clearly want the calls, even if those same people claim that they don't want the calls.
By way of tortured example, it's like someone who has little self control with food. If snack food is available, they'll eat it. So they react by not keeping snack food in their home. Logically they don't want it, but when the actual temptation is in front of them reason goes for a walk.
Telemarketers know that they're trying to subvert reason. Some people want on the Do Not Call list because they will never buy something and don't want the interruption. But some know that they are weak when actually pressure sold something and don't want to face the pressure selling tactics. Claiming that they really wanted the call bullshit.
So, that's why telemarketers want to call people on the Do Not Call list. They're still scum, but it can be educational to study scum.
so what you're saying is, gimp is fine for "professional work" so long as "professional work" is a newspaper without a graphics department who has never once bothered to color correct an image.
When possible, try to avoid using "scare quotes," it's a cheap way to discredit others instead of actually supporting your "argument."
It's damn well professional work. Professional work pretty much just means "for pay," which this is. Even if you add in "college educated, salaried, creating printed material intended for mass distribution," it still qualifies. Anything more restrictive is just making up new definitions. This is the sort of work done across the world. Maybe it's not up to your high standards, but it's still professional. I don't look down my nose and claim that the hordes of code slaves cranking out Visual Basic aren't professional programmers. Like it or not, they are.
And they most certainly do color correct. That's one of the key reasons they use Photoshop. They just never bothered calibrating their monitor and their color matching drivers. Yet they still manage to improve the image. They're going to have problems capturing subtle tones accurately, but apparently it doesn't matter to them or their readers.
i'd image mspaint.exe would be fine for that kinda work...
MS Paint is really crude for cropping, resizing, and basic brightness/contrast adjustment. However, yes, many minimal graphic viewers/editors lack any traditional "retouching" tools, but include color balance, brightness/contrast, cropping, and resizing. And they would do the job just fine. Certainly cheaper than Photoshop.
I overlooked something obvious. The success of
CinePaint (born "Film GIMP") would suggest that the GIMP (or at least one of its direct children) is perfectly fine for use in video work. If it's good enough for "2 Fast 2 Furious,
Scooby-Doo,
Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films," it's probably good enough for video work.
For those who say "But what about Gimp? It's just
as good..."
Those people have also never done professional
graphics for print, video or even the web.
Oh really?
I think you overestimate both your readers ability to discern
carefully color corrected imagery that the requirements of your
fellow professionals creating graphics for the print and the web.
The most telling example was when I was showing some of my
personal photos to a friend. I had just uploaded them off my
camera, so many were dark, had odd color tints, or rotated. My
friend said she was familiar with Photoshop and asked if I had
something like that. I showed her how to load an image in the
GIMP. Within a few minutes she was happily playing with the
photos, well beyond what was necessary to just look at them. She
was enjoying messing with them. All this without any help from
me (well, I did show her how to find the image menu, which is a
cryptic to new users). Surprised at how quickly she got going I
asked about her previous experience. I knew she was a reporter
for several small town newspapers, but I didn't realize that the
newspapers didn't have a dedicated graphics guy, so the reporters
correct and crop their own images. I asked about color
correction and discovered that they had never enabled it, no one
bothered. It just wasn't important. As far as she could tell in
the fifteen or so minutes she played with the GIMP, it did
everything she needed for her job.
Similarly for web page graphics. Anyone doing careful color
correction for the web is misleading themselves. In the real
world monitors are wildly miscalibrated. Each user is going to
see their own personally mangled image. Perfect color matching
is pointless, as long as you're "good enough" you'll be doing as
well as anyone else.
(I can't speak to video, it's not an area that I know much
about. But I expect for local television level quality, it's
equally irrelevant. Again, you're fighting cheap home
televisions with the brightness, contrast, and hue tweaked by
each person (or perhaps their curious five year old).)
This is not to say that the GIMP is a perfect replacement to
Photoshop. Heavens no, Photoshop is great. If you're making
high quality prints the color correction is unmatched. (My
father, who has been retouching and printing his photos for years
using Corel PhotoPaint recently switched to Photoshop. He
loathes the interface, prefering the flexibility of PhotoPaint,
but is willing to suffer because Photoshop got the colors on his
print Just Right, Out of the Box, something PhotoPaint never
accomplished.) The GIMP definately lags in a number of areas.
But to suggest that the GIMP is completely unusable for
professional work is silly. Lots of professional work is
done to much lower standardsthan you expect.
The toolset within Photoshop is unrivaled,...and it's
workflow caters to multiple mind sets. For every one way to do
something there is a handfull of other, equally successful
methods to achieve exactly the same result. It is an artist's
tool.
Interestingly, my father has found Photoshop very frustrating
and less customizable than Corel's PhotoPaint. PhotoPaint made
it easy to tweak the interface to his particular needs and mind
set. As for "more than one way to do it," I'm curious what you
mean. Every significant graphics program provides more than one
way to do lots of things.
I say this constantly and get modded down for it because I'm not supposed to criticize a "volunteer effort."
Nope, you deserve to be modded down because you're a troll. It was going pretty good, you had a flawed, but plausible argument, but the following was just too much...
Meanwhile, in August of 2005, Longhorn is due out, with...a yet-to-be-revealed photorealistic user interface, and even the ability to add and remove RAM without rebooting.
That's all fine, but what happens when the blacklist is wrong and critical business communications cannot get through even though *both* sender and receiver are constantly trying to contact Earthlink to resolve the issue... Where does your "it's my choice, dammit" argument fit into this?
You've misunderstood.
The "my" in "it's my choice" is "the person who owns a given mail server."
You don't own the mail server in question.
It's always the choice of a person running a given mail server to disable mail from anywhere. Any ISP you deal with will at least occasionally hand blacklist a given remote IP (say, to deal with an accidental mail bomb from a misconfigured remote server, or a hostile attacker). Many, many ISPs has specifically blacklisted certain IPs hosting spammers that caused problems. A smaller number hand blacklist IPs of untrustworthy sources. Wherever you go you'll see this. That some ISPs might chose to use a blacklist just automates part of this already existing system. They're not doing it out of malice (Well, some are, but not most), they're just trying to maintain the best level of service possible.
There are some important issues here, but understand that you're asking for control over another person's computer. Are you sure that's appropriate?
And you would trust this file enough to block email based on it's contents??? Accountability is the biggest problem with RBLs, and moving it to a completely anonymous system would loose the last level of trust that they currently have...
You wouldn't trust random files. (Well, you could, but that would be stupid.) Instead you trust files signed by someone you chose to trust. That person might build up trust by publically announcing who he is ("I'm John Smith at johnsmith.example.com, and I'll be publishing blacklists via freenet. My lists will be signed by the PGP key ABABABABAB...."). (Don't trust that John Smith is who is claims he is? Why do you trust any of the existing blacklists? All you've got is a claim on a web page.) Or he might just publish the lists with an anonymous key, the brave can try him out, and if he seems legit build up a reputation. If you don't want to deal with completely anonymous people, you don't need to. Best of all, if you use something like Freenet, you don't need to worry about the signing bit at all, Freenet has support for "owning" a random chunk of the keyspace.
All in all it would be more secure than trusting random DNS queries.
Once they're appointed, they're there for life, and their ONLY politicking is jockying for a seat on the Apellate Circuit or the Supreme Court.
There is politicking, but it changes form. It's extremely common for "think tanks" to put together exclusive seminars on some area of law. "Come to sunny Hawaii for a five day seminar on intellectual property law. 100% free, paid for by The Serious Institute." It's very attractive, a free opportunity to hear interesting discussions on legal issues of the time, get a free trip to a nice resort, and take a little vacation. Of course, the seminars aren't balanced discussions, they're one sided attempts to push a particular agenda or position. If you repeat something often enough, some people with believe you. Being isolated from objections can be very convincing.
But you can not deny that development of several huge software
packages for very small market segments are not feasible without
pattents.
Could you provide some examples? This seems implausible to me. Mass
marketted software makes use of copyright protection. Specialized software
makes use of copyright and trade secret protection. The number of cases where
a beneficial piece of software simply would not exist without patent protection
seems insignificant.
1.) Well supported. Works across 98, 2k, and XP. That's MILLIONs of machines there.
Not well supported. Doesn't work on MacOS, PS2, or GameCube.
That's millions more machines. Because it's proprietary, it's unlikely to
ever be supported on those playforms.
2.) DirectX not only handles graphics, but sound and input as well. It's just not somethting you get from OpenGL.
Apples to oranges. That's like saying, "OpenOffice not only handles word processing, but spreadsheets and presentation graphics as well. It's just not something you get from Microsoft Word."
DirectX is just a big label covering a number of different technologies
(DirectSound, DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and other). The
ties between them are minimal. OpenGL's match is Direct3D. If you want a
similar package that provides a wide variety of support, look to toolkits like
the SDL.
3.) It's always growing. Supposedly they always have new features and stuff going into DirectX. Can't say I know how that compares with other API's, but it seems like Nvidia and ATI are always doing something with MS there.
DirectX on the whole has largely stabilized. This is actually good, it means that developers can spend less time worrying about the API of the week a focus on writing games. The only part that is in heavy flux is Direct3D. Direct3D's more open counterpart, OpenGL, is also in heavy flux and manages to keep apace of Direct3D's new functionality.
Ultimately, the big problem is that DirectX is proprietary. If you want
move to another system (like the growing Mac market) your use of DirectX becomes a burden to rewrite.
(All that said, I do agree that most online petitions are nearly worthless and don't carry anywhere near the weight of individually addressed messages. If you really care, take the time to express your position in your own words and send it as a letter (send an email in addition, if you like)).
That's why you should be using
qmail, ya' code monkeys!
Great idea! I'll just download a package from my favorite distribution that's tuned qmail to mesh nicely with how my system is configured.
Hmm, they don't supply packages for qmail. Why not?
They're not allowed to. If I take the time to make up such a package, I'm not allowed to give it to my friend.
Quoth Bernstein:
But that's a decision for the Apache maintainers, not the UNIX integrators!
Darn those pesky integrators, attempting to make their system internally consistent and trying to please their users!
I've heard great things about qmail, it's great that is available with source for no cost. But it's proprietary software, putting me at the mercy of Bernstein. If you want someone else to maintain a fork with features you desire, you're out of luck.
It's fine if you're willing to accept that, but it's not acceptable to everyone. Fortunately there
are
otheroptions available.
Until 1978, copyright only lasted 52 years in the U.S....
And the most obnoxious feature of the law was that some authors outlived their copyright. Their most popular works would go into public domain while they were still alive and counting on the income. It's like revoking someone's Social Security at age 72, just because they had the temerity not to die when demographics predicted they would.
It's a good article, but this is a really strange side-trek into weirdville.
It's like revoking Social Security? No, it's like getting fired from your job because you haven't done any work in 52 freaking years. If you're 72 and your copyright expired, that means you wrote the work when you were 20. Do you think you might have created something else of value in the intervening 52 years?
The vast majority of the value of any creative work is realized in the first few years. After that it rapidly tapers off to almost nothing. Works that have measurable value after 52 years are few and far between. If an author is relying on that to cover his retirement, he might as well invest in the lottery. If you do get lucky and write one of those few works that will still have value after 52 years, the work certainly paid off quite well years before, save some then.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several posts pointing out that "pirate" and "piracy" has been used to describe copyright infringement for quite a long time.
That's very nice.
It's also not relevant.
Various copyright industries are waging a propoganda war. They're attempting to sway public opinion; not through reasoned argument, but through deception and misdirection. (No matter what you might like to believe, downloading a song off a peer-to-peer network is not identical to shoplifting a CD.)
These industries really like the term pirate. It's a scary word. It suggests violence and severity. It suggests a very physical act.
People's views of piracy aren't entirely consistent. "Pirates are always other people, I just share my favorite songs with my friends." People don't view themselves as pirates, even if they are infringing on copyright protection, as a result people tend to not think about the increasingly strict laws.
It's extremely hard to have a reasoned debate about modern copyright law when one side is using an emotionally loaded, ambiguous term.
We should avoid the words pirate and piracy for exactly those reasons. Pick a more precise term. I happen to like the phrase copyright infringer. It clearly identifies the crime and in fact specifies what you'll be charged as if you're caught violating the law.
What loopholes?
It is illegal to distribute copies of works protected by copyright without the copyright holder's permission.
Nice and simple. It doesn't matter if you're distributing photocopies on the street corner and sharing them over a peer-to-peer client. It's still illegal. No loopholes.
But it's already illegal to distribute works protected by copyright. What will adding a another rule do to help? This is just hyper-criminalization, an amazingly bad idea.
Perhaps we need a law with additional penalties for disabling a home security system. Sure, it's already illegal to break into my home, but I don't feel safe enough. Surely a criminal who has decided to break and enter will be thwarted when he discovers that disabling my alarm system is illegal.
Lots of important security work is being done by loosely associated individuals. What's magic about working for an academic or corporate entity that makes the research more valid?
Yes, there are potential solutions. Repeal the law, it does way more harm than good. The benefits are miniscule and unworthy of protection. We already protect the rights of copyright holders.
Quoth Gupta's signature (just in case he changes it):
Gupta is an old troll. He's pretty good at generating a combination of techno-babble and plausible facts, but he sure as hell isn't really involved in Nintendo research.
Mind you, sometimes he's actually posts interesting ideas, but he claims that his ideas represent current Nintendo research. If any of his claims do match Nintendo actions, it's only by accident or external research by the author; it's not based on inside information.
I suspect Gupta gets a kick out of knowing that he is misleading people, "Look, they all believe I work at Nintendo and am privy to secrets, aren't I clever."
Apparently Gupta is getting lazy, this post is just a copy of his post from last month. (At the very least, this duplication should earn him a "Redundant") And that post is an almost word-for-word retrend of one of his posts from July.
Some classic Gupta for comparison. Some of his technobabble can be hard to sort through if you're not familiar with the field.
That's nice.
But why do we care?
Come to think of it, how do you know that your email is legitimate? After all, if it was legitimate, it would have gone through. The owner over the mail server that bounced your message has decided that he doesn't true your source of email. That is his right, isn't it?
Perhaps you disagree with the owner of the mail server in question about what defines legitimate email. If that's the case, take it up with the owner of the mail server. SpamCop is just providing that person with a list. The mail server's owner decided to use that list for blocking despite SpamCop's explicit warnings against doing so
I agree with most of your rant. I forked over my cash for your game, why do I need to just through more hoops to play? Gosh, you know, I really love shuffling disks in and out of CD drive when I decide to switch games solely to satisfy some copyprotection system. Add to that that my CD driver works fine but hums like jet engine if any CD is in at all, so I have to remove the disk when I finish to cut down on the noise. And while I'm playing I need to stupid disk in the drive (solely for copy protection), so I just get to enjoy the hum while I play.)
Or at the very least, don't make the entire CD black! Leave a light colored area so I can use a Sharpie to write the registration key on the CD. No, I'm not going to keep your stupid jewel case. I own a lot of games, so I keep them in a CD binder to save space. The only thing a gamer is certain to keep is the CD itself, that's where the registration key belongs.
True enough. But "best platform and tools for the task at hand" should include the cost of being able to prove your license to all software you run on demand, a non-trivial task. And you need to include the risk of being auditted; even if they don't find any violations it will cost them money, if a few employees snuck on some illegal copies it will cost even more. And you need to include the risk that the supplier of a given piece of software will provide essential security upgrades, that those upgrades will have licenses that you can accept, that the supplier will still be in business and that the upgrades won't be bundled into an upgrade you can't afford.
Open Source / Free Software is a form of insurance. It can be more expensive up front, but if all hell breaks loose at least you can deal with it yourself. Prior supplier disappear? Hire a new one. In fact, by its very nature companies providing Open Source software need to price extremely aggresively, a competitor is constantly there, able to pick up where you left off.
Unfortunately government (just like business) tends to think short term. "It's cheapest right now, to hell with the future." This could very well be an attempt save the most money in the future. Unfortunately it's hard to be sure, I can't find any sort of official announcement giving the specifics. I definately agree that a "100% Free Software" could be more harmful than good, but if the policy is "You must consider Free Software first, and if all other things are basically even take the Free Software," that sounds like a great win.
HTH. HAND.
Really depressingly, some companies only work through headhunters. When they advertise the job they drown in resumes. So instead they get a headhunter to post the job (absent company details). Feh.
Interesting. We were recently considering other options for our development team when GAIM stopped talking to Yahoo. One of my coworkers downloaded and got the Jabber daemons running in about ten minutes. He and I were chatting using GAIM a few minutes later.
If you need more advanced features perhaps what you say is true. But for basic functionality it worked quite well out of the box. And many people just need the basic functionality.
It's both a rip-off and a sign of an inefficient (malfunctioning) market.
Say the real cost to put a USB cable into my hand is $5, but you charge me $30 for the privledge. Well, with a markup like that some enterprising businessman else should be able to undercut you and sell me USB cables for $25. Of course, he'll get undercut to $20, then $15, and the cycle will eventually drive the price down to just a tad over the actual cost to put it in my hand. This is the theoretical magic of the free market.
Of course, theory and practice aren't on speaking terms right now, so enjoy your $30 cable and your malfunctioning market.
1% would be a pretty good return rate.
Also, the telemarketers believe that the return rate on numbers on the Do Not Call list will be higher than 1%. Many people logically know that buying stuff from a telemarketer is a bad idea, but when confronted with a high pressure salemen start reacting emotionally and may make a bad decision.
Basically telemarketers are seeking permission to continue preying on these people, even though these people have chosen to opt out. (And "these people" isn't "the old and senile", it's lots of otherwise ordinary people who simply aren't good at handling pressure tactics.)
While that's the common sense case, it fails to account for the fundamentally irrational behavior of people. People know they should eat healthy, but they eat junk food anyway (mmmm, junk food). They know they should exersize, but they put it off. And they know that they shouldn't trust random strangers who interrupt them to with telemarketing offers, but they actually buy stuff from telemarketters!
If you ask people, "do you want telemarketing calls?" you'll get a nearly unanimous "NO!" But if you actually call those same people up and pressure sell them something, a non-trivial number will actually buy. You know you shouldn't, but telemarketers (or at least their phone script writers) are quite good at using psychological tricks to work around your logic with drive at emotions. (These aren't strictly telemarketing techniques, anyone doing one-on-one sales is typically familiar with the techniques. People working car sales are the sterotypical example.)
Telemarketers argue that since people do buy things, they clearly want the calls, even if those same people claim that they don't want the calls.
By way of tortured example, it's like someone who has little self control with food. If snack food is available, they'll eat it. So they react by not keeping snack food in their home. Logically they don't want it, but when the actual temptation is in front of them reason goes for a walk.
Telemarketers know that they're trying to subvert reason. Some people want on the Do Not Call list because they will never buy something and don't want the interruption. But some know that they are weak when actually pressure sold something and don't want to face the pressure selling tactics. Claiming that they really wanted the call bullshit.
So, that's why telemarketers want to call people on the Do Not Call list. They're still scum, but it can be educational to study scum.
When possible, try to avoid using "scare quotes," it's a cheap way to discredit others instead of actually supporting your "argument."
It's damn well professional work. Professional work pretty much just means "for pay," which this is. Even if you add in "college educated, salaried, creating printed material intended for mass distribution," it still qualifies. Anything more restrictive is just making up new definitions. This is the sort of work done across the world. Maybe it's not up to your high standards, but it's still professional. I don't look down my nose and claim that the hordes of code slaves cranking out Visual Basic aren't professional programmers. Like it or not, they are.
And they most certainly do color correct. That's one of the key reasons they use Photoshop. They just never bothered calibrating their monitor and their color matching drivers. Yet they still manage to improve the image. They're going to have problems capturing subtle tones accurately, but apparently it doesn't matter to them or their readers.
MS Paint is really crude for cropping, resizing, and basic brightness/contrast adjustment. However, yes, many minimal graphic viewers/editors lack any traditional "retouching" tools, but include color balance, brightness/contrast, cropping, and resizing. And they would do the job just fine. Certainly cheaper than Photoshop.
I overlooked something obvious. The success of CinePaint (born "Film GIMP") would suggest that the GIMP (or at least one of its direct children) is perfectly fine for use in video work. If it's good enough for "2 Fast 2 Furious, Scooby-Doo , Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films," it's probably good enough for video work.
Oh really?
I think you overestimate both your readers ability to discern carefully color corrected imagery that the requirements of your fellow professionals creating graphics for the print and the web.
The most telling example was when I was showing some of my personal photos to a friend. I had just uploaded them off my camera, so many were dark, had odd color tints, or rotated. My friend said she was familiar with Photoshop and asked if I had something like that. I showed her how to load an image in the GIMP. Within a few minutes she was happily playing with the photos, well beyond what was necessary to just look at them. She was enjoying messing with them. All this without any help from me (well, I did show her how to find the image menu, which is a cryptic to new users). Surprised at how quickly she got going I asked about her previous experience. I knew she was a reporter for several small town newspapers, but I didn't realize that the newspapers didn't have a dedicated graphics guy, so the reporters correct and crop their own images. I asked about color correction and discovered that they had never enabled it, no one bothered. It just wasn't important. As far as she could tell in the fifteen or so minutes she played with the GIMP, it did everything she needed for her job.
Similarly for web page graphics. Anyone doing careful color correction for the web is misleading themselves. In the real world monitors are wildly miscalibrated. Each user is going to see their own personally mangled image. Perfect color matching is pointless, as long as you're "good enough" you'll be doing as well as anyone else.
(I can't speak to video, it's not an area that I know much about. But I expect for local television level quality, it's equally irrelevant. Again, you're fighting cheap home televisions with the brightness, contrast, and hue tweaked by each person (or perhaps their curious five year old).)
This is not to say that the GIMP is a perfect replacement to Photoshop. Heavens no, Photoshop is great. If you're making high quality prints the color correction is unmatched. (My father, who has been retouching and printing his photos for years using Corel PhotoPaint recently switched to Photoshop. He loathes the interface, prefering the flexibility of PhotoPaint, but is willing to suffer because Photoshop got the colors on his print Just Right, Out of the Box, something PhotoPaint never accomplished.) The GIMP definately lags in a number of areas. But to suggest that the GIMP is completely unusable for professional work is silly. Lots of professional work is done to much lower standardsthan you expect.
Interestingly, my father has found Photoshop very frustrating and less customizable than Corel's PhotoPaint. PhotoPaint made it easy to tweak the interface to his particular needs and mind set. As for "more than one way to do it," I'm curious what you mean. Every significant graphics program provides more than one way to do lots of things.
Nope, you deserve to be modded down because you're a troll. It was going pretty good, you had a flawed, but plausible argument, but the following was just too much...
Uh-huh.
You've misunderstood.
The "my" in "it's my choice" is "the person who owns a given mail server."
You don't own the mail server in question.
It's always the choice of a person running a given mail server to disable mail from anywhere. Any ISP you deal with will at least occasionally hand blacklist a given remote IP (say, to deal with an accidental mail bomb from a misconfigured remote server, or a hostile attacker). Many, many ISPs has specifically blacklisted certain IPs hosting spammers that caused problems. A smaller number hand blacklist IPs of untrustworthy sources. Wherever you go you'll see this. That some ISPs might chose to use a blacklist just automates part of this already existing system. They're not doing it out of malice (Well, some are, but not most), they're just trying to maintain the best level of service possible.
There are some important issues here, but understand that you're asking for control over another person's computer. Are you sure that's appropriate?
You wouldn't trust random files. (Well, you could, but that would be stupid.) Instead you trust files signed by someone you chose to trust. That person might build up trust by publically announcing who he is ("I'm John Smith at johnsmith.example.com, and I'll be publishing blacklists via freenet. My lists will be signed by the PGP key ABABABABAB...."). (Don't trust that John Smith is who is claims he is? Why do you trust any of the existing blacklists? All you've got is a claim on a web page.) Or he might just publish the lists with an anonymous key, the brave can try him out, and if he seems legit build up a reputation. If you don't want to deal with completely anonymous people, you don't need to. Best of all, if you use something like Freenet, you don't need to worry about the signing bit at all, Freenet has support for "owning" a random chunk of the keyspace.
All in all it would be more secure than trusting random DNS queries.
There is politicking, but it changes form. It's extremely common for "think tanks" to put together exclusive seminars on some area of law. "Come to sunny Hawaii for a five day seminar on intellectual property law. 100% free, paid for by The Serious Institute." It's very attractive, a free opportunity to hear interesting discussions on legal issues of the time, get a free trip to a nice resort, and take a little vacation. Of course, the seminars aren't balanced discussions, they're one sided attempts to push a particular agenda or position. If you repeat something often enough, some people with believe you. Being isolated from objections can be very convincing.
Could you provide some examples? This seems implausible to me. Mass marketted software makes use of copyright protection. Specialized software makes use of copyright and trade secret protection. The number of cases where a beneficial piece of software simply would not exist without patent protection seems insignificant.
Not well supported. Doesn't work on MacOS, PS2, or GameCube. That's millions more machines. Because it's proprietary, it's unlikely to ever be supported on those playforms.
Apples to oranges. That's like saying, "OpenOffice not only handles word processing, but spreadsheets and presentation graphics as well. It's just not something you get from Microsoft Word."
DirectX is just a big label covering a number of different technologies (DirectSound, DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and other). The ties between them are minimal. OpenGL's match is Direct3D. If you want a similar package that provides a wide variety of support, look to toolkits like the SDL.
DirectX on the whole has largely stabilized. This is actually good, it means that developers can spend less time worrying about the API of the week a focus on writing games. The only part that is in heavy flux is Direct3D. Direct3D's more open counterpart, OpenGL, is also in heavy flux and manages to keep apace of Direct3D's new functionality.
Ultimately, the big problem is that DirectX is proprietary. If you want move to another system (like the growing Mac market) your use of DirectX becomes a burden to rewrite.
HTH. HAND.
(All that said, I do agree that most online petitions are nearly worthless and don't carry anywhere near the weight of individually addressed messages. If you really care, take the time to express your position in your own words and send it as a letter (send an email in addition, if you like)).
Great idea! I'll just download a package from my favorite distribution that's tuned qmail to mesh nicely with how my system is configured.
Hmm, they don't supply packages for qmail. Why not? They're not allowed to. If I take the time to make up such a package, I'm not allowed to give it to my friend.
Quoth Bernstein:
Darn those pesky integrators, attempting to make their system internally consistent and trying to please their users!
I've heard great things about qmail, it's great that is available with source for no cost. But it's proprietary software, putting me at the mercy of Bernstein. If you want someone else to maintain a fork with features you desire, you're out of luck. It's fine if you're willing to accept that, but it's not acceptable to everyone. Fortunately there are other options available.
Yes that's fine for people who did chose to sign up for X-Box Live service. However, quoth the article...
If this is true then people who didn't agree are being affected without their permission. That's bogus.
It's a good article, but this is a really strange side-trek into weirdville.
It's like revoking Social Security? No, it's like getting fired from your job because you haven't done any work in 52 freaking years. If you're 72 and your copyright expired, that means you wrote the work when you were 20. Do you think you might have created something else of value in the intervening 52 years?
The vast majority of the value of any creative work is realized in the first few years. After that it rapidly tapers off to almost nothing. Works that have measurable value after 52 years are few and far between. If an author is relying on that to cover his retirement, he might as well invest in the lottery. If you do get lucky and write one of those few works that will still have value after 52 years, the work certainly paid off quite well years before, save some then.