Well, as I said the societies were communal. I'm sure they didn't like other societies stealing from them, but the concept of "ownership" of land and nature was still very foreign. The Iroquios, composed of six sub-nations, had a gigantic farming economy based on corn. But they still didn't think of property as Europeans did. As far as I understand, the treaties they made were more along the lines of "we will allow you to live beside us" instead of "we are splitting ownership of this land at this exact line with you".
Of course I'm not Native American so anything a real Native American has to say on this topic obviously overrides any opinion of mine.
Huh, I guess I was mistaken. I thought I heard that it was cancelled, sorry. Well, just line me up with the rest of the misinformation spouting slashdotters I guess...
Actually, now that I think of it, I do remember at one point getting to a very angry dwarf and pirate. They would steal my stuff and kill me. That sucked. I should have had a rocket launcher.
Yes, innocent people have to pay for the actions of a minority of people who behave badly. Just like when I rent a video I have to pay a 50 cent surcharge regardless of whether I do any damage, because it is their insurance against that one person who will screw up the $18 cassette.
This is not abnormal in itself. The question is, does the recording industry get to dictate that innocent consumers have to pay for the actions of badly behaved ones. The gov could easily say, hey, you're selling a product which is infinately copyable...we'll keep our nose out until you present us with specific cases to bring to court, but until then it's your problem to deal with the market you choose to operate in. I don't see a tax on paper because it is potentially a medium for copyright infringement (I don't know, maybe there *is* a tax on this, although at that point it becomes pretty stupid
Um, I didn't mean it was shared *between* tribes, but I would venture *most* Native American societies were pretty communal, and believed that no one person could claim ownership to land, any more than they could to air; that people were peers with the rest of nature and were not their to dominate it, but to share in it. "Controlled" is also a different thing than "owned". Even people who "controlled" the land had a different view of it than Europeans.
Does anybody else hear that low T2 background music?...
...
At the turn of the century, experimental quantum computers had been successfully demonstrated in scientific labs
Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, writes an article warning against the potential dangers of ubiquitous nanotechnology
In the year 2000 Argonne National Laboratory researchers develop a process for growing diamond film that promises to bring the superior mechanical, tribological, and thermal properties of diamond to the rapidly expanding field of micro- electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology.
...
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum da dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Let me add to this a bit. Jefferson makes his position that what we call intellectual property now, is inherently different in nature than physical property and cannot and should not be bound by the same rules. Ideas are infinately reproduceable and don't deprive the owner of their use. I can almost imagine "ideas" as an atmosphere a society breathes, each breathing in and out and recycling, etc. Now some people over here think you shouldn't be allowed to breath their air, and they will enlist the government to attempt to dilineate whose air is whose and under which circumstances you can inhale and exhale. This gets us into the ridiculous patent situation we are in and generally stifles and suffocates the atmosphere of ideas. Sure this is a very abstract analogy, but I imagine it is something like what the Native Americans felt when the white man came to their universally shared resource, the land, the air, the water, and started talking about who "owned" what land and who "owned" what water and who "owned" what air. It was completely foreign and uncomprehensible.
Funny thing is, the RIAA isn't going after people burning bit-for-bit CDs or copying to tape, etc. They have already convinced congress to tax those media to "compensate" for the potential piracy. So when you buy a writable CD, you are already helping defraying the cost of potential piracy. The thing is, hard drives are not under this taxed category which gives the RIAA room to cry bloody murder about all the atrocities being committed by storing stuff on hard drives, while keeping shut up about CD burning, tape copying, and other forms of storage. Not to say that taxing the media was a great thing in the first place, but I wonder if we just had a small tax on hard drives, like the other media, would that essentially moot the RIAA's argument? We'd ALREADY be paying to defray piracy, just as we do with tapes and CDs, and they'd have no argument.
IMHO, the consumer comes first, so if some company makes some thing they can't control, guess what - that's tough! Find a new business! Nobody is guaranteeing that you can make profit!
I gave up when I couldn't get passed the bird. The hints say the bird is afraid of the rod. This is the kind of ridiculousness that the article is talking about.
(Although I actually loved the Sierra line of "puzzle/adventure" games, as well as Monkey Island, etc.)
But wouldn't this easily be solved by just putting the tax on the hard drive (or the "net", however you would do that)? Then the record companies couldn't extort money from these services and its users, because we will have already paid. As it is, I don't think hard drives are classified and taxed as recording devices...so the record industry can do whatever it wants. Put the tax on the hard drives, and then it sucks for them because they can't claim they're not being reimbursed for all that hypothetical loss of profit.
This is completely besides my opinion that those taxes and assumption of profit as a right are rank and odious themselves.
It's happening. Portals are all the buzz (well, they were all the buzz a few years ago, but it takes a while to catch up). As users become more net/web savvy, and expect to be able to access their information from remote devices and places, universities have to cope with that. One solution is to use the web interface that almost every freshman is familiar with by the time they get to college. Also, that way one can stuff a lot of mini-apps (like slashboxes) in one customized portal for the student, so they don't have to obtain and run different clients to do different things.
So, that's all nice and fine. The problem comes in when the universities don't have the money or expertise to create a portal like this from the ground up...which leads them right into application service provider territory. In fact, at Cornell, if I understand correctly, there have been offers to host a portal in exchange for advertising, but I believe those have all been declined, and there is work underway in a cross-university consortium, to come up with a generic portal that each university can tailor to their needs.
I don't know if I really buy the idea of "interactive books". I mean, the book is the ultimate passive media. It doesn't know or care if you are reading it or not. It just sits there. It's a book.
However, "e-books" could open up real interactivity, like perhaps Choose Your Own Adventure books. Perhaps even profile the way you are reading and the things you are interested in (?? how ??), and guide you along different plot paths according to that data (e.g., perhaps you are really interested in a certain character so the book opens up a new plotline around that character). However, I don't know if people will go for this. Sort of like those "interactive" movie games. Remember them? For some reason people still just want to sit down for an hour and a half and watch a Plain Old Static Movie.
You surely must be joking about They Might Be Giants. I think I would weep if they dropped from their elevated dorky-but-cool status, to absolutely lame.
Models are just that...convenient ways to explain the universe around us. Unfortunately, the scientific community seems very establishment, and resistant to change. Nobody likes to see models they got Nobel prizes for torn down. I'm sure a lot of people didn't like Einstein's proposition that time and space are not absolutely flat as in Euclidean geometry. And until recently most of the medical world laughed at things like acupuncture and herbal remedies. But lo and behold, after doing scientific analysis, they find that all those "primitive" people who have been using "natural" methods of healing for millenia, actually got something right. Who woulda thunk?
If there are any of you still left that don't think that corporations are having a gigantic, inordinate amount of corrupting influence over government, well, follow my sig...
(yes, the Libertarian party and Reform party have some overlap here, but I disagree with each fundamentally on several topics...in all though, I'd say that there is a great mandate for a real non-establishment, reform/progressive third party, in whatever flavor it comes)
Re:It's still a democracy.....use it!
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
But let's try a test. Who wants to support Orin Hatch? Anyone, anyone? He's fought for fair use protection in copyright law, and as chairman of the Judiciary committee is able to get stuff done. His opponents in the committee are opposed to fair use protections. He was worried about MS before most people. Any takers? No? Why not?
I don't agree with most of the republican philosophy, but I am at least one liberal/progressive geek who recognizes the work Orin Hatch has done. I was pleasantly surprised how clueful he was in the hearing on the Future of Digital Music, and I even typed up a long letter thanking him, and others there for their open minds. Unfortunately I got buried under a pile of work and that thank-you never got out. But know there is at least one of us out here whose mind is open, but not so much that his brains fall out.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a non-issue created by people obsessed over aesthetics and graphic design? I have never once come accross a site whose color combination has limited the functionality of the site. Sure, if you have photorealistic images or something, they might look slightly different, but really, for most cases, does precise matching of color matter *that* much (not to slight the color blind). I mean, the BSD and YRO sections of Slashdot are pretty damn ugly, but somehow I still manager to cope. Are there really people out there who are going "Hey, this site looks subtly different on my Mac! Damn you! Burn in hell! I will never buy your products!".
Who really cares if the colors are a bit off? (and I understand if it's a matter of principle - you don't design poorly if you know there is a right way to do something, but still...this seems like splitting hairs)
I'm waiting for them to say next that advanced dungeons and dragons is violent because you go around slashing people up with swords and bludgeoning them with maces, and casting satanic magic. Not to mention all those post-apocolyptic role playing games, where you have actual guns and shoot people. My god.
Yes, I'm being facetious, but my girlfriend's younger brother is just getting interested in role playing and I hope not to get a letter from his teacher one day saying that I have to stop my perversion of his poor little innocent mind with my violent and obscene "role playing".
I worry that if too many highly intelligent people skip school to join the workforce they will not have sufficient breadth of education to fully understand the impacts of what they are doing.
And in turn I bristle at the very arrogant notion that anybody who does not go to college will be an uncultured boor, that college is the only salvation from an inevitable life of beer-guzzling barbarism. On a nearby campus with the cushion of their parents' money, kids are hurrying about, jumping ship, creating startups, riding IPOs, yet, I, uncultured boor, am the one who sits here in existential angst reading Wired articles by Bill Joy, questioning the technologies I employ, and help develop. I don't see any conscience like that being fostered in the feverish startup mania of CS students. It seems to me much of college is a bunch of widget frosting. I think the best, and *real* college experiences come from those small, hidden away, non-prestigious colleges all over the country. We've lost a lot of that in the more prestigious corporatized universities.
Slashdot Mirror
"evil" comes to mind...
heh, the MPAA doesn't want you to use VHS cassettes...
Well, as I said the societies were communal. I'm sure they didn't like other societies stealing from them, but the concept of "ownership" of land and nature was still very foreign. The Iroquios, composed of six sub-nations, had a gigantic farming economy based on corn. But they still didn't think of property as Europeans did. As far as I understand, the treaties they made were more along the lines of "we will allow you to live beside us" instead of "we are splitting ownership of this land at this exact line with you".
Of course I'm not Native American so anything a real Native American has to say on this topic obviously overrides any opinion of mine.
Ok, then the "question" was answered: No, the recording industry should not be able to push congress to impose these arbitrary taxes.
Huh, I guess I was mistaken. I thought I heard that it was cancelled, sorry. Well, just line me up with the rest of the misinformation spouting slashdotters I guess...
Actually, now that I think of it, I do remember at one point getting to a very angry dwarf and pirate. They would steal my stuff and kill me. That sucked. I should have had a rocket launcher.
Yes, innocent people have to pay for the actions of a minority of people who behave badly. Just like when I rent a video I have to pay a 50 cent surcharge regardless of whether I do any damage, because it is their insurance against that one person who will screw up the $18 cassette.
This is not abnormal in itself. The question is, does the recording industry get to dictate that innocent consumers have to pay for the actions of badly behaved ones. The gov could easily say, hey, you're selling a product which is infinately copyable...we'll keep our nose out until you present us with specific cases to bring to court, but until then it's your problem to deal with the market you choose to operate in. I don't see a tax on paper because it is potentially a medium for copyright infringement (I don't know, maybe there *is* a tax on this, although at that point it becomes pretty stupid
Um, I didn't mean it was shared *between* tribes, but I would venture *most* Native American societies were pretty communal, and believed that no one person could claim ownership to land, any more than they could to air; that people were peers with the rest of nature and were not their to dominate it, but to share in it. "Controlled" is also a different thing than "owned". Even people who "controlled" the land had a different view of it than Europeans.
Does anybody else hear that low T2 background music?...
...
At the turn of the century, experimental quantum computers had been successfully demonstrated in scientific labs
Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, writes an article warning against the potential dangers of ubiquitous nanotechnology
In the year 2000 Argonne National Laboratory researchers develop a process for growing diamond film that promises to bring the superior mechanical, tribological, and thermal properties of diamond to the rapidly expanding field of micro- electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology.
...
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum da dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Windows 2000 Professional
Mac OS X
BeOS
Linux+GNOME/KDE
I'm starting to like this "prosumer" OS stuff. I almost shiver to say it, but Mac OS X is looking super sweet.
Let me add to this a bit. Jefferson makes his position that what we call intellectual property now, is inherently different in nature than physical property and cannot and should not be bound by the same rules. Ideas are infinately reproduceable and don't deprive the owner of their use. I can almost imagine "ideas" as an atmosphere a society breathes, each breathing in and out and recycling, etc. Now some people over here think you shouldn't be allowed to breath their air, and they will enlist the government to attempt to dilineate whose air is whose and under which circumstances you can inhale and exhale. This gets us into the ridiculous patent situation we are in and generally stifles and suffocates the atmosphere of ideas. Sure this is a very abstract analogy, but I imagine it is something like what the Native Americans felt when the white man came to their universally shared resource, the land, the air, the water, and started talking about who "owned" what land and who "owned" what water and who "owned" what air. It was completely foreign and uncomprehensible.
Funny thing is, the RIAA isn't going after people burning bit-for-bit CDs or copying to tape, etc. They have already convinced congress to tax those media to "compensate" for the potential piracy. So when you buy a writable CD, you are already helping defraying the cost of potential piracy. The thing is, hard drives are not under this taxed category which gives the RIAA room to cry bloody murder about all the atrocities being committed by storing stuff on hard drives, while keeping shut up about CD burning, tape copying, and other forms of storage. Not to say that taxing the media was a great thing in the first place, but I wonder if we just had a small tax on hard drives, like the other media, would that essentially moot the RIAA's argument? We'd ALREADY be paying to defray piracy, just as we do with tapes and CDs, and they'd have no argument.
IMHO, the consumer comes first, so if some company makes some thing they can't control, guess what - that's tough! Find a new business! Nobody is guaranteeing that you can make profit!
I gave up when I couldn't get passed the bird. The hints say the bird is afraid of the rod. This is the kind of ridiculousness that the article is talking about.
(Although I actually loved the Sierra line of "puzzle/adventure" games, as well as Monkey Island, etc.)
I thought that was what that Alice in Wonderland game what supposed to be. A sort of macabre puzzle/story/FPS game. Of course they cancelled that.
But wouldn't this easily be solved by just putting the tax on the hard drive (or the "net", however you would do that)? Then the record companies couldn't extort money from these services and its users, because we will have already paid. As it is, I don't think hard drives are classified and taxed as recording devices...so the record industry can do whatever it wants. Put the tax on the hard drives, and then it sucks for them because they can't claim they're not being reimbursed for all that hypothetical loss of profit.
This is completely besides my opinion that those taxes and assumption of profit as a right are rank and odious themselves.
It's happening. Portals are all the buzz (well, they were all the buzz a few years ago, but it takes a while to catch up). As users become more net/web savvy, and expect to be able to access their information from remote devices and places, universities have to cope with that. One solution is to use the web interface that almost every freshman is familiar with by the time they get to college. Also, that way one can stuff a lot of mini-apps (like slashboxes) in one customized portal for the student, so they don't have to obtain and run different clients to do different things.
So, that's all nice and fine. The problem comes in when the universities don't have the money or expertise to create a portal like this from the ground up...which leads them right into application service provider territory. In fact, at Cornell, if I understand correctly, there have been offers to host a portal in exchange for advertising, but I believe those have all been declined, and there is work underway in a cross-university consortium, to come up with a generic portal that each university can tailor to their needs.
There are a lot of people with proshetic foreheads on slashdot...
I don't know if I really buy the idea of "interactive books". I mean, the book is the ultimate passive media. It doesn't know or care if you are reading it or not. It just sits there. It's a book.
However, "e-books" could open up real interactivity, like perhaps Choose Your Own Adventure books. Perhaps even profile the way you are reading and the things you are interested in (?? how ??), and guide you along different plot paths according to that data (e.g., perhaps you are really interested in a certain character so the book opens up a new plotline around that character). However, I don't know if people will go for this. Sort of like those "interactive" movie games. Remember them? For some reason people still just want to sit down for an hour and a half and watch a Plain Old Static Movie.
You surely must be joking about They Might Be Giants. I think I would weep if they dropped from their elevated dorky-but-cool status, to absolutely lame.
Models are just that...convenient ways to explain the universe around us. Unfortunately, the scientific community seems very establishment, and resistant to change. Nobody likes to see models they got Nobel prizes for torn down. I'm sure a lot of people didn't like Einstein's proposition that time and space are not absolutely flat as in Euclidean geometry. And until recently most of the medical world laughed at things like acupuncture and herbal remedies. But lo and behold, after doing scientific analysis, they find that all those "primitive" people who have been using "natural" methods of healing for millenia, actually got something right. Who woulda thunk?
If there are any of you still left that don't think that corporations are having a gigantic, inordinate amount of corrupting influence over government, well, follow my sig...
(yes, the Libertarian party and Reform party have some overlap here, but I disagree with each fundamentally on several topics...in all though, I'd say that there is a great mandate for a real non-establishment, reform/progressive third party, in whatever flavor it comes)
I don't agree with most of the republican philosophy, but I am at least one liberal/progressive geek who recognizes the work Orin Hatch has done. I was pleasantly surprised how clueful he was in the hearing on the Future of Digital Music, and I even typed up a long letter thanking him, and others there for their open minds. Unfortunately I got buried under a pile of work and that thank-you never got out. But know there is at least one of us out here whose mind is open, but not so much that his brains fall out.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a non-issue created by people obsessed over aesthetics and graphic design? I have never once come accross a site whose color combination has limited the functionality of the site. Sure, if you have photorealistic images or something, they might look slightly different, but really, for most cases, does precise matching of color matter *that* much (not to slight the color blind). I mean, the BSD and YRO sections of Slashdot are pretty damn ugly, but somehow I still manager to cope. Are there really people out there who are going "Hey, this site looks subtly different on my Mac! Damn you! Burn in hell! I will never buy your products!".
Who really cares if the colors are a bit off? (and I understand if it's a matter of principle - you don't design poorly if you know there is a right way to do something, but still...this seems like splitting hairs)
I'm waiting for them to say next that advanced dungeons and dragons is violent because you go around slashing people up with swords and bludgeoning them with maces, and casting satanic magic. Not to mention all those post-apocolyptic role playing games, where you have actual guns and shoot people. My god.
Yes, I'm being facetious, but my girlfriend's younger brother is just getting interested in role playing and I hope not to get a letter from his teacher one day saying that I have to stop my perversion of his poor little innocent mind with my violent and obscene "role playing".