"then it seems only reasonable that, if they can prevent this copying, the revenue they'd previously been losing should rightfully belong to them."
It doesn't say anywhere in the constitution that anybody is guaranteed profits. The issue is not whether they are losing money, it's over the extent of copyright. If I make a product, and people discover uses for the product that I hadn't intended but can charge for, do I *deserve* that "lost profit"? Am I being cheated? What if the people who use the product for the non-intended use *wouldn't* buy it if they couldn't use it this way?
"I agree that the consumer should see some benefit, but it's not something that you could morally hold the RIAA to. As an analogy, think of if you wrote and sold software, and 50% of it was used without paying. That's a 50% revenue loss"
NO. It can only be considered a revenue LOSS, if that 50% would have otherwise been PURCHASED. For piracy (illegal copying, whatever) this is not the case in many cases. I.e. people WOULD NOT have purchased your product anyway, if they could not pirate it. So no, you aren't being cheated of some hypothetical profit. "Hey, people in mud huts in Africa aren't using my product! They must be *depriving* me of my rightful *profits*!"
"and you would be justified in saying that if you could somehow reduce that loss, the money you saved should belong to you. Right?"
No. Am I justified in saying that if I could somehow beat up people and steal their money, that that money should belong to me? Does might make right? If so, let's go over to Africa and beat up those cheapskates for *depriving* us of our *profits*.
"And, since you were barely covering your costs before the savings, that money should go into making your life a bit easier. Right?"
Hmm...I guess I was barely covering my $1000/day drug addiction, so the money I get from beating people up should go into making my life a bit easier. Right?
Ok, I have a tangentially related question. For some reason it seems like the audio I get out of my CD player (Panasonic) sounds qualitatively "better" than that I get out of my computer (Sound Blaster Live Value + Altec Lansing ACS40 [w/ subwoofer]). It's not that the clarity of the sound is worse (indicating speakers), it just doesn't seem as rich. I always thought this was because my CD player has some special audio DSP in it that made the sound "better". Am I crazy? Or is my audio CD player really playing the music "better" than my CD-ROM player + audio card + speakers?
Great, so the author has just shown that "inline linking" of copyrighted material can be done in many arbitrary ways. So what!? This is not about *linking*. It's about *inline display of material one does not have copyright to in the context of other material (and possibly even without accreditation)*. Sparing the philosophical discussions over whether "intellectual" property should be considered on par with "physical" property, would you really expect it to make a difference to the court if a car thief claimed that he could steal a car through the use of a new technological widget? Or with some special car-theft-device which he only need speak English text into, in order for it to theive the car? NO! Maybe the car theif should write an essay to the judge saying "Hey, judge, it doesn't matter if I stole the car with a crowbar, because in the future there will be tons of new technological devices with which people can steal cars!" It doesn't matter *how* you do it, it is still a crime. The author is not refuting the fact that it was determined to be a crime, but merely the fact that a specific *method* was used to perpetrate the crime. The essay is completely useless.
Personally I don't think "intellectual property" is on par with physical property, or that authors/artists should get some sort of unfair perpetual monopoly on their work. But I *also* don't think that while they *do* have this granted monopoly that people should be able to deprive them of it (for their own profit) simply because they can. What's next? "Hey judge, you can't keep us from beating up old ladies with bats and stealing their money because this can be accomplished in *arbitrary* futuristic ways. Don't you see! Ugh you are so stupid and clueless!" Arriba should have done with Google does: pop up an entire window containing the site which the image originated from, and merely highlight the image (or otherwise make note of it), so there is no ambiguity as to whether Google was the actual copyright owner.
Here's another example. In an essay on, say, jelly beans, you have an image which says "Black ones suck! Die!". Would you really like the KKK to inline link that image, out of context, on some page of theirs? Or maybe you have a picture making fun of the president...do you really want some "terrorist" site inline linking your image? Or maybe you happen to be friends with a certain doctor which performs certain operations that might be considered controversial by certain people, and you have a picture of him nested on a site somewhere...do you really want that showing up on a site which incites people to hunt down and kill the people in the listed photographs? For these sort of reasons (even besides being deprived of profit, or banner ads) I believe content creators should have control on linking in this manner, which for all intents and purposes *is* copying without permission (who the hell cares *HOW* it happens, it still happens). Sure, the law *shouldn't* be against such linking per se (just as there shouldn't be laws against crowbars or hammers), it should just be against inclusion of such copyrighted material without the approval of the author (who still maintains copyright).
Ahahahaah. Wait. As Lessig says, we have to wake up and realize that the internet and unrestricted access to information is not a law of nature. Governments can and will impose regulations. Governments, under the influence of old industries with vested interests and established markets, can and will remove rights you thought you had before. Laughing about how information wants to be free didn't keep Sklyarov from being thrown in jail.
If digital technology is adopted instead of being fought tooth and nail, I think we will see that the market *INCREASES*. Who wants to buy full-blown cable to only watch a few shows? I would certainly pay-per-tv-show if I could. But I can't. So I don't (or maybe I just figure I'll download the content instead), and they lose money.
Hold your horses! Have you really taken the time to understand the *problem* yet? This post is just a laundry list of various programming language features and buzzwords. Choosing a programming language is not like choosing a car, and just adding on all possible accessories and upgrades. More features does not a better language make. I'd have your boss clarify the reason for each and every feature (and yeah, "programmers are familiar with this" probably is a valid response - but there should at least *be* a response). Does your boss even know what multiple inheritence and operator overloading is, and why one would even want it? Until you can justify the features you want, there can't be a debate on "what is the most powerful programming language?". It's like "what is the best religion?", or "what is the best color?".
"Don't write software because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout. Write it for money. At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us."
Um, no, doing stuff you don't like to do just "for the money" is what leads to burnouts. Nobody ever says "Boy am I burned out playing around carefree...I gotta take a vacation and do some drudgery!". That said, the concepts of *sound design*, *quality*, *maintainability*, *lifespan*, etc., have to be built into the "programming curriculum". I mean, they don't just hand soldiers a bazooka and say "Ok, if you can pull the trigger, you're ready! Off you go!".
"Every state requires that votes be cast in secret, but how can officials verify that a party hack isn't standing beside a remote voter?"
And how do they do the same for physical elections? They have vote "watchers" or some such. Even with vote watchers people can be influenced by others [1]. There is nothing stopping us from voting electronically (disregard over the net) in the same way we do physically, in central locations. What voting electronically DOES do, is allow us to have verified results as soon as votes are cast, without introducing human error and speculation (yes yes, subject to the usual haxoring of the process, but that is probably lower than the margin of error introduced by over-speculation and human error).
[1] Real event: the mother of somebody I know was told upon going to vote for the first time in a new county, that she had to reregister, but was strongly dissuaded from registering as a Democrat, because, as the pollster said, the county was largely Republican and she "could not vote if she was a Democrat" (a half-truth: she wouldn't be able to vote in *Republican primaries* (DUH!), but this wasn't made clear to her.), so she registered as Republican. Yes it might have been her fault for being persuaded, but AFAIK, it is a *Federal crime* to defraud the election process...it's even more horrible that the people supposedly watching over the polls to keep them neutral do it.
* checking that you have aasdf12455.so.... no
* checking your FU compiler..../usr/bin/fuc
* checking that your FU compiler supports BAR feature.... DUNNO
* checking that you have 1000 arbitrary dependencies satisfied.... PARTIALLY
* OK we are ready to proceed and create a subtley broken binary which will provoke you to ripping out your hair when it breaks (or breaks other things) in non-intuitive horrible ways and to waste an ungodly amount of time futzing with these stupid makefiles
1 @c This file is processed by GNU's TeXinfo
2 @c If you modify it or move it to another location, make sure that
3 @c TeXinfo works (type `make' in directory documentation).
4
5 Copyright (c) 1993-2000 the Wine project authors (see the file AUTHORS
6 for a complete list)
7
8 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
9 of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
10 in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
11 to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
12 copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
13 furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
14
15 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
16 all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
17
18 THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
19 IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
20 FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
21 COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
22 IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
23 CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
"It's his friggin' hobby, after all. If people don't like the way he deals with it, maybe they ought to go work for a more personable coder on another OS, like, say, Theo De Raadt."
Um, except that NOBODY WORKS FOR LINUS! Linux isn't Linus's ball anymore to take away when he doesn't like how people are playing the game. That said, I think he's been a wonderful leader and manager, and is obviously opening up to suggestions. But it is stupid and insulting to say that people who aren't satisfied with Linus's management should just suck it and pick another OS. Linus himself would tell you that Linux is more the community's than his.
They also heartily approve when the students explain their plans to design a community resource for guided access to government Web sites. The one concern the students have is that they are often unable to read files downloaded from government sites. The problematic files are in a format that requires proprietary software to read.
Man...didn't you just HATE when you were in high school and you couldn't find a community resource for guided access to government Web site, and that all the files you downloaded were in some strange proprietary format? Man that sucked. I can just see it now - "So, you really think school kids will be building national IT infrastructure for us?" "Sure, sure! Maybe we can get pizza parlor managers and goat herders in on it too!" "Suhweet!"
What about close-circuit TV connected to a TiVO or other DVR? Or am I not understanding how those work...
Re:violently overthrow the Constitution?
on
Raisethefist.com Raided
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The United States of America is all for free speech. It's also a democracy, where you can elect a new government to install new laws if you disagree with the current state of affairs. Elected officials (who presumably represent a majority of the populace) will eventually populate the group responsible for interpreting the Constitution, the Supreme Court. Therefore, in a theoretical sense (before you start screaming about corporate america owning the politicians), the people do control the government."
Yeah, in a "theoretical sense". Please tell me what is the hypothetical ethical thing to do when a presumably "democratic" system is actually entirely corrupt to the point that you *cannot peacefully effect any change in the direction you want*. Hmmm? According to you one enters the realm of "terrorist".
Sure this kid might've been stupid and actually *done* something illegal - but just think of the precendent this sets. This sends the message to anybody who is vocal about disagreeing with US policy: "We will crack down on you HARD". This obviously has a "chilling effect".
"which in turn will up their status with the people who are likely to buy linux servers."
Who? Teenage grafitti artists? Dot-bombers? Maybe in 1996. Probably a lot less now.
"makes the company as a whole seem like the same kind of carefree jokesters that my freinds and I tend to be."
And like those carefree jokester Fortune-500 CEOs...hahaha......wait...
Since the "bubble burst" I think the industry has lost it tolerance for juvenile antics. Hey, I think this is great too, but I'm not so sure that the upper-level PHBs, who are now back in charge, do.
This is funny considering that the big agribusinesses are now "patenting" their genetically modified organisms, making them sterile, or otherwise forcing farmers and others to go to THEM for what would otherwise be in nature an "open source" organism. Hmm...maybe instead of "funny" I should have said "sickening".
Slashdot Mirror
"then it seems only reasonable that, if they can prevent this copying, the revenue they'd previously been losing should rightfully belong to them."
It doesn't say anywhere in the constitution that anybody is guaranteed profits. The issue is not whether they are losing money, it's over the extent of copyright. If I make a product, and people discover uses for the product that I hadn't intended but can charge for, do I *deserve* that "lost profit"? Am I being cheated? What if the people who use the product for the non-intended use *wouldn't* buy it if they couldn't use it this way?
"I agree that the consumer should see some benefit, but it's not something that you could morally hold the RIAA to. As an analogy, think of if you wrote and sold software, and 50% of it was used without paying. That's a 50% revenue loss"
NO. It can only be considered a revenue LOSS, if that 50% would have otherwise been PURCHASED. For piracy (illegal copying, whatever) this is not the case in many cases. I.e. people WOULD NOT have purchased your product anyway, if they could not pirate it. So no, you aren't being cheated of some hypothetical profit. "Hey, people in mud huts in Africa aren't using my product! They must be *depriving* me of my rightful *profits*!"
"and you would be justified in saying that if you could somehow reduce that loss, the money you saved should belong to you. Right?"
No. Am I justified in saying that if I could somehow beat up people and steal their money, that that money should belong to me? Does might make right? If so, let's go over to Africa and beat up those cheapskates for *depriving* us of our *profits*.
"And, since you were barely covering your costs before the savings, that money should go into making your life a bit easier. Right?"
Hmm...I guess I was barely covering my $1000/day drug addiction, so the money I get from beating people up should go into making my life a bit easier. Right?
Ok, I have a tangentially related question. For some reason it seems like the audio I get out of my CD player (Panasonic) sounds qualitatively "better" than that I get out of my computer (Sound Blaster Live Value + Altec Lansing ACS40 [w/ subwoofer]). It's not that the clarity of the sound is worse (indicating speakers), it just doesn't seem as rich. I always thought this was because my CD player has some special audio DSP in it that made the sound "better". Am I crazy? Or is my audio CD player really playing the music "better" than my CD-ROM player + audio card + speakers?
Please, have somebody go through and fix all the spelling errors, and generally edit the petition. It looks sort of sloppy.
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/maps/
t s. html
http://rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/Fallout/conten
Great, so the author has just shown that "inline linking" of copyrighted material can be done in many arbitrary ways. So what!? This is not about *linking*. It's about *inline display of material one does not have copyright to in the context of other material (and possibly even without accreditation)*. Sparing the philosophical discussions over whether "intellectual" property should be considered on par with "physical" property, would you really expect it to make a difference to the court if a car thief claimed that he could steal a car through the use of a new technological widget? Or with some special car-theft-device which he only need speak English text into, in order for it to theive the car? NO! Maybe the car theif should write an essay to the judge saying "Hey, judge, it doesn't matter if I stole the car with a crowbar, because in the future there will be tons of new technological devices with which people can steal cars!" It doesn't matter *how* you do it, it is still a crime. The author is not refuting the fact that it was determined to be a crime, but merely the fact that a specific *method* was used to perpetrate the crime. The essay is completely useless.
Personally I don't think "intellectual property" is on par with physical property, or that authors/artists should get some sort of unfair perpetual monopoly on their work. But I *also* don't think that while they *do* have this granted monopoly that people should be able to deprive them of it (for their own profit) simply because they can. What's next? "Hey judge, you can't keep us from beating up old ladies with bats and stealing their money because this can be accomplished in *arbitrary* futuristic ways. Don't you see! Ugh you are so stupid and clueless!" Arriba should have done with Google does: pop up an entire window containing the site which the image originated from, and merely highlight the image (or otherwise make note of it), so there is no ambiguity as to whether Google was the actual copyright owner.
Here's another example. In an essay on, say, jelly beans, you have an image which says "Black ones suck! Die!". Would you really like the KKK to inline link that image, out of context, on some page of theirs? Or maybe you have a picture making fun of the president...do you really want some "terrorist" site inline linking your image? Or maybe you happen to be friends with a certain doctor which performs certain operations that might be considered controversial by certain people, and you have a picture of him nested on a site somewhere...do you really want that showing up on a site which incites people to hunt down and kill the people in the listed photographs? For these sort of reasons (even besides being deprived of profit, or banner ads) I believe content creators should have control on linking in this manner, which for all intents and purposes *is* copying without permission (who the hell cares *HOW* it happens, it still happens). Sure, the law *shouldn't* be against such linking per se (just as there shouldn't be laws against crowbars or hammers), it should just be against inclusion of such copyrighted material without the approval of the author (who still maintains copyright).
"Film has a logarithmic sensitivity to light, while a digital sensor has a linear sensitivity."
So then, isn't the question of what type of sensitivity *human eyes* have? Do we have logarithmic or linear sensitivity?
Ahahahaah. Wait. As Lessig says, we have to wake up and realize that the internet and unrestricted access to information is not a law of nature. Governments can and will impose regulations. Governments, under the influence of old industries with vested interests and established markets, can and will remove rights you thought you had before. Laughing about how information wants to be free didn't keep Sklyarov from being thrown in jail.
If digital technology is adopted instead of being fought tooth and nail, I think we will see that the market *INCREASES*. Who wants to buy full-blown cable to only watch a few shows? I would certainly pay-per-tv-show if I could. But I can't. So I don't (or maybe I just figure I'll download the content instead), and they lose money.
No. You cannot.
"My boss gave me a set of criteria"
Hold your horses! Have you really taken the time to understand the *problem* yet? This post is just a laundry list of various programming language features and buzzwords. Choosing a programming language is not like choosing a car, and just adding on all possible accessories and upgrades. More features does not a better language make. I'd have your boss clarify the reason for each and every feature (and yeah, "programmers are familiar with this" probably is a valid response - but there should at least *be* a response). Does your boss even know what multiple inheritence and operator overloading is, and why one would even want it? Until you can justify the features you want, there can't be a debate on "what is the most powerful programming language?". It's like "what is the best religion?", or "what is the best color?".
I tend to prefer PTBs (Pony-Tailed Bosses), and GBBs (Grizzly-Bearded Bosses). They're usually more in tune with programmers.
"Don't write software because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout. Write it for money. At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us."
Um, no, doing stuff you don't like to do just "for the money" is what leads to burnouts. Nobody ever says "Boy am I burned out playing around carefree...I gotta take a vacation and do some drudgery!". That said, the concepts of *sound design*, *quality*, *maintainability*, *lifespan*, etc., have to be built into the "programming curriculum". I mean, they don't just hand soldiers a bazooka and say "Ok, if you can pull the trigger, you're ready! Off you go!".
"Every state requires that votes be cast in secret, but how can officials verify that a party hack isn't standing beside a remote voter?"
And how do they do the same for physical elections? They have vote "watchers" or some such. Even with vote watchers people can be influenced by others [1]. There is nothing stopping us from voting electronically (disregard over the net) in the same way we do physically, in central locations. What voting electronically DOES do, is allow us to have verified results as soon as votes are cast, without introducing human error and speculation (yes yes, subject to the usual haxoring of the process, but that is probably lower than the margin of error introduced by over-speculation and human error).
[1] Real event: the mother of somebody I know was told upon going to vote for the first time in a new county, that she had to reregister, but was strongly dissuaded from registering as a Democrat, because, as the pollster said, the county was largely Republican and she "could not vote if she was a Democrat" (a half-truth: she wouldn't be able to vote in *Republican primaries* (DUH!), but this wasn't made clear to her.), so she registered as Republican. Yes it might have been her fault for being persuaded, but AFAIK, it is a *Federal crime* to defraud the election process...it's even more horrible that the people supposedly watching over the polls to keep them neutral do it.
what's wrong?
.... no
.... /usr/bin/fuc
.... DUNNO
.... PARTIALLY
* checking that you have aasdf12455.so
* checking your FU compiler
* checking that your FU compiler supports BAR feature
* checking that you have 1000 arbitrary dependencies satisfied
* OK we are ready to proceed and create a subtley broken binary which will provoke you to ripping out your hair when it breaks (or breaks other things) in non-intuitive horrible ways and to waste an ungodly amount of time futzing with these stupid makefiles
"It's his friggin' hobby, after all. If people don't like the way he deals with it, maybe they ought to go work for a more personable coder on another OS, like, say, Theo De Raadt."
Um, except that NOBODY WORKS FOR LINUS! Linux isn't Linus's ball anymore to take away when he doesn't like how people are playing the game. That said, I think he's been a wonderful leader and manager, and is obviously opening up to suggestions. But it is stupid and insulting to say that people who aren't satisfied with Linus's management should just suck it and pick another OS. Linus himself would tell you that Linux is more the community's than his.
Man...didn't you just HATE when you were in high school and you couldn't find a community resource for guided access to government Web site, and that all the files you downloaded were in some strange proprietary format? Man that sucked. I can just see it now - "So, you really think school kids will be building national IT infrastructure for us?" "Sure, sure! Maybe we can get pizza parlor managers and goat herders in on it too!" "Suhweet!"
How is this funny?
According to his journal, it looks like he already solved it...
I'd second that opinion. JAD is absolutely amazing.
http://kpdus.tripod.com/jad.html
What about close-circuit TV connected to a TiVO or other DVR? Or am I not understanding how those work...
"The United States of America is all for free speech. It's also a democracy, where you can elect a new government to install new laws if you disagree with the current state of affairs. Elected officials (who presumably represent a majority of the populace) will eventually populate the group responsible for interpreting the Constitution, the Supreme Court. Therefore, in a theoretical sense (before you start screaming about corporate america owning the politicians), the people do control the government."
Yeah, in a "theoretical sense". Please tell me what is the hypothetical ethical thing to do when a presumably "democratic" system is actually entirely corrupt to the point that you *cannot peacefully effect any change in the direction you want*. Hmmm? According to you one enters the realm of "terrorist".
Sure this kid might've been stupid and actually *done* something illegal - but just think of the precendent this sets. This sends the message to anybody who is vocal about disagreeing with US policy: "We will crack down on you HARD". This obviously has a "chilling effect".
I wonder how they brainstormed *this* up:
Boon Ga Boon Ga
"which in turn will up their status with the people who are likely to buy linux servers."
Who? Teenage grafitti artists? Dot-bombers? Maybe in 1996. Probably a lot less now.
"makes the company as a whole seem like the same kind of carefree jokesters that my freinds and I tend to be."
And like those carefree jokester Fortune-500 CEOs...hahaha......wait...
Since the "bubble burst" I think the industry has lost it tolerance for juvenile antics. Hey, I think this is great too, but I'm not so sure that the upper-level PHBs, who are now back in charge, do.
"I just spotted an open source tomato."
This is funny considering that the big agribusinesses are now "patenting" their genetically modified organisms, making them sterile, or otherwise forcing farmers and others to go to THEM for what would otherwise be in nature an "open source" organism. Hmm...maybe instead of "funny" I should have said "sickening".