So deliciously evil. They pay the fine for monopolistic price increases by pushing through a monopolistic price increase.
What's the next step? Suing their customers for giving them a bad reputation when the next worm gets passed around and everyone running microsoft loses three days patching their systems?
It's much better than taking drug coctails to stay alive, though. A hell of a lot cheaper, too.
Which is why this likely won't be commercialised, even if it works. Pharmaceutical companies don't create cures, they create treatments. Curing a disease is not profitable.
I'm not saying they purposely avoid developing cures, but just that if they're smart at doing business they won't invest more than a token amount in something that could become a cure rather than a treatment.
A horse must be broken before it can become useful. A wild horse may be beautiful to watch... but it contributes nothing. It is only by going through hard times that we grow and learn and mature.
If you consider God as a parent, you will start to understand much of his nature.
What is better for the horse? To live in the wild, in freedom, or to pull a plow in the service of man? For man the horse is better broken, but you would have a hard time arguing that freedom is a bad thing for the horse. Now extend that to humanity's relationship with God. Your argument seems to say that we are merely devices for God's "purposes". However, since God is all-powerful he does not need us to do anything. God can recreate the world how he wishes it to be. What is our purpose then? And if we must obey God as our parent, what with free will? Do we only have choice as long as we make the choice God "wants" us to make? And if so, why isn't the right choice more obvious. Why is it not obvious to believers God does not want them to wage war, because he loves all, on every side of every dispute?
I don't like the concept of the entirety of humanity being a bunch of children with limited responsibility. That kind of "God knows best" reasoning has been the excuse for most of the awful acts perpetrated by organised religion.
Also, a sign of maturity is not needing your parents to solve your problems for you. It is a badge of pride for parents when their children become independent. If we are God's children, he should want us to grow up and not need him anymore. By that reasoning, a person doesn't grow up until they stop praying to God for help.
Frankly, the model of God as a parent raises more questions for me than it explains. So, no, it doesn't help me understand the nature of God.
What I'm really ashamed of is that the US could come up on war crime charges.
Actually, it couldn't. The International Criminal Court is the court that deals with war crimes now, and the US has done everything it can to avoid it having jurisdiction over US citizens, even to the point of passing a law that allows the president to invade holland and forcibly take back any detained suspected war criminals that have a US passport. In addition to measures like cutting of aid to countries that ratify the ICC.
To me Bush has been unusually prescient with respect to avoiding any culpability of US citizens for war crimes committed around the world.
How many fans of "Star Wars" identify themselves with the Empire, Darth Vader, Moff Tarkin, Darth Maul, stormtroopers or "lesser evils" like Bobba Fett?
You should read up on the theory that the empire are actually the good guys, fighting a nasty rebellion that wants interstellar war and an ending to millenia of peace.
I don't claim to buy into it, but you can always make evil look good and good look evil.
Since there were so many specific predictions (and not the flaky Nostradamus guesswork sort of predictions) made in the Old Testament that were fulfilled hundreds or thousands of years later, and documented in the New Testament, that kind of kills the allegory argument.
Ofcourse, the basic assumption you make is that the old testament was written before the "predicted" events it describes, and that it wasn't revised afterwards to "fit in" the predictions, or to "update" them (for example, the 70 year reign of nebuchadnezzar over israel, can you prove that it didn't originally say 20 years, and someone changed it to 70 after the fact?).
I can understand that a believer sees the bible as the word of God, and thus is unwilling to criticize its origin. I however can not make the assumption that the bible is the word of God. To me the assumption that the bible is completely a work of man seems just as likely, especially as you look at early christianity and its revisionist policies regarding the bible (the only reason the bible seems to have been assembled in the first place was to counter gnostic philosophy within the christian faith).
And even if you were able to prove the bible contains predictions that were written before they happened, it doesn't prove that the bible is a valid source of predictions, since you'd need to back it up with a statistical analysis of how often the bible is right about things, and how often it is wrong. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Although I'm sure believers will claim the bible is never wrong, and any specific passages handed to them of predictions the bible is wrong on will be disputed with arguments like "that's allegorical", or "that is yet to happen".
what if... there is no god and the aliens know it for sure and can prove it also
Then they will be considered tools of the devil, and most earthbound religions will move us towards war with them.
To someone who believes religion forms the very essence of who they are. Most of the true believers can not be dissuaded from believing regardless of how strong your argument against God is. But ofcourse that is the whole point of faith, it is belief beyond reason.
Humanity hasn't stopped fighting religious wars against itself (despite the fact that all the major religions say killing of human beings is evil). It seems incredibly unlikely we wouldn't wage religious war against aliens if they made contact with us, which is probably why they haven't made contact yet. If they're out there, that is.
These are simply tests from above to see how we will adapt.
I never understood the argument that God "tests" people. If He is all-knowing and all-seeing, He already knows what you're going to do, so what is the point in actually doing the test?
It seems to me that one can only advance the theory that God tests people if at the same time one advances the concept of God having limited power. A God with infinite power does not need to test anyone.
The "no secrets" reasoning is mistaken. There is empirical evidence that software developers don't go searching for a patented solution to their problem. After all, why would they? It will take them as long to find it as to invent it themselves, and it will only result in a legal obligation to pay someone else for the program you're developing.
I'd like to know of a single software developer who, when stumped with a problem, says "I'lll think I'll go look in the patent database for a solution."
Likely he was allowed to stack a number of books in front of him before getting the questions, just like you would normally research a wide range of subjects in a library.
As if outlook never, ever, corrupted anyone's email.
You're basically saying that because a product doesn't carry the 1.0 label it inherently must be unreliable. 1.0 does not correspond in any way to product quality. Thunderbird can be 0.6 and more reliable than outlook.
We use papertrail-less electronic voting in Belgium too, and there was an incident where a spontaneous bitflip in the counting machine's memory caused a miscount of 8192 votes. It was blamed on cosmic radiation. And no, I'm not kidding.
Still, the vote gets recorded to a separate magnetic card for each voter, so it is possible to retally, even though you have to take the voting machine's word for it that your vote was recorded correctly.
Re:Headphones are an even better solution....
on
A Silent PC Solution?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
My machine is nearly as loud as an airplane, and I can hear it from the other end of my house. Personally I find it comforting, but headhones wouldn't solve the problem if I did want it to be a little quieter in here.
Unfortunately, I doubt this will be allowed to happen, at least not at first. Here's a prediction: as soon as this becomes imminant, we will see the massive implementation of extremely restrictive measures to control it. These will be adopted in the name of security, but incidentally they will also have the effect of making it virtually impossible to use this technology independently, without relying on megacorporate support. This will probably mean continued widespread poverty in the third world, but we will accept it out of fear.
Well, if the AIDS medication is any indication, the third world will just go "screw you", and create their own versions, without caring about US laws.
But the chance of exchanging hundreds of H-Bombs thus causing on a nuclear winter etc. are now very small.
Really? Do you know about the incident in 1995 where Russia almost launched their nukes at the US because they forgot norway was going to launch a missile and thought the US was doing a pre-emptive strike (that's how you do nuclear war, you launch your missiles and hope they strike before the other guy launches his)?
The rocket was spotted by Russian early-warning radars. The radar operators sent an alert to Moscow. Within minutes, President Boris Yeltsin was brought his black nuclear-command suitcase. For several tense minutes, while Yeltsin spoke with his defense minister by telephone, confusion reigned.
Little is known about what Yeltsin said, but these may have been some of the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. They offer a glimpse of how the high-alert nuclear-launch mechanism of the Cold War remains in place, and how it could go disastrously wrong, even though the great superpower rivalry has ended.
Russia and the United States still rely on a doctrine that calls for making rapid-fire decisions about a possible nuclear attack. If a Russian president wants to retaliate before enemy missiles reach his soil, he has about eight minutes to decide what to do.
8 minutes is all that separates us from annihilating half the planet. You can toy with fate for only so long. We've already norrawly dodged nuclear war twice, once with the cuban missile crisis, and once with the underreported norway incident. How many times do we have to come close to midnight on the doomsday clock before we wise up?
Even more worrying, russia can't afford the cost of running their military. They have thousands of nukes, and can't secure them all. The only thing that'll work is a concerted effort to dismantle them, but the US currently is actually building more nukes instead of going for a shared dismantling program.
Really, read diamond age. What'll happen is that there will be nanobots to attack the nanobots, and then nanobots to attack the nanobots that attack the nanobots, and so on. Besides, you'd have to be a loonie to target another race, because sooner or later someone will find out which race you belong to and build a nanobot to retaliate.
There will always be people willing to kill other people, and they will always find a way to do it. Nanotech to them will be a tool. A tool that will be countered by other tools by those who seek to stop them.
What I think will be the real problem is how society is going to deal with the disappearance of scarcity. If you have fusion power, and a decent supply of basic atoms, both not unlikely to be achieved in the course of the century, then it means you can create anytihng at basically the same cost (really cheaply). Capitalism works because price is defined by scarcity, and scarcity represents effort to create a product, so people get reimbursed appropriately for their efforts. We've already seen in the music industry what happens when a product loses its scarcity, think what this would do if everything manmade would suffer the same fate as popular music in the p2p era.
I can see it now, broad new laws which outlaw unlicensed creation of nanofactories. Strict regulation defining who you need to pay royalties to in order to use your nanofactory to create an object. Jail sentences for generating an unlicensed spoon. Basically communism all over but with a high tech coating.
Or maybe we will abandon physical scarcity and move to a model of intellectual scarcity. Where better designs of everyday objects get you higher licensing returns, and so the entire world will resemble the software community, with a bunch of proprietary firms selling specific versions of their products, and an open community trying to engineer free plans for products on their own.
Geeks invoke Fair-Use as a cop-out from facing the legal and moral responsibilities for their actions which are, IN FACT, all-too-often, either STEALING MUSIC, or illegally breaking a copyright-protection scheme.
Two things:
- copyright infringement is not stealing
- just because something is illegal does not mean it is immoral, or even that the law making it illegal is right
Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm opposed to illegally copying copyrighted music and deleted my mp3 collection a long time ago and replaced it with legally bought music. I'm just saying that laws like the dmca treat the symptoms, not the cause, and do more harm than good. The entire music distribution model, which creates artificial scarcity in a product that doesn't know scarcity by nature is hopelessly flawed, and it is only technological retardedness that has kept it working as long as it did. The new anti-circumvention laws promote technological retardedness to prop up a model that doesn't work.
There needs to be a real debate about the future of the music industry, and how culture will be paid for, rather than lawmakers just trying to maintain the status quo, however poorly it is suited to modern society.
However, I will admit that given that lawmakers have much bigger issues on their hands than copyright, it would probably be advisable to, for now, back temporary fixes like the dmca, and grudgingly accept a patch to the distribution model that involves drm. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so people have to be careful to not compromise too long or too much.
"If you don't have permission to watch a copyrighted work, then it's not ok to make digital copies to circumvent the encryption and watch that work. You'll have to find a legal and authorized means to view the content."
If you don't have permission to watch a copyrighted work, it's not ok to watch it period, decrypting it is not relevant to the discussion. If you DO have the permission to watch the work, why shouldn't you be allowed to decrypt it whichever way you want?
I don't see his arguments as making much sense, other than from a powerplay standpoint. He just wants as much power as possible over the viewers of his media.
Other than that, I think it's a little bit unfair to say that he doesn't understand the issues. Remember, disagreeing is not the same as not understanding.
I do think he understands the issues very well too. I just believe that he's trying to kill free culture to get more corporate profits. That makes him an enemy of the public.
You're missing the point. The point is not that there isn't a licensed player for linux, the point is that people need a licensed player to be able to play dvd's. Copyright is the right to have a copy. Once you have the copy, you should be able to use it any which way you want that doesn't involve redistributing another copy. By restricting dvd's to licensed players through the new artificial construct called the dmca they have taken away ability from end users. You can't take screenshots from dvd's (so you are limited to the movie-company distributed shots if you're trying to write a review), you can't skip past commercials on a lot of dvd's (thereby making you pay twice for the same product), if it wasn't for multi-region players (which technically aren't allowed by the dvd licensing body dvd-cca) you wouldn't even be able to buy rare dvd's from across the world and view them at home.
Basically, the essential point is that once you start limiting content to licensed players, you give control over how people interact with popular culture to them, and because of the clear incentives for the entrenched copyright owners to restrict your abilities ever further (making you pay multiple times for the same content) sooner or later you end up with the right to read.
That's the real issue. The dvd player on linux thing is just the angle to interviewer took to approach the issue because valenti's views are so far removed from reality you have to reel him in before you start trying to throw a net around him.
Joe is an easy to use powerful editor that you don't have to remember how to use due to the excellent built-in help system. For those of us who only use console editors when X breaks joe is really nice. I install it everywhere I have a login. And yes, I do know how to use vi, but I don't like it, and I tried to learn emacs, and found out I wouldn't use it enough to remember how to use it. So, vi or emacs? My answer: joe.
Jabber is nice, but I gave up on it for two reasons:
- The msn plugin, crucial to me since everyone I know is on that network, never worked quite right. Either it was outright broken, or unstable.
- Every single jabber client is horrible UI-wise. The whole nomenclature is needlessly obfuscated. "Signing up for transports" ? What the hell is that? The whole transport scheme seems poorly thought out UI-wise, no matter how well-designed it is technologically.
Actually, MSN messenger uses SIP for its audio and video functionality, which IS an open format. It's just not supported in a way yet that will interoperate with a messenger client on linux.
And netmeeting uses open and standardised formats too, which is the whole reason gnomemeeting interoperates with windows.
I have this haunting suspicion that somewhere there is a vast bank of people listening to music fragments and typing in the artist/title, or handing it over to the next person if they don't know. Probably in india.
I'm pretty sure they're not using computer recognition, because you'd need to have every version of every song fingerprinted, which would a truly herculean effort.
One way to test it would be to play a famous song yourself on your own guitar, and see if they give the correct answer.
And that's 3.35 over the minimum price you can pay. The average customer of magnatune pays 3.35 more than he or she has to in order to buy the music. Quality music sold with a good model will make money. It's that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
So deliciously evil. They pay the fine for monopolistic price increases by pushing through a monopolistic price increase.
What's the next step? Suing their customers for giving them a bad reputation when the next worm gets passed around and everyone running microsoft loses three days patching their systems?
It's much better than taking drug coctails to stay alive, though. A hell of a lot cheaper, too.
Which is why this likely won't be commercialised, even if it works. Pharmaceutical companies don't create cures, they create treatments. Curing a disease is not profitable.
I'm not saying they purposely avoid developing cures, but just that if they're smart at doing business they won't invest more than a token amount in something that could become a cure rather than a treatment.
A horse must be broken before it can become useful. A wild horse may be beautiful to watch... but it contributes nothing. It is only by going through hard times that we grow and learn and mature.
If you consider God as a parent, you will start to understand much of his nature.
What is better for the horse? To live in the wild, in freedom, or to pull a plow in the service of man? For man the horse is better broken, but you would have a hard time arguing that freedom is a bad thing for the horse. Now extend that to humanity's relationship with God. Your argument seems to say that we are merely devices for God's "purposes". However, since God is all-powerful he does not need us to do anything. God can recreate the world how he wishes it to be. What is our purpose then? And if we must obey God as our parent, what with free will? Do we only have choice as long as we make the choice God "wants" us to make? And if so, why isn't the right choice more obvious. Why is it not obvious to believers God does not want them to wage war, because he loves all, on every side of every dispute?
I don't like the concept of the entirety of humanity being a bunch of children with limited responsibility. That kind of "God knows best" reasoning has been the excuse for most of the awful acts perpetrated by organised religion.
Also, a sign of maturity is not needing your parents to solve your problems for you. It is a badge of pride for parents when their children become independent. If we are God's children, he should want us to grow up and not need him anymore. By that reasoning, a person doesn't grow up until they stop praying to God for help.
Frankly, the model of God as a parent raises more questions for me than it explains. So, no, it doesn't help me understand the nature of God.
What I'm really ashamed of is that the US could come up on war crime charges.
Actually, it couldn't. The International Criminal Court is the court that deals with war crimes now, and the US has done everything it can to avoid it having jurisdiction over US citizens, even to the point of passing a law that allows the president to invade holland and forcibly take back any detained suspected war criminals that have a US passport. In addition to measures like cutting of aid to countries that ratify the ICC.
To me Bush has been unusually prescient with respect to avoiding any culpability of US citizens for war crimes committed around the world.
How many fans of "Star Wars" identify themselves with the Empire, Darth Vader, Moff Tarkin, Darth Maul, stormtroopers or "lesser evils" like Bobba Fett?
You should read up on the theory that the empire are actually the good guys, fighting a nasty rebellion that wants interstellar war and an ending to millenia of peace.
I don't claim to buy into it, but you can always make evil look good and good look evil.
Since there were so many specific predictions (and not the flaky Nostradamus guesswork sort of predictions) made in the Old Testament that were fulfilled hundreds or thousands of years later, and documented in the New Testament, that kind of kills the allegory argument.
Ofcourse, the basic assumption you make is that the old testament was written before the "predicted" events it describes, and that it wasn't revised afterwards to "fit in" the predictions, or to "update" them (for example, the 70 year reign of nebuchadnezzar over israel, can you prove that it didn't originally say 20 years, and someone changed it to 70 after the fact?).
I can understand that a believer sees the bible as the word of God, and thus is unwilling to criticize its origin. I however can not make the assumption that the bible is the word of God. To me the assumption that the bible is completely a work of man seems just as likely, especially as you look at early christianity and its revisionist policies regarding the bible (the only reason the bible seems to have been assembled in the first place was to counter gnostic philosophy within the christian faith).
And even if you were able to prove the bible contains predictions that were written before they happened, it doesn't prove that the bible is a valid source of predictions, since you'd need to back it up with a statistical analysis of how often the bible is right about things, and how often it is wrong. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Although I'm sure believers will claim the bible is never wrong, and any specific passages handed to them of predictions the bible is wrong on will be disputed with arguments like "that's allegorical", or "that is yet to happen".
what if ... there is no god and the aliens know it for sure and can prove it also
Then they will be considered tools of the devil, and most earthbound religions will move us towards war with them.
To someone who believes religion forms the very essence of who they are. Most of the true believers can not be dissuaded from believing regardless of how strong your argument against God is. But ofcourse that is the whole point of faith, it is belief beyond reason.
Humanity hasn't stopped fighting religious wars against itself (despite the fact that all the major religions say killing of human beings is evil). It seems incredibly unlikely we wouldn't wage religious war against aliens if they made contact with us, which is probably why they haven't made contact yet. If they're out there, that is.
These are simply tests from above to see how we will adapt.
I never understood the argument that God "tests" people. If He is all-knowing and all-seeing, He already knows what you're going to do, so what is the point in actually doing the test?
It seems to me that one can only advance the theory that God tests people if at the same time one advances the concept of God having limited power. A God with infinite power does not need to test anyone.
The "no secrets" reasoning is mistaken. There is empirical evidence that software developers don't go searching for a patented solution to their problem. After all, why would they? It will take them as long to find it as to invent it themselves, and it will only result in a legal obligation to pay someone else for the program you're developing.
I'd like to know of a single software developer who, when stumped with a problem, says "I'lll think I'll go look in the patent database for a solution."
Likely he was allowed to stack a number of books in front of him before getting the questions, just like you would normally research a wide range of subjects in a library.
As if outlook never, ever, corrupted anyone's email.
You're basically saying that because a product doesn't carry the 1.0 label it inherently must be unreliable. 1.0 does not correspond in any way to product quality. Thunderbird can be 0.6 and more reliable than outlook.
We use papertrail-less electronic voting in Belgium too, and there was an incident where a spontaneous bitflip in the counting machine's memory caused a miscount of 8192 votes. It was blamed on cosmic radiation. And no, I'm not kidding.
Still, the vote gets recorded to a separate magnetic card for each voter, so it is possible to retally, even though you have to take the voting machine's word for it that your vote was recorded correctly.
My machine is nearly as loud as an airplane, and I can hear it from the other end of my house. Personally I find it comforting, but headhones wouldn't solve the problem if I did want it to be a little quieter in here.
Yes, they would, if you bought the right ones.
Unfortunately, I doubt this will be allowed to happen, at least not at first. Here's a prediction: as soon as this becomes imminant, we will see the massive implementation of extremely restrictive measures to control it. These will be adopted in the name of security, but incidentally they will also have the effect of making it virtually impossible to use this technology independently, without relying on megacorporate support. This will probably mean continued widespread poverty in the third world, but we will accept it out of fear.
Well, if the AIDS medication is any indication, the third world will just go "screw you", and create their own versions, without caring about US laws.
But the chance of exchanging hundreds of H-Bombs thus causing on a nuclear winter etc. are now very small.
Really? Do you know about the incident in 1995 where Russia almost launched their nukes at the US because they forgot norway was going to launch a missile and thought the US was doing a pre-emptive strike (that's how you do nuclear war, you launch your missiles and hope they strike before the other guy launches his)?
See this link for details.
Specifically, from the article:
The rocket was spotted by Russian early-warning radars. The radar operators sent an alert to Moscow. Within minutes, President Boris Yeltsin was brought his black nuclear-command suitcase. For several tense minutes, while Yeltsin spoke with his defense minister by telephone, confusion reigned.
Little is known about what Yeltsin said, but these may have been some of the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. They offer a glimpse of how the high-alert nuclear-launch mechanism of the Cold War remains in place, and how it could go disastrously wrong, even though the great superpower rivalry has ended.
Russia and the United States still rely on a doctrine that calls for making rapid-fire decisions about a possible nuclear attack. If a Russian president wants to retaliate before enemy missiles reach his soil, he has about eight minutes to decide what to do.
8 minutes is all that separates us from annihilating half the planet. You can toy with fate for only so long. We've already norrawly dodged nuclear war twice, once with the cuban missile crisis, and once with the underreported norway incident. How many times do we have to come close to midnight on the doomsday clock before we wise up?
Even more worrying, russia can't afford the cost of running their military. They have thousands of nukes, and can't secure them all. The only thing that'll work is a concerted effort to dismantle them, but the US currently is actually building more nukes instead of going for a shared dismantling program.
Really, read diamond age. What'll happen is that there will be nanobots to attack the nanobots, and then nanobots to attack the nanobots that attack the nanobots, and so on. Besides, you'd have to be a loonie to target another race, because sooner or later someone will find out which race you belong to and build a nanobot to retaliate.
There will always be people willing to kill other people, and they will always find a way to do it. Nanotech to them will be a tool. A tool that will be countered by other tools by those who seek to stop them.
What I think will be the real problem is how society is going to deal with the disappearance of scarcity. If you have fusion power, and a decent supply of basic atoms, both not unlikely to be achieved in the course of the century, then it means you can create anytihng at basically the same cost (really cheaply). Capitalism works because price is defined by scarcity, and scarcity represents effort to create a product, so people get reimbursed appropriately for their efforts. We've already seen in the music industry what happens when a product loses its scarcity, think what this would do if everything manmade would suffer the same fate as popular music in the p2p era.
I can see it now, broad new laws which outlaw unlicensed creation of nanofactories. Strict regulation defining who you need to pay royalties to in order to use your nanofactory to create an object. Jail sentences for generating an unlicensed spoon. Basically communism all over but with a high tech coating.
Or maybe we will abandon physical scarcity and move to a model of intellectual scarcity. Where better designs of everyday objects get you higher licensing returns, and so the entire world will resemble the software community, with a bunch of proprietary firms selling specific versions of their products, and an open community trying to engineer free plans for products on their own.
Geeks invoke Fair-Use as a cop-out from facing the legal and moral responsibilities for their actions which are, IN FACT, all-too-often, either STEALING MUSIC, or illegally breaking a copyright-protection scheme.
Two things:
- copyright infringement is not stealing
- just because something is illegal does not mean it is immoral, or even that the law making it illegal is right
Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm opposed to illegally copying copyrighted music and deleted my mp3 collection a long time ago and replaced it with legally bought music. I'm just saying that laws like the dmca treat the symptoms, not the cause, and do more harm than good. The entire music distribution model, which creates artificial scarcity in a product that doesn't know scarcity by nature is hopelessly flawed, and it is only technological retardedness that has kept it working as long as it did. The new anti-circumvention laws promote technological retardedness to prop up a model that doesn't work.
There needs to be a real debate about the future of the music industry, and how culture will be paid for, rather than lawmakers just trying to maintain the status quo, however poorly it is suited to modern society.
However, I will admit that given that lawmakers have much bigger issues on their hands than copyright, it would probably be advisable to, for now, back temporary fixes like the dmca, and grudgingly accept a patch to the distribution model that involves drm. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so people have to be careful to not compromise too long or too much.
"If you don't have permission to watch a copyrighted work, then it's not ok to make digital copies to circumvent the encryption and watch that work. You'll have to find a legal and authorized means to view the content."
If you don't have permission to watch a copyrighted work, it's not ok to watch it period, decrypting it is not relevant to the discussion. If you DO have the permission to watch the work, why shouldn't you be allowed to decrypt it whichever way you want?
I don't see his arguments as making much sense, other than from a powerplay standpoint. He just wants as much power as possible over the viewers of his media.
Other than that, I think it's a little bit unfair to say that he doesn't understand the issues. Remember, disagreeing is not the same as not understanding.
I do think he understands the issues very well too. I just believe that he's trying to kill free culture to get more corporate profits. That makes him an enemy of the public.
You're missing the point. The point is not that there isn't a licensed player for linux, the point is that people need a licensed player to be able to play dvd's. Copyright is the right to have a copy. Once you have the copy, you should be able to use it any which way you want that doesn't involve redistributing another copy. By restricting dvd's to licensed players through the new artificial construct called the dmca they have taken away ability from end users. You can't take screenshots from dvd's (so you are limited to the movie-company distributed shots if you're trying to write a review), you can't skip past commercials on a lot of dvd's (thereby making you pay twice for the same product), if it wasn't for multi-region players (which technically aren't allowed by the dvd licensing body dvd-cca) you wouldn't even be able to buy rare dvd's from across the world and view them at home.
Basically, the essential point is that once you start limiting content to licensed players, you give control over how people interact with popular culture to them, and because of the clear incentives for the entrenched copyright owners to restrict your abilities ever further (making you pay multiple times for the same content) sooner or later you end up with the right to read.
That's the real issue. The dvd player on linux thing is just the angle to interviewer took to approach the issue because valenti's views are so far removed from reality you have to reel him in before you start trying to throw a net around him.
Joe is an easy to use powerful editor that you don't have to remember how to use due to the excellent built-in help system. For those of us who only use console editors when X breaks joe is really nice. I install it everywhere I have a login. And yes, I do know how to use vi, but I don't like it, and I tried to learn emacs, and found out I wouldn't use it enough to remember how to use it. So, vi or emacs? My answer: joe.
Jabber is nice, but I gave up on it for two reasons:
- The msn plugin, crucial to me since everyone I know is on that network, never worked quite right. Either it was outright broken, or unstable.
- Every single jabber client is horrible UI-wise. The whole nomenclature is needlessly obfuscated. "Signing up for transports" ? What the hell is that? The whole transport scheme seems poorly thought out UI-wise, no matter how well-designed it is technologically.
The "chat" video conferencing add-ons from AOL, Yahoo!, etc., on the other hand, are tied into a proprietary server infrastructure.
Actually, most of them use SIP in a peer to peer fashion. There's no server dependancy with SIP.
Actually, MSN messenger uses SIP for its audio and video functionality, which IS an open format. It's just not supported in a way yet that will interoperate with a messenger client on linux.
And netmeeting uses open and standardised formats too, which is the whole reason gnomemeeting interoperates with windows.
I have this haunting suspicion that somewhere there is a vast bank of people listening to music fragments and typing in the artist/title, or handing it over to the next person if they don't know. Probably in india.
I'm pretty sure they're not using computer recognition, because you'd need to have every version of every song fingerprinted, which would a truly herculean effort.
One way to test it would be to play a famous song yourself on your own guitar, and see if they give the correct answer.
And that's 3.35 over the minimum price you can pay. The average customer of magnatune pays 3.35 more than he or she has to in order to buy the music. Quality music sold with a good model will make money. It's that simple.