"Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?"
They could put more effort into making file-sharing legal. That would reduce the amount of illegal file-sharing.
Gas phase uranium hydride reactors (such as the Hyperion power cell) cannot melt down. Even if they could achieve conditions equivalent to meltdown, they do not use a structural fuel-- meltdown is irrelevant, from a reactor accident perspective, in addition to being impossible.
The USN has the constraint of submarine performance to consider and is also under the regulatory oversight of the DoE, not NRC. The centralized facility philosophy has more to do with the overhead associated with red tape and design approval than disco era ideals about how power generation should be done.
Also, keep in mind that most fo the reactor designs in play today are thrown around because they can be generalized and scaled up. If you don't care to scale past a kilowatt, a variety of designs become available that require little or no user intervention over core life. Toshiba Nuclear has some really amazing industrial consumer grade stuff available, but it's overkill for residential use. NIMBY hysteria and the lack of political will to undo decades of nuclear regulatory stupidity means the technology will never be implemented along such lines... but it already exists.
"You think scientists would rather lie and be buried anonymously..."
They'd rather continuing to receive the funding that allows them to do science.
Publishing work with challenging conclusions that fit no monetizable agenda will not keep you publishing.
"...than reveal a truth that puts them ahead of everyone else?"
I don't think anyone objects to the use of a Taser instead of a gun. The problem is the use of a Taser in situations where lethal force (even "less lethal" force) is inappropriate.
It may be true that tasering someone is easier for police than justifiable force escalation, but police do not receive the respect and trust they do because their job is easy. If police become known for pulling a weapon on people without adequate provocation or warning, everyone they interact with will view them as a threat... which does not make the job easy or safe.
"Relativism simply means that our values are to be judged by how well they serve society. Absolutism means that those values are an integral part of external reality."
You've poisoned the well by defining the measure of a value system as "how well they serve society". That itself is a value judgment and results in a circular justification.
Accepting that there is an objective external reality and that evaluations of the function or dysfunction of a value system can be evaluated, also objectively, it would be possible to evaluate how well all possible value systems in user space function and say, without a glimmer of subjectivity, that THIS value system is more functional than THAT value system. This isn't absolutism, but merely the recognition that, since all value systems have to deal with the same reality, some value systems will simple work better at dealing with it than others.
The failure of relativist thinking comes when they forget that, though a certain value system might function in a limited set of circumstances, it is not equal to objectively better (as determined above) systems. Once you fall prey to the myth of "equal, but different", you no longer feel justified in the effort to migrate users from dysfunctional value systems.
There were definitely some protocols that supported buddy icons by default the last time I upgraded. Turning them off was so relatively painless that I honestly don't remember if the AIM protocol was one of the one's doing it.
If you want a fancy look, IEView allows fairly arbitrary customization of how messages are displayed.
Without owning the rights to exploit whatever money can be made from it, would anyone bother? Yes. They'd have to work with money they could make from it without being exploitative.
Besides, it sounds like you've added a value judgement into it. Who decides what is a 'useful' art, and what is not 'useful'? Copyright law as it stands doesn't have worry about that. I was just quoting the authorizing document in my country when I mentioned "useful arts". If you think laws can be written without respect to the conditions under which they receive authority... I'm not sure if it's possible for us to have a meaningful discussion.
You don't have a right to their work. Inherently, neither do they. However, We choose to grant authors a exclusive right to their works because We receive value in exchange for allowing such monopolistic control for a limited time.
You're going to have to explain how asking to people to pay for things is an abuse or undermines anything. Why? When I talk about a major label abusing copyright, I'm thinking of subjects like employing the artists as paid contractors who do not retain copyright to their performances. Someone else has brought up the price fixing business, so you can discuss that with them, but there's nothing wrong with tribute being paid for a good ideas and art.
1) What do you think the payment compliance rate would be if it were voluntary? If there were a transparent and direct "vote with your dollar" type mechanism, I'd be inclined to use it.
2) Would you pay per play? 2 cents? 5 cents? How about if there were a cap at a dollar? I would not be paying to play or paying to download. I would be paying because I appreciated the service provided by the artists involved and would like for them to continue producing content I like. And every time the song comes up in the random queue, I'm reminded to go see if there's something new... so even if I was ho-hum on donating for the first song, I might like something else enough to pay. Or maybe the change in how much I like the song or my ability to pay will mean I'll make a donation for a song I already have, just because I can.
Transparency in how the funds are disbursed is essential to making that work. $1 in iTunes goes where, exactly? How much goes to the artists? How much to the engineers? How much to the label? How much to iTunes? I might be more inclined to support labels that take a smaller cut. I might want to support a certain engineer because I like the way he makes the sound work and pay more tracks he's involved with. Track the cultural market value of the content.
"The point of a company is to maximize shareholders profits and not too bring the next great artist to the spotlight." And the point of copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Seems to me that if a corporation is using the rights we grant it to perform in a way that abuses and undermines the reason we grant them their rights, revoke their copyrights.
I've made a habit of going over the stuff I put out ten and fifteen years ago and recalling how enthusiastically certain I was about everything I wrote. And how amusingly simple and corrupted everything I "knew" at that time has turned out to be. I expect in another ten or fifteen years I'll look back at my 2007 self, shake my head, and think the exact same thing. Or maybe not, because, I hope, I can learn from my mistakes. People can change on teh intartubes, too, unless they hide and destroy the record of their progress.
When was the last time you saw an OEM computer come with restore disks? About a week ago when my wife bought a replacement laptop for the one murdalized by the small child.
Raise your hand if your first introduction to programming was on some flavor of interpreted BASIC
Instant feedback and low level control were a pretty fundamental appeal. Dragging and dropping a sound object into a window, pushing a button, and having it pop out the other end playing a song is less gratifying than getting some discordant squeal out of the PC Speaker with a line of code you had to hack out on your own. Change the line, a different discordant squeal! COOL!
LOGO was fun, sure, but how much more fun was it when you figured out you could put your own pixels where ever you wanted?
The key captivating factor of programming wasn't that it was easy to make constrained cartoonish crap but that you could do anything. Maybe cartoonish crap is what you originally wanted to do when you first sat down with an intent to learn you a program... but the fact that there's a limitless amount other stuff to do diverts you.
You seem to be confusing systems adminstration and helpdesk, those little segments of IT [...], with the whole class of "Working with Information Technology" in general.
Coconut oil isn't a good source of palmitic acid. Palm oil, obviously, is the best source. Most animal tallow/lard is high in palmitic acid. Other good vegetable sources are coffee bean or avacado nut oil.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?"
They could put more effort into making file-sharing legal. That would reduce the amount of illegal file-sharing.
Gas phase uranium hydride reactors (such as the Hyperion power cell) cannot melt down. Even if they could achieve conditions equivalent to meltdown, they do not use a structural fuel-- meltdown is irrelevant, from a reactor accident perspective, in addition to being impossible.
Open Government is collecting a suggestions for a government legislative Wiki and RSS feed specification.
The USN has the constraint of submarine performance to consider and is also under the regulatory oversight of the DoE, not NRC. The centralized facility philosophy has more to do with the overhead associated with red tape and design approval than disco era ideals about how power generation should be done.
Also, keep in mind that most fo the reactor designs in play today are thrown around because they can be generalized and scaled up. If you don't care to scale past a kilowatt, a variety of designs become available that require little or no user intervention over core life. Toshiba Nuclear has some really amazing industrial consumer grade stuff available, but it's overkill for residential use. NIMBY hysteria and the lack of political will to undo decades of nuclear regulatory stupidity means the technology will never be implemented along such lines... but it already exists.
Soap Box, Ballot Box, Jury Box, Ammo Box, Coffin?
Where on the progression are we now?
"You think scientists would rather lie and be buried anonymously..."
They'd rather continuing to receive the funding that allows them to do science.
Publishing work with challenging conclusions that fit no monetizable agenda will not keep you publishing.
"...than reveal a truth that puts them ahead of everyone else?"
Everyone else is a firing squad.
What if you design a service so most of the traffic can be defined as "private communication"?
Loophole!
Copyright isn't like trademark. You can hunt, or not, folks who infringe your copyright without it diluting your enforcement ability.
I don't think anyone objects to the use of a Taser instead of a gun. The problem is the use of a Taser in situations where lethal force (even "less lethal" force) is inappropriate.
It may be true that tasering someone is easier for police than justifiable force escalation, but police do not receive the respect and trust they do because their job is easy. If police become known for pulling a weapon on people without adequate provocation or warning, everyone they interact with will view them as a threat... which does not make the job easy or safe.
"Relativism simply means that our values are to be judged by how well they serve society. Absolutism means that those values are an integral part of external reality."
You've poisoned the well by defining the measure of a value system as "how well they serve society". That itself is a value judgment and results in a circular justification.
Accepting that there is an objective external reality and that evaluations of the function or dysfunction of a value system can be evaluated, also objectively, it would be possible to evaluate how well all possible value systems in user space function and say, without a glimmer of subjectivity, that THIS value system is more functional than THAT value system.
This isn't absolutism, but merely the recognition that, since all value systems have to deal with the same reality, some value systems will simple work better at dealing with it than others.
The failure of relativist thinking comes when they forget that, though a certain value system might function in a limited set of circumstances, it is not equal to objectively better (as determined above) systems. Once you fall prey to the myth of "equal, but different", you no longer feel justified in the effort to migrate users from dysfunctional value systems.
There were definitely some protocols that supported buddy icons by default the last time I upgraded. Turning them off was so relatively painless that I honestly don't remember if the AIM protocol was one of the one's doing it.
If you want a fancy look, IEView allows fairly arbitrary customization of how messages are displayed.
Without owning the rights to exploit whatever money can be made from it, would anyone bother?
Yes. They'd have to work with money they could make from it without being exploitative.
Besides, it sounds like you've added a value judgement into it. Who decides what is a 'useful' art, and what is not 'useful'? Copyright law as it stands doesn't have worry about that.
I was just quoting the authorizing document in my country when I mentioned "useful arts". If you think laws can be written without respect to the conditions under which they receive authority... I'm not sure if it's possible for us to have a meaningful discussion.
You don't have a right to their work.
Inherently, neither do they. However, We choose to grant authors a exclusive right to their works because We receive value in exchange for allowing such monopolistic control for a limited time.
You're going to have to explain how asking to people to pay for things is an abuse or undermines anything.
Why? When I talk about a major label abusing copyright, I'm thinking of subjects like employing the artists as paid contractors who do not retain copyright to their performances. Someone else has brought up the price fixing business, so you can discuss that with them, but there's nothing wrong with tribute being paid for a good ideas and art.
1) What do you think the payment compliance rate would be if it were voluntary? If there were a transparent and direct "vote with your dollar" type mechanism, I'd be inclined to use it.
2) Would you pay per play? 2 cents? 5 cents? How about if there were a cap at a dollar? I would not be paying to play or paying to download. I would be paying because I appreciated the service provided by the artists involved and would like for them to continue producing content I like. And every time the song comes up in the random queue, I'm reminded to go see if there's something new... so even if I was ho-hum on donating for the first song, I might like something else enough to pay. Or maybe the change in how much I like the song or my ability to pay will mean I'll make a donation for a song I already have, just because I can.
Transparency in how the funds are disbursed is essential to making that work. $1 in iTunes goes where, exactly? How much goes to the artists? How much to the engineers? How much to the label? How much to iTunes? I might be more inclined to support labels that take a smaller cut. I might want to support a certain engineer because I like the way he makes the sound work and pay more tracks he's involved with. Track the cultural market value of the content.
"The point of a company is to maximize shareholders profits and not too bring the next great artist to the spotlight."
And the point of copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Seems to me that if a corporation is using the rights we grant it to perform in a way that abuses and undermines the reason we grant them their rights, revoke their copyrights.
Never forget your past.
I've made a habit of going over the stuff I put out ten and fifteen years ago and recalling how enthusiastically certain I was about everything I wrote. And how amusingly simple and corrupted everything I "knew" at that time has turned out to be. I expect in another ten or fifteen years I'll look back at my 2007 self, shake my head, and think the exact same thing. Or maybe not, because, I hope, I can learn from my mistakes. People can change on teh intartubes, too, unless they hide and destroy the record of their progress.
Most children have laps.
They do not necessarily have desks.
Or bicycles.
Or generators.
When was the last time you saw an OEM computer come with restore disks?
About a week ago when my wife bought a replacement laptop for the one murdalized by the small child.
Raise your hand if your first introduction to programming was on some flavor of interpreted BASIC
Instant feedback and low level control were a pretty fundamental appeal. Dragging and dropping a sound object into a window, pushing a button, and having it pop out the other end playing a song is less gratifying than getting some discordant squeal out of the PC Speaker with a line of code you had to hack out on your own. Change the line, a different discordant squeal! COOL!
LOGO was fun, sure, but how much more fun was it when you figured out you could put your own pixels where ever you wanted?
The key captivating factor of programming wasn't that it was easy to make constrained cartoonish crap but that you could do anything. Maybe cartoonish crap is what you originally wanted to do when you first sat down with an intent to learn you a program... but the fact that there's a limitless amount other stuff to do diverts you.
Indeed. The Mirabilis "Uh-oh!" is the sound I associate with IMs.
Careful, you may get a notice for manufacturing a circumvention device with that post!
I think he means the imaginary rights to imaginary property.
everyone has to earn their rank by their actions/job performance/knowledge and education
You left out "attrition" and "reenlistment", which is how I've seen most people gain rank.
You seem to be confusing systems adminstration and helpdesk, those little segments of IT [...], with the whole class of "Working with Information Technology" in general.
Coconut oil isn't a good source of palmitic acid. Palm oil, obviously, is the best source. Most animal tallow/lard is high in palmitic acid. Other good vegetable sources are coffee bean or avacado nut oil.
The /. editors just wanted to make sure you knew that the correct grammar was in the original.