Didn't this argument come up before and they specifically claimed "You're not buying the media, you're buying a license to hte music?"
Here we go again.
The media is the physical embodiment of the license you pay for when you purchase the content.
In other words, you're paying for the music, but the music comes with a nice shiny disk that can be used as a talisman to ward off evil RIAA lawyers.
Alternatively, you can say that buying a particular shiny disk entitles you to use of the music that is on that disk. Not music on any other disk, not on anyone else's computer or file sharing network. The music on that specific disk.
Or another way of looking at it: the purpose of a music CD is to transport music. The music doesn't transport itself, so when the music is offered in that format it is a single object: the disk and the content license are inseparable, because the disk will always contain the same music until it reaches the end of its life.
To summarise: they're the same thing, its all about perspective. Which perpective you choose, and whether that perspective can be reconciled with how the law actually works is up to your mental acuity.
Well, yes, DVDs are cheap per unit (though not so cheap per GB, relatively speaking), and maybe home users don't need to keep their data for 20 years, but that wasn't my point. I was providing an example of why the OP was wrong about hard drives being less reliable than optical; the wider experience simply does not match the logic presented (another glass of hemlock, Mr Socrates?). Besides, the odds of a working hard drive and a backup failing at exactly the same time are vanishingly small, so I'm not sure if the whole issue qualifies as paranoid or just silly.
Your point about the difference between archives and backups is noted, and I agree. But we've lost sight of the basic discussion, which was ease of use. In my mind, hooking up a Maxtor One-Touch* and pressing the button on the front is far easier than just about any method you could suggest that involves DVDs. And hard drives allow incremental backups, and also let you backup the operating system in case of a real disaster (I certainly have better things to do with my weekends than reinstall software...time is also leisure!).
Most home users don't necessarily have the $$$ for multiple HDD, so they don't want/need to clutter up their home directory, on a limited space HDD, with stuff they'll only look at every few years or so, if ever.
HDDs are more robust, but that doesn't mean that DVDs are automatically the better choice for short-term backups once all the other factors are taken into consideration. For data that someone may never use again but want to keep just in case, I'd say DVDs are more appropriate (as long as they're decent quality). Burn two, if its that important, and you still have change from $1.
For the home user, what's on their hard drive right now is most important; that's why its there. Their backup strategy should reflect that, IMHO.
While its true that hard drives fail, I have hard drives approaching 20 years old that still retain data perfectly. On the other hand, I've had optical media stored on the same shelf fail after six months.
Hard drives are designed to run for tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours before failure; the probability that one will spontaneously fail after a few hours use and months of storage is extremely small. Optical media, however, start decaying from the instant they're burned; how long it takes depends on the manufacturing quality (whether the edges and data side are sealed), heat, humidity and exposure to ultraviolet light.
That said, any home-use backup probably isn't going to need a long shelf life, so really it comes down to convenience; in this regard hard drives win again.
But ultimately, I'd be very wary of technical advice given by someone yet to master the use of the "shift" key.
The quest for real estate has been the most important driving force of humanity. Early hominids left Africa to search for real estate; the great empires of history were after real estate; even today wars are fought over real estate. The economic value of land is what has made us the creatures we are, and real estate is simply the modern term for this.
Now some might argue that sex is the most important factor, but I disagree. Generally speaking, sex is available without travelling thousands of miles to unexplored lands; I don't believe for an instant that Columbus sailed to the new world because Spanish chicks don't put out. No: it was the land, and the value of what was on it.
For this reason, I think real estate agents should be respected alongside priests and other keepers of great truths, for they herald a more civilised and orderly future.
Next week I'll be discussing why used car salesmen are more important than physicists (physicists only describe reality, while used car salesmen can actually warp it).
...and secondly your work must promote Science and useful Arts.
You aren't interpreting that quote correctly: the works must be science or useful art. The "promote" part is there to explain why congress is allowed to pass intellectual property laws, and does not impose any criteria on the nature of the works themselves.
Mac zealots are feverishly working on a way to blame this all on Microsoft.
Sony's Vaio series use Windows, so Microsoft brought some pressure to bear through licensing to force Sony to sabotage the batteries destined for Apple. Its obvious, really.
It is important that we not give currency to such misdirections
I'd say you'd missed the boat on "piracy" (pardon the pun). You're battling against a usage that's already well entrenched; even more pointlessly, you're doing it on a site with a very narrow appeal, where you're practically guaranteed that at least 50% of other readers will support your view.
But how precisely is it "misdirection"? Everybody understands this usage, even you, and nobody with any sense equates "software piracy" with boarding ships (except pedantic smart-asses). It is technically inaccurate, true, but as you said yourself: "I am not required to construct a legal defense here, nor be concerned with whether a court would recognize the word". So at one moment you're saying technical accuracy isn't important, but in other you're saying it is...but you get to decide when it is or isn't, not wider social conventions, not the dictionary, you alone are the sole arbiter of a word's definition. That isn't noble or idealistic, its just arrogant.
People who say such nonsense here will say it elsewhere.
They have been for years, at least according to my 1957 edition Oxford English Dictionary...that was some time before Slashdot was established, if I'm not mistaken. If you think being a smart-ass about it here is going to change things, you're grossly over-estimating the wider relevance of this site.
Look, I'm sorry to call you an arrogant smart-ass, because I actually think your views on copyright are generally pretty reasonable. But I really don't see any positive benefit from a nerdy insistence that a rose be called a rosoideae family magnoliopsida. It hasn't yielded positive results so far; copyright has become more restrictive over recent years, so yes, it clearly is a distraction from the important issues. And as long as the commercial interests can reduce people like yourself to pedagogical arguments over eye-glazing trivia with a simple word, they've effectively eliminated any sane-sounding opposition. By taking the bait you're playing their game, which is exactly why they use the word.
See what I'm saying? Yes, "piracy" is an emotive term; but the only people who get emotional over it are the people who should concentrating on making what's really at stake known, rather than wasting their time with silly word games that will never be resolved. In the real world, words can and often do have more than one meaning; its high time to get over it.
Slashdot is not a court, and so I am not required to construct a legal defense here, nor be concerned with whether a court would recognize the word.
So since everyone understands the colloquial use of the word in this context and legal precision isn't important, the semantic argument over whether "piracy" is a legitimate term for copyright violation is really a pointless distraction, is it not?
How is it even possible to use 11,000 different type faces??
Font management software. I have over 2,000 myself (collected over the last 20 years and properly licensed, of course), which I can browse and activate as needed with Linotype FontExplorer. I also know a tiny company that uses a single computer for their layout work that has 5,000 fonts, so 11,000 for a larger publisher isn't surprising.
Nerdy types were renowned in the ancient world for providing people who asked for directions with cleverly deceptive answers, hence the saying "Beware of geek's bearing grifts".
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't this argument come up before and they specifically claimed "You're not buying the media, you're buying a license to hte music?"
Here we go again.
The media is the physical embodiment of the license you pay for when you purchase the content.
In other words, you're paying for the music, but the music comes with a nice shiny disk that can be used as a talisman to ward off evil RIAA lawyers.
Alternatively, you can say that buying a particular shiny disk entitles you to use of the music that is on that disk. Not music on any other disk, not on anyone else's computer or file sharing network. The music on that specific disk.
Or another way of looking at it: the purpose of a music CD is to transport music. The music doesn't transport itself, so when the music is offered in that format it is a single object: the disk and the content license are inseparable, because the disk will always contain the same music until it reaches the end of its life.
To summarise: they're the same thing, its all about perspective. Which perpective you choose, and whether that perspective can be reconciled with how the law actually works is up to your mental acuity.
Most of the answers are disclaimers, and the rest didn't claim enough to need disclaimers.
So when his father asked his mother "would you like a toke", she got more than she bargained for?
Actually, "Window" was the second choice. "Roachclip" got too many funny looks at the registrar's office...
So by implication, the options are:
A (current): Ride a controlled bomb into space.
B (proposed): Three days of the worst elevator music imaginable.
Option A is looking pretty good right now...
(That's ignoring option C: Strapping Kenny G to to a bomb and firing him into space, but I haven't raised the funding to do this yet).
Well, yes, DVDs are cheap per unit (though not so cheap per GB, relatively speaking), and maybe home users don't need to keep their data for 20 years, but that wasn't my point. I was providing an example of why the OP was wrong about hard drives being less reliable than optical; the wider experience simply does not match the logic presented (another glass of hemlock, Mr Socrates?). Besides, the odds of a working hard drive and a backup failing at exactly the same time are vanishingly small, so I'm not sure if the whole issue qualifies as paranoid or just silly.
/ 31/1547244
Your point about the difference between archives and backups is noted, and I agree. But we've lost sight of the basic discussion, which was ease of use. In my mind, hooking up a Maxtor One-Touch* and pressing the button on the front is far easier than just about any method you could suggest that involves DVDs. And hard drives allow incremental backups, and also let you backup the operating system in case of a real disaster (I certainly have better things to do with my weekends than reinstall software...time is also leisure!).
Most home users don't necessarily have the $$$ for multiple HDD, so they don't want/need to clutter up their home directory, on a limited space HDD, with stuff they'll only look at every few years or so, if ever.
HDDs are more robust, but that doesn't mean that DVDs are automatically the better choice for short-term backups once all the other factors are taken into consideration. For data that someone may never use again but want to keep just in case, I'd say DVDs are more appropriate (as long as they're decent quality). Burn two, if its that important, and you still have change from $1.
For the home user, what's on their hard drive right now is most important; that's why its there. Their backup strategy should reflect that, IMHO.
*Perhaps that should be called the Maxtor One-Touch-Paper, considering this: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08
Currently at (Troll, 0):
"nobody here has any clue so far what to tell you"
Seems I'm not the one who decended to the schoolyard first. Civility is reciprocal.
Very true, I'd ignored the "-ate" suffix as it is often unnecessarily added to words that are already verbs.
;)
As the word stands you are perfectly correct. I bow to you, Herr Grammatikkommandant
What is uncolicitated, anyway?
Licit is the opposite of illicit. "co" means "between two (or more) parties". "un" is a prefix that denotes a negative (see "United Nations").
Therefore "uncolicitated" must mean "illegal between two parties".
(That whirring noise you hear is Samuel Johnson revving up.)
While its true that hard drives fail, I have hard drives approaching 20 years old that still retain data perfectly. On the other hand, I've had optical media stored on the same shelf fail after six months.
Hard drives are designed to run for tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours before failure; the probability that one will spontaneously fail after a few hours use and months of storage is extremely small. Optical media, however, start decaying from the instant they're burned; how long it takes depends on the manufacturing quality (whether the edges and data side are sealed), heat, humidity and exposure to ultraviolet light.
That said, any home-use backup probably isn't going to need a long shelf life, so really it comes down to convenience; in this regard hard drives win again.
But ultimately, I'd be very wary of technical advice given by someone yet to master the use of the "shift" key.
I tried http://www.noobhelp.com/, and the menu at the top of the page read:
|Help|Adult |Porn|Free Sex |Erotic Pictures|Sex Cams|Amateur|XXX|Gay Dating|
Surely nobody needs that much help...
The quest for real estate has been the most important driving force of humanity. Early hominids left Africa to search for real estate; the great empires of history were after real estate; even today wars are fought over real estate. The economic value of land is what has made us the creatures we are, and real estate is simply the modern term for this.
Now some might argue that sex is the most important factor, but I disagree. Generally speaking, sex is available without travelling thousands of miles to unexplored lands; I don't believe for an instant that Columbus sailed to the new world because Spanish chicks don't put out. No: it was the land, and the value of what was on it.
For this reason, I think real estate agents should be respected alongside priests and other keepers of great truths, for they herald a more civilised and orderly future.
Next week I'll be discussing why used car salesmen are more important than physicists (physicists only describe reality, while used car salesmen can actually warp it).
...and secondly your work must promote Science and useful Arts.
You aren't interpreting that quote correctly: the works must be science or useful art. The "promote" part is there to explain why congress is allowed to pass intellectual property laws, and does not impose any criteria on the nature of the works themselves.
1.1M in the US, 1.8M worldwide.
Mac zealots are feverishly working on a way to blame this all on Microsoft.
Sony's Vaio series use Windows, so Microsoft brought some pressure to bear through licensing to force Sony to sabotage the batteries destined for Apple. Its obvious, really.
The matrix committed this error along with nearly every anime I've ever seen.
.
Them's fighting words. Now wait there for the next five episodes while I power up.
Hgnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn...
Sounds more like the threat of a Bond villain than an action of the United States government.
An increasingly difficult distinction to make...
Maybe if we bombed Chile we could defeat all hackers too!
The way to defeat Chilean hackers is to bomb Burkina Faso.
It is important that we not give currency to such misdirections
I'd say you'd missed the boat on "piracy" (pardon the pun). You're battling against a usage that's already well entrenched; even more pointlessly, you're doing it on a site with a very narrow appeal, where you're practically guaranteed that at least 50% of other readers will support your view.
But how precisely is it "misdirection"? Everybody understands this usage, even you, and nobody with any sense equates "software piracy" with boarding ships (except pedantic smart-asses). It is technically inaccurate, true, but as you said yourself: "I am not required to construct a legal defense here, nor be concerned with whether a court would recognize the word ". So at one moment you're saying technical accuracy isn't important, but in other you're saying it is...but you get to decide when it is or isn't, not wider social conventions, not the dictionary, you alone are the sole arbiter of a word's definition. That isn't noble or idealistic, its just arrogant.
People who say such nonsense here will say it elsewhere.
They have been for years, at least according to my 1957 edition Oxford English Dictionary...that was some time before Slashdot was established, if I'm not mistaken. If you think being a smart-ass about it here is going to change things, you're grossly over-estimating the wider relevance of this site.
Look, I'm sorry to call you an arrogant smart-ass, because I actually think your views on copyright are generally pretty reasonable. But I really don't see any positive benefit from a nerdy insistence that a rose be called a rosoideae family magnoliopsida. It hasn't yielded positive results so far; copyright has become more restrictive over recent years, so yes, it clearly is a distraction from the important issues. And as long as the commercial interests can reduce people like yourself to pedagogical arguments over eye-glazing trivia with a simple word, they've effectively eliminated any sane-sounding opposition. By taking the bait you're playing their game, which is exactly why they use the word.
See what I'm saying? Yes, "piracy" is an emotive term; but the only people who get emotional over it are the people who should concentrating on making what's really at stake known, rather than wasting their time with silly word games that will never be resolved. In the real world, words can and often do have more than one meaning; its high time to get over it.
Slashdot is not a court, and so I am not required to construct a legal defense here, nor be concerned with whether a court would recognize the word.
So since everyone understands the colloquial use of the word in this context and legal precision isn't important, the semantic argument over whether "piracy" is a legitimate term for copyright violation is really a pointless distraction, is it not?
How is it even possible to use 11,000 different type faces??
Font management software. I have over 2,000 myself (collected over the last 20 years and properly licensed, of course), which I can browse and activate as needed with Linotype FontExplorer. I also know a tiny company that uses a single computer for their layout work that has 5,000 fonts, so 11,000 for a larger publisher isn't surprising.
You know it strikes me that probably 90% of the Internet audience these days would have no clue what ASCII is...
Interesting you say that: "ASCII" was an answer to a clue in a crossword in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald.
Or does Greek and Geek seem, mighty similar!
Nerdy types were renowned in the ancient world for providing people who asked for directions with cleverly deceptive answers, hence the saying "Beware of geek's bearing grifts".
Wish I'd thought of that. Nice one!
You don't know what Mario gets up to...
_ Gets_Lucky/mario_gets_lucky.html
http://www.videogamedc.com/Pixeled_Parodies/Mario